Battle Station

— 39

“They are Macros,” I said, dragging the crab-like corpse onto the command deck. I threw it down in the middle of the command staff. Its pointed feet rattled and clattered on the deck.

Sandra came close and knelt over it. “Disgusting.”

“No doubt about it. A new type of Macro. Something that crawls over the surface of our ships. Clearly, they were trying to break in or sabotage the ship. But what I can’t understand is why we’ve never seen these before.”

“Sir, we are in range now,” Captain Sarin informed me. “I’m assuming we should only fire on the Macro cruisers?”

I waved at her dismissively. “Yeah, of course. Choose a target and burn it out of space. One at a time.”

She glanced at me, but I continued examining the mess of metal I had found. It was coated with some kind of black resin, and it was smaller than any Macro I’d ever seen. The six legs were insect-like, but the head-section was bulbous.

I glowered at it, baffled. Where had this thing come from? Had the Macros designed something new, or had they used these small individual units in other conflicts we were unaware of? Maybe we’d never had the bad luck to run into one before, but I didn’t think that was it. These were newly-constructed.

A thought struck me then. I slowly came to the conclusion they were aping our tactics. The more I thought about it, the more concerned I became.

Around me, the rest of the bridge crew fought a fleet battle. But I stayed focused on the thing I’d dragged back into the ship. It was about the size of man. I lifted it, weighing it in my gauntlets. It had a similar weight, being made of lighter metals and polymers. It had six limbs rather than our four-but two of the legs were armed with lasers. I found the repellers next-buried in four of the six appendages.

I frowned fiercely at the thing in my hands. Our most recent battle suit design had been equipped in exactly this way. I shook my head. I was coming to a single inescapable conclusion, and I didn’t like it.

“They’re copying us,” I said. “Copying our tactics and unit design.”

Most of the bridge crew was staring at the sphere in our midst. They were barely listening to me. But that was all right. I was listening to myself. To me, it was clear: the Macros had attempted to build their own version of Star Force Marines. Assault troops that came out of the dark without making any emissions to track them by. Lightly-armed, they weren’t much trouble in small numbers, but if they came out of the dark at us like quiet stealth attackers, they could be dangerous.

Then I had another thought. It was a very worrisome one. “Commander!” I roared.

The man nearest me jumped half out of his suit. At least he gave me his full attention.

“Grab the other end of this thing!” I roared. “Sandra, you help too. We’ve got to get if off this ship now!”

The Commander wasn’t a marine, but he did know how to obey orders. A few seconds later, he and Sandra were helping me run with the clanking multi-legged carcass as we carried it to the nearest airlock. It wasn’t as close as I would have liked. It was about a hundred steps away. I took flight to speed things up, using my repellers inside the ship, which was a safety violation. I half-dragged the other two who bumped along behind me.

“What’s wrong, Kyle?” Sandra asked.

“It’s a bomb,” I said. “At least, I think it is.”

Neither of them dragged their feet after that. We tossed it into the airlock and slapped the emergency release. The outer door disintergrated into a shower of nanites, and the black, twisted form of the Macro flipped and twirled away. It looked like a bundle of black chains being tossed out into the void.

I hit my com-link and connected to Sarin. “Veer sunward. Immediately. That’s an order.”

The ship heeled over and we all leaned into the outer bulkhead. The dead machine vanished quickly. Several long seconds passed as we looked out a tiny window in the airlock. Sandra and the Commander stood next to me, breathing hard. We all tried to look at once, but we could no longer see the thing we’d jettisoned.

Then there was a glaring flash. It shook the ship slightly. It felt like being hit by a gust of wind in a car on a stormy highway. The ship swayed and corrected.

“We’ve just gotten our allotment of rads for the year, I suspect,” I said.

“Did it self-destruct?”

“Yes,” I said. “Just the way my marines do sometimes-when they have nothing else left with which to hurt the enemy.”

I rushed back to the bridge and alerted Miklos to the danger. He told me he already knew something like that was going on. The lurking enemy had not fought terribly well, but they had destroyed several ships by blowing themselves up. Everyone was soon informed-they were not to take aboard any damaged machines to study. That was apparently just what they wanted.

I rubbed at my bristly chin as the fleet battle began in earnest. It was strange to look at the ships depicted inside the sphere. Hundreds were dying on every side, I felt sure of it. Biotics versus machines. We had become like them, and they had adapted as well, using our own tactics against us.

The first stage of the battle was ending. We’d made contact with the enemy, and the Macros were beginning to turn their attention to this new attacker. Jasmine was in charge, and I let her call the shots for now. Her plan was sound, it always had been. The only thing I’d disagreed with was the timing of our entry into the conflict. I’d demanded that we charge in early, but now that we were engaged and mixing it up, everyone was on the same page. We were all fighting to survive and doing our damnedest to destroy the enemy.

As the next stage of the battle unfolded, our gunships rolled forward, accelerating even as the destroyers and our single light cruiser pulled back. We were now in effective range of the enemy railguns. We pushed our own cannons up front to meet fire with fire. The second reason for the pull back was relative velocity. The destroyers each carried marines, and we couldn’t launch them at the enemy cruisers if we didn’t match our relative velocities first.

In the back of my mind, I kept worrying about the Macros and what they were up to. They had clearly been impressed with our tactic of throwing marines at enemy ships. They’d tried to build and operate their own units in a similar fashion. It showed a larger capacity to learn than I’d given them credit for in the past. I’d rarely seen them adapt so effectively. I didn’t like seeing it now, and hoped never to see this kind of flexibility in their methods again.

Essentially, their copycat assault troops had been a failure. They’d had the upper hand, but had misplayed their new assets. They’d reached our ships, crawled secretly over the hulls and once the battle had begun they’d tried to damage the vessels they rode upon. All of this made sense. But they’d ignored the simple expedient of blowing themselves up. They were just machines, after all. They could have all set themselves off on the outer hull of every ship, once they’d reached their targets.

Why hadn’t they done precisely that? It was something of a mystery. The best theory I could come up with was they were aping our tactics as well as our units. When we reached an enemy hull, we didn’t simply commit suicide by blowing up our generators. Possibly, that would have been a very effective tactic. But we’d tried to survive instead. Maybe they’d imitated our methods too closely, not realizing that we did some things because it was in our nature to do so, not because they were the very best tactical move.

The more I thought about it, I realized we really did have a potent weapon that we’d barely employed. Every marine had the power to overload his generator and blow a hole in any ship, provided he made it inside or at least was in contact with the hull. But it had never really occurred to me to fight that way. It hadn’t occurred to my men, either. Probably because it involved…blowing ourselves up. How did you train for such a one-way mission? How could I ask my men to participate?

I couldn’t. But the Macros could have done so. Instead, they’d opted to do what we did. Probably because they’d witnessed it and found it very effective.

I frowned as the battle raged. My tough little gunships were on the front line now, and every one of them was taking a serious beating. Fortunately, they were doing plenty of damage in return. They weren’t very good at evading incoming fire, but their solid hulls usually took several hits before they were knocked out. They fought like bulldogs, while the lighter nanotech ships danced and dodged.

Missile barrages came in periodic waves. Usually, they were launched moments before a cruiser was destroyed. It was use-it-or-lose-it at that point, and the Macros understood that game. Each dying ship fired everything it had, and the rest of them fired one missile each. That way, there were a lot of targets to worry about. When the barrages came, Sarin shouted orders, pushing our destroyers forward with orders to concentrate on the missiles. We couldn’t afford for them to get within range and blow a serious hole in our line.

I shook my head, it was such a simple tactic, but the Nanos had failed to come up with it on their own. They didn’t like to switch targets in a fight. They certainly weren’t military geniuses, these little ships. They were more technologically advanced in some ways, but they certainly were being outfought by the Macros. I had to wonder about that. Had the Blues intended for the Macros to conquer enemies? Were they originally warships, maybe put up defensively at first? The Nanos were the explorers, that much was obvious. But the Macros had been designed to construct more of themselves and fight. Who had they planned to fight against?

I watched as seven cruisers blew up in three fast minutes. A cheer went up from those of us surrounding the spherical display tank. By concentrating all our fire on one Macro at a time, we were taking them out quickly.

I was just beginning to grin when the Macros changed tactics. They turned and directed all their firepower at us, ignoring the flittering distraction the Nano ship swarm had become.

“They are launching something different, sir,” the weapons officer said. “Not missiles-they look like mines or something.”

I zoomed in on the scattering release of the nearest ship. Black objects came spinning out of the ports. They looked like flying saw blades-or flying spiders.

“They are fresh assault troops. They are throwing them at us now, just as we’ve done to them on several occasions.”

“Should we launch our own marines?” Sarin asked me.

I looked at her for a moment, considering. “No. I don’t think so. We are winning the gun battle. We don’t have to board their ships. We can blast them all at range. Every minute, we are taking out more of them than they are of us. More importantly, if I send my men near the Macro fleet, the Nanos will probably fire on the marines. The Macro ships aren’t good at hitting a single man in space-but the Nanos are. We can’t risk it yet.”

Inside the sphere, what had been three distinct groups of differently colored ships had turned into a wild mess. All three fleets were mixed up now, flashing past one another. We’d been slowing our charge for quite a while, but were still going too fast to reverse on a dime. Inertia had taken us past one another as both sides were braking, but not enough to stop all forward momentum. Soon, we’d all wheel around and make another run at close range.

I realized this had been the moment the enemy had been waiting for. They’d built jump-troops for this purpose, and now that all three sides were matching velocities and positions, they were releasing every assault robot they had. I could have played the same game, but I had only three hundred marines while they appeared to have thousands.

“What are your orders, sir?” Sarin asked.

I looked at her in surprise. I saw the worried look on her face. I’d let her run the battle for some time now, and she’d been doing fine. But now, she didn’t know what to do. She didn’t have a snappy set of orders to counter the enemy assault troops. It was time to stop daydreaming and assume operational command.

“Alert every ship to the danger. I want every laser we have targeting those assault bots unless they fire more missiles. The gunships should ignore them, and keep firing at the primary targets. As for my marines-all my marines-get them suited up and waiting at the airlocks. Every marine is now assigned to localized ship defense. Some of the invaders are bound to get past the defensive fire and board our ships.”

“Sir,” Jasmine said, quietly. “The gunships don’t have any marines aboard. Just Fleet people. I ordered all the marines onto the destroyers. I thought they would be more effective that way.”

I nodded. It wasn’t how I would have arranged it, but I understood her thinking. In hindsight, it had been a mistake. But I wasn’t going to second-guess her publicly at this point.

“Tell the gunship crews to button up, then. They have thicker hulls than the nanotech ships. It will take the enemy time to burn through.”

The fighting went on. At close quarters now, the ships were all hampered. The forward guns on Goa never seemed to stop firing for more than a few seconds-but their rate of fire was slowing down. They were having heat problems and I knew from experience that if you chain-fired one of the bigger cannons for too long, it warped the chamber and caused inaccuracies. Eventually, the system would overheat and quit working altogether. I ordered the ships to slow down their rate of fire to prevent this.

“Sir,” Sarin said, looking up at me. “The first assault bots have reached our ships. They are attacking every unit in the fleet.”

I nodded. I checked the active ship counts. The Nano fleet was down to less than fifty effectives-more than eighty percent of the Blue fleet had been destroyed. It was painful to watch. They were helping, but they could have been doing so much more. On our own side of the ledger, we had lost eleven gunships and two destroyers. Now that the assault bots were landing on every hull, I knew that number would go up.

“Time to get moving,” I said. “I want every ship to fire their primary engines and get underway.”

“But we are right in the middle of the enemy.”

“Exactly. I no longer wish to be here. Hurry, pass on the order. We need to get some speed up.”

The order was passed on, although only after Jasmine cast me a worried glance. What crazy plan did Riggs have now?

Full acceleration was a dramatic spectacle. We disengaged in less than a minute, becoming a separate, distinct mass of contacts that resembled a greenish cloud of fireflies inside the sphere. A few lagged behind. They were quickly caught and destroyed.

The Nano ships stayed with the Macros, of course. They weren’t quitters, I could say that for them at least. Their flickering beams stabbed out, catching missiles and assault bots alike. Thousands were destroyed.

“We’re outrunning their assault troops,” Jasmine said.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve been out there, trying to jump from ship-to-ship. It’s a tricky job. Ships have vastly more powerful engines than an assault troop’s repellers. You can really only catch them if they let you, or if they are unaware you are coming.”

“All those robots are flying around, with nothing to land on,” Jasmine said, staring at the display globe. She looked at me, and for the first time today, she smiled. “You screwed them.”

“That’s my job,” I said, and smiled in return.

I noticed even Sandra was smiling at both of us. For once, she wasn’t suspicious of Jasmine or complaining about my risky decisions. She was just happy we were all still alive.

I wished I had a camera handy. I would have taken a picture.