-26-
“But where’s Crow’s fleet?” Jasmine asked.
I moved quickly as she spoke to me, donning full battle armor. It was a new suit, with a custom fit. It was a little too snug in spots, but I was sure after it got warmed up in combat I’d like it just fine.
“I don’t know where that bastard is hiding his ships. He probably had them stationed out here at the border, but they turned around and ran off when they saw Phobos. That would be just like him. He prefers to hoard his ships and never commits them unless the battle is a sure thing. It’s a cowardly—but highly effective—strategy.”
I turned to Miklos before I left. “I’m putting you in charge while I go check on Gaines.”
He looked at me in surprise. “I thought I was on some kind of hiatus.”
“Well, it’s over. At least until you’re dead—or I find someone better.”
It was a line I’d used before but usually on grunts, not Fleet people. It always let them know where they stood. They were there to serve and die if need be for the Force. If they didn’t like that, they could jump ship right now.
“Very well sir,” he said. “I’ll keep you up to date on anything else that comes in our direction.”
I hurried to the encampment at the base of the shaft that led out to the surface. If these cyborgs were all over the outer hull, they had to be repelled. Just as importantly, we needed to control the exterior of the giant ship in order to defend it.
When I got there, I found the situation chaotic. Two companies of marines were preparing to enter the shaft in combat gear. Another company was doing rescue ops, carrying wounded out of the open hole and transporting them to the medical bricks.
I tapped a gunnery sergeant on the shoulder as he raced by, and he whirled on me with a snarl. Then he recognized the bird on my shoulder and did a double-take.
“Sorry sir—busy sir!” he shouted. He looked like he wanted to run away, but didn’t dare.
“Yeah, I gathered that. Are you going in or pulling people out?”
“Going in, sir. We’re moving out any minute.”
“Good. I’ll join you.”
I don’t know what the man had expected me to say, but that wasn’t it. I could tell that I hadn’t made his day, either.
Kwon showed up about a minute later while I grouped up with the gunnery sergeant. His grunts looked at me like I was Dracula, fresh out of the grave.
“You’re late,” I told Kwon.
“Late sir? You didn’t even ask for me to follow you.”
“Yeah, but you always do. Is your suit ready? We’re going down this hole.”
“I figured out that part. What’s the deal with Gaines? Is he holding on up there?”
“I don’t know. We lost contact. The nanite chain and all transmissions to the surface have been cut. That’s pretty much why I’m here.”
I looked at the gunnery sergeant. He took a breath before speaking up.
“Word is he’s pulled back into the mouth of the tunnel, Colonel. The elevator collapsed and we’ve been left with no choice other than scaling the shaft in our suits.”
I nodded. “That’s what I figured. Let’s go in. If any of them are alive, they’ll need relief. If not—we’ll need to stop the enemy advance.”
At the idea the enemy could be advancing down the shaft to our location, the gunnery sergeant’s eyes grew comically wide. He checked his weapon again and led the team into the hole.
I followed with Kwon right on my heels. We didn’t have much in the way of light or handholds, but we only had a mile or so to go. Using the suit’s grav boots, we were able to walk on the sides of the tunnel.
It was an odd sight, looking up and all around. Marines were everywhere, walking all over the walls of the shaft. Since our boots would adhere to any surface and there wasn’t much gravity to pull us in any particular direction, I could look directly “up” from my point of view and see more marines walking on what looked like the ceiling from my position.
Behind us, a smart metal hatch closed. The shaft wasn’t pressurized like the central chamber of the ship. We were in vacuum now.
The shaft was dark except for our suit lights and the distant circle of glare from the far end ahead of us. It occurred to me that the light from outside was the light of Sol, the real sun. The star I was born under. I almost wanted to march the whole way up there just to see it.
Dead ahead, the tunnel flared up with laser fire and my visor darkened to protect my eyes.
“Weapons at the ready,” I said on company chat. “Hold your fire until you see what you’re shooting at. We have marines withdrawing toward us.”
I looked around and realized I needn’t have bothered. There wasn’t a marine there that didn’t have their projector in both hands and aimed dead ahead. Nobody had gone cowboy and begun firing into the unknown, either.
The flare of laser fire grew brighter as we marched deeper into the shaft.
“At least we know some of them are alive,” I said. “Hold your fire until we’re in close.”
A haze of smoke arose, obscuring things. We made several attempts to contact the approaching team, but they didn’t respond. I wasn’t sure why.
We came up to the edge of the smoke, and being marines, we plunged into it.
I felt my heart pound. My breath came in rhythmic bellows, blasting over the microphone in my helmet and causing a roaring feedback in my headset. This was the stuff! It had been a long while since I’d been in serious action. Hunting down cyborgs hiding in holes in the bowels of this mammoth ship was nothing compared to this. They’d never had the numbers and never had a chance. This was something entirely different.
The first thing I met was a flying marine. He was out of control, spinning into us in free-fall. I could tell he’d let go of the walls of the shaft and fired up his boots, hoping to fly the rest of the way to safety.
Unfortunately, we were in the way. He barreled into the first men in line, knocking them down like bowling pins.
“Let’s grab him, Kwon!” I shouted.
Together, we flipped our grav boots to maximum, making them plant us on the side of the shaft. Then we leaned forward, arms outstretched.
He almost took us out. Strong or not, when you’re hit by an armored body flying at over a hundred miles an hour, you’re hit pretty hard.
I stumbled and felt as if my ankles were snapping off. The servos in my armor whined in protest and the smart metal shivered. Kwon’s big hand joined the party, saving the day.
“Duck low if more of them come flying at you!” I shouted. Around me, everyone was duck-walking now into the smoke.
The marine in my arms was limp. I checked his rank and name, which was printed on his helmet and shoulders. PFC Hans Klaus. His vitals were blank—not a good sign.
“Get this man to the rear of the formation! Corpsman!”
More hands soon reached out and handed Klaus to the back of the line. I knew that with luck, he’d make it all the way back out of the shaft and be revived. Our medical was the best—and we were hard to permanently kill. Even though his lungs weren’t breathing and his heart wasn’t pumping, millions of tiny robots were working inside his body, trying to keep his cells alive.
We pressed forward, and I wondered what we’d run into next. I didn’t have long to wait.
We could hear them now. I wasn’t sure why we’d been unable to get radio before—but now we could. Their com links connected with ours automatically and the chatter came in. None of it sounded good.
“Another group on the right. Keep fire up!”
“Man down! Man down! They’ve got the corporal and they’re tearing the shit of him!”
“I’m out of juice! Can anyone give me a hook-up?”
I took a deep breath and my mouth formed into a hard line.
“Call double-time, Sergeant,” I ordered.
He glanced toward his captain, who nodded. Soon, we were trotting down the shaft. I couldn’t hear the footsteps of those around me because there was no air to carry the sound, but my boots were clanking and sparking on the melted, fused rock. The material that made up the outer shell had a lot of flint in it, causing us to leave a shower of orange sparks as we ran.
“Relief coming in on your six! Friendlies! Repeat, friendlies!”
We rushed up and joined the men on the front line—what was left of them. I went from helmet to helmet until I found the bluish glow of an officer. It was a Centaur lieutenant, and he was as banged up as the rest of them.
“Where’s Gaines?” I asked him.
His eyes were glassy, and I saw he’d lost most of his right foreleg. He still had his projector in his strange Centaur hands, however. He was breathing funny, but I wasn’t sure if that was shock or the effects of the venom the cyborgs all seemed to have.
“Gaines!” I shouted at him. “Where’s Major Gaines?”
He lifted his trigger finger and aimed it up the shaft.
Great, I thought. That’s where the cyborgs are.
“Is he dead or alive?”
The lieutenant waggled his head, a Centaur shrug, then he puked in his helmet.
“Withdraw, Lieutenant,” I told him. “You’ve done your part. You’re relieved.”
When he could manage it, he climbed onto his three remaining feet and staggered toward the rear of the line.
I frowned into the haze and laser fire up ahead. How were they getting into our suits like that? The cyborgs I’d dealt with had been mean, but easy to crush in our armor.
Again, I got the answer to my question pretty fast. The cyborgs chose that moment to charge into our line.
The smoke had been doing them a lot of good. It hadn’t occurred to me that they might be releasing it purposefully to obscure our vision. But when they showed up with pouring smoke off their bodies, I understood. This stuff wasn’t just smoke. It was some kind of artificial agent. It was manufactured particulate matter. Something like an aerogel, which we’d used in fleet battles, but never with ground forces.
When lasers went off inside the smoke, it showed its true nature. It refracted and reflected the beams making them blossom wide in a prismatic glare. The stuff turned a perfect beam of linear light into a thousand splintering rays. If I had to lay money on it, I’d bet the damned smoke stopped radio waves as well, effectively blocking our localized transmissions.
I’d been wondering how the cyborgs could penetrate armor. They did it in a way I’d never expected: they had big machetes—I guess you could call them swords. With blades two feet or so long, these weapons flashed and chopped into their victims, hacking through an inch of steel like nothing.
Those blades—I’d seen their like before. The edges were white, and shone like diamond. They were just like our combat knives, but much heavier. Each cyborg carried two of these in its forward claws, and they swung them like they knew what they were doing.
The results of all these new tactics were alarming. Their smoke obscured them as targets and shielded them from the full power of laser fire even at close range. Once they were in hand-to-hand, the cyborgs had the advantage. They were like dervishes, chopping and slashing with abandon.
“Don’t fire unless you have your weapon right up against their bodies,” I told Kwon.
“Why not?” he asked, letting fly with a long bolt into the face of a charging cyborg.
The beam flared outward, blinding us and doing little to the enemy other than causing it’s carapace to sizzle. The beam had no power in this smoke.
“Oh,” said Kwon.
He met the charging enemy with a sweeping foot. He performed a perfect stop-kick. I grimaced, expecting he’d lost his foot. But the cyborg went down. Perhaps it was Kwon’s unexpected size and strength. It had begun its swing a fraction of a second late, and before it could chop anything off Kwon, it was flat on its back.
Kwon pressed his projector to the cyborg’s belly and pulled the trigger. Steam shot out of it, and it stopped thrashing.
“Yeah,” he said. “That works good.”
I had two of my own to worry about. Our front line had been pretty well shredded. I didn’t think they were all dead, but they were definitely letting the enemy through. Instead of taking Kwon’s tactic, I grabbed up one of the enemy blades. Thrusting it directly ahead of me with my arm at full extension, I caught the next one in the chest. It wasn’t finished yet, so I jerked my arms and threw it into the next one that came at me while the first was still impaled on the sword.
They both went down together and marines near me shot them to death.
Kwon and I advanced. For once, my improved strength proved invaluable in battle. This was essentially a hand-to-hand fight. I wasn’t any faster than the enemy, but my armor was much thicker and I hit much harder. Also, the cyborgs seemed to lack discipline. They charged in a frenzy, reminding me of ancient warriors. They were like screaming berserkers. Once we got the hang of how to deal with them we were able to advance steadily with few losses. We formed up an organized line with the other men and moved up the shaft.
“I should issue shields and short swords,” I complained as I hacked and slashed.
Most of my men had swords now, plucked from the dying claws of the fallen. We had our guns in one hand—or in some cases just left them dangling on the ground—while we used the swords to great effect.
The cyborgs were ferocious fighters. They had no fear or pity in them. They were like rabid dogs. But the longer I fought them, I found they had a weakness: disorganization. They didn’t adapt well to our effective tactics. They just kept rushing in to die.
Eventually, there weren’t any more cyborgs. We’d advanced almost to the top at that point. I called a halt about a hundred yards short of the surface.
Around me, the men leaned on their knees and gasped for air. Nothing quite takes it out of you like prolonged hand-to-hand combat. You exert every ounce of power you have in every move, because it might well be your last. After ten minutes of that, even my men were winded.
“Take a breather,” I said. Ahead of us, the opening was a bright circle of light. The sun came into the shaft at an angle, splashing its glare on the southern wall. The round circle of sky we could see clearly now was dotted with stars.
After a ten second rest, I tapped a private’s helmet.
“Private, get up there and give me a report.”
“Me sir?”
“Dammit, that’s what I said!”
Kwon gave him a kick in the butt. That got him going. He scrambled up the final hundred steps to the top of the shaft.
“If you don’t like volunteering, don’t stand close to an officer,” I called after him.
He gave me a perfunctory salute over his shoulder and soon was silhouetted against the starry sky.
I watched as he cautiously stuck his head up there. He looked for all the world like a gopher poking its nose out of a hole.
“Well?” I roared.
“All clear, Colonel. At least, I think it is.”
“That’s good enough for me. Company, advance!”
We made it out onto the surface of Phobos. I had a good look around and was amazed at the mess. Gaines’ cameras hadn’t done justice to the scene. There were deep furrows burned in huge X patterns all over the place. Our equipment, sensors and turrets were all destroyed.
Worse was the strewn bodies of our dead. Hacked apart, our men lay scattered over the field. I walked from suit to suit, reading nameplates.
Finally, I found Gaines. He’d never even made it down into the shaft. His suit was dead, and he showed no more signs of life than it did.
I fell to my knees and smeared the ash-like dust from his faceplate. Another friend down. How many more would I have to find like this?
I started to get up and leave—but something stopped me. It was a gauntleted hand. Gaines had grabbed my ankle as I turned away. His eyes were still closed, but his hand had reached out and gripped me.
“Corpsman!” I roared. “Get the Major down the shaft. I mean NOW!”
I watched them tap nanites into his emergency ports and carry him off.
I smiled. One less dead man would haunt my dreams tonight.