The Catalyst

-Chapter 16-


Like everyone else out there, I came in a little too fast. It was indescribably tempting to overdo my approach speed as I watched the huge cannon swivel, fire and kill two or three clumped marines with every burst. You could see it coming, aiming for you. It reached out like the hand of God and removed men from existence with unfeeling precision. The desire to turn off the braking thrust entirely, and thus get past this deadly, unpredictable menace, was intense.
Some of my marines fell prey to the temptation. They streaked toward the cruiser, then applied maximum thrust. Some pulled it off, knees buckling, shivering from the stresses, but managing to control their tiny dishes enough to slow them down. Others were not so skilled. They tipped, overcompensated and flew into deadly spins that resulted in splattered marines on the dark hull of the cruiser. Like bugs hitting a windshield, dozens of my finest ended their lives that way, howling in my headset during their final seconds.
I cursed myself for not having had more time for training. My marines were experts at a dozen combat exercises, but we were all new to these flying toys. They were inherently dangerous—like sleds with rocket engines attached. I had known my men weren’t really ready to operate them under the stresses of combat, but there had been nothing I could do about it, we just hadn’t had much time to train with them.
The survivors, about eight hundred of them, landed upon the curved hull of the cruiser. We crawled over it on our bellies like beetles.
“Kwon? Get over here,” I said.
One of the biggest beetles scuttled over, eager to obey. I saw him dragging his dish.
“Tell everyone to tether their transports to the cruiser hull. We’ll come back for them later.”
Kwon relayed the order, while I dragged myself toward the belly turret. It was still rotating around, almost silent in space. I could feel the rumble of its motion through my hands and feet where they contacted the cruiser’s hull. Such vibrations were the only sounds you sensed in open space. They felt more like tickling sensations than sounds. I could hear the turret in my bones as it sought a target, but we were too close to the hull to hit, underneath its field of fire.
How long, I wondered, until it turned its muzzle toward the invasion ship? I had no doubt the Macros would blow away their own ship if we captured it. We were a disease and ruthless amputation was every Macro doctor’s favorite technique. The moment they knew my men were going to capture the invasion ship, they would destroy it if they could. I had no doubt of this. We were under tight time pressure. Unfortunately, with this ticking clock I didn’t even know how long we had.
“How do we take this thing out, Kwon?” I asked. “Do we have any charges?”
“No sir, what little we had in the way of explosives and heavy weapons went down with the assault ships.”
I thought of Major Welter and his final assault ship. Should I order him to burn his way out of the hold and fly over here to take out this belly turret? I figured I could tell him to fly between the invasion ship and the cruiser on a precise line. That way, if the cruiser dared to fire it would hit both the assault ship and the invasion ship behind it. I shook my head in my helmet, causing sweat droplets to fly onto the visor and flatten there. There was no gravity to drag even a droplet of water downward.
“No,” I said aloud. I needed Welter to burn a hole in this hull. To bring him over here now, under the muzzle of this gun, was suicide. I knew how the Macros thought by now. Macro Command would fire, I had no doubt of it. They would happily destroy their own ships to rid themselves of us.
It was time to act, and act now. There was no room for niceties. “Men, I want everyone to retreat from the belly cannon. Get around the curve of the hull until you can’t see it anymore. Everyone except for Kwon and I, that is.”
Marines, who had been crawling closer from every direction, now turned and moved away. No one argued, which almost made me grin. Maybe they sensed Old Riggs was about to do something crazy, and they wanted no part of it. They were correct, naturally.
Kwon hulked closer. “What’s up, sir?” he said.
“Find me a body. A marine or two that splatted nearby.”
Kwon, to his credit, paused for a second, but he did not even ask why. He just turned around and crawled away. Less than a minute later, he came back dragging a smashed sack of humanity. I didn’t look at the name patch. I didn’t want to know.
“Major Sarin?” I called over my com-link while he approached. I thought it was a good time to check in on how the takeover of the invasion ship was going. “Major Sarin?”
There was no answer. I frowned. There could have been a lot of reasons why she wasn’t answering, including because she was busy fighting for her life. It could be so loud, she couldn’t hear her headset. Or, she could be dead with a Macro marine squatting over her cooling corpse. I didn’t know which it was, but I didn’t like the list of possibilities.
“Sandra?” I called on our private channel. “Lieutenant, are you there?”
More nothing.
I tried to put it out of my mind. They were dead or alive and I couldn’t help them right now, except by doing my own job right. I concentrated on the task at hand. Kwon had figured out what I had in mind by this time, and was already working on the reactor controls.
“How will we get out of range quickly enough when it goes off?” he asked.
I pointed to the dish that still dangled, attached by a stubborn nanite strap to the dead marine. The sight made me appreciate the nanites a bit more, they were loyal little things, clinging to masters long after there was no hope. I knew that after my men had died, frequently we were surprised upon opening up their body bags. The flesh inside was recomposed and perfect, almost as if they’d never died but instead slept in their airless vinyl shrouds. The nanites had repaired their bodies faithfully, even though they were dead and could not be brought back.
Kwon looked at the dish dubiously. It was banged up, with several big dents in the curvature of it. I waved him toward the reactor. “Rig up the trigger. I’ll test this thing.”
“How will it carry both of us?” he asked.
“We only have to go a few hundred feet. Once we are around the cruiser hull, we will be safe from the blast.”
“We hope,” Kwon said.
“Yeah.”
We worked quietly after that. This part of the drill we knew well. Ever since I’d let Wilson kill himself by overloading his suit reactor and bring down the first Macro dome back on Earth, I’d had them build in timers and codes to do this sort of thing in a more organized fashion.
“It should work,” Kwon announced.
“Good enough,” I said. I had the thrust working on the dish. It was a little unstable, but I figured it only had to fly us away from this spot. There was more than enough push to move our combined weights out of here quickly.
I eyed the dish. There was no chance we could both stand on it. I threw myself over the dish on my belly and grunted. “Climb on. We are going to have to be friendly.”
“Let me go on the bottom,” Kwon said.
I looked at him. He was easily twice my weight. Under acceleration, and in order not to be top-heavy, he was right. We would be more stable if he were the base of this marine pyramid. I rolled off the dish and waved him forward. “Hurry. Start the timer and do it.”
“I already did,” Kwon said as he grunted past me.
“What? Go then, go, go, GO!” I shouted as I threw myself onto his back.
The dish rose up and shoved at my gut. My legs dangled, as did Kwon’s. The dish shuddered and bucked, wanting to go into a spin. Kwon fought the controls. I felt like a chimp clinging to my mother. If I hadn’t had nanite strength in my fingers and exoskeletal strength in my gloves, I could never have held on.
I looked back then, and saw right away we were screwed. We were too high. We were never going to make it. The belly turret rolled around quickly, the muzzle glowing white. It was going to take us out, or the explosion was going to do it. Both sources of death were in a race to finish us.
“Down, dammit, down, hug the deck!” I shouted.
“Yeah, yeah!” Kwon grunted.
I was the ultimate backseat driver. My gloves clutched Kwon’s shoulders. Hunks of Kwon’s suit and the thick meat beneath were crushed by my hands, but he didn’t complain. Kwon flipped us over and applied more thrust. A second later, we were going downward. We were in an inverted dive. We skimmed over the cruiser’s hull. The rough metal surface was five feet from my visor, three feet, two feet—inches.
Flash. The world vanished. There was no way the visor could catch up, I should have dialed down the transparency, but I hadn’t. Blinded, I felt myself go into a spin as the shockwave hit us. I knew right then what it was like to be a buzzing fly swatted out of the air by vengeful man’s palm.
I lost my grip on Kwon. I wasn’t sure what had hit us, and I could barely think coherently. A fist closed on my suit after a while, grabbing me and yanking me to a halt. I wasn’t sure who it was, but I reached up and wrapped my own two hands around that fist. Then I knew. That fist was big. It had to be Kwon.