The Catalyst

-Chapter 17-


“Can you hear me, Colonel?” Kwon asked.
I wasn’t sure, but I didn’t think it was the first time he’d asked that question. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m all right.”
Kwon chuckled. “If you lie too much, you go to hell. Your mamma taught you that, right sir?”
“Yeah she did,” I said. “The old lady was right. I think I’m headed that way.”
“Can you see me?”
“No. Where are you?”
“About two inches from your face.”
I reached up, and felt his visor. He was pressing it against mine so we could talk in the vacuum. “Oh, yeah. It’s dark.”
Kwon fiddled with something on my helmet. “Your visor is transparent. There is plenty light. I think you forgot to blackout your visor.”
I thought about it. I seemed to recall something then. “Blinded,” I said. “The nanites will fix it. What hit us? Was that the cannon?”
“No,” Kwon said. “That little pop was the reactor blowing. The turret is gone.”
“What did you set the timer to?”
I could sense Kwon shrugging, even though I couldn’t see him. “I don’t know. I didn’t set it to anything. I just turned it on.”
Great, I thought. What was the default timer setting? Forty-five seconds, if my memory served. Kwon was many things, but he wasn’t a genius. I groaned aloud. “Remind me to bust you down to sergeant again after this campaign,” I said.
“Fine with me, Colonel,” he said.
I snorted, knowing it probably was fine with him. Kwon was not an ambitious man. His only true drive was the destruction of the machines. He didn’t care about much else. No wonder we got along so well.
“What’s the status of the invasion?” I asked, suddenly alarmed. “What’s going on?”
“No word from the invasion ship. They blew a hole in the hull though, and our last assault ship flew over here and started drilling.”
“Major Welter’s ship?” I asked, trying to get my mind working again at full speed. “Good. Take me over there fast. My eyes are itching, the nanites are on overdrive. I should get some sight back soon.”
Kwon took my hand in his big paw. When I told him to take me fast, he didn’t argue, he just did it. My feet bumped and skipped over the cruiser’s hull. I stumbled behind him like a toddler being dragged through a grocery store by a pissed-off mom. I sensed heat and saw flashes of light ahead.
“Is that the laser drill?” I asked.
“Yeah. You can see something now, huh?”
“They’ll know we are coming through. Get everyone down and ready to fire when we breach the hull.”
Kwon shouted orders. Marines I couldn’t see ringed the spot and readied their rifles.
“Major Welter?” I shouted over the local com-link.
“Sir?” Welter’s voice crackled in my headset. “Is that you Colonel Riggs? Of the infamous Riggs Pigs?”
“The same,” I said.
“Everyone figured you were dead, or at least out of this fight, sir.”
“They thought wrong,” I said. “Are you through the hull yet?”
“No Colonel, this metal is thick and tough. Several times thicker than the invasion ship.”
“I want you to get out of the assault ship and let it drill on automatic.”
“Why sir?”
“Because they know we are coming.”
There was a brief moment of quiet before Welter spoke again. “I’m out of there, sir.”
I nodded appreciatively. He had moved with shocking speed. The man was a survivor. I supposed that anyone who made it this far in my vicinity could be qualified as harder to kill than a cockroach.
Less than a minute later, our last assault ship blew up. It shot outward like a cork fired from a cannon’s mouth. I watched it tumble away, burning. My vision wasn’t perfect yet, that would take another hour or two. But I could see bright lights, especially with my left eye, which was apparently less damaged.
The assault ship was indeed brightly lit. An incandescent fireball of spinning wreckage threw burning chunks of molten metal everywhere. I felt a few hot droplets rain on my suit. The Macros had probably set a charge right under the spot where we worked to breach their hull. The moment the drilling laser had burned through, it had set off the explosives and blown the ship into space.
“I want a recon squad into that breach!” I shouted. “Marines, move!”
I watched a group of shapes approach the breach. They were hazy and indistinct, but I could tell they were my men. They threw in concussion grenades and followed up with a blazing fullisade of laser fire into the smoking hole at their feet.
“You heard the man, get in there!” roared Kwon.
They hopped into the hole and vanished. We waited twenty seconds. Since they were still alive, I ordered more men in. I told them they had to burn their way through every wall they saw. They were to ignore empty passages and inviting hatchways. I wanted them to dig deeply into the ship, burning the walls and the floors at their feet until they got a good distance away from the breach. They were to assume the enemy had set up more booby-traps along the obvious routes of advance.
Several minutes later, when over a hundred of my marines were down there in the thick of it, I decided to join them. Kwon’s heavy hand fell on my shoulder.
“Your eyes, sir?” he asked.
I shook him off. I could see with my left pretty well now. It was little dim, but I could sight along a rifle barrel. “They are fine now,” I said. “Nanites work fast, remember?”
Kwon followed me into the hole, shaking his head. “Hell is a bad place, Colonel.”
“Shut up,” I said. “I know all about it.”
They waited until about half of us were inside before they hit us. I’m not sure if that was due to a plan they had or if it was just the best they could do. I think our tactic of drilling through decks and walls had them baffled. We were not approaching in the expected directions. Several more charges did go off, blowing apart my leading marine scouts. But most of us made it into the cruiser’s guts and spread out. We held ten percent of the ship when the lights went out.
For a second, I thought my eyes were having a catastrophic relapse. I knew it wasn’t our suit lights, as everyone had them on. Shouts went up from a dozen throats, reporting limited visibility. I knew then it wasn’t my eyes, it was much worse, it was everyone’s eyes.
“Some kind of blackout gas, sir,” reported a lieutenant from delta company. “We can’t see a thing.”
“Turn on your motion sensors. Look for big, metal bugs.”
They came at us out of the fog they had created. It was effective, this stuff. I figured it had been designed to allow them to see, but not us. I could hear firing and screams, but saw nothing beyond my HUD. Something hit me in the side and sent me spinning. I almost fired, but stopped myself. From the feel of it when it hit me, it must have been one of my marines running into me. I chided myself. I had to get into the game.
“Men, I want you to draw knives and pistols. Make very sure of your targets. Try to hold your positions while this smoke clears out the breach. Can anyone up topside see anything?”
“It’s venting, sir,” came a voice. “This is Major Welter. I’m standing near the breach. It looks like a volcano is erupting.”
“Right,” I said. “Marines, hold your positions and try not to shoot one another.”
“They are charging in close, sir!” came an anonymous report. I heard sounds of laser fire and more shouting, much of it incoherent.
I felt I was losing control of the situation. The Macros had identified a critical weakness in our operational effectiveness. I figured if I lived through this experience, I would redesign our battle suits to allow marines to fight more effectively without visual input.
“Hold tight,” I said. “The gas is clearing!”
When it did clear, we shot the retreating Macros. They had dragged off a number of my men. We’d lost thirty marines. Only four of the Macro workers had been disabled. They lie in the passages, kicking spastically, repetitively. Like robot toys with dying batteries. They had the familiar metallic, headless-ant look. They had beam weapons mounted where their heads were supposed to be.
“Macro marines,” I said, “their shipboard fighters. There can’t be too many of them, but they are effective.”
I ordered the mass of my men into the ship now. I didn’t want them outside, exposed to incoming fire. I had reports of other Macro ships moving in the system. Only a few recon squads stayed up top on the surface of the hull, watching the skies and the invasion ship.
I decided to change tactics. This was taking too long, and I could not afford attritional losses. If more Macro ships got here before we captured this one, we would be helpless. I ordered the men to head off in company-sized forces in every direction. Someone was bound to discover the bridge or the engine room, and I felt sure the Macro crew wasn’t big enough to contain us all. We would overrun them with our superior numbers.
I took command of the company headed toward the engines. In the invasion ship, that had been the critical region I’d discovered when I was traveling through their tubes and chambers. If they liked to design their ships consistently, we might gain control over it by taking that area.
We saw some fantastic sights along the way. I traveled through chambers that resembled laboratories of some kind. One was filled with bulbous tanks that dripped solvents. Vapors filled these chambers, and I had no doubt the environment was highly toxic. Something like electrolysis was going on inside those bubbling tanks. Was it a power source or a weapons system? I had no idea.
When we reached the engine compartments in the aft part of the ship, I met up with real resistance. There were only four of their marines, crouching on the ceiling with their beam-weapon heads directed toward the entrance. They waited like patient cockroaches, and we didn’t disappoint them. We burned our way in from two sides of the chamber at once, and I sent a few marines in through the open hatch as well just to keep them honest.
It was a slaughter. Caught in a crossfire, the enemy marines fought to the death, but hardly managed to score a hit before they were beamed to smoking ruin. I took note of the fact they didn’t bother to retreat, not even in the face of hopeless odds. We must be getting close to the ship’s vitals.
“Keep moving,” I told my men, broadcasting to every helmet in the invasion force. “Don’t stop for anything. Not even if you are hit. When it becomes clear we are going to take the ship, they will not hesitate to blow up the whole cruiser.”
In the end, it was a close thing. The huge engines rumbled, vibrating the floor in the final room as we fought the dozen or so technicians who held it. We had to be careful here, I didn’t want our weapons to disable the very ship we’d fought so hard to take. It came down to pistols and knives against snapping pinchers in the end. They flicked out their snapping metal mandibles, ripping holes in suits, severing air tanks and flesh. Due to the almost non-existent gravity, blood floated and pooled in odd configurations on the walls and mixed with a dozen stranger liquids that flowed from the struggling Macros.
I saw a man in front of me go down. He had a knife in one hand, having lost his other weapons. The power cable to his generator was severed and floating. I lunged forward, pulling away from Kwon’s watchful grip. He cursed and followed me into hand-to-hand.
Fighting one of the machines this close up was terrifying. They were much worse than the Worms. They were not soft flesh, and they were bigger than your average Worm. A good fifteen feet long, the Macro worker had its back to us as it worked over the marine, who roared hoarsely as the thing diced his suit and flesh. It looked as if he were being attacked by a lawnmower. Shreds of material, nanite-impregnated or not, flew everywhere in an alarming spray. The marine still slashed with his knife, the monofilament edge removing flashing metal mouth parts from the Macro.
I tackled the thing, and it felt as if I had tackled an angry bulldozer. The metal surface didn’t give way a micron. It was not staggered by my weight or the impact of my flying assault. I was an insect hurling myself upon a careless being of gray metal.
I put my pistol onto a jointed section on its back where two sliding plates met. I pulled the trigger and held it down. A thin beam lanced into the metal, melting its way into the things guts. I didn’t have much hope of taking it out this way, however. It would take too long to bring it down.
Kwon came in behind me. His approach was more effective, and got a response from the monster. He put his monofilament blade up into a set of cables that controlled a rear leg. The leg lost tension and went sprawling and flailing. That entire end of the monster sagged.
The Macro left the shredded marine and turned, dragging the bad leg. When it realized we were holding onto its back and not letting go, it did something unexpected. It loaded up its legs underneath itself and sprang into the air.
I felt a huge surge of power. My first instinct was to grab and hold on, but I realized that was the wrong move. I let go.
The Macro surged upward like a grasshopper launching itself into flight. In this case, however, the ceiling was very close, and like a grasshopper in a box, it smashed into the roof.
Kwon, unfortunately, had held on. His bulldog instincts failed him, and he crashed into the roof of the chamber, crushed between the Macro’s metal body and the equally unforgiving ceiling. He went limp and tumbled away, falling in slow-motion.
Not knowing if he was dead or not, I broke my own rules of engagement and unlimbered my beam projector. I fried the Macro point-blank as it came down again.