The Catalyst

-Chapter 19-


I put everyone I could on rescue duty, but it wasn’t enough. Some marines and bricks fell tumbling, out of control, toward the atmosphere of the icy planet below us. They would burn up in a few hours, but I couldn’t get to them. I tried not to think about it.
A full twenty minutes later I got the first word about Sandra. She was identified floating with a brick. We later realized she’d tethered herself to it and when they were jettisoning all the equipment in waves, she’d been flushed out of the hold. Unfortunately, she’d been badly banged-up.
I dared let hope take hold. Letting my exoskeletal suit take huge strides for me, I ran up to the outer decks to the spot we’d drilled into on the cruiser’s hull. On the way, I berated myself for not putting Sandra into a battle suit. I’d built less than two hundred of them, and had used them all on the invasion forces. This had been a sound military decision, but I was still upset I hadn’t used my rank to protect Sandra. It was hard as a commander to have the power to do things that could help your loved ones—even if they weren’t ethical.
When I’d reached the breach, I ordered a squad to clamp down our bricks directly on the surface of the cruiser. We had no way to get them inside at the moment and we needed the life support systems each carried. Marines clustered around each brick, powering up their suits and replenishing their oxygen until the brick was dry. It would take hours to reprocess more supplies, so I had Kwon limp around, knocking heads and getting the marines to share evenly.
It was up on the dark, scarred surface of the cruiser that I found Sandra. They had her stacked in a medical brick. She was in a medical pod. The little door on her pod was closed. I frowned, knowing that was a bad sign. The nanite arms inside worked their little tripods of black metal fingers, performing their magic upon her body. I was filled with memories. Bad ones. She would be pissing out nanites again soon—if she ever got the opportunity to relieve herself again.
I asked the tech what her status was. There were thirty-odd other little coffins stacked up in a tight space with him, but he didn’t seem to mind.
“Best I can tell sir, that one’s a turnip.”
A turnip was Star Force slang for a vegetable stashed away by our nanite friends in a dark hole. The nanites were amazingly good at keeping people alive if you got to a medical unit fast enough. But they couldn’t always fix them completely. Sometimes there was just too much cellular damage. Nanites could force her lungs to function, even if she couldn’t do so on her own, but they couldn’t breathe life into the dead.
I wanted to physically attack the tech who had given me the news so callously, but I controlled myself. He didn’t know he was talking about my girl. I glanced at his nametag. “Give me the details, Sergeant Carlson—and pretend to care.”
Carlson caught my tone and changed his. “Sorry sir. She’s in a coma. Not the good, temporary kind. She’s got almost no brain activity registering. We can keep her on nanite support, but….”
Carlson didn’t need to finish the thought. I leaned against her metal and ballistic-glass coffin, and opened the curtain on the little window. It was fogged with grease and condensation. I could see her in there, just barely. Her hair was still a rich, dark brown. She didn’t look dead, but looks could be deceiving.
It took a while for my throat to unlock enough to allow speech. “What hit her?” I asked.
“Oxygen deprivation and other decompression effects. Her suit was perforated and vented extensively in vacuum. It had repaired itself by the time we got to her, but the damage had been done.”
The damage had been done. Prophetic words. Losing Sandra shouldn’t have hurt as much as it did. I’d lost my wife, and my kids. I’d lost a dozen men who were right there in my face. I hadn’t even been traumatized by watching her die in front of me. She had died while I was busy fighting a ten ton steel bug. But it did hurt to see her like that. It hurt a lot.
“What are her odds?” I asked.
“Odds, sir?”
“Some make a miraculous recovery, don’t they? I’ve been briefed on it.”
“Well, it has happened,” Carlson said with a shrug. “I would give any of them a thousand-to-one shot. The nanites might tickle the right organ. Our tissue damage estimates might be off.”
“How many like her do you have in this brick?” I asked.
“Seven, sir.”
“Do you have enough pods to keep supporting them all?”
Carlson hesitated. “What are you asking sir?”
“You heard me. We have more injuries coming in. Do you have enough pods to support the new injured, the ones with better odds?”
Carlson thought about it. I looked over and saw him tapping at his slate computer. At last he pronounced his verdict: “Yeah. We’ve got enough. There are only a few more coming back now. We’ll be able to keep these seven alive indefinitely—if you want to call it that.”
I gave him a flat stare.
“Uh, sorry sir. But really, we aren’t doing them any favors by keeping them breathing. If the nanites can’t repair their bodies, there isn’t anything the best hospital on Earth could do for them. Even if we cart them all the way home, they won’t make it.”
So strange. I looked into the pod, and could see the nanites had done all surface work correctly. Soon, I knew, her skin would be smooth and perfect again. Since she’d died due to asphyxiation, there wouldn’t even be any scars. But she would never open her eyes, speak, or have a coherent thought again. Sometimes, advanced medical technology had its downside.
“What did we do with the turnips back on Helios?” I asked.
Carlson looked as if he were going to ask what do you mean? again, but he saw my face and didn’t try it.
“We didn’t load that brick sir. It was low priority.”
“We left them. For Worm food. They have dissected them by now. You know that, don’t you?”
He shook his head. “We made sure there was nothing for them to tear apart, sir.”
I looked away from him. Carlson seemed like ghoul to me. Right then, I hated all medical people. I knew I shouldn’t, but somehow these quiet custodians of death sickened me. They didn’t really fix anything, they just made decisions concerning resource allocation—such as who lived and who died. They were accountants, not doctors. The nanites did all the doctoring.
I was sure these thoughts of mine weren’t fair. These people were doing a hard job and they did it well. I didn’t want to do it for them, so I should be more charitable. But right then, I wasn’t feeling charitable.
With a sudden movement, I straightened and left the brick. When I slapped open the airlock, the tech called to me.
“Colonel? What do we do with the turnips?”
“Keep them going for now,” I said, glancing back. “I’m not ready to give up on them yet.”
I saw his slate computer and stylus sag. He was annoyed. He’d heard it all before. I didn’t care.
I reached the cruiser’s engine room again in a very bad mood. The progress there hadn’t been miraculous either. I tinkered with the gain on the neural net learning rates, but really, there were very few options to adjust on one of these brainboxes. All there was to do was wait, listen to reports and explore.
The reports weren’t stellar. I now had just under a thousand surviving marines—including the seven turnips in their tiny coffins. We had only two factories left, and thirty-odd other bricks. The medical brick Sandra was in was the last of its kind. The assault ship that had been blown up when we breached the cruiser’s hull was the last big vehicle in my unit. We were down to troops, flying skateboards and nanites. Lots of nanites.
“We’ve got plenty of these things floating around,” Kwon said, bringing me a strange, star-shaped object.
“Looks like a big caltrops,” I said, twisting it around.
“What’s a caltrops?” he asked.
“A set of spikes welded together that presented a sharp point aiming upward no matter how you throw it down. They’d used them to stop cavalry charges in the old days.”
“Nasty,” Kwon said.
“Yes. Where did you find these things?”
He shrugged. “Floating around everywhere.”
“I wonder if they spilled out of the Macro ship,” I said, curious. “You’ve been picking them up?”
“No, Colonel. They drift along and find us. They are glued to the hull of the cruiser everywhere. They are magnetic, see?”
He let one go, and it drifted quickly to the floor and stuck there.
I stared at it. “Did you find any around our factories?”
“Yes sir. Lots of them.”
“I left the factories making mines, Captain,” I said. “Hundreds of mines should have been produced by now.”
Kwon looked alarmed. He did a double-take, looking at the mine, me, and then back to the mine again. “Do they look like your mines?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t specify the configuration. I let the Nanos figure that out for themselves.”
“Are they dangerous?”
“Extremely,” I said. “But I would assume none of them are armed, as they haven’t killed our ship yet.”
“Why do we need hundreds of mines, sir?” Kwon asked. “This is going to be a space battle, isn’t it?”
“I hope so. But only if we can get this ship underway. Otherwise it will be shooting practice for the Macros.”
I headed back to the control system. The techs I had babysitting the brainbox while it fooled with the engine room interface looked bored. I joined them and went to work following the brainbox’s experimental work. By trying logical sequences of control inputs, the box had figured out some basics. It could turn on an external propulsion jet, for example, for a microsecond burn. But it had made no progress on navigation or even the coherent adjustment of multiple jets.
I worked on following the brainbox’s efforts. I didn’t query it on its progress, not wanting the unit to waste processing power interfacing with me. In the end, I gave up fussing over it. The machine would figure it out, or the Macro ships would come into range and blow us apart. Either way, I couldn’t do much to change things. I tried not to sweat too much about it. The experience made me appreciate the pressure the pentagon boys must have been under when I went up to fight the Macros for them, however. It must have been agonizing to have me, a hotdog amateur, up in space calling the shots while they sat helplessly in their war rooms.
It took another hour for my brainbox to gain basic navigational control of the Macro cruiser, and by that time every Macro in the star system had to be heading our way. We had no weapons control, but the big gun was knocked out anyway so that didn’t matter much. I still would have liked to have some defensive lasers and missiles operating. But I didn’t. All we could do was run for it.
When the brainbox figured out how to get the ship moving, I didn’t hesitate. I signaled an all-points alert, relaying it up to the guys on the vessel’s surface and those few who were still doing rescue missions. Everyone was to get inside the cruiser hull and secure themselves for acceleration. I wasn’t sure if the magnetic clamps would manage to hold our bricks to the outside of the ship, so I told my marines to strap them down with nano-arms and get inside the hull.
There was a beeping communication from the medical brick. Normally at a moment like this, I would have ignored it, but I opened the channel.
“Colonel Riggs?” asked Carlson. “Should we bring the—ah, the incapacitated out of the medical brick and down into the cruiser?”
“Can they survive outside their little coffins?” I asked.
“Not for long, sir.”
“Then don’t bother.”
“Should I stay with them, sir?”
“That’s up to you, Carlson,” I said.
I thought I probably should have ordered him to come below. We could use his skills if the medical brick was lost. But I couldn’t order a man to abandon Sandra. I just couldn’t. Bringing her on this mission had been a big mistake, as I had suspected it would turn out to be.
“I’ll stay, sir,” he said after a pause.
“All right. We burn in ninety seconds.”
When the engines first fired, they stuttered and the ship weaved. The nano brainbox slid three-fingered, cable-like hands over the interface panel. We soon straightened out and began to leave orbit.