The Catalyst

-Chapter 28-


I spent some time asking Marvin what he thought of the tactical situation and what kind of presents the missiles were bringing us from the Macro cruiser. I thought maybe he’d seen this sort of thing before. He immediately started complaining.
“Visual input system is inadequate,” he said. He had elevated his single camera eye up to peek over the top of the table-like computer we’d set up. He panned back and forth, but I imagined the angle and the glare of the lights in the room made it impossible to see.
“Major Sarin will hook you up directly,” I said, waving her forward.
She picked up a cable that led to the screen’s external video feed and walked uncertainly closer to Marvin.
“He doesn’t bite,” I said.
She handed the cable to Marvin, fully-extending her arm so she didn’t have to get too close. Marvin tottered forward. He rested his camera on top of his brainbox and took the cable from her hand, connecting it to a silvery thread of nanites. The nanites adjusted themselves to feed the data and Marvin halted for a few moments, transfixed by the input.
“What did you give him access to?” I asked.
Major Sarin’s eyes widened. She tapped at her screen and canceled a connection point or two. I hoped it wasn’t too late. For all my talk of trusting Marvin, it was hard to believe in the good intentions of any machine yet. For all I knew, he was the Centaurs’ walking revenge.
“What are you doing Marvin?” I asked.
“Translating incomplete two-dimensional data into an estimated three-dimensional projection.”
“Marvin,” I said, hoping he was listening. “What do you think the cruiser fired at us?”
“Question imprecise.”
“What are the most likely payloads of the four largest incoming Macro missiles?” I asked, trying to be more precise.
“Macros,” Marvin said.
I grunted, thinking he had not understood, but then I stopped myself. “You mean there are Macros aboard those missiles?”
“Conceptual error: ‘missiles’ is an imprecise term for the incoming vehicles,” Marvin complained.
“Right,” I said, catching on. “You think they are assault shuttles.”
“That is a more precise term. Reference acceptably accurate.”
I thought about it, and it made too much sense. The Macros were going to try to take back this cruiser, just as we had taken it from them. They hadn’t fired their ship-killer missiles yet, because they thought they could recapture our stolen vessel with assault shuttles rather than blowing it up.
“Why didn’t we find any shuttles like that aboard this ship?” Major Sarin asked.
“Maybe because they’d already launched them. Maybe they threw them all at the Worms and failed. Then they decided to go to Earth, pick us up and use us to do the dirty work.”
I remembered the big holds with berths for hundreds of Macros. I recalled too, that taking this ship had been relatively easy. They had about thirty fighting Macros, but apparently that wasn’t a full ship’s complement.
“Marvin, what is your estimate on enemy numbers?” I asked. “How many Macro marines are on each of those missiles?”
“If they are fully occupied, sixty-four,” Marvin said.
“Sixteen per shuttle,” I said. “That figures. The Macros love binary.”
I left the bridge then to see how Kwon was doing with our forward point-defense weaponry. Our main battery had been obliterated during our boarding assault, but I had high hopes now for our new point-defense laser turrets. The boarding shuttles would have to come in braking hard to match our speed or the Macros inside would smash into us and be destroyed. This was good news, as it gave us a much longer time to shoot them down.
While I was thinking hard, Marvin wandered off down the corridor. I hadn’t recalled giving him permission to explore, but I didn’t think he could do much harm. “Go make yourself useful, Marvin,” I called after him.
He swiveled his camera toward me, paused and stared. I ignored him for a few seconds. The next time I glanced in that direction, he was gone.
“Okay,” I told Kwon as I checked on his newly set up point-defense turret command station. “I need the turrets all connected here with nanite-wires.”
Kwon didn’t argue. He rarely did. He got up, clapping his big gloved hands and shouting for marine techs to move. They ran silvery threads of nanites out to every brainbox that controlled a laser turret on the hull.
We hadn’t gotten things organized enough yet to have these controls linked up to my bridge. Someday, if we survived this battle, I hoped to connect my boards up to the external firing systems. The job would have been made easier if the Macros had designed the ship with a command deck in mind. But as best we could tell, they hadn’t. We’d gone through the ship and hadn’t found any section that resembled a centralized bridge at all. The cruiser was built with distributed control systems only, meaning the engine could only be controlled from the engine room, etc.
Probably, this was because they didn’t have an individual in command of the rest. I’d yet to figure out if they had a specialized ‘leader’ class of Macro unit, but I suspected they didn’t. As best I could tell the Macros wirelessly linked together and formed a single mind for their control system. When I talked with ‘Macro Command’ I was talking to all of the individuals in the local networked group.
They seemed to share their command choices automatically the way one of our computers might share the job of running a single program by spreading the work among many processors. Part of each Macro mind must include software dedicated to group decision-making. I suspected this introduced a delay in the case of complex choices and that was why they tended to hesitate when asked something unexpected. They all ran their software, made a choice, and they all went with the group decision as a single entity. There was no arguing, bickering or jockeying for rank or favor. In this way, they were like giant versions of the Nanos.
At times, they did operate as individuals, however. When you fought one, you didn’t get the feeling it was conferring with the rest about every move it made. They definitely were able to function quickly and independently when they needed to.
Once the control lines were linked up to all the laser turrets, we configured the turrets to focus on the incoming shuttles as their highest priority targets. With any luck, the Macro marines would never make it aboard our ship. Thinking that was the likely result of this attack, I ordered Gorski to produce only drones. We had to knock out the ship-killing missiles. Two were still incoming, and more would likely follow if this invasion attempt was halted. The ship-killers were the bigger danger as they moved so much faster. My little turrets were made to burn down something big and slow like the invasion missiles.
“Kwon,” I said, pulling him away from where he was berating a corporal for a dead turret.
“Sorry sir,” he said, coming closer. He gave the corporal his middle finger. The tech sergeant walked away, shaking his head.
“That guy won’t admit it,” Kwon said angrily, “but he set it up wrong.”
“Don’t worry about that,” I said, thinking that mentally, Kwon was still a master sergeant, and not a conventional one at that. “I want you to prepare for a possible invasion by Macro marines.”
“Invasion?” he asked.
“Yeah. Our intel says those big missiles are carrying armed Macros, not warheads.”
Kwon nodded. “That’s why they keep slowing down. This is good news.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Yeah. I would rather fight Macros than just get blown up.”
“Right. They probably won’t make it through, but I would expect them to come through the breach first if they do. But we can’t be sure. There are hatches all over the outer hull of the ship. They might be able to unlock them and slip aboard.”
Kwon looked excited. This was the kind of fight he understood. “I’m on it. We’ll weld every hatch shut and put down a squad to repel any invaders. I’ll put a company right here, one outside the bridge and set the rest as a reserve guard force in case they do get in.”
I nodded and blessed his ideas. They were sound. He stomped away, arranging his forces. Another twenty minutes passed, and I was surprised no firing had begun. I returned to the bridge.
“We’ve fired two drones at the last two incoming ship-killer missiles,” said Gorski. He was back in his chair nearby. His eyes never left his computer and his fingers never stopped tapping at it as he spoke. “We’ll have another six drones ready in less than an hour.”
“The shuttles are still slowing down, sir,” Sarin told me. “They are clearly planning to match our course and speed so they can land on our hull.”
“Range?” I asked.
“We can almost reach them,” Gorski said.
“Let’s turn around then,” I said.
“Sir, something—” Sarin said, her voice rising.
She didn’t have to tell me. I felt the shock. It was small, but unmistakable. “What hit us?” I asked.
“I don’t know sir. Some kind of beam—the shuttles are firing on us!”
“Hull integrity?”
“No breach, sir,” Sarin said.
“Bring us around now,” I ordered.
The two of them worked the controls. It seemed to take a long time. I clenched my teeth as I felt the ship tremor with three more impacts.
“Are they in range yet?” I asked. “Put up a range plot and a timer based on current velocity.”
Sarin worked hard on the screen settings. It seemed to take too long. The ship shuddered five more times. I heard a beeping in my helmet. It was Kwon.
“Hold on, Kwon,” I said on the command channel.
“I’ve got it, sir,” Sarin said. I saw an orange, fan-shaped region appear in front of the cruiser’s nose. This was our ships firing cone. The color was brighter near the ship, which I immediately interpreted as our strongest firepower. Further out, it quickly faded to nothing. I could tell right away we didn’t have much range. The enemy ships were a good distance away from that cone, but we were already getting hit.
“They out range us,” I said, watching in panic as they slowed further. “They can sit outside our reach and snipe us to death.”
I heard another beeping in my helmet. “Go ahead, Kwon,” I said.
“Sir, my turrets are falling off the ship when you made that turn,” he said.
“What?” I asked frowning.
“I’ve lost contact with eleven of them.”
I suddenly got the message. “The Macros are knocking out our turrets. They’ll take them all out, then invade. Damn.”
“We could turn around again until they get in range,” Gorski suggested.
I shook my head. “They can see them or sense them somehow. They will just snipe at our engines if we let them. They are in no hurry. We don’t have anything to hit them with.”
“We’ll have another drone in time to fire at them,” Gorski said. “Or we could throw mines.”
“We’re going to need those mines. There’s no evidence the ones we threw at them hit anything, is there?”
“No sir.”
I turned back to the board. Another tiny shock rattled the ship. I realized I didn’t have any choices left. I was out-ranged, and they were stripping away the small armament that I had. I could tell, without Sarin spoon-feeding the data to me, the enemy shuttles had slowed down to a crawl now in relative speeds. I would have done the same. When you outranged an enemy, you sat back and pounded him.
I had no interest in being softened up any further. “Full ahead,” I ordered. “Charge them. Let’s get into range before they destroy every turret we set up.”
I felt the ship move under my feet and had to grip the computer table with my hands. The acceleration had to be tremendous to feel it so strongly while the inertial dampeners were functioning.
“Kwon!” I shouted over the engines, which were thrumming loudly now. “Get your men inside the hull and tell them invaders are likely.”
“Right sir!” Kwon shouted back excitedly.
If I hadn’t been facing sixty-four angry robots I would have laughed. He sounded like a kid let loose in a video game store.