The Catalyst

-Chapter 8-


When the assault ships were loading up, I met Kwon on the deck of the hold. The deck curved upward gently, as we were really standing inside the walls of a giant cylinder. The big doors stood open, the four leaves spread like a steel flower. The yawning doors let in the white light reflected up from the ice world as we glided closer. Brilliant yellow starlight from the nearby sun flowed in as well, casting long, stark shadows.
Kwon was wearing one of the new battle suits, as was I. He looked huge and machine-like. His suit had been a special order, as it was the largest size I’d come up with. Not everyone had a suit yet. There weren’t enough to go around. I had decided to put them on the men in the assault shuttles, as they would get to the target first.
“Down here to see us off, Colonel?” Kwon asked me.
“Are you going in one of the ships?” I asked.
“Yes sir.”
“Me too. I’ll fly with Major Welter.”
Kwon looked at me sharply. “I didn’t realize you were coming along.”
“Where else would I be? I don’t like sending my troops into harm’s way without sharing the pain. You know that, Captain Kwon.”
“Sir, permission to speak freely.”
“Granted.”
“Are you out of your freaking mind?” Kwon asked in a low voice. There was more than a hint of exasperation in his tone.
I chuckled. “Some think so.”
“We need our commander at the command brick, on the boards, coordinating all this.”
I shook my head. “There isn’t anything to coordinate. There is no firepower to back up the assault, no more ships. There won’t be a second wave. How can I second-guess the ground commander on a mission like this? Whoever stays in this hold will be watching and providing some sensor data—that’s it.”
“I still think you’re crazy.”
“You’re still right. You want to come with me on my ship?”
“No,” Kwon said. “But I’ll do it anyway. That way, when they blow you out of space I can take command.”
I grinned. “For the good of the Force?”
“Right, sir. Can I ask more questions?”
“Talk to me, Captain.”
“How do we get back?” he asked.
I stared at him. I opened my mouth to say: the Macros will come pick us up. But I stopped myself. I had no indication from Macro Command they would do anything to retrieve us. They had only shown concerns for such issues when we left the Worm planet. We had our mission parameters. We were to take the enemy satellite. But that was all we knew about the Macro plans.
I frowned at him. “Hopefully,” I said, “the Macro ships will park in orbit around this world and we will be allowed to fly back to them.”
“I hope so too, sir. About the enemy, do we kill them all or what?”
I nodded, I’d thought of this one. “We’ll kill as many as we have to, then get them to surrender.”
“What if they won’t? Could get bloody.”
“I know, but any beaten force eventually—”
Kwon interrupted me, which was uncharacteristic for him. “They have nowhere to retreat. Would you surrender to aliens or fight to the last? Maybe they don’t know about surrender and mercy.”
I didn’t like where he was going. He wanted to know if he had permission to slaughter an entire population. We hadn’t even met these people, and we were planning their massacre. The entire conversation had a surreal feel to it. We were the first humans to come to this star system, and we would be remembered as vicious invaders. What did that mean for the future? Would we be reviled millennia from now due to an incident I presided over today? I would have rubbed at my neck, but with my armor on, I couldn’t barely feel the squeeze of my hand.
“We will have to play it by ear. If I don’t make it, you will take command. You will do as you think best.”
Kwon didn’t look happy with those orders. I understood. Big decisions were painful ones. There was no clear policy we could follow right now. We might be forced to destroy the creatures on the space station to survive. We might all die in space just getting there. Or, they might all bow down and beg for mercy. We really didn’t know, and the unknown was hard to take.
“I heard about your plan for the Macros,” Kwon said, grinning at me.
I looked at him sharply. For a second, I thought maybe he was making a joke. He knew me too well, and maybe he knew I had nothing.
“You always have a plan, Riggs,” he said, honking with laughter. “They might not always work, but you always have a trick!”
I smiled tightly and nodded. I always had something, you could ask anyone and they would confirm it. I only wished it was true this time. I left him to his preparations and walked up the curving deck of the hold. My boots didn’t clank upon the deck, because we were in vacuum and there was no air to carry the sound waves to my ears. I heard only a muffled click that came up through my suit to my helmet as I took each step.
I thought about the Macro ships. Most of them were staying away from us, and away from the satellites. It seemed clear they had some kind of deal with the aliens in their orbital structures. They probably had agreed not to come within weapons range of the stations. That would explain the wide berth they gave them. Through Macro logic, however, they’d decided we weren’t part of the equation. We weren’t exactly Macro forces, so if they threw us at a space station and we took it out, they hadn’t violated their deal.
What that meant tactically was the Macro ships would not be too close to the station while we fought. They would not lend us fire support. We were on our own. I had no idea if we would survive this assault, but if we did, they would most likely keep using us on other missions. Until we were all dead.
It was impossible not to think of turning on our masters in this situation. I had done some planning, of course. These boarding systems I’d put together would serve equally well to attack Macros. I thought we could do it—at least that we had enough firepower to take the invasion ship and the cruiser, if need be. But there would be losses, especially against the cruiser.
Hypothetically, I considered the situation we’d be in if I did take control of the ships and somehow figured out how to fly them. Big ‘ifs’. In such a case, we would have to run. We couldn’t fight all the ships in the system. There were four cruisers in this system that we’d spotted in addition to our escort, and more could be quietly orbiting somewhere or sitting on a moon, repairing or mining. They would certainly come at us and take us down.
I found myself standing in front of the row of dark bricks that held our factory units. Each one contained one of the strange, programmable duplicating machines. We had only lost one factory brick since the start of the campaign. This was largely due to my prioritization of defense. The factories were the most critical assets we had.
I tapped out an entry code and stepped into the nearest of the factories. It had been churning out a guidance system for a new assault ship. If we had been given another week, I could have doubled the number of assault ships in our arsenal. I doubted we would be given more than another hour before we were called upon to attack, however. The Macros were fanatically punctual.
I stared at the strange machine. We still didn’t understand it, nor did we even know who had built the original. We knew what it took to create one, but only the machines themselves could reproduce more factories. It was as if I were a primitive biologist from the early renaissance period, examining the human body and wondering how it worked. Figuring these things out completely would probably take Earth’s scientists centuries.
I decided to change the program. They’d finished the battle suits now, and we had all the assault ships we could use. What I did need was a way of stopping Macro cruisers from destroying my forces—if we were to turn on them. I had by no means made that decision yet, but if nothing else, if we were down to our last handful of troops we could at least die well. We could blow up this ship, if nothing else.
Explosives? I recalled the mines the Worms had used so effectively, destroying several cruisers. Maybe if we could trail a few out behind us we could get rid of a Macro cruiser.
I set to work, and soon had a new design that I hoped would do the trick. We didn’t have enough radioactives for big charges. The mines could hardly deliver more than a kiloton yield each. But with a tiny brainbox, some magnetic sensors and a mini propulsion system that was only enough to push a magnetic boot through space. I ordered one factory to produce as many as it could.
What seemed like moments later, a hammering came at the door. Kwon appeared in the airlock. I told the factory unit to end our programming session and continue the manufacturing.
“Sir?” said Kwon, poking his blocky helmet into the room.
“Yes, what is it, Kwon?”
“Time to launch, sir. The Macros—they are ordering us to jump out the big doors.”
“Oh, uh—” I said, stunned to hear so much time had passed. “Why didn’t someone call me?”
Kwon pointed to my helmet. I’d taken it off, and switched off my suit radio. The chatter made it hard to think.
“Right,” I said. “Get to your assault ship. I’ll be right there. We launch in five.”
He vanished, and I turned back to the factory. I ordered it to group-link all the factories. They were to make more mines and battle suits in my absence. I didn’t even know how many they could make in the amount of time we had, but I figured it should be enough. I didn’t even know if I was going to use the new equipment or not.
The assault ships, when we finally climbed into them, reminded me somewhat of my original hovertank design. I’d come up with the design back on Earth, with some of these same, shark-like contours. They were sleek and dangerous-looking.
When I reached the assault ship that had saved a seat for me, I barely had time to get the nanite arms to reach up and strap me in before it launched. I looked at the front wall, where beads of metal crawled. Each one indicated where a nearby ship was. The contact representing our ship was green, the rest of the assault ships were faintly yellow. The two big Macro ships were blue and oblong. I could see our green contact was the last one in the chain. We were late to the party.
Behind my ship, as I watched, hundreds of tiny contacts appeared. They were so faint and so numerous, they looked like rippling flaws in the metal wall. I knew they were not mistakes, or static. They were my men. Each man stood in a capsule, with his legs stiff, his body being pressed hard by acceleration. The capsules were little more than two foot-wide parabolic disks with a propulsion unit on the back and a skin of nanites covering the occupant. The tiny capsules guided themselves, but could be set for manual operations, in which case the marine riding it could guide the vehicle by leaning. The men already had several names for them: dishes, skateboards and flying saucers.
Inside the assault ship, dull metal finishes ruled. I’d put in control systems for every individual marine’s seat at the base of the nanite arms that served us as restraints. Normally, Nano ships were controlled by voice, interacting with the brainbox verbally. In this case, I didn’t want to fly my marines into combat with arms gripping them which they couldn’t release on their own. Combat conditions were hard to predict. The brainbox or the pilot could be taken out of the equation, or both. With my design, every man had some level of control of his own situation. If he tapped or kicked a bead of metal, the nanite arms would release him automatically.
“Any incoming fire yet, pilot?” I asked.
“Negative, sir,” she said. The pilot was Lieutenant Joelle Marquis. She was young and inexperienced, but none of that could be heard in her voice. Her words rang with calm authority and a slight, French accent. She was one of the Fleet people I’d brought along in case I’d needed to build a flying force at some point. On Helios, she’d been left manning the walls, but now her piloting skills were sorely needed.
Kwon leaned forward and waved to me, indicating he wanted to touch helmets. I immediately complied, wondering what my second in command might want to say in private. Since the assault ships were not pressurized, we could normally only communicate with radio intercoms. By touching our bulbous faceplates together, vibrations could be carried and voices therefore could be heard, but only by the two people in close contact. I found myself staring into Kwon’s big face, which was grinning. Being so close to another guy was disconcerting, but you got used to it.
“What is it, Captain?” I asked.
“She’s really hot, isn’t she?”
I stared at him. “Who?”
“Joelle,” he said flicking his eyes toward the front of the ship. “I love that frenchie talk.”
I snorted in disbelief. Kwon was a great marine, but he was like a big kid sometimes. I didn’t know if Joelle would go for a guy like Kwon, she was too good-looking and he was a lump in a battle suit. But I decided that if he was happy to dream about her, I was happy for him.
“Go for it, Kwon,” I said, “but wait until after the fighting, all right?”
“Okay, okay!” he said. Still grinning, he sat back. The nano-straps that held us all in seemed excited by his leaning and stretching. They shortened up their hold on him, all but pinning him to the wall of the ship. Nano arms were like mother hens when you were on a mission.
“Incoming fire,” the pilot said. Joelle’s words were calm, but I heard the tension in them. I didn’t blame her for being worried.
We began immediately swerving from side to side. I knew she was firing the lateral propulsion systems we’d rigged up, jinking randomly to avoid getting hit. The enemy had taken a long time to figure out they were in trouble. We were three-quarters of the way there. In another minute or so, the ships would have to flip the engines forward and decelerate or crash into the station directly.
I looked up at the screen. There was the station; it was huge and reddish-brown. It looked like small moon, but was oddly-shaped. Unlike a human structure, this thing was organic-looking in design. It was looped with tubes and swirling flanges. It looked more like a seedpod coated in cobwebs than anything else. I didn’t see any incoming fire on the screen. They must not be firing missiles at us.
A beam of light splashed into the ship then, having breached the thin hull. My visor darkened almost immediately. The intensity of the light gave me an instant headache. I thought for a second that one of my men had flipped off his safety and discharged his projector. I almost shouted a complaint, when I felt an impact against my right shoulder.
Centrifugal force pushed me into the man on my right, just as the guy on my left was being shoved up against me. I could feel the motion now, we were in a spin. My vision returned and my visor brightened. I could see all the men were caught up in the spin, we were doing at least three Gs of lateral force. The upper hull of the ship was gone. A hole had ripped through the nanite skin and I could see the stars whirling by.
“We’ve been hit!” shouted Kwon unnecessarily. “Orders, sir?”
I’d always known that these ships were sitting ducks if the enemy had their act together. The problem was, we couldn’t come in at a high enough velocity—not if we wanted to do anything other than ram the station. We had to slow down when we got in close. I cursed the Macros and their deals. They’d once again thrown away the lives of my men.
The spin slowed down as the ship struggled to control it. The ship was recovering, but I knew Macros tended to fire on a target until it was completely destroyed.
“Everybody out, we’ve got to expect another strike,” I said. “Deploy your skateboards, marines. The free ride is over!”
“What about me, sir?” asked the pilot. I was momentarily surprised to hear her voice—I hadn’t really expected her to survive.
Lieutenant Joelle Marquis. Young, kind of cute, with an accent that turned on Kwon. I hardened my thoughts. I couldn’t worry about saving her butt any more than the rest of us.
“Can you operate your ship, pilot?” I asked. Around me, twenty men scrabbled to escape their panicked nano straps, which clutched at them like the hands of frightened children. Each of them struggled to get out the disks they sat on and exit the craft through the gaping hole in the roof.
“I can fly,” she said.
“We need that big laser to drill into the station. Take it all the way in. Good luck.”
“Thank you, sir.”
I jumped out then, and Kwon followed me. I wondered if he hated me for giving the girl suicidal orders.
I stood on my disk and a rippling sheen of nanites grew out of it, bubbling up my body to finally stop at my neck. I could still see through my helmet visor to navigate. There was a flash behind me. I suspected it was the assault ship, taking another hit.
I couldn’t do anything about it, so I didn’t look back.