“Give me some color!” I shouted. “Sarin, give me something. I want to see red on unknowns, blue on Macros.”
“Working on it, sir,” she replied evenly. “Blue contacts are Macros.
There it was. I had my answers. Every contact on the surface of every planet was a Macro. All six of the living worlds were crawling with them. Up in space, there were red contacts, however. Unknowns in stationary orbits. Those had to be our targets. Orbiting apart from the satellites was a small number of what I assumed to be Macro ships.
“Looks like we’ve come to this party late,” I said.
“Why do they even need us?” asked Major Sarin. “The Macros have them surrounded; they are running wild on every planet.”
I shrugged. I had a few ideas already. Maybe the satellites were rigged to blow up if they got too close. Maybe they knew they would take a few losses in these final assaults and decided they’d rather lose human fodder. Or maybe, this was all a big test to see which side was stronger, these defeated beings or my marines.
Whatever the answer, I knew we were going to be fighting brother biotics again soon, people who appeared to be on their knees already, and it made me sick.
“Colonel?” Sandra said.
I didn’t answer for a second. I just stared at the screen. I was trying not to have an angry outburst. It would not be good for morale.
“Kyle,” Sandra said insistently, her voice full of sudden emotion. “I’ve got new contacts. Very close, very faint.”
My eyes swept back to our spot on the map. We were at the ring still, in terms of distance we’d covered little ground. There was a scattering of tiny, green dots nearby.
“What are those?” I asked, frowning.
“They’re…” Sandra trailed off. She tapped at her screen with urgency, and piped through a transmission to our speakers. “I think they’re ours.”
“S. O. S…” a scratchy voice came in for a moment, then faded out, then came in again. “We’re Star Force marines, Echo Company. Can anyone read me?”
A chill ran through me. I knew I was hearing my own marines, calling to me for help.
5
For one crazy second, I thought we might have gone through some kind of time-warp. Then I thought of a worse scenario. Maybe, just maybe, we had finally experienced a relativistic effect of the rings. What if this one wasn’t operating properly? What if it really had taken centuries to transport us from Helios to this system, and the men outside were beaten Star Force units from our own future? For all I knew, I was looking at six worlds covered in Macro robots that had once been human colonies. If that were the case, we were far worse than late for the battle. We were centuries late, and we were on the wrong side.
I tried to push these wild thoughts away. They wouldn’t do any of my crew, or myself, any good to contemplate.
“I know who it is,” Sandra said. Everyone looked at her this time, and not with disgust, but with hope.
She smiled, but none of us smiled back. We didn’t share in her hope yet. “It’s the guys that fell through the ring-back on Helios, remember? They had to go somewhere.”
I stared at her, and suddenly I realized she was right. It had to be. It was the simplest answer. The contacts were small. They could be single men, floating in space. They would have been out here for what…four days now? They could have survived that long. Our rebreathers were better than old Earth technology had ever built. With nanos scrubbing out the CO2, they could function almost indefinitely. They would have been critically short of water, power and rations, but…
I nodded. “I think you’re right. They are our marines.”
“The marines who were sucked through the ring with the Worms?” Major Sarin asked in something like shock. “They are still alive?”
I nodded again, and leaned on the table. I leaned close to the tiny green contacts. I felt a growing certainty. “Is there no way we can get a signal out to them?” I asked.
Sandra shook her head and bit her lip. I had known the answer of course, but felt I had to ask the question. I had set up a sensor array in the skin of the invasion ship weeks ago, but it was passive in design. It didn’t transmit radio signals. All it did was feed data down a nanite wire to us in the hold.
We heard the S. O. S message again. The marine giving it sounded tired, but determined. Maybe he could see the Macro ships flying by. I wasn’t surprised none of the Macros had stopped to pick them up or even to send them an acknowledgement. My marines were broken equipment. Useless and beneath notice. There was no compassion in the Macros. They probably didn’t even comprehend the concept.
“You have to do something, Kyle,” Sandra said.
Right then, for the first time, I thought I had made a mistake promoting her and putting her on the command brick. She was too familiar with me, and made constant breaches of protocol under stress. I figured I’d have to come up with a way to get her into another job description soon. Without pissing her off too badly, of course.
I put up my hand for quiet. “I’m trying to think of something.”
“We could try a focused radio beam, it might penetrate the hull,” Gorski suggested.
“Just call up the Macros and tell them to pick them up,” Sandra suggested.
Major Sarin didn’t say anything. She watched me and the board, flicking her eyes between both.
“We’ll try the Macros first,” I said. “Connect me with Macro Command.”
“Channel open,” Sandra said immediately.
“Macro Command. We require reinforcements for maximum combat effectiveness.”
“No reinforcements are available.”
“Negative, Macro Command. We have detected a group of our marines in very close proximity. They are stranded. We could bring them back to this ship and increase our combat numbers significantly.”
“Permission granted.”
Everyone cheered. I grinned at my audience. It felt good to win one once in a while. “Excellent, Macro Command. If you would slow down the invasion ship and turn around, we’ll pick them up now.”
There was a momentary delay. “Request denied.”
I felt as if someone had kicked me in the gut. I fought to keep my temper under control. “Macro Command, we demand that you retrieve our lost forces.”
“This task force will not alter its schedule. It will not decelerate. It will not alter course. Mission parameters will be met.”
“How the hell do they expect us to pick them up, then?” I demanded.
“Colonel?” Major Sarin said. “Sir?”
“What is it?”
“The doors sir, they-”
But she didn’t get any further. Alarms went off all over the base.
Doors? I thought, then I figured it out, and I screamed for the crash-straps to be re-engaged. This time, Sandra didn’t waste any time. She relayed the command, and all over the base little nano arms sprouted and grabbed Marines, securing them. It was a good thing too, as the four triangular doors of the hold had cracked open and begun to fold outward. Escaping atmosphere boiled out into space. We felt the command brick shift with the explosive force of its passage. The magnetic clamps held, however, and none of the bricks floated out with it.
A few of my men were not so lucky. They were lifted as if by a tornado. I ordered the internal cameras in the hold to be displayed. Marines and equipment spiraled out of the flowering jaws of the invasion ship into space. They all appeared to have their helmets on, at least.
