“Man the assault ships!” I shouted over the roaring din. “I want every pilot aboard their ships, with a complement of two, including one medic. Get out there and rescue every marine you find!”
The next few minutes were a frenzy of activity. The doors had opened and sucked out dozens of my men into space before the crash-straps could grab them. I figured they were getting their null-gravity training hands-on today. I ordered one of my eight assault ships to pick up local men, those who had been sucked out by the released pressure in the hold. The other seven ships I sent back to the ring we had just come through. They were to grab every living man they could and bring them back.
“Sir?” Gorski asked, trying to get my attention.
“What is it, Captain?” I snapped.
“I’m not sure, sir…”
“Not sure about what?”
“Not sure this will work. I’m still toying with the math. You might have to abort the rescue effort at the ring.”
“Clarify. And do it fast.”
Gorski shook his head and worked at his screen where he had a big spreadsheet app displayed. Calculus functions were everywhere, displaying large numbers.
“The invasion ship is not decelerating. If we send back our assault shuttles, they might not be able to get to the marines, pick them up, and then turn around and chase us down before we’ve reached our destination.”
“Which is?” I asked.
Gorski tapped his board. “I’ve plotted that out. Given our course and the time-frame the Macros provided, we are heading for one of the big satellites orbiting the outermost warm-water world. There are factors I’m not sure of, but if the Macros keep to their schedule and launch us about four hours from now, we will be going pretty fast when we get there as it is.”
“Just do the math, and give me the answer.”
“I can’t give you a definitive answer, sir,” he said. “There are unknowns.”
“Such as?”
“The big one is our launch point: How far out do the Macros expect to be when they launch us at the enemy?”
I nodded. I could see that. If they intended to move right up and dock with these satellites…that was a far different set of circumstances than firing us out of the hold at a safe distance. Possibly, they intended to pass by and shoot us out laterally, like drive-by bullets fired out a window. Not being able to ask your commander a legitimate question about the grand plan was painful when setting up an assault.
“What’s your call, sir?” Gorski asked.
“What’s a safe point of no return?” I asked.
Gorski didn’t ask what I meant. He knew well enough. I watched him tap at his screen. I needed to know how long I had in the worst case to make my decision.
“You should have two hours, Colonel,” he said. “After that, we are taking the risk of not having the assault ships with us when we have to make our attack-given that the macros won’t adjust their timetable.”
I thought about it, and the more I did the more I didn’t like it. The Macros had never been easily diverted from their plans-even when they were suicidal. They’d rather see us all die pointlessly than be a few minutes late. There was a certain beauty in their approach, from a commander’s point of view. These heartless robots were very good at motivating people to be on time.
I listened for a second to the SOS calls. I ordered Sandra to hook me up on an open transmission channel to my drifting marines. At least, with the hold door open, we could do that much.
“Echo Company,” I said. “This is Colonel Kyle Riggs. We are in contact. We have your positions mapped. We are coming to get you, boys…one way or another.”
There was a lot of cheering after that. Only Major Sarin and Captain Gorski stared at me worriedly. They knew I was splitting my forces in the face of an unknown enemy. I was changing the plan midstream. Possibly, this was a foolish error, but I couldn’t bear the thought of sailing on by my own men and leaving them hanging out there in space, watching us. I knew they were dying gradually in the cold. Call me a sentimental fool, if you wish.
6
Out of the seventeen marines who were sucked out into space, we recovered all but two alive. Three of the survivors were too banged up to fight, but they would heal fast in tanks of nanites. They would have to sit out this assault, but if there was another one, they would be ready to go by tomorrow. Our medical nanites were now better than ever before. They seemed to be learning and getting better at bodily repair each passing month. I often joked they would be able to convert me into a blue-eyed blond, if I wanted to be one, in a few years. They had studied human anatomy for decades prior to the invasion, but that was different than real trauma recovery.
It was miraculous to watch when they flowed over an open wound. I winced when I checked on my injured men, knowing the itch they felt and the gagging tastes of metal in their mouths. A common unpleasant side-effect was sudden blindness that struck when too many clustered around the optical nerve, shorting it out, or went for a swim in the aqueous fluid.
But one could not argue, despite these inconveniencies, the nanites were a godsend. They weren’t like a surgeon-they were like a million tiny surgeons, able to stitch up something as small as an individual cellular membrane. They weren’t as small as viruses, but they could be as small as a single microbe. They were like intelligent, metal microbes that worked in tandem to do amazing things.
The seven assault ships I’d sent back to the ring to pick up the rest of my men had reached them by now. They hadn’t finished the retrieval process, however. It wasn’t easy. My marines were floating around out there in the dark, drifting away from one another. Many were on emergency power and didn’t even have working transponders. I returned to the command brick after ninety minutes and had Sandra contact the pilots.
“Time to finish up out there, Major Welter,” I said, calling my squad leader. Major Kurt Welter was new, and newly promoted, but he’d done well back on Helios. He was my replacement for Captain Roku, who’d died in his hovertank on Helios. Welter had flown with the Fleet back at Andros Island-before the Nanos had taken off and abandoned Earth. That rare flying experience had led me to put him in command of the assault ships.
“We’ve recovered most of them, sir. We’re down to the ones that aren’t responding.”
“You mean the bodies?” I asked.
“Mostly. Every few minutes, we find one that is still breathing, however. They can’t signal us if their power has dropped too far, and many are partly frozen. I’m not sure how much good they will be in the upcoming fight.”
“They won’t be much good at all,” I said. “That’s not why we’re picking them up.”
“Of course not, sir,” Welter said smoothly. “But by the calculations, we soon won’t have enough time to participate in the attack…unless you want us to use these troops we just picked up?”
I thought about that, and I didn’t like it. I couldn’t expect these men to fight, not after they’d been floating out here for days. “Here’s what we’re going to do, Kurt,” I said. “Move all the survivors off one ship and put them aboard the other five. Then leave the empty ship on rescue for now. The other six will then head back to the mothership.”
“Roger that, sir.”
“And Major Welter? The ship you leave behind will not be yours. I want you leading this assault.”
“Assumed, sir. Welter out.”
I looked at Gorski when the connection closed. “Will they make it?”
He nodded. “They’ve got to hurry. But barring any further surprises or acceleration on the part of the Macros-then yes, barely.”
Seven ships. That was what I had to work with. That, plus sixteen hundred one-man capsules. I didn’t like to think about what might happen to all those men in nanite soap-bubbles if my assault ships didn’t make it back in
