“Sir?” Welter’s voice crackled in my headset. “Is that you Colonel Riggs? Of the infamous Riggs Pigs?”
“The same,” I said.
“Everyone figured you were dead, or at least out of this fight, sir.”
“They thought wrong,” I said. “Are you through the hull yet?”
“No Colonel, this metal is thick and tough. Several times thicker than the invasion ship.”
“I want you to get out of the assault ship and let it drill on automatic.”
“Why sir?”
“Because they know we are coming.”
There was a brief moment of quiet before Welter spoke again. “I’m out of there, sir.”
I nodded appreciatively. He had moved with shocking speed. The man was a survivor. I supposed that anyone who made it this far in my vicinity could be qualified as harder to kill than a cockroach.
Less than a minute later, our last assault ship blew up. It shot outward like a cork fired from a cannon’s mouth. I watched it tumble away, burning. My vision wasn’t perfect yet, that would take another hour or two. But I could see bright lights, especially with my left eye, which was apparently less damaged.
The assault ship was indeed brightly lit. An incandescent fireball of spinning wreckage threw burning chunks of molten metal everywhere. I felt a few hot droplets rain on my suit. The Macros had probably set a charge right under the spot where we worked to breach their hull. The moment the drilling laser had burned through, it had set off the explosives and blown the ship into space.
“I want a recon squad into that breach!” I shouted. “Marines, move!”
I watched a group of shapes approach the breach. They were hazy and indistinct, but I could tell they were my men. They threw in concussion grenades and followed up with a blazing fullisade of laser fire into the smoking hole at their feet.
“You heard the man, get in there! ” roared Kwon.
They hopped into the hole and vanished. We waited twenty seconds. Since they were still alive, I ordered more men in. I told them they had to burn their way through every wall they saw. They were to ignore empty passages and inviting hatchways. I wanted them to dig deeply into the ship, burning the walls and the floors at their feet until they got a good distance away from the breach. They were to assume the enemy had set up more booby-traps along the obvious routes of advance.
Several minutes later, when over a hundred of my marines were down there in the thick of it, I decided to join them. Kwon’s heavy hand fell on my shoulder.
“Your eyes, sir?” he asked.
I shook him off. I could see with my left pretty well now. It was little dim, but I could sight along a rifle barrel. “They are fine now,” I said. “Nanites work fast, remember?”
Kwon followed me into the hole, shaking his head. “Hell is a bad place, Colonel.”
“Shut up,” I said. “I know all about it.”
They waited until about half of us were inside before they hit us. I’m not sure if that was due to a plan they had or if it was just the best they could do. I think our tactic of drilling through decks and walls had them baffled. We were not approaching in the expected directions. Several more charges did go off, blowing apart my leading marine scouts. But most of us made it into the cruiser’s guts and spread out. We held ten percent of the ship when the lights went out.
For a second, I thought my eyes were having a catastrophic relapse. I knew it wasn’t our suit lights, as everyone had them on. Shouts went up from a dozen throats, reporting limited visibility. I knew then it wasn’t my eyes, it was much worse, it was everyone’s eyes.
“Some kind of blackout gas, sir,” reported a lieutenant from delta company. “We can’t see a thing.”
“Turn on your motion sensors. Look for big, metal bugs.”
They came at us out of the fog they had created. It was effective, this stuff. I figured it had been designed to allow them to see, but not us. I could hear firing and screams, but saw nothing beyond my HUD. Something hit me in the side and sent me spinning. I almost fired, but stopped myself. From the feel of it when it hit me, it must have been one of my marines running into me. I chided myself. I had to get into the game.
“Men, I want you to draw knives and pistols. Make very sure of your targets. Try to hold your positions while this smoke clears out the breach. Can anyone up topside see anything?”
“It’s venting, sir,” came a voice. “This is Major Welter. I’m standing near the breach. It looks like a volcano is erupting.”
“Right,” I said. “Marines, hold your positions and try not to shoot one another.”
“They are charging in close, sir!” came an anonymous report. I heard sounds of laser fire and more shouting, much of it incoherent.
I felt I was losing control of the situation. The Macros had identified a critical weakness in our operational effectiveness. I figured if I lived through this experience, I would redesign our battle suits to allow marines to fight more effectively without visual input.
“Hold tight,” I said. “The gas is clearing!”
When it did clear, we shot the retreating Macros. They had dragged off a number of my men. We’d lost thirty marines. Only four of the Macro workers had been disabled. They lie in the passages, kicking spastically, repetitively. Like robot toys with dying batteries. They had the familiar metallic, headless-ant look. They had beam weapons mounted where their heads were supposed to be.
“Macro marines,” I said, “their shipboard fighters. There can’t be too many of them, but they are effective.”
I ordered the mass of my men into the ship now. I didn’t want them outside, exposed to incoming fire. I had reports of other Macro ships moving in the system. Only a few recon squads stayed up top on the surface of the hull, watching the skies and the invasion ship.
I decided to change tactics. This was taking too long, and I could not afford attritional losses. If more Macro ships got here before we captured this one, we would be helpless. I ordered the men to head off in company-sized forces in every direction. Someone was bound to discover the bridge or the engine room, and I felt sure the Macro crew wasn’t big enough to contain us all. We would overrun them with our superior numbers.
I took command of the company headed toward the engines. In the invasion ship, that had been the critical region I’d discovered when I was traveling through their tubes and chambers. If they liked to design their ships consistently, we might gain control over it by taking that area.
We saw some fantastic sights along the way. I traveled through chambers that resembled laboratories of some kind. One was filled with bulbous tanks that dripped solvents. Vapors filled these chambers, and I had no doubt the environment was highly toxic. Something like electrolysis was going on inside those bubbling tanks. Was it a power source or a weapons system? I had no idea.
When we reached the engine compartments in the aft part of the ship, I met up with real resistance. There were only four of their marines, crouching on the ceiling with their beam-weapon heads directed toward the entrance. They waited like patient cockroaches, and we didn’t disappoint them. We burned our way in from two sides of the chamber at once, and I sent a few marines in through the open hatch as well just to keep them honest.
It was a slaughter. Caught in a crossfire, the enemy marines fought to the death, but hardly managed to score a hit before they were beamed to smoking ruin. I took note of the fact they didn’t bother to retreat, not even in the face of hopeless odds. We must be getting close to the ship’s vitals.
“Keep moving,” I told my men, broadcasting to every helmet in the invasion force. “Don’t stop for anything. Not even if you are hit. When it becomes clear we are going to take the ship, they will not hesitate to blow up the whole cruiser.”
In the end, it was a close thing. The huge engines rumbled, vibrating the floor in the final room as we fought the dozen or so technicians who held it. We had to be careful here, I didn’t want our weapons to disable the very ship we’d fought so hard to take. It came down to pistols and knives against snapping pinchers in the end. They flicked out their snapping metal mandibles, ripping holes in suits, severing air tanks and flesh. Due to the almost non-existent gravity, blood floated and pooled in odd configurations on the walls and mixed with a dozen stranger liquids that flowed from the struggling Macros.
I saw a man in front of me go down. He had a knife in one hand, having lost his other weapons. The power cable to his generator was severed and floating. I lunged forward, pulling away from Kwon’s watchful grip. He
