I looked away from him. Carlson seemed like ghoul to me. Right then, I hated all medical people. I knew I shouldn’t, but somehow these quiet custodians of death sickened me. They didn’t really fix anything, they just made decisions concerning resource allocation-such as who lived and who died. They were accountants, not doctors. The nanites did all the doctoring.
I was sure these thoughts of mine weren’t fair. These people were doing a hard job and they did it well. I didn’t want to do it for them, so I should be more charitable. But right then, I wasn’t feeling charitable.
With a sudden movement, I straightened and left the brick. When I slapped open the airlock, the tech called to me.
“Colonel? What do we do with the turnips?”
“Keep them going for now,” I said, glancing back. “I’m not ready to give up on them yet.”
I saw his slate computer and stylus sag. He was annoyed. He’d heard it all before. I didn’t care.
I reached the cruiser’s engine room again in a very bad mood. The progress there hadn’t been miraculous either. I tinkered with the gain on the neural net learning rates, but really, there were very few options to adjust on one of these brainboxes. All there was to do was wait, listen to reports and explore.
The reports weren’t stellar. I now had just under a thousand surviving marines-including the seven turnips in their tiny coffins. We had only two factories left, and thirty-odd other bricks. The medical brick Sandra was in was the last of its kind. The assault ship that had been blown up when we breached the cruiser’s hull was the last big vehicle in my unit. We were down to troops, flying skateboards and nanites. Lots of nanites.
“We’ve got plenty of these things floating around,” Kwon said, bringing me a strange, star-shaped object.
“Looks like a big caltrops,” I said, twisting it around.
“What’s a caltrops?” he asked.
“A set of spikes welded together that presented a sharp point aiming upward no matter how you throw it down. They’d used them to stop cavalry charges in the old days.”
“Nasty,” Kwon said.
“Yes. Where did you find these things?”
He shrugged. “Floating around everywhere.”
“I wonder if they spilled out of the Macro ship,” I said, curious. “You’ve been picking them up?”
“No, Colonel. They drift along and find us. They are glued to the hull of the cruiser everywhere. They are magnetic, see?”
He let one go, and it drifted quickly to the floor and stuck there.
I stared at it. “Did you find any around our factories?”
“Yes sir. Lots of them.”
“I left the factories making mines, Captain,” I said. “Hundreds of mines should have been produced by now.”
Kwon looked alarmed. He did a double-take, looking at the mine, me, and then back to the mine again. “Do they look like your mines?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t specify the configuration. I let the Nanos figure that out for themselves.”
“Are they dangerous?”
“Extremely,” I said. “But I would assume none of them are armed, as they haven’t killed our ship yet.”
“Why do we need hundreds of mines, sir?” Kwon asked. “This is going to be a space battle, isn’t it?”
“I hope so. But only if we can get this ship underway. Otherwise it will be shooting practice for the Macros.”
I headed back to the control system. The techs I had babysitting the brainbox while it fooled with the engine room interface looked bored. I joined them and went to work following the brainbox’s experimental work. By trying logical sequences of control inputs, the box had figured out some basics. It could turn on an external propulsion jet, for example, for a microsecond burn. But it had made no progress on navigation or even the coherent adjustment of multiple jets.
I worked on following the brainbox’s efforts. I didn’t query it on its progress, not wanting the unit to waste processing power interfacing with me. In the end, I gave up fussing over it. The machine would figure it out, or the Macro ships would come into range and blow us apart. Either way, I couldn’t do much to change things. I tried not to sweat too much about it. The experience made me appreciate the pressure the pentagon boys must have been under when I went up to fight the Macros for them, however. It must have been agonizing to have me, a hotdog amateur, up in space calling the shots while they sat helplessly in their war rooms.
It took another hour for my brainbox to gain basic navigational control of the Macro cruiser, and by that time every Macro in the star system had to be heading our way. We had no weapons control, but the big gun was knocked out anyway so that didn’t matter much. I still would have liked to have some defensive lasers and missiles operating. But I didn’t. All we could do was run for it.
When the brainbox figured out how to get the ship moving, I didn’t hesitate. I signaled an all-points alert, relaying it up to the guys on the vessel’s surface and those few who were still doing rescue missions. Everyone was to get inside the cruiser hull and secure themselves for acceleration. I wasn’t sure if the magnetic clamps would manage to hold our bricks to the outside of the ship, so I told my marines to strap them down with nano- arms and get inside the hull.
There was a beeping communication from the medical brick. Normally at a moment like this, I would have ignored it, but I opened the channel.
“Colonel Riggs?” asked Carlson. “Should we bring the-ah, the incapacitated out of the medical brick and down into the cruiser?”
“Can they survive outside their little coffins?” I asked.
“Not for long, sir.”
“Then don’t bother.”
“Should I stay with them, sir?”
“That’s up to you, Carlson,” I said.
I thought I probably should have ordered him to come below. We could use his skills if the medical brick was lost. But I couldn’t order a man to abandon Sandra. I just couldn’t. Bringing her on this mission had been a big mistake, as I had suspected it would turn out to be.
“I’ll stay, sir,” he said after a pause.
“All right. We burn in ninety seconds.”
When the engines first fired, they stuttered and the ship weaved. The nano brainbox slid three-fingered, cable-like hands over the interface panel. We soon straightened out and began to leave orbit.
20
We didn’t have a navigational interface working for another two hours. The command brick had been lost, so we didn’t really have a good way to display and analyze the data feeds we were getting from sensor arrays planted on the cruiser’s hull. I was certain the Macro warship had excellent data systems-but we had no way of getting to any of them. The computer systems were built by aliens for their own purposes. Our brainbox could only operate basic engine and attitude controls, enough to fly the ship toward the ring. Enough to flee, nothing else.
I decided to build my own bridge inside the ship to fly this thing. We rigged up the biggest screen I could find-which was about the size of a kitchen table-and set it up in the engine room. I had marines with welding guns and nanite repair buckets roaming all around the area fixing the damage we’d done. We sealed and pressurized that region of the ship first. The cruiser was humming with activity. Owning a real warship was exhilarating for the men. I was in too sour of a mood to enjoy anything, and kept thinking of Sandra in her steel coffin. The Macro carcasses were getting in the way of my new bridge setup. Realizing they were made of tough alloys, I had them fed into my factories as raw materials. I felt it was a fitting end for them.
When we finally did manage to connect a sensor module on the outer hull to our new screen, I was glad we’d been blind up until now. Doom followed us in the form of four cruisers. They weren’t coming in as fast as
