hundred active guns in range, the Macro fleet began to drift northward. They had seventy of their ships still operating, plus that dreadnaught. That they were moving northward was good news for us personally, as it upped our odds of survival. They were no longer pulverizing our base. But it also meant the enemy knew they were winning and were moving on to the next stage: scraping off our defenses from the entire coastline.
“The hovertanks should be arriving soon, sir,” Barrera reported.
“Glad I can still hear you,” I said. “When they get here, order them to move out over the water and fire up at the southern edge of the Macro line. As they retreat, the tanks will focus all their fire on the hindmost cruiser and bring it down fast. They’ll be tearing us up going north, and we’ll follow along hitting them in the rear.”
I could see the new green contacts zooming over the cross-island highway I’d built a few years back.
“Sir,” Major Sarin said urgently. “General Kerr wants to know if now is the time.”
I thought about it. I could certainly use some help. If NORAD unleashed a barrage of ICBMS, the missiles would be here in about ten minutes. But that would put the U. S., if not all Earth, into this fight again. I didn’t want to commit them unless I had no choice.
“Tell him to standby, we’ve got this.”
My staff exchanged worried glances. I ignored them.
When Barrera’s hovercraft finally got within range of the Macro formation and began taking down one cruiser at a time, the enemy did not react at first. More cruisers went down. With each enemy loss, my staff grew more cheery. When the forty-third cruiser of the battle fell, they shouted in unison. Kwon grew over-excited and slapped the computer table. A long crack ran across it. Ballistic glass or not, he had managed to damage it when the entire Macro fleet had failed.
“Oh…” he said. “Sorry about that, Colonel.”
“First Sergeant, take your men upstairs and begin digging us out of this bunker, please,” I said, trying not to sound pissed-off.
“Yes, sir!” he said. He led his men clanking away and the room felt dramatically less claustrophobic.
It was shortly after that when the Macros finally broke. In a typical fashion, they made the move decisively. They powered up their engines in unison and withdrew, gliding back to the east from which they’d come.
The cheering was deafening now. I peered at the screen, tapping for different views. I stared at data, and something began to worry me. “Barrera, those hovertanks are getting out of position. Call them back to the north shore coverage zone.”
The hovertank pilots, eager to bring down every cruiser they could, were pursuing at high speeds eastward over the ocean. My retrieval command was barely transmitted in time. The Macros paused and turned on their tormenters and unleashed a fury of cannon fire. A cluster of new small contacts appeared.
“Missiles!” I roared, mashing the command override button. I was talking directly to the hovertank commanders and everyone else in Star Force. “Switch all targeting to air-defense. Shoot down those missiles.”
The green beams flickered out on the screen, then restarted. They began stabbing at these new targets. There was only a few seconds to do so. My ground-based laser turrets joined the defense. The missiles, each bearing a Macro technician as pilot, did their best to reach the hovertanks, but they were decimated. When there were only two left, one of them detonated, destroying the other. The shockwave rolled across the glowing blue water and smashed into my hovertanks, flipping them over and turning those that had followed the most eagerly into dead, twisted wreckage.
After the blast, the hovertanks with functional brainboxes slowly picked themselves up and limped back to Andros. I curse and muttered about crazy pilots in my helmet.
“Damage report, Barrera,” I said.
“They knocked out twenty-odd hovertanks. I’m not sure as to the exact numbers, sir. In many cases the pilots were killed but the brainbox is still operating. In some cases, it was the reverse. But there is no doubt they hurt us.”
“They drew us out of our defensive perimeter, just as we did to them. Damn it.”
I sensed a light touch through my armor’s feedback system. Sandra was close to me. “We won, Colonel,” she said.
I rotated my helmet toward her. “Not yet, we haven’t. We’ve repelled an assault, yes. But their fleet is still at least sixty percent effective. They can siege us now if they like and wait for reinforcements to attack again. We need every asset we have.”
She nodded, her face falling. She looked back to the screen. I knew she had only been trying to cheer me up, but I wasn’t in a cheerful mood right now. They’d almost taken us out in one rush. The worst thing was they’d just learned their missiles were still effective. If they used them in the next assault, we would be in bad shape.
Sandra frowned at the screen. “What are they doing now?”
“They’re dropping something, Colonel,” Major Sarin said. “Into the sea.”
I turned back to the screen and peered at it. I opened my gloves to handle the screen more gently and ran my fingertips over the cracked glass. There they were, about twenty miles offshore, dropping huge objects into the water. The ocean fountained with each splashing impact. It looked as if their ships were laying eggs of some kind.
“Which ships are those?” I demanded. “Barrera, which ships are dropping objects into the water? Are they dropping bombs on the U. S. subs out there?”
“I don’t think so, sir,” Barrera replied. His voice scratched for a moment as the connection fuzzed, then came back. “The ships making the drop have been identified, sir. They’re invasion ships, Colonel. All six have dropped a large object in that area.”
“That’s the trench,” I said.
The region was known as the Tongue of the Ocean, a deep gash in the sea that separated Andros from New Providence. The hundred mile long region reached depths of six thousand feet.
“What the hell are they dropping?” Major Sarin said.
“Macros,” I said.
“Invasion forces?”
It looked all too familiar. I recalled the first Macro ship that had made it past our little Nano ships years ago. They had dropped payloads on Argentina. In the end, they had destroyed an entire continent.
“Yes,” I said, staring.
“I didn’t know they could operate on the sea bottom,” Sandra said.
“Neither did I.”
— 22
Within a few hours, we knew the full truth. The enemy had not only dropped unknown large objects into the sea, these objects had vanished into the oceanic trench off our eastern shore and sunk to the very bottom. I could only imagine the activity going on down there on the deepest seabeds of the Caribbean. While their fleet hovered far above like watchful parents, perhaps they were setting up domes of force and factory complexes to produce the monstrous foot soldiers of the Macros. Hundred foot tall robots I’d had nightmares about for years.
There could no longer be any confusion about the enemy’s intent. They’d tried a direct assault, but when their losses had grown too high, they’d broken off and shifted to Plan B. Like colonies of ants, they would build their invasion army and when they came again, we would face a combination of invasion and bombardment.
“We have to assume they’ve set up six factories on the bottom of the ocean,” I told General Kerr. He was the lucky recipient of my first call since the withdrawal.
“What? What are you talking about, Riggs?”
The General was out of the loop as far as direct input from the battle was concerned. The Macros had blown down all his satellites in the region as they came in, methodically popping any orbital object in the local sky like light bulbs.
“Down in the trench, sir,” I said. “The invasion ships dropped their payloads to the bottom of it.”
