A warning beeper sounded, and I barely managed to squeeze the hand control in my glove that started up my repellers in time. Boulders shot up on either side of me. I heard clanking and crashing as marines slammed their armored boots into them all around. The bottom came crunching into my boots with shocking speed.
“We’re down,” I said. “Activate repellers. Relay the warning.”
In my helmet, I heard a dozen voices shouting to each other over the com-links. Many were indecipherable. I took a moment to examine the bottom of the cliffs. We’d done a lot of brainstorming about what the Macros intended to do down here. One theoretical plan we’d come up was the possibility of building digging machines and sending them to Andros Island via a network of tunnels. I hadn’t found evidence of tunnels, however. I suspected they planned to march up out of the sea and onto the shoreline when they were ready.
I soon located Kwon. He was trying to pull a man out from between two closely-parked boulders. The marine had the green suit-lights of a non-com. He seemed unhurt, but one big boot was stuck.
“Is everyone okay, First Sergeant?” I asked.
“No, sir,” he said, grunting and heaving at the bounder on the right. It had leaned in and was covered in sharp thorny growths.
“Casualties?”
“One man I’ve found didn’t make it. He’s over there.”
I turned to see a dark shape lying draped over more broken rocks. I turned back to the trapped man. The living are always more important than the dead, so I reached out to help.
I’d thought the bottom would be free of life, but maybe this had fallen from above recently. I joined him and the three of us working together managed to free the man’s foot without ripping it off and killing him. Afterward, I moved over to the dead man. He was a private, his suit’s red LEDs told me that. The lower half of the lights were out, however. I saw a gap in the suit and shook my head. It had split open at the waist, allowing the pressure of the mile-deep ocean inside. Had he tried to take it off? Or had the suit malfunctioned somehow?
I considered my own control systems. I thought I might have the answer. The suit had emergency buttons near my face inside the helmet. If I twisted my neck and brought down my chin hard, the emergency release would trigger. Maybe when he’d come down and jarringly struck the seafloor, this man had done exactly that by accident. I grimaced. A redesign was required.
“What happened to him?” Kwon asked, looming near.
Kwon made me startle. He reminded me of some huge, scary sea creature looming out of the dark water. I’d had to specially order his suit. The factory standard issue unit just hadn’t fit right.
“My fault,” I said. “I need to reprogram the suit units. In low pressure, the suits are built to prevent accidental opening. That way, this couldn’t happen out in the vacuum of space. I hadn’t considered that high pressure could be just as deadly.”
“Ah,” Kwon said. He promptly relayed a warning to the nearest marines, who were now gathering around.
A dozen red-lit men talked among themselves. No doubt they figured Riggs’ Pigs were about to earn their reputation for insane losses once again. I allowed the chatter for now.
I opened the dead man’s suit, attached an emergency line to his wrist and inflated the balloon. In seconds, he was shooting toward the surface. When he arrived, the balloon would begin beeping an emergency signal, and the body would be picked up. The system had been intended as a lifesaver, but it worked just as well to send corpses to the surface in a hurry.
“One down, ninety-nine to go,” muttered one of the men.
“Belay that shit, marine!” Kwon barked, clanking into the midst of the men. “Was that you, Swenson? I’m going to check the logs when we get back.”
“Sorry, First Sergeant.”
I felt like telling Kwon to let it slide, but that wasn’t the way discipline was maintained in my unit. I let Kwon do his job, so I could do mine. I ignored the entire affair and engaged my repellers. Moments later I had a fix on our gathering point and glided toward it. A throng of quiet marines followed me. We were already a few minutes behind schedule.
— 24
Due to the particulate matter floating around in any ocean and the powerful nature of our lasers, I didn’t know how our weapons would perform in the undersea environment. Tests had shown our projectors were effective at short range, but there were many practical problems. Earth science had developed uses for lasers underwater, such as welding, since the nineteen-nineties. But our weapons were an order of magnitude more powerful.
The intense beams tended to heat up the cloudy water as they passed through it, causing steam bubbles to form, especially around the projector units themselves. This was problematic, as the bubbles obstructed the beam, reducing its striking power. The final result of these difficulties was that our weapons did work, but only over a short range and only for short bursts of duration. Over longer ranges or longer durations, their effectiveness dropped off dramatically.
Still, our lasers were the best weapons we had. I could have tried to design some kind of harpoon with an explosive charge, maybe, but I didn’t have time. I didn’t want to leave the Macros down here unmolested, festering at the bottom of our ocean. I didn’t know exactly what their plans were, but I was certain I didn’t want them to succeed.
We kept moving and reached our battalion gathering point unmolested. Three other companies were there, waiting. There were supposed to be a total of five, including us. I talked to the captain of each company and determined they’d not met any resistance.
Several minutes went by. When the last company didn’t show up, I became concerned. I ordered the rest of the men to follow me, backtracking along the route the fifth company should have taken from the cliffs. Kwon came up beside me as we glided over the seabed on a gentle decline that led ever deeper into the ocean trench.
“Uh, sir?” he asked.
I knew what was bothering him without asking. This looked like a detour that would delay our planned search pattern and put us out of position relative to the other battalions that were moving over the seabed looking for the Macros.
“We are down here to search for the Macros, First Sergeant,” I told him. “One company is missing, that’s evidence of Macro activity.”
“Yes sir, but aren’t their domes supposed to be further ahead?”
“No other units have reported in sonically,” I told him. “They are all probing forward, but not finding anything. I believe there is something nearby, between us and the cliffs.”
“But wouldn’t the company have called in if they met the Macros?”
“Not if their communications man was killed fast enough.”
Kwon made a troubled-sounding grunt. I kept pressing ahead. Spreading out on all sides of me were four companies of marines. If there was something out here, we were going to find it.
When we did, it came as a surprise. My first thought was: the machines have been busy.
They ambushed us. They were worker-type Macros, equipped with huge pinchers. A large number of them were drilling-types as well. As soon as I saw them, I knew we’d stumbled upon some kind of resource, probably a mine. That’s why they were hard to see. They’d been in burrowed holes in the rocky bottom. Like a hundred moray eels, they popped up and attacked when we were right on top of them.
Pinchers clanked hard on battle armor and the leading men were sucked down into holes. I knew then how it had happened. Each company had been equipped with only one hydrophone, assigned to a non-com to lug around behind the captain. If those men had been leading the company and all been pulled down into these black holes, they could have been torn apart down there in the dark before they could engage their equipment. That’s why we hadn’t heard a call for support.
Lasers flashed. My headset was full of chatter. I moved to the nearest opening where a corpsman had been
