“None of the other battalions have met the enemy, sir.”
I felt immediately relieved.
“But Battalion Ten,” he continued, “the one directly north of you, isn’t responding. No one has been able to get into contact with them.”
I didn’t like the sound of that at all. Five companies lost? Or at least, unable to respond?
“Okay Sloan, your team and mine are the closest to Ten’s position. We’ll go investigate, double-time. I want all the other battalions to move to the large cave entrance Battalion Six located. We have a definite enemy contact there, and we have to keep the pressure up.”
Very soon I was gliding through the dark waters again, going deeper still into the ocean. Occasionally, there was a clicking sound in my suit and a fresh trickle of cold seawater ran down to wet my toes. The nanites worked hard to weld the microscopic hole shut again, and all was well. I wondered just how deep these suits could go- how much pressure from the billions of gallons of water above they could take. Would men begin popping like eggs at a given depth? I’d never had the time to test them under these conditions.
But most of all, as I slid through the burbling quiet, I thought about the Macro factories and their protective domes. I’d expected to encounter them by now. Where were they?
— 25
We reached Battalion Ten’s designated gathering spot before Captain Sloan’s team did. We glided swiftly to the area, but everyone along the line slowed down warily as we drew near.
Something was desperately wrong. Instead of a flat area of seabed before us, a great hole presented itself. It was hard to tell at first what we were looking at. It resembled a cliff edge, similar to the one we’d dropped down to get here. The rim was ragged, as if it had broken away recently. Exposed sediment was darker than the bottom we’d been passing over, which consisted of sand intermixed with tumbled stones. When we reached the edge, I ordered a halt and everyone obeyed.
I gazed in both directions, seeing my men line up. Their suit lights could be identified at a hundred yards or more in the cloudy water. I could tell they formed a crescent.
“It’s a pit,” I said. “Kwon?”
“Right here, sir.”
“Send a squad in each direction. Tell them to try to follow the edge of this formation all the way around. If they run into each other on the far side, they are to return. If they keep going for more than five minutes without finding anything, tell them to do an about-face and come back anyway.”
Kwon found two non-coms in green-lit suits and sent them off to follow my orders. I waved the corporal with the communications unit forward and tried to contact Captain Sloan. He should be arriving very soon.
Before I could get the hydrophone working, Sloan arrived. He sailed along, looking for blue-lit officers until he found me. It was a relief to be able to communicate clearly with radio.
“What the hell is this, Colonel?” Sloan asked me as soon as he was in range.
“A big hole.”
“Pardon me, but that’s not helpful.”
“Yeah, I think it didn’t help Battalion Ten, either.”
“You think they glided right off this cliff? Five hundred men?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think the cliff was here when they arrived. This is the gathering spot they had staked out. They showed up on station, waited for orders, but something hit them before our transmission came in.”
Sloan was quiet for a moment. “Something that big? So soon?”
“I don’t think it was some kind of super-Macro. I think it was an explosion. The concussion could have knocked out their suit systems. Either that, or it was a whole lot of little Macros under the surface.”
“What are we going to do about it, sir?”
It was my turn to hesitate. There was a big part of me that wanted to head over to that cave the majority of my force was assaulting. But I didn’t like leaving marines behind without investigating. I also didn’t like massing all my marines in a single spot on the ocean floor. Mostly, I wanted to know what had hit my men at this spot.
Before I’d made any kind of decision, the squads I’d sent off to circumnavigate the pit returned. They’d met up on the far side, as I had suspected they would. The hole was circular, and roughly a mile in diameter.
“We’re going down,” I told Sloan. “One company at a time. If a unit lives long enough to signal back the all- clear, the next company will step off this cliff.”
“But sir-”
“Don’t freak out, Sloan,” I said. “I’ll lead the first unit. You can wait up here. We’ll step off the edge in one minute.”
“I don’t know what you are trying in imply,” Sloan said. He sounded hurt.
Too bad, I thought. “You are a survivor, Sloan,” I told him. “That’s not the same as a coward. It’s not a bad thing.”
“Well, sir,” Captain Sloan said. “I’d like the honor of leading the first team down.”
I was surprised, but decided if he wanted to do it, he could have the job. I watched him line his men along the edge. A hundred of Star Force’s finest. When they jumped, a small part of me knew that if they all died, I was going to feel badly. But I had to find out what was going on. If the Macros had somehow slaughtered five hundred of my men at the bottom of the sea, I wanted to at least know how they had done it.
I had a sudden thought as I watched Sloan marshal his marines. “Captain,” I said over the command channel.
“Colonel?”
“Send them down one squad at a time. Weapons out.”
He liked the idea and gave the orders. The first squad took the leap, then the second. Sloan stepped out with the third squad. I saw his blue suit among the numerous red-lit ones. I was able to pick him out for a long time as he fell deeper.
More squads went, but when the last ones were stepping off, there was a sudden commotion. A rush of bubbles came up from the hole. Then more bubbles. They were silver and there were way too many of them. Far from thinking them lovely, I saw those bubbles and knew his men were in trouble. The only way these suits should be able to release bubbles was when they ruptured.
I heard calls up the line, from suit-to-suit, man-to-man. They were passing up a message. When it got back up to us, it was a scream.
“Too deep! Release your pods!”
Every man had an emergency bubble to take them upward. Unfortunately, they found out that they didn’t really work once you went down more than six thousand feet. They hadn’t been designed for that depth. When the gas canister fired to fill the plastic bladder, it popped in most cases. A few men shot upward, dragged toward the distance surface by one wrist. When they passed us, they cut themselves free and glided to the rim of the hole.
Others came back up using their suit’s repellers. It wasn’t as fast, but it was more controlled. I counted the men as they came back up. We’d sent down about seventy, and we’d lost most of them.
I gazed down into the hole, frowning fiercely. Kwon came up beside me. He was unmistakable in his green- lit, oversized suit.
“Colonel Riggs?” he asked. “What happened?”
“The suits can’t go down that far,” I said. “They imploded. Like a sub that sinks to the bottom. Their suits ruptured and the nanites couldn’t keep up. In short, they died.”
“But how did this hole get here?”
“I suspect the Macros did it. They set off a big charge here under our marines. Maybe there was an underground chamber beneath the gathering spot for Battalion Ten. In any case, I think they collapsed the seabed, and the marines fell. They could have used their flight systems to get out of the trap, but I’m guessing their commander ordered them to take the drop, to see what was at the bottom. He must not have realized their suits would pop when they went too deep.”
