“But the lead men should have seen what was happening and flown out the way Sloan’s men did.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe they all went down at more or less the same time and hit the kill zone together.”
“Hey sir,” Kwon said, pointing down over the rim. “Who’s that?”
I looked down. I smiled slowly. A blue-lit suit was rising up toward us. I didn’t know how he’d lived, but I knew who it had to be.
“That, my good man, is the unkillable Captain Sloan.”
All along the line of leaning marines a cry went up as he kept coming. Every second he came slowly, but doggedly, closer.
“Maybe his suit is damaged,” Kwon said. “One repeller might be out.”
“Hey Sloan,” I shouted. “Good to see you slip out of that one. I lost a bet with Kwon, because of you.”
“You did?” Kwon asked, bewildered. He pointed downward again. “What’s that thing?”
No one answered him, because we could all see it now. Sloan didn’t have a problem with his suit-not exactly. He had all his repellers going full blast and had his gas-bubble out too. Unfortunately, he also had the upper half of a Macro latched onto his foot.
We aimed and lit up the tenacious monster. A mass of steam-bubbles rolled upward from every gun, and the robot was torn apart. Moments later, Captain Sloan drifted over to me and I took his hand and hauled him up over the rim.
“That was close,” he said.
I nodded, impressed. “Closer than usual, even for you.”
Kwon knelt and busied himself removing the last clamped-on Macro arm that dangled from Sloan’s left leg.
“Did you build the officer’s suits to the same specs, Colonel?”
I opened my mouth to say yes, but hesitated. I recalled leaving Sandra in charge of the duplication process. Could she have tampered with the design? Could she have altered it to keep me safe, knowing I would wear one of the officer’s suits?
“I thought I did,” I said.
“Well, everyone else’s seemed to collapse when we got to certain depth,” Sloan reported. “We got down there, and we could see bubbles coming up from the first squads. But I figured they were in trouble and ordered weapons at the ready. It was hard to see, sir.”
“Go on.”
“We were all expecting enemy at the bottom, and figured maybe they’d already gotten their first kills. But it wasn’t like that. All of a sudden, the men around me were popping-shooting out bubbles and going radio silent. It took me a second to realize what was happening. I radioed back up, but you know how short our range is down here.”
“How’d you get that lobster on your foot?” I asked.
“We’d about reached the bottom. The men who were still alive were being taken out. There were more marines down there already, sir. I must have seen fifty battle suits. It had to be Battalion Ten. The ones that survived the pressure died from a Macro ambush at the bottom.”
I grunted. He sounded shook-up. I ordered a head count. He’d lost about forty more. In retrospect, it had been stupid to send the whole company down. But in these situations, it was so hard to tell what the right move was. If I’d ordered down a squad and they’d dropped into a mass of Macros, we would have lost them all and learned nothing. By going down in strength, I’d thought I was offering my men protection. Unfortunately, the real enemy in this battle had been the depth of the ocean, and it had won the day.
“What are we going to do about the Macros down there?” Kwon asked me.
“Get out the grenades,” I said.
We stood a man at three points around the rim with a small-yield tactical nuclear grenade. We set them for contact-detonation, and tossed them in. Then-we ran for it.
The shockwave rolled up from behind to smacked my marines in the ass. It sent us tumbling out of control through the water. I felt as if I’d been hit by a train. Fortunately, I’d ordered my troops to glide upward so only a few were smashed into the rocky seabed. After another headcount, we found we’d lost only two more men, both of them were men who’d jumped into the hole on Sloan’s ill-fated adventure. I figured their suits had been damaged and couldn’t handle the shockwave from the explosion, even though we should have reached a safe distance by then.
I reported my situation to the other battalions via the hydrophone. They were assaulting the cave entrance while we spent our time jumping in holes.
Things had gone badly on their front-worse than they had for my two battalions. The enemy had suckered them into narrow tunnels and ambushed my men. Outside on the open seafloor we had the advantage due to our superior numbers and firepower. Every macro that showed its nose outside the tunnels was burned by a hundred guns. But once we went into their warren of tunnels, we lost that advantage. There had been savage fighting down there, and we’d lost more men than they had lost machines.
When I arrived and saw the scene, I began kicking the butt of every officer I saw. But it didn’t change the facts. These Macros weren’t going to be driven out of their holes without a determined assault. I was certain the factories must be down there, so I prepared to do the impossible. I reorganized my marines into independent platoons. That was as big of a unit as could operate effectively in the tunnels. A platoon could all stay within radio distance of one another. A company could not when stretched out down the length of a tunnel.
I felt good about the situation. This next was strong and deeply dug-in, but it had to be protecting their factories. We’d scoured much of the seabed and this was the most strongly protected point.
I was about to order the final assault, expecting grim losses in trade for victory, when the oceans above darkened and very bad things began to come down toward us.
— 26
The Macros had called for air support. I can’t say that I blamed them. They were in trouble. Every beachhead is at its weakest when it first hits enemy territory. Part of my basic plan had been to attack them before they could get organized, before their numbers could grow. With luck, I’d figured they would not be able to defend themselves.
We hadn’t had that kind of luck, but we’d done them a lot of damage. The fighting was hard, but at that moment, I figured we were clearly on the winning team. Unfortunately, the Macros realized this before we could wipe out their main nest.
Everything changed when several wedge-shaped vessels the size of buildings dove into the oceans with us and glided through the water toward my massed formations. We were all in one place now-maybe that was what they’d been waiting for. They came down and came in close to fire their big belly turrets at us at point-blank range.
A spaceship really isn’t all that different from a submarine in design. Both have to be self-contained and airtight. Both are designed to withstand extreme environments. I’d never seen the Macros fly a cruiser down into the oceans, but I’d never seen anything indicating they couldn’t do it.
The second I realized what was coming for us, I ordered my men to scatter. My first thought was to swarm the cruisers one at a time and use our grenades to take them out. Maybe, I thought, this was an opportunity to take the enemy fleet out, to deal a devastating blow.
But then more of them kept diving down after us like greedy seabirds finding a nest teaming with thousands of hatchling turtles. I gave a general bug-out order to every commander and pulled my own rip-cord. With repellers on full and my gasbag dragging me up by the wrist, I shot up past the shark-like cruisers that swam near. Once we were above them, we were safe from their belly-turrets. The escaping last men dropped a barrage of grenades down like depth charges, but we couldn’t see if they did much damage in the inky dark water below.
Once we broke the surface, we flew for the beaches at top speed. We had to get under the Andros Island’s
