“What the hell was that?” Sandra asked.
We scanned the horizons, looking for a telltale pall of smoke rising up out of the surrounding forest. I didn’t see anything. Another trembler hit, making the building rock and sway under us for a moment.
“Charges sir,” Captain Diaz said suddenly. He was listening to his headset. “They are detonating charges under the base.”
As the base C. O. he had plugged himself into the local tactical channel. I hadn’t done so yet. I worked the setting in my helmet, and it connected almost instantly.
“They’re in bunker eleven, sir!” I heard a voice say. It sounded young, high-pitched and terrified.
Suddenly, I got it. They weren’t going to come up and attack the base directly. They were going to dig into the bunkers where each of the Nano factories were hidden and attack them individually. Using that approach, they could isolate our defensive forces.
“Damn it,” I said aloud. I flipped the override and spoke right over Diaz. “This is Colonel Riggs. I want a squad deployed underground in every bunker with a factory unit in it. Report enemy contact immediately.”
I keyed off my transmission and spoke to Kwon. “Get a platoon together. We’ll play reserve support and rush down to every hotspot.”
Kwon didn’t ask any questions. He took a flying leap off the building, switching on the repellers in his boots. He sailed down into the center of the base and began bellowing orders at every marine in sight.
“Sir,” Diaz said to me, looking alarmed. “That will leave us very thin up top. They could march right into the base.”
“I don’t think that’s their intention,” I told him. “Besides, another full company of reinforcements is due to arrive in-eighteen minutes.”
Diaz began to say something else, but I was already flying after Kwon. I vaulted over the observation deck railing and sailed down into the center of the base. I didn’t much care about Diaz’s objections. I had to protect those factories. Human lives, this base-everything was secondary to that goal.
I sensed in Diaz a certain level of dismay at losing command of this base in the midst of what was probably his first real combat experience. I also sensed he would get over it eventually. And if he didn’t…well, that was just too bad.
— 31
Kwon and I charged down an underground ramp toward bunker eleven. It wasn’t hard to find. The men there were fighting hard. I could hear their grunts, screams and blazing weapons up ahead. When we got there, we were already too late. The last marine fell in the hallway at the bottom of the ramp. His lower half was missing, having been removed by a team of Macros. They were operating in pairs now, one with a heavy weapon on the head, the second with two lobster claw-looking mandibles. I wondered if that was an upgrade they’d come up with just to deal with our battle suits. If so, it was alarming. They were adapting faster than usual to our tactics.
The dead man didn’t know he was dead yet, typical of my people. The upper half of his body fought on, gunning the robot that held him with one gun while the other weapon fired directly into the ceiling, hitting nothing. He was screaming and incoherent. Nanites were building a lower mesh to hold the last of his guts in, I knew, but I doubted he would live much longer. There were limits to what even my men could take.
Kwon and I knelt on the ramp and we concentrated our fire. More beams leapt out over our helmeted heads. At least ten beams caught the macro with the lobster claws and burned right through his armor in less than a second. He slumped down, releasing a gout of oily blue smoke that filled the cramped hallway. The men behind us hopped over our heads and pressed ahead. Kwon and I were right behind them.
The guy in the hallway was the last survivor. There had only been three guards down here, apparently. The other two had been expertly killed. Six more Macros were busy ripping my factory from its moorings. They’d cut through the Nano alloy flooring and a set of thick anchor bolts. The flooring flapped and squirmed where it had been cut open. Being smart-metal, it was upset at being out of contact with its fellow deck plates.
On the far wall was a gaping hole, large enough to allow two Macros abreast to walk through. That hole was way larger than it needed to be. I knew in a flash what the enemy plan was: they were trying to steal my machines.
Eighteen of us launched into close-quarters combat without hesitation. Kwon and I leapt together onto one of the cutter robots with the big laser on the head section. These were the type that cut our suits apart, while the lobsters held them down. Right now, it was busy tearing the factory unit free of the floor. We landed on it and slammed the flat of our weapon projectors against the enemy’s joints. After years of study, we’d found certain weak points in the enemy armor. Usually, these were just below the joints where the machine’s limbs attached to the central thorax. We put our weapons there and fired them, burning through the weak armor quickly. They had a team methodology for taking us out, and we had come up with our own approach.
The machine didn’t appreciate our efforts. It made the mistake of trying to scrape off Kwon first. He was much tougher to dislodge than I was, I could have told it that. Kwon hung on, grunting as he took hammering blows from flailing legs that should have crumpled him, armor or no. I hung onto my side and kept burning.
As always when fighting in an enclosed space, our vision quickly blurred. Our helmets had to dim our vision in order to keep us from being blinded by the intense radiation. Soon, we had to depend on the flashes of light coming from our weapons to see anything at all. The smoke wasn’t helping anything either.
The fight took less than two minutes to finish. We simply outweighed them in this case. Six Macros were no match for a platoon of my men in these new suits.
“Casualties?” I asked.
“Three in the room, one more out of my platoon, sir,” Kwon reported.
“Your platoon? What happened to the commanding lieutenant?”
Kwon gestured toward a mess on the floor. The lieutenant had been the single casualty in the platoon.
“Damn,” I said. “I’d had hopes for that man. He was young, but he had fire in his belly.”
Kwon didn’t answer. He was standing with most of the others near the hole the Macros had dug to get in here. I now figured I’d been a fool to put my factories down here in these bunkers. They would have been safer up topside inside their sheds. I shook my head, trying to erase the thought. What was done was done. I’d built my defenses to protect my assets against an aerial bombardment, and from the looks of the sky before I came down here, it looked like we might see an attack from above soon as well.
I looked around next for the half-man. He was dead already, bled out despite the best efforts of the nanites. If I’d had the Microbes that had saved Sandra, I would have dipped him into some of that goop and hoped for the best. But sadly, we didn’t have much that could reconstruct half a body from scratch. Especially not in the midst of a pitched battle.
“All right,” I said. “We have two choices. We can seal this up and let them have one factory, or we can stand here until they hit us again.”
“There’s a third option, sir,” said a voice from behind me.
I turned to find Captain Diaz standing there. “What’s that, Captain?”
He gestured toward the gaping hole in the wall ahead of us. “We can advance. We can go down there after them.”
“Do you have any idea of what a Macro hole looks like from the inside, Captain?”
“Only from vids, sir. Ones taken by your suit, I believe.”
I nodded. I had a habit of recording battlefield action for later training purposes. Most of my troops weren’t equipped with cameras and recording brainboxes.
I turned toward the hole. A sifting runnel of sand ran down the walls and vanished into the blackness. I stepped over to the hole and looked downward. It seemed like a vertical shaft, about a hundred yards deep. I didn’t like the look of it.
“There you are,” Sandra said, appearing at the doorway to the bunker. She pushed through the debris and came to look down at my side.
A private channel request came beeping into my helmet. I winced. It was from Sandra. She was standing
