Annihilation (Star Force Series) (18 page)

Dropping us like bombs wasn’t good enough for Star Force. Some underling of mine had determined more speed was needed. Under the launch pad was a long tube that essentially served as a cannon. I, inside my tight ceramic pod, was the cannonball.

There was spinning, rolling sensation for a moment as I was aimed downward, headfirst. Then the cannon fired.

A terrific shock of force struck my shoulders and skull as I was hurled out of the bottom of the ship. Accelerating at about thirty Gs for a brief period, I knew what it felt like to be a bullet. I shot downward, encased in darkness.

The acceleration was painful, but brief. The pod was carrying me downward with fantastic speed toward the planet’s surface. As I dropped, the speed slowly increased.

It was a grim sensation, being locked inside this thing. There were no screens to look at, just a few readouts from my helmet’s HUD. Except for numbers like altitude and speed printed in colored digital numbers on the inside of my visor, I was cut off from the world.

When falling into a planet’s atmosphere from space, there was always a few minutes of radio blackout. It was an empty, gnawing feeling. You were already alive or you were already dead, and there was absolutely nothing you could do about it.

Those few minutes passed, and I was still breathing. The pod tumbled until I was falling feet-first. The next question in my mind was easy: was I over the right target?

Finally, data began streaming into my helmet. A few details about the ground flashed up, displayed in 2D as elevations. Piled shapes spiked up toward my descending rear-end. The spikes grew and my feet hurt just looking at them. The protrusions were mountains, of course. Rugged mountains crusted in coral and lime deposits. They’d been at the bottom of a black ocean a few weeks ago. Now, I was about to walk on them.

The retros fired next, and slammed up into my feet. I wasn’t really ready for the shock, even though I should have been. I made a mental note to add a warning buzzer when this transition was five seconds from hitting the men riding in these tin cans. If my knees had been locked at that moment—well, it would have hurt.

Massive G forces slammed up into my boots, shocking my entire body. I’d been relatively comfortable and weightless a second before, freefalling at about ten thousand miles per hour. Now, that velocity had to be reduced. I gritted my teeth and strained my muscles. Everything hurt. The burn seemed to go on longer that the initial firing had, primarily because I’d been building up some velocity on the long fall into Yale’s gravity-well.

I almost had a heart attack when the final stage began. The pod around me blew apart. It flashed open and fell in eight twirling, burning pieces.

I was freefalling now, and since I hadn’t really been ready for it, I inverted, then rolled right side up, then found myself inverted again. I was in a tumble.

I fought the suit’s controls and cursed myself for not having done practice jumps with this new drop-pod system. The ground was alarmingly close.

About a second after I got my feet under me and the automatic stabilizers kicked in, I hit the ground. I landed on an ancient seabed, which was now dry for the first time in probably a billion years. My boots hit the surface and kept on going, punching through the crust and into the slimy mud beneath. When I was about three feet down, my boots found solid rock.

That stopped me.

I could move my arms, but not my legs. They were buried like a spearhead from space in the mountainside. There was something all around me, something that looked like drifting snow.

It took me a dazed second to realize it was salt and sand and dried-out crap from the ocean floor. I’d hit with such force I’d fired up a plume of debris.

I was on the surface of Yale.

I wondered hazily how many alien worlds I’d walked on in total—I’d lost count by now.

-16-

“You okay, sir?”

To me, in my slightly dazed state of mind, the question seemed to come from inside my helmet. I didn’t immediately associate it with anyone in my surroundings. The voice was familiar, but my brains were addled—it took me a second to think about who it was… After a moment, I had it.

“Kwon?”

“Of course, sir,” he said.

A big shadow fell over me. Something grabbed my gloves and pulled.

“Just let me get you out of there, Colonel,” he said. “You’re gonna be fine.”

I realized that Kwon was standing over me, tugging at me as if I were a nail sunk halfway into a chunk of wood. It was an embarrassing situation, and I forced myself to get going. I knew that if Kwon was there, others were close by. I didn’t want to look as bad off as I felt.

I had to appear to know what the hell I was doing, at least. Half of leadership, in my opinion, entails appearing to be strong and confident—even if you aren’t. If you’re feeling weak and you let the men know it, they get nervous.

I began churning my power-suited knees. White dust plumed up. Brownish-green slime from under the crusty surface layer came up next, fountaining out of the growing hole around my legs.

“You must of hit pretty hard, sir,” Kwon said when he had me out and standing on the mountainside.

All around us, Marines were busy helping one another, securing equipment and looking for targets. Nothing threatened us immediately, but I was sure the machines knew we were here and would be taking action against us soon.

“Did we lose anybody?” I asked.

“No sir. Not in this unit.”

“Excellent!” I said, trying not to sound too surprised. “Let’s form up the company and head downslope. I want us dug in around the waist of the mountain, then we’ll call in the next battalions.”

“They already coming down, sir,” Kwon said, pointing upward.

I tilted back my helmet to the limit. The neck region on these power-suits only rotated so far. The sky was full of burning, falling objects. They moved too fast to be flares, but too slow to be meteors. They were drop-pods, hundreds of them.

“All right, everyone move downslope!” I roared. “Get them moving, Kwon. Those drop-capsules will make quite a dent in the helmet of any marine left in this LZ.”

Kwon gazed up at the falling stars overhead. His big mouth gaped open. “You think they might hit us?”

“The chances of a direct collision are small, but I want everyone moving downslope just in case. We can setup firing positions in case the enemy is deploying to contain us.”

Kwon began roaring and clapping his metal gauntlets together. The sound was teeth-jarring, even through the thick helmet I was wearing. I couldn’t argue with his results, however. The marines responded as if kicked, trotting down the salt and brine crusted mountainside. They created a small avalanche of dead seabed materials which was kicked ahead by their pounding metal boots.

I joined the herd and trotted downslope, using my suit’s grav-power now and then. In these new, heavier suits it wasn’t a good idea to fly unless it was really necessary. The armor was thicker and therefore the mass to be moved was greater. Power consumption during flight was an issue and I didn’t know how long it would be before I was able to get a fresh charge.

The atmosphere became steadily thicker as we descended and was so full of dust and steam by the time I reached the rocky spur we were planning to call home, I couldn’t see more than a hundred yards in any direction. It was as if I’d been immersed in a massive, clinging fog.

“This is good enough,” I told Kwon. “We’re about four thousand feet above the new sea-level. That’ll give the enemy a hard climb to get up to our positions. I want everyone digging in right here. Once he has a trench large enough to cover himself, each man is to keep right on digging. Every marine is to dig enough trench-space to shield three men. We’re expecting more companies from above soon, and they might not have time to dig their own foxholes.”

There was some grumbling as Kwon relayed these orders. The officers of the company we were embedded with were doing most of the grousing. They felt I was taking direct command of their unit—which I was. But I didn’t lose my temper with them as they didn’t offer any direct objections. I could understand how they felt. Having brass in the middle of your team taking your decisions away wasn’t fun.

Digging the holes themselves was nothing like the grim chore of yesteryear. We had powerful, whining suits of armor on that did most of the work. Every movement was accentuated and exaggerated. We bent, we lifted and we moved massive mouthfuls of loose earth with every scoop. Even if we’d been doing the job without power-suits, our nanotized bodies would have found the work acceptable. Wearing what amounted to a forklift folded around your arms and legs made it positively easy.

Joining the fun, I deployed two scoops, which fanned out from my gauntlets. Each of these was smart metal and about a foot across. I felt like I was pantomiming the motions as I shoved the blades into the ground and heaped up an earthen wall in no time.

As we dug, we kicked up more earth until a dust cloud formed, but a breeze came up the mountain and began to blow the dust away. I could see the water shining far below us for the first time, about two miles away. It was strange to think that seawater had covered this world just weeks ago.

After the first hundred scoops or so, the work began to get a little more taxing. I welcomed the prickling of sweat I felt as I kept going.

“Sir?” asked Kwon, coming to stand over my growing trench.

I looked up at him, feeling a trickle of sweat run down from my face. “Trouble, Kwon?”

“No sir. But I don’t know why you’re digging your own trench.”

“It’s good exercise, First Sergeant. I highly recommend it.”

Around me, the men made quiet, appreciative comments as they worked to connect their trenches to mine. I knew they liked seeing an officer dig a hole, and it was a rare sight. But I wasn’t really doing it to generate good will or to raise morale. I’d been in space and eating air-swimmers for weeks. It felt good to get in a solid workout.

After staring down into my dust-filled trench for a full minute, Kwon finally joined me. I guess he felt guilty, or else it looked like fun to him. He spread his hand-shovels and laughed, then dug in. When we hit hard rock, we burned it, and our visors darkened so much we could hardly see.

I imagined that from the bottom of the slope, our activities must look like we were tearing the mountain apart. The enemy would be barely able to see us, if they were looking. We’d be buried in a plume of billowing gray dust.

When I was tired of digging, I contacted Fleet. This time I was looking for Marvin, not Captain Sarin.

“Marvin? What is the story with the ring? Have you managed to gain control of it yet?”

“All my attempts to do so have failed, Colonel Riggs,” he said. “The enemy might be jamming my efforts by sending in a flood of conflicting command signals. I’m getting resonance readings from the ring that seem like static, but I suspect someone is transmitting signals to it.”

I shook my head in disappointment. “That blows my easy victory,” I said.

I’d hoped to land, then hit the machines by surprise by reversing the flow of the ring. If I could have gotten the ocean currents to suck a few trillion gallons of seawater out into another star system somewhere, the Macros in the vicinity would have been destroyed or at least seriously inconvenienced.

“Well,” I said, “keep trying. If we can get the ring to suck them back where they came from, we’ll pretty much win right there.”

“Will do, Colonel,” Marvin said, “but I calculate the odds of success as rather low.”

I glared up into the sky, wondering about Marvin and his true motivations. Too often, that robot was a mystery to me.

“Just keep trying,” I snapped, and disconnected. I turned to Kwon and told him the bad news.

“We’re going to have to do this the hard way,” I said.

Kwon was overjoyed. “No problem, sir! We’ll gut every machine personally. Ha!”

I nodded unhappily. Kwon loved nothing more than a good fight, but sometimes he didn’t seem to see the big picture. The machines weren’t going to go down easily.

Our first surprise came when we were about half-way done with digging. It came in the form of a series of blazing lights and ripping sounds from above us. I looked up the mountainside to see what was going on. It was hard to make out due to the visibility issues, but there was something happening up there.

I connected to the command channel and tried to make sense of the chatter. The various tactical channels were buzzing. Something was happening, and it seemed to be centered on our original LZ. I didn’t like the sound of that.

“Kwon!” I shouted over my local chat—then I remembered the chain of command, “Kwon, Captain Marcos, report!”

They quickly responded. “Captain, get your men into firing positions. We’re done digging for now. Kwon, assist the Captain, please.”

They began relaying the instructions and the marines around me started to hustle. They tromped and even flew past, stowing their smart metal hand scoops and unlimbering heavier equipment. Within a minute, they were all sitting in an assigned trench with weapons pointed watchfully in every direction.

In the meantime, I’d received my first reports about what was happening upslope. The machines had broken through the crust of the mountain and attacked the second wave of freshly-dropped troops as they were landing.