“Disaster,” said Kwon, leaning his big head into the landing pod beside me. “Total freaking disaster.”
“Thanks for the newsflash, Sergeant. Any more pearls of wisdom for me?”
“Well sir,” he said, taking the question seriously. “I don’t think this is going to work out. I don’t think the Centaurs can be used as drop-ship troops. We have to come up with something else.”
I sucked in a breath, cursed and slammed my gauntleted fist into the wall of the landing pod. The blow crushed in the metal. When I removed my hand, it slowly popped itself back into its previous shape.
When we’d gotten the Centaurs under some kind of control, I let the ship’s big hand lift me back to the bridge. I investigated what had happened, using the vid systems that I’d left recording on their suits.
We watched as they stayed calm for the first minute or so. After that, they become uneasy. A few opened their eyes and turned off the black-out mode on their goggles. These individuals were the first to go nuts. They scrabbled at the walls, trying to get out of what seemed to them to be a deathtrap.
Things had gone from bad to worse when we’d hit a sudden patch of turbulence. At that point, the ones that had remained calm were outnumbered by the panicked Centaurs. Some shed their systems and gored one another, or the smooth walls. A few lasered down the lunatics. Many were blinded by these emissions, released in close quarters without the protection of goggles. After that, they’d pretty much all gone berserk.
We spent a few desperate minutes cleaning up the mess. Seven of the Centaurs out of the twenty we’d brought down survived. There were arguably eight survivors, if you counted the one that had run off onto the ice. But we never found him again.
We buried the dead in the ice and had to lift off with the rest of them in an anesthetized state. According to sat-com, we only had a few minutes left before the missiles reached us, and we didn’t have enough covering fire to assure we could shoot them all down. I ordered the lift-off with a heavy heart.
I told myself as we retreated into space that every training death saved ten lives in combat. I knew as well that the dead troops had at least ended their lives on their own homeworld. These thoughts helped a little, but not much.
— 8
I spent a full day dreaming up solutions to the Centaur transportation problem. My staff brought me their own ideas, which I listened to politely. For the most part, they were terrible.
“Drug all the Centaurs and land them in a base camp a hundred miles from their objective,” Sloan suggested.
I nodded and said something like “uh-huh”. That’s just what I wanted, a million or so semi-conscious mountain goats to care for. What would happen when a Macro missile barrage landed in their midst unexpectedly? Were my marines supposed to run away carrying a drugged goat tucked under each arm?
Miklos came up with a Fleet-centered idea: “Just bombard the domes from space with nuclear weapons, Colonel.”
I had to admit, that idea had more merit than the first. But we would have to manufacture thousands of missiles, and the enemy was well-defended against any space-borne assault. That’s why I had equipped these troops. I had planned to drop dirtside fast and deploy a beachhead, then press in against a dome before they could mass and stop us.
“It’s occurred to me, but I don’t think we have enough firepower. Even if we did, I don’t think I would want to unload it all on the Centaur planets. We are supposed to be freeing these worlds, not destroying them.”
Marvin had the most interesting idea of all. He suggested we go in with a small force, secretly operating as commandos. If we could get Marvin himself under one of those domes, he felt he could reprogram the machine to operate under our control.
I rejected everyone’s plan, but thanked them for their valuable input. I then headed back to my own ship to think. After about twenty hours of mulling it over, I became tired and frustrated. I did what I usually did under such circumstances: I drank a six-pack of beer. This move improved my mood dramatically.
Soon, I found myself in Socorro’s observatory. I hummed and admired the view. I spilled a few golden droplets on the ballistic glass surface. The chamber had always been icy cold, and the beer froze into hard amber beads on the glass.
I studied the planet below, so near yet so inaccessible. The chilly ice-cap on every crag was so white, and so bright it almost hurt to look at it. I tapped at the glass with my foot, and it clacked back at me. I frowned. What if…?
Bursting with a new idea, I rushed out of the observatory and called in my staff. It took them long minutes to assemble. They yawned and squinted at me, as it was the middle of a sleeping shift for most of them.
“How much ballistic glass do we have in the system?” I demanded. “I want a full accounting. I want to know about all of it.”
“I don’t know, sir,” Miklos admitted. “Not much. We don’t generally put windows into our ships, except to cover cameras. Most of it is probably in use as visors for our helmets. What do we need it for?”
“We’ll have to manufacture it, then,” I said, beginning to pace. “That will slow down our infantry kit production, but we don’t have any choice. I mean, what good are Centaur infantry kits if the troops all end up insane when we drop them, anyway?”
My staff exchanged confused glances. I waved my hands at them.
“Don’t you see? They want to see big vistas. They want skies and horizons. They don’t want to be blind in a box. They don’t want goggles or hoods over their heads.”
“Yes sir…” Miklos said, looking at me as I were as nuts as a Centaur.
“Well, we’ll give them that view, just for a few minutes, as we drop them down to the surface.”
“I understand your intent,” Marvin said. “It is ingenious-and if it works, it will prove how bizarre biotic mentalities truly are.”
I almost gave him an angry retort about machines that rebuilt themselves every day like fashion models, but decided there wasn’t time.
“We’ve got to try it first, of course,” I said. “We’ll rig up a new version of the landing pod with transparent material and drop a new group tonight.”
My staff looked concerned, except for Marvin, who looked excited. I could tell from the way he whipped his tentacles and cameras around he was curious about the experiment. Would it end as another horrible, bloody failure? Either way, it was new data for his hungry robot mind.
“Do you mean to give them a window, sir?” Miklos asked.
“Not just a window, man. I mean to give them a glass floor. Like my observatory. Something to look at, something to swallow up their eyes and keep them focused on distant horizons. How can anyone feel claustrophobic while standing on what looks like open space?”
“Sounds more frightening than being surrounded by solid walls,” Kwon said doubtfully.
I pointed a finger at him. “For you, maybe. But you’re not a crazy mountain goat. They don’t like walls. Anyway, it’s worth a try.”
Miklos and the others exchanged glances. “But we’ll have to ask another team to-to possibly sacrifice themselves.”
“That doesn’t matter to them. These people will do anything for the herd. I know them. They won’t hesitate to volunteer. In fact, I bet we get about a million volunteers.”
“But that’s not the point, Colonel-”
I turned on him. Maybe it was the beer that was still in my system, but I wasn’t in any mood for misplaced sentimentality. “Listen, Miklos. I know you want to do this the clean way, bombing our way through it. But that will take a lot of nukes, a lot of floating radiation clouds for decades to come and a lot of time and resources we don’t have. At any moment, a fresh Macro fleet could come sailing through a ring and slaughter these people by the billions. We’re going to risk their lives again, and we’re going to do it within the next few hours.”