I studied the scene. It took me several seconds, but then I saw it. A clump of fur blowing in the ceaseless winds. And something else. “Is that a buried hoof, Marvin?”
“Yes, I’m certain of it.”
I opened my mouth, then closed it again. “It must be the one we left behind. He must have run in a straight line-but he didn’t make it out of the blast radius in time.”
“A stroke of luck, to be sure,” Marvin said. “The Macros didn’t have to use so many missiles against such a small number of targets, but their thoroughness saved us this time. Did you have this result in mind, sir? Did it enter into your planning at some point?”
I stared at him with narrowed, baffled eyes. Marvin wasn’t good at reading human expressions, so I was fairly sure he didn’t realized how dumbfounded I was. “Let me get this right: you are happy this poor creature was blown apart?”
“Naturally, Colonel Riggs. When you first decided to break the pact between the Centaurs and the Macros, I was certain that you had made a mistake in your timing. I now see you had thought of every detail. How can the Macros know their agreement with the herd people has been broken, if there is no evidence? They have obliterated it.”
As he spoke, I felt a chill go through me. I’d sort of forgotten about the agreement between the Centaurs and the Macros. Any Centaur spotted on the planet surface was a violation that would allow the Macros to destroy their vulnerable satellites. With all the fighting that had gone on, I’d figured that deal was null and void now. But there was no real reason to assume that. We are at war with the Macros, but that didn’t mean the Centaurs were classified as rebels yet.
“I’m further impressed that you were so certain of this outcome,” Marvin went on.
“What makes you think I was so sure we’d get away with this?”
“Why-because you didn’t put any kind of defensive systems on the satellites themselves. The Macros could use their missiles to destroy them at any moment, and yet you were unconcerned. Was that done to prevent them from deducing your true intentions?”
I stared at him for a second before nodding slowly. I got it now. If the Macros had realized the Centaurs had set foot on the planetary surface, all bets would have been off. They would have been free to break their deals and destroy the satellites at will.
“Sure,” I said, my voice slightly shaken. “That’s exactly why I did it that way. Why give them a clue what I had planned for them?”
“Well played, Colonel Riggs.”
“Uh-huh. Marvin? Could you tell me the next time you foresee a problem like this, rather than trusting my judgment blindly?”
“Even if it requires interrupting you?” he asked.
“Even then.”
“I’ll reset those thresholds in my neural chains.”
“Excellent,” I said. I stared at the tabletop, which still displayed the fragmented Centaur. If that guy had been a better runner, he might have been responsible for the extermination of his entire species.
I corrected myself almost immediately: then I might have been responsible for the extermination of his entire species.
“One more thing Marvin…”
“Yes, Colonel?”
“Get Miklos on the com-link. We’re cancelling all further trips to the surface for Centaurs from now on. They aren’t going down there again until we launch an all-out attack.”
“Good thinking, sir.”
— 9
The preparations crawled. Every day, I expected to hear from Admiral Crow. I suspected he would soon send formal orders recalling me. Maybe he’d even demand my arrest. But I had the email system locked down, so only I’d hear about something like that.
The order from Star Force never came. After several weeks had gone by, I began to suspect Crow had decided I was less trouble out here in the Eden System. I knew him all too well. Maybe he figured it was easier to let me do whatever I wanted out here. With luck, I’d get my fool ass shot off at some point.
The big invasion day finally came. We were way behind schedule-but nothing was unusual about that. We had a good reason to be late: I’d drastically changed the game plan. Before assaulting the cold Centaur homeworld with native troops, I’d ordered that every Centaur satellite be loaded up with anti-missile batteries. These were essentially beam turrets, like those I’d built on Andros Island back home. Each turret consisted of a light cannon, a generator, a brainbox, a sensory array, a swivel mount, and a number of servos to move it around quickly. These systems were a lot like the one’s I’d built back home, but they had the added advantage of being set up to operate in space. An airless void was a far more effective medium for lasers than an atmosphere, where something like a rainstorm might well ruin your day. Up in space, there were essentially no obstructions. Enemy missiles coming up to take them out would have a tough time of it.
When coming up out of the gravity-well of any planet, a missile was by necessity slowed down. Worse, they didn’t have any distance in which to build up sufficient velocity. Even with nanotech engines, they would hardly be going more than escape velocity-about Mach 30 on this planet-when they came up out of the atmosphere and were burned down. I’d learned that long range missiles were much more effective when they were fired in deep space at a stationary target. That way, they had plenty of time to accelerate up to an incredible speed. Going fast enough, defensive systems became ineffective. Our turrets simply wouldn’t have enough time to shoot them down before they’d slammed into the stations and taken them out.
In our modern form of warfare, Mach 30 was pretty slow. The nano-directed turrets had plenty of time to lock on and plenty of range to fire, as they hung high orbit.
It had taken too long to build the defensive systems, but I knew I didn’t have much choice. If we dropped on the planet, breaking the Centaur treaty with the Macros, they were sure to try to take out the satellites. Hell, they might even have considered that a win. Expunging the civilian population of an entire biotic species was probably worth quite a bit of loss to them at this point. We had to be a big pain in their battery packs by now.
Once every Centaur satellite bristled with laser turrets and we had enough landing pods and infantry equipment, the time to act had arrived. We watched the weather then, hoping for a storm to cover our landing. Unlike past invasions with lower tech systems, storms weren’t really a cause for concern in a space invasion mission like this one. All they did was provide interference for our drop.
“That storm system won’t let up for two days,” Miklos said.
I nodded. “I like the sound of that. We’ll drop in forty minutes. Relay the command and get every marine into a pod.”
Kwon squawked in my helmet a few minutes later. “I heard it was a go, sir! Is that right?”
“You heard correctly, First Sergeant. Get to your pod with a full kit. You are going down with the first wave.”
Kwon roared with excitement, which caused me to wince in my helmet. One pain in the butt about headsets and helmets was you couldn’t easily pull the ear-piece away from your head when someone was being overly loud. Still, I smiled. Kwon had been bored out of his mind for the last month or so. There were only so many drills you could do in the simulation bricks before getting tired of them. He was about to finally be unleashed on a target world, and being allowed to do what he’d signed up for: switching off machines.
When we quietly deployed in space, spreading out in orbit over a large area, I didn’t order them all to drop at once. Instead, I sent down three squadrons of ships, each with three destroyers carrying landing pods clutched up against the bottom skin of the ship. Like birds of prey carrying precious cargo, our ships dove with alarming speed. Watching the assault via optical systems set up on the satellite and on each of the dropships, I thought it looked more reckless than it had seemed on paper. Here we were, riding in thin, smart metal cans in steep dives toward an alien world that was thronged with unknown numbers of enemy robots.