The Centaurs did as I asked. Beams lashed the harvester’s hindquarters, to little apparent effect. At least no more of my troops were dying. Perhaps they felt it was dishonorable, not facing an enemy head on like two rams butting heads. But for once, they didn’t complain about that.
It occurred to me that although the harvester was no longer killing my company, it was successfully delaying us. Could this be the prelude to a more effective attack by military units? I had to disable this thing and get back on track. I thought about the single nuclear grenade I had on my pack. It seemed like a waste to use it now. I only had the one, and I’d hoped to use it on a more critical target.
Finally, I decided to try an old tactic. I’d had time to examine the harvester from a top view. There were certain data and power lines that looked familiar to me, and they all led down to a central nodule about a dozen feet from the ground on the right side of the machine.
“All right this isn’t working out. I want all of you to focus your laser fire on this box. Follow my lead.”
I put my beamer on the box, and let my goggles shade to full blackout mode. If the Centaurs were good at one thing, it was following the leader. More than fifty beams joined mine, and we burned through the module in seconds. Many of the thick cables were severed during the process as well.
That was it for the harvester. First, its spinning, spiked wheels stopped churning up dirt. Then the blades on the forward scoop stopped making chewing motions. Within a minute, the entire machine halted. I sensed it was still active, watching us from a dozen sensory devices. Moreover, I could feel the thrum of its central driving engine, the vibration still came up through my boots.
I wanted this thing dead, so we spent another minute or so burning the contents of its brainbox completely away. It was mildly satisfying. When the machine was a smoking wreck, we left it and pressed onward toward our goal.
We’d gone from being one of the lead companies to being one of the laggers. I pushed my team hard to catch up.
By the time we reached the foot of the mountain range, Miklos had reported to me that most of the teams were down. In the end, we’d fielded much fewer than the millions of volunteers we’d been promised by the Centaurs. I would have gladly put them all down, but I didn’t have enough delivery systems, or infantry kits. Putting them down without proper equipment would have been akin to murder in any case. As far as we could tell, the machines had exterminated every individual on the surface, and they weren’t about to change their genocidal policy now.
We’d landed about thirty thousand Centaurs, each team lead by one of my officers or noncoms. A few were led by private first class marines who’d I’d raised to the rank of Corporal for serving in this hazardous mission.
By the time all the companies had made it to the mountain range, we’d only lost about three percent of them-six marines and about a thousand Centaurs. It seemed unfair, but these poor guys had a way of dying in groups. Their natural herding instincts failed them in modern combat-at least in regards to survival rates. That said, they got the job done and rarely complained. The only queries I received from them came when we stopped moving forward to press against the enemy. In these cases, I explained the situation to them in terms they understood.
“We are massing up before pressing forward. We need more weight, more numbers. When we have all our strength together, we will overrun the machines in our thousands.”
This sort of talk always got them into line. They loved the idea of swarming the machines and burning them down. The enemy themselves were something of a surprise. They had missiles, good command and control and they fought gamely enough. But they lacked troops. Apparently, this system had been marked down as friendly in their book. We were in a state of peace, and therefore all production could be turned to harvesting resources.
I was surprised, as I thought perhaps our forays down to the surface at both poles would have made them switch their massive production systems over to military hardware. They hadn’t done so, but they were sure to now.
Consequently, our march to the enemy dome was relatively easy. We met up with a few hundred machines-mostly small worker units. These functioned well against unarmed civilians, but when faced by thousands of troops carrying heavy beamers, they were melted to scrap quickly. The bigger harvesters were more of a problem, but we’d figured out how to disable them.
Then there were the gathering units that resembled floating cities. These came along the black highways of partially digested materials to pick them up. They were monstrous, buzzing systems that apparently used massive versions of the repellers in our battle suits to fly. Once we figured out where the repellers were located, they were easy to bring crashing to the ground.
I gathered my thousands on the cliffs over the valley we knew must contain the enemy dome. I wasn’t happy with what I saw, however. Instead of finding caves that led down to the enemy production facilities, I found only a deep lake of still water that was barely above freezing. From this water, machines crawled in and out all along the shore line.
I compressed my lips and called Miklos. “Captain. Do you know what I’m seeing down here?”
“Yes Colonel, we are monitoring your suit video.”
“Maybe the stream isn’t clear up there, but what I’m seeing is a failure. The enemy dome must be at the bottom of this lake.”
“Are you sure, sir?”
“Yes, I’m freaking sure!” I shouted. “How am I supposed to take thirty thousand Centaurs into a frozen lake? They don’t even have vacc suits. They’d drown even before the Macros could murder them all.”
“It does look like an intelligence failure, Colonel.”
I took a deep breath. We’d come so far, all for the possibility of capturing a Macro production facility. We’d lost a lot of troops, time and given the enemy details as to our strength and tactics. But the mission was a failure despite all those lost assets on our side of the ledger.
“We spent too much time building up and not enough time doing proper recon. I have to take responsibility for that.”
“Excuse me, Colonel,” Miklos said. “I have Marvin here. He wishes to speak with you.”
“Put him on.”
“Colonel Riggs?”
“Yes, Marvin. Go ahead.”
“You have about three hundred marines in full battle suits. I’ll come down with you, if you like. If you can get me into that dome somehow, I’m fairly certain I can transfer full control of the unit to Star Force.”
Fairly certain. It sounded like my epitaph. Here lies Colonel Kyle Riggs, who was fairly certain he would survive his last campaign.
I thought about it while Marvin prattled on about Macro security protocols and transmission spoofing codes. I believed that he believed it could be done. But I wasn’t sure the Macros were going to cooperate. We had no way of knowing what they had down there. Maybe they’d held back their military hardware to protect the dome itself. Maybe they’d analyzed our intent and prepared a trap for us.
The real trouble was that the three hundred marines were the majority of the five hundred-odd human troops I had in the entire Eden system. If I lost them, I lost an asset I couldn’t replace. I would have to return to Earth and endure Crow’s sneering displeasure with no victories to speak of. For all I knew, Crow was on his way out here with a retrieval fleet. Doubtlessly, he’d been building new ships non-stop since I’d left him. I frowned fiercely and tried to push all thoughts of Crow and Earth out of my mind for now. I had a job right here that needed doing.
“No, I don’t think I want to take my men underwater again,” I said. “The risk is just too great. I went on a sea campaign once with thousands of troops-and we still pretty much failed. I’m pulling out.”