“Ah,” Kwon said. He promptly relayed a warning to the nearest marines, who were now gathering around.
A dozen red-lit men talked among themselves. No doubt they figured Riggs’ Pigs were about to earn their reputation for insane losses once again. I allowed the chatter for now.
I opened the dead man’s suit, attached an emergency line to his wrist and inflated the balloon. In seconds, he was shooting toward the surface. When he arrived, the balloon would begin beeping an emergency signal, and the body would be picked up. The system had been intended as a lifesaver, but it worked just as well to send corpses to the surface in a hurry.
“One down, ninety-nine to go,” muttered one of the men.
“Belay that shit, marine!” Kwon barked, clanking into the midst of the men. “Was that you, Swenson? I’m going to check the logs when we get back.”
“Sorry, First Sergeant.”
I felt like telling Kwon to let it slide, but that wasn’t the way discipline was maintained in my unit. I let Kwon do his job, so I could do mine. I ignored the entire affair and engaged my repellers. Moments later I had a fix on our gathering point and glided toward it. A throng of quiet marines followed me. We were already a few minutes behind schedule.
-24-
Due to the particulate matter floating around in any ocean and the powerful nature of our lasers, I didn’t know how our weapons would perform in the undersea environment. Tests had shown our projectors were effective at short range, but there were many practical problems. Earth science had developed uses for lasers underwater, such as welding, since the nineteen-nineties. But our weapons were an order of magnitude more powerful.
The intense beams tended to heat up the cloudy water as they passed through it, causing steam bubbles to form, especially around the projector units themselves. This was problematic, as the bubbles obstructed the beam, reducing its striking power. The final result of these difficulties was that our weapons did work, but only over a short range and only for short bursts of duration. Over longer ranges or longer durations, their effectiveness dropped off dramatically.
Still, our lasers were the best weapons we had. I could have tried to design some kind of harpoon with an explosive charge, maybe, but I didn’t have time. I didn’t want to leave the Macros down here unmolested, festering at the bottom of our ocean. I didn’t know exactly what their plans were, but I was certain I didn’t want them to succeed.
We kept moving and reached our battalion gathering point unmolested. Three other companies were there, waiting. There were supposed to be a total of five, including us. I talked to the captain of each company and determined they’d not met any resistance.
Several minutes went by. When the last company didn’t show up, I became concerned. I ordered the rest of the men to follow me, backtracking along the route the fifth company should have taken from the cliffs. Kwon came up beside me as we glided over the seabed on a gentle decline that led ever deeper into the ocean trench.
“Uh, sir?” he asked.
I knew what was bothering him without asking. This looked like a detour that would delay our planned search pattern and put us out of position relative to the other battalions that were moving over the seabed looking for the Macros.
“We are down here to search for the Macros, First Sergeant,” I told him. “One company is missing, that’s evidence of Macro activity.”
“Yes sir, but aren’t their domes supposed to be further ahead?”
“No other units have reported in sonically,” I told him. “They are all probing forward, but not finding anything. I believe there is something nearby, between us and the cliffs.”
“But wouldn’t the company have called in if they met the Macros?”
“Not if their communications man was killed fast enough.”
Kwon made a troubled-sounding grunt. I kept pressing ahead. Spreading out on all sides of me were four companies of marines. If there was something out here, we were going to find it.
When we did, it came as a surprise. My first thought was: the machines have been busy.
They ambushed us. They were worker-type Macros, equipped with huge pinchers. A large number of them were drilling-types as well. As soon as I saw them, I knew we’d stumbled upon some kind of resource, probably a mine. That’s why they were hard to see. They’d been in burrowed holes in the rocky bottom. Like a hundred moray eels, they popped up and attacked when we were right on top of them.
Pinchers clanked hard on battle armor and the leading men were sucked down into holes. I knew then how it had happened. Each company had been equipped with only one hydrophone, assigned to a non-com to lug around behind the captain. If those men had been leading the company and all been pulled down into these black holes, they could have been torn apart down there in the dark before they could engage their equipment. That’s why we hadn’t heard a call for support.
Lasers flashed. My headset was full of chatter. I moved to the nearest opening where a corpsman had been dragged down, flailing. I dove into the hole and Kwon followed. We quickly found a large chamber underneath.
It took three Macros to kill one of my men—at least three of this relatively weak variety. Two held him locked in their pinchers while the third used drilling equipment to burn through the armor. Using a laser drill that could melt rock, the burrower opened up the marine’s suit and once it lost its integrity it popped and the man was instantly killed by the intense pressure at this depth. We were about a mile deep, and the pressure here was over a hundred fifty times that felt while standing on the beach.
“Kill the drillers, kill the drillers! Relay that,” I shouted over my suit radio with the strongest possible signal.
Kwon’s twin beams were already blazing, striking the drilling Macro. I joined him.
“Use pulses!” I shouted. “No long burns, you’ll cloud up the water.”
Both of us fired in bursts, hammering at the driller. The two pincher-armed workers dropped the body of the marine they’d methodically killed and churned toward us. They crawled over the rocky interior of the chamber like steel lobsters.
We soon had disabled the drilling Macro. After that, there wasn’t much they could do to us. We kept wrestling and firing at point-blank range, until they sagged down in bubbling ruins.
Working together and targeting the drilling machines, my four companies made fast work of the entire nest. That could not be said of Bravo Company, who’d run into the nest alone and had been annihilated.
“Looks like Bravo Company gave them hell, at least,” Kwon said.
“Indeed they did,” I said, trying not to grind my teeth.
There had been only about fifty of the machines active when we arrived. I counted my marine dead. Besides the company they’d first ambushed, they’d only managed to kill five men. Still, that was a hundred and five, total.
I gathered my survivors and prepared to move out. This took longer than I was accustomed to, as commands had to be relayed and people took time to do headcounts. I wondered if we should have all gone down as a mass force. The Macros had to know we were down here by now.
I decided it was time to use the hydrophone. Possibly, other units had run into nests like this one. If they hadn’t, they needed to know about the possibility. We were looking for underwater Macro domes with factories inside, but as yet hadn’t found one.
Every battalion was under orders to report a dome the moment they located it. The plan at that point was simple: we’d mass our strength and take it out. Unfortunately, if none of us had yet found a dome to attack, the plan was a failure.