Kwon found two non-coms in green-lit suits and sent them off to follow my orders. I waved the corporal with the communications unit forward and tried to contact Captain Sloan. He should be arriving very soon.
Before I could get the hydrophone working, Sloan arrived. He sailed along, looking for blue-lit officers until he found me. It was a relief to be able to communicate clearly with radio.
“What the hell is this, Colonel?” Sloan asked me as soon as he was in range.
“A big hole.”
“Pardon me, but that’s not helpful.”
“Yeah, I think it didn’t help Battalion Ten, either.”
“You think they glided right off this cliff? Five hundred men?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think the cliff was here when they arrived. This is the gathering spot they had staked out. They showed up on station, waited for orders, but something hit them before our transmission came in.”
Sloan was quiet for a moment. “Something that big? So soon?”
“I don’t think it was some kind of super-Macro. I think it was an explosion. The concussion could have knocked out their suit systems. Either that, or it was a whole lot of little Macros under the surface.”
“What are we going to do about it, sir?”
It was my turn to hesitate. There was a big part of me that wanted to head over to that cave the majority of my force was assaulting. But I didn’t like leaving marines behind without investigating. I also didn’t like massing all my marines in a single spot on the ocean floor. Mostly, I wanted to know what had hit my men at this spot.
Before I’d made any kind of decision, the squads I’d sent off to circumnavigate the pit returned. They’d met up on the far side, as I had suspected they would. The hole was circular, and roughly a mile in diameter.
“We’re going down,” I told Sloan. “One company at a time. If a unit lives long enough to signal back the all-clear, the next company will step off this cliff.”
“But sir—”
“Don’t freak out, Sloan,” I said. “I’ll lead the first unit. You can wait up here. We’ll step off the edge in one minute.”
“I don’t know what you are trying in imply,” Sloan said. He sounded hurt.
Too bad, I thought. “You are a survivor, Sloan,” I told him. “That’s not the same as a coward. It’s not a bad thing.”
“Well, sir,” Captain Sloan said. “I’d like the honor of leading the first team down.”
I was surprised, but decided if he wanted to do it, he could have the job. I watched him line his men along the edge. A hundred of Star Force’s finest. When they jumped, a small part of me knew that if they all died, I was going to feel badly. But I had to find out what was going on. If the Macros had somehow slaughtered five hundred of my men at the bottom of the sea, I wanted to at least know how they had done it.
I had a sudden thought as I watched Sloan marshal his marines. “Captain,” I said over the command channel.
“Colonel?”
“Send them down one squad at a time. Weapons out.”
He liked the idea and gave the orders. The first squad took the leap, then the second. Sloan stepped out with the third squad. I saw his blue suit among the numerous red-lit ones. I was able to pick him out for a long time as he fell deeper.
More squads went, but when the last ones were stepping off, there was a sudden commotion. A rush of bubbles came up from the hole. Then more bubbles. They were silver and there were way too many of them. Far from thinking them lovely, I saw those bubbles and knew his men were in trouble. The only way these suits should be able to release bubbles was when they ruptured.
I heard calls up the line, from suit-to-suit, man-to-man. They were passing up a message. When it got back up to us, it was a scream.
“Too deep! Release your pods!”
Every man had an emergency bubble to take them upward. Unfortunately, they found out that they didn’t really work once you went down more than six thousand feet. They hadn’t been designed for that depth. When the gas canister fired to fill the plastic bladder, it popped in most cases. A few men shot upward, dragged toward the distance surface by one wrist. When they passed us, they cut themselves free and glided to the rim of the hole.
Others came back up using their suit’s repellers. It wasn’t as fast, but it was more controlled. I counted the men as they came back up. We’d sent down about seventy, and we’d lost most of them.
I gazed down into the hole, frowning fiercely. Kwon came up beside me. He was unmistakable in his green-lit, oversized suit.
“Colonel Riggs?” he asked. “What happened?”
“The suits can’t go down that far,” I said. “They imploded. Like a sub that sinks to the bottom. Their suits ruptured and the nanites couldn’t keep up. In short, they died.”
“But how did this hole get here?”
“I suspect the Macros did it. They set off a big charge here under our marines. Maybe there was an underground chamber beneath the gathering spot for Battalion Ten. In any case, I think they collapsed the seabed, and the marines fell. They could have used their flight systems to get out of the trap, but I’m guessing their commander ordered them to take the drop, to see what was at the bottom. He must not have realized their suits would pop when they went too deep.”
“But the lead men should have seen what was happening and flown out the way Sloan’s men did.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe they all went down at more or less the same time and hit the kill zone together.”
“Hey sir,” Kwon said, pointing down over the rim. “Who’s that?”
I looked down. I smiled slowly. A blue-lit suit was rising up toward us. I didn’t know how he’d lived, but I knew who it had to be.
“That, my good man, is the unkillable Captain Sloan.”
All along the line of leaning marines a cry went up as he kept coming. Every second he came slowly, but doggedly, closer.
“Maybe his suit is damaged,” Kwon said. “One repeller might be out.”
“Hey Sloan,” I shouted. “Good to see you slip out of that one. I lost a bet with Kwon, because of you.”
“You did?” Kwon asked, bewildered. He pointed downward again. “What’s that thing?”
No one answered him, because we could all see it now. Sloan didn’t have a problem with his suit—not exactly. He had all his repellers going full blast and had his gas-bubble out too. Unfortunately, he also had the upper half of a Macro latched onto his foot.
We aimed and lit up the tenacious monster. A mass of steam-bubbles rolled upward from every gun, and the robot was torn apart. Moments later, Captain Sloan drifted over to me and I took his hand and hauled him up over the rim.
“That was close,” he said.
I nodded, impressed. “Closer than usual, even for you.”
Kwon knelt and busied himself removing the last clamped-on Macro arm that dangled from Sloan’s left leg.
“Did you build the officer’s suits to the same specs, Colonel?”
I opened my mouth to say yes, but hesitated. I recalled leaving Sandra in charge of the duplication process. Could she have tampered with the design? Could she have altered it to keep me safe, knowing I would wear one of the officer’s suits?
“I thought I did,” I said.
“Well, everyone else’s seemed to collapse when we got to certain depth,” Sloan reported. “We got down there, and we could see bubbles coming up from the first squads. But I figured they were in trouble and ordered weapons at the ready. It was hard to see, sir.”