“Go on.”
“We were all expecting enemy at the bottom, and figured maybe they’d already gotten their first kills. But it wasn’t like that. All of a sudden, the men around me were popping—shooting out bubbles and going radio silent. It took me a second to realize what was happening. I radioed back up, but you know how short our range is down here.”
“How’d you get that lobster on your foot?” I asked.
“We’d about reached the bottom. The men who were still alive were being taken out. There were more marines down there already, sir. I must have seen fifty battle suits. It had to be Battalion Ten. The ones that survived the pressure died from a Macro ambush at the bottom.”
I grunted. He sounded shook-up. I ordered a head count. He’d lost about forty more. In retrospect, it had been stupid to send the whole company down. But in these situations, it was so hard to tell what the right move was. If I’d ordered down a squad and they’d dropped into a mass of Macros, we would have lost them all and learned nothing. By going down in strength, I’d thought I was offering my men protection. Unfortunately, the real enemy in this battle had been the depth of the ocean, and it had won the day.
“What are we going to do about the Macros down there?” Kwon asked me.
“Get out the grenades,” I said.
We stood a man at three points around the rim with a small-yield tactical nuclear grenade. We set them for contact-detonation, and tossed them in. Then—we ran for it.
The shockwave rolled up from behind to smacked my marines in the ass. It sent us tumbling out of control through the water. I felt as if I’d been hit by a train. Fortunately, I’d ordered my troops to glide upward so only a few were smashed into the rocky seabed. After another headcount, we found we’d lost only two more men, both of them were men who’d jumped into the hole on Sloan’s ill-fated adventure. I figured their suits had been damaged and couldn’t handle the shockwave from the explosion, even though we should have reached a safe distance by then.
I reported my situation to the other battalions via the hydrophone. They were assaulting the cave entrance while we spent our time jumping in holes.
Things had gone badly on their front—worse than they had for my two battalions. The enemy had suckered them into narrow tunnels and ambushed my men. Outside on the open seafloor we had the advantage due to our superior numbers and firepower. Every macro that showed its nose outside the tunnels was burned by a hundred guns. But once we went into their warren of tunnels, we lost that advantage. There had been savage fighting down there, and we’d lost more men than they had lost machines.
When I arrived and saw the scene, I began kicking the butt of every officer I saw. But it didn’t change the facts. These Macros weren’t going to be driven out of their holes without a determined assault. I was certain the factories must be down there, so I prepared to do the impossible. I reorganized my marines into independent platoons. That was as big of a unit as could operate effectively in the tunnels. A platoon could all stay within radio distance of one another. A company could not when stretched out down the length of a tunnel.
I felt good about the situation. This next was strong and deeply dug-in, but it had to be protecting their factories. We’d scoured much of the seabed and this was the most strongly protected point.
I was about to order the final assault, expecting grim losses in trade for victory, when the oceans above darkened and very bad things began to come down toward us.
-26-
The Macros had called for air support. I can’t say that I blamed them. They were in trouble. Every beachhead is at its weakest when it first hits enemy territory. Part of my basic plan had been to attack them before they could get organized, before their numbers could grow. With luck, I’d figured they would not be able to defend themselves.
We hadn’t had that kind of luck, but we’d done them a lot of damage. The fighting was hard, but at that moment, I figured we were clearly on the winning team. Unfortunately, the Macros realized this before we could wipe out their main nest.
Everything changed when several wedge-shaped vessels the size of buildings dove into the oceans with us and glided through the water toward my massed formations. We were all in one place now—maybe that was what they’d been waiting for. They came down and came in close to fire their big belly turrets at us at point-blank range.
A spaceship really isn’t all that different from a submarine in design. Both have to be self-contained and airtight. Both are designed to withstand extreme environments. I’d never seen the Macros fly a cruiser down into the oceans, but I’d never seen anything indicating they couldn’t do it.
The second I realized what was coming for us, I ordered my men to scatter. My first thought was to swarm the cruisers one at a time and use our grenades to take them out. Maybe, I thought, this was an opportunity to take the enemy fleet out, to deal a devastating blow.
But then more of them kept diving down after us like greedy seabirds finding a nest teaming with thousands of hatchling turtles. I gave a general bug-out order to every commander and pulled my own rip-cord. With repellers on full and my gasbag dragging me up by the wrist, I shot up past the shark-like cruisers that swam near. Once we were above them, we were safe from their belly-turrets. The escaping last men dropped a barrage of grenades down like depth charges, but we couldn’t see if they did much damage in the inky dark water below.
Once we broke the surface, we flew for the beaches at top speed. We had to get under the Andros Island’s defensive umbrella as soon as possible. The cruisers didn’t dare follow us to the surface and gun us down. They’d taken enough loss against Andros Island’s stinging lasers. Over the intervening days, we’d rebuilt a large number of them, and we’d stationed most of the hovertanks on the beach as well to patch the gap in the island’s defenses and to cover any retreat from the sea.
My marines reached the beaches with their tails between their legs, but most of us had lived to fight another day. I walked the shoreline, counting dead, wounded and missing. We were still eight-five percent effective. I wasn’t sure exactly how much damage we’d done the enemy with our campaign, but I was fairly certain we couldn’t knock them off the planet like that—not as long as they still rule the skies with their fleet.
Decompression sickness was a major issue for hundreds of my men. Our suits had the ability to function as mini-decompression systems, maintaining stable pressure inside. They operated the way a submarine allowed her crew to go up and down in the water without building up nitrogen in every man’s blood. Unfortunately, a number of the suits had ruptured due to our speedy exit from the sea. We’d been down too deep and there were limits to what nanites could do and how fast they could do it.
Getting an idea, I decided to find out if those new-age pressure-chamber devices were still on the island. Ping, the purchasing agent in charge, had recently died. Unsurprisingly, she had never filled out the paperwork to return the machines. We broke them out of a surviving warehouse south of the main base and used our suit generators with gleaming lines of nanites to supply the required power. We had to be careful not to step on the nanites, as they were alive with voltage—essentially, they were bare wires. We ran the machines and they did their job. We set up an odd sort of triage in the middle of burnt trees and scorched sands, and it helped my marines. I thought I would have to praise Crow for accidentally having bought something useful.
I looked around me, and I took another kind of accounting. Most of my men had removed their helmets, allowing me to see their faces. Their expressions were grim. No one likes losing. Contrary to the popular adage, a loss does not make you stronger for the next fight, it makes you weaker. Morale is a critical factor in any fight for a human force. As a species, we can be talked into self-sacrifice, but we don’t want to risk our lives when we believe it’s all for nothing.