Annihilation (Star Force Series) (21 page)

That’s the mission I had in mind for them today. The pilots wouldn’t like it much, as there wasn’t much glory in sitting at a hundred thousand feet watching your ship shoot at missiles, but that was just too bad.

“Jasmine,” I said, “you’ve got better data up there and a more stable situation. You make the call. What are we facing?”

“I’ve got about four hundred incoming birds, sir. They’ve just left the sea and are inbound for your beachhead. ETA: four minutes.”

“Four hundred?” I asked, disheartened. “Are they nuclear or conventional?”

“Unknown.”

I grimaced and thought hard for a second. This didn’t look good. Our fighter wings contained four squadrons of twelve fighters each—we hadn’t bothered with dividing them into groups. The carrier I’d brought with us was capable of transporting two fighter wings—about a hundred ships in all.

Right now, I was pretty sure that wasn’t going to be enough guns. Only forty-eight fighters would be in range to provide us defensive fire. Even combined with the small turrets our companies were carrying with them…there just wasn’t enough guns to stop all those missiles. Some were going to make it through.

“Are you there, Colonel?” Sarin asked.

“I’m here. I’m just regretting coming to save the Crustaceans about now.”

“I understand, sir.”

More alarming thoughts piled on top of my first ones. I realized that if the enemy hit us hard enough right now, they could break our invasion before it really got started. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I believed that was exactly what they were attempting to do.

“Captain Sarin, contact your fighters. Move them to a higher elevation. Place them at maximum range to hit those missiles effectively.”

“They can’t possibly shoot them all down from that high, sir.”

“I know that, but I believe these weapons are nukes. Or at least, a large number of them are. That’s why the Macros have more or less sat quietly while we unloaded all our troops. They wanted us all down and set up as sitting ducks. Now, they’ll unload on us in one hard, smashing blow.”

Sarin was quiet for a long second. When she spoke again, there was dread in her voice. I knew she could see my logic and agreed with me. “What are your orders, Colonel?”

“Let’s try what we did in the past. Intercept their missiles with a volley of our own.”

“Should I use nuclear warheads?”

“Of course,” I said.

“How many should I launch?”

“All of them.”

“Plotting…the mission is in the computer, sir. The birds will fly shortly. Flight time to intercept range…forty seconds. Launching—now.”

There were a million things either of us could have said in this horrible moment, but we both knew there just wasn’t time to talk things over. I’d half-expected her to point out, for example, that I’d made it our policy not to use nukes on Yale for environmental concerns. But that just didn’t matter anymore. This had become a matter of survival.

We had to operate on the worst-case basis. We had to assume the incoming missiles were nuclear, not conventional. To do otherwise might be committing suicide.

I knew that if we were wrong, the enemy would have scored a coup. We were expending all of our nuclear missiles blowing up the Macro barrage. Quite possibly, we were doing nothing more than creating a very large radioactive cloud for nothing.

But there wasn’t time to debate. There wasn’t even time to second-guess. We had to assume this was doomsday, because if it was and we didn’t play it right, my little invasion force wasn’t going to exist five minutes from now.

“The birds are reaching their target altitudes,” Jasmine said in my helmet. “Darken your visors, sir.”

“We’re ready.”

“Good luck, Kyle,” she said quietly.

This was a big breach of protocol for Captain Sarin. When under battle conditions, she rarely used my first name. I figured she believed my situation could well be terminal. I had to agree with her.

“Thank you, Jasmine,” I said. “If this goes badly, you’ll be in command of the task force. Miklos will be in overall command of Star Force. Riggs out.”

I felt like I’d just written my own epitaph. Jasmine knew what I meant: if I die in the next few minutes, take over. It had been a hard thing to say. But what followed over the next two minutes was worse.

Around me, the men had all taken cover. The signal to darken visors had gone out, and every faceplate was jet-black. We all hunkered down, waiting for doom. Most of the men didn’t know what was about to hit us. A few did. All of them stayed low and quiet.

It’s a hard thing, waiting in an alien hole for hundreds of missiles to land on top of you. I knew every breath was quite possibly my last. It was frustrating not being able to do anything about my own fate. I’d much preferred facing down that bizarre mining Macro, for example, to this. At least then, I’d had something to shoot at. Taking action makes a man fear death less.

Sitting in a hole as the seconds ticked by…it was one of the hardest things I’d ever had to do. Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait long.

The flashes began out over the eastern horizon. They were pretty at first, flaring greenish-white through our blacked-out visors. Fantastic power was being released out there. I didn’t have a tactical table handy to figure out how many we’d stopped, or how many were still coming.

I couldn’t see the fighters, they were too high up. Hanging in the upper atmosphere, I knew they were stabbing down at the surviving missiles with hot invisible beams of light, but I couldn’t see any of that, either.

In the last seconds, I did see contrails. I knew that was a very bad sign. Incoming trails could only mean one thing: some of the enemy missiles had made it through.

A moment later, the impacts began. They were nuclear. There were no mushroom clouds yet, those would rise up later. In the first moments after a nuclear explosion, there’s nothing but a blooming sphere of heat, light and a sound that’s beyond all sounds.

These effects combined into what we call a shockwave, one of which rolled over my unnamed firebase.

Because my visor was the weakest part of my armor, I’d rolled over and hugged the dirt facedown. When the shockwave hit, it felt as if something huge had jumped on my back, and I lost consciousness.

-18-

I was still breathing. At first, I wasn’t entirely sure about that, but after a few hitching gasps, I knew it was true. I was still alive—for now.

Groaning, I tried to roll over. It didn’t happen. My suit seemed to be dead. I wasn’t sure what was wrong, but it felt like about two thousand pounds of dead weight.

I realized I was having trouble breathing. The air mix in my suit—I looked for the readouts, but of course there was nothing. The HUD was dark.

My first thought was that the generator on my back had gone out. Possibly, it had been damaged by whatever had landed on my back. I struggled to get up.

I’m a powerful man. Quite possibly, I’m the most powerful man physically that’s ever lived. I’ve undergone treatments that the rest of my men hadn’t. Microbial baths had been piled atop of the changes the nanites had made, and had scarred my guts and muscles until they couldn’t be toughened or improved any further.

My conclusion was that I should have been able to move in my power-suit, even if it had gone dead. Like power steering in a car, a man could still wrestle with the wheel even if the hydraulics failed.

I strained and grunted, and I felt myself shift, but not by much. I couldn’t get a breath—that was the problem. I was suffocating, and the suit that was supposed to protect me was now killing me.

I fought to think clearly. Everything hurt, my head was buzzing, and thinking was harder than it should be. Oxygen deprivation, that had to be a factor.

A growing certainty came over me: I was going to die right here, face down in this dusty hole. I wondered if I’d rate a tombstone on this spot someday. I thought about what the inscription might say:
Here lies Colonel Kyle Riggs of the infamous Riggs’ Pigs. He dug his own grave, laid down in it, and buried himself for the convenience of the machines.

Angrily, I thrashed about, trying to move my limbs in any possible direction. There did seem to be some lateral range of movement to my left arm. I could swing my gauntlet back and forth, working the elbow joint.

I found also that I was able to turn my head. Getting an idea, I turned my head to the left, pushed away my fist as far as it would go, then smashed it into my faceplate.

I did it with a little too much force, as it turned out. My nose was pulped. But the visor did break, and dusty, smoke-laden air rolled in. It wasn’t good air, but there was some oxygen in it. I coughed and wheezed. After a few seconds, I felt better.

Star Force marines are tougher than normal humans. We’d been toughened further over the years. I recalled reading that the aboriginal peoples of the past were much hardier folk than soft, modern humans who sat all day at their computer stations. We marines had changed all that. We were the ones in the record books now.

I breathed in dusty, radioactive soot and I did so greedily. My lungs burned, as the air was hot. I had to guess the ambient temperature was around one hundred fifty degrees
Fahrenheit. It was hot enough to kill a normal man, but for someone who’d once rebuilt himself to go down into the atmosphere of a gas giant, it wasn’t all that bad.

Feeling stronger, I heaved. The thing on my back shifted and swayed. I knew now that it wasn’t a ton of earth or a huge rock. I couldn’t be buried if I was getting air in through my visor.

Roaring and straining, I managed to get to my knees. Finally, the fantastic weight on my back rolled away. Then I saw what had pinned me down: it was Kwon.

I checked his suit, and it was dead as well. I punched out his visor and reached inside. Blood trickled from his face.

For a few long seconds, I figured he was gone. I’ve known Kwon for years, and there’d never been a more faithful, loyal person in my life. I didn’t want to lose him.

I should have gotten up and called for a corpsman, but I didn’t. I knew I had better things to do. I had an army to look after, and a war to fight. But instead, I spent the next few precious minutes trying to save Kwon.

He’d been without oxygen for a considerable length of time. Normally, four minutes resulted in brain-death for a human being. But in the case of a Star Force marine, that could be extended considerably.

Even after our bodies shut down, the nanites in us didn’t. They had programs to maintain, and could even keep blood trickling when the heart stopped pumping. In emergencies, they could go to the lungs, gather oxygen and distribute it to critical centers of the body. These extreme measures wouldn’t keep you alive forever, but they might double the time a man had before suffocating.

After working on him with a first aid kit and a fresh nanite medical injection over the heart, I was able to get a pulse. He didn’t wake up, but he was alive.

I slumped back in my incredibly heavy suit, gasping for air myself. A figure appeared at the top of my dusty hole and looked down at me.

“You’re alive, Colonel?” asked Captain Gaines.

“It would appear so,” I mumbled.

“Here’s some water.”

He handed down a bottle and I sucked on it, spat out a gray mass, and sucked on it some more.

“You survived again, Gaines,” I said when some of the dust had been cleared from my throat.

“Yes sir.”

“If you get off this rock in one piece, I’m going to make you a Major.”

“I’m going to remember that, sir.”

Just about then, Kwon sneezed. It was a big sneeze, the kind only a big man can make. A fine wet mist rose up from his smashed visor. The mist was part blood and part snot. I grimaced. He reminded me of a whale, clearing its blowhole.

“You awake, Kwon?”

“No sir,” he said. “I’m still dreaming.”

I nodded. I knew exactly how he felt.

“Colonel,” Gaines said, “with your permission, I’m going to check on the rest of my company.”

“Do it. I’ll join you soon. Are communications up with Fleet?”

“Negative sir, the blast that hit us was laced with an EMP. I think that’s what killed our suit functions.”

I nodded. “Bastard machines. They know how to hurt us. Let me know when you have communications up again.”

“Will do, sir,” he said, then he trudged away.

“I can feel the radiation,” Kwon complained. He had yet to move. He just laid there on his back like beached whale. “I hate that feeling. It makes my teeth ache.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I recall reading about the Russian troops who were tasked with cleaning up the mess after the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl exploded. They called them human robots.”

Kwon’s face stirred and his eyes looked at me. He hadn’t bothered to sit up yet.

“Didn’t they have real robots?” he asked.

“Yeah, they had some. But it was 1986, and they didn’t have good ones. Strangely, delicate electronics are more vulnerable to radiation than biological systems—such as humans. The real robots all broke down.”