B. Larson - Conquest

“I don’t want to go with you. I want you to stay home.”

I sighed. How many marines had a conversation like this with his woman? I understood her feelings, but I had to go. I hugged her, and it was the right move. After a long time, she finally melted against me. Her flesh no longer felt like a piece of metal, but like the shapely young woman she was.

“How long until you leave me?” she whispered.

“We’ll be loaded and flying in five hours. Less, maybe.”

“That’s long enough.”

“For what? Oh…”

She led me to a private place amongst the tents, rubble and newly erected buildings. It was amazing how fast Star Force could rebuild after a battle. A big part of the magic was the smart metal and the nanites, of course. They rebuilt structures by themselves, often without any instructions from us. Left to their own devices, nanites tended to return to their last remembered configuration. When the wounds were too great, however, they had left holes in the smart metal, gaps that couldn’t be troweled over without the addition of fresh barrels of nanites. The walls in particular had suffered. There were big gaping holes here and there in the outer barrier and on top of the ramparts. Wet earth, blackened by scorching heat, showed through the silvery planes of metal here and there.

Sandra and I made love between two new buildings. One of them contained a generator, and the fusion process hummed loudly enough to provide a little cover noise. Still, I suspected that passersby might have heard something. If they did, none of them were rude enough to poke their noses into our hideaway and discover us.

We could have gone back to our new quarters, or found an empty room deep inside the headquarters bunker. But she had led me here, and I didn’t object. I had to wonder if she had found this place while lurking around the base. She did a lot of lurking.

I enjoyed her soft skin the most. The blue sky above was second. Making love in daylight under a clear sky was always invigorating. She was almost desperate in her love-making. She often behaved this way when I was leaving her, possibly for the last time.

I enjoyed every second of it.

When I boarded Barbarossa, I was in an excellent mood. Captain Miklos’ destroyer still had the gleaming interior of a freshly built ship. The walls and particularly the floor of any smart-metal hull were impossible to stain, but crews invariably added their own furnishings over time and that made them more homey. Barbarossa looked like it had been built yesterday, as the crew had had no time to settle in.

The crew greeted me with cautious enthusiasm. They had emerged from the recent battles with the Macros unscathed. As a Star Force marine, I felt slightly jealous of these Fleet people. They had no appreciation for the grim combat my men had endured in the dirt, ashes and blood that was the battle for Andros from our perspective. I took solace in the knowledge that they were going to be encountering the Macros much more closely in the near future.

Captain Miklos’ crew was the same as I’d left it days earlier. The gunner still appeared to be the most nervous of the lot, while the helmsman barely made eye-contact. Miklos himself seemed honored I’d requested to fly with him again. I sincerely hoped he wouldn’t be disappointed by the end of our journey.

Kwon loaded sixteen grunts on after me. I stood in the bridge, watching them take their jump seats in the troop pod located directly below the bridge section, in the belly of the lower deck. Right behind the marines were the engines, and right below them was empty space. The floor was designed to flash open, just as the nanite floors had done to me and my kids years ago when I first encountered the Nanos. I followed the men into the troop pod and gave them a short pep talk. I told them this was really the sweet spot in the ship. If anything went wrong, they would die instantly-a blessing in the grim environment of space. No one wanted to hang around out there waiting to suffocate or burn up when their personal orbit decayed.

When I was finished, only Kwon seemed to be cheered up. The rest gave me a ‘hooah’, but I sensed their morale wasn’t a hundred and ten percent. I chalked it up to a general need for a break we weren’t going to get. These men needed a few weeks of R amp;R, but as far as I was concerned, that was going to have to wait until there wasn’t an enemy robot within a lightyear of Earth.

I returned to the bridge and took my seat behind Captain Miklos. The crewmen glanced at me now and then, but looked away quickly when I returned the scrutiny. I wondered as we lifted off if they were still thinking about the time I’d taken over their ship and threatened to shoot their captain. To me, that was all water under the bridge. We were all in this together, and we would live or die as a team today.

When the mass of ships had risen up and gathered in a loose formation about a hundred miles above Andros, I ordered the fleet to swing around the planet once to gather momentum, and also to possibly throw off the Macros as to our intent.

“We’ll get up to just over escape velocity,” I told the captains on a joint channel, “then slingshot ourselves toward high orbit. With any luck, we’ll catch them sitting there and have a good combat-pass before they know what hit them.”

The kind of combat I intended would be enhanced by a stationary or slow-moving enemy. Getting in close to the Macros was going to be difficult with their massed firepower and unknown supplies of missiles. Getting in close was a requirement for my attack plan, which consisted of harassing the enemy ships with laser fire while covering the real assault, which would consist of around a thousand marines swarming the cruisers like tiny individual spacecraft. Once in close enough, my marines in their powered battle suits could maneuver to the enemy and hurl nuclear grenades at the hulls. If necessary, they could invade surviving ships and destroy the Macro crews in detail. In my fantasies, some of the enemy craft might even be captured.

Before we’d made half of our initial orbit, however, my hopes were thrown out the window.

“Colonel?” Captain Miklos asked. “I’m getting reports, sir-yes, the enemy fleet is getting underway.”

“Shit,” I said. I slammed my fist down on the command chair. The metal shell of the chair was much thinner than my armored battle suit, and it gave way under the blow. I irritably yanked my fist out of the dent it had formed. Over the next minute or so, the smart metal rebuilt the armrest. Nanites were nothing if not dutiful.

I glared at the forward metallic-relief screens and occasionally eyed the normal computer-driven flat screen in front of my chair. They were definitely moving. They’d not been fooled in the slightest. I had to give these machines credit, they could do their math. They’d projected my likely trajectory. Each ounce of thrust that sped us toward them committed us to a shrinking array of objectives. The faster we went, the more easily they could predict where we were headed. Under no illusions, the Macros had reacted immediately rather than sitting and waiting to see just how we were going to hit them.

“Which way are they going?” I asked.

“Not conclusive yet, sir-but it looks like they are not heading toward us.”

I looked at the helmsman in surprise. “Is that from your math? Let’s see it on the boards. Project the likely enemy path on the screen.”

“Yes, sir.”

Soon I had my answer. The enemy were swinging around the Moon and out of the system. The odds were already eighty percent and ticking higher as they continued accelerating.

I frowned at the screen. “Zoom out,” I said. “Continue the projection to its likely destination.”