Empire Ebook Full (31 page)

“Thank you for pulling me out of the water, Colonel Riggs. I have internal injuries,
and seawater has entered cracks in my aft brainbox. I’ve already lost a portion of
my data storage. Many astrophysical mapping files are missing.”

I heaved a sigh. “Do you have backups?”

“Yes, fortunately. Each of my sub-brainboxes holds a compressed backup of my neural
chain. Still, it is disturbing to lose one of them.”

“Yeah. Kind of like dying, I guess. Creatures don’t like dying, Marvin. Do you have
any empathy in that regard? Can you understand you need to avoid killing the brains
of others, because you would not want to lose your own? Because the fate is so terrible,
we don’t wish it upon others?”

Marvin was quiet for a long time. I watched as seawater leaked out of various subsystems.
His entire body was listing to the left. He began heading inland, and the left side
of his body had to be dragged over the beach, leaving a deep groove in the sands.
I followed him, walking at his side while he struggled toward the trees.

“Was your attack meant to instruct me, Colonel?” he asked.

I blinked, considering his question. “Maybe,” I said. “Benjamin Franklin used to say
that pain was highly instructive. Did you experience pain and panic, Marvin?”

“I did.”

“Well, I hope that you learned something from the ordeal. In any case, I’m taking
you off this project. I’m ending it. I don’t want you to do any more experiments on
sentient beings. Whatever you’ve developed—well, that’s as far as it’s going to go.
And you’re also forbidden to build flying structures for yourself. You know that.
Are we clear, Marvin?”

“Perfectly clear, sir. Crystal clear.”

I glanced at him. I couldn’t help but wonder what was going on inside that big, strange
brain of his. “Okay. Let’s reattach enough of your limbs to allow easier locomotion,
then you can show me what you’ve achieved. We’ll skip the messy description of how
you got to this point—just show me the most successful results.”

“Spoken like a true manager, Colonel.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. Were those bitter words? It was hard to tell with Marvin.
I didn’t know what to make of him today. Maybe he felt abused and underappreciated.
If that was the case, he’d just joined a very large club.

-25-

Kwon showed up on a flitter. He met me at the beach, and hailed me. Marvin pouted
and reassembled himself.

Kwon climbed down from the pilot’s chair and stared at Marvin. “What happened to your
robot?”

“He had a malfunction,” I said. “But he’s better now—I think.”

Kwon looked around the island with critical eyes. “This place is disgusting. I never
come here now. You want to see the new troops in action?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s see what Marvin has managed to do. We’ll go pick up Sandra
first though. Marvin, you stay here. I’ll send someone to pick you up in a few hours.
Load up all the serum you have that will work and shut down the rest.”

“Should I exterminate all the colonies, Colonel?”

I considered, and shook my head. Marvin had cannibalized members of one species to
breed another. It was grotesque, but in a way, he was just a type of farmer or animal-breeder.
I’m sure he looked at it that way. Did the relative intelligence of the species involved
raise it to the level of a moral outrage? I guess in my mind it did.

“No. Let them go if you have to, into the sea. Or let them live in their ponds with
your equipment supporting them. Just don’t expect to come back here for a long time.
I’m shutting down this lab of yours.”

Without another word, Marvin dragged himself down the beach. I called after him and
he stopped.

“Marvin,” I said. “I’ve got another more important task for you. I know you like tinkering
with biotics, but if we don’t break the code the Blues are using, we’re all going
to die in this star system. For now, that has to take precedence. Okay?”

“I hope that task won’t trigger any intense emotional responses,” he said. His tone
was as prim and precise as always, but I was sure he was feeling sorry for himself.

“It shouldn’t Marvin. I’ll send a ship for you in a few hours.”

We parted ways, and Kwon flew me low over the waves along the beach.

“You kicked his ass, didn’t you?” Kwon asked.

“Yeah.”

“Was it fun?”

I nodded. “It felt good at the time.”

Kwon chuckled and stopped the flitter. We hovered over the beach and the crashing
waves.

I looked back toward the forest in the center of the island. Had I screwed up? Was
Marvin going to be bitter, seeking revenge? In a way, that robot was a species of
one. An ally on my long list of allies, and possibly one of the most helpful ones.
He was also ghoulish and extremely annoying at times.

I noticed we’d stopped flying and were now circling above a single spot. I turned
to Kwon, who craned his big head over the side of the flitter and stared downward.
I leaned over my side, and saw Sandra down there in the water. She was nude, and swimming.
She looked up at us and gave us both the finger.

Kwon chuckled again. I slapped his shoulder and he landed the flitter on the beach.
When Sandra had some clothes on, she climbed into the back of the ship and we took
off again.

“Where are these super-Centaurs, Kwon?” I asked.

“They’re on another island. Marvin sort of took over this one, and as his experiments
grew stranger over the last week or so, we set up camp for the Centaur volunteers
just south of here.”

We flew to a second island, this one centered around a single conical mountain. It
looked as if it had once been an active volcano to me. We landed and before we even
touched down, I saw them.

Centaurs flew in formation over the waves. There were hundreds of them, moving in
organized companies. They were tightly-grouped, and rode on oval-shaped versions of
the flying skateboard systems I’d devised long ago when we first began assaulting
Macro cruisers with infantry.

“Wow,” Sandra said. “I’m impressed already. Look how close they are, and how they
fly. If they can take riding in a transport to battle, I think they might be able
to do this, Kyle.”

I nodded my head and stared. “What kind of kits did you give them?”

“Nothing special,” Kwon said. “Really, we just gave them the same basic system you
built for us long ago. The skateboards are longer, more like ovals now. That’s to
make up for having four legs. The change made them more stable in air or space.”

I glanced at him. “Space? Have they been tested in space?”

“Oh yeah. That’s why we called you. They’re not much use flying around down here.”

“They each have a laser, a vacuum suit and propulsion,” I said. “What about grenades?”

“Ah,” Kwon smiled. “That is where we made a little change. They each carry one grenade,
a nuke of course. But this one is different. We made it especially for the Centaurs.”

We climbed out of the flitter and Kwon showed me the new equipment. I frowned when
I saw it, but I could not doubt its effectiveness. Nor could I deny that it fit the
temperament of the troops that would wear it.

Sandra, however, saw it differently. “What is this?” she asked, handling the cylindrical
device with care.

Kwon stumped forward and tapped the red contact at the tip. “See here? When armed,
this nosecone-thingie will detonate if it makes a hard impact. Sort of like a dumb
bomb.”

“Why do we need dumb weaponry?”

Kwon held up a thick finger. “Ah-ha, good question. They are not dumb, you see, because
the Centaurs are their brains. And their delivery systems. The whole sled-device they
ride on can be viewed as a delivery system for this payload.”

Sandra stared at each of us in turn. “Are you telling me you’re putting bombs on these
troops, then ordering them to fly into enemy ships?”

“Exactly,” Kwon said.

“
No
,” I said. “That’s
not
what we’ll tell them. We’ll tell them how the systems work. Then they can decide
what they want to do with the weapons they have—when the time comes.”

Kwon lit up. “Very clever, Colonel. I like your idea better.”

Sandra looked troubled, I was frowning as well. Only Kwon seemed unperturbed by this
arrangement. We were giving a team of fanatics what amounted to suicide-vests, hoping
they would get a bright idea in combat and take out enemy ships. It was diabolical,
but I also suspected it would be highly effective.

“Kwon? How many of these Centaurs are we going to be able to get into the ships? How
many kits and altered troops do we have?”

“Give us a day or two, and we will stuff twenty thousand of them into your transports,
sir.”

Twenty thousand
, I thought. I didn’t know what to say. They were like our answer to the Macro missiles—intelligent
flying bombs. I felt both invigorated, as the odds of our winning the coming battles
had just risen dramatically, and sickened with the knowledge of the carnage we were
trying to release.

I watched the Centaurs train and drill for hours. They were good. Not as good as my
marines, but very good for raw recruits. They didn’t seem to fear their suits, flying,
nor even death. They flowed in streaming masses, riding their skateboards at top speed.
They occasionally collided with the waves or one another, and there were serious injuries.
But this didn’t stop the rest of them, it didn’t even slow them down.

I had no doubt after observing them that they would charge the enemy fleet without
any thought of their own personal survival. What more could a commander want?

“Sir,” Kwon said, hurrying up to me. “I have an urgent call from Captain Miklos.”

I had removed my helmet and walked out of the waves to work with the Centaurs. I’d
been watching the newly trained troops closely, shouting suggestions to their leaders,
both human and native. The plan was different than it had been when I’d used the Centaurs
as invasion troops to retake the habitable Eden worlds. At that time, I’d had one
marine lead every company of a hundred Centaurs. These troops were more organized,
and now I used veterans from within their own ranks to lead them. I made sure the
officers of each company had seen combat against the machines back on Eden-11. This
upset their system of chieftains and sub-leaders, but I didn’t care. Being good at
butting heads back home didn’t make you a space marine in my outfit.

I put my helmet back on and opened the command channel. Miklos sounded agitated.

“Sir? Colonel? Are you listening, sir?”

“Talk to me, Miklos.”

“The Macros, sir—more than hundred ships so far have come out of the far ring in the
Thor system. They are massing out there.”

I felt a cold, sick feeling. Another full fleet? So soon? What did the Macros have
on the far side of that ring? As always, not knowing what we truly faced was terrifying.
We’d destroyed a huge fleet only weeks ago, and yet they’d sent another, bigger one.
Was the entire war hopeless? Were we all fooling ourselves?

I pushed aside these defeatist thoughts and walked out of the sea toward the nearest
flitter. I figured I’d just run out of time for inspecting new troops.

“How long will it take the Macros to hit our battle station, if they move now?” I
asked.

“About two days, sir. They have no momentum. They’re moving cautiously, massing up
the entire fleet at the far ring before advancing.”

“What about traffic at the rings?”

“There’s plenty of it, sir. It’s spiked since the Macros arrived.”

I cursed quietly. The Blues seemed to be calling my bluff. Maybe my threats had backfired.
Maybe they’d called the Macros immediately when I’d talked big about bombing their
homeworld. It was also perfectly possible that they’d been coming all along, and my
words had had no effect on their plans. There was no way of knowing right now.

“All right,” I said, “keep watching them, Miklos. I’m flying back out to the fleet.
And I’m bringing reinforcements. I want every transport that isn’t full of marines
already to head to Eden-6. I have twenty thousand new volunteers ready to load up
and ship out.”

“Twenty thousand, sir?”

“That’s what I said. Riggs out.”

All the way back up to the fleet I felt sick inside. They were coming, and everything
I’d done to persuade the Blues to stop them had failed. Worse, it might have backfired.
I felt like a fool.

When I boarded my command ship, I was greeted by an armed and armored marine. The
fleet was on full alert now. The enemy was in sight of our longest ranged scanners,
this was no drill. I flashed my ID transmission to the marine guard and moved on to
the command deck. The holotank had only two staffers standing around it, staring.
The situation displayed showed only the Eden system, which was empty except for our
bustling little fleet of ships. Soon however, that would change.

I walked into the conference chamber, and was met by a dozen sets of anxious eyes.
Only Miklos looked bored. Jasmine immediately tapped up a multi-system display on
the conference table without having been asked. I smiled at the twisted lips Miklos
showed as she did this. Technically, it was his job as my exec to bring up the displays.