The Catalyst

-Chapter 3-


We designed and built eight effective assault ships over the next two days. Essentially, we ordered the Nanos in the skin of each of my hovertanks to reconfigure themselves yet again. All of my surviving hovertanks were set up as drill-tanks—which was a good thing, as I expected they would have to have the ability to drill into enemy hulls and breach them. I realigned the propulsion systems to exert force primarily from the rear of each craft, but with smaller repellers directed forward and to the sides. These smaller propulsion units would serve as brakes and attitude jets for navigation.
Gorski quickly became my sidekick in the reconfiguration effort. He had taken a fair number of programming courses while studying engineering in college, and had worked as a software developer for a few years. It was always good when coding something brand new to have another mind to bounce ideas against, so I welcomed the help.
“What I find so interesting,” Gorski told me in the hold of the ship, leaning with both hands against our prototype’s skin. “Is this hull isn’t a solid surface at all. It’s really a teeming mass of nanos.”
I shrugged and smiled. He had the fever. I’d seen it before in my better programming students. He was inventing new realities with his mind, and that freedom and creative power could be intoxicating. Software had been described as ‘building castles in the air’. There was a feeling of elation that came to programmers when things were working and really coming together. Programming was very different from mathematics, as it was far more creative. In math, there was one right answer, and you worked at a problem until you got to that answer. In programming, there were an infinite number of answers that could be considered correct, just as there might be when writing a book. But the results of programming, unlike a written story, were tangible. Your program had to actually do something. If you wanted your program to make an image of a spaceship fly across the screen, but instead the spaceship just sat there, you had clearly failed. There was no partial credit.
The measurable outcomes made things more difficult, but the positive side was that there might be a million ways to get that spaceship off the ground, and if you could figure out just one of those ways, you were a winner. When your code worked the way you planned for it to work, you felt like a god in your own tiny universe.
This feeling of creative power and fulfillment was magnified when something you designed became physical, as it did with the building of nano-systems. These assault-ships were engrossing problems. Gorski and I reshaped them with our hands to make the front of the craft thicker, more heavily armored. The metal remembered the shapes we pressed it into and stayed there. We angled the material in the nose so it could deflect incoming fire. We could have built the ships with a grossly bloated shape to hold more marines, but that would have made them more vulnerable to enemy weapons. Instead, we went with a sleeker design. The craft would be small, fast and maneuverable.
Instead of having the powerful drilling lasers in the nose, we put them in the aft portion of the ships. I didn’t want the lasers damaged upon impact, or shot out by incoming fire and disabled. When the assault ships reached the target, they would deploy their drills from protective sheaths and burn their way into the enemy hull.
Gorski and I worked in a fever. We were able to fluidly create anything our imaginations could come up with. In the end, when our creations stood up and moved—well, it was exhilarating. We carefully reviewed the design and made finishing touches together. We felt certain we had done the best we could with the knowledge we had. The only problem was it was impossible to come up with the perfect design without better intel on what we would be facing.
“I got the feeling after talking to the Macros for a while that they really didn’t know what we were going up against,” I said.
“Maybe they’ve attacked this star system before, and gotten their butts kicked,” Gorski suggested.
“Maybe. What I did get out of them is the stations are in fixed orbits, so our relative velocities shouldn’t be too huge. I got the feeling that they weren’t too well-armed, either.”
“I hope they aren’t,” Gorski said. “I don’t see how this small force could do much if they are strongly defended.”
“I’m sure the Macros have taken that into account,” I lied smoothly. I reflected that I’d gotten better at lying to my subordinates to keep their morale up. Internally, I figured the odds were good this was an insane suicide mission. After all, hadn’t they thrown their own ships at Earth at times, heedless of our defenses? The only time they’d hesitated was when they had their massed fleets. Then, they’d known the penalty for failure would be high, and they’d blinked. That was the weak moment that had allowed me to negotiate the peace agreement between Earth and the machines.
Pushing negative thoughts out of my head, I found I still didn’t like some of the assumptions we had to make while building these assault ships. I’d tried to get as much out of the Macros as I could over the last day or so during a number of short sessions with Macro Command. I’d asked about the exact count of the enemy targets, the size, relative velocity and armament. I hadn’t gotten much. There would be somewhere around ten to one hundred target space stations. There may, or may not be enemy ships defending them. The stations may or may not have defensive weaponry. It was hopeless.
We went back to work fine tuning the propulsion systems. They were critical elements. If they didn’t have enough power we might take days to reach the enemy target and be sitting ducks in space. Or, we might be going too fast relative to our target at the moment of launch and be unable to brake down to a reasonable speed before running into the enemy.
We struggled with the problem of predicting relative velocities. What would we do if we had to slow down to invade an enemy structure, not speed up? In space, if a ship was flying toward an enemy station and you wanted to dock with it—or in this case, invade it—you had to slow down your approach at the end, rather than continuing to accelerate. When they fired us out of this invasion ship, we would already be moving at the same speed as the ship that had launched us, just like an object tossed out of a car window on a highway. If the attacking ship was moving toward the target at say, 50,000 knots, then an assault ship launched from it was going to hit a stationary target at 50,000 knots, even without using its engines at all. At that point, our ships would effectively be missiles, not an invasion force. Missiles with soft payloads of dead marines.
If we encountered this situation, the assault ships would have to brake hard, using their engines to slow down to a speed that would allow a safe landing on the surface of the target.
“In the worst case,” Gorski said as we reviewed our latest design, “I figure we could turn the main repellers around a hundred and eighty degrees and use the main unit for braking if necessary.”
“Maybe we should make a single large propulsion unit, and make it mobile,” I said. “We could forget about all the smaller repellers, and use only one unit for maximum power. That way, we could direct it at any angle and get maximum thrust for braking once we are in close.”
Gorski sucked in air between his teeth, making a hissing sound. He did that a lot, and it was irritating, but I didn’t complain. Most programmers were irritating people, and I included myself in that category. You had to ignore minor oddball habits to get good work out of your dev team. I once knew a guy who had to snap himself with rubber bands to work effectively. Snap, snap, snap. No one wanted to work near his cubicle, but if you let him snap himself until his skin was red, he would produce code that worked every time.
“How about three propulsion units?” Gorski negotiated at last when he was done sucking his teeth. “One big one for thrust, then two smaller ones that rotate around the center for directional control.”
“Why not just one?”
He shook his head. “Because it will take too long to reposition. If they need to avoid an incoming missile or make fine adjustments when making their final approach, a single large unit couldn’t realign fast enough.”
I nodded and agreed with his plan. We would go with three repellers for the assault ships. Once we had the design set, we set our surviving factories to build the needed components. If we had time after the first eight were perfect, we would build more. Next, we gave the nanite hulls their shaping instructions. It was like molding clay. I ran my gloves over the hulls, shaping it and guiding it into the shape I wanted. It was easier to do it that way than to explain to some dull-witted brainbox what you wanted in English. Once you had the nanite walls shaped, you could just tell them to remember the shape and they could reconfigure into that form perfectly. Smart metal was a wonderful thing.
I climbed inside the first assault ship. It was sleek, and I felt a certain sense of pride in the design. Gorski felt it too, and followed me into the interior. The ship was designed with two rows of seats facing one another. Nanite arms were all I needed for harnesses. With a single, shaped-metal chair for the pilot up front and the big laser, the generator and the engine in back, the shuttle was straightforward in purpose and design. All it needed was a pilot and a platoon of marines in the seats, and we were in business.
“Push that wall out, and smooth every surface with a gentle curve,” I told him.
“To provide structural integrity?” he asked.
I shook my head. “If we take a hard hit in one of these things, the men are all dead anyway, but I don’t want them smashing into hard edges if the ride gets bumpy. Even if everything goes perfectly, they are likely to slam their helmets into these walls when they impact with the target. Let’s not give them anything to injure themselves on.”
There was a central rib that pressed into the hull like a belt around the entire ship. This was the track the directional repeller would move along. I took time with my gloved hands to guide the nanites over it, covering it with glittering particles. I felt like a sculptor. I supposed, in a way, that’s what I was.
When we were finally satisfied with the design, we only had room for twenty marines in each ship. That meant a total force of one hundred and sixty marines in eight assault ships. It sounded like an absurdly small force, but I had to remind myself these were not the only men I had going out there. In fact, these few might be the lucky ones. Most of my troops would not be this well-protected. They would be going solo in a cloud behind these assault ships.
The second day we spent designing the solo capsules. They amounted to a bullet-shaped cocoon of nanites wrapped around each marine. A flat disk under each man’s feet was a repeller, his only means of propulsion. Gorski and I designed these in less than an hour and set the factories to churning out the only elements we needed more of: the disk-shaped mini-repellers and a tiny brainbox for each to control it.
Gorski and I eyed one another. I saw the guilt in his eyes. I felt it too.
“These are death-traps,” he said quietly.
“I know, Captain,” I said.
He blinked at me. “Captain? I was a sergeant two days ago, Colonel. And I believe you might have skipped over first lieutenant.”
“Yeah,” I said, running my hands over the interior of the capsule, looking for rough edges to smooth out. “But anyone who effectively helps me with design gets rank in my outfit. Besides, remember what I said? You’ve survived a day or two and now you’ve got your promotion.”
Gorski chuckled. “Do you remember what I said? These assault ships and even these capsules could work very effectively against the two Macro ships we’re now sitting in the middle of.”
“You’re right,” I said, “but so was what I said before. If it was just us, I would go for it today. But this isn’t about just us. I’ve made mistakes before. Remember China? I didn’t even attack the Macros that time. I just nosed around and pissed them off. I’m not keen to get millions more innocents killed.”
Gorski nodded. “I understand, sir. We are expendable. We will do or die.”
“We will do both,” I said, correcting him.
Quietly, we smoothed and shaped our tiny, flying dishes. I hesitated, and then I ordered our factories to churn out sixteen hundred of them.
I’d been working hard for hours, at that point. One annoying thing about a helmet was the fact that it kept you from touching your face. Abominable itching was something all my men had to endure for hours from time to time. As soon as I got through the airlock, I removed my helmet. The interior of every brick was pressurized. I breathed deeply of slightly fresher air and gave my head a good scratching.
I got to thinking about a suit redesign. We had vacc suits, and they had done fairly well on Helios. But they were far from ideal. They weren’t really made for combat in pure vacuum, nor for weightless maneuvering. I envisioned many problems and deaths with our current designs. We’d come up with suit improvements before the Helios campaign, but I’d put our efforts into preparation for that world’s heavy gravity, such as the lighter combat kits I’d issued. I’d never really gotten around to improving each marine’s basic survival suit.
The problem with combat in space was that any hit tended to be fatal to the victim. Even if you had a suit-puncture over a limb, it was hard to isolate that portion of the marine’s body without the injured man freezing and suffocating. The nanites helped a lot, as they were able to act like a smart metal, automatically sealing up the breach. But the first thing that happened was depressurization. So, even before the nanites could act, the marine had no air in his suit and none in his lungs. The freezing void would suck it all out. We’d taught our people to release all the air from their lungs in such a case—you could last a little longer that way. If you held your breath, you were asking for a rupture.
I found these conditions unacceptable. A small puncture could take out one of my men effectively. Even if it didn’t kill him, it would at least incapacitate him. I soon found myself working on a new suit, a battle suit. There were a lot less of my people left now, and I knew the environment we would be facing. I figured the least I could do was give them the best equipment possible for the job.
Hours went by. I came up with an armored design. A battle suit that was heavy, and required some exoskeletal help from the nanites to move under normal gravity. Naturally, as my marines were anything but average men, they could perform even without this power-assist, but I gave them everything I could. The helmet was hard polymers, as was the chest and limb covering pieces. These harder, thicker surfaces made the suit heavy, but that didn’t matter much in space with nanotized troops. Light hits from shrapnel and the like couldn’t penetrate the new battle suit.
I decided to have each man be responsible for transferring the existing HUD unit inside his current headpiece into the new suits. That way, I didn’t have to duplicate all that delicate electronics. The power packs and weapons systems remained similarly untouched. I was focused on the skin of the suit and how it reacted to damage.
I built the suit in regions, with separate compartments for your limbs, torso and head. There were seals that felt like pinching elastic at each of the critical junctures. With some fast acting sensors, I was able to build the suit so it would clamp down on any region that was compromised. For example, if a marine was hit in the leg, in a split-second the suit would close that section off so the rest of the suit didn’t lose pressure. When the nanites managed to repair the breach, the region could be repressurized.
When it was done, I tested it myself first. The inside of the suit was stiff and somewhat uncomfortable. It smelled harshly of plastic and artificial materials. I was certain that in all history, no fighter had ever enjoyed donning his armor. Still, if it saved your life, you learned to love it.
My first test consisted of detonating a grenade while my chest piece rested on it. This was not as easy to do as it sounds. I lay there, on top of the grenade, for sometime before finally lighting it off. I was reminded of being a kid on the high dive for the first time, looking down at cold blue water. Theoretically, I should survive this—but I wasn’t completely sure. I finally took the plunge and the world bucked beneath me, throwing me against the ceiling. I bounced from there and drifted back down.
Afterward, I check the suit carefully. There was an impressive blast mark and some pitted spots in the chest region, but it had worked. I couldn’t think of a way to test the regional cut-off clamps without doing myself significant harm, so I figured real combat would prove or disprove my theories in that direction. I ordered several factories to churn these out. We should have a good number of them before we went into battle again.
I took out another grenade from the ammo box and rolled it around in my gauntleted fingers, testing my manual dexterity. The suit made my hands move stiffly, there was no question of that. But I thought that a bridge officer could still work a screen with these gauntlets on. Again, it wasn’t preferable, but it was workable.
I headed back to my quarters, exhausted. Sandra appeared to be asleep, so I slipped quietly into bed with her. I sighed and stretched out happily, more than ready for the last sleep I expected to get before things got crazy.
Sandra surprised me, however. She woke up and came after me with sudden determination. Maybe it was the nearness of combat. The love-making was intense, desperate and almost painful. The ending for both of us was more of a tension-release than a blissful pleasure.
Still, like most guys, I was happy to take what I could get.