by Dean M. Cole
Teddy blasted another caterpillar and started searching the ground. “Manhole - shmanhole. Whatever! I’ll take anything.”
Raising eyebrows, Vaughn nodded.
“Uh … Problem, El Capitan. How we find shmanhole?” Teddy paused to fire another grenade and then released a frustrated growl. “There’s too much ash. I can’t even see pavement!”
“Shit!” Vaughn shouted as he cycled between scanning the ground beneath his feet and watching for incoming caterpillars. He swept the soles of his boots left and right, trying to clear space in the muddy ash as he desperately sought the circular outline of one of the access covers. “I’m having the same problem. Just do what I’m doing.”
Angela nodded. “Vaughn’s right. We have to get down there. Once the Necks are back through the wormhole, they’ll fire the light wave again. Then we are finished, especially if the BFG doesn’t come back online.”
BOb got involved in the exercise between grenade shots, dragging his dark gray foot across the ground.
Looking like a five-person formation of back-to-back Riverdancers, they began to rotate slowly, each one of them manically sweeping the soles of their boots through the ash and dust as if tap dancing to the beat of an Irish ballad.
They tried to shift the search to another portion of the pavement, but the caterpillars tightened the noose.
Vaughn swore under his breath. They hadn’t found a goddamn manhole … utility hole … whatever the fuck. Soon the enemy robots would be too close to engage with grenades.
He eyed the backpack slung across BOb’s back again. The heavy nuclear device jumped and lurched with each of the bot’s sporadic movements.
Gnashing his teeth, Vaughn looked away from the nuke and focused his ire on the next contender. The head of the offending caterpillar vanished under another shower of smoke and fractured metal.
The ring tightened another notch as the mechanical monsters inched closer.
Behind the circling horde, Vaughn could see a steady stream of additional caterpillar bots still emerging from the ground.
Regarding the backpack askance, Vaughn contemplated their rapidly diminishing options.
His choices were quickly distilling down to one.
“BOb! BFG status?”
“Still offline, Captain Asshole.”
Angela looked at Vaughn and gave a single nod. “Do what you have to.”
Bill nodded. “Fuck it. Do it.”
Behind him, Teddy’s head bobbed somberly. “Da, El Capitan. Nuke the bastards.”
Vaughn dispatched another caterpillar. This one had gotten almost within the minimum range of his grenade launcher. If the bot had been any closer, the round would not have spun enough times to arm its tiny warhead before striking its target. The thing would’ve just bounced off ineffectually.
Vaughn continued to grind his teeth. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”
Aiming at another of the caterpillars, he gestured to the battle operations bot. “BOb, take the nuke out of your backpack and set it behind you.”
The bot tossed its rifles into the air. Reaching back with both hands, BOb snatched the nuke from his backpack. He bent backward and placed the device on the pavement so fast it launched a spray of ash. Then the bot stood and plucked the pinwheeling assault rifles from the air and launched a fresh salvo at two caterpillars.
Vaughn dropped to a knee next to the bomb. “Cover my sector!”
Everyone shifted position.
Looking up, he received a nod from each of the team members.
Grenade explosions shook the ground beneath him.
Vaughn extended a trembling finger toward the keypad. He tried to press the zero key but inadvertently hit the asterisk. He blinked and yanked his finger away.
Apparently, that wasn’t the detonate now button.
Extending the trembling finger again, he finally pressed the correct key. Bracing his hand on the chassis of the device, he hit the enter key three times.
Then he depressed the zero key again.
He pressed the enter key.
Once.
Twice.
Vaughn swallowed.
Grenades exploded.
Then Angela was next to Vaughn, wrapping her arms around him. She placed her hand on top of his.
Steadied by her presence, he extended his finger. The tip of it caressed the enter key.
He felt Angela’s lips press against his ear. “I love you, Captain.”
Her hand tightened on his. “Now press the damned—”
“Wait!” Bill shouted.
Vaughn flinched. The movement almost caused his finger to press the key.
He yanked back his hand. “Wh-wh-why?!” He looked up at the major. “What—?”
Brilliant orange fire vanquished the night as a rapidly spreading line of explosions burned through the enemy formation, launching metallic chunks of twisted caterpillar bodies into the air.
Watching the pieces arc across the sky as if in slow motion, he blinked, unable to comprehend what was happening.
Bill and Teddy pointed into the sky, gesturing wildly at something behind Vaughn.
Then the growl of churning propellers rose above the fading explosions.
He turned and stared into the sky.
Narrowing his eyes, he spotted the distant silhouette of the onrushing tiltrotor aircraft.
Still small but closing quickly, the V-22 continued to dive straight at him.
Vaughn flinched as yellow fire strobed from the airplane’s belly cannon.
His eyes flew wide.
The white-hot stream of explosive rounds was going to drop right on their heads.
“Get down!”
Part V
“Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”
—H.L. Menkin, Prejudices: First Series
Chapter 48
Rourke watched the bullets he’d fired trace arcing lines across the screen of his gun camera control display. They raced toward the target, sweeping from left to right well ahead of the diving airplane.
“Everyone keep an eye out for those damned Taters,” Colonel Hennessy yelled from the cockpit. “If one of those things sees us before we see it, you might find yourself riding in the back of a pilotless airplane.”
As the man spoke, Rourke watched the rounds arc over the heads of Team Two.
He and the rest of Team One should have been down there with them. They would have, had they not somehow ended up on Mont Salève.
When they had first emerged back into reality, they’d found themselves standing in a small clearing, grass beneath their feet and trees surrounding them.
They’d had no idea where they were, and the jump seemed to have flummoxed Major Lee’s GPS. It couldn’t find itself, so it was of no use.
Then they had stumbled upon the Balcony of Geneva and realized that the emitter had deposited them close to the same spot specified for Angela’s practice jump.
They didn’t know whether it had been a glitch in the device or a mistake made by the robot …
Or a mistake made by Rourke.
He’d felt more than one accusatory glare cast his way.
Presently, white-hot fire erupted across the gun camera’s infrared display. Explosions danced through the far side of the scrambling formation of caterpillars.
“Still too high, Rourky!” Rachel shouted over the intercom. “I know you’re trying to be careful, but we gotta push them away from our people, not toward them!”
Rourke shook his head. “Dammit.”
The last thing he wanted to do was accidentally drop even one explosive-tipped round next to his friends—the damned things had a kill radius of five meters—but, she was right, that volley had only pushed the caterpillars closer to the other team, and the first one had been even worse.
Grimacing, Rourke reluctantly shifted the stabilized aiming reticle closer to Team Two. He had to fire over their heads, aiming at the inne
r circumference of the ring’s far side. He feared a round would fall short and drop in right on their heads, but if he hit the near side of the ring, the explosions would launch shrapnel and heavy chunks of metal machinery into his comrades.
In the infrared display, the humans stood out as four white-hot points at the center of the undulating ring of moving mechanical appendages. BOb darted back and forth between the team members, barely visible as a ghostly gray shadow that all but merged with the background.
Scarcely thirty meters separated them from the closest portion of the circling robots. On his display, the five of them sat just outside the thin, white, oblong ring that denoted the Fire Control Computer’s calculated blast-damage radius.
It was close.
Too damned close.
But Rourke knew it could’ve been much worse. If not for Major Lee’s quick reactions and her rapid combat start-up of the aircraft, they never would have made it there in time.
“Dry-fuck ‘em, Rourky!” Rachel yelled over the intercom. “No 10W-40 for these bastards.”
Pressing his lips paper-thin, he fired the gun and walked the crosshairs clockwise as another fifty-round burst barked from its muzzle.
“Give ‘em what for, mate!” Bingham said as he scrambled from the left portal to the right, scanning each window for approaching Taters.
Holding his breath, Rourke watched the bullets arc through the magnified, infrared image. The hot rounds shone like tiny light bulbs. They sailed through the display like a rapidly fired line of glowing baseballs, flying up from the bottom. As they neared the top of the image, they reached the zenith of their arc and, slowly curving downward, dropped into the target.
Explosions stitched a left-to-right line through the inner ring of the caterpillars. Blossoming like white flowers across the gun camera’s thermal image, heat plumes momentarily washed out portions of the display. The blasts hammered the machines, burning through those closest to the far side of Team Two and launching white-hot chunks of metal into the surrounding enemy formation.
Rourke pumped his fist. “Yes!”
Rachel leaned out from her pilot’s seat. “Hell, yeah! Get some!” Looking back, she shook a thumb up and down. “Great shooting, Rourky! Now slew it around to aim backward. We’re about to overfly the battle.”
Returning to her flight controls, she continued over the intercom system. “You’re up next, Monique! Cover our six. Rourky already hit the front side. Now both of you can hit the back half.”
Lieutenant Gheist looked at Rourke and winked. She adjusted her mic boom and turned the tailgunner pedestal to face fully aft. “You just fly the airplane, Major Lee. I understand what needs doing.”
Reaching the bottom of the attack dive, Rachel pulled back on the controls of the V-22. “Hold on tight, Chauncey-Baby!”
Rourke’s face sagged, and momentarily, his arms felt as if they weighed a hundred pounds each. In his peripheral vision, he saw Bingham’s knees buckle and almost drop him to the floor.
The aircraft heaved upward and then raced back into the sky.
As he slewed the gun to face aft, Rourke stared through the open ramp.
Inertia and propellers thrust the tiltrotor higher. The rectangular patch of Geneva visible through the opening quickly shrank, revealing the full breadth of the churning swarm of attacking robots in the blink of an eye.
Even unaided, Rourke could see the now jagged, ring-shaped outline of caterpillars appeared wider. They continued to circle the five members of Team Two, but his third volley had pushed back the enemy robots.
Monique’s tail-mounted automatic grenade cannon pedestal swiveled the last few degrees as she adjusted her aim. The outline of her head and closely shorn hair glowed faintly, haloed by the light streaming from the gun camera display.
Pulsing fire belched from her cannon. A steady stream of grenades coursed from its muzzle.
Explosive rounds hammered into the enemy formation.
The flashes strobed the night, illuminating the interior of the aircraft and cutting long, frenetic shadows across its cluttered ceiling. Each flicker froze time, forming a series of snapshots forever emblazoned upon Rourke’s psyche like a mental photo album of the apocalypse.
The belly cannon finished slewing aftward, finally pointing back at the circling robots.
Rourke placed the crosshairs on the left side of the formation and pressed the fire button.
Guttering yellow light flared within the belly cannon’s hellhole.
He again walked the targeting reticle clockwise, slowly sweeping it around Team Two.
Even though the aircraft’s speed was quickly carrying it away from the scene, the optics of the scope made it appear as if the tiltrotor was barely moving.
Again, white-hot explosions blossomed around the ringing formation of caterpillars. The widening flares quickly moved in a clockwise pattern, following the path of his aiming reticle.
Then a second group of more powerful detonations began to dance through the enemy machines, moving in the opposite direction, as had Rourke’s.
Monique had picked up on what he was laying down. She’d swept fire across the enemy machines in the same manner as had Rourke but in the opposite direction.
Between the two of them, they obliterated the inner ring of bots.
“Good shooting!” Colonel Hennessy called from the copilot seat. “Everyone keep an eye out for Taters. We’re going to swing it around and bring us back in, see if y’all cleared out enough space for us to land.”
Peering through the left portal, Chance Bingham craned his neck. Then he darted to the other side of the aircraft and looked out that window again. He toggled his mic. “Still don’t see the buggers.”
Rourke glanced forward and saw Rachel and Mark scanning the sky. They shook their heads. “Haven’t seen any up here either,” Colonel Hennessy announced over the intercom.
Rachel banked the aircraft hard left and then looked over her shoulder. “That doesn’t mean they’re not out here. Keep your head on a swivel, people.”
Nodding, Rourke thought back on what they’d witnessed from the Balcony. They had been scanning the city, looking for Team Two, but at first, they’d detected no movement.
None—not even the robots that they’d previously seen from the location.
Then a dust cloud had risen from behind the city builder construction site.
They’d zoomed in using their night-vision goggles and seen Team Two running out from behind the massive structure.
All hell had broken loose after that.
Caterpillar bots had swarmed from a shaft in front of the team just as hundreds of the horse-sized machines came pouring out of the dust behind them.
Major Lee had ordered them to the aircraft. By then, her GPS had started working again. She’d thrown the thing to Mark—who was weighed down by a nuclear-armed backpack—and then sprinted ahead.
By the time they reached the clearing, Rachel already had the tiltrotor blades spinning.
After strapping the nuke into a crate, Colonel Hennessy had joined her in the cockpit. Monique had strapped herself into the tailgunner pedestal. She’d helped program the autocannon for BOb and was the most familiar with its operation. Rourke had taken his assigned position controlling the belly cannon, and Wing Commander Bingham had agreed to act as their roving eyes, scanning each quadrant around the aircraft for Taters.
Presently, Rourke’s face sagged as the nose of the aircraft pitched up.
Major Lee’s voice broke over the intercom. “Transitioning to helicopter mode. Bingham! Be ready to fire out the left side. Help cover that quadrant.”
Grabbing a grenade launcher, Bingham moved to the indicated position. “I’m on it.” He jettisoned the window and aimed his weapon through the opening.
Suddenly, the man’s entire body spasmed. “Bloody hell! Watch out!” He pushed himself back from the window.
A tremendous crash rang out as something slammed into the left side of the airframe. A
portion of the fuselage in front of Bingham caved in, and the V-22 lurched sideways.
Hennessy’s voice exploded over the intercom. “What the hell was that?!”
Hanging from his harness and swinging like a pendulum, Bingham waved his arms wildly as he tried to get his feet back under him. “It looked like a bloody boulder.”
The aircraft had been slowing, but now Rourke felt it begin to accelerate again. Looking aft, he saw something flash by, passing just behind the V-22.
If Major Lee had not reacted so quickly, the object would’ve struck the aircraft.
“Something else just missed us!” Monique called out. “It passed directly behind the aircraft.”
Rachel looked back, eyes widening. “Was it a Tater?”
Monique shook her head. “I do not think so. It looked like a rock to me as well.”
“Anyone see where they’re coming from?” Colonel Hennessy shouted from the front.
No one had.
Panning the gun left and right, Rourke searched the battlefield. He saw a sole caterpillar bot in the center of a long street to the aircraft’s front left. The thing was holding a large boulder high over its head. The forward third of the robot heaved into the air. Then it and the rock slammed down, causing the rear half of the caterpillar to heave up. It folded over the robot’s back like a scorpion’s tail, but it didn’t stop there. The movement accelerated as the thing rolled up like an inverted doodlebug, its appendages protruding outward instead of in. Rolling like a wheel, the robot rapidly accelerated. Soon, it was speeding across the ground, racing toward the left side of the V-22.
Then the caterpillar seized and flung the boulder into the air.
Blinking, Rourke stared at it for a moment before he suddenly realized what was happening. Breaking his paralysis, he shouted, “Incoming!”
Rachel yanked the plane sideways.
Chance Bingham flew off his feet. “Oh, for fuck’s sake!” The man swung through a wide arc as the major snapped the aircraft level again.
She looked back. “What happened?”
