by B. V. Larson
The next few minutes were uncomfortable. Finally, the new orders came down.
“Good news, 3rd Unit,” Graves announced.
What got me was that the centurion sounded honest-to-God happy.
“We’re moving out, top speed,” he continued. “My unit has been awarded the honor of forging the way. Leeson, take point.”
That was it. Harris’ worst fears had been realized.
“You heard the man!” I shouted. “Saddle-up, this will be a full-speed run. We’re going to get this over with before darkness falls. With any luck, we’ll be sipping auto-heated stew in a tent within four hours!”
We began to run. For the first hour, things went relatively smoothly. The land was flat and empty. There were boulders now and then, but no one wrecked their dragon.
But then our luck changed. We ran into a broken region of badlands. There were gullies, pits and wind-carved rocks everywhere. By this time, everyone in the cohort had a channel tuned to the low-frequency bands the machines used for communication. Our computers filtered out all but the strongest, close-range contacts. If the big machines came near, we would be warned by their radioed whale-songs.
There weren’t any problems until we reached the midpoint of the badlands. In a particularly deep gully, we met up with a series of warbling contacts—a lot of them.
“Centurion Graves, we’ve got company dead ahead,” I reported in.
“Roger that, I can see the readouts. Advance your platoon, Leeson. Give me an accurate count on the wildlife. Then I’ll phone this in to Winslade to see what he wants to do. Remember to use only low-powered radio to talk, and hold your ground until told to do otherwise. Don’t bring an avalanche of enemy machines back home to the main column.”
Leeson ordered Harris to swing right and me to swing left. I had to wonder if Graves still hated me, or if his habit of picking Leeson, Harris and I to do his most hazardous missions was some kind of compliment. I figured it was probably a mixture of both, and possibly it had just become reflexive for him. Whatever the case, I found myself at the very front of the line yet again as we trotted our dragons between looming boulders, bubbling streams of methane and metallic-looking rocks with sharp edges.
We finally broke through to an area close enough and wide enough to see what we were facing. I was confused at first. The machines were all in one tight area.
“Looks like that mound of machines we found eating their wounded brother back on the lakeshore,” I said.
“Sure does,” Sargon said, coming close.
We were peering down into a churning pit of machines. There were about twenty of them, and they were roaming around and appeared to be feeding. I knew the look by this time. The machines would kind of hunker down and shiver a little when they found something good to eat.
“Hey,” Sargon said. “Look over there…is that what I think it is?”
I followed his dragon’s outstretched gripper. Peering in the gloomy light, I nodded at last. “Yeah, I think so. That’s a dead trooper.”
We’d found the Solstice infantry—or what was left of them. Looking back down into the open pit area, I began to figure out what I was seeing.
“We’re looking at the remains of the proud Legion Solstice,” I said grimly. “They must have made a last stand here in the badlands. Trapped in this little box canyon, they fought and lost. These machines are feeding on the armored suits of their dead.”
“Makes me sick,” Sargon said. “Permission to destroy these scavengers, vet?”
“Permission denied—for now. It’s not my call.”
Sargon looked at me. I could see his face lit up inside his faceplate by his instrumentation. He was enraged, and I didn’t blame him.
“Come on, McGill,” he said. “Since when did you play anything by the book? Let’s charge down there and smoke those machines. If we move fast, it will be over before anyone knows what’s going on. If the whole cohort shows up in the middle of the action, they’ll back us up without a question.”
“You could be right,” I said, “but I’m playing this one straight. Sorry Sargon. I have the feeling we’ll get the chance to blast plenty of machines apart before this campaign is over if it makes you feel any better.”
Sargon shook his head and glowered back down the slope at the gorging machines. “If you’re bucking for Adjunct already, forget it. They don’t often move an enlisted man up into the officers’ ranks.”
I knew he was emotional, and I didn’t blame him. It looked like we’d found a wiped legion. I couldn’t recall the last time Earth had lost one of the reputable legions like Solstice. Sure, we could revive them all if we got their data. That wasn’t the point. It was a defeat, a humiliation.
“Two thousand years ago, in Roman times,” I said, “the worst defeat ever suffered was in the forests of Germany. They lost three full legions on that doomed campaign. I feel now as if I can fathom some of the dismay the Romans must have felt at that loss.”
Sargon’s mood shifted. “Ha! Good one, McGill! Vicious, but funny.”
“Huh?”
“You know they named our legion Varus after the commander of those three legions Rome lost in Germany, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, the name was a joke, because we were meant to die over and over again,” he said bitterly. “But now here we are, looking down at the remains of the Golden Legion. Solstice died here, not us. The joke is on them this time! Sorry bastards. Maybe their name will mean ‘loser’ someday, too.”
Sargon wheeled around and left. I followed him. I made my report, and various officers came up to survey the mess.
All the while, I was thinking about Sargon’s bitter words. I knew we’d been named after Publius Quinctilius Varus, the unluckiest leader in the history of the Roman Empire, and I’d heard that we’d been given the name as some kind of a joke.
But I didn’t find it funny. It made me want to drag the hog generals out of their offices back home on Earth and put them into light-troop uniforms out here on the front line. We’d see who was laughing then.
Some of Sargon’s dark mood was sinking into my mind.
-19-
Quietly, on a private channel, I asked Natasha to send out a certain radio signal that we isolated and recorded earlier. She’d theorized that it was sort of a dinner bell, a call from one machine to all those in the area that rich metals were available at a given location.
It turned out that Natasha’s theories were correct.
I don’t think Leeson, Graves or Winslade himself ever quite figured out how our first major battle with the native machine life started. Oh sure, the officers might have had their private suspicions. But they couldn’t be sure.
Natasha, always faithful in these situations and equally accountable for the aftermath in any case, kept her pretty mouth shut.
There were about thirty of the big machines in the mountains around us. We’d only spotted about half that number, but the rest came running when we sounded the dinner bell.
“James!” Natasha called on our private channel as the machines rushed up rough mountainous walls, quivering and clattering for a grip on the terrain. “I’m getting a response to my message!”
“You sure are,” I said. “The machines are rolling in from all over.”
“No, I don’t mean that. Someone must be alive down there, underneath all the wreckage. They heard our signal and blipped back something in return.”
“Really? Excellent. You need to have a little more faith in me, girl.”
“I sent the damned message, didn’t I? If we live, you owe me a drink.”
“Done.”
That was all the time we had for chit-chat. What was lucky for us was the lack of coordination in the machine attack. They acted more like a swarm of starving sharks than an army. Rather than timing the assault so they all reached us at once, they came in successive waves.
“On my target!” I roared, hearing Harris echoing the same command. I lit up the near
est machine with a laser marker built into my dragon. “Right flank, center of mass. FIRE!”
We took the first seven or eight down without mishap. But then they were rolling over the ridges above us and falling on us. Some had circled around, hitting our flanks. Other combat units had formed on hillocks farther to the rear, but they didn’t have the same clear field of fire that I did. A few maniples were overrun and ground down by the sheer weight of the enemy machines.
Out of Graves’ unit, six dragons were down and being consumed. A dozen more were in too close to safely use their big guns. Force-blades were extended, and the grim work of dismantling the enemy piece by piece began.
What saved us in the end, I think, was the greed of the enemy machines. Rather than pressing the attack, those in the rear fell upon their mortally wounded comrades. The smoking wrecks of machines we’d blasted were sent sliding back down into the valley where they flipped over and exposed their damaged guts. This was simply too tempting to the last waves of machines. They pounced upon the fallen and feasted.
After five minutes, it was all over. The enemy machines had all been destroyed, had fallen back, or were busy cannibalizing their own.
Graves approached me, and we gazed down upon a scene of destruction.
“We won that one,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“I didn’t even see you fire the first shot to kick things off. How’d you manage it?”
“Manage what, Centurion?” I asked.
Graves shook his head disgustedly.
“By the way, sir,” I said. “We detected new message coming from under this mess of broken metal. We have confirmed it was transmitted by Legion Solstice survivors. They’re down there, Centurion. Permission to attempt a rescue?”
“Since when did you ask my permission to do anything, McGill?”
“There’s always a first time, sir.”
Graves looked over the scene. “The remaining machines are broken or busy. Funny how they’re ignoring us again.”
“They’re driven by hunger more than anything else. It’s my theory that the smaller ones might actually be more intelligent. They don’t have as much mass to keep fed so they can devote more processing time to higher pursuits.”
“I hate theories,” Graves said, “especially those hatched by noncoms.” He eyed my squad. “You’ve only lost one squad member, right? Harris lost four. You know what that means, McGill?”
“That I’m going down there to check for survivors personally, sir?”
“Exactly.”
“Can I take Natasha with me? We might need a good tech.”
“All right. But don’t get her killed this time.”
As Natasha hadn’t qualified to pilot a dragon, she was riding on the back of a drone. We rode our mounts down the steep, rocky slopes to the bottom and quickly reached the coordinates Natasha provided. At first, I didn’t see anything special about this spot. Then we found an entrance shrouded by a polymer shell.
I rapped on the shell. There was no response.
Natasha ran her drone close to my mount. She was trying to look everywhere at once. There were still at least ten of the big machines moving around, eating the guts out of their friends.
“Just blow a hole in it,” she said. “They might be too weak to respond.”
“If I do that, I might kill some of them. This atmosphere is toxic, and this might be their only pressurized refuge.”
“Well, do something fast. Our refined metal is the most delicious thing in this region. To the machines, we’re like walking chocolate bars.”
Chuckling at her imagery, I balled my fist and tapped an unmistakable pattern on the dome. TAP-tap-tap-tap-tap-TAP-TAP.
“What’s that?” Natasha asked. “Morse?”
“Nah. It’s what my grandpa used to call ‘shave and a haircut, two bits.’”
I repeated the sequence several times, and at last the polymer dome rolled open. Inside were worried looking troopers with guns lifted toward our faces. The woman in the lead was the Centurion of a light unit. She had a breastplate and rifle, but no full armor. Fortunately, her vac suit appeared to be in good condition, if a little dirty.
“Legion Varus,” I said.
The centurion waved us into her den. “Come on in, Varus,” she said. “Move fast.”
We rushed inside, and when the last dragon tail was tucked underground, the small dome rolled shut again.
“Don’t use radio,” the Centurion urged me.
“Don’t worry. We already tried that.”
“I’m surprised you survived.”
We demonstrated our spinal cannons. She looked them over appreciatively. “We don’t have much in the way of heavy weaponry. A few specialists with belchers that still operate, that’s it. Snap rifles don’t even get their attention.”
I nodded, thinking it over. Light troops would be hard pressed to damage this enemy. The machines were just too big and too tough.
“My apologies for taking so long to get here, sir,” I told the Centurion.
She looked at me for a second. “We didn’t honestly think anyone would come. I’m Centurion Belter.”
“Veteran McGill.” I introduced my specialists, Natasha and Sargon. We checked on the status of the surviving group. It was pretty good, all things considered. They had supplies and weapons. The injured had already died out, which made things simpler.
“Do you have a confirmation list?” Natasha asked.
Grim-faced, Centurion Belter touched her tapper to Natasha’s. “That’s it. We’ve lost a lot more however, I’m sure of it.”
“How many people do you have hiding down here?” I asked.
“There are a few other groups like this one. Altogether, I would say there’s more than a full cohort. Fortunately, the caverns are huge. We think smaller machines burrowed these tunnels years back.”
I whistled. Somewhere between eighty and ninety percent casualties. Solstice hadn’t been wiped, but it had been a damned close thing.
“We’ve been trying to tunnel our way out,” Belter explained. “That’s been the survival plan all along. The trouble is the ground is full of metals and hard to dig through. We managed to connect tunnels with some the other survivors in these caverns, but that’s all we could do.”
I thought about the surrounding cliffs of metallic ore. There wasn’t much chance the legionnaires could dig through the walls of the valley to safety. It was too far, and the earth was too dense.
“We killed most of the machines,” I said. “I suggest you get your people together and follow us out. Our dragons can kill these machines with focused fire.”
She shook her head. “It’s too late for that tonight,” she said. “Nightfall is coming soon. That’s when most of them show up.”
Staring at her for a few seconds, I blinked, then narrowed my eyes. “Are you saying the thirty-odd machines we encountered isn’t all of them?”
Centurion Belter laughed. “Thirty machines? No, that’s like low-tide around here. Tonight, there will be three hundred. Maybe more after the word gets out that there are freshly dead machine carcasses to feed on. You see, we’ve managed to make small breakout attacks before, but it’s always caused more machines to show up.”
“Uh…maybe we should get out of here right now.”
She checked her tapper. “Too late for that. In fact, you’d better warn the rest of your unit to come down here to hide. They’ll be all around us in these spikes, crawling in to feed at this spot. It’s like a watering hole for them—high grade ore walls and all. That’s why we’ve been trapped here, not daring to leave.”
Without jawing anymore about it, I retreated to the surface. Sure enough, I could see fresh machines coming in over the lips of the valley walls. Racing my dragon up to where Graves waited, I informed him personally.
“We’ve got to tell Winslade about this, sir,” I said.
“What the hell have you gotten us into now, McGill?”
“I didn’
t make these crazy machines, Centurion.”
“No, but you helped ring the dinner bell! Yes, I heard about that, never mind from who.” He sighed and tried to think. “All right,” he said after a moment. “I’m sending a courier now. Stand by.”
In the end, Winslade arrived to see the enemy massing all around us. There were twenty machines roaming the valley, gorging themselves on refined metals. I could tell from the look in his eye that he was worried. He was a hog, not a true fighting man. Death wasn’t a normal part of existence to his desk-flying kind.
“How many did Centurion Belter say were coming?” he asked me.
“Hundreds, sir.”
“We can’t rescue the Solstice troopers,” he said decisively. “We don’t have time, and we can’t outrun these machines if we’re babysitting troops.”
“Your orders, Primus?” Graves asked.
“Get ready to pull out,” Winslade replied.
We did as he ordered—but we didn’t make it. The machines had been gathering slowly and steadily, but as darkness fell over the badlands, they came on in a surge. They were all around us in the gullies and slithering over the hills, moving in from every direction toward our location. They were coming home to sleep, or feed, or mate, or whatever. It didn’t really matter. We were surrounded.
In the end, we had to race down into the valley and stash ourselves in the caverns. The machines gave chase, but after we blasted a few and closed the polymer domes, they gave up. To them, plastic was a strange, possibly nasty-tasting material. They avoided it, and we were left in peace.
Except that we were trapped underground, along with the survivors of Legion Solstice.
-20-
Winslade chanced a powerful transmission up into space the next morning when most of the machines had retreated. We’d hooked up a transceiver just outside of a tunnel mouth and blasted a high-powered compressed message up into space. The message reported our situation to Turov, who had left the surface and returned to her ships.
A fair-sized group of officers and noncoms had gathered in one of the central chambers. Overhead, the roof of the place glittered with nodules of ore and embedded crystals. We hadn’t really gathered for any formal purpose. Leaders tended to clump up together to plan and talk. We hadn’t known what else to do. For the most part, we were waiting on the word from above.
