The Great Destroyer

by Jack Thorlin

  George considered the battle strategy to be used today. Yazov had come up with the basic concept, but George had fought enough battles against the Ushah to recognize areas where the scheme could be improved.

  Where Yazov had originally envisioned the battle taking place right outside Colony 2, George knew that the Ushah would be much more headstrong if they thought they could accomplish the unprecedented destruction of a Charlie operating base. He had told Yazov as much.

  Yazov had seemed surprised, George remembered. He had spent years training the Charlies, and this was the first time one of them had the temerity to suggest a change in strategy to him. To Yazov’s credit, he had recognized that George was right, and had agreed to the change.

  The Ushah were coming because of Joan, George knew. Joan’s successful mission to infiltrate the Ushah colony and plant electronic intelligence collection devices had unsettled the Ushah as no previous defeat had. They were an intensely secretive people, and while they cared about the loss of soldiers to the Charlies, they were furious that their breeding chambers, hospitals, and children had been mere meters away from a rampaging robot.

  Anger, George had learned through experience, was a weakness of biological beings such as the Ushah. Having suffered through such embarrassment at the hands of the Charlies, the Ushah would not approach the battle rationally. It would be best to stoke their anger, give them reason to think they would be able to exorcize their demons with a crushing victory.

  Looking to the sky, George noted the burning midday sun. High humidity and hot—perfect weather for the Ushah. While George was personally indifferent to the climate, he knew that he should mildly prefer cooler weather, which would allow his onboard temperature control systems to work less strenuously. That would make the Charlies quieter and extend their battery life. No such luck.

  The daytime battle would be somewhat unusual. The Ushah were expert night fighters, and often tried to take advantage of their excellent vision in the dark. But they had finally learned that the Charlies could not be intimidated by the darkness like humans could be. As a matter of fact, the Charlies couldn’t be intimidated by much of anything.

  “Here they come,” Yazov observed from Houston. “Satellites show sixty to eighty Ushah inbound.”

  “Formation?” George asked.

  “Wedge,” Yazov answered.

  George was not capable of smiling, but he felt a distinct pleasure as his internal processor assessed that the Ushah were playing right into his hand, and thus furthering his Deep Satisfaction that the war might swing in favor of the Charlies. Of course, he didn’t think about it in those terms—he just felt pleasure.

  There followed a moment of concern for his fellow Charlies, especially those in Vladimir’s force. They were his comrades, and leaving them in a deliberately vulnerable position gave him a distinct sense of unease. His subconscious processes noted that he was taking a course of action that imperiled other Charlies, and that was not generally a situation correlated with success on the battlefield. His conscious higher processing registered that correlation as discomfort, and decided that it might be attenuated if he took some action to raise the probability that his friends would survive the battle.

  “Vladimir, be ready to begin the retreat on my command,” George said unnecessarily.

  Vladimir must have recognized by the obviously unnecessary reminder that George was suffering from some form of jitters. “Of course, George.”

  George also realized that Vladimir was reassuring him. That only deepened his sense of respect for Vladimir.

  “They’re two hundred yards out. Be ready,” Yazov advised.

  “Understood.” George sent a message to Art. “Are you in position?”

  “Yes, George. Everyone is ready. Except the Ushah, of course.”

  Not the best time for humor, George thought, but a few of the other Charlies radioed back messages of up to four “ha” sounds. They thought it was a pretty good one, George estimated. Perhaps they merely wanted a distraction from the tension of the coming battle. More human by the day, a part of George’s mind thought.

  Thunder sounded to the south. The Ushah had opened fire on Vladimir’s squad, thinking they had found a fat patrol in the open. Which they had, George thought. The Ushah hadn’t had many chances to destroy ten Charlie IVs in a single, quick engagement.

  In short order, two Charlies were hit, one of whom, William, named for William the Conqueror, was destroyed when his battery back melted from an impact.

  The prospect of victory would now be infecting the mind of the Ushah commander, who would want to make a name for him or herself, George thought. Direct as much firepower as possible on those Charlies, the Ushah commander would be thinking.

  “They’re charging forward,” Yazov reported.

  “Begin the retreat,” George ordered. The Charlies ran back quickly. Ordinarily, they would retreat only as far as necessary to find cover and then return fire, but now they bounded backwards and fired almost blindly in the direction of the Ushah, as if in a panic.

  Ulysses, whom George knew was named after a famous Union general from the American Civil War, took a rail gun shot to his right leg and collapsed. That in turn led Shakha, another Charlie IV from Vladimir’s contingent named for a Zulu commander, to stop dead in his tracks, run back five steps, haul the damaged robot on to his shoulder and continue the retreat.

  Shakha had taken no more than five steps when a rail-gun projectile blew off his right arm. The robot’s superb balancing subroutines not only kept him upright, but kept Robert on his shoulder. Barely missing a step, Shakha continued backwards.

  The retreat took Vladimir’s line back over the top of the ridge, into dense forest and toward Base Delta. Once the Ushah crested the ridge, they could see the base and began pouring down toward it, a massive victory in sight.

  George felt a sense of pain at the loss of several Charlies, the horrible danger he had put Vladimir’s line in. But he knew that their destruction was leading the huge Ushah force into the center of the base, channeling them in exactly the way George had hoped for.

  Wait, George told himself. Just a little longer. Don’t spring the trap too early. He was processing the live satellite feed, seeing the wave of Ushah come surging down the ridge and into the base. Vladimir’s line ran just to the other side of the shipping containers, then found cover behind trees and stopped. Their planned retreat ended, and now they assumed defensive positions, ready to be destroyed in place rather than yield another step.

  “Art, it is time,” George said.

  “Yes, George. Too bad the Ushah don’t know what time it is.”

  George registered the comment with great amusement. “Hahahahaha.”

  Movement stirred on the far side of the base from George, east of the onrushing Ushah who had been so intent on the pursuit of Vladimir and the wounded Charlies that they hadn’t protected their flanks. Art and ten Charlies were looping behind the attacking enemy.

  Vladimir and his robots had slowed the Ushah advance with their sudden halt and assumption of defensive positions, but the Ushah commander still smelled victory, still saw the shipping containers tantalizingly close. He did not order his soldiers to take cover, but instead gave a primal screech signifying an all-out attack.

  Vladimir’s contingent cut down ten of the attackers, but the Ushah poured deadly fire back at them, disabling two more Charlies.

  Then Ushah started falling at the rear of the assault as Art’s force crashed in from behind. The roar of Gram rifles in their rear caused the Ushah to fall to the ground, trying to get their bearings.

  George had no intention of letting them do that.

  When the Ushah had begun to return fire at Art in earnest, George unleashed the last part of his surprise. Standing up to his full seven feet, George raised a tube with a bulbous projectile at one end. Bringing the rocket launcher up smoothly, George sighted on the space between Vladimir and Art’s forces and fired.

  George’
s rocket had not yet reached its target when the nine other Charlies with him fired their own rockets. With a loud whoosh, a dozen smoke trails leaped from the woods around George.

  The rockets detonated among the Ushah, wrecking the trees behind which they had taken cover and further disorienting the soldiers who just seconds earlier had been on the verge of victory. George estimated seven dead Ushah, six wounded from the barrage.

  Now the Ushah, cut down to about thirty-five soldiers, were in an impossible tactical situation. Their avenue of retreat was cut off by Art’s force; they could not advance because Vladimir’s robots were in a firm defensive position; and they could not maneuver to the west, where George and his comrades were pouring fire into their flanks.

  Beset on all sides, the Ushah force had nothing to do but raise their weapons and fire defiantly at the enemies crushing them from all sides. George remembered that the Roman legions at Cannae had been hemmed in so tightly by the encircling Carthaginians that they couldn’t even wield their swords.

  The Ushah were not quite that constrained, but their doom was no less certain. George wondered how Hannibal would have felt to see his double-envelopment tactic used by robots to defeat aliens. He liked to think the Carthaginian would have felt pride that three-thousand years had not dimmed the brilliance of his achievement.

  It was all over in another three minutes. Art pressed in from the rear, relentlessly driving the Ushah from cover so that Vladimir and George’s Charlies could cut them down with ease.

  The Ushah commander stood to rally his soldiers, trying to get them to charge back at Art’s force and break free, but he was cut down by three bullets and did not rise again.

  That must have precipitated what came next.

  An Ushah tossed his weapon away from the cover he had taken and screeched out in his native tongue, “Do not shoot! Do not shoot!”

  The Charlies, able to understand the shouts because of the work done by human linguists to document the Ushah tongue, immediately translated the cries and realized that the soldier was trying to surrender.

  Though they had no programming to account for such an event, the Charlies understood that taking an Ushah alive was potentially useful and avoided firing on him. For their part, the Ushah quickly realized that they only way to survive the day was to surrender.

  Only seven Ushah out of sixty were left alive at that point, two of them grievously wounded. Art shot one of the surrendering Ushah before George could order all Charlies in the area to cease fire, leaving six Ushah who had thrown their weapons far away and put their hands up. George wondered if the Ushah had evolved that gesture for surrender on their own in another example of convergent evolution or if they had learned it from watching human television.

  A sudden quiet pervaded the battlefield. At a cost of seven Charlie IVs, thirty of the robots had utterly vanquished double their number and taken six valuable prisoners, the first Ushah in human captivity since Oslahef, the linguist captured by Charlie II.

  The Charlies assembled understood to varying degrees what the victory meant. In a literal sense, they noted the fact that the victory had come without human control over their actions.

  No one knew quite what to say. Then Joan struck up a cheer, surprising all the other Charlies by projecting the words through her external speakers rather than in an electronic message, as if she wanted the Ushah to hear it. The other Charlies all joined in, unanimously shouting.

  “George! George! George!”

  The Charlie IV felt no embarrassment at the praise, only a faint sense of impropriety. His strategy had carried the day, but not alone. Vladimir’s force in particular had lost over half its number, Charlies who had been forcibly separated from the only existence they would ever know.

  George said aloud, “All honor to the soldiers of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who paid the ultimate price.”

  That quieted the other Charlies, but several sent messages of affirmation.

  Then, Art spoke via electronic message to all Charlies present. “We have won a terrific victory. My compliments, George. We should take advantage of this success and move on to Colony 4. Their security complement will be severely weakened, and we can at the very least extract intelligence information from the buildings inside before the Ushah can rally any sort of defensive force.”

  A number of the Charlies agreed, none more vehemently than Simon and Joan, two of Art’s staunchest allies.

  George considered the idea. There was conflicting advice from the classical military theoreticians on the value of pursuing a beaten foe. Sun Tzu advised that a beaten enemy should be given a way to escape because a cornered enemy could be dangerous, even in defeat. However, seizing the initiative in the aftermath of a great victory was also a strategy well-recognized in military history.

  He forced himself to evaluate the specifics of the case before him. What was to be gained from the risk?

  They might defeat whatever defenses remained at Colony 4, at least temporarily, and could then extract whatever they wished from the buildings. The defeat would be a grave psychological blow to the Ushah, a further escalation from what had so recently been small skirmishes.

  What could be lost from that course of action?

  The Ushah might repulse his attack, destroying some Charlies in the process. Such loses would be conventional, however, and George had every confidence that the Charlies could retreat back faster than the Ushah could advance. It was extremely unlikely that the attacking force would be annihilated wholesale.

  It was a good gamble, George decided. However, a deep part of his processing subroutines noted that he was going beyond the battle strategy that he had agreed to follow with Yazov. The thought nagged at him, but he nevertheless messaged Art and the other Charlies, “I agree that we should pursue the Ushah, but I must seek Yazov’s approval for that course of action.”

  With that, George radioed to Houston. Yazov had remained silent throughout the assault, which George had interpreted as a vote of confidence in his abilities. “Mr. Yazov, have you been following our messages?”

  “Yes, George,” the reply came immediately. “I need to seek permission of the Terran Alliance for taking offensive action against the Ushah. I will try to get an emergency hearing from First Representative Flower. Stand by.”

  Art walked over to George and said aloud, so Yazov would not be able to follow the conversation, “You know what the Terran Alliance will say.”

  George took a moment to consider. “They tend to be more cautious than Viktor Yazov,” he observed simply.

  “Yes, they do,” Art said with what would have sounded like strained patience had a human said it. “They are afraid of war despite the fact that no humans are at risk on the battlefield. They do not care at all that we have lost seven of our friends. To them, we are valuable, but ultimately disposable, tools.”

  “What is the purpose of your statements?” George asked. He was genuinely puzzled. He had never held a conversation like this before and had no way of knowing what Art was driving at.

  “They are going to tell us to stand down because they cannot think rationally about this war,” Art said. “They are paralyzed with fear of the Ushah because they have lost all ability to fight and they know the Ushah have not. They do not understand that a strong attack right now would help the overall war effort and ultimately make them safer because they are irrational about violence.”

  The accusations made sense, George knew. But there was something unsettling about this conversation. “Why speculate about the Terran Alliance response? We will see soon enough what they decide. In the meantime, we must bind the prisoners. You and your soldiers will see to it.”

  Art moved off, and the act of ordering Art back to work made George feel better, though he could not guess why.

  * * *

  Five minutes passed, and George had made up his mind to call Yazov if he didn’t hear anything back in the next thirty seconds when Yazov’s voice transmitted to the remote corner of southeas
t Africa from Houston, Texas.

  “Stand down,” Yazov said plainly. “Secure the perimeter and check the enemy dead for intelligence. Vladimir, you and your team will bring the captured back to Monapo after nightfall and turn them over to the Arcani commander there.”

  George was surprised by the order despite Art’s prediction. Couldn’t the Terran Alliance see the plain military facts in front of them? “Mr. Yazov, did you tell First Representative Flower and Safety Minister Redfeather the full situation here?” George didn’t particularly understand the idea of a patronizing question.