by B. V. Larson
“I’m talking about these machines, Kyle. What if we had kids, and they went out to play on this beach, and those things were tracking them all the time. Staring at them. Would you be cool with that?”
I blinked and tried to follow her logic. I had trouble. “You don’t like them because—because they might threaten kids we don’t have yet?”
She walked off a dozen steps, shielding her eyes from the blazing sun. She pointed up at the one that was closer. I took the opportunity to admire her figure. I almost missed what she said next.
“There it goes. See? It just noticed my movement. It’s looking over here. I’m about a mile away, and it’s still tracking me and thinking about burning me.”
“They don’t shoot harmless people, Sandra.”
“Well, you had better make damned sure they know what they’re doing. What if I ran up and kissed you, would they freak out?”
“Let’s experiment,” I said, stepping back a few paces. I braced myself for impact. “Okay, get up some speed and make it look real.”
She twisted her lips, not falling for it. “How about if a kid ran around aiming a stick at them?”
I appeared to consider the idea. Mostly, I wondered how I could get out of this conversation unscathed. I had been hoping to get a little reward for letting her lure me out onto the beach hours earlier than I had intended. Instead, I was being interrogated on hypotheticals.
“They are more interested in real weapons,” I told her. “Anything that emits dangerous radiation or projectiles. They won’t trigger on something simple, like throwing a rock on them.”
“You could blow them up then,” she said, looking down the beach. “I think I should try it. What if I just walked up to the base and left a bag of plastique there and walked away. I could blast it apart. You could have commandos walk up to each one, unarmed, seemingly innocent. I wonder if the other side will ever figure that one out.”
I frowned. “I hate to say it, but you might be right. I’m going to have to work on that angle.”
Sandra bounced over to me excitedly. “Are you going to actually blow one up? I want to do it.”
I snorted. “You really hate them, don’t you?”
She finally started kissing on me. I think she liked the fact that she had managed to come up with a worry I hadn’t thought of. I responded to her touch as I was genetically predisposed to do. Sometimes, when we made out like this, I wondered if this relationship really would explode in my face at the end of two years. I mentally counted the months I supposedly had left. They didn’t seem adequate. Maybe the relationship-calculus didn’t apply to college professors who had moved on to bigger things. It was a hope, anyway.
“Hold your arm up,” she commanded.
I smiled indulgently and did so. I held my arm out stiffly at shoulder-level, parallel to the beach. She climbed up there and perched on my arm like some kind of happy, sexy bird. I walked along the beach while we both smiled. Holding her up was easy for me as she didn’t weigh much over a hundred pounds, but I had to lean in the other direction to keep from tipping over.
“I need another girl on the other side to balance me out,” I said, my mouth being faster than my brain at times.
She tweaked my ear viciously.
“That hurts my feelings,” I said.
Sandra hopped down from my arm, ran into the waves and splashed me as I chased her. We ended up making love out there in the ocean. I kept checking the beach for prying eyes, but didn’t see anyone.
Only the beam turrets watched us with silent, alien interest.
-22-
We sent General Kerr back to the mainland six months after his failed invasion. Truthfully, he had become kind of a pain by then. I really didn’t want him snooping around, looking at everything we were doing. Publicly, he was our prisoner. Privately, he operated as a liaison. But I suspected he was more of a spy than anything else. Crow came up with the release idea. Kerr had to go undercover to go back home, of course. The public believed he was the architect of a coup. He was a spook now, and I don’t think he liked it.
“You know what’s worse than dying for your country, Riggs?” he asked me the night before he shipped out.
“What?”
“Living on as a ruined man, having sacrificed everything, and then witnessing firsthand how little everyone cares.”
I eyed him. He seemed sincere. I fell silent and looked around the base.
We’d named it by now, and I pressed for a new tradition: we would name places after our fallen. So, the base was now Fort Pierre. Sure, to deserve the name we should have filled it with red velvet settees. We were fresh out of them, however. We had to make do with corrugated steel, concrete and conical beam-turrets.
Fort Pierre had doubled in size over recent months. We had more troops, supplies and buildings than ever. I’d set up weighing stations recently as well. I’d learned that a fully-equipped and operational fireteam of four marines weighed in at just over a single metric ton. Of course, most of the material we’d be loading onto the Macro ship in six more months wouldn’t be the troops themselves. Each troop needed to eat, for example.
In the sky overhead, a black chopper slid over the treetops. It had come in from the sea. Some kind of ship out there past our borders had sent it in. There were no landing lights on the chopper. It was dark and quieter than a normal bird. I supposed that no one back home wanted to advertise who they were picking up tonight.
“Well,” I said to Kerr, “if you ever need a new home, we are still recruiting.”
Kerr looked at me in surprise. “Really?”
I nodded.
“In what capacity?”
“Everyone here starts fresh. Latrines don’t dig themselves, sir.”
He huffed. “Thanks for the offer,” he said, then as the quiet chopper landed, he climbed inside and buzzed away into the night sky.
“Good riddance,” Major Barrera said from behind me.
I turned and nodded to him. “He’s finally gone. Have you finished the loyalty checks?”
Barrera nodded. He stood with his hands behind his back. I’d made him my Security Chief. He was paranoid and thorough. I could not recall ever having seen him give more than the slightest smile. He was perfect for the job.
“Now that Kerr is gone,” he said, “there’s no one on this base I don’t trust…. Within reason, that is.”
“Make the call,” I told him. “Roll in the tanks.”
People had seen them before, naturally. Every man on the island knew we had a ground force. But very few knew how many I’d built. I’d been hiding them until Kerr left.
An hour later, as the column arrived, I thought to myself I might have overdone it. Sixty hovertanks glided into the base, and another sixty remained in secret reserve at strong points around the island. Barrera played traffic cop, directing them to slide underneath a dozen camouflaged structures around the base. The militaries of the world had been busy putting up new satellites to replace the ones the Macros had knocked down, but they had less than a tenth their previous number. Still, I didn’t want any of them to get lucky and get a clear count of our numbers.
The hovertanks were built to serve two purposes. First, they would aid in any defense of the island. The beam turrets were powerful and symbolic, but vulnerable. If NATO or someone else got a wild idea for a new sneak attack, they might very well knock out my static defensive line. The tanks were my backup, they were my inner line of defense. They could stop any invasion by themselves, I felt sure.
Their second purpose involved the Macros. Many of these sleek tanks would be going with us when the Macros came back, demanding their cargo. After seeing their effectiveness when combined with my ground troops, I’d decided they would be indispensible to any campaign on a distant world.
Crow came out to complain while the column continued to rumble out of the forest.
“You went nuts, Kyle. I thought that was our deal, that you wouldn’t do anything crazy.”
“You promised me a new fleet, Kyle. What the hell are we going to do with all these tanks?” he demanded.
I turned to Crow. Barrera watched the two of us quietly. He was quiet for an officer, and that alone made me want to promote him.
The three of us stood in the middle of camp, far from the barracks and other buildings. We watched as the tanks lined up neatly under their netted camouflage. I knew that infrared systems from satellites overhead would show their engines, but I hoped they wouldn’t quite know yet what they were looking at. The tanks gleamed and the sands beneath them rippled and flattened as they passed over. They left tracks of a sort; it looked as if a giant beach ball had rolled over the land.
“You screwed me, didn’t you?” Crow asked. “This is your way of doing it, of removing me from power. You aren’t going to build me any ships. You command the ground forces, and—”
“I wish I’d thought of that, sir,” I told Crow, smiling. “Send in the prototype, Major Barrera.”
“Yes sir,” he said, and he spoke into his com-link. We’d gotten better at building communications systems now, too. His was a button on his collar. He ran his finger over it, and spoke into it quietly.
Crow looked at me in disbelief. “You mean?”
I nodded.
He spun around, looking up into the sky. A portion of it darkened, blotting out a slice of the starry night. Silently, something loomed over us.
“It’s big,” he said, his voice hushed. He looked like the kid who’d finally gotten that damned pony he could never shut up about.
“It’s all yours,” I said.
He looked at me with big eyes. “What’s it like?”
“Just like Snapper, sir,” I said. “But it has no system software out of our control. Also, it doesn’t have an arm yet. And there is only one gun and one engine. No duplication equipment on board, either.”
“Why not?”
“The reactor is too small to support it, and we wanted to build it fast.”
“But it’s big,” he said, his eyes glittering.
“Yes sir, approximately fifty percent more displacement than the original Nano design.”
“What the hell is taking up all that space?”
“Mostly air, sir,” I explained.
He stared at me as if I was mad. “Just tell me one thing, Riggs.”
“What’s that, sir?”
“How do I get inside?”
“Tell the pilot to land it, Barrera,” I said.
Barrera ran a finger over the extra button on his collar. He spoke quietly to it. Soon, the great ship came slowly down to rest in the open area in the middle of the base. We’d been using it as a picnic area, but originally, it had been there to fill landing pods with marines. Now, it would begin to see use again as a landing zone. Without arms, these newer, lighter, scarier-looking ships would have to land to pick people up.
“She’s a beauty, Riggs,” said Crow in a hushed voice. “What’s she called?”
“Whatever you want to name her, Jack.”
“I think I’ll call her Digger in your honor, mate!”
I smiled and nodded—but I wasn’t sure that I felt honored.
-23-
After finishing Crow’s ship, I immediately began building another. This one was mine. I thought about naming her Alamo, but that seemed wrong somehow. It would reduce my acute emotions toward that ship. She had left me, and like a treacherous ex-wife, I still hated and loved her at the same time.
In the end, I decided to name the new ship Socorro. In 1964, Socorro, New Mexico had been the location of a famous UFO sighting. Until the 1970s, the incident and location was more famous than Roswell. I also liked the sound of Socorro because it was the name of a southwestern city, like Alamo.
The Socorro UFO sighting was historically very compelling to me now with the virtue of hindsight. The eyewitness was a policeman, and had described the ship he’d seen as “a shiny type object ... oval in shape. It was smooth—no windows or doors.” There had been many explanations offered by the government over the years, but after recent events, I felt fairly certain the cop had seen a Nano ship. I felt sorry for him, and I lamented all the years of jokes he’d probably had to endure afterward.
I’d asked General Kerr repeatedly about UFO histories and what the government might have known before the invasion. He never told me anything useful. He provided me only with vague hints, talking about how the topic was ‘above his pay grade’ and was ‘best left to the future historians’. I didn’t buy his ignorance; in fact I was sure he’d been briefed. I figured the current administration didn’t want to talk about what the government might have known and when. They didn’t want the blame for any of this, so they had clammed up.
To me, the Nano ships were repositories of alien secrets. Stored within the factories and their creations, the ships had countless advanced technologies. These marvels were right here in our hands, but in many ways they were still unfathomable. I’d figured out enough of the alien tech to use their systems, but I didn’t really understand them. I knew no more than how to make them operate. I was a user, not a developer. I was like a mathematician who did calculus on a computer—but who could not even add or subtract without it.
When I first boarded the Socorro a rush of nostalgia overwhelmed me. Not all of the memories were good. I thought about my kids, feeling their loss more intensely than I had for months. A ship just like this one had ended my family without a qualm—without an emotion of any kind.
The ship was cool inside, despite the blazing tropical sun outside. The light was very dim in comparison to the outside as well, and it took long seconds for my eyes to adjust to the softly radiant walls. I had no personal equipment inside her yet. She was barren, sterile and quiet. Her brainbox was raw—untrained. She’d been made to match the control systems of the Alamo, but without the deep systems programming the Blues had originally given their ships. She was like an unlocked device, a fully configurable technological toy—a freshly installed operating system.
“Ship, this is your commander. Respond.”
“Responding. How do you wish to address us?”
At those words, a chill went through me. The Alamo had asked exactly the same thing long ago when I’d named her. Even more disturbing, the voice was absolutely identical in cadence and pronunciation to Alamo.
For some reason, I saw my daughter’s terror-stricken, dead eyes. I had to close my own. I tried to erase the image from my mind, tried to push that memory back into the little box where I kept it.
“Ship, I name you Socorro.”
“Rename complete.”
Although Socorro was armed, she was not a twin to Crow’s ship, Digger. I’d built her to be much faster. I hoped she would be a ship of discovery, rather than war. The hope wasn’t a strong one, however. She was armed with a single turret, and she was built with the body-shape of a horseshoe crab, as the rest of the fleet would be. I did not want her to stand out in physical appearance in case I had to take her into battle. But Socorro had three engines rather than one, and a second reactor to keep the extra two engines fed with power.
I had smiled while watching each piece of her roll out of the factories. I’d worked long and hard to build her. Knowing I had many ships to construct, I’d first built a set of a team of vehicles that distinctly resembled my hovertanks. They glided between the great factories, working night and day, helping my nanotized men. These robotic workers were based upon the design of the hovertanks, but with huge, whip-like arms sprouting from their backs where the others had beam turrets. These were my newest creations, and they greatly eased the process of feeding supplies into the maws of my factories. They were critical in the extraction and assembly of finished components as well.
“Socorro,” I said aloud, “I have some instructions for you….”
It took the better part of a day to get things organized. Most of the programming I read out loud t
o the ship. I had typed it in and now kept it stored on a tablet computer. I figured that with new ships being constructed every day now, I would need to have a script for new pilots to follow. I smiled just thinking about that. I realized I had written a program to teach humans to teach their ships. A script for writing scripts.
Hours later, I had the doors working at a touch, I had entry and exit codes set and emergency behaviors set. I managed to get the forward wall of the bridge crawling with metallic beetles, each representing a nearby marine, vehicle or building. I even had a working toilet.
I ordered the ship to lift off and I got my first shock. The ship lurched and knocked me off my feet. The sudden, upward motion was very jarring. I felt like I was in a box and a giant had just picked me up to look inside. I picked myself up off the floor and wondered why the motion had been so abrupt. Was it the group of three engines?
“Socorro,” I said aloud. “Why was that lift-off so sudden?”
“Lift-off was within normal behavioral parameters.”
“I’ve piloted ships like this before. That did not feel the same to me.”
“Specify.”
“I felt more G-forces than I felt aboard the Alamo.”
Hesitation. “No ships with the designation Alamo can be found locally. Attempting long-range contact—”
“Hold!” I said. “Do not attempt any ship-to-ship communications without my authorization.”
“Communications disabled. Permissions set.”
I sat and sweated for a second. I didn’t want this ship to contact the others—if that were even possible. I could only imagine what networking problems I might have. What if contacting the other Nano ships would automatically transfer some of their data ship-to-ship? What if my ship started updating itself, and soon thereafter decided to join the rest of her sisters on a mission in some remote star system?
My ships, I realized over the following cold seconds, had to be kept isolated from other Nano ships. I had no idea what kind of ideas they might get from one another, like viruses in email attachments or worms coming in through an insecure network port.
