All Hail Our Robot Conquerors!

by Seanan McGuire

  Beside the projection was the company banner on the wall, with the laser rifle crossed with an ornate golden staff topped by a golden lion’s head and the words beneath—Pro Aurum et Gloria. That was what it was all about. In Latin. Gold and Glory. For grunts like me, things hadn’t changed much since back then.

  From there I stepped outside into the summer heat and humidity where Bravo Company was forming up. Second squad was already there, lined up in fireteam order. I made a quick sight inspection of the squad, concentrating on the four newbies—Hernandez, Brown, Cornett, and Okafor.

  All four looked fit enough, but their eyes showed that they’d never gotten much more than the daily suburban mandated diet. We all volunteered because living the dole life wasn’t enough. Didn’t matter that I’d managed a degree in logistics management. I cost more than a logistics bot, and I couldn’t do massive and instant cost-effectiveness analyses.

  Three of them looked bored. Okafor didn’t. She couldn’t quite conceal an expression of disgust. She’d learn, but there just might be more than a mostly grown burb kid’s contempt behind those cold brown eyes.

  “Company! Tenn-Hutt!”

  Lieutenant Zynder appeared and inspected the three squads, starting with the squad leaders, first Herrara, then me, and then Solarin.

  After that, Captain Markus stepped forward. She was new to Seventh Battalion, posted from SouthWestCom, where holding the Great South Wall wasn’t any picnic. Jorge had told me that before his brains were curdled, but we’d all dealt with the Canucks, who were much more inventive in a nastily quiet way than the Dustbacks. “Because Seventh Battalion will be engaged in special operations sometime in the near future, there will be no off-base passes or leave until further notice. We’ll be receiving specific orders within twenty-four hours…”

  When she finished, she made it clear there weren’t going to be any additional details. “That’s all. Dismissed.”

  Before anyone in First Platoon could move, the lieutenant turned and fixed his eyes on Gino, the third squad leader. “I’ll need a word with you, Sergeant Solarin.”

  I stiffened. The last thing an NCO wanted was a word from an officer.

  I told the squad to meet in the squad bay. Then Herrara and I left, but I stopped just far enough away so that I could listen without seeming to, just outside the barracks door. Even that early, it was frigging hot out, but it’s hot all the time, even with solar screens in orbit.

  “Solarin. Your med stats say you need to stop leading from the point.”

  “Sir?”

  “You heard me, Sergeant.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The lieutenant’s voice softened a touch. “You need to let your fireteam leaders take some of the risk.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You can go.” Even from outside, I could hear the resignation in the lieutenant’s voice.

  I ambled away, but real slow, so that I could ease over to Gino when he made his way inside and back along the corridor. “Want to tell me what that was all about?”

  “Bonus pay,” he muttered.

  “Bonus pay? You’re thinking about that?”

  “That’s the only way I can get it. Almost saved up enough to put down a deposit on a conapt in Denver. Inside the suburban ring.”

  “You must have been saving everything since you joined up.”

  “Why the frig else would I be here? The grub isn’t that much better.”

  That told me that Gino hadn’t grown up as a real burb kid. Must have been a pro’s brat. One who hadn’t passed the aptitudes. “Conapt won’t do you any good if the Canucks fry you.”

  “Stow it, Corso.”

  At least he said it good-humoredly.

  “Stowed.” I managed a smile. I felt more like shaking my head. Bonus pay wasn’t much good if you couldn’t enjoy it.

  By the time I got to the squad bay, everyone was there.

  “Full gear inspection.”

  “Sarge…” began Menendez.

  “I know. We ran through that on Friday. But when the captain says we’re going to get orders, and doesn’t know more than that, the general’s got something really nasty in mind, especially after the flak we took on the last attack.”

  We didn’t get orders that Monday, or on Tuesday.

  Wednesday morning, the captain called in the platoon leaders. After that, the lieutenant gathered the squad leaders together.

  “We’ve got orders,” he announced. “Tomorrow we’re launching a full-out attack. Seventh Battalion will lead. Company A and Company B will mount a first-light assault on Point Larimer. Alpha will use skimmers over the deeper water to avoid the Canuck mini-mines. Bravo will use ultralights over the strait…”

  I managed not to wince. I hated ultralights, powered kites guided by preprogrammed disposable mini-bots and pushed by electric props. The nanotube frame of the ultralight looked like it would fold in a stiff breeze. It wouldn’t, but it would fragment into biodegradable shards if the ultralight got hit with a sonic bolt.

  “…Sergeant Corso…second squad will be in the center…target is the Canadian lidar remote station near the crest of the point…need to knock that out soonest…”

  The rest of what the lieutenant had to say wasn’t much different from what he always said, keeping the squad together and on target and mission and all the rest. At the end, though, he added, “No damned heroics. Just get it done.” His eyes were on Solarin when he said that.

  Herrara was stone-faced until we were well away. “What was all that shit about heroics?”

  “Probably something the captain fed him,” I said quickly. “Like that business on the interaction of sonics and pulse beams last month.”

  “As if it we didn’t know that already,” added Gino.

  “Lieutenants have to take shit, too,” I said. “Just different shit.”

  Gino didn’t say a word.

  Thursday morning came too soon. At dawn, the battalion suited up and marched through the tunnels to the underground staging bays. ACUs don’t look that much different from duty fatigues. I couldn’t even feel the nanostrands that linked into the personal transponder, let alone the transponder or the communit in my helmet.

  As the leader of fireteam one, Wallis was the first in second squad to pick her ultralight and pulse rifle from the armory tech. I wasn’t the last, but close to it. Never liked carrying the compression pak they came in—not along with a thirty pound pack and the pulse rifle—but any grunt could lug that for the few hundred yards to the launch ramps. Even the newbies weren’t breathing hard when we assembled behind ramps whiskey seven and eight.

  “Fireteams one and three,” I ordered, “ramp seven. Two and four take eight. I’ll follow one.”

  Company B. Fifteen to launch. That order came through the direct comlink, but once we were airborne, I’d lose the link. Pulse beams scramble more than brains.

  “Fifteen to launch. Set-up and activate.” I looked to Wallis, then to Jamal.

  Wallis positioned her pak, then released the seals and stepped back. Jamal did the same. It’s still weird to see an ultralight unfold and snap into basic configuration, everything locked in position except for the wings, and all of it a sort of olive drab, because that doesn’t show up as well on lidar. You can get hurt if you stand too close. But even the newbies managed it without getting mangled, although Cornett had to jump back when she triggered the releases.

  I’d just gotten my ultralight in position when the next comlink hit me. Ten to launch. I repeated the command and checked to see that everyone was ready.

  The time between prep and launch drags. Seemed like an hour before I got the next command. Company B, commence launch. Commence launch this time.

  My acknowledgement was even shorter. Second squad commencing launch.

  Launch is easy enough. Just slide the ultralight’s skids into the track grooves at the top of the launch ramp, insert the pulse rifle into the swivel holder, slip into the body harness, lie on your chest and gut
looking forward, drop down the helmet windscreen, and let the ramp and ultralight do the rest. The sheet of nanosilk that supports and holds your body looks like it would shred in a high wind, but it’s rated at one ton—unless you spend more than a few seconds in the focus of a Canuck disruptor beam, and then all bets are off.

  The ramp’s steep and the tracks seem frictionless. You get spit out of the launch portal at more than flight speed, with the rear electroprops whirring and the wing unfurling, and there’s this little jolt when the wing stiffens and you get lift. Then the ultralight stabilizes, and you’re headed north across that dark grayish blue water. It looked cold, but I knew it wasn’t. Never has been. Not in my life, anyway.

  Once I was clear of the ramps, I looked ahead. The sky was clear. It always is, except for the flitterbots and their wide-angle cams. High Command doesn’t mount attacks when there’s not real-time full-coverage. Cost/loss ratio gets skewed worse than in the Great Meltdown, and no one today has the resources they had then, in troops, equipment, or reserves. At least we’re not fighting Jihadists with IEDs, the way they were. Even the ayatollahs play by the rules of war these days, those few who are left. Costs are too high to go back to the old ways, not that there’s much besides black glass to fight over in the old Middle East.

  The Canucks might know about where we’d be attacking, but the general wasn’t about to give away anything he didn’t have to—either to the Canucks or the frigging newsharks. I never did buy the crap about how necessary the newsharks were. Far as I’m concerned, they’re zombies feeding on the brains of us grunts who never had many choices, except which was the least rotten way to get off the dole.

  I scanned the visual overlays. The squad was holding position, a vee formation composed of smaller vees that were the four fireteams, Wallis leading on the left and Jamal on the right. I was between their teams, back of their last ultralight. Two and four were behind and flanking me. Up ahead, just short of the midpoint of the strait, I could see the wavering silver rain—that’s what it looked like on the overlays—that represented the Canuck seeker beams. They’d turn red when they changed to pulse shots, or electric blue for sonics. I always wondered what Napoleon and Wellington, or Rommel and Patton—or their poor NCOs—would have thought about having real-time battle positions…and in color.

  We were a third of the way across the water when I picked up the dark blue blips of our skimmers, well behind us, hugging the water and angling from the southeast toward the point, aiming north of our planned attack. We were headed over and then behind their shore emplacements, not that their barbed wire and fang bars were anywhere as good as our walls and moats, but that was because the Canadians didn’t use fixed emplacements the way we did.

  Out of nowhere a sonic beam angled under us and toward the skimmers. So far the Canuck lidar hadn’t picked us up, but it wouldn’t be long.

  Overriding the ultralight’s guidance was discouraged, but I could see that the curtain of Canadian pulse beams was leaving a clear area maybe two yards wide running from about a yard above the water to maybe three yards up, and that was the only area where the squad wasn’t going to get shredded…or worse.

  So I overrode the system parameters, just enough to let the guidance drop us nearly as low as the skimmers, right around three yards above the water. Good thing that there was only a bit of chop there, not like the way it was in late November, or in late summer when there were sometimes waterspouts. I remember reading about aerial dogfights in the past century, but ultralights were so close to unstable that any violent move was likely to crash them, and that meant losing the ultralight and the trooper for nothing.

  We were aiming for a grass and rock patch at the top of the ridge that crowned that part of the point, the only sizable clear spot on the point. Below that, the terrain was a mix of pines, scrub oak, small gullies or washes, and rugged enough to offer good cover to the defenders.

  The last part of the flight was a bitch because we had to fly low enough so that the water vapor and heat return fuzzed the ability of the Canucks to target us easily, and then we had to angle up over them, trusting that the guidance systems would get us upslope and through the scattered trees without taking too many hits.

  Brown was the first to go down, right offshore.

  Then the Canuck beams and pulses swung north for a moment.

  I couldn’t help grinning. The chaff-like decoys were good enough that most of the rest of us were past the Canucks and heading up to the ridge top. Once we cleared the shore defenses, the bushes and trees were almost as much a problem for the Canadians as for us. At least until we had to land.

  Wallis almost pancaked her ultralight, but came out standing and had her team moving to the rocks that flanked and ran behind the Canuck lidar remote in less than two minutes, while I was still struggling against a cross-wind that seemed to have come up from nowhere. I didn’t pancake. I had a wingtip dip and caught the uneven ground. Then I cartwheeled sideways. The ultralight’s frame crumpled, like it was supposed to, and I came out in one piece. I’d have bruises. Helps when you’re not that heavy and compact.

  I moved fast—right toward fireteam one. “Team two. On me! Three…south of the lidar remote.” Even while I was speaking, my eyes kept trying to tell me that there was something different about that remote. Instead of just the twin beam projectors, there were three larger protrusions above the projectors on the turret—it wasn’t just a lidar station. Then it hit me. “One! Three! Attack the remote from the rear! Only from the rear! That’s a new pulse-beamer!”

  Before my words were out, the turret swiveled to the side, and a trooper’s figure was outlined in energy, instantly, before turning black. E-pulse grenades rained down around the Canuck emplacement. Instantly, the turret froze, and my read-outs told me that it was dead. So was Cornett. She’d moved too far forward too fast in trying to get a perfect bead on the turret controller.

  A quick check showed my four fireteams were on the ground and moving into position. There weren’t any functioning Canucks within a hundred yards of us, not that I could detect, and that wasn’t good. I kept looking and checking, knowing something would be popping up somewhere.

  Then, midway between me and the dead turret, an energy flow built.

  “Fireteam Two! Five to your left! Beamer coming up!”

  “Behind you, Sarge!”

  I dropped and spun as a tunnel popped open, then waited for just an instant, sighting in on the impermite of the underside of the levered door, using that as a reflector to bank a pulse from my rifle down inside the bunker, then followed it with a grenade…and a second moments later.

  “Peres! Scan the tunnel.”

  “Scanning. Anyone there is dead or fried.”

  “Take over the tunnel. Restrain any prisoners.”

  “On our way.”

  That was good. If the Canucks decided to bombard us, we’d have a shielded position, but I couldn’t see them chewing everything up this early. They’d lose a hell of a lot for what it would take, not to mention the energy costs.

  Farther down the slope, Burford had his team behind a deadfall, and they were scything down a Canuck squad that had been concentrating on the incoming skimmers. A flitterbot swept overhead, too high for a pulsebeam, but that would have been a waste of charges. I thought about it, though. Hated being caught like a bug in vid-view, no matter how much I heard it was necessary.

  I couldn’t do anything about that. So I concentrated on the situation on the ridge.

  There was another lidar beamer turret a hundred yards north. I couldn’t see it, but intermittently the beams and pulses showed up on my systems. If Gino’s squad didn’t take out the turret, the Canucks would have a protected area they could use to retake the ridgetop. And if they did…

  I didn’t want to think about that.

  Almost half an hour passed before the north beamer went down. Gino and his squad finally got it. By then, Canucks were scuttling north along the shore, caught between the Alpha Com
pany skimmers and Bravo Company firing down on them.

  Three hours later, we’d flushed out the last of the defenders, and by sundown, the Canadians had withdrawn to positions well away from the base of the slope at the northwest end of the point. We had the point, but we had to hold it, and they’d stepped up the pulse beam fire against the skimmers, trying to bring reinforcements. There had been three Canucks in the tunnel who survived the frying. For the moment, they were fully restrained, but they were still out cold. One looked like he was a zombie, but maybe he’d get some higher brain function back. I almost felt sorry for him.

  All that likely meant a Canadian attack at first light. In the meantime, we gathered all the wrecked ultralights into a neat row right above the Canadian lidar/pulse beam remote. If we could hold for a few days and solidify our position, then we could consider calling for resupply, and the supply flitters could take what was left of the ultralights back for rework. That would get us some bonus pay without heroics. Better that way.

  Once it got really dark, dark enough that the flitterbots and their wide-angle cams couldn’t pick up anything, I checked the squad and was about to go looking for Gino when the lieutenant showed up. His battle fatigues were shiny in a lot of spots, and that meant he’d been grazed or gotten real close to pulse beams.

  Only thing worse than being a grunt was being a platoon leader. They got paid three times what I did, but they also got fried more than anyone. Thing was that once officers made major, those who didn’t get killed or fried, it got real cushy, because no one coming up from the field ever got promoted higher than major, maybe a light colonel once in a truly cool day. The brass…well, the less said the better.