by B. V. Larson
“Let me try, sir. If this is another trap, then they will have to show themselves. They can’t shoot down my shells if they hide underground.”
I considered the suggestion, and found it reasonable. We still had thirty nuclear-tipped shells in stock. We could afford to use a few on the dome. If nothing else, we could study the effects.
“Very well, fire at will. But only use one special shell in the barrage.”
“Yes sir.”
Within a minute, klaxons wailed. Men all around me hurried for cover. They knew we were far enough out to avoid a burn, and our goggles should save our eyes. But after having seen too many mushroom clouds lately they’d become cautious.
The first salvo arced into the sky. Too high, I was thinking. But the enemy did not come to life and cut them down. The salvo rained down upon the dome and tiny, popping spots appeared all over it, causing it to shimmer and shift color. Another heartbeat passed, and I wondered if the final shell, the special one, hadn’t gone off.
Then the flash came. A rolling boom of thunder shook the landscape. The mushroom cloud was relatively small, but it was big enough. When the livid flaming light had died down sufficiently I searched the area of impact with my binoculars, anxious to see the effects.
The dome still functioned. I was impressed, and raised my eyebrows. You had to give these aliens their due. They could take a beating.
I noticed, however, that the dome had changed in character. It now flickered and flared. It was a burnt orange in color. I lowered my binoculars and contacted the artillery commander.
“Fire again. Two more nukes this time.”
“We can’t fire two, sir, the first will cannibalize the second.”
“What?”
“Only one will go off because the one that hits first will destroy the other as it comes in.”
“Then lead with one, and fire the second right in there at the end of the salvo.”
There was a moment of hesitation. I could hear the commander speaking in Russian to his men. “I think we can manage that, Colonel.”
“Well then do it!” I shouted. “The damned dome is turning white again. And be ready with a third round in case the first two don’t quite do the trick.”
“Sir, do we really want to unleash that many—”
“Yes, damn you, we do. Now fire. That’s an order.”
“Yes sir,” said the artillery commander. He didn’t sound upset. I suspected he’d been yelled at by his superior officers before.
The second bomb had the same effect the first one had. But the third one did the trick. There was no need for a fourth. I had been ready to fire up to half my supply of weapons to finish that dome from a distance. I had no doubt the Macros had prepared something down there for us, something particularly nasty. But we never got the chance to find out what it was.
I lowered my binoculars and smiled at the flaming, smoky hole we’d dug into the farmland. This region might still be blasted a century from now, but at least the machines wouldn’t be ruling it.
After our success on two of the three domes, our army rejoiced. There was a lot of unreleased tension bubbling in my men. They’d expected a grim, horrid surprise. In the end, when the second dome fell more easily than the first had, they were jubilant. I ordered a case of champagne to be sent to the Russian officer’s encampment. They sent back an invitation to join them.
I’d only met the Russian commander at briefings. I recalled his first name was Dmitri. This entire campaign had swept us up and given us no time for pleasantries. We’d had only days to prepare on the Falklands, and I didn’t really know most of the men I was marching with. Perhaps, I thought, I should get to know them. We could take the time now before pressing onward to assault the third and final dome.
Thoughtful, I walked across the crunching gravel of an old roadway. Evening fell over the land, and the stars began popping out in the skies. The lurid red glare of residual fires turned the sky a hazy orange. It would have been pretty, if I hadn’t known the light came from a million burning trees in the distance.
I considered apologizing for my harsh attitude when I met Dmitri, but then decided against it. I would be friendly, but not apologetic. My decisions, so far, had usually been the right ones.
I never made it to the Russian officer’s camp, however. It was the Alamo that stopped me, dead in my tracks.
Incoming contacts.
I turned on one heel and ran back toward my headquarters unit. I didn’t have my rifle or reactor with me. I’d let my guard down. We all had. I would have cursed, but I didn’t have time. I sped up, running with inhuman speed. But it wasn’t fast enough.
How many contacts? I asked my ship.
Over five hundred... six hundred. More every second.
Shit, I thought to the Alamo reflexively. Naturally, the ship didn’t respond. There was no need to.
-37-
First Sergeant Kwon met me at the door to my mobile headquarters unit, which amounted to little more than a fancy trailer with a lot of parabolic dishes on the roof.
“What’s wrong, sir?”
I pushed past him. “Sound a general alarm.”
Kwon obeyed wordlessly.
I laid both hands on the com system and keyed into the command channel. I relayed to all my commanders that a major attack was incoming, talking fast. I hoped I didn’t sound as nervous as I felt. All along, all of us had expected a large Macro counterattack. But they’d done practically nothing since their first failed charge. They’d let us take down two domes. Perhaps they’d been waiting for this moment.
How long before they reach us? I asked my ship.
Two minutes.
I blinked. How had they gotten so close? From what direction?
From every direction, replied the ship with aggravating calm. We are encircled. The circle is closing rapidly.
“This is it, men,” I shouted, thumbing my com system to the general channel so it hit every helmet in the camp. “The Macros are making their big counterattack. They are throwing everything they have at us. Prepare to fight in close quarters. Don’t bother to reunite with your units. Seek cover. Engage and destroy any enemy on sight.”
This time, there would be no nuking of the enemy at a safe distance. I’d always known that if they got in close to us, in sufficient numbers, we would be in trouble. It looked like this was that dreaded moment.
Alamo, why didn’t you detect them further out? I demanded. I felt betrayed by my own ship.
They appear not to be operating their shields.
What? You mean you can only detect them with their shields on?
The electromagnetic emanations from operating shield systems transmit an easily identifiable signal.
So, they are coming in silent and dark? They have no shields? I liked the sound of that. They would be much easier to destroy. Weapons systems like our tanks could do real damage with conventional shells.
Electromagnetic emanations are spiking. Readings indicate enemy shields are coming up now.
“Fire at anything you can see, now!” I roared over the broadcast channel. Every troop with a headset on heard my order. For a few seconds, nothing happened. Then sporadic fire erupted. This quickly grew into a storm. The quiet night outside transformed into a din of explosions and stabbing beams of light. I suspected many of the troops were firing at shadows, but I figured it was worth it. If we could damage the Macros before they were on us, before their shields were up—maybe we had a chance.
Kwon and I helped each other strap on gear. We’d become lax, I chided myself. We’d trusted to our sensory systems. I, in particular, had been lulled by our victories.
“Dammit,” I growled.
Kwon kept adjusting straps and tugging at zippers without comment. We put our hoods on last.
Before we could get out of the command trailer, however, someone kicked it over. At least, that’s what it felt like. The floor heaved up and became the wall, then the ceiling, and then the wall again. I was f
alling around in a quick, sliding cycle. I crashed into furniture and fixtures and was dumped helplessly onto a pile of bodies. I felt the weight of my reactor unit crushing bones beneath me. Staffers gasped in shock. We rolled three and a half revolutions downhill, and by the time we stopped rolling everything in the trailer was broken and dark.
Most of the command staff were regulars. They had no nanites to harden their bodies or repair them after injury. All but one looked dead by the time we stopped rolling. Men and women with broken necks and soft, impaled bodies were strewn over the overturned furniture. I wanted to check them all for signs of life, but there simply wasn’t time. We had been overrun by the Macros and I had to get into the fight. Kwon kicked out a window and I fell out of the trailer after him.
A Macro—one of the big ones—stood over us. It was working its sixteen flashing belly-turrets, belching out gouts of energy a thousand times a second. We answered the fire with our two rifles. It took the turrets a second to seek and lock on us, and we burned those that tried before they could fire.
You could get into a rhythm with the machines, if you were good. The trick was to notice which turrets were seeking new targets. If they weren’t firing, that meant they were dangerous, because they might lock onto you next. Inside their tiny, independent minds, when they sought new targets, they always followed the same pattern. First they swiveled this way and that, sweeping the area. When they locked on something, they would splatter down fire until the target was classified as destroyed. Then they went back into seek mode again. If you put your beam on a seeking turret before it locked onto you, you could destroy it before it had time to lock and fire back. Then others would come and seek you, and you had to spot them and destroy them before they locked on. The system wasn’t perfect, however. If two or more turrets locked on you at once, you were toast.
By the time Kwon and I got into the fight, many of the men in the area were just that—toast. They had been burned down to ash. The regulars did their valiant best. They fired their pathetic one-shot rockets up at the monster overhead. But nine times out of ten, in their panic, they missed. Even if they didn’t miss, there were plenty more seeking turrets up there, swiveling in sudden jerks like darting, reptilian creatures. With terrifying speed, they locked on each new target and burned it down.
The dying troops did serve a useful purpose. They gave the turrets something to do while Kwon and I methodically popped them all. Then we took down a leg, concentrating our fire. The thing got smart, right at the end, and singled us out. It tried to stomp us down. We dove and dodged and kept on beaming the second joint up on the offending leg. We stayed low, crouched or on our knees, so we could dance away from the next flailing limb it threw in our direction.
When we had almost brought it down, I looked up and realized that if it had the brains to simply collapse and fall on us, it would kill at least two soldiers. But it didn’t seem to have thought of that. Instead, it fought on grimly to the bitter end. Kwon did the honors, boring into its CPU and burning out the circuitry.
All around us hundreds of similar battles raged. Some of the machines arrived late, limping in. I figured from the look of them they had been hit by shells and their rush had been slowed. Smaller worker-types were intermixed with the big ones, outnumbering them two to one. Every variety of worker was represented. Some had weapons mounted, the harvesters used their claws, diggers came up under us with deadly drills spinning. There were even a few of the technician types with their delicate, flashing tools.
They all died, and we died with them. In the end, however, we had more troops and better tactics. It was as simple as that. We didn’t win because we pulled a trick of our own, not this time. We won with superior numbers. All the fighting and the loss of their factories had sapped the enemy’s strength. They had been unable to replace their losses. In desperation they had mounted this final, all-out assault. It was do or die for them, and this time they were the ones doing the dying. Like a man who fights to the death with an opponent who has thirty more pounds of muscle, bravado only went so far. They were taken down and slain, one by one.
By morning, there were no more moving machines. We had lost nearly a third of our number as well. I pulled my forces together and we counted noses. We’d lost thousands, right there in the fields of some long-dead rancher. There was hardly a blade of grass or even a chunk of earth that wasn’t smoldering, but we held a memorial service and did our best to bury our dead.
It was about ten am when the sky lit up one final time. It took us some minutes to verify it, but I suspected the truth from the moment that it happened. The enemy had blown up their last dome on Earth.
Why did they do it? Maybe they were sophisticated enough to have some form of pride or shame. Maybe they didn’t want to take any chances with their technology, and once they had clearly lost their programming told them to self-destruct. I really don’t know, and it didn’t matter much. What mattered was that the invasion was over. They had thrown everything they had at us in a last ditch attack and failed. The Macros had been defeated.
I sat down on a crusty spot of ground that had been melted into glass by laser fire. I stared out toward the distant, expanding mushroom cloud as it rolled skyward, just as so many others had on this ravaged corner of my planet. I hoped the enemy never managed to get past our defenses and land another invasion force on our world. If they did, I feverishly hoped they wouldn’t manage to get more ships through the next time they came at us.
-38-
Everything was quiet for a few days. I went back to Andros riding in my ship. I picked up Sandra when I got there and we quickly became reacquainted. Afterward, I had the Alamo fly us to a remote spot on the western shores of the island. I sat on a beach with Sandra. The sunset was the color of blood and the jungle was dark and dank behind us. Every night now, the skies turned red. They told me it was because of all the dust in the atmosphere. So far, none of our Geiger counters had gone off, so we were still able to walk the beaches of this wild island in light, tropical clothing.
Sandra was at her best on a beach, I decided. She was lovely and more deeply tanned than when I’d first met her. A natural hazard of living down here, I suspected. I liked the look.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
“Liar,” she teased. “You were staring at me.”
“I’m thinking of how nice you look out here, in this lonely spot.”
“Oh,” she said. She seemed happy and leaned back against me. “Did you meet anyone else while you were down there?”
I snorted. “I met about a thousand angry robots.”
“No other girls?”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. You realize we were wrapped up in full gear, don’t you? We were even wearing hoods. I didn’t even know which ones were girls.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry,” she said. She touched my face apologetically. “Sometimes the other girls talk. I don’t like the idea of you flying off to some hellish spot. Someday you might not come back.”
“If I don’t, there might not be anything to come back to.”
“I know,” she said, sighing. “I suppose I’ll have to love you twice as hard when you’re here.”
“Not anymore,” I said. “It’s pretty much over.”
She looked at me and twisted her lips in disgust. “Don’t even try to lie to me. They’ll come back. Any day now.”
I stopped talking. There wasn’t any point to it. Neither one of us was buying my line of happy chatter. We’d won a battle, but everyone knew we hadn’t won the war. I started kissing her instead. It was much more enjoyable.
I spent the next month reconfiguring my little factories. I had a new project now. I wanted them to make bigger versions of themselves. The Macro fabrication units in their white domes had given me the idea. They had been able to make duplicate lasers that were smaller than the originals. Why not make factories that were bigger than themselves? If we could use these larger units
to produce bigger ships with bigger weapons, maybe we could do a better job of destroying the Macros before they managed to land again. We didn’t know for sure they were coming back, but we had to assume they were.
The world kept sending me new recruits from their elite forces. We kept swearing them in, filling them with nanites and training them. I figured we should have a standing force of thirty thousand men at the ready. We were doing all right in the ship department now, too. We had about seven hundred ships. We’d even managed to capture a few of the centaur people alive. That happened by chance, not design. Sometimes the ships hovered low, only a dozen feet off the ground. On those occasions when the centaurs lost a fight, but were only knocked out not actually killed, they might live after their ship rudely dumped them out.
The UN people had gathered them, I’d heard from Admiral Crow. They had a colony of centaurs—about thirty in all—hidden away in some lab in Europe. I didn’t ask questions, but I hoped they would treat them well. Crow said they were trying to nurse them back to health and learn how to communicate with them. They were a vicious species, it seemed, but so were we. We had hopes of getting information about the universe from them in the future.
Crow and I had a number of power negotiations between us. As usual, I was less interested in titles than I was in results. After the South American campaign, however, most of the world considered me to be the leader of Star Force. Crow worked to get his name out and did a hundred live interviews, but I was still the hero in the headlines. I think it bothered him more than he let on.
Officially, we agreed to separate our commands. He ran the fleet and was nominally in charge of Star Force. I was a high ranking marine officer, which suited me well.
Then he called me one night with startling news.
“We’ll be having a staff meeting later tonight, Riggs,” Crow told me. “It’s all online, so you don’t have to travel, but put on your dress uniform, will you?”
