Swarm sf-1

by B. V. Larson

  “Sure,” he said.

  I put up my hand gesturing for him to stop. “How about that foot? You can walk around on it?”

  “Sure,” he said, “but not fast.”

  “Okay,” I said, “as long as it’s not causing you too much pain. I can find someone else if it’s bad.”

  “Nah,” he said, “it will feel good to walk. The damned thing itches like a spider bite.”

  I watched as Kwon went stumping around the twisted wreckage and bodies. There were few of our dead in the immediate vicinity, fortunately. Still, this field would begin to stink after a few hot days. I wondered how long we would be here.

  Reports kept coming in over the communications system. They were sketchy, but good. Two more domes had come down. Losses were around fifty percent. Bloody, but so far we hadn’t failed.

  It was about four hours after we took out our dome that I awoke with a start. I thought it was pitch black out, but realized after a few seconds that my goggles had autoshaded themselves. Laser light flared green, exploding the night into life and making me squint. Shouts rang in my headset. I scrambled for my weapon, shouldered my reactor pack and got up on one knee.

  “Staff Sergeant Kwon,” I said, “report.”

  “Something out there, sir. The men to the east side are firing at it.”

  Facing me was the towering wreckage of the broken dome to the west. I swung around and looked east. I thought I saw a shimmer of motion, but it could have been the rain.

  “Okay, everyone get up and look alive. I want men looking in every direction. Everyone stay low, stay covered if possible. We should be functional now, most of us.”

  “Sixty percent are walking wounded now, sir,” said Kwon’s voice.

  “You never came back and made your report.”

  “You were asleep, sir.”

  Great, I thought. I opened my mouth, but one of my men beat me to it.

  “Here they come! From the south sir, from the crater wall!”

  I saw them now, shadows moved in the silver-black rainfall. We all had our suit-lights off. There was no reason to give the enemy something to shoot at.

  Dark shapes, big, but not huge. Workers? I wasn’t sure. They looked like machines, however, and their bodies whined and clanked like them. I sighted on one and fired. I gave it a hard, one-second burst. The beam burned the rain, turning it to an instant gush of steam. All around me, my men opened up and in the flares of light, like lightning flashes, I saw them.

  This was a new breed of machine. I could not guess their purpose, but they resembled centipedes. They had conical-shaped contrivances where the head should be. I realized now, they were yet another kind of worker. One we hadn’t seen before.

  Then I heard screams. Men around me vanished. I saw the ground open up and I saw them fall into the earth. I knew instantly what was happening.

  “Troops!” I shouted, my command signal overriding theirs. The channel was full of shouts of surprise and horror. “They are coming up from underneath us. Repeat, they are tunneling up under us. Move away from your positions. Burn them when they breach.”

  It wasn’t ten more seconds before one came up for me. I burned it. Flashes were going off all over our makeshift camp.

  I looked around wildly, we had to move from here. There were too many Macros. My men were too injured.

  “Move out, everyone. We are going to where the dome was. The ground there is harder, like concrete or stone. They probably can’t drill up into the middle of us there. Walk if you can, and pick up another man who can’t.”

  I looked around for another man and found two-thirds of one, still squirming. I grabbed his jacket and dragged him. I felt prickles where metal slivers popped out of my skin. They had begun budding and bleeding due to my movement.

  Less than twenty of us made it to safer ground. Every second or two, lasers flared and burned another clattering monster. I had no idea how many enemy there were. They seemed to be endless.

  When we reached the hard floor of the dome which had once supported a massive, miraculous machine, they stopped coming. Those that were still in view dug into the earth like giant, wriggling ticks and vanished. Their heads were drills of some kind.

  “Kwon?”

  “Here sir.”

  “Head count?”

  “Twenty-one. Nine lost, sir.”

  I felt something new then. A vibration, under my feet. The other men felt it too. Everyone took staggering, shuffling steps backward from wherever they stood. We aimed our rifles at the ground beneath our feet.

  “They are coming up underneath us, sir!” shouted Kwon.

  I’d never heard fear in that man’s voice before. But I thought I heard it now.

  “What are we going to do, sir?” asked another private.

  I didn’t know his name. I didn’t have an immediate answer for him. But then, after a few seconds I realized that I did have an answer. It was something I’d decided not to do previously, because it was too risky, but I didn’t see how we had much choice now.

  I spoke aloud in my mind and I called the Alamo.

  33

  My officers had often muttered about the fleet ‘not wanting to get their hands dirty’. But we knew from bitter experience that whenever fleet ships like the Alamo came near the domes the Macros would attack our ships and destroy them as priority targets. I had determined before I went on this mission that, except for the initial landing, I could not afford to endanger our ships. Not even to save our men in rescue efforts. If we lost even a portion of our fleet, how could we hope to defeat the next invasion attempt? I suspected the next time there might be nine ships coming. It was only a guess, but we had to prepare for the worst since the single Macro ship that had gotten through the first time had managed to devastate an entire continent. What if it was North America next time, or Asia-or both? We needed to keep every ship intact. They were the only source of prevention we had and they were a thousand times better than the cure of a ground defense.

  But tonight I thought things might be different. Tonight, the Macros had a lot on their plate. They’d lost the three closest domes and their missile batteries. They would have a hard time shooting down a distant ship when they were under serious ground assault. They might still do it, but I wasn’t going to let us all die here when I could stop it, when I could save myself and these fine men.

  So, I called the Alamo and ordered her to come in from where she sat a few feet above the waves of the Southern Atlantic. She was out near the Falkland Islands. I called her and she came with all the blurring she could. The immediate problem I had was that she didn’t have a landing pod handy and there were twenty men to be rescued. I had to decide if they were all going to be picked up one at a time by the ship’s groping hand, or if we could work out something better.

  “Kwon!” I shouted.

  “Sir?”

  “We have a rescue incoming, but we need to get on something large. Something like one of these pieces of wreckage.”

  “Rescue sir?”

  “Just listen,” I said. The thrumming under my feet seemed sharper now, more insistent. My toes were tingling with the vibration of enemy drills. “Find a girder or something we can all hold onto. My ship is coming to pick us up. If she doesn’t get shot down, she can carry us out, but we have to be easy to carry.”

  “Ah,” said Kwon.

  He looked around dazedly. I could see he wasn’t going to find anything. He looked at the hard, stone-like floor as if he might find a handy tree branch lying there.

  “Sir!” shouted the private who’d first asked me what we were going to do. He pointed toward the wrecked factory.

  After a few seconds I saw what he was pointing at. It was a twisted bit of metal about thirty feet long. It was perhaps a foot thick, and looked like a pipe.

  “How are we going to stand on that?” I asked.

  “Not stand, sir!” he shouted, dragging a bad leg toward the pipe. His left knee seemed not to work. “We can all hold on.
We are strong enough. Each man only needs one strong hand.”

  I nodded, liking the idea. “Let’s do it!” I shouted and we all helped one another toward the twisted thing that turned out to be something like a strut. It had probably been part of the new Macro that had been in the birthing process when we blew the dome.

  I dragged the two-thirds of a man I’d brought here. He was still alive, and so I kept dragging him. He never complained. Before I’d made it a dozen steps, he fired his weapon back behind us as I bumped and thumped him along the ground like a sack of meal. I didn’t bother to look back to see what he was shooting at. I just kept pulling him across the ground and up a small mountain of rubble. In between jolts, he continued to flash brilliant beams of light into the black rain. Vapor flared up into a warm fog behind us where he had burned the rain and turned it into fresh steam.

  We reached the girder and worked to wrench it free of the debris, straining with all our enhanced muscles. Sensing we were up to something, the machines struggled to emerge through the hard stony surface where we had stood moments before.

  “Kwon, you and five others with two working arms pull this thing free!” I shouted. “Everyone else fire on the machines as they surface.”

  We fired as they came up, but the survivors quickly moved to circle around the debris stacks. They were flanking us. They would come over the rubble and into close combat very soon. We fired at everything we saw, blowing holes in the blackness with stabbing tubes of light.

  A shadow loomed over us less than a minute later. What little light had been filtering down from the rain clouds above us was blocked out. Instinctively, we raised our faces and our weapons.

  “Hold your fire!” I shouted. “It’s my ship. Is that thing free yet, Kwon?”

  “Almost sir!” shouted Kwon, I could hear the tremendous strain in his voice. He was heaving at it for all he was worth.

  A long black arm snaked down toward me. No, I told my ship. Grab this piece of metal. Gently pull it loose.

  The Alamo plucked the girder free even as it had plucked a hundred trees free of the earth back on Andros Island. I ordered my men to take hold, and to hold onto each other as well. I gave them permission to drop their packs and rifles if they couldn’t hold on otherwise.

  As we lifted off, the Macros realized what was happening and rushed the spot. They got hold of the lowest two men on the girder and ripped them loose. They went down screaming and blazing their rifles. The machines tore them apart as we looked down helplessly. We burned a few more, but then we were gone, rising up into the night.

  I had locked one arm around the girder. In the other hand I still gripped the crippled man I’d been dragging for several minutes. I let my rifle dangle and clatter against the girder. The black cable kept it from falling.

  It was the wildest ride of my life. It was pitch-black and we flew with terrifying speed over the treetops. When we got to the ocean, the rain became a storm. Then the storm became a hurricane. By the time we reached the Falklands and stood on solid ground again, only sixteen of us had managed to hold on. The rest had been lost.

  I looked for the half-man I’d dragged around all night long. They told me he’d died during the flight. I nodded to the nurse, acknowledging her sympathetic words. I wasn’t surprised, really. I knew from experience with my own children that there were limits to what the nanites could do.

  34

  In the morning, just before sunrise, I staggered out of the tiny building that served the island for a hospital. They hadn’t been able to do much for me. The doctor on duty had just stared, wide-eyed, at our wounds full of what looked like quicksilver. I could tell he’d never seen anything like us. He eyed us as a man might when faced with the walking dead. We were frighteningly different, and every one of us should have died hours ago from our gruesome wounds.

  I made every last survivor a noncom. I made Kwon a First Sergeant. I eyed his missing foot without touching it. The foot was a stump, but there were shiny spots there. The nanites were at work, rebuilding cells and stimulating growth. I wondered how long it would take them to regrow Kwon’s foot. A week? A month? I had no idea.

  When I finally contacted Crow, he was mildly pissed. I wasn’t surprised. I wasn’t in the mood for any of his bullshit, however.

  “So you lived, mate?” he said, “I thought you’d done died like a true digger this time.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence, sir.”

  “Where are you?” he demanded.

  “The Falklands, I think.”

  “Ah, having a spot of tea are you?”

  “More like I’m pushing shrapnel out of a dozen spots in my body. Or rather, the nanites are.”

  He paused. “So you didn’t just bugger out?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “That is the general opinion from command. You called your ship and had yourself extracted, leaving Major Radovich and his crew to their fate.”

  “What fate?” I asked. I felt a new weight upon my shoulders.

  “Hadn’t heard eh? They were ambushed on the way to the next dome. A dozen Macros caught them. No survivors.”

  I stood there, breathing heavily. I didn’t respond.

  “I’m sorry about that bit, Kyle,” said Crow, changing his tone. “I shouldn’t have told you that way. But dammit, man, I thought you had died with them until this very minute. No one knew you were still alive.”

  “How’s the rest of the battle going?”

  “We’ve got them down to three domes. We lost half your men doing it, however. More than half. And most of the rest are wounded. They can’t press further. I ordered them all to pull out. All the Macros are circling around their last domes now. Every hour there are more of them. Armies of the big machines were pulled back from the front lines up near the equator. The good news is our forces can now advance from that direction and retake half the continent. The bad news is they aren’t likely to leave things so open again.”

  “No,” I said, trying to think again. “They won’t leave their rear unprotected again.”

  I kept thinking about Radovich. Somehow, I’d always thought he would make it. He’d never gotten his chance to lead a dome assault. I shook myself and took a cup of coffee a nurse offered me.

  “The NATO brass wants to land now. I think they are right.”

  I almost spit out my coffee. “What?”

  “You did it, mate. They think you’ve broken their backs. The enemy is abandoning most of the land they grabbed and are pulling back into tight circles around those last three domes.”

  “Are they landing then?”

  “That’s what Kerr said.”

  “I’ve got to talk to him.”

  “All right. Crow out.”

  I sipped my coffee for about thirty seconds. I tried to calm down. Maybe Kerr was right. Maybe pressing in while the Macros were in retreat was the right thing. But I couldn’t help but feel we might be falling for the same trap they had. We were advancing too quickly.

  It took me less than five minutes to get in touch with Kerr.

  “Kyle Riggs? What the hell? Everyone said you were dead. Some said you ran out, then died. What’s the story?”

  I filled him in.

  “Your own personal rescue chopper, eh? Not sure how you called it in so fast, but I wished every unit had one. Anyway, I’m glad to hear you’re still breathing.”

  “I don’t seem to die easily.”

  “No. No, you don’t. That’s an excellent trait in a ground officer. Now, what’s this call about, besides letting me know you aren’t out of the picture yet?”

  “I heard you were invading, sir,” I said. “With regular forces.”

  “Hardly regulars. Marines and airborne. Tanks and artillery. Our best boys. I’ll need your forces to form up a beachhead on the coast with us and as soon as your troops are ready. We’ll finish those last domes.”

  “I don’t know how soon that will be, sir.”

  “What? I thought you boys
healed like sidewalk weeds.”

  “We do, sir. But I don’t think we can take the domes. Regular troops will be almost useless. My men are beat up, and now the enemy front-line troops have pulled back. They are certain to counterattack and overrun us.”

  “Would it help to know we’ve gotten about another battalion of reinforcements-your kind of marines?”

  “That’s good to know, sir. Have they undergone the treatment and the training?”

  “Your people back at Andros gave them the injections. But they will get their training on the battlefield. This is the moment. We are shipping them down now. If you would order your craft to ferry them, we could get them there much faster.”

  I had a headache. The General had assumed I was dead. Apparently-I could read between the lines-the moment I’d been prematurely declared out of the picture he’d taken over ground operations. He’d given orders I’d never have agreed with. I had to wonder, right then, if the good General would have preferred I’d stayed dead.

  “I’ll tell you what I want to do, General. I want to pull off the continent and build up my forces. The Macros aren’t making more factories-more domes. So each day we get stronger now, and they get relatively weaker. We don’t have to rush in. We can build up another ten thousand troops and kill their domes decisively.”

  “I don’t think we have to wait.”

  “You haven’t faced the Macros personally, sir.”

  “No. And I won’t take that away from you. But I’m going to land my regulars. Will you move to cover our landing?”

  I looked out across the Falklands. I wasn’t sure which island I stood on, the East or the West. The land was cold, beautiful and very green. At my feet, lush grass grew nearly a foot high. Single dew drops clung to every blade.

  Sheep wandered in rolling pastures only a mile off. As I recalled, sheep were about the only thing on these islands. It was odd to think a war had once been fought over this pretty scrap of land. I had to wonder, with the intrusion of aliens, if men would ever again fight silly little wars amongst themselves. I supposed they would.