by B. V. Larson
“You sure it tripped off? Could be a false alarm. There was just one blip and then nothing.”
“Could be a false alarm. That’s why they sent us instead of leveling the island.”
Bjorn stood up silently and stepped forward. None of the marines saw him for a moment. He stood looming over them in the shadow of a banana tree.
“What’s wrong, gentlemen?” he asked softly.
They startled and lurched around, aiming their rifles in his direction. A flashlight played over his face.
“It’s cool, he lives here,” the corporal said.
“You live here?”
The corporal stood up and approached. He eyed Bjorn’s pistol and his bearing. “It’s pretty clear you’re former military,” he said to Bjorn. “Am I right?”
“Yes.”
“That’s cool. But maybe you could help us out. We got a blip from here about an hour after we left. Did you see anything—anything unusual?”
“Like what?”
The corporal cleared his throat and looked at the others. “Like a big machine.”
“Like a robot?”
“Yeah.”
Bjorn shook his head slowly. But now, his eyes were gazing out at the sea. Like the rest of them, he wondered what might be out there.
“This thing you placed on my island—it was built to detect robots right?”
“Right?”
“Or was it built to attract them?”
The corporal shrugged. “Really, I have no idea. I set them up, turn them on, and leave them on little crappy islands like this. No offense.”
“None taken.”
The corporal looked him over. “Your blisters look better.”
“I heal fast,” Bjorn said. “Listen, if the device checks out—”
He got no further. There was an odd sound out in the water. It was a thumping sound. They turned as a group toward the boat. The two men they’d left stationed there were sitting against the gunwales, quietly waiting. The engine still burbled.
The group relaxed, but then another sound came. This time, there was no way to discount it, no way to assume it was the boat nudging up against a hidden rock. A crack rent the air, a sound like that of splitting metal.
As they all watched in shock, the boat heaved up and flipped over. The men sitting inside went flying. One fell into the sea while the other slapped down on the narrow beach.
Bjorn was the first to react. He scrambled forward, his pistol in his hand. He was knee-deep in the water before the marines behind him had taken more than two steps and raised their rifles.
Flashlights played over the scene. There was a chorus of shouts and curses. Bjorn shushed them and knelt to check the man on the beach.
“Neck’s broken,” he said.
The rest of the team fell silent. They spread out and held their guns to their shoulders, aiming this way and that. But there was nothing to shoot at.
The overturned boat’s engine died, leaving them all in a deathly silence.
“What the hell was it?” the corporal asked him, standing at his side.
“I would suspect it was the machine that tripped the sensor. Or one of them, anyway.”
“One of them?”
“Haven’t you watched the news?” Bjorn asked. “Macros don’t usually work alone.”
The kid’s eyes were wide and terrified. His breathing came in gasps. In contrast, Bjorn felt remarkably calm. He looked out into the water, trying to see any sign of the second marine who had stayed with the boat. But he didn’t spot a thing. The waves just kept peacefully lapping on the beach, as if nothing at all were wrong.
-7-
Bjorn crouched on the beach while the others swept the island. He didn’t seek the thing they all suspected was here, instead he listened to the environment carefully.
The troops around him spread out, gun stocks held to their shoulders, aiming their weapons everywhere they looked. They weren’t shouting and screaming, which impressed Bjorn. When they spoke, it was in urgent whispers.
“It’s in the water. Has to be.”
“Anyone see it?”
“Negative.”
“Is Spinelli really dead?”
“Yeah, he’s gone. Both of them are gone.”
While the others circled and searched, Bjorn stood as if frozen. Instead of looking for the machine, he listened for it. He tried to tune out the marines, their comments and the squelch of their boots on the sand. His mind sifted through the sounds for anything unusual.
When he heard a rustling behind him, he turned instantly. But it was just one of the privates, moving into the island’s interior. Palm fronds rattled over the marine’s back as he pressed through them.
Bjorn relaxed a fraction—and that’s when the machine made its move.
He realized as it came out of the trees that it must have come up on the far side of the island to make its second attack. When he saw it looming out of darkness, he brought up his pistol, but didn’t bother to fire.
The machine rushed out of the bushes into the middle of the island, quickly advancing on the private who’d strayed from the rest of the group. It was about as big as a pickup truck—with a king cab. All metal, it was shaped like a headless grasshopper with twin blades mounted where its mouth should have been. Bjorn could hear its grinding gears and whining motors. The thing was loud when it was up close.
The targeted marine knew he was screwed in his final seconds. Shouting hoarsely, he lifted his rifle and unloaded a magazine into the oncoming monster. He fired his weapon in full-automatic mode, but it didn’t seem to matter. Sparks flew from the front plates of the Macro and at least one of the bulbous electronic eyes popped like a light bulb, but it didn’t slow its charge.
Five-foot long curved blades like twin scimitars swept up and made a pincher motion. Bjorn hadn’t known Macros had blades. The shears reminded him of a stained gardening tool. They scissored together with a rasping clack and snipped the marine in half. It was an awful sound, and as the shears met one another in the middle of the man’s flesh, a series of small thumping sounds began. It was the sound of the man’s body emptying out. Blood splashed out over the sands transforming the beach into dark clumps of earth.
The rest of the team was in the action by now. They all fired at the monster, lashing it with bullets. The Macro paused for a moment, then moved determinedly as if making a decision.
Bjorn thought he knew what it was thinking: these guns aren’t damaging me. This doesn’t hurt. I don’t think I need to run.
Possibly, firing on the monster was their greatest error. The machine had been circumspect previously, uncertain as to what kind of danger it faced. Now that they’d done their worst, it had lost all respect for the group. Probably, it had had a mission with orders to stay undetected. Now that stealth was out of the question and running wasn’t necessary, it decided to keep on killing.
It advanced with a decisive lurch toward the next man, who shouted incoherently and reloaded his rifle. He fumbled and dropped the magazine. When he stooped to pick it up, the machine moved in.
Bjorn knew what he had to do. He had to vanish. He was good at vanishing, which was more than just the art of running away from danger. The key was to know when it was time to disappear.
He’d always been gifted with a precise sense of timing in these matters. Once, in his youth, he’d fallen in with a street gang. The leader of the group had gotten the bright idea of knocking off an all-night liquor store. But something had gone wrong. The old man behind the counter had pulled a gun, and bullets had begun to fly.
Before the old guy even had his piece out, Bjorn had already hit the door. He’d seen the steel in the man’s eyes. The owner hadn’t been afraid of the robbers—he’d been pissed. That had been enough for Bjorn. He was the only one of the group to get away, and he’d never tried his hand at robbery again.
This moment was very similar. The machine had decided to kill its assailants, and had coldly calculated that its
odds of success were high. Bjorn knew with crystal clarity that this was the moment when he should turn and run. It was the perfect time to vanish.
He almost did it. He could see himself in his mind’s eye, diving into the water and swimming away. He’d probably make it halfway to the main island before the machine caught all the marines and killed them. They were already splitting up, backing away. They would do their best to stay alive. But there was nowhere to go for a normal man. They couldn’t swim fast enough to outrun this nightmare of heartless metal, and it had already sunk their boat. In less than a minute, they would all be dead.
But Bjorn didn’t turn and run. Instead, he advanced and circled the machine. Internally, he wondered what he could do against it. He’d never met another human being who had been nanotized as he had. It had been years, therefore, since he’d met a man he wasn’t certain he could defeat.
The question in his mind now was: could he kill this raging machine?
The Macro was only a small one. It was one of the units the Star Force people derisively referred to as workers or grasshoppers. Up close, Bjorn thought the machine resembled a metallic ant.
He worked his way around to its flank before it seemed to take notice of him. The marines were more interesting, as they were blasting away ineffectively at its thick metal hull.
The leader of the marines was a staff sergeant. He became the machine’s next victim. He was shouting something, backing away and firing in short, controlled bursts. It seemed he was intent on blowing off all the sensory bulbs on the monster. Bjorn didn’t think that would work, but he had to give the noncom credit; it was worth a try.
Bjorn paused to drop his gun. If automatic fire wasn’t doing any damage, a pistol wasn’t going to do the trick. He exchanged the gun for a combat knife drawn from the belt of a dead man—or rather from the lower half of him. The belt itself was circling nothing at all now, and had been sheared into leather strips in any case.
He held the knife underhand and charged in. He didn’t roar a battle cry or say anything. He didn’t want to distract the machine from the men it was stalking.
The machine finally caught up with the retreating staff sergeant. The man ducked, but it didn’t save him. The sweeping blades neatly sliced off his head. His helmet popped into the air and splashed down in the warm foamy waves.
Despite its attention being riveted firmly on the fallen sergeant, who it chopped to shreds with a series of pecking motions reminiscent of a bird of prey, the machine noticed when Bjorn got close.
It whirled in his direction when he made his final leap toward it. Those deadly blades spread wide, but they snipped the air too low. Bjorn had launched himself a good fifteen feet into the air, and landed neatly on its back.
The machine didn’t have small arms with which to reach Bjorn up there. But it did have kicking legs, which caused the hull to buck and convulse under him. The blades opened and closed spasmodically, shearing away a nearby palm trunk.
Bjorn hung on while the machine thrashed about. Doing anything else would surely mean his death. Fronds and brush lashed his back and the machines inner mechanisms were deafeningly loud.
“You’re a crazy mother!” he heard a remaining marine shout.
Privately, Bjorn had to agree with the man’s assessment. He employed the combat knife now, stabbing it into the machine’s back. The armor was too thick, however, and the point only sparked and scraped. He knew that if he thrust it too hard, it would snap the blade. He had to find a weak spot. He stabbed at the joints, but they were tougher than the hull, being dinner plate-sized, rotating disks of steel.
Then he found one of the ruined sensory bulbs. There was a hole in the machine’s skin there, about as big around as a soup can. Bjorn stabbed into the hole and felt live current jolt his fingers. It would be ironic, he thought, if he electrocuted himself while trying to dig into this thing.
But he kept going. He gouged and stabbed with the knife, widening the hole somewhat. Then he punched his hand inside up to the elbow and pulled out a handful of wires.
The wires were live, and uninsulated. He’d heard that about these machines. They weren’t serviced by humans and so didn’t need to worry about safety in their designs. Bare wires were common inside their chassis. They only insulated one wire from the next when needed to provide smooth operation.
Gritting his teeth against biting shocks, he ripped loose what he could reach. But the effect on the machine was negligible.
Deciding at last that the man on its back was unreachable, the Macro stopped spinning around and lurching like dog with a tape on its back. Instead, it advanced again on the nearest marine.
“Get off that thing!” a soldier shouted at Bjorn. As the machine advanced, the man was backing steadily toward the shoreline. “I can’t get a shot with you riding that thing!”
“Shooting it isn’t having any effect,” Bjorn shouted back. “Give me a weapon. I need to get into this thing’s guts.”
“I warned you,” the marine said. “Duck!”
Then he opened fire. Bjorn hugged the back of the machine while a hail of bullets struck the Macro’s nosecone. He couldn’t blame the man, as he might have done the same. Sparks flew, lighting up the night with orange fire.
The monster wasn’t deterred. The marine ran out of ammo and continued to step backward until he splashed into the water. The water deepened quickly and he was forced to swim. That was the end for him. He was plucked from the waves and torn apart before he could escape.
Ignoring Bjorn completely, the Macro now turned and headed toward the other end of the island. It wasn’t immediately clear what it was doing. To Bjorn, it appeared the island was empty.
“You see me, don’t you, you metal fuck?” shouted a voice.
Bjorn could see the machine’s target now. It was the corporal he’d first met earlier that same day. Looking around, Bjorn realized the two of them were the last living men on the island.
The corporal was hiding inside Bjorn’s bunker. The dugout was too small for the Macro, maybe there was a chance.
But a moment later they both learned this machine could dig. Its front legs became a blur. Sand and gravel sprayed out behind it all the way to the sea.
Bjorn reached deeper still into its guts through the hole in its hull and began ripping again, trying to find something vital. A horrible pain lanced up from his hand a moment later.
“My finger, damn!” he roared.
He yanked, and then yanked harder, but his hand was stuck. Probably, he’d been pinched by a gear inside the thing. He was in agony and getting nowhere. He gave a final, wrenching pull and his hand came out of the machine.
It took him a second to realize his right ring finger was missing. It was just gone. He’d left it somewhere inside the machine. The pain was intense.
-8-
“It’s digging me out,” shouted the corporal in the hole. “I’m out of ammo and I can’t get past it.”
“Have you got a grenade?” Bjorn demanded.
“What? Yeah—good idea. Better than being torn apart.”
“No, don’t pull the pin. Just toss it up here to me.”
The marine threw a small round object up out of the hole. Bjorn had to leap from the machine’s back to catch it. He snatched it out of the air with his good hand, then turned back around.
The machine, which had been totally ignoring Bjorn for a full minute now, suddenly whirled. The pincher-blades opened wide, and Bjorn realized he’d made a mistake. He’d taken its lack of interest as a sign he could survive leaving its back—but he’d been wrong.
The only thing that saved him over the next second and a half was sheer speed. Bjorn took a flying leap backward, out of the path of the snapping shears. He landed on his shoulder, rolled, and came up in a crouch. The machine charged closer for the kill. It seemed more eager than ever before. Perhaps Bjorn had been irritating it with his stabbing and clinging. Either that, or the machine had marked him down as long overdue for death.
Bjorn could tell as he backed from the monster that it wasn’t going to allow him to ride on its hull again. He’d ridden it for over a minute, and the fun was over. The Macro held its blades higher, and whenever he moved, it lifted them immediately, as if planning to snap him in half if he tried another flying leap.
Bjorn was impressed. The machine had learned to counter his tactic after seeing it only once. It wasn’t a dumb toaster—it was smart. That made it all the more dangerous and terrifying. For the first time since he’d engaged with the machine, he began to doubt his ability to defeat it. The thought came to him as a shock. He’d felt challenged before in combat, but never outmatched. At least, not since the old man in the liquor store had looked at him with steely eyes.
He kept backing up, using whatever trees he could to hide behind. The machine pressed forward relentlessly, snapping off thin trunks and scuttling around thick ones. Bjorn was running out of island. Soon, his hind foot would slip into the water and that would be the end of him.
The corporal he’d left hiding in the hole entered the fight then. He’d found some ammo somewhere and fired a steady series of single shots at the Macro’s back. The bullets whined and spanged from the hull, but the Macro took no notice. It didn’t whirl to charge at its tormenter. It stayed on target, determined to kill the man who’d evaded it for so long.
Bjorn was further impressed by the machine’s behavior. An animal would have been distracted—but this thing was smarter than a dog or a bull. It wasn’t like a man, either. It was like—a machine.
His foot slipped. He’d reached the far end of the island. His instinct was to dive into the water and swim for it. He was faster than an Olympic swimmer, and could hold his breath for ten minutes if necessary. The nanites could chemically break down the carbon dioxide in his blood, releasing the oxygen again. But that effect was of limited duration and could only be used in emergencies.
But he decided against that play. Running wasn’t easy when facing a monster like this. If he tried it, the machine would either catch him as it had the last marine who’d gone for a swim, or it would turn and finish the corporal who was still behind it, trying to get its attention, trying to help out. Bjorn wasn’t going to let the kid die as a decoy.