by B. V. Larson
“Fourteen, respond.”
“Responding.”
“What would it take to build the metal equivalent of human legs?”
Hesitation. A long one. I figured that when they were handing out brains, Fourteen had been back at the messhall eating pancakes. “Insufficient information—” it began. I was hardly surprised.
“Okay, forget that question. I don’t have time to verbally describe the specifics of a walking system anyway.”
I frowned. I had to work with what I had. I didn’t have time to design new pieces, I could only reconfigure a new machine with the components I already had. “Let’s talk about a gravity-resist system that is low-powered. Let’s say one that is about ten percent as powerful as a standard system on a Nano ship. How long would that take one duplication factory to produce such a system?”
“Approximately seven hours.”
I nodded. “And what if we duplicated the treads of a standard tank?”
“Insufficient—”
“Okay, okay. Do you have sensory input from the turret above this shed?”
“Fourteen is not linked with—”
“Link with it then.”
“Done.”
“Now, use the sensory equipment to lock onto the APCs we destroyed earlier today. They lie to the east.”
“Done. Auto-defense program reset and off-line.”
I felt a trickle of sweat. I figured there were two other turrets, and I could always cancel this intervention if something started up outside. “Okay, quickly now, scan the APCs. I want you to calculate how long it would take to duplicate the treads on those vehicles.”
There was a long hesitation. Overhead, I heard the turret whine and shift. I dearly hoped that another missile barrage wasn’t incoming right now.
“Components scanned.”
“How long would it take?”
“Answer is variable based on the configuration of the tread in question. Some are only partially intact.”
I closed my eyes, willing myself toward greater patience. “Just give me the estimate of a set of treads for the most intact vehicle.”
“Three point six hours.”
Half as long? I thought about that. It hardly seemed worth the effort to make a vehicle with treads, if that was the difference. I had enough factories that were making nanites now, I could switch their output and they would still beat the ones building the reactors and beam units. I smiled to myself.
We were going to build hovertanks. That would put shocked look on everyone’s face. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. This area of the island was heavily-wooded. We would get choked up on the road just as the enemy had when they came in if we attacked the main base using the same road. With hovertanks gliding along, we could go over the waves or maybe even the trees, depending on how strong the resistors were.
I went through the design for about another hour, until I thought I had it worked out. The tanks would be able to carry themselves, plus a crew of six men, at a height of up to about twenty feet above the surface. What was even better, I figured I could have the first of them ready to fly before morning.
I set all the machines into production and passed out with my head on the desk. I wasn’t even sure what time it was. Sandra came in and gave me something to eat. She saw my exhausted state and badgered Kwon into finding me a cot.
I woke up some hours later with her manning the beam turret. I blinked, bleary-eyed. I realized she must have said something to me. Something meant to wake me up.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“Nearly midnight. And we’ve got trouble.”
I bounced up, staggering beside the cot. “What’s happening?”
She pointed to the wall. “We’ve got contacts.”
I saw them now. A dozen beads of metal on the wall. They didn’t look like they were firing yet. But it was only a matter of time.
“Are all the turrets active?” I demanded. “Why didn’t someone wake me up?”
“They just showed up.”
A rapping came at the door. I knew the pattern. The side of the turret yawned open and Kwon leaned in. “They are helicopters, Colonel. Robinson wants to know if we should shoot them down.”
“No. No dammit. Get me a com-link.”
“They can hear that, sir.”
“I know that. Just give me yours.”
I activated the link and set the unit to broadcast. “No one fire until fired upon.”
“That might be too late, sir,” said a voice. I thought it might be Robinson.
“You have your orders.”
No one fired. We waited. After another minute or two, I heard something on the com-link. It was a familiar voice.
“This is General Kerr. Is that you, Riggs?”
“Yes, General. Go ahead,” I said calmly. Inside, I was seething. It was one thing to know your military network might be compromised. It was another to have the enemy commander listening in and calling you on it like it was your cell phone.
“Riggs, we need to talk.”
“We are talking, sir.”
“I don’t mean on an open channel. I know your men are listening.”
Sandra and I looked at one another. I suspected, at any moment, that Crow might jump in and start talking big. But he didn’t. Maybe he had decided I was better at handling such situations. Or maybe he didn’t want the enemy to know he was here with me. For all I knew, he planned to pull out and run when the fireworks started.
“What do you suggest, General?”
“We’ll meet on neutral ground. Man-to-man. Just step to the edge of camp where you slaughtered my men. We’ll talk amongst the dead Bradleys.”
Sandra waved at me violently, shaking her head and frowning. She clearly did not want me to go.
I looked at her for a long second. “I’ll be there in three minutes, General,” I said. “Riggs out.”
-14-
It was just before midnight and the forest was full of peeping creatures. Things buzzed, rustled and occasionally thrashed about in the dark trees. I’m a trusting soul, so I didn’t take along my reactor and beam projector. I did have a 9mm pistol at my hip and I wore my combat suit, with the full vest underneath. Kevlar and nanites would slow down anything but a headshot, I figured.
Kerr stood in the dark, smoking. I’d never seen him smoke before, but he’d always seemed like he should have had a cigar. I was mildly surprised to see he had a pipe in his mouth. The bowl glimmered orange and although the aromatic smoke was invisible in the night, I could smell it.
“You’ve already let me in too close, you know that, don’t you Riggs?” General Kerr asked me.
“Yeah, I know that.”
“You are too far from your defensive line. My boys—if they were hiding in those trees over there, for instance—they could pick you off right now.”
“Yeah,” I said. “And I know I could kill you with my bare hands in less than one second.”
Kerr gave me a hard look. “That wouldn’t fix your situation.”
“Neither would your sniper.”
Kerr nodded. “Okay, Riggs. You’ve gotten stubborn about this situation. I understand that.” He pointed around at the broken Bradleys. His finger was sweeping and accusatory. “Your stubbornness killed a lot of fine men here, Colonel.”
“I didn’t order the attack.”
He worked on his pipe again for the better part of a minute. He had a lighter that flashed a metallic gold when he flicked it into life. I almost asked him why he preferred a pipe. It seemed like a lot of trouble to have to relight it all the time. But I just stood there, waiting and wondering if his pipe was some kind of signal to a sniper. I guess I wasn’t in the mood for pointless chit-chat.
“Is that why you are here, General?” I asked finally. “To smoke and threaten me?”
“Did you ever figure anything new out about the Blues, Riggs?”
“Since the last time we talked?”
“Aren�
�t you curious about them? We’ve come up with another theory as to why they can’t leave their world.”
I blinked at him in the darkness. He waited. I let him wait a few long seconds. Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore.
“Okay. Tell me your theory.”
“They’re all dead. Extinct. That’s why their robots are running around, doing mad, pointless things.”
I thought about it for a few seconds. Finally, I nodded. “You could be right.”
“My nerds give that answer the highest probability,” Kerr said. “But we can’t really know the truth. Anyway, I’m here to tell you one thing: This power-struggle is over. It’s finished—as of right now. You can keep your weapons and maybe even the island. No one really cares. All you have to do is hand over the camp with the alien machines intact and walk out of here. This is your last chance, your last warning.”
I looked at him appraisingly, an outline in the darkness. He didn’t have the manner of a man who was bluffing. I’d never seen him bluff about anything. “What are you going to do?” I asked. “Nuke us?”
Kerr tilted his head to one side, as if considering it. “There are options. We could use an EMP blast. Did you think of that?”
“Interesting, but we barely use our communication systems now.”
The General made a snorting sound. “Think bigger, Kyle. I’m not talking about a few kilowatts. I’m talking about an electronics-frying tsunami.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think it would work, sir. My reactors and beam projectors can take that sort thing.”
“Ah, but can your nanites?”
I startled and looked at him. I hadn’t thought about that. The nanites had to have circuitry in there somewhere. Would they simply fall dead by the billions, like a plague of locusts stricken down by the hand of God?
“Yes, the nanites… poor little buggers,” Kerr said.
“Hard to deliver in real terms,” I said dismissively, simulating a lack of concern I didn’t feel.
“We’ve tested it. What will your men do when they can’t lift their own beamers? They’ll be flat on their backs with those reactors pulling them down, like beached turtles. And what will your smart turrets do when their brainboxes shut down?”
I narrowed my eyes and stared back at him. “You would have done it already if you thought you could get away with it. There’s something you’re afraid of,” I said. Then I snapped my fingers. “The factories. You don’t want to wreck them. You have no idea if they would be destroyed or not.”
General Kerr sighed like an overindulgent father. “It doesn’t matter, Kyle. We are going to try it soon—or something worse.”
“What’s worse?”
“You don’t want to find out.”
“Nukes? Pointless. Why destroy the factories?”
Kerr shook his head slowly. “Not all such weapons have to destroy hardware, Kyle.”
I thought, suddenly, that I knew what he was getting at. I felt a tickle of sweat. I had to stop myself from reaching up to scratch my head. “Neutron bombs?” I asked. “I thought we outlawed those things in the seventies.”
“We outlaw a lot of things, Riggs. Not every law is followed to the letter.”
I thought about it, and the more I did the less I liked the idea. A neutron weapon would burn us all to death with radiation. The equipment would be left intact. Nothing in the region would survive, not even those big tropical cockroaches that seemed to crawl into everyone’s shed at night.
“We need a little more time, Kerr,” I said.
“For what? Why would I give you any more time? The last time I did that, you built a bunch of laser turrets and smoked my Bradleys.”
“That was self-defense.”
Kerr swept all the words away with his hand. He took a step toward me, then a second. His nose was only six inches from mine. “You listen to me, Riggs. You don’t have any more time. The only reason you’re still breathing is because people at the top have to give the final order, and they are still screwing around. The assets are in place. Do you understand me?”
I nodded. He turned around and left me standing there. He didn’t say goodbye or shake my hand. Silently, he headed back to his chopper. I would have killed him, if I’d thought it would do any good. But I knew it wouldn’t.
I walked back to camp and began a long night of hard work. By two a. m., the first hovertank took shape. I had a new idea by then. I decided to camouflage them. I made them look like boats. Big ones.
It was easier to do than it sounds. Nanites, when you have enough of them, are like smart, liquid metal. They can be told to generate any reasonable structure. They can balloon and puff themselves into any shape you describe to them, just as I’d made a toilet out of them back on the Alamo. Now, however, instead of a toilet, I built a hull in the shape of a blocky patrol boat. Inside were all the weapons and my men, twenty men in each vessel and another man to drive it and operate the gun. The brainboxes were so new, so young and inexperienced, they needed a human to call the shots for them—literally.
By four a.m., I had eleven of these bloated vehicles. With the extra weight, they would barely be able to skim over the waves, but Fourteen assured me they would be able to move. I contacted Kerr again, and he answered instantly. I smiled, they had been watching us and sweating it. I could almost hear their thoughts. What the hell is that crazy bastard Riggs up to now?
“Riggs? What the hell have you been building?” Kerr asked.
“Never seen a troop-carrier before? I’m pulling out. Tell your people to hold their fire—if you really have any people out there.”
“Okay,” said Kerr. “That’s great news. And just in time, too.”
“You have to give me another hour or so to clear out.”
“Don’t think you can load those factories onto your metal zeppelins, or whatever they are.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, General. The factories are too big, anyway. I’m sure your spycams have relayed the info back to your nerds for analysis. What did they tell you?”
Kerr hesitated. “That you can’t carry much more than your troops and some equipment. That even if you did steal a machine or two, you would have nothing to supply it with.”
“Exactly. So stop worrying. Riggs out.”
I turned to Sandra and Crow, who were both looking at me with big, freaked-out eyes.
“That should hold him for a few hours,” I said. “When he sees us glide out of here over the water, he’ll count it as a win.”
“Won’t they come in and take over the camp?” asked Crow. “They will have clearly won at that point.”
I smiled grimly. “I never said we were turning off the turrets.”
-15-
The hovertanks were big and bulky-looking. When puffed out to carry extra troops and hide the laser turret each one had on top, they were about fifteen feet high and thirty feet long. They looked like shiny, teardrop-shaped motor homes from the fifties. But these motor homes had no wheels, no windows, and floated about a yard off the ground.
An hour before dawn, I loaded my deceptive vehicles with every marine I had and we fled the camp. The interior of my hovertank was dimly-lit and thrummed softly as we traveled along the road. The scraping branches sometimes squealed against the thin hull. My men looked around, thumbing their beam-projectors nervously. The marines didn’t like the vehicles, but I found myself strangely comfortable inside them. It was lot like being inside the Alamo again. I wondered if I would ever build a new ship like the Alamo and fly her.
I chuckled to myself. Here I was, reminiscing about that liquid-steel witch of a ship, the same machine that had heartlessly killed my family members. Was I crazy, or was it the world that had gone mad?
Like a pod of silvery whales, the hovertanks followed an overgrown road that led to the coast in single file. I led the way to the coast. We crashed along, the thickest branches denting in the stretched skin of my vehicles while we brushed aside about a thousand smaller twigs. The dents
worked themselves out slowly, the walls folding back into place. It reminded me of watching an air mattress fill out when you pump it up.
I had time, along the way, to wonder if Kerr was right. What if the Blues really were all dead? It would explain a lot. Possibly their machines roved upon a thousand worlds, following their programming to examine or destroy other species. One group, the Nanos, were trying to save “biotics” from the other group, the warrior Macros. If the Blues were extinct, and that was the hidden truth behind these wars, I found it depressing. It was all pointless and terrifying, and humanity was caught up in the middle of it. We were ants at the feet of struggling giants. Pawns caught up in an argument between incomprehensible, idiot gods.
I shook my head and rubbed my face. A few last spots itched where Crow had hit me. There were times in life for introspection and pondering unknowns. This wasn’t one of them. I looked up and noticed we were breaking free of the tree line and the hovertanks were picking up speed, sliding down a gentle slope to the beach. Soon, we would be gliding over the waves and would be able to increase our speed.
I’d named my hovertank the Patton. Crow had named his the Napoleon. I had wondered about his name choice briefly. I supposed it made as much sense as any name.
I watched the screen I’d set up on the Patton’s forward wall. My tank was at the point of the formation. Once we were over the ocean, I ordered the vehicle to turn northward and head around the island, hugging the coastline.
“Riggs?” said the ship, relaying Crow’s voice. We’d dispensed with the business of opening channels. Unless we wanted a private conversation, anything we directed the tanks to transmit would be heard by all of them.
“Riggs here,” I said.
“Colonel, I’m giving you operational command of this taskforce. Napoleon out.”
Very kind of him, I thought to myself drily. We’d already decided I was running the tactical ops back at camp, if only because I’d invented these crazy things. I knew the real reason behind his announcement, of course. Crow wanted to be seen publicly as the man behind the scenes, the real seat of power. I rolled my eyes.