by B. V. Larson
The noise of the machines was tremendous. They had a smoky smell about them too that reminded me of burning tires. I sighted on a splattering turret and burned it until it ruptured like a light bulb. The effort took nearly two seconds, much too long. It was only luck that I wasn’t crushed or beamed down as I stood in one spot for so long. When combating a pack of angry Macros, two seconds was a lifetime.
“Forward!” I shouted, hoping some of the men could hear and obey me. I ran then, sprinting. The dome was very near. Around me a knot of marines followed.
Something roared and I was knocked flat. For several blinking seconds I didn’t know what had happened. Then I had it: a missile strike. The barrage had come in, finally.
It took me a few more seconds to realize there were very few missile strikes. This wasn’t a barrage, it was just a smattering of missiles. I could see now what was happening. Up above the dome, above the machines and the struggling men, a launcher had arisen. It had many tubes. Periodically, each tube sparked and a missile flashed. Spiraling smoke trails led down toward us. They were firing right into their own machines at point-blank range.
Two men picked me up, and I was dragged, half-running toward the dome. My body was full of metal slivers. When I breathed, liquid bubbled out of my chest as if I were a wet, popped tire. My men dragged me under the last machine that stood between us and the dome. It had run out of belly-turrets by this time and two of its crab-like legs were dragging behind it.
I shouted into my com-unit. “Cruise brigade! Take out that missile turret now!”
I wasn’t sure if they acknowledged or not. I wasn’t even sure if they were still alive. We made it under the dying Macro’s legs and hit the dome. All sounds of the battle cut out.
Stepping under the dome was like entering a cool, calm world. Cut off from the outside completely, I could feel the barrier as I passed through. It felt like I’d walked through some kind of plastic film, as if I’d been swallowed in bubble-wrap. We pushed inward and it pushed back, but gently it gave way. I think it was designed to allow slowly moving things to walk through. How else could the workers easily gain access? I supposed they could have sent in some kind of signal, but signals could be duplicated. Besides, I suspected now that the shield prevented all signals from penetrating. Signals were fast-moving energy, just like the laser beams from my rifle. These domes seemed to stop such emissions.
Once past the barrier, we stood in a gloomy world. A machine hulked in front of us, dimly lit by internal sources. I flipped on my suit lights and stood unaided. I coughed, and that hurt worst of all.
“Colonel?” asked the man next to me in concern. I looked at him in surprise. It was Wilson, not Radovich. I wondered briefly if Radovich was dead.
“Should we fire on that thing, sir?” he asked me.
I tried to get my thoughts together. It wasn’t easy. I’d gone through too many shocks too quickly, and I think that close missile blast, exploding almost in my face, had addled my brains. I realized I was lucky I could still hear anything.
“How many do we have?” I asked, and right away I could see relief on Lieutenant Wilson’s face. He hadn’t wanted to command this final leg of the assault. I didn’t blame him.
“Twenty sir, but more are streaming in.”
Twenty? I thought in shock. Was that all that had made it inside?
“Let’s advance then,” I said, “and see what that thing is.”
I staggered forward. One leg didn’t seem to be operating properly. Wilson gave me a shoulder and I took it. We moved toward the thing that crouched in the center of the dome.
It took me a few dozen steps to recognize it. I had seen it before, or something like it. It resembled one of my own factories-the ones I’d built and left on Andros Island-but it was much larger. A hundred times larger. I could hear it now. It sort of thrummed. It was a deep, steady, ominous sound.
“Men,” I said, struggling not to cough. My lungs burned and itched abominably and it was all I could do to speak clearly. “This thing is a factory. It builds new Macros and whatever else they need, just as I built these guns we are carrying. I’ve never thought about how to destroy one, but I think it’s time we figured it out.”
More men came in, a lot of them. We had maybe a hundred and fifty marines inside the dome. Less than two companies out of ten. The new group reported that most of the big machines outside were destroyed, but most of us had died as well.
“Well, there’s nothing like the direct approach. Everyone button up as best they can. On my mark, everyone fire at that thing. Shoot for the center point of the mass, about ten feet from the base. Everyone now, fire!
We blazed at it. Light like that of a thousand suns bloomed, filling the inside of the dome with brilliance. Despite our darkened shades, I could see the light. It was blinding, painful.
I kept the beam going for five seconds. Everyone followed my lead, and as each second passed, the beams came closer together, focused on a single target area.
“Keep firing. Let’s go another five,” I said, trying to sound calm.
My eyes were squinting lines. My retinas were exploding. The heat coming off my weapon burned my hands right through my gloves. We fired for five more seconds, then another two or three, but I could tell the light was dimming. Either I’d burnt out my retinas, or men and lasers were failing around me. Probably, it was the latter. The heat was tremendous.
“Cease fire!” I shouted. The beams cut out and died down. My vision came back slowly, but with many burnt purple splotches that floated and flared annoyingly. “We don’t want to melt our lasers down, or our hands and eyes.”
We checked out the damage when we were able. There wasn’t much to show for all the effort. A pocked area, blackened and burnt, showed in a ten foot radius on the wall of the machine’s heavy base.
Only a few more men had joined us, the flow of new troops was lighter now. Only two companies or so had survived, out of a thousand men. I figured the troops back on the crater’s rim might have lived as well. There might be wounded outside too, if we had taken out all the big machines. I thought perhaps we had, as none of them had tried to get inside here with us. Maybe they were too big. I had no idea actually. But I was sure I wanted to destroy this factory before it could build a new Macro.
I led the men around to the far side of the machine. Wilson still helped me walk. There it was, on the same spot as the machine back inside my own ship. The intake vent. It was up a ways, perhaps twenty feet off the ground. I was sure the worker Macros would lift up their burdens of raw materials and slide them down that hole into something like the nanite digesters my own factories had.
The marines gathered around. “What are we going to do now, sir?” asked Wilson.
“Well, Lieutenant, we’re going to get inside that intake somehow and destroy this thing.”
“You first, sir,” he said.
I looked at him.
“No offense, sir. But are you serious? What if that thing turns on?”
“I need your help, Wilson. I need your command codes for my suit.”
“What, sir?”
“The safeguards. It takes two officers to release them. I need your secret code for self-destruction. Then I need you to lead these men out of here after we build up a ladder to get me up to the rim of that intake vent.”
“What? I didn’t really mean what I said about you going first.”
I nodded. “I know, Wilson. But we haven’t got any other heavy explosives with us.”
Wilson stared at me. “I’ve got a better idea, sir. We’ll rig up the ignition switch to a command signal. Then we’ll drop a reactor inside there. The rest of the men can evac and the last man out can set it off.”
“He’ll have to stay inside the dome,” I said. “No signals will go through it. We haven’t got the equipment to set up an autodestruct or a time-bomb.”
“Yes sir. I would like to volunteer for that mission, sir.”
I shook my head. He put a han
d on my arm.
“Sir,” he said, “Kyle Riggs-I told you I would join up and follow you. I did that sir. And I’m still a man of my word. I’ll do it.”
“I trust you, Lieutenant, but-” I said, but he cut me off.
“We can’t order anyone else to do it. We can’t ask that. But we are playing for keeps here. Difficult situations require difficult choices. I’m willing to take the chance.”
“This is my command,” I said.
“Yes sir, it is.”
I hesitated. Then the machine rumbled. I don’t know what it sounded like-maybe like a locomotive starting up when you had your hands on it and leaned against it. I could feel the deep vibration in my bones. All the men backed away from it instinctively.
“It’s building a new machine, sir,” said Wilson, eyeing me, “you know it is.”
I sighed and coughed. “Okay. Do it.”
We threw Wilson’s armed reactor pack up into its maw, and light flared out to consume it. I hoped it would still operate. I ordered everyone out of the dome. I was one of the last to wave to Wilson, who urgently made pushing motions at me. The machine was indeed giving birth to something… something large. It had to be one of the big fighting machines. I wondered how long it took to generate such a monster, given all the required materials.
I didn’t even make it all the way through the shield bubble before it popped and vanished forever. I never even heard the explosion itself. It was completely dampened by the shield, held inside there and contained. Then the force field collapsed to nothing, revealing only smoking wreckage inside.
Outside, we were met by the cruise missile boys and the company that had covered them. They had pulled through. The two companies I’d led into the dome were the only other survivors. But the dome and the factory inside had been destroyed. It was a blackened hulk of twisted metal.
I had my people search, but we couldn’t find Wilson. There was no sign of him. Nothing at all.
32
Communications were reestablished an hour after the dome fell. The Pentagon people had landed repeating stations on the continent. It wasn’t as good as satellite coverage because we were still blind to enemy movements, but it was better than nothing. We could at least coordinate our actions.
I relayed our bloody success story to the other commanders. They took the news with grim determination. Each assured me they would reach their target domes and destroy them, just as my unit had. I told each of them in turn that I had faith in them-which I did. And that I knew they would succeed-which I didn’t.
My battlegroup had taken too many casualties to be an effective force now. About twenty percent of our survivors were too badly injured to move at all. But I didn’t want to leave anyone behind. I was one of the ones on the incapacitated list, but that wasn’t important. I figured my unit was out of the fight now.
Major Radovich had different ideas.
“Sir,” he said, crouching next to me where I leaned against the broken strut of a dead Macro. “I know with normal men in normal battle, marines don’t leave their own behind. But this is different.”
“And how exactly is it different?” I asked Radovich. I looked at him with bleary stubbornness. My nanites were working hard on the dose of shrapnel I’d gotten during my close encounter with a Macro missile, but they weren’t finished yet. I was still bleeding, inside my suit. I could feel blood oozing down my legs and pooling at the bottom of my suit when I sat down or leaned against something. I was surprised the nanites hadn’t completely contained the bleeding. All the hurrying around must have reopened the tears in my skin. I’d never been so seriously wounded. Not even when my arm had been burnt were things as bad as this. The metal slivers had pierced me in a dozen spots like bullets. I would have never survived this long if it hadn’t been for the nanites in my body. They were working overtime. They itched like a thousand hot grains of sand, each one determinedly rubbing its own personal nerve.
“This situation is different,” he repeated, “because if we leave these wounded, they won’t sicken and die. They will grow stronger with each hour, until they are mobile again.”
“If it comes down to it,” I told Radovich, “I’ll put you in charge and stay behind with the wounded men. I’m one of them, after all. But I don’t think it will come down to that.”
“We have nearly two full companies left,” said Radovich. “I could lead them to the next dome and support Anderson. Two companies might make the difference between success and failure, sir.”
I blinked at him, thinking about it. Negative thoughts loomed in my mind. Was he just looking for glory? Did he want his own command to participate in another successful assault? I didn’t think so. Besides, what difference did it make if that was in his mind? He could have his glory, if he earned it. The point was to decide if he was right or not. We had to kill these domes. They were building new machines, one every day maybe. They had to be stopped. Once we took out the domes, we had won. We could then hunt down every last Macro, driving them off our world. We might not win the war, but we would have won another battle.
“Sir, please think,” said Radovich. “What use was all this? Why did all those good men die if we don’t succeed?”
I decided, looking at him, that he meant what he said. I nodded. “You’re right. We’ll take up a spot with good cover, and wait for our bodies to heal ourselves. We have plenty of weapons systems.”
Radovich looked surprised. Maybe he wasn’t used to commanders who changed their minds in the face of logic. “Very good sir. Very good. I…” he said, then trailed off.
“I wish you well too, Major. I want you to take the com-unit, you will need it more than I will. Now get all your effectives together and destroy another dome for me.”
“I will, sir!” he said, and saluted me.
I felt I should get up, but my body really didn’t want to listen. I got up anyway. He reached out a hand to help, but I ignored it and stood and saluted him. I saw his eyes, as he looked me over. I think he realized I was in bad shape, in no condition to fight or travel, or do much of anything else.
“We’ll be back for you, Colonel,” he said as he walked off, screaming at our last two uninjured sergeants. He gave confident orders and soon they pulled out, bounding up the crater rim to the north like fleeing jackrabbits. It was odd, watching them head over the ridge and vanish. It gave me a lonely, abandoned feeling I hadn’t expected.
I sagged back down into a seated position. Around me, thirty-odd coughing, stricken men pulled their weapons close to their hands and watched the horizons. There would be no movement to a better position for us. We wouldn’t be digging in or setting up defensive strongpoints. We would be struggling, each of us, to keep breathing. We would sit here until the nanites healed us or failed to do so.
I knew as we sat for the next hour, that if a single machine came to investigate, it could probably have taken us all out. But I didn’t think it would come. The Macros had plenty to worry about. They had taken drastic steps to keep us out of their domes. Logically, they would mass whatever forces they had to defend the remaining domes. What would they care about a group of stationary humans at a destroyed dome?
But as the sky darkened and a light, warm rain began, I realized that there were other possibilities. The enemy liked stationary targets for their missiles. They might fire a few at us to take us out. Just to be sure.
I ordered the men to dig in if they were physically capable of it. I think about five of them did so. Most of those were burn victims, men who’d lost an arm or leg to a Macro laser. The men who were riddled with shrapnel had less energy. I was one of these, alive when I should be dead. We were zombies, all of us. Living dead men.
After two hours, I managed to get up and take a piss. I dug out something to eat. It was in a tube, like toothpaste. It tasted like meat or cheese, but really it was paste. I ate it by wiping it on my tongue and washed it down with flat, plastic-tasting water that was body-warm. I still couldn’t take a deep breath
without coughing, but I felt hard lumps in the bottom of my suit. I dug them out, three of them. Shiny bits of shrapnel. I smiled with half my mouth. The nanites were pushing them out. I was giving birth to shards of metal. More were in there, too-I could feel them. They burned and itched and when they crested, poking out through my skin, they dribbled blood.
A large shadow loomed over me after I’d pulled two more bits of metal out of my suit. I looked up. At first, I didn’t recognize him.
“So, you made it, sir,” said a bass voice.
He was a huge one. Then memory flickered. It was Staff Sergeant Kwon, the first guy who ever lifted one of these packs and blew down a tree with it-before he had been filled with nanites.
“Kwon? Good to see you, too. Glad you made it through our first battle.”
Kwon nodded.
“You don’t look too bad,” I said. “Can’t keep up with Radovich’s team?”
Kwon sat on a shelf made of dead Macro. He lifted up his boot and removed it. I winced. Half his foot, the front half, was missing.
“I’m fine sir, except for this.”
“Looks bad.”
Kwon shook his head. “No problem. The nanites will build me new one. But will take them time.”
I nodded slowly. “How did you lose your foot and not your boot?”
Kwon laughed. “Funny story,” he said, “a Macro stepped on me. Took my boot and foot right off. But I found a new boot later and put it on. Is too small, but that’s okay. My foot is not so big now.”
I smiled, but somehow I couldn’t find it in me to laugh. I didn’t ask about the former owner of the boot Kwon had found. I was sure he was one of the dead.
“Are there are any other noncoms that can move?”
Kwon shook his head.
“Well then, could you check on the men and give me a status report? How many can at least fire a weapon? Have we lost anyone?”