Three mrill drones came straight toward Ben. He accelerated to attack, expecting them to break formation and try to get behind him, as others had done. Instead, they kept coming. He was about to fire when he realized Nick was engaged with another group directly behind them. If Ben fired, he might hit Nick. A defensive satellite on Ben’s port side, at a nearly 90-degree angle to the oncoming mrill drones, shattered one of them. The other two continued their rush, spinning a complex spiral to evade the satellite’s targeting system. Ben searched quickly for an alternate attack route, but before he could change course, he noticed a brief blip on his sensors as the charging mrill opened their weapons bays for just a moment. Several mines flew out, hurtling toward Ben like shotgun pellets.
Too far away to hit me, he thought. What the hell are they trying at? The mines exploded, but there was almost no fireball. Miniature EMP bombs meant not to destroy, but disable. A wave of electromagnetic energy washed over his ship, and his view went black as the ship’s systems were overwhelmed by the power surge. He was now drifting along at close to 2,000 kilometers per hour, on a collision course with Earth.
The more immediate danger, though, were the two drones swooping in for the kill. Several more, having noticed his crippled state, were scuttling in behind them. Eddie, farther off, had seen the EMP attack and zipped in, ripping open one of the incoming drones, but was chased off by three more before he could help any further. Ben could sense a small army of his ship’s onboard nanobots streaming out to repair the short-circuited systems, but for the moment he was, if not a sitting duck, then at least a flightless one.
The mrill drones swarmed. Eddie and Nick picked off as many as they could, and the surrounding satellites sent beam after beam of plasma energy through the attacking ships. The mrill were pouring in, far more than there had been a moment ago, and Ben realized they were now streaming out of one of the larger ships. The Project X drones were still busy over Russia. As he skidded toward Earth, he wondered if he’d get shot before he had a chance to crash. His nanobots were finally beginning to repair the damaged electrical systems, and the first equipment to come back online was the basic radio equipment used to communicate with Rickert and the ground team. Static popped and crackled in his head.
“Ben, you there? Ben?”
“Still here, sir. For the moment.”
“There are more mrill ships inbound. Looks like this one is the mothership. You okay? Do you still have control of your ship? You look like you’re drifting.”
Ben’s scanners flickered back to life; a moment later, so did his guns. He destroyed a mrill drone that had slipped through, as the sensors plotted range and trajectory even though he couldn’t see it. His viewscreen came back to life, and it was full of Earth as he continued to sink toward the planet. The gravitational pull wasn’t the problem; that effect was fairly mild. Rather, he was a victim of his previous acceleration, of Newton’s first law, a body in motion staying in motion unless acted upon. At this point, the only force preparing to act on the ship was the eastern seaboard of the United States, about 160 kilometers below.
All this weird alien shit, and I’m about to die from the most fundamental physical law in the universe. I would really like my engines back.
The nanobots seemed to be struggling with that one. His hull was heating up, singeing his metal skin. As he reentered the atmosphere, aerodynamics became a problem. The thickening air began to tug and shove at the contours of his ship. He was spinning. Spinning and shaking, like a yo-yo in an earthquake. And still no thrusters. Warning indicators flashed in his vision. He wasn’t worried about the heat or vibration—the ship could easily take it. The confrontation with the ground, on the other hand, would be much less survivable.
Twenty-five kilometers. Thirty seconds to impact.
He could hear Rickert calling his name over the radio, but he ignored it. Instead, he opened a secure channel to Eddie and Nick, whom he could see engaging his pursuers.
“Break off, break off,” he ordered. “Do not follow me down. Continue to engage the incoming mrill. It looks like more drop ships and attack cruisers are cutting into the solar system, and we need you boys back above on the battlefield.”
“But . . .” Nick began.
“No. That’s an order. My machines are still working on repairs. I’ll make it. And if I don’t, you do not have time to waste on me.”
These were easy orders for Ben. He’d never had trouble going into harm’s way solo. There was nothing they could do to help him, and they would probably be safer fighting on their own than trying to watch his back. And maybe they’d take a few of the mrill with them.
Sixteen klicks. Fifteen seconds to impact.
Virginia loomed below. Washington, DC, in fact.
Ben hoped he wasn’t about to pancake into the White House. Maybe the mrill would put up a plaque for that, and their kids, if they had any, would come and laugh at the idiot human in the decades to come.
He and his ship punctured the clouds, guns blazing, and the mrill drones followed. His ship whistled as air flooded every crevice and channel at nearly supersonic speed. He was actually slowing down, the thick cushion of air acting like a brake. Eddie and Nick broke off and headed back to the upper atmosphere. Three mrill attack ships chased after them, leaving just two on Ben’s tail. But a new signal swooped in from the west, a mrill troopship. The defensive cannons clustered around Washington, DC, couldn’t fire, given how Ben and the mrill ships were bunched together, and the mrill were using the cover to send in their dropship to establish a beachhead.
Five klicks. A shade over 15,000 feet.
“Now would be a good time,” Ben yelled to his mindless, oblivious nanobots. “You little bastards are going to die with me if you don’t hurry up.”
The troopship disappeared from view as it decelerated for landing. Ben tried to shoot it, but the mrill drones crisscrossed in front him, serving as a protective shield for the drop ship. He tried to blast them away, like batting at a swarm of gnats, but the vibration and spin was so fierce that most of his shots streamed wildly off into the air.
Five seconds to impact.
He was still traveling far too fast to survive. This was it. I would have liked to have seen how this all ended, Ben thought.
His engines came to life, and Ben threw the throttle open. The volcanic roar rattled his teeth, but it wasn’t nearly enough to stop his descent. Traveling almost two hundred and fifty kilometers per hour, he slammed into a small pond.
The water was cement at that speed, and the ship shattered around him. The hull cracked open like an egg and he was ripped from his chair. The violent separation, the severing of the connection between man and machine, felt like his brain was being torn from his skull. His body slammed down against the floor of the cockpit, snapping his arms and legs at obscene angles. His head bounced against a panel and his vision turned fuzzy as cold water rushed in.
He tried to escape, to just move, but nothing was working the way it was supposed to, and he wasn’t sure which way was up.
He was back on his father’s boat. The squall had become a storm, and everything was falling apart. The swirl of water was like a blindfold, and all the old familiar surfaces were now alien territory. Cries for help seemed to come from both just beyond reach and a million miles away. Ben thrashed in the gloom. How many times could a man die in one lifetime? One last stab of light from the setting sun through the splintered hull and then muddy water covered everything. Even as he sank, the machines in his body were already working, emergency response crews tirelessly sewing him up, dragging him back, again, from the edge of darkness. No rest. Not yet.
The ship gurgled deeper into the cold murk. His nanobots could store enough oxygen to allow him to nearly take a nap beneath the waves if he wanted. His body would take care of itself. His memories were still broken. Ben wrestled with his mind, pushing the old visions away to let his training take over.
The eight weeks of training as an aspiring frogman at
the Naval Special Warfare Training Center in Coronado, on the California coast, had been all about retraining the body and mind to deal with, then ignore, then finally embrace physical suffering. Floating on your back in water so cold that it cut like a blade, arms locked with those of his fellow classmen, shivering and chattering through exhaustion and lurking hypothermia while a grinning instructor bellowed through a bullhorn. Water, water everywhere, and more than a few puked as nature tried to force them to drink. Most quit. Everyone considered it. After that first shock, though, Ben felt himself enjoying it in a perverse way.
Maybe part of it was just the primordial tether that all life had to the ocean. It had once been home for every living organism. Listen closely enough and you could hear it calling you back. That was part of it. Ben had eventually decided that part of the draw was also the raw physical challenge, something most Americans no longer had to deal with in a world of heated seats and push-button convenience. Some people just need to push themselves, to test themselves. That was what he told himself. That was the reason he refused to quit. And maybe that was true. Partly, anyway. But as he felt the frigid muck of this small pond settle on him like buzzards, he now realized there was more to it. He’d gone back to the water as a man because he’d never really come out of the water as a child on his father’s boat. If he couldn’t rescue his dad from the deep, he’d rescue everyone else from it . . . or die trying.
Ben waited as his superhuman bones were knitted back together, tears and cuts in his skin and organs and tendons stitched up. His ship fully sank beneath the surface of the water, burping one last bubble of air, but still he waited. When he could finally move, he tested his limbs. Back in the fight.
The wreckage of the ship landed gently on the floor of the lake and settled into the mud. Instead of swimming out, he pulled himself to the crunched stern of the ship, his augmented eyes seeing through the murky haze. The weapons locker was jammed shut and would not respond to his electronic commands. Ben braced his feet against the wall, shoved his fingertips into a small gap that had opened in the locker, and pulled. The metal groaned, then finally gave way, sliding up. He grabbed a pistol and a long, bulky rifle. He shoved the pistol into a holster on the side of his leg and strapped the rifle over his back, where it attached itself magnetically. His senses were deciphering the chemical contents of the muddy water. Ben mentally shoved the useless data to the side. Time to leave.
Wriggling back through the gloom, searching for the tear in the hull. More mud had oozed into the space in just the last few seconds, and even his upgraded eyes were now useless. The darkened, twisted interior felt truly alien for the first time. Nothing was where it was supposed to be. Ben ran through a mental checklist of alternative sensory options. He smiled in the cold water. Then he yelled.
The sound waves bounced around the interior and then back to his ears. His computers translated the crashing acoustics, forming an image, a map. Sonar. There was the hole. He kicked and felt the muddy water swirl around him. Everything was buried under a thick layer of sludge. He found the jagged opening and used his superhuman strength to wrench the shards out so he could squeeze through. He swam upward and toward a hazy light filtering down from above. A few feet below the surface, he realized the light wasn’t the steady glow of the setting sun, but a pulsing strobe, accompanied by an irregular thumping sound, the concussive rhythm of battle.
Ben broke the surface of the water and emerged into chaos.
25
Artillery shells and rockets bounded across the darkening sky as mrill drones buzzed overhead. The mrill troop ship had landed about half a kilometer away, near the shore, and robots and mrill soldiers were spreading out, firing at the American soldiers charging through the city streets from the south. What they lacked in coordination they made up for in raw firepower.
A quick check of his internal compass told Ben he’d landed in the McMillan Reservoir, just a few kilometers away from the White House. There were American soldiers, tanks, and helicopters everywhere. None of that bothered the mrill. The invaders had landed on the south edge of the reservoir and were continuing in that direction—through the Howard University campus—to meet the oncoming elements of the 2nd Battalion, 6th Marines, the infantry unit that had been deployed near the White House. A dozen or so M1A1 tanks from the Army’s 77th Armor Regiment were also clattering into the fight. Apache helicopters and F-35 and F-16 fighter jets screamed overhead as they engaged the mrill drones. It was a massive force, yet the mrill were kicking it aside like a pile of dried leaves.
Missiles and tracer rounds whipped through the air from the advancing human troops, gouging and ripping chunks from everything but the mrill. Flashes of plasma sparked out from the far more sophisticated mrill weapons. All the dying was happening on the human side. The sun had almost vanished in the west, but the red glare of the rockets was enough illumination to show that the humans were being chewed up as fast as they arrived on the scene. Tanks rumbled forward, yet most were destroyed before ever firing a shot. An F-16 Fighting Falcon roared overhead, pursued by two drones. The drones pulverized the fleeing jet, raining fiery debris down on an apartment building, then split up to continue their hunt. The chatter of machine-gun fire and the snap of mrill energy cannons filled the night, punctuated only by men, vehicles, and buildings detonating in the dark, momentarily turning the night to day.
A dozen or so terrified civilians stumbled out of a building just as a squad of marines ran around the corner. The two groups, heading in opposite directions, got tangled up, and the soldiers struggled to redirect the hysterical civilians while trying to establish a firing position behind some parked construction equipment.
Before the marines could aim and fire, a squad of mrill robots homed in on the confused gaggle of warriors and civilians, killing them all where they stood. Screams of pain were short-lived, as the robots fired repeatedly into the position.
Two army snipers on the roof of a nearby parking garage opened up on the mrill robots with powerful Barrett M107 rifles. The .50 caliber slugs slammed into the machines, tearing off chunks of metal and sending a couple robots to the ground. From behind the snipers, a third soldier launched an FGM-148 Javelin anti-tank missile at a cluster of robots. The missile popped free of its launcher and soared up into the sky to punch down into the enemy grouping—it never had a chance. While two of the robots dumped green energy blasts into the building, destroying a handful of cars along with the three-man fire team, a third pointed up in the air and fired at the descending missile. It detonated like an asteroid hitting the atmosphere, the boom briefly overpowering the noise around it. In all, the mrill had killed twenty-seven people in the space of less than six seconds.
Rage bubbled up through Ben’s cold computer senses, a useless emotion that would only get him killed if he gave into it. He pushed down his fury and kicked hard through the cold water. At the shore, he paused for a moment to calculate his attack. He’d emerged on the southwest shore of the reservoir, about a hundred meters from where the mrill had landed and were pushing further southwest toward the Capitol and the White House. Military infantry and vehicles continued to stream from that direction, trying to stop the mrill assault. They were being steadily pushed back and Ben could hear in the background of his mind the chaotic radio chatter passing between the soldiers charging into their deaths.
Ben knew the president had been evacuated, but there was also one of the surface-to-space guns installed on the White House lawn, and it was vital to keep it operating. As Ben prepared to move, the cannon fired in the distance, a bright red lance charging up into the sky. Ben reached out to Eddie and Nick, who responded by connecting him with their visual sensors, and for a few moments he watched the space battle raging through their eyes. More mrill ships were cutting in, and the situation was getting more difficult to contain. Nick and Eddie wouldn’t be able to help down here.
Ben switched to a radio connection to Rickert.
“General? Do you read?” he whisper
ed.
“Ben? Holy hell, where are you?”
“On the ground in DC, about two klicks from the White House. We’ve got about two hundred mrill foot soldiers and a handful of drones pushing southwest from the McMillan Reservoir. Our guys are being chewed up. I’m about to engage the mrill from the rear and I need you to patch me in to whoever is in charge on the ground to let them know I’ll be linking up with them in about 45 seconds. We’re also gonna need a hell of a lot more air support.”
“I’m working on it. In the meantime, don’t die.”
Ben shouldered his rifle and slipped out of the water. A quick glance showed him he probably could have cartwheeled out of the water and not been noticed. The mrill were focused on the tanks and soldiers and hadn’t secured their flank, assuming all the defenders were in front of them.
A second mrill force emerged from the troop ship. In addition to foot soldiers, there were a handful of hovering platforms. On each platform were four mrill soldiers, operating what looked to be massive cannons. Mobile artillery. These levitating weapon platforms skimmed above the asphalt, avoiding jagged debris and rubble. Each cannon sizzled and snapped for a moment before firing, sending a thunderbolt into the human ranks. This second squad wasn’t bothering with scouts or perimeter security either. Why should they? As far as they knew, Ben was dead and nothing else on the ground was a serious threat.
The First Protectors: A Novel Page 25