Swarm (14 page)

Then disaster struck from an unexpected direction. The South Pole ship, which had been barreling in at full speed this entire time, had made it close to Earth. It had deviated course somewhat. Quickly, its new goal became apparent.

“Isn’t that South America?” asked Sandra.

I nodded. At least Jack didn’t have to worry about his relatives. It seemed logical when I thought about it. Why not go for the closest land mass with the greatest population?

“Kyle?” said Sandra, “I think its shooting something.”

I watched, unable to speak, unable to swallow. For the first time, I saw an alien ship firing on our planet—if you didn’t count the Nanos, that was. Somehow, I felt responsible. I couldn’t believe my conversations and command decisions had led to this result. I felt hot and sick.

“What are they firing at?” asked Sandra. She was up now, squatting in front of the big dark circle of Earth. “The missiles are vanishing over Antarctica.”

“There are bases there. Scientific installations run by various nations. The aliens are certainly thorough, aren’t they? If only—”

“Kyle!” shouted Sandra, “look at the ten you sent at the other ship.”

I did and I almost choked. I had expected to see them being destroyed, but that hadn’t happened, not yet anyway. What I saw, in some ways, was almost worse. Three of the ships had broken off. They were no longer attacking the target we’d given them. They’d turned away and were now heading downward on our wall toward the ship that approached the southern tip of South America.

Crow’s voice scratched onto the public channel. “Mutiny! Get back on target, everyone! You are screwing up the plan!”

It wasn’t very professional sounding, but it was to the point. The three ships ignored him and kept flying away from their designated battle.

I opened a line to Crow. “Commodore. Break off all of them. Send all ten at the South American ship.”

“What the hell are they doing?”

“They are disobeying orders.”

“I should let them burn.”

“They might very well do so, I think they are going to beat your team to the South American ship.”

Unpleasant laughter. “Serves them right. Deserters.”

“They might have relatives there, on that continent.”

“Yeah, or they might have figured out they can only run away by switching targets over and over again.”

I thought about that. I didn’t like the sound of it. Our fellow fleet members were not a disciplined force. They were a bunch of survivalists. If they heard about a new way to avoid combat—well, they might let a city burn to save their own skins.

“Let’s hope I’m right on this one,” I said.

“I think you are right about our response. I’m pulling our ships off the secondary target. We’ll all hit the third and then deal with the second afterward. I don’t like them shooting at Earth.”

I had a little predictive session with the
Alamo
. We worked out that the ship coming up from the South Pole would get to Santiago Chile or Buenos Aires Argentina before we could get there. As soon as the enemy ship reached land, we watched as it paused over the rocky, cold region of the far south. When it moved away, it looked as if it had laid an egg. A small mass sat there.

“What the hell is that?” I demanded.

“I don’t know,” said Sandra.

“Alamo, what did the ship drop off?”

“Warning, the following is a predictive analysis, not based on factual data.”

“Just tell me.”

“The probabilities indicate it is an invasion force.”

“An invasion force? Of what? Giant robots?”

“Reference unclear.”

“The Macros, they just put troops down, is that what you are saying?”

“Yes. Troops and processing systems.”

They came for raw materials
, my brain said, supplying an unwanted answer. I stared at the wall with bits of shivering, rippling metal all over it. The seas weren’t blue, they were silver. The land was the color of graphite. But it was my home, just the same. I felt fear and panic—and horror.

When they got closer to a belt of major cities, they laid another ‘egg’ of troops, machines, whatever it was. Then the ship fired about five times. I knew, vaguely, where the big cities were. The missiles moved and finally vanished over several of Earth’s greatest cities. I had no doubt there were mass casualties.

I swallowed hard as we swept in over the big ship now. I was proud to see that the three who had broken off and come to fight here were not deserters. They were the first to arrive. Two of them died before we got there to help, but at least one guy lived. I thought that perhaps, they had done the right thing. They had lost us two ships, but had distracted the Macros and kept them from taking out more of our cities.

We swarmed the last ship and brought it down without losing another vessel.

“What next?” Sandra asked.

I knew what she meant. Did we fly to kill the ship over Hawaii or stay and work on the troops or whatever they were? I could see now, they were moving too, very slowly. They were about as fast as a minute hand on an old analog clock, but they were moving. On the planet, I realized, they must be moving very fast indeed. The speed of a car on the highway, at least.

“Fleet, I want everyone to hit the ship over Hawaii. We can come back here and attack these ground forces later. It will take them hours according to the
Snapper
for them to reach any major population centers.”

No one argued. We all raced low over the Earth, crossing her oceans to the northwest. We flew upward, too. I wanted a beer, I wanted it badly, but I held off. I told myself I would have a six-pack when the last Macro on my world died.

The last ship never reached Hawaii. It was close, and it did get off one missile, which took out the city of Hilo, I learned later. The missiles, unsurprisingly, were nuclear. Each carried a single warhead, about a dozen megatons worth of death and destruction. They never got close enough to land to drop any invasion forces, thankfully.

When we raced back to South America, the two red contacts representing the invasion forces had spread out like spills of paint. Our ships flew in and parked over them. I felt my ship fire again and again. I grinned at Sandra fiercely. We were slaughtering them, I could tell.

But then there were squawking voices on the public channel. Reports came in of something hitting us. It was hard to tell, with all our golden, beetle-like ships zooming around and over one another, seeking and destroying.

Then I saw one get hit, not too far from our own contact. I tried to open a channel to Commodore Crow. We had to get out of there. But he ignored my connection and shouted over the public channel.

“Pull out! Everyone move to orbit. The ships will let us, they don’t have an compulsion about leaving a ground fight. I repeat, order your ship to lift off to orbital altitude.”

In a shifting mass we followed his orders. Star Force’s second battle against the Macros was over. But the ground war for Earth had just begun.

-16-

I seriously needed a shave by my fifth day aboard the
Alamo
. Maybe, I thought, the pirates of the old days were depicted with wild frothing beards because they were sitting on ships without any easy way to shave, just as I was.

Pierre had been—interesting to talk to. He was entertaining. He was the life of the party. He presented everything in the best light, even the growing ground war in southern Argentina and Chile. He called it a learning exercise, and said it was good for humanity.

“This war will end all other wars, I tell you,” he said on my private channel to his ship, the
Versailles
. “Why? Because man will not fight man when there are much scarier things out there that want to kill us all.”

Pierre often talked like that, he would first ask a question, then answer it himself. I had to admit, it worked. Everyone found him persuasive.

“All right Pierre, don’t give me that theory again.”

“Theory? You call it a theory? No, you cannot use that term. It is demonstrable
fact
, not theory. Even now, forces that a week ago refused to accept one another’s existence are sending troops to fight this new menace as allies. Ancient enemies will stand shoulder-to-shoulder and fight these machines to the death.”

“I’m sold, man,” I told him, not wanting to argue any further. “Let’s talk about the big meeting.”

“It is tonight, at six PM Eastern Time. I will meet alone with the US government official.”

“Only one man, right?”

“Exactly as we discussed. The Senator—Kim Bager—she has agreed. She will send only one man. We must be recognized as a new sovereign nation. We must have formal relations with the governments of Earth.”

Sandra spoke up. “You should not meet him alone, Pierre.”

“Don’t worry about me, lovely Sandra.”

I glanced at her. I wasn’t sure how Pierre knew, but she did look even better than usual today. Fresh clothes and a wash had done wonders. Her hair was clean and shiny. Up until now, I’d only seen her in a bedraggled state. I’d managed to put together that shower setup I’d promised her. A few nights of real sleep hadn’t hurt her, either.

“We will back you up, Pierre,” I said. “We’ll only be a few miles away.”

“Don’t frighten them! I don’t know how high level this person will be, but he is supposed to be empowered to speak for the government. He will be coming in alone and unarmed. He must be brave to dare to face the ship’s tests.”

“How brave? He’s been briefed on what to do. When he fails, the ship will just dump him out onto the grass of a park in Alexandria. Then you can pick him up again.”

“You and I know that, Commander,” said Pierre. “But this new brave soul doesn’t. To him, he enters the very cave of the lion. Don’t you recall the great fear in your heart when the ship lifted you up in its alien embrace for the first time? I know you can’t have forgotten that moment of terror.”

“I was feeling pissed off at the time, actually.”

Pierre laughed easily. It was another of his habits. When a conversation went in a direction that he didn’t want it to, he would laugh it off, and then switch topics.

“Commander, I ask that you stay well back. Give diplomacy room to breathe.”

“It’s your show, Pierre. I’m just riding shotgun, here.”

Pierre laughed nervously. “Such a quaint turn of phrase you have. I must go now and prepare for my guest.”

We broke the connection.

“He trusts his quick talk too much,” said Sandra. “He thinks he can talk his way out of anything.”

“Maybe he can,” I said. “He talked Crow into making him an ambassador, didn’t he?”

I went back to watching the news with Sandra. The news had never, in my memory, been so interesting. In space, everything was eerily quiet. No new attacking Macro ships had come. Some of us had begun to speculate that the space invasion was over, that the Macros would watch and see if their ground troops could take us out alone before they risked more ships attacking Earth. Personally, I didn’t buy that line. Maybe they had run out of invasion ships, maybe not. But I was sure that as long as they could, these robots would keep coming at us. Computers are tenacious. I used to tell my students they could drop something as small as a pencil in the open doorway of an elevator. Those doors will ding and try to close, but detect the pencil and stop themselves. Come back an hour later, and if no one has picked up the pencil, they will still be dinging and sliding those doors almost shut. They will never give up. That’s how I expected the Macros to behave. They would be relentless.

We’d been watching them for a couple of days. Using internet broadcasts on portable computers, we’d watched several battles. The Macros were the very opposite of the Nanos. They were
huge
. The big ones, built for battle, were over a hundred feet tall. But they weren’t uniform in size, shape or even function. Many were smaller and performed other tasks which we did not fully understand yet. Most of them walked on six legs like giant, headless insects. But these were metal insects as big as buildings. They had good air defenses, unfortunately for our Star Force ships. We could destroy them, but it cost us too much. Just by flying close, our ships automatically fired every weapon they had. But the Macros carried SAMs on their backs, and after the first few engagements we had realized we were losing ships as fast as they were losing giant, crab-like robots.

We had withdrawn, giving up on the idea of fighting them directly. Crow and I had decided that it was the job of Star Force to destroy the Macros before they landed. If we failed, it was up to Earth’s troops, ships and planes to do the rest.

So far, the Macros were doing most of the destroying. Argentina’s military had put up a big ring of defenses around a southern coastal city named Trelew. The fighting there had raged for a full day. Looking at the video, I had to figure our side had lost badly. They just didn’t have enough heavy equipment down there. They needed armor divisions, modern ones.

In the air, we did better. One carrier group sent by the US had reached the region. A few British ships stood in support. Argentina had never had much of a navy of its own, but their ships had shelled the Macros until they’d been sunk.