Swarm (31 page)

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?”

“Sure,” he said.

I put up my hand gesturing for him to stop. “How about that foot? You can walk around on it?”

“Sure,” he said, “but not fast.”

“Okay,” I said, “as long as it’s not causing you too much pain. I can find someone else if it’s bad.”

“Nah,” he said, “it will feel good to walk. The damned thing itches like a spider bite.”

I watched as Kwon went stumping around the twisted wreckage and bodies. There were few of our dead in the immediate vicinity, fortunately. Still, this field would begin to stink after a few hot days. I wondered how long we would be here.

Reports kept coming in over the communications system. They were sketchy, but good. Two more domes had come down. Losses were around fifty percent. Bloody, but so far we hadn’t failed.

It was about four hours after we took out our dome that I awoke with a start. I thought it was pitch black out, but realized after a few seconds that my goggles had autoshaded themselves. Laser light flared green, exploding the night into life and making me squint. Shouts rang in my headset. I scrambled for my weapon, shouldered my reactor pack and got up on one knee.

“Staff Sergeant Kwon,” I said, “report.”

“Something out there, sir. The men to the east side are firing at it.”

Facing me was the towering wreckage of the broken dome to the west. I swung around and looked east. I thought I saw a shimmer of motion, but it could have been the rain.

“Okay, everyone get up and look alive. I want men looking in every direction. Everyone stay low, stay covered if possible. We should be functional now, most of us.”

“Sixty percent are walking wounded now, sir,” said Kwon’s voice.

“You never came back and made your report.”

“You were asleep, sir.”

Great,
I thought. I opened my mouth, but one of my men beat me to it.

“Here they come! From the south sir, from the crater wall!”

I saw them now, shadows moved in the silver-black rainfall. We all had our suit-lights off. There was no reason to give the enemy something to shoot at.

Dark shapes, big, but not huge. Workers? I wasn’t sure. They looked like machines, however, and their bodies whined and clanked like them. I sighted on one and fired. I gave it a hard, one-second burst. The beam burned the rain, turning it to an instant gush of steam. All around me, my men opened up and in the flares of light, like lightning flashes, I saw them.

This was a new breed of machine. I could not guess their purpose, but they resembled centipedes. They had conical-shaped contrivances where the head should be. I realized now, they were yet another kind of worker. One we hadn’t seen before.

Then I heard screams. Men around me vanished. I saw the ground open up and I saw them fall into the earth. I knew instantly what was happening.

“Troops!” I shouted, my command signal overriding theirs. The channel was full of shouts of surprise and horror. “They are coming up from underneath us. Repeat, they are tunneling up under us. Move away from your positions. Burn them when they breach.”

It wasn’t ten more seconds before one came up for me. I burned it. Flashes were going off all over our makeshift camp.

I looked around wildly, we had to move from here. There were too many Macros. My men were too injured.

“Move out, everyone. We are going to where the dome was. The ground there is harder, like concrete or stone. They probably can’t drill up into the middle of us there. Walk if you can, and pick up another man who can’t.”

I looked around for another man and found two-thirds of one, still squirming. I grabbed his jacket and dragged him. I felt prickles where metal slivers popped out of my skin. They had begun budding and bleeding due to my movement.

Less than twenty of us made it to safer ground. Every second or two, lasers flared and burned another clattering monster. I had no idea how many enemy there were. They seemed to be endless.

When we reached the hard floor of the dome which had once supported a massive, miraculous machine, they stopped coming. Those that were still in view dug into the earth like giant, wriggling ticks and vanished.  Their heads were drills of some kind.

“Kwon?”

“Here sir.”

“Head count?”

“Twenty-one. Nine lost, sir.”

I felt something new then. A vibration, under my feet. The other men felt it too. Everyone took staggering, shuffling steps backward from wherever they stood. We aimed our rifles at the ground beneath our feet.

“They are coming up underneath us, sir!” shouted Kwon.

I’d never heard fear in that man’s voice before. But I thought I heard it now.

“What are we going to do, sir?” asked another private.

I didn’t know his name. I didn’t have an immediate answer for him. But then, after a few seconds I realized that I did have an answer. It was something I’d decided not to do previously, because it was too risky, but I didn’t see how we had much choice now.

I spoke aloud in my mind and I called the
Alamo
.

-33-

My officers had often muttered about the fleet ‘not wanting to get their hands dirty’. But we knew from bitter experience that whenever fleet ships like the
Alamo
came near the domes the Macros would attack our ships and destroy them as priority targets. I had determined before I went on this mission that, except for the initial landing, I could not afford to endanger our ships. Not even to save our men in rescue efforts. If we lost even a portion of our fleet, how could we hope to defeat the next invasion attempt? I suspected the next time there might be nine ships coming. It was only a guess, but we had to prepare for the worst since the single Macro ship that had gotten through the first time had managed to devastate an entire continent. What if it was North America next time, or Asia—or both? We needed to keep every ship intact. They were the only source of prevention we had and they were a thousand times better than the cure of a ground defense.

But tonight I thought things might be different. Tonight, the Macros had a lot on their plate. They’d lost the three closest domes and their missile batteries. They would have a hard time shooting down a distant ship when they were under serious ground assault. They might still do it, but I wasn’t going to let us all die here when I could stop it, when I could save myself and these fine men.

So, I called the
Alamo
and ordered her to come in from where she sat a few feet above the waves of the Southern Atlantic. She was out near the Falkland Islands. I called her and she came with all the blurring she could. The immediate problem I had was that she didn’t have a landing pod handy and there were twenty men to be rescued. I had to decide if they were all going to be picked up one at a time by the ship’s groping hand, or if we could work out something better.

“Kwon!” I shouted.

“Sir?”

“We have a rescue incoming, but we need to get on something large. Something like one of these pieces of wreckage.”

“Rescue sir?”

“Just listen,” I said. The thrumming under my feet seemed sharper now, more insistent. My toes were tingling with the vibration of enemy drills. “Find a girder or something we can all hold onto. My ship is coming to pick us up. If she doesn’t get shot down, she can carry us out, but we have to be easy to carry.”

“Ah,” said Kwon.

He looked around dazedly. I could see he wasn’t going to find anything. He looked at the hard, stone-like floor as if he might find a handy tree branch lying there.

“Sir!” shouted the private who’d first asked me what we were going to do. He pointed toward the wrecked factory.

After a few seconds I saw what he was pointing at. It was a twisted bit of metal about thirty feet long. It was perhaps a foot thick, and looked like a pipe.

“How are we going to stand on that?” I asked.

“Not stand, sir!” he shouted, dragging a bad leg toward the pipe. His left knee seemed not to work. “We can all hold on. We are strong enough. Each man only needs one strong hand.”

I nodded, liking the idea. “Let’s do it!” I shouted and we all helped one another toward the twisted thing that turned out to be something like a strut. It had probably been part of the new Macro that had been in the birthing process when we blew the dome.

I dragged the two-thirds of a man I’d brought here. He was still alive, and so I kept dragging him. He never complained. Before I’d made it a dozen steps, he fired his weapon back behind us as I bumped and thumped him along the ground like a sack of meal. I didn’t bother to look back to see what he was shooting at. I just kept pulling him across the ground and up a small mountain of rubble. In between jolts, he continued to flash brilliant beams of light into the black rain. Vapor flared up into a warm fog behind us where he had burned the rain and turned it into fresh steam.

We reached the girder and worked to wrench it free of the debris, straining with all our enhanced muscles. Sensing we were up to something, the machines struggled to emerge through the hard stony surface where we had stood moments before.

“Kwon, you and five others with two working arms pull this thing free!” I shouted. “Everyone else fire on the machines as they surface.”

We fired as they came up, but the survivors quickly moved to circle around the debris stacks. They were flanking us. They would come over the rubble and into close combat very soon. We fired at everything we saw, blowing holes in the blackness with stabbing tubes of light.

A shadow loomed over us less than a minute later. What little light had been filtering down from the rain clouds above us was blocked out. Instinctively, we raised our faces and our weapons.

“Hold your fire!” I shouted. “It’s my ship. Is that thing free yet, Kwon?”

“Almost sir!” shouted Kwon, I could hear the tremendous strain in his voice. He was heaving at it for all he was worth.

A long black arm snaked down toward me.
No,
I told my ship.
Grab this piece of metal. Gently pull it loose.

The
Alamo
plucked the girder free even as it had plucked a hundred trees free of the earth back on Andros Island. I ordered my men to take hold, and to hold onto each other as well. I gave them permission to drop their packs and rifles if they couldn’t hold on otherwise.

As we lifted off, the Macros realized what was happening and rushed the spot. They got hold of the lowest two men on the girder and ripped them loose. They went down screaming and blazing their rifles. The machines tore them apart as we looked down helplessly. We burned a few more, but then we were gone, rising up into the night.

I had locked one arm around the girder. In the other hand I still gripped the crippled man I’d been dragging for several minutes. I let my rifle dangle and clatter against the girder. The black cable kept it from falling.

It was the wildest ride of my life. It was pitch-black and we flew with terrifying speed over the treetops. When we got to the ocean, the rain became a storm. Then the storm became a hurricane. By the time we reached the Falklands and stood on solid ground again, only sixteen of us had managed to hold on. The rest had been lost.