Swarm (28 page)

The Macros were coming into the ruined city from all directions. Seven of them that arrived in the next few minutes. I figured they must have been running steadily to this spot since the moment they had detected our incoming attack.

In a strange way, this was a relief. This was the situation we had trained and planned for. Shrapnel bursts were hard to deal with for infantry, but these machines were the enemy we’d come prepared to destroy.

The men split up into companies, taking up sheltered positions. We had dug in where we could. We waited for the enemy to rush into us, and I for one was afraid they would stand back and pepper us with infinite waves of exploding missiles.

But they weren’t that much different from humans—in their military thinking, at least. They clearly thought of us as being the same men they had faced in previous battles. They had been fighting and slaughtering our kind for weeks now. Probably, they had the algorithm pretty well worked out by now for battles like this when they met a concentration of human troops. Pound us with missiles, then march in the machines to mop-up.

They scuttled and clanked right in over us and set to work with their sixteen belly-turrets spraying fire all at once.

Many men died, especially in the first minutes of the attack. They were stepped on, crushed down by thousands of tons of metal coming to a single, spike-shaped foot. They were overwhelmed and cooked alive by flaring releases of energy from the combined belly-turrets. No one, not even a man pumped full of nanites, could withstand more than a glancing hit from those fierce anti-personnel weapons.

But my men didn’t run. They deployed their goggles and portholed suits. They blazed out with gouts of light. One man, firing for less than a full concentrated second on a single turret could turn it to molten, burning slag. Once inside the individual shields of the Macros, if the machines faced a platoon, even a full organized squad, they were soon rendered defenseless. Always, their response was the same. They set about to stomp the men to death.

But my marines weren’t slow men. They dodged the thundering feet. They rolled and dove and kept firing up at the armored belly, the solid metal legs, the spheroid ball-joints. Metal melted like wax. Men died, but the machines were quickly crippled.

The Macros tried to run then, but it was always too late. My troops took off after them, bounding and whooping like hunters on the blood trail of a fatally wounded prehistoric beast. Each stride took us twice as far and fast as a normal man could run, even with our heavy loads. The machines could not escape us. We took great pleasure in burning the legs from under the machines and carving them up. The death throes ended with a fusillade of concentrated fire on the section we believed covered the CPU. Once we’d penetrated that zone of heavily-armored plates on any machine, burning our way to the circuitry and spinning gears inside, the Macro ceased to operate.

Seven of the giant machines died in five minutes. I had each captain report our losses. We were still ninety-five percent effective.

My men were jubilant, and we relayed the good news to the Pentagon. They told us more missiles had been fired on the far north of the continent. Within fifteen minutes, we were to be treated to another heavy barrage.

I allowed myself one minute to think hard while my men picked up the wounded and organized themselves. I came to a command decision. I thought—briefly—of talking it over with the brass back home, but there simply wasn’t time. We had to move now.

I got out a com-unit and talked to my men using the command channel. Every officer out there heard me in their headset. “Men, we’ve learned two things: we can kill Macros, and they can kill us. We can take out their machines, but these missiles are going to nail us to the ground if we stay in a concentrated area. We have to move out or be pinned down. I want every company to separate and I want ten companies to go for each of the six nearest domes. Your mission is to destroy whatever is under that dome, and every machine you meet on the way. I’ll personally lead the force toward the nearest one. The intel gained by my assault should help the rest of you in completing your missions. Now, let’s get out of this deathtrap of a city and scatter!”

The officers around me stood in stunned silence. I didn’t give them time to mull over these new orders. No one would like them, I was certain of that. Troops didn’t like heading out into hostile territory in small groups. Everyone knew that the machines might well come in packs and overwhelm a lone company. But I had no intention of sitting around in Buenos Aires and being pounded to death by missiles until they could gather enough machines to overwhelm us all. This was not going to be a traditional war, it was a war of maneuver and surprise. There were no reinforcements coming in soon—we were it. Right now, we had the initiative, and I meant to keep it that way.

-30-

As it turned out, the machines didn’t come—not right away. We proceeded at a ground-eating trot. Trotting for Star Force marines wasn’t the same as trotting for normal men. Not even when we carried our bulky reactors and thick laser tubes.

Our gear had undergone many improvements. There would be more, I was sure of that, in the future. The main design points were still the same: we carried the reactors on our backs and the projection unit was connected to it with a thick black cord which, as yet, only the Nano machines could make. The military engineering people had worked on the rest of it. The suits were made of bulletproof materials and everything we carried except for the reactor itself was in front of us, largely centered around our bellies and the lower chest area. Flares, food, medical kits, etc—it was all in front of us to help counter-balance the mass on our backs. We still ran in an odd posture, leaning forward to keep from falling on our backs. If we did lose our balance, we always landed on our butts, with the hard surface of the reactor slamming into the back of our skulls.

The helmets and hoods had improved too, and now were nanite-impregnated. Friendly fire anywhere in the area caused a signal to bleep out, warning nearby suits. In a millisecond, everyone’s vision was protected by instantly darkened, re-polarized goggles. This was a necessity, as the new green-beamed lasers were so powerful that open exposure could burn out a man’s retina permanently. The automatic darkening and lightening of the landscape took some getting used to, but it was necessary. We couldn’t just leave the full shades on all the time, we would be bumping around unable to see where we were going.

In less than an hour, my battlegroup came to the edge of the crater surrounding the dome. Macro workers from the silvery dome had built a barren crater around it with high walls of debris. Apparently, the Macros liked their domes in the center of a dry, flat area with walls all around. If such a spot wasn’t handy, they changed the region to their liking.

Bad news came in over my com-unit as we approached the rim of the target crater. It had an uneven ridge of black earth and junk about two hundred feet high. I could see the crest through the trees when a report came in from the Pentagon.

“The Macros are taking out our satellites, Riggs,” General Kerr told me.

“I’m surprised they didn’t do it earlier.”

“I think you finally impressed them enough to make them move. They either didn’t want to waste the ordinance, didn’t think the satellites mattered, or were waiting until a strategic moment to blind us when we weren’t expecting it. I think it’s the latter.”

I leapt over a rusted bicycle in the middle of a cracked highway. I had to leap again to clear a giant pothole left behind by the foot of a Macro. We were proceeding southward down an Argentinean highway, my HUD said it was the 205. The road was crisscrossed with giant machine footprints. They had punched through the asphalt and formed five-foot deep sinkholes in the dirt beneath. I tilted my head to hear the General better. I thought about ordering a halt, but we were too close. I told myself we wouldn’t stop moving until we reached the crater’s edge and gathered up for the assault.

“At least I’ve impressed them,” I said.

“Indeed you have. Some of the brass here took a crap in their coffee when they realized you were abandoning the beachhead. You are taking a big risk, you know.”

“No sir, sitting pinned down until a thousand machines arrive, that would have been the big risk.”

“I agree with you. But stay away from the proverbial pooch’s hindquarters.”

“Will do, sir,” I said.
The pooch again.
I figured I would buy him a poodle for Christmas when this was all over.

“One last thing, we might lose communications with you soon. They are taking out every satellite indiscriminately. They are blinding and silencing us. We’ll try to set up an alternate communication network, but there’s no guarantee they won’t hunt that down and nail it, too.”

“Understood, sir.”

“Godspeed, Colonel, or whatever you are calling yourself today.”

“You too, sir.”

We broke off the connection and I trotted faster to catch up with my company. I was falling behind. Beside me, Major Radovich paced along easily. I yearned briefly for the early days when I had been the strongest man around. My men had long since surpassed me. In the field with my nanite-enhanced marines, I was one of the slowest of the supermen.

The other battlegroups hadn’t reported any resistance yet. All the way out from Buenos Aires, as we trotted and huffed in our suits, the tension had grown. At first, I had felt relieved not to have contacted the enemy yet, but at the same time I became more apprehensive with each passing minute. They had to show up eventually.

We made it all the way to the foot of the mountain of debris that formed the crater before they hit us. It turned out they were waiting inside the crater. We didn’t know it until we reached the foot of the mound of loose earth and they surfaced at the top, looking down at us. These weren’t the really big machines, but rather the smaller, twenty-footers we’d scathingly referred to as workers. They were like metal ants. Looking up at their dark shadows, I realized there were hundreds of them and they seemed quite large enough to kill a man. Worse, these workers each had a weapon built into their torso, a swiveling turret about where the head should be.

About two hundred of them rose up at once and opened fire. My bounding men were scattered, as per my orders, but not scattered enough. I screamed into my headset to take cover and return fire. The orders were hardly needed. Everyone followed their training and those that lived took cover. We beamed them and they beamed us. At first, they were winning easily. We were softer targets, and we were running around out in the open. Now I saw the wisdom of blasting down everything flat around the domes and building up crater-like walls. These craters functioned as simple, earthwork fortresses. At least this defensive effort confirmed they were important targets. But as I dodged enemy laser-fire, I found the point to be of small consolation.

In less than thirty seconds we lost over a hundred men. After that, we had reached the foot of the rising mound that formed the crater. I thanked God they hadn’t seen fit to make the surface slicker or build minefields into it. We had cover and although they had the advantage of the high ground, we still outnumbered them by four to one.

I thought about ordering the cruise missile brigade to fire on the workers, they should be able to sweep that ridge. But my men were already in too close. We were going to have to do this the hard way.

I crawled into decent cover and got out my com-unit. First, I ordered a company to flank the enemy in either direction, out to the east and west. Then I relayed the news of the enemy tactics to the other teams. They had hours of running to do before they found their domes, but I wanted them to know what to expect and I wanted them to get the message while we could still transmit it.

Working up the hill, we were at close range quickly. They were only a hundred yards away uphill after we reached the base of the mounded earth. With heavy cover-fire, one squad held good firing positions while the second squad of each platoon bounded up to take a higher region of cover. The enemy fire weakened, and as we neared the top, it quit altogether. I watched my men run up the walls of the crater with apprehension. What would we find waiting on the far side?

I broke from cover myself and ran uphill, watching as the first of my men reached the crest. A pair of pinchers lunged and snatched up the fastest man, snipping him in half. Those gleaming, scissor-like blades cut through his suit and flesh just above the waist. A second man met the same fate, and then a third. After that, we took out the machines that had ambushed the first men and drove the rest back. My men crouched all along the ridge and advanced cautiously, blazing fire as they went.

Superior numbers and tactics won the day moments later. The companies I’d ordered to flank to the north and south were in position now, and they came up around either side of the enemy. They fired then at the exposed metallic ants that huddled against the inside rim of their crater. Due to the curvature of the crater, my men had a free field of fire. We annihilated them without further losses.

We turned our attention to the dome itself then. The surface
swirled—
I supposed that was a good word for it. The dome was milky, semi-opaque and shimmered occasionally as a stray beam from my troops lanced out and struck it. Major Radovich crawled up next to me. All around us, my marines were directing killing beams into any Macro worker which still thrashed. As soon as that was done, they dug in along the rim of the crater. They didn’t have to be told to dig in, not these boys. They were doing it before you could give the order.