Swarm (32 page)

I looked for the half-man I’d dragged around all night long. They told me he’d died during the flight. I nodded to the nurse, acknowledging her sympathetic words. I wasn’t surprised, really. I knew from experience with my own children that there were limits to what the nanites could do.

-34-

In the morning, just before sunrise, I staggered out of the tiny building that served the island for a hospital. They hadn’t been able to do much for me. The doctor on duty had just stared, wide-eyed, at our wounds full of what looked like quicksilver. I could tell he’d never seen anything like us. He eyed us as a man might when faced with the walking dead. We were frighteningly different, and every one of us should have died hours ago from our gruesome wounds.

I made every last survivor a noncom. I made Kwon a First Sergeant. I eyed his missing foot without touching it. The foot was a stump, but there were shiny spots there. The nanites were at work, rebuilding cells and stimulating growth. I wondered how long it would take them to regrow Kwon’s foot. A week? A month? I had no idea.

When I finally contacted Crow, he was mildly pissed. I wasn’t surprised. I wasn’t in the mood for any of his bullshit, however.

“So you lived, mate?” he said, “I thought you’d done died like a true digger this time.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence, sir.”

“Where are you?” he demanded.

“The Falklands, I think.”

“Ah, having a spot of tea are you?”

“More like I’m pushing shrapnel out of a dozen spots in my body. Or rather, the nanites are.”

He paused. “So you didn’t just bugger out?”

“Who told you that?”

“That is the general opinion from command. You called your ship and had yourself extracted, leaving Major Radovich and his crew to their fate.”

“What fate?” I asked. I felt a new weight upon my shoulders.

“Hadn’t heard eh? They were ambushed on the way to the next dome. A dozen Macros caught them. No survivors.”

I stood there, breathing heavily. I didn’t respond.

“I’m sorry about that bit, Kyle,” said Crow, changing his tone. “I shouldn’t have told you that way. But dammit, man, I thought you had died with them until this very minute. No one knew you were still alive.”

“How’s the rest of the battle going?”

“We’ve got them down to three domes. We lost half your men doing it, however. More than half. And most of the rest are wounded. They can’t press further. I ordered them all to pull out. All the Macros are circling around their last domes now. Every hour there are more of them. Armies of the big machines were pulled back from the front lines up near the equator. The good news is our forces can now advance from that direction and retake half the continent. The bad news is they aren’t likely to leave things so open again.”

“No,” I said, trying to think again. “They won’t leave their rear unprotected again.”

I kept thinking about Radovich. Somehow, I’d always thought he would make it. He’d never gotten his chance to lead a dome assault. I shook myself and took a cup of coffee a nurse offered me.

“The NATO brass wants to land now. I think they are right.”

I almost spit out my coffee. “What?”

“You did it, mate. They think you’ve broken their backs. The enemy is abandoning most of the land they grabbed and are pulling back into tight circles around those last three domes.”

“Are they landing then?”

“That’s what Kerr said.”

“I’ve got to talk to him.”

“All right. Crow out.”

I sipped my coffee for about thirty seconds. I tried to calm down. Maybe Kerr was right. Maybe pressing in while the Macros were in retreat was the right thing. But I couldn’t help but feel we might be falling for the same trap they had. We were advancing too quickly.

It took me less than five minutes to get in touch with Kerr.

“Kyle Riggs? What the hell? Everyone said you were dead. Some said you ran out, then died. What’s the story?”

I filled him in.

“Your own personal rescue chopper, eh? Not sure how you called it in so fast, but I wished every unit had one. Anyway, I’m glad to hear you’re still breathing.”

“I don’t seem to die easily.”

“No. No, you don’t. That’s an excellent trait in a ground officer. Now, what’s this call about, besides letting me know you aren’t out of the picture yet?”

“I heard you were invading, sir,” I said. “With regular forces.”

“Hardly regulars. Marines and airborne. Tanks and artillery. Our best boys. I’ll need your forces to form up a beachhead on the coast with us and as soon as your troops are ready. We’ll finish those last domes.”

“I don’t know how soon that will be, sir.”

“What? I thought you boys healed like sidewalk weeds.”

“We do, sir. But I don’t think we can take the domes. Regular troops will be almost useless. My men are beat up, and now the enemy front-line troops have pulled back. They are certain to counterattack and overrun us.”

“Would it help to know we’ve gotten about another battalion of reinforcements—your kind of marines?”

“That’s good to know, sir. Have they undergone the treatment and the training?”

“Your people back at Andros gave them the injections. But they will get their training on the battlefield. This is the moment. We are shipping them down now. If you would order your craft to ferry them, we could get them there much faster.”

I had a headache. The General had assumed I was dead. Apparently—I could read between the lines—the moment I’d been prematurely declared out of the picture he’d taken over ground operations. He’d given orders I’d never have agreed with. I had to wonder, right then, if the good General would have preferred I’d stayed dead.

“I’ll tell you what I want to do, General. I want to pull off the continent and build up my forces. The Macros aren’t making more factories—more domes. So each day we get stronger now, and they get relatively weaker. We don’t have to rush in. We can build up another ten thousand troops and kill their domes decisively.”

“I don’t think we have to wait.”

“You haven’t faced the Macros personally, sir.”

“No. And I won’t take that away from you. But I’m going to land my regulars. Will you move to cover our landing?”

I looked out across the Falklands. I wasn’t sure which island I stood on, the East or the West. The land was cold, beautiful and very green. At my feet, lush grass grew nearly a foot high. Single dew drops clung to every blade.

Sheep wandered in rolling pastures only a mile off. As I recalled, sheep were about the only thing on these islands. It was odd to think a war had once been fought over this pretty scrap of land. I had to wonder, with the intrusion of aliens, if men would ever again fight silly little wars amongst themselves. I supposed they would.

“Riggs?” asked Kerr, cutting into my thoughts. “You there, Colonel?”

“I’m here, sir.”

“You are about to turn me down, aren’t you?”

“Yes sir, I was considering it.”

He heaved a sigh, as if ignorant fools plagued his every hour. Perhaps they did.

“All right. I’m going to tell you something. Something not generally known.”

“I’m listening. And I’m wondering why I’m not on your intel short list.”

“I don’t make up the names on those lists, Colonel.”

Liar,
I thought.

“Anyway,” he went on, “we’ve got some cause for moving now. We’ve spotted something, see. Something off in space.”

I straightened and dumped my coffee. The dew drops clinging to the grasses at my feet turned brown. “What kind of something, sir?”

“Well, as you might have guessed, we’ve been working on our telescopes lately. With a feverish new intensity, actually. We’ve been checking out every corner of this solar system. These Macro ships have to be coming from somewhere. We don’t think they are coming directly from another star, they must have a base of some kind.”

“You found such a base?”

“We don’t know. We’ve found something. A satellite—something artificial. Something very large orbiting Venus.”

I blinked at that. I looked at the skies, even though there was nothing up there to see but our own light blue atmosphere streaked with shreds of cloud. Off to the east my own ship hulked close to the ground. As I watched, a car pulled up near it and someone got out surreptitiously. They snapped pictures of the
Alamo
with their cell phone. No doubt they thought themselves very daring.

“Okay,” I said. “Why is this discovery prompting a suicidal attack now, sir?”

“Because, Riggs, there are flashes going on there. Once or twice a week, there is a release of energy. And there are smaller contacts around it, we think. Growing in number. As they come in, they glide back behind Venus, where we can’t see them.”

My stomach turned to ice as I grasped what he was saying. “They are forming up a fleet?”

“We think so.”

“A much bigger fleet.”

“That stands to reason.”

I thought about that. The implications were beyond grim. “Here’s what I propose, General. I’ll direct my bases on Andros to produce more ships. Perhaps we can defeat them in the skies again.”

“Bases? You’ve got more than one?” he asked, clearly startled.

“It seems like a good day to put our cards on the table, General.”

“Yes, of course. But, I mean—you can build more ships?”

“Yes sir. Given time.”

“But you’ve been building more small arms instead?”

“Yes, but I think that will have to stop.”

“I agree. I see now, I should have told you this earlier.”

“Yes sir,” I agreed flatly. That was exactly the conclusion I had wanted him to make.

“Will you help us take out those last domes?” he asked. “As fast as possible?”

“Within—two days sir.”

“Two days… I’m not sure we can get our troops down there that fast.”

“I’ll send transportation help, sir. Mass your men. Give me their tonnage with equipment. We’ll airlift them down here starting now.”

“You’ve given me new hope, Colonel.”

“You’ve given me new fears, General.”

He hesitated.

“What else do you want to tell me, sir?” I asked.

“We’ve got another surprise we’ve been working on. The cruise missile brigades were fairly ineffective, but we’ve got a new support unit for you.”

“I’m glad to hear that, sir,” I said. And I was.

“Well, you might not like them. But they should get the job done.”

I frowned. I walked out toward my ship as we finished the conversation.

He was right. I didn’t like his new units. I didn’t like them at all.

-35-

It was a very tough two days, but I managed to pull together my battered marines. I had about ninety percent of my survivors back in the field and in respectable fighting shape. Most of that miracle was due to relentless rescue-ship forays to gather them from their scattered locations and the hardworking, thankless nanites who repaired their bodies. Men who were too far gone—mostly men with missing limbs—got to rest up back on the Falklands. The new recruits Kerr had so kindly created for me in my brief absence were spread around amongst the veteran units. The new men were green with their weapons and their new bodies. They tried to look tough, but they could tell by the quiet, haunted look in everyone else’s eyes that they were in it deep.

The men in my new unit, in particular, seemed chastened. They were proud to serve with me, I could sense that. But they were also worried. Stories must have circulated about the casualty rate in my previous command, which had been higher than any other battlegroup. I had to wonder if I had any flashy nicknames yet. I had heard a few muttered words in this vein. One was
The Blender
, which I found distasteful. I was sure about my unit name, however. We’d gotten the moniker of
Riggs’ Pigs
. I supposed it was the best I could expect.

This time, instead of splitting up my forces, I massed them under a single banner. I decided to use my ships for anti-missile cover this time. Crow thought I was mad, but I feared that my new strategy could be undone by a single enemy nuclear missile. We knew they had them, or at least they had used them from the ship when they had first invaded. Perhaps the invasion group didn’t have the power to build new nukes, but I didn’t want to assume such a thing. Maybe the only reason they hadn’t nuked us earlier was because we had been so scattered. Or maybe they hadn’t built a stockpile at that point. Another possibility was they hadn’t counted us as serious threat until we began taking out domes, and by then we were in too close to use such drastic measures without destroying themselves.

This time we would be openly advancing on them in a large formation. I didn’t want to learn about a new stockpile of warheads first hand as soon as we made our move. So I used ten ships, clustered toward our rear. They weren’t to engage with the ground forces. In fact, to prevent losing them, they had orders to pull back if the big Macros charged us. But if a missile barrage came our way, they were to take it out. This was crucial not just to prevent a nuclear strike, but also to protect my regular compliment of troops. Normal men couldn’t take a body full of shrapnel and recover in a few days.