Swarm (33 page)

We advanced with half my marines in the vanguard. If the Macros charged in at us, they would have to pass over them and be damaged. The rest of my marines, including myself, were intermixed with the regulars in the core of the formation. The regulars looked more nervous than anyone. They had good reason to be. Kerr had issued them shoulder-mounted rocket launchers rather than rifles. Bullets were useless against Macros of any size and regular men were too weak to carry effective lasers. The rocket launchers would only be useful against the worker machines we’d faced—not the big ones. When it came right down to it, I doubted these rockets could do much in combat, but we could hardly send the men in unarmed.

The most important element of our new forces consisted of armor units. They were an even number of American M-1 Tanks and Russian 2S19 ‘Mstas’, which were essentially self-propelled artillery units. The Mstas looked like tanks with extremely large cannons. They could lob a shell nearly twenty miles. It was their very large guns that had nominated these weapons platforms for this special duty. I wasn’t sure why they sent us Russian howitzers instead of American units, but I figured it was probably political. Or maybe the American units had been knocked out fighting earlier battles. In any case, they formed the center of my new strategy.

We marched with what seemed grim slowness. My own men bounded along at a slouching trot—perhaps ten miles per hour. Around us flowed the heavy machinery. We had to maintain a slow speed to keep the formation moving together without stragglers. We circled the forests and stuck to the plains. We avoided rivers and rocky areas. The going was steady, but seemed agonizingly slow. At any moment, we expected some form of attack. But for hours, none came.

The regular troops—poor bastards—rode in their personnel carriers with rocket launchers in their laps. I could only imagine the fear pounding in their hearts. It was one thing to be asked to die against another force of men. It was quite another to be a softie, facing death by laser and steel pincher, with no hope of surrendering to the merciless robot enemy.

The Macros didn’t come at us until nightfall. They’d learned a few things, I think. We couldn’t wear night vision gear in battle, not with the lasers we carried. Hence, our ancient weakness of poor eyesight haunted us. The enemy had no such qualms. They did not fear the dark, and with infrared sensors, they could see as well in the night as in the day. Our lasers didn’t seem to burn out their sensors, either.

We had not halted our advance during the night. I wanted to get to the shores of the Salado River, south of Buenos Aries. In the morning, we would cross at dawn. We’d honestly begun to relax, fractionally. It seemed clear the enemy wasn’t going to hit us, at least not until we traveled another fifty miles south and drew close to one of their precious domes.

We were wrong. They hit us when we nosed downward into the river valley. It wasn’t a sharp dip in the land, but it was enough to limit our visibility and our line of sight against approaching targets.

Enemy contacts,
the
Alamo
whispered into my brain. I had programmed her to do so, and I was very glad I did. She had seen the Macros before anyone else.

I opened the command channel and hailed all my unit commanders. “Enemy approaching. Halt the advance. Prepare everything we have to fire.”

How many?
I asked my ship.

Sixty-four major contacts. Five hundred twelve minor ones.

I didn’t have time to ponder the significance of the binary numbers of enemy. We were about to be overrun.

Range?
I asked my ship.

Six miles for the larger enemy. Zero for the smaller ones.

I almost blinked, but my eyes didn’t close, they widened. “Forward units, pull back! Defend the vehicles. We have diggers. They are under us. Repeat, we have diggers. Everyone watch your feet!”

Almost as soon as I said the words, the first screams and flashes of light began. Hundreds of machines bubbled up under us. Men who’d never seen a Macro before, fired and died with startling speed.

I decided to forget about the diggers. They were mostly a distraction. My men could take care of them. But the big boys were coming in a rush and in numbers I’d never seen. I was worried they were already too close to spring our big Russian surprise on them.

Alamo, pull back unless missiles—

Missiles incoming. ETA thirty seconds.

Another carefully timed strike from multiple angles. These machines loved to hit us all at once from every side.
Okay,
I told my ship,
take out the missiles, then pull back out of range of the
Macro anti-air fire.

Huge beams of energy stabbed out. Distant objects flared in the skies like fireworks. I heard roars and snapping explosions. Some of the barrage was getting through.

“Artillery commander!”

“Yes sir,” said a man with a Russian accent.

“As soon as you get a confirmed radar trace on a Macro, lay one of your special rounds on it. Fire a barrage of regular shells along with it for cover.”

“Cover? They can’t shoot down a shell, Colonel.”

“Obey the command.”

“Yes sir,” said the Russian. He sounded a bit huffy. I barely had time to mutter a curse before the Mstas roared in unison. The sound was extremely loud. The flashes were almost as bright as laser fire.

“Everyone who can, duck!” I roared, broadcasting over the general com channel.

An incredible flash went off ahead of us, to the south. The shockwave rocked the command vehicle I was in. A small tactical nuclear charge had gone off. I smiled. They hadn’t shot it down. Our hail of shells had been seeded with one atomic weapon. The Msta was an old, Cold War weapon. It had been built to fire nuclear shells back in the last century. Now, for the first time in history, it had performed its appointed task with devastating effect. My men gaped at this surprise for a few seconds, then worked quickly to button up their suits. Fallout was unavoidable at this range.

The charging line of sixty-four Macros never got to us. I’m not sure if they were all destroyed, or if the survivors had retreated. In any case, after mopping up the diggers and suffering relatively light casualties, we had won the battle. I couldn’t help but feel proud. The Macros were in a real fight now, a fight for survival. Unfortunately, our element of surprise was gone.

-36-

We reached the first dome in the morning. When scouts crested the crater around it, we were surprised to find no resistance. We approached it with all due paranoia anyway. I ordered my artillery to take out the missile battery that sat on top of it first. It sprayed missiles at us, but my ships shot them down. We fired shells at the battery until it disintegrated.

The place looked abandoned. I briefly toyed with the idea of attempting to capture the dome—or rather, the factory inside. But I thought the better of it. These machines had to be destroyed. We had no time to mess around with it. I ordered six companies of men to approach the dome from every angle. I sent in the companies with the most new recruits. What better time was there to learn about our enemy? I suspected the machines had pulled out of here because it was an indefensible position. If this was a dry run, if the enemy had decided to pull out and give us this one, then I figured I might as well get some training value out of it. I ordered the majority of my forces to withdraw beyond the crater rim. We would keep a sharp lookout for a surprise attack from an unexpected direction.

When the attack came, it was indeed a surprise. I think it was my withdrawal of forces that triggered it. Reviewing the transmitted video files later, it didn’t seem the boys I’d sent to their deaths had caused the Macros to make their move. My green troops hadn’t even made it half-way across the crater floor when things went bad.

First, the dome disappeared. It flickered, then fuzzed, and at last faded away to nothing. Inside the dome was the great machine we’d come to destroy, with several dozen smaller worker machines crawling over it. These workers were a new variety. Each of them had a delicate set of specialized instruments mounted on the front of their chassis. The glittering tools were finely-made, thin, silvery things that flickered and twisted in a blur of motion. At a distance, they resembled lawn-mower blades, or threshing machines. But I’ve since come to the conclusion these were fast-moving mandibles made of bright metal. We had spotted a new kind of machine I believe, their equivalent of a technician. Unfortunately, it was to be a very brief glimpse.

Seconds after the dome fizzled, everything else vanished, too. There was a tremendous white flash, like the birth of a new sun. The technician machines vanished. The great factory they had crawled upon like metallic maggots vaporized. Even the hard stony surface it sat upon, which had served to project the defensive dome, could not be found afterward. Needless to say, my six companies of green troops disappeared, too. A huge, roiling cloud rolled up into the sky after the thunderclap. It formed the telltale mushroom shape and stood thousands of feet tall. My main force was far enough away to survive. I think what helped was the crater rim itself. It served to direct the energy of the great blast upward, like a bomb going off in a dish.

After we’d pulled ourselves together and our nanites had healed our scorched skins, we headed toward the second of the last three domes. The regulars that had accompanied us had lost all trace of bravado. Fully a third of them had been blinded or burned so badly they were incapacitated. I flew those survivors out by Nano ship.

The machines let us approach the next dome unmolested. I sent scouts, looking for nuclear mines and the like. The enemy had shown the capacity to learn and surprise us. They also weren’t above using nukes. Perhaps they had shifted their construction efforts to producing them in quantity.

Three days later my cautious force was in sight of the dome. This one stood quietly, as had the last. It shimmered and gleamed, reflecting sunlight and shining with a seemingly sourceless inner power. My artillery commander contacted me as we halted to survey the scene.

“Sir? Request permission to begin ranged bombardment.”

“We’re too far out,” I told him. I raised binoculars to my eyes and swept the field, looking for any sign of the Macros. There was nothing to see. The
Alamo
had reported no traceable movement, either. The black ovoid ship hung above my army protectively, hovering like a guardian angel.

“Let me try, sir. If this is another trap, then they will have to show themselves. They can’t shoot down my shells if they hide underground.”

I considered the suggestion, and found it reasonable. We still had thirty nuclear-tipped shells in stock. We could afford to use a few on the dome. If nothing else, we could study the effects.

“Very well, fire at will. But only use one special shell in the barrage.”

“Yes sir.”

Within a minute, klaxons wailed. Men all around me hurried for cover. They knew we were far enough out to avoid a burn, and our goggles should save our eyes. But after having seen too many mushroom clouds lately they’d become cautious.

The first salvo arced into the sky. Too high, I was thinking. But the enemy did not come to life and cut them down. The salvo rained down upon the dome and tiny, popping spots appeared all over it, causing it to shimmer and shift color. Another heartbeat passed, and I wondered if the final shell, the special one, hadn’t gone off.

Then the flash came. A rolling boom of thunder shook the landscape. The mushroom cloud was relatively small, but it was big enough. When the livid flaming light had died down sufficiently I searched the area of impact with my binoculars, anxious to see the effects.

The dome still functioned. I was impressed, and raised my eyebrows. You had to give these aliens their due. They could take a beating.

I noticed, however, that the dome had changed in character. It now flickered and flared. It was a burnt orange in color. I lowered my binoculars and contacted the artillery commander.

“Fire again. Two more nukes this time.”

“We can’t fire two, sir, the first will cannibalize the second.”

“What?”

“Only one will go off because the one that hits first will destroy the other as it comes in.”

“Then lead with one, and fire the second right in there at the end of the salvo.”

There was a moment of hesitation. I could hear the commander speaking in Russian to his men. “I think we can manage that, Colonel.”

“Well then do it!” I shouted. “The damned dome is turning white again. And be ready with a third round in case the first two don’t quite do the trick.”

“Sir, do we really want to unleash that many—”

“Yes, damn you, we do. Now fire. That’s an order.”

“Yes sir,” said the artillery commander. He didn’t sound upset. I suspected he’d been yelled at by his superior officers before.

The second bomb had the same effect the first one had. But the third one did the trick. There was no need for a fourth. I had been ready to fire up to half my supply of weapons to finish that dome from a distance. I had no doubt the Macros had prepared something down there for us, something particularly nasty. But we never got the chance to find out what it was.

I lowered my binoculars and smiled at the flaming, smoky hole we’d dug into the farmland. This region might still be blasted a century from now, but at least the machines wouldn’t be ruling it.