Conquest

-31-

Kwon and I charged down an underground ramp toward bunker eleven. It wasn’t hard to find. The men there were fighting hard. I could hear their grunts, screams and blazing weapons up ahead. When we got there, we were already too late. The last marine fell in the hallway at the bottom of the ramp. His lower half was missing, having been removed by a team of Macros. They were operating in pairs now, one with a heavy weapon on the head, the second with two lobster claw-looking mandibles. I wondered if that was an upgrade they’d come up with just to deal with our battle suits. If so, it was alarming. They were adapting faster than usual to our tactics.

The dead man didn’t know he was dead yet, typical of my people. The upper half of his body fought on, gunning the robot that held him with one gun while the other weapon fired directly into the ceiling, hitting nothing. He was screaming and incoherent. Nanites were building a lower mesh to hold the last of his guts in, I knew, but I doubted he would live much longer. There were limits to what even my men could take.

Kwon and I knelt on the ramp and we concentrated our fire. More beams leapt out over our helmeted heads. At least ten beams caught the macro with the lobster claws and burned right through his armor in less than a second. He slumped down, releasing a gout of oily blue smoke that filled the cramped hallway. The men behind us hopped over our heads and pressed ahead. Kwon and I were right behind them.

The guy in the hallway was the last survivor. There had only been three guards down here, apparently. The other two had been expertly killed. Six more Macros were busy ripping my factory from its moorings. They’d cut through the Nano alloy flooring and a set of thick anchor bolts. The flooring flapped and squirmed where it had been cut open. Being smart-metal, it was upset at being out of contact with its fellow deck plates.

On the far wall was a gaping hole, large enough to allow two Macros abreast to walk through. That hole was way larger than it needed to be. I knew in a flash what the enemy plan was: they were trying to steal my machines.

Eighteen of us launched into close-quarters combat without hesitation. Kwon and I leapt together onto one of the cutter robots with the big laser on the head section. These were the type that cut our suits apart, while the lobsters held them down. Right now, it was busy tearing the factory unit free of the floor. We landed on it and slammed the flat of our weapon projectors against the enemy’s joints. After years of study, we’d found certain weak points in the enemy armor. Usually, these were just below the joints where the machine’s limbs attached to the central thorax. We put our weapons there and fired them, burning through the weak armor quickly. They had a team methodology for taking us out, and we had come up with our own approach.

The machine didn’t appreciate our efforts. It made the mistake of trying to scrape off Kwon first. He was much tougher to dislodge than I was, I could have told it that. Kwon hung on, grunting as he took hammering blows from flailing legs that should have crumpled him, armor or no. I hung onto my side and kept burning.

As always when fighting in an enclosed space, our vision quickly blurred. Our helmets had to dim our vision in order to keep us from being blinded by the intense radiation. Soon, we had to depend on the flashes of light coming from our weapons to see anything at all. The smoke wasn’t helping anything either.

The fight took less than two minutes to finish. We simply outweighed them in this case. Six Macros were no match for a platoon of my men in these new suits.

“Casualties?” I asked.

“Three in the room, one more out of my platoon, sir,” Kwon reported.

“Your platoon? What happened to the commanding lieutenant?”

Kwon gestured toward a mess on the floor. The lieutenant had been the single casualty in the platoon.

“Damn,” I said. “I’d had hopes for that man. He was young, but he had fire in his belly.”

Kwon didn’t answer. He was standing with most of the others near the hole the Macros had dug to get in here. I now figured I’d been a fool to put my factories down here in these bunkers. They would have been safer up topside inside their sheds. I shook my head, trying to erase the thought. What was done was done. I’d built my defenses to protect my assets against an aerial bombardment, and from the looks of the sky before I came down here, it looked like we might see an attack from above soon as well.

I looked around next for the half-man. He was dead already, bled out despite the best efforts of the nanites. If I’d had the Microbes that had saved Sandra, I would have dipped him into some of that goop and hoped for the best. But sadly, we didn’t have much that could reconstruct half a body from scratch. Especially not in the midst of a pitched battle.

“All right,” I said. “We have two choices. We can seal this up and let them have one factory, or we can stand here until they hit us again.”

“There’s a third option, sir,” said a voice from behind me.

I turned to find Captain Diaz standing there. “What’s that, Captain?”

He gestured toward the gaping hole in the wall ahead of us. “We can advance. We can go down there after them.”

“Do you have any idea of what a Macro hole looks like from the inside, Captain?”

“Only from vids, sir. Ones taken by your suit, I believe.”

I nodded. I had a habit of recording battlefield action for later training purposes. Most of my troops weren’t equipped with cameras and recording brainboxes.

I turned toward the hole. A sifting runnel of sand ran down the walls and vanished into the blackness. I stepped over to the hole and looked downward. It seemed like a vertical shaft, about a hundred yards deep. I didn’t like the look of it.

“There you are,” Sandra said, appearing at the doorway to the bunker. She pushed through the debris and came to look down at my side.

A private channel request came beeping into my helmet. I winced. It was from Sandra. She was standing right there, but she wanted to talk helmet-to-helmet. I hesitated a second before opening it.

“You’re thinking about going down this shit-hole, aren’t you, Kyle?” she asked. She sounded furious.

“The thought had crossed my mind.”

“You better give me a damned good reason right now, or I’ll cut you out of that suit and embarrass you in front of everyone by dragging up back up into the sunlight.”

“It’s Diaz’s idea, actually.”

“That bastard. Let him go down, then.”

I thought about it, then nodded. The point of this operation was to keep as many factories as possible. If I stayed with a fast-reaction central force, we could move and deploy wherever the enemy hit us. Still, going after them wasn’t a bad idea. I needed to employ both tactics. Coming to a quick decision, I turned to face the captain.

“Permission granted, Diaz.”

“Sir?”

I waved at the gaping hole. “Take this platoon and go down there. Cause havoc. With luck, you can disrupt their plans. If you live, I’ll give you a medal or something.”

“Uh, thanks sir,” he said. He shouted orders and headed toward the hole.

I reached out and grabbed his armored shoulder. “Send scouts around every corner first,” I told him. “And good luck, marine.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The platoon vanished down the hole less than a minute later. I kept Kwon and Sandra with me, and we trotted up the ramps. We were back in the sunlight again a few minutes later.

More bunkers were attacked soon thereafter. It became clear the enemy had no intention of attacking the base openly. They were only interested in the factories buried underneath it. We ended up fighting in seven more rooms full of Macros and thrumming factories. We repelled the enemy in every case. But in the last three fights, the enemy turned their fire upon the factory and destroyed it, even as we did our damnedest to take them out first. The change in tactics was alarming. If this continued all night long, there would be nothing left to defend.

In all that time, I didn’t hear anything from Diaz. I’d begun to suspect the worst. It was an hour after he’d disappeared into that first hole that we learned the truth.

The insight came when the ground bucked up under the command post. This time, it wasn’t just a little hiccup. The building heaved under our feet and the north wall sagged down, folding up on the ground under the weight of the observation deck and Kwon’s big feet. I rolled out onto the ground in the middle of the base.

Out in the forest around us, hundreds of trees heeled over and fell like dying men. Puffs of dust and debris rolled out of every entrance to the underground bunker system.

Sandra strained and lifted my battle suit into a standing position. Together, we dug Kwon out of the rubble.

“What the hell was that?” Sandra demanded.

“Felt like one of ours,” I said.

“Radiation signature matches, sir,” Kwon said, checking his gauges. “It must have been Captain Diaz.”

“He blew himself up?” Sandra asked.

“He blew the enemy up,” I corrected her sharply. “I’m sure he dealt the Macros a fatal blow with his self-sacrifice.”

I walked away from them. I wasn’t sure Diaz had done any such thing, but it sounded good, and I would keep on saying it to anyone who asked me. I’d been down a few holes full of Macros myself, and there were plenty of reasons to blow yourself up in that situation. Who was I to say whether Diaz had made the right decision or not? I’d give him the benefit of the doubt, no matter what had really happened down there.

As it turned out, the enemy stopped coming after the explosion. As best we could tell by our mapping of the tunnels using sonic sensors on the surface, the enemy was either all dead from cave-ins or they’d retreated from the explosion. I suspected the explosion, which had been a low-yield atomic blast, had collapsed their tunnels for miles. I imagined the machines down there in the dark, squirming and grinding under the weight of a million tons of loose earth. The image brought a grim smile to my face. If Macros could suffer pain or feel loss in any form, I wished to heap it upon them.

Almost as clear a signal of our success was the change in the enemy behavior on other fronts. They’d come up outside the walls of Fort Pierre, which had a much thicker underground net of nanite threads to protect it. So far, they’d yet to hit the walls, but they were massing in the forests and our men had retreated inside the fort itself. What were they waiting for? I wasn’t sure, and neither was anyone else.

Less than an hour later, however, we had our answer. Red contacts appeared on our boards marching up out of the sea. Hundreds of them. This wouldn’t normally be alarming, except for one thing: their size. These weren’t worker Macros.

It had been a long time since I’d run into their real ground-invasion hardware. These were hundred-foot tall invasion bots—monsters taller than the trees themselves. They had yet to surface, but they were marching underwater all along the entire eastern seaboard.

My scalp itched as I absorbed this news. Once again, I’d missed the bet. I’d built systems to repel an aerial attack and they’d used sappers to dig underneath me. I’d built walls around Fort Pierre to slow down a thousand car-sized, worker Macros, and now they were attacking with behemoths that could step over those walls without a qualm.

I wanted to rub my face and my hair, but I couldn’t. My helmet prevented such relief, and I wasn’t going to take it off now.

“What are we going to do now, Kyle?” Sandra asked me. “This fight is over, I think.”

I looked around the base. I had to agree with her. I found the captain of the reinforcement company and briefed him quickly. He was the senior officer after me, so I gave him command of the garrison.

“Oh, and captain,” I said as I boarded my flitter with Sandra beside me. Kwon was up front, piloting.

“Sir?”

“If the Macros break through again—don’t chase them down their holes. Not unless you really want to know what’s down there.”

“Uh, no sir.”

We lifted off and headed east.

“Where to, Colonel?” Kwon asked me.

“Head for the center fort,” I said. “I want to know if we can target the beach with those big guns.”

Kwon swung the aircraft around sickeningly. In seconds, we were skimming over the dark treetops. The palm fronds whipped and rattled as we whizzed past.

The Moon was a rising crescent that hung over the sea to the east, right behind the advancing enemy lines. The crescent was mirrored in the ocean below the Moon, forming a wavering silver reflection. I took a moment to stare at the ancient light of Earth’s only natural satellite, marveling at its timeless beauty. I wondered how many human battles it had witnessed and how many more it was destined to observe before the last of us was snuffed out.