Conquest

-35-

The machines made their next move shortly after dawn. I doubt they planned it for that time, that’s just when their final tunnels breached and Macro diggers swarmed out of their holes. They had brought all their underground units to encircle Fort Pierre. Since they weren’t able to dig through our underground defenses, they came up outside the walls and rushed us from every side.

The big machines began to move then, standing up from their dormant states and forming groups of their own. They marched forward, all surging toward Fort Pierre. I nodded to myself, blinking sleep from my eyes. Typical Macro behavior. They often waited for a crucial tipping point, then slammed everything against a critical juncture. Unfortunately, in this case the juncture was the base I was standing in.

We’d had some forewarning this was their plan. The underground movements showed they were massing more troops under us all the time. They had already knocked out our heavy weapons, weakening us against the big machines.

I had my helmet off. Barrera and Sandra leaned over the table with me. Everyone had dark circles around their eyes. I’d learned the delicate art of scratching my cheek with battle gloves on, and employed it now. I winced as a few hairs of stubble were caught and yanked out. But I was successful. No skin had been removed, and the itch had been vanquished.

“Barrera,” I said, “what do you think we should do in this situation?”

He shrugged and eyed the boards speculatively. “Fight on the walls. That’s why we built them.”

“Can we hold the walls against the tunnelers?”

“Probably.”

“And when the big machines come racing up behind them, what then?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. They’ll step right over the walls. We’ll be overrun.”

“Major, have you ever been underneath an invasion Macro with all sixteen of its belly turrets spraying fire down onto your troops?”

Barrera shook his head. “No, sir.”

He was looking at me now, warily. The others followed his lead. They all stared at me. They knew I had an idea in my head, and that I was bringing them around to making the same conclusion I had. I could tell from their expressions they doubted they would like my conclusion.

“No, you have not,” I said. “None of you have. I can tell you, it is an unpleasant experience, one you will never forget should you be so lucky as to survive. We can’t sit here and wait for them to hit the walls. Not all of us. We have to go on the offensive. Small units will hunt the big machines in the deep forest.”

“Small units?” Barrera asked.

“In the forest, sir?” Major Sarin asked. “Why?”

“Small groups are harder to focus on and wipe out. If they try, we will have succeeded in distracting them and keeping them off the main base. We’ll meet them out in the forest because I don’t want to set off even a small nuclear device inside these walls. And that is how we are going to have to stop them, people—by going nuclear.”

Out of nowhere, Kwon clanked up to my side. He banged his hands together with an ear-punishing ring of metal striking metal. “When do we fly, Colonel?”

I saw the excitement in his eyes and I had to smile. Everyone else in the room looked faintly sick at the prospect of combat with giant robots, but not Kwon. He had signed up with Star Force to kill machines. He never tired of it.

“We’ll send out half the garrison. That should leave you with more than a thousand marines to man this base. Don’t lose it, Lieutenant-Colonel.”

“I’d like to command one of those units, Colonel,” Major Sarin said.

I looked at her in surprise. “Have you trained with the new battle suits?” I asked.

Her lips drew tight. “No, sir. I haven’t had time. I’ve been on ops since—”

“I know,” I said. “I put you on ops. But I wouldn’t send you out in any case, Major. No one is more critical to this operation than you are, and I need you right here running this command screen.”

I watched Jasmine’s face. She wasn’t happy, but she wasn’t going to say anything. I could practically hear her thoughts. She was angry I’d told her she needed command experience, then denied her the chance to get it when the opportunity arose.

I caught Sandra glaring at the two of us and frowned. I could tell she was becoming jealous again. If we didn’t all die in the next twenty-four hours, I planned to assign one of these two women to a new base on the Moon.

“Is there any reason why you have to go personally, Colonel?” Sandra asked me, speaking up for the first time.

“Kwon and I have taken down more of these machines than most. At last count, only five hundred of our Star Force marines are veterans of the South American campaign. If you are thinking of my personal safety—don’t bother. This base, even this bunker, will not be any safer than the forest. Possibly, it is a deathtrap.”

Sandra backed off, and everyone looked grim as my words sank in.

“Colonel,” Barrera said, “as your second in command, I’ve seriously considered your plan. I think you are making the right decision.”

If anyone else had said it, that man might have been called a kiss-ass. But everyone here knew Barrera didn’t kiss anyone’s butt, not even mine. The decision was made without further debate and within three minutes I had my helmet on and was jogging up toward the surface. Kwon clanged ahead while Sandra ran lightly behind me.

Sandra sent me a private message, helmet-to-helmet. I opened the channel.

“Did you ever think, Kyle, that Barrera might be the one behind the assassinations?”

“No,” I lied. To tell her yes, I had thought such a thing, might unnecessarily threaten the life of my second in command.

“Well, you should. Maybe he thinks your idea is crazy. Maybe he wants you to go out and get yourself killed.”

She snapped off the channel after that, and I briefly thought about her concerns. I couldn’t think of anything to do about them at the moment, so I dropped those worries from my mind. Assassins were small matters in comparison to the robots we were now going to engage. That was one detail where I’d bent the truth. By any sane measure, it was safer to stay in the fort. I would have ordered Sandra to stay behind if I’d thought I could get away with it.

We gathered a team of men, bringing along Captain Sloan as the company CO. Kwon shouted most of the orders, seemingly giving them before I had time to pass them down. He was an excellent non-com, the kind that had a mental link to his officer. Again I thought I should promote him to lieutenant, but I knew he wouldn’t feel completely comfortable in that role. More importantly, he didn’t want it. Kwon wasn’t interested in rank. He was interested in killing machines. From his viewpoint, today was going to be a dream come true.

We flew low, only a foot or so off the ground. Single-file, we glided through the forest. Only Sandra was on her feet, as disinterested as she usually was in wearing a heavy battle suit. She could run as fast as we could fly between the trees, so it wasn’t a problem. Sloan led the point squad while Kwon, Sandra and I accompanied the second squad of the three. We wended our way northwest, then swung back to the east, hoping to hit the Macros’ right flank. We could tell we were getting close when the bird sounds cut out. Soon thereafter even the insects fell silent, saving their humming and buzzing for a safer day.

My helmet radio squawked, and excited words from the lead squad spilled out. There was no need for elaboration; we’d obviously made contact with the enemy. A series of rapid cracking sounds approached as a dozen trees were shocked by powerful impacts. The sounds were distant at first, then swooped closer and closer. I could see treetops ahead, bending forward as if they’d been battered by a passing giant. In a way, that was exactly what occurred.

The first squad engaged the monster with flashing laser fire. Trees smoked and burned. The crashing legs of steel, visible only in flashes up ahead, slowed and turned with a loud mechanical whirring sound.

Following our simple, but precisely-timed plan, my group didn’t charge ahead underneath the enemy as the first squad did. We took up what cover there was and fired our beamers up at the monster that darkened the forest like a passing cloud.

The machine looked bigger than I remembered. Those six churning legs were each as massive as a dozen tree trunks and formed of scarred, dull metal. Atop the towering, swinging legs was the vast body. Like a crab’s carapace, it was curved, but unlike any natural beast it bore sixteen belly-turrets to deal with irritants such as ourselves. The turrets blazed, sending ripples of blinding flashes down at my troops.

Sloan and his squad had what was easily the least enviable job of the unit. They were to get underneath the machine and dodge the legs and turrets. They were to fire and attract attention, but it didn’t really matter if they hit anything. The important part for them was to keep moving. The enemy turrets took nearly a second to lock onto a man and pour down streams of deadly fire. If you kept moving, you were much harder to hit.

It was our job, standing back with the second and third squads, to bring down the machine. My plan was to do so by focusing fire on the legs and ignoring the belly turrets. If the machine was flat on the ground, the turrets were useless anyway.

“Target is right-center leg, the one caught up on that big pine. Fire on my mark…mark!” I shouted.

My two squads had two heavy beamers each, one in each arm. Nearly forty streaks of energy flashed out to slice into the thick metal. First, a gush of vapor and plasma erupted from the leg. Dozens of lines were being cut into a single spot, a single massive joint. The metal soon turned orange and curled, opening up with curving lines as our lasers sliced into the outer hull. After a second, we cut the beams.

I squinted through the smoke and saw the machine was limping on that one leg, but it wasn’t down yet. I saw it catch one of Sloan’s troops with three turrets at once. Two others swung in our direction and raked our tree cover with suppressing fire. Men ducked and cursed all around me. Some returned fire, aiming at the turrets.

“Stay on target!” I roared.

I heard Kwon echo my command. He cuffed two helmets and strode around the crouched men as if the enemy Macro couldn’t hit him on a bet.

“Right-center again, fire!” I shouted.

The beams leapt out—more ragged than before, but still on target. The machine buckled and tipped down. One leg was useless. It couldn’t walk with that leg, but it could still use it as a club. Flailing, it caught another of Sloan’s squad and smashed him into the earth like a hammer driving a nail.

I called a new target. We repeated the procedure until three legs were incapacitated. This was when things became dangerous. The machine still had big weaponry on its back. Since it was tilting as its far set of legs struggled to stand up again, the weapons on its back were directed toward us. I gave the order to disperse as rockets and anti-air lasers ripped up the landscape around us. Each squad ran in the opposite direction, circling around to come to the other side of the machine.

“Let’s finish it, sir,” Kwon said, breathing hard.

I looked at him, understanding his eagerness. It had been a very long time since we’d killed one of these big Macros. To us, these would always be the real enemy, the kind of machines we had nightmares about.

“We’re sticking to the plan, First Sergeant.”

“What if it doesn’t work?”

“Then we’ve screwed up. Set the charges.”

We laid our four mines—it was more than necessary, but we wanted to be sure. They had proximity fuses with timers. Once another metallic object of sufficient mass came near, the timer would begin ticking. We set it for one minute. It was a guess, really. Hopefully, it would do the job.

As we glided away from the scene of our raid, we could hear more crashing, more snapping tree trunks. The first machine had called its brethren for aid.

“What if they repair it?” Captain Sloan asked me. “I don’t want to think I lost three men for nothing.”

“In the South American campaign, we lost a hundred to every machine we knocked out, and that was only after we figured out how to do it right,” I told him.

“We could have at least disarmed it, sir,” Sloan complained.

“If we had, the Macros wouldn’t bother to come help.”

“Proximity fuse is reporting, sir,” Kwon said. “It’s been triggered.”

“Fly everyone!” I roared. “Thirty more seconds, then hit the deck. Look for a depression in the ground to hide in. Watch the trees, if they come down on you, you will be crushed, armor or no.”

Men scattered, whizzing ahead through the trees. I watched a man hit his helmet on a low branch and go into a spin. He flopped on the ground, senseless. There was a dent in his helmet. The smart-metal helmet uncreased itself as I watched, but the damage had been done. The equipment was better at taking laser-fire than hard blows from solid objects.

Cursing, I grabbed the red-lit private by the leg and dragged him another hundred yards through the forest before I threw myself down beside Sandra. She’d found a hole to crouch in. I climbed over her body, realizing for the first time her nanite suit wasn’t really adequate to the kind of shockwave we were about to experience.

“Stay under me,” I said, and tried to cover her with the hard shell of my metal armor. She grunted at the weight, but didn’t complain. I pulled the limp private after me, not sure if he was dead or alive. In either case, he would serve to keep my girl breathing.

A blinding flash of light swelled up behind me. I didn’t look. I didn’t have time to take a breath.

The shockwave hit then, and the forest went down all around me like matchsticks. I lost consciousness, and when I reawakened, the world looked different.