Swarm

-16-

I seriously needed a shave by my fifth day aboard the Alamo. Maybe, I thought, the pirates of the old days were depicted with wild frothing beards because they were sitting on ships without any easy way to shave, just as I was.

Pierre had been—interesting to talk to. He was entertaining. He was the life of the party. He presented everything in the best light, even the growing ground war in southern Argentina and Chile. He called it a learning exercise, and said it was good for humanity.

“This war will end all other wars, I tell you,” he said on my private channel to his ship, the Versailles. “Why? Because man will not fight man when there are much scarier things out there that want to kill us all.”

Pierre often talked like that, he would first ask a question, then answer it himself. I had to admit, it worked. Everyone found him persuasive.

“All right Pierre, don’t give me that theory again.”

“Theory? You call it a theory? No, you cannot use that term. It is demonstrable fact, not theory. Even now, forces that a week ago refused to accept one another’s existence are sending troops to fight this new menace as allies. Ancient enemies will stand shoulder-to-shoulder and fight these machines to the death.”

“I’m sold, man,” I told him, not wanting to argue any further. “Let’s talk about the big meeting.”

“It is tonight, at six PM Eastern Time. I will meet alone with the US government official.”

“Only one man, right?”

“Exactly as we discussed. The Senator—Kim Bager—she has agreed. She will send only one man. We must be recognized as a new sovereign nation. We must have formal relations with the governments of Earth.”

Sandra spoke up. “You should not meet him alone, Pierre.”

“Don’t worry about me, lovely Sandra.”

I glanced at her. I wasn’t sure how Pierre knew, but she did look even better than usual today. Fresh clothes and a wash had done wonders. Her hair was clean and shiny. Up until now, I’d only seen her in a bedraggled state. I’d managed to put together that shower setup I’d promised her. A few nights of real sleep hadn’t hurt her, either.

“We will back you up, Pierre,” I said. “We’ll only be a few miles away.”

“Don’t frighten them! I don’t know how high level this person will be, but he is supposed to be empowered to speak for the government. He will be coming in alone and unarmed. He must be brave to dare to face the ship’s tests.”

“How brave? He’s been briefed on what to do. When he fails, the ship will just dump him out onto the grass of a park in Alexandria. Then you can pick him up again.”

“You and I know that, Commander,” said Pierre. “But this new brave soul doesn’t. To him, he enters the very cave of the lion. Don’t you recall the great fear in your heart when the ship lifted you up in its alien embrace for the first time? I know you can’t have forgotten that moment of terror.”

“I was feeling pissed off at the time, actually.”

Pierre laughed easily. It was another of his habits. When a conversation went in a direction that he didn’t want it to, he would laugh it off, and then switch topics.

“Commander, I ask that you stay well back. Give diplomacy room to breathe.”

“It’s your show, Pierre. I’m just riding shotgun, here.”

Pierre laughed nervously. “Such a quaint turn of phrase you have. I must go now and prepare for my guest.”

We broke the connection.

“He trusts his quick talk too much,” said Sandra. “He thinks he can talk his way out of anything.”

“Maybe he can,” I said. “He talked Crow into making him an ambassador, didn’t he?”

I went back to watching the news with Sandra. The news had never, in my memory, been so interesting. In space, everything was eerily quiet. No new attacking Macro ships had come. Some of us had begun to speculate that the space invasion was over, that the Macros would watch and see if their ground troops could take us out alone before they risked more ships attacking Earth. Personally, I didn’t buy that line. Maybe they had run out of invasion ships, maybe not. But I was sure that as long as they could, these robots would keep coming at us. Computers are tenacious. I used to tell my students they could drop something as small as a pencil in the open doorway of an elevator. Those doors will ding and try to close, but detect the pencil and stop themselves. Come back an hour later, and if no one has picked up the pencil, they will still be dinging and sliding those doors almost shut. They will never give up. That’s how I expected the Macros to behave. They would be relentless.

We’d been watching them for a couple of days. Using internet broadcasts on portable computers, we’d watched several battles. The Macros were the very opposite of the Nanos. They were huge. The big ones, built for battle, were over a hundred feet tall. But they weren’t uniform in size, shape or even function. Many were smaller and performed other tasks which we did not fully understand yet. Most of them walked on six legs like giant, headless insects. But these were metal insects as big as buildings. They had good air defenses, unfortunately for our Star Force ships. We could destroy them, but it cost us too much. Just by flying close, our ships automatically fired every weapon they had. But the Macros carried SAMs on their backs, and after the first few engagements we had realized we were losing ships as fast as they were losing giant, crab-like robots.

We had withdrawn, giving up on the idea of fighting them directly. Crow and I had decided that it was the job of Star Force to destroy the Macros before they landed. If we failed, it was up to Earth’s troops, ships and planes to do the rest.

So far, the Macros were doing most of the destroying. Argentina’s military had put up a big ring of defenses around a southern coastal city named Trelew. The fighting there had raged for a full day. Looking at the video, I had to figure our side had lost badly. They just didn’t have enough heavy equipment down there. They needed armor divisions, modern ones.

In the air, we did better. One carrier group sent by the US had reached the region. A few British ships stood in support. Argentina had never had much of a navy of its own, but their ships had shelled the Macros until they’d been sunk.

Internationally, the defense effort was ongoing. The Earth militaries didn’t trust us at all, I could tell that from the news broadcasts. They called us things like ‘the initial invasion forces’. Or the ‘space raiders’. Trust had grown between the various panicked governments of Earth, however. Pierre was right about that. Everyone had air-lifted in what they could. Chinese, NATO and even a few Russian planes had joined the fight. Squadrons of fighter bombers and helicopters were dying hard, led primarily by US forces. But it would be weeks before Earth had a significant ground army in place. By then, the enemy would have marched north to the ruined cities of Santiago and Buenos Aries.

For me, the scariest things were the mysterious domes. There were precious few reports about them. But I could tell they were special. The Macros left them behind as they advanced. Nobody knew why. White things, they were. Huge white domes each as big as a football stadium. Parabolic in shape, the domes were like dinner plates, flipped over and left lying in flat areas of open land. Under them, we knew something was happening, but no one knew what.

Pierre communicated one more time that night. A call came in as I watched massive spiked legs knock down the last, burning buildings of Trelew. It was like watching a Godzilla movie, except we were up against about a hundred metal Godzillas—and we didn’t have any cool monsters of our own to stop them.

I’d stopped thinking about Pierre and the diplomacy he was doing nearby until he tried to contact me. The Alamo asked me if I would take a private call from the Versailles, and of course I said yes. But there was no one there. Just a strange, crashing sound. More noises followed. I heard what sounded like a scrabbling, and a heavy thud.

“Pierre? What’s going on?”

No answer.

My eyes flicked to the big board. Pierre’s ship was still there. His was a golden beetle very close to the cool, metallic-jade bump that represented my own ship.

A whispering voice came over the channel then. It was a stranger’s voice. “Computer, turn off all communications.”

“Command unclear,” said Pierre’s ship.

Sandra and I looked at each other. Whoever it was at the other end of that radio channel, they didn’t know how to address the ship.

“We can hear you. You killed our ambassador, didn’t you?” asked Sandra. She glared at the walls around us, as if the owner of the voice might be hiding behind them.

“Shit,” whispered the assassin.

“I hear you,” I said. “What have you done with Pierre?”

“Ship, I’m renaming you Delta. Respond,” said the stranger. We could barely make out the words. The assassin wasn’t speaking up. I was hardly surprised.

“Ship renamed,” said Pierre’s ship—which was no longer Pierre’s.

“You will not survive our next battle,” I said, “let me assure you of that, whoever you are.”

“Delta, turn off all communications,” hissed the stranger’s voice. That was the last transmission we heard.

Sandra spent the next few minutes fuming and pacing in a rage. I didn’t blame her. I sat silently, brooding. The problem was we couldn’t do much about it. We couldn’t really have saved Pierre, even if we wanted to. Our ship wouldn’t let me get out to help. It wouldn’t fire on one of its own kind, either. So, now we had a traitor in our midst. We had someone who did not belong. A usurper. A murderer.

It was one thing, I told myself, to be pulled up into one of these ships against one’s will and forced to undergo the tests blindly. It was quite another to sneak aboard under false pretenses with cheating knowledge of how to beat the tests. Then, as a final crime, this person had killed the original owner, fully knowing they were stealing the ship.

“Alamo, take us close to the Versailles. Follow it whereever it goes.”

On the big board, I watched as our two contacts merged. The ship, now renamed Delta, had not moved. It wasn’t so easy to figure out how to talk to one of these machines. We had a little time, I figured, but not much.

“Kyle,” said Sandra, eyeing me, “you should report this to Crow.”

“What’s he going to do about it?”

“I don’t know.”

I was in a dark mood. I’d become more of a brooder since my kids had died. I didn’t take well to bullshit like this—if I ever had. What was the government thinking? Here we were, offering them aid in an interstellar war. They had no other allies. Sure, we had robbed a few malls and a few people had died by attacking our ships. But that was nothing compared to the Macros. They were engaged in extermination. They would kill millions—maybe more.

So what had happened? Had Kim Bager ordered it? I doubted that. Had some independent spook-group gotten a wild hair? Maybe. Or maybe a single agent had decided they wanted one of our ships. I didn’t know how it had happened, but it ate at me the more I thought about it. This killing meant we couldn’t trust Earth anymore. I could never go home, no matter how this played out.

I decided something then, as I brooded about it. I decided I was going to find out what the hell was going on.

“Alamo,” I said loudly. “I wish to undergo the injections.”

“What?” Sandra asked, almost shouting. “What are you doing, Kyle?”

Immediately, five black snake-arms lashed out. Three rippled into being from the ceiling and two more came up from the floor. They wrapped around each of my limbs. The third one to drop down from the ceiling circled my neck, but not so tightly that it choked me.

“It’s the only way, Sandra,” I said quietly.

“Don’t do it.”

“Look, I can’t even touch you. I can’t exit this ship. I don’t want to live like this. I’ll take the injections and if they are really horrible, maybe I’ll drown myself or something.”

She looked at me strangely. “You aren’t doing this for me, are you?”

“Aren’t you tired of wearing a leash?” I asked, smiling slightly.

The five arms tightened and stiffened. I looked around, straining my neck to see what they were doing. I had expected, for some reason, to see a dripping needle with a plunger descend out of the ceiling of the ship. That wasn’t how it happened. Instead, the same cable-like arms that held me grew silvery tips. I realized, looking at them, that they were the needles. Why not? The arms were made up of nanites and the point was to inject them into my body, so why not simply form a point, liquefy a number of them and puncture the skin?

I began hoping this wouldn’t hurt too much. My hopes were faint. Five injections? The needles looked as thick as screwdriver tips. I wanted to squirm, but couldn’t.

“This process will temporarily shut down the ship’s command personnel. Confirmation required.”

I hesitated.

“I don’t trust the Nanos, Kyle,” said Sandra. She came close, and the ship restrained her. I was tired of that.

“We’ll figure a way, Kyle,” she told me, getting her face as close to mine as the ship would allow. “We’ll make love if that’s what you want, some day.”

I took a breath and looked at her. I did want her. But that wasn’t the only reason I was doing this. “A government killer took Pierre’s ship. If Earth thinks they can do that, they might try to assassinate each of us in turn and replace us with loyal people. If they get away with it, they’ll do it. I can’t let them have an easy win. We have to move against them now.”

Her eyes widened. I could see that she had begun to grasp the magnitude of my plan.

“You—you are going to board Pierre’s ship? You are going to go after that assassin? You don’t even have a gun!”

“Wish me luck,” I said. I tore my eyes away from her face. The look in her eyes, the horrified stare, wasn’t doing anything for my self-confidence.

“Alamo, command confirmed. Proceed with the injections.”

Driving, hot pain. White hot. Blurring.

I could see, and I could still scream, until the arm that wrapped around my neck looped itself around my chin and skull. The neck needle was the worst, I think. It dug into my flesh. It drove in—worming. It wasn’t the burning stuff it pumped into me that was the most painful. It was those five worming needles. I felt each of them squirming inside my body at five different points, like a team of steel tentacles they rooted around for a thick artery upon which to implant themselves.

I felt blood and sweat run everywhere from my lanced open skin. The Alamo was a machine. It knew no bedside manner, no gentleness. No mercy.

I could not open my mouth to scream, but my lips were fluttering with blasts of heaving breath. I snorted through my nostrils and made long nasally screeching sounds using those twin, tiny outlets. I tasted metal in my mouth and smelled it in my sinuses. The pain went on and on, spreading in a dark burn throughout my body.

I felt them when they reached my spine. They felt like a thousand ants with electric spikes for feet. I felt them when they reached my guts, too. I was filled with gallons of boiling blood.

And at last, I felt them reach my skull. As my eyes filled with glinting flecks and my vision dimmed to nothing, I lost consciousness.