Swarm

-29-

Brazil had been pretty much eaten up by the time I’d finally built a big enough assault force to go after the Macros again. The Pentagon boys had been after me night and day, with General Kerr spearheading the effort to get me to deploy. But I wanted to have a force that couldn’t be dealt with easily. I wanted to have a force that didn’t just slow the Macros, or stop them. I wanted a force that could shock them and roll them back.

I had a number of good officers to back me up by this time. Major Radovich was among them. He had advanced quickly from that first day. He’d been a great help to me in organizing and training the new waves of recruits. Sergeant Wilson had been promoted to Lieutenant. He had the job of performing tricks like the one I’d done on the first day. His only complaint was he’d been running out of trees to blow down lately.

After talking to Crow, I had changed my own rank to that of Colonel. It wasn’t really a high enough rank to command so many men, but I liked the sound of it and I didn’t want to take the title of General. I didn’t feel I’d earned it yet.

My marines were nearly six thousand strong when I told General Kerr I was ready. We began following our plans for invasion immediately. We’d long considered the best strategy to be an assault of the southern shores of the Rio de la Plata, the estuary bay along which Buenos Aires had once stood.

We planned to retake the ruins of the city first. Besides being defensible, the spot was only thirty miles from one of the Macro domes. After the initial invasion, another ten thousand traditionally-armed, supporting marines would join us, if we were not blown off the beach on day one. The generals had come up with the idea of hitting them behind their lines. Way behind. That way, the very distance from the front lines would be a problem for the enemy. They would have to turn around and march a thousand miles to face us. No one knew if they would bother.

They had advanced very quickly. For any normal force to do that, it must stretch its forces and supply lines more and more thinly and therefore defend its rear with less. We weren’t sure as to their capabilities to respond to a counterattack, but hitting the rear of the continent seemed like our best opportunity. If it turned out they had indeed expanded too quickly, without caution—well, that gave us a chance.

Our mission priority was to destroy whatever was underneath the white domes. The shimmering domes we understood to be big, permanently deployed shields. They stood like shining blisters upon our fair Earth. The Macros had deployed them all in the southern region and none had moved from their first appearance during the early days of the invasion. From these, periodically, new Macro fighting machines marched forth. From each dome a line of smaller, roving machines trailed to various mineral deposits. These smaller machines we called workers—the satellite guys had come up with that name.

The foraging workers tore girders from wrecked buildings, carried demolished cars and bicycles and sometimes raw ore from open mines. They carried our metals and other raw materials back to the domes. We didn’t know exactly what was going on under the domes, but we figured they had to be operating factories or fabricators of some kind. Something had to be making these new robots. The good news was there were only eight of them. The bad news was they were very well-defended. We knew that after the initial days of the invasion when we’d lost a number of Nano ships trying to assault them.

General Kerr gave me a final briefing as I rode down in the Alamo, air-lifting a landing pod with a full company of my own troops inside. We had gone beyond shoving them into cargo containers now, they were packed into landing pods. These pods were folding polygons of steel equipped with inch-thick armor, portholes and escape-hatches. NATO had come up with the design. They still looked like deathtraps to me, but I got to ride up inside the ship for the first leg of the journey.

“General, I think I have the plan down,” I said.

“Let’s go over one point,” he said, “those unstable reactors of yours….”

“Yes sir?” I said, playing dumb. We’d figured out it was very easy to set the reactors to overload and explode. I figured that had to be what he was talking about. I knew he didn’t like it, but I’d built in codes for each man to self-destruct on his own initiative. By entering a series of numbers, he could set his pack to explode. The resulting explosion wasn’t atomic, but it would be very satisfactory. About a kiloton of energy could be released by every man in my army. The General had insisted that the officers have enabling controls, and unless they had set them to active, one guy couldn’t decide to end it all and blow away half his battalion. I’d agreed to that design detail reluctantly. I trusted my men.

“You know what I’m talking about,” Kerr said. “I don’t want your officers to enable the destruct unless you can do some real damage to the enemy, not just to our own men.”

“We’re not idiots, sir,” I said, “and we have six cruise missile brigades with nuke warheads in every unit as well, if it comes to that.”

“Of course you’re not idiots,” Kerr snapped. I could hear in his voice he was trying not to get pissed—and he was failing at it. “What I want is your assurance that you will save such tactics for something important.”

“You have my assurance that we will do our damnedest to destroy every one of these frigging machines, General. That is the only assurance I can give you.”

He was silent for about seven seconds.

“Okay,” he said at last in defeat. “It’s your show, Riggs. But don’t screw the pooch this time.”

“I don’t intend to. Riggs out.”

I snapped off the com-link before he could say anything else. I threw down the headphones. They rattled on the computer table. They slid across the slick surface and banged on the decking beyond. I didn’t worry about them breaking. They could take it. They were army issue and very tough.

I sighed. What Kerr had meant was ‘don’t screw the pooch again’. Meaning he thought I’d done a bang-up job on said pooch last time I’d come down here. I hadn’t been in command then, but I still carried the blame in the minds of the Pentagon boys. I would have gone on stewing about it, but fortunately, there wasn’t time.

“ETA: Two minutes,” said the ship. The Alamo was on its final approach. I threw together my gear and stood swaying, watching the forward wall where colored metal beetles once again crawled in profusion. Fortunately, these beetles were all Nano ships on our side.

“Engage all enemy targets upon recognition,” I ordered.

“Weapons activated.”

Normally, when we approached Macros with our ships we gave them strict orders not to fire on the enemy except in self-defense. We didn’t want to lose ships pointlessly. We knew from experience the anti-air of Macro ground forces was superior to our Nano ship anti-ground capabilities. But this time, we had a precious cargo of troops to defend. If the Macros took a few shots at my ship, that was better than having them splatter the hundred helpless infantry in the landing pod that dangled beneath the ship. The Alamo was tougher than the landing pods and could repair itself after anything but a direct hit on the engines.

I had decided to land with the first wave. That way, I’d see firsthand if the rest of the troops should be committed, or if we should plan rescue efforts for the survivors instead. We had two hundred Nano ships involved. They were ferrying in troops from a flotilla of seaborne transports about seventy miles offshore, just over the horizon. At that range, the curvature of the Earth prevented laser weapons from stabbing out and hitting the sea transports. With each Nano ship carrying a landing pod full of one hundred marines, we would hit the insertion point in three waves and be fully deployed, six thousand strong, in about an hour.

We’d decided to land in the middle of the fallen buildings of Buenos Aires. The cover was better and with flying transports, we didn’t have to put our backs to the sea. According to some dry runs done at other points, they didn’t have much in the way of automated defenses to repel this kind of attack. They would have to send their land forces to meet us, which should halt their advance in the north immediately. We had high hopes they wouldn’t surprise us with something unforeseen in the first hours.

“Landing pod deployed,” said the ship.

I walked heavily into the cargo area. Below was the landing pod, looking like an octagonal, steel pressure-cooker. The ship’s black arm snaked back up toward me. I could see the men pouring out of all four exits in good formation. There was no defensive fire yet, but once they were in the rubble-filled streets they all ran for cover, expecting the worst. A hundred silver-suited ants flowed in every direction. I gritted my teeth. It was my turn to make my entrance.

Alamo, take me down to the group around Lieutenant Wilson.

The big, black hand gripped my waist, and in less than a second I was out in the open air again. I wished then, as I hurtled down toward the earth in a giant alien hand, that I’d given Sandra one more kiss. I’d left her behind at Andros. There was no place for her here. She was still only flesh and blood. We had talked over the idea of giving her the injections, but decided against it. She was young and wanted to have kids some day. No one knew what the nanites would do to a woman’s prospects of having a normal birth later in life. We knew they messed with cell structure and edited DNA. How far did it go? What side-effects might there be? She might already be genetically damaged after the first time she’d undergone a single repair effort. Neither of us had seen any point to taking more risks.

As soon as I had my feet on the ground again, I felt marginally better. Everyone said something along the lines of glad you could make it down, sir! I ignored them and got out my binoculars.

“No sign of the Macros?” I asked.

“No sir, we have the town to ourselves.”

“Well, don’t make dinner plans yet,” I said, and waved to Wilson. “Let’s move into the interior and take up better positions and dig in. The second wave may need cover fire.”

They didn’t hit us for nearly two hours. By that time, the second wave was down, we’d taken up positions all over the city ruins and the third wave was incoming—but the Macros beat them.

The missiles didn’t scream as they came down, but they did roar, for just an echoing second, before they went off. Fortunately, they weren’t tipped with nukes. We’d feared that they would be, right from the start. But so far, the enemy hadn’t used nukes except when the ones they’d fired from the big invasion ship, when they first landed. Maybe they didn’t have any nukes. Maybe they hadn’t seen the need to use one yet.

Our only anti-air systems consisted of the Nano ships themselves. But they weren’t due back with the third wave of troops for another seven minutes.

The Macro missile barrage lasted only about ninety seconds, but it was a rough minute and a half. In that short amount of time, about a hundred missiles hit us. They’d been fired from all over the continent the guys watching on satellite told us later, mostly from the domes themselves. They’d all been fired at different times, but carefully synchronized to arrive here and pound us with a single massive barrage. All we could do was crawl under concrete blocks, down into sewers and underneath the burnt out shells of cars.

When the missiles arrived, they didn’t smash down into the land and make craters. Instead they popped overhead in airbursts, exploding into a hundred showers of hot metal slivers. Our suits, made of Kevlar and lined with lead, absorbed some of this shrapnel, but not all. Almost everyone had a few bloody holes. Men crawled around the landscape, leaving bloody trails like pinpricked snakes.

I was hit in four spots. The one in the back of my neck was the worst. It had come in at a low angle under my hood and lodged itself up near the base of my spine. It burned there, cooking the flesh around it. The nanites in my system flocked to the damaged spots in my body quickly. I could feel them, itching and burning in the wounds. The bleeding stopped faster than normal, and within two minutes the punctures were only oozing. After four minutes, my wounds had stopped bleeding entirely. After half an hour, the shrapnel began to poke itself up out of my skin in places, like metallic bean sprouts bursting from the earth. The slivers slowly wriggled their way out as the nanites ejected them from my flesh.

After the initial barrage ended, there was a few minutes of relative calm. Everyone scrambled to reorganize and look around.

“Two thirds of our forces have landed, sir,” said Major Radovich after he found me, “but if they are going to hit us with barrages of missiles like that with any regularity, we can’t call in the support troops.”

I agreed immediately. I relayed the orders for the transports to hold back after the third wave of my nanite-infested marines. It simply wasn’t safe enough to bring in regular troops.

It was Staff Sergeant Kwon who sounded the alarm when the second stage of the enemy counterattack began. “Three machines, sir!” he roared in his deep, bass voice. He pointed to the west, then north. “And a fourth!”

The Macros were coming into the ruined city from all directions. Seven of them that arrived in the next few minutes. I figured they must have been running steadily to this spot since the moment they had detected our incoming attack.

In a strange way, this was a relief. This was the situation we had trained and planned for. Shrapnel bursts were hard to deal with for infantry, but these machines were the enemy we’d come prepared to destroy.

The men split up into companies, taking up sheltered positions. We had dug in where we could. We waited for the enemy to rush into us, and I for one was afraid they would stand back and pepper us with infinite waves of exploding missiles.

But they weren’t that much different from humans—in their military thinking, at least. They clearly thought of us as being the same men they had faced in previous battles. They had been fighting and slaughtering our kind for weeks now. Probably, they had the algorithm pretty well worked out by now for battles like this when they met a concentration of human troops. Pound us with missiles, then march in the machines to mop-up.

They scuttled and clanked right in over us and set to work with their sixteen belly-turrets spraying fire all at once.

Many men died, especially in the first minutes of the attack. They were stepped on, crushed down by thousands of tons of metal coming to a single, spike-shaped foot. They were overwhelmed and cooked alive by flaring releases of energy from the combined belly-turrets. No one, not even a man pumped full of nanites, could withstand more than a glancing hit from those fierce anti-personnel weapons.

But my men didn’t run. They deployed their goggles and portholed suits. They blazed out with gouts of light. One man, firing for less than a full concentrated second on a single turret could turn it to molten, burning slag. Once inside the individual shields of the Macros, if the machines faced a platoon, even a full organized squad, they were soon rendered defenseless. Always, their response was the same. They set about to stomp the men to death.

But my marines weren’t slow men. They dodged the thundering feet. They rolled and dove and kept firing up at the armored belly, the solid metal legs, the spheroid ball-joints. Metal melted like wax. Men died, but the machines were quickly crippled.

The Macros tried to run then, but it was always too late. My troops took off after them, bounding and whooping like hunters on the blood trail of a fatally wounded prehistoric beast. Each stride took us twice as far and fast as a normal man could run, even with our heavy loads. The machines could not escape us. We took great pleasure in burning the legs from under the machines and carving them up. The death throes ended with a fusillade of concentrated fire on the section we believed covered the CPU. Once we’d penetrated that zone of heavily-armored plates on any machine, burning our way to the circuitry and spinning gears inside, the Macro ceased to operate.

Seven of the giant machines died in five minutes. I had each captain report our losses. We were still ninety-five percent effective.

My men were jubilant, and we relayed the good news to the Pentagon. They told us more missiles had been fired on the far north of the continent. Within fifteen minutes, we were to be treated to another heavy barrage.

I allowed myself one minute to think hard while my men picked up the wounded and organized themselves. I came to a command decision. I thought—briefly—of talking it over with the brass back home, but there simply wasn’t time. We had to move now.

I got out a com-unit and talked to my men using the command channel. Every officer out there heard me in their headset. “Men, we’ve learned two things: we can kill Macros, and they can kill us. We can take out their machines, but these missiles are going to nail us to the ground if we stay in a concentrated area. We have to move out or be pinned down. I want every company to separate and I want ten companies to go for each of the six nearest domes. Your mission is to destroy whatever is under that dome, and every machine you meet on the way. I’ll personally lead the force toward the nearest one. The intel gained by my assault should help the rest of you in completing your missions. Now, let’s get out of this deathtrap of a city and scatter!”

The officers around me stood in stunned silence. I didn’t give them time to mull over these new orders. No one would like them, I was certain of that. Troops didn’t like heading out into hostile territory in small groups. Everyone knew that the machines might well come in packs and overwhelm a lone company. But I had no intention of sitting around in Buenos Aires and being pounded to death by missiles until they could gather enough machines to overwhelm us all. This was not going to be a traditional war, it was a war of maneuver and surprise. There were no reinforcements coming in soon—we were it. Right now, we had the initiative, and I meant to keep it that way.