Swarm

-32-

Communications were reestablished an hour after the dome fell. The Pentagon people had landed repeating stations on the continent. It wasn’t as good as satellite coverage because we were still blind to enemy movements, but it was better than nothing. We could at least coordinate our actions.

I relayed our bloody success story to the other commanders. They took the news with grim determination. Each assured me they would reach their target domes and destroy them, just as my unit had. I told each of them in turn that I had faith in them—which I did. And that I knew they would succeed—which I didn’t.

My battlegroup had taken too many casualties to be an effective force now. About twenty percent of our survivors were too badly injured to move at all. But I didn’t want to leave anyone behind. I was one of the ones on the incapacitated list, but that wasn’t important. I figured my unit was out of the fight now.

Major Radovich had different ideas.

“Sir,” he said, crouching next to me where I leaned against the broken strut of a dead Macro. “I know with normal men in normal battle, marines don’t leave their own behind. But this is different.”

“And how exactly is it different?” I asked Radovich. I looked at him with bleary stubbornness. My nanites were working hard on the dose of shrapnel I’d gotten during my close encounter with a Macro missile, but they weren’t finished yet. I was still bleeding, inside my suit. I could feel blood oozing down my legs and pooling at the bottom of my suit when I sat down or leaned against something. I was surprised the nanites hadn’t completely contained the bleeding. All the hurrying around must have reopened the tears in my skin. I’d never been so seriously wounded. Not even when my arm had been burnt were things as bad as this. The metal slivers had pierced me in a dozen spots like bullets. I would have never survived this long if it hadn’t been for the nanites in my body. They were working overtime. They itched like a thousand hot grains of sand, each one determinedly rubbing its own personal nerve.

“This situation is different,” he repeated, “because if we leave these wounded, they won’t sicken and die. They will grow stronger with each hour, until they are mobile again.”

“If it comes down to it,” I told Radovich, “I’ll put you in charge and stay behind with the wounded men. I’m one of them, after all. But I don’t think it will come down to that.”

“We have nearly two full companies left,” said Radovich. “I could lead them to the next dome and support Anderson. Two companies might make the difference between success and failure, sir.”

I blinked at him, thinking about it. Negative thoughts loomed in my mind. Was he just looking for glory? Did he want his own command to participate in another successful assault? I didn’t think so. Besides, what difference did it make if that was in his mind? He could have his glory, if he earned it. The point was to decide if he was right or not. We had to kill these domes. They were building new machines, one every day maybe. They had to be stopped. Once we took out the domes, we had won. We could then hunt down every last Macro, driving them off our world. We might not win the war, but we would have won another battle.

“Sir, please think,” said Radovich. “What use was all this? Why did all those good men die if we don’t succeed?”

I decided, looking at him, that he meant what he said. I nodded. “You’re right. We’ll take up a spot with good cover, and wait for our bodies to heal ourselves. We have plenty of weapons systems.”

Radovich looked surprised. Maybe he wasn’t used to commanders who changed their minds in the face of logic. “Very good sir. Very good. I….” he said, then trailed off.

“I wish you well too, Major. I want you to take the com-unit, you will need it more than I will. Now get all your effectives together and destroy another dome for me.”

“I will, sir!” he said, and saluted me.

I felt I should get up, but my body really didn’t want to listen. I got up anyway. He reached out a hand to help, but I ignored it and stood and saluted him. I saw his eyes, as he looked me over. I think he realized I was in bad shape, in no condition to fight or travel, or do much of anything else.

“We’ll be back for you, Colonel,” he said as he walked off, screaming at our last two uninjured sergeants. He gave confident orders and soon they pulled out, bounding up the crater rim to the north like fleeing jackrabbits. It was odd, watching them head over the ridge and vanish. It gave me a lonely, abandoned feeling I hadn’t expected.

I sagged back down into a seated position. Around me, thirty-odd coughing, stricken men pulled their weapons close to their hands and watched the horizons. There would be no movement to a better position for us. We wouldn’t be digging in or setting up defensive strongpoints. We would be struggling, each of us, to keep breathing. We would sit here until the nanites healed us or failed to do so.

I knew as we sat for the next hour, that if a single machine came to investigate, it could probably have taken us all out. But I didn’t think it would come. The Macros had plenty to worry about. They had taken drastic steps to keep us out of their domes. Logically, they would mass whatever forces they had to defend the remaining domes. What would they care about a group of stationary humans at a destroyed dome?

But as the sky darkened and a light, warm rain began, I realized that there were other possibilities. The enemy liked stationary targets for their missiles. They might fire a few at us to take us out. Just to be sure.

I ordered the men to dig in if they were physically capable of it. I think about five of them did so. Most of those were burn victims, men who’d lost an arm or leg to a Macro laser. The men who were riddled with shrapnel had less energy. I was one of these, alive when I should be dead. We were zombies, all of us. Living dead men.

After two hours, I managed to get up and take a piss. I dug out something to eat. It was in a tube, like toothpaste. It tasted like meat or cheese, but really it was paste. I ate it by wiping it on my tongue and washed it down with flat, plastic-tasting water that was body-warm. I still couldn’t take a deep breath without coughing, but I felt hard lumps in the bottom of my suit. I dug them out, three of them. Shiny bits of shrapnel. I smiled with half my mouth. The nanites were pushing them out. I was giving birth to shards of metal. More were in there, too—I could feel them. They burned and itched and when they crested, poking out through my skin, they dribbled blood.

A large shadow loomed over me after I’d pulled two more bits of metal out of my suit. I looked up. At first, I didn’t recognize him.

“So, you made it, sir,” said a bass voice.

He was a huge one. Then memory flickered. It was Staff Sergeant Kwon, the first guy who ever lifted one of these packs and blew down a tree with it—before he had been filled with nanites.

“Kwon? Good to see you, too. Glad you made it through our first battle.”

Kwon nodded.

“You don’t look too bad,” I said. “Can’t keep up with Radovich’s team?”

Kwon sat on a shelf made of dead Macro. He lifted up his boot and removed it. I winced. Half his foot, the front half, was missing.

“I’m fine sir, except for this.”

“Looks bad.”

Kwon shook his head. “No problem. The nanites will build me new one. But will take them time.”

I nodded slowly. “How did you lose your foot and not your boot?”

Kwon laughed. “Funny story,” he said, “a Macro stepped on me. Took my boot and foot right off. But I found a new boot later and put it on. Is too small, but that’s okay. My foot is not so big now.”

I smiled, but somehow I couldn’t find it in me to laugh. I didn’t ask about the former owner of the boot Kwon had found. I was sure he was one of the dead.

“Are there are any other noncoms that can move?”

Kwon shook his head.

“Well then, could you check on the men and give me a status report? How many can at least fire a weapon? Have we lost anyone?”

“Sure,” he said.

I put up my hand gesturing for him to stop. “How about that foot? You can walk around on it?”

“Sure,” he said, “but not fast.”

“Okay,” I said, “as long as it’s not causing you too much pain. I can find someone else if it’s bad.”

“Nah,” he said, “it will feel good to walk. The damned thing itches like a spider bite.”

I watched as Kwon went stumping around the twisted wreckage and bodies. There were few of our dead in the immediate vicinity, fortunately. Still, this field would begin to stink after a few hot days. I wondered how long we would be here.

Reports kept coming in over the communications system. They were sketchy, but good. Two more domes had come down. Losses were around fifty percent. Bloody, but so far we hadn’t failed.

It was about four hours after we took out our dome that I awoke with a start. I thought it was pitch black out, but realized after a few seconds that my goggles had autoshaded themselves. Laser light flared green, exploding the night into life and making me squint. Shouts rang in my headset. I scrambled for my weapon, shouldered my reactor pack and got up on one knee.

“Staff Sergeant Kwon,” I said, “report.”

“Something out there, sir. The men to the east side are firing at it.”

Facing me was the towering wreckage of the broken dome to the west. I swung around and looked east. I thought I saw a shimmer of motion, but it could have been the rain.

“Okay, everyone get up and look alive. I want men looking in every direction. Everyone stay low, stay covered if possible. We should be functional now, most of us.”

“Sixty percent are walking wounded now, sir,” said Kwon’s voice.

“You never came back and made your report.”

“You were asleep, sir.”

Great, I thought. I opened my mouth, but one of my men beat me to it.

“Here they come! From the south sir, from the crater wall!”

I saw them now, shadows moved in the silver-black rainfall. We all had our suit-lights off. There was no reason to give the enemy something to shoot at.

Dark shapes, big, but not huge. Workers? I wasn’t sure. They looked like machines, however, and their bodies whined and clanked like them. I sighted on one and fired. I gave it a hard, one-second burst. The beam burned the rain, turning it to an instant gush of steam. All around me, my men opened up and in the flares of light, like lightning flashes, I saw them.

This was a new breed of machine. I could not guess their purpose, but they resembled centipedes. They had conical-shaped contrivances where the head should be. I realized now, they were yet another kind of worker. One we hadn’t seen before.

Then I heard screams. Men around me vanished. I saw the ground open up and I saw them fall into the earth. I knew instantly what was happening.

“Troops!” I shouted, my command signal overriding theirs. The channel was full of shouts of surprise and horror. “They are coming up from underneath us. Repeat, they are tunneling up under us. Move away from your positions. Burn them when they breach.”

It wasn’t ten more seconds before one came up for me. I burned it. Flashes were going off all over our makeshift camp.

I looked around wildly, we had to move from here. There were too many Macros. My men were too injured.

“Move out, everyone. We are going to where the dome was. The ground there is harder, like concrete or stone. They probably can’t drill up into the middle of us there. Walk if you can, and pick up another man who can’t.”

I looked around for another man and found two-thirds of one, still squirming. I grabbed his jacket and dragged him. I felt prickles where metal slivers popped out of my skin. They had begun budding and bleeding due to my movement.

Less than twenty of us made it to safer ground. Every second or two, lasers flared and burned another clattering monster. I had no idea how many enemy there were. They seemed to be endless.

When we reached the hard floor of the dome which had once supported a massive, miraculous machine, they stopped coming. Those that were still in view dug into the earth like giant, wriggling ticks and vanished. Their heads were drills of some kind.

“Kwon?”

“Here sir.”

“Head count?”

“Twenty-one. Nine lost, sir.”

I felt something new then. A vibration, under my feet. The other men felt it too. Everyone took staggering, shuffling steps backward from wherever they stood. We aimed our rifles at the ground beneath our feet.

“They are coming up underneath us, sir!” shouted Kwon.

I’d never heard fear in that man’s voice before. But I thought I heard it now.

“What are we going to do, sir?” asked another private.

I didn’t know his name. I didn’t have an immediate answer for him. But then, after a few seconds I realized that I did have an answer. It was something I’d decided not to do previously, because it was too risky, but I didn’t see how we had much choice now.

I spoke aloud in my mind and I called the Alamo.