Swarm

-37-

First Sergeant Kwon met me at the door to my mobile headquarters unit, which amounted to little more than a fancy trailer with a lot of parabolic dishes on the roof.

“What’s wrong, sir?”

I pushed past him. “Sound a general alarm.”

Kwon obeyed wordlessly.

I laid both hands on the com system and keyed into the command channel. I relayed to all my commanders that a major attack was incoming, talking fast. I hoped I didn’t sound as nervous as I felt. All along, all of us had expected a large Macro counterattack. But they’d done practically nothing since their first failed charge. They’d let us take down two domes. Perhaps they’d been waiting for this moment.

How long before they reach us? I asked my ship.

Two minutes.

I blinked. How had they gotten so close? From what direction?

From every direction, replied the ship with aggravating calm. We are encircled. The circle is closing rapidly.

“This is it, men,” I shouted, thumbing my com system to the general channel so it hit every helmet in the camp. “The Macros are making their big counterattack. They are throwing everything they have at us. Prepare to fight in close quarters. Don’t bother to reunite with your units. Seek cover. Engage and destroy any enemy on sight.”

This time, there would be no nuking of the enemy at a safe distance. I’d always known that if they got in close to us, in sufficient numbers, we would be in trouble. It looked like this was that dreaded moment.

Alamo, why didn’t you detect them further out? I demanded. I felt betrayed by my own ship.

They appear not to be operating their shields.

What? You mean you can only detect them with their shields on?

The electromagnetic emanations from operating shield systems transmit an easily identifiable signal.

So, they are coming in silent and dark? They have no shields? I liked the sound of that. They would be much easier to destroy. Weapons systems like our tanks could do real damage with conventional shells.

Electromagnetic emanations are spiking. Readings indicate enemy shields are coming up now.

“Fire at anything you can see, now!” I roared over the broadcast channel. Every troop with a headset on heard my order. For a few seconds, nothing happened. Then sporadic fire erupted. This quickly grew into a storm. The quiet night outside transformed into a din of explosions and stabbing beams of light. I suspected many of the troops were firing at shadows, but I figured it was worth it. If we could damage the Macros before they were on us, before their shields were up—maybe we had a chance.

Kwon and I helped each other strap on gear. We’d become lax, I chided myself. We’d trusted to our sensory systems. I, in particular, had been lulled by our victories.

“Dammit,” I growled.

Kwon kept adjusting straps and tugging at zippers without comment. We put our hoods on last.

Before we could get out of the command trailer, however, someone kicked it over. At least, that’s what it felt like. The floor heaved up and became the wall, then the ceiling, and then the wall again. I was falling around in a quick, sliding cycle. I crashed into furniture and fixtures and was dumped helplessly onto a pile of bodies. I felt the weight of my reactor unit crushing bones beneath me. Staffers gasped in shock. We rolled three and a half revolutions downhill, and by the time we stopped rolling everything in the trailer was broken and dark.

Most of the command staff were regulars. They had no nanites to harden their bodies or repair them after injury. All but one looked dead by the time we stopped rolling. Men and women with broken necks and soft, impaled bodies were strewn over the overturned furniture. I wanted to check them all for signs of life, but there simply wasn’t time. We had been overrun by the Macros and I had to get into the fight. Kwon kicked out a window and I fell out of the trailer after him.

A Macro—one of the big ones—stood over us. It was working its sixteen flashing belly-turrets, belching out gouts of energy a thousand times a second. We answered the fire with our two rifles. It took the turrets a second to seek and lock on us, and we burned those that tried before they could fire.

You could get into a rhythm with the machines, if you were good. The trick was to notice which turrets were seeking new targets. If they weren’t firing, that meant they were dangerous, because they might lock onto you next. Inside their tiny, independent minds, when they sought new targets, they always followed the same pattern. First they swiveled this way and that, sweeping the area. When they locked on something, they would splatter down fire until the target was classified as destroyed. Then they went back into seek mode again. If you put your beam on a seeking turret before it locked onto you, you could destroy it before it had time to lock and fire back. Then others would come and seek you, and you had to spot them and destroy them before they locked on. The system wasn’t perfect, however. If two or more turrets locked on you at once, you were toast.

By the time Kwon and I got into the fight, many of the men in the area were just that—toast. They had been burned down to ash. The regulars did their valiant best. They fired their pathetic one-shot rockets up at the monster overhead. But nine times out of ten, in their panic, they missed. Even if they didn’t miss, there were plenty more seeking turrets up there, swiveling in sudden jerks like darting, reptilian creatures. With terrifying speed, they locked on each new target and burned it down.

The dying troops did serve a useful purpose. They gave the turrets something to do while Kwon and I methodically popped them all. Then we took down a leg, concentrating our fire. The thing got smart, right at the end, and singled us out. It tried to stomp us down. We dove and dodged and kept on beaming the second joint up on the offending leg. We stayed low, crouched or on our knees, so we could dance away from the next flailing limb it threw in our direction.

When we had almost brought it down, I looked up and realized that if it had the brains to simply collapse and fall on us, it would kill at least two soldiers. But it didn’t seem to have thought of that. Instead, it fought on grimly to the bitter end. Kwon did the honors, boring into its CPU and burning out the circuitry.

All around us hundreds of similar battles raged. Some of the machines arrived late, limping in. I figured from the look of them they had been hit by shells and their rush had been slowed. Smaller worker-types were intermixed with the big ones, outnumbering them two to one. Every variety of worker was represented. Some had weapons mounted, the harvesters used their claws, diggers came up under us with deadly drills spinning. There were even a few of the technician types with their delicate, flashing tools.

They all died, and we died with them. In the end, however, we had more troops and better tactics. It was as simple as that. We didn’t win because we pulled a trick of our own, not this time. We won with superior numbers. All the fighting and the loss of their factories had sapped the enemy’s strength. They had been unable to replace their losses. In desperation they had mounted this final, all-out assault. It was do or die for them, and this time they were the ones doing the dying. Like a man who fights to the death with an opponent who has thirty more pounds of muscle, bravado only went so far. They were taken down and slain, one by one.

By morning, there were no more moving machines. We had lost nearly a third of our number as well. I pulled my forces together and we counted noses. We’d lost thousands, right there in the fields of some long-dead rancher. There was hardly a blade of grass or even a chunk of earth that wasn’t smoldering, but we held a memorial service and did our best to bury our dead.

It was about ten am when the sky lit up one final time. It took us some minutes to verify it, but I suspected the truth from the moment that it happened. The enemy had blown up their last dome on Earth.

Why did they do it? Maybe they were sophisticated enough to have some form of pride or shame. Maybe they didn’t want to take any chances with their technology, and once they had clearly lost their programming told them to self-destruct. I really don’t know, and it didn’t matter much. What mattered was that the invasion was over. They had thrown everything they had at us in a last ditch attack and failed. The Macros had been defeated.

I sat down on a crusty spot of ground that had been melted into glass by laser fire. I stared out toward the distant, expanding mushroom cloud as it rolled skyward, just as so many others had on this ravaged corner of my planet. I hoped the enemy never managed to get past our defenses and land another invasion force on our world. If they did, I feverishly hoped they wouldn’t manage to get more ships through the next time they came at us.