Swarm

-38-

Everything was quiet for a few days. I went back to Andros riding in my ship. I picked up Sandra when I got there and we quickly became reacquainted. Afterward, I had the Alamo fly us to a remote spot on the western shores of the island. I sat on a beach with Sandra. The sunset was the color of blood and the jungle was dark and dank behind us. Every night now, the skies turned red. They told me it was because of all the dust in the atmosphere. So far, none of our Geiger counters had gone off, so we were still able to walk the beaches of this wild island in light, tropical clothing.

Sandra was at her best on a beach, I decided. She was lovely and more deeply tanned than when I’d first met her. A natural hazard of living down here, I suspected. I liked the look.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Liar,” she teased. “You were staring at me.”

“I’m thinking of how nice you look out here, in this lonely spot.”

“Oh,” she said. She seemed happy and leaned back against me. “Did you meet anyone else while you were down there?”

I snorted. “I met about a thousand angry robots.”

“No other girls?”

“You’ve got to be kidding me. You realize we were wrapped up in full gear, don’t you? We were even wearing hoods. I didn’t even know which ones were girls.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry,” she said. She touched my face apologetically. “Sometimes the other girls talk. I don’t like the idea of you flying off to some hellish spot. Someday you might not come back.”

“If I don’t, there might not be anything to come back to.”

“I know,” she said, sighing. “I suppose I’ll have to love you twice as hard when you’re here.”

“Not anymore,” I said. “It’s pretty much over.”

She looked at me and twisted her lips in disgust. “Don’t even try to lie to me. They’ll come back. Any day now.”

I stopped talking. There wasn’t any point to it. Neither one of us was buying my line of happy chatter. We’d won a battle, but everyone knew we hadn’t won the war. I started kissing her instead. It was much more enjoyable.

I spent the next month reconfiguring my little factories. I had a new project now. I wanted them to make bigger versions of themselves. The Macro fabrication units in their white domes had given me the idea. They had been able to make duplicate lasers that were smaller than the originals. Why not make factories that were bigger than themselves? If we could use these larger units to produce bigger ships with bigger weapons, maybe we could do a better job of destroying the Macros before they managed to land again. We didn’t know for sure they were coming back, but we had to assume they were.

The world kept sending me new recruits from their elite forces. We kept swearing them in, filling them with nanites and training them. I figured we should have a standing force of thirty thousand men at the ready. We were doing all right in the ship department now, too. We had about seven hundred ships. We’d even managed to capture a few of the centaur people alive. That happened by chance, not design. Sometimes the ships hovered low, only a dozen feet off the ground. On those occasions when the centaurs lost a fight, but were only knocked out not actually killed, they might live after their ship rudely dumped them out.

The UN people had gathered them, I’d heard from Admiral Crow. They had a colony of centaurs—about thirty in all—hidden away in some lab in Europe. I didn’t ask questions, but I hoped they would treat them well. Crow said they were trying to nurse them back to health and learn how to communicate with them. They were a vicious species, it seemed, but so were we. We had hopes of getting information about the universe from them in the future.

Crow and I had a number of power negotiations between us. As usual, I was less interested in titles than I was in results. After the South American campaign, however, most of the world considered me to be the leader of Star Force. Crow worked to get his name out and did a hundred live interviews, but I was still the hero in the headlines. I think it bothered him more than he let on.

Officially, we agreed to separate our commands. He ran the fleet and was nominally in charge of Star Force. I was a high ranking marine officer, which suited me well.

Then he called me one night with startling news.

“We’ll be having a staff meeting later tonight, Riggs,” Crow told me. “It’s all online, so you don’t have to travel, but put on your dress uniform, will you?”

“Dress uniform?”

“You’ve got one. If you don’t know where it is, ask your aides.”

“All right. Who is attending the meeting?”

“My general staff. Of which you are a member, naturally.”

General staff? I frowned. “Who is on the guest list?”

He named a list of captains. He had several of them in the fleet now. And then he listed three generals.

“General who?” I asked, not recognizing the names.

“Marine people. Real Marine people. They are mostly Yanks, you should be happy about that.”

“I’m not quite sure—” I began, a little confused.

“Look, Riggs. I love you, man. You are the best of the best. As a field commander, there’s no one I’d rather have out there. But this is an expanding organization. I have to have managers. People who know how to handle people. You are a fighter. You are a front-line type. I’ve been recruiting staffers, and I’ve selected three to run our Marine Corps.”

I was silent for probably five seconds while all this sank in. “Do I have to salute them?”

“It wouldn’t kill you.”

My initial reaction, naturally, was rage. Here was Crow, up to his old tricks. He was always tossing ranks around. Now, he felt threatened by me and had to trump up some new officers to run the organization I’d invented. I even thought, briefly, of overthrowing Crow. I figured I could probably do it. All I had to do was tell the fleet and the marines—my marines—that we’d had a falling out and they needed to back one of us. They would come to me, most of them, I felt sure.

I took in two deep breaths. My second reaction came in the form of a shrug. In a way, I didn’t care. I had Sandra. I had this base on Andros. When enemies came, I would fight them. I hadn’t gotten into this to have a turf war with Crow. I wasn’t that ambitious. I had gotten into this to kill alien machines. I had been successful in that regard.

“All I want to do is kill machines, Crow,” I said.

“I know that.”

“If you don’t want to have a problem with me, then don’t ever try to take that away from me.”

He was silent for a few seconds. I think the implicit threat in my words was sinking in. Maybe it made him angry. But he didn’t let on. When he spoke again, his voice was calm.

“Right. Well—right then. I hear you, mate. We’ve been through a lot together. I owe you everything. Hell, the world owes you everything. If you want to fight, then you’ll fight.”

“Okay then. I’ll log in tonight and attend your staff meeting. And I’ll have clothes on.”

“Thanks, Kyle,” he said and signed off.

Sandra came in and asked what the conversation had been all about. When she heard Crow had promoted officers over me—without even consulting me—she was furious. I think she was madder than I was. It took the better part of an hour to calm her down. Once she’d cooled to a simmer, she busied herself with getting a dress uniform for me from the staff down at Andros. I had been right, I didn’t even own one. I hadn’t even known we had dress uniforms until now.

Crow was right about one thing. The meeting was boring. There was little in it about combat strategies. Instead, they talked about supplies and splitting accounts from our various funding sources. They discussed shipping schedules and a thousand other logistical details. We had support now from the world at large. For the most part, the nations of Earth had dug up billions and marked it down as a percentage of their defense budgets. A hundred nations donated what they could. But a conspicuous few footed the vast majority of the bill.

One interesting topic was the discussion of what our oath of allegiance should say. Up until now, we had only required men to swear to follow orders and give their lives in the defense of Earth. The staffers were in favor of requiring new troops to renounce their citizenship. They would be, in essence, our citizens. A separate nation. I didn’t like that sort of talk. I didn’t want to tell men they could never go home again.

“I’ve got an alternative,” I said, jumping into the conversation for the first time.

The group fell quiet, realizing who I was. I must have impressed them somehow along the way. On my big computer screen, they all looked as if a pit bull had entered the room and begun snarling, even though my tone was level. I wondered, right then, how many of these new generals had undertaken the injections. I suspected none of them had. That seemed wrong to me, but I decided to let it go—for now.

“I don’t want to tell a man that if he fights for us he can never go back to his old life again. Let them swear allegiance to Star Force for the term of their enlistment. But don’t require them to renounce anything. Leave it up to my officers to form them into a single, cohesive force.”

Crow cleared his throat. I looked at him through narrowed eyes. He was a white-haired fellow with piercing blue eyes and a lot of broken capillaries around his hawk-nose. Today, his red face looked more red than usual. “Look, Colonel, we’ve discussed this at length. We’ve come to the conclusion that—”

“This is the first I’ve heard of it,” I said.

“Right, well… you’ve been in the thick of it, Kyle. There wasn’t always time to discuss every plan with you.”

“Okay. I can accept that. But I’m telling you I don’t want your morale-damaging idea. Let them fight for Bolivia or Japan, or wherever they are from.”

One of the staffers leaned forward to say something, his name was General Sokolov. He was a stout man with thick black eyebrows that needed trimming. His black eyes were small, narrow and annoyed. “Colonel Riggs. With all due respect, you are very new to running an army. Men who swear allegiance to this organization—only this organization, will tend to be more loyal and dependable.”

“I understand your reasoning, General, but it’s wrong. We aren’t like a normal force. We have been changed. We marines become freaks after we go through the injections. We feel a brotherhood afterward, an effect few armies have ever achieved. The nature of the war is unlike any other as well. Consider sir, that we aren’t fighting against men. We face armies of alien robots out to destroy our world.”

“With all due respect—” droned the black-eyed General again. I could tell he hadn’t heard a word.

“Hold on,” said Crow. “We’ll do it your way Colonel Riggs. You know our troops better than anyone. The pledge stays as it is.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The staffers looked annoyed, but dropped it. The meeting went on and became terminally dull before it finally, blissfully, ended.