A National Guard tank turned a corner behind where Modular Man floated in the middle of the conflict, then drove into a building, jamming itself in rubble. Flappers had coated the tank's armor, obscuring its view slits. The android dived onto the tank, picked up flappers, tore them like paper. Acid juices spattered his clothing. Artificial flesh smoked. The tank ground bricks under its treads, backing out of the building.
As the android rose, the Great and Powerful Turtle formed a vast blip on his radar. He was picking up Swarm buds bodily, flinging them into the air, then letting them fall. It was like a cascade fountain. Flappers beat hopelessly at the armored shell. Their acids weren't enough to get through battleship armor.
The air crackled as it was torn apart by energized photons: Pulse, his body become light. The human laser ricocheted off enemy, brought a dozen down, then disappeared. When Pulse finally ran out of energy he would revert to human form, and then he would be vulnerable. The android hoped the flappers wouldn't find him.
Mistral rose overhead, colored like a battleflag. She was seventeen, a student at Columbia, and she dressed in bright patriot colors like her father, Cyclone. She was held aloft by the cloak she filled with the winds she generated, and she battered at the flappers with typhoons, flinging them, tearing them apart. Nothing came close to her.
Peregrine flew in circles around her, uselessly. She was too weak to go against the Swarm in any of its incarnations. None of this was enough. The Swarm kept moving through the gaps between the aces.
Wailing filled the air as jagged black shadows, Air Guard A-10s, fell through the sky, their guns hammering, turning the Delaware white. Bombs tumbled from beneath their wings, becoming bright blossoms of napalm.
The android fired until his generators were drained, and then he fought flappers with his bare hands. Despair filled him, then anger. Nothing seemed to help.
The enemy main body hit the river and began its swim. Few soldiers were alive to fight them. Most of the survivors were trying to hide or run away.
The Sixth Marine Regiment was dead on arrival, and nothing could alter the fact.
Between Trenton and Levittown, bombs and fire had turned the brown December landscape black. Swarm buds moved across the devastated landscape like a nightmare tide. Two more Marine regiments were entrenched in the Philadelphia suburbs, this time with artillery in support and a little group of light Marine armor.
The aces were waiting in a Howard Johnson's off the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The plan was for them to be thrown into any counterattack.
A battery of 155s was set up in the parking lot, and fired steadily. The crescendo of sound had already blown out most of the restaurant's windows. The sound of jets was constant overhead.
Pulse was lying down in a hospital tent somewhere; he'd overstrained his energies and was on the brink oЂ collapse. Mistral was curled up sideways in a cheerful orange plastic booth. Her shoulders shook with every crash of the guns outside. Tears poured in rivers down her face. The Swarm hadn't come near her but she'd seen a lot of people die, and she had held together through the fight and the long nightmare of the retreat, but now the reaction had set in. Peregrine sat with her, talking to her in gentle tones the android couldn't hear. Modular Man followed Howler as the ex-sandhog searched the restaurant for something to eat. The man's chest was massive, the mutated voicebox widening the neck so that the android couldn't put his two hands around it. Howler wore a borrowed set of Marine battle dress: flapper acid had eaten his civvies. The android had had to fly him out at the end, holding the ace in hands that had been eaten down to the alloy bones.
"Canned turkey," Howler said. "Great. Let's have Thanksgiving." He looked at Modular Man. "You're a machine, right? Do you eat?"
The android jammed two alloy fingers into a light socket. There was a flash of light, the smell of ozone. "This works better," he said.
"They gonna put you into production soon? I can see the Pentagon taking an interest."
"I've given my creator's terms to General Carter. There's been no reply yet. I think the command structure is in disarray."
"Yeah. Tell me about it."
"Wait," said the android. Behind the crashing of the guns, the roar of jets, he began to hear another sound. The crackle oЂ small-arms fire.
A Marine officer raced into the restaurant, his hand holding his helmet. "It's started," he said. The android began running through systems checks.
Mistral looked up at the officer with streaming eyes. She looked a lot younger than seventeen.
"I'm ready," she said.
The Swarm was stopped on the outskirts of Philadelphia. The two Marine regiments held, their strongpoints surrounded by walls of Swarm dead. The victory was made possible thanks to support from Air Force and Navy planes and from the battleship New Jersey, which flung 18-inch shells all the way from the Atlantic, Ocean; thanks also to Carter's National Guard and paratroops driving into the Swarm from their rear flank.
Thanks to the aces, who fought long into the night, fought on even after the Swarm hesitated in its onslaught, then began moving west, toward the distant Blue Mountains.
All night the Philadelphia airport was busy with transport bringing in another Marine division all the way from California.
The next morning the counterattack began.
After nightfall, the next day. A color television babbled earnestly from a corner of the departure lounge. Carter was getting ready to move his command post west to Allentown, and Modular Man had flown in with news of the latest Swarm movements. But Carter was busy right now, talking over the radio with his commanders in Kentucky, and so the android listened to news from the rest of the world.
Violence from Kentucky splashed across the screen. Images, taken from a safe distance through long lenses, jerked and snapped. In the midst of it was a tall man in fatigues without insignia, his body blazing like a golden star as he used a twenty-foot tree trunk to smash Swarm buds. There was an interview with him afterward: he looked no older than twenty, but his eyes had thousand-year ghosts in them. He didn't say much, made excuses, left to return to the war. Jack Braun, the Golden Boy of the forties and the Judas Ace of the fifties, back in action for the duration of the emergency.
More aces: Cyclone, Mistral's father, fighting the Swarm in Texas with the aid of his own personal camera crew, all armed with automatic weapons. The Swarm was in full retreat across the Mexican border, driven by armor from Forts Bliss and Hood, and by infantry from Fort Polk, the fliers decimated by widespread use of Vietnam-era defoliants. The Mexicans, slower to mobilize and with an army unprepared for modern large-scale warfare, weren't happy about the Swarm being pushed into Chihuahua and protested in vain.
More images, more locales, more bodies scattered across a torn landscape. Scenes from the autumn plains of northern Germany, where the Swarm had dropped right into the middle of a large-scale maneuver by the British Army of the Rhine, and where they had never even succeeded in concentrating. More troubled images from Thrace, where a Swarm onslaught was straddling the Greco-Turkish-Bulgarian border. The human governments weren't cooperating, and their people suffered.
Pictures of hope and prayer: scenes of Jerusalem and Bethlehem, already packed with Christmas pilgrims, now filling the churches in long, endless rounds of murmured prayer.
Stark black-and-white images from China, refugees and long columns of PLA troops marching. Fifty million dead were estimated. Africa, the Near East, South America-pictures of the Swarm advance across the third world, images of an endless wave of death. No continent was untouched save Australia. Help was promised as soon as the superpowers cleaned up their own backyards.