“Right-center again, fire!” I shouted.
The beams leapt out—more ragged than before, but still on target. The machine buckled and tipped down. One leg was useless. It couldn’t walk with that leg, but it could still use it as a club. Flailing, it caught another of Sloan’s squad and smashed him into the earth like a hammer driving a nail.
I called a new target. We repeated the procedure until three legs were incapacitated. This was when things became dangerous. The machine still had big weaponry on its back. Since it was tilting as its far set of legs struggled to stand up again, the weapons on its back were directed toward us. I gave the order to disperse as rockets and anti-air lasers ripped up the landscape around us. Each squad ran in the opposite direction, circling around to come to the other side of the machine.
“Let’s finish it, sir,” Kwon said, breathing hard.
I looked at him, understanding his eagerness. It had been a very long time since we’d killed one of these big Macros. To us, these would always be the real enemy, the kind of machines we had nightmares about.
“We’re sticking to the plan, First Sergeant.”
“What if it doesn’t work?”
“Then we’ve screwed up. Set the charges.”
We laid our four mines—it was more than necessary, but we wanted to be sure. They had proximity fuses with timers. Once another metallic object of sufficient mass came near, the timer would begin ticking. We set it for one minute. It was a guess, really. Hopefully, it would do the job.
As we glided away from the scene of our raid, we could hear more crashing, more snapping tree trunks. The first machine had called its brethren for aid.
“What if they repair it?” Captain Sloan asked me. “I don’t want to think I lost three men for nothing.”
“In the South American campaign, we lost a hundred to every machine we knocked out, and that was only after we figured out how to do it right,” I told him.
“We could have at least disarmed it, sir,” Sloan complained.
“If we had, the Macros wouldn’t bother to come help.”
“Proximity fuse is reporting, sir,” Kwon said. “It’s been triggered.”
“Fly everyone!” I roared. “Thirty more seconds, then hit the deck. Look for a depression in the ground to hide in. Watch the trees, if they come down on you, you will be crushed, armor or no.”
Men scattered, whizzing ahead through the trees. I watched a man hit his helmet on a low branch and go into a spin. He flopped on the ground, senseless. There was a dent in his helmet. The smart-metal helmet uncreased itself as I watched, but the damage had been done. The equipment was better at taking laser-fire than hard blows from solid objects.
Cursing, I grabbed the red-lit private by the leg and dragged him another hundred yards through the forest before I threw myself down beside Sandra. She’d found a hole to crouch in. I climbed over her body, realizing for the first time her nanite suit wasn’t really adequate to the kind of shockwave we were about to experience.
“Stay under me,” I said, and tried to cover her with the hard shell of my metal armor. She grunted at the weight, but didn’t complain. I pulled the limp private after me, not sure if he was dead or alive. In either case, he would serve to keep my girl breathing.
A blinding flash of light swelled up behind me. I didn’t look. I didn’t have time to take a breath.
The shockwave hit then, and the forest went down all around me like matchsticks. I lost consciousness, and when I reawakened, the world looked different.
-36-
I struggled to my feet, screaming “KWON!” in my helmet. I knew I was screaming, but I couldn’t hear anything except a loud ringing sound. I kept at it anyway. “KWON!”
I checked Sandra first. She was squirming, which had to be a good sign. I tried to help her to her feet, but she slapped me away, wanting to stay down. I let her. I wasn’t sure how hurt she was, but if she wanted to stay lying there, she could.
I staggered in a circle. Ash was up to my ankles. Most of the trees nearby were down, and most of the trunks were on fire. I walked around in a world of white smoke and debris. Dead men were scattered here and there. The next time I shouted, “KWON!” I could hear my own voice.
Apparently, the First Sergeant could too. He stumped up, dragging an ankle that was obviously broken. It twisted away from his body at an odd angle, doubtlessly held in place by the stiffness of his boot.
“What is it, Colonel?” Kwon asked.
“What is it?” I echoed his words in disbelief. “Look around us, what do you think I’m upset about?”
“Yes, sir. I see causalities, sir.”
“Causalities, right. Did something go wrong, here?”
“The blast was too big, sir.”
I clapped him on the shoulder with a gloved hand. The sound of metal on metal clanked and rasped.
“Exactly, First Sergeant,” I said. “You did it again, didn’t you?”
“Sir?”
“You left the grenades on default. I specifically instructed you to set the devices to their lowest yield setting.”
“No, sir,” Kwon said.
“No?”
“I did not, sir. I set them for low yield. I double-checked, sir.”
I stared at Kwon for a second. “You’re sure?”
“Absolutely, sir. After that time we nearly died on the Macro cruiser, I always double-check settings.”
I didn’t know what to make of it. I tried to clear my thoughts, but it was difficult under the circumstances.
“Okay,” I said, “we’ll figure out what went wrong later. Get all the men together. Gather the wounded and the dead too, even if we have to drag them out of here. Let’s move to a safe position.”
We ended up using fallen saplings covered in charcoal as stretchers. We dragged, limped and drifted out of the forest. I was thinking hard as we retreated. The blast had been much too big. Instead of less than a kiloton, I estimated the yield at closer to ten times what it was supposed to be. Possibly even Hiroshima-level. The enemy had been decimated, but so had we. I could only hope there hadn’t been any other teams operating in the forest near us at the time. If another platoon had been caught even closer to the blast, they had probably been wiped out.
How could it have happened? Only three possibilities came to mind. Either Kwon was an idiot and had set the yield to high by accident—a possibility I was willing to entertain—or a device had malfunctioned. The third possible scenario was the one that concerned me the most, however. What if it had been sabotage? What if the devices had been tampered with, either after Kwon had set them or before we’d come out here? That was the thought that would not leave my mind, and it haunted me as we escaped the burning trees.
When we got to the open zone around Fort Pierre, we came up behind thousands of smaller Macros attacking the walls. The free-fire zone around the fort had long ago been cleared of trees to create a field without cover for enemy attackers. There were so many beam flashes going off our autoshades dimmed to near blackout. It seemed like every marine we had was up on that wall, blazing away with both his arm-mounted projectors. Larger cannons were mounted at the corners as well, and they fired in pulsing sprays of light. With so many beam projectors flashing, our autoshades made it difficult to see. The sunlight overhead was too dim to penetrate the gloom of our helmets. It was like witnessing combat in a room full of strobe lights.
“Switch helmets to wireframe perception mode,” I ordered.
One of the newest improvements I’d made to our equipment load-out was a new sensory system for the HUD. Instead of using direct visual input, a brainbox interrupted the signal and transformed the data from pickups into a three-D environment. Enemies were red wireframes, while friendlies were limed in green. Neutral equipment and unknowns appeared as blue or yellow, respectively. The system took a little getting used to, but it was a lot better than getting a headache from constantly shifting brightness levels. Before, intense firefights had often resembled wild lightning storms from the point of view of a marine in the middle of it.