“Any second now, Morris! Feel free!” Nielsen bellowed. The barghest was almost on them, growing wider by the second, undeterred by the gallons of blood and black hydraulic fluid pouring from its wounds.
“Got it!”
The robot chirped pleasantly, and suddenly the rocket pods on its central chassis burst into life. Four 66mm incendiary rockets screamed through the air, each one landing right on top of the other. The monster’s front legs were sheared clean off. One of the rockets detonated inside the barghest, showering all of them with blood, guts and machine parts. The metallic skeleton of the creature was revealed, along with sparking wires and steaming organs.
The barghest mindlessly pushed itself toward them with its hind legs. The kill team kept up their rate of fire until it was only a few feet from them. Finally, it stopped, right in front of Folen, a mechanical screech signaling the death of its primary power source.
Folen peered down at its massive, bloody jaws. He chuckled, and kicked it in the eye.
The barghest lunged forward, its teeth sinking into his leg. Folen screamed as it savaged the wound, jerking its head back and forth. His limb came away at the hip, bright arterial blood fountaining through the air. The others yelled, dumping rounds into the creature’s head until its skull was nothing more than a black and red smear on the shattered tile.
Nielsen immediately went to Folen’s side. The soldier clasped his sergeant’s arm, looking up at him with a mixture of sorrow and annoyance.
“Nielsen,” he whispered. “Tell my wife…”
The sergeant squeezed his hand. “I will, Folen. I promise.”
“No… listen. Tell my wife I said…” Nielsen leaned forward, until Folen’s lips brushed his ear. “… fuck Obama.”
“Goddammit,” Nielsen said, standing up as Folen briefly cackled at his own joke before dying. “Macy, how much ammo you got left?”
“I’m Winchester,” Macy answered, unceremoniously dumping his MK48 onto the ground. “I’ll take Folen’s LAW. And his M4, so I can shoot myself once this is all over.”
“Great idea.” He turned to Morris, and gestured at the huge corpse blocking the corridor. “We aren’t getting around this. Is there any other way to the bionics bay?”
“Yeah. We gotta backtrack a bit, but we’ll make it there quick if we hustle. Follow me.”
The bionics bay was as big as some brigade-level operation centers Nielsen had seen. Massive screens covered the walls. Multiple rows of desks were set up, as well as what looked like a laboratory in a separate chamber near the eastern end of the bay. There was no sign of violence like there was elsewhere in the camp; everything was still, almost bizarrely serene.
“You better put me in for a bronze star with valor,” Macy said to Morris, taking up a defensive position behind a row of desks. He unlimbered his LAW, extended the rocket tube, and placed it lightly on his shoulder.
“I’ll deny any award he puts you in for,” Nielsen replied, kneeling behind the row across from Macy. “You’ve got a bad attitude. Maybe you’ll get a certificate of achievement. Maybe.”
“All right, ladies,” Morris said from one of the computers, typing away furiously. “I sent the return command a minute ago. Now all we gotta do is wait.”
The words had barely left his mouth when the sturdy steel doors they had entered through collapsed, along with much of the wall. The remaining barghest exploded into the room, barreling straight for Morris and the command console. Nielsen cursed, squeezing the trigger of the recoilless rifle as Macy opened up with his LAW. Nielsen’s round went wide, landing in the bionics lab with a muted crump. Glass flew everywhere, the lethal shards forcing him to duck and cover.
MAARS-bot opened up with all four machine guns mounted to its frame. The 7.62mm rounds pinged loudly as they penetrated the monster’s subcutaneous shell. The.50 cal rounds blasted huge chunks out of the barghest’s flank. Despite missing most of its left front limb from Macy’s accurate rocket attack, it barged through the rows of desks and threw itself at Morris.
There was a brief moment of panicked screaming, rising only slightly over the nonstop barrage of bullets. Macy fired the LAW he’d recovered from Folen, managing to completely shred the creature’s left rib cage. Blood and pressurized lubricant sprayed everywhere, live wires hissing as they crossed each other.
It turned to face them with most of Morris hanging from its jaws. The console the SF soldier had been busily typing into was mangled, destroyed beyond repair. The barghest roared, sending a chunk of Morris’ leg flying through the air.
“Fuck you,” Nielsen snarled, squeezing the trigger on his M320. The 40mm grenade thundered against its snout with a shriek of tortured metal. Macy primed and threw two hand grenades in quick succession, both of them erupting beneath the monster’s heaving gut.
The MAARS-bot continued its unrelenting stream of tungsten and lead. Subjected to such withering firepower, the barghest’s outer skin was blasted to pieces until it was nothing more than a huffing, wheezing skeleton. It rounded on the robot, flipping it onto its side and viciously pounding it with heavy strikes of its massive paws.
“MAARS-bot, no!” Macy yelled. “Save yourself, robot friend!” The robot chirped weakly in response, before exploding in a shower of sharp metal pieces.
The barghest rounded on Macy. The infantryman hastily backstepped, firing controlled pairs into its mouth as it advanced on him. He tripped over a fallen computer screen and went down. The barghest howled, rearing up on its hind legs to deliver a crushing strike.
Nielsen’s one remaining 83mm round caught it right in the ribs. The projectile detonated with the thunder of a mortar round, blasting the cyborg monster apart from the inside out. The top half of its body blasted toward the ceiling, its torso spewing rancid blood everywhere. Its upper half crashed onto the floor a moment later, its eyes rolling across the ground to stare accusingly at its killer.
The sergeant limped over to Macy and helped him to his feet. Macy looked at the bisected corpse, then glared at Nielsen.
“This is bullshit.”
SWARM
Bruce Sterling
“I will miss your conversation during the rest of the voyage,” the alien said.
Captain-Doctor Simon Afriel folded his jeweled hands over his gold-embroidered waistcoat. “I regret it also, ensign,” he said in the alien’s own hissing language. “Our talks together have been very useful to me. I would have paid to learn so much, but you gave it freely.”
“But that was only information,” the alien said. He shrouded his bead-bright eyes behind thick nictitating membranes. “We Investors deal in energy, and precious metals. To prize and pursue mere knowledge is an immature racial trait.” The alien lifted the long, ribbed frill behind his pinhole-sized ears.
“No doubt you are right,” Afriel said, despising him. “We humans are as children to other races, however; so a certain immaturity seems natural to us.” Afriel pulled off his sunglasses to rub the bridge of his nose. The starship cabin was drenched in searing blue light, heavily ultraviolet. It was the light the Investors preferred, and they were not about to change it for one human passenger.
“You have not done badly,” the alien said magnanimously. “You are the kind of race we like to do business with: young, eager, plastic, ready for a wide variety of goods and experiences. We would have contacted you much earlier, but your technology was still too feeble to afford us a profit.”
“Things are different now,” Afriel said. “We’ll make you rich.”
“Indeed,” the Investor said. The frill behind his scaly head flickered rapidly, a sign of amusement. “Within two hundred years you will be wealthy enough to buy from us the secret of our starflight. Or perhaps your Mechanist faction will discover the secret through research.”