So, I called the Alamo and ordered her to come in from where she sat a few feet above the waves of the Southern Atlantic. She was out near the Falkland Islands. I called her and she came with all the blurring she could. The immediate problem I had was that she didn’t have a landing pod handy and there were twenty men to be rescued. I had to decide if they were all going to be picked up one at a time by the ship’s groping hand, or if we could work out something better.
“Kwon!” I shouted.
“Sir?”
“We have a rescue incoming, but we need to get on something large. Something like one of these pieces of wreckage.”
“Rescue sir?”
“Just listen,” I said. The thrumming under my feet seemed sharper now, more insistent. My toes were tingling with the vibration of enemy drills. “Find a girder or something we can all hold onto. My ship is coming to pick us up. If she doesn’t get shot down, she can carry us out, but we have to be easy to carry.”
“Ah,” said Kwon.
He looked around dazedly. I could see he wasn’t going to find anything. He looked at the hard, stone-like floor as if he might find a handy tree branch lying there.
“Sir!” shouted the private who’d first asked me what we were going to do. He pointed toward the wrecked factory.
After a few seconds I saw what he was pointing at. It was a twisted bit of metal about thirty feet long. It was perhaps a foot thick, and looked like a pipe.
“How are we going to stand on that?” I asked.
“Not stand, sir!” he shouted, dragging a bad leg toward the pipe. His left knee seemed not to work. “We can all hold on. We are strong enough. Each man only needs one strong hand.”
I nodded, liking the idea. “Let’s do it!” I shouted and we all helped one another toward the twisted thing that turned out to be something like a strut. It had probably been part of the new Macro that had been in the birthing process when we blew the dome.
I dragged the two-thirds of a man I’d brought here. He was still alive, and so I kept dragging him. He never complained. Before I’d made it a dozen steps, he fired his weapon back behind us as I bumped and thumped him along the ground like a sack of meal. I didn’t bother to look back to see what he was shooting at. I just kept pulling him across the ground and up a small mountain of rubble. In between jolts, he continued to flash brilliant beams of light into the black rain. Vapor flared up into a warm fog behind us where he had burned the rain and turned it into fresh steam.
We reached the girder and worked to wrench it free of the debris, straining with all our enhanced muscles. Sensing we were up to something, the machines struggled to emerge through the hard stony surface where we had stood moments before.
“Kwon, you and five others with two working arms pull this thing free!” I shouted. “Everyone else fire on the machines as they surface.”
We fired as they came up, but the survivors quickly moved to circle around the debris stacks. They were flanking us. They would come over the rubble and into close combat very soon. We fired at everything we saw, blowing holes in the blackness with stabbing tubes of light.
A shadow loomed over us less than a minute later. What little light had been filtering down from the rain clouds above us was blocked out. Instinctively, we raised our faces and our weapons.
“Hold your fire!” I shouted. “It’s my ship. Is that thing free yet, Kwon?”
“Almost sir!” shouted Kwon, I could hear the tremendous strain in his voice. He was heaving at it for all he was worth.
A long black arm snaked down toward me. No, I told my ship. Grab this piece of metal. Gently pull it loose.
The Alamo plucked the girder free even as it had plucked a hundred trees free of the earth back on Andros Island. I ordered my men to take hold, and to hold onto each other as well. I gave them permission to drop their packs and rifles if they couldn’t hold on otherwise.
As we lifted off, the Macros realized what was happening and rushed the spot. They got hold of the lowest two men on the girder and ripped them loose. They went down screaming and blazing their rifles. The machines tore them apart as we looked down helplessly. We burned a few more, but then we were gone, rising up into the night.
I had locked one arm around the girder. In the other hand I still gripped the crippled man I’d been dragging for several minutes. I let my rifle dangle and clatter against the girder. The black cable kept it from falling.
It was the wildest ride of my life. It was pitch-black and we flew with terrifying speed over the treetops. When we got to the ocean, the rain became a storm. Then the storm became a hurricane. By the time we reached the Falklands and stood on solid ground again, only sixteen of us had managed to hold on. The rest had been lost.
I looked for the half-man I’d dragged around all night long. They told me he’d died during the flight. I nodded to the nurse, acknowledging her sympathetic words. I wasn’t surprised, really. I knew from experience with my own children that there were limits to what the nanites could do.
-34-
In the morning, just before sunrise, I staggered out of the tiny building that served the island for a hospital. They hadn’t been able to do much for me. The doctor on duty had just stared, wide-eyed, at our wounds full of what looked like quicksilver. I could tell he’d never seen anything like us. He eyed us as a man might when faced with the walking dead. We were frighteningly different, and every one of us should have died hours ago from our gruesome wounds.
I made every last survivor a noncom. I made Kwon a First Sergeant. I eyed his missing foot without touching it. The foot was a stump, but there were shiny spots there. The nanites were at work, rebuilding cells and stimulating growth. I wondered how long it would take them to regrow Kwon’s foot. A week? A month? I had no idea.
When I finally contacted Crow, he was mildly pissed. I wasn’t surprised. I wasn’t in the mood for any of his bullshit, however.
“So you lived, mate?” he said, “I thought you’d done died like a true digger this time.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence, sir.”
“Where are you?” he demanded.
“The Falklands, I think.”
“Ah, having a spot of tea are you?”
“More like I’m pushing shrapnel out of a dozen spots in my body. Or rather, the nanites are.”
He paused. “So you didn’t just bugger out?”
“Who told you that?”
“That is the general opinion from command. You called your ship and had yourself extracted, leaving Major Radovich and his crew to their fate.”
“What fate?” I asked. I felt a new weight upon my shoulders.
“Hadn’t heard eh? They were ambushed on the way to the next dome. A dozen Macros caught them. No survivors.”
I stood there, breathing heavily. I didn’t respond.
“I’m sorry about that bit, Kyle,” said Crow, changing his tone. “I shouldn’t have told you that way. But dammit, man, I thought you had died with them until this very minute. No one knew you were still alive.”
“How’s the rest of the battle going?”
“We’ve got them down to three domes. We lost half your men doing it, however. More than half. And most of the rest are wounded. They can’t press further. I ordered them all to pull out. All the Macros are circling around their last domes now. Every hour there are more of them. Armies of the big machines were pulled back from the front lines up near the equator. The good news is our forces can now advance from that direction and retake half the continent. The bad news is they aren’t likely to leave things so open again.”