By the time Kwon and I got into the fight, many of the men in the area were just that—toast. They had been burned down to ash. The regulars did their valiant best. They fired their pathetic one-shot rockets up at the monster overhead. But nine times out of ten, in their panic, they missed. Even if they didn’t miss, there were plenty more seeking turrets up there, swiveling in sudden jerks like darting, reptilian creatures. With terrifying speed, they locked on each new target and burned it down.
The dying troops did serve a useful purpose. They gave the turrets something to do while Kwon and I methodically popped them all. Then we took down a leg, concentrating our fire. The thing got smart, right at the end, and singled us out. It tried to stomp us down. We dove and dodged and kept on beaming the second joint up on the offending leg. We stayed low, crouched or on our knees, so we could dance away from the next flailing limb it threw in our direction.
When we had almost brought it down, I looked up and realized that if it had the brains to simply collapse and fall on us, it would kill at least two soldiers. But it didn’t seem to have thought of that. Instead, it fought on grimly to the bitter end. Kwon did the honors, boring into its CPU and burning out the circuitry.
All around us hundreds of similar battles raged. Some of the machines arrived late, limping in. I figured from the look of them they had been hit by shells and their rush had been slowed. Smaller worker-types were intermixed with the big ones, outnumbering them two to one. Every variety of worker was represented. Some had weapons mounted, the harvesters used their claws, diggers came up under us with deadly drills spinning. There were even a few of the technician types with their delicate, flashing tools.
They all died, and we died with them. In the end, however, we had more troops and better tactics. It was as simple as that. We didn’t win because we pulled a trick of our own, not this time. We won with superior numbers. All the fighting and the loss of their factories had sapped the enemy’s strength. They had been unable to replace their losses. In desperation they had mounted this final, all-out assault. It was do or die for them, and this time they were the ones doing the dying. Like a man who fights to the death with an opponent who has thirty more pounds of muscle, bravado only went so far. They were taken down and slain, one by one.
By morning, there were no more moving machines. We had lost nearly a third of our number as well. I pulled my forces together and we counted noses. We’d lost thousands, right there in the fields of some long-dead rancher. There was hardly a blade of grass or even a chunk of earth that wasn’t smoldering, but we held a memorial service and did our best to bury our dead.
It was about ten am when the sky lit up one final time. It took us some minutes to verify it, but I suspected the truth from the moment that it happened. The enemy had blown up their last dome on Earth.
Why did they do it? Maybe they were sophisticated enough to have some form of pride or shame. Maybe they didn’t want to take any chances with their technology, and once they had clearly lost their programming told them to self-destruct. I really don’t know, and it didn’t matter much. What mattered was that the invasion was over. They had thrown everything they had at us in a last ditch attack and failed. The Macros had been defeated.
I sat down on a crusty spot of ground that had been melted into glass by laser fire. I stared out toward the distant, expanding mushroom cloud as it rolled skyward, just as so many others had on this ravaged corner of my planet. I hoped the enemy never managed to get past our defenses and land another invasion force on our world. If they did, I feverishly hoped they wouldn’t manage to get more ships through the next time they came at us.
-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.