snow and wipe away the dirt and frost. They make no sudden movements and offer no surprises. They simply rise as though they had been asleep.
“Brightboy squad,” I announce, “meet Freeborn squad.”
Although they regarded each other uneasily at first, within a few days the new soldiers were a familiar sight. By week’s end, Brightboy squad had used plasma torches to carve the squad tattoo into the metal flesh of their new comrades.
3. THEY SHALL GROW NOT OLD
We’re not all of us human anymore.
The true horror of the New War unfolded on a massive scale as Gray Horse Army approached the perimeter defenses of the Ragnorak Intelligence Fields. As we closed in on its position, Archos employed a series of last-ditch defensive measures that shocked our troops to the core. The horrific battles were captured and recorded by a variety of Rob hardware. In this account, I describe the final march of humankind against the machines from my own point of view.
The horizon pitches and rolls mechanically as my spider tank trudges across the Arctic plain. If I squint my eyes, I can almost imagine that I’m on a ship. Setting sail for the shores of Hell.
Freeborn squad brings up the rear, decked out in Gray Horse Army gear. From a distance they look like regular grunts. A necessary measure. It’s one thing to agree to fight alongside a machine, but it’s another thing to make sure nobody in Gray Horse Army puts hot lead into its back.
The rhythmic whine of my spider tank trudging through knee-deep snow is reassuring. It’s something you can set your watch to. And I’m glad to have the top spot up here. Sucks to be down low with all the creepy crawlies. There’s too much wicked shit out there hidden in the snow.
And the frozen bodies are disconcerting. The corpses of hundreds and hundreds of foreign soldiers carpet the woods. Stiff arms and legs poking out of the snow. From the uniforms we figure they’re mostly Chinese and Russian. Some Eastern Europeans. Their wounds are strange, extensive spinal injuries. Some of them seem to have shot each other.
The forgotten bodies remind me of how little we know of the big picture. We never met them, but another human army already fought and died here. Months ago. I wonder which of these corpses were the heroes.
“Beta group is too slow. Pull up,” says a voice over my radio.
“Copy that, Mathilda.”
Mathilda Perez started speaking to me over the radio after we met Nine Oh Two. I don’t know what Rob did to her, but I’m glad to have her on the horn. Telling us exactly how to approach our final destination. It’s nice to hear her little kid voice over my earpiece. She speaks with a soft urgency that’s out of place out here in the hard wild.
I glance at the clear blue sky. Somewhere up there satellites are watching. And so is Mathilda.
“Carl, report in,” I say, dipping my face near the radio embedded in the fur collar of my jacket.
“Roger.”
A couple of minutes later, Carl pulls up on a tall walker. He’s got a .50 caliber machine gun jerry-rigged to the pommel. He pulls his sensory package up onto his forehead, leaving pale raccoon circles around his eyes. He leans forward quizzically, resting his elbows on the massive machine gun italicized across the front of the tall walker.
“Beta group is falling behind. Go hurry them up,” I say.
“No problem, Sarge. By the way, you got stumpers on your nine. Fifty meters out.”
I don’t even bother to glance at where he’s talking about. I know the stumpers are buried in a shaft, waiting for footsteps and heat. Without a sensory package I won’t be able to see them.
“I’ll be back,” says Carl, yanking his visor back down over his face. He flashes a grin at me and wheels around and ostrich walks back out across the plain. He hunches down onto the saddle, scanning the horizon for the hell we all know is coming.
“You heard him, Cherrah,” I say. “Spurt it.”
Crouched next to me, Cherrah aims a flamethrower and sends controlled arcs of liquid fire out onto the tundra.
The day has been going this way so far. As close to uneventful as you can get. It’s summer in Alaska and the light will last another fifteen hours. The twenty or so spider tanks of Gray Horse Army form a ragged line about eight miles across. Each plodding tank trails a line of soldiers. Scavenged exoskeletons of all varieties are mixed in: sprinters, bridge spanners, supply carriers, heavy-weapon mounts, and medical units with long, curved forearms for scooping up injured troops. We’ve been slogging over this empty white plain for hours, cleaning up pockets of stumpers. But who knows what else is out here.
It kills me to think how economical Big Rob has been for this whole war. In the beginning, he took away the technology that kept us alive and turned it against us. But mostly Rob just turned off the heat and let the weather do his work. Cut off our cities and forced us to fight each other for food in the wilderness.
Shit. I haven’t seen a robot with a gun for years. These pluggers and stumpers and tanklets. Rob built all kinds of little nasties designed to cripple us. Not always kill us, sometimes just hurt us bad enough so we stay away. Big Rob’s spent the last few years building better mousetraps.
But even mice can learn new tricks.
I cock the machine gun and slap it with my palm to knock the frost off it. Our guns and flamethrowers keep us alive, but the real secret weapons are pacing thirty meters behind
Freeborn squad is a whole different animal. Big Rob specialized its weapons to the task of killing humans. Taking chunks out of us. Burrowing into our soft skin. Making our dead meat talk. Rob found our weak spots and attacked. But I’m thinking maybe Rob specialized too much.
We’re not all of us human anymore. Out of the squad downstairs are a couple of soldiers who can’t see their breath in the wind. They’re the ones who don’t flinch when the stumpers get too close, who don’t get sluggish after five hours on the march. The ones who don’t rest or blink or talk.
Hours later, we reach the Alaskan woods—the taiga. The sun is low on the horizon, bleeding sick orange light out of every branch of every tree. We march steady and silent, save our footsteps and the guttering burn of Cherrah’s wind-battered pilot light. I squint as the weak sunlight blinks on and off through the tree branches.
We don’t know it yet, but we have reached hell—and as a matter of fact, it
There’s a sizzling sound in the air, like bacon frying. Then a
Carl’s machine gun stutters, spraying bullets into the ground. I can see the long, glinting legs of his tall walker as he hops between the trees to keep moving and avoid being hit.
I count five anchor blasts as the pluggers secure their firing pods in the ground. Carl better get the hell out of there now that the pluggers are target seeking. We all know it only takes one.
