Say what you would about these robots—they could shoot straight.
-33-
“Crawl! Crawl! Head for the water!”
It was chaos. I’d never performed a beach invasion before, at least not on a large scale. The hellish blaze of rounds going over my head gave me respect for that experience.
We were pretty far from the robots, as we’d run right through and past them. They were now at a higher elevation, and the land dipped at the beach, making it harder for them to hit us as long as we stayed low. They couldn’t get a bead on us when we crawled on our bellies.
Not everyone had gotten the message in time, however. A few dared to run in a crouch. They were shot down instantly.
Most of my troops were confused and breathing hard, but they were listening to me, following orders. Those who’d listened moved like snakes on the run. We wormed our way as fast as we could toward the water.
Only one man stood tall and got away with it. He came to stand over me and walked at my side. I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t seen his footprints in the wet sand.
“This is pretty insane, Centurion, even for you,” he said. It was my chief ghost, Specialist Cooper. He was a mean little guy with a smart mouth on him. “Why are we squirming our way into the water like a herd of turtles?”
“On your belly, Cooper. There’s lots of metal flying.” Reaching out to my right, I grabbed one of his ankles and yanked. He went down onto his face with a whoop.
“They can’t even see me, sir.”
“Nope. But they’re hosing down the beach, and I gave an order.”
Grumbling, he wormed along next to me. Soon, we reached the lapping water. Farther out ahead of us, rounds were hitting and causing a lot of little splashes.
“Looks like the Satilla River back home—when the fish are biting hard.”
“Remind me to avoid your slice of Georgia, sir. Can you at least tell me why we’re doing this? The robots will just come after us and shoot us in the ass.”
“Visors down, everyone! Seal up your suits and swim for the bottom!” After shouting out these orders, I turned to Cooper. He was a weird outline, an emptiness made visible by the water. He looked like a man-shaped bubble.
“Cooper, have you ever dropped a complex electronic device into a bucket of water?”
“I dropped my mom’s work-scanner into the toilet once—it was an accident, of course.”
“Of course,” I said, knowing he was lying. “These robots have open wire harnesses. I didn’t see any rubber-coated seals in there.”
“Oh…”
We kept scooting along until we were swimming. Some of my troops didn’t make it that far. In fact, seven of them died on that beach. A few had straightened up and run like fools. A few more had hung back too long, not sure if they should follow their unit into the water. After these losers were shot in the ass by a dozen charging robots, they learned the error of their ways. The enemy had realized they couldn’t hit us, so they’d advanced to where they could.
The lagoon wasn’t all that deep. Ten meters at the most, no more than that. But that was all the depth we needed. We squatted on the bottom, and our gear weighed us down enough to keep us from floating away. Since we were in spacer suits, oxygen wasn’t a problem. Our radios even worked decently, but we’d lost our connection with the ship’s grid.
“Why didn’t they give the robots space suits?” Harris asked me.
Leeson answered that one. “Because the brass is cheap. If they gave them a full kit, they might as well use flesh and blood. It’s always about the cost of things—always.”
After about ten minutes, a few of the robots tried to get to us. They walked into the water, and we could see their metal feet. They didn’t go in deeper than their plastic knees, however. They stuck their rifles into the water and fired at us, like hicks trying to shoot fish.
“Jeez!” Harris complained, retreating down to the bottom. He’d been halfway up the slope to the surface. “They’re getting close with some of those rounds. You think they’re smart enough to find spears or something?”
“I doubt it. Cooper! Della! Put your stealth suits on and go up there.”
“What are we supposed to do to the robots?” Cooper complained.
“Take these cables and get a loop around a foot.”
My two ghosts swam up to the line of metal feet. They looped cables around anything they could then snaked away. The robots had visual sensors, but it seemed that their software couldn’t recognize a man underwater in a stealth suit.
Cooper brought a cable down to me, and I had several heavies grab onto it. We yanked the wire—we yanked it hard.
Hooked by the leg, a robot came jouncing down to us. It lost hold of its rifle, and before we could even hammer it to death, the light went out of its camera eye. It went rigid in death, but I put an explosive charge on its chassis and lit it up anyway.
“You wrecked it, sir,” Harris said as he examined the robot.
“They don’t seem to like taking a bath,” I said, and everyone laughed. “Go get me some more of them.”
The ghosts swam off, and we soon had fresh game to beat on. After we’d destroyed maybe seven of these evil machines, they stopped venturing into the water.
It was about ten minutes after that when a
