I had decided to land with the first wave. That way, I’d see firsthand if the rest of the troops should be committed, or if we should plan rescue efforts for the survivors instead. We had two hundred Nano ships involved. They were ferrying in troops from a flotilla of seaborne transports about seventy miles offshore, just over the horizon. At that range, the curvature of the Earth prevented laser weapons from stabbing out and hitting the sea transports. With each Nano ship carrying a landing pod full of one hundred marines, we would hit the insertion point in three waves and be fully deployed, six thousand strong, in about an hour.
We’d decided to land in the middle of the fallen buildings of Buenos Aires. The cover was better and with flying transports, we didn’t have to put our backs to the sea. According to some dry runs done at other points, they didn’t have much in the way of automated defenses to repel this kind of attack. They would have to send their land forces to meet us, which should halt their advance in the north immediately. We had high hopes they wouldn’t surprise us with something unforeseen in the first hours.
“Landing pod deployed,” said the ship.
I walked heavily into the cargo area. Below was the landing pod, looking like an octagonal, steel pressure- cooker. The ship’s black arm snaked back up toward me. I could see the men pouring out of all four exits in good formation. There was no defensive fire yet, but once they were in the rubble-filled streets they all ran for cover, expecting the worst. A hundred silver-suited ants flowed in every direction. I gritted my teeth. It was my turn to make my entrance.
Alamo, take me down to the group around Lieutenant Wilson.
The big, black hand gripped my waist, and in less than a second I was out in the open air again. I wished then, as I hurtled down toward the earth in a giant alien hand, that I’d given Sandra one more kiss. I’d left her behind at Andros. There was no place for her here. She was still only flesh and blood. We had talked over the idea of giving her the injections, but decided against it. She was young and wanted to have kids some day. No one knew what the nanites would do to a woman’s prospects of having a normal birth later in life. We knew they messed with cell structure and edited DNA. How far did it go? What side-effects might there be? She might already be genetically damaged after the first time she’d undergone a single repair effort. Neither of us had seen any point to taking more risks.
As soon as I had my feet on the ground again, I felt marginally better. Everyone said something along the lines of glad you could make it down, sir! I ignored them and got out my binoculars.
“No sign of the Macros?” I asked.
“No sir, we have the town to ourselves.”
“Well, don’t make dinner plans yet,” I said, and waved to Wilson. “Let’s move into the interior and take up better positions and dig in. The second wave may need cover fire.”
They didn’t hit us for nearly two hours. By that time, the second wave was down, we’d taken up positions all over the city ruins and the third wave was incoming-but the Macros beat them.
The missiles didn’t scream as they came down, but they did roar, for just an echoing second, before they went off. Fortunately, they weren’t tipped with nukes. We’d feared that they would be, right from the start. But so far, the enemy hadn’t used nukes except when the ones they’d fired from the big invasion ship, when they first landed. Maybe they didn’t have any nukes. Maybe they hadn’t seen the need to use one yet.
Our only anti-air systems consisted of the Nano ships themselves. But they weren’t due back with the third wave of troops for another seven minutes.
The Macro missile barrage lasted only about ninety seconds, but it was a rough minute and a half. In that short amount of time, about a hundred missiles hit us. They’d been fired from all over the continent the guys watching on satellite told us later, mostly from the domes themselves. They’d all been fired at different times, but carefully synchronized to arrive here and pound us with a single massive barrage. All we could do was crawl under concrete blocks, down into sewers and underneath the burnt out shells of cars.
When the missiles arrived, they didn’t smash down into the land and make craters. Instead they popped overhead in airbursts, exploding into a hundred showers of hot metal slivers. Our suits, made of Kevlar and lined with lead, absorbed some of this shrapnel, but not all. Almost everyone had a few bloody holes. Men crawled around the landscape, leaving bloody trails like pinpricked snakes.
I was hit in four spots. The one in the back of my neck was the worst. It had come in at a low angle under my hood and lodged itself up near the base of my spine. It burned there, cooking the flesh around it. The nanites in my system flocked to the damaged spots in my body quickly. I could feel them, itching and burning in the wounds. The bleeding stopped faster than normal, and within two minutes the punctures were only oozing. After four minutes, my wounds had stopped bleeding entirely. After half an hour, the shrapnel began to poke itself up out of my skin in places, like metallic bean sprouts bursting from the earth. The slivers slowly wriggled their way out as the nanites ejected them from my flesh.
After the initial barrage ended, there was a few minutes of relative calm. Everyone scrambled to reorganize and look around.
“Two thirds of our forces have landed, sir,” said Major Radovich after he found me, “but if they are going to hit us with barrages of missiles like that with any regularity, we can’t call in the support troops.”
I agreed immediately. I relayed the orders for the transports to hold back after the third wave of my nanite- infested marines. It simply wasn’t safe enough to bring in regular troops.
It was Staff Sergeant Kwon who sounded the alarm when the second stage of the enemy counterattack began. “Three machines, sir!” he roared in his deep, bass voice. He pointed to the west, then north. “And a fourth!”
The Macros were coming into the ruined city from all directions. Seven of them that arrived in the next few minutes. I figured they must have been running steadily to this spot since the moment they had detected our incoming attack.
In a strange way, this was a relief. This was the situation we had trained and planned for. Shrapnel bursts were hard to deal with for infantry, but these machines were the enemy we’d come prepared to destroy.
The men split up into companies, taking up sheltered positions. We had dug in where we could. We waited for the enemy to rush into us, and I for one was afraid they would stand back and pepper us with infinite waves of exploding missiles.
But they weren’t that much different from humans-in their military thinking, at least. They clearly thought of us as being the same men they had faced in previous battles. They had been fighting and slaughtering our kind for weeks now. Probably, they had the algorithm pretty well worked out by now for battles like this when they met a concentration of human troops. Pound us with missiles, then march in the machines to mop-up.
They scuttled and clanked right in over us and set to work with their sixteen belly-turrets spraying fire all at once.
Many men died, especially in the first minutes of the attack. They were stepped on, crushed down by thousands of tons of metal coming to a single, spike-shaped foot. They were overwhelmed and cooked alive by flaring releases of energy from the combined belly-turrets. No one, not even a man pumped full of nanites, could withstand more than a glancing hit from those fierce anti-personnel weapons.
But my men didn’t run. They deployed their goggles and portholed suits. They blazed out with gouts of light. One man, firing for less than a full concentrated second on a single turret could turn it to molten, burning slag. Once inside the individual shields of the Macros, if the machines faced a platoon, even a full organized squad, they were soon rendered defenseless. Always, their response was the same. They set about to stomp the men to death.
But my marines weren’t slow men. They dodged the thundering feet. They rolled and dove and kept firing up at the armored belly, the solid metal legs, the spheroid ball-joints. Metal melted like wax. Men died, but the machines were quickly crippled.
The Macros tried to run then, but it was always too late. My troops took off after them, bounding and whooping like hunters on the blood trail of a fatally wounded prehistoric beast. Each stride took us twice as far and fast as a normal man could run, even with our heavy loads. The machines could not escape us. We took great pleasure in burning the legs from under the machines and carving them up. The death throes ended with a fusillade of concentrated fire on the section we believed covered the CPU. Once we’d penetrated that zone of heavily-armored plates on any machine, burning our way to the circuitry and spinning gears inside, the Macro ceased to operate.
Seven of the giant machines died in five minutes. I had each captain report our losses. We were still ninety-
