Extinction

machines intact and walk out of here. This is your last chance, your last warning.”

I looked at him appraisingly, an outline in the darkness. He didn’t have the manner of a man who was bluffing. I’d never seen him bluff about anything. “What are you going to do?” I asked. “Nuke us?”

Kerr tilted his head to one side, as if considering it. “There are options. We could use an EMP blast. Did you think of that?”

“Interesting, but we barely use our communication systems now.”

The General made a snorting sound. “Think bigger, Kyle. I’m not talking about a few kilowatts. I’m talking about an electronics-frying tsunami.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think it would work, sir. My reactors and beam projectors can take that sort thing.”

“Ah, but can your nanites?”

I startled and looked at him. I hadn’t thought about that. The nanites had to have circuitry in there somewhere. Would they simply fall dead by the billions, like a plague of locusts stricken down by the hand of God?

“Yes, the nanites… poor little buggers,” Kerr said.

“Hard to deliver in real terms,” I said dismissively, simulating a lack of concern I didn’t feel.

“We’ve tested it. What will your men do when they can’t lift their own beamers? They’ll be flat on their backs with those reactors pulling them down, like beached turtles. And what will your smart turrets do when their brainboxes shut down?”

I narrowed my eyes and stared back at him. “You would have done it already if you thought you could get away with it. There’s something you’re afraid of,” I said. Then I snapped my fingers. “The factories. You don’t want to wreck them. You have no idea if they would be destroyed or not.”

General Kerr sighed like an overindulgent father. “It doesn’t matter, Kyle. We are going to try it soon-or something worse.”

“What’s worse?”

“You don’t want to find out.”

“Nukes? Pointless. Why destroy the factories?”

Kerr shook his head slowly. “Not all such weapons have to destroy hardware, Kyle.”

I thought, suddenly, that I knew what he was getting at. I felt a tickle of sweat. I had to stop myself from reaching up to scratch my head. “Neutron bombs?” I asked. “I thought we outlawed those things in the seventies.”

“We outlaw a lot of things, Riggs. Not every law is followed to the letter.”

I thought about it, and the more I did the less I liked the idea. A neutron weapon would burn us all to death with radiation. The equipment would be left intact. Nothing in the region would survive, not even those big tropical cockroaches that seemed to crawl into everyone’s shed at night.

“We need a little more time, Kerr,” I said.

“For what? Why would I give you any more time? The last time I did that, you built a bunch of laser turrets and smoked my Bradleys.”

“That was self-defense.”

Kerr swept all the words away with his hand. He took a step toward me, then a second. His nose was only six inches from mine. “You listen to me, Riggs. You don’t have any more time. The only reason you’re still breathing is because people at the top have to give the final order, and they are still screwing around. The assets are in place. Do you understand me?”

I nodded. He turned around and left me standing there. He didn’t say goodbye or shake my hand. Silently, he headed back to his chopper. I would have killed him, if I’d thought it would do any good. But I knew it wouldn’t.

I walked back to camp and began a long night of hard work. By two a. m., the first hovertank took shape. I had a new idea by then. I decided to camouflage them. I made them look like boats. Big ones.

It was easier to do than it sounds. Nanites, when you have enough of them, are like smart, liquid metal. They can be told to generate any reasonable structure. They can balloon and puff themselves into any shape you describe to them, just as I’d made a toilet out of them back on the Alamo. Now, however, instead of a toilet, I built a hull in the shape of a blocky patrol boat. Inside were all the weapons and my men, twenty men in each vessel and another man to drive it and operate the gun. The brainboxes were so new, so young and inexperienced, they needed a human to call the shots for them-literally.

By four a.m., I had eleven of these bloated vehicles. With the extra weight, they would barely be able to skim over the waves, but Fourteen assured me they would be able to move. I contacted Kerr again, and he answered instantly. I smiled, they had been watching us and sweating it. I could almost hear their thoughts. What the hell is that crazy bastard Riggs up to now?

“Riggs? What the hell have you been building?” Kerr asked.

“Never seen a troop-carrier before? I’m pulling out. Tell your people to hold their fire-if you really have any people out there.”

“Okay,” said Kerr. “That’s great news. And just in time, too.”

“You have to give me another hour or so to clear out.”

“Don’t think you can load those factories onto your metal zeppelins, or whatever they are.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it, General. The factories are too big, anyway. I’m sure your spycams have relayed the info back to your nerds for analysis. What did they tell you?”

Kerr hesitated. “That you can’t carry much more than your troops and some equipment. That even if you did steal a machine or two, you would have nothing to supply it with.”

“Exactly. So stop worrying. Riggs out.”

I turned to Sandra and Crow, who were both looking at me with big, freaked-out eyes.

“That should hold him for a few hours,” I said. “When he sees us glide out of here over the water, he’ll count it as a win.”

“Won’t they come in and take over the camp?” asked Crow. “They will have clearly won at that point.”

I smiled grimly. “I never said we were turning off the turrets.”

— 15-

The hovertanks were big and bulky-looking. When puffed out to carry extra troops and hide the laser turret each one had on top, they were about fifteen feet high and thirty feet long. They looked like shiny, teardrop- shaped motor homes from the fifties. But these motor homes had no wheels, no windows, and floated about a yard off the ground.

An hour before dawn, I loaded my deceptive vehicles with every marine I had and we fled the camp. The interior of my hovertank was dimly-lit and thrummed softly as we traveled along the road. The scraping branches sometimes squealed against the thin hull. My men looked around, thumbing their beam-projectors nervously. The marines didn’t like the vehicles, but I found myself strangely comfortable inside them. It was lot like being inside the Alamo again. I wondered if I would ever build a new ship like the Alamo and fly her.

I chuckled to myself. Here I was, reminiscing about that liquid-steel witch of a ship, the same machine that had heartlessly killed my family members. Was I crazy, or was it the world that had gone mad?

Like a pod of silvery whales, the hovertanks followed an overgrown road that led to the coast in single file. I led the way to the coast. We crashed along, the thickest branches denting in the stretched skin of my vehicles while we brushed aside about a thousand smaller twigs. The dents worked themselves out slowly, the walls folding back into place. It reminded me of watching an air mattress fill out when you pump it up.

I had time, along the way, to wonder if Kerr was right. What if the Blues really were all dead? It would explain a lot. Possibly their machines roved upon a thousand worlds, following their programming to examine or destroy other species. One group, the Nanos, were trying to save “biotics” from the other group, the warrior Macros. If the Blues were extinct, and that was the hidden truth behind these wars, I found it depressing. It was all