Extinction

unknown world to face an unknown enemy.

“We need flexibility,” I said. “I can only think of one way we can gain that attribute. We’ll take a set of factories with us. Then we can produce what we need when we get there. We can take raw supplies and build appropriately.”

Major Robinson locked stares with me and nodded slowly. “Is Admiral Crow aware of this detail of your planning?”

I sat back in my chair and crossed my arms. The chair creaked ominously. We’d still never gotten to constructing furniture to hold up our nanite-laden bodies.

“We’re taking hovertanks, you know,” I said. “Some of them will be very well-equipped- hovertanks.”

Robinson smiled. “How many specially-equipped hovertanks were you thinking about taking?”

“Twelve. With each puffed up into a rectangular shape for shipping, about the size of a railroad car and packed with raw materials. Another eight will carry more raw mass, but no factories.”

Robinson, still smiling, worked on his tablet. It beeped and lit his face with blue light. We worked out that each of these special hovertanks would weigh in at a little over a hundred fifty metric tons. We could easily squeeze them into our roster.

Most of the weight ended up being the living quarters for the troops. We built modular units that were considerably smaller than a Macro robot, figuring that they would be easily loaded into one of their ships. Besides weight, there were volume concerns, but we calculated that since much of a marine’s weight was liquid or metal, we were dense enough to fit into a fraction of the space one of the big Macro transport’s cargo holds. We had decided to build modular units for barracks, which could be stacked like bricks and could interconnect if placed close to one another. They could take a lot of heat, pressure and were armored against incoming fire. With a team of worker units, we could deploy anywhere-on a sea floor or a mountaintop. If forced to, we could handle a nearly-weightless vacuum environment like an asteroid, but I hoped we would not have to fight under such conditions. I couldn’t imagine a lifeform that needed removal from such a place.

When we were all done amassing our expeditionary force, we only had five thousand personnel, about a thousand of which were non-combat support people. I only took volunteers and I insisted everyone be nanotized.

I hired Sandra as my personal aide. There was snickering, but I did my best to ignore it. If I’d been in their place, I would have smirked, too. I set her up with a desk in my private office in the command module. She handled all my personal incoming messages, which were countless. She liked the job, saying it gave her a chance to delete all the sexting messages I received as fanmail before I got to see them.

The main camp on Andros had been transformed by the time the big day came. We had thousands of troops living in the expanded base area in their steel modular units. The men had taken to calling their modules ‘bricks’, but not without affection. Each housed sixteen to twenty people. They were comfortable and well air-conditioned, a real bonus in the tropical climate of the Bahamas.

There were bricks everywhere on the sands around Fort Pierre by the time the Macros were due to return. Many of them didn’t house troops, but rather supplies and armament. Many were dedicated to reprocessing breathable air, waste, water and food. Some contained arrays of reactors to supply power. Each of the hovertanks had their own brick to stuff them into, like steel garages.

When the big day finally came it was blustery and clear outside. Everyone watched the sky and checked their handheld computers approximately every eight seconds for net-news of the Macro arrival. Even Crow seemed nervous. I caught him eyeing the sky at regular intervals.

Eventually, the sun set and disappointment set in with it. The Macros were late. The news was met with a mixture of relief and fresh worry. What did it mean? Were they coming at all? Was there a problem? Would they not be needing us for six months or more? How long did we all have to stand around on this beach, waiting for them like thousands of stood-up brides?

Days passed, and I saw my troops growing edgy. I announced major war-games. Thousands of men drilled and sweated in the sun and the surf. We practiced beaming sand into glass, trees into smoldering stumps and ceramic targets into slag. Constantly, we checked the sky over our shoulders.

After a week, we began to relax. I didn’t allow anyone to go on leave, but I began rotating people on and off the rosters for various reasons. As long as we had all the equipment we needed, and all the troops stayed on high alert ready to scramble into their bricks, I figured we were as ready as we were ever going to be.

By the eighth dawn, rumors ruled every mind: The Macros had a different calendar, and a year to them meant a millennium. The Macros had really wanted a big cargo of rare earths, and they’d mined that from our asteroids months back, the whole thing about troops being the cargo was a communications foul-up. The Macros didn’t have anyone left worth fighting against, and we might still be waiting for deployment a century from now. Macro ships were on the way, but they would take years to get here. The Macros had all been destroyed.

I didn’t buy any of the rumors, the theories. I waited and watched the skies as tensely as the greenest recruit. Maybe that was because I had some inkling of what might lie ahead.

— 35-

They arrived before dawn at the end of a black, moonless night. The Macros were eleven days late, and I’d wager by then half my men had managed to convince themselves the huge ship would never come for them.

Sandra shook me awake gently. She kissed me over and over while I sighed and stretched in our bed. We had an entire brick to ourselves, but only a small part of it was our sleeping quarters. Most of the module was designed to be my command headquarters.

“What is it?” I asked her in a whisper.

“They’re here,” she said.

My eyes snapped open. I lurched up, and if she hadn’t had nanite-enhanced reflexes, we might have bumped heads.

“We’ve got contacts on the boards?” I asked, slapping the walls lightly to make the ceiling brighten.

“Yes,” she said. “And we’ve got video coming in over the net, too.”

Our ‘bricks’ were more than modular living quarters, they had more in common with a Nano ship than a traditional Earth trailer. The walls teemed with nanites and were programmed to be touch-sensitive. The interface quickly became second-nature to everyone who worked with it. A single tap turned up the lights. A double-tap turned them off. If you applied a steady pressure to a small area for about a second, a radial menu of additional options came up in full relief. Even if a trooper was blinded, he could feel his way over the relief surface of the menu and make his selection. To make the menu hotpoints easier to find through a thick glove, I had scripted them to shiver slightly when active. They felt like hard, quivering beads under one’s fingertips.

I sprang out of bed and reached my ‘locker’ in a single stride. To open the locker I put my hand on an indented area of the wall and made a spreading motion with my thumb and forefinger. The metal surface melted away, revealing a storage area jammed with clothing and equipment. I was dressed in less than a minute. The seals were all automatic, every seam in the suit seemed to melt together and form a single mass as the nanite clusters found one another and made friends.

I spread my hand over the exit portal and stepped down a short hall. Along the hallway was a conference room, a restroom and medical/weapons locker. At one end of the hall was the portal into the command center. At the other far end, the end of the entire brick, was an airlock that led to the outside world. Right now, we didn’t need an airlock, but I suspected we would in time.

I melted the door of the command center and stepped inside. Sandra stayed behind and retreated down the hall. We’d decided that she couldn’t be in the command center with me. Not only would that smack of nepotism and be bad for morale, it would likely be bad for our relationship. Sometimes a commander had to be a real asshole in public, and it was best not to have your sweetie-bunkmate in the room with you at the time. She would work in my private office, handling high-level communications and correspondence. In effect, she was to be a combination of secretary and personal security operative. She liked pistols, and was a naturally suspicious person.