on shovel duty. It’s hard to think about desertion and hopelessness while you’re shoveling your ass off, especially if you’re building something interesting and impressive. After another hour of work, the new walls were really taking shape. Looking at the wall, none of the men could doubt them now. The outer surface was inches thick of bright, reactive metal. Behind that was a mound of rubble ten feet thick at the top and forty feet thick at the bottom.
I walked the perimeter, making sure the walls stood a uniform forty feet in height. I had fresh barrels of nanites dumped over the mounds of rubble next. They covered the interior with a glaring metal skin of nanites and loose metals leeched from the debris. I nodded to myself appreciatively. The structure would serve fairly well as a defensive fortification against a ground attack.
The outside face of the walls was straight and sheer. The inside was slanted, as it was really metal covering mounds of dirt and trash. I began putting up the finishing touches, adding stairways and ramps to the top, and a crenulated line of battlements all along the parapet. I had marines set up heavy gun emplacements with clamshell turrets here and there then added automated lasers in-between all along the top of the wall.
As darkness fell, I burned massive arrays of lamps and kept the men working in shifts, allowing the exhausted to shower and rest. Barrera approached me at around midnight.
“Hello Colonel,” he said, his mood was obviously brighter-but it was always hard to tell with Barrera.
“Hello,” I grunted. My mood was beginning to sour as fatigue set in. Even with nanotized bodies, we all grew tired and needed to rest eventually.
“This is very impressive, sir.”
“Glad you approve.”
Barrera looked at me. “I never said I disapproved, sir.”
“Oh come on,” I said. “Admit it man, you thought I’d lost it when I first started building this thing.”
Barrera gave me a ghostly smile. A rare expression for him. “Well, I’m more at ease now. I’ve got just three things I wish to ask you about.”
“Name them.”
“First, what if they come from above? Will this wall help against their fleet?”
“No, not really. But they aren’t massing on the bottom of our oceans for a science experiment. They will come up and assault these walls, I’m sure of that.”
“Very good sir. On to my second point: What if they come from below?”
I paused. He had me there. They were diggers, these mechanical monsters. I’d fought drilling Macros before in South America and they were clearly active under the sea.
“You make a good point there. I’ll have to build underground defensive layers as we did on Helios against the Worms.”
Barrera nodded. “Excellent idea, sir.”
“And the third thing?”
He looked at me appraisingly. “When’s the last time you had some sleep, sir?”
I felt a surge of irritation. I felt like slapping him just for saying the word sleep. But then, I realized I was exhausted. I’d fought a hard underwater campaign, then exited the sea just in time to begin a massive rebuilding effort. I sat down on the tracks of a deactivated crawler.
“Just sitting down feels good,” I said. “You’re right, Lieutenant-Colonel. Can you carry on while I get some rest?”
“It’s as if you read my mind, sir.”
I was too tired to laugh or even smile at him. I did shake his hand, however, and headed toward the sleeping tents we’d set up in the landing pits. A sound made by moving fabric caused me to stop and look behind me. There, in the blackness, I saw a familiar outline. It was Sandra. She was particularly disturbing at night, as she no longer seemed to require light to see by. I wondered if her eyes had been rebuilt with the ability to see in the infrared spectrum. I suspected that was the case, but I’d never asked her about it. We rarely talked about our special abilities-at least, not the freaky ones. It was a turn-off to notice how much our bodies had changed over time. We just went with it, and by silent mutual agreement, pretended we were the same normal human couple from years past.
“Did you put Barrera up to that?” I asked.
“He handled it well, didn’t he?”
“Yeah,” I said. “He did. He’s more diplomatic than you are.”
“More than either of us.”
I nodded in agreement and fell onto a cot. Sandra fell into bed beside me. I wondered if she had been following me ever since I’d stepped out of the sea. I figured she probably had. I’d half-expected to run into her while underwater.
— 27
Being a commanding officer had its perks. One of them was being given a cot and a tent, even when such things were in short supply. Normally, after a base had been wiped out, I would have spent the night in my personal ship. But I’d given up the Socorro now for the good of the cause. She was behind the Moon, hiding from the Macros with the rest of the Fleet. The only good thing about that was Crow was hiding out in space with the rest of the Fleet, which meant I didn’t have to listen to him. He only rarely sent a message out to us. Maybe he feared the Macros would home in on his signal and run down his comparatively small force of ships.
I woke up the next time the sun shone. It could have been morning, but it felt more like noon. The tropical heat was already in the tent with me, making my face stick to things. The inadequate pillow they’d given me was glued to my head with sweat. I knew enough not to complain, however. Most of my marines could only fantasize about a bed and a pillow. They were out shoveling already, finishing up the walls and the underground nanite- woven defenses I’d had them working on for over a day now.
I groaned and looked around blearily, but didn’t get up. Sandra was gone, probably having become bored with waiting for me to wake up. I finally hauled myself up and put my feet on the floor.
When my feet touched the floor I triggered some kind of trap. At the time, I had no idea what was happening to me, but I felt a powerful shock running up through my body. I flopped back on the cot, and saw flashes of light in my head.
Something had gone off. At least, that was what the part of my mind that still operated told me. Something like a flashbulb, but with only the tiniest flare of bluish light. Whatever it was, I felt stunned.
I commanded my muscles to leap out of bed, but it didn’t work out that way. Forcing myself to move, I rolled off my cot and slumped onto the floor on the other side of cot. My body wasn’t obeying me yet.
What had hit me? I could only think it was an electrical shock of some kind. Something meant to stun me into submission. In my foggy mind, there were no happy reasons why someone would want to do this.
I heard words then: “That’s it, move, move, move!”
The words came from strange throats-voices I didn’t recognize. The words were spoken in low tones, louder than whispers but clearly not meant to be heard at a distance. I heard feet tapping and cloth swishing as unseen figures approached.
I managed to struggle up to all fours before they reached me. I reached for my pillow, which was still soaked with my sweat. My hand slid under the cloth and my fist closed around the hilt of a combat blade. Every second that passed brought greater strength and coordination to my limbs. I pulled out the blade and held it low as I slowly began to stand up.
Coincidentally, my assassins were armed with blades as well. The first one made a mistake. He grabbed my hair, yanking my head back and moving his blade to my throat. His knife never quite made it to my neck, however. I took his hand off for him, as my blade was ready and flicked a split-second faster than his did. A hand fell, still tightly gripping a combat knife like my own. I don’t think the guy even knew what had happened at first. Maybe he was confused at the sudden lightness at the end of his treacherous wrist. He made two more sawing motions at my face. Blood gushed hotly onto my cheek.
He figured it out after that and began to howl and keen in shock. The other guy was smarter, unfortunately. Perhaps he’d grown wiser after seeing what happened to his buddy. He just stuck his knife in my back, nothing
