right there, but she wanted to talk helmet-to-helmet. I hesitated a second before opening it.
“You’re thinking about going down this shit-hole, aren’t you, Kyle?” she asked. She sounded furious.
“The thought had crossed my mind.”
“You better give me a damned good reason right now, or I’ll cut you out of that suit and embarrass you in front of everyone by dragging up back up into the sunlight.”
“It’s Diaz’s idea, actually.”
“That bastard. Let him go down, then.”
I thought about it, then nodded. The point of this operation was to keep as many factories as possible. If I stayed with a fast-reaction central force, we could move and deploy wherever the enemy hit us. Still, going after them wasn’t a bad idea. I needed to employ both tactics. Coming to a quick decision, I turned to face the captain.
“Permission granted, Diaz.”
“Sir?”
I waved at the gaping hole. “Take this platoon and go down there. Cause havoc. With luck, you can disrupt their plans. If you live, I’ll give you a medal or something.”
“Uh, thanks sir,” he said. He shouted orders and headed toward the hole.
I reached out and grabbed his armored shoulder. “Send scouts around every corner first,” I told him. “And good luck, marine.”
“Thank you, sir.”
The platoon vanished down the hole less than a minute later. I kept Kwon and Sandra with me, and we trotted up the ramps. We were back in the sunlight again a few minutes later.
More bunkers were attacked soon thereafter. It became clear the enemy had no intention of attacking the base openly. They were only interested in the factories buried underneath it. We ended up fighting in seven more rooms full of Macros and thrumming factories. We repelled the enemy in every case. But in the last three fights, the enemy turned their fire upon the factory and destroyed it, even as we did our damnedest to take them out first. The change in tactics was alarming. If this continued all night long, there would be nothing left to defend.
In all that time, I didn’t hear anything from Diaz. I’d begun to suspect the worst. It was an hour after he’d disappeared into that first hole that we learned the truth.
The insight came when the ground bucked up under the command post. This time, it wasn’t just a little hiccup. The building heaved under our feet and the north wall sagged down, folding up on the ground under the weight of the observation deck and Kwon’s big feet. I rolled out onto the ground in the middle of the base.
Out in the forest around us, hundreds of trees heeled over and fell like dying men. Puffs of dust and debris rolled out of every entrance to the underground bunker system.
Sandra strained and lifted my battle suit into a standing position. Together, we dug Kwon out of the rubble.
“What the hell was that?” Sandra demanded.
“Felt like one of ours,” I said.
“Radiation signature matches, sir,” Kwon said, checking his gauges. “It must have been Captain Diaz.”
“He blew himself up?” Sandra asked.
“He blew the enemy up,” I corrected her sharply. “I’m sure he dealt the Macros a fatal blow with his self- sacrifice.”
I walked away from them. I wasn’t sure Diaz had done any such thing, but it sounded good, and I would keep on saying it to anyone who asked me. I’d been down a few holes full of Macros myself, and there were plenty of reasons to blow yourself up in that situation. Who was I to say whether Diaz had made the right decision or not? I’d give him the benefit of the doubt, no matter what had really happened down there.
As it turned out, the enemy stopped coming after the explosion. As best we could tell by our mapping of the tunnels using sonic sensors on the surface, the enemy was either all dead from cave-ins or they’d retreated from the explosion. I suspected the explosion, which had been a low-yield atomic blast, had collapsed their tunnels for miles. I imagined the machines down there in the dark, squirming and grinding under the weight of a million tons of loose earth. The image brought a grim smile to my face. If Macros could suffer pain or feel loss in any form, I wished to heap it upon them.
Almost as clear a signal of our success was the change in the enemy behavior on other fronts. They’d come up outside the walls of Fort Pierre, which had a much thicker underground net of nanite threads to protect it. So far, they’d yet to hit the walls, but they were massing in the forests and our men had retreated inside the fort itself. What were they waiting for? I wasn’t sure, and neither was anyone else.
Less than an hour later, however, we had our answer. Red contacts appeared on our boards marching up out of the sea. Hundreds of them. This wouldn’t normally be alarming, except for one thing: their size. These weren’t worker Macros.
It had been a long time since I’d run into their real ground-invasion hardware. These were hundred-foot tall invasion bots-monsters taller than the trees themselves. They had yet to surface, but they were marching underwater all along the entire eastern seaboard.
My scalp itched as I absorbed this news. Once again, I’d missed the bet. I’d built systems to repel an aerial attack and they’d used sappers to dig underneath me. I’d built walls around Fort Pierre to slow down a thousand car-sized, worker Macros, and now they were attacking with behemoths that could step over those walls without a qualm.
I wanted to rub my face and my hair, but I couldn’t. My helmet prevented such relief, and I wasn’t going to take it off now.
“What are we going to do now, Kyle?” Sandra asked me. “This fight is over, I think.”
I looked around the base. I had to agree with her. I found the captain of the reinforcement company and briefed him quickly. He was the senior officer after me, so I gave him command of the garrison.
“Oh, and captain,” I said as I boarded my flitter with Sandra beside me. Kwon was up front, piloting.
“Sir?”
“If the Macros break through again-don’t chase them down their holes. Not unless you really want to know what’s down there.”
“Uh, no sir.”
We lifted off and headed east.
“Where to, Colonel?” Kwon asked me.
“Head for the center fort,” I said. “I want to know if we can target the beach with those big guns.”
Kwon swung the aircraft around sickeningly. In seconds, we were skimming over the dark treetops. The palm fronds whipped and rattled as we whizzed past.
The Moon was a rising crescent that hung over the sea to the east, right behind the advancing enemy lines. The crescent was mirrored in the ocean below the Moon, forming a wavering silver reflection. I took a moment to stare at the ancient light of Earth’s only natural satellite, marveling at its timeless beauty. I wondered how many human battles it had witnessed and how many more it was destined to observe before the last of us was snuffed out.
— 32
We headed to the central laser-battery fort, the biggest of the three. I’d ordered two companies of marines to support each of the forts and act as a garrison. I saw the men standing around in squads on the loose earth outside the fort. I was pleased they were all wearing our latest battle suits. Most of my men had them now.
Of the three red lines of tunneling Macros, one group had committed themselves at this point. The first line had apparently been digging the longest, and they’d come up to hit my production base. That failure had been costly for both sides, but I had to mark it down as a Macro victory. Although we’d beaten them back, they had damaged or destroyed nearly half my factories. My productions systems took around a month each to build and required many rare earths to construct. They would take much longer to replace than a thousand tunneling Macro
