The machine looked bigger than I remembered. Those six churning legs were each as massive as a dozen tree trunks and formed of scarred, dull metal. Atop the towering, swinging legs was the vast body. Like a crab’s carapace, it was curved, but unlike any natural beast it bore sixteen belly-turrets to deal with irritants such as ourselves. The turrets blazed, sending ripples of blinding flashes down at my troops.
Sloan and his squad had what was easily the least enviable job of the unit. They were to get underneath the machine and dodge the legs and turrets. They were to fire and attract attention, but it didn’t really matter if they hit anything. The important part for them was to keep moving. The enemy turrets took nearly a second to lock onto a man and pour down streams of deadly fire. If you kept moving, you were much harder to hit.
It was our job, standing back with the second and third squads, to bring down the machine. My plan was to do so by focusing fire on the legs and ignoring the belly turrets. If the machine was flat on the ground, the turrets were useless anyway.
“Target is right-center leg, the one caught up on that big pine. Fire on my mark… mark!” I shouted.
My two squads had two heavy beamers each, one in each arm. Nearly forty streaks of energy flashed out to slice into the thick metal. First, a gush of vapor and plasma erupted from the leg. Dozens of lines were being cut into a single spot, a single massive joint. The metal soon turned orange and curled, opening up with curving lines as our lasers sliced into the outer hull. After a second, we cut the beams.
I squinted through the smoke and saw the machine was limping on that one leg, but it wasn’t down yet. I saw it catch one of Sloan’s troops with three turrets at once. Two others swung in our direction and raked our tree cover with suppressing fire. Men ducked and cursed all around me. Some returned fire, aiming at the turrets.
“Stay on target!” I roared.
I heard Kwon echo my command. He cuffed two helmets and strode around the crouched men as if the enemy Macro couldn’t hit him on a bet.
“Right-center again, fire!” I shouted.
The beams leapt out-more ragged than before, but still on target. The machine buckled and tipped down. One leg was useless. It couldn’t walk with that leg, but it could still use it as a club. Flailing, it caught another of Sloan’s squad and smashed him into the earth like a hammer driving a nail.
I called a new target. We repeated the procedure until three legs were incapacitated. This was when things became dangerous. The machine still had big weaponry on its back. Since it was tilting as its far set of legs struggled to stand up again, the weapons on its back were directed toward us. I gave the order to disperse as rockets and anti-air lasers ripped up the landscape around us. Each squad ran in the opposite direction, circling around to come to the other side of the machine.
“Let’s finish it, sir,” Kwon said, breathing hard.
I looked at him, understanding his eagerness. It had been a very long time since we’d killed one of these big Macros. To us, these would always be the real enemy, the kind of machines we had nightmares about.
“We’re sticking to the plan, First Sergeant.”
“What if it doesn’t work?”
“Then we’ve screwed up. Set the charges.”
We laid our four mines-it was more than necessary, but we wanted to be sure. They had proximity fuses with timers. Once another metallic object of sufficient mass came near, the timer would begin ticking. We set it for one minute. It was a guess, really. Hopefully, it would do the job.
As we glided away from the scene of our raid, we could hear more crashing, more snapping tree trunks. The first machine had called its brethren for aid.
“What if they repair it?” Captain Sloan asked me. “I don’t want to think I lost three men for nothing.”
“In the South American campaign, we lost a hundred to every machine we knocked out, and that was only after we figured out how to do it right,” I told him.
“We could have at least disarmed it, sir,” Sloan complained.
“If we had, the Macros wouldn’t bother to come help.”
“Proximity fuse is reporting, sir,” Kwon said. “It’s been triggered.”
“Fly everyone!” I roared. “Thirty more seconds, then hit the deck. Look for a depression in the ground to hide in. Watch the trees, if they come down on you, you will be crushed, armor or no.”
Men scattered, whizzing ahead through the trees. I watched a man hit his helmet on a low branch and go into a spin. He flopped on the ground, senseless. There was a dent in his helmet. The smart-metal helmet uncreased itself as I watched, but the damage had been done. The equipment was better at taking laser-fire than hard blows from solid objects.
Cursing, I grabbed the red-lit private by the leg and dragged him another hundred yards through the forest before I threw myself down beside Sandra. She’d found a hole to crouch in. I climbed over her body, realizing for the first time her nanite suit wasn’t really adequate to the kind of shockwave we were about to experience.
“Stay under me,” I said, and tried to cover her with the hard shell of my metal armor. She grunted at the weight, but didn’t complain. I pulled the limp private after me, not sure if he was dead or alive. In either case, he would serve to keep my girl breathing.
A blinding flash of light swelled up behind me. I didn’t look. I didn’t have time to take a breath.
The shockwave hit then, and the forest went down all around me like matchsticks. I lost consciousness, and when I reawakened, the world looked different.
— 36
I struggled to my feet, screaming “KWON!” in my helmet. I knew I was screaming, but I couldn’t hear anything except a loud ringing sound. I kept at it anyway. “KWON!”
I checked Sandra first. She was squirming, which had to be a good sign. I tried to help her to her feet, but she slapped me away, wanting to stay down. I let her. I wasn’t sure how hurt she was, but if she wanted to stay lying there, she could.
I staggered in a circle. Ash was up to my ankles. Most of the trees nearby were down, and most of the trunks were on fire. I walked around in a world of white smoke and debris. Dead men were scattered here and there. The next time I shouted, “KWON!” I could hear my own voice.
Apparently, the First Sergeant could too. He stumped up, dragging an ankle that was obviously broken. It twisted away from his body at an odd angle, doubtlessly held in place by the stiffness of his boot.
“What is it, Colonel?” Kwon asked.
“What is it?” I echoed his words in disbelief. “Look around us, what do you think I’m upset about?”
“Yes, sir. I see causalities, sir.”
“Causalities, right. Did something go wrong, here?”
“The blast was too big, sir.”
I clapped him on the shoulder with a gloved hand. The sound of metal on metal clanked and rasped.
“Exactly, First Sergeant,” I said. “You did it again, didn’t you?”
“Sir?”
“You left the grenades on default. I specifically instructed you to set the devices to their lowest yield setting.”
“No, sir,” Kwon said.
“No?”
“I did not, sir. I set them for low yield. I double-checked, sir.”
I stared at Kwon for a second. “You’re sure?”
“Absolutely, sir. After that time we nearly died on the Macro cruiser, I always double-check settings.”
I didn’t know what to make of it. I tried to clear my thoughts, but it was difficult under the circumstances.
“Okay,” I said, “we’ll figure out what went wrong later. Get all the men together. Gather the wounded and the dead too, even if we have to drag them out of here. Let’s move to a safe position.”
We ended up using fallen saplings covered in charcoal as stretchers. We dragged, limped and drifted out of the forest. I was thinking hard as we retreated. The blast had been much too big. Instead of less than a kiloton, I
