The Macros were coming. The estimates were that we had less than an hour to position ourselves. Now that the nuclear mines had gone off without a hitch and the helicopters had managed to tease the Macros into charging in this direction, all we had to do was hide and wait. Supposedly, we were going to ambush the monstrosities. I hoped they would feel ambushed when they got here.
Avoiding all structures in the base, we waited in foxholes dug everywhere. On top of every hole was a layer of fabric and on top of that was a layer of dirt for camouflage. The Macros had infrared heat-sensors for targeting systems, but according to the techs, an inch or two of soil could foil that.
We had men everywhere, buried in gopher holes. When a Macro came near, the bubble of their shields would pass over us. We would then pop up inside the shell of their electromagnetic shielding and fire for all we were worth. We were to shoot the small automated turrets on the thing’s belly, then take out the legs. When it was helpless, we would bore in with concentrated fire until we penetrated the hull and killed it.
Actually, I wasn’t supposed to do any of this. I was supposed to observe. They told me I was too valuable to risk engaging with the Macros myself. In truth, I think they figured I would get in the way. It was only with obvious reluctance that they’d armed me with one of my own weapons systems. I supposed they couldn’t figure a way to turn down my request, seeing as I had designed the things.
The first Macro showed up early. There was barely any warning. Something squawked in my headset, but I didn’t catch what the officer in charge of the platoon I was embedded with tried to say. There was too much noise going on, too much thunderous, pounding, rumbling…. I finally caught on. The sides of my foxhole were shivering, collapsing in little sandy avalanches. Either they had set off another bomb, or the first Macro had taken the bait and arrived.
It was a slaughter. I peeped out of my covered hole to watch, I couldn’t help it. What was the point of fighting this hard, this long, then getting turned into a grease spot on the bottom of one of these monstrous things’ feet without even knowing it was coming? The Macro was big—bigger than I’d imagined. Shaped like a crab and bristling with weaponry, it had six legs that looked like steel columns from my vantage point. Its shifting, louvered belly plates were at least fifty feet above me.
I couldn’t see it at first, but I could feel it. The feeling was like that of an approaching high-speed train. I recalled taking Jake to stand close to the railroad tracks when he was a kid. We’d put nickels on the tracks, then step back and watch a train roar up. When it ran over the nickel, it would smoosh it flat, into a long, curled shape like a tongue of silvery metal. Sometimes, you could hear it ring and tinkle as it fired from the rails, already flattened by the first dozen tones of weight that pushed down on those steel wheels.
Nearby a row of trees cracked and split to expose the white, wooden flesh inside. The palms exploded, trunks looping through the air as a churning metal tower brushed them aside with startling speed. Another tower cracked through more trees and I realized the metal towers were the Macro’s legs. Six immense legs churned toward us, each of which was several yards thick and triangular in shape. The spike-like foot shifted twice more, then swept over me and the foxholes nearby. Where it stabbed down, men died silently, hiding in their holes. The sky darkened and the monster paused over my head. I knew that sixteen belly turrets were locking on targets.
The Macro targeted and blew apart the bunkers at first, as was part of our plan. The main heavy battery and the anti-air weaponry were on top of each Macro, but underneath it were what could only be called anti-personnel turrets. These were overkill for the job, however, as they were quite capable of destroying an armored tank.
I realized we must be inside the bubble of the machine’s shielding. We couldn’t see the shield when we were this close, but it deflected bullets just the same. Around me, foxholes yawned open. The platoon had thrown back their camouflage and exposed themselves. They began firing, stabbing up at the Macro over our head with dozens of beams. Fifty feet overhead, the Macro’s belly turrets swiveled with obscene eagerness. They splattered us with laser fire. Streams of flashing beams lanced down from sixteen black, flared tubes.
The soldiers were quickly targeted and killed. More uncovered their foxholes and fired, then more still. We were hitting the turrets, I could see that, but we weren’t destroying them.
I keyed my com-link. “Everyone hit one turret, everyone fire on the same one!”
I wasn’t supposed to say or do anything. But I couldn’t help it. I threw back the dirt-covered carpet that shielded me from the monster and I joined in the firefight.
We concentrated on one or two turrets at a time, destroying them after a few seconds. But each second, fewer men were returning fire. We were losing.
A bolt hit me then, and one of my arms stopped working. I fell back into my foxhole, dazed. A dozen long, strange seconds later I saw the sky again. I wondered if I’d died.
It was only the Macro, moving on. I heaved myself up, leaning heavily against the wall of my foxhole, which had transformed into a smoking crater. I raised my beamer with one arm. I considered firing after the machine, but the beam would have just splashed over its shields.
Oddly, I thought about the shields. We’d known how to build them long ago, but we simply couldn’t generate enough power to make them useful. Back in World War Two, the Navy had experimented with electromagnetic shields to ward shells away from ships. But in those days, it would have taken all the power generated on the entire East Coast to make such a system work. One advantage of the Macro’s great size, I realized, was the ability to carry powerful fusion generators.
My state of shock faded. I came back to the here and now. I looked around for the corporal who had been my guide. He was gone. They were all gone. Every foxhole had been turned into a black crater. They’d been blasted open like cooked oysters, the human contents obliterated.
I looked after the machine. I thought I saw a fair amount of damage to its undercarriage. We’d done something to it. But not enough. Were tactical nukes the only answer? Did we have to destroy several square miles of our planet and poison another hundred every time we killed one of these things? At that rate, we would run out of bombs and trees fairly quickly.
I took that moment to look down at my arm. I hadn’t wanted to. My other arm was strong enough to hold up the laser weapon by itself. I was still functional.
My arm was a smoking slag of flesh. There was plenty of metal in there too. The Nanos were working hard, and barely any blood leaked down what was left of my forearm to my relatively normal-looking wrist and gloved hand. I thought about the radiation and the exposure, then. I hoped the nerds back at the Pentagon were right about the prevailing winds. I didn’t want fallout ash sticking to my wounds. I was particularly glad my mask and filtration system were still operating. I had no desire to smell my own cooked flesh.
I looked around, wondering what I should do. I decided to leave my foxhole. The Macros knew about them, and the cover flap had been destroyed anyway. Knowing how computers operated, they would recall the spot every soldier had been sighted. I imagined I’d been marked as dead by their targeting systems. My injury would have taken out a normal man.
I ran, faster possibly than any man in history had ever run with a hundred pound pack thumping on his back. I ran toward the bunkers, which had been marked destroyed on the Macro target list, I was sure. I crawled into the nearest bunker. I had a lot of smoke and heat to deal with, but at least it wasn’t packed with dead bodies.