I sighed and coughed. “Okay. Do it.”
We threw Wilson’s armed reactor pack up into its maw, and light flared out to consume it. I hoped it would still operate. I ordered everyone out of the dome. I was one of the last to wave to Wilson, who urgently made pushing motions at me. The machine was indeed giving birth to something… something large. It had to be one of the big fighting machines. I wondered how long it took to generate such a monster, given all the required materials.
I didn’t even make it all the way through the shield bubble before it popped and vanished forever. I never even heard the explosion itself. It was completely dampened by the shield, held inside there and contained. Then the force field collapsed to nothing, revealing only smoking wreckage inside.
Outside, we were met by the cruise missile boys and the company that had covered them. They had pulled through. The two companies I’d led into the dome were the only other survivors. But the dome and the factory inside had been destroyed. It was a blackened hulk of twisted metal.
I had my people search, but we couldn’t find Wilson. There was no sign of him. Nothing at all.
-32-
Communications were reestablished an hour after the dome fell. The Pentagon people had landed repeating stations on the continent. It wasn’t as good as satellite coverage because we were still blind to enemy movements, but it was better than nothing. We could at least coordinate our actions.
I relayed our bloody success story to the other commanders. They took the news with grim determination. Each assured me they would reach their target domes and destroy them, just as my unit had. I told each of them in turn that I had faith in them—which I did. And that I knew they would succeed—which I didn’t.
My battlegroup had taken too many casualties to be an effective force now. About twenty percent of our survivors were too badly injured to move at all. But I didn’t want to leave anyone behind. I was one of the ones on the incapacitated list, but that wasn’t important. I figured my unit was out of the fight now.
Major Radovich had different ideas.
“Sir,” he said, crouching next to me where I leaned against the broken strut of a dead Macro. “I know with normal men in normal battle, marines don’t leave their own behind. But this is different.”
“And how exactly is it different?” I asked Radovich. I looked at him with bleary stubbornness. My nanites were working hard on the dose of shrapnel I’d gotten during my close encounter with a Macro missile, but they weren’t finished yet. I was still bleeding, inside my suit. I could feel blood oozing down my legs and pooling at the bottom of my suit when I sat down or leaned against something. I was surprised the nanites hadn’t completely contained the bleeding. All the hurrying around must have reopened the tears in my skin. I’d never been so seriously wounded. Not even when my arm had been burnt were things as bad as this. The metal slivers had pierced me in a dozen spots like bullets. I would have never survived this long if it hadn’t been for the nanites in my body. They were working overtime. They itched like a thousand hot grains of sand, each one determinedly rubbing its own personal nerve.
“This situation is different,” he repeated, “because if we leave these wounded, they won’t sicken and die. They will grow stronger with each hour, until they are mobile again.”
“If it comes down to it,” I told Radovich, “I’ll put you in charge and stay behind with the wounded men. I’m one of them, after all. But I don’t think it will come down to that.”
“We have nearly two full companies left,” said Radovich. “I could lead them to the next dome and support Anderson. Two companies might make the difference between success and failure, sir.”
I blinked at him, thinking about it. Negative thoughts loomed in my mind. Was he just looking for glory? Did he want his own command to participate in another successful assault? I didn’t think so. Besides, what difference did it make if that was in his mind? He could have his glory, if he earned it. The point was to decide if he was right or not. We had to kill these domes. They were building new machines, one every day maybe. They had to be stopped. Once we took out the domes, we had won. We could then hunt down every last Macro, driving them off our world. We might not win the war, but we would have won another battle.
“Sir, please think,” said Radovich. “What use was all this? Why did all those good men die if we don’t succeed?”
I decided, looking at him, that he meant what he said. I nodded. “You’re right. We’ll take up a spot with good cover, and wait for our bodies to heal ourselves. We have plenty of weapons systems.”
Radovich looked surprised. Maybe he wasn’t used to commanders who changed their minds in the face of logic. “Very good sir. Very good. I….” he said, then trailed off.
“I wish you well too, Major. I want you to take the com-unit, you will need it more than I will. Now get all your effectives together and destroy another dome for me.”
“I will, sir!” he said, and saluted me.
I felt I should get up, but my body really didn’t want to listen. I got up anyway. He reached out a hand to help, but I ignored it and stood and saluted him. I saw his eyes, as he looked me over. I think he realized I was in bad shape, in no condition to fight or travel, or do much of anything else.
“We’ll be back for you, Colonel,” he said as he walked off, screaming at our last two uninjured sergeants. He gave confident orders and soon they pulled out, bounding up the crater rim to the north like fleeing jackrabbits. It was odd, watching them head over the ridge and vanish. It gave me a lonely, abandoned feeling I hadn’t expected.
I sagged back down into a seated position. Around me, thirty-odd coughing, stricken men pulled their weapons close to their hands and watched the horizons. There would be no movement to a better position for us. We wouldn’t be digging in or setting up defensive strongpoints. We would be struggling, each of us, to keep breathing. We would sit here until the nanites healed us or failed to do so.
I knew as we sat for the next hour, that if a single machine came to investigate, it could probably have taken us all out. But I didn’t think it would come. The Macros had plenty to worry about. They had taken drastic steps to keep us out of their domes. Logically, they would mass whatever forces they had to defend the remaining domes. What would they care about a group of stationary humans at a destroyed dome?
But as the sky darkened and a light, warm rain began, I realized that there were other possibilities. The enemy liked stationary targets for their missiles. They might fire a few at us to take us out. Just to be sure.
I ordered the men to dig in if they were physically capable of it. I think about five of them did so. Most of those were burn victims, men who’d lost an arm or leg to a Macro laser. The men who were riddled with shrapnel had less energy. I was one of these, alive when I should be dead. We were zombies, all of us. Living dead men.
After two hours, I managed to get up and take a piss. I dug out something to eat. It was in a tube, like toothpaste. It tasted like meat or cheese, but really it was paste. I ate it by wiping it on my tongue and washed it down with flat, plastic-tasting water that was body-warm. I still couldn’t take a deep breath without coughing, but I felt hard lumps in the bottom of my suit. I dug them out, three of them. Shiny bits of shrapnel. I smiled with half my mouth. The nanites were pushing them out. I was giving birth to shards of metal. More were in there, too—I could feel them. They burned and itched and when they crested, poking out through my skin, they dribbled blood.
A large shadow loomed over me after I’d pulled two more bits of metal out of my suit. I looked up. At first, I didn’t recognize him.