“What dot?” Sergeant Cordette asked. The light-brown infantry sergeant wasn’t much older than the specialist but he had two extra tours of being shot at and blown up. In about a month he would have been trying to decide whether to end his second hitch and try the college and civvie route or reup and become a “lifer.” But with the state of emergency the choice had been made for him. One less stress in life was fine by Eshraka Cordette. He was looking north and looked to the east as the specialist waved in that direction.
The two soldiers were forward of their company, holding down a look-out point a hundred meters towards the treeline. It could have been worse, but Cordette wasn’t sure how.
“There was a dot,” Werry said. “At about eleven o’clock. It just popped up then back down.”
“I don’t see,” the sergeant said, shielding his eyes. Then he did. Everyone did.
His mind immediately identified it as a flock of starlings; that was sort of what it looked like climbing up over the trees. But it wasn’t; starlings didn’t fly like that. Starlings swooped and whorled as they flew. These things moved around within the… flock but their movements were erratic or responding to some pattern he couldn’t identify. And the… swarm wasn’t swirling as such at all. It was flying in a straight line for their position.
“Contact!” Cordette bellowed, dropping into the belly of the Stryker and swiveling the M240B towards the swarm of probes. “Open fire!”
Shane saw them even before the lead units, because of his slight elevation over them. He listened to the familiar rattle of M-4s and machine guns start up and watched for a moment to gauge their effect. Not damned much.
“You watching the tracers, sir?” Cady asked, not taking his eyes off the approaching swarm.
“Yeah,” Shane replied quietly. You couldn’t see bullets, of course, but you could follow the red lines of the tracers. They were approaching the swarm, and the probes were tight packed enough that some of them were going to be hit, but they would just… disappear.
And there wasn’t much time to fire. The probes had seemed to be moving slow but they weren’t. They were on the lead unit in less than a second after it had opened fire and they swarmed around the Strykers like bees attacking a wasp. Shane could see portions of the armor flying off and as it approached the probes it would… deform and then just vanish. Six or seven of the probes had stopped in the air over each of the Abrams and as he watched, the refractory metal, mostly depleted uranium, of the powerful tanks was peeling away like skin from a grape. A soldier, probably a medic, was running across the battle, if this massacre could be called a battle. As he did so a probe swooped down and he was suddenly decapitated then levitated into the air. His rucksack seemed to explode outward, his weapon flying up towards the probe along with bits from the ruck and LBE. Then the sodden corpse fell thirty feet through the air to slump to the ground.
Shane had only gotten a brief glimpse of all of this, fragmentary images, when one of the probes dropped right on the command Humvee. It had broken away from the swarm and seemed to ignore most of the vehicles around the Humvee, making a beeline for it. It was followed by a handful more. He saw Colonel Schon and Major Forrester along with the Humvee driver all similarly decapitated and levitated as the Humvee shuddered and began to dissolve.
Surprise is a function of the mind of the commander…
“Get us out of here,” Shane said. “NOW!”
“What?” Cady asked, looking over at him.
“GO! Go west! Now!”
Cady put the Humvee in reverse, made a flying three-point turn, and headed down the road through the light industrial park.
“You know where we’re going?” Shane asked, pulling off his dogtags and tossing them out the window.
“I don’t know why they sent us here,” Cady said, looking over at him as the captain similarly began tossing ammunition magazines out of the window. “But there’s a… What are you doing?”
“I’ll take the wheel,” Shane said. “Start getting rid of every scrap of metal you have on your body, starting with your dog tags. Right NOW!”
Cady blinked, then relinquished the wheel with a blurted: “Holy shit!”
“Those things eat formed metal,” Shane said, trying to steer the Humvee down the twisty road. “They ripped the dog tags off the colonel so fast his head went with them. We need to get rid of everything. As soon as one gets to us, we’re going to unass this vehicle, too.”
“We should call in,” Cady said.
“They zeroed in on the command track,” Shane replied tightly, as Cady took the wheel back and started tossing magazines out the window one handed. “Why?”
“I dunno,” Cady said. “You’re the brains of this outfit, sir.”
“Radios,” Shane snapped. “They eat metal but they zero in on radios. Unless you’re radio silent you’re just a big metal popsicle to those things.” He popped open the hatch for the gun mount and climbed through.
“Keep pulling metal off your body!” he yelled, pulling off his watch and tossing it away. “Rings, necklaces, bracelets, watches. Like you’re going through a scanner at security!”
“Coins!” Cady yelled back. “What are you doing?”
“Keeping an eye out for them,” Shane yelled, emptying his pockets by the roadside. He thought about what other metal he had and then looked at his West Point ring. Graduates were disparagingly referred to as “ring knockers” because you weren’t anybody unless you had “the ring.” He contemplated losing it. Then contemplated losing a finger. The finger won. But instead of tossing it aside, he put it in the shoulder pocket of his digi-cam uniform. Even if they ripped it out, all he’d lose was a pocket.
The battalion had been obscured by the buildings but Shane could see a few of the probes up over them in the air now. As he watched, a building collapsed and he couldn’t figure out why until he realized the damned things were ripping the rebar right out of the concrete walls.
Nails. Wiring. Cars. It was all going into those damned probes. Every damned scrap of metal. They didn’t seem to be killing people except as a byproduct. But they would. Metal was civilization. And… one… three… more were headed for them.
“Pull over and unass!” Shane yelled, dropping into the Humvee and opening his door. He was rolling on the road before it was at a full halt.
So was the master sergeant, as it turned out, and the Humvee continued forward, still in drive, as five of the probes came up with a thunder of air. The Humvee began to shake and tear apart and the master sergeant let out a curse as he was jerked into the air. The seam on the seat of his pants ripped and his boots came apart as the eyelets were ripped out. Then he dropped through the air to land hard on the asphalt.
“Son of a BITCH!” Cady snarled, looking up at the probe, which was hovering not much above head height. His wallet was firmly attached to the underside.
As Shane watched, the wallet ripped apart and a bit of metal was briefly visible, then the wallet dropped through the air, just another scrap of useless garbage to the probe.
“My COIN!” the master sergeant raged. He looked around for a weapon and finally settled on a timber by the side of the road. “That was my battalion coin you BASTARDS!”
The master sergeant hefted the heavy construction timber and jumped in the air as the hovering probes drifted over them, apparently searching for more scraps of metal. The four by four hit the surface, hard, and rebounded leaving a large dent. The master sergeant cried out in pain as the timber vibrated in his hand and he dropped it.