B. Larson - Swarm

It was about ten am when the sky lit up one final time. It took us some minutes to verify it, but I suspected the truth from the moment that it happened. The enemy had blown up their last dome on Earth.

Why did they do it? Maybe they were sophisticated enough to have some form of pride or shame. Maybe they didn’t want to take any chances with their technology, and once they had clearly lost their programming told them to self-destruct. I really don’t know, and it didn’t matter much. What mattered was that the invasion was over. They had thrown everything they had at us in a last ditch attack and failed. The Macros had been defeated.

I sat down on a crusty spot of ground that had been melted into glass by laser fire. I stared out toward the distant, expanding mushroom cloud as it rolled skyward, just as so many others had on this ravaged corner of my planet. I hoped the enemy never managed to get past our defenses and land another invasion force on our world. If they did, I feverishly hoped they wouldn’t manage to get more ships through the next time they came at us.

Everything was quiet for a few days. I went back to Andros riding in my ship. I picked up Sandra when I got there and we quickly became reacquainted. Afterward, I had the Alamo fly us to a remote spot on the western shores of the island. I sat on a beach with Sandra. The sunset was the color of blood and the jungle was dark and dank behind us. Every night now, the skies turned red. They told me it was because of all the dust in the atmosphere. So far, none of our Geiger counters had gone off, so we were still able to walk the beaches of this wild island in light, tropical clothing.

Sandra was at her best on a beach, I decided. She was lovely and more deeply tanned than when I’d first met her. A natural hazard of living down here, I suspected. I liked the look.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Liar,” she teased. “You were staring at me.”

“I’m thinking of how nice you look out here, in this lonely spot.”

“Oh,” she said. She seemed happy and leaned back against me. “Did you meet anyone else while you were down there?”

I snorted. “I met about a thousand angry robots.”

“No other girls?”

“You’ve got to be kidding me. You realize we were wrapped up in full gear, don’t you? We were even wearing hoods. I didn’t even know which ones were girls.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry,” she said. She touched my face apologetically. “Sometimes the other girls talk. I don’t like the idea of you flying off to some hellish spot. Someday you might not come back.”

“If I don’t, there might not be anything to come back to.”

“I know,” she said, sighing. “I suppose I’ll have to love you twice as hard when you’re here.”

“Not anymore,” I said. “It’s pretty much over.”

She looked at me and twisted her lips in disgust. “Don’t even try to lie to me. They’ll come back. Any day now.”

I stopped talking. There wasn’t any point to it. Neither one of us was buying my line of happy chatter. We’d won a battle, but everyone knew we hadn’t won the war. I started kissing her instead. It was much more enjoyable.

I spent the next month reconfiguring my little factories. I had a new project now. I wanted them to make bigger versions of themselves. The Macro fabrication units in their white domes had given me the idea. They had been able to make duplicate lasers that were smaller than the originals. Why not make factories that were bigger than themselves? If we could use these larger units to produce bigger ships with bigger weapons, maybe we could do a better job of destroying the Macros before they managed to land again. We didn’t know for sure they were coming back, but we had to assume they were.

The world kept sending me new recruits from their elite forces. We kept swearing them in, filling them with nanites and training them. I figured we should have a standing force of thirty thousand men at the ready. We were doing all right in the ship department now, too. We had about seven hundred ships. We’d even managed to capture a few of the centaur people alive. That happened by chance, not design. Sometimes the ships hovered low, only a dozen feet off the ground. On those occasions when the centaurs lost a fight, but were only knocked out not actually killed, they might live after their ship rudely dumped them out.

The UN people had gathered them, I’d heard from Admiral Crow. They had a colony of centaurs-about thirty in all-hidden away in some lab in Europe. I didn’t ask questions, but I hoped they would treat them well. Crow said they were trying to nurse them back to health and learn how to communicate with them. They were a vicious species, it seemed, but so were we. We had hopes of getting information about the universe from them in the future.

Crow and I had a number of power negotiations between us. As usual, I was less interested in titles than I was in results. After the South American campaign, however, most of the world considered me to be the leader of Star Force. Crow worked to get his name out and did a hundred live interviews, but I was still the hero in the headlines. I think it bothered him more than he let on.

Officially, we agreed to separate our commands. He ran the fleet and was nominally in charge of Star Force. I was a high ranking marine officer, which suited me well.

Then he called me one night with startling news.

“We’ll be having a staff meeting later tonight, Riggs,” Crow told me. “It’s all online, so you don’t have to travel, but put on your dress uniform, will you?”

“Dress uniform?”

“You’ve got one. If you don’t know where it is, ask your aides.”

“All right. Who is attending the meeting?”

“My general staff. Of which you are a member, naturally.”

General staff? I frowned. “Who is on the guest list?”

He named a list of captains. He had several of them in the fleet now. And then he listed three generals.

“General who?” I asked, not recognizing the names.

“Marine people. Real Marine people. They are mostly Yanks, you should be happy about that.”

“I’m not quite sure-” I began, a little confused.

“Look, Riggs. I love you, man. You are the best of the best. As a field commander, there’s no one I’d rather have out there. But this is an expanding organization. I have to have managers. People who know how to handle people. You are a fighter. You are a front-line type. I’ve been recruiting staffers, and I’ve selected three to run our Marine Corps.”

I was silent for probably five seconds while all this sank in. “Do I have to salute them?”

“It wouldn’t kill you.”

My initial reaction, naturally, was rage. Here was Crow, up to his old tricks. He was always tossing ranks around. Now, he felt threatened by me and had to trump up some new officers to run the organization I’d invented. I even thought, briefly, of overthrowing Crow. I figured I could probably do it. All I had to do was tell the fleet and the marines- my marines-that we’d had a falling out and they needed to back one of us. They would come to me, most of them, I felt sure.

I took in two deep breaths. My second reaction came in the form of a shrug. In a way, I didn’t care. I had Sandra. I had this base on Andros. When enemies came, I would fight them. I hadn’t gotten into this to have a turf war with Crow. I wasn’t that ambitious. I had gotten into this to kill alien machines. I had been successful in that regard.

“All I want to do is kill machines, Crow,” I said.

“I know that.”

“If you don’t want to have a problem with me, then don’t ever try to take that away from me.”