Extinction

-17-

They hit us first. The only warning I had was the beeping of the communications box. Kerr was trying to contact me. I ignored the first beeping, and the second that came in a few minutes later. There wasn’t a third.

I’m pretty sure it was an RPG—maybe a lot of them. I realized in the first seconds of the ambush that they had to be firing from somewhere close, probably in the tree line right along the beach. All I knew was I heard a whoosh and a boom, and one of our troop carriers blew up. It was the one right behind me in our diamond formation.

The turrets on our hovertanks homed in collectively. They sang less than a second later and there was no more incoming fire. The turrets sang again and again, firing into the beach area. Were they hitting troops? Were there enemy vehicles involved? I couldn’t be sure. A few targets popped up, coppery-red on the wall in front of me, looking man-sized. They vanished almost as quickly as they appeared. I opened my mouth to order the auto-firing to stop, but closed it again. Maybe they were beaten, crawling around out there on the sand between the palms, screaming. Or maybe they were loading another round to destroy my hovertank next. I couldn’t tell, and I couldn’t afford to stop the turrets.

“Dammit, Kerr,” I whispered to myself. I sweated and watched as we slid by. The turrets slowed their firing, then stopped altogether. Whoever they had been, they were all dead or hiding now.

“Pull on to the beach!” I shouted on the open channel. “Which tank was hit?”

“The Rommel, sir,” said a voice.

I sighed. That was Robinson’s tank. Had he gone through the nanite injections, the hours of agony, not to mention my brutal recruitment techniques, only to be splattered in the first minutes of this battle? “We’ll go back and search for survivors,” I said.

“Let’s keep moving, Riggs,” said Crow, second-guessing me again.

“Patton, mute transmission to broadcast channel. Open private channel to the Napoleon.”

“Options set,” said the tank.

“What now?” barked Crow.

“I’m not leaving Robinson and his men in the ocean, sir.”

“I thought we were sneaking up on the base. We’ve still got several miles to go.”

“I think it’s clear the enemy understands our intent now. We need to reconfigure these vehicles into battle mode and move down to the target area as battle tanks.”

Crow argued for a few more seconds, but finally dropped it. I figured he’d been rattled by the hit and had wanted to keep moving fast. I didn’t say so aloud, but I did ask him to stop countermanding my operational orders or I would leave him on the beach as well. Grumbling, he broke the connection.

We did manage to pick up about half the lost men. Each of the surviving tanks took two aboard. I was pleased to see Major Robinson himself climb aboard the Patton.

“Robinson! You are a hard man to kill.”

“Thank you, sir. I think…” he said.

Looking him over, I could tell one of his legs didn’t operate properly. “You can ride on my tank when we reconfigure. There are some ledges for people to hold on to.”

Robinson smiled through the pain he clearly felt. “Mighty considerate of you, sir.”

We disgorged our infantry and reconfigured the tanks on the beach. Nearby, the Queen’s Highway turned into a causeway and crossed the open sea. South of us was Andros Town, long since abandoned, and further south was the location of our base, where the enemy waited with unknown strength.

The tanks reshaped themselves, taking about a minute to do so. The transformation was dramatic. They soon resembled sharks instead of whales. The transformation continued, flatting out the round contours and forming slanting surfaces. When they were finished, the metal of every wall had been thickened to more than an inch, enough to stop incoming bullets. The armor was relatively thin, but alive and very reactive. It would reshape itself after a hit. I hoped it would do well against conventional weaponry. Looming atop each tank was a swiveling beam-cannon mount. The cannons scanned everything, softly whirring as they moved. Watching them gave me a ‘creeped-out’ feeling. I could tell they had an intelligence to them—albeit an artificial, alien one. The way they moved and scanned their surroundings was uncanny. They would frequently pause, aiming at an individual marine. They sensed you, measured you and made decisions about you as a possible target. Every man knew that if you were ever classified as a hostile, you would be toast in seconds. The tanks reminded me of the Macros, of their behavior patterns. They were upsetting, and I doubted I would ever get used to them.

We took the time to pull our dead out of the water. I promised the men we would bury them later. I wasn’t sure whether or not I was lying, but figured if we all died no one would remember the promise anyway.

We set off along the beach, continuing southward. I was inside my tank, but now I had a tiny slit cut into the metal around the pilot’s chair. I could see my actual surroundings and that made things much easier than calculating the external situation by the metallic beads on the interior hull of the tank. Historically, tanks had performed better with a commander who could see the battle situation directly. When in a pitched battle, I could order the Patton to button up and seal the inside of the tank off completely. It was also programmed to automatically closed the slits, like blinking eyes, if incoming fire was detected.

We got underway again, this time surrounded by racing infantry. The men were in full gear and had the job of taking out any enemy infantry and light vehicles. The hovertanks were for knocking out aircraft, missiles and heavy armor, if we encountered any.

For several miles, things went smoothly. We were down to traveling at about thirty miles an hour, but that was fast enough. It would be much harder, at these speeds, for an enemy to ambush us. The hovertanks would have time to sense them and target them, hopefully before they could fire again.

The second ambush was the test of my hopes. It came as I watched the beach slide by, catching the fresh ocean breezes that came into my tank through the open slits. The salty tang of the air made me wish for easier times. I remembered the days before the Macros had returned with their battle fleet, when I’d nothing more serious on my mind than keeping Sandra happy.

We made it down to a point of land with plenty of foliage on it that thrust out into the open ocean. I could have followed the Queen’s Highway inland, but I didn’t want to be stuck in a column formation by trees. So, we glided along the beach, our tanks drifting out over the waves themselves.

The racing troops around us saw the enemy first, or maybe they began taking incoming fire. I wasn’t sure which it was, but they began to light up the trees with their heavy beamers. The weapons were overkill, really. I thought as the battle began that I should have developed a hand-held beamer for anti-personnel purposes. My men could have carried one in each hand and left the heavy backpack reactors behind. The heavy weapons were designed to take out hundred-foot tall robots, not enemy soldiers of thin flesh and blood.

Swathes were cut from the jungle. Flames exploded in orange mushrooms and tree trunks burst as if mined by plastique charges. Smoke billowed up in gray gushes from the wet jungle. It had rained recently, and when my men’s searching beams darted out into the forest everything the shafts of energy touched turned instantly to vapor.

At first, automatic fire chattered back. Yellow spots of fire blazed back at us. A few of my men spun around, tripped, fell into the wet sand. Blood blossomed in the seawater, but every one of them got back up. My marines were armored and dense. I knew when they went down it was mostly from the kinetic force of being hit by a dozen rounds, not from serious injury.

“All tanks hold fire unless heavier targets show themselves,” I shouted over the open channel. “Infantry advance and drive them out of there.”

I knew all the tanks should have been set to only fire at larger targets, but I didn’t want any of my green pilots to get excited and tell their vehicles to fire. Blue-on-blue friendly-fire would take out my infantry faster than anything I’d seen from the enemy.

My marines sprang forward, closing with the enemy hiding in the trees. I didn’t see much of the action once they reached the green gloom of the forest, but I did see the flashes of released energy. It was brief and violent. My men came walking back out of the trees about three minutes later, and only a few were injured.

“Mission accomplished, sir,” reported a lieutenant.

“Load the wounded on the running boards of the tanks. They can heal up as we head down to finish this.”

I had just begun to think this was all going to be a cakewalk, when Robinson spoke up on the general channel. “Contacts sir, coming in fast from the east again.”

I turned my attention to my forward ‘screen’ again. There were incoming coppery beads again. They were way out, but coming in very fast. They had to be planes. I’d been so involved in the land action, watching through the slits in my turret, I’d forgotten about the primary purpose of my hovertank, which was to cover the force against enemy vehicles and aircraft.

“Button up, everyone. Close those slits.”

“Looks like they must have a carrier group out there, sir,” said Robinson, watching the incoming planes. “They are coming from the same area and there aren’t any bases on my map in that zone.”

“I agree, Major,” I said, watching as the contacts multiplied. I counted a dozen aircraft. Seconds later, there were more than twenty. “And I doubt I’ll be able to talk them into turning back this time.”