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  “This way!” Marlborough said.

  A nearby building ahead became highlighted, thanks to the HUD.

  The Ravagers on point quickly reached the building in question: a partially collapsed apartment.

  The platoon scrambled over the rubble.

  “Send the mechs forward and around!” Marlborough commanded. “We’ll draw the rest inside!”

  The Ravagers hurried around the sides of the building, while Eric and the others continued forward. They entered an intact floor of the apartment.

  “Place charges!” Marlborough said.

  Eric retrieved a charge from his harness, and threw it onto a nearby exposed pillar, where it attached. He continued placing charges as he hurried forward, as did the others. Behind them, the swarm pursued.

  They reached the far side of the building, and dove through the window, breaking it.

  “Detonate charges!” Marlborough said when the last of them was clear.

  The building came down on the micro machines.

  “Nicely done,” Bambi said.

  “How long do you think it’ll take before they dig their way out?” Hyperion said.

  “Depends on how damaged they were in the collapse,” Marlborough said.

  They rendezvoused with the waiting Ravagers and continued forward.

  “What’s the plan?” Eric asked.

  “We head to the Chinese base,” Marlborough said. “Then leave the city, and loop around the outskirts until we rendezvous with our waiting Abrams. Then we put as much distance as we can between ourselves and these termites.”

  “And if they catch us before then?” Eagleeye said.

  “Then we deal with them the same way as the others,” Marlborough said. “Trapping them inside a building.”

  “Um, er, I used up all my demolition blocks in that last attack,” Traps said.

  “Me too,” Bambi added.

  “Then we’ll just have to improvise,” Marlborough said. “Maybe we’ll find a cache of intact charges at the Chinese base.”

  “If there was a cache, my scouts would have reported it,” Traps said.

  “Well, as I told you, we’ll improvise,” Marlborough said.

  17

  Eric and the troops moved at a trot through the city streets. They utilized stealth mode feet placement, ensuring that each step was as quiet as possible, and they commensurately dialed down the output of their servomotors to reduce the emitted humming sounds. They eyed the buildings around them, constantly alert for signs of ambush.

  “So Sarge, do you really think the Chinese are behind those termites?” Brontosaurus said. “Or the Russians?”

  “I don’t know what to think anymore,” Marlborough said. “First we encounter a wide-sweeping gamma ray attack capable of killing all life upon contact, and temporarily knocking out any nearby machines in the process. And then we meet these robotic termites. Both of them require technology far beyond anything we’ve ever seen.”

  “So what are you saying, you admit we’re being invaded by aliens?” Slate asked.

  “As I told you, I don’t know what to think,” Marlborough said.

  The Bolt Eaters trekked on in silence.

  “What if we’re the last surviving members of the human race?” Bambi said.

  “Wouldn’t that be ironic, given that we’re not even human?” Hank told her.

  “Man, I hope we’re not the last humans on Earth,” Tread said. “I’d hate to spend an eternity with the rest of you.”

  “Then spend it in VR,” Hicks said. “Have your Accomp play different avatars to keep you company.”

  Ordinarily the banter would have continued a lot longer, but it died after Hicks’ words. None of them were really in the mood for joking at the moment.

  During the continued march through the city toward the Chinese base, Eric gave some serious thought to the problem of evading those micro machines. It was inevitable that the group would encounter them again at some point.

  He sent a private call to Frogger.

  “What can I do you for?” Frogger said.

  “I need someone to bounce ideas off of,” Eric said. “And what better sounding board then myself?”

  “Okay, shoot,” Frogger said. “Keeping in mind, I’m not an exact copy of you. Quantum effects and all...”

  “Gotta love those quantum effects,” Eric said. “So then, did you see how well those pulse grenades handled the micro machines?”

  “Of course,” Frogger replied. “It’s just too bad we don’t have more of them.”

  “What if we don’t need more?” Eric said. “What if we could reroute some energy from our power cells to electrify our skin? Sending a surge of high current into any micro machines that dare touch us?”

  “Hm,” Frogger said. “It might be possible. We’d have to install some fresh wiring of course, direct electricity from the power cell to the LEDs coating our skin. With a small circuit in-between to regulate the flow.”

  “Exactly my thoughts,” Eric said.

  “The thin film below the translucent top layer of the LEDs should act as a conductor, spreading the current evenly around our exteriors,” Frogger said. “However we’d have to cut a small cross-section around our feet, severing the LEDs there to prevent the current from traveling into the ground.”

  “We’d have to do that, yes,” Eric said. “It means the very bottom of our feet wouldn’t match our surroundings. A small price to pay for the protection offered.”

  “There’s only one problem: we don’t have access to a 3D printer,” Frogger said. “Where do we get the regulator circuit?”

  “What if we repurpose a different circuit?” Eric said. “All of the boards are programmable. Remove one, plug it into the reprogrammer in our repair kits, and we can change its function as we see fit.”

  “But which one will you remove?” Frogger said. “We need every circuit aboard, especially considering we’re essentially running on backup processors. In case you forgot, our mains already burned out thanks to that gamma ray burst.”

  “It’s an interesting problem...” Eric said. He considered it for a few micro cycles. “What about the mechs? Their armor held up to the gamma ray attack. We have five Ravagers with us. With at least five backup processors aboard each.”

  “Mm, I’m running a remote diagnostic now,” Frogger said. “Looks like some of their processors did in fact fail during the gamma ray attack, forcing a switch-over to the backups... but it looks like enough of them are available for our purposes.”

  “We only need one each,” Eric said.

  “This could work,” Frogger said. “I suppose you want to do the honors of informing the rest of the team, considering it was mostly your idea.”

  “Mostly?” Eric said. “It was all my idea.”

  “Yeah, but without me to talk to, you would have never come up with it,” Frogger said.

  “That’s what I mean,” Eric said. “When I say all my idea, I’m referring to you and me both, since we’re the same person. Or different facets of the same person anyway.”

  “Ah, I get it!” Frogger said. “I can be a bit slow sometimes.”

  “Oh I know,” Eric said. He proceeded to relay his plan to Marlborough and the rest of the team. “Once our hulls are electrified, any termite that touches us will go down. And as long as we don’t make contact with any of the fallen machines again, giving them more metal to digest, they’ll stay down.”

  “You don’t really know that for sure,” Crusher said. “Considering that we didn’t really stay around all that long after the pulse grenades went off.”

  “True, maybe it will only stun them,” Eric said. “But a temporary stun is all we need. It’ll prevent them from entering through our vents and fan grills. I can put together some blueprints for the rest of you to look over.”

  Eric put them together, and sent them out over the comm line. He was spammed with “acceptance” verbiage on his HUD as the different members accepted the file request.<
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  “You know, electrifying our hulls like this is a good way to drain our power cells,” Hyperion said.

  “Check out the blueprints,” Eric said. “The drain is minimal, until an external metal object completes the circuit. Because of the nature of the LED top layer, the current will tunnel through and into the object in question.”

  “But we don’t even know if these termites are made of metal,” the robot operator pressed.

  “No,” Eric said. “But we do know they conduct electricity, otherwise the pulse grenades wouldn’t have affected them. And that’s good enough.”

  “Even so,” Hyperion said. “If enough of the termites swarm a given unit, that will drain the cell entirely. We’ll be defenseless.”

  “Yes,” Eric said. “It’s meant to protect us in a pinch. Against a small number of them. If we let a swarm reach us, we’re dead either way. But wouldn’t you at least like to have some protection, rather than none at all?”

  “He’s right,” Marlborough said. “I want this hull electrifying ability in place. We stop at the next intersection.”

  The team reached the next intersection and confirmed that the way was clear on either side; staying close to the wall, they began implementing the changes Eric had sent to electrify their hulls.

  With the tools from their repair kits they opened up the Ravager mechs and removed the necessary spare backup circuits. With their reprogrammers, they repurposed the boards, and then plugged them into their power cells using the spools of solder and the laser irons from their repair kits. With mini laser cutters, also from the kit, they carved small cross-sections around their feet, severing the LEDs there so that the expected current wouldn’t flow straight into the ground, and then they ran the wires from the repurposed boards to the insides of their LED skins, electrifying the hulls.

  They performed the upgrades not just on the Cicada units, but the Savage and Breacher combat robots as well. They didn’t have the equipment necessary to upgrade the mechs, unfortunately.

  They activated the protection, and the current passed into their weapons as well, insuring that every part of them was electrified, and protected from the enemy micro machine swarm.

  Then they hurried on toward the Chinese base. They arrived shortly, and confirmed what the scouts had reported: the place was empty, stripped of all metals. They passed through the far side, and headed northwest, hugging the city’s external wall as they made their way back to their forward base. They arrived without incident, and found the Abrams waiting beyond the base untouched, and in the same state in which they had left them. The two Ravagers on the walkways still acted as sentries.

  “It’s too bad we don’t have the equipment to upgrade our tanks and mechs with this electrostatic shielding,” Slate said.

  “It’s not electrostatic,” Eric said. “And our tanks aren’t entirely defenseless. They have laser turrets. And two of them are Jupiter units.” Those two tanks harbored electrolasers that utilized a directed energy, laser-induced plasma channel to inflict lightning bolts at targets. “Those electrolasers will function the same as the pulse grenades, with arcing voltage taking down big swathes of those micro machines, if they swarm again.”

  “Unless they get smart, and decide to come at us one at a time,” Bambi said.

  “My guess is their algorithms are of the ‘greedy shooter’ type,” Eric said. “Which is they attack the nearest enemy object, no matter what that object is doing. Swarming behavior, essentially.”

  “I forget, you were once a programmer,” Slate said.

  “Once a programmer, always a programmer,” Eric said. For good or for bad. “Anyway, so far swarming is the only behavior we’ve seen.”

  “Actually, that’s not true,” Hank said. “You forget that the original horde split up when we sent our infected mechs away.”

  “That’s true,” Eric said. “So they also have a conversion algorithm in place: once a unit is infected, the swarm divvies its attention, sending some to the next target, while the rest concentrates on converting the first.”

  “Yeah well, these are all nice theories and everything,” Slate said. “But that only sidesteps the issue: if any of those termites so much as touch our tanks, or our mechs, we lose the units. And it don’t matter if those tanks have electrolasers or not.”

  “Then we don’t let those micro machines touch them,” Dickson said.

  “All right, enough chitchat, we’re leaving this city behind,” Marlborough said. “It’s time to make our way toward Malibu.” That was the main base. Yes, the name was meant to be ironic. “Keep transmission range low. Strong enough to cover the platoon only. Let’s not do anything to broadcast our presence.”

  “Assuming they don’t have eyes on us from orbit…” Hank said.

  The group raced away across the rocky terrain, following alongside the tanks.

  When Urdani was the size of a fist behind them, Marlborough gave the order to shut down the power supply to their electrified hulls in order to conserve power. Though the drain wasn’t all that much, it was prudent not to keep the electrification running at all times since the power usage added up after a while.

  The seven Ravager mechs continued to run alongside, while the smaller Cicadas and support troops hopped onto the tanks. The base was eighty kilometers away, and while the Bolt Eaters could have jogged the whole way, it was better to ride if only to spare the robots from the wear and tear on their servomotors. The mechs were too big to fit on the Abrams, of course, so they had no choice but to continue on foot.

  Eric opened up a top panel on the tank and retrieved one of the recharge cables; he opened up the small door on his chest piece, and plugged the cable into his power cell. Brontosaurus also grabbed a cable beside him.

  “Might as well top up,” Brontosaurus said.

  Eric scanned the dusty plains around them like the rest of the troops. He thought of Morpheus once again. Such a terrible way to go. He hoped his end wasn’t so ignominious.

  He occasionally glanced at the sky. And whenever he did, he had to wonder, if there truly were aliens in orbit, were they watching them even now?

  Though he was a machine, the thought always made him shudder.

  18

  Eric and the rest of the Bolt Eaters were crouched behind a natural rise, and the tanks were distributed across the rocky ground behind them. The dusty desert stretched out at their backs, and to the left and right. Ahead, in the distance, lurked Malibu base.

  The sprawling army outpost was situated at the top of a broad hill that interrupted the desert. The Brass always liked to choose defensible positions, and this place was no exception.

  Eric had his laser rifle aimed at the six-meter tall perimeter wall that enveloped the base, and he switched his point of view to the scope to zoom in, because the weapon was capable of a much higher magnification than his own eyes. He noticed immediately that the concrete Alaska barriers composing the wall were missing their characteristic razor wire at the top. He continued moving his scope along the perimeter, toward the entrance.

  “Holy shit,” Hyperion said. “Are you guys seeing what I’m seeing.”

  “Yup,” Brontosaurus said. “And you thought we were in deep poopy before...”

  “What are you seeing?” Slate said. “What? And who says poopy?”

  “He must have had kids,” Crusher said. “Only parents talk— holy shit.”

  Eric finally reached the entrance with his scope, and he, too, had his holy poop moment. He simply couldn’t believe what he was seeing, not for several moments. He blinked, wondering if what he saw was real, or some apparition. But it remained, no matter what he did.

  There were these two quadruped cyborgs on either side of the entrance, seated as if guarding. Each of them vaguely resembled a Sphinx, straight out of ancient Egypt. Their bodies seemed almost robotic, as the torso and limbs were coated in a mirror-like sheen, though there were otherwise no obvious signs of mechanization. The exterior surfaces were completely smo
oth: no bulges of servomotors, no tubes or conduits, no recessed panels.

  Conversely, their heads seemed organic: part reptile, part insect, part Portuguese man-of-war. He zoomed in on one of them, and saw a pair of mandibles at perpendicular angles to one another topping a tube-like maw coated in razor-sharp teeth inside. Two compound eyes bulged from the sides of that maw, reminding Eric of a fly. A cobra-like hood draped down beneath those eyes, flanking the head and neck all the way to the silvery torso; bordering the hood were a series of flagellum-like tentacles, coiling amongst themselves like the stinging tentacles of the aforementioned man-of-war. Probably covered in toxin-filled nematocysts, too.

  The join between the organic and inorganic sections seemed rather rudimentary, and was the only incongruence in the otherwise perfect forms of the creatures. A bloody outline underneath the neck areas demarcated the change, as if the biological head had been crudely stitched onto the metal body in a Frankenstein’s monster sort of way.

  Beyond the pair of reptile-robots, past the entrance gap, Eric could see a herd of strange... entities. These were entirely organic, with no hint of a machine in them. Each being had an elongated white head, the color of newly born larvae, with a wicked-looking maw filled with shark-like teeth. The head was connected to a red, four-armed torso, which in turn was pasted onto the front of a black, centipede-like body that had six jointed legs—each joint had a large, scythe-like spike protruding from it. The torso was balanced by a counterweight at the rear of the body: a long, dark green spiked tail that ended in a thick, reddish ball, perhaps some kind of glandular sac. The dorsal section of the body was armored with several sharp spikes, which looked like they could impale anything that had the misfortune of landing there.

  It was hard to get an impression of size, but comparing them to the height of the perimeter wall, he estimated the entities were about twice as tall as a human, and as long as a tank.

  The strange creatures were locked within some sort of translucent pen inside the base. Eric could tell the pen was there because the beasts occasionally bumped into it, their features flattening as if scrunching up against glass. He wondered if there really was glass in place there, or whether it was some kind of energy field. Either way, he counted around eight of the entities, though there were probably more hidden from view since the perimeter walls prevented him from seeing the full extents of that pen.