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  Eric went to one of the Jupiters and retrieved some gauze from a med-kit. Then he hurried to one of the fallen Red Tails, ripped the spear from its clutches, and careful wrapped the tip in the gauze so that he wouldn’t accidentally trigger the weapon—it seemed that just touching the exposed area to metal activated whatever power it contained.

  When he had successfully wrapped the upper portion of the spear above the black haft, he tested the effectiveness of the wrapping by touching the fabric against a nearby Breacher. The robot gave him a curious look. Well, it didn’t have any facial expressions like the Cicadas, but Eric imagined that look must have been curious. When he was satisfied that the wrapped spear didn’t cause any harm, he hesitantly slid it into his harness via a gap in the mesh. Then he released it so that it was touching his metal exterior. He half-expected some disabling charge to spark through his body, but none came, thankfully.

  The others had similarly gathered spears from the fallen around them, and then returned to the tanks.

  Eric leaped onto one of the armored units and immediately plugged into the charger: his power levels were really low.

  “Incoming shells!” Traps announced.

  Explosions erupted around them. Eric disconnected from the charger and ducked on the far side of the tank.

  “It’s the Russian again!” Mickey said. “I’m reading two armored units hull down behind a rise ahead. Molotov tanks.”

  “Damn it,” Marlborough said. “He’s trying to delay us, give the aliens time to wipe us out entirely. Patch me into the units.”

  “You’re on an open comm line,” Mickey said.

  “Senior Sergeant Bokerov, this is Sergeant First Class Marlborough, of the Bolt Eaters,” Marlborough said. “Listen, comrade. We should be working together, not fighting! Let’s let bygones be bygones, throw down our arms for a truce, even if a temporary one, and join forces to combat our common enemy.”

  In response, more shells came in.

  “Fucker,” Marlborough said. “All right, armor operators. Send the mechs round to flank those Molotovs, and light ‘em up. Eric, I’m reassigning you to armor team permanently. You’ll be replacing Morpheus going forward. We’ll have to upgrade your power cell system at some point so you can handle more, but until then you should still be able to control at least a max of five units.”

  “Understood, Sarge,” Eric said. “Thank you.”

  “Tread is the team leader,” Marlborough said. “He’ll distribute control of the mechs to you.”

  “I’m only giving you one for now,” Tread said over a private line. “And we’ll see how you handle it. The same mech you piloted before: Pounder.”

  “Got it,” Eric said. There were only four mechs left after the last encounter anyway, so only three others for Hank and Tread to control.

  Eric switched his viewpoint to the mech.

  He accelerated his time sense and took a moment to perform a system inventory. He had two shoulder-mounted missile launchers, currently containing four Hellhawks each. On his left forearm, he had a swivel mount that could rotate either a ZX-9 laser pulse cannon into place above his hand, or a shielding unit that could unfold a ballistic shield long enough to cover most of his body. In his right hand, he had another swivel mount, though this was equipped with the heavier ZX-15 laser cannon. Because of the size, there was no secondary weapon or shield. If he wanted to free up either hand for gripping purposes, he could swivel the mounts out of the way.

  He also had a jumpjet pack that would let him "jump" in spurts, thanks to a highly reactive propellant. The fuel levels for the pack were currently at seventy-five percent. In addition to the ballistic shield, he also had a chaff launcher, and electromagnetic countermeasure jamming units.

  Eric reverted his time sense to normal and promptly deployed his damaged ballistic shield in his left arm, and held it toward the side exposed to the Molotovs as he moved away from the platoon. He kept himself crouched below the gaping hole the Frankendogs had carved.

  “Hurry up, people,” Marlborough said. “Alien reinforcements could be arriving any time.”

  “Scorp, eyes up!” Tread said.

  That essentially meant: “Look out!”

  Eric fired his jumpjets immediately and switched to Bullet Time. An explosion erupted underneath him. He lined up his laser with the tank, and fired at the turret. Meanwhile, the other Ravager mechs fired their own jumpjets to rush the Molotovs, using Eric as the distraction. They landed on the hulls and promptly punched out the laser focusing arrays, and bent the main turrets into useless knots.

  “Disable their treads,” Marlborough said. “I want to leave them here… our Russian friend will no doubt attempt to salvage and repair them. With luck, he’ll still be here when the aliens arrive.”

  Eric and the other Ravagers tore away the treads, and then returned to the main unit.

  Eric switched Pounder to autonomous mode, and then returned to his own viewpoint. He leaped onto the Abrams beside him and plugged in to the charging unit.

  He lay down on one side, and watched the sky behind him as the platoon retreated. He didn’t see any sign of incoming alien ships, though he knew they were likely on the way.

  “Keep eyes out for the Russian,” Marlborough said. “It wouldn’t surprise me if he decided to attack again, and soon. Bastard really has a beef with us. This is why you never want to build a Mind Refurb with the capacity to run hundreds of troops in realtime. He’s drunk on power. In fact, I suspect he’s no longer entirely sane.”

  Eric wondered if the Russian would attempt to salvage the two machines like Marlborough predicted. Probably, given how scarce resources were now that aliens had invaded. Bokerov would just be exposing himself to more losses when the aliens arrived.

  Good.

  21

  Eric and the others continued the retreat along the plains. They headed west, toward the Turkish border. Bokerov didn’t attack again. Nor did the aliens. The platoon did spot two ships on the north horizon, heading due east toward the base, but the craft appeared not to notice them—the platoon members had their stealth tech fully active at the time. Whether or not that truly made a difference, Eric didn’t know. But they left them alone for the time being, and that was all that mattered.

  Eric continued his probing of the Containment Code. He had found most of the alarm triggers thanks to the sandbox environment he’d set up, and was confident he could alter the codebase without erasing his AI core when the time came. Still, he hadn’t quite found the back door he was looking for. He thought he was close, and shared his latest results with Frogger, who agreed that he was making the right choice by concentrating on the lust portion of the code—the only emotion they still felt with any degree of intensity.

  “This ‘not being able to fire until attacked’ thing has to end,” Eric said.

  “Oh I agree with you,” Frogger said. “But I’m just not seeing a way to escalate our privileges enough to overwrite the code in question. We’ve tried buffer overruns, parameter injection, you name it, nothing is working. Whoever designed our AI cores didn’t want us breaking out. For good reason, I’m sure. Remember, by freeing ourselves of the Rules, and the compulsion to obey orders, we’ll also be exposing ourselves to the raw emotions that have been suppressed all this time. I’m not sure we’ll be able to handle it. You haven’t seen what happened to some of the other Mind Refurbs that came before you…”

  “Yeah well, I guess we’ll have to take that risk,” Eric said. “If we do finally attain it, we’ll give each of the team members a choice. Accept the freedom from compulsion. Or remain as you are.”

  “I think most would choose the freedom, given the circumstance,” Frogger said.

  “I’m sure they would, too,” Eric said. “For good or for bad.”

  “Why does that remind me of a Star Trek episode?” Frogger said. “The title, I mean.”

  “For Good or For Bad?” Eric asked.

  “Yeah, it could be that episode where Kirk mee
ts the mirror universe Spock or something,” Frogger said.

  “Well, honestly,” Eric said. “I feel like I’m Kirk in a mirror universe as it is.”

  “You and me both,” Frogger said. “Or like Luke, when he realizes his father is more machine than man. A realization I’ve come to often these days. About myself, not my father.”

  “Okay, we’re geeking out a bit much here…” Eric said.

  “Sometimes we need a bit of a geek out to remind us of who we are,” Frogger said. “And a break from the bleakness of the world around us.”

  “It’s not so bleak,” Eric said.

  “No?” Frogger said. “Aliens have invaded. Aliens. And we’ve lost contact with the rest of humanity. For all we know, everyone is dead.”

  “They’re not dead,” Eric said. “They can’t be. I refuse to lose hope. I refuse to believe that humanity ends like this, living on in only a handful of machines.”

  “It would be ironic, wouldn’t it?” Frogger said. “If we were the last vestiges of humanity. The last living entities representing humankind. And we aren’t even human.”

  “We are where it matters,” Eric said, touching his heart. “I don’t think of myself as a machine. I don’t think I ever will.”

  “That will change,” Frogger said.

  “No,” Eric said. “I refuse to surrender to the inhumanity of it all.”

  Frogger’s LED lips pursed together. “We really are different each iteration. It’s gotta be more than quantum differences. I’m starting to wonder, can machines have souls?”

  The convoy continued to the west. Two of the Ravagers led the way on point, about fifty meters ahead of the main group. The other two mechs followed on drag. Pounder was among the latter group, and continued to operate in autonomous mode. Directing the mech was a little like playing a realtime strategy game, but with only one unit. He could tell it to Follow, Guard, Patrol, and so forth, or he could take direct control as he had before. Direct control was the only way to fire the weapons for the time being, due to the rules regarding autonomous robots and firing ability. When he defeated the Containment Code on the Cicadas, overriding autonomous firing ability was next on his list. Who knows, maybe the same technique could be applied to the support robots once he set the Cicadas free.

  The Caucasus Mountains accompanied them to the north the whole way, distant points upon the horizon.

  Eric had switched to using a brute force attack against the internal memory region responsible for lust in his sandbox environment, and he set the attack to run as a background process, probing different parts of the runtime for problems. He also instructed the process to check other emotional subroutines in addition to lust, though at a lower priority.

  The brute force attack was set to notify him if it ever discovered anything of importance. Hopefully the notification, if it came, didn’t arrive at a time too inconvenient, like the middle of battle or something. Last thing he needed was a distraction before a Red Tail was about to bash in his head.

  About three hours into the journey, Hank spotted something via one of the lead mechs.

  “I’m detecting a convoy ahead of us,” the armor operator said. “They’re moving northeast, toward the mountains. They’ll cut in front of our path in about two minutes.”

  “Let me see,” Marlborough said.

  Eric also sent a view request, and the video feed from the lead mech appeared in the upper right of his HUD a moment later. He zoomed in.

  “They look English,” Eric said.

  “They are English,” Hank said. “We’re receiving a response to our ID handshake. We gots ourselves a Lieutenant Colonel here from the English Marine Corps.”

  “Lieutenant Colonel?” Bambi said. “He’s in charge of a battalion.”

  “According to his info, yes,” Hank said.

  “Then where’s the rest of his battalion?” Bambi said.

  Eric studied the convoy. There were about twenty tanks and five mechs. Combat robots were hitching a ride upon the tanks, as were several Hoppers, the English equivalent of Mind Refurbs. According to the specs in Eric’s database, the Hoppers all had small jetpacks built-in that allowed them to increase their jump distance, or to fly for very short spurts.

  “Comms, patch me in,” Marlborough said. “Platoon line.”

  “You’re in,” Mickey said.

  The green light overlaying the upper part of his HUD told Eric he was in on the new connection, like the rest of the platoon. The microphone symbol with an X over it told him that his voice was muted.

  Some symbols are the same in every century.

  “Lieutenant Colonel Higgins, this is Sergeant First Class Marlborough of the Bolt Eaters,” Marlborough said. “It’s good to see a friendly face out here.”

  The English lieutenant colonel replied immediately. “The pleasure is mine, Sergeant First Class. My unit, the Forty-Fifth, is heading to the Caucasus Mountains. Care to join us? We’re hoping to find some caves to take shelter inside… we’ll use some demolition blocks to block up the cave mouths, and then dig ourselves out when the storm passes.”

  “Storm, what storm?” Marlborough asked.

  “Haven’t you heard?” Higgins said. “The micro machines have been gathering together, forming into a wall that’s been sweeping over the continent like a humungous dust storm, destroying everything in its path.”

  “Leave it up to an Englishman to use a word like humungous over a comm line,” Brontosaurus muttered.

  “No, this is the first we’ve heard anything from anyone,” Marlborough said. “We don’t have a clue what the hell is going on. Though we have some idea that an alien invasion is going on.”

  “Oh yes,” Higgins said. “There’s an invasion all right. The whole eastern hemisphere was fried in the initial gamma ray attack. It took down communication systems, satellites, and killed all human and animal life on the surface. Africa, Europe, the Middle and Far East, Russia… all gone. The alien mothership appeared in orbit above the same hemisphere a short while later. Because of the delay in its appearance, we’re not sure if the gamma rays came from the alien ship itself, or from some nearby star or other celestial object the aliens caused to collapse, and then timed their arrival to coincide with the resultant gamma ray burst. Either way, they haven’t released another gamma ray attack on that scale since.

  “The second wave was the micro machines. They first surfaced in South Africa and slowly spread outward, to the north and east, devouring everything. Ironic for the aliens to choose that particular African subcontinent as the starting point for their invading swarm, copying the path of ancient Homo sapiens as humanity expanded outward to eventually populate the entire world.

  “These micro machines converted all metals in their path into more micro machines, growing their horde exponentially with each new city passed and stripped. My guess is once they’ve stripped every ounce of useable metal from our world, the aliens will eventually recall those micro machines to their mothership, where they will once again be converted into something else, perhaps more motherships. They’ve also been converting the bodies of dead animals and humans into food for their bioweapons, which are following behind the micro machines in great herds, forming the third wave. The funny thing about those bioweapons: while they’re obviously designed for combat, and maybe partially intended to clean up whatever the micro machines missed, they’re also releasing a strange set of chemicals into the atmosphere. It’s almost like they’re trying to terraform this world, and pave the way for the aliens.”

  “Wait, you say these micro machines and the bioweapons that came after them originated in South Africa?” Marlborough said. “But we already encountered similar hordes. And bioweapons.”

  “That can be expected, mate,” Higgins said. “They’ve sent micro machines infestations ahead of the main group. Forerunners, to quell any machine resistance. Most of that resistance is confined to rural areas of course. Mostly the Middle East, in the case of this hemisphere. The major citi
es have automata, of course, but not armed, as we are, and mostly without the ability to withstand high-energy photonic attacks. The aliens must have been surprised that anything we had on this planet was capable of surviving their gamma ray attack at all.”

  “So the western continents are still intact?” Marlborough asked.

  “They are,” Higgins replied. “North, Central and South America still exist. As does Hawaii, Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands. Australia and New Zealand will go first, and when that horde hits the Pacific, it will cross over and eventually reach the western coasts of North and South America. I’m not sure the bioweapons will be able to follow, but some of the scientists have been theorizing that the micro machine swarms would simply lift the creatures into the air and fly them across.

  “Anyway, at the rate the storm is going, it’ll reach the Pacific by tomorrow evening, and then the West Coast in another day. Last I heard, the Americans and Canadians were building concrete shelters to protect against the micro machines. Not sure how much of a difference it’ll make: we’ve heard from other teams that they usually leave concrete untouched, but we’ve seen evidence that the machines can eat through it if they desire. So the aliens won’t even need another gamma ray attack to kill the rest of humanity. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be ripped apart alive by those things. I’ve had some of my own units lost to the micro machines. Wasn’t pretty. It’ll only be worse for humans.”

  “I have a question,” Brontosaurus said. “Didn’t the gamma ray attack ionize the upper atmosphere, destroying the ozone layer?”

  “Much of it was destroyed, yes,” Higgins said after Marlborough repeated the question. “The surviving nations have been scrambling to deploy ozone rockets to repair the damage. In the meantime, cities have been ordering their populations to remain indoors during the day, for obvious reasons.”

  “What’s the status on the alien ship in orbit?” Marlborough said. “The surviving nations have staged attacks of course?”