31

The bombs from the B-2s had been more effective than Ben had dared to hope. The heavy explosives had fallen like a storm, overwhelming the mrill attempts to blast them out of the sky. The bombs had taken out thirty-four of the mrill infantry and robots, leaving eleven of them still fighting. Plenty lethal, but no longer overwhelming. After destroying the robot on Vermont Street, Ben had instructed his small squad of marines to fall back and rejoin the main defenses at the space cannon, rearmed with grenades and missiles, and regroup on the south side of McPherson Square on K Street. This was a winnable fight, but the only way the American forces could prevail was by firing and falling back. Any toe-to-toe skirmish was an instant slaughter. Even the guerilla tactics resulted in heavy losses, but it was at least a manageable strategy. And Ben had also instructed the marines, once they reached the command center, to relay the coordinates of McPherson to the USS Anzio, a guided missile cruiser parked in the Chesapeake Bay. One more combined aerial and ground attack might be enough to finish this off.

Ben’s internal communications systems lit up, pinged simultaneously by Nick and Rickert. He fired three quick blasts and sprinted from behind the jumble of mangled concrete and rebar to the smoking wreckage of a carved-out tank.

He connected Eddie, Nick, and Rickert to a joint audio session over his internal network.

“Hey team. How we doing?” Ben asked.

“The mrill just sent in more than 2,000 additional ships and they’ve got one big-ass mother of a ship parked in orbit,” Nick said.

“The mrill somehow discovered Cheyenne Mountain and attacked it, and we’ve lost contact with the president,” Rickert said.

Ben sagged against the scorched tank. He accessed Nick’s visual feed and watched remotely as Nick and Eddie hopped and dodged and fired, while the defensive satellites, ground-based cannons, and human drones fired at an almost continuous rate against the incoming swarm. The defenders were outnumbered 100 to 1, and it was only a matter of time before they were overwhelmed.

Ben didn’t need to see through Rickert’s eyes to feel his despair.

“Did the defensive nukes detonate? Are the mrill inside the mountain, or did the explosion simply knock out our comms?” Ben asked.

“It looks like the nukes were detonated, but there’s no sign of the president’s escape plane. We’re sending a team in from Peterson Air Force Base, but who knows if they’ll be able to make it in, given the reinforcements the mrill just put in orbit. The rest of the government has gone dark. No one wants to communicate electronically for fear of giving away their position. The VP is holed up in California, and we’ve got the rest of the cabinet scattered at different sites. The SecDef was with the president, though, so his status is also unknown. We don’t really have a functional government right now. I . . . hold on, getting a call on my secure line.”

Ben felt his brief hope flickering out, a candle thrust into a tornado. Two fireballs bloomed on the horizon to the east, and Ben knew before the sound wave hit that it was the Anzio being destroyed by the mrill drones. With their numbers, the mrill didn’t even need to engage with Nick and Eddie in orbit. Just leave enough drones up there to keep them busy and send the rest down to the surface to wipe out the other defenses. Despair curled its clammy fingers around Ben’s mind and stepped on his chest as he wondered who was now in charge of the American government, and how soon they would start lobbing nukes at everything that moved in the sky. At least a dozen people had the launch codes. Someone would undoubtedly come up for air just long enough to use them. Nukes wouldn’t win the war. All they’d do was kill a lot of people. But the brass would get desperate as defeat loomed, and the end felt very near. A squirming, plummeting sense of panic twisted his gut. He was eleven again, helpless in the heaving storm, his grip slipping no matter how hard he held on.

Two mrill drop ships whooshed down about a block away and vomited out two squads of robot infantry. Ben looked up and could see mrill drone fighters and drop ships now crisscrossing the sky and, farther up, the blink and pop of the battle above the planet. A squadron of F-22 fighter jets were screaming in from Andrews Air Force Base, but Ben wanted to call them off. The moment they engaged the mrill, they were dead.

Rickert came back on.

“You guys will want to hear this.”

Ben was surprised to hear the voice of Ying Lai, the Chinese doctor who had overseen the initial nanobot transfusions.

“I have good news,” she said. “The Chinese government has completed its first drone fleet based on the specifications from the brin your team provided, and they are being launched as we speak.”

“Yeah?” Eddie said without much hope in his voice. “Well, we’re looking at nearly 2,000 mrill ships up here, but I guess if you’ve got a couple drones, send ’em our way. We’ll delay the inevitable as long as possible.”

“We have 543 drones inbound to your position,” Ying said.

There was silence for a moment, then Eddie chortled and whooped.

“Well, damn, let’s do this.”

“How the hell did you have time to build 543 drones?” Rickert asked.

“All of our major consumer electronics assembly plants shut down when the global economy stopped,” Ying said. “We had 400,000 workers with nothing to do. We provided the brin blueprints, retooled the assembly lines, and put them back to work. It was efficient.”

“I bet,” Ben said.

“The technology was quite challenging, but the concepts were straightforward. There was . . . considerable debate over whether to enable the machines to be remote-controlled by you and your team, Lt. Shepherd. But I was able to prevail, saying that it was necessary to enable this functionality to ensure our survival.”

“You pushed for that?”

“Simple logic, Lieutenant. You and your men are by far the most advanced weapons in the human arsenal. Even with these drones, we’ll face a tremendous challenge to overcome the enemy. Why cripple our chances further? Plus, your actions in Shanghai were not forgotten.”

Ben, Nick, and Eddie felt 543 connection points suddenly open themselves to their minds as the Chinese drones rose into the sky. The team quickly divvied up the reinforcements, with most rocketing toward Nick and Eddie, who were now battling in the skies over South America. Thirty of the ships veered off to Ben’s location in DC. Then he reconsidered.

“General, I’m sending five of the drones to Cheyenne Mountain, or what’s left of it. Alert the rescue team from Peterson that they’re going to be getting some company, and not to shoot at it. The drones will provide cover for the rescue team. Dr. Ying, do the drones have any passenger capabilities?”

“I’m afraid not. They are purely weapons platforms.”

“Well, if the president is still alive, hopefully the runway and jet are still useable. Okay, let’s go.”

Rickert signed off from his bunker in the foothills of South Dakota, but Ben kept his connection open with Nick and Eddie a bit longer. Through their eyes, he could see them fighting through the cloud of mrill ships. A bolt of enemy fire carved a precise, black streak down the edge of Nick’s ship. Then the cavalry arrived, cutting in from the east like a silver hailstorm. There were too many for Nick and Eddie to control directly, so their internal computers instantly distributed a series of orders and guidelines, turning the drones loose as autonomous weapons. Nick and Eddie kept a handful to fly a protective formation around their own ships, and with that, the largest vehicular battle in human history was underway.

Ben pushed the feed to the background of his mind but didn’t cut it off. He needed to deal with the mushrooming mrill presence down on the ground, though he had a feeling he would be needing backup soon and in some form. The twenty-five drones he’d commandeered would be there in five minutes, but he had to hold the fort until they arrived.

At that moment, Sergeant Daniels and his marines came into view. Daniels whistled softly, unable to see Ben, who was still cloaked. Ben ducked down behind the wreckage of the tank and deactivated his invisibility cloak. The marines, weighed down with missile launchers and various explosives, hustled over, weapons and ammo clinking softly, and squeezed up against the twisted metal.

“What’s the situation, sir?” Daniels said.

“A bit more complicated since you left, but nothing we can’t handle,” Ben said. “We’ve got two squads of mrill robots half a block away, and they’ve got a hell of a lot more air cover now thanks to some reinforcements that just parked themselves about 500 miles above our heads. And unless I’m very much mistaken, they just took out the USS Anzio, so no missile support.”

Every man in the squad glanced up involuntarily and muttered a soft curse.

“Good news is we’ve got some reinforcements of our own inbound. Made in China, and I think they commandeered every manufacturing site in the country, so I hope y’all aren’t planning on buying a new phone anytime soon. More than 500 drones to call our own. Most of them are dispatched to help with the orbital battle, but we’ve got twenty-five inbound to provide us some air support. And we’re mostly facing mrill robots down here, not foot soldiers. The robots are tough, but they’re a damn sight dumber and slower than the mrill themselves, so we’ve got a fighting chance.”

“How’s the rest of the world doing, sir?” one of the soldiers asked. “Is there anything left out there?”

Ben decided not to say anything about Lockerman.

“We’ll find out once we kick these shitheads off Earth,” he said. “So, same drill as before. I’ll draw their attention, you plant claymores at the intersection to the south and set up missile teams on the roof. I’ll draw them in, you’ll cut them apart. Things go pear-shaped, rendezvous point is the White House lawn. We’re running out of real estate to retreat to, and we’ve still got to protect that cannon. Drone ETA 45 seconds.”

As if to offer a reminder of its existence, the cannon fired three times into the sky. They were close enough now that they could feel the jolt in both the ground and the air. The mrill robots and handful of remaining infantry were clawing closer to the weapon, bulldozing their way through the city. The marines dispersed to set up their explosives and move to the rooftops of the adjacent buildings. Ben suspected the mrill would be wise to the maneuver this time, but they would definitely not be expecting the drone attack from above. The marines were moving silently up the fire escape of one of the buildings when one of them, Private Robert Black, slipped and clattered down a few steps. He caught himself quickly, but it was enough to attract the attention of the mrill force, which swiveled as one toward the sound. The marines were caught, exposed in an indefensible position, their heavy weapons useless in the tight, confined, twisting space of the staircase.

Five blips streaked into DC airspace.

The only one who noticed was Ben, who had been tracking the signals from the Chinese fighters on his internal feed. Now it was a party. The five drones, designed in a distant star system by a dead race, assembled on the other side of the world, guided by a man who was no longer certain whether he still qualified as human or not, responded to a thought and opened fire on the alien invaders.

Crackling darts of energy sawed through the mrill robots and soldiers, drilling deep craters in the surrounding streets and buildings. The mrill drones were already responding to the attack, flying in from the east, presumably the same drones that had taken out the Anzio. Ben sent the Chinese drones around for another pass, moving well over the speed of sound to avoid the return fire from the forces on the ground. A clutch of sonic booms rattled the few windows that were still intact. At the same time, the marines reached the rooftops and unleashed their missiles and rockets. Though less lethal than the ion guns on the drones, the conventional explosives found their marks. It was nearing 3 a.m. now, but the glow of battle and trail of fire extending back to the original mrill insertion point made it look like feeble dawn.

Four mrill drones arrived just as the Chinese drones began their second attack run.

Two of the drones were picked off as they strafed the mrill position. Ben turned his drones to engage the enemy ships. Despite the hundreds of reinforcements engaging the mrill fleet in orbit, Nick, Eddie, and their machines were still outnumbered nearly four to one. The ground defenses had to hold.

Ben and the remaining military forces on the surface would have to deal with the mrill ground forces directly. Even as his nanomachines took over his body, his mind was already mourning the deaths to come. In his previous life, the chaos of combat had required him to focus both his mind and body on the task at hand. Now the machines in his body handled the fighting, leaving his mind to agonize even as the battle still unfolded. He was still unclear if this was an improvement or not.

From the rooftops, missiles and rocket-propelled grenades whistled and hissed. Beautiful red, orange, and yellow fireballs blossomed where ordnance was planted: in the ground, on top of buildings, inside shattered vehicles. As the mrill struggled to pivot from the air attack to this new ground assault, Ben wondered again if they felt any emotions at all. Did they question and hesitate? Did they mourn? Fear?

It didn’t matter. They would.