Planetary Assault (Star Force Series) Read online

  Summoning all his speed, Bjorn made his play. He knew he might well die, but at least it would be a clean death, one met fighting, rather than running.

  He pulled the pin on the grenade.

  A second passed while he dodged this way and that. The blades sawed at the air, spread wide the way an ant warrior might spread its mandibles, seeking something to crush. The shears rasped over his head as he ducked under them.

  He held the grenade in his left hand, and stuck his right hand up in the air, higher than the rest of his body.

  The machine took the bait. It lunged and sliced off his hand at the wrist. The blades clacked together and gore sprayed Bjorn’s cheek. He tasted his own blood as it ran into his mouth and dimmed the vision of his right eye.

  This was the moment he’d been waiting for. The machine had its deadly jaws shut. It would take a fraction of a second to open them again. During this moment, he could move freely.

  Scrambling to his feet, Bjorn threw himself to the machine’s side, and rammed the grenade into the hole in its hull, the same hole he’d been gouging at with his knife minutes earlier.

  The grenade went in and vanished. Then, he dove to get away.

  The Macro didn’t cooperate, however. It turned, blades opening like jaws. It couldn’t get Bjorn into the blades, he was too close, but it did manage to smash the curved outside of the shears into his back.

  Bjorn was thrown onto the sand face first. He scrambled to get back to his feet, but his missing hand failed him. He levered against the stump, driving it into the sand and feeling the grit sting his laid-open flesh.

  He could sense the machine looming over him, coming in for the kill. Then there was a shocking thud. The grenade had finally gone off.

  The machine thrashed for a few seconds more, snapping at nothing spasmodically. Bjorn scrambled away from it.

  Finally, its motors stopped whirring, and it crashed down, dead.

  Bjorn sat up, sides heaving. He circled the machine warily. The corporal came up behind him, aiming his rifle at the dead machine.

  “Is it really dead?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “That was some crazy shit. You’re my hero.”

  Bjorn chuckled. He sat down on the sand and cradled his stump. The sand had caked up on the exposed flesh, but it was still bleeding a bit. He knew the nanites in his body were rushing to the scene, forming a net to keep his blood in his veins like platelets forming a scab—but faster.

  “Oh, jeez!” said the marine, throwing himself down on his knees. “I didn’t see you lost your hand. Wow, crap. Let me get a tourniquet on that.”

  “No,” said Bjorn. “Just go find my hand.”

  The corporal looked at him for a second, as if he were insane.

  “You’re in shock. You aren’t thinking straight.”

  “Look, do you want to help me or not?”

  “Yeah, of course. I already radioed this in. A chopper should be coming out soon.”

  Bjorn closed his eyes and shook his head. “That’s not helping me. Just get my damned hand, will you?”

  “Yeah, sure man.”

  The corporal went off down the beach, and came back less than a minute later with the sandy, blood-caked hand in his helmet.

  “Could you give me your canteen?” Bjorn asked.

  Wordlessly, the corporal gave him the canteen and the helmet with the hand in it.

  “I’ve never seen moves like those,” the corporal said while he watched Bjorn wash off the hand in the helmet. “Jeez, man…I got to wear that, you know?”

  Bjorn used the helmet as a washbasin, cleaning the sand from his hand and his stump. When he was through, he handed it back to the corporal, who looked disgusted.

  “Go wash it out in the ocean,” he told him.

  When the corporal’s back was turned, he pressed the severed hand onto his wrist again. He held it there, applying steady, firm pressure.

  “Uh,” said the corporal, returning a minute later. “You know, I don’t think that’s going to work. I think you need a surgeon to sew it up. And fast. The chopper will be here in a fifteen minutes.”

  Bjorn read the man’s nametag. “Listen,” he said, “Robertson?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m not going to be here when that chopper gets here. You understand?”

  Robertson stared at him. His mouth hung open. Finally, he closed it and nodded.

  “I get it,” he said. “You’re Star Force, aren’t you?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  The corporal snorted and shook his head. “Just a guess. It’s either that, or you’re some kind of circus act.”

  Bjorn looked troubled.

  “Hey!” the corporal said. “It’s cool, man. I don’t care if you’re an astronaut, or a spy, or a deserter, or what. I’m not telling anyone about you. I think you guys are the best.”

  “Why’s that?”

  The corporal gestured back toward the steaming hulk of the machine. “Because you go up against these machines every day. You probably knew it was coming here, didn’t you?”

  “Maybe…”

  “That’s what I thought,” Robertson said excitedly. “You guys sacrifice everything just to protect the rest of us. Hell, you’re barely human now.”

  Bjorn awarded him with a thin smile. “You’re welcome.”

  “What about your hand?” Robertson asked in real concern. “That’s a nasty wound.”

  “It was a clean cut. The nanites can reattach my hand. I’ll be able to move it again soon, and it will feel pretty normal in a day or so.”

  “You still have a missing a finger.”

  Bjorn got to his feet with a grunt and took a deep breath. A normal man would be in shock. But the nanites had a cure for almost any physical malady a man could experience. They only had trouble solving psychological problems. He went to the Macro and reached inside with his good hand. He dug around in there, but couldn’t find the finger.

  “You’re trying to find the missing finger, aren’t you?” Robertson asked in amazement.

  “No, I dropped my car keys in here.”

  The corporal stared at him for a moment, then gave a single wild bark of laughter. Bjorn could see he was feeling unstable. It was natural enough after what he’d been through.

  “That’s really funny,” the corporal said. He didn’t look like he was happy. He looked like he was about to be sick. “I’m not feeling so good.”

  “Was that your first real firefight?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Lay down,” Bjorn advised. “You’re just coming down and have a lot of chemicals in your bloodstream. It’s a mild form of shock. Give it a minute and you’ll be fine.”

  Following his advice, Robertson laid on his back on the blood-clotted sand. The waves lapped up, almost reaching him, but not quite. His eyes stared upward at the clouds overhead.

  “I’m messed up inside,” he said. “All these dead guys—I knew them. I don’t know how you can make jokes in the middle of this nightmare.”

  Bjorn looked at him for a moment. He wasn’t exactly a kid; he was probably about twenty and growing up fast.

  “Practice,” Bjorn told him, answering the kid’s question at last.

  Robertson perked up after a few minutes, but he stayed lying there on his back. Bjorn was feeling worse rather than better. His hand had begun to reattach itself, and the pain was intense. The skin of his arm and his hand had already sealed over. A livid red ring of swollen scar tissue circled his wrist. The nanites were working overtime, but Bjorn knew his hand was barely hanging there. If he slapped it a good one it would probably fall off again.

  “I’ve got to splint and wrap this,” he said.

  He got up wearily and roamed the island. After a minute or so of fruitless searching, Robertson showed up at his side.

  “Take a break,” the corporal said. “I bet our med kit spilled out of the skiff we came in on.”

  He waded out into the
surf and rummaged in the wreckage of his patrol boat. After a few minutes, he came back to shore with a dripping plastic case. The box was olive green and had a small red cross printed on it.

  Robertson knelt beside Bjorn and went to work on him.

  “Freaky,” he said as he eyed the healing wound. “I can see little metal flecks in there. It looks like somebody threw glitter on your arm.”

  He cut two branches for splints, then began to wrap the whole wrist in gauze and tape.

  “Okay,” Robertson said. “So you’re a Star Force hero. That’s cool. But I’m guessing you were military before. What made you quit national service and go up against the aliens? Did they burn your hometown or something?”

  “They picked me up.”

  Robertson paused and stared at him wide-eyed. “You mean you’re a pilot? You are one of the originals? I can’t believe it. I thought they were all carried off into space by the Nano ships. Except for Riggs, that is.”

  “Don’t believe everything the news tells you.”

  “I don’t. Believe me, I don’t. But…wow. What the hell are you doing here on this scrap of dirt them—I mean, if you don’t mind my asking.”

  Bjorn shook his head. The kid was getting on his nerves, but somehow he felt compelled to answer. How had he gotten to this point in his life? He’d started off in the regular service, gone on into special forces units—then somehow he’d lost his way. It had been a long time ago.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “you start off all ‘oorah’, but if you get involved with the Washington people it can become…confused. After my enlistment was up, I found I had become something different from what I’d intended.”

  Robertson looked at him blankly. Bjorn could tell the kid had no idea what he was talking about. For some reason, he decided to explain further.

  “You know how you felt after you watched your friends die on this scrap of dirt? How sick you felt?”

  The corporal nodded.

  “That’s how the world felt when they met up with the aliens. The world governments have all gone a little crazy, in my opinion. I think it was a form of shock. They got paranoid and they’ve done things no one could be proud of.”

  “Like what?”’

  “Like sending me in to do dirty jobs. To clean up enemies—real or imagined enemies.”

  Robertson looked at him with narrowed eyes. He was beginning to catch on.

  “So…you did things you’re not proud of, is that it?”

  “Yeah. I’ve been a bad boy. And I signed up to be a good guy. Finally, I dumped them all and went independent. After a few years of this, I guess the suits decided to reel me back in. But I’m not going back in. Not alive, anyway. Now you know why I’m on this tiny chunk of land in the middle of a war zone.”

  “Shock,” Robertson said thoughtfully. “I never thought of it that way. The whole world is sick and puking. I think you’re right about that. All the cameras, the drones. They are in every city now, watching people. You can’t take a piss in a forest without it being logged in a database somewhere.”

  “Not out here,” Bjorn told him, making a sweeping gesture with his good arm. “That’s why I came.”

  When the field dressing was finished, Bjorn thanked the corporal and headed toward the leafy end of the island. He’d heard a helicopter coming. The sound was unmistakable.

  The corporal shielded his eyes against the tropical sun and looked for it. Bjorn took a last look at the kid, but didn’t say goodbye. It was better that way.

  When the flying machine made its approach a few minutes later, Robertson looked around in confusion, but Bjorn was gone.

  He’d vanished.

  -9-

  Bjorn watched the island for a day, but no one came, so he went back to his vacation spot and tried to settle in. It was difficult. Although he was able to enjoy a few nights of peace after battling his first Macro, things just didn’t feel the same. The encounter with the kid corporal and the Macro had put everything into a new light.

  For a long time now, Bjorn had been an independent operator. He was his own man, and he answered to no one once a mission was finished. He’d liked that part of the job, and always, in-between contracts, he’d found a spot like this to sit quietly and enjoy life.

  But now, he felt bad about just sitting here. It was obvious the regular military couldn’t hope to deal with these aliens. Just one machine would have easily wiped out a trained team of regular troops. It was disturbing. Bjorn knew that if he hadn’t been here to help, they all would have died. It’d been a long time since he’d thought of himself as a hero of any form.

  So he was troubled, but he didn’t know what to do about it. Usually, when bothered by some detail of life—like a man’s dying face—he would go to a vacation spot like this one and slowly forget. He’d soak up the sun and let his bad thoughts fade away. Today, it wasn’t working, and he wasn’t sure why not.

  He knew he couldn’t stay on the island forever. Someone was too likely to come looking for him now, if the Macros in the sky didn’t end the world for everyone. They were busy for the moment with bigger problems, that he could understand. But he wouldn’t be forgotten forever. Eventually, his tiny island would be investigated.

  He considered leaving, but didn’t know where else to go. He was out of money, and all his supplies were on the island. Despite the fact he’d had a few bad experiences here, he still liked the quiet hours. Sure, he knew the marines might come looking for him. But if the kid had reported him, they would at least have a good impression to start with.

  He didn’t trust that the kid wouldn’t talk. Defeating a Macro in close combat made quite a story and his superiors would want to know how they’d managed to defeat the machine with only small arms. The corporal might mean well, but the temptation to brag would be intense. But even if he did keep quiet, if his commanders sensed any twisting of the facts with a dead patrol to answer for, they would lean on him. They would debrief him until he confessed everything. You didn’t just wander back to camp after having lost everyone in your unit and explain it all away with a shrug.

  If he did tell them about the nanotized nut he’d met out here on this rock, they’d probably want to come out here to see the magic man who had ridden a Macro like a bronco for themselves. Figuring he had at least until morning, he dug into his supplies and found a small bottle of vodka. Somehow it had never leaked a drop despite all the explosions and giant robots.

  After pouring a few drops onto the crusty circular scar around his wrist and rubbing it in, he drank the rest straight. The alcohol burned in his throat and on his wounds, and he liked both sensations. He lifted his right hand to examine it. For nearly a day, his fingers had remained blue and wouldn’t operate properly, but the hand had stayed attached to his wrist. The second day the tingling had begun in those fingers, feeling as if he’d left his hand folded under his body overnight, cutting off the circulation. He hated that tingling, but at least he still had a hand. Today it was working well, almost fully healed. He thought that perhaps in time he would figure out a way to regrow the missing digit.

  That night he slept restlessly. There had been more fighting out over the ocean to the east. Sometimes, he thought he saw hulking ships appear in the distance, silhouetted by explosions. They had to be close or huge to be visible. Perhaps it was both.

  Expecting things to worsen, he continued to eye the sky until it became overcast and began to rain. It was almost a relief. Now, if a missile did zoom close and end his life, he at least wouldn’t have time to even acknowledge it.

  But still, he kept looking around whenever he heard an unusual sound. Each time the stray noise turned out to be a surging wave slapping the beach or a rustling palm dropping a frond. Twice, a sea bird landed nearby and foraged on the shore until he tossed a stone at it and it flapped off, squawking. He was so tired in the early hours of the next day he almost didn’t care if another marine patrol came out here and caught him.

  When the rains stopped,
he ate the cold remains of his last yellow jack and finished his last drops of vodka. Then he found the cleanest stretch of dry bare sand left on the island and stretched out on it. He passed out until dawn the next day.

  * * *

  When the dawn light came, it was pink at first, then deep blue. Sunlight filtered through cloud cover and a stiff breeze came up, making every leaf on the island rattle and flap.

  Bjorn yawned and stretched. He ate sparingly and flexed his hand experimentally every few minutes. It wasn’t perfect, but it was operating again. It itched and burned abominably. The skin was red and puffed up. He could see metal in there—dark, blue-gray streaks that pulsed like veins but he which he knew weren’t full of blood. They were veins in between his skin and his muscle tissue. Veins of nanites.

  His right hand felt odd, and not just because it was missing a finger. It was almost entirely without tactile feeling, but he could move it. He squeezed and flexed the surviving fingers, watching them tremble as he sent them commands. He supposed he should be glad he couldn’t feel more, as the pain would have been worse.

  As he watched, tiny granules of sand were pressed out of his skin around the laceration which circled his wrist. The nanites were cleaning up, locating sand granules inside his arm which his poor washing efforts had missed. One at a time, the tiny machines forced these foreign objects out of his body. After each sand grain was pushed out, feeling like a slow-stabbing needle in reverse, a trickle of blood ran from the spot. These leaks were quickly tended to by more invisibly small machines.

  As he watched this strange, alien process, wincing now and then, he thought about what the corporal had said: You sacrificed everything—hell, you’re barely human now…

  Bjorn had to agree. He was no longer entirely human, he was part machine. Maybe that was why he didn’t want to live among humans anymore, to play by their rules. He didn’t hate them, but he did feel distant from them. They were like relatives from his childhood. People he recalled fondly, but who had grown apart from.