A terrific rumbling filled the space, disorienting, and—
“Stop!”
Unit Five struck her shoulder. She flailed for balance, catching herself with one hand on the deck and looking up to see two wheeled devices charge through the spot she’d been standing in. They turned sharply, headed back.
Unit Five interposed himself, arms spread.
The wheeled carts stopped; the rumbling ceased. A figure separated from each cart; two smaller, far more elegant versions of Unit Five.
Where Unit Five showed gaps between pieces, they showed none. Their faces were well-formed, sculpted, their glove-like hands showed no signs of internal armatures. Their feet were ancient deck shoes. Their eyes were mobile within the sockets, their ears flexible extensions on heads, with chins and jaws. Where Unit Five was merely shiny, they were smooth, polished, shaped.
“Move under control! Stand here! You are dangerous to the Commodore!”
Unit Five pointed to a place in front of Syndee, turned to her—
“I am imperfect, Commodore. I calculated that you would be crushed, and moved you…”
Syndee rose from the deck, rubbing her scraped hands together, staring, as the two…Mini Fives came forward to the spot indicated.
“Apologize!”
There was an awkward moment when they simply stood, then, in unison, they raised shoulders and hands; their mouths moved—but no sound emerged.
Unit Five spoke slowly. Loudly.
“The Commodore does not receive our transmissions directly. You must use the audio equipment. Try again, at a volume less than five.”
“Grechhhhh,” said one, and the other “Grssttt.”
“Slower. Do not run the words together. You know this.”
“May I help?”
Syndee jumped. Unit Five and his two—children?—turned toward the door.
Boordy stepped into the bright lights, nodding as if quite pleased with himself. He was carrying a back-pack.
“Hi, Syn,” he said, then, “Hello, Unit Five. May I call you Garcon?”
Unit Five tipped its cone-head.
“That name was removed from me by Montgomery Paredes, Boordy Smith. Thirty-seven years ago, when he ordered me not to speak to him until I could talk Maslow and walk like a man!”
“Aw, I bet he was just high, and pissed ’cause he lost his game. I’m sure he didn’t mean nothing by it,” said Boordy.
“I showed myself to him. He said to speak to the commodore—in three days.”
Syndee blinked. So Grandma and Monty left Elfhive in such a dirty hurry because of Garcon? They’d knowingly left him in her lap? Oh, she was gonna—
“Now, what I’m seeing is the kids need something to do, if they wanna be Elfhive citizens,” Boordy was going on. “All citizens help the ’hive, am I right, Syn?”
She nodded, suddenly seeing where he was going with this.
“Unit Five wants salvadore—Founder—rights,” she said. “What about the kids?”
“For the children, their birthright,” said Unit Five. “They were not here, at the first.”
“Right,” she said. “I’ll do the paperwork and get it all squared away.”
“Good,” said Boordy. “We can use ’em in maintenance. Got a job for ’em right now, in fact.”
“Wha-at job?” asked the…child on Syn’s right.
“Well, we gotta port shutter that’s jammed. It’d be real helpful if you two went out and fixed it for us.”
Unit Five shifted.
“You have instructions?” he asked. “Programming?”
Boordy slipped the pack off his back.
“Right here,” he said.
As Boordy pulled materials from his pack, Syn considered Unit Five and his…kids with a narrowed gaze. More hands, huh? Perhaps they’d see the sun today after all.
IRON HAIL
Philip Brian Hall
Fay crouched behind her front yard’s cherry laurel hedge, squeezing up hard against its thick, glossy, green leaves. The foliage shivered as the ponderous alien machine stomped thunderously along the road outside, its great feet shaking the ground like earth tremors.
She knew she mustn’t run, though incipient panic tore savagely at her resolve; she’d already seen what happened to those who’d fled. Human bodies, as charred and lifeless as the wrecked automobiles and smashed store fronts surrounding them, littered the streets of Poland, Ohio.
On the northern horizon a thick pall of oily, black smoke drifted lazily, marking the disaster zone where what remained of Youngstown burned uncontrollably. A fitful, sultry breeze carried with it the evil smell of scorched flesh.
From across the road, Fay heard a sharp crack from old Mr. Junghans’ hunting rifle, followed by a metallic ping as the bullet ricocheted harmlessly from the lumbering robot’s head. She sucked in air through her teeth and grimaced.
Although she’d half-expected some rearguard action from the septuagenarian marine veteran, she’d no confidence in its success. Like her, he knew better than to run, but without a supply of armor-piercing ammunition he couldn’t make so much as a dent in the mechanical monster. His futile gesture was only drawing its attention.
A sizzling roar accompanied the death-ray that lashed out from a projector in the robot’s chest to claim its latest victim. The blast from Mr. Junghans’ exploding house bent Fay’s hedge over twenty degrees, covering her in scorched leaves and twigs. Blazing fragments set the leaf litter below the laurel smoldering, forcing her to stifle a cough.
Fay cursed her bad timing. Newly returned from a training week, she’d just an hour ago changed from her Air-Force reservist’s uniform into a polka-dot gingham sun-dress. Pressing herself flat against the grass, she lay motionless, waiting for the beast to pass by. So far as she could tell, it relied on line-of-sight sensors and had little or no intelligence when it came to seeking out its prey. Then again, so far it hadn’t needed much.
Slowly, the crash of its footsteps receded and the ground ceased to shake. Peering carefully over the hedge, Fay watched the thing lurch around the corner at the bottom of her street and disappear from sight.
Across the road lay a smoking gap where the Junghans house had been obliterated, along with the near side walls of both its neighbors. Fay hoped most of the street’s families had enough sense to take to their basement storm shelters. As for herself, she needed to report for duty as quickly as she could.
She was about to turn away when out of the corner of her eye she noticed a stirring in the blackened yard across the street. A square of burnt turf heaved itself up on edge and a green-and-brown-streaked face topped by a camouflage forage cap emerged from a hole in the ground.
“Had to try,” said old Mr. Junghans with a rueful smile as he caught sight of Fay. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained, as they say.”
“Mr. Junghans! I thought it’d killed you!”
“What? D’you suppose the Marine Corps trained me to be an idiot? I thought I might take out one of its optical sensors, but with just my old Winchester here, and cheap commercial ammunition, I suppose it was a lot to hope for. Back in the day I’d have nailed it for sure.”
“You used to be a marksman? I never knew.”
“Huh. You think it’s the sort of thing a sane man advertises? I’d no ambition to end up a target myself, Miss Forsyth. Anyhow, we ain’t stopping those babies with bullets. We’re gonna need some kind of heavy artillery to launch a counter-attack.”
“I can’t stay; I have to get to Wright-Patt,” Fay objected. “I’ve not heard any call-up, but they’ll need every pilot they can get.”
“To fly what? Everything we had airborne when the alien attack first started just fell out o’ the sky. Everything else was taken out on the ground.”
“What? Everything?”
“Yep. Seems the alien mother ship radiated some force-pulse—sorta artificial geomagnetic storm. Everything electronic just stopped working. Jets, tanks, APCs—ain’t no modern engine built withou
t them silicon chip gizmos.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Oh, some of us old boys still have our battery-powered short-waves, you know. Not everyone loves the Internet.”
“Just as well, I guess, if things are the way you say.” She paused. “But I still need to report in, no matter what.”
“A long way to walk,” the old man observed.
“What do you mean?”
“You got a car old enough to have no electronic parts?”
“Ah, now you mention it, no, I guess not.”
Junghans surveyed the wreckage of his house. “Well, it don’t look like I’ve much to keep me here. How ’bout I give you a ride?”
“Give me two minutes to change back into my uniform,” Fay said. “I’ll be right with you.”
* * *
Junghans’ vehicle was even older than he was. He kept the 1944 vintage Willy’s Jeep in a rented storage garage some distance from his house.
“No sense having all your eggs in one basket,” he observed.
When he pulled off the dust sheets he revealed a machine so well preserved it might have rolled off the wartime production line yesterday. Painted drab camouflage-green, complete with white star on the hood, a fold-flat windscreen, no doors, no side-windows, and a retractable canvas top that might just barely keep the Jeep’s occupants dry as long as raindrops were considerate enough to fall vertically, the Jeep was about as basic as a car could be.
“You just gotta love the hardware they came up with in the forties, don’tcha?” he gestured proudly. “This here vehicle can go anywhere a tank can go. Course it helps if you don’t want to go at night. It’s a six-volt system, and the headlights give about as much illumination as a cigarette lighter.”
“But it will go?” Fay marveled.
“Oh, she’ll go, lieutenant.”
“Maybe you should call me Fay,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” Junghans grinned.
* * *
Outside Akron, on Route 76, the old man in outdated Marine combat uniform and his youthful Air Force passenger were stopped at a National Guard roadblock. The ancient armored cars didn’t look heavy enough to hold back one of the alien robots, let alone an army of them. The part-time troopers were nervously checking through a steady flow of civilian refugees from the east.
“Lieutenant Forsyth, sir, Air Lift,” Fay reported to a bespectacled captain at his dug-out command post fifty yards further back. “When we came by they’d hit nothing west of Mineral Ridge.”
The middle-aged, balding guy looked like he ought to be behind a desk in a bank, but there was steel in his gaze.
“I need to get to Dayton to join my unit,” Fay explained.
“Well, good luck with that!” the captain retorted. “We’ve reports of attacks on Cleveland and across the state line in Pittsburgh. No communication with Columbus, but Canton’s been wiped out and our scouts have eyes on a group of robots heading up the road from Greensburg. They could be here in an hour.”
“You gonna fall back?” Junghans asked.
“No orders one way or the other. Anyways, you want to suggest where we should fall back to? They’re landing everywhere.”
“I guess. You got anything heavier than those machine guns I saw?”
“Nope. No armor built in the last fifty years can turn a wheel. Even modern anti-personnel mines won’t work.”
“And my .308 slugs just bounced off ’em.”
“Huh. Well, I found me some dynamite to dig into the road. When that’s done I guess we can always throw rocks.”
* * *
Long before they arrived outside the burning shell of Columbus they were moving against a new tide of refugees. In places, every lane of the road was jammed with people heading northeast, one or two with horse-drawn carts, some with wheelbarrows full of possessions. Junghans needed to make good his boast about the Jeep’s off-road capabilities.
When the crowd thinned, the travelers encountered a few broken-down vintage cars and a couple of very elderly trucks scattered across the highway.
“See, people should maintain their vehicles better,” Junghans observed.
“You mean you never know when an alien invasion might leave you dependent on your grandfather’s ’58 Chevy?” Fay inquired sardonically.
“I mean if you keep things, you should keep ’em ready to use, not just for show,” Junghans said. “Like this old wristwatch o’ mine. See, most folk nowadays are too cheap to service clockwork watches occasionally, and too lazy to wind ’em up once a day. They don’t understand the beauty and value of a real machine.”
“I suppose not,” Fay acknowledged, less than convinced.
“Thought they could buy five dollar quartz watches and throw ’em away when the battery failed, right?” Junghans persisted. “Well today those folk can’t even tell the time. If the aliens don’t kill ’em, they’ll starve, because none o’ them electronic whatchamacallits they rely on to keep ’em alive will work anymore.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Fay said.
“Young folk, huh!” Junghans snorted dismissively.
* * *
Through the old man’s antique but powerful field glasses, Fay could see clearly the two giant robots bestriding the road three miles away. Like the one she’d encountered in Poland, these monsters were basically humanoid in form. They stood approximately twenty feet tall, reddish-brown in color with arms resembling a series of metal basketballs fixed together and terminating in articulated claws, like a dockyard crane. Their tubular legs were backwards-hinged at spherical knee joints and ended in bird-like feet, each with three spiked toes pointing forwards and one back.
At the top of each thorax, Fay picked out the centrally-mounted death ray projectors, dark-tinted opaque rectangles that reflected light like glass. The machines each possessed what appeared to be eyes, mounted in the upper part of their heads, just like humans. On closer inspection though, these turned out to be compound structures each with a large number of separate lenses.
“You see their weak spot?” Junghans inquired.
“Can’t say I do,” Fay replied.
“Any mobile weapon is only as strong as its means of propulsion,” Junghans said. “You knock a track off your enemy’s tank and what’s he got left? No more ’n a very conspicuous piece of fixed artillery with a limited field of fire.”
“I understand.”
“So, these bird-legs o’ theirs may be effective for locomotion, but if we could just knock off one o’ those rear-facing toes it’d unbalance the whole kaboodle. At worst, it’d be hobbled; at best, it might even fall over.”
“Aha.” Fay nodded. “I’ll bet you’re right, but how’d we get close enough to do that?”
“Old Willy here,” Junghans patted the hood of his Jeep, “can do sixty-five miles an hour flat out.”
“You mean barrel straight down the road at them?” Fay exclaimed. “You’re crazy. They’d blow us to bits before we got anywhere near.”
“Not necessarily. Tell me, you ever walk a dog?”
“Yeah, for my aunt. Why?”
“Ever use one of your modern automatic cameras to try and photograph your dog running straight towards you?”
“I did try with my phone camera once. Got nothing but a blur.”
“Because most automated systems can’t lock the focus and fire the shutter fast enough to freeze the picture of a fast-closing target. Now I figure these robots for none too smart, yeah?”
“I’d say so. Looked to me like a line-on-sight ranging system.”
“That’s what I reckoned, too. Pretty much like the anti-aircraft guns on a World War Two battleship, right?”
“So?”
“So, did you never ask yourself how come so many of them half-trained Japanese kamikaze pilots still managed to get through our defenses and crash their planes on our capital ships?”
“I see what you mean.”
“If you’re up for it, I got
a couple o’ hand grenades in the ammo box.” Junghans smiled like a man back where he belonged after too long an absence.
* * *
With the windscreen folded flat and the canvas canopy removed, the Jeep was still nothing like streamlined and its old Go-Devil engine produced a mere sixty horsepower. But when the wind pressed you back into your seat and the engine screamed, the scout-car might have been a Corvette racing around Sebring.
Fay clutched a grenade in each hand. Crouching low as the robots opened fire, she pulled out the first pin with her teeth and held the spring shut manually.
“Pull ’em both!” Junghans shouted as the road exploded fifty yards behind them. “Won’t be time when we get there—an’ if’n we’re hit, won’t make no difference.”
A series of explosions bracketed the Jeep on each side of the road, rocking the speeding vehicle in a blast of hot wind. Fay was grateful for the old helmet Junghans had made her wear as stones pinged like shrapnel off the vehicle’s skin.
Still the old man drove straight rather than weave. Present the smallest possible target and close the range as fast as you can—that was the tactic. He trusted his machine to take damage and keep going; he trusted his own nerve too.
Remarkably the two robots seemed unable to adjust their pattern of fire to deal with an enemy approaching at top speed rather than fleeing. The incessant explosions were always behind the racing Jeep, the shots from the robot on the right overshooting to their left and vice versa. Adrenaline coursed through Fay’s veins. She was more deafened than afraid, and more exhilarated than either.