Chapter 20
brODIE, TAYLOR, AND MILLER WALKED down the central street of the mock village, past the line of wrecked and rusted cars. A battered white Nissan jutted into the road, probably to provide meager cover for the town’s defenders.
Brodie observed the tightly packed gray cinderblock buildings and their narrow window openings.
Miller was pointing out different spots around the town where his men would take up positions.
“If we try to hold the roads, we’re dead.
They’re too fast and their aim is too accurate.
They can fire with perfect precision while running twenty miles an hour.
And these things move like they’re sharing a brain, which they basically are.
Each bot maintains a constant awareness of the exact geolocation of its squadmates.
” He pointed to one of the taller buildings.
“We tried a tactic of just holding the high ground, thinking we could pick off a few and bottleneck the rest as they came up the stairs. But then this happened.”
Miller walked up to a cinderblock wall and put his fingers into a gap between the blocks where the mortar had chipped away.
“The extreme temperature fluctuations in the desert cause the mortar to expand and contract constantly, weakening it and making it brittle. The tin men use these as footholds and break away additional mortar as needed. They started climbing up the sides of the buildings.”
Brodie pictured a swarm of Buckys, scrambling like chrome cockroaches up the walls and through the windows. This was a nightmare. Or, if you were unlucky enough to be an Army Ranger at Camp Hayden, it was a Tuesday.
“So,” continued Miller, “we take an all-of-the-above tactical approach. Fixed suppressive fire, ground-level ambushes, sniping from rooftops and through windows. It turns into a grim game of subtraction.” He pointed to a spot farther down the road.
“If we put a guy there with a mounted machine gun, he can usually kill two D-17s before he dies. One or two other guys can maybe get one shot off each with an RPG before they’re killed, and three out of five times they miss.
How many enemy kills do you get per man that you sacrifice?
And how do you raise that number so that the enemy are all dead, and at least one of you is left standing?
We haven’t worked out that equation yet. ”
Brodie said, “Maybe it’s an unsolvable problem.”
Miller looked at him with a wry smile. “General Morgan says there’s no such thing as an unsolvable problem in the United States Army.”
Taylor asked, “And what do you think?”
“I think he’s a goddamned general and I’m a sergeant.
Take a look in here.” He led them into one of the cinderblock buildings, which was empty except for MRE wrappers and shell casings littering the ground, and some Sharpie drawings on the walls of a similar ilk to what they had seen in the barracks—robots, penises, naked women with giant breasts, and a dead Ranger with x’s for eyes and a message below it: HAIL THE RISE OF THE MACHINES.
Miller wasn’t there to show them the graffiti, but the terrible sightlines inside the building.
He pointed through one of the narrow windows, where from any angle you could only see a sliver of the road.
“A lot of the buildings are tight like this, so we don’t get a visual from in here until they’re right on top of us. ”
Brodie tried to put himself in Sergeant First Class Miller’s position—given an impossible task by a hard-ass general who might be more interested in proving a point about mankind than training the men under his command.
Brodie imagined being inside one of these buildings when the tin men came, charging down the roads and through the doors, scaling the walls and clambering in through the windows, all the while barely catching a glimpse of these man-shaped weapons before they were right on top of your ass.
Brodie said, “Not much to work with in here. You don’t even have furniture to barricade the entrance and slow them down.”
Miller nodded. “We only have our brains, our balls, and a lot of ammo.” He said to Taylor, “Excuse me, ma’am.”
“No need,” said Taylor. “I’m frankly shocked by what you and your men have been put through here.”
“Beats the real deal. Out here, the only thing that dies is your soul.” He added, “With a couple of exceptions.”
Right. This game had become deadly, but the math hadn’t changed. The ledger of human survivors always came to zero, with the tin men still standing.
Miller led them up the narrow staircase to the roof, where a firing nest stood—sandbags and a mount for a machine gun.
Brodie spotted a few cans of Monster Energy drink littering the roof.
He was sure the Rangers were trained to clean up after themselves.
But this was a sign of a morale problem.
They’d stopped caring, and their COs had stopped bothering to demand anything better.
Miller pointed to a high sand berm about two hundred yards to the southeast. “The tin men get dropped behind there, and when the battle begins, they crest the top of that berm or go around it. Those opening moments are when they are the most vulnerable, and when the odds are most in our favor. They can’t run well on loose sand, but as you can see it gets more hard-packed the closer to the village due to all the vehicle activity. Plus, they have some cover.”
Their cover consisted of a few freestanding cinderblock walls and a single broken-down pickup truck sunk in the sand. If the tin men had been humans, a two-hundred-yard charge on foot with barely any cover toward a heavily fortified position would be suicide.
Miller, possibly sensing what Brodie was thinking, added, “They clear this open land and are inside the village within twenty seconds, and as I said they can run and gun with perfect accuracy. That makes it a lot harder on our gunners.”
Right. It seemed like every tactical disadvantage was thrown at the Rangers, and even the elements that appeared to favor them became liabilities when factoring in the superhuman powers of the D-17s.
Taylor was scanning the surrounding land. “What about drones? No one’s mentioned those at a place that’s supposedly developing the future of warfare. I bet they’d be an asset to you.”
“I’m sure they would,” said Miller. “I’d love to have a whole goddamn fleet of them to kamikaze the line of D-17s.
But it’s a hard thing to simulate in training.
And once you bring in a weapon like that, you need to match it with a countermeasure for the other side and then shit gets complicated.
This training is not about force integration. It’s a street brawl.”
Brodie said, “Tell us about the siege.”
Miller looked at him. “Who told you about that? Greer?”
Brodie nodded. “He also told us that was the day he started abusing substances.”
“I know. I was there.”
“Did you intervene?”
“No. I was dead. Once you’re out, you’re not supposed to interact with anyone.” He added, “And even if I hadn’t been… my men were at the breaking point. I let them do what they needed to do in that moment.”
Taylor asked, “Why did the bots change tactics that one time? We’ve been led to understand they can’t learn, can’t draw on prior experience to alter their behavior.”
“That’s correct,” said Miller. “They were simply reacting to something we changed.” The sergeant squinted against the harsh sun as he looked out at the sand berm where the enemy had emerged sixty-seven different times to stalk and kill his men.
“We’ve got a gearhead in our platoon, Corporal Chris Reyes.
No formal education, but his dad was an electrical engineer, and they used to disassemble machines—computers, kitchen appliances, whatever they got their hands on—and build new things out of them.
So this guy, he decides he wants to make an EMP bomb.
Takes our EMP barrel attachments, mods them, hooks them to a small genny and a detonator.
The idea is, when the bastards are in range, we hit the switch, and they all drop like puppets without strings.
” He laughed bitterly. “And we bag our first win.”
“I can’t imagine that was within training regs,” said Brodie.
“Not even close. But the men were tired and pissed off. And I thought it would be a good morale booster. Plus, a fun surprise. No one knew about the bomb other than me and Reyes and his roommate. The three of us staged it here in secret well before the exercise. I knew I’d get my ass chewed by command, but I didn’t care. ”
Then it dawned on Brodie what the siege was about. Taylor, thinking along the same lines, said, “The D-17s knew the bomb was there, and they stayed beyond its range.”
Miller nodded. “We underestimated them. Again. Turns out these things have the capacity to pick up a wide spectrum of electromagnetic energy on their visual sensors. They saw the EMP bomb even though it was behind a concrete wall. Not only that, but they somehow used this capability to calculate the projected range of the bomb and then parked their flat metal asses just outside of it. No one ever taught the tin men what a ‘siege’ was. But they understood we needed food, water, and sleep to keep going, and that they could outlast us.”
Jesus. This kept getting worse. All the robots needed now were rocket boosters out their asses for flight, and maybe a mind-control ray. Brodie asked, “And did you get disciplined?”
Miller shook his head. “Captain Pickman was angry. At first. Then he realized General Morgan loved the ingenuity and brashness of it, and he changed his tune. The captain leans whichever way the strongest wind is blowing.” He added, “The truth is I didn’t invite Captain Pickman this morning.
I’m sorry I misled you. But I wanted to speak freely. ”
Taylor said, “We value your honesty, Sergeant. And it sounds like you don’t trust your commanding officer.”