SF Books by B. V. Larson:

STAR FORCE SERIES:

(In chronological order)

Swarm

Extinction

Rebellion

Conquest

Army of One (Novella)

Battle Station

Empire

Annihilation

Storm Assault

The Dead Sun

Outcast

Exile

The Undying Mercenaries Series:

Steel World

Dust World

Tech World

Machine World

Visit BVLarson.com for more information.

Army of One

(A Star Force Series Novella)

by

B. V. Larson

Copyright © 2014 by the author.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the author.

Author’s Note: For those fans of the Star Force Series, the events in this novella occur concurrently with CONQUEST, the fourth book of the series.

The first thing you will notice is that this story is not from the point of view of Kyle Riggs (but it is very much part of the Star Force story). That’s because I originally wrote this piece to fill in behind-the-scenes information concerning key events that were occurring on Earth without the knowledge of Riggs. I was never able to fit this part of the story into the series itself, as the Star Force books are written entirely in the first person, and Riggs can’t be everywhere at once.

If you haven’t yet read through book four of the series, there might be some minor spoilers for you here…

-B. V. Larson

-1-

Several weeks before the machines returned to Earth, an interview for a very special job was carefully arranged. Two men met one another in a hotel room that was supposedly neutral ground. One of them was a professional assassin, and the other was a self-important suit who worked for the newly reimagined CIA.

Outside the seventh floor window, Arlington, Virginia, was spread out in all its brick-and-mortar glory. The southwest corner of the Pentagon building could be easily seen across the Potomac.

The assassin, referred to by members of the community only as “Bjorn”, was not in a sightseeing mood. He was all business.

His interviewer from the Agency seemed to sense this, but he also seemed not to care. The case agent was a typical example of his breed: white, male, balding and overconfident. He had told Bjorn his cover name at the start of the interview, but Bjorn had already forgotten it because he had no interest in filling his mind with vague aliases.

“So…your name is Bjorn?” the suit asked, reading from the screen of his tablet. “Doesn’t that mean ‘bear’ in Swedish, or something? That’s about as euro of a name as you can get, and you don’t look like you come from Europe.” The interviewer looked up at Bjorn and smiled, enjoying his own joke.

Bjorn stared back at him flatly, until the interviewer cleared his throat. Bjorn realized in surprise that he already wanted to kill this man, which had to be some kind of a record. In most cases, it took hours for him to dislike another man enough to want to put a bullet in him. He wondered what year it would be when a half-black guy didn’t have to listen to any jokes.

Finally, Bjorn spoke: “I guess my heritage is what you might call ‘mixed’,” he said. He didn’t add the words “you asshole” but he felt like it.

The suit chuckled. “You do have a sketchy past,” he went on, “Delta originally, then off the grid. We have a dozen hits attributed to you, but without any real pattern. You appear in a town—and then someone dies in an interesting way that same night. We know that you’re effective, but what are your core beliefs?”

The question brought a flicker of amusement to Bjorn’s face, but not to his eyes. What kind of mercenary worried about core beliefs? In Bjorn’s opinion, the interviewer was a fool. But he was a fool who must be dealt with. Bjorn had been out of work for nearly a year now, and his accounts were running dry. In this country, whether aliens were invading from the skies or not, this man and a thousand suit-wearing fools like him held the purse strings for all freelance hitmen.

“I have no beliefs,” Bjorn said. “At least, none that reach longer than my arm.”

The suit frowned slightly and flicked at his tablet some more. “What about the machines from the stars? You must have an opinion about the aliens?”

Bjorn shrugged. “I don’t.”

The interviewer stared for a second, then leaned forward. “We know more about you than what you’ve listed on your resume. For instance, we know you’ve been on a Nano ship.”

For the first time, Bjorn was surprised. He hadn’t thought it was possible for this man to surprise him, but he’d managed it. He felt his mind kicking into an entirely new gear. Up until this moment, he’d been almost bored with the interview. But now, he was on guard.

“What else do you know?” Bjorn asked.

The interviewer sat back and smiled broadly, happy to have gotten a response. Bjorn felt his dislike for the agent intensify. This, then, was the source of the man’s inner confidence. Usually, when suits met with freelance killers they were at least nervous. But this fellow had been overconfident from the start. That could only mean he felt he had this particular vicious dog under control. Bjorn didn’t like the implications.

His eyes drifted around the room. Peepholes? Could there be a squad in body armor on the other side of these walls, ready to pounce? He’d checked out the hotel in advance hours ago. It was standard procedure for him, but possibly he’d missed something.

Finally, his traveling eyes landed on the window and the view of the gray river outside. There were plenty of places to hide a camera and a microphone in this city. It was one of the most camera-filled regions in the world.

The interviewer watched his reactions with interest. “In answer to your question,” he said, “we know all about your relationship with the Nano ships. One of them took you aboard on the night of the initial invasion. You passed all the tests for obvious reasons. But, among all the humans ever to have done so, you alone were determined to escape the ship. You weren’t swayed by its offers of power, and you were able to escape its defensive systems, everything meant to keep you aboard.”

Bjorn didn’t say anything. His face was a mask of stone. He knew every word the interviewer spoke was true, but in case the other was fishing for details and confirmation, he was determined not to respond. He didn’t want to give this smug pig anything he didn’t already have.

The interviewer looked at him, eyebrows arched expectantly. He still wore that confident smile. “Nothing about this story rings a bell?” he asked. “Is there anything you might want to add?”

“In my business, one does not give out information unnecessarily.”

“Right,” the agent said, nodding. “I get that. But unfortunately, it is necessary. You see, we didn’t call you here to hire you for a hit. We have plenty of people who can do that. You’re much more interesting to us than your typical thug. You have a ship out there that loves you, and you would make it very happy simply by climbing back aboard her. You know that, don’t you? Once in a Nano ship, you could rejoin Star Force and then you could…tell us about it.”

Bjorn now understood the agency’s motivation. They wanted his ship. They wanted a free introduction into Star Force. But he also knew that his old ship had found another commander and no longer served him. He couldn’t call it or contact it. He wouldn’t want to if he could. He thought about explaining all this to the interviewer, but rejected the idea. He decided to go with a simpler way out.

“I’m not a spy,” he said. “Get an intel guy.”

The interviewer shook his head. “Due to certain…misunderstandings, the Star Force people are paranoid. They only offer membership to people they trust. They trust people in Nano ships, who are almost all amateurs. We really need you, and no one else can do this job.”

Bjorn stood up suddenly. The interviewer stiffened at his unexpected movement.

“I’ll do it,” Bjorn said. “Put a hundred thousand in the drop-box and I’ll infiltrate Star Force.”

The interviewer took a deep breath and smiled. His confident exterior returned in full force. “Excellent,” he said. “There are a few more formalities, however. If you’ll just sit down a moment longer, please?”

Bjorn stood there for several seconds, considering. He had no intention of spying on Star Force for this fool. It wasn’t his kind of work. He liked to keep things clean and simple. Not long-term commitments. No choosing sides. He did his hits the night he arrived in a given town, just as the man had described, and then he vanished again. By morning, he liked to be on a plane bound for another continent.

The agent frowned at him and seemed slightly exasperated. “There’s a lot of money riding on your next move. Don’t you think a hundred K is worth a few more minutes?”

Bjorn had already decided to skip picking up the money, although he needed it. He just wanted to get out of this room. When a deal went sour, his standard operating procedure was to agree to whatever they wanted and leave the country. That was usually a good way to escape a meeting like this. Once he was out of the reach of whoever he’d been dealing with, he could vanish. Usually they were upset, but not so upset that they would try to burn him.

He was very good at vanishing. Southern Spain, Indonesia—those were perfect places to go when a man wanted to vanish quickly. But this meeting wasn’t going as planned. Realizing he was going to have to keep playing this game for a while longer, he reluctantly sat down again.

The interviewer pulled a briefcase up onto the small circular hotel table between them. He opened it and a moment later placed a pair of wrist straps on the cherry veneer tabletop.

“No lie-detectors,” Bjorn said.

The interviewer sighed. “We have to do it. Just for purposes of protocol. I apologize.”

Bjorn frowned. He stared at the unit, then at the man. He made a hard decision. As his first escape plan wasn’t working, he decided to proceed with Plan B.

“All right,” he told the agent. “But could we close the curtains first?”

“Why?”

“I don’t like being on camera.”

The agent snorted. “You know there are no cameras in here. You did a sweep hours ago.”

Bjorn gestured toward the window. The interviewer pursed his lips in annoyance.

“This city is full of cameras,” Bjorn said. “They’re everywhere, and I’m sure a few of them are focused on these windows right now.”

“All right,” the agent said. “Just to put you at ease.”

The agent got up and drew the curtains. They were the blackout shades designed to block out sunlight and let a jet-lagged salesman sleep in if he wanted to. The two men were suddenly cast into gloom. The interviewer pulled a chain that dangled down from a hanging lamp over the cherry-veneer table. A circle of yellowy light illuminated them both.

“Happy now?”

“Ecstatic.”

Bjorn allowed the man to affix the padded cuffs to his thick wrists. He frowned throughout the process. Tiny metal sensors pressed against his skin.

“Now, first question: are we in Arlington, Virginia?”

“Yes.”

“Did you eat breakfast this morning in the hotel?”

“No.”

“Very good. Have you undergone nanite-injections, administered by your ship?”

Bjorn stared.

“Well?”

“I’m not going to answer that.”

“Not even if it means losing this job?”

“I don’t care.”

The interviewer made a note on his tablet. He seemed irritated. “All right, it isn’t necessary that you reply to that one. Let me ask another: have you been aboard a Nano ship?”

“Yes.”

“Did you take the alien tests and survive them all?”

“Yes.”

“Very good…” he said, doing some more tapping.

Bjorn wondered what the agent got out of this process. The man seemed to be enjoying himself. He wondered if the man had a psychological complex that caused him to feel pleasure when he had the upper hand on a killer. He liked to hold the tiger’s leash. Bjorn’s frown deepened the more he thought about it.

“You’re scowling,” the agent said. “Are you ready for the next question?”

“Stop wasting time.”

“All right. Next question: Do you plan to overthrow the U. S. Government?”

“What? No.”

“Do you associate with people who do wish to overthrow the U. S. Government?”

“No.”

“Hmm,” the interviewer said, frowning. “Do you wish to elaborate on that one?”

“No.”

The questions went on, but at the end, the interviewer was left chewing his lip. He heaved a sigh.

“I’m sorry, Bjorn, but this isn’t going the way I’d planned. If you have something to hide, you should do a better job of it. You’re a pro, after all.”

Bjorn frowned. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“One of the questions—you lied. The machine registered a distinct response pattern.”

“Then it’s broken.”

“I don’t think so.”

Bjorn stood up again. “In that case, I’m sorry to disappoint you. I’m not a suitable candidate, as I said. I’ll be going now.”

“Just a minute,” said the interviewer. “You’re always in such a hurry to leave! I have an idea. Just take this pill, please.”

The agent pushed a capsule full of greenish liquid across the desk toward Bjorn, who made no move to pick it up. It looked like pain medication.

“I don’t think so,” Bjorn said.

“Look, it’s the only way. I’m authorized to bump up the offer to make it worth your while. We’ll give you five hundred thousand today. And then an additional five hundred thousand when you submit your first intel report on Star Force.”

Bjorn was surprised by the amount, but he still didn’t reach out for the pill on the table between them. “What is it?”

“It’s a knock-out pill. I have to give it to you before taking you in. You must understand, you’re an assassin full of nanites who has just failed a loyalty polygraph. I have to take you in and have the experts figure out what the problem is. We want you working for us at all costs—but there are formalities. The suits will want you to come clean.”

Bjorn’s lips twitched upward for a moment. “You’re a suit.”

“Right, well—I meant the suits who are higher up the food chain that I am.”

Bjorn picked up the pill. He looked at it suspiciously. Then he looked at the interviewer.

“You’re sure you want me to do this?”

The overconfident smile came back, but this time Bjorn could see an edge to it. The agent was nervous underneath.

The man was wise to be uncertain.

Bjorn lunged. He grabbed the interviewer with his left hand, clutching a wad of cloth over his chest. His hands found a lump there, in the breast pocket. He squeezed, and the object inside the man’s front jacket pocket crunched in his incredibly powerful grip. He ripped it out and wires came free like the guts of a fish. He dropped the recording device on the table between them. It was completely destroyed.

The interviewer then made two mistakes: first, he went for the pistol under his arm, and second, he opened his mouth to yell. Both moves were understandable, but they sealed his fate. If he’d remained perfectly motionless, he might have survived the encounter. But Bjorn had been injected with nanites a year ago, and they had transformed him from simply a smooth, highly-competent assassin into a true machine of death.

Bjorn’s hands moved with such blurring speed and irresistible power that before the interviewer could make a coherent sound, it was all over. Bjorn snatched away the pistol and shoved the green capsule into the agent’s open mouth.

He followed up by clamping the man’s mouth shut with one large hand. The interviewer’s eyes rolled in terror. He ignored Bjorn’s other hand, which held the gun. Both his hands and all his attention were on the fingers that held his mouth closed. He strained, but he could not remove Bjorn’s grip.

The interviewer began kicking and flailing. The blows didn’t bother Bjorn much. There was no power in them. It was like being struck by an angry child.

“What are you so worried about?” Bjorn asked. “It’s just a knock-out pill, right?”

The interviewer whined and gurgled, but could not speak.

“Did you swallow it?” Bjorn asked him.

The man tried to scream something at him through his shut mouth. Sounds came out of his nostrils, something like “let go” but Bjorn could not be sure. Reluctantly, he removed his hand from the agent’s mouth.

The man immediately spat out the pill. Bjorn’s reflexes were as superb as his strength. He snatched it from the air and held it up again.

The interviewer’s eyes were focused on the pill and nothing else.

“You’re more afraid of this little pill than you are of me,” Bjorn observed curiously. “Why?”

“They’re coming. You have to know that. You broke the signal when you—”

Bjorn lost interest in the man’s threats. He popped the pill back into the agent’s mouth again and this time when he slammed his jaws shut, he made sure the teeth closed on the capsule. The pill was crushed between two sets of wet molars.

The man howled and spat. He reached up with hands like claws toward Bjorn’s throat, but was easily pushed away.

“What is in that pill?” Bjorn asked, letting him go. “You might as well tell me now that you’ve taken it.”

The interviewer attempted to speak, but failed. He began foaming pink flecks that first appeared at the corners of his mouth, then spread across his swelling lips. His eyes were huge and ringed with white.

“You killed me,” he gasped. “They said you would kill me.”

“You killed yourself with your overconfidence,” Bjorn told him. “Did you really think I was going to just swallow a pill and commit suicide on the spot?”

The agent slid out of his chair and down onto all fours. He sagged down, dying. His eyes stayed open, but the strange foam still flowed. It made a dark stain around his mouth on the Berber carpet. Bjorn frowned and checked agent’s pulse. It was thready for a moment, then stopped.

“Fast-acting,” he muttered. He didn’t like it. He took a moment to wash his hands in the tiny bathroom. It could be some kind of contact poison.

On the way out of the room, he took the agent’s computer tablet with him. He didn’t head for the elevators or the stairs. Those easy paths would be blocked.

Instead, he crossed the hallway to the room opposite. He’d identified it earlier as an escape route, just in case. He straight-armed the door. The lock popped and a small sliver of broken wood fell out of the doorframe. He stepped inside and forced the broken door closed behind him.

Then he stepped into the middle of the dark room, scooted the bed aside and began to tear up the carpet.

His hands were like steel claws, which made the task easy for him. It was almost like unwrapping a Christmas present. Once through the thin layer of carpet, he pulled up the subfloor. This was the tricky part, as the nails squeaked and the plywood crackled.

He paused in his activities to head into the bathroom. He turned on all the faucets and the bathroom fan for cover noise, then he went back to work.

In less than two minutes, he heard men running down the hall and shouting. But by that time, he had dug his way down to the room below. He took the time to slide the bed over the hole he’d made in the room above before dropping down onto into the next room. Once there, he began digging again, tearing his way through the floor down into yet another hotel room.

He’d scouted this escape route over an hour ago, simply by making sure the rooms were unoccupied. He’d once heard of a lab experiment which had placed a monkey in a room with thirteen possible exits. A group of scientists had sat around, watching carefully to see which exit the monkey figured out and used to escape. The monkey had reportedly used the fourteenth exit—the one no one had thought of.

Bjorn liked to think of himself in that way, as the man who could do the unexpected. Many people believed that the key to being a successful killer lay in the method of execution. They studied the murder itself. But he knew better. Killing was relatively easy. Escaping the scene afterward—now that was the critical part where most assassins failed.

Soon he stood on the fifth floor, rather than the seventh. He was also on the opposite side of the building, on the side that faced south, away from the Pentagon. Bjorn was a paranoid man, but he didn’t think that they would put a team on him so large they’d watch both sides of the building. Probably they were in the hotel lobby, covering all the exits and waiting. They might have stationed a man on the roof too—a man with a high-powered rifle.

He took a moment to check out the tablet he’d stolen from the dead agent. He tapped at the screen and found the questions he’d been asked and answers he’d given. There actually were questions that he’d failed. Apparently, he did have plans to overthrow the government. This seemed amusing to him, but troubling as well. He felt as if he ought to know his own internal thoughts on such issues.

He also found the name of the man who was in charge of this recruiting op. It was none other than General Robert Kerr. Bjorn had heard of him, but had never dealt with him directly.

After briefly skimming the information, he smashed the tablet thoroughly. They might be tracking it somehow. Then he opened the hotel room window and stepped out onto the balcony. Without hesitation he jumped off.

On this side of the hotel, the lower section of the building thrust outward three floors down. He landed hard, leaving two footprints in the crushed stucco, but walked away uninjured. A thirty-foot drop wasn’t a big deal for a nanotized man. He hadn’t wanted to try this from fifty feet, which was why he’d dug his way down two floors first.

Bjorn crossed the roof, dropped into an alley twenty feet below, and walked nonchalantly into the city streets. Once there, he was in his element. He vanished into the crowds like a shadow blending into dusk.

-2-

“What do you mean ‘the subject has successfully employed delaying tactics’?” General Kerr demanded loudly. He was a naturally loud man with a southern twang that accented his colorful speech patterns. “You’re telling me you lost him, right? What about the sniper? Is he as blind as the rest of your team?”

“No, sir—I mean, he never had a shot.”

“Doesn’t matter, I’m sure. He probably couldn’t hit a bull in the butt with a bass fiddle. You tell him that for me. You got that, Randy?”

“Bull…butt…yes, sir.”

Kerr stabbed at the smartphone screen repeatedly until it disconnected the call. Somehow, these new phones resisted taking directions if you went at them too vigorously. He found the experience very unsatisfying. In his youth, he’d enjoyed slamming phones down into receivers. Now he wasn’t even given that small joy when his underlings screwed the pooch.

He continued tapping at the phone when he had his breathing under control. It was time to call in some favors.

“Randy? This is Kerr again.”

“I’m sorry sir, I haven’t had time to—”

“I know you haven’t had time to—”

“It’s been less than a minute, General.”

“I don’t care about that, listen—”

“I’m calling them—I mean I’m going to call them, but—”

“Shut up, man!” shouted Kerr in sudden fury. “I said I don’t care. I’m giving you new orders. I know where this killer is going.”

“You do?”

“That’s right.”

“Where, sir?”

“Well, I’ll tell you if you will shut up for one damned second.”

Kerr waited until the other man had remained silent for several seconds.

“That’s better,” he said. “Bjorn is heading for Star Force. That’s right, Andros Island. Get down there and look for him.”

There was more buzzing in his ear. Kerr rolled his eyes and massaged his temples. Why couldn’t people just do as they were told without asking questions? He missed the real military sometimes. The United States was in a real war after all, a war against aliens and internal dissidents at the same time. If he’d been placed in charge of a correspondingly real military operation he would be able to order a questioning, simpering man shot. General George Washington had put down his share of mutineers in his time, and what was good enough for old George was good enough for General Kerr.

At the very least, Kerr figured he should have had the power to demote the man on the spot. He had neither of these powers as an intel ops-runner, and he didn’t like it. This business of running a spook patrol to keep a lid on Kyle Riggs and his happy band of pirates was getting on his last nerve.

Kerr pulled the phone from his ear and cheek and waggled it in the air. He waited until it stopped making sounds, indicating Randy had stopped speaking. He had no interest in anything the man was saying, he just wanted it to come to an end. Finally, it did.

He put the phone back to his head and growled into it. “All right, I’ve heard enough whining. You don’t need to know how I know. You’re just going to act on the intel and not ask any more stupid questions. Now, get down there to the Florida Keys and start looking for your target before he ships out.”

Randy finally stopped prattling and hung up. General Kerr walked to the window of his Pentagon office and stared across the Potomac. There, in plain sight, stood the hotel where this character who called himself “Bjorn” had given them the slip. The man was a natural talent at both killing and escaping. These were two critical skills for any assassin to have. And there was no longer any doubt in anyone’s mind that he was nanotized.

Kerr wanted this man on the team so badly he could crush Randy’s windpipe for failing. It was such an opportunity, and the team had pissed it right down their collective spook legs.

“He was right there!” Kerr shouted aloud. “Sitting within arm’s reach, and now he’s gone. The perfect mole…and they let him slip away.”

He shook his head and lamented the loss. Bjorn was probably going to have to be put down now. He’d smelled the trap and fled. Randy’s team had done the worst thing possible: they’d put him on his guard. He’d gone rogue, and like a stray dog that had been smacked around, he would never trust the bad man’s feeding hand again.

When they caught up with Bjorn the next time, Kerr figured he wasn’t going to let Randy’s team play amateur hour twice in a row.

“This time, things will be handled my way,” he said to no one.

* * *

The vast arrowhead-shaped warships of the Macros had returned to the Solar System. They were a cold race of gigantic machines. Whatever they lacked in flexibility and intellect they more than made up for in bulk and implacability.

The enemy fleet was gathering over Venus, massing up for their inevitable charge at Earth. Bjorn watched the news reports with mild interest as he traveled southward. Either the robots would kill everyone, or they wouldn’t. He didn’t think there was much he could do about it either way, so he tried not to think about it.

Apparently he was the only person on Earth who wasn’t riveted by the reports. There was nothing else to talk about planet-wide. Every news station was running the story, and the fact there was very little actual information to report didn’t stop them from covering it around the clock.

Bjorn had more immediate worries. He had to get out of the region, and he had to do it fast. After a bit of work on his laptop, using public wireless systems in coffee shops, he boarded a military transport in Norfolk. The big plane was deafeningly loud inside, but it was bound for Florida and it was cheap.

Arranging military transport wasn’t as tricky as it sounded, at least not for him. U. S. military personnel often took jump-seat rides all over the world almost for free. The only hitch was that he was no longer technically a member of the military. Fortunately, he had plenty of false documentation from past work. The hardest part had been getting together a cover story for his trip. Things had never been the same after the South American Campaign. In the days after the destruction of an entire continent, security had tightened worldwide. There had never been any reports of alien infiltration, but everyone was looking over their shoulders anyway.

That’s where Bjorn’s specialized training came into play. He was a man trained to use a host country’s infrastructure against itself. Every security protocol ever built followed rules, and strict adherence to those rules over time caused a certain degree of blindness in the people who followed them. They became more concerned with the rules themselves than what they were actually trying to protect.

Bjorn had found that most security people tended to pay the least attention to what was right in front of them. In their minds, they had marked such things as safe and uninteresting. They were scanning for the unexpected. Since they expected him to try to sneak out of the country, he knew they would be watching every transportation hub. Therefore, the safest spot was to place himself right under their noses. By getting into a military transport with false orders inserted into their own computer files and a fake ID, he could have managed to have himself shipped anywhere around the globe.

Again, his destination was chosen to be unexpected. He would travel to Florida, right into the heart of the current action. The subtropical state had been turned into a militarized region over the last several years as Star Force grew in the islands to the south and enemy ships had battled with Earth’s fleets in the skies there more than once.

Bjorn employed one of his more useful IDs, that of Specialist Edwin Serkin. A nonexistent reservist with unusual skills, Serkin’s backstory always included reactivation and assignment for duty in whatever remote location Bjorn wanted to go.

Today, Specialist Edwin Serkin flew to Key West Naval Air Station. He was urgently needed there for vague reasons. In the military, vague orders were rarely questioned by those who reviewed them and passed them on. It was assumed the imaginary Serkin was working on a secret project—God knew there were enough of those around these days in Florida.

Bjorn deplaned and blinked in the bright tropical sun. By the time he made it out of the plane and onto the tarmac, his skin was already prickling under the assault of the tropical humidity. He could feel the heat sinking into him. Sweat sprouted quickly in response. He told himself he would just have to get used to it—he planned to be here for a long time.

He’d deplaned and passed the initial checkpoint without a problem. He’d almost made it to the guard post in fact before anything went awry.

Fortunately, he spotted the spotter first. There was a man at the gate who didn’t belong there. The chain-link fences, razor wire and checkout station were all expected and in place, but the man in the navy blazer, his tie flapping in the breeze—he was all wrong.

First of all, most people on the base were in uniform, or at least had crew-cuts and a noticeable military bearing. This man was different. He leaned against the guard post with an insolent, bored stance. He had the look of someone who’d been stationed there for far longer than he’d expected to be, and he was disgusted by the duty. But he was still alert. He examined every passenger as they exited the transport with keen eyes, lifting his black sunglasses when someone interesting approached.

Bjorn had positioned himself at the rear of the group automatically. He stepped aside long before he reached the front of the line.

The guard at the gate was busy looking down at IDs as he checked each one against a roster. Security was tighter than it had been in the old days, but usually, these routines gave Bjorn no trouble. It was the man with the flapping tie he was worried about. He was looking for a face, and Bjorn had a pretty good idea who he was hoping to find.

With precise, quick steps, Bjorn walked around to the far side of the guard post and vaulted the ten-foot tall chain link fence. He did this with a single smooth motion, bounding into the air impossibly high. He paused only long enough to place his hand into the wire at the top. He caught himself with this single outstretched hand and redirected his angle of travel downward. He landed on his feet with a thump. Behind him, the razor wire rattled and droplets of his blood glinted in the sun.

Bjorn fell into step with the others on the far side, who glanced at him and frowned. No one challenged him, fortunately for them. They were all too busy meeting relatives and digging out their keys. The welcoming parking lot was dead ahead and everyone had their eyes on it.

At a steady, almost nonchalant pace, the group headed for their waiting cars. Bjorn slung his bag over his neck. Blood still ran from his injured hand, dribbling down onto the sidewalk. He stepped out over the grass, not wanting to leave a visible trail.

He’d made it halfway to the parking lot before anyone caught on. He heard a distant shout behind him: “That’s him!”

He didn’t bother to look back. He didn’t concern himself with how he’d been spotted. Perhaps someone had witnessed his leap and reported it. Perhaps the man at the checkpoint had missed Edward Serkin. Possibly, the man with the flapping tie had done a count and come up with a discrepancy.

It didn’t matter. What mattered now was that the race was on, and Bjorn meant to win it.

He reached out to the man in front of him, a soldier with his arm around a young woman who’d doubtlessly come to pick him up.

Bjorn squeezed, snapping the man’s collarbone in less than a second. The young soldier fell to his knees, gasping. The woman knelt with him, asking him what was wrong.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Something hit me. I might be shot.”

The girl shouted something about a “shooter”, and that was just gravy. Everyone who’d initially gathered around the stricken man now began backing away. A fair number of them began trotting for the parking lot, while others milled around the spot in confusion, trying to aid the couple.

Bjorn joined those flowing toward the cars. He reached the edge of the parking lot when the spook from the guard post broke past the crowd around the couple. The diversion hadn’t fooled him.

Bjorn took a moment to glance back and saw the man in the blazer had two armed guardsmen in tow. The original plan had been to take a cab or a bus to town. That wasn’t going to work for him now.

He reached the line of sun-silvered cars and ducked among them. Pounding feet followed. They weren’t shooting yet, but that was only a matter of time.

Bjorn crouched behind a car until they were close. One second before they arrived, he sprang over the hood of the car. He attacked the guards before they could lift their rifles to their shoulders.

The first man was dropped by a high kick to the face. Jaw broken, the man crumpled.

The second soldier was more alert and had time to get off a single shot. The rifle cracked and Bjorn took the bullet in his right thigh. The guard had aimed low to disable him. That had been a mistake.

Bjorn threw his bag at him and the guard didn’t even bother to duck. That was his second mistake. The bag had a large metal object in it, and it hit the guard with such force it knocked him down. A second later Bjorn was on him.

“Always shoot to kill,” he told him before he put him to sleep with a blurring fist.

The agent finally joined the fight. He stepped up behind Bjorn. He had his gun aimed at Bjorn’s head as Bjorn turned to face him.

“Freeze right there, you son of a bitch,” the agent said. “I’ve got orders to bring you in alive, but I’ll forget them if you don’t cooperate.”

Bjorn moved with careful slowness so as not to startle the man. He took a deep breath and straightened his clothing. He knew he didn’t have long. Soon, the entire base would go into shut-down mode and he’d be in it deep then.

“You did well,” he told the agent calmly. “But not well enough. You should have shot me at range.”

“Put your hands on your head,” the agent ordered. He began fumbling inside his jacket pocket nervously with one hand.

Bjorn didn’t move. He gauged the distance between himself and the agent. It was only about ten feet.

“I’m full of magic metal,” he told the agent. “I can kill you—even if you hit me with every round, you’ll still die. You have five seconds to decide what you’re going to do.”

“Shut up,” snarled the other man. He finally pulled his shaking hands out of his blazer. He threw a pair of handcuffs on the tarmac at Bjorn’s feet. “Get on your knees and put those on.”

The left side of Bjorn’s mouth flickered up into a brief half-smile. He shook his head slowly.

“Three seconds left,” he said.

“You’re crazy!” the agent shouted. “You can’t get away. There will be five hundred men hunting you down. This island isn’t—”

“One second left—your last one. Have you made your decision, government man?”

A long moment passed. The agent’s hands shook so much he could hardly hold his gun. He kept looking down at the fallen guardsmen with flickering eyes. Neither of them was moving. To him, they looked dead. Only Bjorn knew better. They’d both recover with prompt medical care.

Finally, the agent lowered his weapon. Bjorn walked forward and plucked the gun out of the man’s nerveless fingers.

“Right move,” Bjorn told him. “Now, tell this to General Kerr: Tell him not to keep fucking with me, or I will return the favor. I just want to be left alone. It’s all up to him.”

He left the agent standing on the hot pavement, staring after him.

-3-

Bjorn’s leg was hurting and enough blood had run down into his shoes to make them squelchy. His nanites were already working hard on the spot, making it itch as much as it burned as they knitted his flesh back together as fast as they could. They’d already closed the skin and stopped the bleeding. In an hour or less, they would push the bullet out and the itching would fade.

The gunplay actually served to make it easier to get off the base undetected. When traveling and even when on duty, most military personnel on American bases were unarmed. It was an absurd rule, but it was useful to Bjorn: it made them all run like hens when guns started blazing nearby.

The parking lot was full of people scrambling to get into their cars and escape the area. Many were the family members of arriving airmen.

Bjorn contrived to create a panicked look on his face. It didn’t come naturally to him, but he’d practiced the expression in front of mirrors. He requested a ride, saying he’d been hit. He was quickly picked up and whisked away by a young family of three. The woman in the car fussed, handing him tissues and baby wipes. The man drove with a worried eye in the rearview mirror, studying Bjorn. The baby itself, sitting in a car seat, stared at the stranger as if he were fascinating.

Bjorn couldn’t help but smile at the kid. “You’ve got it made,” he told the child in a whisper. “Just don’t sign any papers when you grow up.”

“You’re here because of the aliens, aren’t you?” the wife asked Bjorn suddenly.

He looked at her. “I guess you could say that.”

“Do you know anything? Are they coming here? What will they do?”

“Monica, stop,” said her husband. “If he knows anything, he can’t tell us.”

“They’re coming right here,” she said. She kept her eyes on Bjorn. “Star Force is only a hundred miles off. That will bring the war home to us. How could it not? I have a right to know if we’re all going to die.”

Bjorn looked at her for a moment, then looked at the kid in the car seat. The baby hadn’t cried yet. He’d just stared at Bjorn with quiet intensity the entire time.

“I honestly don’t know what they’re going to do,” he told the young mother. “I don’t think anybody does. But the military will do all that it can, I’m sure of that.”

She turned away and crossed her arms. “That’s not good enough. We’re all dead or we’re all fine. There’s nothing we can do. I hate it.”

The rest of the short trip to town was taken in silence. Even the kid stayed quiet.

Bjorn let them drive him to the nearest hospital, where they began asking questions. He waved them off, thanked them, and headed through the emergency doors. He limped and held one hand to his knee, even though it was no longer bothering him much. The man’s wife wanted to follow, but her husband held her back.

“He’ll be all right.”

Bjorn smiled. Some men had the right instincts when they met him. They knew they should stay away. He wasn’t a large man, but he’d been told he had the face of a pit bull. There was something in his eyes that gave other men pause.

After talking to the nurse, it was a simple matter to be placed in the waiting area. Anything less than a life-threatening injury never impressed emergency rooms. The system loved waiting rooms, and it loved to place you there and forget about you—preferably for hours.

His leg was feeling much better. The nanites had formed a dark gray knot under the new layer of skin now. They’d sealed the wound and encapsulated the bullet with flesh and a fine coat of metal. Next, they would work and work, pressing the dark bullet out of his flesh. The injury had only earned him a disinterested glance from the admitting nurse, nothing more.

Bjorn headed for the waiting room, but didn’t stop there. He kept right on walking through it and out the door. The nurses and patients barely noticed. They were all staring at the TVs stationed in every high corner. The TVs displayed the huge Macro Fleet sailing silently through the void toward Earth. They’d fired missiles which flew in a mass ahead of the fleet and Star Force was in full battle-mode, preparing to stop them. No one had time to look for a missing patient who’d probably just stepped out for a smoke.

He was barely limping by the time he reached the parking lot. The nice couple that had given him a ride to the hospital had wisely disappeared. He followed their example and vanished into the city streets of downtown Key West.

There wasn’t much traffic of any kind. The tourist shops were empty and many of them were closed. Everyone was watching the skies nervously.

* * *

For Bjorn, renting a boat turned out to be harder than flying down here on a military transport had been. The trouble was no one on the docks really wanted to rent anything to him. They had either closed up shop, or were saving their boats for their families in case they had to run. Everyone in Key West knew that Star Force was based nearby on Andros Island, and that was only about a hundred and fifty miles away. Far too close for comfort.

If history were to be repeated, the machines would take an interest in that Island. They might bomb it, or land on it—who knew? People talked about radiation and tidal waves. The tourist traffic had dried up to a trickle already, and the locals had hung “gone fishing” signs in half the windows in town.

This last detail helped Bjorn narrow down his search. He walked the docks, found a suitable boat and crept aboard, lying on the deck under some tarps. He waited until nightfall, dozing.

When midnight came and went, the sole watchman was riveted to the tiny TV in his booth. Bjorn came up to the window, intending to knock the man unconscious. Instead, he frowned and found himself watching the report over the man’s shoulder.

The Macros were almost here, and the barrage of missiles they’d fired at Earth was getting close. This was a definite sign they hadn’t come to sign a free-trade deal.

No one said where the missiles were heading, but Bjorn had a pretty good idea. He turned and looked due east, there Andros lay. What the hell was that madman Riggs doing out there now?

He left the guardsman in the booth, without the heart to injure him. Quietly, he stole the crappy, peeled-paint scow he’d been hiding aboard and floated gently away. He kept the running lights off and slipped away into the night. The watchman, if he’d heard anything, never stirred from his television. Bjorn couldn’t blame him for that. It looked like the world was ending, and ground zero was going to be right about here.

It was enough to make him wish he’d chosen a different destination, but his plan was still clear in his head: he wanted to get into the middle of the confusion and vanish. Already, that strategy had paid off dividends. If he’d stayed up in D. C. or gone to one of his usual hiding spots on the globe using traditional transportation, he probably would have been captured or killed by now. As it was, they’d managed to put a bullet into his leg. He hoped the distractions of the coming war would be enough to hide him without killing him outright.

During the day, Bjorn had collected a fair amount of supplies. It was easy to do—no one was guarding anything. Half the population had fled the Keys and the other half were huddling in their homes. The Macros were more frightening than any hurricane that had ever threatened these shores.

There were nearly two thousand islands down here, not even counting the ones farther out around Andros, which was technically part of the Bahamas. Many of them were very small and most were uninhabited. There were only about eighty thousand year-round residents in any case. With so much of the population having fled the region, Bjorn estimated there were only about ten people left per island, tops.

That was what had made the Keys his destination. He’d always liked tropical beaches, who didn’t? He’d come down here to escape his problems in a very real way. Unlike everyone else, he wasn’t running to avoid the robots from space—he wanted to avoid the governments of Earth. Most especially, he wanted to avoid General Kerr and his minions.

When a man had little money and few resources, a deserted tropical island was as good a place as any to seek refuge and, more importantly, solitude. The stolen boat was small, slow and decrepit. But it was seaworthy, had a low profile and was propelled by a quiet, burbling engine. For Bjorn’s purposes, it was the perfect getaway vehicle.

Star Force had claimed all of the big slices of land out to the east, but off the shores of the main Keys were many smaller ones. He located several, scouted them, but rejected them all. There was one thing he needed above all else: a good supply of fresh water.

On the fourth island, he found what he was looking for. Three huts that had been there for the better part of a century. They were primitive, and open to the elements. There were hammocks, a dock and little else. Most importantly, there was a drum half-full of water, and a catch-basin system to run more rainwater into the drum.

Bjorn tapped at it, listening to the echo approvingly. There had to be a hundred gallons, maybe more. He unloaded the boat and set up camp. Within hours, he had a fire going in a pit so the light couldn’t be seen from the mainland. He toasted up his dinner, which consisted of cheese, sausage and some fresh vegetables. He knew he’d have to forage soon, but for now, he was going to eat well.

The small island was interesting to him. He wondered about its history. The buildings were colorful and had probably housed generations of poor people years ago. Squatters had lived in places like this in the old days. But now, rich people bought these islands and came to anchor their houseboats at the docks.

One would think people with a million or two to blow on a small island would build a mansion on it, but that was no longer possible. There were so many environmental laws and building codes that it was almost impossible to build new structures on an island down here. They could only patch up what had been built in the past.

And so, his tiny island served him well as a hiding place and as a museum from simpler times. The peacefulness of the spot belied the nervousness of the people on the main island.

Bjorn tried to forget about them and the coming aliens—surprisingly, he managed it. The island was peaceful and almost magical in that regard. It was as if the cares of the world could all be forgotten here.

He enjoyed his newfound peace for a short time, and every hour was precious to him.

-4-

The next day on the island was peaceful and sublime. Bjorn hadn’t experienced anything like this in a long, long time. As he gazed out to sea, watching the birds spiral and the waves slap against the foliage-covered shores, he wondered why he hadn’t done this in the past.

He quickly came up with ways to keep a low profile. He waited until the sun set out over the Gulf of Mexico to begin cooking in a fire pit. The deep pit hid the light of the flames and the darkness hid the smoke. He’d caught fish during the day with his lightning-fast hands, and when they were cooked to crispy perfection he ate them ravenously. He added fruit to his diet which he’d gathered while swimming to neighboring islands to scout them and make sure they were uninhabited. To supplement the meal, he added a single can of pinto beans from the stash of canned goods he’d found on the boat.

About an hour after the sun had set over the Gulf of Mexico, Bjorn noticed odd flashes of light in the opposite direction, to the east. The Florida Keys marked the boundary between the Gulf and the Atlantic. Gazing eastward, he knew he must be seeing activity over the home of Star Force, as Andros Island was due east of his position.

Although he’d long made it a point not to concern himself with political events, even he was interested in a battle with aliens occurring so close he could see it with his own eyes.

He watched until things seemed to quiet, and then went back to the business of keeping his location a secret. Just after midnight, the moon dipped under the horizon. He took this occasion to ditch the boat he’d used to get here. The bigger islands were less than a quarter mile away, and there were other dark islets closer than that. He didn’t really need the boat any longer. Like all nanotized people, he was an excellent swimmer.

He didn’t want to leave the boat docked at the island because it was stolen and it was a clear sign to anyone passing near that the island was inhabited. He had to get rid of it, but scuttling the boat wasn’t a realistic option. The waters here were shallow and he wanted the evidence far away from him. If he sank the thing just offshore, he knew passersby might well notice the wreck twenty feet down on the sandy bottom.

Instead, he cut her loose when the night was at its darkest and let her drift out to sea. There was a northerly current in the area, and it took the craft away slowly. He watched it fade to the northeast until it was indistinguishable from the black ocean and the slate-gray sky.

It was then that he took the occasion to look upward. He frowned, uncertain as to what he was seeing.

Blue streaks of glowing light were up there—dozens of them. They had an elongated look, like jets of blue gas. They were moving—moving fast.

“What the hell…?” he asked the parrots and the waves. The birds had fallen silent, as had the insects.

His bafflement slid away and became something more personal: fear. He knew what he had to be seeing…the machines had arrived at last.

More blue trails flared into existence out to the west, streaking downward with alarming speed. He realized they must be coming down below the cloud layer, flying into the atmosphere from orbit and slowing as they entered the thickest layers of Earth’s sky. There had to be fifty—no, more kept appearing. There were hundreds of them! He knew the Macros had huge ships, bigger than anything Earth had. Could they really have so many? Could they be flying them directly at Andros Island, the base of Star Force, with such reckless speed? Earth’s ships seemed pathetic in comparison. A motley collection of stolen vessels and homebrewed ships with half-baked designs. He’d seen them online. The biggest of them was no more than a tenth the size of the enemy cruisers. If he was seeing hundreds of enemy ships streaking toward Earth, everything was surely lost.

Bjorn’s eyes searched the sky, looking for anything else of interest. Where were the Star Force ships? Where were Earth’s fleets, as tiny as they might be? Try as he might, he couldn’t see another fleet.

Then a shocking series of events followed. Near at hand, less than a mile from his position, a blossoming white light lit up the night. He crouched and stared out to the open sea. There, illuminated briefly by the missile it had just fired, was what had to be a submarine. He hadn’t seen it out there at all until it had launched a missile.

The weapon streaked into the sky, and Bjorn’s eyes followed it. His mouth hung open. More missiles rose up after the first. The light was shocking in the dim night and the roar was deafening. Most of the launches came from miles away out to the east, presumably from other subs in the distance.

Bjorn couldn’t believe his misfortune. The subs would probably attract return fire. He was in the middle of a battle, and if his hunch was right, those blue streaks bearing down out of space were missiles as well. He was standing far too close to ground zero for comfort.

He looked this way and that, seeking shelter. There was precious little to be had, and precious little time to seek it. He crossed the three cabins off his list immediately. Any serious blast would destroy them. There were no cellars under any of the buildings, either.

As he saw it, he had very few options. He could dive into the ocean and swim downward, but that might mean certain death. He had no idea how long he might have to wait, holding his breath down there. The exchange appeared to be minutes away, but it was hard to be sure. He could drown waiting for it, or possibly be forced to surface just as the warheads went off.

Just as bad, the water might not save him anyway. When the shockwaves rolled out over the ocean, they would kill every fish in the water, crushing their brains inside their skulls and rupturing their eyes…

His eyes swept the island, which was no more than two hundred feet long in total. The scene, once as tranquil and perfect as he’d ever laid eyes upon, was now lit up with glaring lights that bloomed overhead, filtering down through the rustling palms. From his position, it looked as if the grand finale of a fireworks display had been set off directly above the island.

There were only two structures on the island other than the three cabins. One was the water catch-basin system. The other was the outhouse.

Bjorn’s eyes fixated on this last. It had to be.

Never having been a squeamish man nor one who was fraught with indecision, he sprinted to the outhouse door and ripped it half off the hinges. He tore the cracked wooden seat away. The hole exposed beneath was as black as a tomb.

He vaulted inside, feet first. He landed with surprisingly little squelching about a dozen feet down. He’d only used the thing a few times. The bottom was slick with brine and tainted with waste water. It stank, but he hardly cared now.

Bjorn crouched down there less than a minute before the world cracked open outside and a brilliant light more intense than anything he’d ever seen shone down through the opening. It was a pure white, like that produced by an arc-welder. He wondered if he would be burned by this burst of energy, which was like a thousand suns.

Strangely, there was no sound at first, just that shock of white light. Then the illumination changed and faded to a lurid roiling red. Still, there was no sound.

Bjorn had studied such things. He’d worked for enough governments and taken field courses in survival under every conceivable situation. This one was not one of the better ones, as he recalled. The blasts had to have been thermonuclear to cause such a bright, distant flash. It had to be a fusion bomb—an H-bomb. He knew it was far from over. The worst was yet to come.

Light travels much faster than sound. That’s why the flash seemed silent at first. The megatons of force released initially sent out massive pulses of light and particle radiation, which was soon followed up by a concussive blast wave of high-pressure air. Depending on how close the strike was, he was either in for a rough time or instantaneous death. He wasn’t quite sure which was preferable and had no idea if the nanites in his body could repair cellular damage from radiation burns.

Fortunately he didn’t have long to wait. More bursting flares of light appeared in the hole above. There were so many he could not count them. Some were dimmer than others, indicating they were far off. Others appeared to be close and blindingly bright. They all left purple afterimages on his retina, but he found he didn’t want to close his eyes. He wanted to die with them open.

When the first shockwave hit the island, he was surprised by the suddenness of it. The calm night went from relative silence to a deafening howl of wind in less than a second. Trees went down, and the outhouse over his head was blown clear off the island and tumbled over the water toward the mainland. It lifted up into the air where it twirled and crashed. He could hear it flying end over end and breaking into pieces.

He crouched at the bottom of his stinking hole and placed his palms flat over his ears and opened his mouth. Putting his fingers into his ears would have been a mistake; he’d learned that when dealing with artillery blasts. With a tight seal in the ear canal, the air pressure difference could pop a man’s eardrums.

The flashes and the blasts went on for more than a minute. The bursts seemed to be high up in the atmosphere, fortunately for him. There were no tidal waves or fireballs hitting him directly. He had time to wonder what the clouds of radioactive isotopes would do, and where on the Earth they would fall and settle at last.

When the barrage was over at last, he climbed up onto the surface of the island again. Many of the trees were damaged, but none of them were on fire. Of the three cabins on the island, only one was left standing.

Bjorn walked to the sea and stood in the ankle deep water. The night had become still again, as suddenly as it had been disrupted. The tremendous explosions had ceased.

He waded around the island, noting the water was warmer than it had been. Something thumped against his leg, and he crouched to examine it. The corpse of a yellow jack floated in the waves. He picked up the fish and examined it. He wasn’t sure what had killed the creature, but he was sure these were good to eat. He circled the island twice, wading out and scooping with his hands. Within twenty minutes, he had seven of the fish on the shore. A small school must have been swimming by his island when the war in the heavens had reached down and struck them dead.

He toasted one up in the fire pit and ate it, sitting on the fallen trunk of a snapped-off palm. Radioactive or not, the meat was fresh and good.

-5-

Most men would have fled the island after experiencing Armageddon in the middle of the night. The stress and worry would have gotten to them. They would have been too nervous to fall sleep again, or at least too busy watching the skies, waiting for the spacecraft in the heavens above to drop the second proverbial shoe.

But if Bjorn was anything, he was unusual. He didn’t worry about the war overly much. He knew it was being fought nearby, but that didn’t change his decision to ride it out right here on his forgotten little scrap of land. In fact, he reasoned that he’d just become considerably more uninteresting to those who had been searching for him.

He decided to stay put. He arrived at this decision with characteristically sound logic: First, he thought it was unlikely there would be another missile strike that would come closer than the one that he’d just ridden out. In case there was one coming, in the morning he would dig a superior bunker in the middle of the island, shoring it up with wood from the fallen trees and collapsed cabins. Second, this island had now become a haven that was very unlikely to be invaded by the spooks who were seeking him. Even if they had been scouring the Keys, they now had bigger things to worry about.

Bjorn came to the conclusion that the nuclear exchange he’d witnessed in the night had furthered his goals. All he wanted was to be left alone, to be left out of this fight. And who in their right minds would come out here after him now?

But Bjorn was wrong about his seclusion having been enhanced. Two quiet days passed, and then visitors arrived on what he was already coming to think of as his island.

They came just after dawn. The night had been a colorful one, as the skies overhead had given him another distant light show. Apparently, the Macro cruisers had finally arrived, having followed their shower of missiles to Earth. They’d parked themselves near Andros Island. Bjorn wasn’t sure if they were bombarding Star Force or not, but there were flashes of light in the distance to the east, and occasionally aircraft cruised overhead. The planes were particularly annoying, as they were military craft and the ban on sonic booms had been lifted in this region. The pilots seemed to enjoy creating thunder in the skies as their planes broke the sound barrier.

It was just after dawn when Bjorn’s eyes snapped open. For a split-second, he wondered what had awakened him—then he heard it: the unmistakable buzzing of an outboard motor.

He launched himself to his feet and headed for the only section of the island where the foliage was still dense and green. He crouched there in the shade of mangroves and palms, looking out to sea with intense eyes.

There were four of them. Regular Marines, U. S. personnel. He narrowed his eyes, and read what he could from their behavior.

They didn’t look like they were planning an assault. They had stripped down to their tee shirts and dog tags. They kept their helmets on, and their rifles slung, but they were merely talking, rather than grim-faced and determined. When they came onto the island with splashing boots, they were looking around but did not appear concerned for their safety.

Bjorn read the situation, and figured that if they were looking for him, they didn’t actually expect to find him. Perhaps they’d been checking countless islands for days. Or possibly they didn’t know he existed and were pursuing some other kind of mission.

He decided to remain hidden and see what they would do. From the green gloom of his foliage, he watched as they unfolded some kind of transceiver and buried it, with an antenna sticking up, in the middle of the island. Then they turned and went back to their boat.

This was too much. He didn’t want this thing on his island. He would have to leave, and he’d already spent too much time arranging this place to his liking.

When none of them were looking, he sprinted down the sandy strip of land that served as a western shore. When he was about twenty feet from their craft, where they laughed and talked and pointed out to sea, discussing their next move, Bjorn hailed them. He had his pistol tucked in his waistband at the small of his back.

“Hey!” he shouted. “What are you guys doing on my land?”

The startled marines fell silent. They all turned together, staring at him in surprise.

“Sorry, sir,” one said. He had a corporal’s stripes on his shirt, which he hastened to shrug on. “Sorry. We didn’t know anyone was on this rock.”

“No problem,” Bjorn said, pasting on a smile. “Could you tell me what you’re doing, or is it top secret?”

The men glanced at one another. The corporal shrugged and walked up the shore to meet Bjorn, who was already calculating his next move.

Bjorn had never gotten along terribly well with regular troops, and he was distrustful of them now. He went over in his mind, as the corporal approached, just how he could kill the man in the most efficient manner possible. Really, the first man wasn’t the problem. He was certain he could strike him dead or at least unconscious with a single blow.

It was the rest of the team that concerned him. They had rifles on their backs, and he was pretty sure he couldn’t spring into their midst and put them all down before they managed to get off a few rounds. In most cases, a single gunshot wound would not stop Bjorn, but a lucky shot to the head might do just that.

Even if they didn’t kill him, they could injure him seriously. Recovery could take days. Bjorn wasn’t interested in enduring that unless it was absolutely necessary. He also knew that once he got rid of this team another would come after them trying to figure out the disappearance.

Military people could be like a trail of ants: once you squished one the rest went crazy and they never stopped coming at you.

Accordingly he didn’t draw his gun, or crush the corporal’s windpipe. Instead, he stood there motionless, forcing himself to smile.

“You okay, man?” the corporal asked. “You look…burned.”

Bjorn blinked, then nodded. “Yeah, I probably do. I was out here a few nights ago when the sky lit up.”

“Holy shit!” the marine said with real feeling. “You should get to a hospital or something.”

“I will soon,” Bjorn promised. “But could you tell me what kind of device you placed in the middle of my island? It’s not some kind of mine, is it?”

Bjorn knew what a mine looked like, and he knew this wasn’t one, but he figured the marine would be more forthcoming if he was reassuring a civilian.

“No, no,” said the corporal. “It’s not dangerous. It’s a sensory device. It’s a magnetometer, actually. If anything big and metal comes near, it will warn us.”

Bjorn frowned. “Big? Metal? Like what, a ship?”

“Not that big. You couldn’t get a deep draft ship close to this island anyway. It’s too shallow. No, we’re detecting machines—you know, robots. Hey, listen, if you want a ride back to the main island, we can take you now. We have orders to pick up civvies in need.”

Bjorn shook his head. “Thanks, but I’m all right.”

The corporal clearly didn’t believe him, but he shrugged and turned to go. “Suit yourself, it’s your funeral. I think everyone has the right to choose how and where they go out. Just ignore the sensor box. It won’t go off and send out a signal unless a very large piece of metal comes close.”

“How big and how close?”

“Uh, something the size of a pickup would have to be within a hundred yards or less.”

“I see.”

“Oh, and one more thing, sir.”

“What?”

“If one of those machines does come here, you should start swimming. The sensor will alert the Air Force. This island will be lit up a few minutes later.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

“No problem. Luck.”

Bjorn watched them leave. They glanced back frequently and talked among themselves, laughing. He had no doubt they were making jokes at his expense. To them, he was a crazy hermit on an island who wouldn’t leave.

But in his mind, they were all lucky to be alive.

-6-

Bjorn spent the next hour or so tinkering with the device. He managed to alter its function rather easily, as it wasn’t built with any kind of failsafe. He set it up to beep when it detected something, but not to send out a radio signal. It still had its transponder active, of course, so anyone monitoring it wouldn’t know he had tampered with it. The device would appear to be functioning normally, but wouldn’t transmit its warning when the time came.

When the sun was beginning to set and he was in the middle of cooking up the last of his blast-killed yellow jacks for dinner, he heard a familiar sound: again, it was the buzzing of an outboard motor.

He threw sand into the fire and left the fish sizzling in the dark. He hoped he would have time to eat it later.

The boat circled the island twice while a spotlight played over the dark trees. Bjorn lay in the sand on his belly. He felt a few bugs crawl over his back and sweating arms; one prodded him over the kidneys with what felt like a needle, but he ignored it. Only his eyes moved, following the boat. It looked like the same one that had visited the first time.

In his right hand, he held his 9mm tightly. He was thinking hard. Had he tripped some kind of failsafe on the device by accident? He didn’t think so, but it was hard to be sure. He was a capable tech, but not a wizard.

No. It was far more likely they’d reported the strange black man who’d weathered a series of atomic blasts on a tiny offshore island. A man who hadn’t been interested in returning to the mainland despite his burns. Once they’d made the report, someone had put two and two together and sent them back out here to pick him up. Just maybe, they’d found their mystery man from the airport incident.

One would think that in the excitement of a pitched battle, these troops would have something better to do. But Bjorn knew better. Whoever wanted him, they wanted him badly. He was special. He was a single nanotized man in the midst of billions of normal people. Possibly, he was the only nanotized man on the planet who wasn’t a loyal member of Star Force.

Bjorn counted heads in the boat. There were six this time, instead of four. They’d come wearing their full kits as well, and their rifles were in their hands rather than slung over their backs.

He believed he could kill them all and survive, but it would be somewhat iffy. They were trained men on alert. They weren’t going to cut him a break this time. They were going to come in with their weapons hot, and all he had was a pistol with fifteen rounds in the magazine.

He still thought he could do it, so he didn’t flee. He waited, hugging the sand and moving nothing other than his eyes as they warily circled the island in their boat. He could have slid down into the small bunker he’d dug against future bombings, but then he wouldn’t have been able to see them as easily. Really, his bunker was just a dug out hole shored up with timbers. There were a few side tunnels, but he hadn’t built it for a siege. He’d only planned to use it as a bomb shelter. In a fight, it would be nothing more than a trap. They’d toss in grenades and it would all be over.

Finally, the team stopped circling and landed their boat. They didn’t drop an anchor, but jumped into the shallow water, boot splashing. Four of them came ashore while two others stayed with their tiny patrol craft. The motor had dropped down from a whine to a burbling sound.

“Hey man? Are you still here?” a voice called out.

Bjorn frowned. He thought he recognized the voice. Could it be the same corporal he’d talked to earlier?

Distrustful, he stayed down and quiet.

“I think he’s gone,” said one of the men.

“That’s bad. Stay alert. Eyes open, team.”

They advanced as a group to the center of the island where they’d buried their device. They checked it and seemed interested in nothing else. They whispered together and gazed out to sea in every direction at once. They were nervous.

Bjorn began to realize that these men weren’t looking for him. They weren’t searching the island or calling out to him. They were only interested in their sensor.

“You sure it tripped off? Could be a false alarm. There was just one blip and then nothing.”

“Could be a false alarm. That’s why they sent us instead of leveling the island.”

Bjorn stood up silently and stepped forward. None of the marines saw him for a moment. He stood looming over them in the shadow of a banana tree.

“What’s wrong, gentlemen?” he asked softly.

They startled and lurched around, aiming their rifles in his direction. A flashlight played over his face.

“It’s cool, he lives here,” the corporal said.

“You live here?”

The corporal stood up and approached. He eyed Bjorn’s pistol and his bearing. “It’s pretty clear you’re former military,” he said to Bjorn. “Am I right?”

“Yes.”

“That’s cool. But maybe you could help us out. We got a blip from here about an hour after we left. Did you see anything—anything unusual?”

“Like what?”

The corporal cleared his throat and looked at the others. “Like a big machine.”

“Like a robot?”

“Yeah.”

Bjorn shook his head slowly. But now, his eyes were gazing out at the sea. Like the rest of them, he wondered what might be out there.

“This thing you placed on my island—it was built to detect robots right?”

“Right?”

“Or was it built to attract them?”

The corporal shrugged. “Really, I have no idea. I set them up, turn them on, and leave them on little crappy islands like this. No offense.”

“None taken.”

The corporal looked him over. “Your blisters look better.”

“I heal fast,” Bjorn said. “Listen, if the device checks out—”

He got no further. There was an odd sound out in the water. It was a thumping sound. They turned as a group toward the boat. The two men they’d left stationed there were sitting against the gunwales, quietly waiting. The engine still burbled.

The group relaxed, but then another sound came. This time, there was no way to discount it, no way to assume it was the boat nudging up against a hidden rock. A crack rent the air, a sound like that of splitting metal.

As they all watched in shock, the boat heaved up and flipped over. The men sitting inside went flying. One fell into the sea while the other slapped down on the narrow beach.

Bjorn was the first to react. He scrambled forward, his pistol in his hand. He was knee-deep in the water before the marines behind him had taken more than two steps and raised their rifles.

Flashlights played over the scene. There was a chorus of shouts and curses. Bjorn shushed them and knelt to check the man on the beach.

“Neck’s broken,” he said.

The rest of the team fell silent. They spread out and held their guns to their shoulders, aiming this way and that. But there was nothing to shoot at.

The overturned boat’s engine died, leaving them all in a deathly silence.

“What the hell was it?” the corporal asked him, standing at his side.

“I would suspect it was the machine that tripped the sensor. Or one of them, anyway.”

“One of them?”

“Haven’t you watched the news?” Bjorn asked. “Macros don’t usually work alone.”

The kid’s eyes were wide and terrified. His breathing came in gasps. In contrast, Bjorn felt remarkably calm. He looked out into the water, trying to see any sign of the second marine who had stayed with the boat. But he didn’t spot a thing. The waves just kept peacefully lapping on the beach, as if nothing at all were wrong.

-7-

Bjorn crouched on the beach while the others swept the island. He didn’t seek the thing they all suspected was here, instead he listened to the environment carefully.

The troops around him spread out, gun stocks held to their shoulders, aiming their weapons everywhere they looked. They weren’t shouting and screaming, which impressed Bjorn. When they spoke, it was in urgent whispers.

“It’s in the water. Has to be.”

“Anyone see it?”

“Negative.”

“Is Spinelli really dead?”

“Yeah, he’s gone. Both of them are gone.”

While the others circled and searched, Bjorn stood as if frozen. Instead of looking for the machine, he listened for it. He tried to tune out the marines, their comments and the squelch of their boots on the sand. His mind sifted through the sounds for anything unusual.

When he heard a rustling behind him, he turned instantly. But it was just one of the privates, moving into the island’s interior. Palm fronds rattled over the marine’s back as he pressed through them.

Bjorn relaxed a fraction—and that’s when the machine made its move.

He realized as it came out of the trees that it must have come up on the far side of the island to make its second attack. When he saw it looming out of darkness, he brought up his pistol, but didn’t bother to fire.

The machine rushed out of the bushes into the middle of the island, quickly advancing on the private who’d strayed from the rest of the group. It was about as big as a pickup truck—with a king cab. All metal, it was shaped like a headless grasshopper with twin blades mounted where its mouth should have been. Bjorn could hear its grinding gears and whining motors. The thing was loud when it was up close.

The targeted marine knew he was screwed in his final seconds. Shouting hoarsely, he lifted his rifle and unloaded a magazine into the oncoming monster. He fired his weapon in full-automatic mode, but it didn’t seem to matter. Sparks flew from the front plates of the Macro and at least one of the bulbous electronic eyes popped like a light bulb, but it didn’t slow its charge.

Five-foot long curved blades like twin scimitars swept up and made a pincher motion. Bjorn hadn’t known Macros had blades. The shears reminded him of a stained gardening tool. They scissored together with a rasping clack and snipped the marine in half. It was an awful sound, and as the shears met one another in the middle of the man’s flesh, a series of small thumping sounds began. It was the sound of the man’s body emptying out. Blood splashed out over the sands transforming the beach into dark clumps of earth.

The rest of the team was in the action by now. They all fired at the monster, lashing it with bullets. The Macro paused for a moment, then moved determinedly as if making a decision.

Bjorn thought he knew what it was thinking: these guns aren’t damaging me. This doesn’t hurt. I don’t think I need to run.

Possibly, firing on the monster was their greatest error. The machine had been circumspect previously, uncertain as to what kind of danger it faced. Now that they’d done their worst, it had lost all respect for the group. Probably, it had had a mission with orders to stay undetected. Now that stealth was out of the question and running wasn’t necessary, it decided to keep on killing.

It advanced with a decisive lurch toward the next man, who shouted incoherently and reloaded his rifle. He fumbled and dropped the magazine. When he stooped to pick it up, the machine moved in.

Bjorn knew what he had to do. He had to vanish. He was good at vanishing, which was more than just the art of running away from danger. The key was to know when it was time to disappear.

He’d always been gifted with a precise sense of timing in these matters. Once, in his youth, he’d fallen in with a street gang. The leader of the group had gotten the bright idea of knocking off an all-night liquor store. But something had gone wrong. The old man behind the counter had pulled a gun, and bullets had begun to fly.

Before the old guy even had his piece out, Bjorn had already hit the door. He’d seen the steel in the man’s eyes. The owner hadn’t been afraid of the robbers—he’d been pissed. That had been enough for Bjorn. He was the only one of the group to get away, and he’d never tried his hand at robbery again.

This moment was very similar. The machine had decided to kill its assailants, and had coldly calculated that its odds of success were high. Bjorn knew with crystal clarity that this was the moment when he should turn and run. It was the perfect time to vanish.

He almost did it. He could see himself in his mind’s eye, diving into the water and swimming away. He’d probably make it halfway to the main island before the machine caught all the marines and killed them. They were already splitting up, backing away. They would do their best to stay alive. But there was nowhere to go for a normal man. They couldn’t swim fast enough to outrun this nightmare of heartless metal, and it had already sunk their boat. In less than a minute, they would all be dead.

But Bjorn didn’t turn and run. Instead, he advanced and circled the machine. Internally, he wondered what he could do against it. He’d never met another human being who had been nanotized as he had. It had been years, therefore, since he’d met a man he wasn’t certain he could defeat.

The question in his mind now was: could he kill this raging machine?

The Macro was only a small one. It was one of the units the Star Force people derisively referred to as workers or grasshoppers. Up close, Bjorn thought the machine resembled a metallic ant.

He worked his way around to its flank before it seemed to take notice of him. The marines were more interesting, as they were blasting away ineffectively at its thick metal hull.

The leader of the marines was a staff sergeant. He became the machine’s next victim. He was shouting something, backing away and firing in short, controlled bursts. It seemed he was intent on blowing off all the sensory bulbs on the monster. Bjorn didn’t think that would work, but he had to give the noncom credit; it was worth a try.

Bjorn paused to drop his gun. If automatic fire wasn’t doing any damage, a pistol wasn’t going to do the trick. He exchanged the gun for a combat knife drawn from the belt of a dead man—or rather from the lower half of him. The belt itself was circling nothing at all now, and had been sheared into leather strips in any case.

He held the knife underhand and charged in. He didn’t roar a battle cry or say anything. He didn’t want to distract the machine from the men it was stalking.

The machine finally caught up with the retreating staff sergeant. The man ducked, but it didn’t save him. The sweeping blades neatly sliced off his head. His helmet popped into the air and splashed down in the warm foamy waves.

Despite its attention being riveted firmly on the fallen sergeant, who it chopped to shreds with a series of pecking motions reminiscent of a bird of prey, the machine noticed when Bjorn got close.

It whirled in his direction when he made his final leap toward it. Those deadly blades spread wide, but they snipped the air too low. Bjorn had launched himself a good fifteen feet into the air, and landed neatly on its back.

The machine didn’t have small arms with which to reach Bjorn up there. But it did have kicking legs, which caused the hull to buck and convulse under him. The blades opened and closed spasmodically, shearing away a nearby palm trunk.

Bjorn hung on while the machine thrashed about. Doing anything else would surely mean his death. Fronds and brush lashed his back and the machines inner mechanisms were deafeningly loud.

“You’re a crazy mother!” he heard a remaining marine shout.

Privately, Bjorn had to agree with the man’s assessment. He employed the combat knife now, stabbing it into the machine’s back. The armor was too thick, however, and the point only sparked and scraped. He knew that if he thrust it too hard, it would snap the blade. He had to find a weak spot. He stabbed at the joints, but they were tougher than the hull, being dinner plate-sized, rotating disks of steel.

Then he found one of the ruined sensory bulbs. There was a hole in the machine’s skin there, about as big around as a soup can. Bjorn stabbed into the hole and felt live current jolt his fingers. It would be ironic, he thought, if he electrocuted himself while trying to dig into this thing.

But he kept going. He gouged and stabbed with the knife, widening the hole somewhat. Then he punched his hand inside up to the elbow and pulled out a handful of wires.

The wires were live, and uninsulated. He’d heard that about these machines. They weren’t serviced by humans and so didn’t need to worry about safety in their designs. Bare wires were common inside their chassis. They only insulated one wire from the next when needed to provide smooth operation.

Gritting his teeth against biting shocks, he ripped loose what he could reach. But the effect on the machine was negligible.

Deciding at last that the man on its back was unreachable, the Macro stopped spinning around and lurching like dog with a tape on its back. Instead, it advanced again on the nearest marine.

“Get off that thing!” a soldier shouted at Bjorn. As the machine advanced, the man was backing steadily toward the shoreline. “I can’t get a shot with you riding that thing!”

“Shooting it isn’t having any effect,” Bjorn shouted back. “Give me a weapon. I need to get into this thing’s guts.”

“I warned you,” the marine said. “Duck!”

Then he opened fire. Bjorn hugged the back of the machine while a hail of bullets struck the Macro’s nosecone. He couldn’t blame the man, as he might have done the same. Sparks flew, lighting up the night with orange fire.

The monster wasn’t deterred. The marine ran out of ammo and continued to step backward until he splashed into the water. The water deepened quickly and he was forced to swim. That was the end for him. He was plucked from the waves and torn apart before he could escape.

Ignoring Bjorn completely, the Macro now turned and headed toward the other end of the island. It wasn’t immediately clear what it was doing. To Bjorn, it appeared the island was empty.

“You see me, don’t you, you metal fuck?” shouted a voice.

Bjorn could see the machine’s target now. It was the corporal he’d first met earlier that same day. Looking around, Bjorn realized the two of them were the last living men on the island.

The corporal was hiding inside Bjorn’s bunker. The dugout was too small for the Macro, maybe there was a chance.

But a moment later they both learned this machine could dig. Its front legs became a blur. Sand and gravel sprayed out behind it all the way to the sea.

Bjorn reached deeper still into its guts through the hole in its hull and began ripping again, trying to find something vital. A horrible pain lanced up from his hand a moment later.

“My finger, damn!” he roared.

He yanked, and then yanked harder, but his hand was stuck. Probably, he’d been pinched by a gear inside the thing. He was in agony and getting nowhere. He gave a final, wrenching pull and his hand came out of the machine.

It took him a second to realize his right ring finger was missing. It was just gone. He’d left it somewhere inside the machine. The pain was intense.

-8-

“It’s digging me out,” shouted the corporal in the hole. “I’m out of ammo and I can’t get past it.”

“Have you got a grenade?” Bjorn demanded.

“What? Yeah—good idea. Better than being torn apart.”

“No, don’t pull the pin. Just toss it up here to me.”

The marine threw a small round object up out of the hole. Bjorn had to leap from the machine’s back to catch it. He snatched it out of the air with his good hand, then turned back around.

The machine, which had been totally ignoring Bjorn for a full minute now, suddenly whirled. The pincher-blades opened wide, and Bjorn realized he’d made a mistake. He’d taken its lack of interest as a sign he could survive leaving its back—but he’d been wrong.

The only thing that saved him over the next second and a half was sheer speed. Bjorn took a flying leap backward, out of the path of the snapping shears. He landed on his shoulder, rolled, and came up in a crouch. The machine charged closer for the kill. It seemed more eager than ever before. Perhaps Bjorn had been irritating it with his stabbing and clinging. Either that, or the machine had marked him down as long overdue for death.

Bjorn could tell as he backed from the monster that it wasn’t going to allow him to ride on its hull again. He’d ridden it for over a minute, and the fun was over. The Macro held its blades higher, and whenever he moved, it lifted them immediately, as if planning to snap him in half if he tried another flying leap.

Bjorn was impressed. The machine had learned to counter his tactic after seeing it only once. It wasn’t a dumb toaster—it was smart. That made it all the more dangerous and terrifying. For the first time since he’d engaged with the machine, he began to doubt his ability to defeat it. The thought came to him as a shock. He’d felt challenged before in combat, but never outmatched. At least, not since the old man in the liquor store had looked at him with steely eyes.

He kept backing up, using whatever trees he could to hide behind. The machine pressed forward relentlessly, snapping off thin trunks and scuttling around thick ones. Bjorn was running out of island. Soon, his hind foot would slip into the water and that would be the end of him.

The corporal he’d left hiding in the hole entered the fight then. He’d found some ammo somewhere and fired a steady series of single shots at the Macro’s back. The bullets whined and spanged from the hull, but the Macro took no notice. It didn’t whirl to charge at its tormenter. It stayed on target, determined to kill the man who’d evaded it for so long.

Bjorn was further impressed by the machine’s behavior. An animal would have been distracted—but this thing was smarter than a dog or a bull. It wasn’t like a man, either. It was like—a machine.

His foot slipped. He’d reached the far end of the island. His instinct was to dive into the water and swim for it. He was faster than an Olympic swimmer, and could hold his breath for ten minutes if necessary. The nanites could chemically break down the carbon dioxide in his blood, releasing the oxygen again. But that effect was of limited duration and could only be used in emergencies.

But he decided against that play. Running wasn’t easy when facing a monster like this. If he tried it, the machine would either catch him as it had the last marine who’d gone for a swim, or it would turn and finish the corporal who was still behind it, trying to get its attention, trying to help out. Bjorn wasn’t going to let the kid die as a decoy.

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.

The day started in that slow, lazy fashion that so many hot days begin in the tropics. But at about ten a. m. that all changed.

It was Saturday, and out over the ocean to the east a battle began. It was so high up and so huge in scope, spanning many miles of land, sea, air and space that it was visible from his tiny island. Although he didn’t know it then, the final conflict for Andros Island between Star Force and the Macros had begun, and it would later come to be called the Saturday Assault.

High atmospheric bursts of fusion weapons were visible for a tremendous distance. In the past, when the militaries of Earth had seen fit to test such things, they’d done so far out at sea or in the depths of uninhabited deserts. Many people had seen the fission bombs go off in the early days of testing, but relatively few had witnessed H-bombs, fusion weapons thousands of times as powerful as the original bombs dropped on Japan to end World War Two.

Now, for a second time in a few days, Bjorn was treated to a display of modern weaponry being released by two combatants with no restrictions. As the day wore on, what had been a few sparks and thunder-like sounds out over the ocean to the east had drifted closer and become more dramatic.

Missiles sailed overhead from land-based locations in the U. S. They roared toward Andros and detonated in airbursts that made Bjorn lift his hands to cover his eyes. The fighting went on for long hours. Before it was over, Bjorn saw what could only be strikes to the north—they had to be hitting the mainland. He stared that way long after the flashes had dimmed from the initial white glare to a glowing, rising, lurid red.

So huge! Like new suns lit upon the surface of the Earth. The strikes must be massive, at least twenty megatons—or maybe a hundred. He couldn’t tell, but they lingered, sending fallout upward in a rising cloud. Up and up, columns of smoke and fire rose into the sky and set the clouds alight. The machines must have wiped out Florida’s greatest urban center, and who knew what else. Miami had to be gone.

Bjorn scrambled to his shelter, which now seemed pitiful. It wasn’t deep enough, and it wasn’t even airtight. Still, he did what he could. He drove new tunnels and shored up spots with sticks of driftwood. All the while he worked, he knew there was little point to it. If a warhead that powerful went off on top of Key West he’d be vaporized in an mercifully short instant, whether he was sitting in his pathetically shallow tunnels or not.

The battle quieted during the night, and he wondered who had won. He supposed if he saw a hundred machines marching up out of the sea around him in the morning he’d figure it out fast enough.

At dawn on the following day, he awakened again. There was a burning smell in the air, like that of a forest fire. He couldn’t see flame, but maybe it was just ash and smoke from the distant destruction. The winds were blowing from the northeast.

“I bet it’s hard to sleep much past dawn,” said someone nearby. There was a southern twang to the man’s voice.

Bjorn vaulted to his feet. He’d been lounging one second, wondering what he was going to eat for breakfast, and the next he was standing in a crouch. His hands both operated properly now, and his pistol was in his right hand as if having appeared there by magic. His fingers still tingled and itched, but they operated well enough.

“When I used to go camping as a kid,” the stranger continued conversationally, “and during patrols in the bush, we never slept after the sun came up.”

A man stood nearby on the beach, on the eastern side of Bjorn’s tiny island. With the dawning sun at his back, Bjorn couldn’t make out the face. He couldn’t see how the man had gotten here, either.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

“You’re a hard man to find, did you know that? And even harder to kill, apparently. I’m impressed. Very impressed.”

Bjorn stepped to his right, walking sideways. He never took his eyes off the intruder. Every muscle was tense, every cord stood out on his bare arms and back.

He could see the invader better now as the sun was no longer at his back. He was wearing military fatigues, and there were stars on his collar—a general’s stars.

“My, my,” said the general. “You move like some kind of werewolf, boy. Did you know that? Have you gone feral on us, hiding out here on this lump of dirt?”

“Answer my question or I’ll kill you where you stand,” Bjorn said. “Who are you?”

“I’m known as General Kerr. Maybe you’ve heard of me. I’ve been wrestling with Star Force and these effing aliens since the get-go.”

Bjorn peered at him. As a rule, he made an effort not to keep up with current events. But the name did ring a bell. “You work with Riggs, right?” he asked the stranger. “You’re some kind of government suit in a man’s uniform.”

“Heh,” said Kerr, nodding. “That sounds about right. Now, let’s talk about you, shall we? You’re Bjorn Gaines, a half-black deserter who’s gone into business for himself. A freelance contractor who the spook-patrol up in Washington likes to call up when someone needs to be removed from the landscape. A hitman, in other words. Do I have the right man?”

“I just want to be left alone,” Bjorn said. “Why can’t you people get that through your heads?”

Kerr snorted with amusement. He pointed over his shoulder to the north with a lazy finger. “Did you check out the lightshow yesterday? Do you have any idea what happened?”

“Nuclear strikes. A lot of them. Mostly airbursts, from the look of it.”

“Yeah, mostly. But not all. Miami is gone. Three million people and counting. The machines snuck a few in there when they realized they weren’t going to get to land their warheads on Andros Island, see? They’re smart that way. The missiles, I mean. They’re each flown by an angry robot, and if it’s clear they can’t take out their original target, they look for another one to suicide on. Any fat target of opportunity will do.”

Bjorn thought about it. He hadn’t known that. But after what he’d seen firsthand when dealing with the Macro on his island, he knew the machines were smart and very willing to sacrifice themselves to get a job done.

“That’s great,” he told the intruder. “I’m so glad you could come by and give me a personal update, General. But now, I’m afraid this interview is at an end.”

He turned away from Kerr and walked to the water’s edge.

“Think it’s going to be that easy, do you?” Kerr asked from behind him. “You can’t leave this island—not now. See that rock about six hundred yards off to your right? And the smaller one—just a pile of sand and bird crap, really—off to your left? I’ve got sharpshooters out there. They have their weapons trained on your skull, and these boys don’t miss. Trust me on that point.”

“I do,” said Bjorn. His eyes swept to both the small landmasses in the distance. Kerr could be telling the truth. There could very well be snipers out there. That would explain the brass balls he had to come and talk to a killer alone and personally.

Bjorn turned around slowly to face the general. “What do you want?”

“Ah,” chuckled Kerr. “Finally, at long last, the question that I want to hear! I want you to get involved, boy. That’s all! I want you to serve your government for a change, not just the highest bidder.”

“You want me to do a hit?”

“Exactly.”

“Who?”

Kerr’s face darkened with sudden feeling. He pointed out to the north again. “I want you to destroy the cocksucker who did that,” he said.

Bjorn looked confused. “You want me to kill Macros?”

“No, I’m talking about a certain Star Force commander.”

“Kyle Riggs?”

Kerr’s face shifted again, from dark rage to an easy smile. “That’s right.”

Bjorn nodded in sudden understanding. “That’s what you wanted all along, isn’t it? Since the interview in D. C. You want Riggs dead.”

“Lots of people do. I took my number a long time ago, and now it’s my turn to take a shot at him. And you’re the weapon I’ve chosen for the job. You’re the best.”

Bjorn shook his head. “I don’t know about that. There’s always someone better.”

“Nope. There’s no one better,” Kerr ticked off a series of facts on his fingers: “You’re nanotized, Delta-trained, non-Star Force, an accomplished independent assassin, and you have no easily located records… In short, you’re one of a kind on this planet, Gaines. What do you say?”

Bjorn stared at the general for several long seconds. “I think you’re right, General. I think I should get back into the game.”

“Excellent! Let me call in my transport. We’ll have you back in Washington in two hours.”

“What? No, that’s not what I meant. I’m not going to work with you.”

Kerr looked pissed for a moment, then he sucked in a breath through his nostrils and nodded. “All right. I respect a man who sticks to his principles. But, it is a pity.”

The older man reached for something on his belt, and for once Bjorn didn’t move fast enough. He was too surprised and the general seemed to be moving very nonchalantly. With almost a negligent, lazy motion, he lifted a grenade in his hand.

Before Bjorn could grab Kerr’s wrist, the man had pulled out the pin.

-10-

Bjorn was fast. All nanotized men were, but he’d been fast before he’d been injected with tiny robots. Now, he was a shocking blur when he moved.

He knew he didn’t have much time. He wasn’t sure if Kerr was insane and suicidal, or if the grenade was just a feint, or maybe even a signal for the snipers to begin shooting. He had a plan by this time, however, and he put it into motion.

First, he swatted the grenade from the man’s hand. There was a crackling sound of bones snapping. He ignored this and the howl that came out of the general a split second later.

Gathering himself, he sprang into the water. Gripped in both his hands, held tightly by his fatigues, was General Kerr. He’d leapt while holding onto the man, and now they were both flying toward the water together.

Something snapped nearby, causing a white spot to appear on a tree trunk. Well, thought Bjorn, at least I know the snipers are real.

The two men landed what seemed like an eternity later in the water. Bjorn made no effort to come down feet first. He fell on his right shoulder, which plunged into the water. General Kerr was pulled down after him.

The old man was game, Bjorn had to say that for him. Before they’d splashed into the sea together, he’d managed to get a knife out. Bjorn was forced to squeeze his wrist until he dropped it in the salt

water.

They sank together into the water, with Kerr on top and Bjorn below. Bjorn pulled the older man down with his greater weight. Nanotized people were denser than normal humans. They were excellent swimmers, but they didn’t float in water. It had something to do with having several pounds of metal in your body.

A muffled popping sound told Bjorn the grenade had gone off back on the surface. Somewhere on his abused island there was a new scorch mark.

The general’s eyes were wide in shock and bubbles streamed from his mouth. He kneed Bjorn, who had both his wrists clamped, but Bjorn didn’t care. His balls were almost as tough as the rest of him, courtesy of the nanites.

They sank to the sandy bottom. Bjorn knew that if he surfaced, the snipers would pop his head like a melon.

Kerr’s struggles grew weaker. Bjorn knew he was drowning. Kerr hadn’t had a chance to take a deep breath before this unexpected dive.

Bjorn watched him for several more seconds before finally letting him go. In his heart, he wanted to kill this man. But he didn’t feel he had that option. The reason was simple: if he killed Kerr, he’d never be able to work in the U.S. again, and their intel people would put him on every burn list they could. Messing with Kerr was one thing, killing him was another, even if the cocky old bastard richly deserved it.

Kerr kicked away from him and staggered out of sea back onto the beach. Bjorn watched his legs churn in the water. The general wasn’t fleeing in fear. There seemed not to be any urgency in his movements, just pain.

After a few steps, Kerr stopped and turned around. He stood there in about a foot of seawater, with his dark bootlaces floating in the waves. Bjorn stayed underwater to avoid the snipers. He watched, but the general just stood there on the shoreline, waiting.

Bjorn became curious. He found a spot between several rocks and stuck his head up between them. He made sure the snipers didn’t have a shot.

“Why don’t you just fuck off?” he shouted at Kerr. “I think you must realize by now there’s no way I’m going to do what you want.”

Kerr was holding his wrist. Some of his fingers didn’t look right. His face was full of pain, but there was plenty of determination there, too.

“Just tell me why you won’t do it? Riggs has screwed up again and again. He’s a tinplated dictator with delusions of grandeur. Millions just died yesterday due to his decisions. Why won’t you help out your planet—your species?”

Bjorn saw a plume of green smoke rising from the island behind Kerr. He realized what the grenade was that Kerr had deployed. It was a smoker.

“That was the signal to take me out, wasn’t it?” Bjorn asked. “If I won’t serve you, I have to die, is that it?”

“That’s about the size of it, chief. We’ve been watching you since you killed that Macro with your bare hands. I could have ordered you shot at any time.”

“You think that kind of argument is going to get me to serve you?”

“You can still come in,” Kerr said. “I’ll call all this off right now. All you have to do is say yes. There’s no other way off this island for you, not in a scenario where you’re still breathing. And there’s not going to be anywhere else for you to run on this world, either. Your days of disappearing on us are over, because even if you do manage it, we’ll be waiting when you show your nose again. My boys are everywhere. One of them will be waiting while you buy a glace in Italy, or bask on the beach in Manila.”

Bjorn swallowed. One of his favorite spots on Earth was indeed the beaches of the Philippines. He hesitated a second, then nodded.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

“Just like that?”

“Yeah. Just like that. Your powers of persuasion are admirable.”

Kerr chuckled and whooped. “Boy, you did give me a scare!” he shouted, shaking his head and laughing aloud. “I thought you’d gone right over the cliff. They warned me about you, Gaines.”

“Who did?”

“The pysch boys. They said you were unstable.”

“Did they?”

“Yeah, but I told them that crazy came with the territory. There’s never been a pro hitman with a head full of normal brains in the history of man. Anyway, I’m glad you came to your senses.”

“How are we going to do this?” Bjorn asked.

“What? Oh, you mean the snipers. Hold on.”

Kerr produced a second smoker, and this one poured out red vapor moments later.

“Green for kill, red for stand down?”

“More like green for go, red for stop.”

“Got it.”

Bjorn carefully crawled up onto the land again. No more bullets came. He eyed the sea and the neighboring islands critically.

“My bird is on the way,” Kerr told him. “We’ve got less than five minutes.”

“I don’t hear it.”

“Of course not. How do you think I got to your island without you knowing I was coming?”

Bjorn had been close enough to stealth helicopters in the past to know what they sounded like. They weren’t really silent. He knew Star Force had control over gravity somehow and had vehicles that could fly silently. It was alien technology that he was all too familiar with. When the Nano ships had come from the stars on that fateful night and picked him up out of bed, they hadn’t made a sound. Now he knew that the pentagon had similar tech.

“Mind if I get my things?” he asked.

“You’ve got things?”

“Just one bag.”

“All right. But don’t pull any more bullshit. There are guns on you. Even if you go to the far side of this dirtball and jump in, they’re waiting for you on the mainland too.”

“No bullshit.”

Bjorn walked to his shelter. It was really more of a ditch than anything else. He didn’t pick up any luggage, or weapons. Instead, he slithered down into the hole he’d dug and disappeared.

-11-

When the Macro had trapped the corporal down here, Bjorn had seen his makeshift bunker had a critical flaw: there was only one way in or out. He’d decided then to add a new exit. He’d dug it at night, in the depths of this muddy little hole.

As a kid he’d learned that foxes always dug two exits from their holes. The animals knew that a hole with only one way out was as much of a trap as it was a safe haven. Understanding the wisdom of this instinct, Bjorn had scratched twenty feet of earth and sand out of the way until he met with seawater.

Since he didn’t have any timber to keep the hole from filling back in, he was having a hard time making use of the escape tunnel now. He scratched at the wet sand, swimming in it like a mole. It was only his hard, claw-like hands, great strength, and the ability to hold his breath for prolonged periods that allowed him to slip away into the sea.

When he did reach open water, his lungs had already begun to burn. Far above him, he could see a shadow moving over the water. That had to be the ghostly airship, hunting for him. It was just as silent as Kerr said it was. When it passed directly overhead, he could see it press at the water, dishing it away. But it wasn’t causing much turbulence. It reminded him of the Nano ship that had once caught him and kept him trapped inside. Those ships used gravity repellers, alien systems that pushed away gravitational forces the way the opposite poles of two magnets repelled one another. To him, this technology seemed similar.

Swimming away from the islands on the very bottom of the sea, he kept going downslope into the darkening water. He never looked back. He didn’t care to know if they had subs or frogmen after him. He just kept going, deeper and deeper until the water became gloomy and clouded.

Six minutes after his last breath, he found a kelp bed. He dove into it and used it for cover like a man running in tall grass.

After about ten full minutes, he knew he was running out of air. Even the nanites couldn’t keep his cells going much longer. He turned upward and scooped powerfully.

He came up much too fast. He worried the rapid changes in pressure might damage his body, but he also knew that nanites swam inside him even as he swam in the ocean. They would repair the damage in time.

When he surfaced briefly, gasping, he only let himself have five or six breaths before diving down again into the cool depths. During that time, he had the vague suspicion that the airship—or whatever it was—was still there. Perhaps a sniper hung out the side, scanning the water for his head. He didn’t want to let them get a shot, so he dove again.

He swam at right angles to his original course. When he came up again, gasping and desperate for air, it was only few minutes later. He scanned the skies quickly, even as he sucked lungful after lungful of deep breaths. His oxygen-starved cells burned throughout his body and his vision slowly brightened.

He spotted something resembling a helicopter to the south. The airship was strange in configuration. It hovered low over an island made of black rocks stained with white guano. A man with a long-barreled rifle was lifted up into the craft.

Bjorn knew what that meant. They were retrieving their snipers to give them a better firing position in the air. He was hard to see from an island, just popping up like a seal from time to time to catch a breath, hidden among the waves. From the air, he would be easier to spot.

The craft was sleek, and black and had no blades whirling above it. No wonder it had been so quiet. He thought immediately that he’d been right—it wasn’t a helicopter at all. It was an example of alien technology built by humans.

Of everything that had happened today, this development worried him the most. He knew what a modern gunship could do, but this thing was an unknown. If they had employed alien tech for propulsion, why not for sensory equipment and weaponry?

He dove deep again, not wanting to wait until the sniper was harnessed in and targeting him. He turned east again and swam for a long time.

How long he stayed under this time he was never sure afterward. When he did finally come up, his vision had failed him. He’d gone blind. Possibly, the nanites were rationing the oxygen in his bloodstream, directing it to the most critical sections of his body. Since he was underwater, he needed his muscles and his heart and his brain the most in order to survive. Perhaps the tiny machines had decided vision was overrated and had switched that part of his body off.

When he surfaced at last, he popped into the open air like a balloon that had been released underwater. He gasped and choked. Only then did he realize he couldn’t hear anything. He could barely feel the water that pressed against him and the wind that cooled his head.

He didn’t care. He just lay on his back, trying to float and breathe in great sucking gasps. He did this for almost a minute before his vision returned. He was a sitting duck during this time, and he decided that if he survived the next few minutes he wouldn’t stay down so long again.

When his eyes began reporting to his brain again, and his ears could hear and his skin could feel the water and the breezes, he looked around. There it was, north of him this time, skimming over the waves. It was about fifty feet above the water and there was a gunman in a harness leaning out of both sides of the craft. A long-barreled weapon poked out from the sides of the craft in each sniper’s hands. They’d picked up the men and were doing sweeps, searching for him.

He dove again. This time, he didn’t go for as long as he could. He thought he’d been very near death the last time. And if he repeated that feat and lived, he’d still be blind and deaf when he surfaced. He figured it would be better to surface sooner and be vulnerable for a shorter amount of time.

Following a pattern of about seven to ten minute dives followed by thirty seconds of desperate gasping and looking around, he traveled eastward. At first, he switched course randomly to the north or south every other time. He didn’t think they would guess he was heading out to sea. It seemed far more rational for a thinking man to stay close to shore or to try to sneak onto another island. But that wasn’t Bjorn’s plan.

Each dive took him farther from land and farther from the men who were searching for him. Over the next several hours, he kept up a killing pace.

Finally, after dozens of dives, he came up to a darkened world. For a moment he thought he’d stayed under too long and the nanites had decided to dim his vision again. But then he noticed the sun was going down, causing the sea to turn magenta and blood red. He dared to stay on the surface long enough to have a good look around. He scanned every horizon and the skies overhead.

The sea was empty. He couldn’t even see land. He smiled, because he knew that he’d vanished yet again.

A fish nibbled the bloody scratches on his leg, reminding him to get moving again. He turned away from the sun, which was dipping down to touch the horizon in the west. He planned to swim like this, underwater most of the time like a tiny, human submarine, until he reached his final destination. He figured that if he kept going at a steady pace for a day or two, due east, he’d reach land again.

During the day, he used the sun to direct him, but at night it was harder. The stars were enough when the skies were clear, but often it was overcast. Sometimes he was forced to paddle idly for hours, unsure of his heading. The currents were a problem as well. He had to work hard to keep on an even course.

On the morning of the third day he began to worry. The water was quite warm and he wasn’t overly-tired yet, but he was getting very hungry. He tried, but found it difficult to catch passing fish. Even though he was fast, this far from land the fish were less common and they didn’t generally like to come close to a thrashing man. The water impeded his arms, and the fish he did touch slipped away.

He decided he had to do something or he might starve. For all he knew, he had missed his goal and was headed to Africa.

He took out his combat knife, moving with great care lest he drop it in the ocean, which was thousands of feet deep here. The knife was his only weapon. He used it to open a vein, then began thrashing around, creating a pink froth. The nanites quickly close the vein, but that was expected. He waited patiently.

After twenty minutes he decided he’d failed, so he cut himself again—and then again ten minutes after that.

Finally, on the eighth try, something bit him. Fortunately, it wasn’t a huge chunk of flesh that it took from his calf, but it did hurt. He drove his knife into the fish repeatedly, and soon the devil gave up its life for his. He hauled it up into the daylight, and saw it was a good-sized tiger shark, about seven feet in length. He chewed the shark meat raw, having no better options. The flesh was thick and disgusting, but it was nourishing. After he’d eaten his fill, he left the carcass floating in the water and swam away quickly, worried that more sharks were on the way to join in on the fun.

He swam onward whenever he could see the stars or the sun. He rested when he had to. One time, he saw a ship skimming by. He kept low and made no attempt to hail them. The ship steamed safely away. He had no idea if anyone was looking for him, and it occurred to him that the ocean was the ultimate place for a man to hide on this world. It was vast, empty, and incredibly difficult to search. Finding a lone man who did not want to be found out here was almost impossible. There was no better place to hide—it was the ultimate wilderness.

On the next day he began to get tired, but he was determined to keep going. He had little choice. It was early in the afternoon of…Friday? He wasn’t entirely sure anymore. It rained later that day, and he caught every drop he could in his open mouth, swallowing greedily. Saltwater had been gluing up his guts for days, dehydrating him. The nanites had sensed toxic levels of saline and done their best to correct his blood chemistry, but he knew there had to limits even to their magic.

Later that same day, he spotted land. He wasn’t sure what he was looking at. He didn’t know the currents in this part of the world, and his navigation may have been off. For all he knew, he was looking at Cuba.

He decided the fun was over for him no matter where he was. He’d had enough of the sea. He wasn’t a fish, and it was time to set his feet on dry land again.

Long before he made landfall, he knew he’d reached the island that had been his destination all along. It was the laser turrets that gave it away. They were large and deadly-looking. They swiveled ceaselessly, scanning everything in range that moved and many things that didn’t.

When he came up on the beach he moved slowly, but the turrets sensed him anyway. Two of them, about a mile off in either direction, swung and directed their projectors at him.

He froze, heart pounding. He was an invader, after all. God only knew what the Star Force people had programmed into these things.

But after about twenty seconds, the two turrets turned away and went back to scanning again. Bjorn moved forward onto the beach in relief. At least they weren’t going to fry him immediately after that long, long swim.

He sat down because it felt great to do so. He’d never kept his body moving for so long without any real rest. He passed out on the dry sand and slept the sleep of exhaustion.

When he awakened some hours later he made his way down the endless strip of beach, looking for human habitation. He found destruction instead. Many of the laser turrets had been knocked out. They were burnt, sitting in puddles of crusty glass. Huge beams must have come down from the Macro ships and destroyed them.

Eventually, he found a Star Force patrol. They were full of questions, and he explained he was a new volunteer, a recruit who had been caught up in the battle and lost at sea. He didn’t have a unit yet—he hadn’t gotten that far.

The men could see he’d been to Hell and back. They all had. He could see it in their eyes. They let him into their strange flying vehicle and carried him back to base.

“What’s your name again, recruit?”

“Gaines,” he said. “Private Gaines. At least, that’s what I’m here to become.”

“You picked a hell of a time to join up, Gaines.”

“I know.”

Gaines realized in surprise that he respected these men. They were not only like him, they were quite possibly more deadly than he was. They had futuristic weapons and body armor. They also possessed his speed, strength and endurance.

Most of all, they were doing something that needed doing. Kerr’s speech hadn’t fallen entirely on deaf ears. Gaines had agreed with much of what the general had said. The world was dying, and it was time for all fighting men to choose sides.

But he hadn’t wanted to join Kerr’s side. He didn’t want to be a tool, a disposable instrument used to strike at a political enemy. He wanted to be something new, something respectable. A soldier, maybe a marine—not just a killer without a cause.

Right then, right there, looking at the marines around him with their dented, burned armor and unsmiling faces, he knew he’d made the right decision. He’d swam two hundred miles or more, and it hadn’t been a mistake. He was going to join Star Force. He felt that he belonged here with these men. They could do what he could do—what no one else on Earth could do. What’s more, it was something that had to be done. The machines from the stars had to be destroyed.

He smiled a real smile at that moment, the first one that had crossed his face in a long, long time.

His days of vanishing were over.

The End

From the Author: Thanks Reader! I hope you enjoyed ARMY OF ONE. If you liked reading about the untold stories of Star Force characters and want to read more, please put up some stars and a review to support the series. Let me know who you’d like to read about next. General Kerr? The Blues? Marvin? Tell everyone!

-BVL

SF Books by B. V. Larson:

STAR FORCE SERIES:

(In chronological order)

Swarm

Extinction

Rebellion

Conquest

Army of One (Novella)

Battle Station

Empire

Annihilation

Storm Assault

The Dead Sun

Outcast

Exile

The Undying Mercenaries Series:

Steel World

Dust World

Tech World

Machine World

Visit BVLarson.com for more information.