He zipped past us, then dove over the edge of the wall toward them. Above, the missiles continued to fire back and forth, but they all came from the woods now, and there were fewer than before. The wall was still getting hammered with fire, but most of it was from mechs that had fallen over. The whole world shook as a distant part of the wall took a direct hit from something, but that was followed by a distant tremendous explosion that could only have been a Heavy going up.
“Roger,” I yelled. Something pinged off my helmet. It was a piece of shrapnel from an exploding missile.
And then Roger was back. “Spiders have been turned,” he said before disappearing again.
“Turned?” I asked. Sam and I both peered back over the edge, but we couldn’t see them anymore.
Sam slid down to the floor, putting his back against the barrier. “Holy shit, man,” he said, breathing heavily. His hands shook as he took out a cigarette and lit it. He coughed.
“When did you start smoking again?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. “New fear unlocked. Fucking robot spiders that blow your head off? What a goddamned nightmare. What else do you think they got in that coming-soon tool chest?” His entire body was shaking.
“Not much more for tonight,” I said. Outside, the sounds of battle had mostly stopped.
After the firing had started, the battle was even shorter than the one had been the previous night.
I thought of the spiders bubbling over the wall. I’d actually spent a little bit of time scrolling through the coming-soon section of the Apex site. The robot spiders were a small sample of what people would soon be able to get. There were things from flying drones to what basically amounted to Peacekeepers that people could drive with their immersion rigs. I hoped most of that wouldn’t come to pass here on New Sonora. Not tonight or ever.
The amount of fire coming in our direction was starting to wane. Despite them being more organized and there being four times as many of them, our overwhelming defenses were still too thick.
But unlike last night, we hadn’t knocked them out completely. Many had fallen back and were now taking up positions to take potshots at us.
As the smoke cleared, I turned to look at the line of fighters from BYE, and they all lay where they were when they’d started their mortar run. Already, drones swarmed all over them, ripping them apart. The white stuffing from their hats was everywhere.
A random shot hit the barrier to my left, right near where Sam was normally standing. I barely flinched.
“Hold tight,” Roger said. “We are hunting down any stragglers. The Reaper Spiders will disable the communications and locomotiongovernors of the fallen mechs. Keep your positions and stay under cover. It appears the survivors may be massing for a second push. I will attempt to head it off with honeybee assets.”
Relief flooded me. We’d held them off much better tonight than the night before. Above our heads, the camo netting that prevented the satellite from pinpointing our positions was mostly still intact thanks to the new design, though it hung dangling in multiple places, reminding me of party streamers.
The casualty list appeared on my bracelet. We’d lost five people, and I didn’t know any of them.
Only five people,I thought, relieved. And then I felt sick for being relieved.
And that was when I looked up to see my house was nothing but a smoking crater.
Chapter 36
Irushed down the ladder, heart pounding. The entire house was just gone. It was nothing but burning wood planks. My bed sat there in the middle of it all, miraculously untouched, surrounded by just smoking debris. My eyes caught my plastic toy dinosaurs scattered on my bed, having fallen from the top of the headboard. They lay there as if I’d just finished playing with them. Ash and embers settled gently on it all like snow.
I rushed to the edge of the house, right where our front door used to be. The footprint of the house looked so much smaller now that it was gone. Lulu walked up to stand beside me, smoking a cigarette.
“Nobody was inside,” she said. “Thank god. I can’t believe they got the house and not the damn barn.”
“I didn’t even hear it fall,” I said. The occasional distant explosion and the acrid smoke gave the whole scene a dreamlike quality. It was like everything had been moving so fast, and now it was in slow motion. I kept seeing random recognizable things in the middle of the carnage. Grandpa Lewis’s chair on its side. A poster that was on Lulu’s wall for some place called Oranjestad. It fluttered on the ground, torn in half. The tail end of her fox sex toy. The jacket Sam’s grandmother had made me.
“We’re homeless,” Lulu said, taking another drag. She, too, seemed to be in a haze.
“Nah,” I said after a minute. “We can have the honeybees build us another house in like ten minutes.”
“Hey, Ollie,” Lulu said after another minute of us just staring.
“What’s up?”
“Do you ever wonder why we didn’t live in a giant mansion? It never even occurred to me. We knew these things could build. They can’t dig worth shit. At least they couldn’t until we found that attachment. And they’re terrible with wire fences, but they sure as hell could build us a palace in like a day. So why didn’t we ever have them do it?”
I grunted.
