CHAPTER TWO
“Oh, sure, we’ve got bigger guns. Bigger guns and more of ’em. The problem, as I see it, is that we don’t got enough hands to hold the fekkin’ things. We need more soldiers, and we need them yesterday. What’s the point in outgunning your enemy if your ordnances are collecting dust in the armory?”
THE PLANET SHILOH, THE CONFEDERACY OF MAN
If it had been hot earlier that day, it was absolutely hellish by mid-afternoon. It was at least ninety degrees inside the CSX-410’s open cab as Raynor drove the huge machine toward the south end of the field. There had been a time, starting back before Jim had been born, when the machine had been able to guide itself. But the roboharvester’s navigation system failed long before his family acquired the secondhand machine, which forced Jim to sit behind the wheel and manually steer the harvester as it cut a broad swath through the field of triticale-wheat.
Raynor neared the edge and turned the robo-harvester back in the other direction. Suddenly, his thoughts were interrupted by what looked like a dust devil off to the north. The windscreen was dirty so he stuck his head out of the cab in order to see more clearly, a feat made even more difficult because his left eye was swollen shut and hurt like hell. Then Jim realized that what he was looking at wasn’t a dust devil, but a machine of some sort, coming his way. What the hell … ? Was it the neighbors? No, their crop was in, so there was no reason to roll their robo-harvester.
Raynor pulled his head back in, but kept an eye on the pillar of dust, as he guided the harvester toward the river. Then, once he was about halfway across the length of the field, he took a second look. What he saw surprised and worried him. The oncoming machine was a Confederate goliath.