We had breakfast in a cafeteria meant for dry-dock employees. They fed us whatever we wanted. I grabbed a tray and ordered a four-egg scramble, five strips of bacon, a double order of potatoes, two slices of toast, and two cups of orange juice. The food felt heavy on my tray.
That chow tasted good. A Marine could get spoiled. A few of my men even ate their eggs without smothering them in ketchup.
We ate breakfast early, at 0600, and had the place to ourselves. Rows of tables stood empty on either side of us. I had hoped to see the SEALs this morning, but they might have already left.
“Hey, Master Sarge, when are we going back to the ship?” Philips asked.
Only Philips called me “Master Sarge.” Soldiers may call their sergeants “Sarge,” but in the Marine Corps, the term “Sarge” is demeaning, not that it bothered me…much. I had not yet accustomed myself to the name, “Master Sergeant,” because I did not think of myself as a master gunnery sergeant. Back when I had the rank of colonel, I never thought of myself as an officer. The only rank I ever felt entirely confident about was private first class, and I got promoted out of that after three months.
“We’re not going back to the Obama,” I said. “We’re headed Earth-side, boys.”
They greeted my announcement with a moment of hushed awe. The thirty-six remaining men in my platoon all knew what that meant. It meant war.
“We’re not going back for our gear?” one of the men asked.
“It’s already been crated and shipped to Fort Houston.” I sat down, and they moved in around me.
“You wouldn’t happen to know the next stop after Fort Houston?” Evans called from across the table.
“I could make an educated guess,” I said.
“Strap on your bayonets, we’re headed to Mogatopolis,” Philips said to the Marine sitting beside him. He surprised me by not referring to it as “Planet HomeMo.”
“We’re still a few men shy of a platoon,” Thomer pointed out. He was a cautious one.
“I’m not sure what they’re going to do about that,” I said. “Now that the orphanages are gone, reinforcements are harder to come by. Maybe someone will shift some companies around.”
“Think they’ll break us up?” Thomer asked.
“No. They don’t break up teams that produce. Not if they can help it.”
Thomer nodded. He was skinnier than the other clones. He ate light and preferred jogging to lifting weights. He left the tough talking to the other Marines, but he held his own in combat.
I picked up a strip of bacon and ate it followed by two fork-loads of eggs. “The brass has a bigger problem than a few empty slots,” I said. “They have to figure out some way to land enough men to make a stand. And they have to do it without the Broadcast Network.”
“How many men will they need?” Evans asked.
“This is off the top of my head, but I’m guessing we’ll need one hundred thousand or maybe two hundred thousand fully equipped troops just to get our boot in the door.
“The 2510 census said there were 200 million Mogats. If they have 200 million people on that planet, we’re going to need a couple million men along with tanks and gunships to support them.”
Evans whistled. “Two million men?” he asked. “That’s going to be some airlift.”
“Especially if we have to ship them there in explorers,” I said. “If Washington is serious about invading that planet, they’re going to need to come up with something.”
“When do we leave for Fort Houston?” Thomer asked me.
“Pretty soon—1100.”
“When do we deploy?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I think they plan to send us out as quickly as possible,” I said around a wad of bacon. I finished my first cup of orange juice in one long drink. “It just depends on how quickly they can figure out the logistics.”
“But they know how to find the Mogat planet?” Thomer asked.
“They seem to. I’m guessing they lifted the information off the broadcast computer on that ship we took.”
Thomer nodded again.
I had withheld a lot of information. My boys did not know that the Unified Authority and the Confederate Arms had signed a treaty and that we would likely ship out in battleships like the one we had captured. I neglected to mention that the entire Mogat fleet, which was still nearly four hundred ships strong, was moored around the target planet. I said nothing about our unarmed ships needing to slip in, drop us on the hostile planet, and get out before the Mogats shot them down. I also neglected to mention that the Mogats’ ships had some new shield technology that rendered our weaponry useless.
Three hours after breakfast, we all boarded an explorer and flew to Earth.
It took less than an hour for us to arrive at Fort Houston, a small training base in the southwestern portion of the old United States. Fort Houston had once been attached to an orphanage. Young clones ages twelve and up once had run its obstacle course and bivouacked in its fields. The Mogats destroyed the orphanage after defeating the Earth Fleet. Thirty-six thousand clone children fried in their beds as a Mogat battleship hit the orphanage with a laser from above the atmosphere.
Bastards.
Over the next two days, a hundred platoons moved into portable barracks buildings set up around the Fort Houston parade grounds. That gave us four thousand five hundred Marines. If they’d had a hundred more forts with a hundred platoons, we might have had enough Marines to hold a beachhead while we waited for reinforcements to arrive.
Within an hour of landing in Fort Houston, we began training. I found comfort in this. There was something nostalgic about doing calisthenics in the blazing-hot noonday sun, sweat rolling down my face and back, while another platoon ran laps around the field. We finished our calisthenics and headed for the firing range, passing men on the obstacle course crawling across a field while their sergeants fired live rounds over their shoulders.
Hearing the swearing of sergeants and the explosions of grenades, I realized that I had returned home. Semper fi, Marine.
One of the great benefits of being stationed back on Earth was the mediaLink. On the Obama, the only news we received was prerecorded information released by the Department of the Navy. It wasn’t much. Before I logged on to the mediaLink, however, I had important business to take care of. I had a call to place.
At 1600 hours, the base commander announced that we had the rest of the night to ourselves. My men went into a nearby town called Austin. I stayed back.
We had our own barracks building. With the platoon gone, I dug through my gear and found the pair of disposable shades I’d bought in DC. After one last glance to make sure that no one would see me, I logged on to the mediaLink and placed the call.
The picture that appeared on the screen was a pretty little girl with long blond hair and startling blue eyes. She sat on a blanket in a field of daisies holding a dandelion in her hands. Looking at me through the screen, she smiled and in the sweetest of voices said, “We can’t beat the Mogats.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I tried to break into their compound,” Freeman said through his little girl avatar.
“Let me guess, the building has impenetrable shields,” I said. My trip to Mogatopolis was highly classified. I could barely wait to share the details.
“Have a look,” said the little girl.
The picture of the little girl disappeared from the screen. Video of a large building that took up an entire city block replaced it. There was an explosion. I saw a flash of fire followed by a cloud of smoke. Cars parked near the building flipped in the air and tumbled away. There was no sound.
When the smoke cleared, the building looked exactly as it had before the explosion. Then the image on the screen returned to the little girl as she blew on her dandelion, and the air carried its fluff toward the camera.
“Something big is going on in there. I took energy readings from my station. They’re off the scales,” Freeman said. On the screen, the little girl, who could not have been older than five and probably weighed all of fifty pounds, picked a daisy and started playing He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not.
“It’s almost like they have a broadcast engine running in there.”
“They do have a broadcast engine,” I said. “That is exactly what they have.”
“Sounds like you’ve been busy,” Freeman said. He was using a short video loop. The dandelion magically reappeared in the little girl’s hand.
“I went down to Mogatopolis,” I said.
“Mogatopolis?”
“That’s the name they’re using for the Mogat home world,” I said. “The Mogats have some new kind of shield generator on their planet. They’re broadcasting the shield. If you give me a location on that building, Brocius can send out the hounds of war.”
“They still have to deal with those shields.”
“We’re shutting the shields down at the source,” I said. “Now that we have the Mogats’ address, we’re going to pay them a visit. I think you should come with us as a civilian advisor.” I knew that Freeman would never accompany us any other way.
“Why would I do that?” Freeman asked.
“Crowley should be there.” The first time I met Freeman, I was stationed in an armory on a backwater planet called Gobi. Freeman, who made his living as a mercenary, had come to investigate a report that Amos Crowley, a former U.A. Army general who had converted to Mogatism and defected, was on that planet. Crowley attacked the armory and almost took us with it.
“What’s Crowley worth these days?” Freeman asked.
“I’m guessing two or three million.”
On the screen, the little girl blew her dandelion fluff.
Word came around the camp to look smart; Admiral Brocius had come to Fort Houston to review the troops.
It was our second week on the base. A captain and three lieutenants woke my platoon and three others at 0500. We dressed and fell in for an early-morning hike that would last sixteen hours and end with a bivouac. We ate MREs in the field and drank only the water we brought with us as we hiked in the 110-degree weather.
None of this would have mattered had we worn our climate-controlled armor, but we hiked in fatigues. My men were more acclimatized to the chilled air on the U.A.N. Obama than the heat in Texas. They suffered the entire way.
Philips, who had no trouble staying ahead of the rest of the platoon, bellyached more than the rest of my men combined. He must have asked “Where the hell are we going?” five times an hour as we tromped through plains and over foothills. In the midafternoon we entered a marsh. Philips grimaced as his feet sank in the mud, and he asked, “What is the point of running through this shit?”
In the marshland we ran through ankle-deep mud, crushing reeds and scaring ducks as we went. That lasted for three hours. At 1500, the officers steered us to a makeshift firing range they had constructed in the middle of the swamp. They sat in the backs of their Jeeps and ate MREs as we fired M27s and other small weapons.
Of the 168 Marines on the hike, I scored highest on the range with a perfect score—three hundred shots fired, three hundred hits scored on targets three hundred yards away. In Marine jargon, I had just pulled off a “three-by-three.”
I took more than a little pleasure when I noted that Private Philips came in second with a score of 283. No one else scored over 250.
We spent two hours on the firing range, then continued our hike. Mud sucked at our boots. The air smelled of sulfur and decay. Clouds of mosquitoes formed around us. The hot sun glistened on the water and shone in our eyes. The air was hot and wet and thick as perspiration. The crickets and cicadas buzzed so loud it nearly drove some men insane.
When we finally reached the far side of the swamp, we were met by two trucks. The captain over the exercise climbed into the back of a truck and dumped out our gear. “We’re here for the night,” he said. “You might as well set up your bivouac.” As he grabbed a pack, Philips mentioned something about using their Jeep as a latrine once the officers settled down for the evening. I seriously toyed with the idea of joining him.
We had tents, but whoever’d planned the hike wanted us to rough it. Instead of a plasticized tent with an elevated floor and inflatable cots, we slept in an old-fashioned canvas tent. Groundwater soaked through the floor of our tent and our blankets.
Had we been planning to invade a swamp, I would have called this bivouac an ideal proving ground; but I had never seen so much as a drop of groundwater on the Mogat home world. Unless the brass wanted to invade their planet through its plumbing, the hike made no sense.
That night, as we doused our lanterns and went to sleep, one of the lieutenants called in through the tent door. “Harris, Captain Moultry wants to see you in his tent.”
A bright full moon hung over the campgrounds. We had set up our bivouac on the edge of the swamp lands. As likely to inhale mosquitoes as oxygen with every breath, I trudged to the captain’s tent.
I knocked on the door.
“Enter,” the voice growled back.
There sat Admiral Alden Brocius, looking tired and grim in the bleaching white light of a lantern. “This hike was not my idea,” he said as I stepped in.
“It certainly wasn’t my idea,” I said.
“Your base commander didn’t want me fraternizing with enlisted men,” Brocius said. “His replacement is arriving tomorrow.
“You’re welcome to come back with me and spend the night in the commandant’s quarters. They’re vacant and a lot more comfortable.”
Compared to my canvas tent in the swamp, this plasticized tent with its dry interior and hardened floor was a five-star hotel. It had climate control and folding chairs.
“Sounds nice, sir, but I would prefer to stay with my platoon,” I said.
“I had a feeling you would say that,” Brocius said. “This hike was a very bad idea. We need you rested.”
“Big plans for us?” I asked. I already knew the answer. If we didn’t launch an invasion soon, we’d be defending, not attacking.
“Briefing the day after tomorrow.” Brocius pulled a book with a black leather cover from a table by his seat. He tossed it to me. The book was unread and its cover stiff. Its pages did not flutter as it flew through the air. I caught it and looked at the cover. The title was printed in gold leaf: Man’s True Place in the Universe: The Doctrines of Morgan Atkins.
“Have you read this book?” Brocius asked.
I shook my head. “No, sir.”
“Have you ever wondered why you haven’t read this particular book?”
“It’s against regulations,” I said.
“Yeah, they don’t want to take a chance on any of you enlisted men becoming converted. I always wondered who came up with that rule,” Brocius said. He took a bottle of Scotch from the table and poured himself a glass. Then he tossed me the bottle. “You can share it with your platoon. Tell them it came compliments of Fleet Command.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said, turning the bottle in my hand so I could read the label. I did not recognize the name.
“They made us read the Space Bible in Annapolis. It always seemed like a fairy tale to me. Atkins claims he found an underground alien city in the center of the galaxy.” Brocius waved his hand. He made a sour face as if he had just smelled garbage. “Strictly Jules Verne stuff. You know what I mean? It’s like Journey to the Center of the Earth.
“I’ve read your report a dozen times, Harris. Every time I read it, I think about Atkins. That city you described, it sounds just like the one in his book. Right down to the transparent ceilings, Atkins described it all just the way you did.
“There’s something else, too. We tracked down the location of that planet using the broadcast computer on the battleship you boys stole. You know where that planet is located? It’s in the inner curve of the Norma Arm. It’s the very rock the Liberators invaded fifty years ago. The difference is that back then no one ever thought about looking under the covers. This time we know better.”
“Admiral, how can we possibly invade their planet?” I asked. “Even with the Confederates and the Japanese, the Mogats have ten ships for every one of ours, and they have those shields. They’ll pick us off before we land a single platoon.”
Brocius laughed. “Come on, Harris. You don’t think I’d send the Marines into the meat grinder without leveling the field? Atkins isn’t the only one with secret technology. The boys on the Golan came up with something good.”
“Did they figure out how to get through the Mogats’ shields?” I asked.
“We already know that,” Brocius said. “You turn them off at the source.
“No, they came up with something better. They came up with a way to get through the Mogats’ radar. They’ve invented a new cloaking technology that makes our capital ships invisible to radar detection.”
“What about transports?” I asked.
Brocius shook his head. He was not drunk, just morose. He sat there looking craggy and old, his skin showing not a hint of color in the bleaching light from the electric lantern. He sat silently for several seconds. I had no idea what he might have been thinking about. Finally, he said, “I’ll send a truck by tomorrow morning. No more hikes for you and your men.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said.
I saluted. Admiral Brocius returned my salute. I started to leave, but he stopped me. “Your friend Freeman turned himself in to Navy Intelligence last night. I don’t suppose you had something to do with that?”
“I spoke with him,” I said.
“He had a crazy story about a Mogat base,” Brocius said. Maybe he had forgotten our conversation back on the Golan Dry Docks, or maybe he thought I had.
“We checked into his story. He was right. The energy readings coming out of that building are off the scale. Did you know they were there?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“We’ve set up round-the-clock satellite surveillance. They slipped an entire broadcast engine in under our noses. Who knows what else they brought with them.
“Freeman said something about going out with our invasion force.”
“Oh, yeah, can he come?” I asked.
The rules changed when we returned back to camp the next day. We did not drill all day, nor did we get to go into town that evening. Instead, we had a quiet night on base, lights out at 2200.
They called Reveille at 0600 the next morning. Our briefing was at 0800. The sergeants from every platoon filed into the mess hall. In my platoon that included Thomer, Evans, and a guy named Greer, whom we shipped in to replace Sutherland. I went, of course. There were almost five hundred of us sprinkled across a cafeteria built to serve as many as two thousand men at a time.
A small ten-foot-by-ten-foot dais sat on one side of the cafeteria. In the time that I had been in Fort Houston, no one had ever used it. Now I saw a podium on that stand. Three empty chairs formed a short row behind the podium.
When the officers in charge came into the cafeteria, everyone snapped to attention. The officers, all Marines in Charlie Service uniforms, marched up to the stand without so much as a sideward glance. One of those men was a colonel—probably our new camp commandant. One was a major. He’d been around all along. The third, also a major, was a briefing officer who had most likely flown in from Washington.
The briefing officer stood straight and tall. He was a Marine who had seen combat; I could see it in his demeanor. We all could see it. Something about the way he carried himself commanded instant respect. Even the way he scowled at us commanded respect.
“At ease,” the colonel said. Then he followed up with, “Gentlemen, make yourselves comfortable. We have a lot to discuss.”
With this he stepped back and gave the mike to the briefing officer.
“Gentlemen, we have an enemy; and as you know, the Unified Authority Marines do not take kindly to enemies. Our enemy is Morgan Atkins. Now, gentlemen, we could try to reason with Mr. Atkins. We could try to negotiate with Mr. Atkins. We could even offer to play nice with Mr. Atkins, but that would not be the Marine way.
“Do I make myself clear?”
“Sir, yes, sir!” we yelled.
“What was that?” the major asked. “I don’t believe I heard you clearly.”
“Sir, yes, sir!” we all shouted at the tops of our lungs.
“That’s better,” the major said.
He was a short man with a shaved head and glasses. He had a scar on his forehead. That scar might have come from an old skiing injury, but I had the feeling he’d earned it in battle. Sitting as close as I was, I could also see that he was missing some teeth.
“You,” the major called to one of us, “shut down the lights.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” the man called back as he raced to the switch.
A screen lowered from the ceiling, and a familiar image appeared. It was a planet called Hubble, certainly the ugliest piece of real estate I had ever seen. The planet had a smoggy, brownish black surface that had not seen sunlight in thousands of years.
“Gentlemen, this here is Hubble. Hubble does not have oxygen in its atmosphere. The gases that surround Hubble are humid with oil. If you breathe that shit, you will die, Marines. I suggest you take good care of your armor so it can take good care of you.”
The picture changed to a surface view of the planet. Several of the men in the cafeteria groaned. The landscape looked like a desert at night except that the soil sparkled like fresh coffee grounds. The cliffs looked like they were made of volcanic glass.
“This is the surface of Hubble. This is what happens when a sun expands and bakes a planet, gentlemen. It turns to shit.
“Hubble is made of one kind of shit and one kind of shit only. That shit is in the air. It is in the ground. It is in the rocks. It is nasty shit, gentlemen.
“Should you visit Hubble, do not shoot the rocks or dig a hole, gentlemen. In the rocks and ground you will find the nastiest shit of all. The boys in the science lab have labeled this an ‘extreme-hydrogenation elemental compound distillation.’ At the Pentagon we call it ‘distilled shit gas.’
“You may not know this, Marines, but we lost a lot of good men and equipment on Hubble because distilled shit gas eats through armor and machinery.”
The scene changed to show a corpse. It was a Marine in combat armor. The outside of his armor was intact. The camera came up to his visor, which normally had tint shields but was now entirely transparent. The face behind the visor was stripped down to skull and muscle, with the muscle disintegrating right before our eyes.
I’d fought on Hubble. That was before the Confederate Arms declared independence. We massacred a Mogat settlement on that planet. I always wondered why the Mogats had chosen to hide on such a hideous planet. I was about to find out.
“Gentlemen, you learn something new every day. Today we have learned that the corrosive elements in distilled shit gas can be used to produce energy. If you strip those corrosive elements out of the shit gas compound, you are left with highly malleable chemicals that carry an electrical charge and are easily transformed.”
“Nanotechnology,” somebody whispered in the audience.
“You are almost correct, Marine,” said the briefing officer. “Not nanotechnology.” He stretched the first syllables—Nan-oh-technology. “Atomic conversion.” A-tomic con-versh-shun. “This is alchemy, Marines. Morgan Atkins is an alchemist. He is taking shit and turning it into plastics, metals, fuel, and fertilizer. For all we know, the Morgan Atkins Separatists even eat food made of distilled shit gas.
“It turns out that distilled shit gas is useful stuff. Morgan Atkins has based his entire civilization on the use of distilled shit gas. He fuses the noncorrosive compounds with an electrical charge and converts them into plastic to build his cities. He condenses it and strips the acids out to fuel automobiles. The man has an endless supply of distilled shit gas at his fingertips, and he is specking Albert Einstein when it comes to the many uses of that gas.
“When you invade his planet, gentlemen, you will be underground. Be aware, Marines, that everything around you will be made of distilled shit gas.
“Do you hear me, Marines?”
“Sir, yes, sir!”
Manipulative or not, I had to admire the way this briefing officer personalized the war. He never referred to the Mogats. Everything focused on Morgan Atkins himself, as if he personally had attacked Earth, killed Marines, and declared war.
The screen reverted to an orbital shot of Hubble. “The good news is that we no longer need to invade Hubble. There are no Mogats on this planet, we already killed them,” the briefing officer continued.
Across the cafeteria I heard sighs and nervous laughter.
“The bad news is that you will be invading a planet that is exactly like Hubble, right down to having distilled shit gas in the dirt.
“The distilled shit gas will be the least of your worries. You Marines will invade a planet that is home to an estimated 200 million Morgan Atkins Believers. Those men and women will not welcome you into their home, Marines.
“Leading their forces is one General Amos Crowley. You may have heard of this man. You may be ignorant of him. Amos Crowley was once a general in the Unified Authority Army. His having deserted the Unified Authority makes this dickweed our enemy, Marines. His having swapped sides to join the Mogats makes him a treacherous dickweed.
“Do not underestimate this dickweed. When he was our dickweed, he led the Unified Authority Army through many great battles. He may be a dickweed, but he is a dickweed who knows how to fight.”
On the screen, the white-bearded face of General Amos Crowley smiled down at us. Crowley had a smooth, kind face with a generous smile. He had shown that same smile to me as I lay on a table waiting to be tortured. He was the reason I’d invited Freeman to join the invasion. Whether we won or lost, Freeman would make sure that General Crowley did not survive the battle.
“I have more good news for you, gentlemen. Morgan Atkins has developed shields that protect his ships and his buildings from any weapon we possess. We have not seen his tanks in action, but we have reason to believe that his tanks and battle vehicles may have those shields as well.
“Their shields are the real specking deal, Marines. Do not bother shooting Morgan Atkins tanks with laser weapons. Do not bother shooting his buildings with particle beams. You will not hurt them with grenades or mortars.
“If this invasion goes as planned, we hope to shut those shields down before you have to deal with them. If it does not go as planned, gentlemen, you may find yourselves in a battle against an invulnerable enemy. If that becomes the case, Marines, you will be expected to employ hit-and-run tactics until those shields are brought down. You are not to engage the enemy in a head-on war. Do you understand me, Marines?”
“Sir, yes, sir.” The chant was not especially enthusiastic.
Clearly hearing the lack of enthusiasm, the major said, “Gentlemen, this is the Unified Authority Marine Corps. We do not send our own off unprepared.”
That was not the case in my experience, but I did not quibble. In my experience, officers did not think twice about wasting clones.
“The Navy is sending SEALs to visit Morgan Atkins and disable his shields. We are not sending you to invade Morgan Atkins’s planet. We are not sending you to kill Morgan Atkins or his followers. We are sending you Leatherneck Marines to distract Mr. Atkins’s army while the SEALs persuade him to shut down his shields.
“Once the SEALs have turned off his shields, the Navy plans to send his fleet a message. Once that message is received, you will be joined by three million soldiers from the Unified Authority Army. Gentlemen, as you know, the Marines capture the fort, then the Army holds down the fort.
“Do you read me, Marines?”
“Sir, yes, sir.”
“Let’s try that again. Do you read me, Marines?”
“Sir, yes, sir.”
“I’m glad to hear that, Marines. You and your men ship out at 0930.”
What they did not tell us at the briefing:
After we landed on Mogatopolis, the Navy would send three teams of SEALs. One of those teams would go after the Mogats’ shield generator, likely the most closely guarded spot on the planet. The second team would go after the broadcast engine that the Mogats used to transmit their shield signal. The third team would attack the Mogat power grid on the off chance that having failed to shut down the shields or engine, they might still be able to shut down the power.
I would have judged this a suicide mission if they weren’t sending one thousand Adam Boyd clones. This was their element. If anyone could slip in under the radar and find those targets, it was the Adam Boyd clones.
Never once did the major mention modes of transportation. Except for me, none of the Marines knew of the alliance with the Confederate Arms. As far as everyone in the camp knew, we would fly our transports from Earth to the Mogat planet. What more did they need to know, I suppose.
“Holy Moses on a rope. What the speck is that?” Private Philips asked as we waited to board the transport.
I followed his gaze. There, nearly eighteen inches taller than the armor-plated clones around him, stood Ray Freeman. He wore full battle armor that he must have bought custom-made. Because I knew Freeman, I also knew that the armor was the right size to fit over his enormous shoulders and torso. Had I never seen him before, as the Marines around him had not, I would have thought he had a jetpack or maybe a luggage compartment inside that huge armor. There was no jetpack and no hidden compartment, just a giant of a man.
So here came Freeman, tall, dark-skinned, bald, and muscled to extrahuman proportions. He carried a rifle case in his left hand.
“That is Ray Freeman,” I said.
“Okay,” Philips said, “as long as he’s on our team.”
“Ray only plays on his own team. This time he happens to be on our side.”
“Does he ever change sides?” Philips asked. “If he does, I don’t want to be nearby when that happens.”
We were issued special gear for this battle. Everything worked the same, but instead of the dark green camouflage we generally wore, this time we had desert beige.
Since Freeman brought his own armor, his was more gray than beige. It was a light silvery gray that stood out against his dark skin. As he silently moved through the ranks, Marines quickly stepped out of his way.
“Ray, I didn’t recognize you without the dandelion,” I said.
Freeman did not say anything. He might have caught the reference to the little girl he used for cover on the mediaLink, but I doubt it. Humor did not register with him.
“You don’t need to bring us the corpse,” I said, trying to move on from my failed joke.
“I don’t plan to. Brocius says the video record from my scope will do.”
“How much is he paying?” I asked. I felt envious even before he answered. The only money I would see from this action was a sergeant’s combat pay.
“Five million,” Freeman said.
“That’s a lot of money,” I said. “How did you work him up to that?”
Freeman shrugged. “That’s what he offered.”
Around the deck, the grunts in my platoon eyed Freeman nervously. He was huge and different. He radiated danger. He had cold, dark eyes, and his face betrayed nothing but indifference to everyone around him.
Ahead of us, the doors of the transport slid apart. “Fall in,” I called to my men. We jogged forward as a platoon, our armored boots clanging against the steel ramp that led into the kettle. Freeman stayed beside me at the front of the group. Standing beside him, I flashed back to our four-billion-mile trek from Little Man. Back then we’d wanted to reenter the war. Now we might possibly play a role in ending it.
Once my platoon settled in, a second platoon joined us. Normally a sprinkling of officers would come along for the ride, but this time we clones traveled alone. My platoon was still shy some men from hijacking that battleship, so we came nowhere near filling the transport to capacity.
I had each of my squad leaders take a roll call. They reported every man present and accounted for. A moment later we got the all clear sign, and the kettle door closed.
We did not know how long it would take to get to the target. It took three minutes to fly to our base ship. Between the Japanese Fleet, the Confederate Arms Fleet, and the battleship we stole, we had thirty-seven self-broadcasting battleships. The Confederate Arms had an additional twenty-five self-broadcasting destroyers.
Battleships had two launch bays, each of which was designed to accommodate four transports. Each destroyer had a single launch bay. Crews had worked around the clock to prepare the ships for attack, not only adding a stealth device, but expanding every launch bay so that it could handle six transports instead of four. In theory, our landing force included 59,400 Marines.
We were a force of nearly 60,000 men being dropped among an enemy with a population in the hundreds of millions. The brass wanted us to distract the enemy; but if the real forces did not land soon, any distraction we provided might be short-lived.
“Five million seems awfully generous,” I said. I remembered Admiral Brocius’s house and the casino on the second floor. He liked house odds. Maybe he was betting Freeman would not live to collect.
Freeman sat silent for a moment. He opened his rifle case and pulled out a magnificent sniper rifle with a computerized scope. Returning the rifle, he pulled out his gear and sorted it. He had rope, grenades, and a knife. He pulled the knife half out of its scabbard, looked at the blade, then pushed it back in.
Around the kettle men stood or sat in silence. A few well-trained Marines stripped and tested their M27s. Most of the men wore their helmets. If they spoke among themselves, I would not hear it unless I located their frequency.
“So what is that guy doing here?” Philips asked over a platoon-wide frequency.
“Just so you know, Philips, Ray Freeman is the best friend you can have on this mission. In the entire Mogat Empire, there is only one great military mind, and Freeman came to put a bullet through it,” I answered on a private band.
“He came to assassinate Crowley?”
“He did.”
“So he’s a sniper?” Philips asked.
“A sniper? Philips, snipers are guys who sneak around with rifles waiting for someone to shoot. Freeman doesn’t wait.”
“No shit? A specking corpse factory,” Philips said. He sounded impressed.
“Just keep out of his way.”
Freeman had his helmet on. Since he was not a Marine, and his armor was of civilian make, he could not legally access the frequencies we used on the interLink. “Freeman, you on?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Did you and Admiral Brocius discuss any other work he might have for you after you’ve collected on Crowley?”
“No,” Freeman said.
“You do know that civilians are not allowed to listen in on communications on this frequency?” I asked. Then, without waiting for Freeman to answer, I added, “If you listen in on my communications, we won’t need to waste time updating each other.”
Freeman did not respond.
We touched down on our base ship. We would step off of our transport, tucked away in the launch bay. Once all of the transports checked in, the battleships would broadcast to a spot 100 million miles from Mogatopolis, where no one would detect the electrical anomaly. Then we would fly the four-hour trip into Mogat space under the cloak of the new stealth engines.
Once every last destroyer and battleship was in place, we would launch our transports. There was no way to cloak or protect our transports, so we would scramble down to the planet as quickly as possible.
Standing there, in the dim and anxious atmosphere, I comforted myself by looking for things that would make me feel safe. I did not come up with much.
I thought about the Mogats…the Believers. They might know we were coming. They had to know that we hijacked their battleship and that we now knew how to find them, but they would think we had no way of striking them. Since they did not know about our alliance with the Confederate Arms and the Japanese, they would not know that we had access to a self-broadcasting fleet. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the alliance was both our best-kept secret and our greatest strength. Even the men in my platoon did not realize we were riding in a Confederate Arms ship.
Time passed slowly now. We could not hear what happened outside our sealed world. Had our host ship already broadcasted itself? Were we nearing enemy space? What if the Mogats spotted us? We could die in a flash, never knowing the battle had already begun.
Then, after hours of sitting, we received our warning. Lights flashed in the cabin as our pilot prepared to launch.
The invasion had begun.
“Sergeant Harris, do you want to come up to the cockpit?” the pilot asked.
“On my way,” I said.
I looked up at Freeman. “I have to go to the cockpit,” I said. He continued checking his gear.
“Where are you going?” Private Philips asked, as I started toward the ladder.
“The pilot wants to see me,” I said. I thought for a moment, then radioed back to the pilot. “Can I bring one of my men?”
“We have room for a fourth.” That might not have applied if I tried to bring Freeman.
“Philips, you want to come?”
“Sure,” he said.
I had a reason for taking Philips. He might have been old and irreverent, but he was a leader. When the bullets started flying, and bombs started to burst, the guys in the platoon would forget all about who wore stripes and who wore clusters. Despite his antics around the barracks, Philips kept his head under fire. During an extended campaign, the rest of the platoon would look up to a Marine like him.
We climbed the ladder and removed our helmets before entering the cockpit.
The inside of the cockpit was dark except for the light from the dials and gauges. We had a pilot and a copilot for the flight. Both men wore combat gear without helmets. The pilot looked back, and said, “Which one of you is Harris?”
“Me, sir,” I said. He was a lieutenant.
The transport had just entered the planet’s atmosphere. Below us, an endless plain stretched ahead. Special gear under our transport shined a blinding light down on the landscape.
“I hear you’ve been down here before,” the pilot said.
“Once,” I said.
“Think you can find one of those gravity chutes?” the pilot asked.
“I might recognize one if we passed close to it,” I said.
“Good enough,” the pilot said. “They sent an explorer yesterday to scout the place. The pilot mapped a path for us, but I want you up here just in case.”
I nodded. “The gate we entered was in the mountains,” I said.
“Oh, man, that’s one shitty-looking planet,” Philips said.
“We’re not landing on this part. The place we’re going has air,” I said.
There was a radar scope beside the pilot’s seat. My gaze strayed toward it, and I froze. If I read that display correctly, hundreds of ships had gathered behind us. Then I realized they were other transports. “Those are all ours, right?” I asked.
“Every last one of them,” the pilot said. “Believe me, you’ll hear alarms if the Mogats show.”
“Transport pilots, this is Fleet Command. Be advised that enemy ships are approaching. We are going to evacuate orbit in twenty seconds. Repeat, we will evacuate in twenty seconds.”
“Now that’s just specking great,” the pilot said.
Below our ship, the plains ended at the foot of a tall, sheer mountain range. The peaks looked like they were made of obsidian. They were as black as deepest, darkest space and reflected the transport lights with all the clarity of mirrors.
“There’s your entrance,” I said, pointing toward a particularly tall and jagged peak ahead and to the left. The entrance itself was not lit, and the mountain looked like a shadow against a night sky, but blue-and-white marker lights flashed on its face.
“We’re going there?” Philips asked. He did not sound scared, he sounded incredulous.
“That’s just the doorway,” I said. Having not been admitted to the briefing, Philips had no idea what to expect.
“You know we’ll drop straight down like a rock if the Mogats cut power to that gravity chute?” the pilot said.
“Let’s hope they don’t,” I said. Could they cut the power to a gravity chute? They knew we were coming. If they could cut the power, they would.
We slowed to a crawl and dropped several hundred feet until we pulled parallel with the mountain. Then we hovered toward the entrance at a very slow speed. Our searchlight shone all the way across the entrance. It looked like a giant tunnel. A short way in, the floor suddenly disappeared.
“So that’s a gravity chute?” the pilot asked.
“That’s a gravity chute,” I agreed.
“Do you remember how your ship approached it?” the pilot asked.
“We flew in. I think I felt the engines cut…”
“I was afraid you would say that,” the pilot said.
I shrugged my shoulders. “Everything else was automatic. The pilot came into the cabin and stood around talking to passengers.”
“I hope we’re not missing anything here,” the pilot said. We inched ahead. The light from our searchlight reflected and refracted from the walls. Its glare seemed to multiply and fill the cavern around us; and yet, the cavern still seemed dark.
We hovered ten feet off the deck as we ambled forward. I looked down and saw the shimmering black floor below us. Then we dropped over the edge.
“Here’s your leap of faith,” the pilot said.
“Damn, why’d you ask me up here, Harris? I’d rather be back there and ignorant with the rest of the grunts,” Philips complained.
At first we hung in the air. With our spotlight shining on the walls around us, I could see dozens of spotlights as hundreds of transports followed us in. The beams of light looked like spokes as they cut through the darkness.
One moment we seemed to hang in the air, the next we dropped at least fifty feet. Not a peep came from the kettle where eighty Marines probably thought we’d hit an air pocket. In the cockpit, we braced ourselves and held on for the ride. Then the transport found its equilibrium.
“Good thing I have one of them siphon lines attached to my pecker,” Philips said. “I’d hate to have all that piss running down my leg.”
We were in the chute for nearly one minute when a synthetic voice spoke over the radio. “Transport pilots, be advised that enemy ships have entered this orbital space.” The message came from a cloaked satellite.
“Can we all make it into the chute that quick?” Philips asked.
“There are six hundred transports,” the pilot said.
The frantic messages started a moment later. Pilots screamed at the transports in front of them to hurry. Someone yelled, “Oh, God! They got the transport behind me!” Another pilot yelled, “We’re going to run for it! We’re going—” and his radio went dead.
Our pilot looked over to his copilot, then switched off the radio. We went the rest of the way in silence. I could not tell how anyone else felt, but I agreed with what Philips had said right before we entered the chute. I wished I was back in the kettle, unaware of everything.
We started the invasion with 582 transports. By the time we reached the target, we were down to 461. The Confederate Arms Fleet evacuated the area long before the Mogats arrived, leaving their ships to pick off one-fifth of our transports as they waited to enter the gravity chute.
“Line up! Move it! Move it! Move it!” I shouted into the microphone in my helmet. The circuits in the receiving helmets would filter out my volume, but the intensity and voice would still resonate. We were going to war. No time for questions. No time for thinking. These clones were designed to respond.
With the exception of Ray Freeman, who sat in a far corner sorting his gear, every man stood at attention. My platoon moved to the rear of the kettle, ready to charge the moment the doors opened. They held their M27s across their chests. From here on out, we would act like war machines, not men.
The heavy metal doors of the kettle started their slow swing apart. They seemed to move at the speed of an ocean tide. I noticed my fingers squeezing and relaxing along the butt and barrel of my gun. The neural programming inside my brain had already sent my nerves into their clockwork movement. The combat reflex had not taken effect yet. That highly engineered gland was back in sync. It would not secrete its euphoric mixture until the enemy closed around us. With the bullets would come peace of mind. With the killing would come warmth. It was the Zen of the deranged.
When the opening was large enough for two men to run out side by side, I sent my men out. “Move it! Move it! Move it!” I screamed, prodding them in the backs with the butt of my M27.
We knew the drill, and we ran it by the numbers. First we would secure the area. We would not encounter resistance, of course. Not on this level of the planet. It was just for landing and taking off.
We might run into some hostility one deck down, but we had landed in the civilian sector, and the military had not yet had time to mobilize. In the meantime, we would make ourselves a thorn in their side by disrupting their home world. I had my platoon break into squads and my squads break into fire teams. Only when we were ready for battle did I observe my surroundings.
The topography of the civilian sector looked no different than the top layer of the military district. The space was flat and open, with elevator stations spaced miles apart. We had landed in a spaceport that was probably identical to every other spaceport on the whole specking planet.
I heard a whining siren that sounded like it was coming from hundreds of miles away. The wailing was just a whisper in the air that the audio equipment in my helmet registered and amplified. If I removed my helmet, I might not hear the siren at all.
Hundreds of transports landed around us. They dropped out of the gravity chute, engaged their boosters, and hovered until they found clear spots on which to land.
Clearly the brass had done a poor job of planning for this part of the invasion. The transports should have landed in some sort of order that arranged their shields into a protective picket line. Instead, they dropped down here and there, some with their cockpits facing me, some offering their broad sides, some pointing their asses in my general direction.
Two hundred feet above me, the gravity chute kept spitting out transports. Every five seconds another one fell from that hole in the sky. But I did not have time to watch. “Platoon one-zero-three, move out!” I yelled.
“Where is he going?” Thomer asked. He pointed across an open stretch. I turned and saw Freeman tromping toward an elevator station, his rifle case in one hand. “Do they call it ‘absent without leave’ when civilians abandon their platoon?”
“Just you worry about your own men,” I said. “If that man does what he came here to do, this battle is going to go a whole lot easier.”
“That guy scares me,” Thomer said.
“He ought to,” I agreed.
I had my platoon move double time toward the nearest elevator station. Other platoons followed. Hundreds of men in desert beige armor lined up behind us.
“Harris, what is this place?” The colonel called on his direct frequency so that no one would hear us. He could not afford to sound confused; he was the ranking officer.
“This is the foyer,” I said.
“The what?” he barked.
“We’re on the top floor. The Mogats only use this floor for spaceports. From what I saw, nothing happens up here. Those buildings around us, those are elevator stations,” I said. “Didn’t they brief you on this, sir?”
The colonel did not answer immediately. “Yeah, they did. I just didn’t believe them.” A moment later, he yelled, “Secure that elevator station!” on a command frequency.
My men reached the station first. A four-man fire team lined up with two men on either side of the door. The automatic rifleman, Private Mark Philips, peered in the door then gave the all clear sign. The siren blared through the open doorway, but the audio filters in my helmet censored the sound to a hum.
“I think they know we are here,” Thomer said.
“I get that feeling,” I said.
“I hope them Mogie boys weren’t planning on using this little elevator station, because I claim this in the name of the Unified Authority,” Philips radioed from inside the elevator station.
“Stow it, Philips,” I said.
Across the flatness of the man-made plain, tens of thousands of armor-clad Marines captured five elevator stations. By taking different stations, we spread ourselves over a several-mile area. We would need to regroup before the enemy arrived, but we had no choice. The elevator stations were a bottleneck. It could take hours to funnel forty-eight thousand Marines through them, and we had minutes, not hours.
I followed my men into the building. Ahead of me, one of my men stared down to the lower levels through the opening in the center of the floor. The virtual dog tag identified him as Evans. “It’s like we’re invading a specking anthill,” he said, as I stared down as well.
It was like invading an anthill, except all of the ants had run for cover. The ground below us looked like a bedroom community. I saw buildings that looked like apartment complexes. I saw stores. What I did not see was people.
“Welcome to Planet HomeMo,” I said.
“HomeMo?” Evans asked.
“It’s short for Planetary Home of Morgan,” I said.
“That sounds like something Philips would say,” Evans said.
I laughed.
We stationed snipers around the railing to fire at anyone they saw on the level below. Then we forced the doors of the elevators open and sent men rappelling down the shafts to the next level. Other Marines lowered themselves from the balcony using rappel cords that created magnetic links with their suits, eliminating much of the muscle work. We needed to secure the area around the station and hold it. Nearly ten thousand Marines would have to pass through that elevator station. Even if we sent one hundred men through every minute, it would take us over an hour; and the Mogats were not going to wait around.
My men were among the first to drop to the next level. We hit the deck below and looked for enemies. We found the area abandoned. The sirens still blared their doleful warning. The people must have run for cover.
This was the civilian district. I saw four-story tenements in every direction. I saw roads and storehouses and medical clinics. The Mogats had built churches with steeples that stood thirty feet in the air.
With the exception of the landing, we had executed our invasion in an orderly way. The officers leading the attack knew their objectives and signaled them to their platoon leaders. A message signal flashed. As I turned toward the nearest tenement, a blue frame appeared around the building in my visor. A simple message appeared along the bottom of my visor: “CAPTURE OBJECTIVE.”
My men received the same message.
“Why the hell should we waste time capturing an apartment building?” Sergeant Evans asked.
“Stevens, hand me that rocket launcher,” I called to one of my men.
PFC Stevens, a grenadier, did as asked. He selected a handheld rocket launcher from his gear and gave it to me.
“Boys, this is the best-built home you will ever see,” I said as I hoisted the launcher to my shoulder, turned toward the tenement, and fired. There was a jolt to my shoulder and the rumble of the rocket. A moment later the smoke from the rocket hung across the open area like a fluffy white feather. The rocket’s contrail formed a shallow arc, then the rocket slammed into the target with a thunderous bang.
Smoke and flames flashed from the side of the building. There was no debris and the smoke cleared in seconds because the rocket did not so much as smudge the tenement.
“Harris, what happened?” the colonel barked.
“Just showing my men what we’re dealing with,” I said.
“We need that building in one piece,” the colonel warned me.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “One piece, sir.”
That rocket, which would have destroyed several city blocks back on Earth, had not so much as broken a window on the tenement. The building stood untouched.
“What the hell?” Evans asked.
“Shields,” I said. “They have shields protecting every building on this planet.”
“Every building?” Evans asked.
“So how the speck are we supposed to take a building with specking missile-proof shields?” Philips asked.
“I don’t think we’ll have much of a problem,” I said. “The shields are only on the outside walls. Once you get inside, everything is breakable.”
We moved as teams, taking corners, making sure every corner was secure, then moving ahead to the next. One of my fire teams flanked the rest of the platoon. If we entered a firefight, one team would pin the enemy down while the flanking team came around and attacked from the side. But the enemy had not yet arrived. They were not coming from across town. They were coming from the other side of a continent, possibly the other side of the planet. We would have time to dig ourselves in.
The apartment building had an open doorway, just like the spaceports and elevator stations. The Mogats had never been invaded. They did not expect an invasion. Until the moment we landed on their planet, they did not believe their enemies could reach them. As far as they knew, the Unified Authority was landlocked.
“Is it shielded inside, too?” Evans asked.
“No, just on the outside,” I said. I remembered the armory Illych and I blew up as we left the planet. “Hard on the outside.
“Evans, secure the first floor. Thomer, you’ve got the second floor. Greer, take your squad and secure the third. Got it?”
Evans’s squad ran in first. One of the men tossed a smoke grenade through the doorway. All three of Evans’s fire teams stormed into the building under the cover of the smoke.
“Evans, run a heat-vision sweep. What do you see?” I asked.
Moments later, he said, “This is a civilian dwelling.”
“Yeah,” I said, trying to sound as caustic as possible, “that’s who you find in civilian sectors.”
“There are people in the apartments, Master Sergeant,” he said.
“Flush them out,” I said. “We want the building to ourselves. Do you read me?” I was prepared to kill anyone who would not leave. We had come here to kill. But I did not relish the idea of killing women and children as they cowered in their apartments. I wanted minimum breakage.
As we cleared the apartment building, other platoons prepared in other ways. Demolitions teams placed mines on the train wells and traffic ramps. We hid snipers and grenadiers along the roads. We had time to burrow in, but I did not hold much hope. The same shields that protected the building would protect the trains and armored transports. We might derail a train or knock over a transport, but we had no prayer of defending ourselves until the Mogats’ shields were down.
I entered the tenement lobby. The last remnants of smoke still hung in the air. My men had trampled the lamps and smashed furniture on their way in. As I looked down a hall, I saw a Marine rifleman kick a door open and step back as his automatic rifleman charged in. A moment later a woman carrying a baby with three young children came galloping in my direction. All of their mouths hung wide open in panicked screams. Fortunately, the audio filters in my armor dampened the sound of their shrieks. I stepped out of their way, and they ran screaming through the lobby and out into the street.
The woman and her children were the first Mogat refugees. Over the next few minutes, dozens of people followed. Men, boys, women, girls, children alone, children with adults—I felt more like a bully than a Marine.
Gunfire echoed down the hall. There was a single shot followed by the rapid fire of an M27.
Those shots were a wake-up call. I ran down the hall and stopped by an open door in which one of my men stood pointing his weapon. Inside that apartment, a man lay sprawled on the ground in a kidney-bean-shaped puddle of blood.
“Report!” I shouted into the interLink.
“The guy had a gun,” the Marine said. Near enough to the corpse to be covered with blood, an old-fashioned automatic pistol lay on the floor.
“That was a bad choice on his part,” I said.
“Thomer, Greer, stay alert. Evans already found one Mogat packing a gun. There may be more in the building.”
Oh, there would be more guns in the building. The problem was, I felt bad for the dead guy. He was not an enemy soldier hunting my men. He was just someone protecting his property…just a guy with an old pistol trying to stand up to armor-clad Marines…a casualty of war.
I looked back at the body—an old man with gray-and-white hair dressed in an old T-shirt. There might be 200 million more like him on this planet. Why did these assholes ever pick this war?
I stood by a window on the third floor watching a steady flow of Marines pour out of the elevator station. Nearly twenty minutes had passed since we landed on the planet. I wondered how much time we would have before the Mogats would arrive.
Below me, former tenants of the building poured out into the street. Some ran for cover. Some stood just outside the entrance in a forlorn circle. Some walked away huddled together. A middle-aged man walked with his arm across his weeping wife’s shoulders. Their children dragged behind. They were refugees now, but at least they were alive.
We found two or three hundred people living in the building and turned them out. Some screamed at us. One woman tried to attack one of my Marines with her bare hands. In anger, her face contorted with hate, she shrieked like a wild animal and beat on his chest. Her husband dragged her back and thanked my Marine for not shooting her. I could not believe it. He actually thanked the man who had just evicted them from their home.
The woman was short and chubby, with six screaming children. Shooting her might have been an act of kindness. I stood in her tiny two-room apartment now. Judging by the mattresses stacked along the wall, four of her children slept in a room that doubled as the family room, living room, and kitchen.
On their wall was a family portrait and a picture of Morgan Atkins. They had a bookshelf with storybooks, a small bin of toys, and eight copies of Man’s True Place in the Universe, the Space Bible. The entire apartment was twenty feet wide and maybe thirty feet across, about the size of a doctor’s office—and eight people lived in this hole.
Atkins, what good did you do for these people? I thought to myself. They lived in a plasticized city. Growing up in Orphanage #553, I played in fields and forests. The Mogats provided their people with apartments but not so much as a blade of grass on the entire planet. All the buildings and streets were made of the same material. I could see schools and stores from up here. Everything was made from distilled shit gas. That was why the Mogats tried to establish a colony on Hubble, too. They planned to turn the distilled shit gas into a city.
From where I stood, I had a clear view of the city around us. Blocks away, the traffic ramps rose out of the ground like attic doors. The Mogat Army would use those ramps as they came to retaliate. Just a half mile away, the magnetically charged lines of several train tracks funneled into a train station. Normally we would destroy the tracks and traffic ramps, but these had shields.
“Sergeant Harris, we have a small situation,” Greer called in to me over the interLink.
“I’m on my way,” I said.
Taking one last look at the city below, I left the apartment. I don’t know if all Mogats lived as these families did. Looking around on my way out, I saw three child-sized mattresses stacked along the wall. Maybe that was how the Mogat population grew so quickly—pregnancy spread through them like a virus. The small kitchenette in the corner of the room included a hot pad, a sink, and a single pot.
I had no trouble finding the altercation, it was just down the hall. Most of Greer’s squad stood staring into the door of an apartment. I pushed my way through.
In the eye of this gathering stood Sergeant Greer, my newest squad leader, along with two teenage boys, both barely five feet tall. The boys looked to be friends, not brothers. They had long hair and pimples. One had oily blond hair to his shoulders, the other had red hair that only covered the tops of his ears.
“Specking clone,” the redhead sneered.
“This boy doesn’t seem to like you, Greer,” I said.
“They attacked one of my men with knives,” Greer said. He held up two kitchen knives for me to inspect.
I tried not to laugh, but could not help myself. Our armor would not stop lasers or particle-beam weapons. Bullets glanced off our armor if they hit it at a shallow angle. Kitchen knives, on the other hand, would break long before they could so much as scuff the polish. They might as well have attacked the Marine with a pillow.
“You called me about a couple of kids with knives?” I asked. I said this using the microphone so that the boys would hear me.
“Get specked, clone,” one of the boys said.
“Their buddy in the next apartment says he has a gun,” Greer said.
I nodded. Without saying a word, I pulled a grenade from my belt.
“Chris, he’s got a specking grenade!” one of the boys screamed.
The door of the apartment opened and another old-fashioned twenty-four-shot pistol flew out. “Don’t shoot, man, I’m unarmed.” A boy who could not have been a day past twelve stepped out with his arms up, his fingers sticking up in the air.
“Somebody take these boys out of here,” I said, still using the mike.
Chris, the rebel without the gun, stopped in front of me and spit on my armor. I shot out my hand and grabbed him by the collar of his shirt. “You got something you want to say to me, boy?” I said.
“Yeah, I’m going to kill you, you specking tube-for-a-mother clone.”
I pulled off my helmet and stared down at the kid. “The term is, specking tube-for-a-mother Liberator clone,” I snarled. All three boys stared up at me in panic, but only Chris wet himself. They knew Liberators. They probably grew up hearing horror stories about us in school.
“Get these children out of here,” I said. “We’ve got work to do.”
“Let them go?” Greer asked me.
If the boys found real weapons, they might come back. Ray Freeman would have killed them and not thought twice about it. So would Illych and his SEALs. I suppose I should have as well; but deep in the back of my mind, I did not think we belonged on this planet. Killing Mogat soldiers and destroying Mogat battleships were one thing, landing an invasion in a residential sector and terrorizing kids was something else.
“Unless you have a better idea,” I said. I knew he did. We should have shot the boys; but coming after a platoon of Marines with kitchen knives and an old pistol did not seem like capital offenses.
I watched Greer and two of his men lead the boys down the hall at gunpoint. One of them stopped and turned to face me. “Devil!” he screamed. Greer grabbed him by the hair and kept on walking without breaking stride. As they stepped onto the elevator, I replaced my helmet.
“Any other problems, gentlemen?” I asked over a platoon-wide band.
The colonel, the highest-ranking Marine to accompany the invasion, called me over the interLink. “Sergeant Harris, are you and your men comfortable in that cozy little hotel you’ve captured?”
“Just dandy, sir,” I said.
“Sergeant, I have it on good authority that the first wave of Mogats will be here in less than ten minutes. I would like to offer you and your men front-row seats if you’re feeling up to it.”
This was neither a friendly offer nor an order. It was a challenge. “Scared we’ll miss the action?” I asked.
“I just thought you’d want to be in on it. Your choice, train station or traffic ramp,” the colonel offered.
“You know, sir, I’ve always had a thing for trains.”
Two other platoons replaced us as we left the building. They would fight from behind the shielded walls we had captured. Leaving the tenement gave me the same feeling I sometimes got when I parachuted out of a transport. I had the uneasy feeling of leaving safety behind.
Watching my men, I saw that they knew the countdown had begun. We might have three minutes, we might have seven, but the Mogat Army was coming with its shielded tanks and vehicles and its endless supply of men. Leaving the shielded safety of the tenement, we entered the street. To our right was an elevator station from which a steady stream of Marines continued to pour.
The neighborhood around us looked like a ghost town. No one stood in the streets. By this time everyone had found cover, even the people we evicted from the apartment building. No one stood in the doorways or courtyards of the three-and four-story tenements we passed on the way to the station. Running alongside my platoon, I scanned those buildings and occasionally saw Marines peering through open windows. If the Mogats wanted this neighborhood back, they would have to take it floor by floor.
“Harris, you and your platoon better hurry if you want to catch your trains,” the colonel called to me.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
The colonel transmitted virtual beacons to guide us to the station. The beacons led us through alleys rather than along main streets. Unless we got very lucky stopping the Mogats, we would need to retreat. The colonel’s path would let us fall back more safely, leading the Mogats through gauntlets in which our men would already have high ground.
We ran another three blocks, crossed an open square that was probably the Mogat version of a commons. The park had benches and sculptures of people, but when it came to plant life, it had not so much as a single bush.
Then we arrived. The train station had a roof but no walls. Weather was not an issue in this artificial environment.
Another platoon had already set up. The lieutenant in charge came out to greet us. “Sergeant Harris, am I ever glad to see you,” he said.
“Find cover,” I told my men, then I turned to the lieutenant. “What’s the situation, sir?” I asked.
“We’ve mined the tracks,” he said. “I have snipers on every roof.”
“Do you know how much longer till they arrive?” I asked.
“How could I know that?” the man asked.
“Evans, search the station. There should be a computer monitoring which tracks are in use. I want men with rocket launchers watching each of those tracks,” I said.
“Got it,” Evans said.
Turning back to the lieutenant, I said, “My men and I will have a look. I’ll let you know if we find anything.”
A moment later Philips called me. “Hey, Master Sarge, ain’t those trains shielded?”
“They are,” I said.
“So what’s the use of shooting rockets at them?”
“We’re going to shoot at the front car,” I said. “Let’s see if we can derail a train or two.”
“Derail the suckers; I like it,” Philips said.
“Thomer, keep a leash on Philips, will you?” I asked.
“I found your control system,” Evans called back a moment later.
“Open band,” I told Evans. “We need everyone to hear you. Where’s the first train?”
“Track number seven. It arrives in thirty-eight seconds.”
“I got this one,” Philips called over the interLink. He trotted off toward a track carrying a rocket launcher in his right hand and his M27 in his left.
“I’ll watch him,” Thomer said.
“No, I’ll go with Philips,” I said. “Take care of the rest of your squad.”
“There are trains coming down tracks one, three, eight, nine, and eleven,” Evans radioed me.
“Did you get that, Lieutenant?” I asked.
“Got it. My men can take eight, nine, and eleven,” the lieutenant said.
The tracks were trenches with plasticized edges and metal floors. They were five feet deep and fifteen feet across, and they seemed to worm their way under the horizon. The trains used magnetic levitation. The Mogats had undoubtedly shielded the tracks and the trains floating inside them, but the men inside those trains would be as vulnerable as eggs in a carton.
I ran to join Philips. At the edge of our vision, the train sped toward us. At first it was nothing but a tiny spot of light. Soon I saw the massive wedge of its engine, then I could identify the dome on its nose and the airfoils along its top. A mine blew up beneath it, and the train seemed to wriggle in the track. Another mine exploded. A small burst of flames erupted under the heavy engine; the cars kicked from side to side in the track.
“Steady, Philips,” I said. Now I was calm. My combat reflex had begun, and warmth spread through my veins. I knew I could have made the shot, but I trusted Philips to shoot as well as me.
“I hope they shut down those shields soon,” Philips said.
“Hit the train low,” I said. “Let’s try to upend it.”
“Damn it, Master Sarge, I know that,” Philips snapped. He fired the rocket. A long rope of smoke appeared three feet above the floor of the track. The rocket reached the train so quickly that the smoke and the explosion seemed to all happen at once. A star-shaped flame exploded beneath the base of the train. Philips had fired a damn-near perfect shot.
What happened next was as beautiful as any ballet. The train veered toward the edge of the track as its nose kicked up. Magnetic levitation had placed that train in a nearly frictionless environment, so its bulk and momentum continued forward despite the upward thrust of the rocket.
Barreling forward at hundreds of miles an hour when the rocket struck, the engine bounced nearly three feet on its magnetic cushion, enough to leap the edge of the track. The rest of the train followed, twisting over on its side as it did. The track sort of ejected the train.
The rear cars slid over three more mines as they threaded their way out of the magnetic tracks. I expected sparks and a trail of destruction to follow the derailed train, but it did not happen that way. The shielded train slid across a shielded street, hitting a couple of shielded walls. The train gave off no sparks; but smoke rose from its windows as its cars slid along the street, rebounding against walls before skidding to a rest. The outside of the train went undamaged; but liquid, maybe blood, maybe oil, maybe both, slowly seeped out of the wreckage.
The cheer started spontaneously. Marines stood up from behind cover, waved their rifles in the air, and shouted at the tops of their lungs. You had to have your ear to the interLink to hear them, of course, but I imagined the noise ringing through the air. In that moment, I imagined us as the Israelites watching David slay Goliath. I imagined us as the Union soldiers on Cemetery Ridge after Hays’s men stopped Pickett’s Charge. Our armor and interLink technology did not fit into my image of this battle.
“Nice shooting, Philips,” I said as I slapped him on the back.
For the first time, maybe in his whole entire life, Philips had nothing to say. He stood staring at the carcass of the train absolutely silent. Perhaps he was in awe of what he had accomplished.
Our revelry ended quickly when we heard men firing rockets a few tracks away. One of the Marines from the other platoon fired his rocket too early. It struck the track more than a hundred feet ahead of the oncoming train. The train continued to barrel toward us. Mines blew up beneath it, creating small geysers of flames that flashed and disappeared.
Rushing because he knew his life depended on it, the Marine slipped open the back of his launcher and reloaded it. He brought the tube up and rested it on his shoulder. By this time the train was only a quarter of a mile away. I could read the numbers printed along its cab.
The Marine fired his second rocket. It struck the engine head-on but too high. The train buckled and continued on. Then a Marine two tracks down fired a rocket that slammed into the side of the train, just behind the “gills”—the flexible corridor between the engine and the first car. The front of the train leaned over precariously. It would have righted itself, but another Marine fired a second rocket into the side of the engine, tipping the heavy car over.
The train had come close enough to the station that it had already begun to slow for its stop. With so little momentum, many of the rear cars did not follow the engine off the track but sat upright just behind the cars that had tipped over.
Trains started coming down other tracks, but I no longer had time to watch. A Mogat soldier climbed from the wreckage of the train that Philips derailed. The train had come to a stop less than a hundred yards from us, so I could see blood smeared on the man’s face and tunic. The train was lying on its side, and he popped out of a door, headfirst, like a prairie dog popping out of its hole.
He had a gun in his right hand. He laid the gun on the side of the train, then used both hands to push himself up. Once he was out of the door, he picked up the gun and stood on the side of the train, a shaky, dizzy survivor. I shot him in the head, and he fell behind the train.
“Shit, here it comes,” said Philips.
One of the cargo doors opened on the train that other Marines had knocked over. There was a moment of silent mystery, then three Targ Tanks rumbled out of that compartment.
Targs were an old model, antipersonnel tanks. They had smaller cannons and carried light armor, but they could scoot at speeds of up to 170 miles per hour. They were only five feet high. When they got going, their low-slung profile reminded me of spiders. These particular tanks would not need heavy armor, not with those Mogat shields.
In our rush to nail that first train, Philips and I had separated ourselves from the platoon. It didn’t seem important at the time; but seeing those Targs rush toward the station, I knew we were cut off.
“Philips, give me the launcher,” I said.
He handed me the rocket launcher, then took up his M27. “Master Sarge, I don’t like the look of those tanks.”
I fired a quick shot at one of the tanks. It was a perfect shot. The arc of the contrail ended right at the middle of the turret on the tank. There was a massive explosion. Flames and smoke filled the air, and the tank rolled through them untouched. The turret turned in our direction as the tank driver looked to return fire. Philips and I lay flat on the ground, hiding behind a waist-high wall.
“Should we hold the station?” Evans called in.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Philips said.
Marines fired a hailstorm of rockets and bullets at the three tanks, but the situation was getting worse. Another cargo car opened, and three more tanks spilled out. Down the alley I could see more tanks off-loading.
“We can’t stop the tanks!” Thomer yelled into the interLink. “The other platoon is clearing out.”
“Go with them,” I said. “You got that?” I added for Evans and Greer. I sent the communication over the platoon-wide frequency. “Fall back. Get back to the apartment building.”
“Got it,” Evans said.
“Yes, Sergeant,” said Greer.
“What about you?” Thomer asked.
“Fall back. You read me, Thomer? Fall back.”
“Yes, sir,” he said.
“Safest place for us is in that train,” Philips said, pointing to the wreck he had made.
I knew he was right. “Stay down,” I said, as I pulled a smoke grenade from my armor and tossed it into the open area between us and the train. We would need to wait another twenty seconds for the smoke to spread. More survivors climbed out of the wreck. Someone back in the station shot a man as he rose out of a doorway. They shot another as he popped out of a window and started to aim his gun. Then a tank fired a round at the station. I could not tell if the shell hit anyone, but no one fired back. By this time the smoke from the grenade had formed a fairly thick cloud.
“Let’s go!” I yelled as I leaped from behind the wall and dashed into the cover of the smoke. “You there, Philips?” I asked.
“Right behind you,” he said.
“Run for the train,” I said. Once you start talking in battle, it’s all too easy to repeat the obvious.
“And here I was thinking I should run for the Mogat tanks,” Philips said.
A Targ fired into the smoke. It was a blind shot that missed us completely, but the force of the shell’s explosion sent me skidding just as I reached the train. I flew forward five feet and spun to the ground. The upended engine lay on its side, its roof facing in my direction just a few feet ahead. I lunged forward and hid behind its mass.
“That was close.” Philips said.
“It’s going to get a lot more exciting around here,” I said. I found a handhold and scaled the roof of the engine. We needed to find a way inside.
One of the tanks spotted me and fired a shell that struck the base of the train. The whole thing slid. I dropped flat against the engine and held on. Philips, who was trying to climb up behind me, fell off.
“Philips, you all right?”
“Yeah, just dandy,” he said.
I had climbed to the top of the train. Several cars ahead of us, a Mogat popped out of a doorway. His head, chest, and rifle stuck out of the train. He spotted me and started to bring his gun to bear, and I shot him. Another followed him. Philips nailed that one before I could get off another shot.
I found an open doorway just behind the gills of the train and jumped in. What a mess we’d created. With the train on its side, rows of seats hung horizontally in the air like padded shelves. Some bodies lay slumped in the seats. Others were thrown across the car. The ceiling of the train car was to my left. All the light fixtures along the ceiling had shattered.
Scores of men lay bleeding along the side of the car. Some were dead and lay as still as sardines in a can. Others squirmed. If they squirmed enough, I shot them. If they lay still with their hands on their weapons, I shot them—the logic of the battlefield: Only when an enemy truly looked dead did you spare him.
In some spots the bodies were stacked two and three men deep. I suppose I could have pushed them out of my way. Instead, I had to stretch my legs and step over them. An inch-deep stream of blood ran along the side of the car.
I saw a man lying facedown in a puddle of blood so deep that he could have drowned. His hand was wrapped around a gun, and his finger was on the trigger, so I shot him. Another man sat limp in a corner of the train. His hair was matted with blood, but he sat vertically and had a gun on his lap. He looked dead, and I saw no sign of breathing as I fired a shot into his chest. Either of them might have been alive enough to shoot me in the back as I passed.
I heard a crash, pivoted around and aimed my M27, then saw that it was Philips. “Don’t shoot, Harris, it’s me,” he said, holding his hands in front of his face.
I lowered my gun and started for the next car.
“I heard gunshots,” Philips said.
“I’m making sure there aren’t any survivors,” I said.
“You think any of these guys are alive?” Philips asked. He prodded a pile of bodies with the barrel of his M27. The man on the top slid over the other side showing no more signs of life than a sack of potatoes.
“Not in this car,” I said.
“What’s going on out there?” I called to my squad leaders.
“It’s getting ugly,” Thomer shouted. “They parked two trains out of range and off-loaded tanks. There’s a column headed right for us.” I could hear gunfire in the background.
“Targs?” I asked.
“Bigger. I think the Targs were meant to pin us down while they waited for the real guns to arrive.”
“Where are you?” I asked.
“We’re still in the station,” Evans said. “They sent Targs around the building to cut us off.”
The door to the next compartment fell open and machine-gun fire sprayed across the wall above my head. I dropped to one knee and fired back, knowing I would not hit the gunman.
I snatched a grenade, pulled the pin, and tossed it through the open doorway. The grenade exploded, blowing out most of the wall between our car and the next one. Nothing stirred when I got a look in the next car. I climbed over the remains of the door. With the train on its side, the doorway formed a horizontal stripe. It looked more like a window than a door.
“I’m not sure how long they’ll hold up against those tanks,” Philips said as he followed me into the next car.
I sighed. Maybe all of the bodies were bothering me. So much blood and carnage and no one left to shoot.
“Good news, gentlemen,” the colonel called over an open frequency. He had to be calling about the shields. If they were down, we could shoot our way out of this killing bottle. A rocket or two would take care of the Targs once the shields were down, and our grenadiers had plenty of rockets. If the shields were down, all we would have to do was hold out for a few more minutes, then the reinforcements would arrive—wave upon wave of soldiers.
“Navy SEALs have touched down on Mogat territory,” the colonel said. He spoke in a cheerful tone that radiated his utter ignorance about the fight. He was probably tucked away safely in a transport, a million miles from the action.
“Speck,” I hissed. “They’ve only specking touched down?” I asked. They’d barely begun their damn mission. “That’s great, sir,” I said. “Why don’t you call me when they shut down the specking power.”
“Watch yourself, Sergeant,” the colonel said. For a moment, it occurred to me that the spirit of the late Colonel Grayson had returned to haunt me through that fool.
“Sorry, sir,” I said.
“You and I are going to have a conversation when this is over, Harris,” he said over an open frequency that every Marine on the planet could hear.
Several Mogat survivors fired at us from inside the next car. I took cover behind the metal walls of a storage locker and radioed back to Philips. “Can you go up top and flank these guys?” I asked.
“I’ve got ’em, sir,” Philips answered. He called me “sir.” Enlisted men never called other enlisted men “sir.” That kind of respect was reserved for officers. By reprimanding me, the colonel had won me respect that I could never have earned on my own.
Bullets clattered against the metal and ricocheted around the compartment. The firing stopped for a moment. I looked around the locker and fired shots through the open door. I had nothing to shoot at, but I wanted to distract the Mogats on the other side. It did not work. When no one fired back, I ventured for a closer look and peered into the next car. I saw a Mogat trying to shoot through the windows along the top of the train. He must have been shooting at Philips, but his bullets would never get through the shielded glass.
One of the Mogats spotted me. I rolled back behind my cover as he shot. Then I heard the creaking of metal. I rolled out and fired at the man as he tried to climb onto my side of the door. I missed, and he ducked back for safety.
“How’s it going, Philips?” I called over the interLink.
“Keep your panties on, Master Sarge,” Philips sneered back. So much for respect.
“They’re expecting you,” I said, warning Philips.
“I know…I know.”
The gunfire continued, but now it was farther away. I rolled for a quick look, shot the Mogat who was supposed to be covering me, then rushed the door of the next compartment, where I got the drop on one of the three men tracking Philips. I shot him. As the other two turned on me, Philips shot them.
“Harris, are you there?” Thomer called in over the interLink.
“I’m here,” I said. “What’s going on out there?”
“They’re closing in on us,” Thomer said.
“Did the other platoon make it out?” I asked.
“Some of them,” Thomer said. “Those tanks caught a bunch of them in the open. Half of them did not make it across.”
“Squad counts,” I ordered.
“I’m down to nine,” Thomer said. One of those nine would be Philips, who was in here with me.
“Seven,” said Evans.
“Five,” said Greer.
Of my original forty-two men, I now had twenty-three remaining, including myself. If I did not find some way to get my men out of there, the roll call might only find two.
“Hold on,” I called over the platoon-wide band. “I’ll find a way to draw some of the heat off you. Just hold on.”
“You want to draw some heat?” Philips asked. “You should see what we have in here.”
The Mogats had only launched the first wave of their counterattack and already our invasion was unraveling around us. I wondered how long the platoons guarding the traffic ramps would hold out. I wondered if the Mogats would send gunships across the planet to attack our transports. Probably not. Why should they? Their Navy ruled orbital space. If they waited for us to surrender, they could take our transports intact.
Everything hinged on the SEALs. Our invasion was meant to draw Mogat forces away. Well, we’d pulled that one off. If the SEALs could just accomplish their objectives, some of us might survive.
“Harris, over here,” Philips called excitedly, as I came across the car.
Along the left wall, which had become the floor when the whole train tipped on its side, lay stacks of clear canisters filled with some sort of swirling brown gas. The canisters were strapped down tight. Nothing short of a grenade would have shattered them; the Mogats did not take any chances with this cargo.
Stacks of a different sort hung from the top of the train—canisters filled with gray, glittering gas. Seeing these lethal weapons, I could not help but smile.
“What is this shit?” Philips asked.
“The brown ones are distilled shit gas,” I said, borrowing that briefing officer’s parlance. “This is the most corrosive stuff you’ll ever see. Eats anything soft—skin, wires, rubber.”
I pointed to the canisters on the other wall. They were filled with compressed silver gas. They looked like they might have contained mercury. “You know what this is, right?” I asked.
Philips shook his head.
“That’s noxium gas. You’ve heard of noxium gas before?” I said.
“Oh, yes, I’ve heard of it.” Terrorists favored noxium because it was cheap and scary. It bored into people and turned them to jelly, then dispersed into the air. You could shoot it into a building, kill everyone inside, then enter the building yourself five minutes later. The air would be clean.
“How are you holding up out there?” I called on a frequency that reached only my squad leaders.
“Rumsfelds,” Evans said. “They’ve got specking Rumsfelds!”
Of course there were Rumsfelds. I should have known there would be Rumsfelds. That explained the gas canisters. Rumsfelds were designed to spew supercharged gas. They also packed the standard machine guns and cannons.
Despite all the weapons and armor, the Rumsfeld was obsolete before it rolled off the assembly line. It moved too slowly for practical use in battle. Other battlefield units could outmaneuver Rumsfelds and ultimately cut them down. The government had labeled them obsolete thirty years ago, but they should have been discontinued long before that.
“Are they on you?” I asked. I worked as I spoke, hoping to find the guns that foot soldiers used to shoot gas canisters. I found a rack of compressed-gas shooters near the door. These were breech-loading rifles with barrels as thick as baseball bats.
“Bearing down,” Evans said.
“Just hold on,” I said. “Help is on the way.”
Rumsfelds had a closed circulation system with filters that could weed out noxium gas—a biogas that quickly evaporated into the environment. I did not think the tanks’ filters would hold up against distilled shit gas, however. That long-lasting corrosive would eat through the filters. Shit gas hung around for hours as it seeped into the ground. The Rumsfelds would probably fire the canisters in one direction, then drive off in the other.
I pulled off my helmet and placed four canisters of shit gas into it. The canisters were about three inches tall and two inches in diameter. I removed three of the other canisters as well, the ones with the gray-colored gas.
Philips removed his helmet and did the same.
Strapping a shooter to my back, I climbed to the top of the train. Up ahead, I saw at least twenty Targs facing into the station. Rumsfelds lurked in the distance, rumbling in like dinosaurs. I sat on the edge of the doorway with my feet dangling down as I unstrapped that shooter. “Philips, pass me my helmet,” I said.
Each of the tanks had brown camouflage paint and a golden crown painted on its turrets. The Targs had formed an elliptical row about forty feet from the station. They fired cannons into the station in rapid and unordered succession. I saw the flashes, then heard the rumble of their guns a split second later.
Hoping to create an uncrossable puddle, I planned to fire distilled shit gas into the street behind the station. Distilled shit gas was heavy, and that puddle would last for hours. I would shoot canisters of noxium gas in front of the station to clear a path. In the open air, the noxium would do its work and evaporate in a minute.
“If you see gas floating in your direction, run,” I said over the platoon-wide band.
“In case you haven’t noticed, they’ve got tanks out there,” Greer said.
“Not for long,” I said as I loaded a canister of noxium gas into my shooter.
“When I give you the signal, I want you to run,” I said.
“They’ll hit us,” Greer said.
“Take my word on this one, Greer,” I said. “Getting hit by a shell would be a lot better than waiting around for this shit.” I fired. The canister sailed through the air so slowly that I could actually watch it as it hurtled toward the target. The shot lobbed over the roof of the train station. A moment later, the top of a silver-white cloud appeared in the air.
I quickly loaded a canister of distilled shit gas and fired behind the train station. The canister flew into the center of the tanks, where it vanished in a rapidly spreading cloud of brown haze.
“That gas won’t hurt those tanks,” Philips said, as I loaded another canister of shit gas. “They have shields.”
“It won’t hurt the outside of those tanks,” I said, and squeezed off the next shot, lobbing this canister deeper into the tank column. “Those boys have to breathe something. It’s like spraying insects.”
Philips handed me the next canister. It was gray—noxium gas. I loaded it into the shooter and fired over the roof of the train station.
“Get running!” I yelled to my squad leaders.
Philips handed me another canister of distilled shit gas. I raised my trajectory and fired at the Rumsfelds in the distance. Dinosaurs that they were, the first of the Rumsfelds charged straight ahead, directly into the spreading cloud. Philips handed me another canister. I loaded it and fired deeper into their lines. I did not want any stragglers to escape.
One of the Rumsfelds fired back.
“Incoming,” I yelled, bracing myself in the door of the train for cover.
The shell hit the train like a giant hammer. Standing below me, Philips lost his balance and fell, his arms cradling the canister-filled helmet. The canisters did not break. They were designed not to break until fired, but I did not want to test the quality of their manufacture.
“Give me a brown one,” I told Philips.
Tanks were now coming in our direction. I reached down without saying a word, and he slapped the canister into my hand. I loaded and fired at the tanks, and they fired at us.
“Duck!” I yelled, as I dropped into the train.
Philips placed his helmet top down on the floor and laid over it, cradling it in his arms. If he’d seen what those gases could do to a man, he would not have been so brave.
One shell hit the train, followed by a second, then a third and a fourth, in rapid succession. Then there was silence.
I emptied the remaining canisters out of my helmet, then pulled my helmet down over my head. I called my squad leaders. “Report.”
“What was that?” Thomer asked.
“What is your status?” I asked.
“Safe for now,” Evans said. “We made it to an apartment building.”
“What did you hit them with?” Thomer repeated.
“Bug spray,” I said. “Be ready to make a quick exit from your building. The reason they brought that shit out here was to feed it to you.”
General Crowley, I thought to myself. The son of a bitch was always ahead of the game. He knew that if we made it to this planet, we would hide in buildings with tank-proof shields; and he found a way around it. Gas the buildings, and the occupants would die. Bastard.
“What are you doing?” Philips asked, as I headed back into the car with all of the gas canisters. The shelling had stopped but more Rumsfelds were undoubtedly on the way. The last place he wanted to be was in a train car carrying canisters filled with deadly gases. I didn’t want to go back there any more than he did.
I had not worked with Ray Freeman for two full years without learning a trick or two. The man did not talk much, but he knew the angles for every situation. He knew how to find winning solutions to desperate situations and how to turn traps to his advantage.
“The Mogats know we’re here,” I said as I pulled a grenade from my armor. Grenades were all-purpose devices. You could pull the pins and toss them, or you could program them, then pull the pins. In this case, I programmed the grenade for maximum yield and set it to explode on impact, then I pulled the pin and laid it to rest between two canisters of distilled shit gas. Then I set three more grenades the same way.
“They know we’re in the train, and they’re coming after us,” I said. “They’re probably going to shell the train to shake us loose, right?” I patted the second grenade to make sure it was snug. Those canisters were designed to not explode until fired from a shooter, but I had the feeling that a grenade might do the trick.
Looking around the car, I did not find what I wanted. I rushed to the next car and found it—a small airtight case for carrying canisters. As I pulled it off a shelf, a Mogat moaned and stirred on the floor. I shot him, then went back and fitted eight canisters of noxium gas and four canisters of distilled shit gas into the case.
Satisfied that I had the right load, I headed for a doorway through which I could leave the train. I had the canister shooter strapped over my shoulder. I carried my M27 in my right hand and the case of gas canisters in my left. I also had two canisters of noxium gas tucked into my armor. If anything broke those canisters…
“Where are you going?” Philips asked.
“That way,” I said, pointing to my left. The Mogats were coming from the right. Using the telescopic lens in my visor, I could see two waves of tanks on the way. The rear guard were Rumsfelds, slow, vicious machines. The first wave were Targ Tanks. They were still five miles back, but they would close that gap quickly. There were hundreds of them this time. These guys could tell what I had done to the first wave. They would skirt around the gas.
“I’m headed that way and going as fast as I can.” I swung my legs over the edge of the train and hopped off.
“Why left?” Philips asked.
“Do you want to head right?” I asked.
“Guess not,” Philips said. The ground was still covered with distilled shit gas in that direction. If he used his telescopic lens, he would have seen the next column of tanks coming from behind us. He slid down the roof of the train and landed next to me.
“Those tanks back there are going to start shelling this train in another minute,” I said. “That will set off my grenade, gas will leak…”
“That gas is going to leak out of every orifice,” Philips said. I was going to say doorway, but I preferred his description.
“Harris, you better beat it out of there,” Evans called over the interLink. “The whole frigging Mogat Army is headed in your direction.”
“Where are you?” I asked. “Give me a beacon on your building,”
“Just up the street. I can see you from the window.” The virtual beacon turned the building blue in my visor.
“Are the streets clear?” I asked.
“Not entirely. I sent my snipers up to the roof to clear a way for you.”
I heard sporadic gunfire. The crack of rifles echoed through the streets.
“Call your boys in,” I said. “We’ll catch up with you, but for now, I want everyone tucked in safe.”
“Harris, those tanks are getting closer.”
“I got it,” I said. “Just bring your squad in.”
“Philips, let’s move out,” I said. Feeling a little awkward with a gun on my back and both hands full, I hunched over and sprinted as best I could up the street. We ran one block, then another before the shelling started. When I looked back, I saw searchlights from the tanks. Then, hearing another shell fired, I ducked against a storefront. It was a three-story Laundromat, of all things, with an all-glass fascia, but it was the only choice we had. At least I knew it was empty.
“Philips, in here!” I yelled. I pushed the door open and ran for the stairs. Philips and I climbed to the top floor and hid behind a row of washers.
“Oh, shit,” Evans said. “Look at all those specking Mogats.”
At that very moment, the tanks fired a barrage of shells. The Targs fired at the train. They pounded it.
I could see the whole thing from the third floor of the Laundromat. Shells and rockets slammed into that train, sending it sliding, jostling the cars back and forth. It reminded me of shooting at an empty can to see how long you could keep it in the air. Eventually, several cars rolled upside down.
The gases did not mix. Brown and gray gases began oozing from the windows and doors of the train. The brown gas crept along the streets like a tide, swelling nearly two feet in the air. Targs might have been fast, but they were not built for sharp turns at top speeds. The first row of tanks on the scene cut sharp and managed to avoid the gas. The tanks that followed did not. Line after line of Targs stampeded into the deadly fog and stalled.
From my third-floor vantage point, I saw dozens of tanks stall in the distilled shit gas mist. I could also see hundreds beyond them that the gas would never reach.
Around the train station, I saw the carcasses of the tanks that I’d gassed. They sat totally immobile, looking like stones. No, not stones. With their curved backs and squat, low-slung profiles, and their green camouflage, they looked like gargantuan frogs. At least the Targs looked like frogs. There were twenty Rumsfelds in the mix. From up here, they looked more like armadillos.
The distilled shit gas I’d fired at the Rumsfelds would have dissolved the wiring in the tanks as well as the drivers. I shot the Targs with noxium gas. They would still work, so long as you didn’t mind sitting in the puddle of what once was an enemy soldier.
A half mile away from the train station, the nearest traffic ramp spewed out a river of green personnel carriers. Our men had put up a fight there. Beside the ramp, a couple of trucks lay on their sides; but the men we sent to hold that ramp were dead or in retreat, and now tens of thousands of Mogats poured out.
From here, I could also see the nearest elevator station. When the reinforcements came, they would funnel through buildings like that one. I imagined ten thousand soldiers storming through each station, M27s raised, grenades in their hands. Sooner or later they would need to destroy the elevator stations so that they could lower their tanks and gunships.
Lord, it would be a beautiful sight to behold, I thought. I had begun to doubt whether any of us would live to see it.
“Talk to me, Evans,” I called on the frequency for squad leaders.
“They stopped shooting,” Evans said.
“Can you see the street around your building?” I asked.
“I can’t see the street from here,” said Evans.
“No windows?” I asked.
“I’ve got a window,” Evans said. “I just can’t see the street. There are too many specking Mogats on it. Those speckers are everywhere.”
“How long can you hold out? I’m going to try to make it over to your building,” I said. Not much had changed since I left Little Man; I was still committing passive suicide.
“We barricaded the entrance,” Evans said. “They might be able to bash through with their tanks, but I’d hate to be the first man to come through that door. We may go down, but we are not going down easy.”
“Is Philips with you?” Thomer broke in.
“He’s here,” I said.
“And he’s okay?”
“Not a scratch on him,” I said.
Thomer did not answer. I figured that he probably switched bands and called Philips directly.
“Master Sergeant, there’s no point in coming here,” Evans said. “We’re cooked.”
I laughed. “Evans, we’re all cooked. I don’t know about Philips, but I’d rather go down with my platoon.
I’d lost a platoon a few years ago. I still remembered every man in that platoon by name. Sometimes I heard them in my sleep. “We’ll find a way to reach you, Evans. Just hold on.”
“What about your friend, the giant with the rifle?” Evans asked.
“His name is Freeman. He came here hunting Crowley.” I said this more to myself than to Evans.
“You mean Amos Crowley, the Mogat general?”
“Crowley is a field general. He likes to go down to the field to fight with his men. He’s down there somewhere right now. At least he should be. He’ll be sleeping with Napoleon and Caesar if Freeman spots him.” I did not believe what I’d just said. In truth, I regretted bringing Freeman on a suicide mission.
“Are the Mogats outside your building, too?” Evans asked.
I looked out the window. The path back to the train station was almost clear. Most of the tanks and troops had gathered around the tenements. The street around the building in which my platoon had hidden looked like a parking lot.
“Nope,” I said, trying to sound cheerful. “All’s clear.”
“You should stay put,” Evans said.
“Are you shitting me?” I asked. It might have been the combat hormone speaking by then. If someone had shot me in the head at that moment, I think I might have leaked out more hormone than blood or brains. “Just keep some men by the back door. Philips and I are on our way.”
I switched frequencies. “Philips.”
“Thomer says I should shoot you. He says I should shoot you and lie low until the Army comes.” Thomer must have listened in on part of my conversation with Evans.
Philips stood in front of the window staring down at the street. The sky had turned dark during the time that we hid in the Laundromat. Bright lights shone all over the city, and fires blazed near the train station and some of the traffic ramps.
Philips removed his helmet as he viewed this panorama. He stood still as a tree holding his M27 by the butt in his limp right hand, its muzzle pointing straight at the floor. “Look at all those specking Mogats. Hell, with that many men, they don’t need to shoot us. They can just wait till we run out of bullets, then trample us to death.”
I pulled off my helmet and stood beside Philips. Neither of us spoke for a time. Then I pointed to the building where the rest of the platoon was waiting. “They’re only six blocks away.”
He said, “Damn, Master Sarge, you can’t possibly think we’ll survive those six blocks.”
“You know what, Philips, I really hate being called Master Sarge. The rank is master sergeant, not master sarge.”
He smiled but did not answer.
Still glaring at Philips, I replaced my helmet. It was at that moment that the lights went out.
The city lights did not stutter. They did not blink on and off. They went out. In the pitch-darkness, my visor automatically switched to night-for-day vision. I stared out the big glass window down at a cityscape painted in blue-white and black.
I looked over at Philips as he put on his helmet. “The power is out,” I said.
“I can see that,” he growled.
“You don’t get it,” I said, and I fired my M27 into the window, which shattered into tire-sized pieces of jagged glass and dropped to the street.
“Evans, Thomer, Greer,” I called. “The shields are down.”
“Harris,” a familiar voice interrupted my conversation with my squad leaders. “You out there?”
“Nice to hear from you,” I said.
“I’m the only SEAL with any time on this planet,” Illych said. “They had to send me.
“I’m in their capital sector. You should have seen this place. It’s wild. It’s half government, half religious shrine. Too bad it’s all going away.”
By this time Philips and I had already started down the stairs. The rows of washing machines did not glisten or reflect light. There was no light for them to reflect. This world had become that dark, as black as any hole.
“You guys pulled off a coup turning out the lights,” I said, full of admiration for the SEALs.
“Not just the lights,” Illych said. “We sent two teams into the military sector. Alpha Team took out their broadcast engine. Tango just knocked out their shield generator. Considering all the trouble these guys have caused, we wanted to shut them down for good.”
Philips and I ran into the street. Seen through the night-for-day lens, the scene had no more depth than an old black-and-white photograph. I saw it in the ghostly blue-white. I could see details clearly enough. I could see clearly enough to know I was staring into an empty street. I looked both ways, then switched to heat vision to make sure that no one was hiding. The walls gave off no heat, but tanks, men, and weapons all had heat signatures. The block ahead of us was clean.
“When are you pulling out?” Illych asked.
“We’re not,” I said. “We’re going to hang around until the Green Machine arrives.” The “Green Machine” was a Corps name for the Army.
I didn’t really need my visor to know that the coast was clear. Mogat soldiers typically did not wear armor. They would have needed torches to see anything. With the power out, Mogatopolis was nothing more than a big specking cave. I felt the excitement of a battle won. We had the advantage now. We had better armor. Once the Army arrived, we would have comparable numbers and better equipment.
“Harris, what are you talking about?” Illych asked.
I ran through an alley using a building for cover, not that anyone would be able to see me without some kind of vision enhancement. The tanks and trucks had spotlights—big specking deal. I’d see the spotlights a mile away.
“The second wave,” I said. I stopped and parked myself against a wall. “They’re sending the Army in to occupy…”
“What are you doing?” Philips broke in.
“Quiet,” I snapped.
“Harris, the Army isn’t coming. The Confederate Arms Navy is engaging the Mogat Fleet right now. Once we chew through their Fleet, the Mogats will be landlocked. All we need to do is pin them down on this rock for another two hours and…”
“No Army?” I asked.
“Why would they send in the Army? Now that the power is out, everything down here is going to revert back to elemental gas.”
“Distilled shit gas,” I whispered. The briefing officer had told us that everything down here was made of the stuff.
“They’ll all be dead,” Illych said.
“We’ll all be dead,” I repeated. I felt stunned. I felt like I had received a knee in the groin. This was pain and confusion that even the combat reflex could not mask. I thought of Samson, blinded and captured by the Philistines. In a final show of faith, he killed himself and the Philistines by toppling their temple down upon his head.
Only Samson volunteered to pull the temple on his own head. And then it struck me: the Unified Authority might have been God; but the clones were the sacrifices, not the high priests. Those speckers were offering me up to die.
“Harris, you have to get out of there,” Illych said.
“And go where?” I asked. “Where the speck are we supposed to go?” Even if we made it topside and boarded the transports, who would pick us up? If it were not for my programming, I would have shoved the muzzle of my M27 in my mouth and pulled the trigger. I felt numb. I felt dizzy. The Unified Authority had betrayed us. I should have known they would. And by leading my men into the trap, I had betrayed them.
“Master Sarge, what is going on?” Philips said.
“The battleships are still up there,” Illych said. “If you make it up before they leave, they’ll take you.”
“No, they won’t,” I said. “They came to kill Mogats, not rescue Marines.”
“Harris, you need to hurry,” Illych said. “Without their shields, those Mogat ships won’t last long against the fleet.”
We were a distraction, I thought. They sent us here to clear the way for the SEALs. That was all they wanted us for, and now we’ve outlived our purpose. “Those specking assholes. Ah, shit,” I said as I rested my gun on a the ground. “Bloody hell.”
“Harris, you need to get your men topside,” Illych said.
“Harris, what the speck are you doing?” Philips asked.
So we are still the bullet. We are still a commodity. Even if I can lead my men out, why should I? This will just happen again. Even as I considered this, I knew that I had to try to escape. They programmed survival instinct into my being. They also gave me aggression, and I found reason enough to live in the idea of revenge.
“How long do we have?” I asked Illych. I had picked up my gun and begun running to the next corner. Philips remained a pace behind me, gun ready.
“Till the Navy leaves or the whole city reverts back into elemental gas?” Illych asked. “You have two hours until everything down here melts. The Navy will be long gone by then.”
“Harris, can you get to a transport?” the low resonant voice of Ray Freeman asked. I had forgotten about Freeman.
While we were back on the transport, I’d suggested that he listen in on my communications. Back then I said that he should listen in so he could keep an eye on our troop movements. “Freeman?” I asked.
“Are you pinned down?” Freeman asked.
“I’ve got to go,” I said, more for Freeman than Illych, though they both heard me. I was so angry and ashamed that I could barely think. The combat reflex protected me against fear, not humiliation. I had to get my men out. I had to get them to a transport. I knew this, but my actions were as mechanical as my breathing and heartbeat. All that ran through my head was anger and embarrassment.
“Semper fi, my ass,” I whispered. I was a faithful servant to an unfaithful master. I was a fool. If I made it off this planet, I would turn my back on the Unified Authority once and for all. My programming might prevent me from fighting against bastards like Brocius, but I did not have to die as one of their pawns.
“Get moving,” Illych shouted, before signing off. Freeman said nothing. He had offered to help; now he was already on his way to the transport.
I changed frequencies to call to the colonel commanding the operation. This asshole must have had more enemies than friends. He was the highest-ranking sacrifice sent out here to die. Some general back in Washington, DC, had probably asked, whom should we screw on this one, and everyone agreed on this jerk. I should have known something was wrong when they sent an asshole colonel to command a sixty-thousand-man landing. Where was the boatload of generals trying to claim the victory for themselves?
Now that I thought about it, I should have spotted the whole plan from the start. The combined Navy only had sixty-two self-broadcasting ships. Sixty-two ships would not have enough space for all of the men and machines. Then I thought about the elevator shafts. It would take days to funnel one million men through those shafts.
“What is it, Harris?” the colonel asked.
“Call the men back to the transports, sir,” I said.
“What are you talking about?” the colonel asked. “Hold your position.”
“We’ve accomplished our mission,” I said.
“We’re supposed to hold our position until reinforcements arrive,” the colonel said.
“There won’t be any reinforcements,” I said. “The Army’s not coming.”
“You’re full of…” The colonel paused. “Harris, give me a minute.”
“We don’t have a minute,” I said, but the colonel was already gone.
I switched frequencies so that my entire platoon could hear me. “Boys, we’re in trouble.” I did not have time to explain everything. I would not have explained it all, even if I had. They would need whatever fight they had in them.
“We need to make a run for the transports,” I said. “When I give you the signal, fire everything you have at the Mogats in front of your building; then when I clear you, run out the back door and keep running. Do you read me, Marines?”
“What about the ones in the back?” Evans asked.
“I’ve got them,” I said. “You just start shooting when you get my signal.”
“Where are you?” Greer asked.
“I’m two blocks out the ass of your building. You hit them from your side, and I’ll hit them from back here.”
“There are too many,” Greer said.
“We don’t need to kill them, they’re already blind,” I said. “Just run on my command and keep running until you are topside and harnessed into your transport. You got that, speck-sucker? That is an order.”
It was in their programming. These boys could not disobey a direct order.
Peering out from behind a wall, I saw that the street was filled with enemy soldiers and tanks. Most of the tanks had searchlights. The trucks had headlights, and the soldiers held flashlights. Soldiers sat on the turrets of the Rumsfelds shining spotlights down into the street. Foot soldiers milled around the beams of the lights, talking and drinking. They looked confused, not blind. These men could not have realized the extent of what had happened to their world. They had the enemy trapped, but no one had given them their next orders. Without their power grid, they could not communicate with their commanders.
Philips and I crouched behind a wall and watched the Mogats for a moment. “Hold this,” I whispered, handing the case with the gas cartridges to Philips. I was wearing my helmet. I could have screamed the words at the top of my lungs and the Mogats would not have heard me, but I whispered. It was a natural reflex. There might have been ten thousand Mogats around us.
Philips took the case without saying a word. He was not afraid, but the smart-ass style had run out of him. He was serious now. He wanted to walk away from this battle with his skin intact, and he wanted to make sure the other members of the platoon went with him.
I leaned my M27 against the wall, then pulled the canister shooter off my shoulder. I broke it open at the hinge and loaded a canister of noxium gas in its chamber.
Once I fired the shooter, it would take three minutes for the gas to dissipate. I aimed the shooter so that it would spit the canister deep into the Mogats’ ranks and fired. The muzzle of the shooter did not flash like a gun, it simply emitted a quiet belch. The darkness remained total as the canister spiraled through the air and struck a tank no more than twenty feet from the back door of the building.
There was a crash and a moment of silence, followed by screaming and yelling. They wanted to run, but they could not. Panic and death came too quickly.
I had my second cartridge loaded before the first even hit the ground. This time I aimed at the Mogats in the rear, the ones closest to Philips and me. I fired again.
The Mogats had already begun to panic when the second canister dropped. By now they were screaming in pain as well as panic. The men near spotlights might have seen the gas seeping in around them, but most only heard the shouting caused by an undefined death. I fired the third canister right in the middle of the crowd. Each canister unleashed enough gas to cover hundreds of square feet.
Someone else might have described the scene as pandemonium, but to me it spoke of entropy. The Mogat troops fell into disarray from which they would never again organize. They ran, they panicked, they dissolved into the street.
On the other side of the building, the other Mogats must have heard the noise. They must have wondered what had happened. I waited a few more moments before radioing up to Evans. I wanted to make sure the noxium gas evaporated before he came running out.
“Light ’em up!” I shouted at Evans over the interLink.
In the street before us, all was still and quiet now. Any Mogat who was going to escape had escaped. The rest had died. I could see the bodies by using my night-for-day vision. The dead men still looked human, more or less. The bodies, strewn along the ground like toys thrown in a pile, had limbs and hair. Their faces had no more distinct features than a giant blister; and they would squash like overripe melons if you stepped on them. Given another hour, the bodies would burst under their own weight.
Quick flashes of light that reminded me of sheet lightning broke and faded on the other side of the building. Evans and his squad had begun firing their rockets at the tanks. The flashes followed each other quickly, with less than a second’s separation. The audio equipment in my helmet picked up the explosions and played them as ambient noise.
The rockets made a sizzling sound when they launched. Their explosions reverberated and echoed through the dark city. I imagined millions of civilians around me, scared, huddled like mice in their apartments, hearing the explosions and praying to whatever god the Mogats believed in for the battle to end. I thought about those three boys who had tried to stand up to my platoon with a knife. I spared them. Big specking deal. I’d bought them a few more hours and a more painful way to die.
For the Mogats, the universe was ending. They would all die. I could not save them if I wanted to. I might not be able to save any of my men. I might not be able to save my own sorry carcass, not that it deserved to be saved. Friend, foe, soldier, civilian…if we did not escape this very moment, we would all die as one. The men, women, and children would certainly die. They were innocents, but they could not be saved.
Exploding rockets and firing cannons make different sounds. To the untrained ear, it all sounds like a big bang. Once you’ve been in combat, you learn to listen for pitch, intensity, duration, and volume. I heard the sound of the tanks returning fire.
“Evacuate the building. Now!” I yelled. “Now! Now! Now!” Without shields, those shells would tear right through the building. In another minute, the entire building would come down.
“They got Evans,” Thomer called back.
“Out of there!” I screamed. The planet was dissolving, the building was crumbling, and Thomer was taking roll. “Move it!”
“Are there Mogats out the back?” Thomer shouted. I could tell he was running. He sounded winded.
“The street is clear!” I yelled.
I’d started to say something else, when the colonel’s voice sounded over the interLink. He shouted, “Everyone, fall back to the transports. Anyone who does not make it back to the transports in fifteen minutes will be left behind.”
Had he somehow reached Washington or just gotten the lowdown from an officer in the Confederate Arms Fleet? Somehow, he now knew the truth.
Marines understand exactly what it means when they receive the order to fall back. It means that your invasion has gone to shit. Fall back means that you cannot hold your position, and the situation has become critical. It means that the enemy is on your heels. It means stragglers will be captured or killed. Marines are trained to lead the way into battle. They don’t much care for the order to fall back.
Of all the Marines that landed on the Mogat planet, only my platoon had begun its retreat when the colonel gave the order to fall back. The rockets my guys fired from the building crippled a lot of Mogat hardware, and my gas had opened a route for them to escape.
The back door of the apartment building flew open, and out ran my platoon, or what remained of it. A twenty-man stampede. They ran straight ahead, straight into the clutter of bodies that filled the street. By this time the noxium had largely accomplished its purpose. Without so much as a glance at the ground, Sergeant Greer stepped into a corpse. He should have tripped over that dead soldier. Instead, he kicked through him.
Philips and I saw the scene from two blocks up the street. Our boys dashed out of the building. Moments later, another platoon followed. They could follow us if they liked, but I would not waste time waiting for them.
I jumped into the street, making a pinwheel motion with my arm to direct my men on. “Philips, take the lead,” I yelled. He knew the way to the elevator station. I had shown it to him in the Laundromat.
“You heard him,” Philips called over the interLink. With the platoon under fire, the lowest-ranking man took the lead. “This way…now move it!”
I had just joined Thomer at the back of the pack when the first of the Targs rounded a corner ahead of us. Its spotlight cut through the darkness. Its beam looked as hard and pale as a marble pillar. The light never found us; and inside the tank, the driver only saw what his spotlight showed him.
A moment later, one of our grenadiers fired a rocket at the Targ. After the explosion, the jagged remains of the turret looked like an enormous crown. Small fires danced on the top. I saw spotlights and headlights cruising back and forth on the streets around us. Those tanks should have had radars; but for some reason, the drivers were hunting for us by sight.
By this time we had almost reached the elevator station. The road we were on came to a dead end at the door of the station—which towered above everything around it. The elevator station reached all the way to the ceiling, a hundred feet above us. With the power down, I could now see a rough rock ceiling instead of a sky overhead.
Three Rumsfelds rolled out onto the street a thousand feet behind us. Their searchlights sniffed along the ground until they located Marines from the other platoon. Machine guns opened fire.
“Light ’em!” I yelled over the interLink.
My last remaining grenadiers spun and fired rockets at the tanks. One actually hit his target. The other two missed. At a thousand feet, a shot from the hip was too much to ask. They fired again and hit a second tank. Seeing the wreckage of the tanks on either side of it, the third Rumsfeld ambled for safety.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Philips called back to me. He had already reached the door of the elevator station. He stood in the doorway, letting other men pass him, his M27 pointing up the street. “Now they know we’re here.”
My training told me to stay on the street and clear the way for the other Marines. My programming ordered me to survive. The Mogats used Targ Tanks like wolves. They dodged in and out of alleys and streets, picking at groups of Marines, herding them away from the elevator station. There must have been thousands of tanks rumbling around the city. I might get some of them, but I would never get all of them. The most I could accomplish now was saving my men. By waiting and trying to save another platoon, I would only endanger the few men I had left.
I ran in the door of the elevator station and turned to see the street. I saw searchlights, tanks, and Marines in retreat. “Philips, Thomer, get them topside.”
There were no stairs in the elevator station. With the power down, the elevators would no longer work. Since we did not come with jetpacks, the only way up was using ropes. Fortunately, the magnetic link between our armor and the rappel cords would make the climb easier. Any man who could not climb those hundred feet would stay behind and die.
With the power out, I did not know if the gravity chute would work. All I could do was hope that it ran on a natural convection created by the distilled shit gas. On the other hand, I did not want to know what the gas might do to a transport.
A searchlight shone across the entrance of the elevator station. It was from a Rumsfeld at least a hundred yards away. The light formed a blinding circle that scoured the road outside the station, then shone on the door. I stepped back and hid behind a wall as the light played past me.
I looked back at the men. A few had started the climb. Most stood in front of the shaft, waiting their turn. “Any of you have rockets?” I called.
One of the men came over and handed me a launcher and three rockets. They were small, no bigger than my fist.
“Thanks,” I said. “Now get topside.”
Outside, the Rumsfeld moved toward the door of the station. I fired a rocket into it, and the tank somersaulted forward and landed on its turret.
I looked back again. All but three of my men had started up the shaft. Philips, Greer, and Thomer were still down, but I knew they could handle the climb. Seeing Philips grab a cord, I had to smile. We were going to make it out of this shit hole. More than half of my platoon would survive this mission.
A scattering of Marines saw the explosion and headed in our direction. Spotlights roved up and down the side streets. Gunfire and tank engines rumbled in my audio. I started to head toward the cords; but just as I did, I caught a glimpse of something that made me freeze.
At first I thought the Mogats had turned the power back on. In the distance, the civilian sector glowed brightly. The light that filled the sky was so bright that the lens in my visor switched from night-for-day to standard tactical. Tint shields clouded my visor when I looked directly into the glare.
The light did not come from the city, it came from behind it. It wasn’t just light. It wasn’t like the glow of a searchlight or even a thousand searchlights.
The light above the city constantly changed hues and pattern as if the reds, yellows, and blues separated and remixed with each other. Patterns of color rose like smoke out of the glow. It looked something like the aurora borealis, only enormous sparks flashed in it. For a moment I thought the light might be coming from the city itself. Maybe light happened when buildings made of distilled shit gas decomposed; but I did not have time to waste reasoning it out.
“Harris, you seeing this?” Freeman called over the interLink.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“One floor up,” Freeman said. “You better get climbing.”
“You can see that light?” I asked. I took one last glance out the door. The light had a slow gelatinous property about it. It seemed to seep over the city like viscous oil. As soon as I turned from the door, the night-for-day lens resumed in my visor. The glow from that strange light had not yet reached the elevator station, but it would soon.
I ran to the elevator shaft, grabbed a cord, and started up.
The shaft looked like a gigantic tunnel turned vertical. Dozens of rappel cords dangled from the top.
“Thomer, where are you?” I called over the interLink.
“In the elevator station.” Thomer said.
“Can you see any transports?” I asked.
“There’s a transport just outside,” Thomer said.
“I requisitioned us that one,” Freeman said.
“What happened to the pilot?” I asked.
Freeman did not answer.
The area inside the shaft would have been black as coal if not for the glow that started to pour into it. It gushed in like a flood of water, shining on the opposite wall. I had never known a man could climb as quickly as I now scaled my way up that shaft.
“Load the men in the transport,” I called to Thomer.
“They’re in,” Thomer said.
“And you’re in?” I asked.
Thomer did not answer.
“Get in the transport!” I yelled.
I looked up to see how much farther I had to go, but I did not pause. I had another twenty feet. Below me, the light in the shaft became blinding. It was like looking into the sun. The tint shields in my visor blocked out some of the brightness, but when I tried to look up again, I found that my eyes would not adjust to the darkness.
I looked back down. That was when I saw it. There was a creature in that viscous light. Whatever it was, the creature I saw was nearly as bright as the light around it. It looked like a six-foot, canary yellow smudge in a field of glare that had the startling silver-white clarity of an electrical spark. I only saw it for a moment, and I mostly concentrated on the two silver-black eyes. They were too large for that head, the size of my fists, and they seemed to be made of smoky black chrome. For a brief moment my eyes met that creature’s eyes and I saw no pity in him. Then I saw that the creature held a rifle of some kind.
“Oh, shit,” I moaned, and managed to climb even faster.
A bolt of white light flew past me. It might have been some sort of white laser, if there can be such a thing. It might or might not have been any more powerful than our particle beams, but the bolt cut through the cords around me and struck a wall. The spot it struck glowed white and orange, and distilled shit gas gushed out of it like blood from a bullet hole.
The men above me must have seen the shot, too. One of them leaned into the shaft, lowered an M27, and fired a continuous ten-second burst. “I can’t hit it!” Freeman yelled, but he did not say if his bullets missed or failed.
Two sets of arms grabbed me and pulled me out of the shaft. Philips and Thomer pulled me to my feet as Freeman dropped a grenade down the shaft. We sprinted out of the elevator station. Outside the station, the strange, gelatinous light continued to creep toward us. It was less than a mile away and moving at a slow pace. Running as fast as I could to the transport, I did not have time to stop and check.
“Can anybody fly this thing?” Thomer asked, as we rushed the ramp.
Freeman did not bother answering. He climbed the ladder and entered the cockpit with all the dexterity of a spider checking its web. A moment later the boosters sounded. We were already off the ground when the doors at the rear of the kettle banged shut.
I looked around the kettle and tore off my helmet. “Get harnessed,” I growled at my men. From here on out, we had to rely on luck, Freeman, and God. Of the three, Freeman was the only one who had not abandoned us so far. Leaving my helmet on the bench along the wall, I crossed the deck and climbed up to the cockpit.
Freeman sat at the controls, holding the yoke with one hand and hitting switches with the other. Through the windshield, I could see the landscape ahead of us. The tide of light continued to move toward us. I did not see tanks or gunships or armies moving inside it. Then Freeman rotated the ship toward the gravity chute.
Staring out of the cockpit, I saw Marines running out of elevator stations and transports taking off. We might not be the only ones who made it out, if we made it out. There was still the question about the gravity chute.
Freeman slowed down as he approached the chute the way Mogat pilots did. “Do you know how it works?” he asked.
“You just fly into it,” I said. “It’s like an elevator.”
We approached the chute so slowly that we seemed to inch toward it. I felt like we would simply drop. And then the updraft caught us, and we rose. I peered over the nose of the transport. I saw another transport below us; and then I saw the strange light spreading over everything below.
“Did you see that thing that shot at me,” I asked, then added, “in the elevator shaft?”
Freeman shook his head.
“It wasn’t human,” I said.
I could not shake the image of those metallic eyes watching me as I climbed up the dark elevator shaft. For the first time since I entered the Marines, I had felt real fear, mortal fear, fear undiluted by the delirious effects of the combat reflex. Even the hormone in my blood had not kept me calm. And now, standing behind Freeman, I realized that I was still trembling.
We rose more quickly up the gravity chute than I had expected. Whatever was happening in the Mogat city below had accelerated the natural convection. It was probably consuming thousands of Marines and millions of Mogats as well. Glare as bright as sunlight shone up the shadowy length of the chute. Rainbow colors spiraled on the rock just below us. At some point, the light faded, and a minute later we emerged on the dark surface of the planet. There was no hint of whatever was happening below.
Freeman flew us out of that hollowed-out mountain and straight up, out of the atmosphere. A few moments later, we received the message I think we both doubted would come: “U.A. Transport, this is the battleship Sakura. Please prepare to dock.”