I looked around the cabin of the transport. We called this area the “kettle” because it was shaped like a teakettle and had thick metal with no windows. The Unified Authority built these sturdy birds for durability, not comfort. We would fly the transport to a self-broadcasting cruiser, and the cruiser would carry us to the farthest arm of the galaxy.
They packed a hundred Marines in this kettle, two platoons’ worth. Since we were not flying into battle this time, most of the men wore Charlie service uniforms. A few of the veterans came in armor, preferring the air-conditioned comfort of the undersuit to the climate in the transport. I had all of my noncommissioned officers wear armor. Ava came wearing her armor as well. Counting Ava and me, there were forty people in armor. That gave her a reasonable chance of fitting in. Even so, I had her sit in a crowded corner so that no one would notice her short arms. I sat beside her.
Thomer dropped down to my right. We were on the bench that lined the wall of the cabin. We kept our helmets on. Thomer sat on one side of me, Ava sat on the other.
“What’s wrong with him?” Thomer asked on a private frequency.
“Who?” I asked.
“Rooney.”
“Rooney?” I asked.
“The guy to your left,” said Thomer.
The gear in our helmets broadcast virtual dog tags, which showed on our visors. Ava’s armor identified her as Corporal Mike Rooney.
She did look nervous, sitting absolutely still with her hands primly folded on her lap, her back ramrod straight. Had he not known we were a load of Marines, Thomer might have guessed there was a woman sitting inside that armor.
“He says he’s never been on a transport before,” I said.
“Want me to talk to him?” Thomer asked.
“No, let him work it out on his own,” I said. Then, hoping to change the subject, I added, “You seem peppy today; did they up your prescription?”
“Speck you, sir,” Thomer said. “We’re out of specking Clonetown, and I’m back in combat armor.
“You sailed with the Scutum-Crux Fleet before, didn’t you, sir?”
“Yeah, this will be my second tour,” I said.
“Did you ever land on Terraneau?” Thomer asked.
“I never did, but I hear it’s a nice place,” I said, recalling my conversation with General Smith. “At least it used to be nice. There’s no telling what condition the Avatari have left it in.”
The first major battle of the Avatari invasion took place on Terraneau. Four years ago, the aliens spread one of their ion curtains around the planet, and no one had seen or heard anything since then. Presumably, the atmosphere could still sustain life. It occurred to me that the Pentagon could have lied about the message from Terraneau. That would be one way to solve the clone problem—a quick lie, a hearty salute, and a ride to some distant corner of the galaxy. The pieces fit, but I believed Smith.
The bastard didn’t even tell us what the message was. It might have been a call for help or a planetwide obituary. Hell, for all I knew, they might have been calling out for a pizza.
We were expected to establish a beachhead on the planet. If we found aliens there, we were supposed to attack; and once we liberated the planet, we would declare martial law. Smith made it sound simple.
“What do you think we’ll find when we get there?” Thomer asked.
“It’s not going to be like New Copenhagen,” I said. “We know how to unsleeve the planet. Once the ion curtain is out of the way, we should be able to hunt the aliens down with fighters and battleships. They won’t be able to fight back if we hit them from space.”
Borrowing a trick from Smith’s playbook, I made it sound simple.
“Hit the Avatari from space, that sounds good,” Thomer said.
Thomer was part of a select group who knew the term “Avatari.” Only a handful of politicians, the top brass at the Pentagon, and a few survivors from New Copenhagen knew the name.
The transport had a top speed of one hundred thousand miles per hour. It lumbered along at about three thousand miles per hour until it left the atmosphere, then picked up speed as it flew out to dock with the self-broadcasting cruiser. The cruiser would take us to Scutum-Crux space, where we would rendezvous with the U.A.N. Kamehameha, an old fighter carrier that served as the flagship of the Scutum-Crux Fleet.
We’d been in the air for less than thirty minutes when the pilot of the transport gave the signal to prepare for docking with the cruiser. For Ava, those thirty minutes must have been a long and lonely time. Not taking a chance on one of my Marines striking up a conversation with her, I had crippled the interLink interface in her armor. She could listen in on open-channel communications, but she could only speak to me. The last thing I needed was for my men to hear a woman’s voice over the interLink.
“Are we there? Have we reached Terraneau?” Ava asked.
“Not even close. We’ve reached the ship that will take us to the ship that will take us to Terraneau.”
“Harris, I need to use the restroom,” she said.
“There’s a tube in your …” I started.
“Um, my plumbing doesn’t exactly match up with the equipment,” she said, sounding irritated.
“Speck, I didn’t think about that.”
“Honey, you seemed pretty interested in my plumbing last night,” she said, sounding more brassy than ever.
“I wasn’t thinking about how you matched up with the armor,” I said. “You’re going to have to hold it.”
“Don’t they put bathrooms on these planes?”
“There’s a head, but everyone’s going to notice if you go in wearing combat armor.” The booth-styled bathrooms they built into these transports were too tight for use in combat armor. I explained this to Ava. She didn’t like it, but she didn’t argue the point.
A few minutes later, I heard the hiss of booster engines and the muffled creak of the landing gear as we touched down. There was a loud clank, and the rear doors of the transport slowly ground apart, revealing the ramp that led out of the ship. I removed my helmet and headed down the ramp.
A team of officers greeted me at the bottom. We traded salutes and formalities—in military circles discipline must always be maintained—and a nameless, faceless, prick of a natural-born asked me to follow him to the bridge.
I told him that some of my men were sick and asked if they could go to the head aboard the cruiser. When he asked why they didn’t just use the facilities on the transport, I explained that they were in combat armor and that settled it. I ordered all of my noncoms to go. Ava was a bright girl; she’d find a way to get herself in and out of the stall without being noticed.
Having arranged for my men to use the head, the officer escorted me off the transport. Before we left the landing dock, I turned back and watched Corporal Rooney bringing up the rear as my noncoms left for the head. I could only imagine what they were saying over the interLink. Most of them would be indignant about being sent to the head.
Across the bay, I saw our four transports lined up in a tight row and neatly stowed for this journey. This was a cruiser, the smallest of capital ships. Our four transports filled the landing area to capacity.
“Captain Pershing wanted me to bring you up to the bridge,” the ensign said, as we left. He was a short, slight man with thinning blond hair. He walked fast, pumping his skinny legs in overdrive but taking short, mincing strides.
“Is this call business or social?” I asked.
“He didn’t say,” the ensign answered without looking at me.
I had never spent any time on a cruiser. The ship had narrow halls and low ceilings. Equipment filled every nook and niche. Squeezing past sailors on my way to the lift, I felt more than a little claustrophobic.
This scow had both a broadcast engine and a nuclear reactor; it only made sense that it would fly hot. The cooling system succeeded only in keeping the temperature to a low bake around the engines, but then they built this ship more than fifty years ago, in an era when Congress feared an imminent attack. The engineers back then sent ships into space the moment they knew they could fly.
“Aren’t you hot?” I asked the ensign.
“I’m warm,” he admitted, still sounding haughty. “You get used to it.”
As we entered the lift to go to the bridge, I saw an engineer, a natural-born seaman first class wearing a greasy smock covered with sweat stains. His face was blood-blister red and damp with perspiration. Normally clones did this kind of work.
When the doors closed behind us, the ensign and I stood in silence, each of us pretending not to notice the other. The lift started a slow climb, and a blessed gush of cold air flowed out from the vents. A moment later, the doors opened, and we stepped on to the bridge.
“Well, Captain Harris, I’m glad you decided to come up,” Captain Pershing said as he met us off the lift.
“I appreciate the invitation, sir,” I lied. There’s a big difference between captains in the Navy and captains in every other branch. A Navy captain is the equivalent of a colonel in the other branches. Even with my promotion to captain, Pershing outranked me.
“Tell me, Captain, have you ever been on a bridge during a broadcast?”
“Yes, sir. A few times,” I said.
“On a cruiser?”
“On a fighter carrier,” I said.
“So you’re a virgin.” Pershing grinned. “You’ve never seen a broadcast until you’ve seen one from the bridge of a cruiser.”
“I would think it’s all the same once the shields go up,” I said.
“Cruisers don’t have tint shields, Captain,” Pershing said, as one of his men handed me a pair of thick wraparound goggles with black-tinted glass.
The sailor said, “You’ll want to put these on before we broadcast.”
My helmet had tint shields, but I had left it back on the transport. I would have preferred my helmet over goggles. Hesitating for just a moment, I slung the strap behind my head and let the eyepieces rest on my forehead.
“Right, well, Captain Harris, if you could excuse me for a moment, the captain of the cruiser always directs the broadcast himself.”
Pershing turned and drifted back into place in the center of the bridge. On other ships, bridges looked something like business offices with computer stations located around the deck. On this smaller ship, the bridge was more like a tiny movie theater with a window into space instead of a screen.
“Lieutenant Kim, do you have the coordinates logged into the broadcast computer?” Pershing asked.
“Aye, Captain.”
Turning to his intercom, Pershing asked, “Landing bay, have you secured the outer hatch?”
“Hatch secured, aye.”
Pershing said, “Lieutenant Kim, is the broadcast generator charged?”
“Generator charged, aye.”
“Seal the hatch to the bridge,” Pershing ordered.
“Aye, aye. Bridge hatch is sealed, sir.” I guessed this was to prevent anyone from walking in without goggles.
“Goggle up,” Pershing said to no one in particular. He pulled his goggles down over his eyes. I followed his example. The half-inch-thick rubber rim around the goggles formed a tight seal, blocking my peripheral vision, and the bridge vanished from my view.
Pershing must have stepped beside me because when I next heard his voice it sounded close by. He asked me, “Have you ever been in Washington, DC, during a New Year’s Eve celebration, Captain?” Then he barked out, “Initiate broadcast.”
I had been in Washington for New Year’s Eve, but I was on duty, so I missed his meaning. Then the fireworks began, and I understood.
They called the electric fields created by broadcast engines “anomalies.” I had seen traces of anomalies through the heavily tinted windows of fighter carriers and spaceliners. I knew anomalies were bright, but I had never appreciated how bright.
What happened next I could only describe as chaos. Somewhere ahead of me, a pulsing silver-white circle appeared. I hoped it was outside the viewport, but with the dark goggles over my eyes, I could not be sure. The circle spread in an unsteady jolt, then seemed to explode, sending jagged tendrils in every direction.
Only a physicist could grasp the workings of broadcast technology, but I knew enough to understand that there was enough electricity dancing on the outside of the ship to incinerate the entire crew. The lightning would coat the hull with highly charged particles that could be translated into some kind of wave and transferred instantaneously across the galaxy. Judging by the sheer violence of the anomaly, I suspected that the broadcast equipment on this cruiser had been designed for a larger boat.
The anomaly around the cruiser began at the bow of the ship and wound around the hull like an electric skein. With my goggles on, I saw only lightning, creating the illusion that it might be inside the ship. I felt a stab of fear, then the broadcast ended, and everything went dark.
“You can remove your goggles now, Captain,” Captain Pershing said.
Feeling unsteady, I clamped my trembling fingers on the goggles and pulled them from my eyes.
“Isn’t that something?” Pershing asked. “You never get used to it.” He sounded so damned excited.
“Specking hell,” I whispered, still feeling jitters in my muscles.
I had not meant for anyone to hear this, but Pershing did and laughed. “Harris, perhaps you would join me in my stateroom. It’s going to be a while before the Kamehameha arrives. We might as well get to know each other.”
Pipes and cables ran along the ceiling of Captain Pershing’s stateroom. He had a dented metal relic for a desk wedged into a space so small that books falling from his shelves would almost certainly hit him. At least the room was bright. Two high-lumens light fixtures dangled from the ceiling, projecting glare so bright that it made me squint.
Apparently, Pershing believed we would chat like old friends. He pulled a chair up beside his desk for me, then threaded his way through the narrow alley between his deck and the wall. He slid his chair out as far as he could, then ducked beneath a bookshelf and squeezed his legs into the tight gap under his desk. Once safely seated, he said, “I’ll tell you up front, Harris, Fleet Command showed me your orders. Some duty you got there. Play your cards right, and you could end up the most powerful man in the galaxy.”
Having known Pershing for about five minutes, I gave him the politic response to any statement by a superior officer. “Yes, sir.”
“You don’t seem excited about it,” Pershing noted.
“Are we speaking man-to-man, or am I a clone Marine speaking to his superior?”
“The gloves are off,” Pershing said.
“I’ve never traveled on a self-broadcasting cruiser before, but every other self-broadcaster I’ve ridden could go wherever it wanted,” I said. “Is there a problem with your broadcast computer?”
“What’s your point?” Pershing asked.
“We could have broadcast in right beside the Kamehameha ,” I said.
Pershing’s expression hardened into something a little less friendly. “True enough.”
“So Fleet Command asked you to stage this little soiree,” I guessed.
Pershing leaned back in his chair and laughed. “Captain Harris, you’re a bright man. Admiral Brocius warned me you were smart.”
I did not respond. I had to play this interview just right, passing myself off as cautious instead hostile. If I came across as spoiling for a fight, Pershing might report back to Brocius that I was too big a risk. If I played it too polite, he might suspect a hidden agenda.
Pershing waited several seconds for me to speak, then added, “Okay, yes, this conversation may have been authorized on some level. Admiral Brocius is keeping an eye on you. Do you blame him?”
I still said nothing.
“You do realize that they’re giving you command of the largest fleet in the galaxy?”
“The largest fleet in the galaxy,” I repeated. “That’s one way of putting it. Here’s another, they’re sending me to the far end of the galaxy with no way to return.”
“Is that really how you see it, Harris?” Pershing asked. “You’ll have three times as many battleships as the Earth Fleet.”
True enough. All of the six galactic arms had three fleets; but in the Scutum-Crux Arm, the Unified Authority combined those fleets into one.
“Are they giving me any self-broadcasting ships …you know, for shuttling in supplies?”
Pershing shook his head. “It’s not in the cards.”
“Are they planning on reestablishing a broadcast connection between Terraneau and Earth?”
“No,” Pershing said in a quiet voice, making no attempt to mask his irritation.
“So I’ll have big ships, plenty of guns, and a lot of empty space.”
“There’s always Terraneau,” Pershing pointed out.
“If we can’t break Terraneau away from the aliens, we’re screwed,” I said.
Pershing sat silent for a moment. In former times, before the civil war and the Avatari invasion, the commanding officer of a scow like this cruiser would barely have been considered an officer at all. Some commanders didn’t even think cruisers qualified as capital ships. Pershing had a shabby little office with pipes running along the ceiling and battered furniture, a stateroom fit for an officer with a dead-end career.
But times had changed. He was the commander of a self-broadcasting naval ship, a scarce commodity indeed. Officer country on this scow may have been dingy, but the men who inhabited it had friends in high places.
“You’ve got yourself a fleet, and I have no doubt you’ll recapture Terraneau, Captain.” Pershing said this with the voice that officers use when they want to signal the end of an interview.
I thought about offering to swap places with Pershing—he could have the gigantic fleet and the strategic planet, and I would take the dilapidated cruiser; but I knew better. I had already pushed him too far and, despite his chatty demeanor, his interest in me was anything but friendly.
Some Pentagon genius must have choked when he saw the logistics. The Navy originally intended to ship the entire population of Clonetown to Scutum-Crux in one mass transfer. Who came up with the idea of trusting thirty thousand trained killing machines to behave themselves as you shipped them out to nowhere?
The plans changed. Instead of shipping us off like Marines, the Pentagon transferred the inmates of Clonetown the way prison guards transfer inmates—with limited contact and in small groups. Granted, they did not place us in shackles, but we were confined to our transports. Pershing’s cruiser served as the prison bus, hauling us in increments of four hundred men at a time.
Captain Pershing’s shuttle service ran in both directions. After dropping us off with the fleet, his orders had him loading up natural-borns and returning them to Earth. The Navy intended to complete the entire transfer four hundred men at a time, but I did not think the sailors out in Scutum-Crux would be happy with this slow-trickle approach. The natural-born officers coming back to Earth had just spent the last four years of their lives running laps around a tiny planet in a nondescript corner of space, they’d be in a rush to head home. The problem was, there were so many of them.
The Kamehameha was an old Expansion-class fighter carrier, making it the smallest of the thirty-six fighter carriers in the SC Fleet. She carried an eight-thousand-man crew, nearly a thousand of whom were natural-borns. She also carried a complement of two thousand Marines, almost two hundred of whom were natural-born officers. It would take Pershing’s cruiser three trips just to bring home the natural-borns on the Kamehameha.
The other carriers would take longer as they were Perseus-class, vessels twice as big as the Kamehameha. While the basic crew of a Perseus-class fighter carrier was only slightly larger than the crew of an Expansion-class ship, Perseus carriers stowed five times as many Marines and twice as many fighters. All fighter pilots were natural-born.
And the carriers only formed the backbone of the Scutum-Crux Fleet. There were 90 battleships, 150 frigates, 120 cruisers, and sundry communications ships, minelayers and minesweepers, and scouts, and more. At four hundred men per trip, it would take Pershing months to ferry all natural-born officers back to Earth. Maybe years.
Sitting in the windowless kettle of the transport, I did not get a view of the cruiser as we left, nor did I catch a glimpse of the Kamehameha as we approached her. I sat in the darkness of the cabin with my men listening to the noise of the landing gear. The rear doors ground open, and the officer on duty came up the ramp.
I told my NCOs to keep their helmets on, then removed my helmet and went to meet the duty officer. I met him on the ramp, saluted, and said, “Requesting permission to come aboard, sir.”
The officer returned my salute, and said, “Permission granted, Captain.” With that simple ceremony, we took up residence in the Scutum-Crux Fleet.
Rear Admiral Lawrence Thorne met me as I came off the transport. He stood with an entourage of no less than seventeen officers. I counted them. You can tell a lot about an officer by the number of remora fish trailing behind him.
One of the men in Thorne’s group had an anchor and two stars on his collar—the insignia of a master chief petty officer. The rest wore eagles, clusters, and bars. These were high-ranking officers. Thorne stood out because he was the only officer with a star. His single star identified him as a lower-half rear admiral.
I could not help but wonder at the Scutum-Crux Fleet’s drop in stature. Years ago, when I arrived as a young corporal, a five-star admiral had command of the fleet. He was replaced by Rear Admiral Robert Thurston, an upper-half rear admiral with two stars. With Thorne in command, the fleet was down to one star. Once I took over, the stars would be replaced by the silver bars of a captain.
Admiral Thorne and his parade of officers greeted me as I stepped from the ramp. With all those younger officers trailing behind him, Thorne looked like a broken old man. My first impression of him was not good.
I saluted the admiral, and he returned my salute.
“You must be Captain Harris,” he said. “Welcome aboard, Captain.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said.
“Warshaw, see to Captain Harris’s gear.” Thorne called over his shoulder, not looking back when the one noncom in the entourage acknowledged the order. “Your men are in good hands, Captain. In the meantime, why don’t I get you up to speed with your new fleet.”
I turned to look at Warshaw. He was a master chief petty officer, the ranking enlisted man in the Scutum-Crux Fleet. He gave me a smart salute.
He was, of course, a clone, but he stood out because he looked short for a clone. He was as tall as any clone of his make, of course; but he was more squat. He had broad, bulging shoulders and a neck like a bull’s—the earmarks of a dedicated bodybuilder. The forms of his biceps and triceps filled his sleeves.
Warshaw barked rapid-fire orders to his men. Watching the master chief, I got the feeling that he pretty much ran the show on this ship.
“Perhaps we should begin your tour, Captain,” Thorne said to me, interrupting my thoughts.
The docking bay of the Kamehameha was brightly lit, every bit as immaculate as I remembered it, and large enough to hold twenty-five transports. Pershing might have been able to fit half of his cruiser in this docking bay, and the other half in the second docking bay on the other side of the ship.
As we crossed the deck, Thorne said, “Your crew is as competent as any crew that has ever flown this fleet. We spent the last year training them.
“There is an all-clone crew manning the bridge at this very moment. There are enlisted-man crews flying every ship in the fleet. At this point, my officers are acting in an advisory role.”
“Is that so?” I asked, unable to come up with a more interested response.
“You have a full complement of fighter pilots, all clones, all noncommissioned officers. It’s a shame we didn’t experiment with clone pilots earlier, this fleet has never run so smoothly,” the admiral said in a loud voice, sounding like a salesman with a hearing problem. After a moment I realized that he was speaking as much for the benefit of the remora fish entourage as for mine.
He stopped and handed me a folder. “This is your new chain of command. You’ll want to meet with your staff as soon as possible. There are a million things that can go wrong transferring command of a fleet, and I want this transfer to go as smoothly as possible.”
“You sound anxious to get home,” I said in as friendly a voice as I could. I did not want the admiral to know just how bitter I felt.
Thorne was an old man with a wrinkled face and alert blue eyes. He heard my comment and detected the disrespect hidden underneath my words. His smile did not falter, but his eyes narrowed. “Captain, I have officers who would kill to get home. Some of those boys thought they might never see home again. You bet they want to get home.”
Since I had presumably been stationed here for the remainder of my life, I felt less than sympathetic. I took the folder without opening it.
Thorne turned and continued down the hall. He looked to be in his sixties. His hair had gone all white and thinned around the corners. Instead of a beard, he had powdery stubble on his cheeks and chin. Tall but bent by age, he had a stooped back, though his scrawny shoulders were as straight across as lumber.
Admiral Thorne’s entourage followed behind as we left the hangar and entered a corridor that led all the way across the ship. “You once served on this ship, did you not?” Thorne asked.
“I did, sir,” I said.
“Was that under Admiral Klyber? I was assigned to the Scutum-Crux Inner Fleet when Klyber combined the fleets,” Thorne said.
I was on the Kamehameha when Klyber combined the fleets and said so. Then, in an attempt to show polite interest, I asked, “Have you been reassigned to the Earth Fleet?” I knew the Navy would not bother assigning a fossil like Admiral Thorne to another fleet, his career was over.
To his credit, Admiral Thorne did not take well to flattery. “The new Navy has almost as much room for overage officers as it has for clones. They’re putting us both out to pasture.” Then he lowered his voice to a croak, and said, “The difference between my new assignment and yours is that the Pentagon does not see me as a threat.”
I wondered if I had heard him correctly. This was something I had not expected—honesty.
As I sorted this out, Thorne dismissed his entourage. They scattered in every direction like a flock of birds. When two officers lingered, he growled, “Did you need something?”
One man in particular, a captain, looked stunned, even flustered. “But sir, Admiral Brocius said …”
Apparently the soon-to-retire Lawrence Thorne did not give a flying speck what Admiral Brocius might or might not have said. “This is a conference for fleet commanders, Captain Stone. The last time I checked, you weren’t on the invite list.”
“But, sir, Admiral …”
“I give the orders on this ship,” Thorne said in a voice so sarcastic it did not sound like something that could come from an old man’s mouth. He licked his lips. “And here is a direct order, ‘You are dismissed.’”
Stone took a step, stopped, took another step, and stopped again. Confusion showed on his face. He had orders from a higher authority than this broken-down admiral, but the officer who had issued them was too far away for an appeal.
“Don’t make me repeat myself, Stone,” Thorne said, now raising his voice.
Captain Stone turned smartly and strode away; quite the dignified officer. Once he disappeared around a corner, Admiral Thorne said, “Have they told you that rubbish about commanding the most powerful fleet in the galaxy?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Did they tell you the entire arm would be at your command?”
“Something along that line,” I said.
“You do know it’s all bullshit?”
“I had that feeling,” I said.
Thorne laughed. “They tried to sell me the same line. Let me give you the skinny, Harris. Even if everything goes according to plan, you’re still stuck out here a trillion miles from home. You and your men are going to be marooned out here, and nothing is ever going to change that.”
I nodded.
“I bet you think it’s an antisynthetic conspiracy. Do you think they sent you out here because you’re a clone?” Thorne asked. “Somebody told me that you knew you were a Liberator clone and not to worry about the death reflex.” He looked at me, concern showing in his sky-blue eyes.
“I know that I am a clone, sir.”
“You’re a Liberator, right?” He said the term “Liberator” with little emotion. “I’ve gone over your record. Not a bad record. It might even be a great record if they hadn’t flagged you for killing superior officers.
“You’re a Liberator; they should have expected a little fratricide from you. That’s why they discontinued your kind.”
Thorne walked as he spoke, leading me through the halls at a pace so fast that no one could follow us without looking suspicious. “We’re outdated, Captain Harris. I’m old and you’re obsolete. Didn’t they stop making your kind fifty years ago? We’re both marked for extinction.”
The old man chattered nervously. He might have been scared of Liberators, but he might have just been giddy knowing that my arrival meant he could soon go home.
He paused to take a breath or possibly to let me respond. I had nothing to say. When I first saw him, I thought Admiral Thorne was a dried-up relic, a paper-pusher who had been pressed into commanding an inconsequential fleet. I might have been partly right, but there was something more to this man.
“They sold me the same line when I took command of the fleet three years ago. That was right after the aliens sleeved Terraneau. I was fifth in the command chain at the time. Admiral Chen should have taken command, but he had a brother in the Senate. Admiral Long was under him. He had an uncle on the Linear Committee. They both went home. I didn’t have any high-ranking relatives, so they promoted me to admiral and congratulated me for becoming ‘the most powerful man in the galaxy.’
“They had to reach a long way down the chain to find someone they could leave behind,” Thorne said. “That was three years ago.”
I heard what he said, but my attention strayed. Three sailors walked past us down the hall, and I could have sworn that two of them had blue eyelids. It wasn’t a dark pronounced blue, just a light, faint shade that could easily be overlooked.
I watched them walk past, my eyes following them even as they turned a corner and headed away from us.
“Is something the matter?” Thorne asked.
“No, just …I saw something I didn’t …I’m fine,” I said, feeling confused.
I knew the layout of the Kamehameha well, so I was surprised when Admiral Thorne walked past the bank of elevators that led to the fleet decks. He caught me looking back at the elevator, and asked, “What’s the matter?”
“Aren’t those the elevators to Fleet Command?”
“We’re not going to Fleet Command, Captain.”
“Where are we going?”
“Those men you saw following me when you arrived, they are all fleet officers. They’re waiting for us on the fleet deck so they can give you a proper briefing. I want to take a few minutes to brief you improperly.”
“That’s very kind of you,” I said, feeling a little suspicious.
By this time Thorne had led me across the ship to the second docking bay. Here he stopped, and said, “I want to start by showing you the things I am supposed to show you, then I thought I might show you what that prick Stone did to this ship behind my back. I’ve got something to show you that neither of us is supposed to know about.”
A fleet of five transports sat in the darkened hangar. These were obese, ugly ships with immoderately small wings sticking out of the distended bellies of their cabin. The spine that stretched from the cockpit to the tail along the top of the transports looked like it had been thrown on as an afterthought. The transports stood on struts instead of wheels, though they struggled with vertical takeoffs in atmospheric conditions. Lacking even the semblance of aerodynamics and entirely unable to glide, they dropped like bricks when their thrusters cut out; but they were the workhorses of the Unified Authority’s invasion force. Without them, the Army and Marines would have been grounded.
Admiral Thorne led me to the first bird in the line and pointed between the struts. “This is the one with the torpedo tube,” he said.
I bent down but still could not see the modification, so I dropped to my knees. A cylinder the size and shape of an Army boot hung from the bottom of the ship. It looked almost as if someone had welded a boot to the chassis.
“That’s it?” I asked, amazed that such a small barrel could house a nuclear-tipped torpedo. I remained on my knees, staring into that tube. Deep inside it, I could see the rounded point of a red-tipped cone.
“Armed and ready,” Thorne said. He coughed a dry, wheezing sort of cough. It was an old man’s cough, not one caused by congested lungs or something in his throat.
I fired off a nuclear device once. The sight was dazzling and mesmerizing and horrible. Heat, or radiation, or maybe it was just force, rose from the center of the explosion like an electric sheet. I remember thinking that with some skill, you could protect yourself from a bullet or a knife; but with a nuke, there was nothing you could do. It would kill you, then incinerate your body no matter how you tried to protect yourself. The realization that I would once again be dealing with a weapon designed to destroy areas instead of people left me nervous.
“Per your request, the other transports are not armed. You have one armed transport, and that transport is armed with one torpedo. If the shot fails, you’re going to need to return to the ship for another torpedo, Captain. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want us to place tubes on the other transports.”
“If we need another one, we can come back easily enough,” I said. “It’s not like we have to work around a window of time.”
I was making up excuses. The truth was that nuclear weapons scared me. We would need one nuclear-tipped torpedo to get through the ion curtain; and once we made it through the curtain, I did not want any superfluous warheads distracting me.
“No, there isn’t. Not for you,” Thorne said. “How long do you think you will need to capture the planet?”
What would happen once we landed on Terraneau was anybody’s guess. A few weeks had passed since Admiral Thorne received the message from the survivors. Apparently he had not heard anything since. He told me this along with his belief—that we would find ourselves on a ghost planet once we landed. I did not like that prospect, but I could think of a worse scenario—finding the atmosphere saturated with the gas the aliens used in their mining. The gas was so corrosive that it would dissolve our transports around us as soon as we punched our way through the curtain.
“Is the big package ready as well?” I asked.
“It’s on board, Captain. So is the other equipment you requested,” Thorne said. “Did you want to inspect it?”
“No,” I said. The big package was a fifty-megaton bomb. If Thorne said it was ready and aboard the ship, that was good enough for me.
“Excellent. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s move on to the Engine Room,” Thorne said.
I asked, “What’s in the Engine Room?” giving Thorne an opening he could not resist. “The ship’s engine,” he said. Then he added, “Admiral Brocius authorized Captain Stone to make a modification without telling me, Captain. I became aware of it quite by accident last week, and I thought you might find it interesting.”
What Thorne showed me next opened my eyes. I had not told anyone my plans, not even Thomer or Ava, but the brass suspected me just the same. Somebody had hobbled this ship.
I spent hours touring the ship and discussing the fleet with Admiral Thorne. After that, I went to my billet to rest. A pile of combat armor belonging to Corporal Mike Rooney sat in the corner of the room. Rooney herself, now in Ava attire, sat cleaned and dressed in the booth-sized head across the room.
One thing about Ava; she kept her wits about her. Sitting in that tight bathroom could not have been comfortable, but it would give her some level of concealment if someone stepped into the room other than me. “How do you like the ship?” I asked.
“It beats the hell out of Clonetown, Honey.”
“We had more space back at Fort Bliss,” I pointed out.
“I had to pee in a bucket,” she said. “I like the cool air.”
“Glad you’re satisfied,” I said.
“Satisfied? Aren’t you some kind of important officer. Why did they stick you in such a tiny apartment?” She stood up and examined herself in the mirror over my sink until she found a smudge on her forehead. Then she ran the water to wet a tissue and dabbed at the spot.
Ava may not have risked a shower just yet, but she had clearly preened. She had hand-tousled her hair and washed her face and arms.
Confined to my shed, she had not gotten any sun in weeks and her skin had gone milky white. A permanent film of sweat and dust had formed on her body. Having had some time to clean herself, she now looked clean and pale.
“These are not my permanent quarters,” I said. “Once I assume command of the fleet, I get a deck to myself.”
“A deck to ourselves? That sounds absolutely marvelous,” Ava said as she continued inspecting herself in the mirror. This was the first chance she’d had to fix herself since General Smith had dumped her off at Fort Bliss, and she could not tear herself away from the mirror. “When do we move in?”
“It’s not going to be that easy. Before we can move in, Admiral Thorne needs to move out.”
“Who is Admiral Thorne?”
“He’s the fleet commander.”
“I thought you were the fleet commander?”
“He’s the outgoing fleet commander.”
“So when does he check out?” Ava asked.
Ava stood there in the bathroom, the cleanest I had seen her since I met her at the New Year’s Eve party. She had to know what I wanted, but she gave no sign of reading me. I took a step toward the bathroom, and she finally looked away from the mirror. Her green eyes locked in on mine, and I saw something both playful and stern in her expression.
“Don’t you think it might be a little tight in here for two?” she asked.
“Not if we get real close,” I said.
“That doesn’t sound very comfortable,” she said.
“Then come on out, there’s plenty of space out here,” I said.
She shook her head, and said, “I think I like it better in here.”
“Any way you want it.” I started toward her.
“By myself,” she added.
“So why did you get all cleaned up like that?” I asked.
Ava smiled an indulgent, amused smile. “Honey, that’s the difference between girls and Marines. I cleaned up because I wanted to be clean, not because I wanted to have sex.”
“Oh,” I said. After that, I went to my rack and reviewed the orders Admiral Thorne had given me. I spent two hours reading and rereading them; and then, ready or not, it was time to start briefing my men.
Our first staff meeting did not go as I had expected.
We held the meeting in a staff room near the bridge. In the future, once Admiral Thorne and his corps of natural-born officers returned to Earth, I would conduct staff meetings on the fleet deck.
For this first meeting, I only brought two of my men, Thomer and Herrington. Thomer, who must have luded up a few hours earlier, paid little attention to the surroundings as he entered the room. He walked straight to the conference table and sat down without even scanning his surroundings.
Not Herrington. An enlisted man who had limited contact with the upper ranks, he’d never seen how the commissioned tenth lived. He stepped through the door, stopped, took in the size of the room, then spun one of the leather chairs. He whistled. “Some digs,” he said. “Do we get to play in here whenever we want?”
Hearing this, Thomer glanced around the room. He squinted his eyes, and his forehead wrinkled, giving him a confused expression; but he still made no comment.
Taking the chair at the head of the table, the captain’s chair, I brought out the orders Admiral Thorne had given me, along with a small audio chip I had found inside the folder. I set the folder down on the table, then placed the chip in the media reader near my seat.
“Who’s coming to this meeting?” Thomer asked, the glazed expression fading from his eyes.
“Ships’ captains and fleet officers,” I said.
“Officers?” Thomer asked. “I thought all of the natural-borns were going home.”
“They aren’t officers yet, but they will be once the Thorne administration leaves. There’s a new round of promotions coming up. How does Brigadier General Kelly Thomer sound to you?” I said as I fished the promotions list from my folder and handed it to Thomer.
“You’re joking, right?” Herrington asked, both looking and sounding as if he was fighting the urge to laugh. “Thomer, a general? I have enough trouble getting used to you as a captain.”
Thomer took the list and slowly read it. Thomer had become a study in clinical depression. Over the last two years, he had lost enough weight to go from skinny to skeletal. He had the haunted look of a man who has seen too many friends die on the battlefield. Before New Copenhagen, Thomer’s biggest problem was excessive worrying over small details. Now I wondered if he cared about anything.
“I’m a brigadier general?” Thomer asked. He looked me in the eye and could tell I was not joking. “How is that possible?”
Having been raised in an orphanage, Thomer had already reached the highest rank he could have hoped to attain—master gunnery sergeant. Now, out of the blue, the Marines had advanced him twelve pay grades.
Herrington moved behind Thomer so he could read over his shoulder. After thirty-two years serving in the Marine Corps as an enlisted man, Sergeant Lewis Herrington would shortly find himself holding the rank of full-bird colonel. He took the news of the promotion with his usual stoic good humor. He said what he always said when he heard good news, “You have got to be shitting me!” After a second glance, Herrington added, “A field rank promotion from sergeant to colonel, there’s one for the books.”
“You can’t run a fleet with master sergeants and petty officers at the helm,” I said.
According to these new orders, I was both fleet commander and “Scutum-Crux Arm administrator,” a position that sounded more political than military. I held the field rank of lieutenant general in the Marines. In my experience, only naval officers commanded fleets; but my rank made me the highest-ranking officer in the Scutum-Crux Arm.
At least I would be the highest-ranking officer in the Scutum-Crux Arm once the natural-born officers went home. Until Admiral Thorne and his crew left, I would remain a captain. If and when Washington sent natural-born officers to inspect the fleet, my rank would automatically revert to captain.
Thomer finished reading the orders over and handed them to me. “I can’t be commandant of the Marines,” he said in that quiet voice. “I think that I might be a clone.”
“Something’s wrong with my hearing. I could have sworn he just said he thinks he’s a clone,” Herrington gasped. “Aren’t you supposed to have one of those death reflexes now? Aren’t you going to keel over?”
“Thomer, we have to get you off that Fallzoud shit,” Herrington added, staring at Thomer as if he had horns sprouting from his ass.
“You might want to hold off on that, Sergeant,” I said. “Fallzoud may be the only thing keeping this Marine alive.”
Just then a chime rang, warning us that the other members of our conclave were outside the door. “Keep a lid on the promotions for now,” I said as I placed the orders back in the folder and went to let them in. Herrington nodded, but his eyes remained on Thomer, who sat as placid as ever.
I took one last look at Thomer to make sure he was ready for the meeting. He sat bolt upright, his hands lying flat on the table before him. I might have mistaken him for a mannequin except that he was breathing. Hoping for the best, I pressed a button, and the conference room door slid open.
Master Chief Petty Officer Gary Warshaw was the first man to step through the doorway. My impressions of Warshaw did not change now that I got a closer look at him. You could not miss the effects of his bodybuilding; he had taken it so far that he looked slightly misshapen. The network of veins along his tree trunk of a neck looked like ivy vines growing in under the skin. His neck was so thick with muscle that I had trouble telling where his neck ended and his skull began. Those veins ran right up the sides of his clean-shaven skull. He stepped into the room, snapped a smart salute, and said, “Captain Harris, you are a legend around these parts, sir.”
The words sounded sincere; but most ass-kissing subordinates had a talent for sounding sincere. I returned flattery for flattery, “Good to meet you, Master Chief. Admiral Thorne says good things about you.”
There was an acute alertness about Warshaw. Like a predator on the prowl, he took in every movement around the room. He had such a commanding presence that I barely noticed the next few sailors who entered.
I needed to stay on good terms with the master chief. Despite my rank and assignment, he would end up as the power behind the chair. Running the Scutum-Crux Fleet was a naval operation, and I was a Marine.
A few more sailors entered. I recognized their names from the file Admiral Thorne had given me. He had referred to these men as “the backbone of the fleet.”
Then came Senior Chief Petty Officer Perry Fahey, chief NCO of the U.A.N. Washington, and I lost my train of thought. The man had eye shadow over his eyes. There was no mistaking it. His eyelids were light blue patches. He did not wear rouge, lipstick, or eyeliner; but there was no denying cosmetic coloring above his eyes.
Fahey saluted me and identified himself.
I saluted back, but I could not stop myself from staring at the makeup. I was about to make the mistake of asking about it, but Herrington saw what was happening and stepped in. “Senior Chief, you look like a man who knows his way around a ship …” And he led Fahey to a seat, asking him about how he could go about expanding the Marine compound on the Kamehameha.
Even after Herrington pulled him away, I could not take my eyes off the blue shadowing the man had painted around his eyes. I wondered if it was a tattoo. It was a pretty shade, and I wondered where I could get some of that for Ava.
The meeting started out well enough. Thomer, mostly recovered from his morning dose of Fallzoud, woke from his stupor and chatted with Warshaw. Herrington and Fahey swapped a few stories as if they were old friends.
When I said, “We might as well get started,” the sailors standing in the back of the room found seats around the table. A good beginning.
We did a round of introductions first. None of us clones had ever commanded so much as a transport, let alone a fleet. Warshaw and his friends might have sat in on a few high-level meetings, but they would have attended as spectators, not participants.
“Our first objective is to recapture Terraneau,” I said, trying to put a leash around any stray conversations. “As most of you know, Admiral Thorne recorded a transmission from Norristown. We may as well start there.”
I tapped a button on the AV-console, and an old man’s voice came from the speakers. The recording lasted less than two seconds. It began with a moment of static followed by the sound of someone taking a deep breath. Then a voice said, “Go away.” The words were hushed, almost whispered, but emphatic. It sounded like a command. After that, the file went silent.
“That’s it?” Herrington asked.
“That’s it,” I said.
“They sent us all the way across the galaxy because of that?” Herrington continued. “He wasn’t even asking for help.”
“Maybe he thought he was talking to the aliens. Maybe that’s why he told us to go away,” Fahey guessed.
“That can’t be real.” Herrington shook his head.
“It’s legitimate,” I said. “Military intelligence ran the feed through a voiceprint computer and came up with a match. According to the Pentagon, that’s the voice of Colonel Ellery Doctorow.”
“Never heard of him,” Warshaw said.
“Doctorow was the head chaplain of the Unified Authority Army,” I said. “The Army transferred him to Terraneau right before the assault.” I pulled out a photograph of Doctorow and slipped it across the table to Warshaw. The picture showed a tall man wearing a cassock and stole over a set of Army fatigues. The stole had both religious symbols and military insignia, and the pressed eagle of colonel could be seen on his collar. Colonel Doctorow kept his hair in a coal-colored flattop.
“Okay, so if he’s Army, why the speck does he want us to leave?” Herrington asked. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“Beats me,” I said.
“Admiral Thorne’s been punching holes through the curtain for two years now. From what I heard, they’d spotted movement on the planet; this was just the first time we were able to make contact,” Warshaw said. The other sailors seemed content to have Warshaw speak for them.
“Movement? Are you talking cars …airplanes …bodies?” Thomer asked.
Warshaw shrugged. “I don’t know. I just overheard a few conversations.”
“The report did not cover anything other than the message,” I said. This led to some unorganized chatter. I made a note to ask Admiral Thorne about it.
After that, we spent the next few minutes discussing the upcoming mission. News of the mission had trickled down through the ranks. Thorne had briefed his officers, who related the information to their key NCOs. I had gone over the details with Thomer and Herrington as well.
If there were aliens on Terraneau, we would need to slip around them. We couldn’t afford a fight. Our goal was to locate the spot where the aliens were digging their mine and set off our nuclear device there. We had a serious package to deliver—fifty megatons’ worth, enough to destroy the ion curtain if everything went well. Once the curtain was down, we would land more Marines and set up a base on the planet.
“Who are you sending to lead that mission?” asked Fahey, the sailor. He was young to have made the rank of senior chief, maybe not even in his thirties.
“I’m going,” I said.
“Begging your pardon, sir, but is that a good call?” Warshaw asked. “It could get dangerous down there.”
“I’ll take my chances,” I said.
“That’s what they said about you. I have a couple of engineers who say they were on the Kamehameha when you went down to Little Man,” Warshaw said. “They said you liked it hot.”
“I didn’t volunteer for that duty,” I said. “They sent every enlisted man on the ship.”
This must have synced with the gossip Warshaw heard about me. He smiled, nodded, and whispered something to the sailor sitting next to him.
“I heard you served on New Copenhagen,” another said. I looked at my notes and saw that he was Senior Chief Petty Officer Hank Bishop. Once the transfers were complete, this man would take command of the Kamehameha.
“Sergeant Thomer and Sergeant Herrington were also on New Copenhagen,” I said. No one knew how to respond, and we sat in silence.
“How’s the training going?” I asked Warshaw, trying to get the meeting back on track. “Do your men know everything they need to know to run the fleet?”
He did not answer. Instead, he looked at the various men who had accompanied him and let them answer individually. To a man, the NCOs all reported they had been sailing with clone crews for months.
“I can’t remember the last time I saw an officer in our weapons area,” one of the men responded. “The last year has been a paid vacation as far as those bastards are concerned.”
I almost laughed when I heard this; there was something ironic about a synth-bred clone calling natural-borns “bastards.”
“I don’t suppose Admiral Thorne has informed you about your new field ranks,” I said.
“Field ranks, sir?” Warshaw asked.
I held up the orders and repeated the lecture I’d given Thomer and Herrington a few minutes earlier. Field promotions had been written up for every man in the room.
“May I have a look at that roster?” Warshaw asked. As he studied the new command structure, a change came over him. He had begun the meeting all handshakes and smiles; but as he read the changes, his jaw tightened and his eyes turned to flint. He read the orders a second time, then a third, all the while silently mouthing the words to himself. Finally, he looked up, an angry stitch showing across his forehead. “It says you’re taking command of the fleet. There must be some kind of speck-up, how can they leave a Marine clone in charge?” He did not sound confused or curious, more than anything he sounded insulted.
Warshaw’s behavior violated his neural programming. He should not have been able to call me a clone or question orders. Under other circumstances, I would have knocked his teeth in, then busted him for insubordination; but I needed him on my side.
A smoldering silence filled the staff room. Thomer, sounding more like an angry Marine than a Fallzoud jockey waking from a haze, asked, “What did you just say? What the speck did you just say?”
“Do you have a hearing problem, asshole?” Warshaw snapped. “I said that I cannot believe they are leaving a fleet in the hands of a Marine.” Despite the bravado, Warshaw had just blinked in this game of chicken by not repeating the term, “clone.”
“You’re not the one handing out the orders, Master Chief,” I said.
He glared at me, his face so red he might have been choking, but he did not speak a word.
I got the feeling that whether or not I won this battle, I might well have lost the war. Warshaw had come with twenty other sailors, all men who had served with him for years. They did not care who the Office of the Navy named top dog, their loyalty would remain with him.
If there was any way to win Warshaw over as a friend, I needed to find it. Trying to defuse the situation, I said, “You’ll be the one running the fleet; I’m more of a figurehead. As I understand it, they’ve put me in as a regional administrator.”
Warshaw grunted but showed no satisfaction.
I knew right then and there that the man was going to be a problem for me; the question was, how big a problem.
“Does that mean you will remain on Terraneau?” Fahey asked.
“No,” I said, “I’ll remain on the Kamehameha.”
“But I will have command of the fleet?” Warshaw asked.
“That’s what he said,” growled Thomer. “Do you have a hearing problem?”
“That will be enough, Sergeant,” I said. Then I turned to Warshaw, and said, “Our field ranks don’t come into play until Thorne and the other natural-borns are gone.”
“What’s your point?” asked Warshaw.
“It could take months before the transfer is complete, that should give us plenty of time to work out any kinks in the command structure.”
Warshaw did not say anything, but he nodded.
I could read the man easily enough. As the highest-ranking noncommissioned officer in the Scutum-Crux Fleet, he had expected to take over. Frankly, he had two thousand years of naval tradition supporting his position. The swabbies steered the ships, and the leathernecks ran the invasions. It had always been that way. The natural animosity between Marines and sailors only made things worse.
For a moment, I thought Warshaw or one of the other officers would threaten to go over my head about the promotion. Then we really would have had a problem. In the Marines, we did not tolerate the kind of politicking and political maneuvering that took place as a matter of course among ships’ captains.
Warshaw fixed his glare on me, and his mouth worked into a nasty grin that reflected the hate in his eyes. I could just about hear his thoughts, they were somewhere between insubordination and mutiny. But Warshaw was a clone just like everyone else in the room. Angry or not, he had neural programming that in theory prevented him from disobeying orders, no matter how he felt about having a Marine in the chain of command.
I wondered what steps Warshaw would willingly take to correct the chain of command. I had heard stories about Navy officers wrangling for positions and honors in ways that a simple Marine could never comprehend.
Warshaw started to say something, and I put up my hand to stop him. “Our first order of business is to retake Terraneau, Master Chief. I think everybody here can agree that capturing the planet is very much a Marine operation.”
There were nods of agreement around the table.
“Who says we’ll let you back on our boats once you’re through?” asked Fahey. That sent me over the edge. I had a combat reflex. Anger and peace merged together in my brain. Thomer started to say something, but I spoke over him. “Let’s see …Senior Chief Petty Officer Perry Fahey?” I asked, making a show of looking down at the roster. “It says here that you’re on the Washington. That’s a Perseus-class fighter carrier.”
Fahey, his made-up eyes now fluttering, said, “That’s correct.”
“That means there are ten thousand armed Marines on your ship, Senior Chief. Would you like to try and explain why you are scuttling the local commandant of the Marines on an alien-held planet to ten thousand combat Marines?”
Fahey was not stupid. He had to know that my Marines would seize control of his ship.
“No one is leaving anyone behind,” Warshaw said. “My men obey orders, Captain Harris, even when they come from a Marine.”
That ended the meeting. I dismissed the sailors, and they returned to their ships.
“That was specked,” Thomer said after the last sailor left. “Warshaw’s an ass.”
“Do you blame him?” I asked. “He thought he was going to command the fleet.”
“He has a point, too,” Herrington said.
“No he doesn’t,” said Thomer.
“Yes he does,” said Herrington. “Would you want a sailor calling the shots when we take Terraneau?”
“Okay, he’s got a point,” Thomer conceded.
“But what was that stuff on Fahey’s eyes?” I asked. “It looked like eye makeup …like the stuff women use.”
“It is,” Herrington said.
“He’s wearing makeup?” I asked.
“He’s a bitch,” Herrington said.
“What is that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“Harris, none of these boys have had R & R for four years now.”
“And?” I knew where this was going, but I wanted to see how Herrington would handle it.
“And the makeup identifies Fahey as a pleasure vehicle.”
“God, I’m glad he’s not a Marine,” I said.
“You haven’t toured the compound yet, have you?” Herrington asked.
I shook my head.
Thomer and Herrington exchanged a glance, then laughed.
“Where the speck are they getting makeup?” I asked. I knew what Herrington wanted to say next. He wanted to ask something along the lines of whether or not I needed it for myself.
I gave Herrington an order to search the Marine compound for any cosmetics. When he found them, he had orders to “confiscate without repercussions.”
At the end of the day, when I went back to my billet, I had lipstick, eye shadow, rouge, and a pair of man-sized silk stockings. I came into the room and placed the cache on the bed, then called for Ava—she was hiding in the bathroom.
She stood at the edge of the bed, staring down at the various tubes and bottles as if they were antiques from a foreign land.
“What do you think?” I asked. “Can you use any of it?”
“Use it for what?” she asked.
“It’s makeup,” I said.
“Honey, back home we called this ‘queer gear,’ ” she said.
“Queer gear?” I asked.
“These are cosmetics for men,” she said, picking up the stockings. “I could use these for a hammock, but I wouldn’t want to wear them. Harris, stockings are not one size fits all.”
Feeling deflated, I went to the mess to get us our first meal. While I was gone, Ava removed the makeup from my rack. She played coy, but I noticed the faint smear of red on her cheeks and the enhanced shadow above her eyes when I returned.
It looked good.
A week passed between the day I boarded the Kamehameha and the time we would start the mission. I spent some of my time on the Washington, welcoming shuttles as Captain Pershing’s cruiser ferried Marines in and natural-borns out at the snail’s pace of four hundred men per trip. Walking the upper corridors of the ship, I heard officers complaining about the slow pace of the transfers.
In my off-hours, I stockpiled MREs in my quarters so that Ava would have food to eat while I was on Terraneau. If everything went well, the mission might only take a day. If things went wrong, I might not return for weeks, if I returned at all. Preparing for the worst, I hid a month’s worth of meals around my billet.
I had Ava sample each of the meals to see which ones she liked. She didn’t like any of them, but she did not complain. After sampling the spaghetti, she groaned, and said, “Can’t we just use room service?”
When I said, “They’d probably just bring you more of the same stuff,” she said, “Honey, that’s fine with me as long as the waiter looks good.”
“Charming,” I said. “He’d probably look a lot like me since they’re all clones.”
We could have smuggled a spare rack into the billet; we had the floor space. Instead, Ava and I slept in the same bed. I liked the warmth of her body under the sheets, though she showed little interest in me. She generally came to bed dressed in her bra and panties, both of which were made of a satiny white material that had been stained and dulled by the heat and sweat of Clonetown.
Ava slept with her back toward me. If I reached out and touched her, she did not pull away so long as my hands stayed around her back or her waist. When I reached too high, she wrapped her arms across her breasts and curled into a ball.
She probably would have allowed me to grope her if I forced the issue, but I never did. Instead, I would lie there, smelling her scent and feeling her warmth, entirely unable to sleep.
We talked a lot. Ava told me all about her life. She treated conversations like an autobiography. I didn’t mind, though; her life was interesting.
Ava had known that she was a clone from an early age. When she was young, the man who claimed to be her father employed a series of lab technicians to help raise her. Although they treated her well, they were not especially careful about what they said around her or about keeping her safely away from the truth of her birth. As an eight-year-old, she sneaked into the lab where she was cloned and saw the equipment that reproduced her. She wanted to believe she was real, but seeing that equipment, she had her doubts.
She lost her virginity and decided she was a clone all on the same night. She had her first period at the age of fifteen. Exactly one week later, her “father” came to visit her after she’d gone to bed. By the time he left, her virginity was gone along with any illusions that the man was really her father.
She related this tale in a matter-of-fact style without shedding a single useless tear. After telling me this story, she stared at me for several seconds, then asked, “What’s wrong with you?”
Her question caught me off guard. I did not know anything was wrong with me. “Wrong with me?”
“Don’t you feel sorry for me?” she asked.
“Why the speck would I feel sorry for you?” I asked.
“He raped me and took away my dreams.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.” I grew up with thousands of clones who never knew any parents other than instructors at military orphanages. Our instructors lied to us and sent us to war. The closest thing we had to a dream was the goal that we might one day reach the rank of sergeant. Sex and reality at the age of fifteen sounded pretty good to me.
That night and the next, Ava and I slept in the same rack but a million miles apart. I call them nights, but they were just sleep periods. Life on a starship …the halls are constantly bright as day, and the world around you is generally dark as night. I had work shifts, shifts in which I was off duty, and shifts in which I slept.
Ava’s attitude thawed the day before I left for Terraneau. From the moment I entered my quarters, she wanted to talk.
I came in sweating from a day spent working out, sparring, and drilling my men. Ava, pretending as if she had not given me ice for the last forty-eight hours, followed me into the bathroom and asked about my day as I stripped off my clothes. I grunted that I had worked hard and that my crew looked ready.
“That’s good,” she said. “Are you excited to get to the planet?”
I turned to look at her. Dressed in the smallest sailor suit I could find, she looked clean and childlike. The tunic looked stylish and loose on her, but the trousers were baggy around her waist. She had rolled the cuffs back on the denim sleeves to prevent them from covering her hands. There was something vulnerable and oddly erotic about seeing this petite woman wearing a sailor’s suit.
She had also applied the makeup I brought her. Her eyes looked wide and the blue of the eye shadow played well against the green of her eyes. The makeup looked a lot better on her than it had on Fahey.
“Are you excited or scared?” she repeated in a soft voice.
I stood there naked and sweaty, considered her question, and said, “I’m both,” no longer thinking about the mission. I was excited and scared by the beautiful woman standing in the doorway. For a sliver of a second, I thought of Pavlov and his dog. He rang a bell, and his dog salivated. Ava dressed right, and I did the same.
“Excited to fight?” she asked. The other half of her question hung in the air entirely tangible but unasked. Was I anxious to get away from her?
“I was designed to fight,” I said.
I stepped into the shower. Ava had once said the difference between women and Marines was that women did not only shower when they wanted to have sex. She was wrong, of course, the Corps demands hygiene. That said, she had certainly pegged the motivation behind this particular shower.
Ava stepped into the bathroom so we could hear each other over the water. She didn’t mind the fact that I was naked. Ava was many things, but she was not shy. Rather than sit on the toilet, she stood just outside the shower and half sat on the washbasin. She kept her arms folded across her chest.
“Do you think it’s going to be dangerous?”
“Any time the Avatari are involved, things are going to get dangerous,” I said. The term “Avatari” was highly classified, but I had shared a lot of classified information with Ava. I was an outcast now; what did I care about Unified Authority security?
“Is Thomer ready?” she asked. She knew all about Thomer and his drug problems.
“He’s as ready as he’s going to get,” I said.
“Can you count on him?” she asked.
“I think so,” I said. He did a good job drilling the men today—not perfect, but good enough. “He still moves slowly; but once he gets a little adrenaline running through him, I think he’ll do okay.”
“What about Warshaw? Are you worried about him?” she asked.
“There’s not much I can do there,” I said.
“What if he doesn’t let you off the planet?” she asked. “Would he try to shoot your transport?”
“He could,” I said. “I don’t think he will. If he shoots my transport, he’s going to answer to some angry Marines.”
“Does he know that?” Ava asked.
“He’d better.”
After my shower, I dressed and went to the mess. We had hundreds of MREs stowed by now, but we would save those meals. I brought back a tray covered with food—two steaks, two bowls of soup, two potatoes, and an oversized salad.
Ava mostly ate salad and picked at a potato. I ended up eating both steaks, which was just fine.
After dinner, I dropped off my dishes and went to the officers’ club to grab some bottles of beer. Ava preferred wine to beer, but she would need to make do. No one paid attention to off-duty officers walking around with a beer, but a bottle of wine would attract all kinds of notice. So far no one had asked me if I had a Hollywood starlet hidden in my quarters, and I wanted to keep it that way.
I stepped through the door. Silence. Always aware of her precarious situation, Ava never called out my name when I came back. She waited for me to identify myself, then came out of her hiding places—usually the shower.
“Ava, I’m back,” I called softly.
She came out from the bathroom, very much the confident woman of the house. “Why do I feel like I should be bringing you a pipe and slippers?” she asked.
I laughed as I placed the bottles on the nightstand. She came and sat across the bed from me. She poured her beer into a glass. I drank mine from the bottle.
She took a sip of beer, and asked, “I know you’re excited about going on a mission, but don’t you ever get scared? Do Marines get scared?”
“Sure we do. The Avatari scare the hell out of me,” I said. “A little fear is a good thing; it keeps you from making stupid mistakes. Scared is another thing. I’ve seen good men freeze under fire.”
“But that’s never been a problem for you, Harris,” she said.
“The Avatari are eight feet tall. You can’t hurt them. Their guns cut through shielded bunkers as easily as they shoot through the air. I saw a man get hit by a bolt in the shoulder. He went into convulsions and died a miserable death.
“Yes, I get scared.”
Ava laughed softly and touched a warm finger to my cheek. “I’d be worried if they didn’t scare you,” she said.
I did not like this conversation. I did not like discussing my fears. “Once we liberate Terraneau, you will be able to move into a mansion or maybe even have a whole damn hotel to yourself. I bet you’ll be glad to have a place to yourself.”
“I suppose so,” she said, and sadness filled her voice. She didn’t cry, but her mood turned melancholy, and she seemed to withdraw.
“You don’t want your own hotel?” I asked.
“Not to myself,” she said, looking down at the food. She would not meet my eyes. “I thought maybe …I thought maybe we could share a place.”
I had just downed a large mouthful of beer when she said this. I nearly choked on it. I coughed, which she must have taken to mean I was laughing at her. She looked up, and I saw anger in her eyes.
“Are you laughing at me?” she asked.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “I thought you’d be glad to be rid of me.”
“Why would I want to get rid of you?” she asked.
“You haven’t let me touch you since we landed on the ship,” I said.
“And you’ve been wonderful about it,” she said. “Ted and Al never took no for an answer.”
“Al?” I asked. “Al Smith?” I knew she had dated General Mooreland, but she could not possibly have meant who I thought she meant. “You don’t mean General Alexander Smith?”
Looking like a scolded child, she silently nodded, her beautiful green eyes fixed on mine.
“You slept with Al Smith? That fat old bastard has to be twice your age,” I said.
“He’s almost three times my age, thank you,” she said. “I’m twenty-three, he’s sixty-five.”
I had a brief, chilling vision of Smith, his body as white and round as an egg, sliding into bed beside Ava. She would not have let him touch her for money. She had to have made millions. She sure as hell wouldn’t have slept with him for love.
“What in the world were you doing with that old man?” I asked.
“Faking it mostly,” Ava said. “He needed a lot of encouragement.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“The Senate hearings set off a witch hunt, and I was the galaxy’s most famous witch. Ted dumped me before the hearings even ended. We were living together, and he kicked me out of the house.” Ava sat silent for a moment.
“Was he good to you before the hearings?” I asked.
“Was he good to me? Honey, I hope he knows more strategies in battle than he does in bed.”
“No shit?”
“Even good things get boring when you do them the exact same way every time.” She paused, thought, and said, “I will say this for the boy, he’s got a lot of energy …a lot of energy.”
I could not help but feel a little jealous. Maybe she read me too well. She reached over and squeezed my hand. “He liked it more than I did, Harris.”
“So how did you end up with General Smith?” I asked.
“I moved in with Al after Teddy kicked me out. He said he would keep me safe until things calmed down. That lasted for about a month, then he dropped me off at Clonetown.
“So what do you think, Harris? Does that make me a whore?” she asked, her voice defiant, almost daring me to condemn her.
“It says a lot about Smith’s negotiation skills,” I said.
She moved toward me, her hand still over mine. Her touch was warm, and the air in the room was slightly cold. I wondered how she might describe me to the next man. It made me nervous.
“What about me?” I asked. “Am I energetic?”
“You took care of me, and you never forced yourself on me,” Ava said.
“I think I’d rather have you think of me as ‘energetic,’ ” I said.
“Do you want to hear you were the best lover I had?” Ava laughed. “Men.
“Teddy showed me off like a trophy, like one of the medals he wears on his chest. That’s why he introduced me to you at the New Year’s Eve party; he wanted to show you he had something you couldn’t have.”
“He’s got a lot of things I will never have,” I said.
“He doesn’t see it that way. He’s scared of you, Harris.”
“Scared of me?” I asked.
“Scared to death. They were all scared of you. Al, Teddy, J. P. Glade, all of them. They knew you won the war. They were scared Congress would find out who was a hero and who was a fake.”
“Even Mooreland?” I asked.
“Especially Teddy.”
“But he fought. He was the only officer who stood his ground.”
“He said he didn’t fight in the last battle, the one that ended the war.”
“No, he didn’t.”
“But you did,” Ava said.
“Herrington, Thomer, Freeman, and me,” I said, more to myself than to Ava. Ray Freeman was a mercenary, a ruthless freelancer who knocked down a billion-dollar payday for helping win the war. Thomer, Herrington, and I were clones. The only men to survive that final battle were three clones and a mercenary, no wonder the Pentagon kept a lid on the story.
“You were the real heroes,” she said.
I didn’t respond.
Ava slid closer to me. She fixed her eyes on mine, a strange smile playing on her lips, and she ran her finger along the open neckline of her blouse. She moved slowly and her eyes never left mine. There was nothing unusual about the way she undid the first buttons. Her eyes stayed on mine; her smile remained gentle. There were seven buttons on her sailor’s tunic. As she undid the buttons, she peeled back the material, giving me a glimpse of breasts and bra. Just that glimpse of satiny material got my pulse pounding.
She leaned toward me until our lips met. We had kissed before, but those other times had been mechanical and infrequent. Kissing had been part of a ritual, just another step toward having sex. This time it seemed to take on its own significance.
I realized now that she was in control. Ava, with her perfect body, green eyes, and gentle touch, knew what she wanted and how to get things done. I did not think she loved me, but she gave herself over to me that night in a way that seemed more lasting than before.
When my alarm woke me the next morning, I found her lying beside me wide-awake. She took my hand in hers and held it against her breast.
“Are you going to be okay?” I asked.
“Me?” she asked. “I’m not the one going out to fight the aliens.”
“You’re going to need to hide for a while,” I said.
“You just come back to me,” she said. She teared up as she said this. Maybe I was being cynical, but it reminded me of a scene from a movie. I did not know if Ava loved me, but I absolutely knew she was an accomplished actress.
“We’ll find other women on the planet. You’ll be safe once you’re not the only woman on this side of the galaxy,” I said.
“I have to admit, I would be so glad to talk to another woman. God, Harris, you have no idea.”
“For now, you have to stay hidden. I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I promised.
“No problem,” she said. “I’ll just hang the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign outside your door.” She rubbed her naked body against mine. I knew I would be a few minutes late arriving at the docking bay, but some things cannot be helped.
Admiral Thorne did not come to see the transports off, but he did wish us luck on the mission. As I dressed in my armor, I noticed the message light flashing on the communications console beside my desk. Instead of a steady flash, the light blinked three times, paused, and blinked three times. That meant the message came from Fleet Command.
I vaguely remembered ignoring a call while Ava and I were in the throes. Not entirely sure there was anyone in Fleet Command I wanted to hear from, I played the message.
“Good luck on Terraneau,” said the reedy voice, and that was it.
“Who was that?” Ava asked.
“Admiral Thorne,” I said.
“That’s it? That’s the entire message?” she asked.
“It would appear so.”
“It’s a bit on the terse side, don’t you think?” she asked.
“Well, he is an admiral. Maybe he’s too busy running the fleet for mushy farewells,” I said.
I kissed Ava. We had kissed more over the last twelve hours than all of our other nights together combined. “Stay hidden,” I said.
She put a hand on the crook of my arm, and asked, “What do you think will happen if they find me?”
“The sailors on this scow have not seen a woman in four years, what do you think will happen?”
“I see,” she said.
“So don’t get caught.”
Ava hid her fear well. She was, after all, the clone of an actress. She looked at me, her green eyes scanning my face. “Will I ever be safe?” she asked.
“Sure you will,” I said. “There will be women on Terraneau. I’ll smuggle you down and release you into the flock.”
“Will I still be yours?” she asked.
She had not had time to fix her hair that morning. Her lipstick and rouge had not survived the night. I probably had more of them spread on my skin than she did on hers. Somehow she had replaced last night’s glamour with simple beauty. She looked less like a starlet and more like a beautiful housewife—the prettiest woman on the block.
Looking into her face, I silently asked myself if I loved Ava Gardner. At the moment I felt sexual satisfaction more than anything else, but I could grow to love her.
“I have a planet to capture,” I said.
She stood up, gave me a long, luxuriant kiss, and scampered into the bathroom. The last I saw of her was blue panties covering cream-colored cheeks as she slipped through the bathroom door.
“Stay hidden,” I said.
“As if my life depended on it,” she said.
“It does.”
“You be careful, too.”
I turned and left the room.
I had not suited up for a mission in more than two years, not since New Copenhagen. It felt good to wear a shell. Combat armor was not bulletproof, though it would deflect shrapnel. Under my armor I wore a skintight bodysuit, which was airtight, climate-controlled, radiation-resistant, and pressurized. There were limits as to how much it would protect me; but it stood up well to heat, radiation, and chill. If I found myself at ground zero during a nuclear explosion, the percussion would crush me, and the extreme heat would cremate me, but my bodysuit would shield me from the radiation.
Our armor was light and bodysuits impressive, but it was our communications and surveillance technology that enabled the once-powerful Unified Authority Marines to conquer the Milky Way. The list of tools built into the visor of our helmets included a communications network called the interLink—video lenses that let us see in the dark, read heat signatures, and view distant targets. We had radar/sonic detection equipment for locating traps and surveying battlefields. Our visors also housed a memory chip that recorded everything we saw and heard in battle. Officers could transmit live visual feeds or read images from their subordinates’ visors. All of these tools were controlled with an ocular interface. Only Marines wore this combat armor. Soldiers fought in fatigues, and sailors …well, you could say they wore their ships when they went into battle.
Inside the docking bay door, 250 Marines in combat armor waited beside transports, lined up and ready to go. These were the men with whom I had trained for the last week. Some had come with me from Clonetown, the rest were veterans of the Scutum-Crux Fleet.
We had five transports, enough room for 500 men; but each transport also carried two armored jeeps. We were a small force traveling light. Even if the aliens had withdrawn from Terraneau, there was no way we could take control of the planet with 250 men and ten jeeps.
“Captain Harris, the men are ready to board, sir,” Thomer, very much the sergeant in charge, said as I approached.
“Load ’em up, then meet me in the cockpit of the first bird once we are under way,” I said.
“Aye, aye, sir.”
I walked to the front of the queue and proceeded up the ramp of the transport with the torpedo. A jeep waited at the top of the ramp, its headlights facing out toward the dock. I stood beside the jeep and watched as men boarded the dark, vaulted space of the kettle. The cabin was dark, with a high, curved ceiling. Metal floor, metal walls, metal ceiling, a metal booth with a cold metal seat for a head, and a wooden bench lining the wall that sat thirty men—kettle comfort was the military equivalent of being sealed in a can.
I climbed the ladder at the far end of the kettle and entered the cockpit. The pilot behind the yoke was a clone—brown hair, brown eyes, the works.
“Are we ready for takeoff, sir?” he asked as I entered.
“Just loading the men,” I said, as the distant rattle of armor boots walking across a metal floor carried to the cockpit. On some level, I still did not believe clones could run their own fleet; it hardly seemed possible. We were the grunts, the cannon fodder, the drones. Natural-borns threw us into the line of fire, and we held to the last man, never questioning orders. Seeing a clone in the pilot’s seat and the confident way he checked the controls made other possibilities seem more real.
The pilot radioed the other transports, and we rolled out of the staging area, riding on “sleds”—wheeled vehicles that carried transports through the various atmospheric locks. We passed through the first lock, then the second, and finally the third. Once past the third, the artificial gravity ended and a simple thrust lifted us into space.
As the pilot dropped us below the fleet where we could safely maneuver, I watched ships pass above us and felt like a minnow in a sea filled with whales. A frigate, the smallest of the capital ships, crossed over us. The frigate was thirty times larger than our transport; but when it sidled up beside a battleship, it looked no bigger than a flea.
In the far distance, Terraneau shone like a light. With the ion curtain around it, the planet had a man-made appearance. Instead of the blues, greens, and whites of a habitable planet, Terraneau looked as if it had been spun in white gold. It did not look habitable.
Hard as it was to believe, a census taken four years earlier recorded 1.2 billion people living on that planet. By now, most if not all of the population would be dead. Norristown, the capital city, would be covered with the four-year-old corpses of people who’d died fighting an enemy they could not possibly have understood.
Admiral Thorne believed the aliens had abandoned Terraneau long ago, but he did not understand them, either. He did not know about the mining operations and the shitload of toxic gas the aliens left behind. He didn’t know that the Avatari used suns to finish their work, baking planets after they finished excavating them and filling them with gas. Over the next hundred thousand years, Terraneau’s sun would expand and die.
The Avatari did not capture planets to annex them into an intergalactic empire; they destroyed planets in order to use them for mining purposes.
“I have a fix on the target zone,” the pilot said.
“Do you think that was what New Copenhagen looked like from outside, sir?” Thomer asked.
“I’ve never thought about it,” I lied.
“Captain, what do we do if the aliens are still down there?” the pilot asked.
“They’re gone,” I said, hoping I sounded more confident than I felt. “They don’t have time for sightseeing, not with an entire galaxy to destroy.”
As long as the ion curtain remained in place, the Avatari could return. The curtain might even work like a burglar alarm, sending a signal to the Avatari every time we poked a hole into the atmosphere. We would certainly set off alarms when we fired off our big bomb, but it would be too late for them to do anything once that happened. At least I hoped it would.
“Do you have the torpedo ready?” I asked.
“Ready to go, sir,” the pilot said.
“Do you think this will work?” Thomer asked me.
“It doesn’t matter what I think,” I said. “We’ll know one way or the other in about five seconds.” I sent Thomer back to ride with the men in the kettle, then gave the pilot the order to fire the torpedo.
Back on the Kamehameha, engineers had built a toggle-switch trigger into the navigation console above the pilot’s head. The pilot acknowledged my order, then flipped the switch.
The weapon fired. Staring out the front of the ship, I caught the quickest glimpse of the torpedo as it sped off from under the ship—just a flash of dull white and orange against the luminous backdrop of Terraneau, then the torpedo vanished into the glare of the planet.
We hovered nearly a thousand miles above the spot where the torpedo exploded. From this distance, the flash was bright but not blinding, just a small speck of white light that flared and vanished, leaving a hole in the shining sphere of the ion curtain. The hole was small and dark, with shimmering edges where the radioactive particles from the torpedo faded into the tachyons of the ion curtain.
I put on my helmet and opened an interLink frequency that would reach every man on all five transports. “Hold on tight; we’re going in.”
We shifted direction and picked up speed. Ahead of us, the hole looked like a dark speck on a glaring lightbulb. Two opposing gravitational forces fought for me—the artificial force created by the transport’s gravity generator held me to the deck while the genuine gravity, created by our acceleration, tugged me toward the rear hatch. Feeling like I was falling upward, I became dizzy and dragged myself into the copilot’s chair.
The planet filled the windshield. In the middle of the glowing horizon, the hole that we had created with our puny torpedo looked like a mere pinprick.
“I hope the corridor holds,” the pilot mumbled to himself.
I looked over at him to consider what he had just said. When I looked up again, the hole in the ion curtain filled my view. It might have been a half mile wide. Compared to the shining border around it, the hole looked dark and deep; I could not see the end of it.
“Here we go,” the pilot said. His words barely had time to register before we bored into the atmosphere with the force of a bullet slamming into a wooden plank. The transport shook violently, nearly throwing me out of my seat. A moment later, the shaking ended. We had taken a hard knock when we slammed into the atmosphere, but we tore through.
I had always imagined the ion curtain as a skin—a thin layer of glowing particles no deeper than a storm cloud. It wasn’t like that at all. It must have been a full hundred miles thick. I felt like I was speeding through an endless tunnel.
The meters and lights around the cockpit flickered, and I realized that the door we had opened with our torpedo was shrinking. “It’s closing in on us,” I told the pilot.
“I see that, sir,” he snapped.
The lights in the cockpit winked on and off again. The outage lasted less than a second, but it felt longer.
“If it closes in on us …” I started.
“We’re dead either way,” the pilot interrupted. He was right. Only a lunatic would take a transport balls-out on a vertical drop. With its stubby wings, this bird was anything but aerodynamic. If we dropped too quickly, we would never pull out.
I glanced down at the instruments and saw the altitude and speed meters flashing nonsense. The radar screen turned dark. Then, just as suddenly as we entered the ion layer, we plummeted into open air, and the systems went normal. The sky above us glowed like a sun, and the world below us was green and blue. In the forest below us, I saw a reminder that we had entered Avatari-held space—a line of glowing spheres.
“What are those?” the pilot asked, partially standing to get a better look.
“Can you leave a beacon on this spot?” I asked, ignoring his question.
“Yes, sir,” he said. He sat back, flipped a switch on the communications console, then craned his neck to get one last look back at the spheres. Once the beacon was set, he repeated his question, “Captain, what were those things.”
Against my better judgment, I told him the truth. “It’s an intergalactic transportation system.”
“Like the Broadcast Network?” he asked.
“Something like that.” In truth the spheres were nothing like the Broadcast Network, but I didn’t want to talk about it. I had other things on my mind.
I radioed Thomer in the kettle. “How’s the breakage back there?” I asked.
“Minimal, sir,” he said.
Next, I radioed Herrington. He flew in the second transport. “Your men okay?” I asked.
“I’ve had smoother rides,” Herrington said.
“And your men?” I repeated.
“One dumb shit asked if we could do it again,” Herrington said.
I contacted Sergeant Philo Hollingsworth in the third transport. He said, “A few bruises; they’ll get over it.”
I got no response from the fourth and fifth transports. The pilot checked the radar and confirmed that both ships were gone.
Seen from the inside, the shine from the ion curtain made my eyes hurt, but it did not leave me blind. Given another few hours, my eyes would adjust. The same thing had happened on New Copenhagen; we wore sunglasses much of the time, but we learned to live with the glare.
We entered the airspace over Norristown. The wreckage that had once been a capital city reminded me of ancient ruins. The skeletons of a few tall buildings poked out of the debris below us like plants growing out of a rocky field. A three-story-tall water tower pointed up at us like an accusing finger. Norristown, once a showcase city, had become an entropic mess, with heaps of rubble, broken streets, and the occasional straight edge of a wall or walkway.
We passed over a suburb in which pockets of homes and parks remained untouched by the destruction around them. A church with twin steeples rose out of a ground like a giant gravestone. Past the church, the deep blue depths of the Norris River cut across town. I spotted the remains of a suspension bridge. Half of it lay visible under the water like a sunken ship; the other half looked solid enough to cross.
A line of riverside apartments still stood. We would need to search those buildings for survivors.
“How does it look?” Thomer called up from the kettle.
“Familiar,” I said. A veteran of New Copenhagen, Thomer knew what I meant.
“I’ve located the airfield up ahead,” the pilot said. “It looks clean. Do you want to go in for a landing or do a flyby?”
I could see the field as well. It had been an Army air base—nothing more than a few corrugated steel hangars, a two-story temporary tower, and a long, open tarmac.
“Go on in,” I said, my thoughts more centered on what to do once we landed.
The pilot signaled the other transports to land, and we touched down. As he had said, the area was clean. Taking a quick look through the windshield, I might have gone so far as to call it deserted. I saw no wreckage, no choppers, and no bodies. The buildings looked untouched.
Thomer led a team of men to sweep and secure the area. When he gave us the all clear, Herrington and Hollingsworth shouted their platoons out of the transports. The sergeants had their men off-load our gear and the jeeps. With its open grounds and hangars, the field might work for landings and rendezvous, but it would never serve as a base.
As my men unloaded the gear, I eavesdropped on a few of their conversations over the interLink. They sounded nervous.
…could be anywhere.
Maybe they left the planet? I heard they left.
I don’t know about you, but I’m shitting ice cubes. I specking hate this place.
It’s better than being stuck on the ship.
How the specking hell is this better than the ship? The sky is a specking lightbulb, the buildings are blown to shit. How in the hell is this better than being aboard a ship?
I hear there’s plenty of scrub on this planet.
Scrub? That changes things.
“Scrub,” was Marine-speak for women and one-night stands. Hearing them talk about scrub, I thought for a moment about Ava. There was something about her …Maybe it was her eyes, or maybe it was the brassy way she talked about Ted Mooreland and Al Smith; something about her stayed with me.
As I swept through the open frequencies, I heard a Marine singing “Amazing Grace,” and I had to laugh. Don’t waste your breath, I thought. The god they wrote that for doesn’t know you exist. Hymns were meant to be sung by men with souls and heard by the god that created them, leaving us clones out of the loop.
We weren’t created by God, we were devised by scientists; mortal men who borrowed parts from God’s creation and used them in a scientific process that every major religion condemned. Those same religions said we were created without souls.
“Gods too decompose,” I said to myself. It was a quote from Nietzsche. “Friedrich, old pal, I gave up on you too quickly.”
Once we finished this invasion, I would give Nietzsche another try.
After we pulled the gear from our three remaining transports, I divided the men up. Thomer and I would take two platoons into town. Hollingsworth would guard the landing field with the third platoon. Herrington had the important job: he and a pilot would take a transport and locate the Avatari mining site.
Back on New Copenhagen, we had found the mines by tracking seismic activity. Herrington would have it a little easier. He had a device that detected the toxic gas that the Avatari placed in their excavations.
Our jeeps could transport eight men, but you wouldn’t want to pack more than five men into them during combat situations. Having lost two transports we were down to six jeeps, meaning we could drive forty-eight men into town.
Nine years of war had hardened me. As a new recruit, I would have grieved for the men in the transports we lost on the way through the atmosphere; now I worried more about losing manpower, not men. Instead of blaming myself for casualties, I concerned myself with completing the mission.
As we left the airfield, I saw Herrington’s transports go wheels up. All short wings and stout metal walls, the bird lumbered off the ground unsteadily, righted itself, then shot away, disappearing against the glare of the ion curtain. I watched it depart, all the while calculating the odds of our success.
We traveled slowly into downtown Norristown. The first few miles took us along the overgrown streets of an industrial district. Weeds choked the ditches, and tall grass grew up along the fences. Except for cracked windows and an occasional collapsed façade, the one- and two-story buildings in this part of town had survived the war untouched. Dusty cars sat in parking lots and along the street. Most had flat tires. We saw no bodies—none at all.
“It looks like they just walked away,” Thomer said on a direct frequency.
“I wonder how far they got,” I said. After that, we both went silent. I listened in on my men and found very little chatter. They were alert, which was good, but I could feel the tension among them. The Marine handling the machine gun on my jeep flitted the barrel back and forth, scouring the street for any sign of movement; he was a man who would shoot first and ask questions later. The men in the seats behind me had their M27s ready. Obviously, these men had not fought on New Copenhagen or they would have known that M27s were useless against the Avatari.
M27s might not do much to an alien, but they were hell on Earth when it came to crowd control. I had a feeling that any survivors we found around this wreckage would be scared and dangerous. Speaking on an open frequency, I told my men, “Think before you shoot. We’re looking for survivors, not aliens, and we want to keep them alive. You got that?”
It was a rare rhetorical question, but it still netted me a few aye, ayes. The boys were nervous.
“Sir, how will we identify the aliens?” one man asked. The Pentagon never released the images of the Avatari to the public. Only the veterans of New Copenhagen would have seen the aliens in action.
Thomer fielded the question. “Shoot at anything eight feet tall or taller.”
“Eight feet?”
“And made of stone,” Thomer added.
Silence followed as the inexperienced Marines tried to decide if Thomer was joking.
“There are spiders, too,” I said.
“Oh yeah, the spiders,” Thomer said. “If you see a spider the size of a jeep, it’s probably not friendly.”
“Don’t listen to them, you dumb speck. They’re just playing with you,” Sergeant Hollingsworth said. I heard laughter in his voice. Hollingsworth had not been with us on New Copenhagen. He didn’t know. He thought we were hazing the kid.
“I assure you, Sergeant, this is no joke,” I said on a platoon-wide frequency. Then, opening a direct channel between me and Hollingsworth, I added, “Thomer is going easy on you, Sergeant. He hasn’t told you about their guns.”
“Yes, sir,” said Hollingsworth.
Two hours after leaving the airfield, we passed a billboard for a shopping mall. All of the buildings in this part of town had been demolished. Wind whistled through the pipes, bricks, and fragments of walls that rose like spines out of the grounds. We passed the remains of a fence here and the jagged remains of a warehouse there; but nothing over ten feet tall remained standing in this part of town. In the distance, three tall skyscrapers towered over the road, but that was a few miles ahead.
We drove over patches of road when they appeared between mounds of debris and rubble. Glass and plaster crunched under our tires. We passed a park in which a row of barren flagpoles stood out of the ground like giant needles. The clang of the wind smacking the tackle against the shafts of the flagpoles echoed like gunfire in the empty streets.
The Army airfield was on the east side of town. We drove west toward the heart of the city. The destruction was so complete in some parts of Norristown that the landscape looked like a painted desert. We passed an area in which a ten-foot knoll the color of red brick lined the road to our left and a thirty-foot hill of gray concrete and rusted steel lined the road to our right. The dusty shards of black glass along the top of the hill reflected the light from the sky.
“This can’t be Norristown, sir,” my driver said.
“This is it, Corporal,” I said. “That hill over there probably stood thirty stories tall when the aliens arrived.”
The driver slowed the jeep and studied the panorama around us. Perhaps he was trying to reconstruct the city in his mind, or he might have been watching out for an ambush.
A large river ran through the center of Norristown. As we approached it, we saw the arches and towers of a large suspension bridge spanning the water. I recognized the architecture from the flight in; it was the bridge that had collapsed on one side. “We’re not going to be able to cross here,” I said, as we mounted a rise and the entire bridge became visible.
“No, sir,” my driver said.
The closer half of the bridge—a brick-and-metal structure with grand arches, thick rails, and a spider work of cables—looked solid enough. One of the arches from the far side of the bridge poked out of the water like the elbow of a swimming giant. The rest of the bridge had vanished beneath the river.
Surfing channels on the interLink, I heard men groaning. We could very well have a big fight coming up, so I could not afford for these men to become discouraged.
We passed a row of small apartment buildings overlooking the river. Following the mostly clear road that ran along the waterfront, we searched for another bridge. A couple of miles up the road, we found an old concrete arch bridge that seemed untouched by the war.
It wasn’t until we crossed the bridge that we started seeing bodies. After four years out in the open, they were no longer rotting corpses, just bones. Had I removed my helmet, I would not have smelled the scents of death and decay; they were long gone.
From what I could tell, the people on this planet had died in groups. We might drive for blocks and see nothing more than an occasional Army helmet or fatigue-clad skeleton, then we would turn a corner and enter a boneyard in which the ground seemed paved with skulls and femurs. I understood this, of course. The concentrated areas were places where battalions made a stand; the scattered remains were soldiers who died in retreat.
The Marines who fought on Terraneau did not fight alongside the soldiers in these battles. We passed avenues that looked as if they had been paved with skeletons draped in dirty camos—places in which the Army made a stand. A few blocks later, Marine battle armor lay strewn along the street.
“Harris, why do I feel like I’m back in Valhalla?” Thomer asked.
Valhalla was the capital of New Copenhagen.
I did not respond, but I was thinking the same thing.
As we drove through one particularly corpse-sown battlefield, I saw a battery of rocket launchers leaning across the top of the wall of a two-story building like a drunk leaning to keep from falling to the ground. There were so many bones scattered along this stretch of road that it would have taken an army of archaeologists and psychics to reconstruct the skeletons. My driver steered the jeep right through the center of the mess. He had no choice but to drive over the dead, the wreckage lay everywhere. Our tires ground bones into the cement. Camos tore. Helmets popped and flattened or shot out from beneath us.
As we pushed deeper into the downtown area, the rubble of buildings that had once lined the roadway now covered it. Crossing a dune made of walnut-sized pieces of debris, our jeeps left cat tails of dust in their wake.
The Avatari seldom left buildings in their wake. When they calibrated their weapons to destroy skyscrapers, the buildings dropped like a man shot through the heart. Some broke off at their base, leaving straight edges poking up through the ground; but most caved in on themselves.
“Captain Harris, we’re picking up traces of shit gas in the air,” Herrington said. He was out of interLink range but the communications gear in his transport had a long-distance communicator that could reach my commandLink. Driving through the ruins of Norristown, I had almost forgotten that Herrington was out looking for the mines.
“Have you found the opening?” I asked.
“Not yet, but we’ve got to be close. You don’t get this much shit in the air unless there’s an asshole nearby.”
“Keep me advised,” I said, and signed off.
We drove into the downtown financial district, an area mostly reduced to dust. Less than a mile ahead of us, the three remaining high-rise towers rose out of the ground like giant pillars. They were straight-edged versions of Jack’s bean-stalk, and they seemed to reach all the way up into the shining white-gold sky.
Two of the buildings had black glass exteriors, the third had a silver metallic finish. These might have been the tallest buildings on Terraneau. Had they fallen, their rubble would have flooded three blocks in every direction.
The black marble walls of the first building were pocked with holes and scrapes from large-caliber bullets. Some of the street-level windows were shattered, and others were cracked. If people had died here, the bodies had been cleared out. The driveway into the parking lot looked like it had been swept clean.
If I had to guess, I would have said that the battle had wound down by the time it reached this part of town. Had soldiers entered these buildings, the Avatari would have demolished them. Apparently nobody did.
I had my driver park our jeep, and the other jeeps stopped behind us. A few of the men hopped out of their rides, while others stood on the vehicles. Everyone scanned the area.
“Listen up,” I called over an open channel, drowning out unauthorized conversations between my men. “We’re going to split up.
“Thomer, you take three jeeps and head out to Fort Sebastian. I want to know about weapons, power, and survivors.” Fort Sebastian was the local Army base. The force defending Terraneau used it as their hub.
“Aye, aye, sir,” Thomer said. Fallzoud haze or straight, Thomer would locate the fort and expedite. I could depend on him. He gave the command, and the last three jeeps in our convoy split off from the rest. I watched them leave, then I addressed the men who remained with me.
“We came here looking for survivors. I don’t give a shit about dead bodies, so don’t waste my specking air-space gab bing about them. Got that?”
They got it.
“We’ll search the whole damn city if we need to, but we’re going to start here, with these buildings. Now fall out.”
These men knew the drill. They broke into platoons and fire teams. As they headed toward the buildings, I reminded them about their priorities.
“Listen up, Leathernecks, we are not here to act like the specking police. We did not come here to specking serve and protect. If you see survivors, do not expect them to be rational human beings.
“If you see survivors, assume that they are armed. You may have noticed there are a lot more dead bodies than weapons on the streets. If the bodies are there, and the weapons are gone, you bet your ass that whoever took those weapons is alive and scared and dangerous as hell.”
“Sir …” one of my Marines began.
“What is it?” I snapped.
“Begging the captain’s pardon, sir, but this Marine saw lots of human bodies.”
“We’re racing against the clock,” I said, cutting the man off. “Spit it out, man.”
“Sir, this Marine did not see dead aliens, sir.”
“Yeah, they evaporate when they die,” I said.
“Can we kill them, sir?” the Marine persisted.
“Damn straight we can kill them,” I said, which was not entirely true, but it was not entirely untrue, either. We could break them, and they would stay broken for a couple of days. They would evaporate, then the particles would re-form, and they would spawn again. The key to beating the bastards was finding their mining site and setting off our nuke. God, I hoped Herrington found the mines.
“You have your orders,” I said. “Call me if you find survivors.”
I hopped out of my jeep and entered the building, stepping over a shattered glass panel. Shards of glass sank and shuffled under my boots. Inside, the lobby was as silent and still as death itself.
“Herrington, you found anything yet?” I called from just inside the lobby of the skyscraper. I looked around as I waited for his response, studying the security desk and the large glass panel that listed the offices on each floor. The desk looked forlorn and abandoned intact. The safety glass over the directory was still in its frame and thick with dust.
I walked down the hall that led to two rows of five elevators. All of the doors to the elevators stood open; they looked like closets.
“I think we found it,” Herrington finally replied from his transport. “Do you want me to go down for a closer look?”
“Not a chance, Sergeant,” I said. At that moment, it seemed like the mission might go according to plan. Herrington had already found the mines, and there was no sign of the aliens, all we needed to do was to deliver our nuke and look for survivors. “Leave a beacon over the entrance and get back here as quickly as possible.”
“Yes, sir.”
I contacted Hollingsworth back at the airstrip and told him to queue up the transport with the nuke. I hoped to have Herrington swap birds and send him back with most of my men.
For now, I turned my attention to finding survivors.
Besides me, seven other Marines entered this building. We would search the building in two fire teams. Fire teams consisted of a rifleman, an automatic rifleman, a team leader, and a grenadier. I played leader in absentia for one of those teams, sending my men to explore the lobby.
“Captain Harris,” my rifleman radioed in. He was on point.
“What is it?” I asked in a testy voice. Officers need to act officious, or their subordinates become insubordinate.
“I see a large mess at the back of the lobby. Should we search it?”
“This whole place is a mess.”
The man laughed. “A mess hall, sir …a cafeteria.”
“See any survivors?” I asked.
“No, but it looks like somebody is still using the facilities. I’m knee deep in empty cans and boxes.”
“Get this—somebody is using the oven for a fireplace,” my grenadier added.
“But you haven’t spotted anybody with a pulse?” I asked.
“No, sir.”
I told the team to “stay alert” and signed off.
Past the open doors of the elevators, I found a stairwell. Someone had removed the door from its hinges and left it leaning against the wall. I searched the stairwell using my heat-vision lenses to make sure no one was waiting for me around the corner. The area was clear.
Inside the stairwell, flights of stairs formed a helix leading to the top of the building. I did not think I would need to climb to the top. The building was over a hundred stories tall; without the elevators and air-conditioning, any survivors living in this tower would confine themselves to the lower floors.
The light from the ion curtain filled the lobby, but it trailed off as I started up the stairs. My visor switched to night-for-day lenses in the darkness. I climbed a couple of flights, scanned the area for heat signatures, and kept my M27 ready.
When I reached the second-floor landing, I found an open doorway leading to a mezzanine. Looted shops with smashed windows lined the halls past the doorway. A flood of trash, papers, and broken furniture covered the black marble floor.
After wasting a few minutes sifting my way through the wreckage, I headed back to the stairs and climbed three more flights to the next floor. The door to this floor was closed.
“Has anyone found anything?” I asked on a company-wide frequency. Everyone but Thomer replied with a negative. He had something to report.
“We found Fort Sebastian,” he said.
Switching frequencies to a direct line with Thomer, I asked, “How does it look?”
“We’re outside the fort right now, sir,” Thomer said. “It’s pretty banged up.”
“How banged up?” I asked.
“Remember the shielded bunker the Army used on New Copenhagen? They set one up just like it over here.”
Shielded bunkers were supposedly sturdy enough to survive a nuclear blast. Soldiers stationed in the bunker would be cooked and irradiated by the time the blast dissipated, but the bunker would survive. Unfortunately, shielding and bunkers meant nothing to the Avatari—the bolts from their guns bored through their walls.
“How did it hold up?” I asked.
“It looks like the Avatari used it for target practice,” Thomer said.
“Any signs of life?” I asked.
“It’s full of bones,” Thomer said. “I found a rat’s nest.”
“How about MREs, clean blankets, screaming children, or shit that hasn’t dried to powder?”
“Nothing,” Thomer said.
“Find any guns or grenades?”
“Someone cleaned the place out.”
“It would seem so,” I agreed.
“Want me to search the rest of the bunker?” Thomer asked.
“Don’t waste your time,” I said. “You might as well move on to the fort. Keep an eye out for working generators. They needed juice to talk to the fleet. If you find the generators, you’ll probably find the survivors.”
“Aye, sir,” Thomer said before he signed off.
Thomer’s search was not going to be easy. In the grand tradition of all things Army, the layout of Fort Sebastian defied reason. According to our maps, the base was as big as a farming town.
Trusting Thomer to follow orders, I returned to my own search.
I opened the door to the next floor slowly. Using the external speaker on my helmet, I called out: “This is Captain Wayson Harris of the Unified Authority Marines. I repeat, I am a Unified Authority Marine. Is there anyone in this building?”
The announcement was greeted with silence. The door swung open, revealing another gloomy hallway.
I stepped out of the stairwell and into that hall. The equipment in my visor picked up sounds easily missed by the human ear. Someone far to my right was trying to ease away from me. The person must have thought he could hide by clinging to the shadows. Using night-for-day vision, I saw it was only a kid. He had to be in his teens. He crawled along the wall until he reached a door, then he looked back toward me and turned the knob. Light leaked into the hall as he opened the door. The boy slithered through the opening and closed the door behind him.
“I found a survivor,” I said over the open frequency.
“Where are you, sir?” Hollingsworth asked.
“Was he friendly?” asked Herrington.
I answered Herrington first. “He wasn’t armed.”
“That’s good news,” said Hollingsworth.
“Where are you, sir?” It was the automatic rifleman from the fire team I had abandoned.
“Third floor.”
“We’re on our way, sir.”
I was not foolish enough to follow that kid into a blind situation without backup. As I waited, I tried identifying myself again. “This is Captain Wayson Harris of the Unified Authority Marines,” I repeated, with my voice so amplified that anyone on that floor of the building could hear me.
Scanning the wall using the heat-vision lens in my visor, I located several people hidden beyond the wall. Judging by the way they crouched along the floor, they seemed to be frightened of me.
I toyed with the idea of yelling, “Come out with your hands up,” or possibly, “I know you’re in there.” They might have mistaken me for an alien. Hell, by the standards of whatever society had formed on this planet since the invasion, these guys could be criminals on the lam.
My fire team joined me. “Where are the survivors, sir?” the automatic rifleman asked.
“Hiding behind the door,” I said. As I pulled out a grenade and set it for the lowest yield possible, my backup instinctively backed off. I called to the people hidden on the other side of the wall: “Stand away from the wall.”
“Sir, I found the mines.” It was Herrington.
I wanted to hear his report, but I had other priorities at the moment. “Not now, Herrington,” I said as I tossed my grenade toward the wall and took cover.
“Aye, aye, sir, but do you want me to reconnoiter the spheres on my way back?”
“Herrington, I’m a bit busy at the moment,” I snapped.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
The first explosion, the one from my grenade, had enough force to blow a ten-foot section out of the wall. The second explosion, the one caused by whatever explosives the friendly natives had rigged, sent a rush of flames across the hall.
“What the hell was that?” my rifleman asked.
“That, Corporal, is why you stay under cover when there is fire in the hole.”
“I don’t think they were happy to see you, sir,” the grenadier said.
“That’s just ’cause they don’t know him,” said the rifleman.
We searched the first five floors of the building. The place had been occupied recently, but now stood abandoned. Reviewing the confrontation, I decided that throwing a grenade might not have made a good first impression, and time was running out.
“Captain Harris, we’ve located survivors. Do you want us to make contact?” The call came from the fire team I had sent into the metal-skinned skyscraper. The Marine on the line, Corporal Hunter Ritz, sounded too helpful.
“Negative, Corporal. The natives are not friendly,” I said.
“The natives in this building may be hostile, but they don’t look dangerous, sir,” Ritz said. “It’s like a cathouse in here.”
“A cathouse?” I repeated.
“Yes, sir. A brothel, sir.”
“As in hookers and whores?” I asked, suddenly understanding his motivation to volunteer.
“Maybe not hookers and whores, but they are all of the female variety, sir,” Ritz said. “It’s pretty much paradise as far as I can tell. We’ve checked several floors; there are no men.”
“Keep your armor on,” I said.
“We’re going to need to make contact sooner or later, sir, and they don’t appear to be hostile. Maybe we could just ask them for directions.”
“Keep away from them, Ritz. That is an order. Do not start up a conversation. Do not deliver your best pickup line. You and your men will observe the targets, but do not engage.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And try to stay alert, asshole. There’s no point keeping the hens in a henhouse unless you have a watchdog to guard it.”
“Yes, sir.”
I had left the Kamehameha with 250 men, 100 of whom I lost entering the atmosphere. We did not have enough men to take this city by force, not from the survivors and certainly not from the aliens. If I lost anyone else, I would not even have enough bodies to deliver the big bomb to the mines, and I did not want to be stuck on this planet for the rest of my life.
Unfortunately, Ritz had contacted me on an open frequency to report his discovery.
As I scanned through other frequencies, I heard Marines offering to help guard the place they had already dubbed “the Norristown brothel and home for wayward girls.” I had to admit, I was just as curious as everyone else. Was the building a harem? A brothel? Maybe a boot camp for Amazons? In a broken society, there was no telling what a building filled with women could mean.
“Sir, we have a problem?” one of my men reported. “The locals have arrived.”
Using the commandLink, I looked at the situation through the other man’s visor. He must have been standing at a window staring down at the street. Below him, the residents of Norristown had arrived en masse.
There were hundreds of men in the street, standing silently, prepared to fight but not yet rioting. In the center of this mob, my three jeeps looked like tiny islands. No one had overturned our vehicles, but the tide closed around them.
I sent my next message out on a company-wide frequency that even Hollingsworth and Herrington would hear. “Boys, we have a street full of survivors.”
“How did you find them?” Thomer asked.
“They found us,” I said.
“Do you want me to bring my men?” Thomer asked.
“Stay put, they’re behaving themselves so far,” I said as I headed down the stairs toward the lobby. As I stepped on to the floor, I could see men just outside the lobby staring in. Without taking my eyes off the street, I backed into the stairwell and trotted back up the stairs to the mezzanine, where I could have a closer look at the street below.
I loped over the debris left behind by looters and stole up to the window, my nerves tense. A large mob of men had formed on the street, but they showed no interest in entering the building. They milled around like an army of vagrants. Many carried M27s or handguns. A few of them had rocket launchers. Every weapon I saw was standard military issue, probably gleaned from the streets.
As I surveyed the scene, I noticed Corporal Ritz peering around the shattered glass of a fifth-floor window. My visor read his virtual tags. He looked in my direction, probably spotting me through the window with his telescopic lens.
“Do you think they know we’re up here?” Ritz asked.
“Can you think of any other reason for them to be here?” I asked.
“Look at those bastards. There must be a thousand of them.”
I estimated them at five hundred or six hundred, but kept it to myself.
“Are they armed?” Thomer asked.
“Every last mother-specking one of them,” I said. “I think we know where all the guns disappeared to.”
The mob filled the streets and sidewalks in a single, unorganized mass. At any moment, I expected some leader to climb onto one of our jeeps and rally his troops with a speech, but it did not happen.
“Ritz, what’s happening in the brothel?”
“Not much, sir,” Ritz said. “I don’t think the ladies know we’re in here.”
“So we have a standoff,” I said. “They don’t want to come in, and we don’t want to step out.”
“Maybe they don’t know who we are, sir,” Ritz said. “Maybe they don’t know we’re Marines.”
“Maybe they don’t care,” I said. Who knew what kind of anarchy had taken hold in Norristown. These people probably knew no authority higher than a gun.
I decided it was time to introduce myself. Pulling both a grenade and a rocket launcher from my belt, I took twelve paces back from the window. I set the grenade for a relatively low-yield explosion, and tossed it toward the window, then hid in a doorway. The explosion sprayed shattered glass onto the street. Bright light poured in through the shattered glass wall.
“What are you doing?” Ritz asked.
“I’m introducing myself,” I said.
The men in the street scattered as glass showered down on them. Not giving them a moment to regroup, I bolted for the window and fired my rocket at one of the jeeps. I hated sacrificing a perfectly good ride, but explosions and burning metal made a strong impression.
The rocket hit the rear of the jeep just above the fuel tank, touching off a second explosion. The jeep did an anemic flip through the air, crashing onto its front bumper, then landing upside down. Greasy black smoke rose from the chassis along with a bloom of orange-and-red flames.
Down below, all of the men on the street turned their guns in my direction, but nobody fired. Finally, a man stepped out of the crowd and climbed onto the nearest jeep. He wore Army fatigues and a Marine Corps combat helmet. He spoke to me over an open channel on the interLink, his voice sounding so damn familiar we might have been old friends.
He said, “I understand your need to intrude upon our privacy, Captain, but why in God’s name are you shooting at us?”
Hoping that the mob would overestimate our numbers, I had my Marines trail me as I left the building.
The locals made way for me as I entered the street, allowing me and my Marines to pass through unchallenged. I worked my way toward the flaming wreckage of the jeep and the man in the combat helmet who stood beside it. As I came closer, he removed his helmet, revealing shoulder-length hair and a flowing beard. I hardly recognized him.
I came within a few feet of the man and removed my helmet as well.
“What are you doing here, Captain Harris?” asked the Right Reverend Colonel Ellery Doctorow in a voice that held both hostility and restraint. This was the man who had told the fleet to go away. He sounded like he was about to do it again. Gone was the slightest trace that this man had ever been an Army chaplain.
“We came to liberate Terraneau,” I said.
Doctorow laughed. “You hear that? He came to rescue us,” he called out to his men. Those close enough to hear him laughed. Then turning to me, he said, “The aliens left here long ago, Captain.”
Somehow, Doctorow seemed to have gone from highest-ranking shaman in the U.A. Army to some sort of acting governor of Norristown. Hell, for all I knew, he might have set himself up as the lord high emperor of all Terraneau. Whatever his domain, these men clearly followed him.
Doctorow was not as tall as he looked in his picture. He stood over six feet tall, but I still had an inch or two on him. He had aged over the last four years and had become less military in his bearing. The photo that came with my orders showed Doctorow still in his fifties; now he looked more like a well-preserved sixty-five-year-old. He stood erect, but he was too thin. He had let his coal-colored flattop grow into a shaggy mane that reached down to his shoulders, and his thick salt-and-pepper beard had strayed over to the salt side of the equation.
I did not know whether to call the man by his military rank or religious title. Since he was out of uniform, I decided to go the religious route. “Reverend Doctorow,” I began.
“I prefer ‘Colonel,’ ” he corrected.
“Colonel, you see that bright stuff up there in the sky?” I asked.
“Hard to miss,” Doctorow said.
“They call that the ‘ion curtain,’ ” I said.
“I’m familiar with the term. The scientist who coined it was stationed at Fort Sebastian.”
“Was he a dwarf?” I asked.
Doctorow smiled. “It sounds as if we have a common acquaintance.”
“Dr. William Sweetwater,” I said.
Undoubtedly remembering dark days past, Doctorow said, “They tried to lift him off the planet as the invasion began. Sounds like he made it.”
“I met him on New Copenhagen,” I said.
“New Copenhagen? The aliens made it all the way to New Copenhagen?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. There was nothing more to say.
We stood in the road, in the junction between the three skyscrapers. Doctorow’s horde surrounded us, but they also gave us a lot of space. The seven men who had come down with me had worked their way to one of the jeeps. The tone of our meeting was neither friendly nor hostile. “They would have finished us off on New Copenhagen if it were not for Sweetwater,” I said. “The little bastard saved us.”
“Saved you from what?” Doctorow asked. “The aliens don’t do much once they capture your planet. They leave their ion curtain in the sky; they knock down buildings. But they’re not all that bad.
“They killed off our army, but they left us alone once we stopped trying to fight them.” He wore a reassuring expression, the smile of a parent explaining the difference between right and wrong to an ignorant kid.
“They haven’t left,” I said.
“We haven’t seen them for years.”
“You do know that there’s a line of glowing spheres no more than twenty miles from here?” I asked. “The aliens use those to spawn. You know that, right?”
Doctorow placed a hand on my shoulder. It was a condescending gesture, and it made me angry. He leaned toward me and spoke in a whisper so that no one would hear what he said. “That, Captain Harris, is why we asked your fleet to go away.”
I did not go into detail, but I told Doctorow about New Copenhagen. I described how the Avatari had hollowed mountains and filled them with gas so toxic the fumes slowly melted your skin. I told him how the aliens would expand the nearest sun and use it to bake Terraneau until it was cinder and gas.
“Is that a fact?” Doctorow asked, already acting a lot less sure of himself. “That changes things. How long do we have?”
“It will be a few thousand years before the sun goes on broil, but we’ve already located the gas,” I said. “It’s nasty shit.”
“There’s no need for vulgarity,” Doctorow said; but I had the feeling that he said it out of reflex instead of conviction, the same way he might say “God bless you” to a man who sneezed. As a former Army man, he knew the score. Among military men, swearing isn’t a vice, it’s a specking art form. Once he finished considering what I said, he added, “I don’t suppose you have any proof?”
“Excuse me,” I told Doctorow. I replaced my helmet and tried to reach Herrington. He did not answer, so I called Thomer instead.
I wanted to send Doctorow to the mines with Herrington, but I could not raise his transport. Somehow, he had flown out of range.
I contacted Hollingsworth and told him to get a transport ready, then I told Thomer to return to the airfield. With Herrington gone, Thomer would need to take his place. He would take Doctorow to see the Avatari mines, and he would lead a team into the mines to detonate the bomb.
As one of the only three men in the Unified Authority to enter an alien dig site and survive, Thomer had the right ré sumé for offering guided tours around Avatari mines; but I still worried. The Right Reverend would undoubtedly notice Thomer’s Fallzoud-induced lethargy. Thomer was more alert than he had been back on the ship, but he still reacted to questions a fraction of a second too slow.
Thomer arrived at the airfield first. He loaded seventy-five Marines onto the transport, then waited for Doctorow to show. Once the Right Reverend rolled onto the field, Thomer led him onto the transport, and they took off for the mines. They did not leave empty-handed. I hoped Doctorow would not notice the large crate in the cargo hold or ask why seventy-five Marines had come along for the ride.
So far, nothing on this mission had gone according to plan.
“Captain Harris, sir?” Hollingsworth called from the airfield just moments after Thomer and Doctorow took to the air.
“What do you have?”
“I’m still not getting through to Sergeant Herrington.”
“Maybe something is wrong with his equipment,” I said.
“I understand, sir, but I haven’t had any luck locating his transport with our radar.” Hollingsworth was using the equipment on our third transport. Powerful equipment.
I wondered how long it had been since I spoke with Herrington. A couple of hours had passed. He said he had located the mines. He had said something else, but I was distracted. I’d missed what he said.
Then I remembered what he had said. “Oh shit,” I groaned. “Speck.”
“What is it, sir?” Hollingsworth asked.
“Herrington said he was going to fly by the Avatari spheres,” I said. “He said he was going to swing by the spheres on the way back to the airfield.”
“I don’t understand.” Hollingsworth sounded confused. Not having served on New Copenhagen, he could not fit the pieces together.
“Sergeant, you’d better have your pilot patch me through to Thomer’s transport,” I said. “We have a hell of a problem.”
I looked around the street. Mixing what was left of my men and the local militia, there might have been a thousand of us. We mostly had M27s and machine guns. My men would have some rocket launchers and grenades. We were cooked.
“Captain Harris, I have them,” Hollingsworth said.
“Thomer.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Doctorow, you there, too?”
“I’m here,” Doctorow said.
“Herrington is dead,” I said. “The Avatari are on their way.”
Herrington’s transport simply vanished. That meant it went down quickly, so quickly that the pilot never even had time to send a distress signal. They could have had an equipment failure, but I knew damn well that they hadn’t. They were shot down. They reached the spheres and ran into the Avatari with their specking light rifles.
I remembered that the last thing I told Herrington was that I was too busy to talk; then I snuffed out that guilty memory. There would be time for recriminations later.
The beacon Herrington left by the mines was just over eight thousand miles away. Flying at 2,250 miles per hour, it would have taken him nearly four hours to get from the mines to the spheres. That meant he went down about an hour ago.
The spheres were approximately twenty miles from town. An army with light armor could close that gap in under an hour, but the Avatari moved slowly. Once they emerged from the spheres, it would take them hours to make the long march into Norristown.
Using interLink communications, I went over my calculations with Doctorow and Thomer and Hollingsworth. “Are you sure about this?” Doctorow asked. “For all you know, Herrington’s radio might be on the blink.”
I reminded him that the radar no longer showed Herrington’s transport.
“So what do we do?” Doctorow asked.
“We’re going to have to fight,” I said.
“Then you’re on your own, Captain. This is your fight; they came here looking for you.” Doctorow sounded angry, like a man who suspects his friends are trying to con him.
I wanted to tell Doctorow to go speck himself. I wanted to tell him we could all die together if he preferred it that way. I kept my mouth shut, partially because I needed his help and partially because I knew he was right.
“What if we lit up the nuke?” Thomer asked. “We’re closing in on the mines.”
“It’s too late for that,” I said. “We’re going to have to fight them. One way or another, we’re going to need to fight them.”
The Avatari emerged from their spheres as energy, then created their bodies by attracting tachyons out of the ion curtain. Exploding a nuclear device in the mines would draw loose tachyons out of the atmosphere, eradicating the ion curtain. It would not pull in tachyons that had already attached themselves to an avatar.
“Do you want me to scout the area?” Hollingsworth volunteered. “I could take a transport and be back in no time.”
It sounded like an unnecessary risk, but I allowed him to persuade me. “I wouldn’t mind having an ETA on the bastards,” I agreed. “Just don’t get shot down.”
Hollingsworth said he would be careful and signed off.
Perhaps hearing Hollingsworth throw himself into the fire reminded Doctorow of his days in the Army. Maybe he’d just rethought things. Something made him change his mind, and he said, “If the mines are as bad as you say they are, we’re all facing a death sentence. If it will help, Captain Harris, my militia will join you.”
“A thousand men with M27s; I’m not sure what good that will do.”
“My militia is five thousand men strong, and we have a lot more than machine guns. We have an exit strategy we’ve been saving in case of an emergency.”
“We have an army of indestructible aliens marching into town. I think that qualifies as an emergency,” I said.
“It sounds like an emergency to me,” Doctorow agreed. As it turned out, the Right Reverend Colonel Ellery Doctorow had a very good exit strategy indeed.
Norristown did not have enough electricity for everyday life, but the city’s emergency generators produced more than enough juice to power the sirens. All around town, sirens blared, calling the militia to arms and warning everyone else to abandon the town. When it came to evacuation, I had little doubt that the general population of Norristown took their warning sirens seriously.
The sound of the sirens tore through the air as we crossed town, their moaning wail carried across the ruined landscape unobstructed by walls or towers.
I rode with the locals in a truck to go see the place that Ellery Doctorow described as “the darkest spot on Terraneau.” On the way, we would stop by the Norristown Armory. According to Doctorow, the locals had collected enough guns and bombs to put up a fight.
“Captain Harris, I found Herrington’s transport,” Hollingsworth radioed in over the interLink.
“Any survivors?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“I can’t tell from here. Do you want me to go in for a closer look?”
“No,” I said, seeing no reason for him to risk his life to confirm something we both already knew. With the ion curtain forcing us to fly low, our transports made easy targets for the aliens. “Do you see any sign of the aliens?”
“There’s some kind of glow coming off some hills,” Hollingsworth said. “Should I go have a look?”
“No!” My voice lurched as I yelled this, but I could not help myself. Hollingsworth had not been on New Copenhagen. He had no idea what he was dealing with. “That glow is the aliens. Mark the area on the map and get back to the airfield.”
A moment later, the positions came in on the virtual map in my visor. Hollingsworth marked the spot where Herrington went down. It was twenty-three miles west of town. He also marked the aliens’ position, approximately eighteen miles west of town. One thing about the Avatari, they moved at a glacial pace. I took off my helmet so I could speak with Kareem O’Doul, Doctorow’s right-hand man.
“The aliens are eighteen miles west of us.” I had to shout so that he could hear me over the blare of the sirens. “That gives us four or five hours.” Now that I had my helmet off, cool wind blew hard against my face. It felt good.
O’Doul was a small, dark man with nearly black eyes and skin the color of walnut shells. His hair was brown but very close to black. “What about your missing transport?”
“They found that, too.”
“Shot down?”
“Yes, they got it.” I surveyed the landscape and listened to the sound of the sirens. “Do your people know what to do when they hear sirens?”
“They know,” he answered. “We have a fleet of buses for evacuating town. When people see the buses, they climb on without asking questions.
“I’m more worried about giving them someplace to come home to.”
“You and me both.” I mumbled this far too quietly for him to hear me. We could not fight the Avatari. Even with the militia on our side, we could not engage them head-on. Instead of fighting like Marines, we would employ guerilla tactics, the old hit-and-run offense.
“How fast can your men rig the tunnels?” I asked.
“I’ve seen them do miracles. You’re talking about blowing a big area. If they had more time, they’d give you a real work of art.”
He sounded like a veteran. “Sounds like you have some demolitions experience,” I said.
“Army Special Forces,” O’Doul said. “I’m not your demolitions man. We have a couple of ex-Navy SEALs rigging the bombs.”
“SEALs?” I asked. About eight years back, the Navy phased out its natural-born SEALs, replacing them with a line of specially equipped clones. “Survivors from the alien invasion?”
“Retired,” O’Doul said.
“Old guys?”
“And they aren’t getting any younger. Good thing setting up charges is like riding a bike,” O’Doul said. “These boys will be hobbled and senile before they forget how to set a charge.”
“Good thing,” I agreed. If his demolitions men were former SEALs, we were in good hands. The Army and Marines had talented demolitions experts, but the SEALs were in a class of their own.
O’Doul drove through the broken city desert and into a ghost town where two- and three-story buildings stood untouched and abandoned. The doors of all of these structures hung open, and a few had broken windows; but for the most part, the war had passed them by.
“Welcome to the new capital city of Terraneau,” O’Doul said.
A network of squat five-story buildings spread out around the area like a maze. Sky bridges ran between the buildings, connecting them like a strand of spider’s web. There was no mistaking these for anything but government buildings, they were too ugly to be anything else.
“You stashed your arsenal in a government complex?” I asked.
“Under the complex,” O’Doul said. “We saw the aliens knocking buildings down and thought it might be safer underground.”
We made the same mistake on New Copenhagen. We placed our arsenal in a parking lot under a large hotel. The strategy backfired when the Avatari destroyed the hotel.
As we drove down the ramp leading underground, I checked back with Thomer and Hollingsworth. Thomer had found Herrington’s beacon and the mountain in which the aliens had dug their mines.
Having seen the enormous entrance carved into the granite face of the cliffs and read the meters showing the toxicity level of the air, Doctorow became as cooperative as a newly minted cadet. When I put him on the line with O’Doul, he gave the order to mobilize the militia.
When Hollingsworth’s transport touched down, the militia sent trucks out to the airfield to bring him and the rest of my men into town.
Holding on to the unreasonable hope that he might respond, I tried to reach Herrington as well. I could not adjust to the idea that I no longer had Sergeant Lewis Herrington watching my back.
Four men with M27s stood at the entrance to the parking lot. They opened the iron gate, allowing us to enter the first level of the garage. The sound of industrial generators echoed through the structure.
We drove down one level and parked outside a fenced enclosure. Looking through the chain link, I saw that Doctorow had indeed stockpiled enough weapons to start a galactic war. From outside the fence, I saw shelves covered with M27s and rocket launchers. Pallets with crates of ammunition lined a wall. Behind the shelves and pallets stood three rows of Jackals—fast-moving jeeps with overpowered engines, rear turrets, and light armor.
A dozen armed guards stood inside the fence. When they saw O’Doul approach, they unlocked the gate. I followed, entering the organized madness of an armory made by the kind of men who submit to an alien occupation.
The armory had stacks of combat armor, more likely salvage than surplus. A fleet of tanks sat in one corner of the garage. They had both gas-spewing Rumsfelds and powerful LGs. These vehicles would be worse than useless against the aliens, their slow speeds would make them easy targets, and their armor would offer no protection against Avatari light rifles.
Taking a cursory look around, I saw rocket launchers, grenade launchers, rifles, pistols, cannons, landmines, and robot defense units called trackers. “We’re going to need particle-beam cannons and handheld rocket launchers,” I said.
“We have enough rockets to send your men out with a thousand launchers each,” O’Doul said.
“And all of yours, too?” I asked. “I’m going to need men and vehicles.”
“I’m not sending my men out there,” O’Doul said. Sending men to rig tunnels was one thing; sending men into battle was another.
“Doctorow told you to give me whatever support I need,” I said. “I need vehicles, I need drivers, and I need men to fight on the line.”
O’Doul did not like it, and I got the feeling he did not like me, but he knew I was right. He ordered his men to load trucks with particle-beam cannons and handheld rocket launchers, and the men went to work.
Hollingsworth arrived a few minutes later. Looking at the stacks of weapons, he gave a low whistle, and said, “Man, you have enough shit here to overthrow an empire.”
I hoped he was right.
The underground garage/armory had seven levels, but at this point in the mission, the back of the third level was what interested me.
The rear wall of the third level opened to an underground train station. There were no lights in the station, just a platform that disappeared into utter darkness.
“Welcome to the blackest spot on Terraneau,” O’Doul said.
“I’ve seen assholes more brightly lit than this place.” I noticed that as he relaxed around me and my Marines, he became more and more profane.
“Where’s it go?” I asked.
“It’s the Norristown subway system. Where do you think it goes?” He stepped onto the platform and shined a torch out toward the tracks. The light was not especially bright. It dissolved into the blackness a few feet in. The area in the beam was a gleaming, polished, magnetic railway system hidden under a blanket of darkness so dense I felt like I could breathe it.
“Hit the lights,” O’Doul yelled to the guards.
A string of bulbs lit up along the ceiling. Instead of illuminating the tunnel, they produced a series of dim bubbles that vanished in the distance.
I put on my helmet and stepped through the opening. Even with night-for-day lenses, I could not see very far. I saw the plasticized world around me clearly enough—twenty-foot-wide platforms on either side of the tunnel; six magnetic tracks laid out like stripes that rolled out as far as the eye could see; and dead monitors, which had not displayed train schedules for years. Without juice running through them, the magnetic tracks were simply four-foot-deep grooves.
“You’re going to use these tunnels to rig your charges?” I asked.
“Unless you have a better idea,” O’Doul said.
“How solid are the tunnels?” I asked. “Are you going to be able to get to the zone?”
“We’ve mapped every inch of these speckers, Harris. I know my way around these bitches better than the guys who ran the trains. You just deliver the aliens to the right place at the right time, and I’ll cream their asses.”
“How are we planning to get the bombs in place?” Hollingsworth asked. Like me, he had his helmet on. “There is no way in the world that these guys are going to power a big system like this with a couple of emergency generators.”
“You let me worry about that,” O’Doul said. “The bombs are my problem; the aliens are yours.”
“Begging your pardon, sir, the bombs are my problem, too,” Hollingsworth said. “My orders are to coordinate efforts between your militia and our Marines. I’m staying with you.”
“Speck. What the speck!” said O’Doul. Judging by his language arts, he had become totally at ease around us.
O’Doul, Hollingsworth, and a small army of drivers would shuttle the charges to the target area on the west side of town. They could probably have loaded all of the explosives into a single commuter train had the trains been running. Instead, they loaded the explosives onto the gas-powered sleds that the transit authority had used for tunnel maintenance.
Their job was to set the trap; my job was to kick the hornet’s nest. I was taking 73 of my 148 remaining Marines along with 200 men from the local militia to meet the Avatari. All we had to do was lead the specking aliens into O’Doul’s blast zone, then get the hell out of there before the bombs went off. We would definitely take casualties on this one. We were dealing with the Avatari, and the one thing you could count on with those bastards was death and destruction. But if we ran a hit-and-run offense, I thought we might limit the breakage.
I had my men stock up on rocket launchers and grenades. If we were forced into a close-range fight, we would use particle-beam weapons. That would be the last resort. When O’Doul asked me what weapons I thought his drivers should take, I gave it to him straight, “All they will need are body bags and Jackals.”
Then we loaded up and left the armory.
As we drove west through town, I looked back at my convoy. We had thirty-five jeeps and thirty-six Jackals, all borrowed from the armory and piloted by militiamen. Those Jackals were our best bet. They had rocket arrays set up on their front fenders, machine guns with armor-piercing bullets in their rear turrets, and hundreds of horses under their hoods.
We headed south, then west across Norristown, entering areas as desolate as the Martian desert, in which I did not see so much as a living plant. The streets were buried under slag and debris. The parks were nothing more than burned-over lots with the occasional stream running through them. Using the Geiger counter in my visor, I took radiation readings and found more than a few hot spots. The first Norristown defenders must have resorted to nuclear-tipped ordinance as the war wound down.
After leaving the downtown area, we entered a storm-torn suburb in which the occasional tree, or house, or chapel stood as a reminder of how life should have been. As the invasion began, the troops defending Norristown would have sacrificed this area the way doctors amputate a cancerous limb. They would have let the aliens in, then bombarded the place with everything they had. The pockmarked remains of expended minefields covered much of the area.
My men traveled in jeeps; the militia rode in Jackals. Jeeps were smaller and a lot more vulnerable, but you could hop in and out of them as fast as you liked. With their armored walls, Jackals were not so easy to enter. I rode in a Jackal, but it was only as a show of confidence. The guy doing the driving was a high-ranking member of the Norristown militia. O’Doul had designated him Jackal squad leader. I could see why—the son of a bitch showed no fear at all.
The Jackal leader flipped some switches on his dash, and said, “I have the aliens on radar.” He swung the screen over so I could have a look. The Avatari were still a couple of miles ahead of us. Their ranks showed up as a solid white block against the glowing green background of the screen.
“Do you know that part of town?” I asked.
He laughed, “I used to live there …had a nice house with a swing set in the back. They had good schools in this part of town.”
“I bet the schools aren’t much of a selling point anymore,” I said.
“But the house prices have dropped,” he said. The guy had a sense of humor. We were driving through the wreckage of his old neighborhood, but he could still tell jokes. I liked that.
“Know anyplace between us and them that might give us a high-ground advantage?” I asked.
He slowed the Jackal and pulled the radar screen over for a closer look. “There’s Hyde Park,” he said. “It’s not exactly mountainous, but the bluffs might work out.”
“Let’s go,” I said.
He used his radio to relay my orders to the other Jackals, and I sent my Marines the info over the interLink: “We’re headed to a park where we should have a slight elevation advantage.”
It took about three minutes to find Hyde Park, a long, terraced pasture with slopes overlooking the western edge of Norristown. The charred remains of a two-story community center stood in the middle of the park like a large chapel overlooking a cemetery.
The jeeps led the way, skidding to a stop at the edge of a ridge so my Marines could climb out. The Jackal leader pulled up near my men and stopped. I asked him if I could use his radio to speak to his men. He nodded.
Taking the microphone, I said, “You boys driving the Jackals, you remember your job is to harass, not to fight.” Then I thanked the Jackal leader for the ride and wished him luck. From here on out, I would ride in a jeep.
I took my spot on the hill, pulled out my first rocket launcher, and prepared for the battle.
Every last one of us on those hills was a Marine. We were the ones with the combat armor, the training, and the frontline experience. I listened in on my men when they spoke. I heard them breathe when they were silent. The only thing I could not hear was their thoughts.
You see them out there? Where the specking hell are those speckers?
They’ll be here soon enough. You in a rush to see them?
The iron-gray-colored horde appeared in the ruins below us. They were far away, small and indistinct. I did not think they had spotted us yet when I gave my final instructions.
“The objective at this stop is not—I repeat, not—to kill aliens,” I said over an open frequency. “I’m not handing out medals for kills. Got it? Fire off a rocket, and back away. The name of the game here is catching their attention, not holding on to real estate. Anybody who falls behind gets left behind, so do us all a favor and save the heroics.”
As I finished my piece, a trio of Jackals rushed in. They sped across the grassy shelf like a formation of fighter jets, speeding over the battered landscape firing shots, then rushing away. One of the Jackals bounced over a crater left by an explosion, lurched over the lip, and flew through the air. It landed as smoothly as a cat jumping from a ledge.
The militia made its first strafing run while the aliens were still three-quarters of a mile away. Their light-armor Jackals looked like toys from that distance, and the Avatari looked no bigger or more distinct than the bristles on a toothbrush. Zooming in for a closer look with the telescopic lenses in my visor, I watched as the lead vehicle fired three rockets into the horde, then made a skidding swipe, the gunner in its turret swinging around so that he could fire large-caliber bullets into the aliens’ ranks the entire time. Those bullets could drill a brick wall to dust. They would cut a man in half, but it took three shots to bring one of the aliens down.
The Jackals made their run, then sped to safety. The aliens might have fired after them, but two more formations rocketed onto the ridge from different directions, fired, retreated.
Looking over the battlefield, I decided that the Avatari had not come with their standard fifty thousand troops, maybe not even with a quarter of that number. Not that it mattered. They had more than enough soldiers to win a fair fight. If our Jackals stumbled, they would swat them like bugs.
One of the Jackals in the third formation rolled as it skidded around to escape. It might have hit loose gravel, or one of its bulletproof tires might have popped, or the turn might have simply been too tight. The Jackal canted onto two wheels, then rolled onto its side, spinning out of control. Jackals were made to roll and right themselves; but as soon as this one landed on its wheels, a hailstorm of light bolts seared through it. The Jackal exploded in flames.
Doctorow’s militia had done its job. I contacted the Jackal leader and told him to pull his men back. I did not have to tell him twice.
The Avatari continued toward us. “Two shots. Two shots, then make for the jeeps,” I called over an open frequency. I wanted the drivers and grenadiers to hear me.
Down below us, the Avatari continued their march, slow-moving, unflinching, unafraid. Using telescopic lenses, I could see them clearly now—bodies the color of stone; eyes, lips, and ears all made of the same rocklike material as their skin. Their eyes stared straight ahead, like the eyes of a crudely sculpted statue. Their faces never twitched.
The Avatari stood eight feet tall. Their rifles were four-foot tubes made of gleaming chrome. They fired yard-long bolts of light that traveled as fast as the eye could see and burned through shields, armor, buildings, and men—and then kept going.
They marched toward us. “Steady …steady,” I called to my men. I remembered Nietzsche as I looked down at the alien army: When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you.
Using the equipment in my helmet, I measured the distance between us and the enemy. Six hundred feet. In another kind of fight, this would have been the moment to fire or to retreat. We could not hit them with HURL rockets at that range. They could hit us, though. A few of them fired in our direction, the bolts flying wild into the sky.
I yelled for my men to drop, but a couple of morons remained on their feet. “Get down!” I repeated, as the Avatari picked them off. Natural selection works among military clones nearly the same way it does in nature. Sadly, the rest of us were every bit as sterile as the idiots whom the Avatari had just shot dead.
Perched on my knees, I measured the range again. The aliens were 575 feet away. An Avatari bolt struck a Marine a few feet to my right. A lucky shot. It bored through the ground at the front of the slope, then through ten feet of earth and into the Marine before sailing off through the air. Tiny flames burned around the three-inch hole in his helmet. I knew without looking that the armor around the hole would melt and dribble into the wound.
The man was lucky that the bolt hit him in the head, he died instantly. It did not matter if these bolts hit you in the head or the foot; they killed you either way. A shot through the head was more merciful because it killed you instantly. Anyone shot in the leg, hand, or arm went into shock and died in a fit of convulsions.
To this point, not a one of my Marines had fired a shot. They waited for the order to shoot. With the Avatari 480 feet away, I gave the order to return fire.
“Two shots and retreat. Two shots and withdraw!” I bellowed. Over the interLink, I could hear my squad leaders repeating the command. You hear things without thinking about them during battle. Once the shooting begins, all the loose talk becomes chatter, something no more distinct than static.
I pulled a handheld rocket, aimed, and fired at the first phalanx of aliens as it reached the bottom of the slope. Handheld rocket launchers were a foot long and about the same diameter as the handle of a mop. You pointed the launcher like a flashlight to fire it, then threw away the empty tube. The Avatari spotted me and returned fire. I fell back as dozens of bolts came soaring toward me.
“Head for the jeeps,” I yelled, my voice so loud in my helmet that it caused a ringing in my ears. Three stray bolts shot up through the dirt near my feet. More flew through the air above me.
I had made a mistake telling my men to fire two shots, even a single shot was dicey. A living enemy would have run for cover or charged our position, these bastards kept marching forward, returning fire as they went. They were avatars, not living beings. They had nothing to fear.
I turned to run and stumbled. In the brief moment I was down on my ass, I saw three of my men die. Looking up and down the slope, I saw that I had lost eleven men in all. I repeated the order to fall back, then pulled out a second rocket launcher, sprang to my feet, and fired.
Dropping low as light bolts flew through the air and ground around me, I turned and sprinted to the jeeps, no more than twenty feet behind the last of my men. It was early in the fight, but we’d already lost eleven men and one Jackal, a bad omen.
“Want me to risk a drive-by?” the Jackal leader asked.
“Hit them when they reach the top of the hill,” I said. “One pass and get the hell out. Don’t push your luck, you saw what happens.”
“Pushing your luck—you mean, like staying to fire a second rocket after telling your men to retreat?”
“Get specked,” I said. He was right, though. I shouldn’t have piped off that second rocket. This was combat, the first action I had seen in two years, and I was having a combat reflex.
It was part of my Liberator architecture. When the battle got hot, the glands that made me a Liberator pumped testosterone and adrenaline into my veins.
“You coming, Captain?” the Marine driving the last jeep asked.
“Yeah, on my way,” I said. I took one last look back in time to see a lone Jackal slice its way across the hill. The gunner swayed back and forth, and the muzzle of his machine gun flashed nonstop.
I sprinted to the jeep and jumped in. We bounced and jostled over the deeply scarred ground, easily outpacing the aliens. Once we were far enough away, I ordered the drivers to slow down. We needed the Avatari to follow us.
“How are you doing with the explosives?” I asked Hollingsworth on a direct Link.
“O’Doul is a prick,” he said.
“Is that opinion professional or personal?”
“Personal,” Hollingsworth said. “My professional opinion is that the bastard knows his way around a charge.”
“How long before the area is ready for visitors?” I asked.
“He’s got several teams working. The team I’m with is just putting on the finishing touches. We’re about to evacuate the area.
“I’d hate to be around when this place goes up, not with all the shit they have wired. These boys aren’t taking any chances.
“How’s it going on the front?”
“Peachy, Sergeant, just peachy.”
The Avatari behaved more like security men than soldiers, but they were not stupid. If they saw us driving at fifteen miles an hour, they would know we were baiting them. We had to make them believe that we thought we could win this thing. We’d take casualties, but everyone who signed up for this show knew the score.
I had my driver step on the gas so we could get to the head of our all-jeep convoy. The target zone was ten miles south-east of us. We could stick to a fairly clean road if we veered north, but that would have taken us in the wrong direction.
The area around us was little more than dunes of rubble and the burned-out skeletons of small buildings. It looked like a fire had swept through. I saw nothing that would give us a strategic advantage, so I called in a Jackal strike. “Make it look like you mean it,” I told the Jackal leader.
“Like I mean it?” he asked.
“Make it look like you came to fight, not to lead them into a trap.”
“We’ll take casualties,” the Jackal leader warned.
I sighed, and said, “Understood.”
When I looked back, I saw groups of Jackals heading toward the Avatari from two different directions. More waves might have moved in from other directions as well.
I had hoped for hills or at least a stretch of buildings, but the best I could find was a small neighborhood seven miles south. Everything else was beaten so flat that the small ring of houses stood out like an island in a sea of debris. “Pull in there,” I said, pointing to the burb.
“We lost three more vehicles on that last strike,” the Jackal leader radioed in. “I’m down to twenty-eight cars.”
“Should I send some jeeps to pick up survivors?” I asked.
“No,” he said, his voice devoid of emotion. “Like you said back at the armory, ‘Jackals and body bags.’”
“I found a spot where my men can make another stand, but we’ll need time to set up. Can you buy me another minute or two?” I asked.
“I can do that.”
“And, Jackal leader, kick in the shins, not the balls,” I said. “Just slow them down, don’t even think about trying to win this.”
“No problem,” he said.
We drove over a slight rise, and I glimpsed two squads of Jackals heading back toward the aliens. Moments later, I heard the chatter of distant machine guns.
We entered the remains of what must have once been an upscale bedroom community. We had maybe a mile lead on the aliens, giving us a ten-minute head start.
“Pull over,” I told my driver.
The other jeeps followed.
I gave the order for my riflemen and grenadiers to fall out, and they leaped from the jeeps, rocket launchers ready. “Here’s the drill, stay out of the houses. Do not get yourselves trapped in a yard or a building. The name of the game is shoot and run …shoot and run. You got that? Shoot and run. If you get a chance to fire off a second HURL, you do it; but the drill here is to fire off a shot and head for the jeeps.”
The yards around the houses were four years overgrown. The grass reached my knees, and flower beds had gone to seed. The houses were large, surrounded by tiny lawns and tall fences. I leaped over a tangled hedge and pulled my first launcher. In a normal gunfight, I would never hide behind bushes, they cannot protect you from anything more powerful than a slingshot; but fighting the Avatari and their blasted light rifles, concealment was the only protection. Nothing, not even the yard-thick walls of a shielded bunker, could protect me from those bolts.
Looking up and down the street, I saw men hiding behind fences, peering around houses, and ducking behind abandoned cars; all better barriers than my hedge but utterly useless in this situation.
“Harris, they’re headed your way,” the Jackal leader warned me. Even as he said that, a line of Jackals came tearing down the street. One had large holes where light bolts had fused through its turret. A dead gunner hung slumped over the machine gun, his lolling head twisting as the jeep banked around a curve.
“Jackal leader, what is the status of your squad?” I asked.
“We’re hauling our asses out of here,” he said.
“How bad are your casualties?”
“Three and a half down,” he said. “We lost three more Jackals and one is running without a gunner.”
“Send that one back to the armory,” I said.
“I can’t do that,” the Jackal leader said. “It’s my ride.”
“What do you expect to accomplish driving with a dead gunner?” I asked.
“I am not leaving my men.”
The Avatari approached us, walking across the ruins that had once been the outskirts of the community. They were several hundred yards away, their first ranks advancing over cement slabs and weed-infested lawns, trampling grounds in which toys and dreams had been lost.
The Avatari slowed their advance. In the past, the bastards had fought with mindless intensity. This time, they surprised me. They performed an actual military maneuver: They spread their ranks. I smiled, thinking they might reenact Pickett’s Charge, but then the ends of their formation broke off. The specking sons of bitches wanted to flank us.
“Shit!” I said. Then to my squad leaders, I said, “Break off the attack. Head for the jeeps.”
The Avatari opened fire.
There were so many bolts in the air, it looked like a specking blizzard. They could not have seen us, but the bastards figured out our hiding places. Three bolts struck a car, forcing the men hiding behind it to run for better cover. A bolt hit the first man in the head the moment he jumped out from behind the car, leaving a smoking hole through his head and helmet. The man collapsed to the street.
The second man did not make it much farther, but for just a moment, I thought the third might reach safety. Bolts flying over his head and shoulders, he ran crouched toward a garden gate. As he started to leap the gate, a bolt struck him between his shoulders. He fell like a bird shot in flight, slamming into the gate. Half-hidden by the tall grass, he lay quivering until he died.
If I could have, I would have put him out of his misery, but three bolts flared through the hedge just a few feet from me. The dried branches near me caught on fire. Without looking for a target, I raised a hand and fired off a rocket, tossed the launcher, then fired another.
“Head for the jeeps!” I yelled. “Get moving! Get out of here!”
Strange as it might sound, I was glad to be in this fight. There must have been a fifty-fifty mix of blood and hormone running through my veins. My skin prickled the way it did when I took a hot shower on a cold night.
A half block ahead of me, a bolt struck the windshield of an abandoned car, melting its way through. The bolt did not shatter the dirty glass, it simply bored a hole through it. I saw another bolt pass through a tree with a trunk as wide as a water barrel. In the yards and on the street, the dead, my dead lay scattered like leaves blown from a tree—men in dark green combat armor, some dead and some convulsing as the shock snuffed out their lives.
I ran as fast as I could, not along the street, like most of the men who had died, but through yards and behind houses. If the aliens saw me, they could shoot me no matter what I used for cover.
My driver radioed. “Captain, where are you? They’re closing in around us.”
No more than thirty yards ahead of me, three aliens stepped out from around the corner of a house. They were tall, their heads almost reaching the eaves of the roof. They looked like earthen statues made by primitive sculptors who had not quite mastered the human form. They held their rifles muzzles up. Somehow these bastards had flanked me without even knowing I was there.
Ducking behind a tree, I watched them fan out.
“Captain Harris?” My driver’s voice came over the interLink.
“Get out!” I shouted.
“But …”
“Out! That’s a specking order.”
I had a particle-beam pistol, an M27, and three rocket launchers. I wasn’t going to win a war armed like that, but I might keep myself safe for a while.
“Sir …”
“Are you on the road?”
“Just pulling out”
I dived through a hedge and landed in the overgrown remains of what may once have been a nice backyard. I saw a small fountain in one corner of the yard and a pile of lawn furniture in another.
“Captain Harris?”
“What is it?” I asked in a voice meant to scare the driver off.
I could hear the heavy footsteps of two-thousand-pound soldiers behind me. They might have been after me, but I thought it more likely they were just searching for targets. In my experience, the Avatari worried about armies, not individual men. They did not distinguish between officers and enlisted men; our command structure meant nothing to them.
“Let me come back for you,” the driver said. He was a good Marine, he did not want to leave a man behind.
“You made it out?” I asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“What was the damage to my men?” I asked.
“Heavy casualties, sir.”
Hearing half-ton footfalls as the Avatari tromped through yards, I ran to the back of the house and kicked my way through a glass door. Stealing a quick glance over my shoulder, I saw a burly, stone-colored leg step through the bushes as I slipped into the house.
“Do not come back, Corporal. I repeat, do not return here. That is an order.”
“But, sir …”
“Stow it, Marine, I’m busy here.”
I entered the house through the kitchen and continued through to the living room, where a knee-high gate blocked off a corner filled with blocks and stuffed animals. Having spent my youth in a military orphanage, I had no experience with the classic family home; but I got the feeling the last family to occupy this residence had had kids. Pinched between bookshelves and some long-extinct potted plants, a holographic television stood as a mute witness that life had once existed in this home.
Beyond the plants, I found a door.
“Captain Harris, what are you going to do?” At first I thought it was my driver carrying his concern to the point of insubordination. When I checked the label on my visor, I saw that it was Sergeant Hollingsworth.
“I found myself a basement. I can hide down here,” I said, looking down the stairs and into the darkness. “I’ll just dig in and let the bastards pass me by.”
“You might not want to do that, sir,” Hollingsworth said.
“Why the hell not?” I asked.
“You’re on the edge of the blast zone.”
“What?” I asked.
“The train system passes right under you.”
“Shit,” I said, hoping that I sounded more distracted than scared. But it wasn’t the intel about the blast zone that set me off, it was the sounds of breaking glass and heavy footsteps. The Avatari had found my hiding place.
Hearing an alien enter the house, I quietly closed the door behind me and hurried down the stairs. When my visor switched to night-for-day lenses, I saw a line of dusty pictures showing a happy family—two parents, three children, the oldest might have been ten years old. I wondered if they survived the invasion, or had I found myself in the company of ghosts?
“You can’t wait them out in the blast zone, sir.” Hollingsworth sounded exasperated.
“I have company,” I said.
“Aliens?”
“No, it’s Ava Gardner coming to say she can’t live without me,” I said. I regretted saying that the moment the words left my lips.
Above my head, the ceiling groaned under the weight of the alien …or aliens. Looking around for somewhere to hide, I found mostly mouse shit and cobwebs. The skeleton of a dead dog lay on one corner of the floor, locked into its pen by a wire fence. In life, it had been one of those rodent dogs, just a few inches tall and full of attitude. A few scabs of fluffy white fur still remained on its skull and legs; the rest had been picked clean by rats, mice, or maggots. There were no eyes in its skull.
Hearing heavy footsteps above me, I began feeling frantic. “Hollingsworth, you said this was the edge of the zone? How close to the edge? Any chance this house could survive the blast?”
The explosion would take place thirty feet down, I might be safe if I was far enough from ground zero. Even if the house collapsed, I might survive. I had armor to protect me.
“I don’t like your chances, sir,” Hollingsworth said.
I heard the sound of wood smashing, and light poured down the stairway. The light cast a long shadow along the wall. I had done the very thing I told my men not to do—I had gotten myself cornered. I had come down to a dead end. There were plenty of places to hide down here, but the only way out was up the stairs.
“Harris, where are you?” the Jackal leader asked.
I watched the wooden stairs that led back up to the house and wondered if they could handle a full ton of alien bulk. My pulse was up. I had already put away my rocket launchers and switched to my particle-beam pistol. This was close combat, far closer than I wanted to get. With the joules of energy inside their tachyon shells, the Avatari could fry the circuits in my armor just by touching it.
I imagined the stairs collapsing, leaving me and a two-thousand-pound alien trapped together as the bombs went off. The house might come down on top of us, or the ground could open under our feet.
“Captain Harris, where are you?” the Jackal leader repeated.
“Still in the last drop zone,” I whispered, though I knew it was unlikely the avatar could hear me.
An avatar stepped onto the top step. I heard the footstep, then the groan of straining wood. My heart pounding so hard I could feel it in my ears and neck, I held my pistol up and ready to fire.
The alien took another step, and I could see its foot, a simple rectangle with no ornamentation representing shoes or toes. The wooden stair bowed beneath the weight, but did not break. I could have shot the bastard at point-blank range at that second. I could have shot its foot out from under it, then shot it a second time in the head once it fell. I waited.
“You wouldn’t happen to know what I’ll run into when I get out of this house?” I asked on a frequency that both Hollingsworth and the Jackal leader would pick up.
“The last I saw, the area around you was lousy with those alien speckers,” the Jackal leader said. “Maybe hundreds of ’em.”
“Harris, you need to get out of there,” Hollingsworth said.
“Yeah, that’s what I hear,” I said. “Jackal leader, think you could do me a favor?”
The alien continued down the stairs in slow motion, taking two steps at a time. It poked the barrel of its rifle down and surveyed the base of the stairway. I wondered how well the Avatari could see in the dark.
“What?” the Jackal leader asked.
“Give these bastards a swift kick to the nuts,” I said. “See if you can move them deeper into the blast zone.”
There was a moment of silence. When the Jackal leader spoke again, he sounded nervous. “I’m down to eleven cars,” he said. The man who had just run a sortie with a dead gunner hanging from his turret sounded sheepish.
“Eleven cars?” We were almost out of cars, but things had come down to the wire. Resolved that I would probably die in that basement, I no longer cared about my safety. We needed to lure the aliens closer to ground zero.
“It’s too late to back out now,” I said.
“This isn’t just about getting your ass out of there?” the Jackal leader asked. He already knew the answer, but he wanted reassurance before he would send men out to die.
“I’m guessing my ass is fried no matter what happens,” I said. The alien came down two more steps, pointing the muzzle of its rifle back and forth across the basement as it went.
If the aliens gave off a heat signature, I could have counted their numbers through the floor with the heat-vision lenses in my visor; but the Avatari gave off no heat. If this one was alone, I could cap it. But if it had come with friends …
“We’re on our way,” the Jackal leader said. I heard a car door shut in the background and knew without asking that he had just sent his navigator to man the turret in the back of his Jackal. “I hope you make it out of there, Harris.”
I would never hear him speak again.
Standing eight feet tall, the alien had to duck its head before it could reach the bottom of the stairs. When the bastard lowered its head, I shot it in the back. Hit by a particle beam, a human target would have exploded. This son of a bitch simply quivered and fell.
A second avatar started down the stairs. I hoped there were only two of them; if these bastards called for backup, I was specked.
The stairs creaked as the second avatar started down. I found a hiding place behind a table, not far from Fido’s bones. I aimed my pistol and waited in the darkness, but the alien stopped halfway down the stairs. Moments passed, and then it went back the way it came from.
I tried to contact the Jackal leader, but the connection was gone.
“Hollingsworth, what’s happening out there?” I asked.
“The enemy is almost in position, maybe a quarter of a mile off,” Hollingsworth said.
I walked to the bottom of the stairs and stepped over the broken alien. It lay facedown, as still and as stiff as a fallen tree.
“How much longer?” I asked Hollingsworth.
“They’re almost in place. Any minute now.”
“Okay,” I said. There was a shift in the shadows along the wall. I paused and looked up the stairs, but the area was clear. With my connection to the Jackal leader down, I had no way to tell the Jackals to break off their attack. Like me, they needed to get to safety before the bombs went off.
The Jackals might not make it to safety. I had lost many of my men. I was about to ride out the explosion at the edge of ground zero. It looked like we might win the battle, but everything had still gone wrong.
“Okay, light the fuse,” I told Hollingsworth.
“What about you?” Hollingsworth asked.
“I’m going to make a break for it,” I said. I had already started up the stairs. “Tell you what, Sergeant, if you get the men together when we get back to the ship, I’ll slip you all into the officers’ club for a brew.”
“We can buy you a few more minutes if we send in …” Hollingsworth began.
“You have your orders, Hollingsworth.”
“Yes, sir.” I heard neither pity nor regret in his voice, only resignation.
I struggled to come up with some way to radio the Jackals, but they were militia, the interLink did not reach them. Only the Jackal leader had an interLink connection; and without him acting as middleman, communications with the Jackals had gone dark.
Knowing that I might only have a minute to get out of the blast zone, I did not stop at the top of the stairs. I stepped through the splintered doorway into the living room. An alien stood in the middle of the floor, its massive silhouette forming a dark cameo against the beige curtains, which glowed against the ion light.
The alien had its rifle ready, but not pointed in my direction. Its body little more than an animated statue, the avatar might or might not have been able to hear the world around it. When our scientists dissected the bastards, they found that their ears and eyes were little more than ornamental grooves.
This alien sensed something. It spun and aimed its rifle in my direction, but I fired first. The sparkling green particle beam hit the side of the alien’s head.
The bastard did not fall right away. Even as its head split open, it stood motionless, as if trying to decide whether to collapse or shoot me. Not waiting to see if I had sufficiently broken the alien, I fired again, then sprinted toward the kitchen. I stopped suddenly. Through the shattered glass of the back door, I saw three more Avatari circling the yard just outside.
Only a few seconds had passed since I had ordered Hollingsworth to set off the bombs, but the seconds hung like minutes in my mind. I ran back through the house and crashed through a front window, landing on a tree-lined avenue that ran the length of the neighborhood. The grass on the lawns had so overgrown that it spilled on to the sidewalks, but the street still looked like something out of a picture book.
I saw three avatars hunting along the street and there might have been more in the brush. At the end of the block, I could see a Jackal stopped beside a tree. At first glance, it looked parked and abandoned; but when I used telescopic lenses, I saw burns on the hood, a blackened windshield, and holes in the doors. From where I crouched, I could not see the turret in the back; but there would surely be a dead gunner hanging out of it.
Hollingsworth’s voice came over the interLink on a frequency that every Marine would hear. “The aliens are in place, evacuate the blast zone. I repeat, evacuate the blast zone.”
Several responses of “aye” and “copy that” came back over the same frequency.
Only a hundred yards, and three Avatari stood between me and that Jackal. If I crossed those yards without getting shot, and the engine still ran, I thought I might make it out of the blast zone alive.
As I prepared to make my move, the sound of breaking glass came from the back of the house. I did not look back. I held my particle pistol in my left hand, where it would be all but useless, and readied a rocket launcher in my right.
The first bolt missed my head by inches. I did not wait to see where it had come from. Instinctively, I spun and returned fire, shooting off a valuable rocket. Tossing the empty tube, I pulled another rocket and fired it at the closest alien between me and the Jackal. The rocket struck the alien in the chest, slinging its arms, head, and chest in different directions.
“Last call to evacuate the blast zone,” Hollingsworth called out over the interLink. “One minute till detonation. One minute.”
I ran in a zigzag pattern, snaking my way across the street, somersaulting over the hood of an old car, and sliding ass first to the ground. Light bolts slammed through the hood, the windshield, and the front tires. The car exploded in an eruption of orange and yellow and black, the force of the explosion slamming me to the ground.
That explosion must have thrown me ten feet, enough to save my life. When I looked back, I saw dozens of bolts shoot through the flames.
A few yards ahead of me, one of the aliens stepped around a hedge. I fired my last rocket, a worthless shot that went wild, hitting nothing.
Switching to my M27, I raced toward the corner. I must have hit that damn alien a hundred times before the bastard finally fell.
As I rounded the corner, I saw broken avatars all along the street, dozens of them, along with the hulls of demolished Jackals. There had been a bloody showdown. Some of the Jackals lay on their sides instead of their wheels. One had crashed into a house.
Avatari soldiers moved along the street to my left and to my right. I fired my M27 at them, and they fired bolts at me. If they’d so much as nicked me, I would have died; but I did not have time to worry about light bolts and painful death. I tossed my M27 aside, pumped my legs as hard as I could, and kept my eyes on the door of the Jackal ahead. I focused on the holes in the driver’s-side door because they riveted my attention.
The Avatari had fired several bolts into the windshield of the vehicle to bring it down. Some of the armored glass had melted, and the rest of the smoke-stained glass was nearly opaque. The door on the driver’s side hung limp from a single hinge. Running as fast as I could, I took in details without analyzing them.
A bolt flew past me, spearing the turret in the rear of the Jackal. The wall of the turret fell off, revealing the head and shoulders of the dead gunner inside. His body hung from the back of the big gun.
Avatari milled around the far end of the street, beyond the Jackal, but they had not yet noticed me. Even if I’d had the rockets, I could not have fired at them. The clock was ticking.
The Jackal’s engine was still running, I heard its heavy purr. The driver’s door tumbled to the ground when I pulled it. Inside, the decapitated body of the driver sat belted in behind the wheel. His head was missing from the jawbone up, an unusual wound. The heat from a bolt must have boiled the fluid inside the dead man’s skull, causing it to explode.
There was no time for manners, not with the Avatari on the street and the bombs about to explode. I unbuckled the dead man’s harness and shoved him aside. When I slipped the Jackal into gear, the vehicle lurched forward, causing the dead man to roll toward me. I felt something hit against my armor, looked down, and found myself staring into the open tray of the dead man’s mouth, his lolling tongue, the curve of teeth and molars, and the bone and muscle hinges that once connected the jawbone to a skull.
I vomited inside my helmet. God, I was like a kid fresh out of camp. Scared out of my wits, so excited I wanted to scream, sick to my stomach, and choking on the acrid fumes of my bile, I tore off my helmet and wiped my mouth. It felt good to breathe fresh air.
A bolt sheared through the passenger’s side of the cab, passing through the empty seat and into the gun nest behind it. Two bolts struck the cab of the Jackal and more flashed across the hood. I could not dodge their fire. All I could do was drive and hope I would have more luck than the dead man beside me.
Leaning forward over the wheel so I could see through the melted windshield, I headed straight down the street, skidding around one corner, then another, picking up speed as I went. I dodged cars and Avatari, smacked into a curb, then pounded through a hedge before reaching the edge of the little row of houses that had survived the war. Ahead of me, the west side of Norristown stretched out like a barren wasteland.
Driving three-quarters blind, I headed west and hoped for the best. Then came the explosion. It sounded as if all of Terraneau had erupted, as if God had cupped his hands and clapped them around the planet.
A shock wave rolled across the open plain, carrying with it a wall of smoke and dust as tall as a mountain. I did not see it coming. One moment the path ahead of me was clear, the next, a shock wave struck my Jackal from behind, lifting it onto its front wheels, then dropping the rear wheels back to the ground. The road buckled and bowed, but the ground did not cave in.
Trying to land on solid ground, I gunned the engine. The Jackal shot up the side of a tall dune and took to the air over the crest. When I landed, the jolt knocked my dead copilot free from the seat, and he toppled to the floor.
Looking at the hideous remains, I felt no guilt at all. I had come to liberate a planet. In order to accomplish my objective, I had needed civilian assistance. They had a militia. Yes, this man had died, but we had defeated the Avatari with a couple hundred men and a handful of vehicles.
“You did well, Harris,” I told myself. But looking at the dead man beside me, something told me I had not done as well as I had hoped.
I was not the first Marine to vomit in his helmet, and I doubted I would be the last, but I still derided myself for doing it. I would need to turn in the helmet for cleaning before I could wear the damn thing again; and even after the cleaning, the ghost of my bile would linger for another month.
Then I remembered my new rank. As the commander of the Scutum-Crux Fleet, I could requisition new equipment anytime I specking well pleased. As I headed back to the armory, I tossed my helmet, pleased with myself for hiding the evidence of my weakness.
I had one of those moments of clarity in which the future looked so bright. We had defeated the Avatari with a tiny army, and now Thomer could set off the nuke, and we would have the planet to ourselves. No one would know about my helmet. The fleet was mine, and Ava was waiting for me back on the ship.
I found my way to the government complex, the great fortress that had once symbolized the strength of the Unified Authority in this part of the galaxy. This complex had been the seat of government in the Scutum-Crux Arm, and it would be again.
I drove down the ramp into the underground garage, convinced of my invincibility. My revelry ended the moment I stepped out of the Jackal.
“You made it out?” O’Doul broke off from a different conversation and turned his attention on me. I saw the ex-Special Forces commando in his swagger. The man was about six-three, and for the first time I realized he was not just some skinny old man, he had muscles made of scrap wire.
“You sound surprised,” I said, still believing in my own immortality.
“You were in a house surrounded by aliens in the middle of a blast zone.” He looked over at the Jackal. “And you fought your way out in that?”
Shrugging my shoulders, I said, “It took some damage.”
Other men came to investigate the commotion. Philo Hollingsworth must have sneaked up on me. One moment there was no one beside me; but when I looked to my right a moment later, there Hollingsworth stood.
“You specking son of a bitch asshole!” O’Doul screamed, looking at the Jackal instead of me. “I told you not to go. I specking told you not to go!” Anger and anguish resonated in his voice.
He looked at me and said, “Mu took five Jackals with him. What about the others?” then looked in the cab of the battered Jackal. “Oh, no! No! No! No!”
I came over to ask what he’d seen, but O’Doul rounded on me. His dark eyes looked rabid. He grimaced, and said, “They should have left you.”
Glancing over O’Doul’s shoulder, I saw that the body of the dead driver still lay on the floor of the vehicle. Only then did I recognize the dead man’s bloody clothing. It was the Jackal leader.
“Twelve men went to rescue you,” O’Doul snarled.
“I didn’t know,” I whispered.
“You didn’t know,” O’Doul said, shaking his head. “Doctorow, Mu …How many people trusted you and died today?”
“Doctorow? Doctorow is dead?” I asked, remembering that he had gone off with Thomer.
“We lost contact with Thomer’s transport,” Hollingsworth said.
My legs went weak. I felt dizzy, almost ready to collapse. Thomer disappeared? First Herrington, now Thomer.
Then I remembered the mission. Without that bomb, we would not be able to destroy the curtain. At most, the battle we had just fought would buy us three days without that bomb. I felt puny and impotent.
For a moment, I thought O’Doul would attack me. We stood there, all of his militiamen forming a ring around us, his eyes boring into mine. His breathing was loud. Instead of attacking me, he did something worse. He turned his back on me. He pulled the body out of the Jackal and carried it the way a man carries a child or a bride. He said, “This man was my brother, Muhammad.” And then he walked away.
All the thoughts of victory and invincibility vanished from my head. The words of Nietzsche abandoned me as well. I thought about Ava waiting for me in my quarters; but this time, instead of fantasizing about sex, I thought about holding her. I wondered when and if I would ever see her again.
“When did we lose contact with Thomer?” I asked. The words came slowly. I was a man ready to fall over and looking for balance wherever I could find it. “Give me an update.”
The militiamen slowly peeled away from us. I no longer mattered to them.
“Fifteen minutes ago,” Hollingsworth said.
“Before or after you set off the bombs?”
“After, right after,” Hollingsworth said.
“That might not be a problem,” I said, seeing a ray of hope. “It might even be good. It means they’re in the mines. They’re placing the nuke.”
“Wouldn’t they have called in first?”
I shook my head. “I told him to wait for the bombs to go off, then to head in.” I gave that order back when Doctorow first floated his idea about blowing up the subway tracks.
“We’re still down to eighty-one men,” Hollingsworth said.
When he first said this, I thought it sounded pretty good because I did not calculate Thomer and the seventy-five Marines he took into the mines in the equation. For one bright moment, I thought Hollingsworth meant that we had eighty-one men plus the seventy-six Marines placing the nuke in the mines. When I did the math, it didn’t add up, and I realized he meant that only five of my men had survived our brush with the aliens.
We started the mission a few hours earlier with 250 men, and at that moment I could only confirm that six were alive. Herrington, the old leatherneck son of a bitch had survived more than thirty years of service, and now he was gone.
“How about the militia?” I asked. “How many Jackals made it back home?”
Hollingsworth shook his head. “You drove the only one that made it back.”
I took a step back. We were alone now, Hollingsworth and I. We stood in a giant underground garage with the entire level to ourselves. Looking over Hollingsworth’s shoulder, I saw the torn-up, broken carcass of the Jackal I had driven in, the dead gunner still peering from the turret in the back. A thin trickle of oil leaked from the seals around the Jackal’s chassis, and three of its tires were flat.
I groaned.
If we did not bury our dead quickly, dogs, rats, and insects would find the men in those Jackals. They would gnaw at their flesh and pick at their bones. O’Doul was right about me. I had been the death of the men who trusted me.
Nietzsche was right as well. When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you. Those men had died trying to save me. I owed them a debt I could not repay.
“Just what I need, more ghosts,” I muttered to myself.
“Ghosts?” Hollingsworth asked. He looked confused.
“Ghosts,” I said. “If there is one thing Marines have, it’s ghosts. We take them everywhere we go.”
“I don’t understand,” Hollingsworth said.
“No, but you will,” I said. As a relatively new Marine who had ridden out the Avatari invasion on a battleship, Hollingsworth had little if any combat experience. He had not lost many friends.
We saw the results of the blast before we heard from the transport. I was at the airfield helping stow gear on what was likely the last of our transports. We did not need to load the transport. If Thomer succeeded in setting off his bomb, we would leave the gear on Terraneau. If he failed, we’d be stuck on the planet, gear and all. Either way, the only reason to repack was to distract ourselves.
Paying little attention to the darkness around me, I looked out of the kettle and saw my men staring into the night sky. I trotted down the ramp and stared into the beautiful blackness with its ribbons of clouds. Above the clouds, stars sparkled like diamond shards.
“They made it,” Hollingsworth said. He laughed. “Goddamn, they made it.”
My pilot had already picked up their radio signal by the time I reached the cockpit. “I’ve got them, sir,” he said. A moment later, Thomer’s voice came over the speaker.
“Thomer, report,” I said, my hands trembling around the microphone.
“We set off the nuke.”
“There’s a night sky above Norristown,” I said. “Did you take casualties?”
“No sir. We did not see any opposition.”
“That’s good news, Thomer,” I said. “That’s really good news.” I clung to the words “no opposition” as if they were a lifeline in a stormy sea.
“I’m not sure what kind of damage we did to the planet,” Thomer said. “We did a flyby, several mountains caved in after the explosion. Those mines ran several miles deeper than the ones on New Copenhagen. We never reached the bottom.”
I should have expected the mines on Terraneau to be bigger than the ones on New Copenhagen. Those mines only ran a few hundred feet deep, but the Avatari had only worked on them for a couple of weeks. Who knew how long the aliens had been burrowing on Terraneau.
“Well done, Sergeant,” I said. And then I told him about our defense of Norristown. Considering what we had accomplished, I did not paint a very glorious picture.
“They outnumbered you, sir,” Thomer said. It helped a little. I thanked him and told him we needed to report back to the Kamehameha as soon as possible.
Thomer congratulated me, then he signed off.
It only took me a minute to reach Admiral Thorne. Having seen the ion curtain disappear from the atmosphere, he had expected the call.
“Congratulations, Captain.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said. “How does the planet look from topside?”
“The radiation readings around the Dansforth Mountain Range are off the charts. People will be avoiding that site for the next few thousand years.” Thorne gave a perfunctory laugh.
Looking through the windshield of the transport, I watched Hollingsworth lead what was left of my men. Five Marines stood where 150 Marines had recently landed.
“What’s the damage look like?” Thorne asked.
“I lost sixty percent of my men.”
“A small price to pay to rescue a planet, Captain, but I wasn’t asking about casualties. What does Norristown look like? Are there many survivors? If you know who is in charge, tell him I want to tour the city.”
“The city is almost gone. I can’t say what the rest of the planet looks like, but Norristown is just about a bust.”
“What about Colonel Doctorow? Did you find him?”
“Yes, sir, we found Doctorow. You want the leader of Norristown …he’s your man.”
“You’ll give him my message?” Thorne asked.
“Yes, sir. If it’s all right with you, sir, I’d like to stay here this evening to debrief him. He should be landing shortly. I can …”
“As you wish, Captain. I will need to speak with him separately.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, my curiosity turning to paranoia. What did I know about Thorne? I still trusted him, but I wondered what he wanted to tell Doctorow.
The people of Norristown might not have welcomed our visit, but they were glad to be freed. The party they threw lit the horizon.
Most of my men headed into town to join in the celebration, but I stayed back to deal with my regrets and my ghosts. I wanted some time to myself.
I spent the night in a transport, sitting in the pilot’s seat. The cockpit faced east. Beyond the gates of the airfield, I saw the outskirts of Norristown. A myriad of lights marked the part of town where the locals held their celebration. I stared on past the lights to the mountains just visible on the other side of town. Beyond the mountains, the sun had already begun to rise. The sky looked like it was carved from the skin of a very ripe peach.
Romanticizing sunsets and starry skies did not fit in my nature; but after the ion curtain, I welcomed the brindle sky.
Thomer came into the cockpit and sat with me.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I didn’t feel like having a good time, so I came to see you.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“It was either that, or I could have shot up some Fallzoud.”
Three or four minutes passed before we spoke again, then Thomer asked, “Do you think they’re gone for good?”
I started to answer, then took a moment to consider the question again. The sun had begun to rise. Glare shone through the windshield.
“Those sons of bitches must have a million million planets under their thumb. I think they can afford to let one or two slip away,” I said.
Thomer nodded. “A million million planets,” he repeated. “What is that, a trillion planets? You really think that many planets exist?”
“Damn it, Thomer, I’m a Marine, not an astronomer,” I said. “How the hell should I know?”
“Yeah, good point.”
After that, neither of us spoke. We sat there, staring out the windshield, glad to see a sunrise.
“Captain Harris, are you in there?” The voice came from the rear of the transport.
I walked to the door and called back, “We’re up in the cockpit.” Without waiting for an answer, I returned to the pilot’s chair and sat down.
I recognized the voice; the Right Reverend Colonel Ellery Doctorow had come to invade my privacy. Would he congratulate me for liberating his planet or berate me for killing so many of his men? I didn’t care either way.
The metal soles of his boots clanged against the floor of the kettle. I heard only one set of footfalls. At least Doctorow had come alone.
He struggled up the ladder, then he said, “Permission to come aboard.” There was irony in his voice, but the attempt at observing protocol seemed sincere just the same.
“Come on in,” I said.
“Want me to leave?” Thomer asked.
“Don’t leave on my account,” Doctorow said.
Thomer did not leave, but he abandoned the copilot’s chair so that Doctorow could sit. The Right Reverend looked out of place in that seat with his long hair and beard. He had not come empty-handed. He had brought a basket with a dozen bottles of Earth-brewed beer. Under different circumstances, he might have been able to sell those bottles for a hundred dollars apiece
“Are you thirsty, Sergeant?” he asked, offering Thomer the first beer. He offered me a bottle, then opened one for himself.
“Have I come at a good time?” Doctorow asked.
“It’s fine,” I said in a quiet voice.
“You know, Captain Harris, you had me scared when you first arrived. I thought fleet intervention would only make things worse. I was wrong.” He held out his beer in a gesture of salute.
“I spoke with Fleet Command an hour ago,” I said. “The last atmospheric readings came up completely clean. From what they can tell, the aliens are gone.”
“Yes. Admiral Thorne gave me the same report,” Doctorow said, a warm smile showing from under his beard. “A toast then, to a free planet, with afternoon skies and stars at night.”
“Afternoon skies and starry nights,” I repeated. We traded nods instead of tapping bottles, then we drank. Somehow he had chilled the beer. It tasted cold and fresh.
Thomer sipped his beer, enjoying the flavor. Doctorow downed most of his bottle in one long drink. I drank more like Thomer, enjoying the feel of the alcohol on my tongue.
“It almost doesn’t seem real,” Doctorow said. “After all those years, you chased the aliens away in a single day. Who would have known?”
“It did not go as well as I hoped,” I said. “Have you spoken to O’Doul?”
“Oh yes, Kareem,” Doctorow said. “He’s a man who understands sacrifice. You did what you had to do. He knows that.”
“Does he believe it?” I asked.
“Down deep, yes. He’ll never come out and say it; but, yes, I think that is precisely what he believes.
“So what’s next for you, Captain Harris?”
“Now we rebuild Terraneau,” I said. “We have enough engineers and equipment to have Norristown lit and self-sustaining by the end of the month. We’re all going to go hungry if we don’t start building some food stores soon.”
“A farming planet? Excellent,” Doctorow said. “Where do you intend to set up your base?” Doctorow asked.
“Fort Sebastian,” I said.
Doctorow seemed to expect that answer and shook his head. “I am not sure that will be an acceptable arrangement, Captain.”
“It’s not as if we have other options,” I said.
He put up a hand to stop me. “Admiral Thorne told me about your situation.”
“Yeah, well, I never planned on retiring in Scrotum-Crotch,” I said, forgetting myself and using the Marine-speak name for the galactic arm.
“There’s no need for vulgarity, Captain,” Doctorow said. Our eyes locked for a second, and I saw good humor and maybe a little embarrassment in his expression. “Sorry,” he said. “Force of habit from my days as a chaplain.”
I apologized as well.
“I am sure we can find a more suitable arrangement. Terraneau is a large planet, surely we can find locations other than Norristown for you to use as a military base.”
“I don’t get it. Why can’t we use Fort Sebastian?” Thomer asked.
Doctorow fixed him with a plastic smile. “It’s not the base that I would object to. It’s what happens to the town around it.”
“So you’re worried we won’t behave ourselves,” I said. “What is this, your own personal theocracy?”
When Doctorow answered that he was trying to foster a community, not a theocracy, I asked the question I had wanted to ask since we first met. “How did you become the king of Norristown anyway?”
Thomer shifted nervously as I asked this. On Fallzoud or off, he had a deep respect for authority.
“The bard of Norristown might be a better description,” Doctorow said. He pulled his third beer out of the basket and drained it. “Anyone else for another?” He had come with twelve beers. After we each took one more, only three remained.
Outside, a new day had begun.
“Will you look at that—there’s a sun in the sky over Norristown,” Doctorow said. “Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve seen one? It may not mean much to you …”
“It means a lot to me,” I said, giving Thomer a commiserating glance. “How about you, Sergeant? Does it mean anything to you?”
Thomer nodded. “Like swimming underwater and suddenly getting your first breath of air.”
“Yeah, right, like getting your first breath of air,” I said, impressed with Thomer’s analogy. It was too good an analogy. I would not have expected it from a Fallzoud jockey.
“Colonel Doctorow, what did you mean by the bard of Norristown?” Thomer asked.
“In a figurative sense, I am in charge because I am a singer of epic verses,” Doctorow said.
“Is that what you do?” asked Thomer. He felt comfortable around Doctorow. Clearly they had bonded during their mission to the mines.
“You seem to be the man in charge,” I said.
Doctorow told me the history that I had missed. He talked about the fall of Norristown and the deaths of over a million soldiers. After the aliens spread their ion curtain around the planet, the Army had managed to hold out for a month. During that entire time, Doctorow remained on active duty, delivering sermons to men who he believed had no souls and blessing the mass graves of men who he believed had no hope.
“It came to nothing,” Doctorow said. “Prayers, works, faith …nothing.”
“Sounds like you lost your faith,” I said. I did not tell him about my misplaced faith. I did not think it mattered.
“Lost my faith?” Doctorow echoed. He shook his head. “I still believe there is a God, if that is what you mean by faith. But if He is anything like I picture him, He’s not much of a shepherd.”
“If not a shepherd, then what?” I asked.
“Just a voyeur. Just a cosmic witness. A bystander who probably thinks it’s strange that we still call to Him for help when He hasn’t done anything to help any of us for thousands of years. He probably hears us calling and laughs.”
“ ‘For with the old Gods things came to an end long ago,’ ” I said, still spouting Nietzsche. “ ‘One day they laughed themselves to death.’ ”
“What was that?” Doctorow asked.
“It’s something an old philosopher said,” I said. “He said the Gods laughed themselves to death.”
“Well, now there’s some blasphemous bullshit,” Doctorow said.
“There’s no need for vulgarity, Colonel,” I said, purposely trying to make my voice like Doctorow’s when he had corrected me. We all laughed.
“ ‘Gods laughed themselves to death …’ You have to admit, it does sound pretty stupid,” Thomer said.
I did not say anything. Until that moment, I had always thought it sounded mystical and wise.
Doctorow changed the subject. “Thomer says you’re a Liberator clone. Is that right? He says you know you’re a clone.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“He says he knows he’s a clone, too,” Doctorow added.
“We do live in an age of miracles,” I said. “So, you were explaining to us how you became the poet of Norristown?”
“Not so much a poet, maybe a historian,” Doctorow said. “I recorded the defense of Norristown, one funeral at a time. I was like a New-Age version of Homer recalling the siege of Troy. Now you’ve come along and changed the ending of the story.” He paused, pulled out his fourth beer, and chugged it.
“How did you end up in charge?” Thomer asked.
“Most of the line officers died. Some took their own lives. That left me the highest-ranking man on base.
“When the fighting died down, the people came to Fort Sebastian looking for protection; and I …I gave them the best advice of all. I told them not to fight. At the time, I told them to trust in God because God would protect them.
“As it turned out, we didn’t need God to protect us. Once we stopped taking up arms, the aliens went away.”
“Maybe that was how God protected them,” Thomer said. We both stared at him. This was his night for deep thoughts.
“You’re defending God?” I asked.
“It just seems like that’s how God works,” Thomer said, sounding defensive.
“That was how I rose from a chaplain to leader. Funny, it happened so gradually that I never stopped to think about it.”
“So are you governor of Norristown or the whole planet?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Doctorow said, thinking the question over. “I’ve never been outside of Norristown. We lost contact with the rest of the planet.”
“Why did you put all those girls in that building?” Thomer asked.
“They’re orphans,” Doctorow said. “We put them there so we could keep them safe.”
“Safe from whom?” I asked.
“Just safe,” Doctorow said.
“The building I was in, was that a dorm for orphan boys? Were they just trying to keep themselves safe when they rigged the walls with explosives?” I asked. “They almost killed me.”
“They weren’t trying to hurt you, Captain Harris. They barricaded the door with a propane canister from their kitchen. It was the heaviest thing they could find. Fortunately for all of us, they were already running for the fire escape when you tossed your grenade at the door.” He chuckled. “That kind of behavior is another reason why we would prefer for you to build your base away from Norristown.”