The mood around Valhalla remained exuberant. All anybody seemed to know was that we had beaten back the Mudders and that this latest victory was the easiest so far.
Freeman and I returned to the hotel in time to see a truck loaded with Marines in fatigues driving out of the parking lot. The men in the back of the truck carried M27s, but they looked more like a hunting party than Marines on a mission.
A second group of men with M27s waited by the hotel entrance. “Where are you going?” I asked a corporal.
“Dog hunting, sir,” he replied.
“Dog hunting?”
“Yes, sir. You know all those strays you see around town? A couple of them up and bit somebody. Base Command is offering a fifty-dollar reward for every dog pelt we bring in.”
Most of the men held open bottles of beer in one hand and M27s in the other. Just beyond them I saw another group of would-be hunters waiting for a truck, and another group beyond them. Soon the town might be filled with half-drunk Marines shooting stray dogs and guzzling beer.
At first I felt angry about the waste of bullets, then I realized that even if I collected every bullet shot at every dog, I might not have enough firepower to bring down a single Avatar. Somebody in the chain of command was thinking. Scanning the parking lot, I sensed the excitement. A few of the guys might accidentally shoot each other, but the costs would be minimal compared to morale value.
Freeman and I went to the mess hall.
We walked down the food line, selecting dishes. The choices would have made for a fine breakfast, lunch, or dinner. There was bacon, steak, biscuits, vegetables, fruits in sugar syrups, ham, hot cereal, and soup. The salad bar was closed, but the cooks had left out plates with chef and vegetable salads. With the sky bright all day long and men on alternating shifts, breakfast, lunch, and dinner all mixed into each other.
“Hunting dogs,” Freeman said as he loaded up his plate. “Does that make sense to you?”
“Sure it does,” I said. “We wouldn’t want those dogs to bite anyone.”
Freeman did not respond.
“It’s not about killing dogs,” I said. “Those men are too busy thinking about scoring a fifty-dollars bounty to worry about being stuck on a planet with an alien army. It’s a damn good morale booster.”
Freeman took five fried eggs, a T-bone steak, and a football-sized wad of green beans. He also took two glasses of milk and a glass of orange juice. I picked up a bacon cheeseburger, saw the way the heat lamps had shriveled the bun, and put it back in the bin. Instead, I chose a plate with dried-out fried chicken and petrified french fries.
We carried our trays to an empty corner of the mess and sat down. “When do you want to leave for the dig site?” I asked. “I can set up a chopper and a pilot.” I picked up a piece of chicken and took a bite of it. The skin was greasy, the meat was dry, but the flavor was fine.
“I’ll fly us,” Freeman said. Using his fork, he cut one of his eggs into three nearly equal triangles. The yolk had apparently solidified under the heat lamps and barely ran.
“You can fly a helicopter?” I asked.
“We’ll take a transport.” Military transports, the flying kind, were short-range birds used mostly for shuttling troops to and from ships. They were big, clunky, unarmed beasts with thick shields and no weapons. I knew Freeman could fly transports; I’d ridden with him before.
“I never thought of that,” I said. If we ran into the Avatari, a transport would have a better chance of surviving their light bolts than a helicopter. The bolts would pierce the shields and pass right through the fuselage, but it would take a lucky shot to bring a transport down.
“Will you need time to arrange the transport?” I asked. I drank my juice and water but only picked at the french fries. The grease from the chicken felt heavy in my stomach.
“I might need an hour or two,” Freeman said. He looked tired.
“Sounds good,” I said as I got up from the table. I picked up my tray and started for a busing station.
“And Harris, bring standard armor, not the white stuff,” Freeman said. He was right. If New Copenhagen was anything like Earth, the lower hemisphere would be warmer when the upper hemisphere was in winter. There would be no snow to blend in with, and we might very well go underground anyway. White armor would stand out; dark armor would blend in.
I went to my quarters to rest. Stripping down to my boxers, I climbed into bed and fell asleep quickly. That was part of life in the Marines, you slept when you could and stayed awake when you had to.
I dreamed of Hawaii. I dreamed of white sand beaches and Christina—the girl I left behind at Sad Sam’s Palace. I remembered her name. Her name mattered in my dream.
The chimes from my communications console woke me from a deep sleep. I thought maybe I had overslept and Freeman was calling to wake me up. I generally woke myself up with good accuracy.
“Hello?” I asked.
“You’re sleeping?” It was Moffat.
I groaned softly. “What time is it?”
“It’s 0300,” he said. Freeman and I had planned on leaving at 0400. As far as I was concerned, I still had forty-five minutes to sleep.
“The general’s staff says you’re out of action for the next few days,” Moffat said.
“I have an assignment,” I said.
“I don’t suppose you would care to share some details with your company commander,” Moffat said. He said this in jest. The fact was, Moffat didn’t bother me so much anymore. He had a high opinion of himself, but what officer didn’t? At least he’d led his men into battle when we went to meet the Avatari in the forest.
“I wish I could, sir,” I said.
“I hear you’ve been out to visit the University of Valhalla.” Moffat was fishing for clues and doing a good job of it.
“I’m taking an after-hours annex course,” I said. “It’s in advanced interpersonal relations.”
“Must be a big class,” Moffat said. “I understand General Glade is taking it, too.”
“You might ask General Glade about the class, he’s probably in a better position to share his opinions.”
“Nice, Harris. Very nice,” Moffat said. “So are you going in for an extended seminar today?”
“A field trip,” I said.
“What kinds of field trips do you take in a class on interpersonal relations?” Moffat asked.
“Social calls, mostly. We visit new friends, try to learn their likes and dislikes. It’s not a trip to the beach with Ava Gardner, but …”
“Oh, shit. I hope you’re not another of those guys who walks around fantasizing about Ava all day,” Moffat said.
“You don’t think she’s beautiful?” I asked. In truth, I didn’t waste much time thinking about Ava or any other woman …well, maybe Christina and Marianne, Freeman’s sister.
“I don’t waste time thinking about clones,” Moffat said. He considered his audience and retracted the statement. “Fantasizing about clones.”
Deciding that he had fished as much information as he was going to get, Moffat turned to business. “Will we see your ass back on the duty roster soon?” Now he sounded positively officious.
“This could take a couple of days,” I said.
“I expect you to report in for duty the moment you return to base,” Moffat said.
I could not actually do that—anything I found would be classified. When I got back, I would report to General Glade, who would hear what I had to say, then send me to the Science Lab, where I would repeat everything for Sweetwater and Breeze. After that meeting, I’d probably need a few hours’ rest.
“Aye, aye, sir,” I said with conviction, almost as if I meant it.
The rear end of the transport slid open slowly, the hydraulic rods pulling aside six-inch-thick doors that might well have weighed two thousand pounds each.
Walking up the grated ramp reminded me a lot of entering the Vista Street bunker. I saw metal in every direction. The walls were metal. The floor was metal. The lights in the kettle shone down from metal casings. Only the bench that ran around the perimeter of the cabin was wood, and it was painted the dull dark gray of metal. There were no windows, just a ladder at the far side of the cabin that led up to the cockpit.
I once spent six weeks trapped in one of these birds with no one to talk to except Ray Freeman. I had a Bible on that flight. Faced with deciding between trying to strike up conversations with Freeman and reading the Bible, I read through the Old Testament of the Bible four times. I started that trip a devout atheist and finished it having formed a religion of my own.
Over the last year, I had given up on religion; but now, walking up the ramp with Freeman, I could feel stirrings of devotion in my soul. Ray would pilot the flight. He flew these birds as well as any air jockey.
“You coming up?” Freeman paused at the base of the ladder.
“Give me a minute. I want to look through our equipment.”
Freeman nodded and climbed up to the cockpit two rungs at a time.
I was glad for an excuse to get away from Freeman; his intense silence wore me down. Something had caught my eye. Along with the particle-beam pistols, grenades, and the Jackal Freeman requisitioned for this trip, I saw a familiar sight—a case shaped like a tuba with the acronym S.C.O.O.T.E.R. running along its side.
The case was maybe three and a half feet tall. As I walked over for a closer look, the rear hatch of the kettle closed, its grinding metal yawn filling the cargo hold. I barely noticed. I had a ghost to deal with.
The acronym on the top of the case stood for Subautonomous Control Optical Observation Terrain Exploration Robot. They really had to reach for that name, I thought, but I knew why they had done it. The inventor of this unit called his prototype Scooter. I met the guy once. Back then, S.C.O.O.T.E.R. was a name, not an acronym. The bastard loved his little robot. He treated the thing like a pet.
The walls of the transport rumbled as it lifted from the ground. The sheer tonnage of these ships was ridiculous. They were flying hunks of iron, made for space travel, where aerodynamics meant nothing. In atmospheric conditions, they had the grace and elegance of a brick. They were built to carry troops and absorb punishment and did a good job of both.
I placed the case on its side and opened it. The S.C.O.O.T.E.R. was shaped like a hubcap, a smooth chrome ellipse, twelve inches across, with four independent wheels on the bottom. The remarkable thing about these little robots was the sense of self-preservation that had been programmed into their processing chips. At the moment, this little robot could not have had the slightest idea of what danger it was in; but once it was deployed, the programming would come in handy. Sergeant Tabor Shannon, my mentor and the finest Marine I had ever known, died because he underestimated the self-preservation programming in one of these little bastards.
I stared down at the S.C.O.O.T.E.R.’s outer shell, which was not the mirror it appeared to be but a well-crafted 360-degree lens. This little robot could slip into narrow spaces, map out enemy positions, and plan routes of attack. I placed this new S.C.O.O.T.E.R. back in its case and headed for the cockpit. The powerful engines of the transport filled the kettle with a soft sucking noise, and the handles along the sides of the ladder vibrated.
“What’s our ETA?” I asked as I entered the cockpit. Looking through the windshield, I saw virginal forests of snowcapped trees, a vast carpet that swept on for miles and miles. With the ion curtain above us, there was not a trace of blue in the silvery sky. There were clouds, lots of clouds.
“Five hours, maybe,” Freeman, ever the raconteur, responded. Where was a Bible when I needed one?
I headed up to the cockpit and watched in studied silence as we flew closer.
The aliens could have dug their mines on an open prairie or deep in the deserts, some sensible convenient place. Had they been after gold, they might have done it the old-fashioned way, panning silt in streams and rivers. Whatever they were here for, they had burrowed into the side of a mountain in the middle of a remote range.
“Ah shit,” I said, as a nearly paralyzing sense of déjà vu spread through me. The setting for the Avatari Mining Company looked very familiar indeed. A few years back, the Unified Authority Marines tracked the Mogats to a burned-out planet called Hubble. Finding themselves trapped, the Mogats hid in a series of caverns that ran deep below the only mountains on the planet. Likewise, when we finally tracked the Believers to their home planet, it was a burned-out planet in which their cities were hidden deep below the surface. The only way to get to those cities was through shafts that had been carved into tall mountains.
“I’m beginning to see a pattern,” I told Freeman.
The mountains formed a jagged wall of granite gray slopes and icy peaks. They looked like a giant fortress from the distance. The light from the ion curtain illuminated the various nooks and crevices that would otherwise have gone dark.
Some of the peaks disappeared above the clouds. I pointed to one and asked Freeman if it could possibly extend through the curtain. He shrugged his shoulders, and said, “Don’t know.” Hypothesis was the sport of scientists like Sweetwater and Breeze; Freeman felt no inclination to try his hand at it.
“If that peak goes higher than the ion curtain, we might be able to climb to the top and set up some sort of communications link,” I said.
“You saw what happened to the bullets I shot through the sphere?” Freeman asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“And you want to risk hiking through that shit?” he asked.
I thought about that as we approached the coordinates William Sweetwater had provided. This took us deep into the mountains, flying low among ridges and saddles. Freeman circled around until he found the exact coordinates where the digging had been detected, then circled more until he found an opening along the face of the mountain. This took over an hour, and I began to wonder if the Avatari had found a hollow spot in some mountain and materialized inside. Finally, we found our doorway, a squared opening in the face of a mountain that was fifty feet tall and one hundred feet wide.
Designed to fly in space as well as in atmospheric conditions, our transport could perform vertical landings. We would not need a long runway with this bird, thank goodness, but we would need someplace sturdy enough to support three hundred metric tons—preferably a location with a strong granite base so that the landing gear would not dig in too deeply. After another fifteen minutes, Freeman found a solid shelf about a quarter of a mile from the opening, and we touched down.
“You know, they might have dug a gravity chute?” I said, as we headed into the cargo hold to off-load our equipment.
The only time I had ever seen a gravity chute was on the Mogat home world. It was an enormous well that ran between the surface of the planet and the underground cities a few miles below. The damn thing worked like an elevator, using some weird convection that lifted outgoing ships to the surface and lowered incoming ships to the core.
“There won’t be a chute,” Freeman said.
“How can you be so sure?” I asked.
“The Avatari haven’t had time to dig one,” Freeman said.
“Maybe they dig really quickly,” I said. I knew Freeman was right, but that did not mean I wanted to give in. The chute on the Mogat planet went several miles straight down.
Freeman only grunted.
We loaded a dozen trackers into the back of the Jackal along with guns, grenades, charges, cameras, and the S.C.O.O.T.E.R. We took rappel cords for scaling any vertical chutes we might encounter. The goal was to get in and out of the mines undetected, but that did not mean we would not go in ready to fight.
Jackals might handle foothills well, but the landscape around us was cliffs and peaks. Jeep-sized boulders stuck out of the ground. There were ruts and drop-offs, every obstruction except for trees. We were one hundred feet above the tree level, and the mountain was bare.
We were able to drive to a ridge forty or fifty feet below the entrance to the Avatari mine. Then we had to ditch our ride and haul the equipment by hand. I strapped three particle-beam cannons and three trackers to my back and started walking.
My load weighed damn near eighty pounds, and I had nothing to complain about. Freeman carried the S.C.O.O.T.E.R., two trackers, and a satchel filled with demolition gear. He probably lugged 150 pounds out of the Jackal in all.
“I thought we didn’t want to blow anything up,” I said, remembering Freeman’s response when I asked about bringing more men.
“Not by accident,” Freeman said.
We came to a sheer cliff, where we would need to scale the side of the mountain. I found a groove in which I could climb and stripped off the gear I was carrying. Big as he was, Freeman was more suited for combat than climbing, and our combat armor wouldn’t make scaling the ridge any easier. Once I got to the top, I would throw down a cord. I would haul up our gear first, then Freeman could use the cord to come up.
It did not take long for me to get to the top. I shot a piton into the granite and tied our cord to it. After securing the cord, I found a solid foothold on the dry granite and tossed the cord down to Freeman. He sent up the satchel full of explosives first, then the S.C.O.O.T.E.R., the trackers, and the rifles. Next, Freeman attached the cord to his armor and started climbing.
“You know that this whole thing will have been a waste of time if there’s a gravity chute inside that cave?” I called down to Freeman, using an interLink connection.
“Did you see a gravity chute on Hubble?” Freeman asked.
“No,” I said.
“Then they don’t build one on every planet.” He grunted as he worked his way up the groove. He was breathing heavily. The man weighed over three hundred pounds; mountain climbing did not come easily for him.
“So it’s a fifty-fifty chance,” I said. Something about Freeman’s obsessive silence made me more chatty, like I was trying to get on his nerves.
Freeman did not answer. A minute later, he reached the top of the cord and pulled himself up to the ledge. I was not there to offer him a hand. I had walked a few feet into the cave to have a look around.
“You see a gravity chute?” Freeman asked.
“Not exactly,” I said. What I saw was a wide corridor carved out of solid rock. The entrance was so large, I thought I could run six lanes of traffic through it.
Ray Freeman had made a rare mistake when he said that the aliens had not had enough time to dig a gravity chute. He had underestimated them. Judging by this digging, they could have bored right through the center of New Copenhagen and popped up in the Hotel Valhalla pool had they wished.
Not that Freeman commented on the immense excavation when he saw it. He simply gazed down one side of the corridor, then the other, and said nothing. He knelt, unloaded his gear, and brought out the S.C.O.O.T.E.R.
“Ever used one of these?” Freeman asked.
“I’ve seen one in action,” I said, “on Hubble.”
Freeman placed the S.C.O.O.T.E.R. on the ground, then opened the top of the case to access the control panel. The panel included a four-inch screen with touch controls. They had improved the robot’s design. Freeman could give it voice commands using the interLink.
“Right or left?” Freeman asked me. The tunnel branched out in both directions.
“Doesn’t look like it matters,” I said.
A moment later the little robot rumbled off to the left, faltering over divots and skirting around large rocks, its sensors sweeping the area for signs of danger. I think I would have preferred the S.C.O.O.T.E.R. to have more balls and less brains. It found a rut along the wall of the cavern in which it could both travel and hide. The rut was just big enough for the robot, but it was useless for Freeman and me.
The ambient light inside the tunnel was just as bright as it was outside. I got the feeling that the glowing tachyons of the ion curtain had found their way into the mountains.
“This could take a while,” I said. “The S.C.O.O.T.E.R. I saw on Hubble was better at survival than reconnaissance.”
Wanting to kill time, I picked up the trackers and began placing them. I did not get very far, however. Within a few minutes, the S.C.O.O.T.E.R. found the Avatari. But they weren’t the Avatari we expected.
Freeman sat fiddling with the S.C.O.O.T.E.R.’s controls as I lugged three trackers up the hall to the right. About twenty yards in, I started passing arterial hallways that led down into the heart of the mountain. The halls were fairly uniform, about six feet from floor to ceiling and somewhere around twenty-five feet from wall to wall. I tried to imagine a platoon of eight-foot-tall Avatari soldiers running through these halls. It seemed impossible. I would need to hunch my back to fit in there, and Freeman would need to crouch. I had no idea how a bunch of animated statues like the Avatari would fit; those bastards had another foot on Freeman.
As I peered into one of the tunnels, something surprised me, at least it surprised me once I realized what I was seeing. The grand corridor might have been brightly lit with the stuff that made the ion curtain, but the ancillary tunnels were dark as night. I relayed this piece of intelligence back to Freeman, but he did not reply. He might have been too busy guiding the S.C.O.O.T.E.R., or more likely he had already seen this in the S.C.O.O.T.E.R.’s video feed.
Looking for the right place to set up my first tracker, I walked just deep enough into a tunnel for my visor to switch to night-for-day vision, then called back to Freeman. “Think I should set up trackers in this tunnel?” I said.
“You wouldn’t want to go too far in there,” Freeman said.
“Any particular reason?” I asked.
“Because it’s full of giant spiders,” Freeman said.
I leaned the tracker against the wall and trotted back to have a look at the control screen. I did not like what I saw.
No one would ever describe the creature we saw on the tiny black and white screen as a “Space Angel.” Apparently the Avatari considered the humanoid form efficient for combat but not for mining. The creatures in these shafts looked like enormous spiders. They had eight multijointed legs. The two forelegs were shaped like a knife blade; the rear legs did not taper down to points. They were broad at the base—limbs made for mobility.
“I don’t like the look of that,” I said.
Freeman had switched to manual controls so that he could bypass the S.C.O.O.T.E.R.’s self-preservation programming. Using a joy-lever and dials, he guided the little robot toward the closest miner, then directly under its belly. Through the fish-eye lens, I watched as the spider-thing slashed at the granite floor with its forelegs. There must have been real power in those legs—they hacked through the rock as easily as a shovel digging in dry sand, showering the S.C.O.O.T.E.R. with rock and debris.
“Think that thing can cut through armor with those legs?” I asked.
Freeman, who seldom speculated on anything, said, “Yes.”
Scary or not, these things would have been useless on an open battlefield where men with guns could pick them off before they got within striking range. I saw no sign of guns or projectile weapons on the creature. Twisting through mountain tunnels, however, this creepy, ground-hugging bastard would have an advantage.
“Let’s kill the specker, grab its carcass, and get out of here,” I said.
Without saying a word, Freeman had the S.C.O.O.T.E.R. spin so that the camera showed the cavern. The walls were covered with dark spots that seemed to quiver in place.
“Those aren’t …” I started to say, but I knew they were. They were more spider-things. The S.C.O.O.T.E.R.’s camera only captured a small portion of the cavern, but I could see hundreds, maybe thousands, of spider-things wedged in together, slashing and scraping at the walls.
I wanted to make a joke about having seen enough and heading back to base. Instead, I said, “They don’t seem very alert. If their soldiers are avatars of real aliens, these things might just be drones.”
Freeman drove the S.C.O.O.T.E.R. out from under the spider-thing and guided it up a peak.
“Probably,” I added.
Now that I could see much more of the cavern on the screen, I lost all sense of proportion. I might have been staring into a nothingness as vast as the skies. What I saw was an endless vault with rough-hewn walls on which crawled thousands and thousands of spider-things, and I knew I had only seen the tip of the iceberg. Even with the S.C.O.O.T.E.R.’s enhanced optics, the camera only captured a tiny sliver of that enormous hive.
“Got any bug spray?” I asked Freeman.
He switched S.C.O.O.T.E.R. to autopilot mode.
“You know it’s just going to come running for safety now,” I said as he stood up, went to our gear, and slung the satchel of demolition equipment over his shoulder.
Freeman tossed me a particle-beam cannon. “You take point,” he said.
Ah shit, I thought, we’re going in. “Do we want to set up the trackers before we go in?” I asked. “We might need to leave in a hurry.”
“Good idea,” he said, so we spent fifteen minutes placing our trackers along the main tunnel. If we did need to beat a fast retreat, we could start the trackers using controls in our helmets …if we made it that far.
That done, we started down the main corridor. I took a second gun slung over my shoulder. Creatures like these spider-things could probably snap a cannon in two with one swipe of their powerful legs. On the off chance that one of them broke my first cannon without cutting me in two along the way, having a second weapon would come in handy.
Then it came time to enter the ancillary tunnel that led down into the main cavern. I boosted the volume on the ambient noise and heard scraping and thumping, but it came from far away. I had point—not exactly a significant position with only two of us—but it meant that I would plan our route and lead the way. In a situation like this, it was all a crapshoot. At the end of the tunnel, we might run into an ambush—a horde of giant alien spider-things just waiting for us, or they might not even register us at all.
Were these avatars of thinking beings, or robotic drones, or maybe living, breathing, eating creatures? Did they sling webs? Visions of spiderwebs with threads the size of nylon cables played in my mind. I imagined those creatures trapping us, tying us tightly, then eating us alive. In my mind, I saw spiders with bayonet-like mandibles. I tried to erase these thoughts, but they lingered as I bent my back and started down that tunnel.
The ground sloped down at a twenty-degree angle. The world around me went dark for less than a second, then my night-for-day lenses took over and I saw everything around me in black-and-blue-white images. My sense of depth, however, disappeared quickly.
The tunnel was clearly not natural. Though it was pitted with pick marks and inch-deep lines, the roof of the tunnel was flat and straight, as were the walls. The spider-things had hacked the tunnel out of a solid granite slab.
The ceiling had to be almost precisely six feet tall. Standing six-three with two extra inches for my helmet, I had to duck my head as I walked. Freeman, who quickly fell back behind me, could only get through by walking in a crouch.
“Maybe we can trap these things if we place charges around the entrance,” I suggested.
“No,” Freeman said.
“Any reason?” I asked.
“They just hollowed out this entire mountain, they would be able to dig themselves out.”
“So why bring all the demolition gear if you’re not going to use it?”
“We might find a generator or some central control,” Freeman said.
I realized I was thinking survival, and he was talking strategy.
The tube curled down like a spiral stairwell in which the steps had washed away. As I continued down, I moved toward the wall for a closer look. The walls and ceiling were anything but smooth—though flat, they were pocked with yard-long grooves into which I could fit my hands.
“Any guesses on how many of those things can fit through here at once?” I asked. Before Freeman could respond, I had my answer.
“Incoming!” I yelled into the interLink.
I saw two front legs first. They were shaped like an ax handle and tapered down to ice-pick points. I flattened my back against the wall as hard as I possibly could, and aimed my particle-beam cannon. That was all that I could do.
“How many?” Freeman asked.
“Just one, so far,” I said.
It rounded the corner and scuttled past me. There was nothing resembling flesh on this creature. It might have had an exoskeleton or it could have been all armor, but I saw no soft spots on its body. And it was big. The sharp arches of the spider-thing’s forelegs came almost to my chest.
Behind those legs came a featureless, ball-shaped head. It had no eyes and, to my relief, no mouth. The spider-thing had a low-slung body that cleared the ground by no more than a foot. The damned thing thrust past me without so much as a sideways glance, leaving me shivering in its wake.
I watched it from the back as it continued up the slope and around the curve. Unlike the insectile forelegs, the short rear legs looked reptilian. The forelegs clawed at the ground, breaking the rock and hard-packed earth loose. The rear legs swept up the debris. I felt a strong impulse to give that thing a particle-beam enema but resisted.
“It’s on its way toward you,” I warned Freeman.
“I see it,” he said.
“It walked right past me,” I said. “It doesn’t seem to care about visitors.”
Moments later, Freeman let me know that the spider-thing passed him as well. We continued down the tunnel, then, all of a sudden, I found myself facing a cavern that stretched far beyond the limited range of my night-for-day lenses. Using optical commands, I initiated a sonar sweep and pinged the cavern to determine its size. I got no reading. Something in the cave either dampened or absorbed my ping.
The spider-things were everywhere, digging at the floor, clinging to the walls, digging at the ceiling. I watched one near me as it dug, scraping the granite with its front-most legs, pushing boulders out of its way with its outermost legs, then sweeping at the dirt and debris with its hind legs. The spider-thing had dug a shallow pit around itself. Most of the spider-things around the cavern had dug themselves into pits.
I stood on a ridge overlooking the scene. A path led on, winding down the steep slope of the cavern. We would need to follow that path. The spider-things used it, too. They also climbed the sides of the cavern. By stabbing their dagger legs into the granite wall, they moved adroitly along the rock. It did not matter to them if the wall sloped down at forty-five degrees or ninety, they moved with equal alacrity.
A shower of small rocks fell around me. When I looked up, I saw two of those spider-things almost directly over my head. They could have pounced on me if they had a mind to, but a mind was something they seemed to lack.
I scanned the area using heat vision. Like the Avatari soldiers, these creatures gave off no body heat. That did not mean they were avatars; real spiders do not generate body heat, either. Just then a rock the size of a grapefruit fell, narrowly missing my head.
Above me, one of those creatures had arranged itself so that its face stared straight down at me, but it paid me no attention. It slashed at the rocks around it with one of its legs, dislodging rock chips, gravel, and rocks the size of golf balls.
“That way,” Freeman said as he paused beside me on the ridge at the end of the tunnel. He pointed toward a mound on the floor of the cavern. The cavern itself was dark, but there was a cave on the mound, with light pouring out of it. I tried to measure the distance to that cave using a sonar ping. Apparently the signal returned garbled but readable, as an icon appeared on my visor warning me that it was “repairing” the test results. A moment later a virtual beacon appeared over the cave along with a measurement of 1.2 miles.
A ninety-foot drop stood between us and the floor of the cavern. To get down to the floor, we would need to follow a trail that switched back and forth along a steep slope. The ridge on which we stood jutted out over the top of the slope, so I could not see what was just below us. Once we reached the cavern floor, though, the path to the distant cave looked dangerous. We would cross more than a mile of spider-thing-infested cavern floor. As I traced the route we would take, I saw five or six spider-things cut across the path.
“I don’t suppose we can examine the cave from here?” I asked. When Freeman did not respond to my little joke, I followed up with, “Let’s go.”
Viewed through night-for-day lenses, the spider creatures looked just a shade lighter than absolute black against the nickel gray of the granite stone. Of course, seen through those lenses, everything was blue-gray, blue-white, or black with a hint of blue. Down along the floor of the cavern, the drones looked like animated patches of grass. There were thousands of them, maybe hundreds of thousands. Most of them dug within their own personal divots, but some were working so closely together that their legs became interlaced.
I reached over my shoulder and touched my backup cannon for reassurance, then started down the slope. The moment I stepped off our ledge, I found myself no more than a foot from one of the spider-things. It had carved a hole into the granite directly beneath the spot on which I had been standing. Taking a half step back, I aimed my rifle at the creature, but the busy little bastard ignored me. It rolled a two-foot boulder out of its hole, pivoted around, and crawled back the way it had come.
My Liberator’s combat reflex had already begun. Testosterone and adrenaline flowed through my veins, leaving me calm and ready for violence at the same time. I liked it more than ever before, my thoughts taking on new clarity as a nearly electric tingle ran across my skin. The danger had already gone, but I welcomed the effects as the reflex lingered.
If I kill one of those things, do you think the others will know? I asked myself. Probably not, but I didn’t want to risk it.
“If those things have any brains, they’ve spotted us by now,” I told Freeman. “Maybe they know we’re here, and they’re just too scared to do anything about us.”
He did not respond.
I looked back the way we had come and saw something that disturbed me. All of the spider-things in this cavern appeared to be the exact same size …all of them except one. This creature was twice the size of the others, a spider-thing the size of a small car that crawled more quickly than its fellows. I spotted it moving along the roof of the cavern. While most of the other spider-things remained fixed in their small holes, this creature crawled in a straight line along the wall of the cavern, heading in our direction.
It was still hundreds of feet away. It crawled toward us slowly but steadily, dwarfing the other spider-things around it, its sharp, front legs stepping, stabbing, and pulling.
“You didn’t happen to see the big spider on the wall?” I asked.
“I saw it,” Freeman said.
We risked attracting more attention to ourselves by running; but seeing that big creature coming after us, I sped to a jog as we worked our way down the slope along the zigzagging trail.
I rounded a bend and had to stop moving while a spider-thing strolled across the path. I looked at its forelegs. From the ground to the joint at the top of their arch, those legs were as long and wide as a grown man’s crutches. The ends of its segmented legs were flat and smooth and sharp as swords. They had a dull shine as if they were made of metal or plastic.
As I waited for the spider-thing to crawl off the path, I looked back toward the roof of the cavern. The giant spider-thing I spotted earlier was still coming in our direction. It might have gained some ground on us, but it still had not yet reached the ridge from which we had come. It scuttled across the wall, working its legs like knitting needles as it clung to the rock.
“At least they don’t spin webs,” I said.
Freeman did not answer. He stood about fifteen feet behind me fiddling with a T-shaped instrument of some kind. At the moment, I would have preferred for him to have a grenade in his left hand and a particle-beam pistol in his right, but we had come to gather scientific data.
“We better get moving,” I said. “If that thing catches up to us, we might be in trouble.” The gargantuan spider-thing might not need to catch up to us, though. As long as it remained between us and our way out of the cavern, it was in control of the situation. Freeman seldom made mistakes, but he might have made a colossal error when he switched the S.C.O.O.T.E.R. to its self-preservation autopilot too soon.
We passed dozens of regular-sized spider-things as we wound our way down to the floor of the cavern. Sometimes I came so close to them that I could have reached out and grabbed their legs, but they showed no sign of noticing me.
I hazarded another look back at the big spider-thing and saw that it had made it past the entrance to the tunnel. It moved slowly, maybe even slower than we did; but we were walking back and forth along a twisting path. The giant spider-thing crawled straight down the steep slope, gaining ground on us.
As I spared just a moment to watch its casual gait, I decided that the Avatari had not placed it in these caverns as a guard. This one was no drone. It might be the avatar of an engineer or maybe a foreman who located problems and sorted them out. It probably took care of cave-ins, explosions, floods, and the occasional two-legged stranger that meandered into its lair.
It was still a hundred feet back, but moments earlier, it had been two hundred or three hundred feet away.
“What do we do if it catches up to us?” I asked Freeman. The drones might have been on autopilot, but that did not mean their guardian would be.
“We don’t let it catch up to us,” Freeman said. His voice was absolutely calm.
A spider-thing rolling a seven-foot boulder crossed the path a few feet ahead of me. It moved the boulder so easily it might have been pushing a gigantic ball of string instead of a ten-ton rock. The spider-thing paused, tapped the boulder with its legs to change the direction it rolled, then, with a nudge, started pushing again. During the moment that it stopped, I aimed my weapon at its head and tightened my finger across the trigger. I was on edge and ready to kill.
“If any more get in your way, kill them,” Freeman told me. He did not need to tell me twice.
I reached the bottom of the slope and waited for Freeman. The cavern floor was low around the edges and bulged up toward the middle. Because of the convex curvature, I could no longer see the cave entrance that I had marked with my virtual beacon. I knew we were heading in the right direction; and, because I had marked it with a virtual beacon, a chip in my visor marked the distance—0.7 miles away. We would have reached the cave by now if we could have moved toward it in a straight line. But between us and that beacon, thousands of spider-things scratched at the granite floor. They did not seem to care about us, but we were going to need to dodge any of them between us and the cave. Traveling that 0.7 of a mile might take longer than a five-mile hike once we worked in our winding trail.
“Did they give you that meter at the Science Lab? What’s it reading?” I asked Freeman.
“I don’t know what it reads,” Freeman said. He held the T-shaped device in his right hand. Lights flashed across the broad bar on its top. “I know it’s taking air samples.”
“Can it broadcast a signal to the lab?”
“No.”
“What happens if we don’t make it out of here?” I asked.
“There’s a computer recording our results in the transport,” Freeman said.
“So if we don’t make it, they’ll get along perfectly well without us. How does it feel to be expendable?” I asked, thinking that Freeman was now just as replaceable as a bullet or a rifle, or a clone.
“I’m a mercenary; I’m worse than expendable. The people who hire us want us to die once we finish our job—that way they don’t have to pay us.”
For the first time in my life, I had to entertain the notion that there might be someone lower on the social ladder than a clone. Try as I might, I could not come up with a smart comeback, so I concentrated on reaching the beacon.
Moving along the floor of the cavern proved less dangerous than I had expected—I simply had to thread my way around the pits in which the spider-things worked. Most of the drones had dug three- or four-foot-deep pits around themselves. They moved back and forth in their little cells, clawing at the rocky floor, then sweeping the debris out of their holes. I had no idea what became of the dirt and rocks they dislodged. Presumably this entire cavern had once been a solid mass of rock and earth. They must have disintegrated it or hauled it out somewhere.
The spider-things spun and clawed and tore great shards of rock out of the ground. I had the feeling that if I fell into one of these holes, the creature inside it might tear me in half without ever noticing.
We continued up the gentle slope toward the center of the cavern, where the mound with the brightly lit cave-within-a-cave rose out of the ground like a pimple. The constant scraping and tapping of the spider-things around me caused the ground to vibrate. When I slowed to wait for Freeman, I could feel that vibration through my boots.
But I did not have time to worry about the drones or the way the ground shook beneath my feet. Maintaining a quick jog, I skirted one spider-filled divot, then the next as I headed toward the cave. I did not know how far we had traveled at this point but, according to my visor, we had approximately a quarter of a mile to go. When I looked back toward the tunnel from which we had entered the cavern, I saw that we had put a little more distance between us and the guardian spider. It had either slowed down or was hanging back to see what we would do next.
I did not have time to figure the spider-thing out. We reached the mound with the cave, a steep cone with no trails leading up its twenty-foot slope. Light shone out of the cave at the top like a search beam from a lighthouse. The silver-white beam stabbed into the darkness of the cavern like a flame from a welding torch, its glow so bright that when I looked at it, my visor switched from night-for-day to tactical view.
Loose dirt and rock shavings covered the sides of the mound; I had to scramble to keep my footing as I climbed toward the cave. When I reached the mouth itself, I played it by the book. For all I knew, the guardian spider had slowed because it had a buddy waiting for us in the cave. Crouching low to the ground, my particle-beam cannon ready, I spun around the lip for a quick glance in, then spun back out for safety. I did another peek in, this time darting from one side of the entrance to the other. Certain that I had not seen anything dangerous, I stepped into the mouth of the cave and scanned for spider-things. Then I went back outside to look for Freeman.
As I left the cave, I came within inches of a drone crawling along the outside of the cave. Two knife-blade legs pawed at the wall a few inches from my head. The spider-thing lifted one of its legs, then stabbed it into the granite. As it pulled that leg back, I saw that it had stabbed a three-inch gash into the rock, dislodging chips and fist-sized rocks.
I had been so intent scanning the cave that I hadn’t even noticed the specker. Had it been an avatar instead of a drone, it could have killed me. But it was only a drone. As I stepped away from it, it ignored me and continued digging.
“Careful on your way up,” I told Freeman. “They’re up here, too.”
Below me, Freeman no longer bothered taking readings with the meter. He pulled a line of explosive charges from his satchel and stabbed one into the ground.
“You planting charges?” I asked.
“I’ve placed twenty of them so far,” Freeman said.
“Didn’t you say these spider-things would just dig themselves out?” I said.
“I’m marking a path,” Freeman said.
“Like Hansel marking his path through the woods with bread-crumbs?” I asked. Freeman did not answer, leaving me to wonder if he had ever heard of Hansel and Gretel.
Waiting for Freeman to reach the cave, I searched the cavern for the big spider-thing. I scanned up and down the winding path along the ridge. Nothing. I looked around the cavern floor, nervous that this creature might have enough intelligence to flank us, and saw no sign of it.
“It’s gone,” I said. “There’s no specking trace of the bastard.” Maybe it was assigned to a territory, I thought. But I did not like that idea because if that big spider had a territory it protected, that meant there had to be more of them around.
Maybe, a fatalistic voice said in my head, it can camouflage itself. I felt a numbing tingle deep in my gut and realized that I was scared. The effect of the combat reflex had tapered off, and cold fear had replaced it.
“It has to be out there,” Freeman said.
“Stop it. You’re scaring me,” I said, hoping it sounded like a joke.
Freeman showed no signs of nervousness. He pulled out the T-shaped meter that Sweetwater had given him and did a sweep of the area. A drone climbed out of its pit and walked past him. Freeman drew his pistol and covered the beast as it scampered past, then said, “Let’s get this over with.”
Taking advantage of the light that spilled out of the cave, I used the tactical lens in my visor because it showed color—not that there was much color to see. The spider-things were a light shade of black, the granite was gray, the atmosphere was dark. Even with the light, I could not see more than a hundred yards ahead of me.
If that big spider-thing was trying to hide, I hoped using the tactical view would increase the odds of my spotting it. Just for a moment, I thought I saw something at the edge of the darkness, but it vanished. I switched back to night-for-day and saw nothing. I tried every gadget in my helmet—heat vision, telescopic lenses, sonic location—but still nothing.
“It’s out there somewhere,” I reminded myself.
Freeman stopped to scan the area, and said, “I don’t see anything.”
“Me either,” I agreed. We both knew that our inability to find the creature did not mean a thing.
Freeman walked toward the cave, and instructed, “Guard the entrance.”
“Last time I did something like this, the guy I came with did not make it out,” I observed.
“Thanks for the warning,” said Freeman. I spared a look back and saw him disappear into the entrance.
Now I was alone in the dark. Well, not alone. There might have been a million spider-thing drones around me, and somewhere out there, the king of the spider-things lurked like a shadow. Could something like that have gone invisible? Why would the aliens program that into the creature unless they meant to use the thing for combat purposes? I flipped through the different lenses in my helmet and spotted thousands of drones digging, but I found no trace of that guardian spider-thing.
“If there are more of those big bastards out there, this could be a one-way trip,” I told Freeman. Suddenly my nerves had me babbling. Here we were, a clone and a mercenary. Could any duo be more expendable? I asked myself, knowing I did not want to hear the answer.
“As long as we finish what we came to do,” Freeman said.
“Which is?” I asked.
“We find out what the aliens are up to,” Freeman said.
“And you think the answer is in this cave?” I asked. I still had my back to the brightly lit opening and my rifle ready as I kept a lookout for that spider-thing guardian. “You know, you never struck me as the self-sacrificing type,” I told Freeman.
He did not respond, not that I expected him to.
As I stood looking out into the cavern, I meandered toward the entrance of the cave, forgetting about the drone that had sneaked up on me a few moments earlier, and the little bastard caught me off guard a second time. It lifted a questing leg, then slammed it into the rock wall, barely missing my head. I spun, jumped back, and fired my weapon, hitting that digger in what passed for its face. The creature collapsed. No spasms. No struggles. It rolled out of its hole on the outside wall of the cave and tumbled down to the foot of the mound, where hundreds of drones dug around it.
I must have yelled, which Freeman would have heard over our interLink connection. “What happened?”
“I just killed a drone,” I said.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the guardian drop out of the darkness, landing above the mouth of the cave. It was not invisible, but it had camouflaged itself. Its color had blended in with the darkness, and now that it was on the nickel-colored rock, its color faded to gray.
Shooting from the hip, I fired three shots with my particle-beam cannon, hitting the guardian spider each time. It toppled from its perch. Unlike the drone I had just killed, the guardian did not die. It landed on its feet and came toward me raising a leg high into the air as if issuing a challenge.
I fired between the legs, hitting the underside of the giant spider’s body. The creature convulsed, then came toward me again. It seemed weakened. The legs pawed at the ground as it pulled itself forward.
“I found the spider that was following us,” I shouted to Freeman.
“Kill it,” Freeman said. The man seldom spoke, and when he did, there were times he might have done better had he just remained silent.
Stretched out straight, the guardian’s leg might have been twelve feet long. The creature stabbed one of its two giant forelegs into the ground and slashed in my direction with the other. The sharp tip sheared through the air in a slow, powerful arc. I dropped to the ground to avoid being sliced and fired my particle beam at the foreleg that the spider-thing was using to balance itself. The emerald green beam connected and a section of the spider-thing’s leg dissolved. Whatever bond held the particles in that knife-blade leg broke, and it fell apart and turned to powder.
Seemingly unaware that its leg had evaporated, the spider-thing tried to step forward using the disintegrated appendage. It fell, the remaining joints of the leg still pulling at the ground. Trying to right itself, the creature stabbed its other foreleg into the ground, and I shot that leg as well.
The spider-thing fell on its face as it pawed at the ground with the remains of its forelegs. The two forelegs were its longest legs and its only useful weapons. The next legs were not designed to reach forward, they were there for propulsion. I approached the spider-thing and shot its head, which dissolved as easily as the legs. This creature was made for mining, not combat; it broke apart instantly. Beneath its head, the guardian’s body was hollow and full of light that faded quickly.
Wanting to make sure that there were no more camouflaged spiders waiting to pounce on me, I fired quick bursts along the wall above the cave. Some crags exploded, but nothing fell as I ran into the cave.
The light in the inner cave came from a string of energy spheres, spheres that looked just like the ones in the forest—a string of ten brighter-than-light pearls about ten feet in diameter. Seeing the spheres did not surprise me. These spider-things had to have been incubated somewhere; they were no more alive than the Avatari soldiers attacking Valhalla. What I did not expect to see was the stream of mud-colored gas leaking from the bottom of these spheres.
At first I thought that gas might have been the stuff we called distilled shit gas, a substance I had only seen on two other planets—Hubble and the Mogat home world. Distilled shit gas was corrosive gas that ate through just about anything soft, including bodysuits and flesh. Sweetwater and Breeze would have known the stuff by its scientific name, “extreme-hydrogenation elemental compound distillation,” but we military types knew it for what it really was—distilled shit gas.
I could see that this stuff was not distilled shit gas, though it looked like a close cousin. The substance was so heavy it almost qualified as a liquid. The way it leaked out of the spheres and streamed along the floor of the cave, it looked more like spent sludgy motor oil. Fumes from the gas caused visible ripples in the air in the cave.
Freeman stood near the stream of sludgy gas, waving his sensor over it.
“What is that shit?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but you wouldn’t want to breathe it,” Freeman said. “It’s eating right through the ground.”
I looked back at the mouth of the cave, wondering what we would do if an entire colony of spider-things attacked us. That probably would not happen, but I suspected there might be more of the big ones hiding out there.
“You might want to move in farther,” Freeman said.
“What?” Then I saw that he had placed charges around the mouth of the cave. He gave me a moment to move to safety, then he set off the charges. The cave shook. The noise was so loud that I heard it through my helmet. Freeman, a master at demolitions, had set the charges so that the percussion of the explosion faced away from us; but when the dust cleared, a solid wall of boulders and debris blocked the entrance.
Specking great, I thought. Now I’m stuck in a collapsed cave filled with primordial shit gas. “Why did you do that?”
“I needed more time,” Freeman said, as if explaining the obvious.
“Great, now you have all the specking time in the world. We’re trapped in here,” I said.
“If there are any more of the guardians out there, you will be able to spot them when they dig through that wall,” Freeman said.
“Damn it, Freeman, you just buried us alive.”
That’s one way to protect yourself from giant alien spider-things, I thought. Bury yourself alive so they can’t specking get to you. That was not what I said, however. What I told Freeman was, “Next time you start feeling expendable, can you take somebody else along for the ride?”
Freeman’s pyrotechnic display reduced the front of the cave to a wall of rocks and boulders. I went to the wall and tried to push a large boulder aside. It did not budge. I tried another. It moved easily enough, so I pushed this way, then pulled that way. After about five minutes’ work, I dislodged the rock from its cradle and rolled it to the floor. Other rocks shifted as that one rolled down the pile, and, for a moment, I feared that the wall of rocks might cave in.
I waited for the rocks to settle, then reached into the hole I had created and touched a long slab of granite. Even through my gloves, I could feel the vibration, something, maybe many somethings, was scratching at the rock on the other side.
One of the larger boulders shook and rolled down the mound. “The Avatari Search and Rescue squad is here,” I said. Touching a rock and feeling the strong vibration, I added, “This wall isn’t going to keep them out long.”
“You’re a Marine, shoot them,” Freeman said. “You know the distilled shit gas on the Mogats’ planet; this stuff is worse. If we stay here too long, the fumes will eat our armor.”
At the mouth of the cave, a coffin-sized slab of granite slid out from the pile. Smaller rocks, some as small as grenades and some as large as combat helmets, rolled off the pile. The creatures on the other side of that wall did not care if they pulled the rocks away or pushed them in on us.
“Better hurry it up,” I told Freeman.
A moment passed, and he said, “I’ve got what I need.” He clipped the meter to his belt and brought out his particle-beam pistol.
The digging on the other side of the cave-in got louder. More rocks fell. Something hit the pile with so much force that it caused a slab of granite to shatter. As the pieces fell, I saw the foot-long point of a spider-thing’s foreleg sticking through. The leg vanished in an avalanche of dust and rubble.
“Can those spiders go invisible?” Freeman asked.
“They camouflage themselves,” I said.
The digging got louder. It took form. The amorphous tapping and rumbling solidified into the sound of knife-blade legs scratching and stabbing into stone. Rocks the size of car tires spilled from the pile that had once filled the front of the cave. All too soon that wall of debris stopped a full foot from the ceiling. Five feet of questing spider leg came slashing through that gap.
“Don’t shoot them yet,” I said, stating the obvious. “We need them to make the hole bigger.” I could feel my heart thumping in my chest and the sound of my breath echoing in my helmet. The steam from my breath created a small patch of fog on the inside of my visor. It was nothing bad, though, nothing that would block my vision. Somewhere in my nervous system, the combat reflex began.
We backed toward the spheres, keeping our guns aimed at the mouth of the cave and a wary eye out to make sure we did not step in the gas. I would take my chances against a whole herd of spider-things before I would step in that. And then there were those spheres …Between the gas, the spheres, and the giant spider-things, this mission was heading south in a hurry.
I knelt, using a boulder as cover, and waited for the guardians to dig through. Freeman did not bother crouching or looking for cover. He stood erect, his particle-beam pistol raised and ready to fight.
A three-foot-round boulder wiggled, then dropped out of place from the top of the cave-in. It bowled down the slope and crashed into a wall. Dust flew, then the first bladelike leg quested through the hole. It slashed at the air, hooked a large tray of rock, and dragged it out of the way. The hole at the top was now large enough for us to wiggle through, though it would have been a tight fit for Freeman.
A section of rocks exploded in toward us, two-hundred-pound rocks flying through as if they were beach balls. I easily could have crawled through the gap the rocks left, but, fortunately, the spider-thing that made it did not fit. Its legs speared through the hole, flailing slowly in the air.
I had a clear shot right then but held my fire. Freeman followed my lead, aiming his gun and waiting.
Another spider-thing bashed a second gap through the rocks.
“Not yet,” I whispered to Freeman. “Let them do the work for us.” The guardian digging the second hole hooked a slab and dragged it back through the hole, causing the top of the pile to sift down one side. “Just a little more …a little more, then we shoot.”
Another spider-thing began a second hole, forcing its forelegs through the gap it had created. With those powerful hind legs pushing, it might have broken all the way through had I not killed it. I sprang to my feet firing my cannon as I dashed for the entrance. The green, glittering beam dissolved the legs, and I fired at the head behind them and kept firing until the head disappeared and the weight of the boulders finally crushed whatever was left.
Another spider-thing tried to crawl over the now-wide-open gap at the crest, but I got there first. I aimed over the back of a rock and fired, disintegrating legs and heads and bodies. Amazingly agile for his size, Freeman darted into a gap in the rocks below me. He fired several shots at a guardian spider, then jumped through the gap and appeared on the other side. Lying on the top of the cave-in, I swung my legs out over the other side of the rubble and slid down to join him. We had destroyed three guardian spiders, and the shells of their bodies lay around us like wreckage from a plane crash.
Now that I had left the well-lit harbor of the cave, with its spheres and gas, my visor switched to night-for-day lenses. If there were more guardian spiders out there, their camouflage would render them all but invisible to me through these lenses. “We better get out of here,” I said to Freeman, and I started running.
And then the world fell apart around me and I was knocked to the ground.
The spider-thing might have sneaked up on me as I left the cave, or it could have dropped from the shadowy reaches of the top of the cavern. It did not land on top of me, but it struck me with one of its legs, and that was enough. The leg clubbed me across the back of my helmet and along my left shoulder.
All I knew was that I was lying facedown and barely conscious. The world had gone dark and silent. Even as my head cleared, the world around me remained dark, and I knew that the electronics in my armor had failed. With my visor on the blink, I could not see or hear the outside world. Without the interLink, I could not call Freeman for help.
I would not be able to find my way out of the caverns blind. If I removed my helmet, I’d inhale the fumes from the gas. Feeling around blind, I tried to find my particle-beam cannon and came up dry. I accepted that I was going to die, but that did not mean I would die empty-handed. I reached back for my spare rifle and discovered that it was gone as well.
Something closed around my shoulders and lifted me to my feet. At first I thought it might be one of the guardian spiders, but this thing did not slice me or squeeze me to death.
“Ray. Ray. My gear’s gone dead!” I screamed it at the top of my lungs. My voice echoed loud inside my helmet. It did not matter that he wouldn’t hear me, not at that moment. I did not know if he was still beside me, but I suspected he was already gone. He had helped me to my feet, and now he was running to safety.
If I had stopped to think about it, I should not have expected Freeman to come back for me at all. He was a mercenary, not a Marine. Marines have a code about leaving no one behind. Mercenaries, lone-wolf soldiers with no real allegiance, have no such code. But here he was, my friend, my former partner. Some part of me still hoping to survive this thing, I made the intergalactic sign of distress—I stumbled around like a man gone blind, groping in the darkness with my hands outstretched before me.
At any moment I would stumble into one of those spider-thing drones and get pulled apart, but I didn’t care. I probably had more adrenaline and testosterone flowing through my veins than blood, the combat reflex was coming on so strong. I felt no fear. My thoughts were clear, and I knew I would die, but I was okay with that.
Freeman did not leave me. He grabbed my wrist and pulled me forward. I followed, stumbling and unsure about every step. I was completely useless. Now the clarity of my thoughts worked against me; I understood my helplessness all too well. For the first time in my life, the combat reflex only added to my frustration.
Freeman led me across the floor cavern, then slowed as we started the uphill slope at the end. I could feel contours in the ground beneath my feet. If I stepped too far, I could lose my balance and topple into a divot and under a drone. It would not see me, I would not see it, but I would die nonetheless.
Something scooped up my right foot, and I flew face-first, hitting Freeman in the back—at least I assumed it was Freeman—and landing on my stomach. It may have been a guardian trying to kill me, or a drone may have accidentally tripped me while digging its hole. I did not know, and I never did find out. A tense moment passed, then Freeman pulled me back to my feet.
We started up the ridge toward the entrance to the cavern. I could tell because we would run twenty or thirty paces in one direction, turn sharply, and switch back in the other direction, all the time headed uphill. At some point Freeman set off the explosive charges he had placed around the cavern earlier. The sound of the explosion penetrated my helmet in the form of a faint growl.
And then just when I thought it would never happen, we had reached the tunnel that led out of the mountain. Freeman set off an explosion meant to keep any spider-things from following us. The powerful blast pushed at our backs, and suddenly I felt fresh air on my face as Freeman pulled the helmet from my head.
“You okay?” Freeman asked. We were in the open, standing outside the caverns. I could only squint because of the glare coming from the silver-white sky.
He handed me my helmet. There was a crack in the armor along the back, and the visor looked smoke-stained, like glass pulled from a fire. I could tell something had burned the back of my head, and my right shoulder throbbed. My neck hurt, too. “Fine,” I said, as I headed toward the ridge and the climb down to our ship.
Climbing down the cord to the ship, I knew that something was wrong with my shoulders, but I was glad enough to be alive. I kept reliving the moment when I thought I was blind and alone in that cave. As much as I told myself that I really didn’t care, I wanted to survive. I didn’t want some spider-thing to tear me in half. I didn’t want to breathe the contaminated air. I wanted to make it out of that cavern.
“So what did we get for our trouble, Ray?” I asked. “We know they have giant spiders digging a big hole in the side of the mountain. That seems like a big waste of time.”
“Remember that underground city on the Mogat planet?” Freeman asked. “It had to start somewhere.”
“You think that’s what they’re doing here?” I asked.
“I want to know about the gas they were spreading.”
“Damn, what happened to you …sir?” Private Skittles, just back from his tour of duty at the Hen House, added the “sir” as an afterthought.
I had barely stepped into the barracks, and Skittles was the first Marine I saw. I had a sling over my right shoulder. My collarbone was broken, but the military had good medical facilities in Valhalla. The doctors grafted the bones back together and mended them well. The collarbone smarted, but I barely noticed it compared to the throbbing of my dislocated right shoulder.
When it dropped on me from the ceiling, the guardian spider had struck with enough force to dislocate my shoulder and shatter my collarbone. It also gave me a severe concussion, but the combination of instinct, neural programming, and high doses of combat hormone in my blood had masked the effects of the concussion.
I also had burns on my scalp and shoulder. Toxic fumes had seeped through hairline cracks in my helmet and shoulder pads, charring my skin. The armor itself was a complete write-off.
“I had an accident,” I said.
“No kidding,” Skittles said. “I always figured you were indestructible. That theory’s out the window.”
“Thanks,” I said, and excused myself. I saw someone else I needed to speak to. Sitting on his bunk, playing a happy tune on his harmonica, Sergeant Mark Philips looked downright perky. He had his back propped against the wall, and one of his legs dangled over the edge of the cot, swinging with the beat of the song.
He put down the harmonica, and said, “I’d salute you, sir, but you might hurt yourself returning the salute.”
“How did you like guarding the Hen House?” I asked.
“It beats running through a forest filled with shit-colored aliens,” Philips said. “How do I sign up for another tour?”
“Did you see any action?” I asked.
“Oh, I saw action,” Philips said with a schoolboy grin.
It did not take a genius IQ to interpret that message. He had found his way into some officer’s house. Thomer had been right about him.
The team of scientists and soldiers that designed the clones had wrestled with the idea of stripping out their sex drive. In the end, the officers overseeing the project argued that an army of eunuchs would be worthless in combat. Those officers were long dead, but maybe Philips had found his way into the bedroom of one of their descendants. If so, they deserved what they got.
I left the barracks, hoping to slip back to my quarters for some rest. The doctor had even given me some pills to help me sleep, but no one in his right mind would take sleeping pills this close to the front. Get luded before a fight, and you might find yourself asleep when the enemy comes knocking on your door.
I went to the elevator. Tired as I was, I lacked the concentration to tell my men from any other clones. Men walked by and saluted me. I nodded, not sure if they were from my company.
When I entered my billet, I found the room just as I had left it. My white combat armor sat on the table beside my neatly made bed. Even here, with no one inspecting my rack, I kept a tidy room. I turned off the lights and dropped onto my rack to rest. Then I saw the red light flashing on the communications console.
The first message was from General Glade. “Harris, I just got a report from Sweetwater. You should have heard the dwarf bastard; he sounds like he’s going to wet his pants. Report down here ASAP.”
A summons from a general, I thought, as I drifted to sleep. Then came the second message.
“Speck! Speck! Where the hell did they send him? Harris, this is Moffat. Where the hell are you?”
The third message was Moffat again. “Damn it. Harris.” He sounded insane with anger. “I want a list of the men you sent on guard duty. You got that? I want that list now.”
The fourth message. “Harris? Did you authorize Sergeant Philips to guard the Hen House? That wife-specking son of a bitch! I’ll see that that specker gets the firing squad. You got me?”
That woke me up.
General Glade met me at the door of his office. He let me in, told me to sit, then started pacing back and forth in front of his desk. “I heard you had a rough time of it,” he said. “Did you get hurt?” He had nothing remotely resembling concern as he asked the question. Like any general, he was a man who routinely sent other men out to die. He could not do his job without caring more about the missions than the men he sent to do them.
I should have appreciated his feeble attempt at courtesy. He was, after all, a natural-born and a general.
“I’m fine, sir,” I said. Hell, he could see that my arm was in a sling. I had a severely blackened eye. How the hell I got a black eye wearing a combat helmet was beyond me. A bald spot and a bandage marked the burn where the gas seeped into the back of the helmet.
“Good. Glad to hear it,” he responded so quickly he nearly cut me off. “I heard your armor failed.”
“My visor,” I said.
“Breeze had his team take a look at it. They say it shorted out when the alien touched you, a complete system overload.”
“Was there anything on the video record?” I asked.
“There is no record, Harris. Breeze says every circuit in your helmet fused. You would have been electrocuted if your armor had a higher ratio of metal to plastic.” Huuhhhhhh. Huhhhhh. He cleared his throat, stopped pacing, stared down at me, and said, “I hate those specking scientists.”
“Sweetwater and Breeze?” I asked.
“Yes, Sweetwater and Breeze.” He snorted. He cleared his throat again. “I don’t know why we bother with them. So far the only thing Dr. Sweetwater has been able to discover about the aliens is that they break instead of die.” He laughed. “I’ll tell you what, Harris, the Unified Authority Marines do not care if their enemies break, die, or give birth to triplets so long as they stop moving when they are shot in the head.”
“Begging the general’s pardon, but I don’t see how we can possibly win this one with bullets and bombs,” I said. “If we’re going to survive, the only way we can do it is if the lab comes up with something.”
General Glade stopped pacing finally and sat behind his desk. “You seem like a man who keeps confidences. I’ll tell you a secret even the Army brass doesn’t know.”
For effect, Glade looked around the empty office to make sure no one was listening. “Sweetwater was the last man off Terraneau before the Angels sleeved it. The dwarf took off just as the ion curtain began to spread.”
“That sounds like a lucky break,” I said.
Glade sat up so quickly and so straight you would have thought someone had stung him with an electric prod. “Lucky break, my ass, Lieutenant. He’s a coward. He turned and ran. Everyone else on the planet is dead …everyone but him.”
I wanted to point out that (A) there had to be a pilot to fly him off the planet and (B) technically speaking, we did not know if anyone on that planet had died. For all we knew, some botanist had discovered a tachyon-eating rubber tree, and the entire population of Terraneau was alive and well and watering their gardens twice a day.
“I don’t suspect Sweetwater would have contributed much to the battle if they had sent him in with an M27,” I said.
Glade stopped. I suspect he was imagining William Sweetwater carrying an M27. He laughed, fought back more laughter, took a deep breath, and started laughing again. “I have this picture of the little bastard wearing a man-sized helmet.” He laughed again.
I smiled to be politic but did not laugh.
“Harris, have you seen Lieutenant Moffat since you got back?” Glade asked.
“He left a couple of messages in my quarters,” I said.
“Do you know what happened at the Hen House?”
“I have a pretty good idea.”
“He’s calling for a firing squad,” Glade said. “Major Burton had to post a couple of MPs inside the barracks in case Moffat goes on a rampage. Philips isn’t allowed out of the barracks, and Moffat isn’t allowed in. That’s no way to run a base.”
“Philips was confined to barracks?” I asked.
“Sure he was,” Glade said, “pending his court-martial hearing.”
“The guy’s got a set of stones on him,” I said. “I ran into him on my way in.”
“He wasn’t out of …?”
“No, nothing like that. He was sitting on his rack playing his damn harmonica. You’d have thought he was on vacation. He asked me to sign him up for another tour of guard duty,” I said.
General Glade changed the subject. “So you and Freeman infiltrated the Avatari dig. What the hell is going on down there? What did you see, Harris?”
“Spiders,” I said. “Spiders the size of small trucks.”
Ignoring my own best advice, I took one of those sleeping pills and went to bed after meeting with General Glade. I slept for sixteen hours. I dreamed of a planet with winter forests, steel gray lakes the size of small oceans, high mountains buried in snow, and beneath it all, a wretched hell filled with giant spiders. I dreamed of New Copenhagen, dreams that grew out of reality. I squirmed and rolled in my sleep, sweating so profusely that the sheets became drenched and clung to my skin. The medicine I had taken gave my imagination a vivid, hallucinatory quality so that the bumps and jerks I made in my sleep worked their way into the fabric of my dreams.
When I woke, my mouth was dry and the world seemed to spin around me. I heard loud ringing in my ears, but that had nothing to do with tranquilizers. The ringing was real. It was the steel shriek of the Klaxons calling every man to arms. I recognized the pattern in the noise; this was a yellow alert.
I sat up and tried to clear my head. Outside my door, the hallway echoed with the rattle and thud of doors slamming and men readying for battle. As I slid from my bed, I felt a twinge in my arm and shoulder.
I would need to put on armor before heading out, I knew that, as did the doctor who had set my shoulder. He had given me medicine to “mask” the pain. I turned on a light in my room, fumbled around the table until I found the medicine, took the pill, then changed into my bodysuit. By the time I strapped on my chest plate, I felt no pain.
As I left my quarters, I detected a feeling of panic. Officers ran through the hall in a helter-skelter frenzy, bumping into each other, pushing each other, rushing in a dizzy flurry and not speaking. It was almost as if they shared a universal premonition of something bad, not just a battle, but a defeat.
With my head clearing, I came to realize why the brass had only issued a yellow alert. This was to be the old men’s march. This was the battle in which the Army would thin its ranks and preserve its munitions, not so much a genocide as a chronocide. They were killing clones according to age.
General Newcastle would flood the battlefield with his white-haired soldiers, the clones Philips had labeled the “Prune Juice Brigade.” The general’s plan was to win the fight by overwhelming the Avatari with vastly superior numbers, knowing he would lose the majority of his troops.
“Harris, where are you?” Moffat’s voice sounded stiff as he addressed me over the interLink. Unless somebody had let him know that I had slept most of the last twenty-four hours, he would probably think I was avoiding him.
“Just entering the mez now,” I said as I spilled out of the stairwell and onto the second floor. “What is the situation?”
“From what I hear, the Army’s taking point on this one. Major Burton says we’re on deck. Base Command wants us suited up in case the Mudders break through.”
I entered the hallway that passed the various ballrooms-turned-barracks. Walking past the Odin Ballroom, I peered in and saw hundreds of men in white armor standing at attention. I had gotten off to a late start.
Klaxons still blaring, officers ran from barracks to barracks checking on troop readiness. I entered the Valkyrie Ballroom and saw the Marines standing at attention.
“Nice of you to join us, Harris,” Moffat said, as I came through the door. “I hear you’ve been goldbricking.” He might not have been allowed in the barracks during off hours, but as we prepared for an attack, he took his place at the head of the company. Without replying, I walked around the ranks and stood beside Moffat. Moments later we received an order from Major Burton calling for the entire battalion to fall in.
General Morris Newcastle, commander of the combined armed forces stationed on New Copenhagen, left few things to chance.
For this battle, he selected the two hundred fifty thousand oldest soldiers under his command and stationed them in the woods six miles west of town. He assigned fifty thousand younger troops to man the Vista Street bunker. Granted, I could have made a fortune selling canes and dentures to the old fellows in the forest, but Newcastle sent enough men into battle to give himself a five-to-one numerical advantage.
At 0412, with the sky as bright as noonday, the spheres dilated and fifty thousand Avatari troops entered the forest. They moved east, following the same route they had taken on their previous assaults. Cameras stationed along the way—by this time the Army, Marines, civilian militia, and Science Lab had all placed cameras—were broadcasting images of their march back to town.
More than an hour passed before the Avatari stepped into the Army’s trap. Their path took them into a brilliantly prepared gauntlet that gave Newcastle’s soldiers the high-ground advantage and better cover.
Over the last three days, the Corps of Engineers had given the forest a practical makeover. They dug tight channels that led scores of Avatari into narrow trenches. Standing above those trenches our soldiers could safely lob grenades. The engineers built up earth-and-concrete palisades so steep and high that the Avatari could not possibly see soldiers hiding behind them. They built blinds in which entire brigades could hide, and they designated rallying points where men from broken platoons could gather and regroup. In war, redundancy is the mother of victory, and General Morris Newcastle had covered all his bases.
The breakdown was not tactical but strategic. The brass had decided to win this one with men, grenades, and bullets so that they could reserve the more valuable munitions for later. But even after all the preparation, Newcastle’s old men were not up to the task. The first problem was the weapons. Particle-beam weapons were effective enough against Avatari, but our general-issue particle-beam pistols were designed for close-range combat. M27s were accurate at over a hundred yards, but against the Avatari, they had proven ineffective at any range.
At 0723, the Avatari marched into the kill zone. Instead of staying to the low ground as expected, they fanned out, forming a thousand-man picket line. They spread out along the high ground, the low ground, and on the steep slopes in between.
It was a crazy formation that left them wide open to a frontal attack, but it screwed the hell out of the Army’s FOCPIG preparations. Moving forward with that wide a front line, the Avatari wrapped around our blinds and palisades, trapping Newcastle’s old men’s brigades inside. Then the Avatari opened fire with their light-bolt weapons, boring through earthworks, sandbags, and trenches. The Avatari rifles had twice the range of our particle-beam pistols. Avatari light bolts cut through trees, slammed through embankments, exploded boulders.
Forced out of their cover, our antique soldiers tried to execute a staged retreat—falling back, taking cover, wearing down the enemy; but they were too old to run and gun. They lacked the mobility needed for an ordered retreat.
The front line of eighty thousand men Newcastle sent to stall the aliens did not last the hour. The troops he sent to flank and attack from the rear were massacred. And then …
Certain that a force of two hundred fifty thousand men would hold off the enemy, somebody at the top had issued an order to service the rocket launchers along the Vista Street bunker. For this reason, the missile defenses sat partially assembled when nearly forty thousand Avatari entered the no-man’s-land on the outskirts of the city.
Without the missiles protecting their position, the men in the bunker had no more protection against the Avatari advance than the men in the forest.
“In the trucks, now! Move it! Move it! Double time!” I growled. I had my helmet on, and my voice came ringing back into my ears so loud it made them numb.
Some of the men clambered into the trucks even as they slowly pulled away from the sidewalks. Thomer stood at the back of the truck helping the stragglers make it up. As they jumped onto the bumper, he grabbed their arms and hoisted them in.
Around the U-shaped hotel driveway, I saw Marines in full battle armor sprinting to keep up with trucks that had already left them behind. There was no need to rush, once the trucks left the hotel drive, they entered streets clogged by gridlock. The Valhalla was one of dozens of hotel/barracks in this part of town. Hundreds of transport trucks now streamed out of every hotel driveway. Without police managing the flash flood of traffic, the congestion was inevitable
“Shit! Shit! Shit!” Major Burton said over a network that every officer in his battalion could hear. With the Army’s inability to stop the Avatari outside the city, the situation had turned from routine to dire.
Attempting to find a way around the traffic jam, transport drivers tried side streets and alleys. A row of trucks pulled onto the sidewalk, plowing over mailboxes, signs, and benches. In the streets, the traffic crawled at no more than five miles per hour.
“Everybody out!” I shouted.
“Harris, what are you doing?” Moffat asked over the interLink.
“Out! Move it. Move it!” Men leaped from the truck.
“It’s only a mile or two from here to Vista Street,” I said. “We can run it faster than this.”
Moffat did not respond. Behind us I saw other companies doing the same, off-loading Marines and ordering them to run. With the trucks moving at such a slow crawl, we easily out-paced them.
I heard mortar fire as we got closer. I expected to enter the shielded bunkers along Vista Street; but we never reached Vista, the retreat had already begun. We reached the front end of the traffic jam and ran into the tide of men in green fatigues filling the streets.
Up ahead, the Vista Street bunker looked as jagged as a saw blade. Entire sections of the bunker had collapsed, other sections stood in ruins, shot through with so many holes that I could see right through the walls to other side.
“Hold the street.” Burton gave the potentially fatal command over a frequency that would reach every man in the battalion; and I repeated it to my company.
“Dig in. Find cover,” I shouted. Cars, corners, Dumpsters, signs, mailboxes, anything was better than standing out in the open. The Avatari could shoot through any barrier, but at least a car or a bush would offer someplace to hide. There was not enough cover to go around; and behind us, Marines were arriving by the tens of thousands.
I had a brief moment in which I wondered if the Avatari would actually breach the bunker. Then came the explosion—a powerful, jarring force that ran the entire length of the street. Suddenly, all that remained of the Vista Street bunker were a few of its ribs—massive arching girders that stood as separate from each other as the goalposts on either end of a football field. Everything else turned to rubble so loose you could drive a jeep over it.
Beyond the bunker, the Avatari horde came slowly across the charred landscape that had once been the outskirts of Valhalla. I took a step back and thudded into something. When I turned to look, I saw that I had backed into an unarmed rocket launcher, its panels still hanging open for maintenance.
“This is General James P. Glade. Men, we need to hold this position at all costs. I have tanks and helicopter gunboats on the way.” His voice had a forced calm about it. There was none of his customary throat clearing, none of the wildness or swagger. He took the tone of a father explaining life to his young son.
“I ask you men to give everything now …everything. If you die here, you die a savior. If mankind survives this war, it will survive because of the sacrifices you make on this street on this day.
“I am sending in every Marine under my command, officers and enlisted men alike. Help is on its way, but you must hold this position until it arrives. Fight to the last man. Fight to your dying breath. Do you understand me, Marines? The future of everything you have ever known or cared about depends on you holding this street.”
Now there’s a cheerful message, I thought to myself as I watched the Avatari wade through the wreckage of the bunker. He was right, though. It wasn’t the street that mattered, it was the defenses along the street. Our rocket launchers had proven themselves to be our best weapon against the Avatari, and most of the launchers were lined up along this street. The problem was, I didn’t think we could hold.
The aliens were still too far away for us to hit them when the first squadron of gunboats floated overhead. There were ten of them, and each got off a couple of rockets, then the Avatari fired back, aiming those big rifles in the air. I watched three bolts cut through one of the gunboats like an ice pick stabbing through a balloon. Trails of smoke rose from the fuselage of the gunboat as it began a slow rotation along the wing, and the chopper dropped out of the sky. Less than a minute after they appeared in the skyline, all ten gunboats went down.
Most of my men had general-issue particle-beam pistols with an effective range of approximately fifty feet. Soldiers with M27s opened fire while the Avatari were still hundreds of yards away. As the Avatari closed to within a hundred yards, our grenadiers began firing at them. Boll and Skittles moved to the front of the platoon and piped handheld rockets into the advancing Avatari. Boll, the more experienced Marine, punched holes in the Avatari line.
The Avatari blended into the charred landscape. They were dark, the color of mud made from volcanic soil. So much smoke rose around them that they sometimes disappeared from view, but they never wavered. They never hesitated. They moved ahead, a juggernaut. I thought to myself, Where are the tanks? But I already knew the answer—they were back at the hotels, trapped in the traffic jam.
The Avatari came closer and began returning fire. We were no match for them. Their bolts drilled us no matter where we hid. Cars, buildings, trees, nothing offered enough protection. Up the block from me, an Army sniper hid behind the ruins of a Targ, an antipersonnel tank. He would stand, aim quickly over the front end of the tank, fire an explosive round, then duck back behind the protection of the tank. He was a good sniper; I saw him hit and break three Avatari with three shots before the Avatari retaliated with a barrage of their own. Dozens of bolts bored through the tank, turning its armor into a sieve. Three or four of the bolts hit the sniper, tearing holes through his body. The wounds were seared dry; no blood leaked from the wounds as the man slumped to the ground with his rifle across his lap.
Seeing the sniper die even as he hid behind a tank, I realized we would never hold this street. The Avatari fired a fusillade of bolts in my direction, ripping into my men and ravaging our cover. The aliens continued to come toward us in their disorganized march. They stepped into range of our particle-beam weapons, and we returned their fire.
So many particle-beam weapons fired at once that it looked like the facade of reality had cracked, releasing a sparkling green river of light. Rays from the particle-beam pistols hit walls, windows, the remnants of jeeps abandoned along the street and the advancing Avatari. Everything the beams hit exploded, and still the Avatari drove us back. They had no fear. They felt no pain. They lost nothing when they were shot. Death, to them, was little more than an inconvenience.
I heard the pop of M27 fire and saw soldiers firing from the second-story windows of the building behind a rocket launcher. These were technicians; I could tell by the insignia on their fatigues. Once they realized the Avatari were coming, they must have quit working on the launchers and barricaded themselves. Four techs climbed out of a window and leaped onto the top of the rocket launcher. As three fiddled with cables, the fourth aimed a single tube by hand, flipped a switch, and fired a lone rocket.
Across the street, the Avatari continued pushing their way forward. The rocket shot out of the tube, leaving a slanted string of smoke so narrow it might have been drawn with a pen. It struck the ground, throwing dozens of Avatari into the air and shattering a twenty-foot swath of street.
The Avatari seemed not to notice. The brown-black giants continued flowing toward us, firing their deadly light bolts. Men dropped on either side of me. Frustrated by the short range of his particle-beam pistol, one Marine tossed it aside and pulled out his M27. A light bolt struck him square in the visor, searing through his head and helmet. Though he had to have died instantly, the Marine continued standing on the spot for two or three seconds before he fell.
We had no choice but to yield. The Avatari would take the street and capture the rocket launchers no matter what we did. I could see this clearly; my combat reflex was in full swing. I felt calm. I was a man at peace in a chaotic battle.
“Harris, close in around the launchers,” Moffat yelled. “We need to hold the launchers.”
He was wrong. The batteries were lost, and I saw no point in losing my company along with them. The last thing we should do was cluster together. That would enable the Avatari to kill several men with each shot. Up and down the street, Marines were already dropping a few at a time.
We still had a huge numerical advantage, but that advantage was fading. We needed to attack. I stepped onto the street. The men from my company instinctively followed me. One of my men stepped in front of me, and a bolt slashed him across the throat, vaporizing the bottom of his helmet and taking his chin with it. He fell face-first to the sidewalk.
His virtual dog tag still showed—Corporal Ted Robinson. He had been alive just a moment earlier and ready to follow me even before I’d issued an order. If I had told him to stay back, he would still be alive, but I had no time for regret.
I contacted Burton, the battalion commander, on a direct frequency, bypassing Moffat. “Major, we need to launch a counterattack.”
“How many do you need?” Burton asked.
“All three companies,” I said. “And we need to act fast.”
Burton did not waste a moment considering my recommendation before issuing the order, telling the men to rally together at a virtual beacon he placed precisely where I stood. Our grenadiers held back, concentrating their fire, blasting a hole in the Avatari line.
What was left of our battalion formed behind me. Grenadiers firing over us, soldiers with M27s behind us, we rushed the enemy firing our pistols as we ran across the street and into their line.
I leaped a tangled barrier and flew over the curb onto the other side of the street. I could hear men coming up behind me but kept my eyes straight ahead. Bolts struck into the crowd around me, but almost all of the Avatari fire flew over our heads. A rocket struck in the direction I was headed, sending up a geyser of dirt, concrete, and flames. I could see dark shapes in the haze, towering figures that moved slowly. I fired. The moment I saw any movement in the haze, I fired, all the while hoping that the men behind me would not shoot me in the back.
Remembering how my armor shorted out when that spider-thing attacked me, I shouted, “Don’t let them touch you!” over an open frequency. We were in close now; my warning may have come too late for some. Running forward in a crouch as fast as I could, I almost fell on my face when I stepped onto the layer of loose slag that had once been the bunkers.
An alien stepped in my way and stopped. It did not seem to notice me. I shot it in the leg. As it collapsed, I prepared to shoot it again, then saw that there was no need. A cloud of powder whooshed out around the body as it hit the ground. The thing was severely chipped and dented, probably scars first received as the Avatari massacred our old soldiers out in the forest. My shot to the leg was just the finishing offense.
Crouching beside the broken alien, I moved my pistol from one target to the next. Before I could get back to my feet, another wave of Avatari came. I fired three shots, and more Avatari fell. The battle seemed to swell around me. By charging in, our battalion had broken the Avatari line in this one spot, forcing it to collapse in on itself. Listening to the chatter on the interLink, I could tell that this place was one of the few spots that we had managed to hold. Along Vista Street, the Marines who had tried to hold their positions were now in full retreat. Batteries of rocket launchers had fallen into Avatari hands.
Through the smoke, haze, and dust, I saw green beams and silver-white bolts. Then I saw something new. Across the street, a building lit up. For just a moment it looked like the red bricks along its walls had turned to glass, revealing a bright light in its heart, then the building collapsed to its foundation. The destruction was so fast and so clean that it appeared as if the whole thing imploded.
I did not have time to think about what was happening behind me. Marines continued to charge into the gap we had created. We fanned into the enemy lines and spread behind them. The Avatari seemed more interested in bludgeoning their way across the street than stopping our charge.
One Avatari soldier aimed its rifle at the Marine beside me and fired. I managed to shove the man out of the way, and the bolt struck another Avatari, searing through the big alien the way it might pierce a tank or hill. The wounded Avatari turned stiff and fell.
I caught a quick glimpse of Philips and Thomer leading a squad deeper into the Avatari line. A flash of green struck near Philips, missing him by inches. Philips ran on without noticing.
There were no Avatari where that particle beam hit, just men. As I looked back, I saw Moffat, his particle-beam pistol extended in Philips’s direction.
“Moffat,” I said.
He did not answer.
Three Avatari moved toward me. There was a flash. One of them fired at me. Running on instinct, I dived for the powdery ground, somersaulted, and came up firing. I hit two of the Avatari. Someone else hit the third. I never saw who.
There was a flash across the street, coming from the spot where we had begun our charge. I looked over in time to see another building take on that glassy appearance and collapse. The whole thing happened so quickly that the tint shields in my visor did not react before the flash had imprinted itself on my brain. A negative image of the collapse replayed inside my eyelids.
When the tint cleared from my visor, I saw dust and rubble and the twisted remains of the rocket launcher. I looked for enemies to shoot, but the only survivors around me were Marines.
This part of the battle had ended. We held our ground, but the Avatari had still managed to destroy the rocket launchers. We were screwed.
Before we suspected it was there, the noose had tightened around our necks.
To hear the other generals talk about it, the entire debacle was Newcastle’s fault. I suppose it might have been his fault in a “the buck stops here” way, but he did everything by the book.
He set his soldiers up with a specking five-to-one advantage. Granted, they were all old men, but there were so damn many of them.
The big mistake was authorizing the techs to work on the rocket launchers with the enemy on the way. In a show of no confidence and a play for power, the two Army generals under Newcastle authorized an investigation into the error. We were trapped on a planet, fighting an enemy we could not hurt, cut off from the rest of the galaxy, and the brass was still wrangling for power. I should have seen it coming; these men were career officers, not soldiers. They thought like politicians.
The investigation only took a day. The men in charge concluded that the rocket launchers were complex pieces of machinery that required routine maintenance after every battle—maintenance that generally required a minimum of four days to complete. With the Avatari attacking every three days, finding a good time to disassemble and repair the batteries was pretty much out of the question. The investigators also discovered that Newcastle had nothing to do with the maintenance of the rocket launchers. The order to work on the batteries had come from Brigadier General Samuel Hauer, the tough little weasel who was number two in the Army chain of command. As Hauer was the one who called for the investigation in the first place, the matter was dropped. Hauer resigned his commission the following day.
Even after the investigation ended, whenever General Glade referred to this battle, he inevitably called it, “Newcastle’s speck-up.” He also referred to the ruins along Vista Street as “Newcastle’s sandbox.”
I heard all of this secondhand. Generals like Glade and Newcastle did not invite me to their high-level meetings unless Sweetwater or Breeze asked for me by name.
I had it better than any of my men. At least I knew about the Science Lab. I knew that the government had assigned great minds to this planet. My men heard nothing about Sweetwater and Breeze. They heard about the infighting among the generals and saw the costs of incompetent command, but they heard nothing about the mines, the spider-things, or whatever discoveries the scientists might make. Not that it mattered. The generals distracted most of their men with bounties for dog pelts and other entertainment. And then there was the work. We had an embattled city to maintain.
I didn’t allow myself to worry too much about incompetent leadership as I fell into the rhythm of life without the protection of Vista Street. Within hours of the battle, the brass placed all personnel on a new duty schedule. We had a twelve-hour work detail, followed by a four-hour shift in which we could do whatever we liked, then an eight-hour sleep period.
The brass enforced this new schedule with a vengeance. We could loaf around the base or slum around town during our off hours; but, to a man, anyone not present and accounted for during work shifts and lights-out would find himself in the brig.
I spent my first work detail driving into the forest with Philips, Thomer, and eight other men looking for survivors. I did not think we would find anyone with a pulse, but I was wrong.
It was a cold, miserable shift. By the clock, it was 2200 when we arrived on the spot. The time did not matter as far as daylight was concerned, not with the ion curtain smothering the planet in a blanket of light. But ion curtain or no ion curtain, Valhalla became colder at night. The rest of the men wore combat armor; the lucky bastards had climate-controlled bodysuits to keep them warm. My dislocated shoulder already hurt from the last time I’d put on my armor, so I came in fatigues with an interLink piece clipped to my ear.
We found our first bodies along the highway, just a scattering of men the Avatari had killed as they headed toward town. Once we went off road, we found large pockets where soldiers had died trying to make a stand. They were everywhere, and it quickly became obvious that once shot, no one survived. We found a few wounded who had fallen behind because of broken legs or other injuries.
Philips and Thomer took turns loading survivors into jeeps and chauffeuring them back to town, while the rest of us stayed back to “smart tag” the dead. Smart tagging meant painting a laser beacon onto the bodies. This was not about burying the dead; it was about accounting. By scanning the bodies with lasers, we cataloged how many had died.
Burial was not a high priority. Right now we had more important things to do. With any luck, the winter chill would keep the bodies from decomposing too quickly. Once the spring thaw began, we’d probably set the forest on fire to cremate the remains.
So there we were, bright ion curtain light dissolving anything even resembling a shadow under the thick canopy of trees. I was cold and wishing I had worn my armor, bad shoulder or no, when Phillips said, “There are a lot more humans than Mudders out here.”
“I heard the Mudders evaporate after you kill ’em,” Thomer said.
Part of me wanted to say, “At the Science Lab, they refer to it as degrading, but these creatures are not ‘Mudders,’ they are ‘Avatari,’ and they don’t die, they break.” I wanted to tell them the truth. They deserved to know what they were up against. Instead, I followed the party line and played dumb. I said, “Yeah, I heard that, too.”
“How many do you think we’ve tagged so far, sir?” Thomer asked. He brushed aside the ferns and made a gagging noise as if he was about to vomit. Even Philips grimaced.
“Six of ’em down here,” Philips said. “Hey, there’s barbecued brain poking out of this guy’s skull.” Philips was faking the old bravado. That was a good sign. I found myself watching Philips constantly, looking for signs of him recovering from the shock of losing Huish and White in our first encounter with the Avatari.
He had not yet reverted back to the reckless, obnoxious Philips of old, but some of his former swagger had returned to him. I could push him more now, but I didn’t dare mention Moffat or the Hen House.
“Okay, we got them,” Thomer said, straightening up and dusting dirt from his armor. “Where now?”
I suggested we head over the rise.
“Are you guys heading into town after this?” Philips asked. He sounded hopeful. He was still restricted to the barracks, but I mentioned that I might ask Major Burton for permission to take him out with us.
“After this detail? Man, I want to get good and drunk,” said Thomer, who seldom got drunk.
“How about you, Harris?” Philips asked. As a noncom addressing a superior officer, he was supposed to refer to me as “Lieutenant” or “sir,” but under the current circumstances …
“I’m ready to tie on a good one,” I admitted.
We crested the rise, and the massacre was suddenly laid out before us. Fatigue-clad bodies carpeted the ground ahead of us, and every last one of them had muddy white hair and brown eyes wide open and startled. They lay in intricate patterns like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle poured out of a box.
“Lord.” Thomer sighed.
“Shit,” groaned Philips. “There must be a million of them down there.”
I surveyed the scene. It was absolutely still. Even the wind had stopped, but not everything was silent.
“There’s a live one,” Thomer said. He pointed along the ridge that surrounded the clearing. There, sitting on the ridge, was an old soldier curled around an M27. He cradled it to his chest and rocked back and forth. His sobs carried across the forest floor.
“Go get the jeep,” I told Philips. “We’d better run this guy back to town.”
Thomer and I stepped over bodies and made our way around the rim of the clearing. When we came to the bottom of his hill, the old man turned and stared down at us. “The Liberator,” he said, his voice drenched with disgust. “All of these men die, and the specking Liberator makes it out alive.”
It was Glen Benson, the Liberator-hating old man who sat next to me on that flight to Mars. Even with all these men dead around him, this piece of shit could not let go of his prejudice. All these men died, and this asshole walks off the field untouched, I thought, then realized he had just said the exact same thing about me.
“What is your name, Corporal?” Thomer asked, stepping between me and Benson.
“Benson. Corporal Glen Benson.”
“Are you hurt?” Thomer asked.
“Just my leg,” Benson said. Now that he mentioned it, I saw that it was bent at an unnatural angle.
“We’ll take you into town,” Thomer said, as Philips came driving over the ridge, his jeep bouncing as it cleared ruts in the ground. He worked a miracle, managing to drive right up to us without running over any bodies.
“Thomer, why don’t you drive Corporal Benson back to town,” I said, trying to sound sympathetic.
Benson shook his head. “I’m staying here with my platoon.”
“You’re doing what with who?” Philips asked. There was no sympathy in his voice; he let his outrage show. “Listen here, you old specker, we ain’t got time to argue. We have a war to fight.”
“These men died …”
“Damn specking right they died. That’s why they’ve got all them holes in them,” Philips said.
“I belong with my platoon,” Glen protested.
“You do? You planning on killing yourself, or are you just going to sit around crying and wait for the Mudders to come back?”
I thought Benson would either shoot Philips or put a bullet in his own fool head. Instead, he climbed to his feet, wincing at the pain and obviously unsteady. Thomer grabbed him by the shoulder and helped him walk to the jeep.
“Can I drive the old bastard in?” Philips asked loud enough for Benson to hear. He had clearly taken a liking to the old fool.
“Doesn’t matter to me,” Thomer said, as he arranged Benson in the back of the jeep.
As they drove away, Thomer muttered, “What an asshole.”
I nodded, then asked, “Which one?”
Over the next two days, more than ten thousand survivors found their way back to Valhalla from the forest. The rest of the two hundred and fifty thousand troops were officially listed M.I.A., though everyone knew they were deader than Caesar’s ghost. We lost another thirty-five thousand men when the Avatari rolled over the bunker. More than two hundred and seventy-five thousand men died in a single day.
It wasn’t the loss of manpower that upset the balance of power. We lost twenty-five rocket launchers when the battle reached Vista Street. With only six hundred thousand men and no working missile defenses along the western edge of Valhalla, we could no longer enforce our perimeter.
From here on out, the Avatari would be able to wage their war in town.
There were seven of us—Thomer, Skittles, Boll, Herrington, Manning, Sharpes, and me. Manning and Sharpes were from another company in the battalion, but we could overlook that shortcoming. The numbers in our company were down after the battle for Vista Street.
I had hoped to get Philips off the shit list, so he could come with us, but no such luck. When I asked Major Burton, our battalion commander, to give Philips the night off, he had refused even to consider the idea.
I did not bother asking Burton if he wanted to come into town with us because he would have said no. He would not come to town with a pack of enlisted men. As an officer, I wasn’t supposed to fraternize with the enlisted folk either, but I did not think my fellow officers would mind. They were natural-born, I was a clone. I might have received the bars but that did not make me part of their fraternity. Knowing that I would never be counted an equal in the loyal order of officers, I fraternized with the conscripts.
We borrowed a truck and drove to the bar and restaurant district. The first time I went for a joyride downtown, trucks were reserved for officers and noncoms who could produce a requisition slip signed by an officer. This time, Corporal Manning said he could procure the truck. When I volunteered to sign for it, he said, “Don’t sweat it, I took care of it.”
Since he’d signed his life away on the truck, Manning got to drive. Herrington rode shotgun up front. The rest of us piled in the back and swapped stories as we drove up Carlson Avenue and into town. I listened to the conversations around me but did not join in.
I had become preoccupied with what I saw. We passed a park that the Corps of Engineers had turned into a city dump with a twenty-foot-tall mountain range of garbage. Birds swooped down from the sky to hop along the garbage and pick at it. Cat-sized rats scurried around the base of the garbage. Seeing the birds and the rats, I wondered how long it would take until those carrion feeders found their way to the dead soldiers in the forest.
We drove down streets along which new barricades were under construction. The brass planned to cordon these areas off. With the Vista Street bunker destroyed, these areas might soon become the new fronts.
Some places we passed showed new signs of urban decay. We drove by an L-shaped bank building in which the wind had blown huge piles of loose papers along the walls; they looked like snowdrifts. Vandals had painted signs on a couple of police stations in one part of town. Other areas of town were immaculate. We drove past a central park in which dozens of soldiers worked, picking up trash, raking leaves, and trimming hedges.
“I heard you went out on a tagging detail,” Boll said.
“Yeah,” Thomer answered.
“What was it like out there?”
“A lot of trees and shit,” I said, breaking in and hoping to stop Thomer from saying anything that might hurt company morale. That was a direct order, by the way. Officers were told to keep their men from speculating about the situation for all the good it would do. Telling Marines not to discuss the battle was like ordering someone who has been shot in the gut to stop bleeding. Stuff leaks out, no matter what you do.
“Did you find dead soldiers?” Boll asked.
Technically, I was supposed to tell them to change the subject, but they would have just fired up the conversation again a little later.
“Are you kidding?” Thomer asked. “We found this one clearing where they were piled up on top of each other. It was all those old guys, thousands of them.”
“Did you find any Mudders?” Boll asked.
“Not many. I bet we lost a hundred men for every one of theirs that we killed,” Thomer said.
“I heard it wasn’t that bad, someone told me we lost twenty-five of ours for every one of theirs.” Boll said.
“Maybe,” Thomer said. “I only saw one small piece of the battlefield.”
“I heard somewhere that we lost about two hundred and fifty thousand men out there and they lost ten thousand. That’s about twenty-five to one.” Boll was not going to let the subject drop.
“That wasn’t what I saw,” Thomer said. “It was almost like they were throwing those old guys away …like they didn’t care whether—”
“Thomer,” I said, realizing that I had let the conversation go too long. Smarter and more alert than any clone I knew, Thomer had just strayed too close to the truth. Newcastle had thrown men away.
“Sir?” he asked, not sure why I had interrupted him.
“Did you ever bag any dogs?” I asked for lack of a better way to change the subject. “I heard you can earn a full month’s pay for shooting a few strays.”
Thomer looked confused.
“I got one,” said Sharpes.
“I bagged eight of them,” Skittles said. “And Moffat paid up on them, too. Two specking weeks’ worth of pay in a single afternoon. Now if I just had something good to spend it on.”
“I hear the locals opened a Tune and Lude,” Sharpes said.
The term “Tune and Lude” referred to dance clubs where they played loud music and served up enormous amounts of alcohol. Some ran a steady trade in illegal drugs; but that did not concern me, the neural programming in military clones stopped them from abusing drugs. Most Tune and Ludes, respectable or otherwise, were tied in with some form of prostitution. Some even had built-in hotels that rented rooms by the hour.
“Are you kidding me?” Thomer asked. “All-male Tune and Ludes, that’s kind of disgusting.”
“No way,” Sharpes replied. “They brought in scrub.”
Thomer, ever the Boy Scout, shook his head. “That’s not going to help us win this war.”
“I don’t know. A good wiggle always helps me stay focused,” Sharpes quipped.
“I heard Philips managed to get hooked up while he was in the Hen House,” Boll said.
Skittles, who went with Philips, burst into a fit of laughter. “He bagged Lieutenant Moffat’s wife.”
“It isn’t funny,” said Thomer.
He started to launch into a lecture on honor when Skittles said, “You haven’t seen Moffat’s wife.”
“Was she pretty?” Boll asked.
“Pretty in two ways—pretty ugly and pretty likely to stay that way,” Skittles said. “She’s got a face like a bear and legs like a chicken. If I had a wife like her, I wouldn’t know whether to kill her or cut off my wanger.
“It didn’t stop Philips, though. That guy is crazy. Did you see his tattoo?”
Thomer smiled and nodded. “I saw it.”
“His tattoo?” I asked.
Skittles laughed. “Yeah, he got a Lilly Moffat tattoo.”
Everyone laughed except Thomer and me. “I think Moffat took a shot at Philips during the fighting on Vista Street,” I said. That quieted them down.
“Are you serious?” Thomer asked.
“I can’t prove it,” I said. “He’s called for a firing squad. One way or another, he wants Philips dead. Can’t say that I blame him.”
That killed the conversation, but that was okay. We had just pulled in to the entertainment district. Packs of men in uniforms lined the streets. In fact, downtown looked more crowded than I had ever seen it.
I thought about the barricaded streets we passed, and the parks used for trash dumps. Somebody was closing off entire sections of town, compressing the population into smaller neighborhoods to hide our losses. Not a bad idea. It might keep morale up for a while, until men started noticing that no one along the street had white hair and wrinkles.
As we moved through the streets, I heard the sound of music thumping and the ringing of feminine voices. Hundreds of soldiers and Marines were fighting their way into a little alley. At least a dozen girls in short dresses danced and mooned down on the soldiers from a balcony above.
“I guess you found your Tune and Lude,” Thomer said.
Sharpes, Skittles, and Manning stopped to stare into the crowd. “You guys coming?” Skittles asked.
“Doesn’t interest me,” Herrington said. He was older than the other men, sort of a father figure.
“I think they’re staying,” said Boll.
I placed a hand on Manning’s shoulder, and said, “Give me the truck keys if you’re staying here.”
“Oh,” he said. He took one last longing look at the girls on the balcony and stayed with us. Not far from the Tune and Lude, we found an empty bar and claimed our table.
“Didn’t you used to read a lot of philosophy?” Thomer asked me as we sat. We all ordered beers.
“I used to,” I said. “Then I found religion.”
The beers arrived moments later. With so many men dead and the Tune and Lude attracting most of the survivors, business could not have been good for this hole-in-the-wall.
“Religion?” Herrington asked. “I never thought of you as a religious man.”
“I’m not,” I said. “After we attacked the Mogats, I gave up on religion. Now I don’t believe in anything.”
Herrington saluted this with his beer.
“Doesn’t that make you an atheist?” Boll asked.
“Atheists believe something,” I said. “They believe that they know that there is no God. I don’t even believe that I don’t believe.”
“Wow, that’s kind of bleak,” Thomer said.
“But you still came to fight. It sounds like you believe in the Unified Authority,” Herrington said.
“I especially do not believe in the Unified Authority,” I said. “I used to think it was God.”
Boll downed a whole stein of beer, and said, “Careful, Lieutenant, you’re confusing me.”
Freeman gave me exactly twenty-four hours to rest up from the battle. The next day he called early enough to wake me from bed.
“How soon can you be down to the Army airfield?” he began.
“I’m doing well. Thanks, and how are you?” I said.
Silence.
“Give me an hour,” I said, figuring I would shower, dress, grab a bite to eat, and head out. It would take me a few minutes to commandeer a jeep, and the airfield was fifteen minutes away.
“Thirty minutes,” Freeman said. “Bring full armor.”
“What’s happening in thirty minutes?” I asked.
“We leave in thirty minutes,” Freeman said as he cut the line.
After making sure the line was indeed dead, I said, “Pushy specker.” I dressed in full combat armor, left immediately to find a jeep, and arrived a few minutes late. As I drove through the gate, I saw Freeman waiting for me in a big helicopter, the kind the Army generally used for transporting artillery. The blade over the chopper began to spin as I parked my ride, they were in such a rush.
“What are we doing today?” I asked as I approached the chopper.
“Dr. Sweetwater wants us to run some experiments,” Freeman said.
I paused before climbing into the bird. “Experiments? We’re not going back to those mines, are we?”
“No,” said Freeman. “We’re going out to the Avatari landing zone.”
“In the forest?” I asked. When he said yes, I asked, “You planning on parachuting down? The trees around those spheres are too thick to land.”
“Not anymore,” Freeman said. “They moved them closer to town.”
Against my better judgment, I climbed in the helicopter. Besides our pilot, we were the only ones along for the ride. The chopper lifted off and flew across the western edge of town. The ground below us looked burned over and pulverized. We flew over five miles of city buried under rubble. Fires still burned in some of the ruins. I saw frames and shells of buildings, but nothing stood over two stories tall.
“So you’ve been out here running errands for the Science Lab, I never knew you were so”—I paused and pretended to struggle for the right word—“so altruistic.”
Freeman, who was not much for conversation, gave me a go-speck-yourself glare.
“You know this is going to flush your macho, I-only-care-about-myself reputation down the shitter once and for all,” I said. “From here on out, people are going to expect you to stop for children in crosswalks and help little old ladies cross the street.”
“How much are they paying you, Harris?” Freeman asked, his voice a low rumble and his eyes as dark as the anger behind them. “Last I heard, they pay lieutenants twenty-five hundred dollars per month.”
“I get a combat bonus,” I said.
“Five hundred per month?” Freeman asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Something like that.”
“If we survive this, I get a 1.5-billion-dollar payday,” Freeman said.
“That’s a lot of money,” I admitted. “We’re still partners, right?” We had been partners nearly three years ago. That was during one of my stints away from the Marines.
Freeman did not respond.
“Okay,” I said, “just remember my birthday.”
“You’re a clone. You weren’t born,” Freeman said.
“I was born; I just wasn’t conceived—kinda like Jesus,” I said.
The spheres were in a large clearing just a few miles out of town. I had passed through this very clearing my first day on New Copenhagen, on my way back to town with Philips and the remaining members of his fire team. There had been a tall radio tower in the center of the clearing, but the structure now lay twisted along the ground like the skeleton of a thousand-foot snake.
Twelve Avatari light spheres stood in a line across the clearing. I looked at the scene and asked, “How long have they been here?”
“They moved last night,” Freeman said.
“The aliens moved the spheres here after the attack?” I asked. It did not make sense, but on the other hand, they were balls of light. It wasn’t like they had to lift the spheres onto a truck and drive them here.
Dead bodies littered the floor of the clearing, old soldiers now twenty-four hours gone. I saw M27s and pistols in the mud. Off along one edge of the clearing was a pile of crates and equipment. Freeman must have been busy all morning; the pile included a full-sized steam shovel. “What is that for?” I asked, pointing at the steam shovel.
“An experiment,” was all he would tell me.
The helicopter landed in the farthest corner of the clearing from the spheres, and there the pilot waited as we made a long day of it. Freeman began the experiments by having me toss a grenade into a sphere. The grenade exploded, the sphere seemed untouched. When we found shrapnel from the grenade, it was already coated with tachyons.
Freeman recorded everything as I fired lasers from all across the light spectrum into the sphere. The laser color made no difference, they all dissolved in the light of spheres. He planted several chemical bombs around the spheres. The bombs had no effect.
The highlight of the day came when Freeman climbed into the steam shovel and dumped a two-ton load of dirt on the spheres. “What the hell are you trying to do?” I asked.
“Bury it,” he said as he poured a second load of dirt over the sphere.
“Bury it? You think you can make it go away by burying it?” I asked, barely able to stop from laughing.
It did not matter what Freeman thought, and I didn’t know if burying the spheres was his idea in the first place. The uselessness of burying the sphere became apparent as the sphere rose to the top of the dirt like a bubble rising to the surface of water.
In all, the day seemed rather laughable. I started making jokes about the different experiments. As Freeman climbed out of the steam shovel, I asked, “Got a fire hydrant? Maybe we can wash the spheres away.”
Freeman did not dignify my joke with a response. He radioed the pilot of the helicopter. On the other side of the clearing, the chopper’s blades began to rotate. “Are we finished for the day?” I asked Freeman.
“One more thing,” he said, opening a wooden crate that was about the size of a footlocker. Until that very moment, I had not noticed that particular crate; but now that I did, I did not like the look of it. The symbol on the side of it was a black circle with three yellow triangles in it—the symbol used to mark radioactive materials.
“Um, Ray, that looks a like nuke,” I said.
Freeman said nothing as he opened the case.
“Are you planning on nuking the spheres?” I asked. Across the field, the blades over the helicopter were in full whirl.
“This is a dirty bomb,” Freeman said. The unit looked like a computer. The bomb and all its components were stored inside a keyboard with a little three-inch display.
“That’s great,” I said, “but shouldn’t we give burying the spheres another shot. I mean, that looked promising.”
“Sweetwater made it small, just a half-kiloton device with maximum radiation yield.”
That was small. When the bomb went off, it would only go off with the force of five hundred metric tons of TNT. Of course it did not matter how big the bomb was; the air around it would still heat up to over five hundred thousand degrees. The good news was that our combat armor would protect us from the radiation if we survived the heat and the shock wave.
“A dirty bomb,” I said. “How nice. Well, as long as the radiation yield is high.”
Freeman typed some code into the bomb and 10:00 appeared on the screen. The countdown began immediately.
Freeman stood and headed toward the helicopter. I followed, glancing back and seeing that the clock had counted down to 9:51.
The truth was that Freeman had played it more than safe. With the helicopter flying us to safety, he could have set the clock for three minutes, and we would have survived. With ten minutes, we could get in a game of chess before boarding. Still, I always found it hard to relax around nuclear bombs.
We boarded the helicopter and left the clearing, circling three hundred feet over the forest and nearly a mile away. I would have preferred to put more distance between us and the bomb, but Freeman said he’d worked everything out with Sweetwater, and I had confidence in both men. Besides, so long as the blast did not short out our electrical system, this bird was made to withstand a little radiation.
Below us, the forest looked like a frosted green carpet. There were no shadows or dark spots. In the distance, I could see the clearing. And then the explosion took place, a bright flash that rendered the rest of the clearing as bright as the line of spheres running across its diameter. Above the clearing, the flash of the bomb solidified into a shape like a golden jellyfish rising from the forest floor that cooled into smoke, then rose like a mushroom. The trees around the clearing leaned out, swayed back toward the explosion, then caught on fire. They burned like matches in a book. A layer of smoke formed around the body of the steam shovel. When the smoke evaporated, it left a blackened hulk in its wake.
“Guess we won’t be going into that part of the forest anytime soon,” I said. There must have been a few hundred dead soldiers around there, men killed during the old men’s march. They were the lucky ones. Incineration had come much sooner for them than for those who died deeper in the forest.
As the smoke and ash cleared away, I could see the spheres sparkling against the silver, black, and orange background that had once been filled with trees. “Nothing hurts them,” I said.
Freeman said nothing in return.
During duty hours, I played the role of the faithful lieutenant in the Marines. I located the dead on tagging duty and prepared what was left of my company for the next wave of the invasion. During off hours, I socialized with enlisted men. I pretended to know only what they knew, and I acted as if I thought we would survive this war. That was the life I lived as a normal Marine. I also had another life, however, one that made it hard to spend time with men who were not in the know. My second life was working with the Science Lab.
“We’ve examined the data Raymond and Lieutenant Harris collected,” William Sweetwater said as he waddled across the laboratory floor. As he always did, Sweetwater spoke in a tough and hip way, as if he did not realize that he was a pudgy little dwarf with a scraggly beard and thick glasses.
“Roll the feed,” Sweetwater said to Arthur Breeze.
On the ten-foot screen that hung from the ceiling, the Avatari mining operation appeared. The video feed started with what we saw the moment we entered the cavern, as captured by Ray Freeman’s visor. I stood with my back to the camera looking out at the spider-things.
As Freeman entered the cavern, the camera panned around it, and there the feed froze, focusing on one of the spider-things.
“What the hell is that?” asked General Glade.
“We think they’re drone workers. From what we can tell, they’re not much more intelligent than a mechanical arm on an assembly line,” Sweetwater said. “They appear to follow a simple digging protocol and show no signs of initiative or independent thought.
“This is interesting.” He waddled over to the screen. “See, here Lieutenant Harris comes within a few inches of that drone.” On the screen, I am walking down the path as one of the drone pops out of a hole and walks right past me.
“A sentient being would have attacked Lieutenant Harris,” Sweetwater said. “With those sharp forelegs, it could have cut him in half.”
“Do we assume that they came to hollow out the mountain?” asked General Haight, the Army’s new second-in-command. “Are they going to hollow the entire planet?”
“We’ve run a computer analysis of this cavern. If our estimates are correct, the cavern is 41.3 miles long. Assuming the mountain was solid when the Avatari arrived, we estimate that they have displaced approximately eight hundred cubic miles of mountain per week,” said Arthur Breeze. Unlike Sweetwater, Breeze did not refer to himself alone when he said “we.”
“It’s all hypothetical, of course,” he admitted. Tall, slightly built, and obviously insecure, Breeze tended to decorate his speech with more scientific terms than Sweetwater.
“Eight hundred miles per week?” General Haight asked. “That doesn’t seem like much. I mean, at eight hundred miles per week, it could take them years to hollow out the planet.”
“They don’t need to hollow out the planet,” Sweetwater said. “We think they are just trying to make enough space to hold their catalyst.”
Breeze leaned over the projector, and said, “William, perhaps we should show them the cave.”
“Good idea,” said Sweetwater.
On the screen, the cave in which Freeman and I had found the spheres appeared. Freeman entered first and examined the spheres and the gas leaking out of them. He pulled out the meter Sweetwater gave him and held it over the mud-colored gas.
“This is not the extreme-hydrogenation elemental compound distillation that was found in other Avatari settlements such as the Mogat home world and Hubble,” Breeze announced.
Nobody responded.
“The military term is ‘distilled shit gas,’ ” Sweetwater said.
“Oh, sure, that,” the generals responded. They all knew about distilled shit gas.
“Raymond ran a number of tests on the gas, and we have been able to make some educated guesses about its properties,” Breeze said.
“That is a gas? It looks like muddy water,” General Glade observed.
“It is very dense; so dense, in fact, that it is on the border of the definition of both a gas and a liquid,” admitted Breeze.
“That’s what those things are after? They just want that mud stuff?” General Haight asked.
“Quite the opposite,” Sweetwater said. “That is what they are pouring into the planet.
“We think they are seeding the planet.” He waddled over to Breeze and handed him a data chip to place in the projector. When the picture resumed, it showed the same map of the galaxy that Brocius showed me back on Mars.
“We assume you are all familiar with this map?” Sweetwater asked. Then, without waiting for an answer, he approached the screen, and continued. “Arthur, can you close in on Hubble?”
The screen switched to a close-up view of Hubble, the burned-out cinder of a planet on which a colony of Mogats tried to make a stand.
“Oh, sorry; would you display the prenova image of the Templar System?” Sweetwater asked.
A moment later the image of a very crowded solar system appeared. The system had three planets orbiting so close to its sun that the planets could not have been habitable. There was a fourth planet that had surface area covered by water, a fifth planet that resembled Earth, and seven more planets that looked too dark to provide productive habitation.
“This is the Templar System,” said Sweetwater. “The fifth planet is about the same distance from its sun as our Earth is from Sol.
“About fifty thousand years ago, some event caused Templar to expand suddenly, then go supernova,” Breeze said. “Please understand, gentlemen, that fifty thousand years is a very short amount of time in astronomical terms. In astronomy, we generally measure events by millions of years. In this case, a sun expanded and cooked everything around it in a matter of fifty thousand years.
“As you can see, the first three planets in this system vanished entirely. But this planet”—he pointed to the fifth planet again—“this planet survived after a fashion.”
The screen now showed the familiar murky landscapes of Hubble.
“We sent a military force to this planet a few years back and found that everything on it was made of the extreme-hydrogenation elemental compound,” Sweetwater said.
“Distilled shit gas?” one of the generals asked.
“That was not the only time we ever encountered that gas,” Sweetwater said. “Arthur, will you please show us the Mogats’ solar system?”
The screen showed a new solar system. Like the Templar System, this one had gone dark. “This is the planet on which the Mogats built their home world,” Sweetwater said.
General Hill, from the Air Force, started to speak, but Sweetwater cut him off. “Their home world was nearly the exact same distance from its sun as Hubble was from Templar …as Earth is from Sol …as New Copenhagen is from Nigellus.”
The generals remained silent. They stared at the screen, which once again showed the map with the Avatari movements across the galaxy. “We have come to the conclusion that the same solar positioning that makes planets productive for human habitation also makes them desirable to the Avatari,” Sweetwater said. “That would explain why they have only sleeved the planets we have colonized or planned to colonize.”
“Why would they pump distilled shit gas into a planet?” General Newcastle asked, now rejoining the discussion.
“It’s not shit gas,” said Sweetwater. “The stuff they’re importing into New Copenhagen is something else that we think can be turned into shit gas. It’s highly toxic. Direct contact with the gas would be fatal. A healthy man who breathed this gas would die in under a minute. A few traces of this gas seeped into Lieutenant Harris’s helmet and left him with a second-degree burn.”
“The toxicity level from this gas is extreme,” Breeze added. “If you poured a single gallon of that gas into Valhalla Lake, you would contaminate the water. That would be a ratio of one part gas to 160 million parts water, and the water would be rendered unsalvageable.”
“From what the data tell us, this gas will expand exponentially when superheated. That is why we are more concerned about what the Avatari are doing with the sun than we are concerned about their work in the mountains,” said Sweetwater.
“To the sun?” Several of the generals asked this at the same time.
“Dr. Breeze,” Sweetwater said with a nod.
Now that we had entered his specialty, Breeze took over the meeting. He paused to collect his thoughts and steel his confidence, then said, “I have not been able to experiment on the gas itself, of course, but from w-what I have been able to observe, this gas is a catalyst. Hypothetically, it has the ability to transmogrify everything around it into the same extreme-hydrogenation elemental compound distillation found on Hubble and the Mogat home world. Of course, before it can do that, it must be superheated.”
“And how exactly do you expect the aliens to superheat the gas?” asked General Newcastle.
“By causing the nearest star to supernova,” Breeze answered. He showed no emotion as he said this, merely blinking as he saw the commotion his announcement had caused.
“You think they are going to blow up the sun?” General Newcastle asked, his voice cutting through the confusion.
“They do not want to cause Nigellus to explode, they want to make it expand until it is large enough to incinerate New Copenhagen,” Breeze said.
“That is what they did to the stars in the Templar and Hadriean systems,” added Sweetwater.
This caused even more commotion.
“You’re telling us that it’s not going to make any difference if we beat these bastards or not; our goose is still cooked?” asked General Haight, who was clearly struggling to make sense of this.
“As a worst-case scenario, yes, that seems to be the case,” Sweetwater said.
“We’re stuck on a planet with an alien army we can’t kill. The sons of bitches are filling the mountains with enough toxic gas to poison the entire specking planet. Now you’re telling us that they’re getting ready to blow up the sun and incinerate the entire specking solar system. Sweetwater, you don’t think this qualifies as a worst-case scenario?” asked General Haight.
“So it sounds like you’re telling us we’re all going to die,” General Newcastle said.
The room went silent. Sweetwater and Breeze looked confused as to what they should say next. The generals stood in morbid silence. Everyone was running the same equations in their heads and coming up with the same bleak answers.
“They can’t beat us in battle so they’re going to fry the entire goddamned planet?” asked General Newcastle. “Is this some sort of a scorched-earth thing. If they can’t have the specking planet, they’ll make sure it isn’t any good to anyone?”
“They don’t appear to care whether we die or survive,” Sweetwater said. He climbed back on his stool. “If anything, we get the feeling they would be happy to see us leave so they could get on with their work. The map they sent out, the one showing their movements …We’ve come to the conclusion that they’re using the map as an eviction notice.”
“How very humane of them,” Newcastle muttered. Unlike Haight and some of the other generals, Morris Newcastle had a certain sarcastic wit. Now that he understood the extent of the crisis, he seemed more determined than the other generals to rise to the challenge. “What happens if we send a division into that pit and stop those bugs from digging?”
“Maybe we could bomb them,” offered General Hill. “If we caused a cave-in, it might force them to start digging all over again.”
“You know,” Glade said, “maybe we should nuke the bastards just for good measure. We have some nuclear devices back at our camp.” By “camp,” he meant the Hotel Valhalla.
Glade’s suggestion set off some nods of appreciation.
“I recommend against using a nuclear device,” Breeze said. He pulled off his glasses and rubbed the lenses vigorously with a handkerchief from his pocket. “And I caution you against any action involving their dig.”
More silence.
“Why is that?” Glade asked.
“Because it might cause the Avatari to step up the level of their attacks,” Sweetwater said. “We believe that the dig is their main operation. They haven’t come here to kill us. We’re like mice to them, as long as we stay out of their way, they won’t stop what they are doing and fumigate. We theorize that the attacks on Valhalla are only a safeguard to prevent us from disturbing their excavation.”
“A safeguard? They killed three hundred thousand soldiers during their last attack,” Newcastle said.
“We would hate to see what happened if they launched an all-out assault,” Sweetwater said.
“They destroyed our perimeter defenses,” Newcastle continued speaking over the scientist until Sweetwater said, “And that attack came on the heels of our sending men to investigate their excavation.” The little scientist snapped the words, his rough edge more apparent than I had ever seen it.
“You think we made things worse by sending in spies?” Haight asked.
“It had to be done,” said Glade.
“It most certainly did,” agreed Sweetwater. “If Raymond and the lieutenant had not gone in, we would still be in the dark about their plans.”
“I thought you said those things were like robots,” said Newcastle. “Didn’t you say they were drones?”
“Most of the workers in that cavern were drones,” said Sweetwater. “There are larger creatures that seem to perform the role of a project foreman or a guard. We think the larger ones may be avatars instead of drones.”
“And they spotted Harris?” Glade asked.
“There is no question that they spotted Raymond and the lieutenant,” Sweetwater said.
“Well, that is just specking great,” General Haight said.
“And you think the Avatari upped their attack because of it?” Newcastle asked, clearly placing a lot of weight on the scientists’ opinions.
“It seems like a reasonable assumption,” Breeze said. “Of course, I’m a physicist, not a xenopsychologist.”
A conversation began among the generals. At first they whispered among themselves, but their voices continued to rise as they blamed each other and the scientists. As they continued to point fingers at each other and everyone except themselves and the aliens, what started as whispers became shouting. The generals shouted and swore like schoolkids.
“We need to try a nuclear solution,” General Newcastle said, his voice rising above the din. “We can place a nuke out there and let them deal with that.”
“We’ve tried it,” Sweetwater said.
The room went quiet. “Tried what?” Newcastle asked.
“We deployed a small nuclear device,” Sweetwater said. He looked around the room nervously. “We had Raymond and Lieutenant Harris place a low-yield nuclear bomb beside the spheres,” Sweetwater answered. “It didn’t impact them.”
“You nuked them without telling us?” Newcastle asked. He sounded angry. Like so many officers I had known, he looked upon a show of initiative as a challenge to his authority.
“Look, General, we’ve tried burning them with fire, freezing them with liquid oxygen, corroding them with acid, distorting them with radio waves, and irradiating them with a small but dirty atomic device.” Sweetwater looked over at Freeman and smiled. “Oh, and we tried burying one of the spheres under several tons of soil.”
“You buried it?” Glade asked.
“Raymond and the lieutenant took a steam shovel out there.”
I looked over at Freeman, who kept apart from everyone else in a solitary corner of the room. He stood there like a statue, maintaining a grim expression on his face. He was tall and dark, the shadow of a giant that had somehow turned solid. He felt no compulsion to speak and had no need for recognition or approval. At that moment I respected Ray Freeman more than any man I had ever met.
“What happened when you buried it?” General Glade asked.
“The soil falls through the sphere and is altered, then the sphere rises to the surface,” Sweetwater said. “We didn’t seriously think it would destroy the sphere, but we wanted to see what would happen.”
“Maybe blowing up the mountain would slow their digging,” General Hill said. Hill always seemed so much more reasonable than the other generals.
“I’m not convinced it would have any effect,” Breeze said. “It won’t stop the spheres from excreting more of that gas catalyst into the mountain.”
“Unless you gentlemen can figure out a way to destroy their spheres,” Sweetwater added, “they’ll just keep on dumping gas.”
“Damn it!” yelled Newcastle, and he slammed his pudgy fist down on a nearby desk. The sound echoed through the room. “Damn it!” he repeated. “Stop telling us what we can’t do. Give us something we can use. How do we fight these bastards?”
Breeze started to say something, then looked over at Sweetwater as if seeking permission. The dwarf nodded. Having been given permission, Breeze spoke. “We might have just what you need. At least we believe we are on the edge of a breakthrough.”
“What kind of a breakthrough,” Newcastle asked.
“One of our teams is on the verge of decoding their technology,” Breeze said. “We may soon understand how they manipulate tachyons.”
“Well, what goddamned good is that going to do us?” snarled Newcastle. “I don’t want to understand these bastards. I want to shove my foot up their asses!”
None of the other generals joined Newcastle in his tirade, though they seemed curious about the discoveries.
“Are you telling us that we might be able to use the tachyons to attack them?” General Haight asked.
“We think we may be able to block them from using tachyons,” Sweetwater said.
“What goddamned good is that?” Haight demanded.
“If they cannot use the tachyons, they can’t hurt us,” Sweetwater said. “They would come out of their spheres as energy, but without the tachyon shell forming around them, their energy bodies will simply evaporate.” It was like a ray of hope had found its way into this dungeonlike Science Lab. Men who one minute earlier had stood around smoldering and staring at the ground suddenly looked up in surprise.
“Damn,” General Haight said, sounding impressed.
“How soon? How soon will you know?” asked General Newcastle. He whispered the question as if almost afraid to hear the answer.
“It’s still a week out, at the soonest,” Sweetwater said, sounding swept up in the excitement.
The generals’ spirits dropped so hard I could almost hear the thud. “A week? A week?” Haight complained. “We’re down to fewer than six hundred thousand troops. We don’t have any working rocket launchers. The wall around our outer perimeter is down.
“Do you have any idea what you are saying? Those Avatari bastards attack every three days. We’re almost out of soldiers, and you want us to hold off two more attacks?”
“General, ev-ev-every man we have is w-working around the clock,” Breeze said. “W-we need to run tests. It t-takes time to an-analyze the data and build off the results.”
“Whatever you think you can do, you get it done in forty-eight hours! You got that, Sweetwater?” Newcastle demanded. Perhaps he wanted to show everyone that he was back in charge. If so, it backfired.
“Then make it yourself,” William Sweetwater said in an unnaturally calm voice.
“What?” barked Newcastle. “What did you say?”
“If you think you and your soldiers can decode an alien technology in forty-eight hours, by all means, do it,” Sweetwater said. General Newcastle stormed over to the stool on which Sweetwater sat, but the dwarf did not budge.
Staring down at the misshapen little scientist, Newcastle growled like a dog. “Work faster,” he said.
“General, we started with nothing. We didn’t even have the technology to prove the existence of tachyons two weeks ago, and now we are developing a primitive method for controlling them. One of our teams is about to hijack an alien technology that is far more advanced than our own. It’s a miracle we have gotten this far this fast,” Sweetwater said. He was in control, and he knew it. General Newcastle glared down at him, and Sweetwater flatly returned that gaze.
“And you expect us to protect your facility that entire time?” he asked.
“No, sir, not the entire week,” Sweetwater said. “Only when we are under attack.” I saw the twinkle in Sweetwater’s dark eyes.
Newcastle mulled his options over, then said, “Gentlemen, we have our orders. We need to hold out for another week.”
“Harris, we’re moving camp.”
Moffat met me as I entered the hotel. The work of moving had already begun. A line of trucks waited along the access road that led to the hotel loading dock. The Hotel Valhalla had taken on the aspect of a theatrical stage during a change of settings. Men in fatigues stripped down booths, carried racks, and pushed carts filled with supplies.
As Moffat spoke, I saw something that left me deeply disturbed—graffiti. Somebody had spray painted a stick-figure mural on one of the walls. The portrait showed five large figures gathered around a smaller figure. The Avatari were big and bulky, each of them holding one of those four-foot-long rifles. The human looked pathetic beside them, a man on his hands and knees. He wore what appeared to be combat armor. At least, he had armor covering his head and chest. From the waist down, the figure was naked with a little sliver of a penis dangling below his stomach.
The caption on the bottom of the drawing, written in the same red paint, was “MUDDERS GANG BANG!” Under the guy on his knees was one word—“Glade.”
If the name under the guy on his knees had been Moffat instead of Glade, I would have had Philips arrested. Hell, I might have killed him myself.
Giving the mural a second glance, I realized that what I had taken as Avatari rifles had been intended to represent a portion of their anatomy. Aside from the disproportionate generosity that the artist had shown the enemy, this painting bothered me because military clones were supposedly incapable of doing something like this. In theory the capacity for vandalism and lawbreaking had been weeded out of them through neural programming; but as I looked around the lobby, I saw shattered mirrors, broken windows, wallpaper stripped from walls, and more graffiti. If clones had done this, what other parts of their programming had also become undone?
“Yeah, we have a specking Michelangelo on our hands,” Moffat said, when he saw my gaze return to the graffiti. “The company is stripping down the Valkyrie Ballroom. I need you to make sure the move goes smoothly.”
I wanted to tell Moffat that I saw him take a shot at Philips, but I decided to play it safe. Instead, I asked, “Where are we headed?”
“The University of Valhalla,” Moffat said. “They want us settled in by 1900.”
I checked my watch. It was 1130. That seemed generous. “Seven and a half hours just to move racks?” I asked.
“We should be so lucky,” Moffat said. “Command wants this side of town FOCPIG-ready by 0000 hours. We’ve got mines to plant and traps to wire.”
“What about the armory?” I asked. It would take days to move all of the weapons out of the underground garage. Finding and stocking another location would not go quickly either.
“We’re leaving it.”
“Everything?” I asked. “We’ve got nuclear bombs down there.”
“Yeah, I know,” Moffat said. “I asked Burton about that. He says our best bet is to stop the Mudders before they get here.”
“So, am I helping with the move or FOCing the PIG?” I asked.
“You’re supervising the move, then you’re FOCing the PIG,” Moffat said. “Once we get everything loaded on to the truck here, I want you to take one full platoon to help the ACOE work on a new DMZ.” In plain speak, he wanted me to take the company out to help the Army Corps of Engineers set up a new “demilitarized” zone. In this case, the term “demilitarized zone” meant a highly militarized zone, indeed. Once the Corps of Engineers finished their work, there would not be a safe inch of land west of the hotel.
“Let me get my armor,” I said.
“How’s the shoulder?” Moffat asked.
“Better,” I said. I saluted and caught an elevator to my room.
“You know, you guys don’t need to guard me every specking minute of the day,” Philips complained, as we rode out on the truck.
I leaned back into the canvas awning. I had my helmet off so I could enjoy the bracing feel of the cool air against my face. “I’m not guarding you, Philips, I’m protecting you,” I said.
“I don’t want to be protected,” Philips said. He was dressed in fatigues, the only man on the truck who had not put on armor. There was no rule that said we had to wear armor, but most Marines wanted all the protection they could get when they laid land mines. It seemed like a logical choice—at least it seemed logical to those of us who wanted to survive the detail.
“I like keeping an eye on you, Philips; you’re entertaining. I’ve never watched anybody self-destruct before. It’s kind of exciting.”
“Go speck yourself, Harris.”
I hated to pull rank, but I was an officer, and I could not allow him to show me disrespect in front of the men. “You are speaking to an officer,” I said.
“Sorry. Go speck yourself, sir,” he said.
“What happened to that famous Mark Philips sense of humor?” I asked.
“I left it back at the Hen House,” Philips said.
“Not back on the battlefield?” I asked.
We drove past Vista Street, deep into the neighborhoods on the west edge of town. Men in battle armor and men in fatigues lay in piles along the road. Crews of soldiers worked to clear the streets of death and debris, moving the burned husks of tanks and trucks along with corpses. In a patch of grass by a tumble-down house, a group of soldiers gathered for a smoke and a chat.
“Huish grew up in the same orphanage as me,” Philips said.
“Did you know him?” I asked.
“Are you specking kidding me? He was twenty-three years younger than me. I made corporal by the time he was three.”
“I’ve read your record,” I said. “You were probably busted back down to private again by the time he was four.”
“I specked it all up, didn’t I?” asked Philips. He shook his head. All of the old arrogance drained from his face. He looked physically tired and mentally exhausted.
“You mean at the Hen House? Yes, you specked up royally.”
“You don’t get it, Harris,” Philips said.
“I don’t get what?”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass about Moffat or what he does. Let him shoot me. I don’t give a shit. Thomer says I deserve it. That’s what you think, too.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.
“I guess I deserve a good specking, but not because I boffed Moffat’s wife.” He laughed. “Hell, more guys have ridden her than the goddamned Broadcast Network. I’m surprised she managed to work me into her busy schedule.”
“You’re shitting me?” I asked.
“Would I shit you about something like that? I think she has a thing for clones. Half the men guarding the specking Hen House had a roll with her. I think Skittles might have. I was the only one who talked about it.
“He’s doesn’t give a rat’s ass who sleeps with the old girl. He’s just mad ’cause I didn’t keep quiet about it.”
Philips unbuttoned his shirt and showed me his upper arm. “He’s pissed about this,” he said as he displayed the tattoo he’d had placed over the biceps on his right arm. It showed a naked woman, a modern Venus in a half shell with one hand cupped over a breast and the other covering her pelvis. The banner around the picture said “LILLY MOFFAT, COUNT ME IN.”
“Shit, Philips,” I said. “When did you get that?”
“I got this while I was at the Hen House. It was her idea. Harris, she hates Moffat; she offered to pay for the damn tattoo.”
“Nice, Philips. Very nice,” I said. Philips missed the irony in my choice of compliments. “How did Moffat hear about it?”
The truck slowed to a stop. We had come to a busy stretch in which teams of soldiers dragged heavy carts across the six-lane street.
The other men jumped from the truck. Philips stood to join them.
“How did Moffat find out about the tattoo?” I repeated. “Did she tell him about it?”
Philips shook his head. “Not likely. She’s had so many guys since me, I bet she doesn’t even remember my name. He saw it when I showed up for morning calisthenics. I came in a tank top.”
“You what?” I asked.
Philips shrugged. “And I lined up front and center.”
“Were you trying to get yourself shot?”
“And I started doing arm curls while he was counting out jumping jacks.”
While the rest of the men gathered in front of the truck, I held Philips back for another moment. “You really do want to die, don’t you?” I asked.
“You know what, Harris. I don’t care what happens,” Philips said. I looked into his eyes. The fight was gone. The mischief was gone as well. He looked tired.
Groaning deep in my gut, I let my friend go join the other men. There was no way both Philips and Moffat would survive this war. Sooner or later Moffat would find a way to kill Philips, and Philips would do nothing to protect himself, the stupid prick. There are a lot of ways to kill yourself. At least suicide by screwing was unique.
The mine-placer looked like an industrial vacuum cleaner. It had a twenty-foot telescoping hose with ribbing for flexibility. You could have rolled a tennis ball down the length of the hose, but a baseball would not fit.
The Corps of Engineers had painted foot-wide Xs all along the street. Our job was to roll the mine-placer to each location, press the nozzle over the axis of the X, and plant the mine. The mine-placer literally shot the explosive right through asphalt or concrete.
We worked in five-man teams. It was grueling work. The mine-placer sat on wheels, but fully loaded with fifty mines, the damned thing weighed about four hundred pounds. The Corps assigned us a stretch of posh neighborhood with a row of elm trees between the roads. Pushing that specking mine-placer up hills and over speed bumps damn near killed us. Once we got to the X, it took three men to hold the hose in place as it blasted the mines through the street. The blast struck with so much power that it bounced all three men in the air.
The blast both placed the mine and removed the painted X without cracking the pavement beneath. The only trace the mine-placer left was a clean spot of road where the mine now sat. As a kid I thought it was magic. It wasn’t. First the Corps of Engineers had used a sonic device to create a hollow spot under the surface of the concrete. The mines were made of liquid chemicals, which the mine-placer broke into a vapor so fine that it could pass through concrete. When we fired it off, the mine-placer blasted the atomized chemicals with so much power that it forced them through concrete, where they mixed to create a volatile, pressure-sensitive bubble. The chemicals washed away paint, grease, dirt, and anything else that got in the way into the ground.
“You think these are strong enough to kill one of those Mudders?” Skittles asked. My crew included Herrington, Boll, Skittles, and Thorpe. Boll and Herrington, both veteran Marines with more years in the Corps than me, worked quietly. Thorpe and Skittles, both three-year men who had joined the year before the orphanages were destroyed, kept up an endless string of commentary.
About a hundred yards away, Thomer and Philips led another crew. Thomer had a calming influence on Philips. Philips would not do anything crazy with Thomer around.
“Charge is up!” Skittles called.
“Hold!” I shouted. Herrington, Boll, and I braced our weight against the nozzle, and Skittles pulled the trigger. The sound the mine-placer made was a hollow thwoop as it sent a jolt that traveled up our arms and into our shoulders. Boll and I pulled the hose away, and Herrington crouched and inspected the placement.
“Good,” he said, and we moved on to the next X.
We stood a few feet away from the skeletal frame of one of the destroyed rocket launchers. The structure stood thirty feet tall, a charred skeleton of twisted rods and melted wires.
Around the grounds, soldiers and Marines placed traps of many descriptions. A team of soldiers strung hot-wire fences. Once they finished the fence, they would hook it up to an electrical circuit, and four thousand volts would surge through the wires. A fence like that could wipe out a whole platoon, but I doubted the Avatari would even notice it.
“What do you think?” Herrington asked, standing straight and stretching out his back. “This should give us an edge.”
“The mines might slow them down,” I said.
“It’s going to come down to a firefight again, isn’t it?” Boll asked.
If Skittles or some other lightweight asked that question, I might well have lied, but I would not lie to Boll or Herrington. They deserved better. “There’s a lot going on that I can’t tell you about,” I said.
“It’s bad?” Herrington asked.
“Yeah, it’s bad,” I agreed.
General Glade sent an aide to retrieve me from the DMZ. We were on our fourth load of mines. My arms were numb, and the muscles in my back felt like they were tied in a knot. I wanted to head back to base and take a nap, but no one was handing out furloughs.
“Lieutenant Harris, General Glade sent for you,” the man said. He was wearing his Charlie-service khakis—a captain with a chestful of ribbons for typing and filing. If they gave out purple hearts for paper cuts, this guy would have one.
I sized the captain up in an instant and did not like what I saw. Let the world collapse around him, this guy’s peach-fuzz blond hair would never grow beyond regulation length. I quickly dismissed all his ribbons as having been earned by typing above and beyond the call of duty.
“Captain …” I paused because I did not know the man’s name.
The captain took a moment to figure out that I was waiting for his name. “Everley,” he said.
“Captain Everley,” I said.
“Charge is up!” Skittles yelled.
I called, “Hold!” and Skittles pulled the trigger. The recoil of the hose reverberated through my body. “Captain Everley, do you realize that you are standing in the middle of a minefield?”
The officer’s smug smile evaporated from his face. He was an administrator who had stumbled into an area for fighting men.
“Excuse me, sir,” Sergeant Herrington said, gently escorting Everley out of his way so he could inspect the mine. He climbed on all fours and ran a hand over our work. “It’s good,” he said.
“You see those Xs?” I asked, holding on to the hose with one hand and moving closer to Captain Everley.
“Are those mines?” he asked.
“No, Captain, those are the only places you can be sure do not have mines. We’re laying mines under the Xs.” Everley looked back. The path he had come on was still marked with Xs.
“I’m guessing between the Marines and the Army, we’ve laid at least ten thousand mines out here today. Each mine is calibrated to blow the legs off a Mudder,” I said.
Everley swallowed and looked around the street.
“Charge is up!”
“Hold!” We shot another mine into the pavement.
“You tell General Glade that I’ll head straight for Base Command when we finish up here. It should be another hour or two.”
“But the—”
“And, Captain, watch your step on the way back. I figure that any mine that could blow the legs off a Mudder would send your balls at least a mile away.”
“I always thought it would vaporize them,” said Herrington.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought, also, sir,” Skittles piped in.
Everley nodded and left, hopping from X to X as if they were stepping-stones leading across a pond.
“A bit on the harsh side, wasn’t that?” Boll asked me.
“You think so?” I asked. It was harsh, but I had a pretty good feeling why General Glade wanted to speak with me, and I didn’t feel like playing along. We were coming down to the wire now. When things came down to the wire, the men at the top often turned to the men they sent out to die for absolution. They wanted us to know they were not making these decisions lightly, and they wanted to know that we understood. It was all bullshit.
Having bright daylight twenty-four hours per day wreaked havoc on my internal clock, but it had some advantages. We worked well past 2100 hours on a winter night, and the sky was always as bright as midday.
By the time we finished, my right shoulder hurt just about the same way it did after the doctor reset it. The small of my back ached from all of my leaning over the mine-placer. I stood on the truck as we rode out to our new barracks working my back and neck. No one spoke on that ride. They may not have known the particulars, but most military clones can sense the calm before the storm.
I found my billet and stripped out of my armor. I took a muscle relaxant and headed for the shower. I wanted to eat a large meal and crawl into bed, but that was not on the agenda. Instead, I called Base Command, and General Glade’s staff sent Captain Everley to retrieve me.
“Do we have time for me to stop by the mess for a sandwich?” I asked.
“I’d get to General Glade’s office as quickly as I could if I were you,” Everley said. “He’s still in a rage about this afternoon.”
“What happened this afternoon?” I asked.
“You didn’t specking report that’s what happened,” he said. “When a general invites you in for a chat, you drop everything and report.”
“I see. You know what, I really need that sandwich,” I said, remembering just how much I despised admirals and generals.
We were nearing the dormitory cafeteria. The food wouldn’t be as good as the restaurants in the Valhalla Hotel, but this was our mess hall. I turned in and headed for the food line.
“Lieutenant, I must—” Captain Everley whined. I had sized him up as an officious weakling the first time I saw him. He was a captain, and I was a lieutenant, but I was the one controlling the situation.
“Just a moment,” I said.
“But General Glade—”
“Unless he has chow laid out, he’s going to have to wait. I’ll eat on the way, Captain. I have just come from ten hours of laying mines and I’m hungry.” I selected two slices of bread and slathered them with mayo and mustard. I used tongs to take slices of ham, roast beef, and turkey. After laying lettuce, onions, and tomatoes across the pile, I closed the sandwich, stuffed half of it into my mouth, and said, “There. That didn’t take so long,” around the sandwich as I bit.
“Can we go now?” Everley asked. He was mad, and he showed it by pouting. Real officer material, I told myself.
I grabbed two cartons of milk. “Sure, I’m ready.”
Everley did not speak to me again as we drove around the outside of the campus. Except for the abundance of armor and fatigues, it looked like business as usual around the University of Valhalla. It had the right number of warm bodies walking its yards, they just happened to be soldiers instead of students.
The Corps of Engineers was out in force erecting rocket launchers. It would take days to get them ready for combat. If we managed to keep the Avatari out of the campus during the first attack, the batteries would be ready in time for the second. I just hoped some of us would be around to arm them.
Newcastle had teams of soldiers placing machine-gun nests and barricades all over the school. Checking the skyline, I saw blinds for snipers on rooftops. I thought about the exploding bullets Freeman made for himself and wished we could all arm ourselves with bullets like that.
Using sandbags to redirect the water, the Army converted storm drains into pillboxes along the main drag. The muzzles of high-caliber machine guns peered from beneath culverts and behind drains.
We came to the administration building, a three-story brick-and-plaster affair with useless pillars and an ornamental balustrade along its flat roof. Squirrels jumped on the bare branches of the elm trees on either side of the entrance.
We parked the car, and Everley spoke for the first time since we had left the barracks. He said, “Shit,” because he locked his keys and cap in the car. He tried the handle several times, then gave up. “Shit,” he repeated.
“Lost your keys?” I asked as I came around the car.
“Forget it, Lieutenant,” he said. He walked past me and headed into the building. I followed. We headed up the stairs to the third floor. General Glade had set up shop in the dean’s office. Through the open door, I could see him sitting behind the desk, staring into space.
Everley knocked on the doorjamb, then peered in. “I’ve got him, sir.”
Glade swiveled around and said something softly that I could not hear.
“Go on in,” Everley said, stepping out of my way.
I walked in, stopped two feet from the desk, and saluted. The salute hurt; my right shoulder felt like it might never heal.
“Everley says you were too busy to talk this afternoon,” Glade said. He sounded angry.
“I was laying mines,” I explained. Now that I said it, the excuse sounded weak.
“I served under Bryce Klyber for fourteen years. Did you know that?”
Klyber was the officer who developed the Liberator cloning program. He did that as a young officer, more than fifty years ago. Until his untimely death, he watched over my career. He mentored me and protected me from Marines who would have gladly killed me simply for being a Liberator clone. Klyber was murdered by a fellow officer during the Mogat War.
“I did not know that, sir,” I said.
“Just about every senior officer in the Navy or the Marines served under Klyber at some time or another, Harris. If he liked you, you could count on a long and successful career. I was a captain when I reported for duty on the Grant.”
The Grant was a fighter carrier in the Scutum-Crux Fleet, Klyber’s old fleet.
“By the time they transferred me to Brocius’s command in the Central Cygnus Fleet, I was a colonel. From captain to colonel in fourteen years; you could say that’s a good rate of promotion.”
I had actually made the jump from private to colonel in under five years, but that was another story. Since that time, Admiral Brocius had demoted me to sergeant, then re-promoted me to lieutenant. At least Glade held on to his promotions.
“I hear you spent a lot of time with Klyber,” Glade said. “The way I hear it, you were something of a son to him …as close to a son as he ever got, I suppose. He did create your kind.
“Me, Harris, I have three sons of my own. I’m not looking for a surrogate. As far as I’m concerned, you’re a Marine who gets things done, and that earns you some leeway. You’re efficient, I’ll give you that, but you’re not a real officer. Only natural-borns qualify as officers in my book, Lieutenant. You may be the last of your kind, but you are still a clone …just a clone. You got that?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“When I send an officer, a natural-born officer, to call you in, you will show him proper respect. Do you understand me? You will specking well drop what you are doing, whatever you are doing, and report. Do you read me, Lieutenant?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why did it take Everley so specking long to get you this evening?” Glade asked.
“I stopped off for a sandwich,” I said.
“Maybe I’ve been too lenient with you, Lieutenant,” Glade said.
“There’s no question about that, sir,” I said.
“What the speck is that supposed to mean?” Glade asked.
“It means, sir, that I am ready to resign my commission. More than four hundred thousand clones have died out there without even knowing what they were up against. You don’t like clones, sir; and I don’t like the kind of antisynthetic asshole natural-borns they make into officers. If you want my commission, you go right ahead and take it …sir.”
Granted, I pushed General Glade way too far, but I didn’t care. That was what Mark Philips had said when I asked if he wanted to get himself killed. He looked me in the eye, and said, “I don’t care anymore.” Maybe you could communicate suicidal tendencies like a virus.
Glade must have thought I was bluffing. He said, “If you are tired of command, I can have you busted down to private.”
“I wish you would,” I said. “You might want to stand me in front of a firing squad while you’re at it. The way things are going, General, you wouldn’t even be shaving a week from my life.”
“What’s the matter with you, Harris?” Glade asked. “Are you trying to get busted down?”
“General, every time we head into battle, I watch good men die thinking they’re in a fair fight. You might not consider clones human—”
“You’ve got me wrong—”
I interrupted the general’s interruption. “If you don’t mind, sir, I would be happier as an enlisted man. I’m sick of running errands for you and the Science Lab.”
General Glade sat staring at me. He paused for just a moment, just a fraction of a second, then said, “But we need you.”
The next time the Avatari came, we knew they were coming even before the first of their troops emerged from the spheres. Freeman had rigged a rudimentary early-warning system by placing photocell-powered sensors near the spheres. When the spheres dilated, the light they gave off powered up the cells and set off the alarms.
Cameras hidden along the path showed the army of glowing specters as it trudged toward town. As always, they did not march in formation. They showed no semblance of organization other than marching in the same direction. They looked like a parade of giant ghosts all cloned from the same pattern.
By the time they reached the outer limits of Valhalla, the Avatari had begun to take on substance. Their brown-black shells were covered with cracks through which yellow light glowed. They each had two arms, two legs, and a chest and shoulders that were far too broad for any man. The features on their faces were flat and impassive. They did not search the area for traps as they walked through the ruins of the first suburb.
They passed burned-out doorways and toppled walls of what had a few weeks earlier been a fashionable neighborhood. Grenades and rockets had left the streets a patchwork of scrapes and holes. The Avatari walked past the scabby remains of once-manicured lawns. They trudged across homes that now existed only as cinder. Gaining weight as more and more tachyons adhered to their forms, the Avatari crushed glass and wood and fragments of brick under their feet.
Abandoned pets still roamed the streets. A fluffy white dog with mangy fur paused to watch them from a few yards ahead. It growled and ran away.
By the time they reached the DMZ, the Avatari had become as solid as our tanks and bullets and weighed nearly two thousand pounds, these walking statues of alien stone. Their weapons had already formed into chrome cylinders, and the light of the ion curtain reflected off the barrels of those guns like sunlight shining off mirrors.
They entered the minefield.
At this point, every man in Valhalla knew that nothing but massive trauma would stop the aliens. One of the bastards marched straight into the electric fencing and pushed right through it. Sparks popped in the air around it. It looked like a miniature fireworks display, and it went unnoticed. The alien avatar paid no attention to the electrical air show as it trampled the fence and continued.
The Army and Marines deployed every available man. With all of the casualties we’d taken, my company had compacted its three combat platoons into two, and now we sent our support platoon into battle as well. Other companies had fared worse than us. Some were down to a single platoon, and some platoons were down to a single squad.
I watched the video feed of the Avatari entering the demilitarized zone from inside my helmet in a small window on my visor.
“Ten minutes to showtime,” Major Burton told the entire company over the interLink. Every man in the company heard Major Burton’s announcement, but only commissioned officers had access to the video feed. Somebody had decided that ignorance equated to bliss for the enlisted ranks.
“Harris, report,” Moffat demanded.
“The company is ready, sir,” I said.
Thomer ran one of my combat platoons, and Philips ran the other. I no longer worried about how he would react in battle; it was between battles when his self-destructive tendencies showed. Once the fighting commenced, all of his horseshit stopped, and he cared only about achieving objectives and keeping his men alive.
Philips’s virtual dog tag showed above his helmet—Name: Mark Philips, Rank: Sergeant, Serial Number: 59682136029. I didn’t need the virtual tag to recognize him, even when he was hidden in combat armor. The casual but efficient way he handled his firearms, the trademark of a veteran Marine, gave him away. Philips fussed about his men like a mother bear, slapping Marines across their helmets to get their attention, bullying them into safer slots, shaking his head as he walked away from young Marines who made stupid mistakes.
Thomer, a far steadier platoon leader, trusted his men. He did not fuss over them, but when I listened in on his communications, I heard him giving plenty of direction. He was a natural leader. Had he been natural-born, he might have risen to general.
I had promoted Herrington so he could lead the support platoon in battle. They needed a leader with experience. He did not like his new responsibilities as a sergeant. Corporal Boll, Herrington’s best friend, assisted with the platoon. As I listened in on Herrington’s frequency, I caught him chatting with Boll.
“Hey, Trevor, you think these Mudders are ever going to send a bigger army? I mean, they keep dribbling in small numbers, and we keep mowing them down,” Herrington said.
“Man, I know what you mean. It doesn’t make sense. If they’d sent more men, they could have had us last time,” said Boll. “I’ll tell you what, though, those bastards are wearing us down.”
“Tell me about it,” Herrington said. “You seen Lieutenant Harris? The guy looks like the walking dead. We better keep an eye on the poor son of a bitch just in case.”
“Darn straight I’m keeping an eye on Harris; he’s the only thing standing between us and that ass-wipe Moffat,” Boll said.
“Stow the unnecessary chatter,” I said over an open frequency that every man in the platoon would hear. “Let’s keep the Link open.”
“Think he heard us?” Boll asked.
“Not a chance. They always say that before the fighting starts,” Herrington said.
“That goes double for you, Herrington,” I said.
“Shit,” said Herrington.
Boll did not respond.
The entire company save one member was stationed in the hotel district, hidden in a park. It was a small park, no more than five or six acres. Monolithic skyscrapers surrounded us on every side. When I looked back over my shoulder, I could see the outline of the Hotel Valhalla against the sky.
The only man not present was Lieutenant Moffat. He and several other company commanders sat in a conference several blocks away. Even now, with humanity’s back to the wall, when push came to shove, the natural-borns were sending us out alone.
I dug the men in along the crest of a hill. The ground in front of us was a marsh. I could see the still surface of the water through canes and reeds, plants that had gone dormant for the winter. The sludgy water reflected the ionically charged sky above it, with the added effect of a rainbow streak caused by a minor oil slick.
“Lieutenant Harris, are you watching the feed?” Major Burton spoke to me over a direct link.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Those bastards danced through four thousand volts like it wasn’t there,” Burton said.
“Yes, sir,” I said. I wasn’t really listening to him.
From my perch on this hill, I could see far enough down the street to spot the Avatari. At this distance, I needed telescopic lenses to make them out, but I could see them tramping forward. Thanks to the hot-spot-identifying sensors in my visor, I saw thousands of fire red dots marking the spot where mines had been laid on the street ahead as well.
Walking point, a yard or two ahead of its comrades, one of the Avatari stepped on a mine. With my visor zoomed in on the bastard, I enjoyed the carnage as much as I would have if I were only a couple of yards away. I watched its foot come down on the virtual dot that marked the location of very real explosives. I watched the ground burst. Dust, rock, concrete fragments, and who knew what else, shot up like a pillar. The explosion tore the alien’s leg from the rest of its body and it flew twenty feet through the air. The remainder of the body flew backward, flipping through the air and smashing into the Avatari behind it.
A whoop of victory echoed across the city.
“At least they’re not mine-proof,” Burton said. On the video feed, I could see that maybe as many as a hundred Avatari had stepped on mines. The rest of their army paused and studied the field for a moment. This was the first time they had ever shown the slightest concern about their surroundings.
An alien stepped forward, pointed its rifle at the street ahead, and fired. Watching the feed on a small window in my visor, I saw several other Avatari doing the same thing. I expected the rifle to fire a bolt of light into the street, but it fired a long string of light instead. There was a silent moment in which I decided that nothing would happen, then the entire street vanished in a mass explosion.
Working frantically with the optical controls in my visor, I rewound the explosion and watched it in slow motion. In one frame the Avatari stood before a perfectly normal street. In the next frame, the surface of the street began to crack in a thousand different locations. In the next frame, pieces of concrete began to sprout in the air. And in the frame after that, a thousand individual geysers of smoke, dust, and rubble appeared. The force of their simultaneous explosion sent the entire street flying in the air, where it shattered, crumbled, and turned to dust.
The explosion reverberated through the city. The ground shook beneath me as if it might break open. The buildings between us and the Avatari shook. Windows exploded. The base of one of the buildings at the edge of the park caved in—a hundred-story cloud shredder, falling in on itself, flushing a flashflood of dust and debris in every direction.
“Lieutenant …” Thomer and Herrington both tried to contact me.
“Stay focused,” I said over a platoon-wide frequency.
“Harris, they’ve disarmed the minefield,” Moffat said over a company-wide frequency. He sounded so specking calm. “Prepare to attack.”
The cloud of dust, dirt, and smoke washed across the space between the buildings like a river breaking through a dam. It flooded the open ground of the park, then splashed into us and moved beyond.
“What the hell was that?” Philips asked on the company-wide frequency. The conscripts did not have access to the video feed, they were in the dark about what was happening up the street.
“Steady,” I answered. “They detonated the mines.”
“So we got them?” Skittles asked.
“As soon as the smoke clears, Harris, take your men and …” Moffat said.
We stared straight ahead into the haze. Night-for-day vision made no difference, we might as well have been buried in mud. Heat vision revealed fires and spent mines, but the Avatari gave off no heat signature.
“Glad we worked so hard laying those mines, eh?” Philips drawled over the interLink. “Got any ideas on what to do next?”
There was a second explosion. I saw nothing, but it stirred the cloud of dust around me.
“What was that?” Skittles asked.
“They must have detonated more mines,” Thomer said.
“Steady,” I said. Minutes passed. I could feel the tension. I could hear my men breathing heavily when I listened over the interLink. There was no chatter. The men were scared but ready to fight.
“Harris, take ’em out,” Moffat yelled.
He was ordering us to commit suicide. We had no idea what waited on the other side of that smoke. If I had been a normal clone, my neural programming would have forced me to obey, but I was a Liberator. I ignored him. What I could not ignore was the combat hormone welling up in my blood. With that hormone in my blood, the moments of waiting before we attacked were like foreplay. I wanted to get to the real thing.
The dust in the air slowly thinned. I could make out the edges of buildings against the sky. I could see more than five feet ahead of me.
“Harris, attack,” Moffat said. “That is an order.”
I said nothing.
Anything more than ten feet ahead of me was still a blur of dust and smoke. Standing in the park felt like swimming underwater. I could not see anything beyond the reeds in the pond at the base of the hill.
“Harris, I gave you an order. Acknowledge.”
Some of the dust had settled on the surface of the pond. It floated on the oil film.
I listened to my men chatter over the interLink. Skittles, too young of a Marine to be in such a desperate battle, sounded terrified as he asked his platoon leader, “Thomer, can you see them?”
“It’s okay,” Thomer said. “We’re ready for them.”
“I never thought it would be like this,” Skittles said.
“Harris, I have given you a direct order. I order you to attack.”
“Why don’t you get your natural-born ass down here and lead the attack yourself?” I asked. He could send me to the brig for saying that, and I knew it. I had been through battles before, but this one seemed different. I was in a rage. Was this the beginning of a full-fledged Liberator meltdown? I wondered if that old asshole soldier on the trip to Mars had been right about me. I wondered if I could really go out of control, and I realized that I didn’t much care.
“Watch yourself, Harris.”
“You want to send us in alone?” I asked. “You’re sending a single company against fifty thousand Mudders?”
Moffat didn’t care about killing the Avatari; this was about Philips. He wanted Philips dead, and he planned on using the Avatari as his instrument of choice. He probably didn’t give a shit if any of us clones made it out …if I died, so much the better. All of a sudden, the Avatari were no longer the enemy in my mind, Moffat was.
Then something happened. There was a flash so bright that I could see it through the dust and smoke. I turned back in time to see another building folding in on itself. The explosion made no detectable sound, but the crash of the building shook the ground.
“What the hell was that?” Philips asked.
“Shit, they’re knocking down buildings!” one of my men yelled.
“Harris, this is your last warning. Get in there!” Moffat shouted.
Without saying a word, I left the hill. I started back toward the hotels …toward the officers’ sanctuary from which Moffat was issuing orders.
“Lieutenant, where are you going?” Thomer asked as he saw me leave. I did not answer him. I was beyond speaking.
“Lieutenant, where are you going?” Thomer asked again.
“Harris, my console shows that you are moving away from the line. What the speck do you think you are specking doing?” Moffat yelled. “You and your men get your asses in there! That is an order!”
“Lieutenant Harris …?” Thomer asked. He fell in behind me, so did the rest of the company.
I stashed my particle-beam pistol—a good weapon for killing Avatari—in my armor and pulled out my M27.
“Lieutenant, what are you doing?” Thomer asked, sounding confused.
“I’m going to help Lieutenant Moffat earn his combat pay,” I said.
A second building fell off in the background as I cut across the park. The big building fell so smoothly it seemed to sink into the ground. I looked down at my M27, wrapped my fingers around the grip, and ran my thumb along the barrel as I visualized committing murder. Thomer, Philips, and Herrington brought their platoons in behind me, but I paid them no attention. Nor did I pay any attention to Lieutenant Moffat’s nonstop ranting over the interLink.
The system had broken down, exposing a new weakness. Moffat, a prick even by natural-born-officer standards, wanted to sacrifice an entire company because he had a grudge against a single clone. Like the Liberators before me, I had given in to bloodlust. I cared more about killing Moffat than killing the enemy.
“Sergeant Philips, take your men and return to the park,” Moffat yelled. He said it over an open frequency, and every man in the company heard him. Philips ignored the order. He stayed behind me.
Officers sacrificing clones and Liberators going on a killing spree were nothing new, but a general-issue clone like Mark Philips ignoring a direct order …the fabric of military discipline had come undone. Clones of Philips’s make had autonomic obedience hardwired into their brains. For them, obeying orders was as deeply seated as their need to breathe.
“Harris, you are relieved of command,” Moffat shouted. “Philips, you and your specking platoon get your specking asses out there. Do you specking hear me, Sergeant, I specking order you to specking engage the specking enemy. I order—”
“Philips, what are you doing?” I asked.
“We go where you go, Kap-y-tan,” Philips said.
“Philips! Philips! Philips, you specking waste of DNA—” Moffat ranted like a maniac.
“I don’t need a damn posse,” I said.
“We’re not your damn posse, sir,” Philips said.
Seeing that the entire company had attached itself to me, Moffat ordered Thomer’s platoon to fall back. Thomer did as he was told. Moffat issued the same command to Herrington, who also fell back. That was good. I did not want them in the middle of this.
“Lieutenant Harris,” Thomer called.
“Shut up, Thomer,” I responded without looking back. I holstered my M27. Whatever I did once I caught up to Moffat, I would do with my bare hands.
Another building fell, but I paid no attention to it. Somewhere behind me, a fourth building fell as the Avatari began demolishing everything around them. Why should they care what they destroyed or how much damage they caused? For them, a scorched earth was as good as any.
“Harris, what the speck do you think you are doing?” Moffat asked. He was a big man, a strong man …not one to be easily intimidated.
“Harris, are we going to kill an officer?” Philips asked. “Is that what we are going to do?”
“Get out of here,” I growled at Philips. “This is between me and Moffat.”
“Bullshit,” Philips said. “I’m the one who slept with his ugly-ass wife. This is my specking court-martial.”
“Go kill a Mudder,” I said. He did not listen. He and his platoon trailed after me, my unwanted entourage.
Behind us, another building fell. It may have been the fifth or the fiftieth—I had lost count.
I accelerated to a jog, skirted around a park bench, then kicked a trash can out of my way. Trash sprayed through the air. A wine bottle hit the ground and spun in a circle. I was almost to the street, Philips and his platoon just a few feet behind me. Across the street, I saw dozens of officers huddling around a makeshift bunker. They were the second echelon. They would watch how the enemy attacked the men on point, then send reinforcements. Technically speaking, Moffat was on the front line; but for those of us on point, he looked to be a million miles away.
I was too enraged to hate the man. Hate takes thought, and my brain was strictly on survival mode—breathe, walk, kill: things I could do without thinking. Nothing mattered to me except killing Moffat and the testosterone-laced adrenaline running through my veins.
Moffat stood at the front of the pack. I saw his virtual tag—Name: Warren Moffat, Rank: Second Lieutenant, Serial Number: 61752248013. He stood in the open, staring straight at me, his arms crossed before his chest.
“Arrest that man,” Moffat said over an open frequency that every Marine in Valhalla would hear.
The first Marine to reach me was Major Brad Warren, a good man from the command staff. He came slowly, his pistol held low but drawn. He clearly did not want to arrest me.
“Lieutenant,” he said, starting to raise his weapon toward my chest. I grabbed his hand, twisted the gun back against the top of his wrist, and flipped him out of my way. Another Marine reached for me. I slapped my palm into his right shoulder while kicking the inseam of his knee. He spun and fell.
Suddenly a dozen guns pointed at me. Marines standing so close I could reach them with my elbows pointed guns into my chest. Marines standing a few feet away pointed guns at my head. I grabbed one of the Marines by the top of his chest plate, but staggered when the butt of another Marine’s pistol slammed into the unprotected area between my helmet and shoulder plate.
By this time, my combat reflex had all but obliterated my thoughts. Feeling nothing but anger and a desire to kill whoever had just struck me, I threw the Marine I had grabbed to the ground and spun to see who had hit me.
“For God’s sake, Harris, stop!” Philips shouted.
As I started to come to my senses, the hammer struck. I felt the blow, knew it had knocked my helmet from my head; but that was all I knew as I fell face-first to the street.
Since the U.A. Marines did not have a base on New Copenhagen before the war, they did not have a brig of their own. As he prepared for the Avatari invasion, General Glade commandeered a downtown police station to use as a holding pen for grunts who got drunk or caused problems. When I woke up, I found myself a guest of that facility.
I was alone, lying on the floor in a jail cell. After weeks spent cursing the twenty-four-hours-per-day illumination of the ion curtain, I now found myself in near blackness. The only light came from two “EXIT” signs a long way from my cell.
The dim lighting was a good thing because my head felt like someone had used it for a soccer ball. This was worse than a hangover. When I reached back and felt the spot where my skull and neck came together, the goose-egg-sized welt was wet to the touch.
I reached out and felt a cot just a few feet from where I lay on the cold floor. Using that cot like a crutch, I pulled myself up. Blood rushed to my head, so I sat and tried to get my bearings. I took a personal inventory. My name was Wayson Harris, I was a lieutenant in the Unified Authority Marines, and we were stationed on New Copenhagen where some mother-specking aliens were going to annihilate our army and bake the survivors. Good, I thought to myself, no brain damage. Would I bake in this very cell?
I did not have my helmet. The MPs must have confiscated it as they dragged me down here. I did not have a gun or a knife or even my combat boots. Had Moffat brought me down himself, he probably would have shot me. Had he come with the MPs that dropped me off, he would have left a knife or a rope, something I could use to commit suicide so that he would not need to come back and kill me himself. He sure as hell did not want me getting out of here alive. Fortunately, the MPs must have brought me down here, and they would have done everything by the book.
My brain felt like an open wound. Circles of white light popped behind my eyes as I lifted myself off the cot and stood. I listened for the sounds of battle and heard nothing. But that did not mean anything—from what I could tell, I was in the basement of the police station. A few minutes later an explosion gave the building a quick shake, and I knew the war was still on. So be it; there was nothing I could do. I climbed onto the rack and lay there. If the Avatari reached this building, they might cave it in. I’d be crushed like a bug, but that might be better than starving to death. If we lost the battle, I might just be down here as the planet fried. I should have shot Moffat—at least then I would have gone down with something to smile about.
The tremors continued. They were not constant, and I never got the feeling that the police station would come crumbling down on me, but every few minutes I felt another undeniably unnatural vibration.
I must have been down in that cell for hours, the twelve-hour muscle relaxant I took for my shoulder wore off. That gave me some perspective about how long I had been down there. It also hurt like hell. I tried to sleep but could not get over the anger. I thought about Moffat and dreamed up a hundred different ways to kill the son of bitch. I lay there in the semidarkness, staring up from my rack, when I realized that I did not care if the Avatari collapsed the building on top of me. Let them, I said to myself.
Lost in my thoughts, I did not notice when the vibrations stopped outside the station. They might have faded, or they might have stopped abruptly. At some point I realized that I had no idea when the vibrations had ceased.
No one came for me. Time ticked by slowly. At least I thought it passed slowly. Without a clock, I had no way to judge. Maybe there’s no one left to come for me, I thought. Maybe they are all dead. I liked that idea; it meant I had outlived Moffat and Glade and Newcastle and the whole clone-hating cabal. I did not mind the idea of dying in this cell. Starving to death did not sound appealing, but I did not mind the idea of dying alone.
Time continued to drag on. I fell asleep. When I woke, I searched around the cell until I found the toilet that sat in the corner. I took a piss. I found the sink while I was on the head and washed my hands. I cupped my hands and took a drink. The water tasted rusty. The sink was small and shallow, but I thought it might be big enough for me to submerge my face and drown myself. The problem was, I would never be able to kill myself. The neural programming in Liberators did not allow us to commit suicide.
Shredding the mattress and using the material to hang myself seemed like the best option as I considered ways to shorten my stay in the jailbird hotel. If I didn’t mind hanging naked, I could use the sheer material in my bodysuit to tie a noose. I could drag my rack against the bars of the cell, then tie one pant leg around my neck and the other around the bars. My neck would snap as I rolled from the rack. I knew from experience that necks snapped easily when you gave them the right sort of force. I knew I could not bring myself to do it, but it felt good to think of ways I could end this.
Feeling like I might just be able to pull it off, I slid my cot against the bars, and there I sat. This was not the first time I had contemplated suicide to avoid a slow death. The last time I found myself in a similar situation, I discovered that I could not go against the things that were hardwired in my head. So I kicked up my feet and lay back on my bed and waited to see what would happen next. Time passed, then I heard someone open a door.
I did not worry about a visit from the Avatari; they would not bother hunting stragglers. What did they care about stray humans running around the city?
It could have been Moffat, come to fix me once and for all. I hoped it was. I would try to goad him close to the cell, then I would tear out his throat. We could die down here together. I liked that idea. Then again, I was feeling drowsy and possibly a little deranged.
“Harris? You in here?” I recognized the voice. Major Terry Burton came in with an entourage of officers and MPs. The low glow of the “EXIT” signs reflected on their combat armor. They came to my cell and looked at me through the bars. “Comfortable?” Burton asked.
“I could use some chow,” I said, making no effort to get up and salute.
“Don’t mind us,” Burton said. “By all means, go back to sleep if you like.”
“Did we win?” I asked.
“That depends on your definition of winning,” Burton said. “I understand you tried to attack a fellow officer. Is there anything I need to know about before I let you out?”
Burton put on a good face, but there was something forced about his causal tone.
“Is Moffat with you?” I asked.
“No,” Burton said.
“Then I’ll behave myself.”
Burton turned toward one of his aides, and said, “Spring him.” He stepped back, and a moment later the cell door slid open.
“General Glade wants to see you. Apparently he has something he wants to discuss with you.”
“My court-martial?” I asked.
“Nope,” Burton said. “He wouldn’t have bothered sending me if he planned on throwing you right back in.”
Burton and his men cleared away from the door as I stepped out, acting as if I had a fatal disease. “Your things are in a box upstairs,” one of the junior officers said.
We took an elevator up three floors to the ground floor, and suddenly the building looked as bright as the sun. The light hurt my eyes, and I winced. “I see the ion curtain is still up,” I mumbled.
Parts of the station looked vaguely familiar. I recognized some of the maps and pictures on the walls as I walked through the building. I realized that I must have lapsed in and out of lucidity as the MPs dragged me in to my cell. Bastards, I thought. Whoever it was that had knocked me out had fetched me one hell of a blow. But I didn’t really care who dropped the hammer; he had just been doing Moffat’s bidding. The war was between me and Moffat.
One of the men in armor pointed to the box that held my holster and personal effects. I found my boots and body gear, but my helmet and weapons were gone.
“My guns?” I asked.
“We’ll hold the guns for safekeeping. You can have them back after your meeting with General Glade,” Burton said.
“And my helmet?” I asked.
“Evidence,” he said.
“I thought you said there wasn’t going to be a court-martial,” I said as I picked up my stuff.
“There’s going to be an investigation,” Burton said. “If it leads to a court-martial, I don’t think the court-martial will be yours.”
I thought about putting on my armor. Walking around town in my bodysuit was about the same thing as walking around in my underwear. But who was I trying to impress. I mean, this wasn’t a uniform inspection, so I put on my boots and carried the rest of my things in the box.
“Lieutenant Moffat claims you tried to kill him,” Burton said, as we headed for the door.
“The thought occurred to me,” I said. “Did he happen to mention why I wanted to kill him?”
“He says he was baffled by it.”
“Did you check the record in his helmet?” I asked.
Burton laughed. “Funny thing about that, his helmet appears to have malfunctioned. The record got erased during the battle.” He stopped in front of the door to the street, and said, “Fair warning, Harris—Valhalla changed a bit while you were locked up.”
“Changed?” I asked.
Burton pushed the door open.
It was as if by opening the door, Major Burton had transported me from New Copenhagen to the cities of Dresden or Hiroshima after the Second World War. Instead of looking at a city, I was staring into a desert with slag instead of sand. Except for the litter and the ruins, the world outside the station looked primordial.
“The battle was all but done by the time the Avatari reached this part of town,” Burton said.
“How far are we from the demilitarized zone?” I asked.
If everything had gone as planned, we would have kept the Avatari pinned down in the demilitarized zone. From here I could only see a small sliver of town, but I could already tell that the plan had gone down the shitter.
“Harris, this is city center. The demilitarized zone ends eight miles away,” Burton said.
I tried to grasp the concept that the Avatari could have bashed their way so far into town as Burton led me to his car. “You must be hungry,” he said.
“Yeah, a bit,” I admitted.
“You had water in your cell?” he asked.
“It tasted like shit,” I said. “How long was I down there?”
“A day and a half,” Burton said.
“A day and a half?” I asked, totally stunned. I thought maybe I was there for five or six hours.
“How hard did they hit us?”
“Pretty hard,” Burton said. I could see that. If we drove to the right or left, we could not go more than a block before we ran into wreckage.
“How hard?” I asked.
“I think General Glade wants to handle your briefing, Harris. The truth is, I don’t know much more than you. They aren’t giving out numbers. I figure my battalion took a seventy percent casualty rate. We’re down to forty-seven men.” That was forty-seven men out of three hundred.
As we drove, I became more aware of just how damaged the city had become. We entered one area in which I saw the ruins of an ornate security gate. Beyond the gate lay the wreckage of a toppled building.
Burton asked, “Know where we are?”
“No,” I said.
“Don’t recognize it at all?”
The sign dangling from the twisted archway gave it away: “Welcome to the Hotel Valhalla.” Having seen the sign, I recognized the horseshoe drive. The hotel, I thought. Then I understood the bigger picture. “What about the underground parking lot?” I asked.
“I knew you’d ask,” Burton said. “I’m not in the loop on these things, but from what I have seen, it’s a total loss.
“Harris, we took it in the ass when we had six hundred thousand men and so much ammunition we didn’t know what to do with it. Now, if we’re lucky, we might have one hundred thousand men left, and we’re down to rocks and bullets for weapons.
“I hope General Glade has something up his sleeve that I don’t know about, or else we’re screwed.”