Campus Drive looked pretty much the same as it did the first time General Glade brought me to a briefing in the Science Lab. The tree-lined walks, the rows of redbrick dormitories, the fountains, and everything else remained untouched by war. As we cut across campus, I saw the lab in the distance.
They held, I thought. Newcastle had said that everyone and everything was expendable except the Science Lab. We had lost hundreds of thousands of men and our entire armory, but the specking science building stood unmolested. We rolled on to dormitory row.
“General Glade left strict orders for you to have a quick shower and report to his office,” Burton said.
“I haven’t eaten in—”
Burton put up a hand. “He said you might say something along that line. He ordered a meal for you from the officers’ mess.
“He also said to warn you not to keep him waiting.”
So I followed orders. I walked straight through the barracks, heads turning as I passed.
“Lieutenant Harris?” Sergeant Thomer came out to meet me. “Where were you?” he asked. “Herrington told me that Lieutenant Moffat threw you in the brig.”
“Is that what he said?” I asked. “I don’t have much time; what did I miss? How’s your platoon?”
“There are only nine of us left in the platoon,” Thomer paused. “They got Philips.”
I stopped walking. “Did you see what happened?” That was an attempt at tact. What I meant was, “Did Moffat shoot him?”
Thomer understood immediately. “No,” he said. “I lost track of him in the battle.”
“Have you gone out after him?” I asked.
“No, sir. We’ve been confined to base.” There it was, the neural programming that Philips had somehow managed to overcome. Given a direct order, this make of clone was supposed to obey without question. Philips was Thomer’s closest friend. He’d been Thomer’s guardian angel on the battlefield, and Thomer protected him everywhere else; but some officer gave orders for the clones to return to base, and the programming hardwired into Thomer’s brain would not ignore a direct order. That was how it was supposed to work.
“Who gave the order?” I asked.
“Lieutenant Moffat,” Thomer said.
“Moffat again?” I whispered. Now I wanted a look at Philips’s body more than ever. He would be dead, no question about that, but I needed to know what killed him.
“The Mudders got Manning and Skittles. Boll and Herrington made it. I never saw anything like it before,” Thomer said in a flat voice. “They just plowed through everything. They knocked down buildings whenever they came to anything more than a couple of stories tall. I hear the Army stationed a regiment in a parking garage. The Mudders knocked down the building, and the Army lost the entire regiment …an entire regiment destroyed with one shot.”
I did not have time to talk, but there would be time later. “Thomer, take five men and find Philips,” I said, specifically framing it as an order. “His virtual tags will still be up unless he was shot in the head. Do you know where he took his platoon?”
“What about Lieutenant Moffat?” Thomer asked.
“You just get your team together and head out,” I said. “If you run into Moffat, tell him he can take it up with me directly.”
Thomer smiled and saluted. “Aye, aye, sir,” he said.
As he started to leave, I added, “If you find anyone with a pulse, you bring them back, but Philips is the one I want to see. Once you find him, head straight back to the barracks.”
Thomer nodded and went out to piece together his hunting party.
I stood and watched as Thomer left, not really following him so much as staring into space. Philips was murdered only after I’d gotten myself thrown in the brig for no reason. What did I accomplish by going after Moffat now that Philips was dead? Maybe if I had controlled my temper, I could have kept him safe.
What would I do if Philips’s armor had been blown apart? Bullets from M27s left small holes where they entered and jagged exit wounds, light bolts from Avatari rifles created distinctive tunnels through the entire body, but particle-beam fire would blow obliterated armor apart. One look at Philips’s body and I would know who killed him.
And what if the armor had bullet holes? If Moffat had enough guts to face Philips, there might be a video record in Philips’s helmet. Even if Moffat shot him from behind, a pompous ass like Moffat might have said something over the interLink before pulling the trigger. I could just see him saying, “Philips, this is for Lilly.” I could also see him standing over Philips body, maybe kicking him a time or two for good measure.
Shaking my head to clear those thoughts, I went to my room, stripped out of my bodysuit, and grabbed a towel. I found the medicine for my shoulder and gave myself a double dose, then headed for the showers. What if I ran into Moffat in there, would I attack him or ignore him? It would be one or the other; talking was out of the question.
The officers’ shower was empty. There might not have been many officers left, and those still alive may well have needed a drink more than a shower. By now every natural-born knew we could no longer win this war. Only the cowards who ran would survive the next battle. I thought about the deserters come judgment day—when the Avatari caused the sun to go supernova. Would the world suddenly melt around them, or would it happen gradually over centuries? Sweetwater had never said how long it would take for the sun to expand. Would it be a year or a hundred years or a thousand? General Haight made that comment about our gooses being cooked whether we won or lost the war, not the scientists. What was a thousand years or a hundred thousand in terms of space? However long it took, I hoped the deserters would realize they had leaped out of the frying pan and into a hot fire indeed. Heroes and cowards, we’d all burn as one on that day.
Semper fi …or should I have said “semper fry”?
I stepped into the shower and turned on the water. Strands of water arced out of the showerhead. I made the water as hot as I could, felt it lightly burning my skin, watched steam rise into the air around me.
So what if we all died, what did it matter? What did death mean to a clone? Heaven and hell were the domain of natural-borns. At least there would be no more talk about “fighting for Earth” or “preserving the Unified Authority” or “making the galaxy safe for mankind.” From here on out, the most anyone could hope for was to take a few Mudders down with them.
This strange enemy had changed the nature of war. My shoulder hurt, but the medicine had already begun its magic, and the hot water felt good.
I finished my shower and dressed. Then I went to Base Command and reported in. As I waited to see General Glade, I noticed other generals milling around the building. Newcastle and Haight argued in a nearby office. I did not see them, but I recognized their voices. Army command must have moved into this building as well; I noticed several aides in Army drab.
Huuuuh huuuh. “Lieutenant Harris.” Glade had cleared his throat as he came to meet me.
I stood and saluted. He returned the salute.
“Has the Army moved in with you, sir?” I asked.
“It would appear so,” Glade said. “They lost their headquarters in the fighting. Let’s talk in my office.” He turned and started back down the hall. I followed.
A small food cart had been placed in a corner of the office. On it sat trays with several kinds of meats, breads, and vegetables. He even had packets of mayonnaise and mustard.
“Help yourself,” Glade said. As I reached for a plate, he added something that took me by surprise. “We fought that whole damn battle for nothing, yesterday; the Science Lab is useless.”
“Useless?” I asked.
“Burton didn’t tell you?” Glade asked.
I lowered my plate back and stepped away from the cart. “Tell me what, sir?” I asked.
“Arthur Breeze is missing.”
“Missing? General, if there’s one man on New Copenhagen who knows there’s no place to run …” I said. Breeze was the one who figured out that the aliens planned to bake the planet.
Glade sat down behind his desk. “Not Breeze, he didn’t run away. Sweetwater’s the one who would have bolted. He’s the coward.”
“So what happened?” I asked.
“All we know at this point is that Breeze stole a private plane,” Glade said. “We don’t know where he went with it.”
“Sweetwater doesn’t know?” I asked.
“Apparently not,” Glade said.
Bright light from the ion curtain poured in through the window behind Glade’s desk. It illuminated the back of his bald, parakeet-shaped skull. The light seemed to form a silvery halo behind him as he sat, silently watching me.
“You don’t think much of Sweetwater,” I said as I went back to making my sandwich.
“No, I don’t,” Glade agreed. “The little runt ran out on Terraneau.”
“Maybe he’s more cut out to be a scientist than a soldier,” I said as I selected two slices of bread.
“He better be, ’cause he’s all we have now,” Glade said. “Lieutenant, I’m not sure how much Major Burton actually knows about the last attack.”
“He said it went badly,” I said, “but he did not know any specifics.”
“Here are the specifics, Harris,” Glade said. “The armory was destroyed. All our weapons, all our ammunition—buried. The Avatari destroyed the Hotel Valhalla. Did you know that they got the Valhalla?”
“Major Burton took me by the hotel,” I said.
Huuuuhh, Glade grunted, shaking his head and clearing his throat.
“They just about cleaned out the Army. Newcastle is down to about twenty thousand men. I have less than ten thousand Marines. I think the entire New Copenhagen militia was wiped out, but General Hill still has all of his pilots, for all of the good those grounded bastards do us.
“We lost it all protecting the specking scientists, then Breeze just ups and runs. Why did we listen to them?”
“We didn’t have any choice, sir,” I said.
“No, we did not.” Glade reached up and rubbed his temples, then went on. “General Newcastle wants to bring in any civilians old enough to carry a gun. There’s no point in bringing in more bodies, not with all of our guns buried under that hotel.”
“It doesn’t sound like more bodies would make much of a difference,” I agreed.
“They fought a completely different battle this time, Harris. Did Burton tell you that? Did he tell you that they attacked on two fronts?”
“There were one hundred thousand this time?” I asked.
Glade shook his head. “The same damned fifty thousand, but they attacked on two fronts. They sent half their men in from the east side of town, and we didn’t have a single platoon in place to meet them. Not a single specking platoon.
“They always came in from the west. Why did they have to pick this battle to start thinking strategies?”
He sat and thought for a moment. “Five days ago we had too many men and too many weapons, and we couldn’t decide which one we wanted to throw away first. Now look at us.”
That wasn’t exactly accurate, but I knew better than to correct the general. Five days ago we were trying to decide whether to throw men or munitions at the Avatari, but we already knew we had limited supplies of both.
“Sir, what about the rocket launchers?” I asked. “Wasn’t the Army constructing them around campus?”
“Completed,” Glade said, sounding more miserable and frustrated than ever. “The only problem is that we left the damned rockets in the armory for safekeeping.”
Glade leaned back in his chair. The chair looked comfortable, but the general clearly took no comfort from it. “Do you know where that leaves us, Harris? That leaves us so far up shit creek we’re practically to the kidneys.”
Glade droned on about the battle, but I paid little attention. I felt like someone had drilled a hole in my head and poured thick oil into my brains. Thoughts came slowly. The world was coming to an end, and all I could do was hang on for the ride. I finished my sandwich in three bites.
Someone rapped at the door.
“Come in,” Glade barked.
“Jim, we better get going to the lab; the dwarf is waiting on us.”
“Oh yeah, I forgot about the briefing.” Glade laughed. “We don’t want to miss out on the latest bad news.”
General Haight turned toward me and paused. “I heard you sat the last fight out, son.”
“I got thrown in the brig,” I said, still trying to figure out who “Jim” was. Moments passed before I realized that Jim was commanding-officer-talk for General James Ptolemeus Glade.
“I heard that, too,” he said. “A firing squad would be too good for the bonehead who took you off the line.”
I did not say anything though I felt the same way.
The war did not reach the hallowed steps of the Science Laboratory. Not a window was cracked, not a doorpost was nicked. Not so much as a blade of grass looked out of place on the lawn. The only bombardment this building had seen came from the flocks of pigeons that gathered along its ledge.
I stepped into the lab and saw a janitor mopping the floor. In a city littered with dead soldiers, a city in which most of the skyscrapers now lay in ruins, here stood a man in blue canvas coveralls swinging a mop back and forth over the gleaming white floor. After everything I had seen over the last two weeks, this simple janitor looked more alien to me than the Avatari.
The floor was wet and shiny. Reflections of the fluorescent light fixtures showed in the water. I stopped to stare at that janitor for just a moment. He looked up at me and gave me a nervous smile, then one of General Glade’s officers asked, “You coming?” and we moved on toward the lab.
Military high command was and always will be a club for overaged boys. As officers are known to do, some of the ones leading this campaign came up with childish epithets for Arthur Breeze and William Sweetwater after that first briefing. The names that caught on were “the Cadaver” and “the Dwarf.” I once heard Newcastle make a joke about them having a “lesbian affair.” By now, however, the joking had stopped.
The generals walked through the lobby in silence. They did not speak to each other. They did not speak to their aides. They walked up the steps, taking one stair at a time, heads down and faces devoid of emotion. They did not look defeated, but they did not look proud. Gone were the days of boasting and haughtiness.
We filed into the lab and formed our familiar circle. Ninety-five percent of the fighting men had died, but the ring of generals remained intact. Sweetwater sat waiting for us, looking agitated as he fiddled with some odd contraptions.
“I suppose we should get started,” Sweetwater said, looking around the circle. “We might as well begin with the good news.”
“Good news?” Newcastle repeated. He did not wear his former smirk. “There’s good news?”
Sweetwater pressed a button on a portable communications console and played a recording of an audio signal. It was weak and filled with static. Then came a human voice. “This is Valhalla Station. Come in. Repeat, this is Valhalla Station. Come in.”
The crackle of the static grew louder, then …“Valhalla Station, this is UAN Thermopolis. We read you, Valhalla Station.” The static increased and the signal ended.
“What was that?” Newcastle asked.
“We were able to make a hole in the ion curtain,” Sweetwater said. He had always struck me as brilliant and arrogant, maybe a man with a chip on his shoulder. Without Breeze around, he seemed awkward. He fumbled for words and answered questions in sentences instead of paragraphs.
“There are ships out there?” General Hill asked.
“During the moment that we penetrated the curtain, we detected six battleships orbiting the planet.”
“Do we know if the Avatari have attacked Earth?” General Glade asked.
Sweetwater shook his head. “You just heard everything we have.”
“That’s it?” Newcastle asked. He shook his head, the disappointment showing on his face. “That is the good news—that you located six battleships orbiting the planet? They can’t send down reinforcements, you weren’t able to speak to them for more than a second, and you don’t know if Earth even exists. That is the best news you have for us? We can’t even call them back, and that’s the good news?”
“No,” Sweetwater said. “The good news is that we believe we have cracked the Avatari’s tachyon-based technology. Give us a little more time and—”
“A little more time?” Of all people, this time it was mild-mannered General James Hill, the Air Force officer who could not even get his pilots in the air, who cracked. “We are down to thirty-five thousand troops. Did you know that? I am about to send highly trained pilots into ground battles …ground battles! We have given you time, and blood, and everything else you have asked for! If you don’t have anything now, then, then …we’re specked. We’re really specked.”
William Sweetwater, short, heavy, with shaggy black hair and thick glasses, hung his head and sighed. The sound of that sigh was long and weary.
“Do you or do you not have a weapon that we can use?” General Newcastle asked in a quiet voice.
“Arthur had an idea,” Sweetwater confessed, “but that idea of his probably cost him his life.”
A stifling three-second pause hung in the room.
“Goddamn! We’ve lost. We’ve lost, do you understand that?” General Newcastle shouted. “We’re out of fighting solutions. So far the only thing you have given us is six useless battleships.” He turned to the other generals. “Gentlemen, the end of humanity came on our watch.”
None of the other officers said anything.
“Arthur believed he found a way to stop the Avatari from assembling,” Sweetwater said.
Another moment of silence followed, after which General Newcastle said in a voice so calm I could not believe it came from him, “Stop them from assembling? I …I don’t understand.”
“Tachyons are not like other kinds of particles, they do not bond together. They are in constant motion. We have never been able to prove their existence because they move faster than the speed of light and we would need an incredible amount of energy to cause them to stop. It must take even more energy to fuse them together, and that is why the Avatari degrade so quickly …it’s not because you destroyed them but because so much energy has leaked out. They no longer have enough energy to keep the tachyons fused,” Sweetwater said.
He typed something into a keyboard, and a video feed of the Avatari spheres appeared on a small screen near his seat. Near the spheres sat the dirty bomb Freeman had used to nuke the site. Sweetwater did not run the feed; he just left the image on the screen.
“Raymond and Lieutenant Harris made an important discovery the first day that the Avatari landed, but we did not have enough data to realize what they had found.” Sweetwater held up a petri dish holding a layer of rust-colored dust. “This was once a bullet.”
The generals crowded for a closer look. Finally, Newcastle asked, “What did you do to it?”
“We didn’t do anything to it in the lab. This was one of the bullets that Raymond fired through the light spheres. Something in the spheres coated the bullet, changing its chemical makeup.
“We initially thought it was some form of radiation. Then we found out about the gas Raymond and Lieutenant Harris discovered in the Avatari mines. Arthur …Doctor Breeze checked the information Raymond gathered about that gas and compared it to this bullet to see if the gas might have caused the changes to this bullet and found a match.
“It appears that the spheres are made out of that gas. They’re like a bubble of gas.
“Now watch this,” Sweetwater said. He started the video feed. The dirty bomb exploded. I relived all of the disturbing images on the screen—the holocaust, the flash that looked like a golden jellyfish as it rose in the air. Sweetwater froze the image before the firestorm re-formed itself into a mushroom cloud.
The scene occurred so quickly at the time that it took place in my head as a single blur. Watching from the helicopter, I had only paid attention to the conflagration itself. Now, on the screen, I saw the spheres. In the moment of the explosion, they seemed to dim.
Sweetwater pointed to one of the spheres with his pen.
“It’s getting darker,” General Glade said. “The bomb made it weaker.”
“That was what we assumed, too,” Sweetwater said. The feed resumed. As wind pushed and tore the forest, and the flash fire turned trees to ash, the spheres went dark. Then came the smoke, and the spheres vanished entirely. By the time that the smoke cleared, the spheres were as bright as before but considerably smaller. I had not noticed it at the time because I had been so focused on the explosion and its apparent failure. Now, in the recording, I saw that the spheres could not have even been a full yard in diameter. And there was something else, too—shit gas. A layer of shit gas covered the ground. Now, viewing everything magnified and in slow motion, I saw that the shit gas formed a layer under the smoke.
“The nuclear explosion had a much greater effect than we initially thought. After careful analysis, Dr. Breeze discovered that the spheres had not become darker, they had become coated with tachyons. The bomb both heated or irradiated the gas in the spheres, charging it so that it temporarily attracted tachyons.”
“Do you know if it was the heat or the radiation?” asked General Hill.
“No, we don’t know,” admitted Sweetwater. “But we will only need to run a few quick tests to find out. Once we know, we should be able to adjust the next explosion to maximize its impact.”
“But how does this help us?” asked Newcastle.
“When the Avatari emerge from their spheres, they attract tachyons and bond them together the same way this bomb attracted the tachyons to the sphere. The Avatari bodies are composed of supercharged gas, which attracts tachyons like a magnet.
“If we supercharge a larger source of the gas—”
“Like the gas in the mines,” interrupted General Hill.
“That radio message we picked up from the Thermopolis was received twenty seconds after Raymond and the lieutenant ran the nuclear test. By charging the spheres, they were able to poke a hole in the ion curtain,” Sweetwater said.
“So you are saying that if we charge the gas in the mines, we can get out of here?” asked General Haight. The mood in the room had changed, suddenly the generals sounded excited as they chattered back and forth.
“No,” said Sweetwater, and the room became quiet.
“First of all, gentlemen, understand that we are discussing an extreme amount of energy. If we could tap the energy it takes to create one Avatari soldier, we might have enough power to run a small city for a year,” Sweetwater said. “Assuming we can generate enough energy and we can take that energy to a large enough source of the gas, we might be able to attract the tachyons before they attach themselves to the Avatari. That was what Breeze believed, and it appears he was right all along.”
“How does that help us?” Newcastle asked.
“Because without the tachyons to create bodies and weapons, the Avatari aren’t much of a threat,” General Glade spoke slowly, a man figuring out the answer to a riddle.
“If it works, the next time the Avatari emerge, they will remain in their pure energy form,” Sweetwater said, “as will their weapons. Without tachyons forming a protective shell around their core, they should dissipate into the atmosphere in a matter of minutes.”
“In simple terms?” Newcastle asked.
“It’s as simple as this …The Avatari as we see them are an energy impulse made solid by a layer of tachyons. If Arthur was right, we can block the tachyons from attaching themselves to the Avatari by attracting them to a larger source of supercharged gas—the caves. The key is creating enough energy to attract tachyons.”
“So we need to break into the alien mines and detonate a device like the one you used on the spheres?” asked General Newcastle.
“No, sir, we are going to need something a great deal bigger than that little half-kiloton bomb we sent Raymond and the Lieutenant to explode. According to our calculations, we’re going to need at minimum a twenty-five-megaton explosion in their caves. We assume you have a device that size.”
Several of the generals groaned. Newcastle remained silent as the other generals complained among themselves. When the groaning stopped, he said, “That, Doctor, is going to be a problem. The Avatari just demolished our armory. We had nuclear weapons, but they’re all buried now.”
“Well, that does present a problem,” said Sweetwater. He turned to me, and said, “Raymond will be back in a half hour. Do you think the two of you could dig out one of those bombs?”
“What’s the point?” General Haight asked. “If we stop the aliens from coming back, we’re still going to fry.” This earned Haight a few appreciative nods.
Huhhhhh. Huhhh. “You know what, General Haight, given a choice, I think I would rather die in battle than get fried by an overheated sun,” General Glade said.
“Hear, hear,” said Newcastle. General Hill patted Glade on the back.
“The sun? The supernova? Gentlemen, I should have been more explicit from the start. We have learned a great deal about how the Avatari create a supernova by studying the reaction they caused in the Templar System. If the Avatari were to begin working on Nigellus, it would be at least twenty thousand years before it began to supernova and another ten thousand years before it incinerated this planet.”
“Excuse me?” General Glade asked.
“Twenty thousand years,” Sweetwater repeated.
“Twenty thousand years?” Newcastle asked. “You made it sound like it would happen immediately.”
Sweetwater stifled a laugh. “I believe it was Dr. Breeze who discussed it with you. This is more his area of expertise.”
“What are you saying about twenty thousand years?” General Hill asked.
“I understood what Arthur meant. It never occurred to me that …well, the destruction of the sun in the Templar System took place over a fifty thousand-year period. We’ve documented the entire cycle by observing it from different locations across the galaxy.
“From the far end of the galaxy, one hundred thousand light-years from Templar, the solar system is unchanged. From approximately eighty thousand light-years away, we can detect slight variations in the size of the sun.”
“So much for the goose getting cooked,” Glade said.
“For the immediate future, I suppose you are correct, but they are still saturating the planet with a highly toxic gas. The atmosphere is already permeated. If they continue pouring gas into this planet, we will die.”
Freeman liberated a jeep when he got back to Valhalla, and we drove through the graveyard that had once been the capital city of New Copenhagen.
“You missed all the action,” I said, as we pulled away from campus. Had he known, Freeman might have pointed out that I had spent most of the battle stretched out on a cot. Freeman being Freeman, however, said nothing.
“I heard that Dr. Breeze is missing,” I said, still trying to drum up a conversation. We were driving on surprisingly safe roads—the Corps of Engineers had sent teams out to clear a path between the university campus and the hotel.
“I found him,” Freeman said.
I smiled. “Maybe that’s a good omen.”
“He’s dead,” Freeman said.
“Oh,” I said.
We drove the next two miles without a word. I took in the sights—dunes where skyscrapers and office buildings once stood; parks and alleys filled with bodies; dogs brazenly gnawing at the bodies of the servicemen who used to hunt them.
The engineers had cleared the roads all the way to the hotel, but with trucks, jeeps, and emergency-equipment vehicles blocking the driveway, we had to park our jeep along the street and walk to the ruins of the hotel. I climbed out for a look around. Wind rustled past. The mild winter was ending.
In the distance, I could see that the engineers had cleared the rubble and debris from the entrance to the garage. The arch of the garage opened like a man-made cave with a road vanishing into its darkened maw. From here, the whole thing looked untouched except that there was supposed to be a luxury hotel on top of it.
“So, do you like spelunking?” I asked Freeman.
He said nothing.
“At least there aren’t any giant spiders mining the garage,” I said, trying to sound optimistic.
“Just a couple of nuclear bombs,” Freeman said.
“Well, yeah, there are the bombs …and all kinds of unexploded shells …and probably some chemical weapons.” Engineers scurried about us, ignoring us, surveying the damage. There were engineers everywhere. They reminded me of ants walking about an anthill.
I saw a flashlight sitting on a table and decided to borrow it. As I took it toward the garage, I heard somebody yell, “Hey! Who took my flashlight?”
“Let’s go have a look,” I said to Freeman.
“I mean it! I want it back now!” yelled the guy at the table.
The concrete arch at the front of the garage did not have so much as a crack in it. Light from the ion curtain seeped in, through the open archway, and I could see everything around me quite clearly. The structural integrity seemed intact.
The ramp entered the garage as a four-lane highway, then, just after the ticket booths, it narrowed to two lanes of traffic as it dropped toward lower levels at an acute angle. Jagged glass teeth hung from the windows of the booths.
Beyond the booths, the light from the ion curtain faded, and I switched on the flashlight. Standing a few feet behind me, Freeman switched on the torch he had brought. The ramp spiraled down about twenty feet, then spilled into the first level of the garage—a cavernous expanse that had once been as wide as the hotel itself. It wasn’t anymore, though; a solid wall of debris rose from the floor to the ceiling.
The air was colder down here. My breath turned to steam. I blew on my hands to warm them. When I paused to survey the area around me, I stomped my feet to keep them warm.
“Dead end,” I said.
Ahead of us, little bubbles of light marked the places where engineers were conducting stress tests on caved-in areas. Their voices echoed softly.
“I bet they could dig this whole thing out,” I said.
Freeman shook his head. “If they had a month.”
“So we find another way in,” I said. “Maybe we can tunnel our way in from outside.”
I saw a trace of red mixed in with the concrete and rubble and went to have a closer look. From a distance it looked as if it might have been blood, but it was dry. When I shined my flashlight on it, I saw that it was a wedge of the red carpet that had once covered the lobby. Stepping over concrete boulders and splintered wood, I gave the carpet a tug. It frayed before I could pull it loose.
This far into the garage, the floor seemed strong, but that did not mean much. Deeper in it might have collapsed under the weight of everything that had toppled onto it. I did not see any bodies or blood. As far as I knew, every Marine was on the streets when the Hotel Valhalla came down.
I saw a metal bar sticking out of a mound of cement chunks and pulled on it. The bar did not budge. I gave it a harder yank. It did not come out, but it wobbled freely. As I pulled it again, a small avalanche cascaded down the pile of debris covering the bar. Plaster and concrete rolled down and struck the floor.
They expected Freeman and me to go rooting through this and come up with nuclear bombs? I didn’t like the idea of hauling live nuclear weapons through a collapsed structure but didn’t see any alternatives. Being crushed under a mountain of concrete did not seem any worse than being shot by an Avatari rifle. I might die faster. In the end, though, it wouldn’t matter whether a million tons of hotel fell on our heads or an atomic bomb exploded in our faces or the Avatari shot us through the head with their specking light bolts, dead is dead.
“We’re not getting in through here,” Freeman said, his voice almost as soft as its echo in the underground vault. He turned to look for another route.
It’s all just a matter of time, I thought. If I skipped the dig, the Avatari would kill us when they returned. I could drive into the forest and hide from the Avatari, but sooner or later the gunk they were dumping into the mountains would poison the air. Even if I found a way off the planet, I would have no place to go. The aliens had “sleeved” every habitable planet in the galaxy.
Go spelunking in a crumbling underground parking lot? Sure. What’s the worry when you only have days to live?
Freeman drove me to the dormitory, then went on to the Science Lab. He said he would pick me up when the engineers found a way into the garage.
The clock was ticking. We needed to get into that underground garage, liberate at least one nuke, fly it to the alien dig site, and detonate it before the next battle. The Avatari returned every three days. I’d spent a day locked up in that cell, another eight hours had passed since Major Burton released me …
“It might take them all day to find a way into the garage,” I said.
“If you don’t hear from me in twelve hours, don’t worry about it,” Freeman said. He had a point.
Thomer met me as I entered the dormitory. He looked like every other clone, but I recognized him just the same. You do that when you live in a world of clones. You find ways to pull them out of the crowd.
“We found Philips,” he said.
“You brought him back with you?” I asked.
Thomer nodded.
“Let’s go have a look,” I said, and followed Sergeant Thomer out of the building. He led me to a little parking lot behind the dorm. A single jeep sat in the lot, which was ringed by three-foot snowdrifts with surprisingly clean snow. A cold wind blew across the scene, making the bare branches rattle in the trees.
We approached the jeep. Thomer had laid Philips out in the back of the jeep, curling his knees against his chest so that he would fit. He’d left Philips covered under an Army blanket. I pulled back the blanket.
The man lying in the back of the jeep could have been any of the over one million clones flown to New Copenhagen to defend the planet. His helmet was removed, revealing a face with an ice blue tint to the skin. He had died with his mouth closed. Even Philips would have appreciated that irony.
Gone were the swagger and defiance that once made Sergeant Mark Philips stand out. The Japanese said that it was “the nail that stuck out that got beaten down.” I suppose the indomitable Sergeant Philips had finally been beaten down. What remained was a body lying on its side in muddy combat armor. Had he been shot with a particle-beam weapon, his armor would have been in splinters or entirely gone.
“Where was he hit?” I asked.
“Shot through the chest,” Thomer said.
I wrestled Philips’s body onto its back, prepared to see bullet holes. I knew how I would react; I’d already rehearsed the scene in my head. I would turn without a word and march into the dorms. I would find Moffat and kill him, without ever speaking a word.
The wound was three inches across and ran right through the center of Philips’s chest. Except for the trail of white where his armor melted and drooled into the wound, the hole was clean—the work of an Avatari bolt.
“It doesn’t matter who fired the shot,” Thomer said, “Moffat killed him.”
“Yes, he did,” I said. The son of a bitch had intentionally sent Philips to die.
“Philips knew this was coming,” Thomer said. He was trying to stay in control …good clones don’t accuse natural-born officers. “This is what he wanted to happen.”
“I suppose,” I said.
“The moment they carted you away, Moffat sent Philips’s platoon back out to the enemy line.” Thomer, the closest the clone Marines had ever come to producing a Boy Scout, had to struggle to say these next words: “I’ll shoot that bastard if I get a shot at him.”
I’ll shoot that bastard if I get a shot at him. The neural programming hardwired into Thomer’s brain should not have allowed him to think such thoughts, let alone say them.
I did not know what to say. I went back into the dorms wondering how things had become so undone.
The excavation project commenced within the hour. It began with two crazed Army generals trying to show each other up. General Newcastle, still the highest-ranking officer on the planet, had his Corps of Engineers begin digging while General Haight, the up-and-comer, sent soldiers to all the local rescue stations to locate specialized equipment.
In the end, it was General James Ptolemeus Glade who stole the show. He was preordained to win the pissing match because the man going after the bombs wore a Marine’s uniform. When Sweetwater asked me to go down, nobody volunteered to take my place.
I helped General Glade trump Newcastle and Haight a second time by telling him about S.C.O.O.T.E.R., the exploration robot Freeman and I had used to scout out the alien dig before we went in.
“Good idea,” Glade said. “But unless those robots can dig their way out of a collapsed underground garage …”
“They didn’t all go down with the armory, sir,” I said. “Freeman got one out of the Science Lab.”
Huhuhu. I could not tell if Glade had just cleared his throat or laughed. Maybe that sound came as a combination of the two. “Damn, son,” said Glade. “That’s a good idea. I love showing that son of a bitch Newcastle who’s got the real stones around here.”
In the battle to show who had real stones, Haight came in last. Rather than showing up with specialized equipment, his detail arrived on the scene with sonic cannons, ropes, a collapsible platform, radio gear, hard hats, flashlights, hydraulic lifts, and other bric-a-brac that Newcastle’s Corps of Engineers had brought from the start.
A few hours passed before the engineers cleared out enough of the garage for Freeman and me to attempt an entry. An hour before the garage was ready, Freeman called to tell me I was on deck.
“Aren’t we both on deck?” I asked.
“You’re on deck,” he said.
“Where are you going?” I asked. I could not help feeling like I was about to do something really dangerous, and Freeman was skating off scot-free.
“I need to find Breeze,” Freeman said.
“I thought you said he was dead,” I said.
“Sweetwater needs the equipment he had on him.”
“Where is he?” I asked.
“The Avatari mines.”
“You’re going into the mines?” Suddenly retrieving nuclear bombs from an unstable underground garage did not seem so bad.
“Only the entrance. Breeze didn’t make it very far,” Freeman said as he hung up.
So I called Major Burton and had Herrington assigned to my detail, then I dressed and went down to the street. While Newcastle’s engineers finished their stress tests, Sergeant Herrington located a staff car and picked me up in front of the barracks. “Where to, sir?” he asked, as I climbed into the passenger’s seat.
“The hotel,” I said.
“The Hotel Valhalla?” Herrington asked. “The Mudders smashed it, sir. They knocked that place flat.”
Looking into the sky, I almost mistook this for the early hours of a beautiful day. The sky had the white-paper look that it sometimes has on clear mornings as the sun rises over a cloudless atmosphere. There were clouds up in the silvery brightness and I realized it was midday.
“Do you still want to go back to the hotel?” Herrington asked.
“I do,” I said. “We’re excavating the armory.”
“The armory?” Herrington asked. “Hot damn.”
We drove across campus. Snowdrifts still leaned hard on a few of the buildings. The parks and greenbelts looked far too peaceful. Soldiers walked the pathways, and jeeps crossed the roads, but the place looked empty. This was a large campus, and the tens of thousands of defenders left to hold this ground did not provide enough warm bodies to replace the missing students.
“We aren’t going to beat the Mudders, are we, sir?” Herrington asked.
I thought about telling him the truth. I could tell him that they were not “Mudders,” in fact, they were not even living beings, just avatars of aliens who were far away and safe from assault. I thought about telling him that nothing we could do would matter in the end since the Avatari were pumping the planet full of chemicals.
“Sure we can win. The Science Lab has some ideas that could turn this thing around,” was what I said. I did not believe a word of it. As for Herrington, he was a clone. When an officer gave him information, his neural programming was supposed to make him accept it.
“So there’s a chance?” he asked.
We drove away from the campus and entered Valhalla, a city in ruins.
“We’re Marines,” I said. “There’s always a fighting chance.”
If we could get into the garage and retrieve a nuclear bomb, maybe we could stop the Avatari from forming. Maybe magnetizing the gas in the mines would suck a wide enough hole through the ion curtain for us to contact those ships circling the planet. Then what? How would we stop the Avatari from returning? Templar went supernova and fried Hubble fifty thousand years ago. If the Avatari were the ones who did it, they had a long and powerful history.
I had come to dislike driving the streets of Valhalla. Every toppled building spoke of our failure to defend it. The bodies were everywhere. The first time I saw packs of dogs or birds gathered around bodies, I wanted to shoot them. But seeing animals feeding on bodies no longer bothered me; I had seen too much of it.
The Avatari, a numerically insignificant enemy, had attacked us like a cancer. The truth was that we had gone the wrong way at every turn, and maybe we deserved to go extinct. For centuries the Unified Authority had relied heavily on naval power, leaving our ground tactics pretty much unchanged since the nineteenth century. Now that we faced an enemy who we could not stop in space, our ground attacks proved inadequate.
We’d had a nuclear solution all along, but we had stuck to conventional weapons until it was too late. First we threw away our numerical advantage, then we chucked our weapons, and now we found ourselves alone and unarmed.
“I’m not fishing for answers, sir, but have you talked to Thomer lately?” Herrington asked.
“Should we talk about something in particular?” I asked.
“He’s pretty upset about Philips,” Herrington said.
“They were best friends,” I said.
“Thomer blames Lieutenant Moffat.”
“So do I,” I said.
“I’m worried he wants to go after the lieutenant,” Herrington said. He slowed the car down, hoping to talk.
“Not Thomer,” I said. “I don’t think he has it in him.”
“I’ve known Kelly for a while. He’s not a big talker. If he’s talking about getting even, I’d take it seriously, sir.”
“It won’t happen,” I said. “Thomer won’t kill Moffat. I’m sure of it.”
“What makes you so sure?” Herrington asked.
We had drifted within a block or two of the hotel. I watched soldiers carrying rescue equipment into the garage. “Thomer’s a clone; he can’t murder a superior officer. It’s not in his programming.”
“Lieutenant, I grew up in an orphanage. I don’t know if you knew that, sir. I grew up around clones, and I am here to tell you that I’m seeing them do a lot of things these days that go against their programming. It makes me nervous.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, “me too.”
Captain Everley, Glade’s aide, bustled me through the crowd. We walked down the ramp toward the garage passing fire trucks and smaller emergency vehicles. The thump of air compressors and the buzz of a dozen electrical generators created a smothering blanket of sound. Between the arc lights, the workmen, and the hot air that always accompanies officers, the temperature had gone up in the garage.
“Captain Baxter, this is Lieutenant Wayson Harris.” Everley introduced me to a big man in Army fatigues.
I saluted. The captain returned the salute.
“Harris is leading the team,” Everley said.
“So I hear,” the captain answered, his lack of interest obvious in his voice. He turned to me. “How many men do you want to take down with us?” The captain reminded me of some of the guys I used to fight at Sad Sam’s Palace—slender around the gut but with huge shoulders. He had scars on his face and a surly attitude. I had already forgotten his name.
“You’re coming?” I asked. “I prefer to work with Marines.”
“You got a problem with regular Army, Harris?” the captain asked. “This is your op, but I’m coming.”
“I see,” I said. I thought about what we would need to liberate a couple of nukes. If push came to shove, having a big, strong moron to absorb the radiation might come in handy. “We might be able to get away with only five men if the lower levels aren’t too broken up. If the damage is too bad and we can find a route—”
“I can help you with that.” A sheep in colonel’s clothing trotted in to join our conversation. “You’re Lieutenant Harris, is that right? You’re the one leading the search team?” He reached to shake my hand. “John Young, Army Corps of Engineers.”
Young had an Army uniform and a military haircut, but those were the only military things about him. He introduced himself like a civilian, smiling and expecting me to shake hands. I shook hands, but when Young—probably not a military man but a civilian engineer pressed into service during a time of emergency—reached to shake hands with Baxter, he came up dry.
“I hope you found us a way in,” Baxter said. His tone of voice reflected his lack of respect for Young. “I’m looking forward to the workout.” He flexed his shoulder as if limbering up for a fight.
“We’ve taken soundings and X-rays,” Young said as he led me to a card table in a brightly lit corner of the garage. He sounded cheerful, like a man who is just happy to be of service. He also sounded like a man in the know. I suspected that Newcastle had confided in him, and he knew the truth about the Avatari.
Strings of lights hung along the ceiling in this corner of the garage. The blades of a seven-foot-tall fan lazily spun, circulating the warm air away from the table.
Generals Newcastle, Haight, and Glade huddled around the table. Young pushed his way among them, saying in a dismissive voice guaranteed to offend any commanding officer, “Make way, make way. Some of us have work to do.
“General Glade tells me you were the one who suggested we use that robot. That was a great suggestion.”
Newcastle glared at Glade, who answered him with a smirk.
Young spread a set of blueprints across the table. The drawing showed a side view of the garage. He then spread a second blueprint over the first. It showed separate top-down schematics of all seven levels of the garage. Young pointed to an uneven circle drawn around the top level.
“We’re here.” He drew an X. “This circle represents the collapsed area. As you can see, it takes up most of this level of the garage.”
Young moved his finger down to the next level. The collapsed area on the second level was less than a third the size of the area on the upper level. “Whatever kind of weapon the Mudders are using, it only impacts structures on the surface of the ground. Using that S.C.O.O.T.E.R. robot, we were able to get a look at a few of the lower levels. From what I can tell, the structural integrity remains good.”
Even though he called the aliens “Mudders,” something about the way Young spoke made me think that he knew they were avatars. I could hear it in his voice. He must have known that the Army guys did not know and that it was privileged information.
“What about this damage zone?” I asked, pointing to the circled area on the second level.
“It’s caved in there,” Young said.
“But the structure is sound around the cave-in?” I asked.
“Sound? As in unharmed?”
Young smiled. “Harris, a fifty-six-story hotel collapsed on top of this garage. Frankly, I am amazed how well it held up.”
Young said that the damaged area on the third level was only a fraction of the size on the second. The fourth level, where they stored the nukes, was clear.
“Yeah, I got that it’s solid. How do we get down there?” Baxter, my Army-appointed second-in-command, demanded.
“Okay, so this is the top level of the garage,” said Young. He pointed to a square. “We cut a hole through the floor here. That’s how we got the robot in. I suppose we could make the hole bigger if you want to drop down through it, Captain.”
Baxter bent over the schematic. He nodded and grunted his approval.
“That’s our best way in?” I asked.
Young laughed. “Personally, I’d take the stairs.” He pointed to two wavy lines that snaked along the circled area on the map. “We cleared a path to the stairwell.”
As I looked at the blueprint, I saw that the collapse line only approached the stairs on the top floor. “Can we take the stairs all the way down?”
“Yup,” Young said.
“Depending on the size of a fifty-megaton nuke, it’s going to be rough going carrying the bomb up the stairs,” I said.
“You’d be surprised,” Young said. “Your bomb is not that big, two men should be able to carry it without any problem. If you prefer, though, you could take the elevator.” He pointed to a spot on the blueprint. Under his finger were the words, “Shaft is structurally sound.”
“The elevator works?” I asked.
“We had to put new braces on the motor and some of the gears, but the shaft is fine.”
“So what was all that bullshit about dropping through a hole in the floor?” Baxter asked.
“You said you were looking forward to the workout,” Young said. “I thought you wanted the exercise.”
“Asshole,” Baxter said.
Young smiled.
I had a couple of hours to rest before we left on our mission to the mines. While I slept, Sweetwater and the techs at the Science Lab prepared the bomb we had retrieved, the ground crew readied the transport we would fly to the Avatari dig, and the remaining troops dug in to defend Valhalla. Fifty-eight hours had passed since the last time the Avatari came knocking. Sometime in the next fourteen hours, they would come back for their return engagement.
Thanks to John Young and the Corps of Engineers, we were well armed. We had rockets loaded into the launchers along Campus Drive. Our grenadiers had more grenades and shoulder-fired rockets than they could use in a month. We had so many mobile rocket launchers that our riflemen and automatic riflemen abandoned their weapons of record and took up rockets. For the first time in known history, Marine fire teams were made up of four grenadiers.
The Avatari had forced us into an advantageous battle-ground. Mostly flat and studded with heaps of rubble instead of buildings, the field would allow men with rockets and grenades clear shots at an advancing enemy. The last defenders of Valhalla would have good ground with lots of cover from which they could engage the Avatari from a distance, yield ground, and engage again. If they were lucky, they might wear the Avatari down.
In a few hours I would take a crew into the Avatari mine. Our objective would be to reach the gas deposits and detonate a fifty-megaton nuclear bomb. We hoped to set the nuke and beat a hasty retreat, but hopes are not as important as objectives to Marines. If everything went as expected, the bomb would blow, the gas would charge and attract tachyons, and it would punch a hole in the ion curtain. If Sweetwater was right, the bomb would change the gas in the caverns to shit gas. Basically, we were going the speck the aliens’ plans.
For some reason I had the feeling things were not going to go smoothly. I sat in my quarters, the curtains drawn, the room nearly dark, as I wrestled with ghosts from my past and nervousness about my near future. I had a copy of the Bible, a book that I once misinterpreted and now no longer believed. Beside it sat a copy of the Space Bible, a book I once dismissed and now believed and despised. Originally titled Man’s True Place in the Universe: The Doctrines of Morgan Atkins, the Space Bible told the implausible story of how scientists had encountered an alien they called a “Space Angel.”
Someone threw open the door to my room with so much force that it left a dent in the wall. The crash made me jump.
“I hear you’ve been looking for me, Harris.” First Lieutenant Warren Moffat stomped into my room, drunk off his ass, swaying as he stood there glaring down at me with heavily bloodshot eyes. “You think you’re scary shit, don’t you, clone?” He shut the door behind him.
“I haven’t been looking for you,” I said, which was true. I sort of hoped we would run into each other, but the thought of looking for Moffat had not occurred to me.
“You think you’re something, don’t you, Harris? The general’s pet clone. I heard you were an admiral’s pet, too. Frigging Liberator clone.”
He had his M27 with him, strapped to his belt. Even drunk, a good Marine never forgets how to use his weapon. I did not consider Moffat a good Marine.
The civil thing would have been to tell him to go home. I, however, was not feeling civil. My combat reflex had already started; the warm sensation of testosterone and adrenaline flowing through my blood had begun. What I felt for Moffat was not anger, it was hate. I wanted to kill the man. My combat reflex filled me with clarity of thought and the desire to kill. I had never hated anyone before, but I hated this man. The reflex had never given me the desire to kill before, but it did now. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I was aware of all the things that had come undone—clones spraying graffiti, Thomer wanting to kill an officer, Philips ignoring orders, and now I was ready to give in to the Liberator bloodlust. Things come undone in the end.
I pushed away from my desk and stood up. “You carrying that gun for show, or are you planning to use it?” I asked.
“Look at you, the big Liberator!” Moffat laughed. He was just like Philips—a Marine in self-destruct mode who planned to use a fellow Marine as the instrument of his suicide. He had to know I would kill him. I could kill him sober, he’d be no trouble drunk. He stared me in the eyes, no fear showing on his face. His body vaguely swayed as he stood there.
“Go sleep it off, asshole,” I said, knowing the message would only piss him off. I took a small step toward him. I did not want him to go sleep it off, I wanted him to reach for his gun. I took another step in his direction. The dorm room was small, and he was only a few feet away.
“Do you think winning this war will make you human? Do you think it’s going to make you a natural-born? Specking synth,” he said. And then he did it. He reached for his gun. It was just a twitch. He could not have possibly meant to draw it, but it was enough for me.
I swatted his hand from the grip of his M27 with my left hand and slammed the blade of my right into his throat. As he gasped for air, I grabbed him by the chin and the nape of his neck and snapped his head to the side. There was a soft click as the chain of bones that made up his neck twisted apart
Moffat collapsed. That was death—your body goes limp, you piss and shit yourself, nothing more. No one-way ticket to heaven. As far as I could tell, Moffat’s journey ended when his head bounced against the floor.
Killing Moffat did not bring Philips back, but it left me feeling slightly better about life. The only problem was that now that he was dead, now that the threat had passed, I felt an emotional vacuum forming. The hormone began to thin in my blood, and I didn’t want it to go.
“What do you think now, hotshot?” I asked Moffat. He lay on the floor as lifeless as a puppet cut from its strings. “Where are your natural-born buddies now, asshole?” I kicked him.
Kicking Moffat’s corpse was not as satisfying as snapping his neck. It was not even a close substitute, and I wanted to feel that first satisfaction again. At that moment, I needed something exciting to happen, and I would sacrifice anything to get it. If I could have, I would have resuscitated Moffat so I could kill him a second time.
Now I understood why cats play with mice instead of simply killing them. The moment of death comes so quickly; and once it’s gone, what do you do? I could sense the heat draining from my blood, and I felt desperate to make it stay.
There was Captain Everley, Glade’s officious aide. I didn’t like him much, maybe I could go kill him. Maybe, if I killed him …But he was such a weakling. And then it came to me—Baxter, the prick from the Army that I took into the garage …I could …I could …
I looked down at Moffat and nudged the antisynthetic bastard with my toe. There was no question about what I had done this time—I had committed murder. I’d suckered the poor bastard into reaching for his gun and snapped his neck. I felt bad, but I did not feel bad for him. I felt bad because he was dead, and I wanted more of the hormone in my rapidly chilling veins.
“My God,” I said. This was how the Liberators became what they were. This was why my kind were outlawed. I went to the communications console and sent a signal to Command. There would be repercussions from this killing. The man was in my room, he had booze in his blood and his gun in his hands, but he was a natural-born and I …I was a Liberator.
“Harris, shouldn’t you be getting ready?” Captain Everley asked as he answered the call.
“You might want to send somebody to collect my company commander,” I said. “We had a bit of a run-in.”
“Should I send a doctor?”
“No, but a priest might be good.”
“Oh, shit,” Everley said. “What have you done, Harris? I better call General Glade.”
“I heard about Lieutenant Moffat,” Major Burton said, as I climbed into the jeep. He had suited up in combat armor, not the white armor we’d worn out in the open but the standard-issue dark stuff—the stuff we would wear as we entered the Avatari dig, the same armor I now wore. “Let’s go,” he said to the driver. A caravan of four trucks followed behind us.
“Think there’s going to be an inquest?” I asked. I felt curious but not concerned.
“I’m not entirely sure there’s going to be anyone alive to hold one,” Burton answered. “Even if there is an inquest, I think you will come off clean. There were two men outside your room when he smashed the door in. They said they heard him yelling at you and you telling him to go home.”
“Did they?” I asked. “Did they happen to mention why they didn’t call for an MP?”
“Yes, they did,” Burton said. “When they heard Moffat fall, they thought he had passed out.”
Had I been thinking, I might not have said what I said next. “The bastard did me a favor when he came to my quarters; he saved me the trouble of looking for him.”
“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” Burton said. “Lieutenant, you went a long way toward proving that the killing was not premeditated when you reported it right away; don’t spoil it now.”
“So there could still be trouble?” I asked.
“We have an impossible mission, and everyone agrees that you are the best man to lead it. If we make it out alive, I don’t think anyone is going to ask about last night.”
“What if we don’t make it out?” I asked.
Burton smiled. “If you don’t make it out, will you really give a shit what anyone thinks about you?”
That last comment might have been meant to make me feel better, but it didn’t. No one gave a shit about me; I was a clone. We spent most of the drive in silence.
During that silence, Major Burton’s entire demeanor changed. When he next spoke, he looked pale. “I’m scared, Harris. I’m so specking scared I think I’m going to be sick.”
I wanted to give him the same advice a drill sergeant once gave me: “If you have a choice, wet yourself.” We had a hose inside our armor that gathered urine. When you vomited, you inevitably left sawdust-colored stains on your chest plate.
I did not say that, however. Instead, I said, “You don’t need to come with us, sir. An extra pair of hands won’t make much of a difference.” He didn’t need to tell me how scared he felt, I could see it in his face and posture. Natural-born or not, he was a Marine at heart, and he would not back out. I felt a strange sympathy for the man. He had always been decent.
“Do you think we’re going to survive this?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “It’s a one-way ticket.”
“And you’re okay with that?” Burton asked.
“I’d rather take a one-way trip than wait around to be slaughtered.”
Burton swallowed. He nodded but said nothing.
As we approached the landing strip, I saw trucks and jeeps parked around the buildings. All the top brass came to see us off. Now that the end was so near, the new competition among the generals was to see which one could portray himself as being more a man of the people. General Newcastle, who had previously preferred a limousine, had came in a staff-driven jeep, probably the first jeep he had ridden in years. General Haight drove himself in a simple town car. General Glade rode in the back of the troop carrier with the men from one of my platoons.
Burton and I waited in the jeep while he collected himself, the color slowly returning to his face.
Thomer approached us. He gave me a sharp salute, then asked, “Want me to get the gear loaded, sir?” He had a new energy to his step. I could not be sure, but I suspected that Thomer’s new enthusiasm had something to do with the late Lieutenant Moffat.
“Load it,” I said.
He saluted and left.
“You okay?” I asked Burton.
He drew in a long, deep breath, looked up, and met my eyes. “You know what, Harris, you’re better than any of them.” He looked at the generals standing in their little cult, then back at me, and said, “You’re tougher and smarter than all of them put together. Harris, you’re the real Marine.”
“Wear your helmet until you get into the transport,” I said. “No one will be able to tell you were scared.”
“Lieutenant Harris. Lieutenant Harris, thank God we caught you.” William Sweetwater waddled to the front of the pack of generals as they came toward the jeep. He was so out of breath from outrunning those old men that he bent over to huff and puff after calling my name. Sweat pasted his long black hair to his pudgy face. “Harris, we’re coming with you.”
Now there was an irony—Major Terry Burton, a professional Marine, had just told me that the thought of heading into the Avatari caves left him so scared he wanted to puke; now here stood William Sweetwater, all of four-foot-eight and out of breath from outrunning generals, demanding in on the mission.
“You want to go into the caves?” I asked. I looked over at General Glade, the man who had once called Sweetwater a coward. Our eyes locked for a moment, then he looked away.
“There’s a lot more to this than just blowing up a bomb down there,” Sweetwater said. Blowing up a bomb was, of course, exactly what I expected to do. “There are going to be tests. We’re going to need to calibrate the explosion. We’re not trying to blow up Avatari, we’re building a magnet for attracting tachyon particles. We need to—”
“Does this have to do with Dr. Breeze?” I asked.
Sweetwater knew exactly what I meant. I was suggesting that he was trying to go because his friend had died. I was suggesting he was unneeded baggage, and the dwarf scientist knew it. He froze like a thief caught in a spotlight, turned to face me head-on, and growled, “You’re goddamned specking right this has to do with Arthur.”
“Breeze is dead,” I said. “You’re not going to change that.”
“We are aware of that,” Sweetwater said in a cold voice. “That does not negate the fact that you will need someone to run final tests on the gas and calibrate the explosion for maximum effect.”
“And you are the only man for the job?” I asked.
“The best man for the job,” he said. He fumbled in his jacket and pulled out a very-small-caliber automatic pistol. “We also know how to use one of these,” he said.
Still sitting beside me in the jeep, Major Burton could not stop himself from laughing as he looked at the little man holding the little pistol. “A tiny gun like that won’t do you much good against the Mudders,” Burton said.
“You’d need armor,” I said. “The air is toxic.”
“We are aware of that, we authorized your first visit and analyzed the results,” said Sweetwater. He opened the little canvas bag that hung from his shoulder and dug out a rebreather and a pair of goggles that were wide enough to fit over his glasses.
“I’m not sure what that gas is going to do to your skin,” I said. I was anxious to get moving. We were wasting time.
“These will get us into the site,” Sweetwater said. “We don’t expect to come back.”
“Lieutenant Harris, is there a problem?” Newcastle asked. He and the other generals stood a few feet back from the jeep, waiting for Burton and me.
“Someone get this man a particle-beam pistol,” I said.
“You’ll take us?” Sweetwater looked near tears. Small, pudgy, and severely uncoordinated, this man had probably grown up being picked last for every group activity that did not involve science.
“You just keep up with us,” I said, handing him a particle-beam pistol. “If you fall behind, you’re on your own.”
Sweetwater stowed that pistol in his bag so gently you would have thought I’d given him a faulty grenade. “Freeman is in that transport; go tell him you’re coming along for the ride,” I said, pointing to the only transport with an open ramp. He thanked me, picked up his bag, and waddled off.
“You sure you don’t need more men?” Newcastle asked.
I had a quick vision of him foisting an entire platoon of muscle-headed Neanderthals like Captain Baxter on me. “I just picked up another new recruit,” I said, pointing at Sweetwater. “That gets us to forty-nine.” We had forty-seven men in the company, plus Freeman, and now William Sweetwater.
“You’re going to need an entire regiment at the very least,” Newcastle said. “I can have more men—”
“I’ve been in those caves,” I said. “The entrance is a bottleneck, and the route to our target area is a narrow path. The plan is to place the bomb by the gas and beat a hasty retreat. The last thing I need is a regiment of men clogging the works once that nuke is armed,” I said. It was a lie. I didn’t expect any of us to make it out alive, but that didn’t matter, not much.
There was just a brief moment when I stopped and questioned why I was doing this. I wasn’t doing it for love of humanity, and I sure as hell was not going into that mountain again because I wanted to save a bunch of crusty old bastards like these generals. Mostly I was going because I was programmed to go, I supposed I never had much of a choice.
Thomer jogged over to join us. “The gear’s loaded, sir. The rest of the company is on board.”
I knew why Sergeant Kelly Thomer was going on this mission—neural programming. William Sweetwater was going because he had something to prove, even if it would cost him his life. I suppose he felt he had to prove it to himself more than to anyone else. Surely he didn’t care what Newcastle and these generals thought about him.
So the soulless clones and the misfit scientist would die carrying out a mission while these privileged jackass generals waved us good-bye. Maybe that was all they were made to do, these high-powered officers. They were the human equivalent of S.C.O.O.TE.R. robots, practicing the self-preservation programming that was genetically hardwired into their brains. Newcastle’s version of self-preservation involved sending men to their deaths.
And the programming in my brain made me fight. I wasn’t fighting for humanity. Hell, I wasn’t even fighting for myself, I was fighting simply because that was what I did. I fought.
“I have a flight to catch,” I told Newcastle.
“Good luck, Lieutenant,” General Glade said with a salute. He turned to Burton and saluted him as well.
“I don’t need to tell you just how much is riding on your shoulders,” General Newcastle said. He also saluted.
In the background, I heard the thunderous roar of a Tomcat formation. The jets passed over us seconds before the noise of their engines could catch up. They flew a few hundred yards above the ground, remaining well below cloud level. We all watched the five-jet formation bank and circle back over us.
One way or another, this would be the final battle. Flying too low over the city, the jets would be easy targets; but they’d have been even easier marks sitting on a runway. The troops protecting the city would fire every bullet, missile, and rocket they had; why spare the jets?
I returned the salute. “General, good luck to you,” I said, knowing that every man who remained in Valhalla might well be dead by the time I returned …if I returned.
“We’d better go,” I said to Burton. We walked past the generals, who held their salutes as we passed.
“Still feeling sick?” I asked in a whisper.
“More embarrassed than sick,” Burton admitted. “Seeing that little twerp scientist begging to go, I wanted to shoot myself.”
“I know what you mean; the little bastard’s got guts,” I said, as we walked up the steel ramp and entered the transport. The major bobbed his head enthusiastically, then ran to the head, a hand over his mouth to keep the bile from spewing out of his mouth.
Watching Major Burton dash into the can, I hit the button that closed the big doors. Somewhere below my feet, gears whined as they drew the six-inch-thick doors together.
The transport was made to carry two platoons—a hundred men. It was half-full. Some of the men stood near the ladder at the far end of the cabin; most sat on the benches along the walls. The sound of the iron doors closing served as a call to attention. The men stood, turned to face me, and saluted.
I returned the salute and told them to sit. The transport’s powerful engines flared to life outside. Inside the kettle, the sound of the engines was no more than a rumble, but outside those thick walls, they made a deafening roar.
Our nukes—we actually had two of them—sat in a couple of large crates near the rear of the cargo hold. As we took off, I sat on one of the crates with the nukes, a combination of bravado and Marine Corps humor. Across the cabin I saw William Sweetwater, a short, stout man with mangy long black hair, thick glasses, and a second chin that hung from his neck like a hammock. He sat alone in a corner staring at the floor, his hands clasped between his knees.
“Dr. Sweetwater!” I yelled louder than was necessary for him to hear me over the engines. Hearing his name, he looked up with an alert, startled expression. “Why don’t we head up to the cockpit?” I called out.
Sweetwater hopped off the bench and shuffled across the deck. His head was just about even with the heads of the Marines sitting on the bench. Just as he reached me, the door to the can opened and Major Burton came out wiping his mouth.
“Major,” I called out. “The doctor and I were just about to visit the pilot. Would you care to join us?”
Burton looked at the ladder leading up to the cockpit and shook his head. “I’m still getting my sea legs.”
“Aye, sir,” I said. I was in charge. The generals had put me in charge, and Major Burton accepted my authority, but I wanted to show respect to an officer who had come out to die with his men.
I let Sweetwater climb the ladder first. With his chubby body and short limbs, he looked like a koala bear climbing a tree. I waited until he reached the top, then I went up after him.
As we reached the cockpit door, Sweetwater paused. He forced himself to look me in the eye, like a kid caught stealing cookies, and said, “Um, we might have neglected to mention to Raymond that we were coming on this mission.”
“I thought I told you to report to Freeman.” It occurred to me that I was scolding one of the brightest men in the galaxy the way a mother scolds a misbehaving child.
Even more ironic, he answered in kind. “We’re sorry, Lieutenant. It’s just …What if Raymond said we couldn’t come?” Somewhere in that stubby body still beat the heart of the schoolboy.
Fighting back the urge to laugh, I tried to sound angry as I said, “Well, we’re stuck with you now, whether he likes it or not.”
Sweetwater brightened, led the way into the cockpit, and called out, “Good afternoon, Raymond.” Then he said, “Good Lord, Raymond, that can’t be comfortable.”
Freeman sat cramped behind the controls of the ship. The engineers who designed the cockpit did not have a seven-foot, 350-pound man in mind when they placed the pilot’s chair a mere twenty-four inches away from the yoke. Freeman’s knees did not fit into the cavity under the HUD, so he had to sit with his legs straddling the yoke, a comical sight.
Freeman looked back, nodded at me, then said, “Good afternoon, Doctor.”
“How is our flight time looking?” Sweetwater asked. He really did behave like a nervous adolescent. He stood there nervously fidgeting, swinging his arms back and forth while rocking on his heels.
“We have a few hours ahead of us,” Freeman said in a velvet rumble. “Are you going in with us, Dr. Sweetwater, or just coming along for the ride?”
“We thought we might go in and help place the device,” Sweetwater said.
“Of course,” said Freeman. “Doctor, perhaps Lieutenant Harris and I could have a word in private.” Cold and distant as Ray Freeman was in most situations, he had a fondness for Sweetwater. I could see it in the way he gazed at the doctor, like a father watching his child.
Sweetwater’s confidence sank like a rock. He looked nervous, sad, and desperate all at once. “We can help,” he said. “We figured out about supercharging the gas before Arthur. You’ll need us there, Raymond.”
Freeman nodded, then the softness in his expression disappeared as he fixed his double-barrel gaze on me, and said, “Doctor, I’m sure we need your help, but may I have a word with Harris now?”
Sweetwater looked at me, and asked, “Should we wait outside?”
“Why don’t you go down and wait with the other men,” I said. Then I added, “This could get bloody.” I said it under my breath, so that neither man would hear me.
“Right,” Sweetwater said, heading out the bulkhead. “We’ll just, um, be down in the cabin with everyone else.” He stepped over the threshold and shot back one last highly insecure look, then headed down the ladder.
I launched a preemptive defense. “It doesn’t matter whether he comes with us or hides in the galaxy’s biggest fallout shelter; we either succeed, or he’s a dead man.”
Freeman nodded, but anger still showed in his eyes. “Does he have armor?” Freeman asked.
“No,” I said.
“He’s going to die a bad death,” Freeman said. I saw something I had never seen in Freeman’s face before—sympathy.
“We can leave him in the transport,” I said. “He can try and direct us over the interLink.”
Freeman shook his head. “He’s right. We were either going to need him or Breeze to come with us. You just get us down there, Harris; I’ll watch out for Sweetwater.”
I stayed in the cockpit for most of the flight. When I finally came down, I found my Marines gathered around Sweetwater. He looked like a coach prepping his team before a big game.
“Oh, Lieutenant Harris, we were just explaining to your men about the nature of the Avatari miners.”
“I see,” I said.
“Is it true?” Thomer asked. “We never fought the real aliens, it was just their reflections all along?”
I sighed. I had come to brief the men, but Sweetwater had already handled most of the briefing. The problem was that while he had all the information, he would not know how to couch it so that it would motivate the men.
“Doctor, Freeman wants to talk to you,” I said.
“What does Raymond want to discuss?” Sweetwater asked, sounding nervous.
“He’s ponying the equipment,” I said. “I think he wants to plan out his part of the mission with you.”
Satisfied that Freeman would not leave him tied up in the transport, Sweetwater said, “Excellent idea. We really do need to plan out what to take and what to leave behind. Excuse us, gentlemen.” And he waddled to the ladder and climbed to meet Freeman.
I looked at Major Burton and noticed the relaxed way in which he leaned back on the bench. It was dark in the kettle, so I could not be sure, but Burton did not look pale or sick. In fact, the entire company looked ready for action.
“Put on your helmets,” I said. “Let’s test the gear.
“Sound off, Marines,” I said.
The fire teams answered to their team leaders. The team leaders reported to their squad leaders. Squad leaders sounded off for platoon leaders. Platoon leaders reported to Major Burton, who reported to me. With only forty-seven men, we had enough men for one full platoon with a little spare change, but we organized the men into two miniature platoons.
Major Burton told the men to remove their helmets, then came over and took his place behind me and to my right, and I began the mission briefing.
I’d seen many briefings during my stints with the Marines. They were generally conducted by officers who had nothing but disdain for clones. The officers often began by insulting our intelligence, then proceeded to play off our emotions to work us into a frenzy. The meetings were somewhere between a pep rally and an evangelical revival with homicidal overtones. This one would be different, I decided, I would show these men the respect they deserved.
I took a moment to arrange my thoughts. “Who knows what’s in these crates?” I asked.
Herrington raised his hand. “Those would be our nukes.”
“Yes, these would be two fifty-megaton nuclear devices,” I said. “We have a matching set. Any of you ever set off a nuke in battle?” No one raised his hand. “No?
“Here’s the drill. We are going to hike into a hollowed-out mountain that is filled to the gills with giant spiderlike creatures. Some are six feet tall and some are ten feet tall, any of them can tear a man in half without thinking twice about it, and your combat armor won’t even add any challenge.
“If we can hoss these big bombs in there, we will fry those motherspeckers. These bombs will bring the whole damn cave down on top of them. These bombs will make the insides of those mountains so hot the rocks will melt and the dirt will turn to ash.”
I could tell my briefing was not going over well. The men looked confused. They looked nervous.
“Are we planning on hanging around to watch that happen?” asked Private Peterson.
“No, Private, we are not,” I said. “The plan is to deliver our little presents and beat it out of there rapid, quick, and pronto. I don’t know about you, Peterson, but I plan on being halfway back to Valhalla before that big bang goes off.
“Any other questions?”
No one responded. They looked confused.
Burton laid a hand on my shoulder, and whispered, “May I, Lieutenant?”
“Be my guest,” I said.
“Okay, Gyrenes!” he shouted in a voice that was several decibels louder than it needed to be. “You, Sergeant. What’s your name?”
“Herrington, sir.”
“So, Sergeant Herrington, can you tell me why we are taking a couple of nukes on this little joyride?” Burton asked. “What’s so good about nukes?”
“They make a really loud bang, sir,” Herrington said.
“Damn specking right it makes a big bang. Gyrene, you are specking officer material. You’re a goddamned genius. Nukes make big, hot bangs. They make big, hot, radioactive bangs. Tell me, Herrington, what do you think about giving the specking Mudders a big, hot, radioactive bang?”
“I like it, sir.”
“You say you like it? That’s all? Shoving a nuke up these planet-stealing motherspeckers’ asses is just okay with you. Is that what you just said?”
“Sir, no sir,” Herrington yelled. I could hear Herrington’s confidence building. He did not want to be treated with respect; he wanted to be cudgeled. “It makes me horny all over!”
Burton’s disdainful approach made Herrington feel relaxed. It had the same effect on the entire company. Men sat up straight, they smiled. The verbal beating placed them in territory they knew.
“Just so you assholes know, I believe in the big bang theory,” Burton said. “I believe we should shove something that makes a big bang up every one of our enemies’ asses.”
The funny thing was that giving the briefing, Burton’s confidence also seemed to grow as he went on. Until this moment, I had never realized the yin and yang in the relationship between natural-born officers and general-issue clones. These boys did not want respect and honesty. They deserved the truth; but going into battle, what they really wanted to hear was assurance. Burton, an experienced officer, gave them what they needed instead of what they deserved.
“We reserve the really big bangs for the pecker speckers we hate the most. And let me tell you, Gyrenes, fifty-megatons is the biggest bang of them all. Now what does that tell you about Mudders?”
“We hate the speckers,” yelled Thomer—mild-mannered Kelly Thomer, the Boy Scout.
“Damn straight, we goddamn hate those pecker speckers. There is no one and nothing we hate more than those speckers. I hate those bastards more than my wife’s time of the month. Do you read me, you mean horn-dog sons of bitches?”
Burton sent the men into a frenzy. They didn’t just respond, they ignited.
“Listen here, Gyrenes; these nukes are the second-worst weapon in this man’s universe. You ugly sons of bitches are the specking worst. You are the cruelest, meanest, most lowdown, dirty weapon in the Unified specking Authority’s arsenal.”
As Burton put on his show, Sweetwater shambled down the ladder and came to stand next to me. He looked scared but determined. He glanced over at me, then mimicked my stance and posture—feet shoulder-width apart, hands clasped behind his back, chest out. The stance looked unnatural with his short, dumpy posture, thick glasses, and lank hair.
“We are going to shove you forty-seven sons of bitches so far down those speckers’ throats that nothing else will ever fit. You got that, Gyrenes?”
“Sir, yes, sir!” the company shouted so loud that their voices frayed.
“Did you Gyrenes say something? I think I almost heard you. Think you peckerwoods can put enough voice into it so I can hear you?”
“Sir, yes, sir!” they screamed.
Burton took a step back, and whispered to me, “Tell them what you need to, but for God’s sake, try to keep them warmed up.”
I explained what we would do, and the briefing ended. The men went back to speaking among themselves, clearly more relaxed than before. As I headed toward the cockpit, Major Burton quietly whispered, “You Liberators may be killing machines, but you don’t know shit about giving briefings.”
Looking ahead through the windshield, I could see the serrated silhouette of the distant mountains. “I’m going to park us next to Breeze’s plane,” Freeman said. Sweetwater leaned over the copilot’s seat for a look below. He did not speak a word.
“What’s our ETA?” I asked.
“Ten minutes,” Freeman said.
Outside the transport, the plains gave way to steppes and the steppes gave way to foothills. Soon we would cross the guardians of the mountains. I could imagine these granite giants framed by an orange sunset, as dark as shadows and as mysterious as the night. I could also imagine them turned to dunes of ash with Avatari spider-things creeping across them.
I looked out and saw something I had not seen for a couple of years, something I had hoped never to see again. A series of trenches crisscrossed the flat areas between some of the mountains. “Snake shafts,” I said.
“Those weren’t there last time you came,” Freeman commented.
“No, they weren’t,” I said as I studied the network of trenches and troughs that the drones had dug. Until that moment, I had never put two and two together properly. Nobody knew what snake shafts were used for, but the common consensus was that it had something to do with smuggling. Now I understood all too well. The Avatari would cover the trenches without filling them in, and they would serve as a capillary system for harvesting shit gas from the planet.
As Freeman circled for a landing, Sweetwater and I returned to the kettle. I found most of the men in the cargo hold sitting in clusters, checking their weapons or simply talking. Burton stood at the rear staring at the crates with the nukes.
Sweetwater found a shadowy corner where he could be alone. He sat with his head down, examining his breathing mask.
“Doctor,” I said in a soft voice, as if waking a sleeping child. “Dr. Sweetwater?”
“Lieutenant,” he said. “Please tell us you’re not giving another briefing.”
“Ha, very funny,” I said.
Sweetwater smiled. “So it’s showtime.”
“Yes, Doctor,” I said.
“Call us William, Lieutenant.”
“Freeman wanted me to warn you Dr. Breeze’s body is just inside the caves. He also told me to warn you that the body is pretty messed up.”
“Thanks for the warning,” Sweetwater said.
“You really don’t need to go in there,” I said.
“You’re wrong, Lieutenant,” Sweetwater said, a new stiffness in his voice. “We do need to go in there. That is the very place we need to be.”
The late Arthur Breeze must have been one hell of a pilot.
Freeman had a far easier time lowering our big bird than Breeze must have had landing his plane. Our ship weighed at least twenty times more than Breeze’s craft, but transports had rockets for vertical landings. Breeze’s light craft required a runway. The ridge on which he had landed was too short and too bumpy for a safe landing; and if he’d overshot the landing, he would have either crashed into the mountain or skidded off a cliff.
We touched down not more than a hundred feet from Breeze’s ride. The loose ground settled unevenly beneath our skids, and forty-six Marines lunged for the crates with the nukes to make sure they didn’t slide.
“You don’t need to do that,” I told them over the interLink. “You can toss those bad boys off the side of the mountain, and they won’t go off. The specking Hotel Valhalla fell on them, and they didn’t go off.”
I heard some nervous laughter, and the men backed away from the crates.
I pulled off my helmet and looked down at Sweetwater; he stood beside me waiting to exit the transport. “Maybe I should go out there first and check the air quality,” I said.
“You’re worried about us? Lieutenant, we’re touched.” The little bastard might have had a better facility with sarcasm than scientific terms. “We already agreed this was a one-way trip.”
“Know what, Dr. Sweetwater? You’d make a hell of a Marine,” I said.
“Really?” he asked.
“Yeah, well, except for the height requirement,” I said.
He smiled. “That means something coming from a homicidal clone like you. We heard you killed your commanding officer last night.”
“He had it coming,” I said, only half-joking.
“What did he do?” Sweetwater asked.
“Asked too many questions,” I said.
“Oh,” said Sweetwater.
I thought about what we were heading into and decided this was not the time to hold back. “His name was Lieutenant Moffat,” I said. “He was one of those antisynthetic types.”
“Lieutenant, we just want you to know that we wholeheartedly support clone equality,” Sweetwater volunteered.
“Equality among clones?” I asked. “Not all clones are created equal.”
“How about equal treatment and opportunity for clones?” Sweetwater asked.
“Lieutenant Moffat sent one of my platoons out to get massacred because he had a problem with the platoon sergeant,” I said. “I couldn’t live with that.”
“Someone said that he wanted to kill you, too,” Sweetwater said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I suppose he did. We’d better test our gear.”
As I put on my helmet, he strapped on his rebreather and protective goggles.
“Can you hear us?” he asked.
His breathing gear did not have an interLink connection. We could give him an earpiece for listening in, but he would not be able to speak to us without breaking the seal around his oxygen mask. He said something to me that my audio gear picked up as an ambient noise. Given more time, we could have found some way to make our combat armor fit him, but time was the thing we lacked. What he needed most was a helmet, but that big head of his was too wide to fit a standard-sized helmet.
Wondering what tortures the air inside those caves would perform on Sweetwater, I gave him the thumbs-up to show that I had heard him just fine. Then I hit the button to open the ramp, knowing I had just signed the little scientist’s death sentence.
The kettle doors slid open, revealing Breeze’s aircraft. Standing silently beside me, William Sweetwater stared at the plane that had brought his close friend to his death. He was breathing through the oxygen mask now, his breath fogging the clear plastic.
Maybe it was just my imagination, but I sensed death as I looked at the little six-seater plane. Breeze had left the hatch hanging open. Up here in the mountains, that opened door looked out of place. It reminded me of a porch light left on for a traveler who would never return.
Sergeant Thomer asked, “Lieutenant, should I have the men unpack the crates?” waking me from dour thoughts.
“I would appreciate it, Sergeant,” I said.
“Aye, aye, sir,” Thomer said.
“Major, we might as well send everybody out,” I said.
I felt a certain level of helplessness looking across the kettle. Marines in dark combat armor moved around the shadowy cabin. Across the deck, Ray Freeman slid down the ladder from the cockpit with the alacrity of a spider on a web. They were a good crew, a game crew, men ready to put up a fight.
Sweetwater opened his canvas satchel and brought out a T-shaped environmental meter much like the one Freeman had used on our last trip into the mines. As the little scientist tested the air, Thomer and his men removed the nuclear devices from their crates.
Stripped from their crates, the nukes were distinctly unimpressive—neither especially heavy nor unreasonably large—two polished metal cylinders about one yard long and two feet in diameter with two sets of handles, one at either end. With some struggle, a single Marine could have lugged each device, but we assigned four to the task. They carried the devices like pallbearers around a casket.
Freeman, carrying a case in one hand and a particle-beam cannon in the other, came to the ramp. Sweetwater naturally gravitated toward the giant mercenary. He had been the eyes and hands of the Science Lab. When they ran field experiments, Sweetwater and Breeze had relied on Freeman to carry out their wishes.
“I don’t know how long he’s going to last,” I told Freeman over a private line. “Did you check out his breathing gear? That oxygen mask isn’t going to protect him. I’ve seen masks like that before; it’s from a paramedic’s emergency kit. The seal around his mask is not airtight.”
“I know,” Freeman whispered.
“He’s going to breathe in fumes,” I said. “Most of his face is exposed. You saw what that stuff does.”
“I’ll take care of him,” Freeman said.
“We’ll carry him as long as we can, but when he falls behind …”
“I’ll take care of it,” Freeman said. I knew better than to argue.
I took one last look around the kettle. The men stood ready to fight, but I sensed something brittle in their resolve. Burton stood at the head of the company, a man ready to take any risk because he feared losing control of the situation or possibly control of himself. The men fell into lines. William Sweetwater, who now held nothing more than a small penlight in his hands, kept himself apart from the Marines. He orbited around Freeman like a child keeping an eye on a protective parent in a crowd.
“Let’s move out,” I said, giving the order in an unnaturally quiet voice.
The bright ion curtain sky shone in through the open ramp as we marched out. It had rained recently. My boots sank a quarter of an inch in the mud-covered ground.
“It’s 2100 hours,” Burton said. “Maybe we’ll see a night sky when we come back out. I’d be willing to nursemaid a nuke through a cave of gigantic alien spiders to see a real night sky.”
“Did Sweetwater mention that most of those spiders are mindless drones that are no more dangerous than a footlocker as long as you stay out of their way?” I asked.
“Yup,” Burton said.
“Did he mention that some of them are as big as jeeps?”
“The hunter spiders?” Burton asked.
“I think there are live aliens controlling the big ones,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s what Dr. Sweetwater said, that they’re avatars, just like the soldiers we’ve been fighting,” Burton said.
“Yeah, avatars,” I said, still stunned at how much more easily the men accepted the idea that they were fighting avatars than the generals had. “There aren’t very many of the big ones.”
“Good to know,” Burton said.
We stood and watched as the men filed out of the transport. Thomer led the riflemen, each of them carrying particle-beam cannons—guns with slightly better range than our standard-issue particle-beam pistols. They also had rockets. Every man in the company carried rockets.
Next came Herrington and Boll, leading the team carrying the first of the nukes.
“Harris, you’re not going to go berserk on us, are you? I mean, you’re not going to get so hopped up on that combat hormone that you start killing us off, are you?” Burton asked over a private channel.
“If you have to die, wouldn’t you rather be killed by one of your men?” I asked.
Burton turned and let the ranks walk past him until only Sweetwater, Freeman, and I remained in the ship. He raised his right hand as if preparing to salute me, then flipped me off.
Standing at the base of the ramp, Sweetwater saw Burton flip me the finger. He looked from Burton, then to me, then back to Burton. “Does that mean the same thing to Marines that it means to scientists?” he shouted through his oxygen mask.
“I’m sure it does,” I said.
“Trouble among the ranks?” he asked, then waddled off to stand nearer to Freeman.
Breeze had parked beside a different entrance than the one Freeman and I used. We would not need to scale the mountain to reach this one; it was level with the ridge.
“Get ready,” I said over the open frequency, as we neared the entrance. The men lugging the nuclear devices pulled their pistols out of their holsters. The company grenadiers unstrapped rocket launchers, and the riflemen readied their particle-beam cannons. Seeing the other men with their weapons, Sweetwater pulled out the particle beam pistol I’d given him. He held it like an old-fashioned dueler—the barrel only inches from his nose, the muzzle aimed toward the sky.
“Last chance for you to turn back,” I said to him through the speaker in my helmet. My respect for the diminutive scientist would not have changed if he’d soiled his pants and run back to the transport, but I knew he would not. Sweetwater turned toward me and pointed at the back of his hand. His skin was already turning an inflamed red as if he were having an allergic reaction. Given a little more time, blisters would form. The skin on his cheeks and forehead had a ruddy look as well.
“It’s too late to turn back now,” he yelled through the mask. He did not need to yell for me to hear him, but he did not know that.
“You took a reading before you left the ship. Did you know this was going to happen?” I asked.
He shrugged and walked away.
“Plucky little son of a bitch,” I whispered to myself. That was heartfelt praise in Marine-ese. From where I stood, with their backs to me, Freeman and Sweetwater looked like a father-and-son act. Freeman, tall and broad, Sweetwater short and stubby. Sweetwater stayed in perfect sync with the big man. When Freeman turned left, so did Sweetwater.
Noticing Sweetwater’s physical deterioration, Thomer fell back, and asked, “Is he going to be okay?”
“You mean Sweetwater?” I asked.
“Yeah, is he going to be all right?” Thomer asked.
“He’s melting. The air out here is like acid.”
Like the entrance Freeman and I used when we explored the mines, this entrance led to a foyer filled with light from the ion curtain. Burton and two of his riflemen led the way in. I entered next, followed by the teams carrying the bombs. Freeman and Sweetwater came next, with more riflemen and grenadiers bringing up the rear.
Burton hiked ahead, checked for enemies, then doubled back. “It looks clear this far in,” Burton said.
“Did you see any openings along the walls?” I asked.
“I did,” Burton said.
“The fun starts once we enter one of those openings,” I said.
“Fair enough,” Burton said. “Harris, do we really need two bombs? I could use four extra guns.”
“We need them …both of them,” I said.
“We’re not just bringing the second in case we lose one?”
“Major, did you ever fly through Mars Spaceport on a busy day?” I asked.
“Sure, it’s a real zoo,” he said.
“Shoulder-to-shoulder crowds; you can’t even swing your arms without hitting someone. That’s about how crowded it was last time I stepped into those caverns—except instead of people with suitcases, you get drone spiders.”
“You said they weren’t any more dangerous than a footlocker,” Burton said.
“I meant a footlocker with a forty thousand-volt charge. If one of those spiders so much as rubs against you, all the electronics in your armor go dead, then you either have to walk around blind or breathe whatever that lethal shit is in the air.
“I’m betting that we lose both bombs long before we reach the target area. This is one of those ‘the fate of humanity is resting on us’ moments, sir. Do you really want to cut the odds in half by leaving one of the nukes behind?”
Burton made a laughing noise, but it sounded short, sour, and forced. “So we’re going to set off a nuclear bomb to save humanity? Did I ever mention that my parents left Earth and moved to the Norma Arm because they did not approve of all the violence?”
“They’re probably dead now,” I said. “Norma was one of the first arms to go.”
A bat came flapping down from the ceiling. It was hit by green flashes from so many particle-beam cannons that all that was left was a fine, red mist and a few shreds of fur.
“Steady,” I said over the open frequency, just glad that no one had fired a rocket at it.
“They probably are dead,” Burton agreed. “Are you a praying man, Lieutenant Harris? I heard somewhere that you read the Bible.”
“I stopped reading it,” I said. “I lost my faith.”
“I’ve never been much for religion, but I said a shitload of prayers on the flight over here.”
“Yeah, well, if God is any good with a particle beam, we sure as hell could use him on our team right about now,” I said. “We better move out, sir.”
Major Burton gave the order to mount up, and we walked ahead. The ion light faded slightly as we moved deeper into the caves. Freeman led us toward the tunnel opening that would take us into the cavern.
“Breeze went in through this tube,” Freeman said, as we came to the first opening. Under normal circumstances he would have communicated this over the interLink, but this time he used his external speaker so that Sweetwater would hear.
“Maybe we should go to the next one,” I said over the open mike as well.
Sweetwater stared into the darkened doorway. “We want to see him,” he said. It was hard to hear him, and I wondered how much of the gas his mask allowed in. The damage to his throat might have already begun.
“Okay, if you are sure,” I said. Then I switched to a company-wide channel on the interLink. “The angle is going to be like going down a spiral staircase. Got it? The tube is wide with a low ceiling. You men on point, no stopping until we get to the bottom, then fan out. I want the first men down to form a shield by the time the nukes make it through.”
I heard a collective “Aye, aye, sir.” Burton led the way in.
The tube was just as I remembered it, long and wide with a six-foot ceiling, deep scratches in the walls and ceiling. Like me,
Burton had to duck his head to get through. Because their helmets added an inch to their height, the general-issue clones had to bow their heads, but Sweetwater could have skipped rope in there.
The light from the curtain faded out quickly. By the time we reached the second bend in the downward-spiraling tube, my visor had switched to night-for-day vision, and I saw the world around me in blue-white images. I listened to my men over the interLink. Some of them were breathing heavily, a sign of fear.
“Steady,” I said. “There are two kinds of spiders in here, small ones and big ones. The small ones are drones. Don’t bother shooting them, they won’t know you are there. It’s the big ones you have to worry about.”
This was all review, of course, but Herrington asked, “How big are the big ones, sir?”
“What the speck!” Burton gasped.
“Hold,” I told the men.
Burton had located a guardian spider. The damn thing had had to climb in here with its legs spread wide, and its girth left the tunnel half-filled. It remained perfectly still.
“Please tell me that is one of the big ones,” Burton said.
“Stay here.” I stepped past Burton and the men on point as I approached the guardian spider. It lay there absolutely still, just lurking there, blending into the darkness. I watched it for several seconds, then said, “It’s dead.”
As I approached, I saw that two of its legs had broken away. Its body was cracked and desiccated. The gash in its underbelly stretched from its head to its tail, and dust poured out of it.
Arthur Breeze had killed the creature that killed him. He sat against the far wall of the tunnel, his legs spread out before him. He held a standard-issue particle-beam pistol in his right hand. The spider-thing had slashed his white combat armor, breaking his chest plate and shattering his visor. I don’t think I felt any special bond with Breeze; but looking at his corpse, I felt outrage. I spun my particle-beam cannon around and smashed the butt into the guardian spider’s head. I hit it a second time. The hollow shell of the monster cracked under the force of that blow, and I hit it again and again.
“Harris, is it alive?” Burton sounded scared.
“Mother-specking son of a bitch!” I yelled. Spit was flying from my mouth into the microphone. I hit the spider again, and the uppermost ridge of its back and its exoskeleton crushed in on itself.
They had killed each other. Breeze probably died first, but he broke the spider. He would have fallen back and fired, but the spider-thing had still slashed him, nearly cutting off his head and channeling a deep, deep gash that ran from his neck to his thigh. Arthur Breeze’s glasses lay on the ground along with the jigsaw puzzle of glass that had once been his visor. Beads of blood had dried on his snowy white armor, and a puddle of blood covered the floor.
His face had never been much to look at, but the only parts I now recognized were the big, square teeth that would have looked better matched in the mouth of a horse. The other features—the cheeks, the nose, the chin, and the forehead—had turned to sponge. The eyeballs had wilted so that they completely filled the sockets in which they sat.
The face lit up. Sweetwater stood beside me, shining his flashlight into his dead friend’s face.
“Harris? Harris what the speck is going on?” Burton asked as he came over and joined us.
I ignored both Burton and Sweetwater, listening only to the echo of the insane scream I made inside my helmet. This was not just about Breeze, and I knew it. This was for Philips and Huish and White, and the nine hundred thousand clones who had died defending this goddamned planet. I spun and smashed my boot into the side of the dead spider. I kicked it as hard as I could, and the side of its body shattered. I felt something tug at my shoulder.
“It’s not getting any deader,” said Freeman.
Maybe it was the calmness in his voice or the weight of his hand on my shoulder, though more likely it was the way my combat reflex had sneaked up on me, but I whirled around and prepared to shoot Freeman. He was ready for me, though. As I came around and raised my gun, he shoved me hard, and I stumbled into the giant carcass. I fell on my ass angrier than ever, but before I could bring up my gun, the bastard had his particle-beam pistol pressed straight into my visor.
“You are going to get yourself killed,” Freeman said, sounding so specking calm it made we want to piss myself. I was in a rage. I tried to bring up my cannon, and the bastard stepped on it. So there I sat, leaning against the shell of a guardian spider, my former partner pressing the muzzle of a particle-beam cannon against my helmet.
“Your combat reflex is taking over, Harris; this is why they killed off the other Liberators. You keep this up, and you’re more likely to kill us than those aliens down there.” Freeman tapped his cannon against my visor as he said this. Had he wanted to, he could have shattered the glass.
“You’re the best man we have, but I will shoot you before I let you screw this job up.”
Several things occurred to me at that moment. The first and most important was that even if I tried to kick his legs out or knocked his gun away, Freeman would shoot me without a moment’s hesitation. The next thing that ran through my head was that I was exactly like the Liberators on Albatross Island—the ones who massacred helpless prisoners and guards. Freeman was right—once I finished off the spider, my blood in a boil, I would turn on anything I could kill.
With that thought came the beginnings of self-control. My muscles slowly loosened. I allowed my hands to drop palms down on my lap.
“You back in control of yourself?” Freeman asked.
The entire company, Sweetwater included, was staring down at me. Visors hid most of their faces; but I could see Sweetwater’s expression, and he looked downright scared. I felt ashamed of myself. The funny thing was that as the reflex simmered, I felt all sorts of pains. I felt the last tremors in my shoulder and the vivid knot on the back of my head, and I felt small.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m back in control.”
Anyone else would have helped me up. Not Freeman. He took a step back and kept his cannon trained on my face. I still had the last traces of rage, and I considered trying to shoot Freeman. Something in me liked the idea of shooting all of them, even Sweetwater. Then I took a deep breath, and the last traces of my rage evaporated.
I wanted to thank Freeman. I also wanted to apologize to him. Instead, I kept quiet.
“You okay, Harris?” Major Burton asked, as we started down the tunnel.
“Freeman was right,” I said. “I’m surprised he didn’t shoot me.”
“If I were him, I wouldn’t have shot you either. It was too much fun watching you beat the shit out of that dead bug,” Burton said.
“Get specked,” I said.
“After this is done, I hope to do just that,” Burton said. “My wife’s in the Hen House.”
I laughed. It felt good. Then Sergeant Thomer said something for my ears only over a direct link. “Lieutenant, we better get moving. The guy from the lab is starting to melt.”
“Holy shit, you could fit a whole city in this place,” Major Burton radioed back when he reached the end of the tunnel. “This place is too big to be the inside of anything. It’s like I’m looking across space.”
A moment later, I stood out there beside him. The spider-things had hollowed out the mountain even more than I remembered, leaving a vast blackness in its place, a hollow vault that seemed to stretch on forever.
Giving the enormous vault a cursory scan, I had to agree. I could see for miles across the desertlike floor. I looked to find the cave-within-a-cave in which Freeman and I had found the spheres and the gas …that goddamned gas. It was gone.
The last time we were there, Freeman collapsed the entrance to the inner cave; but now the whole cave was gone, and the row of spheres shone in the darkness like a string of pearls. I did not even bother trying to count the glowing orbs; the string stretched on and on, and each of those damn orbs would have gas leaking from it—enough to saturate the planet.
“It looks like your spider drones are gone,” Burton said. “The place is empty.”
From this angle the cavern did look empty. I motioned back toward Breeze with an exaggerated nod so that Burton would see the motion, then I said, “That man back there did not slip and fall.”
“No, he did not,” Burton agreed.
So we turned and stared back down at the floor of the cavern. I do not know which lenses the major used, but I tried a combination of night-for-day and telescopic lenses, a bad combination under most circumstances. This time, though, it worked well enough. As I zoomed in, I saw movement hidden in the darkness. There were drones along the cavern floor; they had just dug deep pits around themselves.
I pointed this out to Burton, who followed suit, and said, “Shit. You’re right, I see them.”
By this time the rest of the company had caught up to us. Herrington and Boll, leading one of the teams carrying a nuke, sidled up to me. “So this is it?” Boll asked.
“This is it,” I said.
“Where do we leave our packages?” Boll asked.
“See those lights out there, the spheres?”
“That’s a long way out, sir,” Boll pointed out.
“A long, dangerous way. Try zooming in on the floor down there,” I said.
“I already have,” Boll said. “Are they like the one that killed the guy back there?”
“No, those are the drones. They’re the small ones. You saw how big the one in there was.”
“Actually, sir, it was kind of hard to judge its size once you got through with it,” Boll commented.
“Yeah, sorry. I guess I lost control,” I said.
“Were you friends with that man in there?” Boll asked.
“Breeze? No, I barely knew him. He was one of the chief scientists at the lab.”
“So he was friends with Dr. Sweetwater?” Boll asked. They all treated William Sweetwater like an old acquaintance. In the short time that I had mistakenly left the dwarf scientist unguarded, he had won them over.
“Yes, they were friends.”
Freeman and Sweetwater waited in the shelter of the tunnel while the rest of us admired the size of the cavern. When I saw them, I radioed Freeman, and said, “I don’t suppose we can detonate the bombs off from up here.”
I watched them—Freeman kneeling to speak, Sweetwater considering the question. He pulled out the handheld meter, waved it in the air, then shined his penlight on it. He walked out to the ridge, squeezing between a couple of Marines, waved his meter in the air again, and shook his head.
Freeman bent down to see what the meter said. “We need to get closer.”
“How close?” I asked.
Freeman and Sweetwater traded words. “Right up to the gas.”
“Wonderful.” I sighed though I had expected that answer all along.
Staring at the closest sphere, I could just make out the uneven carpet of gas bleeding out of it. Out of the side of my eye, I caught a glimpse of something moving along the cavern floor. I reacted instinctively. “Grenadiers forward. Rifles, cover the rear. Freeman, get Sweetwater back in the tunnel.”
Just that quickly, the shooting began.
“Holy shit, there must be ten million of those bastards down there,” said Herrington, the kind of Marine who normally downplayed the situation. That pretty much summed it up, though.
Eight of us remained on the ridge, including Herrington and Boll, who ran their nuke into the tunnel for safety, then came back out ready to fight. Below us, a small army of guardians and Avatari soldiers appeared out of nowhere. They poured out of trenches and climbed over dunes. Bolts of light seemed to generate out of thin air and fly at us. In the time it took me to hit my first target, three of my men went down.
Bolts of white light streaked through the dark air like fireworks. They were so bright against the darkness that they left echoes etched in my visor.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something fall. Memory and instinct taking over, I stepped forward, spun, and scanned the wall above us; but I saw nothing. The bastards knew how to camouflage themselves, but I had come prepared.
Dropping to the ground so that the Avatari soldiers coming along the floor of the cavern would not see me, I pulled one of the disposable flare pistols from my armor and fired an acetylene flare. The projectile moved at one-tenth the speed of a bullet, a packet of bright-burning chemical smoldering so hot that it melted anything it touched. The flare slammed into the granite fifty feet above my head, fusing itself to the rock and illuminating everything around it in white, blazing light.
With the light shining between the camouflaged spider-things and the granite wall, the spider-things showed up like islands of blackness. The guardian spiders did not have time to react before I tossed the empty flare gun, shouldered my particle-beam cannon, and hit all three of them.
“Boll, cover the walls,” I shouted. Then I thought again. Assigning a grenadier to clear the walls would almost guarantee an avalanche. “Belay that order. Peterson, out here now. Watch the walls,” I shouted as I pulled out another flare gun.
“The what?” he asked as he ran out.
“They’re spiders, damn it. They’re crawling up walls,” I said, and then I fired another flare into the wall about one hundred feet up. The light exposed dozens of guardian spiders.
“Oh, shit,” Peterson groaned and began firing. Burton and Mathis grabbed their cannons and joined him.
Still kneeling on the ground, I turned back to peer over the ledge. A hundred feet below us, dark shapes moved across the land. Closer in, a handful of Avatari soldiers stood firing in our direction.
“They’re too far for rockets,” Herrington said.
An Avatari soldier climbed over a ridge a few yards away, and I picked it off with a shot from my cannon. A few stray bolts flew in my direction. In another moment, I would need to back up for cover, but first I took a second to study the lay of the land.
“Lieutenant, we can’t stay here much longer,” Herrington said. “They’re coming.”
I had already begun to have a combat reflex. I could feel the warmth in my blood, but I had control of my rage—my thoughts were clear. It was not about hate or even survival, this time I was fighting because I had an objective.
“Freeman, I need a sniper!” I yelled into my helmet.
Without saying a word, Freeman came lumbering out of the cave pulling his rifle from over his shoulder. He dropped face-first into a crawl and moved up beside me.
“I need that ridge cleared,” I said, pointing toward an embankment. Even as I pointed, bolts flew out from behind it.
And then Freeman did something I did not mean for him to do—he pulled off his helmet. With one eye closed and the other pressed against the scope on his rifle, he sighted the aliens. Not wanting to inhale the shit in the air, he held his breath and fired several shots.
I tried to spot for Freeman as he hit enemies a thousand yards away. I saw the flash from the muzzle in peripheral vision, and one of the Avatari exploded. It looked out from behind a rock, and its head immediately burst. Another Avatari stood to fire at us. I caught the flash from Freeman’s rifle, and its chest, head, and arms flew in different directions. Freeman hit four more, dropped his rifle, and slammed his helmet back in place over his head.
I started to say something to him over the interLink, but I heard him wheezing, heard a faint moan, a deep breath. Then he wrenched his helmet from his head again, raised his rifle, sighted in on his first target, and plugged four more Avatari before running out of bullets.
He threw on his helmet. Over our link, I could hear him sucking in air as he stuffed more bullets into the magazine.
“Can’t you shoot that thing with your helmet on?” I asked.
Freeman did not answer, and the point became moot a moment later when Boll pulled out a big shoulder-fired rocket. The specking thing must have weighed thirty pounds, an aircraft-grade ordnance in a flimsy aluminum tube. Boll stood, fired, then dropped back down for cover. A moment later, the ridge the Avatari soldiers were using for cover dissolved in a bright flash.
I heard Boll laughing and cheering over an open channel on the interLink. “What the speck was that?” I asked.
“That, sir, was a thermite-tipped surface-to-air rocket,” Boll said.
“Aren’t thermite-tipped rockets illegal?” I asked.
“You brought a thermite-load down here?” Herrington asked, sounding incensed. “You’d have to be insane to strap one of those to your—”
“Lieutenant, those specking spiders are coming in behind us!” One of the riflemen in the tunnel interrupted the debate.
“Everyone out. Move! Move! Move!” I yelled. They were closing in on us, fighting more intelligently than ever before. Maybe they knew we were packing something dangerous, or maybe they just wanted to keep us out of their mines.
Boll and Herrington started back in to grab their nuke, but two of my riflemen had already replaced them. Freeman headed back for Sweetwater. There was an awkwardness to his movements. He walked with the overly solid movements of a man trying to cross a deck in stormy seas.
I dismissed it as unimportant. He’d probably burned his eyes when he took off his helmet, but I had no idea how badly. The fumes in the air may have hurt his equilibrium. I watched Sweetwater waddling toward Freeman and wondered how the little scientist had lasted this long. If a small whiff of the air had hobbled a giant like Freeman, what would it do to Sweetwater?
“Holy specking shit,” yelled one of the men still in the tunnel. The opening flashed with the green of a particle-beam weapon.
“Get out of there!” I yelled.
The men with the nukes came out followed by riflemen, but there should have been more of them. I waited three seconds, then gave Herrington the order to “seal the cave.” Anyone still in there had waited too long.
As we started down the ridge, Herrington piped a grenade into the tunnel. I cringed when I heard the explosion—it meant that we could no longer leave this hellhole the way we had come in.
Burton lost one of his riflemen, so I took a turn on point. That placed Burton, Peterson, and me on point, followed by another layer of riflemen, followed by the teams carrying the nukes. The grenadiers brought up the rear. Having handed off their nuke to two riflemen, Herrington and Boll took their places among the grenadiers.
Freeman and Sweetwater floated around our formation, sometimes meandering all the way to point to test the gas in the air, sometimes dropping back.
We did not bother with the switchback trail leading down ridge; instead we stormed down the slope, particle cannons out and blazing. We had come in with forty-nine men and were now down to forty-three, having just barely gotten our collective foot in the door. “You won’t want to waste men or bullets,” Admiral Brocius had warned me a million years ago when he handed me his pistol before briefing me on Mars. If only that bastard could be here to see just how right he had been.
Up ahead, a javelin-shaped foreleg came questing around a large boulder. I aimed my particle beam, waited for the head to appear, and fired. The shot hit one of the legs, and the spider-thing reared back on its hind legs. I charged toward it and fired again. The flash of my cannon lit up the creature’s underside, and it dropped flat.
“Freeman, where are you?” I called out on the interLink.
There was an explosion behind me and just to my left. I instinctively dropped to one knee and spun just in time to see another guardian spider tip over and drop to the ground. The bastard’s camouflage had fooled me. It was poised on a tall rock, and I had walked right below it as I attacked. The giant spider landed top down, its legs curled in, motionless on its back. That was the only time I had seen these things exhibit a truly spiderlike behavior.
I started to thank Freeman for pulling me out of that one, but that save came from Burton just a few yards away. “Speck!” he said, “I didn’t see that thing until it was almost on you.”
“They camouflage themselves,” I said. I stared at the monster lying on its back and realized how close I had come. “Thank you …shit, that was close.”
“Don’t mention it,” Burton said.
“Lieutenant, you’ve got two more heading your way at nine o’clock,” Thomer called in over the interLink.
I turned, saw two spider-things working their way through a deep groove in the ground, and realized they were drones. They moved past us and continued on their way.
“Those are workers,” I said. I watched them scurry away, both harmless and deadly. They could not attack because attacking was not in their programming, just as graffiti and lawlessness were not in the programming of the clones who had defaced the Hotel Valhalla, just like wanting to kill a superior officer was not in Thomer’s programming.
I wanted to warn Freeman to watch the drones …maybe the aliens could change their programming. If the thousands of drones in this cavern suddenly rose and attacked …
“Freeman?” I called over the interLink. “Freeman?”
He did not respond.
“Thomer, where are Freeman and Sweetwater?”
A moment passed. “They’re almost down the slope. The little bastard looks like he’s burning up,” Thomer said.
“Freeman,” I said, creating a direct link. I heard the rasp of his breathing and realized that he had not responded because he could not respond. He must have inhaled some of the air when he removed his helmet. If he’d breathed even a trace of this gas, his throat would be seared.
I could see Freeman and Sweetwater threading their way toward me. In the blue-white world of night-for-day vision, they looked like a formation of shadows against chalky ground.
“We have to get Sweetwater out of here,” Thomer said, naturally inclined to protect the people around him.
“He has a job to do, Thomer; just like everyone else,” I said as I turned back to have a look at Sweetwater. I did not know what we could do for him, but we needed to keep him alive long enough to place the nukes, though I could not imagine how we could accomplish it.
Sweetwater’s swollen face had puffed up badly. It was covered with blisters, and the skin was abnormally dark. His eyes had a glazed look. He might have been going into shock or he might have simply been dazed from pain. His ears, already covered with blisters, had a spongelike texture. Liquid glistened on all of his exposed skin. At first I thought it was sweat, but I now realized it was fluid oozing out of the open sores.
“We’ve gotta keep moving,” Herrington said over an open line. “There’s a whole lot of company coming our way.”
“Spiders or Avatari?” I asked.
“Spiders.”
“Hold them off,” I said. We could keep the guardian spiders at bay well enough with our guns as long as we did not allow them to get too close to us. The Avatari soldiers were another story, with those damned light-bolt rifles. They could pick us off, but they seemed scarce, just a guard or two. Perhaps the Avatari sent a small detachment to help guard this hellhole.
I signaled for Thomer to come.
“Freeman, they’re closing in ahead of us. I need you up here.” He did not answer, probably could not answer. I wondered how well he could breathe. As he and Thomer came to join me at the front of the party, I told Freeman, “I’m going to assign Sergeant Thomer to guard Sweetwater.”
I heard a dry, painful sigh over the interLink, as Freeman brought down the particle-beam cannon he kept slung over his shoulder. He made an exaggerated nod and stood ready.
“Dr. Sweetwater,” I said. I knelt beside him so that our eyes were nearly level. “Can you hear me?”
He looked at me and nodded. The sharpness returned to his eyes.
“Are we close enough to set off the bombs?” I asked, knowing the answer already.
He took a moment to consider this, then he opened his satchel and pointed to six metal tubes. “Need to take reading of the gas,” he said in a whisper while shaking his head. The wet shreds of burst blister stretched the entire length of his throat. I wanted to shoot the little son of a bitch just to end his suffering.
“Can I run ahead and throw them in?” I asked.
He shook his head and held out that T-shaped meter of his.
“You need to run tests,” I guessed, my heart sinking. We still had a mile-long hike ahead of us if we wanted to reach the gas.
A light bolt soared over us, striking a large boulder and boring through it as swiftly as it flew through the air. Then the storm broke. The darkness took on a strobe effect as dozens of bolts struck all around us. We had stayed in one place too long, and the Avatari had homed in on us.
Freeman scooped Sweetwater up with one arm, his particle-beam cannon extended from the other, and ran for cover behind a boulder. Thomer ran behind them, shooting blind fire at the aliens to give Freeman cover.
“Major, close ranks around Sweetwater and the nukes …” I told Burton.
A few feet away from me, a man hid behind a boulder. Three bolts seared through the rock, all of them missing him; but he panicked and jumped out from behind the cover. Bolts hit him in the leg, head, and chest, passing through him as cleanly as they had passed through the rock a moment earlier.
“Burton!” I yelled.
“On my way,” Burton said.
To my left, a grenadier stood to fire a rocket. The bolt that killed him traveled straight up his extended arm and out through his shoulder, leaving only a shred of hollow armor behind. Had it been a bullet or even a laser, the man would have lived. He collapsed in convulsions, flopping around on the ground like a fish on a dock. I ended his suffering, firing a quick green burst from my cannon that exploded his helmet in a splash of blood and shreds of armor.
Sweetwater stared at me, a frantic mixture of shock and fear in his eyes.
“Looks like this is as far as we’re going to get,” Burton warned as he slid in beside me.
“Bullshit,” I said. “Freeman, if this doesn’t work, grab Sweetwater and make a run for the spheres.” I rose to my feet, then spun so that my back was against a massive rock wall. I needed to clear a hole, just enough of a lane for us to get past this trap. If push came to shove, we’d detonate the nukes before reaching the gas, but only as a last resort. Prematurely detonating the nukes might not charge the gas, but it would do more than giving up and dying.
There were too many Avatari for us to fight our way through, and time was running out. In another five minutes, Sweetwater would die whether we got him close enough to calibrate the nuke or not.
Just when I thought we would never waltz out of the trap, I peered around the rock and saw something promising—aliens of a feather were flocking together. There may have been as many as a hundred Avatari soldiers out there, but they grouped together in a cluster. It might have been because they were not designed for underground combat, or it could have been because the aliens controlling those avatars were not used to this sort of firefight, but the soldiers massed in one small area were forcing the guardian spiders to handle the legwork.
“Boll, you got any more thermite tips?” I asked.
“Only legal loads from here on out,” he answered.
“Shit,” I said.
“I got one,” Herrington said.
“You said I was insane for—” Boll said.
“You wanna point fingers or win this?” Herrington snapped. Then, in a calmer voice, he said, “Lieutenant, I have a thermite load to fire.”
“Herrington, I’m placing a virtual beacon on the spot I need you to hit. Then I am going to break left and draw fire,” I said. “Wait until you get a clear shot, then you light those bastards.”
“Once you get clear of them?” Herrington asked.
“The moment you have the shot, you specking take it!” I said. As I said this, a barrage of light bolts splattered the ground around us. Two guardian spiders marched over a rock off in the distance. Freeman picked them off.
Crouching low and darting for cover, I tried to find a path that offered me cover as I circled around the Avatari. I sent messages as I ran, telling Burton and the rest of the company to move toward the spheres whether my plan worked or not. The clock was ticking; in the next few minutes every one of us might well die whether we succeeded or not.
Some sharp-eyed specker of an Avatari spotted me as I made my way toward a wall. A bolt missed my shoulder by inches. As I dived for cover in a trench, a bolt hit the rifle I kept strapped to my back. A few bolts flew over my head, then the attack simply stopped.
I peered out from the trench in time to see Ray Freeman stowing his particle-beam cannon. Freeman, murderous son of a bitch that he was, may have been the best man I had ever known.
I had already wasted seconds I could not afford. With Freeman as my guardian angel and trusting that none of the other Avatari had noticed me, I sprang from the trench and sprinted across open ground. At first I had a clear path, then one of the drone spider-things crawled out of a hole. I jumped left to avoid it, and the shooting began. Bolts flew through the air around me, not just one or two, but en masse. Four, maybe five bolts struck a rock ledge not more than twenty feet from me. The ledge exploded with such force that it threw me into a waist-deep hole.
Over the interLink, I heard Boll talking to Herrington.
“He makes a good distraction,” Boll said.
“Shhh! I’m looking for my shot. I’ve waited my whole life to fire off one of these thermite jobs. It’s kind of a life’s ambition.”
In order for Herrington to hit the target, I would need to distract the bastards. I placed my virtual beacon, then I sprang from cover. Bolts streaked around me, but they could not get a clear shot at me because I ran between rocks and stayed low to the ground. One bolt passed just a few inches from my face.
“Hey, there’s the beacon,” Herrington said.
“Fire the specking thing!” Boll shouted.
The flash Herrington’s thermite rocket made seemed to make the world around me disappear. I had no idea if he had cleared the enemy stronghold, and I would need to go in to make sure the path was secure. As I lay facedown preparing to leap out, the dark form of a guardian appeared over the lip of the hole. It slashed at me with one of its forelegs, but I managed to jump out of its reach.
I couldn’t kill the damned thing. If I shot and it fell on me, it would crush me under its bulk. If it touched me with its leg, my armor would short out, and I’d be blind.
The guardian lashed at me with a foreleg. I rolled to the other side of the hole and shot at the bastard’s head. The spider reeled but did not fall, so I shot out its legs. The guardian fell backward, out of the hole. I did not waste time looking to see what happened to it.
“Cut your way through,” I called over an open frequency. The message was mostly for Burton and Peterson—the men on point—but it was also meant for Boll and Herrington, our best grenadiers. I ran ahead until I had a clear view of the spot Herrington hit with that thermite rocket. I don’t know how many Avatari had been there, but they were all gone now.
The grenadiers led our formation, with Burton and his riflemen coming up next. They had formed a tight circle around Sweetwater and the nukes. Even from a distance, I could see that Freeman was carrying William Sweetwater like a mother carrying a child.
Targeting guardians and drones, I cut across the ground between me and the rest of the company, leaping over holes and rocks, and skirting boulders. Somewhere in the distance, the Avatari regrouped and began shooting at us. Light bolts tore into two men behind me. As I turned to sight the aliens, I saw another of my riflemen fall.
My grenadiers went to work, firing rocket after rocket into the path to clear the way. The explosions cast a staccato of flashes across the bleak cavern. Their rockets exploded, sending twisting columns of smoke that rose from the ground and evaporated into the blackness.
In the flash from the rockets, I saw more guardians moving in the distance. “What the hell is it going to take to break through, damn it!” I yelled in frustration. I turned to look at the ridge to our rear and saw ten Avatari standing on an outcropping. Freeman cut down three of them. A dozen sparkling green beams demolished the others as the riflemen in the rear opened fire. The Avatari shot back at us, and I lost two more of my men.
The riflemen were falling back as the grenadiers forced their way ahead. “Stay together! Stay together!” I yelled.
Burton repeated the order.
Thomer fell back to help Freeman.
We found a twenty-foot rise that seemed to run the length of the cavern and climbed it. Along the crest of that rise I could see the light from the spheres as it traveled along its spine. We had to stick to the rise—the ground around us was buried under a layer of drones working so close together that their legs touched. The rise, though, left us as exposed as a can on a post in a shooting gallery.
“They’re all around us!” one of my men screamed. That was our only warning that we had waded into the horde. The next moment guardian spiders started climbing up the sides of our path.
“They’re coming in close,” Herrington called over the interLink.
I barely had time to issue the order to switch to pistols before the guardian spiders began climbing the rise. Private Grossman, one of the men carrying the nukes, stood in the two o’ clock position in our formation. When a guardian charged the circle from eleven o’clock, he and the three other men carrying the nuke shot it. He was still looking at the guardian they killed when another spider lashed out at him from the top of a twenty-foot shelf. His armor split, and he screamed in pain. The guardian slashed at him again and would have stabbed him clean through, but Herrington shot it.
Blind and scared, Grossman threw off his helmet. He inhaled a lungful of the poisoned air and dropped to one knee.
“Simmons …” I said. The man instinctively knew what I meant. He aimed his pistol at Grossman. “Sorry, pal,” he whispered as he fired a single shot, which caused Grossman’s head to explode. I did not know if being hit in the head by a particle beam was painless, but I was certain it beat the hell out of running around blind as the acid in the air melted you inside and out.
With only a hundred yards to go, the light from the spheres was so bright that my visor automatically switched to tactical view. Now I could see colors. I could see the black-gray spiders against the flat black rock.
A white bolt struck Thompson, the Marine walking next to me. He spun around and fell to the ground, lying there convulsing for a moment, then slumping into death. Another bolt struck Robison, one of the men lugging a nuke. It hit him in the head, and he fell dead and rolled down the hill. The other men handling that nuke lost their balance and slid after him, dragging the nuke in their wake.
“Cover me,” Thomer shouted. He dropped on his ass and slid down the side of the rise. At least a half dozen of those spider-thing drones scurried along his path. I shot three; Burton might have hit five. We might have been down to two dozen men now. A bolt hit a man to my left a moment later, and we were down one more.
I spotted the Avatari trooper coming toward us, and fired.
“Boll, Herrington—cover our ass side,” I shouted. “Use grenades, and don’t worry about the trip home.” The trip home was the last of our concerns. Herrington managed to pick off two Avatari a moment later. Boll took a bolt in the head and rolled into a hole with a drone. The giant spider-thing did not see him when it stabbed its leg through Boll’s stomach and scratched at the ground flinging his corpse around like a rag. As it continued to dig, the spider-thing tore Corporal Boll in half.
“Get up here!” I yelled at Thomer, as he struggled to climb the side of the rise carrying the hundred-pound nuke. Bolts flew around us. Another grenadier fell.
I shouted for Freeman.
Ray came toward me, still carrying Sweetwater in the crook of his right arm. He dropped to one knee and reached for Thomer with his left. Instead of grabbing the big man’s arm, Thomer handed him the nuke. He did not attempt to climb the hill. Instead, he turned, pulled out his pistol, and began shooting spider-things.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Get going,” Thomer said. “I’ll catch you on the way out.”
“Sure,” I said. “Catch you on the way out.”
Three riflemen came forward and took the nuke. I was about to ask for a fourth man and realized these were the only ones I had left. We were down to twelve men—three men lugging one nuke and four lugging the other, Herrington watching the rear, Burton, Freeman, Sweetwater, and me.
We ran ahead as quickly as we could, stumbling along the top of the rise until we reached the spheres. A guardian sprang up to block our way, and I shot it. I shot it again and again because even though it was dead, it still blocked our path. The three men carrying the first of the nukes managed to snake their way around it, but the four-man team carrying the second bomb lost their footing and rolled down the side of the rise. They vanished into the darkness.
I could not go back to help them. Stray bolts flew through the air around us, and we had to move on. I did not see where they fell, and could not find so much as their virtual dog tags. Things were unraveling so quickly. By the time we reached the spheres, Burton was gone. Where we lost him, I had no idea.
Of the forty-nine of us that had left Valhalla that morning, only seven of us remained to place the bomb.
The line of spheres stretched out in both directions, an endless string of glowing balls simultaneously emitting crystalline white light and oozing brown sludge. The light from the spheres shone over the swampy puddle of the gas like overbright moonlight. The cave that had once covered the spheres had vanished, and only its footprint remained—a half-pipe trench partially filled by a layer of gas.
Still silent, Freeman carried Sweetwater to the outside edge of that trench and lowered him to the ground.
“Is he even alive?” Herrington asked me.
We got our answer when the scientist sank to his knees but remained vertical. Looking at the clock in my visor, I saw that only twenty minutes had passed since we had entered the Avatari dig. It didn’t seem possible. It felt like the entire universe had changed in those twenty short minutes.
What was left of my company fanned out to form a perimeter while Freeman helped Sweetwater open his canvas bag and fish out equipment. I took my place along the perimeter, my back to the light, looking out into a darkness in which monsters lurked and stealing an occasional glance at Freeman and Sweetwater. One time I looked over my shoulder and caught a glimpse of Freeman dragging the scientist toward the spot where the gas came to the edge of the rocks. When I looked back again, I saw Freeman pulling some kind of cylinder out of Sweetwater’s canvas bag. There were more cylinders on the ground, a whole pile of them. Freeman showed the cylinder he was holding to Sweetwater and the scientist shook his head.
Out in the distance, white bolts and green flashes were visible. One of my men was still alive out there, probably Thomer. A spider moved in the nearby shadows. Herrington raised a rocket to fire at it, but I hit it first with my particle-beam cannon.
“Nice shooting, sir,” Herrington said.
Behind me, Freeman lay flat on his stomach and held one of the cylinders as far over the gas as he could. He brought the cylinder back and showed it to Sweetwater.
A bolt struck Private Ferris in the chest, and he crumpled. Herrington and I both returned fire, but the company was now down to six men. As I thought about it, for all intents and purposes, the magic number was five. Sweetwater could not possibly live much longer.
“Harrrisss.” The voice whispering over the interLink sounded more like wind than someone speaking. “Harrrrisss.” I would have dismissed the message as my imagination, but the name “Freeman” appeared on my visor.
I turned and saw both Freeman and Sweetwater staring in my direction. They had removed the nuclear device from its outer shell, and Sweetwater was sitting on the ground beside the disassembled bomb while Freeman knelt over him.
“Shoot anything that moves,” I told Herrington and Grubb, the last of my grenadiers. I went and knelt beside Sweetwater.
Stripped from its shell, the bomb looked like a rock tumbler—a spherical canister with chrome piping and lots of wires. It had a little keypad, which Freeman must have used to program the explosion. Sweetwater could not have set the bomb; his fingers had swollen to the point of bursting.
The red LED above the keypad said 20:00.
The goggles had done a fair job of protecting Sweetwater’s eyes. The lids of his eyes were heavily swollen, and the whites of his eyes had mostly turned the color of blood, but he could see. Through the fog in his oxygen mask, I saw that blisters had formed on Sweetwater’s lips around his mouth.
The scientist beckoned with both hands for me to come closer, so I bent down even lower until my helmet was practically against his face.
“What do you think, Harris? Would we have made a good Marine?” he asked.
“I still like you better as a scientist,” I said. He chuckled, a painfully dry sound rising up from his throat.
“You’d make a shitty scientist, Lieutenant. You kill everything you see,” Sweetwater croaked. Then he motioned me even closer. “The case …the case around the device. We’ve set the device to explode in twenty minutes. Put the bomb in the gas.”
“The gas won’t destroy the bomb?” I asked.
Sweetwater shook his head. “Not fast.”
Even if the Avatari knew what we had and went looking for it, I doubted they would find the nuke in the gas. “You know, Sweetwater,” I said. “I was wrong, you’d make a hell of a Marine.”
Sweetwater coughed up something that looked like blood. “Run fast. Maybe you can make it out.”
I wanted to tell him that we’d take him out with us, but I knew better, and so did he.
“The clock starts when you close the case. You better run fast,” he said.
I toyed with the idea of simply setting the bomb off, then I looked at that clock again. If we made a mad dash and the aliens did not pin us in their cross fire, we could probably reach the transport in ten minutes, maybe less. A mile to the slope, a short uphill sprint, then out to the transport.
“The nuke’s on a twenty-minute timer,” I said on an open frequency. “What do you think? Do we stay here, or make a break for it?”
“Think we can make it out?” Grubb asked.
“Maybe we should guard the bomb till it explodes. This whole thing is for nothing if the aliens disarm it,” said Herrington.
“They won’t,” I said, “I’m throwing it into the gas.”
“Well, in that case, I wouldn’t mind collecting my back pay,” Herrington said.
“Yeah, me too,” I said.
I started to slide the inner mechanism of the nuke back in the sleeve, then stopped. Once I closed it, there would be no time to do anything but chuck the nuke in the gas and run, and there was something I needed to do.
A guardian spider dropped off a wall and landed on Private Neery. Herrington and Grubb shot the creature, but Neery was already dead.
Sweetwater lay on his stomach looking away from me toward the spheres. Sure that he could not see me, I slowly pulled out my pistol. The man had suffered too much. I wanted to end his suffering and seal the bomb, but I hesitated before pulling the trigger, and he turned and saw me.
He reached for me with the wad of raw meat that had once been his hand.
“Our gun,” was all he said.
“You’re an amazing man, Dr. Sweetwater,” I said as I aimed my pistol at his head. I had not yet laid my finger across the trigger. I hated what I was about to do.
Freeman pushed my gun away. He dug through the scientist’s canvas bag and pulled out Sweetwater’s small-caliber pistol. Freeman placed the gun in Sweetwater’s hand, then gently closed the little scientist’s fingers around the toy. Through the clear plastic of his oxygen mask, a faint smile formed across Sweetwater’s bloodstained mouth.
“Turn us over,” he called to Freeman, sounding like a sick child.
Freeman carefully rolled him onto his stomach and stretched his arms out so that he looked like a soldier lying in wait. During their time alone in the cockpit, Sweetwater and Freeman must have discussed how the scientist wanted to die.
Herrington looked back over the scene, and said, “Good luck, Doc,” on an open channel that everyone but Sweetwater could hear. “It’s too bad they don’t clone natural-borns; we could use an entire battalion of men like you.”
As I started to slide the nuke into its sleeve, I saw Freeman gently pat Sweetwater on the back. The little pistol fell from his hand, and I knew William Sweetwater had died.
“Okay, boys, I’m going to start the timer. On my mark, start running and shooting, and don’t stop till you’ve reached the transport,” I said.
I heard a round of aye-ayes.
For a brief moment, it seemed like everything would work out, then the world around us suddenly became brighter. I turned and saw that the long line of spheres had begun to dilate; and worse, I saw the yellow outlines of Avatari soldiers inside each sphere.
Half-convinced the bomb would explode the moment I reassembled it, I shoved the inner mechanism back into its sleeve. The window on the outside of the outer cylinder showed that the clock had begun to count down the moment the innards snapped into place. I noted the time in my visor and sprang to my feet.
“Go!” I yelled.
Behind me, Avatari energy forms began marching out of the spheres. There must have been thousands of them, and there might have been tens of thousands more waiting to emerge. They were behind us, not between us and our way back to the transport, and they were slow. If we ran quickly, I thought we might still make it out.
Grabbing the handles on either end of the nuke, I hefted it off the ground, but I was weak from the march down here. I had trouble lifting the damn thing, and I had to wrestle it toward the gas. Less than a hundred feet away from me, more glowing yellow soldiers took form and emerged from the spheres—an army of creatures made of nothing but energy. Seeing the Avatari step into the knee-deep carpet of gas that surrounded the spheres, I had a moment’s hope that the gas would dissolve them.
“Run!” I shouted, and dropped the armed nuke into the gas.
There were only four of us now. Grubb led the way, scrambling up the side of the ridge that led back across the cavern. Herrington followed, his pistol ready in case anything stepped in his way.
In the dark confines of the cavern, thousands of glowing beings poured out of the spheres behind us. They strolled across the layer of gas like a phosphorous tide, the light from their bodies spreading its glow through the gloom.
At the top of the ridge, Herrington stopped and turned to look back. “Harris, you better get moving. The whole specking Mudder Army’s behind you.”
A few yards ahead of me, Ray Freeman ran like an injured man, his back curled, his shoulders hunched and tight. He struggled to climb the loose slag along the ridge until I came up behind him and rammed him forward. It was a struggle—the man weighed at least 350 pounds, and he was weak, but we managed to reach the top together.
I hazarded a look back. Avatari soldiers continued pouring out of the spheres. They walked across the gas and moved in our direction, apparently unaware of the nuclear device I had left. In another minute or two, their rifles would become solid enough to shoot. We could outrun the Avatari but not their light bolts.
Herrington jogged back in my direction carrying a grenade launcher. He said something about slowing the bastards down, and I yelled, “Go! Just go!” At this stage, with their bodies still made of energy, a rocket would not hurt the Avatari, but it might damage the nuclear device.
I had only run a short way before I looked back and saw something that made the hormone-warmed blood freeze in my veins—the glowing front line of the Avatari had reached the spot where William Sweetwater’s body lay on the ground as still as a rock. The light emanating from their bodies gave the ground around his corpse a golden glow.
I did not have time to process the images I had just seen; I could either push Freeman ahead or leave him behind. Left on his own, Freeman stumbled along as if he did not know where he was. The ground beneath us was loose and uneven, and the path was narrow and covered with rocks and slag. If he fell, I might not be able to get him up again, but I knew one thing—I would not leave this man behind.
Private Grubb lost his footing as he ran ahead of us. He tripped and flew face-first, but managed to land on the ridge. As he climbed to his feet, his right leg folded beneath him. He’d probably broken an ankle when he tripped. He stumbled, then rolled down the side of the rise, vanishing into a spider-thing’s hole.
I fired a few blasts of particle beam in his general direction, but I could not wait to see if he made it out. Stopping for Grubb would mean sacrificing Freeman.
Freeman stumbled along at little better than a drunk man’s run. He’s going to make it, I told myself. I told myself this because it made me feel like I was in control, but the truth was that I didn’t think Freeman’s legs would hold out much longer. If he fell, I would stay and die with him.
Herrington pulled ahead of us by twenty, maybe even thirty, yards. Every few seconds, he’d pause, run in place for just a moment, and check back on us. When he reached the carcass of a guardian spider that we killed along the ridge, he stopped and lowered his gun. I thought he was waiting for us.
“Hey, asshole, get moving,” I said.
Herrington fired his pistol into the darkness along the rise. Grabbing one of the dead guardian cablelike legs to keep himself up, he reached down the side of the slope, extending himself as far as he could. When he came back up the rise, Sergeant Thomer came with him.
By this time, Freeman and I were on his heels.
“Nice of you to join us,” I told Thomer.
The other shoe dropped. The Avatari infantry began shooting.
We always knew that the Avatari’s guns took on form more quickly than the avatars of the troopers. Silver-white bolts flew past us, sliding through the darkness at speeds just visible to the eye. Their aim was well wide of us, as if either their guns or their vision had not finished forming; but the message was clear—time had run out.
Still unaware of us, spiderlike drones toiled in their holes along our path. A guardian climbed on to the ridge ahead of us. Shooting his pistol as he ran, Herrington shot the thing so many times he dismembered it.
Had they been more fleet, the Avatari would have overtaken us, but speed had never figured into their battle plans. They won wars by attrition. Behind us, light flooded the cavern, not the silvery light of the ion curtain but the yellow glow of the on-rushing tide of Avatari. Bolts flew through the air, ethereal dashes that flashed past us in a millisecond and vanished into the darkness. In the distance, more guardian spiders headed in our direction, but they were too far away to reach us.
Prodding Freeman from behind, I followed Thomer and Herrington to the final slope—the rise that would lead us out of the caverns. Only nine minutes had passed, nine minutes down and eleven minutes to go until the bomb performed whatever destructive magic Sweetwater had programmed into it. I hoped his magic would be strong enough.
The bolts were getting closer, striking the ground around us. A hailstorm struck just ahead of Herrington. He jumped back to avoid it, lost his balance, and slid back down on his stomach. Thomer made it to the top of the ridge, then dropped to the ground and began shooting to give us cover.
The next storm of bolts came so close that Thomer, Freeman, and I had to drop for cover. While we waited for a momentary hiccup in the steady stream of bolts, my eye flicked across the timer in my visor and I saw we now had only ten minutes to get away.
“Got any rockets left?” I asked Herrington.
“Nothing with a thermite tip,” he said.
“The hell with thermite, give me anything that makes a specking bang,” I shouted.
Herrington held up a grenade launcher. “It’s all I’ve got left. I can—”
“Give it here,” I said.
He did.
“Thomer, on my mark take Freeman and get out of here.”
“I can—” Herrington began to argue.
“Shut it, asshole!” I yelled. “I’ll be right behind you.”
I stood and aimed the grenade at the spot on the ridge where the front-most Avatari were working their way around the dead guardian spider. “Now! Move!” I shouted.
The images I saw at that moment etched themselves in my mind’s eye. Twenty or possibly thirty Avatari crowded around the dead spider. Their bodies had evolved to the point where the yellow light shone through cracks and crevices from behind a thin layer of tachyons. They had their rifles aimed, and I saw them fire bolts in the air, the flashes so bright they looked like holes in my memory.
The grenade struck the spider, igniting an explosion powerful enough to chew an entire section out of the rise. I did not wait to see if I hit them or if they could still follow us. Tossing the empty launcher aside, I sprinted straight up the ridge.
Above me, Thomer, Freeman, and Herrington fired a few particle-beam blasts, then darted into one of the tunnels. I followed. With eight minutes and five seconds left before the nuke exploded, the spiders and Avatari no longer mattered to us. We sprinted up the spiraling floor of the tunnel. My lungs and legs spent, I started to laugh when I flew around that final corner and saw the bright light at the end of the tunnel.
With seven minutes and twenty seconds remaining, we reached the outer entrance of the caves. Not until we left the cave did I realize that Freeman was our only pilot. There were only four of us now—Herrington, Thomer, Freeman, and me, and the Unified Authority did not waste its taxpayers’ money teaching piloting skills to simple combat Marines.
Every moment mattered. In another minute, fully formed Avatari troops would pour out of the cave like ants out of an anthill. They would be slow, but their weapons could tear through our transport. In five minutes a fifty-megaton nuclear bomb would explode, collapsing this mountain and hopefully attracting every specking tachyon on the planet. If Sweetwater had any other information about how the gas would react to a nuclear explosion, he took that secret with him to the grave.
We’d left the ramp of the transport open. Herrington ran in first, then Thomer. Freeman shambled in and stomped across the kettle, pulling himself up the ladder to the cockpit.
I hit the button to seal the rear ramp and headed toward the ladder to check in on Freeman. “Harness yourselves in, boys, it could be a bumpy ride,” I told Herrington and Thomer as I climbed the ladder.
Freeman hunched behind the controls still wearing his helmet. His back was stiff and his shoulders hunched.
The transport’s engines rumbled with just over two minutes to go when the craft lifted off the ground. We did not circle the mountain to get a good look at the explosion. Freeman took us straight up and straight away. We might have been a hundred miles away when the nuke finally went off.
They say you can hear a nuke from hundreds of miles away, but we never heard a thing. We flew at a speed faster than Mach 1, and the sound never caught up to us. Riding in the steel belly of the transport, we did not see the flash.
I shuttled between Thomer and Herrington in the kettle and Freeman in the cockpit. Time with Freeman was spent in silence. He did not remove his helmet, and he did not speak.
I was in the cockpit with Freeman when we reached Valhalla. The sky was dark, and lights sparkled in what was left of the city. The ion curtain had vanished, leaving a night sky in its place.
I spent the night in the hospital with Freeman.
Doctors spent six hours operating on his throat and lungs. When they finally wheeled him out of the operating room, his face was wrapped in bandages, and an oxygen vent was attached to his bed.
“He breathed in a vesicant,” the doctor told me.
“A what?” I asked.
“He’s got blisters in his throat and lungs,” the doctor said. “Whatever he breathed, it burned a lot of tissue.”
“Is he going to be okay?” I asked.
The doctor took a sharp breath, and said, “We tried to clean the toxins out of the blisters. If we got all of that stuff out, he should recover.”
Two orderlies wheeled Ray down the hall to his room. I followed them down and watched as the doctor checked Freeman’s vitals and chemical drips, then left.
Darkness never looked so good, I thought as I spread the blinds and peered out the hospital window. Streetlights blazed in the parking area below, stars showed in the sky, and in the distance, the first orange-and-pink streaks of sunrise pierced the horizon.
I dropped down in the seat beside Freeman’s bed and fell asleep.
I woke the next morning in time to find some significant brass coming up the hall. One of the generals had come to look in on Freeman—General James Hill, from the Air Force.
“How is he doing, Lieutenant?” Hill asked as he entered the room.
Hill was younger than the other generals, and I had the feeling he was a great deal smarter than the other generals as well. He was the only officer who ever seemed to understand all of the scientific jargon used by the late doctors Sweetwater and Breeze. I sure as hell never fully understood them.
“They say he’s going to live,” I said. “He inhaled a vesicant.” I tried to use the word as if I actually knew it.
“I thought he had combat armor,” Hill said. He knew the word. “That should have protected him.”
“He took his helmet off,” I said.
Hill nodded. “That’s right. I saw the video feed from your helmet.”
My helmet …No wonder they didn’t force me to stay for a debriefing. Once they downloaded the video from my helmet, they would know everything I knew.
Freeman lay before us, a mass of cotton and tubes. His massive chest expanded and contracted rhythmically under the sheet. Except for his chest, nothing on the bed moved, not his fingers, his eyes. The screen beside his bed showed steady vital signs.
“He was crazy to take off his helmet,” I said.
“You were all insane,” Hill said. “If any of you had acted sanely, we’d all be dead now.”
I thought about Thomer jumping into a horde of spider drones to save the nuke. I remembered Boll and Herrington carrying thermite-tipped rockets strapped to their backs. They cared more about the mission than they did about themselves. If he lived, at least Freeman would walk away a billionaire. All Herrington and Thomer had to look forward to was a long life in the Marines.
“Did Sweetwater’s plan work?” I asked. There was a night sky over Valhalla when we landed, so I knew that at least part of the plan had succeeded.
“Harris, Sweetwater and Breeze may have been the finest scientists of all time. Have you seen the sky? There’s a sun in the sky. The ion curtain is gone, the tachyons are all stuck in that gas.”
“Did you reach the battleships?”
“We’ve even sent messages to Earth,” Hill said.
“What’s to stop the Avatari from coming back?” I asked.
Hill shook his head. “They haven’t come back yet I suppose we know how to ruin their plans next time they do.”
“They’ll come back sooner or later,” I said.
“We’re going to take the war to them,” Hill said.
“Take the war to them?” I asked.
“Apparently back on Earth they have some idea about which galaxy the Avatari are from. They’re sending the Japanese fleet to explore the neighborhood.”
I thought about this and fell silent. I was tired, and this new information left me dizzy. Taking the war to them, I thought. It had a nice sound to it.
Hill stood studying Freeman for several minutes, his hands clasped behind his back and a look of sympathy on his face. He watched Freeman’s vital-signs readouts and stared into the bandaged face. Finally, he turned to me, and said, “Well, it was a pleasure serving with you, Lieutenant Harris. You lived up to everything I’ve ever heard about you.”
We traded salutes, and the only general to visit Ray Freeman turned and walked away.
I stayed with Freeman for two more days. I watched his fingers twitch and his eyes roll as he dreamed. He woke briefly, then the doctors placed him in an induced coma, saying his body would heal more quickly if he was asleep. It was while he was in that coma that they grafted new skin on his face and throat. They rebuilt his eyes.
He would, they told me, leave the hospital as good as new. But it would take time. Everything would be as good as new, but it would take time.