If the Bible is telling the truth, Moses tapped his rod against the shore of the Red Sea, and the waters split into a path. There’s no point denying that that was a miracle. Jesus turning the water into wine, Peter walking on water, three guys spending a night in a blazing furnace without getting burned …all events that qualify for miracle status.
If Scott Mars had seen the battle at the spaceport, he would have called it a miracle. I’m not so sure.
The batteries that the Unified Authority Marines used in their armor ran out of power. The batteries gave out because the power spiked every time something touched the shields. In order to rush our position, the U.A. Marines crossed the runway during a blizzard. Snow landed on their armor and drained their shields.
It wasn’t like Moses splitting the Red Sea or Peter walking on water. If the Egyptians had used water-soluble glue to attach the heads to their spears, and Moses had led them through a rain forest, their spears would have fallen apart. Would that have been a miracle?
So Lieutenant Mars, the “born-again” clone, prayed for a miracle, and we survived a battle against Unified Authority Marines because they didn’t realize that their armor would react to the snow. Mars would probably say that God sent the snow.
I’ve always thought of miracles as singular events. God did not cause the Red Sea to split every year on the anniversary of Moses’s miraculous escape; but He sure as hell repeats the miracle of the snow every winter. We were just outside Washington, D.C., in early December. It snows there every year.
The weather changed the course of history, not God. At least, I don’t think it was God. I’ll explain that to Mars if I ever see him again. If he’s alive. If God was as kind to him as He was to us.
Maybe in his “ineffable way,” God sent the equivalent of a blizzard to help Holman and the Enlisted Man’s Fleet as they delivered refugees to Terraneau. Andropov sent the entire Earth Fleet to the Scutum-Crux Arm. The Unifieds’ fleet had faster ships with better armor. They had more fighter carriers than Holman. Could Holman have turned it around with his torpedo-wielding fighters? It would have taken a miracle.
When Tobias Andropov surrendered Washington, D.C., he must not have thought the defeat would last. He probably expected that the victorious Earth Fleet would return from Terraneau. His miracle never materialized.
The Earth Fleet never returned. Sometimes I stay awake at night, wondering what happened at Terraneau.
The first few days after we captured Earth, we had kept our fleet on high alert. Nothing happened. After a week, we realized that the Earth Fleet would not return and cut back our patrols.
And then we turned our thoughts to the Avatari. We knew that the murderous bastards planned to fill our atmosphere with tachyon particles and incinerate us; but without Sweetwater and Breeze, we did not know when. Andropov turned over the computer that once housed the scientists; but the men and the virtual space station in which they lived had vanished.
Without our barges, evacuating the planet was unfeasible. We inherited an impressive civilian fleet when we captured Earth, ships that were big and slow and comfortable. But those ships only traveled at ten million miles per hour, making it a twelve-hour flight to Mars and back, plus time for loading and refueling. With over fifty million people living on Earth, evacuating the planet did not seem possible.
In those first weeks after we captured Earth, I spent a lot of time thinking about Solomon, the planet on which so many people had died. We did not warn those people. We let them go about their lives completely unaware that death was around the corner.
Death comes quickly at nine thousand degrees. Those people might not have even had time to note the change in the temperature before they turned to ash. It was a comforting thought. Since we could not evacuate Earth, Cutter and I decided to keep its upcoming destruction a secret. It was Solomon all over again, only this time I was on the planet. Cutter remained safe on his ship.
Freeman and I spent days, then weeks, on edge. But, just like the Earth Fleet, the aliens never returned.
Miracles followed miracles in those days. Moses parted a sea, Peter walked on water, Earth survived to greet another year.
In the days after the first Avatari invasion, the Unified Authority sent its SEAL clones along with the Japanese Fleet to hunt down the aliens. When the Avatari never materialized, I decided that the SEALs had probably accomplished their mission.
Miracles never struck me as particularly miraculous when men died to accomplish them. The aliens never returned. Neither did the Japanese Fleet. If God was revealing His power, He allowed a lot of good men to die in the process.