The Clone Elite

CHAPTER ONE

Until the first half of humanity was gone, all anybody wanted to talk about was the actress Ava Gardner. By then it was too late.

“She’s from New Copenhagen, you know,” the girl said to me.

“Who’s from New Copenhagen?”

“Ava Gardner,” she said. “Look, they’re showing The Bare-foot Contessa at that theater over there. Maybe we can go see it tomorrow.”

I did not respond.

“Do you think Ava’s a clone?” she asked. The girl’s name might have been Katerina. It might have been Leanne. She had told me her name on the beach this afternoon, but I forgot it as soon as I heard it. I remembered the name of her hotel. What more did I need?

“You’re not still going on about that actress?” I asked. “Who cares if she’s a clone? How would I know if she’s a clone?”

Katerina, or Leanne, or whatever her name was, shot me a frustrated look, and said, “I don’t know. I mean, I figured you being a clone and all, you might know.”

“Are you asking if they sent a memo down the clone network?” I asked.

“No, no, nothing like that. It’s just …I thought maybe you, like, you know, recognized other clones when you see them.” Now she sounded nervous.

“It’s not like that. Most clones don’t even know that they’re clones. They die if they …”

“Oh, right. I heard about that. They die if they find out that they’re clones. Is that for real? I heard about that, but I never believed it. How come you didn’t die when you found out?”

She was so pretty. She had brown eyes, deeply tanned skin from a week’s vacation spent entirely on the beach, and black hair that she pulled back into a ponytail. And she had a figure. In another few years she would probably get plump, but right now she had a tiny waist, sharp little breasts, and muscular thighs I could hardly take my eyes off of. She had reached that brief moment of physical perfection when youth gives way to womanhood.

The girl’s half-moon-shaped eyes were just wide enough to give her a look of constant surprise. Her stream of stupid questions did little to change my impression of her as both pretty and pretty stupid.

Back in the Marines, we called girls like her “scrub.” You enjoyed them for a night or two and moved on. This girl’s vacation would end in two days. By that time I’d be glad to see her go. For that face, though, I could put up with dumb questions and conversations about movie stars for a couple of days.

“I’m not a normal clone,” I said. “I’m a Liberator. Liberator clones don’t have the death reflex.”

Her eyes narrowed slightly. “Aren’t Liberators supposed to be dangerous?”

“I make my living beating the shit out of people in an Iron Man competition,” I said. “I guess that makes me dangerous.”

“But you wouldn’t hurt me,” she said, pulling herself closer to me so that our bodies touched. She wore an ice blue bikini top and a green wrap around her tiny waist. I could feel the warmth of her body. Oh yes, I could definitely put up with stupid questions and conversations about movie stars.

We were sitting in a booth in a beachside diner. It had two benches, but she opted to cram in next to me. I noticed that a lot of girls did things like that. Maybe it made them feel like they meant something to me, like they were more than a hobby.

“Nope,” I said, “I would never hurt you.”

She smiled. She practically purred. If someone had told me she was still in high school, I would have believed it; but she claimed she was twenty-one years old. She may have actually been eighteen or nineteen. Two years younger than me …four years younger than me, it didn’t really matter. Leanne or Katerina, whatever her name was, she was old enough to take care of herself.

“Maybe Ava’s a Liberator,” the girl said.

“She can’t be a Liberator,” I said. “All Liberators are male.”

“Then how do you reproduce?” the girl asked, shock showing on her face.

She better be good, I thought to myself. “We’re clones. We don’t reproduce; the Department of Defense manufactures us. That’s why they call us synthetics.”

Now disappointment showed on her face.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “All the machinery works.” Until that moment, I had not stopped to think that she might see me as disposable, too.

She smiled and moved in so close that she practically sat on my lap. The idea of mating with something not quite human seemed to have aroused her curiosity.

I looked at my watch. It was almost 1900. I didn’t need to be at the Palace until 2030, and work didn’t really start till nearly 2100. Time enough, I told myself as I suggested we swing by my apartment. Time enough.

Sad Sam’s Palace …

The Palace was an old auditorium at the edge of town, a few miles west of the Waikiki tourist district and one mile inland from the harbor. It was a three-story cement-and-plaster castle surrounded by auto-repair shops, warehouses, and bars. Its light-studded marquee stood out like fireworks among the dark alleys that populated the seedier side of Honolulu.

We rolled into the parking lot at 2030. The sun had long since gone down, leaving the sky black with veins of gray clouds. The Palace’s brightly lit silhouette cut an ostentatious figure against the sky. A huge marquee with flashing bulbs spelling the name “SAD SAM’S PALACE” flickered above the facade.

“That’s Sad Sam’s Palace?” the girl asked, as we drove toward the side gate. She seemed more confident around me now that we’d run by my pad; perhaps she thought she had impressed me.

“That’s it,” I said.

“Does it ever scare you, you know, fighting for a living?” she asked. “Are you ever afraid that you’ll get hurt?”

The “are you afraid” question …It almost made me miss conversations about Ava Gardner. “No,” I said. “I don’t worry about it much.”

“You must be really good,” she said.

“Either that, or I just like getting the shit kicked out of me,” I muttered quietly enough that she would not hear me.

“Harris,” the guard said as we rolled into the lot. “Big crowd tonight. You better give ’em a show.”

“That’s the plan,” I said as I drifted past. I parked and climbed out of the car. My date sat quietly, waiting for me to open her door for her, but I was already in fighter mode and opening a door for my date was the last thing on my mind. Seeing me headed to the back door of the Palace without so much as a backward glance, she opened the door for herself and caught up to me. She might not have been brilliant, but the girl was bright enough not to complain.

I didn’t have time to think about her now. I had other things on my mind.

We went into an alley leading behind the Palace. The place was dirty, with an overflowing Dumpster surrounded by a wall of garbage bags. The overly sweet smells of stale beer and old food filled the air. The alley must have made my date nervous; she stayed close to me as I knocked on the pea green metal door.

“Harris,” the guard said as he made room for me to step in.

“How’s the competition look?” I asked.

“Not as good as the company you’re keeping,” the guard said. He stared at my date and made no attempt to camouflage his interest. His fascination with my girl irritated me.

“Do I have anything to worry about?” I asked.

“You’ve seen this guy before. His name’s Monty.” The guard said this while staring at Leanne or Katerina. Whatever her name was, he was still watching her, and she didn’t seem to mind the attention.

“Big guy?” I asked.

“Short. Five-eight, maybe five-ten. You trashed him bad last time. He’s still missing his front teeth.” The guard—I could not remember his name—was missing a few teeth of his own. I might not have been the one who extracted those teeth, but I had little doubt that he’d lost them fighting in Sad Sam’s ring.

“Thanks,” I said, and turned toward the locker room.

“I don’t think I like this place,” my date said.

“You don’t think you like it here?” I asked. “Give it a little time. You’ll know you don’t like it.”

“You don’t think I’ll like the fights?”

“Some girls like them, and some girls don’t,” I said.

The hall was long and dark with cinder-block walls and a cement floor. The Palace’s auditorium was alive with bright lights, loud fans, and beer. In the tunnels and locker rooms, the atmosphere was somber, dim, and quiet. A metal bucket sat in a corner, a mop growing out of the dirty water it held. The air was humid and smelled of sweat. Somewhere not too far away, a couple of security guards, janitors, or possibly fighters were telling dirty jokes. I heard the punch line—“I told her, ‘Speck you later!’ ”—followed by roaring laughter.

I led my date to a doorway where one of the floor waitresses stood. “Can you get her a good seat for the fight?” I asked.

The waitress gave my date a quick once-over, then said in a bored voice, “So you’re the girl of the week. Pleased to meet you.”

“I can’t come with you?” Leanne—by this time I was pretty sure her name was Leanne—pleaded. She gave me a desperate look with those beautiful brown eyes.

“That’s probably not a good idea. I’m headed to the men’s locker room.” I patted her hand and continued on my way. They almost never gave me a locker room to myself, and bloodied fighters were a common sight. Leanne might be all right watching the fight, but she didn’t want to see the aftermath. She would have a good table near the ring, and the waitresses would warn away any guys stupid enough to approach her.

Already unbuttoning my shirt, I stepped into the locker room and did not like what I saw. Somebody had switched off the lights, and the green glow from the emergency exit sign stood out against the darkness. Pale light spilled out from the door of the shower room.

“Did you know that you are a fugitive from the law, Harris?” a familiar voice asked as I closed the door. That voice combined with the dark atmosphere sent a shiver down my spine. “Ever heard of the Elite Conscription Act?”

I had my shirt off and did not pause before unbuckling my belt and starting on my pants. If that voice belonged to the man I thought it belonged to, I preferred the lights off. “Can’t say that I have,” I said.

“It’s brand-new; Congress just enacted it. It gives all four branches of the military the right to call men back to active duty whether they want to go back or not. The Linear Committee signed it into law without the usual fanfare. I guess ‘Wild Bill’ didn’t want people asking questions about why the military needs to recall retired servicemen,” he said.

“Nope,” I said, “never heard of it.”

“The ECA is not the kind of thing that the average citizen needs to know about.”

“I’m an average citizen,” I said. “Maybe I don’t need to know about it.”

“You were an average citizen. As of midnight tonight, you will be a first lieutenant in the U.A. Marines. That means you need to know about it,” Illych said.

Emerson Illych was a military clone. He was not your standard government-issue military clone, the kind that had a death reflex if they found out they were synthetic; but he was not a Liberator, either. He was a Special Operations clone, a limited make minted specifically for the Navy SEALs. His kind could slip in and out of an enemy stronghold without leaving a trace other than the bodies they left in their wake. Illych and I were friendly, having fought in more than one campaign together.

“So now I’m elite?”

“Don’t get too jazzed about it,” Illych said. “All it takes to be ‘elite’ is battle experience and a pulse.”

Considering the last battle I had fought in, the one where the Navy left sixty thousand Marines on a planet to die, I considered myself elite after a fashion. Illych and I stood there in a silent stalemate for a moment.

Under other circumstances I might have turned on the lights, but Illych and his brew looked better in the dark. They were built for stealth work and combat at close quarters. A thick and protective bone ridge ran along the front of their skulls, just under the eyebrows. It gave their faces a Neanderthal aspect.

The first time I came to Sad Sam’s Palace, I was a naïve Marine, and I got suckered into a fight with a SEAL like Illych. The man could have killed me, but he’d slipped up and given me a break, opening the door for me to beat him to death instead. That was four years ago. I’d become less humane over the years.

“When did you SEALs start playing messenger boy?”

By this time I had stripped to my fighting trunks. It was just a question of waiting for the last fight to end so I could head out to defend my title. A moment later there was a knock on the door. “Harris, you ready?” one of the guards asked.

“I volunteered. I even took leave to come here. This is a historic event—your last fight at the Palace,” Illych said.

“Just like that? They pass a new law, and poof, I’m recalled? I thought Mooreland didn’t want me in his Corps.”

“Mooreland isn’t in charge anymore,” Illych said. “He was killed in action on Hubble.”

“Hubble?” I asked. I had fought there once. The Unified Authority did not maintain a settlement on that godforsaken rock.

“Hubble,” Illych said. “The aliens he said didn’t exist killed him and his division.”

“No shit.” I was stunned but not saddened. Mooreland was an asshole. The men who died with him were just clones. I was just a clone, too; but I had had the good sense to get out of the service. I closed my locker and reached for the door. “I’m coming,” I yelled to the guard outside.

“You know, the aliens that you saw …the ones that don’t exist, they’re taking over the galaxy. At least we think it’s them. No one has seen them and lived. No one but you.”

“So it’s begun?” My hand dropped from the door. I stood there in the dark, chilling images flashing through my brain. I saw the Mogat planet, thousands of Marines dying in the dark, and the weird light spreading over the city. I thought of the alien and about the hearing in which Brallier and Mooreland crucified me.

“Harris, you coming?” the guard called from outside.

“It’s more than begun, Harris. It’s in full swing.”

I let those words penetrate me and felt a strange numbness. I had always known the war was coming, and now it was here. These aliens would certainly kill everyone; but from my point of view, they did not seem any more treacherous than the clone-hating officers I had served under. I had resigned myself to the idea that I would die whether I fought or not. The Unified Authority could not stand up to this new threat. If I enlisted, I would die in battle. If I did not enlist, I would die in the civilian onslaught. Given a choice, I had originally decided that I would rather die like a sheep than give my life protecting the people who had betrayed me so many times in the past. But now that the war had become a reality, I had second thoughts.

“Harris?” the guard called from outside the door.

“Coming,” I said.

“Don’t get hurt,” Illych said as I opened the door. “You’re government property now. There are laws against damaging government property.”

CHAPTER TWO

Sanity never counted for much at Sad Sam’s Palace. The fighters I faced seldom scared me as much as the crowds screaming themselves hoarse from the bleachers and balconies lining the cavernous walls. Bright lights blazed down from the ceiling during interludes between fights. Once the announcer began calling the match, the crew doused the main lights and followed the fighters into the ring with spotlights.

While the main lights still cooked, I caught a glimpse around the arena. Friday night fights always attracted a crowd, but this …The audience sat so packed together they seemed to form a carpet. The loud cheering left a ringing in my ears.

Scouting the tables closest to the ring, I saw Marines in Charlie service uniforms. Some wore armbands identifying them as military police.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the announcer began. I mused that neither ladies nor gentlemen would come to see this bloody spectacle.

“…Sad Sam’s Palace welcomes you to our main event.”

Tonight’s sacrifice had already entered the ring. He stood beside the announcer, rolling his shoulders and shaking his head. The guy was short. His muscled arms hung slack by his sides, slightly bent at the elbows like parenthesis marks on either side of his body. He was barrel-chested, with a solid slab for a stomach. The guy looked vaguely familiar; I probably had given him a beating sometime back.

The air in the Palace felt hot, and the atmosphere was electric. As I stepped onto the floor, a man to my right accidentally splashed beer on me. He stood screaming at the tops of his lungs, his voice raw, and he waved his half-gallon-sized paper cup of beer in the air like a baby shaking a rattle. Two security guards walked ahead of me, clearing a path through crowds that had jumped to their feet.

“Our challenger, weighing in at 227 pounds, your Sad Sam’s Iron Man champion of the evening, Thomas Monty!”

I heard screaming and pounding. Men jumped up and down like children pitching a tantrum, but no one could seriously believe this stiff stood a chance. He was just another Christian being fed to the clone lion. The lights suddenly cut out, leaving the entire arena dark except for the blazing lights above the ring and a spotlight that followed me. The floor quieted.

“And now, our defending champion, weighing in at 218 pounds, Wayson the Liberator clone Harris.” I heard the screaming and saw the fans, but my mind was on the Elite Conscription Act. I thought about aliens that looked like they were made of light instead of matter. I thought about full-scale invasions and full-scale betrayals.

The ring was a raised platform with no ropes around it. There would be chain-link walls, but those would drop from the ceiling after I entered the ring and the referee exited it—there would be no third man in the ring in this competition.

I climbed the three-step ladder near the corner. Across the ring, Monty stood in the bright white glare, the light reflecting off the sheen of perspiration on his face. Now that I was close enough to get a good look, I saw that the guard in the parking lot had sized Monty up perfectly. He stood under six feet, maybe only five-foot-eight, but he was a bear of a man with huge shoulders. Because the bright light was directly over him, dark shadows formed over Monty’s eye sockets. I could not see his eyes. No emotion showed on his face—neither hate nor anger. His lips parted, and I saw the black squares where he had once had teeth.

Sad Sam’s management did not compromise the integrity of its Iron Man competition with something so foreign as a point system. The fights ended when one of the opponents was out cold or submitted. The tough guys who entered this ring seldom called uncle, though. A few people died, but no one ever asked for mercy.

The referee looked at Monty, then at me. He mouthed something. I could not hear his whispered instructions over the crowd, but I imagined it was something along the lines of “Let’s put on a good show.” He left the ring with the announcer, and the walls, seven-foot panels of chain-link fencing, began to lower from the rafters.

I never took my eyes off Monty. Standing this close, I saw that he had not made it through the tournament unscathed. He had a black eye, and the left side of his mouth was swollen. He also had bruises on his arms and chest. I did not feel bad for him, though; we all went through that. To become champion, you had to win the Friday Night Tournament and have enough left in you to beat the standing champ.

Cogs ground as the walls slowly lowered. Monty slid his mouthpiece over his upper teeth. I already had mine in. I stared into Monty’s emotionless brown eyes. No fear showed, nor did anything resembling compassion. Perhaps he regarded me as something less than human.

The walls clanged into place. Somewhere in the darkness outside the ring, somebody rang a bell, and the fight began. Monty turned toward me and started to drift in my direction. I hit him in the mouth with a straight right, leaving a small stream of blood flowing from his already-swollen lower lip. He did not stutter or miss a step.

I took a step back. I had at least six inches of reach on this guy. I hit him along the top of his mouth with an overhand right, making sure to roll my knuckles across the point of his nose.

Monty did not so much as blink. A tough enough guy might shake off the belt across the mouth, but the knuckles to the nose would have caused anyone to wince …any normal person. If Monty had luded up before the match, the drugs would feel the pain instead of him. And if he was drugged, the chemicals would keep him demonically focused on breaking my neck. I kept my distance and long-ranged him with a few more shots.

Management supposedly tested fighters for ludes and boosters, but that was usually before their first fight. Monty might have taken something later. He might have even waited until right before this fight.

Monty lunged at me. I had no trouble dodging the attack, I simply stepped to the left, allowing him to sail on past me and charge face-first into the chain-link wall around the ring. Then I grabbed a handful of his hair with my left hand and placed my right along the nape of his neck. I rubbed his face up and down the chain-link wall like a cook grating cheese. Monty screamed like an animal, pivoted around, and broke my grip with a wild brush of his arm.

He should not have been able to break out of my grip so easily, but you can do all kinds of things with the right pharmaceuticals. Still, I had left my mark—a four-inch gash opened across his forehead. Blood rolled down his face and into his impassive eyes.

Monty stopped for just a second and smiled at me. The blood hid the outline of his lips, and red droplets speckled his teeth.

I had originally planned to carry the guy for a few minutes, maybe give the paying customers a moment to believe they were witnessing a fair fight. Now I changed my mind. Screw showmanship, I swept Monty’s right knee, contacting hard at about the two o’clock angle on the poor bastard’s kneecap. The leg broke easily enough, and Thomas Monty fell like a tree. He laughed as if I had told him a joke, shook his fist in the air like a man cursing his bad luck, then pushed down on the canvas mat and climbed right back to his feet. If I ever doubted my ability to put this guy away, it was at that moment.

When men are luded to the gills, they can stand up on broken legs; hell, I once saw a guy do jumping jacks on a broken leg. Thomas Monty stood on his good leg, then put weight on the broken one, which folded instantly. He took a step forward just the same, so I broke his good leg with a second kick.

Down went Monty, and this time he stayed down. He tried to get to his feet again, but the law of gravity conspired against him. He planted his feet, then leaned forward, trying to heave himself up, but tumbled on his face instead. And now he began to feel the pain.

I watched this from about six feet away, just out of his reach. I stood there with my arms folded across my chest to demonstrate to the ref that the fight was over, my opponent had nothing left.

Cursing at the top of his lungs, Monty pulled himself toward me. He reminded me of the Hollywood version of a mortally wounded soldier pulling himself heroically across the battlefield. I took a step away. He pulled himself closer. I took another step away. He followed. The fight would not stop until he stopped chasing me, so I scooted around the recently crippled Mr. Thomas Monty and kicked one of his broken kneecaps as hard as I could.

His shriek was neither human nor animal. It reminded me of the sound of stressed metal twisting and tearing. When he swung a fist at my leg, I sidestepped his punch and kicked his leg a second time. The pain from that kick shot its way through the haze of drugs that numbed his brain, and he curled into a ball, weeping and screaming with the shrillness of an injured child.

The referee walked to the outside of the cage and yelled, “Do you submit?”

Monty screamed, rolled around on the mat, and held his legs.

The referee asked again and got the same unintelligible response, so I kicked Monty’s knees to help clarify things. The lower half of his leg spun like a tetherball from below his kneecap. “Hey, asshole, the referee asked you a question.”

Monty howled.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked the ref. “He’s too luded to know he’s beat.”

“Hey, Monty!” the ref yelled.

Monty said something along the line of “Ummmmmmm! Hyummmm.”

I kicked his knee again. “The guy can’t defend himself.”

“I can’t stop the fight unless he quits,” the ref said.

“Want me to kill him?” I asked. “That’s what it’s going to take to shut him down.”

This was new territory for Sad Sam’s Palace. In the past, Iron Man championships were won or lost by knockout. Seconds passed with Monty still curled on the ground, too drugged to tap out and too injured to continue the fight. Finally, the walls of the cage rose in the air, and the referee ended it.

The ref swaggered into the ring with the bravado of a sailor on leave. When he looked down at Monty, no sympathy showed on his face. Then he looked over at me. “Damn, with all the shit this guy took, I thought he would get you,” he said as he raised my hand.

So ended my last fight at Sad Sam’s Palace. I gave Monty’s broken leg one last kick for good measure before climbing out of the ring and heading to the locker room.

CHAPTER THREE

I picked up an entourage as I stepped from the ring. MPs, both from the Navy and the Marines, fell in behind me. These boys came prepared, pistols in their belts, nightsticks in their hand. I had barely stepped to the floor when the first two fell in behind me. A few feet later, I picked up two more. By the time I reached the service hall that led to the locker room, I had my own little platoon.

I paused to look at Leanne, Bethany, whatever her name was …She sat at the table watching me. Our eyes met. I knew our eyes were the only part of our anatomy that would meet from here on out.

Other fighters and several Palace workers milled around the hall as I headed toward the locker room. They cleared out of the way as I stalked past. It might have been the line of MPs traveling behind me, but no one ever patted me on the back or told me congratulations under normal circumstances, either. It’s the nature of the beast—most people don’t feel sentimental about clones who beat people up for a living.

I opened the door to the locker room and found that someone had switched on the lights. My entourage did not follow me inside, nor did they leave me to my own devices. A Marine major flanked by two more MPs stood in the center of the locker room waiting for me.

“Wayson Harris, by the articles of U.A. Senate resolution 2514-353, otherwise known as the Elite Conscription Act, you have been called back to active duty in the Unified Authority Marine Corps.” By the stilted way in which the major delivered this line, I could tell that he had committed it to memory.

Without saying a word, I pulled off my trunks and walked over to the bathroom. I stripped off my cup and placed it on the stand behind the sink, then strode over to a urinal. I had three prefight beers to tap, but it still took a few seconds to get started. We stood in silence, me tensing and relaxing to squeeze whatever I could out of my bladder, the major angrily watching me piss. His polished demeanor disappeared. “Lieutenant, I am talking to you.”

“Go ahead.”

“You will show me the proper respect, Lieutenant,” the major said. “You are speaking to a superior …”

By this time I had cleared the blockage, and the old hose ran full flow. If I let go to salute, the waterworks would have flown out of control.

“I may have been out of the loop too long,” I said, “but last I heard, I’m still a civilian and we don’t have superiors.” I gave myself a last shake and stepped away from the urinal, making a point of not washing my hands. I did grab my protective cup off the sink and toss it into a waste can, adding, “Guess I won’t need that anymore.”

I went to my locker and pulled out my clothes. Given the chance, the major might have had his MPs teach me a lesson about showing respect to officers, but that would not happen here. Somebody a lot more important than this major wanted me back in the Marines.

“You planning on giving me trouble, hotshot?” the major asked.

“Not me,” I said. And I didn’t. I stepped into my underwear and pants. I pulled on my shirt and followed the major out as meek as a lamb.

As we stepped out of the locker room, I heard the plink of hard-soled shoes running up the hall. I turned just in time to see my date.

“Wayson, what’s going on?”

“I’ve been drafted,” I said.

“Move it, Harris. You’ve got a plane to catch,” the major said. He started to walk away. My entourage waited for me to follow him. With a hesitant sigh, I started up the hall.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

I stopped to look back at her. There she stood, with her dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, her perfect skin, and her slender figure. “Leanne,” I said, “I have no idea.”

“My name is Christina,” she said.

“No shit?” was the last thing I said to her as one of the MPs gave me a shove. I did not expect to come back. If the aliens I saw on that Mogat planet were headed toward Earth, I wouldn’t find her alive even if I did return.

“Move it, Romeo,” an MP said as he gave me a careful prod with his stick.

“Get specked,” I said, stopping to stare the guy down. He glared back, looking like he would have gladly dropped down one rank just to take a shot at me. I probably looked like I wanted him to try.

“Don’t worry about him; he’s an asshole,” another MP said, nodding toward the first. That broke the ice. We left Sad Sam’s.

Three jeeps waited along the road that ran behind the Palace.

The major stood impatiently beside one of them. “He’s an asshole, too,” the MP muttered as we approached.

“He’s an officer,” I said. “They’re all assholes.”

“They’re making you a lieutenant,” the MP said. He led me to the first jeep, then watched from the sidewalk to make sure I climbed in.

“You haven’t been paying attention,” I said. “I’m an asshole, too.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Until recent events upended our society, the Broadcast Network was the superhighway that laced the republic together. Even flying at the speed of light, and the Navy’s fastest ships did not travel at the speed of light, it would take a hundred thousand years to fly from one end of the galaxy to the other.

Broadcasting technology solved that problem. You could “broadcast” a spaceship to any spot in the galaxy instantaneously. The process involved coating the ship in highly charged particles, translating the ship and everything on it into a transmittable form, then sending it to the target location. The Broadcast Network, which was little more than a string of interlinked satellites, not only facilitated galactic travel, it also transmitted communications instantaneously. With the Network in place, man and messages could travel from the Orion Arm to the Norma Arm in less time than it would take to drive a car around the city block.

That ended two years ago, during the Civil War. A religious group called the Morgan Atkins Believers, better known as the Mogats, wanted to break up the Republic. They damn near accomplished it, too, by destroying the Mars broadcast station—the satellite closest to Earth. By knocking out the keystone broadcast station, the Mogats cut Earth off from the rest of the Republic. With the Mars station down, the other stations lost their power supply and the galaxy “went dark.”

Once the war with the Mogats ended, I had expected to hear about the government reopening the Broadcast Network or at least beginning work on a new station around Mars. If that work ever began, the news never got out. They could not have built one in secret; broadcast stations are built around mile-wide mirrors that act like focusing lenses. Someone would have spotted a mile-wide mirror floating around Mars. Even if the U.A. Corps of Engineers found a way to hide the damned mirror, they could never have hidden the blinding white lightning the station emitted during broadcasts.

I expected the major to drive me to Honolulu Airport—a civilian facility used mostly for servicing atmospheric transportation. The jeep rolled right on past the civilian terminal, and we drove to a small Air Force facility at the far end of the runway.

We arrived at the military hangars sometime around 2300. It was a balmy December night with a cool breeze rolling in from the sea. Though hundreds of stars glittered above, the blue-black sky reminded me of the color of bruises. No moon shone in that sky. Gauzy clouds floated slowly in from the sea.

“Is that the guy?” a guard said, as we drove up to the gate.

“That’s him,” our driver said.

The guard stepped back and opened the barrier blocking the entrance to the base. He watched me carefully as we drove past.

“What’s he so curious about?” I asked the major. This was the first time we spoke during the twenty-minute ride from Sad Sam’s.

“He wants to see if you can walk on water,” the major said. “They sent ten MPs and three jeeps to bring your ass in. Normal orders are to shoot conscripts unless they come willingly.”

“So you had orders to shoot me if I put up a fight?” I asked.

“Me, I wouldn’t have bothered with you in the first place. I had orders to bring you in alive and in one piece.”

We drove to the edge of the runway and parked beside a small military atmospheric shuttle.

“What would you have done if I said no?” I asked as I climbed out of the jeep.

“I would have shot you and said you committed suicide,” the major said. “I’ve seen your record, Harris. As far as I’m concerned, you’re worse than a deserter. You were a decorated officer, and you turned your back on the Corps.”

“I was given an honorable discharge,” I said.

“It’s been revoked. How do you like that? You went from deserter to officer status all in one night,” the major said as he loaded me on to a military shuttle, an atmospheric unit used mostly for transfers and cargo.

The commuter flew me to Salt Lake City Pangalactic Spaceport, where I boarded a C-89, a cargo hauler—a massive freighter used for both atmospheric and space hauling. Compared to the little atmospheric shuttle, this huge ship looked like a dinosaur. It could hold more cargo than a normal warehouse, but having spent years on various fighter carriers, I saw the C-89 for what it was—just another cargo jet.

The inside of the C-89 had been decked out for troop movements. Rows and rows of seats filled the cargo hold. Lockers had been built into the bulkheads for small arms and duffel bags. For reasons I did not understand, the pilot had dimmed the lights, giving the cabin a tunnel-like atmosphere. I could see heads full of gray and white hair along the tops of the seats. This wasn’t a troop movement, it was a gathering of the veterans of ancient wars.

“This is the last of them,” a sergeant said, as I boarded the flight. The sergeant was a clone. Until the civil war, every enlisted man in the Unified Authority was a clone.

After besting the Earth Fleet and destroying the Mars broadcast station, the Mogats launched a limited attack on Earth. They went after the orphanages in which the clone soldiers were raised. At the time, the Pentagon believed the attack on the Earth Fleet and the orphanages was in preparation for a full-scale invasion, but that invasion never materialized. Had they come, the Mogats would have won the war. Their first attack had so crippled the Unified Authority’s military infrastructure that, as far as I could tell, no real attempt had yet been made to repair the damage. Even if the military had rebuilt its clone farms, it would have taken another eighteen years before the first graduates entered boot camp.

Illych had been correct when he told me that I only needed a pulse to qualify as “elite” for the Elite Conscription Act. Half the clones on this flight had white hair and wrinkled faces. The youngest man I saw had to be in his forties. I did not have any gear to stow, so I went right to the only open seat I could find.

“Can you believe we got called back?” asked the guy in the seat next to mine. He was a standard-issue clone, just under six feet tall and broad-shouldered. He had brown hair heavily threaded with strands of white. He looked a lot like me, only shorter, broader, and older. “Were you Army?”

“Marines,” I said.

“Marines, eh?” the guy said. “I was Army. I heard you boys took a real shellacking at the end of the Mogat War.”

“That’s what I heard, too,” I said.

“You must have already been out before the invasion,” he said. “I heard no one made it off that planet alive.”

The C-89 took off. I chose to use our launch as an excuse to ignore the comment.

C-class cargo lifts were not built with onboard broadcast engines, so I figured we would fly someplace nearby …maybe dock with one of the Confederate Arms’ self-broadcasting battleships. “When’s the last time you went to Mars, pal? Been years for me.” Apparently the guy in the next seat and I had become pals.

“Is that where we’re headed?” I asked. Nobody told me my final destination on the short flight from Honolulu.

“Off to Mars. Sheesh, the last time I was there was ’95, maybe ’98. Could it really be fifteen years?” He thought for a moment. “No, I passed through Mars in ’07 when I went out to Olympus Kri.”

At thirty million miles per hour, the flight from Earth to Mars could take as long as five hours depending on where each planet stood in its orbit.

“Been a couple of years for me, too,” I said. All flights in and out of Earth passed through the Mars broadcast station, but nobody actually lived there. Even the soldiers and pilots guarding the planet lived on other planets. They went out and stayed in barracks for three-week shifts, then returned home.

The only populated area on Mars was the spaceport—the galaxy’s biggest shopping bazaar. Since no one officially lived on Mars, everyone on the planet qualified for duty-free shopping. Merchants from every corner of the galaxy ran shops and restaurants there. The spaceport had forty-three grand hotels, six hundred restaurants, and three thousand stores. The galaxy’s largest convention center was on the northern outskirts of the spaceport, and its second-largest convention center was in the eastern corner.

One of the best-known advertising slogans in the galaxy was, “Serious shoppers shop on Mars.” It was probably true. Young couples used to travel to Mars from as far away as the Scutum-Crux Arm to purchase their engagement rings. The savings on the diamonds and gems more than covered the cost of the trip. Of course, back then the Broadcast Network was in operation, and you could fly from Scutum-Crux to Mars in a matter of minutes. With the Network down, I figured many of the stores must have closed.

My new buddy kept squinting to get a good look at me. He must have noticed as I sat down that I was too tall to be a standard-issue military clone; but in the darkness, he could not make out more details. Communications between clones included an interesting dance since anything that tipped clones off to their synthetic origins could have a fatal consequence. The “death reflex” was a fail-safe insisted upon by Congress to prevent clones from discovering their “nonhuman” identity and rebelling. The reflex was counterbalanced by neural programming. Clones were programmed not to know they were clones. If I asked the guy sitting next to me what he looked like, he would have said he had blond hair and blue eyes—despite both his hair and eyes being brown. Seeing his reflection in the mirror, he would have seen himself as blond-haired and blue-eyed, even if he was standing next to an identical clone whom he would recognize as having dark hair and eyes. To stop an outbreak of dead clones, that same programming prevented clones from discussing clone-related topics about each other.

“Were you living on Earth?” I asked.

“Not me. I had a small farm on Janus.”

“Janus? That’s not in the Orion Arm, is it?”

“It’s in the Perseus Arm. I’ll tell you what, when the Perseus Arm signed on to the Confederate Arms Treaty, I thought I was going to die. Me living in one of the Confederate Arms …If my parents had not died when I was a kid, that would have killed them.”

Every clone raised in every orphanage was programmed to believe he was the only true orphan on the premises. Learning differently could trigger the death reflex in a standard-issue clone. As a Liberator, I discovered my true origins within a year of joining the Marines. In my case, ignorance was not blissful, and learning the truth had not set me free.

“Did the Confederate Army ask you to join up?”

“Not to fight against the Unified Authority. They knew better. As long as they knew I wasn’t fighting against them, I think that was good enough. Truth is, I don’t think they were worried about me. I mean, I’m fifty-six years old. I’m no spring chicken.”

Hearing his age left me stunned. If the Pentagon was recalling fifty-year-old men, things were grim.

An officer came and opened a miniature movie holotorium at the front of the cabin. The compartment was four feet tall, seven feet wide, and two feet deep, a slightly curved concavity faced with a dull, snow-white finish.

“Look at that, they’re going to show us something. Maybe they’re going to brief us,” my new pal said. He sounded excited.

I expected a propaganda film about life in the military. That’s what they showed us on the way to boot camp when I was a recruit. Instead, the words “THE SUN ALSO RISES” appeared in large, three-dimensional letters that slowly revolved above the small holotorium screen.

The background of the movie was projected using old-fashioned two-dimensional technology. The foreground, the characters, the furniture, a door here or automobile there, was shown in holographic 3-D. The final product was a three-dimensional experience in which you could completely lose yourself.

“Holy speck, an Ava Gardner movie,” my new pal said. “If this is how they treat the recruits, I think I’m glad I’m back in.” We sat and watched our movie as the flight crew walked the aisles passing out beef noodle MREs. My pal tore his meal open, and said, “This is the life!”

I thought it a bad omen. In my experience, the services became more hospitable as the situations became worse.

“You think Ava’s a clone?” the guy asked. “I saw an old film clip with the original Ava—you know, the actress from way back when. They do look an awful lot alike. It’s kind of scary.”

“Does it make any difference if she is a clone?” I asked.

“Sure it does. I’d be disappointed if she is. I mean, you know, then she’s not the real thing.”

The movie was about an ancient time in which honor seemed to mean more than victory. When men fought, they knocked each other down and walked away from the fight. Gardner looked beautiful playing a young ingénue smitten with a bullfighter in twentieth-century Spain. Looking infatuated and innocent, she reminded me of Christina. “I’d take a night with her, synthetic or not,” I said, meaning both Ava and Christina.

My new friend and I traded a few more comments as we ate our MREs and watched the movie. When Gardner appeared on the screen, nobody on the flight spoke a word. Then the movie ended. As the credits scrolled, my pal looked over at me. “I’m Glen Benson. I guess it’s about to become Corporal Benson. Can you believe it? A fifty-six-year-old corporal. I guess they’ve come up with some sort of peacetime duties for us old guys like me.”

“Harris,” I said, offering a hand. As we shook, the cabin lights came on. Benson looked at me, screwed his eyes into a squint, then pulled back his hand.

The way Benson now stared at me, I knew he had something he wanted to ask. I also had a pretty good idea of what that might be. I decided to make it easy on him. “You’re wondering if I’m a Liberator?” I asked.

Benson’s expression remained flat. “I already know what you are. I thought all the Liberators were dead,” he said, sounding hostile.

“Let me guess, you were one of the soldiers they sent to Albatross Island after the prison riots.” A decade before I was born, there was a riot on a penal colony called Albatross Island. The Navy dispatched Liberator clones to handle the situation.

Liberators had been designed for combat in unknown and dangerous situations. Instead of a gland with a death hormone, our physiology included a gland that released a combination of testosterone and adrenaline into our blood, giving us a combat reflex that kept our minds cool and our thoughts clear. It was a pretty good idea with one problem—most Liberators became addicted to the hormone, and the only way to keep it flowing was to keep on fighting. When the Liberators finished killing the rioting prisoners on Albatross Island, they killed the hostages, then the nonrioting prisoners, then some of the guards. The Army had to send an entire battalion to take control of the planet.

“I went to Albatross Island,” Glen said. “I went to Volga, Electra, Dallas Prime, and New Prague, too. Albatross Island wasn’t the worst. They only killed adults on Albatross—guards and prisoners, at least they had a shot at defending themselves.”

“I wasn’t involved in any of those actions,” I said.

“I don’t see how you could be, a young guy like you. Those massacres happened almost thirty years ago, you weren’t even made yet, were you?” Glen asked.

Before I could answer, he said, “My question is why you were made at all. When did the Senate vote to bring back Liberators?”

I shook my head. “I’m one of a kind. Some factory worker made a mistake.”

“A bad one,” Glen said. “I was a private when all those massacres happened. General Crowley called my unit up to help with the investigations.

“You ever wonder why a decorated officer like Crowley would abandon his command to join the Mogats? I can tell you why. After seeing what the Liberators did, I wondered if the Mogats didn’t have it right after all. He must have figured traitors and religious fanatics were better than Liberators.

“Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I want to get some sleep before we reach Mars.” Having said his piece, Glen leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes, a frown remaining on his lips. He did not speak to me again for the rest of the flight.

CHAPTER FIVE

As we prepared to leave the C-89, the men around me talked excitedly about returning to active status in the military. They had created successful civilians lives, but they were clones, built and bred to be soldiers. Some of the guys talked about stopping in the duty-free stores and picking up booze before they shipped out. Others talked about buying enough cigarettes to last for their entire tour of duty. Military men love a shopping bazaar as a rule, and these retired clones were no exception.

The last time I entered Mars Spaceport, it was brightly lit and packed with civilians. Men in suits and women in smart dresses crowded the clubs and business centers. Models in tight dresses stood at the entrances of fragrance stores trying to tempt men into sniffing some new perfume. Parents took young children to play in the solariums. Everywhere you looked you saw neon signs marking some gaudy new retailer.

The men ahead of me rushed down the gangway laughing, stepped into the terminal, and fell silent. I stepped off the gangway and fell silent. Mars Spaceport had become an empty shell.

Without the crowds and the lights, the spaceport revealed its true nature—a cavernous mausoleum. Metal gates hung like curtains over storefronts that looked as dark as deep-sea caves. Halls that had once teemed with an endless tide of humanity sat dark and silent, lit only by the plumes of red and green emergency torches.

“What happened here?” an old fellow asked as he stared along a line of dead stores. Through the darkness, I saw men with flashlights coming to meet us as we gathered in the terminal.

“Is the spaceport on lockdown?” an old recruit asked one of the soldiers as they arrived to greet us.

“Shiiit, have a look around,” the soldier replied. “There ain’t nothing left here to lock down, old-timer. Look around you. This place is deserted. There’s nothing in the stores to steal.”

“What are we doing here?” the old man asked.

“You look like you been around the block a time or two,” the soldier said. “You can’t possibly think I’m going to risk getting some officer on my case by spoiling the surprise.” Our guides were regular government-issue Army clones. When the first two hundred of us had come down the gangway, two corporals paired off with us, leading us away from the gates and into a dim shopping arcade. The arcade floor was so wide that the storefronts on either side of us vanished into the shadows.

“Keep up,” one of the corporals said as he looked back and saw slower recruits lagging behind. “Stay in a group. If one of you gets lost in here, it’s our asses that will answer for it.”

Unlit and empty, the spaceport transformed into a maze in which a person could easily become lost. The corporals led us down two floors to an underground railway system. Before the civil war, the spaceport maintained six separate wings, one for each arm of the galaxy. Passengers used to board these trains to get from one wing to the next.

Maybe the other wings are active, I thought.

Rumbling along at no more than ten miles per hour, we passed by boarding zones for one wing after another, the platforms were all dark. When we reached the wing for Scutum-Crux—the farthest arm of the galaxy—the train slowed and switched tracks, entering a tunnel that led us uphill and through a set of airtight doors.

“The Corps of Engineers just finished this new track a few weeks ago,” said one of the corporals. He wasn’t speaking to anyone in particular, just enjoying the audience of recruits.

When the outer door opened, I saw the Martian landscape. I had flown over this planet many times but never looked across the landscape at ground level. The land was flat and ugly, a featureless desert with rocks and sand and no signs of life.

“Are these cars sealed to hold air?” one of the recruits asked.

“They weren’t before the Corps of Engineers got ahold of them,” the soldier replied. “But don’t you worry your white head over that. They’re sure as shit airtight now.”

Looking at the old-man recruit and corporal leading us was like looking at multiple generations of the same family. All of the men standing in this car stood just under six feet, though many of the older ones were slumped with age. Those recalled soldiers who were still young enough to have color in their hair had brown hair. I did see one or two old fellows who had tried to dye their hair with blond hair dye. Everyone had the same color of brown in their eyes, the same exact cleft in their chins, and the same bridge in their noses.

“I wouldn’t worry about the poisonous air,” our second corporal /guide said. “Hell, it’s so cold out there you’d freeze to death.”

Ah, hazing the recruits, a time-honored tradition in the military. Battle-wary veterans scaring new recruits was a tradition that might even be as ancient as the MREs they served us on the transport. On the other hand, the tradition took on a strange twist in this train car, where the veterans were in their thirties and the naïve victims were in their fifties.

The train took us thirty miles across the surface of Mars to Citadel Air Force Base. There were no roads or fences around this glowing geodesic dome, just a dun-colored building that rose out of the ground like a five-story blister. Rings of blue-white light shone about the foot and cornice of the building.

The tracks led through another air lock and into a tube that took a sharp dive under the wall of the dome. We emerged from the tube in an underground train station. Aluminum ventilation shafts snaked along the red rock wall twenty feet overhead. Bright arc lights shone down on the platform from ten feet above. The ceiling of the station was a slab of rough-hewn red rock.

The door to our train car opened, and frozen air rushed in.

“You want to hurry it up, boys,” one of the corporals yelled as he pushed his way out to the platform. “The air is a few degrees south of zero.” His breath formed a cloud around his mouth.

Soldiers in heated environmental suits ushered us toward the far end of the platform as we left the train. Feeling the cold air burning deep in my lungs, I trotted to the front of the herd and entered another air lock at the far end of the platform. The old men around me remained mostly quiet in the cold, though a few moaned. I suspect the men in the environmental suits enjoyed watching them suffer. I could hear muffled laughter through their masks, and why not—they wore electronically insulated jackets.

So much for Ava Gardner movies and all-you-can-eat MREs; now we were back in the real military.

“We should’a just stayed in the spaceport,” one of the old men said as he stepped into the air lock. Everyone around him agreed. I could have pointed out that enormous as it was, the unshielded spaceport would collapse if hit by a single missile. The Citadel had shielded walls, batteries of defensive missiles, several cannons, and squadrons of fighters protecting it.

Warm air circulated through this tunnel. As soldiers piled in behind me, I followed the tunnel to an escalator that led upward. Two soldiers waited for us at the top.

“Well,” one of them yelled, “hurry it up.”

The automatic stairs took us 150 feet up at a seventy-degree angle. The soldiers that met us at the top of the stairs pointed toward yet another corridor and rushed everyone along. Finally, we passed through one last set of doors and entered the admin area.

The Citadel reminded me of office buildings everywhere. Rows of bright fluorescent light fixtures shone from the ceilings to the endless plains of white, shiny flooring spread beneath our feet. We passed cubicles and small offices, conference rooms and cafeterias.

The building was crowded with servicemen from all branches. Walking past a break room, I saw officers in blue, green, and white sitting at a table drinking coffee. The guards along the wall wore olive drab service uniforms. This was an air base, but with all the branches represented, it felt more like the Pentagon.

One of the recruits paused and asked a soldier, “Where are the billets?”

“Other side of the building,” the soldier grunted, not even bothering to look at the man.

“Are we staying here tonight?” the old recruit asked.

“Not here. We’ll have you back on your transport in a couple of hours.”

We stopped in front of a large auditorium. A group of soldiers met us by the door and waited for us to form a group. “Anyone who served in the Army, fall in on the right. Air Force, front and center. Marines, you fall in on the left.”

“What if I was Navy?” a man called from the back. There was a group of retired sailors, fifty or sixty of them.

The soldier smiled as if this was a great joke. “You’re in the Army now,” he said. This raised a groan from the seamen.

Of the first two hundred recruits to walk off of the transport, I was the only Marine. I stood in a one-man queue.

“You, young blood,” one of the guides called to me. “What’s your name?”

“Harris,” I said.

He looked at his clipboard, then over to the other guide. “Yup, he’s the one. Harris, we have special orders for you.”

Somebody yelled, “He’s a specking Liberator.” I did not need to look back to know it was Glen.

The guide saluted me. “Lieutenant Harris, I’ve been instructed to take you to a special briefing. Would you follow me, sir?” he asked.

I nodded, and we left.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Officer country.”

As we moved deeper into the Citadel, the base population switched from servicemen of all description to administrative airmen. Men in blue sweaters and blue pants rushed down corridors, carrying files and boxes. Men in blue uniforms sat behind desks studying computers. These men worked quietly, efficiently. They had direction.

“Who else is coming to this briefing?” I asked.

“As far as I know, you’re it, sir,” the corporal said.

“Aren’t there any other Marines?” I asked, remembering the way we had grouped.

“Other Marines, yes; but you’re the only officer,” he said.

We came to a door marked “Conference Room.” A small red light flashed beside the door to show that the room was in use. “This is your stop, sir,” the soldier said. He saluted and left.

I let myself in.

“You’re just in time, Lieutenant,” the admiral said as I entered. “They’re about to start.”

There were no guards in the room. Admiral Alden Brocius sat at the head of a ten-foot-long table, looking frail and old. He’d lost at least fifty pounds since the last time I saw him. I could see the shape of his skull under his cheeks. Age and tension had added new wrinkles to his face.

“Admiral Brocius.” I could not help but sneer as I said the name. He commanded the Central Cygnus Fleet. At some point in recent years he had become the highest-ranking man in the Navy; but as far as I knew, he never made the jump from fleet commander to Secretary of the Navy.

“You will show me proper respect, Lieutenant,” Brocius said, trying to stay in command of what he knew to be a dangerous situation. He was an old man, and I was a Liberator, a class of clone designed for violence. He also knew that I had a score to settle with him. He was the one who had ordered sixty thousand Marines to the Mogat home world and left them stranded there as the planet melted.

“I’ll bet you want to kill me,” Brocius said.

“More than anything I have ever wanted in my life,” I said.

Brocius pulled a pistol out from under the table and pointed it at me. “I’ve spent the last year of my life worrying about you and your friend Freeman. I didn’t even feel safe on my own damned ship, Harris; not my own damned ship. I had extra guards posted outside of my quarters, but I knew that wouldn’t stop you.

“It turns out I didn’t have anything to worry about after all. I got reports …Earning a living winning Iron Man competitions and screwing tourist girls in Hawaii. I wanted you euthanized, but General Mooreland said no.

“Mooreland died two months ago. I suppose you heard about that,” Brocius said.

“I only heard that this evening,” I admitted.

“Are you planning to shoot me?” I asked.

“Quite the opposite,” Brocius said. He placed his pistol flat on the table and slid it toward me.

Admiral Brocius had an antique casino on the second floor of his family mansion, but he did not play cards. He liked running games of chance, not playing them. Not a gambling man in the ordinary sense, he preferred house odds. Now, for some reason, he believed he had better-than-even odds that I would not pull the trigger. I had the gun, but he knew something I needed to know.

“Speck! Look at these pathetic bastards,” a voice whispered out from a large monitor sitting in the center of the conference table. I could not see the screen; it faced away from me. “They get older with each group. These boys are decrepit. They belong in a specking old folks’ home, not the damn Army.”

“Given a choice, I suppose I would rather be shot than beaten to death,” Brocius said, his eyes locked on mine. “If you shoot me, the military will be down one man and one bullet. Take my word on this one, Harris. We cannot afford to waste men or bullets.”

I picked up the pistol but did not aim it at Brocius. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing at the screen with his gun.

“It’s a briefing,” Brocius said. “They’re briefing the recruits that came in with you.”

“Gentlemen, perhaps we should get started,” the man on the screen said in a loud voice. Still holding the pistol, I walked around the table to see what was happening.

From what I could tell, all of the two thousand passengers from the transport had been crammed into a large auditorium. The room was dim but not dark, and all of those old, white heads sparkled in the audience like marble grave markers. An Army major whom I did not recognize stood on a stage.

“Gentlemen, I’m going to skip the formalities and cut to the chase,” the briefing officer began. “The Unified Authority is in a state of war. The war is not going so well.”

The auditorium remained silent as the major paused to organize his notes. The rustling of his papers seemed almost ear-splitting in that silence.

An image appeared on a screen above the major. It was battle footage. The footage showed Army men barricaded in some kind of bunker, firing M27s through ramparts at an unseen enemy. I heard the normal battlefield chatter—There’s one …Fire, fire, fry the bastard …Your left! Your left!

Then the camera panned out over the ramparts and into the field. There, no more than thirty feet from the U.A. firing line, were creatures the likes of which I had never seen in my life. I could not tell if they were black-skinned or wearing some type of combat armor. If I had to guess, I would have put their height at somewhere between seven and eight feet. They looked bulky and powerful.

“What are those things?” I asked.

“Don’t you recognize them?” Brocius returned my question with one of his own.

“I’ve never seen them before,” I said.

The screen in the briefing room froze and closed in on one of the creatures. It looked almost human except that its entire body seemed to be made of some hard, charcoal-colored substance. I would have liked to see what happened next, but that was where the feed ended.

The alien had two eyes, which resembled shot-put balls in size and color, two ears, a very flat nose, and a mouth with no lips. Its body showed no features such as muscles or bones. Looking at the frozen frame, I tried to determine if that thing was wearing some kind of suit. I saw nothing to suggest armor, just a rounded chest and torso that were twice the size of a human’s.

“Then you don’t recognize it? I thought you were old friends,” Brocius said at the same time the major resumed his briefing. “This guy or one of his brothers was the thing that fired on you during the Mogat invasion.”

Hearing Brocius mention the invasion gave me a quick mental stab. I tightened my grip on the pistol.

We are dealing with a life-form that is not human. Your job is to kill it, the major told his audience.

“The thing I saw was made of plasma or electricity or some kind of energy,” I said. “It was yellow and it glowed.”

They have invaded our galaxy. They have come into our house and now they are pushing us out of the way, the major said. We’re going to give the bastards the fight of the specking century.

“Everything they’re saying in the briefing is bullshit, in case you were wondering,” Brocius said. “Those things are eating us alive.” He watched me for a few seconds, not saying a word, and asked, “You mind if I turn that off?” then stood up and reached over to turn off the monitor without waiting for my answer.

I shrugged. He paused, standing in midreach with his eyes locked on the pistol—his pistol—that I held in my right hand.

“You can forget everything Major Doolan is telling them in that briefing. It’s all bullshit,” Brocius said as he turned off the screen and returned to his seat.

“They have taken control of Scutum-Crux, Norma, and Perseus.” Those were the three largest arms of the galaxy, but also the least populated. “They took all of that territory in under a year, and they have started to move into Cygnus and Sagittarius. If we can’t slow them, they’ll have control of the Orion Arm in a couple of months.

“That’s why you’re here, Harris. That’s why they’re here,” Brocius said, nodding toward the blank screen. “That’s why we brought back the specking Roman Legion.”

“Then you have two problems, because the alien I saw glowed. I don’t know what those things are, but they aren’t the aliens that Atkins was calling ‘Space Angels,’ ” I said.

“Yeah, I saw the video you captured,” Brocius said dismissively. He pulled out a folder, which he opened and placed on the table. “This is from your feed.” He selected a still shot and passed it to me. The shot was blurry, but the image was clear in my mind. It showed a luminous alien creature holding a broad-barreled rifle. I noticed that the rifle in the picture looked like the weapon the aliens were carrying in the video feed.

“These shots were taken on Terraneau just over a year ago.” He handed me a single eight-by-ten sheet with a series of one-inch windows on it. Some of the pictures were washed out. In the first shot, a group of four luminous beings stood on one side of the frame. The rest of the picture was white. In the next frame, those same beings stood on a street.

“What is this?” I asked.

“This, Harris, is a full-scale invasion. We don’t know how many troops they landed, but we had three million troops on Terraneau. They captured the planet within a couple of hours.”

“What happened to the rest of these pictures?” I asked, pointing to the whited-out area.

“We think that was their landing zone,” Brocius said. “They were captured by a satellite as the invasion began. We got lucky on those. Besides the video you caught, these photographs are the only images we have of these things in their transited state.”

“Transited?” I asked. “Your term?”

“That’s what the scientists are calling it. ‘Transited.’ ”

“What does it mean?” I asked.

“It means they just arrived,” Brocius said.

“Do you have any shots of their spaceships?”

“They don’t use spaceships,” Brocius said. “That was why no one believed you after the Mogat invasion. We had our entire fleet circling the planet. You said you saw aliens, but none of the ships saw anything unusual.”

“How did they get to the planet?” I asked.

“You saw the bright light during the invasion …we think they came in through it,” Brocius said. “It’s just a theory, but it’s the best we have.”

I wished I could forget that light. Often as I fell asleep, my mind returned to that desperate moment as our invasion collapsed around us. I remembered the way that the strange light spread like a fog over the city and the odd glow it sent into the air. Waves of elemental colors seemed to rise out of that glow like smoke from a fire.

By the fifth frame in the series, the creatures no longer glowed. Their complexions had turned dark. I could see their massive forms clearly.

“They don’t look so advanced,” I said. “No vehicles, no tanks …just men on foot carrying rifles. What do you know about their battle tactics?”

“Absolutely nothing,” Brocius said. “Once that phantom light you saw stretches across an area, we lose all contact with the planet. We can’t transmit through it. We can’t take readings through it. Those battle images Major Doolan just showed the geezers were taken from a live feed just before the light sealed off the area.

“Around the Pentagon they’re calling it the ‘ion curtain.’ ” Brocius sighed.

“What do the survivors say?”

“No survivors,” Brocius said. “Once these bastards close that light curtain around a planet, there’s no going back to it. We’ve tried reentering; nothing gets through. We’ve sent fighters, robot ships …nothing makes it through, and nothing ever comes out.”

I placed the pistol back on the table and slid it back toward Brocius. I wasn’t going to shoot him.

“You’re not going to shoot me?” Brocius asked as he gathered up the gun.

“Maybe next time,” I said.

“Now you know why we need every man we can get …even those old fools.” It occurred to me that Brocius was older than many of those “old fools.”

“So how much of what you tell me will they get to hear?” I asked.

“Not much. Then again, I’m telling you everything we know, and it’s not much,” Brocius admitted. “In this war, we’re going to need to learn as we go along.”

CHAPTER SIX

If they had asked me to accept a commission when I left Sad Sam’s Palace, I would have said no. I had no choice about reporting, not with a dozen MPs breathing down my neck; but that did not mean I needed to rejoin. If I refused, the worst they could do was kill me, and I figured the aliens would kill us all in due course.

But meeting with Admiral Brocius had a strange effect on me. Here sat a man whom I had wanted to kill for over a year. I must have imagined myself snapping his neck a thousand times; but now that I saw him in person, the urge to kill Brocius slipped away.

He had come to represent everything I hated about the Unified Authority—the prejudice and abuse of clones, the deceit, the haughty attitude of its politicians and officers. U.A. officers fought wars as if they were a game of chess, an intellectual sport played on a black-and-white battlefield with pieces instead of people.

This time, though, Admiral Brocius had laid himself bare. Alone in the conference room, he could have been killed. I wouldn’t need a gun to kill a dried-up old derelict like him—I could have jumped across the table and broken his neck.

Having a worm like Brocius at my mercy had an unexpected impact on me. I won’t say I forgave him, but my anger fell out of focus. Here he sat, a sheep in a stall waiting for slaughter. Looking at him now, scared and trying to look like he was still in control of the situation, I realized how I did and did not want to die. I didn’t want to die at all. But if the war was on my doorstep, I preferred death on the battlefield with a gun in my hand and men that I trusted fighting beside me to dying like a sheep with a herd of civilians.

“It sounds like we can’t win this one,” I said.

“I suppose that depends on how you mean ‘win,’ ” Brocius said. “We’ve given up on colonizing the galaxy if that’s what you mean. It’s theirs. At this point we’re not even trying to hold on to the last of our colonies. If we can keep these bastards from reaching Earth, that will be victory enough.”

Brocius slid a memory disc into the monitor. A moment later a map of the galaxy appeared before us. There it was, a whirlpool made of six spiral arms leading into a vortex dense with stars. The image showed white stars with subtle bubbles of color against a black background. The camera zoomed in on the map, showing a series of stars orbited by planets.

“The invasion started in this unpopulated section of the Scutum-Crux Arm,” Brocius said.

The outer edge of the Scutum-Crux Arm, the outermost arm of the galaxy, turned red. They called this area the outer frontier. It was supposed to be unpopulated, but I knew about a very small colony of Neo-Baptists in that quadrant. I visited that colony with Ray Freeman, a mercenary and former partner. His family was among the colonists.

“There was a colony on—”

“Neo-Baptists on Little Man,” Brocius interrupted. For the first time since I had arrived, he did not strike me as a scared dog trying to act ferocious. “I oversaw the evacuation personally.”

“Overseeing” the evacuation, of course, did not mean that he participated in it.

“I made a deal with Freeman; we traded a life for a life. I saved the colony and he …We’re square now. I don’t need to worry about him.” I got the feeling Brocius added that last part more to convince himself than to inform me. Ray Freeman was a large and dangerous man. Brocius had left him to die on the Mogat planet along with the Marines, and Ray was not normally the forgiving type.

“Did you have trouble getting them out?” I asked.

“You’d have to ask Freeman,” Brocius said.

Ask Freeman, I thought. “Am I going to see Freeman?” Brocius ignored the question. “I can show you what became of Little Man.” Little Man was a “naturally productive” planet, meaning it was similar in size, temperature, and atmosphere to Earth. The image of the planet spun on the monitor, its blue, green, and tawny surface visible under a swirl of clouds. A small dot of light appeared on one of the continents. At first it was no more than a pinprick of light, but it spread in every direction until it flooded the entire planet.

“We placed a satellite to track the event,” Brocius said. “Our scientists call the process ‘sleeving.’ It took about five hours for the light to spread across the planet.”

“Then what happened?” I asked.

Brocius started to say something, paused, then said, “We don’t know.

“The satellite did not pick up the approach of a spaceship. We learned later that the aliens don’t use ships. That phantom light of theirs appears on the planet, and they come walking out of it like ghosts coming out of a fog.

“Our Navy is completely useless against them. Once that light closes around a planet …seals around the planet, we’re cut off. We can’t send messages in, and no messages come out. We’re working under the assumption that everyone on the planet is dead.

“The aliens don’t have ships, so we can’t put up a blockade. We can’t engage their land troops from space because the light shields them from us. Who knows what field tactics they use.”

“And there’s no way to send a landing force in to investigate?” I asked.

Brocius laughed. “Like I told you before, once they sleeve the planet, we’re cut off. Nothing gets in or out of that ion curtain.” Brocius’s frustration showed. He snarled these words, then repeated them softly. “We even tried sending in a self-broadcasting ship. We programmed it to broadcast in under the curtain.”

“Did it make it?” I asked.

Brocius fixed me with a patronizing grin. “You tell me. We never heard back.”

I stared at the monitor. It showed a planet encased in that gleaming light. “So it’s possible that people are alive down there. For all you know, they won the battle, and they just can’t send a signal out.”

“It seems a little more likely that they are all dead, don’t you think?” Brocius asked. “We don’t know anything except that as soon as the light spreads over one planet, the aliens move on to the next.”

The image on the monitor panned out to a view of the Scutum-Crux Arm. This was not a photographic record shot by a satellite, like the one of Little Man. This time the screen showed a computer simulation in which entire solar systems turned dark red when they were invaded. The simulation looked a lot like a demonstration of a circulatory system with blood running through previously empty veins. The map showed the steady and unalterable progress of the invasion. On the bottom of the screen, a small window ticked off dates as the red tide covered the galaxy. It took twenty days for the invasion to reach Terraneau, the capital of the Scutum-Crux Arm, and there the simulation stopped.

“Part of the Scutum-Crux Fleet was orbiting Terraneau when the Broadcast Network went down, it’s been there ever since. We lifted a scientist from the planet before it was cut off. Without the Network, we couldn’t evacuate the planet.”

“Why haven’t you restored the Network?” I asked.

“It’s too late now,” Brocius said. “By the time we detected the invasion, it was too late.”

He paused, brightened slightly, and added, “Of course, Scutum-Crux is Confederate Arms territory. Even if the Network were up, we might not have activated it in their territory.” Scutum-Crux was among the first arms to declare independence from the Unified Authority.

“Terraneau went just like every other battle—the light field closed the planet. After that, your guess is as good as mine,” Brocius said. “The battleships were useless.”

On the screen, the simulation ticked off two days with no movement, then the red portion of the galaxy began expanding. The blood-colored stream entered the Cygnus Arm, spreading slowly into the Norma Arm, then Perseus.

“Even if we could evacuate people, we just plain don’t have anyplace to relocate them. I suppose we have time to bring a few million refugees to Earth, but it’s just a matter of time.”

The computer started its countdown anew. By day two hundred, the entire Scutum-Crux Arm was flooded with red, and Norma, Cygnus, and Perseus were looking pretty damn crimson.

“I don’t suppose we’ve been able to contact them to negotiate,” I said.

“We did negotiate with them, and rather successfully, too. That’s the problem. Our negotiator was the late Senator Morgan Atkins.”

The simulation resumed, only now it seemed to gain momentum. The calendar on the bottom of the screen did not accelerate, but the spreading of reddened territory did. Over the next fifty days, all of Scutum-Crux, Norma, and Perseus turned red. The Galactic Eye, the star-rich vortex of the galaxy, turned red in a matter of twenty days.

“That cannot be,” I said.

Brocius paused the simulation.

“The Galactic Eye …there are a billion stars in that part of the galaxy.”

“They move fast, the bastards,” Brocius said. “The real problems are just beginning. Check the date.”

The calendar at the bottom of the screen said October 23, 2514—just six weeks ago.

“We always know exactly where they are going to attack next, Harris. It’s a straight march. Strategy has nothing to do with this campaign.”

I looked at the map of the galaxy on the monitor and saw what he meant. The aliens had landed on the far end of the galaxy and were working their way straight across. “They might as well phone their plans in to us in advance,” I said.

“They have,” Brocius said. “The map you are looking at was taken from a signal they transmitted on Earth.”

“They gave us this map?” I asked. “What about the calendar?”

“We added that,” Brocius said. “We synchronized their attack to our calendar system. So far, it’s been a perfect match.” With this, he tapped the monitor, and the simulation continued up to December 18, 2514.

“That was yesterday,” I said as I watched the red area marking invaded territory flood into the Orion Arm. “They sent this?”

“They’re still sending it,” Brocius said. “They transmit it on a continuous signal on several of our military frequencies.”

“How often do they update it?” I asked.

“They don’t. This is what they have been sending for over a year now. They told us exactly what they planned to do from the start, and they’ve gone and done it. The only explanation we can come up with is that they don’t really care about killing humans; what they’re really after is capturing planets.”

The simulation started again. The days ticked by quickly. On March 15, the red area expanded to include the inner section of the Orion Arm, that part of the galaxy where Earth was located.

“Three months?” I asked.

“They’re coming, Harris. God help us, they’re coming.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

“Have you ever heard of a planet called New Copenhagen?” Admiral Brocius asked. He looked old and broken-down. For as long as I had known Brocius, he had been a chubby old man with high corners on his hairline and a double chin. Time and stress had taken a toll. Over the last year he had grown a decade older, and he had the look of a man who had lost a lot of weight in a very little time. His mouth and eyes looked too big for his face, giving him a hungry, startled look. His hairline started higher on his head than I remembered.

“Sounds familiar,” I said, remembering that I had recently heard someone mention the planet without recalling who or why.

Brocius crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair, the smirk on his face giving him an expression of mild disgust. “Been following the latest movie-star gossip, have you?”

That tipped the scales in my memory. Christina had mentioned New Copenhagen when she asked me about Ava Gardner. Now that I remembered where I heard the name, I didn’t want to admit it. “Movie-star gossip?” I asked, trying to sound as innocent as I could.

Brocius didn’t bite. “Yes, well, the planet is of strategic value now. It will be the aliens’ last stop before they land on Earth.” He tapped a stylus to the computer screen, and the image closed in on the Orion Arm. Along the arm, flags stood out marking solar systems with inhabited planets. Toward the inner curve of the Orion Arm, already covered in red, was the location of Olympus Kri. I once knew a woman from that planet. Perhaps “knew” was the right word; if everything I had heard this evening was correct, that girl might already be dead.

The map showed three inches of star-strewn space between Olympus Kri and Earth—each inch representing ten thousand light-years. The space around Olympus Kri was outlined in red. So were most of the other solar systems with inhabited planets along the way. But the red tide stopped just shy of one flagged solar system. “The Woden System?” I asked.

“That’s where we have a colony called New Copenhagen, it’s the closest inhabited planet to Earth. Win or lose, that’s where we make our last stand. The goal is to stop the aliens on New Copenhagen. We’re sending in as many soldiers, pilots, and Marines as we can get in before the action starts. We’ve shipped in more equipment …By the time we get through, there will be over one million troops on that planet and at least thirty guns and three hundred grenades for every man we sent in.

“We’re sending our best scientists to help analyze the situation, and we’ll have as many ships as we can spare orbiting the planet at all times.”

“That’s good coverage,” I said.

“You’re going in as a lieutenant. I wanted to give you a division to work with, but that was not my call. I would have restored you to colonel …maybe even made a general out of you.”

“Kind of you,” I said.

The sarcasm did not go unnoticed. “I put in a word for you with the Marine commandant. He said he’d give you some leeway, that’s the best I could do,” Brocius said.

“What happens if we lose?” I asked.

“If you lose?” Brocius repeated. “Harris, we have approximately fifty self-broadcasting Navy ships and a hundred scientific explorers. We’d be able to airlift a couple million people off Earth if we had someplace to put them, but we don’t, Harris. Even if we get them off, the sad fact is that we wouldn’t have anyplace to put them.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

They made the right choice when they decided not to evacuate the planet, I thought as I stared out the window of the civilian shuttle and saw New Copenhagen. These aliens, these Space Angels, weren’t just crossing the galaxy at a rate nearly one hundred thousand times faster than the speed of light; they were conquering it at that speed. The galaxy was one hundred thousand light-years from end to end, and they had captured almost all of it in a single year. Fighting an enemy that could move one hundred thousand times faster than light, why bother running?

It was just like Brocius had said, even if we could load all of humanity into some interstellar ark, we’d have no place to go. With the exception of the self-broadcasting fleet, our fastest ships could not travel as fast as light. With the galaxy under enemy control, we would need to travel to another galaxy to start again—a trip that would take thousands of years at light speed. And then what? What if the nearest habitable planet was one thousand light-years deep in that galaxy? Loading humanity into a lifeboat would mean nothing if that lifeboat had no safe harbor in which to land.

The shuttle trembled as it penetrated the planet’s atmosphere. Heat and friction from the atmosphere turned the protective tiles on the shuttle’s wings orange and red, then the pilot adjusted the angle of our descent and we flew over a sparkling ocean. We crossed a coast and dropped to less than a mile above the ground. Below us, the city of Valhalla spread out in every direction, a giant metropolis buried in snow. A frozen lake bordered it on one side and snowcapped forests and countryside surrounded it on another.

“Why this place? Why fight here?” the sergeant in the seat next to mine asked as our shuttle descended through ribbons of faded clouds. “Man, just looking out the window gives my ass the shivers.” He was one of the really old recruits. The guy looked like he was in his sixties.

This was it, the place the human race would make its stand. The only way I would make it off this planet would be if we defeated the enemy, but could anyone defeat the Space Angels? Who knew what would happen once they sleeved New Copenhagen and that strange light cut us off from the rest of the universe. For all I knew, we might have won battles on some of the other 179 colonized worlds. All those soldiers they sent to Terraneau might be alive at this very moment, just standing around waiting for that phantom light to burn out.

I didn’t believe they were alive, though. I took a cynical view. Having had a brief glimpse of the Angels in action, I believed that all hope ended once the light closed in around you.

“If we’re going to die, we might as well die on a frozen wasteland,” I said, joking. Judging by the sudden silence, the old fellow did not appreciate my sense of humor. As an officer, I supposed I should have come up with a more encouraging response.

According to the simulation Brocius showed me, we only had a few hours left to dig in before the fireworks began. In the meantime, transports and commuter flights dotted the sky like lines of ants around a picnic basket. A constant stream of transports and cargo ships flew in and out of Valhalla Spaceport and the new, temporary runways the Corps of Engineers had stitched into the outskirts of town. The Navy would airlift those with the right connections to Earth. Those lucky few were mostly politicians and people from families wealthy enough to bribe their way off the planet, a brief reprieve at best.

Those who could not afford to evacuate from New Copenhagen were transported across the planet to relocation camps around the southern hemisphere. Data collected from previous battles showed that the lights always appeared first in northern latitudes, and generally near large population centers. The hope was that relocating the general population away from the fighting might buy them some time. If we won the fight, we would bring them back once the danger ended.

The Army Corps of Engineers had built several temporary bases on New Copenhagen to house the 620,000 soldiers now stationed in town. Army command, however, was located in the capitol building, in the center of Valhalla. They called it Fort Schwarzkopf.

The Air Force set up shop in a shopping mall, turning its long flat roof into multiple runways. They had a complement of three hundred Tomcat fighters. The Navy was mostly involved in the logistics of shipping in fighters and equipment; the Marines, however, would make a show of this fight. We came in four hundred thousand men strong. For the foreseeable future, the city of Valhalla was the galaxy’s military base.

As for me, I had mixed emotions about joining this fight. I did not like the idea of fighting for the same specking officers who tried to leave me and my Marines stranded to die, but I didn’t see much of a future in trying to make friends with the Space Angels, either. Even back when I was telling myself I’d sit this one out, I knew I didn’t have it in me. I was a Marine, damn it. I solemnly swore that I would defend the Republic against all enemies, foreign, domestic, and, I suppose, extragalactic. Besides, I was losing interest in the easy life—Friday-night fights and one-night stands were fun but not satisfying. I needed something more challenging, something to get my heart beating hard; and it did not matter whether I survived it or not. I preferred “death in battle to death like cattle,” as one of my old drill instructors used to say. There just isn’t anything that compares to going into battle with a platoon of willing men at your back and a loaded M27.

Semper fi, Marine.

We dropped down until we were no more than thirty feet above the skyscrapers on the way to the spaceport. Some of those buildings had ten-foot mounds of gleaming white snow piled up on roofs.

The streets below were mostly empty. Before the evacuation, Valhalla had a population of approximately three million. Only 200,000 of those residents signed up to defend their city. The rest chose the safety of a relocation camp. Populated with 620,000 soldiers, 400,000 Marines, 150,000 Airmen, and 200,000 civilians, the city was barely one-third full; but that population was compressed. From the air, some parts of Valhalla looked deserted and others looked crowded.

Looking down as we came in for a landing, I saw tanks and troop carriers. The Army sent out an enormous contraption that created waist-high bulletproof barriers by extruding plasticized blocks. The machine looked like a gigantic combine. Moving at no more than ten miles per hour, it rumbled down the middle of the highway, taking up four lanes of traffic, leaving rows of gun-metal gray barriers in its wake. The machine was officially known as a “Barrier Manufacturer,” or BM. In the Corps, we unofficially called it a “Shitter.” A small robotic device followed behind the BM, sanding any rough edges from the plasticized barriers. In the Corps we referred to that second unit as a “Babyshitter.”

From the air, the runways looked like black straps that prevented the snowy fields from unrolling like blankets. Caravans of tractors towed carts filled with rifles and munitions into warehouses on the far side of the airfield. Off in the distance, a line of artillery rolled along the horizon. As we circled the landing strip, I spotted tanks, missile launchers, and laser cannons. The equipment blended into the landscape around it. It had all been painted white.

Then the shuttle came in to the airport, I took one last look around. We came in low over an abandoned business district with empty streets. The shuttle did not even jostle as much as a car going over a speed bump when we touched down onto the runway. As we rolled to the terminal, I told myself that a smooth landing was as good an omen as any. On the other hand, I did not believe in omens.

As I prepared to leave my seat, I had a look around the runway. Never had I seen such a buildup. A formation of Tomcats flew overhead. In the distance gunships patrolled the edge of town. They flew low to the ground, maybe just a couple hundred feet up, low enough that I almost lost track of them as they vanished behind high-rise buildings. Then the ground crew attached the gangway to our shuttle and opened the hatch.

“Welcome to Valhalla,” the pilot called back as he cut the engines.

As we deplaned, a squadron of duty officers descended upon us and divided us by rank and branch. I was greeted by a Marine captain, who told me where to claim my gear and meet my ride.

The spaceport pulsed with tension as Navy and civilian transports arrived and departed every minute. Four hundred thousand Marines had flown through here over the last few days with enough field equipment and supplies to wage a war. The Navy had commandeered Valhalla Spaceport, replacing its former civilian splendor with martial sensibility. MPs and duty officers patrolled the halls, überefficient supply officers off-loaded cargo, and information desks now posted duty rosters instead of flight schedules.

Snow-brightened sunlight poured in through every wall-length window of the terminal. Officers and packs of enlisted men moved through the halls with purpose but little urgency. I saw Marine khaki wherever I looked—the floors, the gates, even on the balcony fifteen feet above me. Officers ripped past me riding carts and honking their horns to clear paths through the crowds. The natural-borns might have sat out other battles, but they could not avoid this one.

I was an officer, too …a second lieutenant. I found a head and changed into my uniform, sneering at the single gold bar on my lapel. That made me the lowest evolution of officer. No one over the rank of private took second lieutenants seriously in combat, but the bar would get me a billet in officer country. I made sure the bar was straight and went to grab my gear.

“Twenty-third Marines, Company B. If you’re from Company B, grab your gear and head out!” a sergeant yelled at the old recruits as they stepped around a corner. It was a touching intergenerational scene—the sergeant, a clone in his late thirties screaming so loud that strands of spit flew from his lips, reactivated Marines in their forties, fifties, and maybe even their sixties jumping to comply.

“Move it, assholes! The captain is waiting,” the sergeant yelled. “You, Grandpa, you hoping for a second retirement check?” he yelled to no recruit in particular, so far as I could tell. “Move it, move it, move it!”

“Sergeant, where do I go to gather my gear?” I asked.

He looked at me with too much mirth in his smile. Like every other clone, he thought he was a natural-born, and here was a clone in an officer’s uniform asking him for a ride.

“See something amusing, Sergeant?” I asked. The smile vanished from his lips.

“No, sir,” he said.

“ ’Cause if you see something funny, Sergeant, I’d like to be in on the specking joke.”

“No, sir! The sergeant sees nothing funny, sir.”

“Where are they unloading the officers’ gear?” I asked.

“I have your gear, Lieutenant Harris,” someone said from behind me.

The man standing behind me was a clone with the same brown stubble and brown eyes as every other clone in the spaceport, but I recognized him nonetheless. I had no trouble identifying the men who served with me during the Mogat invasion. “Hello, Thomer,” I said.

“I knew you would be here,” Sergeant Kelly Thomer said, after we traded salutes. “There was no way you’d sit this one out.”

“Glad you knew it,” I said. “I didn’t. It took an armed guard just to drag me to Mars.” I was happy to see Thomer. We’d fought together, and I respected him. I could trust him under any circumstances.

“I don’t see anyone guarding you now,” Thomer said.

“Yeah, I shook ’em,” I said.

Thomer acknowledged my joke with a grin and a nod, then said, “Come with me, sir. Philips is warming up our jeep.”

“Philips? He’s still around?” I asked. I liked Mark Philips; but I would not have been surprised to hear he had been shot, drummed out of the Corps, or thrown in the brig for life. He had a talent for rubbing people the wrong way, especially officers.

“Sure he’s around; the Corps needs every man,” Thomer said.

Thomer led the way through the terminal and out to the street. We passed a team of Marines loading gear into the backs of trucks. We passed companies waiting for rides to arrive. The snow-lined sidewalks glistened in the sunlight. The cold, fresh air stung my skin in a pleasant way. A fine powder of dry snow hung in the air.

“Any sign of the aliens yet?” I asked Thomer.

“You would know more about that than I do, sir. They’ve kept us completely in the dark so far,” he said. “If we’re fighting aliens this time, are these the same aliens you saw when we invaded the Mogats?”

“Officially?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“How about unofficially?” Thomer asked.

“I still don’t know,” I said.

“Thanks, sir.”

“Anytime, Sergeant.”

Thomer pointed to a jeep up ahead. “That’s our ride.”

“Have you been on New Copenhagen long?” I asked, as we walked toward the jeep. I half expected Thomer to ask, “Officially?”

“Two days, sir. I was in the third rotation for Terraneau and Bristol Kri. If those fights had lasted another day, they would have flown me in.”

“You’re all right for a natural-born,” I said. “At least you’re up to the fight.”

“Thank you, sir,” Thomer said.

Kelly Thomer was a clone, of course, but like every other clone, he had been programmed to believe he was natural-born. Clones like Thomer, who had an introspective nature, tended to question the logic of their neural programming. Introspection was a self-destructive trait for a clone. If they convinced themselves they were synthetic, they would trigger the death reflex, but ignoring the questions caused them cognitive dissonance. So clones like Thomer spent a lot of time trying to convince themselves that they were clones even though they harbored deep suspicions that they weren’t. It was an intellectual juggling act that might one day prove fatal.

“If it ain’t the new XO,” Philips said, as Thomer stowed my twin duffel bags in the back of the jeep. “Things must really be desperate if they’re letting an asshole like you back in, sir.”

“Philips, shouldn’t you be in a brig somewhere?” I asked, climbing in the passenger’s seat.

“Yeah, but they sent me here to face the alien firing squad instead,” Philips said. “It’s one of them opportunities to die with honor.”

“And they made you a sergeant?” I asked, looking at the stripes on his uniform.

“Everyone who survived the invasion got promoted,” Thomer said. “Even Philips.”

“Well, I’m not surprised he got promoted, though I am surprised he was able to hold on to it,” I said. Philips, who was once the oldest buck private in the history of the Marines, had a knack for bouncing up and down in rank.

Philips laughed. “How are you doing, Harris?” he asked. “And how the hell did you end up as an officer?”

I ignored him calling me by my last name because he’d won my respect in combat. I ignored his question because I hated the gold bar on my collar.

“Thomer, how did you know I was coming in?” I asked.

“It’s on the duty roster, you’re our executive officer,” Thomer said. “Somebody went out of their way to surround you with old friends. Your buddy Freeman is the company’s civilian advisor.”

“Ray Freeman is here?”

“Oh sure, he’s here,” Philips muttered as he put the jeep in gear. The sun was a white-gold disc in the sky. Tall buildings cast clearly defined shadows that stretched across streets and painted empty parking lots. The day was as bright as a summer day, but the air was winter crisp.

I had never seen such preparation for battle. We turned a corner and passed a team of technicians placing the final touches on a rocket launcher. A few blocks later, we saw soldiers stringing wires through a bombproof barricade.

Philips drove to the lakeshore, where a shattered layer of ice stretched into the horizon in a web of tiny white islands and steel gray water. Along the shore stood rows of trackers—motion-tracking robots that looked like barber poles. I’d seen trackers armed with everything from machine guns to missiles. These trackers had heavy-caliber machine guns and particle-beam cannons.

“I’d hate to be the alien that tries to cross that lake,” Thomer said. “You’d be wide open with no place to hide.”

“What if they’re waterproof?” I asked. “Those things might be able to walk along the bottom of the lake.”

“You wouldn’t want to do that,” Philips said. “The stuff they have in the water makes a machine-gun colonic look like an act of mercy. If there’s so much as a tadpole alive in that pond, I’d be surprised.”

“Have you ever seen a buildup like this?” Thomer asked me.

“Nope, not like this,” I said.

“They must be doing ten times as much on Earth,” Thomer said.

“Don’t count on it,” I said. “I think they sent their best men and equipment here.”

“Bullshit,” Philips said.

“That’s not just talk?” Thomer asked.

“Look around. There are over a million well-armed troops here. We have tanks, jets, and orbital support. Thomer, if we can’t pull this one out, there’s no point in trying again on Earth.”

“I heard they had three times this many men on Terraneau,” Philips said.

“They didn’t know what they were up against,” I said.

“Do you know what we’re up against?” Philips asked. “They haven’t told us shit.” He sounded angry. I didn’t blame him.

“Are they trying to find someplace safe to settle?” Thomer asked.

“Not in this galaxy,” I said.

Silence followed. We drove through town. Thomer and Philips took me on a circuitous route to show me all of the installations the Corps of Engineers had under way, but they had lost their enthusiasm once I said this was the final stand. Philips drove to our camp—a luxury hotel that had been converted into the most comfortable base in the history of the Marines. While he and Thomer returned the jeep to the motor pool, I reported in.

Once in my room on the twenty-third floor of the hotel, I changed into my bodysuit and armor. As I stowed away my clothes, I noticed a message on the communications console beside my bed. The base commander wanted me to report to his office ASAP.

CHAPTER NINE

“So you are the man I have heard so much about?” First Lieutenant Warren Moffat said, as I stepped out of the elevator and onto the mezzanine floor. He sat on a white leather sofa just outside the glass doors that led to what had once been the hotel’s administrative offices.

“The way I hear it, you single-handedly won the Mogat War, Harris.”

I did not like the way this conversation had started. He did not mean what he’d said as a compliment, he meant it as a challenge. He had just accused me of taking credit for the sacrifices of dead Marines, and the guy was clearly looking for a fight.

“I’m looking for Base Command,” I said, knowing I had already found it, but hoping to derail this conversation.

“You’re standing in it,” Moffat said. “General Glade asked me to wait for you. Guess you’re here.” He rose to his feet.

I started ahead, but the lieutenant stepped in front of me. “Let me give you a quick prebriefing, XO. I run the company. I run the show. I don’t care if you are a specking Liberator. I don’t care if you survived the specking Mogat invasion. I don’t give a rat’s ass if you turn out to be the next specking messiah, you got that?

“I am company commander, and that puts me one seat away from God Almighty as far as you are concerned. Cross that line, boy, and I will fry your ass. I will personally shove my particle-beam pistol up every hole you got, then I will shove it up the new holes I make.” He stood with his face less than an inch from mine. Filaments of spit flew from his lips and splattered my cheeks.

“Will that be all?” I asked.

“I’m just getting started, Harris,” Moffat said. He was in a rage, but he kept his voice low. A vein had appeared across his forehead. It started between his eyebrows and disappeared under his hairline. His face was red with rage.

Like every officer in the Marine Corps except me, Moffat was a natural-born. He was a big man. I stood six-foot-three, and he had a couple of inches on me. He had muscular arms. His biceps and triceps bulged under the sleeves of his shirt. I could see a few small scars on his scalp under the fine brown bristle of his hair. The boy had been a tough customer; probably a football star or wrestler in college.

“If General Glade thinks you’re something special, that’s his problem, asshole!” Moffat continued. “You got that? You may have friends in high places, but I have friends of my own, asshole. Do you hear me? You try to make yourself the hero again, and I will flatten you into a specking statistic. I will turn you into K.I.A. roadkill so fast you won’t have time to wet yourself.” As he said this, he placed a hand on my shoulder.

He should not have put his hand on me. Now I found myself angered to the point that I began to have a Liberator combat reflex. The hormone was beginning to flow through my blood, soothing me and pushing me to attack at the same time. Struggling to keep my temper in check, I brushed Moffat’s hand from my sleeve. “I’ll keep that in mind,” I growled, still hoping to keep my growing need for violence in check

Huuuuhhh Huhhhh. General James Ptolemeus Glade stood at the door behind Moffat clearing his throat. At that moment, I thought his throat-clearing ceremony was meant to catch our attention. It wasn’t. I soon learned that he made the same noise during speeches, meals, and probably in his sleep.

“Is this our new man, Lieutenant?” he asked Moffat.

“Yes, sir,” Moffat said, taking a step back from me. “This is the famous Lieutenant Harris.”

“Out of my way. Moffat. Out of my way. Let’s have a look at him,” Glade said. He gave me a quick inspection, then invited Moffat and me to follow him into the admin offices. “Lieutenant Harris, I’ve read your record. It’s a pleasure to have a Marine of your caliber under my command.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said, feeling more than a little off balance. Generals did not, as a rule, pay attention to the lieutenants under their command, let alone greet them.

“I hear you fought on Little Man and in the Mogat invasion. You’ve been in on the big ones, haven’t you, Lieutenant.” Then his smile tightened. “Scuttlebutt around command is that you once shot a colonel in the line of duty. Is that true, Harris?”

“I’ve heard the rumor,” I said.

“The way I hear it, it’s not just a rumor. I heard you shot Aldus Grayson,” General Glade said. “Now, I knew Grayson.”

Oh shit, I thought to myself.

Glade put on a good “plain folks” persona, but looking into his eyes, I could tell that he was shrewd and keenly aware of everything around him. “I went through Annapolis in the same class as Grayson. We graduated from the academy the same year, he and I and about ten thousand other cadets.

“I’m not sure Annapolis ever saw a more pompous, self-aggrandizing, useless cadet than Aldus Grayson, if you know what I mean—but I hate to think he was shot by one of his own.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

As I watched Glade, I realized that he had not said this for my benefit. He was delivering a message to Moffat. His eyes bore into the first lieutenant’s, expressly driving home the message with one last phrase, “Though I suppose it’s sensible to shoot dogs and officers when they go rabid.”

Only a ten-man staff worked in Glade’s administrative office. The generals and admirals I had met prior to Glade all insulated themselves with bloated staffs. Glade, who rose through the ranks on the battlefield, kept as small an entourage as possible.

“Like my offices?” Glade asked me.

“Very elegant, sir,” I said.

“Seems like a waste of space to me,” Glade said. “Now if you want to see something really impressive, you should see what the Army has done with the capitol building. They have turned that place into a world-class command center. That’s where all the real work gets done.

“This here is my office,” he added as he opened the wood-paneled door. “I spent six years assigned to the Pentagon before the Civil War broke out. I visited the offices of each of the Joint Chiefs; none of them had an office like this.”

Glade’s office was thirty feet long and thirty feet wide. He had a glass-and-pewter desk, glass shelves with recessed lighting, a white marble crown below the ceiling, and hand-annotated battle maps taped to the wood-paneled walls. Rows of leather-bound books stood in the bookshelves, and a line of fancy liqueurs rested on the ledge over the wet bar. The rug was burgundy red and more than an inch thick; the soles of my shoes sank into its cut-pile depths.

“Do you know where they got the name ‘Valhalla’?” Glade asked.

“That was Viking heaven,” Moffat said. “That was the home of the Norse gods.” He had a smirk on his face that said, “You don’t get an education like that in clone orphanages.”

“Good, Moffat. Did you take humanities in the academy?” Glade asked.

“Yes, sir,” Moffat said.

I, too, had read a little Norse mythology. Unlike the gods of the Greek and Roman eras, the Norse gods could die. They expected to ultimately lose the battle of good and evil. I did not volunteer that information.

Huuuuh. Huuuuh. “Lieutenant Harris, I had a chat with Admiral Brocius before you arrived. He speaks very highly of you. He recommended that I provide you with anything you want and stay out of your way. I must say, Lieutenant, I am not used to giving my junior officers that kind of latitude.” He looked at me for a response.

I did not know what to say, so I remained silent.

“Do you have any questions, Lieutenant?” Glade asked.

“No, sir,” I said.

“As I understand it, Admiral Brocius briefed you about our situation, is that right?”

I looked over at Moffat. He tried to give me a threatening glare, but it looked more imploring than menacing. “I understand a friend of mine has been sent here as a civilian advisor.”

“You mean Freeman,” Glade said. “Admiral Brocius tells me that you’ve worked with him before.”

“He’s a friend of yours?” Moffat said. “Interesting piece of work …I thought his kind was extinct.”

Glade glared at Moffat. “What do you mean, Lieutenant?”

“Have you seen him? He’s a black man. An African. There aren’t supposed to be races anymore, but Freeman, his skin is black as tar.”

The room went silent for several seconds before Glade spoke up. “Is there a point you wish to make, Lieutenant Moffat?”

“No, sir,” Moffat said. Thickheaded as he was, he was bright enough to know that he had just stepped on a land mine.

“Ever heard of Shin Nippon?” Glade asked. Everybody knew about Shin Nippon, the all-Japanese colony. After the role Shin Nippon played in ending the Civil War, the U.A. Senate allowed the racially pure people of Shin Nippon to form a nation within a nation and settle the Japanese islands on Earth. “Welcome to the twenty-sixth century, Marine. Races still exist, and will exist as long as there are humans to preserve them.”

“Yes, sir,” Moffat said. “I don’t trust Freeman.”

Not trusting Ray Freeman was another story. He and I had been partners for two years, and he still made me nervous. He was smart, dangerous, and silent, a man who radiated intensity and seldom spoke. I had seen him kill enemies for money and revenge …and maybe for the fun of it. I once saw him glue a live grenade to a man’s hand and pull the pin. When I first met Freeman, I thought he had no allegiance to anyone but himself; but I was wrong. He never fought against the Unified Authority.

“What do you think of Freeman?” Glade asked me. He cleared his throat again.

“I’d trust him with my life,” I said.

“Just you keep that bastard out of my line of sight,” Lieutenant Moffat warned.

“You know, Moffat, I’ve been trying to play nice with you,” Glade said. “I came out and caught you browbeating your XO for no apparent reason, and I tried to warn you that Lieutenant Harris is not an officer to be pushed around—but here you are, doing it again.

“I tried to be diplomatic with you, but now I think I’ll just be frank. I would put you on permanent KP duty till this war is over, but I don’t want to risk you poisoning my men. That leaves me very few other options.

“Against my better judgment, I am going to trust you to conduct yourself in a manner befitting an officer in the Marines. If you do not live up to my expectations, I will be forced to either bust you down to private, put you in the brig, or have you shot. Any one of those options would be fine by me.” He cleared his throat again; this time I was almost sure it was for emphasis. “Do I make myself clear, Lieutenant Moffat?”

“Yes, sir,” Moffat said.

“Harris, Brocius says to let you and your platoon prosecute this war any way you see fit. You want tanks or air support, I’m supposed to provide it, no questions asked. I can’t make many promises, but I do promise to protect you from hotheaded officers; and I will give you whatever support that I can.

“Don’t expect me to dig you out if you speck up. You do what you think is best, but if you get yourself captured, don’t expect me to risk men pulling your ass out of the fire.”

“No, sir,” I said.

“Last I heard, the boys in Intelligence think we still have a few hours before this shooting match begins. Do you have any plans?” Glade asked.

“I want to run some recon, sir,” I said.

Glade nodded. “Recon? We have every inch of this planet mapped, scaled, and under electronic surveillance. We have this planet so wired that the rabbits in the woods can’t so much as fart without us listening in. What can you possibly hope to accomplish?”

“Sir, if I can locate the enemy’s launch point, I may be able to determine numbers, logistical clusters, maybe vulnerabilities …” I said. “I want to see if I can come in behind the enemy.”

“I believe the general just warned you not to get caught,” Moffat scowled, a grin on his lips.

“Excuse me, sir, but I believe he said he would not pull my ass out of the fire if I did get caught. I don’t intend to get caught.”

“No one intends to get caught,” said Moffat.

“We could get some good intel if this works. And if I do get caught, at least we’ll know we’re dealing with an alert and dangerous enemy,” I said.

“Not bad, Harris. Not bad,” Moffat said with transparent respect.

“Tell you what, Harris. The Navy set up a full-scale Science Lab just a few miles from here at the University of Valhalla. You go out there and do what you need to do, and you bring in one of those bastards. You bring one in alive.” Glade cleared his throat. “You bring us a live one, so the boys in the lab have something to play with.

“You do that, Harris, and I’ll put every man in your platoon down for a chestful of medals when this is over. I’ll tell you what, you bring me one of those bastards, and my wife and I will have your whole platoon out to the house for a barbecue.” Glade sounded excited. I got the feeling that he liked the idea of the Marine Corps bringing in the first prisoner.

“Your house? Are you from Valhalla originally?” I asked. With few exceptions, officers—the black-sheep children of politicians and bureaucrats who either could not cut it in school or in the political arena—came from Earth families.

“They set up housing for officers’ families. They’re calling it the ‘Hen House.’ ” Glade sounded somber. “Moffat, you’re a married man.”

“Yes, sir,” Moffat said.

“You brought your wife?”

“Yes, sir,” Moffat said.

I saw a chilling implication. Why shouldn’t the officers bring their families? If we lost here, their families would be as good as dead on Earth.

Glade cleared his throat once more, softly this time, the sound mostly muffled. “I guess that’s all I have to say.” He saluted, and said, “Good luck, Harris.”

Moffat and I left the admin area without speaking a word. Originally I had hated this man, now I found some form of sympathy for him. He was fighting to save his wife, not just to advance his career.

As the glass doors closed behind us, Moffat said, “Just keep out of my way, Harris. I’ve dealt with assholes like you before.”

“No, you haven’t,” I said. “Not like me.”

CHAPTER TEN

Since the early days of the Unified Authority, the colonies had always been a great melting pot. In an effort to prevent boundaries being drawn along racial lines, the U.A. government forcibly mixed peoples of all nationalities in the various colonies. As the government got to decide who went to which planet, racial division was virtually eliminated by fiat.

The government, however, allowed a few churches to establish colonies as well. These colonies were not as closely regulated as the ones founded by the government. If the rumors were true, the Catholic Church still had priests of purely Italian descent. Unless they were clones, those priests had to have come from Italian parents. The government did not need to worry about the priests extending their race, however, since they had all taken an oath of celibacy.

Ray Freeman descended from a long line of Neo-Baptist colonists, men and women of African-American descent. Freeman’s dark skin and huge size intimidated people. He stood a hulking seven feet tall with a heavy and powerful physique, the build of a blacksmith, not an athlete. He had so many scars along the back of his head that hair could no longer grow there even if he did not shave his head bald.

Freeman’s eyes were clear and white and set far apart. His irises were as black as a starless sky; they were the only truly black part of his body. His skin was the dark brown of ebony.

Freeman was brilliant, deadly in battle, and utterly ruthless. Despite his Neo-Baptist upbringing, he never showed remorse.

“It’s about time you got here,” Freeman said, as I climbed from the back of the truck.

“You knew I was coming?” I asked.

“Philips told me.”

I was the last man off the truck. Freeman and I watched as Philips and Thomer led the rest of the platoon across the landing strip, where three helicopters waited—two personnel carriers and a gunship escort. The men formed a line and waited for my orders.

“I didn’t know you and Sergeant Philips were friends,” I said.

Freeman ignored this comment. He probably did not like the connotation of the word “friend.” His life had room for allies, partners, and people who employed him, but no one came any closer than that.

Before leaving base, we were issued white-coated combat armor instead of the dark green we normally wore. In the snowy forests, the white armor would provide better camouflage. Around the plowed streets of Valhalla, however, the armor could not have been more visible if it had been painted red and dotted with a bull’s-eye.

The three aircraft were also painted white. They also stood out when environed by the city.

“I saw Admiral Brocius,” I said. “He says you made a deal with him to get your family off Little Man.”

Freeman nodded. “He and I are square.”

“Where are they now?” I asked, as we headed toward the helicopters. “Are they safe?”

I felt a strange pang in my gut when I thought of Freeman’s family. The only time I had ever felt something that might have been love was for Freeman’s sister, a single mother with a teenaged son. Her name was Marianne. Her son was Caleb. Marianne and I might have had a romance, but our relationship ended prematurely. I still thought about her from time to time.

“They’re as safe as they can be in this galaxy. Brocius relocated them here.”

“New Copenhagen?” I asked.

“It was the best Brocius had to offer,” Freeman said, as we reached my men.

“Sergeant Thomer, what is the status of the platoon?” I asked, when we reached the helicopters.

Standing at attention, Thomer yelled, “All men are present and accounted for, sir.” It was formal, the Marine Corps answer to a minister welcoming his congregation to church, but discipline was a facet of Marine life that could not be ignored. I had fought with some of these men, but others were new to me. If we went into battle without going through the formalities, the new ones might get the wrong idea and think I did not care much about discipline.

“Very good, Sergeant,” I said. “Load the men on the choppers.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Thomer yelled. He was a quiet man but also a by-the-book Marine. Freeman and I waited for Philips and Thomer to direct the platoon onto the choppers, then we climbed in. Including Freeman and me, we had forty-four men.

Assuming Naval Intelligence interpreted the aliens’ simulation correctly, the invasion would take place today. Data from past attacks suggested the lights would appear in the early evening. That was the Pentagon’s best estimate. What we gleaned from our long string of losses was that the lights generally started near the largest city on the planet and almost always in a northern region of that planet. The brains at the Pentagon might not have the slightest clue about what would happen next; but when it came to where and when the invasion would begin, they had it down.

I wanted to see when and where the enemy landed and watch for any vulnerable moments. Would they have their weapons drawn when they first appeared? Would they arrive in formation? Did they have protection when they landed, however they landed? I wanted to see if we could surprise them behind their lines and maybe end this fight early with a well-timed bomb. If we managed to hold out against the first wave of their attack, maybe we could bring a division out to greet them the next time they arrived.

For this little field trip we would travel in helicopters. No bulky transports for us, just sleek atmospheric vessels. The rotary blades on the top of the choppers made a suppressed tock-tock-tock noise as they began to spin, and we lifted into the air.

As we took off, I looked around the well-fortified city of Valhalla. Even from here I could see batteries of rocket launchers, gun emplacements, and troops …lots and lots of troops. It was late afternoon. The sky no longer looked white as paper. It had turned blue and orange as the sun slid toward the horizon. I had my armor on, but not my helmet, and the cold air stabbed imaginary needles into my cheeks.

“We’ll put up a good fight,” I said as I watched an armored column roving outside the landing-field gate.

Freeman did not respond.

The three helicopters formed a caravan, the gunship leading the way, with the two choppers remaining side by side behind it. Some of my men sat quietly, staring out the portholes, studying the landscape below. The forests ahead were cold and full of shadows.

I donned my helmet and checked the ocular controls. From here on out, I would see everything through the lenses of my visor. Marine combat armor had night-for-day lenses, heat-vision lenses, automatic tint shields that protected against blinding light, and farseeing telescopic lenses. The equipment also included sonic locators, smart tags for identifying personnel, and interLink communications gear. General-issue armor would not stop a bullet or absorb a particle beam, but the bodysuit would keep me comfortable even on a long march through the snowy woods.

Though he was not a Marine, Freeman had been fitted for armor as well. Where they found a suit that could fit him, I had no idea. His chest and shoulders had to be eighty inches around; his biceps might have been a full twenty-five inches.

“What’s the plan?” the pilot asked me over the interLink, as I settled in.

“First, we’re going to kill time until we know where to go,” I said. “It might be an hour, maybe more. You see that forest? In a little while some bright lights are going to appear out there.”

“And there’s going to be an army of aliens out there, too,” the pilot commented.

“First the lights, then the aliens. Take my word for it. The Marine Corps has experience with these things,” I said. The pilot was Navy. Navy chopper pilots tended to be a bit more skittish than Marine Corps pilots in these situations.

“So we’re looking for the light?” the pilot asked.

“I need you to drop us as close to the lights as you can, then head back for base. Our goal is to slip in unannounced; having choppers thumping overhead isn’t going to help with the mission.”

“Understood.” The pilot sounded relieved.

We had reached altitude and were now flying across an outer suburb. Below us, Valhalla was a grid of plowed streets and houses with an occasional park or school or shopping center.

“You interested in heading anyplace in particular while we wait?” the pilot asked. We were speaking on an open frequency. Every man in the platoon could hear us. So could Freeman. As a civilian advisor, he was not technically a member of the platoon.

“Freeman, got any ideas?” I asked.

Because of his huge size and icy demeanor, Freeman’s intelligence often went unnoticed. He did not stumble into situations. He considered the angles, studied whatever information he could, and had a keen eye for any advantages to be had. With Freeman, I never needed to worry about uninformed opinions blending in with the facts. Since he did not know any more than me, he simply shook his head.

“What’s it look like beyond those hills?” I asked the pilot, pointing to hills to the west.

“It looks dark; that’s how it looks,” the pilot said. I got the feeling he did not want to stray any farther from town than necessary.

“I can see that,” I said. “What is the terrain like?”

“Forest, mostly. It’s pretty dense.”

“Use your radar; see if you locate a clearing. You may need to drop us off out there,” I said.

“Yes, sir,” the pilot said.

The sun set quickly during the New Copenhagen winter. First the horizon became red and gold and orange—a molten copper sun sinking behind clouds that looked inflamed and infected. Then the sky was purple with gray clouds. As the last streaks of light slowly drained from the sky, the horizon went from indigo to black. Snow-covered trees formed a carpet below us, and mountains looked like phantom shapes in the distance.

“How far out do you want to go?” the pilot asked.

I glanced at Freeman, then said, “Ten, fifteen miles, not any farther than a half day’s hike back to town.”

The pilot headed out over the woodlands, cruising quickly while remaining no more than ten feet from the tops of the trees, a tactic called Earth mapping. The pilot kept us low enough to pass under most tracking technologies. It was a wise precaution.

It only took a couple of minutes to reach our target area. On the off chance that the aliens came late, we had fifteen hours of fuel. We circled and evaluated the terrain, and looked for places where we could set up an ambush. We looked for paths and hollows, places where we could hide should we need to retreat.

We flew for over an hour, cruising over rivers, lakes, and endless woodlands. We skimmed over hills and saw no phantom lights. The moon appeared in the sky, and the first stars began to show. In the distance, we could see the low glow of city lights generating over Valhalla.

“Maybe they aren’t coming,” Thomer said over the interLink.

That thought had occurred to me as well, but I knew better. “Maybe,” I said.

“They’re coming,” Freeman said.

“How do you know?” I asked over a discrete connection that the other men in my platoon would not hear.

“I saw their damned battle plan,” Freeman answered over that same connection.

“You mean the battle simulation they broadcast? Maybe we misunderstood it,” I said. “Maybe they changed their minds.”

A few minutes later the pilot radioed to tell me that he’d spotted the phantom light. I moved to the front of the helicopter to ask where, but didn’t bother asking the question. I could see it clearly myself.

A small dome of light had started to grow out of the forest about twenty miles from us. Its glare shone through the trees like twisted spokes, and the top of the dome rose above the trees, casting alternating waves of red, blue, and yellow into the black sky. The stars above the scene vanished, canceled out by the glare from that dome.

“We need to come in behind it,” I told the pilot.

“Which side is the front?” the pilot asked.

“Let’s come in from the west, the side facing away from town.”

“We’re on our way,” the pilot said. A moment later, however, he signaled me again. “Lieutenant, I ran a satellite sweep of the position. The trees are too thick for us to land around that light source. The closest spot I can drop you is about four miles back.”

“How about to the north?” I asked.

“About the same,” the pilot said. “The closest spot I’ve got is about three miles from their point of origin, but it’s southeast of the light. That will place you between the light and town.”

Not knowing anything about the enemy, I did not want to risk being caught in the open. All I had to go by was my briefing with Admiral Brocius and the Space Angel I had seen on the Mogat planet. If an alien like that caught us in the open, we would be as good as dead. “Got any other options?” I asked.

“No, sir.”

“Okay, get us there quickly. I have a feeling we’re going to need to dig in.”

“Yes, sir,” the pilot said.

“Listen up,” I said over an open frequency that my men would hear in both helicopters. “We’re headed in. The choppers are not here for air support. Once we reach the drop zone, we’re on our own.”

Now came the part I always hated about briefings, the pep talk. “So what’s the latest rumor around base? What have you boys heard about the enemy?” I asked.

Thomer and Philips, veterans of the Mogat invasion, had to have a pretty good idea about what was going on. They were under orders to keep that opinion to themselves, and the clone programming in their brains meant they obeyed orders.

“They showed us a video feed from Terraneau, sir,” one of the men said. The interLink marked the message as coming from Private First Class Scott Huish. “And I heard some officers call them ‘Space Angels.’ ”

“Those officers were full of shit,” I said. “I’ve seen one these speckers up close, and it wasn’t an angel.”

“Are we really fighting aliens, sir?” It was Huish again. “I always thought that only humans lived in this galaxy.”

“I guess that means they came from outside the galaxy,” I said.

“We’re approaching the site,” the pilot told me.

In the distance, the light had grown from a dome to a mountain. It reached high into the sky and continued to spread until it was already more than two miles in diameter. The light was like a clear, bright gel that oozed out, engulfing everything it touched.

As the dome expanded, it spread in every direction. Our gunship escort swept the area first for any sign of the enemy. With its antenna array, the gunship could detect a noise as soft as a heartbeat. Its motion-tracking sensors would scan for movement, then remove interference such as leaves rustling in the wind. Even with the noise produced by chopper blades and wind, the sensors would be able to sort out the sound of a twig snapping or the slight movements of an assassin hiding in the trees.

“I can give you the complete lowdown we have on these aliens before we land. You see that light out there? That light is going to close in around the planet. Those mother-specking aliens travel inside the light. Got that? That is all we know.”

“The drop zone is clear,” the pilot said over a direct frequency.

“Circle it a couple of times,” I said on the same frequency. “I’m not done building their self-esteem.”

“It might be nice if we knew how to communicate with them,” one of my Marines said.

“If we know how to kill ’em, that’s enough for me,” Sergeant Philips said in his distinctive drawl.

“Damned specking right, and that is the only thing we need to know,” I said. “I don’t care what they eat, how they talk, or how they specking reproduce. You boys got that? This is Marines Biology 101; we study how to kill the bastards and leave everything else to the other sciences.”

Then, still using the open frequency, I told the pilot to take us down.

The gunship took one last sweep of the clearing, the searchlights under its belly casting a crisp white beam onto the snowy circle below. Along the edges of the light, the trees around the clearing looked half-bleached and half-etched in shadow. The other chopper went in first, lowering slowly, then hovering about six feet off the ground. The door rolled open and twenty-three Marines in white combat armor jumped to the ground.

Having delivered its cargo, the chopper rose sharply and slid out of the way to make room for us. Armor or no armor, I felt my stomach drop along with our chopper as the pilot lowered us into position. The chopper doors slid open on either side of the cabin. The men nearest the doors swung their legs over the edge and jumped out. As the commanding officer, I jumped last.

“Good luck, Lieutenant,” the pilot said, as I prepared to jump. There was a different camaraderie to this mission than I had ever experienced in past missions. In the past, I had always sensed a certain distance between me and the pilots who flew me into battle. They were dropping me off and rushing to safety. If we made it out, that was good. If we died, well, that was part of the game. Not this time, though. This time we were all in it together.

He watched me from the cockpit. He saluted, and I returned his salute, then leaped. I fell for a moment, then plunged into a four-foot snowdrift. Above my head, the chopper rose straight up toward the sky. The gunship performed one last security sweep of the area, and our convoy left.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

For logistical reasons, the smart gear in our visors included an absolute compass—a device that affixed the geographical directions north, south, east, and west to our visual display. They were not true compass points based on magnetic poles, but because our gear gave each of us the exact same reference points, it helped us coordinate our movements.

The gunship and helicopters flew east toward town. In the sky above them I saw a three-quarter moon. I saw clouds and stars, heavens that would soon vanish behind the false ceiling that the aliens were spreading across the sky. The light from their ion curtain did not dissolve into the darkness like other light. Instead, it remained condensed.

Before switching to night-for-day vision, I surveyed the drop zone through my default tactical lens. Our armor was the exact white of fresh-fallen snow, and it diffracted ambient light the same way the snow did. If we lay flat on our stomachs, we would fully blend in with the landscape around us.

When I switched to my night-for-day lenses, which displayed the world in blue-white-on-black images, my men completely disappeared into the landscape around them. Night-for-day vision tended to compress the world into two-dimensional images, blurring the white armor into the snow. No matter. I would not need the night-for-day lenses much longer, not once that phantom light spread over us.

“Thomer, report,” I said.

“Every man accounted for, sir,” Thomer said.

I ordered the platoon to form into fire teams, then told them to look for a good place to hide.

“How about town?” Philips asked.

Borrowing a page from Ray Freeman’s playbook, I pretended I did not hear the comment. “Philips, take a fire team and flank our movements.”

Philips could hit the bull’s-eye sixty out of sixty from a hundred yards. I liked the idea of having him cover us if it came to a firefight. If we ran into resistance, the rest of the platoon would keep the enemy pinned while Philips’s squad flanked them and shot them—a time-honored Marine tactic.

“Aye, aye, Kap-y-tan,” said Philips. He was great in combat and an asshole in every other situation. If anyone else in the platoon called me anything but “Lieutenant” or “sir,” I would have corrected him. With Philips, I wanted that layer of irreverence. The few times he showed officers proper respect, I generally worried about him losing his edge.

We left the clearing and entered the forest. The snow was not as heavy under the trees. In some spots the trunks grew so thick that their branches seemed to form a solid roof over our heads and I only found patches of mud on the ground. I saw everything in the blue-white imagery of night-for-day vision crystal clear and devoid of depth. The world under the trees was dark and shadowy, but it was far less confusing than standing out in the snow where my men and their surroundings blended into a single blue-white sheet. Here I could see my men against the contours in the forest floor.

As we walked, I tried to imagine what this forest might look like during the day. Sunlight would penetrate the branches, a silvery ray slanting here and there toward the forest floor. Some light would filter in from the clearings. I could find no trace of the moon or stars through the branches above.

“You know that attack simulation the aliens sent out …how do we know they meant for us to receive it? Maybe they just use the same frequencies we do,” I said over a private channel between me and Freeman. “Maybe we intercepted a battle plan they meant for their generals.”

“The signal originated on Earth,” Freeman said.

“On Earth?” I asked. “Do we know where on Earth?”

“It came from their embassy,” Freeman said.

I wanted to laugh. It sounded like a joke, a bit on the sarcastic side, but funny nonetheless. The problem was, Ray Freeman had absolutely no sense of humor. He lacked the capacity to tell jokes, even “Why did the chicken cross the reactor” jokes.

“They have an embassy?” I asked.

“Remember the building I staked out just outside DC?”

“You said it was a Mogat base,” I said. In the weeks before the Mogat invasion, Freeman located a building on the outskirts of Washington, DC, that employed the same advanced shielding technology that the Mogats used to protect their ships.

“I was wrong,” Freeman said. “The shields around that building did not shut down when we attacked the home planet.”

“Brocius says they want us to evacuate planets before they arrive,” I said. “He believes that is the reason they sent us their plan. Think he’s right?”

I was sure he did not know the answer, but I hoped he would guess.

Guessing, however, was no more a part of Freeman’s nature than telling jokes or showing mercy. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Lieutenant Harris, you’d better have a look at this,” Thomer called to me over the interLink. He and several of the men from the platoon had gathered around the edge of a small clearing.

They stood in a thirty-man semicircle, M27s in hand. Freeman and I came to join them.

Not expecting to hear much more than standard patrol chat, I switched to the platoon-wide frequency to eavesdrop on what the men had to say. I was doing more than snooping, though—this gave me a chance to gauge their morale. As their voices came labeled inside my helmet, I knew that the first conversation I locked in on was Thomer contacting Philips.

Can you guys see what’s going on? Thomer asked Philips, whose fire team was flanking the platoon somewhere twenty or thirty yards away.

It’s all trees and branches around here. What you got? Philips responded.

The sky is full of light. It’s just like Mogatopolis all over again. Thomer sounded depressed as he said this.

At least the planet isn’t on self-destruct this time, Philips said. I still have nightmares about that specking invasion.

Yeah, me too, Thomer said, still sounding down.

There it was, the phenomenon that Admiral Brocius had called the “ion curtain.” During the invasion I had mistaken it for some kind of benign glare; now I knew that it was a luminous barrier, a wall of light designed to cut planets off from the rest of the galaxy.

Staring at the edge of that light, which loomed high above the trees, was like gazing into the spark made by an arc-welding machine. The light was beyond white, platinum—white with a gold tint hidden deep within its translucence. As I stood there staring into it, the lenses in my visor switched from night-for-day to tactical view with tint shields to protect my eyes.

The dome had spread more quickly than I expected. It was only a mile away at best.

What’s it like once the light spreads over you? Corporal Trevor Boll, who was not with us during the Mogat invasion, asked Thomer.

It’s nothing. It’s just a bright light; don’t worry about it, Thomer answered. He tried to hide the concern in his voice but failed.

Ah, speck. I didn’t ever want to go through this again, Philips said.

I’m sending you an image, Thomer said to Philips. Our helmets had imaging equipment that not only allowed us to view the world through different lenses, it let us record and transmit what we saw. Corporals and up could control the gear to capture video and send it over the interLink. You don’t have to open it if you don’t want to.

Oh, hell no. I don’t want to see it. A moment later. Ah, shit, Thomer. I didn’t want to see that. I still have nightmares from last time.

Brocius called this “sleeving” the planet. That was what it felt like—as if some sort of material closed around us. It certainly did not act like light. The leading edge of the brightly lit curtain did not shine into the sky around it. Where the curtain had spread was bright, while the sky just beyond was still dark. Shimmering waves of elemental colors—pure hues of red, yellow, and blue—showed in the light like an aurora borealis.

Is it radioactive? one of the men asked over the general frequency. He sounded nervous.

No, several voices answered at once. We had a rudimentary Geiger counter in our visors as well.

The light won’t hurt you. That was Thomer.

The light won’t hurt you, but whatever’s inside of it might specking eat you for lunch, Philips, always the charmer, said. At least he had the good sense to say it over a private frequency that only sergeants and higher would hear.

“Well, boys, it’s safe to assume that the enemy is at hand,” I said. “Any suggestions on a good hiding spot?”

“There’s a nice ridge over here. Might make a good place to dig in.” The message came from Private First Class Steven White, one of Philips’s men.

“We’d have the high-ground advantage,” Philips added.

“Set a beacon,” I said. Philips created a virtual beacon—a red spot that appeared in all of our visors showing us the direction to follow, and I ordered the rest of the platoon to follow. As we headed toward the beacon, I spoke to my men. “The light will not hurt you, but we don’t know what else it might be able to do. It might have some kind of sensor ability, like a radar. It might be able to detect our body heat or our breathing or the chemicals in our bodies or the electrical impulses in our brains.”

“Want me to stop thinking?” Philips asked over a private channel.

“I’d be glad enough if you’d stop talking for a change,” I said.

“Sorry, sir,” Philips said in a slow drawl that told me he was not.

We reached the beacon. It marked a low-slung hill. The trees did not grow as close together on this hill, opening the way for a thick layer of snow on the ground.

The dome of light was closing in. At this rate it would spread over us in another minute. So long as the light did not have some sort of radar or sonar to detect us, I thought we might be able to hide. With our white armor, we would be nearly invisible in the snow, and our armor would shield the heat from our bodies.

“Man, this shit is blinding,” one of my Marines said.

“Things are going to be bright for a while, so you might as well get used it,” Philips said.

“Stow it, you two,” I said. We didn’t have time for a philosophical discussion about alien lights. “Gentlemen, the fun is about to begin, you better find a good place to hide and dig in.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

I did not know much about physics, but I knew enough to see that the light around the alien landing did not behave like natural light. It didn’t move, it spread like a viscous fluid, slowly flooding the forest and engulfing everything it touched in a bright silvery blanket. Light shining from a source like a star or a bulb casts shadows. This light seemed to turn the very air into a light source so that there were no shadows anywhere.

The light mesmerized my men. Private First Class Harold Messman summed it up best when he said, “Holy specking shit.”

Burrowing through a three-foot mound of snow on the side of the hill, I tried to forget about the phantom light and concentrate on the aliens. We were directly between the origin of the light and Valhalla. Somewhere in that light, an alien army was headed our way.

Most of my men hid behind trees. Up the slope from me, an entire fire team crouched behind a stand of fallen logs. A few feet ahead of me, Ray Freeman concealed himself behind a boulder that was about the size of a large dog. Big as he was, he had to lie chest down in the snow to keep from showing, and even then it was a tight fit. At least his combat armor protected him from the cold.

My own situation wasn’t much better. As I was lying facedown in the snow, my body was pressed against the joints in my armor. The creases in my shoulder guards were wreaking havoc on my neck and chest. Because of the shape of my helmet, I could not lie flat on my stomach, it cocked my neck back. We had to keep our M27s hidden, too. Their black stocks and barrels would be a dead giveaway. I buried mine in the snow. Good thing it was not the kind of gun that jams up when a little mud splashes into the barrel.

I had no idea how many soldiers the enemy might bring, but it seemed likely that an intergalactic army might rely on overwhelming force to secure new territories, wipe their enemies out entirely, then move on to the next conquest. Over the next while, a million soldiers might pass this glade.

“Get comfortable, boys,” I said over the interLink. “We may be here for a long, long time.” Hours, I thought. Then I added, “Keep your eyes open, but hold your fire. We do not want to engage. Repeat, we do not want to engage.”

“What if they spot us?” asked one of my privates.

“Just sit tight, Messman,” I said. “Don’t start shooting until I give you the order.”

“Yes, sir.” He sounded nervous. I needed him to hold tight. All it would take was one loose cannon to give us away.

Now that the flood of light had spread over us, my visor automatically switched to tactical lenses with moderate tinting to protect my eyes from the glare. The trees and moss were awash with color—dark green needles, lime green moss, stones the color of iron, trunks with gray bark, ferns with red leaves.

The light had enveloped the forest for as far as I could see. Everything was drowned in liquid light. During the Mogat invasion, I managed to escape before the light closed in around me. Our transport took off just in time to avoid it. This time, there was no escape.

Using the Geiger counter in my visor, I checked for radiation and found nothing. The environmental equipment showed no change in air temperature, and I could see that the light did not melt the snow, which glistened like a blanket of diamond fragments along the ridge.

“Holy shit! Look at that ugly specker.” Philips spotted the Angels first. “I saw the video feed, but I didn’t believe it.”

The creatures looked like they were made out of light, but not the same light that now flooded the forest. The liquid light pouring across the forest was silver-white, like raw electricity. The creatures were bright yellow.

The first Space Angels around the bend looked like statues sculpted from yellow neon light. Their movements were stiff and stilted, as if their limbs had somehow become locked by the snow. Made of light or glass, they marched along the ground. No floating, no flying, no vehicles. Instead, column after column of eight-foot-tall soldiers that looked no more substantial than a smear of light marched along the ground below us. They had heads, arms, and legs, all with fairly human proportions only larger. They carried enormous chrome rifles cross chest. The aliens might have looked like they were made out of energy, but those damn rifles seemed pretty specking real. I remembered how one of those bastards had fired a bolt at me as I tried to escape up an elevator shaft on the Mogat home world.

Marching past us, the Angels never spared so much as a sideways glance. If I’d had more men, guns, and guts, I might have tried to end the war right then and there. The minutes passed by slowly as we lay hidden watching the alien army parade past. If there are a million of them, we may be trapped here for days, I thought to myself. I also berated myself for not arranging a more comfortable hiding place.

At some point one of my men started to panic. “Oh God! Look at them! Look at them! What are we going to do?” he whimpered to himself, and the interLink equipment in his helmet dutifully broadcast it out to every man in the platoon.

Thomer took care of it. “Quiet down, Anderson,” he said. “They don’t even know we’re here.”

“Thomer, is he going to be okay?” I asked over a discrete link.

“He’ll hold up,” Thomer said. “They’ll all hold up.”

“Good thing we don’t have any kids fresh out of boot camp,” I said.

“I’d take a dozen kids over those fossils the Army brought in,” Thomer said.

Thank God for Kelly Thomer, I thought to myself. The men trusted him; he commanded their respect. Something in the way he addressed Private Anderson calmed the man down. It was lucky Thomer was able to do that. Freeman would have slipped in behind Anderson and snapped his neck before he’d risk the kid giving away our position.

Zooming in with the telescopic lenses in my visor, I studied the faces of some of the creatures. At first glance they all looked alike to me, like ants or fish. They all had the same big eyes and jutting lower jaws. Their size, about eight feet tall and broad as bears, seemed uniform. Their size and shape was the only constant.

The first Space Angels looked more like body-shaped auras than living creatures. As more passed, however, the aliens started to take on a sand-colored look. Their bodies began to look like they were made out of substance instead of light, as if some kind of crust was forming around them. They continued to get darker as they marched past us. Bulky, statuesque soldiers with an iron gray patina on their skin replaced the sleek creatures with the golden translucence.

These aliens had huge, featureless bodies. I saw no seams or edges to suggest they were wearing clothes or armor, nor cavities or lines to suggest they were naked. Aside from arms, limbs, and heads, the bodies had no features at all. They had nothing even remotely resembling hair on their limbs or pumpkin-shaped heads.

I did notice that a few of the creatures had cracks in the outer crust that had formed on their bodies. I could see yellow-colored light shining through those cracks. When I used my heat-vision lens to take a reading of the aliens’ heat signature, I saw that they still generated no heat whatsoever.

The seemingly endless procession of aliens continued to file past us. At one point I realized that their numbers were in the tens of thousands. Not long after that, the column ended abruptly.

“They’re gone,” Philips said over the interLink.

“Stay where you are,” I said. “That might have only been the scouts.” We remained hidden in our snowy camouflage for several more minutes, but no additional aliens materialized.

“I’m open to suggestions,” I said over the command line so that only Thomer, Philips, and Freeman heard me.

“It didn’t seem like there were enough of them to take over a planet,” Philips said.

“He’s right, sir. That can’t be all of them,” Thomer said.

“I suppose it depends on what each of them can do. If those guns fire nukes, they’ll toast us in an afternoon,” I said. “What do you think, Ray? Do you think they landed more troops somewhere else?”

“One landing site,” Freeman said. “That’s all we’ve ever seen.”

“If that’s all they need to capture a planet, those are going to be some pretty damn tough mother speckers,” Philips said. “Either that, or we’re going to carve those boys new assholes when they reach Valhalla.”

“Maybe we should get back to Valhalla,” Thomer said. “They may need all the help they can get.”

“Thomer, there are four hundred thousand Marines, six hundred thousand soldiers, and about a trillion surface-to-surface missiles waiting down there,” Philips said. “You can’t possibly think the forty of us are going to make a difference.”

I considered our options. The aliens would not reach Valhalla for another hour. Philips was right. Even if we found a way to reach the city before them, there was nothing we could do. Using the interLink, I tried to reach General Glade. When that failed, I forwarded him the video-feed file of everything I’d seen and labeled it “urgent.”

“There’s no point heading back to Valhalla,” I said on the command line, then switched to the open frequency and spoke to the entire platoon. “We’re going to follow the bastards’ tracks and see where they came from. If we find their base, maybe we can speck with it. Now move out.”

If we found an alien base, I planned to place some charges around it, but what I really wanted to find was a scout or a guard or a straggler who we could capture. I wanted to bring a trophy back to General Glade.

Using the gear in my helmet, I tested the ground for traces of radiation. The forest was clean. “Freeman, you picking up anything I should be concerned about?” I asked.

Freeman surprised me by removing his helmet. The temperature had dropped to below freezing, and steam formed when he breathed. He reached into one of his utility pockets and removed a small laser scope, which he pointed into the sky. “Did you get a good look at the sky?” Freeman asked.

“You mean the colors?” I asked

He looked back at me and nodded. “Take a look through this.”

I pulled off my helmet and aimed the scope into the sky. Sensors within its housing ran an instant retinal diagnostic, then projected a hairline laser as a direct extension of the angle of my vision. Markings along the edges of the scope displayed the distance between my eye and the target. As I looked across the forest, I marked 37’ 3.5‘ between me and a tree. I marked 4’ 1.8‘ between me and Freeman. When I looked up into the sky, both the end of the laser beam and the numbers vanished.

“Something’s wrong with your scope,” I said as I tested it on a tree that was precisely 43’ 7‘ away. I sighted the sky again. Once again the beam and numbers vanished.

Freeman replaced his helmet over his head. I did the same, glad to feel the warmth around my face.

“There is something in this light that disassembles waves,” Freeman said.

I could still see shimmering strokes of blue, red, and yellow above us. It never occurred to me that they might be the frayed edges of the light around us. If no waves could penetrate this light field, we were cut off from the rest of the galaxy. And that made sense. Once the planets were sleeved, they were cut off …we were cut off. The aliens had effectively placed a wall between New Copenhagen and the ships orbiting the planet. Back on Earth, the brass would see the sleeve and write us off before the battle even began. Could that be what had happened on all of the other planets?

“Thomer, Philips, have your men run an equipment check,” I said as I toyed with the idea that mankind might have kicked these aliens’ asses on all of the other 179 populated worlds, and we wouldn’t know it. But I knew that these guys would not have been able to cross a hundred thousand light-years of space, sleeving every planet they passed, unless they had something going for them. There had to be something more, something we were overlooking.

“Sir,” Thomer said, interrupting my thoughts. “Lieutenant, all of the equipment checks out.”

“Thank you, Sergeant,” I said. I switched to the open-frequency channel, and said, “Listen up. I want to take one of those bastards home alive. You got that?

“Break into fire teams, we’re going to sweep the woods. I want to find some scouts. If you see a column heading your way, dig in and radio me. If you see some stragglers, I don’t care if they are watching birds, eating babies, or building a memorial to peace in the universe; you will not, repeat, not attack. You contact me, and the entire platoon will converge before you make a move.

“Do you read me, Marines?”

“Aye, aye, sir,” came back.

“Head north and west toward their original position. Platoon leader, fan ’em out,” I said. Thomer, my platoon leader, took over from there.

Leaving the hill, I took one last look around the scene. The way the Space Angels had lit this thick forest fascinated me. There were no shadows. The light came from every direction instead of one. They really had flooded the place with some sort of illumination that behaved like liquid.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“Lieutenant, we found the place where the aliens landed,” Philips said over the interLink.

“Any unfriendlies?”

“Nah. Not an alien soul in sight.”

“Do they have buildings? Is there any kind of fortification?” I asked.

“Nope, but they’ve got some awful big balls.”

“What are you talking about?” Philips probably thought he was being cryptic; I thought he was being a pain in the ass. “Put up a beacon and stay hidden,” I said.

On my visor, Philips’s virtual beacon looked like a translucent red fence that ran through the forest. The same line would appear on every man’s visor. You could see through it; no point blinding the troops, but it was bright and impossible to overlook. I ordered the entire platoon to converge on that beacon.

The path Philips had taken led through trees, over a creek, and around several clearings. By this time the entire forest was as bright as a desert under a midday sun. As I climbed over a gentle rise, I found Philips sitting on a log “supervising” as his men searched the area.

There, partially hidden by a pocket of trees, sat a perfectly round sphere of light. It was approximately ten feet in diameter and appeared to be constructed of nothing but light. Until the moment I saw that sphere, I had thought that nothing could be as pure and bright as the light filling the forest, but the sphere proved me wrong. The tint shields in my visor doubled themselves to protect my eyes as I stared into the ball of light.

I stood there, staring into that odd bubble of light. It might have been some sort of hologram, but how did they get the light to confine itself? As I examined it, Ray Freeman came up beside me. I did not need to see Freeman’s virtual dog tag to recognize him.

“Is that some kind of portal?” I asked him over an open frequency, not even caring if the rest of the platoon heard me.

The sphere was as transparent as glass and completely empty. By this time the rest of the platoon had gathered around it, and I could see men clearly through its walls.

Until that moment, I had not yet grasped the significance of these aliens traveling across space without a ship. They had somehow ridden in on this light. We were still tramping around the galaxy in specking spaceships while these aliens simply materialized wherever they wanted. Our technology was primitive compared to theirs.

“Are you sure this is how they got here?” I asked Philips.

He pointed to the ground around the sphere. On one side of the sphere the snow remained fresh and white, on the other the aliens had stomped it into soupy mud dotted with footprints.

“Their footsteps start right there,” Philips said. “I figure they must have come out of that thing when they started their march.”

“Why didn’t they leave some sort of guard?” Thomer asked as he came and joined us.

“To guard what?” Philips asked. “What are we going to do, cut the power? It’s a specking ball of light.” He picked up a pebble and tossed it through the sphere.

“Leaving it unguarded doesn’t seem very military,” said Thomer.

I checked the sphere for heat and radiation and found nothing. “It’s so clean it’s practically not there,” I told Freeman.

Freeman removed his helmet and shined his laser scope into the sphere. He replaced the scope in its pouch and put on his helmet.

“Well?” I asked. When Freeman did not respond, I rephrased the question. “Did the beam get through?”

“Yes,” was all Freeman answered.

I was about to ask more when I got a signal from Base Command, and General Glade addressed me. “Lieutenant Harris, I just viewed your report.” Glade’s voice betrayed tension.

“Have they reached the city yet?” I asked.

Huhhhh Huuuhhhh. He cleared his throat. “They’re not here yet, Lieutenant, but it won’t be long now. Do you have anything new to report? Any luck catching one of those bastards?”

“No, sir,” I said. Even as I said this, I noticed something strange. The light in the sphere had begun pulsing. “Fall back!” I yelled.

“Take cover!” Thomer and Philips yelled. They must have noticed the change in the sphere at the same moment I did.

“What’s happening out there?” Glade asked.

“I’ll send you what I’m seeing,” I said as I backed behind a tree and crouched. Using optical commands, I forwarded the images in my visor to Glade, then I forgot about him entirely.

The sphere stretched as if it were made out of rubber. It doubled in size until it was twenty feet tall, then expanded again so that it was now as tall as the trees around it. As it stretched to an oval shape, I saw that there were more Space Angels inside it—hundreds of them.

“Harris, get your men out of there!” Glade ordered. “Harris—”

“General, I need to go,” I said, knowing that he had just given me about the worst advice he could have. We might have done better attacking the aliens than showing them our backs. We needed to stay calm, and we needed to stay hidden.

“Steady, boys,” I said. “Get comfortable. It looks like we might be here for a while.”

The figures inside the sphere had a gold cast to them, otherwise, they might have been completely invisible. Space Angels, monsters, alien invaders, whatever you called them, here they were. They sort of congealed in the light and strode right out of that sphere without a moment’s pause.

“You seeing this?” I asked Freeman.

“Good God,” Glade answered. His frequency overrode any other communications. “How the speck are we supposed to fight something like that?”

Freeman did not respond.

The way they glowed as they stepped out of that sphere, the creatures could not possibly have been made of solid matter.

They looked like gold extensions of the white-gold light inside the sphere and nothing more. The creatures carried those oversized rifles; but inside the sphere, even the rifles looked like they were made out of light.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

More aliens came, but not in the large numbers they had before. We hid behind trees, rocks, and ferns, watching them stroll out of that sphere for forty minutes. This time no more than a thousand aliens materialized. If this was the second wave of the invasion, it was even more pathetic than the first wave. The aliens did not bother themselves with such details as securing the area when they emerged from the sphere. They formed into loose ranks and disappeared into the brightly lit folds of the forest.

As I crouched down behind a rock, I noticed that the Angels did not speak to each other. Having just materialized as little more than light, they might not have had the organs needed to speak to each other even if they’d wanted to.

I assumed that this sphere employed some variant of the broadcast technology we used to transport ships. The aliens coming out of the sphere, having had their molecular structure hyperaccelerated, seemed more like they were made out of energy than matter. Maybe that was what gave them that radiant appearance. As we had seen when their army passed us before, they cooled down into matter with time. Even in this energy form, they did have weight. Their feet sank into the squishy mud around the sphere. When they stepped forward, mud stuck to their feet.

The sphere began compressing into itself, but even as it shrank, three final figures emerged from it. Two of these last aliens carried rifles, the third appeared to be empty-handed. They stepped out of the light, stood still for a moment, and followed the rest of their ranks into the forest.

Watching the aliens vanish into the trees, I felt relief. This was not the innumerable army I had expected. Nor were these the nightmarish battle conditions of the Mogat invasion, not with the forest filled with light.

Sergeant Thomer signaled me. “Want me to go after those last ones, sir? I can take a squad.”

“Send Philips after them,” I said. “Tell him to track them down but not to engage. I want to be there when the shooting starts.”

“Aye, aye,” Thomer said.

“And Thomer, make sure he knows his ass is on the line.”

Moments later, five men split off from us. For some reason I had the feeling that I would never see these men again, and I noted each of their names in my head. Philips took the lead; he always took point when he was in charge. The four men in his fire team were Corporal Trevor Boll as grenadier, Corporal Lewis Herrington as rifleman, Private First Class Scott Huish as automatic rifleman, and PFC Steven White as second rifle. I noted the care they showed as they cut through woods, using trees for cover, moving quickly enough to catch up to the aliens and silently enough not to get caught.

The big question was what they would do once they spotted the trio of aliens. Of all the men in this platoon, Mark Philips was the one with the right skills for sneaking up on the enemy and setting an ambush, despite his lack of discipline.

And then there were the questions about the aliens. Had I underestimated the bastards just because of their numbers? Had I sent these men, my men, to an unnecessary death?

Philips jumped a small ledge and juked behind a tree, keeping his M27 out and ready. Other Marines preferred to use their M27s in their pistol configuration for maneuverability, but Philips almost always mounted the rifle stock. He crouched, checked to the left, then the right, then dashed out of sight. Boll followed, then Herrington and Huish, followed by White in the rear. Good men, I thought. Maybe among the best the Corps had to offer. Semper fi, Marines.

The chatter among the men of the platoon was nervous but controlled. I gave a quick scan on the interLink and heard:

Tell me how the speck you kill a specking beam of light?

There weren’t very many of them. That’s something.

Not if we can’t kill them.

How do we know that was all of them? There might be a billion more on the other side of town.

Tuning out the chatter, I turned to survey the area and saw Freeman approaching the sphere. “What are you doing?” I asked.

He pulled a pistol from his armor. As a civilian, Freeman could carry whatever equipment he saw fit. When it came to battle arms, we government-issue types carried M27s and particle-beam pistols, and that was about it. Knives were optional.

Freeman stood about twenty feet from the sphere, leveled his pistol, and fired three shots through it. The bullets struck a tree on the other side.

“Basic physics,” I said. “Light and bullets don’t mess with each other.”

“Ever fired a bullet through a laser stream?” Freeman asked.

As a matter of fact, I had. That was the kind of mischief we pulled back in the orphanage. For young military clones, firing guns and experimenting with battle lasers was a wild time. We’d sneak off to the range and “cross-fire” bullets through a laser beam. The bullets ended up as formless blobs. Remembering the turd-shaped blobs, I asked, “Do you think this thing is a laser of some sort?”

After pocketing the pistol, Freeman pulled out a particle-beam pistol. He walked around the sphere until he had a straight shot at the tree he had hit with his bullets. It was a big tree, maybe fifty feet tall, with a trunk that was easily three feet across. That tree might have been a hundred years old, but it would not see another winter night. Freeman held his pistol a few inches from the trunk and fired. The spot that the sparkling green particle beam struck exploded in a flash of bark and splinters. The tree toppled, leaving a five-foot stump with a jagged crown.

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked.

“Running a scientific experiment,” Freeman said. He put the particle-beam pistol away and produced a combat knife with an eight-inch serrated blade. Then he went to the trunk and began digging out his bullets. By this time, most of my Marines had come to see what the giant in the combat armor was up to. Big, silent, and scary, Freeman was just as enigmatic as the aliens.

After prying the first of the bullets out of the stump with his knife, Freeman held it up for me to see. The bullet glowed as if he had just pulled it out of a furnace. I switched the lenses in my visor to heat vision, but the shell was not hot, it simply glowed.

“I wouldn’t touch that; it might be radioactive,” I said.

“I already checked,” Freeman said as he dropped the bullet into a bag. He dug out a second shell and placed it in his bag with the first bullet.

“Thomer,” I said, “send some men out to sweep the area. I want to know if there are any more of these light spheres out here.”

“Aye, aye,” Thomer said.

I walked closer to the sphere. As I approached, the tint shields in my visor increased. The sphere did not become brighter, so it must have been the proximity that set off the tint shield.

“Harris, the aliens have begun their attack.” It was not General Glade but Lieutenant Moffat who contacted me. He sounded strangely calm. “Intel is estimating their forces at approximately fifty thousand troops. How the speck do they expect to invade us with fifty thousand troops?”

“Are they putting up much of a fight?” I asked.

“We were a lot more scared of these guys before they got here,” Moffat said. “They beat the shit out of our gunships, but our ground troops are holding their own. So far they don’t look all that specking dangerous.”

I took a moment to process this information. “Have you been up to the front line?” I asked.

“The Army is taking this one,” Moffat said. “How about you? Any luck capturing a live one?”

“Not yet. We found where they landed, if you can call it a landing. It looks more like they broadcast in.”

“Broadcast in? Nice, very nice. What’s the ETA on your return?”

“I was hoping to look around a bit longer,” I said.

“There’s no rush, Harris. Dig up what you can and get back here when you’re done,” Moffat said before signing off.

I stood there thinking about the aliens. The Unified Authority had just survived a civil war with the Mogats, an enemy with next to no military experience and no ground troops. Survived was the optimal term. The Mogats won too many battles before we finally tracked them down and eviscerated them. Now we were fighting an alien invader that telegraphed its battle plans and sent fifty thousand troops to battle our million. Maybe our luck is holding up. Maybe the entire universe is incompetent, I thought.

Thomer woke me from my thoughts. “Lieutenant Harris, we found nine more of those chambers.”

“Chambers?” I asked. I had already labeled them “spheres” and subconsciously assumed that everyone else had as well.

“The glowing balls,” Thomer said. “We found nine more of them just north of here.”

I gave the sphere another glance to make sure it wasn’t growing. It seemed stable. “Good work, Thomer. Bring your men back,” I said. “I just got a report from Moffat—the fireworks have started.”

Impossible as it sounded, I thought the war for New Copenhagen might end as suddenly as it had started. The aliens would probably send in more reinforcements, but maybe they were having the same problems on every planet. How big an army would you need to conquer an entire galaxy? Sooner or later they had to run out of soldiers. Maybe they were running out now. With only ten spheres for landing more soldiers, they would never be able to land a large enough army in time to save this campaign. I was beginning to feel like we had just dodged an apocalyptic bullet.

“Freeman, what do you think about setting up a line of trackers to guard the area?” I asked. “If the bastards send in reinforcements, maybe we can pop them as quick as they appear.”

I imagined a line of the motion-tracking robots—little more than poles with radars and trigger fingers—surrounding each sphere. Bullets passing through the spheres might get irradiated, but they did pass through the spheres. And if the bullets did not kill aliens, we could equip the trackers with particle beams, lasers, gas canisters filled with noxium gas, or rockets.

At that moment it all seemed so easy. If our lines could just hold outside Valhalla, these alien bastards could be killed. The once-impossible war now seemed so winnable. For the first time since my meeting with Admiral Brocius, I could close my eyes and see the end of the war. The possibilities seemed endless.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“We found their scouts,” Philips said. He and his fire team had been tracking the aliens for most of an hour.

“Are they still a party of three?” I asked.

“If you still want to take one alive, Kap-y-tan, the odds aren’t going to get any better. Want me to take ’em?”

“How close can you get?” I asked.

“How close do you want me to get? It’s like tracking stiffs. I bet I can get close enough to piss on them.” Philips sounded brash. That was good.

“Close enough to piss on them?” I asked.

“Well, maybe not against the wind. I don’t know if these boys are fresh out of alien boot or just plain stupid, but they sure as hell don’t act like galaxy conquerors.”

“They might still have something up their sleeve,” I reminded Philips.

“So can I move in?” Philips asked.

“Send up a beacon,” I said. “Don’t move till I get there.”

“Yes, sir,” Philips said, sounding so wooden I wanted to shoot him.

“Do not engage them, Sergeant. If I hear shots, you better hope they kill you first,” I said. “I’m on my way.”

“Got it, sir.” I heard the annoyance in Philips’s voice. Not that it would matter to someone like Philips, but I understood his frustration. He was a resourceful Marine, a veteran on the battlefield who had earned and lost his first stripes by the time I learned to walk.

I ordered Thomer to herd the rest of the platoon back to town while I headed north after Philips’s beacon. Freeman went with the platoon so he could deliver his bullets to the Science Lab for analysis.

By this time, nearly four hours had passed since we first sighted the phantom lights. The ion curtain had long since closed around New Copenhagen, cutting us off from the rest of mankind. Cutting across a clearing, I looked into the sky for signs that the light field was fading, but it was as solid as ever. The woodland around me was unnaturally bright. Even under the trees and in the deepest thickets, I could see patches of mossy ground that sunshine would never have reached under normal circumstances. Light sparkled off distant snowdrifts.

“You’re not going to believe this, Harris,” Moffat called in. “The fight’s over, we routed the bastards.” He sounded jubilant.

“It’s over?” I asked.

“They folded; the specking jokers just plain folded.”

“Any signs that there might be more of them on the way?” I asked.

“I was going to ask you the same question,” Moffat said. “If this was the whole damned war …”

“One of my fire teams is tracking some scouts,” I said. “We’re going to bring one in.”

“You might want to hurry back. The party’s already started,” said Moffat.

“Just make sure you don’t drink Valhalla dry before we get there,” I said, trying to forget how much I hated this prick.

“Tell you what, Harris, you bring back a live one, and I’ll find the best bottle in the whole specking city for you,” Moffat said, before signing off. He’d pulled a Jekyll and Hyde. I could not believe this was the same power-hungry asshole who tried to threaten me a few hours back.

I wanted to feel excited by his news, but I knew better. It was beginning to feel as if we could win the war, but it could not possibly happen this easily and this quickly. Using a platoon-wide frequency, I said, “I just heard from base. The Army has routed the enemy.”

“Routed them where?” one Marine asked.

“They won the battle,” I said.

Silence.

“The Space Angels, the aliens, the speckers we watched head into town …they’re dead. I just got a report from Base Command—the Army annihilated them.”

The silence lasted another moment, then I heard excited chatter, which instantly silenced when Sergeant Philips asked me, “Are you saying that the war’s over?”

I had to think about this for a second. That was what they were celebrating in town. I knew it could not be over. No one would send a mere fifty thousand troops to capture a planet. You couldn’t even hold a city with fifty thousand troops. Their ion curtain still had us in its sleeve. There simply had to be more aliens on the way. I did not want to say that, however. I did not want to crush the morale. “No, it’s not over,” I said. “But the first round went better than we could have hoped for.”

The shouts, the cheers, and the rapturous cursings restarted spontaneously, but Philips did not join in. “If it’s not all over, sir, can we get back to capturing this alien?” he asked. When everyone else was serious, Philips bucked discipline and flaunted authority. Now that everyone else celebrated, Sergeant Mark Philips was all business.

“I’m on my way,” I said.

Philips’s beacon led through well-trafficked territory where snow, ferns, and small trees had been tromped into the mud. Soon, though, the beacon took me into a less-traveled glen. Virgin snow with a few footprint trails gleamed in the bright light. The aliens followed a natural pathway that led through thin growth while Philips and his men had stuck to the trees. I recognized their boot prints.

The aliens’ feet left rectangular prints in the shallow snow. When they reached drifts, the bastards sloshed through without lifting their feet out of the snow. Instead of leaving a line of individual prints, they dragged their feet and left ruts in their wake.

I spotted Huish before I saw the others. He was kneeling in a small gully, his gun trained on the enemy and his finger on the trigger waiting for the order to shoot. I identified him by the virtual dog tag over his helmet.

“What is the situation?” I asked Huish over a direct link.

“They’re just over that rise, about thirty yards out. Philips and Herrington are moving in for a better angle,” he said, pointing with his rifle.

I hid behind a tree and surveyed the scene. Looking along the edge of the gully, I spotted White and Boll. Philips and Herrington lay flat on the ground in a patch of ferns. I don’t know how well concealed they were from the aliens, but it took me a few moments to spot them.

“Do you have a good line on them?” I asked Philips on a direct channel.

“All three of ’em,” Philips said. “Can we get this show under way, sir …now that you’re here to help?”

I stole up the rise, cutting through the ferns at a crouch and making as little noise as possible. Below us, the ground seemed to form a bowl, offering the aliens no protection. One of the aliens knelt and played with some sort of scientific instrument while two others stood guard. The one with the instrument was poking a four-inch needle into the ground.

“Maybe they’re a science team,” I said.

“Bet you’re right. Can we cap ’em now?” Philips asked, not bothering to hide his annoyance.

“I want to take the one checking the soil home with us …alive,” I said.

“Got it,” Philips purred. He signaled Huish and Herrington to flank the aliens from behind. I sighted in on one of the guards as Philips assigned targets to his men. The creature’s eyes were the same color as the rest of his face. They looked no more lifelike than the eyes on a marble statue. The face had a more or less human-looking mouth and nose.

There was that one brief moment of anticipation as every man took his place and homed in on his target. A breeze whistled through the trees, shaking branches just hard enough to dislodge the snow from some distant tree. I saw a blue-and-red bird hopping on a limb a few feet above one of the aliens.

On my visor, the names Tom, Dick, and Hairy appeared above the three aliens. Tom and Dick were the guards; Hairy was the scientist. Philips had placed these designations so that we all knew what we were doing. “Lieutenant Harris wants us to take Hairy home with him,” Philips said.

“Boll, Herrington, you guys smack Tom. Take him out fast,” Philips whispered. He sounded completely calm. “Huish, you and I get Dick.”

Boll and Herrington laughed. I got the feeling Huish would take grief about getting “Dick” for some time to come.

“What about me?” White asked.

“Make sure Hairy doesn’t get away. Lieutenant Harris has a thing for him.”

Now everyone was laughing. If this did not go well, Philips and I would have a conversation when we got back to base.

“Take ’em out!” Philips yelled.

I fired a three-shot burst. The bullets struck Dick on the side of his head, just above the tiny nubs that looked like ears. Sparks flashed where the first bullet struck, as if it had glanced off a rock. The second and third chipped at the head, producing a shallow gash.

Dick spun to face me. Its face was impassive. Its eyes seemed as fixed as flint stones. It must have been searching for me, but I could not tell by looking at those eyes. I aimed at its forehead and fired off three more shots, making the alien stumble backward. I wasn’t the only one shooting the bastard. More chips spattered off its back and shoulders.

“What do I have to do to kill this specker?” one of the men yelled.

I aimed at one of its eyes and fired again. The eye chipped, but it was the same color under the surface, and nothing leaked from the hole, as if the alien had been carved out of stone.

“Speck!” Philips yelled, sounding nearly out of control. “I hit that bastard in the nuts. Go down, asshole! Your Nuts are busted!”

Hairy, the scientist alien, stopped taking readings and ran to join the guards. Dick’s rifle fired, making a cooing noise as a yard-long bolt of white light flared from its muzzle. The bolt traveled through the air at the absolute speed limit of what a man can track with his eyes. I perceived that bolt as much as saw it, watching where it started and where it struck while my mind filled in the holes. The light bolt struck a thick mound of dirt to my right, cut through the mound, and continued through the air. A plume of smoke rose from the hole it left in the ground behind it.

“Fall back,” Philips told his men.

I agreed with that order, but I did not follow. Aiming my M27 at Dick’s right shoulder, I held the trigger down. I must have fired twenty rounds within a two-inch spread before the alien stumbled backward. I continued shooting as the shoulder dented, fractured, then splintered. Dick’s right arm fell to the ground, and his rifle fell with it.

Boll, a grenadier, popped out from a ditch and fired a rocket that hit the ground somewhere between Tom and Hairy. The ground shook on impact. Mud and bits of rock sprayed through the air. The heat from the explosion filled the air with steam that evaporated as quickly as it appeared. The report of the explosion echoed off distant trees.

The explosion sent the aliens flying in opposite directions. One crashed into a tree, spun part way around its trunk, then landed twenty feet farther on. Had it been human, it would have been torn in half against that trunk. Even in combat armor, a man would have been ripped in half. I did not see where the other alien landed. By this time, capturing prisoners was the last thing on my mind. All I cared about was getting my men out of this skirmish alive.

When Dick rose to his feet and picked up the rifle with his remaining arm, Boll fired a rocket at the bastard. That rocket could have blown an entire platoon into an unrecognizable pile of limbs and parts. It might have knocked a tank on its side or caved in a small building. In this case it simply split Dick in half. His body broke. Boll fired another rocket, striking Hairy in the chest and blowing him apart while Philips and Herrington continued firing at him.

It was not until the shooting stopped that I noticed that both Huish and White had been hit.

White lay flat on the ground, a fist-sized hole seared through the back of his armor. One of the alien bolts had passed through ten feet of ground, through Private First Class Steven White, armor and all, and continued on into the trees beyond. The wound was clean, cauterized, and probably instantly fatal. A wisp of steam rose from that hole. Heat from the bolt had melted his armor, leaving a stream of polymerized metal dribbling into the hole in his back. If I had chosen to place my hand in that hole, it would have come out clean. There was no blood.

Huish was not so lucky. The bolt had passed through his right shoulder, taking a small and clean chunk with it. The wound might not have killed him had he not gone into severe shock. He lay on his back, shivering convulsively like a man in an icebox. The plates in his armor rattled against each other.

Philips and I stayed with Huish while Herrington and Boll went out to gather the body parts and equipment the aliens left behind. Philips pulled off Huish’s helmet and loosened his chest plate. He could not pull the plate off because much of it had fused into the wound. He tried to talk to Huish, but he never responded. By the time Herrington and Boll returned with alien body parts, a rifle, and the meter that Hairy had been using, PFC Huish had quietly died.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“We’re coming in,” I radioed Moffat. “Has the rest of the platoon arrived?”

“Present and accounted for,” he said. “Sergeant Thomer says you stayed back to catch a prisoner. How did it go?”

“I’ve got some body parts and a weapon.”

“General Glade wanted a live one. We don’t need more body parts or weapons,” Moffat said. I knew he was right. The Army had just used fifty thousand aliens for target practice—alien body parts would be in plentiful supply.

“We captured some of their scientific equipment. I think they were taking soil samples,” I said.

“Scientific equipment? Not bad, Harris,” Moffat conceded. “Not bad. It doesn’t earn you the best bottle of booze in Valhalla, but I’ll spot your first round in the officers’ lounge.” That was a tired old wartime chestnut—our drinks were free.

Moffat struck me as a man who appreciated platitudes. I had only met him that day, and this was the third time I had heard him say that bit about “Not bad, Harris. Not bad.” It already meant less than nothing to me.

“We lost two men,” I reported.

“Noncoms?” Moffat asked.

Stupid question. I was the only officer who went on the mission. “White and Huish …both privates.”

“Good men, I’m sure,” he said, sounding about as unmoved as a man can get. We signed off, each of us glad to be rid of the other.

While Boll cut down branches and built a travois for carrying back our dead, Herrington brought me one of the alien’s rifles. Its stock was featureless and lacked even a trigger. It looked like a nickel-plated pipe and weighed well over fifty pounds. How any creature could carry and use such a weapon I did not understand. Herrington lifted the rifle to his chest and tried to sight down its barrel, but he could not hold it steady.

Herrington also brought in a head and a long section of back. Looking over these parts, I saw no signs of muscles, veins, tissue, or bone. The limbs we found were solid and un-malleable. There was no tissue, the body parts had the same composition inside and out. As I rolled one of the heads we collected with the toe of my boot, I realized this thing had no more brains than the head of Michelangelo’s statue of David.

“Do we want to haul this shit home with us?” Herrington asked.

“Only the meter,” I said. “Moffat says they’ve got all the body parts they can handle,” I added. So Herrington helped Boll load the bodies onto the travois. I watched them lift and lower the bodies as they lashed them into place. They strapped Huish on the travois first. Watching the scene, I noticed how his armor was stiff but his limbs hung limp.

“So we attacked them for nothing?” Philips asked. He had ambled over toward me unnoticed.

“We got this,” I said, holding up the soil-reading tool that Boll retrieved. The unit was about the size of a shoe box. There was no visible way to read the damn thing, it didn’t have any window, meters, or dials.

“Well, that makes me feel a whole specking lot better,” Philips said. “As long as we aren’t leaving this specked-up mission empty-handed.”

“Watch it, Sergeant,” I said, though I agreed with him.

Moffat called in a couple of hours after we started back to town. “Where are you?”

I had precise coordinates from the equipment in my visor. But rather than give him the specifics, I simply said, “We’re headed toward town.”

“As far as we can tell, the woods around the city are clear. Maybe I should send a patrol to bring you in, just in case.”

“I appreciate it,” I said, but I was just playing along. He wasn’t trying to bring us in safely. He wanted a hand in the delivery. If the stuff we captured proved valuable, Moffat would try to take credit for finding it.

We broke off our transmission, and I took a moment to stare out into the diamond-bright sky. It looked like midday with direct sunlight coming down from every direction. I could not see Valhalla itself—we were too far from town—but I could see smoke rising from that direction. Several tails of smoke twisted and curled into the sky. Most of it was of the white-artillery variety, but some of the smoke was the greasy black you get from machine and fuel fires.

Philips, who was scouting up ahead, radioed me to say, “The area’s clear.”

“Base Command says the woods are clear all the way to town,” I said.

“If Lieutenant Moffat is so specking sure it’s safe, why the hell doesn’t he come get us?”

“He is,” I said.

“Harris, did you see those bastards, goddamn it? Those sons of bitches are bulletproof. They’re damned near rocketproof.” I could hear pain and anger in Philips’s voice. He sounded frantic, but I knew it was with regret rather than fear. A man who had spent so much of his career as a private, Philips had never lost Marines under his command before. Once we got back to base, he’d start looking for some way to get himself busted down to private again. He might pick a fight with an officer or simply spend a day absent without leave. He would do whatever it took to get himself relieved of command. I could hear it in his voice.

“What are we doing out here, Harris?” Philips asked. “What the speck did we accomplish?”

“We killed three of theirs,” I pointed out, ignoring his calling me by my last name.

“Yeah, and they killed two of ours. We had the specking drop on them, and they still nailed us.” There was no fear in his voice, just anger and frustration.

We continued toward town, Philips and I moving ahead in silence, Boll and Herrington keeping up a running commentary. Another hour passed. I never saw Philips. I could tell he was somewhere ahead of us, but he kept himself hidden in the trees. When we reached a clearing in which a three-hundred-foot radio tower stood, I found Philips resting at the edge of the trees—a good sign, I thought. At least he wasn’t trying to run himself to death.

As I approached, Philips said, “We didn’t kill them. We specking broke them. They’re like chunks of metal or something. Who the speck cares if we nail them, they’re just specking statues!”

I agreed, but I was not going to say so. Philips was speaking on an open frequency. Boll and Herrington could listen in. As an officer, I had to sound authoritative and in control in all situations. I came up with the best answer that I could manage. “There are a lot more of us than there are of them,” I said.

“What?” Philips asked.

“We have over a million troops defending Valhalla, they’re going to run out of men before we do,” I said. It was a poor attempt at humor, but it was also the truth.

We crossed the clearing, passing under that radio tower. There was something humbling about walking past a skeletal structure that was fifty times taller than me.

“You want someone else to scout for a while?” I asked. I knew Philips would turn down the offer. With so much tension running through him, he probably welcomed the chance to be alone.

“We’re almost back,” Philips said. He sped on ahead, vanishing behind the first row of trees. It was disorienting to see a man disappear into a well-lit forest. You expected him to disappear into shadows when he stepped under a tree. Now that the invaders had spread their ion curtain across our planet, the grounds under the trees were no darker than the grounds in the open.

“How are you two doing?” I asked, turning to Herrington and Boll. They had the hard job, dragging a 350-pound load on a travois through the snow. They didn’t complain, though, and when I offered to take my turn pulling, they turned me down. All Herrington would say was, “With all due respect, sir, I could use a shower and some rack time.”

Boll was even more circumspect. He grunted an unintelligible answer that ended with “sir.”

Five minutes later, Philips radioed in to say that he had rendezvoused with Moffat and his welcoming party. They escorted us back to town.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The Hotel Valhalla was quite the billet. Officers had rooms to themselves. Enlisted men stayed in the convention center, where barracks had been set up in the enormous ballrooms. Before heading in for a debriefing with General Glade, I swung through the Valkyrie Ballroom to look in on my men.

Entering the cavernous room, I discovered that despite the elegant setting, inside the ballroom/barracks the life of enlisted men remained unchanged. Men lounged around in their skivvies speculating about who was scared and who nearly wet their pants. Including a support platoon, which mainly pushed papers and hauled supplies, our company had four platoons. Company command held the first platoon in reserve in case the battle went wrong. Second Platoon spent three hours posted just north of the front line, in case the aliens tried to flank the Army’s perimeter. Kelly Thomer and the Third Platoon spent the battle scouting enemy territory with me.

Now that the fighting was over, members from the various platoons sat around swapping exaggerated stories. To hear some of Thomer’s men talking, you would have thought we took on the whole alien army instead of hiding in the snow and watching them pass. The guys from the Second Platoon spun a good yarn about guarding the walls of the city. Sergeant Shepherd never once mentioned the rocket launchers and laser cannons, let alone the 150,000 soldiers on the bleeding edge of the battle. The way he told the story, it sounded like he and his men engaged in hand-to-hand combat.

Off in the distance, I saw Mark Philips, dressed in his government-issue boxers and tank top, sitting on his rack playing his harmonica. He could play a lively tune when he wanted, but now he played softly to himself. He slid the silver harmonica slowly back and forth across his mouth, and his eyes stared off in the distance.

“Sergeant Thomer,” I called. The entire pack of men stood, turned, and saluted. “Can I have a moment?”

Thomer joined me. I led him to an empty corner of the ballroom, far away from Philips, and still I spoke in a whisper. Under normal circumstances he did not care what people said about him; but Philips blamed himself for the deaths of White and Huish, and he might have developed a new sensitivity.

“How is Philips?” I asked.

Thomer was the only Marine that Philips actually considered a friend. They had served together for years.

“He isn’t talking. What happened out there?”

“His fire team ambushed an alien scouting party,” I said. “It went bad.”

“He says he got White and Huish killed,” Thomer said. “You were there. Did he do anything wrong?”

“It looked like a perfect op. Philips slipped in behind them without being seen. He waited for the order, then he opened fire.”

“So what happened?” Thomer asked.

“Those speckers are damn near bulletproof,” I said. “Their guns shot right through the ground. White was dead by the time the shooting stopped. Huish …he hung on for a while.”

Thomer nodded.

“Keep an eye on Philips. I don’t want him doing anything stupid,” I said.

“We’re talking about Mark Philips,” Thomer said. “When he gets like this, there’s no stopping him.”

“Well, do what you can,” I said. Thomer saluted and I saluted, and I headed to Base Command.

“Leave your helmet with my staff,” General Glade said. “We’ll download whatever you’ve got and let the boys in the Science Lab have a look at it.”

I always considered men to be out of uniform when they wore their combat armor without their helmets, but I knew better than to argue with a general. I took off my helmet and handed it to the major standing beside General Glade’s desk. The man showed no pleasure in accepting it. He turned to salute the general, then left the office.

Glade watched the man leave, then said, “Makes a great secretary, doesn’t he? He’s a piss-poor excuse for a Marine, but he does okay as a secretary. I hate having assholes like him on my staff.”

We stood in silence for a moment, then Glade said, “There’s something I want to show you. Let’s go for a ride, Harris.”

We left the offices, walked down to the lobby, and headed out of the hotel. A fancy black limousine awaited us in the hotel parking lot, the engine running, the driver waiting inside. “Head over to Vista,” Glade said as he climbed in behind the passenger’s seat. I sat behind the driver.

“Aye, aye, sir,” the driver said.

“Vista’s on the edge of town. You probably drove down it on your way in from the spaceport. Beyond that is Odin Street, but we don’t want to drive on Odin right now.” Huuhhhh huhhhhh. He cleared his throat. “Odin is the kill zone. There are trackers, rocket launchers, and a hellhole of mines waiting for anyone who so much as taps a toe on Odin Street.

“The way things stand now, Mo Newcastle’s Army boys are guarding Vista Street. Assuming those alien bastards come back, taking the battle to them is going to be our job.”

Mo Newcastle was General Morris Newcastle, the highest-ranking officer on New Copenhagen. I had never met him before, but I knew the name.

The miles of city we passed between the hotel and Vista were completely unchanged except for the unflinching light that now blanketed the city. The buildings were untouched. Tall skyscrapers lined the streets, their windows reflecting the light in blazing white squares.

Sixteen hours had passed since I’d led my platoon into the forest. We had left in the late afternoon, spent the night chasing aliens in the forest, and now it was nearly noon. There was something unnerving about living in an endless day, and I had not yet come to grips with it.

The closer we came to the city’s edge, the more apparent it became that we had entered a military zone. Soldiers patrolled the sidewalks. Lines of trucks ferried weapons and supplies ahead. Troop carriers and armored vehicles choked the streets, and the traffic crawled.

“Near as we can tell, they underestimated our numbers,” Glade said. “The Mudders came in about fifty thousand strong. We know that because we placed sensors outside the city.”

“The Mudders?” I asked.

“That seems to be the popular name for them around the ranks,” Glade said.

“Is that mudder as in you mudder-specking son of—”

Hhhhuhhh. Huhhhhh. Glade interrupted me by clearing his throat. “The term is ‘mud,’ as in the stuff you get when you mix water and dirt.”

He thought for a moment, and said, “Juvenile, I know. But what do you expect? The Army came up with it. I think Newcastle likes it, says giving the enemy demoralizing names is good for morale.” He cleared his throat, only this time more softly.

“The enemy does not appear to have tanks, jets, or vehicles of any sort, and they all carry the same weapon, some kind of light rifle. Frankly, I wish they had something else. Those rifles gave our troops a fit yesterday.”

“Maybe we can replicate their technology,” I said.

“Did you get a close look at one?” Glade asked. “The damned things weigh a ton.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“You didn’t happen to fire one, did you?”

“No, sir,” I said. “I couldn’t find the trigger.”

“We had the same problem. I’m sure the boys in the Science Lab will know what to do with it,” Glade mumbled, not sounding confident at all.

The traffic sped up as three trucks pulled onto the sidewalk and began off-loading surface-to-surface rockets—non-radiation-bearing rockets, each of which packed enough explosives to destroy a city block.

“You’ve been firing STS rockets at them?” I asked. It seemed like overkill. Normally, the U.A. Military tried to win battles as decisively as possible with as little force as possible.

I watched soldiers carefully unloading the rockets from the trucks as we drove by. Crews had formed around each of the trucks.

“We used smaller ordnance last time, but we’ll switch to STSs if the bastards come back. That was Colonel Mooreland’s idea. You remember General Tommy Mooreland, the colonel is his son. His daddy died fighting in the Scutum-Crux Arm; he’s got a score to settle with them, says he wants to end this one quickly. Can’t say that I blame him.”

We arrived at the Vista Street bunker, an enormous structure that stretched twenty miles along the western edge of the city. Similar bunkers lined the northern edge of town. These were the sides of town that faced the forest. Having decided that the southern suburbs offered no strategic value, the Army seeded them with mines and tracker robots, then left them unmanned. The eastern edge of Valhalla fronted a great lake that was laced with all sorts of automated defenses. Philips and Thomer pointed the lake out to me on the way from the spaceport to the Hotel Valhalla.

The car pulled to a stop, and we climbed out. “Wait here for us,” Glade told the driver. “We shouldn’t be more than an hour.”

The outer wall of the bunker was a 50-foot-tall structure made of three-foot-thick steel alloy protected by electrical shields. Like every other piece of equipment that we had on New Copenhagen, this was the best and the latest technology, able to withstand an atomic explosion. The heat from an explosion would not melt this structure, and the force from the explosion would not blow it down. The men inside the bunker might be incinerated, but the bunker itself would survive.

“How long did it take to build this?” I asked, looking down the length of the great wall.

“About a month,” Glade said. “The Army Corps of Engineers rigged a temporary broadcast station just for bringing materials in on special barges. It’s amazing how the red tape gets cut when people are fighting for their lives.”

The bunkers were the same lifeless gray color inside and out. The light from the ion curtain did not penetrate their gloomy depths. Bare bulbs hung from wires in the ceiling.

As General Glade led me up some stairs, I saw a scattering of bright spots that looked like searchlights shining through the wall. It was not until we came closer that I realized the beams were coming from outside; they were holes through the yard-thick walls. The areas around the holes had the wilted-flower look of molten metal. I knelt and looked inside one.

“Pretty impressive, isn’t it?” General Glade asked.

“What happened?” I asked.

“The Mudders’ rifles shoot right through our shields, Lieutenant,” Glade said. “We were able to kill most of their troops out in the forest, but a couple hundred of them got through.”

“And their guns did this?” I asked, my mind on Private Huish lying on the snowy ground, shaking to death.

“And that,” Glade said, pointing to a matching hole in the opposite wall. The bolts had shot clean through both shielded walls.

After that, the tenor of the tour became more somber. General Glade led me through the second-level corridor, an endless lane pinched between charcoal-colored walls lit more by the beams of glare shining through the occasional hole than the lights hanging from the ceiling. We passed through a hatch and entered a metal catwalk that ran the length of the bunker. When I looked down from the catwalk, I saw barracks below us.

When it came to accommodations, the Marines got the better end of the stick for a change. The Valkyrie Ballroom was crowded, but our boys had enough light to read and space to breathe.

Billeted along the bottom floor of this bunker, these soldiers must have felt like they were living in a mausoleum. I heard a few men snoring in the shadows below me. There were none of the spontaneous card games that I would have found back at the Hotel Valhalla. We had bars, gymnasiums, and a pool—the soldiers in this installation were lucky to have running water in their latrines.

“These are pretty shitty accommodations,” I said.

“Frontline accommodations, Harris,” General Glade said. “Soldiers not posted on the front line are billeted in buildings downtown.”

As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw that many of the soldiers were old. Glen Benson, the fifty-six-year-old corporal who had sat next to me on the trip from Earth to Mars, was probably down there …if he had survived the fight. Maybe there were thousands of Glen Bensons down there, all sleeping cozy in their cots waiting for the next attack.

As we cut across the bunker, we passed technicians working on wall-mounted cannons. We passed a radar station. We passed gunnery stations. After confirming that the area was still clear, Glade led me onto the roof of the bunker.

When I had flown into Valhalla, I saw an orderly city surrounded on two sides by pristine forests that were buried in snow. Everywhere I looked, I saw green and white under an ice blue sky. The outskirts were virgin, and the city was clean. That was all gone now.

There had once been a tidy suburb beyond the Vista Street bunker, an upper-class community with large homes and up-scale shopping malls. I could tell that much by examining the smoldering battlefield that spread out before me. The enemy had been beaten back, but the battle had not been won as easily as I had been led to believe.

We had a term in the Marines—FOCPIG, which stood for Fire, Observed, Concealed, Protected, Integrated, non-Geometric. It described the obstacle courses you built to guide enemies into heavy fire. That was the benefit of being the home team when unfriendlies came to visit—they had to make their way through a landscape created to speck them over once and for all.

Acres of homes, stores, and churches had been leveled long before the aliens ever arrived, but the ruins of those structures remained. To get through these ruins, the enemy would need to follow paths designed to bring them into our sights. FOCPIG—limit the places your enemy can enter, then point your guns at the places that are left.

The grounds below the Vista Street bunker were covered with the broken bodies of dead aliens. Now I understood why Lieutenant Moffat advised me not to waste my time bringing back alien parts. From where I stood, I could see the wreckage of a dozen gunships lying about like insects both enormous and dead. A small fire still flickered in one or two of the wrecks.

The real carnage, however, lay about one mile out, where our intermediate defenses had battered the aliens. These aliens were killed by our heavy ordnance—rockets and laser cannons capable of destroying a building or sinking a ship. From the top of the bunker, I could see smoke rising from burned-over craters left by rockets and heaps of brick, steel, and dirt where buildings had once stood.

“We lost 137 gunships,” General Glade said. “The Army lost better than 20,000 troops.

“I’ll say one thing for those bastards—they came right at us. I don’t think a single one of them ever turned back. It didn’t matter if we hit them with machine guns, grenades, or cannon fire, those bastards marched right into it, Harris. They fought to the last. We got every last one of them.”

That sounded good.

Glade paused for dramatic effect, then delivered the bad news. “If they come back this week, the Marines take point. We have to beat them out there”—he pointed to the forest—“stop them in the woods so the Army can rebuild its perimeter.” Huuhhhh huhhhh. He cleared his throat.

The general delivered most of his meaning unsaid. Next time we would meet the enemy out there without the benefit of rocket launchers and shielded bunkers. I thought about the yard-long bolts of light that flew through the air like javelins, cutting through any embankments, trees, and combat armor that happened to get in the way. I thought about Private Huish shivering as he died.

Twists of smoke still rose from the wreckage beyond the bunker. FOCPIG, indeed.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The only stores still operating in Valhalla were the ones that catered to the GI crowd. Crews stayed to open liquor shops, cigar stores, bars, and movie houses while grocery stores, bookstores, and clothiers remained empty and closed. It didn’t matter whether you entered a coffee shop or a fine grill; so many military types were crammed around the tables that every restaurant felt like a mess hall. With most of its civilian population in a relocation camp and nearly a million servicemen walking the streets, Valhalla felt like an extended military base.

Among the hundred thousand men who formed the local militia, there were hundreds of devoted capitalists who owned bars, and they willingly opened their establishments between battles, God bless them. Large pockets of Valhalla’s low-rent entertainment district ran round-the-clock operations, and some of the finer establishments opened their doors as well. The day after that first battle, more than five hundred bars opened for business. Restaurants, movie theaters, and arcades opened. Most of the Marines I knew would have preferred to have waitresses working the tables instead of off-duty militiamen, but I never saw anyone refuse a drink.

We were on call, of course. If something happened at the front, we would hear sirens and report for duty in an instant. With the entire city on continuous alert, our commanders could muster their scattered platoons and report in a matter of minutes.

Approximately one-tenth of the men could go on leave at a time now that the shooting had ended. With the exception of Philips, who spent the day on his rack staring into space, the entire platoon headed into town for the night. Thomer offered to hang back with Philips, but I didn’t think it would matter. He was somewhere between grieving and guilt-stricken, territory most Marines prefer to travel alone. Philips might come out of this funk in a day, or it might take a month, but his wild nature would pull him through. Until then, the best thing we could do for Sergeant Mark Philips was to give him space to work things out while watching him closely enough to make sure he did not hurt himself.

I headed into town with five guys from my company, all enlisted men. Officers and enlisted men did not pal around together as a rule, but I was also a clone. In the hierarchy of U.A. Marine Corps society, the gap between officers and enlisted men was not nearly as pronounced as the separation of natural-borns and synthetics.

We borrowed a jeep and drove deep into town. Driving the streets of Valhalla, it was easy to forget we were fighting a war. The entertainment district was alive. Marines, soldiers, and civilians crowded the streets. The dance clubs were closed, but crowds packed the movie theaters and bars. The MPs turned out in force, too. Walking around with their armbands and nightsticks, they scowled at every man they passed.

What downtown Valhalla really needed was a dog catcher. Packs of stray dogs roamed the alleys, looking for food. They posed no threat to humans, especially in a community in which most pedestrians carried M27s, but the dog shit was turning alleyways into minefields.

People’s pets became the first victims of the mass relocation. In the rush to relocate the human population, house pets were left to fend for themselves. The dogs and cats seemed to adapt, but I suspected that the domesticated fish, bird, and hamster populations were on their way to extinction.

There were so many jeeps parked along the sidewalks downtown that the place looked like a motor pool. We ended up parking in a residential area and walking eight blocks back. As we walked, Private Skittles made a snide remark about all of the old, white-haired soldiers we passed. “I don’t know about you guys, but seeing all these old guys around gives me the creeps.”

“Philips calls them the ‘Prune Juice Brigade,’ ” Thomer said. Philips’s quotes were always good for a laugh.

Then Corporal Thorpe asked the question of the day, “What happened out there with Sergeant Philips?”

“I heard you capped one of those things with a rocket,” Skittles said to Corporal Boll. “A rocket …Man, you must have blown that bastard to bits.”

Neither Herrington nor Boll seemed interested in talking about the skirmish. Herrington ignored the comment. Boll gave Skittles a tight smile, and grunted, “Something like that,” in a voice just above a whisper.

“Think there’s anyplace around here that serves Crash?” I asked, hoping to change the subject. Crash was a hard liquor made out of potatoes grown in toxic soil. The U.A. Senate had recently banned the stuff due to a rash of fatalities, but Marines loved it because it was cheap and got them drunk fast.

“They don’t serve that anymore,” said Thorpe, taking the bait. “It’s been banned.”

“Banned?” I asked, pretending I had never heard about the ban. As I looked over at Thomer, I could tell he saw through me. He smiled but did not say a word.

“A bunch of college kids died after drinking it in a frathouse initiation,” Skittles said.

“No shit?” I asked. “Curbing the frat-boy population. I never thought of using it for that.”

Wherever we went, we ran into crowds. The restaurants and bars had lines that stretched half a block, so we wandered off the main drag and began searching smaller streets and back alleys. There was dog shit everywhere, but the ion curtain provided enough light for us to avoid stepping in it.

Five blocks off Main Street, we finally found a small pub that only looked mildly overcrowded. When the guy serving the drinks said he would be able to seat us within the hour, we decided we were not going to get a better offer. It actually took two hours, but that was okay.

Herrington pointed out the window, and said, “Hey, look, an Ava movie’s showing in the theater over there.” It was an Ava Gardner double feature—The Sun Also Rises and On the Beach. What red-blooded Marine could resist?

Among the vices that appealed to enlisted men, drinking was the uncontested champion, with sex coming in a strong second. Movies did not figure into the top ten, at least not before Ava and her lovely face.

“I bet Ava does some naughty stuff ‘on the beach,’ ” Skittles said.

“No, man, it’s not like that,” Thomer said. “I saw it. It’s an end-of-the-world flick. She’s stuck on a planet with radiation problems, waiting to die.”

“C’mon, it’s got to have some good visuals; it’s an Ava flick,” said Herrington.

“She does look good,” Thomer agreed.

“Think she really is a clone?” Herrington asked.

Thomer shook his head. “I hope not,” he said.

“Would it make a difference?” I asked.

“Well, I hope she is a clone,” said Skittles. I first met Private Timothy H. Skittles as we rode the helicopter out to the forest, and I already liked him. The kid was nuts.

“You hope she’s a clone?” Thorpe asked.

Before Skittles could answer, one of the two guys running the bar showed us to a table. We carried on the conversation as we headed across the floor. The six of us sat around a small, square table that was meant for two people.

“Sure I hope she’s a clone,” Skittles said as he scooted his chair toward the table. “If she’s a clone, they can make more of her. I’d take one.”

This got a laugh, but Thomer did not join in. The conversation had strayed far too close to a discussion of cloning and identity for an introspective clone like Thomer, who suspected he might be synthetic.

After that, things became quiet as we watched soldiers and Marines come and go. Herrington and Skittles continued to opine about Ava Gardner. Boll and Thorpe argued about the virtues of Earth-brewed beer over the outgrown stuff.

I let my mind wander, until I heard Thorpe ask, “Lieutenant, what happened with Philips?” The weight of that question smothered all other conversation.

“What happened?” I repeated. I sighed. I looked at the waiter, hoping he would come and take our order. I looked out the window, hoping to see some distraction on the street. Thorpe, who was always earnest, waited patiently until I answered. “What did he tell you?”

“He wouldn’t talk about it,” Thorpe said.

“You know what they were doing. I sent them to capture an alien,” I said.

“You went with them,” Thorpe added.

“Yes, I went too. I didn’t want to miss out on all the fun,” I said. “Three of the aliens split off, and Philips followed them. We set up an ambush. We had the drop on them, so what could happen, right?”

“Those sons of bitches are bulletproof,” Herrington said.

“Damn straight they’re bulletproof,” I said.

“One of them was doing some kind of science experiment when I got there. The other two were standing guard, but the one doing the experiment wasn’t even holding a gun.

“It was all perfect. We were on a hill overlooking the bastards, and we opened fire.

“Just like Herrington said, the bastards were bulletproof. I emptied an entire magazine on one of the guards, but the specker didn’t die. And their weapons …they shot right through the embankment.”

I had not realized how much that skirmish had bothered me. Once I opened up and started talking, the words just kept pouring out. “Boll nailed them with his grenades, but they hit White and Huish during the firefight. White died right away. Huish, though …he went into shock. I’m no doctor, but I don’t think it was the wound that killed him; I think it was the pain that did it.”

The waiter finally came to ask for our order, but now he was an unwanted distraction. We asked for a round of beers and sent him away.

“So why is Philips taking this so hard? You’d think he would blame you if he had to blame somebody,” Thorpe said. He did not mean this as a challenge. As I thought about it, he made a good point.

“You’ve never had your own command,” I said. “I sent them out, but he told them where to go and when to shoot. A guy like him, when things go wrong, he’s not looking to cover his ass, he just thinks about the men he lost.”

“That’s the shits,” said Skittles.

After that, we sat without speaking until the waiter brought us two pitchers of beer, and we all drank, glad to keep our thoughts to ourselves. The taste of beer improved my mood. It probably had the same effect on everybody else.

“Wish there were women around here,” Skittles said. “It’s kind of weird being in a town with all men.”

“It kind of reminds me of being on base,” said Boll.

We all would have preferred having a woman slinging our beers, but that did not stop anyone from downing them. The first two pitchers went dry in an instant. Seeing this, the waiter brought two more. And another two, and two more after that.

I was glad that the beer distracted the other guys, but it did not erase the image of Huish from my mind. I would have liked to get drunk, but I was no more likely to get drunk from beer than from soda. Nothing short of Sagittarian Crash ever plowed me under. The other guys, though …A few of them could barely sit straight after the third round of pitchers.

We asked about food, and the waiter informed us the cook was gone. After Skittles begged for grub and Herrington all but threatened the man’s life, he said he could bring us sandwiches and chips. Thomer told him to make enough for ten people and offered to pick up the tab.

When the sandwiches arrived, I saw that the bread was stale and the meat was stiff and unidentifiable. Boll and Herrington said they tasted fine, but I thought I would rather eat back on base. I told them I was leaving because I didn’t want to see Skittles puke, but that was a lie. The truth was that I felt morose and wanted to be alone.

Handing Thomer the keys to the jeep, I went out to the street and turned west. The night was brighter than noonday. I would have no trouble finding my own way home.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Like most of the planets the Unified Authority chose to colonize, New Copenhagen was almost exactly the same size as Earth. It orbited its star from approximately the same distance that Earth orbited the sun, and both planets rotated at nearly the same speed. The term “day” on New Copenhagen meant just about the same thing that it meant on Earth—at least it did until the aliens “sleeved” the planet in a curtain of light.

It does not matter if there are people in the forest when a tree falls, the event still produces the vibrations that humans, animals, and audio equipment register as “sound.” It did not matter that the ion curtain made the sky so bright that we could not see beyond the atmosphere, the sun still shone.

Three days after their first attack, the Mudders returned.

The scream of Klaxons woke me out of a largely dreamless sleep. I leaped out of bed, pulled on my bodysuit, then clapped on my combat armor, the whole process taking less than a minute.

I grabbed my M27 as a matter of course. That was the default weapon of a U.A. Marine, sturdy, durable, and accurate. As I headed out the door, though, I saw my particle-beam pistol lying on the writing desk beside my bed. Wanting to travel light, I had not taken that weapon on the last mission. We generally did not use particle-beam weapons in a normally breathable atmosphere, they were a high-maintenance nightmare. If you accidentally closed the outtake valve, they overcharged and exploded in your hands. If you jostled the lenses and they fell out of alignment, the gun would simply refuse to shoot. Bullets had always been effective enough when the enemy was human, but battering the Space Angels with bullets had proven ineffective in our first meeting. A particle-beam weapon, which disrupted the target at an atomic level, seemed like less of a gamble. I grabbed the pistol but still held on to my M27 for good measure.

As I left my room, I joined a stream of men racing through the halls. We all knew the pecking order. Majors and up, heading to command shelters and wearing service uniforms instead of armor, went for the elevators. Mere lieutenants, like me, did not need to be told where we fitted into the hierarchy. I joined the mass of armor-wearing junior officers sprinting down the stairs to the lobby.

As I entered the stairwell, I saw one of the Klaxons that Command had installed near the door. The little specker was no bigger than a saltshaker, but it screamed loud enough to shake the walls, and the engineers had placed one at the top of each flight of stairs. If not for the protection of my helmet, I might have gone deaf running down the stairs.

A cavalcade of men in combat armor poured down the stairwell, not stopping for oncoming traffic, their boots clanking against the concrete steps, the joints in their armor rattling. Yaaaayyyeeeeeeeee, the Klaxons wailed nonstop, their unceasing screech boring through our helmets until our heads felt like they might split in two. I tried to use the noise-canceling filters in my helmet to screen the sound out. I turned off the ambient audio receiver and still heard the shriek of the Klaxons through the supposedly soundproofed shell around my head.

We trampled down the stairs and out into the plush hotel lobby. As I entered the lobby, I received the same instructions issued to every Marine in the hotel. “This is not a drill! Companies, form up in the parking lot. This is not a drill!”

The lobby of Hotel Valhalla was jammed as multiple regiments of Marines rushed through. All told, nearly twenty thousand men were billeted in that hotel.

Long lines of trucks formed in the parking lot. Officers in service uniforms segregated us into battalions as we ran, directing one battalion this way and another battalion that way. By the time we reached the trucks, they were breaking us down into companies. Our briefing—whatever briefing we would receive—would come as we drove to the front.

As I headed for the trucks, I saw Ray Freeman running with a field bag dangling over one of his shoulders. Being a full foot taller than any of the clones around him, he stood out.

“You have any idea what’s going on?” I asked Freeman, as he got into the back of a truck. Other men climbed into trucks, Freeman simply stepped onto the bed.

“Nobody’s talking,” Freeman said. His voice was so low I felt it as much as I heard it.

I climbed in behind him. Across the bed of the truck sat Lieutenant Moffat, our intrepid company commander. As his executive officer, I took the seat across from him and waited for orders. Freeman sat beside me.

“Harris, get me a head count,” Moffat ordered.

They’d squeezed an entire platoon into the back of the truck—forty-five men, including Moffat, Freeman, and me. As I scanned the men crammed in around me, I was relieved to see Philips among them. I radioed to our other trucks and asked for a head count.

“Is every man accounted for?” I asked my platoon leaders. Once all three combat platoons radioed in the affirmative, I relayed that message to Moffat and the briefing began.

“Listen up,” Moffat, the kind of CO who enjoys reminding his men who is in charge, shouted as if we were not wearing equipment which automatically controlled the audio volume in our helmets. “The Mudders are back. An Army tracking station picked them up seven miles west of town. They’re headed north-east toward Valhalla. From what we can tell, the dumb bastards plan to hit the exact spot they attacked three days ago.”

They could have gotten us to the battle more quickly in helicopters, I thought. Then I remembered the ruined gunships on the battlefield and decided that the trucks seemed like a good idea.

“We’re going to try to come in behind them,” Moffat said. “Command is sending two light infantry divisions to keep the Mudders pinned down while we flank them from the west. When we are in position, we will launch a counterattack, dividing their line in two.

“Once we have broken their lines, our objective is to finish the bastards off before they can retreat. That is all.”

Not a very inspiring briefing, I thought to myself as the battle plans slowly took shape in my head. I thought about that deep forest with its dense growth and slow rises. There would be no point in taking cover behind hills and rocks in this battle when the enemy could shoot through anything.

I looked over at Freeman. He sat, his helmet on, leaning back against the wall of the truck, his huge body rolling along with the truck’s bumps and jounces. “You think they’re going to bring more men this time?” I asked.

“Fifty thousand,” Freeman said.

“Fifty thousand?” I asked.

“Fifty thousand, just like last time,” Freeman said.

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“I just heard from the Science Lab,” Freeman said.

“You’re in touch with the Science Lab?” I asked. Freeman did not bother answering.

The trucks rolled fast. We took a main artery out of Valhalla, then followed a highway deep into the forest. Somewhere out there, the fighting had begun. I could hear the rumble of handheld rockets in the distance. We were too far away to hear the rifles.

We drove for less than an hour before the trucks pulled off to the side, and everybody got out and fell into ranks. I did not realize the sheer size of our convoy until I climbed out the back of the truck. A line of two hundred trucks stretched out behind us, each carrying a platoon with forty-two men. Bringing tanks into this battle would have done us no good because the forest terrain was too overgrown for heavy equipment. I did see smaller vehicles—missile-bearing ATVs and Jackal attack vehicles.

We formed into companies and headed away from the road. The grounds around us were virginal. We trudged through deep drifts and air powdered with miniscule flakes of snow. A layer of clouds floated below the ion curtain, but the clouds cast no shadows. Just as the air was bright under the trees of the forest, the space under the clouds had its own illumination.

We marched into the trees, ten thousand men strong. My company belonged to the Second Expeditionary Marine Brigade. The first brigade and several other units would pour into the forest from other directions. Our heavy-artillery units would act as a hedge to keep the enemy from reaching the city limits while we flanked the aliens. If everything went according to plan, we would break their lines and cut off their retreat. Everything hinged on the numbers. The Army reported the enemy force at a mere fifty thousand troops. If their report held true and the aliens returned as understaffed as they arrived the first time, the battle would end quickly.

While the rest of us prepped our M27s, Freeman brought out his sniper rifle and loaded a magazine into it.

“You’re shooting bullets?” I asked. “I expected you to have something …I don’t know …bigger. Maybe shoulder-fired nuclear-tipped rockets or something.”

“These will do,” Freeman said.

“Powerful?” I asked.

Freeman pointed out a tree on a distant hill. The crack of his rifle attracted the attention of the men milling around us.

Up on the hill, the upper half of a very large pine tree hopped in the air and fell like a bowling pin. Freeman slung the rifle over his shoulder. “I’ll meet you back in town,” he said.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“I want to get to their drop zone,” Freeman said.

“Why?” I asked.

“I have a package to deliver,” he said.

“Something that makes a loud bang?” I asked.

“Something more scientific,” Freeman said. With this, he bounded a wide drift and headed off.

“Where does your buddy think he’s going?” Lieutenant Moffat asked.

“He didn’t say,” I said. Lying to officers like Moffat was easier than telling them the truth.

CHAPTER TWENTY

In all the battles I’d fought, this was the first time I had ever seen Jackals in action. Jackals were jeeps with enhanced engines and armor. They had ten small, independent wheels along their chassis instead of the standard four—four wheels up front and six in the back. Each had shielded tank armor along the sides and front and a machine-gun turret up top. The machine gun fired variable loads.

The military categorized Jackals as a “dated, but not obsolete” combat vehicle. The design of this venerable old battle-ax had not changed for eighty years. Fast and maneuverable, Jackals were an especially useful unit for lightning attacks in tightly confined areas.

I watched the Jackals weave in and out of trees at speeds nearing forty miles per hour. They leaped over ledges, sliced through snowdrifts, and splashed across creeks. I suppose a Jackal would make an easy target in an open field, but traveling at those speeds through trees, they looked impossible to hit.

We marched five miles into the forest, moving east toward town. Our battalion would be the spearhead, the wedge that would snap the enemy column in two. We would sweep down from the north. If everything went according to plan, we would leave the bastards with only a token force to attack the city while other battalions dissected the rest of their force in the woods. There would be no quarter given. We would pound the Mudders until we destroyed every last one of them.

As we pushed through the forest, the echoing thunder of rockets became louder. Occasionally we would pass some break in the trees and see tails of smoke rising in the distance. Then we crossed the invisible line bordering the battlefield, and the explosions became something we felt as well as heard. The ground trembled slightly when rockets were fired, and branches rattled above us.

The ATVs and Jackals continued streaking ahead, then channeling back, running along our flanks, then clearing new paths. At one point, an ATV leaped over a ridge, and exploded into a fireball. Through the flames and smoke and the glare of the ion curtain, I saw the bolt that speared the vehicle.

Flames trailing behind it like a wild mane, the ATV finished its arc and landed smoothly before skidding sideways into a tree. Medics ran to check the two-man crew, but they did not need to bother. Already twisted around the trunk of the tree, the ATV exploded, and the passenger tube broke open to reveal the driver and gunner, covered in flame, skin charred black, and motionless.

I saw this as I ducked behind a tree and prepared to fire. We had not run into the alien army itself, just a couple of scouts. The nearest platoon tried to pin the enemy with suppressing fire as a second platoon flanked them and cut them down. But you cannot pin an enemy that has no fear of being shot. The two aliens marched forward and returned fire as an entire platoon shredded them with an endless stream of M27 fire.

As if attracted to the gunfire, the next wave of aliens came pounding through the trees. Had it not been for the glare of the ion curtain, the Mudders would have blended into the forest. Their dark skin would have worked like camouflage had there been shadows.

An ATV streaked past, presenting a diversion. The Mudders did not take cover but simply marched ahead, firing spears of light that bored through trees, rocks, and anything else they hit.

We were not entirely ready for them, but the Mudders did not catch us by surprise, either. We would have had a better position if we had had more time to dig in. Many of our men found cover behind trees and fallen logs. Others had no choice and simply knelt in the open. Our entire company showered a continuous stream of M27 fire, battering the Mudders and everything around them. Shreds of bark and wood flew through the air; branches fell, then danced along the ground.

Moffat radioed me to say that another large force of Mudders was headed in from the north. Our company was assigned to form a skirmishing line with three other companies. The objective was to maintain a hundred-foot buffer between us and the aliens while the rest of the regiment dug in.

“Spread out, spread out,” I radioed as I moved up and down the line. “Thomer, take your platoon and cover that rise.” Moffat moved among the men, doing the same. We only had a few moments before the aliens arrived. The first of them walked out from a stand of trees. More followed.

The Mudders’ absolute disregard for our firepower made holding our position nearly impossible. They just did not care if we hit them. I’d seen Marines spend more time bracing themselves to step into a cold shower than these aliens spent before preparing to walk into our fusillade. Our gunfire chipped away their bodies, slowly splintering their broad chests and heads.

Looking across our line, I saw Philips out in the open, firing three-shot bursts from his M27. White bolts struck the tree behind him and sailed through the air around him.

As a survivor of the previous skirmish, Philips knew what would happen if he got hit. But there he was, not even trying to take cover.

I set up an interLink connection between me and Philips and heard nothing but his breathing. He wasn’t even talking to himself. Normally he was the noisiest Marine I had ever known, maintaining nonstop commentary with himself when he could not find another audience.

“Philips, fall back,” I ordered. He did not respond.

Thomer, always the guardian angel, climbed out from good cover so he could pull Philips to safety. “Leave him,” I yelled.

“He’ll get hit,” yelled Thomer.

But Philips had angels looking out for him. An alien light bolt drilled through the tree directly behind Philips’s head. The trunk caught on fire. Philips seemed not to notice any of this. More bolts speared the ground near his feet and the bushes around him, but nothing hit him.

“Harris, take your platoon and fall in around my beacon,” Moffat ordered. Had I been a general-issue clone, I would have called up a platoon and started toward the beacon before sizing up the situation. Automatic order response was programmed into their DNA. As I followed the beacon signal, I saw that it led to an indefensible knoll with no trees or rocks for cover and no strategic value.

“We can’t hold that area. It’s in their path, sir,” I yelled.

“I gave you an order, Harris.”

Following that beacon would expose our flank to the aliens. Moffat had a point, though. If we could hold that area, we might turn the tide of the battle. I wanted to get to that knoll but following a different path.

I switched to a private frequency so I could speak with Thomer. “You got Moffat’s beacon?” I asked.

“Yeah. Is that for us?” Thomer asked.

“No,” I lied. If I had told him the truth, his reaction would have been to follow orders. “Take the platoon in from behind the hill, and don’t take any chances. Those bastards can shoot through rock.”

I watched Philips, expecting him to ignore the order, but his programming won out. He stayed with Thomer and the rest of the platoon as they fell back, then moved up to take point as they circled the hill.

“I told you to secure that hill,” Moffat called to me. He was screaming like a lunatic now. I imagined more than a little spit flying inside his helmet.

“We’re on our way, sir,” I said.

A Jackal skidded to a stop to the left of the beacon. The Marine in the turret sprayed heavy-caliber shells into the growing bank of Mudders as they came swarming out of the woods. The three-inch shells tore through trees and Mudders alike. One alien tried to charge the Jackal, wading into the heavy fire. The bullets slowly ground the crazy bastard into mulch, shredding it even as it continued its charge. The Mudder managed to get about twenty feet in that barrage before falling in a heap of pieces.

A line of five Jackals sped in from another direction, firing into the enemy line while weaving through the trees. Moments later they emerged for another pass, their tires kicking up mud and twigs as they skidded past.

The Mudders fired back. When three bolts struck the first of the Jackals, the driver lost control, and the vehicle flipped. More bolts hit the chassis as it burst into flames. The Jackal spun through the air and settled roof down.

The Mudders opened fire on the other Jackals. Two made it to safety; two more crashed.

“Heads up!” Thomer yelled, as hundreds of Mudders crested a distant ridge and opened fire.

Grenadiers standing near the top of the hill fired rockets into the Mudders’ ranks, then dropped back. The ground around the aliens seemed to boil as the rockets kicked up a veil of steam, mud, and leaves.

We could not let the Mudders drive us back, but a single platoon could not hold this hill. At least a hundred Mudders had gathered on a nearby ridge. Hiding proved useless when the aliens returned our fire; the bolts from their weapons cut through the ground like needles through a sheet. I saw a bolt pass through a boulder and hit one of my men in the face. The bolt continued on through the back of his helmet as the Marine fell to the ground, his dead body still trembling as the muscles in his arms and legs exerted their last impulses of life.

Thomer sent three grenadiers to scatter the Mudders, but the grenadiers attracted too much attention. When they appeared at the top of the knoll, the Mudders fired at them and continued firing at them even after they dropped back behind cover.

Another squadron of Jackals skidded into range, fired a hailstorm into the Mudder line, then vanished. Under the cover of the chaos created by the Jackals, platoons crowded in beside us. Another force attacked the Mudders from the right, and it looked, for a moment, like we would hold. The enemy line seemed to crumble in disarray, but then a small herd of Mudders charged into our fire. The platoons on either side of us gave way, and my platoon suddenly became the point of the spearhead.

“We need to hold this area!” the regimental colonel yelled over an open frequency, and a virtual beacon appeared around us.

Now the battle hinged on our little hill as the entire specking regiment followed the colonel’s beacon. Ten thousand Marines headed in our direction as hundreds of Mudders, looking like three-dimensional shadows, aimed their guns in our direction. Jackals streaked by and fired into them, but the crazy bastards did not fall back.

I would have given a year’s pay for air support, but that was not going to happen in this battle. The Mudders had destroyed two-thirds of our gunships during the last battle, and whatever gunships were left would be ineffective in this heavily forested terrain.

ATVs poured in from every direction, firing rockets into the enemy line, then charging through it, weaving in and out around the trees as if they were running a slalom course. One leaped over a ridge, firing two rockets in midair. The rockets pummeled the enemy line, leaving a gap in it, but when the driver tried to thread that gap, a Mudder stepped in the way. That alien must have weighted one thousand five hundred pounds, maybe even a full ton. When the light-armor ATV struck it, the Mudder only spun and fell backward as if it tripped.

And still the Mudders did not drop behind cover or halt their disorganized march in our direction. Thousands of bolts of light rained down on the ATVs. But the ATVs were fast and low to the ground, difficult targets to hit.

The rest of the regiment arrived en masse. Grenadiers launched rockets over the ATVs, and automatic riflemen fired an endless hail of M27 fire into the enemy line. The Mudders continued to fire at the ATVs—a wasted effort. They hit a few of the fast vehicles but left themselves open to our grenadiers and fire teams. A gap had formed in the enemy line, and in came the Jackals.

I could feel it. I could taste it. The battle had swung in our direction, and in another moment the Unified Authority Marines would begin another charge. Tension built as I waited for the order. When the regimental colonel finally gave the order to advance, it came as a relief. I allowed the momentum of the regiment to draw me forward. This was not a wild charge. It began slowly and methodically, but it was also unrelenting. There were men in front of me and behind me. We pushed over a rise, beyond a line of trees.

As I left the protection of the trees, I experienced that pleasant stinging in my veins, the combat reflex. A mixture of adrenaline and testosterone flowed through my blood. It was like the return of an old friend, maybe more pronounced on this occasion than ever before. I felt both calm and excited at the same time. It left me peaceful, almost blissful, and ready to kill. I did not become part of the mob; my thoughts remained my own. But I shared its purpose—we had come to kill.

By this time I had lost track of which men belonged to which company. With so many Marines pushing in around me, I simply ignored their virtual dog tags as they appeared in my visor. There comes a time when chaos takes over, and all strategy is lost on the field. We had reached that point.

When I saw Mudders, I aimed and fired. I no longer entertained any objectives other than to kill. It was hard to shoot with men jostling around me, bumping me, constantly forcing me forward. When I shot at enemies, I never shot alone. We were ten thousand men moving in unison, and we fired at every Mudder we saw. When small groups of aliens stepped over a ridge or out from behind the trees, so many bullets ripped into them that they simply shredded before our eyes.

As I reached the top of the rise, I saw a Mudder no more than fifty feet away and fired over the helmets of several Marines. Hundreds of bullets bounced off the alien’s hide. I did not see if it fell. The momentum of the regiment shoved me on, and I lost sight of it.

A knee-deep stream ran across our path. I splashed into the water, high-stepping my way across, afraid to fall because I knew I’d be trampled. It was not until I emerged on the other side of that stream, slipping on the rocks along the shore, that I looked back and saw the extent of our casualties. As we crossed the far bank and stepped over a rise, all of our cover had fallen away. The slippery rocks I’d stumbled over as I crossed the river were dead Marines. Dozens of them lay facedown in the water.

A thousand Marines now funneled in through a bottleneck no more than three hundred feet across. The aliens fired into our ranks, and we fired into theirs. Still we pushed ahead. When I crested another ridge, I saw that the ground that I had first thought was a snow-covered forest was really piled with dead Marines in white combat armor. Yard-long bolts of light soared through the air at speeds we could see but not dodge. Men around me were hit in the head, the chest, the arms, the legs.

Had I not been part of the herd, I would have found cover and dug in. But this was not a battle in which men dug in and fought—this was a charge. Marines pushed at my back. Marines ran ahead of me. We splashed over the banks of the creek, stormed across the field of fallen men, and crashed headlong into enemy fire.

A few feet ahead of me, a bolt seared through a Marine, and the Marine behind him, then a third Marine. The bolt pierced the first man in the head, the next through the chest, and barely grazed the final man in the arm, but all three would die. Whenever those bolts connected, it caused such trauma that a shot through the arm was every bit as lethal as a shot through the head.

We continued our rush, all the time hearing officers taunting us, coaxing us, their voices ringing in our helmets and merging with our thoughts. “Run!” “Get going!” “Move it! Move it! Move it!”

An ATV skidded around a hollow, catching three Mudders from behind. It fired a missile that blew the Mudders apart, and the ATV rumbled over their bodies as if they were no more deadly than overgrown roots.

Switching from my M27 to a particle-beam pistol, I continued to run in the stampede. My pistol was made for close-combat situations, and that phase of the battle was about to begin. The aliens were all around us now, their massive single-colored bodies blending in with the landscape.

The men to the right and left of me fell a few moments apart. The one on my right was hit in the gut, and his legs crumpled beneath him. The one on my left was hit in the face—I saw the bolt coming and turned in time to see it strike his visor and tear through it. The plasticized glass in his visor had already melted as he fell backward and was trampled.

I did not know the man’s name and did not bother reading his virtual dog tag. I got a quick glimpse of him as he fell, and then the momentum of the pack forced me on.

“Move it, you specking sons of bitches!” some officer yelled at us. The interLink seemed to fuse with my brain.

Once we reached the next ridge, the momentum slowed to a crawl. With every step I pushed off the back or head of a fallen Marine. In this situation, I had no time to worry about stepping on fallen Marines, but the footing was terrible the way the bodies slid under my weight. As I stumbled forward, I began to run into broken Mudders as well. A hundred yards more, and the white of Marine combat armor gave way to charcoal as the battlefield became a junkyard of alien body parts.

At some point, I felt one of my legs pulled out from under me, and I fell on my face. I swerved around and saw that one of the dying Mudders had grabbed my ankle. The creature had been blown in half. Its chest, arms, and head were still intact, its eyes looked to me as if they had been carved out of iron or stone. I wondered if the thing could see me as I swung my pistol into its face and fired the sparkling green beam. I held the trigger down for several seconds, though it had already released me.

The eyes never flinched. I continued to fire. The head stuttered, then exploded like a skeet. Bits of some material that might have been clay or metal or both burst out of its face, then I was back on my feet.

Our regiment slammed into the Mudders from the south and east. We continued to pour into them in a column, but they would not retreat. They tried to push back against us, but by that time, their attack had no teeth.

We started out ten thousand troops strong but had lost a lot of men. Our objective had been to cut the Mudders’ line and stall their advance toward Valhalla. We succeeded at breaking their lines, but we did not stall their attack. Nothing could stall their attack. The aliens we did not kill continued on toward the city. To a man, these bastards knew nothing of retreat.

Perhaps Glade had foreseen this. His Twenty-third Regiment came in from the north and east, creating an additional buffer across the city lines. They slashed into the enemy, creating a second front. Other regiments circled in behind the aliens, coming in from the south and west. Even then, the Mudders did not yield; they simply broke into groups and continued the fight until we struck down their last men.

The report that day was good.

The Fifteenth Regiment, my unit, struck first. We broke their line, trapping the aliens between ourselves and the Twenty-third Regiment. Between our two regiments we killed over fifteen thousand aliens and lost only three thousand five hundred men—by far the lowest casualty rate in the campaign.

After we snapped their lines, thirty-five thousand Mudders headed south and west, but the trap had been sprung. They ran headlong into the Eighth, Tenth, and Sixteenth Regiments. The battle lasted several hours with the Mudders fighting the Marines to a stalemate until the Ninth and Twelfth Regiments arrived from the west.

When the Seventeenth, Twenty-ninth, and Thirty-third came in from the east, trapping the aliens on yet another flank, the battle finally came to a close. Though they were shamefully outnumbered, the Mudders stood and fought.

Opting for aggression over caution, Glade poured more men into the fire—officers and enlisted men alike. When the stakes are too high to rely on a surgical strike, you need to rely on your numbers. Against an alien force of fifty thousand troops, General Glade sent over one hundred thousand Marines. Only twenty-four thousand of those Marines returned.

By day’s end, we had lost over seventy-five thousand men, but we had won the war!

That was what we all kept telling ourselves, that we had won the war.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

When we left the hotel for the battle that morning, we needed 250 trucks to transport the troops. We returned in 121, what was left of us at least. On balance, things seemed hopeful.

Other regiments continued to fight as we turned to leave the field, but our part of the battle had ended. All we knew as we loaded into the trucks and headed back to the hotel was that we had lost nearly one-third of our men. We were exhausted both physically and emotionally, but mostly I think we were nervous about how the other regiments would fare. No one spoke as the trucks rumbled back toward town.

The trucks dropped us in front of the lobby. As I climbed out, I felt the eyes of my men resting on me. “We sent those speckers packing. Now go clean up,” I said, then I brooded as I wandered up to my room and changed out of my armor. There was tension in the air. I took a bath and a nap and ignored the noise when somebody knocked on my door. I kept the curtains closed and the lights off, creating my own personal nightfall.

A few minutes later the first reports leaked. I heard shouting outside my door and stuck my head out. I saw a group of officers celebrating in the hall and asked what happened. One of the officers turned toward me long enough to say, “It’s another massacre, just like last time. Better!” The officer said he was on his way to Valhalla Skyline, the restaurant and bar that occupied the top two floors of the hotel, and asked if I wanted to come. I thanked him and went back to bed. I tried to sleep, but I was too keyed up, so I dressed in my Charlie service uniform and took the elevator up the Skyline. The bar was packed with officers, hundreds of them. Rings of officers swapped battlefield stories in the open area that was intended to be the dance floor. I wrestled my way into the crowd and felt the excitement.

Moments later, an officer made his way to the stage and gave the first official update. The Eighth, Tenth, and Sixteenth Regiments successfully engaged the aliens, sweeping in from the south. He did not release casualty numbers but could confirm that the attack had been entirely successful. A few minutes later, the officer returned with more information—the Ninth Infantry Regiment and the Twelfth Light Artillery Regiment had flanked the aliens from the west while three more regiments surprised the enemy on their eastern flank.

Thousands of officers shouted at the tops of their lungs.

Forty minutes later, the briefing officer appeared again, and this time he made it official, announcing complete and total victory. Moments later, the message was repeated over the hotel speaker system.

A trio of colonels climbed onto the bar and began tossing bottles of booze into the sea of officers. Arms waved in anticipation, and feeding frenzies flared wherever the bottles landed.

I never stopped to wonder why this victory should be more permanent than the one we had three days earlier. Nothing had changed, the Mudders had come at us with an army exactly like the one we just routed. But that first victory seemed insignificant, like an opening act. This one had finality about it; this time the bastards knew what we had, and we still sent them packing

The elevator doors opened, and a new tide of Marines poured onto the floor. Officers crowded around each other like bullets in a box. By now hundreds and hundreds of officers had packed into the bar, drinking, boasting, yelling at the tops of their lungs.

Bottles of beer slowly trickled across the room. No one could talk above the crowd, you needed to shout as loud as you could if you wanted to speak to the man standing next to you. The more each man shouted, the louder the aggregate noise became.

In one corner of the room, a ring of twenty or maybe thirty officers sang a drunken version of “The Halls of Montezuma,” the anthem of the Unified Authority Marines. All of them held glasses of beer, which they waved and clanked together as they sang. Beer and suds flew everywhere. Nobody cared.

Then a man sitting near the big observation window spotted a convoy of trucks driving into town. The caravan should have been endless. But it was not endless, not endless at all. There might have been a thousand trucks, but not much more than that. Watching them roll into town from way up at the top of the hotel, we could see the end of the procession.

Slowly, as if someone was turning down the volume, the entire bar went silent. The sight of those trucks was like a dirge. Then Base Command ordered all officers down to the enlisted men’s barracks to prepare for debriefing. I took one last look at the end of the line of trucks and headed for the stairs.

Downcast officers stumbled out of the bar. I caught brief snatches of several conversations.

“Weren’t there a lot more trucks this morning? I could have …”

“…damn it. It’s over, right? I mean, we crushed the bastards …”

The celebration had gone out of all of us. Everybody’s mood had changed, including mine. For no reason at all, I had come to believe we had won the war and not just a battle; and though I had no new information, I now knew that something had changed.

As I reached the Valkyrie Ballroom—the barracks my battalion called home—a young major approached me. “Lieutenant Harris?” he asked.

I saluted.

“General Glade would like a word with you.”

“Harris, glad they found you,” General Glade said. We traded salutes.

He looked tired. He was a skinny man with a weak chin, a long, hooked nose, and a round, balding head. Looking at his face and head made me think of a parakeet.

“Congratulations, General,” I said.

Huuuuhh. He cleared his throat. “Not much of a victory, Lieutenant. We lost a lot of men. I’m not so sure congratulations are in order.”

I did not know how to respond, so I said nothing.

“We can talk on the way, Harris. We have a briefing at the Science Lab, and they asked me to bring you along.”

I was a second lieutenant. For me to attend the same briefing with a general was beyond unusual, it was downright bizarre. Then I remembered Freeman mentioning the Science Lab and realized that he might well have mentioned my name to the scientists holding the briefing.

Two staff officers met us as we left the office. They led us through the lobby, a plush indoor palace with burgundy carpeting and crystal chandeliers. The area was abandoned. Briefings had already begun in the ballrooms; every Marine on the premises was required to attend.

Almost every Marine. Since I was traveling with a general, I was excused. The two staff officers led us out to the main entrance, where a sedan waited under the portico. Glade and I climbed into the back. The staff officers, both of whom outranked me, sat in the front.

News of the victory had already spread through Valhalla. With the Marines and Army holding mass briefings, most parts of the city lay empty; but hysteria had erupted in the areas occupied by the civilian militia. We passed neighborhoods in which rapturous mobs filled the streets—men dancing and drinking and celebrating. Valhalla has got to be the galaxy’s happiest ghost town, I thought to myself. Loud music rang in the air. I saw a man in a heavy jacket carrying four bottles of whiskey, two under each arm, while waving a fifth bottle in the air.

Glade cleared his throat. “It’s a bit early to celebrate,” he grumbled. The officers in the front seat heard him and nodded. One sighed, and said, “Civilians.”

We drove to the University of Valhalla, a sprawling campus that reminded me of just about every other university I had ever seen. We passed a large fountain that had become the domicile of hundreds of ducks. We passed walkways lined by trees that had long since shed their leaves for the winter. Except for the military supply trucks and security stops, I might have guessed that the university had closed for the season.

The university campus sat serene. Fresh white snow had built up on the lawn areas. Melting snow covered the streets and walkways. The air was clean. The weather had washed this part of the city clean, and there were no occupants to mess it up again.

We parked near what had been the university’s School of Science and now served as the military’s scientific laboratory. The outside of the building had a glass entryway and an old gray brick facade. The benches outside the main entrance were buried in snow. The building itself went three stories up and three stories down. On this day, the debriefing took place on the bottom floor.

Apparently the four of us—General Glade, his two staff officers, and me—were the last of the elect group to arrive. We passed through a security station at the door and another, larger, station by the elevators. An MP took us down to Basement 3, where we were met by an armed escort that led us through the halls. As we entered the auditorium in which the briefing would be held, I saw a lot of brass. The meeting was for generals and their staffs, an elite circle in which I was the token clone.

Glade and his two staff officers found a row with three open seats and filled them. I sat alone on the next row. It didn’t bother me.

There was a stage at the front of the auditorium, but the scientist running the show did not use it. He stood beside a table, the objects he placed on display along the table magnified on the screen above his head.

“I understand we are all here now,” said the old scientist conducting the meeting. He was an odd-looking man—tall and skinny, built like the human version of a cotton-tipped swab, only bald. He had thick glasses, an unkempt ring of cotton-fluff hair, and a lab coat draped over his skeletal body. The guy probably stood a good six-foot-four, but if he weighed more than 140 pounds, I did not see where he packed it. He had a low, jittery voice giving the impression that his mouth had trouble keeping up with his brain.

“Um, we have made some significant discoveries over the last twenty-four hours,” the scientist began. “I’m not really sure where to begin. Under normal circumstances I would publish my results and present them in a conference. Under these circumstances, I will present our findings directly to you.”

“Can we get on with this?” someone asked from the front row. All the officers on the far end of the auditorium wore Army green. When push came to shove, the Army headed this operation.

“Yes, yes, of course,” the scientist muttered nervously. “Over the last three days, we have explored the anatomy of the aliens you refer to as the Mudders.” His mentioning the term “Mudders” brought a snicker from the officers, making the scientist all the more nervous. “We have been unable to secure a complete cadaver for examination, so we have had to work on, um, how can I put this, the various parts that have been delivered. I have brought a head and some other samples of alien anatomy with me today.” The scientist pointed a trembling finger at the table.

“Yes, yes, we see that.” The voice came from the Army section again. That kind of open disrespect would only come from the highest-ranking general.

“When …when …when we received these parts three days ago, they were solid. We cataloged their weights at that time. Depending on the damage, heads generally weighed 98 pounds and 3.2 ounces. Arms weighed 133 pounds and 2.2 ounces. Legs weighed 268 pounds, 5.1 ounces. We received portions of torsos, though these were generally badly damaged.”

“The only good alien is a dead alien,” said a member of General Glade’s staff. This brought a round of subdued applause. These old officers were behaving like a bunch of rowdy enlisted men.

“Upon examination, we …we found that the aliens had a precisely uniform body weight of 3 pounds, 6.3 ounces per cubic inch.”

“A uniform body weight per cubic inch? Is that any part of the body? Do humans have a pound-per-inch weight, too?” This question came from the Air Force section. The general asking sounded interested.

“No, no, sir,” the scientist stuttered. He looked so uncomfortable in front of these officers. “No, sir. Human bone, fat, muscle mass, organs, and hair all have unique weights and densities.

“The aliens do not have bones or muscles. They seem to be made out of a metal-clay polymer that is foreign to our understanding. We’ve tried to analyze the material. I’m afraid we could not find an equivalent material on our known periodic table of elements.” The question from the Air Force section seemed to relax the old goat.

The scientist prattled on for another five minutes, comparing the polymer to various known elements and explaining how it differed. I heard whispered conversations starting around the room. No one listened until he said, “The parts we have collected are rapidly degenerating.”

“They’re doing what?” the Army general asked.

“The material is degenerating,” the scientist repeated. “These alien sections were solid when we received them. They contained a solid mass of the new element that Dr. Sweetwater has labeled ‘MBC,’ or more properly, ‘Mudder Brown Carbon.’ When they first arrived, these alien sections were highly concentrated; we could only obtain samples for spectral and elemental analysis using a laser scalpel.

“Even so, we were able to determine that they were not composed of living tissue. Upon early examination, we, um, we found that there were no signs of entrails for analysis.”

“Entrails? You mean guts?” someone called out.

“We, uh, tried several experiments to see if we could break this material down to its most elemental form. We superradiated samples with three hundred thousand grays. This material does not absorb radiation.” As he became nervous again, the scientist’s stuttering returned.

“Are you saying they can’t be nuked?” an Army general asked. This time I saw the man asking the question—a pudgy little man with a flattop of white hair. I didn’t recognize him.

“N-no, sir. The trauma caused by the explosion might destroy the avatar, but the radiation would not bother it.”

“Avatar?” the general asked. “What the speck is an avatar?”

“Um …ah, it’s a representation.”

“A representation?” the general asked. “Somebody help me out here.”

“Avatar? You mean like the characters in computer games?” somebody asked from the Air Force section of the room.

“Computer games?” the Army general asked. “Games!”

“I understand you use computerized combat simulations to train your men,” the scientist said.

“Oh …battle simulations,” the general said, sounding somewhat appeased. “What do the Mudders have to do with combat sims?”

“These are not living creatures,” the scientist said. “These are physical representations of creatures that are controlled by the creatures they represent.

“The samples we received contain no semblance of living tissue. As you can see,” he said, pointing with a foot-long metal stick, “the material is uniform. There is no muscle or bone. It’s almost as if this creature w-were a living statue.”

“What about their guns?” This time it was one of the staff members Glade brought. “Those are real.”

“Oh, the weapons, now that was fascinating,” the scientist said. “The weapons degraded even faster than the aliens themselves.”

“Degraded?” The Army general clearly wanted to turn the briefing into an interrogation. “You said that before. What do you mean by degraded?”

“Th-this creature and his weapon are …are …are made out of the exact same material. They are made out of the element we refer to as MBC. Also, um, the illumination shield that has enveloped New Copenhagen appears to be made out of that same element.”

Spontaneous arguments broke out. The soft-spoken scientist tried several times to restart his briefing, but his bullheaded audience paid him no mind. He watched nervously, slicking back his cotton-fluff hair.

Finally, the chubby Army general took control of the meeting. “Just to make sure I have got this straight.” He waited for the auditorium to become quiet and started again. “Just to be sure I have this straight, you claim that the Mudders and their guns are nothing more than computer characters made out of light? Is that what you are saying, because if it is, we may need to find some better scientists. Those Mudder bastards were alive enough to kill eighty thousand Marines today. Those were flesh-and-blood clones they killed out there. This was not some bullshit computer simulation.”

The general stood and took a step toward the stage. Now that he was out of his seat, I saw that the general was short as well as chubby and old. But compared to the scientist, he looked like a green beret.

“No one is calling this a computer game,” Ray Freeman said as he stepped in from the wings. Ray stood nearly two feet taller than the general and weighed more than the general and the scientist combined. He had been hiding somewhere, and he now came downstairs along the front of the stage.

The general spun around to look at Freeman, then paused. I don’t know if he recognized Freeman or was simply put off by the sheer size of the man. “I see,” was all the general managed to squeak out. “I, uh, just wanted to clarify the point,” the general said as he returned to his seat.

“Thank you, Raymond,” the scientist said, turning and smiling up at Freeman. Freeman walked to the edge of the stage and sat, watching over the scientist like a bodyguard.

With Freeman watching over him, the scientist gained confidence. For a moment, he and his audience looked at each other in silence, no one quite knowing where to pick up. Finally, a general from the Air Force asked, “What did you mean by degrading?”

“Oh …oh yes,” the scientist said. He surprised me by lifting the specimen of an alien arm with one hand. “When we received this limb, it weighed 133 pounds. Compared to a human arm, that would be about—”

“Can you please get on with this?” the Army general asked. Some of the other officers in the room sounded a note of agreement.

“This limb was too heavy for me to lift,” the scientist said. “Within an hour of our receiving it, we realized it had begun to degrade.”

The scientist carefully replaced the arm on the table, then took hold of the forearm with both his hands like a man breaking a stick. He snapped the forearm in two and held up the wrist and hand. “Three days ago I could not lift this limb, let alone break it in two. Over the last 72 hours, the weight of this arm has dropped from 133 pounds to 27 pounds. The limb has become hollow and brittle. It is as if the MBC particles are evaporating.”

“Can you explain how that could happen?” an Air Force officer asked.

“I cannot explain it at this juncture. Dr. Sweetwater has a hypothesis, but we need to put it to the test before we discuss it,” the scientist said.

“And you said that their guns are made out of the same stuff?” the Air Force general asked. By this time, the briefing had reached a low level of pandemonium.

The scientist bent over and picked up a box that sat beside the table. He looked into the box, shaking his head as if trying to steel himself for a difficult task, then brought out something that looked like a two-foot-long mud clod.

“This is one of their guns,” the scientist said.

That could not possibly have been one of the guns, I thought. It was the right basic shape, but it looked old and dirty, like something you might find rusting on the bottom of a lake. There was no hint of the nickel plating.

“What happened to it?” someone asked.

“It is degrading to its tachyonic form.” The scientist turned the box over and poured out a small pile of dust.

“It all turns into dust?” somebody asked in a voice loud enough to be heard above the chaotic chatter.

“This is all that we have left from the scientific instrument that was captured three days ago. As you can see, the instrument has nearly completed the entropic cycle.” The rectangular stone he held up looked like an oversized brick. “Everything the aliens create ultimately reverts back to tachyons and evaporates.”

“And what are tachyons?” the Army general asked.

“Tachyons? Why, tachyons are one of the great mysteries of science. They are a class of particle that is too small and fast for us to detect. We have no way of proving tachyons exist, but all of the data we have collected from the aliens are consistent with our understanding about the properties of tachyons.”

“Wait. Wait a moment, Doctor,” the little Army general shouted, once again leaping to his feet. “So you do not know if anything you have told us is accurate? It’s all your opinion? Is that right?”

“The …the data support our theory,” the scientist said.

“Subatomic particles?” the Air Force general asked. “Tachyons are subatomic particles?”

“Yes, sir. Tachyons are particles that move at a speed greater than the speed of light. Theoretically, it takes a great deal of energy to bond these particles in place. We have been able to measure enormous amounts of energy released by these body parts and this weapon as they degrade.

“I can try to explain the mechanics of this, but—”

“I’ll take your word for it,” the general said. “It doesn’t matter anyway. We defeated them. Killed them, broke them …it really doesn’t matter.” Taking a moment to look back at the officers around him, the Army general smirked and said, “My colleagues in the Marine Corps degraded a lot of tachyons this afternoon.”

The audience laughed.

“If our theory is correct, General, over the next seventy-two hours the avatars will simply reassemble,” the scientist said.

The laughter stopped.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The picture on the screen was a familiar one. It showed three Mudders in their glowing form—the form that Morgan Atkins had labeled “Space Angels”—as they emerged from one of those light spheres in the forest. The picture might have been downloaded off any of my men’s visors, but I suspected it was taken from mine.

“From what we can tell, the illuminated fields shown in this feed act as incubation chambers. We were initially stymied as to how the fields functioned, then Raymond provided the missing pieces for us to form a theory.” The scientist paused to smile at Freeman, who, of course, did not respond.

The picture of the Mudders vanished from the screen, replaced by a close-up view of the glass dish with the bullets on the table. “These bullets passed through the alien incubation field,” said the scientist.

Passed through? I thought. It made it sound like Freeman tossed them through the sphere instead of firing them into a nearby tree.

“The energy inside this field was so intense that it altered the composition of the bullets. Before entering the field, they were composed of a lead-and-steel alloy coated with Teflon. After passing through the field, the Teflon fused with the steel.

“When the spent bullets were first retrieved, they glowed almost exactly the way that the avatars glowed when they emerged from the field. Over the next few hours, the bullets attracted trillions of tachyon particles out of the atmosphere. By the time Raymond delivered the bullets to us, the tachyons had formed a cylindrical crust around them.

“Because the bullets passed through the field in a matter of milliseconds, they did not receive the prolonged charge necessary to form a lasting bond.”

The scientist looked up at the screen again. He ran the video feed of the three glowing aliens a second time. As the last alien stepped out of the sphere, he froze the feed.

“If our hypothesis is correct, the avatars leave the field as a mass of energy so powerful it is able to attract tachyon particles out of the atmosphere and bond them together.”

“So the particles, these tachyons things, are forming a skin around a creature made of energy? Is that your point?” one of the generals asked.

“Not a creature—a signal,” the scientist said. “Remember, the beings you have encountered are only avatars, representations of creatures in another location.” He smiled nervously, exposing enormous teeth that might have looked more at home in the mouth of a horse.

“But you said these same particles are what make their guns? That doesn’t make sense to me. Their guns are too complex. How can they come together to make the working parts of a light rifle?” This question came from the Air Force section. I heard no sarcasm in the tone.

“These creatures appear to have the ability to manipulate tachyon particles on a fundamental level. From what we have been able to determine, it appears the particulate matter that is attracted to the avatars remains constant while the particles that arrange themselves into the weapon re-form themselves into a wide array of materials.”

“Come again?” one of the generals asked.

The scientist thought for a moment, then said, “The tachyons arrange themselves into wires, prisms, or whatever materials are needed to create those guns.”

“So you know what’s inside those rifles? Can we duplicate them?” the Army general asked.

“No, the rifles had degraded to mostly dust by the time we received them,” said the scientist.

“Just to be sure I understand this, you have no idea how they work?” the general asked.

“No, sir,” said the scientist.

This caused yet another chaotic outburst, generals not so much arguing as agreeing with each other that the information in this briefing had re-formed itself into a colossal waste of time.

The briefing lasted another twenty minutes. When it ended, the officers filed out of the room. “Well, gentlemen, you have just seen your tax dollars at work,” General Glade said in a wry voice as he passed the Army contingent. “An hour wasted and millions of dollars spent just so some egghead scientist could tell us what Lieutenant Harris discovered three days ago—that we have to break these, these, Avatar bastards instead of killing them. There’s a breakthrough for the history books.”

Glade’s reference to the “Avatars bastards” was the first time anyone used the term “Avatar” as if it referred to a race. I liked it; it sounded a hell of a lot better than Mudder. Hearing his comment, the Army brass laughed.

For once the Army and Marines seemed to agree about something.

I didn’t laugh, though. I didn’t mind Glade, he was more respectful than most of the officers I had served under; but he had to be pretty thick if he didn’t understand the implications. If we really were fighting avatars of aliens instead of the aliens themselves, Glade had just lost one-fifth of his command without so much as denting the enemy.

We walked out of the science building and into the blinding glare of the ion curtain, which, according to that scientist, was also composed of tachyon particles. The auditorium had been dark and warm. Out here, the frosty air braced my skin, and I had to shade my eyes to see in the tachyon-charged atmosphere. It looked more like 1300 hours than 2200.

Could all of the brass have been that obtuse, I wondered. None of them seemed to understand. The generals chatted on the university lawn for another ten minutes, then Glade took his entourage and climbed into his car.

“Hey, maybe if the Mudders are like representations of creatures …What if …? What if the real aliens are so wrapped up in their avatars that they die when we kill the avatar off?” Glade’s aide/driver asked as he started up the car.

Glade, who had clearly lapsed into a foul mood, grimaced. “What kind of stupid idea is that?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” the man said, sounding a bit embarrassed. “I’m just trying to expand the matrix.”

“Did you see the look on General Newcastle’s face when that Freeman came down from the stage?” another staffer asked. The question sounded pandering, as if he wanted to change the subject and maybe flatter Glade by making fun of a rival general. “I thought he was going to piss his pants right on the spot.”

“Freeman, he’s a piece of work,” said the first staffer. “I hear he ran for the hills the moment the shooting started this morning.”

I could feel myself tensing. The asshole had fought the war from behind the guarded walls of Base Command; he had no right to judge men who went to the field. He was my superior, but he was full of shit. I was about to tell him what I thought, but General Glade spoke first, “You know, son, when you don’t know what you’re talking about, you really should keep quiet. That way you won’t make such an ass of yourself.”

The mood around the hotel was somber when we returned. My men had not been told about Avatars or tachyons in their briefing—that was highly classified information for a highly privileged few—but they had heard numbers. Marines judge battles by results. When my men heard that eighty thousand men died killing fifty thousand aliens, it sent a chill through the company.

There were a few wounded—men who broke an arm or a leg in the charge. But every Marine who got shot by the aliens died. It was the shock that killed them—whether they were shot in the head or the foot, the shock killed them as surely as it had killed Huish.

“Where were you?” Moffat asked me, as I left the company’s barracks on my way to my quarters.

“I attended a different briefing,” I said.

“You had orders to attend the briefing with your company,”

Moffat said. He had not raised his voice yet, but I could tell his blood was up.

“No, sir, you had orders to attend the briefing with the company. General Glade gave me different orders,” I said. “Perhaps you should take it up with him.”

“General Glade?” he asked. “Why wasn’t I invited?”

“I have a better question,” I said. “Why was I invited? From what I could tell, the briefing was for generals and their staffs.”

Moffat thought about this for a moment. Though I tried to downplay it, there was an implicit threat in what I said. If I was invited to that meeting, it meant that at least one of those generals wanted me around. Since Moffat was not invited, it meant that none of the generals knew he existed. As he considered this, he took a step back, and the muscles along his jaw relaxed.

“Care to share anything that you learned?” he asked.

I shook my head. “I wish I could, sir,” I said. For what it was worth, I sincerely did wish I could discuss the briefing with Moffat and every man in the company. I did not like it when officers kept potentially important information from the men who needed it most, the ones who put their lives on the line.

“You will tell me what you can, when you can?” Moffat asked. His belligerence had melted away. I think he recognized that I had heard something that genuinely rocked me—something even more disturbing than the casualty figures.

I nodded.

“I need you to rearrange the roster; Command wants volunteers to guard the Hen House,” Moffat said. “The paperwork is in the company office. They want our roster within the hour.” We traded salutes, and Moffat walked off, still a prick, but a prick who knew when to back down.

Most of the company was out for the night. With so many Marines dead, they would keep the celebrations subdued, but as far as they knew, they had not only just won a battle, they might have won the war. Heavy losses or not, they had the right to celebrate. I could have gone into town and joined them, but I knew the truth—we were in worse trouble than ever, and, at the moment, I could not bring myself to drink with guys whom I might shortly betray. When the Avatars regenerated, I would send the men out thinking they were engaged in a fair fight against an enemy who could be killed. I was keeping secrets from men whose lives were on the line, and that made me no different than any natural-born officer.

I went to my company office and found the orders Moffat had left for me. They came directly from Major Terry Burton, our battalion commander.

Leaning back in my chair, I picked the orders up off the desk and read. Burton had not attended the briefing at the Science Lab, but he knew the score. These were orders for every platoon in our regiment to provide three men to protect the Hen House. That was the name we gave the compound in which the officers kept their wives and families. These were the kinds of orders you gave when you needed to dig in and hold your position.

I listed Herrington, Skittles, and Philips. I chose Herrington because of all the men in my platoon, he was the one who pushed himself the hardest. He needed a break. I sent Skittles because I liked the kid, and I thought he would have better odds protecting the Hen House than on the front line. As for Philips, this was my chance to do something with him before he got himself killed. Muttering to myself about this being Philips’s lucky day, I keyed the new roster into the computer and forwarded it to Base Command.

When they returned from their night out, Philips, Herrington, and Skittles would find new orders waiting for them on their racks. They would fly out to the Hen House first thing in the morning.

As I sat at the duty desk, I considered all that had happened that day. I felt tired and hungry, so I went to the mess and ate a good dinner. Then I returned to my quarters and climbed into bed.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

We held the funeral at 0600 the following morning.

The Army guarded the city while the Marines buried their dead. More than three hundred thousand Marines—enlisted men in white combat armor, officers in dress uniforms—assembled in rows as straight as razor blades, standing still as grave markers as they waited for the honored to arrive. We used a city park with four baseball diamonds, two soccer fields, and a long stretch of rolling pasture for our assembly. The Corps of Engineers removed the fences and goals from the various fields to create a large enough contiguous space to accommodate us all.

We stood at attention, facing an enormous stage on which sat General Glade, the highest-ranking Marine on New Copenhagen, General Morris Newcastle, the Army commander who had made such an ass of himself at the briefing in the Science Lab, and General James Hill, representing the Air Force. Along with the generals sat twenty-five civilians in dark suits—five turned out to be U.A. senators who had flown in to oversee the battle preparations, five were local politicians, and the other fifteen were their bodyguards.

“Ten-hut!”

We snapped to attention.

An honor guard marched in bearing flags—the flag of the Unified Authority, the banner of the Orion Arm, the flag of New Copenhagen, the ceremonial flag of the Confederate Arms, and the red-and-gold standard of the Unified Authority Marine Corps.

A horse came forward pulling an antique caisson bearing the flag-draped coffin of a single unknown Marine. This man would be buried here. Should we survive this battle, a monument would follow. The other eighty thousand fallen were on their way to an industrial-strength crematory, likely a glass factory or some other location with an oven and an assembly line. The horse hung its head as it dragged the caisson. Steam formed around the horse’s nose when it exhaled. The wheels of the wagon cut a groove through the soggy grass and snow.

Three columns of servicemen carrying antique bolt-action rifles marched behind the caisson. The Marine honor guard marched on the right, the Air Force marched on the left, and the Army honor guard formed the column in the middle.

Next came the pledges, the oaths, and the prayers, followed by the speeches. One by one, they all stood up and spoke …every last self-important man on that specking stage except for the bodyguards. The generals took precisely five minutes each. The politicians took ten or fifteen. The entire service took three hours.

I heard the speeches via the interLink, each voice rolling around in my helmet like a song you can’t tune out. From the opening bugle to the closing remarks, I heard it all as clearly as if I had been sitting on the stand.

Snow started to fall. Heavy inch-wide flakes drifted down from the sky, first in a scattered dusting, then in a heavy bombardment.

After the speeches came a twenty-one-gun salute performed by the servicemen who marched behind with the caisson.

“Ready!” shouted the colonel leading the salute.

The men raised the antique rifles in perfect unison.

“Aim!”

They fixed their sites on the same invisible target.

“Fire!”

Twenty-one rifles fired as one, shattering the perfect silence. The horse drawing the caisson started, but it did not buck.

“Ready!”

The men snapped the bolts back and loaded another round.

“Aim!”

They raised their rifles.

“Fire!”

They fired again, then repeated the process one last time.

The bugler blew “Taps.” I could not hear that music without thinking of the men with whom I had served. I thought of Vince Lee, my first real friend. I thought about Fleet Admiral Bryce Klyber and Sergeant Tabor Shannon, both great men in their times. One was natural-born and died a hero, the other a Liberator and died heroically.

The color guard left, the politicians left, then the generals departed. The fighting men were the last to leave. It took half an hour for us to file off the field.

What was happening on Earth? I wondered. They could not know that eighty thousand men had died in a single day of battle, nor could they know the utter meaninglessness of those deaths. Hell, only a handful of men on this planet knew that we could not kill this enemy. Did anybody care what happened to a few thousand clones back on Earth? For all I knew, they were fighting for their lives as well.

Despite our spearhead role in the battle, my company had lost only twenty-three men. That may sound like a lot, but it was only one-sixth of our men. During the latter part of the battle, some companies lost entire platoons.

When I returned to the barracks after lunch, I saw the “holes”—the stripped racks and emptied lockers of men who had died. They left a temporary scar. By the end of the day, Base Command would rearrange the roster. The platoons with the heaviest losses would be disbanded, their men sent to other platoons to fill the holes. Since we lost so few men, we would receive survivors from some of those disbanded units. In the past, our commanders would have sent us new recruits fresh out of boot camp, but there were no new recruits left on New Copenhagen by this time. We were all veterans.

“It’s not over yet, is it?” Sergeant Thomer came to meet me when he saw me enter the barracks.

“I don’t see how this can end as long as they have that light field around the planet. We’re still trapped. They’re still out there …”

“Do you think they will send a bigger army next time, sir?” Thomer asked.

“Let’s grab a cup of coffee,” I said. Then, as we left the barracks, I told him the things I could not tell him in front of the other men. “As long as the Mudders have those light spheres, there’s nothing stopping them from sending in more soldiers.”

Thomer took a long, deep breath as he tried to still himself. We headed down to one of the hotel restaurants—in use as a mess hall. “They let you in on more about this than the rest of us, didn’t they?”

“Probably,” I said.

“But you can’t talk about it.”

“Probably not,” I said.

“But it’s bad,” Thomer guessed.

“I’m not going to talk about it,” I said. “But it isn’t good.” We entered the mess. The place was empty this late in the morning. In another hour, the early-lunch crowd would roll in—assuming we were not heading back out to the front. Only a few men waited in the cafeteria line. We stood alone by Coffee Machine Row, filling our mugs and speaking in the relative privacy.

“One of the guys, Boll maybe, thought the Mudders might take down the curtain if we hit them hard enough …You know, maybe drop the curtain so they can land more men. He figures the Navy has ships circling the planet and they’ll drop off supplies and men once the curtain goes down,” Thomer said. “Does that sound possible?”

Supplies. I had forgotten all about supplies. “The military can’t afford to waste men or bullets,” Admiral Brocius had said as he handed me his pistol, and he was right. How many rockets had the Army fired as they defended the Vista Street bunker? How many did they have left? This much I knew—during that last battle, we had lost one-fifth of our Marines.

“I would not know anything about that, Sergeant,” I told Thomer. “I hope you are right, though. I hope we can get more men and supplies.”

We went to sit down at a secluded table. “What about the rest of the men?” I asked. “How is your platoon holding up?”

“Most of them think we won,” Thomer said.

“We did,” I said.

“Won the war,” Thomer clarified.

“Yeah, well, we certainly won the battle,” I said.

“I don’t get that feeling,” Thomer said. “You know something, and I know better than to ask what it might be.” He stared into my face, trying to read me.

“I need you to keep your suspicions to yourself,” I said. “Troop morale is strong right now, let’s keep it that way.”

I finished my coffee. I drank it black, strong and hot. It tasted good, fairly fresh. As I started to leave, Thomer asked, “Some of the guys moved out this morning. I heard you signed them up for some kind of guard duty.”

“Battalion command wanted a detail to guard the Hen House,” I said. “I figured it might be a smart idea to send Philips with them …get him out of the line of fire until he gets his head straight.”

Thomer placed his cup down on the counter and stared at me. He looked angry, maybe exasperated. “The compound for officers’ families?” he asked. “Are you shitting me? Please tell me that you’re joking.”

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

“A few years ago, Philips nearly got himself court-martialed for screwing around with some officer’s wife. Officers’ wives are his favorite brand of scrub.”

“Shit,” I said.

Thomer said nothing.

I thought about calling him back and sending a replacement but opted against it. Depressed as he was, scrub would probably be the last thing on his mind. At least that was what I told myself.

The Army continued repairing its bunkers and servicing its rocket launchers. Apparently the Avatars had broken through our lines somewhere near Vista Street. If the rumors were true, they shot so many holes into a small section of bunker that it caved in under its own weight.

Since we Marines were technically an invasion force, we had nothing to rebuild. Every company in the Marines had a platoon assigned to support ops, and they performed any rebuilding or refurbishing we needed done.

Except for the latrine scrubbers and potato peelers in the support platoon, the company had too little to do while we waited for the next attack. Some men spent their free time roving around Valhalla. I decided to go back out to the spheres, the place General Glade now called “Camp Avatar.” I wasn’t looking for a fight, per se, but I did want to leave the Avatars a housewarming present.

Before leaving, I needed to locate Ray Freeman to ask if he wanted to join me on this excursion. Unfortunately, I could not find him. I left messages at Base Command and the Science Lab then went to requisition some hardware.

Upon taking control of the property, the Marines converted the hotel’s underground parking facility into an armory. Riding the elevator down reminded me of heading through a department store. The sign on the first floor of the garage said, “Combat Armor and Small Arms.” Second floor—“Rockets, Mortars, and Grenades.” Third floor—“Motor Pool: Tanks, Jackals, Jeeps, ATVs, and Robots.”

When I asked the supply officer on the third floor what I might find on the lower floors, he said, “You don’t want to go down to the fourth.” Then he leaned over his duty desk, and whispered, “There are enough nukes down there to fry this entire planet. We might lose this battle, but we are not going to lose the war, if you know what I mean.”

“Aren’t you worried about leaks?” I asked. The officer was wearing fatigues that offered no protection against radiation.

“Not me,” he said. “What’s the worst that can happen—I start shooting blanks? Sounds like a beni in my book. Those guys who designed the clones had it right from the start. ‘Copulate, don’t populate.’ Heh. Words to live by.”

I pretended to laugh. I, of course, was a clone. So was the duty officer, though the dolt would never so much as suspect it. With a mind like his, the death reflex was the least of this guy’s worries.

“Look,” I said, “I want to check out a Jackal and three trackers.”

“The trackers are no problem, sir, but I’ll need authorization before I can give you a Jackal,” he said. “For anything bigger than a motorcycle, I need approval from Base Command.”

A communications console sat on the desk. I reached toward it, paused, and asked, “Will General Glade do?”

“Sure,” the duty officer said with a snide smile. “You just ring up your old pal J. P. Glade and get his approval.”

I punched in the code, and Glade’s assistant appeared on the screen. I asked to speak to the general—it never pays to aim low—and the aide sent me up the ladder to a captain, who passed me to a major, who sent me to one of the colonels who attended the briefing at the Science Lab.

“What is it, Harris?” he asked.

“I need to requisition some equipment, sir,” I said.

“You’re calling the general’s line for a requisition?” the colonel sounded incredulous.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I’m down here in the Armory, and—”

“Put the duty officer on,” the colonel snapped.

“Right here, sir,” he said, his voice nearly cracking.

The colonel looked at the duty officer, and said, “What the hell is the matter with you, boy? Give the lieutenant anything he wants. You got that?” Then he ended the connection.

I drove out of the garage with a Jackal, three trackers, an M27, two particle-beam cannons, and three combat helmets. Anyone else would have spliced video cameras into the trackers, but I knew nothing about electronics. I broke things; I did not splice them.

Before leaving, I returned to my quarters to put on my armor. I found a message from Freeman on my communications console, so I called him back and told him what I had in mind. He said he wanted to come along. An hour later, Freeman showed up wearing his custom-made oversized combat armor, and we drove into the woods just north of town.

We drove in silence—Freeman observing everything we passed and me holding a silent conversation with myself. No surprise. I had learned years ago that time spent in the company of Ray Freeman was lonelier than time spent completely alone.

The Jackal handled just like a jeep, though it had a lot more power. It had built-in radar. A screen on the dashboard showed an overhead readout of the world around us. Remembering how the Avatars’ light bolts had shot through these vehicles as if they were made of papier-mâché, I did not bother with the retractable armor. If we ran into aliens, the armor would not protect us.

“What do you think it will take to win this thing?” I finally asked. We had been driving for half an hour.

“What makes you think we can win?” Freeman asked.

“Do your scientist friends have any ideas?” I asked.

“Sweetwater thinks we can win, but he has no idea how,” Freeman said.

“Who?”

“Dr. Sweetwater, he’s the head of the Science Lab.”

“Was he the guy who gave the briefing?” I asked.

“That was Dr. Breeze.”

I programmed in the path our convoy had taken on the way to the battle. That got us deep into the woods, where we slowed down to a mere twenty miles per hour, just fast enough to present a difficult target should we run into trouble.

“Sweetwater thinks we might stop them from coming back if we can block their signal,” Freeman said.

“Block their signal?” I said. “Then what happens?”

“Nothing happens,” Freeman said. “The invasion gets unplugged.”

“Wow, unplug an invading army. I like it. Can he really do that?” I asked.

Freeman did not answer my question.

We bounced over a stream. Trees shot by on either side of the Jackal. Our radar showed no signs of enemy vehicles or armies, just open woods and lots of trees. Of course, I had no idea if the radar could detect an Avatar. “Looks like we have the forest to ourselves,” I said as I stopped the Jackal. According to my map, we were still a few hundred yards from the spheres.

The new snow had not yet settled to the ground. Hoarfrost coated the trees, and mostly frozen mud covered most of the ground. Freeman did a visual scan of the area and nodded. We parked and unpacked the equipment.

“Why did you bring these helmets?” Freeman asked, lifting one of the helmets, then tossing it back in the bay.

“Surveillance,” I said.

“Isn’t that why they make surveillance cameras?” Freeman asked. He carried all three trackers and both particle-beam cannons and the M27 in the crook of his left arm while keeping his particle-beam pistol at the ready in his right hand. He left the helmets for me.

I rolled the helmets into a rucksack and closed the back of the Jackal. “Security cameras work great if you know how to install them.”

“They clip right on to the tracker. Where are you going to place the helmets?”

“I haven’t thought about it,” I said.

“You’re an officer, you could have had a tech install them,” Freeman said.

“This way I can watch what happens on the interLink. I registered the helmets up as members of my platoon.”

Freeman shook his head.

“What’s the matter?”

“You’re setting this up so you can watch over the interLink? Limited range, unstable signal …”

Freeman was right. With the interLink’s limited range, the Hotel Valhalla would be on the outer reach of good reception. “What kind of range would I get with a surveillance camera?” I asked.

“Unlimited,” Freeman said. He wasn’t being rude or snappy. For him, this was downright chatty.

“How do you access the signal?” I asked.

“Satellite telemetry,” Freeman said.

“A satellite signal? Will it get through the curtain?”

Other men might have stopped to slap their forehead or curse. Ray Freeman kept walking. “No, it would not get through,” Freeman finally said.

“I didn’t think so,” I said. “With the planet sleeved, you’d just get static.”

“You might not get anything,” Freeman said. He sounded distant now, his mind was on other things.

We crossed a particularly dense grove of trees, then the foliage thinned. The bright glare of one of the spheres showed above the light from the curtain. As we approached, though, I saw that the trees around the sphere had begun to wither. The area looked like it had been exposed to radiation or toxic chemicals. The needles in the pine trees had turned from emerald green to a sickly lime green color.

The row of trees closest to the portal took the worst of it. They had clearly died. Their rust-colored needles looked hard as nails, and their bark had faded nearly white. I got the feeling that the rigid branches would shatter like glass long before they would snap.

In a normal military facility, you would find guards. Even when armies launched an all-out assault, they kept guards around their camps. The Avatars did not leave guards, however. They really did not need them since they had nothing to steal and nothing to break. Hell, technically speaking, they had never even set foot on the planet.

Freeman placed two of the trackers on the ground, then started to plant the third a few feet from the sphere.

“Not there,” I said, remembering how the sphere dilated as it generated troops. “It’s too close. The sphere might spread over it.”

Without saying a word, Freeman wrapped his hand around the shaft of the tracker and pulled it out of the ground. He stepped back twenty feet or so and drove it into the ground a second time.

I picked up one of the two trackers Freeman had laid in the mud. I would arm this one with the M27. I had a pretty good idea what would happen when it opened fire, but I needed to make sure. I carried the robotic sentry beyond the first row of trees, trees that were completely dead from exposure to the sphere. I considered leaving it here, then decided to take it back farther. There would be plenty of time to experiment with the effects of direct exposure to the spheres.

I went about thirty feet away from the clearing where the trees seemed to have suffered only mildly from the effects of the sphere. Turning to make sure that the tracker would have an unobstructed view of the target, I stabbed the shaft into the frozen soil.

“You want them grouped?” Freeman asked me.

“We’ll call this one twelve o’clock. Place the others at four and eight,” I said.

“That leaves one tracker where they’ll find it,” Freeman warned me.

“Yes,” I agreed. “I don’t think they’ll notice it.”

Freeman stabbed the last tracker into the ground.

We could not place the combat helmets on the tops of the tracking poles. The top was taken up by a motion-tracking sensor housed in a four-inch ball. We placed the helmets at the feet of the trackers, then I used optical commands to tap into each helmet and check its view of the sphere.

“So where are the Avatars right now?” I asked as we left the clearing.

“Probably in there,” Freeman said, sparing once last glance back at the energy spheres.

“I wonder if they know we are out here?” I asked. When Freeman shrugged, I added, “You never know, maybe tachyons have eyes.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

We did not hear from the Avatars for two more days. They returned on the morning of the third day.

The day began with Corporal Boll pulling the first watch duty. That meant that he spent three hours sitting in front of an interLink-compatible command console. The console had forty-five five-inch screens, enough to assign one to each member of the platoon. We only used three of those screens, one for each of the helmets we left by the spheres. At 0300 hours, Thomer sent a man to replace Boll. At 0600, a third man took over. The spheres came to life at 0637.

The alarm rang on the communications console beside my bed. When I answered, Thomer said, “Lieutenant Harris, you better get down here, sir.”

“The Mudders?” I asked.

“The spheres are getting bigger,” Thomer said.

I rolled out of bed and punched up Freeman. “Freeman,” I said, “it’s on.”

“Can you record it?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“I’ll get there as quick as I can.” By the sound of things, he’d left the hotel but had not gone very far. I did not have time to think about it.

Barely taking the time to throw on my uniform, I headed for the ballroom barracks. I passed Lieutenant Moffat in the hall. Definitely an aging athlete, Moffat had just come in from a long run in the cold. His face was pink, and his bristly hair was clumped with sweat. He looked winded but not exhausted. He wore the general-issue shorts and T-shirt of the Marines, his perspiration making the shirt adhere to his chest.

“Where are you going?” he asked in an accusing tone.

“Freeman and I left the Mudders a surprise by their base,” I said. Personally, I preferred the term “Avatar,” but Moffat was not among the elite group cleared to hear it. As far as he was concerned, the aliens were still “Mudders,” and we were able to kill them.

“Who authorized that action?” Moffat asked. The man could not help himself, acting like a prick came naturally to him.

“General Newcastle, General Glade …Freeman pretty much has carte blanche around here,” I said, trying to sound oblivious to the fact that I had gone over Moffat’s head. Then I decided to offer an olive branch. “They’re just beginning to arrive,” I said. “Want to watch?”

“What did you leave there?” Moffat asked, interest edging his voice.

“I left a couple of helmets. We’re watching ground zero over the interLink.”

“Are you heading over to General Glade’s office?”

“No, sir. This was strictly a personal experiment,” I said. “We have a command console set up in the barracks.”

“Nice, Harris. Very nice.” Moffat used that line so often that it sounded worse than canned.

We took the elevator to the mezzanine and trotted into the Valkyrie Ballroom. By this time a crowd had formed around the console. Men in boxers and undershirts were pushing in for a look. Moffat and I cut through the crowd.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“The sphere is getting real big,” Boll said. “We haven’t seen any Mudders yet.”

“Is that where the Mudders come from?” Moffat asked. His mouth formed a strange sneer, the kind of fascinated repulsion you might see on a little girl as she watched a spider eating its prey. “What are those things?”

“I’m guessing it’s a broadcast device,” I said, lying and not looking back to see if Moffat took the bait.

Avatars appeared. First they showed as gold-colored smudges. I held my breath. In another moment, the aliens would step out of their incubator, and the trackers would open fire. With any luck, the particle beams would shred them.

The first row of Avatars took shape and strode out of the sphere. Nothing happened. The trackers did not open fire.

“Whose idea was it to place helmets out there?” Moffat asked, his eyes riveted to the screen.

“My idea, sir.” It took me a few seconds to answer. I was distracted. Why weren’t the trackers firing? What was wrong with them?

“Having cameras around ground zero was a good idea, Harris. I’m surprised the Science Lab didn’t come up with it,” Moffat said.

“They did.” Freeman’s low rumbling voice rolled over us. “They placed radars and cameras out there four days ago, but the experiment failed.”

“Satellite telemetry?” I asked, remembering the conversation we had as we placed the trackers.

Freeman did not answer. He did not need to answer. One thing about Ray Freeman, he only spoke when he saw the need. I looked away from the monitor just long enough for a quick glance at him. He stood just behind the crowd, towering over the rest of us. No expression showed on his dark face. His lips were pressed together, and his eyes were focused hard on the screens.

Around the console, Marines chattered back and forth as they watched; but I filtered out most of what they said. I concentrated instead on the three screens.

“Too bad you didn’t stick some trackers out there as well—maybe you could have massacred those bastards as they climbed out of their shell,” Moffat said. I heard lots of agreement among the men.

“We did,” I said.

By this time, dozens of Avatars had emerged from the sphere, maybe even hundreds. The trackers should have opened fire.

“We did place trackers, trackers armed with particle-beam cannons,” I said.

“Did you forget to switch them on or something?” Moffat asked. Like the rest of us, he did not look away from the screen as he spoke.

“They’re not detecting motion,” Freeman said.

“What is that supposed to mean?” Moffat asked. “I’ve seen trackers D-and-D a specking grasshopper from three hundred yards off.” “D-and-D” was Marine-speak for “detect and destroy.”

Freeman ignored Moffat.

“What are those things?” someone else asked.

“They’re the Mudders,” said Boll.

“They aren’t anything like the bastards I saw,” the first Marine said. He sounded confused, maybe even scared.

Then came the sirens signaling the call to quarters. “Suit up,” Moffat shouted.

I, of course, had to run back to my room to get my armor. As I headed for the door, I heard Moffat shout, “Hey, Harris, not bad.” He smiled and nodded his head. “Not bad.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

As the Avatars left their spheres, they took substance, and the early-warning radars that the Corps of Engineers rigged in the forest read movements that our trackers missed. As the Klaxons rang through the Hotel Valhalla, Base Command circulated the battle report. An estimated fifty thousand Mudders were headed toward town.

Freeman and I were not the only ones who came up with the idea of using trackers. Trying to find ways to whittle the aliens’ numbers down before we met them, the Corps of Engineers placed a number of booby traps along the path that the aliens had used in their previous attacks. The Corps planted a small grove of trackers along the top of a ten-foot rise one mile in from the spheres.

Their trackers worked no better than the ones that Freeman and I left behind. The Avatars had not picked up enough substance for the Corps’ sensors to detect them. A half mile later, however, they passed another bank of trackers. By this time enough tachyons had attached themselves to the Avatars for motion sensors to read their movements. They opened fire with particle-beam cannons and M27s, dropping hundreds of Avatars as they marched by. The aliens retaliated, cutting the robots down with their light rifles.

The Corps of Engineers had placed canisters of noxium gas in one secluded glade. As the Avatars entered, the Corps released the flesh-eating gas, but it had no effect on the aliens as they had no flesh. Any deer or rabbits unlucky enough to meander into that glade, however, would have been reduced to soup.

The Army began its first rocket barrage while the Avatars were still out in the forest. They hauled out the big guns this time, surface-to-surface rockets that combined explosive procession and incineration. By the time the Avatars finally reached the edge of town, their army was down to no more than twenty-three thousand, a force that our soldiers dispatched from the Vista Street bunker with small rockets and machine guns.

Two regiments of Marines were sent into the woods to flush out and finish any stragglers, but there were no stragglers. The Avatars pressed forward into the line of fire until every last one of them was dead or broken.

We only lost twelve hundred men during the third battle for Valhalla, but our armory was severely depleted.

The rank and file did not know it, but they were on a sinking ship. Enlisted men and officers alike went out to celebrate yet another easy victory, but those of us who knew the score did not participate. Our ship had struck an iceberg, but it was sinking so slowly that the passengers didn’t realize it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Sweetwater and Breeze …

Arthur Breeze, you will recall, stood a bony six feet four and could not have even weighed 150 pounds. His skull was the size of a watermelon, and his teeth would have fit on a horse, but the rest of his body vanished in the lab coat that hung from his shoulders. The lenses on his glasses were a half inch thick, a collage of greasy fingerprints, dandruff, and shed hairs. Some people might have described him as “forehead bald,” but I think he stretched the term. If he was “forehead bald,” his forehead extended clear up to the crown of his head. What hair he had was a disorganized swatch of filament-fine white strands that formed a saddle-shaped band around his head.

Breeze was not the chief scientist at the Science Lab, he was the chief briefing officer. It did not take long to see that Breeze’s talents lent themselves more to science than presentations.

William Sweetwater, the top scientist at the lab, was a dwarf. He barely cleared the four-foot mark. He was too short to pass the height restrictions for a fast roller coaster in a theme park, not that he looked like the kind of man who went out for thrills. He had long, stringy black hair that hung down every side of his globe-shaped head. He had a potbelly and massive shoulders, like an athlete gone to seed. He stood more than two feet smaller than Breeze and probably outweighed the man by twenty pounds.

Until the moment William Sweetwater opened his mouth, I believed Arthur Breeze was the smartest man in the galaxy. But when Sweetwater spoke, everyone with any sense would shut up and listen.

The briefing took place in the basement of the science building. This time it was for generals and up, even their staffs had to wait outside. There were five generals on the planet—one from the Marines, three from the Army, and one very contrite general from the Air Force. Freeman attended as a consultant and invited me along for the ride.

“That was some shock you gave us, Harris.” Sweetwater looked at me as he said this.

“Us,” in this case, referred to Sweetwater alone. He generally spoke about himself in the plural. He had a high, crackly voice. “It never occurred to us to consider what effect the ion curtain might have on existing satellite communications.”

Sweetwater waddled around the room handing each visitor a five-page document. “This is a list of computer and communications systems that rely on satellite communications. Since the systems were not destroyed, we never got emergency messages; the signals just sort of blipped out.”

I scanned the list. There was the local mediaLink—the system that hosted current events, entertainment broadcasting, and a large portion of civilian messaging traffic. I saw an item on the list and smiled—the New Copenhagen Emergency Broadcast System relied on satellite transmissions.

“Most of these systems do not impact your operations,” Breeze said. His voice was low. He had the dried-out voice of a very old man, though he could not have been older than forty. “As Dr. Sweetwater pointed out, we didn’t even notice when they failed.”

“Raymond brought it to our attention,” Sweetwater said. I got the feeling that Sweetwater genuinely liked Freeman. He and his team were lab-coat intellectuals, men of science, not action. Freeman, a mercenary whose knowledge of science only extended to areas in which it impacted his work, must have impressed them as smarter than a soldier and braver than a scientist.

“We have rerouted most of these systems,” Sweetwater said. That “we” probably referred to his team of scientists and engineers. “Even the mediaLink is restored. Thanks to Dr. Breeze, the youth of New Copenhagen can once again watch mindless cartoons and sports shows.”

Breeze blushed and smiled—an ugly sight with those big teeth of his.

Looking over the list, I saw that it included the facility that managed the planetwide sewage system. I hoped the temporary blackout had not caused backwash—at least not in range of Valhalla.

“Have you restored the signal from the Seismic Activity Station?” Freeman asked as he flipped through the list.

“You noticed that, did you?” Sweetwater asked. “That was the one that concerned us the most. We expected to hear something if there was any activity anywhere on the planet. Of course, with the satellite link broken, we didn’t hear anything at all.”

Sweetwater walked over to a lab stool that was nearly as tall as he was and, with some effort, climbed high enough to sit down on it. “Maybe it was a lucky coincidence that we lost that signal. When we reestablished it, we did a little extra poking around to see if we had missed anything. The settings on the equipment were pretty low. The seismic station was mostly used for surveying earthquakes and volcanic activity.

“Dr. Breeze found a way to reroute the signal through a ground network, then he boosted the sensitivity. What a good piece of work that turned out to be.” Sweetwater turned and nodded to Breeze, who blushed a second time. “It turns out that there is a lot more going on around this planet than we previously thought.”

Sweetwater hopped off the stool.

Either the university did not have money for cutting-edge holographic displays, or Sweetwater preferred not to use them. The dwarf opened a cabinet and pulled out a two-foot-tall globe that looked enormous in his pudgy hands. The thing was half his size.

He placed the globe on a counter. Spinning the ball slowly, he got his bearings. “Marduck Mountains …okay …” he muttered. Then turning to his audience, he said, “This spot here is Valhalla.” He gave the globe a half turn and placed his thumb on a new spot. “We have discovered significant underground activity in this region. We will provide precise coordinates in our report. As you can see, the activity is occurring on this equatorial line. We do not know who is causing the disturbance.”

“If someone is digging on this planet, I think we can all guess who it might be,” General Newcastle said.

Looking at General Morris Newcastle up close, I didn’t like what I saw. He looked more like a cantankerous old man than a supreme commander, someone who bullied underlings and wore his power like a medal. Sweetwater spotted this as well. The difference between Sweetwater and Breeze was that while Breeze allowed Newcastle to intimidate him, Sweetwater had the smarts and the self-confidence to put the general in his place.

“If you know something that we don’t, General Newcastle, feel free to enlighten us,” Sweetwater snapped in a clear, impatient voice. The dwarf stood silent, a bored look on his face, as he waited for the Army general to reply.

“Well, it’s obvious who’s digging there. There are only two parties on this planet, us and the Avatars, and we sure as hell know that we aren’t digging.” Newcastle laughed. So did the other generals from the Army. They laughed alone.

“You may be right, General, but if you are, the Avatari seem more concerned about digging than beating your forces,” Sweetwater said. That was the first time I heard the term “Avatari.” I liked it. The term “avatar” referred to a virtual representation. “Avatari” was a name for an actual enemy, and it did not sound nearly as juvenile as “Mudders.”

“What do you mean?” Newcastle asked, his face red with anger.

“If the seismic readings are accurate, we estimate that the Avatari have a force of five hundred thousand, maybe even one million laborers, working in their underground site around the clock. Based on the numbers, it seems pretty obvious that they place more emphasis on clearing this underground site than beating your forces.”

Newcastle’s round face turned so red I thought he might have swallowed his tongue. He muttered something that sounded like, “You little runt,” then went silent. He stared down at Sweetwater, who, in turn, stared right back at him. Sweetwater met the general’s glare with a heavy-lidded expression.

“Excuse me,” General Glade interjected, “but do we know what the Avatari are digging for?”

“Frankly, we have no idea what they are looking for,” Sweetwater answered. “In fact, sending some men to investigate their dig site would be a wise precaution.”

Glade nodded, then looked over at me. “Harris, you up for that?”

“Now wait a …” General Newcastle began. “The Army …”

“I’ll go with you,” Freeman said. Newcastle fell silent.

“Sounds like it’s settled,” said Sweetwater. “Are there any questions?”

“Have you made any progress figuring out a way to kill these Avatari things?” Newcastle asked.

“It seems to me like you have a pretty good handle on that,” Sweetwater said, absolutely no trace of malice in his voice. “From what Arthur tells us, you broke their line in three hours with minimal casualties.”

“Are you aware of how many rockets we fired off?” General Newcastle asked. “If we keep using rockets at that rate, our supplies won’t last the week.”

“How low are we?” Hill, the Air Force general, asked.

“I’m down by a third on my STS supplies. I’ve got plenty of guns and grenades, and I’m doing all right on tanks. We’d be a lot better off if we could get your birds in the air,” Newcastle said.

“I already told you, the interference we get from the ion curtain has my boys grounded,” Hill said. “The flight computers in our fighters shut down at one thousand feet.”

“Fly low,” Newcastle said.

“Like you did with your gunships?” asked Hill.

“If your pilots can’t fly, maybe we should put them on the front line,” Newcastle said.

“Let’s play nice, boys,” Glade interrupted.

Newcastle exhaled deeply and nodded. “The way things are going now, it seems like the only way to beat the sons of bitches is to smother them with troops or throw fireworks at them. Combining the two doesn’t work so well—we end up losing a whole bunch of both.”

Glade shook his head. “I lost twenty percent of my troops last time I sent them in the forest. Two, three more battles like the one we had last week and I’ll be hurting for men.”

“We need another solution,” Newcastle told Sweetwater. “How long before you can have something for us?”

“What are you looking for?” Sweetwater asked.

“You say these Avatari just rebuild themselves every time we kill them? Fine. How long will it take you to find a way to stop them from rebuilding themselves?”

Taking a moment to consider the question, Sweetwater climbed back on his stool. His eyes never falling away from General Newcastle’s, he said, “We can’t even begin to guess.”

“Then what the hell good are you?” Newcastle shouted. “You might as well be up on the line.”

“We’re dealing with an entirely alien technology that we never even knew existed. For all we know, the laws of physics as we know them do not apply in their world.”

“The existence of tachyons was just a theory until the aliens landed,” added Arthur Breeze. “Our scientists did not have the technology to prove that they existed.”

“We need time,” Sweetwater said.

General Newcastle nodded and turned to the other generals. “We defend the Science Lab at all costs. If we’re going to win this thing, the answers are going to come from here.”

The other generals grumbled in agreement.

“So it comes down to men or matériêl,” General Glade said. “Which can we afford to give up first?”

“We burn through the men,” Newcastle said. “I’ll assign my white-haired privates to man the line for an attack or two. Time to thin the herd and conserve the rockets.”

I heard echoes in my head. I imagined every antisynthetic officer under whom I had ever served making similar decisions about clones. I imagined Admiral Thurston sending two thousand cloned Marines to a planet named Little Man, not for a battle as they had been told, but simply as bait. And I thought of Admiral Brocius stranding sixty thousand clone Marines on the Mogat home world as the planet melted around them.

Hearing the cavalier way in which the generals treated men and matériel, I felt a familiar angry pang. They judged everything in terms of expendability. First they would sacrifice the old clones, then the young ones, then the rockets, and finally the expendable natural-borns. Sooner or later, everything became expendable to these men except themselves.