opening in the center of the floor. The virtual dog tag identified him as Evans. “It’s like we’re invading a specking anthill,” he said, as I stared down as well.
It was like invading an anthill, except all of the ants had run for cover. The ground below us looked like a bedroom community. I saw buildings that looked like apartment complexes. I saw stores. What I did not see was people.
“Welcome to Planet HomeMo,” I said.
“HomeMo?” Evans asked.
“It’s short for Planetary Home of Morgan,” I said.
“That sounds like something Philips would say,” Evans said.
I laughed.
We stationed snipers around the railing to fire at anyone they saw on the level below. Then we forced the doors of the elevators open and sent men rappelling down the shafts to the next level. Other Marines lowered themselves from the balcony using rappel cords that created magnetic links with their suits, eliminating much of the muscle work. We needed to secure the area around the station and hold it. Nearly ten thousand Marines would have to pass through that elevator station. Even if we sent one hundred men through every minute, it would take us over an hour; and the Mogats were not going to wait around.
My men were among the first to drop to the next level. We hit the deck below and looked for enemies. We found the area abandoned. The sirens still blared their doleful warning. The people must have run for cover.
This was the civilian district. I saw four-story tenements in every direction. I saw roads and storehouses and medical clinics. The Mogats had built churches with steeples that stood thirty feet in the air.
With the exception of the landing, we had executed our invasion in an orderly way. The officers leading the attack knew their objectives and signaled them to their platoon leaders. A message signal flashed. As I turned toward the nearest tenement, a blue frame appeared around the building in my visor. A simple message appeared along the bottom of my visor: “CAPTURE OBJECTIVE.”
My men received the same message.
“Why the hell should we waste time capturing an apartment building?” Sergeant Evans asked.
“Stevens, hand me that rocket launcher,” I called to one of my men.
PFC Stevens, a grenadier, did as asked. He selected a handheld rocket launcher from his gear and gave it to me.
“Boys, this is the best-built home you will ever see,” I said as I hoisted the launcher to my shoulder, turned toward the tenement, and fired. There was a jolt to my shoulder and the rumble of the rocket. A moment later the smoke from the rocket hung across the open area like a fluffy white feather. The rocket’s contrail formed a shallow arc, then the rocket slammed into the target with a thunderous bang.
Smoke and flames flashed from the side of the building. There was no debris and the smoke cleared in seconds because the rocket did not so much as smudge the tenement.
“Harris, what happened?” the colonel barked.
“Just showing my men what we’re dealing with,” I said.
“We need that building in one piece,” the colonel warned me.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “One piece, sir.”
That rocket, which would have destroyed several city blocks back on Earth, had not so much as broken a window on the tenement. The building stood untouched.
“What the hell?” Evans asked.
“Shields,” I said. “They have shields protecting every building on this planet.”
“Every building?” Evans asked.
“So how the speck are we supposed to take a building with specking missile-proof shields?” Philips asked.
“I don’t think we’ll have much of a problem,” I said. “The shields are only on the outside walls. Once you get inside, everything is breakable.”
We moved as teams, taking corners, making sure every corner was secure, then moving ahead to the next. One of my fire teams flanked the rest of the platoon. If we entered a firefight, one team would pin the enemy down while the flanking team came around and attacked from the side. But the enemy had not yet arrived. They were not coming from across town. They were coming from the other side of a continent, possibly the other side of the planet. We would have time to dig ourselves in.
The apartment building had an open doorway, just like the spaceports and elevator stations. The Mogats had never been invaded. They did not expect an invasion. Until the moment we landed on their planet, they did not believe their enemies could reach them. As far as they knew, the Unified Authority was landlocked.
“Is it shielded inside, too?” Evans asked.
“No, just on the outside,” I said. I remembered the armory Illych and I blew up as we left the planet. “Hard on the outside.
“Evans, secure the first floor. Thomer, you’ve got the second floor. Greer, take your squad and secure the third. Got it?”
Evans’s squad ran in first. One of the men tossed a smoke grenade through the doorway. All three of Evans’s fire teams stormed into the building under the cover of the smoke.
“Evans, run a heat-vision sweep. What do you see?” I asked.
Moments later, he said, “This is a civilian dwelling.”
“Yeah,” I said, trying to sound as caustic as possible, “that’s who you find in civilian sectors.”
“There are people in the apartments, Master Sergeant,” he said.
“Flush them out,” I said. “We want the building to ourselves. Do you read me?” I was prepared to kill anyone who would not leave. We had come here to kill. But I did not relish the idea of killing women and children as they cowered in their apartments. I wanted minimum breakage.
As we cleared the apartment building, other platoons prepared in other ways. Demolitions teams placed mines on the train wells and traffic ramps. We hid snipers and grenadiers along the roads. We had time to burrow in, but I did not hold much hope. The same shields that protected the building would protect the trains and armored transports. We might derail a train or knock over a transport, but we had no prayer of defending ourselves until the Mogats’ shields were down.
I entered the tenement lobby. The last remnants of smoke still hung in the air. My men had trampled the lamps and smashed furniture on their way in. As I looked down a hall, I saw a Marine rifleman kick a door open and step back as his automatic rifleman charged in. A moment later a woman carrying a baby with three young children came galloping in my direction. All of their mouths hung wide open in panicked screams. Fortunately, the audio filters in my armor dampened the sound of their shrieks. I stepped out of their way, and they ran screaming through the lobby and out into the street.
The woman and her children were the first Mogat refugees. Over the next few minutes, dozens of people followed. Men, boys, women, girls, children alone, children with adults—I felt more like a bully than a Marine.
Gunfire echoed down the hall. There was a single shot followed by the rapid fire of an M27.
Those shots were a wake-up call. I ran down the hall and stopped by an open door in which one of my men stood pointing his weapon. Inside that apartment, a man lay sprawled on the ground in a kidney-bean-shaped puddle of blood.
“Report!” I shouted into the interLink.
“The guy had a gun,” the Marine said. Near enough to the corpse to be covered with blood, an old-fashioned automatic pistol lay on the floor.
“That was a bad choice on his part,” I said.
“Thomer, Greer, stay alert. Evans already found one Mogat packing a gun. There may be more in the building.”
Oh, there would be more guns in the building. The problem was, I felt bad for the dead guy. He was not an enemy soldier hunting my men. He was just someone protecting his property…just a guy with an old pistol trying to stand up to armor-clad Marines…a casualty of war.
I looked back at the body—an old man with gray-and-white hair dressed in an old T-shirt. There might be 200 million more like him on this planet.
