Marines understand exactly what it means when they receive the order to fall back. It means that your invasion has gone to shit. Fall back means that you cannot hold your position, and the situation has become critical. It means that the enemy is on your heels. It means stragglers will be captured or killed. Marines are trained to lead the way into battle. They don’t much care for the order to fall back.
Of all the Marines that landed on the Mogat planet, only my platoon had begun its retreat when the colonel gave the order to fall back. The rockets my guys fired from the building crippled a lot of Mogat hardware, and my gas had opened a route for them to escape.
The back door of the apartment building flew open, and out ran my platoon, or what remained of it. A twenty-man stampede. They ran straight ahead, straight into the clutter of bodies that filled the street. By this time the noxium had largely accomplished its purpose. Without so much as a glance at the ground, Sergeant Greer stepped into a corpse. He should have tripped over that dead soldier. Instead, he kicked through him.
Philips and I saw the scene from two blocks up the street. Our boys dashed out of the building. Moments later, another platoon followed. They could follow us if they liked, but I would not waste time waiting for them.
I jumped into the street, making a pinwheel motion with my arm to direct my men on. “Philips, take the lead,” I yelled. He knew the way to the elevator station. I had shown it to him in the Laundromat.
“You heard him,” Philips called over the interLink. With the platoon under fire, the lowest-ranking man took the lead. “This way…now move it!”
I had just joined Thomer at the back of the pack when the first of the Targs rounded a corner ahead of us. Its spotlight cut through the darkness. Its beam looked as hard and pale as a marble pillar. The light never found us; and inside the tank, the driver only saw what his spotlight showed him.
A moment later, one of our grenadiers fired a rocket at the Targ. After the explosion, the jagged remains of the turret looked like an enormous crown. Small fires danced on the top. I saw spotlights and headlights cruising back and forth on the streets around us. Those tanks should have had radars; but for some reason, the drivers were hunting for us by sight.
By this time we had almost reached the elevator station. The road we were on came to a dead end at the door of the station—which towered above everything around it. The elevator station reached all the way to the ceiling, a hundred feet above us. With the power down, I could now see a rough rock ceiling instead of a sky overhead.
Three Rumsfelds rolled out onto the street a thousand feet behind us. Their searchlights sniffed along the ground until they located Marines from the other platoon. Machine guns opened fire.
“Light ’em!” I yelled over the interLink.
My last remaining grenadiers spun and fired rockets at the tanks. One actually hit his target. The other two missed. At a thousand feet, a shot from the hip was too much to ask. They fired again and hit a second tank. Seeing the wreckage of the tanks on either side of it, the third Rumsfeld ambled for safety.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Philips called back to me. He had already reached the door of the elevator station. He stood in the doorway, letting other men pass him, his M27 pointing up the street. “Now they know we’re here.”
My training told me to stay on the street and clear the way for the other Marines. My programming ordered me to survive. The Mogats used Targ Tanks like wolves. They dodged in and out of alleys and streets, picking at groups of Marines, herding them away from the elevator station. There must have been thousands of tanks rumbling around the city. I might get some of them, but I would never get all of them. The most I could accomplish now was saving my men. By waiting and trying to save another platoon, I would only endanger the few men I had left.
I ran in the door of the elevator station and turned to see the street. I saw searchlights, tanks, and Marines in retreat. “Philips, Thomer, get them topside.”
There were no stairs in the elevator station. With the power down, the elevators would no longer work. Since we did not come with jetpacks, the only way up was using ropes. Fortunately, the magnetic link between our armor and the rappel cords would make the climb easier. Any man who could not climb those hundred feet would stay behind and die.
With the power out, I did not know if the gravity chute would work. All I could do was hope that it ran on a natural convection created by the distilled shit gas. On the other hand, I did not want to know what the gas might do to a transport.
A searchlight shone across the entrance of the elevator station. It was from a Rumsfeld at least a hundred yards away. The light formed a blinding circle that scoured the road outside the station, then shone on the door. I stepped back and hid behind a wall as the light played past me.
I looked back at the men. A few had started the climb. Most stood in front of the shaft, waiting their turn. “Any of you have rockets?” I called.
One of the men came over and handed me a launcher and three rockets. They were small, no bigger than my fist.
“Thanks,” I said. “Now get topside.”
Outside, the Rumsfeld moved toward the door of the station. I fired a rocket into it, and the tank somersaulted forward and landed on its turret.
I looked back again. All but three of my men had started up the shaft. Philips, Greer, and Thomer were still down, but I knew they could handle the climb. Seeing Philips grab a cord, I had to smile. We were going to make it out of this shit hole. More than half of my platoon would survive this mission.
A scattering of Marines saw the explosion and headed in our direction. Spotlights roved up and down the side streets. Gunfire and tank engines rumbled in my audio. I started to head toward the cords; but just as I did, I caught a glimpse of something that made me freeze.
At first I thought the Mogats had turned the power back on. In the distance, the civilian sector glowed brightly. The light that filled the sky was so bright that the lens in my visor switched from night-for-day to standard tactical. Tint shields clouded my visor when I looked directly into the glare.
The light did not come from the city, it came from behind it. It wasn’t just light. It wasn’t like the glow of a searchlight or even a thousand searchlights.
The light above the city constantly changed hues and pattern as if the reds, yellows, and blues separated and remixed with each other. Patterns of color rose like smoke out of the glow. It looked something like the aurora borealis, only enormous sparks flashed in it. For a moment I thought the light might be coming from the city itself. Maybe light happened when buildings made of distilled shit gas decomposed; but I did not have time to waste reasoning it out.
“Harris, you seeing this?” Freeman called over the interLink.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“One floor up,” Freeman said. “You better get climbing.”
“You can see that light?” I asked. I took one last glance out the door. The light had a slow gelatinous property about it. It seemed to seep over the city like viscous oil. As soon as I turned from the door, the night-for-day lens resumed in my visor. The glow from that strange light had not yet reached the elevator station, but it would soon.
I ran to the elevator shaft, grabbed a cord, and started up.
The shaft looked like a gigantic tunnel turned vertical. Dozens of rappel cords dangled from the top.
“Thomer, where are you?” I called over the interLink.
“In the elevator station.” Thomer said.
“Can you see any transports?” I asked.
“There’s a transport just outside,” Thomer said.
“I requisitioned us that one,” Freeman said.
“What happened to the pilot?” I asked.
Freeman did not answer.
The area inside the shaft would have been black as coal if not for the glow that started to pour into it. It gushed in like a flood of water, shining on the opposite wall. I had never known a man could climb as quickly as I now scaled my way up that shaft.
“Load the men in the transport,” I called to Thomer.
“They’re in,” Thomer said.
