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
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,
