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.
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
