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.
“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.
