They looked no more lifelike than the eyes on a marble statue. The face had a more or less human-looking mouth and nose.
There was that one brief moment of anticipation as every man took his place and homed in on his target. A breeze whistled through the trees, shaking branches just hard enough to dislodge the snow from some distant tree. I saw a blue-and-red bird hopping on a limb a few feet above one of the aliens.
On my visor, the names Tom, Dick, and Hairy appeared above the three aliens. Tom and Dick were the guards; Hairy was the scientist. Philips had placed these designations so that we all knew what we were doing. “Lieutenant Harris wants us to take Hairy home with him,” Philips said.
“Boll, Herrington, you guys smack Tom. Take him out fast,” Philips whispered. He sounded completely calm. “Huish, you and I get Dick.”
Boll and Herrington laughed. I got the feeling Huish would take grief about getting “Dick” for some time to come.
“What about me?” White asked.
“Make sure Hairy doesn’t get away. Lieutenant Harris has a thing for him.”
Now everyone was laughing. If this did not go well, Philips and I would have a conversation when we got back to base.
“Take ’em out!” Philips yelled.
I fired a three-shot burst. The bullets struck Dick on the side of his head, just above the tiny nubs that looked like ears. Sparks flashed where the first bullet struck, as if it had glanced off a rock. The second and third chipped at the head, producing a shallow gash.
Dick spun to face me. Its face was impassive. Its eyes seemed as fixed as flint stones. It must have been searching for me, but I could not tell by looking at those eyes. I aimed at its forehead and fired off three more shots, making the alien stumble backward. I wasn’t the only one shooting the bastard. More chips spattered off its back and shoulders.
“What do I have to do to kill this specker?” one of the men yelled.
I aimed at one of its eyes and fired again. The eye chipped, but it was the same color under the surface, and nothing leaked from the hole, as if the alien had been carved out of stone.
“Speck!” Philips yelled, sounding nearly out of control. “I hit that bastard in the nuts. Go down, asshole! Your Nuts are busted!”
Hairy, the scientist alien, stopped taking readings and ran to join the guards. Dick’s rifle fired, making a cooing noise as a yard-long bolt of white light flared from its muzzle. The bolt traveled through the air at the absolute speed limit of what a man can track with his eyes. I perceived that bolt as much as saw it, watching where it started and where it struck while my mind filled in the holes. The light bolt struck a thick mound of dirt to my right, cut through the mound, and continued through the air. A plume of smoke rose from the hole it left in the ground behind it.
“Fall back,” Philips told his men.
I agreed with that order, but I did not follow. Aiming my M27 at Dick’s right shoulder, I held the trigger down. I must have fired twenty rounds within a two-inch spread before the alien stumbled backward. I continued shooting as the shoulder dented, fractured, then splintered. Dick’s right arm fell to the ground, and his rifle fell with it.
Boll, a grenadier, popped out from a ditch and fired a rocket that hit the ground somewhere between Tom and Hairy. The ground shook on impact. Mud and bits of rock sprayed through the air. The heat from the explosion filled the air with steam that evaporated as quickly as it appeared. The report of the explosion echoed off distant trees.
The explosion sent the aliens flying in opposite directions. One crashed into a tree, spun part way around its trunk, then landed twenty feet farther on. Had it been human, it would have been torn in half against that trunk. Even in combat armor, a man would have been ripped in half. I did not see where the other alien landed. By this time, capturing prisoners was the last thing on my mind. All I cared about was getting my men out of this skirmish alive.
When Dick rose to his feet and picked up the rifle with his remaining arm, Boll fired a rocket at the bastard. That rocket could have blown an entire platoon into an unrecognizable pile of limbs and parts. It might have knocked a tank on its side or caved in a small building. In this case it simply split Dick in half. His body broke. Boll fired another rocket, striking Hairy in the chest and blowing him apart while Philips and Herrington continued firing at him.
It was not until the shooting stopped that I noticed that both Huish and White had been hit.
White lay flat on the ground, a fist-sized hole seared through the back of his armor. One of the alien bolts had passed through ten feet of ground, through Private First Class Steven White, armor and all, and continued on into the trees beyond. The wound was clean, cauterized, and probably instantly fatal. A wisp of steam rose from that hole. Heat from the bolt had melted his armor, leaving a stream of polymerized metal dribbling into the hole in his back. If I had chosen to place my hand in that hole, it would have come out clean. There was no blood.
Huish was not so lucky. The bolt had passed through his right shoulder, taking a small and clean chunk with it. The wound might not have killed him had he not gone into severe shock. He lay on his back, shivering convulsively like a man in an icebox. The plates in his armor rattled against each other.
Philips and I stayed with Huish while Herrington and Boll went out to gather the body parts and equipment the aliens left behind. Philips pulled off Huish’s helmet and loosened his chest plate. He could not pull the plate off because much of it had fused into the wound. He tried to talk to Huish, but he never responded. By the time Herrington and Boll returned with alien body parts, a rifle, and the meter that Hairy had been using, PFC Huish had quietly died.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“We’re coming in,” I radioed Moffat. “Has the rest of the platoon arrived?”
“Present and accounted for,” he said. “Sergeant Thomer says you stayed back to catch a prisoner. How did it go?”
“I’ve got some body parts and a weapon.”
“General Glade wanted a live one. We don’t need more body parts or weapons,” Moffat said. I knew he was right. The Army had just used fifty thousand aliens for target practice—alien body parts would be in plentiful supply.
“We captured some of their scientific equipment. I think they were taking soil samples,” I said.
“Scientific equipment? Not bad, Harris,” Moffat conceded. “Not bad. It doesn’t earn you the best bottle of booze in Valhalla, but I’ll spot your first round in the officers’ lounge.” That was a tired old wartime chestnut—our drinks were free.
Moffat struck me as a man who appreciated platitudes. I had only met him that day, and this was the third time I had heard him say that bit about “Not bad, Harris. Not bad.” It already meant less than nothing to me.
“We lost two men,” I reported.
“Noncoms?” Moffat asked.
Stupid question. I was the only officer who went on the mission. “White and Huish …both privates.”
“Good men, I’m sure,” he said, sounding about as unmoved as a man can get. We signed off, each of us glad to be rid of the other.
While Boll cut down branches and built a travois for carrying back our dead, Herrington brought me one of the alien’s rifles. Its stock was featureless and lacked even a trigger. It looked like a nickel-plated pipe and weighed well over fifty pounds. How any creature could carry and use such a weapon I did not understand. Herrington lifted the rifle to his chest and tried to sight down its barrel, but he could not hold it steady.
Herrington also brought in a head and a long section of back. Looking over these parts, I saw no signs of muscles, veins, tissue, or bone. The limbs we found were solid and un-malleable. There was no tissue, the body parts had the same composition inside and out. As I rolled one of the heads we collected with the toe of my boot, I realized this thing had no more brains than the head of Michelangelo’s statue of David.
“Do we want to haul this shit home with us?” Herrington asked.
