“Only the meter,” I said. “Moffat says they’ve got all the body parts they can handle,” I added. So Herrington helped Boll load the bodies onto the travois. I watched them lift and lower the bodies as they lashed them into place. They strapped Huish on the travois first. Watching the scene, I noticed how his armor was stiff but his limbs hung limp.
“So we attacked them for nothing?” Philips asked. He had ambled over toward me unnoticed.
“We got this,” I said, holding up the soil-reading tool that Boll retrieved. The unit was about the size of a shoe box. There was no visible way to read the damn thing, it didn’t have any window, meters, or dials.
“Well, that makes me feel a whole specking lot better,” Philips said. “As long as we aren’t leaving this specked-up mission empty-handed.”
“Watch it, Sergeant,” I said, though I agreed with him.
Moffat called in a couple of hours after we started back to town. “Where are you?”
I had precise coordinates from the equipment in my visor. But rather than give him the specifics, I simply said, “We’re headed toward town.”
“As far as we can tell, the woods around the city are clear. Maybe I should send a patrol to bring you in, just in case.”
“I appreciate it,” I said, but I was just playing along. He wasn’t trying to bring us in safely. He wanted a hand in the delivery. If the stuff we captured proved valuable, Moffat would try to take credit for finding it.
We broke off our transmission, and I took a moment to stare out into the diamond-bright sky. It looked like midday with direct sunlight coming down from every direction. I could not see Valhalla itself—we were too far from town—but I could see smoke rising from that direction. Several tails of smoke twisted and curled into the sky. Most of it was of the white-artillery variety, but some of the smoke was the greasy black you get from machine and fuel fires.
Philips, who was scouting up ahead, radioed me to say, “The area’s clear.”
“Base Command says the woods are clear all the way to town,” I said.
“If Lieutenant Moffat is so specking sure it’s safe, why the hell doesn’t he come get us?”
“He is,” I said.
“Harris, did you see those bastards, goddamn it? Those sons of bitches are bulletproof. They’re damned near rocketproof.” I could hear pain and anger in Philips’s voice. He sounded frantic, but I knew it was with regret rather than fear. A man who had spent so much of his career as a private, Philips had never lost Marines under his command before. Once we got back to base, he’d start looking for some way to get himself busted down to private again. He might pick a fight with an officer or simply spend a day absent without leave. He would do whatever it took to get himself relieved of command. I could hear it in his voice.
“What are we doing out here, Harris?” Philips asked. “What the speck did we accomplish?”
“We killed three of theirs,” I pointed out, ignoring his calling me by my last name.
“Yeah, and they killed two of ours. We had the specking drop on them, and they still nailed us.” There was no fear in his voice, just anger and frustration.
We continued toward town, Philips and I moving ahead in silence, Boll and Herrington keeping up a running commentary. Another hour passed. I never saw Philips. I could tell he was somewhere ahead of us, but he kept himself hidden in the trees. When we reached a clearing in which a three-hundred-foot radio tower stood, I found Philips resting at the edge of the trees—a good sign, I thought. At least he wasn’t trying to run himself to death.
As I approached, Philips said, “We didn’t kill them. We specking broke them. They’re like chunks of metal or something. Who the speck cares if we nail them, they’re just specking statues!”
I agreed, but I was not going to say so. Philips was speaking on an open frequency. Boll and Herrington could listen in. As an officer, I had to sound authoritative and in control in all situations. I came up with the best answer that I could manage. “There are a lot more of us than there are of them,” I said.
“What?” Philips asked.
“We have over a million troops defending Valhalla, they’re going to run out of men before we do,” I said. It was a poor attempt at humor, but it was also the truth.
We crossed the clearing, passing under that radio tower. There was something humbling about walking past a skeletal structure that was fifty times taller than me.
“You want someone else to scout for a while?” I asked. I knew Philips would turn down the offer. With so much tension running through him, he probably welcomed the chance to be alone.
“We’re almost back,” Philips said. He sped on ahead, vanishing behind the first row of trees. It was disorienting to see a man disappear into a well-lit forest. You expected him to disappear into shadows when he stepped under a tree. Now that the invaders had spread their ion curtain across our planet, the grounds under the trees were no darker than the grounds in the open.
“How are you two doing?” I asked, turning to Herrington and Boll. They had the hard job, dragging a 350- pound load on a travois through the snow. They didn’t complain, though, and when I offered to take my turn pulling, they turned me down. All Herrington would say was, “With all due respect, sir, I could use a shower and some rack time.”
Boll was even more circumspect. He grunted an unintelligible answer that ended with “sir.”
Five minutes later, Philips radioed in to say that he had rendezvoused with Moffat and his welcoming party. They escorted us back to town.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Hotel Valhalla was quite the billet. Officers had rooms to themselves. Enlisted men stayed in the convention center, where barracks had been set up in the enormous ballrooms. Before heading in for a debriefing with General Glade, I swung through the Valkyrie Ballroom to look in on my men.
Entering the cavernous room, I discovered that despite the elegant setting, inside the ballroom/barracks the life of enlisted men remained unchanged. Men lounged around in their skivvies speculating about who was scared and who nearly wet their pants. Including a support platoon, which mainly pushed papers and hauled supplies, our company had four platoons. Company command held the first platoon in reserve in case the battle went wrong. Second Platoon spent three hours posted just north of the front line, in case the aliens tried to flank the Army’s perimeter. Kelly Thomer and the Third Platoon spent the battle scouting enemy territory with me.
Now that the fighting was over, members from the various platoons sat around swapping exaggerated stories. To hear some of Thomer’s men talking, you would have thought we took on the whole alien army instead of hiding in the snow and watching them pass. The guys from the Second Platoon spun a good yarn about guarding the walls of the city. Sergeant Shepherd never once mentioned the rocket launchers and laser cannons, let alone the 150,000 soldiers on the bleeding edge of the battle. The way he told the story, it sounded like he and his men engaged in hand-to-hand combat.
Off in the distance, I saw Mark Philips, dressed in his government-issue boxers and tank top, sitting on his rack playing his harmonica. He could play a lively tune when he wanted, but now he played softly to himself. He slid the silver harmonica slowly back and forth across his mouth, and his eyes stared off in the distance.
“Sergeant Thomer,” I called. The entire pack of men stood, turned, and saluted. “Can I have a moment?”
Thomer joined me. I led him to an empty corner of the ballroom, far away from Philips, and still I spoke in a whisper. Under normal circumstances he did not care what people said about him; but Philips blamed himself for the deaths of White and Huish, and he might have developed a new sensitivity.
“How is Philips?” I asked.
Thomer was the only Marine that Philips actually considered a friend. They had served together for years.
“He isn’t talking. What happened out there?”
“His fire team ambushed an alien scouting party,” I said. “It went bad.”
“He says he got White and Huish killed,” Thomer said. “You were there. Did he do anything wrong?”
“It looked like a perfect op. Philips slipped in behind them without being seen. He waited for the order, then he opened fire.”
