“So what happened?” Thomer asked.
“Those speckers are damn near bulletproof,” I said. “Their guns shot right through the ground. White was dead by the time the shooting stopped. Huish …he hung on for a while.”
Thomer nodded.
“Keep an eye on Philips. I don’t want him doing anything stupid,” I said.
“We’re talking about Mark Philips,” Thomer said. “When he gets like this, there’s no stopping him.”
“Well, do what you can,” I said. Thomer saluted and I saluted, and I headed to Base Command.
“Leave your helmet with my staff,” General Glade said. “We’ll download whatever you’ve got and let the boys in the Science Lab have a look at it.”
I always considered men to be out of uniform when they wore their combat armor without their helmets, but I knew better than to argue with a general. I took off my helmet and handed it to the major standing beside General Glade’s desk. The man showed no pleasure in accepting it. He turned to salute the general, then left the office.
Glade watched the man leave, then said, “Makes a great secretary, doesn’t he? He’s a piss-poor excuse for a Marine, but he does okay as a secretary. I hate having assholes like him on my staff.”
We stood in silence for a moment, then Glade said, “There’s something I want to show you. Let’s go for a ride, Harris.”
We left the offices, walked down to the lobby, and headed out of the hotel. A fancy black limousine awaited us in the hotel parking lot, the engine running, the driver waiting inside. “Head over to Vista,” Glade said as he climbed in behind the passenger’s seat. I sat behind the driver.
“Aye, aye, sir,” the driver said.
“Vista’s on the edge of town. You probably drove down it on your way in from the spaceport. Beyond that is Odin Street, but we don’t want to drive on Odin right now.”
“The way things stand now, Mo Newcastle’s Army boys are guarding Vista Street. Assuming those alien bastards come back, taking the battle to them is going to be our job.”
Mo Newcastle was General Morris Newcastle, the highest-ranking officer on New Copenhagen. I had never met him before, but I knew the name.
The miles of city we passed between the hotel and Vista were completely unchanged except for the unflinching light that now blanketed the city. The buildings were untouched. Tall skyscrapers lined the streets, their windows reflecting the light in blazing white squares.
Sixteen hours had passed since I’d led my platoon into the forest. We had left in the late afternoon, spent the night chasing aliens in the forest, and now it was nearly noon. There was something unnerving about living in an endless day, and I had not yet come to grips with it.
The closer we came to the city’s edge, the more apparent it became that we had entered a military zone. Soldiers patrolled the sidewalks. Lines of trucks ferried weapons and supplies ahead. Troop carriers and armored vehicles choked the streets, and the traffic crawled.
“Near as we can tell, they underestimated our numbers,” Glade said. “The Mudders came in about fifty thousand strong. We know that because we placed sensors outside the city.”
“The Mudders?” I asked.
“That seems to be the popular name for them around the ranks,” Glade said.
“Is that mudder as in you mudder-specking son of—”
He thought for a moment, and said, “Juvenile, I know. But what do you expect? The Army came up with it. I think Newcastle likes it, says giving the enemy demoralizing names is good for morale.” He cleared his throat, only this time more softly.
“The enemy does not appear to have tanks, jets, or vehicles of any sort, and they all carry the same weapon, some kind of light rifle. Frankly, I wish they had something else. Those rifles gave our troops a fit yesterday.”
“Maybe we can replicate their technology,” I said.
“Did you get a close look at one?” Glade asked. “The damned things weigh a ton.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“You didn’t happen to fire one, did you?”
“No, sir,” I said. “I couldn’t find the trigger.”
“We had the same problem. I’m sure the boys in the Science Lab will know what to do with it,” Glade mumbled, not sounding confident at all.
The traffic sped up as three trucks pulled onto the sidewalk and began off-loading surface-to-surface rockets—non-radiation-bearing rockets, each of which packed enough explosives to destroy a city block.
“You’ve been firing STS rockets at them?” I asked. It seemed like overkill. Normally, the U.A. Military tried to win battles as decisively as possible with as little force as possible.
I watched soldiers carefully unloading the rockets from the trucks as we drove by. Crews had formed around each of the trucks.
“We used smaller ordnance last time, but we’ll switch to STSs if the bastards come back. That was Colonel Mooreland’s idea. You remember General Tommy Mooreland, the colonel is his son. His daddy died fighting in the Scutum-Crux Arm; he’s got a score to settle with them, says he wants to end this one quickly. Can’t say that I blame him.”
We arrived at the Vista Street bunker, an enormous structure that stretched twenty miles along the western edge of the city. Similar bunkers lined the northern edge of town. These were the sides of town that faced the forest. Having decided that the southern suburbs offered no strategic value, the Army seeded them with mines and tracker robots, then left them unmanned. The eastern edge of Valhalla fronted a great lake that was laced with all sorts of automated defenses. Philips and Thomer pointed the lake out to me on the way from the spaceport to the Hotel Valhalla.
The car pulled to a stop, and we climbed out. “Wait here for us,” Glade told the driver. “We shouldn’t be more than an hour.”
The outer wall of the bunker was a 50-foot-tall structure made of three-foot-thick steel alloy protected by electrical shields. Like every other piece of equipment that we had on New Copenhagen, this was the best and the latest technology, able to withstand an atomic explosion. The heat from an explosion would not melt this structure, and the force from the explosion would not blow it down. The men inside the bunker might be incinerated, but the bunker itself would survive.
“How long did it take to build this?” I asked, looking down the length of the great wall.
“About a month,” Glade said. “The Army Corps of Engineers rigged a temporary broadcast station just for bringing materials in on special barges. It’s amazing how the red tape gets cut when people are fighting for their lives.”
The bunkers were the same lifeless gray color inside and out. The light from the ion curtain did not penetrate their gloomy depths. Bare bulbs hung from wires in the ceiling.
As General Glade led me up some stairs, I saw a scattering of bright spots that looked like searchlights shining through the wall. It was not until we came closer that I realized the beams were coming from outside; they were holes through the yard-thick walls. The areas around the holes had the wilted-flower look of molten metal. I knelt and looked inside one.
“Pretty impressive, isn’t it?” General Glade asked.
“What happened?” I asked.
“The Mudders’ rifles shoot right through our shields, Lieutenant,” Glade said. “We were able to kill most of their troops out in the forest, but a couple hundred of them got through.”
“And their guns did this?” I asked, my mind on Private Huish lying on the snowy ground, shaking to death.
“And that,” Glade said, pointing to a matching hole in the opposite wall. The bolts had shot clean through both shielded walls.
After that, the tenor of the tour became more somber. General Glade led me through the second-level corridor, an endless lane pinched between charcoal-colored walls lit more by the beams of glare shining through
