the occasional hole than the lights hanging from the ceiling. We passed through a hatch and entered a metal catwalk that ran the length of the bunker. When I looked down from the catwalk, I saw barracks below us.
When it came to accommodations, the Marines got the better end of the stick for a change. The Valkyrie Ballroom was crowded, but our boys had enough light to read and space to breathe.
Billeted along the bottom floor of this bunker, these soldiers must have felt like they were living in a mausoleum. I heard a few men snoring in the shadows below me. There were none of the spontaneous card games that I would have found back at the Hotel Valhalla. We had bars, gymnasiums, and a pool—the soldiers in this installation were lucky to have running water in their latrines.
“These are pretty shitty accommodations,” I said.
“Frontline accommodations, Harris,” General Glade said. “Soldiers not posted on the front line are billeted in buildings downtown.”
As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw that many of the soldiers were old. Glen Benson, the fifty-six- year-old corporal who had sat next to me on the trip from Earth to Mars, was probably down there …if he had survived the fight. Maybe there were thousands of Glen Bensons down there, all sleeping cozy in their cots waiting for the next attack.
As we cut across the bunker, we passed technicians working on wall-mounted cannons. We passed a radar station. We passed gunnery stations. After confirming that the area was still clear, Glade led me onto the roof of the bunker.
When I had flown into Valhalla, I saw an orderly city surrounded on two sides by pristine forests that were buried in snow. Everywhere I looked, I saw green and white under an ice blue sky. The outskirts were virgin, and the city was clean. That was all gone now.
There had once been a tidy suburb beyond the Vista Street bunker, an upper-class community with large homes and up-scale shopping malls. I could tell that much by examining the smoldering battlefield that spread out before me. The enemy had been beaten back, but the battle had not been won as easily as I had been led to believe.
We had a term in the Marines—FOCPIG, which stood for Fire, Observed, Concealed, Protected, Integrated, non-Geometric. It described the obstacle courses you built to guide enemies into heavy fire. That was the benefit of being the home team when unfriendlies came to visit—they had to make their way through a landscape created to speck them over once and for all.
Acres of homes, stores, and churches had been leveled long before the aliens ever arrived, but the ruins of those structures remained. To get through these ruins, the enemy would need to follow paths designed to bring them into our sights. FOCPIG—limit the places your enemy can enter, then point your guns at the places that are left.
The grounds below the Vista Street bunker were covered with the broken bodies of dead aliens. Now I understood why Lieutenant Moffat advised me not to waste my time bringing back alien parts. From where I stood, I could see the wreckage of a dozen gunships lying about like insects both enormous and dead. A small fire still flickered in one or two of the wrecks.
The real carnage, however, lay about one mile out, where our intermediate defenses had battered the aliens. These aliens were killed by our heavy ordnance—rockets and laser cannons capable of destroying a building or sinking a ship. From the top of the bunker, I could see smoke rising from burned-over craters left by rockets and heaps of brick, steel, and dirt where buildings had once stood.
“We lost 137 gunships,” General Glade said. “The Army lost better than 20,000 troops.
“I’ll say one thing for those bastards—they came right at us. I don’t think a single one of them ever turned back. It didn’t matter if we hit them with machine guns, grenades, or cannon fire, those bastards marched right into it, Harris. They fought to the last. We got every last one of them.”
That sounded good.
Glade paused for dramatic effect, then delivered the bad news. “If they come back this week, the Marines take point. We have to beat them out there”—he pointed to the forest—“stop them in the woods so the Army can rebuild its perimeter.”
The general delivered most of his meaning unsaid. Next time we would meet the enemy out there without the benefit of rocket launchers and shielded bunkers. I thought about the yard-long bolts of light that flew through the air like javelins, cutting through any embankments, trees, and combat armor that happened to get in the way. I thought about Private Huish shivering as he died.
Twists of smoke still rose from the wreckage beyond the bunker. FOCPIG, indeed.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The only stores still operating in Valhalla were the ones that catered to the GI crowd. Crews stayed to open liquor shops, cigar stores, bars, and movie houses while grocery stores, bookstores, and clothiers remained empty and closed. It didn’t matter whether you entered a coffee shop or a fine grill; so many military types were crammed around the tables that every restaurant felt like a mess hall. With most of its civilian population in a relocation camp and nearly a million servicemen walking the streets, Valhalla felt like an extended military base.
Among the hundred thousand men who formed the local militia, there were hundreds of devoted capitalists who owned bars, and they willingly opened their establishments between battles, God bless them. Large pockets of Valhalla’s low-rent entertainment district ran round-the-clock operations, and some of the finer establishments opened their doors as well. The day after that first battle, more than five hundred bars opened for business. Restaurants, movie theaters, and arcades opened. Most of the Marines I knew would have preferred to have waitresses working the tables instead of off-duty militiamen, but I never saw anyone refuse a drink.
We were on call, of course. If something happened at the front, we would hear sirens and report for duty in an instant. With the entire city on continuous alert, our commanders could muster their scattered platoons and report in a matter of minutes.
Approximately one-tenth of the men could go on leave at a time now that the shooting had ended. With the exception of Philips, who spent the day on his rack staring into space, the entire platoon headed into town for the night. Thomer offered to hang back with Philips, but I didn’t think it would matter. He was somewhere between grieving and guilt-stricken, territory most Marines prefer to travel alone. Philips might come out of this funk in a day, or it might take a month, but his wild nature would pull him through. Until then, the best thing we could do for Sergeant Mark Philips was to give him space to work things out while watching him closely enough to make sure he did not hurt himself.
I headed into town with five guys from my company, all enlisted men. Officers and enlisted men did not pal around together as a rule, but I was also a clone. In the hierarchy of U.A. Marine Corps society, the gap between officers and enlisted men was not nearly as pronounced as the separation of natural-borns and synthetics.
We borrowed a jeep and drove deep into town. Driving the streets of Valhalla, it was easy to forget we were fighting a war. The entertainment district was alive. Marines, soldiers, and civilians crowded the streets. The dance clubs were closed, but crowds packed the movie theaters and bars. The MPs turned out in force, too. Walking around with their armbands and nightsticks, they scowled at every man they passed.
What downtown Valhalla really needed was a dog catcher. Packs of stray dogs roamed the alleys, looking for food. They posed no threat to humans, especially in a community in which most pedestrians carried M27s, but the dog shit was turning alleyways into minefields.
People’s pets became the first victims of the mass relocation. In the rush to relocate the human population, house pets were left to fend for themselves. The dogs and cats seemed to adapt, but I suspected that the domesticated fish, bird, and hamster populations were on their way to extinction.
There were so many jeeps parked along the sidewalks downtown that the place looked like a motor pool. We ended up parking in a residential area and walking eight blocks back. As we walked, Private Skittles made a snide remark about all of the old, white-haired soldiers we passed. “I don’t know about you guys, but seeing all these old guys around gives me the creeps.”
“Philips calls them the ‘Prune Juice Brigade,’ ” Thomer said. Philips’s quotes were always good for a
