was not invited, it meant that none of the generals knew he existed. As he considered this, he took a step back, and the muscles along his jaw relaxed.
“Care to share anything that you learned?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I wish I could, sir,” I said. For what it was worth, I sincerely did wish I could discuss the briefing with Moffat and every man in the company. I did not like it when officers kept potentially important information from the men who needed it most, the ones who put their lives on the line.
“You will tell me what you can, when you can?” Moffat asked. His belligerence had melted away. I think he recognized that I had heard something that genuinely rocked me—something even more disturbing than the casualty figures.
I nodded.
“I need you to rearrange the roster; Command wants volunteers to guard the Hen House,” Moffat said. “The paperwork is in the company office. They want our roster within the hour.” We traded salutes, and Moffat walked off, still a prick, but a prick who knew when to back down.
Most of the company was out for the night. With so many Marines dead, they would keep the celebrations subdued, but as far as they knew, they had not only just won a battle, they might have won the war. Heavy losses or not, they had the right to celebrate. I could have gone into town and joined them, but I knew the truth—we were in worse trouble than ever, and, at the moment, I could not bring myself to drink with guys whom I might shortly betray. When the Avatars regenerated, I would send the men out thinking they were engaged in a fair fight against an enemy who could be killed. I was keeping secrets from men whose lives were on the line, and that made me no different than any natural-born officer.
I went to my company office and found the orders Moffat had left for me. They came directly from Major Terry Burton, our battalion commander.
Leaning back in my chair, I picked the orders up off the desk and read. Burton had not attended the briefing at the Science Lab, but he knew the score. These were orders for every platoon in our regiment to provide three men to protect the Hen House. That was the name we gave the compound in which the officers kept their wives and families. These were the kinds of orders you gave when you needed to dig in and hold your position.
I listed Herrington, Skittles, and Philips. I chose Herrington because of all the men in my platoon, he was the one who pushed himself the hardest. He needed a break. I sent Skittles because I liked the kid, and I thought he would have better odds protecting the Hen House than on the front line. As for Philips, this was my chance to do something with him before he got himself killed. Muttering to myself about this being Philips’s lucky day, I keyed the new roster into the computer and forwarded it to Base Command.
When they returned from their night out, Philips, Herrington, and Skittles would find new orders waiting for them on their racks. They would fly out to the Hen House first thing in the morning.
As I sat at the duty desk, I considered all that had happened that day. I felt tired and hungry, so I went to the mess and ate a good dinner. Then I returned to my quarters and climbed into bed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
We held the funeral at 0600 the following morning.
The Army guarded the city while the Marines buried their dead. More than three hundred thousand Marines —enlisted men in white combat armor, officers in dress uniforms—assembled in rows as straight as razor blades, standing still as grave markers as they waited for the honored to arrive. We used a city park with four baseball diamonds, two soccer fields, and a long stretch of rolling pasture for our assembly. The Corps of Engineers removed the fences and goals from the various fields to create a large enough contiguous space to accommodate us all.
We stood at attention, facing an enormous stage on which sat General Glade, the highest-ranking Marine on New Copenhagen, General Morris Newcastle, the Army commander who had made such an ass of himself at the briefing in the Science Lab, and General James Hill, representing the Air Force. Along with the generals sat twenty-five civilians in dark suits—five turned out to be U.A. senators who had flown in to oversee the battle preparations, five were local politicians, and the other fifteen were their bodyguards.
“Ten-hut!”
We snapped to attention.
An honor guard marched in bearing flags—the flag of the Unified Authority, the banner of the Orion Arm, the flag of New Copenhagen, the ceremonial flag of the Confederate Arms, and the red-and-gold standard of the Unified Authority Marine Corps.
A horse came forward pulling an antique caisson bearing the flag-draped coffin of a single unknown Marine. This man would be buried here. Should we survive this battle, a monument would follow. The other eighty thousand fallen were on their way to an industrial-strength crematory, likely a glass factory or some other location with an oven and an assembly line. The horse hung its head as it dragged the caisson. Steam formed around the horse’s nose when it exhaled. The wheels of the wagon cut a groove through the soggy grass and snow.
Three columns of servicemen carrying antique bolt-action rifles marched behind the caisson. The Marine honor guard marched on the right, the Air Force marched on the left, and the Army honor guard formed the column in the middle.
Next came the pledges, the oaths, and the prayers, followed by the speeches. One by one, they all stood up and spoke …every last self-important man on that specking stage except for the bodyguards. The generals took precisely five minutes each. The politicians took ten or fifteen. The entire service took three hours.
I heard the speeches via the interLink, each voice rolling around in my helmet like a song you can’t tune out. From the opening bugle to the closing remarks, I heard it all as clearly as if I had been sitting on the stand.
Snow started to fall. Heavy inch-wide flakes drifted down from the sky, first in a scattered dusting, then in a heavy bombardment.
After the speeches came a twenty-one-gun salute performed by the servicemen who marched behind with the caisson.
“Ready!” shouted the colonel leading the salute.
The men raised the antique rifles in perfect unison.
“Aim!”
They fixed their sites on the same invisible target.
“Fire!”
Twenty-one rifles fired as one, shattering the perfect silence. The horse drawing the caisson started, but it did not buck.
“Ready!”
The men snapped the bolts back and loaded another round.
“Aim!”
They raised their rifles.
“Fire!”
They fired again, then repeated the process one last time.
The bugler blew “Taps.” I could not hear that music without thinking of the men with whom I had served. I thought of Vince Lee, my first real friend. I thought about Fleet Admiral Bryce Klyber and Sergeant Tabor Shannon, both great men in their times. One was natural-born and died a hero, the other a Liberator and died heroically.
The color guard left, the politicians left, then the generals departed. The fighting men were the last to leave. It took half an hour for us to file off the field.
What was happening on Earth? I wondered. They could not know that eighty thousand men had died in a single day of battle, nor could they know the utter meaninglessness of those deaths. Hell, only a handful of men on this planet knew that we could not kill this enemy. Did anybody care what happened to a few thousand clones back on Earth? For all I knew, they were fighting for their lives as well.
Despite our spearhead role in the battle, my company had lost only twenty-three men. That may sound like a lot, but it was only one-sixth of our men. During the latter part of the battle, some companies lost entire
