The colonel looked at the duty officer, and said, “What the hell is the matter with you, boy? Give the lieutenant anything he wants. You got that?” Then he ended the connection.
I drove out of the garage with a Jackal, three trackers, an M27, two particle-beam cannons, and three combat helmets. Anyone else would have spliced video cameras into the trackers, but I knew nothing about electronics. I broke things; I did not splice them.
Before leaving, I returned to my quarters to put on my armor. I found a message from Freeman on my communications console, so I called him back and told him what I had in mind. He said he wanted to come along. An hour later, Freeman showed up wearing his custom-made oversized combat armor, and we drove into the woods just north of town.
We drove in silence—Freeman observing everything we passed and me holding a silent conversation with myself. No surprise. I had learned years ago that time spent in the company of Ray Freeman was lonelier than time spent completely alone.
The Jackal handled just like a jeep, though it had a lot more power. It had built-in radar. A screen on the dashboard showed an overhead readout of the world around us. Remembering how the Avatars’ light bolts had shot through these vehicles as if they were made of papier-mache, I did not bother with the retractable armor. If we ran into aliens, the armor would not protect us.
“What do you think it will take to win this thing?” I finally asked. We had been driving for half an hour.
“What makes you think we can win?” Freeman asked.
“Do your scientist friends have any ideas?” I asked.
“Sweetwater thinks we can win, but he has no idea how,” Freeman said.
“Who?”
“Dr. Sweetwater, he’s the head of the Science Lab.”
“Was he the guy who gave the briefing?” I asked.
“That was Dr. Breeze.”
I programmed in the path our convoy had taken on the way to the battle. That got us deep into the woods, where we slowed down to a mere twenty miles per hour, just fast enough to present a difficult target should we run into trouble.
“Sweetwater thinks we might stop them from coming back if we can block their signal,” Freeman said.
“Block their signal?” I said. “Then what happens?”
“Nothing happens,” Freeman said. “The invasion gets unplugged.”
“Wow, unplug an invading army. I like it. Can he really do that?” I asked.
Freeman did not answer my question.
We bounced over a stream. Trees shot by on either side of the Jackal. Our radar showed no signs of enemy vehicles or armies, just open woods and lots of trees. Of course, I had no idea if the radar could detect an Avatar. “Looks like we have the forest to ourselves,” I said as I stopped the Jackal. According to my map, we were still a few hundred yards from the spheres.
The new snow had not yet settled to the ground. Hoarfrost coated the trees, and mostly frozen mud covered most of the ground. Freeman did a visual scan of the area and nodded. We parked and unpacked the equipment.
“Why did you bring these helmets?” Freeman asked, lifting one of the helmets, then tossing it back in the bay.
“Surveillance,” I said.
“Isn’t that why they make surveillance cameras?” Freeman asked. He carried all three trackers and both particle-beam cannons and the M27 in the crook of his left arm while keeping his particle-beam pistol at the ready in his right hand. He left the helmets for me.
I rolled the helmets into a rucksack and closed the back of the Jackal. “Security cameras work great if you know how to install them.”
“They clip right on to the tracker. Where are you going to place the helmets?”
“I haven’t thought about it,” I said.
“You’re an officer, you could have had a tech install them,” Freeman said.
“This way I can watch what happens on the interLink. I registered the helmets up as members of my platoon.”
Freeman shook his head.
“What’s the matter?”
“You’re setting this up so you can watch over the interLink? Limited range, unstable signal …”
Freeman was right. With the interLink’s limited range, the Hotel Valhalla would be on the outer reach of good reception. “What kind of range would I get with a surveillance camera?” I asked.
“Unlimited,” Freeman said. He wasn’t being rude or snappy. For him, this was downright chatty.
“How do you access the signal?” I asked.
“Satellite telemetry,” Freeman said.
“A satellite signal? Will it get through the curtain?”
Other men might have stopped to slap their forehead or curse. Ray Freeman kept walking. “No, it would not get through,” Freeman finally said.
“I didn’t think so,” I said. “With the planet sleeved, you’d just get static.”
“You might not get anything,” Freeman said. He sounded distant now, his mind was on other things.
We crossed a particularly dense grove of trees, then the foliage thinned. The bright glare of one of the spheres showed above the light from the curtain. As we approached, though, I saw that the trees around the sphere had begun to wither. The area looked like it had been exposed to radiation or toxic chemicals. The needles in the pine trees had turned from emerald green to a sickly lime green color.
The row of trees closest to the portal took the worst of it. They had clearly died. Their rust-colored needles looked hard as nails, and their bark had faded nearly white. I got the feeling that the rigid branches would shatter like glass long before they would snap.
In a normal military facility, you would find guards. Even when armies launched an all-out assault, they kept guards around their camps. The Avatars did not leave guards, however. They really did not need them since they had nothing to steal and nothing to break. Hell, technically speaking, they had never even set foot on the planet.
Freeman placed two of the trackers on the ground, then started to plant the third a few feet from the sphere.
“Not there,” I said, remembering how the sphere dilated as it generated troops. “It’s too close. The sphere might spread over it.”
Without saying a word, Freeman wrapped his hand around the shaft of the tracker and pulled it out of the ground. He stepped back twenty feet or so and drove it into the ground a second time.
I picked up one of the two trackers Freeman had laid in the mud. I would arm this one with the M27. I had a pretty good idea what would happen when it opened fire, but I needed to make sure. I carried the robotic sentry beyond the first row of trees, trees that were completely dead from exposure to the sphere. I considered leaving it here, then decided to take it back farther. There would be plenty of time to experiment with the effects of direct exposure to the spheres.
I went about thirty feet away from the clearing where the trees seemed to have suffered only mildly from the effects of the sphere. Turning to make sure that the tracker would have an unobstructed view of the target, I stabbed the shaft into the frozen soil.
“You want them grouped?” Freeman asked me.
“We’ll call this one twelve o’clock. Place the others at four and eight,” I said.
“That leaves one tracker where they’ll find it,” Freeman warned me.
“Yes,” I agreed. “I don’t think they’ll notice it.”
Freeman stabbed the last tracker into the ground.
We could not place the combat helmets on the tops of the tracking poles. The top was taken up by a motion- tracking sensor housed in a four-inch ball. We placed the helmets at the feet of the trackers, then I used optical commands to tap into each helmet and check its view of the sphere.
“So where are the Avatars right now?” I asked as we left the clearing.
