whittle the aliens’ numbers down before we met them, the Corps of Engineers placed a number of booby traps along the path that the aliens had used in their previous attacks. The Corps planted a small grove of trackers along the top of a ten-foot rise one mile in from the spheres.
Their trackers worked no better than the ones that Freeman and I left behind. The Avatars had not picked up enough substance for the Corps’ sensors to detect them. A half mile later, however, they passed another bank of trackers. By this time enough tachyons had attached themselves to the Avatars for motion sensors to read their movements. They opened fire with particle-beam cannons and M27s, dropping hundreds of Avatars as they marched by. The aliens retaliated, cutting the robots down with their light rifles.
The Corps of Engineers had placed canisters of noxium gas in one secluded glade. As the Avatars entered, the Corps released the flesh-eating gas, but it had no effect on the aliens as they had no flesh. Any deer or rabbits unlucky enough to meander into that glade, however, would have been reduced to soup.
The Army began its first rocket barrage while the Avatars were still out in the forest. They hauled out the big guns this time, surface-to-surface rockets that combined explosive procession and incineration. By the time the Avatars finally reached the edge of town, their army was down to no more than twenty-three thousand, a force that our soldiers dispatched from the Vista Street bunker with small rockets and machine guns.
Two regiments of Marines were sent into the woods to flush out and finish any stragglers, but there were no stragglers. The Avatars pressed forward into the line of fire until every last one of them was dead or broken.
We only lost twelve hundred men during the third battle for Valhalla, but our armory was severely depleted.
The rank and file did not know it, but they were on a sinking ship. Enlisted men and officers alike went out to celebrate yet another easy victory, but those of us who knew the score did not participate. Our ship had struck an iceberg, but it was sinking so slowly that the passengers didn’t realize it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Sweetwater and Breeze …
Arthur Breeze, you will recall, stood a bony six feet four and could not have even weighed 150 pounds. His skull was the size of a watermelon, and his teeth would have fit on a horse, but the rest of his body vanished in the lab coat that hung from his shoulders. The lenses on his glasses were a half inch thick, a collage of greasy fingerprints, dandruff, and shed hairs. Some people might have described him as “forehead bald,” but I think he stretched the term. If he was “forehead bald,” his forehead extended clear up to the crown of his head. What hair he had was a disorganized swatch of filament-fine white strands that formed a saddle-shaped band around his head.
Breeze was not the chief scientist at the Science Lab, he was the chief briefing officer. It did not take long to see that Breeze’s talents lent themselves more to science than presentations.
William Sweetwater, the top scientist at the lab, was a dwarf. He barely cleared the four-foot mark. He was too short to pass the height restrictions for a fast roller coaster in a theme park, not that he looked like the kind of man who went out for thrills. He had long, stringy black hair that hung down every side of his globe-shaped head. He had a potbelly and massive shoulders, like an athlete gone to seed. He stood more than two feet smaller than Breeze and probably outweighed the man by twenty pounds.
Until the moment William Sweetwater opened his mouth, I believed Arthur Breeze was the smartest man in the galaxy. But when Sweetwater spoke, everyone with any sense would shut up and listen.
The briefing took place in the basement of the science building. This time it was for generals and up, even their staffs had to wait outside. There were five generals on the planet—one from the Marines, three from the Army, and one very contrite general from the Air Force. Freeman attended as a consultant and invited me along for the ride.
“That was some shock you gave us, Harris.” Sweetwater looked at me as he said this.
“Us,” in this case, referred to Sweetwater alone. He generally spoke about himself in the plural. He had a high, crackly voice. “It never occurred to us to consider what effect the ion curtain might have on existing satellite communications.”
Sweetwater waddled around the room handing each visitor a five-page document. “This is a list of computer and communications systems that rely on satellite communications. Since the systems were not destroyed, we never got emergency messages; the signals just sort of blipped out.”
I scanned the list. There was the local mediaLink—the system that hosted current events, entertainment broadcasting, and a large portion of civilian messaging traffic. I saw an item on the list and smiled—the New Copenhagen Emergency Broadcast System relied on satellite transmissions.
“Most of these systems do not impact your operations,” Breeze said. His voice was low. He had the dried-out voice of a very old man, though he could not have been older than forty. “As Dr. Sweetwater pointed out, we didn’t even notice when they failed.”
“Raymond brought it to our attention,” Sweetwater said. I got the feeling that Sweetwater genuinely liked Freeman. He and his team were lab-coat intellectuals, men of science, not action. Freeman, a mercenary whose knowledge of science only extended to areas in which it impacted his work, must have impressed them as smarter than a soldier and braver than a scientist.
“We have rerouted most of these systems,” Sweetwater said. That “we” probably referred to his team of scientists and engineers. “Even the mediaLink is restored. Thanks to Dr. Breeze, the youth of New Copenhagen can once again watch mindless cartoons and sports shows.”
Breeze blushed and smiled—an ugly sight with those big teeth of his.
Looking over the list, I saw that it included the facility that managed the planetwide sewage system. I hoped the temporary blackout had not caused backwash—at least not in range of Valhalla.
“Have you restored the signal from the Seismic Activity Station?” Freeman asked as he flipped through the list.
“You noticed that, did you?” Sweetwater asked. “That was the one that concerned us the most. We expected to hear something if there was any activity anywhere on the planet. Of course, with the satellite link broken, we didn’t hear anything at all.”
Sweetwater walked over to a lab stool that was nearly as tall as he was and, with some effort, climbed high enough to sit down on it. “Maybe it was a lucky coincidence that we lost that signal. When we reestablished it, we did a little extra poking around to see if we had missed anything. The settings on the equipment were pretty low. The seismic station was mostly used for surveying earthquakes and volcanic activity.
“Dr. Breeze found a way to reroute the signal through a ground network, then he boosted the sensitivity. What a good piece of work that turned out to be.” Sweetwater turned and nodded to Breeze, who blushed a second time. “It turns out that there is a lot more going on around this planet than we previously thought.”
Sweetwater hopped off the stool.
Either the university did not have money for cutting-edge holographic displays, or Sweetwater preferred not to use them. The dwarf opened a cabinet and pulled out a two-foot-tall globe that looked enormous in his pudgy hands. The thing was half his size.
He placed the globe on a counter. Spinning the ball slowly, he got his bearings. “Marduck Mountains …okay …” he muttered. Then turning to his audience, he said, “This spot here is Valhalla.” He gave the globe a half turn and placed his thumb on a new spot. “We have discovered significant underground activity in this region. We will provide precise coordinates in our report. As you can see, the activity is occurring on this equatorial line. We do not know who is causing the disturbance.”
“If someone is digging on this planet, I think we can all guess who it might be,” General Newcastle said.
Looking at General Morris Newcastle up close, I didn’t like what I saw. He looked more like a cantankerous old man than a supreme commander, someone who bullied underlings and wore his power like a medal. Sweetwater spotted this as well. The difference between Sweetwater and Breeze was that while Breeze allowed Newcastle to intimidate him, Sweetwater had the smarts and the self-confidence to put the general in his place.
“If you know something that we don’t, General Newcastle, feel free to enlighten us,” Sweetwater snapped in a clear, impatient voice. The dwarf stood silent, a bored look on his face, as he waited for the Army general to
