dropped onto my rack to rest. Then I saw the red light flashing on the communications console.
The first message was from General Glade. “Harris, I just got a report from Sweetwater. You should have heard the dwarf bastard; he sounds like he’s going to wet his pants. Report down here ASAP.”
“Speck! Speck! Where the hell did they send him? Harris, this is Moffat. Where the hell are you?”
The third message was Moffat again. “Damn it. Harris.” He sounded insane with anger. “I want a list of the men you sent on guard duty. You got that? I want that list now.”
The fourth message. “Harris? Did you authorize Sergeant Philips to guard the Hen House? That wife-specking son of a bitch! I’ll see that that specker gets the firing squad. You got me?”
That woke me up.
General Glade met me at the door of his office. He let me in, told me to sit, then started pacing back and forth in front of his desk. “I heard you had a rough time of it,” he said. “Did you get hurt?” He had nothing remotely resembling concern as he asked the question. Like any general, he was a man who routinely sent other men out to die. He could not do his job without caring more about the missions than the men he sent to do them.
I should have appreciated his feeble attempt at courtesy. He was, after all, a natural-born and a general.
“I’m fine, sir,” I said. Hell, he could see that my arm was in a sling. I had a severely blackened eye. How the hell I got a black eye wearing a combat helmet was beyond me. A bald spot and a bandage marked the burn where the gas seeped into the back of the helmet.
“Good. Glad to hear it,” he responded so quickly he nearly cut me off. “I heard your armor failed.”
“My visor,” I said.
“Breeze had his team take a look at it. They say it shorted out when the alien touched you, a complete system overload.”
“Was there anything on the video record?” I asked.
“There is no record, Harris. Breeze says every circuit in your helmet fused. You would have been electrocuted if your armor had a higher ratio of metal to plastic.”
“Sweetwater and Breeze?” I asked.
“Yes, Sweetwater and Breeze.” He snorted. He cleared his throat again. “I don’t know why we bother with them. So far the only thing Dr. Sweetwater has been able to discover about the aliens is that they break instead of die.” He laughed. “I’ll tell you what, Harris, the Unified Authority Marines do not care if their enemies break, die, or give birth to triplets so long as they stop moving when they are shot in the head.”
“Begging the general’s pardon, but I don’t see how we can possibly win this one with bullets and bombs,” I said. “If we’re going to survive, the only way we can do it is if the lab comes up with something.”
General Glade stopped pacing finally and sat behind his desk. “You seem like a man who keeps confidences. I’ll tell you a secret even the Army brass doesn’t know.”
For effect, Glade looked around the empty office to make sure no one was listening. “Sweetwater was the last man off Terraneau before the Angels sleeved it. The dwarf took off just as the ion curtain began to spread.”
“That sounds like a lucky break,” I said.
Glade sat up so quickly and so straight you would have thought someone had stung him with an electric prod. “Lucky break, my ass, Lieutenant. He’s a coward. He turned and ran. Everyone else on the planet is dead … everyone but him.”
I wanted to point out that (A) there had to be a pilot to fly him off the planet and (B) technically speaking, we did not know if anyone on that planet had died. For all we knew, some botanist had discovered a tachyon-eating rubber tree, and the entire population of Terraneau was alive and well and watering their gardens twice a day.
“I don’t suspect Sweetwater would have contributed much to the battle if they had sent him in with an M27,” I said.
Glade stopped. I suspect he was imagining William Sweetwater carrying an M27. He laughed, fought back more laughter, took a deep breath, and started laughing again. “I have this picture of the little bastard wearing a man-sized helmet.” He laughed again.
I smiled to be politic but did not laugh.
“Harris, have you seen Lieutenant Moffat since you got back?” Glade asked.
“He left a couple of messages in my quarters,” I said.
“Do you know what happened at the Hen House?”
“I have a pretty good idea.”
“He’s calling for a firing squad,” Glade said. “Major Burton had to post a couple of MPs inside the barracks in case Moffat goes on a rampage. Philips isn’t allowed out of the barracks, and Moffat isn’t allowed in. That’s no way to run a base.”
“Philips was confined to barracks?” I asked.
“Sure he was,” Glade said, “pending his court-martial hearing.”
“The guy’s got a set of stones on him,” I said. “I ran into him on my way in.”
“He wasn’t out of …?”
“No, nothing like that. He was sitting on his rack playing his damn harmonica. You’d have thought he was on vacation. He asked me to sign him up for another tour of guard duty,” I said.
General Glade changed the subject. “So you and Freeman infiltrated the Avatari dig. What the hell is going on down there? What did you see, Harris?”
“Spiders,” I said. “Spiders the size of small trucks.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Ignoring my own best advice, I took one of those sleeping pills and went to bed after meeting with General Glade. I slept for sixteen hours. I dreamed of a planet with winter forests, steel gray lakes the size of small oceans, high mountains buried in snow, and beneath it all, a wretched hell filled with giant spiders. I dreamed of New Copenhagen, dreams that grew out of reality. I squirmed and rolled in my sleep, sweating so profusely that the sheets became drenched and clung to my skin. The medicine I had taken gave my imagination a vivid, hallucinatory quality so that the bumps and jerks I made in my sleep worked their way into the fabric of my dreams.
When I woke, my mouth was dry and the world seemed to spin around me. I heard loud ringing in my ears, but that had nothing to do with tranquilizers. The ringing was real. It was the steel shriek of the Klaxons calling every man to arms. I recognized the pattern in the noise; this was a yellow alert.
I sat up and tried to clear my head. Outside my door, the hallway echoed with the rattle and thud of doors slamming and men readying for battle. As I slid from my bed, I felt a twinge in my arm and shoulder.
I would need to put on armor before heading out, I knew that, as did the doctor who had set my shoulder. He had given me medicine to “mask” the pain. I turned on a light in my room, fumbled around the table until I found the medicine, took the pill, then changed into my bodysuit. By the time I strapped on my chest plate, I felt no pain.
As I left my quarters, I detected a feeling of panic. Officers ran through the hall in a helter-skelter frenzy, bumping into each other, pushing each other, rushing in a dizzy flurry and not speaking. It was almost as if they shared a universal premonition of something bad, not just a battle, but a defeat.
With my head clearing, I came to realize why the brass had only issued a yellow alert. This was to be the old men’s march. This was the battle in which the Army would thin its ranks and preserve its munitions, not so much a genocide as a chronocide. They were killing clones according to age.
General Newcastle would flood the battlefield with his white-haired soldiers, the clones Philips had labeled the “Prune Juice Brigade.” The general’s plan was to win the fight by overwhelming the Avatari with vastly superior numbers, knowing he would lose the majority of his troops.
“Harris, where are you?” Moffat’s voice sounded stiff as he addressed me over the interLink. Unless somebody
