“Are you kidding?” Thomer asked. “We found this one clearing where they were piled up on top of each other. It was all those old guys, thousands of them.”
“Did you find any Mudders?” Boll asked.
“Not many. I bet we lost a hundred men for every one of theirs that we killed,” Thomer said.
“I heard it wasn’t that bad, someone told me we lost twenty-five of ours for every one of theirs.” Boll said.
“Maybe,” Thomer said. “I only saw one small piece of the battlefield.”
“I heard somewhere that we lost about two hundred and fifty thousand men out there and they lost ten thousand. That’s about twenty-five to one.” Boll was not going to let the subject drop.
“That wasn’t what I saw,” Thomer said. “It was almost like they were throwing those old guys away …like they didn’t care whether—”
“Thomer,” I said, realizing that I had let the conversation go too long. Smarter and more alert than any clone I knew, Thomer had just strayed too close to the truth. Newcastle had thrown men away.
“Sir?” he asked, not sure why I had interrupted him.
“Did you ever bag any dogs?” I asked for lack of a better way to change the subject. “I heard you can earn a full month’s pay for shooting a few strays.”
Thomer looked confused.
“I got one,” said Sharpes.
“I bagged eight of them,” Skittles said. “And Moffat paid up on them, too. Two specking weeks’ worth of pay in a single afternoon. Now if I just had something good to spend it on.”
“I hear the locals opened a Tune and Lude,” Sharpes said.
The term “Tune and Lude” referred to dance clubs where they played loud music and served up enormous amounts of alcohol. Some ran a steady trade in illegal drugs; but that did not concern me, the neural programming in military clones stopped them from abusing drugs. Most Tune and Ludes, respectable or otherwise, were tied in with some form of prostitution. Some even had built-in hotels that rented rooms by the hour.
“Are you kidding me?” Thomer asked. “All-male Tune and Ludes, that’s kind of disgusting.”
“No way,” Sharpes replied. “They brought in scrub.”
Thomer, ever the Boy Scout, shook his head. “That’s not going to help us win this war.”
“I don’t know. A good wiggle always helps me stay focused,” Sharpes quipped.
“I heard Philips managed to get hooked up while he was in the Hen House,” Boll said.
Skittles, who went with Philips, burst into a fit of laughter. “He bagged Lieutenant Moffat’s wife.”
“It isn’t funny,” said Thomer.
He started to launch into a lecture on honor when Skittles said, “You haven’t seen Moffat’s wife.”
“Was she pretty?” Boll asked.
“Pretty in two ways—pretty ugly and pretty likely to stay that way,” Skittles said. “She’s got a face like a bear and legs like a chicken. If I had a wife like her, I wouldn’t know whether to kill her or cut off my wanger.
“It didn’t stop Philips, though. That guy is crazy. Did you see his tattoo?”
Thomer smiled and nodded. “I saw it.”
“His tattoo?” I asked.
Skittles laughed. “Yeah, he got a Lilly Moffat tattoo.”
Everyone laughed except Thomer and me. “I think Moffat took a shot at Philips during the fighting on Vista Street,” I said. That quieted them down.
“Are you serious?” Thomer asked.
“I can’t prove it,” I said. “He’s called for a firing squad. One way or another, he wants Philips dead. Can’t say that I blame him.”
That killed the conversation, but that was okay. We had just pulled in to the entertainment district. Packs of men in uniforms lined the streets. In fact, downtown looked more crowded than I had ever seen it.
I thought about the barricaded streets we passed, and the parks used for trash dumps. Somebody was closing off entire sections of town, compressing the population into smaller neighborhoods to hide our losses. Not a bad idea. It might keep morale up for a while, until men started noticing that no one along the street had white hair and wrinkles.
As we moved through the streets, I heard the sound of music thumping and the ringing of feminine voices. Hundreds of soldiers and Marines were fighting their way into a little alley. At least a dozen girls in short dresses danced and mooned down on the soldiers from a balcony above.
“I guess you found your Tune and Lude,” Thomer said.
Sharpes, Skittles, and Manning stopped to stare into the crowd. “You guys coming?” Skittles asked.
“Doesn’t interest me,” Herrington said. He was older than the other men, sort of a father figure.
“I think they’re staying,” said Boll.
I placed a hand on Manning’s shoulder, and said, “Give me the truck keys if you’re staying here.”
“Oh,” he said. He took one last longing look at the girls on the balcony and stayed with us. Not far from the Tune and Lude, we found an empty bar and claimed our table.
“Didn’t you used to read a lot of philosophy?” Thomer asked me as we sat. We all ordered beers.
“I used to,” I said. “Then I found religion.”
The beers arrived moments later. With so many men dead and the Tune and Lude attracting most of the survivors, business could not have been good for this hole-in-the-wall.
“Religion?” Herrington asked. “I never thought of you as a religious man.”
“I’m not,” I said. “After we attacked the Mogats, I gave up on religion. Now I don’t believe in anything.”
Herrington saluted this with his beer.
“Doesn’t that make you an atheist?” Boll asked.
“Atheists believe something,” I said. “They believe that they know that there is no God. I don’t even believe that I don’t believe.”
“Wow, that’s kind of bleak,” Thomer said.
“But you still came to fight. It sounds like you believe in the Unified Authority,” Herrington said.
“I especially do not believe in the Unified Authority,” I said. “I used to think it was God.”
Boll downed a whole stein of beer, and said, “Careful, Lieutenant, you’re confusing me.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Freeman gave me exactly twenty-four hours to rest up from the battle. The next day he called early enough to wake me from bed.
“How soon can you be down to the Army airfield?” he began.
“I’m doing well. Thanks, and how are you?” I said.
Silence.
“Give me an hour,” I said, figuring I would shower, dress, grab a bite to eat, and head out. It would take me a few minutes to commandeer a jeep, and the airfield was fifteen minutes away.
“Thirty minutes,” Freeman said. “Bring full armor.”
“What’s happening in thirty minutes?” I asked.
“We leave in thirty minutes,” Freeman said as he cut the line.
After making sure the line was indeed dead, I said, “Pushy specker.” I dressed in full combat armor, left immediately to find a jeep, and arrived a few minutes late. As I drove through the gate, I saw Freeman waiting for me in a big helicopter, the kind the Army generally used for transporting artillery. The blade over the chopper began to spin as I parked my ride, they were in such a rush.
“What are we doing today?” I asked as I approached the chopper.
“Dr. Sweetwater wants us to run some experiments,” Freeman said.
I paused before climbing into the bird. “Experiments? We’re not going back to those mines, are we?”
“No,” said Freeman. “We’re going out to the Avatari landing zone.”
“In the forest?” I asked. When he said yes, I asked, “You planning on parachuting down? The trees around
