those spheres are too thick to land.”
“Not anymore,” Freeman said. “They moved them closer to town.”
Against my better judgment, I climbed in the helicopter. Besides our pilot, we were the only ones along for the ride. The chopper lifted off and flew across the western edge of town. The ground below us looked burned over and pulverized. We flew over five miles of city buried under rubble. Fires still burned in some of the ruins. I saw frames and shells of buildings, but nothing stood over two stories tall.
“So you’ve been out here running errands for the Science Lab, I never knew you were so”—I paused and pretended to struggle for the right word—“so altruistic.”
Freeman, who was not much for conversation, gave me a go-speck-yourself glare.
“You know this is going to flush your macho, I-only-care-about-myself reputation down the shitter once and for all,” I said. “From here on out, people are going to expect you to stop for children in crosswalks and help little old ladies cross the street.”
“How much are they paying you, Harris?” Freeman asked, his voice a low rumble and his eyes as dark as the anger behind them. “Last I heard, they pay lieutenants twenty-five hundred dollars per month.”
“I get a combat bonus,” I said.
“Five hundred per month?” Freeman asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Something like that.”
“If we survive this, I get a 1.5-billion-dollar payday,” Freeman said.
“That’s a lot of money,” I admitted. “We’re still partners, right?” We had been partners nearly three years ago. That was during one of my stints away from the Marines.
Freeman did not respond.
“Okay,” I said, “just remember my birthday.”
“You’re a clone. You weren’t born,” Freeman said.
“I was born; I just wasn’t conceived—kinda like Jesus,” I said.
The spheres were in a large clearing just a few miles out of town. I had passed through this very clearing my first day on New Copenhagen, on my way back to town with Philips and the remaining members of his fire team. There had been a tall radio tower in the center of the clearing, but the structure now lay twisted along the ground like the skeleton of a thousand-foot snake.
Twelve Avatari light spheres stood in a line across the clearing. I looked at the scene and asked, “How long have they been here?”
“They moved last night,” Freeman said.
“The aliens moved the spheres here after the attack?” I asked. It did not make sense, but on the other hand, they were balls of light. It wasn’t like they had to lift the spheres onto a truck and drive them here.
Dead bodies littered the floor of the clearing, old soldiers now twenty-four hours gone. I saw M27s and pistols in the mud. Off along one edge of the clearing was a pile of crates and equipment. Freeman must have been busy all morning; the pile included a full-sized steam shovel. “What is that for?” I asked, pointing at the steam shovel.
“An experiment,” was all he would tell me.
The helicopter landed in the farthest corner of the clearing from the spheres, and there the pilot waited as we made a long day of it. Freeman began the experiments by having me toss a grenade into a sphere. The grenade exploded, the sphere seemed untouched. When we found shrapnel from the grenade, it was already coated with tachyons.
Freeman recorded everything as I fired lasers from all across the light spectrum into the sphere. The laser color made no difference, they all dissolved in the light of spheres. He planted several chemical bombs around the spheres. The bombs had no effect.
The highlight of the day came when Freeman climbed into the steam shovel and dumped a two-ton load of dirt on the spheres. “What the hell are you trying to do?” I asked.
“Bury it,” he said as he poured a second load of dirt over the sphere.
“Bury it? You think you can make it go away by burying it?” I asked, barely able to stop from laughing.
It did not matter what Freeman thought, and I didn’t know if burying the spheres was his idea in the first place. The uselessness of burying the sphere became apparent as the sphere rose to the top of the dirt like a bubble rising to the surface of water.
In all, the day seemed rather laughable. I started making jokes about the different experiments. As Freeman climbed out of the steam shovel, I asked, “Got a fire hydrant? Maybe we can wash the spheres away.”
Freeman did not dignify my joke with a response. He radioed the pilot of the helicopter. On the other side of the clearing, the chopper’s blades began to rotate. “Are we finished for the day?” I asked Freeman.
“One more thing,” he said, opening a wooden crate that was about the size of a footlocker. Until that very moment, I had not noticed that particular crate; but now that I did, I did not like the look of it. The symbol on the side of it was a black circle with three yellow triangles in it—the symbol used to mark radioactive materials.
“Um, Ray, that looks a like nuke,” I said.
Freeman said nothing as he opened the case.
“Are you planning on nuking the spheres?” I asked. Across the field, the blades over the helicopter were in full whirl.
“This is a dirty bomb,” Freeman said. The unit looked like a computer. The bomb and all its components were stored inside a keyboard with a little three-inch display.
“That’s great,” I said, “but shouldn’t we give burying the spheres another shot. I mean, that looked promising.”
“Sweetwater made it small, just a half-kiloton device with maximum radiation yield.”
That was small. When the bomb went off, it would only go off with the force of five hundred metric tons of TNT. Of course it did not matter how big the bomb was; the air around it would still heat up to over five hundred thousand degrees. The good news was that our combat armor would protect us from the radiation if we survived the heat and the shock wave.
“A dirty bomb,” I said. “How nice. Well, as long as the radiation yield is high.”
Freeman typed some code into the bomb and 10:00 appeared on the screen. The countdown began immediately.
Freeman stood and headed toward the helicopter. I followed, glancing back and seeing that the clock had counted down to 9:51.
The truth was that Freeman had played it more than safe. With the helicopter flying us to safety, he could have set the clock for three minutes, and we would have survived. With ten minutes, we could get in a game of chess before boarding. Still, I always found it hard to relax around nuclear bombs.
We boarded the helicopter and left the clearing, circling three hundred feet over the forest and nearly a mile away. I would have preferred to put more distance between us and the bomb, but Freeman said he’d worked everything out with Sweetwater, and I had confidence in both men. Besides, so long as the blast did not short out our electrical system, this bird was made to withstand a little radiation.
Below us, the forest looked like a frosted green carpet. There were no shadows or dark spots. In the distance, I could see the clearing. And then the explosion took place, a bright flash that rendered the rest of the clearing as bright as the line of spheres running across its diameter. Above the clearing, the flash of the bomb solidified into a shape like a golden jellyfish rising from the forest floor that cooled into smoke, then rose like a mushroom. The trees around the clearing leaned out, swayed back toward the explosion, then caught on fire. They burned like matches in a book. A layer of smoke formed around the body of the steam shovel. When the smoke evaporated, it left a blackened hulk in its wake.
“Guess we won’t be going into that part of the forest anytime soon,” I said. There must have been a few hundred dead soldiers around there, men killed during the old men’s march. They were the lucky ones. Incineration had come much sooner for them than for those who died deeper in the forest.
As the smoke and ash cleared away, I could see the spheres sparkling against the silver, black, and orange background that had once been filled with trees. “Nothing hurts them,” I said.
Freeman said nothing in return.
