alien dig site, and detonate it before the next battle. The Avatari returned every three days. I’d spent a day locked up in that cell, another eight hours had passed since Major Burton released me …
“It might take them all day to find a way into the garage,” I said.
“If you don’t hear from me in twelve hours, don’t worry about it,” Freeman said. He had a point.
Thomer met me as I entered the dormitory. He looked like every other clone, but I recognized him just the same. You do that when you live in a world of clones. You find ways to pull them out of the crowd.
“We found Philips,” he said.
“You brought him back with you?” I asked.
Thomer nodded.
“Let’s go have a look,” I said, and followed Sergeant Thomer out of the building. He led me to a little parking lot behind the dorm. A single jeep sat in the lot, which was ringed by three-foot snowdrifts with surprisingly clean snow. A cold wind blew across the scene, making the bare branches rattle in the trees.
We approached the jeep. Thomer had laid Philips out in the back of the jeep, curling his knees against his chest so that he would fit. He’d left Philips covered under an Army blanket. I pulled back the blanket.
The man lying in the back of the jeep could have been any of the over one million clones flown to New Copenhagen to defend the planet. His helmet was removed, revealing a face with an ice blue tint to the skin. He had died with his mouth closed. Even Philips would have appreciated that irony.
Gone were the swagger and defiance that once made Sergeant Mark Philips stand out. The Japanese said that it was “the nail that stuck out that got beaten down.” I suppose the indomitable Sergeant Philips had finally been beaten down. What remained was a body lying on its side in muddy combat armor. Had he been shot with a particle-beam weapon, his armor would have been in splinters or entirely gone.
“Where was he hit?” I asked.
“Shot through the chest,” Thomer said.
I wrestled Philips’s body onto its back, prepared to see bullet holes. I knew how I would react; I’d already rehearsed the scene in my head. I would turn without a word and march into the dorms. I would find Moffat and kill him, without ever speaking a word.
The wound was three inches across and ran right through the center of Philips’s chest. Except for the trail of white where his armor melted and drooled into the wound, the hole was clean—the work of an Avatari bolt.
“It doesn’t matter who fired the shot,” Thomer said, “Moffat killed him.”
“Yes, he did,” I said. The son of a bitch had intentionally sent Philips to die.
“Philips knew this was coming,” Thomer said. He was trying to stay in control …good clones don’t accuse natural-born officers. “This is what he wanted to happen.”
“I suppose,” I said.
“The moment they carted you away, Moffat sent Philips’s platoon back out to the enemy line.” Thomer, the closest the clone Marines had ever come to producing a Boy Scout, had to struggle to say these next words: “I’ll shoot that bastard if I get a shot at him.”
I did not know what to say. I went back into the dorms wondering how things had become so undone.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
The excavation project commenced within the hour. It began with two crazed Army generals trying to show each other up. General Newcastle, still the highest-ranking officer on the planet, had his Corps of Engineers begin digging while General Haight, the up-and-comer, sent soldiers to all the local rescue stations to locate specialized equipment.
In the end, it was General James Ptolemeus Glade who stole the show. He was preordained to win the pissing match because the man going after the bombs wore a Marine’s uniform. When Sweetwater asked me to go down, nobody volunteered to take my place.
I helped General Glade trump Newcastle and Haight a second time by telling him about S.C.O.O.T.E.R., the exploration robot Freeman and I had used to scout out the alien dig before we went in.
“Good idea,” Glade said. “But unless those robots can dig their way out of a collapsed underground garage …”
“They didn’t all go down with the armory, sir,” I said. “Freeman got one out of the Science Lab.”
In the battle to show who had real stones, Haight came in last. Rather than showing up with specialized equipment, his detail arrived on the scene with sonic cannons, ropes, a collapsible platform, radio gear, hard hats, flashlights, hydraulic lifts, and other bric-a-brac that Newcastle’s Corps of Engineers had brought from the start.
A few hours passed before the engineers cleared out enough of the garage for Freeman and me to attempt an entry. An hour before the garage was ready, Freeman called to tell me I was on deck.
“Aren’t we both on deck?” I asked.
“You’re on deck,” he said.
“Where are you going?” I asked. I could not help feeling like I was about to do something really dangerous, and Freeman was skating off scot-free.
“I need to find Breeze,” Freeman said.
“I thought you said he was dead,” I said.
“Sweetwater needs the equipment he had on him.”
“Where is he?” I asked.
“The Avatari mines.”
“You’re going into the mines?” Suddenly retrieving nuclear bombs from an unstable underground garage did not seem so bad.
“Only the entrance. Breeze didn’t make it very far,” Freeman said as he hung up.
So I called Major Burton and had Herrington assigned to my detail, then I dressed and went down to the street. While Newcastle’s engineers finished their stress tests, Sergeant Herrington located a staff car and picked me up in front of the barracks. “Where to, sir?” he asked, as I climbed into the passenger’s seat.
“The hotel,” I said.
“The Hotel Valhalla?” Herrington asked. “The Mudders smashed it, sir. They knocked that place flat.”
Looking into the sky, I almost mistook this for the early hours of a beautiful day. The sky had the white-paper look that it sometimes has on clear mornings as the sun rises over a cloudless atmosphere. There were clouds up in the silvery brightness and I realized it was midday.
“Do you still want to go back to the hotel?” Herrington asked.
“I do,” I said. “We’re excavating the armory.”
“The armory?” Herrington asked. “Hot damn.”
We drove across campus. Snowdrifts still leaned hard on a few of the buildings. The parks and greenbelts looked far too peaceful. Soldiers walked the pathways, and jeeps crossed the roads, but the place looked empty. This was a large campus, and the tens of thousands of defenders left to hold this ground did not provide enough warm bodies to replace the missing students.
“We aren’t going to beat the Mudders, are we, sir?” Herrington asked.
I thought about telling him the truth. I could tell him that they were not “Mudders,” in fact, they were not even living beings, just avatars of aliens who were far away and safe from assault. I thought about telling him that nothing we could do would matter in the end since the Avatari were pumping the planet full of chemicals.
“Sure we can win. The Science Lab has some ideas that could turn this thing around,” was what I said. I did not believe a word of it. As for Herrington, he was a clone. When an officer gave him information, his neural programming was supposed to make him accept it.
