“So there’s a chance?” he asked.
We drove away from the campus and entered Valhalla, a city in ruins.
“We’re Marines,” I said. “There’s always a fighting chance.”
If we could get into the garage and retrieve a nuclear bomb, maybe we could stop the Avatari from forming. Maybe magnetizing the gas in the mines would suck a wide enough hole through the ion curtain for us to contact those ships circling the planet. Then what? How would we stop the Avatari from returning? Templar went supernova and fried Hubble fifty thousand years ago. If the Avatari were the ones who did it, they had a long and powerful history.
I had come to dislike driving the streets of Valhalla. Every toppled building spoke of our failure to defend it. The bodies were everywhere. The first time I saw packs of dogs or birds gathered around bodies, I wanted to shoot them. But seeing animals feeding on bodies no longer bothered me; I had seen too much of it.
The Avatari, a numerically insignificant enemy, had attacked us like a cancer. The truth was that we had gone the wrong way at every turn, and maybe we deserved to go extinct. For centuries the Unified Authority had relied heavily on naval power, leaving our ground tactics pretty much unchanged since the nineteenth century. Now that we faced an enemy who we could not stop in space, our ground attacks proved inadequate.
We’d had a nuclear solution all along, but we had stuck to conventional weapons until it was too late. First we threw away our numerical advantage, then we chucked our weapons, and now we found ourselves alone and unarmed.
“I’m not fishing for answers, sir, but have you talked to Thomer lately?” Herrington asked.
“Should we talk about something in particular?” I asked.
“He’s pretty upset about Philips,” Herrington said.
“They were best friends,” I said.
“Thomer blames Lieutenant Moffat.”
“So do I,” I said.
“I’m worried he wants to go after the lieutenant,” Herrington said. He slowed the car down, hoping to talk.
“Not Thomer,” I said. “I don’t think he has it in him.”
“I’ve known Kelly for a while. He’s not a big talker. If he’s talking about getting even, I’d take it seriously, sir.”
“It won’t happen,” I said. “Thomer won’t kill Moffat. I’m sure of it.”
“What makes you so sure?” Herrington asked.
We had drifted within a block or two of the hotel. I watched soldiers carrying rescue equipment into the garage. “Thomer’s a clone; he can’t murder a superior officer. It’s not in his programming.”
“Lieutenant, I grew up in an orphanage. I don’t know if you knew that, sir. I grew up around clones, and I am here to tell you that I’m seeing them do a lot of things these days that go against their programming. It makes me nervous.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, “me too.”
Captain Everley, Glade’s aide, bustled me through the crowd. We walked down the ramp toward the garage passing fire trucks and smaller emergency vehicles. The thump of air compressors and the buzz of a dozen electrical generators created a smothering blanket of sound. Between the arc lights, the workmen, and the hot air that always accompanies officers, the temperature had gone up in the garage.
“Captain Baxter, this is Lieutenant Wayson Harris.” Everley introduced me to a big man in Army fatigues.
I saluted. The captain returned the salute.
“Harris is leading the team,” Everley said.
“So I hear,” the captain answered, his lack of interest obvious in his voice. He turned to me. “How many men do you want to take down with us?” The captain reminded me of some of the guys I used to fight at Sad Sam’s Palace—slender around the gut but with huge shoulders. He had scars on his face and a surly attitude. I had already forgotten his name.
“You’re coming?” I asked. “I prefer to work with Marines.”
“You got a problem with regular Army, Harris?” the captain asked. “This is your op, but I’m coming.”
“I see,” I said. I thought about what we would need to liberate a couple of nukes. If push came to shove, having a big, strong moron to absorb the radiation might come in handy. “We might be able to get away with only five men if the lower levels aren’t too broken up. If the damage is too bad and we can find a route—”
“I can help you with that.” A sheep in colonel’s clothing trotted in to join our conversation. “You’re Lieutenant Harris, is that right? You’re the one leading the search team?” He reached to shake my hand. “John Young, Army Corps of Engineers.”
Young had an Army uniform and a military haircut, but those were the only military things about him. He introduced himself like a civilian, smiling and expecting me to shake hands. I shook hands, but when Young— probably not a military man but a civilian engineer pressed into service during a time of emergency—reached to shake hands with Baxter, he came up dry.
“I hope you found us a way in,” Baxter said. His tone of voice reflected his lack of respect for Young. “I’m looking forward to the workout.” He flexed his shoulder as if limbering up for a fight.
“We’ve taken soundings and X-rays,” Young said as he led me to a card table in a brightly lit corner of the garage. He sounded cheerful, like a man who is just happy to be of service. He also sounded like a man in the know. I suspected that Newcastle had confided in him, and he knew the truth about the Avatari.
Strings of lights hung along the ceiling in this corner of the garage. The blades of a seven-foot-tall fan lazily spun, circulating the warm air away from the table.
Generals Newcastle, Haight, and Glade huddled around the table. Young pushed his way among them, saying in a dismissive voice guaranteed to offend any commanding officer, “Make way, make way. Some of us have work to do.
“General Glade tells me you were the one who suggested we use that robot. That was a great suggestion.”
Newcastle glared at Glade, who answered him with a smirk.
Young spread a set of blueprints across the table. The drawing showed a side view of the garage. He then spread a second blueprint over the first. It showed separate top-down schematics of all seven levels of the garage. Young pointed to an uneven circle drawn around the top level.
“We’re here.” He drew an X. “This circle represents the collapsed area. As you can see, it takes up most of this level of the garage.”
Young moved his finger down to the next level. The collapsed area on the second level was less than a third the size of the area on the upper level. “Whatever kind of weapon the Mudders are using, it only impacts structures on the surface of the ground. Using that S.C.O.O.T.E.R. robot, we were able to get a look at a few of the lower levels. From what I can tell, the structural integrity remains good.”
Even though he called the aliens “Mudders,” something about the way Young spoke made me think that he knew they were avatars. I could hear it in his voice. He must have known that the Army guys did not know and that it was privileged information.
“What about this damage zone?” I asked, pointing to the circled area on the second level.
“It’s caved in there,” Young said.
“But the structure is sound around the cave-in?” I asked.
“Sound? As in unharmed?”
Young smiled. “Harris, a fifty-six-story hotel collapsed on top of this garage. Frankly, I am amazed how well it held up.”
Young said that the damaged area on the third level was only a fraction of the size on the second. The fourth level, where they stored the nukes, was clear.
“Yeah, I got that it’s solid. How do we get down there?” Baxter, my Army-appointed second-in-command, demanded.
“Okay, so this is the top level of the garage,” said Young. He pointed to a square. “We cut a hole through the floor here. That’s how we got the robot in. I suppose we could make the hole bigger if you want to drop down through it, Captain.”
Baxter bent over the schematic. He nodded and grunted his approval.
