“That’s our best way in?” I asked.
Young laughed. “Personally, I’d take the stairs.” He pointed to two wavy lines that snaked along the circled area on the map. “We cleared a path to the stairwell.”
As I looked at the blueprint, I saw that the collapse line only approached the stairs on the top floor. “Can we take the stairs all the way down?”
“Yup,” Young said.
“Depending on the size of a fifty-megaton nuke, it’s going to be rough going carrying the bomb up the stairs,” I said.
“You’d be surprised,” Young said. “Your bomb is not that big, two men should be able to carry it without any problem. If you prefer, though, you could take the elevator.” He pointed to a spot on the blueprint. Under his finger were the words, “Shaft is structurally sound.”
“The elevator works?” I asked.
“We had to put new braces on the motor and some of the gears, but the shaft is fine.”
“So what was all that bullshit about dropping through a hole in the floor?” Baxter asked.
“You said you were looking forward to the workout,” Young said. “I thought you wanted the exercise.”
“Asshole,” Baxter said.
Young smiled.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
I had a couple of hours to rest before we left on our mission to the mines. While I slept, Sweetwater and the techs at the Science Lab prepared the bomb we had retrieved, the ground crew readied the transport we would fly to the Avatari dig, and the remaining troops dug in to defend Valhalla. Fifty-eight hours had passed since the last time the Avatari came knocking. Sometime in the next fourteen hours, they would come back for their return engagement.
Thanks to John Young and the Corps of Engineers, we were well armed. We had rockets loaded into the launchers along Campus Drive. Our grenadiers had more grenades and shoulder-fired rockets than they could use in a month. We had so many mobile rocket launchers that our riflemen and automatic riflemen abandoned their weapons of record and took up rockets. For the first time in known history, Marine fire teams were made up of four grenadiers.
The Avatari had forced us into an advantageous battle-ground. Mostly flat and studded with heaps of rubble instead of buildings, the field would allow men with rockets and grenades clear shots at an advancing enemy. The last defenders of Valhalla would have good ground with lots of cover from which they could engage the Avatari from a distance, yield ground, and engage again. If they were lucky, they might wear the Avatari down.
In a few hours I would take a crew into the Avatari mine. Our objective would be to reach the gas deposits and detonate a fifty-megaton nuclear bomb. We hoped to set the nuke and beat a hasty retreat, but hopes are not as important as objectives to Marines. If everything went as expected, the bomb would blow, the gas would charge and attract tachyons, and it would punch a hole in the ion curtain. If Sweetwater was right, the bomb would change the gas in the caverns to shit gas. Basically, we were going the speck the aliens’ plans.
For some reason I had the feeling things were not going to go smoothly. I sat in my quarters, the curtains drawn, the room nearly dark, as I wrestled with ghosts from my past and nervousness about my near future. I had a copy of the Bible, a book that I once misinterpreted and now no longer believed. Beside it sat a copy of the Space Bible, a book I once dismissed and now believed and despised. Originally titled
Someone threw open the door to my room with so much force that it left a dent in the wall. The crash made me jump.
“I hear you’ve been looking for me, Harris.” First Lieutenant Warren Moffat stomped into my room, drunk off his ass, swaying as he stood there glaring down at me with heavily bloodshot eyes. “You think you’re scary shit, don’t you, clone?” He shut the door behind him.
“I haven’t been looking for you,” I said, which was true. I sort of hoped we would run into each other, but the thought of looking for Moffat had not occurred to me.
“You think you’re something, don’t you, Harris? The general’s pet clone. I heard you were an admiral’s pet, too. Frigging Liberator clone.”
He had his M27 with him, strapped to his belt. Even drunk, a good Marine never forgets how to use his weapon. I did not consider Moffat a good Marine.
The civil thing would have been to tell him to go home. I, however, was not feeling civil. My combat reflex had already started; the warm sensation of testosterone and adrenaline flowing through my blood had begun. What I felt for Moffat was not anger, it was hate. I wanted to kill the man. My combat reflex filled me with clarity of thought and the desire to kill. I had never hated anyone before, but I hated this man. The reflex had never given me the desire to kill before, but it did now. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I was aware of all the things that had come undone—clones spraying graffiti, Thomer wanting to kill an officer, Philips ignoring orders, and now I was ready to give in to the Liberator bloodlust. Things come undone in the end.
I pushed away from my desk and stood up. “You carrying that gun for show, or are you planning to use it?” I asked.
“Look at you, the big Liberator!” Moffat laughed. He was just like Philips—a Marine in self-destruct mode who planned to use a fellow Marine as the instrument of his suicide. He had to know I would kill him. I could kill him sober, he’d be no trouble drunk. He stared me in the eyes, no fear showing on his face. His body vaguely swayed as he stood there.
“Go sleep it off, asshole,” I said, knowing the message would only piss him off. I took a small step toward him. I did not want him to go sleep it off, I wanted him to reach for his gun. I took another step in his direction. The dorm room was small, and he was only a few feet away.
“Do you think winning this war will make you human? Do you think it’s going to make you a natural-born? Specking synth,” he said. And then he did it. He reached for his gun. It was just a twitch. He could not have possibly meant to draw it, but it was enough for me.
I swatted his hand from the grip of his M27 with my left hand and slammed the blade of my right into his throat. As he gasped for air, I grabbed him by the chin and the nape of his neck and snapped his head to the side. There was a soft click as the chain of bones that made up his neck twisted apart
Moffat collapsed. That was death—your body goes limp, you piss and shit yourself, nothing more. No one-way ticket to heaven. As far as I could tell, Moffat’s journey ended when his head bounced against the floor.
Killing Moffat did not bring Philips back, but it left me feeling slightly better about life. The only problem was that now that he was dead, now that the threat had passed, I felt an emotional vacuum forming. The hormone began to thin in my blood, and I didn’t want it to go.
“What do you think now, hotshot?” I asked Moffat. He lay on the floor as lifeless as a puppet cut from its strings. “Where are your natural-born buddies now, asshole?” I kicked him.
Kicking Moffat’s corpse was not as satisfying as snapping his neck. It was not even a close substitute, and I wanted to feel that first satisfaction again. At that moment, I needed something exciting to happen, and I would sacrifice anything to get it. If I could have, I would have resuscitated Moffat so I could kill him a second time.
Now I understood why cats play with mice instead of simply killing them. The moment of death comes so quickly; and once it’s gone, what do you do? I could sense the heat draining from my blood, and I felt desperate to make it stay.
There was Captain Everley, Glade’s officious aide. I didn’t like him much, maybe I could go kill him. Maybe, if I killed him …But he was such a weakling. And then it came to me—
I looked down at Moffat and nudged the antisynthetic bastard with my toe. There was no question about what I had done this time—I had committed murder. I’d suckered the poor bastard into reaching for his gun and snapped his neck. I felt bad, but I did not feel bad for him. I felt bad because he was dead, and I wanted more of
