“Thomer, on my mark take Freeman and get out of here.”
“I can—” Herrington began to argue.
“Shut it, asshole!” I yelled. “I’ll be right behind you.”
I stood and aimed the grenade at the spot on the ridge where the front-most Avatari were working their way around the dead guardian spider. “Now! Move!” I shouted.
The images I saw at that moment etched themselves in my mind’s eye. Twenty or possibly thirty Avatari crowded around the dead spider. Their bodies had evolved to the point where the yellow light shone through cracks and crevices from behind a thin layer of tachyons. They had their rifles aimed, and I saw them fire bolts in the air, the flashes so bright they looked like holes in my memory.
The grenade struck the spider, igniting an explosion powerful enough to chew an entire section out of the rise. I did not wait to see if I hit them or if they could still follow us. Tossing the empty launcher aside, I sprinted straight up the ridge.
Above me, Thomer, Freeman, and Herrington fired a few particle-beam blasts, then darted into one of the tunnels. I followed. With eight minutes and five seconds left before the nuke exploded, the spiders and Avatari no longer mattered to us. We sprinted up the spiraling floor of the tunnel. My lungs and legs spent, I started to laugh when I flew around that final corner and saw the bright light at the end of the tunnel.
With seven minutes and twenty seconds remaining, we reached the outer entrance of the caves. Not until we left the cave did I realize that Freeman was our only pilot. There were only four of us now—Herrington, Thomer, Freeman, and me, and the Unified Authority did not waste its taxpayers’ money teaching piloting skills to simple combat Marines.
Every moment mattered. In another minute, fully formed Avatari troops would pour out of the cave like ants out of an anthill. They would be slow, but their weapons could tear through our transport. In five minutes a fifty- megaton nuclear bomb would explode, collapsing this mountain and hopefully attracting every specking tachyon on the planet. If Sweetwater had any other information about how the gas would react to a nuclear explosion, he took that secret with him to the grave.
We’d left the ramp of the transport open. Herrington ran in first, then Thomer. Freeman shambled in and stomped across the kettle, pulling himself up the ladder to the cockpit.
I hit the button to seal the rear ramp and headed toward the ladder to check in on Freeman. “Harness yourselves in, boys, it could be a bumpy ride,” I told Herrington and Thomer as I climbed the ladder.
Freeman hunched behind the controls still wearing his helmet. His back was stiff and his shoulders hunched.
The transport’s engines rumbled with just over two minutes to go when the craft lifted off the ground. We did not circle the mountain to get a good look at the explosion. Freeman took us straight up and straight away. We might have been a hundred miles away when the nuke finally went off.
They say you can hear a nuke from hundreds of miles away, but we never heard a thing. We flew at a speed faster than Mach 1, and the sound never caught up to us. Riding in the steel belly of the transport, we did not see the flash.
I shuttled between Thomer and Herrington in the kettle and Freeman in the cockpit. Time with Freeman was spent in silence. He did not remove his helmet, and he did not speak.
I was in the cockpit with Freeman when we reached Valhalla. The sky was dark, and lights sparkled in what was left of the city. The ion curtain had vanished, leaving a night sky in its place.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
I spent the night in the hospital with Freeman.
Doctors spent six hours operating on his throat and lungs. When they finally wheeled him out of the operating room, his face was wrapped in bandages, and an oxygen vent was attached to his bed.
“He breathed in a vesicant,” the doctor told me.
“A what?” I asked.
“He’s got blisters in his throat and lungs,” the doctor said. “Whatever he breathed, it burned a lot of tissue.”
“Is he going to be okay?” I asked.
The doctor took a sharp breath, and said, “We tried to clean the toxins out of the blisters. If we got all of that stuff out, he should recover.”
Two orderlies wheeled Ray down the hall to his room. I followed them down and watched as the doctor checked Freeman’s vitals and chemical drips, then left.
I dropped down in the seat beside Freeman’s bed and fell asleep.
I woke the next morning in time to find some significant brass coming up the hall. One of the generals had come to look in on Freeman—General James Hill, from the Air Force.
“How is he doing, Lieutenant?” Hill asked as he entered the room.
Hill was younger than the other generals, and I had the feeling he was a great deal smarter than the other generals as well. He was the only officer who ever seemed to understand all of the scientific jargon used by the late doctors Sweetwater and Breeze. I sure as hell never fully understood them.
“They say he’s going to live,” I said. “He inhaled a vesicant.” I tried to use the word as if I actually knew it.
“I thought he had combat armor,” Hill said. He knew the word. “That should have protected him.”
“He took his helmet off,” I said.
Hill nodded. “That’s right. I saw the video feed from your helmet.”
My helmet …No wonder they didn’t force me to stay for a debriefing. Once they downloaded the video from my helmet, they would know everything I knew.
Freeman lay before us, a mass of cotton and tubes. His massive chest expanded and contracted rhythmically under the sheet. Except for his chest, nothing on the bed moved, not his fingers, his eyes. The screen beside his bed showed steady vital signs.
“He was crazy to take off his helmet,” I said.
“You were all insane,” Hill said. “If any of you had acted sanely, we’d all be dead now.”
I thought about Thomer jumping into a horde of spider drones to save the nuke. I remembered Boll and Herrington carrying thermite-tipped rockets strapped to their backs. They cared more about the mission than they did about themselves. If he lived, at least Freeman would walk away a billionaire. All Herrington and Thomer had to look forward to was a long life in the Marines.
“Did Sweetwater’s plan work?” I asked. There was a night sky over Valhalla when we landed, so I knew that at least part of the plan had succeeded.
“Harris, Sweetwater and Breeze may have been the finest scientists of all time. Have you seen the sky? There’s a sun in the sky. The ion curtain is gone, the tachyons are all stuck in that gas.”
“Did you reach the battleships?”
“We’ve even sent messages to Earth,” Hill said.
“What’s to stop the Avatari from coming back?” I asked.
Hill shook his head. “They haven’t come back yet I suppose we know how to ruin their plans next time they do.”
“They’ll come back sooner or later,” I said.
“We’re going to take the war to them,” Hill said.
“Take the war to them?” I asked.
“Apparently back on Earth they have some idea about which galaxy the Avatari are from. They’re sending the Japanese fleet to explore the neighborhood.”
I thought about this and fell silent. I was tired, and this new information left me dizzy.
