them. Smoke or maybe steam or possibly exhaust wafted out of the vents along the wall. The air had a burned and dusty smell to it.
Someone peered from around a corner down the hall. In the brief glimpse I had, I saw that he was natural- born; so when he peered around the corner for a second glance, I shot him in the face. He fell to the ground, and his M27 clattered across the floor.
“What about Nobles?” I asked, as Freeman led the way.
“Who’s that?”
Freeman was ruthless that way. The Marines lived by the code that no man gets left behind, but Ray Freeman was no Marine. He was a mercenary, his loyalty was selective.
“My pilot,” I said as I turned and headed down the hall. A guard stepped out through an open door. I would have shot him, but Freeman got him first—three shots in the chest, and the man flew against the wall, then slumped to the floor; the water sprinkling from the ceiling washed some of his blood from the wall.
The locals must have dismissed Nobles as unimportant. I found him alone in his interrogation room, the door locked from the outside. I opened the door, and Nobles followed me out. Freeman led us out a back door and into an alley, where two Jackals waited. Freeman and I climbed in the first vehicle, and Nobles rode in the second. No one fired at us as we pulled away from the station. No one followed us.
The man driving the Jackal removed his helmet and turned to look at me. “How in God’s good name can you stand this armor?” asked Mars. I recognized him by his badly dyed hair. “If these thigh plates dug any deeper in my crotch, I might end up a eunuch.”
Freeman, sitting in the backseat with his feet behind my seat and his body behind Mars, removed his helmet as well.
The streets around us were still semisilent. I expected police cars and sirens, but the streets were almost empty of cars, and I saw very few pedestrians.
“Where is everybody?” I asked.
“The militia is busy stopping the invasion,” Mars said.
“What invasion?” I asked, wondering if perhaps Doctorow had taken me seriously after all.
“The Enlisted Man’s Navy just landed fifty transports outside Scott Card Park on the east side of town. Doctorow is evacuating Norristown.”
“Why the hell would fifty transports land outside Scott Card Park?” I asked. The park was nothing but an open field.
Mars gave me a patient smile, and said, “They’re ghosts, General. It’s a fake. I hacked into the Terraneau tracking system last night. The transports are fakes, just like the additional fighter carriers.”
“There’s only one fighter carrier?” I asked, my spirits suddenly dropping.
Mars didn’t notice. “Just the
We sped over a viaduct, toward the southern edge of town; and again, I was struck by the emptiness of the road around us. Doctorow had risen to power during the Avatari occupation. If there was one skill the people had learned under his leadership, it was how to evacuate town efficiently. My real warning of an alien threat did not impress Doctorow enough to call for an evacuation, but Mars’s phantom clones did the trick.
“What happens when they get to the park and find out it’s empty?” I asked.
“That could take a while,” he said.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“I left trackers,” he said. “That park has never been so heavily guarded.”
I had to laugh. He’d left the park in the hands of robots that consisted of nothing more than a motion-tracking sensor and an automated trigger finger.
But Mars was more of an engineer than he was a military strategist. Scott Card Park was a flat grassy field with a stream and a few shade trees. We would not have much time before the militia figured out that the invasion was a hoax.
We were halfway across town, and the second Jackal lagged a few hundred yards behind us. As it drove down the ramp at the end of the viaduct, I glanced back and wondered how long it would take Doctorow to figure out that Mars had outsmarted him.
As the second Jackal reached the bottom of the ramp, Mars said something softly into the radio. I did not catch what he said.
The voice on the other end gave a one-word response, “Clear.”
Mars gave me a wicked smile, and asked, “Do you believe in burning bridges behind you?”
I turned in time to see the horizon go up in flames. At first I thought the crazy bastard had detonated the entire city, then I saw that he’d just blown up the bridge. He’d destroyed the viaduct that ran from the north end of town to the south. An enormous, twisting curtain of smoke, dust, and debris rose from the spot where the ten- mile-long bridge once stood.
“You just cut Norristown in half,” I said.
“No one’s hurt, no one’s killed, and no one’s going to follow us,” Mars said. “Praise Jesus, God is good.”
The cloud of smoke and dust settled, revealing sections of bridge that hung like severed limbs over battered city blocks.
“Mars, you missed your calling,” I said. “You should have been in demolitions.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said, sounding extraordinarily cheery about his act of benevolent terrorism. “It’s much more fun to bust them than to build them, but the Corps of Engineers giveth, and the Corps of Engineers taketh away.” He laughed, and I could not help but smile. Freeman, on the other hand, kept his rifle out and his finger on the trigger.
I turned to him, and said, “Why the speck did you come here, Freeman?”
He didn’t answer, but Mars did. “He was the one that got you out of jail.”
“Stay out of this,” I told Mars. “Freeman and I have a few issues we need straightened out.”
I asked Freeman, “Whose specking side are you on? Are you working for the Unified Authority this time, or are you just out for yourself?”
Had my mind sped up or had time just slowed down? We were in the Jackal driving through Norristown, but everything seemed silent and slow. The world around me seemed to disappear so that there was nothing left except for me and Ray Freeman. Even Mars had vanished.
“Somebody has to survive,” Freeman said.
I saw agony in his generally emotionless face and understood. “Marianne?” I asked.
Ray shook his head.
“Caleb?”
Freeman did not answer, and by not doing so, he made the answer even more clear. Marianne was Ray’s sister. Caleb was her son. They had lived in a Baptist colony on the edge of the Milky Way. As the Avatari began their invasion, the Navy moved the colony to New Copenhagen. They were still on New Copenhagen when the Avatari returned.
“Hill didn’t tell me he was going to attack your ships,” Freeman said. He did not say this by way of apology, just explanation. Millions of people were about to die; he did not have time to grieve over a few dead clones.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
“The temperature’s been playing roulette for the last fourteen hours,” Mars said, as we drove the slalom course leading to the Norris Lake tunnels.
Mars and his engineers had placed cars, trucks, Dumpsters, and heavy equipment along the road. Our sporty little Jackals had no problem threading the gaps between the barriers, but larger vehicles like tanks and troop carriers would need to go slow to get through. Once we made it through the obstacle course, Mars set off a pyrotechnical display that left the trucks, cars, and Dumpsters in flames. His engineers had rigged a masterful barrier.
