powder still hung in the air.
The artillery was far away and hidden by trees, I could not get a good look at it. On a still night like this, the sound of the engines carried clear across the runway.
“Specking hell,” said Ritz.
“Son of a bitch,” said another colonel.
“What do you think they have out there?” asked another officer.
“How the speck should I know,” I snapped in frustration. “The bastards don’t consult with me? I mean speck! They don’t come to me for ideas!” I hated myself for berating the dumb speck, but I could not make myself stop. I felt cold claws closing around my gonads.
The bastards shot a flare into the sky. They must have fired the son of a bitch from a tank, or maybe a cannon. None of our shoulder-fired weapons could have hurled a heavy phosphorous canister all the way across the runway. The flare burned like a silver-red diamond as it rose to the top of a fifteen-hundred-foot arc, then hung in the sky like a still photograph of fireworks, its glare shining down on the building. We had men on the roof as well as the second floor. The light from that flare must have wreaked technological havoc on the men on the roof. The glare from that projectile would have been bright enough to shut down their night-for-day vision, but the runway remained as dark as a cave beyond it.
As the flare started to fade, the Unifieds fired a second flare. This one was silver-green. It hung in the sky directly over the terminal for nearly a minute.
The third projectile rose up like a mortar shell. Sparks bubbled from the shining ball as it climbed toward the sky. It slowed as it reached its zenith, then it exploded, sending out an electromagnetic pulse, and the world went black around me.
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
The invasion had broken down around us. There was no sign of the second wave. Freeman had vanished. We were trapped in a spaceport, cut off from the world; and the EMP the Unifieds fired over the spaceport had destroyed the electronics in our visors. Now I would not be able to say good-bye to Cutter if he arrived in time to see me die.
We no longer had night-for-day vision or any other kind of vision through our visors. We had no interLink connection. Wearing our helmets, we were deaf, speechless, and blind. We couldn’t even wear them to protect us from the cold.
The frigid wind that blew in through the broken window casings burned my ears when I pulled off my helmet. I tossed the worthless plasticized shell out into the open runway. Ritz saw me. I thought it was Ritz, but I could no longer use the smart display in my visor to identify him. Whoever he was, he was standing where Ritz had been standing a moment ago. He threw his helmet out the window as well.
In the lingering glare from the EMP, I spotted men sprinting across the runway. I started to shout orders for our snipers to shoot them, but I had no means of contacting them. Fortunately, our snipers were alert and did not wait for orders. Rifle fire tore through the calm of the night.
They had flares, but so did we. The snipers on the roof shot them in every direction. The first volley was uncoordinated. Dozens of phosphor-burning projectiles arced into the night sky turning it bright as day in some spots while leaving it dark in others. The light from the flares exposed the bodies of the hundreds of Unified Authority Marines we had slain.
I saw the carnage and wondered how long we could hold out. The Unifieds had regrouped. We were like a tiger caught in a tree. So long as we held thousands of their men trapped in the bottom of our building, the Unifieds would not pull in their heavy artillery to finish us. They could send gunships to try and gut the top two floors with their chain guns; but we had already proven that we could defend ourselves against gunships.
So many shielded tanks had gathered on the far side of the runway that the forest glowed. If my visor still worked, I could have used the telescopic lens to scout their numbers. If I’d had a helmet on, I would not have worried about the cold numbing my face. The Unifieds had to fire that specking EMP.
The worst part about not wearing a helmet was trying to communicate. Every goddamned man in the terminal looked so specking alike. If I accidentally called Chris Nobles “Ritz,” I could trigger a death reflex. Fortunately for everyone, it was so damned dark in the terminal building that no one saw anyone else clearly. In case the guy standing next to me was not the officer I expected, I would have an excuse. I said, “Those bastards stole your idea, Ritz.”
He snickered, and said, “Assholes.”
I heard another Marine bitching, but I did not know his name or rank without my visor. He said, “It’s specking cold in here. Bastards. My ears are specking freezing.”
We were in a powder keg with a fuse just waiting to be lit. The Unifieds had us at their mercy, but they did not know how to strike the final blow without killing the natural-borns we had trapped below us. A tank fired a few warning shells that shattered the runway a few yards from the building, but those shells were idle threats. Time passed slowly.
If they’d had shielded trucks, the Unifieds could have driven right up to the building to haul their men home. Apparently, they did not have shielded trucks. Nor did they send in more teams of men. Like us, they probably had no idea why the shields had failed, and they did not want to risk losing more men.
The sun started to rise. I was on the western side of the building, so I did not see it rise over the trees. I saw blue-andpewter veins forming along the edges of the black sky; and then I saw fighters circling the runway.
CHAPTER SIXTY
The fighters did a flyby just a few hundred feet above the ground. There were three in the formation, either Phantoms or Tomcats. Who could tell at those speeds? They flew over our heads at thousands of miles per hour.
A few men fired guns and rockets at the fighters; but that was a waste. By the time they located the fighters, it was already too late to shoot. Looking out the second-story window, I could not see the U.A. fighters or the men who’d fired at them. I heard the engines and felt the sonic booms. As the noise of the fighters died down, I heard gunfire and the shouting.
Outside, the darkness slowly gave way to a gray morning sky filled with low-hanging clouds that threatened rain or snow. The glow of the shielded artillery faded in the light. The trees looked like shadows in a faint golden haze. Bodies still littered the runway.
“They’re not coming back to get us, are they?” one of the clones asked. I thought he might be Ritz. No one else acted as casually around me.
“That depends who you mean by ‘they,’” I said. “If ‘they’ includes the Unifieds, then yes, they are definitely coming for us.”
“What about our second wave?”
“Just because we haven’t heard from them doesn’t mean they aren’t out there,” I said. “Without the interLink, they have no way to contact us.”
Ritz, if it was Ritz, held his M27 over his shoulder, his finger still over the trigger, and said, “Whatever comes, we fight to the last.”
“Oorah,” I said.
We were both full of shit and bravado.
