armor, then other Marines began falling on top of me. The first one fell on my back, his head right above mine, driving my face into the rough concrete. The next man fell on him and slid forward, over my head. That second man probably saved my life. Moments after he landed on me, blood began trickling from his armor. The flechettes left small exit and entry holes, but blood ran from those holes in steady streams. An inky, sticky puddle began to form around me.
Blood has a unique scent, a tinny, subtle smell that is not unpleasant on its own, but it comes with a rush of memories tinged with death and rage. Lying prone, with limbs and armor pressing down on me, I felt suffocated and trapped by the scent of blood. I heard men moaning and shouts of pain. A man right above me fired his M27. He fired a long steady burst. Other men fired, too.
I crawled forward, trying to pull myself from beneath the pile of men the way a snake might wriggle out of a collapsed den. Clamping both my hands around my M27, I used the butt like a paddle or maybe a crutch.
The fighting continued. Men died as I wedged my way out from under them. Some of them slumped to the floor like laundry, like wet towels waiting to be cleaned. Others fought. I kept low to the floor as bullets and flechettes passed above my head.
Freed from the pile, I rolled to a clearing, using bodies as palisades as I rose to an elbow and sprayed bullets into the ocean of men. I lay on the floor under a ghillie suit of limbs and corpses, and I fired ten-second bursts, hitting ankles and thighs. Men fell, and I aimed at their faces.
I could not look back to see if my men were trapped in the stairwell. I had to keep firing. When I ran out of bullets, I did not stop to reload. With dozens of dead men heaped up around me, there were plenty of guns on the floor, some wet with blood. I had to pull one out of the hand of a dead Marine. Such things did not bother me. I did not think about them.
I did not need to aim; the Unifieds were everywhere. I faced forward and pulled the trigger. Men died.
Against a force with fifty thousand men, a man with a gun is little more than a nuisance. Screaming and shooting and insane with rage, I might have killed fifty men. I pulled a grenade and lobbed it high, over the heads of the Unifieds. I heard it explode, but I did not see the results.
And then came the apocalypse. It was not a grenade or a mortar or a rocket. Those are small weapons designed to kill men. This was a bomb. Something big. Something meant to fell cities.
It created a blast so powerful that the floor bounced beneath me. It was like lying on the surface of a kettledrum while a drummer beats it with a sledgehammer. The entire pile of bodies bounced six inches into the air; and when I fell back down, I landed on a dead Marine.
The blast must have been a U.A. shell, or a bomb, or maybe a missile. The next blast was even more powerful. All the men and bodies around me flew two feet in the air; and when we landed, the world returned to silence.
The shooting stopped.
I sat up. Still clutching my M27, I searched the floor.
The walls were covered with blood, and there was blood splattered on the ceiling. The sound of the explosion rang in my ears. Blood and dust still coated my face.
From where I sat, I could stare out to the runway. I could see the flames and the wreckage of tanks and trucks. Thick tails of smoke twisted from the flaming vehicles.
The fighting had stopped.
It took an act of supreme violence to bring the fighting to an end, an act so brutal that it stunned men into helplessness. Rising to my feet, I did not know if the caravan of destroyed vehicles belonged to the Enlisted Man’s Empire or the Unified Authority. It could have been ours. It could have been theirs.
At the moment, it didn’t matter.
The shooting had stopped, but no one laid down his gun. We could not disarm the Unified Authority Marines without removing their armor. My Marines held their M27s tight. They were ready to keep fighting. If one man fired his weapon, everyone else would follow. The feeling in the air was tense. It was like standing waist-deep in a pool of gasoline and holding a match.
A wave of fighters flew by, escorting the bomber that had delivered the message. The Enlisted Man’s Empire now ruled the skies.
We never did invade Washington, D.C. The spaceport was as close as we came. When Freeman destroyed the missile defenses, the Unified Authority collapsed. Cutter had to drop a bomb on the forces massed around the spaceport to get their attention, but Tobias Andropov had already surrendered.
EPILOGUE
If the Bible is telling the truth, Moses tapped his rod against the shore of the Red Sea, and the waters split into a path. There’s no point denying that that was a miracle. Jesus turning the water into wine, Peter walking on water, three guys spending a night in a blazing furnace without getting burned …all events that qualify for miracle status.
If Scott Mars had seen the battle at the spaceport, he would have called it a miracle. I’m not so sure.
The batteries that the Unified Authority Marines used in their armor ran out of power. The batteries gave out because the power spiked every time something touched the shields. In order to rush our position, the U.A. Marines crossed the runway during a blizzard. Snow landed on their armor and drained their shields.
It wasn’t like Moses splitting the Red Sea or Peter walking on water. If the Egyptians had used water-soluble glue to attach the heads to their spears, and Moses had led them through a rain forest, their spears would have fallen apart. Would that have been a miracle?
So Lieutenant Mars, the “born-again” clone, prayed for a miracle, and we survived a battle against Unified Authority Marines because they didn’t realize that their armor would react to the snow. Mars would probably say that God sent the snow.
I’ve always thought of miracles as singular events. God did not cause the Red Sea to split every year on the anniversary of Moses’s miraculous escape; but He sure as hell repeats the miracle of the snow every winter. We were just outside Washington, D.C., in early December. It snows there every year.
The weather changed the course of history, not God. At least, I don’t think it was God. I’ll explain that to Mars if I ever see him again. If he’s alive. If God was as kind to him as He was to us.
Maybe in his “ineffable way,” God sent the equivalent of a blizzard to help Holman and the Enlisted Man’s Fleet as they delivered refugees to Terraneau. Andropov sent the entire Earth Fleet to the Scutum-Crux Arm. The Unifieds’ fleet had faster ships with better armor. They had more fighter carriers than Holman. Could Holman have turned it around with his torpedo-wielding fighters? It would have taken a miracle.
When Tobias Andropov surrendered Washington, D.C., he must not have thought the defeat would last. He probably expected that the victorious Earth Fleet would return from Terraneau.
The Earth Fleet never returned. Sometimes I stay awake at night, wondering what happened at Terraneau.
The first few days after we captured Earth, we had kept our fleet on high alert. Nothing happened. After a week, we realized that the Earth Fleet would not return and cut back our patrols.
And then we turned our thoughts to the Avatari. We knew that the murderous bastards planned to fill our atmosphere with tachyon particles and incinerate us; but without Sweetwater and Breeze, we did not know when. Andropov turned over the computer that once housed the scientists; but the men and the virtual space station in which they lived had vanished.
Without our barges, evacuating the planet was unfeasible. We inherited an impressive civilian fleet when we captured Earth, ships that were big and slow and comfortable. But those ships only traveled at ten million miles
