“Kill you?” the interrogator asked, sounding both shocked and amused. “Why would we kill you? You came to save us.”
Another moment passed, then the battle began.
It started with an explosion that shook the building. The soundproof walls of the interrogation room muffled the blast, but the walls vibrated just the same. Alarms went off, but they sounded like they were a million miles away.
“What the speck?” the interrogator said. Now his guards drew their M27s. One of them aimed his gun at me while the other watched the door.
The electricity went out. I remembered the police station that the Double Y clone attacked on St. Augustine. This attack seemed to go by the same numbers. The lights went out, then emergency lights kicked in, casting their pale white glow. Through all of this, I remained in my chair. I did not know if this was the work of the Corps of Engineers or the last surviving Double Ys, but I did not want to give the guards a reason to shoot me.
The clock on the wall had frozen at 07:45.
I sat on the far side of the table, facing the door and the two armed guards. Had the table been loose, I might have kicked it toward them, but the table was bolted to the floor. I thought about leaping over it and trying to grab O’Doul, but what would it get me? In the end, I had no choice but to trust Mars and his engineers.
Thirty seconds after that initial explosion, the door of the interrogation room burst open, and in walked a giant of a man wearing custom-fitted combat armor, its green camouflage coloring looking taupe in the emergency lighting.
The screaming alarms tore into my thoughts. With the guards occupied, I shot over the table, knocking O’Doul out of his seat, and tackled the guard hiding behind the door. His armor protected him from punches, not grappling. I slammed into his chest, and we both hit the floor, me on the top and him on the bottom. I pinned his right hand down as he tried to raise his gun.
The giant in the specially fitted combat armor, he could only have been Ray Freeman, lifted the other guard in the air, slammed him against the wall so hard it must have knocked the fellow senseless, and slung him at O’Doul as if he were a sack of laundry. The guard and the interrogator lay there on the floor as Freeman drew his M27 and shot them both. Their blood looked black as oil in the dim light.
“You didn’t need to kill them,” I said, ignoring the fact that I had already snapped the second guard’s neck. So there we were, Ray Freeman, the homicidal humanitarian, and me, killing the very people I had come to save. Was it murder? With the Avatari on the way, everyone on the planet was as good as dead.
“You’re early,” I said.
“The temperatures started jumping yesterday afternoon,” Freeman answered.
“That’s not supposed to happen yet,” I said, taking the dead guard’s M27 and following Freeman out of the room.
Water rained from burst mains along the ceiling. Inch-deep puddles had formed on the corridor floor. Light fixtures dangled from wires, and in the middle of the entropy, three guards lay dead where Freeman had shot 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 Churchill.” He sounded cheerful as he pounded another coffin nail into my soul.
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.”
And so are well-placed explosives, I thought.
The cloud of smoke and dust settled, r
evealing 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.
Ahead of us, the twin tunnels rose from the waters of Lake Norris like a double-barreled shotgun. Mars drove the Jackal right up to the tunnel for northbound traffic, then came to a stop.
I climbed out. To my left was Lake Norris, an endless stretch of sparkling water. A bright sun hung high into the sky. Like Olympus Kri, Terraneau would have a radiant final day. Perhaps the tachyons caused clear weather; perhaps they needed clear weather to perform their work of death. All I knew was that the sky was clear, and a chilled, crisp breeze blew off Lake Norris. The wind cooled one side of my face, and the heat from the fires warmed the other. The breeze put a crease in the column of greasy black smoke that rose from the flames. Heat ripples hovered over the wreckage, and the flames looked especially orange.
I climbed back into the Jackal and powered up the radar-scope. Mars, a sailor and engineer who had never seen ground fighting, asked, “What’s that?”
“It’s radar,” I said.
On the scope, swarms of dots appeared. Some represented the burning barriers, some were in the air.
I looked back at Freeman, and said, “The home team’s coming in at six o’clock.” The militia would not need to drive across town to get to us; as long as they had pilots, they could fly here in transports. I’d left a small fleet of transports behind when I evacuated Fort Sebastian.
Transports were big and bulky, but unarmed. Had we left fighters behind, Tomcats or Harriers, they could have fired rockets at us from the air. They could, of course, ferry tanks and troops in those transports, but they would not be able to attack from the air.
Freeman pushed his way out of the Jackal, bringing with him his rifle and gear. He surveyed the three-lane entrance of the tunnel. The way his mind worked, he instantly spotted tactical advantages that most men would miss. He was clever and cunning; and though he had come to save lives, he would kill without mercy. With Doctorow in charge, the only lives that could be saved on Terraneau belonged to me and Mars and the Corps of Engineers.
The first transports appeared above the barriers. They flew so slowly they looked like they would fall, hovering like bees as they passed over the fiery obstacle course. Mars watched them and chuckled, then asked, “Where do they think they’re going to land?”
The only road leading to the front of the tunnels was blocked; and the tunnels rose out of the lake. There was no place to land behind them.
A transport passed over our heads, circled us in the air, then returned the way that it had come. Several more transports followed. I counted eight, but there might have been more. Each of those transports could carry one hundred troops, but they could also carry a tank or a combination of men and machinery.
I walked up beside Freeman as he geared up, attaching grenades to his armor and checking the clip in his rifle. “How long do you think we have?” I asked. “How long before the planet burns?”
Freeman shrugged his shoulders and continued loading bullets and grenades.
“Care to guess?” I asked.
“Maybe ten minutes, maybe ten hours,” he said. Freeman was an agent of action who left prophecies and predictions to the likes of Arthur Breeze and William Sweetwater.
“I don’t suppose you brought Sweetwater with you,” I said.
“They’re in a U.A. computer. The only way to talk to them is to have a capital ship nearby.”
“But you had them with you when I met you on Olympus Kri . . .” I stopped myself in midsentence. Another piece suddenly fitted into the puzzle. “Their self-broadcasting spy ships . . . they had a cloaked ship orbiting Olympus Kri.”
Freeman, of course, did not comment. Instead, he said, “We need to get into the tunnel. We can’t get pinned down out here.” As I left him, he was carrying equipment into the tunnel and preparing for a fight.
The differences between men. Freeman stood silent and subdued, all of his attention focused on the road as he waited for the militia to attack. I found Mars gabbing with a knot of about thirty engineers. They were in the tunnel, but no more than fifty feet from the entrance.
“Where are the rest of your men?” I asked. When I left Terraneau, Mars had one thousand engineers in his corps.
“In there, waiting for us.” Mars pointed down the tunnel as he spoke.
“Do you have men guarding both tunnels?” I asked.
Mars shook his head. “We flooded the southbound tube.”
I nodded, and said, “You better tuck your men in; the fighting is about to begin.”
“What about the aliens?” he asked.
“One battle at a time,” I said. “Freeman and I will slow the militia while you and your men dig in. After that, we’ll work on the blast doors.”
“Hear that, guys. It’s time,” Mars said. He sounded so damn cheerful that I thought he must have misunderstood me. His engineers scattered. Two of them climbed into a freight truck that was parked along one wall of the tunnel. As they started up the engine, Mars and a few of his engineers hopped into a Jackal.
The big truck headed out the tunnel, then cut a wide U-turn and squealed to a stop. It was so large it blocked out most of the sunlight. It also completely clogged two of the three lanes leading in from the city.
The engineers hopped out of the truck unscathed.
Moments later, huge metal doors pivoted out from the shadows along the walls and shut out the rest of the sunlight. The doors were perfectly fitted for the entrance. They were tall and thick, and they slid along rails, mak
ing no more noise than a bicycle riding on a flat paved road until they connected together with an earsplitting clang.
With the doors shut, the tunnel went as dark a closet. Just a narrow seam of daylight shone in around the edges of the doors. I turned and looked into the darkness. Far away, a Jackal moved slowly through the darkness, its racks of lights casting a blinding glare. And then the tunnel lights came on, shining down on the spider’s web of scaffolding that ran along the walls.
When I did not see him immediately, I worried that we might have sealed Freeman outside the tunnel, but my worries proved unfounded. I spotted him working under the scaffolding, probably setting charges or some other defense.
One of the Jackals rolled up beside me, and Nobles hopped out. I said to him, “That flimsy door isn’t going to keep anyone out,” though I thought it might protect us from the pressure shift of a falling atmosphere.
“It’s just supposed to slow them down,” Mars said.
I kept my eyes on Freeman, watching him walk around the piping. He moved slowly, deliberately. I could not tell what he was doing.
How ironic, I thought. Ray Freeman, out to save the universe.
The first grenade exploded. The force of the explosion did not destroy the iron door, but the sound of the blast echoed inside the tunnel.
One of the engineers came to me, and shouted, “Your armor is in the back of the Jackal.”
“No shit,” I said. They’d brought me armor, I was touched.
A rocket struck the door, nearly blasting it off its rails. The deafening sound was followed by the sharp tak tak of bullets striking unyielding metal.
“It’s in the turret,” the man said.
I nodded and jogged to the back of the Jackal. The militia would break through in another moment. I needed armor and firepower. When I opened the door of the turret, I saw that Mars had used the space to stow a lot more than a set of armor and a handful of weapons. Two figures lay huddled on the floor, tied up and gagged.
I stared in at Ava, and she stared back at me. Her hands were bound behind her back, and someone had taped her mouth. Seeing me, she struggled and shifted her weight, mumbling incoherently all the while.
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