by Kent, Steven
The Jackals made their run, then sped to safety. The aliens might have fired after them, but two more formations rocketed onto the ridge from different directions, fired, retreated.
Looking over the battlefield, I decided that the Avatari had not come with their standard fifty thousand troops, maybe not even with a quarter of that number. Not that it mattered. They had more than enough soldiers to win a fair fight. If our Jackals stumbled, they would swat them like bugs.
One of the Jackals in the third formation rolled as it skidded around to escape. It might have hit loose gravel, or one of its bulletproof tires might have popped, or the turn might have simply been too tight. The Jackal canted onto two wheels, then rolled onto its side, spinning out of control. Jackals were made to roll and right themselves; but as soon as this one landed on its wheels, a hailstorm of light bolts seared through it. The Jackal exploded in flames.
Doctorow’s militia had done its job. I contacted the Jackal leader and told him to pull his men back. I did not have to tell him twice.
The Avatari continued toward us. “Two shots. Two shots, then make for the jeeps,” I called over an open frequency. I wanted the drivers and grenadiers to hear me.
Down below us, the Avatari continued their march, slow-moving, unflinching, unafraid. Using telescopic lenses, I could see them clearly now—bodies the color of stone; eyes, lips, and ears all made of the same rocklike material as their skin. Their eyes stared straight ahead, like the eyes of a crudely sculpted statue. Their faces never twitched.
The Avatari stood eight feet tall. Their rifles were four-foot tubes made of gleaming chrome. They fired yard-long bolts of light that traveled as fast as the eye could see and burned through shields, armor, buildings, and men—and then kept going.
They marched toward us. “Steady . . . steady,” I called to my men. I remembered Nietzsche as I looked down at the alien army: When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you.
Using the equipment in my helmet, I measured the distance between us and the enemy. Six hundred feet. In another kind of fight, this would have been the moment to fire or to retreat. We could not hit them with HURL rockets at that range. They could hit us, though. A few of them fired in our direction, the bolts flying wild into the sky.
I yelled for my men to drop, but a couple of morons remained on their feet. “Get down!” I repeated, as the Avatari picked them off. Natural selection works among military clones nearly the same way it does in nature. Sadly, the rest of us were every bit as sterile as the idiots whom the Avatari had just shot dead.
Perched on my knees, I measured the range again. The aliens were 575 feet away. An Avatari bolt struck a Marine a few feet to my right. A lucky shot. It bored through the ground at the front of the slope, then through ten feet of earth and into the Marine before sailing off through the air. Tiny flames burned around the three-inch hole in his helmet. I knew without looking that the armor around the hole would melt and dribble into the wound.
The man was lucky that the bolt hit him in the head, he died instantly. It did not matter if these bolts hit you in the head or the foot; they killed you either way. A shot through the head was more merciful because it killed you instantly. Anyone shot in the leg, hand, or arm went into shock and died in a fit of convulsions.
To this point, not a one of my Marines had fired a shot. They waited for the order to shoot. With the Avatari 480 feet away, I gave the order to return fire.
“Two shots and retreat. Two shots and withdraw!” I bellowed. Over the interLink, I could hear my squad leaders repeating the command. You hear things without thinking about them during battle. Once the shooting begins, all the loose talk becomes chatter, something no more distinct than static.
I pulled a handheld rocket, aimed, and fired at the first phalanx of aliens as it reached the bottom of the slope. Handheld rocket launchers were a foot long and about the same diameter as the handle of a mop. You pointed the launcher like a flashlight to fire it, then threw away the empty tube. The Avatari spotted me and returned fire. I fell back as dozens of bolts came soaring toward me.
“Head for the jeeps,” I yelled, my voice so loud in my helmet that it caused a ringing in my ears. Three stray bolts shot up through the dirt near my feet. More flew through the air above me.
I had made a mistake telling my men to fire two shots, even a single shot was dicey. A living enemy would have run for cover or charged our position, these bastards kept marching forward, returning fire as they went. They were avatars, not living beings. They had nothing to fear.
I turned to run and stumbled. In the brief moment I was down on my ass, I saw three of my men die. Looking up and down the slope, I saw that I had lost eleven men in all. I repeated the order to fall back, then pulled out a second rocket launcher, sprang to my feet, and fired.
Dropping low as light bolts flew through the air and ground around me, I turned and sprinted to the jeeps, no more than twenty feet behind the last of my men. It was early in the fight, but we’d already lost eleven men and one Jackal, a bad omen.
“Want me to risk a drive-by?” the Jackal leader asked.
“Hit them when they reach the top of the hill,” I said. “One pass and get the hell out. Don’t push your luck, you saw what happens.”
“Pushing your luck—you mean, like staying to fire a second rocket after telling your men to retreat?”
“Get specked,” I said. He was right, though. I shouldn’t have piped off that second rocket. This was combat, the first action I had seen in two years, and I was having a combat reflex.
It was part of my Liberator architecture. When the battle got hot, the glands that made me a Liberator pumped testosterone and adrenaline into my veins.
“You coming, Captain?” the Marine driving the last jeep asked.
“Yeah, on my way,” I said. I took one last look back in time to see a lone Jackal slice its way across the hill. The gunner swayed back and forth, and the muzzle of his machine gun flashed nonstop.
I sprinted to the jeep and jumped in. We bounced and jostled over the deeply scarred ground, easily outpacing the aliens. Once we were far enough away, I ordered the drivers to slow down. We needed the Avatari to follow us.
“How are you doing with the explosives?” I asked Hollingsworth on a direct Link.
“O’Doul is a prick,” he said.
“Is that opinion professional or personal?”
“Personal,” Hollingsworth said. “My professional opinion is that the bastard knows his way around a charge.”
“How long before the area is ready for visitors?” I asked.
“He’s got several teams working. The team I’m with is just putting on the finishing touches. We’re about to evacuate the area.
“I’d hate to be around when this place goes up, not with all the shit they have wired. These boys aren’t taking any chances.
“How’s it going on the front?”
“Peachy, Sergeant, just peachy.”
The Avatari behaved more like security men than soldiers, but they were not stupid. If they saw us driving at fifteen miles an hour, they would know we were baiting them. We had to make them believe that we thought we could win this thing. We’d take casualties, but everyone who signed up for this show knew the score.
I had my driver step on the gas so we could get to the head of our all-jeep convoy. The target zone was ten miles south-east of us. We could stick to a fairly clean road if we veered north, but that would have taken us in the wrong direction.
The area around us was little more than dunes of rubble and the burned-out skeletons of small buildings. It looked like a fire had swept through. I saw nothing that would give us a strategic advantage, so I called in a Jackal strike. “Make it look like you mean it,” I told the Jackal leader.
“Like I mean it?” he asked.
“Make it look like you came to fight, not to lead them into a trap.”
“We’ll take casualties,” the Jackal leader warned.
&n
bsp; I sighed, and said, “Understood.”
When I looked back, I saw groups of Jackals heading toward the Avatari from two different directions. More waves might have moved in from other directions as well.
I had hoped for hills or at least a stretch of buildings, but the best I could find was a small neighborhood seven miles south. Everything else was beaten so flat that the small ring of houses stood out like an island in a sea of debris. “Pull in there,” I said, pointing to the burb.
“We lost three more vehicles on that last strike,” the Jackal leader radioed in. “I’m down to twenty-eight cars.”
“Should I send some jeeps to pick up survivors?” I asked.
“No,” he said, his voice devoid of emotion. “Like you said back at the armory, ‘Jackals and body bags.’”
“I found a spot where my men can make another stand, but we’ll need time to set up. Can you buy me another minute or two?” I asked.
“I can do that.”
“And, Jackal leader, kick in the shins, not the balls,” I said. “Just slow them down, don’t even think about trying to win this.”
“No problem,” he said.
We drove over a slight rise, and I glimpsed two squads of Jackals heading back toward the aliens. Moments later, I heard the chatter of distant machine guns.
We entered the remains of what must have once been an upscale bedroom community. We had maybe a mile lead on the aliens, giving us a ten-minute head start.
“Pull over,” I told my driver.
The other jeeps followed.
I gave the order for my riflemen and grenadiers to fall out, and they leaped from the jeeps, rocket launchers ready. “Here’s the drill, stay out of the houses. Do not get yourselves trapped in a yard or a building. The name of the game is shoot and run . . . shoot and run. You got that? Shoot and run. If you get a chance to fire off a second HURL, you do it; but the drill here is to fire off a shot and head for the jeeps.”
The yards around the houses were four years overgrown. The grass reached my knees, and flower beds had gone to seed. The houses were large, surrounded by tiny lawns and tall fences. I leaped over a tangled hedge and pulled my first launcher. In a normal gunfight, I would never hide behind bushes, they cannot protect you from anything more powerful than a slingshot; but fighting the Avatari and their blasted light rifles, concealment was the only protection. Nothing, not even the yard-thick walls of a shielded bunker, could protect me from those bolts.
Looking up and down the street, I saw men hiding behind fences, peering around houses, and ducking behind abandoned cars; all better barriers than my hedge but utterly useless in this situation.
“Harris, they’re headed your way,” the Jackal leader warned me. Even as he said that, a line of Jackals came tearing down the street. One had large holes where light bolts had fused through its turret. A dead gunner hung slumped over the machine gun, his lolling head twisting as the jeep banked around a curve.
“Jackal leader, what is the status of your squad?” I asked.
“We’re hauling our asses out of here,” he said.
“How bad are your casualties?”
“Three and a half down,” he said. “We lost three more Jackals and one is running without a gunner.”
“Send that one back to the armory,” I said.
“I can’t do that,” the Jackal leader said. “It’s my ride.”
“What do you expect to accomplish driving with a dead gunner?” I asked.
“I am not leaving my men.”
The Avatari approached us, walking across the ruins that had once been the outskirts of the community. They were several hundred yards away, their first ranks advancing over cement slabs and weed-infested lawns, trampling grounds in which toys and dreams had been lost.
The Avatari slowed their advance. In the past, the bastards had fought with mindless intensity. This time, they surprised me. They performed an actual military maneuver: They spread their ranks. I smiled, thinking they might reenact Pickett’s Charge, but then the ends of their formation broke off. The specking sons of bitches wanted to flank us.
“Shit!” I said. Then to my squad leaders, I said, “Break off the attack. Head for the jeeps.”
The Avatari opened fire.
There were so many bolts in the air, it looked like a specking blizzard. They could not have seen us, but the bastards figured out our hiding places. Three bolts struck a car, forcing the men hiding behind it to run for better cover. A bolt hit the first man in the head the moment he jumped out from behind the car, leaving a smoking hole through his head and helmet. The man collapsed to the street.
The second man did not make it much farther, but for just a moment, I thought the third might reach safety. Bolts flying over his head and shoulders, he ran crouched toward a garden gate. As he started to leap the gate, a bolt struck him between his shoulders. He fell like a bird shot in flight, slamming into the gate. Half-hidden by the tall grass, he lay quivering until he died.
If I could have, I would have put him out of his misery, but three bolts flared through the hedge just a few feet from me. The dried branches near me caught on fire. Without looking for a target, I raised a hand and fired off a rocket, tossed the launcher, then fired another.
“Head for the jeeps!” I yelled. “Get moving! Get out of here!”
Strange as it might sound, I was glad to be in this fight. There must have been a fifty-fifty mix of blood and hormone running through my veins. My skin prickled the way it did when I took a hot shower on a cold night.
A half block ahead of me, a bolt struck the windshield of an abandoned car, melting its way through. The bolt did not shatter the dirty glass, it simply bored a hole through it. I saw another bolt pass through a tree with a trunk as wide as a water barrel. In the yards and on the street, the dead, my dead lay scattered like leaves blown from a tree—men in dark green combat armor, some dead and some convulsing as the shock snuffed out their lives.
I ran as fast as I could, not along the street, like most of the men who had died, but through yards and behind houses. If the aliens saw me, they could shoot me no matter what I used for cover.
My driver radioed. “Captain, where are you? They’re closing in around us.”
No more than thirty yards ahead of me, three aliens stepped out from around the corner of a house. They were tall, their heads almost reaching the eaves of the roof. They looked like earthen statues made by primitive sculptors who had not quite mastered the human form. They held their rifles muzzles up. Somehow these bastards had flanked me without even knowing I was there.
Ducking behind a tree, I watched them fan out.
“Captain Harris?” My driver’s voice came over the interLink.
“Get out!” I shouted.
“But . . .”
“Out! That’s a specking order.”
I had a particle-beam pistol, an M27, and three rocket launchers. I wasn’t going to win a war armed like that, but I might keep myself safe for a while.
“Sir . . .”
“Are you on the road?”
“Just pulling out”
I dived through a hedge and landed in the overgrown remains of what may once have been a nice backyard. I saw a small fountain in one corner of the yard and a pile of lawn furniture in another.
“Captain Harris?”
“What is it?” I asked in a voice meant to scare the driver off.
I could hear the heavy footsteps of two-thousand-pound soldiers behind me. They might have been after me, but I thought it more likely they were just searching for targets. In my experience, the Avatari worried about armies, not individual men. They did not distinguish between officers and enlisted men; our command structure meant nothing to them.
“Let me come back for you,” the driver said. He was a good Marine, he did not want to leave a man behind.
“You made it out?” I asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“What was the damage to my men?” I asked.
“Heavy casualties, sir.”
Hearing half-ton footfalls as the Avatari tromped through yards, I ran to the back of the house and kicked my way through a glass door. Stealing a quick glance over my shoulder, I saw a burly, stone-colored leg step through the bushes as I slipped into the house.
“Do not come back, Corporal. I repeat, do not return here. That is an order.”
“But, sir . . .”
“Stow it, Marine, I’m busy here.”
I entered the house through the kitchen and continued through to the living room, where a knee-high gate blocked off a corner filled with blocks and stuffed animals. Having spent my youth in a military orphanage, I had no experience with the classic family home; but I got the feeling the last family to occupy this residence had had kids. Pinched between bookshelves and some long-extinct potted plants, a holographic television stood as a mute witness that life had once existed in this home.
Beyond the plants, I found a door.
“Captain Harris, what are you going to do?” At first I thought it was my driver carrying his concern to the point of insubordination. When I checked the label on my visor, I saw that it was Sergeant Hollingsworth.
“I found myself a basement. I can hide down here,” I said, looking down the stairs and into the darkness. “I’ll just dig in and let the bastards pass me by.”
“You might not want to do that, sir,” Hollingsworth said.
“Why the hell not?” I asked.
“You’re on the edge of the blast zone.”
“What?” I asked.
“The train system passes right under you.”
“Shit,” I said, hoping that I sounded more distracted than scared. But it wasn’t the intel about the blast zone that set me off, it was the sounds of breaking glass and heavy footsteps. The Avatari had found my hiding place.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Hearing an alien enter the house, I quietly closed the door behind me and hurried down the stairs. When my visor switched to night-for-day lenses, I saw a line of dusty pictures showing a happy family—two parents, three children, the oldest might have been ten years old. I wondered if they survived the invasion, or had I found myself in the company of ghosts?