He seemed so specking nonchalant about my spotting; that was what bothered me more than anything else. I started to say something and stopped myself.
A platoon of men in shielded armor appeared around a distant corner. They looked like phosphorus creatures, like something that lived deep in the oceans, with phosphorous light glowing from its skin. I supposed these men had lived deep in the ocean before they invaded.
The gunship swooped in, firing chain guns. A standoff. The gunship’s chain guns couldn’t penetrate their shields; they couldn’t harm the gunship with their fléchettes.
I heard a fizzing noise and looked in time to see the explosion. Someone had fired a rocket from a building two blocks away. The gunship did a half flip in the air. Clearly injured, it pivoted and returned fire. A missile hit the window from which the rocket had been fired, and the entire front of the building caved in and poured into the street in a flash of fire and light and white smoke.
A few feet from where I stood, one of our soldiers pulled a grenade and tossed it at the Marines in the shielded armor. The guy had a good arm; he threw that pill an entire city block. The grenade hit the sidewalk, and bounced into the enemy platoon, where it exploded. Out here in the open, the pop of the grenade didn’t seem nearly as visceral.
“Better get in the jeep, sir,” said the captain. “It’s getting hot around here.”
It could get a lot hotter, I thought, remembering Thomas Hauser’s inability to stop that stealth destroyer. I asked myself what other surprises the U.A. Navy might have up its sleeve. I knew the answer. The Unifieds had one of our fighter carriers in their fleet as well—the de Gaulle, piloted by a crew of reprogrammed clones. For all you know, they might have more, I reminded myself.
I stepped into the passenger’s side of the jeep. Up in the sky, a fighter pilot must have seen something of interest. He took his jet hypersonic, vanishing so quickly that I didn’t even see the flame from his engines, and all that remained of his bird was a loud boom.
That jet wasn’t only the vehicle that left the scene in a hurry. The corporal driving our jeep gave the captain and me a moment to buckle ourselves in, then he sped off, tires screeching.
“What are they going to do about those glowboys?” I asked the captain.
“Ignore them,” he said with a smirk.
“Ignore them?” I asked.
“Ignore them and keep out of their way,” he said, adding a shrug to signal that he had stated the obvious. Seeing that his answer hadn’t satisfied me, he said, “General MacAvoy’s orders are to capture them if they’re still around when their shields run out of juice and to bury them if they’re stupid enough to stand near a building.”
It sounded so specking simple. In my experience, the U.A. Marines were the terrors of the battlefield. Yes, their weapons were short-range, but they could kill us, and we couldn’t touch them.
Seeing that I still didn’t understand, he said, “We contain them with our tanks, sir. Their fléchettes don’t penetrate tank armor, and they can’t fire rockets when their shields are on.
“Look, sir, they’re only dangerous when they’re fighting troops, they don’t have any answer for heavy armor.”
Armor. I laughed. I was a Marine, and as a Marine, my primary military occupational specialty was infantry. I seldom dealt with mechanized cavalry and heavy armor.
MacAvoy was beating the Unifieds better than I ever could. I wasted time searching for elegant solutions; he happily relied on brute force. They weren’t used to his methods.
• • •
General MacAvoy had moved his headquarters to a two-story portable in the shadow of the now-ruined Pentagon.
The captain led me into the building, a long Quonset-shaped structure made out of a metal-and-plastic composite that insulated its occupants against heat, cold, and indirect hits. The missiles that destroyed the Pentagon would smash this structure to splinters, but MacAvoy didn’t bother with details like that.
He had a perfectly good office, but that wasn’t where we met. As we entered the building, I spotted him standing a few feet from the door, berating two colonels and a major.
“Oh, I’m sorry, ladies. Were you having your nails done this evening?” he asked with faux concern.
“No, sir,” said one of the colonels, sounding unsure about whether or not he should answer the question.
“Then why the speck aren’t you out there with your men? I hope to hell you don’t think those worthless birds over your boobs make you special! Those are eagles, damn it, not chickens. If I wanted cowards for colonels, I’d drop the eagles and decorate you with chicken feathers instead.”
He saw me standing near the door, stared at me for just a moment, then turned back to the officers, and shouted, “Why in speck’s name are you sons of bitches still breathing my air? Get out of my building!”
They saluted.
He returned the salute.
They rushed out of the building. As soon as they were gone, MacAvoy said, “Those are some of my better officers. I think I’ll put them down for medals and promotions when this one is over.”
He stood there for a moment, lost in thought. MacAvoy stood five-ten, of course, a man nearing retirement with mostly white hair. He was thick and solid, a brick of a man with an incisive internal compass that never questioned whether north was north or south was south.
“Did Grayson tell you that we mobilized V Corps?”
I hadn’t even noticed the captain’s name, but he had to be Grayson. I asked, “You’re sending an entire corps into the Territories?”
As we spoke, I removed my flak jacket. It was not tight, heavy, or constricting, but I wouldn’t describe it as a comfortable fit. I folded the jacket over once and placed it on an empty desk. MacAvoy’s Corps of Engineers had provided him with a building and furniture, but he had not yet selected the personnel to man it.
Most high-ranking officers surround themselves with posses of ass-lickers. Not MacAvoy. The way he beat down his officers, I wasn’t sure anybody wanted to kiss his ass. Entourage officers avoided benefactors like Perry MacAvoy. He liked visiting the front and watching the action up close; they preferred admirals and generals who specialized in summits and diplomacy. Tom Hauser, for instance, had a congregation shadowing his every move.
“Did you find your girlfriend?” asked MacAvoy.
My girlfriend, I repeated to myself. The question left me confused. At that moment, Kasara and Sunny occupied no real estate in my head. My girlfriend? I thought of Kasara first, then realized he meant Sunny. I had gone to that building searching for Sunny. I had been to her apartment . . . had destroyed it with a grenade. Hell, MacAvoy and the Unifieds had left the entire building in tatters.
“The only people I saw were Unified Authority Marines,” I said.
“A lot of people left town before we started evacuating,” he said. “I’ll tell my men to keep an eye out for her, but she’s probably off in Chicago or Seattle watching us on TV.”
I thanked him.
“Hell, who knows what we’ll turn up looking for your gal,” he said, “You sent us searching for Travis, and we discovered an invasion. You asked me to meet you at your girlfriend’s apartment, now the whole damn city is in flames. Damn good thing we’re activating V Corps; we’ll probably run into the whole specking U.A. Army in the Territories.”
He led me up to the empty second floor of his headquarters. The bottom floor had furniture. The top floor had no desks, no partitions, no chairs, just light fixtures, which he had set on dim. There were large windows at either end of the building; one faced southwest toward the remains of the Pentagon, the other northeast to the Potomac and the lights of downtown.
In a hollow voice, he said, “They took back most of my view. I used to control the riverfront; now I don’t even have Capitol Hill.”
I walked to the window. The world outside was dark and dotted with tiny lights. Looking to my right, I saw the 14th Street Bridge, an unadorned stretch of road that
spanned the river without suspension towers or cables. From this second-floor spot, I saw monuments and government buildings across the river, but they were so distant they looked like miniatures instead of the real buildings.
An unsteady darkness covered Washington, D.C. Off on the horizon, artillery flashed. No stars showed in the sky. Dual layers of clouds and smoke obscured them.
MacAvoy came and stood beside me. We both stared out the window, trying to read the flashes of light as if they held some sort of code. After a moment, he asked, “Did you ever play football?”
“I never did,” I said. I wrestled and boxed. Whenever my teachers gave me a choice, I always selected combat training instead of phys. ed.
“It’s an interesting sport, football,” he said. “You have two kinds of defenses in football—man-to-man and zone. We’re running a zone operation out here. If the Unifieds want the capital, they have to fight us for it. If they want a foothold in the New Olympian Territories, they can fight us there. There’s no place they can go without having to fight us; that’s a zone defense.
“Harris, Hauser says you want to fight man-to-man. He thinks you’re making this your own personal war.”
“Does he?” I asked.
“He doesn’t know who it’s about, and he doesn’t know what it’s about, but he says you’re after somebody.”
“Did Hauser play football?” I asked, unable to imagine him wearing pads and breaking tackles.
MacAvoy laughed, and said, “He strikes me as more of the chess-club type.”
“But he thinks I’m adopting a man-to-man defense?” I asked.
“He thinks you are headhunting.”
Headhunting? Two particularly bright flashes lit up the horizon. It was like watching a lightning storm.
“We’ll lose some tanks and some gunships, but the fight is already won,” said MacAvoy. “They thought they would run into the Marines, not the Army.”
“Oh, shit, MacAvoy, let’s not make this a battle between soldiers and Marines,” I said, though I wouldn’t have minded a stupid argument.
“Depends on the mission,” said MacAvoy. “I think they expected to run into you when they invaded. They expected to face a Marine using Marine tactics. They weren’t counting on artillery and gunships.
“They didn’t get the fight they had prepared for, and it’s going to cost them.”
Before leaving the Territories, I had already known that I would need Admiral Hauser’s help. He was a by-the-regulations-type officer, meaning I would need to sell him on the idea of my private retribution. That would require meeting him on his terms, on his ship, where he held all the ace cards. I had requested a one-on-one with him before I arrived in Washington, D.C. I could have told Hauser my plans before climbing on the gunship, but I thought he might be more generous if I met him on his ship.
My ride, the military transport that would carry me to the Churchill, landed a few yards away. We watched the bulky, nearly wingless bird through the window. Her booster rockets flared as it touched down on heavy skids. That bulky warhorse of a ship would take me to space and from there to whatever boneyard Franklin Nailor had chosen for a hiding place.
MacAvoy watched me instead of the transport. Once she landed, he said, “You’re going to get your fight, Harris. I hope it’s the fight that you’re looking for.”
CHAPTER
FIFTY-SEVEN
It was already late in the evening, and, of course, no light shone from the remains of the Pentagon. Those ruins were the opposite of light; they were a black hole, a vortex attempting to ingest the flatlands around them. Streetlamps still shone around the vast parking lot, casting tiny islands of light in a black sea.
As I approached the rear of the transport, two men met me. Both were clones, but I recognized them both.
We traded salutes.
“Lieutenant Nobles,” I said, “if you’re my pilot, this ride could be dangerous.”
Nobles said, “It can’t be worse than the time you had me dodging three battleships in an outer-space graveyard.”
“I don’t know; you’re taking me to meet with an admiral.”
“Am I meeting with the admiral as well?” asked Nobles.
“Nope.”
He smiled, and said, “Sounds like a safe flight to me, sir.” We traded salutes, and he left for the cockpit.
The second man was General Hunter Ritz. He asked, “You always fly with that boy, don’t you.”
I said, “More often than not.”
Ritz looked more regulation than usual. His uniform was pressed, the gigs on his blouse formed ruler-straight rows, and his shoes reflected the dim light that trailed out of the transport.
I said, “You know, you look a lot like an officer I used to know named Ritz, but he never dressed as natty as you.”
Ritz said, “The way I hear it, I may be running the show any day now, Harris.”
I chose to play innocent. I said, “I’m not sure what you mean, General.”
He said, “Admiral Hauser told me you wanted locations for underwater cities.”
We started up the ramp, and Ritz hit the button to close the doors behind us. The motor that moved those heavy iron doors made a loud, grinding noise.
“Sounds like a tall tale,” I said.
“Is he down there, sir? Is that where Nailor is hiding? Are you going after him?” asked Ritz. He was the only person who could have known what I had in mind. I’d told him about Nailor on Mars, and the name came up again when I finally made it out of that specking mine. He’d been with me, too, when Pugh showed me the SCUBA gear. Ritz had put it all together. I hoped he didn’t share his theory with Tom Hauser.
Caught with my hand in the cookie jar, I saw no point to playing innocent any longer. I said, “Something like that.”
“Admiral Hauser doesn’t know about Nailor, but he knows you’re after someone.”
He’d told MacAvoy, too. Who needs an entourage when I have a public affairs officer like Hauser telling everyone my plans? I asked myself. My irritation must have shown.
Ritz said, “I did some digging around, and I’ve got good news and bad news for you, Harris. The good news is that Navy Intelligence knows which Cousteau city Nailor is hiding in. The bad news is that Hauser knows I was dicking around with his spooks.”
I kept my expression even as my insides went black.
“I hope you boys are strapped in,” Nobles yelled from the cockpit. “We’re going wheels up.”
Normally, I flew in the cockpit with Nobles. This time, feeling like I had just been kicked in the balls, I remained in the kettle with Ritz. I sat on the bench and looked around the shadowy cabin. I admitted something to myself as I sat there, I admitted that I didn’t want to go to break into a Cousteau city. I had hoped that I would find Nailor in Washington, D.C., maybe even in Sunny’s building.
“One of the undersea cities?” I asked. Suddenly, I saw the reality of going down to those cities. I had to face the reality that I would go to the bottom of the ocean, to the dark heart of the universe I most feared.
Ritz nodded. “Hauser’s boys tracked him down. He knows that I asked his boys for information about Nailor, and he’s got a pretty good idea why you want to kill him.”
“Now that’s bad news,” I said.
“What are you going to tell Hauser?” asked Ritz.
“I’ll make a deal with him,” I said. “I’ll offer him intelligence in exchange for Nailor’s head.”
“How are you going to get down there? Hauser told me he doesn’t have any submarines.”
“Yeah, I thought about that,” I said. “I have a pretty good idea where I can find one.”
“You know, Harris, maybe we can hit the cities with a bomb. It would be just like hitting a ship, right? You can’t survive in space; you can’t survive underwater. Destroy the city, and everyone inside it dies.
“I don’t see why you need to go down after him.”
From a logical standpoint, he was right, of
course. I could not think of a single good reason for me to go, but I had some very compelling bad ones. I wanted revenge. I wanted to see the man die, to make sure he died, to know how he had died, and to know that I had done it myself.
As a Marine, I had thousands of enemies and no enemies at all. We were at war with the Unified Authority, making every U.A. sailor, soldier, and Marine my foe. But if the war ended tomorrow, I would never give those sailors, soldiers, and Marines a second thought. They weren’t really my enemies, just citizens of an enemy state.
That wasn’t the case with Nailor.
I started to make up excuses about gathering intelligence, but they were hollow, and Ritz would have seen through them. He knew the same truth I did.
Rather then apologize or make more excuses, I saluted Ritz myself and went to the cockpit to visit with Christian Nobles. He seemed glad enough to see me, and he didn’t ask any questions that made me choose between duty and revenge.
He asked, “Do you ever think about retiring?”
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Are you feeling old?”
He said, “Not old, just tired. Sometimes I think I’d like to start another life.”
CHAPTER
FIFTY-EIGHT
Location: The EMN Churchill, orbiting Earth
Date: August 7, 2519
“Kill the head, and the body dies, too,” I said.
Hauser listened and smiled. He said, “Isn’t that backward? I always thought the saying went, ‘Kill the body, and the head will die.’”
We sat in his office on the Churchill. This space had belonged to the late Don Cutter before Hauser inherited it. This was the room in which Cutter had died. I remembered the way Cutter had organized this room; I’d spent a good deal of time in here. Hauser had changed some things around. He’d brought in a newer desk, a different chair, and placed new bookshelves along the wall behind the desk. Nothing else seemed to have changed.
I remembered hearing that the man who killed Cutter had shot him while he sat at his desk. I scanned the distance from the hatch to the desk—twelve feet, maybe, fairly close range—and hit with a shotgun. Perhaps the changes in interior decoration had more to do with necessity than taste. Cutter’s desk and everything behind it must have been shredded and covered with blood.
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