“They made us read the Space Bible in Annapolis. It always seemed like a fairy tale to me. Atkins claims he found an underground alien city in the center of the galaxy.” Brocius waved his hand. He made a sour face as if he had just smelled garbage. “Strictly Jules Verne stuff. You know what I mean? It’s like Journey to the Center of the Earth.
“I’ve read your report a dozen times, Harris. Every time I read it, I think about Atkins. That city you described, it sounds just like the one in his book. Right down to the transparent ceilings, Atkins described it all just the way you did.
“There’s something else, too. We tracked down the location of that planet using the broadcast computer on the battleship you boys stole. You know where that planet is located? It’s in the inner curve of the Norma Arm. It’s the very rock the Liberators invaded fifty years ago. The difference is that back then no one ever thought about looking under the covers. This time we know better.”
“Admiral, how can we possibly invade their planet?” I asked. “Even with the Confederates and the Japanese, the Mogats have ten ships for every one of ours, and they have those shields. They’ll pick us off before we land a single platoon.”
Brocius laughed. “Come on, Harris. You don’t think I’d send the Marines into the meat grinder without leveling the field? Atkins isn’t the only one with secret technology. The boys on the Golan came up with something good.”
“Did they figure out how to get through the Mogats’ shields?” I asked.
“We already know that,” Brocius said. “You turn them off at the source.
“No, they came up with something better. They came up with a way to get through the Mogats’ radar. They’ve invented a new cloaking technology that makes our capital ships invisible to radar detection.”
“What about transports?” I asked.
Brocius shook his head. He was not drunk, just morose. He sat there looking craggy and old, his skin showing not a hint of color in the bleaching light from the electric lantern. He sat silently for several seconds. I had no idea what he might have been thinking about. Finally, he said, “I’ll send a truck by tomorrow morning. No more hikes for you and your men.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said.
I saluted. Admiral Brocius returned my salute. I started to leave, but he stopped me. “Your friend Freeman turned himself in to Navy Intelligence last night. I don’t suppose you had something to do with that?”
“I spoke with him,” I said.
“He had a crazy story about a Mogat base,” Brocius said. Maybe he had forgotten our conversation back on the Golan Dry Docks, or maybe he thought I had.
“We checked into his story. He was right. The energy readings coming out of that building are off the scale. Did you know they were there?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“We’ve set up round-the-clock satellite surveillance. They slipped an entire broadcast engine in under our noses. Who knows what else they brought with them.
“Freeman said something about going out with our invasion force.”
“Oh, yeah, can he come?” I asked.
CHAPTER
FORTY-THREE
The rules changed when we returned back to camp the next day. We did not drill all day, nor did we get to go into town that evening. Instead, we had a quiet night on base, lights out at 2200.
They called Reveille at 0600 the next morning. Our briefing was at 0800. The sergeants from every platoon filed into the mess hall. In my platoon that included Thomer, Evans, and a guy named Greer, whom we shipped in to replace Sutherland. I went, of course. There were almost five hundred of us sprinkled across a cafeteria built to serve as many as two thousand men at a time.
A small ten-foot-by-ten-foot dais sat on one side of the cafeteria. In the time that I had been in Fort Houston, no one had ever used it. Now I saw a podium on that stand. Three empty chairs formed a short row behind the podium.
When the officers in charge came into the cafeteria, everyone snapped to attention. The officers, all Marines in Charlie Service uniforms, marched up to the stand without so much as a sideward glance. One of those men was a colonel—probably our new camp commandant. One was a major. He’d been around all along. The third, also a major, was a briefing officer who had most likely flown in from Washington.
The briefing officer stood straight and tall. He was a Marine who had seen combat; I could see it in his demeanor. We all could see it. Something about the way he carried himself commanded instant respect. Even the way he scowled at us commanded respect.
“At ease,” the colonel said. Then he followed up with, “Gentlemen, make yourselves comfortable. We have a lot to discuss.”
With this he stepped back and gave the mike to the briefing officer.
“Gentlemen, we have an enemy; and as you know, the Unified Authority Marines do not take kindly to enemies. Our enemy is Morgan Atkins. Now, gentlemen, we could try to reason with Mr. Atkins. We could try to negotiate with Mr. Atkins. We could even offer to play nice with Mr. Atkins, but that would not be the Marine way.
“Do I make myself clear?”
“Sir, yes, sir!” we yelled.
“What was that?” the major asked. “I don’t believe I heard you clearly.”
“Sir, yes, sir!” we all shouted at the tops of our lungs.
“That’s better,” the major said.
He was a short man with a shaved head and glasses. He had a scar on his forehead. That scar might have come from an old skiing injury, but I had the feeling he’d earned it in battle. Sitting as close as I was, I could also see that he was missing some teeth.
“You,” the major called to one of us, “shut down the lights.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” the man called back as he raced to the switch.
A screen lowered from the ceiling, and a familiar image appeared. It was a planet called Hubble, certainly the ugliest piece of real estate I had ever seen. The planet had a smoggy, brownish black surface that had not seen sunlight in thousands of years.
“Gentlemen, this here is Hubble. Hubble does not have oxygen in its atmosphere. The gases that surround Hubble are humid with oil. If you breathe that shit, you will die, Marines. I suggest you take good care of your armor so it can take good care of you.”
The picture changed to a surface view of the planet. Several of the men in the cafeteria groaned. The landscape looked like a desert at night except that the soil sparkled like fresh coffee grounds. The cliffs looked like they were made of volcanic glass.
“This is the surface of Hubble. This is what happens when a sun expands and bakes a planet, gentlemen. It turns to shit.
“Hubble is made of one kind of shit and one kind of shit only. That shit is in the air. It is in the ground. It is in the rocks. It is nasty shit, gentlemen.
“Should you visit Hubble, do not shoot the rocks or dig a hole, gentlemen. In the rocks and ground you will find the nastiest shit of all. The boys in the science lab have labeled this an ‘extreme-hydrogenation elemental compound distillation.’ At the Pentagon we call it ‘distilled shit gas.’
“You may not know this, Marines, but we lost a lot of good men and equipment on Hubble because distilled shit gas eats through armor and machinery.”
The scene changed to show a corpse. It was a Marine in combat armor. The outside of his armor was intact. The camera came up to his visor, which normally had tint shields but was now entirely transparent. The face behind the visor was stripped down to skull and muscle, with the muscle disintegrating right before our eyes.
I’d fought on Hubble. That was before the Confederate Arms declared independence. We massacred a Mogat settlement on that planet. I always wondered why the Mogats had chosen to hide on such a hideous planet. I was about to find out.
“Gentlemen, you learn something new every day. Today we have learned that the corrosive elements in distilled shit gas can be used to produce energy. If you strip those corrosive elements out of the shit gas compound, you are left with highly malleab
le chemicals that carry an electrical charge and are easily transformed.”
“Nanotechnology,” somebody whispered in the audience.
“You are almost correct, Marine,” said the briefing officer. “Not nanotechnology.” He stretched the first syllables—Nan-oh-technology. “Atomic conversion.” A-tomic con-versh-shun. “This is alchemy, Marines. Morgan Atkins is an alchemist. He is taking shit and turning it into plastics, metals, fuel, and fertilizer. For all we know, the Morgan Atkins Separatists even eat food made of distilled shit gas.
“It turns out that distilled shit gas is useful stuff. Morgan Atkins has based his entire civilization on the use of distilled shit gas. He fuses the noncorrosive compounds with an electrical charge and converts them into plastic to build his cities. He condenses it and strips the acids out to fuel automobiles. The man has an endless supply of distilled shit gas at his fingertips, and he is specking Albert Einstein when it comes to the many uses of that gas.
“When you invade his planet, gentlemen, you will be underground. Be aware, Marines, that everything around you will be made of distilled shit gas.
“Do you hear me, Marines?”
“Sir, yes, sir!”
Manipulative or not, I had to admire the way this briefing officer personalized the war. He never referred to the Mogats. Everything focused on Morgan Atkins himself, as if he personally had attacked Earth, killed Marines, and declared war.
The screen reverted to an orbital shot of Hubble. “The good news is that we no longer need to invade Hubble. There are no Mogats on this planet, we already killed them,” the briefing officer continued.
Across the cafeteria I heard sighs and nervous laughter.
“The bad news is that you will be invading a planet that is exactly like Hubble, right down to having distilled shit gas in the dirt.
“The distilled shit gas will be the least of your worries. You Marines will invade a planet that is home to an estimated 200 million Morgan Atkins Believers. Those men and women will not welcome you into their home, Marines.
“Leading their forces is one General Amos Crowley. You may have heard of this man. You may be ignorant of him. Amos Crowley was once a general in the Unified Authority Army. His having deserted the Unified Authority makes this dickweed our enemy, Marines. His having swapped sides to join the Mogats makes him a treacherous dickweed.
“Do not underestimate this dickweed. When he was our dickweed, he led the Unified Authority Army through many great battles. He may be a dickweed, but he is a dickweed who knows how to fight.”
On the screen, the white-bearded face of General Amos Crowley smiled down at us. Crowley had a smooth, kind face with a generous smile. He had shown that same smile to me as I lay on a table waiting to be tortured. He was the reason I’d invited Freeman to join the invasion. Whether we won or lost, Freeman would make sure that General Crowley did not survive the battle.
“I have more good news for you, gentlemen. Morgan Atkins has developed shields that protect his ships and his buildings from any weapon we possess. We have not seen his tanks in action, but we have reason to believe that his tanks and battle vehicles may have those shields as well.
“Their shields are the real specking deal, Marines. Do not bother shooting Morgan Atkins tanks with laser weapons. Do not bother shooting his buildings with particle beams. You will not hurt them with grenades or mortars.
“If this invasion goes as planned, we hope to shut those shields down before you have to deal with them. If it does not go as planned, gentlemen, you may find yourselves in a battle against an invulnerable enemy. If that becomes the case, Marines, you will be expected to employ hit-and-run tactics until those shields are brought down. You are not to engage the enemy in a head-on war. Do you understand me, Marines?”
“Sir, yes, sir.” The chant was not especially enthusiastic.
Clearly hearing the lack of enthusiasm, the major said, “Gentlemen, this is the Unified Authority Marine Corps. We do not send our own off unprepared.”
That was not the case in my experience, but I did not quibble. In my experience, officers did not think twice about wasting clones.
“The Navy is sending SEALs to visit Morgan Atkins and disable his shields. We are not sending you to invade Morgan Atkins’s planet. We are not sending you to kill Morgan Atkins or his followers. We are sending you Leatherneck Marines to distract Mr. Atkins’s army while the SEALs persuade him to shut down his shields.
“Once the SEALs have turned off his shields, the Navy plans to send his fleet a message. Once that message is received, you will be joined by three million soldiers from the Unified Authority Army. Gentlemen, as you know, the Marines capture the fort, then the Army holds down the fort.
“Do you read me, Marines?”
“Sir, yes, sir.”
“Let’s try that again. Do you read me, Marines?”
“Sir, yes, sir.”
“I’m glad to hear that, Marines. You and your men ship out at 0930.”
CHAPTER
FORTY-FOUR
What they did not tell us at the briefing:
After we landed on Mogatopolis, the Navy would send three teams of SEALs. One of those teams would go after the Mogats’ shield generator, likely the most closely guarded spot on the planet. The second team would go after the broadcast engine that the Mogats used to transmit their shield signal. The third team would attack the Mogat power grid on the off chance that having failed to shut down the shields or engine, they might still be able to shut down the power.
I would have judged this a suicide mission if they weren’t sending one thousand Adam Boyd clones. This was their element. If anyone could slip in under the radar and find those targets, it was the Adam Boyd clones.
Never once did the major mention modes of transportation. Except for me, none of the Marines knew of the alliance with the Confederate Arms. As far as everyone in the camp knew, we would fly our transports from Earth to the Mogat planet. What more did they need to know, I suppose.
“Holy Moses on a rope. What the speck is that?” Private Philips asked as we waited to board the transport.
I followed his gaze. There, nearly eighteen inches taller than the armor-plated clones around him, stood Ray Freeman. He wore full battle armor that he must have bought custom-made. Because I knew Freeman, I also knew that the armor was the right size to fit over his enormous shoulders and torso. Had I never seen him before, as the Marines around him had not, I would have thought he had a jetpack or maybe a luggage compartment inside that huge armor. There was no jetpack and no hidden compartment, just a giant of a man.
So here came Freeman, tall, dark-skinned, bald, and muscled to extrahuman proportions. He carried a rifle case in his left hand.
“That is Ray Freeman,” I said.
“Okay,” Philips said, “as long as he’s on our team.”
“Ray only plays on his own team. This time he happens to be on our side.”
“Does he ever change sides?” Philips asked. “If he does, I don’t want to be nearby when that happens.”
We were issued special gear for this battle. Everything worked the same, but instead of the dark green camouflage we generally wore, this time we had desert beige.
Since Freeman brought his own armor, his was more gray than beige. It was a light silvery gray that stood out against his dark skin. As he silently moved through the ranks, Marines quickly stepped out of his way.
“Ray, I didn’t recognize you without the dandelion,” I said.
Freeman did not say anything. He might have caught the reference to the little girl he used for cover on the mediaLink, but I doubt it. Humor did not register with him.
“You don’t need to bring us the corpse,” I said, trying to move on from my failed joke.
“I don’t plan to. Brocius says the video record from my scope will do.”
“How much is he paying?” I asked. I felt envious even before he answered. The only money I would see from this action was a sergeant’s
combat pay.
“Five million,” Freeman said.
“That’s a lot of money,” I said. “How did you work him up to that?”
Freeman shrugged. “That’s what he offered.”
Around the deck, the grunts in my platoon eyed Freeman nervously. He was huge and different. He radiated danger. He had cold, dark eyes, and his face betrayed nothing but indifference to everyone around him.
Ahead of us, the doors of the transport slid apart. “Fall in,” I called to my men. We jogged forward as a platoon, our armored boots clanging against the steel ramp that led into the kettle. Freeman stayed beside me at the front of the group. Standing beside him, I flashed back to our four-billion-mile trek from Little Man. Back then we’d wanted to reenter the war. Now we might possibly play a role in ending it.
Once my platoon settled in, a second platoon joined us. Normally a sprinkling of officers would come along for the ride, but this time we clones traveled alone. My platoon was still shy some men from hijacking that battleship, so we came nowhere near filling the transport to capacity.
I had each of my squad leaders take a roll call. They reported every man present and accounted for. A moment later we got the all clear sign, and the kettle door closed.
We did not know how long it would take to get to the target. It took three minutes to fly to our base ship. Between the Japanese Fleet, the Confederate Arms Fleet, and the battleship we stole, we had thirty-seven self-broadcasting battleships. The Confederate Arms had an additional twenty-five self-broadcasting destroyers.
Battleships had two launch bays, each of which was designed to accommodate four transports. Each destroyer had a single launch bay. Crews had worked around the clock to prepare the ships for attack, not only adding a stealth device, but expanding every launch bay so that it could handle six transports instead of four. In theory, our landing force included 59,400 Marines.
We were a force of nearly 60,000 men being dropped among an enemy with a population in the hundreds of millions. The brass wanted us to distract the enemy; but if the real forces did not land soon, any distraction we provided might be short-lived.
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