I ran in the door of the elevator station and turned to see the street. I saw searchlights, tanks, and Marines in retreat. “Philips, Thomer, get them topside.”
There were no stairs in the elevator station. With the power down, the elevators would no longer work. Since we did not come with jetpacks, the only way up was using ropes. Fortunately, the magnetic link between our armor and the rappel cords would make the climb easier. Any man who could not climb those hundred feet would stay behind and die.
With the power out, I did not know if the gravity chute would work. All I could do was hope that it ran on a natural convection created by the distilled shit gas. On the other hand, I did not want to know what the gas might do to a transport.
A searchlight shone across the entrance of the elevator station. It was from a Rumsfeld at least a hundred yards away. The light formed a blinding circle that scoured the road outside the station, then shone on the door. I stepped back and hid behind a wall as the light played past me.
I looked back at the men. A few had started the climb. Most stood in front of the shaft, waiting their turn. “Any of you have rockets?” I called.
One of the men came over and handed me a launcher and three rockets. They were small, no bigger than my fist.
“Thanks,” I said. “Now get topside.”
Outside, the Rumsfeld moved toward the door of the station. I fired a rocket into it, and the tank somersaulted forward and landed on its turret.
I looked back again. All but three of my men had started up the shaft. Philips, Greer, and Thomer were still down, but I knew they could handle the climb. Seeing Philips grab a cord, I had to smile. We were going to make it out of this shit hole. More than half of my platoon would survive this mission.
A scattering of Marines saw the explosion and headed in our direction. Spotlights roved up and down the side streets. Gunfire and tank engines rumbled in my audio. I started to head toward the cords; but just as I did, I caught a glimpse of something that made me freeze.
At first I thought the Mogats had turned the power back on. In the distance, the civilian sector glowed brightly. The light that filled the sky was so bright that the lens in my visor switched from night-for-day to standard tactical. Tint shields clouded my visor when I looked directly into the glare.
The light did not come from the city, it came from behind it. It wasn’t just light. It wasn’t like the glow of a searchlight or even a thousand searchlights.
The light above the city constantly changed hues and pattern as if the reds, yellows, and blues separated and remixed with each other. Patterns of color rose like smoke out of the glow. It looked something like the aurora borealis, only enormous sparks flashed in it. For a moment I thought the light might be coming from the city itself. Maybe light happened when buildings made of distilled shit gas decomposed; but I did not have time to waste reasoning it out.
“Harris, you seeing this?” Freeman called over the interLink.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“One floor up,” Freeman said. “You better get climbing.”
“You can see that light?” I asked. I took one last glance out the door. The light had a slow gelatinous property about it. It seemed to seep over the city like viscous oil. As soon as I turned from the door, the night-for-day lens resumed in my visor. The glow from that strange light had not yet reached the elevator station, but it would soon.
I ran to the elevator shaft, grabbed a cord, and started up.
The shaft looked like a gigantic tunnel turned vertical. Dozens of rappel cords dangled from the top.
“Thomer, where are you?” I called over the interLink.
“In the elevator station.” Thomer said.
“Can you see any transports?” I asked.
“There’s a transport just outside,” Thomer said.
“I requisitioned us that one,” Freeman said.
“What happened to the pilot?” I asked.
Freeman did not answer.
The area inside the shaft would have been black as coal if not for the glow that started to pour into it. It gushed in like a flood of water, shining on the opposite wall. I had never known a man could climb as quickly as I now scaled my way up that shaft.
“Load the men in the transport,” I called to Thomer.
“They’re in,” Thomer said.
“And you’re in?” I asked.
Thomer did not answer.
“Get in the transport!” I yelled.
I looked up to see how much farther I had to go, but I did not pause. I had another twenty feet. Below me, the light in the shaft became blinding. It was like looking into the sun. The tint shields in my visor blocked out some of the brightness, but when I tried to look up again, I found that my eyes would not adjust to the darkness.
I looked back down. That was when I saw it. There was a creature in that viscous light. Whatever it was, the creature I saw was nearly as bright as the light around it. It looked like a six-foot, canary yellow smudge in a field of glare that had the startling silver-white clarity of an electrical spark. I only saw it for a moment, and I mostly concentrated on the two silver-black eyes. They were too large for that head, the size of my fists, and they seemed to be made of smoky black chrome. For a brief moment my eyes met that creature’s eyes and I saw no pity in him. Then I saw that the creature held a rifle of some kind.
“Oh, shit,” I moaned, and managed to climb even faster.
A bolt of white light flew past me. It might have been some sort of white laser, if there can be such a thing. It might or might not have been any more powerful than our particle beams, but the bolt cut through the cords around me and struck a wall. The spot it struck glowed white and orange, and distilled shit gas gushed out of it like blood from a bullet hole.
The men above me must have seen the shot, too. One of them leaned into the shaft, lowered an M27, and fired a continuous ten-second burst. “I can’t hit it!” Freeman yelled, but he did not say if his bullets missed or failed.
Two sets of arms grabbed me and pulled me out of the shaft. Philips and Thomer pulled me to my feet as Freeman dropped a grenade down the shaft. We sprinted out of the elevator station. Outside the station, the strange, gelatinous light continued to creep toward us. It was less than a mile away and moving at a slow pace. Running as fast as I could to the transport, I did not have time to stop and check.
“Can anybody fly this thing?” Thomer asked, as we rushed the ramp.
Freeman did not bother answering. He climbed the ladder and entered the cockpit with all the dexterity of a spider checking its web. A moment later the boosters sounded. We were already off the ground when the doors at the rear of the kettle banged shut.
I looked around the kettle and tore off my helmet. “Get harnessed,” I growled at my men. From here on out, we had to rely on luck, Freeman, and God. Of the three, Freeman was the only one who had not abandoned us so far. Leaving my helmet on the bench along the wall, I crossed the deck and climbed up to the cockpit.
Freeman sat at the controls, holding the yoke with one hand and hitting switches with the other. Through the windshield, I could see the landscape ahead of us. The tide of light continued to move toward us. I did not see tanks or gunships or armies moving inside it. Then Freeman rotated the ship toward the gravity chute.
Staring out of the cockpit, I saw Marines running out of elevator stations and transports taking off. We might not be the only ones who made it out, if we made it out. There was still the question about the gravity chute.
Freeman slowed down as he approached the chute the way Mogat pilots did. “Do you know how it works?” he asked.
“You just fly into it,” I said. “It’s like an elevator.”
We approached the chute so slowly that we seemed to inch toward it. I felt like we would simply drop. And then the updraft caught us, and we rose. I peered over the nose of the transport. I saw another transport below us; and then I saw the strange light spreading over everything below.
>
“Did you see that thing that shot at me,” I asked, then added, “in the elevator shaft?”
Freeman shook his head.
“It wasn’t human,” I said.
I could not shake the image of those metallic eyes watching me as I climbed up the dark elevator shaft. For the first time since I entered the Marines, I had felt real fear, mortal fear, fear undiluted by the delirious effects of the combat reflex. Even the hormone in my blood had not kept me calm. And now, standing behind Freeman, I realized that I was still trembling.
We rose more quickly up the gravity chute than I had expected. Whatever was happening in the Mogat city below had accelerated the natural convection. It was probably consuming thousands of Marines and millions of Mogats as well. Glare as bright as sunlight shone up the shadowy length of the chute. Rainbow colors spiraled on the rock just below us. At some point, the light faded, and a minute later we emerged on the dark surface of the planet. There was no hint of whatever was happening below.
Freeman flew us out of that hollowed-out mountain and straight up, out of the atmosphere. A few moments later, we received the message I think we both doubted would come: “U.A. Transport, this is the battleship Sakura. Please prepare to dock.”
EPILOGUE
“Wild Bill” Grace, the senior member of the Linear Committee, stood at the podium smiling at his audience. Gordon Hughes, the chairman of the Confederate Arms, stood behind him. Both men smiled so freely you would never guess that they had recently sent navies to annihilate each other. Behind them, two flags hung from crossed staffs—the Unified Authority stars and bars and the Confederate Arms map of the galaxy.
Seated at the back of the podium were Admiral Brallier, General Smith, and several other officers I recognized. An empty seat marked Admiral Brocius’s place. He was in exile back on the Central Cygnus Fleet. He had sent Freeman to die along with me and my platoon. He had deceived Ray Freeman just as he had the rest of us; but there was no programming in Freeman’s natural-born brain to cause him to overlook the indiscretion. Freeman would take his revenge. Once he learned that we had survived, Brocius fled to the safety of his ships.
Admiral Brallier looked particularly pleased with himself, sitting beside Brocius’s empty seat.
Brocius’s obsession with house odds had done him in. He tried to hedge his bets against the Mogats by sacrificing the Marines. Afraid that Freeman might try to avenge me, he improved the odds against Freeman by sending him to die on a wild-goose chase. Crowley was never on the Mogat planet; he died fighting his former allies when the Mogats attacked the Confederate Arms as they battled for control of the fleet. Yoshi Yamashiro gave us that scrap of information on our way back to Earth.
“Wild Bill” held a single sheet of paper. “Perhaps we can get started,” he said. “I’d like to start by introducing my colleague for this occasion, Mr. Gordon Hughes, chairman of the Confederate Arms.”
The reporters in the gallery obviously recognized the former Speaker of the House and chairman of the Confederate Arms Treaty Organization, but the introduction drew anxious whispers from the crowd.
“This afternoon at 2:30 Washington, DC, time, the Unified Authority and Confederate Arms launched an invasion into Mogat space,” Grace continued.
Judging by the gasps of the reporters in the audience, you might have thought that Grace had tossed a live grenade into the gallery. Some people merely raised their hands to signal questions. Others tried to push right up to the dais.
Grace ignored the pandemonium and continued.
“We sent an invasion force of sixty thousand Unified Authority Marines and two hundred Navy SEALs to the home world of the Morgan Atkins Movement. At the same time, the Confederate Arms sent its forty-ship self-broadcasting fleet to support the invasion.
“I am pleased to announce that the invasion was an unqualified success. The Mogat threat has been eliminated. We have destroyed their base of operations, and we have destroyed their self-broadcasting fleet.
“I think it is safe to say that we have closed the door once and for all on the Morgan Atkins uprising.
“Are there any questions?”
Reporters pushed and shoved to climb in front of each other. One man actually grabbed another by the back of his collar and yanked him out of the way.
Grace selected a pretty female reporter and pointed to her.
“When did you create an alliance with the Confederate Arms, and does this mean the Confederate Arms will be rejoining the Republic?”
“Perhaps I could answer that,” Gordon Hughes said, stepping up to join “Wild Bill.”
“Ambassadors from the Unified Authority approached us several months ago. As you may know, our alliance with the Mogats ended quickly…”
This might have been the hundredth time I replayed the briefing. It was a work of art that mystified me. Grace and Hughes put on a splendid show. They never hinted that the invasion had ended in the total annihilation of an entire planet. They never mentioned the Japanese Fleet. They sure as hell never mentioned that they’d left tens of thousands of Marines stranded or that they annihilated 200 million civilians. To listen to those two prophets, you would have thought that we won a conventional battle on Mogatopolis and that the long-dead Morgan Atkins handed over his sword from his grave.
“You’re not watching that briefing again?” Freeman asked as he stepped into the courtyard.
Including the question-and-answer period, the briefing lasted two full hours, and no one ever bothered to ask the most important question: “Who was helping the Mogats?”
If their performance was any indication, Grace and Hughes did not believe the Mogats had any help. The Confederate Arms ships circling the planet did not see any bright lights or alien ships.
I removed my shades. I was sitting on a deck chair, in an open-air courtyard, in a villa on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. I’d stayed here four years earlier, shortly after I was promoted to sergeant. When I received my honorable discharge three months ago, I marched off the base and boarded a plane to Hawaii. I rented the villa and had been staying here ever since.
I liked the sun and the warm air in Hawaii. I liked it when it rained, and I liked the sweet smell in the air following the rain. I liked going to the beach. Most of all, I liked the feeling that I was out of the picture.
“You think I spend too much time watching the briefing?” I asked as I picked up the Space Bible I’d placed beside my chair. The book was six hundred pages long. I’d read it five times now.
“You spend too much time with the book, too,” Freeman said. “If you wanted to become a Mogat, you should have done it before you helped kill everyone on that planet.”
Freeman telling jokes…what a world.
His joke struck a nerve. I had helped kill 200 million people. Two hundred million. I didn’t feel bad about the soldiers, but the faces of the civilians still haunted me day and night. I was obsessed. I was obsessed with that briefing and everything Grace and Hughes did not divulge. I was obsessed with the Space Bible and everything Morgan Atkins had told the world.
When the book first appeared, people dismissed it as a hoax. As far as the public knew back then, Atkins had died during the Liberaton invasion, and that was all they knew. When evidence emerged that Atkins had not died and that the book was authentic, everyone dismissed his book as the work of a crackpot.
Now that I had read the book, I did not blame them. In it, Atkins talked about uncovering an alien city buried in the core of a planet in the center of the galaxy. He referred to the “radiant being” who guarded the city as a “Space Angel.” The angel, he said, warned him that his race would soon invade our galaxy. Atkins said he created an alliance with the creature. He would unite the galaxy under his control, and the radiant aliens would leave mankind alone. That was why he needed to subvert the government, so he could set up a government of his own. He wanted to save us. Morgan Atkins was actually the good guy—no wonder no one believed it.
It sounded ridi
culous. From what I had seen, Atkins told the truth about some things, but I had trouble envisioning that “Space Angel” as a benevolent partner. I did not think the Unified Authority would be able to stand up to those aliens. I abandoned the Christian Bible and began studying the Space Bible because Morgan Atkins had a more powerful God.
“You think I should stop reading, I’ll stop reading,” I said. I tossed the Space Bible back on the table.
“You can’t stay here forever,” Freeman said. “You’re not going to be able to sit this one out.”
Now Freeman, a man who never swore allegiance to anything or anyone, was lecturing me about patriotism and civic duty.
“If we cannot stop them, they’re going to kill everybody,” Freeman said. “You might as well commit suicide as sit this one out.”
“Stop them? Are you joking? We barely beat the specking Mogats. These guys will eat us alive.”
Off in the distance, waves rolled in and out of the bay below the villa. I heard the sound of the waves. A breeze blew off the ocean and rustled the leaves around the garden. The sun burned hot and bright overhead.
Part of me actually believed that Freeman was talking to me. Sometimes it was Freeman who came to talk me into rejoining the war, sometimes it was Philips, and sometimes it was Thomer; but it was all in my imagination.
Philips and Thomer and the rest of my platoon remained in Washington, DC. Given the option to retire, they’d all reen-listed. Some young lieutenant now commanded my platoon. Yoshi Yamashiro and the Japanese returned to Earth. The Unified Authority allowed them to settle on the original islands of Japan. His four battleships now orbited the Earth.
I did not know where Ray Freeman was. He simply vanished while we orbited Earth. He said he would join this fight, but he had no intention of fighting it as a Marine or a soldier. Not Freeman. He was a mercenary.
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