by B. V. Larson
For a moment, I couldn’t tear my eyes away. They kept coming at a methodical run. Each one moved like the others, coming our way with deadly intent. It was like watching a vast pack of predators coming to feast. Some instinct of mind sent fear through my nervous system. Part of me knew I was being attacked by an army of monsters, even if my brain was too stupid to admit it.
“All right!” I shouted. “Listen up! We’re not going to make it to the target before we’re overwhelmed. Sargon, take your package and sprint toward the coiled thing. The rest of us will head in the opposite direction.”
Sargon was far ahead, but he heard me. “Got it, Centurion. My football will reach the target, or I’ll die trying.”
“Come on everybody, get moving!” As I said this, I reversed course and raced off in the opposite direction.
Sargon was carrying one of our few bombs. We didn’t have many A-bombs left, mostly because antimatter was very difficult to make. Using supercolliders to knock the unstable stuff apart from standard matter, antimatter had one useful property: total conversion from mass to energy when it contacted normal matter.
Just keeping it from exploding was the most difficult thing about making an antimatter bomb. You didn’t need to have a detonator or some kind of compression system. All you had to do was let it touch any normal mass and boom! Everything went up. Even our best fusion warheads using plutonium only converted mass to energy about a tenth as efficiently.
Unfortunately, we’d blown up most of our strategic arsenal with the T-bomb attack, and Graves had entrusted my unit with one of the precious few A-bombs we had left.
All of us were running now. Instead of following him, we were moving as fast as we could away from Sargon.
Above us, the metallic flock grew, and those bastards finally began to plunge downward. This time, there were thousands.
We slashed them down and shot them, but they kept coming down and trying to capture us. Some troops, swarmed and screeching, were carried off. Wriggling and wrestling with their captors, they couldn’t break away.
Most of us fought and died more naturally. We killed hundreds, but hundreds more took their place. They seemed absolutely heedless of their losses. They didn’t seem to feel pain, either, when you cut them down. The broken halves crawled around until their bodies no longer functioned. It was like fighting giant insects.
We’d been inside the enemy ship for around fifteen minutes now, and we were running out of oxygen and men—but I knew it didn’t matter.
This attack had been insanity from the start. How could a hundred men hope to best a ship the size of the Moon? If we’d sent in a thousand, it wouldn’t have mattered.
Then, a brilliant explosion flared behind me. My right eye glazed over, going white, and it never saw anything again.
The other eye—my left, still could make out my surroundings. Perhaps it had been more protected by the back of my helmet than the right.
A moment later I was struck by a wave of superheated gas and hurled like a leaf into spinning flight. I was sure I’d been captured by those manta rays—but there were none in evidence.
Flying ass-over-teakettle straight up, I saw the sky again.
Such a beautiful sight. The door—the massive, roll-away door—it was sliding open again. Outside was space, and Mother Earth, shining with a blue radiance.
My mind wasn’t working too well. I was shot-through with gamma rays and ionizing radiation. I was as good as dead. But it still occurred to me what that massive coiled up tower had to have been: a big spring. Or maybe a cable. Something that had kept the outer door shut.
Sargon must have reached it and lit off his bomb. In doing so, he’d broken the mechanism that shut the outer door. It was now falling open like the yawning mouth of a sleepy giant.
Earth had been revealed again because we’d broken the monster’s jaws. One of the massive springs had been cut, and now the whole system had malfunctioned.
What’s more, I suspected there was some amount of atmosphere in the great ship. Maybe only the region around the door was depressurized when it opened. Or maybe it was just the vaporized gasses released by the bomb.
In any case, gas puffed out into space. The surge of air pressure drove me up into the sky and now sent me hurtling out into open space.
Once I passed through the mouth and out into the blazing light of our own home star, I began trying to transmit.
No one answered me. Not my own troops, not Central, not even space traffic control.
But I kept trying. My armor was leaking air, my body and mind were barely obeying my brain’s commands, and I was spinning in an uncontrolled tumble.
But I still kept trying to transmit everything I’d recorded on my tapper. It was the least I could do.
Eventually, I knew I’d fall down in a decayed orbit, burning up in the upper atmosphere like a meteor.
Long before that, I choked up, stopped breathing, and died.
-12-
Groaning, I awoke and almost fell off the gurney. I couldn’t talk yet, but I could sit up—kind of.
“That was outstanding!” A gravelly voice said. After a second, I realized it was Graves. “Here’s a man who’s eager for the fight!” he continued with unusual enthusiasm. “How’s it feel to be Earth’s hero, McGill?”
“Mmph?” I asked. For some reason, my mouth wasn’t able to form words yet. With a fantastic effort of will, I forced my eyes to flutter open and squint.
“What’s his score?” a woman asked. She pawed at my face, and I let her.
“He’s an eight,” an orderly said. “But his nervous system isn’t hooked up to his face quite right yet.”
“You’re telling me he’s a bad grow?” Graves complained. “What shitty luck.”
“His scans were hard to get,” the bio specialist explained. “His engrams… they were sketchy. Where did you get this file, Primus?”
“From orbit,” Graves said.
“That explains it,” she said. “I’ll get the grinder going.”
I heard the whine and whir of the blades spinning. My eyes flew wide, and I blinked. I might have tried to grab a weapon, but I was weak still—and a little dizzy.
“Shut that damned thing off,” Graves said. “Let’s give him a chance. I don’t want to recycle my best soldier without being sure.”
The bio nodded to her sidekick. Reluctantly, the orderly shut down the whirling blades.
“I’ve seen a lot of this emotionalism, Centurion,” the bio said. “Sometimes the hardest choice is the right one.”
“You don’t have to tell me about that,” Graves said.
I couldn’t believe he was actually sticking up for me. Frankly, I was amazed that I’d been revived at all. Anyone who died floating in space near a giant alien ship should expect a solid perming, and I’d done so—but praise and protection from Primus Graves? Now, that was a first.
“Sirrr…?” I managed to slur out.
“There you go!” Graves responded. “Did you hear that? He’s talking.”
“We have to keep him here for observation, Primus. If you’ll just come back in about an hour—”
“No, no, no,” Graves said. “You ghouls want to reroll. I’ll tell you what, I’m taking him out of here. If he still sounds like a stroke-victim in half an hour I’ll shoot him myself and shove him into the recycler.”
“Suit yourself,” the bio said resignedly. “Place your thumb here, sir.”
“What’s this?”
“A standard release form.”
Graves glared at the tablet and at the bored-looking bio. She had the look of an over-worked Blue-Decker who just wanted her troubles to go away.
“Something that releases you from responsibility for him, right?”
“That’s about it, sir.”
Graves touched his thumb to the plate and lifted me off the gurney. He helped press me into a smart-cloth uniform, and we exited the place, which stank of new life and old death.
“Thhhff
…” I said.
“Thanks? Don’t thank me yet. If you can’t talk right in the next twenty minutes, hero or not, I’ll have to put you down, McGill.”
“Whaa—?” I asked.
“Why do I have to put you down? Because I can’t have a clearly bad grow talking to the troops—or the brass.”
“No… Why hero?” I was forming each word with great effort. It shouldn’t be this hard, but sometimes part of a man’s new body didn’t operate at one hundred percent capacity right off.
“Why are you a hero? Because you chased off that ship, man! Don’t you know?”
“…been dead…”
“Of course, of course. Here’s the short version: by some miracle, we got a transmission from your suit after the big ship’s door reopened. The alien crew didn’t like you blowing their jaw off, apparently, and they couldn’t close the hatch again. The ship spun around so the opening couldn’t be seen from Earth, then it withdrew several million kilometers. We think they were worried we’d fire a load of T-bombs into the guts of their vessel and take them out.”
“…good idea…”
“Yeah, it would have been, but we’re pretty much out of T-bombs. We fired them all in that first attack hoping to penetrate the hull—fortunately, the enemy doesn’t know that. With their armor breached, they couldn’t take the chance.”
I nodded and began to walk without aid. I wasn’t feeling a hundred percent, not yet, but at least I wasn’t feeling sick anymore. My mind was working better every second, but I never seemed to get out of a revival chamber without some kind of lingering malady.
“That’s right,” Graves said. “Walk it off. You’re coming to dinner with me tonight—before deployment. Praetor Drusus demands to sit at your side. You’ll be his guest of honor.”
“…deployment…?”
“Of course. You didn’t think this war was over, did you? The enemy invaded with ninety-one assault shuttles before their mothership retreated. Each shuttle carried down something like a thousand troops.”
That was a stunner. While I turned his words this way and that in my mind, we made our way through Central. Graves talked to me all the way up to the Varus offices. By the time we got there, I’d learned that New Jersey was full of alien troops. It wasn’t the homecoming I’d dreamt about, but I did my best to take it in stride.
When I could talk properly they debriefed me for a few hours. I described the strange cyborg creatures we’d fought and been overwhelmed by. They were particularly interested in the way the giant coil worked to open the ship’s outer door.
“Are you seriously expecting us to believe you broke the hinge or something?” Winslade asked in a distrustful tone.
“Primus Winslade,” I began, “you and I go way back. Way back. You might have felt that some of my after-action reports were inaccurate or… let us say exaggerated somehow. But all that’s in the past. Today, the fate of Earth is involved. I stand by my statements, one hundred percent.”
“I wonder…”
“That’s enough,” Turov said. “Winslade, you’re dismissed.”
“Technically,” Winslade said, “I work for Hegemony under Drusus now, remember? I represent his interests in this debriefing.”
“Fine. I’ll just tell him you’re not being cooperative.”
Winslade’s hand came up off the table he’d been leaning on as if a bee had stung him. I got the immediate feeling that he wasn’t on Drusus’ hot list anymore, and he didn’t need complaints going back to the big boss.
“I’ll go check in with the dinner crew,” he said. “I don’t want to eat cold food again.”
“You do that,” Galina told him.
Miffed, Winslade sauntered out. I was left with Graves and the tribune.
With Winslade out of the room, I found things to be much more pleasant. Both Graves and Turov were pretty happy with me. Graves was prideful that Varus troops had helped drive away the enemy ship—even if the aliens had managed to deposit invaders on Earth before leaving.
Turov, on the other hand, was trying to figure out how to best exploit my unit’s success and take credit for it. In any case, neither one of them wanted to hear jealous nitpicking from the likes of Winslade.
“We don’t have any of your video recordings, unfortunately,” Graves said. “We got something from the platoon that withdrew—but nothing of the enemy you saw. The last pulse of data from your tapper carried the essentials of your mental engrams, proof you were dying—and that’s about it.”
“It’s a pity,” Galina mused. “It would be a powerful move to play video of your commando raid at tonight’s banquet.”
For my own part, I wasn’t so sure about that. After all, the operation had resembled a first-class Charley-Foxtrot. We’d popped up there and splatted one platoon right off the bat. Then, another platoon had been forced to bug out without seeing much. Lastly, my dented-up heavies had run around like cockroaches until we blew ourselves up in desperation.
Of course, I didn’t describe it that way. It was the charge of the light brigade in my version. We were damned near perfect in our execution and made critical choices under fire.
Now, a person might get the wrong idea while listening to me that I was hamming it up for a promotion or something. That’s not really the case. I was pretty happy as a centurion, and most of my superiors would have been very hesitant to advance me any further.
No, my call for glowing descriptions and outright bragging just came naturally to me. When events needed a little dolling-up for public consumption, James McGill could always do the job.
By dinner time, true to Graves’ word, I found myself seated next to Drusus. Not only that, but what amazed me even more was the list of big-wigs in attendance. Another praetor was there, Wurtenburger was his name. He was a fat-boy from the Euro-branch that I hadn’t laid eyes on for years.
Graves wasn’t even invited and neither was Winslade. In fact, I was the only person in attendance under the rank of tribune. Many lower ranked officers would have been spooked by this fact, but not me. I wasn’t fazed in the least. I was eyeing the doors to the kitchen, mostly.
“When do we get to eat?” I asked again.
Drusus smiled good-naturedly. “I see you haven’t put on any years or any pounds, McGill.”
“No sir. My body just got freshened up this afternoon.”
“Freshening up” was what legion veterans called dying for Mother Earth. Doing so, then getting pumped out of a revival machine, allowed a man to live again in a copy of his body that was often years younger than the one that had been mangled. Copies of our neural networks—our memories and thought-connections, were updated much more frequently so we could remember our past.
“Of course… that was a spectacular operation. The enemy were clearly surprised and unprepared for a boarding attempt by infantry.”
“That’s right, sir,” I said. “We took the fight to them.”
“It is remarkable,” Praetor Wurtenberger said, speaking up for the first time. He had one of those Germanic accents and voices that were a little irritating. “Our fleet fired everything we had at the intruder. Not even T-bombs penetrated the enemy hull. How do you think you managed it, Centurion McGill?”
Something in his voice made me look up from my menu. I’d been drooling over it since I sat down. The special today was lamb. I love lamb, when it’s done right.
“Uh…” I said. “Well sir, as far as I could tell, they opened a door in the hull. That’s how we got inside.”
“Oh yes, of course. I’ve heard that theory, that the stardust is too dense to allow teleportation through its mass—but I don’t buy it.”
“Huh. You don’t?”
“No. There must be something else at work, rather than the density of a relatively thin wall of matter.”
“How’s that, sir?”
“Think of a journey between star systems. Often, the teleporting individual passes through the entirety of Earth’s mass in order to reach another
planet far away. How can it be believed that a mere hundred meters of—”
At this point, Galina leaned forward and smiled sweetly at Wurtenberger, touching his upraised hand.
“Excuse me, Praetor,” she said in what seemed to me to be an unnaturally nice voice. I knew she was pissed, but she’d always been good at hiding that when she really had to. “Not everything is known or understood about this enemy. I believe we’ll have the good fortune to find out more about them soon, however.”
Wurtenberger blinked at her and the hand touching his own for a moment. She let that hand linger there, and I knew she was purposefully fogging his mind with it. Galina was a lovely woman who had absolutely no qualms about using every gift God gave her in pursuit of her interests.
“You are speaking of the enemy ground force, correct?” Wurtenberger said.
“Naturally,” Galina said, keeping that steady voice going. She was only rude to people she outranked. “The invaders have already been surrounded by six near-human legions. They’re trapped in the New Jersey—”
“They have been contained? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“Yes, sir. We don’t anticipate—”
“No, you do not anticipate. I, however, must do so. We must assume their ground forces are superior in performance, as was their ship.”
Galina blinked and frowned. “Do you know something I don’t about this situation, sir?”
Wurtenberger gave Drusus a glance, and he cleared his throat. Before he spoke, a waiter showed up. We all ordered food. I requested an extra plate, and no one argued.
When the waiter had left, Drusus leaned toward Galina.
“Tribune,” he said. “As you are about to deploy Legion Varus to face this invasion, I feel we have the responsibility to keep you informed.”
That didn’t sound good. I almost stopped chewing on the breadsticks.
“Please enlighten me, Drusus,” Turov told him.
“The enemy landed in a circular pattern. Their ships are arranged to form a perimeter. Inside that zone, approximately two thousand hectares, nothing has come out. The landing ships formed some kind of collective shield. They are essentially hiding under a dome of force.”
