“Have a seat,” Lee said, smiling. His expression turned serious again quickly. “Those bastards are evil. I thought Shannon was bad. No offense, Harris, but you and Shannon are defective. Lector is the real Liberator. He almost killed a guy in Doherty’s platoon today . . . sent him to sick bay with a dislocated shoulder and a broken collarbone.”
“I don’t think Captain McKay likes them,” the private said. “I saw them come in together. McKay looked nervous.”
Risking a quick glance, I peered around Lee and noticed the stiff way McKay sat in his chair. He stared angrily at Lector. Though all three of the new sergeants had the exact same face, I had no trouble telling them apart by their scars. Lector had that wide gash through his left eyebrow and a long, spiraling scar on his left cheek. Marshall had bald spots, probably the result of shrapnel, in his thinning white hair. Of the three, Saul might have had it the worst. The skin on his face was lumpy and blotched. He must have been burned in some kind of chemical fire. The scarring most likely covered his entire body. McKay said something quietly. I could not hear him above the chatter in the bar. He placed his hand on the table and started to stand, but Lector placed a hand over McKay’s and held him down. They traded more inaudible talk. Lector said something, and Captain McKay nodded. Lector removed his hand from McKay’s, and the captain stormed away from the table.
Lee had turned to watch the exchange. “Look at them, Wayson,” Lee whispered. “I’d kill myself if I were a clone.”
“How you going to do it?” I asked distractedly.
Lee laughed. “I would not joke about that if I were you.”
Apparently, Admiral Thurston believed one ship could handle our mission. The Kamehameha was almost alone in the quadrant. We had no accompanying frigates or cruisers; only one lone communications ship hovered nearby.
The logistics were simple enough. The Kamehameha carried fifteen armored transports, each of which could carry two platoons and supplies. Two trips per transport, and all twenty-three hundred Marines would be in position. My platoon, of course, got to land in the first wave. As we prepared to take our place in the kettle, I found out what Lector and McKay were discussing in the bar. Captain McKay’s command included the Twelfth and Thirteenth Platoons—Sergeant Grayson’s. But it wasn’t Grayson I saw at the head of the Thirteenth when I led my squad into the kettle. Lector paced the floor goading his men. Marshall and Saul sat at the stern of the ship.
“Harris.” I turned and was surprised to see Captain McKay, wearing full armor with his helmet off, boarding the AT.
I saluted. “You’re coming down in the kettle, sir?” This was the first time I had seen an officer ride with the ground fodder. Usually they stayed a safe distance away.
“Orders,” McKay said, returning my salute. “Harris, you saw that they switched Grayson out of the thirteenth Platoon. Somebody placed all four Liberators in one company. I get the feeling they want to make a clean sweep.”
“I get that feeling too, sir.”
McKay signaled toward Lector with the slightest of eye motions. “Watch my back, Harris. I want to survive this mission. I don’t want to die on Little Man.”
“I will do what I can for you, sir.” In my gut, I had the sinking feeling that it wouldn’t be much.
We were both sergeants, but Booth Lector outranked me. I was just a sergeant. He was a first sergeant. In the noncommissioned ranks, Lector was just one step from the top.
“Okay, so now I am nervous,” Lee said over a private interLink frequency. “What are Lector and Saul doing on our AT? What is McKay doing here? God, I hate Liberators.”
“They shuffled the sergeants,” I said. “And you are speaking to a Liberator.”
“You’re only a Liberator in theory,” Lee said. “Lector’s the real thing.”
Several of my men removed their helmets and placed them on the floor. Judging by their expressions, I got the feeling that the grim mood had spread across the kettle. No one spoke. No one, that is, except Sergeants Lector, Marshall, and Saul. After liftoff, while the rest of the men quietly attached rifle stocks to their M27s or inspected the inventory in their belts, Lector and his friends continued to chat. I sat with Lee in the back of the ship, whispering back and forth with him over the interLink.
“Why would McKay trade Grayson for those three?” Lee asked.
“I don’t think McKay calls the shots anymore,” I said. “He looked pretty nervous at the bar last night. He must have gotten a memo about the change in platoons right after the briefing. He probably took Lector to the bar to discuss the transfer.
“Remember when McKay tried to leave and Lector stopped him? McKay must have told them how he wanted to run things and found out that Lector and his pals had ideas of their own.”
“You think they threatened him?” Lee asked.
“He’s staying as far from them as he can. Lector probably said something about friendly fire or battlefield accidents.”
“That cuts two ways,” Lee said.
“It should,” I agreed. Looking around the kettle, I knew that it did not. Standard clones were incapable of that kind of initiative; it was not in their programming.
A yellow light flashed over the cabin, warning us that we were broaching the atmosphere. The kettle shuttered. Men who were standing jolted forward but did not lose their balance. Then the amber light turned red.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“They must be firing at us,” Lee said.
The men who had removed their helmets fastened them in place so that they would not smell the acrid ozone stench of the shields. In the vacuum of space, the shields were odorless. In an atmosphere, they burned oxygen and produced quite a stink.
The thick walls of the kettle muffled outside sounds. We heard the soft plink as bullets struck our hull. They must have been enormous bullets. The average M27 bullets turned to steam as they pierced the shields, but these shots had enough mass and momentum to tap the hull. Whoever the “squatters” were, they had lots of firepower. Artillery shells burst all around us. All we heard in the kettle was a soft rumble as our shields disintegrated the shrapnel in the air. The bigger explosions created air pockets, causing our clumsy, armored transport to drop a few feet at a time. The kettle shook violently. The lights flashed off, and we dropped at least a hundred feet before the lights kicked on again and the pilots regained control.
“They have a particle-beam cannon!” McKay yelled over the interLink.
“Take positions,” I called to my men.
We were hit with another particle-beam barrage. That time, as we dropped, I heard the rat-a-tat sound of bullets striking the side of the ship. The shields were out, and bullets were hitting our unprotected hull. There was a loud, hollow boom as a shell struck the top of the kettle, flopping the entire AT on its side. Two more struck. We were like a boxer who is out on his feet, taking shots with no way to protect himself.
In the flashing red emergency light, I saw a private jump to his feet and run toward the front of the cabin. As if out of nowhere, someone reached out a hand and smashed the man across the front of his helmet with so much force that the Marine fell to the floor. My visor identified Sergeant Marshall as he pulled back his M27 and knelt over the fallen man.
The lights came back on, and within moments, we were down on the beach.
The ATs landed in a row, their shields facing the bluffs at the top of the beach. The enemy’s guns could not penetrate the barrier created by the shields—the only danger came from accidentally stumbling into them.
Under other circumstances the coastline might have been beautiful. A bright blue sky with puffy clouds stretched off to the horizon. We had landed on a beach with white sand and still, gray water. Ahead, through the electrified window of our shields, I saw sandy bluffs leading to coral rock foothills. The melting air in front of the shields blurred my vision, but I thought I saw men scurrying along the tops of the bluffs.
Then I heard the guttural growl of gunships. Two s
hips waddled across the sky, traveling over our heads and stopping over the enemy. They hovered in the air firing rockets and side-mounted chain guns. A huge explosion churned up a geyser of sand and a blinding green flash as the enemy’s particle-beam cannon exploded.
Debris from the explosion flew in all directions. Concrete, dirt, and bits of rocks rained down around us. Fire burned at the top of the bluffs. The radioactive core of the particle-beam cannon might well have irradiated the enemy. The firefight seemed to have ended.
Though we did not have tanks with us, our transports brought several cavalry units with gun-mounted, all-terrain vehicles—sprite four-wheel two-man buggies—with mounted chain guns and missile launchers. As the platoons organized behind the shields, the ATVs sped up the beach, kicking plumes of sand in their wake.
They drove in a zigzagging pattern, weaving toward the bluffs. When the first unit drove within a hundred yards of the hill, a single rocket fired. It was all so fast. I heard the hiss, saw the contrail, and the ATV
vanished in a ball of flames.
The two gunships that had pulled back from the scene flew back and hovered over the area looking for targets. They continued over the area for minutes without firing. Whoever was down there was well hidden.
With no other options, we prepared to rush the bluffs. “Prepare for attack,” McKay yelled over the interLink. The shield in front of our AT extinguished. For a moment I saw the distant hills clearly.
“Attack.”
We started up the beach, running hard and kicking up loose sand. I kept my eye on the top of the bluffs, the enemy fortification. “Vince, do you see anything?” I called on a private frequency.
“If anybody’s alive up there,” Lee panted, “they’re either wearing radiation armor or they glow in the dark.”
The body gloves we wore under our armor would protect us from radiation poisoning, but technicians would need to neutralize the radiation before we could remove so much as a glove. In that kind of battle, radioactivity worked for us.
The gunships continued to float over the attack area looking for targets. They did not fire. Perhaps Lee was right. Perhaps some dying soldier flamed our ATV as his last act of defiance. As the first men reached the flaming, smoking remains of that ATV, gunfire erupted from the hillside.
“Drop!” I yelled over the platoon frequency.
Up ahead, machine guns fired so many shots into the first few men that their armor exploded, spraying blood and shredded plastic.
The gunships fired, but their shots were blind. The men on the ships must have been hunting human targets. Their heat sensors and radar would not locate motion-tracking drones.
“It’s trackers,” I said to Lee.
“It looks that way,” Lee agreed.
“Think we can go around them?” I asked.
“It’s not worth the trouble,” Lee answered. “You watch, they’re going to light up the hill.”
As if on cue, the gunships fired incendiary rockets. One moment the bluffs were green and white, covered with sand and vines, the next they glowed ocher as chemical fires superheated the ground to well over eighteen hundred degrees. The flash heat vanished quickly; but wiring melted and munitions exploded as the bunkers at the far end of the beach turned into ovens. The air boiled with the crackle of bullets and the boom of artillery shells as the once-smooth ridge at the top of the bluffs convulsed into a jagged scar.
The problem with “lighting the hill” was that it took three hours for the heat to dissipate. Until the temperature went down, the most our ground forces could do was sit. Thurston sent Harriers and bombers to patrol the other side of the foothills, but the heavily forested terrain made flybys ineffective. We’d gone to Little Man to annihilate the enemy; but for the time being, all we could do was sit tight as the enemy fled to safety.
When we crested the hill, we saw the remains of a mile-long concrete bunker with yard-thick walls. With its ground cover blown to the winds, the concrete shell of the bunker lay exposed like a giant trench. Heat and explosions had blown the top off the structure, leaving a mazelike complex beneath. No other path was left for us, so we dropped down into the ruins.
I could not smell the outside world through my helmet. I sometimes smelled my own sweat after a long march or battle, but that was about it. Walking across the bunker’s concrete floors, I thought I smelled death. It did not smell like burned meat. The dry and dusty scent of ash filled my helmet. Looking back, I am sure that I imagined the smell, of course I imagined it; but at the time, it seemed very real to me. The floor was littered with the cinder remains of wooden beams. It wasn’t until we got deeper into the bunker that we discovered the bodies.
The charred remains of hundreds of men covered the floor in the center of the compound. There was no way to identify the bodies; they were scorched beyond recognition. They looked mummified, with all traces of hair burned away and skin that looked like parched leather. The fleshy, loose skin around their lips had shrunk, leaving their mouths with toothy grins. When one of my men accidentally stepped on a body, it crumbled into dust and bone beneath his boot.
“Think they’re Japanese?” Vince asked, as we left a room in which four bodies had fallen on top of each other as if stacked.
“How could you possibly tell?” I asked. “What could these people have done to deserve this?”
Vince did not answer. That was the only reasonable response.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“Harris, you’re on guard duty,” Lector said, as I climbed the ladder out of the bunkers.
“Aye,” I answered, fighting back the urge to say more. I watched Lector swagger back to the front of the platoon, then switched interLink frequencies. “Lee, you there?”
“Sure,” Lee said.
“Lector just gave me guard duty.”
“That should be dull,” Lee said. “Yamashiro will be light-years from here by now.”
“If he was ever here,” I said.
“Of course he was here,” Lee said. He clipped his syllables as he spoke, something he did when he felt irritated. I knew better than to argue.
Thick forest covered the foothills ahead of us. Trees with green and orange leaves, so brightly colored they looked like gigantic flowers, blanketed the countryside. “Gather up,” I called to my men, as we started for the forest.
The foothills stretched for miles. Beyond the hills, I could see the vague outline of tall mountains against the horizon. Somewhere between the forested hills and the mountains we would catch our enemy. “Let’s roll,” I said, after organizing my men.
Our course took us through the forest. The trees and boulders would have provided the right kind of cover for guerilla attacks. I scanned the landscape for heat signatures, but the trunks of the trees were ten feet in diameter. The rocks were thick and made of granite. I could not read a heat signature through such barriers. The light played against us, too.
Rays of sunlight filtered in through the trees. Bright, hot, and straight as searchlights, the beams of light looked like pillars growing out of the floor of the forest. And they were hot, as hot as a human body—nearly a hundred degrees. When I looked at one of the rays of light with my heat vision, it showed orange with a yellow corona on my visor, the same signature as an enemy soldier. I pinged for snake shafts and found nothing, but that did little to calm my nerves. Fortunately, our scouts located enemy tracks. Hundreds of people had fled the bunkers, trampling ferns and shrubs as they rushed through the trees. Tracking the escapees posed little challenge, but the wilderness gave us other headaches. The overgrowth slowed our ATVs. Obviously, Harriers and gunships were out of the question. We had to send scouts ahead on foot. Five of our scouts did not return when we broke for camp that evening.
We stopped in a mile-wide clearing that would be easy to guard. At night, Little Man cooled to a comfortable sixtyfive degrees. When I scanned the serrated tree line with heat vision, it seemed to hold no secrets. I saw the orange signatures of forest animals movi
ng around the trees. Every few hours, at uneven intervals, a gunship traveled around the perimeter of the clearing. I sat at my guard post, hidden behind a hastily built lean-to made of logs, clods of grass, and rocks, peering out across the flatlands at the trees. The night sky had so many layers of stars that it shone milky white. I realized that not all of the stars were in our galaxy. We were at the edge of known space. A gunship rumbled over the treetops, its twin tail engines firing blue-white flames. Moonlight glinted on the ship’s dull finish as it circled slowly across my field of vision. Traveling at a mere twenty miles per hour, it moved with the confidence of a shark circling for food. Switching the lens in my visor to heat vision, I watched animals flee as the gunship approached. A stubby bird, built a bit like an owl but with a seven-foot wingspan, launched from the trees and flew toward me. I could not see the color of its plumage with heat vision, and I could not see the bird at all when I switched to standard view. Guard duty left me with plenty of time to roll evidence over in my mind. I did not think we were there to massacre Japanese refugees from Ezer Kri. They would not have had time to build the complicated bunker system on the beach.
The Morgan Atkins Separatists seemed a more likely target. I did not know how the Japanese could have gotten off Ezer Kri. They never could have traveled this far. I did not know what the Mogats would want on a planet like Little Man, but I knew they had transportation. They had their own damn fleet. Still, why would the Mogats colonize a planet that was so far from civilization? As I understood it, the Mogats never populated their own planets. They sent missionaries to colonize planets and attracted converts. But there was nobody to convert in the extreme frontier.
Just like Lee predicted, the night passed slowly.
We found three of our missing scouts early the next morning.
Packing quickly before sunrise, we continued through the woods. The trees in that part of the forest stood hundreds of feet tall. They stood as smooth and straight as ivory posts, with only a few scraggly branches along their lower trunks. Perhaps that was what made the scene so terrible—the almost unnatural symmetry of the primeval woods.
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