There were a hundred or so defenders left when the BMK troops broke in. They doubled their firing, and the sharp gunfight became even more extreme. Suddenly, the inside of the arena was filled with ricocheting bullets, many that could penetrate the BMK armor if they hit the right spot.
Despite the fusillade, Xirstix burst his own way into the building. He had a sonic amplifying device attached to the mouthpiece of his helmet so when he spoke, his voice would take on a frightening, shrill sound. Raising his protective visor now, he screamed for his troops to forget about killing the defenders, just capture the Twenty 'n Six portal before the last soldier stepped through and it disappeared. Only then could the BMK troops continue their pursuit.
But the invaders had taken just a bit too much time preening outside the arena. Though the battle was fierce, the defenders were jumping through the portal faster than the BMK soldiers could fight their way down to get at them. Once Xirstix realized this, he let out a bloodcurdling wail.
It was strange what happened next. Just as the last defender was about to step through the empty space, he turned, aimed his rifle at Xirstix, and fired a single round.
The bullet caught Xirstix in full bellow, right between the eyes.
He was dead before he hit the floor.
22
With the death of Xirstix, a subcommander named Lax Deaux became head of the BMK invasion forces.
Deaux was Xirstix's cousin; that was the only reason he held any rank at all in the BMK. Essentially Xirstix's gofer, Deaux knew nothing about military tactics or strategy or philosophy. He had no idea of the BMK's order of battle, nor was he privy to the invasion's plan for world conquest. The commander's death and the failure of any unit from Planet France to deploy landed the job right in Deaux's lap. Appropriately enough, he was asleep while on duty at the time.
Deaux had spent most of his 101-year career holo-whoring, eating, drinking, and sleeping, in that order. Though only five and a half feet tall, he weighed a hefty three hundred pounds, not an ounce of which he carried well. Those who knew him swore he didn't know which end of a Master Blaster to aim or which end of an electron torch was up. He'd had a modest staff of three for nearly fifty years, and he still didn't know their first names. That was Lax Deaux, a very dim bulb in a very bright part of the Galaxy.
He was now in charge of nearly a million men.
No sooner had Xirstix's body been placed inside a crude ceremonial rocket and shot out of the atmosphere and into the nearby sun, when the invasion's field commanders huddled around Deaux in what was now his command vehicle, trying to get him up to speed in a hurry at this very critical point in the invasion.
They explained that the American defenders were highly trained guerrilla troops, hitting the BMK at times and places of their choosing and refusing to stand still and make battle. They told him about enemy troops vanishing into Twenty 'n Six field portals and how in the battles in the big cities so far, all the enemy troops knew where to retreat because everyone knew where the city's sports arena was.
Deaux's only knowledge of Twenty 'n Six technology was that it was related in some way to how holo-girls were produced. (They were actually distantly related.) It took the officers nearly two hours to explain to him how the enemy soldiers were able to jump through a screen and literally disappear from the battlefield. Deaux just didn't get it. He just kept asking the same idiotic questions over and over again.
But sometimes idiots open their mouths, and pure genius comes out. That's almost what happened here.
When the briefing finally ended, Deaux simply sat back in his oversized commander's chair and began chewing on his fingernails. "Where do these enemy troops go when they pass through the portal?" he asked.
His officers all shrugged. "No one knows, sir," one explained. "That is the mystery of the twenty-sixth dimension."
Deaux smiled. He had awful teeth.
"I guess what I mean is, where do the enemy troops return to?" he said. "They're obviously returning to this dimension at some other location, a gathering point perhaps?"
The officers all nodded.
"And we can probably expect that they will continue this tactic?" Deaux asked, his first time ever using the word. "Withdrawing to a hiding place of sorts until they can hit us again— and then escape again?"
"True, sir…"
Deaux stopped chewing his nails for a moment.
"Well, we must simply find that hiding place then," he said matter-of-factly. "Locate the other side to their Twenty 'n Six field portal, and you may well have them by the throats. Am I right?"
The commanders grudgingly agreed.
"How do we find such a place, sir?" one asked. "This land-mass is actually quite large; it stretches right around the planet. It has many, many places in which to hide, especially in the lands west of us. To march out into that vast expanse and try to smoke them out would be a serious task. It might take weeks, and we could never really be sure that we were any closer to their return station."
Deaux bit his nails some more.
"Then send the shuttle crafts out to look for it," he said suddenly. "Draw a hundred men from our advance scouting units for each vehicle, and dispatch them to the countryside. The unit that finds the enemy's return station will be handsomely rewarded with pay raises and elevations in rank. I'm sure such a distortion in the transdimensional fabric can be picked up by some fancy piece of equipment we own. Am I right?"
The commanders all nodded again.
"Then hook them up to the shuttles. Form a grid, and assign each shuttle a square, maybe a hundred miles by a hundred miles. If one of them detects the distorted dimensional field, we can rush the rest of our forces to the spot and crush the enemy to bits."
He looked at his officers.
"Am I correct?" he asked them.
Though they tried, they had no real reason to say no.
"You are correct, sir," one replied, a change in tone betraying a hint of toadyism as well. "In fact, you are very correct."
23
The BMK didn't invade Washington, D.C.
Had the original Delta Attack plan worked, then the city would have been swept up by the invaders once New York and Philadelphia had been taken. But when the focus of the battle shifted west, first to Chicago and then to St. Louis, D.C. remained unconquered.
Downtown was empty. Houses, offices, government buildings, the streets themselves, all deserted. Like those people in the other major cities, the population had been evacuated a long time ago.
But the city was still the capital of America. And it was still in American hands.
Tomm and Zarex had stayed behind in the bunker beneath Weather Mountain, along with Gordon and a small army of essential CIA agents. The hope was to hang onto the city for as long as possible but to evacuate if and when the BMK arrived.
By this time, both Tomm and Zarex had their own CIA aides, their own van and van driver. On this night, about twenty-four hours after the first invasion craft streaked overhead, Tomm talked his driver into taking him into the city itself. It was close to three a.m., and the streets were absolutely still. Tomm directed his driver to head for the national cathedral. On arrival, he told the driver to pull around to the back of the big church and kill the engine. Tomm got out, ducked into the shadows, and picked the same lock he had his first trip to the city. Silently, he slipped inside.