It was pitch black inside the massive cathedral. Tomm let his eyes adapt to the darkness as best he could. He had good night vision from all his years of flying in space, but this place seemed extra dark. He studied the altar, the walls, and the ceiling. He walked forward and started searching through the pews. Every once in a while he thought he detected a movement here, a glint of light there, but it always turned out to be his mortal mind playing tricks on him. He was not going to find what he was looking for by eyesight alone.
So he walked to the center of the center aisle and sat down on the very cold floor. Legs crossed, his hands up to his ears, he closed his eyes and began to listen.
It was hard to say just how much time went by. A few minutes? Twenty? A half hour? But then, finally, Tomm heard something. Off to his right, maybe about thirty feet away, in a pew up near the altar. He concentrated on the sound for a few moments, then smiled.
It was the sound of someone snoring.
Just what he was here for.
Tomm carefully regained his feet and started walking toward the sound. It was a light, hushed breathing. Even. Perfectly rhythmic. No surprise there.
He reached the pew and looked down. Below him, cuddled up tightly, snoring away, was a small white form.
"Typical…" Tomm murmured.
He reached beneath his collar and took out the brass cross he always kept hanging there. With its longest point, he reached down and gently jabbed the sleeping form. It stirred a bit but kept on snoring.
"It's not as if they've been working so hard," Tomm mumbled again.
He poked the form once more, and this time there was some more movement. It turned over, stretched, and went right back to snoring.
Finally, Tomm put his cross away and shook the form with his hand. Now there was a sudden flash of movement and bright light. In an instant, Tomm found a horrible, drooling, pus-filled face snarling and snorting not an inch from his nose. Tomm steeled himself and swatted the face away. There was another flash. Now a huge set of mechanical teeth snapped at him. Again, Tomm just pushed it away.
"Open yer eyes," Tomm yelled, his voice echoing around the empty church. "I don't have all day for you."
Tomm saw two large eyes appear in the darkness. Wide, dazed, but not the slightest bit frightened.
It was the poof.
"You… again?" she asked Tomm.
By the glow of the eyes, Tomm could see the poof as it really was. Not a hellion or a banshee, not quite a jester or a beatific vision. The poof looked mostly like a young, teenage girl. She was pretty, not glamorous, plainly dressed in a short tunic and white tights, her hair pulled all the way back to reveal slightly pointed ears.
The poof was miffed that she had been disturbed. "What are you doing here? How did you find me?"
Tomm just waved these questions away.
"The people of this planet are in trouble," Tomm told the poof. "And I know that you know what that means. If they are in trouble, then the Galaxy, the whole Universe, all of Nature is in trouble."
The poof wearily rubbed her eyes. "So?"
"So you have to help them," Tomm told her. "Them, and all the people in this star system."
She yawned. "What makes you think I would want to?"
"You helped us before," Tomm told her. "In fact, you've been helping us all along."
"I'm sorry." She sighed. "Whatever happens in the normal course of human events, I cannot affect, or—"
Tomm raised his hand and silenced her in midsentence. Her eyes were glowing brighter now. So were his.
"Please, we don't have time for that," he said. "I'm sure you can recite that 'normal course of human events' stuff in your sleep. But I know better. Did you really think nobody would notice that no one lost their lives when this system started shaking the other day? My dear, you are the normal course of human events."
She smiled, but she was still annoyed. "You seem to be an expert on me," she said. "Why? Just because you're a priest?"
Tomm looked her straight in her huge, glowing eyes.
"No, my dear," he said slowly. "It's because I know what you are."
24
It was a shuttle craft known only as #555 that finally located the elusive American base.
The shuttle had been scouring its eleventh search pattern in forty-eight hours when they reached a place called Fire Rock Ridge just after dawn on the sixth morning of the invasion. Their dimensional distortion detection device had commenced beeping slowly as soon as they passed over the place. Something was affecting the natural dimensional fabric, something very close by.
The shuttle set down about five hundred feet from the lip of the ridge. The hundred special troops disembarked along with the crew and quickly made their way up to the edge of the cliff.
What lay below them was the vast expanse of Ghost River Valley. Long and flat, it stretched unbroken from north to south and beyond the horizon. This part of the valley was known as the Plain of Stars. To the west, not two miles away, was the foot of the Medicine Bow mountain range. Located about halfway between those mountains and Fire Rock Ridge, hidden inside a deep thicket of woods, was a huge military encampment.
Studying the base through long-range viz scopes, the scouts saw many structures, built low to the ground, constructed of melted wood and stone. Their roofs were covered with dirt and tree branches, blending them almost perfectly into the tiny, narrow forest. Barracks, gun emplacements, ammo dumps — the base was also hidden behind a wall of earthen fortifications, one that ran parallel to the western bank of the Ghost River and stretched for miles in every direction. The scouts estimated the encampment housed about fifteen thousand fighters. They had no electron-based weaponry, or at least none the scouts could see. Flying from a crudely cut post located in the middle of the camp was a flag of stars and stripes, colored red, white, and blue.
The scouts were ecstatic. The flag was enough proof for them. They called back to BMK headquarters in St. Louis and issued a one-sentence report: "We have found the enemy."
It was six a.m.
Twenty miles behind Fire Rock Ridge, in the next river valley over, advance elements of the BMK ground forces were approaching from the east.
The largest of these was a motorized artillery column; towing twelve Master Blaster arrays with a fleet of HVVs, a type of military hovercraft that rode a cushion of air about three feet thick.
Intentionally trailing behind the scout shuttles, this column was scheduled to reach the Ghost River area around ten that morning. But then the convoy's commanders learned that the enemy camp had been found just up ahead. This resulted in an acceleration of their original orders.
Their new instructions came right from Deaux's command staff itself. The artillerymen were told to get the twelve Master Blasters up on Fire Rock Ridge as quickly as possible. They were to set up and be ready to fire no later than nine a.m.
One hundred seventy-two miles behind them, was the main element of the BMK's Army Central. Two hundred ninety-four thousand men, they were equipped with heavily armored HVVs and several dozen smaller, single-tube blaster arrays.
They had occupied the city of North Platte, Nebraska, just the day before. The city and the surrounding area had been evacuated nearly a week before they'd arrived.
Having maneuvered west from St. Louis four days into the invasion, Army Central had not been in place in North Platte more than twenty hours when news of finding the American camp arrived. Stopping such a massive force had been no easy task. North Platte could hold fifty thousand people tops; at nearly six times that number, it had been a tight squeeze finding places to sleep and do chow all around. Getting the huge army up and moving again would be just as difficult.