“You can’t wait them out in the blast zone, sir.” Hollingsworth sounded exasperated.
“I have company,” I said.
“Aliens?”
“No, it’s Ava Gardner coming to say she can’t live without me,” I said. I regretted saying that the moment the words left my lips.
Above my head, the ceiling groaned under the weight of the alien …or aliens. Looking around for somewhere to hide, I found mostly mouse shit and cobwebs. The skeleton of a dead dog lay on one corner of the floor, locked into its pen by a wire fence. In life, it had been one of those rodent dogs, just a few inches tall and full of attitude. A few scabs of fluffy white fur still remained on its skull and legs; the rest had been picked clean by rats, mice, or maggots. There were no eyes in its skull.
Hearing heavy footsteps above me, I began feeling frantic. “Hollingsworth, you said this was the edge of the zone? How close to the edge? Any chance this house could survive the blast?”
The explosion would take place thirty feet down, I might be safe if I was far enough from ground zero. Even if the house collapsed, I might survive. I had armor to protect me.
“I don’t like your chances, sir,” Hollingsworth said.
I heard the sound of wood smashing, and light poured down the stairway. The light cast a long shadow along the wall. I had done the very thing I told my men not to do—I had gotten myself cornered. I had come down to a dead end. There were plenty of places to hide down here, but the only way out was up the stairs.
“Harris, where are you?” the Jackal leader asked.
I watched the wooden stairs that led back up to the house and wondered if they could handle a full ton of alien bulk. My pulse was up. I had already put away my rocket launchers and switched to my particle-beam pistol. This was close combat, far closer than I wanted to get. With the joules of energy inside their tachyon shells, the Avatari could fry the circuits in my armor just by touching it.
I imagined the stairs collapsing, leaving me and a two-thousand-pound alien trapped together as the bombs went off. The house might come down on top of us, or the ground could open under our feet.
“Captain Harris, where are you?” the Jackal leader repeated.
“Still in the last drop zone,” I whispered, though I knew it was unlikely the avatar could hear me.
An avatar stepped onto the top step. I heard the footstep, then the groan of straining wood. My heart pounding so hard I could feel it in my ears and neck, I held my pistol up and ready to fire.
The alien took another step, and I could see its foot, a simple rectangle with no ornamentation representing shoes or toes. The wooden stair bowed beneath the weight, but did not break. I could have shot the bastard at point-blank range at that second. I could have shot its foot out from under it, then shot it a second time in the head once it fell. I waited.
“You wouldn’t happen to know what I’ll run into when I get out of this house?” I asked on a frequency that both Hollingsworth and the Jackal leader would pick up.
“The last I saw, the area around you was lousy with those alien speckers,” the Jackal leader said. “Maybe hundreds of ’em.”
“Harris, you need to get out of there,” Hollingsworth said.
“Yeah, that’s what I hear,” I said. “Jackal leader, think you could do me a favor?”
The alien continued down the stairs in slow motion, taking two steps at a time. It poked the barrel of its rifle down and surveyed the base of the stairway. I wondered how well the Avatari could see in the dark.
“What?” the Jackal leader asked.
“Give these bastards a swift kick to the nuts,” I said. “See if you can move them deeper into the blast zone.”
There was a moment of silence. When the Jackal leader spoke again, he sounded nervous. “I’m down to eleven cars,” he said. The man who had just run a sortie with a dead gunner hanging from his turret sounded sheepish.
“Eleven cars?” We were almost out of cars, but things had come down to the wire. Resolved that I would probably die in that basement, I no longer cared about my safety. We needed to lure the aliens closer to ground zero.
“It’s too late to back out now,” I said.
“This isn’t just about getting your ass out of there?” the Jackal leader asked. He already knew the answer, but he wanted reassurance before he would send men out to die.
“I’m guessing my ass is fried no matter what happens,” I said. The alien came down two more steps, pointing the muzzle of its rifle back and forth across the basement as it went.
If the aliens gave off a heat signature, I could have counted their numbers through the floor with the heat-vision lenses in my visor; but the Avatari gave off no heat. If this one was alone, I could cap it. But if it had come with friends …
“We’re on our way,” the Jackal leader said. I heard a car door shut in the background and knew without asking that he had just sent his navigator to man the turret in the back of his Jackal. “I hope you make it out of there, Harris.”
I would never hear him speak again.
Standing eight feet tall, the alien had to duck its head before it could reach the bottom of the stairs. When the bastard lowered its head, I shot it in the back. Hit by a particle beam, a human target would have exploded. This son of a bitch simply quivered and fell.
A second avatar started down the stairs. I hoped there were only two of them; if these bastards called for backup, I was specked.
The stairs creaked as the second avatar started down. I found a hiding place behind a table, not far from Fido’s bones. I aimed my pistol and waited in the darkness, but the alien stopped halfway down the stairs. Moments passed, and then it went back the way it came from.
I tried to contact the Jackal leader, but the connection was gone.
“Hollingsworth, what’s happening out there?” I asked.
“The enemy is almost in position, maybe a quarter of a mile off,” Hollingsworth said.
I walked to the bottom of the stairs and stepped over the broken alien. It lay facedown, as still and as stiff as a fallen tree.
“How much longer?” I asked Hollingsworth.
“They’re almost in place. Any minute now.”
“Okay,” I said. There was a shift in the shadows along the wall. I paused and looked up the stairs, but the area was clear. With my connection to the Jackal leader down, I had no way to tell the Jackals to break off their attack. Like me, they needed to get to safety before the bombs went off.
The Jackals might not make it to safety. I had lost many of my men. I was about to ride out the explosion at the edge of ground zero. It looked like we might win the battle, but everything had still gone wrong.
“Okay, light the fuse,” I told Hollingsworth.
“What about you?” Hollingsworth asked.
“I’m going to make a break for it,” I said. I had already started up the stairs. “Tell you what, Sergeant, if you get the men together when we get back to the ship, I’ll slip you all into the officers’ club for a brew.”
“We can buy you a few more minutes if we send in …” Hollingsworth began.
“You have your orders, Hollingsworth.”
“Yes, sir.” I heard neither pity nor regret in his voice, only resignation.
I struggled to come up with some way to radio the Jackals, but they were militia, the interLink did not reach them. Only the Jackal leader had an interLink connection; and without him acting as middleman, communications with the Jackals had gone dark.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Knowing that I might only have a minute to get out of the blast zone, I did not stop at the top of the stairs. I stepped through the splintered doorway into the living room. An alien stood in the middle of the floor, its massive silhouette forming a dark cameo against the beige curtains, which glowed against the ion light.