The alien had its rifle ready, but not pointed in my direction. Its body little more than an animated statue, the avatar might or might not have been able to hear the world around it. When our scientists dissected the bastards, they found that their ears and eyes were little more than ornamental grooves.
This alien sensed something. It spun and aimed its rifle in my direction, but I fired first. The sparkling green particle beam hit the side of the alien’s head.
The bastard did not fall right away. Even as its head split open, it stood motionless, as if trying to decide whether to collapse or shoot me. Not waiting to see if I had sufficiently broken the alien, I fired again, then sprinted toward the kitchen. I stopped suddenly. Through the shattered glass of the back door, I saw three more Avatari circling the yard just outside.
Only a few seconds had passed since I had ordered Hollingsworth to set off the bombs, but the seconds hung like minutes in my mind. I ran back through the house and crashed through a front window, landing on a tree-lined avenue that ran the length of the neighborhood. The grass on the lawns had so overgrown that it spilled on to the sidewalks, but the street still looked like something out of a picture book.
I saw three avatars hunting along the street and there might have been more in the brush. At the end of the block, I could see a Jackal stopped beside a tree. At first glance, it looked parked and abandoned; but when I used telescopic lenses, I saw burns on the hood, a blackened windshield, and holes in the doors. From where I crouched, I could not see the turret in the back; but there would surely be a dead gunner hanging out of it.
Hollingsworth’s voice came over the interLink on a frequency that every Marine would hear. “The aliens are in place, evacuate the blast zone. I repeat, evacuate the blast zone.”
Several responses of “aye” and “copy that” came back over the same frequency.
Only a hundred yards, and three Avatari stood between me and that Jackal. If I crossed those yards without getting shot, and the engine still ran, I thought I might make it out of the blast zone alive.
As I prepared to make my move, the sound of breaking glass came from the back of the house. I did not look back. I held my particle pistol in my left hand, where it would be all but useless, and readied a rocket launcher in my right.
The first bolt missed my head by inches. I did not wait to see where it had come from. Instinctively, I spun and returned fire, shooting off a valuable rocket. Tossing the empty tube, I pulled another rocket and fired it at the closest alien between me and the Jackal. The rocket struck the alien in the chest, slinging its arms, head, and chest in different directions.
“Last call to evacuate the blast zone,” Hollingsworth called out over the interLink. “One minute till detonation. One minute.”
I ran in a zigzag pattern, snaking my way across the street, somersaulting over the hood of an old car, and sliding ass first to the ground. Light bolts slammed through the hood, the windshield, and the front tires. The car exploded in an eruption of orange and yellow and black, the force of the explosion slamming me to the ground.
That explosion must have thrown me ten feet, enough to save my life. When I looked back, I saw dozens of bolts shoot through the flames.
A few yards ahead of me, one of the aliens stepped around a hedge. I fired my last rocket, a worthless shot that went wild, hitting nothing.
Switching to my M27, I raced toward the corner. I must have hit that damn alien a hundred times before the bastard finally fell.
As I rounded the corner, I saw broken avatars all along the street, dozens of them, along with the hulls of demolished Jackals. There had been a bloody showdown. Some of the Jackals lay on their sides instead of their wheels. One had crashed into a house.
Avatari soldiers moved along the street to my left and to my right. I fired my M27 at them, and they fired bolts at me. If they’d so much as nicked me, I would have died; but I did not have time to worry about light bolts and painful death. I tossed my M27 aside, pumped my legs as hard as I could, and kept my eyes on the door of the Jackal ahead. I focused on the holes in the driver’s-side door because they riveted my attention.
The Avatari had fired several bolts into the windshield of the vehicle to bring it down. Some of the armored glass had melted, and the rest of the smoke-stained glass was nearly opaque. The door on the driver’s side hung limp from a single hinge. Running as fast as I could, I took in details without analyzing them.
A bolt flew past me, spearing the turret in the rear of the Jackal. The wall of the turret fell off, revealing the head and shoulders of the dead gunner inside. His body hung from the back of the big gun.
Avatari milled around the far end of the street, beyond the Jackal, but they had not yet noticed me. Even if I’d had the rockets, I could not have fired at them. The clock was ticking.
The Jackal’s engine was still running, I heard its heavy purr. The driver’s door tumbled to the ground when I pulled it. Inside, the decapitated body of the driver sat belted in behind the wheel. His head was missing from the jawbone up, an unusual wound. The heat from a bolt must have boiled the fluid inside the dead man’s skull, causing it to explode.
There was no time for manners, not with the Avatari on the street and the bombs about to explode. I unbuckled the dead man’s harness and shoved him aside. When I slipped the Jackal into gear, the vehicle lurched forward, causing the dead man to roll toward me. I felt something hit against my armor, looked down, and found myself staring into the open tray of the dead man’s mouth, his lolling tongue, the curve of teeth and molars, and the bone and muscle hinges that once connected the jawbone to a skull.
I vomited inside my helmet. God, I was like a kid fresh out of camp. Scared out of my wits, so excited I wanted to scream, sick to my stomach, and choking on the acrid fumes of my bile, I tore off my helmet and wiped my mouth. It felt good to breathe fresh air.
A bolt sheared through the passenger’s side of the cab, passing through the empty seat and into the gun nest behind it. Two bolts struck the cab of the Jackal and more flashed across the hood. I could not dodge their fire. All I could do was drive and hope I would have more luck than the dead man beside me.
Leaning forward over the wheel so I could see through the melted windshield, I headed straight down the street, skidding around one corner, then another, picking up speed as I went. I dodged cars and Avatari, smacked into a curb, then pounded through a hedge before reaching the edge of the little row of houses that had survived the war. Ahead of me, the west side of Norristown stretched out like a barren wasteland.
Driving three-quarters blind, I headed west and hoped for the best. Then came the explosion. It sounded as if all of Terraneau had erupted, as if God had cupped his hands and clapped them around the planet.
A shock wave rolled across the open plain, carrying with it a wall of smoke and dust as tall as a mountain. I did not see it coming. One moment the path ahead of me was clear, the next, a shock wave struck my Jackal from behind, lifting it onto its front wheels, then dropping the rear wheels back to the ground. The road buckled and bowed, but the ground did not cave in.
Trying to land on solid ground, I gunned the engine. The Jackal shot up the side of a tall dune and took to the air over the crest. When I landed, the jolt knocked my dead copilot free from the seat, and he toppled to the floor.
Looking at the hideous remains, I felt no guilt at all. I had come to liberate a planet. In order to accomplish my objective, I had needed civilian assistance. They had a militia. Yes, this man had died, but we had defeated the Avatari with a couple hundred men and a handful of vehicles.
“You did well, Harris,” I told myself. But looking at the dead man beside me, something told me I had not done as well as I had hoped.