CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I was not the first Marine to vomit in his helmet, and I doubted I would be the last, but I still derided myself for doing it. I would need to turn in the helmet for cleaning before I could wear the damn thing again; and even after the cleaning, the ghost of my bile would linger for another month.
Then I remembered my new rank. As the commander of the Scutum-Crux Fleet, I could requisition new equipment anytime I specking well pleased. As I headed back to the armory, I tossed my helmet, pleased with myself for hiding the evidence of my weakness.
I had one of those moments of clarity in which the future looked so bright. We had defeated the Avatari with a tiny army, and now Thomer could set off the nuke, and we would have the planet to ourselves. No one would know about my helmet. The fleet was mine, and Ava was waiting for me back on the ship.
I found my way to the government complex, the great fortress that had once symbolized the strength of the Unified Authority in this part of the galaxy. This complex had been the seat of government in the Scutum-Crux Arm, and it would be again.
I drove down the ramp into the underground garage, convinced of my invincibility. My revelry ended the moment I stepped out of the Jackal.
“You made it out?” O’Doul broke off from a different conversation and turned his attention on me. I saw the ex-Special Forces commando in his swagger. The man was about six-three, and for the first time I realized he was not just some skinny old man, he had muscles made of scrap wire.
“You sound surprised,” I said, still believing in my own immortality.
“You were in a house surrounded by aliens in the middle of a blast zone.” He looked over at the Jackal. “And you fought your way out in that?”
Shrugging my shoulders, I said, “It took some damage.”
Other men came to investigate the commotion. Philo Hollingsworth must have sneaked up on me. One moment there was no one beside me; but when I looked to my right a moment later, there Hollingsworth stood.
“You specking son of a bitch asshole!” O’Doul screamed, looking at the Jackal instead of me. “I told you not to go. I specking told you not to go!” Anger and anguish resonated in his voice.
He looked at me and said, “Mu took five Jackals with him. What about the others?” then looked in the cab of the battered Jackal. “Oh, no! No! No! No!”
I came over to ask what he’d seen, but O’Doul rounded on me. His dark eyes looked rabid. He grimaced, and said, “They should have left you.”
Glancing over O’Doul’s shoulder, I saw that the body of the dead driver still lay on the floor of the vehicle. Only then did I recognize the dead man’s bloody clothing. It was the Jackal leader.
“Twelve men went to rescue you,” O’Doul snarled.
“I didn’t know,” I whispered.
“You didn’t know,” O’Doul said, shaking his head. “Doctorow, Mu …How many people trusted you and died today?”
“Doctorow? Doctorow is dead?” I asked, remembering that he had gone off with Thomer.
“We lost contact with Thomer’s transport,” Hollingsworth said.
My legs went weak. I felt dizzy, almost ready to collapse. Thomer disappeared? First Herrington, now Thomer.
Then I remembered the mission. Without that bomb, we would not be able to destroy the curtain. At most, the battle we had just fought would buy us three days without that bomb. I felt puny and impotent.
For a moment, I thought O’Doul would attack me. We stood there, all of his militiamen forming a ring around us, his eyes boring into mine. His breathing was loud. Instead of attacking me, he did something worse. He turned his back on me. He pulled the body out of the Jackal and carried it the way a man carries a child or a bride. He said, “This man was my brother, Muhammad.” And then he walked away.
All the thoughts of victory and invincibility vanished from my head. The words of Nietzsche abandoned me as well. I thought about Ava waiting for me in my quarters; but this time, instead of fantasizing about sex, I thought about holding her. I wondered when and if I would ever see her again.
“When did we lose contact with Thomer?” I asked. The words came slowly. I was a man ready to fall over and looking for balance wherever I could find it. “Give me an update.”
The militiamen slowly peeled away from us. I no longer mattered to them.
“Fifteen minutes ago,” Hollingsworth said.
“Before or after you set off the bombs?”
“After, right after,” Hollingsworth said.
“That might not be a problem,” I said, seeing a ray of hope. “It might even be good. It means they’re in the mines. They’re placing the nuke.”
“Wouldn’t they have called in first?”
I shook my head. “I told him to wait for the bombs to go off, then to head in.” I gave that order back when Doctorow first floated his idea about blowing up the subway tracks.
“We’re still down to eighty-one men,” Hollingsworth said.
When he first said this, I thought it sounded pretty good because I did not calculate Thomer and the seventy-five Marines he took into the mines in the equation. For one bright moment, I thought Hollingsworth meant that we had eighty-one men plus the seventy-six Marines placing the nuke in the mines. When I did the math, it didn’t add up, and I realized he meant that only five of my men had survived our brush with the aliens.
We started the mission a few hours earlier with 250 men, and at that moment I could only confirm that six were alive. Herrington, the old leatherneck son of a bitch had survived more than thirty years of service, and now he was gone.
“How about the militia?” I asked. “How many Jackals made it back home?”
Hollingsworth shook his head. “You drove the only one that made it back.”
I took a step back. We were alone now, Hollingsworth and I. We stood in a giant underground garage with the entire level to ourselves. Looking over Hollingsworth’s shoulder, I saw the torn-up, broken carcass of the Jackal I had driven in, the dead gunner still peering from the turret in the back. A thin trickle of oil leaked from the seals around the Jackal’s chassis, and three of its tires were flat.
I groaned.
If we did not bury our dead quickly, dogs, rats, and insects would find the men in those Jackals. They would gnaw at their flesh and pick at their bones. O’Doul was right about me. I had been the death of the men who trusted me.
Nietzsche was right as well. When you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you. Those men had died trying to save me. I owed them a debt I could not repay.
“Just what I need, more ghosts,” I muttered to myself.
“Ghosts?” Hollingsworth asked. He looked confused.
“Ghosts,” I said. “If there is one thing Marines have, it’s ghosts. We take them everywhere we go.”
“I don’t understand,” Hollingsworth said.
“No, but you will,” I said. As a relatively new Marine who had ridden out the Avatari invasion on a battleship, Hollingsworth had little if any combat experience. He had not lost many friends.
We saw the results of the blast before we heard from the transport. I was at the airfield helping stow gear on what was likely the last of our transports. We did not need to load the transport. If Thomer succeeded in setting off his bomb, we would leave the gear on Terraneau. If he failed, we’d be stuck on the planet, gear and all. Either way, the only reason to repack was to distract ourselves.
Paying little attention to the darkness around me, I looked out of the kettle and saw my men staring into the night sky. I trotted down the ramp and stared into the beautiful blackness with its ribbons of clouds. Above the clouds, stars sparkled like diamond shards.
“They made it,” Hollingsworth said. He laughed. “Goddamn, they made it.”
My pilot had already picked up their radio signal by the time I reached the cockpit. “I’ve got them, sir,” he said. A moment later, Thomer’s voice came over the speaker.