After prying the first of the bullets out of the stump with his knife, Freeman held it up for me to see. The bullet glowed as if he had just pulled it out of a furnace. I switched the lenses in my visor to heat vision, but the shell was not hot, it simply glowed.
“I wouldn’t touch that; it might be radioactive,” I said.
“I already checked,” Freeman said as he dropped the bullet into a bag. He dug out a second shell and placed it in his bag with the first bullet.
“Thomer,” I said, “send some men out to sweep the area. I want to know if there are any more of these light spheres out here.”
“Aye, aye,” Thomer said.
I walked closer to the sphere. As I approached, the tint shields in my visor increased. The sphere did not become brighter, so it must have been the proximity that set off the tint shield.
“Harris, the aliens have begun their attack.” It was not General Glade but Lieutenant Moffat who contacted me. He sounded strangely calm. “Intel is estimating their forces at approximately fifty thousand troops. How the speck do they expect to invade us with fifty thousand troops?”
“Are they putting up much of a fight?” I asked.
“We were a lot more scared of these guys before they got here,” Moffat said. “They beat the shit out of our gunships, but our ground troops are holding their own. So far they don’t look all that specking dangerous.”
I took a moment to process this information. “Have you been up to the front line?” I asked.
“The Army is taking this one,” Moffat said. “How about you? Any luck capturing a live one?”
“Not yet. We found where they landed, if you can call it a landing. It looks more like they broadcast in.”
“Broadcast in? Nice, very nice. What’s the ETA on your return?”
“I was hoping to look around a bit longer,” I said.
“There’s no rush, Harris. Dig up what you can and get back here when you’re done,” Moffat said before signing off.
I stood there thinking about the aliens. The Unified Authority had just survived a civil war with the Mogats, an enemy with next to no military experience and no ground troops. Survived was the optimal term. The Mogats won too many battles before we finally tracked them down and eviscerated them. Now we were fighting an alien invader that telegraphed its battle plans and sent fifty thousand troops to battle our million. Maybe our luck is holding up. Maybe the entire universe is incompetent, I thought.
Thomer woke me from my thoughts. “Lieutenant Harris, we found nine more of those chambers.”
“Chambers?” I asked. I had already labeled them “spheres” and subconsciously assumed that everyone else had as well.
“The glowing balls,” Thomer said. “We found nine more of them just north of here.”
I gave the sphere another glance to make sure it wasn’t growing. It seemed stable. “Good work, Thomer. Bring your men back,” I said. “I just got a report from Moffat—the fireworks have started.”
Impossible as it sounded, I thought the war for New Copenhagen might end as suddenly as it had started. The aliens would probably send in more reinforcements, but maybe they were having the same problems on every planet. How big an army would you need to conquer an entire galaxy? Sooner or later they had to run out of soldiers. Maybe they were running out now. With only ten spheres for landing more soldiers, they would never be able to land a large enough army in time to save this campaign. I was beginning to feel like we had just dodged an apocalyptic bullet.
“Freeman, what do you think about setting up a line of trackers to guard the area?” I asked. “If the bastards send in reinforcements, maybe we can pop them as quick as they appear.”
I imagined a line of the motion-tracking robots—little more than poles with radars and trigger fingers—surrounding each sphere. Bullets passing through the spheres might get irradiated, but they did pass through the spheres. And if the bullets did not kill aliens, we could equip the trackers with particle beams, lasers, gas canisters filled with noxium gas, or rockets.
At that moment it all seemed so easy. If our lines could just hold outside Valhalla, these alien bastards could be killed. The once-impossible war now seemed so winnable. For the first time since my meeting with Admiral Brocius, I could close my eyes and see the end of the war. The possibilities seemed endless.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“We found their scouts,” Philips said. He and his fire team had been tracking the aliens for most of an hour.
“Are they still a party of three?” I asked.
“If you still want to take one alive, Kap-y-tan, the odds aren’t going to get any better. Want me to take ’em?”
“How close can you get?” I asked.
“How close do you want me to get? It’s like tracking stiffs. I bet I can get close enough to piss on them.” Philips sounded brash. That was good.
“Close enough to piss on them?” I asked.
“Well, maybe not against the wind. I don’t know if these boys are fresh out of alien boot or just plain stupid, but they sure as hell don’t act like galaxy conquerors.”
“They might still have something up their sleeve,” I reminded Philips.
“So can I move in?” Philips asked.
“Send up a beacon,” I said. “Don’t move till I get there.”
“Yes, sir,” Philips said, sounding so wooden I wanted to shoot him.
“Do not engage them, Sergeant. If I hear shots, you better hope they kill you first,” I said. “I’m on my way.”
“Got it, sir.” I heard the annoyance in Philips’s voice. Not that it would matter to someone like Philips, but I understood his frustration. He was a resourceful Marine, a veteran on the battlefield who had earned and lost his first stripes by the time I learned to walk.
I ordered Thomer to herd the rest of the platoon back to town while I headed north after Philips’s beacon. Freeman went with the platoon so he could deliver his bullets to the Science Lab for analysis.
By this time, nearly four hours had passed since we first sighted the phantom lights. The ion curtain had long since closed around New Copenhagen, cutting us off from the rest of mankind. Cutting across a clearing, I looked into the sky for signs that the light field was fading, but it was as solid as ever. The woodland around me was unnaturally bright. Even under the trees and in the deepest thickets, I could see patches of mossy ground that sunshine would never have reached under normal circumstances. Light sparkled off distant snowdrifts.
“You’re not going to believe this, Harris,” Moffat called in. “The fight’s over, we routed the bastards.” He sounded jubilant.
“It’s over?” I asked.
“They folded; the specking jokers just plain folded.”
“Any signs that there might be more of them on the way?” I asked.
“I was going to ask you the same question,” Moffat said. “If this was the whole damned war …”
“One of my fire teams is tracking some scouts,” I said. “We’re going to bring one in.”
“You might want to hurry back. The party’s already started,” said Moffat.
“Just make sure you don’t drink Valhalla dry before we get there,” I said, trying to forget how much I hated this prick.
“Tell you what, Harris, you bring back a live one, and I’ll find the best bottle in the whole specking city for you,” Moffat said, before signing off. He’d pulled a Jekyll and Hyde. I could not believe this was the same power-hungry asshole who tried to threaten me a few hours back.
I wanted to feel excited by his news, but I knew better. It was beginning to feel as if we could win the war, but it could not possibly happen this easily and this quickly. Using a platoon-wide frequency, I said, “I just heard from base. The Army has routed the enemy.”