“You hope she’s a clone?” Thorpe asked.
Before Skittles could answer, one of the two guys running the bar showed us to a table. We carried on the conversation as we headed across the floor. The six of us sat around a small, square table that was meant for two people.
“Sure I hope she’s a clone,” Skittles said as he scooted his chair toward the table. “If she’s a clone, they can make more of her. I’d take one.”
This got a laugh, but Thomer did not join in. The conversation had strayed far too close to a discussion of cloning and identity for an introspective clone like Thomer, who suspected he might be synthetic.
After that, things became quiet as we watched soldiers and Marines come and go. Herrington and Skittles continued to opine about Ava Gardner. Boll and Thorpe argued about the virtues of Earth-brewed beer over the outgrown stuff.
I let my mind wander, until I heard Thorpe ask, “Lieutenant, what happened with Philips?” The weight of that question smothered all other conversation.
“What happened?” I repeated. I sighed. I looked at the waiter, hoping he would come and take our order. I looked out the window, hoping to see some distraction on the street. Thorpe, who was always earnest, waited patiently until I answered. “What did he tell you?”
“He wouldn’t talk about it,” Thorpe said.
“You know what they were doing. I sent them to capture an alien,” I said.
“You went with them,” Thorpe added.
“Yes, I went too. I didn’t want to miss out on all the fun,” I said. “Three of the aliens split off, and Philips followed them. We set up an ambush. We had the drop on them, so what could happen, right?”
“Those sons of bitches are bulletproof,” Herrington said.
“Damn straight they’re bulletproof,” I said.
“One of them was doing some kind of science experiment when I got there. The other two were standing guard, but the one doing the experiment wasn’t even holding a gun.
“It was all perfect. We were on a hill overlooking the bastards, and we opened fire.
“Just like Herrington said, the bastards were bulletproof. I emptied an entire magazine on one of the guards, but the specker didn’t die. And their weapons …they shot right through the embankment.”
I had not realized how much that skirmish had bothered me. Once I opened up and started talking, the words just kept pouring out. “Boll nailed them with his grenades, but they hit White and Huish during the firefight. White died right away. Huish, though …he went into shock. I’m no doctor, but I don’t think it was the wound that killed him; I think it was the pain that did it.”
The waiter finally came to ask for our order, but now he was an unwanted distraction. We asked for a round of beers and sent him away.
“So why is Philips taking this so hard? You’d think he would blame you if he had to blame somebody,” Thorpe said. He did not mean this as a challenge. As I thought about it, he made a good point.
“You’ve never had your own command,” I said. “I sent them out, but he told them where to go and when to shoot. A guy like him, when things go wrong, he’s not looking to cover his ass, he just thinks about the men he lost.”
“That’s the shits,” said Skittles.
After that, we sat without speaking until the waiter brought us two pitchers of beer, and we all drank, glad to keep our thoughts to ourselves. The taste of beer improved my mood. It probably had the same effect on everybody else.
“Wish there were women around here,” Skittles said. “It’s kind of weird being in a town with all men.”
“It kind of reminds me of being on base,” said Boll.
We all would have preferred having a woman slinging our beers, but that did not stop anyone from downing them. The first two pitchers went dry in an instant. Seeing this, the waiter brought two more. And another two, and two more after that.
I was glad that the beer distracted the other guys, but it did not erase the image of Huish from my mind. I would have liked to get drunk, but I was no more likely to get drunk from beer than from soda. Nothing short of Sagittarian Crash ever plowed me under. The other guys, though …A few of them could barely sit straight after the third round of pitchers.
We asked about food, and the waiter informed us the cook was gone. After Skittles begged for grub and Herrington all but threatened the man’s life, he said he could bring us sandwiches and chips. Thomer told him to make enough for ten people and offered to pick up the tab.
When the sandwiches arrived, I saw that the bread was stale and the meat was stiff and unidentifiable. Boll and Herrington said they tasted fine, but I thought I would rather eat back on base. I told them I was leaving because I didn’t want to see Skittles puke, but that was a lie. The truth was that I felt morose and wanted to be alone.
Handing Thomer the keys to the jeep, I went out to the street and turned west. The night was brighter than noonday. I would have no trouble finding my own way home.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Like most of the planets the Unified Authority chose to colonize, New Copenhagen was almost exactly the same size as Earth. It orbited its star from approximately the same distance that Earth orbited the sun, and both planets rotated at nearly the same speed. The term “day” on New Copenhagen meant just about the same thing that it meant on Earth—at least it did until the aliens “sleeved” the planet in a curtain of light.
It does not matter if there are people in the forest when a tree falls, the event still produces the vibrations that humans, animals, and audio equipment register as “sound.” It did not matter that the ion curtain made the sky so bright that we could not see beyond the atmosphere, the sun still shone.
Three days after their first attack, the Mudders returned.
The scream of Klaxons woke me out of a largely dreamless sleep. I leaped out of bed, pulled on my bodysuit, then clapped on my combat armor, the whole process taking less than a minute.
I grabbed my M27 as a matter of course. That was the default weapon of a U.A. Marine, sturdy, durable, and accurate. As I headed out the door, though, I saw my particle-beam pistol lying on the writing desk beside my bed. Wanting to travel light, I had not taken that weapon on the last mission. We generally did not use particle-beam weapons in a normally breathable atmosphere, they were a high-maintenance nightmare. If you accidentally closed the outtake valve, they overcharged and exploded in your hands. If you jostled the lenses and they fell out of alignment, the gun would simply refuse to shoot. Bullets had always been effective enough when the enemy was human, but battering the Space Angels with bullets had proven ineffective in our first meeting. A particle-beam weapon, which disrupted the target at an atomic level, seemed like less of a gamble. I grabbed the pistol but still held on to my M27 for good measure.
As I left my room, I joined a stream of men racing through the halls. We all knew the pecking order. Majors and up, heading to command shelters and wearing service uniforms instead of armor, went for the elevators. Mere lieutenants, like me, did not need to be told where we fitted into the hierarchy. I joined the mass of armor-wearing junior officers sprinting down the stairs to the lobby.
As I entered the stairwell, I saw one of the Klaxons that Command had installed near the door. The little specker was no bigger than a saltshaker, but it screamed loud enough to shake the walls, and the engineers had placed one at the top of each flight of stairs. If not for the protection of my helmet, I might have gone deaf running down the stairs.
A cavalcade of men in combat armor poured down the stairwell, not stopping for oncoming traffic, their boots clanking against the concrete steps, the joints in their armor rattling. Yaaaayyyeeeeeeeee, the Klaxons wailed nonstop, their unceasing screech boring through our helmets until our heads felt like they might split in two. I tried to use the noise-canceling filters in my helmet to screen the sound out. I turned off the ambient audio receiver and still heard the shriek of the Klaxons through the supposedly soundproofed shell around my head.