“Damn, what happened to you …sir?” Private Skittles, just back from his tour of duty at the Hen House, added the “sir” as an afterthought.
I had barely stepped into the barracks, and Skittles was the first Marine I saw. I had a sling over my right shoulder. My collarbone was broken, but the military had good medical facilities in Valhalla. The doctors grafted the bones back together and mended them well. The collarbone smarted, but I barely noticed it compared to the throbbing of my dislocated right shoulder.
When it dropped on me from the ceiling, the guardian spider had struck with enough force to dislocate my shoulder and shatter my collarbone. It also gave me a severe concussion, but the combination of instinct, neural programming, and high doses of combat hormone in my blood had masked the effects of the concussion.
I also had burns on my scalp and shoulder. Toxic fumes had seeped through hairline cracks in my helmet and shoulder pads, charring my skin. The armor itself was a complete write-off.
“I had an accident,” I said.
“No kidding,” Skittles said. “I always figured you were indestructible. That theory’s out the window.”
“Thanks,” I said, and excused myself. I saw someone else I needed to speak to. Sitting on his bunk, playing a happy tune on his harmonica, Sergeant Mark Philips looked downright perky. He had his back propped against the wall, and one of his legs dangled over the edge of the cot, swinging with the beat of the song.
He put down the harmonica, and said, “I’d salute you, sir, but you might hurt yourself returning the salute.”
“How did you like guarding the Hen House?” I asked.
“It beats running through a forest filled with shit-colored aliens,” Philips said. “How do I sign up for another tour?”
“Did you see any action?” I asked.
“Oh, I saw action,” Philips said with a schoolboy grin.
It did not take a genius IQ to interpret that message. He had found his way into some officer’s house. Thomer had been right about him.
The team of scientists and soldiers that designed the clones had wrestled with the idea of stripping out their sex drive. In the end, the officers overseeing the project argued that an army of eunuchs would be worthless in combat. Those officers were long dead, but maybe Philips had found his way into the bedroom of one of their descendants. If so, they deserved what they got.
I left the barracks, hoping to slip back to my quarters for some rest. The doctor had even given me some pills to help me sleep, but no one in his right mind would take sleeping pills this close to the front. Get luded before a fight, and you might find yourself asleep when the enemy comes knocking on your door.
I went to the elevator. Tired as I was, I lacked the concentration to tell my men from any other clones. Men walked by and saluted me. I nodded, not sure if they were from my company.
When I entered my billet, I found the room just as I had left it. My white combat armor sat on the table beside my neatly made bed. Even here, with no one inspecting my rack, I kept a tidy room. I turned off the lights and dropped onto my rack to rest. Then I saw the red light flashing on the communications console.
The first message was from General Glade. “Harris, I just got a report from Sweetwater. You should have heard the dwarf bastard; he sounds like he’s going to wet his pants. Report down here ASAP.”
A summons from a general, I thought, as I drifted to sleep. Then came the second message.
“Speck! Speck! Where the hell did they send him? Harris, this is Moffat. Where the hell are you?”
The third message was Moffat again. “Damn it. Harris.” He sounded insane with anger. “I want a list of the men you sent on guard duty. You got that? I want that list now.”
The fourth message. “Harris? Did you authorize Sergeant Philips to guard the Hen House? That wife-specking son of a bitch! I’ll see that that specker gets the firing squad. You got me?”
That woke me up.
General Glade met me at the door of his office. He let me in, told me to sit, then started pacing back and forth in front of his desk. “I heard you had a rough time of it,” he said. “Did you get hurt?” He had nothing remotely resembling concern as he asked the question. Like any general, he was a man who routinely sent other men out to die. He could not do his job without caring more about the missions than the men he sent to do them.
I should have appreciated his feeble attempt at courtesy. He was, after all, a natural-born and a general.
“I’m fine, sir,” I said. Hell, he could see that my arm was in a sling. I had a severely blackened eye. How the hell I got a black eye wearing a combat helmet was beyond me. A bald spot and a bandage marked the burn where the gas seeped into the back of the helmet.
“Good. Glad to hear it,” he responded so quickly he nearly cut me off. “I heard your armor failed.”
“My visor,” I said.
“Breeze had his team take a look at it. They say it shorted out when the alien touched you, a complete system overload.”
“Was there anything on the video record?” I asked.
“There is no record, Harris. Breeze says every circuit in your helmet fused. You would have been electrocuted if your armor had a higher ratio of metal to plastic.” Huuhhhhhh. Huhhhhh. He cleared his throat, stopped pacing, stared down at me, and said, “I hate those specking scientists.”
“Sweetwater and Breeze?” I asked.
“Yes, Sweetwater and Breeze.” He snorted. He cleared his throat again. “I don’t know why we bother with them. So far the only thing Dr. Sweetwater has been able to discover about the aliens is that they break instead of die.” He laughed. “I’ll tell you what, Harris, the Unified Authority Marines do not care if their enemies break, die, or give birth to triplets so long as they stop moving when they are shot in the head.”
“Begging the general’s pardon, but I don’t see how we can possibly win this one with bullets and bombs,” I said. “If we’re going to survive, the only way we can do it is if the lab comes up with something.”
General Glade stopped pacing finally and sat behind his desk. “You seem like a man who keeps confidences. I’ll tell you a secret even the Army brass doesn’t know.”
For effect, Glade looked around the empty office to make sure no one was listening. “Sweetwater was the last man off Terraneau before the Angels sleeved it. The dwarf took off just as the ion curtain began to spread.”
“That sounds like a lucky break,” I said.
Glade sat up so quickly and so straight you would have thought someone had stung him with an electric prod. “Lucky break, my ass, Lieutenant. He’s a coward. He turned and ran. Everyone else on the planet is dead …everyone but him.”
I wanted to point out that (A) there had to be a pilot to fly him off the planet and (B) technically speaking, we did not know if anyone on that planet had died. For all we knew, some botanist had discovered a tachyon-eating rubber tree, and the entire population of Terraneau was alive and well and watering their gardens twice a day.
“I don’t suspect Sweetwater would have contributed much to the battle if they had sent him in with an M27,” I said.
Glade stopped. I suspect he was imagining William Sweetwater carrying an M27. He laughed, fought back more laughter, took a deep breath, and started laughing again. “I have this picture of the little bastard wearing a man-sized helmet.” He laughed again.
I smiled to be politic but did not laugh.
“Harris, have you seen Lieutenant Moffat since you got back?” Glade asked.
“He left a couple of messages in my quarters,” I said.
“Do you know what happened at the Hen House?”
“I have a pretty good idea.”
“He’s calling for a firing squad,” Glade said. “Major Burton had to post a couple of MPs inside the barracks in case Moffat goes on a rampage. Philips isn’t allowed out of the barracks, and Moffat isn’t allowed in. That’s no way to run a base.”