“Philips was confined to barracks?” I asked.
“Sure he was,” Glade said, “pending his court-martial hearing.”
“The guy’s got a set of stones on him,” I said. “I ran into him on my way in.”
“He wasn’t out of …?”
“No, nothing like that. He was sitting on his rack playing his damn harmonica. You’d have thought he was on vacation. He asked me to sign him up for another tour of guard duty,” I said.
General Glade changed the subject. “So you and Freeman infiltrated the Avatari dig. What the hell is going on down there? What did you see, Harris?”
“Spiders,” I said. “Spiders the size of small trucks.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Ignoring my own best advice, I took one of those sleeping pills and went to bed after meeting with General Glade. I slept for sixteen hours. I dreamed of a planet with winter forests, steel gray lakes the size of small oceans, high mountains buried in snow, and beneath it all, a wretched hell filled with giant spiders. I dreamed of New Copenhagen, dreams that grew out of reality. I squirmed and rolled in my sleep, sweating so profusely that the sheets became drenched and clung to my skin. The medicine I had taken gave my imagination a vivid, hallucinatory quality so that the bumps and jerks I made in my sleep worked their way into the fabric of my dreams.
When I woke, my mouth was dry and the world seemed to spin around me. I heard loud ringing in my ears, but that had nothing to do with tranquilizers. The ringing was real. It was the steel shriek of the Klaxons calling every man to arms. I recognized the pattern in the noise; this was a yellow alert.
I sat up and tried to clear my head. Outside my door, the hallway echoed with the rattle and thud of doors slamming and men readying for battle. As I slid from my bed, I felt a twinge in my arm and shoulder.
I would need to put on armor before heading out, I knew that, as did the doctor who had set my shoulder. He had given me medicine to “mask” the pain. I turned on a light in my room, fumbled around the table until I found the medicine, took the pill, then changed into my bodysuit. By the time I strapped on my chest plate, I felt no pain.
As I left my quarters, I detected a feeling of panic. Officers ran through the hall in a helter-skelter frenzy, bumping into each other, pushing each other, rushing in a dizzy flurry and not speaking. It was almost as if they shared a universal premonition of something bad, not just a battle, but a defeat.
With my head clearing, I came to realize why the brass had only issued a yellow alert. This was to be the old men’s march. This was the battle in which the Army would thin its ranks and preserve its munitions, not so much a genocide as a chronocide. They were killing clones according to age.
General Newcastle would flood the battlefield with his white-haired soldiers, the clones Philips had labeled the “Prune Juice Brigade.” The general’s plan was to win the fight by overwhelming the Avatari with vastly superior numbers, knowing he would lose the majority of his troops.
“Harris, where are you?” Moffat’s voice sounded stiff as he addressed me over the interLink. Unless somebody had let him know that I had slept most of the last twenty-four hours, he would probably think I was avoiding him.
“Just entering the mez now,” I said as I spilled out of the stairwell and onto the second floor. “What is the situation?”
“From what I hear, the Army’s taking point on this one. Major Burton says we’re on deck. Base Command wants us suited up in case the Mudders break through.”
I entered the hallway that passed the various ballrooms-turned-barracks. Walking past the Odin Ballroom, I peered in and saw hundreds of men in white armor standing at attention. I had gotten off to a late start.
Klaxons still blaring, officers ran from barracks to barracks checking on troop readiness. I entered the Valkyrie Ballroom and saw the Marines standing at attention.
“Nice of you to join us, Harris,” Moffat said, as I came through the door. “I hear you’ve been goldbricking.” He might not have been allowed in the barracks during off hours, but as we prepared for an attack, he took his place at the head of the company. Without replying, I walked around the ranks and stood beside Moffat. Moments later we received an order from Major Burton calling for the entire battalion to fall in.
General Morris Newcastle, commander of the combined armed forces stationed on New Copenhagen, left few things to chance.
For this battle, he selected the two hundred fifty thousand oldest soldiers under his command and stationed them in the woods six miles west of town. He assigned fifty thousand younger troops to man the Vista Street bunker. Granted, I could have made a fortune selling canes and dentures to the old fellows in the forest, but Newcastle sent enough men into battle to give himself a five-to-one numerical advantage.
At 0412, with the sky as bright as noonday, the spheres dilated and fifty thousand Avatari troops entered the forest. They moved east, following the same route they had taken on their previous assaults. Cameras stationed along the way—by this time the Army, Marines, civilian militia, and Science Lab had all placed cameras—were broadcasting images of their march back to town.
More than an hour passed before the Avatari stepped into the Army’s trap. Their path took them into a brilliantly prepared gauntlet that gave Newcastle’s soldiers the high-ground advantage and better cover.
Over the last three days, the Corps of Engineers had given the forest a practical makeover. They dug tight channels that led scores of Avatari into narrow trenches. Standing above those trenches our soldiers could safely lob grenades. The engineers built up earth-and-concrete palisades so steep and high that the Avatari could not possibly see soldiers hiding behind them. They built blinds in which entire brigades could hide, and they designated rallying points where men from broken platoons could gather and regroup. In war, redundancy is the mother of victory, and General Morris Newcastle had covered all his bases.
The breakdown was not tactical but strategic. The brass had decided to win this one with men, grenades, and bullets so that they could reserve the more valuable munitions for later. But even after all the preparation, Newcastle’s old men were not up to the task. The first problem was the weapons. Particle-beam weapons were effective enough against Avatari, but our general-issue particle-beam pistols were designed for close-range combat. M27s were accurate at over a hundred yards, but against the Avatari, they had proven ineffective at any range.
At 0723, the Avatari marched into the kill zone. Instead of staying to the low ground as expected, they fanned out, forming a thousand-man picket line. They spread out along the high ground, the low ground, and on the steep slopes in between.
It was a crazy formation that left them wide open to a frontal attack, but it screwed the hell out of the Army’s FOCPIG preparations. Moving forward with that wide a front line, the Avatari wrapped around our blinds and palisades, trapping Newcastle’s old men’s brigades inside. Then the Avatari opened fire with their light-bolt weapons, boring through earthworks, sandbags, and trenches. The Avatari rifles had twice the range of our particle-beam pistols. Avatari light bolts cut through trees, slammed through embankments, exploded boulders.
Forced out of their cover, our antique soldiers tried to execute a staged retreat—falling back, taking cover, wearing down the enemy; but they were too old to run and gun. They lacked the mobility needed for an ordered retreat.
The front line of eighty thousand men Newcastle sent to stall the aliens did not last the hour. The troops he sent to flank and attack from the rear were massacred. And then …
Certain that a force of two hundred fifty thousand men would hold off the enemy, somebody at the top had issued an order to service the rocket launchers along the Vista Street bunker. For this reason, the missile defenses sat partially assembled when nearly forty thousand Avatari entered the no-man’s-land on the outskirts of the city.