“Tell me about it,” Herrington said. “You seen Lieutenant Harris? The guy looks like the walking dead. We better keep an eye on the poor son of a bitch just in case.”
“Darn straight I’m keeping an eye on Harris; he’s the only thing standing between us and that ass-wipe Moffat,” Boll said.
“Stow the unnecessary chatter,” I said over an open frequency that every man in the platoon would hear. “Let’s keep the Link open.”
“Think he heard us?” Boll asked.
“Not a chance. They always say that before the fighting starts,” Herrington said.
“That goes double for you, Herrington,” I said.
“Shit,” said Herrington.
Boll did not respond.
The entire company save one member was stationed in the hotel district, hidden in a park. It was a small park, no more than five or six acres. Monolithic skyscrapers surrounded us on every side. When I looked back over my shoulder, I could see the outline of the Hotel Valhalla against the sky.
The only man not present was Lieutenant Moffat. He and several other company commanders sat in a conference several blocks away. Even now, with humanity’s back to the wall, when push came to shove, the natural-borns were sending us out alone.
I dug the men in along the crest of a hill. The ground in front of us was a marsh. I could see the still surface of the water through canes and reeds, plants that had gone dormant for the winter. The sludgy water reflected the ionically charged sky above it, with the added effect of a rainbow streak caused by a minor oil slick.
“Lieutenant Harris, are you watching the feed?” Major Burton spoke to me over a direct link.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Those bastards danced through four thousand volts like it wasn’t there,” Burton said.
“Yes, sir,” I said. I wasn’t really listening to him.
From my perch on this hill, I could see far enough down the street to spot the Avatari. At this distance, I needed telescopic lenses to make them out, but I could see them tramping forward. Thanks to the hot-spot-identifying sensors in my visor, I saw thousands of fire red dots marking the spot where mines had been laid on the street ahead as well.
Walking point, a yard or two ahead of its comrades, one of the Avatari stepped on a mine. With my visor zoomed in on the bastard, I enjoyed the carnage as much as I would have if I were only a couple of yards away. I watched its foot come down on the virtual dot that marked the location of very real explosives. I watched the ground burst. Dust, rock, concrete fragments, and who knew what else, shot up like a pillar. The explosion tore the alien’s leg from the rest of its body and it flew twenty feet through the air. The remainder of the body flew backward, flipping through the air and smashing into the Avatari behind it.
A whoop of victory echoed across the city.
“At least they’re not mine-proof,” Burton said. On the video feed, I could see that maybe as many as a hundred Avatari had stepped on mines. The rest of their army paused and studied the field for a moment. This was the first time they had ever shown the slightest concern about their surroundings.
An alien stepped forward, pointed its rifle at the street ahead, and fired. Watching the feed on a small window in my visor, I saw several other Avatari doing the same thing. I expected the rifle to fire a bolt of light into the street, but it fired a long string of light instead. There was a silent moment in which I decided that nothing would happen, then the entire street vanished in a mass explosion.
Working frantically with the optical controls in my visor, I rewound the explosion and watched it in slow motion. In one frame the Avatari stood before a perfectly normal street. In the next frame, the surface of the street began to crack in a thousand different locations. In the next frame, pieces of concrete began to sprout in the air. And in the frame after that, a thousand individual geysers of smoke, dust, and rubble appeared. The force of their simultaneous explosion sent the entire street flying in the air, where it shattered, crumbled, and turned to dust.
The explosion reverberated through the city. The ground shook beneath me as if it might break open. The buildings between us and the Avatari shook. Windows exploded. The base of one of the buildings at the edge of the park caved in—a hundred-story cloud shredder, falling in on itself, flushing a flashflood of dust and debris in every direction.
“Lieutenant …” Thomer and Herrington both tried to contact me.
“Stay focused,” I said over a platoon-wide frequency.
“Harris, they’ve disarmed the minefield,” Moffat said over a company-wide frequency. He sounded so specking calm. “Prepare to attack.”
The cloud of dust, dirt, and smoke washed across the space between the buildings like a river breaking through a dam. It flooded the open ground of the park, then splashed into us and moved beyond.
“What the hell was that?” Philips asked on the company-wide frequency. The conscripts did not have access to the video feed, they were in the dark about what was happening up the street.
“Steady,” I answered. “They detonated the mines.”
“So we got them?” Skittles asked.
“As soon as the smoke clears, Harris, take your men and …” Moffat said.
We stared straight ahead into the haze. Night-for-day vision made no difference, we might as well have been buried in mud. Heat vision revealed fires and spent mines, but the Avatari gave off no heat signature.
“Glad we worked so hard laying those mines, eh?” Philips drawled over the interLink. “Got any ideas on what to do next?”
There was a second explosion. I saw nothing, but it stirred the cloud of dust around me.
“What was that?” Skittles asked.
“They must have detonated more mines,” Thomer said.
“Steady,” I said. Minutes passed. I could feel the tension. I could hear my men breathing heavily when I listened over the interLink. There was no chatter. The men were scared but ready to fight.
“Harris, take ’em out,” Moffat yelled.
He was ordering us to commit suicide. We had no idea what waited on the other side of that smoke. If I had been a normal clone, my neural programming would have forced me to obey, but I was a Liberator. I ignored him. What I could not ignore was the combat hormone welling up in my blood. With that hormone in my blood, the moments of waiting before we attacked were like foreplay. I wanted to get to the real thing.
The dust in the air slowly thinned. I could make out the edges of buildings against the sky. I could see more than five feet ahead of me.
“Harris, attack,” Moffat said. “That is an order.”
I said nothing.
Anything more than ten feet ahead of me was still a blur of dust and smoke. Standing in the park felt like swimming underwater. I could not see anything beyond the reeds in the pond at the base of the hill.
“Harris, I gave you an order. Acknowledge.”
Some of the dust had settled on the surface of the pond. It floated on the oil film.
I listened to my men chatter over the interLink. Skittles, too young of a Marine to be in such a desperate battle, sounded terrified as he asked his platoon leader, “Thomer, can you see them?”
“It’s okay,” Thomer said. “We’re ready for them.”
“I never thought it would be like this,” Skittles said.
“Harris, I have given you a direct order. I order you to attack.”
“Why don’t you get your natural-born ass down here and lead the attack yourself?” I asked. He could send me to the brig for saying that, and I knew it. I had been through battles before, but this one seemed different. I was in a rage. Was this the beginning of a full-fledged Liberator meltdown? I wondered if that old asshole soldier on the trip to Mars had been right about me. I wondered if I could really go out of control, and I realized that I didn’t much care.
“Watch yourself, Harris.”
“You want to send us in alone?” I asked. “You’re sending a single company against fifty thousand Mudders?”