I thought about putting on my armor. Walking around town in my bodysuit was about the same thing as walking around in my underwear. But who was I trying to impress. I mean, this wasn’t a uniform inspection, so I put on my boots and carried the rest of my things in the box.
“Lieutenant Moffat claims you tried to kill him,” Burton said, as we headed for the door.
“The thought occurred to me,” I said. “Did he happen to mention why I wanted to kill him?”
“He says he was baffled by it.”
“Did you check the record in his helmet?” I asked.
Burton laughed. “Funny thing about that, his helmet appears to have malfunctioned. The record got erased during the battle.” He stopped in front of the door to the street, and said, “Fair warning, Harris—Valhalla changed a bit while you were locked up.”
“Changed?” I asked.
Burton pushed the door open.
It was as if by opening the door, Major Burton had transported me from New Copenhagen to the cities of Dresden or Hiroshima after the Second World War. Instead of looking at a city, I was staring into a desert with slag instead of sand. Except for the litter and the ruins, the world outside the station looked primordial.
“The battle was all but done by the time the Avatari reached this part of town,” Burton said.
“How far are we from the demilitarized zone?” I asked.
If everything had gone as planned, we would have kept the Avatari pinned down in the demilitarized zone. From here I could only see a small sliver of town, but I could already tell that the plan had gone down the shitter.
“Harris, this is city center. The demilitarized zone ends eight miles away,” Burton said.
I tried to grasp the concept that the Avatari could have bashed their way so far into town as Burton led me to his car. “You must be hungry,” he said.
“Yeah, a bit,” I admitted.
“You had water in your cell?” he asked.
“It tasted like shit,” I said. “How long was I down there?”
“A day and a half,” Burton said.
“A day and a half?” I asked, totally stunned. I thought maybe I was there for five or six hours.
“How hard did they hit us?”
“Pretty hard,” Burton said. I could see that. If we drove to the right or left, we could not go more than a block before we ran into wreckage.
“How hard?” I asked.
“I think General Glade wants to handle your briefing, Harris. The truth is, I don’t know much more than you. They aren’t giving out numbers. I figure my battalion took a seventy percent casualty rate. We’re down to forty-seven men.” That was forty-seven men out of three hundred.
As we drove, I became more aware of just how damaged the city had become. We entered one area in which I saw the ruins of an ornate security gate. Beyond the gate lay the wreckage of a toppled building.
Burton asked, “Know where we are?”
“No,” I said.
“Don’t recognize it at all?”
The sign dangling from the twisted archway gave it away: “Welcome to the Hotel Valhalla.” Having seen the sign, I recognized the horseshoe drive. The hotel, I thought. Then I understood the bigger picture. “What about the underground parking lot?” I asked.
“I knew you’d ask,” Burton said. “I’m not in the loop on these things, but from what I have seen, it’s a total loss.
“Harris, we took it in the ass when we had six hundred thousand men and so much ammunition we didn’t know what to do with it. Now, if we’re lucky, we might have one hundred thousand men left, and we’re down to rocks and bullets for weapons.
“I hope General Glade has something up his sleeve that I don’t know about, or else we’re screwed.”
PART III
ONE LAST STAND
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Campus Drive looked pretty much the same as it did the first time General Glade brought me to a briefing in the Science Lab. The tree-lined walks, the rows of redbrick dormitories, the fountains, and everything else remained untouched by war. As we cut across campus, I saw the lab in the distance.
They held, I thought. Newcastle had said that everyone and everything was expendable except the Science Lab. We had lost hundreds of thousands of men and our entire armory, but the specking science building stood unmolested. We rolled on to dormitory row.
“General Glade left strict orders for you to have a quick shower and report to his office,” Burton said.
“I haven’t eaten in—”
Burton put up a hand. “He said you might say something along that line. He ordered a meal for you from the officers’ mess.
“He also said to warn you not to keep him waiting.”
So I followed orders. I walked straight through the barracks, heads turning as I passed.
“Lieutenant Harris?” Sergeant Thomer came out to meet me. “Where were you?” he asked. “Herrington told me that Lieutenant Moffat threw you in the brig.”
“Is that what he said?” I asked. “I don’t have much time; what did I miss? How’s your platoon?”
“There are only nine of us left in the platoon,” Thomer paused. “They got Philips.”
I stopped walking. “Did you see what happened?” That was an attempt at tact. What I meant was, “Did Moffat shoot him?”
Thomer understood immediately. “No,” he said. “I lost track of him in the battle.”
“Have you gone out after him?” I asked.
“No, sir. We’ve been confined to base.” There it was, the neural programming that Philips had somehow managed to overcome. Given a direct order, this make of clone was supposed to obey without question. Philips was Thomer’s closest friend. He’d been Thomer’s guardian angel on the battlefield, and Thomer protected him everywhere else; but some officer gave orders for the clones to return to base, and the programming hardwired into Thomer’s brain would not ignore a direct order. That was how it was supposed to work.
“Who gave the order?” I asked.
“Lieutenant Moffat,” Thomer said.
“Moffat again?” I whispered. Now I wanted a look at Philips’s body more than ever. He would be dead, no question about that, but I needed to know what killed him.
“The Mudders got Manning and Skittles. Boll and Herrington made it. I never saw anything like it before,” Thomer said in a flat voice. “They just plowed through everything. They knocked down buildings whenever they came to anything more than a couple of stories tall. I hear the Army stationed a regiment in a parking garage. The Mudders knocked down the building, and the Army lost the entire regiment …an entire regiment destroyed with one shot.”
I did not have time to talk, but there would be time later. “Thomer, take five men and find Philips,” I said, specifically framing it as an order. “His virtual tags will still be up unless he was shot in the head. Do you know where he took his platoon?”
“What about Lieutenant Moffat?” Thomer asked.
“You just get your team together and head out,” I said. “If you run into Moffat, tell him he can take it up with me directly.”
Thomer smiled and saluted. “Aye, aye, sir,” he said.
As he started to leave, I added, “If you find anyone with a pulse, you bring them back, but Philips is the one I want to see. Once you find him, head straight back to the barracks.”
Thomer nodded and went out to piece together his hunting party.
I stood and watched as Thomer left, not really following him so much as staring into space. Philips was murdered only after I’d gotten myself thrown in the brig for no reason. What did I accomplish by going after Moffat now that Philips was dead? Maybe if I had controlled my temper, I could have kept him safe.
What would I do if Philips’s armor had been blown apart? Bullets from M27s left small holes where they entered and jagged exit wounds, light bolts from Avatari rifles created distinctive tunnels through the entire body, but particle-beam fire would blow obliterated armor apart. One look at Philips’s body and I would know who killed him.