Someone rapped at the door.
“Come in,” Glade barked.
“Jim, we better get going to the lab; the dwarf is waiting on us.”
“Oh yeah, I forgot about the briefing.” Glade laughed. “We don’t want to miss out on the latest bad news.”
General Haight turned toward me and paused. “I heard you sat the last fight out, son.”
“I got thrown in the brig,” I said, still trying to figure out who “Jim” was. Moments passed before I realized that Jim was commanding-officer-talk for General James Ptolemeus Glade.
“I heard that, too,” he said. “A firing squad would be too good for the bonehead who took you off the line.”
I did not say anything though I felt the same way.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
The war did not reach the hallowed steps of the Science Laboratory. Not a window was cracked, not a doorpost was nicked. Not so much as a blade of grass looked out of place on the lawn. The only bombardment this building had seen came from the flocks of pigeons that gathered along its ledge.
I stepped into the lab and saw a janitor mopping the floor. In a city littered with dead soldiers, a city in which most of the skyscrapers now lay in ruins, here stood a man in blue canvas coveralls swinging a mop back and forth over the gleaming white floor. After everything I had seen over the last two weeks, this simple janitor looked more alien to me than the Avatari.
The floor was wet and shiny. Reflections of the fluorescent light fixtures showed in the water. I stopped to stare at that janitor for just a moment. He looked up at me and gave me a nervous smile, then one of General Glade’s officers asked, “You coming?” and we moved on toward the lab.
Military high command was and always will be a club for overaged boys. As officers are known to do, some of the ones leading this campaign came up with childish epithets for Arthur Breeze and William Sweetwater after that first briefing. The names that caught on were “the Cadaver” and “the Dwarf.” I once heard Newcastle make a joke about them having a “lesbian affair.” By now, however, the joking had stopped.
The generals walked through the lobby in silence. They did not speak to each other. They did not speak to their aides. They walked up the steps, taking one stair at a time, heads down and faces devoid of emotion. They did not look defeated, but they did not look proud. Gone were the days of boasting and haughtiness.
We filed into the lab and formed our familiar circle. Ninety-five percent of the fighting men had died, but the ring of generals remained intact. Sweetwater sat waiting for us, looking agitated as he fiddled with some odd contraptions.
“I suppose we should get started,” Sweetwater said, looking around the circle. “We might as well begin with the good news.”
“Good news?” Newcastle repeated. He did not wear his former smirk. “There’s good news?”
Sweetwater pressed a button on a portable communications console and played a recording of an audio signal. It was weak and filled with static. Then came a human voice. “This is Valhalla Station. Come in. Repeat, this is Valhalla Station. Come in.”
The crackle of the static grew louder, then …“Valhalla Station, this is UAN Thermopolis. We read you, Valhalla Station.” The static increased and the signal ended.
“What was that?” Newcastle asked.
“We were able to make a hole in the ion curtain,” Sweetwater said. He had always struck me as brilliant and arrogant, maybe a man with a chip on his shoulder. Without Breeze around, he seemed awkward. He fumbled for words and answered questions in sentences instead of paragraphs.
“There are ships out there?” General Hill asked.
“During the moment that we penetrated the curtain, we detected six battleships orbiting the planet.”
“Do we know if the Avatari have attacked Earth?” General Glade asked.
Sweetwater shook his head. “You just heard everything we have.”
“That’s it?” Newcastle asked. He shook his head, the disappointment showing on his face. “That is the good news—that you located six battleships orbiting the planet? They can’t send down reinforcements, you weren’t able to speak to them for more than a second, and you don’t know if Earth even exists. That is the best news you have for us? We can’t even call them back, and that’s the good news?”
“No,” Sweetwater said. “The good news is that we believe we have cracked the Avatari’s tachyon-based technology. Give us a little more time and—”
“A little more time?” Of all people, this time it was mild-mannered General James Hill, the Air Force officer who could not even get his pilots in the air, who cracked. “We are down to thirty-five thousand troops. Did you know that? I am about to send highly trained pilots into ground battles …ground battles! We have given you time, and blood, and everything else you have asked for! If you don’t have anything now, then, then …we’re specked. We’re really specked.”
William Sweetwater, short, heavy, with shaggy black hair and thick glasses, hung his head and sighed. The sound of that sigh was long and weary.
“Do you or do you not have a weapon that we can use?” General Newcastle asked in a quiet voice.
“Arthur had an idea,” Sweetwater confessed, “but that idea of his probably cost him his life.”
A stifling three-second pause hung in the room.
“Goddamn! We’ve lost. We’ve lost, do you understand that?” General Newcastle shouted. “We’re out of fighting solutions. So far the only thing you have given us is six useless battleships.” He turned to the other generals. “Gentlemen, the end of humanity came on our watch.”
None of the other officers said anything.
“Arthur believed he found a way to stop the Avatari from assembling,” Sweetwater said.
Another moment of silence followed, after which General Newcastle said in a voice so calm I could not believe it came from him, “Stop them from assembling? I …I don’t understand.”
“Tachyons are not like other kinds of particles, they do not bond together. They are in constant motion. We have never been able to prove their existence because they move faster than the speed of light and we would need an incredible amount of energy to cause them to stop. It must take even more energy to fuse them together, and that is why the Avatari degrade so quickly …it’s not because you destroyed them but because so much energy has leaked out. They no longer have enough energy to keep the tachyons fused,” Sweetwater said.
He typed something into a keyboard, and a video feed of the Avatari spheres appeared on a small screen near his seat. Near the spheres sat the dirty bomb Freeman had used to nuke the site. Sweetwater did not run the feed; he just left the image on the screen.
“Raymond and Lieutenant Harris made an important discovery the first day that the Avatari landed, but we did not have enough data to realize what they had found.” Sweetwater held up a petri dish holding a layer of rust-colored dust. “This was once a bullet.”
The generals crowded for a closer look. Finally, Newcastle asked, “What did you do to it?”
“We didn’t do anything to it in the lab. This was one of the bullets that Raymond fired through the light spheres. Something in the spheres coated the bullet, changing its chemical makeup.
“We initially thought it was some form of radiation. Then we found out about the gas Raymond and Lieutenant Harris discovered in the Avatari mines. Arthur …Doctor Breeze checked the information Raymond gathered about that gas and compared it to this bullet to see if the gas might have caused the changes to this bullet and found a match.
“It appears that the spheres are made out of that gas. They’re like a bubble of gas.
“Now watch this,” Sweetwater said. He started the video feed. The dirty bomb exploded. I relived all of the disturbing images on the screen—the holocaust, the flash that looked like a golden jellyfish as it rose in the air. Sweetwater froze the image before the firestorm re-formed itself into a mushroom cloud.