The engineers had cleared the roads all the way to the hotel, but with trucks, jeeps, and emergency-equipment vehicles blocking the driveway, we had to park our jeep along the street and walk to the ruins of the hotel. I climbed out for a look around. Wind rustled past. The mild winter was ending.
In the distance, I could see that the engineers had cleared the rubble and debris from the entrance to the garage. The arch of the garage opened like a man-made cave with a road vanishing into its darkened maw. From here, the whole thing looked untouched except that there was supposed to be a luxury hotel on top of it.
“So, do you like spelunking?” I asked Freeman.
He said nothing.
“At least there aren’t any giant spiders mining the garage,” I said, trying to sound optimistic.
“Just a couple of nuclear bombs,” Freeman said.
“Well, yeah, there are the bombs …and all kinds of unexploded shells …and probably some chemical weapons.” Engineers scurried about us, ignoring us, surveying the damage. There were engineers everywhere. They reminded me of ants walking about an anthill.
I saw a flashlight sitting on a table and decided to borrow it. As I took it toward the garage, I heard somebody yell, “Hey! Who took my flashlight?”
“Let’s go have a look,” I said to Freeman.
“I mean it! I want it back now!” yelled the guy at the table.
The concrete arch at the front of the garage did not have so much as a crack in it. Light from the ion curtain seeped in, through the open archway, and I could see everything around me quite clearly. The structural integrity seemed intact.
The ramp entered the garage as a four-lane highway, then, just after the ticket booths, it narrowed to two lanes of traffic as it dropped toward lower levels at an acute angle. Jagged glass teeth hung from the windows of the booths.
Beyond the booths, the light from the ion curtain faded, and I switched on the flashlight. Standing a few feet behind me, Freeman switched on the torch he had brought. The ramp spiraled down about twenty feet, then spilled into the first level of the garage—a cavernous expanse that had once been as wide as the hotel itself. It wasn’t anymore, though; a solid wall of debris rose from the floor to the ceiling.
The air was colder down here. My breath turned to steam. I blew on my hands to warm them. When I paused to survey the area around me, I stomped my feet to keep them warm.
“Dead end,” I said.
Ahead of us, little bubbles of light marked the places where engineers were conducting stress tests on caved-in areas. Their voices echoed softly.
“I bet they could dig this whole thing out,” I said.
Freeman shook his head. “If they had a month.”
“So we find another way in,” I said. “Maybe we can tunnel our way in from outside.”
I saw a trace of red mixed in with the concrete and rubble and went to have a closer look. From a distance it looked as if it might have been blood, but it was dry. When I shined my flashlight on it, I saw that it was a wedge of the red carpet that had once covered the lobby. Stepping over concrete boulders and splintered wood, I gave the carpet a tug. It frayed before I could pull it loose.
This far into the garage, the floor seemed strong, but that did not mean much. Deeper in it might have collapsed under the weight of everything that had toppled onto it. I did not see any bodies or blood. As far as I knew, every Marine was on the streets when the Hotel Valhalla came down.
I saw a metal bar sticking out of a mound of cement chunks and pulled on it. The bar did not budge. I gave it a harder yank. It did not come out, but it wobbled freely. As I pulled it again, a small avalanche cascaded down the pile of debris covering the bar. Plaster and concrete rolled down and struck the floor.
They expected Freeman and me to go rooting through this and come up with nuclear bombs? I didn’t like the idea of hauling live nuclear weapons through a collapsed structure but didn’t see any alternatives. Being crushed under a mountain of concrete did not seem any worse than being shot by an Avatari rifle. I might die faster. In the end, though, it wouldn’t matter whether a million tons of hotel fell on our heads or an atomic bomb exploded in our faces or the Avatari shot us through the head with their specking light bolts, dead is dead.
“We’re not getting in through here,” Freeman said, his voice almost as soft as its echo in the underground vault. He turned to look for another route.
It’s all just a matter of time, I thought. If I skipped the dig, the Avatari would kill us when they returned. I could drive into the forest and hide from the Avatari, but sooner or later the gunk they were dumping into the mountains would poison the air. Even if I found a way off the planet, I would have no place to go. The aliens had “sleeved” every habitable planet in the galaxy.
Go spelunking in a crumbling underground parking lot? Sure. What’s the worry when you only have days to live?
Freeman drove me to the dormitory, then went on to the Science Lab. He said he would pick me up when the engineers found a way into the garage.
The clock was ticking. We needed to get into that underground garage, liberate at least one nuke, fly it to the alien dig site, and detonate it before the next battle. The Avatari returned every three days. I’d spent a day locked up in that cell, another eight hours had passed since Major Burton released me …
“It might take them all day to find a way into the garage,” I said.
“If you don’t hear from me in twelve hours, don’t worry about it,” Freeman said. He had a point.
Thomer met me as I entered the dormitory. He looked like every other clone, but I recognized him just the same. You do that when you live in a world of clones. You find ways to pull them out of the crowd.
“We found Philips,” he said.
“You brought him back with you?” I asked.
Thomer nodded.
“Let’s go have a look,” I said, and followed Sergeant Thomer out of the building. He led me to a little parking lot behind the dorm. A single jeep sat in the lot, which was ringed by three-foot snowdrifts with surprisingly clean snow. A cold wind blew across the scene, making the bare branches rattle in the trees.
We approached the jeep. Thomer had laid Philips out in the back of the jeep, curling his knees against his chest so that he would fit. He’d left Philips covered under an Army blanket. I pulled back the blanket.
The man lying in the back of the jeep could have been any of the over one million clones flown to New Copenhagen to defend the planet. His helmet was removed, revealing a face with an ice blue tint to the skin. He had died with his mouth closed. Even Philips would have appreciated that irony.
Gone were the swagger and defiance that once made Sergeant Mark Philips stand out. The Japanese said that it was “the nail that stuck out that got beaten down.” I suppose the indomitable Sergeant Philips had finally been beaten down. What remained was a body lying on its side in muddy combat armor. Had he been shot with a particle-beam weapon, his armor would have been in splinters or entirely gone.
“Where was he hit?” I asked.
“Shot through the chest,” Thomer said.
I wrestled Philips’s body onto its back, prepared to see bullet holes. I knew how I would react; I’d already rehearsed the scene in my head. I would turn without a word and march into the dorms. I would find Moffat and kill him, without ever speaking a word.
The wound was three inches across and ran right through the center of Philips’s chest. Except for the trail of white where his armor melted and drooled into the wound, the hole was clean—the work of an Avatari bolt.
“It doesn’t matter who fired the shot,” Thomer said, “Moffat killed him.”
“Yes, he did,” I said. The son of a bitch had intentionally sent Philips to die.
“Philips knew this was coming,” Thomer said. He was trying to stay in control …good clones don’t accuse natural-born officers. “This is what he wanted to happen.”