“I suppose,” I said.
“The moment they carted you away, Moffat sent Philips’s platoon back out to the enemy line.” Thomer, the closest the clone Marines had ever come to producing a Boy Scout, had to struggle to say these next words: “I’ll shoot that bastard if I get a shot at him.”
I’ll shoot that bastard if I get a shot at him. The neural programming hardwired into Thomer’s brain should not have allowed him to think such thoughts, let alone say them.
I did not know what to say. I went back into the dorms wondering how things had become so undone.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
The excavation project commenced within the hour. It began with two crazed Army generals trying to show each other up. General Newcastle, still the highest-ranking officer on the planet, had his Corps of Engineers begin digging while General Haight, the up-and-comer, sent soldiers to all the local rescue stations to locate specialized equipment.
In the end, it was General James Ptolemeus Glade who stole the show. He was preordained to win the pissing match because the man going after the bombs wore a Marine’s uniform. When Sweetwater asked me to go down, nobody volunteered to take my place.
I helped General Glade trump Newcastle and Haight a second time by telling him about S.C.O.O.T.E.R., the exploration robot Freeman and I had used to scout out the alien dig before we went in.
“Good idea,” Glade said. “But unless those robots can dig their way out of a collapsed underground garage …”
“They didn’t all go down with the armory, sir,” I said. “Freeman got one out of the Science Lab.”
Huhuhu. I could not tell if Glade had just cleared his throat or laughed. Maybe that sound came as a combination of the two. “Damn, son,” said Glade. “That’s a good idea. I love showing that son of a bitch Newcastle who’s got the real stones around here.”
In the battle to show who had real stones, Haight came in last. Rather than showing up with specialized equipment, his detail arrived on the scene with sonic cannons, ropes, a collapsible platform, radio gear, hard hats, flashlights, hydraulic lifts, and other bric-a-brac that Newcastle’s Corps of Engineers had brought from the start.
A few hours passed before the engineers cleared out enough of the garage for Freeman and me to attempt an entry. An hour before the garage was ready, Freeman called to tell me I was on deck.
“Aren’t we both on deck?” I asked.
“You’re on deck,” he said.
“Where are you going?” I asked. I could not help feeling like I was about to do something really dangerous, and Freeman was skating off scot-free.
“I need to find Breeze,” Freeman said.
“I thought you said he was dead,” I said.
“Sweetwater needs the equipment he had on him.”
“Where is he?” I asked.
“The Avatari mines.”
“You’re going into the mines?” Suddenly retrieving nuclear bombs from an unstable underground garage did not seem so bad.
“Only the entrance. Breeze didn’t make it very far,” Freeman said as he hung up.
So I called Major Burton and had Herrington assigned to my detail, then I dressed and went down to the street. While Newcastle’s engineers finished their stress tests, Sergeant Herrington located a staff car and picked me up in front of the barracks. “Where to, sir?” he asked, as I climbed into the passenger’s seat.
“The hotel,” I said.
“The Hotel Valhalla?” Herrington asked. “The Mudders smashed it, sir. They knocked that place flat.”
Looking into the sky, I almost mistook this for the early hours of a beautiful day. The sky had the white-paper look that it sometimes has on clear mornings as the sun rises over a cloudless atmosphere. There were clouds up in the silvery brightness and I realized it was midday.
“Do you still want to go back to the hotel?” Herrington asked.
“I do,” I said. “We’re excavating the armory.”
“The armory?” Herrington asked. “Hot damn.”
We drove across campus. Snowdrifts still leaned hard on a few of the buildings. The parks and greenbelts looked far too peaceful. Soldiers walked the pathways, and jeeps crossed the roads, but the place looked empty. This was a large campus, and the tens of thousands of defenders left to hold this ground did not provide enough warm bodies to replace the missing students.
“We aren’t going to beat the Mudders, are we, sir?” Herrington asked.
I thought about telling him the truth. I could tell him that they were not “Mudders,” in fact, they were not even living beings, just avatars of aliens who were far away and safe from assault. I thought about telling him that nothing we could do would matter in the end since the Avatari were pumping the planet full of chemicals.
“Sure we can win. The Science Lab has some ideas that could turn this thing around,” was what I said. I did not believe a word of it. As for Herrington, he was a clone. When an officer gave him information, his neural programming was supposed to make him accept it.
“So there’s a chance?” he asked.
We drove away from the campus and entered Valhalla, a city in ruins.
“We’re Marines,” I said. “There’s always a fighting chance.”
If we could get into the garage and retrieve a nuclear bomb, maybe we could stop the Avatari from forming. Maybe magnetizing the gas in the mines would suck a wide enough hole through the ion curtain for us to contact those ships circling the planet. Then what? How would we stop the Avatari from returning? Templar went supernova and fried Hubble fifty thousand years ago. If the Avatari were the ones who did it, they had a long and powerful history.
I had come to dislike driving the streets of Valhalla. Every toppled building spoke of our failure to defend it. The bodies were everywhere. The first time I saw packs of dogs or birds gathered around bodies, I wanted to shoot them. But seeing animals feeding on bodies no longer bothered me; I had seen too much of it.
The Avatari, a numerically insignificant enemy, had attacked us like a cancer. The truth was that we had gone the wrong way at every turn, and maybe we deserved to go extinct. For centuries the Unified Authority had relied heavily on naval power, leaving our ground tactics pretty much unchanged since the nineteenth century. Now that we faced an enemy who we could not stop in space, our ground attacks proved inadequate.
We’d had a nuclear solution all along, but we had stuck to conventional weapons until it was too late. First we threw away our numerical advantage, then we chucked our weapons, and now we found ourselves alone and unarmed.
“I’m not fishing for answers, sir, but have you talked to Thomer lately?” Herrington asked.
“Should we talk about something in particular?” I asked.
“He’s pretty upset about Philips,” Herrington said.
“They were best friends,” I said.
“Thomer blames Lieutenant Moffat.”
“So do I,” I said.
“I’m worried he wants to go after the lieutenant,” Herrington said. He slowed the car down, hoping to talk.
“Not Thomer,” I said. “I don’t think he has it in him.”
“I’ve known Kelly for a while. He’s not a big talker. If he’s talking about getting even, I’d take it seriously, sir.”
“It won’t happen,” I said. “Thomer won’t kill Moffat. I’m sure of it.”
“What makes you so sure?” Herrington asked.
We had drifted within a block or two of the hotel. I watched soldiers carrying rescue equipment into the garage. “Thomer’s a clone; he can’t murder a superior officer. It’s not in his programming.”
“Lieutenant, I grew up in an orphanage. I don’t know if you knew that, sir. I grew up around clones, and I am here to tell you that I’m seeing them do a lot of things these days that go against their programming. It makes me nervous.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, “me too.”