“Look, Harris, I admire you. You’re the best goddamn—”
Rather than suffer through another eulogy, I interrupted him. “You didn’t like me much on Terraneau.”
“That’s ’cause I thought you were wrong about everything. Turns out you were right about everything.”
“I thought it was about Ava,” I said. “I thought you were mad about my hiding a girl in my quarters while everyone else was confined to the ship.”
Hollingsworth’s face flushed. “Yeah, well, that was more envy than anger. I would have done the same thing if I had a shot at Ava Gardner. Any man would.”
His honesty stunned me.
“You don’t really want to kill yourself, do you?” Hollingsworth asked.
“Kill myself?” I laughed. “I tried that once. It didn’t work. Liberators can’t kill themselves; it goes against our programming.”
I wasn’t lying. Part of my programming gave me a survival instinct. Even if I wanted to, I lacked the ability to pull the trigger—or the pin. The time I did try to commit suicide, my weapon of choice was a grenade.
“It’s not a question of suicide; it’s a question of needing to be in the middle of the action. It’s in my DNA. I can’t kill myself, and I can’t sit out the fight.”
“So you’re screwed,” Hollingsworth said.
An impressive array of ships now filled the space above Olympus Kri. Warshaw sent six additional fighter carriers to watch out for the empire’s interests during the evacuation. They floated in seeming stasis beside enemy battleships. If the Avatari suddenly began traveling in spaceships and appeared in range, I thought they might find themselves in the fight of their lives.
Of course, the Avatari did not travel in ships. They had no time for such primitive contrivances as traveling at the speed of light. In fact, they did not travel at all. We called them the “Avatari” because the army they sent to our galaxy was made of avatars instead of living beings.
They’d used some new weapon during their latest assault on New Copenhagen, and we had no hope of making a stand against them until we knew what they had. That meant having men on the ground as well as eyes in the air. Our satellites would record the destruction from outside the atmosphere while I experienced it firsthand down below. Maybe I would see things or hear things or just feel things hiding underground that we would miss from above.
And if I died? I had a bunch of patriotic and macho responses; but they were all for show. The truth was that I had survived too much already. I was ready to go.
Checking my watch, I saw that I would probably arrive ahead of schedule, but I felt the urge to get started. I could stand around up here, safe and sound on the Salah ad-Din, or I could stand around down there, on the planet. Down there I would be in place, ready to react if something went wrong.
Hollingsworth stayed on the observation deck as I went to my quarters and swapped my service uniform for combat armor. “Nickel” Hill had offered to loan me shielded armor; but I turned him down. What a laugh. With shielding from head to toe, the only weapon you could carry was a dart gun that ran along the outside of the right arm. It fired fléchettes made of depleted uranium, good for killing people, but I doubted it would have much effect on the Avatari.
My mood turned dark as I fastened my armor. Hill said that the Avatari we faced on New Copenhagen were just the janitors and that this time we would face the A-team. When I asked the ghost of Sweetwater about it, he said, “Not so much janitors. We think they were more like scarecrows, mostly harmless and designed to scare away pests.”
I had answered him with one word, “Bullshit.”
But it hadn’t been bullshit, and I accepted that now as I prepared to fly down to Olympus Kri. Alone, in my billet, I owned up to the truth.
My armor included a rebreather, temperature-controlling bodysuit, and protection against radiation, yet it only weighed a couple of pounds. My portable arsenal, on the other hand, registered seventy-three pounds and thirteen ounces. My go-pack contained six disposable grenade launchers, six handheld rockets, a particle-beam pistol, a particle-beam cannon, and a handheld laser. Facing anyone but the Avatari, that would have been overkill.
I wondered what weapon the Avatari would use when they attacked and realized that while I was down there, my fate was entirely in their hands. Handing over the controls always made me nervous. No Marine expects to live forever, but we all hope to see the day through.
“Wheel, are you there?” I asked, testing the special interLink connection Hill had given me so that I could contact the virtual version of the Arthur C. Clarke Wheel.
Arthur Breeze answered. “Are you heading down to the planet?”
“That I am,” I said.
“Sweetwater is asleep,” said Breeze.
The virtual versions of Sweetwater and Breeze ate, slept, passed gas, and shat. Whoever designed them had to give them foibles along with strengths to prevent them from figuring out that they lived in a computer. Along with mapping and scanning their brains, the engineers had mapped and scanned their bodies. Nothing was left to chance.
The digital ghosts of Arthur Breeze and William Sweetwater spent their time playing with digital replicas of the finest scientific equipment in their little virtual laboratory on a computer model of the Clarke space station. When interactive Breeze ran atoms in his virtual collider, did he control real equipment accelerating real particles and getting real results? When he peered through his spectroscope, did he examine real samples with virtual eyes? Even now, he was watching the real me through eyes that only existed in a computer. Did the digital program that emulated his brain hear the digital protocol that simulated his voice?
If I allowed myself to play with these questions long enough, I could have driven myself insane. A lab assistant worked at a desk behind Breeze. I wondered if the avatar was attached to a real man and if that man currently stood in a real-world lab working with real-world equipment.
Breeze was a physicist who had published volumes on particles. He was probably a better scientist than Sweetwater, but his lack of confidence was an Achilles’ heel. He stuttered during briefings and used so much jargon that he could never communicate his ideas clearly. Sweetwater, whose expertise extended into chemistry as well as physics, had no shortage of confidence.
“You’re sure fifty feet down will be enough?” I asked.
“Based on my best calculations, ten feet might be enough,” Breeze said. He pulled off his thick glasses, polished them, and replaced them on his face. The grease and dandruff were still there, now wiped into a spiral pattern.
“The combustion on New Copenhagen was strictly a surface event. Sweetwater sent a drone down to take soil samples. The heat penetration was only a few feet.”
“So if someone was in a basement apartment on New Copenhagen, they might have survived,” I said, thinking not so much about survivors on New Copenhagen as civilians on Terraneau.
“It’s not likely,” Breeze said. “Concrete calcifies at two thousand degrees. At three thousand, soil melts.”
“Not all of the buildings melted on New Copenhagen,” I said.
“The surface of the planet retained heat longer than the atmosphere,” Breeze said. “The soil and air samples show that the atmosphere reached temperatures of nine thousand degrees before the heat subsided. If you were in a building with any kind of ventilation system, you’d be incinerated.”
“Good to know,” I said.
“Harris, you might want to consider flying down to the planet’s surface after the event. Any structure exposed to those kind of temperatures is going to sustain fundamental damage. You could survive the event and still find yourself buried alive.”