Mars gave me a wicked smile, and asked, “Do you believe in burning bridges behind you?”
I turned in time to see the horizon go up in flames. At first I thought the crazy bastard had detonated the entire city, then I saw that he’d just blown up the bridge. He’d destroyed the viaduct that ran from the north end of town to the south. An enormous, twisting curtain of smoke, dust, and debris rose from the spot where the ten-mile-long bridge once stood.
“You just cut Norristown in half,” I said.
“No one’s hurt, no one’s killed, and no one’s going to follow us,” Mars said. “Praise Jesus, God is good.”
And so are well-placed explosives,
I thought.
The cloud of smoke and dust settled, revealing sections of bridge that hung like severed limbs over battered city blocks.
“Mars, you missed your calling,” I said. “You should have been in demolitions.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said, sounding extraordinarily cheery about his act of benevolent terrorism. “It’s much more fun to bust them than to build them, but the Corps of Engineers giveth, and the Corps of Engineers taketh away.” He laughed, and I could not help but smile. Freeman, on the other hand, kept his rifle out and his finger on the trigger.
I turned to him, and said, “Why the speck did you come here, Freeman?”
He didn’t answer, but Mars did. “He was the one that got you out of jail.”
“Stay out of this,” I told Mars. “Freeman and I have a few issues we need straightened out.”
I asked Freeman, “Whose specking side are you on? Are you working for the Unified Authority this time, or are you just out for yourself?”
Had my mind sped up or had time just slowed down? We were in the Jackal driving through Norristown, but everything seemed silent and slow. The world around me seemed to disappear so that there was nothing left except for me and Ray Freeman. Even Mars had vanished.
“Somebody has to survive,” Freeman said.
I saw agony in his generally emotionless face and understood. “Marianne?” I asked.
Ray shook his head.
“Caleb?”
Freeman did not answer, and by not doing so, he made the answer even more clear. Marianne was Ray’s sister. Caleb was her son. They had lived in a Baptist colony on the edge of the Milky Way. As the Avatari began their invasion, the Navy moved the colony to New Copenhagen. They were still on New Copenhagen when the Avatari returned.
“Hill didn’t tell me he was going to attack your ships,” Freeman said. He did not say this by way of apology, just explanation. Millions of people were about to die; he did not have time to grieve over a few dead clones.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
“The temperature’s been playing roulette for the last fourteen hours,” Mars said, as we drove the slalom course leading to the Norris Lake tunnels.
Mars and his engineers had placed cars, trucks, Dumpsters, and heavy equipment along the road. Our sporty little Jackals had no problem threading the gaps between the barriers, but larger vehicles like tanks and troop carriers would need to go slow to get through. Once we made it through the obstacle course, Mars set off a pyrotechnical display that left the trucks, cars, and Dumpsters in flames. His engineers had rigged a masterful barrier.
Ahead of us, the twin tunnels rose from the waters of Lake Norris like a double-barreled shotgun. Mars drove the Jackal right up to the tunnel for northbound traffic, then came to a stop.
I climbed out. To my left was Lake Norris, an endless stretch of sparkling water. A bright sun hung high into the sky. Like Olympus Kri, Terraneau would have a radiant final day. Perhaps the tachyons caused clear weather; perhaps they needed clear weather to perform their work of death. All I knew was that the sky was clear, and a chilled, crisp breeze blew off Lake Norris. The wind cooled one side of my face, and the heat from the fires warmed the other. The breeze put a crease in the column of greasy black smoke that rose from the flames. Heat ripples hovered over the wreckage, and the flames looked especially orange.
I climbed back into the Jackal and powered up the radar-scope. Mars, a sailor and engineer who had never seen ground fighting, asked, “What’s that?”
“It’s radar,” I said.
On the scope, swarms of dots appeared. Some represented the burning barriers, some were in the air.
I looked back at Freeman, and said, “The home team’s coming in at six o’clock.” The militia would not need to drive across town to get to us; as long as they had pilots, they could fly here in transports. I’d left a small fleet of transports behind when I evacuated Fort Sebastian.
Transports were big and bulky, but unarmed. Had we left fighters behind, Tomcats or Harriers, they could have fired rockets at us from the air. They could, of course, ferry tanks and troops in those transports, but they would not be able to attack from the air.
Freeman pushed his way out of the Jackal, bringing with him his rifle and gear. He surveyed the three-lane entrance of the tunnel. The way his mind worked, he instantly spotted tactical advantages that most men would miss. He was clever and cunning; and though he had come to save lives, he would kill without mercy. With Doctorow in charge, the only lives that could be saved on Terraneau belonged to me and Mars and the Corps of Engineers.
The first transports appeared above the barriers. They flew so slowly they looked like they would fall, hovering like bees as they passed over the fiery obstacle course. Mars watched them and chuckled, then asked, “Where do they think they’re going to land?”
The only road leading to the front of the tunnels was blocked; and the tunnels rose out of the lake. There was no place to land behind them.
A transport passed over our heads, circled us in the air, then returned the way that it had come. Several more transports followed. I counted eight, but there might have been more. Each of those transports could carry one hundred troops, but they could also carry a tank or a combination of men and machinery.
I walked up beside Freeman as he geared up, attaching grenades to his armor and checking the clip in his rifle. “How long do you think we have?” I asked. “How long before the planet burns?”
Freeman shrugged his shoulders and continued loading bullets and grenades.
“Care to guess?” I asked.
“Maybe ten minutes, maybe ten hours,” he said. Freeman was an agent of action who left prophecies and predictions to the likes of Arthur Breeze and William Sweetwater.
“I don’t suppose you brought Sweetwater with you,” I said.
“They’re in a U.A. computer. The only way to talk to them is to have a capital ship nearby.”
“But you had them with you when I met you on Olympus Kri . . .” I stopped myself in midsentence. Another piece suddenly fitted into the puzzle. “Their self-broadcasting spy ships . . . they had a cloaked ship orbiting Olympus Kri.”
Freeman, of course, did not comment. Instead, he said, “We need to get into the tunnel. We can’t get pinned down out here.” As I left him, he was carrying equipment into the tunnel and preparing for a fight.
The differences between men. Freeman stood silent and subdued, all of his attention focused on the road as he waited for the militia to attack. I found Mars gabbing with a knot of about thirty engineers. They were in the tunnel, but no more than fifty feet from the entrance.
“Where are the rest of your men?” I asked. When I left Terraneau, Mars had one thousand engineers in his corps.
“In there, waiting for us.” Mars pointed down the tunnel as he spoke.
“Do you have men guarding both tunnels?” I asked.
Mars shook his head. “We flooded the southbound tube.”
I nodded, and said, “You better tuck your men in; the fighting is about to begin.”
“What about the aliens?” he asked.
“One battle at a time,” I said. “Freeman and I will slow the militia while you and your men dig in. After that, we’ll work on the blast doors.”
“Hear that, guys. It’s time,” Mars said. He sounded so damn cheerful that I thought he must have misunderstood me. His engineers scattered. Two of them climbed into a freight truck that was parked along one wall of the tunnel. As they started up the engine, Mars and a few of his engineers hopped into a Jackal.
The big truck headed out the tunnel, then cut a wide U-turn and squealed to a stop. It was so large it blocked out most of the sunlight. It also completely clogged two of the three lanes leading in from the city.
The engineers hopped out of the truck unscathed.
Moments later, huge metal doors pivoted out from the shadows along the walls and shut out the rest of the sunlight. The doors were perfectly fitted for the entrance. They were tall and thick, and they slid along rails, making no more noise than a bicycle riding on a flat paved road until they connected together with an earsplitting clang.
With the doors shut, the tunnel went as dark a closet. Just a narrow seam of daylight shone in around the edges of the doors. I turned and looked into the darkness. Far away, a Jackal moved slowly through the darkness, its racks of lights casting a blinding glare. And then the tunnel lights came on, shining down on the spider’s web of scaffolding that ran along the walls.
When I did not see him immediately, I worried that we might have sealed Freeman outside the tunnel, but my worries proved unfounded. I spotted him working under the scaffolding, probably setting charges or some other defense.
One of the Jackals rolled up beside me, and Nobles hopped out. I said to him, “That flimsy door isn’t going to keep anyone out,” though I thought it might protect us from the pressure shift of a falling atmosphere.
“It’s just supposed to slow them down,” Mars said.
I kept my eyes on Freeman, watching him walk around the piping. He moved slowly, deliberately. I could not tell what he was doing.
How ironic,
I thought.
Ray Freeman, out to save the universe.
The first grenade exploded. The force of the explosion did not destroy the iron door, but the sound of the blast echoed inside the tunnel.
One of the engineers came to me, and shouted, “Your armor is in the back of the Jackal.”
“No shit,” I said. They’d brought me armor, I was touched.
A rocket struck the door, nearly blasting it off its rails. The deafening sound was followed by the sharp
tak tak
of bullets striking unyielding metal.
“It’s in the turret,” the man said.
I nodded and jogged to the back of the Jackal. The militia would break through in another moment. I needed armor and firepower. When I opened the door of the turret, I saw that Mars had used the space to stow a lot more than a set of armor and a handful of weapons. Two figures lay huddled on the floor, tied up and gagged.
I stared in at Ava, and she stared back at me. Her hands were bound behind her back, and someone had taped her mouth. Seeing me, she struggled and shifted her weight, mumbling incoherently all the while.
“Ava,” I said. “I’m glad you’re safe.”
She mumbled something, twisting and turning and struggling to get free. I might have untied her, but I did not have time. The next rocket knocked one of the huge metal doors out of its tracks. With a deafening yawn, it fell, kicking up a blast of air that smelled of dust, oil, sulfur, and iron.
The man lying beside Ava screamed and struggled. There was no mistaking the look of terror in his eyes. In Ava’s green eyes, I saw nothing but fury. As I grabbed my rucksack, Ava began babbling all the louder. She thrashed to get my attention as I removed the various sections of my armor from the bag. After laying out the armor, I gazed at the assortment of weapons Mars had brought me.
I leaned in, and said, “Well, Ava, nice seeing you again.”
She brought up a foot and tried to stomp it on my face; but she was slow, and she telegraphed the kick. I dodged her foot, and said, “That wasn’t very polite.” As I closed the door to the turret, I could hear her kicking and shouting.
Freeman must have captured them, Ava and her new lover. Maybe it was Mars. I did not have time to think about it; but if I survived Terraneau, I would have a debt to repay.
It took me under a minute to strip out of my service uniform and step into my bodysuit. In another thirty seconds, my armor was in place.
“Mars, are you on?” I asked over the interLink.
“Sounds like it’s getting hot out there,” he said. That was an understatement. By that time, the other half of the door had caved in. A fusillade of militia bullets struck the jackknifed truck and dug into the walls and ceiling. Sunlight and bullets and the sound of explosions poured in through the tunnel entrance.
Retreating deep into the tunnel and hiding behind whatever protection the engineers had installed would be easy, the trick would be stalling the militia so that they did not have time to kick in the doors. We would not fight them, per se, so much as slow them down; but even that had to be timed just right. If we stalled too long, we might get ourselves cooked in the bargain.
“Get your men in deep,” I told Mars. “Get settled in and get the doors ready.”
Someone fired a grenade into the scaffolding where I had last seen Freeman. The grenade burst, sending smoke and flames and twisted pipes in every direction. My helmet deadened the sound, and my armor absorbed the percussion, giving the explosion a dreamlike feeling, and I felt no fear and realized that my combat reflex had already begun.
The militia fired automatic weapons along the walls, their bullets kicking up sparks as they struck steel pipes. “Freeman, where are you?” I asked over the interLink. As I checked for Freeman, I saw Lieutenant Nobles climb behind the wheel of the Jackal that carried Ava and her lover. He drove away.
Freeman answered my query with action instead of words. Three men tried to sprint from the entrance of the tunnel. Using his sniper rifle, Freeman picked them off.