A line of riverside apartments still stood. We would need to search those buildings for survivors.
“How does it look?” Thomer called up from the kettle.
“Familiar,” I said. A veteran of New Copenhagen, Thomer knew what I meant.
“I’ve located the airfield up ahead,” the pilot said. “It looks clean. Do you want to go in for a landing or do a flyby?”
I could see the field as well. It had been an Army air base—nothing more than a few corrugated steel hangars, a two-story temporary tower, and a long, open tarmac.
“Go on in,” I said, my thoughts more centered on what to do once we landed.
The pilot signaled the other transports to land, and we touched down. As he had said, the area was clean. Taking a quick look through the windshield, I might have gone so far as to call it deserted. I saw no wreckage, no choppers, and no bodies. The buildings looked untouched.
Thomer led a team of men to sweep and secure the area. When he gave us the all clear, Herrington and Hollingsworth shouted their platoons out of the transports. The sergeants had their men off-load our gear and the jeeps. With its open grounds and hangars, the field might work for landings and rendezvous, but it would never serve as a base.
As my men unloaded the gear, I eavesdropped on a few of their conversations over the interLink. They sounded nervous.
…could be anywhere.
Maybe they left the planet? I heard they left.
I don’t know about you, but I’m shitting ice cubes. I specking hate this place.
It’s better than being stuck on the ship.
How the specking hell is this better than the ship? The sky is a specking lightbulb, the buildings are blown to shit. How in the hell is this better than being aboard a ship?
I hear there’s plenty of scrub on this planet.
Scrub? That changes things.
“Scrub,” was Marine-speak for women and one-night stands. Hearing them talk about scrub, I thought for a moment about Ava. There was something about her …Maybe it was her eyes, or maybe it was the brassy way she talked about Ted Mooreland and Al Smith; something about her stayed with me.
As I swept through the open frequencies, I heard a Marine singing “Amazing Grace,” and I had to laugh. Don’t waste your breath, I thought. The god they wrote that for doesn’t know you exist. Hymns were meant to be sung by men with souls and heard by the god that created them, leaving us clones out of the loop.
We weren’t created by God, we were devised by scientists; mortal men who borrowed parts from God’s creation and used them in a scientific process that every major religion condemned. Those same religions said we were created without souls.
“Gods too decompose,” I said to myself. It was a quote from Nietzsche. “Friedrich, old pal, I gave up on you too quickly.”
Once we finished this invasion, I would give Nietzsche another try.
After we pulled the gear from our three remaining transports, I divided the men up. Thomer and I would take two platoons into town. Hollingsworth would guard the landing field with the third platoon. Herrington had the important job: he and a pilot would take a transport and locate the Avatari mining site.
Back on New Copenhagen, we had found the mines by tracking seismic activity. Herrington would have it a little easier. He had a device that detected the toxic gas that the Avatari placed in their excavations.
Our jeeps could transport eight men, but you wouldn’t want to pack more than five men into them during combat situations. Having lost two transports we were down to six jeeps, meaning we could drive forty-eight men into town.
Nine years of war had hardened me. As a new recruit, I would have grieved for the men in the transports we lost on the way through the atmosphere; now I worried more about losing manpower, not men. Instead of blaming myself for casualties, I concerned myself with completing the mission.
As we left the airfield, I saw Herrington’s transports go wheels up. All short wings and stout metal walls, the bird lumbered off the ground unsteadily, righted itself, then shot away, disappearing against the glare of the ion curtain. I watched it depart, all the while calculating the odds of our success.
We traveled slowly into downtown Norristown. The first few miles took us along the overgrown streets of an industrial district. Weeds choked the ditches, and tall grass grew up along the fences. Except for cracked windows and an occasional collapsed façade, the one- and two-story buildings in this part of town had survived the war untouched. Dusty cars sat in parking lots and along the street. Most had flat tires. We saw no bodies—none at all.
“It looks like they just walked away,” Thomer said on a direct frequency.
“I wonder how far they got,” I said. After that, we both went silent. I listened in on my men and found very little chatter. They were alert, which was good, but I could feel the tension among them. The Marine handling the machine gun on my jeep flitted the barrel back and forth, scouring the street for any sign of movement; he was a man who would shoot first and ask questions later. The men in the seats behind me had their M27s ready. Obviously, these men had not fought on New Copenhagen or they would have known that M27s were useless against the Avatari.
M27s might not do much to an alien, but they were hell on Earth when it came to crowd control. I had a feeling that any survivors we found around this wreckage would be scared and dangerous. Speaking on an open frequency, I told my men, “Think before you shoot. We’re looking for survivors, not aliens, and we want to keep them alive. You got that?”
It was a rare rhetorical question, but it still netted me a few aye, ayes. The boys were nervous.
“Sir, how will we identify the aliens?” one man asked. The Pentagon never released the images of the Avatari to the public. Only the veterans of New Copenhagen would have seen the aliens in action.
Thomer fielded the question. “Shoot at anything eight feet tall or taller.”
“Eight feet?”
“And made of stone,” Thomer added.
Silence followed as the inexperienced Marines tried to decide if Thomer was joking.
“There are spiders, too,” I said.
“Oh yeah, the spiders,” Thomer said. “If you see a spider the size of a jeep, it’s probably not friendly.”
“Don’t listen to them, you dumb speck. They’re just playing with you,” Sergeant Hollingsworth said. I heard laughter in his voice. Hollingsworth had not been with us on New Copenhagen. He didn’t know. He thought we were hazing the kid.
“I assure you, Sergeant, this is no joke,” I said on a platoon-wide frequency. Then, opening a direct channel between me and Hollingsworth, I added, “Thomer is going easy on you, Sergeant. He hasn’t told you about their guns.”
“Yes, sir,” said Hollingsworth.
Two hours after leaving the airfield, we passed a billboard for a shopping mall. All of the buildings in this part of town had been demolished. Wind whistled through the pipes, bricks, and fragments of walls that rose like spines out of the grounds. We passed the remains of a fence here and the jagged remains of a warehouse there; but nothing over ten feet tall remained standing in this part of town. In the distance, three tall skyscrapers towered over the road, but that was a few miles ahead.
We drove over patches of road when they appeared between mounds of debris and rubble. Glass and plaster crunched under our tires. We passed a park in which a row of barren flagpoles stood out of the ground like giant needles. The clang of the wind smacking the tackle against the shafts of the flagpoles echoed like gunfire in the empty streets.