“Admiral Brocius.” I could not help but sneer as I said the name. He commanded the Central Cygnus Fleet. At some point in recent years he had become the highest-ranking man in the Navy; but as far as I knew, he never made the jump from fleet commander to Secretary of the Navy.
“You will show me proper respect, Lieutenant,” Brocius said, trying to stay in command of what he knew to be a dangerous situation. He was an old man, and I was a Liberator, a class of clone designed for violence. He also knew that I had a score to settle with him. He was the one who had ordered sixty thousand Marines to the Mogat home world and left them stranded there as the planet melted.
“I’ll bet you want to kill me,” Brocius said.
“More than anything I have ever wanted in my life,” I said.
Brocius pulled a pistol out from under the table and pointed it at me. “I’ve spent the last year of my life worrying about you and your friend Freeman. I didn’t even feel safe on my own damned ship, Harris; not my own damned ship. I had extra guards posted outside of my quarters, but I knew that wouldn’t stop you.
“It turns out I didn’t have anything to worry about after all. I got reports …Earning a living winning Iron Man competitions and screwing tourist girls in Hawaii. I wanted you euthanized, but General Mooreland said no.
“Mooreland died two months ago. I suppose you heard about that,” Brocius said.
“I only heard that this evening,” I admitted.
“Are you planning to shoot me?” I asked.
“Quite the opposite,” Brocius said. He placed his pistol flat on the table and slid it toward me.
Admiral Brocius had an antique casino on the second floor of his family mansion, but he did not play cards. He liked running games of chance, not playing them. Not a gambling man in the ordinary sense, he preferred house odds. Now, for some reason, he believed he had better-than-even odds that I would not pull the trigger. I had the gun, but he knew something I needed to know.
“Speck! Look at these pathetic bastards,” a voice whispered out from a large monitor sitting in the center of the conference table. I could not see the screen; it faced away from me. “They get older with each group. These boys are decrepit. They belong in a specking old folks’ home, not the damn Army.”
“Given a choice, I suppose I would rather be shot than beaten to death,” Brocius said, his eyes locked on mine. “If you shoot me, the military will be down one man and one bullet. Take my word on this one, Harris. We cannot afford to waste men or bullets.”
I picked up the pistol but did not aim it at Brocius. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing at the screen with his gun.
“It’s a briefing,” Brocius said. “They’re briefing the recruits that came in with you.”
“Gentlemen, perhaps we should get started,” the man on the screen said in a loud voice. Still holding the pistol, I walked around the table to see what was happening.
From what I could tell, all of the two thousand passengers from the transport had been crammed into a large auditorium. The room was dim but not dark, and all of those old, white heads sparkled in the audience like marble grave markers. An Army major whom I did not recognize stood on a stage.
“Gentlemen, I’m going to skip the formalities and cut to the chase,” the briefing officer began. “The Unified Authority is in a state of war. The war is not going so well.”
The auditorium remained silent as the major paused to organize his notes. The rustling of his papers seemed almost ear-splitting in that silence.
An image appeared on a screen above the major. It was battle footage. The footage showed Army men barricaded in some kind of bunker, firing M27s through ramparts at an unseen enemy. I heard the normal battlefield chatter—There’s one …Fire, fire, fry the bastard …Your left! Your left!
Then the camera panned out over the ramparts and into the field. There, no more than thirty feet from the U.A. firing line, were creatures the likes of which I had never seen in my life. I could not tell if they were black-skinned or wearing some type of combat armor. If I had to guess, I would have put their height at somewhere between seven and eight feet. They looked bulky and powerful.
“What are those things?” I asked.
“Don’t you recognize them?” Brocius returned my question with one of his own.
“I’ve never seen them before,” I said.
The screen in the briefing room froze and closed in on one of the creatures. It looked almost human except that its entire body seemed to be made of some hard, charcoal-colored substance. I would have liked to see what happened next, but that was where the feed ended.
The alien had two eyes, which resembled shot-put balls in size and color, two ears, a very flat nose, and a mouth with no lips. Its body showed no features such as muscles or bones. Looking at the frozen frame, I tried to determine if that thing was wearing some kind of suit. I saw nothing to suggest armor, just a rounded chest and torso that were twice the size of a human’s.
“Then you don’t recognize it? I thought you were old friends,” Brocius said at the same time the major resumed his briefing. “This guy or one of his brothers was the thing that fired on you during the Mogat invasion.”
Hearing Brocius mention the invasion gave me a quick mental stab. I tightened my grip on the pistol.
We are dealing with a life-form that is not human. Your job is to kill it, the major told his audience.
“The thing I saw was made of plasma or electricity or some kind of energy,” I said. “It was yellow and it glowed.”
They have invaded our galaxy. They have come into our house and now they are pushing us out of the way, the major said. We’re going to give the bastards the fight of the specking century.
“Everything they’re saying in the briefing is bullshit, in case you were wondering,” Brocius said. “Those things are eating us alive.” He watched me for a few seconds, not saying a word, and asked, “You mind if I turn that off?” then stood up and reached over to turn off the monitor without waiting for my answer.
I shrugged. He paused, standing in midreach with his eyes locked on the pistol—his pistol—that I held in my right hand.
“You can forget everything Major Doolan is telling them in that briefing. It’s all bullshit,” Brocius said as he turned off the screen and returned to his seat.
“They have taken control of Scutum-Crux, Norma, and Perseus.” Those were the three largest arms of the galaxy, but also the least populated. “They took all of that territory in under a year, and they have started to move into Cygnus and Sagittarius. If we can’t slow them, they’ll have control of the Orion Arm in a couple of months.
“That’s why you’re here, Harris. That’s why they’re here,” Brocius said, nodding toward the blank screen. “That’s why we brought back the specking Roman Legion.”
“Then you have two problems, because the alien I saw glowed. I don’t know what those things are, but they aren’t the aliens that Atkins was calling ‘Space Angels,’ ” I said.
“Yeah, I saw the video you captured,” Brocius said dismissively. He pulled out a folder, which he opened and placed on the table. “This is from your feed.” He selected a still shot and passed it to me. The shot was blurry, but the image was clear in my mind. It showed a luminous alien creature holding a broad-barreled rifle. I noticed that the rifle in the picture looked like the weapon the aliens were carrying in the video feed.
“These shots were taken on Terraneau just over a year ago.” He handed me a single eight-by-ten sheet with a series of one-inch windows on it. Some of the pictures were washed out. In the first shot, a group of four luminous beings stood on one side of the frame. The rest of the picture was white. In the next frame, those same beings stood on a street.