The video record showed a subterranean city under siege, seen through the visor of a Marine combat helmet. The scene played out in tones of blue-white and gray—night-for-day vision as seen through the visor of Marine combat armor.
Suddenly a rim of light appeared above the city, raining glare down upon buildings and streets. For a moment it looked like the light came from an explosion, but it did not flash and disappear. Instead, the light expanded over the top of the city like smoke gathering over a fire. The light was bright enough to cancel out the night-for-day lens, and the visor automatically switched to a standard tactical lens. As the light came closer, tint shields formed over the visor as protection from the blinding glare
Shit, I thought to myself, as I felt my pulse rise. Shit, shit, shit!
Even through the tint shields, I saw changing hues and patterns in the light as if the reds, yellows, and blues in that strange overbright light constantly kept separating themselves from the colors around them, then remixed back into the spectrum.
“Harris, you seeing this?” a voice asked me on the screen. The record was taken from my combat helmet.
I recognized the voice. It was Ray Freeman, the man who had once been my partner. “Where are you?” I asked in the record.
“One floor up,” Freeman said. “You better get climbing.”
I was standing in the door of an elevator station. The city in the video feed had levels; only now that we had shut down the power, I would need to climb to the next level using a rappelling cord.
“You can see that light?” I asked over the interLink—the communications system used by the military.
The light had a slow, gelatinous property to it. It seemed to seep over the city like viscous oil. As soon as I turned away from the light to run toward the open elevator shaft, the night-for-day lens in my visor resumed. The glow from that strange light had not yet reached the elevator station, but it soon would.
In the record, I ran to the shaft, attached a cord to the loop in my armor, and started up. The Marines in my platoon, at least those still breathing, had already climbed up to the top level.
The shaft looked like a gigantic tunnel turned on its end. Dozens of rappel cords dangled from the top.
“Thomer, where are you?” I called over the interLink. Thomer was one of the squad leaders in my platoon.
“In the elevator station,” Thomer said.
“Can you see any transports?” I asked.
“There’s a transport just outside,” Thomer replied.
“I requisitioned that one,” Freeman said.
“What happened to the pilot?” I asked.
Freeman did not answer, which probably meant he was dead.
The area inside this shaft would have been black as coal if not for the glow that started to pour in through the open doors. It rushed in like water from a flood, shining on the opposite wall. I had never known that a man could climb as quickly as I did when I scaled my way up that shaft.
“Load the men in the transport,” I called to Thomer.
“They’re in,” Thomer said.
“And you’re in?” I asked.
Thomer did not answer.
“Get in the transport!” I yelled.
I looked up to see how much farther I had to go. I had another twenty feet. Below me, the light in the shaft became blinding. The tint shields in my visor blocked out some of the brightness.
I looked back down. There was a creature in that viscous light—a creature nearly as bright as the light around it. It looked like a canary yellow smudge in a field of glare that had the startling silver clarity of an electrical spark. I only saw it for a moment, and I concentrated on the two black eyes. They were the size of my fists, and they seemed to be made of smoky black chrome.
The video feed froze on the image of the creature. The image was blurry and indistinct, like a picture taken by a child who can’t stop jiggling his camera.
“Master Gunnery Sergeant Harris, perhaps you could give us your opinion about the nature of this creature,” Admiral Brallier said, the forced calm in his voice fraying on the word “creature.”
I had retired, only I wasn’t allowed to stay that way. These officers would not have had any authority over a retired Marine—I was back on active duty so that they could decide whether or not they wanted to lock me up.
“I have no idea,” I said. I could feel the heat rising in my blood. Brallier and I stared at each other, saying nothing.
Finally, Brallier broke the silence, asking, “Do you think it was a Space Angel?”
That video record was shot during the invasion of the planetary home of the Mogats—a religious cult that had all but overthrown the Unified Authority. In his writings, cult founder Morgan Atkins discussed meeting a radiant alien being, which he referred to as a “Space Angel.” Other than Atkins, no one of any note had ever mentioned making contact with space aliens, so it was hard to take Atkins seriously.
“He fired a gun at me,” I said.
“So?”
“That doesn’t seem very angelic,” I said.
A few people in the gallery laughed, but tensions ran high in those chambers. Most people sat mute as stone.
“No one but you saw this creature,” Brallier said, turning to the screen to take another look. “I find that strange, Master Gunnery Sergeant. Don’t you find that strange? From what we have been able to ascertain, the creature in this frame is nearly ten feet tall and carrying a giant rifle, but you were the only person who noticed it. How do you explain that?”
The bastard had just called me a liar. He did it in an eloquent, formal style, but he had just called me a liar, and everyone in the chamber knew it. “Do you think I made it up?” I asked.
Brallier kept blathering on about how there were thousands of Marines on the planet and how unlikely it was that I had spotted the only “bug-eyed monster” to invade the planet. “How is it, Master Gunnery Sergeant, that you were the only man who spotted the invading aliens?” The question must have been rhetorical, because instead of giving me a chance to respond, the admiral kept going.
I could not figure out why Admiral Brallier was doing so much of the talking. Yes, he was one of the highest-ranking officers in the Unified Authority Navy, but General Thomas “Tommy” Mooreland sat right beside him, a man with enough brass and braids to decorate a division. As the commandant of the Marines, General Mooreland should have had more say in my interrogation than the admiral. I was, after all, a Marine. Instead, Mooreland sat there looking stolid and angry, never uttering a single syllable.
It wasn’t just the military that had turned out to watch this inquisition. “Wild Bill” Grace, the senior member of the Linear Committee, had come. He was the closest thing the Unified Authority had to a president. The other members of the Committee came as well. So had half the Senate.
Our allies, the Confederate Arms, sent representatives as well. Gordon Hughes, the chairman of the Confederate Arms Treaty Organization, sat in the gallery. Earlier this year, the Unified Authority and the Confederate Arms were at war with each other. Now they were allies. Go figure.
“Are you saying that I lied? What would I get out of lying?” I asked.