My own situation wasn’t much better. As I was lying facedown in the snow, my body was pressed against the joints in my armor. The creases in my shoulder guards were wreaking havoc on my neck and chest. Because of the shape of my helmet, I could not lie flat on my stomach, it cocked my neck back. We had to keep our M27s hidden, too. Their black stocks and barrels would be a dead giveaway. I buried mine in the snow. Good thing it was not the kind of gun that jams up when a little mud splashes into the barrel.
I had no idea how many soldiers the enemy might bring, but it seemed likely that an intergalactic army might rely on overwhelming force to secure new territories, wipe their enemies out entirely, then move on to the next conquest. Over the next while, a million soldiers might pass this glade.
“Get comfortable, boys,” I said over the interLink. “We may be here for a long, long time.” Hours, I thought. Then I added, “Keep your eyes open, but hold your fire. We do not want to engage. Repeat, we do not want to engage.”
“What if they spot us?” asked one of my privates.
“Just sit tight, Messman,” I said. “Don’t start shooting until I give you the order.”
“Yes, sir.” He sounded nervous. I needed him to hold tight. All it would take was one loose cannon to give us away.
Now that the flood of light had spread over us, my visor automatically switched to tactical lenses with moderate tinting to protect my eyes from the glare. The trees and moss were awash with color—dark green needles, lime green moss, stones the color of iron, trunks with gray bark, ferns with red leaves.
The light had enveloped the forest for as far as I could see. Everything was drowned in liquid light. During the Mogat invasion, I managed to escape before the light closed in around me. Our transport took off just in time to avoid it. This time, there was no escape.
Using the Geiger counter in my visor, I checked for radiation and found nothing. The environmental equipment showed no change in air temperature, and I could see that the light did not melt the snow, which glistened like a blanket of diamond fragments along the ridge.
“Holy shit! Look at that ugly specker.” Philips spotted the Angels first. “I saw the video feed, but I didn’t believe it.”
The creatures looked like they were made out of light, but not the same light that now flooded the forest. The liquid light pouring across the forest was silver-white, like raw electricity. The creatures were bright yellow.
The first Space Angels around the bend looked like statues sculpted from yellow neon light. Their movements were stiff and stilted, as if their limbs had somehow become locked by the snow. Made of light or glass, they marched along the ground. No floating, no flying, no vehicles. Instead, column after column of eight-foot-tall soldiers that looked no more substantial than a smear of light marched along the ground below us. They had heads, arms, and legs, all with fairly human proportions only larger. They carried enormous chrome rifles cross chest. The aliens might have looked like they were made out of energy, but those damn rifles seemed pretty specking real. I remembered how one of those bastards had fired a bolt at me as I tried to escape up an elevator shaft on the Mogat home world.
Marching past us, the Angels never spared so much as a sideways glance. If I’d had more men, guns, and guts, I might have tried to end the war right then and there. The minutes passed by slowly as we lay hidden watching the alien army parade past. If there are a million of them, we may be trapped here for days, I thought to myself. I also berated myself for not arranging a more comfortable hiding place.
At some point one of my men started to panic. “Oh God! Look at them! Look at them! What are we going to do?” he whimpered to himself, and the interLink equipment in his helmet dutifully broadcast it out to every man in the platoon.
Thomer took care of it. “Quiet down, Anderson,” he said. “They don’t even know we’re here.”
“Thomer, is he going to be okay?” I asked over a discrete link.
“He’ll hold up,” Thomer said. “They’ll all hold up.”
“Good thing we don’t have any kids fresh out of boot camp,” I said.
“I’d take a dozen kids over those fossils the Army brought in,” Thomer said.
Thank God for Kelly Thomer, I thought to myself. The men trusted him; he commanded their respect. Something in the way he addressed Private Anderson calmed the man down. It was lucky Thomer was able to do that. Freeman would have slipped in behind Anderson and snapped his neck before he’d risk the kid giving away our position.
Zooming in with the telescopic lenses in my visor, I studied the faces of some of the creatures. At first glance they all looked alike to me, like ants or fish. They all had the same big eyes and jutting lower jaws. Their size, about eight feet tall and broad as bears, seemed uniform. Their size and shape was the only constant.
The first Space Angels looked more like body-shaped auras than living creatures. As more passed, however, the aliens started to take on a sand-colored look. Their bodies began to look like they were made out of substance instead of light, as if some kind of crust was forming around them. They continued to get darker as they marched past us. Bulky, statuesque soldiers with an iron gray patina on their skin replaced the sleek creatures with the golden translucence.
These aliens had huge, featureless bodies. I saw no seams or edges to suggest they were wearing clothes or armor, nor cavities or lines to suggest they were naked. Aside from arms, limbs, and heads, the bodies had no features at all. They had nothing even remotely resembling hair on their limbs or pumpkin-shaped heads.
I did notice that a few of the creatures had cracks in the outer crust that had formed on their bodies. I could see yellow-colored light shining through those cracks. When I used my heat-vision lens to take a reading of the aliens’ heat signature, I saw that they still generated no heat whatsoever.
The seemingly endless procession of aliens continued to file past us. At one point I realized that their numbers were in the tens of thousands. Not long after that, the column ended abruptly.
“They’re gone,” Philips said over the interLink.
“Stay where you are,” I said. “That might have only been the scouts.” We remained hidden in our snowy camouflage for several more minutes, but no additional aliens materialized.
“I’m open to suggestions,” I said over the command line so that only Thomer, Philips, and Freeman heard me.
“It didn’t seem like there were enough of them to take over a planet,” Philips said.
“He’s right, sir. That can’t be all of them,” Thomer said.
“I suppose it depends on what each of them can do. If those guns fire nukes, they’ll toast us in an afternoon,” I said. “What do you think, Ray? Do you think they landed more troops somewhere else?”
“One landing site,” Freeman said. “That’s all we’ve ever seen.”
“If that’s all they need to capture a planet, those are going to be some pretty damn tough mother speckers,” Philips said. “Either that, or we’re going to carve those boys new assholes when they reach Valhalla.”
“Maybe we should get back to Valhalla,” Thomer said. “They may need all the help they can get.”
“Thomer, there are four hundred thousand Marines, six hundred thousand soldiers, and about a trillion surface-to-surface missiles waiting down there,” Philips said. “You can’t possibly think the forty of us are going to make a difference.”
I considered our options. The aliens would not reach Valhalla for another hour. Philips was right. Even if we found a way to reach the city before them, there was nothing we could do. Using the interLink, I tried to reach General Glade. When that failed, I forwarded him the video-feed file of everything I’d seen and labeled it “urgent.”
“There’s no point heading back to Valhalla,” I said on the command line, then switched to the open frequency and spoke to the entire platoon. “We’re going to follow the bastards’ tracks and see where they came from. If we find their base, maybe we can speck with it. Now move out.”