“No, sir,” I said. Even as I said this, I noticed something strange. The light in the sphere had begun pulsing. “Fall back!” I yelled.
“Take cover!” Thomer and Philips yelled. They must have noticed the change in the sphere at the same moment I did.
“What’s happening out there?” Glade asked.
“I’ll send you what I’m seeing,” I said as I backed behind a tree and crouched. Using optical commands, I forwarded the images in my visor to Glade, then I forgot about him entirely.
The sphere stretched as if it were made out of rubber. It doubled in size until it was twenty feet tall, then expanded again so that it was now as tall as the trees around it. As it stretched to an oval shape, I saw that there were more Space Angels inside it—hundreds of them.
“Harris, get your men out of there!” Glade ordered. “Harris—”
“General, I need to go,” I said, knowing that he had just given me about the worst advice he could have. We might have done better attacking the aliens than showing them our backs. We needed to stay calm, and we needed to stay hidden.
“Steady, boys,” I said. “Get comfortable. It looks like we might be here for a while.”
The figures inside the sphere had a gold cast to them, otherwise, they might have been completely invisible. Space Angels, monsters, alien invaders, whatever you called them, here they were. They sort of congealed in the light and strode right out of that sphere without a moment’s pause.
“You seeing this?” I asked Freeman.
“Good God,” Glade answered. His frequency overrode any other communications. “How the speck are we supposed to fight something like that?”
Freeman did not respond.
The way they glowed as they stepped out of that sphere, the creatures could not possibly have been made of solid matter.
They looked like gold extensions of the white-gold light inside the sphere and nothing more. The creatures carried those oversized rifles; but inside the sphere, even the rifles looked like they were made out of light.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
More aliens came, but not in the large numbers they had before. We hid behind trees, rocks, and ferns, watching them stroll out of that sphere for forty minutes. This time no more than a thousand aliens materialized. If this was the second wave of the invasion, it was even more pathetic than the first wave. The aliens did not bother themselves with such details as securing the area when they emerged from the sphere. They formed into loose ranks and disappeared into the brightly lit folds of the forest.
As I crouched down behind a rock, I noticed that the Angels did not speak to each other. Having just materialized as little more than light, they might not have had the organs needed to speak to each other even if they’d wanted to.
I assumed that this sphere employed some variant of the broadcast technology we used to transport ships. The aliens coming out of the sphere, having had their molecular structure hyperaccelerated, seemed more like they were made out of energy than matter. Maybe that was what gave them that radiant appearance. As we had seen when their army passed us before, they cooled down into matter with time. Even in this energy form, they did have weight. Their feet sank into the squishy mud around the sphere. When they stepped forward, mud stuck to their feet.
The sphere began compressing into itself, but even as it shrank, three final figures emerged from it. Two of these last aliens carried rifles, the third appeared to be empty-handed. They stepped out of the light, stood still for a moment, and followed the rest of their ranks into the forest.
Watching the aliens vanish into the trees, I felt relief. This was not the innumerable army I had expected. Nor were these the nightmarish battle conditions of the Mogat invasion, not with the forest filled with light.
Sergeant Thomer signaled me. “Want me to go after those last ones, sir? I can take a squad.”
“Send Philips after them,” I said. “Tell him to track them down but not to engage. I want to be there when the shooting starts.”
“Aye, aye,” Thomer said.
“And Thomer, make sure he knows his ass is on the line.”
Moments later, five men split off from us. For some reason I had the feeling that I would never see these men again, and I noted each of their names in my head. Philips took the lead; he always took point when he was in charge. The four men in his fire team were Corporal Trevor Boll as grenadier, Corporal Lewis Herrington as rifleman, Private First Class Scott Huish as automatic rifleman, and PFC Steven White as second rifle. I noted the care they showed as they cut through woods, using trees for cover, moving quickly enough to catch up to the aliens and silently enough not to get caught.
The big question was what they would do once they spotted the trio of aliens. Of all the men in this platoon, Mark Philips was the one with the right skills for sneaking up on the enemy and setting an ambush, despite his lack of discipline.
And then there were the questions about the aliens. Had I underestimated the bastards just because of their numbers? Had I sent these men, my men, to an unnecessary death?
Philips jumped a small ledge and juked behind a tree, keeping his M27 out and ready. Other Marines preferred to use their M27s in their pistol configuration for maneuverability, but Philips almost always mounted the rifle stock. He crouched, checked to the left, then the right, then dashed out of sight. Boll followed, then Herrington and Huish, followed by White in the rear. Good men, I thought. Maybe among the best the Corps had to offer. Semper fi, Marines.
The chatter among the men of the platoon was nervous but controlled. I gave a quick scan on the interLink and heard:
Tell me how the speck you kill a specking beam of light?
There weren’t very many of them. That’s something.
Not if we can’t kill them.
How do we know that was all of them? There might be a billion more on the other side of town.
Tuning out the chatter, I turned to survey the area and saw Freeman approaching the sphere. “What are you doing?” I asked.
He pulled a pistol from his armor. As a civilian, Freeman could carry whatever equipment he saw fit. When it came to battle arms, we government-issue types carried M27s and particle-beam pistols, and that was about it. Knives were optional.
Freeman stood about twenty feet from the sphere, leveled his pistol, and fired three shots through it. The bullets struck a tree on the other side.
“Basic physics,” I said. “Light and bullets don’t mess with each other.”
“Ever fired a bullet through a laser stream?” Freeman asked.
As a matter of fact, I had. That was the kind of mischief we pulled back in the orphanage. For young military clones, firing guns and experimenting with battle lasers was a wild time. We’d sneak off to the range and “cross-fire” bullets through a laser beam. The bullets ended up as formless blobs. Remembering the turd-shaped blobs, I asked, “Do you think this thing is a laser of some sort?”
After pocketing the pistol, Freeman pulled out a particle-beam pistol. He walked around the sphere until he had a straight shot at the tree he had hit with his bullets. It was a big tree, maybe fifty feet tall, with a trunk that was easily three feet across. That tree might have been a hundred years old, but it would not see another winter night. Freeman held his pistol a few inches from the trunk and fired. The spot that the sparkling green particle beam struck exploded in a flash of bark and splinters. The tree toppled, leaving a five-foot stump with a jagged crown.
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked.
“Running a scientific experiment,” Freeman said. He put the particle-beam pistol away and produced a combat knife with an eight-inch serrated blade. Then he went to the trunk and began digging out his bullets. By this time, most of my Marines had come to see what the giant in the combat armor was up to. Big, silent, and scary, Freeman was just as enigmatic as the aliens.