It was not until the shooting stopped that I noticed that both Huish and White had been hit.
White lay flat on the ground, a fist-sized hole seared through the back of his armor. One of the alien bolts had passed through ten feet of ground, through Private First Class Steven White, armor and all, and continued on into the trees beyond. The wound was clean, cauterized, and probably instantly fatal. A wisp of steam rose from that hole. Heat from the bolt had melted his armor, leaving a stream of polymerized metal dribbling into the hole in his back. If I had chosen to place my hand in that hole, it would have come out clean. There was no blood.
Huish was not so lucky. The bolt had passed through his right shoulder, taking a small and clean chunk with it. The wound might not have killed him had he not gone into severe shock. He lay on his back, shivering convulsively like a man in an icebox. The plates in his armor rattled against each other.
Philips and I stayed with Huish while Herrington and Boll went out to gather the body parts and equipment the aliens left behind. Philips pulled off Huish’s helmet and loosened his chest plate. He could not pull the plate off because much of it had fused into the wound. He tried to talk to Huish, but he never responded. By the time Herrington and Boll returned with alien body parts, a rifle, and the meter that Hairy had been using, PFC Huish had quietly died.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“We’re coming in,” I radioed Moffat. “Has the rest of the platoon arrived?”
“Present and accounted for,” he said. “Sergeant Thomer says you stayed back to catch a prisoner. How did it go?”
“I’ve got some body parts and a weapon.”
“General Glade wanted a live one. We don’t need more body parts or weapons,” Moffat said. I knew he was right. The Army had just used fifty thousand aliens for target practice—alien body parts would be in plentiful supply.
“We captured some of their scientific equipment. I think they were taking soil samples,” I said.
“Scientific equipment? Not bad, Harris,” Moffat conceded. “Not bad. It doesn’t earn you the best bottle of booze in Valhalla, but I’ll spot your first round in the officers’ lounge.” That was a tired old wartime chestnut—our drinks were free.
Moffat struck me as a man who appreciated platitudes. I had only met him that day, and this was the third time I had heard him say that bit about “Not bad, Harris. Not bad.” It already meant less than nothing to me.
“We lost two men,” I reported.
“Noncoms?” Moffat asked.
Stupid question. I was the only officer who went on the mission. “White and Huish …both privates.”
“Good men, I’m sure,” he said, sounding about as unmoved as a man can get. We signed off, each of us glad to be rid of the other.
While Boll cut down branches and built a travois for carrying back our dead, Herrington brought me one of the alien’s rifles. Its stock was featureless and lacked even a trigger. It looked like a nickel-plated pipe and weighed well over fifty pounds. How any creature could carry and use such a weapon I did not understand. Herrington lifted the rifle to his chest and tried to sight down its barrel, but he could not hold it steady.
Herrington also brought in a head and a long section of back. Looking over these parts, I saw no signs of muscles, veins, tissue, or bone. The limbs we found were solid and un-malleable. There was no tissue, the body parts had the same composition inside and out. As I rolled one of the heads we collected with the toe of my boot, I realized this thing had no more brains than the head of Michelangelo’s statue of David.
“Do we want to haul this shit home with us?” Herrington asked.
“Only the meter,” I said. “Moffat says they’ve got all the body parts they can handle,” I added. So Herrington helped Boll load the bodies onto the travois. I watched them lift and lower the bodies as they lashed them into place. They strapped Huish on the travois first. Watching the scene, I noticed how his armor was stiff but his limbs hung limp.
“So we attacked them for nothing?” Philips asked. He had ambled over toward me unnoticed.
“We got this,” I said, holding up the soil-reading tool that Boll retrieved. The unit was about the size of a shoe box. There was no visible way to read the damn thing, it didn’t have any window, meters, or dials.
“Well, that makes me feel a whole specking lot better,” Philips said. “As long as we aren’t leaving this specked-up mission empty-handed.”
“Watch it, Sergeant,” I said, though I agreed with him.
Moffat called in a couple of hours after we started back to town. “Where are you?”
I had precise coordinates from the equipment in my visor. But rather than give him the specifics, I simply said, “We’re headed toward town.”
“As far as we can tell, the woods around the city are clear. Maybe I should send a patrol to bring you in, just in case.”
“I appreciate it,” I said, but I was just playing along. He wasn’t trying to bring us in safely. He wanted a hand in the delivery. If the stuff we captured proved valuable, Moffat would try to take credit for finding it.
We broke off our transmission, and I took a moment to stare out into the diamond-bright sky. It looked like midday with direct sunlight coming down from every direction. I could not see Valhalla itself—we were too far from town—but I could see smoke rising from that direction. Several tails of smoke twisted and curled into the sky. Most of it was of the white-artillery variety, but some of the smoke was the greasy black you get from machine and fuel fires.
Philips, who was scouting up ahead, radioed me to say, “The area’s clear.”
“Base Command says the woods are clear all the way to town,” I said.
“If Lieutenant Moffat is so specking sure it’s safe, why the hell doesn’t he come get us?”
“He is,” I said.
“Harris, did you see those bastards, goddamn it? Those sons of bitches are bulletproof. They’re damned near rocketproof.” I could hear pain and anger in Philips’s voice. He sounded frantic, but I knew it was with regret rather than fear. A man who had spent so much of his career as a private, Philips had never lost Marines under his command before. Once we got back to base, he’d start looking for some way to get himself busted down to private again. He might pick a fight with an officer or simply spend a day absent without leave. He would do whatever it took to get himself relieved of command. I could hear it in his voice.
“What are we doing out here, Harris?” Philips asked. “What the speck did we accomplish?”
“We killed three of theirs,” I pointed out, ignoring his calling me by my last name.
“Yeah, and they killed two of ours. We had the specking drop on them, and they still nailed us.” There was no fear in his voice, just anger and frustration.
We continued toward town, Philips and I moving ahead in silence, Boll and Herrington keeping up a running commentary. Another hour passed. I never saw Philips. I could tell he was somewhere ahead of us, but he kept himself hidden in the trees. When we reached a clearing in which a three-hundred-foot radio tower stood, I found Philips resting at the edge of the trees—a good sign, I thought. At least he wasn’t trying to run himself to death.
As I approached, Philips said, “We didn’t kill them. We specking broke them. They’re like chunks of metal or something. Who the speck cares if we nail them, they’re just specking statues!”
I agreed, but I was not going to say so. Philips was speaking on an open frequency. Boll and Herrington could listen in. As an officer, I had to sound authoritative and in control in all situations. I came up with the best answer that I could manage. “There are a lot more of us than there are of them,” I said.
“What?” Philips asked.