Every moment mattered. In another minute, fully formed Avatari troops would pour out of the cave like ants out of an anthill. They would be slow, but their weapons could tear through our transport. In five minutes a fifty-megaton nuclear bomb would explode, collapsing this mountain and hopefully attracting every specking tachyon on the planet. If Sweetwater had any other information about how the gas would react to a nuclear explosion, he took that secret with him to the grave.
We’d left the ramp of the transport open. Herrington ran in first, then Thomer. Freeman shambled in and stomped across the kettle, pulling himself up the ladder to the cockpit.
I hit the button to seal the rear ramp and headed toward the ladder to check in on Freeman. “Harness yourselves in, boys, it could be a bumpy ride,” I told Herrington and Thomer as I climbed the ladder.
Freeman hunched behind the controls still wearing his helmet. His back was stiff and his shoulders hunched.
The transport’s engines rumbled with just over two minutes to go when the craft lifted off the ground. We did not circle the mountain to get a good look at the explosion. Freeman took us straight up and straight away. We might have been a hundred miles away when the nuke finally went off.
They say you can hear a nuke from hundreds of miles away, but we never heard a thing. We flew at a speed faster than Mach 1, and the sound never caught up to us. Riding in the steel belly of the transport, we did not see the flash.
I shuttled between Thomer and Herrington in the kettle and Freeman in the cockpit. Time with Freeman was spent in silence. He did not remove his helmet, and he did not speak.
I was in the cockpit with Freeman when we reached Valhalla. The sky was dark, and lights sparkled in what was left of the city. The ion curtain had vanished, leaving a night sky in its place.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
I spent the night in the hospital with Freeman.
Doctors spent six hours operating on his throat and lungs. When they finally wheeled him out of the operating room, his face was wrapped in bandages, and an oxygen vent was attached to his bed.
“He breathed in a vesicant,” the doctor told me.
“A what?” I asked.
“He’s got blisters in his throat and lungs,” the doctor said. “Whatever he breathed, it burned a lot of tissue.”
“Is he going to be okay?” I asked.
The doctor took a sharp breath, and said, “We tried to clean the toxins out of the blisters. If we got all of that stuff out, he should recover.”
Two orderlies wheeled Ray down the hall to his room. I followed them down and watched as the doctor checked Freeman’s vitals and chemical drips, then left.
Darkness never looked so good, I thought as I spread the blinds and peered out the hospital window. Streetlights blazed in the parking area below, stars showed in the sky, and in the distance, the first orange-and-pink streaks of sunrise pierced the horizon.
I dropped down in the seat beside Freeman’s bed and fell asleep.
I woke the next morning in time to find some significant brass coming up the hall. One of the generals had come to look in on Freeman—General James Hill, from the Air Force.
“How is he doing, Lieutenant?” Hill asked as he entered the room.
Hill was younger than the other generals, and I had the feeling he was a great deal smarter than the other generals as well. He was the only officer who ever seemed to understand all of the scientific jargon used by the late doctors Sweetwater and Breeze. I sure as hell never fully understood them.
“They say he’s going to live,” I said. “He inhaled a vesicant.” I tried to use the word as if I actually knew it.
“I thought he had combat armor,” Hill said. He knew the word. “That should have protected him.”
“He took his helmet off,” I said.
Hill nodded. “That’s right. I saw the video feed from your helmet.”
My helmet …No wonder they didn’t force me to stay for a debriefing. Once they downloaded the video from my helmet, they would know everything I knew.
Freeman lay before us, a mass of cotton and tubes. His massive chest expanded and contracted rhythmically under the sheet. Except for his chest, nothing on the bed moved, not his fingers, his eyes. The screen beside his bed showed steady vital signs.
“He was crazy to take off his helmet,” I said.
“You were all insane,” Hill said. “If any of you had acted sanely, we’d all be dead now.”
I thought about Thomer jumping into a horde of spider drones to save the nuke. I remembered Boll and Herrington carrying thermite-tipped rockets strapped to their backs. They cared more about the mission than they did about themselves. If he lived, at least Freeman would walk away a billionaire. All Herrington and Thomer had to look forward to was a long life in the Marines.
“Did Sweetwater’s plan work?” I asked. There was a night sky over Valhalla when we landed, so I knew that at least part of the plan had succeeded.
“Harris, Sweetwater and Breeze may have been the finest scientists of all time. Have you seen the sky? There’s a sun in the sky. The ion curtain is gone, the tachyons are all stuck in that gas.”
“Did you reach the battleships?”
“We’ve even sent messages to Earth,” Hill said.
“What’s to stop the Avatari from coming back?” I asked.
Hill shook his head. “They haven’t come back yet I suppose we know how to ruin their plans next time they do.”
“They’ll come back sooner or later,” I said.
“We’re going to take the war to them,” Hill said.
“Take the war to them?” I asked.
“Apparently back on Earth they have some idea about which galaxy the Avatari are from. They’re sending the Japanese fleet to explore the neighborhood.”
I thought about this and fell silent. I was tired, and this new information left me dizzy. Taking the war to them, I thought. It had a nice sound to it.
Hill stood studying Freeman for several minutes, his hands clasped behind his back and a look of sympathy on his face. He watched Freeman’s vital-signs readouts and stared into the bandaged face. Finally, he turned to me, and said, “Well, it was a pleasure serving with you, Lieutenant Harris. You lived up to everything I’ve ever heard about you.”
We traded salutes, and the only general to visit Ray Freeman turned and walked away.
I stayed with Freeman for two more days. I watched his fingers twitch and his eyes roll as he dreamed. He woke briefly, then the doctors placed him in an induced coma, saying his body would heal more quickly if he was asleep. It was while he was in that coma that they grafted new skin on his face and throat. They rebuilt his eyes.
He would, they told me, leave the hospital as good as new. But it would take time. Everything would be as good as new, but it would take time.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
While looking for the right name for his fictional spy, Ian Fleming poached the name James Bond from the author of the book Birds of the West Indies. I borrowed the name Wayson from a friend of mine named Wayson Okamoto, who was neither a bounty-hunting Marine nor a clone. Wayson was a microbiologist. He worked for the Board of Water Supply back in Honolulu.
I mention this only because Wayson Okamoto passed away in March 2007, and those of us who knew him will miss him deeply. The real Wayson and the one in my books resemble each other only in name. Wayson Okamoto was a kind and friendly person. He was a man who would quickly accept people into his circle of friends and someone you could always count on for a smile.
I attended the Nebula Awards in 2007. No, I was not a nominee, but that did not stop me from attending. Anne Sowards, my editor, invited me to join the Ace/Roc table during the banquet—a rare invitation for a freshman writer like me. During the banquet, I sat next to Joe Haldeman, author of The Forever War.