PROLOGUE
“You can’t possibly be serious about attacking Earth.”
“Why not?” I asked.
The rising sun might have been a molten copper penny and the sky around it made of gold. The financial district of Norristown no longer bristled with business. War had turned the city into a wasteland. Only three skyscrapers remained in what once had been the most significant financial district on this side of the galaxy. Surrounded by debris and desolation, the buildings looked like gigantic gravestones.
Colonel Philo Hollingsworth and I stood on a hill overlooking the ruins of what once had been the government center for an entire galactic arm …the Scutum-Crux Arm. His laugh was bitter and derisive. Hate resonated in that laugh.
“You are eighty thousand light-years from Earth, you only have twenty-two hundred Marines under your command, and every last specking one of them blames you for starting the war in the first place. No, let’s just be honest, they hate you.”
“My engineers don’t hate me,” I said. I had a thousand-man corps of naval engineers on the planet along with my Marines.
“Don’t tell me you think they like you,” Hollingsworth said.
“I didn’t mean they liked me. I just wanted to keep our census accurate,” I said.
Hollingsworth went back to counting the reasons I could not attack Earth. “You don’t even have any ships left in your fleet. Face it, Harris, the war is over. You lost.”
I saw no reason to argue the facts: the distance to Earth; the number of men I had under my command; how much they despised me.
“I might have some ships left,” I said.
Hollingsworth rolled his eyes and said nothing. In the two months since the Earth Fleet had attacked Terraneau, there had been no word from our fleet. Dozens of broken ships floated in the space outside our atmosphere, but they only accounted for a portion of the missing four hundred ships that once made up the Scutum-Crux Fleet.
Morning light spread slowly over the city as the cranes moved into place. Today, they would excavate the misshapen mound that had once been the Treasury building.
Three cranes struggled as they pulled slabs and columns from the wreckage, the ground below them visibly shifting under the stress. The arm of one of the cranes bent and shook like a rod bringing in a big fish.
Keeping an eye on that crane, I walked over to Lieutenant Scott Mars, my chief engineer, and asked, “Are you sure your cranes can handle that much weight?” I had to shout for him to hear me above the din of his equipment.
Mars shrugged, and answered, “It’s fine, sir.”
“That column isn’t too heavy?” I asked.
He gave me a sardonic smile, and said, “Look, General, you worry about the tanks, and I’ll take care of the cranes and bulldozers.”
He did not come across as hostile, but that did not mean he respected me. Since landing on Terraneau, Scott Mars had adopted an evangelical lifestyle. He testified about being “born again,” a claim that the rest of us did not take seriously. He was a clone, just like the rest of us. He could not be born again because he wasn’t really born the first time.
Mars was universally perky and ready to please, and we got used to him saying “praise this” and “praise that.” Everybody liked Mars. The hallelujah chorus was just part of having him around.
I was glad to have a friend, even if he wasn’t so much a friend as a nonhostile acquaintance. In his version of the gospel, smiling at people drew him closer to God. What was the harm in that?
One of the cranes struggled to pull a thirty-foot section of wall out of the ground. The wreckage looked heavier than the crane, but that did not seem to make a difference. After a short fight, the wall broke free, and the crane pulled it out like a fisherman reeling in a trophy bass.
Seeing that Lieutenant Mars had everything under control, I returned to Hollingsworth to restart our conversation. “There are fifteen fighter carriers floating up there. What happened to the other twenty-one?” The Scutum-Crux Fleet had had thirty-six fighter carriers when the Earth Fleet attacked. Searching with telescopes and radars, we had located twelve of our carriers. We located three more when we started searching the area with transports.
“Even if they got away, they wouldn’t have gotten very far,” Hollingsworth said. “Not with those new U.A. ships chasing after them.”
He was right. The ships that the Unified Authority sent were stronger, faster, and better shielded than our ships.
Hollingsworth continued his assault. “Just for the sake of argument, let’s say you have twenty-one carriers waiting for you. What are you going to do with them? The Unifieds smashed us when we had thirty-six carriers. They’ll just smash us again.”
“They didn’t smash us down here,” I said. It was a weak argument, but it was true. “We beat their Marines.”
As far as the Unified Authority was concerned, the battle had been nothing more than a war game, but not all of the game went as expected. They sent three thousand Marines in shielded armor to attack my five thousand men in old-fashioned unshielded armor. We had the numbers, they had the impenetrable armor that rendered our bullets and particle beams useless. We won by way of a battlefield miracle.
Of course, what one side labels a miracle, the other sees as murder.
“You dropped a building on them,” Hollingsworth said. “You buried them. Next time, they won’t be so quick to chase you into an underground garage.”
Below us, two of the cranes worked in tandem to hoist a long stretch of outer wall from the ruins of that underground garage. With cables pulling at it from two different directions, the concrete crumbled like a giant cracker, and the cranes fished out nothing but shreds.
“It doesn’t look stable,” Hollingsworth said.
“You better be grateful for that. We buried three thousand Unified Authority Marines down there; if it were stable, they might have dug themselves out,” I said.
Mars jogged over to join us. “We’ve dug an entrance, sir,” he said, his fingers covering the microphone on his headset. “I’ve got a team ready. Is there anything you want to tell them before I send them in?”
I shook my head.
Down along the wreckage, five men in soft-shelled armor ventured into the gap that the cranes had opened.
“If you don’t mind my asking, sir, do we really need to do this?” Mars asked, his new born-again values leaving him uncomfortable about excavating graves.
“I want a better look at their armor,” I said.
“We’re pulling them out to look at their armor?”
“You worry about the engineering, I’ll worry about the ethics,” I said.
“The general wants to examine their armor for weaknesses,” Hollingsworth volunteered.
“Why does he care about that?” asked Mars
“He wants to know how to get through their armor before his return engagement,” Hollingsworth answered. He and Mars carried on their conversation around me as if I weren’t there.
“Are they coming back?” Mars asked.
“Nope; Harris wants to invade Earth,” Hollingsworth said.
For a moment, Mars looked stunned, then he laughed. “You’re joking, right?”
I started to say something, but Lieutenant Mars’s expression suddenly shifted. Something he’d heard over his headset caught his attention. He took a step toward the wreckage, then turned to me, and said, “They’ve got one, sir.”
“Are they certain it’s one of theirs?” I asked. We had lost nearly as many men as the Unified Authority in that battle. Most of ours were killed on the top level of the underground garage. Most of theirs were killed on the lower levels. They found this stiff so quickly, I thought it might be one of ours.
“It’s a U.A. Marine,” Mars confirmed.