"Aye, aye, sir."

I walked to the front of the queue and proceeded up the ramp of the transport with the torpedo. A jeep waited at the top of the ramp, its headlights facing out toward the dock. I stood beside the jeep and watched as men boarded the dark, vaulted s.p.a.ce of the kettle. The cabin was dark, with a high, curved ceiling. Metal floor, metal walls, metal ceiling, a metal booth with a cold metal seat for a head, and a wooden bench lining the wall that sat thirty men-kettle comfort was the military equivalent of being sealed in a can.

I climbed the ladder at the far end of the kettle and entered the c.o.c.kpit. The pilot behind the yoke was a clone-brown hair, brown eyes, the works.

"Are we ready for takeoff, sir?" he asked as I entered.

"Just loading the men," I said, as the distant rattle of armor boots walking across a metal floor carried to the c.o.c.kpit. On some level, I still did not believe clones could run their own fleet; it hardly seemed possible. We were the grunts, the cannon fodder, the drones. Natural-borns threw us into the line of fire, and we held to the last man, never questioning orders. Seeing a clone in the pilot's seat and the confident way he checked the controls made other possibilities seem more real.

The pilot radioed the other transports, and we rolled out of the staging area, riding on "sleds"-wheeled vehicles that carried transports through the various atmospheric locks. We pa.s.sed through the first lock, then the second, and finally the third. Once past the third, the artificial gravity ended and a simple thrust lifted us into s.p.a.ce.

As the pilot dropped us below the fleet where we could safely maneuver, I watched ships pa.s.s above us and felt like a minnow in a sea filled with whales. A frigate, the smallest of the capital ships, crossed over us. The frigate was thirty times larger than our transport; but when it sidled up beside a battleship, it looked no bigger than a flea.

In the far distance, Terraneau shone like a light. With the ion curtain around it, the planet had a man-made appearance. Instead of the blues, greens, and whites of a habitable planet, Terraneau looked as if it had been spun in white gold. It did not look habitable.

Hard as it was to believe, a census taken four years earlier recorded 1.2 billion people living on that planet. By now, most if not all of the population would be dead. Norristown, the capital city, would be covered with the four-year-old corpses of people who'd died fighting an enemy they could not possibly have understood.

Admiral Thorne believed the aliens had abandoned Terraneau long ago, but he did not understand them, either. He did not know about the mining operations and the s.h.i.tload of toxic gas the aliens left behind. He didn't know that the Avatari used suns to finish their work, baking planets after they finished excavating them and filling them with gas. Over the next hundred thousand years, Terraneau's sun would expand and die.

The Avatari did not capture planets to annex them into an intergalactic empire; they destroyed planets in order to use them for mining purposes.

"I have a fix on the target zone," the pilot said.

"Do you think that was what New Copenhagen looked like from outside, sir?" Thomer asked.

"I've never thought about it," I lied.

"Captain, what do we do if the aliens are still down there?" the pilot asked.

"They're gone," I said, hoping I sounded more confident than I felt. "They don't have time for sightseeing, not with an entire galaxy to destroy."

As long as the ion curtain remained in place, the Avatari could return. The curtain might even work like a burglar alarm, sending a signal to the Avatari every time we poked a hole into the atmosphere. We would certainly set off alarms when we fired off our big bomb, but it would be too late for them to do anything once that happened. At least I hoped it would.

"Do you have the torpedo ready?" I asked.

"Ready to go, sir," the pilot said.

"Do you think this will work?" Thomer asked me.

"It doesn't matter what I think," I said. "We'll know one way or the other in about five seconds." I sent Thomer back to ride with the men in the kettle, then gave the pilot the order to fire the torpedo.

Back on the Kamehameha, engineers had built a toggle-switch trigger into the navigation console above the pilot's head. The pilot acknowledged my order, then flipped the switch.

The weapon fired. Staring out the front of the ship, I caught the quickest glimpse of the torpedo as it sped off from under the ship-just a flash of dull white and orange against the luminous backdrop of Terraneau, then the torpedo vanished into the glare of the planet.

We hovered nearly a thousand miles above the spot where the torpedo exploded. From this distance, the flash was bright but not blinding, just a small speck of white light that flared and vanished, leaving a hole in the shining sphere of the ion curtain. The hole was small and dark, with shimmering edges where the radioactive particles from the torpedo faded into the tachyons of the ion curtain.

I put on my helmet and opened an interLink frequency that would reach every man on all five transports. "Hold on tight; we're going in."

We shifted direction and picked up speed. Ahead of us, the hole looked like a dark speck on a glaring lightbulb. Two opposing gravitational forces fought for me-the artificial force created by the transport's gravity generator held me to the deck while the genuine gravity, created by our acceleration, tugged me toward the rear hatch. Feeling like I was falling upward, I became dizzy and dragged myself into the copilot's chair.

The planet filled the windshield. In the middle of the glowing horizon, the hole that we had created with our puny torpedo looked like a mere pinp.r.i.c.k.

"I hope the corridor holds," the pilot mumbled to himself.

I looked over at him to consider what he had just said. When I looked up again, the hole in the ion curtain filled my view. It might have been a half mile wide. Compared to the shining border around it, the hole looked dark and deep; I could not see the end of it.

"Here we go," the pilot said. His words barely had time to register before we bored into the atmosphere with the force of a bullet slamming into a wooden plank. The transport shook violently, nearly throwing me out of my seat. A moment later, the shaking ended. We had taken a hard knock when we slammed into the atmosphere, but we tore through.

I had always imagined the ion curtain as a skin-a thin layer of glowing particles no deeper than a storm cloud. It wasn't like that at all. It must have been a full hundred miles thick. I felt like I was speeding through an endless tunnel.

The meters and lights around the c.o.c.kpit flickered, and I realized that the door we had opened with our torpedo was shrinking. "It's closing in on us," I told the pilot.

"I see that, sir," he snapped.

The lights in the c.o.c.kpit winked on and off again. The outage lasted less than a second, but it felt longer.

"If it closes in on us . . ." I started.

"We're dead either way," the pilot interrupted. He was right. Only a lunatic would take a transport b.a.l.l.s-out on a vertical drop. With its stubby wings, this bird was anything but aerodynamic. If we dropped too quickly, we would never pull out.

I glanced down at the instruments and saw the alt.i.tude and speed meters flashing nonsense. The radar screen turned dark. Then, just as suddenly as we entered the ion layer, we plummeted into open air, and the systems went normal. The sky above us glowed like a sun, and the world below us was green and blue. In the forest below us, I saw a reminder that we had entered Avatari-held s.p.a.ce-a line of glowing spheres.

"What are those?" the pilot asked, partially standing to get a better look.

"Can you leave a beacon on this spot?" I asked, ignoring his question.

"Yes, sir," he said. He sat back, flipped a switch on the communications console, then craned his neck to get one last look back at the spheres. Once the beacon was set, he repeated his question, "Captain, what were those things."

Against my better judgment, I told him the truth. "It's an intergalactic transportation system."

"Like the Broadcast Network?" he asked.

"Something like that." In truth the spheres were nothing like the Broadcast Network, but I didn't want to talk about it. I had other things on my mind.

I radioed Thomer in the kettle. "How's the breakage back there?" I asked.

"Minimal, sir," he said.

Next, I radioed Herrington. He flew in the second transport. "Your men okay?" I asked.

"I've had smoother rides," Herrington said.

"And your men?" I repeated.

"One dumb s.h.i.t asked if we could do it again," Herrington said.

I contacted Sergeant Philo Hollingsworth in the third transport. He said, "A few bruises; they'll get over it."

I got no response from the fourth and fifth transports. The pilot checked the radar and confirmed that both ships were gone.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

Seen from the inside, the shine from the ion curtain made my eyes hurt, but it did not leave me blind. Given another few hours, my eyes would adjust. The same thing had happened on New Copenhagen; we wore sungla.s.ses much of the time, but we learned to live with the glare.

We entered the airs.p.a.ce over Norristown. The wreckage that had once been a capital city reminded me of ancient ruins. The skeletons of a few tall buildings poked out of the debris below us like plants growing out of a rocky field. A three-story-tall water tower pointed up at us like an accusing finger. Norristown, once a showcase city, had become an entropic mess, with heaps of rubble, broken streets, and the occasional straight edge of a wall or walkway.

We pa.s.sed over a suburb in which pockets of homes and parks remained untouched by the destruction around them. A church with twin steeples rose out of a ground like a giant gravestone. Past the church, the deep blue depths of the Norris River cut across town. I spotted the remains of a suspension bridge. Half of it lay visible under the water like a sunken ship; the other half looked solid enough to cross.

A line of riverside apartments still stood. We would need to search those buildings for survivors.

"How does it look?" Thomer called up from the kettle.

"Familiar," I said. A veteran of New Copenhagen, Thomer knew what I meant.

"I've located the airfield up ahead," the pilot said. "It looks clean. Do you want to go in for a landing or do a flyby?"

I could see the field as well. It had been an Army air base-nothing more than a few corrugated steel hangars, a two-story temporary tower, and a long, open tarmac.

"Go on in," I said, my thoughts more centered on what to do once we landed.

The pilot signaled the other transports to land, and we touched down. As he had said, the area was clean. Taking a quick look through the windshield, I might have gone so far as to call it deserted. I saw no wreckage, no choppers, and no bodies. The buildings looked untouched.

Thomer led a team of men to sweep and secure the area. When he gave us the all clear, Herrington and Hollingsworth shouted their platoons out of the transports. The sergeants had their men off-load our gear and the jeeps. With its open grounds and hangars, the field might work for landings and rendezvous, but it would never serve as a base.

As my men unloaded the gear, I eavesdropped on a few of their conversations over the interLink. They sounded nervous.

... could be anywhere.

Maybe they left the planet? I heard they left.

I don't know about you, but I'm s.h.i.tting ice cubes. I specking hate this place.

It's better than being stuck on the ship.

How the specking h.e.l.l is this better than the ship? The sky is a specking lightbulb, the buildings are blown to s.h.i.t. How in the h.e.l.l is this better than being aboard a ship?

I hear there's plenty of scrub on this planet.

Scrub? That changes things.

"Scrub," was Marine-speak for women and one-night stands. Hearing them talk about scrub, I thought for a moment about Ava. There was something about her . . . Maybe it was her eyes, or maybe it was the bra.s.sy way she talked about Ted Mooreland and Al Smith; something about her stayed with me.

As I swept through the open frequencies, I heard a Marine singing "Amazing Grace," and I had to laugh. Don't waste your breath, I thought. The G.o.d they wrote that for doesn't know you exist. Hymns were meant to be sung by men with souls and heard by the G.o.d that created them, leaving us clones out of the loop.

We weren't created by G.o.d, we were devised by scientists; mortal men who borrowed parts from G.o.d's creation and used them in a scientific process that every major religion condemned. Those same religions said we were created without souls.

"G.o.ds too decompose," I said to myself. It was a quote from Nietzsche. "Friedrich, old pal, I gave up on you too quickly."

Once we finished this invasion, I would give Nietzsche another try.

After we pulled the gear from our three remaining transports, I divided the men up. Thomer and I would take two platoons into town. Hollingsworth would guard the landing field with the third platoon. Herrington had the important job: he and a pilot would take a transport and locate the Avatari mining site.

Back on New Copenhagen, we had found the mines by tracking seismic activity. Herrington would have it a little easier. He had a device that detected the toxic gas that the Avatari placed in their excavations.

Our jeeps could transport eight men, but you wouldn't want to pack more than five men into them during combat situations. Having lost two transports we were down to six jeeps, meaning we could drive forty-eight men into town.

Nine years of war had hardened me. As a new recruit, I would have grieved for the men in the transports we lost on the way through the atmosphere; now I worried more about losing manpower, not men. Instead of blaming myself for casualties, I concerned myself with completing the mission.

As we left the airfield, I saw Herrington's transports go wheels up. All short wings and stout metal walls, the bird lumbered off the ground unsteadily, righted itself, then shot away, disappearing against the glare of the ion curtain. I watched it depart, all the while calculating the odds of our success.

We traveled slowly into downtown Norristown. The first few miles took us along the overgrown streets of an industrial district. Weeds choked the ditches, and tall gra.s.s grew up along the fences. Except for cracked windows and an occasional collapsed facade, the one- and two-story buildings in this part of town had survived the war untouched. Dusty cars sat in parking lots and along the street. Most had flat tires. We saw no bodies-none at all.

"It looks like they just walked away," Thomer said on a direct frequency.

"I wonder how far they got," I said. After that, we both went silent. I listened in on my men and found very little chatter. They were alert, which was good, but I could feel the tension among them. The Marine handling the machine gun on my jeep flitted the barrel back and forth, scouring the street for any sign of movement; he was a man who would shoot first and ask questions later. The men in the seats behind me had their M27s ready. Obviously, these men had not fought on New Copenhagen or they would have known that M27s were useless against the Avatari.

M27s might not do much to an alien, but they were h.e.l.l on Earth when it came to crowd control. I had a feeling that any survivors we found around this wreckage would be scared and dangerous. Speaking on an open frequency, I told my men, "Think before you shoot. We're looking for survivors, not aliens, and we want to keep them alive. You got that?"

It was a rare rhetorical question, but it still netted me a few aye, ayes. The boys were nervous.

"Sir, how will we identify the aliens?" one man asked. The Pentagon never released the images of the Avatari to the public. Only the veterans of New Copenhagen would have seen the aliens in action.

Thomer fielded the question. "Shoot at anything eight feet tall or taller."

"Eight feet?"

"And made of stone," Thomer added.

Silence followed as the inexperienced Marines tried to decide if Thomer was joking.

"There are spiders, too," I said.

"Oh yeah, the spiders," Thomer said. "If you see a spider the size of a jeep, it's probably not friendly."

"Don't listen to them, you dumb speck. They're just playing with you," Sergeant Hollingsworth said. I heard laughter in his voice. Hollingsworth had not been with us on New Copenhagen. He didn't know. He thought we were hazing the kid.

"I a.s.sure you, Sergeant, this is no joke," I said on a platoon-wide frequency. Then, opening a direct channel between me and Hollingsworth, I added, "Thomer is going easy on you, Sergeant. He hasn't told you about their guns."

"Yes, sir," said Hollingsworth.

Two hours after leaving the airfield, we pa.s.sed a billboard for a shopping mall. All of the buildings in this part of town had been demolished. Wind whistled through the pipes, bricks, and fragments of walls that rose like spines out of the grounds. We pa.s.sed the remains of a fence here and the jagged remains of a warehouse there; but nothing over ten feet tall remained standing in this part of town. In the distance, three tall skysc.r.a.pers towered over the road, but that was a few miles ahead.