"We'll take casualties," the Jackal leader warned.

I sighed, and said, "Understood."

When I looked back, I saw groups of Jackals heading toward the Avatari from two different directions. More waves might have moved in from other directions as well.

I had hoped for hills or at least a stretch of buildings, but the best I could find was a small neighborhood seven miles south. Everything else was beaten so flat that the small ring of houses stood out like an island in a sea of debris. "Pull in there," I said, pointing to the burb.

"We lost three more vehicles on that last strike," the Jackal leader radioed in. "I'm down to twenty-eight cars."

"Should I send some jeeps to pick up survivors?" I asked.

"No," he said, his voice devoid of emotion. "Like you said back at the armory, 'Jackals and body bags.'"

"I found a spot where my men can make another stand, but we'll need time to set up. Can you buy me another minute or two?" I asked.

"I can do that."

"And, Jackal leader, kick in the shins, not the b.a.l.l.s," I said. "Just slow them down, don't even think about trying to win this."

"No problem," he said.

We drove over a slight rise, and I glimpsed two squads of Jackals heading back toward the aliens. Moments later, I heard the chatter of distant machine guns.

We entered the remains of what must have once been an upscale bedroom community. We had maybe a mile lead on the aliens, giving us a ten-minute head start.

"Pull over," I told my driver.

The other jeeps followed.

I gave the order for my riflemen and grenadiers to fall out, and they leaped from the jeeps, rocket launchers ready. "Here's the drill, stay out of the houses. Do not get yourselves trapped in a yard or a building. The name of the game is shoot and run . . . shoot and run. You got that? Shoot and run. If you get a chance to fire off a second HURL, you do it; but the drill here is to fire off a shot and head for the jeeps."

The yards around the houses were four years overgrown. The gra.s.s reached my knees, and flower beds had gone to seed. The houses were large, surrounded by tiny lawns and tall fences. I leaped over a tangled hedge and pulled my first launcher. In a normal gunfight, I would never hide behind bushes, they cannot protect you from anything more powerful than a slingshot; but fighting the Avatari and their blasted light rifles, concealment was the only protection. Nothing, not even the yard-thick walls of a shielded bunker, could protect me from those bolts.

Looking up and down the street, I saw men hiding behind fences, peering around houses, and ducking behind abandoned cars; all better barriers than my hedge but utterly useless in this situation.

"Harris, they're headed your way," the Jackal leader warned me. Even as he said that, a line of Jackals came tearing down the street. One had large holes where light bolts had fused through its turret. A dead gunner hung slumped over the machine gun, his lolling head twisting as the jeep banked around a curve.

"Jackal leader, what is the status of your squad?" I asked.

"We're hauling our a.s.ses out of here," he said.

"How bad are your casualties?"

"Three and a half down," he said. "We lost three more Jackals and one is running without a gunner."

"Send that one back to the armory," I said.

"I can't do that," the Jackal leader said. "It's my ride."

"What do you expect to accomplish driving with a dead gunner?" I asked.

"I am not leaving my men."

The Avatari approached us, walking across the ruins that had once been the outskirts of the community. They were several hundred yards away, their first ranks advancing over cement slabs and weed-infested lawns, trampling grounds in which toys and dreams had been lost.

The Avatari slowed their advance. In the past, the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds had fought with mindless intensity. This time, they surprised me. They performed an actual military maneuver: They spread their ranks. I smiled, thinking they might reenact Pickett's Charge, but then the ends of their formation broke off. The specking sons of b.i.t.c.hes wanted to flank us.

"s.h.i.t!" I said. Then to my squad leaders, I said, "Break off the attack. Head for the jeeps."

The Avatari opened fire.

There were so many bolts in the air, it looked like a specking blizzard. They could not have seen us, but the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds figured out our hiding places. Three bolts struck a car, forcing the men hiding behind it to run for better cover. A bolt hit the first man in the head the moment he jumped out from behind the car, leaving a smoking hole through his head and helmet. The man collapsed to the street.

The second man did not make it much farther, but for just a moment, I thought the third might reach safety. Bolts flying over his head and shoulders, he ran crouched toward a garden gate. As he started to leap the gate, a bolt struck him between his shoulders. He fell like a bird shot in flight, slamming into the gate. Half-hidden by the tall gra.s.s, he lay quivering until he died.

If I could have, I would have put him out of his misery, but three bolts flared through the hedge just a few feet from me. The dried branches near me caught on fire. Without looking for a target, I raised a hand and fired off a rocket, tossed the launcher, then fired another.

"Head for the jeeps!" I yelled. "Get moving! Get out of here!"

Strange as it might sound, I was glad to be in this fight. There must have been a fifty-fifty mix of blood and hormone running through my veins. My skin p.r.i.c.kled the way it did when I took a hot shower on a cold night.

A half block ahead of me, a bolt struck the windshield of an abandoned car, melting its way through. The bolt did not shatter the dirty gla.s.s, it simply bored a hole through it. I saw another bolt pa.s.s through a tree with a trunk as wide as a water barrel. In the yards and on the street, the dead, my dead lay scattered like leaves blown from a tree-men in dark green combat armor, some dead and some convulsing as the shock snuffed out their lives.

I ran as fast as I could, not along the street, like most of the men who had died, but through yards and behind houses. If the aliens saw me, they could shoot me no matter what I used for cover.

My driver radioed. "Captain, where are you? They're closing in around us."

No more than thirty yards ahead of me, three aliens stepped out from around the corner of a house. They were tall, their heads almost reaching the eaves of the roof. They looked like earthen statues made by primitive sculptors who had not quite mastered the human form. They held their rifles muzzles up. Somehow these b.a.s.t.a.r.ds had flanked me without even knowing I was there.

Ducking behind a tree, I watched them fan out.

"Captain Harris?" My driver's voice came over the interLink.

"Get out!" I shouted.

"But . . ."

"Out! That's a specking order."

I had a particle-beam pistol, an M27, and three rocket launchers. I wasn't going to win a war armed like that, but I might keep myself safe for a while.

"Sir . . ."

"Are you on the road?"

"Just pulling out"

I dived through a hedge and landed in the overgrown remains of what may once have been a nice backyard. I saw a small fountain in one corner of the yard and a pile of lawn furniture in another.

"Captain Harris?"

"What is it?" I asked in a voice meant to scare the driver off.

I could hear the heavy footsteps of two-thousand-pound soldiers behind me. They might have been after me, but I thought it more likely they were just searching for targets. In my experience, the Avatari worried about armies, not individual men. They did not distinguish between officers and enlisted men; our command structure meant nothing to them.

"Let me come back for you," the driver said. He was a good Marine, he did not want to leave a man behind.

"You made it out?" I asked.

"Yes, sir."

"What was the damage to my men?" I asked.

"Heavy casualties, sir."

Hearing half-ton footfalls as the Avatari tromped through yards, I ran to the back of the house and kicked my way through a gla.s.s door. Stealing a quick glance over my shoulder, I saw a burly, stone-colored leg step through the bushes as I slipped into the house.

"Do not come back, Corporal. I repeat, do not return here. That is an order."

"But, sir . . ."

"Stow it, Marine, I'm busy here."

I entered the house through the kitchen and continued through to the living room, where a knee-high gate blocked off a corner filled with blocks and stuffed animals. Having spent my youth in a military orphanage, I had no experience with the cla.s.sic family home; but I got the feeling the last family to occupy this residence had had kids. Pinched between bookshelves and some long-extinct potted plants, a holographic television stood as a mute witness that life had once existed in this home.

Beyond the plants, I found a door.

"Captain Harris, what are you going to do?" At first I thought it was my driver carrying his concern to the point of insubordination. When I checked the label on my visor, I saw that it was Sergeant Hollingsworth.

"I found myself a bas.e.m.e.nt. I can hide down here," I said, looking down the stairs and into the darkness. "I'll just dig in and let the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds pa.s.s me by."

"You might not want to do that, sir," Hollingsworth said.

"Why the h.e.l.l not?" I asked.

"You're on the edge of the blast zone."

"What?" I asked.

"The train system pa.s.ses right under you."

"s.h.i.t," I said, hoping that I sounded more distracted than scared. But it wasn't the intel about the blast zone that set me off, it was the sounds of breaking gla.s.s and heavy footsteps. The Avatari had found my hiding place.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR.

Hearing an alien enter the house, I quietly closed the door behind me and hurried down the stairs. When my visor switched to night-for-day lenses, I saw a line of dusty pictures showing a happy family-two parents, three children, the oldest might have been ten years old. I wondered if they survived the invasion, or had I found myself in the company of ghosts?

"You can't wait them out in the blast zone, sir." Hollingsworth sounded exasperated.

"I have company," I said.

"Aliens?"

"No, it's Ava Gardner coming to say she can't live without me," I said. I regretted saying that the moment the words left my lips.

Above my head, the ceiling groaned under the weight of the alien . . . or aliens. Looking around for somewhere to hide, I found mostly mouse s.h.i.t and cobwebs. The skeleton of a dead dog lay on one corner of the floor, locked into its pen by a wire fence. In life, it had been one of those rodent dogs, just a few inches tall and full of att.i.tude. A few scabs of fluffy white fur still remained on its skull and legs; the rest had been picked clean by rats, mice, or maggots. There were no eyes in its skull.

Hearing heavy footsteps above me, I began feeling frantic. "Hollingsworth, you said this was the edge of the zone? How close to the edge? Any chance this house could survive the blast?"

The explosion would take place thirty feet down, I might be safe if I was far enough from ground zero. Even if the house collapsed, I might survive. I had armor to protect me.

"I don't like your chances, sir," Hollingsworth said.

I heard the sound of wood smashing, and light poured down the stairway. The light cast a long shadow along the wall. I had done the very thing I told my men not to do-I had gotten myself cornered. I had come down to a dead end. There were plenty of places to hide down here, but the only way out was up the stairs.

"Harris, where are you?" the Jackal leader asked.

I watched the wooden stairs that led back up to the house and wondered if they could handle a full ton of alien bulk. My pulse was up. I had already put away my rocket launchers and switched to my particle-beam pistol. This was close combat, far closer than I wanted to get. With the joules of energy inside their tachyon sh.e.l.ls, the Avatari could fry the circuits in my armor just by touching it.

I imagined the stairs collapsing, leaving me and a two-thousand-pound alien trapped together as the bombs went off. The house might come down on top of us, or the ground could open under our feet.

"Captain Harris, where are you?" the Jackal leader repeated.

"Still in the last drop zone," I whispered, though I knew it was unlikely the avatar could hear me.

An avatar stepped onto the top step. I heard the footstep, then the groan of straining wood. My heart pounding so hard I could feel it in my ears and neck, I held my pistol up and ready to fire.

The alien took another step, and I could see its foot, a simple rectangle with no ornamentation representing shoes or toes. The wooden stair bowed beneath the weight, but did not break. I could have shot the b.a.s.t.a.r.d at point-blank range at that second. I could have shot its foot out from under it, then shot it a second time in the head once it fell. I waited.

"You wouldn't happen to know what I'll run into when I get out of this house?" I asked on a frequency that both Hollingsworth and the Jackal leader would pick up.

"The last I saw, the area around you was lousy with those alien sp.e.c.k.e.rs," the Jackal leader said. "Maybe hundreds of 'em."

"Harris, you need to get out of there," Hollingsworth said.

"Yeah, that's what I hear," I said. "Jackal leader, think you could do me a favor?"

The alien continued down the stairs in slow motion, taking two steps at a time. It poked the barrel of its rifle down and surveyed the base of the stairway. I wondered how well the Avatari could see in the dark.

"What?" the Jackal leader asked.

"Give these b.a.s.t.a.r.ds a swift kick to the nuts," I said. "See if you can move them deeper into the blast zone."