Each time, however, I employed a foolproof approach. First off, I made a big show of dialing up the marine commander and the City Council on my tapper. I explained that I couldn’t possibly give up my position without letting the Mogwa brass know they’d be disappointed when they came out here to consult with their Earth liaison.

  While I made my bullshit call, pretending to wait on hold, I quickly invented a list of imaginary alien dignitaries in robes who were all marching out here from the big City like the wise men coming to meet Jesus. That got the sweat popping out, let me tell you.

  Whatever snooty officer had come along to steal our accommodations soon began to urge me to stop the call. The next step in my script was to pretend to blink in confusion, but at last, I let myself be convinced.

  That approach quickly turned away all but the most stubborn thieves. As a case in point, only one primus dared argue with me after I’d made the scenario clear to her.

  “I want you to know I’m not buying any of this, McGill,” Primus Collins said. She had her little fists all balled-up on her hips, and she was glaring up at me with her eyes slitted. She looked like a cat with a freshly pulled tail.

  Throwing my right hand high and placing my left on my heart, I looked at her with deadly seriousness. “As the Almighty is my witness, I will not tell anyone who it was that ordered me to desert this post, sir. I will let you meet with the Mogwa and explain things to them yourself. No one at Headquarters has to know what happened out here today, either.”

  “What do you mean by that? Is that some kind of threat?”

  I huffed. “It’s the opposite, sir. I’m pledging to cover for you. As a fellow officer of Varus, I feel the comradery. It will be our little secret when the dust settles. Now, if you don’t mind excusing me, I’ve got to gather up my boys and find a new place to sleep tonight.”

  Primus Collins licked her lips. She looked troubled. She watched as I made a show of gathering gear and shouting orders to my startled troops. My adjuncts asked what was going on, and I made vague gestures in Collins’ direction.

  They glanced at her and nodded. Soon, everyone was packing and grumbling.

  My tapper made a tone, and I looked at it expectantly. “Just a false alarm,” I said to Collins. “I’m still on hold with Mogwa Command. I guess they’re busy, what with the invasion and all.”

  Collins watched me, her teeth bared and clenched in her mouth. Despite the fact I was complying with her demands to clear out, she didn’t seem happy. Damnation if some people weren’t nigh-on impossible to please.

  After about four minutes—that’s all it took, I know because I’d marked the time on my tapper, which was set to make a beeping sound every minute—she caved.

  “Damn you, Centurion!”

  I turned in her direction, looking as surprised and innocent as possible. My jaw sagged, and I snapped it closed again. “Uh… what’s the problem, Primus?”

  “Just forget it. You’re staying put—and you’re dismissed.”

  She spun on her heel and walked out of the place. A few of the noncoms looked like they were going to snicker at her, but they controlled themselves after a stern warning look from me.

  At the door of our place, however, there was a chance meeting. As Primus Collins was marching out, Adjunct Barton was walking in. They almost walked into one another.

  Both girls pulled up short, and Barton dodged away, being the lower-ranked. But then, Collins stopped and cocked her angry head.

  “Barton?” she asked. “Didn’t you get drummed out of Victrix?”

  “Ah… no sir, I was reassigned.”

  Collins gave her a dirty laugh. “Sure. Everyone wants to bail on Victrix of their own free will. Well, whatever you did, rest assured the recommendation you asked me for has been rescinded. I think you deserve to be serving with these animals in 3rd Unit. I’m surprised you haven’t quit your commission yet.”

  Poor Erin didn’t answer. She just studied her boots, and mean-assed Collins brushed past her on the way to the door.

  “Aw now, that wasn’t right,” Harris said. He gave me a nudge on the shoulder. “Go comfort her, McGill—but not with your dick this time.”

  I gave him a reproachful glance but then walked up to Erin. She was a nice enough girl. She was also very business-like and effective as an officer. Her private life, however, had always been an unmitigated disaster.

  “Hey Adjunct,” I said. “Have you heard the good news? We’re not camping out in the fields again. Not even the sewers. No, sir! Tonight, every officer in this unit will get a bed to themselves.”

  “Right sir. I’ll get right on it,” she said. She didn’t seem to be hearing me.

  “Uh…”

  She went outside and put field goggles on. She was using them to study the surrounding land.

  Walking slowly, I came up next to her. I couldn’t help but notice her cheeks were a little wet under the goggles, but you couldn’t really tell if she was crying or not. The goggles were a good cover.

  “Hey, Erin,” I said. “You want me to go ask Collins if she’ll trade this farm for a recommendation letter?”

  That got her attention. She lowered her visor so I couldn’t see her face inside her helmet, and she shook her head. “That’s a really nice offer, sir. But it won’t work. Collins isn’t flexible like that. You managed to threaten her and push her today—and now you’ve made a fool of her in front of the troops. She’ll just be even angrier if you admit you were bullshitting her in the first place.”

  “Huh…” I said, giving myself an idle scratch. “Yeah, I can see that. Ah well, you don’t need her approval anyway. If Victrix wants you back, you’ll find a way. Don’t worry.”

  She nodded, and I left her out there, stewing and pretending to do a tactical survey of what was pretty much a flat, featureless stretch of land.

  -37-

  Primus Collins left us alone after that single visit, and a few days passed by pleasantly. Almost all of my troops were revived and returned to duty during that time span.

  It was kind of nice to be lording it up on a for-reals Mogwa farm. Honestly, I never thought I’d experience such wonders.

  Unfortunately, our happy state of affairs didn’t last long. New orders came in on the third day when the bears made their first serious attack.

  Just like I’d predicted when I talked to the Mogwa marine captain, the bears didn’t appreciate us humans retreating under the safety of the dome. They tried to follow us. They began burrowing under, just as we’d done.

  Now, don’t go thinking that our engineering folk were total morons. They filled in the holes we used with puff-crete and crystallized steel—but that didn’t mean much. The bears had gotten the idea from us, and they decided to run with it. Digging in new spots, they came up like sappers inside the sewer systems.

  “The bears are breaching in your sector, McGill,” said a familiar voice. It was Winslade, and he was in as sour a mood as ever. “I’m sending the coordinates and the tactical sitrep to your tapper. Move your unit into the defensive position stipulated. You have twelve minutes to get there.”

  “Twelve minutes?” I demanded, spitting out a mouthful of bootleg brew. I’d put my bio people to work fermenting things all over the Mogwa farm, and they’d finally produced something that didn’t taste like formaldehyde. At least, not entirely like formaldehyde. “Sir, that’s a kilometer off, and my people aren’t…”

  I stopped talking because Winslade was gone. He’d dropped the call and gone off to hassle some other subordinate.

  Cursing, I stood up and pulled my boots on. While I was hopping and cursing, I gave the all-hands scramble order, sounding the alarm. People began racing around pulling together their gear and rushing to the road.

  Once they were eighty percent assembled, I began to trot. Very quickly, I increased my pace to a ground-eating run. Soldiers who were still taking a crap or making out together somewhere would have to catch up on their own. This was go-time.

  Ten minutes later, we arrived at our designated rally point. Behind me most of my troops were bent over grabbing their knees. They were huffing and puffing. I frowned to see that. Sure, we’d brought a lot of gear, and we’d been traveling at a dead run for more than a kilometer—but a true legionnaire wouldn’t let something like that knock the wind out of him.

  “We’re going to start practicing wind-sprints if you guys don’t stop that embarrassing gasping and groaning.”

  They straightened up and hid their pain after that. Harris and Moller walked among the group, cuffing people and lining them up.

  Winslade met us a few minutes later, stepping out of a ground car that looked like it had been polished to a chrome shine.

  I whistled long and low. “Damn, sir. That’s one fine piece of equipment. How’d you manage to wangle that?”

  He gave me a pursed-lip shrug. “It’s courtesy of the Mogwa. All our upper-tier officers have been provided with personal transportation—hey, get out of there!”

  I’d ducked my head in to feel-up the seats and admire the instrumentation. The rear buckets were shaped wrong, mind you, but I didn’t think a human Winslade’s size would be too uncomfortable.

  “That’s some kind of leather in there,” I commented. “The real deal.”

  “Forget about it, McGill. I recall what you did to Praetor Drusus’ air car years back.”

  I looked up in disappointment. “He still talks about that when I’m not around, huh?”

  “Incessantly.”

  Jerking a thumb over my shoulder at my unit, I faced Winslade squarely. It was time for business. “So this is where you want us to set up camp? Really? We’re all just standing around on a puff-crete road.”

  “You’ve failed to grasp the obvious yet again. You’re to deploy in that ditch—on the city side of the road.”

  Squinting in the sunshine, I eyeballed the ditch in question. “That’s not much cover, sir.”

  “No. But it’s one of the most likely surfacing points of the Rigellian digging machines.”

  “Huh…?”

  He looked at me sourly and crossed his skinny arms. “Don’t tell me you haven’t been looking at the latest intel?”

  “Well sir, we’ve been hard at work shoring up our defenses at the farm, see, and—”

  “Shut up. 3rd Unit is working now, not loafing. You’ll cover this stretch of road for about a kilometer span. The bears will probably emerge somewhere in one of the culverts that come out of the sewers. Either that, or they’ll surface in one of their digging machines in that field to the west.”

  I eyed the landscape unhappily. “How long have we got? Until they get here?”

  “If they actually do choose to breach here, you’ll see them in the next half hour. Attack them immediately then report the contact. Hold them until you’re annihilated. That’s your purpose—to give our real lines a chance to form up and envelop the invasion.”

  “That doesn’t sound—”

  But I was talking to his back. He climbed into his car—the backseat, of course—and tapped the shoulder of a pretty adjunct with severely short hair. They drove away without giving me a second glance.

  “Fuck me,” Harris said, coming near with his hands on his hips. “How in the hell are we supposed to defend a stretch of road this long and open?”

  “We’re not. Not really.”

  I told him what our real orders were, and he didn’t get any happier. In fact, he looked like he smelled shit.

  “That’s just grand, sir. How do you want to do this? Break up in to squads, or…?”

  I ordered Kivi to do a buzzer survey before I answered him. It turned out there were seven culverts. Seeing those as the most likely exit points, I placed a squad at each location, then took the rest of my men—mostly specialists—and pulled back from the road a ways. There was a hillock with some rocks around it. We set up in there.

  “Now listen-up,” I broadcast over tactical chat. “If your squad draws the lucky ticket and bears start boiling up out of your ditch, start shooting and call in. We’ll move to support you. Throw grenades into the hole immediately to keep them ducking. We’ll come save your bacon in ninety seconds flat after that.”

  This was a bald-faced lie, of course, but it did help with morale. Grim-faced soldiers squatted in a circle about ten meters off from every opening. Every squad was pretty much staring at the mouth of a pipe, swallowing hard and checking their rifles every minute or so.

  “Kivi, I want half your buzzers zooming over that field. Run patterns, scanning for any changes in the landscape. The second a dirt clod moves, tell me about it.”

  She did as I ordered, and I sat back to wait. I was tense, but not too tense. After all, thousands of troops were watchdogging nowhere roads like this one on the city outskirts. The odds that we would be the ones—

  “Sir!” Kivi shouted in my headset. “We’ve got underground vibrations to the west.”

  “Show me.”

  She sent me a live feed. All kinds of technology had gone into projecting some red triangles on my tapper. The vibrations were depicted by dozens of these triangles, which kept appearing in new spots and indicating a northern course. The last of about ten triangles faded out the moment a new one appeared.

  I called in the contact and gave the coordinates and direction. Winslade called me back less than a minute later. “That has to be one of their digging machines. You’ve got one of our first sightings, McGill. Congratulations. If they surface, give them hell. Winslade out.”

  My first thought was to pull my unit together and abandon the culvert watch-parties, but I held off on giving that order. What if the bears were doing both strategies, running troops through the tunnels and riding in digging machines? I just didn’t know enough yet.

  “Dammit, Kivi. I need intel. What’s happening? What are the other units seeing?”

  “To our north and south, no sightings. All we know so far is there’s a machine tunneling along in the earth on a course that’s parallel to the roadway.”

  I thought about that. I thought hard. “They’re reconning us. They’ve spotted us, somehow, and they’re deciding what to do about our formation, just like we are eyeballing them. Keep looking.”

  “Yessir.”

  Ten long minutes went by without further incident. The digging machine moved north and into the next unit’s territory. No doubt they were giving Manfred a heart attack about now.

  “How fast did that thing move, Kivi? Have you got a speed measurement?”

  “It’s steaming along at about ten to twenty kilometers an hour. Not very fast—but fast enough for a digging machine.”

  “That’s crazy… where did they get that tech?”

  Kivi came to my position and squatted next to me. In situations like this, your tech noncoms were like honored guests for any centurion.

  “I’d say they had to know about this dome and how it could be penetrated. Maybe they planned all along to breach this way—if their business of dropping rocks didn’t work out for them.”

  “Huh… yeah, I guess. The rock-dropping seemed crazy, anyway. I mean, if you want to capture a city, it makes no sense to blow it up.”

  “They weren’t doing that,” she said. “They were smart about it. They dropped their rocks on one section at a time, trying to destroy it. The shield isn’t a single wall of force, you know. It’s far too big for that. It’s a series of reactive fields that overlap each other, like shingles on a—”

  “Yeah, yeah. That’s real interesting, Kivi. How did you come to hear all these tech details, anyways?”

  She shrugged and avoided my eye. “There have been certain briefings for the upper tier officers. We techs share, you know.”

  I laughed. I did know all about that. Techs were like birds on a wire. They buzzed and gossiped almost as much as their buzzers did in the sky above.

  “Okay… so you hacked some briefings. What else did they say?”

  “Well… our fleet did do one thing right. They destroyed a lot of those tugs. That stopped the rock-dropping effort. The enemy gave up on knocking down a pie-slice of this dome and decided to invade on foot when we showed up. That’s how things got to this point.”

  I stared out at the open field again. The drilling machine that had given us all a good scare was long gone by now. It was a kilometer or two to the north, still refusing to come up for air.

  Leaning back with a grunt and a sigh, I tipped my helmet’s sun shade over my eyes. “Wake me up when something happens.”

  In the end, it wasn’t Kivi who woke me up. It was the crack and boom of gunfire.

  -38-

  “Bears, sir! Zillions of them! They’re pouring out of the ground!”

  That was the report that came into my earpiece, word for word. The speaker was Johnson, a veteran I’d placed in charge of a squad at one of the culverts.

  Even before I heard Johnson’s fateful words, I heard the rattle and boom of a firefight in progress. As I’d ordered, the troops fell back, using grenades and encircling fire to keep the bears at bay.

  “I’ll tell you one thing, these bears aren’t pussies,” Harris said. “Look at ‘em, charging right into our guns.”

  He’d appeared in my circle of rocks somehow, probably sneaking in while I was taking a catnap. I got up and frowned at him.

  “Harris, gather up a reserve squad of heavies. Move to Johnson’s position to support him. Maybe we can keep them contained.”

  Harris looked startled. “Say what? You really want to commit our reserves already? You really have been sleeping, haven’t you Centurion? Check the cohort-wide sitrep.”

  Annoyed, I did as he suggested. Harris’ point was immediately made in stark graphics. All along our cohort’s covered ground, the bears were making probes like this one.