Aces High

"They're moving south. Toward Philadelphia. Advance guard, flank guards, main body, rear guard." Carter looked at his staff. "It looks like they've been reading our tactical manuals, gentlemen." He dropped the photographs to his table.

"I want you to get your boys mounted and headed south. Move straight down the Jersey Turnpike. Requisition civilian vehicles if you have to. We want to outflank them and go in from the east toward Trenton. If we drive in their flank maybe we can pin their rear guard before they clear Princeton." He turned to an aide. "Get the Pe

Carter turned to the aces who stood in a corner, near a pile of hastily moved plastic chairs. Modular Man, Howler, Mistral, Pulse. A pterodactyl that was actually a little kid who had the ability to transform himself into reptiles, and whose mother was coming to get him for the second time in a few hours. Peregrine, with a camera crew. The Turtle orbited over the terminal in his massive armored shell. Tachyon wasn't here: he'd been called to Washington as a science advisor.

"The Marines from Lejeune are moving into Philadelphia," Carter said. His voice was soft. "Somebody saw sense and put them under my command. But only one regiment is going to get to the Delaware in time to meet the alien advance guard, and they won't have armor, they won't have heavy weapons, and they'll have to get to the bridges in school buses and Lord-knows-what. That means they're going to get crushed. I can't give you orders, but I'd like you to go to Philadelphia and help them out. We need time to get the rest of the Marines into position. You might save one heck of a lot of lives."

Coleman Hubbard stood in the hawk mask of Re before the assembled group of men and women. He was barechested, wearing his Masonic apron, and he felt a bit selfconscious-too much of his scar tissue was exposed, the burns that covered his torso after the fire at the old temple downtown. He shuddered at the memory of the flame, then looked up to draw his mind from the recollection…

Above him blazed the figure of an astral being, a giant man with the head of a ram and a colossal erect phallus, holding in his hands the ankh and the crooked rod, symbols of life and power-the god Amun, creator of the universe, blazing amid a multicolored aura of light.

Lord Amun, Hubbard thought. The Master of the Egyptian Masons, and actually a half-crippled old man in a room miles away. His astral form could take whatever shape it wished, but in his body he was known as the Astronomer. Amun's radiance shone in the eyes of the assembled worshippers. The god's voice spoke in Hubbard's head, and Hubbard raised his arms and related the god's words to the congregation.

"TIAMAT has come. Our moment is nearly here. We must concentrate all our efforts at the new temple. The Shakti device must be assembled and calibrated."

Above the god's ram-head another form appeared, an ever-changing mass of protoplasm, tentacles and eyes and cold, cold flesh.

"Behold TIAMAT," Amun said. The worshippers murmured. The creature grew, dimming the radiance of the god. "My Dark Sister is here," said Amun, and his voice echoed in Hubbard's head. "We must prepare her welcome."

A Marine Harrier sucked a flapper into an intake and screamed as it spewed molten alloy and slid sideways into doomed Trenton. The sound of flappers drowned the wail of jets and the throb of helicopters. Burning napalm glowed as it drifted on the choked water. Colored signal smoke twisted into the air.

The Swarm main body was bulldozing its way through Trenton, and the advance guard was already across the river. Blocking and blowing the bridges hadn't stopped them: they'd just plunged into the frigid river and come across like a vast, dark wave. A hundred flappers had surrounded the Marine commander's chopper and brought it down, and after that there was no one in charge: just parties of desperate men holding where they could, trying to form a breakwater against the Swarm tide.

The aces had become separated, coping with the emergencies. Modular Man was burning enemy, trying to help the scattered pockets of resistance as, one after the other, they came under assault. It was a hopeless task.

From somewhere on the left he could hear the Howler's shrieks, curdling Swarm bone and nerve. His was a more useful talent than the android's; the microwave laser was too precise a weapon for dealing with a wave assault, but the Howler's ultrasonic screams could destroy whole platoons of the enemy in the space of a second.

A National Guard tank turned a corner behind where Modular Man floated in the middle of the conflict, then drove into a building, jamming itself in rubble. Flappers had coated the tank's armor, obscuring its view slits. The android dived onto the tank, picked up flappers, tore them like paper. Acid juices spattered his clothing. Artificial flesh smoked. The tank ground bricks under its treads, backing out of the building.

As the android rose, the Great and Powerful Turtle formed a vast blip on his radar. He was picking up Swarm buds bodily, flinging them into the air, then letting them fall. It was like a cascade fountain. Flappers beat hopelessly at the armored shell. Their acids weren't enough to get through battleship armor.

The air crackled as it was torn apart by energized photons: Pulse, his body become light. The human laser ricocheted off enemy, brought a dozen down, then disappeared. When Pulse finally ran out of energy he would revert to human form, and then he would be vulnerable. The android hoped the flappers wouldn't find him.

Mistral rose overhead, colored like a battleflag. She was seventeen, a student at Columbia, and she dressed in bright patriot colors like her father, Cyclone. She was held aloft by the cloak she filled with the winds she generated, and she battered at the flappers with typhoons, flinging them, tearing them apart. Nothing came close to her.

Peregrine flew in circles around her, uselessly. She was too weak to go against the Swarm in any of its incarnations. None of this was enough. The Swarm kept moving through the gaps between the aces.

Wailing filled the air as jagged black shadows, Air Guard A-10s, fell through the sky, their guns hammering, turning the Delaware white. Bombs tumbled from beneath their wings, becoming bright blossoms of napalm.

The android fired until his generators were drained, and then he fought flappers with his bare hands. Despair filled him, then anger. Nothing seemed to help.

The enemy main body hit the river and began its swim. Few soldiers were alive to fight them. Most of the survivors were trying to hide or run away.

The Sixth Marine Regiment was dead on arrival, and nothing could alter the fact.

Between Trenton and Levittown, bombs and fire had turned the brown December landscape black. Swarm buds moved across the devastated landscape like a nightmare tide. Two more Marine regiments were entrenched in the Philadelphia suburbs, this time with artillery in support and a little group of light Marine armor.

The aces were waiting in a Howard Johnson's off the Pe

A battery of 155s was set up in the parking lot, and fired steadily. The crescendo of sound had already blown out most of the restaurant's windows. The sound of jets was constant overhead.

Pulse was lying down in a hospital tent somewhere; he'd overstrained his energies and was on the brink oЂ collapse. Mistral was curled up sideways in a cheerful orange plastic booth. Her shoulders shook with every crash of the guns outside. Tears poured in rivers down her face. The Swarm hadn't come near her but she'd seen a lot of people die, and she had held together through the fight and the long nightmare of the retreat, but now the reaction had set in. Peregrine sat with her, talking to her in gentle tones the android couldn't hear. Modular Man followed Howler as the ex-sandhog searched the restaurant for something to eat. The man's chest was massive, the mutated voicebox widening the neck so that the android couldn't put his two hands around it. Howler wore a borrowed set of Marine battle dress: flapper acid had eaten his civvies. The android had had to fly him out at the end, holding the ace in hands that had been eaten down to the alloy bones.