Aces High Page 0,45

their rear guard before they clear Princeton." He turned to an aide. "Get the Pennsylvania Guard on the horn. We want the bridges over the Delaware blown. If they don't have the engineers to blow them, have them blocked. Jackknife semitrucks across them if they have to."

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