by James Evans
“Right you are, sir. We’ve got a few specialist clones types here. Any particular assignments you want me to make?”
“We need to give these clone types designations so we can match them to equivalent specialities. What do we have so far?”
“Okay, well, the flyers are obviously snipers,” replied Barlow. “They’ve got clever adaptations in their legs, hips and backs to allow them to lie prone without discomfort. All our snipers have the appropriate qualifications and, as we didn’t lose any from A Troop, I’ve assigned the snipers from Troops B and C to these blanks. Here’s the list I’ve made of the clones we have available. There are six flyers, six of the officer types like the one we put Captain Atticus in, then there are thirty of what seems to be the default trooper clone and six of the big bastards that look like ogres.”
“Ogres, eh? That’s a good name for them. Seems fitting to me, Lieutenant,” said Milton.
“Fine, ogres they are. Anyone got a good idea for the flyers?”
“Batmen?” suggested Barlow, but he couldn’t keep the nerdy smirk from his face.
“Doesn’t sound quite right,” said Warden, shaking his head. “What about Valkyries? Vultures? Harpies?”
Barlow and Milton both confirmed, “Harpies.”
“And these standard ones?”
“That one’s easy – they’re lizardmen. Scales all over them.”
“All, over them?” Milton enquired, one eyebrow raised.
Barlow coughed.
Warden joined in, “Very, umm, diligent of you Barlow, not sure why we needed to know that but, thank you, I suppose?”
Barlow sighed. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance I won’t be hearing about this in the mess later?”
Warden slapped him on the back. “Don’t worry, Barlow, Marine X is bound to do something that will take the attention from you. Now, what are we calling the ones that they use for pilots?”
“Ruperts,” Barlow responded with malicious glee.
“Well, we don’t have time to be dainty, I suppose, even if we do have time to inspect the contents of the clones’ underpants,” Warden responded.
“Now, now, boys,” said Milton, suppressing a grin, “shall we decide who is going to get which body type and start the deployments? We do have an alien fleet bearing down on us, after all.” She took the data slate from Barlow and flicked through the list of Marines and clones.
“First up is the company command. Who wants to pick a body type for Colour Sergeant Jenkins, hmm?” she asked sweetly, pausing to see if Warden would speak up. “No? Very brave. Shall I pick one, then?”
Both men nodded enthusiastically and with obvious relief and Sergeant Milton sighed. Grown men and Royal Marines, both battle-hardened and experienced, and for some reason Stephanie Jenkins, who couldn’t be nicer if she tried, terrified them. Milton honestly didn’t know why the colour sergeant invoked such visceral reactions in the troops; she wasn’t intimidated at all.
Tutting to herself, she flagged the profile for deployment to a clone labelled ‘Ogre’ and noted alongside the order ‘As agreed by Lt. Warden’.
“Right,” she said, hiding her grin, “let’s work through this list.”
5
Atticus sat in the empty conference suite and skimmed the information in the comms update that Barlow had forwarded to him. The gist of it was that they were getting some support from HQ but too little and, in Atticus’s opinion, too late. Not good.
The captain sat back, slate on the table, and considered his options. There really was only one, now that the wormhole comm system was working again. He picked up his slate and queued a call for General Bonneville, marking it ‘urgent’. The general was a busy man, so this might take a while, and Atticus settled back for a long wait.
Six seconds later the call was answered, and Atticus was surprised to see the general’s face appear on the screen.
“Atticus?” he said uncertainly, leaning forward to peer into the camera. “Is that you?”
“Yes, sir, I’m wearing an enemy clone.”
The general did not look convinced even though Atticus had used his personal cypher, so they danced the identification two-step, an age-old protocol to verify personality integrity in an age when downloads were everyday and facial recognition was no longer sufficient. Eventually, the general was satisfied, and Atticus was able to discuss the situation on New Bristol.
“It’s bad, sir. We’re hard-pressed and short of pretty much everything,” said Atticus, slightly despondent. “About the only things we have in sufficient quantities are tea and gin.”
Bonneville frowned and Atticus could feel his disapproval across the light years.
“Keep it together, Edward, this whole business rests on your shoulders.”
“Yes, sir, sorry. It’s been a long day.”
“Never mind that. The researchers are making progress and should have more information for you soon. They’re preparing a package of information and will send it once they complete their analysis.”
There was a pause as Bonneville glared at something off-screen. Atticus couldn’t shake the feeling that the general was preparing to impart bad news.
“The review of the DNA sequences you sent is not yet conclusive but the preliminary results suggest that it might indeed have originated on one of the lost Ark ships.”
“Any idea which one?”
“Not yet, but it wasn’t one of ours. The boffins are certain of that, or as close to certain as they ever admit to being. Something to do with the marker sequences that were added to the DNA of travellers on the Ark ships. Frankly, I don’t understand more than one word in six, but I’ll send it to you. Maybe it’ll make sense when you read it.”
Atticus didn’t think it likely, but that was a problem for another day.
“Anyway,” said Bonneville, “we’ve asked around and shared the marker sequences with the usual suspects. Nobody has admitted ownership yet, but it’s only a matter of time. How do things look at your end?”
“Sticky, if I’m honest. I wasn’t joking about the tea. We’re pressing every able-bodied person into service, but really our only hope is the fleet. If they arrive in time, we should avoid complete body death and stand a decent chance of making it through with the backups intact. If not…” He didn’t finish the sentence; there was no need.
“Quite,” said Bonneville, his face grim, “keep me informed when you can, Captain Atticus, but otherwise just get on with the job. I’ll let you know if anything changes on this end.”
“Will do, thank you, sir. Goodbye.”
6
The cavern was, well, cavernous. Wilson took a moment to look around and marvel at the enormous space. He’d been told by a rather excited geologist that it was a solutional cave of unusual size and formation, whatever the hell that meant. All Corporal Wilson cared about was that this part of the cave system was deep enough underground that it would be hard to assault from orbit. That, and the fact that the composition of the rocks would render their base near-impossible to detect.
To the horror of the geologists, the decision had been made to bring in the heaviest equipment available and grind smooth the floor of several of the larger, more useful chambers. Wilson could see the quandary. The cave was both impressive and strangely beautiful, but as important as it was geologically, beauty today was a secondary concern.
He turned to his colleagues. “Enough gawking, folks. They took plenty of records of this place before we even got here, so you can review those at your leisure when New Bristol is safe. Right now, it’s time for us to crack on and make sure that happens.” The other tech specialists of A troop nodded and started moving.
Wilson turned to Eileen Robinson, one of the colony’s top civil engineers. Her normal role was to design efficient terraforming solutions and deploy the equipment that would give New Bristol the atmosphere and environment it needed to support a much larger population. Today, her talents were being put to more urgent use, namely smoothing
out the floor, filling in the cracks and creating enough space for the machinery of day-to-day life to be installed and set up.
“What do you think? Can we get it all done?” asked Wilson.
She smiled at him, but her lips were a little too tightly pressed and her frown a little too prominent for the expression to come across as particularly confident. She sniffed then said, more confidently than Wilson had expected, “Absolutely. I don’t see any reason why not.”
And their needs were great. As well as utilities – power, plumbing, sewerage – they needed communications stations, housing, canteens and several big flat spaces for cloning bays. And they needed it all done and ready to be used before the enemy fleet pounded Ashton back into the barren rocks from which it had grown. A challenge for even the best-equipped team.
Perhaps the biggest headache was working out what they had to do first in this mammoth project. Fortunately for Wilson, that wasn't his job. He and the other Marine tech specialists had added their work items to the list of outstanding jobs, but they weren’t being asked to organise the project. The colonists of New Bristol were heavily biased towards science, engineering, project management, hydroponics, manufacturing and similar skills. You had to be useful if you wanted to join a frontier colony, so everyone had multiple skillsets. Except for the children, of course, but there really wasn't much use for children out here.
“Great. I was a little worried we might not have time for a hot wet,” he said, laughing. Then he saw her face. “We do, right?” he asked, not a little worried.
“There’s always time for tea, Corporal Wilson. We don’t have to be barbaric just because the colony isn’t very old. I think tea was the second plant the hydroponics folks started cultivating in earnest.”
“Really? What was the first? I’m betting potatoes. Biologists love growing potatoes. I think it’s the challenge.”
“Juniper, or so I’m told.”
Wilson grinned and nodded appreciatively.
“Good call. Who needs cabbage and mash anyway?”
“Agreed. Shall we look at the locations we’ve suggested for your cloning bays?” she asked. Wilson nodded, and they walked around the cave, Robinson looking at her data tablet to confirm the areas that were marked for the new bays to be constructed.
Two hundred colonists had been assigned to the task of preparing the ground and the platforms for the new bays then extracting the necessary pods and equipment from the dropships. As soon as the current batch of clones had been deployed, the teams would pull the first dropship cloning bay apart and reconstruct it in the caves. They would run a battery of tests on the first of the stolen enemy bays to confirm it was operating correctly; then the techs would start growing new clones.
If the first bay worked, the teams would dismantle the bays in the other two ships and re-install them elsewhere in the caverns. If there were problems, the backup plan was to use the bays where they were but bury the dropships under improvised shelters covered in rock to protect them from discovery. That would mean losing the dropships’ flight capabilities, though, and Captain Atticus wasn’t keen on having to fall back to that plan, not keen at all. Wilson had learned a long time ago that when the captain wasn’t keen on something, it was a really good idea to find an alternative solution.
“What about weapons production?” asked Wilson.
“We’re trying to gather all the facilities from the outlying sites and anything that hasn’t already been destroyed in the city. Look, here are the numbers we’ve identified, and the units we can confirm were already destroyed. These tables here,” she said, flicking at her data slate and zooming out to show the whole picture, “show the production queue we have and the dependencies.”
Wilson whistled, the list was huge, and almost every item was depending on several other things. The number of lines connecting the various components was so great that it was difficult to see where the first piece of work sat within the whole.
“The timescale looks wrong,” Wilson said, peering at a copy of the chart on his own slate. “It says it’ll take six more days to get phase one done and that doesn’t leave us enough time for the things we need in phase two.”
“It does look bad at the moment,” conceded Robinson. “I’ve asked the governor to provide more people to help with production but we’re running out of bodies. We need to find more creative ways to increase productivity or we’ll have problems.”
“We’re going to have to cut back on something then,” said Wilson glumly. “There must be something we can do without.”
“Be my guest. We should get all the senior people to check the list and see if there’s anything they can do without, but I haven’t found much in the way of improvements, yet. We need more people to get things done, or we need to cut tasks from the list, or we need to increase our manufacturing capabilities. Or some kind of genius idea. I don’t see any option but to prioritise everything we need, pare back the quantities as far as possible and make do with what we can produce in the short term.”
Wilson flicked around the list and chart on his slate and sat down on a flattened stalactite. Or stalagmite. Had to be one or the other, he thought. He scrolled up and down the list, looking for items he thought they could do without.
Guns would be a sticking point, he knew. They’d inventoried every weapon in the colony, including the captured alien gear, and they knew how many colonists needed guns. They were already only aiming to produce enough weapons for the colonists who were being conscripted for the defence of New Bristol. They could cut back further, but that would leave no room for losses or damage.
The surveillance drones were another issue. Captain Atticus and Lieutenant Warden were convinced they had to have a large number of drones to replace the satellite and sensor grid networks. They didn’t have time to re-build the sensor grid and launching satellites wasn’t going to go unnoticed, so drones were their only option for gathering the information required to organise an effective defence. The large military surveillance drones weren’t simple to produce, and they competed directly with weapons and munitions for manufacturing time.
If they cut the number of drones, they’d be able to produce more guns. Maybe he should ask Captain Atticus if he’d rather have fewer armed conscripts or a smaller area under surveillance by drone. Wilson sighed and slipped the slate back into his jacket pocket. Then a thought occurred to him.
“We need more drones, but they’re eating into our production time and stretching our timelines for other equipment. Do you know how many drones the colony has?”
“Yes, of course. Look, here. These are our monitoring, weather and delivery drones. There aren’t that many, I’m afraid, and their capabilities are a lot more specialised than yours. You can probably repurpose some of them, though, and link them into your network.”
“Yeah, but what about the civilian drones? There are no numbers here.”
“Civilian drones? All our drones are civilian, Corporal.”
“No, I don’t mean that kind of civilian, I mean the drones the citizens own for their own use.”
“It can’t be that many, surely. Are there really that many grown men that want to play with drones?”
“I’ll take that in the spirit it was intended, Mrs Robinson. But I wasn’t thinking of the adults. You’ve got kids here as well, right?”
7
Atticus stared at the holo-table, amazed that the thing had survived the firefight that had engulfed the city. It was an absolute boon. It was showing the terrain around Ashton, and the colony’s geologists and engineers had marked several sites that could be used to conceal the dropships. Atticus had been trying all morning to decide the best way to distribute them. His eyes were beginning to glaze over with the mind-numbing tedium.
The problem was to balance utility and security. Keeping the dropships close to Fort Widley maximised their value by ensuring they would be available if they needed to evacuate civilians or run med-evac from hot zones.
But any launch might be noticed by the enemy, and a launch close to Fort Widley might draw attention to their base. Did they dare use the dropships except in an emergency?
Atticus twiddled the stylus between his fingers, thinking. He was vacillating, stuck with an awkward decision that could easily go either way, and he needed to break the deadlock.
“Get a second opinion,” he muttered to himself, drafting a message to request assistance from Lieutenant Warden and Governor Denmead.
Then he went back to his pondering. His feeling was that the dropships should be far enough from Widley to allow launches to take place without revealing the location of their base. That would leave just two proposals and a limited set of options for locations.
Governor Denmead arrived just before Lieutenant Warden, and Atticus went straight to work, laying out the risks and rewards of the two options. He answered their questions quickly then called a vote. Each of them scrawled a letter on their data slate.
“And I vote option B,” said Atticus, turning his slate around to show his choice.
“Unanimous,” said Denmead once she and Warden had flipped around their own slates. “Well, that was easy.”
“So you say,” grunted Atticus, guiltily aware that he’d spent half the morning on a question that they had just settled in under fifteen minutes.
“To summarise,” he said, repeating himself to be sure that everyone agreed and understood, “the pods will be stripped from the dropships, installed in Fort Widley and the dropships positioned well away from both Ashton and the caves. The locations are reasonably accessible, but the dropships will be concealed, to some degree, by the surrounding terrain. Two will be in canyons over here,” he said, pointing at a spot on the holo-table, “and the third will be below a rock arch near some cliffs over there. We’ll add anti-scan camo-netting to make life a little more complicated for the enemy.”
