Looking out from the cockpit of the explorer, I saw no sign of that last ship. It had simply vanished into the debris, pilot and all. We might nudge it out of our path and not notice.
“We’ll be more careful this time,” I said.
“How is that?” the pilot asked.
“Last time we didn’t know the Mogats were watching for visitors. This time we do.”
“I hope you don’t expect me to wait around for you,” the pilot said.
“Yes, I expect you to wait till we tell you to leave. Waiting wasn’t what killed our last pilot. He got killed running away. If he’d just sat still and blended in with the scenery…” I let the sentence hang.
In order for my plan to work, we needed the Mogats to know we had trespassed onto their property, and to think they had scared us away. The best way to do that was to give them a show.
As we approached the battleship, the pilot scanned for booby traps and burglar alarms. Once we boarded the derelict, we would use the stealth kits I had requisitioned from naval headquarters. Until then, we would need to rely on the explorer’s sensors. Fortunately, this was a scientific ship. It had sensors that could pick up all kinds of fields. The coast seemed clear, but there was one kind of signal the vessel would not detect—a signal transmitted by a broadcast engine.
As we opened the cargo hatch and started to unpack, the pilot hailed me over the interLink. “I’m not waiting around,” he warned. “Listen, Sergeant. Command said nothing about babysitting a bunch of clones on a suicide mission. If I get a whiff of a Mogat ship, I am going to leave.”
“They won’t find you if you hide, sir,” I said. “They will find you if you run.”
“Then maybe I should leave now,” the pilot said.
“We’re still on your ship, sir,” I pointed out.
“I mean once you are off.”
“Are you talking about abandoning us?” I asked. “Don’t you think someone will ask questions when you show up short forty-two men?”
“No, I don’t. Not if they are clones.”
They had a term for officers who were prejudiced against clones—“antisynthetic.” In my experience, most officers were antisynthetic to some extent, but things were changing. There used to be six hundred clone factory/orphanages pumping out over one million clones every year. Now that the Mogats had destroyed the orphanages, clones were no longer the inexhaustible resource they had once been. Once the military complex ran out of its current supply of clones, the government would have to start sending natural-borns to the front. After years of relying on clones to do their fighting, few natural-borns would willingly fight or die.
“You strand us out here, sir,” I growled, “and you’d better pray the Mogats find you before I do.”
“Are you threatening me, Sergeant?” the pilot asked.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“You have just officially crossed over the…”
“Maybe we should take this up with Admiral Brocius,” I said. “He’s the one who assigned you to this platoon.”
“Admiral Brocius?” the pilot asked.
As a lieutenant, the pilot outranked me. But rank and authority did not always mean the same thing in the Marines. A veteran sergeant is at the top of the arc as enlisted men go. He may not make as much money as the lowest-paid officer, and he may sleep on a mean rack in dingy barracks, but an experienced sergeant merits more respect than a lieutenant who is still wet behind the ears.
A master gunnery sergeant is a veteran and a man who knows his way around the Corps. Let a lieutenant and a master sergeant go head-to-head, and the sergeant may take a token vacation in the brig; but unless that lieutenant has some good answers, his career will be specked for good.
That said, I’m not sure which rattled the lieutenant more, my bringing up Admiral Brocius or my threatening his life. Either way, the good lieutenant decided to park his bird and leave the meter running.
He sidled the explorer right below the sunken Mogat battleship and brought it to a stop. Then it was our turn. We exited the ship in groups of ten, each of us shepherding crates and equipment toward that huge hole in the bottom of the Mogat ship. Nearly a month had passed since I came here with the SEALs. The memories were still fresh in my mind.
The first team on the spot fastened hooks onto the hull and started building a long scaffold that would stretch all the way across the breach. The next crew brought more scaffolding. By the time the third group arrived, enough of the scaffolding had been set to create a staging area. We were preparing to put on quite a show.
Our show props included scaffolds, a complete laser welding rig, crates for storing samples of the ship’s armor plating, and several changes of clothes. We unloaded our props and built the scaffolds in double time. Even though my threats had made our pilot more agreeable, we could tell he was spooked and unreliable.
“That’s the last of the cargo,” I told the pilot, as three of my men ferried over a set of crates on a sled. “Go hide your ship in the debris.” He could not leave yet, but he could park a safe distance away and watch if the Mogats came and massacred us.
The lieutenant did not say anything. The explorer’s engines started, and the ship drifted away, but the pilot did not say a word. We continued building.
First we attached base rods to the bottom of the battleship using a bonding glue that worked better than welding in the coldness of space. Once the rods were in place, we erected the rest of the scaffold using pins and sockets. The work went slowly.
It took us two hours to set up the scaffolding along the battered bottom side of that battleship. That is a long time to spend undefended in enemy space, but we needed it to make our show believable. We had to convince the Mogats that we were naval engineers, come to study the damage to this battleship. As things worked out, we did run one test on the armor plating.
Once the scaffolding was fastened in place, I had two of my men remove a plate from the hull. The plate was a flat square about eight feet along its edges. Had there been gravity, it would have weighed a couple of hundred pounds. In a gravity situation, its bulk would have crushed the thin rods of the scaffolding.
One of my men shoved the plate into space. As it slowly glided away, I drew my particle-beam pistol and fired. The plate absorbed the bright green beam. I thought I saw it quiver slightly, but I might have imagined that. My beam was too small to destroy it, but I wanted to test the integrity of the plating.
In truth, I did not need to test the plating. Looking straight up, I had plenty of evidence about what happens when laser cannons hit an unshielded hull. Rows of plates melt into slag, leaving foot-long stalactites in their wake.
“The stage is in place, Master Sergeant,” Sergeant Evans reported.
The “stage” was impressive. The scaffolding crisscrossed the breach on the bottom of the hull like stitches closing a knife wound. From a distance it might look like stitches. Some of the men built a launch area. If we had been engineers instead of jarheads, we could have spacewalked out to examine the shield antennae.
We spent the next hour removing entire rows of armor plates, some battered and some untouched. We rigged test stations and communications arrays. This was all for show, just a set decoration for the Mogats to shoot at. Once they arrived, our setup scaffolding would prove absolutely indefensible and clearly the work of engineers who had no concept of battle tactics.
“You know what, Sutherland, you’d make a good engineer,” I said as I traversed the scaffold.
“Thank you,” he said.
“That was an insult,” I said.
“Then go speck yourself,” Sutherland said.
Taking one last look up and down the length of our work, I asked Sutherland if he had everything he would need for the mission. He held up his satchel. “I’m good for a day,” he said. That was an exaggeration. In the discomfort of space, he would not be able to eat or shit. Our armor did have a hydration wire to protect us from the dry air our rebreathers produced, and
our undergarments included a vacuum tube and bottle for urine. If everything went according to plan, however, Sutherland might not have much of a stay on that wretched battleship.
The stealth kits I had requisitioned for this mission were not the sleek three-inch remotes used by the SEALs. Central Cygnus Fleet did not carry those. Our general-issue kits were ten inches long and shaped like the bottom half of a combat boot. Our stealth kit had meters for measuring sensor fields. They even had a handy-dandy little device that left virtual beacons so you could mark your trail.
When I was in boot camp, I used to like cunning, space-saving devices that combined knives, cooking utensils, and communications equipment in one convenient handle. After a battle or two, I learned to despise them. I wanted my gun to shoot, my knife to stab, and everything else to perform the task God meant it to do. I did not like fishing through handles to find the right blade. The only exception was my combat helmet. God went above and beyond the call of duty when he created Marine combat armor. I loved each and every lens in my visor, and I liked the way my helmet protected my head, too.
My helmet had lenses that let me see in the dark, scan areas for heat, and zoom in on objects. It also had a sonar device that did double duty measuring distances and locating hollow areas. The lenses in my visor also contained a chip that recorded everything I saw and an interLink terminal that let me communicate with everybody or anybody in my platoon. In my religion, with the government as God, combat armor was divine.
Using the oversized stealth device to jam the Mogats’ security sensors, Sutherland made his way to the engine room. There he would set up camp and wait. I watched him pull his way into the belly of that battleship, an insignificant speck moving through layers of metal, plastic, and wiring that really did look like a wound.
“Lieutenant, are you there?” I hailed the explorer.
“Sergeant?” The pilot tried to control his voice, but I heard desperation in it. “Are you finished?”
“We’re dividing up now. Most of the platoon is ready to leave whenever you are, sir,” I said.
“What about the rest?” the pilot asked.
“You get to leave us here,” I said. “That’s the good news. The bad news is that you are going to miss the big show.” I added, “Come back in five hours. We’ll need you to pick up whatever is left.”
The explorer lit up and drifted in our direction. Old as it was, the little ship had a bright, sleek look. If this had been a transport, it would have been bulky and bulged around its center. Civilian-designed vessels like this explorer had style. The explorer had a brightly colored fuselage, dramatic hull lighting, and an all-glass cockpit that bulged like a bubble. It would never hold up under fire, but it was not meant for war.
The explorer pulled right up to the scaffold at a speed so slow you would have thought someone was pushing it.
“Master Sergeant, are you sure you don’t need more hands?” one of my men asked. “I wouldn’t mind staying back.”
“I can stay,” another Marine volunteered.
“Better to have too many men than too few,” a third man offered.
“You have your orders,” I said, barely acknowledging the offer. Master gunnery sergeants do not thank people often. Soldiers can be as polite as they want; Marine sergeants do not say “please” or “thank you” to their men.
The dome at the rear of the explorer opened. When we’d arrived a few hours earlier, we had four sled-loads of men and equipment. Now thirty-one men would return. Watching the last load of men disappear into the explorer ship, it occurred to me that this was not a Marine operation. It was a bloody SEAL op being run by an overly ambitious Marine.
“You going to be okay out here?” the pilot asked over the interLink. It was a hollow inquiry. He did not ask this until he had sealed up his ship and started away.
I wanted to ask if he was offering to stay, but I played it politic. “We’re good, sir,” I said. “See you in five hours.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
The first time out, we fooled the Mogats with a cat-and-mouse chase and a single body. We didn’t need luck that time, the SEALs were more skilled at playing that kind of game than my Marines.
I stood on that scaffold with the torn section of hull above me and the vastness of space as a backdrop. I watched the explorer pick its way out of the space graveyard, nudging the ruins of fighter craft out of its way. Ten men had stayed behind with me. Some of the men waited beside me on the scaffold. We watched the explorer, none of us saying a word. It was a small ship, and it soon vanished out of sight. A moment later, I saw the flash of a distant anomaly and knew that the ship had broadcasted.
Watching the anomaly fade, I realized that the silence in my helmet had a profoundly sobering effect on me.
Marines generally chatter over an open interLink. This time they stood silent and still. I wanted to tell them that everything would work out. I wanted to tell them that they would be back on the Obama in a few hours and they would get to rest in their own racks.
“Okay, ladies. Switch on those Stealth kits, we have work to do,” I said. “The first man I catch slacking gets a particle-beam enema.” For the average Marine clone, hearing a sergeant growl offered more comfort than a glass of mother’s milk.
Last time out, I rode up the gash in a sled. This time we kicked off the scaffolding and leaped up three floors. We did not take spotlights or laser torches. We took satchels with clothing, oversized stealth kits, and particle-beam pistols.
Our props for this delicate performance included empty suits of soft-shelled armor. The combat armor used by Marines was not bulletproof, but it was rigid. Engineers, firemen, and other noncombat personnel wore flexible armor. It was not as pliable as cloth, but it was a lot softer than the metal-resin alloy used in our armor.
“You boys ready for the cadaver roundup?” I asked. We split up in groups and searched the ship.
The next task on the agenda was morbid but necessary. We went scouting for bodies.
When the U.A. sank this boat, the bodies in the open areas were flushed into space. We would need to scour closed rooms and compartments now. I started my search in a latrine on the third deck, just behind the birthing area.
The entire ship would have been pitch-black had I not used the night-for-day lens, but the latrine seemed particularly dark. Maybe it was the small size of the room and the way the stalls reached out like fingers. The darkness just seemed to close in around me. There was something eerie about the empty latrine. It reminded me of walking across the barracks late at night. Stainless-steel urinals hung from the walls, the sinks were pristine, and the floor was clean, but no one moved. I went to look in the toilet stalls.
I found the first of my corpses wedged into a stall. The man hovered an inch or two above the seat. When the lasers struck the ship, he had probably just finished his business. His pants were up and sealed. His neck was broken. Depending on his luck, that might have killed him. Otherwise, he might have suffocated, or died as his own blood pressure caused his body to explode, or froze to death. Death in space came in many flavors, all of them fast.
The man’s blood hung frozen just above the floor like an icy web of beads. Walking in on the scene, you might have thought he’d vomited up glass.
I unpacked the top half of a soft-shell suit and used it like a net to scoop up the blood. The brittle strands snapped and shattered into beads inside the armor.
Then I pulled the dead sailor out of the stall and dressed him, and his blood, in the armor. The man’s body was frozen as stiff as stone in the absolute chill of space. Had I hit him against the wall with enough force, he might have shattered into tiny pieces like a pane of glass. As I tried to force him into the suit, flaps of his skin kept snapping like crackers between my fingers, and I eventually had to break his arms off and shove them into the sleeves of the armor separated from his torso. Once I finished dressing the sailor, I sealed his armor. It pressurized, read his body temperature, an
d heated itself automatically. It would take this boy a long time to thaw.
“How is it going out there?” I called out over the interLink.
“I feel like a ghoul,” one of my men responded.
“Are you eating them or dressing them, Marine?” I asked.
“Dressing them.”
“Ghouls don’t dress bodies, they eat them,” I said.
“Then I feel like a specking grave robber,” the Marine returned.
“You’re not fleecing them, are you?” I asked.
That Marine did not answer.
“They’re so frigging stiff,” another Marine commented. “I keep snapping off this guy’s fingers.”
“I had to break my guy’s arms off,” another Marine said.
“This seems kind of disrespectful,” another Marine added.
“They’re not going to fool anybody. No one is going to believe that these stiffs are alive.” It was the one who said he felt like a ghoul. “Maybe we could paint them white and sell them as marble statues.”
“The Mogats won’t be watching for flexibility,” I said.
I checked my first puppet. Some of the skin from his face had thawed, but his face was no longer attached to his skull. I had broken his legs and arms at the joints so that they would fold in the right places. I shook his helmet and saw liquid blood.
I found two more bodies in the halls beyond the birthing area and dressed them. It was unpleasant work.
“Okay, report. How many puppets do we have?” I called over the interLink.
“I have four ready,” one team called in.
“We have five and a half stiffies,” Private Philips, always the joker, reported. He had partnered up with Sergeant Thomer. I would not have trusted him on this mission without Thomer looking after him.
“Thomer, what does he mean by a half?” I asked.
“Don’t ask,” said Thomer.
“I’m asking,” I said.
“Philips thought it would be funny to kick one of the sti…puppets while I was loading him in his armor. He went flying backward and snapped in half.”
The Clone Alliance Page 16
