The Clone Alliance

by Steven L. Kent

  “He was an officer,” Philips explained in his own defense.

  “Just shove the legs into some pants and seal him up,” I said.

  “That might be a problem,” Thomer said. “His ass hit a bulkhead and shattered.” I heard the other men laughing over the interLink.

  “We have nine,” the last team radioed in.

  “Ass kiss,” one of the men muttered. I was pretty sure it was Philips.

  “We need this puppet show to happen just the way we discussed. Any questions?” I asked.

  “How many Mogats do we get to off?” Private Philips asked.

  “Our puppets are supposed to be Navy engineers,” I said. “We have to keep this simple.”

  “Ten of them?” Philips asked.

  “None if we can help it,” I said.

  “Philips is right. We have to kill some of them,” another Marine complained.

  “Not a one,” I said.

  “Ahhh, c’mon, Master Sergeant, how about just one?” Philips pled.

  “Well, yeah, maybe one,” I said. “But open your speck receptacle one more time, Philips, and I’ll load you in a puppet suit,” I growled. “Any more smart questions, assholes?”

  No one said anything. I liked their attitude.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-THREE

  Before a battle, Marines do not have time for ghosts. After a battle and a few drinks, Marines have time for just about anything.

  Traveling around the deck of this demolished ship, I became consumed by the feeling of walking among ghosts. Perhaps it was the shadowy blue-white world that my night-for-day lens showed me. Maybe the way we abused the bodies of these dead Mogat sailors got to me. A few of my Marines tried to hide their nerves behind gallows humor, but we all felt it. The Mogats had died a fast but gruesome death. They were the enemy, but Corps honor seldom made room for abusing the dead, friend or foe.

  I felt closed in. I felt trapped. The combat hormone had not yet kicked in to my system, but the anxiety of battle was there. I had entered the Liberator version of no-man’s-land.

  I dropped down to the scaffold below the ship. I had been in and out of the gash in the hull four times now, and each time the trip left me with a different impression. The first time I came up, I thought that the breach looked like a gaping wound in a human body. The next time I thought it looked like a tear through a building. The third time my mind stayed more focused on the job, and I thought about the air flushing out of the ship, washing thousands of bodies out with it. This time, I felt like I was falling through an open grave.

  Once I landed on the scaffolding, I switched from night-for-day to my standard tactical view lens. We had lamps set up along the scaffold. I would have seen everything more clearly with night-for-day vision; but feeling morose as I did, I wanted a moment to myself in which I could see color and depth. There are areas of color in space, but you do not see them often or clearly. Seeing the charcoal-colored hull and the silver pipes of scaffolding did not improve my spirits.

  I came down to examine the nine puppets we had placed along the scaffold. I tried to think of them as puppets, not bodies, and especially not corpses. Their faces were buried behind faceplates. I did not need to look into the colorless tissue flowers that filled their eye sockets. For all intents and purposes, the soft-shells on the scaffold could have been empty. Except they were not empty, and I knew it.

  Sergeant Evans and two other men posed the puppets so that they would look like engineers cowering during an attack. They placed five of the puppets in a kneeling position behind the welding rig. One of the puppets had thawed enough for Evans to bend his body. He seemed to peer over the top of the rig. One puppet sat near the far side of the scaffold. Three more hung from wires—puppet strings. Once our audience arrived, we would effect their escape by pulling them back into the ship.

  Maybe I felt jinxed by the ship, but I did not think we could make our puppet show believable. It was one thing for a squad of SEALs to put on a magic act in which they fooled the Mogats into shooting their own pilot. The SEALs specialized in reconnaissance, not combat. Our show would be more ambitious and the men less skilled. I trusted my men. I worked them hard and knew they would not fold in battle, but the clones were made for storming buildings and routing enemies. Finesse was not in their DNA.

  “How does the stage look, Sergeant?” Evans called to me on the interLink. He and Corporal Kasdan stood three decks above me, holding the puppet wires.

  “I think they’ll buy it,” I said.

  “You know this is crazy?” Evans said. Once the Mogats arrived, he and Kasdan would reel in their puppets and disappear into the ship.

  “Is everyone in place?” I called over an open frequency.

  When all of my men answered, I launched myself from the scaffold and back into the ship. On my way up, I switched off my stealth kit. The sensors spotted me that instant and the show began. Philips, the man from my platoon in whom I had the least confidence, met me as I reached the third deck. With one arm around a railing, he hooked me and tugged me toward an open corridor.

  “Think they know we’re here?” Philips asked.

  “I’d bet on it,” I said. “It might take them a minute to scramble their battleship in our direction, but they know about us.”

  Thomer joined us as we entered a corridor. I don’t think the sensors knew or cared that there were three of us. They recorded our movement. Wherever they were, the Mogats knew someone was mucking around the ship.

  With the sensors reading our movements, Philips, Thomer, and I traveled a route we thought engineers might take. We meandered through corridors as if studying the wiring. We took detours past system junctions. The one thing we made sure we did not do was move in the direction of the engine room. If the Mogats knew that we knew about the secondary broadcast engine, they might abandon it.

  Other Marines joined us as we floated through the halls. Soon nine of us met. Only Evans and Kasdan stayed in place. We wanted to give the impression that a body of men had entered the ship through the bridge, then separated to examine its arteries. The men used their stealth kits as they joined us, then switched them off. Some of my men headed for the bridge. Others went to examine the shield generator, which was in the front of the ship but three decks below the bridge. Now, with three simultaneous alarms, I hoped the Mogats would become nervous.

  Once I was alone, I switched on my stealth kit. Once again invisible to the sensors, I headed for the launch bay. For the rest of the mission, I would hide in the launch bay and wait. Everything hinged on one point—they could not know I was there.

  The landing area was huge, dark and empty. It was so vast that I could not see all the way across it with my night-for-day lens. With the doors of its atmospheric locks wide open, one side of the bay opened out to space. As I looked for a good place to hide, I stumbled across an emergency elevator. The opening to the elevator was fifteen feet tall and twice as far across. Fire engines and bomb disposal carts rode in that lift. Peering into the gap in the door, I saw that the shaft ran the entire height of the ship.

  I pried the doors apart and left them wide open. I doubted if anyone would notice the open doorway. The lift was dead. The ship was dead. Who would care about an elevator shaft? Besides, according to the Mogats’ sensors, no one had entered the launch bay.

  Before stepping into the shaft, I looked down to make sure it did not open into space. Below me, the shaft yawned like a giant gullet. I did not see a bottom, but I did not see stars below me, either. The car itself was about ten feet above me, the bulky metal reinforcements beneath its floor forming a roof over my head. I sprung up to the roof, then pushed off it to drop down the length of the shaft.

  The emergency shaft ended in a storage room on the bottom deck. In this room I found a few dead men and a trove of battered equipment. Parts of the floor had been shorn away in the fighting. Judging by the amount of destruction around me, I decided that I could not have been far from the gash in the hull. The
holes must have occurred at the end of the fight after the hull had been pierced and the atmosphere had equalized; otherwise, the men and equipment would have been flushed out with the air.

  Bright flashes of lightning sent a momentary glare through the holes in the deck. I saw the blinding light shine and looked away. That light could only have been the anomaly of a Mogat ship broadcasting into the area. If I looked into it, I would be blinded. Even looking in the opposite direction with tint shields blocking my visor, I still registered the flashes. When the lightning stopped, I peered out a hole and saw the black silhouettes of two Mogat ships against the fading brightness of their anomalies. A moment later I saw a transport leave one of the ships and head in our direction.

  Unified Authority armored transport ships have heavy shields and no guns. The Mogats might have claimed this transport fifty years earlier, but it was still of a bulky, slow, and unarmed Unified Authority design. As the transport approached us, it slowed to a crawl. The doors at the rear of the kettle slid open and out flew five Mogats in unwieldy deep-space armor that the Unified Authority Navy had abandoned decades earlier.

  “Evans, reel them in!” I shouted over the interLink. From my vantage point, I could not see the puppets rise as Evans and Kasdan reeled them up into the battleship. I did see the Mogats fire their lasers into scaffolding. I could see a small section of scaffold. I had enough of a view to see it blow apart in a flash. In the midst of the debris, the seven puppets we left on the scaffold must have flown off in every direction. Very satisfying.

  One of the puppets coasted into my field of vision. As I watched, a Mogat commando fired at it. The laser cut through the soft armor, causing a small explosion in the oxygen-pressurized suit. The puppet exploded, spraying out body parts and blood.

  “They bought it,” I called over an open frequency. “Now let’s give these specks a good show.”

  The deep-space commandos rocketed toward the break in the hull. They would fly into the ship on their own while their transport parked in the launch bay above me.

  “Evans, get out of there,” I barked over the interLink.

  “I saw them coming up the well,” Evans said.

  “Are you clear of them?” I asked.

  “All clear,” Evans answered.

  I had just started to tell everyone that Evans was safe and the first act of the show was over when the anomalies started flashing. Ships began broadcasting in by the dozen. Just looking away from the glare was not enough. I had to bury my visor in the crook of my arm. The walls around the storage hold flashed so brightly I would have sworn someone was flash-welding steel an inch away from my face.

  “Oh, shit,” I whispered to myself, knowing full well that every last man on my team would hear me. The problem was, I could not change the frequency with my eyes closed; and with all of that lightning going out there, I turned away, covered my face, closed my eyes, and still saw bleaching.

  “What’s going on?” nine of my men asked me at the same time. Philips, the tenth, said, “That doesn’t sound so good.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Even looking away and covering my eyes, I could feel the intensity of the anomalies outside. They came at a rapid staccato, like thousands of blinding-white arc bulbs popping on and off at an impossibly fast speed.

  “I think the whole specking Mogat Navy is out there,” I said over the open frequency.

  “How many ships?” one man asked.

  “I can’t look out to count, they just keep coming.”

  I knew it would not be the entire Mogat Fleet. Broadcasting four hundred ships into a tight lane of space is a complicated matter. You would need to stage the broadcasts so that the ships came in far enough apart. Broadcasting ships do not need to bump each other to cause damage; the electricity from their anomalies is enough to cause havoc. Besides, it would have taken hours for the Mogats to broadcast their entire four-hundred-ship navy into our space. The lightning storm ended a mere five minutes after it began.

  When the flashes stopped, I turned back toward the break in the deck for a look. From this narrow window, I counted thirteen ships milling about. Had I had a more panoramic view, I suspected I might have spotted fifty. The Mogats probably had another hundred on reserve in case the battle turned nasty. Despite their recently nonaggressive stance, the Morgan Atkins Believers were spoiling for a fight over this little acre.

  The Mogats could field as many battleships as they wanted; it wouldn’t affect us in here so long as their ships cleared out before our ride returned. Our pilot had struck me as a guy with a strong sense of self-preservation. He would broadcast in far away and find a safe zone from which to scan the area before flying into a potentially hazardous situation. The mission still seemed on track, but then things took an unexpected turn.

  A formation of transports drifted into view.

  “Bad news, puppeteers, your audience just got larger,” I said.

  “How bad?” someone asked.

  “Three more transports,” I said. If each transport carried a full load, we would have a grand total of nearly four hundred Mogats trolling the halls. This old battleship was starting to feel crowded.

  “Speck me with a three-legged dog,” Private Philips grumbled. “This show of yours was already standing room only.” As always, he called on a platoon-wide band. Philips enjoyed an audience.

  I heard a few Marines laughing. I wanted the platoon to be serious, but I needed them calm. Philips was a joker, but he was also the old man of the platoon. Even if he was a private, some of my men looked to him for leadership.

  “Listen up, Leathernecks,” I said. That was us. We were “grunts.” We were “jarheads.” We were “Leathernecks.” Marines get shitty-sounding names and shitty-sounding jobs and take pride in them. “Things are getting tight in here, but the show goes on exactly as planned.”

  “How the speck are you going to sneak on their specking transport with three hundred specking Mogats milling around the specking launch bay? Not meaning any disrespect, Master Sarge, but you’re specked,” Philips said.

  “Can it, Philips,” I said.

  I agreed with Philips. After taking another look at my stealth kit to make absolutely sure it was engaged, I leaped to the top of the elevator shaft for another look. As I flew higher, light from the Mogat transports illuminated the walls around me. Had one of the Mogats glanced into the elevator shaft at that moment, he would have seen me. I would have made a dandy target, alone in an empty shaft with only a pistol.

  I found a handhold and stopped myself just below the light. Inching slowly along the wall, I got to the door and peered out.

  Somehow, the Mogats had wedged four transports side by side onto the deck. The ships’ landing lights shone down, illuminating the entire bay. I turned off my night-for-day lens and viewed the scene through the tactical lens in my visor. Even with the lights, there was a distinct lack of color—dozens of men in dark armor climbing out of bare metal kettles and lining up in front of the white walls of the launch bay.

  Using optical controls for the interLink, I started scanning frequencies to find the band the Mogats used, but the signal got buried under the chatter from my men. “Keep it down,” I said. “From here on, I do the talking and you listen unless there is an emergency. Do you read me?”

  We would have a hard time outmaneuvering these boys unless we could eavesdrop on their conversations.

  Mogat interLink technology included a narrow and obsolete band of frequencies. The Unified Authority armed forces had abandoned those bands years ago.

  I found their chatter, but their signals overlapped each other. When I was here with the SEALs, the Mogats sent two transports, and we had no problem listening in on them. This time, with four transports and four hundred men, the messages seemed to scramble themselves. It would have taken a cryptography computer to untangle who said what and which statement responded to which question. From what I could tell, however, they were confusing themselves as wel
l with this chatter.

  Apparently no more impressed with the chaos than I was, a group of Mogat platoon leaders weighed into their mob. The platoon leaders wore magnetic-gravitation boots that anchored their feet to the ground. Thanks to their gravity boots, they could stand firm as they sorted through the cluster and found the men from their various platoons. Every so often they would spot a man out of place and grab him by the arm or the neck. The sergeants would yank these unfortunate conscripts and sling them. In a weightless situation, a man with gravity in his shoes can throw other men as if they had no more substance than a wet towel.

  I switched to a frequency my platoon would hear. “Get ready, they’re sending teams out.”

  “How do they look?” asked Evans, probably the most serious man under my command.

  “You’ve never seen anything like this. They’re about as organized as a pond full of ducks,” I said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that these boys can’t tell their boots from their helmets,” I said.

  The Mogats from the first transport had long since filed out into the ship. Two of my men, Evans and Kasdan, tracked their movements, while other members of my team led them on a wild-goose chase that would end somewhere near midship.

  The teams from the secondary transports started filing out. Listening to my men, I heard them abandoning routes and altering plans as additional Mogats poured out. Maneuvering like ghosts around a ship with four hundred Mogats crowding the corridors would present a challenge.

  I took reports every two minutes.

  “This would be a whole lot easier if you could get them to stay in one place,” Private Adams signaled me after nearly two hundred Mogats converged by sick bay, a single hatch away from where he and PFC Nielsen lay hidden. They had planned to enter the vent system; but when the dozens of Mogats flooded the area, they hid in a room without any vents.

  “They’re closing in on us,” Nielsen called. Military clones seldom panicked, but they were prone to confusion when they did not receive close supervision while under fire.