“What happened?” he repeated.
“You know the bomber? I was just outside an admin building he attacked. The explosion burned off my hair and did this to my skin,” I said. It sounded good for spur of the moment.
“Lord,” the lieutenant commander said. “Did you hear the good news?”
“What news?” I asked.
“You’re going to love this. It turns out there were two bombers, and it looks like they blew themselves up. They were hiding out in a supply depot.”
“Great to hear,” I said.
The hatch of the kettle ground shut and the only light inside was red emergency light. The flight went quickly. We hovered horizontally for a minute, then entered the gravity chute. My stomach dropped below my feet. The chatty lieutenant commander sitting beside me started to moan, then brought out a plastic bag and vomited into it. The ammonia smell coming from that little bag nearly made me retch.
The lieutenant commander looked up at me and apologized. “Late breakfast,” he said. When we left the chute, and our flight pattern normalized, he excused himself and deposited his prize package down the toilet. Probably embarrassed about having coughed up his meal, he found another place to sit.
Up to this point, our plan gave the Mogats nothing to worry about. To them, this day began like any other day. We arrived on a routine shuttle flight to the fleet.
Illych and I deplaned with the other passengers. No one paid any attention to us at all as we crossed the launch bay and went our separate ways.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FOUR
The alarms started before the announcements. First we heard the alarms sounding general quarters. This meant that every man on the ship—sailor and commando—had to report for duty.
Then came the announcement: “All commando teams, report to launch bay. All commando teams, report to launch bay.”
A second announcement followed on the heels of the first: “Prepare for broadcast. All hands, prepare for broadcast.”
Amber lights flashed in the halls. Men scrambled to their posts. In a moment, our ship would enter a battle zone.
I stood in the open hatch. Men ran past me without a second glance. No one noticed the bald, bleach-haired, green-eyed Liberator. They ignored me, and I ignored them; it was a reciprocal relationship that would come to a rapid end. I needed commando armor. The only way I could get it was to take it.
An entire platoon of commandos darted past me. They all wore the armor I needed, but they ran with the herd. I needed a straggler. And here he came, right on time. The man was nearly my height. The boy looked to be in his midtwenties, the same age as me but still just a boy. His black hair hung past his ears. He held his helmet like a bowl of water. He seemed distracted. He did not pay attention as he walked.
We were near a latrine. I approached him. I was about to shove him in the open door of the latrine. There I would…
“Jason.”
The boy turned. “Oh, hey, Frank. Any idea where we’re headed?”
“Perseus Arm.”
“Not again,” the boy whined.
I had no choice. I kept walking and headed into the latrine and watched as my armor on the hoof walked away.
Standing in the door of the latrine, I watched as sailor after sailor trotted past me. I saw no more commandos. I was going to miss my specking transport. I was going to sit out the mission I had specking planned. Then I saw him.
He was the last of the commandos, maybe a sergeant bringing up the rear. As he rumbled past the door of the latrine, I made my move. I grabbed his shoulder armor and swung him into the latrine using his own momentum to force him around the corner and face-first into the wall. He spun so quickly that his feet nearly left the ground. I hoped the shock would cause him to drop his pistol. It didn’t.
I must have picked a fight with the wrong man. The guy kept his wits about him. I expected him to reach for his pistol, leaving himself open for a dozen different deadly attacks. Instead, he took a lethal swing at me with his helmet. The plasticized metal was light but hard, and that old helmet design had lots of corners. He landed a glancing blow with the helmet that bounced off my shoulder and across my face.
Had the guy been wearing normal clothes, I could have hit him in the sternum and knocked the air out of his lungs. Of course, if he’d been wearing normal clothes, I would not have needed to kill him. In a normal fight I might have broken his arm or his leg, but his armor protected his elbows and knees against hyperextension. It also protected him from groin and kidney shots.
At least the guy was too tough to yell for help. Small miracles.
I grabbed the hand with the laser pistol and pushed my weight against it as I spun into his body, coming in too close for him to shoot me. By this time, my combat reflex was in full flow. I felt strong. Still pinning down the arm with the pistol, I twisted my shoulders and flung the man toward a bathroom stall with a poorly executed flip. My move did not lift the guy off the ground, but it had enough force behind it to make him stumble backwards into a stall.
He tripped over the toilet and dropped both his helmet and gun as he caught himself against the wall. I slammed my fist into his face. Blood splattered everywhere. I smashed the cartilage in his nose, and he grunted softly. He must have known he was in trouble as he started waving his hands wildly, but I pinned my knee into his chest and caught him between the wall and the toilet.
Realizing that he would not win the fight, he started to call out. I cut into his throat with the blade of my hand. Blood and spit flew from his mouth. I had no time for sympathy. My third punch shattered both the front and back of his skull.
My fist shattered the bones around his right eye socket. The force of the punch smashed the back of his head against the lip of the stainless-steel toilet. When I pulled the guy up to hit him again, I saw blood in his hair and realized that his skull had caved in. Men have survived with a shattered skull, and a live man has the potential to set alarms. I snapped the man’s neck.
I did not need to hide the dead commando very carefully. Sailors do not visit the latrine during general quarters. The ship was on full alert. Its laser cannons were lit and its rockets ready to fire. Any sailor worth his salt, even a Mogat sailor, would piss down his leg before leaving his station during general quarters.
I did not have so much as a second to waste. Using toilet paper to wipe blood off the armor as I went, I stripped the commando and put on his combat suit. The blood turned into droplets on the waxy surface of the armor. I did not have time to clean it well. I cleaned what I could and dressed in under a minute. During the mass hysteria of general quarters, I did not think anyone would examine me closely.
After placing the dead commando on the toilet seat, I closed the stall. I put on his helmet and holstered his laser pistol, then ran to the launch bay as quickly as I could. Small beads of blood trickled down my right arm as I ran. There might have been blood on my chest plates, as well, but I could do nothing about it.
Sailors ran in and out of hatches around me as I raced down the corridor. I noticed no other commandos. A bad sign. Wondering if I had missed my boat, I skidded through the launch-bay door and leaped between the doors at the rear of the kettle as they slowly closed.
“You took your sweet time, Belcher,” somebody said over the interLink in my helmet. “Good thing Smith wasn’t watching.”
“Yeah,” I said in a voice that sounded a lot like a cough. I knew I wasn’t fooling anyone with that voice.
“I saved you a seat. Over here.” My new friend Corporal Alberts stood and waved his hands, so I pressed my way through the crowd and joined him.
“You okay?” the commando asked as we sat on the bench running along the wall.
“Yeah, just winded,” I said.
“You don’t…”
“Listen carefully.” I placed my laser across my lap so that it pointed at Alberts’s ribs. “This can go either way for you. Take off your helmet and place it on your lap until we reach the drop zone.”
Alberts did not move.
“Now!” I yelled, and I made a show of tightening my finger around the trigger.
He reached up and removed his helmet. Now I could see his mouth and face. He could not make a sneaky little frequency change and warn some other commando using the interLink.
Alberts had fine blond hair cut to stubble. He had brown eyes. I saw anger in his eyes. Like Belcher, apparently the man I killed in the latrine, the guy had some fight in him.
With the doors closed and the emergency bulbs casting their shadowy red light, no one would notice my finger on the trigger. The other commandos were loud.
I reached up with one hand and removed my helmet so that I could whisper to Alberts. “Welcome to Unified Authority Airlines,” I said. I wanted to provoke him into making a move. He was as good as dead already. I wanted him to give me a reason so that I would not need to babysit him. He obliged.
Alberts made a grab at my laser, and I fired it into the side of his ribs. The wound cauterized, but that did not stop part of his armor from bubbling as it melted into his chest.
By the look of things, there was a complement of a hundred commandos in the kettle—a full, standing-room-only flight. No one seemed to care about the flash from my laser. They did not notice Alberts’s hands drop or the way he slumped to the ground before I pulled him back on the bench. The shadowy environment of the kettle had worked in my favor. In a moment, however, somebody was bound to notice the smoke rising out of Alberts’s collar as the highly flammable environmental suit inside his armor continued to burn.
I propped Alberts against the wall and placed his laser pistol on the seat beside him. Then, I rose to my feet and stepped away from the scene without looking back. The kettle was filled to capacity—men sitting on every inch of bench, men standing under all the harnesses on the floor. I took a second to place my helmet back over my head, then weaved my way through the crowd and headed toward the ladder that led to the cockpit.
“Hey…hey, this guy is dead!” somebody yelled just as I reached the top.
Looking back, I saw the commandos crowding into the corner of the kettle where Alberts still sat huddled against the wall. I heard one man shouting for a medical kit. I saw somebody pull a flashlight and shine it on the late corporal’s face. Then I opened the door and stepped into the cockpit. The pilot, a.k.a. Master Chief Petty Officer Emerson Illych, pulled his pistol and watched carefully as I removed my helmet.
“I see you already killed one,” Illych said, nodding to the monitor beside his flight controls. On the screen, men gathered around the dead commando.
“You’re one to talk,” I said. Illych’s dead copilot lay on the floor, his back sprawled around the pedals. “Besides, I made it look like a suicide.”
We were already deep in the graveyard, so to speak. We were back in the battleground where the five Mogat ships had stood down the Outer Perseus Fleet. I saw dead fighters floating around us, more closely packed together than the debris in an asteroid belt. We inched ahead, maybe only ten miles an hour. We should have gone faster. With its shields and armor, the transport could have shunted these broken Tomcats out of its way like dried leaves. Instead, we waded through.
“You see anything?” I asked.
“Oh yeah,” Illych said. “Take a close look when we approach that fighter.”
We glided toward a fighter. It had a gray hull with an oblong nose. The area around its cockpit was entirely melted and the glass was smoke-stained and crumpled. One of the fighter’s wings was sheared off. Wires hung from the amputation.
On the remaining wing, clinging and blending in like a chameleon on a leaf, lay a SEAL. I spotted him because his shape did not blend in with the contour of the wing to which he clung. The color of his armor matched the fighter perfectly. As we passed that fighter, I spotted two more SEALs clinging to the fuselage.
“How long can they stay out there?” I asked Illych.
He thought for a moment. “I’ve gone twelve hours. It wasn’t comfortable.”
“Twelve hours in open space?” I had always heard that you would go insane after two hours. There’s not much you can do in space, just cling to an object like a drowning man holding a raft. No pleasant thoughts would pass through your brain as you sat there with only your armor separating you and an infinite expanse of death. “That must have been one hell of an important mission.”
“It was for training. You don’t get your brantoo until you clear a twelve-hour spacewalk.”
“Do all SEALs go through that?” I asked. Before the Navy switched to Adam Boyd clones, only natural-born volunteers could became SEALs.
“We did,” Illych said. He never talked about the days of natural-born SEALs.
We were coming up on the derelict battleship. I saw it ahead. We approached it from a side that had not been damaged in battle. From this angle, the battleship looked ready to fight.
“You’d better lock the door,” Illych said as he pulled off a pair of headphones.
“The door?” I asked.
“Your buddies in the kettle don’t believe the kid you killed committed suicide. They’re on their way up looking for a killer”
“Have you blocked out external communications?” I asked. The transport had an interLink override that could block passengers from communicating with outside sources.
The door rattled.
“I cut their communications the moment we left,” Illych said. The man had ice in his veins.
The door rattled again. This time someone started pounding on it.
“This will quiet them,” Illych said. He reached across the controls and flipped the switch that controlled the gravity generator.
“Let’s hope no one was taking a shit,” I said.
By the annoyed look Illych shot me, I could tell that he did not approve of my language.
Pounding on a door in zero gravity takes some thinking. Hit the door hard and you will fly in the other direction. Try to shake the door without finding some way to anchor yourself, and you end up shaking yourself instead of the door.
“You’d better do something,” Illych said. “They’re going to pull their lasers next.” The door to the cockpit was made with a laser-dampening clay-and-metal alloy. It would hold for a minute or two of laser abuse.
“How long before we land?” I asked.
“Almost there,” Illych said, still as cool as ever.
I looked through the windshield. We were just outside the launch bay. The door was wide open. The atmospheric locks were disabled. We drifted in and hovered for a moment as Illych rotated the ship.
“Motherbird, we have landed. Repeat, Motherbird, transport one has landed. The coast appears to be clear,” Illych called in.
Outside the cockpit, a dozen laser beams pecked away at our door.
“I believe they’re calling your name,” Illych said.
“Thanks, pal,” I said.
“Harris, I have a present for you.” I looked back and saw him holding out his right hand in a fist, palm up. When he spread his fingers, I saw he was holding a grenade.
“Won’t that damage the transport?” I asked as I took the grenade.
“Not a chance,” Illych said. “It’s a dud.”
“A dud? Why do I want a dud?”
“Those boys are in zero gravity,” Illych said. “Chasing a grenade should keep them busy.”
A distraction, I thought. It would work on me. “Can you crank up the lights in the cabin? Let’s let them see it coming.”
Illych switched off the emergency bulbs and turned on the cargo lights. The kettle would not be bright by any means, but the commandos would see what I tossed to them.
“Are you going to share in the fun?” I asked Illych as I went to the hatch.
“Sorry, sport, I have to sit this one out. As the only qualified pilot on this mission, I’m indispensable.”
“Indispensable my ass,” I said, knowing that he was right. I put on my helmet. In another moment, having sea
led armor would be the deciding factor on who lived and who died.
I opened the door just a crack. In the moment before the storm of lasers speared the door and wall, I saw men floating under the metallic cathedral ceiling. I bowled the grenade underhanded and resealed the door as the first lasers struck around me. Then I waited for the grenade to have its effect.
When I opened the door again, nobody fired at me. The commandos were hiding as best they could and waiting for the grenade to explode.
Had the grenade been real, it would have juiced every last one of them. It would not have destroyed the transport, but it would have done damage. The dud, however, just tumbled harmlessly through the air, causing absolute chaos. The Mogat commandos pushed off each other and collided into one another in their general panic.
The cockpit opened to a three-foot-wide catwalk which led to the ten-foot ladder from the floor of the kettle. Seeing my grenade, everyone had scattered down. When I peered over the ledge of the catwalk, I saw men hiding under benches and men floating pell-mell across the cabin.
“Illych, drop them,” I called over the interLink. He restarted the gravity generator, and the commandos who had been floating dropped to the deck. Then I opened fire.
My job was to distract the commandos. In this case, death was a perfectly acceptable form of distraction. I saw a man hiding behind a girder and fired, hitting him in the arm. He dropped into a crouching position. My next shot hit the top of his helmet.
No one seemed to know what happened, so I targeted another Mogat as he ran to help my first victim. I waited until he bent over with his back to me, then aimed at the knot in his armor that housed his rebreather. He collapsed onto the first guy. It would have looked comical, like one dead guy had tripped over the other, but the rebreather exploded, and flames danced out of the hole.
I had visions of building a pile of dead Mogats.
Another commando looked up in my direction and fired at me before seeing where I hid. His laser seared into the wall about five feet to my left. My shot hit him square in the visor. He fell near the metal doors at the rear of the kettle. So much for my pile.
The Clone Alliance Page 23
