It felt good to be back in combat. I felt the hormone surging through my blood, but I knew I could stop when the battle was over. Early Liberator clones had crawled out of the tube battle-ready. Most of them got hooked on violence because they never knew anything else. I was raised in an orphanage and steeped in military protocol. Self-control was less of an issue.
At least twenty commandos fired back at me. I ducked low. I had the high-ground advantage. They could hit the catwalk, but they could not hit me. Some guy bucking for a medal leaped toward the front of the kettle. He probably wanted to shoot up from under the catwalk. He might have even planned to shoot through it. I hit him as he jumped, and he fell facedown on the deck.
“Grab a handhold,” Illych called over the interLink.
As I wedged myself into a corner, Illych cut the gravity. A commando immediately launched himself in the air. I shot him, and his dead body slammed headfirst into the roof.
It wasn’t the gravity that Illych was warning me about. On the other side of the kettle, the heavy metal doors started to slide apart. As their seal broke, the pressure of our oxygenated atmosphere swept unprepared commandos against the rear of the transport like leaves in a hurricane.
It took approximately three seconds for the pressure to right itself. During that time, at least a third of the Mogat commandos were sucked up and flung against the rear of the kettle. I have no idea how many survived the experience.
Then the SEALs stormed up the ramp. Five Navy SEALs, dressed in the same antiquated armor as Mogat commandos, charged up the ramp firing lasers. They charged into the cargo-loading area, killing everyone they saw, then found cover and dug in. More SEALs waited outside the transport doors. The entire shooting match took less than a minute.
“The transport is secure,” I called out over an open frequency.
“That was easy,” Illych responded. “Now for the hard part.”
CHAPTER
THIRTY-FIVE
“Motherbird, this is Away Team.”
“Did you find anything?” the Mogat communications officer asked.
“The ship’s clean,” Illych said.
“Clean?” the officer asked.
“Not a clone to be found,” Illych said.
“I’ll put you through to the captain.”
A moment later a voice asked, “What is the situation, Away Team?”
“The ship is clean, sir,” Illych said. In the movies, soldiers always push it when they make these calls. They say puns or play with words, giving their enemies clues that go unnoticed. Illych, a SEAL instead of a Hollywood actor, did not play that game. We had an unarmed transport, they had a heavily armed battleship with seemingly impregnable shields. Illych stuck to the script.
“Have you searched the ship?”
“Yes, sir, every deck. I’ve been monitoring the security sensors. They picked up our guys, but that’s it.”
“Somebody set off the alarms,” the Mogat officer said.
“They must have cleared out before we got here.” Illych was a great liar. His voice showed not so much as a note of emotion. His eyes remained on the monitor. Sometimes dishonest people stare too long into your eyes thinking it will prove they are telling the truth. Illych stared just enough.
“Very well. Make one more sweep of the ship and see if our visitors left anything behind, then come on back.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Illych said. He waited for the captain to sign off before turning back to us. “We’re in.”
The SEALs had 121 men on that derelict battleship, but they only used fifteen to capture the transport. The SEALs adjusted to their environment. Having as many men as possible might win battles on an open field; but in the confines of a crowded transport, too many men meant impaired mobility.
We took no prisoners as we captured the transport. From the commandos to the copilot, we made sure that everybody died. The dirty part of reconnaissance work is that it leaves no room for mercy.
After clearing out the bodies, we crammed 116 SEALs into the kettle. The five we could not fit had to wait on the derelict. They got a better deal than the men hiding among the wrecked fighters outside. There are no injuries in a space battle. If anything breaches your armor, you die. It does not matter whether an enemy laser pierces your heart or your foot. If your armor depressurizes, you may freeze or suffocate or burst; but you will certainly die.
We packed the transport so tightly that three of the SEALs had to ride in the cockpit along with Illych and me. We wasted no floor space. Not in the kettle. Not in the cockpit.
As they had before, the SEALs headed into battle in silence. In the cockpit, we stood pressed together, watching the five who could not come with us salute as our transport lifted from the deck.
Illych broke the silence. “Think we can pull this off, Harris?”
“Against these stiffs?” I asked. “What could go wrong?” Even as I said this, I regretted it. It had the ring of other famous last words.
“You’re joking, right?” Illych asked. We both knew we were flying a load of 116 men into a ship with a two-thousand-man crew, not counting commandos.
“Yeah, I’m joking,” I said. That was a lie. Had Illych asked me earlier, I would have said it was not possible to take an entire transport without losing a man. Sometimes it seemed like the Mogats were sleepwalking.
Illych and I never took our gazes from the scene outside the cockpit during the return flight. Between the SEALs and the Marines, we had two thousand men hiding in the wreckage around us. They waited to pounce like camouflaging insects.
Things look smaller in death than they do in life, even battleships. Looking at the derelict battleship with its darkened windows, I did not appreciate its size. The ships of the old Galactic Central Fleet had diamond-shaped hulls with rounded bows. Like all U.A. ships, they were wider than they were long.
Coming around the stern of this live battleship, I saw that we were smaller than the tips of its wings. Our transport was meant to hold one hundred men, one man for every twenty on that ship. We were a flea creeping up on a big dog. If we got in, we might draw blood.
“We’re coming in for a landing,” I called back over the interLink. We had to watch what we said now that we were wearing Mogat armor. The interLink equipment in the old combat armor had limited frequencies. We used a frequency we had never heard the Mogats use, but we had no way of knowing if they listened in on us.
We floated into the launch bay and hovered over the deck as the first of the atmospheric locks sealed behind us. In this fifty-year-old ship, the locks did not have the transparent electrostatic shields you saw on modern ones. The doors were enormous metal blast shields. We flew forward twenty yards, and a second gate closed behind us. Now we were inside the ship’s atmosphere. Illych used the thrusters to guide us down, but he cut them a bit soon, and we landed hard.
“Nice landing,” I said. “Now that you are dispensable again, are you going to join the fun?” Having flown the transport back, Illych was no longer any more important than anyone else to the mission.
“That’s why I came,” he said, and he had that same giddiness that I heard the first time I saw him in combat. He pulled out his laser pistol and held it up for me to see. “You know, I’d give up a week’s pay to use a particle beam instead of a laser on this one.”
“They have lasers, so we use lasers,” I said. “We need to blend in.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know,” Illych said.
“Well, good luck, Illych,” I said.
“Good luck, Harris.”
I left the cockpit and practically slid down the ladder. We stood silent, staring at the rear hatch as the big metal doors slid open. The bright lights of the launch bay shone in from the top, pouring a wedge of glare across the floor.
We had our orders. We would divide up. Fifteen men would remain in the transport, hiding wherever they could and killing any unlucky maintenance men who happened to see them. Another forty men would head to the engine room to s
hut down the shields. Illych went with that group.
That left sixty-three men to head for the bridge. I went with that squad. We would “clear the bridge” quickly, a polite way of saying we would kill every officer and seal the hatch. If we moved quickly enough and targeted the helm and communications, we could prevent the ship from fleeing the scene or putting out a distress signal.
Having flown return flights with Mogat commandos, I knew that they generally removed their helmets before stepping off their transport. We kept them on. The SEALs were all clones of the Adam Boyd variety. They all looked alike. They were short, bald, and marked with the distinctive bony ridge across their brows. Had we removed our helmets, I would have been the only non–Adam Boyd face in the crowd, and the Mogats knew my kind.
In a world with no clones, a transport loaded with one hundred identical men would raise suspicion. So might a hundred commandos pouring out of a transport wearing their helmets. We had no other options. We rushed off the transport and walked quickly across the deck of the launch bay. One sailor stopped to watch us. He waved in our direction. Not knowing what else to do, I waved back but kept with the pack.
“Everything okay?” a crewman asked as we hustled past.
No one answered. He stood and watched us, but did nothing. Then we were out the door and down the hall.
We marched toward the central corridor of the ship. The smaller squad broke off and headed toward the engine room at the back of the ship. My squad turned toward the front. We knew in advance that the elevators were too small to hold sixty-three men; so we divided up and took separate paths. By the time I reached the last bank of elevators, there were only six men with me.
We moved through the hall in absolute silence. We did not draw our guns. We did not remove our helmets. Some of the crew stopped and stared at us, but no one approached us. Their ship was in enemy territory, and they were on alert. The brass had wisely not withdrawn the call to general quarters, so the entire crew was engaged.
The seven of us took the elevator at the front of the ship. I did not like traveling in an elevator. It was a bottleneck. Once the doors sealed, we would be helpless prisoners until they reopened. We waited for our elevator, watching sailors running past. Two sailors came to wait with us. We did not speak with them. If they headed to the bridge, we would kill them in a few minutes. We were a hundred men capturing a ship with over two thousand able-bodied crewmen. We would have no time for prisoners.
I stepped into the elevator and stared straight ahead when the door opened. The SEALs crowded around me, leaving an unreasonable amount of room for the two sailors. They congregated on the other side of the car, quietly whispering to each other. Two floors up, they left us without so much as a sideward glance. We continued to the top deck.
I decided to risk a communication. “Illych, you in place?”
“We’re just waiting for the signal. What’s taking so long?”
“We had farther to go,” I said.
I was not in charge. This was a SEAL operation, with regular Navy and Marine support.
Leaving the elevator, I led my little band to the main corridor. When I looked back over my shoulder, I saw the rest of the team catching up with us. They pushed through the halls quickly. Sailors stepped out of their way.
“Launch Bay Squad, are you in position?” the SEAL commanding the mission asked.
“Locked and loaded.”
“Blue Team, are you in position?” Blue Team was the one sent to capture the engine room and shut down the shields.
“In position.”
“Gold Team, everyone in position?”
This time I answered, too. “In position.”
The six SEALs and I led the way into the bridge. We stepped through the hatch, drew our laser pistols, and began firing. I dropped to one knee and targeted the two sentries standing guard across the deck. I hit the first man before he could even reach for his pistol and the second man as his fingers closed around its grip. The men wore no armor, so my laser cut through them like a javelin. Their blouses caught fire around the wounds. When they fell, I saw the burns on the wall. The laser had shot right through them.
More SEALs jammed in through the door.
The bridge looked more like an office than the control room of a ship. It had computer stations instead of steering wheels. Navigators plotted its course on a computer screen. Beside that station, three men slumped dead in their seats. In the next station, the communications officers lay dead as well. They had been our primary targets as we entered the bridge.
A door on the far side of the bridge opened. The man in the doorway reacted quickly. He swung back into his room, sealing the doors behind him. Alarms went off. Amber and blood-colored lights flashed everywhere.
“Engine room report?” the mission leader called over the interLink.
“We have control. The weapons are down. The shields should be down any minute,” Illych said.
“Step it up. They know we’re on board,” the mission leader said.
“What happened up there?” Illych asked.
“We got spotted. The situation is under control. Now get the shields down. If we don’t see the cavalry soon, we’re in for a beating.”
“You okay, Harris?” Illych asked on a band that the mission leader would not hear.
One of the SEALs used a torch to short-circuit the door to the room off the bridge. He pulled his pistol and stepped in. I saw the red glow of the laser flash across the walls as the SEAL fired two shots into the man at point-blank range.
“We’re pinned down! We’re pinned down!” The call came from the squad guarding the launch bay.
“What is your status?” the mission leader asked.
“We are trapped in the transport.”
“Do you have control of the target area?”
No answer.
“Launch Bay Squad, do you have control of the target area?”
“Grenade! Grenade!” was the last we heard from the squad in the launch bay.
Then someone in the corridor tried to open the hatch and enter the bridge. He had cracked the door less than an inch when one of the SEALs fired through and ended the problem.
“Seal the hatch!” our team yelled. That seemed like a good idea.
“It’s going to get hot up here,” I told Illych. I was not complaining.
“Wait a moment. Just a…Okay, the shields are down,” the Blue Team leader called in.
“We’ve lost Launch Bay Squad. Gold Team, break into squads. Gold 1, hold the bridge. Gold 2, retake the launch bay.” I was in Gold 2, the emergency squad. We were the ones who would catch the shit face-first.
Now that’s a specker, I thought. Why didn’t we just leave more men to hold the launch bay in the first place?
There were forty of us in Gold 2, almost twice as many men as in Gold 1, with good reason. All Gold 1 had to do was hold on to the bridge. The forty of us would have to run the gauntlet. We were going to have to go back down the elevators, if we made it that far. Before we worried about the elevators, we needed to fight our way out of the bridge. And if we failed…At that moment, two thousand men were floating in space outside the ship. They were armed, and they had combat gear, but they would be sitting ducks in a shoot-out with men on a ship. Hell, until we got the launch-bay door open, those men out there were doing little more than waiting to die.
“Harris, are you Gold 1 or Gold 2?” Illych called over.
“Two,” I said.
“You’re in for a fight.”
“Against these stiffs?” I asked, purposely echoing my famous last words from the cockpit. “They didn’t give us any trouble when we took the bridge.”
“I think they’ve figured out what we’re doing,” Illych said. “They’re all over the halls out there. Good thing they have to come to us. Man, I would hate to be the one squeezing through a narrow hatch to get in.”
“Thanks,” I said, knowing that in order to retake the launch bay, Gold 2 would run through
the corridor and hatches.
“Oh, you guys will make it through, no problem,” Illych said. “I meant I would hate to be a Mogat squeezing through those halls.”
“Gold 2, stage.”
At the order to stage ourselves, we drew our guns and approached the hatch. SEALs from Gold 1 opened the door for us. Two Gold 2 men leaped through the door firing lasers, hoping to clear a path for the rest of us. The Mogats shot them with so many lasers that they seemed to dissolve into the air. The door slid shut, cutting through the bloody puddle.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-SIX
We had to get down to the launch bay quickly. Looking at the viewport at the front of the bridge, I could see squads of SEALs and Marines heading for the ship like a swarm of locusts. They were armed and trained, but they could not defend themselves unless we opened the launch-bay locks and cleared a path for them.
“Gold 2, prepare!” the mission leader yelled.
A Gold 1 SEAL tripped the door mechanism, and the panels slid open. With the panels just inches apart, another SEAL ran toward the door, somersaulted past the opening, and tossed a grenade into the hall. The guy at the controls closed the panels the moment the grenade cleared.
There they go using the old dud grenade trick, I thought to myself. It was impressive the first time.
But nobody made a move for the door, and a moment later an explosion rocked the deck.
“Move it! Move it! Move it!”
The hatch slid open. A cloud of smoke rolled in. Another group of SEALs dashed into the smoke, firing blindly. Even with heat-vision technology in their visors, they would not see anything through the smoke. The heat and fire would cloud their vision.
I was in the second wave to leave. We did not fire our lasers. Had we fired, we would have been more likely to hit one of ours than theirs. We ran into the thick white smoke. If we’d had to breathe that smoke, we might have suffocated, but we had rebreathers.
The floor was red and slick with blood. Looking down to get my balance, I saw armor boots with legs still sticking out of them. The blood looked like a bouillabaisse made with bits of armor instead of fish. The grenade tore holes in the walls.
The Clone Alliance Page 24
