The Clone Betrayal

by Kent, Steven

“I don’t think they were happy to see you, sir,” the grenadier said.

  “That’s just ’cause they don’t know him,” said the rifleman.

  We searched the first five floors of the building. The place had been occupied recently, but now stood abandoned. Reviewing the confrontation, I decided that throwing a grenade might not have made a good first impression, and time was running out.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “Captain Harris, we’ve located survivors. Do you want us to make contact?” The call came from the fire team I had sent into the metal-skinned skyscraper. The Marine on the line, Corporal Hunter Ritz, sounded too helpful.

  “Negative, Corporal. The natives are not friendly,” I said.

  “The natives in this building may be hostile, but they don’t look dangerous, sir,” Ritz said. “It’s like a cathouse in here.”

  “A cathouse?” I repeated.

  “Yes, sir. A brothel, sir.”

  “As in hookers and whores?” I asked, suddenly understanding his motivation to volunteer.

  “Maybe not hookers and whores, but they are all of the female variety, sir,” Ritz said. “It’s pretty much paradise as far as I can tell. We’ve checked several floors; there are no men.”

  “Keep your armor on,” I said.

  “We’re going to need to make contact sooner or later, sir, and they don’t appear to be hostile. Maybe we could just ask them for directions.”

  “Keep away from them, Ritz. That is an order. Do not start up a conversation. Do not deliver your best pickup line. You and your men will observe the targets, but do not engage.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And try to stay alert, asshole. There’s no point keeping the hens in a henhouse unless you have a watchdog to guard it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I had left the Kamehameha with 250 men, 100 of whom I lost entering the atmosphere. We did not have enough men to take this city by force, not from the survivors and certainly not from the aliens. If I lost anyone else, I would not even have enough bodies to deliver the big bomb to the mines, and I did not want to be stuck on this planet for the rest of my life.

  Unfortunately, Ritz had contacted me on an open frequency to report his discovery.

  As I scanned through other frequencies, I heard Marines offering to help guard the place they had already dubbed “the Norristown brothel and home for wayward girls.” I had to admit, I was just as curious as everyone else. Was the building a harem? A brothel? Maybe a boot camp for Amazons? In a broken society, there was no telling what a building filled with women could mean.

  “Sir, we have a problem?” one of my men reported. “The locals have arrived.”

  Using the commandLink, I looked at the situation through the other man’s visor. He must have been standing at a window staring down at the street. Below him, the residents of Norristown had arrived en masse.

  There were hundreds of men in the street, standing silently, prepared to fight but not yet rioting. In the center of this mob, my three jeeps looked like tiny islands. No one had overturned our vehicles, but the tide closed around them.

  I sent my next message out on a company-wide frequency that even Hollingsworth and Herrington would hear. “Boys, we have a street full of survivors.”

  “How did you find them?” Thomer asked.

  “They found us,” I said.

  “Do you want me to bring my men?” Thomer asked.

  “Stay put, they’re behaving themselves so far,” I said as I headed down the stairs toward the lobby. As I stepped on to the floor, I could see men just outside the lobby staring in. Without taking my eyes off the street, I backed into the stairwell and trotted back up the stairs to the mezzanine, where I could have a closer look at the street below.

  I loped over the debris left behind by looters and stole up to the window, my nerves tense. A large mob of men had formed on the street, but they showed no interest in entering the building. They milled around like an army of vagrants. Many carried M27s or handguns. A few of them had rocket launchers. Every weapon I saw was standard military issue, probably gleaned from the streets.

  As I surveyed the scene, I noticed Corporal Ritz peering around the shattered glass of a fifth-floor window. My visor read his virtual tags. He looked in my direction, probably spotting me through the window with his telescopic lens.

  “Do you think they know we’re up here?” Ritz asked.

  “Can you think of any other reason for them to be here?” I asked.

  “Look at those bastards. There must be a thousand of them.”

  I estimated them at five hundred or six hundred, but kept it to myself.

  “Are they armed?” Thomer asked.

  “Every last mother-specking one of them,” I said. “I think we know where all the guns disappeared to.”

  The mob filled the streets and sidewalks in a single, unorganized mass. At any moment, I expected some leader to climb onto one of our jeeps and rally his troops with a speech, but it did not happen.

  “Ritz, what’s happening in the brothel?”

  “Not much, sir,” Ritz said. “I don’t think the ladies know we’re in here.”

  “So we have a standoff,” I said. “They don’t want to come in, and we don’t want to step out.”

  “Maybe they don’t know who we are, sir,” Ritz said. “Maybe they don’t know we’re Marines.”

  “Maybe they don’t care,” I said. Who knew what kind of anarchy had taken hold in Norristown. These people probably knew no authority higher than a gun.

  I decided it was time to introduce myself. Pulling both a grenade and a rocket launcher from my belt, I took twelve paces back from the window. I set the grenade for a relatively low-yield explosion, and tossed it toward the window, then hid in a doorway. The explosion sprayed shattered glass onto the street. Bright light poured in through the shattered glass wall.

  “What are you doing?” Ritz asked.

  “I’m introducing myself,” I said.

  The men in the street scattered as glass showered down on them. Not giving them a moment to regroup, I bolted for the window and fired my rocket at one of the jeeps. I hated sacrificing a perfectly good ride, but explosions and burning metal made a strong impression.

  The rocket hit the rear of the jeep just above the fuel tank, touching off a second explosion. The jeep did an anemic flip through the air, crashing onto its front bumper, then landing upside down. Greasy black smoke rose from the chassis along with a bloom of orange-and-red flames.

  Down below, all of the men on the street turned their guns in my direction, but nobody fired. Finally, a man stepped out of the crowd and climbed onto the nearest jeep. He wore Army fatigues and a Marine Corps combat helmet. He spoke to me over an open channel on the interLink, his voice sounding so damn familiar we might have been old friends.

  He said, “I understand your need to intrude upon our privacy, Captain, but why in God’s name are you shooting at us?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Hoping that the mob would overestimate our numbers, I had my Marines trail me as I left the building.

  The locals made way for me as I entered the street, allowing me and my Marines to pass through unchallenged. I worked my way toward the flaming wreckage of the jeep and the man in the combat helmet who stood beside it. As I came closer, he removed his helmet, revealing shoulder-length hair and a flowing beard. I hardly recognized him.

  I came within a few feet of the man and removed my helmet as well.

  “What are you doing here, Captain Harris?” asked the Right Reverend Colonel Ellery Doctorow in a voice that held both hostility and restraint. This was the man who had told the fleet to go away. He sounded like he was about to do it again. Gone was the slightest trace that this man had ever been an Army chaplain.

  “We came to liberate Terraneau,” I said.

  Doctorow laughed. “You hear that? He came to rescue us,” he called out to his men. Those close enough to hear him laughed. Then turning to me, he
said, “The aliens left here long ago, Captain.”

  Somehow, Doctorow seemed to have gone from highest-ranking shaman in the U.A. Army to some sort of acting governor of Norristown. Hell, for all I knew, he might have set himself up as the lord high emperor of all Terraneau. Whatever his domain, these men clearly followed him.

  Doctorow was not as tall as he looked in his picture. He stood over six feet tall, but I still had an inch or two on him. He had aged over the last four years and had become less military in his bearing. The photo that came with my orders showed Doctorow still in his fifties; now he looked more like a well-preserved sixty-five-year-old. He stood erect, but he was too thin. He had let his coal-colored flattop grow into a shaggy mane that reached down to his shoulders, and his thick salt-and-pepper beard had strayed over to the salt side of the equation.

  I did not know whether to call the man by his military rank or religious title. Since he was out of uniform, I decided to go the religious route. “Reverend Doctorow,” I began.

  “I prefer ‘Colonel,’ ” he corrected.

  “Colonel, you see that bright stuff up there in the sky?” I asked.

  “Hard to miss,” Doctorow said.

  “They call that the ‘ion curtain,’ ” I said.

  “I’m familiar with the term. The scientist who coined it was stationed at Fort Sebastian.”

  “Was he a dwarf?” I asked.

  Doctorow smiled. “It sounds as if we have a common acquaintance.”

  “Dr. William Sweetwater,” I said.

  Undoubtedly remembering dark days past, Doctorow said, “They tried to lift him off the planet as the invasion began. Sounds like he made it.”

  “I met him on New Copenhagen,” I said.

  “New Copenhagen? The aliens made it all the way to New Copenhagen?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. There was nothing more to say.

  We stood in the road, in the junction between the three skyscrapers. Doctorow’s horde surrounded us, but they also gave us a lot of space. The seven men who had come down with me had worked their way to one of the jeeps. The tone of our meeting was neither friendly nor hostile. “They would have finished us off on New Copenhagen if it were not for Sweetwater,” I said. “The little bastard saved us.”

  “Saved you from what?” Doctorow asked. “The aliens don’t do much once they capture your planet. They leave their ion curtain in the sky; they knock down buildings. But they’re not all that bad.

  “They killed off our army, but they left us alone once we stopped trying to fight them.” He wore a reassuring expression, the smile of a parent explaining the difference between right and wrong to an ignorant kid.

  “They haven’t left,” I said.

  “We haven’t seen them for years.”

  “You do know that there’s a line of glowing spheres no more than twenty miles from here?” I asked. “The aliens use those to spawn. You know that, right?”

  Doctorow placed a hand on my shoulder. It was a condescending gesture, and it made me angry. He leaned toward me and spoke in a whisper so that no one would hear what he said. “That, Captain Harris, is why we asked your fleet to go away.”

  I did not go into detail, but I told Doctorow about New Copenhagen. I described how the Avatari had hollowed mountains and filled them with gas so toxic the fumes slowly melted your skin. I told him how the aliens would expand the nearest sun and use it to bake Terraneau until it was cinder and gas.

  “Is that a fact?” Doctorow asked, already acting a lot less sure of himself. “That changes things. How long do we have?”

  “It will be a few thousand years before the sun goes on broil, but we’ve already located the gas,” I said. “It’s nasty shit.”

  “There’s no need for vulgarity,” Doctorow said; but I had the feeling that he said it out of reflex instead of conviction, the same way he might say “God bless you” to a man who sneezed. As a former Army man, he knew the score. Among military men, swearing isn’t a vice, it’s a specking art form. Once he finished considering what I said, he added, “I don’t suppose you have any proof?”

  “Excuse me,” I told Doctorow. I replaced my helmet and tried to reach Herrington. He did not answer, so I called Thomer instead.

  I wanted to send Doctorow to the mines with Herrington, but I could not raise his transport. Somehow, he had flown out of range.

  I contacted Hollingsworth and told him to get a transport ready, then I told Thomer to return to the airfield. With Herrington gone, Thomer would need to take his place. He would take Doctorow to see the Avatari mines, and he would lead a team into the mines to detonate the bomb.

  As one of the only three men in the Unified Authority to enter an alien dig site and survive, Thomer had the right ré sumé for offering guided tours around Avatari mines; but I still worried. The Right Reverend would undoubtedly notice Thomer’s Fallzoud-induced lethargy. Thomer was more alert than he had been back on the ship, but he still reacted to questions a fraction of a second too slow.

  Thomer arrived at the airfield first. He loaded seventy-five Marines onto the transport, then waited for Doctorow to show. Once the Right Reverend rolled onto the field, Thomer led him onto the transport, and they took off for the mines. They did not leave empty-handed. I hoped Doctorow would not notice the large crate in the cargo hold or ask why seventy-five Marines had come along for the ride.

  So far, nothing on this mission had gone according to plan.

  “Captain Harris, sir?” Hollingsworth called from the airfield just moments after Thomer and Doctorow took to the air.

  “What do you have?”

  “I’m still not getting through to Sergeant Herrington.”

  “Maybe something is wrong with his equipment,” I said.

  “I understand, sir, but I haven’t had any luck locating his transport with our radar.” Hollingsworth was using the equipment on our third transport. Powerful equipment.

  I wondered how long it had been since I spoke with Herrington. A couple of hours had passed. He said he had located the mines. He had said something else, but I was distracted. I’d missed what he said.

  Then I remembered what he had said. “Oh shit,” I groaned. “Speck.”

  “What is it, sir?” Hollingsworth asked.

  “Herrington said he was going to fly by the Avatari spheres,” I said. “He said he was going to swing by the spheres on the way back to the airfield.”

  “I don’t understand.” Hollingsworth sounded confused. Not having served on New Copenhagen, he could not fit the pieces together.

  “Sergeant, you’d better have your pilot patch me through to Thomer’s transport,” I said. “We have a hell of a problem.”

  I looked around the street. Mixing what was left of my men and the local militia, there might have been a thousand of us. We mostly had M27s and machine guns. My men would have some rocket launchers and grenades. We were cooked.

  “Captain Harris, I have them,” Hollingsworth said.

  “Thomer.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Doctorow, you there, too?”

  “I’m here,” Doctorow said.

  “Herrington is dead,” I said. “The Avatari are on their way.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Herrington’s transport simply vanished. That meant it went down quickly, so quickly that the pilot never even had time to send a distress signal. They could have had an equipment failure, but I knew damn well that they hadn’t. They were shot down. They reached the spheres and ran into the Avatari with their specking light rifles.

  I remembered that the last thing I told Herrington was that I was too busy to talk; then I snuffed out that guilty memory. There would be time for recriminations later.

  The beacon Herrington left by the mines was just over eight thousand miles away. Flying at 2,250 miles per hour, it would have taken him nearly four hours to get from the mines to the spheres. That meant he went down about an hour ago.

  The spheres were approximately twenty
miles from town. An army with light armor could close that gap in under an hour, but the Avatari moved slowly. Once they emerged from the spheres, it would take them hours to make the long march into Norristown.

  Using interLink communications, I went over my calculations with Doctorow and Thomer and Hollingsworth. “Are you sure about this?” Doctorow asked. “For all you know, Herrington’s radio might be on the blink.”

  I reminded him that the radar no longer showed Herrington’s transport.

  “So what do we do?” Doctorow asked.

  “We’re going to have to fight,” I said.

  “Then you’re on your own, Captain. This is your fight; they came here looking for you.” Doctorow sounded angry, like a man who suspects his friends are trying to con him.

  I wanted to tell Doctorow to go speck himself. I wanted to tell him we could all die together if he preferred it that way. I kept my mouth shut, partially because I needed his help and partially because I knew he was right.

  “What if we lit up the nuke?” Thomer asked. “We’re closing in on the mines.”

  “It’s too late for that,” I said. “We’re going to have to fight them. One way or another, we’re going to need to fight them.”

  The Avatari emerged from their spheres as energy, then created their bodies by attracting tachyons out of the ion curtain. Exploding a nuclear device in the mines would draw loose tachyons out of the atmosphere, eradicating the ion curtain. It would not pull in tachyons that had already attached themselves to an avatar.

  “Do you want me to scout the area?” Hollingsworth volunteered. “I could take a transport and be back in no time.”

  It sounded like an unnecessary risk, but I allowed him to persuade me. “I wouldn’t mind having an ETA on the bastards,” I agreed. “Just don’t get shot down.”

  Hollingsworth said he would be careful and signed off.

  Perhaps hearing Hollingsworth throw himself into the fire reminded Doctorow of his days in the Army. Maybe he’d just rethought things. Something made him change his mind, and he said, “If the mines are as bad as you say they are, we’re all facing a death sentence. If it will help, Captain Harris, my militia will join you.”