The Clone Redemption

by Steven L. Kent

  The shields held. Nothing hit the ship itself, but we spun and bumped and tilted and bounced, working our way down the last thirty feet. And then we touched down as delicately as a ballerina completing a grand jeté, and the world around us was silent.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  Location: Earth

  Galactic Position: Orion Arm

  Astronomic Location: Milky Way

  Back on Terraneau, Lieutenant Mars and his engineers tested the batteries in the Unified Authority’s new shielded armor and discovered that the batteries stored enough energy to power the armor for forty-five minutes. Their power usage spiked whenever anything hit the shields. If we hit them with a continuous laser stream or enough bullets, we could cut that battery life to a few minutes.

  The only weapons their Marines could use while wearing the armor were the built-in fléchette guns that ran along the outsides of their sleeves—decidedly short-range weapons, accurate to one hundred yards.

  The original plan was to cut off any outside support by surrounding Washington, D.C., then tightening the noose around the city’s neck as our reinforcements arrived.

  They, of course, would retaliate by sending out soldiers in shielded armor; but we had that all figured out. With our M27s, we could hit the defenders from outside their range. We would drain their shields; and, once we depleted the batteries in their shields, we would annihilate them.

  It was a good plan, and it probably would have worked had I had three hundred thousand troops. Instead, I had twenty-six thousand men, and we were cut off. We’d lost 90 percent of our birds on the way down, and there would be no reinforcements as long as the missile defenses remained operational.

  Both Freeman and I survived. Most of the transports in the front of the pack made it through. That was because the fighters that cleared our way took the brunt of the attack. As long as Freeman was alive, there was still hope we might shut down the missiles.

  “Everyone out! Regroup. Regroup!” I shouted over the interLink. I used a frequency for company commanders. The Unifieds would come looking for us shortly, and they’d have artillery. They would not have any trouble locating our transports; we’d practically crushed the forest when we crashlanded. As we did not have enough men to guard them, we’d need to leave the transports behind.

  Our only hope was to hide in the forest, where we might be able to escape the Unifieds’ fighters. It wasn’t much of a hope. Once the fighters failed, the Unifieds would send slow-moving, low-flying helicopter gunships to flush us out. First they’d send gunships, then they’d send in tanks and Marines. We needed to move.

  “Freeman, where are you?” I asked on a direct Link.

  “I’m on my way,” he said.

  “Do you want me to send a team with you?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer. It was a stupid question. Sometimes a lone man can accomplish feats that an army could not. Working by himself, Freeman could hijack a car and infiltrate Washington unseen. Every person he added to his entourage made him that much more visible; and in this game, visibility was death.

  “Is there any chance the Unifieds found your buildings?” I asked. Maybe I was losing faith.

  The enemy had better armor, artillery, air support, and more men; but we were Marines. We organized and spread out under the cover of the trees as the first of the U.A. fighters arrived overhead.

  The fighters didn’t worry me . . . much. Fighters were made for fighting each other, not ground forces. They worked best when they moved fast. We had drone planes and rockets. Those fighters would need to slow down to a vulnerable speed to attack us. If they did, we would give them something to think about.

  Fighting back against Unified Authority gunships and troops would be another story. We needed to evacuate the forest before the Unified’s ground forces arrived. We wouldn’t stand a chance against tanks and shielded armies fighting here in the trees; but we might find safety in the eye of the storm.

  “We need to get to the city,” I called out to the troops.

  The first explosion was of the benevolent variety, at least it was benevolent toward us. A few miles east of us some charges went off. Though he did not call it in, I suspected Ray Freeman had set something off. Looking up through the trees in the direction of the blast, I saw a column of white smoke rise into the air. White smoke, clean smoke, the kind of smoke you get from charges.

  In this case, Freeman had hit a communications tower to try to buy us some time. I heard the pop of cables snapping and the yawn of metal bending. The tower fell through trees as it collapsed. I heard the sounds, but they meant nothing to me until we crossed over a ridge and found the tower lying twisted in a bed of broken branches.

  “What is that?” asked one of my captains.

  “A relay tower,” I said. Losing the tower would not cripple U.A. communications in the area; it might not even slow them down.

  The trees around us were spindly but tall, most of their trunks no more than four inches across. They had silver-gray bark. Looking up through the trees, I saw a nickel-colored sky with high-flying clouds. A crow flew across my path, or maybe a raven. It looked like a fast-flying shadow against the sky.

  Fighters streaked overhead. First we heard the growl as they approached, then the screech as they slammed past us, and finally the bang as the noise of their engines followed. They flew at supersonic speeds crossing the woods in a matter of seconds. Beneath the trees we walked ten-minute miles, hoping that our slow speed would make us harder to follow.

  Then came the dull thudthudthudthudthud that I did not want to hear. Gunships approached. Looking around, I saw several men spin and fire distortion canisters into the air. The canisters burst in a cloud of shimmering silver glitter that vanished somewhere between the tops of the trees and the increasingly cloudy sky.

  Those canisters would not harm the gunships, but they would wreak havoc on their radar, sonar, and infrared tracking systems. They filled the air with invisible filaments that gave sonar false readings and choked out radar and other tracking technologies.

  Negotiating my way through grayscale landscape, I felt abandoned by the God in whom I did not believe and the fleet in which I did. The trees were gray, and the sky was silver; sunlight showed like platinum streaks casting shadows on the muddy ground. No help was coming, and we could not defeat the enemy. The best we could hope for was to lengthen the fight as we waited to die.

  With their tracking systems hobbled, the men flying the gunships circled over the tops of the trees, hoping to establish visual contact. The gunships had thick, powerful armor. They were flying tanks armed with rockets, chain guns, and excellent tracking equipment, which my men had now blinded.

  Trying to force us into the open, the gunships fired rockets into the trees. One ship loomed over us like a shark following prey. When we came to a clearing, the gunship spun into position and sprayed bullets into a company of men.

  The chain guns were large and powerful. The bullets stabbed through my men and their armor. Blood sprayed out of the holes as men stumbled and fell. The gunship fired a rocket that hit the base of a tree, sending five men tumbling through the air. They landed as corpses; arms, legs, and armor blown away from their bodies.

  One of my grenadiers scored a hit with a rocket-propelled grenade, but the handheld rocket didn’t dent the gun bird. More of my grenadiers joined in the fight.

  It was like hitting bulletproof glass with a baseball. Hit it enough times, and the glass will weaken and break. I had thousands of grenadiers on the ground. Once enough of them fired rockets, the gunship slowly came apart, tumbling into the trees, then crashing to the ground in a fiery wad of smoke and metal.

  My visor displayed each Marine’s name above his helmet. They were faceless to me, but not nameless. When I looked at the dead men lying in the clearing, their armor broken and their blood seeping into the ground, I almost gave up. I felt tired and weak and unfit to lead a division of men faced with a challenge that might be too big for the entire
corps.

  We continued our trot toward the outskirts of D.C. The gun birds shadowed us; but having lost a member of their flock, they did not attack. Fighters still flew far overhead. The air above us seemed to echo with the sounds of their engines.

  We came to a break in the trees and stopped. A six-lane highway ran the gap like a border between two nations. The Unified Authority’s tanks, trucks, and troops had not yet arrived, but a swarm of gunships hovered over the road like vultures waiting for a carcass.

  I knew this area. If we followed the highway, we would end up on Capitol Hill, but it was a twenty-mile march. We were farther west of the city than I had hoped.

  While I waited for my men to regroup, a colonel came and asked me if I had any ideas.

  “Two,” I said. First, I pointed to the gunships waiting for us to cross the highway, and said, “We need to take care of them.

  “Then we head east. There’s a spaceport a few miles east of here. If we can make it to the spaceport, that will be the place where we make our stand.”

  “Do you think we should make a stand?” the colonel asked.

  “Colonel, the Unified Authority has cut us off from the fleet. We have twenty-six thousand men armed with M27s. We are too small to invade Washington and too big to hide in the woods. At the moment, I cannot think of a better alternative. How about you?”

  “Aye, sir. I’ll send my grenadiers bird hunting. Let’s see what they can bring down,” he said with a salute.

  “That sounds like a fine idea, Colonel. Carry on.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  The colonel relayed the order to shoot down the gunships. Several companies sent grenadiers to join in the attack. Three minutes later, a fusillade of rocket-propelled grenades came streaming out of the trees. Most of the choppers skated away untouched. Three gunships left trails of thick smoke in their wake. Two went down.

  The unharmed gunships lifted above the trees, spun, and returned fire. Hovering in the air like wasps around a nest, they launched rockets and fired chain guns. Flames and smoke boiled out from the forest, trees bounced in the air before toppling onto the highway.

  “Everyone out of there!” I yelled.

  “Hey, General, watch this,” a self-assured-sounding voice said over the interLink. My visor identified the cocky phantom as Major Hunter Ritz. I knew the name, but I did not have time to register it.

  The enterprising bastard fired a mortar into the air. It shot out from the trees, leaving a perfectly arced steam trail in its wake. Mortars were big, stupid weapons that were meant for demolishing buildings and landscapes. No one in his right mind would use a mortar to hit a flying target no matter how slow-moving . . . only the gunships weren’t moving.

  One thing about mortars, you could modify their shells. You could attach a radioactive charge, or a nuclear warhead, or a gas canister. In this case, Ritz had added a warhead that emitted an electromagnetic pulse.

  The gunships hovered over the highway like cats watching over a mousehole. When the mortar shell reached the apex of its arc in the center of the flock of gun birds, it dropped a dozen yards, and burst. There was a double flash. First, there was the white and black you get with your basic explosion. Next came a burst of something that looked like steam. It filled the sky and vanished.

  The force of the first explosion sent the gunships skittering into each other. They slid through the air. A few rotor blades collided. Before the collisions could result in real damage, the pulse struck, sending the birds into hibernation. Shields would have protected the gunships from that pulse; but these birds carried heavy armor instead of shields.

  The Unifieds had twenty, maybe twenty-five, gunships in that flock. Ritz knocked them all down with a single shot.

  “Nice shot, Colonel,” I told Ritz on an open frequency that every man on the planet could listen in on.

  “I’m a major, sir,” he said.

  “Not anymore,” I said.

  Ritz’s trick might have slowed them down, but the Unifieds were still herding us, still driving toward the location of their choice. They had more gunships, and their fighters still streaked over the trees. They could end the fight from the air if they wanted, but apparently they didn’t.

  They’re still using us for military exercises, I thought. That strategy had backfired on them before, when we established our empire. It could backfire again.

  We crossed the road and waded back into the woods. It was late in the afternoon, and the winter sky was darkening. The low-hanging layer of gray clouds turned to charcoal as the sun went down, then the trees looked like shadows.

  Traveling through the dark woods, we needed to rely on night-for-day vision. Our lenses would show the world in blue-white monochrome, ignoring shadows and indirect sources of light. We could not, for instance, see the glow of shielded armor once we switched to night-for-day vision. We could not see ten yards ahead without it.

  I issued an order to my company commanders. “Team leaders, automatic riflemen, and grenadiers, switch to night-for-day vision. Riflemen stay with tactical lenses. Fall to the rear of your fire teams. Aim your Viridians on the man in front of you and stay close in behind.”

  Viridian lasers were the laser aiming devices we attached to our guns. They housed both a thin green laser beam used for aiming and a flashlight.

  Darkness came quickly. A suffocating stillness filled the woods. There might have been owls in the trees, but I did not hear them. There might have been a breeze, but I did not hear the rustling of branches. In the solitude of my helmet, I was alone.

  The U.A. fighters ran a flyby. First the woods were silent, then they rang with the roar of engines. Those pilots knew our location and just how to hit us. A few of the men ahead of me stopped to stare into the sky.

  “They could kill us if they wanted to,” commented one of my majors.

  I did not answer. If I confirmed his theory, his fear would spread like a virus through my troops; and I did not like lying to my officers. Better to ignore my men than to scare them or lie.

  We first spotted the glow of shielded armor at 19:00. The golden light looked ghostly as it weaved through the trees at improbable speeds. The units stayed far away. We heard their engines, saw the pale, golden glow, and knew the Jackals were behind us. They wanted us to know they were there, the bastards. They were pushing us forward, guiding us to their trap. Fighters forcing us to stay on the path, Jackals hurrying us along, we were cattle headed to the slaughterhouse.

  Jackals were upgraded jeeps with powerful engines and armored turrets. I’d used them in battle, but I’d never seen Jackals with shields.

  “Ritz, you hear those Jackals back there?” I asked on a direct Link.

  “Hard to miss ’em,” he said.

  “Think you could hit one with a rocket?” I asked.

  “Shouldn’t be much of a problem,” he said.

  “Do you think you can hit one and get away alive?”

  “Wouldn’t do it any other way.”

  “Take three grenadiers. Have them cover your ass in case it comes after you,” I said.

  “Aye, sir,” he said.

  Every man in armor had access to the interLink; but I was the only officer in the field with the commandLink. I could look through any man’s visor, see the world as he saw it. Using optical commands, I created a window that let me look through Ritz’s helmet. I saw his world as he dropped back from our ranks, hiding behind trees, darting behind bushes.

  He did not carry a mortar for this job, just a handheld RPG, a foot-long silver tube that he held in his right hand. He stuck to the shadows. I could hear his breathing over the audio. If we made it through this mission, I would have a word with him about his conditioning. He was breathing heavily, like a man who had just run two miles instead of a couple of hundred feet.

  He scurried to a mound of leaves and logs, slid in behind it, and switched to his tactical view. Dark forest surrounded him.

  “You guys back there?” he asked as he went ba
ck to night-for-day vision.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Right behind you.”

  “Just making sure,” Ritz told them.

  He took one last scan of the landscape, then darted to a spot where three spindly trees grew out of the rotted trunk of a long-dead oak. He switched his visor back to night-for-day and spotted a Jackal a few hundred yards away and closing the distance.

  His breathing slowed. “Yeah, I see you, specker,” he said to himself. “Yeah, that’s right, you just bring your fat ass this way. I got a present for you.” He switched his visor to tactical.

  Seeing the world through the unenhanced tactical view, Ritz was surrounded by darkness. Looking through his visor using my commandLink, I could make out the trees he used for cover, but I saw them only as textures in the blackness. He held out the RPG. I could not see the tube, just the shape of his arm.

  In the distance, the Jackal sped through the forest, dodging obstacles. It juked around trees and skipped over ditches, disappearing briefly behind a hill, then emerging not more than twenty yards from Ritz. He could have hopped out of his hiding hole and popped it. Instead, he waited, letting the vehicle approach.

  “That’s right, darlin’. A little closer. A little specking closer.”

  The kid was patient. The best Marines are patient.

  He didn’t move. The Jackal came within thirty feet of him, dashed right past, and went by unmolested. It streaked away, offering him a clear shot at its tailpipe and turret.

  Ritz stepped out from behind his blind and fired.

  “Next time watch your ass, boys!” he yelled as he switched to night-for-day vision and sprinted for safety. He was screaming. He was whooping. He ran without breathing, then struggled for air, never looking back to see what his grenade had done. He jumped over a fallen log, cut to the left behind a clump of trees, and yelled, “Hell yeah!” as he scrambled up a small rise.