The Clone Republic

by Steven L. Kent

  On Earth, they still saw Hubble as an outer space Eden, but Earth was sixty thousand light-years away. The astronomers who named Hubble’s solar system after an ancient religious order had no way of knowing that they were looking at an extinct vision. The images they saw were older than civilization. Viewed from observatories in the much closer Sagittarius Arm, Hubble was a scene of grand destruction. From their telescopes, scientists watched as Templar, the eponymous central star of the Templar System, expanded. Once a benevolent sun, Templar died as suns often do, swelling until it devoured half of the solar system around it. Before collapsing into itself, Templar engulfed A8Z3, A8Z2, and A8Z1, its three closest neighbors. Those planets vanished entirely.

  Fifty thousand light-years away, the flaring red surface of Templar had just begun to spread into the orbits of the next neighboring planets. I have watched video images of it melting entire mountain ranges and boiling seas into steam—images of a fifty-thousand-year-old apocalypse that are still viewable fifty thousand light-years away.

  A8Z4 and Hubble (A8Z5), the fourth and fifth planets from Templar, were not completely destroyed, though the dying sun scorched their surfaces. A8Z4 now existed as a wisp of dust particles and gas. You could fire a missile through it. The once-rich soil of Hubble was cooked to ash, and its atmosphere became toxic.

  The kettle opened to reveal the rim of a sweeping valley. As the platoon hustled out of the armored transport, I looked across the panorama and noticed how the black sky and gray landscape seemed to stretch forever.

  During our briefing, Captain McKay described the full extent of this invasion. Within the hour, armored transports would land thirty thousand Marines on this desecrated planet with another seventy thousand Marines waiting in reserve.

  The outer skin of Hubble’s atmosphere was formed of combustible gas that exploded in harmless flashes when heated by rocket engines. We had so many ships passing through the atmosphere that the sky looked like it was on fire.

  “Positions, men,” Sergeant Shannon bellowed. “Fan out. Secure the area.”

  We knew the drill. Shannon had trained us well. He had rehearsed every step of securing a landing area with us hundreds of times.

  “You heard the sergeant,” I said to my fire team. The four men on my team formed a diamond, and we headed south to the ridge. The ash crunched and compressed under my boots. I did not sink; it was not like stepping into water or quicksand. It felt more like walking on dry leaves. The sun that burned up this system might have burned out, but it still generated heat, over two hundred degrees. The planet’s landscape spread before us as a perpetual nightscape. On other worlds I sometimes regretted the way our night-for-day vision blotted out color; but it didn’t matter on a desolate brick, like Hubble. Everything was gray or black except for the amber-colored condensation that formed on my visor. I wiped at it with the tips of my fingers, leaving a translucent swirl. Fine beads of oil hung in the air of the planet like steam after a summer rain.

  The first of the barges landed no more than thirty yards from where I stood. Jets of fiery exhaust flared from its engines. The blast blew dust that stuck to the oil on the front of my visor. I tried to clean it, but the hardened plastic on my battle armor only smeared the film. When I looked back at the barge, the smear obscured my view of a column of low-gravity tanks rolling out of its hold. LG tanks were ten feet tall and thirty feet long—built long and low to take advantage of any available gravity. They were iron beasts carrying artillery, particle beams, and missiles. Weighing nearly two hundred thousand pounds each, they sank six inches into the clinker soil.

  “Holy shiiiiit,” Lee gasped over the interLink. “Sergeant Shannon, Harris, you’d better have a look at this.” Lee stood at the edge of the valley. I joined him.

  “What are you looking at?” I asked.

  “Ping it,” Lee said.

  Shannon let out a litany of four-letter words.

  Using optic commands, I initiated the sonic locator. My helmet emitted an inaudible ping that bounced across the landscape. One moment, I saw the valley below me as a wasted desert with cinder for soil; the next moment, the sonic locator overlaid that scene with a network of translucent green trenches. Hundreds of snake shafts crisscrossed the ground in nonsensical patterns. I did not know what the excavations could be used for. When I discussed them with veteran Marines, I used to get a shrug and a tired look. To them, snake shafts were as baffling as the giant stone heads on Easter Island, something that religious fanatics built for the sake of building. I thought that there had to be more to it than that.

  “Those can’t all be snake shafts,” I said. “There are too many of them.”

  My sonic locator sent out another ping as the ghosts of the first ping faded. An identical pattern appeared.

  “The Mogats could not have dug those,” I said. “They only left Ezer Kri a few weeks ago.”

  “Then somebody has been digging into this planet for years,” Lee said. “Think they knew they would hide here someday?”

  “I don’t know what to make of it,” Shannon said as he left to return to his squad. As Lee and I debated the improbabilities of the snake shafts, a gust of wind blasted so hard it almost pushed me over. I looked back to see the gray hull of another barge touching down. The barge’s oblong body settled with a loud creak, then made a loud mechanical whine as the cargo bay doors opened. It carried Cobra gunships—low-flying units used to cover ground troops. With their giant racks of guns and rockets, Cobras looked more like gigantic bumble-bees than snakes. The gunships’ engines kicked into gear as a conveyor belt moved them to the front of the cargo bay, and they launched into the air. My vision remained clouded. I tried brushing the oil-based mud from my visor with my glove again, but that only smeared it more.

  By that time, over twenty thousand Marines crowded the ridge with another ten thousand on the way. I looked across the scene and took mental inventory of the men and tanks. “Lee, gunships, tanks . . . this is a full-scale invasion,” I said.

  “I’ve never seen anything on this scale,” he agreed. “Shannon is probably the only active Marine who has.”

  The oil mist that passed for humidity in Hubble’s atmosphere distorted sounds, but it did not smother them. A wing of ten Harriers zoomed over our heads. Two seconds passed before the roar of their engines tore through my helmet. By the time the sound caught up to us, the Harriers had slowed for a methodical sweep of the valley. As the fighters approached the horizon, I heard the thunder of missiles and saw tiny bubbles of light along the valley floor.

  “Move out!” McKay’s voice bellowed over the interLink.

  “Gentlemen, let’s roll!” Shannon shouted.

  That was our call. The first wave of the attack consisted of thirty thousand Marines, a mere five hundred tanks, and thirty gunships. The Harriers that preceded us pounded the enemy’s gun placements, bunkers, and air defense. Whatever ships and airfields the Mogats possessed, would now lie in ruin. As the Harriers wove their fire, our job was to cause chaos. We would breach the Mogat lines and scatter their defenders so that the rest of our landing party could deliver a killing blow. The Mogats were the men who had massacred our platoon. We owed them.

  “Lets go!” Lee yelled to his men over a platoon-wide open channel on the interLink. Lunging over the precipice, we used our jetpacks to glide down the sloping valley wall. Our packs set off small fireballs in the gassy air. From above, we must have looked like a swarm of locusts with exploding asses. Once we reached the valley floor, we dropped to our feet and trotted toward battle. From an observation craft far overhead, one of our commanders signaled us to break into a picket line by illuminating a formation symbol in our visors. We rushed to comply. Forming diagonal lines with our fire teams, we stretched the width of the valley.

  “There cannot possibly be any living people on this planet,” I said to Shannon over the interLink.

  “Shut up, Harris,” Shannon said. “Keep the Link open.” Shannon’s words sounded harsh, but a cer
tain lilt in his voice suggested agreement.

  The ground started to vibrate under my feet. I looked back in time to see rows of tanks reaching the bottom of the valley wall. “Skiing” with our jetpacks, we had easily out-paced the heavy LGs down the slope; but now they were catching up to us quickly. Seeing their approach, I radioed my team to pick up speed.

  I wiped the glass with the side of my forefinger, scraping the dust and grease as best I could; but the stiff plates that formed my gloves just would not absorb the oil from my visor. The landscape around me remained out of focus.

  “Platoon leaders, report,” Captain McKay ordered. He took their reports over the open link so that everyone in our platoon could hear them.

  Tim Grayson, the sergeant over the Thirteenth Platoon, responded. Sergeant Shannon said nothing. McKay waited for his report then called, “Sergeant Shannon, report.”

  “Have you run a sonic sweep?” Shannon asked.

  “Affirmative,” McKay said, in a voice that was both authoritative and efficient. “We are aware of the tunnels. We have scanned the tunnels for enemy personnel and equipment as well.” He sounded impatient. The ships orbiting Hubble had much more sophisticated equipment than the scaled-down sonic locators in our helmets.

  I looked back and saw Shannon kneel with one knee in the ash soil. “All clear in this sector, sir,”

  Shannon said. I could tell he felt frustrated by McKay’s cool response, but his voice hid it well. The odd atmosphere continued to distort sounds. In an oxygen atmosphere, the rumble of the LG tanks would have rattled my armor. During field exercises on Earth, I could hear gunships from hundreds of yards and could tell which direction the sound came from. On Hubble, I did not hear the gunships until after they had flown past me, and the growl of the tanks seemed to come from all directions.

  “Watch yourselves,” McKay shouted over the interLink.

  The tanks caught up to us. A less rigid formation flashed in my visor, and my team fell back, keeping pace with the tanks. We moved at a fast jog, maybe six miles per hour. You had to watch your step in the low gravity. We had weights in our boots; but it was easy to stumble. If you fell in front of a tank . . . An LG rumbled past me. The tops of its spools were just about even with my head. The dust it kicked up stuck to my visor, and I was temporarily blinded. I did not dare stop with tanks rolling past, so I stumbled forward as I scraped at the dust with the side of my finger. When I removed my hand, I saw something on the tank that left me numb. The words “PFC Harold Goldberg” appeared over a muddy spot in the tread. The tank must have run over Goldberg, crushing his helmet into fragments, some of which were trapped in the tread.

  Ahead, at the end of the valley, I caught a clear view of Harriers circling in the air, dropping bombs and firing missiles. Three gunships flew low overhead, skittering into the distance and joining that battle. Suddenly the night sky boiled as dozens of fighters burst through the combustible outer atmosphere.

  “They’re launching ships!” McKay yelled over the interLink. “They’re trying to escape.”

  Reality had finally caught up to the Morgan Atkins colony of Ezer Kri. They had caught a platoon unaware in Hero’s Fall, then outsmarted a frigate, but now the U.A. Navy had them trapped. They would pay for their aggression.

  “You’re not going to get away this time,” I whispered to myself.

  Another minute passed, and I caught a quick glimpse of the battle ahead. A spark of light lit a distant ridge for a moment. The flash was so fast that I almost missed it. Slowing to a trot, I switched my visor to telescopic lenses. My dirty visor obscured my view, and Hubble’s dark atmosphere made a clear sighting almost impossible, but I caught a glimpse of Harriers swarming the air above a lofty fire.

  “Lee, have you seen what’s going on up there?”

  “I just saw a specking LG run over one of Grayson’s men,” Lee panted over our team frequency. “Stay alert.”

  I do not know if I sensed a shift in the ground or simply sensed the danger. For some reason I stopped and turned to watch the LG that had pushed up ahead of me. The ground in front of the tank rumbled and several columns of ash spun into the air. Those twenty-foot twisters were the only warning. As they dissolved, the ground in front of the LG crumbled, leaving a deep trench in its place. Riding so near to the ground, the low-gravity tank was an easy target. It teetered on the edge of the trench for a moment, but its momentum and weight sent it forward, and it tumbled nose first into the hole. The ground shook, and a flash of flame shot into view.

  “Holy shit!” Lee shouted into the interLink.

  Until I saw the tank topple into that shaft, I had not felt the hormone rush that I had experienced during the battle on Gobi. Suddenly I felt the warmth running through my blood. The feeling was soothing. It was more than soothing. It felt good. “The bastards rigged their friggin’ snake shafts to cave in,” I shouted. I heard Sergeant Shannon. “Command! Command! Stop all movements! Stop all movements!” But Shannon’s warning came too late.

  Looking around the valley, I saw the ground crumbling in all directions as dozens of trenches appeared. To my left, an LG tank struggled to reverse itself before it rolled into one trench, then backed into another. The men piloting the tanks did not wear breathing equipment. If they evacuated, they would be strangled by Hubble’s toxic air.

  “Stop all movements! Repeat, stop all movements!” Shannon continued. Another tank to my left tried to pivot around a trench, but the powdery soil beneath it caved in. A group of men walking beside it fell in as well. Several more vehicles had fallen farther back; I could see their useless hulls leaning out of the trenches. Flames burst through their armor.

  “Repeat, halt all movements!” Shannon bellowed then fell silent. By this time endorphins and adrenaline coursed through my veins.

  The officers commanding the invasion would have known about the snake shafts. At least those who were alive would know. Some field officers were stationed aboard a mobile command center that more likely than not was now lying ass up in a ditch.

  The invasion force ground to a stop, giving me a moment to survey the damage. I counted sixty-three destroyed tanks, but I might have missed some in the dust and smoke. There was no way of estimating how many men had fallen when the shafts caved in beneath them.

  Across the scarred field, the tanks that had not fallen into trenches remained perfectly still. The men within them were trapped. Any movement might send them over a ledge.

  “Gather your men,” Shannon ordered his fire team leaders over the interLink.

  “Fall in,” I called to my men. Only one man answered.

  “Amblin? Schultz? Respond,” I called out. When they did not reply, I hailed them twice more.

  “Sergeant,” I said, hailing Shannon.

  “What?”

  “I’m missing two men,” I said. “Amblin and Schultz. Requesting permission to look for them.”

  “You can look; but, Harris, do not drop in the snake shafts,” Shannon barked back. “Even if you find one of your men in a shaft, do not go in after him.”

  “Understood,” I said, though I did not understand.

  “You have ten minutes to look,” Shannon said. “Find them or not, in ten minutes get back to the platoon.”

  I called to my remaining team member. “You heard him. We have fifteen minutes to locate Amblin and Schultz.”

  We split up. I turned toward the rear of our stalled forces. What had once been an endless and empty strip of land now looked like a junkyard. The fire-blackened tails of low-gravity tanks poked out of the ground like scattered rocks. The oily Hubble atmosphere had smothered the fires that had erupted out of the ruined tanks, but smoke still rose from their hatches.

  I passed a trench and stared down the hull of a derelict tank. It had fallen nose first, smashing its turrets under its own immense weight. Pausing to wipe the grease from my visor, I looked at the wreckage. Under other circumstances I might have hopped on to the back of the tank for a closer look; but w
ith the crew still inside, I did not want to take a chance of making things worse. A layer of sludgy, brown fog filled the bottom of the trench, obscuring the nose of the tank. As I looked more closely, I saw the bodies of dead Marines along the edges of the snake shaft. At first I thought that they might have jumped from the tank, but there were too many bodies, and most wore armor. Some of the bodies were burned. My visor did not register the identity signals from any of them. Whatever the fog inside the trenches was, it destroyed the electronics inside their combat armor. I did not want to know what it might have done to the men wearing the armor.

  Amblin’s armor still gave off its identification signal. As I looked across a collapsed snake shaft, I saw him. He must have caught on to a ledge as the ground collapsed around him. He lay sprawled, facedown, over the lip of the trench like a man hanging off the edge of a swimming pool. But Amblin was not moving.

  I knelt beside him. When I touched his helmet, it rolled away from the rest of his armor. A layer of darkened blood sloshed around inside his visor. Shocked, I stumbled backward, my attention still fixed on the maroon liquid that seeped out from his shoulder pads.

  “Dammmnnn!” I bellowed inside my helmet. Amblin and I had never been friends, but we trained together. I’d known I could depend upon him.

  I remained sitting on the cinder soil for another minute, fighting to regain my composure. Everything had gone so wrong. Our invading army sat in a morass. How had they done it? How did these Mogat hoodlums, these small-time criminals and religious fanatics, outsmart our fleet?

  “Lee, Harris, come on back,” Shannon said.

  “I found Amblin,” I said.

  “Is he okay?” Shannon asked, his voice perking up.