“Son of a bitch,” one of the men said. “What is that?”
“Marsten is flooding the air shafts with superheated air,” I said.
Looking through heat vision, the hall in front of me was long and black with no walls or floor but a flat, tan ceiling. I could see junctions where it intersected with other halls.
“Okay, everybody, take your positions,” I said as I continued to the control room. “Get ready. Our guests should stumble in soon, Marines. I believe we have a debt to square with them.”
“Sir, yes, sir!” they barked. I was using tactics I had learned from the officer who sent us to die on Little Man, and I felt angry at myself for doing it.
As I approached the entrance to operations, I saw the light chocolate-colored heat signatures from the ten men I had posted by the door. Some of them were kneeling with pistols drawn. I also saw their identifier labels and made a point of calling each man by name. They saluted me as I approached. I returned their salutes. “Are you ready, Marines?” I asked. They were.
“Sir, do you think this will work?” Gubler asked, when I entered the control room. I meant to say that I did not know, but that I thought our heat vision would give us a slight advantage. I meant to tell him that I had once gone on a mission with a team of SEALs, and that they had gotten themselves blown up while exiting an empty campsite. I did not have the chance to say any of that, however. The attack started.
It began with a systems blackout in operations. Someone, somewhere, had managed to power down our systems, shields and all. The big screens around the operations room winked once and went dark.
“This is it, boys,” I said over the interLink. “The attack has begun. Stay calm. Remember, with lights out and the heat on, you will see the enemy before he can see you. Now hold your positions.”
I had placed men in every corner of the building, with the idea that they could call each other for help as needed. In the next moment, the SEALs turned that decision into a death sentence. A soft hum began ringing in my ears. “They’re jamming the interLink!” I yelled at Marsten. He did not hear me. He stood three feet from me, and he did not hear my voice through my helmet. I watched him tap his helmet over the right ear.
What a choice they left me, my vision or my sight. I snapped off my helmet and motioned for Marsten and Gubler to do the same. With our helmets off we were now completely blind.
“They jammed the interLink,” Gubler or Marsten said. In the darkness, I could not tell which one spoke. I heard panic in his voice.
“Pretty specking smart!” I yelled, not realizing that with their helmets off, both men could hear me perfectly well.
“The comms console is down,” Marsten or Gubler added. “What do we do?”
“We do the same as everybody else,” I said. “We hold our positions. You defend this room, shoot every SEAL bastard that touches that door.” Since the power was off, taking that room would be a low priority for the SEALs. Marsten and Gubler had worked hard and pulled off miracles, but they were not combat grunts. Perhaps I could keep them alive by hiding them in the useless room.
“Where are you going?” one of them asked.
“I’m going to the motor pool. That’s where they will enter the building,” I said as I put on my helmet. It seemed, at that moment, that perhaps we had caught a lucky break. The power was off on the computers, but the ventilation system was still getting hotter. The ceiling above me looked dark orange through my heat vision.
Before leaving the room, I looked at Marsten and Gubler and tapped my visor. I meant to signal, “stay alert,” but they thought I wanted them to remove their helmets.
I broke the seal on my helmet and yelled, “Stay alert!”
“Oh,” one of them said.
“Goddamn useless techno-humpers,” I said as I left the room. I had my helmet on. They did not hear me.
I’d posted eight men in every corner of the building, with an additional seven men inside the motor pool. Those seven men were our first line of defense. I went to join them. I wanted to sprint down the corridor and through the living area. Made dizzy by my limited vision, the most I could bring myself to do was a fast jog.
I had not run far before I felt the first signs of fatigue. Perhaps the month I had served on the Doctrinaire doing administrative work had taken a fatal toll. Adrenaline shot through my veins, but I still felt weak. My heart pumped crazy hard, and my labored breathing sounded like the wheezing of a man who had run a marathon. I slowed to a stealthy walk as I reached the end of the hall, but I already knew I was too late.
The chocolate-colored cameos of men in combat armor lay on the floor before me. Three of the men lay in fetal positions, curled around their pistols. They had died near the door to the motor pool. When I looked in the door, I saw that the entire floor was covered with multiple layers of green. The bottom layer was the coldest and darkest. It did not move. Above it was a light-colored fog that swirled and undulated. The scene looked like lime-colored mist rising out of emerald-colored water. Inside that dark green, I saw several splashes of purple. I had no idea what it was, but I did not enter the room. Something in that malevolent green color warned me away.
“Damn,” I growled. “Damn!” My voice whirled around in my helmet.
Another body lay facedown in the hall beyond the motor pool. He must have been shot down while trying to run for help.
Seeing that, I did sprint. Running as fast as I could, I came to the storage area in the west corner of the base. I saw muzzle flashes as I approached. They appeared white in my visor. I also saw three Boyd clones hiding behind a wall. Their signature looked orange with a yellow corona. They had something dark on their heads, probably night-for-day goggles. One of them pulled a canister from his belt. The bastards did not hear me coming, and I shot each of them in the head. Their dwarf bodies flopped to the floor, oozing blood that registered bright red in my heat vision. Removing my helmet, I waved it around the corner so that my men would see my identifier. Then I stepped out with hands in the air.
“Lieutenant Harris?” one of the men asked. Without my helmet, I could not see a thing. I stumbled on a Boyd clone.
“How many did we lose?” I asked.
“At least seven,” someone answered.
I nodded. I had already lost a good part of my platoon. “Marsten and Gubler are in the control room. If you can get to them, that will be the best place to fight.”
“Are you coming, sir?” the voice asked.
“I’m going to see what I can do out here,” I said.
“Aye, sir,” the man said. I put on my helmet and saw him doing the same. Three brown silhouettes cut across the hub and ran to the control room. I hoped they would not run into any SEALs. My battle instincts started to kick in. I could feel the adrenaline and endorphins, and my head cleared. The westernmost corner of the base was the machine room. I held my pistol ready and trotted forward. The door of the machine room slid open, and I saw a flood of colors. The vents in the ceiling showed orange. The furnace generating the heat looked yellow. There I found more of that green mist. It seemed fresher this time; very little had darkened and settled on the floor. Whatever that green shit was, I wanted nothing to do with it.
The door on the far side of the machine room was open. Three Boyds stood right outside the door—short, slender orange silhouettes with yellow coronas. I could see the clawlike fingers. I capped the first two as the third one turned to face me. He was too late. I shot him in the shoulder as he spun. His momentum tripped him. As he fell, he tumbled into the green goo. His screams were so loud that I heard him through my helmet.
His heat seemed to charge the mist as he fell into it. It swirled around him, and purple liquid oozed from his body. It was not blood. The blood of the other two Boyds registered red in my heat vision. The liquid was purple and viscous. It seemed to seep from his body and did not spread on the floor. Elite SEALs, the Republic’s most deadly killing machines . . . They had to have been Huang’s idea. How many t
rained killers would Huang send to annihilate a platoon of Marines? He would probably send a single squad against our three—thirteen of his men against our forty-two. Arrogant bastard. I had no way of knowing how many enemy SEALs my men might have capped as they entered the motor pool. The battle might already be over, though I doubted it.
I needed to return to the control room. It all made sense. The herding tactic, the strange stains on the concrete floor and the mattresses—they were using Noxium gas—the gas that Crowley tried to use on us in Gobi. It was heavier than air. That was why the ducts that dispensed the gas on the elevators leading to the Kamehameha ’s Command deck were built into the ceiling. The gas would form a fog along the ground—a fog that registered light green as it chilled and dissipated in the environment. Hiding in the control room, using computer equipment barricades for protection, my men would be easy targets for a Noxium gas pellet.
I leaped over bodies as I ran toward the control room. If they had not jammed the interLink, I could call to my men and warn them. Ours was a battle against the senses—the SEALs left us deaf, we left them blind.
I rounded a corner and slid to a stop. On the ground before me lay the three men I had rescued outside of the storage area. They were dead, probably shot, but a thin green mist swirled like a swarm of flies near their bodies. The SEALs were dissolving the evidence.
The gas had not spread far. I knew that I should have backtracked around the motor pool, but I needed to get to the last of my men. I needed to warn Gubler and Marsten. Taking a meaningless deep breath that would offer me no protection, I edged my way around the walls of the room, never taking my eyes off the slowly melting bodies.
The panels on the far side of the hub slid open as I approached. The three Boyds standing on the other side of the door proved a lot more alert than the ones outside the machine room. I barely had a moment to drop to one knee before bullets struck the wall above my shoulder. I returned fire, hitting one of the three SEALs in the chest. I continued firing, but missed the other men as I hid behind the open door. The Boyds had night-for-day goggles. I should have known that they would. As I prepared to spring out, I heard the muffled clink of something metal against the concrete floor. I was lucky to have heard it through my helmet. A few feet in front of me, a green cloud started to spread across the ground. I had a brief moment to react. Jumping to my feet, I lunged over the canister and into the open hall, shooting as I flew through the air. I hit one of the Boyds. But I landed hard, crashing face-first into a wall. Dazed, I rose on one knee, spun, and fired several more shots.
My head and shoulders stung and white flashes filled my eyes as I struggled to slide away from the door—away from the gas. I could see the jade-colored cloud rising in the darkness. Beyond it, I saw something that looked like a long, purple carpet across the floor of the corridor to the control room. Something struck hard against the side of my helmet, knocking it off my head. I toppled to my elbows, barely conscious at all. I felt around the floor for my pistol but could not find it.
“You failed, Lieutenant,” a high-pitched voice purred. “Your team is dead.”
“Get specked,” I said. Without my helmet I was completely blind, and there was a spreading cloud of Noxium gas somewhere nearby.
Out of the darkness, something grabbed the back of my armor and pulled me to my feet. The Boyd slammed me backward against the wall. I hit hard and fell back to the floor. I moaned and tried to crawl to my feet. The Boyd slashed his sharp fingers across my face, gouging deeply into my cheeks. He kicked me, and I slid across the floor toward the barracks . . . toward the gas. I started to sit up, but he knelt, his weight on my chest, and swiped another claw across my face. He pulled me to my feet, then shoved me backward.
My armor did not clatter when I landed. I landed on one of the SEALs I had shot a few moments earlier. Patting the ground behind me, I felt an arm and traced it. My hand reached the dead man’s forearm as I felt myself being lifted. I felt my attacker slice his claws across my face a third time, and I fell to the floor. I landed on the dead Boyd’s arm, and there it was. I felt the bulge of a pistol under my back when I landed. Barely able to breathe through my badly ripped mouth, with blood pouring down my face, I turned on my side and grabbed the gun.
I felt weight on my shoulder. The Boyd stepped down on me, pressing his foot into my throat and allowing the sharp toe of his boot to dig into my jaw. I hoped he could see clearly as I raised the pistol and fired three shots up the side of his leg.
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THE CLONE REPUBLIC
An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author
PRINTING HISTORY
Ace edition / April 2006
Copyright © 2006 by Steven L. Kent.
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I would like to dedicate this work to
Professor Ned Williams,
because he taught a bear to dance.
BLOOD IN THE SAND
Two of Crowley’s soldiers had seen the drone coming and shielded their eyes at the last moment. They had sprung from their hiding place and chased Ray Freeman as he ran toward his ship. Taking less than a second to aim, I hit one of them in the shoulder from over a hundred yards away. He spun and fell. His friend skidded to a stop and turned to look for me. I fired a shot, hitting him in the face. Freeman’s ship must not have been hidden very far away. Moments after he disappeared over the edge of the canyon, a small spaceworthy flier that looked like a cross between a bomber and transport rose into the air. Unlike the barge that Freeman had used as a decoy, the ship was immaculate, with rows of dull white armor lining its bulky, oblong hull. Gun and missile arrays studded its wings . . . At first I thought Freeman had abandoned the base, but then he doubled back toward the barracks. I could see some of the guns along the wings glinting as I ran to view the f
ight. There was no hurry, however. Crowley’s men were not prepared to fight a ship like this one. The Gatling guns flashed. Some of the guerillas managed to escape, but there was no escape, not from Freeman.
Map by Steven J. Kent, adapted from a public domain NASA diagram
“You had good reason, he said, to be ashamed of the lie which you were going to tell.”
“True, I replied, but there is more coming; I have only told you half.”
—Plato
The Republic, Book 3
INTRODUCTION
A.D. 2510
Location: Ravenwood Outpost; Planet: Ravenwood;
Galactic Location: Scutum-Crux Arm
“You picked a hell of a place to die, Marine,” I told myself.
This planet had no economic value, no strategic value, and no scientific worth. The outpost, with its naked concrete walls, was just a primitive fort on a barren planet surrounded by plains and ice. Every Marine in every platoon that came to defend this spot ended up missing in action—a polite way of saying they were dead . . . gone to the halls of Montezuma. Semper fi, Marine. As I walked through the halls of this shit hole, every boy stopped to salute me. “Ready at your post, Marine?” I would ask, pretending that it mattered.
“Sir, yes, sir!” they would shout, still naïve enough to believe that enthusiasm counted for something. And I would grunt lines like, “Carry on, Marine,” and salute, then move on knowing that nothing any of us did mattered. These boys were dead. Fresh out of basic, loyal to their last breath, and served up to die. I could not save them any more than I could save myself. In a couple of days, a patrol would come looking for survivors and find the base abandoned. The Corps would list us as missing in action, some officer would say, “Damn, not another platoon,” and send the next forty-two men to replace us. Legend had it that space monsters prowled the surface of Ravenwood. Most of my boys believed it was space aliens attacking the fort. Facing their deaths, these boys turned back the clock to the days when authors wrote books about alien invasions. But those authors were wrong. Once we entered space we discovered that we were almost alone in the galaxy. The only thing man had to fear was man himself. Up ahead, a couple of my boys knelt in the shadow of a doorway and prayed. “You do that,” I mumbled. “You pray. Why not?” Once the guns are loaded and the troops in place, God and chance are all you have left .
The Clone Republic Page 39
