The Clone Republic (Clone 1)

by Steven L. Kent

  “Do you want this, sir?” the man asked.

  “Take it to Marsten,” I said. “Tell him that it’s still transmitting an identifier signal and ask him if he can access the data chip.”

  Though Marsten was surely a gifted hacker, I had little hope that he would extract information from that data chip, assuming it was even in there. Combat helmets were complex pieces of equipment with optical movement readers, multiple lenses, interLink wiring, and more. It seemed like too much to hope for the read-and-relay data chip to be in that small section. Luck, for once, was on our side.

  We did not find anything else of significance in the motor pool. As I left to return to the hub, I saw two of my men praying. “You do that,” I whispered. “Why not.” A few minutes later, Marsten contacted me.

  “Lieutenant Harris, I think we got it rigged.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  “Rigged” was a good choice of words. Marsten had strung a full dozen wires into a small socket along the left edge of the visor. Gubler connected that rat’s nest of wires into the back of a computer.

  “The chip was damaged to begin with, and this is not the way these chips were meant to be read,” Marsten said, by way of apology, as he turned on a computer monitor. “We won’t get much, but we should get something.”

  Rather than a streaming video feed, we got a single image on the screen. It could only have been the last thing Gearhart saw as the bullet struck him. Jagged lines marked the screen where his visor had already shattered.

  Gearhart must have been guarding the motor pool when the enemy arrived. The image on the screen showed three men climbing through holes they had bored—the holes my men were currently sealing back up.

  I could see two of the men’s faces. The third, likely the man who killed Gearhart, was hidden behind a rifle scope. One of the other men held a pistol in one hand as he pulled himself forward with the other. His clawlike fingers were wrapped over the edge of the hole.

  “They all have the same face. Are they clones?” Gubler asked as he stared into the screen.

  “Adam Boyd,” I said.

  “You know him?” Marsten asked.

  I thought about the scars around my forehead and right eye. “We’ve met.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Two years earlier, when I first reported to Gobi Station, I dreamed only of serving the Republic. My greatest ambition was the life of a Marine, but only twenty-four months later I no longer gave a damn about the Earth, the Unified Authority, or the Marines. Programming or no, I was done with all of it.

  To me, the Unified Authority was people like Robert Thurston, who considered clones expendable. He was no more antisynthetic than he was antibullets. Both were supplies that could easily be replaced and should be used to strategic advantage. On Little Man, he sent twenty-three hundred loyal Marines to their deaths without a backward glance. And Ravenwood . . . Ravenwood wasn’t a fuel depot, it was a training ground. Admiral Huang was using Marines as live targets to train his new breed of SEAL clones how to kill. I doubted that Huang knew that I had beat the shit out of one of his clones at Sad Sam’s Palace, but I hoped that he did.

  If only I could have peeked. One quick look at the old security tapes and I might have understood the SEALs’ tactics. Screw superior numbers and the home field advantage, I wanted to know what methods the Boyd clones used, what weapons they carried, and what made those deep purple stains on the floors. But they had made sure that I could not peek. No one cared if it was a matter of life and death for my platoon; the important thing was that the SEALs have their training exercises. Peeking at past performances would be breaking the rules of their game.

  If the SEALs stuck to their past schedule, they would attack within five hours of our entering the base. We spent three hours patching walls that the SEALs could easily breach, repairing systems the SEALs had twice destroyed, and gathering specks of evidence of past SEAL victories.

  That was how the past platoons had played it, too. I needed to start developing new ways to play the game. The key, I thought, was not getting herded into a group.

  The stains on the ground might not have been blood, but they represented death. Looking at the evidence, I reconstructed the last assault. The Boyd clones had circled the outer halls, killing off the stragglers and herding the rest of the platoon into squad bay.

  There, with the last Marines using bunks for cover, the SEALs finished the battle. They massacred the platoon. They had done something awful, but I had no idea what it might have been.

  In the waning minutes before the fight, I came up with an idea that might give us a small advantage. “Marsten,” I called over the interLink, “kill the lights and close off the vents.”

  “Do you want me to shut off the heat?” Marsten asked.

  “No, bump the heat as far as it will go. Just close the vents.”

  “The vents are in the ceiling, sir. It’s going to get cold in here.”

  “That’s what I want, Marsten. I want this base cold and dark. Do you have that?”

  “Yes, sir,” Marsten said in an unsure voice.

  “I’m on my way to the control room. I’ll explain when I get there,” I said.

  Next, I spoke over the platoon-wide frequency. “This is Harris,” I barked. “I have given the order to power down the lights and turn off the vents. I want everybody to switch to heat vision. I repeat, do not use night-for-day vision, use heat vision.”

  An eerie, almost liquid, darkness flooded the halls as the lights went out. For the first few seconds, I did not see anything other than the heat signatures of the men around me. Their armor muffled their colors; instead of orange with a yellow corona, they were brown and red. Groping blindly, I found my way to a wall, then felt my way to the door.

  “Begging the lieutenant’s, pardon, sir, but I can’t see a specking thing,” someone complained over the interLink. “Can I switch to night-for-day?”

  “No!” I shouted. “We’re running out of time, and we cannot do what the last platoon did.”

  “And the lieutenant believes that fighting blind will help?” another man asked.

  “You can bet the last platoon leader did not try that,” another man quipped.

  “Take a look at the ceiling, asshole,” I said.

  By that time, a faint orange glow appeared along the ceiling and the tops of the walls. It wasn’t bright, but the air in the ventilation shafts was only getting hotter. Soon the heat signature from the shafts would give us a clear outline of every room. We could tell the shapes of the rooms and where we stood in them. We would see each other. We would have marginal lighting, and the Boyd clones would be entirely blind.

  “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 trained 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.”