The Clone Sedition

by Steven L. Kent

  The trunk that led to the grand arcade was nearly empty, but screams and thumping echoed from the intersection up ahead. When I looked in that direction, I saw no people.

  The first of my snipers entered the grand arcade on the third floor, and somebody shot him. My second sniper spotted the assassin. He was up on a catwalk, about ten feet below the atrium’s glass cathedral ceiling. My sniper aligned his shot and fired, hitting his target.

  If he’d asked permission, I would not have allowed the shot, not with an M27.

  The man dropped his rifle and fell over the edge of the catwalk and into the roiling mass of people below. This had about as much effect as throwing a lit match into a blazing furnace. The already hysterical mob remained hysterical.

  My sniper was three floors up, standing near a corner, hiding behind a rail. I could see him standing by himself, and I could see a flood of people fighting and shoving to enter the trunks leading to the other wings of the spaceport. They were as crowded together as the sand in the upper funnel of an hourglass.

  Using my visor, I marked the entrance to the service tunnels that led to barracks and the power plant. It was several hundred yards ahead of me…several hundred very exposed yards.

  The men who blew up that first corridor would not repeat that act of sabotage. If they detonated a bomb anywhere near the reactor, they would die along with me and the New Olympians. If the power plant below the arcade exploded, it would take half the hemisphere with it.

  “You see anything?” I asked.

  “Looks clear, sir,” he said.

  Before stepping out of my hiding place, I asked myself how much I trusted this Marine. I trusted his marksmanship. He’d proved himself several times. I trusted his reflexes, too. He was quick.

  I wouldn’t need his protection once I reached the tunnel. I would be in a winding, tight environment, with low ceilings and no room to maneuver. Any fighting I did down there would be close-range.

  I said, “Just get me to the tunnels alive.”

  “Not a problem, sir,” he said.

  I scanned the area. Far ahead of me, the vanishing mob continued to scream and fight and push. The upper decks of the grand arcade had emptied. Thousands of bodies lay motionless on the hard ground. I’d been in battles with smaller body counts, and there were hundreds of living casualties as well.

  A lone voice resonated through the cavernous space. It was the keening of a child.

  I scanned the area ahead of me and spotted a little girl crawling between two dead bodies. I did not know enough about children to guess their ages accurately, but she was no bigger than a backpack. There was blood on her face and her clothing.

  I searched the upper decks of the atrium and saw no traces of people hiding behind walls or rails. Not that heat vision always spots them. There are limits to heat vision. Thick walls and stealth armor can mask heat signatures.

  I ran half the length of the grand arcade, passing defunct stores that had been converted into cave dwellings, passing the abandoned bric-a-brac of an abandoned people, and passing the lifeless remains of the dead. My armored boots clacked across the floor. I held my M27 out and ready, my finger across the trigger instead of along it. Anyone or anything that stepped in my way now was forfeit.

  Ahead of me, I saw the doorway that led down into the spaceport underground. I scanned the area around it, then used a sonar locator to ping the entrance.

  There were people in the tunnel, hiding in the darkness. They might have been refugees trying to escape from the panic, but I doubted it. They hid along the sides of the tunnel, lurking in the shadows. As I approached, I switched to night-for-day lenses and spotted one of them, a man in civilian clothing holding an automatic rifle. As I started down the ramp, I fired a burst and killed the man. His partner swung out from the other side of the tunnel. I shot him before he could aim his gun.

  “I have it from here,” I called to my sniper. He didn’t answer. I didn’t think about that. I didn’t think about checking in with Ritz to see how the battle outside was going.

  I was a fool.

  CHAPTER

  SEVENTY-TWO

  Colonel Hunter Ritz pushed through an air lock, stepping over limbs and bodies, wading through the dead. His visor identified the names of casualties. They were all still listed as active members of the Enlisted Man’s Marines even though they had changed sides.

  He reached the far side of the air lock. His gun up and ready, he leaped over the last of the bodies and stumbled onto the runway. The spaceport’s artificial gravity did not extend outside to the runway. Ritz leaped out of the building as a 186-pound man in ten pounds of combat armor; he landed as a 63-pound man in just under four pounds of armor.

  Ritz saw four Marines in white armor running along the edge of the runway. They stopped. Two of them fired at him. He fired back. They used M27s. He used an RPG. Their bullets hit the ground near his feet. His rocket hit the ground near their feet as well, killing all four of them.

  “Assholes,” Ritz said as he tossed away the empty tube. He pulled out his M27.

  He did not know if he had just killed the last members of Spaceport Security or if more lurked around the runway. He’d lost a third of his men, but he’d defeated an enemy with superior numbers.

  Ritz saw a man in white armor—security armor—limping. Without waiting to see if the man had a gun, Ritz shot him.

  Scattered bodies littered the runway. The corpses weren’t stacked three high as they were in the air locks, but the signs of battle were unmistakable. Out here, they looked like the debris around a crash site. Some lay in groups, some lay scattered. The farther down the runway he looked, the fewer bodies he saw.

  “You out here Riley? You still alive?” Ritz asked over the interLink. In his head he added the words, “you dumb bastard.”

  No one answered.

  Ritz used the interLink to contact Wayson Harris. He said, “I have a battle report for you, General. Do you want the good news or the bad news?” He didn’t wait for Harris to respond. He said, “We beat Martian Security. We’re still mopping up strays, but it’s over. I’d be surprised if we lost another man.”

  Ritz gave Harris a few seconds to respond and went on talking. He said, “Here’s the bad news, General. I hope you’re getting this. The de Gaulle is about to crash our party. She’s launched her transports. Want to know how I know so much?”

  He waited for Harris to answer but heard nothing.

  “I can see them in the sky. You can see them, too, if you voyeur me.”

  There were no clouds above the spaceport, but cloudlike trails of smoke or steam laced the tea-colored sky. From this distance, the trails looked as tiny as raindrops. There were hundreds of them.

  It was the end. The transports would land twenty thousand infantrymen. They would have tanks and mortars and gunships and fighters. Ritz toyed with the idea of not warning his men…letting them die celebrating victory. The moment he warned them, they would dig in for a fight they could not possibly win.

  They’re good men, he thought. They won’t go down without a fight. But how much of a fight could his remaining two thousand Marines put up against an entire division?

  “Are you getting this, General?”

  No answer.

  “Tell you what, Harris,” said Ritz. He laughed. It was the end, he might as well go down smiling. He repeated himself. “I’ll tell you what, Harris. Me and my men are going to go down fighting. We’ll hold those bastards off as long as we can.”

  The transports dropped through the atmosphere quickly. The commanding officers on those birds would give their men one last speech in which they would instruct them to take no quarter.

  “Good luck, Harris,” said Ritz. He didn’t worry about Harris, nothing short of a nuclear explosion would kill that clone. No person alive could kill Harris, not even Ray Freeman, he thought.

  Colonel Ritz used the interLink to contact his Marines. He said, “I hope you boys saved some spare rounds.” That was
all he said.

  Something caught his attention.

  Two swarms of ships launched from the direction of the Air Force base. They were small ships. From where Ritz stood, they looked like the tiny silver fish you could catch in a stream. He knew they were the explorers, of course. Those were the ships that had brought him and his Marines to Mars.

  They emerged from behind the horizon. A few of them flew up into space, but most of them flew in an arc that led toward the transports from the de Gaulle. That was when the explosions began.

  Had Ritz been a few miles closer, he might have gone blind.

  CHAPTER

  SEVENTY-THREE

  Location: The Churchill

  Date: May 2, 2519

  Cutter saw that the explorers had launched. He shouted, “What the hell is wrong with them!” He was an officer who prided himself on remaining calm in battle; now he was watching a suicide. The de Gaulle had not only entered the battle, she had launched her transports.

  “Scramble every specking fighter!” Hauser shouted. “Attack de Gaulle!”

  As the fighters launched, Hauser fired torpedoes even though the target was too far away.

  If the explorer pilots want to commit suicide, there is nothing we can do, Cutter told himself. Maybe they have it right. The de Gaulle is launching transports. With two hundred ships in the air, some might escape. No one will escape on the ground.

  He watched the display. Five of the tiny ships rose straight up, 202 explorers followed a path that took them high above the spaceport, where they would run into the transports.

  The display showed the explorers as tiny specks, little helpless motes of silver that looked no more capable of defending themselves in holographic space than they were able to defend themselves in reality. The transports had powerful shields and hulls designed to withstand missiles. They did not have guns or torpedoes, but they would not need them to destroy a fleet of explorers. The transports could ram through them as if they were made of smoke.

  On the display, the shining silver dots approached the red boxes that represented transports. When they were within a mile of each other, the explorers dissolved in miniscule flashes of light.

  “Holy hell, they’re broadcasting,” said Hauser.

  The explorers had risen in a swarm, and they disappeared in a swarm. Two hundred tiny broadcasts erupted. Transports were made for war and able to withstand missiles and particle weapons, but not the sheer volume of energy unleashed by broadcast engines.

  Cutter looked up from the display, and said, “Satellite view.”

  Beside the tactical display, a large screen showed a video feed. A ghostly green ribbon wavered and shimmered in the Martian atmosphere. The sudden release of unbridled energy had triggered an aurora effect. On the dark surface of the planet, tiny sparks glowed like embers, the carcasses of fallen transports.

  Cutter looked back at the holographic display. The ship he called the Toothless had broadcasted out. He had no idea where she had gone and no way of tracking her. She might have broadcasted to Terraneau, in the Scutum-Crux Arm. He did not air his suspicion.

  About one hundred thousand miles away, the de Gaulle stood her ground, but not for long.

  Cutter asked, “Who is the captain of the de Gaulle?”

  “Meade, sir. Alan Meade,” said Lieutenant Nolan. He had looked it up on his computation pad.

  “Send Captain Meade a message. Tell him that I don’t give a damn if he and his men want to commit suicide, but I want my ship back. Tell him if he surrenders the de Gaulle now, he might be out in time to enjoy his grandchildren.”

  The sailors on the bridge who heard Cutter laughed. Meade was a clone, incapable of reproduction without the use of test tubes and lab equipment.

  Everybody laughed; but the sailors who suspected they might be clones themselves laughed more nervously than those around them.

  “They’re not responding, sir,” said Nolan.

  The de Gaulle sat silent and still until the Lancet and the Christy flew into tracking range.

  “Give Meade one last chance to surrender,” said Cutter.

  Before Nolan could relay the message, the de Gaulle launched into space at maximum acceleration.

  Hauser started to instruct his helmsmen to follow her, but Cutter silenced him. He said, “The de Gaulle does not have a broadcast engine. She isn’t going anywhere.”

  Earth was surrounded by the fleets of the Enlisted Man’s Navy. Jupiter was five hundred million miles away and uninhabitable. At the speeds the de Gaulle could travel, the closest planet of strategic value was over a century away.

  Cutter said, “We need to stay here in case more guests arrive.” He settled back in his seat, then added, “Let me know when we have contact with the spaceport. If I know Harris, that could be anytime now.”

  CHAPTER

  SEVENTY-FOUR

  Location: Mars SpaceportDate: May 2, 2519

  Someone had turned off the lights. That didn’t change things, I had night-for-day lenses in my visor. I had heat vision that allowed me to peek through corners when I could not see around them. The walls down in this area were made of steel and cement, thick enough that they might mask a heat signature, but they would not hide it entirely.

  The night-for-day lenses in my visor showed the world devoid of depth and color, with everything in striations from black to white with a bluish hue. Emergency lights glowed so brightly over signs that they rendered them unreadable through my visor. Halls that stretched unlit for more than two hundred feet looked like black holes. The pipes and fixtures that lined the ceiling looked all to have been painted the exact same color. Seen with the naked eye, they might have been yellow and white and pink for all I knew; but through night-for-day vision, they all looked bluish white.

  I searched the first hall at a slow speed, coasting ahead carefully, searching open doorways and finding no one. I’d been in the underground for maybe five minutes before noticing Ritz’s prolonged silence. His name appeared on my commandLink; but when I tried to reach him, I did not connect.

  Somebody was sludging again.

  Whoever was doing the sludging, I thought he would also be the one who sent Riley and all of the security force after Watson and Freeman.

  Walking alone through dark, empty halls, I had an odd sense of déjà vu, and not a kind one. I felt the same crippling sense of dread I had felt when I stared into the ocean back in Hawaii.

  The spaceport’s water and a third of its oxygen came from the same source. Beneath the spaceport sat huge veins of underground ice. The Unified Authority had created a robotic underground mining operation that harvested that ice and shuttled it into the building using subterranean tunnels. The ice was melted and filtered. Some was sent to a plant in which the hydrogen and oxygen molecules were separated. The Os were fed into the spaceport ventilation system while the Hs were released into the atmosphere.

  The machinery in those plants was old, powerful, and as reliable as a chemical latrine. I had heard somewhere that the Oxygen Separation Plant was fifty years old and still used the same machinery. A low thrumming rose from the blast chambers in which the Hs were separated from the Os. I was a thousand feet from the plant, but I could feel the vibrations in the floor.

  A man hid behind a doorway up ahead. I spotted him with my heat vision. All I saw was his specter, a figure in glowing orange and yellow, crouching, holding something long and straight. It could have been a rifle, it could have been a pipe.

  He was a smart man. He would be in the door of the oxygen plant when we met. I would not fire my weapon into those old relics, not unless I wanted to risk killing millions.

  I thought about the toxic atmosphere leaking into the spaceport through the air locks. I thought about…

  That was when I saw his friends. In all, four men attacked from four different directions, a classic ambush. I would have seen it was coming had I read the lay of the land.

  Three of them came at me from behind as the fourth man swung
around the corner. I heard the footsteps, spun, fired my M27, and dropped two of them. The third man fired his pistol, grazing my left shoulder, causing a moment of numbness followed by fire. I fired at the bastard, hit him in the face with three bullets, hollowing the back of his head with the first.

  The guy coming from the Oxygen Separation Plant slammed the butt of his rifle into the back of my head. Bullets and shrapnel could penetrate my helmet, but knives and rifle butts never got through. He hit me a good one, though. Had I not been wearing combat armor, he would have broken my neck and shattered my skull.

  Despite my armor, the force of the blow sent me face-first into a wall, and I dropped my M27.

  I hit the wall, slumped to the floor, and recovered my senses all in the same second. My head hurt, and my shoulder burned, and my combat reflex kicked into full gear. I no longer gave a shit about pain or shoulder wounds or blast chambers. The haze went from my thoughts, and the need for violence returned.

  The man spun his rifle around and aimed it at my head. At the same time, he clipped a foot across my M27, kicking it backward so that it slid across the floor toward the door of the oxygen plant.

  Bastard, I thought.

  “Get up,” he said.

  I did. And as I did, I did something he did not expect. I pulled a grenade from my belt and let it roll off my fingers. He looked down to see what I’d dropped, identified it and instantly knew I had not pulled the pin, but the grenade had distracted him long enough. I sprang to my feet, knocked the barrel of his rifle aside, and flew into him as the back of my armor shattered into fragments.

  There had been a fifth man. He’d lurked like a spider, hiding somewhere in the shadows, someplace I had not thought to look. I did not see him, but the force of the blast from his shotgun lifted me off my feet and tossed me like a toy, while the pellets shredded my armor and punctured my skin. The hormones from my combat reflex raged hotter than ever; but from the small of my back to the base of my neck, my body would not respond.