The Clone Betrayal

by Kent, Steven

  “Yes, sir,” said Hollingsworth.

  Two hours after leaving the airfield, we passed a billboard for a shopping mall. All of the buildings in this part of town had been demolished. Wind whistled through the pipes, bricks, and fragments of walls that rose like spines out of the grounds. We passed the remains of a fence here and the jagged remains of a warehouse there; but nothing over ten feet tall remained standing in this part of town. In the distance, three tall skyscrapers towered over the road, but that was a few miles ahead.

  We drove over patches of road when they appeared between mounds of debris and rubble. Glass and plaster crunched under our tires. We passed a park in which a row of barren flagpoles stood out of the ground like giant needles. The clang of the wind smacking the tackle against the shafts of the flagpoles echoed like gunfire in the empty streets.

  The Army airfield was on the east side of town. We drove west toward the heart of the city. The destruction was so complete in some parts of Norristown that the landscape looked like a painted desert. We passed an area in which a ten-foot knoll the color of red brick lined the road to our left and a thirty-foot hill of gray concrete and rusted steel lined the road to our right. The dusty shards of black glass along the top of the hill reflected the light from the sky.

  “This can’t be Norristown, sir,” my driver said.

  “This is it, Corporal,” I said. “That hill over there probably stood thirty stories tall when the aliens arrived.”

  The driver slowed the jeep and studied the panorama around us. Perhaps he was trying to reconstruct the city in his mind, or he might have been watching out for an ambush.

  A large river ran through the center of Norristown. As we approached it, we saw the arches and towers of a large suspension bridge spanning the water. I recognized the architecture from the flight in; it was the bridge that had collapsed on one side. “We’re not going to be able to cross here,” I said, as we mounted a rise and the entire bridge became visible.

  “No, sir,” my driver said.

  The closer half of the bridge—a brick-and-metal structure with grand arches, thick rails, and a spider work of cables—looked solid enough. One of the arches from the far side of the bridge poked out of the water like the elbow of a swimming giant. The rest of the bridge had vanished beneath the river.

  Surfing channels on the interLink, I heard men groaning. We could very well have a big fight coming up, so I could not afford for these men to become discouraged.

  We passed a row of small apartment buildings overlooking the river. Following the mostly clear road that ran along the waterfront, we searched for another bridge. A couple of miles up the road, we found an old concrete arch bridge that seemed untouched by the war.

  It wasn’t until we crossed the bridge that we started seeing bodies. After four years out in the open, they were no longer rotting corpses, just bones. Had I removed my helmet, I would not have smelled the scents of death and decay; they were long gone.

  From what I could tell, the people on this planet had died in groups. We might drive for blocks and see nothing more than an occasional Army helmet or fatigue-clad skeleton, then we would turn a corner and enter a boneyard in which the ground seemed paved with skulls and femurs. I understood this, of course. The concentrated areas were places where battalions made a stand; the scattered remains were soldiers who died in retreat.

  The Marines who fought on Terraneau did not fight alongside the soldiers in these battles. We passed avenues that looked as if they had been paved with skeletons draped in dirty camos—places in which the Army made a stand. A few blocks later, Marine battle armor lay strewn along the street.

  “Harris, why do I feel like I’m back in Valhalla?” Thomer asked.

  Valhalla was the capital of New Copenhagen.

  I did not respond, but I was thinking the same thing.

  As we drove through one particularly corpse-sown battlefield, I saw a battery of rocket launchers leaning across the top of the wall of a two-story building like a drunk leaning to keep from falling to the ground. There were so many bones scattered along this stretch of road that it would have taken an army of archaeologists and psychics to reconstruct the skeletons. My driver steered the jeep right through the center of the mess. He had no choice but to drive over the dead, the wreckage lay everywhere. Our tires ground bones into the cement. Camos tore. Helmets popped and flattened or shot out from beneath us.

  As we pushed deeper into the downtown area, the rubble of buildings that had once lined the roadway now covered it. Crossing a dune made of walnut-sized pieces of debris, our jeeps left cat tails of dust in their wake.

  The Avatari seldom left buildings in their wake. When they calibrated their weapons to destroy skyscrapers, the buildings dropped like a man shot through the heart. Some broke off at their base, leaving straight edges poking up through the ground; but most caved in on themselves.

  “Captain Harris, we’re picking up traces of shit gas in the air,” Herrington said. He was out of interLink range but the communications gear in his transport had a long-distance communicator that could reach my commandLink. Driving through the ruins of Norristown, I had almost forgotten that Herrington was out looking for the mines.

  “Have you found the opening?” I asked.

  “Not yet, but we’ve got to be close. You don’t get this much shit in the air unless there’s an asshole nearby.”

  “Keep me advised,” I said, and signed off.

  We drove into the downtown financial district, an area mostly reduced to dust. Less than a mile ahead of us, the three remaining high-rise towers rose out of the ground like giant pillars. They were straight-edged versions of Jack’s bean-stalk, and they seemed to reach all the way up into the shining white-gold sky.

  Two of the buildings had black glass exteriors, the third had a silver metallic finish. These might have been the tallest buildings on Terraneau. Had they fallen, their rubble would have flooded three blocks in every direction.

  The black marble walls of the first building were pocked with holes and scrapes from large-caliber bullets. Some of the street-level windows were shattered, and others were cracked. If people had died here, the bodies had been cleared out. The driveway into the parking lot looked like it had been swept clean.

  If I had to guess, I would have said that the battle had wound down by the time it reached this part of town. Had soldiers entered these buildings, the Avatari would have demolished them. Apparently nobody did.

  I had my driver park our jeep, and the other jeeps stopped behind us. A few of the men hopped out of their rides, while others stood on the vehicles. Everyone scanned the area.

  “Listen up,” I called over an open channel, drowning out unauthorized conversations between my men. “We’re going to split up.

  “Thomer, you take three jeeps and head out to Fort Sebastian. I want to know about weapons, power, and survivors.” Fort Sebastian was the local Army base. The force defending Terraneau used it as their hub.

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Thomer said. Fallzoud haze or straight, Thomer would locate the fort and expedite. I could depend on him. He gave the command, and the last three jeeps in our convoy split off from the rest. I watched them leave, then I addressed the men who remained with me.

  “We came here looking for survivors. I don’t give a shit about dead bodies, so don’t waste my specking air-space gab bing about them. Got that?”

  They got it.

  “We’ll search the whole damn city if we need to, but we’re going to start here, with these buildings. Now fall out.”

  These men knew the drill. They broke into platoons and fire teams. As they headed toward the buildings, I reminded them about their priorities.

  “Listen up, Leathernecks, we are not here to act like the specking police. We did not come here to specking serve and protect. If you see survivors, do not expect them to be rational human beings.

  “If you see survivors, assume that they are armed. You may have noticed there are a lot
more dead bodies than weapons on the streets. If the bodies are there, and the weapons are gone, you bet your ass that whoever took those weapons is alive and scared and dangerous as hell.”

  “Sir . . .” one of my Marines began.

  “What is it?” I snapped.

  “Begging the captain’s pardon, sir, but this Marine saw lots of human bodies.”

  “We’re racing against the clock,” I said, cutting the man off. “Spit it out, man.”

  “Sir, this Marine did not see dead aliens, sir.”

  “Yeah, they evaporate when they die,” I said.

  “Can we kill them, sir?” the Marine persisted.

  “Damn straight we can kill them,” I said, which was not entirely true, but it was not entirely untrue, either. We could break them, and they would stay broken for a couple of days. They would evaporate, then the particles would re-form, and they would spawn again. The key to beating the bastards was finding their mining site and setting off our nuke. God, I hoped Herrington found the mines.

  “You have your orders,” I said. “Call me if you find survivors.”

  I hopped out of my jeep and entered the building, stepping over a shattered glass panel. Shards of glass sank and shuffled under my boots. Inside, the lobby was as silent and still as death itself.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “Herrington, you found anything yet?” I called from just inside the lobby of the skyscraper. I looked around as I waited for his response, studying the security desk and the large glass panel that listed the offices on each floor. The desk looked forlorn and abandoned intact. The safety glass over the directory was still in its frame and thick with dust.

  I walked down the hall that led to two rows of five elevators. All of the doors to the elevators stood open; they looked like closets.

  “I think we found it,” Herrington finally replied from his transport. “Do you want me to go down for a closer look?”

  “Not a chance, Sergeant,” I said. At that moment, it seemed like the mission might go according to plan. Herrington had already found the mines, and there was no sign of the aliens, all we needed to do was to deliver our nuke and look for survivors. “Leave a beacon over the entrance and get back here as quickly as possible.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I contacted Hollingsworth back at the airstrip and told him to queue up the transport with the nuke. I hoped to have Herrington swap birds and send him back with most of my men.

  For now, I turned my attention to finding survivors.

  Besides me, seven other Marines entered this building. We would search the building in two fire teams. Fire teams consisted of a rifleman, an automatic rifleman, a team leader, and a grenadier. I played leader in absentia for one of those teams, sending my men to explore the lobby.

  “Captain Harris,” my rifleman radioed in. He was on point.

  “What is it?” I asked in a testy voice. Officers need to act officious, or their subordinates become insubordinate.

  “I see a large mess at the back of the lobby. Should we search it?”

  “This whole place is a mess.”

  The man laughed. “A mess hall, sir . . . a cafeteria.”

  “See any survivors?” I asked.

  “No, but it looks like somebody is still using the facilities. I’m knee deep in empty cans and boxes.”

  “Get this—somebody is using the oven for a fireplace,” my grenadier added.

  “But you haven’t spotted anybody with a pulse?” I asked.

  “No, sir.”

  I told the team to “stay alert” and signed off.

  Past the open doors of the elevators, I found a stairwell. Someone had removed the door from its hinges and left it leaning against the wall. I searched the stairwell using my heat-vision lenses to make sure no one was waiting for me around the corner. The area was clear.

  Inside the stairwell, flights of stairs formed a helix leading to the top of the building. I did not think I would need to climb to the top. The building was over a hundred stories tall; without the elevators and air-conditioning, any survivors living in this tower would confine themselves to the lower floors.

  The light from the ion curtain filled the lobby, but it trailed off as I started up the stairs. My visor switched to night-for-day lenses in the darkness. I climbed a couple of flights, scanned the area for heat signatures, and kept my M27 ready.

  When I reached the second-floor landing, I found an open doorway leading to a mezzanine. Looted shops with smashed windows lined the halls past the doorway. A flood of trash, papers, and broken furniture covered the black marble floor.

  After wasting a few minutes sifting my way through the wreckage, I headed back to the stairs and climbed three more flights to the next floor. The door to this floor was closed.

  “Has anyone found anything?” I asked on a company-wide frequency. Everyone but Thomer replied with a negative. He had something to report.

  “We found Fort Sebastian,” he said.

  Switching frequencies to a direct line with Thomer, I asked, “How does it look?”

  “We’re outside the fort right now, sir,” Thomer said. “It’s pretty banged up.”

  “How banged up?” I asked.

  “Remember the shielded bunker the Army used on New Copenhagen? They set one up just like it over here.”

  Shielded bunkers were supposedly sturdy enough to survive a nuclear blast. Soldiers stationed in the bunker would be cooked and irradiated by the time the blast dissipated, but the bunker would survive. Unfortunately, shielding and bunkers meant nothing to the Avatari—the bolts from their guns bored through their walls.

  “How did it hold up?” I asked.

  “It looks like the Avatari used it for target practice,” Thomer said.

  “Any signs of life?” I asked.

  “It’s full of bones,” Thomer said. “I found a rat’s nest.”

  “How about MREs, clean blankets, screaming children, or shit that hasn’t dried to powder?”

  “Nothing,” Thomer said.

  “Find any guns or grenades?”

  “Someone cleaned the place out.”

  “It would seem so,” I agreed.

  “Want me to search the rest of the bunker?” Thomer asked.

  “Don’t waste your time,” I said. “You might as well move on to the fort. Keep an eye out for working generators. They needed juice to talk to the fleet. If you find the generators, you’ll probably find the survivors.”

  “Aye, sir,” Thomer said before he signed off.

  Thomer’s search was not going to be easy. In the grand tradition of all things Army, the layout of Fort Sebastian defied reason. According to our maps, the base was as big as a farming town.

  Trusting Thomer to follow orders, I returned to my own search.

  I opened the door to the next floor slowly. Using the external speaker on my helmet, I called out: “This is Captain Wayson Harris of the Unified Authority Marines. I repeat, I am a Unified Authority Marine. Is there anyone in this building?”

  The announcement was greeted with silence. The door swung open, revealing another gloomy hallway.

  I stepped out of the stairwell and into that hall. The equipment in my visor picked up sounds easily missed by the human ear. Someone far to my right was trying to ease away from me. The person must have thought he could hide by clinging to the shadows. Using night-for-day vision, I saw it was only a kid. He had to be in his teens. He crawled along the wall until he reached a door, then he looked back toward me and turned the knob. Light leaked into the hall as he opened the door. The boy slithered through the opening and closed the door behind him.

  “I found a survivor,” I said over the open frequency.

  “Where are you, sir?” Hollingsworth asked.

  “Was he friendly?” asked Herrington.

  I answered Herrington first. “He wasn’t armed.”

  “That’s good news,” said Hollingsworth.

  “Where are you, sir?” It was the autom
atic rifleman from the fire team I had abandoned.

  “Third floor.”

  “We’re on our way, sir.”

  I was not foolish enough to follow that kid into a blind situation without backup. As I waited, I tried identifying myself again. “This is Captain Wayson Harris of the Unified Authority Marines,” I repeated, with my voice so amplified that anyone on that floor of the building could hear me.

  Scanning the wall using the heat-vision lens in my visor, I located several people hidden beyond the wall. Judging by the way they crouched along the floor, they seemed to be frightened of me.

  I toyed with the idea of yelling, “Come out with your hands up,” or possibly, “I know you’re in there.” They might have mistaken me for an alien. Hell, by the standards of whatever society had formed on this planet since the invasion, these guys could be criminals on the lam.

  My fire team joined me. “Where are the survivors, sir?” the automatic rifleman asked.

  “Hiding behind the door,” I said. As I pulled out a grenade and set it for the lowest yield possible, my backup instinctively backed off. I called to the people hidden on the other side of the wall: “Stand away from the wall.”

  “Sir, I found the mines.” It was Herrington.

  I wanted to hear his report, but I had other priorities at the moment. “Not now, Herrington,” I said as I tossed my grenade toward the wall and took cover.

  “Aye, aye, sir, but do you want me to reconnoiter the spheres on my way back?”

  “Herrington, I’m a bit busy at the moment,” I snapped.

  “Yes, sir,” he said.

  The first explosion, the one from my grenade, had enough force to blow a ten-foot section out of the wall. The second explosion, the one caused by whatever explosives the friendly natives had rigged, sent a rush of flames across the hall.

  “What the hell was that?” my rifleman asked.

  “That, Corporal, is why you stay under cover when there is fire in the hole.”