The Clone Redemption

by Steven L. Kent

  The men in the center of the building stood so packed together that they could not move without bumping into each other. That put them out of play. If the Unifieds came running up the stairs, my men would not be able to shoot or defend themselves without killing the clones around them. I surveyed the scene.

  We were the clones, the unwanted golems, the Frankenstein monsters that had come home to roost. Men in dark-colored combat armor looked like monsters as I viewed them through my night-for-day lenses. Because of their helmets, their heads looked huge and misshapen, featureless at the front and flat across the top. In the blue-gray of day-for-night vision, the armor was the not-quite-black of shadows on cement.

  I stood just outside the stairs with Ritz and a circle of officers. As I started to ask for a report, I saw something through the window. We all saw it. Every man on that side of the building must have spotted it.

  I walked toward the empty casing for a closer look.

  I switched from night-for-day vision to telescopic lenses and saw lights the color of honey glowing behind the trees at the far edge of the runway. At first I thought a second wave of U.A. Marines had arrived, a column of troops with fresh batteries powering their shields. By that time the snow had mostly stopped, though flecks of powder still hung in the air.

  The artillery was far away and hidden by trees, I could not get a good look at it. On a still night like this, the sound of the engines carried clear across the runway.

  “Specking hell,” said Ritz.

  “Son of a bitch,” said another colonel.

  “What do you think they have out there?” asked another officer.

  “How the speck should I know,” I snapped in frustration. “The bastards don’t consult with me? I mean speck! They don’t come to me for ideas!” I hated myself for berating the dumb speck, but I could not make myself stop. I felt cold claws closing around my gonads.

  The bastards shot a flare into the sky. They must have fired the son of a bitch from a tank, or maybe a cannon. None of our shoulder-fired weapons could have hurled a heavy phosphorous canister all the way across the runway. The flare burned like a silver-red diamond as it rose to the top of a fifteen-hundred-foot arc, then hung in the sky like a still photograph of fireworks, its glare shining down on the building. We had men on the roof as well as the second floor. The light from that flare must have wreaked technological havoc on the men on the roof. The glare from that projectile would have been bright enough to shut down their night-for-day vision, but the runway remained as dark as a cave beyond it.

  As the flare started to fade, the Unifieds fired a second flare. This one was silver-green. It hung in the sky directly over the terminal for nearly a minute.

  The third projectile rose up like a mortar shell. Sparks bubbled from the shining ball as it climbed toward the sky. It slowed as it reached its zenith, then it exploded, sending out an electromagnetic pulse, and the world went black around me.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  Earthdate: December 3, A.D. 2517

  The invasion had broken down around us. There was no sign of the second wave. Freeman had vanished. We were trapped in a spaceport, cut off from the world; and the EMP the Unifieds fired over the spaceport had destroyed the electronics in our visors. Now I would not be able to say good-bye to Cutter if he arrived in time to see me die.

  We no longer had night-for-day vision or any other kind of vision through our visors. We had no interLink connection. Wearing our helmets, we were deaf, speechless, and blind. We couldn’t even wear them to protect us from the cold.

  The frigid wind that blew in through the broken window casings burned my ears when I pulled off my helmet. I tossed the worthless plasticized shell out into the open runway. Ritz saw me. I thought it was Ritz, but I could no longer use the smart display in my visor to identify him. Whoever he was, he was standing where Ritz had been standing a moment ago. He threw his helmet out the window as well.

  In the lingering glare from the EMP, I spotted men sprinting across the runway. I started to shout orders for our snipers to shoot them, but I had no means of contacting them. Fortunately, our snipers were alert and did not wait for orders. Rifle fire tore through the calm of the night.

  They had flares, but so did we. The snipers on the roof shot them in every direction. The first volley was uncoordinated. Dozens of phosphor-burning projectiles arced into the night sky turning it bright as day in some spots while leaving it dark in others. The light from the flares exposed the bodies of the hundreds of Unified Authority Marines we had slain.

  I saw the carnage and wondered how long we could hold out. The Unifieds had regrouped. We were like a tiger caught in a tree. So long as we held thousands of their men trapped in the bottom of our building, the Unifieds would not pull in their heavy artillery to finish us. They could send gunships to try and gut the top two floors with their chain guns; but we had already proven that we could defend ourselves against gunships.

  So many shielded tanks had gathered on the far side of the runway that the forest glowed. If my visor still worked, I could have used the telescopic lens to scout their numbers. If I’d had a helmet on, I would not have worried about the cold numbing my face. The Unifieds had to fire that specking EMP.

  The worst part about not wearing a helmet was trying to communicate. Every goddamned man in the terminal looked so specking alike. If I accidentally called Chris Nobles “Ritz,” I could trigger a death reflex. Fortunately for everyone, it was so damned dark in the terminal building that no one saw anyone else clearly. In case the guy standing next to me was not the officer I expected, I would have an excuse. I said, “Those bastards stole your idea, Ritz.”

  He snickered, and said, “Assholes.”

  I heard another Marine bitching, but I did not know his name or rank without my visor. He said, “It’s specking cold in here. Bastards. My ears are specking freezing.”

  We were in a powder keg with a fuse just waiting to be lit. The Unifieds had us at their mercy, but they did not know how to strike the final blow without killing the natural-borns we had trapped below us. A tank fired a few warning shells that shattered the runway a few yards from the building, but those shells were idle threats. Time passed slowly.

  If they’d had shielded trucks, the Unifieds could have driven right up to the building to haul their men home. Apparently, they did not have shielded trucks. Nor did they send in more teams of men. Like us, they probably had no idea why the shields had failed, and they did not want to risk losing more men.

  The sun started to rise. I was on the western side of the building, so I did not see it rise over the trees. I saw blue-andpewter veins forming along the edges of the black sky; and then I saw fighters circling the runway.

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  The fighters did a flyby just a few hundred feet above the ground. There were three in the formation, either Phantoms or Tomcats. Who could tell at those speeds? They flew over our heads at thousands of miles per hour.

  A few men fired guns and rockets at the fighters; but that was a waste. By the time they located the fighters, it was already too late to shoot. Looking out the second-story window, I could not see the U.A. fighters or the men who’d fired at them. I heard the engines and felt the sonic booms. As the noise of the fighters died down, I heard gunfire and the shouting.

  Outside, the darkness slowly gave way to a gray morning sky filled with low-hanging clouds that threatened rain or snow. The glow of the shielded artillery faded in the light. The trees looked like shadows in a faint golden haze. Bodies still littered the runway.

  “They’re not coming back to get us, are they?” one of the clones asked. I thought he might be Ritz. No one else acted as casually around me.

  “That depends who you mean by ‘they,’” I said. “If ‘they’ includes the Unifieds, then yes, they are definitely coming for us.”

  “What about our second wave?”

  “Just because we haven’t heard from them doesn’t mean they aren’t out there,”
I said. “Without the interLink, they have no way to contact us.”

  Ritz, if it was Ritz, held his M27 over his shoulder, his finger still over the trigger, and said, “Whatever comes, we fight to the last.”

  “Oorah,” I said.

  “Semper Fi,” he answered.

  We were both full of shit and bravado.

  The fighters screeched past the window so fast that I saw nothing more than a blur. Moments after they passed, the boom from their engines tore through the air. If they hit the roof with a missile, the right missile, they could cave it in without demolishing the entire building. Sure, they’d lose some of theirs as well; but losing Marines had always been an acceptable price to the Unified Authority. At least, it had always been acceptable when those Marines were clones.

  “General, do you think they have already landed the second wave?” asked an unknown clone. He sounded desperate.

  “For all we know, they’ve already landed and captured the capital without us,” I said. It was true. I did not think it was likely; but without information coming over the interLink, who knew?

  Only at that moment did it occur to me that Freeman might have failed. He might have only shut down one or two of the missile bases. Maybe there were more bases than he thought. Cutter might have flown the fleet into an ambush. So many variables. So many reasons why the second wave might never arrive.

  Across the runway, a strange thing happened. A flying snake darted out of the trees. It was twenty feet long with a body that reflected the sky like a mirror. It fluttered and swirled in the air, flying in an erratic pattern that twisted and spun. The air dance only lasted a moment, then the Unifieds shot Freeman’s drone to pieces.

  “Freeman,” I whispered. How long had he been out there, hiding in the woods, watching? I understood his message, though.

  Several of the men around me asked, “What the hell?”

  “That,” I said, “is the signal.”

  Even as I spoke, a wing of fighters passed overhead, a wedge-shaped formation with six jets followed by two formations of three.

  Across the runway and over the trees, the fighters put on an air show. The three fighters in the first formation split apart, each fighter crossing another’s path, creating a braided vapor trail. The six fighters bringing up the rear split as well. They fired rockets, filling the sky with starbursts and smoke trails.

  Inside the building, all went silent as the men near the windows struggled to understand. A moment later, they cheered. They screamed. They fired their guns in the air.

  For the Unifieds, the battle had taken on a frantic turn. Jets from the Enlisted Man’s Empire had entered their skies.

  Desperate men turn to desperate measures.

  First came the teakettle screech of an incoming shell, then the blast that shook the building, followed by the rumble of distant cannons. The shell hit the roof. Tiles fell from the ceiling, hitting men and shattering. Light fixtures dropped partway out of the ceiling as well, then dangled from wires over our heads. Clouds of dust billowed out of the walls, but those clouds vanished when broken pipes began spraying steam and water.

  That first shell had been small, a test to see how hard they could hit the top floors without bringing the entire terminal down on the natural-borns trapped below. The second shell followed after another minute. This one slammed into a corner of the building like a hammer striking a sand castle.

  The roof collapsed. It simply fell in, taking down a twenty-foot section of wall and crushing men beneath an avalanche of debris. As the smoke and the steam cleared, I saw open sky instead of ceiling.

  The third shell hit a few seconds later.

  The second wave of our invasion must have landed. The Unifieds could no longer hold our ships off. There was no longer any doubt that we would win the war, but my men and I would celebrate posthumously.

  Without my helmet’s electronics, I could not communicate orders across the ranks, so I communicated with my officers the way commanders had been communicating since the days of clubs and muskets—I screamed at the officer nearest to me and he screamed at the man closest to him.

  “We’re taking the bottom floors,” I yelled. “Get your men! Go! Go! Go!”

  I did not wait to see how they would react. I did not wait for my message to get through the confused and scared men crowding the halls. I ran to the nearest stairwell, and I screamed “Move it! Move it, Marines!”

  One of the things I liked best about cloned Marines was the way they responded to commands. Hearing, “Move it,” they did not stop to ask what they were to move or where they should move it to, they simply grabbed their guns and followed me into the darkness.

  The stairwell did not have windows, and the lights were out. Even the emergency lighting had failed. I’d had a helmet with night-for-day vision the last time I’d taken these stairs. I never stopped to think about lights. As we clambered down the first flight of stairs in total blackness, I missed my helmet, with its many lenses.

  I rounded the landing, the rattle of boots clattering against the stairs filling my head. If I fell, they might trample me, but I didn’t care. I had my gun and my enemy and my combat reflex. I was in control this time, but I was more than ready to kill.

  We ran past the doors to the first floor. If the U.A. Marines still held it, I did not care. They could have it. Their fighters and artillery were about to blow the stuffing out of this building. If the U.A. Marines wanted to ride the avalanche to the tarmac below, they had my permission.

  As I started down the next flight, I saw a sliver of light in the shadows below. My men had set off charges in these shafts to make it harder for the Unifieds to attack us. Now we found ourselves running down the ruins of our work. I leaped breaks in the stairs, ignored holes in the walls and the groaning of the metal rails along the stairs. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I hoped the wall did not cave in on me.

  I would be vulnerable at the base of the stairs. Give or take a thousand, fifty thousand Unified Authority Marines waited for me down there. They might not have shields, but they had numbers.

  “Stop!” I screamed, but the sound of a thousand armored boots ground my voice to powder. “Stop!” But they could not hear me, and they would not stop. If I stopped, I would be trampled by my own Marines.

  The same thing might have been happening in every stairwell in the enormous terminal building. I had over twenty thousand Marines, we were preparing to rush the enemy, we’d traded our thought processes for the mentality of a controlled mob.

  I jumped a broken flight of stairs, landed badly, and tumbled into a wall. One more flight of stairs, and I would be on the ground floor, surrounded by U.A. Marines. The speckers would kill me. They would shoot depleted uranium darts through my skull, through my face, through my armor. The poison would not even have time to kill me as their fléchettes riddled my heart and drilled into my brains.

  The breaks in the stairs behind had slowed the front of the herd; but the men in the back kept pressing. Some men leaped the chasm as I had. Some leaped and failed. Some tried to stop, and the men in the back pushed them over the ledge. They did not have far to fall, but a pile of squirming bodies began to form.

  I ran to the door, reached for a grenade, pulled the pin, threw it low and hard, then I closed the door and fought halfway up the flight of stairs. My pill must have hit a wall or maybe a person. It did not go far. When it exploded, the percussion caused one of the walls at the base of the stairs to cave in. Had I waited by the door, I might have been crushed.

  A cloud of dust filled the stairwell. Then came the fléchettes, like raindrops in a storm, only flying up, not down. The needles struck the cinder-block walls and bored into them. The darts hit men and metal stairs. I threw another grenade through the broken wall. This time there was nothing to block percussion. The explosion was deafening. Its force knocked me on my ass, but the hail of fléchettes slowed.

  The sound of the explosion echoed off the walls of the stairwell. God, the battle wa
s loud. It had never bothered me when I had a helmet.

  One of the men standing behind me lost his footing. He landed on his armor-covered ass and slid down the stairs, making a clacking noise–tak, tak, tak, tak. He slid to the bottom of the stairs and climbed to his feet.

  I saw the whole thing clearly. The man climbed to his feet, then dropped to his knees as fléchettes drilled through his gut, chest, and groin. Some of the needles passed all the way through his armor, both front and back. The man fell to his knees, and shots hit him in the face, shredding his cheeks. His eyes splattered. His forehead split as he fell face-first to the floor.

  Despite the explosions and the dead Marine, more men gathered behind me, forcing me down the stairs. Without the interLink, I had no more control over this tide of cloned humanity than I would have had over water breaking through a dam. If I did not stay ahead of them, they would crush me.

  I had no other choice. I scrambled down the stairs and dived through the hole in the wall, landing on my face in the shallow crater from my grenade. I had the briefest glimpse of a sea of natural-borns wearing combat armor, then other Marines began falling on top of me. The first one fell on my back, his head right above mine, driving my face into the rough concrete. The next man fell on him and slid forward, over my head. That second man probably saved my life. Moments after he landed on me, blood began trickling from his armor. The fléchettes left small exit and entry holes, but blood ran from those holes in steady streams. An inky, sticky puddle began to form around me.

  Blood has a unique scent, a tinny, subtle smell that is not unpleasant on its own, but it comes with a rush of memories tinged with death and rage. Lying prone, with limbs and armor pressing down on me, I felt suffocated and trapped by the scent of blood. I heard men moaning and shouts of pain. A man right above me fired his M27. He fired a long steady burst. Other men fired, too.

  I crawled forward, trying to pull myself from beneath the pile of men the way a snake might wriggle out of a collapsed den. Clamping both my hands around my M27, I used the butt like a paddle or maybe a crutch.