“Shut up, Harris,” Shannon hissed.
“Any chance there is somebody hiding inside?” the SEAL asked.
“I doubt it. All of the machinery is turned off. If they had machinery going, I would pick up a heat signature from an engine or a generator.”
By that time the entire team had gathered around Shannon and the SEAL leader. “We’re still going in,”
said the SEAL. “Sergeant, you and the corporal wait out here.”
Shannon saluted and slung his rifle over his shoulder. He turned to me, and said, “Let’s just keep out of their way.” We found a shaded spot overlooking the compound and sat and watched as the SEALS
crawled face-first, rifles ready, under the edge of the camouflage nets. I switched to heat vision and watched the SEALs’ orange-and-yellow profiles through the netting. I lost track of them once they entered the buildings.
“Think they’ll find anything?” I asked.
“Like what?” Shannon asked.
I did not have an answer. I continued to scan the compound with my heat-vision lens. Every so often I spied a SEAL dashing between buildings, but those glimpses were rare. “They’re amazing,” I said to myself, forgetting that Sergeant Shannon would hear me.
“Snap out of it, Harris,” Shannon said. “They’re no big deal. The only thing they have done is storm an abandoned compound, and you’re already specking your armor. You watch, they’re going to come up empty-handed, and Huang will blame us.”
The SEALs spent hours searching the compound, giving me hours to consider Shannon’s prediction. Roaches swarmed the plants around me, and I distracted myself by crunching some of them with the heel of my boot. The sun began to set in the distance, and the roaches became notably more aggressive. One marched right up to where Shannon was sitting, then tumbled onto its back when it tried to crawl over the top of his leg. He looked over and crushed it with his fist.
“So who is the dominant species,” I joked, “the rats or the roaches?”
“The goddamned Mogats,” Shannon answered. “They were the only speckers with enough sense to get off this rock.”
Up ahead, I saw movement in the camouflage covering and switched to heat vision in time to see the first of the SEALs rolling out from under the edge of the net. Ten more were nearby.
“Look who’s back,” Shannon said a split second before the explosion. I just had time to take in the irony in his voice, then the very air around us seemed to turn white, activating the polarizing lenses in my visor. The explosion cut through the jungle in a wave. Its concussion knocked me flat on my back, but I quickly climbed back to my feet.
“GODDAMN!” Shannon yelled as he sprinted toward the clearing. I ran after him, rifle at the ready for no particular reason.
“Harris, find the ones who made it out. I’m going under the net to look for survivors.”
There was no net, not where we were standing. Shreds of flaming camouflage netting floated down from the sky for as far as I could see. I saw Shannon running into the heart of the flames, dropping down a waist-high crater.
One of the SEALs lay with his back wrapped around the trunk of a tree at an impossible angle. I threw my helmet off and ran over to him. He was already dead.
Another SEAL lay on his stomach a few feet away. As I ran to him, I saw a streamer of flaming camouflage float over his shoulder. Brushing it away, I turned the man on his back. He was alive, but barely. A shard of metal the size of my hand was buried in his throat. Blood poured out of the wound. He would die in a moment no matter what I did for him. I wanted to shake him. I wanted to yell, “What happened here? What the hell did you do?”
Shannon was wasting his time looking for survivors. Not even the rats and the roaches would have survived that explosion. The only survivors were the Mogats. “They were the only speckers with enough sense to get off this rock.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Clones may come out of the tube identical, but experience takes over where genetic engineering and neural programming leave off. Most of the platoon followed soccer, boxing, and basketball. Gambling was rampant. But Vince Lee did not gamble or watch professional sports. He napped whenever he got the opportunity. He read books about self-improvement and told me that his time in the Marines would give him an excellent platform to launch into politics. He was a dedicated bodybuilder who started each morning lifting weights in the officers’ gym. Of all of the clones I ever knew, Lee was the only one who openly worried about not being natural-born.
Lee was also the only man in our platoon who talked about retiring from the Corps. “When I get out,” he would often begin a conversation, “I’m going to a frontier planet,” he would say, “someplace where they appreciate hard work.” Around the time we went to Ronan Minor, Lee sometimes talked about building a resort on the shore of Lake Pride, a few miles west of Rising Sun. Ever since meeting with Oberland, keeping up with current events had become my hobby. It was an obsession, maybe even an addiction. I began each day with a quick glance at the headlines. I did so before crawling out of bed. If I found something interesting, I stopped to read it. I usually spent a good hour reading before tossing my mediaLink shades aside and heading for the mess. And after breakfast, I found time for more reading.
Two days after we left Ronan Minor I found a story with the headline: “24 SEALS LOST IN CRASH.”
They don’t release information when clones die. We don’t have parents or relatives, so nobody notices. SEALs, natural-borns with families, merit a news story, even if it’s completely fabricated. In this case, the official story was that twenty-four Navy SEALs were killed when their transport malfunctioned during a training exercise in a remote sector of the Scutum-Crux Arm.
“The accident occurred as the squad practiced landing maneuvers on an uninhabited planet.” True enough, unless you count rats, roaches, and Liberators.
“‘The accident was caused by an equipment failure,’ said Lieutenant Howard Banks of Naval public affairs. ‘We are conducting a thorough investigation to determine the cause of the accident.’”
“There’s already been a thorough investigation,” I mumbled to myself. I knew that because my ass was on the line. Admiral Huang had Shannon and me held in custody while he and Admiral Klyber played back the data in our helmets. Huang called us a disgrace to the uniform and ranted about court-martials and executions; but in the end, we were cleared.
Other stories caught my eye. Back on Earth, the Senate seemed unaware of the war brewing in the outer arms while the House of Representatives seemed intent on stoking it. The big story out of the Senate was about a senior senator retiring and the party his friends threw to celebrate his years of service. The story listed the celebrities in attendance, and there was a side story critiquing gowns worn by politicians’ wives. As far as the Senate was concerned, life on the frontier was just aces. In the House of Representatives, congressmen were arguing about gun laws. Many powerful representatives wanted the gun laws preventing the private ownership of automatic weapons repealed. One congresswoman argued that citizens should be allowed to buy a battleship if they could afford it. Delegations from the Cygnus, Perseus, and Norma Arms flew to Washington to meet with their congressmen. There was no mention whether these delegations also visited the Senate.
“Something’s happening,” Lee said as he entered the mess hall. “The fleet’s moving.” He had just come from the gym, and jagged vein lines bulged across his biceps and forearms.
“Moving where?” I asked as I took a drink of orange juice.
Lee, whose hair was still wet from the shower, smelled of government-issue soap. “I’m not sure where we are headed, but a guy at the gym said we’re going to rendezvous with the Inner SC Fleet.”
“Really?” I asked. “What about the Outer Fleet?”
Lee sat down next to me. “He says we’re combining into one fleet.
“Wayson, I’ve never seen this before. You don’t send twenty-four carriers to one corner of space for peacekeep
ing. This is war.”
“That’s drastic talk,” I said. “How does the guy at the gym know so much? Are you sure he knew what he was talking about?”
It seemed like a fair question. When it came to the “need to know” hierarchy, we grunts were the bottom rung. I wolfed down the rest of my breakfast and waited for Lee to finish. Once he finished eating, we rushed to the rec room to look out the viewport.
We were no longer orbiting Ronan Minor. I saw an endless starfield and not much else. “Did your friend say anything about where we are headed?”
“Nope,” Lee said. “Nothing at all.”
“Do not learn the wrong lesson from Ronan Minor,” Bryce Klyber said. He might have maintained a sparse office—the only things you ever saw on his desk were an occasional file and a set of pens—but his dining area was like an art museum. Track lighting on the ceiling shone down on a row of fine oil paintings along one wall. The outer wall of the room was a viewport overlooking the bow of the ship. Another wall was lined with two one-thousand-gallon aquariums.
One tank held schools of colorful fish that dived and darted among coral formations. The other tank was only half-full. A strange animal called a man-of-war floated along the top of the water. Perhaps it is an exaggeration to call a man-of-war an “animal,” but I don’t know what else to call it. It looked like a violet-colored bubble with long, silky threads dangling to the bottom of the tank.
“Do you follow the news? Have you heard the one about the twenty-four SEALs who died in a transport accident?” Klyber asked me in the kind of singsong tone you would use when asking a friend if he’d heard the one about the secretary of the Navy and the farmer’s daughter.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“The Pentagon uses that story far too often.” He shook his head. “One of these days, the Linear Committee will launch an investigation into AT disasters and learn that we haven’t had a legitimate accident for thirty years.”
I did not know if Admiral Klyber was serious. He sat by himself in an austere, uncomfortable-looking chair, picking pieces of chicken out of his salad. Klyber was the epitome of the aristocrat-soldier, elegant and well-spoken, sitting in his uniform at a table with fine wine in crystal goblets. With his sunken cheeks and puny arms, he looked so fragile, but anger and intelligence radiated from his cold, gray eyes. “I suppose we shall never know if that compound was rigged or if Huang’s SEALs blew themselves up.”
“You don’t think it was a trap, sir?” I asked.
Admiral Klyber mused for a moment, smiled, shook his head ever so slightly. “No. If Huang could not take prisoners, he would have wanted to leave bodies in his wake. Ours or theirs, it wouldn’t matter to Huang as long as there were bodies.” His mouth curved into a smile as he chewed a bite of salad. “Never occurred to you that those SEALs might have done it to themselves? Sergeant Shannon said that you were impressed by them.”
“Yes, sir.”
Klyber finished his salad. He laid his fork across the top of the plate and pushed the plate aside. Then he sipped his wine and turned toward his main course, a thick slab of roast beef.
“Corporal, I have served in the U.A. Navy for over forty years. I had my own command before Che Huang entered officer training school. In all of that time, the Liberators are the only blemish on my record.”
“They won the war,” I said, trying not to feel offended.
“Indeed they did,” Klyber agreed. “Made the galaxy safe, didn’t they? Unfortunately, history remembers them as unnecessarily cruel, and Congress outlawed them. You are going to help me prove otherwise, Corporal Harris. That is why I have taken such an interest in you. The climate has changed. We are headed toward war, and a fighting man with your talents will be recognized, clone or natural-born.”
“Even a Liberator?” I asked.
“I believe so, yes,” Klyber said as he sliced the meat on his plate. “Especially a Liberator.
“No clone has ever been promoted beyond the rank of sergeant. Only one quarter of the clone boys from your orphanage will become NCOs, Harris. You beat the odds in your first six months.” He speared the prime rib with a quick stab and chewed it with small, mechanical bites. “Perhaps you and I can expand that field of promotions.”
“Only natural-born are admitted into officer candidate school,” I said. Still chewing, Klyber neatly placed his utensils on his plate. He took a sip of wine and leaned back to savor it. “When I was at the academy, only Earth-born cadets were admitted. ‘Earth-born, Earth-loyal,’
that was the old saying.
“They’ve let that slide quite a bit over the years. Politicians have replaced tradition with political expedience. The citizens in the territories complained that they did not have all of the opportunities given to Earth-born children, so Congress used the military for a social experiment. They integrated and enrolled some out-born cadets,” Klyber said, not even trying to mask the disdain in his voice.
“As you know, Huang saw fit to replace Admiral Barry. Our new fleet commander will be Rear Admiral Robert Thurston, an outworlder born and raised in the Orion Arm. If an out-born can command a fleet . .
.” Klyber looked at me and smiled.
Life on the Kamehameha settled into a schedule of drills and drinking. Something was brewing out there beyond the horizon, but nobody knew any details.
Two weeks after we left Ronan Minor, the Kamehameha rendezvoused with the rest of the Central SC
Fleet in orbit around Terraneau. Two days later, the Inner SC Fleet joined our orbit. Down on Terraneau, officers from both the Inner and Central SC Fleets attended meetings as Admiral Klyber created a new command structure. As bits of information trickled in, talk around the platoon was enthusiastic.
Most of the sea-soldiers I spoke with liked the idea of merging with the Inner SC Fleet. The combined fleet would have over a hundred thousand fighting Marines, a force that we believed capable of wiping out any threat.
None of the Marines seemed to care that a new fleet commander had replaced Admiral Absalom Barry. The name Robert Thurston meant nothing; and besides, he was Navy, we were Marines. As long as his boats brought us to the fight on time, we’d do the rest.
That indifference changed on the day that Thurston boarded the Kamehameha. Admiral Klyber took him on a tour of the ship. The last stop on the tour was our deck. A party of officers dressed in whites passed by our barracks, and we all caught a brief glimpse of the little troll. Robert Thurston looked younger than most of the privates in my platoon. He had thick red hair and pimples; honest to God, pimples all over his face. He cut his hair to regulation length, but it stood in spiky clumps under his cap. I was most taken by his size. Thurston was five-foot-five at best, with a slender, almost effeminate build. Needless to say, talk at the bar was wilder than ever that evening.
“You see that kid? He’s barely out of diapers,” one clone shouted as he entered the bar.
“What do you think of Thurston?” Lee asked me as I found the platoon’s watering spot for the night.
“I wonder if he drinks milk or Scotch,” a private from the platoon joked.
“So he looks a bit green,” I said as I downed half my beer.
“Yeah, he looks a little green,” Lee agreed. “I’d hate to find myself nuked just because somebody’s congressman-daddy pushed his boy up the ranks.”
“I don’t think you need to worry about that,” I said. “From what I hear, Thurston earned his way up the ranks.”
“Is that a fact?” Shannon asked, nosing his way into our crowd.
“That is a fact,” I said.
Shannon, who knew damned well that I had met with Admiral Klyber the day before, considered my words. “That’s good news,” he said as he saluted me with his glass. “Did you all hear that? Harris heard that Thurston pulls his own weight, and Harris has good sources.” Lowering his voice, Shannon added,
“The boy must have one hell of a record.”
“And there’s something else,” I said, mov
ing toward Shannon so that no one else would hear me. “He’s out-born.”
I expected Shannon to spit out his beer, but he didn’t. He stood frozen for a moment, then swallowed.
“No shit?” he said. “Born off Earth? That little speck-sucker must really know his stuff.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Kamehameha sat listless, while the frigates and fighters that surrounded her remained in constant motion. Nearly a dozen frigates orbited her hull, circling it in odd patterns. They would keep the flagship safe from fighter attacks. Of course, any fighter carrier, even an ancient one like the Kamehameha, had strong shields and powerful cannons.
The Inner and Central Scutum-Crux Fleets hovered along opposite hemispheres of Terraneau. For a moment, the two fleets looked like mirror reflections of each other; then the Central Fleet pulled back from the planet and arrayed itself in battle formation with six carriers launching fighters and six carriers in reserve. Harriers and Tomcats poured out of six carriers at the front of the formation like angry hornets defending their nest. The Harriers moved so quickly that they could not be tracked with the human eye. Admiral Klyber, commander of the Central Fleet, attacked first. A wave of his Tomcats, fighters made for nonatmospheric conditions with particularly powerful missiles and particle-beam cannons, vanished from radar. When they reappeared, they were approaching the al-Sadat, the flagship fighter carrier of the Inner SC Fleet.
I watched the virtual representation of the battle in real time on a three-dimensional holographic display. Floating in midair, the display looked like a glowing green grid with models of ships. Five meters long and three meters deep, it was large enough to show every detail of the battle.
“Man, that’s fierce,” Lee whispered to me.
“Shhh,” I hissed. Everyone else in the room was silent.
Klyber’s attack made perfect sense. The al-Sadat sat isolated from the other capital ships in the Inner SC Fleet. The nearest frigates were hundreds of miles away and headed in the wrong direction—toward what would likely become the front line of the battle. Klyber’s fighters skirted that line, flanking Robert Thurston’s formation and attacking an unguarded pocket near the rear. It would take a couple of minutes for Thurston’s closest carrier to arrive on the scene.
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