Shannon said. “Scooter was just ahead of us when it ran into the first guards.”
Shannon stopped, and we knelt behind a rock to talk. “This tunnel leads to Mogat-central. Got it? The shaft with the generators is somewhere between us and them. That shaft is only big enough for one of us, Harris, so you’re on watch while I speck with their equipment. Any questions?”
The cave was absolutely silent. Far ahead, I could see an odd-shaped circle of light. Its distorted reflection on the obsidian walls might have extended for hundreds of yards. My heart thudded hard in my chest, but the endorphins had not yet begun to flow.
“Once I’m through screwing with the equipment, I’m going to give you a signal, and you are going to run like your shitter’s on fire. Don’t wait for me. Just run, and I will catch up to you.”
“You’ll be cut off,” I said.
“I’m getting out the same way Scooter did. This side tunnel loops back into the main cavern. I’ll crawl through and catch up with you.”
In the darkness, I could barely make out the shape of Shannon’s green armor. His helmet looked like a shadow cast on those charcoal-colored walls.
“Sergeant?”
“What is it, Harris?”
“Why did you bring me? I’ve got less combat experience than anyone else in the platoon.”
“You can’t possibly consider Ezer Kri combat experience,” he said in a harsh voice. “Harris, that’s all any of them have . . . skirmishes. You’re a Liberator, Harris. That makes you more dangerous than any of them. Now move out.”
I climbed back to my feet but remained slightly crouched. By that time I had my finger on the trigger. I hated the idea of splitting up with Shannon. I felt like I was abandoning him, like I should go in the tunnel with him.
I passed the shaft with the generators and looked back in time to see Shannon crawling into it. From here on out, I could no longer navigate using Scooter’s beacons. Scooter had gone no farther into the cave. That was the point where the little drone got scared and hid. From here on out, Shannon would be following the path blazed by the robot scout. I was in new territory. Far ahead, the Mogats had set up some sort of temporary shelter. There would be thousands of them. The men who fried our patrol on Ezer Kri were probably somewhere up ahead. My finger still on the trigger of my particle-beam pistol, I moved on. Would Amos Crowley be there?
“How’s it going?” I called to Shannon over the interLink.
“Where are you?”
I looked around. “In a tunnel on the biggest shit hole planet in the galaxy.”
“There are worse ones,” Shannon said. “Now, where are you precisely, asshole?”
“I’m about forty yards from you. I found a good ridge to hide behind in case . . .”
“Harris?”
The part of the cave I had entered was about as brightly lit as a night with a full moon. Up ahead of me, I saw two bobbing balls of light that looked no bigger than a fingernail. Using my telescopic lenses, I got a better look—two men were walking in my direction. Both men wore oxygen masks and carried rifles.
“Piss-poor excuse for sentries,” I said.
“You see something?”
“Two men,” I said. “They might be the ones who walked past Scooter.”
“Pick them off before they spot you,” Shannon said.
“Not a problem,” I said, sighting the first one with my pistol. I took a deep breath, held it for a moment.
“They turned around.” When I switched back to my telescopic lenses, I saw that they were walking away. From that distance, they were nothing more than gray silhouettes.
“Think they saw you?” Shannon asked.
“Not unless they’re telepathic. How’s it going with the equipment?”
There was no way the two guards could have heard me speaking inside my helmet, nonetheless they turned back in my direction. Shannon was saying something about one of the generators, but I stopped listening.
“They’re coming back,” I said, raising my particle-beam pistol. I kept my aim on the more erect of the two men. My hand as steady as the dead air in the cave, I pulled the trigger. The walls of the cave reflected my pistol’s green flash, and sparks flew when my bolt struck its target. Knowing that I would not miss under such circumstances, I fired at the second man without waiting to see if the first one fell. My shot hit the second man in the chest, but it did not kill him. He flew backward against the wall. The man spun around to run and my second shot hit his oxygen tube. Flames burst from his breathing equipment, then snuffed out the moment the oxygen was gone. The explosion produced a brilliant flash and created a loud bang that echoed through the caves.
“What was that?” Shannon asked.
“The bastard’s oxygen tube flamed,” I said.
“Are you dug in?” Shannon asked.
The flange in the rocks behind which I hid was thick, but only three feet tall. I glanced ahead, then crouched as low as I could behind it. “They’re coming,” I said. I saw torch beams bouncing on a far wall.
“How many?”
“About a million of them,” I said. “Wish I could use a grenade. How much more time do you need?”
A red laser bolt struck the rock in front of me. Sparks flew over the top, and I heard hissing as the laser boiled its way into the stone. Another bolt sliced across the top of my barricade, dumping molten slag and brown vapor over the edge. Remembering the way Amblin’s helmet had slid from his body, I moved as far from the vapor stream as I could. Suddenly I felt the soothing warmth in my blood. The Mogats weren’t about to let me enjoy it. Shots began raining in my direction. So many shots struck the shelf in front of me that the black obsidian glowed red as laser bolts liquefied and hollowed it. One of the people shooting at me began targeting the ceiling above my head, and slag and vapor poured out to the floor, just missing my shoulders. I started to peek around the corner of my barricade, and bullets glanced off the rock.
“I’m getting massacred out here!” I said to Shannon.
“It’s tighter than I expected,” Shannon said. “Hold them off!”
I could hear the Mogats yelling to each other. Their fire thinned, and I heard somebody running. I rolled to my right along the ground, fired three shots into the bastard without so much as a pause, and ducked behind a tiny ridge along the other wall. I moved just in time. The Mogats had pumped so much laser fire into the rocks on the other side of the tunnel that they glowed.
Reaching my hand around my new cover as far as I could, I fired blindly. They answered with a hail of laser and bullets. The ridge on this side of the cave was too small to protect me. I fired shots into the roof above them and backed up a couple of yards to a larger rock formation. The Mogats did not see me back away. They continued to fire at the spot that I abandoned. I stole a glance and saw bubbles forming on the back side of the obsidian ridge as the center of the rock boiled red.
“I’m trapped,” I said.
“I’ve got it, Harris. Run!” Shannon ordered.
As I turned to run, the thin light in the cavern flickered out. Light no longer shone from behind the Mogats. They were in total darkness, with only their flashlights and lanterns. Whatever Shannon had done, it doused their electricity. Once again I saw the world without depth through night-for-day lenses. For once I was grateful. I sprinted up the tunnel, laser blasts and bullets blindly spraying the rock walls behind me.
I reached the passage to the generators and saw a beautiful sight. Orange-red light glowed from the opening. It was not the flickering light of a struggling flame; it showed bright, warm, and strong. I got only a brief glimpse of Shannon’s work as I ran past, but it was enough. White-and-blue flames jetted away from the oxy-gen, heating walls farther down the tunnel. Shannon had ignited a fire in the oxy-gen’s piping, turning it into a torch. The flames carved into the obsidian walls. The surface of the rock was already orange and melting, belching thousands of gallons of vile fog. I could not tell if there was a hunting party behind
me. If there was, they weren’t using flashlights—I did not see beams on the wall around me. Somehow I doubted that they were following me. More likely than not, they had run back to camp when Shannon turned out the lights.
Wanting to present the smallest possible target, I crouched as I ran. I sprinted around a bend and chanced one last look back. What I saw made me shutter. A thick tongue of vapor rolled out of the generator tunnel. Given a few hours, the vapor would flood the entire cave system. I had seen the way random laser fire had superheated the rock. The fire from Shannon’s torch was not as hot, but it was broad and steady.
“Harris, are you out of there?” Shannon asked over the interLink.
“That shit’s pouring out of that hole like a waterfall,” I answered.
“Get moving uphill,” Shannon said. “Meet me at the top.”
I had not realized how much space we had covered. The path led on and on, and the slope no longer seemed so gentle now that it was uphill. My calves burned, and my pistol felt heavy in my hands. I found myself fighting for breath, then I thought about the Mogats trapped in the dark with their air supply cut off. “Dead or captured,” I mused. For those speckers, that was one hell of a choice. I continued up the slope, my run slowing into a jog, then a walk as I bumped my way forward. “Are you getting through that tunnel okay?” I asked Shannon.
“It’s tight,” he said. “But it seems to be getting wider.”
“I wasn’t paying attention when Scooter went through there,” I said.
“Neither was I,” Shannon said.
“I don’t know how you figured this all out,” I said. “They’re not even following me. That vapor cut them off.”
“Hang on a moment,” Shannon said. “I need to concentrate.” That was the last time we spoke. I walked around one final bend and saw the mouth to the cave. When I looked at the interLink menu in my visor, I did not see Shannon’s frequency.
“Sergeant? Sergeant Shannon!” I called again and again. I called on the platoon frequency. I tried an open frequency. I turned around and shouted his name at the top of my lungs.
“Harris, is that you?” Vince Lee asked. “What’s the matter?”
“I think Shannon is dead!” I said, wanting to go back to look for him. But I could not go back. I realized that. The vapor Shannon had unleashed had flooded the chamber behind me. It had probably flooded the tunnel around him as well. I imagined him crawling in the darkness of that narrow pass, struggling to get through a tight squeeze as he noticed the vapor creeping up behind him. Perhaps he was wedged in so tightly that he could not even turn to see the vapor until it had seeped around him. Whatever toxin that vapor held, it corroded its way through the rubber in our body suits, turning armor into a worthless exoskeleton. It ate through flesh and tissue. If I found Shannon, all I would find would be the hard stuff—the armor and bones, Everything else would be melted. God I hated Hubble.
A very comfortable cruiser landed near our platoon, and Captain McKay ordered me aboard. He wanted to introduce me to the colonels and commodores who would take credit for Tabor Shannon’s tactical genius. Dressed in immaculate uniforms, the colonels and commodores showed no interest in me, but they allowed me to watch as they mopped up the battle.
Nearly ten thousand Mogats surrendered, more than enough for Bryce Klyber’s judicial circus. Their quota met, the officers aboard the cruiser sent airborne battle drones into the caves. The drones looked like little giant pie plates. They were about three feet long and a foot tall. Most of their housing was filled with a broad propeller shaft. They had particle-beam guns mounted on their sides. We called them “RODEs,” but their technical name was Remote Operated Defense Engines. The officers sent ten RODEs into the cavern. The little beasts hovered about five feet over the vapor, and the officers made a game of seeing who could fly the lowest. One swabbie flew his RODE too low, and the vapor shorted it out. Everybody laughed at him. There was a jolly atmosphere inside the cruiser. I could not think. The atmosphere inside the cruiser was suffocating me. I wanted to find a way to rescue Shannon. Even if he was dead, I wanted to pull his body out. I did not want to leave him stranded in a cave filled with dead Mogats. I asked if I could leave, but Captain McKay told me I had to stay. Most RODEs are black, but the ones the colonels and commanders used were special. They had shiny gold chassis and bright headlights. They were not made for stealth.
“The angel of death, come to claim her victims,” one of the colonels joked in a loud voice. I saw that he had a microphone. He was broadcasting his voice inside the cave.
Maybe if I got to Shannon quickly . . . Perhaps he was in the caves, breathing the Mogats’ generated oxygen. I asked McKay a second time if I could leave, and he told me that the officers wanted me to stay.
The officers huddled around tracking consoles, watching the scene inside the cave through their RODEs’
eyes. “Permission to go join my platoon?” I asked McKay.
“Denied,” McKay said, sounding very irritated.
From where I sat, I could see one of the officers steering his RODE. I had a clear view of the monitor that showed him the world as his RODE saw it.
It took less than ten minutes for this officer to steer his RODE past the capillary that led to the generators. Thick fog still chugged out of it like viscous liquid. The RODE’s bright headlight cut through the darkness with a beam that was straight and hard. It shined momentarily on the ridge I used for protection during the shoot-out with the Mogats. The obsidian walls sparkled in the bright beam, but the headlight was not powerful enough to penetrate the thick layer of vapor that blanketed the floor of the cavern. Whatever secrets lay hidden under that gas would remain concealed.
“I found one!” an officer on the other side of the cabin yelled. He got a giddy response from other officers, who wanted hints about how he got there so quickly.
The colonel closest to me had found a grand cavern. His drone flew laps around the outer walls of the cavern like a shark looking for prey. The officer began to search the fog for survivors, and it did not take long until he found his first.
Whatever chemicals made up the vapor were heavier than the atmosphere. The vapor was heavy; it melted flesh and circuitry. What other pleasant surprises could it hold, I wondered. The RODE edged along the outer walls. It had a near miss as it dodged another RODE, and two officers shouted playful insults at each other.
A few Mogats had died while trying to pull themselves to safety, much the way Private Amblin had died in the trench. The colonel steered his way over to one of them for a closer look. The man’s chest, arms, and head lay flat on a rock shelf in a puddle that looked more like crude oil than blood. The gas had dissolved everything below his chest except his clothing.
The colonel circled the camera around the dead man. Vapor must have splashed against the right side of his face. The left side seemed normal enough, but the skin had dissolved from the right side, revealing patches of muscle and skull. Brown strings, maybe skin or maybe sinew, still dangled between the cheek and jaw. His left eye was gone.
Then the colonel found his first survivor—a man in torn clothes perched on a narrow lip of rock. His back was to the RODE. His arms were wrapped around a pipe for balance.
“We’ll certainly have none of that,” the colonel said in a jovial voice. On the screen I saw a particle-beam gun flash, and the man fell from his perch.
The cruiser erupted with laughter.
“Watch this,” another officer shouted. He, too, had found a survivor—a woman. He steered his RODE
toward the woman in a slow hover, then shined its blinding headlight on her face. She screamed and tried to shield her eyes with her forearm, but managed to stay balanced on a narrow rock ledge. The colonel fired a shot at her feet. Trying to back away from the RODE, the woman stumbled and fell. Her face struck the ledge, and she caught herself, but her body had fallen into the pool of vapor that covered the floor. She tried to pull herself up, but the skin on her face and arms was melting
. The officers laughed.
“Captain, may I please return to my men?”
McKay looked around the ship. If the officers had ever known we were there, they had forgotten about us by then. “You are dismissed, Corporal,” he said in a hushed voice. Forty thousand Mogats landed on Hubble. We captured ten thousand as they fled the caves and another fifteen thousand died when our Harriers hit their ships. The rest died in the caves.
CHAPTER TWENTY
First I was an orphan, then I was a clone, then I was both. Tabor Shannon had not been my father or my brother, but he had been my family. For a brief few weeks I belonged to a tiny and hated fraternity. So where did all that leave me? I was the last member of a discontinued line of clones fighting to protect the nation that outlawed their existence. All in all, I thought I had it better than Vince Lee and the 2,299
other enlisted Marines on the Kamehameha . I knew I was a clone, and I knew I could live with that knowledge. It now seemed to me that it was impossible that they did not suspect their origins on some level, and they must have lived in fear of the fatal confirmation.
By the time we left Hubble, I had spent more than eighteen months on active duty without asking for leave. The idea sounded foreign when Vince Lee first suggested it.
“Hello, Sergeant Harris,” Vince Lee said as he placed his breakfast tray on the table and sat down beside me. “Sergeant Harris . . . It almost sounds right. The next step is officer, pal. You could actually do it. Hell. You made sergeant in under two years.”
“I did not ask for the promotion,” I said. That was Lee, obsessed with promotions and success. Lee smiled. “You were made for it. You’re a Liberator.”
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