Everything I had done up to that point made perfect sense. In fact, it was obvious. If you inherited a base that had been ransacked, you fixed the holes and restored the security systems. The previous platoon would have taken the same precautions.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The war began on November 8, 2510. Hoping to find a response from Admiral Klyber, I went into the command office and slipped on my mediaLink shades.
NORMA ARM SECEDES FROM THE REPUBLIC
November 8, Washington, DC— Announcing that they had formed a new organization called the Norma Arm Treaty Organization, 27 of the 30 colonized planets in the Norma Arm declared independence from the Unified Authority.
Other territories may follow suit. There are reports that the Cygnus Arm has a similar treaty organization.
“Shit,” I gasped. An entire arm of the galaxy had declared independence. If the Cygnus Arm followed, would Scutum-Crux be far behind?
I did not tell my men about the secessions. Knowing that a civil war had begun would hurt their morale and possibly weaken their resolve. In the new state of affairs, they would need to fight more than ever. With entire galactic arms declaring independence, the Navy would not waste time worrying about an all-clone platoon on an ice cube like Ravenwood. We were on our own.
While I read the news in my office, my men scoured the base for bodies and signs of fighting. We found them everywhere. Bullets had gouged and scratched many of the walls. Somebody had fired a particle beam in the building, too. We found places where beam blasts had exploded parts of the walls.
“Sir, I think you should see this,” one of my men called.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“Squad bay,” the man said, “in the hub.”
Viewed from the top, Ravenwood Station looked like a square with an X connecting its four corners. The center of that X, the “hub,” included the barracks, the rec room, the galley, and the latrine. I found three of my privates in squad bay. One of them had noticed a dark stain on the floor. They had pushed the bunks out of the way for a better look and found that most of the bare, concrete floor was discolored.
“I don’t think it’s blood,” I said. “Blood washes off clean.”
“It almost looks like an oil stain,” a private said.
“Whatever this shit was, sir, there was a lot of it,” the first private said. “Most of the floor is stained.”
“So did it evaporate?” I asked.
“No, sir. Somebody mopped up afterward.”
“What?” I asked.
The private pushed a bunk out of his way and opened a service closet. Inside the closet were a coiled steam hose and some maps. The heads of these mops were thick and heavily stained towels that were stiff and purple.
“There are more stains, sir,” another private said. The group took me on a tour of the base, pointing out crescent-shaped stains where past residents had most likely died.
From what I could tell, the unfortunate platoon before us made a stand in the barracks. Everywhere we went, we found scratches and gashes in the wall. The boys before us had not worried about conserving ammunition. They obviously had something more on their minds.
We stripped the sheets from the bunks and found that most of the mattresses had a black stain running along one edge. Many had flash burns, and a few even had bullet holes. The last platoon had thrown their bunks on their sides and used them as barricades during the firefight. As we examined the bunks, a corporal noticed something strange about the damage in the walls. Most of the shots were between three and five feet up, with only a rare shot having hit any higher. Marines, who are trained to shoot to kill, will normally aim at their enemies’ chests and heads.
I went to the operations area, the northern corner of the fortress. The rest of Ravenwood Station had plastic-coated white walls and bright lights. Operations had black walls and no windows. The only light in the area came from the security screens and computer monitors. Lights blinked on and off on the banks of computers lining the walls.
It was there that I found Marsten and Gubler hacking into the station’s many computer systems. Despite the cold, they had removed their helmets and gloves.
“Aren’t you cold?” I asked.
“We’ve got the climate controls working. It’s getting warmer,” Gubler said. “We’re already up twenty degrees.” He pointed to a monitor that showed the base temperature at just under forty degrees. I looked at Gubler and saw that his face was pale; his lips had turned slightly blue.
“Yeah, warmer,” I said. “How is it going with the radar system?”
“Up and running,” Marsten said. “I may have already found something, too.”
He went to a terminal and typed in some commands, bringing up a radar screen. “Now this may only have been an echo from something detected a long time ago; but as the system came online, I picked up a ship at the edge of our range. It was only there for a moment.”
“So another ship might be in the area?” I asked. “Is it possible that the ship detected your scan and flew out of range?” I asked.
“I’m not sure why it would do that,” Marsten said. “It was one of ours, a fighter carrier. Have a look.”
Marsten typed some commands, and the screen fuzzed for a moment. The time mark in the corner showed “11/8/2510: 1437.” The screen froze.
“There,” Marsten said, pointing to the very top of the screen. Outlined in green and white was the bat-winged shape of a U.A.N. fighter carrier.
“A carrier. Did you identify it?” I asked.
“No, sir. It moved out of range too quickly.” Marsten stood in front of the scanning station, the glare from the screen reflected in a bright smear on his armor.
“Did you get any information?” I asked.
Marsten’s forehead became very smooth as his eyes narrowed, and he considered my question. “I’ll see what we can take from the radar reading.”
I walked beside him and looked over his shoulder as he typed more information into the computer. A glowing red grid showed on the screen. He brought up the radar frame with the ghost ship, then isolated the ship. Numbers flashed on the computer screen as he plumbed the image for information. “You’ll be able to see it more clearly if you take off the helmet,” Marsten said.
“I need to stay on the interLink,” I responded.
Marsten nodded. “This is the beginning of the scan. The ship was pretty far away.” Strange numbers appeared on the screen. Leaning in for a better look, Marsten traced his finger along the screen. His finger looked green in the glare.
“That can’t be right,” Marsten said as he looked up from the screen. He turned to face me. “This may sound odd. It’s probably a misread, but this ship is only twenty-two hundred feet wide. I mean, it’s either a very large battleship or maybe an old Expansion-class fighter carrier.”
This information should have come as a surprise, but it didn’t. I felt a familiar chill run through me. “How far back in time can you go on radar record?”
“You want to know what the other platoons saw?” Marsten asked. “I can do that.” He sounded both pleased and excited.
We had no information about the hundred-man Navy detachment that disappeared on Ravenwood. One moment they were there, and everything was fine. A week later they did not report in. Nothing is known about what happened during that week.
We knew more about the missing platoon. It disappeared within five hours of landing on Ravenwood. The commanding officer had checked in with Pollard every hour on the hour. Captain Pollard sent a rescue ship two hours after the final transmission. The ship took three hours to arrive, and by the time it did, the base was empty.
After a thorough search, Marsten found another slight echo that suggested inconclusively that an Expansion-class fighter carrier did indeed pass within radar range of Ravenwood Station sometime after the platoon arrived.
“Does that ship mean anything, sir?” Marsten asked.
“It might,” I said.
I shook my head. “No. That fleet did not have any carriers.”
“I’ll keep on this,” Marsten said.
“Okay,” I answered, “I’m going to have another look around. Let me know if you find anything else.”
All of the evidence pointed in the same direction, but I did not like where it was pointing. For one thing, if I was reading it right, our chances of survival were nil.
The one part of Ravenwood Station I had not yet visited was the vehicle pool. I called for a squad to meet me there.
“Lieutenant,” Marsten said.
“What have you got?” I asked.
“The radar was running during the first attack. An Expansion-class carrier was in the area around the time of the attack. In fact, it was flying over the area when the radar was shut down.”
“Was it the Kamehameha ?” I asked.
“How did you know?” Marsten asked.
“Just an ugly hunch,” I said. “You’ve done good work. Any chance you can search the security records?
I need to know everything that happened in this base.”
“Gubler already tried,” Marsten said, now starting to sound slightly nervous. “The records were erased.”
“Okay, you’ve done great. Thanks.” I signed off.
Twelve of my men met me inside the motor pool, and we searched. If Ravenwood Station ever had tanks or ATVs, they were now gone. Except for tools, fuel tanks, and a lot of trash, the room was empty.
The floor and walls were bare concrete. We searched methodically, piling debris in the center of the room behind us. I found a few spent M27 cartridges and a line of icy footprints. Somebody had come in here with wet feet. Unfortunately, I had no way of telling the age of the footprints. When it came to important discoveries, one of my corporals won the prize. “I’ve found a body!” he yelled over the open frequency. Everybody stopped what they were doing and went to have a look. The doors to the motor pool opened as more Marines came for a look.
“Where is it?” I asked as I looked at the far wall.
“He’s buried in that corner, sir,” the corporal said. He pointed toward the far corner of the room. Any lights that might have been in that section of the pool had either stopped working or been shot out. I switched on the night-for-day lens in my visor as I moved in for a closer look, but I need not have bothered. The corner was empty except for a pile of cans and rags; but growing out of those rags was the name, “Private Thadius Gearhart.”
“Search it,” I ordered, not knowing what we might find. The pile of trash was about a foot deep—too shallow to conceal a body. “The rest of you, get back to work.”
As the others filed out of the motor pool, the corporal called out, “I found him. At least I have what’s left of him.”
The corporal held the broken front section of a combat helmet between his pinched fingers. The section included most of the frame around the visor and a jagged swath of the portion around the left ear. A few shards of glass remained in the visor.
Gearhart had been most likely shot in the face. The bullet would have entered through the visor, flattening on impact, and blown out the back of his head and helmet. If we examined the area more carefully, I suspected we would find bits of broken plastic along with skull and brain among the rags, cans, and trash.
The corporal swung the scrap of helmet as if he planned to throw it in the trash. “Stop,” I said.
“Do you want this, sir?” the man asked.
“Take it to Marsten,” I said. “Tell him that it’s still transmitting an identifier signal and ask him if he can access the data chip.”
Though Marsten was surely a gifted hacker, I had little hope that he would extract information from that data chip, assuming it was even in there. Combat helmets were complex pieces of equipment with optical movement readers, multiple lenses, interLink wiring, and more. It seemed like too much to hope for the read-and-relay data chip to be in that small section. Luck, for once, was on our side. We did not find anything else of significance in the motor pool. As I left to return to the hub, I saw two of my men praying. “You do that,” I whispered. “Why not.” A few minutes later, Marsten contacted me.
“Lieutenant Harris, I think we got it rigged.”
“I’ll be right there.”
“Rigged” was a good choice of words. Marsten had strung a full dozen wires into a small socket along the left edge of the visor. Gubler connected that rat’s nest of wires into the back of a computer.
“The chip was damaged to begin with, and this is not the way these chips were meant to be read,”
Marsten said, by way of apology, as he turned on a computer monitor. “We won’t get much, but we should get something.”
Rather than a streaming video feed, we got a single image on the screen. It could only have been the last thing Gearhart saw as the bullet struck him. Jagged lines marked the screen where his visor had already shattered.
Gearhart must have been guarding the motor pool when the enemy arrived. The image on the screen showed three men climbing through holes they had bored—the holes my men were currently sealing back up.
I could see two of the men’s faces. The third, likely the man who killed Gearhart, was hidden behind a rifle scope. One of the other men held a pistol in one hand as he pulled himself forward with the other. His clawlike fingers were wrapped over the edge of the hole.
“They all have the same face. Are they clones?” Gubler asked as he stared into the screen.
“Adam Boyd,” I said.
“You know him?” Marsten asked.
I thought about the scars around my forehead and right eye. “We’ve met.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Two years earlier, when I first reported to Gobi Station, I dreamed only of serving the Republic. My greatest ambition was the life of a Marine, but only twenty-four months later I no longer gave a damn about the Earth, the Unified Authority, or the Marines. Programming or no, I was done with all of it. To me, the Unified Authority was people like Robert Thurston, who considered clones expendable. He was no more antisynthetic than he was antibullets. Both were supplies that could easily be replaced and should be used to strategic advantage. On Little Man, he sent twenty-three hundred loyal Marines to their deaths without a backward glance. And Ravenwood . . . Ravenwood wasn’t a fuel depot, it was a training ground. Admiral Huang was using Marines as live targets to train his new breed of SEAL clones how to kill. I doubted that Huang knew that I had beat the shit out of one of his clones at Sad Sam’s Palace, but I hoped that he did.
If only I could have peeked. One quick look at the old security tapes and I might have understood the SEALs’ tactics. Screw superior numbers and the home field advantage, I wanted to know what methods the Boyd clones used, what weapons they carried, and what made those deep purple stains on the floors. But they had made sure that I could not peek. No one cared if it was a matter of life and death for my platoon; the important thing was that the SEALs have their training exercises. Peeking at past performances would be breaking the rules of their game.
If the SEALs stuck to their past schedule, they would attack within five hours of our entering the base. We spent three hours patching walls that the SEALs could easily breach, repairing systems the SEALs had twice destroyed, and gathering specks of evidence of past SEAL victories. That was how the past platoons had played it, too. I needed to start developing new ways to play the game. The key, I thought, was not getting herded into a group.
The stains on the ground might not have been blood, but they represented death. Looking at the evidence, I reconstructed the last assault. The Boyd clones had circled the outer halls, killing off the stragglers and herding the rest of the platoon into squad bay.
There, with the last Marines using bunks for cover, the SEALs finished the battle. They massacred the platoon. They had done something awful, but I had no idea what it might have been. In the waning minutes before the
fight, I came up with an idea that might give us a small advantage.
“Marsten,” I called over the interLink, “kill the lights and close off the vents.”
“Do you want me to shut off the heat?” Marsten asked.
“No, bump the heat as far as it will go. Just close the vents.”
“The vents are in the ceiling, sir. It’s going to get cold in here.”
“That’s what I want, Marsten. I want this base cold and dark. Do you have that?”
“Yes, sir,” Marsten said in an unsure voice.
“I’m on my way to the control room. I’ll explain when I get there,” I said. Next, I spoke over the platoon-wide frequency. “This is Harris,” I barked. “I have given the order to power down the lights and turn off the vents. I want everybody to switch to heat vision. I repeat, do not use night-for-day vision, use heat vision.”
An eerie, almost liquid, darkness flooded the halls as the lights went out. For the first few seconds, I did not see anything other than the heat signatures of the men around me. Their armor muffled their colors; instead of orange with a yellow corona, they were brown and red. Groping blindly, I found my way to a wall, then felt my way to the door.
“Begging the lieutenant’s, pardon, sir, but I can’t see a specking thing,” someone complained over the interLink. “Can I switch to night-for-day?”
“No!” I shouted. “We’re running out of time, and we cannot do what the last platoon did.”
“And the lieutenant believes that fighting blind will help?” another man asked.
“You can bet the last platoon leader did not try that,” another man quipped.
“Take a look at the ceiling, asshole,” I said.
By that time, a faint orange glow appeared along the ceiling and the tops of the walls. It wasn’t bright, but the air in the ventilation shafts was only getting hotter. Soon the heat signature from the shafts would give us a clear outline of every room. We could tell the shapes of the rooms and where we stood in them. We would see each other. We would have marginal lighting, and the Boyd clones would be entirely blind.
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