Riding so near to the ground, the low-gravity tank was an easy target. It teetered on the edge of the trench for a moment, but its momentum and weight sent it forward, and it tumbled nose first into the hole. The ground shook, and a flash of flame shot into view.
“Holy shit!” Lee shouted into the interLink.
Until I saw the tank topple into that shaft, I had not felt the hormone rush that I had experienced during the battle on Gobi. Suddenly I felt the warmth running through my blood. The feeling was soothing. It was more than soothing. It felt good. “The bastards rigged their friggin’ snake shafts to cave in,” I shouted.
I heard Sergeant Shannon. “Command! Command! Stop all movements! Stop all movements!” But Shannon’s warning came too late.
Looking around the valley, I saw the ground crumbling in all directions as dozens of trenches appeared. To my left, an LG tank struggled to reverse itself before it rolled into one trench, then backed into another. The men piloting the tanks did not wear breathing equipment. If they evacuated, they would be strangled by Hubble’s toxic air.
“Stop all movements! Repeat, stop all movements!” Shannon continued.
Another tank to my left tried to pivot around a trench, but the powdery soil beneath it caved in. A group of men walking beside it fell in as well. Several more vehicles had fallen farther back; I could see their useless hulls leaning out of the trenches. Flames burst through their armor.
“Repeat, halt all movements!” Shannon bellowed then fell silent. By this time endorphins and adrenaline coursed through my veins.
The officers commanding the invasion would have known about the snake shafts. At least those who were alive would know. Some field officers were stationed aboard a mobile command center that more likely than not was now lying ass up in a ditch.
The invasion force ground to a stop, giving me a moment to survey the damage. I counted sixty-three destroyed tanks, but I might have missed some in the dust and smoke. There was no way of estimating how many men had fallen when the shafts caved in beneath them.
Across the scarred field, the tanks that had not fallen into trenches remained perfectly still. The men within them were trapped. Any movement might send them over a ledge.
“Gather your men,” Shannon ordered his fire team leaders over the interLink.
“Fall in,” I called to my men. Only one man answered.
“Amblin? Schultz? Respond,” I called out. When they did not reply, I hailed them twice more.
“Sergeant,” I said, hailing Shannon.
“What?”
“I’m missing two men,” I said. “Amblin and Schultz. Requesting permission to look for them.”
“You can look; but, Harris, do not drop in the snake shafts,” Shannon barked back. “Even if you find one of your men in a shaft, do not go in after him.”
“Understood,” I said, though I did not understand.
“You have ten minutes to look,” Shannon said. “Find them or not, in ten minutes get back to the platoon.”
I called to my remaining team member. “You heard him. We have fifteen minutes to locate Amblin and Schultz.”
We split up. I turned toward the rear of our stalled forces. What had once been an endless and empty strip of land now looked like a junkyard. The fire-blackened tails of low-gravity tanks poked out of the ground like scattered rocks. The oily Hubble atmosphere had smothered the fires that had erupted out of the ruined tanks, but smoke still rose from their hatches.
I passed a trench and stared down the hull of a derelict tank. It had fallen nose first, smashing its turrets under its own immense weight. Pausing to wipe the grease from my visor, I looked at the wreckage. Under other circumstances I might have hopped on to the back of the tank for a closer look; but with the crew still inside, I did not want to take a chance of making things worse.
A layer of sludgy, brown fog filled the bottom of the trench, obscuring the nose of the tank. As I looked more closely, I saw the bodies of dead Marines along the edges of the snake shaft. At first I thought that they might have jumped from the tank, but there were too many bodies, and most wore armor. Some of the bodies were burned. My visor did not register the identity signals from any of them. Whatever the fog inside the trenches was, it destroyed the electronics inside their combat armor. I did not want to know what it might have done to the men wearing the armor.
Amblin’s armor still gave off its identification signal. As I looked across a collapsed snake shaft, I saw him. He must have caught on to a ledge as the ground collapsed around him. He lay sprawled, facedown, over the lip of the trench like a man hanging off the edge of a swimming pool. But Amblin was not moving.
I knelt beside him. When I touched his helmet, it rolled away from the rest of his armor. A layer of darkened blood sloshed around inside his visor. Shocked, I stumbled backward, my attention still fixed on the maroon liquid that seeped out from his shoulder pads.
“Dammmnnn!” I bellowed inside my helmet. Amblin and I had never been friends, but we trained together. I’d known I could depend upon him.
I remained sitting on the cinder soil for another minute, fighting to regain my composure. Everything had gone so wrong. Our invading army sat in a morass. How had they done it? How did these Mogat hoodlums, these small-time criminals and religious fanatics, outsmart our fleet?
“Lee, Harris, come on back,” Shannon said.
“I found Amblin,” I said.
“Is he okay?” Shannon asked, his voice perking up.
“He’s dead,” I answered. “There’s some sort of toxic gas in the snake shafts.”
“I saw shit like this during the Galactic Central War,” Shannon said. “You find it on scorched planets.”
“I hate this place,” I said.
“Then I’ve got some bad news for you,” Shannon said. “Our Harriers destroyed their ships.”
“That’s good,” I said, feeling brighter. “I forgot about the air battle.”
“The speckers ran into caves at the far end of the valley,” Shannon continued, ignoring my comment. “We’re going after them, Harris. We’re going underground.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The pleated cliffs surrounding the far edge of the valley had nearly vertical walls made of a black, obsidian-like rock that reflected light. From our gathering point a few hundred yards back, we did not have a good view of the dozens of caves in the craggy walls. They might have been formed by erosion, or bubbling heat, or carved by the same Mogat hands that dug the snake shafts.
At the moment, our invasion looked more like a rescue operation. Teams of corpsmen brought breathing gear to men trapped in LG tanks, and evacuation teams pulled the crews to safety. From what McKay told Shannon, our engineers had not yet figured out how to pull the surviving tanks off the battlefield. At a hundred tons each, the tanks weighed too much for personnel carriers to lift, and the ground was too broken to land barges. Vince Lee made a joke about building dozens of bridges and rolling the tanks to safety, but that seemed like the most plausible answer.
While engineers and evacuation crews cleaned up after the first stage of our invasion, wings of ATs flew in another regiment to replace the dead and wounded. Captain McKay had his two platoons regroup along one side of the Mogats’ launchpad. We had lost twenty-one men—just less than half of our men, and our platoon had one of the lower casualty rates because we were at the front of the attack. We had almost been across the field by the time the shafts caved in.
We were not the only ones who had suffered. The broken hulls of so many Mogat cargo ships littered the near side of the canyon that I did not bother counting them. Our fighters and gunships had left a smoldering graveyard in their wake. The wrecked ships, strewn like broken eggshells across the ground, glowed with small fires that burned inside their hulls. The flickering flames were only visible through port-holes and cracked hatches.
The Mogats had cargo ships of various sizes in their fleet. Clearly the enemy wanted to escape, not fight. I saw
no sign of the dreadnoughts that had destroyed the Chayio , just lightly armed cargo ships and transports.
“I am sending coordinates over your visor,” Captain McKay said, over an open frequency on the interLink. “We’ve been ordered to secure a cave.”
McKay’s mobile command center had survived the trap. His pilot had managed to swerve around three shafts and drive the vehicle to safety. With the airspace over the battlefield secured, the officers overseeing the invasion now commanded us from one of Klyber’s diplomatic cruisers.
“Maybe they could command us from a penthouse in Washington, DC,” Lee joked. “There aren’t many snake shafts around Capitol Hill.”
“Watch your mouth,” Shannon said, his voice snapping like a whip. “Now roll out.” Shannon, always duty-bound, did not let his men criticize officers.
The shortest way to our sector was straight across the launch area. We followed a path through the destroyed ships with our particle-beam rifles raised and ready, prepared to fire at anything that moved. We needn’t have bothered. It quickly became apparent that our pilots had more than evened the score. I passed a large freighter with an oblong, rectangular front and sickle-shaped fins. Two-foot-wide rings dotted its sides, marking the spots where particle beams had blasted the hull. When I got closer, I noticed that the armor plating under the blast rings had blistered. Most of the ships had not even lifted off the ground when the attack started; and their shields were down.
As I walked by this particular wreck, I saw the fatal wound. The engines at the back of the ship, now little more than blackened casings and fried wires, had exploded. The thick and unbreathable Hubble air stifled the fire outside the freighter, but the inside sparkled with dozens of tiny flames. I peered through the open hatch and saw fire dancing on the walls.
I also saw people. If the ship was full at launch, at least three hundred people died inside it. In the brief glimpse that I got, I saw men slumped in their seats like soldiers sleeping on a long transport flight. One dead man’s arms hung flaccid over the armrests.
“Are they all dead?” I asked Lee.
He did not answer at first. Just as I prepared to ask again, he said, “I hope so, for their sake.”
We pushed on, weaving through the wreckage. I passed by a small transport—a ship capable of carrying no more than seven people. It had apparently lifted a few meters off the ground when a missile tore its tail section off. The ship crashed and settled top side down, bashing a hole in its nose section.
I looked in the cockpit and saw the pilot hanging from his chair, his restraint belt still binding him into place. The man’s mouth gaped, and blood trickled over his upper lip and into his nostrils. More blood leaked from the tops of his eyes, running across his forehead in little rivulets that disappeared into his thick, dark hair. The pilot’s arms dangled past his head; the ends of his curled fingers rested on the ceiling.
I could not tell if Hubble’s gases had killed him or if he had broken his neck in the crash. I had no problem identifying what killed the copilot hanging from the next seat. A jagged shard of outer plating hung from his neck. From what I could see, that bloodstained wedge had sliced through the man’s throat and become jammed in his spine.
A hand touched my shoulder and I jumped. When I looked over, I saw Shannon’s identifier.
“Don’t get distracted,” Shannon said.
“Remind me never to piss off the U.A. Navy,” I said.
“That’s not the worst of it.” Lee approached us and nodded toward the body. “His pilot’s license was revoked.”
“You’re a sick man, Lee,” I said.
We turned and continued through the wreckage. After a while, one ship looked pretty much like the next, and I no longer bothered to peer inside. The passengers were dead; that was enough.
As we reached the edge of the landing area, I noticed piles of melted netting and wires—the ruins of a camouflaged hangar. These people were so desperate to live that they had colonized an uninhabitable planet. No sane person would have ever searched for life on a rock like Hubble, but our intelligence network found them just the same. Perhaps a recon ship just happened to spot them or maybe a loose-lipped friend let the information slip over a drink. In any case, they were trapped.
We stopped a hundred yards from the cliffs. I had to ping the wall to locate the caves—night-for-day lenses are not good tools for spotting dark caverns set in jet-black cliffs. The ground was black, the cliffs were black, the sky was black, and the dust and oil on my visor were not helping. My sonic locator outlined the opening with a translucent green orifice, but I still could not tell what machinery might be hiding inside.
“Are we going in?” I asked Sergeant Shannon when I spotted him and his men.
He did not dignify the question with an answer. He stared ahead at the cave, his hands tight around the stock of his gun.
“They fight harder when they’re backs are up against a wall like this,” Shannon said. “They’ll be more angry than scared.”
I thought about what he said. “They’re bound to have a few more tricks.”
“No,” Shannon said, sounding resigned to the situation. “They’re at the bottom of their deck. They could never have expected us to find them here. We’ve finally closed every back door unless their friends have enough ships to overwhelm an entire fleet.”
I followed Shannon’s gaze back to the cliffs and the barely visible mouth of the cave. “We could wait them out. They’re going to run out of food and air . . .”
“We’ll take the battle to them, Harris. You want to know why we have all-clone enlistment? It’s so that we can throw an infinite supply of men into any fire and not worry about the public outcry.”
“Clones are equipment,” I echoed.
“Standard-issue, just like guns, boots, and batteries,” Shannon said. Through most of our conversation, Shannon stared at the cliff; then he paused and turned toward me. “We’re still on point, and McKay’s going to give the order soon.”
I nodded and turned. “Lee,” I called over the interLink. “Shannon says it’s almost time to roll.”
Lee came to me and held out his hand. He held a swatch of black cloth. “Wipe your visor, friend,” he said.
“Where’d you get that?” I asked.
“I swiped it from that ship,” he said, pointing toward a small cruiser that had broken wide open. “It’s from the upholstery.”
“Clever,” I said. “Thanks for sharing.”
“No problem,” Lee said. “You’ll do a better job of watching my back if you can see where you’re going.”
“Ha,” I said.
By that time, the reinforcements were positioned all along the valley walls. We had enough men to cover every cave. No matter where they tried to evacuate, the Mogats would run into Marines.
“Okay, Lee . . . Harris,” Shannon called out, “I just got the word. McKay wants us to secure the entrance.”
That was just a courtesy call. The next message, sent over the platoon frequency, was the actual order. “Okay, gentlemen, secure this area and stay within the goddamned lines!” Shannon barked.
Along with missiles, fighters, and tanks, the Unified Authority Marine Corps utilized more subtle technologies. Command divided the battlefield and sent platoon the coordinates of their attack in the form of a visual beacon—a signal that drew virtual walls around our zone in our visors.
Looking straight ahead, I saw the black face of the cliffs. If I turned to the right or the left, however, translucent red walls appeared.
Lee and his team took the left edge of the target zone. Shannon sent my fire team to the right edge. He and the rest of the men ran up the middle. Shannon led the charge, leaving small clouds of dust in his wake as he moved forward in a low crouch. There was no cover for hiding, just flat, featureless soil.
With the next man crouched ten paces behind me, I sprinted along the right boundary of the target zone. Keeping my finger along the edge of the trigger guard, I pointe
d the barrel of my particle-beam gun at the cave.
The mouth of the cave—a broad, yawning keyhole in the side of the cliff—was twenty feet high and maybe ten feet wide. If the inside of the cave was as narrow as the mouth, we would be vulnerable as we funneled through it.
Somebody fired at me. Had he used a particle beam or laser, he might have hit me. Instead, he used a regular gun—a weapon that was somewhat unpredictable in the oil-humid air. Instinctively reacting to the first shot, which clipped the dirt near my feet, I jumped to my right and rolled. The world turned red around me. I had left the target zone and entered the no-man’s-land outside the beacon’s virtual walls. I heard more bullets strike the ground in front of me; but with the red light from the beacon filling my visor, I could not see where they hit.
I climbed to my knees and lunged back to the target zone, jumping forward, slamming my chest and face into the soft ground. My helmet sank deep into the ash, which caked onto glass. As I rolled to my left, staying as flat to the ground as I could, a coin-thick layer of ash clogged my sight. Moving slowly to avoid attracting attention, I reached up and tapped my visor with one finger, causing most of the ash to slide off. Then I pulled the swatch of cloth from my belt and wiped away the grime and ash.
Using heat vision, I peered into the cave and saw six gunmen hiding in the shadows with three more on the way. As I rolled on my back again, I saw red streaks flash through the air above my head.
I wanted to fire into the cave, but I did not dare. If I’d turned to shoot, I would have made an easy target—the enemy had pinned me down. They had pinned all of us down as they hid behind the entrance of the cave.
Of the forty-two men in our platoon, only twenty-one had survived to make the assault, and I suspected the casualties were mounting. Suddenly there it was, that sweet clarity. My body was awash with endorphins and adrenaline. My fear did not disappear, but it no longer mattered. I could see everything clearly and knew that I could handle any situation. The hormone left me feeling in control. I rolled to my left to get a shot, but a laser bolt struck the ground near me. Apparently the Mogats intended to make us earn every inch of ground we took.
The Clone Republic (Clone 1) Page 21