Steven Kent - The Clone Redemption

Some pilots sit as still as statues while they wait to take off; Lieutenant Nobles was a tinkerer. As we waited for the outer hatch to open, he fiddled with the instrumentation around his seat. He checked dials and flipped switches. I tried to ignore him as he pulled out his M27, but ultimately asked, “When was the last time you stripped and oiled your piece?”

“Yesterday, sir,” he said.

“Can you think of any reason why you would have botched the job?”

“No, sir,” he said.

“Is there any reason why anyone would have specked with your weapon?”

“No, sir.”

“Have you dropped it in mud since you stripped it?”

“No, sir.”

“Were you drunk when you assembled it?”

“No, sir.”

“Then leave it alone,” I said.

“Aye, sir. Yes, sir.”

Nobles sat back in his chair and crossed his arms. A few seconds passed, and pretty soon, he was testing the controls again.

I received a message over my commandLink. “General, we are almost in place, sir. Fifty miles and closing.”

Outside the cruiser, the space around Mars was silent. Inside our transport, amber lights flashed and Klaxons tolled. In the last moment before we launched, the ship went silent. The outer hatch slid open, revealing a galaxy of stars and darkness. With a tap of our thrusters, Nobles lifted the transport off the sled and we glided into space.

By this time, we had circled Mars and come around to the side facing the sun. A dust-colored planet glowed below us, and I saw Mars Spaceport, a white-and-gray plateau that looked too large to be man-made. It formed a plain across a small corner of the planet’s surface.

And above the spaceport, moored in five razor-straight rows, were the barges we had come to collect. They did not look like ships. They looked like floating boxes.

“Listen up,” I said over the interLink, opening a channel that every man on every transport would hear, both sailors and Marines. “This is General Wayson Harris. I am personally overseeing this operation. You’ve all been briefed. You know your objectives.

“You know your assignments. Shoot anyone who gets in your way on this op. With all of the planets we need to evacuate, every one of these barges is worth millions of lives. We can’t afford to lose a single barge.” Even as I said it, I wondered how many other missions of mercy had begun with similar instructions— kill anyone who crosses your path.

“We don’t have time for mistakes or mercy on this one,” I said, and with that, I signed off.

No long motivational speech, no threats or cussing. Maybe I was getting soft.

It might have been that no one was guarding the barges, or it might have been that we caught them napping. The big ships remained stationary, silent, and dark as we sidled up beside them.

Seeing the mammoth barges from a lowly transport, I felt like a flea approaching a dog …no, an elephant. We had just come out of a cruiser that ferried twenty-one transports crammed into three overcrowded landing bays. With a little creative packing, we could have fit a thousand transports inside one these behemoths.

The barge did not have landing bays. It was designed for quick evacuations; and the slow act of towing transports in and out through launch tubes and atmospheric locks did not fit the mode. The hulls of the barges were dotted with landing pads, hard points with magnetic clamps and retractable entryways. These ships did not have weapons or shields. They were leviathans, giant whales traveling the galaxy, defenseless against attack.

The first four transports to leave the spy ship had to fly double duty. While the rest of the transports docked, they would return to the cruiser for a second set of Marines, who they would deliver to a second barge. The transports themselves were meaningless. Even if everything went according to plan, we would lose them when we broadcasted out. They would fall from the clamps along the hulls of the barges like flakes of dead skin.

Our transports touched down on the landing pads, and the entryways automatically extended. They attached to the rear hatches of our transports, creating a seal. I reminded myself that entering the barges would, in theory, be no more difficult than entering a grocery store.

Time was of the essence. I left the cockpit, breezed across the short catwalk, and slid down the ladder. As lieutenants and sergeants organized the platoons, I made my way to the hatch.

The muffled bang and thud of the struts touching down sounded through walls, and the metal floor bounced and settled under our feet.

There we stood, in the dark metal can that was our military transport, our ranks organized into fire teams, squads, and platoons, our M27s ready in case of resistance.

My heart pounding hard and steady, my combat reflex already begun, I stood at the front of my company, like a private on point duty, my finger already over the trigger of my gun as I watched the doors of the transport slowly grind open.

Cross this line, and the Unifieds will never let you rest, I told myself. The Unified Authority had declared this war, not I; but by stealing their barges, we would take this conflict to a fiery new level. They would come after us. They would hunt us. If we took these barges, the population of Earth would be trapped on a targeted planet. They had already decided to leave every man, woman, and child on every one of our planets to die; now they would see how it felt to be alone with their fate. Bastards.

Since the barge had hundreds of landing pads along its hull, there was no way a skeleton security patrol could have guarded every entrance, so it was no surprise when the hatch opened to an empty tube.

From that point on, I would no longer speak to the entire team on an open frequency. A designated coordinator would take control of the mission. The platoon leaders called the shots with their men.

We charged down the entryway—two platoons, each with its own commanding and executive officers. I led the way. We were one hundred men entering a ship designed to ferry 250,000 people at a time.

The entryway was a hall wide enough for ten men walking side by side. As I ran ahead, the shifting field of gravity played with my balance. The floor was a gravitational field that twisted along the outside wall like the thread of a screw. What had been the ceiling when I entered the tube became the floor twenty feet in. To the men behind me, it must have looked like I was running upside down. When I reached the exit, the orientation of the entryway floor matched the deck of the barge.

Though I had seen the barges during the evacuation of Olympus Kri, I had never set foot on one. The grand size of it took me aback. Maybe it would look smaller crowded with people; but seeing the long, empty deck overwhelmed my senses. It looked like an unfinished spaceport. The floors were flat and wide and open. The glint of naked aluminum girders accented the ceiling. The walls were so far away that they seemed to press themselves into a distant horizon. The frame supporting the deck above us was so low that I could reach up and touch it. Had Freeman come on this mission, he might have bumped his head every few steps.

Dozens of spiraling stairwells twisted up from the floor like giant corkscrews. There was no furniture.

Since I had assigned myself to point position, Major Ritz expected me to report. He asked, “General, do you see anyone?”

“Either they’re hiding in the heads or this deck is secure,” I said. “Head” was Marine-speak for bathroom.

“Aye, sir, I’ll send a couple of men to flush out the head.”

I started to laugh at the man’s juvenile pun, then realized that he had made the pun inadvertently. “You do that. We don’t want anyone sneaking out from behind the toilets.”