Steven Kent - The Clone Redemption

Not even trying to understand the events around me, I watched as fragments of plaster chipped from the ceiling and walls. Men fell to the floor. The men who had wrestled me down now tried to pull me away. I flailed. I kicked. I got one arm free and slammed my fist into one of my attackers. I hit the front of his helmet. His head jerked back, but I did not even put a crack in his visor.

More men dropped. Some fell in spasms. Some fell still, their blood leaking from pin-sized holes in their armor. I brushed men off my other arm, kicked wildly, and I was free.

My desperation slackened. The part of me that still had intelligence told me to put on my helmet. I lay on my stomach, propelling myself along the ground by faking convulsions. With the Unifieds just entering the floor, I rolled to my side so I could slip my helmet back over my head without being seen. Once I had my helmet secured, I wrapped my hand around the stock of my M27, it might have been my M27, and I played dead. I lay in a pile of dead Marines. I saw the men sprawled on the floor around me and realized they’d died trying to save me.

I played possum, a paisley piece in a collage of dead bodies—one that the Unified Authority might never find. Natural-borns ran past the bodies without sparing a second glance. Knowing that anyone they shot would die, they did not worry about the wounded.

Sensibility slowly set in. I was not entirely in control. I felt some semblance of thought coming back to my brain.

“Ritz. You there?” I asked. I felt ashamed of myself; but I did not have time for embarrassment. There would be a time to apologize, but it would come after the battle. For now, I had shown enough weakness already.

“Harris?” I heard doubt, maybe even fear.

“Did you send men to save me?” I asked.

He answered my question with one of his own. “Where are you?”

“What do you have in the way of explosives?” I asked. I was about to suggest demolishing ourselves and the building. My Liberator programming would not allow me to detonate the bomb myself, but I thought maybe I could give the order. Then something caught my attention and I forgot about bombs.

I lay on the ground, doing my best imitation of a corpse, albeit one that had fallen with a gun still in his grip. My arms stretched past my head, my finger still on the trigger. Thanks to my armor, I could breathe and still look no more alive than the dead men around me. An intelligent Marine might notice the lack of blood leaking from my armor, but there was plenty of blood on the ground around me. About twenty U.A. Marines had already walked past without giving me a second glance.

The glow of their shielded armor had died. The batteries must have run out, though I had no idea what could have caused it.

The Unifieds walked through the dead, stepping over bodies, ready to fire fléchettes into anything that moved. These were the men on point, the sacrificial lambs …the canaries in the air vents.

“Ritz, listen to me. I think their armor is running out of juice.”

“What?” he asked.

“The batteries in their armor are running out of power.” I shifted ever so slowly, gradually rolling to one side, allowing my left arm to loll in place while shifting the M27 in my right hand so that I could aim it. “Their shields are out.”

No one noticed. I was just another corpse, just another piece of trash on the floor. As I fumbled to free an RPG from my belt, I watched the door to the stairwell. A never-ending parade of men in flickering armor strode through the opening.

Working blind, I managed to snag a grenade from my belt. I twisted it in my hand. An RPG would have worked better, but the grenade would do. I would use it to create a distraction; and then, in the confusion, I would escape.

One of the Unifieds meandered past me, then stopped. He just stood there, sightseeing in the empty spaceport, I supposed, no more than ten feet from me. His armor winked on and off before it went out entirely. He looked in my direction, and I froze. After a moment he took a step toward me. If he inspected me more closely, he might notice that I was holding a grenade in my left hand and an M27 in my right, and that I had no holes in my armor and no blood oozing from my helmet. In fact, I did not look especially corpselike, not that this shit-for-brains natural-born would have noticed.

“Ritz, where are you?” With my helmet over my head, I could talk, and the bastards around me would not hear my voice or see my mouth move.

“I’m on the third floor,” he said.

“What’s the situation?”

“They haven’t sent anyone up here.”

“Yeah, they’re still securing this floor,” I said.

“I can get you out of there, General. I can …”

I hissed, “Shut up and listen.” It was harsh. I was still in the tail end of combat reflex, my every instinct was to kill. Ritz, the Unifieds, civilians, at that point it didn’t matter. The violence welling up in my brain no longer cared about sides or alliances.

“There’s going to be some trouble down here,” I said. “Let’s see how they fight without their shields.”

The U.A. bastard hovering around me walked over for a closer look. Would he notice the way I rested my finger over the trigger of my M27? If he did, it would be the last thing he saw before God welcomed him to Heaven.

The bastard moved slowly, like I was some kind of museum exhibit. He twisted his head to see me from different angles, bending far enough forward that he should have seen the pingpong-ball-sized grenade cribbed in the fingers of my left hand. I mean, what kind of corpse cradles a grenade in his hand? If I saw a body like that, I’d pump a couple rounds into the head to make sure it never came back to life; but this idiot stared at me for a few seconds. When I did not move, he walked away.

I made my move. With a subtle flick of my wrist, I half rolled/half tossed the grenade, hoping it would reach the nearest set of stairs. It came up short. Instead of rolling into an open doorway about thirty feet away, the grenade skittered to a stop beside a dead Marine.

I did not know whether or not the upgraded Unified Authority armor would protect its occupants from the blast, but my armor sure as speck would not. A second before the blast made milk shakes of everyone it touched, I sprang to my feet, shot the Unified bastard who’d been hovering around me in the face, and sprinted for the nearest corner.

Several Unifieds saw my miraculous rise from the dead and fired at me with their stupid fléchette guns; but I’d caught them napping and put space between us. They didn’t worry me. When it came to aiming accurately and firing fast, give me a good old-fashioned pistol or an M27 with a short stock any day. I did not return their fire. I sprinted for a corner, then I dived over a row of chairs and slid to safety behind the wall as the blast of the grenade shook the air.

“Ritz, send your men back to the windows. Shoot any Unifieds you see trying to run away. I want them pinned down in the building.”

“You want me to herd them into the building?” he asked.

I managed to say, “Listen to me, Ritz,” before I noticed all of the U.A. Marines crowded around me. Dozens of them. At first I thought I’d been spotted, but most of them ran past me and around the corner. One of them stopped and put out a hand to help me climb to my feet. If he’d known who I was, he would have shot me; but I had created chaos. My grenade must have killed the Unifieds who’d shot at me; and the ones who were left only wanted to see what was going on.

If they saw me carrying a gun, they would have figured out that I was not one of theirs, so I ignored my M27 as the U.A. Marine pulled me to my feet. Without the glow of shields, his armor looked just like my armor. The only notable difference was the tube running along the outside of his right sleeve. I hoped he would not notice that my armor was not equipped to fire fléchettes.