Steven Kent - The Clone Betrayal

I steadied my rifle against my shoulder, aimed at the Marine’s head, and pulled the trigger. The crack of my rifle was no louder than the sound of a man giving a single, hard clap of his hands, but it echoed. My armor absorbed the recoil of the rifle so that I felt only the slightest nudge against my shoulder. Eight hundred yards away, my bullet had about as much impact on the new Marine as a sparrow might have flying into a skyscraper.

The Marine saw or felt the bullet, or perhaps his equipment reported the shot. The man pointed to the spot where the bullet hit. I imagined him laughing as he reported the wasted attack to his platoon sergeant.

I put down my rifle and slung my helmet over my head. “Rifles are no good,” I told Thomer and Hollingsworth.

Hollingsworth answered first. “Speck!” Thomer gave a similar response.

“Let me try one more shot,” I said.

Aiming with the telescopic lenses in my visor, I chose another target, aimed at his helmet, and fired. My first shot went wide. The next three shots hit. The bullets showed only as momentary white flashes against the golden glow of the man’s shields. I fired four more shots, hitting the son of a bitch in the chest, the stomach, the crotch, and the knee.

I had a sinking feeling of defeat as I replaced my helmet. We had signed up for a fight we would not win. Even as I thought this, my combat reflex started, filling me with confidence, clearing self-doubt from my thoughts, and turning fear into comfort. I smiled a ghoulish smile as I realized just how little the terms “impregnable” and “invincible” had in common.

“Hard on the outside, soft on the inside,” I said to myself. Then, I opened a channel to Thomer, and said, “General, withdraw your snipers and reposition them in the top two floors of the garage.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Thomer said.

“And Thomer, tell them to leave their sniper rifles here. We’re sticking with particle beams and rocket launchers from here on out.”

“But …Sir, the garage could cave in on us,” Thomer said.

“I certainly hope so,” I said, knowing that what I had in mind was the military equivalent of threading a needle.

Thomer figured out what I had in mind immediately. He said, “You evil son of a bitch,” sounding more like the old Thomer than he had since New Copenhagen.

“But we’ll be buried,” Hollingsworth said.

“Not if we slip out the back door,” I said.

“The train station,” Hollingsworth said. He should have remembered it; he was the one who helped Doctorow’s men drag explosives through the tunnel. “If you can’t beat them, bury them. I specking love it.”

“You just make sure your men do a good job rigging the garage,” I said. “I don’t want Mooreland digging himself out.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Hollingsworth said. “It’s going to take a few minutes.”

“We’ll buy you whatever time we can,” I said. “You got that, Thomer?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thomer, have your men rig the buildings to blow on their way down. That goes double for any stairs and elevators that lead into the garage.”

“Yes, sir,” said Thomer.

“And remember, keep your Link chatter short. You never know who might be listening,” I said.

I doubted there were any demolitions experts stationed at Fort Sebastian. Trained demolitions men could make buildings blow so precisely that they imploded in on themselves, folding in on themselves like origami figures. Our guys did not have that kind of skill, but that would not stop us from achieving our objectives. We were Marines—when we lacked the skill, we compensated for with sheer will and a large supply of explosives. The garage wouldn’t exactly implode, but it would sure as hell come down. We just needed to make sure that it caved in from the top down and that we made it to the train tunnels before the world came down around us. This was war—nobody would give us extra points for neatness.

Thomer ordered his snipers to abandon their rifles and report to the first floor of the garage. By the time Mooreland’s men entered sniper range, Thomer no longer had anyone on the roof to shoot them. I remained on the roof a moment longer to observe the enemy.

The shine of their shields gave Mooreland’s men a god-like appearance in the frail dawn light. Had their aura shone brighter, the light from the various suits would have meshed; instead, each man had his own, personal, tea-colored glow.

As they approached, they broke into smaller formations. A couple of companies tried to fan out and flank the brigade, but that failed. Hollingsworth’s FOCPIG preparations funneled them back. If they meant to chase us down into the armory, they would need to pass through two bottlenecks—the first created by our transports and the second by the entrance to the underground garage.

The last man on the roof, I took a final look at the high-velocity sniper rifles we’d abandoned in our wake. They lay spread across the concrete like sticks dropped from a bundle. In a fair fight, we might have been able to eliminate Mooreland’s entire regiment with those rifles. Letting the door close behind me as I started down the stairs, I tried to remember the last time I saw a fair fight and came up dry.

“Thomer, make sure your men know this is the foreplay, not the sex,” I said over a new frequency, as I left the stairwell and joined my grenadiers.

The third floor of the building looked like a breezeway. In preparation for the fight, we had knocked out the windows. The wind howled as it blew through broken casings. Hundreds of men in combat armor knelt along the wall, rocket tubes in hand. We had the high-ground advantage, nearly bulletproof cover, numerical superiority, and possibly even the element of surprise; and still, we could not afford to wage the war from this spot, not against an enemy dressed in shielded armor. Unless we found a way through their shields, Mooreland’s men would make our cover cave in around us.

For this mission, my grenadiers had orders to fire a few shots and retreat to the garage. If everything went according to plan, these men would lead the way into the train station. That was, if everything went according to plan. In the heat of battle, entropy dissolves plans into chaos, and Marines sometimes forget their orders. Some become heroes, lingering to fire one final round, when they have been told to pull back. Others lose their nerve and abandon their posts.

Looking over my troops, it occurred to me that I might be going to the well one time too many. By the time we finished this battle, I would have pushed the same damn tactic three times: fighting the Avatari; destroying the battleships that followed us into the Mogat Fleet; and now, I was using it against the Unified Authority Marines. Coaxing a dangerous enemy into an ambush is a fine tactic, and there was no way these guys could know that we had used it on the Avatari and the battleships, but overused tactics have a way of coming apart on their own.

If I made it out of this, I told myself, I would ditch Nietzsche and start brushing up on military strategy. If I made it out of this alive, I would be smarter in the future.

“That which did not destroy me would make me stronger,” I said to myself, citing the battlefield wisdom of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Mooreland’s scouts stepped into the kill zone between the wings of the government buildings. The first of the four men entered the zone slowly, showing no more confidence than a mouse leaving its hole. The rest of his fire team followed.

These were the men on point, the sacrifices. They stepped onto a walkway, stopped, and examined the buildings. One of them pointed to the broken window casings. They knew what we had planned.

“Hold your fire,” I said over the interLink.