Steven Kent - The Clone Elite

I shrugged. He paused, standing in midreach with his eyes locked on the pistol—his pistol—that I held in my right hand.

“You can forget everything Major Doolan is telling them in that briefing. It’s all bullshit,” Brocius said as he turned off the screen and returned to his seat.

“They have taken control of Scutum-Crux, Norma, and Perseus.” Those were the three largest arms of the galaxy, but also the least populated. “They took all of that territory in under a year, and they have started to move into Cygnus and Sagittarius. If we can’t slow them, they’ll have control of the Orion Arm in a couple of months.

“That’s why you’re here, Harris. That’s why they’re here,” Brocius said, nodding toward the blank screen. “That’s why we brought back the specking Roman Legion.”

“Then you have two problems, because the alien I saw glowed. I don’t know what those things are, but they aren’t the aliens that Atkins was calling ‘Space Angels,’ ” I said.

“Yeah, I saw the video you captured,” Brocius said dismissively. He pulled out a folder, which he opened and placed on the table. “This is from your feed.” He selected a still shot and passed it to me. The shot was blurry, but the image was clear in my mind. It showed a luminous alien creature holding a broad-barreled rifle. I noticed that the rifle in the picture looked like the weapon the aliens were carrying in the video feed.

“These shots were taken on Terraneau just over a year ago.” He handed me a single eight-by-ten sheet with a series of one-inch windows on it. Some of the pictures were washed out. In the first shot, a group of four luminous beings stood on one side of the frame. The rest of the picture was white. In the next frame, those same beings stood on a street.

“What is this?” I asked.

“This, Harris, is a full-scale invasion. We don’t know how many troops they landed, but we had three million troops on Terraneau. They captured the planet within a couple of hours.”

“What happened to the rest of these pictures?” I asked, pointing to the whited-out area.

“We think that was their landing zone,” Brocius said. “They were captured by a satellite as the invasion began. We got lucky on those. Besides the video you caught, these photographs are the only images we have of these things in their transited state.”

“Transited?” I asked. “Your term?”

“That’s what the scientists are calling it. ‘Transited.’ ”

“What does it mean?” I asked.

“It means they just arrived,” Brocius said.

“Do you have any shots of their spaceships?”

“They don’t use spaceships,” Brocius said. “That was why no one believed you after the Mogat invasion. We had our entire fleet circling the planet. You said you saw aliens, but none of the ships saw anything unusual.”

“How did they get to the planet?” I asked.

“You saw the bright light during the invasion …we think they came in through it,” Brocius said. “It’s just a theory, but it’s the best we have.”

I wished I could forget that light. Often as I fell asleep, my mind returned to that desperate moment as our invasion collapsed around us. I remembered the way that the strange light spread like a fog over the city and the odd glow it sent into the air. Waves of elemental colors seemed to rise out of that glow like smoke from a fire.

By the fifth frame in the series, the creatures no longer glowed. Their complexions had turned dark. I could see their massive forms clearly.

“They don’t look so advanced,” I said. “No vehicles, no tanks …just men on foot carrying rifles. What do you know about their battle tactics?”

“Absolutely nothing,” Brocius said. “Once that phantom light you saw stretches across an area, we lose all contact with the planet. We can’t transmit through it. We can’t take readings through it. Those battle images Major Doolan just showed the geezers were taken from a live feed just before the light sealed off the area.

“Around the Pentagon they’re calling it the ‘ion curtain.’ ” Brocius sighed.

“What do the survivors say?”

“No survivors,” Brocius said. “Once these bastards close that light curtain around a planet, there’s no going back to it. We’ve tried reentering; nothing gets through. We’ve sent fighters, robot ships …nothing makes it through, and nothing ever comes out.”

I placed the pistol back on the table and slid it back toward Brocius. I wasn’t going to shoot him.

“You’re not going to shoot me?” Brocius asked as he gathered up the gun.

“Maybe next time,” I said.

“Now you know why we need every man we can get …even those old fools.” It occurred to me that Brocius was older than many of those “old fools.”

“So how much of what you tell me will they get to hear?” I asked.

“Not much. Then again, I’m telling you everything we know, and it’s not much,” Brocius admitted. “In this war, we’re going to need to learn as we go along.”

If they had asked me to accept a commission when I left Sad Sam’s Palace, I would have said no. I had no choice about reporting, not with a dozen MPs breathing down my neck; but that did not mean I needed to rejoin. If I refused, the worst they could do was kill me, and I figured the aliens would kill us all in due course.

But meeting with Admiral Brocius had a strange effect on me. Here sat a man whom I had wanted to kill for over a year. I must have imagined myself snapping his neck a thousand times; but now that I saw him in person, the urge to kill Brocius slipped away.

He had come to represent everything I hated about the Unified Authority—the prejudice and abuse of clones, the deceit, the haughty attitude of its politicians and officers. U.A. officers fought wars as if they were a game of chess, an intellectual sport played on a black-and-white battlefield with pieces instead of people.

This time, though, Admiral Brocius had laid himself bare. Alone in the conference room, he could have been killed. I wouldn’t need a gun to kill a dried-up old derelict like him—I could have jumped across the table and broken his neck.

Having a worm like Brocius at my mercy had an unexpected impact on me. I won’t say I forgave him, but my anger fell out of focus. Here he sat, a sheep in a stall waiting for slaughter. Looking at him now, scared and trying to look like he was still in control of the situation, I realized how I did and did not want to die. I didn’t want to die at all. But if the war was on my doorstep, I preferred death on the battlefield with a gun in my hand and men that I trusted fighting beside me to dying like a sheep with a herd of civilians.

“It sounds like we can’t win this one,” I said.

“I suppose that depends on how you mean ‘win,’ ” Brocius said. “We’ve given up on colonizing the galaxy if that’s what you mean. It’s theirs. At this point we’re not even trying to hold on to the last of our colonies. If we can keep these bastards from reaching Earth, that will be victory enough.”

Brocius slid a memory disc into the monitor. A moment later a map of the galaxy appeared before us. There it was, a whirlpool made of six spiral arms leading into a vortex dense with stars. The image showed white stars with subtle bubbles of color against a black background. The camera zoomed in on the map, showing a series of stars orbited by planets.

“The invasion started in this unpopulated section of the Scutum-Crux Arm,” Brocius said.

The outer edge of the Scutum-Crux Arm, the outermost arm of the galaxy, turned red. They called this area the outer frontier. It was supposed to be unpopulated, but I knew about a very small colony of Neo-Baptists in that quadrant. I visited that colony with Ray Freeman, a mercenary and former partner. His family was among the colonists.