Steven Kent - The Clone Elite

The simulation started again. The days ticked by quickly. On March 15, the red area expanded to include the inner section of the Orion Arm, that part of the galaxy where Earth was located.

“Three months?” I asked.

“They’re coming, Harris. God help us, they’re coming.”

“Have you ever heard of a planet called New Copenhagen?” Admiral Brocius asked. He looked old and broken-down. For as long as I had known Brocius, he had been a chubby old man with high corners on his hairline and a double chin. Time and stress had taken a toll. Over the last year he had grown a decade older, and he had the look of a man who had lost a lot of weight in a very little time. His mouth and eyes looked too big for his face, giving him a hungry, startled look. His hairline started higher on his head than I remembered.

“Sounds familiar,” I said, remembering that I had recently heard someone mention the planet without recalling who or why.

Brocius crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair, the smirk on his face giving him an expression of mild disgust. “Been following the latest movie-star gossip, have you?”

That tipped the scales in my memory. Christina had mentioned New Copenhagen when she asked me about Ava Gardner. Now that I remembered where I heard the name, I didn’t want to admit it. “Movie-star gossip?” I asked, trying to sound as innocent as I could.

Brocius didn’t bite. “Yes, well, the planet is of strategic value now. It will be the aliens’ last stop before they land on Earth.” He tapped a stylus to the computer screen, and the image closed in on the Orion Arm. Along the arm, flags stood out marking solar systems with inhabited planets. Toward the inner curve of the Orion Arm, already covered in red, was the location of Olympus Kri. I once knew a woman from that planet. Perhaps “knew” was the right word; if everything I had heard this evening was correct, that girl might already be dead.

The map showed three inches of star-strewn space between Olympus Kri and Earth—each inch representing ten thousand light-years. The space around Olympus Kri was outlined in red. So were most of the other solar systems with inhabited planets along the way. But the red tide stopped just shy of one flagged solar system. “The Woden System?” I asked.

“That’s where we have a colony called New Copenhagen, it’s the closest inhabited planet to Earth. Win or lose, that’s where we make our last stand. The goal is to stop the aliens on New Copenhagen. We’re sending in as many soldiers, pilots, and Marines as we can get in before the action starts. We’ve shipped in more equipment …By the time we get through, there will be over one million troops on that planet and at least thirty guns and three hundred grenades for every man we sent in.

“We’re sending our best scientists to help analyze the situation, and we’ll have as many ships as we can spare orbiting the planet at all times.”

“That’s good coverage,” I said.

“You’re going in as a lieutenant. I wanted to give you a division to work with, but that was not my call. I would have restored you to colonel …maybe even made a general out of you.”

“Kind of you,” I said.

The sarcasm did not go unnoticed. “I put in a word for you with the Marine commandant. He said he’d give you some leeway, that’s the best I could do,” Brocius said.

“What happens if we lose?” I asked.

“If you lose?” Brocius repeated. “Harris, we have approximately fifty self-broadcasting Navy ships and a hundred scientific explorers. We’d be able to airlift a couple million people off Earth if we had someplace to put them, but we don’t, Harris. Even if we get them off, the sad fact is that we wouldn’t have anyplace to put them.”

They made the right choice when they decided not to evacuate the planet, I thought as I stared out the window of the civilian shuttle and saw New Copenhagen. These aliens, these Space Angels, weren’t just crossing the galaxy at a rate nearly one hundred thousand times faster than the speed of light; they were conquering it at that speed. The galaxy was one hundred thousand light-years from end to end, and they had captured almost all of it in a single year. Fighting an enemy that could move one hundred thousand times faster than light, why bother running?

It was just like Brocius had said, even if we could load all of humanity into some interstellar ark, we’d have no place to go. With the exception of the self-broadcasting fleet, our fastest ships could not travel as fast as light. With the galaxy under enemy control, we would need to travel to another galaxy to start again—a trip that would take thousands of years at light speed. And then what? What if the nearest habitable planet was one thousand light-years deep in that galaxy? Loading humanity into a lifeboat would mean nothing if that lifeboat had no safe harbor in which to land.

The shuttle trembled as it penetrated the planet’s atmosphere. Heat and friction from the atmosphere turned the protective tiles on the shuttle’s wings orange and red, then the pilot adjusted the angle of our descent and we flew over a sparkling ocean. We crossed a coast and dropped to less than a mile above the ground. Below us, the city of Valhalla spread out in every direction, a giant metropolis buried in snow. A frozen lake bordered it on one side and snowcapped forests and countryside surrounded it on another.

“Why this place? Why fight here?” the sergeant in the seat next to mine asked as our shuttle descended through ribbons of faded clouds. “Man, just looking out the window gives my ass the shivers.” He was one of the really old recruits. The guy looked like he was in his sixties.

This was it, the place the human race would make its stand. The only way I would make it off this planet would be if we defeated the enemy, but could anyone defeat the Space Angels? Who knew what would happen once they sleeved New Copenhagen and that strange light cut us off from the rest of the universe. For all I knew, we might have won battles on some of the other 179 colonized worlds. All those soldiers they sent to Terraneau might be alive at this very moment, just standing around waiting for that phantom light to burn out.

I didn’t believe they were alive, though. I took a cynical view. Having had a brief glimpse of the Angels in action, I believed that all hope ended once the light closed in around you.

“If we’re going to die, we might as well die on a frozen wasteland,” I said, joking. Judging by the sudden silence, the old fellow did not appreciate my sense of humor. As an officer, I supposed I should have come up with a more encouraging response.

According to the simulation Brocius showed me, we only had a few hours left to dig in before the fireworks began. In the meantime, transports and commuter flights dotted the sky like lines of ants around a picnic basket. A constant stream of transports and cargo ships flew in and out of Valhalla Spaceport and the new, temporary runways the Corps of Engineers had stitched into the outskirts of town. The Navy would airlift those with the right connections to Earth. Those lucky few were mostly politicians and people from families wealthy enough to bribe their way off the planet, a brief reprieve at best.

Those who could not afford to evacuate from New Copenhagen were transported across the planet to relocation camps around the southern hemisphere. Data collected from previous battles showed that the lights always appeared first in northern latitudes, and generally near large population centers. The hope was that relocating the general population away from the fighting might buy them some time. If we won the fight, we would bring them back once the danger ended.