Steven Kent - The Clone Elite

The Army Corps of Engineers had built several temporary bases on New Copenhagen to house the 620,000 soldiers now stationed in town. Army command, however, was located in the capitol building, in the center of Valhalla. They called it Fort Schwarzkopf.

The Air Force set up shop in a shopping mall, turning its long flat roof into multiple runways. They had a complement of three hundred Tomcat fighters. The Navy was mostly involved in the logistics of shipping in fighters and equipment; the Marines, however, would make a show of this fight. We came in four hundred thousand men strong. For the foreseeable future, the city of Valhalla was the galaxy’s military base.

As for me, I had mixed emotions about joining this fight. I did not like the idea of fighting for the same specking officers who tried to leave me and my Marines stranded to die, but I didn’t see much of a future in trying to make friends with the Space Angels, either. Even back when I was telling myself I’d sit this one out, I knew I didn’t have it in me. I was a Marine, damn it. I solemnly swore that I would defend the Republic against all enemies, foreign, domestic, and, I suppose, extragalactic. Besides, I was losing interest in the easy life—Friday-night fights and one-night stands were fun but not satisfying. I needed something more challenging, something to get my heart beating hard; and it did not matter whether I survived it or not. I preferred “death in battle to death like cattle,” as one of my old drill instructors used to say. There just isn’t anything that compares to going into battle with a platoon of willing men at your back and a loaded M27.

Semper fi, Marine.

We dropped down until we were no more than thirty feet above the skyscrapers on the way to the spaceport. Some of those buildings had ten-foot mounds of gleaming white snow piled up on roofs.

The streets below were mostly empty. Before the evacuation, Valhalla had a population of approximately three million. Only 200,000 of those residents signed up to defend their city. The rest chose the safety of a relocation camp. Populated with 620,000 soldiers, 400,000 Marines, 150,000 Airmen, and 200,000 civilians, the city was barely one-third full; but that population was compressed. From the air, some parts of Valhalla looked deserted and others looked crowded.

Looking down as we came in for a landing, I saw tanks and troop carriers. The Army sent out an enormous contraption that created waist-high bulletproof barriers by extruding plasticized blocks. The machine looked like a gigantic combine. Moving at no more than ten miles per hour, it rumbled down the middle of the highway, taking up four lanes of traffic, leaving rows of gun-metal gray barriers in its wake. The machine was officially known as a “Barrier Manufacturer,” or BM. In the Corps, we unofficially called it a “Shitter.” A small robotic device followed behind the BM, sanding any rough edges from the plasticized barriers. In the Corps we referred to that second unit as a “Babyshitter.”

From the air, the runways looked like black straps that prevented the snowy fields from unrolling like blankets. Caravans of tractors towed carts filled with rifles and munitions into warehouses on the far side of the airfield. Off in the distance, a line of artillery rolled along the horizon. As we circled the landing strip, I spotted tanks, missile launchers, and laser cannons. The equipment blended into the landscape around it. It had all been painted white.

Then the shuttle came in to the airport, I took one last look around. We came in low over an abandoned business district with empty streets. The shuttle did not even jostle as much as a car going over a speed bump when we touched down onto the runway. As we rolled to the terminal, I told myself that a smooth landing was as good an omen as any. On the other hand, I did not believe in omens.

As I prepared to leave my seat, I had a look around the runway. Never had I seen such a buildup. A formation of Tomcats flew overhead. In the distance gunships patrolled the edge of town. They flew low to the ground, maybe just a couple hundred feet up, low enough that I almost lost track of them as they vanished behind high-rise buildings. Then the ground crew attached the gangway to our shuttle and opened the hatch.

“Welcome to Valhalla,” the pilot called back as he cut the engines.

As we deplaned, a squadron of duty officers descended upon us and divided us by rank and branch. I was greeted by a Marine captain, who told me where to claim my gear and meet my ride.

The spaceport pulsed with tension as Navy and civilian transports arrived and departed every minute. Four hundred thousand Marines had flown through here over the last few days with enough field equipment and supplies to wage a war. The Navy had commandeered Valhalla Spaceport, replacing its former civilian splendor with martial sensibility. MPs and duty officers patrolled the halls, überefficient supply officers off-loaded cargo, and information desks now posted duty rosters instead of flight schedules.

Snow-brightened sunlight poured in through every wall-length window of the terminal. Officers and packs of enlisted men moved through the halls with purpose but little urgency. I saw Marine khaki wherever I looked—the floors, the gates, even on the balcony fifteen feet above me. Officers ripped past me riding carts and honking their horns to clear paths through the crowds. The natural-borns might have sat out other battles, but they could not avoid this one.

I was an officer, too …a second lieutenant. I found a head and changed into my uniform, sneering at the single gold bar on my lapel. That made me the lowest evolution of officer. No one over the rank of private took second lieutenants seriously in combat, but the bar would get me a billet in officer country. I made sure the bar was straight and went to grab my gear.

“Twenty-third Marines, Company B. If you’re from Company B, grab your gear and head out!” a sergeant yelled at the old recruits as they stepped around a corner. It was a touching intergenerational scene—the sergeant, a clone in his late thirties screaming so loud that strands of spit flew from his lips, reactivated Marines in their forties, fifties, and maybe even their sixties jumping to comply.

“Move it, assholes! The captain is waiting,” the sergeant yelled. “You, Grandpa, you hoping for a second retirement check?” he yelled to no recruit in particular, so far as I could tell. “Move it, move it, move it!”

“Sergeant, where do I go to gather my gear?” I asked.

He looked at me with too much mirth in his smile. Like every other clone, he thought he was a natural-born, and here was a clone in an officer’s uniform asking him for a ride.

“See something amusing, Sergeant?” I asked. The smile vanished from his lips.

“No, sir,” he said.

“ ’Cause if you see something funny, Sergeant, I’d like to be in on the specking joke.”

“No, sir! The sergeant sees nothing funny, sir.”

“Where are they unloading the officers’ gear?” I asked.

“I have your gear, Lieutenant Harris,” someone said from behind me.

The man standing behind me was a clone with the same brown stubble and brown eyes as every other clone in the spaceport, but I recognized him nonetheless. I had no trouble identifying the men who served with me during the Mogat invasion. “Hello, Thomer,” I said.

“I knew you would be here,” Sergeant Kelly Thomer said, after we traded salutes. “There was no way you’d sit this one out.”

“Glad you knew it,” I said. “I didn’t. It took an armed guard just to drag me to Mars.” I was happy to see Thomer. We’d fought together, and I respected him. I could trust him under any circumstances.

“I don’t see anyone guarding you now,” Thomer said.