Steven Kent - The Clone Elite

Before switching to night-for-day vision, I surveyed the drop zone through my default tactical lens. Our armor was the exact white of fresh-fallen snow, and it diffracted ambient light the same way the snow did. If we lay flat on our stomachs, we would fully blend in with the landscape around us.

When I switched to my night-for-day lenses, which displayed the world in blue-white-on-black images, my men completely disappeared into the landscape around them. Night-for-day vision tended to compress the world into two-dimensional images, blurring the white armor into the snow. No matter. I would not need the night-for-day lenses much longer, not once that phantom light spread over us.

“Thomer, report,” I said.

“Every man accounted for, sir,” Thomer said.

I ordered the platoon to form into fire teams, then told them to look for a good place to hide.

“How about town?” Philips asked.

Borrowing a page from Ray Freeman’s playbook, I pretended I did not hear the comment. “Philips, take a fire team and flank our movements.”

Philips could hit the bull’s-eye sixty out of sixty from a hundred yards. I liked the idea of having him cover us if it came to a firefight. If we ran into resistance, the rest of the platoon would keep the enemy pinned while Philips’s squad flanked them and shot them—a time-honored Marine tactic.

“Aye, aye, Kap-y-tan,” said Philips. He was great in combat and an asshole in every other situation. If anyone else in the platoon called me anything but “Lieutenant” or “sir,” I would have corrected him. With Philips, I wanted that layer of irreverence. The few times he showed officers proper respect, I generally worried about him losing his edge.

We left the clearing and entered the forest. The snow was not as heavy under the trees. In some spots the trunks grew so thick that their branches seemed to form a solid roof over our heads and I only found patches of mud on the ground. I saw everything in the blue-white imagery of night-for-day vision crystal clear and devoid of depth. The world under the trees was dark and shadowy, but it was far less confusing than standing out in the snow where my men and their surroundings blended into a single blue-white sheet. Here I could see my men against the contours in the forest floor.

As we walked, I tried to imagine what this forest might look like during the day. Sunlight would penetrate the branches, a silvery ray slanting here and there toward the forest floor. Some light would filter in from the clearings. I could find no trace of the moon or stars through the branches above.

“You know that attack simulation the aliens sent out …how do we know they meant for us to receive it? Maybe they just use the same frequencies we do,” I said over a private channel between me and Freeman. “Maybe we intercepted a battle plan they meant for their generals.”

“The signal originated on Earth,” Freeman said.

“On Earth?” I asked. “Do we know where on Earth?”

“It came from their embassy,” Freeman said.

I wanted to laugh. It sounded like a joke, a bit on the sarcastic side, but funny nonetheless. The problem was, Ray Freeman had absolutely no sense of humor. He lacked the capacity to tell jokes, even “Why did the chicken cross the reactor” jokes.

“They have an embassy?” I asked.

“Remember the building I staked out just outside DC?”

“You said it was a Mogat base,” I said. In the weeks before the Mogat invasion, Freeman located a building on the outskirts of Washington, DC, that employed the same advanced shielding technology that the Mogats used to protect their ships.

“I was wrong,” Freeman said. “The shields around that building did not shut down when we attacked the home planet.”

“Brocius says they want us to evacuate planets before they arrive,” I said. “He believes that is the reason they sent us their plan. Think he’s right?”

I was sure he did not know the answer, but I hoped he would guess.

Guessing, however, was no more a part of Freeman’s nature than telling jokes or showing mercy. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Lieutenant Harris, you’d better have a look at this,” Thomer called to me over the interLink. He and several of the men from the platoon had gathered around the edge of a small clearing.

They stood in a thirty-man semicircle, M27s in hand. Freeman and I came to join them.

Not expecting to hear much more than standard patrol chat, I switched to the platoon-wide frequency to eavesdrop on what the men had to say. I was doing more than snooping, though—this gave me a chance to gauge their morale. As their voices came labeled inside my helmet, I knew that the first conversation I locked in on was Thomer contacting Philips.

Can you guys see what’s going on? Thomer asked Philips, whose fire team was flanking the platoon somewhere twenty or thirty yards away.

It’s all trees and branches around here. What you got? Philips responded.

The sky is full of light. It’s just like Mogatopolis all over again. Thomer sounded depressed as he said this.

At least the planet isn’t on self-destruct this time, Philips said. I still have nightmares about that specking invasion .

Yeah, me too, Thomer said, still sounding down.

There it was, the phenomenon that Admiral Brocius had called the “ion curtain.” During the invasion I had mistaken it for some kind of benign glare; now I knew that it was a luminous barrier, a wall of light designed to cut planets off from the rest of the galaxy.

Staring at the edge of that light, which loomed high above the trees, was like gazing into the spark made by an arc-welding machine. The light was beyond white, platinum—white with a gold tint hidden deep within its translucence. As I stood there staring into it, the lenses in my visor switched from night-for-day to tactical view with tint shields to protect my eyes.

The dome had spread more quickly than I expected. It was only a mile away at best.

What’s it like once the light spreads over you? Corporal Trevor Boll, who was not with us during the Mogat invasion, asked Thomer.

It’s nothing. It’s just a bright light; don’t worry about it, Thomer answered. He tried to hide the concern in his voice but failed.

Ah, speck. I didn’t ever want to go through this again, Philips said.

I’m sending you an image, Thomer said to Philips. Our helmets had imaging equipment that not only allowed us to view the world through different lenses, it let us record and transmit what we saw. Corporals and up could control the gear to capture video and send it over the interLink. You don’t have to open it if you don’t want to.

Oh, hell no. I don’t want to see it. A moment later. Ah, shit, Thomer. I didn’t want to see that. I still have nightmares from last time.

Brocius called this “sleeving” the planet. That was what it felt like—as if some sort of material closed around us. It certainly did not act like light. The leading edge of the brightly lit curtain did not shine into the sky around it. Where the curtain had spread was bright, while the sky just beyond was still dark. Shimmering waves of elemental colors—pure hues of red, yellow, and blue—showed in the light like an aurora borealis.

Is it radioactive? one of the men asked over the general frequency. He sounded nervous.

No , several voices answered at once. We had a rudimentary Geiger counter in our visors as well.

The light won’t hurt you . That was Thomer.

The light won’t hurt you, but whatever’s inside of it might specking eat you for lunch, Philips, always the charmer, said. At least he had the good sense to say it over a private frequency that only sergeants and higher would hear.