Steven Kent - The Clone Elite

Zooming in with the telescopic lenses in my visor, I studied the faces of some of the creatures. At first glance they all looked alike to me, like ants or fish. They all had the same big eyes and jutting lower jaws. Their size, about eight feet tall and broad as bears, seemed uniform. Their size and shape was the only constant.

The first Space Angels looked more like body-shaped auras than living creatures. As more passed, however, the aliens started to take on a sand-colored look. Their bodies began to look like they were made out of substance instead of light, as if some kind of crust was forming around them. They continued to get darker as they marched past us. Bulky, statuesque soldiers with an iron gray patina on their skin replaced the sleek creatures with the golden translucence.

These aliens had huge, featureless bodies. I saw no seams or edges to suggest they were wearing clothes or armor, nor cavities or lines to suggest they were naked. Aside from arms, limbs, and heads, the bodies had no features at all. They had nothing even remotely resembling hair on their limbs or pumpkin-shaped heads.

I did notice that a few of the creatures had cracks in the outer crust that had formed on their bodies. I could see yellow-colored light shining through those cracks. When I used my heat-vision lens to take a reading of the aliens’ heat signature, I saw that they still generated no heat whatsoever.

The seemingly endless procession of aliens continued to file past us. At one point I realized that their numbers were in the tens of thousands. Not long after that, the column ended abruptly.

“They’re gone,” Philips said over the interLink.

“Stay where you are,” I said. “That might have only been the scouts.” We remained hidden in our snowy camouflage for several more minutes, but no additional aliens materialized.

“I’m open to suggestions,” I said over the command line so that only Thomer, Philips, and Freeman heard me.

“It didn’t seem like there were enough of them to take over a planet,” Philips said.

“He’s right, sir. That can’t be all of them,” Thomer said.

“I suppose it depends on what each of them can do. If those guns fire nukes, they’ll toast us in an afternoon,” I said. “What do you think, Ray? Do you think they landed more troops somewhere else?”

“One landing site,” Freeman said. “That’s all we’ve ever seen.”

“If that’s all they need to capture a planet, those are going to be some pretty damn tough mother speckers,” Philips said. “Either that, or we’re going to carve those boys new assholes when they reach Valhalla.”

“Maybe we should get back to Valhalla,” Thomer said. “They may need all the help they can get.”

“Thomer, there are four hundred thousand Marines, six hundred thousand soldiers, and about a trillion surface-to-surface missiles waiting down there,” Philips said. “You can’t possibly think the forty of us are going to make a difference.”

I considered our options. The aliens would not reach Valhalla for another hour. Philips was right. Even if we found a way to reach the city before them, there was nothing we could do. Using the interLink, I tried to reach General Glade. When that failed, I forwarded him the video-feed file of everything I’d seen and labeled it “urgent.”

“There’s no point heading back to Valhalla,” I said on the command line, then switched to the open frequency and spoke to the entire platoon. “We’re going to follow the bastards’ tracks and see where they came from. If we find their base, maybe we can speck with it. Now move out.”

If we found an alien base, I planned to place some charges around it, but what I really wanted to find was a scout or a guard or a straggler who we could capture. I wanted to bring a trophy back to General Glade.

Using the gear in my helmet, I tested the ground for traces of radiation. The forest was clean. “Freeman, you picking up anything I should be concerned about?” I asked.

Freeman surprised me by removing his helmet. The temperature had dropped to below freezing, and steam formed when he breathed. He reached into one of his utility pockets and removed a small laser scope, which he pointed into the sky. “Did you get a good look at the sky?” Freeman asked.

“You mean the colors?” I asked

He looked back at me and nodded. “Take a look through this.”

I pulled off my helmet and aimed the scope into the sky. Sensors within its housing ran an instant retinal diagnostic, then projected a hairline laser as a direct extension of the angle of my vision. Markings along the edges of the scope displayed the distance between my eye and the target. As I looked across the forest, I marked 37’ 3.5‘ between me and a tree. I marked 4’ 1.8‘ between me and Freeman. When I looked up into the sky, both the end of the laser beam and the numbers vanished.

“Something’s wrong with your scope,” I said as I tested it on a tree that was precisely 43’ 7‘ away. I sighted the sky again. Once again the beam and numbers vanished.

Freeman replaced his helmet over his head. I did the same, glad to feel the warmth around my face.

“There is something in this light that disassembles waves,” Freeman said.

I could still see shimmering strokes of blue, red, and yellow above us. It never occurred to me that they might be the frayed edges of the light around us. If no waves could penetrate this light field, we were cut off from the rest of the galaxy. And that made sense. Once the planets were sleeved, they were cut off …we were cut off. The aliens had effectively placed a wall between New Copenhagen and the ships orbiting the planet. Back on Earth, the brass would see the sleeve and write us off before the battle even began. Could that be what had happened on all of the other planets?

“Thomer, Philips, have your men run an equipment check,” I said as I toyed with the idea that mankind might have kicked these aliens’ asses on all of the other 179 populated worlds, and we wouldn’t know it. But I knew that these guys would not have been able to cross a hundred thousand light-years of space, sleeving every planet they passed, unless they had something going for them. There had to be something more, something we were overlooking.

“Sir,” Thomer said, interrupting my thoughts. “Lieutenant, all of the equipment checks out.”

“Thank you, Sergeant,” I said. I switched to the open-frequency channel, and said, “Listen up. I want to take one of those bastards home alive. You got that?

“Break into fire teams, we’re going to sweep the woods. I want to find some scouts. If you see a column heading your way, dig in and radio me. If you see some stragglers, I don’t care if they are watching birds, eating babies, or building a memorial to peace in the universe; you will not, repeat, not attack. You contact me, and the entire platoon will converge before you make a move.

“Do you read me, Marines?”

“Aye, aye, sir,” came back.

“Head north and west toward their original position. Platoon leader, fan ’em out,” I said. Thomer, my platoon leader, took over from there.

Leaving the hill, I took one last look around the scene. The way the Space Angels had lit this thick forest fascinated me. There were no shadows. The light came from every direction instead of one. They really had flooded the place with some sort of illumination that behaved like liquid.

“Lieutenant, we found the place where the aliens landed,” Philips said over the interLink.

“Any unfriendlies?”

“Nah. Not an alien soul in sight.”

“Do they have buildings? Is there any kind of fortification?” I asked.