Steven Kent - The Clone Elite

I imagined a line of the motion-tracking robots—little more than poles with radars and trigger fingers—surrounding each sphere. Bullets passing through the spheres might get irradiated, but they did pass through the spheres. And if the bullets did not kill aliens, we could equip the trackers with particle beams, lasers, gas canisters filled with noxium gas, or rockets.

At that moment it all seemed so easy. If our lines could just hold outside Valhalla, these alien bastards could be killed. The once-impossible war now seemed so winnable. For the first time since my meeting with Admiral Brocius, I could close my eyes and see the end of the war. The possibilities seemed endless.

“We found their scouts,” Philips said. He and his fire team had been tracking the aliens for most of an hour.

“Are they still a party of three?” I asked.

“If you still want to take one alive, Kap-y-tan, the odds aren’t going to get any better. Want me to take ’em?”

“How close can you get?” I asked.

“How close do you want me to get? It’s like tracking stiffs. I bet I can get close enough to piss on them.” Philips sounded brash. That was good.

“Close enough to piss on them?” I asked.

“Well, maybe not against the wind. I don’t know if these boys are fresh out of alien boot or just plain stupid, but they sure as hell don’t act like galaxy conquerors.”

“They might still have something up their sleeve,” I reminded Philips.

“So can I move in?” Philips asked.

“Send up a beacon,” I said. “Don’t move till I get there.”

“Yes, sir,” Philips said, sounding so wooden I wanted to shoot him.

“Do not engage them, Sergeant. If I hear shots, you better hope they kill you first,” I said. “I’m on my way.”

“Got it, sir.” I heard the annoyance in Philips’s voice. Not that it would matter to someone like Philips, but I understood his frustration. He was a resourceful Marine, a veteran on the battlefield who had earned and lost his first stripes by the time I learned to walk.

I ordered Thomer to herd the rest of the platoon back to town while I headed north after Philips’s beacon. Freeman went with the platoon so he could deliver his bullets to the Science Lab for analysis.

By this time, nearly four hours had passed since we first sighted the phantom lights. The ion curtain had long since closed around New Copenhagen, cutting us off from the rest of mankind. Cutting across a clearing, I looked into the sky for signs that the light field was fading, but it was as solid as ever. The woodland around me was unnaturally bright. Even under the trees and in the deepest thickets, I could see patches of mossy ground that sunshine would never have reached under normal circumstances. Light sparkled off distant snowdrifts.

“You’re not going to believe this, Harris,” Moffat called in. “The fight’s over, we routed the bastards.” He sounded jubilant.

“It’s over?” I asked.

“They folded; the specking jokers just plain folded.”

“Any signs that there might be more of them on the way?” I asked.

“I was going to ask you the same question,” Moffat said. “If this was the whole damned war …”

“One of my fire teams is tracking some scouts,” I said. “We’re going to bring one in.”

“You might want to hurry back. The party’s already started,” said Moffat.

“Just make sure you don’t drink Valhalla dry before we get there,” I said, trying to forget how much I hated this prick.

“Tell you what, Harris, you bring back a live one, and I’ll find the best bottle in the whole specking city for you,” Moffat said, before signing off. He’d pulled a Jekyll and Hyde. I could not believe this was the same power-hungry asshole who tried to threaten me a few hours back.

I wanted to feel excited by his news, but I knew better. It was beginning to feel as if we could win the war, but it could not possibly happen this easily and this quickly. Using a platoon-wide frequency, I said, “I just heard from base. The Army has routed the enemy.”

“Routed them where?” one Marine asked.

“They won the battle,” I said.

Silence.

“The Space Angels, the aliens, the speckers we watched head into town …they’re dead. I just got a report from Base Command—the Army annihilated them.”

The silence lasted another moment, then I heard excited chatter, which instantly silenced when Sergeant Philips asked me, “Are you saying that the war’s over?”

I had to think about this for a second. That was what they were celebrating in town. I knew it could not be over. No one would send a mere fifty thousand troops to capture a planet. You couldn’t even hold a city with fifty thousand troops. Their ion curtain still had us in its sleeve. There simply had to be more aliens on the way. I did not want to say that, however. I did not want to crush the morale. “No, it’s not over,” I said. “But the first round went better than we could have hoped for.”

The shouts, the cheers, and the rapturous cursings restarted spontaneously, but Philips did not join in. “If it’s not all over, sir, can we get back to capturing this alien?” he asked. When everyone else was serious, Philips bucked discipline and flaunted authority. Now that everyone else celebrated, Sergeant Mark Philips was all business.

“I’m on my way,” I said.

Philips’s beacon led through well-trafficked territory where snow, ferns, and small trees had been tromped into the mud. Soon, though, the beacon took me into a less-traveled glen. Virgin snow with a few footprint trails gleamed in the bright light. The aliens followed a natural pathway that led through thin growth while Philips and his men had stuck to the trees. I recognized their boot prints.

The aliens’ feet left rectangular prints in the shallow snow. When they reached drifts, the bastards sloshed through without lifting their feet out of the snow. Instead of leaving a line of individual prints, they dragged their feet and left ruts in their wake.

I spotted Huish before I saw the others. He was kneeling in a small gully, his gun trained on the enemy and his finger on the trigger waiting for the order to shoot. I identified him by the virtual dog tag over his helmet.

“What is the situation?” I asked Huish over a direct link.

“They’re just over that rise, about thirty yards out. Philips and Herrington are moving in for a better angle,” he said, pointing with his rifle.

I hid behind a tree and surveyed the scene. Looking along the edge of the gully, I spotted White and Boll. Philips and Herrington lay flat on the ground in a patch of ferns. I don’t know how well concealed they were from the aliens, but it took me a few moments to spot them.

“Do you have a good line on them?” I asked Philips on a direct channel.

“All three of ’em,” Philips said. “Can we get this show under way, sir …now that you’re here to help?”

I stole up the rise, cutting through the ferns at a crouch and making as little noise as possible. Below us, the ground seemed to form a bowl, offering the aliens no protection. One of the aliens knelt and played with some sort of scientific instrument while two others stood guard. The one with the instrument was poking a four-inch needle into the ground.

“Maybe they’re a science team,” I said.

“Bet you’re right. Can we cap ’em now?” Philips asked, not bothering to hide his annoyance.

“I want to take the one checking the soil home with us …alive,” I said.

“Got it,” Philips purred. He signaled Huish and Herrington to flank the aliens from behind. I sighted in on one of the guards as Philips assigned targets to his men. The creature’s eyes were the same color as the rest of his face. They looked no more lifelike than the eyes on a marble statue. The face had a more or less human-looking mouth and nose.