Steven Kent - The Clone Elite

“Pretty impressive, isn’t it?” General Glade asked.

“What happened?” I asked.

“The Mudders’ rifles shoot right through our shields, Lieutenant,” Glade said. “We were able to kill most of their troops out in the forest, but a couple hundred of them got through.”

“And their guns did this?” I asked, my mind on Private Huish lying on the snowy ground, shaking to death.

“And that,” Glade said, pointing to a matching hole in the opposite wall. The bolts had shot clean through both shielded walls.

After that, the tenor of the tour became more somber. General Glade led me through the second-level corridor, an endless lane pinched between charcoal-colored walls lit more by the beams of glare shining through the occasional hole than the lights hanging from the ceiling. We passed through a hatch and entered a metal catwalk that ran the length of the bunker. When I looked down from the catwalk, I saw barracks below us.

When it came to accommodations, the Marines got the better end of the stick for a change. The Valkyrie Ballroom was crowded, but our boys had enough light to read and space to breathe.

Billeted along the bottom floor of this bunker, these soldiers must have felt like they were living in a mausoleum. I heard a few men snoring in the shadows below me. There were none of the spontaneous card games that I would have found back at the Hotel Valhalla. We had bars, gymnasiums, and a pool—the soldiers in this installation were lucky to have running water in their latrines.

“These are pretty shitty accommodations,” I said.

“Frontline accommodations, Harris,” General Glade said. “Soldiers not posted on the front line are billeted in buildings downtown.”

As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw that many of the soldiers were old. Glen Benson, the fifty-six-year-old corporal who had sat next to me on the trip from Earth to Mars, was probably down there …if he had survived the fight. Maybe there were thousands of Glen Bensons down there, all sleeping cozy in their cots waiting for the next attack.

As we cut across the bunker, we passed technicians working on wall-mounted cannons. We passed a radar station. We passed gunnery stations. After confirming that the area was still clear, Glade led me onto the roof of the bunker.

When I had flown into Valhalla, I saw an orderly city surrounded on two sides by pristine forests that were buried in snow. Everywhere I looked, I saw green and white under an ice blue sky. The outskirts were virgin, and the city was clean. That was all gone now.

There had once been a tidy suburb beyond the Vista Street bunker, an upper-class community with large homes and up-scale shopping malls. I could tell that much by examining the smoldering battlefield that spread out before me. The enemy had been beaten back, but the battle had not been won as easily as I had been led to believe.

We had a term in the Marines—FOCPIG, which stood for Fire, Observed, Concealed, Protected, Integrated, non-Geometric. It described the obstacle courses you built to guide enemies into heavy fire. That was the benefit of being the home team when unfriendlies came to visit—they had to make their way through a landscape created to speck them over once and for all.

Acres of homes, stores, and churches had been leveled long before the aliens ever arrived, but the ruins of those structures remained. To get through these ruins, the enemy would need to follow paths designed to bring them into our sights. FOCPIG—limit the places your enemy can enter, then point your guns at the places that are left.

The grounds below the Vista Street bunker were covered with the broken bodies of dead aliens. Now I understood why Lieutenant Moffat advised me not to waste my time bringing back alien parts. From where I stood, I could see the wreckage of a dozen gunships lying about like insects both enormous and dead. A small fire still flickered in one or two of the wrecks.

The real carnage, however, lay about one mile out, where our intermediate defenses had battered the aliens. These aliens were killed by our heavy ordnance—rockets and laser cannons capable of destroying a building or sinking a ship. From the top of the bunker, I could see smoke rising from burned-over craters left by rockets and heaps of brick, steel, and dirt where buildings had once stood.

“We lost 137 gunships,” General Glade said. “The Army lost better than 20,000 troops.

“I’ll say one thing for those bastards—they came right at us. I don’t think a single one of them ever turned back. It didn’t matter if we hit them with machine guns, grenades, or cannon fire, those bastards marched right into it, Harris. They fought to the last. We got every last one of them.”

That sounded good.

Glade paused for dramatic effect, then delivered the bad news. “If they come back this week, the Marines take point. We have to beat them out there”—he pointed to the forest—“stop them in the woods so the Army can rebuild its perimeter.” Huuhhhh huhhhh. He cleared his throat.

The general delivered most of his meaning unsaid. Next time we would meet the enemy out there without the benefit of rocket launchers and shielded bunkers. I thought about the yard-long bolts of light that flew through the air like javelins, cutting through any embankments, trees, and combat armor that happened to get in the way. I thought about Private Huish shivering as he died.

Twists of smoke still rose from the wreckage beyond the bunker. FOCPIG, indeed.

The only stores still operating in Valhalla were the ones that catered to the GI crowd. Crews stayed to open liquor shops, cigar stores, bars, and movie houses while grocery stores, bookstores, and clothiers remained empty and closed. It didn’t matter whether you entered a coffee shop or a fine grill; so many military types were crammed around the tables that every restaurant felt like a mess hall. With most of its civilian population in a relocation camp and nearly a million servicemen walking the streets, Valhalla felt like an extended military base.

Among the hundred thousand men who formed the local militia, there were hundreds of devoted capitalists who owned bars, and they willingly opened their establishments between battles, God bless them. Large pockets of Valhalla’s low-rent entertainment district ran round-the-clock operations, and some of the finer establishments opened their doors as well. The day after that first battle, more than five hundred bars opened for business. Restaurants, movie theaters, and arcades opened. Most of the Marines I knew would have preferred to have waitresses working the tables instead of off-duty militiamen, but I never saw anyone refuse a drink.

We were on call, of course. If something happened at the front, we would hear sirens and report for duty in an instant. With the entire city on continuous alert, our commanders could muster their scattered platoons and report in a matter of minutes.

Approximately one-tenth of the men could go on leave at a time now that the shooting had ended. With the exception of Philips, who spent the day on his rack staring into space, the entire platoon headed into town for the night. Thomer offered to hang back with Philips, but I didn’t think it would matter. He was somewhere between grieving and guilt-stricken, territory most Marines prefer to travel alone. Philips might come out of this funk in a day, or it might take a month, but his wild nature would pull him through. Until then, the best thing we could do for Sergeant Mark Philips was to give him space to work things out while watching him closely enough to make sure he did not hurt himself.

I headed into town with five guys from my company, all enlisted men. Officers and enlisted men did not pal around together as a rule, but I was also a clone. In the hierarchy of U.A. Marine Corps society, the gap between officers and enlisted men was not nearly as pronounced as the separation of natural-borns and synthetics.