Steven Kent - The Clone Elite

As I left the protection of the trees, I experienced that pleasant stinging in my veins, the combat reflex. A mixture of adrenaline and testosterone flowed through my blood. It was like the return of an old friend, maybe more pronounced on this occasion than ever before. I felt both calm and excited at the same time. It left me peaceful, almost blissful, and ready to kill. I did not become part of the mob; my thoughts remained my own. But I shared its purpose—we had come to kill.

By this time I had lost track of which men belonged to which company. With so many Marines pushing in around me, I simply ignored their virtual dog tags as they appeared in my visor. There comes a time when chaos takes over, and all strategy is lost on the field. We had reached that point.

When I saw Mudders, I aimed and fired. I no longer entertained any objectives other than to kill. It was hard to shoot with men jostling around me, bumping me, constantly forcing me forward. When I shot at enemies, I never shot alone. We were ten thousand men moving in unison, and we fired at every Mudder we saw. When small groups of aliens stepped over a ridge or out from behind the trees, so many bullets ripped into them that they simply shredded before our eyes.

As I reached the top of the rise, I saw a Mudder no more than fifty feet away and fired over the helmets of several Marines. Hundreds of bullets bounced off the alien’s hide. I did not see if it fell. The momentum of the regiment shoved me on, and I lost sight of it.

A knee-deep stream ran across our path. I splashed into the water, high-stepping my way across, afraid to fall because I knew I’d be trampled. It was not until I emerged on the other side of that stream, slipping on the rocks along the shore, that I looked back and saw the extent of our casualties. As we crossed the far bank and stepped over a rise, all of our cover had fallen away. The slippery rocks I’d stumbled over as I crossed the river were dead Marines. Dozens of them lay facedown in the water.

A thousand Marines now funneled in through a bottleneck no more than three hundred feet across. The aliens fired into our ranks, and we fired into theirs. Still we pushed ahead. When I crested another ridge, I saw that the ground that I had first thought was a snow-covered forest was really piled with dead Marines in white combat armor. Yard-long bolts of light soared through the air at speeds we could see but not dodge. Men around me were hit in the head, the chest, the arms, the legs.

Had I not been part of the herd, I would have found cover and dug in. But this was not a battle in which men dug in and fought—this was a charge. Marines pushed at my back. Marines ran ahead of me. We splashed over the banks of the creek, stormed across the field of fallen men, and crashed headlong into enemy fire.

A few feet ahead of me, a bolt seared through a Marine, and the Marine behind him, then a third Marine. The bolt pierced the first man in the head, the next through the chest, and barely grazed the final man in the arm, but all three would die. Whenever those bolts connected, it caused such trauma that a shot through the arm was every bit as lethal as a shot through the head.

We continued our rush, all the time hearing officers taunting us, coaxing us, their voices ringing in our helmets and merging with our thoughts. “Run!” “Get going!” “Move it! Move it! Move it!”

An ATV skidded around a hollow, catching three Mudders from behind. It fired a missile that blew the Mudders apart, and the ATV rumbled over their bodies as if they were no more deadly than overgrown roots.

Switching from my M27 to a particle-beam pistol, I continued to run in the stampede. My pistol was made for close-combat situations, and that phase of the battle was about to begin. The aliens were all around us now, their massive single-colored bodies blending in with the landscape.

The men to the right and left of me fell a few moments apart. The one on my right was hit in the gut, and his legs crumpled beneath him. The one on my left was hit in the face—I saw the bolt coming and turned in time to see it strike his visor and tear through it. The plasticized glass in his visor had already melted as he fell backward and was trampled.

I did not know the man’s name and did not bother reading his virtual dog tag. I got a quick glimpse of him as he fell, and then the momentum of the pack forced me on.

“Move it, you specking sons of bitches!” some officer yelled at us. The interLink seemed to fuse with my brain.

Once we reached the next ridge, the momentum slowed to a crawl. With every step I pushed off the back or head of a fallen Marine. In this situation, I had no time to worry about stepping on fallen Marines, but the footing was terrible the way the bodies slid under my weight. As I stumbled forward, I began to run into broken Mudders as well. A hundred yards more, and the white of Marine combat armor gave way to charcoal as the battlefield became a junkyard of alien body parts.

At some point, I felt one of my legs pulled out from under me, and I fell on my face. I swerved around and saw that one of the dying Mudders had grabbed my ankle. The creature had been blown in half. Its chest, arms, and head were still intact, its eyes looked to me as if they had been carved out of iron or stone. I wondered if the thing could see me as I swung my pistol into its face and fired the sparkling green beam. I held the trigger down for several seconds, though it had already released me.

The eyes never flinched. I continued to fire. The head stuttered, then exploded like a skeet. Bits of some material that might have been clay or metal or both burst out of its face, then I was back on my feet.

Our regiment slammed into the Mudders from the south and east. We continued to pour into them in a column, but they would not retreat. They tried to push back against us, but by that time, their attack had no teeth.

We started out ten thousand troops strong but had lost a lot of men. Our objective had been to cut the Mudders’ line and stall their advance toward Valhalla. We succeeded at breaking their lines, but we did not stall their attack. Nothing could stall their attack. The aliens we did not kill continued on toward the city. To a man, these bastards knew nothing of retreat.

Perhaps Glade had foreseen this. His Twenty-third Regiment came in from the north and east, creating an additional buffer across the city lines. They slashed into the enemy, creating a second front. Other regiments circled in behind the aliens, coming in from the south and west. Even then, the Mudders did not yield; they simply broke into groups and continued the fight until we struck down their last men.

The report that day was good.

The Fifteenth Regiment, my unit, struck first. We broke their line, trapping the aliens between ourselves and the Twenty-third Regiment. Between our two regiments we killed over fifteen thousand aliens and lost only three thousand five hundred men—by far the lowest casualty rate in the campaign.

After we snapped their lines, thirty-five thousand Mudders headed south and west, but the trap had been sprung. They ran headlong into the Eighth, Tenth, and Sixteenth Regiments. The battle lasted several hours with the Mudders fighting the Marines to a stalemate until the Ninth and Twelfth Regiments arrived from the west.

When the Seventeenth, Twenty-ninth, and Thirty-third came in from the east, trapping the aliens on yet another flank, the battle finally came to a close. Though they were shamefully outnumbered, the Mudders stood and fought.

Opting for aggression over caution, Glade poured more men into the fire—officers and enlisted men alike. When the stakes are too high to rely on a surgical strike, you need to rely on your numbers. Against an alien force of fifty thousand troops, General Glade sent over one hundred thousand Marines. Only twenty-four thousand of those Marines returned.