Steven Kent - The Clone Elite

I went to my company office and found the orders Moffat had left for me. They came directly from Major Terry Burton, our battalion commander.

Leaning back in my chair, I picked the orders up off the desk and read. Burton had not attended the briefing at the Science Lab, but he knew the score. These were orders for every platoon in our regiment to provide three men to protect the Hen House. That was the name we gave the compound in which the officers kept their wives and families. These were the kinds of orders you gave when you needed to dig in and hold your position.

I listed Herrington, Skittles, and Philips. I chose Herrington because of all the men in my platoon, he was the one who pushed himself the hardest. He needed a break. I sent Skittles because I liked the kid, and I thought he would have better odds protecting the Hen House than on the front line. As for Philips, this was my chance to do something with him before he got himself killed. Muttering to myself about this being Philips’s lucky day, I keyed the new roster into the computer and forwarded it to Base Command.

When they returned from their night out, Philips, Herrington, and Skittles would find new orders waiting for them on their racks. They would fly out to the Hen House first thing in the morning.

As I sat at the duty desk, I considered all that had happened that day. I felt tired and hungry, so I went to the mess and ate a good dinner. Then I returned to my quarters and climbed into bed.

We held the funeral at 0600 the following morning.

The Army guarded the city while the Marines buried their dead. More than three hundred thousand Marines—enlisted men in white combat armor, officers in dress uniforms—assembled in rows as straight as razor blades, standing still as grave markers as they waited for the honored to arrive. We used a city park with four baseball diamonds, two soccer fields, and a long stretch of rolling pasture for our assembly. The Corps of Engineers removed the fences and goals from the various fields to create a large enough contiguous space to accommodate us all.

We stood at attention, facing an enormous stage on which sat General Glade, the highest-ranking Marine on New Copenhagen, General Morris Newcastle, the Army commander who had made such an ass of himself at the briefing in the Science Lab, and General James Hill, representing the Air Force. Along with the generals sat twenty-five civilians in dark suits—five turned out to be U.A. senators who had flown in to oversee the battle preparations, five were local politicians, and the other fifteen were their bodyguards.

“Ten-hut!”

We snapped to attention.

An honor guard marched in bearing flags—the flag of the Unified Authority, the banner of the Orion Arm, the flag of New Copenhagen, the ceremonial flag of the Confederate Arms, and the red-and-gold standard of the Unified Authority Marine Corps.

A horse came forward pulling an antique caisson bearing the flag-draped coffin of a single unknown Marine. This man would be buried here. Should we survive this battle, a monument would follow. The other eighty thousand fallen were on their way to an industrial-strength crematory, likely a glass factory or some other location with an oven and an assembly line. The horse hung its head as it dragged the caisson. Steam formed around the horse’s nose when it exhaled. The wheels of the wagon cut a groove through the soggy grass and snow.

Three columns of servicemen carrying antique bolt-action rifles marched behind the caisson. The Marine honor guard marched on the right, the Air Force marched on the left, and the Army honor guard formed the column in the middle.

Next came the pledges, the oaths, and the prayers, followed by the speeches. One by one, they all stood up and spoke …every last self-important man on that specking stage except for the bodyguards. The generals took precisely five minutes each. The politicians took ten or fifteen. The entire service took three hours.

I heard the speeches via the interLink, each voice rolling around in my helmet like a song you can’t tune out. From the opening bugle to the closing remarks, I heard it all as clearly as if I had been sitting on the stand.

Snow started to fall. Heavy inch-wide flakes drifted down from the sky, first in a scattered dusting, then in a heavy bombardment.

After the speeches came a twenty-one-gun salute performed by the servicemen who marched behind with the caisson.

“Ready!” shouted the colonel leading the salute.

The men raised the antique rifles in perfect unison.

“Aim!”

They fixed their sites on the same invisible target.

“Fire!”

Twenty-one rifles fired as one, shattering the perfect silence. The horse drawing the caisson started, but it did not buck.

“Ready!”

The men snapped the bolts back and loaded another round.

“Aim!”

They raised their rifles.

“Fire!”

They fired again, then repeated the process one last time.

The bugler blew “Taps.” I could not hear that music without thinking of the men with whom I had served. I thought of Vince Lee, my first real friend. I thought about Fleet Admiral Bryce Klyber and Sergeant Tabor Shannon, both great men in their times. One was natural-born and died a hero, the other a Liberator and died heroically.

The color guard left, the politicians left, then the generals departed. The fighting men were the last to leave. It took half an hour for us to file off the field.

What was happening on Earth? I wondered. They could not know that eighty thousand men had died in a single day of battle, nor could they know the utter meaninglessness of those deaths. Hell, only a handful of men on this planet knew that we could not kill this enemy. Did anybody care what happened to a few thousand clones back on Earth? For all I knew, they were fighting for their lives as well.

Despite our spearhead role in the battle, my company had lost only twenty-three men. That may sound like a lot, but it was only one-sixth of our men. During the latter part of the battle, some companies lost entire platoons.

When I returned to the barracks after lunch, I saw the “holes”—the stripped racks and emptied lockers of men who had died. They left a temporary scar. By the end of the day, Base Command would rearrange the roster. The platoons with the heaviest losses would be disbanded, their men sent to other platoons to fill the holes. Since we lost so few men, we would receive survivors from some of those disbanded units. In the past, our commanders would have sent us new recruits fresh out of boot camp, but there were no new recruits left on New Copenhagen by this time. We were all veterans.

“It’s not over yet, is it?” Sergeant Thomer came to meet me when he saw me enter the barracks.

“I don’t see how this can end as long as they have that light field around the planet. We’re still trapped. They’re still out there …”

“Do you think they will send a bigger army next time, sir?” Thomer asked.

“Let’s grab a cup of coffee,” I said. Then, as we left the barracks, I told him the things I could not tell him in front of the other men. “As long as the Mudders have those light spheres, there’s nothing stopping them from sending in more soldiers.”

Thomer took a long, deep breath as he tried to still himself. We headed down to one of the hotel restaurants—in use as a mess hall. “They let you in on more about this than the rest of us, didn’t they?”

“Probably,” I said.

“But you can’t talk about it.”

“Probably not,” I said.

“But it’s bad,” Thomer guessed.

“I’m not going to talk about it,” I said. “But it isn’t good.” We entered the mess. The place was empty this late in the morning. In another hour, the early-lunch crowd would roll in—assuming we were not heading back out to the front. Only a few men waited in the cafeteria line. We stood alone by Coffee Machine Row, filling our mugs and speaking in the relative privacy.