Steven Kent - The Clone Elite

“Where are you going?” he asked in an accusing tone.

“Freeman and I left the Mudders a surprise by their base,” I said. Personally, I preferred the term “Avatar,” but Moffat was not among the elite group cleared to hear it. As far as he was concerned, the aliens were still “Mudders,” and we were able to kill them.

“Who authorized that action?” Moffat asked. The man could not help himself, acting like a prick came naturally to him.

“General Newcastle, General Glade …Freeman pretty much has carte blanche around here,” I said, trying to sound oblivious to the fact that I had gone over Moffat’s head. Then I decided to offer an olive branch. “They’re just beginning to arrive,” I said. “Want to watch?”

“What did you leave there?” Moffat asked, interest edging his voice.

“I left a couple of helmets. We’re watching ground zero over the interLink.”

“Are you heading over to General Glade’s office?”

“No, sir. This was strictly a personal experiment,” I said. “We have a command console set up in the barracks.”

“Nice, Harris. Very nice.” Moffat used that line so often that it sounded worse than canned.

We took the elevator to the mezzanine and trotted into the Valkyrie Ballroom. By this time a crowd had formed around the console. Men in boxers and undershirts were pushing in for a look. Moffat and I cut through the crowd.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“The sphere is getting real big,” Boll said. “We haven’t seen any Mudders yet.”

“Is that where the Mudders come from?” Moffat asked. His mouth formed a strange sneer, the kind of fascinated repulsion you might see on a little girl as she watched a spider eating its prey. “What are those things?”

“I’m guessing it’s a broadcast device,” I said, lying and not looking back to see if Moffat took the bait.

Avatars appeared. First they showed as gold-colored smudges. I held my breath. In another moment, the aliens would step out of their incubator, and the trackers would open fire. With any luck, the particle beams would shred them.

The first row of Avatars took shape and strode out of the sphere. Nothing happened. The trackers did not open fire.

“Whose idea was it to place helmets out there?” Moffat asked, his eyes riveted to the screen.

“My idea, sir.” It took me a few seconds to answer. I was distracted. Why weren’t the trackers firing? What was wrong with them?

“Having cameras around ground zero was a good idea, Harris. I’m surprised the Science Lab didn’t come up with it,” Moffat said.

“They did.” Freeman’s low rumbling voice rolled over us. “They placed radars and cameras out there four days ago, but the experiment failed.”

“Satellite telemetry?” I asked, remembering the conversation we had as we placed the trackers.

Freeman did not answer. He did not need to answer. One thing about Ray Freeman, he only spoke when he saw the need. I looked away from the monitor just long enough for a quick glance at him. He stood just behind the crowd, towering over the rest of us. No expression showed on his dark face. His lips were pressed together, and his eyes were focused hard on the screens.

Around the console, Marines chattered back and forth as they watched; but I filtered out most of what they said. I concentrated instead on the three screens.

“Too bad you didn’t stick some trackers out there as well—maybe you could have massacred those bastards as they climbed out of their shell,” Moffat said. I heard lots of agreement among the men.

“We did,” I said.

By this time, dozens of Avatars had emerged from the sphere, maybe even hundreds. The trackers should have opened fire.

“We did place trackers, trackers armed with particle-beam cannons,” I said.

“Did you forget to switch them on or something?” Moffat asked. Like the rest of us, he did not look away from the screen as he spoke.

“They’re not detecting motion,” Freeman said.

“What is that supposed to mean?” Moffat asked. “I’ve seen trackers D-and-D a specking grasshopper from three hundred yards off.” “D-and-D” was Marine-speak for “detect and destroy.”

Freeman ignored Moffat.

“What are those things?” someone else asked.

“They’re the Mudders,” said Boll.

“They aren’t anything like the bastards I saw,” the first Marine said. He sounded confused, maybe even scared.

Then came the sirens signaling the call to quarters. “Suit up,” Moffat shouted.

I, of course, had to run back to my room to get my armor. As I headed for the door, I heard Moffat shout, “Hey, Harris, not bad.” He smiled and nodded his head. “Not bad.”

As the Avatars left their spheres, they took substance, and the early-warning radars that the Corps of Engineers rigged in the forest read movements that our trackers missed. As the Klaxons rang through the Hotel Valhalla, Base Command circulated the battle report. An estimated fifty thousand Mudders were headed toward town.

Freeman and I were not the only ones who came up with the idea of using trackers. Trying to find ways to whittle the aliens’ numbers down before we met them, the Corps of Engineers placed a number of booby traps along the path that the aliens had used in their previous attacks. The Corps planted a small grove of trackers along the top of a ten-foot rise one mile in from the spheres.

Their trackers worked no better than the ones that Freeman and I left behind. The Avatars had not picked up enough substance for the Corps’ sensors to detect them. A half mile later, however, they passed another bank of trackers. By this time enough tachyons had attached themselves to the Avatars for motion sensors to read their movements. They opened fire with particle-beam cannons and M27s, dropping hundreds of Avatars as they marched by. The aliens retaliated, cutting the robots down with their light rifles.

The Corps of Engineers had placed canisters of noxium gas in one secluded glade. As the Avatars entered, the Corps released the flesh-eating gas, but it had no effect on the aliens as they had no flesh. Any deer or rabbits unlucky enough to meander into that glade, however, would have been reduced to soup.

The Army began its first rocket barrage while the Avatars were still out in the forest. They hauled out the big guns this time, surface-to-surface rockets that combined explosive procession and incineration. By the time the Avatars finally reached the edge of town, their army was down to no more than twenty-three thousand, a force that our soldiers dispatched from the Vista Street bunker with small rockets and machine guns.

Two regiments of Marines were sent into the woods to flush out and finish any stragglers, but there were no stragglers. The Avatars pressed forward into the line of fire until every last one of them was dead or broken.

We only lost twelve hundred men during the third battle for Valhalla, but our armory was severely depleted.

The rank and file did not know it, but they were on a sinking ship. Enlisted men and officers alike went out to celebrate yet another easy victory, but those of us who knew the score did not participate. Our ship had struck an iceberg, but it was sinking so slowly that the passengers didn’t realize it.

Sweetwater and Breeze …

Arthur Breeze, you will recall, stood a bony six feet four and could not have even weighed 150 pounds. His skull was the size of a watermelon, and his teeth would have fit on a horse, but the rest of his body vanished in the lab coat that hung from his shoulders. The lenses on his glasses were a half inch thick, a collage of greasy fingerprints, dandruff, and shed hairs. Some people might have described him as “forehead bald,” but I think he stretched the term. If he was “forehead bald,” his forehead extended clear up to the crown of his head. What hair he had was a disorganized swatch of filament-fine white strands that formed a saddle-shaped band around his head.