Steven Kent - The Clone Elite

“Sounds like it’s settled,” said Sweetwater. “Are there any questions?”

“Have you made any progress figuring out a way to kill these Avatari things?” Newcastle asked.

“It seems to me like you have a pretty good handle on that,” Sweetwater said, absolutely no trace of malice in his voice. “From what Arthur tells us, you broke their line in three hours with minimal casualties.”

“Are you aware of how many rockets we fired off?” General Newcastle asked. “If we keep using rockets at that rate, our supplies won’t last the week.”

“How low are we?” Hill, the Air Force general, asked.

“I’m down by a third on my STS supplies. I’ve got plenty of guns and grenades, and I’m doing all right on tanks. We’d be a lot better off if we could get your birds in the air,” Newcastle said.

“I already told you, the interference we get from the ion curtain has my boys grounded,” Hill said. “The flight computers in our fighters shut down at one thousand feet.”

“Fly low,” Newcastle said.

“Like you did with your gunships?” asked Hill.

“If your pilots can’t fly, maybe we should put them on the front line,” Newcastle said.

“Let’s play nice, boys,” Glade interrupted.

Newcastle exhaled deeply and nodded. “The way things are going now, it seems like the only way to beat the sons of bitches is to smother them with troops or throw fireworks at them. Combining the two doesn’t work so well—we end up losing a whole bunch of both.”

Glade shook his head. “I lost twenty percent of my troops last time I sent them in the forest. Two, three more battles like the one we had last week and I’ll be hurting for men.”

“We need another solution,” Newcastle told Sweetwater. “How long before you can have something for us?”

“What are you looking for?” Sweetwater asked.

“You say these Avatari just rebuild themselves every time we kill them? Fine. How long will it take you to find a way to stop them from rebuilding themselves?”

Taking a moment to consider the question, Sweetwater climbed back on his stool. His eyes never falling away from General Newcastle’s, he said, “We can’t even begin to guess.”

“Then what the hell good are you?” Newcastle shouted. “You might as well be up on the line.”

“We’re dealing with an entirely alien technology that we never even knew existed. For all we know, the laws of physics as we know them do not apply in their world.”

“The existence of tachyons was just a theory until the aliens landed,” added Arthur Breeze. “Our scientists did not have the technology to prove that they existed.”

“We need time,” Sweetwater said.

General Newcastle nodded and turned to the other generals. “We defend the Science Lab at all costs. If we’re going to win this thing, the answers are going to come from here.”

The other generals grumbled in agreement.

“So it comes down to men or matériêl,” General Glade said. “Which can we afford to give up first?”

“We burn through the men,” Newcastle said. “I’ll assign my white-haired privates to man the line for an attack or two. Time to thin the herd and conserve the rockets.”

I heard echoes in my head. I imagined every antisynthetic officer under whom I had ever served making similar decisions about clones. I imagined Admiral Thurston sending two thousand cloned Marines to a planet named Little Man, not for a battle as they had been told, but simply as bait. And I thought of Admiral Brocius stranding sixty thousand clone Marines on the Mogat home world as the planet melted around them.

Hearing the cavalier way in which the generals treated men and matériel, I felt a familiar angry pang. They judged everything in terms of expendability. First they would sacrifice the old clones, then the young ones, then the rockets, and finally the expendable natural-borns. Sooner or later, everything became expendable to these men except themselves.

The mood around Valhalla remained exuberant. All anybody seemed to know was that we had beaten back the Mudders and that this latest victory was the easiest so far.

Freeman and I returned to the hotel in time to see a truck loaded with Marines in fatigues driving out of the parking lot. The men in the back of the truck carried M27s, but they looked more like a hunting party than Marines on a mission.

A second group of men with M27s waited by the hotel entrance. “Where are you going?” I asked a corporal.

“Dog hunting, sir,” he replied.

“Dog hunting?”

“Yes, sir. You know all those strays you see around town? A couple of them up and bit somebody. Base Command is offering a fifty-dollar reward for every dog pelt we bring in.”

Most of the men held open bottles of beer in one hand and M27s in the other. Just beyond them I saw another group of would-be hunters waiting for a truck, and another group beyond them. Soon the town might be filled with half-drunk Marines shooting stray dogs and guzzling beer.

At first I felt angry about the waste of bullets, then I realized that even if I collected every bullet shot at every dog, I might not have enough firepower to bring down a single Avatar. Somebody in the chain of command was thinking. Scanning the parking lot, I sensed the excitement. A few of the guys might accidentally shoot each other, but the costs would be minimal compared to morale value.

Freeman and I went to the mess hall.

We walked down the food line, selecting dishes. The choices would have made for a fine breakfast, lunch, or dinner. There was bacon, steak, biscuits, vegetables, fruits in sugar syrups, ham, hot cereal, and soup. The salad bar was closed, but the cooks had left out plates with chef and vegetable salads. With the sky bright all day long and men on alternating shifts, breakfast, lunch, and dinner all mixed into each other.

“Hunting dogs,” Freeman said as he loaded up his plate. “Does that make sense to you?”

“Sure it does,” I said. “We wouldn’t want those dogs to bite anyone.”

Freeman did not respond.

“It’s not about killing dogs,” I said. “Those men are too busy thinking about scoring a fifty-dollars bounty to worry about being stuck on a planet with an alien army. It’s a damn good morale booster.”

Freeman took five fried eggs, a T-bone steak, and a football-sized wad of green beans. He also took two glasses of milk and a glass of orange juice. I picked up a bacon cheeseburger, saw the way the heat lamps had shriveled the bun, and put it back in the bin. Instead, I chose a plate with dried-out fried chicken and petrified french fries.

We carried our trays to an empty corner of the mess and sat down. “When do you want to leave for the dig site?” I asked. “I can set up a chopper and a pilot.” I picked up a piece of chicken and took a bite of it. The skin was greasy, the meat was dry, but the flavor was fine.

“I’ll fly us,” Freeman said. Using his fork, he cut one of his eggs into three nearly equal triangles. The yolk had apparently solidified under the heat lamps and barely ran.

“You can fly a helicopter?” I asked.

“We’ll take a transport.” Military transports, the flying kind, were short-range birds used mostly for shuttling troops to and from ships. They were big, clunky, unarmed beasts with thick shields and no weapons. I knew Freeman could fly transports; I’d ridden with him before.

“I never thought of that,” I said. If we ran into the Avatari, a transport would have a better chance of surviving their light bolts than a helicopter. The bolts would pierce the shields and pass right through the fuselage, but it would take a lucky shot to bring a transport down.