Steven Kent - The Clone Elite

“Shit! Shit! Shit!” Major Burton said over a network that every officer in his battalion could hear. With the Army’s inability to stop the Avatari outside the city, the situation had turned from routine to dire.

Attempting to find a way around the traffic jam, transport drivers tried side streets and alleys. A row of trucks pulled onto the sidewalk, plowing over mailboxes, signs, and benches. In the streets, the traffic crawled at no more than five miles per hour.

“Everybody out!” I shouted.

“Harris, what are you doing?” Moffat asked over the interLink.

“Out! Move it. Move it!” Men leaped from the truck.

“It’s only a mile or two from here to Vista Street,” I said. “We can run it faster than this.”

Moffat did not respond. Behind us I saw other companies doing the same, off-loading Marines and ordering them to run. With the trucks moving at such a slow crawl, we easily out-paced them.

I heard mortar fire as we got closer. I expected to enter the shielded bunkers along Vista Street; but we never reached Vista, the retreat had already begun. We reached the front end of the traffic jam and ran into the tide of men in green fatigues filling the streets.

Up ahead, the Vista Street bunker looked as jagged as a saw blade. Entire sections of the bunker had collapsed, other sections stood in ruins, shot through with so many holes that I could see right through the walls to other side.

“Hold the street.” Burton gave the potentially fatal command over a frequency that would reach every man in the battalion; and I repeated it to my company.

“Dig in. Find cover,” I shouted. Cars, corners, Dumpsters, signs, mailboxes, anything was better than standing out in the open. The Avatari could shoot through any barrier, but at least a car or a bush would offer someplace to hide. There was not enough cover to go around; and behind us, Marines were arriving by the tens of thousands.

I had a brief moment in which I wondered if the Avatari would actually breach the bunker. Then came the explosion—a powerful, jarring force that ran the entire length of the street. Suddenly, all that remained of the Vista Street bunker were a few of its ribs—massive arching girders that stood as separate from each other as the goalposts on either end of a football field. Everything else turned to rubble so loose you could drive a jeep over it.

Beyond the bunker, the Avatari horde came slowly across the charred landscape that had once been the outskirts of Valhalla. I took a step back and thudded into something. When I turned to look, I saw that I had backed into an unarmed rocket launcher, its panels still hanging open for maintenance.

“This is General James P. Glade. Men, we need to hold this position at all costs. I have tanks and helicopter gunboats on the way.” His voice had a forced calm about it. There was none of his customary throat clearing, none of the wildness or swagger. He took the tone of a father explaining life to his young son.

“I ask you men to give everything now …everything. If you die here, you die a savior. If mankind survives this war, it will survive because of the sacrifices you make on this street on this day.

“I am sending in every Marine under my command, officers and enlisted men alike. Help is on its way, but you must hold this position until it arrives. Fight to the last man. Fight to your dying breath. Do you understand me, Marines? The future of everything you have ever known or cared about depends on you holding this street.”

Now there’s a cheerful message, I thought to myself as I watched the Avatari wade through the wreckage of the bunker. He was right, though. It wasn’t the street that mattered, it was the defenses along the street. Our rocket launchers had proven themselves to be our best weapon against the Avatari, and most of the launchers were lined up along this street. The problem was, I didn’t think we could hold.

The aliens were still too far away for us to hit them when the first squadron of gunboats floated overhead. There were ten of them, and each got off a couple of rockets, then the Avatari fired back, aiming those big rifles in the air. I watched three bolts cut through one of the gunboats like an ice pick stabbing through a balloon. Trails of smoke rose from the fuselage of the gunboat as it began a slow rotation along the wing, and the chopper dropped out of the sky. Less than a minute after they appeared in the skyline, all ten gunboats went down.

Most of my men had general-issue particle-beam pistols with an effective range of approximately fifty feet. Soldiers with M27s opened fire while the Avatari were still hundreds of yards away. As the Avatari closed to within a hundred yards, our grenadiers began firing at them. Boll and Skittles moved to the front of the platoon and piped handheld rockets into the advancing Avatari. Boll, the more experienced Marine, punched holes in the Avatari line.

The Avatari blended into the charred landscape. They were dark, the color of mud made from volcanic soil. So much smoke rose around them that they sometimes disappeared from view, but they never wavered. They never hesitated. They moved ahead, a juggernaut. I thought to myself, Where are the tanks? But I already knew the answer—they were back at the hotels, trapped in the traffic jam.

The Avatari came closer and began returning fire. We were no match for them. Their bolts drilled us no matter where we hid. Cars, buildings, trees, nothing offered enough protection. Up the block from me, an Army sniper hid behind the ruins of a Targ, an antipersonnel tank. He would stand, aim quickly over the front end of the tank, fire an explosive round, then duck back behind the protection of the tank. He was a good sniper; I saw him hit and break three Avatari with three shots before the Avatari retaliated with a barrage of their own. Dozens of bolts bored through the tank, turning its armor into a sieve. Three or four of the bolts hit the sniper, tearing holes through his body. The wounds were seared dry; no blood leaked from the wounds as the man slumped to the ground with his rifle across his lap.

Seeing the sniper die even as he hid behind a tank, I realized we would never hold this street. The Avatari fired a fusillade of bolts in my direction, ripping into my men and ravaging our cover. The aliens continued to come toward us in their disorganized march. They stepped into range of our particle-beam weapons, and we returned their fire.

So many particle-beam weapons fired at once that it looked like the facade of reality had cracked, releasing a sparkling green river of light. Rays from the particle-beam pistols hit walls, windows, the remnants of jeeps abandoned along the street and the advancing Avatari. Everything the beams hit exploded, and still the Avatari drove us back. They had no fear. They felt no pain. They lost nothing when they were shot. Death, to them, was little more than an inconvenience.

I heard the pop of M27 fire and saw soldiers firing from the second-story windows of the building behind a rocket launcher. These were technicians; I could tell by the insignia on their fatigues. Once they realized the Avatari were coming, they must have quit working on the launchers and barricaded themselves. Four techs climbed out of a window and leaped onto the top of the rocket launcher. As three fiddled with cables, the fourth aimed a single tube by hand, flipped a switch, and fired a lone rocket.

Across the street, the Avatari continued pushing their way forward. The rocket shot out of the tube, leaving a slanted string of smoke so narrow it might have been drawn with a pen. It struck the ground, throwing dozens of Avatari into the air and shattering a twenty-foot swath of street.

The Avatari seemed not to notice. The brown-black giants continued flowing toward us, firing their deadly light bolts. Men dropped on either side of me. Frustrated by the short range of his particle-beam pistol, one Marine tossed it aside and pulled out his M27. A light bolt struck him square in the visor, searing through his head and helmet. Though he had to have died instantly, the Marine continued standing on the spot for two or three seconds before he fell.