Steven Kent - The Clone Elite

“I belong with my platoon,” Glen protested.

“You do? You planning on killing yourself, or are you just going to sit around crying and wait for the Mudders to come back?”

I thought Benson would either shoot Philips or put a bullet in his own fool head. Instead, he climbed to his feet, wincing at the pain and obviously unsteady. Thomer grabbed him by the shoulder and helped him walk to the jeep.

“Can I drive the old bastard in?” Philips asked loud enough for Benson to hear. He had clearly taken a liking to the old fool.

“Doesn’t matter to me,” Thomer said, as he arranged Benson in the back of the jeep.

As they drove away, Thomer muttered, “What an asshole.”

I nodded, then asked, “Which one?”

Over the next two days, more than ten thousand survivors found their way back to Valhalla from the forest. The rest of the two hundred and fifty thousand troops were officially listed M.I.A., though everyone knew they were deader than Caesar’s ghost. We lost another thirty-five thousand men when the Avatari rolled over the bunker. More than two hundred and seventy-five thousand men died in a single day.

It wasn’t the loss of manpower that upset the balance of power. We lost twenty-five rocket launchers when the battle reached Vista Street. With only six hundred thousand men and no working missile defenses along the western edge of Valhalla, we could no longer enforce our perimeter.

From here on out, the Avatari would be able to wage their war in town.

There were seven of us—Thomer, Skittles, Boll, Herrington, Manning, Sharpes, and me. Manning and Sharpes were from another company in the battalion, but we could overlook that shortcoming. The numbers in our company were down after the battle for Vista Street.

I had hoped to get Philips off the shit list, so he could come with us, but no such luck. When I asked Major Burton, our battalion commander, to give Philips the night off, he had refused even to consider the idea.

I did not bother asking Burton if he wanted to come into town with us because he would have said no. He would not come to town with a pack of enlisted men. As an officer, I wasn’t supposed to fraternize with the enlisted folk either, but I did not think my fellow officers would mind. They were natural-born, I was a clone. I might have received the bars but that did not make me part of their fraternity. Knowing that I would never be counted an equal in the loyal order of officers, I fraternized with the conscripts.

We borrowed a truck and drove to the bar and restaurant district. The first time I went for a joyride downtown, trucks were reserved for officers and noncoms who could produce a requisition slip signed by an officer. This time, Corporal Manning said he could procure the truck. When I volunteered to sign for it, he said, “Don’t sweat it, I took care of it.”

Since he’d signed his life away on the truck, Manning got to drive. Herrington rode shotgun up front. The rest of us piled in the back and swapped stories as we drove up Carlson Avenue and into town. I listened to the conversations around me but did not join in.

I had become preoccupied with what I saw. We passed a park that the Corps of Engineers had turned into a city dump with a twenty-foot-tall mountain range of garbage. Birds swooped down from the sky to hop along the garbage and pick at it. Cat-sized rats scurried around the base of the garbage. Seeing the birds and the rats, I wondered how long it would take until those carrion feeders found their way to the dead soldiers in the forest.

We drove down streets along which new barricades were under construction. The brass planned to cordon these areas off. With the Vista Street bunker destroyed, these areas might soon become the new fronts.

Some places we passed showed new signs of urban decay. We drove by an L-shaped bank building in which the wind had blown huge piles of loose papers along the walls; they looked like snowdrifts. Vandals had painted signs on a couple of police stations in one part of town. Other areas of town were immaculate. We drove past a central park in which dozens of soldiers worked, picking up trash, raking leaves, and trimming hedges.

“I heard you went out on a tagging detail,” Boll said.

“Yeah,” Thomer answered.

“What was it like out there?”

“A lot of trees and shit,” I said, breaking in and hoping to stop Thomer from saying anything that might hurt company morale. That was a direct order, by the way. Officers were told to keep their men from speculating about the situation for all the good it would do. Telling Marines not to discuss the battle was like ordering someone who has been shot in the gut to stop bleeding. Stuff leaks out, no matter what you do.

“Did you find dead soldiers?” Boll asked.

Technically, I was supposed to tell them to change the subject, but they would have just fired up the conversation again a little later.

“Are you kidding?” Thomer asked. “We found this one clearing where they were piled up on top of each other. It was all those old guys, thousands of them.”

“Did you find any Mudders?” Boll asked.

“Not many. I bet we lost a hundred men for every one of theirs that we killed,” Thomer said.

“I heard it wasn’t that bad, someone told me we lost twenty-five of ours for every one of theirs.” Boll said.

“Maybe,” Thomer said. “I only saw one small piece of the battlefield.”

“I heard somewhere that we lost about two hundred and fifty thousand men out there and they lost ten thousand. That’s about twenty-five to one.” Boll was not going to let the subject drop.

“That wasn’t what I saw,” Thomer said. “It was almost like they were throwing those old guys away …like they didn’t care whether—”

“Thomer,” I said, realizing that I had let the conversation go too long. Smarter and more alert than any clone I knew, Thomer had just strayed too close to the truth. Newcastle had thrown men away.

“Sir?” he asked, not sure why I had interrupted him.

“Did you ever bag any dogs?” I asked for lack of a better way to change the subject. “I heard you can earn a full month’s pay for shooting a few strays.”

Thomer looked confused.

“I got one,” said Sharpes.

“I bagged eight of them,” Skittles said. “And Moffat paid up on them, too. Two specking weeks’ worth of pay in a single afternoon. Now if I just had something good to spend it on.”

“I hear the locals opened a Tune and Lude,” Sharpes said.

The term “Tune and Lude” referred to dance clubs where they played loud music and served up enormous amounts of alcohol. Some ran a steady trade in illegal drugs; but that did not concern me, the neural programming in military clones stopped them from abusing drugs. Most Tune and Ludes, respectable or otherwise, were tied in with some form of prostitution. Some even had built-in hotels that rented rooms by the hour.

“Are you kidding me?” Thomer asked. “All-male Tune and Ludes, that’s kind of disgusting.”

“No way,” Sharpes replied. “They brought in scrub.”

Thomer, ever the Boy Scout, shook his head. “That’s not going to help us win this war.”

“I don’t know. A good wiggle always helps me stay focused,” Sharpes quipped.

“I heard Philips managed to get hooked up while he was in the Hen House,” Boll said.

Skittles, who went with Philips, burst into a fit of laughter. “He bagged Lieutenant Moffat’s wife.”

“It isn’t funny,” said Thomer.

He started to launch into a lecture on honor when Skittles said, “You haven’t seen Moffat’s wife.”

“Was she pretty?” Boll asked.

“Pretty in two ways—pretty ugly and pretty likely to stay that way,” Skittles said. “She’s got a face like a bear and legs like a chicken. If I had a wife like her, I wouldn’t know whether to kill her or cut off my wanger.