Steven Kent - The Clone Elite

The helicopter landed in the farthest corner of the clearing from the spheres, and there the pilot waited as we made a long day of it. Freeman began the experiments by having me toss a grenade into a sphere. The grenade exploded, the sphere seemed untouched. When we found shrapnel from the grenade, it was already coated with tachyons.

Freeman recorded everything as I fired lasers from all across the light spectrum into the sphere. The laser color made no difference, they all dissolved in the light of spheres. He planted several chemical bombs around the spheres. The bombs had no effect.

The highlight of the day came when Freeman climbed into the steam shovel and dumped a two-ton load of dirt on the spheres. “What the hell are you trying to do?” I asked.

“Bury it,” he said as he poured a second load of dirt over the sphere.

“Bury it? You think you can make it go away by burying it?” I asked, barely able to stop from laughing.

It did not matter what Freeman thought, and I didn’t know if burying the spheres was his idea in the first place. The uselessness of burying the sphere became apparent as the sphere rose to the top of the dirt like a bubble rising to the surface of water.

In all, the day seemed rather laughable. I started making jokes about the different experiments. As Freeman climbed out of the steam shovel, I asked, “Got a fire hydrant? Maybe we can wash the spheres away.”

Freeman did not dignify my joke with a response. He radioed the pilot of the helicopter. On the other side of the clearing, the chopper’s blades began to rotate. “Are we finished for the day?” I asked Freeman.

“One more thing,” he said, opening a wooden crate that was about the size of a footlocker. Until that very moment, I had not noticed that particular crate; but now that I did, I did not like the look of it. The symbol on the side of it was a black circle with three yellow triangles in it—the symbol used to mark radioactive materials.

“Um, Ray, that looks a like nuke,” I said.

Freeman said nothing as he opened the case.

“Are you planning on nuking the spheres?” I asked. Across the field, the blades over the helicopter were in full whirl.

“This is a dirty bomb,” Freeman said. The unit looked like a computer. The bomb and all its components were stored inside a keyboard with a little three-inch display.

“That’s great,” I said, “but shouldn’t we give burying the spheres another shot. I mean, that looked promising.”

“Sweetwater made it small, just a half-kiloton device with maximum radiation yield.”

That was small. When the bomb went off, it would only go off with the force of five hundred metric tons of TNT. Of course it did not matter how big the bomb was; the air around it would still heat up to over five hundred thousand degrees. The good news was that our combat armor would protect us from the radiation if we survived the heat and the shock wave.

“A dirty bomb,” I said. “How nice. Well, as long as the radiation yield is high.”

Freeman typed some code into the bomb and 10:00 appeared on the screen. The countdown began immediately.

Freeman stood and headed toward the helicopter. I followed, glancing back and seeing that the clock had counted down to 9:51.

The truth was that Freeman had played it more than safe. With the helicopter flying us to safety, he could have set the clock for three minutes, and we would have survived. With ten minutes, we could get in a game of chess before boarding. Still, I always found it hard to relax around nuclear bombs.

We boarded the helicopter and left the clearing, circling three hundred feet over the forest and nearly a mile away. I would have preferred to put more distance between us and the bomb, but Freeman said he’d worked everything out with Sweetwater, and I had confidence in both men. Besides, so long as the blast did not short out our electrical system, this bird was made to withstand a little radiation.

Below us, the forest looked like a frosted green carpet. There were no shadows or dark spots. In the distance, I could see the clearing. And then the explosion took place, a bright flash that rendered the rest of the clearing as bright as the line of spheres running across its diameter. Above the clearing, the flash of the bomb solidified into a shape like a golden jellyfish rising from the forest floor that cooled into smoke, then rose like a mushroom. The trees around the clearing leaned out, swayed back toward the explosion, then caught on fire. They burned like matches in a book. A layer of smoke formed around the body of the steam shovel. When the smoke evaporated, it left a blackened hulk in its wake.

“Guess we won’t be going into that part of the forest anytime soon,” I said. There must have been a few hundred dead soldiers around there, men killed during the old men’s march. They were the lucky ones. Incineration had come much sooner for them than for those who died deeper in the forest.

As the smoke and ash cleared away, I could see the spheres sparkling against the silver, black, and orange background that had once been filled with trees. “Nothing hurts them,” I said.

Freeman said nothing in return.

During duty hours, I played the role of the faithful lieutenant in the Marines. I located the dead on tagging duty and prepared what was left of my company for the next wave of the invasion. During off hours, I socialized with enlisted men. I pretended to know only what they knew, and I acted as if I thought we would survive this war. That was the life I lived as a normal Marine. I also had another life, however, one that made it hard to spend time with men who were not in the know. My second life was working with the Science Lab.

“We’ve examined the data Raymond and Lieutenant Harris collected,” William Sweetwater said as he waddled across the laboratory floor. As he always did, Sweetwater spoke in a tough and hip way, as if he did not realize that he was a pudgy little dwarf with a scraggly beard and thick glasses.

“Roll the feed,” Sweetwater said to Arthur Breeze.

On the ten-foot screen that hung from the ceiling, the Avatari mining operation appeared. The video feed started with what we saw the moment we entered the cavern, as captured by Ray Freeman’s visor. I stood with my back to the camera looking out at the spider-things.

As Freeman entered the cavern, the camera panned around it, and there the feed froze, focusing on one of the spider-things.

“What the hell is that?” asked General Glade.

“We think they’re drone workers. From what we can tell, they’re not much more intelligent than a mechanical arm on an assembly line,” Sweetwater said. “They appear to follow a simple digging protocol and show no signs of initiative or independent thought.

“This is interesting.” He waddled over to the screen. “See, here Lieutenant Harris comes within a few inches of that drone.” On the screen, I am walking down the path as one of the drone pops out of a hole and walks right past me.

“A sentient being would have attacked Lieutenant Harris,” Sweetwater said. “With those sharp forelegs, it could have cut him in half.”

“Do we assume that they came to hollow out the mountain?” asked General Haight, the Army’s new second-in-command. “Are they going to hollow the entire planet?”

“We’ve run a computer analysis of this cavern. If our estimates are correct, the cavern is 41.3 miles long. Assuming the mountain was solid when the Avatari arrived, we estimate that they have displaced approximately eight hundred cubic miles of mountain per week,” said Arthur Breeze. Unlike Sweetwater, Breeze did not refer to himself alone when he said “we.”