Steven Kent - The Clone Elite

“Damn,” General Haight said, sounding impressed.

“How soon? How soon will you know?” asked General Newcastle. He whispered the question as if almost afraid to hear the answer.

“It’s still a week out, at the soonest,” Sweetwater said, sounding swept up in the excitement.

The generals’ spirits dropped so hard I could almost hear the thud. “A week? A week?” Haight complained. “We’re down to fewer than six hundred thousand troops. We don’t have any working rocket launchers. The wall around our outer perimeter is down.

“Do you have any idea what you are saying? Those Avatari bastards attack every three days. We’re almost out of soldiers, and you want us to hold off two more attacks?”

“General, ev-ev-every man we have is w-working around the clock,” Breeze said. “W-we need to run tests. It t-takes time to an-analyze the data and build off the results.”

“Whatever you think you can do, you get it done in forty-eight hours! You got that, Sweetwater?” Newcastle demanded. Perhaps he wanted to show everyone that he was back in charge. If so, it backfired.

“Then make it yourself,” William Sweetwater said in an unnaturally calm voice.

“What?” barked Newcastle. “What did you say?”

“If you think you and your soldiers can decode an alien technology in forty-eight hours, by all means, do it,” Sweetwater said. General Newcastle stormed over to the stool on which Sweetwater sat, but the dwarf did not budge.

Staring down at the misshapen little scientist, Newcastle growled like a dog. “Work faster,” he said.

“General, we started with nothing. We didn’t even have the technology to prove the existence of tachyons two weeks ago, and now we are developing a primitive method for controlling them. One of our teams is about to hijack an alien technology that is far more advanced than our own. It’s a miracle we have gotten this far this fast,” Sweetwater said. He was in control, and he knew it. General Newcastle glared down at him, and Sweetwater flatly returned that gaze.

“And you expect us to protect your facility that entire time?” he asked.

“No, sir, not the entire week,” Sweetwater said. “Only when we are under attack.” I saw the twinkle in Sweetwater’s dark eyes.

Newcastle mulled his options over, then said, “Gentlemen, we have our orders. We need to hold out for another week.”

“Harris, we’re moving camp.”

Moffat met me as I entered the hotel. The work of moving had already begun. A line of trucks waited along the access road that led to the hotel loading dock. The Hotel Valhalla had taken on the aspect of a theatrical stage during a change of settings. Men in fatigues stripped down booths, carried racks, and pushed carts filled with supplies.

As Moffat spoke, I saw something that left me deeply disturbed—graffiti. Somebody had spray painted a stick-figure mural on one of the walls. The portrait showed five large figures gathered around a smaller figure. The Avatari were big and bulky, each of them holding one of those four-foot-long rifles. The human looked pathetic beside them, a man on his hands and knees. He wore what appeared to be combat armor. At least, he had armor covering his head and chest. From the waist down, the figure was naked with a little sliver of a penis dangling below his stomach.

The caption on the bottom of the drawing, written in the same red paint, was “MUDDERS GANG BANG!” Under the guy on his knees was one word—“Glade.”

If the name under the guy on his knees had been Moffat instead of Glade, I would have had Philips arrested. Hell, I might have killed him myself.

Giving the mural a second glance, I realized that what I had taken as Avatari rifles had been intended to represent a portion of their anatomy. Aside from the disproportionate generosity that the artist had shown the enemy, this painting bothered me because military clones were supposedly incapable of doing something like this. In theory the capacity for vandalism and lawbreaking had been weeded out of them through neural programming; but as I looked around the lobby, I saw shattered mirrors, broken windows, wallpaper stripped from walls, and more graffiti. If clones had done this, what other parts of their programming had also become undone?

“Yeah, we have a specking Michelangelo on our hands,” Moffat said, when he saw my gaze return to the graffiti. “The company is stripping down the Valkyrie Ballroom. I need you to make sure the move goes smoothly.”

I wanted to tell Moffat that I saw him take a shot at Philips, but I decided to play it safe. Instead, I asked, “Where are we headed?”

“The University of Valhalla,” Moffat said. “They want us settled in by 1900.”

I checked my watch. It was 1130. That seemed generous. “Seven and a half hours just to move racks?” I asked.

“We should be so lucky,” Moffat said. “Command wants this side of town FOCPIG-ready by 0000 hours. We’ve got mines to plant and traps to wire.”

“What about the armory?” I asked. It would take days to move all of the weapons out of the underground garage. Finding and stocking another location would not go quickly either.

“We’re leaving it.”

“Everything?” I asked. “We’ve got nuclear bombs down there.”

“Yeah, I know,” Moffat said. “I asked Burton about that. He says our best bet is to stop the Mudders before they get here.”

“So, am I helping with the move or FOCing the PIG?” I asked.

“You’re supervising the move, then you’re FOCing the PIG,” Moffat said. “Once we get everything loaded on to the truck here, I want you to take one full platoon to help the ACOE work on a new DMZ.” In plain speak, he wanted me to take the company out to help the Army Corps of Engineers set up a new “demilitarized” zone. In this case, the term “demilitarized zone” meant a highly militarized zone, indeed. Once the Corps of Engineers finished their work, there would not be a safe inch of land west of the hotel.

“Let me get my armor,” I said.

“How’s the shoulder?” Moffat asked.

“Better,” I said. I saluted and caught an elevator to my room.

“You know, you guys don’t need to guard me every specking minute of the day,” Philips complained, as we rode out on the truck.

I leaned back into the canvas awning. I had my helmet off so I could enjoy the bracing feel of the cool air against my face. “I’m not guarding you, Philips, I’m protecting you,” I said.

“I don’t want to be protected,” Philips said. He was dressed in fatigues, the only man on the truck who had not put on armor. There was no rule that said we had to wear armor, but most Marines wanted all the protection they could get when they laid land mines. It seemed like a logical choice—at least it seemed logical to those of us who wanted to survive the detail.

“I like keeping an eye on you, Philips; you’re entertaining. I’ve never watched anybody self-destruct before. It’s kind of exciting.”

“Go speck yourself, Harris.”

I hated to pull rank, but I was an officer, and I could not allow him to show me disrespect in front of the men. “You are speaking to an officer,” I said.

“Sorry. Go speck yourself, sir,” he said.

“What happened to that famous Mark Philips sense of humor?” I asked.

“I left it back at the Hen House,” Philips said.

“Not back on the battlefield?” I asked.

We drove past Vista Street, deep into the neighborhoods on the west edge of town. Men in battle armor and men in fatigues lay in piles along the road. Crews of soldiers worked to clear the streets of death and debris, moving the burned husks of tanks and trucks along with corpses. In a patch of grass by a tumble-down house, a group of soldiers gathered for a smoke and a chat.