Steven Kent - The Clone Elite

They had killed each other. Breeze probably died first, but he broke the spider. He would have fallen back and fired, but the spider-thing had still slashed him, nearly cutting off his head and channeling a deep, deep gash that ran from his neck to his thigh. Arthur Breeze’s glasses lay on the ground along with the jigsaw puzzle of glass that had once been his visor. Beads of blood had dried on his snowy white armor, and a puddle of blood covered the floor.

His face had never been much to look at, but the only parts I now recognized were the big, square teeth that would have looked better matched in the mouth of a horse. The other features—the cheeks, the nose, the chin, and the forehead—had turned to sponge. The eyeballs had wilted so that they completely filled the sockets in which they sat.

The face lit up. Sweetwater stood beside me, shining his flashlight into his dead friend’s face.

“Harris? Harris what the speck is going on?” Burton asked as he came over and joined us.

I ignored both Burton and Sweetwater, listening only to the echo of the insane scream I made inside my helmet. This was not just about Breeze, and I knew it. This was for Philips and Huish and White, and the nine hundred thousand clones who had died defending this goddamned planet. I spun and smashed my boot into the side of the dead spider. I kicked it as hard as I could, and the side of its body shattered. I felt something tug at my shoulder.

“It’s not getting any deader,” said Freeman.

Maybe it was the calmness in his voice or the weight of his hand on my shoulder, though more likely it was the way my combat reflex had sneaked up on me, but I whirled around and prepared to shoot Freeman. He was ready for me, though. As I came around and raised my gun, he shoved me hard, and I stumbled into the giant carcass. I fell on my ass angrier than ever, but before I could bring up my gun, the bastard had his particle-beam pistol pressed straight into my visor.

“You are going to get yourself killed,” Freeman said, sounding so specking calm it made we want to piss myself. I was in a rage. I tried to bring up my cannon, and the bastard stepped on it. So there I sat, leaning against the shell of a guardian spider, my former partner pressing the muzzle of a particle-beam cannon against my helmet.

“Your combat reflex is taking over, Harris; this is why they killed off the other Liberators. You keep this up, and you’re more likely to kill us than those aliens down there.” Freeman tapped his cannon against my visor as he said this. Had he wanted to, he could have shattered the glass.

“You’re the best man we have, but I will shoot you before I let you screw this job up.”

Several things occurred to me at that moment. The first and most important was that even if I tried to kick his legs out or knocked his gun away, Freeman would shoot me without a moment’s hesitation. The next thing that ran through my head was that I was exactly like the Liberators on Albatross Island—the ones who massacred helpless prisoners and guards. Freeman was right—once I finished off the spider, my blood in a boil, I would turn on anything I could kill.

With that thought came the beginnings of self-control. My muscles slowly loosened. I allowed my hands to drop palms down on my lap.

“You back in control of yourself?” Freeman asked.

The entire company, Sweetwater included, was staring down at me. Visors hid most of their faces; but I could see Sweetwater’s expression, and he looked downright scared. I felt ashamed of myself. The funny thing was that as the reflex simmered, I felt all sorts of pains. I felt the last tremors in my shoulder and the vivid knot on the back of my head, and I felt small.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m back in control.”

Anyone else would have helped me up. Not Freeman. He took a step back and kept his cannon trained on my face. I still had the last traces of rage, and I considered trying to shoot Freeman. Something in me liked the idea of shooting all of them, even Sweetwater. Then I took a deep breath, and the last traces of my rage evaporated.

I wanted to thank Freeman. I also wanted to apologize to him. Instead, I kept quiet.

“You okay, Harris?” Major Burton asked, as we started down the tunnel.

“Freeman was right,” I said. “I’m surprised he didn’t shoot me.”

“If I were him, I wouldn’t have shot you either. It was too much fun watching you beat the shit out of that dead bug,” Burton said.

“Get specked,” I said.

“After this is done, I hope to do just that,” Burton said. “My wife’s in the Hen House.”

I laughed. It felt good. Then Sergeant Thomer said something for my ears only over a direct link. “Lieutenant, we better get moving. The guy from the lab is starting to melt.”

“Holy shit, you could fit a whole city in this place,” Major Burton radioed back when he reached the end of the tunnel. “This place is too big to be the inside of anything. It’s like I’m looking across space.”

A moment later, I stood out there beside him. The spider-things had hollowed out the mountain even more than I remembered, leaving a vast blackness in its place, a hollow vault that seemed to stretch on forever.

Giving the enormous vault a cursory scan, I had to agree. I could see for miles across the desertlike floor. I looked to find the cave-within-a-cave in which Freeman and I had found the spheres and the gas …that goddamned gas. It was gone.

The last time we were there, Freeman collapsed the entrance to the inner cave; but now the whole cave was gone, and the row of spheres shone in the darkness like a string of pearls. I did not even bother trying to count the glowing orbs; the string stretched on and on, and each of those damn orbs would have gas leaking from it—enough to saturate the planet.

“It looks like your spider drones are gone,” Burton said. “The place is empty.”

From this angle the cavern did look empty. I motioned back toward Breeze with an exaggerated nod so that Burton would see the motion, then I said, “That man back there did not slip and fall.”

“No, he did not,” Burton agreed.

So we turned and stared back down at the floor of the cavern. I do not know which lenses the major used, but I tried a combination of night-for-day and telescopic lenses, a bad combination under most circumstances. This time, though, it worked well enough. As I zoomed in, I saw movement hidden in the darkness. There were drones along the cavern floor; they had just dug deep pits around themselves.

I pointed this out to Burton, who followed suit, and said, “Shit. You’re right, I see them.”

By this time the rest of the company had caught up to us. Herrington and Boll, leading one of the teams carrying a nuke, sidled up to me. “So this is it?” Boll asked.

“This is it,” I said.

“Where do we leave our packages?” Boll asked.

“See those lights out there, the spheres?”

“That’s a long way out, sir,” Boll pointed out.

“A long, dangerous way. Try zooming in on the floor down there,” I said.

“I already have,” Boll said. “Are they like the one that killed the guy back there?”

“No, those are the drones. They’re the small ones. You saw how big the one in there was.”

“Actually, sir, it was kind of hard to judge its size once you got through with it,” Boll commented.

“Yeah, sorry. I guess I lost control,” I said.

“Were you friends with that man in there?” Boll asked.

“Breeze? No, I barely knew him. He was one of the chief scientists at the lab.”

“So he was friends with Dr. Sweetwater?” Boll asked. They all treated William Sweetwater like an old acquaintance. In the short time that I had mistakenly left the dwarf scientist unguarded, he had won them over.