Steven Kent - The Clone Elite

The men with the nukes came out followed by riflemen, but there should have been more of them. I waited three seconds, then gave Herrington the order to “seal the cave.” Anyone still in there had waited too long.

As we started down the ridge, Herrington piped a grenade into the tunnel. I cringed when I heard the explosion—it meant that we could no longer leave this hellhole the way we had come in.

Burton lost one of his riflemen, so I took a turn on point. That placed Burton, Peterson, and me on point, followed by another layer of riflemen, followed by the teams carrying the nukes. The grenadiers brought up the rear. Having handed off their nuke to two riflemen, Herrington and Boll took their places among the grenadiers.

Freeman and Sweetwater floated around our formation, sometimes meandering all the way to point to test the gas in the air, sometimes dropping back.

We did not bother with the switchback trail leading down ridge; instead we stormed down the slope, particle cannons out and blazing. We had come in with forty-nine men and were now down to forty-three, having just barely gotten our collective foot in the door. “You won’t want to waste men or bullets,” Admiral Brocius had warned me a million years ago when he handed me his pistol before briefing me on Mars. If only that bastard could be here to see just how right he had been.

Up ahead, a javelin-shaped foreleg came questing around a large boulder. I aimed my particle beam, waited for the head to appear, and fired. The shot hit one of the legs, and the spider-thing reared back on its hind legs. I charged toward it and fired again. The flash of my cannon lit up the creature’s underside, and it dropped flat.

“Freeman, where are you?” I called out on the interLink.

There was an explosion behind me and just to my left. I instinctively dropped to one knee and spun just in time to see another guardian spider tip over and drop to the ground. The bastard’s camouflage had fooled me. It was poised on a tall rock, and I had walked right below it as I attacked. The giant spider landed top down, its legs curled in, motionless on its back. That was the only time I had seen these things exhibit a truly spiderlike behavior.

I started to thank Freeman for pulling me out of that one, but that save came from Burton just a few yards away. “Speck!” he said, “I didn’t see that thing until it was almost on you.”

“They camouflage themselves,” I said. I stared at the monster lying on its back and realized how close I had come. “Thank you …shit, that was close.”

“Don’t mention it,” Burton said.

“Lieutenant, you’ve got two more heading your way at nine o’clock,” Thomer called in over the interLink.

I turned, saw two spider-things working their way through a deep groove in the ground, and realized they were drones. They moved past us and continued on their way.

“Those are workers,” I said. I watched them scurry away, both harmless and deadly. They could not attack because attacking was not in their programming, just as graffiti and lawlessness were not in the programming of the clones who had defaced the Hotel Valhalla, just like wanting to kill a superior officer was not in Thomer’s programming.

I wanted to warn Freeman to watch the drones …maybe the aliens could change their programming. If the thousands of drones in this cavern suddenly rose and attacked …

“Freeman?” I called over the interLink. “Freeman?”

He did not respond.

“Thomer, where are Freeman and Sweetwater?”

A moment passed. “They’re almost down the slope. The little bastard looks like he’s burning up,” Thomer said.

“Freeman,” I said, creating a direct link. I heard the rasp of his breathing and realized that he had not responded because he could not respond. He must have inhaled some of the air when he removed his helmet. If he’d breathed even a trace of this gas, his throat would be seared.

I could see Freeman and Sweetwater threading their way toward me. In the blue-white world of night-for-day vision, they looked like a formation of shadows against chalky ground.

“We have to get Sweetwater out of here,” Thomer said, naturally inclined to protect the people around him.

“He has a job to do, Thomer; just like everyone else,” I said as I turned back to have a look at Sweetwater. I did not know what we could do for him, but we needed to keep him alive long enough to place the nukes, though I could not imagine how we could accomplish it.

Sweetwater’s swollen face had puffed up badly. It was covered with blisters, and the skin was abnormally dark. His eyes had a glazed look. He might have been going into shock or he might have simply been dazed from pain. His ears, already covered with blisters, had a spongelike texture. Liquid glistened on all of his exposed skin. At first I thought it was sweat, but I now realized it was fluid oozing out of the open sores.

“We’ve gotta keep moving,” Herrington said over an open line. “There’s a whole lot of company coming our way.”

“Spiders or Avatari?” I asked.

“Spiders.”

“Hold them off,” I said. We could keep the guardian spiders at bay well enough with our guns as long as we did not allow them to get too close to us. The Avatari soldiers were another story, with those damned light-bolt rifles. They could pick us off, but they seemed scarce, just a guard or two. Perhaps the Avatari sent a small detachment to help guard this hellhole.

I signaled for Thomer to come.

“Freeman, they’re closing in ahead of us. I need you up here.” He did not answer, probably could not answer. I wondered how well he could breathe. As he and Thomer came to join me at the front of the party, I told Freeman, “I’m going to assign Sergeant Thomer to guard Sweetwater.”

I heard a dry, painful sigh over the interLink, as Freeman brought down the particle-beam cannon he kept slung over his shoulder. He made an exaggerated nod and stood ready.

“Dr. Sweetwater,” I said. I knelt beside him so that our eyes were nearly level. “Can you hear me?”

He looked at me and nodded. The sharpness returned to his eyes.

“Are we close enough to set off the bombs?” I asked, knowing the answer already.

He took a moment to consider this, then he opened his satchel and pointed to six metal tubes. “Need to take reading of the gas,” he said in a whisper while shaking his head. The wet shreds of burst blister stretched the entire length of his throat. I wanted to shoot the little son of a bitch just to end his suffering.

“Can I run ahead and throw them in?” I asked.

He shook his head and held out that T-shaped meter of his.

“You need to run tests,” I guessed, my heart sinking. We still had a mile-long hike ahead of us if we wanted to reach the gas.

A light bolt soared over us, striking a large boulder and boring through it as swiftly as it flew through the air. Then the storm broke. The darkness took on a strobe effect as dozens of bolts struck all around us. We had stayed in one place too long, and the Avatari had homed in on us.

Freeman scooped Sweetwater up with one arm, his particle-beam cannon extended from the other, and ran for cover behind a boulder. Thomer ran behind them, shooting blind fire at the aliens to give Freeman cover.

“Major, close ranks around Sweetwater and the nukes …” I told Burton.

A few feet away from me, a man hid behind a boulder. Three bolts seared through the rock, all of them missing him; but he panicked and jumped out from behind the cover. Bolts hit him in the leg, head, and chest, passing through him as cleanly as they had passed through the rock a moment earlier.

“Burton!” I yelled.