Steven Kent - The Clone Elite

“They’re all around us!” one of my men screamed. That was our only warning that we had waded into the horde. The next moment guardian spiders started climbing up the sides of our path.

“They’re coming in close,” Herrington called over the interLink.

I barely had time to issue the order to switch to pistols before the guardian spiders began climbing the rise. Private Grossman, one of the men carrying the nukes, stood in the two o’ clock position in our formation. When a guardian charged the circle from eleven o’clock, he and the three other men carrying the nuke shot it. He was still looking at the guardian they killed when another spider lashed out at him from the top of a twenty-foot shelf. His armor split, and he screamed in pain. The guardian slashed at him again and would have stabbed him clean through, but Herrington shot it.

Blind and scared, Grossman threw off his helmet. He inhaled a lungful of the poisoned air and dropped to one knee.

“Simmons …” I said. The man instinctively knew what I meant. He aimed his pistol at Grossman. “Sorry, pal,” he whispered as he fired a single shot, which caused Grossman’s head to explode. I did not know if being hit in the head by a particle beam was painless, but I was certain it beat the hell out of running around blind as the acid in the air melted you inside and out.

With only a hundred yards to go, the light from the spheres was so bright that my visor automatically switched to tactical view. Now I could see colors. I could see the black-gray spiders against the flat black rock.

A white bolt struck Thompson, the Marine walking next to me. He spun around and fell to the ground, lying there convulsing for a moment, then slumping into death. Another bolt struck Robison, one of the men lugging a nuke. It hit him in the head, and he fell dead and rolled down the hill. The other men handling that nuke lost their balance and slid after him, dragging the nuke in their wake.

“Cover me,” Thomer shouted. He dropped on his ass and slid down the side of the rise. At least a half dozen of those spider-thing drones scurried along his path. I shot three; Burton might have hit five. We might have been down to two dozen men now. A bolt hit a man to my left a moment later, and we were down one more.

I spotted the Avatari trooper coming toward us, and fired.

“Boll, Herrington—cover our ass side,” I shouted. “Use grenades, and don’t worry about the trip home.” The trip home was the last of our concerns. Herrington managed to pick off two Avatari a moment later. Boll took a bolt in the head and rolled into a hole with a drone. The giant spider-thing did not see him when it stabbed its leg through Boll’s stomach and scratched at the ground flinging his corpse around like a rag. As it continued to dig, the spider-thing tore Corporal Boll in half.

“Get up here!” I yelled at Thomer, as he struggled to climb the side of the rise carrying the hundred-pound nuke. Bolts flew around us. Another grenadier fell.

I shouted for Freeman.

Ray came toward me, still carrying Sweetwater in the crook of his right arm. He dropped to one knee and reached for Thomer with his left. Instead of grabbing the big man’s arm, Thomer handed him the nuke. He did not attempt to climb the hill. Instead, he turned, pulled out his pistol, and began shooting spider-things.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Get going,” Thomer said. “I’ll catch you on the way out.”

“Sure,” I said. “Catch you on the way out.”

Three riflemen came forward and took the nuke. I was about to ask for a fourth man and realized these were the only ones I had left. We were down to twelve men—three men lugging one nuke and four lugging the other, Herrington watching the rear, Burton, Freeman, Sweetwater, and me.

We ran ahead as quickly as we could, stumbling along the top of the rise until we reached the spheres. A guardian sprang up to block our way, and I shot it. I shot it again and again because even though it was dead, it still blocked our path. The three men carrying the first of the nukes managed to snake their way around it, but the four-man team carrying the second bomb lost their footing and rolled down the side of the rise. They vanished into the darkness.

I could not go back to help them. Stray bolts flew through the air around us, and we had to move on. I did not see where they fell, and could not find so much as their virtual dog tags. Things were unraveling so quickly. By the time we reached the spheres, Burton was gone. Where we lost him, I had no idea.

Of the forty-nine of us that had left Valhalla that morning, only seven of us remained to place the bomb.

The line of spheres stretched out in both directions, an endless string of glowing balls simultaneously emitting crystalline white light and oozing brown sludge. The light from the spheres shone over the swampy puddle of the gas like overbright moonlight. The cave that had once covered the spheres had vanished, and only its footprint remained—a half-pipe trench partially filled by a layer of gas.

Still silent, Freeman carried Sweetwater to the outside edge of that trench and lowered him to the ground.

“Is he even alive?” Herrington asked me.

We got our answer when the scientist sank to his knees but remained vertical. Looking at the clock in my visor, I saw that only twenty minutes had passed since we had entered the Avatari dig. It didn’t seem possible. It felt like the entire universe had changed in those twenty short minutes.

What was left of my company fanned out to form a perimeter while Freeman helped Sweetwater open his canvas bag and fish out equipment. I took my place along the perimeter, my back to the light, looking out into a darkness in which monsters lurked and stealing an occasional glance at Freeman and Sweetwater. One time I looked over my shoulder and caught a glimpse of Freeman dragging the scientist toward the spot where the gas came to the edge of the rocks. When I looked back again, I saw Freeman pulling some kind of cylinder out of Sweetwater’s canvas bag. There were more cylinders on the ground, a whole pile of them. Freeman showed the cylinder he was holding to Sweetwater and the scientist shook his head.

Out in the distance, white bolts and green flashes were visible. One of my men was still alive out there, probably Thomer. A spider moved in the nearby shadows. Herrington raised a rocket to fire at it, but I hit it first with my particle-beam cannon.

“Nice shooting, sir,” Herrington said.

Behind me, Freeman lay flat on his stomach and held one of the cylinders as far over the gas as he could. He brought the cylinder back and showed it to Sweetwater.

A bolt struck Private Ferris in the chest, and he crumpled. Herrington and I both returned fire, but the company was now down to six men. As I thought about it, for all intents and purposes, the magic number was five. Sweetwater could not possibly live much longer.

“Harrrisss.” The voice whispering over the interLink sounded more like wind than someone speaking. “Harrrrisss.” I would have dismissed the message as my imagination, but the name “Freeman” appeared on my visor.

I turned and saw both Freeman and Sweetwater staring in my direction. They had removed the nuclear device from its outer shell, and Sweetwater was sitting on the ground beside the disassembled bomb while Freeman knelt over him.

“Shoot anything that moves,” I told Herrington and Grubb, the last of my grenadiers. I went and knelt beside Sweetwater.

Stripped from its shell, the bomb looked like a rock tumbler—a spherical canister with chrome piping and lots of wires. It had a little keypad, which Freeman must have used to program the explosion. Sweetwater could not have set the bomb; his fingers had swollen to the point of bursting.