Steven Kent - The Clone Elite

I did not have time to process the images I had just seen; I could either push Freeman ahead or leave him behind. Left on his own, Freeman stumbled along as if he did not know where he was. The ground beneath us was loose and uneven, and the path was narrow and covered with rocks and slag. If he fell, I might not be able to get him up again, but I knew one thing—I would not leave this man behind.

Private Grubb lost his footing as he ran ahead of us. He tripped and flew face-first, but managed to land on the ridge. As he climbed to his feet, his right leg folded beneath him. He’d probably broken an ankle when he tripped. He stumbled, then rolled down the side of the rise, vanishing into a spider-thing’s hole.

I fired a few blasts of particle beam in his general direction, but I could not wait to see if he made it out. Stopping for Grubb would mean sacrificing Freeman.

Freeman stumbled along at little better than a drunk man’s run. He’s going to make it, I told myself. I told myself this because it made me feel like I was in control, but the truth was that I didn’t think Freeman’s legs would hold out much longer. If he fell, I would stay and die with him.

Herrington pulled ahead of us by twenty, maybe even thirty, yards. Every few seconds, he’d pause, run in place for just a moment, and check back on us. When he reached the carcass of a guardian spider that we killed along the ridge, he stopped and lowered his gun. I thought he was waiting for us.

“Hey, asshole, get moving,” I said.

Herrington fired his pistol into the darkness along the rise. Grabbing one of the dead guardian cablelike legs to keep himself up, he reached down the side of the slope, extending himself as far as he could. When he came back up the rise, Sergeant Thomer came with him.

By this time, Freeman and I were on his heels.

“Nice of you to join us,” I told Thomer.

The other shoe dropped. The Avatari infantry began shooting.

We always knew that the Avatari’s guns took on form more quickly than the avatars of the troopers. Silver-white bolts flew past us, sliding through the darkness at speeds just visible to the eye. Their aim was well wide of us, as if either their guns or their vision had not finished forming; but the message was clear—time had run out.

Still unaware of us, spiderlike drones toiled in their holes along our path. A guardian climbed on to the ridge ahead of us. Shooting his pistol as he ran, Herrington shot the thing so many times he dismembered it.

Had they been more fleet, the Avatari would have overtaken us, but speed had never figured into their battle plans. They won wars by attrition. Behind us, light flooded the cavern, not the silvery light of the ion curtain but the yellow glow of the on-rushing tide of Avatari. Bolts flew through the air, ethereal dashes that flashed past us in a millisecond and vanished into the darkness. In the distance, more guardian spiders headed in our direction, but they were too far away to reach us.

Prodding Freeman from behind, I followed Thomer and Herrington to the final slope—the rise that would lead us out of the caverns. Only nine minutes had passed, nine minutes down and eleven minutes to go until the bomb performed whatever destructive magic Sweetwater had programmed into it. I hoped his magic would be strong enough.

The bolts were getting closer, striking the ground around us. A hailstorm struck just ahead of Herrington. He jumped back to avoid it, lost his balance, and slid back down on his stomach. Thomer made it to the top of the ridge, then dropped to the ground and began shooting to give us cover.

The next storm of bolts came so close that Thomer, Freeman, and I had to drop for cover. While we waited for a momentary hiccup in the steady stream of bolts, my eye flicked across the timer in my visor and I saw we now had only ten minutes to get away.

“Got any rockets left?” I asked Herrington.

“Nothing with a thermite tip,” he said.

“The hell with thermite, give me anything that makes a specking bang,” I shouted.

Herrington held up a grenade launcher. “It’s all I’ve got left. I can—”

“Give it here,” I said.

He did.

“Thomer, on my mark take Freeman and get out of here.”

“I can—” Herrington began to argue.

“Shut it, asshole!” I yelled. “I’ll be right behind you.”

I stood and aimed the grenade at the spot on the ridge where the front-most Avatari were working their way around the dead guardian spider. “Now! Move!” I shouted.

The images I saw at that moment etched themselves in my mind’s eye. Twenty or possibly thirty Avatari crowded around the dead spider. Their bodies had evolved to the point where the yellow light shone through cracks and crevices from behind a thin layer of tachyons. They had their rifles aimed, and I saw them fire bolts in the air, the flashes so bright they looked like holes in my memory.

The grenade struck the spider, igniting an explosion powerful enough to chew an entire section out of the rise. I did not wait to see if I hit them or if they could still follow us. Tossing the empty launcher aside, I sprinted straight up the ridge.

Above me, Thomer, Freeman, and Herrington fired a few particle-beam blasts, then darted into one of the tunnels. I followed. With eight minutes and five seconds left before the nuke exploded, the spiders and Avatari no longer mattered to us. We sprinted up the spiraling floor of the tunnel. My lungs and legs spent, I started to laugh when I flew around that final corner and saw the bright light at the end of the tunnel.

With seven minutes and twenty seconds remaining, we reached the outer entrance of the caves. Not until we left the cave did I realize that Freeman was our only pilot. There were only four of us now—Herrington, Thomer, Freeman, and me, and the Unified Authority did not waste its taxpayers’ money teaching piloting skills to simple combat Marines.

Every moment mattered. In another minute, fully formed Avatari troops would pour out of the cave like ants out of an anthill. They would be slow, but their weapons could tear through our transport. In five minutes a fifty-megaton nuclear bomb would explode, collapsing this mountain and hopefully attracting every specking tachyon on the planet. If Sweetwater had any other information about how the gas would react to a nuclear explosion, he took that secret with him to the grave.

We’d left the ramp of the transport open. Herrington ran in first, then Thomer. Freeman shambled in and stomped across the kettle, pulling himself up the ladder to the cockpit.

I hit the button to seal the rear ramp and headed toward the ladder to check in on Freeman. “Harness yourselves in, boys, it could be a bumpy ride,” I told Herrington and Thomer as I climbed the ladder.

Freeman hunched behind the controls still wearing his helmet. His back was stiff and his shoulders hunched.

The transport’s engines rumbled with just over two minutes to go when the craft lifted off the ground. We did not circle the mountain to get a good look at the explosion. Freeman took us straight up and straight away. We might have been a hundred miles away when the nuke finally went off.

They say you can hear a nuke from hundreds of miles away, but we never heard a thing. We flew at a speed faster than Mach 1, and the sound never caught up to us. Riding in the steel belly of the transport, we did not see the flash.

I shuttled between Thomer and Herrington in the kettle and Freeman in the cockpit. Time with Freeman was spent in silence. He did not remove his helmet, and he did not speak.

I was in the cockpit with Freeman when we reached Valhalla. The sky was dark, and lights sparkled in what was left of the city. The ion curtain had vanished, leaving a night sky in its place.