Steven Kent - The Clone Alliance

“What happened in here?” I asked.

“Colonel, back here,” Illych called.

He headed toward the back of the engine room. As I followed, I saw an odd flickering glow that shone on the walls and furniture. I almost missed the subtle light changes surveying the room through my night-for-day lens. Switching to my standard, tactical lens, I saw the blue-white glow of an electrical arc. It looked as if someone might have been using a spot welder around the corner.

“What do you think of this?” Illych asked me. “How do you think it survived when everything else got blown up?”

Peering slowly around the corner, my pistol drawn, I saw a second broadcast engine. It did not have the thirty-foot-high brass cylinders of the battleship’s main broadcast engine. It was smaller and tucked away at the back of the ship. The eighteen cylinders in this engine were about eight feet tall and connected together by a web of cables as thick as my arms. Across the top of the cylinders, jagged lines of electricity danced from joint to joint.

“That’s not possible,” I said. It did not make sense that something as delicate and power-consuming as a broadcast engine could be up and running when every other system had failed. Also, when it came to broadcast equipment, I had never heard of any ship carrying spares.

I started toward the engine for a closer look, but Illych pulled me back. “I wouldn’t do that,” he said. “There may be a shield around it.”

I inched slightly closer but did not see the telltale glimmer of an electrical field. Had I had more time, I might have fired a particle beam at the floor beside the engine, but I did not get that chance.

“Colonel, they’re coming!” the pilot sounded frantic.

“Mogats?” I asked.

“Who the speck cares,” the pilot said. “I’ve got to get out of here!”

“Where are they?” I asked.

“They just broadcasted in. I picked up the anomaly.”

“I’m going to need a couple of minutes…”

The pilot interrupted me. “I don’t have minutes! I don’t have seconds!”

“Everybody back to the sled!” I called over an open frequency so that all of the SEALs would hear me. I pushed off against a railing and bounded back toward the companionway.

“Colonel, what is it?” Illych asked, sounding impossibly calm.

“Mogats,” I said. I had already flown half the distance back to the stairs.

“In the ship?” Illych asked. These Special Operations clones were small, but they had muscles like steel cables. He kicked off a wall hard enough to catch up to me.

“Outside,” I said. “The pilot picked them up on radar.”

“What’s happening out there?” I asked the pilot.

“Two ships coming in quick,” the pilot said. “I can’t wait for you. I need…”

“You can’t outrun them,” I said. “Find someplace to hide and play dead.”

“I’ve got to get out of here,” he screamed.

“You can’t…” But the connection was already broken.

I tried hailing the explorer twice more, but knew I would not get through.

“Shit,” I said.

“Sir?” Illych asked.

“We just lost our specking ride,” I said.

On our way to the engine room, Illych and I passed a room with a broad window looking out into space. I headed toward the room and told Illych to tell his SEALs to join us. There was no reason to head for the space sled anymore; our explorer was gone.

“Regroup on my mark,” Illych told his men over an open band. His men responded without comment.

I went to the glass wall and stared out, not knowing what I hoped to find. In the back of my mind, I guess I expected to see the smoldering wreckage of the explorer. It was nowhere to be found, of course. In the seconds that I spoke with the pilot, he might have flown ten thousand miles.

“Do you see anything out there, sir?” Illych asked.

I did. Just for a moment I saw a black shadow that got between our ship and the stars. It moved quickly, and I lost track of it, but it was out there. I imagined that ship, big and unstoppable, knocking the carcasses of dead fighters out of the way with its shields.

“How the speck can they know that we’re here?” I asked.

I voiced the question out loud, but it was mostly directed at me. The signal from the security sensors should not have traveled faster than the speed of light. Could it even have traveled 100 million miles in the few moments we had been on board the ship? Yet the Mogat ships had broadcast in. Broadcasted in! That meant that they had come from a long way away. They would have had to have been close to receive the signal, but they should not have needed to broadcast in if they were close enough to receive it. How far could they go and still hear their burglar alarm?

My mind flashed on the working broadcast engine we’d seen in the engineering section. “There is no way that broadcast engine could have survived. The room is a disaster,” I said out loud, even though I was only thinking to myself.

The other SEALs entered the room.

“The Mogats shot down our ride,” I said in frustration. “They shot down our specking ride.” I was swearing more than usual, possibly because the damned Boyd clones were so specking calm about the whole thing.

Illych—I knew it was him because my visor displayed his virtual dog tag—walked past me. “We’ve got company,” he said, staring out the viewport.

I turned and looked. Two Mogat transports floated in our direction, their naked steel hulls appearing flat gray in the darkness. I had a particle-beam pistol. We all had particle-beam pistols. That was the general-issue weapon for combat in nonatmosphere situations.

Each of the approaching transports could carry a complement of a hundred Mogat commandos. The way I saw it, we had two options. Our best bet was to hide. Using those stealth kits, we could move undetected by their sensors. The only other option was to attack the Mogats as they stepped off their transports. It would be seven of us against two hundred of them. That gave them the house odds, as Admiral Brocius would have put it.

The SEALs came up with a better option.

“I always heard that you Liberator clones were lucky,” a SEAL named Simmons said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Listen to this,” he patched me into the frequency he was listening to over the interLink. Okay, so we break up into eight groups. The sensors only picked them up for a second. They were in the bridge but that…

“You tapped the Mogats’ communications?” I asked.

“All of their equipment is stuff they stole from us,” Simmons said. “I just did a frequency scan and there they were.”

You cannot change clothes in unpressurized space. If you do, the pressure of your body will cause you to explode. You will end up like the sailors in the engine room, lying dead beneath the frozen splashes of their blood.

As a military clone and a Marine, I only knew one way to engage the enemy—head-on. I knew how to make an enemy die in space. I did not think in terms of vanishing into his ranks. My objective might require me to snipe a guard or infiltrate a building; but in the end, my area of expertise was combat. The SEALs thought in terms of special operations.

Illych had one of his SEALs give me his stealth kit. He teamed that man up with another SEAL and sent them out. He sent his other three SEALs out on their own. They scattered around the ship. The two-man team headed for the bow. One of the lone SEALs returned to the engine room. Another went to the top deck. The last man went midship. When the time came, they would lead the Mogats on a wild-goose chase. They would do it one at a time, jamming and unjamming the security sensors in such a way that there only appeared to be one intruder on the ship. I had no doubt about the SEALs’ ability to pull off this trick.