Steven Kent - The Clone Alliance

Using Illych’s stealth kit to neutralize the motion sensors, he and I stole to a corridor that reached all the way across the ship. The corridor ran along the lowest deck. When the laser had hit the belly of this battleship, it carved out huge sections of the floor and walls.

I listened to the Mogats blunder through their maneuvers as we went. One of their teams had a sergeant barking out orders which, from the sound of things, no one understood. The more he screamed, the more confused his men became. Soon he could barely breathe because he had screamed all of the oxygen out of his lungs. I imagined that the inside of his visor was covered in spit. I enjoyed listening to the man.

The Mogats’ other teams operated more efficiently.

The old battleship was two-thirds of a mile wide and just under a half a mile long from bow to stern. We did not tire flying through the corridor; hell, our feet never even touched the deck. At midship, we reached a fifty-foot stretch of corridor below which the entire hull had been sheared away during the battle. All that was left of it was the right-hand wall and ceiling—everything else was wreckage and stars. Seen through the night-for-day lens in my visor, space looked flat and black with a swirl of blue-white specks.

You cannot swim in space. Launch in the wrong direction in open space, and there is no course correction without some sort of rocket. When we reached the break in the corridor, we stopped. The hall ahead of us had a slight bend to it. If I launched ahead and missed the curve, I would fly into space without a prayer of turning myself around. I would fly in a straight line at a constant speed until I ran into a planet or a black hole, or maybe a meteor shower.

I locked the fingers of my right hand unnecessarily tight around the grip of my pistol. I let the fingers of my left hand drag along the edge of the wall to feel around for emergency handholds should I need one. Then I pushed off the wall and over through the missing section of corridor. I drifted slowly, focusing my attention on the floor ahead.

Illych followed.

I heard: Delta Team, check the lower-deck main corridor .

Got it .

That placed one of the Mogat teams on the same deck as Illych and I, probably no less than two walls away. If they came into our hall before we reached the other side of the gap, we would have no place to hide and little chance of defending ourselves.

It didn’t happen that way. The Mogats preferred the safety of corridors with all four walls intact. From listening to their communications, I could tell that the Mogat commandos did not believe anyone had trespassed onto the ship. They thought the alarm was proof of a malfunctioning sensor.

You see anything? a Mogat commander asked one of his group leaders.

Nothing.

All clear here, another volunteered.

I’m thinking malfunction, Captain.

We caught an enemy ship prowling around outside, the captain pointed out.

Maybe he bumped the wreck. Would that set it off?

Don’t be stupid, the captain said. He would have been killed if he crashed into a battleship.

Maybe he barely bumped it.

Shut up, Anson, the captain said . You think you can shake a battleship by nudging it with a little ship like that?

I changed frequencies to speak to Illych. “We’d better show them some bait before they lose interest.”

Illych radioed the order.

Captain, I’ve got ’em! I’ve got ’em, some idiot Mogat radioed a moment later.

Illych led the way as we continued across the ship. The camouflage device in his helmet turned his armor the same pale gray color as the walls. Through the night-for-day lens in my visor, both he and the walls looked nearly white. Because of the poor depth perception the lens gave me, he was all but invisible.

“Do you have any idea how much of the ship is wired for motion?” I asked.

“Every inch of it from what I can tell,” Illych said.

“Good thing your boy looked for sensor fields,” I said.

Illych did not respond. I suppose that kind of precaution came as second nature when you worked in SpecOps.

Near the front of the ship, we crossed a major corridor that ran from one wing of the ship to the other. This hall was so wide you could drive two tanks side by side across it. Illych traveled along the ceiling. I hung low, an inch above the floor. We saw no signs of damage. Here the ship looked dormant, not derelict. I saw no debris, though I did see dead sailors when I peered into the hatches.

“How did they get into the launch bay?” I asked. “There shouldn’t be any power in the doors.”

“Maybe the atmospheric locks were open,” Illych suggested.

“Illych,” I said, “your ship is under attack, and you’re going to send out unarmed transports?”

“Maybe the locks opened when the battleship blew up,” Illych suggested.

“Yeah, sure, and all Mogat ships carry pint-sized broadcast engines along as a spare.” I tried to sound sarcastic, but I had trouble whispering in a sardonic tone. “When the Mogats sacrificed this ship, they had something up their sleeves.”

We moved ahead. I continued to listen to the Mogats, leaving Illych to figure out our course.

“Stop,” I hissed, just in time.

We lost them again, one of the Mogats said. No, wait, there they are. They’re near the engine room.

These guys are fast.

Get down there, the captain bellowed. Don’t let them anywhere near that broadcast engine.

“You hear that,” Illych radioed over an open frequency for the rest of us to hear. “Stay away from the engine room. Lead them back to midship.”

Up ahead, a squad of soldiers crossed the hall. They had not adjusted to the lack of gravity and tried to move along the floor as if in a ship with gravity and an atmosphere. We slid gracefully above the deck; they waddled and bounced with every step.

There were eight men, all carrying lasers in one hand and searchlights in the other. Had they shined their lights in our direction, they could easily have spotted us; but not a one of them even paused to make certain the path was clear before crossing. They simply cut across the hall and continued walking in their square formation without looking back. Had I wanted to, I could have ambushed the lot of them just for sport.

“Pathetic,” Illych said. “Didn’t anyone ever teach them to look both ways before crossing? We should have picked them off, just on principle. What do these Mogats teach their boys in basic, knitting?”

He turned toward me. “I cannot believe they are winning this war!”

Illych yelled this so loud that I jumped and half expected the Mogats to hear him. The Mogats would not hear him, I reminded myself, not wearing combat helmets in nonatmospheric conditions. I had been whispering, but I wore combat armor so often that I sometimes forgot it was on. He seldom worked in his armor.

“Are you always this chatty on stealth missions?” I asked.

“Is that a rhetorical question, sir?” Illych asked. Now that the action had begun, I sensed a mildly giddy tone in his voice and wondered if the Special Operations clones had some form of combat reflex.

Illych and I remained perfectly still as we waited to make sure that the Mogats did not have a fire team bringing up the rear. They did not, so we turned down the hall and headed in the direction from which they had come.

This part of the ship had significant internal damage. We passed shattered bulkheads and an occasional corpse. Thanks to their torches, we spotted the next squad of Mogats the moment they entered the area. They passed without looking as we dodged into the first open hatch.