Steven Kent - The Clone Alliance

The man’s blood hung frozen just above the floor like an icy web of beads. Walking in on the scene, you might have thought he’d vomited up glass.

I unpacked the top half of a soft-shell suit and used it like a net to scoop up the blood. The brittle strands snapped and shattered into beads inside the armor.

Then I pulled the dead sailor out of the stall and dressed him, and his blood, in the armor. The man’s body was frozen as stiff as stone in the absolute chill of space. Had I hit him against the wall with enough force, he might have shattered into tiny pieces like a pane of glass. As I tried to force him into the suit, flaps of his skin kept snapping like crackers between my fingers, and I eventually had to break his arms off and shove them into the sleeves of the armor separated from his torso. Once I finished dressing the sailor, I sealed his armor. It pressurized, read his body temperature, and heated itself automatically. It would take this boy a long time to thaw.

“How is it going out there?” I called out over the interLink.

“I feel like a ghoul,” one of my men responded.

“Are you eating them or dressing them, Marine?” I asked.

“Dressing them.”

“Ghouls don’t dress bodies, they eat them,” I said.

“Then I feel like a specking grave robber,” the Marine returned.

“You’re not fleecing them, are you?” I asked.

That Marine did not answer.

“They’re so frigging stiff,” another Marine commented. “I keep snapping off this guy’s fingers.”

“I had to break my guy’s arms off,” another Marine said.

“This seems kind of disrespectful,” another Marine added.

“They’re not going to fool anybody. No one is going to believe that these stiffs are alive.” It was the one who said he felt like a ghoul. “Maybe we could paint them white and sell them as marble statues.”

“The Mogats won’t be watching for flexibility,” I said.

I checked my first puppet. Some of the skin from his face had thawed, but his face was no longer attached to his skull. I had broken his legs and arms at the joints so that they would fold in the right places. I shook his helmet and saw liquid blood.

I found two more bodies in the halls beyond the birthing area and dressed them. It was unpleasant work.

“Okay, report. How many puppets do we have?” I called over the interLink.

“I have four ready,” one team called in.

“We have five and a half stiffies,” Private Philips, always the joker, reported. He had partnered up with Sergeant Thomer. I would not have trusted him on this mission without Thomer looking after him.

“Thomer, what does he mean by a half?” I asked.

“Don’t ask,” said Thomer.

“I’m asking,” I said.

“Philips thought it would be funny to kick one of the sti…puppets while I was loading him in his armor. He went flying backward and snapped in half.”

“He was an officer,” Philips explained in his own defense.

“Just shove the legs into some pants and seal him up,” I said.

“That might be a problem,” Thomer said. “His ass hit a bulkhead and shattered.” I heard the other men laughing over the interLink.

“We have nine,” the last team radioed in.

“Ass kiss,” one of the men muttered. I was pretty sure it was Philips.

“We need this puppet show to happen just the way we discussed. Any questions?” I asked.

“How many Mogats do we get to off?” Private Philips asked.

“Our puppets are supposed to be Navy engineers,” I said. “We have to keep this simple.”

“Ten of them?” Philips asked.

“None if we can help it,” I said.

“Philips is right. We have to kill some of them,” another Marine complained.

“Not a one,” I said.

“Ahhh, c’mon, Master Sergeant, how about just one?” Philips pled.

“Well, yeah, maybe one,” I said. “But open your speck receptacle one more time, Philips, and I’ll load you in a puppet suit,” I growled. “Any more smart questions, assholes?”

No one said anything. I liked their attitude.

Before a battle, Marines do not have time for ghosts. After a battle and a few drinks, Marines have time for just about anything.

Traveling around the deck of this demolished ship, I became consumed by the feeling of walking among ghosts. Perhaps it was the shadowy blue-white world that my night-for-day lens showed me. Maybe the way we abused the bodies of these dead Mogat sailors got to me. A few of my Marines tried to hide their nerves behind gallows humor, but we all felt it. The Mogats had died a fast but gruesome death. They were the enemy, but Corps honor seldom made room for abusing the dead, friend or foe.

I felt closed in. I felt trapped. The combat hormone had not yet kicked in to my system, but the anxiety of battle was there. I had entered the Liberator version of no-man’s-land.

I dropped down to the scaffold below the ship. I had been in and out of the gash in the hull four times now, and each time the trip left me with a different impression. The first time I came up, I thought that the breach looked like a gaping wound in a human body. The next time I thought it looked like a tear through a building. The third time my mind stayed more focused on the job, and I thought about the air flushing out of the ship, washing thousands of bodies out with it. This time, I felt like I was falling through an open grave.

Once I landed on the scaffolding, I switched from night-for-day to my standard tactical view lens. We had lamps set up along the scaffold. I would have seen everything more clearly with night-for-day vision; but feeling morose as I did, I wanted a moment to myself in which I could see color and depth. There are areas of color in space, but you do not see them often or clearly. Seeing the charcoal-colored hull and the silver pipes of scaffolding did not improve my spirits.

I came down to examine the nine puppets we had placed along the scaffold. I tried to think of them as puppets, not bodies, and especially not corpses. Their faces were buried behind faceplates. I did not need to look into the colorless tissue flowers that filled their eye sockets. For all intents and purposes, the soft-shells on the scaffold could have been empty. Except they were not empty, and I knew it.

Sergeant Evans and two other men posed the puppets so that they would look like engineers cowering during an attack. They placed five of the puppets in a kneeling position behind the welding rig. One of the puppets had thawed enough for Evans to bend his body. He seemed to peer over the top of the rig. One puppet sat near the far side of the scaffold. Three more hung from wires—puppet strings. Once our audience arrived, we would effect their escape by pulling them back into the ship.

Maybe I felt jinxed by the ship, but I did not think we could make our puppet show believable. It was one thing for a squad of SEALs to put on a magic act in which they fooled the Mogats into shooting their own pilot. The SEALs specialized in reconnaissance, not combat. Our show would be more ambitious and the men less skilled. I trusted my men. I worked them hard and knew they would not fold in battle, but the clones were made for storming buildings and routing enemies. Finesse was not in their DNA.

“How does the stage look, Sergeant?” Evans called to me on the interLink. He and Corporal Kasdan stood three decks above me, holding the puppet wires.

“I think they’ll buy it,” I said.

“You know this is crazy?” Evans said. Once the Mogats arrived, he and Kasdan would reel in their puppets and disappear into the ship.

“Is everyone in place?” I called over an open frequency.

When all of my men answered, I launched myself from the scaffold and back into the ship. On my way up, I switched off my stealth kit. The sensors spotted me that instant and the show began. Philips, the man from my platoon in whom I had the least confidence, met me as I reached the third deck. With one arm around a railing, he hooked me and tugged me toward an open corridor.