Steven Kent - The Clone Alliance

I thought of the times in the Bible when God directed His generals to annihilate entire populations of enemies. In His new guise as the Unified Authority, He had not become any more forgiving. The Mogats won that first round on Hubble with their snake shafts, but we settled the score in that battle. Lord did we ever settle that score.

I followed the other passengers across the empty landing field and out to the street. The guy with the family headed in one direction, his children buzzing around him and his wife like bees in a flower bed. The man had his arm around her waist.

“How long are you down for, Lieutenant?” the pilot asked me.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“R and R?” he asked.

He was trying to be friendly. Even if I had been a real Mogat lieutenant, I would not have wanted to chat. I could have pretended, but I preferred to play things as close to real as possible. I did what I would have done on Earth if I didn’t feel like talking. “Yeah,” I grunted. “R and R.” I hoped I sounded like somebody who wanted to be left alone making a halfhearted attempt to sound friendly.

“Well, have a nice stay,” the pilot said. Message received.

I looked up one side of the street, then down the other. The nearest buildings were at least a mile away in every direction. From here, they looked exactly alike. They were made of the same dull plastic material, and they all appeared to be approximately fifty feet tall and shaped like cubes. Resolutely uniform.

During the battle on Hubble, the Mogats lived in a large underground cavern; but it was nothing like this. The cavern on Hubble was rough-hewn. When we sent probes down, we saw no cube-shaped buildings and no gridwork of streets. They had oxygen and strings of lightbulbs powered by portable generators. I wondered if they could ever have made something like this on Hubble, had they been given enough time. On that occasion, we gave them no time.

As I thought about Hubble, a small shudder ran the length of my spine. I lost friends on Hubble. I witnessed a massacre. The planet made me feel desolate when we landed. By the time we left, I had no feeling at all.

The ground around me on this planet was flat, with no notable features. The sheer uniformity of this city left me disoriented. The computers in my helmet could have created a virtual map to mark my path as I explored, but I could not go walking around a Mogat city wearing the combat helmet of a Unified Authority Marine.

In fact, I could not afford to do anything suspicious. If this was the Mogat promised land, there would be a sizable population. As I looked around, I saw only a scattering of people walking the streets; but I might have arrived during their night or perhaps a time of prayer. I knew so little about Mogat beliefs. Maybe they had prayer hours like Moslems, a time when every man spread his mat and prayed. The Starliner might have let us off in an unpopulated district. Perhaps we would take a train into a larger city.

I needed someplace to hide and access the interLink, but I saw no alleys, just scattered buildings with endless open space between them. I saw no signs to indicate one street from the next. No vehicles moved along the streets. They were broad and clean and entirely unused. I had the feeling I could sleep in the middle of any road without worrying about ever being hit by a car.

All of the other passengers had left, and I did not want to call attention to myself by loitering. Since the pilot went right, I headed left. I simply grabbed my box by its handle and started walking toward the closest building in that direction.

Cubes play optical illusions on your eyes. From the air, all of the buildings looked four stories tall. From the street, the nearest building looked smaller and closer, maybe a mile away. It was a cube in an open space. It could have been ten miles away and forty stories tall. If I had my helmet on, I could have measured the distance to the building and the height of the walls. I ached for my armor.

It took me about twenty minutes to reach that building. As I got closer, I realized that its blank façade gave no clues about what the Mogats used it for. It could have been a movie holotorium or a penitentiary or a home for wayward violinists. It might have been abandoned. From what I could see, it had no windows. The only feature I saw was an open doorway in the front. It reached almost all the way to the roof.

This cannot possibly be the Mogat home world, I thought. I had traveled a mile or two and seen no homes, no vehicles, and barely any people. If there were really 200 million Mogats, and this was their planet, I should have seen crowds.

When I reached the first building, I put down my box, peered in through the doorway, and found myself alone. I strolled in through the tall doorway and paused. The building was hollow, a four-story empty cube. Its gray façade had a strange rose-colored tint. It was made out of some smooth, cool material that looked like a merging of plastic and marble.

Thinking that I might have come to an abandoned structure, I turned and stared back down the street. Something else caught my eye. This planet did not have a sun, but there was enough ambient light to create the illusion of daylight. Looking back into the sky, I recognized the layer of phosphorous gas that must have provided the light for the internal world. I assumed it was phosphorous gas, and I assumed they could charge the ions in that gas to simulate an entire day-night cycle.

I wondered about the Mogats. They had no concept of how to run a military or maintain battleships, but I had never seen such technological miracles as I found here.

Back in the direction I came from, the Starliner took off from the spaceport with the customary rolling start of an atmospheric craft. It zipped over the ground at a shallow angle, hung a wide, looping curve, then decelerated as it spiraled back toward the opening of the gravity chute. Just as it reached the chute, the Starliner came to a dead stop. It did not drop. Caught in the mysterious updraft, it hovered higher until it disappeared from sight. At that same moment, a military transport dropped out of the chute. Its thruster rockets ignited, and it hovered toward the ground.

I did not understand what technology governed this planet. I did not believe that the Unified Authority Corps of Engineers could hollow a planet, and I knew they had nothing resembling a gravity chute. Maybe Atkins and his followers had more luck converting scientists than they did converting soldiers. On the other hand, I had heard that Atkins’s Space Bible told wild stories about an underground city and aliens with light emanating from their being. Well, they certainly had an underground city. I would need to keep my eyes peeled for radiant beings.

I turned and entered that hollow building. As I entered, I realized that I could see through the inside of its walls. They’d built the structure using some kind of translucent material. From the outside it looked like a mixture of marble and plastic. From the inside it seemed more like tinted glass.

Inside the building I found nothing but a gigantic foyer. There was no furniture, no signs, nothing but a waist-high wall with a rail around it in the center of the floor. Feeling discouraged, I examined that wall and realized that I was peering over the edge of a terrace. Below me, I saw a crowded city block. The drop from this rail was a good hundred feet, but it was not the drop that interested me.

Below the building, a thriving sea of humanity bustled along, completely unaware of me. It was like staring into a paved and urbanized ant colony. I saw businessmen and women and soldiers in uniforms. I saw a street and cars.

Up here I was alone and ignored; but one hundred feet below me, an entire society existed. Though I barely believed what I saw, I needed to report it. Looking out at the street through the walls around me, I saw no one nearby. I crouched down behind the waist-high wall, opened the box, and took out my helmet. After one last unnecessary look around to make sure no one would see me, I lowered the helmet over my head and tried the interLink.