Steven Kent - The Clone Alliance

One of the SEALs in my group had taken a shot in the thigh as he ran through the hall. Three-quarters of the thigh had disintegrated, leaving a strap of inner thigh that looked like cooked meat. The man vacillated. When he could stand the pain, he rolled onto his stomach and shot at the Mogats. When the pain became too much, he rolled onto his side and wrapped his arms around his legs. He was in that position when a laser struck him in the back and killed him. Even in death, he never released his pistol.

Gold 2 lost four men just fighting its way out of the bridge. I did not even bother counting how many men the Mogats lost. There were dead men and body parts all along the corridor. That grenade had blown some of their men right through walls. Some had been blown into walls that did not give. Bloody starbursts outlined the spots where their bodies struck.

At one moment it did not look like we could possibly clear the hall; and then in the next, we were through that gauntlet. A few Mogats halfheartedly fired at us from behind. They had other problems. A Gold 1 sharpshooter was picking them off from the door of the bridge.

We ran into limited resistance as we made our way across the deck. There might be a man hiding behind a hatch here or a couple of men hiding around a corner there. They were sailors—unused to this kind of combat and completely unorganized. They tried to shoot us from the front instead of letting us pass and hitting us off from the back. We almost always got off the first shot.

“There are elevators down the corridor to the left,” one of the men called over the interLink.

Head for the first bank of elevators — a dumb idea, I thought. A few of the men ahead of me turned left, but I did not follow. My orders were to get to the launch bay, not run with a suicide squad.

Turn around! Turn around! I heard a few moments later.

Oh Lord! Oh damn! The SEALs did not use bad language, even in death.

“What are the losses, Gold 2?” the mission leader called.

“At least five so far.”

“Harris, how are you doing up there?” Illych called.

I spotted two Mogats ducking behind a corner a hundred feet ahead and took a skidding right around the next corner to avoid them. I caught the sailor up the hall unawares and shot him as he reached for his pistol. Only after I dropped the guy did I realize he had only been waiting for a lift.

“Not too badly,” I said. Adrenaline and endorphins now flowed through my veins in intoxicating levels. Had they been alcohol, it might have been a big enough dose to kill me.

I heard a constant stream of reports from the rest of Gold 2, Gold 1, and Blue Team. If anyone remained alive from Launch Bay Squad, they had gone silent.

Gold 1 and Blue Team were dug in or pinned down, depending on how you wanted to look at the situation. Blue Team had enough men to defend the engine room for now, but no men to spare. Gold 1 had all but welded the hatch to the bridge shut. They disabled it.

As I dragged the dead sailor into the elevator, I heard a report from some other members of Gold 2. They had found a stairwell that led to Deck 3. What they would find when they reached the bottom of the stairs was any man’s guess, but it would not be pretty.

The Mogats must have known we wanted to secure the launch bay. We might have taken the bridge and engineering, but we did not have a prayer of capturing the ship with a mere hundred men. We would need reinforcements, and there was only one place the cavalry would land—launch bay. The Mogats might or might not have figured out about the men we had floating around their ship, but they certainly knew how to stop us from receiving reinforcements.

Remembering the battle my platoon had fought on that derelict battleship, I rode the lift down to the lowest deck. The doors to the elevator opened to a darkened corridor in which no one walked. I felt like a mouse scurrying through a maze. I followed the mainline corridor to the back of the ship and realized I had gone too far. The vault I needed would be almost directly under the launch bay.

As I ran down another hall, I heard, “Hey!”

His shot flew over my shoulder and burrowed into a wall as I spun, dropped to one knee, and fired. I hit the first man. The second jumped back into the open hatch. I could not afford for him to radio for help, so I followed.

I opened the door and entered a mechanics workshop. Across the room, the Mogat fired a wild shot that came far too close, then hid behind a workbench. I aimed at the barrel of solvent behind him. It exploded into a pillar of fire that shot up to the ceiling and rained down in a cascade of flames. I heard the man screaming as I left.

Two decks above me, the twenty-three remaining members of Gold 2 had fought their way out of the stairwell and reached the launch-bay hatch. And there they stopped. They had the same problem that the Mogats had retaking the bridge and engine room. To get into the launch bay, they would need to funnel through a narrow hatch, no more than three at a time.

I found the door marked “Emergency Storage” at the end of the corridor. It was not even locked.

Inside the dimly lit storage area, three mobile firefighting units sat side by side. These were not the big, thirty-foot fire trucks you saw in cities. These were compact three-man units that looked like small tanks. They were ten feet long, small enough to fit on the emergency lift…powerful, but designed for emergency situations, not gunfights.

I lit one of the mobiles up and drove it onto the lift. I had hidden in a shaft just like it as Philips had used his “stiffies” to lead the Mogats away. On that occasion, in that wrecked battleship, I had been content to wait and hide. This time, I planned to fight.

“Gold 2, report?” the mission leader asked.

“We’re pinned down outside the launch bay.”

“Can you break in?”

“Negative, mission leader. They have shooters on every side of us.”

“How long can you hold out?” I called over the interLink.

“Harris?” the mission leader asked.

“Reporting.”

“Where are you?” asked Gold 2 Leader.

“I’m on my way up,” I said. “I’ll have the doors open in another minute.”

They kept talking, but I did not have time to listen. The elevator doors opened. The launch bay spread out before me, with its gray walls and ceiling and its bright lights. I saw men crouched behind barricades pointing lasers at the hatch. They paid no attention as the elevator opened across the deck. It might not have mattered if they did.

I put the mobile firefighting unit in gear. It rumbled forward slowly on its own as I jumped out to the deck. Then I grabbed three grenades, pulled their pins, and tossed them. I ran for cover. The grenades exploded in rapid succession. The rumble of the first grenade did not have time to settle before the next grenade blew.

The damage those grenades made…I was a hundred feet away, hidden behind a ten-ton mobile fire unit, and I still felt the deck rumble under my armored boots. As I looked around the rear of the firefighter, I saw that the force of the grenades had tipped a forklift on its side.

White smoke as thick as a gauze hung in the air. I ran into the smoke, my laser ready; but there was no one left to shoot. As I passed through, I saw dead men and body parts. An inch-deep stream of blood ran down the drainage grooves in the floor. The first grenade had probably killed them all, leaving the second and third to pulverize the walls. The grenades had blown huge dents in the walls, and the shrapnel had chipped and gashed everything in sight.

“Get ready to run,” I called to the men on the other side of the hatch.