Steven Kent - The Clone Alliance

That chow tasted good. A Marine could get spoiled. A few of my men even ate their eggs without smothering them in ketchup.

We ate breakfast early, at 0600, and had the place to ourselves. Rows of tables stood empty on either side of us. I had hoped to see the SEALs this morning, but they might have already left.

“Hey, Master Sarge, when are we going back to the ship?” Philips asked.

Only Philips called me “Master Sarge.” Soldiers may call their sergeants “Sarge,” but in the Marine Corps, the term “Sarge” is demeaning, not that it bothered me…much. I had not yet accustomed myself to the name, “Master Sergeant,” because I did not think of myself as a master gunnery sergeant. Back when I had the rank of colonel, I never thought of myself as an officer. The only rank I ever felt entirely confident about was private first class, and I got promoted out of that after three months.

“We’re not going back to the Obama ,” I said. “We’re headed Earth-side, boys.”

They greeted my announcement with a moment of hushed awe. The thirty-six remaining men in my platoon all knew what that meant. It meant war.

“We’re not going back for our gear?” one of the men asked.

“It’s already been crated and shipped to Fort Houston.” I sat down, and they moved in around me.

“You wouldn’t happen to know the next stop after Fort Houston?” Evans called from across the table.

“I could make an educated guess,” I said.

“Strap on your bayonets, we’re headed to Mogatopolis,” Philips said to the Marine sitting beside him. He surprised me by not referring to it as “Planet HomeMo.”

“We’re still a few men shy of a platoon,” Thomer pointed out. He was a cautious one.

“I’m not sure what they’re going to do about that,” I said. “Now that the orphanages are gone, reinforcements are harder to come by. Maybe someone will shift some companies around.”

“Think they’ll break us up?” Thomer asked.

“No. They don’t break up teams that produce. Not if they can help it.”

Thomer nodded. He was skinnier than the other clones. He ate light and preferred jogging to lifting weights. He left the tough talking to the other Marines, but he held his own in combat.

I picked up a strip of bacon and ate it followed by two fork-loads of eggs. “The brass has a bigger problem than a few empty slots,” I said. “They have to figure out some way to land enough men to make a stand. And they have to do it without the Broadcast Network.”

“How many men will they need?” Evans asked.

“This is off the top of my head, but I’m guessing we’ll need one hundred thousand or maybe two hundred thousand fully equipped troops just to get our boot in the door.

“The 2510 census said there were 200 million Mogats. If they have 200 million people on that planet, we’re going to need a couple million men along with tanks and gunships to support them.”

Evans whistled. “Two million men?” he asked. “That’s going to be some airlift.”

“Especially if we have to ship them there in explorers,” I said. “If Washington is serious about invading that planet, they’re going to need to come up with something.”

“When do we leave for Fort Houston?” Thomer asked me.

“Pretty soon—1100.”

“When do we deploy?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I think they plan to send us out as quickly as possible,” I said around a wad of bacon. I finished my first cup of orange juice in one long drink. “It just depends on how quickly they can figure out the logistics.”

“But they know how to find the Mogat planet?” Thomer asked.

“They seem to. I’m guessing they lifted the information off the broadcast computer on that ship we took.”

Thomer nodded again.

I had withheld a lot of information. My boys did not know that the Unified Authority and the Confederate Arms had signed a treaty and that we would likely ship out in battleships like the one we had captured. I neglected to mention that the entire Mogat fleet, which was still nearly four hundred ships strong, was moored around the target planet. I said nothing about our unarmed ships needing to slip in, drop us on the hostile planet, and get out before the Mogats shot them down. I also neglected to mention that the Mogats’ ships had some new shield technology that rendered our weaponry useless.

Three hours after breakfast, we all boarded an explorer and flew to Earth.

It took less than an hour for us to arrive at Fort Houston, a small training base in the southwestern portion of the old United States. Fort Houston had once been attached to an orphanage. Young clones ages twelve and up once had run its obstacle course and bivouacked in its fields. The Mogats destroyed the orphanage after defeating the Earth Fleet. Thirty-six thousand clone children fried in their beds as a Mogat battleship hit the orphanage with a laser from above the atmosphere.

Bastards.

Over the next two days, a hundred platoons moved into portable barracks buildings set up around the Fort Houston parade grounds. That gave us four thousand five hundred Marines. If they’d had a hundred more forts with a hundred platoons, we might have had enough Marines to hold a beachhead while we waited for reinforcements to arrive.

Within an hour of landing in Fort Houston, we began training. I found comfort in this. There was something nostalgic about doing calisthenics in the blazing-hot noonday sun, sweat rolling down my face and back, while another platoon ran laps around the field. We finished our calisthenics and headed for the firing range, passing men on the obstacle course crawling across a field while their sergeants fired live rounds over their shoulders.

Hearing the swearing of sergeants and the explosions of grenades, I realized that I had returned home. Semper fi, Marine.

One of the great benefits of being stationed back on Earth was the mediaLink. On the Obama , the only news we received was prerecorded information released by the Department of the Navy. It wasn’t much. Before I logged on to the mediaLink, however, I had important business to take care of. I had a call to place.

At 1600 hours, the base commander announced that we had the rest of the night to ourselves. My men went into a nearby town called Austin. I stayed back.

We had our own barracks building. With the platoon gone, I dug through my gear and found the pair of disposable shades I’d bought in DC. After one last glance to make sure that no one would see me, I logged on to the mediaLink and placed the call.

The picture that appeared on the screen was a pretty little girl with long blond hair and startling blue eyes. She sat on a blanket in a field of daisies holding a dandelion in her hands. Looking at me through the screen, she smiled and in the sweetest of voices said, “We can’t beat the Mogats.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I tried to break into their compound,” Freeman said through his little girl avatar.

“Let me guess, the building has impenetrable shields,” I said. My trip to Mogatopolis was highly classified. I could barely wait to share the details.

“Have a look,” said the little girl.

The picture of the little girl disappeared from the screen. Video of a large building that took up an entire city block replaced it. There was an explosion. I saw a flash of fire followed by a cloud of smoke. Cars parked near the building flipped in the air and tumbled away. There was no sound.

When the smoke cleared, the building looked exactly as it had before the explosion. Then the image on the screen returned to the little girl as she blew on her dandelion, and the air carried its fluff toward the camera.

“Something big is going on in there. I took energy readings from my station. They’re off the scales,” Freeman said. On the screen, the little girl, who could not have been older than five and probably weighed all of fifty pounds, picked a daisy and started playing He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not.