Steven Kent - The Clone Alliance

“Admiral, how can we possibly invade their planet?” I asked. “Even with the Confederates and the Japanese, the Mogats have ten ships for every one of ours, and they have those shields. They’ll pick us off before we land a single platoon.”

Brocius laughed. “Come on, Harris. You don’t think I’d send the Marines into the meat grinder without leveling the field? Atkins isn’t the only one with secret technology. The boys on the Golan came up with something good.”

“Did they figure out how to get through the Mogats’ shields?” I asked.

“We already know that,” Brocius said. “You turn them off at the source.

“No, they came up with something better. They came up with a way to get through the Mogats’ radar. They’ve invented a new cloaking technology that makes our capital ships invisible to radar detection.”

“What about transports?” I asked.

Brocius shook his head. He was not drunk, just morose. He sat there looking craggy and old, his skin showing not a hint of color in the bleaching light from the electric lantern. He sat silently for several seconds. I had no idea what he might have been thinking about. Finally, he said, “I’ll send a truck by tomorrow morning. No more hikes for you and your men.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said.

I saluted. Admiral Brocius returned my salute. I started to leave, but he stopped me. “Your friend Freeman turned himself in to Navy Intelligence last night. I don’t suppose you had something to do with that?”

“I spoke with him,” I said.

“He had a crazy story about a Mogat base,” Brocius said. Maybe he had forgotten our conversation back on the Golan Dry Docks, or maybe he thought I had.

“We checked into his story. He was right. The energy readings coming out of that building are off the scale. Did you know they were there?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“We’ve set up round-the-clock satellite surveillance. They slipped an entire broadcast engine in under our noses. Who knows what else they brought with them.

“Freeman said something about going out with our invasion force.”

“Oh, yeah, can he come?” I asked.

The rules changed when we returned back to camp the next day. We did not drill all day, nor did we get to go into town that evening. Instead, we had a quiet night on base, lights out at 2200.

They called Reveille at 0600 the next morning. Our briefing was at 0800. The sergeants from every platoon filed into the mess hall. In my platoon that included Thomer, Evans, and a guy named Greer, whom we shipped in to replace Sutherland. I went, of course. There were almost five hundred of us sprinkled across a cafeteria built to serve as many as two thousand men at a time.

A small ten-foot-by-ten-foot dais sat on one side of the cafeteria. In the time that I had been in Fort Houston, no one had ever used it. Now I saw a podium on that stand. Three empty chairs formed a short row behind the podium.

When the officers in charge came into the cafeteria, everyone snapped to attention. The officers, all Marines in Charlie Service uniforms, marched up to the stand without so much as a sideward glance. One of those men was a colonel—probably our new camp commandant. One was a major. He’d been around all along. The third, also a major, was a briefing officer who had most likely flown in from Washington.

The briefing officer stood straight and tall. He was a Marine who had seen combat; I could see it in his demeanor. We all could see it. Something about the way he carried himself commanded instant respect. Even the way he scowled at us commanded respect.

“At ease,” the colonel said. Then he followed up with, “Gentlemen, make yourselves comfortable. We have a lot to discuss.”

With this he stepped back and gave the mike to the briefing officer.

“Gentlemen, we have an enemy; and as you know, the Unified Authority Marines do not take kindly to enemies. Our enemy is Morgan Atkins. Now, gentlemen, we could try to reason with Mr. Atkins. We could try to negotiate with Mr. Atkins. We could even offer to play nice with Mr. Atkins, but that would not be the Marine way.

“Do I make myself clear?”

“Sir, yes, sir!” we yelled.

“What was that?” the major asked. “I don’t believe I heard you clearly.”

“Sir, yes, sir!” we all shouted at the tops of our lungs.

“That’s better,” the major said.

He was a short man with a shaved head and glasses. He had a scar on his forehead. That scar might have come from an old skiing injury, but I had the feeling he’d earned it in battle. Sitting as close as I was, I could also see that he was missing some teeth.

“You,” the major called to one of us, “shut down the lights.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” the man called back as he raced to the switch.

A screen lowered from the ceiling, and a familiar image appeared. It was a planet called Hubble, certainly the ugliest piece of real estate I had ever seen. The planet had a smoggy, brownish black surface that had not seen sunlight in thousands of years.

“Gentlemen, this here is Hubble. Hubble does not have oxygen in its atmosphere. The gases that surround Hubble are humid with oil. If you breathe that shit, you will die, Marines. I suggest you take good care of your armor so it can take good care of you.”

The picture changed to a surface view of the planet. Several of the men in the cafeteria groaned. The landscape looked like a desert at night except that the soil sparkled like fresh coffee grounds. The cliffs looked like they were made of volcanic glass.

“This is the surface of Hubble. This is what happens when a sun expands and bakes a planet, gentlemen. It turns to shit.

“Hubble is made of one kind of shit and one kind of shit only. That shit is in the air. It is in the ground. It is in the rocks. It is nasty shit, gentlemen.

“Should you visit Hubble, do not shoot the rocks or dig a hole, gentlemen. In the rocks and ground you will find the nastiest shit of all. The boys in the science lab have labeled this an ‘extreme-hydrogenation elemental compound distillation.’ At the Pentagon we call it ‘distilled shit gas.’

“You may not know this, Marines, but we lost a lot of good men and equipment on Hubble because distilled shit gas eats through armor and machinery.”

The scene changed to show a corpse. It was a Marine in combat armor. The outside of his armor was intact. The camera came up to his visor, which normally had tint shields but was now entirely transparent. The face behind the visor was stripped down to skull and muscle, with the muscle disintegrating right before our eyes.

I’d fought on Hubble. That was before the Confederate Arms declared independence. We massacred a Mogat settlement on that planet. I always wondered why the Mogats had chosen to hide on such a hideous planet. I was about to find out.

“Gentlemen, you learn something new every day. Today we have learned that the corrosive elements in distilled shit gas can be used to produce energy. If you strip those corrosive elements out of the shit gas compound, you are left with highly malleable chemicals that carry an electrical charge and are easily transformed.”

“Nanotechnology,” somebody whispered in the audience.

“You are almost correct, Marine,” said the briefing officer. “Not nanotechnology.” He stretched the first syllables— Nan-oh-technology . “Atomic conversion.” A-tomic con-versh-shun . “This is alchemy, Marines. Morgan Atkins is an alchemist. He is taking shit and turning it into plastics, metals, fuel, and fertilizer. For all we know, the Morgan Atkins Separatists even eat food made of distilled shit gas.

“It turns out that distilled shit gas is useful stuff. Morgan Atkins has based his entire civilization on the use of distilled shit gas. He fuses the noncorrosive compounds with an electrical charge and converts them into plastic to build his cities. He condenses it and strips the acids out to fuel automobiles. The man has an endless supply of distilled shit gas at his fingertips, and he is specking Albert Einstein when it comes to the many uses of that gas.