Steven Kent - The Clone Alliance

“Now that’s just specking great,” the pilot said.

Below our ship, the plains ended at the foot of a tall, sheer mountain range. The peaks looked like they were made of obsidian. They were as black as deepest, darkest space and reflected the transport lights with all the clarity of mirrors.

“There’s your entrance,” I said, pointing toward a particularly tall and jagged peak ahead and to the left. The entrance itself was not lit, and the mountain looked like a shadow against a night sky, but blue-and-white marker lights flashed on its face.

“We’re going there?” Philips asked. He did not sound scared, he sounded incredulous.

“That’s just the doorway,” I said. Having not been admitted to the briefing, Philips had no idea what to expect.

“You know we’ll drop straight down like a rock if the Mogats cut power to that gravity chute?” the pilot said.

“Let’s hope they don’t,” I said. Could they cut the power to a gravity chute? They knew we were coming. If they could cut the power, they would.

We slowed to a crawl and dropped several hundred feet until we pulled parallel with the mountain. Then we hovered toward the entrance at a very slow speed. Our searchlight shone all the way across the entrance. It looked like a giant tunnel. A short way in, the floor suddenly disappeared.

“So that’s a gravity chute?” the pilot asked.

“That’s a gravity chute,” I agreed.

“Do you remember how your ship approached it?” the pilot asked.

“We flew in. I think I felt the engines cut…”

“I was afraid you would say that,” the pilot said.

I shrugged my shoulders. “Everything else was automatic. The pilot came into the cabin and stood around talking to passengers.”

“I hope we’re not missing anything here,” the pilot said. We inched ahead. The light from our searchlight reflected and refracted from the walls. Its glare seemed to multiply and fill the cavern around us; and yet, the cavern still seemed dark.

We hovered ten feet off the deck as we ambled forward. I looked down and saw the shimmering black floor below us. Then we dropped over the edge.

“Here’s your leap of faith,” the pilot said.

“Damn, why’d you ask me up here, Harris? I’d rather be back there and ignorant with the rest of the grunts,” Philips complained.

At first we hung in the air. With our spotlight shining on the walls around us, I could see dozens of spotlights as hundreds of transports followed us in. The beams of light looked like spokes as they cut through the darkness.

One moment we seemed to hang in the air, the next we dropped at least fifty feet. Not a peep came from the kettle where eighty Marines probably thought we’d hit an air pocket. In the cockpit, we braced ourselves and held on for the ride. Then the transport found its equilibrium.

“Good thing I have one of them siphon lines attached to my pecker,” Philips said. “I’d hate to have all that piss running down my leg.”

We were in the chute for nearly one minute when a synthetic voice spoke over the radio. “Transport pilots, be advised that enemy ships have entered this orbital space.” The message came from a cloaked satellite.

“Can we all make it into the chute that quick?” Philips asked.

“There are six hundred transports,” the pilot said.

The frantic messages started a moment later. Pilots screamed at the transports in front of them to hurry. Someone yelled, “Oh, God! They got the transport behind me!” Another pilot yelled, “We’re going to run for it! We’re going—” and his radio went dead.

Our pilot looked over to his copilot, then switched off the radio. We went the rest of the way in silence. I could not tell how anyone else felt, but I agreed with what Philips had said right before we entered the chute. I wished I was back in the kettle, unaware of everything.

We started the invasion with 582 transports. By the time we reached the target, we were down to 461. The Confederate Arms Fleet evacuated the area long before the Mogats arrived, leaving their ships to pick off one-fifth of our transports as they waited to enter the gravity chute.

“Line up! Move it! Move it! Move it!” I shouted into the microphone in my helmet. The circuits in the receiving helmets would filter out my volume, but the intensity and voice would still resonate. We were going to war. No time for questions. No time for thinking. These clones were designed to respond.

With the exception of Ray Freeman, who sat in a far corner sorting his gear, every man stood at attention. My platoon moved to the rear of the kettle, ready to charge the moment the doors opened. They held their M27s across their chests. From here on out, we would act like war machines, not men.

The heavy metal doors of the kettle started their slow swing apart. They seemed to move at the speed of an ocean tide. I noticed my fingers squeezing and relaxing along the butt and barrel of my gun. The neural programming inside my brain had already sent my nerves into their clockwork movement. The combat reflex had not taken effect yet. That highly engineered gland was back in sync. It would not secrete its euphoric mixture until the enemy closed around us. With the bullets would come peace of mind. With the killing would come warmth. It was the Zen of the deranged.

When the opening was large enough for two men to run out side by side, I sent my men out. “Move it! Move it! Move it!” I screamed, prodding them in the backs with the butt of my M27.

We knew the drill, and we ran it by the numbers. First we would secure the area. We would not encounter resistance, of course. Not on this level of the planet. It was just for landing and taking off.

We might run into some hostility one deck down, but we had landed in the civilian sector, and the military had not yet had time to mobilize. In the meantime, we would make ourselves a thorn in their side by disrupting their home world. I had my platoon break into squads and my squads break into fire teams. Only when we were ready for battle did I observe my surroundings.

The topography of the civilian sector looked no different than the top layer of the military district. The space was flat and open, with elevator stations spaced miles apart. We had landed in a spaceport that was probably identical to every other spaceport on the whole specking planet.

I heard a whining siren that sounded like it was coming from hundreds of miles away. The wailing was just a whisper in the air that the audio equipment in my helmet registered and amplified. If I removed my helmet, I might not hear the siren at all.

Hundreds of transports landed around us. They dropped out of the gravity chute, engaged their boosters, and hovered until they found clear spots on which to land.

Clearly the brass had done a poor job of planning for this part of the invasion. The transports should have landed in some sort of order that arranged their shields into a protective picket line. Instead, they dropped down here and there, some with their cockpits facing me, some offering their broad sides, some pointing their asses in my general direction.

Two hundred feet above me, the gravity chute kept spitting out transports. Every five seconds another one fell from that hole in the sky. But I did not have time to watch. “Platoon one-zero-three, move out!” I yelled.

“Where is he going?” Thomer asked. He pointed across an open stretch. I turned and saw Freeman tromping toward an elevator station, his rifle case in one hand. “Do they call it ‘absent without leave’ when civilians abandon their platoon?”

“Just you worry about your own men,” I said. “If that man does what he came here to do, this battle is going to go a whole lot easier.”