Steven Kent - The Clone Alliance

I entered the tenement lobby. The last remnants of smoke still hung in the air. My men had trampled the lamps and smashed furniture on their way in. As I looked down a hall, I saw a Marine rifleman kick a door open and step back as his automatic rifleman charged in. A moment later a woman carrying a baby with three young children came galloping in my direction. All of their mouths hung wide open in panicked screams. Fortunately, the audio filters in my armor dampened the sound of their shrieks. I stepped out of their way, and they ran screaming through the lobby and out into the street.

The woman and her children were the first Mogat refugees. Over the next few minutes, dozens of people followed. Men, boys, women, girls, children alone, children with adults—I felt more like a bully than a Marine.

Gunfire echoed down the hall. There was a single shot followed by the rapid fire of an M27.

Those shots were a wake-up call. I ran down the hall and stopped by an open door in which one of my men stood pointing his weapon. Inside that apartment, a man lay sprawled on the ground in a kidney-bean-shaped puddle of blood.

“Report!” I shouted into the interLink.

“The guy had a gun,” the Marine said. Near enough to the corpse to be covered with blood, an old-fashioned automatic pistol lay on the floor.

“That was a bad choice on his part,” I said.

“Thomer, Greer, stay alert. Evans already found one Mogat packing a gun. There may be more in the building.”

Oh, there would be more guns in the building. The problem was, I felt bad for the dead guy. He was not an enemy soldier hunting my men. He was just someone protecting his property…just a guy with an old pistol trying to stand up to armor-clad Marines…a casualty of war.

I looked back at the body—an old man with gray-and-white hair dressed in an old T-shirt. There might be 200 million more like him on this planet. Why did these assholes ever pick this war?

I stood by a window on the third floor watching a steady flow of Marines pour out of the elevator station. Nearly twenty minutes had passed since we landed on the planet. I wondered how much time we would have before the Mogats would arrive.

Below me, former tenants of the building poured out into the street. Some ran for cover. Some stood just outside the entrance in a forlorn circle. Some walked away huddled together. A middle-aged man walked with his arm across his weeping wife’s shoulders. Their children dragged behind. They were refugees now, but at least they were alive.

We found two or three hundred people living in the building and turned them out. Some screamed at us. One woman tried to attack one of my Marines with her bare hands. In anger, her face contorted with hate, she shrieked like a wild animal and beat on his chest. Her husband dragged her back and thanked my Marine for not shooting her. I could not believe it. He actually thanked the man who had just evicted them from their home.

The woman was short and chubby, with six screaming children. Shooting her might have been an act of kindness. I stood in her tiny two-room apartment now. Judging by the mattresses stacked along the wall, four of her children slept in a room that doubled as the family room, living room, and kitchen.

On their wall was a family portrait and a picture of Morgan Atkins. They had a bookshelf with storybooks, a small bin of toys, and eight copies of Man’s True Place in the Universe , the Space Bible. The entire apartment was twenty feet wide and maybe thirty feet across, about the size of a doctor’s office—and eight people lived in this hole.

Atkins, what good did you do for these people? I thought to myself. They lived in a plasticized city. Growing up in Orphanage #553, I played in fields and forests. The Mogats provided their people with apartments but not so much as a blade of grass on the entire planet. All the buildings and streets were made of the same material. I could see schools and stores from up here. Everything was made from distilled shit gas. That was why the Mogats tried to establish a colony on Hubble, too. They planned to turn the distilled shit gas into a city.

From where I stood, I had a clear view of the city around us. Blocks away, the traffic ramps rose out of the ground like attic doors. The Mogat Army would use those ramps as they came to retaliate. Just a half mile away, the magnetically charged lines of several train tracks funneled into a train station. Normally we would destroy the tracks and traffic ramps, but these had shields.

“Sergeant Harris, we have a small situation,” Greer called in to me over the interLink.

“I’m on my way,” I said.

Taking one last look at the city below, I left the apartment. I don’t know if all Mogats lived as these families did. Looking around on my way out, I saw three child-sized mattresses stacked along the wall. Maybe that was how the Mogat population grew so quickly—pregnancy spread through them like a virus. The small kitchenette in the corner of the room included a hot pad, a sink, and a single pot.

I had no trouble finding the altercation, it was just down the hall. Most of Greer’s squad stood staring into the door of an apartment. I pushed my way through.

In the eye of this gathering stood Sergeant Greer, my newest squad leader, along with two teenage boys, both barely five feet tall. The boys looked to be friends, not brothers. They had long hair and pimples. One had oily blond hair to his shoulders, the other had red hair that only covered the tops of his ears.

“Specking clone,” the redhead sneered.

“This boy doesn’t seem to like you, Greer,” I said.

“They attacked one of my men with knives,” Greer said. He held up two kitchen knives for me to inspect.

I tried not to laugh, but could not help myself. Our armor would not stop lasers or particle-beam weapons. Bullets glanced off our armor if they hit it at a shallow angle. Kitchen knives, on the other hand, would break long before they could so much as scuff the polish. They might as well have attacked the Marine with a pillow.

“You called me about a couple of kids with knives?” I asked. I said this using the microphone so that the boys would hear me.

“Get specked, clone,” one of the boys said.

“Their buddy in the next apartment says he has a gun,” Greer said.

I nodded. Without saying a word, I pulled a grenade from my belt.

“Chris, he’s got a specking grenade!” one of the boys screamed.

The door of the apartment opened and another old-fashioned twenty-four-shot pistol flew out. “Don’t shoot, man, I’m unarmed.” A boy who could not have been a day past twelve stepped out with his arms up, his fingers sticking up in the air.

“Somebody take these boys out of here,” I said, still using the mike.

Chris, the rebel without the gun, stopped in front of me and spit on my armor. I shot out my hand and grabbed him by the collar of his shirt. “You got something you want to say to me, boy?” I said.

“Yeah, I’m going to kill you, you specking tube-for-a-mother clone.”

I pulled off my helmet and stared down at the kid. “The term is, specking tube-for-a-mother Liberator clone,” I snarled. All three boys stared up at me in panic, but only Chris wet himself. They knew Liberators. They probably grew up hearing horror stories about us in school.

“Get these children out of here,” I said. “We’ve got work to do.”

“Let them go?” Greer asked me.

If the boys found real weapons, they might come back. Ray Freeman would have killed them and not thought twice about it. So would Illych and his SEALs. I suppose I should have as well; but deep in the back of my mind, I did not think we belonged on this planet. Killing Mogat soldiers and destroying Mogat battleships were one thing, landing an invasion in a residential sector and terrorizing kids was something else.