Steven Kent - The Clone Alliance

Outside, the Rumsfeld moved toward the door of the station. I fired a rocket into it, and the tank somersaulted forward and landed on its turret.

I looked back again. All but three of my men had started up the shaft. Philips, Greer, and Thomer were still down, but I knew they could handle the climb. Seeing Philips grab a cord, I had to smile. We were going to make it out of this shit hole. More than half of my platoon would survive this mission.

A scattering of Marines saw the explosion and headed in our direction. Spotlights roved up and down the side streets. Gunfire and tank engines rumbled in my audio. I started to head toward the cords; but just as I did, I caught a glimpse of something that made me freeze.

At first I thought the Mogats had turned the power back on. In the distance, the civilian sector glowed brightly. The light that filled the sky was so bright that the lens in my visor switched from night-for-day to standard tactical. Tint shields clouded my visor when I looked directly into the glare.

The light did not come from the city, it came from behind it. It wasn’t just light. It wasn’t like the glow of a searchlight or even a thousand searchlights.

The light above the city constantly changed hues and pattern as if the reds, yellows, and blues separated and remixed with each other. Patterns of color rose like smoke out of the glow. It looked something like the aurora borealis, only enormous sparks flashed in it. For a moment I thought the light might be coming from the city itself. Maybe light happened when buildings made of distilled shit gas decomposed; but I did not have time to waste reasoning it out.

“Harris, you seeing this?” Freeman called over the interLink.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“One floor up,” Freeman said. “You better get climbing.”

“You can see that light?” I asked. I took one last glance out the door. The light had a slow gelatinous property about it. It seemed to seep over the city like viscous oil. As soon as I turned from the door, the night-for-day lens resumed in my visor. The glow from that strange light had not yet reached the elevator station, but it would soon.

I ran to the elevator shaft, grabbed a cord, and started up.

The shaft looked like a gigantic tunnel turned vertical. Dozens of rappel cords dangled from the top.

“Thomer, where are you?” I called over the interLink.

“In the elevator station.” Thomer said.

“Can you see any transports?” I asked.

“There’s a transport just outside,” Thomer said.

“I requisitioned us that one,” Freeman said.

“What happened to the pilot?” I asked.

Freeman did not answer.

The area inside the shaft would have been black as coal if not for the glow that started to pour into it. It gushed in like a flood of water, shining on the opposite wall. I had never known a man could climb as quickly as I now scaled my way up that shaft.

“Load the men in the transport,” I called to Thomer.

“They’re in,” Thomer said.

“And you’re in?” I asked.

Thomer did not answer.

“Get in the transport!” I yelled.

I looked up to see how much farther I had to go, but I did not pause. I had another twenty feet. Below me, the light in the shaft became blinding. It was like looking into the sun. The tint shields in my visor blocked out some of the brightness, but when I tried to look up again, I found that my eyes would not adjust to the darkness.

I looked back down. That was when I saw it. There was a creature in that viscous light. Whatever it was, the creature I saw was nearly as bright as the light around it. It looked like a six-foot, canary yellow smudge in a field of glare that had the startling silver-white clarity of an electrical spark. I only saw it for a moment, and I mostly concentrated on the two silver-black eyes. They were too large for that head, the size of my fists, and they seemed to be made of smoky black chrome. For a brief moment my eyes met that creature’s eyes and I saw no pity in him. Then I saw that the creature held a rifle of some kind.

“Oh, shit,” I moaned, and managed to climb even faster.

A bolt of white light flew past me. It might have been some sort of white laser, if there can be such a thing. It might or might not have been any more powerful than our particle beams, but the bolt cut through the cords around me and struck a wall. The spot it struck glowed white and orange, and distilled shit gas gushed out of it like blood from a bullet hole.

The men above me must have seen the shot, too. One of them leaned into the shaft, lowered an M27, and fired a continuous ten-second burst. “I can’t hit it!” Freeman yelled, but he did not say if his bullets missed or failed.

Two sets of arms grabbed me and pulled me out of the shaft. Philips and Thomer pulled me to my feet as Freeman dropped a grenade down the shaft. We sprinted out of the elevator station. Outside the station, the strange, gelatinous light continued to creep toward us. It was less than a mile away and moving at a slow pace. Running as fast as I could to the transport, I did not have time to stop and check.

“Can anybody fly this thing?” Thomer asked, as we rushed the ramp.

Freeman did not bother answering. He climbed the ladder and entered the cockpit with all the dexterity of a spider checking its web. A moment later the boosters sounded. We were already off the ground when the doors at the rear of the kettle banged shut.

I looked around the kettle and tore off my helmet. “Get harnessed,” I growled at my men. From here on out, we had to rely on luck, Freeman, and God. Of the three, Freeman was the only one who had not abandoned us so far. Leaving my helmet on the bench along the wall, I crossed the deck and climbed up to the cockpit.

Freeman sat at the controls, holding the yoke with one hand and hitting switches with the other. Through the windshield, I could see the landscape ahead of us. The tide of light continued to move toward us. I did not see tanks or gunships or armies moving inside it. Then Freeman rotated the ship toward the gravity chute.

Staring out of the cockpit, I saw Marines running out of elevator stations and transports taking off. We might not be the only ones who made it out, if we made it out. There was still the question about the gravity chute.

Freeman slowed down as he approached the chute the way Mogat pilots did. “Do you know how it works?” he asked.

“You just fly into it,” I said. “It’s like an elevator.”

We approached the chute so slowly that we seemed to inch toward it. I felt like we would simply drop. And then the updraft caught us, and we rose. I peered over the nose of the transport. I saw another transport below us; and then I saw the strange light spreading over everything below.

“Did you see that thing that shot at me,” I asked, then added, “in the elevator shaft?”

Freeman shook his head.

“It wasn’t human,” I said.

I could not shake the image of those metallic eyes watching me as I climbed up the dark elevator shaft. For the first time since I entered the Marines, I had felt real fear, mortal fear, fear undiluted by the delirious effects of the combat reflex. Even the hormone in my blood had not kept me calm. And now, standing behind Freeman, I realized that I was still trembling.

We rose more quickly up the gravity chute than I had expected. Whatever was happening in the Mogat city below had accelerated the natural convection. It was probably consuming thousands of Marines and millions of Mogats as well. Glare as bright as sunlight shone up the shadowy length of the chute. Rainbow colors spiraled on the rock just below us. At some point, the light faded, and a minute later we emerged on the dark surface of the planet. There was no hint of whatever was happening below.