Steven Kent - Rogue Clone

Freeman fitted his armored chest pad over his head and shoulders, then pulled out his arsenal. He chose an automatic rifle, a pistol and three grenades. I took my M27. We both knew that we could not outshoot an entire platoon of Marines, even a platoon that had forgotten the basics.

Some of the Marines waited at the other end of the camp-site, M27s at the ready, in case the people in the tents came out. The rest of the men walked in past the tents and started across the open ground toward my ship.

I knew the Marines outside the ship would not be able to see into the Starliner, not even with all of the nifty lenses in their helmets; but I ran to the cockpit in a crouch. “I’m going to level the playing field,” I said.

“Turn on the lights?” Freeman asked.

Neither of us bothered to tell the other what we both knew—they had come for the Starliner. They had come to take my free ticket to any place in the galaxy. I powered up the control console and looked at the readout. Sure enough, it showed a U.A. battleship flying above the atmosphere.

“Anything on the radar?” Ray asked.

By now the men were close, less than ten feet from the ship. I could see them squatting, hustling into position.

“They have a battleship about a thousand miles up.” I lit the landing lights, flooding the entire settlement area with bright, blinding light. Tint shields in the Marines’ visors would protect their eyes from the glare. They could stare right into the light and it would not bother them.

Most of the Marines dropped to the ground or looked for cover. Three ran to the ship, and Ray accommodated them by opening the hatch.

Standard Marine training—you don’t walk into a situation blind. You flank the enemy. You always pin the enemy down and flank him. These boys had forgotten that. Guns drawn, they rushed up the ramp yelling something. I have no idea what they said, however, because Freeman picked them off immediately. His automatic rifle had a silenced muzzle. The noise that the armor made as the dead Marines rolled down the ramp was louder than Freeman’s gunfire. The dead men formed a small pile at the base of the ship.

Outside the Starliner, people climbed out of their tents looking absolutely terrified. Seeing the dead Marines topple down the ramp, women screamed. One young wife collapsed to her knees and wailed. Her husband stood beside her, obviously confused whether he should help her or stand still.

I never knew that negotiation was among Freeman’s skills, but his technique was impeccable. First, he dropped a grenade down the ramp. It rolled smoothly, plunked on the three dead men, then continued to roll to the ground.

The Marines scrambled back and waited.

Seeing the grenade, a man jumped out of his tent only to be hit across the top of the head with the butt of a Marines’ rifles. The men and women of Delphi were settlers, not soldiers. This was more than they could handle. They were desperately scared.

Caleb, who had slept through most of this, woke and placed a hand in front of his face to block the glare.

“That one still has its pin,” Freeman yelled.

“What’s happening?” Caleb, now more awake, shouted.

One of the Marines ventured forward to verify this. He picked up the grenade, examined it, then tossed it in one hand like a kid with a baseball. Freeman shot him in the head.

“Oh, God!” Caleb screamed when he saw the Marine fall.

“This one doesn’t have a pin!” Freeman shouted. He did not scream. Freeman sounded like a man in control. But he did not toss the grenade down the ramp this time, he tossed the pin. “Do I have your attention?”

Freeman and his grenade remained in the Starliner. Caleb came out with me. Most of the Marines acted nonchalant as I stepped down the ramp. A few trained their guns on me, but most stood their ground, carefully watching my every twitch. The Marines may have been chatting over the comLinks in their helmets, but I could not hear them.

Caleb stood right behind me, a boy working so hard to be a man. If he wanted me to hold him or protect him, he kept it to himself. He walked at my side, a couple feet away from me. He did not whimper or cry. He did not cringe, but he took tentative steps like a man walking on thin ice.

“We have a standoff,” I called.

“It’s not such a standoff,” one of the Marines shouted for me to hear. He bent down and grabbed a man out of a tent. The Marine held his M27 to the man’s head. He started to say something more, and I shot him.

The ring of Marines in the front raised their guns, then lowered them immediately. Whoever was giving the orders, he did not want to test me.

“What do you want?” one of the Marines asked.

“I want you to leave,” I said. This, of course, was impossible. They had no place to go. Little Man was the only livable planet around. They could fly one hundred light years in any direction and not find a suitable planet. “But you can’t do that, can you?”

A Marine stepped forward and removed his helmet. I did not like what I saw. He held his M27 in his right hand. In his left, he gripped his helmet by the lip as if it were a bucket. He was a clone, of course. The man may have been in his late thirties, a veteran so to speak. His eyes had that calculated confidence you generally saw in the eyes of veteran Marines.

But there was something odd about him. His eyelids rode high on his eyes, showing whites both above and below his pupils. He had a nervous tick which caused him to glance to the sides.

Like me, the man had brown hair and brown eyes. He stood just under six feet tall. Something else caught my attention. The man looked emaciated, as if he hadn’t eaten for weeks. This was not the thin face of a man who eats sparingly, this was the bony face of a man who had lost a lot of weight in a very short time.

It had only been two weeks since the Network was destroyed. Even on a ship trapped in a remote part of the galaxy, the pantries should have had enough inventory to last for months.

“You think you’re in control, don’t you, asswipe?” the Marine asked. He acted as if the entire situation struck him funny.

“That depends how badly you want my ship,” I said.

“Who says I want your ship?” He made a strange, high-pitched whinnie. “Maybe I just want to poke a few women and go home.”

This, of course, was not the way Marines talked to outsiders. Had the man not been a clone, I would have thought he was a pirate or a guerilla wearing stolen combat armor.

Marianne stood outside her tent, watching all of this anxiously. She took little stuttering steps as if she wanted to start running to Caleb then she pulled herself back. She looked at me with a pleading expression.

“This your boy?” the Marine asked, pointing his rifle at Caleb. I loved that boy, and I had no idea what this crazed Marine might do. Bringing my right hand up, I batted the rifle away from Caleb, then grasped the muzzle and thrust it backward as hard as I could. The rifle butt struck the Marine in the shoulder.

“Watch yourself,” he snarled at me.

“Yeah, you’re here for the ship,” I said with a sneer as I let go of the rifle.

Tension showed in his face. He wanted to shoot me, but he couldn’t. If he shot me, he would lose the Starliner. Thanks to Ray Freeman’s opening gambit—shooting three Marines then tossing out the pin of a grenade, no one dared accuse us of bluffing. “I could kill you,” the man’s gaunt face with its hollow cheeks and bulging eyes contorted into a snarl.

“Mad Dog,” I said, “you wouldn’t even be a warm-up.”

He raised his M27. The other Marines all raised their M27s. For a moment I had no idea what would happen. Then I heard clink, clink, clink, and a second pin dropped out of the Starliner.