Steven Kent - The Clone Republic

Switching back to standard combat vision, I peered through the thinning dust cloud. A ring of small fires still burned around the ten-meter-wide hole that the rocket had left in our walkway. Constructed of massive sandstone blocks, the outpost could withstand gunfire, but not rocket attacks.

Looking at the jagged remains of the hall and hearing the chaotic chatter of the Marines around me, I did not feel scared or confused. I felt soothed. That must sound odd. It was the same feeling I have when I eat a favorite food or hear a familiar song. The world seemed to slow down, and my thoughts became clearer. It felt good. Everything around me was chaos, but I felt happy. It had never happened to me during the simulations back at the orphanage or during basic. If that was how it felt to be in a real combat situation, I didn’t mind it.

“Sarris, Mervin, Phillips. Secure the main hall.” Godfrey shouted orders over the interLink. Without so much as a moment’s hesitation, three Marines pulled their pistols and charged down that shattered hallway. Automatic fire struck Sarris as he left the cover of the barracks. The first shot banked off the back of his shoulder plates, spitting chips of armor. Two more shots struck his head, shattering his helmet and spraying blood and brains in the air. He twisted and fell to the ground. Mervin and Phillips ran past him and sprinted through a volley of bullets and laser fire.

“Harris, go with them,” Godfrey yelled.

Clones like Sarris reacted to orders by reflex, but I needed a moment. “Move out!” Godfrey shouted again, as I reached the door. I leaped over Sarris, landed on a layer of grit and debris, and slid, almost falling over. Bullets ricocheted off the walls around me. Clutching my gun close to my chest, I ran toward the crumbling ledge where the rocket had blasted through the walkway.

A few feet ahead of me, Mervin lay on the ground beside the shredded wall. He had been shot in the head and part of his helmet and visor littered the ground around him. I saw the singed skin and one brown eye, crazy with fear, staring at me.

“Harris, what are you doing?” Godfrey snapped. “What are you waiting for?”

“Mervin’s alive,” I said.

Rockets had destroyed the promenade around Mervin. I could not get to him without exposing myself. Judging by the way they hit Sarris and Mervin, Crowley had a dead-eyedick sniper out there. I dropped to my stomach and pulled myself forward.

“Forget Mervin,” Godfrey screamed. “I want that side of the base secured. Do you understand me?”

“I can get him out of here,” I said.

Someone shot at me. A slug passed just over my back and tore into the wall behind. Rubble showered my head and shoulders.

“I gave you an order,” Godfrey yelled.

Just then, I heard a hissing sound that I recognized at once. Rolling to one side, I hid behind a pile of rubble as a rocket slammed into the remains of the walkway about thirty feet ahead of me. My visor instantly polarized, shielding my eyes from the blinding flash.

Already weakened from the first blast, the breezeway collapsed. My armor protected me from shrapnel and flying fragments of sandstone as I fell amidst the rubble. I landed on my stomach, crushing the air out of my lungs.

“Harris. Harris!” Godfrey’s voice rang in my ears, but I could not suck enough air into my lungs to answer.

“Damn,” Godfrey said, but his grieving did not last long. “Phillips get to my office and contact Fleet Command. We need reinforcements, and now.” Why Godfrey would ask for reinforcements from a fleet that was thousands of light-years away was beyond me.

I rolled from side to side, trying to draw air in my lungs and find the strength to stand. My back ached. My chest burned. My helmet protected my head from damage, not from pain. As I squirmed to lie on my side, my vision cleared. I saw the words “Theo Mervin, Private, First Class” superimposed over the cloud of dust to my right. As the air settled, I saw a pile of blocks and shattered tiles. A long crossbeam that must have weighed multiple tons stuck out of the top of the pile at a nearly straight angle. The top of Mervin’s shattered helmet peeked out from beneath it.

The avalanche had dumped me in the courtyard. Kneeling, still dizzy from the blast and winded from the fall, I peered over the waist-high ruins of the outer wall. Increasing the magnification in my visor, I scanned the desert and saw four figures crouched along a distant ridge—three men in camouflaged fatigues and Kline, who had not changed out of his black-and-white card dealer’s outfit. He still had that grenade glued to his hand. Clearly, Kline had not come to fight. He came to scavenge.

As Freeman had suspected, the grenade had worked like a catalyst, forcing Crowley to attack. If Kline had ever wondered whether or not to join forces with Crowley, Freeman’s grenade had surely made the decision for him. There he was, watching the action, hoping to find the key on Ray Freeman’s dead body and disarm the grenade.

“Harris?” Godfrey asked, likely having spotted me from a barracks window. “Harris, report.”

“Just a little shook up,” I said.

“Not your condition, you idiot,” Godfrey said. “What do you see?”

“I see some of them…Four of them, a hundred thirty yards out.” A tool in my visor measured the distance.

“There are three more a few yards to the east,” Ray Freeman interrupted.

“I don’t see…No, there they are. He’s right.” They wore sand-colored camouflage suits. Even after increasing the magnification in my visor, I did not know how Freeman had spotted them. There they were—Crowley and two other men standing around a table with a map and some kind of control console. Seeing the console explained a lot. Crowley hadn’t come with an army, he’d come with trackers—motiontracking robots that registered movement in a designated area and fired at that movement with incredible accuracy. Shaped like a barber pole, with radar equipment crammed into the ball at the top, one of these single-task devices cost almost nothing to build and could be used to fire anything from pistols to rockets.

“He’s got trackers,” I called out to Godfrey. “I can’t see them, but I can see the control console.”

“He has six trackers,” said Freeman. “Four guarding the front wall of the base, one on the west, and one on the east.”

“You’re sure about that count?” I asked.

“Crowley has twenty men watching the west wall of the base,” Freeman continued, “and ten to the east.”

“Where are you, Freeman?” Godfrey asked. “Are you near the armory?”

Freeman did not answer.

“What is your position?” Godfrey repeated. What he should have asked was how the hell Freeman had tapped into our communications. The interLink was supposedly secure from civilian interference.

Freeman did not care about Gobi Station, defending the Republic, or protecting its Marines. Wherever he had hidden himself, he did not plan to go down with a platoon of clones. He was, after all, a mercenary, not a soldier. As far as I could tell, the only things he cared about were staying alive and capturing Crowley.

“Dammit! Where are you, Freeman?” Godfrey demanded.

Freeman said nothing.

“Do you have a clean shot at them?” Godfrey asked.

Still no answer.

I started to shuffle along the wall to get a better look at Crowley’s position.

“Do not move, Harris,” Freeman said.

“I see movement out the main gate,” Rickman broke in.

Peering over the wall, I saw three Marines run toward a heap of rocks and dive behind it. They moved so quickly that I did not have a chance to scan their names. Two of the men took cover behind the massive front arch of the outpost and fired. They fired six quick shots, to which Crowley’s men responded with a token spray of automatic fire.