Steven Kent - The Clone Republic

“What the hell are you doing?” I screamed into the interLink. The arch would offer protection from bullets, but a particle beam or a rocket would reduce it to rubble.

“Get your men out of there,” Freeman said. But he was too late. The top of a tracker popped up from behind a sand dune; and before anyone could react, two rockets came flying toward the arch. At first I only saw the contrails, then a bright flash bleached the air around the arch where the men were hiding. The entire desert rumbled with reverberation. Rock chips and large chunks of pillars flew across the courtyard. A fist-sized stone struck my helmet. Adding to the cacophony, the domed roof of the main hall caved in. As the smoke and dust cleared, the jagged remains of the arch poked out of the ground in haphazard spikes. The rockets had destroyed the entrance and much of the main hall. From where I stood, I could look directly into Glan Godfrey’s office. A huge block had fallen from the roof and crushed his desk, and I saw no sign of the communications console, our link to the outside world. Godfrey tried to raise Rickman and Phillips on his interLink, but no one responded.

“Harris, get to the armory,” Godfrey said.

The armory was in the far corner of the base, just beyond the office. That last rocket had smashed most of the building, but the doorway to the armory remained standing. I started across the courtyard, cutting through the shallow edges around the stagnant pond area of the courtyard.

“Harris, stop,” Freeman’s voice shouted through the audio piece in my helmet. “Those trackers have you. Check for scanners with your radar sensors.”

For a civilian, Ray Freeman seemed to have an incredible amount of information about Marine Corp combat armor. Our helmets included a sensor warning system that detected radar devices. I should have switched on the sensor the moment I knew there were trackers outside the wall.

I ran the scan and froze in midstep, still standing in the shallows of that polluted brackish pond. A blue ring appeared around the edges of my visor as the sensor kicked in. The ring remained blue for a moment, then turned yellow, then orange. The trackers were bathing the courtyard with radar, and they could only be looking for me. If the ring in my visor turned red, it meant that the sensors had fixed on my location. Orange meant they had detected me, but I had stopped moving before they could fire. A strong wind blew across the courtyard, shaking some reeds, and the ring around my visor turned yellow momentarily as the trackers homed in on the reeds. I dropped to the ground and felt my knees sink into the mud. My only hope was that the trackers would not notice me.

Moments passed slowly. In the air-conditioned comfort of my helmet, I felt both an odd elation and fear. Large drops of sweat rolled down the sides of my face, but kneeling in the mud and the reeds with trackers searching to find me, I felt strangely relaxed. I listened for the hiss of incoming rockets as the seconds passed and the ring in my visor fluctuated from yellow to orange and back to yellow again. It never turned blue or red.

“Harris, get to the armory,” Godfrey yelled.

“Crowley doesn’t care about the armory,” Freeman said. “He wants the barracks.” And Godfrey must have understood. Crowley wanted to keep the platoon bottled up in one place where he could hit it without risk of destroying the weapons he had come to steal.

“We need to attack,” Freeman said.

“Are you insane?” Godfrey asked. “Harris, either get to the armory or get your ass back to the barracks.”

They haven’t located Freeman and they have me pinned down in the courtyard, I thought as I peered out through the reeds. Everybody else is right where Crowley wants them.

“Godfrey, you can’t hide in the barracks,” Freeman said. “You’re playing into his hands.”

“Harris, get over here,” Godfrey ordered. “We’ll cover you.”

“Freeman, got any suggestions?” I asked.

Enemies around the west and north walls fired into the courtyard. Poorly aimed, possibly not aimed at all, their bullets chipped into the sandstone wall, making sparks and dust. They must have been hoping to coax me into running back to the barracks or returning fire.

“Make a break for the northeast corner,” Freeman said.

I looked across the yard toward the northeast corner of the outpost—the nearly disintegrated northeast corner where Rickman and Phillips had made their stand. The rockets had destroyed Phillips so thoroughly that his armor did not even register. “You’re shitting me, right?” I asked, as I squeezed the rifle stock against my chest and prepared to run.

“I’ll take care of the trackers,” Freeman answered.

“You have a shot at them?” I asked. Even as I spoke, someone fired a spray of bullets along the wall behind me.

“Are you listening, Harris?” Godfrey piped in. “Get your ass over here.”

“Leave them to me,” Freeman said. “Move on the count of three.”

“Got it,” I said.

“It’s your court-martial,” Godfrey said.

“Get specked,” I answered.

“One.”

Some kind of strange creature shot into the air along the southeast corner of the outpost. I did not see it clearly, but it looked something like a giant flying snake as it jumped nearly thirty feet in the air, then darted behind a wall.

“Two.”

Whatever Freeman had unleashed, it distracted the trackers. The ring around my visors went blue. I heard the hiss of rockets, but they flew well over my head and slammed into a wall along the back of the courtyard. In the wake of the explosion, a large rock slammed across the top of my helmet, almost knocking me senseless.

Three.

I did not hear Freeman count that last number. The impact of the rock hitting my helmet must have disabled my interLink circuit. In the echoing silence, I climbed to my feet and sprinted. Ahead of me, I saw Freeman leap to the top of a huge pile of rubble. He fired a grenade launcher toward the trackers, turned, then slid back down the mound for cover as men outside the outpost answered him with a hail of bullets. The shock wave of Freeman’s grenade knocked me slightly off course. No one fired at me, and the sensor rings in my helmet remained blue. I dived headlong and joined him behind the rubble.

“Crowley has already left,” Freeman said, as I sat up and pulled off my helmet.

“How do you know?” Using my rifle stock as a crutch, I pushed myself up and peered over the rubble. I saw nothing but open desert.

Freeman handed me a palm-top computer display that showed Gobi Station and the surrounding landscape. Freeman had either established a link with some satellite tracking our area or placed cameras around the outside of the base. The northern and western walls were ruins. The display showed people as small white ovals.

“You placed sensors?”

“Two days ago,” Freeman said.

“You only flew in yesterday morning,” I said.

“Don’t you ever wake up?” Freeman asked. “I’ve been on this damned planet for three days now …came quietly with a second ship in tow. The one they hit was a decoy; my real ship is down there,” Freeman said, nodding toward the canyon behind our base. “I can take you in the hold as far as the next outpost.”

“I can’t leave Gobi,” I said.

“Have it your way.” Freeman laughed and flashed a toothy smile. “Don’t suppose you would cover me while I make a run for my ship.”

“I suppose not,” I said.

“The ship has missiles and a chain gun,” Freeman said. “Help me get to my ship, and I’ll fix this.”

“I don’t trust you,” I said. I tried to peer around the rubble to get a look at the enemy. Somebody fired a wild shot that hit several feet wide of me.