Steven Kent - The Clone Republic

“How do we know this was shot on Ronan Minor, sir?” Shannon asked.

“Good question,” McKay said. He allowed the video to resume at a slowed speed. As the camera faded back to take in all three men, a window appeared along the right edge of the screen. McKay stopped the feed. He approached the screen and pointed to the window. “At present, the Department of Reclamation has thirty-five seeded planet projects in the Scutum-Crux Arm. Of those, only twelve are at stage three.”

“Admiral Huang came all the way out here to oversee a mission with one-in-twelve odds?” Shannon asked.

“Not likely,” McKay agreed. “Intelligence was able to lift a serial number off that climate generator.”

“Not meaning to show the captain any disrespect, but is there any chance that they meant for us to intercept this file and locate the planet?” Shannon asked.

“You’re asking if this is a trap?” McKay asked. “It may be a trap.”

“Admiral Huang and I have discussed that possibility,” Admiral Klyber said. “Sergeant, I should think that you above all people would recognize the importance of capturing Atkins.”

“Find Atkins, and you find the GC Fleet,” Shannon agreed.

“Something like that,” Klyber said, looking not at us but at the picture of Warren Atkins on the monitor. “The Navy has improved its ship designs since launching the Galactic Central Fleet. Atkins beat a frigate with three dreadnoughts, hardly something to crow about. Had he run into a battleship or a carrier, the outcome would have been different.”

I did not want to say anything, but I was not sure that I agreed. The attack on the Chayio had been smart and well executed. Somebody had analyzed our blockade and found a weakness.

“Are we sending a platoon to Ronan Minor, sir?” Shannon asked.

“Huang isn’t taking any chances on this one,” McKay said. “He brought a team of SEALs.”

Shannon’s lips broke into a sardonic grin. He looked from side to side as if hoping to see if the rest of us had caught the hidden punch line of a bad joke.

“Is something funny, Sergeant?” McKay asked.

“I know what our sergeant is thinking,” Klyber said. “You are correct, Sergeant Shannon, but it cannot be helped.

“For now I suggest that you go get some rest. We’ll be in position around Ronan Minor in five hours. Your transport leaves at 0500.”

“Okay, what did I miss?” I asked, as we rode the elevator down.

Shannon smiled that same sardonic smile. “Huang has SEALs. Why do you think he asked Admiral Klyber for a couple of Marines?”

I thought about this for a moment. “I have no idea,” I said, shaking my head.

“He’s covering his ass,” Shannon said. “If we run into an enemy army, he can say we led them into a trap. If Crowley and Atkins get away, he’ll report that we specked the god-damned mission. And that, Corporal Harris, is why they call out the shit-kicking Marines.”

There was something of the poet in Sergeant Shannon. ***

If Crowley and Atkins were down there, they did not have radar. Radar was a luxury fugitives could not afford. The Navy could detect a radar field from thousands of miles away. Having radar would have warned them we were coming, but it would also have confirmed for us that they were there.

Huang’s orders directed us to land a full day’s hike from Atkins’s camp so that no one would see us coming. We would drop in the morning, cut our way through the jungle, and surprise the enemy at dusk. I liked the plan’s simplicity, but I was nervous about working with SEALs.

Having only been on active duty for one year, I had never seen SEALs in action. All I knew about them was that they were not clones, nor were they, unlike the other officers, the errant sons of Earth-based politicians. SEALs were volunteers. Adventurous young men from around the galaxy applied to join. Only the absolute best were admitted into SEAL training school, and less than half of those who entered the school graduated.

The SEALs were already aboard the AT when Sergeant Shannon and I walked up the ramp into the kettle. This was the first time I had ever gone out with a team composed of all natural-born soldiers, and I was curious to get a look at them. Most of them were on the short side—between five-foot-six and five-foot-ten—with taut builds, clean-shaven heads, and alert eyes. As we boarded, they became quiet and watched us warily.

The SEALs traveled light. We had a twenty-mile hike from the drop site to the target zone. If we got bogged down in the jungle, Huang wanted us to stop for the night rather than travel blind. Shannon and I had brought packs. The only supplies the SEALs carried were what they could wear on their belts.

The rear of the kettle closed as our pilot prepared to take off. Hearing the hiss of the lifts, I placed my helmet on the bench beside me and rested my elbow on it. Shannon, who sat across the floor from me, continued to wear his.

As we rumbled out of the landing bay of the Kamehameha , the SEALs began talking quietly among themselves. They had clearly worked together before and spoke nostalgically about planets they had raided. I could not see into Shannon’s helmet, but I got the feeling he enjoyed listening to them. There had only been one real war in the last hundred years, and Tabor Shannon was the only man on our mission who was old enough to have fought in it.

One of the SEALs pulled a cigar from his vest pocket. As he lit it, I noticed a round insignia brantooed on his forearm. In the quick glimpse that I got, I saw the whirlpool pattern of the Milky Way with each of its arms stained a different color.

The brantoo process involved melting a pattern into the skin, then staining the burn with alcohol-based dyes. I knew plenty of Marines with tattoos. Some of the more rugged veterans around the Kamehameha had brantoos, but they were small, maybe the size of a coin, and single-colored. To make these brantoos, these SEALs would have suffered through the tinting process six or seven times. I wanted to ask the SEAL if he was awake when he got the brantoo, but I already knew the answer.

The SEAL looked at me. “See something interesting?” he said, in a way that was neither aggressive nor friendly.

“I noticed your brantoo,” I said.

With a slight laugh, he rolled back his sleeve and showed me his arm. “We all have one.”

I looked more closely. The insignia showed the Milky Way with red, yellow, blue, green, orange, and black arms. A banner over the galaxy said “NAVY SEALS.” A banner under the galaxy said “THE FINAL SOLUTION.”

Shannon removed his helmet, and said, “Let’s test out your interLink.”

I put my helmet on.

“They’re not so tough,” Shannon said over the interLink. “Don’t let that brantoo shit fool you.”

“It has six tints,” I said.

“Keep focused, Harris.”

“Six,” I said.

“Harris, do you know why Admiral Huang got so angry when he saw us?” Shannon interrupted.

“Years of constipation?” I asked.

“He wanted Marines he could push around…grunts he could intimidate. He thought Klyber would give him a couple of normal jarheads. Instead, he got us.”

“You think so?” I asked.

“Take my word for it, Harris. We’re the scariest friggin’ weapon in the Unified Authority arsenal.”

I glanced at the SEAL who had shown me his brantoo. Nothing bound him to me, not even humanity. He was natural, I was synthetic. It might have been psychosomatic; but ever since my conversation with Klyber, I felt more and more disconnected from everyone around me. Was this untethering the reason the Linear Committee resorted to Plato’s lie?

The SEALs passed small pots of green and black face paint among themselves. Dipping their fingers in the pots, they drew stripes and patterns over their faces until they covered all of their skin.