Steven Kent - The Clone Republic

Klyber paused, giving me a moment to respond; but I did not say a word. “Thurston read my attack as a move to spread the battle to three fronts. The bastard was exactly right.”

“He figured that out from your opening attack?” I asked.

“Apparently so,” Klyber said.

“Luck?” I asked.

Klyber smiled, taking my question as welcomed flattery. “I thought it was luck, but he’s taken every captain in the fleet. The captain of the Bolivar managed to last the longest—twenty minutes; but he spent most of the simulation running away.” Thinking of this match brought a wicked grin to Klyber’s narrow face. “I sent a video record of the match to the Joint Chiefs. Che Huang may have something to say to Captain Cory about his tactics.”

“Are you going to act on Thurston’s suggestion about adding new ships to the fleet?” I asked.

“You must be joking,” Klyber snapped. His demeanor changed in a flash. His eyes narrowed, and he pursed his lips so hard that they almost disappeared. Sitting with his back as rigid as a board, he said, “You give this man entirely too much credit. He won a simulation, nothing more than a game. That is a far cry from proving yourself in battle.”

Knowing that I had touched a nerve, I nodded and hoped the moment would pass.

“We don’t need new ships,” Klyber continued. “Unless you have been briefed about some new enemy that I don’t know about, the Unified Authority is the only naval power in the galaxy. We are the only ones with anything larger than a frigate.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. I thought about the three dreadnoughts that attacked the Chayio , but had the good sense to keep my mouth shut.

Klyber stared angrily at me for another moment. “I would not give that frontier-born mongrel the satisfaction,” he hissed. Having said this, Admiral Klyber relaxed. His shoulders loosened, and he leaned back in his chair.

“People feel the same way about clones,” I said.

A glimmer of Klyber’s earlier humor showed in his smile. “I wouldn’t hold my hopes out for a seat on the Linear Committee,” Klyber said, “but, all in all, I think a clone is more readily welcomed into proper society than a prepubescent from the frontier. After all, clones are raised on Earth and are entirely loyal to the Republic. Can anybody really know where a frontier-born’s loyalties lie?”

“But no clone has ever become an officer,” I said.

“As I have said before, we may be able to change that, you and I.” He turned to look out of the viewport. None of the other ships from the fleet were visible at the moment, so he turned back toward me.

“It’s been forty years since the Unified Authority has seen a full-scale assault, Corporal. That is about to change. I am placing your platoon on point. If you perform well…Let’s just say that I will be able to open new doors for you.”

Klyber did not tell me the details at that time. Polished brass ran through his veins, and I was still a corporal. The details became apparent soon enough, however. Admiral Thurston cut the orders the following day.

We filed into the briefing room and sat nervously. People spoke in whispers that steadily grew louder as we waited, and more and more Marines packed into the room. By the time Captain McKay began speaking, four platoons had squeezed into a holotorium that was barely large enough for one.

McKay strode up to the podium alone. Sitting one row in, I was close enough to see the way his eyes bounced around the gallery. Then the lights went out. The holographic image of a dark planet appeared. The planet spun in a slow and lopsided rotation. No sunlight showed on its rocky surface. It did not appear to be a moon, but I saw no signs of plant life or water.

“Naval Intelligence has traced the location of the Mogat separatists who attacked our platoon on Ezer Kri,” McKay said. His voice was low and commanding and tinged with poorly concealed excitement. “The insurgents have set up on a planet in the uninhabited Templar System called A8Z5. For purposes of this mission, we shall refer to A8Z5 as ‘Hubble.’”

McKay spent the better part of an hour laying out the tactics we would employ to invade Hubble. When he finished, he opened the meeting for questions.

“Excuse me, sir,” a Marine from another platoon asked. “Is that a moon?”

“Hubble is a planet,” McKay said.

“God,” Sergeant Shannon whispered, “what a pit.”

I knew the paradise Hubble once was and the hell it had become. One hundred thousand years ago, Hubble, the garden planet of the Templar System, had lakes and forests, mountain pastures and ice-capped peaks. Colorful birds once flew across its skies. During our briefing, they showed us video footage of the very spot on which the battle would occur. It was a paradise.

But Hubble no longer had a sky, per se. The noxious, oily gases that passed for its atmosphere could kill a person as surely as a bullet through the head. A thin film of gas swirled overhead, blurring my view of the stars. No sunlight warmed the planet’s rock and powder surface. No plants grew through the hard crust that covered so much of Hubble’s scaly ground.

On Earth, they still saw Hubble as an outer space Eden, but Earth was sixty thousand light-years away. The astronomers who named Hubble’s solar system after an ancient religious order had no way of knowing that they were looking at an extinct vision. The images they saw were older than civilization.

Viewed from observatories in the much closer Sagittarius Arm, Hubble was a scene of grand destruction. From their telescopes, scientists watched as Templar, the eponymous central star of the Templar System, expanded. Once a benevolent sun, Templar died as suns often do, swelling until it devoured half of the solar system around it. Before collapsing into itself, Templar engulfed A8Z3, A8Z2, and A8Z1, its three closest neighbors. Those planets vanished entirely.

Fifty thousand light-years away, the flaring red surface of Templar had just begun to spread into the orbits of the next neighboring planets. I have watched video images of it melting entire mountain ranges and boiling seas into steam— images of a fifty-thousand-year-old apocalypse that are still viewable fifty thousand light-years away.

A8Z4 and Hubble (A8Z5), the fourth and fifth planets from Templar, were not completely destroyed, though the dying sun scorched their surfaces. A8Z4 now existed as a wisp of dust particles and gas. You could fire a missile through it. The once-rich soil of Hubble was cooked to ash, and its atmosphere became toxic.

The kettle opened to reveal the rim of a sweeping valley. As the platoon hustled out of the armored transport, I looked across the panorama and noticed how the black sky and gray landscape seemed to stretch forever.

During our briefing, Captain McKay described the full extent of this invasion. Within the hour, armored transports would land thirty thousand Marines on this desecrated planet with another seventy thousand Marines waiting in reserve.

The outer skin of Hubble’s atmosphere was formed of combustible gas that exploded in harmless flashes when heated by rocket engines. We had so many ships passing through the atmosphere that the sky looked like it was on fire.

“Positions, men,” Sergeant Shannon bellowed. “Fan out. Secure the area.”

We knew the drill. Shannon had trained us well. He had rehearsed every step of securing a landing area with us hundreds of times.

“You heard the sergeant,” I said to my fire team. The four men on my team formed a diamond, and we headed south to the ridge. The ash crunched and compressed under my boots. I did not sink; it was not like stepping into water or quicksand. It felt more like walking on dry leaves.