Steven Kent - The Clone Republic

The sun that burned up this system might have burned out, but it still generated heat, over two hundred degrees. The planet’s landscape spread before us as a perpetual nightscape. On other worlds I sometimes regretted the way our night-for-day vision blotted out color; but it didn’t matter on a desolate brick, like Hubble. Everything was gray or black except for the amber-colored condensation that formed on my visor. I wiped at it with the tips of my fingers, leaving a translucent swirl. Fine beads of oil hung in the air of the planet like steam after a summer rain.

The first of the barges landed no more than thirty yards from where I stood. Jets of fiery exhaust flared from its engines. The blast blew dust that stuck to the oil on the front of my visor. I tried to clean it, but the hardened plastic on my battle armor only smeared the film. When I looked back at the barge, the smear obscured my view of a column of low-gravity tanks rolling out of its hold.

LG tanks were ten feet tall and thirty feet long—built long and low to take advantage of any available gravity. They were iron beasts carrying artillery, particle beams, and missiles. Weighing nearly two hundred thousand pounds each, they sank six inches into the clinker soil.

“Holy shiiiiit,” Lee gasped over the interLink. “Sergeant Shannon, Harris, you’d better have a look at this.” Lee stood at the edge of the valley. I joined him.

“What are you looking at?” I asked.

“Ping it,” Lee said.

Shannon let out a litany of four-letter words.

Using optic commands, I initiated the sonic locator. My helmet emitted an inaudible ping that bounced across the landscape. One moment, I saw the valley below me as a wasted desert with cinder for soil; the next moment, the sonic locator overlaid that scene with a network of translucent green trenches. Hundreds of snake shafts crisscrossed the ground in nonsensical patterns. I did not know what the excavations could be used for. When I discussed them with veteran Marines, I used to get a shrug and a tired look. To them, snake shafts were as baffling as the giant stone heads on Easter Island, something that religious fanatics built for the sake of building. I thought that there had to be more to it than that.

“Those can’t all be snake shafts,” I said. “There are too many of them.”

My sonic locator sent out another ping as the ghosts of the first ping faded. An identical pattern appeared.

“The Mogats could not have dug those,” I said. “They only left Ezer Kri a few weeks ago.”

“Then somebody has been digging into this planet for years,” Lee said. “Think they knew they would hide here someday?”

“I don’t know what to make of it,” Shannon said as he left to return to his squad.

As Lee and I debated the improbabilities of the snake shafts, a gust of wind blasted so hard it almost pushed me over. I looked back to see the gray hull of another barge touching down. The barge’s oblong body settled with a loud creak, then made a loud mechanical whine as the cargo bay doors opened. It carried Cobra gunships—low-flying units used to cover ground troops. With their giant racks of guns and rockets, Cobras looked more like gigantic bumblebees than snakes. The gunships’ engines kicked into gear as a conveyor belt moved them to the front of the cargo bay, and they launched into the air.

My vision remained clouded. I tried brushing the oil-based mud from my visor with my glove again, but that only smeared it more.

By that time, over twenty thousand Marines crowded the ridge with another ten thousand on the way. I looked across the scene and took mental inventory of the men and tanks. “Lee, gunships, tanks…this is a full-scale invasion,” I said.

“I’ve never seen anything on this scale,” he agreed. “Shannon is probably the only active Marine who has.”

The oil mist that passed for humidity in Hubble’s atmosphere distorted sounds, but it did not smother them. A wing of ten Harriers zoomed over our heads. Two seconds passed before the roar of their engines tore through my helmet. By the time the sound caught up to us, the Harriers had slowed for a methodical sweep of the valley. As the fighters approached the horizon, I heard the thunder of missiles and

saw tiny bubbles of light along the valley floor.

“Move out!” McKay’s voice bellowed over the interLink.

“Gentlemen, let’s roll!” Shannon shouted.

That was our call. The first wave of the attack consisted of thirty thousand Marines, a mere five hundred tanks, and thirty gunships. The Harriers that preceded us pounded the enemy’s gun placements, bunkers, and air defense. Whatever ships and airfields the Mogats possessed, would now lie in ruin.

As the Harriers wove their fire, our job was to cause chaos. We would breach the Mogat lines and scatter their defenders so that the rest of our landing party could deliver a killing blow. The Mogats were the men who had massacred our platoon. We owed them.

“Lets go!” Lee yelled to his men over a platoon-wide open channel on the interLink.

Lunging over the precipice, we used our jetpacks to glide down the sloping valley wall. Our packs set off small fireballs in the gassy air. From above, we must have looked like a swarm of locusts with exploding asses. Once we reached the valley floor, we dropped to our feet and trotted toward battle.

From an observation craft far overhead, one of our commanders signaled us to break into a picket line by illuminating a formation symbol in our visors. We rushed to comply. Forming diagonal lines with our fire teams, we stretched the width of the valley.

“There cannot possibly be any living people on this planet,” I said to Shannon over the interLink.

“Shut up, Harris,” Shannon said. “Keep the Link open.” Shannon’s words sounded harsh, but a certain lilt in his voice suggested agreement.

The ground started to vibrate under my feet. I looked back in time to see rows of tanks reaching the bottom of the valley wall. “Skiing” with our jetpacks, we had easily outpaced the heavy LGs down the slope; but now they were catching up to us quickly. Seeing their approach, I radioed my team to pick up speed.

I wiped the glass with the side of my forefinger, scraping the dust and grease as best I could; but the stiff plates that formed my gloves just would not absorb the oil from my visor. The landscape around me remained out of focus.

“Platoon leaders, report,” Captain McKay ordered. He took their reports over the open link so that everyone in our platoon could hear them.

Tim Grayson, the sergeant over the Thirteenth Platoon, responded. Sergeant Shannon said nothing. McKay waited for his report then called, “Sergeant Shannon, report.”

“Have you run a sonic sweep?” Shannon asked.

“Affirmative,” McKay said, in a voice that was both authoritative and efficient. “We are aware of the tunnels. We have scanned the tunnels for enemy personnel and equipment as well.” He sounded impatient. The ships orbiting Hubble had much more sophisticated equipment than the scaled-down sonic locators in our helmets.

I looked back and saw Shannon kneel with one knee in the ash soil. “All clear in this sector, sir,” Shannon said. I could tell he felt frustrated by McKay’s cool response, but his voice hid it well.

The odd atmosphere continued to distort sounds. In an oxygen atmosphere, the rumble of the LG tanks would have rattled my armor. During field exercises on Earth, I could hear gunships from hundreds of yards and could tell which direction the sound came from. On Hubble, I did not hear the gunships until after they had flown past me, and the growl of the tanks seemed to come from all directions.

“Watch yourselves,” McKay shouted over the interLink.