Steven Kent - The Clone Republic

The tanks caught up to us. A less rigid formation flashed in my visor, and my team fell back, keeping pace with the tanks. We moved at a fast jog, maybe six miles per hour. You had to watch your step in the low gravity. We had weights in our boots; but it was easy to stumble. If you fell in front of a tank…

An LG rumbled past me. The tops of its spools were just about even with my head. The dust it kicked up stuck to my visor, and I was temporarily blinded. I did not dare stop with tanks rolling past, so I stumbled forward as I scraped at the dust with the side of my finger. When I removed my hand, I saw something on the tank that left me numb. The words “PFC Harold Goldberg” appeared over a muddy spot in the tread. The tank must have run over Goldberg, crushing his helmet into fragments, some of which were trapped in the tread.

Ahead, at the end of the valley, I caught a clear view of Harriers circling in the air, dropping bombs and firing missiles. Three gunships flew low overhead, skittering into the distance and joining that battle. Suddenly the night sky boiled as dozens of fighters burst through the combustible outer atmosphere.

“They’re launching ships!” McKay yelled over the inter-Link. “They’re trying to escape.”

Reality had finally caught up to the Morgan Atkins colony of Ezer Kri. They had caught a platoon unaware in Hero’s Fall, then outsmarted a frigate, but now the U.A. Navy had them trapped. They would pay for their aggression.

“You’re not going to get away this time,” I whispered to myself.

Another minute passed, and I caught a quick glimpse of the battle ahead. A spark of light lit a distant ridge for a moment. The flash was so fast that I almost missed it. Slowing to a trot, I switched my visor to telescopic lenses. My dirty visor obscured my view, and Hubble’s dark atmosphere made a clear sighting almost impossible, but I caught a glimpse of Harriers swarming the air above a lofty fire.

“Lee, have you seen what’s going on up there?”

“I just saw a specking LG run over one of Grayson’s men,” Lee panted over our team frequency. “Stay alert.”

I do not know if I sensed a shift in the ground or simply sensed the danger. For some reason I stopped and turned to watch the LG that had pushed up ahead of me. The ground in front of the tank rumbled and several columns of ash spun into the air. Those twenty-foot twisters were the only warning. As they dissolved, the ground in front of the LG crumbled, leaving a deep trench in its place.

Riding so near to the ground, the low-gravity tank was an easy target. It teetered on the edge of the trench for a moment, but its momentum and weight sent it forward, and it tumbled nose first into the hole. The ground shook, and a flash of flame shot into view.

“Holy shit!” Lee shouted into the interLink.

Until I saw the tank topple into that shaft, I had not felt the hormone rush that I had experienced during the battle on Gobi. Suddenly I felt the warmth running through my blood. The feeling was soothing. It was more than soothing. It felt good. “The bastards rigged their friggin’ snake shafts to cave in,” I shouted.

I heard Sergeant Shannon. “Command! Command! Stop all movements! Stop all movements!” But Shannon’s warning came too late.

Looking around the valley, I saw the ground crumbling in all directions as dozens of trenches appeared. To my left, an LG tank struggled to reverse itself before it rolled into one trench, then backed into another. The men piloting the tanks did not wear breathing equipment. If they evacuated, they would be strangled by Hubble’s toxic air.

“Stop all movements! Repeat, stop all movements!” Shannon continued.

Another tank to my left tried to pivot around a trench, but the powdery soil beneath it caved in. A group of men walking beside it fell in as well. Several more vehicles had fallen farther back; I could see their useless hulls leaning out of the trenches. Flames burst through their armor.

“Repeat, halt all movements!” Shannon bellowed then fell silent. By this time endorphins and adrenaline coursed through my veins.

The officers commanding the invasion would have known about the snake shafts. At least those who were alive would know. Some field officers were stationed aboard a mobile command center that more likely than not was now lying ass up in a ditch.

The invasion force ground to a stop, giving me a moment to survey the damage. I counted sixty-three destroyed tanks, but I might have missed some in the dust and smoke. There was no way of estimating how many men had fallen when the shafts caved in beneath them.

Across the scarred field, the tanks that had not fallen into trenches remained perfectly still. The men within them were trapped. Any movement might send them over a ledge.

“Gather your men,” Shannon ordered his fire team leaders over the interLink.

“Fall in,” I called to my men. Only one man answered.

“Amblin? Schultz? Respond,” I called out. When they did not reply, I hailed them twice more.

“Sergeant,” I said, hailing Shannon.

“What?”

“I’m missing two men,” I said. “Amblin and Schultz. Requesting permission to look for them.”

“You can look; but, Harris, do not drop in the snake shafts,” Shannon barked back. “Even if you find one of your men in a shaft, do not go in after him.”

“Understood,” I said, though I did not understand.

“You have ten minutes to look,” Shannon said. “Find them or not, in ten minutes get back to the platoon.”

I called to my remaining team member. “You heard him. We have fifteen minutes to locate Amblin and Schultz.”

We split up. I turned toward the rear of our stalled forces. What had once been an endless and empty strip of land now looked like a junkyard. The fire-blackened tails of low-gravity tanks poked out of the ground like scattered rocks. The oily Hubble atmosphere had smothered the fires that had erupted out of the ruined tanks, but smoke still rose from their hatches.

I passed a trench and stared down the hull of a derelict tank. It had fallen nose first, smashing its turrets under its own immense weight. Pausing to wipe the grease from my visor, I looked at the wreckage. Under other circumstances I might have hopped on to the back of the tank for a closer look; but with the crew still inside, I did not want to take a chance of making things worse.

A layer of sludgy, brown fog filled the bottom of the trench, obscuring the nose of the tank. As I looked more closely, I saw the bodies of dead Marines along the edges of the snake shaft. At first I thought that they might have jumped from the tank, but there were too many bodies, and most wore armor. Some of the bodies were burned. My visor did not register the identity signals from any of them. Whatever the fog inside the trenches was, it destroyed the electronics inside their combat armor. I did not want to know what it might have done to the men wearing the armor.

Amblin’s armor still gave off its identification signal. As I looked across a collapsed snake shaft, I saw him. He must have caught on to a ledge as the ground collapsed around him. He lay sprawled, facedown, over the lip of the trench like a man hanging off the edge of a swimming pool. But Amblin was not moving.

I knelt beside him. When I touched his helmet, it rolled away from the rest of his armor. A layer of darkened blood sloshed around inside his visor. Shocked, I stumbled backward, my attention still fixed on the maroon liquid that seeped out from his shoulder pads.

“Dammmnnn!” I bellowed inside my helmet. Amblin and I had never been friends, but we trained together. I’d known I could depend upon him.

I remained sitting on the cinder soil for another minute, fighting to regain my composure. Everything had gone so wrong. Our invading army sat in a morass. How had they done it? How did these Mogat hoodlums, these small-time criminals and religious fanatics, outsmart our fleet?