Steven Kent - The Clone Republic

“Lee, Harris, come on back,” Shannon said.

“I found Amblin,” I said.

“Is he okay?” Shannon asked, his voice perking up.

“He’s dead,” I answered. “There’s some sort of toxic gas in the snake shafts.”

“I saw shit like this during the Galactic Central War,” Shannon said. “You find it on scorched planets.”

“I hate this place,” I said.

“Then I’ve got some bad news for you,” Shannon said. “Our Harriers destroyed their ships.”

“That’s good,” I said, feeling brighter. “I forgot about the air battle.”

“The speckers ran into caves at the far end of the valley,” Shannon continued, ignoring my comment. “We’re going after them, Harris. We’re going underground.”

The pleated cliffs surrounding the far edge of the valley had nearly vertical walls made of a black, obsidian-like rock that reflected light. From our gathering point a few hundred yards back, we did not have a good view of the dozens of caves in the craggy walls. They might have been formed by erosion, or bubbling heat, or carved by the same Mogat hands that dug the snake shafts.

At the moment, our invasion looked more like a rescue operation. Teams of corpsmen brought breathing gear to men trapped in LG tanks, and evacuation teams pulled the crews to safety. From what McKay told Shannon, our engineers had not yet figured out how to pull the surviving tanks off the battlefield. At a hundred tons each, the tanks weighed too much for personnel carriers to lift, and the ground was too broken to land barges. Vince Lee made a joke about building dozens of bridges and rolling the tanks to safety, but that seemed like the most plausible answer.

While engineers and evacuation crews cleaned up after the first stage of our invasion, wings of ATs flew in another regiment to replace the dead and wounded. Captain McKay had his two platoons regroup along one side of the Mogats’ launchpad. We had lost twenty-one men—just less than half of our men, and our platoon had one of the lower casualty rates because we were at the front of the attack. We had almost been across the field by the time the shafts caved in.

We were not the only ones who had suffered. The broken hulls of so many Mogat cargo ships littered the near side of the canyon that I did not bother counting them. Our fighters and gunships had left a smoldering graveyard in their wake. The wrecked ships, strewn like broken eggshells across the ground, glowed with small fires that burned inside their hulls. The flickering flames were only visible through portholes and cracked hatches.

The Mogats had cargo ships of various sizes in their fleet. Clearly the enemy wanted to escape, not fight. I saw no sign of the dreadnoughts that had destroyed the Chayio , just lightly armed cargo ships and transports.

“I am sending coordinates over your visor,” Captain McKay said, over an open frequency on the interLink. “We’ve been ordered to secure a cave.”

McKay’s mobile command center had survived the trap. His pilot had managed to swerve around three shafts and drive the vehicle to safety. With the airspace over the battlefield secured, the officers overseeing the invasion now commanded us from one of Klyber’s diplomatic cruisers.

“Maybe they could command us from a penthouse in Washington, DC,” Lee joked. “There aren’t many snake shafts around Capitol Hill.”

“Watch your mouth,” Shannon said, his voice snapping like a whip. “Now roll out.” Shannon, always duty-bound, did not let his men criticize officers.

The shortest way to our sector was straight across the launch area. We followed a path through the destroyed ships with our particle-beam rifles raised and ready, prepared to fire at anything that moved. We needn’t have bothered. It quickly became apparent that our pilots had more than evened the score. I passed a large freighter with an oblong, rectangular front and sickle-shaped fins. Two-foot-wide rings dotted its sides, marking the spots where particle beams had blasted the hull. When I got closer, I noticed that the armor plating under the blast rings had blistered. Most of the ships had not even lifted off the ground when the attack started; and their shields were down.

As I walked by this particular wreck, I saw the fatal wound. The engines at the back of the ship, now little more than blackened casings and fried wires, had exploded. The thick and unbreathable Hubble air stifled the fire outside the freighter, but the inside sparkled with dozens of tiny flames. I peered through the open hatch and saw fire dancing on the walls.

I also saw people. If the ship was full at launch, at least three hundred people died inside it. In the brief glimpse that I got, I saw men slumped in their seats like soldiers sleeping on a long transport flight. One dead man’s arms hung flaccid over the armrests.

“Are they all dead?” I asked Lee.

He did not answer at first. Just as I prepared to ask again, he said, “I hope so, for their sake.”

We pushed on, weaving through the wreckage. I passed by a small transport—a ship capable of carrying no more than seven people. It had apparently lifted a few meters off the ground when a missile tore its tail section off. The ship crashed and settled top side down, bashing a hole in its nose section.

I looked in the cockpit and saw the pilot hanging from his chair, his restraint belt still binding him into place. The man’s mouth gaped, and blood trickled over his upper lip and into his nostrils. More blood leaked from the tops of his eyes, running across his forehead in little rivulets that disappeared into his thick, dark hair. The pilot’s arms dangled past his head; the ends of his curled fingers rested on the ceiling.

I could not tell if Hubble’s gases had killed him or if he had broken his neck in the crash. I had no problem identifying what killed the copilot hanging from the next seat. A jagged shard of outer plating hung from his neck. From what I could see, that bloodstained wedge had sliced through the man’s throat and become jammed in his spine.

A hand touched my shoulder and I jumped. When I looked over, I saw Shannon’s identifier.

“Don’t get distracted,” Shannon said.

“Remind me never to piss off the U.A. Navy,” I said.

“That’s not the worst of it.” Lee approached us and nodded toward the body. “His pilot’s license was revoked.”

“You’re a sick man, Lee,” I said.

We turned and continued through the wreckage. After a while, one ship looked pretty much like the next, and I no longer bothered to peer inside. The passengers were dead; that was enough.

As we reached the edge of the landing area, I noticed piles of melted netting and wires—the ruins of a camouflaged hangar. These people were so desperate to live that they had colonized an uninhabitable planet. No sane person would have ever searched for life on a rock like Hubble, but our intelligence network found them just the same. Perhaps a recon ship just happened to spot them or maybe a loose-lipped friend let the information slip over a drink. In any case, they were trapped.

We stopped a hundred yards from the cliffs. I had to ping the wall to locate the caves—night-for-day lenses are not good tools for spotting dark caverns set in jet-black cliffs. The ground was black, the cliffs were black, the sky was black, and the dust and oil on my visor were not helping. My sonic locator outlined the opening with a translucent green orifice, but I still could not tell what machinery might be hiding inside.

“Are we going in?” I asked Sergeant Shannon when I spotted him and his men.

He did not dignify the question with an answer. He stared ahead at the cave, his hands tight around the stock of his gun.