Steven Kent - The Clone Republic

“Do you want us to get to work on the wall, sir?” one of the privates asked.

“Wait up, Private,” I said, as I started around the base for a look at the damage. A thin layer of long-frozen snow covered the ground. My boot broke through its icy crust. I found my scout party examining the back wall—the wall farthest from the launchpad.

The wall was made of foot-thick concrete blocks coated with a thick plastic and metal polymer for added protection. Using a ramming device, or possibly just a well-placed charge, somebody had made seven holes through a thirty-foot section of wall.

“Can you fix this?” I asked.

“It shouldn’t be much of a problem, sir. We have the materials, but, ah…”

“Private?”

“If the wall didn’t keep the enemy out the first time, I don’t see how patching it will make much of a difference.”

“Point taken,” I said. “Do what you can here and look for anything that tells us who made these holes and how they made them.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We did find these,” the private said, pointing to an unexploded fractal-field grenade—a messy device that overloaded shields by flooding them with radioactive isotopes.

A couple of those bangers could certainly have shorted out the generators on this base.

“Son of a bitch,” I said. The U.A. military stopped using those grenades decades ago, possibly even forty years ago. I picked the grenade up and rolled it in my palm, being careful not to touch the pin.

“You might want to be careful with that, sir,” the private said.

“Private, this banger is forty years old. If it wasn’t stable, it would have blown years ago.” Just the same, I carefully replaced the grenade on the ground.

“While you’re patching the walls, I want you to check the grounds for radiation. Let me know if the soil is hot, would you?”

“Yes, sir,” the private said.

“I’ll send some men out to guard you,” I said. I did that for his comfort, not his safety. Whoever had attacked Raven-wood didn’t care if we fixed the walls and started the shield generators. That much was obvious.

Everything I had done up to that point made perfect sense. In fact, it was obvious. If you inherited a base that had been ransacked, you fixed the holes and restored the security systems. The previous platoon would have taken the same precautions.

The war began on November 8, 2510. Hoping to find a response from Admiral Klyber, I went into the command office and slipped on my mediaLink shades.

NORMA ARM SECEDES FROM THE REPUBLIC

November 8, Washington, DC — Announcing that they had formed a new organization called the Norma Arm Treaty Organization, 27 of the 30 colonized planets in the Norma Arm declared independence from the Unified Authority.

Other territories may follow suit. There are reports that the Cygnus Arm has a similar treaty organization.

“Shit,” I gasped. An entire arm of the galaxy had declared independence. If the Cygnus Arm followed, would Scutum-Crux be far behind?

I did not tell my men about the secessions. Knowing that a civil war had begun would hurt their morale and possibly weaken their resolve. In the new state of affairs, they would need to fight more than ever. With entire galactic arms declaring independence, the Navy would not waste time worrying about an all-clone platoon on an ice cube like Ravenwood. We were on our own.

While I read the news in my office, my men scoured the base for bodies and signs of fighting. We found them everywhere. Bullets had gouged and scratched many of the walls. Somebody had fired a particle beam in the building, too. We found places where beam blasts had exploded parts of the walls.

“Sir, I think you should see this,” one of my men called.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“Squad bay,” the man said, “in the hub.”

Viewed from the top, Ravenwood Station looked like a square with an X connecting its four corners. The center of that X, the “hub,” included the barracks, the rec room, the galley, and the latrine.

I found three of my privates in squad bay. One of them had noticed a dark stain on the floor. They had pushed the bunks out of the way for a better look and found that most of the bare, concrete floor was discolored.

“I don’t think it’s blood,” I said. “Blood washes off clean.”

“It almost looks like an oil stain,” a private said.

“Whatever this shit was, sir, there was a lot of it,” the first private said. “Most of the floor is stained.”

“So did it evaporate?” I asked.

“No, sir. Somebody mopped up afterward.”

“What?” I asked.

The private pushed a bunk out of his way and opened a service closet. Inside the closet were a coiled steam hose and some maps. The heads of these mops were thick and heavily stained towels that were stiff and purple.

“There are more stains, sir,” another private said. The group took me on a tour of the base, pointing out crescent-shaped stains where past residents had most likely died.

From what I could tell, the unfortunate platoon before us made a stand in the barracks. Everywhere we went, we found scratches and gashes in the wall. The boys before us had not worried about conserving ammunition. They obviously had something more on their minds.

We stripped the sheets from the bunks and found that most of the mattresses had a black stain running along one edge. Many had flash burns, and a few even had bullet holes. The last platoon had thrown their bunks on their sides and used them as barricades during the firefight.

As we examined the bunks, a corporal noticed something strange about the damage in the walls. Most of the shots were between three and five feet up, with only a rare shot having hit any higher. Marines, who are trained to shoot to kill, will normally aim at their enemies’ chests and heads.

I went to the operations area, the northern corner of the fortress. The rest of Ravenwood Station had plastic-coated white walls and bright lights. Operations had black walls and no windows. The only light in the area came from the security screens and computer monitors. Lights blinked on and off on the banks of computers lining the walls.

It was there that I found Marsten and Gubler hacking into the station’s many computer systems. Despite the cold, they had removed their helmets and gloves.

“Aren’t you cold?” I asked.

“We’ve got the climate controls working. It’s getting warmer,” Gubler said. “We’re already up twenty degrees.” He pointed to a monitor that showed the base temperature at just under forty degrees. I looked at Gubler and saw that his face was pale; his lips had turned slightly blue.

“Yeah, warmer,” I said. “How is it going with the radar system?”

“Up and running,” Marsten said. “I may have already found something, too.”

He went to a terminal and typed in some commands, bringing up a radar screen. “Now this may only have been an echo from something detected a long time ago; but as the system came online, I picked up a ship at the edge of our range. It was only there for a moment.”

“So another ship might be in the area?” I asked. “Is it possible that the ship detected your scan and flew out of range?” I asked.

“I’m not sure why it would do that,” Marsten said. “It was one of ours, a fighter carrier. Have a look.”

Marsten typed some commands, and the screen fuzzed for a moment. The time mark in the corner showed “11/8/2510: 1437.” The screen froze.

“There,” Marsten said, pointing to the very top of the screen. Outlined in green and white was the bat-winged shape of a U.A.N. fighter carrier.