Steven Kent - The Clone Republic

“A carrier. Did you identify it?” I asked.

“No, sir. It moved out of range too quickly.” Marsten stood in front of the scanning station, the glare from the screen reflected in a bright smear on his armor.

“Did you get any information?” I asked.

Marsten’s forehead became very smooth as his eyes narrowed, and he considered my question. “I’ll see what we can take from the radar reading.”

I walked beside him and looked over his shoulder as he typed more information into the computer. A glowing red grid showed on the screen. He brought up the radar frame with the ghost ship, then isolated the ship. Numbers flashed on the computer screen as he plumbed the image for information. “You’ll be able to see it more clearly if you take off the helmet,” Marsten said.

“I need to stay on the interLink,” I responded.

Marsten nodded. “This is the beginning of the scan. The ship was pretty far away.” Strange numbers appeared on the screen. Leaning in for a better look, Marsten traced his finger along the screen. His finger looked green in the glare.

“That can’t be right,” Marsten said as he looked up from the screen. He turned to face me. “This may sound odd. It’s probably a misread, but this ship is only twenty-two hundred feet wide. I mean, it’s either a very large battleship or maybe an old Expansion-class fighter carrier.”

This information should have come as a surprise, but it didn’t. I felt a familiar chill run through me. “How far back in time can you go on radar record?”

“You want to know what the other platoons saw?” Marsten asked. “I can do that.” He sounded both pleased and excited.

We had no information about the hundred-man Navy detachment that disappeared on Ravenwood. One moment they were there, and everything was fine. A week later they did not report in. Nothing is known about what happened during that week.

We knew more about the missing platoon. It disappeared within five hours of landing on Ravenwood. The commanding officer had checked in with Pollard every hour on the hour. Captain Pollard sent a rescue ship two hours after the final transmission. The ship took three hours to arrive, and by the time it did, the base was empty.

After a thorough search, Marsten found another slight echo that suggested inconclusively that an Expansion-class fighter carrier did indeed pass within radar range of Raven-wood Station sometime after the platoon arrived.

“Does that ship mean anything, sir?” Marsten asked.

“It might,” I said.

“Do you think it’s from the GC Fleet?”

I shook my head. “No. That fleet did not have any carriers.”

“I’ll keep on this,” Marsten said.

“Okay,” I answered, “I’m going to have another look around. Let me know if you find anything else.”

All of the evidence pointed in the same direction, but I did not like where it was pointing. For one thing, if I was reading it right, our chances of survival were nil.

The one part of Ravenwood Station I had not yet visited was the vehicle pool. I called for a squad to meet me there.

“Lieutenant,” Marsten said.

“What have you got?” I asked.

“The radar was running during the first attack. An Expansion-class carrier was in the area around the time of the attack. In fact, it was flying over the area when the radar was shut down.”

“Was it the Kamehameha ?” I asked.

“How did you know?” Marsten asked.

“Just an ugly hunch,” I said. “You’ve done good work. Any chance you can search the security records? I need to know everything that happened in this base.”

“Gubler already tried,” Marsten said, now starting to sound slightly nervous. “The records were erased.”

“Okay, you’ve done great. Thanks.” I signed off.

Twelve of my men met me inside the motor pool, and we searched. If Ravenwood Station ever had tanks or ATVs, they were now gone. Except for tools, fuel tanks, and a lot of trash, the room was empty.

The floor and walls were bare concrete. We searched methodically, piling debris in the center of the room behind us. I found a few spent M27 cartridges and a line of icy footprints. Somebody had come in here with wet feet. Unfortunately, I had no way of telling the age of the footprints.

When it came to important discoveries, one of my corporals won the prize. “I’ve found a body!” he yelled over the open frequency. Everybody stopped what they were doing and went to have a look. The doors to the motor pool opened as more Marines came for a look.

“Where is it?” I asked as I looked at the far wall.

“He’s buried in that corner, sir,” the corporal said. He pointed toward the far corner of the room. Any lights that might have been in that section of the pool had either stopped working or been shot out. I switched on the night-for-day lens in my visor as I moved in for a closer look, but I need not have bothered. The corner was empty except for a pile of cans and rags; but growing out of those rags was the name, “Private Thadius Gearhart.”

“Search it,” I ordered, not knowing what we might find. The pile of trash was about a foot deep—too shallow to conceal a body. “The rest of you, get back to work.”

As the others filed out of the motor pool, the corporal called out, “I found him. At least I have what’s left of him.”

The corporal held the broken front section of a combat helmet between his pinched fingers. The section included most of the frame around the visor and a jagged swath of the portion around the left ear. A few shards of glass remained in the visor.

Gearhart had been most likely shot in the face. The bullet would have entered through the visor, flattening on impact, and blown out the back of his head and helmet. If we examined the area more carefully, I suspected we would find bits of broken plastic along with skull and brain among the rags, cans, and trash.

The corporal swung the scrap of helmet as if he planned to throw it in the trash. “Stop,” I said.

“Do you want this, sir?” the man asked.

“Take it to Marsten,” I said. “Tell him that it’s still transmitting an identifier signal and ask him if he can access the data chip.”

Though Marsten was surely a gifted hacker, I had little hope that he would extract information from that data chip, assuming it was even in there. Combat helmets were complex pieces of equipment with optical movement readers, multiple lenses, interLink wiring, and more. It seemed like too much to hope for the read-and-relay data chip to be in that small section. Luck, for once, was on our side.

We did not find anything else of significance in the motor pool. As I left to return to the hub, I saw two of my men praying. “You do that,” I whispered. “Why not.” A few minutes later, Marsten contacted me.

“Lieutenant Harris, I think we got it rigged.”

“I’ll be right there.”

“Rigged” was a good choice of words. Marsten had strung a full dozen wires into a small socket along the left edge of the visor. Gubler connected that rat’s nest of wires into the back of a computer.

“The chip was damaged to begin with, and this is not the way these chips were meant to be read,” Marsten said, by way of apology, as he turned on a computer monitor. “We won’t get much, but we should get something.”

Rather than a streaming video feed, we got a single image on the screen. It could only have been the last thing Gearhart saw as the bullet struck him. Jagged lines marked the screen where his visor had already shattered.

Gearhart must have been guarding the motor pool when the enemy arrived. The image on the screen showed three men climbing through holes they had bored—the holes my men were currently sealing back up.