Steven Kent - The Clone Republic

“The comms console is down,” Marsten or Gubler added. “What do we do?”

“We do the same as everybody else,” I said. “We hold our positions. You defend this room, shoot every SEAL bastard that touches that door.” Since the power was off, taking that room would be a low priority for the SEALs. Marsten and Gubler had worked hard and pulled off miracles, but they were not combat grunts. Perhaps I could keep them alive by hiding them in the useless room.

“Where are you going?” one of them asked.

“I’m going to the motor pool. That’s where they will enter the building,” I said as I put on my helmet. It seemed, at that moment, that perhaps we had caught a lucky break. The power was off on the computers, but the ventilation system was still getting hotter. The ceiling above me looked dark orange through my heat vision.

Before leaving the room, I looked at Marsten and Gubler and tapped my visor. I meant to signal, “stay alert,” but they thought I wanted them to remove their helmets.

I broke the seal on my helmet and yelled, “Stay alert!”

“Oh,” one of them said.

“Goddamn useless techno-humpers,” I said as I left the room. I had my helmet on. They did not hear me.

I’d posted eight men in every corner of the building, with an additional seven men inside the motor pool. Those seven men were our first line of defense. I went to join them.

I wanted to sprint down the corridor and through the living area. Made dizzy by my limited vision, the most I could bring myself to do was a fast jog.

I had not run far before I felt the first signs of fatigue. Perhaps the month I had served on the Doctrinaire doing administrative work had taken a fatal toll. Adrenaline shot through my veins, but I still felt weak. My heart pumped crazy hard, and my labored breathing sounded like the wheezing of a man who had run a marathon. I slowed to a stealthy walk as I reached the end of the hall, but I already knew I was too late.

The chocolate-colored cameos of men in combat armor lay on the floor before me. Three of the men lay in fetal positions, curled around their pistols. They had died near the door to the motor pool.

When I looked in the door, I saw that the entire floor was covered with multiple layers of green. The bottom layer was the coldest and darkest. It did not move. Above it was a light-colored fog that swirled and undulated. The scene looked like lime-colored mist rising out of emerald-colored water. Inside that dark green, I saw several splashes of purple. I had no idea what it was, but I did not enter the room. Something in that malevolent green color warned me away.

“Damn,” I growled. “Damn!” My voice whirled around in my helmet.

Another body lay facedown in the hall beyond the motor pool. He must have been shot down while trying to run for help.

Seeing that, I did sprint. Running as fast as I could, I came to the storage area in the west corner of the base. I saw muzzle flashes as I approached. They appeared white in my visor.

I also saw three Boyd clones hiding behind a wall. Their signature looked orange with a yellow corona. They had something dark on their heads, probably night-for-day goggles. One of them pulled a canister from his belt. The bastards did not hear me coming, and I shot each of them in the head. Their dwarf bodies flopped to the floor, oozing blood that registered bright red in my heat vision.

Removing my helmet, I waved it around the corner so that my men would see my identifier. Then I stepped out with hands in the air.

“Lieutenant Harris?” one of the men asked. Without my helmet, I could not see a thing. I stumbled on a Boyd clone.

“How many did we lose?” I asked.

“At least seven,” someone answered.

I nodded. I had already lost a good part of my platoon. “Marsten and Gubler are in the control room. If you can get to them, that will be the best place to fight.”

“Are you coming, sir?” the voice asked.

“I’m going to see what I can do out here,” I said.

“Aye, sir,” the man said. I put on my helmet and saw him doing the same. Three brown silhouettes cut across the hub and ran to the control room. I hoped they would not run into any SEALs.

My battle instincts started to kick in. I could feel the adrenaline and endorphins, and my head cleared. The westernmost corner of the base was the machine room. I held my pistol ready and trotted forward.

The door of the machine room slid open, and I saw a flood of colors. The vents in the ceiling showed orange. The furnace generating the heat looked yellow. There I found more of that green mist. It seemed fresher this time; very little had darkened and settled on the floor. Whatever that green shit was, I wanted nothing to do with it.

The door on the far side of the machine room was open. Three Boyds stood right outside the door—short, slender orange silhouettes with yellow coronas. I could see the clawlike fingers. I capped the first two as the third one turned to face me. He was too late. I shot him in the shoulder as he spun. His momentum tripped him. As he fell, he tumbled into the green goo. His screams were so loud that I heard him through my helmet.

His heat seemed to charge the mist as he fell into it. It swirled around him, and purple liquid oozed from his body. It was not blood. The blood of the other two Boyds registered red in my heat vision. The liquid was purple and viscous. It seemed to seep from his body and did not spread on the floor.

Elite SEALs, the Republic’s most deadly killing machines…They had to have been Huang’s idea. How many trained killers would Huang send to annihilate a platoon of Marines? He would probably send a single squad against our three—thirteen of his men against our forty-two. Arrogant bastard.

I had no way of knowing how many enemy SEALs my men might have capped as they entered the motor pool. The battle might already be over, though I doubted it.

I needed to return to the control room. It all made sense. The herding tactic, the strange stains on the concrete floor and the mattresses—they were using Noxium gas—the gas that Crowley tried to use on us in Gobi. It was heavier than air. That was why the ducts that dispensed the gas on the elevators leading to the Kamehameha ’s Command deck were built into the ceiling. The gas would form a fog along the ground—a fog that registered light green as it chilled and dissipated in the environment.

Hiding in the control room, using computer equipment barricades for protection, my men would be easy targets for a Noxium gas pellet.

I leaped over bodies as I ran toward the control room. If they had not jammed the interLink, I could call to my men and warn them. Ours was a battle against the senses—the SEALs left us deaf, we left them blind.

I rounded a corner and slid to a stop. On the ground before me lay the three men I had rescued outside of the storage area. They were dead, probably shot, but a thin green mist swirled like a swarm of flies near their bodies. The SEALs were dissolving the evidence.

The gas had not spread far. I knew that I should have backtracked around the motor pool, but I needed to get to the last of my men. I needed to warn Gubler and Marsten. Taking a meaningless deep breath that would offer me no protection, I edged my way around the walls of the room, never taking my eyes off the slowly melting bodies.

The panels on the far side of the hub slid open as I approached. The three Boyds standing on the other side of the door proved a lot more alert than the ones outside the machine room. I barely had a moment to drop to one knee before bullets struck the wall above my shoulder. I returned fire, hitting one of the three SEALs in the chest. I continued firing, but missed the other men as I hid behind the open door.