Steven Kent - The Clone Republic

Two of Crowley’s soldiers had seen the drone coming and shielded their eyes at the last moment. They had sprung from their hiding place and chased Ray Freeman as he ran toward his ship. Taking less than a second to aim, I hit one of them in the shoulder from over a hundred yards away. He spun and fell. His friend skidded to a stop and turned to look for me. I fired a shot, hitting him in the face.

Freeman’s ship must not have been hidden very far away. Moments after he disappeared over the edge of the canyon, a small spaceworthy flier that looked like a cross between a bomber and transport rose into the air. Unlike the barge that Freeman had used as a decoy, the ship was immaculate, with rows of dull white armor lining its bulky, oblong hull. Gun and missile arrays studded its wings…

At first I thought Freeman had abandoned the base, but then he doubled back toward the barracks. I could see some of the guns along the wings glinting as I ran to view the fight. There was no hurry, however. Crowley’s men were not prepared to fight a ship like this one.

The Gatling guns flashed. Some of the guerillas managed to escape, but there was no escape, not from Freeman.

“You had good reason, he said, to be ashamed of the lie which you were going to tell.”

“True, I replied, but there is more coming; I have only told you half.”

“You picked a hell of a place to die, Marine,” I told myself.

This planet had no economic value, no strategic value, and no scientific worth. The outpost, with its naked concrete walls, was just a primitive fort on a barren planet surrounded by plains and ice. Every Marine in every platoon that came to defend this spot ended up missing in action—a polite way of saying they were dead…gone to the halls of Montezuma. Semper fi, Marine.

As I walked through the halls of this shit hole, every boy stopped to salute me. “Ready at your post, Marine?” I would ask, pretending that it mattered.

“Sir, yes, sir!” they would shout, still naïve enough to believe that enthusiasm counted for something.

And I would grunt lines like, “Carry on, Marine,” and salute, then move on knowing that nothing any of us did mattered. These boys were dead. Fresh out of basic, loyal to their last breath, and served up to die. I could not save them any more than I could save myself. In a couple of days, a patrol would come looking for survivors and find the base abandoned. The Corps would list us as missing in action, some officer would say, “Damn, not another platoon,” and send the next forty-two men to replace us.

Legend had it that space monsters prowled the surface of Ravenwood. Most of my boys believed it was space aliens attacking the fort. Facing their deaths, these boys turned back the clock to the days when authors wrote books about alien invasions. But those authors were wrong. Once we entered space we discovered that we were almost alone in the galaxy. The only thing man had to fear was man himself.

Up ahead, a couple of my boys knelt in the shadow of a doorway and prayed. “You do that,” I mumbled. “You pray. Why not?” Once the guns are loaded and the troops in place, God and chance are all you have left .

Even as I thought this, I realized that I didn’t care what became of these boys. In fact, I did not care whether or not I made it off this planet alive. I had the urge to survive, but that was just instinct.

It was because of the lie. Plato’s lie seems innocent, but it leaves you alienated from everything.

“Name?” The sergeant barked the question without bothering to look up from his desk. I heard the indifference in his voice and could not fault him for his callous attitude. Nothing important ever happened in dried-up stink holes like Gobi. Once you got assigned to a planet like this, your only option was to sit and wait for a transfer. It could take years. I’d heard rumors about Marines spending their entire careers on backwater planets praying for any excuse to leave, even a war.

“Private First-class Wayson Harris reporting as ordered, sir.” I saluted, then handed him the sealed file that contained my orders.

I had shown up for this transfer wearing my Charlie Service uniform, not my armor. The uniform left me exposed to the desert air, and sweat had soaked through the material under my arms, not that this guy would notice. With his faded armor and stubble beard, this sergeant looked like he hadn’t bathed in years. All the same, I could barely wait to change into my armor. It wasn’t the protective chestplate and helmet I wanted. It was the climate-controlled bodysuit, which had kept me cool in temperatures even less livable than this desert.

“PFC Harris,” he echoed under his breath, not even bothering to look up. I shouldn’t have saluted. Once you leave basic training, you only salute officers or Marines acting under command authority. You don’t salute sergeants, and you certainly don’t call them “sir,” but it’s a hard habit to break.

Having just spent three months living the spit-and-polish discipline of boot camp, I had come to fear drill sergeants for the gods they were. This sergeant, however, struck me as a heretic. His camouflage-coated armor had dulled, and there was sand and oil caked in the joints. His helmet sat on the ground beside his seat. I had never seen a Marine remove his helmet while on duty. If the job required combat armor, you wore the whole thing, or you were technically out of uniform.

The sergeant sat slumped in his chair with his armor loosened to fit his wilting posture. My drill sergeant would have given me a week in a detention cell if he saw me sitting like that; but I didn’t think this guy worried about the brig. The brass doesn’t punish you unless it catches you, and I doubted that any officers had set foot in this outpost in years. Why visit a place like Gobi Station and risk having a superior order you to stay. It could end your career.

“PFC Harris…PFC Harris…Let’s see what we have here,” he mumbled as he broke the red strip sealing my files. He flipped through the pages, occasionally stopping to scan a line. Apparently having found what he wanted, he spread the file on his desk and absentmindedly wrapped his fingers around his bristle-covered chin, as he browsed my records. “Fresh out of recruit training,” he muttered. Something caught his eye, and he paused and mulled over the information before looking up at me. “A ‘1’ in combat readiness?” He sounded like he wanted to laugh. “I’ve never seen anyone score under four hundred.”

“It’s a performance ranking, sir,” I said.

He sneered when he heard the word, “sir.” “You say something, private?”

“That number was my school rank. I drew top marks in hand-to-hand combat and marksmanship.”

Godfrey cocked an eyebrow in my direction, then returned to my paperwork. “Son of a bitch, perfect scores,” he whispered. “Why waste a perfectly good Marine on a shithole planet like this?”