The Clone Republic Page 10

  The impact of Klyber’s words was immediate and universal. Applause echoed through the Kamehameha . Klyber was speaking in an auditorium on Terraneau, but his speech was shown on every monitor on every deck of every ship in all three Scutum-Crux fleets. As he said those words, I have no doubt that all 2 million men under Klyber’s command shouted with excitement.

  “I have spoken with both the Joint Chiefs and the Linear Committee, and they have authorized me to subdue the enemy by all means necessary. As we speak, enemy strong-holds are being targeted in all six galactic arms, and terrorist leaders are being sought out.”

  The platoon watched Klyber’s speech on a small monitor hanging from the ceiling of our barracks. Everyone around me fidgeted with excitement except Shannon, who stood mute and slack-jawed with an expression that betrayed no emotion. His arms were folded across his chest, and he seemed to consider the weight of the challenges ahead.

  “I will not discuss our tactics at this time, but every officer will be briefed. The details and goals of our missions will become apparent over the next few days.

  “Dismissed.”

  The screen blinked off. As it did, the barracks began to echo with loud conversations.

  “What do you think?” Lee asked me.

  “Sounds like war,” I said. “We will overwhelm them.”

  “If we can find them,” Vince reminded me.

  Like a crew heading into combat, we had the rest of the day to relax and think about the battles that might lie ahead. By the time Vince and I went to the sea-soldier’s bar late that afternoon, it was already packed with noncoms. Tight knots of combat-ready Marines stood along the bar slapping each other across the shoulders and speaking in booming voices. They toasted Admiral Klyber and made dunderheaded statements about Congress.

  A private from our platoon waved to us as we surveyed the bar. He came to us. “Lee, Harris, we have a table back there,” he said, pointing with a frothy mug.

  “I’m never quite sure, but wasn’t that one of Shannon’s men?” Lee asked, after the private left.

  “Couldn’t be. They don’t talk to us.”

  Lee shrugged. “I suppose we should at least drop in on them.”

  “You find them, I’ll get the beer,” I said as I pushed my way through the crowd. I reached the bar and looked around. It was a big night. By all appearances, we were headed for a fight. The mood was wild. When the bartender asked what I wanted, I ordered two bottles of Earth-brewed beer.

  “The best I have left is brew made with Earth-grown malt.”

  “That will do,” I said handing him a twenty.

  The bartender smiled and gave me very little change.

  It took a few minutes to fight through the crowd and find the table. I handed Vince his beer. He looked at the label, and asked, “Earth-grown malt? I thought you didn’t taste any difference?”

  “I don’t.” I smiled, nodded, took a swig of my beer. “But you’ve sprung for Earth-grown so many times, I felt guilty.”

  Drinks did not come free on board the Kamehameha, but they were pretty damn cheap. Even hard stuff like vodka and whiskey cost only one dollar per drink.

  As far as I was concerned, the only difference between Earth-grown and outworld beers was the cost. The snobbish crowd said they tasted a difference, but I never did. For reasons I could not peg at the time, Lee preferred Earth-grown brew; but I had not bought the beer for the taste, I bought it for the occasion.

  Most of our platoon sat around this table in two nearly concentric circles. “Guess we’re standing,” Lee said.

  “Have you guys heard anything?” someone asked.

  “You kidding?” a familiar voice burst out. “They’re corpses. Corporals are always the last to hear shit.”

  Just across from me, Sergeant Shannon sat with one leg up on the table. He looked relaxed, and his smile was almost friendly.

  “We’ll all know soon enough,” Lee said.

  The banter continued. We no longer seemed like a divided platoon. Shannon leaned back in his chair and listened to the conversations around him.

  “Harris?”

  Captain McKay, probably fresh from the officers meetings on Terraneau and still wearing his whites, tapped me on the shoulder. He smiled and spoke in a quiet tone that was just loud enough for me to hear him above the crowd. “Harris, I suspect that you are just about the most important person in the fleet right now.”

  “Begging your pardon, sir, I don’t understand.”

  “That an Earth-grown brew you’re drinking?” he asked, looking at my bottle. “The record from your helmet . . . that was the key to all of this. I showed it to Klyber, and he showed it to the Linear Committee.

  “Do you know what Admiral Klyber told the Committee? He told them that our enemies ‘no longer fear us.’ ‘No longer fear us,’ that was what finally woke them up. That and your video feed. Life in the galaxy just got a little more exciting thanks to that goddamned helmet of yours.”

  “I’m not sure what to say,” I said. I could not tell if McKay was angry or pleased. He sounded sarcastic, but I wasn’t sure if he was joking or angry. He did not stay long, either. A moment later he waved to the platoon and disappeared into the crowd.

  “We have our orders,” Sergeant Shannon said as he called Lee and me into his office the next day.

  “Have a seat.”

  We pulled chairs up to his desk. Judging by the time mark on the communiqué, Captain McKay had sent the orders less than an hour earlier. “The Kamehameha has been assigned to a planet called Ezer Kri. Ever heard of it?”

  “No, Sergeant,” Lee said.

  “We’re invading Ezer Kri?” Lee and Shannon stared at me. “Ezer Kri has been in the news. I’ve been following the story.”

  “You know about Ezer Kri?” Shannon asked. He picked up a combat knife and wiped its blade on his forearm.

  I began to feel self-conscious. “The story is all over the news. Ezer Kri has a large population of ethnically pure Japanese people who want to make Japanese the official language of the planet. The governor of the planet went to DC and the Linear Committee said no.”

  Shannon smiled. “Japanese? There’s got to be something more. You can’t invade a planet just because a bunch of people want to speak Japanese.”

  “I thought the old races disappeared,” Vince said.

  “You run into it a bit out here,” Shannon said. “But I’ve never seen an entire planet like that.”

  “So we’re sending a fleet?” I asked. “Are we going to blockade the planet or something?”

  “I don’t know what Klyber has in mind,” Shannon said. “He is sending the Kamehameha and a few support ships.”

  “Is Admiral Klyber coming along for the ride?” Lee asked.

  “I don’t know if he returned to ship after Terraneau,” Shannon said. “We’re still six days out from Ezer Kri. Harris, see that every man in the platoon gets his armor shined and ready.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You should be keen on maintenance considering all the trouble your faulty helmet has caused,” Shannon said.

  “One other thing . . . I worked you both over when I got here. The whole deal changes now that we have an assignment. You understand? I’ll be depending on you.”

  “Yes,” Lee said.

  “Understood,” I said.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The rain streamed down in sheets. Sudden gusts of wind slammed into the sides of the armored transport, battering it off course. I always hated ATs, steel-plated boxes designed with more concern about durability than aerodynamics.

  We called the cabin area of armored transports the “kettle” because it was metal, potbellied, and had no windows. Inside this kettle, we heard wind rattling the cables that ran between the AT’s tail and its stubby wings. The sounds of wind and rain were our only contact with the outside. I looked up through a hatch in the ceiling and saw the pilot flipping switches and pulling levers to smooth the ride. The walls of the transp
ort groaned as the ship touched down. Then the rear of the ship split open revealing a ramp for us to disembark. We had arrived.

  They packed both of Captain McKay’s platoons into one transport—sixty privates, sixteen corporals, and six sergeants. We came wearing armor and carrying minimal field supplies. Larger ships would bring artillery, vehicles, field hospitals, and temporary housing. For the time being, all of our equipment came strapped to our backs. I was not concerned. We had twenty-three hundred field-ready Marines on the ground, fighter craft circling the sky, and the only thing our enemy wanted was permission to speak a foreign language.

  Shannon, his M27 braced across his chest as if he expected resistance, charged down the ramp shouting for the platoon to follow. He vanished into the glare of the landing lights. We touched down on a temporary landing strip built by field engineers. Six other ATs landed around us. Above the brightness of the landing lights, I could see the deep black of the night sky.

  “Line ’em up!” McKay shouted, his voice thundering over the interLink.

  “Get a move on!” Sergeant Shannon yelled. The platoon assembled quickly, forming ranks and standing at attention. Shannon inspected the line, then took his place at the head of the platoon. The rain fell in glassy panes, which splintered in the wind. Huge drops tapped on my helmet and shoulder plates. Out of the side of my eye, I could see steam rising from spots on the racks of landing lights. Nestled in my temperature-controlled bodysuit, I felt warm. The temperature inside my armor was a balmy sixty-eight degrees.

  Captain McKay crossed the landing pad to inspect the platoon. Dressed in his Charlie Service uniform, he looked cold and wet. His face was pale, and his shoulders were hunched. “Report, Sergeant?”

  “All accounted for, sir!” Shannon said with a smart salute.

  I heard the whirr of a wing of Harrier fighters doing a fly-over. Captain Olivera had orchestrated the landing by the numbers. First he scanned the area from the Kamehameha to find an appropriate drop zone. Next, he sent in a team of commandos to secure the area, followed by the field engineers who erected the temporary landing facility. Once the zone was secure and the facility was constructed, fighters were sent to patrol the skies. It all seemed like overkill for Ezer Kri. From what I heard, Governor Yamashiro had even offered to let us use the local spaceport.

  McKay pulled a digital map unit from his belt and showed it to Sergeant Shannon. “Secure areas 7-J, 6-J, and 5-J, then set up camp at the perimeter—space W.”

  “Aye, sir,” Shannon said, and saluted.

  McKay returned the salute and walked off. The loud whine of turbines cut through the air as the transports lifted from the landing pad. More would arrive shortly.

  Our drop zone was twenty-two miles outside of Hero’s Fall, a city with nearly 2 million residents that served as everything but the government seat for Ezer Kri. The locals called Hero’s Fall “the old city”

  because it was the planet’s first settlement.

  “Okay, gentlemen, we have a long night ahead of us,” Shannon shouted over the interLink. “Let’s spread out. Harris and Lee, your fire team can take the flank.”

  Marines do things in threes. Platoons have three squads, each of which is composed of three fire teams. Lee, as the senior corporal, was our team leader. I carried an automatic rifle. We had two privates on the fire team—a grenadier named Amblin and a rifleman named Shultz.

  As the platoon divided into fire teams and formed a picket, we moved to the rear. We would remain to the right of the formation. When the shooting started, it would be our job to circle around the enemy. The formation worked well for scouting wide areas but would have left us exposed to sniper attacks in a less secure zone. But we were not walking into battle, and as far as I could tell, the only danger on the planet was that the locals wanted to tell us “sayonara” instead of “good-bye.”

  Klyber, however, saw our incursion as more of an unofficial occupation than an exercise. He deployed Marines to close the roads around Hero’s Fall. Two thousand men might not be enough of a force to lay siege to a city the size of Hero’s Fall, but we could certainly teach those Godless Japanese speakers a lesson.

  As we left the glare of the landing lights, the lenses in our visors switched automatically to night-for-day vision that illuminated the forest in eerie blue-white tones. While the lens enabled us to see clearly at night, it also rendered us color-blind and hampered our depth perception.

  “Keep the chatter down, gentlemen,” Shannon said. “Call out only if you see something.”

  Shannon led us across the meadow and into the trees. The woods outside of Hero’s Fall were filled with towering pines that reminded me of the grounds around my old orphanage. “Fan out,” Shannon said.

  “Keep an eye on your team.”

  About forty minutes into our march, we located a paved road that ran through the woods—a highway leading to town. There were no signs of cars. The police had probably closed the highway to assist with our invasion. Shannon divided the platoon into two squads, which he marched on either side of the road.

  “Harris, over here,” Shannon called, as we marched.

  I trotted to the front of the formation, sloshing through the damp pine needles and kicking up mud. Shannon had left the rest of the platoon and stood on a small ridge surrounded by a particularly dense growth of trees.

  “Harris, what do you see in that stand of trees?” he asked, pointing straight ahead with his rifle. The pocket of trees looked unremarkable. I used my heat-vision lens to see if someone was hiding in the brush. Nothing. Magnifying the view made no difference. “Trees,” I said, sounding confused.

  “Ever patrol a wooded area?” Shannon asked.

  “Only as a cadet,” I said.

  “There’s a trapdoor between those trees,” he said. “See it?”

  I used every lens in my helmet. “No, Sergeant,” I said, beginning to wonder if he was playing with me.

  “Stop looking for it. Listen for it. Use your sonar locator.”

  The locator was a device in our visors that emitted an ultrasonic “ping,” then read the way that the ping bounced off objects and surfaces.

  Using optical commands, I brought up the locator. A transparent green arc swished across my visor. In its wake, I saw four lines cut into the ground beneath a tree.

  “Come here, Harris,” Shannon said. He walked toward the door. As I followed, my sonar locator made a new reading, marking an oblong cavity beneath the ground in translucent green. “Damn,” I whispered.

  “I never would have thought about a locator sweep.”

  “It’s called a snake shaft,” Shannon said. “You have any idea what it’s used for?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Neither does anybody else,” Shannon said. “They’re what you might call an anomaly. Let’s go in for a closer look.”

  Sergeant Shannon pulled a grenade from his belt and set it for low yield. “Fire in the hole,” he yelled as he tossed it into the trees. The grenade exploded with a muffled thud. When the steam cleared, I saw that he had blown a ten-foot hole in the top of the tunnel. Water poured down it as if it were a drain. I stepped in for a closer look. It was so dark that even with my night-for-day vision, I could not see the bottom. “Who builds these?”

  Shannon came over to me. “Mogats, I suppose. Nobody knows for sure. We found them during a battle in the Galactic Eye. That was the first time anybody saw them, I think.”

  I looked up from the hole and stared at Sergeant Shannon. Had Shannon let that slip, or was he trying to tell me he was a Liberator?

  “They can stretch on for miles, and they’re strong. I’ve seen LG tanks park right on top of one of these snake shafts and not dent the roof.” LG tanks were low-gravity combat tanks—units that ran low to the ground and weighed in at as much as a hundred tons. “We used to dare each other to hide in the shaft while a tank ran over it. Far as I know, no one ever died doing it.”

  I stared down into that gaping black maw and wa
tched water pour into it. “Should we check it?” I asked.

  “You want to go down in there?” Shannon asked. He did not wait for me to answer. “Me either. I’ll have a tech send a probe through it later. Might be something down there. Sometimes they’re rigged to blow up.

  “I want you and Lee to go scout the area for more of them. Make me a map.” With that, Shannon returned to the platoon.

  It took several hours to scour the area. Our search turned up eleven more snake shafts. Lee and I caught up with the platoon at Hero’s Fall. I needed sleep, but that was not about to happen. Captain McKay and Sergeant Shannon hailed us. “Harris, Lee . . . Glad you could join us.”

  “We just got here, Sergeant,” Lee said.

  Across the camp, the platoons had already begun to assemble. I could see ranks forming. “Follow me,”

  McKay said as he started toward the camp.

  We set up camp in a large meadow just outside of town. By that time, the rain and wind had stopped. A pervasive stillness echoed across the grounds. The sun rose over the trees, and the wet grass sparkled. Three Harriers and a civilian shuttle flew in from the west. The fighters formed a tight wedge and circled low in the air as the shuttle touched down. Once the shuttle landed, the fighters thundered over the city’s edge and vanished behind a line of buildings.

  Captain McKay called the two platoons he commanded to attention. When we were in place, the shuttle’s hatch opened. Out stepped Captain Olivera, looking tall, gaunt, and dapper in his Naval whites. Behind Olivera came Vice Admiral Barry, the rather bell-shaped commander of the Scutum-Crux Fleet. Olivera and Barry met with McKay at the bottom of the ramp, and the three of them held a brief conversation. A few moments later, another officer disembarked, one whom I had not expected to see. Wearing a white uniform that seemed tailored to fit his skeletal frame, Admiral Klyber strode off the shuttle with what I would later learn was his distinctive long gait. Klyber stood at least three inches taller than Olivera—the tallest of the other officers. Pudgy little Barry barely came up to Klyber’s neck. Klyber conferred with Barry, asked McKay a question, and the entire party ambled forward.