The Clone Republic Page 11

  “Let’s have a look at the ranks, shall we?” Klyber said in a comfortable voice, but he paid little attention to the rows of Marines as he walked by. “Have you encountered any resistance?” Klyber asked.

  “No, sir,” McKay replied.

  “No one challenged the air wings, either?” Klyber asked.

  “No, sir,” said Olivera.

  “Have you found evidence of terrorist activity?” Klyber asked.

  “One of my platoons sighted a large tunnel just west of town,” McKay answered. “It was over three miles long.”

  “A three-mile-long snake shaft?” Klyber asked. “Religious fanatics, mobsters, racial segregationists . . . It’s getting hard to tell the riffraff apart. I understand the Mogats have a large presence on Ezer Kri. Are your men prepared to lay down the law?”

  “Yes, sir,” said McKay.

  “Then we have little to worry about, Captain,” Klyber said, sweeping his gaze over the ranks. “This seems like a very pleasant planet; let’s hope our stay is uneventful. Admiral Barry, I wish to conclude our tour of Ezer Kri within the month.”

  The name of the city appeared as “Hero’s Fall” in our orders and in the mediaLink accounts of our operation, but as usual, we were misinformed. The local signage said “Hiro’s Fall.” Apparently the city was named after Takuhiro Yatagei, “Hiro” for short, the planet administrator who stocked the planet with people of Japanese descent. This was the spot where he and the original colonists landed—in legend talk, they “fell from the sky.”

  Searching for “riffraff ” in Hiro’s Fall proved to be problematic. The bureaucratic tangles began the first day. The mayor of Hiro’s Fall complained to Governor Yamashiro, and Yamashiro formally inquired of the Senate if the Unified Authority was declaring “martial law” on Ezer Kri. The historic reference did not go unnoticed.

  I wish we had declared Martial Law. I wish we had launched a full-scale invasion. Enemies do not demand their rights when you bully them, citizens do. Several shopkeepers refused to allow us to inspect their businesses. The president of a car manufacturer called his congressman in DC when Captain McKay sent an inspection team to visit his plant. The Hiro’s Fall police department even arrested one of our fire teams for assaulting a local resident. When the police discovered that the victim was a burglar caught in the act, they let the squad go with a warning.

  None of this should have mattered, but the more we scratched the surface, the more we found evidence of deeply rooted corruption. An inspection of the port authority logs showed that the local police ignored smugglers. The Senate’s problem might have been with the Japanese population of Ezer Kri, but the problem in this town was a Mogat infestation. The Mogat community had become so deeply rooted in Hiro’s Fall that people referred to one of the western suburbs as the “Mogat district.”

  I had read more than a few stories about Mogats since taking Aleg Oberland’s advice about following current events. The Mogats were a religious cult that took its name from Morgan Atkins, a mysterious and charismatic man who vanished about fifty years ago. I did not know anything about Atkins himself, and the only thing I knew about his movement was that it was the first religion created in space. The U.A. government promoted Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. These churches had holy sites on Earth, and the government encouraged any activity that strengthened ties between frontier planets and Earth.

  Atkins’s beliefs were pangalactic. His preaching stressed independence, stopping just shy of outright rebellion. While the U.A. Constitution called for general freedom of religion, the Senate spun out a litany of obtuse laws designed to discourage Mogat expansion. The laws did not succeed. Protected by the courts, Mogat communes sprang like daisies across the frontier. News stories about the Mogat movement inevitably started with accusations about smuggling and ended with warnings about Mogat proselytizing and predictions that Atkinism would one day be the largest religion in the galaxy. No matter what we found, Barry and Klyber seemed unwilling to do more than patrol the streets. We sent platoons on routine patrols through the Mogat district—an industrial area lined with warehouses and factories. We sent “peacekeeping” missions to monitor spaceports. Klyber wanted to make our presence felt without creating confrontations. His strategy worked. Most of the residents of Hiro’s Fall resented our presence. We made ourselves hard to ignore.

  I did not mind patrolling Hiro’s Fall, though it was fairly dull work. The town was not especially picturesque, but you could see the Japanese influence everywhere. A few downtown parks had pagodas with rice paper walls and fluted roofs. The canal running through the center of town was teeming with gold and white koi. Less than 30 percent of Hiro’s Fall was Japanese; but if you were in the right part of town, you might see women dressed in orange-and-red kimonos. My sightseeing ended when the shooting began.

  We began sending routine patrols into the Mogat district the night after we landed. These patrols were uneventful. We would hike past warehouses, steel foundries, and gas stations. Workmen stopped and stared at us. There was no way of knowing if these people were Atkins believers, though I suppose most of them were. One thing I noticed during a patrol was that few people in the Mogat district were Japanese.

  Seven days after we landed on Ezer Kri, Staff Sergeant Ron Azor led the Twenty-fifth Platoon into the Mogat district for a late-morning patrol. The goal was to follow a random path, marching through alleys and small streets as well as main roads. Azor’s path, however, was reckless. Our combat helmets were designed for standard battlefield situations. They offered good visibility in most situations, but anything above a seventy-degree plane was a blind spot. Whoever planned the attack must have known that.

  Azor opened his platoon up for an ambush by marching through a labyrinth of tall buildings and narrow alleyways. A four-story cinder-block building lined their final stretch. Walking beside that building, Azor’s platoon had no hope of spotting the enemy that watched from above. Just as the platoon reached the middle of the block, somebody fired two rockets from the roof of the building. Four men died instantly. Gunmen, hiding behind a ledge, picked off three more men as the platoon dashed across the street for cover.

  Desperate to regroup, Azor shot the door off a warehouse. He and his men ducked in and radioed for assistance. Moments later, three rockets slammed into the warehouse. The corrugated steel walls blew apart as did a fuel pump inside the building. No one survived.

  I was off duty when Shannon burst into the barracks and announced the attack. Every available man was called in. I threw on my armor and climbed into a truck. As we drove from the camp, I looked into a blue sky filled with feathery clouds, wondering how there could be an attack on such a beautiful day. I asked that question again as the truck dropped us next to the pile of rubble that had once been a thirty-foot-tall warehouse. Twisted fingers of what once was a wall stood in the corners of the lot; everything else had crumbled. We were the third platoon to arrive on the scene. Men in green armor dotted the rubble. Shannon led us to a corner of the ruins, and we began pulling up metal sheets and concrete chunks by hand. I felt the urgency, but I knew that we would not find survivors. No one survives that kind of devastation.

  I heard the thudding engines of gunships passing overhead. Long and squat and bulky, three Warthogs floated across the sky. They hardly looked airworthy, but there was something menacing about the deliberate way they scoured the rooftops.

  The tension was thick. Had a pedestrian carelessly strolled down the street, we might have shot first and asked questions later. But the streets were empty. Perhaps they had been empty before the ambush as well. I wondered how many people knew that the ambush was coming.

  “Dig,” Shannon shouted over the interLink. “Any man who finds a survivor gets a three-day pass.”

  We normally would have located the bodies by looking for signals from their helmets, but the heat of the explosion must have destroyed their equipment. There were no signals, so we dug blindly through concrete, iron, and dust. As time wen
t on, hope dwindled, and the rescue effort became less organized. City engineers arrived on the scene with laser arcs that could cut through concrete and iron alike. With their help, we located twelve crushed bodies and the search became even more discouraging. Judging by the way the bodies were laid out, Azor must have told his men to spread out along the outer wall once they entered the warehouse. Perhaps they thought they needed to guard the windows and doors. Sergeant Shannon came to check on me. He cursed softly when I mentioned my theory about the way the bodies were spread. “Fool,” he said, yanking a metal sheet from under concrete so violently that it tore. “Clone idiot! The enemy shoots rockets at you, so what do you do? You don’t hide in a fuel dump. Goddamn it!”

  As Shannon spoke, a formation of fighters flew over us. Even though we were wearing helmets and speaking over the interLink, the noise of the fighters drowned out his voice. When they streaked away, I heard Shannon say, “So much for passive force. Klyber is going to make an example of friggin’ Ezer Kri.”

  We did not find all of the bodies. In the early evening, as the sun set and a thick layer of clouds filled the sky, Captain Olivera spoke to us on an open interLink. “An entire platoon has perished here,” the captain of the Kamehameha began.

  As he spoke, three Harriers cruised low overhead—less than fifty feet off the ground. They rotated in perfect unison and banked as they made a hairpin turn. Perched on two crumbling piles of rock, I watched them. Suddenly the middle fighter in the formation exploded and dropped out of the sky. It landed in a heap of smoke and flames. Looking quickly, I saw a contrail leading from a nearby rooftop. Someone had sneaked up there and fired a missile. The two remaining Harriers broke out of formation.

  “Spread out! Take cover!” Shannon yelled.

  The Harriers zipped around a building, then charged back to the battle zone. Crouching, with my rifle drawn, I watched the roof from behind the knee-high remains of a concrete wall. No more shots were fired. Whoever hit that Harrier had slipped away after making his point.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  What leads men to make such foolish decisions? Admiral Klyber could never have touched the Mogats of Ezer Kri had they lain low. The government did not trust them, but our bylaws protected them. The daily patrols would have continued. We might have raided some buildings. Perhaps they had something to hide, or perhaps their separatist beliefs prevented them from waiting us out. Whatever possessed those Atkins believers to ambush our platoon, they had seriously miscalculated. Fanatics that they were, perhaps the Mogats thought they could take on the entire Scutum-Crux Fleet. But a few rockets and a massacred platoon did not intimidate Bryce Klyber. It irritated him. It showed him that the Ezer Kri government could not be relied upon.

  With the Kamehameha at his command, Klyber had more than enough firepower to overwhelm Ezer Kri—a planet with a commerce-based economy and impressive engineering facilities but no standing army. Annihilating Ezer Kri would not have been enough for Klyber. He would have used Ezer Kri to send a message across the territories, and he would have made that message clear enough that every colony in the Republic would understand it.

  The day of the massacre, the Kamehameha altered its orbit so that it flew over Hiro’s Fall. As it made its first pass, the ship opened fire, leveling the entire Mogat district. More than fifteen square miles were thoroughly pulverized. Whatever it was that the Mogats wanted to hide, the Kamehameha vaporized it in a flash of red lasers and white flames.

  A few hours after the demonstration ended, Captain McKay sent several platoons to the area to inspect the damage and search for survivors. It was all theatrics, of course. The destruction was total; nobody could have survived it.

  I did not recognize the scene when I hopped off the truck. The sun had not yet risen, and in the gray-blue light of my day-for-night lenses, the urban Mogat district looked like a desert. Lots that once held buildings now looked like rock gardens. The heat of the lasers had melted anything made of glass and metal. It incinerated wood, paper, and cloth into fine ash.

  We strolled around the wreckage for nearly an hour, not even pretending to search for survivors. Klyber sent us so that the citizens of Hiro’s Fall would know that the U.A. Navy assumed responsibility for demolishing the offending district and that the U.A. Navy felt no regret.

  “You see anything?” Vince Lee asked, as we walked over a sloping mound of pebbles that might have once been a factory.

  Gravel crunched under my armored boot. “This is an improvement. If they planted some trees and built a pond, this could be a park,” I said.

  “You’re not far off,” Private Ronson Amblin said, coming up beside us. “That happens a lot. I’ve been on more than one assignment where we sacked an entire town, just blew it to dust. You watch. They’ll build a monument to galactic unity in this very spot.”

  “And the bodies?” I asked.

  “Bodies?” Amblin asked. “Harris, those lasers were hot enough to melt a truck. Anybody caught here was cremated.”

  By this time, the sun had started to rise above the skyline, and just as it cleared the tallest buildings, a motorcade approached. Four policemen on motorcycles led the way followed by four shiny, black limousines, with more motorcycles bringing up the rear. The convoy drove within fifty yards of us and stopped.

  Shannon spoke on an open interLink channel. “The local authorities.” I detected disgust in his voice. “Fall in behind the other platoons.”

  Moving at a brisk trot, we lined up in two rows behind the other platoon and stood at attention. The doors of the first government car swung open. I had not been able to see into the cars with their heavily tinted windows, but I was not surprised to see Captain McKay, dressed in formal greens, emerge.

  “Attention,” Shannon bellowed in our ears, and we all snapped to attention. I did not recognize the next man who climbed out of the car, but the third man out was Alan Smith, the mayor of Hiro’s Fall. A couple of young aides climbed out of the second car and joined Smith. As Smith looked up and down the scene, I saw a set of meaty fingers grip the sides of the car as the rotund form of Vice Admiral Absalom Barry, wearing whites with multiple rows of medals, struggled to his feet. Barry smiled as he looked over the landscape. Happy-looking wrinkles formed around his eyes. He approached the mayor and muttered something in a soft voice. I could not hear what he said, but Smith laughed nervously. He looked pale. As he passed our ranks, he stared down at our feet.

  “I think a slight alteration in the town’s name would be appropriate. Naming the town ‘Heroes’ Fall,’

  after the fallen Marines seems fitting, don’t you think? And this spot, this destroyed area, would be a fine spot for a monument and park . . . with a statue dedicated to the memory of the fallen. That would go a long way toward showing your loyalty to the Republic,” Barry said in a raspy voice, his pudgy cheeks glowing. “Nothing too fancy. Nothing over a hundred feet, just a simple monument surrounded by U.A. flags . . .” and then they were too far away to hear.

  As the others left, Captain McKay remained behind to address the men. “Gentlemen, you have just witnessed the ‘Bryce Klyber Urban Renewal’ program.”

  EZER KRI:One of over 100 habitable planets in the Scutum-Crux Arm POPULATION:25 million (8.5 million of Japanese ancestry)

  LARGEST CITY:Hiro’s Fall (4.5 million residents)

  CENTER OF COMMERCE:Hiro’s Fall

  CENTER OF INTELLECTUAL ACTIVITY:Hiro’s Fall

  GOVERNMENT SEAT:Rising Sun

  POPULATION OF RISING SUN:3 million (2.5 million of Japanese ancestry)

  Pulverizing the Mogat district changed the social climate for us in Hiro’s Fall. People who once pretended to ignore our presence now feared us. Captain Olivera left three platoons to patrol “Heroes’

  Fall,” then stationed the rest of us in other major cities. My platoon was assigned to accompany a diplomatic envoy visiting the capital city, Rising Sun.

  We crossed the planet in two ships. Most of the platoon traveled in the kettle of
an AT. Vince Lee and I, and four other lucky privates, stood guard on the second ship, a civilian cruiser on loan to the diplomatic corps.

  The rest of the men flew in the belly of a flying drum that barely looked fit to fly. They sat on hard benches with crates of supplies and equipment around their feet. The main cabin of the civilian cruiser looked like a living room complete with lamps, couches, and a wet bar. God, I envied those other guys. Wearing greens instead of armor, two privates and I stood guard around the main cabin. We stood like statues, pretending we did not notice as the bartender mixed drinks and the waiter served meals. The pilot flew the mission like a sightseeing tour, hugging close to mountains so that his passengers would enjoy the vistas. That was another difference between the AT and the cruiser—the cruiser had windows. From where I stood, I occasionally saw our Harrier escort through those windows. After the trouble in Hiro’s Fall, we weren’t taking any chances.

  Whenever I could, I stole a glimpse outside. The rain around Hiro’s Fall gave way to snow as we traveled north. We flew over snow-glazed forests and frozen lakes, heading east into a brilliant red-sky sunset. The flaming horizon turned black, and we flew beneath a cloudless sky. As we continued on, the pilot lowered the lights in the cabin, and several of the passengers went to sleep. When my detail ended, I went to a small cabin in the back of the cruiser to rest. Vince Lee took my post. As I entered the ready room, I noticed light under the door of an executive berth. I tried to figure out who might be behind that door as I lay on my bunk. Sleep came quickly. Lee woke me a few hours later. “Harris,” he said as he prodded my shoulder, “we’re nearly there.”