The Clone Republic Page 5

  “Harris. Harris!” Godfrey’s voice rang in my ears, but I could not suck enough air into my lungs to answer.

  “Damn,” Godfrey said, but his grieving did not last long. “Phillips get to my office and contact Fleet Command. We need reinforcements, and now.” Why Godfrey would ask for reinforcements from a fleet that was thousands of light-years away was beyond me.

  I rolled from side to side, trying to draw air in my lungs and find the strength to stand. My back ached. My chest burned. My helmet protected my head from damage, not from pain. As I squirmed to lie on my side, my vision cleared. I saw the words “Theo Mervin, Private, First Class” superimposed over the cloud of dust to my right. As the air settled, I saw a pile of blocks and shattered tiles. A long crossbeam that must have weighed multiple tons stuck out of the top of the pile at a nearly straight angle. The top of Mervin’s shattered helmet peeked out from beneath it.

  The avalanche had dumped me in the courtyard. Kneeling, still dizzy from the blast and winded from the fall, I peered over the waist-high ruins of the outer wall. Increasing the magnification in my visor, I scanned the desert and saw four figures crouched along a distant ridge—three men in camouflaged fatigues and Kline, who had not changed out of his black-and-white card dealer’s outfit. He still had that grenade glued to his hand. Clearly, Kline had not come to fight. He came to scavenge. As Freeman had suspected, the grenade had worked like a catalyst, forcing Crowley to attack. If Kline had ever wondered whether or not to join forces with Crowley, Freeman’s grenade had surely made the decision for him. There he was, watching the action, hoping to find the key on Ray Freeman’s dead body and disarm the grenade.

  “Harris?” Godfrey asked, likely having spotted me from a barracks window. “Harris, report.”

  “Just a little shook up,” I said.

  “Not your condition, you idiot,” Godfrey said. “What do you see?”

  “I see some of them . . . Four of them, a hundred thirty yards out.” A tool in my visor measured the distance.

  “There are three more a few yards to the east,” Ray Freeman interrupted.

  “I don’t see . . . No, there they are. He’s right.” They wore sand-colored camouflage suits. Even after increasing the magnification in my visor, I did not know how Freeman had spotted them. There they were—Crowley and two other men standing around a table with a map and some kind of control console. Seeing the console explained a lot. Crowley hadn’t come with an army, he’d come with trackers—motion-tracking robots that registered movement in a designated area and fired at that movement with incredible accuracy. Shaped like a barber pole, with radar equipment crammed into the ball at the top, one of these single-task devices cost almost nothing to build and could be used to fire anything from pistols to rockets.

  “He’s got trackers,” I called out to Godfrey. “I can’t see them, but I can see the control console.”

  “He has six trackers,” said Freeman. “Four guarding the front wall of the base, one on the west, and one on the east.”

  “You’re sure about that count?” I asked.

  “Crowley has twenty men watching the west wall of the base,” Freeman continued, “and ten to the east.”

  “Where are you, Freeman?” Godfrey asked. “Are you near the armory?”

  Freeman did not answer.

  “What is your position?” Godfrey repeated. What he should have asked was how the hell Freeman had tapped into our communications. The interLink was supposedly secure from civilian interference. Freeman did not care about Gobi Station, defending the Republic, or protecting its Marines. Wherever he had hidden himself, he did not plan to go down with a platoon of clones. He was, after all, a mercenary, not a soldier. As far as I could tell, the only things he cared about were staying alive and capturing Crowley.

  “Dammit! Where are you, Freeman?” Godfrey demanded.

  Freeman said nothing.

  “Do you have a clean shot at them?” Godfrey asked.

  Still no answer.

  I started to shuffle along the wall to get a better look at Crowley’s position.

  “Do not move, Harris,” Freeman said.

  “I see movement out the main gate,” Rickman broke in.

  Peering over the wall, I saw three Marines run toward a heap of rocks and dive behind it. They moved so quickly that I did not have a chance to scan their names. Two of the men took cover behind the massive front arch of the outpost and fired. They fired six quick shots, to which Crowley’s men responded with a token spray of automatic fire.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I screamed into the interLink. The arch would offer protection from bullets, but a particle beam or a rocket would reduce it to rubble.

  “Get your men out of there,” Freeman said. But he was too late. The top of a tracker popped up from behind a sand dune; and before anyone could react, two rockets came flying toward the arch. At first I only saw the contrails, then a bright flash bleached the air around the arch where the men were hiding. The entire desert rumbled with reverberation. Rock chips and large chunks of pillars flew across the courtyard. A fist-sized stone struck my helmet. Adding to the cacophony, the domed roof of the main hall caved in. As the smoke and dust cleared, the jagged remains of the arch poked out of the ground in haphazard spikes. The rockets had destroyed the entrance and much of the main hall. From where I stood, I could look directly into Glan Godfrey’s office. A huge block had fallen from the roof and crushed his desk, and I saw no sign of the communications console, our link to the outside world. Godfrey tried to raise Rickman and Phillips on his interLink, but no one responded.

  “Harris, get to the armory,” Godfrey said.

  The armory was in the far corner of the base, just beyond the office. That last rocket had smashed most of the building, but the doorway to the armory remained standing. I started across the courtyard, cutting through the shallow edges around the stagnant pond area of the courtyard.

  “Harris, stop,” Freeman’s voice shouted through the audio piece in my helmet. “Those trackers have you. Check for scanners with your radar sensors.”

  For a civilian, Ray Freeman seemed to have an incredible amount of information about Marine Corp combat armor. Our helmets included a sensor warning system that detected radar devices. I should have switched on the sensor the moment I knew there were trackers outside the wall. I ran the scan and froze in midstep, still standing in the shallows of that polluted brackish pond. A blue ring appeared around the edges of my visor as the sensor kicked in. The ring remained blue for a moment, then turned yellow, then orange. The trackers were bathing the courtyard with radar, and they could only be looking for me. If the ring in my visor turned red, it meant that the sensors had fixed on my location. Orange meant they had detected me, but I had stopped moving before they could fire. A strong wind blew across the courtyard, shaking some reeds, and the ring around my visor turned yellow momentarily as the trackers homed in on the reeds. I dropped to the ground and felt my knees sink into the mud. My only hope was that the trackers would not notice me.

  Moments passed slowly. In the air-conditioned comfort of my helmet, I felt both an odd elation and fear. Large drops of sweat rolled down the sides of my face, but kneeling in the mud and the reeds with trackers searching to find me, I felt strangely relaxed. I listened for the hiss of incoming rockets as the seconds passed and the ring in my visor fluctuated from yellow to orange and back to yellow again. It never turned blue or red.

  “Harris, get to the armory,” Godfrey yelled.

  “Crowley doesn’t care about the armory,” Freeman said. “He wants the barracks.” And Godfrey must have understood. Crowley wanted to keep the platoon bottled up in one place where he could hit it without risk of destroying the weapons he had come to steal.

  “We need to attack,” Freeman said.

  “Are you insane?” Godfrey asked. “Harris, either get to the armory or get your ass back to the barracks.”

  They haven’t located Freeman and they have me
pinned down in the courtyard, I thought as I peered out through the reeds. Everybody else is right where Crowley wants them.

  “Godfrey, you can’t hide in the barracks,” Freeman said. “You’re playing into his hands.”

  “Harris, get over here,” Godfrey ordered. “We’ll cover you.”

  “Freeman, got any suggestions?” I asked.

  Enemies around the west and north walls fired into the courtyard. Poorly aimed, possibly not aimed at all, their bullets chipped into the sandstone wall, making sparks and dust. They must have been hoping to coax me into running back to the barracks or returning fire.

  “Make a break for the northeast corner,” Freeman said.

  I looked across the yard toward the northeast corner of the outpost—the nearly disintegrated northeast corner where Rickman and Phillips had made their stand. The rockets had destroyed Phillips so thoroughly that his armor did not even register. “You’re shitting me, right?” I asked, as I squeezed the rifle stock against my chest and prepared to run.

  “I’ll take care of the trackers,” Freeman answered.

  “You have a shot at them?” I asked. Even as I spoke, someone fired a spray of bullets along the wall behind me.

  “Are you listening, Harris?” Godfrey piped in. “Get your ass over here.”

  “Leave them to me,” Freeman said. “Move on the count of three.”

  “Got it,” I said.

  “It’s your court-martial,” Godfrey said.

  “Get specked,” I answered.

  “One.”

  Some kind of strange creature shot into the air along the southeast corner of the outpost. I did not see it clearly, but it looked something like a giant flying snake as it jumped nearly thirty feet in the air, then darted behind a wall.

  “Two.”

  Whatever Freeman had unleashed, it distracted the trackers. The ring around my visors went blue. I heard the hiss of rockets, but they flew well over my head and slammed into a wall along the back of the courtyard. In the wake of the explosion, a large rock slammed across the top of my helmet, almost knocking me senseless.

  Three.

  I did not hear Freeman count that last number. The impact of the rock hitting my helmet must have disabled my interLink circuit. In the echoing silence, I climbed to my feet and sprinted. Ahead of me, I saw Freeman leap to the top of a huge pile of rubble. He fired a grenade launcher toward the trackers, turned, then slid back down the mound for cover as men outside the outpost answered him with a hail of bullets. The shock wave of Freeman’s grenade knocked me slightly off course. No one fired at me, and the sensor rings in my helmet remained blue. I dived headlong and joined him behind the rubble.

  “Crowley has already left,” Freeman said, as I sat up and pulled off my helmet.

  “How do you know?” Using my rifle stock as a crutch, I pushed myself up and peered over the rubble. I saw nothing but open desert.

  Freeman handed me a palm-top computer display that showed Gobi Station and the surrounding landscape. Freeman had either established a link with some satellite tracking our area or placed cameras around the outside of the base. The northern and western walls were ruins. The display showed people as small white ovals.

  “You placed sensors?”

  “Two days ago,” Freeman said.

  “You only flew in yesterday morning,” I said.

  “Don’t you ever wake up?” Freeman asked. “I’ve been on this damned planet for three days now . . . came quietly with a second ship in tow. The one they hit was a decoy; my real ship is down there,”

  Freeman said, nodding toward the canyon behind our base. “I can take you in the hold as far as the next outpost.”

  “I can’t leave Gobi,” I said.

  “Have it your way.” Freeman laughed and flashed a toothy smile. “Don’t suppose you would cover me while I make a run for my ship.”

  “I suppose not,” I said.

  “The ship has missiles and a chain gun,” Freeman said. “Help me get to my ship, and I’ll fix this.”

  “I don’t trust you,” I said. I tried to peer around the rubble to get a look at the enemy. Somebody fired a wild shot that hit several feet wide of me.

  “They’re moving south. They will leave a few men to keep us pinned down while the rest of their force flanks the barracks,” Freeman said, pointing at his display. “Godfrey could take them if he had any brains.”

  “He won’t,” I agreed.

  A small trickle of blood ran down the side of Freeman’s bald head. He didn’t bother with helmets or battle gear other than the chestplate that was built into his fatigues. He placed one foot on a partially destroyed sandstone block and unloaded the grenade launcher he kept slung over his shoulder. He must have known that I did not trust him, but he also knew that I was trapped. I could either help him escape or pull him down with me.

  “What do you have in mind?” I asked.

  “They’re gathering around the barracks.” Freeman handed me his computer. Even as I watched, the little ovals representing Crowley’s men moved toward the ridges along the barracks. “You storm them here, and I’ll go get the ship.”

  “There are five men there,” I pointed out.

  Freeman took back his palm display and said nothing.

  “Take out five men armed with a pistol?”

  “How busted is your helmet?” Freeman asked.

  “The sound is out,” I said.

  “Does the polarizing lens still work?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said placing the helmet over my head. The nonfunctioning interLink turned the inside of my helmet into an echo chamber. Using a few optical commands, I ran a diagnostic. “It works,” I said, removing the helmet again.

  No sooner had I said this than the strange flying animal that had distracted the trackers popped up from behind the far wall of the base. It skirted the top of the wall and dropped to the ground, traveling through the swamp and reeds. Only it wasn’t an animal. It was a service drone that Freeman controlled with a small remote.

  Dragging a ten-foot train of shimmering brown cloth behind it, the drone snaked toward us and stopped. Freeman unclipped the thermal blanket he had tied around it and attached a thin silver disc. “You’ll want to cover your eyes in a moment,” Freeman said.

  Replacing my helmet, I watched the little drone pick its way through the debris that had once been the outpost’s massive front wall. The drone zigged around broken pillars and scrambled through a large pipe. It disappeared behind the wall, but I could still see it on Freeman’s readout as it approached the terrorists’ bunker.

  If Crowley’s men saw it coming, they didn’t seem to care. When the drone got within fifty feet of their location, the little sphere exploded in a chemical flash so bright that it drowned out the desert sun.

  “Go!” Freeman yelled, and he slapped my helmet to make sure that I had heard him. Even looking through polarizing lenses, I could barely see. The Gobi landscape looked faded and white. I felt as if I had been staring into the sun. Running half-blind, I did not see the knee-high ridge left from the broken wall. The toe of my boot jammed into the remains of a heavy sandstone block, and I lurched forward but managed to regain my balance without falling.

  Over the top of the sand dune I saw three of Crowley’s men squirming on the ground rubbing their eyes with both hands. One of the men heard me coming and patted the ground around him until he found a gun. He squinted as he aimed at the sound of my footfalls. I squeezed off two rounds hitting him in the face and chest. One of his friends screamed, “What happened?” I shot him and the other man. 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. From where I stood, I had a clear view of the cockpit, but the glass was mirror-tinted and I could not see in. The ship hovered over me for a few moments, then launched across the desert in the direction of Morrowtown. 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 Freeman’s. Its titanium-barreled chain guns made one continuous flash as they spent hundreds of bullets per second. Some of the guerillas tried to escape, but there was no escape, not from Freeman. Two men lunged into an armored truck. Before they could get the vehicle moving, he fired a missile that reduced it to flames and twisted metal. Freeman sprayed a dune with that chain gun, churning up sprays of blood and sand. When he finished, shreds of smoldering cloth floated in the air like autumn leaves. The only man left standing was Kline.

  “Bastards!” Kline shrieked in his thick accent as I approached him. “You bastards! Are you going to kill me, too?”

  Kline still cradled the grenade with both hands. His clothes were spattered and dripping with blood, none of it his own. He looked down at the pulverized remains of his allies. “Oh . . . goddamn . . .” he muttered. Freeman hovered over the dune and landed his ship in a rippling heat cloud. He climbed out and came over to inspect his work. In the distance, Godfrey emerged from the barracks and started toward us. Freeman stared at Kline with disgust. “Go,” he said.

  Kline looked down at his hand, then held the grenade out for Freeman. “Please?”

  “Keep it,” Freeman said. He turned his back on Kline and walked away. Kline cradled the grenade against his chest as he staggered into the desert. I didn’t know if he would die of thirst or be blown to pieces, and I tried not to care. That useless moron had tried to sell my platoon for the slaughter, I told myself. But when he paused and looked back in what seemed like a plea for help, I felt a sharp pang of guilt. A moment later, he disappeared over a dune.