Rogue clone (47 page)

We hid along the edge of that primal forest. We heard the scratch of tiny animals running among the branches overhead and the occasional howl of something larger marching upon the forest floor, but we never saw anything creeping or climbing. These woods were dark in the sunlight and black in the night.

“Have a look at this,” Freeman said.

Two Marines guarded the clearing sitting on a log. They did not have a fire. They did not need one. The night-for-day lenses in their helmets gave them better vision than a fire could ever offer. The ventilation in their bodysuits kept their environment a comfortable 75 degrees.

I lay down on the ground beside Freeman and shifted my weight so that I could peer through the scope. In the distance, the sun had just begun to rise, and that part of the sky was a rich blue. Behind the sentinels, the kettle door was open, and I could peer up the ramp and see the Marines milling about inside.

White light blazed within the kettle. Most of the men inside it wore their body armor, with their helmets off. Then I saw him. A man in a medic’s uniform walked around the kettle distributing plastic cups. The men drank the content out of these cups then crumbled them up.

“This looks promising,” I said.

The medic walked out to the guards and handed them cups. They emptied the little cups like shot glasses, snapping their heads backwards and spilling the liquid into their mouths. I handed the rifle back to Freeman and knelt beside him. “Give the medicine a few minutes to take,” I said.

We could not use the particle beam pistols because we could not risk damaging the transport. That left us with my two M27s, Freeman’s pistol, and my oversized combat knife. I thought about the knife that Hollywood Harris used in
The Battle for Little Man
and smirked.

“Get in position,” Ray said. “I’ll wait for your signal.” I nodded and took five men with me. I brought these elders along as scavengers. They would take weapons off the bodies that Ray and I left behind. We moved just inside the tree line, crouching, stealing behind thick trunks. When we stopped at one tree, the guards were no more than fifty feet away. They sat slumped on their fallen log. Their helmets were off, so I could see that they were not speaking to each other.

I handed an M27 to one of the elders, a young man who would have looked athletic had he not been so skinny. Then I told all five of them to stay behind the tree.

Things move slowly when you begin stealth missions. Nothing ruins stealth like impatience. I might have taken those five men with me, but when the adrenaline starts to flow, beginners become impatient. Moving slowly, taking long, shallow breaths that made no sound, I came within twenty feet of the guards. They sat on their makeshift bench, their eyes staring straight out without blinking. Their hands hung down by their sides. They were not comatose exactly, but they were strung out. One of them turned and looked in my direction. I was pretty well hidden between some ferns and a tree trunk. He would have seen me if he had his helmet on and might have seen me anyway, but he showed no reaction. His brown eyes seemed unfocused and his jaw hung open.

I pointed my forefinger straight up in the air, then brought it down as if aiming a pistol and pointed at the guards. The report of Freeman’s rifle was no louder than a man spitting, but it scared two large black birds that had settled a few feet away. The first bullet tore through a guard’s head, blowing off his ear and most of his forehead. The man fell off the log. The other guard fell a moment later. Neither man made a sound as they died, but their armor rattled as it struck the ground. The log blocked my view of the bodies, but a puddle of blood spread into view.

The hormone already started to flow through my veins. I looked around the clearing, took a deep breath, and ran to the transport. Hiding behind one of the doors at the base of the ramp, I knelt to think out my next move. The morning sun beat down. I felt heat reflecting off the ship. The men inside the kettle were not as dazed as the guards we had just killed. I heard them talking softly among themselves. They sounded mellow, not strung out. Had I not needed this transport, I would have tossed a grenade up the ramp. A grenade in the hole would have killed every one of them. Had any tried to escape, Freeman and I would have shot them as they left the ship. But I needed the transport in working condition.

I signaled for Freeman to come. The elders came, too. I did not want them to see this bloodbath. They looked so young. Most of them were in their thirties; but with their wide eyes and scared expressions, they looked young and vulnerable to me just the same.

“Stay here,” I whispered to the man beside me.

“I can help,” he said.

I pointed to the two dead guards. We could see them very clearly from beside the ship. The tops of their heads were blown off. One of the men had fallen in such a way that his face had turned in our direction. Below his eyebrows and to the right of his nose, everything was intact. Everything else was a wad of soft, bloody meat.

The man beside me looked at the bodies and swallowed. He started breathing hard. I knew the expression on his face. He was imagining himself falling just that way. Fortunately, Freeman arrived before the man could panic.

“I’ll take the left. You take the right,” I told Freeman. “We’ll both start in the middle.”

He nodded. He took his pistol. We edged our way to the bottom of the ramp and ran up shooting. There were thirty-six men on this transport, two pilots and a platoon—less the four men we had killed earlier and the two downed guards.

Most of the men did not even have their guns with them. They turned and looked at Freeman and me with stunned expressions as we opened fire. A man in the back jumped for the bench where his M27 lay. I hit him three times as he flew through the air. His head cracked the bench and he fell to the ground. Another man whirled around and leveled his gun on me. I shot him in the chest and the face, then shot the unarmed man who stood beside him.

Some of the Marines hid in the shadows. As I walked past one of the steel girder ribs, someone reached out and grabbed me by the shoulder and neck. I spun and slammed the butt of my M27 into his chest with so much force that the detachable stock broke.

The force of my blow did not hurt the Marine inside his armor, but it knocked him off balance. He fell to the deck, and I shot him in the back as he tried to climb to his feet. By now the hormone ran thick in my blood.

The noise of our guns was deafening inside the kettle and flashes from our muzzles looked like lightning. A Marine leaped at me from behind. I saw him at the last moment and pistol-whipped him. Shards from the broken rifle stock stabbed into the man’s cheek and lips. He screamed in pain. Blood streamed from the wounds. I shot him.

Another man ran toward the ladder that led to the cockpit. He may have wanted to hide. He may have wanted to call for help. I shot him between the shoulder blades, and he dropped to the floor. And then it was over and I never did use that damned knife. It was a one-minute storm that rained intensely and went away. I looked around the kettle with its bitter stew of dead Marines. The walls were covered with blood. The floor was littered with men in dark green armor. With all of the blood and flesh around them, they looked more like squashed insects than like men.

They had once been my comrades. A few years earlier, I would gladly have stood shoulder-to-shoulder with these men. Time draws great gulfs.

We only had a small window of time. The first men we shot had barely moved. They sat lethargically by and let us butcher them. As we moved into the transport, the Marines we encountered became more aware. Some of them seemed to awaken out of their drunken stupor entirely. That meant we had to get to the
Grant
as quickly as possible. If that fighter carrier was already filled with alert clones, it was time to surrender.

I invited the elders to come have a look. Most of them vomited as they came up the ramp, but that was expected. They did not know the workings of death; they were farmers. The elders—carried the bodies out of the ship. They worked in groups of two, holding the corpses by their feet and hands. They tossed the bodies into an untidy pile just outside the ship. These elders became acclimated with death quickly. When they first began clearing the bodies, the elders handled them gently. By the time they finished clearing out the kettle, these good Christian men lugged the corpses no more reverently than they would handle a sack of grain.

My job was different. I was the grave robber. I mixed and matched armor from the dead guards, wiped away the blood, and put together a full combat suit. This was the exact same thing I had done to Derrick Hines, the technician on that Confederate Arms ship, but it bothered me more. In fact, this entire bloody mission left me unnerved.

Ray climbed into the pilot’s chair. He had never flown a transport before, but he had flown some pretty big ships. As for me, I had never flown anything but a couple of private spacecraft. Everything I had ever flown was made by Johnston Aerospace.

The rest of the mission lasted only four minutes. I followed Ray up the ladder and into the cockpit. He had no trouble figuring out the controls. I heard the whine of the ramp doors closing. I heard the hiss of the thruster engines as we performed a very smooth vertical takeoff.

“That went well,” Freeman said, taking his eye from the wind screen for just a moment.

“Did it look like the medicine was already wearing off?” I asked.

Freeman nodded. “There are almost two thousand men up there. It’s not going to be this easy.”

“We need to go wholesale . . . sabotage the ship and kill them all with one big bang,” I said. We stared at each other in silence, both of us knowing that we did not stand a chance of pulling this off, both of us knowing it was far too late to back out.

“Transport Pilot, this is
Grant
. Fred, what the speck are you doing?” The voice came over the radio and it sounded lucid and irritated. There was no trace of the drug slurring his voice. We were only half way between the planet and the ship, but they had already spotted us. The sky around us had thinned. In a matter of seconds, we would leave the atmosphere.

“Fred, respond. Transport pilot . . .”

In the distance, I could see the
Grant
hovering in space like a great white moth. Radiant light from the atmosphere glowed on its underbelly. The top of the ship was lit by external lights. Beyond the ship, the textured blackness of space stretched in every direction.

“Fred, your orders were to remain on Little Man. Come in.”

Freeman and I exchanged glances. I went to the communications console. By this time I had checked the virtual dog tag on the combat armor I took from the guard. I was now Private First Class Thomas Cain.

“Grant traffic control, this is Cain. Our pilot is down,” I said. “He got sick last night. We’re bringing him in.”

Clap
.
Clap
.
Clap
. The sound of somebody clapping his hands three times in sardonic applause rang from the communications console. “If Fred’s sick, who is flying the transport? Fred’s the only enlisted man on the
Grant
who knows how to fly a transport.

“Wayson Harris. You never change.” I recognized the voice. It belonged to Vince Lee.

“Harris, their shields are up,” Freeman whispered. By now we were close to the
Grant
. Shields were invisible in space, but their energy reading showed on our computers. More importantly, their cannons and missiles must have been locked in on us.

“Lee?” I asked, “that you?”

“You’re making this too easy, Wayson. I pretty much decided I would have to take you out, but you’re coming to me. Whoever heard of anybody raiding a carrier? And in an unarmed transport, Wayson, that’s great.”

And that was when it happened. Flames burst out of several areas along the length of the
Grant
. The entire hull seemed to breathe in and out like a bellow. Then the ship exploded. It looked nothing like the grand explosion of the
Doctrinaire
. This explosion was not nearly as big nor as bright. Twenty-foot fireballs ignited from the hull and extinguished in the vacuum of space. Pieces of the ship crumbled and flew off into space.

The superstructure of the Grant never fell apart. The ship just seemed to turn off. The windows in the bridge went dark, and the ship listed slightly, then floated out of position.

We landed the kettle and hiked back through the woods. As expected, the Starliner was gone when we returned.

The congregation assumed I had flown off in it. Upon seeing me, Marianne started a frantic search for Caleb. She found him out in the field. Only then did I understand.

Archie must have listened when I taught Caleb how to broadcast a ship. Caleb said that Archie ordered him off the Starliner early that morning. It must have taken the old man a long time to program the location of the
Grant
into the computer. Once he did, he started up the ship. Around the camp, people compared Archie Freeman to Samson and said that he died a martyr. I don’t think he saw it that way. He would have described himself as a shepherd protecting his fold, the bastard. But he had left me stranded on goddamned Little Man. Marianne and Caleb would adopt me, and I thought I could love them, but I was made for space, not farming. Ray, I thought, would have even more trouble adapting than me. He’d abandoned this life once before.

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr. Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)