The Clone Redemption (46 page)

“There's going to be some trouble down here,” I said. “Let's see how they fight without their shields.”

The U.A. bastard hovering around me walked over for a closer look. Would he notice the way I rested my finger over the trigger of my M27? If he did, it would be the last thing he saw before God welcomed him to Heaven.

The bastard moved slowly, like I was some kind of museum exhibit. He twisted his head to see me from different angles, bending far enough forward that he should have seen the pingpong-ball-sized grenade cribbed in the fingers of my left hand. I mean, what kind of corpse cradles a grenade in his hand? If I saw a body like that, I'd pump a couple rounds into the head to make sure it never came back to life; but this idiot stared at me for a few seconds. When I did not move, he walked away.

I made my move. With a subtle flick of my wrist, I half rolled/half tossed the grenade, hoping it would reach the nearest set of stairs. It came up short. Instead of rolling into an open doorway about thirty feet away, the grenade skittered to a stop beside a dead Marine.

I did not know whether or not the upgraded Unified Authority armor would protect its occupants from the blast, but my armor sure as speck would not. A second before the blast made milk shakes of everyone it touched, I sprang to my feet, shot the Unified bastard who'd been hovering around me in the face, and sprinted for the nearest corner.

Several Unifieds saw my miraculous rise from the dead and fired at me with their stupid fléchette guns; but I'd caught them napping and put space between us. They didn't worry me. When it came to aiming accurately and firing fast, give me a good old-fashioned pistol or an M27 with a short stock any day. I did not return their fire. I sprinted for a corner, then I dived over a row of chairs and slid to safety behind the wall as the blast of the grenade shook the air.

“Ritz, send your men back to the windows. Shoot any Unifieds you see trying to run away. I want them pinned down in the building.”

“You want me to herd them into the building?” he asked.

I managed to say, “Listen to me, Ritz,” before I noticed all of the U.A. Marines crowded around me. Dozens of them. At first I thought I'd been spotted, but most of them ran past me and around the corner. One of them stopped and put out a hand to help me climb to my feet. If he'd known who I was, he would have shot me; but I had created chaos. My grenade must have killed the Unifieds who'd shot at me; and the ones who were left only wanted to see what was going on.

If they saw me carrying a gun, they would have figured out that I was not one of theirs, so I ignored my M27 as the U.A. Marine pulled me to my feet. Without the glow of shields, his armor looked just like my armor. The only notable difference was the tube running along the outside of his right sleeve. I hoped he would not notice that my armor was not equipped to fire fléchettes.

“Listen, Ritz, the exercise is over. Their shields ran out of batteries, and they don't want a straight fight. As long as we can keep their Marines in here with us, the Unifieds won't blast the building with fighters and tanks. We need to keep them pinned down. Shoot anyone who tries to get away.”

I blended in with a pack of Unifieds as they walked around the corner to inspect the damage from my grenade. Water gushed from broken pipes in the floor and ceiling. Wires and twisted strips of metal hung above my head. Body parts and pieces of armor littered the floor. Helmets had been blown from bodies, some of them with heads still inside.

“If we keep their men pinned down, they won't be able to hit the building without burying them,” I said.

“Yes, sir, we're on it,” said Ritz.

U.A. Marines cautiously sifted through the debris. Seeing their dead, they must have realized that their glorious war game had become a disaster. I had only killed a few of them, maybe thirty at most. A passel of men gathered around some of the fallen, gingerly kneeling beside one of the bodies.

With the Unifieds distracted, I allowed myself a quick glance out the nearest window. A sea of men in dark armor stood in moonlight and snow on the tarmac, just below the building. They were waiting for orders. They must have known that their assault had gone bad; so there they stood, trapped in a purgatory between attack and retreat.

Ritz's men opened fire with M27s. Firing in small bursts, they hit the outer echelon of the Unifieds, catching the milling enemy by surprise. Ritz's men had the high-ground advantage and better weapons. In the few seconds that I watched, I saw dozens of men collapse.

Hearing the renewed fighting, the Unifieds went to the window frame and stared down at the scene. Nobody noticed as I backed away; they were too busy watching the slaughter outside. Another few steps, and I turned and started for a hall. As I rounded a corner, I reached down and scooped up an M27.

It's not as glorious when we can shoot back, is it?
I thought.
How do you like the war games now? How do you like your specking war games now?

From where I stood, I could see along two sides of the terminal. I saw U.A. Marines standing by the window casings, staring out at the slaughter, helpless. If they had rockets, they could shoot the ceiling and cause a cave in; but they came armed with fléchettes instead of grenades.

One of the U.A. Marines looked back, saw that I was carrying an M27. He stood in a mostly empty hall. He glanced in my direction, started to turn away, then gave me a second pass. He probably tried to speak to me. When he realized he couldn't, he raised his arm.

I shot him in the head, then opened fire on the three Marines standing near him. Hearing the sound of gunfire, more Unifieds came running. I fired my M27 down the hall, turned and fired at anyone coming from the other direction, and ran toward the nearest stairs.

I'd been hit by fléchettes before. They cut through armor as if it weren't there. Between the poison and the shock, your body and brain stopped working in seconds. The last time I had barely survived. If it happened again, I might not be so lucky.

Three Marines tried to make a stand ahead of me. They were a hundred feet away. Two stood. One knelt. Their fléchettes bored through a vending machine as I ducked behind it. Hot drinks bled out of the side of the machine as I spun around its edge and squeezed off twenty rounds. I killed them, then I leaped over their bodies on my way to the stairs.

I pulled a grenade and tossed it behind me without looking back. The hall was long and straight like the barrel of a cannon. It would funnel the percussion and flames from the grenade.

I jetted up a full flight before my grenade went off, and the walls shook. A geyser of flame shot into the stairwell below me. Even if the flames had hit me, they would not have hurt me. My unshielded armor offered that much protection.

I was almost at the top of the stairs when I realized that my own men might shoot me before I could identify myself. “Ritz, I'm coming up the stairs,” I said, and I gave him my location. Then I lowered my gun and waited by the door. A moment later, a team of Marines opened the way and led me in.

The terminal building might have been made to accommodate ten thousand travelers, giving them plenty of space to carry luggage. For ten thousand travelers spread across the two upper floors, the building would be spacious. I now had twenty thousand Marines crammed onto one floor and the roof. That floor had become an unholy zoo. Most of the men stood in the central lobby, crammed close together like passengers on a bus in rush hour.

There were no departure gates on that floor. The outer walls were a continuous observation deck. The inside had storefronts, play areas, bathrooms, offices, restaurants, and bars.

The men in the center of the building stood so packed together that they could not move without bumping into each other. That put them out of play. If the Unifieds came running up the stairs, my men would not be able to shoot or defend themselves without killing the clones around them. I surveyed the scene.

We were the clones, the unwanted golems, the Frankenstein monsters that had come home to roost. Men in dark-colored combat armor looked like monsters as I viewed them through my night-for-day lenses. Because of their helmets, their heads looked huge and misshapen, featureless at the front and flat across the top. In the blue-gray of day-for-night vision, the armor was the not-quite-black of shadows on cement.

I stood just outside the stairs with Ritz and a circle of officers. As I started to ask for a report, I saw something through the window. We all saw it. Every man on that side of the building must have spotted it.

I walked toward the empty casing for a closer look.

I switched from night-for-day vision to telescopic lenses and saw lights the color of honey glowing behind the trees at the far edge of the runway. At first I thought a second wave of U.A. Marines had arrived, a column of troops with fresh batteries powering their shields. By that time the snow had mostly stopped, though flecks of powder still hung in the air.

The artillery was far away and hidden by trees, I could not get a good look at it. On a still night like this, the sound of the engines carried clear across the runway.

“Specking hell,” said Ritz.

“Son of a bitch,” said another colonel.

“What do you think they have out there?” asked another officer.

“How the speck should I know,” I snapped in frustration. “The bastards don't consult with me? I mean speck! They don't come to me for ideas!” I hated myself for berating the dumb speck, but I could not make myself stop. I felt cold claws closing around my gonads.

The bastards shot a flare into the sky. They must have fired the son of a bitch from a tank, or maybe a cannon. None of our shoulder-fired weapons could have hurled a heavy phosphorous canister all the way across the runway. The flare burned like a silver-red diamond as it rose to the top of a fifteen-hundred-foot arc, then hung in the sky like a still photograph of fireworks, its glare shining down on the building. We had men on the roof as well as the second floor. The light from that flare must have wreaked technological havoc on the men on the roof. The glare from that projectile would have been bright enough to shut down their night-for-day vision, but the runway remained as dark as a cave beyond it.

As the flare started to fade, the Unifieds fired a second flare. This one was silver-green. It hung in the sky directly over the terminal for nearly a minute.

The third projectile rose up like a mortar shell. Sparks bubbled from the shining ball as it climbed toward the sky. It slowed as it reached its zenith, then it exploded, sending out an electromagnetic pulse, and the world went black around me.

The invasion had broken down around us. There was no sign of the second wave. Freeman had vanished. We were trapped in a spaceport, cut off from the world; and the EMP the Unifieds fired over the spaceport had destroyed the electronics in our visors. Now I would not be able to say good-bye to Cutter if he arrived in time to see me die.

We no longer had night-for-day vision or any other kind of vision through our visors. We had no interLink connection. Wearing our helmets, we were deaf, speechless, and blind. We couldn't even wear them to protect us from the cold.

The frigid wind that blew in through the broken window casings burned my ears when I pulled off my helmet. I tossed the worthless plasticized shell out into the open runway. Ritz saw me. I thought it was Ritz, but I could no longer use the smart display in my visor to identify him. Whoever he was, he was standing where Ritz had been standing a moment ago. He threw his helmet out the window as well.

In the lingering glare from the EMP, I spotted men sprinting across the runway. I started to shout orders for our snipers to shoot them, but I had no means of contacting them. Fortunately, our snipers were alert and did not wait for orders. Rifle fire tore through the calm of the night.

They had flares, but so did we. The snipers on the roof shot them in every direction. The first volley was uncoordinated. Dozens of phosphor-burning projectiles arced into the night sky turning it bright as day in some spots while leaving it dark in others. The light from the flares exposed the bodies of the hundreds of Unified Authority Marines we had slain.

I saw the carnage and wondered how long we could hold out. The Unifieds had regrouped. We were like a tiger caught in a tree. So long as we held thousands of their men trapped in the bottom of our building, the Unifieds would not pull in their heavy artillery to finish us. They could send gunships to try and gut the top two floors with their chain guns; but we had already proven that we could defend ourselves against gunships.

So many shielded tanks had gathered on the far side of the runway that the forest glowed. If my visor still worked, I could have used the telescopic lens to scout their numbers. If I'd had a helmet on, I would not have worried about the cold numbing my face. The Unifieds had to fire that specking EMP.

The worst part about not wearing a helmet was trying to communicate. Every goddamned man in the terminal looked so specking alike. If I accidentally called Chris Nobles “Ritz,” I could trigger a death reflex. Fortunately for everyone, it was so damned dark in the terminal building that no one saw anyone else clearly. In case the guy standing next to me was not the officer I expected, I would have an excuse. I said, “Those bastards stole your idea, Ritz.”

He snickered, and said, “Assholes.”

I heard another Marine bitching, but I did not know his name or rank without my visor. He said, “It's specking cold in here. Bastards. My ears are specking freezing.”

We were in a powder keg with a fuse just waiting to be lit. The Unifieds had us at their mercy, but they did not know how to strike the final blow without killing the natural-borns we had trapped below us. A tank fired a few warning shells that shattered the runway a few yards from the building, but those shells were idle threats. Time passed slowly.