The Clone Redemption

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

Even using the telescopic lenses in my visor, I could not get a clear view of the bastards. I only saw the glow of their shields emanating from the edge of the woods. They were testing their armor, getting ready to strike.

A few minutes passed, and the ghost light vanished on the far end of the runway. I watched them through my telescopic lenses, saw how they slowly moved in, keeping a wary eye out for ambushes. Our snipers could not hit them that far away, but our mortars and RPGs sure as hell could. The moment our shells started rumbling, the glow of their shields came back on.

It took us ten minutes to cross the runway. Wearing shield armor, knowing that the clock would run out if the battle lasted forty-five minutes, the Unifieds rushed ahead.

As they surged toward us, a soft ruffle of thunder rolled through the air, and it began to snow. At first the flakes were tiny, like salt crystals falling from the sky. Then the gates of an unseen dam spread wide, and coin-sized flakes tumbled out of the clouds. A strong wind picked up and drove the snow as it fluttered to the ground. Partially blinded by the snowstorm, the U.A. Marines slowed their charge.

The snow and wind played havoc on our mortars. Shells seemed to fly wild. It didn’t matter. They had their shields going, and we needed to conserve ammo.

Hoping to get a better look at the enemy, I found a stairwell and raced up the four flights that led to the roof. The door was hanging open on a quiet scene under low clouds. Wearing armor, I could not feel the wind; but I saw the angle of the falling snow. A powerful wind was blowing.

I could have taken a temperature reading with the gear in my visor, but I did not bother. Whatever it was, it must have been cold. The snow had already started to pile up. A quarterinch layer of it already covered the roof. On the runway, the tarmac looked gray instead of black.

“General,” a major said when he turned and saw me. He snapped to attention and saluted. His men remained as they were; this was a battle situation.

I pointed to one of the snipers and asked to see his rifle. The major retrieved it for me.

How long will it take them? I asked myself, thinking of Cutter and the fleet, not the U.A. Marines. Our ships could cross a million miles in a couple of minutes, but launching transports and fighters would add time.

I lifted the rifle and peered through the scope. Nine-tenths of a mile away, men in armor lit the edge of the runway as they poured out from between trees and ran onto the tarmac. I could hit them from that distance. Most of my snipers could hit a target from a mile away, but we could not afford to waste ammunition. At that point, our high-powered rifles were no more effective than a swarm of mosquitoes.

As I watched through the scope, the flood of men in glowing armor continued to flow out from behind the trees. They came from every direction, completely closing us in. Confident their armor could protect them, they jogged toward us. By that time, only the blizzard conditions stood between us and them.

Looking for a clean shot through all of the snow, I aimed the rifle at one Marine’s head and pulled the trigger. The rifle bucked in my hand. It did not have much of a kick. Three seconds passed. My aim was off, the scope was calibrated for another shooter. My bullet missed the target and struck the man behind him. There was a flash where the bullet hit, just over his right cheek.

I handed the rifle back to its owner. The other snipers waited for me to give the order to fire. The snow would not help their accuracy; but at seven hundred yards and firing at a slow-rushing tide, the bullets would hit enemy Marines.

Using a channel that only the snipers would hear, I said, “Fire.”

Along the roof, the muzzles of the guns flashed and went dark. The boys spent more time aiming than I would have liked, waiting ten and sometimes twenty seconds between shots.

“When the Unifieds get within one hundred yards, bring your boys in,” I told the major.

“Should I take them down to the third floor?” he asked.

“No, just bring them in from the ledges. We’ll leave them up on the roof for now.”

“Aye, sir,” he said.

At one hundred yards, M27s and RPGs are nearly as accurate as sniper rifles. Once the Unifieds reached that point, we’d need to dig in and prepare to fight at close range.

By that time, a thick layer of snow had begun to crunch under my boots. I slid in it as I walked back to the stairs. When I stepped in the open doorway, I kicked the jam to get the snow off my boots.

Cutter’s voice came over the interLink. “Harris, where are you?”

“We’re holding a spaceport just outside Washington, D.C.,” I said. “The bastards have us surrounded.”

“Just hold on,” Cutter said. “We’re almost ready to launch.”

Almost ready to launch. Almost ready to launch. The words made my insides knot like a kick to the crotch.

“Thanks,” I said in a voice that was distracted and weak. We’re specked, I thought. Maybe the second wave would win the ground war. No, it will be Ray Freeman and his hidden bombs who win the war, if we win it.

As for me, I liked the idea of going down swinging. I didn’t feel hope, but I did feel a sense of excitement. I ran down the stairs and took my place by the grenadiers on the second floor.

The Unifieds were four hundred yards away, too far away to return fire with their fléchettes. Along with my snipers, my grenadiers began firing rockets and grenades, squeezing off shots, then tossing old tubes out the window and grabbing the next. Below us, the runway looked like a moonscape. It was white from the snow and pockmarked with craters from our rockets, grenades, and even a few mortars. And crossing that moonscape, slowed more by the damage to the tarmac than the rockets themselves, the Unified Authority Marines tightened their ranks as they approached the building.

There were more of them than there were of us. I couldn’t count them, wouldn’t even have tried, but I estimated them at fifty thousand strong.

“Harris, I’m almost at the spaceport,” Freeman said.

“Go away,” I said.

“I can …”

“You wouldn’t happen to have a nuke that knows the difference between clones and natural-borns?” I asked.

He didn’t answer.

“Ray, there’s nothing you can do here.” I thought for a moment. “Ray, can you hack into their shields?”

“What?” Freeman asked.

“The shields. The shielded armor. Do you think there’s some way you can hack into it with a computer?”

“No,” he said. “How many are you up against?”

“I’m guessing fifty thousand.”

“And you?”

“Not even half that many.”

They were closing in. In another few minutes, the Unifieds would enter the building. They would pour into the vacant bottom floor of the terminal. They would charge up the stairs, and we would be in range of their fléchettes—depleted uranium needles coated with neurotoxin. Once they entered the building, the slaughter would begin.

It was while I stood by that broken-out window that my combat reflex began. Calm washed over me as testosterone and adrenaline flooded my bloodstream, and my anxiousness disappeared. I heard the music of the battle in my head. The men around me seemed to move in slow motion. They aimed their weapons, fired shots that did not matter, and held their line against an unstoppable enemy that had not yet begun to fire back.

Using the telescoping lenses in my visor, I took a closer look at the Unifieds. Some stumbled as they ran through the snow. They were natural-borns. Their genes were not selected for battle, they did not have our abilities. Some sprinted, some trotted, some had already run out of breath. A few stared back in my direction as they ran. Snow fell on them, and their shields vaporized it. Steam rose from the spots where their shielded boots kicked through the snow.

As I watched, a rocket struck one of the U.A. Marines in the chest, exploding in a flash of fire, steam, and shrapnel. That rocket was designed to fell small buildings and turn tanks upside down. Had he not been in shielded armor, it would have left the man nothing more than a splash of blood on broken concrete. Instead, the blast slammed him to the ground. He hit hard, bounced ten feet in the air, and fell limp into the snow. The fall hurt him, and he rose to his feet like a dazed fighter, stumbling, weak in the knees. He limped as he took a few steps, then he fell to the ground. The bastard had landed badly and hurt his leg. That was the most we could hope for, to make them trip.

They were closing in, twenty-five yards from the terminal building and closing fast. Some paused to fire fléchettes at us. They ran, pointed arms in our direction as if saluting us, and fired darts that mostly hit the ceiling above our heads. A man a few feet from me was hit. He dropped his gun, reached for his neck, and fell to the ground, where he convulsed for several seconds before dying. A thin and steady stream of blood leaked from the hole in his armor.

If we had a bomb, something big but not nuclear, we could set it off once the Unifieds entered the building, I thought to myself. That was how I had beaten them before. I lured the Unifieds into an underground garage, then blew it up as my men exited through the back door.

If we demolished this building, we would die, too. I did not mind that idea. Was the combat reflex influencing my thinking? At least we would take two of theirs for every man we lost.

Outside, the front edge of the Unifieds had almost reached the building. They were close enough to hit us with their fléchettes, and the fusillade had begun. A steady stream of uranium needles flew in through the crashed-out window, forcing us to our knees. I crawled over the jagged glass fringe that remained in the window casing, climbed to one knee, and fired my M27 down at their heads. Fléchettes zinged past me, like wasps chasing prey, but I held my ground and fired, and I ignored everything around me.

“Harris, get out of there,” somebody screamed over the interLink. The name Ritz showed. I did not recognize the name. The part of my brain that recognized people and names had closed down for the evening.

A fléchette brushed across the side of my helmet. I roared in anger and squeezed the trigger of my gun. Men came from my left and my right. The bastards grabbed me and hauled me back away from the window. I screamed and struggled. I would have shot them, but they piled on top of me and held me down.

Somebody pulled my helmet off my head. Still trying to free my arms, I looked up and growled like an animal. “Get off me. Get off me! I’ll kill you all,” I screamed.

Somewhere in the distance, there were muffled explosions. Flames coughed out of open doorways. Clouds of smoke and dust billowed in from the stairwells. Men had tossed bombs or grenades down the stairs. I did not care. All I cared about was killing, I needed to kill, and these crazy bastards were holding me down. I wanted to kill them. Once I killed them, I would go after the enemy. The calm and the music of battle had left me, they faded from my mind like a drug evaporating from the brain of an addict, and all that they left behind was the need for more.

I fought. I struggled to get loose. A man in combat armor slapped me across the face, his hardened armor glove slamming my cheekbone like a hammer. I was a rabid dog. I turned, stared at him, silently dared him to do that again.

They might have been speaking to each other, but they used the interLink. My helmet was gone. I could not hear them as I snarled and fought to free myself.

Until that moment, I still held my M27 in a hand that was buried under a pile of Marines. I felt the stock slipping from my fingers. I felt desperate, crazed, like a man held underwater. God, not my gun; I need it to breathe!

A part of my brain watched the struggle like an innocent bystander witnessing a mugging. In one of my mind’s many eyes, I could see that I had turned into an animal. I could see myself clearly, and I hated what I saw. Stop it. Stop it, stop it, stop it! I thought to myself.

But that part of my brain was a distant satellite. The rest of my consciousness had shut down entirely. All that remained was anger and instinct. I needed to free myself and to kill, I needed to kill more fiercely than a man held underwater needs to breathe. Life, death, right, wrong, nothing mattered except killing, feeling the hormone in my brain, the missing song of battle.

With the gun out of my hand, I managed to pull my right shoulder free of the men who had piled on top of it. The man in the armor slapped me across the face a second time. If he’d lived another minute, he might even have hit me again, but the doors to the stairs slammed open and men in glowing armor invaded our world.

Not even trying to understand the events around me, I watched as fragments of plaster chipped from the ceiling and walls. Men fell to the floor. The men who had wrestled me down now tried to pull me away. I flailed. I kicked. I got one arm free and slammed my fist into one of my attackers. I hit the front of his helmet. His head jerked back, but I did not even put a crack in his visor.

More men dropped. Some fell in spasms. Some fell still, their blood leaking from pin-sized holes in their armor. I brushed men off my other arm, kicked wildly, and I was free.

My desperation slackened. The part of me that still had intelligence told me to put on my helmet. I lay on my stomach, propelling myself along the ground by faking convulsions. With the Unifieds just entering the floor, I rolled to my side so I could slip my helmet back over my head without being seen. Once I had my helmet secured, I wrapped my hand around the stock of my M27, it might have been my M27, and I played dead. I lay in a pile of dead Marines. I saw the men sprawled on the floor around me and realized they’d died trying to save me.

I played possum, a paisley piece in a collage of dead bodies—one that the Unified Authority might never find. Natural-borns ran past the bodies without sparing a second glance. Knowing that anyone they shot would die, they did not worry about the wounded.

Sensibility slowly set in. I was not entirely in control. I felt some semblance of thought coming back to my brain.

“Ritz. You there?” I asked. I felt ashamed of myself; but I did not have time for embarrassment. There would be a time to apologize, but it would come after the battle. For now, I had shown enough weakness already.

“Harris?” I heard doubt, maybe even fear.

“Did you send men to save me?” I asked.

He answered my question with one of his own. “Where are you?”

“What do you have in the way of explosives?” I asked. I was about to suggest demolishing ourselves and the building. My Liberator programming would not allow me to detonate the bomb myself, but I thought maybe I could give the order. Then something caught my attention and I forgot about bombs.