The Clone Redemption

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

I lay on the ground, doing my best imitation of a corpse, albeit one that had fallen with a gun still in his grip. My arms stretched past my head, my finger still on the trigger. Thanks to my armor, I could breathe and still look no more alive than the dead men around me. An intelligent Marine might notice the lack of blood leaking from my armor, but there was plenty of blood on the ground around me. About twenty U.A. Marines had already walked past without giving me a second glance.

The glow of their shielded armor had died. The batteries must have run out, though I had no idea what could have caused it.

The Unifieds walked through the dead, stepping over bodies, ready to fire fléchettes into anything that moved. These were the men on point, the sacrificial lambs …the canaries in the air vents.

“Ritz, listen to me. I think their armor is running out of juice.”

“What?” he asked.

“The batteries in their armor are running out of power.” I shifted ever so slowly, gradually rolling to one side, allowing my left arm to loll in place while shifting the M27 in my right hand so that I could aim it. “Their shields are out.”

No one noticed. I was just another corpse, just another piece of trash on the floor. As I fumbled to free an RPG from my belt, I watched the door to the stairwell. A never-ending parade of men in flickering armor strode through the opening.

Working blind, I managed to snag a grenade from my belt. I twisted it in my hand. An RPG would have worked better, but the grenade would do. I would use it to create a distraction; and then, in the confusion, I would escape.

One of the Unifieds meandered past me, then stopped. He just stood there, sightseeing in the empty spaceport, I supposed, no more than ten feet from me. His armor winked on and off before it went out entirely. He looked in my direction, and I froze. After a moment he took a step toward me. If he inspected me more closely, he might notice that I was holding a grenade in my left hand and an M27 in my right, and that I had no holes in my armor and no blood oozing from my helmet. In fact, I did not look especially corpselike, not that this shit-for-brains natural-born would have noticed.

“Ritz, where are you?” With my helmet over my head, I could talk, and the bastards around me would not hear my voice or see my mouth move.

“I’m on the third floor,” he said.

“What’s the situation?”

“They haven’t sent anyone up here.”

“Yeah, they’re still securing this floor,” I said.

“I can get you out of there, General. I can …”

I hissed, “Shut up and listen.” It was harsh. I was still in the tail end of combat reflex, my every instinct was to kill. Ritz, the Unifieds, civilians, at that point it didn’t matter. The violence welling up in my brain no longer cared about sides or alliances.

“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.