Clone World (Undying Mercenaries Series Book 12), page 20
We didn’t find anything alive. Even the trees were dead. The ground itself was uneven, broken up and blasted with craters as big as football stadiums. The ground inside these craters crunched under our boots, the earth having been flash-melted into dirty glass.
At last, we reached the dome and halted, hunkering down under what cover we could find. A hundred meters away a glassy wall of force rose up out of nothing.
“What do you see?” I asked Harris, who was leading the lighter troops right to the edge of the dome itself.
“I don’t see shit. Outside the dome, it’s a dust storm. Inside, it’s a jungle.”
“A jungle? Untouched?”
“That’s what I said. Everything near the borderline is all burnt up and dead, but there are plenty of trees, and even some balloon-looking things floating around deep inside their safe zone.”
The fusion warheads from a broadside barrage not only struck with fantastic force, radiation and heat, they also released a brilliant light. Anything with eyes was often blinded for miles around. I was surprised the scene inside looked tranquil.
“Light platoon,” I ordered, “advance and enter the dome. See if we can penetrate it.”
“What? Now?” Harris called back.
“You heard me. Move!”
They hustled forward, and I brought up the heavy troops with Barton behind Harris. Since the last campaign, I’d given Harris the lights again. I felt it was only right, as Barton had been stuck with them for years.
I watched as Harris’ lights reached out with the muzzles of their snap-rifles and touched the glossy surface. It buzzed and flashed, but it let them through if they moved slowly enough.
“Aw, this is nasty!” Harris complained as he put a foot into the wall. “It’s like walking into a wall of Jell-O.”
“Jell-O that tingles your balls with static electricity,” I added. I came up behind him, giving it a try.
Only a dozen paces behind Harris, the heavy platoon entered next. There were complaints about the sensation up and down the line.
I didn’t care. We’d advanced a long way with no resistance to speak of. They should be happy we were still breathing.
The dome was about a hundred steps thick. As we pushed our way inside, the weird feel of it was intense. Every cell on the surface of my skin felt like it was being tickled. Every hair on my body was individually tugged.
After walking for perhaps three minutes, we were through.
“The dome can’t stop troops,” I said, gasping for breath. It had felt natural to hold my breath when I was in the force field’s grip. “The dome only stops bullets and bombs.”
“Great,” Harris said, standing next to me. “Orders, sir?”
“Keep advancing until we make contact. That’s what we’re supposed to do.”
He rolled his eyes and shook his head, but he kept moving forward. He in turn ordered his ghosts to sprint ahead of the lights, and they vanished.
Off to my right and left, I saw similar contingents of troops advancing on both flanks. Could it be Claver’s forces had been caught outside this dome and been destroyed by the bombardment? I dared to hope it was true. His legions might have been placed in defensive positions, outside the central fortress. If so, this might be a cakewalk.
No sooner had that happy thought crossed my mind than the first ripple of gunfire raked our lines. It was a light turret, manned and firing plasma bolts. At least five hundred bolts per second buzzed out, hosing down Harris and his advancing lights.
They threw themselves to the ground, but many of them wouldn’t be getting up again.
“Take cover!” I shouted, echoing the calls of every officer and noncom in the unit. “Sargon, take out that turret!”
The enemy up there had little more than a machinegun, but they did have a clamshell lid on top of their gun. It was rotating evenly, humming with electric motors. I recognized the type of emplacement. There would be a crew of three working it, and unless we took it down fast it would destroy my infantry.
There was plenty of return fire from our side. Grav-grenades, bolts from morph-rifles—but that stuff couldn’t penetrate. Most of our fire spanged and sparked, flashing off that sealed shell.
Methodically, it roved over the scene, chewing up my crawling men. They were desperate to take cover, but the enemy gun knocked down trees and lanced beams right through mounds of dirt a meter thick. The gunners knew their business, they were shooting men right through the cover they’d taken.
Then, three beams lanced out from our side. The beams struck the clamshell from three angles, hitting all at once.
The turret swung toward the first of these focused beams, stitching the ground with dark, smoking holes. If they could get lined up—
The turret exploded. The belchers had penetrated the armor and ignited the troops and the ammo inside. A very satisfactory plume of fire shot up ten meters, and smoke licked the roof of the dome itself.
We’d survived our first encounter with the enemy—or at least, most of us had. Scrambling back to our feet, we marched forward again, but with greater caution this time.
Not a single man in the unit walked with a straight back after the ambush. All of our dreams of a peaceful invasion had evaporated.
-36-
Resistance stiffened as we penetrated further into the domed region. For a time, I couldn’t get in touch with Graves, and that freaked me out a little. Naturally, I didn’t let on. I told my troops that our forces were pressing the attack on every front.
Finally however, I called a halt less than a kilometer into the domed area. We had found an area with good cover, and I wasn’t willing to press ahead without knowing what we were up against, or who was supporting our flanks. It was one thing to push an enemy hard, and another to commit tactical suicide.
Radioing a good friend of mine, Centurion Manfred answered my call. It was a relief to hear his friendly, British-accented voice.
“Hey Manfred,” I said. “I’m out of contact with Graves. How about you?”
“Same here,” he said. “He’s not inside this dome yet, as I understand it. Communications can’t penetrate it. Are you still pressing deeper?”
I looked around at my tense, crouching troops. We’d lost a nearly a platoon’s worth of men by now, including those who died during the drop, and no one was joking around any longer.
“Nope,” I admitted. “We’re holing up in this jungle, waiting for fresh orders.”
“Yeah… probably the right move. I’m going to call a halt after we take this outbuilding.”
“What outbuilding?” I began to ask, but I heard fire opening up.
Turning my head, I realized Manfred had to be pretty close. No more than a few hundred meters off. I could hear the gunfire off to our right.
“How’s it going?” I asked Manfred, frowning at my tapper.
“We’ve got a nest of Clavers here, McGill. Signing off.”
He disconnected, and I heard the gunfire continue. In fact, it grew in intensity.
“Unit!” I called out. “Gather your gear. We’re moving toward that skirmish. With luck, we’ll hit a battle group of Clavers in the ass.”
They hustled and soon we were marching through the jungle again. Ahead, the forest was lit up by flashes and a lot of noise. It didn’t seem to be letting up.
“Kivi, get your buzzers into position, I want a live stream. Harris, get your light troops out there on both our flanks. Barton, heavies in the center—pick up the pace!”
We moved at a jog through the trees until we reached the conflict. The ground here was open and low, a depression that might have served as a mining zone or something like that…
The buzzer feed finally came in, almost too late to be useful. I saw the scene now, from an aerial point of view. The depression was some kind of a dried up artificial pond. It appeared to have been full of water at some recent date—probably before we’d blown up all the surrounding land and destroyed whatever river fed this spot.
Pouring into the muddy middle were hundreds of Claver-Threes. They seemed to know that they had an enemy camp to face here. They were coming in force.
Behind the wave of Clavers, a row of vehicles hummed. They were open-backed transports. Little more than floaters with rails and big motors. Fast, easy transport for a lot of troops. The Clavers must have sighted Manfred here at the pond and swooped in with mobile infantry to trap them.
“Orders, sir?” Harris asked.
“When you see a target, halt and engage. Heavies, continue to press in closer.”
On both our flanks, my advancing line stopped and began peppering the enemy troops with fire. Manfred’s unit was hugging the shoreline opposite us, and they were stubbornly holding their own against a force that outnumbered them by at least four to one.
But then we hit the Clavers in the ass. They were slow to recognize the new threat—but then after a moment of milling around, they did behave intelligently. They dismounted from their vehicles and advanced on foot. Half of them turned to attack us, while the rest drove onward toward Manfred.
That made me frown. They were operating like they had a brain. Someone was directing them with smart tactics.
Zooming in with my helmet’s optics, I scanned the center of their formation. There! I saw someone differently dressed, differently shaped.
It was a woman, and it wasn’t Toro. Who could it be? Who was commanding these men?
Before I could hope to identify her, I was deep in the shit. About two hundred Clavers had turned and formed a line to advance toward us.
My unit had the higher ground, and we had some cover from the trees. The enemy, in comparison, were slogging through mud and made easy targets even when they threw themselves flat and crawled in our direction.
Still, it wasn’t easy. They had a lot of firepower, and it wasn’t easy to break their morale. They didn’t surrender, or run, they shot at us and kept coming.
“Stay in the trees! Fire from cover! Choose your targets, and put each man down!”
It was a grim battle. Usually, modern fights with humanoids were fought at a distance of one to three kilometers. You shot at puffs of smoke, and they fired back at you.
Not this time. These men were taken by surprise, and we were all within a hundred meters or so of each other. We hosed one another down with guns set to full-auto, blazing away like there was no tomorrow—because there wasn’t.
But soon, our superior training, organization and position began to tell. My men were better shots, and we had more heavy weapons. Grav-grenades rained down on the men in the mud, and the few that came back at us failed to strike more than a handful of my troops.
Belchers fired in wide arcs, blinding and burning the approaching knots of troops. They died hard, fighting until the last, but in the end, we overwhelmed them.
When the smoke cleared, I stood up and approached the shoreline. It was a massacre. Dead Clavers were everywhere, in every imaginable state of repose.
“Hey, sir!” Barton came near and touched my elbow.
I looked at her in surprise. She was pointing down, down into the muddy core of the pond full of dead men.
Right off, I saw what she was talking about. A single white cloth was waving down there. A strip of someone’s shirt, by the look of it. They didn’t even seem to have a stick to put it on.
“Huh…” I said. “Looks like we’ve got ourselves a prisoner.”
“But Clavers don’t surrender, Centurion,” Barton said suspiciously. “We should gun them down, whoever they are.”
I pushed her snap-rifle down, laughing. “Damn, girl! Varus has gotten into your blood, hasn’t it? Let’s see what this turncoat officer has to say.”
“Turncoat?”
“That’s right.”
Advancing toward the waving white strip of cloth, I slogged through bloody mud and stood over a drainage pipe of some kind. It was in the middle of the pond, and must have been used to draw water from it before disaster had struck this world.
“All right,” I said loudly, lifting my rifle and training it on that fluttering flag. “Come on out and leave your weapons behind.”
When she stood up, I was dumbstruck.
It wasn’t Winslade, or Armel, or even Toro. It was Centurion Leeza, formerly of Legion Germanica.
-37-
You have to understand, Centurion Leeza and I went way back. We’d had run-ins over many years, some good and some bad. One time she’d discovered me sleeping on a pool table naked, for instance. On another occasion, she’d overseen a duel to the death between myself and Tribune Armel.
She wasn’t a bad-looking woman, as they go. She was tall, lean, and kind of mean-looking in the face. She wasn’t the nicest person I’d ever met—but then, neither was I. She’d long served under Armel as a personal assistant in Legion Germanica. I’d never examined that relationship too closely—I hadn’t wanted to.
“Centurion Leeza?” I shouted, tilting my morph-rifle up at the sky. “Fancy finding you out here in this pathetic mud-puddle. Tell me, did all these bad Claver-men kidnap you? Are you a woman in distress?”
Leeza climbed out of her hole in the ground and looked around with narrowed eyes. As far as she could see, there was nothing but dead bodies, blood and mud. From either direction, a ragged unit of Varus troops approached. She had to have around a hundred guns aimed at her skinny ass. In fact, I was probably the only human present who wasn’t aiming a gun at her and scowling.
I grinned instead, like I’d found a long-lost cousin hiding under my porch.
“James McGill…” she said, spitting out the words. She had a faintly European accent. “My good fortune is overwhelming.”
“That’s right. You’re one lucky lady today. How about you come all the way out of your bolt-hole and put your hands on your head?”
She did so, and my men captured her properly. She was manacled, but not roughed up. I gave the Varus boys a stern look to make sure.
Another individual approached the scene across the mud flats. He was as broad-chested as I was tall.
He was Centurion Manfred, the one and only. We clasped hands, and he grinned.
“Good to see you, mate,” he said. “Although I have to protest on this glory-hounding behavior.”
“How’s that, Manfred?”
“Here I am, having the time of my life slaughtering a thousand-odd Clavers single-handedly, when your lot shows up to steal a share of the credit.”
I snorted. “That’s right,” I said. “I’ve always been like that. It’s a character flaw.”
We laughed and turned back to Leeza. Manfred pointed at her. “I see you’ve caught yourself a new girlfriend, eh?”
“Hardly that. She’s a traitor, and an enemy of all Earth.”
He nodded in agreement. “Shall we execute her now, or interrogate her first?”
“Hell no, we shouldn’t shoot her! Not yet. Barton! Disable her tapper!”
Leeza’s hands were manacled behind her back. Barton took two strides forward, and she stabbed her combat knife into Leeza’s right foreman. She did it quick-like, as if she’d been itching to do it since we found her.
Leeza’s tapper went dark. It would no longer transmit anything about her status—or about us—to Claver-central. She hissed in pain, and Barton sprayed her arm with a pink foam of fresh skin-cells.
“If we kill her now,” Barton said conversationally. “She might be permed. She’s not on the grid any longer—theirs or ours.”
“Good point,” I said. “Unit, move out! Let’s get out of this mud-pit before more Claver’s show up.”
While we marched back into the jungle, I took the time to question Leeza. “You remember that time you caught me on the pool table?” I asked her.
“How could I forget?”
“You remember what you said back then?”
She frowned. “Something about never wanting to catch you raiding the officers’ bar again.”
“That, and you said you were in my debt. You let me go because you owed me one.”
At that, Leeza glanced up at me, sidelong. “Are you suggesting a deal, McGill?”
“Of course. Start talking. If you give us information that makes this action go smoothly, you probably won’t get permed at the trial at the end.”
She huffed. “That’s not much of a deal. I’ll tell you what: transmit my engrams to Claver’s fortress. In the clear, right now. If you do that, I’ll be revived there. I’ll claim legitimacy, kill my clone, and I’ll owe you a favor once again.”
“Uh…” I said, chewing over her words. “What are you talking about, kill your clone?”
“If you haven’t noticed, Claver doesn’t play by Imperial rules. As soon as one of us has lost contact, they’re marked for dead and a new officer is born. I’m probably half-way through the gestation process already.”
I thought that over. It did make sense. Whenever Claver was executed, he never showed much concern. He knew he’d pop out of the oven again somewhere.
Apparently, that was now true for all his compatriots as well. I recalled that Winslade had been self-assured at his execution that he wasn’t in any real danger either.
“Huh…” I said. “Is that the appeal, then? Eternal life? You can’t get permed if you join up with Claver?”
“Not just that,” she said. “He’s got bigger, more powerful allies than Earth does.”
“You mean Rigel? Those bears are tough, but we can beat them. We’ve done it several times.”
“Maybe so… but can you beat the Skay, McGill?”
I halted, and we locked eyes. Centurion Leeza wasn’t the kind of woman who joked around. She played things straight—she always had. I could tell she was telling the truth now.
My face didn’t show it, but I felt a chill. The Skay were Galactics—nasty ones. They were like the Mogwa, but worse. They were machine intelligences. Each member of their race was the size of a planet and moved as they pleased around the cosmos. Just one of those ships could destroy a hundred worlds out here on the frontier, where our tech was comparatively weak.
“That’s not good…” I admitted. “So that’s the situation? Claver threw his lot in with Rigel, that much I knew. But the Skay…” I shook my head. “They’re worse than the Mogwa. Who wants to be enslaved by alien AI?”
