element of surprise working in their favor. But they had something else going for them as well—and that was the strange, almost supernatural, relationship that existed between them. Because having been created from the same DNA, and raised with replicas of themselves, the Seebos were like fi?ngers on the same hand as they ghosted between the town’s mostly darkened buildings.
There was little more than a series of soft pops as the sentries stationed outside the administration building fell, and the clones rushed to surround the structure. The clones knew that the facility had two entrances, and once both of them were covered, Six led a squad up onto the front porch. The door seemed to open on its own as one of the bugs sought to exit. So the offi?cer shot him in the face and pushed his way into the vestibule beyond.
A second door opened onto a reception area, and three Ramanthians were already headed his way as Colonel Six entered. The offi?cer took them down with short bursts from his submachine gun (SMG) and shouted, “Kill the radio!” as the rest of the squad came in behind him.
“Got it, sir!” a corporal replied as he fi?red three rounds into the rugged com set that occupied one of the desks. The alien RT took exception to that, produced a pistol, and was trying to bring the weapon to bear when the corporal fi?red again. The bug jerked spastically, fell over sideways, and began to leak green digestive goo onto the fl?oor.
“Good work,” Six said grimly. “Find the rest of them.”
“You came!” a female voice said gratefully, as the rest of the squad went looking for additional chits. “Thanks be to the founder!”
That was when Colonel Six turned to see that half a dozen townspeople had been tied to chairs that lined one of the walls. The individual who had spoken was a member of the Mogundo line and therefore an administrator. The rest were Ortovs. A hardy line commonly used for industrial applications. “How many of you are there?” the offi?cer demanded brusquely.
“Twenty-six,” the woman replied crisply. She had brown skin, fl?ashing black eyes, and a full fi?gure. The offi? cer imagined what she would look like without any clothes on, felt the usual response, and pushed the image away. Such thoughts were less frequent than they had been twenty years earlier but still plagued him.
The sound of muted gunfi?re interrupted the offi?cer’s thoughts as the second platoon dealt with the Ramanthians in the processing plant. “Please! Stop the fi?ghting!” one of the Ortovs pleaded. “They have our children!”
“She’s right,” the administrator put in, as a soldier cut her loose. “The Ramanthians took hostages earlier today.”
Six nodded. “Yes, I know. And I’m sorry. But there’s nothing I can do about it. Gather your people together. . . . Tell them to pack cold-weather gear, plus food that won’t spoil, and bring it here. But only what they can carry on their backs. Because the bugs will return, and when they do, they’ll kill everyone they fi?nd.”
“But what about our children?” the Ortov sobbed. “The ones they took?”
Under normal circumstances, on planets like Alpha-001, clone children were raised in crechelike institutions where they could be properly socialized. But that wasn’t always possible on less-developed planets like Gamma- 014, where children were occasionally assigned to an appropriate community at the age of two, to be raised within the embrace of the profession to which they would one day belong. But that practice could lead to unacceptably strong bonds between individual adults and children, as was clearly the case where the distraught Ortov was concerned. Because even though she hadn’t given birth to a child, she clearly felt as if she had, and that was wrong.
“Maybe the children will survive,” Colonel Six allowed, as the Ortov was freed. “But I doubt it. The Ramanthians regard mercy as a weakness, and if we’re going to beat them, we’ll have to be just as hard as they are. Now stop crying, get your things, and hurry back. I plan to pull out thirty minutes from now.”
The woman began to sob, and might have remained right where she was, had two of her companions not taken the miner between them and half carried her away.
“We have some explosives,” the administrator said helpfully. She was determined, and Six liked that.
“Good,” the Seebo replied. “That means we can save what we have. Perhaps one of your people would show us where to place them?”
The process of placing the charges, and pulling the civilians out of Strat’s Deep, took the better part of an hour, rather than the thirty minutes that Six had been hoping for. But it went smoothly, and once both the townspeople and the Seebos were assembled on the ledge above town, it was safe to trigger the charges. A series of muffl?ed thuds was heard, and the onlookers felt the explosions through the soles of their boots, as a rockslide clattered down a neighboring slope. “All right,” Colonel Six said grimly. “The bugs will come looking for us tomorrow. Let’s fi?nd a place to hide.” And with that, 150 people vanished into the night. Seven hours later, when the Ramanthians assigned to hold Strat’s Deep failed to check in as they were supposed to, and attempts to contact them failed, a quick-reaction force was dispatched. It wasn’t possible to assess the amount of damage infl?icted on the mine shafts from the air. But there was no mistaking the fact that the railroad tracks had been severed—and the processing plant had been reduced to a pile of smoking rubble.
And when members of the elite Hammer regiment hit the ground, the town was empty except for the row of twentysix Ramanthian bodies laid out in front of the admin building, and the large numbers scrawled across the facade. The paint was red, the numerals were “666,” and none of the troopers knew what they meant.
A report was written, approved, and passed up through the chain of command. And, when it appeared on Okoto’s computer screen, the general actually read it, a fact that would have amazed the lowly fi?le leader who authored it. The numbers “666” held no particular meaning for Okoto, but the offi?cer was a student of human warfare, and widely read. Which is why he went looking for a certain fi?le, brought it on-screen, and scanned for the passage he had in mind. It read:
“Many people think it is impossible for guerrillas to exist for long in the enemy’s rear. Such a belief reveals lack of comprehension of the relationship that should exist between the people and the troops. The farmer may be likened to water and the latter to the fi?sh who inhabit it.”
The text had been authored by a man named Mao TseTung. And he had been dead for a long, long time. But Okoto could tell that someone else was familiar with the revolutionary’s writings as well. Someone who was very, very dangerous. PLANET ALPHA-001, THE CLONE HEGEMONY
President Marcott Nankool and his staff were quartered in the equivalent of a large if not especially posh hotel, which the Hegemony’s State Department ran for both the convenience of visiting dignitaries and its own intelligence service. The entire building was bugged, including conference rooms like the one that the visitors had been forced to meet in, which was why all of them were shooting the breeze, catching up on administrative tasks via their data
