The Clone Alliance

Illych—I knew it was him because my visor displayed his virtual dog tag—walked past me. “We’ve got company,” he said, staring out the viewport.

I turned and looked. Two Mogat transports floated in our direction, their naked steel hulls appearing flat gray in the darkness. I had a particle-beam pistol. We all had particle-beam pistols. That was the general-issue weapon for combat in nonatmosphere situations.

Each of the approaching transports could carry a complement of a hundred Mogat commandos. The way I saw it, we had two options. Our best bet was to hide. Using those stealth kits, we could move undetected by their sensors. The only other option was to attack the Mogats as they stepped off their transports. It would be seven of us against two hundred of them. That gave them the house odds, as Admiral Brocius would have put it.

The SEALs came up with a better option.

“I always heard that you Liberator clones were lucky,” a SEAL named Simmons said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Listen to this,” he patched me into the frequency he was listening to over the interLink. Okay, so we break up into eight groups. The sensors only picked them up for a second. They were in the bridge but that…

“You tapped the Mogats’ communications?” I asked.

“All of their equipment is stuff they stole from us,” Simmons said. “I just did a frequency scan and there they were.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

You cannot change clothes in unpressurized space. If you do, the pressure of your body will cause you to explode. You will end up like the sailors in the engine room, lying dead beneath the frozen splashes of their blood.

As a military clone and a Marine, I only knew one way to engage the enemy—head-on. I knew how to make an enemy die in space. I did not think in terms of vanishing into his ranks. My objective might require me to snipe a guard or infiltrate a building; but in the end, my area of expertise was combat. The SEALs thought in terms of special operations.

Illych had one of his SEALs give me his stealth kit. He teamed that man up with another SEAL and sent them out. He sent his other three SEALs out on their own. They scattered around the ship. The two-man team headed for the bow. One of the lone SEALs returned to the engine room. Another went to the top deck. The last man went midship. When the time came, they would lead the Mogats on a wild-goose chase. They would do it one at a time, jamming and unjamming the security sensors in such a way that there only appeared to be one intruder on the ship. I had no doubt about the SEALs’ ability to pull off this trick.

Using Illych’s stealth kit to neutralize the motion sensors, he and I stole to a corridor that reached all the way across the ship. The corridor ran along the lowest deck. When the laser had hit the belly of this battleship, it carved out huge sections of the floor and walls.

I listened to the Mogats blunder through their maneuvers as we went. One of their teams had a sergeant barking out orders which, from the sound of things, no one understood. The more he screamed, the more confused his men became. Soon he could barely breathe because he had screamed all of the oxygen out of his lungs. I imagined that the inside of his visor was covered in spit. I enjoyed listening to the man.

The Mogats’ other teams operated more efficiently.

The old battleship was two-thirds of a mile wide and just under a half a mile long from bow to stern. We did not tire flying through the corridor; hell, our feet never even touched the deck. At midship, we reached a fifty-foot stretch of corridor below which the entire hull had been sheared away during the battle. All that was left of it was the right-hand wall and ceiling—everything else was wreckage and stars. Seen through the night-for-day lens in my visor, space looked flat and black with a swirl of blue-white specks.

You cannot swim in space. Launch in the wrong direction in open space, and there is no course correction without some sort of rocket. When we reached the break in the corridor, we stopped. The hall ahead of us had a slight bend to it. If I launched ahead and missed the curve, I would fly into space without a prayer of turning myself around. I would fly in a straight line at a constant speed until I ran into a planet or a black hole, or maybe a meteor shower.

I locked the fingers of my right hand unnecessarily tight around the grip of my pistol. I let the fingers of my left hand drag along the edge of the wall to feel around for emergency handholds should I need one. Then I pushed off the wall and over through the missing section of corridor. I drifted slowly, focusing my attention on the floor ahead.

Illych followed.

I heard: Delta Team, check the lower-deck main corridor.

Got it.

That placed one of the Mogat teams on the same deck as Illych and I, probably no less than two walls away. If they came into our hall before we reached the other side of the gap, we would have no place to hide and little chance of defending ourselves.

It didn’t happen that way. The Mogats preferred the safety of corridors with all four walls intact. From listening to their communications, I could tell that the Mogat commandos did not believe anyone had trespassed onto the ship. They thought the alarm was proof of a malfunctioning sensor.

You see anything? a Mogat commander asked one of his group leaders.

Nothing.

All clear here, another volunteered.

I’m thinking malfunction, Captain.

We caught an enemy ship prowling around outside, the captain pointed out.

Maybe he bumped the wreck. Would that set it off?

Don’t be stupid, the captain said. He would have been killed if he crashed into a battleship.

Maybe he barely bumped it.

Shut up, Anson, the captain said. You think you can shake a battleship by nudging it with a little ship like that?

I changed frequencies to speak to Illych. “We’d better show them some bait before they lose interest.”

Illych radioed the order.

Captain, I’ve got ’em! I’ve got ’em, some idiot Mogat radioed a moment later.

Illych led the way as we continued across the ship. The camouflage device in his helmet turned his armor the same pale gray color as the walls. Through the night-for-day lens in my visor, both he and the walls looked nearly white. Because of the poor depth perception the lens gave me, he was all but invisible.

“Do you have any idea how much of the ship is wired for motion?” I asked.

“Every inch of it from what I can tell,” Illych said.

“Good thing your boy looked for sensor fields,” I said.

Illych did not respond. I suppose that kind of precaution came as second nature when you worked in SpecOps.

Near the front of the ship, we crossed a major corridor that ran from one wing of the ship to the other. This hall was so wide you could drive two tanks side by side across it. Illych traveled along the ceiling. I hung low, an inch above the floor. We saw no signs of damage. Here the ship looked dormant, not derelict. I saw no debris, though I did see dead sailors when I peered into the hatches.

“How did they get into the launch bay?” I asked. “There shouldn’t be any power in the doors.”

“Maybe the atmospheric locks were open,” Illych suggested.

“Illych,” I said, “your ship is under attack, and you’re going to send out unarmed transports?”

“Maybe the locks opened when the battleship blew up,” Illych suggested.

“Yeah, sure, and all Mogat ships carry pint-sized broadcast engines along as a spare.” I tried to sound