The Clone Elite

“Do you have any shots of their spaceships?”

“They don’t use spaceships,” Brocius said. “That was why no one believed you after the Mogat invasion. We had our entire fleet circling the planet. You said you saw aliens, but none of the ships saw anything unusual.”

“How did they get to the planet?” I asked.

“You saw the bright light during the invasion …we think they came in through it,” Brocius said. “It’s just a theory, but it’s the best we have.”

I wished I could forget that light. Often as I fell asleep, my mind returned to that desperate moment as our invasion collapsed around us. I remembered the way that the strange light spread like a fog over the city and the odd glow it sent into the air. Waves of elemental colors seemed to rise out of that glow like smoke from a fire.

By the fifth frame in the series, the creatures no longer glowed. Their complexions had turned dark. I could see their massive forms clearly.

“They don’t look so advanced,” I said. “No vehicles, no tanks …just men on foot carrying rifles. What do you know about their battle tactics?”

“Absolutely nothing,” Brocius said. “Once that phantom light you saw stretches across an area, we lose all contact with the planet. We can’t transmit through it. We can’t take readings through it. Those battle images Major Doolan just showed the geezers were taken from a live feed just before the light sealed off the area.

“Around the Pentagon they’re calling it the ‘ion curtain.’ ” Brocius sighed.

“What do the survivors say?”

“No survivors,” Brocius said. “Once these bastards close that light curtain around a planet, there’s no going back to it. We’ve tried reentering; nothing gets through. We’ve sent fighters, robot ships …nothing makes it through, and nothing ever comes out.”

I placed the pistol back on the table and slid it back toward Brocius. I wasn’t going to shoot him.

“You’re not going to shoot me?” Brocius asked as he gathered up the gun.

“Maybe next time,” I said.

“Now you know why we need every man we can get …even those old fools.” It occurred to me that Brocius was older than many of those “old fools.”

“So how much of what you tell me will they get to hear?” I asked.

“Not much. Then again, I’m telling you everything we know, and it’s not much,” Brocius admitted. “In this war, we’re going to need to learn as we go along.”

CHAPTER SIX

If they had asked me to accept a commission when I left Sad Sam’s Palace, I would have said no. I had no choice about reporting, not with a dozen MPs breathing down my neck; but that did not mean I needed to rejoin. If I refused, the worst they could do was kill me, and I figured the aliens would kill us all in due course.

But meeting with Admiral Brocius had a strange effect on me. Here sat a man whom I had wanted to kill for over a year. I must have imagined myself snapping his neck a thousand times; but now that I saw him in person, the urge to kill Brocius slipped away.

He had come to represent everything I hated about the Unified Authority—the prejudice and abuse of clones, the deceit, the haughty attitude of its politicians and officers. U.A. officers fought wars as if they were a game of chess, an intellectual sport played on a black-and-white battlefield with pieces instead of people.

This time, though, Admiral Brocius had laid himself bare. Alone in the conference room, he could have been killed. I wouldn’t need a gun to kill a dried-up old derelict like him—I could have jumped across the table and broken his neck.

Having a worm like Brocius at my mercy had an unexpected impact on me. I won’t say I forgave him, but my anger fell out of focus. Here he sat, a sheep in a stall waiting for slaughter. Looking at him now, scared and trying to look like he was still in control of the situation, I realized how I did and did not want to die. I didn’t want to die at all. But if the war was on my doorstep, I preferred death on the battlefield with a gun in my hand and men that I trusted fighting beside me to dying like a sheep with a herd of civilians.

“It sounds like we can’t win this one,” I said.

“I suppose that depends on how you mean ‘win,’ ” Brocius said. “We’ve given up on colonizing the galaxy if that’s what you mean. It’s theirs. At this point we’re not even trying to hold on to the last of our colonies. If we can keep these bastards from reaching Earth, that will be victory enough.”

Brocius slid a memory disc into the monitor. A moment later a map of the galaxy appeared before us. There it was, a whirlpool made of six spiral arms leading into a vortex dense with stars. The image showed white stars with subtle bubbles of color against a black background. The camera zoomed in on the map, showing a series of stars orbited by planets.

“The invasion started in this unpopulated section of the Scutum-Crux Arm,” Brocius said.

The outer edge of the Scutum-Crux Arm, the outermost arm of the galaxy, turned red. They called this area the outer frontier. It was supposed to be unpopulated, but I knew about a very small colony of Neo-Baptists in that quadrant. I visited that colony with Ray Freeman, a mercenary and former partner. His family was among the colonists.

“There was a colony on—”

“Neo-Baptists on Little Man,” Brocius interrupted. For the first time since I had arrived, he did not strike me as a scared dog trying to act ferocious. “I oversaw the evacuation personally.”

“Overseeing” the evacuation, of course, did not mean that he participated in it.

“I made a deal with Freeman; we traded a life for a life. I saved the colony and he …We’re square now. I don’t need to worry about him.” I got the feeling Brocius added that last part more to convince himself than to inform me. Ray Freeman was a large and dangerous man. Brocius had left him to die on the Mogat planet along with the Marines, and Ray was not normally the forgiving type.

“Did you have trouble getting them out?” I asked.

“You’d have to ask Freeman,” Brocius said.

Ask Freeman, I thought. “Am I going to see Freeman?” Brocius ignored the question. “I can show you what became of Little Man.” Little Man was a “naturally productive” planet, meaning it was similar in size, temperature, and atmosphere to Earth. The image of the planet spun on the monitor, its blue, green, and tawny surface visible under a swirl of clouds. A small dot of light appeared on one of the continents. At first it was no more than a pinprick of light, but it spread in every direction until it flooded the entire planet.

“We placed a satellite to track the event,” Brocius said. “Our scientists call the process ‘sleeving.’ It took about five hours for the light to spread across the planet.”

“Then what happened?” I asked.

Brocius started to say something, paused, then said, “We don’t know.

“The satellite did not pick up the approach of a spaceship. We learned later that the aliens don’t use ships. That phantom light of theirs appears on the planet, and they come walking out of it like ghosts coming out of a fog.

“Our Navy is completely useless against them. Once that light closes around a planet …seals around the planet, we’re cut off. We can’t send messages in, and no messages come out. We’re working under the assumption that everyone on the planet is dead.

“The aliens don’t have ships, so we can’t put up a blockade. We can’t engage their land troops from space because the light shields them from us. Who knows what field tactics they use.”

“And there’s no way to send a landing force in to investigate?” I asked.

Brocius laughed. “Like I told you before, once they sleeve the planet, we’re cut off. Nothing gets in or out of that ion curtain.” Brocius’s frustration showed. He snarled these words, then repeated them softly. “We even tried sending in a self-broadcasting ship. We programmed it to broadcast in under the curtain.”

“Did it make it?” I asked.

Brocius fixed me with a patronizing grin. “You tell me. We never heard back.”

I stared at the monitor. It showed a planet encased in that gleaming light. “So it’s possible that people are