The Clone Elite

The sphere began compressing into itself, but even as it shrank, three final figures emerged from it. Two of these last aliens carried rifles, the third appeared to be empty-handed. They stepped out of the light, stood still for a moment, and followed the rest of their ranks into the forest.

Watching the aliens vanish into the trees, I felt relief. This was not the innumerable army I had expected. Nor were these the nightmarish battle conditions of the Mogat invasion, not with the forest filled with light.

Sergeant Thomer signaled me. “Want me to go after those last ones, sir? I can take a squad.”

“Send Philips after them,” I said. “Tell him to track them down but not to engage. I want to be there when the shooting starts.”

“Aye, aye,” Thomer said.

“And Thomer, make sure he knows his ass is on the line.”

Moments later, five men split off from us. For some reason I had the feeling that I would never see these men again, and I noted each of their names in my head. Philips took the lead; he always took point when he was in charge. The four men in his fire team were Corporal Trevor Boll as grenadier, Corporal Lewis Herrington as rifleman, Private First Class Scott Huish as automatic rifleman, and PFC Steven White as second rifle. I noted the care they showed as they cut through woods, using trees for cover, moving quickly enough to catch up to the aliens and silently enough not to get caught.

The big question was what they would do once they spotted the trio of aliens. Of all the men in this platoon, Mark Philips was the one with the right skills for sneaking up on the enemy and setting an ambush, despite his lack of discipline.

And then there were the questions about the aliens. Had I underestimated the bastards just because of their numbers? Had I sent these men, my men, to an unnecessary death?

Philips jumped a small ledge and juked behind a tree, keeping his M27 out and ready. Other Marines preferred to use their M27s in their pistol configuration for maneuverability, but Philips almost always mounted the rifle stock. He crouched, checked to the left, then the right, then dashed out of sight. Boll followed, then Herrington and Huish, followed by White in the rear. Good men, I thought. Maybe among the best the Corps had to offer. Semper fi, Marines.

The chatter among the men of the platoon was nervous but controlled. I gave a quick scan on the interLink and heard:

Tell me how the speck you kill a specking beam of light?

There weren’t very many of them. That’s something.

Not if we can’t kill them.

How do we know that was all of them? There might be a billion more on the other side of town.

Tuning out the chatter, I turned to survey the area and saw Freeman approaching the sphere. “What are you doing?” I asked.

He pulled a pistol from his armor. As a civilian, Freeman could carry whatever equipment he saw fit. When it came to battle arms, we government-issue types carried M27s and particle-beam pistols, and that was about it. Knives were optional.

Freeman stood about twenty feet from the sphere, leveled his pistol, and fired three shots through it. The bullets struck a tree on the other side.

“Basic physics,” I said. “Light and bullets don’t mess with each other.”

“Ever fired a bullet through a laser stream?” Freeman asked.

As a matter of fact, I had. That was the kind of mischief we pulled back in the orphanage. For young military clones, firing guns and experimenting with battle lasers was a wild time. We’d sneak off to the range and “cross- fire” bullets through a laser beam. The bullets ended up as formless blobs. Remembering the turd-shaped blobs, I asked, “Do you think this thing is a laser of some sort?”

After pocketing the pistol, Freeman pulled out a particle-beam pistol. He walked around the sphere until he had a straight shot at the tree he had hit with his bullets. It was a big tree, maybe fifty feet tall, with a trunk that was easily three feet across. That tree might have been a hundred years old, but it would not see another winter night. Freeman held his pistol a few inches from the trunk and fired. The spot that the sparkling green particle beam struck exploded in a flash of bark and splinters. The tree toppled, leaving a five-foot stump with a jagged crown.

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked.

“Running a scientific experiment,” Freeman said. He put the particle-beam pistol away and produced a combat knife with an eight-inch serrated blade. Then he went to the trunk and began digging out his bullets. By this time, most of my Marines had come to see what the giant in the combat armor was up to. Big, silent, and scary, Freeman was just as enigmatic as the aliens.

After prying the first of the bullets out of the stump with his knife, Freeman held it up for me to see. The bullet glowed as if he had just pulled it out of a furnace. I switched the lenses in my visor to heat vision, but the shell was not hot, it simply glowed.

“I wouldn’t touch that; it might be radioactive,” I said.

“I already checked,” Freeman said as he dropped the bullet into a bag. He dug out a second shell and placed it in his bag with the first bullet.

“Thomer,” I said, “send some men out to sweep the area. I want to know if there are any more of these light spheres out here.”

“Aye, aye,” Thomer said.

I walked closer to the sphere. As I approached, the tint shields in my visor increased. The sphere did not become brighter, so it must have been the proximity that set off the tint shield.

“Harris, the aliens have begun their attack.” It was not General Glade but Lieutenant Moffat who contacted me. He sounded strangely calm. “Intel is estimating their forces at approximately fifty thousand troops. How the speck do they expect to invade us with fifty thousand troops?”

“Are they putting up much of a fight?” I asked.

“We were a lot more scared of these guys before they got here,” Moffat said. “They beat the shit out of our gunships, but our ground troops are holding their own. So far they don’t look all that specking dangerous.”

I took a moment to process this information. “Have you been up to the front line?” I asked.

“The Army is taking this one,” Moffat said. “How about you? Any luck capturing a live one?”

“Not yet. We found where they landed, if you can call it a landing. It looks more like they broadcast in.”

“Broadcast in? Nice, very nice. What’s the ETA on your return?”

“I was hoping to look around a bit longer,” I said.

“There’s no rush, Harris. Dig up what you can and get back here when you’re done,” Moffat said before signing off.

I stood there thinking about the aliens. The Unified Authority had just survived a civil war with the Mogats, an enemy with next to no military experience and no ground troops. Survived was the optimal term. The Mogats won too many battles before we finally tracked them down and eviscerated them. Now we were fighting an alien invader that telegraphed its battle plans and sent fifty thousand troops to battle our million. Maybe our luck is holding up. Maybe the entire universe is incompetent, I thought.

Thomer woke me from my thoughts. “Lieutenant Harris, we found nine more of those chambers.”

“Chambers?” I asked. I had already labeled them “spheres” and subconsciously assumed that everyone else had as well.

“The glowing balls,” Thomer said. “We found nine more of them just north of here.”

I gave the sphere another glance to make sure it wasn’t growing. It seemed stable. “Good work, Thomer. Bring your men back,” I said. “I just got a report from Moffat—the fireworks have started.”

Impossible as it sounded, I thought the war for New Copenhagen might end as suddenly as it had started. The aliens would probably send in more reinforcements, but maybe they were having the same problems on every planet. How big an army would you need to conquer an entire galaxy? Sooner or later they had to run out of soldiers. Maybe they were running out now. With only ten spheres for landing more soldiers, they would never be able to land a large enough army in time to save this campaign. I was beginning to feel like we had just dodged an apocalyptic bullet.

“Freeman, what do you think about setting up a line of trackers to guard the area?” I asked. “If the bastards