The fighters screeched past the window so fast that I saw nothing more than a blur. Moments after they passed, the boom from their engines tore through the air. If they hit the roof with a missile, the right missile, they could cave it in without demolishing the entire building. Sure, they’d lose some of theirs as well; but losing Marines had always been an acceptable price to the Unified Authority. At least, it had always been acceptable when those Marines were clones.
“General, do you think they have already landed the second wave?” asked an unknown clone. He sounded desperate.
“For all we know, they’ve already landed and captured the capital without us,” I said. It was true. I did not think it was likely; but without information coming over the interLink, who knew?
Only at that moment did it occur to me that Freeman might have failed. He might have only shut down one or two of the missile bases. Maybe there were more bases than he thought. Cutter might have flown the fleet into an ambush. So many variables. So many reasons why the second wave might never arrive.
Across the runway, a strange thing happened. A flying snake darted out of the trees. It was twenty feet long with a body that reflected the sky like a mirror. It fluttered and swirled in the air, flying in an erratic pattern that twisted and spun. The air dance only lasted a moment, then the Unifieds shot Freeman’s drone to pieces.
“Freeman,” I whispered. How long had he been out there, hiding in the woods, watching? I understood his message, though.
Several of the men around me asked, “What the hell?”
“That,” I said, “is the signal.”
Even as I spoke, a wing of fighters passed overhead, a wedge-shaped formation with six jets followed by two formations of three.
Across the runway and over the trees, the fighters put on an air show. The three fighters in the first formation split apart, each fighter crossing another’s path, creating a braided vapor trail. The six fighters bringing up the rear split as well. They fired rockets, filling the sky with starbursts and smoke trails.
Inside the building, all went silent as the men near the windows struggled to understand. A moment later, they cheered. They screamed. They fired their guns in the air.
For the Unifieds, the battle had taken on a frantic turn. Jets from the Enlisted Man’s Empire had entered their skies.
Desperate men turn to desperate measures.
First came the teakettle screech of an incoming shell, then the blast that shook the building, followed by the rumble of distant cannons. The shell hit the roof. Tiles fell from the ceiling, hitting men and shattering. Light fixtures dropped partway out of the ceiling as well, then dangled from wires over our heads. Clouds of dust billowed out of the walls, but those clouds vanished when broken pipes began spraying steam and water.
That first shell had been small, a test to see how hard they could hit the top floors without bringing the entire terminal down on the natural-borns trapped below. The second shell followed after another minute. This one slammed into a corner of the building like a hammer striking a sand castle.
The roof collapsed. It simply fell in, taking down a twenty-foot section of wall and crushing men beneath an avalanche of debris. As the smoke and the steam cleared, I saw open sky instead of ceiling.
The third shell hit a few seconds later.
The second wave of our invasion must have landed. The Unifieds could no longer hold our ships off. There was no longer any doubt that we would win the war, but my men and I would celebrate posthumously.
Without my helmet’s electronics, I could not communicate orders across the ranks, so I communicated with my officers the way commanders had been communicating since the days of clubs and muskets—I screamed at the officer nearest to me and he screamed at the man closest to him.
“We’re taking the bottom floors,” I yelled. “Get your men! Go! Go! Go!”
I did not wait to see how they would react. I did not wait for my message to get through the confused and scared men crowding the halls. I ran to the nearest stairwell, and I screamed “Move it! Move it, Marines!”
One of the things I liked best about cloned Marines was the way they responded to commands. Hearing, “Move it,” they did not stop to ask what they were to move or where they should move it to, they simply grabbed their guns and followed me into the darkness.
The stairwell did not have windows, and the lights were out. Even the emergency lighting had failed. I’d had a helmet with night-for-day vision the last time I’d taken these stairs. I never stopped to think about lights. As we clambered down the first flight of stairs in total blackness, I missed my helmet, with its many lenses.
I rounded the landing, the rattle of boots clattering against the stairs filling my head. If I fell, they might trample me, but I didn’t care. I had my gun and my enemy and my combat reflex. I was in control this time, but I was more than ready to kill.
We ran past the doors to the first floor. If the U.A. Marines still held it, I did not care. They could have it. Their fighters and artillery were about to blow the stuffing out of this building. If the U.A. Marines wanted to ride the avalanche to the tarmac below, they had my permission.
As I started down the next flight, I saw a sliver of light in the shadows below. My men had set off charges in these shafts to make it harder for the Unifieds to attack us. Now we found ourselves running down the ruins of our work. I leaped breaks in the stairs, ignored holes in the walls and the groaning of the metal rails along the stairs. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I hoped the wall did not cave in on me.
I would be vulnerable at the base of the stairs. Give or take a thousand, fifty thousand Unified Authority Marines waited for me down there. They might not have shields, but they had numbers.
“Stop!” I screamed, but the sound of a thousand armored boots ground my voice to powder. “Stop!” But they could not hear me, and they would not stop. If I stopped, I would be trampled by my own Marines.
The same thing might have been happening in every stairwell in the enormous terminal building. I had over twenty thousand Marines, we were preparing to rush the enemy, we’d traded our thought processes for the mentality of a controlled mob.
I jumped a broken flight of stairs, landed badly, and tumbled into a wall. One more flight of stairs, and I would be on the ground floor, surrounded by U.A. Marines. The speckers would kill me. They would shoot depleted uranium darts through my skull, through my face, through my armor. The poison would not even have time to kill me as their flechettes riddled my heart and drilled into my brains.
The breaks in the stairs behind had slowed the front of the herd; but the men in the back kept pressing. Some men leaped the chasm as I had. Some leaped and failed. Some tried to stop, and the men in the back pushed them over the ledge. They did not have far to fall, but a pile of squirming bodies began to form.
I ran to the door, reached for a grenade, pulled the pin, threw it low and hard, then I closed the door and fought halfway up the flight of stairs. My pill must have hit a wall or maybe a person. It did not go far. When it exploded, the percussion caused one of the walls at the base of the stairs to cave in. Had I waited by the door, I might have been crushed.
A cloud of dust filled the stairwell. Then came the flechettes, like raindrops in a storm, only flying up, not down. The needles struck the cinder-block walls and bored into them. The darts hit men and metal stairs. I threw another grenade through the broken wall. This time there was nothing to block percussion. The explosion was deafening. Its force knocked me on my ass, but the hail of flechettes slowed.
The sound of the explosion echoed off the walls of the stairwell. God, the battle was loud. It had never bothered me when I had a helmet.
One of the men standing behind me lost his footing. He landed on his armor-covered ass and slid down the stairs, making a clacking noise–
I saw the whole thing clearly. The man climbed to his feet, then dropped to his knees as flechettes drilled through his gut, chest, and groin. Some of the needles passed all the way through his armor, both front and back. The man fell to his knees, and shots hit him in the face, shredding his cheeks. His eyes splattered. His forehead split as he fell face-first to the floor.
Despite the explosions and the dead Marine, more men gathered behind me, forcing me down the stairs. Without the interLink, I had no more control over this tide of cloned humanity than I would have had over water breaking through a dam. If I did not stay ahead of them, they would crush me.
I had no other choice. I scrambled down the stairs and dived through the hole in the wall, landing on my face in the shallow crater from my grenade. I had the briefest glimpse of a sea of natural-borns wearing combat
