The Clone Redemption (42 page)

“Good luck to you,” he said, and signed off.

If every transport landed, we would start our invasion with three hundred thousand Marines. That would be the first of four waves—three thousand transports, each carrying one hundred troops and equipment. The second wave would have fewer troops and bigger guns, two hundred thousand men plus tanks and artillery.

Maybe five hundred miles ahead of us, our fighter escort entered into the storm. These were small, agile ships, able to execute tight maneuvers and armed with decoy buoys, sonic shields that could detonate warheads and missiles. They had ghosting technology designed to scramble enemy targeting systems with false readings. They dropped phosphorous-burning target drones that distracted heat-seeking missiles and sent them off course.

Our defensive tactics were designed for dogfights in mostly empty skies. The wing escorting our transports included thousands of fighters wedged too tightly together to maneuver. The shields on our fighters would offer little protection against nuclear-tipped missiles. With our pilots flying so close together, fooling a missile into missing one fighter might well send it into another.

Missiles began to burst in flashes that, from our transports, looked no bigger than the flame of a candle, but those explosions burned bright in the darkness.

Off to the side, Earth revolved as smooth and round as a child's dream. The sun shone down on the far side of the hemisphere, lighting the nearest edge of Europe and farthest shore of the Atlantic. And directly ahead of us, men in Harriers, Tomcats, and Phantoms did something that will forever color the way I think of fighter pilots. With missiles slamming into them from every side, they slowed their speed.

Had they bashed their way through at full speed, the vast majority of those fighters would have survived the attack. They would have left us behind, and the Unifieds would have renewed their attack on our unescorted transports. I doubt a single one of our slow-flying birds would have survived.

The fighters throttled back to a crawl. We caught up to them so gradually, I might not have noticed had it not been for Nobles. He muttered, “Specking hell, they're almost at a dead stop.”

“What?” I asked.

“Thirty seconds, sir, and we'll be in missile range.”

Then I saw it. We had nearly caught up to the fighters as they weaved around each other and waited for us. With the Earth turning peacefully in the background, I saw a Phantom take a direct hit. The missile struck it just behind the cockpit. The missile hit it “in the gills,” in the pilots' vernacular.

The missile exploded outside the shields—an electrical layer that showed like a flat plane of glass, then vanished as the force of the blast tore, shredded, and melted the fighter all at the same time. Pieces of wing, and nose, and fuselage spun into space, scattering like buckshot from a shotgun.

A few hundred yards away, a Phantom banked, looped, and nose-dived toward Earth, then pulled into a corkscrew as it led multiple rockets away from our transports. I did not have a clear view of the fighter when the first of the missiles hit, I just saw the flare of the explosion.

Then we entered the pack and found ourselves as much a target as the fighters that protected us. Fighters darted in and out of view. The debris of broken fighters floated around us; and in the distance, Earth was ten or maybe twenty times the size of a full harvest moon.

I did not see the missile that shot toward our bow, but I caught a glimpse of the particle beam that disabled it and I saw the fighter that fired the beam as she passed. The fighter streaked by so quickly, I could not tell if she was a Tomcat, a Harrier, or a Phantom.

Nobles said, “That was close.”

I said, “That fighter almost hit us.”

Nobles said, “The missile came closer.”

Until he mentioned the missile, I had not understood. “Can you tell how many transports we've lost?” I asked. We were at the front of the wave. I had no idea what had happened behind us.

“Seventy-five so far,” he said. “The fighters are taking it worse than us. They're down a few hundred.”

I barely heard what Nobles said about the fighters because I was already trying to raise Freeman on the interLink.

“Ray. Ray, are you there?” If we lost Freeman, the mission was over.

“Here,” he said.

“We're losing transports,” I said.

Just ahead of us, three fighters formed a small wing to clear our path. They stayed in a tight formation for a minute or two, firing lasers and particle beams into the glowing atmosphere ahead of us.

A missile hit the fighter on the right. It happened so fast I did not see where it hit or if the bird survived. One moment there were three ships, then the tinting over in our windshield darkened. When the tint cleared, there were two fighters instead of three.

“Just making sure you're okay,” I said.

Freeman didn't answer.

“Better brace yourself,” Nobles said. “We're coming in hard.”

Before I could react, we slammed into the edge of Earth's atmosphere and glanced off, only to strike it again and break through. The impact of the entry slung me back in my seat, my arms flying to the sides, my head snapped back. The force of the drop held me pinned in my chair. I struggled to sit up, to breathe, to see through the windshield.

Our fighter escort did not lead us down to the planet. We dived through bright mist and empty sky with no ships leading our way. The sky around us was crisscrossed with slowly evaporating vapor trails.

The Unifieds would not fire their nuclear-tipped missiles at us now that we had entered the atmosphere, the radiation would have come back to fry them. As we flew through the paper white sky, thick beams of silver-red light slashed the air around us.

“Lasers,” Nobles mumbled. He said it dismissively. We could survive a direct hit from a laser. He studied his scopes for a moment, and said, “Whatever is left of us has already entered the atmosphere. The fighters are headed back to the fleet.”

“How many transports do we have?” I asked.

Nobles hesitated, swallowed, said, “Two hundred sixty-five.”

“What the speck do we do now?” I asked. That left us with twenty-six thousand men plus change. We weren't going to conquer Washington with twenty-six thousand men.

“We'd better land. Sooner or later, those lasers are going to wear down our shields,” Nobles said. Either a particle beam or possibly a short-range missile hit us. I thought it might have been a particle beam by the way we dropped. A hundred feet ... a thousand feet ... One moment we were flying straight ahead and the next falling straight down.

We had reached the eastern seaboard of the territory once called the United States. This was the seat of power, the capital of the Unified Authority. The ground below us was trussed with roads and highways. We skirted cities and traversed forests as we traveled up the coast at three times the speed of sound.

It was a clear day. We might have been ten miles out of Washington, D.C., the city skyline rose out of the tree-covered landscape up ahead. Until that moment, the Unifieds had only fired ground weapons at us, and I finally understood why. They were herding us, guiding us toward the capital itself and Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, the largest military air base on Earth.

I shouted, “Put us down.”

“We're in the middle of nowhere,” Nobles said. Then he saw fighters on his radar and the flashing amber warning light.

Nobles was a good pilot and a smart man. He knew we had a better chance of surviving a crash landing than an aerial assault. We had powerful shields but no weapons and limited maneuverability.

Nobles set off Klaxons to alert the Marines in the kettle about the upcoming crash. He hit the radio, and shouted, “Incoming fighters! Drop where you are! Drop where you are!”

We nose-dived toward the forest. Our shields obliterated the bare branches of trees that had shed their leaves for the winter. We skipped across the tops of the trees as Nobles cut our speed from thousands of miles per hour to hundreds. He righted our attitude, and our momentum hurled us forward. As I watched Nobles steering us into trees, I realized he was using them to slow us.

The shields held. Nothing hit the ship itself, but we spun and bumped and tilted and bounced, working our way down the last thirty feet. And then we touched down as delicately as a ballerina completing a grand jeté, and the world around us was silent.

Back on Terraneau, Lieutenant Mars and his engineers tested the batteries in the Unified Authority's new shielded armor and discovered that the batteries stored enough energy to power the armor for forty-five minutes. Their power usage spiked whenever anything hit the shields. If we hit them with a continuous laser stream or enough bullets, we could cut that battery life to a few minutes.

The only weapons their Marines could use while wearing the armor were the built-in fléchette guns that ran along the outsides of their sleeves—decidedly short-range weapons, accurate to one hundred yards.

The original plan was to cut off any outside support by surrounding Washington, D.C., then tightening the noose around the city's neck as our reinforcements arrived.

They, of course, would retaliate by sending out soldiers in shielded armor; but we had that all figured out. With our M27s, we could hit the defenders from outside their range. We would drain their shields; and, once we depleted the batteries in their shields, we would annihilate them.

It was a good plan, and it probably would have worked had I had three hundred thousand troops. Instead, I had twenty-six thousand men, and we were cut off. We'd lost 90 percent of our birds on the way down, and there would be no reinforcements as long as the missile defenses remained operational.

Both Freeman and I survived. Most of the transports in the front of the pack made it through. That was because the fighters that cleared our way took the brunt of the attack. As long as Freeman was alive, there was still hope we might shut down the missiles.

“Everyone out! Regroup. Regroup!” I shouted over the interLink. I used a frequency for company commanders. The Unifieds would come looking for us shortly, and they'd have artillery. They would not have any trouble locating our transports; we'd practically crushed the forest when we crashlanded. As we did not have enough men to guard them, we'd need to leave the transports behind.

Our only hope was to hide in the forest, where we might be able to escape the Unifieds' fighters. It wasn't much of a hope. Once the fighters failed, the Unifieds would send slow-moving, low-flying helicopter gunships to flush us out. First they'd send gunships, then they'd send in tanks and Marines. We needed to move.

“Freeman, where are you?” I asked on a direct Link.

“I'm on my way,” he said.

“Do you want me to send a team with you?” I asked.

He didn't answer. It was a stupid question. Sometimes a lone man can accomplish feats that an army could not. Working by himself, Freeman could hijack a car and infiltrate Washington unseen. Every person he added to his entourage made him that much more visible; and in this game, visibility was death.

“Is there any chance the Unifieds found your buildings?” I asked. Maybe I was losing faith.

 

The enemy had better armor, artillery, air support, and more men; but we were Marines. We organized and spread out under the cover of the trees as the first of the U.A. fighters arrived overhead.

The fighters didn't worry me . . . much. Fighters were made for fighting each other, not ground forces. They worked best when they moved fast. We had drone planes and rockets. Those fighters would need to slow down to a vulnerable speed to attack us. If they did, we would give them something to think about.

Fighting back against Unified Authority gunships and troops would be another story. We needed to evacuate the forest before the Unified's ground forces arrived. We wouldn't stand a chance against tanks and shielded armies fighting here in the trees; but we might find safety in the eye of the storm.

“We need to get to the city,” I called out to the troops.

The first explosion was of the benevolent variety, at least it was benevolent toward us. A few miles east of us some charges went off. Though he did not call it in, I suspected Ray Freeman had set something off. Looking up through the trees in the direction of the blast, I saw a column of white smoke rise into the air. White smoke, clean smoke, the kind of smoke you get from charges.

In this case, Freeman had hit a communications tower to try to buy us some time. I heard the pop of cables snapping and the yawn of metal bending. The tower fell through trees as it collapsed. I heard the sounds, but they meant nothing to me until we crossed over a ridge and found the tower lying twisted in a bed of broken branches.

“What is that?” asked one of my captains.

“A relay tower,” I said. Losing the tower would not cripple U.A. communications in the area; it might not even slow them down.

The trees around us were spindly but tall, most of their trunks no more than four inches across. They had silver-gray bark. Looking up through the trees, I saw a nickel-colored sky with high-flying clouds. A crow flew across my path, or maybe a raven. It looked like a fast-flying shadow against the sky.

Fighters streaked overhead. First we heard the growl as they approached, then the screech as they slammed past us, and finally the bang as the noise of their engines followed. They flew at supersonic speeds crossing the woods in a matter of seconds. Beneath the trees we walked ten-minute miles, hoping that our slow speed would make us harder to follow.