The Clone Redemption (43 page)

Then came the dull
thudthudthudthudthud
that I did not want to hear. Gunships approached. Looking around, I saw several men spin and fire distortion canisters into the air. The canisters burst in a cloud of shimmering silver glitter that vanished somewhere between the tops of the trees and the increasingly cloudy sky.

Those canisters would not harm the gunships, but they would wreak havoc on their radar, sonar, and infrared tracking systems. They filled the air with invisible filaments that gave sonar false readings and choked out radar and other tracking technologies.

Negotiating my way through grayscale landscape, I felt abandoned by the God in whom I did not believe and the fleet in which I did. The trees were gray, and the sky was silver; sunlight showed like platinum streaks casting shadows on the muddy ground. No help was coming, and we could not defeat the enemy. The best we could hope for was to lengthen the fight as we waited to die.

With their tracking systems hobbled, the men flying the gunships circled over the tops of the trees, hoping to establish visual contact. The gunships had thick, powerful armor. They were flying tanks armed with rockets, chain guns, and excellent tracking equipment, which my men had now blinded.

Trying to force us into the open, the gunships fired rockets into the trees. One ship loomed over us like a shark following prey. When we came to a clearing, the gunship spun into position and sprayed bullets into a company of men.

The chain guns were large and powerful. The bullets stabbed through my men and their armor. Blood sprayed out of the holes as men stumbled and fell. The gunship fired a rocket that hit the base of a tree, sending five men tumbling through the air. They landed as corpses; arms, legs, and armor blown away from their bodies.

One of my grenadiers scored a hit with a rocket-propelled grenade, but the handheld rocket didn't dent the gun bird. More of my grenadiers joined in the fight.

It was like hitting bulletproof glass with a baseball. Hit it enough times, and the glass will weaken and break. I had thousands of grenadiers on the ground. Once enough of them fired rockets, the gunship slowly came apart, tumbling into the trees, then crashing to the ground in a fiery wad of smoke and metal.

My visor displayed each Marine's name above his helmet. They were faceless to me, but not nameless. When I looked at the dead men lying in the clearing, their armor broken and their blood seeping into the ground, I almost gave up. I felt tired and weak and unfit to lead a division of men faced with a challenge that might be too big for the entire corps.

We continued our trot toward the outskirts of D.C. The gun birds shadowed us; but having lost a member of their flock, they did not attack. Fighters still flew far overhead. The air above us seemed to echo with the sounds of their engines.

We came to a break in the trees and stopped. A six-lane highway ran the gap like a border between two nations. The Unified Authority's tanks, trucks, and troops had not yet arrived, but a swarm of gunships hovered over the road like vultures waiting for a carcass.

I knew this area. If we followed the highway, we would end up on Capitol Hill, but it was a twenty-mile march. We were farther west of the city than I had hoped.

While I waited for my men to regroup, a colonel came and asked me if I had any ideas.

“Two,” I said. First, I pointed to the gunships waiting for us to cross the highway, and said, “We need to take care of them.

“Then we head east. There's a spaceport a few miles east of here. If we can make it to the spaceport, that will be the place where we make our stand.”

“Do you think we should make a stand?” the colonel asked.

“Colonel, the Unified Authority has cut us off from the fleet. We have twenty-six thousand men armed with M27s. We are too small to invade Washington and too big to hide in the woods. At the moment, I cannot think of a better alternative. How about you?”

“Aye, sir. I'll send my grenadiers bird hunting. Let's see what they can bring down,” he said with a salute.

“That sounds like a fine idea, Colonel. Carry on.”

The colonel relayed the order to shoot down the gunships. Several companies sent grenadiers to join in the attack. Three minutes later, a fusillade of rocket-propelled grenades came streaming out of the trees. Most of the choppers skated away untouched. Three gunships left trails of thick smoke in their wake. Two went down.

The unharmed gunships lifted above the trees, spun, and returned fire. Hovering in the air like wasps around a nest, they launched rockets and fired chain guns. Flames and smoke boiled out from the forest, trees bounced in the air before toppling onto the highway.

“Everyone out of there!” I yelled.

“Hey, General, watch this,” a self-assured-sounding voice said over the interLink. My visor identified the cocky phantom as Major Hunter Ritz. I knew the name, but I did not have time to register it.

The enterprising bastard fired a mortar into the air. It shot out from the trees, leaving a perfectly arced steam trail in its wake. Mortars were big, stupid weapons that were meant for demolishing buildings and landscapes. No one in his right mind would use a mortar to hit a flying target no matter how slow-moving . . . only the gunships weren't moving.

One thing about mortars, you could modify their shells. You could attach a radioactive charge, or a nuclear warhead, or a gas canister. In this case, Ritz had added a warhead that emitted an electromagnetic pulse.

The gunships hovered over the highway like cats watching over a mousehole. When the mortar shell reached the apex of its arc in the center of the flock of gun birds, it dropped a dozen yards, and burst. There was a double flash. First, there was the white and black you get with your basic explosion. Next came a burst of something that looked like steam. It filled the sky and vanished.

The force of the first explosion sent the gunships skittering into each other. They slid through the air. A few rotor blades collided. Before the collisions could result in real damage, the pulse struck, sending the birds into hibernation. Shields would have protected the gunships from that pulse; but these birds carried heavy armor instead of shields.

The Unifieds had twenty, maybe twenty-five, gunships in that flock. Ritz knocked them all down with a single shot.

“Nice shot, Colonel,” I told Ritz on an open frequency that every man on the planet could listen in on.

“I'm a major, sir,” he said.

“Not anymore,” I said.

Ritz's trick might have slowed them down, but the Unifieds were still herding us, still driving toward the location of their choice. They had more gunships, and their fighters still streaked over the trees. They could end the fight from the air if they wanted, but apparently they didn't.

They're still using us for military exercises,
I thought. That strategy had backfired on them before, when we established our empire. It could backfire again.

We crossed the road and waded back into the woods. It was late in the afternoon, and the winter sky was darkening. The low-hanging layer of gray clouds turned to charcoal as the sun went down, then the trees looked like shadows.

Traveling through the dark woods, we needed to rely on night-for-day vision. Our lenses would show the world in blue-white monochrome, ignoring shadows and indirect sources of light. We could not, for instance, see the glow of shielded armor once we switched to night-for-day vision. We could not see ten yards ahead without it.

I issued an order to my company commanders. “Team leaders, automatic riflemen, and grenadiers, switch to night-for-day vision. Riflemen stay with tactical lenses. Fall to the rear of your fire teams. Aim your Viridians on the man in front of you and stay close in behind.”

Viridian lasers were the laser aiming devices we attached to our guns. They housed both a thin green laser beam used for aiming and a flashlight.

Darkness came quickly. A suffocating stillness filled the woods. There might have been owls in the trees, but I did not hear them. There might have been a breeze, but I did not hear the rustling of branches. In the solitude of my helmet, I was alone.

The U.A. fighters ran a flyby. First the woods were silent, then they rang with the roar of engines. Those pilots knew our location and just how to hit us. A few of the men ahead of me stopped to stare into the sky.

“They could kill us if they wanted to,” commented one of my majors.

I did not answer. If I confirmed his theory, his fear would spread like a virus through my troops; and I did not like lying to my officers. Better to ignore my men than to scare them or lie.

We first spotted the glow of shielded armor at 19:00. The golden light looked ghostly as it weaved through the trees at improbable speeds. The units stayed far away. We heard their engines, saw the pale, golden glow, and knew the Jackals were behind us. They wanted us to know they were there, the bastards. They were pushing us forward, guiding us to their trap. Fighters forcing us to stay on the path, Jackals hurrying us along, we were cattle headed to the slaughterhouse.

Jackals were upgraded jeeps with powerful engines and armored turrets. I'd used them in battle, but I'd never seen Jackals with shields.

“Ritz, you hear those Jackals back there?” I asked on a direct Link.

“Hard to miss 'em,” he said.

“Think you could hit one with a rocket?” I asked.

“Shouldn't be much of a problem,” he said.

“Do you think you can hit one and get away alive?”

“Wouldn't do it any other way.”

“Take three grenadiers. Have them cover your ass in case it comes after you,” I said.

“Aye, sir,” he said.

Every man in armor had access to the interLink; but I was the only officer in the field with the commandLink. I could look through any man's visor, see the world as he saw it. Using optical commands, I created a window that let me look through Ritz's helmet. I saw his world as he dropped back from our ranks, hiding behind trees, darting behind bushes.

He did not carry a mortar for this job, just a handheld RPG, a foot-long silver tube that he held in his right hand. He stuck to the shadows. I could hear his breathing over the audio. If we made it through this mission, I would have a word with him about his conditioning. He was breathing heavily, like a man who had just run two miles instead of a couple of hundred feet.

He scurried to a mound of leaves and logs, slid in behind it, and switched to his tactical view. Dark forest surrounded him.

“You guys back there?” he asked as he went back to night-for-day vision.

“Yes, sir.”

“Right behind you.”

“Just making sure,” Ritz told them.

He took one last scan of the landscape, then darted to a spot where three spindly trees grew out of the rotted trunk of a long-dead oak. He switched his visor back to night-for-day and spotted a Jackal a few hundred yards away and closing the distance.

His breathing slowed. “Yeah, I see you, specker,” he said to himself. “Yeah, that's right, you just bring your fat ass this way. I got a present for you.” He switched his visor to tactical.

Seeing the world through the unenhanced tactical view, Ritz was surrounded by darkness. Looking through his visor using my commandLink, I could make out the trees he used for cover, but I saw them only as textures in the blackness. He held out the RPG. I could not see the tube, just the shape of his arm.

In the distance, the Jackal sped through the forest, dodging obstacles. It juked around trees and skipped over ditches, disappearing briefly behind a hill, then emerging not more than twenty yards from Ritz. He could have hopped out of his hiding hole and popped it. Instead, he waited, letting the vehicle approach.

“That's right, darlin'. A little closer. A little specking closer.”

The kid was patient. The best Marines are patient.

He didn't move. The Jackal came within thirty feet of him, dashed right past, and went by unmolested. It streaked away, offering him a clear shot at its tailpipe and turret.

Ritz stepped out from behind his blind and fired.

“Next time watch your ass, boys!” he yelled as he switched to night-for-day vision and sprinted for safety. He was screaming. He was whooping. He ran without breathing, then struggled for air, never looking back to see what his grenade had done. He jumped over a fallen log, cut to the left behind a clump of trees, and yelled, “Hell yeah!” as he scrambled up a small rise.

The Marines he took with him fired RPGs that sailed past him. Ritz did not turn to see what they were shooting at.

“Let's get the speck out of here!” he screamed to his backup.

“What the speck does it take to kill that specking whorehumper?” asked one of the men.

“More than you're packing,” Ritz said. He huffed and puffed as he ran, wheezing with each step.

The sound of high-caliber machine guns tore through the forest. A tree off to Ritz's left splintered and split. He muttered, “Are you trying to shoot me in the back, you bastards?” He spun and fired another RPG without aiming. It hit a tree or a rock and exploded. Ritz turned and continued running into the woods.

The Jackal darted ahead of him, skidding around trees without coming to a stop. Fire flashed from the machine gun in the turret. He should have dived for cover, but Ritz fired another RPG instead, hitting the Jackal above the rear tires. Had it not been for the shields, the Jackal would have exploded. Even with the shields, the percussion of Ritz's grenade knocked the Jackal for a loop. It spun like a dog chasing its own tail, slid down a rise, and disappeared into the shadows.

“That's two up your ass,” Ritz screamed as he panted. Then, more quietly, he added, “I got more where that came from.”