The Clone Empire (48 page)

I spotted him by following the angle of his rifle fire. He had taken cover behind a crane. “The engineers built a steel barrier a quarter mile in,” he said in his low, ineffable voice. “We need to get back there.”

A few of Mars’s men tried to come back and help us; but they were engineers, not combat Marines. They crawled along the walls and froze when the gunfire erupted, and I told them to get back into the tunnel and guard the door. “Fall back,” I shouted over the interLink on a frequency that every man could hear. They did not need to be told a second time.

Several guns opened fire. Shooting blindly into the tunnel, the militia leaders hoped to keep us pinned while some of their men tried to flank us. They made a mistake. They overestimated our numbers. They must have thought there were dozens of us instead of two men hiding in the shadows along the wall. They fired toward the center of the tunnel, then they sent out six men who ducked low and sprinted for cover. Freeman picked them off, starting with the man in the rear and working his way forward. He hit them so quickly that the first four went down before last ones noticed.

A grenadier spotted Freeman. As he stepped out to fire an RPG, I picked him off with my M27.

“Where are you?” I asked Mars over a frequency that only he and Freeman would hear.

“We’re dug in behind the next blast wall, about a quarter mile in,” he said.

“Okay, we’re going to try and work our way back to you.”

“Your girlfriend escaped,” Mars said.

“Shoot her if she gives you any trouble,” I said. I wasn’t joking.

The sound of a large engine caught my attention. The growl of the engine seemed to fill the tunnel, drowning out the gunfire. It became louder, then vanished under the thunder of a shell striking the jackknifed truck. The blast sent the truck skidding along the street, kicking up a trail of sparks as large as dandelions. A Targ Tank had entered the tunnel. Low to the ground and very fast-moving, Targ Tanks were the Jackal killers and troop displacers of the battlefield.

The tank fired a second shell into the truck, sending it into a slow roll. It crashed into a concrete barrier and smashed it to rubble. Still rolling, the truck rammed into a scaffolding platform and crushed it like a house of twigs. The tank headed toward a dark corner in which Freeman knelt behind a bulldozer.

I pulled my first grenade launcher, flipped the safety, and fired. Before the pill even hit, I’d chucked the first tube and pulled out a second. The first grenade hit home, striking the turret just behind its guns. The second shot caused the tank to skid sideways, crumpling the turret and bending the cannon so that it hung askew.

By that time, I had found a new hiding place. Rocket-propelled grenades were great for killing tanks, but they left a trail of fine smoke that stretched from your target to your front door. I had barely dug into my new spot, semisafe behind a concrete barrier, when Freeman said, “Harris, we’re out of time. We have to get behind the wall.”

Knowing that the militia would spot me the moment I left my new hiding place, I sprang from behind my barricade. I caught a quick glimpse of men pouring into the tunnel, then I began my sprint, thinking I might just survive this action. The militia would shoot at me, but they would not fire missiles. If they fired missiles, they might rupture the walls of the tunnel, and lake water would flood in.

“Mars, close the gates,” I shouted over an open frequency. I knew Freeman would be listening.

“Where are you?”

“We’re on our way,” I said. By the time I said that, it was already a lie. We were both pinned down. The militia had spotted me. Bullets rang out and chipped at the ceiling and the walls of the tunnel.

Freeman fired off the charges I had seen him placing by the front of the tunnel and something amazing happened. Instead of triggering a massive explosion, the charges burst into a wall of flames that filled the tunnel from roof to floor in a solid sheet of fire. He triggered a second of those explosions, then a third.

The militia fired bullets through those flames, shooting blindly, not compensating for the downhill grade. Running just ahead of me, Freeman spun and set off one last explosion. I did not stop to watch the fireworks. I dashed ahead, making my way through the tunnel until I reached the front metal doors, where I did not so much stop as fall. Panting for air, I skidded behind a crane, then slid for cover. Freeman ran in beside me.

Mars and another engineer watched us from behind the door. I could see them; but I could not see if there was concern on their faces.

Bullets struck the heavy metal door; but this was shielded metal, and they might as well have been shooting spit wads for all the damage their bullets would do. The sound of the bullets was faint, a dull thud, then that stopped.

And then the event began.

A quarter of a mile deep in the tunnel, I did not hear or feel a thing; but when I looked back up the tunnel, I caught a brief glimpse of the glowing red sky, the color of lava or maybe molten metal. Anyone near the front of the tunnel was already ash; but this far in, with the lake distributing the heat, we were safe. There was plenty of cool air in the tunnel; and as long as we stayed behind the metal door, we’d be safe from the backlash when the superheated atmosphere came down. Freeman and I dashed the last few yards and ducked behind the door. By that time, though, the shooting had stopped.

The last thing I saw as the engineers rammed the doors in place was a passel of militiamen lined up like stones in a cemetery. They stood facing toward the mouth of the tunnel, their backs bathed in shadow. Beyond them, I could see just a sliver of open sky in which the colors were all wrong, and the air itself seemed to have caught on fire.

 

They must have all seen what I saw before they sealed the doors. Ava, her courage spent and her strength gone, sat on the ground crying like a child. When her boyfriend tried to comfort her, she pushed him away. Mars’s army of engineers stood silent. I lost track of Freeman.

It was crowded in the tunnel, Mars had a thousand men in his Corps of Engineers; but I think every soul in that tunnel went through the next dark hours feeling alone. Mars came to me and said something about Noah closing the doors of his ark. I heard the words, but I wasn’t listening. I did not respond.

It would be like this all across the galaxy—running, warning, hiding, waiting. The Enlisted Man’s Empire still had twenty-two planets. The thought of trying to rescue so many planets left me exhausted. The thought of failing left me hollow.

I needed to sleep.

I had come to rescue people, and now I wanted to escape from the few people I had actually managed to save. No one paid attention to me as I pushed through the ranks of engineers, slowly walking deeper into the tunnel. I removed my helmet. The air was still and cool. It was musty and smelled of iron. I tasted ash in the air, but that might have been my imagination. I could not tell.

Deep in the tunnel I spotted the shuttle, parked under a flickering light that only illuminated its nose. Nobles sat inside the cockpit doing what he always did when he was nervous, checking instruments, running tests, distracting himself. I watched him, not really paying attention as I stared in his direction.

I had no idea how much time passed.

Ava found me. She planted herself in front of me and stared into my eyes until I looked back at her, then she pressed herself against me. I think she wanted me to hold her, but I felt nothing for her at that moment. I had come all this way because I loved her. There was a time when every man, woman, and child on the planet could have died, and I would have considered my mission a success because I had rescued Ava. Now she stood before me, wanting me to make her feel safe, and I would not even wrap my armor-plated arms around her.

“They’re all dead?” she asked.

I said nothing.

“Could you have stopped this?”

“No,” I said.

“Hold me,” she said, and she pressed the side of her face against the cold and hardened plate that covered my heart. She locked her arms around me the way a frightened little girl might lock her arms around her father. I let her hold me, but I did not put my arms around her. After a moment, I stepped away.

“Don’t leave me, Wayson,” she said; but she was too late, I already had.

Later, I had no idea how much later, we heard the thud of the atmosphere crashing back into place. Some men moaned, and other men shouted, but the impact was not especially loud.

Freeman found me, and said in a soft voice, “We’re going to open the shield.” He stood behind me. I could not see him, but I could feel his presence.

As I followed him toward the shield, I saw Ava begin to sob. I watched her fall to her knees, and I felt no desire to comfort her.

I placed my helmet over my head as I followed Freeman toward the front of the tunnel. Holding our guns ready, we waited as the engineers pulled back the doors, revealing a scene I’d seen too many times before—the aftermath.

The tunnel was intact, but its contents were in tatters. Men lay like puzzle pieces across the concrete. The heat had not penetrated that far into the tunnel, but the pressure from the atmosphere had. There was blood on the ground and on the walls. Two overturned jeeps sat in a pile. I took my first tentative steps from behind the steel doors and stopped.

Not all of the men were dead. A half dozen militiamen sat huddled along one wall of the tunnel. They had blood on their faces and bloodstained clothes and blood in their hair, and they looked stunned as they sat and moaned. I stepped over a body and saw blood running out the man’s ear.

“Maybe the medics on the
Churchill
can save them,” Freeman said.

The
Churchill
was a fighter carrier, it would certainly have beds and medicine. “Do you mean
save
them or
fix
them?” I asked.

Freeman said nothing.

Walking just outside the door, I found two more pockets of survivors. Three men sat beside each other, they were silent and still. As I approached them, one looked up into my visor, and asked, “Is it over?” He yelled the words. The heat hadn’t reached these men; when the atmosphere dropped back in place, the pressure it created obliterated their eardrums.

But it wasn’t physical pain that left them numb. They had lost everything and everyone that meant anything to them.

“Harris, come here,” Mars called over the interLink.

He stood in a little clearing. I went to join him.

Not far from Mars, a single body rested against a wall. The Right Reverend Colonel Ellery Doctorow, president of Terraneau, sat with his finger still around the trigger of the gun he had used to kill himself. His head had shattered like a melon tossed from a tall building, but I recognized his tailored suit just the same. The jolt of recognition did not include sympathy; I felt nothing but disgust for this man whose high ideals and sense of self-importance had cremated an entire population. How many millions had he killed with his visions of moral superiority simply because he did not trust any authority other than his own?

I came up beside Mars, who was dressed in his engineering armor. He stared down at Doctorow. I had no idea what he felt; but I thought his feelings toward Doctorow might not be any kinder than my own.

“General, should we take your shuttle out?” he asked after several seconds passed. They really were magicians, Lieutenant Mars and his engineers. They saved ships, built bridges, dug tunnels, and resurrected the left-for-dead.

“Give it a few more minutes,” I said, remembering the tests Freeman had run on Olympus Kri. “Let’s let the dust settle.”

Outside the tunnel, the sky would be filled with soot and steam and smoke. The final dregs of Tachyon D would still be dangerous as they traveled their circuits like angels of death.

Mars did not leave. He stood there, beside me, staring down at Doctorow’s lifeless remains. He did not speak for several seconds. I could not see his face through his helmet, but I could imagine his expression. He was new to this kind of war. The first time you see the bodies and the blood and the waste, the muscles in your face go numb and your mind goes numb and you feel as if you are no more alive than the men lying on the ground.

“What about the other planets?” Mars asked. “Is it going to be like this? Can we save them?”

I took a deep breath, held it in my lungs until I felt them searing; and even then, I still did not exhale. I thought about the Unified Authority, its leaders waiting for another chance to betray us, and the Avatari traveling from planet to planet, burning entire worlds.

“We can’t save them all,” I said, but I would try just the same. Staring down at Doctorow, I realized that the only time I appreciated the value of life was when I saw it spent and wasted.

“Takahashi-san, what are we doing out here?” asked Yokoi Shigeru, the least Japanese of the four ship’s captains.

Takahashi Hironobu, captain of the self-broadcasting battleship
Sakura
, took the question at face value and dismissed it as the kind of stupid talk men make after too much sake. “We’re here to track down the aliens and to protect our home planet,” he said. Even as he said it, he knew it was more slogan than answer.

Takeda Gumpei, the captain of the
Yamato
, accepted the patriotic answer as an excuse to toss another bowl of sake.
“Kanpai!”
he yelled, then he flipped the inch-round bowl with so much force that the well-aimed rice wine sailed over his tongue and down his throat.

“Kanpai.”
The rest of the ship’s captains echoed his toast with limited enthusiasm. Takeda could keep drinking long after most men would pass out on the floor.