I could not tell if Hubble’s gases had killed him or if he had broken his neck in the crash. I had no problem identifying what killed the copilot hanging from the next seat. A jagged shard of outer plating hung from his neck. From what I could see, that bloodstained wedge had sliced through the man’s throat and become jammed in his spine.
A hand touched my shoulder and I jumped. When I looked over, I saw Shannon’s identifier.
“Don’t get distracted,” Shannon said.
“Remind me never to piss off the U.A. Navy,” I said.
“That’s not the worst of it.” Lee approached us and nodded toward the body. “His pilot’s license was revoked.”
“You’re a sick man, Lee,” I said.
We turned and continued through the wreckage. After a while, one ship looked pretty much like the next, and I no longer bothered to peer inside. The passengers were dead; that was enough.
As we reached the edge of the landing area, I noticed piles of melted netting and wires—the ruins of a camouflaged hangar. These people were so desperate to live that they had colonized an uninhabitable planet. No sane person would have ever searched for life on a rock like Hubble, but our intelligence network found them just the same. Perhaps a recon ship just happened to spot them or maybe a loose-lipped friend let the information slip over a drink. In any case, they were trapped.
We stopped a hundred yards from the cliffs. I had to ping the wall to locate the caves—night-for-day lenses are not good tools for spotting dark caverns set in jet-black cliffs. The ground was black, the cliffs were black, the sky was black, and the dust and oil on my visor were not helping. My sonic locator outlined the opening with a translucent green orifice, but I still could not tell what machinery might be hiding inside.
“Are we going in?” I asked Sergeant Shannon when I spotted him and his men.
He did not dignify the question with an answer. He stared ahead at the cave, his hands tight around the stock of his gun.
“They fight harder when they’re backs are up against a wall like this,” Shannon said. “They’ll be more angry than scared.”
I thought about what he said. “They’re bound to have a few more tricks.”
“No,” Shannon said, sounding resigned to the situation. “They’re at the bottom of their deck. They could never have expected us to find them here. We’ve finally closed every back door unless their friends have enough ships to overwhelm an entire fleet.”
I followed Shannon’s gaze back to the cliffs and the barely visible mouth of the cave. “We could wait them out. They’re going to run out of food and air…”
“We’ll take the battle to them, Harris. You want to know why we have all-clone enlistment? It’s so that we can throw an infinite supply of men into any fire and not worry about the public outcry.”
“Clones are equipment,” I echoed.
“Standard-issue, just like guns, boots, and batteries,” Shannon said. Through most of our conversation, Shannon stared at the cliff; then he paused and turned toward me. “We’re still on point, and McKay’s going to give the order soon.”
I nodded and turned. “Lee,” I called over the interLink. “Shannon says it’s almost time to roll.”
Lee came to me and held out his hand. He held a swatch of black cloth. “Wipe your visor, friend,” he said.
“Where’d you get that?” I asked.
“I swiped it from that ship,” he said, pointing toward a small cruiser that had broken wide open. “It’s from the upholstery.”
“Clever,” I said. “Thanks for sharing.”
“No problem,” Lee said. “You’ll do a better job of watching my back if you can see where you’re going.”
“Ha,” I said.
By that time, the reinforcements were positioned all along the valley walls. We had enough men to cover every cave. No matter where they tried to evacuate, the Mogats would run into Marines.
“Okay, Lee…Harris,” Shannon called out, “I just got the word. McKay wants us to secure the entrance.”
That was just a courtesy call. The next message, sent over the platoon frequency, was the actual order. “Okay, gentlemen, secure this area and stay within the goddamned lines!” Shannon barked.
Along with missiles, fighters, and tanks, the Unified Authority Marine Corps utilized more subtle technologies. Command divided the battlefield and sent platoon the coordinates of their attack in the form of a visual beacon—a signal that drew virtual walls around our zone in our visors.
Looking straight ahead, I saw the black face of the cliffs. If I turned to the right or the left, however, translucent red walls appeared.
Lee and his team took the left edge of the target zone. Shannon sent my fire team to the right edge. He and the rest of the men ran up the middle. Shannon led the charge, leaving small clouds of dust in his wake as he moved forward in a low crouch. There was no cover for hiding, just flat, featureless soil.
With the next man crouched ten paces behind me, I sprinted along the right boundary of the target zone. Keeping my finger along the edge of the trigger guard, I pointed the barrel of my particle-beam gun at the cave.
The mouth of the cave—a broad, yawning keyhole in the side of the cliff—was twenty feet high and maybe ten feet wide. If the inside of the cave was as narrow as the mouth, we would be vulnerable as we funneled through it.
Somebody fired at me. Had he used a particle beam or laser, he might have hit me. Instead, he used a regular gun—a weapon that was somewhat unpredictable in the oil-humid air. Instinctively reacting to the first shot, which clipped the dirt near my feet, I jumped to my right and rolled. The world turned red around me. I had left the target zone and entered the no-man’s-land outside the beacon’s virtual walls. I heard more bullets strike the ground in front of me; but with the red light from the beacon filling my visor, I could not see where they hit.
I climbed to my knees and lunged back to the target zone, jumping forward, slamming my chest and face into the soft ground. My helmet sank deep into the ash, which caked onto glass. As I rolled to my left, staying as flat to the ground as I could, a coin-thick layer of ash clogged my sight. Moving slowly to avoid attracting attention, I reached up and tapped my visor with one finger, causing most of the ash to slide off. Then I pulled the swatch of cloth from my belt and wiped away the grime and ash.
Using heat vision, I peered into the cave and saw six gunmen hiding in the shadows with three more on the way. As I rolled on my back again, I saw red streaks flash through the air above my head.
I wanted to fire into the cave, but I did not dare. If I’d turned to shoot, I would have made an easy target—the enemy had pinned me down. They had pinned all of us down as they hid behind the entrance of the cave.
Of the forty-two men in our platoon, only twenty-one had survived to make the assault, and I suspected the casualties were mounting. Suddenly there it was, that sweet clarity. My body was awash with endorphins and adrenaline. My fear did not disappear, but it no longer mattered. I could see everything clearly and knew that I could handle any situation. The hormone left me feeling in control. I rolled to my left to get a shot, but a laser bolt struck the ground near me. Apparently the Mogats intended to make us earn every inch of ground we took.
Two bullets flew so low over my shoulder that they clipped my armor. One of the other men was not as lucky. As a seemingly endless wave of laser fire flew overhead, the interLink echoed with his scream.
Shannon shouted for him to stay down, but the wounded man did not listen. I turned in time to get a glance of him, though not in time to read his identity. The laser must have grazed the front of his visor, superheating the glass, which melted and splashed on his face. He managed to climb to his knees before a combination of bullets and laser bolts tore into his face and chest blowing him apart.