Twelve of my men met me inside the motor pool, and we searched. If Ravenwood Station ever had tanks or ATVs, they were now gone. Except for tools, fuel tanks, and a lot of trash, the room was empty.
The floor and walls were bare concrete. We searched methodically, piling debris in the center of the room behind us. I found a few spent M27 cartridges and a line of icy footprints. Somebody had come in here with wet feet. Unfortunately, I had no way of telling the age of the footprints.
When it came to important discoveries, one of my corporals won the prize. “I’ve found a body!” he yelled over the open frequency. Everybody stopped what they were doing and went to have a look. The doors to the motor pool opened as more Marines came for a look.
“Where is it?” I asked as I looked at the far wall.
“He’s buried in that corner, sir,” the corporal said. He pointed toward the far corner of the room. Any lights that might have been in that section of the pool had either stopped working or been shot out. I switched on the night-for-day lens in my visor as I moved in for a closer look, but I need not have bothered. The corner was empty except for a pile of cans and rags; but growing out of those rags was the name, “Private Thadius Gearhart.”
“Search it,” I ordered, not knowing what we might find. The pile of trash was about a foot deep—too shallow to conceal a body. “The rest of you, get back to work.”
As the others filed out of the motor pool, the corporal called out, “I found him. At least I have what’s left of him.”
The corporal held the broken front section of a combat helmet between his pinched fingers. The section included most of the frame around the visor and a jagged swath of the portion around the left ear. A few shards of glass remained in the visor.
Gearhart had been most likely shot in the face. The bullet would have entered through the visor, flattening on impact, and blown out the back of his head and helmet. If we examined the area more carefully, I suspected we would find bits of broken plastic along with skull and brain among the rags, cans, and trash.
The corporal swung the scrap of helmet as if he planned to throw it in the trash. “Stop,” I said.
“Do you want this, sir?” the man asked.
“Take it to Marsten,” I said. “Tell him that it’s still transmitting an identifier signal and ask him if he can access the data chip.”
Though Marsten was surely a gifted hacker, I had little hope that he would extract information from that data chip, assuming it was even in there. Combat helmets were complex pieces of equipment with optical movement readers, multiple lenses, interLink wiring, and more. It seemed like too much to hope for the read-and-relay data chip to be in that small section. Luck, for once, was on our side.
We did not find anything else of significance in the motor pool. As I left to return to the hub, I saw two of my men praying. “You do that,” I whispered. “Why not.” A few minutes later, Marsten contacted me.
“Lieutenant Harris, I think we got it rigged.”
“I’ll be right there.”
“Rigged” was a good choice of words. Marsten had strung a full dozen wires into a small socket along the left edge of the visor. Gubler connected that rat’s nest of wires into the back of a computer.
“The chip was damaged to begin with, and this is not the way these chips were meant to be read,” Marsten said, by way of apology, as he turned on a computer monitor. “We won’t get much, but we should get something.”
Rather than a streaming video feed, we got a single image on the screen. It could only have been the last thing Gearhart saw as the bullet struck him. Jagged lines marked the screen where his visor had already shattered.
Gearhart must have been guarding the motor pool when the enemy arrived. The image on the screen showed three men climbing through holes they had bored—the holes my men were currently sealing back up.
I could see two of the men’s faces. The third, likely the man who killed Gearhart, was hidden behind a rifle scope. One of the other men held a pistol in one hand as he pulled himself forward with the other. His clawlike fingers were wrapped over the edge of the hole.
“They all have the same face. Are they clones?” Gubler asked as he stared into the screen.
“Adam Boyd,” I said.
“You know him?” Marsten asked.
I thought about the scars around my forehead and right eye. “We’ve met.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Two years earlier, when I first reported to Gobi Station, I dreamed only of serving the Republic. My greatest ambition was the life of a Marine, but only twenty-four months later I no longer gave a damn about the Earth, the Unified Authority, or the Marines. Programming or no, I was done with all of it.
To me, the Unified Authority was people like Robert Thurston, who considered clones expendable. He was no more antisynthetic than he was antibullets. Both were supplies that could easily be replaced and should be used to strategic advantage. On Little Man, he sent twenty-three hundred loyal Marines to their deaths without a backward glance. And Ravenwood…Ravenwood wasn’t a fuel depot, it was a training ground. Admiral Huang was using Marines as live targets to train his new breed of SEAL clones how to kill. I doubted that Huang knew that I had beat the shit out of one of his clones at Sad Sam’s Palace, but I hoped that he did.
If only I could have peeked. One quick look at the old security tapes and I might have understood the SEALs’ tactics. Screw superior numbers and the home field advantage, I wanted to know what methods the Boyd clones used, what weapons they carried, and what made those deep purple stains on the floors. But they had made sure that I could not peek. No one cared if it was a matter of life and death for my platoon; the important thing was that the SEALs have their training exercises. Peeking at past performances would be breaking the rules of their game.
If the SEALs stuck to their past schedule, they would attack within five hours of our entering the base. We spent three hours patching walls that the SEALs could easily breach, repairing systems the SEALs had twice destroyed, and gathering specks of evidence of past SEAL victories.
That was how the past platoons had played it, too. I needed to start developing new ways to play the game. The key, I thought, was not getting herded into a group.
The stains on the ground might not have been blood, but they represented death. Looking at the evidence, I reconstructed the last assault. The Boyd clones had circled the outer halls, killing off the stragglers and herding the rest of the platoon into squad bay.
There, with the last Marines using bunks for cover, the SEALs finished the battle. They massacred the platoon. They had done something awful, but I had no idea what it might have been.
In the waning minutes before the fight, I came up with an idea that might give us a small advantage. “Marsten,” I called over the interLink, “kill the lights and close off the vents.”
“Do you want me to shut off the heat?” Marsten asked.
“No, bump the heat as far as it will go. Just close the vents.”
“The vents are in the ceiling, sir. It’s going to get cold in here.”
“That’s what I want, Marsten. I want this base cold and dark. Do you have that?”
“Yes, sir,” Marsten said in an unsure voice.
“I’m on my way to the control room. I’ll explain when I get there,” I said.
Next, I spoke over the platoon-wide frequency. “This is Harris,” I barked. “I have given the order to power down the lights and turn off the vents. I want everybody to switch to heat vision. I repeat, do not use night-for-day vision, use heat vision.”
An eerie, almost liquid, darkness flooded the halls as the lights went out. For the first few seconds, I did not see anything other than the heat signatures of the men around me. Their armor muffled their colors; instead of orange with a yellow corona, they were brown and red. Groping blindly, I found my way to a wall, then felt my way to the door.