“The site’s gone cold,” Shannon said. “My guess is that they’ve been gone for months.”
I stared down at the zone. Little yellow filaments of light dodged in and out. “No people,” I said, “but there are plenty of rats.”
“The happy little bastards have the planet all to themselves,” Shannon said. “Maybe the SEALs will capture one. I would hate to see them go home empty-handed.”
“Do we tell them that the target zone is cold?” I asked.
“Why ruin their night?” Shannon asked.
***
If we found the compound crawling with people, the plan was to radio the Kamehameha for backup. We did not make a contingency plan for finding it overrun by rats.
Night on Ronan Minor lasted nine hours, and the SEALs resumed their march an hour before sunup. Feeling a bit fuzzy-headed, I had a little trouble keeping up with them. Pushing through the unchecked vines and broad-leaved foliage was slow work. The air was thick as steam. Condensation formed outside my visor. I wondered how the SEALs managed to breathe.
The rats were not the only residents of Ronan Minor; the planet had a healthy cockroach population as well. We didn’t run into many of them on the first day, but as we got closer to the Atkins compound, we saw them clinging to tree trunks and flying rather clumsily through the air. Several of them crashed into my helmet and fell to the ground. These were big roaches, maybe three inches long, with copper-colored bodies. I started when one crawled across the front of my visor. Nobody but Shannon noticed, but I had to put up with him laughing at me over the interLink for the next two miles.
We climbed over a rise and found the edge of the target. The entire site lay hidden under layers of camouflage netting.
“Sergeant”—the team leader motioned for Shannon to come—“do you have heat vision?”
“The compound is empty,” Shannon said in a matter-offact voice.
“Son of a— Shit!” the SEAL said.
“You gonna tell him you scanned it last night?” I whispered over the interLink.
“Shut up, Harris,” Shannon hissed.
“Any chance there is somebody hiding inside?” the SEAL asked.
“I doubt it. All of the machinery is turned off. If they had machinery going, I would pick up a heat signature from an engine or a generator.”
By that time the entire team had gathered around Shannon and the SEAL leader. “We’re still going in,” said the SEAL. “Sergeant, you and the corporal wait out here.”
Shannon saluted and slung his rifle over his shoulder. He turned to me, and said, “Let’s just keep out of their way.” We found a shaded spot overlooking the compound and sat and watched as the SEALS crawled face-first, rifles ready, under the edge of the camouflage nets.
I switched to heat vision and watched the SEALs’ orange-and-yellow profiles through the netting. I lost track of them once they entered the buildings.
“Think they’ll find anything?” I asked.
“Like what?” Shannon asked.
I did not have an answer. I continued to scan the compound with my heat-vision lens. Every so often I spied a SEAL dashing between buildings, but those glimpses were rare. “They’re amazing,” I said to myself, forgetting that Sergeant Shannon would hear me.
“Snap out of it, Harris,” Shannon said. “They’re no big deal. The only thing they have done is storm an abandoned compound, and you’re already specking your armor. You watch, they’re going to come up empty-handed, and Huang will blame us.”
The SEALs spent hours searching the compound, giving me hours to consider Shannon’s prediction. Roaches swarmed the plants around me, and I distracted myself by crunching some of them with the heel of my boot. The sun began to set in the distance, and the roaches became notably more aggressive. One marched right up to where Shannon was sitting, then tumbled onto its back when it tried to crawl over the top of his leg. He looked over and crushed it with his fist.
“So who is the dominant species,” I joked, “the rats or the roaches?”
“The goddamned Mogats,” Shannon answered. “They were the only speckers with enough sense to get off this rock.”
Up ahead, I saw movement in the camouflage covering and switched to heat vision in time to see the first of the SEALs rolling out from under the edge of the net. Ten more were nearby.
“Look who’s back,” Shannon said a split second before the explosion. I just had time to take in the irony in his voice, then the very air around us seemed to turn white, activating the polarizing lenses in my visor. The explosion cut through the jungle in a wave. Its concussion knocked me flat on my back, but I quickly climbed back to my feet.
“GODDAMN!” Shannon yelled as he sprinted toward the clearing. I ran after him, rifle at the ready for no particular reason.
“Harris, find the ones who made it out. I’m going under the net to look for survivors.”
There was no net, not where we were standing. Shreds of flaming camouflage netting floated down from the sky for as far as I could see. I saw Shannon running into the heart of the flames, dropping down a waist-high crater.
One of the SEALs lay with his back wrapped around the trunk of a tree at an impossible angle. I threw my helmet off and ran over to him. He was already dead.
Another SEAL lay on his stomach a few feet away. As I ran to him, I saw a streamer of flaming camouflage float over his shoulder. Brushing it away, I turned the man on his back. He was alive, but barely. A shard of metal the size of my hand was buried in his throat. Blood poured out of the wound.
He would die in a moment no matter what I did for him. I wanted to shake him. I wanted to yell, “What happened here? What the hell did you do?”
Shannon was wasting his time looking for survivors. Not even the rats and the roaches would have survived that explosion. The only survivors were the Mogats. “They were the only speckers with enough sense to get off this rock.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Clones may come out of the tube identical, but experience takes over where genetic engineering and neural programming leave off. Most of the platoon followed soccer, boxing, and basketball. Gambling was rampant. But Vince Lee did not gamble or watch professional sports. He napped whenever he got the opportunity. He read books about self-improvement and told me that his time in the Marines would give him an excellent platform to launch into politics. He was a dedicated bodybuilder who started each morning lifting weights in the officers’ gym. Of all of the clones I ever knew, Lee was the only one who openly worried about not being natural-born.
Lee was also the only man in our platoon who talked about retiring from the Corps. “When I get out,” he would often begin a conversation, “I’m going to a frontier planet,” he would say, “someplace where they appreciate hard work.” Around the time we went to Ronan Minor, Lee sometimes talked about building a resort on the shore of Lake Pride, a few miles west of Rising Sun.
Ever since meeting with Oberland, keeping up with current events had become my hobby. It was an obsession, maybe even an addiction. I began each day with a quick glance at the headlines. I did so before crawling out of bed. If I found something interesting, I stopped to read it. I usually spent a good hour reading before tossing my mediaLink shades aside and heading for the mess. And after breakfast, I found time for more reading.
Two days after we left Ronan Minor I found a story with the headline: “24 SEALS LOST IN CRASH.”
They don’t release information when clones die. We don’t have parents or relatives, so nobody notices. SEALs, natural-borns with families, merit a news story, even if it’s completely fabricated. In this case, the official story was that twenty-four Navy SEALs were killed when their transport malfunctioned during a training exercise in a remote sector of the Scutum-Crux Arm.