The Clone Apocalypse by Steven L. Kent Read Free Book Online

parked. Strings of black vehicles rolled to the shore and vanished into the mouths of transports.
    The Anacostia was inconvenient for us but narrow. Had the Unifieds expected our movements, they could have bombarded us from the other shore. They could have battered us with heavy artillery from miles away, but the night remained silent. And no flashes or explosions broke the darkness on the eastern side of the river.
    The tanks, Jackals, and personnel carriers loaded quickly. Marines don’t leave things to chance. We drilled and drilled again, until loading onto transports became one of our favorite pastimes.
    “We’re about to cross the river,” I told MacAvoy.
    “If you see Tobias Andropov, give him a five-toe enema, would you? Say it’s from me,” said MacAvoy.
    Tobias Andropov was a Unified Authority politician, not a soldier. He was the one who came up with abandoning the all-clone conscription, transferring the clones to man outdated battleships that the new U.A. Navy would use for target practice. Amazing how ambitious men are brought down by their own avarice. Andropov would still be in charge if he hadn’t turned on us.
    I said, “Five-toe enema with your name on it; got it.”
    I signed off as my driver pulled up to the last of the amphibious transports. The entrance into the gigantic hovercraft looked like open jaws. We drove up the ramp, trading the sheer darkness behind us for the red-lit interior. All of the vehicles ahead of us were exactly identical, clones, like me and my men. Looking down the row was like looking down a row in a factory; every roof was the same height and size; all the wheels evenly spaced on identical chassis, turrets, hoods, and windshields on every carrier the same as the last. Inside those trucks, every driver was the same as the last. Every man wore identical armor. Remove their armor, and they had identical faces.
    The red glow of the interior lights seemed to dissolve into the flat back enamel covering the personnel carriers. Our vehicles were beyond black; they were darkness itself.
    I gave the order, and the invasion began.
    Unified Authority infiltrators had moved into our shores, and we wanted them out, but we didn’t want to cause too much damage along the way. The buildings, the streets, and the infrastructure were ours. We couldn’t bombard the enemy to soften their defenses without damaging property we considered our own.
    Stage one: a sortie of gunships flew overhead as our amphibious transports shuffled us across the river. Using my commandLink, I patched into the visor of my lead gunship pilot and watched the proceedings from his vantage point.
    Gunships are flying tanks—slow, heavily armored, carrying enough cannons and machine guns to take out a fortress. They can withstand RPG fire, but missiles, rockets, and particle-beam cannons make short work of them, and the Unifieds had plenty of rockets.
    So here’s the scene, the sun started rising on the horizon. Looking through my lead pilot’s visor, I saw a molten-lava sky with clouds ablaze in orange and red as the sun started rising. The city was all silhouettes, a jumble of gaps and boxes with hardly any movement.
    The pilot looked to his left, then looked to his right. To his left was a cockpit window. Beyond that was a long row of gunships, a wing, flying slightly behind him. To his right sat his weapons officer. He sat staring into a screen.
    The pilot said, “Looks like we caught them sleeping.”
    The gunner said, “They’re still here. I got heat signatures.”
    The pilot said, “Remember, General Harris said as little damage as possible,” to which the gunner replied, “It’s a war; we’re gonna break stuff.”
    And then the fighting began. The first shots fired were five rockets that streamed out of a single-story storefront, maybe a clothing shop, the contrails behind the rockets spread like the fingers of a grasping hand.
    Our gunships flew approximately one hundred feet off the ground,