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

ahead, two more Jackals joined us, making us the middle car in a trio, speeding down a midtown avenue in a canyon of five- and six-story buildings. Shapes in the windows in some of the buildings glowed softly, barely perceptibly—men in shielded armor.
    I spun my gun to the four o’clock position and fired. No need to aim at the windows. A 60-caliber round goes through walls and windows alike, but my 60-caliber man-splitters might as well have been spit wads against their shields.
    One of the drawbacks of Unified Authority shielded armor was that you couldn’t use the shields and hold a weapon at the same time. Their armor included wrist-mounted fléchette cannons that ran along the right sleeves, but that was a decidedly close-range weapon. Our Intelligence Agency had found data on remote-controlled rocket launchers that the Unifieds could fire using ocular commands built into their visor. I’d never seen those launchers in action, however.
    I fired a string of bullets into the front window of a department-store lobby. The ghostly outlines of men in shielded armor rushed to return fire, but it came too late to do any damage. Like me, they didn’t mind wasting ammo. They shot. I shot. We skidded around a corner, and I lost sight of the building, entering a new street, a lane filled with men in armor. Targets.
    I aimed. I fired. My bullets meant nothing. They returned fire. There may have been fifty men there, milling around, glowing like embers in a dying fire. My driver kept clear of them. If we strayed too close, they stood a better chance of hurting us than we did of injuring them.
    The cannon sounded so loud that it made my helmet vibrate. When I looked back where the passel of Unifieds had been, I saw a small crater. The Targ that had fired the shot pulled up beside our little convoy, thin wisps of smoke still twisting from its cannon. The shell probably hadn’t hurt those U.A. Marines, but it scattered them beautifully, and who knows, some of them might have landed incorrectly and broken an arm or a leg.
    To this point, the engagement was still in the dream state. They had fired a few shots. We had fired a few shots. Maybe we’d killed a few of them, then again, maybe not. The real excitement had yet to begin.
    I contacted MacAvoy, and said, “We have our beachhead.”
    He responded, “My birds are wheels up, and my rubber’s hit the specking road.
    “How is it going down there?”
    I asked, “Ever knocked a crippled man out of his wheelchair?”
    “Sounds like you caught them napping.”
    “Quiet neighborhood, practically a bedroom community,” I said. “Maybe I’ll move here once the riffraff moves out.”
    As the last traces of orange and red cleared from the sky, the shelling began. Pillars of flame rose ten feet out of the ground, spraying our light armor with cement and rock as the Unifieds bombed the streets and infrastructure we hoped to preserve. Apparently, the Unifieds had adopted a scorched-earth policy.
    An explosion that looked like a fifteen-foot fist punching up through the asphalt sent a Targ swerving. Targs were light and small by tank standards, but they still weighed thirty tons; it takes a powerful jolt to send one careening down the street. Dozens of small FLAWS rockets flew from the windows of a block-long brownstone, striking Jackals, Targs, and one of my Schwarzkopfs. A pair of gunships swooped in to respond.
    I
voyeured
the scene, peering through one of the gunners’ visors, and saw dozens of men swarming out of the back of the building like ants from a hill, their armor glowing. We could bury them, of course, blow up the buildings on either side of the alley and leave them interred under a mountain of shattered bricks.
    The gunner had his orders. We wouldn’t destroy two buildings to bury shielded Unifieds, not yet. Not yet. Not today. We had the Unifieds on the run, so we would show our better angels.
    These boys didn’t push their luck. They sprinted down the alley instead