The Clone Redemption (10 page)

“We will reach the moons in twenty hours. Prepare a reconnaissance team for the operation.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I want to send one hundred men on this mission, fifty to each moon. Perhaps if we send a larger force, we will have better success against the enemy,” Yamashiro said, though he had his doubts. From the little of the battle he'd seen, Illych and his men never stood a chance.

“Yes, sir.”

Yamashiro looked at the newly minted master chief and felt dissatisfied with the way the interview had gone. He felt as if he had not given the man his full due. “You may be wondering why we are sending men to these installations instead of attacking them from space.”

“No, sir,” said Oliver.

“No?”

“No, sir. I would not presume to question your orders.”

Yamashiro believed this, but he still felt the need to explain. “As you will see from the video feed, Master Chief Illych destroyed A-361-F by detonating his stealth infiltration pods. We did not fire on that planet. Perhaps the master chief and his team would still be alive if we had.

“Illych and his men launched from a cloaked transport, flying stealth infiltration pods. We do not know anything about the aliens' technology; but there is little chance they could trace the landing team to our ships. If we fired on the planet instead of sending a team, the aliens would certainly be aware of our ships.

“We have invaded an alien empire with four ships. We are badly outnumbered by an enemy with superior technology. If I must lose men to keep my ships hidden ... I am willing to make that sacrifice.”

“Yes, sir,” said Oliver.

Yamashiro nodded, and said, “Master Chief, as the highest-ranking member of the SEALs, you will oversee the operation from this ship.”

There was neither hostility nor complaint in Oliver's voice as he asked, “Sir, wouldn't that qualify as a dereliction of duty? As the highest-ranking man on the team, I am supposed to . . .”

“Master Chief, you will be violating a direct order if you assign yourself to this mission,” said Yamashiro.

Oliver did not raise an eyebrow or cock his head. His lips did not twitch, and he did not look away from Yamashiro though his gaze still fell just below the admiral's eyes.

Yes,
thought Yamashiro.
He is very Japanese.

“Sir, if you are concerned for my welfare . . .”

Yamashiro scowled and raised a hand to stop the SEAL.
These are the true Kamikaze,
he thought.
He has no fear of death.
And then he lied. “I do not have time to worry about your welfare.

“Sending your highest-ranking man into an action is inefficient. Commanding officers remain with the fleet and coordinate the movements. I was not aware that Illych accompanied the team to A-361-F. If I had been, I would not have allowed it.”

“Sir . . .” Oliver began.

Yamashiro shook his head to signal that he did not want to continue the discussion. “You have your orders.”

“Yes, sir.”

A moment of silence passed, then Yamashiro asked, “Do you have any questions, Master Chief?”

“Yes, sir. Did Illych accomplish anything on A-361-F?”

Yamashiro kept these thoughts to himself, and said, “We'll be in position by A-361-D in twenty hours, Master Chief. Have your men ready.”

“Yes, sir,” said Oliver.

Yamashiro looked away from the SEAL, and said, “That will be all.”

If Yamashiro did not want Oliver to show the video feed to all of his SEALs, he should have voiced his preference. The SEALs shared information unless given orders to conceal it. Oliver routed copies of the video feed to the senior chiefs on each of the four battleships; and they, in turn, held mass briefings in which they showed the footage to their men.

Master Chief Oliver sat in the back of a large auditorium with his two closest friends watching the video feed along with his men. No one in the auditorium spoke a word until the feed ended. When the lights came on, the SEALs divided themselves by platoon and discussed what they had seen. Oliver and his two friends, Senior Chief Jeff Harmer and Senior Chief Brad Warren, remained where they were.

“What did you see?” asked Oliver.

Down in the gallery, chief petty officers led similar discussions.

“We can't outgun them,” said Warren. “It doesn't look like we can even touch them.”

“Agreed,” said Oliver.

“They only sent five defenders,” said Warren.

“What's your point?”

“They must have had a pretty good idea about how many men we had, or they would have sent a larger force to intercept us.”

“Maybe they didn't have anyone else available,” said Harmer.

Warren shook his head, and replied, “They always sent armies of fifty thousand soldiers on New Copenhagen. It didn't matter how many men we sent, they always sent fifty thousand.”

“But if we caught them by surprise,” Harmer began.

“They could only find five men . . . Are you joking?” asked Warren.

“Okay, so you think they counted our caskets?” Oliver asked.

“Aren't the caskets untraceable?” asked Warren.

“They are to us . . . with our technology,” said Oliver. “Who knows what they have. For all we know, they may be able to track us by our brain waves.”

“How would you track an S.I.P.?” asked Warren.

“Light field, vision, and sound tracking are out; but who's to say they don't have technology that senses every time anything breaches their atmosphere,” said Harmer.

Warren gave Harmer an incredulous glare, and asked, “How in the world did you come up with that?”

“It's Occam's razor, yes? The simplest explanation ...

“Their technology is more advanced than ours, but from what we know, it's centered around the use of tachyons and particles. Invisible or not, infiltration pods are still made out of matter. They still caused a physical disruption when they entered an atmosphere. Matter displaces matter, it's going to cause a disruption.

“The simplest solution is that the aliens counted the disruptions.”

Senior Chief Warren muttered, “A tachyon early-warning system ... like a burglar alarm. How do we get around something like that?”

Oliver asked, “Do either of you see any holes in the theory?”

Neither of them did, so the discussion moved ahead.

“They may have been bulletproof, but that final explosion did them in,” said Warren. He enjoyed looking for holes in everything Harmer suggested. They were friends, but they were also rivals.

“We don't know that,” said Oliver. “We know what it did to the planet, and we know that the tachyon curtain dissolved, but the alien avatars may have survived.”

“The avatars are made of tachyons. If the explosion dispersed the tachyons, then we can take it for granted that the individual avatars were destroyed,” said Harmer.

“That is the first time anyone has detonated a field-resonance engine. We don't know how much radiation it generated. Maybe it was the radiation that destroyed the curtain,” said Oliver.

“But we all agree that the caskets did the job, right? I mean, come on, those babies zapped the whole planet,” said Warren.

Harmer agreed. He said, “They are our best weapon.”

“They may be our only weapon,” said Oliver.

“So do we win the war by blowing ourselves up?” asked Warren. He did not seem bothered by the idea, just curious.

“We win the war by any available means,” said Oliver. He thought about using them as torpedoes instead of transports. They flew themselves. So long as they were preprogrammed to overcharge and explode, they did not need live cargo for seek-and-destroy missions.

Harmer and Warren agreed.

Master Chief Oliver looked at the time. Two hours to go before the launch. In another hour, he would board a shuttle to the
Onoda
and escort one hundred of his men to their Kamikaze farewell. He would watch as they drank the ceremonial sake. They would leave on a hazardous mission, and he would call in their orders from the safety of a ship. They would face danger, and he would command them from far away. Oliver chided himself for hiding on a ship while his men faced the enemy on otherwise-uninhabited moons. He felt humiliated.

Replacing Emerson Illych as master chief of the SEALs was a nightmare for Oliver. Like an undergraduate secondstringer replacing an injured varsity athlete, Oliver saw himself as having inherited the promotion instead of earning it. He thought about Illych's dying on A-361-F while he would not go on the mission to A-361-D, and experienced a stab of the self-loathing that had been hardwired into every SEAL clone's brain.

He went to the landing bay and boarded an interfleet shuttle that flew him to the
Onoda
. Five Japanese sailors rode the same flight. They were enlisted men, as he was. Oliver did not speak to the sailors, and they paid little attention to him as they talked loudly among themselves in Japanese.

They were not really ignoring him, though. English was the first language on Ezer Kri, as it was in all of the 180 colonies. Many of the colonists learned to speak Japanese and read
Kanji
out of pride in their heritage, but English remained their first and native language. Had a SEAL clone not been on their shuttle, the sailors would have spoken in English.

Bred for stealth and almost invisible,
Oliver told himself. He sat alone in the back of the shuttle for the ten-minute flight. A few rows ahead, the sailors chatted among themselves, confident in the knowledge that the master chief could not understand them. One of them commented that Oliver had the face of a bat. Another said, “Not all bats are that ugly. I once saw a fruit bat that was much better-looking than this
kage no yasha
.”

The sailors laughed.

Had the sailors been paying more attention, they might have noticed Oliver ignoring them a little too much. Some of their chuckling should have caught his attention.

Had Yamashiro read Oliver's profile a little more closely, he would have seen that the SEALs learned languages just by hearing them spoken. The ability was built into their brains. Corey Oliver spoke Japanese better than the sailors on the shuttle. Sitting quietly in his seat, pretending not to hear them, he corrected their grammatical mistakes in his head.

Oliver fantasized about asking the sailors for directions to Captain Miyamoto's office in Japanese. He imagined the stunned looks on their faces and smiled. But Illych gave strict orders to the SEALs not to speak Japanese in public, and Oliver understood the wisdom of that decision. If he spoke Japanese to these men, he would humiliate them. They would know that he had heard them, and they would be ashamed. Oliver did not want to humiliate them.

The shuttle landed. Oliver waited for the sailors to leave the ship. He gave them another minute to leave the landing bay, then he rose from his seat and left as well.

Two of his SEALs met him as he came off the shuttle. “Do I have a face like a bat?” Oliver asked as he joined his friends.

“Maybe a really ugly one,” said Senior Chief Harmer.

“Have you been eavesdropping on sailors again?” asked Senior Chief Warren. “Just ignore them.”

Harmer laughed. “Listen to him,” he said. “He's always complaining because some sailor . . .”

“He asked what my face looked like before it caught on fire,” Warren explained.

“He wasn't speaking to you,” Harmer said.

“But he was talking about me.”

“Well, yeah. But you really are ugly.”

“You have the same face I do,” said Warren.

Harmer looked mortified. He looked down at the ground, then briefly met Warren's gaze, and said, “That's low.”

Warren looked to Oliver for help. “See what I mean? He treats me like this all the time.”

Oliver only shrugged, and said, “You shouldn't let it get to you.”

They started toward the compound in which the SEALs lived and trained.

All three SEALs might have been thinking the same thing, but Warren was the one who voiced it. “I'm sorry you can't come with us,” he said, and the joking fell away from his voice.

“I wanted to go on the mission,” said Oliver.

“Everybody knows that,” said Harmer. “Give us a little credit.”

A few silent moments passed, then Harmer and Warren began joking back and forth, their banter coming across like a play they had rehearsed to bolster the master chief's spirits. Warren made himself the butt of the jokes, spurring Oliver and Harmer to use him as their fall guy; but Oliver's mood only became darker.

“You know, it's not going to be like Illych's mission,” said Warren. “You saw the files. It's a flat surface. That's all it is, probably just an abandoned landing strip. I bet the only thing we find is a million-year-old sign that says, ‘Keep off the grass.' ”

Oliver tried to smile, but he felt so humiliated.

Still hoping to raise the master chief's mood, Warren added, “Honestly, the aliens won't even bother coming after us, not on a moon like that. They probably forgot the place exists.”

They reached the compound but did not get the chance to step inside. A young Japanese ensign waited for them at the door. Short by Japanese standards, the ensign stood five-eight and towered over the SEAL clones. He wore a blue uniform, so dark it was almost black.