The Clone Redemption (14 page)

Seconds ticked by slowly. One minute and five seconds became one-fifteen, and then one-thirty-five.

Takeda grimaced, and told the technicians, “Prepare to launch.”

He looked at the moon through the viewport, a silver coin in a velvet space. He looked at its image in the satellite feed and saw a desert pitted by craters and marked with a deck as flat as a dance floor.

One minute and fifty-two seconds. Fifty-three. Fifty-four. Fifty-five.

Miyamoto clenched his hands into fists and hid his fists by his sides so that no one saw him trembling. He felt the weight of humanity upon him, but his eyes remained fixed as he said,
“Ute!
,
”
the word that translated to the English command “Fire!”

Able to hold twelve stealth infiltration pods at a time, the launching device worked like the cylinder of a revolver. It fired its first pod, rotated twenty degrees, and fired the next one, then the next all in under a second.

Flying at top speed, without a human payload, the S.I.P.s could reach the planet in less than five seconds. Passengers slowed the pods down—not because of the added weight but because they were fragile. When the pods accelerated at top speed, the gravitational force inside the compartment was more than the human body could withstand. Possessing so much power that they seemed to bend the laws of physics, the S.I.P.s could decelerate so quickly that the force would turn human passengers inside out.

Moments after they left the transports, the S.I.P.s accelerated to ten million miles per hour. They dropped to the speed of sound as they reached their targets. One of the S.I.P.s reached its target. Two did not.

Captain Takahashi, standing by the viewport and watching the larger of the moons, only knew that the mission had begun because Yamashiro told him. There were no explosions or bursts of laser to signal the beginning of the attack. Still staring out into space, waiting to see what would happen to the moons, he heard his father-in-law's sharp gasp.

He turned in time to see Yamashiro yelling into the communications console. “Return to the
Sakura
.” He spoke in English. Yamashiro generally spoke in Japanese when addressing junior officers, but he gave this order in English.

The pilot on the other end of the communication asked, “What about survivors?”

Yamashiro stood partway out of his chair as he shouted, “Return immediately!” He took a breath, and added, “There are no survivors.”

Takahashi wanted to know what had happened, but he knew better than to interrupt the admiral. Still listening for clues, he looked out through the viewport and searched in time to see the smaller of the moons fall apart. First, it blurred into a smudge, as if fog had formed on the viewport. An envelope of fog, or dust, or maybe gas formed around it. Whatever rose off A-361-D/Satellite 2, it was the same color as the moon itself and translucent. It did not spread. It remained tight around the moon and became thicker and thicker, a stifling, suffocating cloud. Focusing on the words “no survivors,” Takahashi wondered if somehow one of the transports had collided with the moon. But Satellite 2 had come
undone
, and that suggested more than a transport mishap. The core that held the moon together broke and dissolved before his eyes.

Feeling a sense of elation, Takahashi looked at the larger moon, hoping to see similar destruction. Nothing had changed on Satellite 1.

“No! Do not return to the
Sakura
,” Yamashiro said, countermanding his first orders. Takahashi heard something in Yamashiro's voice he had never heard before. He heard fear. Clearly struggling to keep from shouting, he growled, “Rendezvous with the other transport but do not return to this ship until you are given further orders.”

Then, obviously speaking to the bridge, he barked the fatal order, “Prepare to broadcast!”

“Admiral, are you leaving us in space?” asked a voice over the console. Takahashi knew the man was a transport pilot.

“We will return for you,” Yamashiro told the transport pilots. “We are broadcasting out of the solar system. We will contact you when . . .” But he clearly did not know how to finish the sentence.

“Yes, sir.” The voice that came from the console speaker bore the uncertain tone of a terrified child.

Yamashiro turned his attention to the bridge. “Broadcast status?” he barked, waited less than a second for a response, then repeated the question in a more emphatic tone. “What is our broadcast status? We need to broadcast now!”

“Admiral, the generator is not yet charged.”

Yamashiro stared at the screens, glanced toward the viewport, looking right through Takahashi, then back at the screens. “Broadcast us the moment it's ready!”

“What is our destination, sir?” asked Commander Suzuki, Takahashi's second-in-command.

“Out of the solar system! Anywhere outside of this solar system!”

One of the transport pilots asked, “Admiral, where do you want us to rendezvous?”

“Get as far from A-361-D as you can ... as far from every planet as you can. Get as far as you can from those planets, and keep flying farther away. We'll find you. When we return, we'll find you.”

 

Takahashi stood behind Admiral Yamashiro, staring over his shoulder. He looked into the various screens and saw nothing. All but one of the displays showed nothing but open space.

“Why are we broadcasting out of the solar system?” he asked.

If Yamashiro heard the question, he did not acknowledge it. He sat hunched over the monitors as if searching for secrets in the empty screens.

“Admiral, why are we leaving the solar system?” Takahashi repeated.

Yamashiro still showed no sign of hearing him.

Suzuki's voice came over the console. “Admiral, the engines are . . .”

“Take us out of this solar system.” Yamashiro yelled the words.

“What is our destination, sir?”

“Out. Anywhere out of this system!” He sounded desperate. He sounded frantic. Takahashi thought he sounded crazed as well.

“What about the other ships?” asked Suzuki.

His face turning red, Yamashiro hissed the word, “Now!”

Tint shields formed on the viewport, blocking any hint of the one remaining moon. A moment later, the
Sakura
had broadcasted out of Solar System A-361.

He's lost his mind,
thought Takahashi. Wondering if his father-in-law was still fit for command, he asked, “How will we find the other ships?”

Slowly turning in his chair so that he faced his son-in-law, his dark eyes burning with more intensity than Takahashi had ever seen in them, Yamashiro said, “They have been destroyed.”

 

The video feeds were clear and mysterious.

The feed of A-361-D/Satellite 1 showed a bird's-eye view of the deck and the surface of the moon. For a tenth of a second, maybe only a hundredth of a second, light flared across the screen. A small wisp of steam formed and dissipated. Steam and smoke vanish quickly in the absolute zero temperature and vacuum conditions of space.

Slowing the feed to five seconds per frame did not make a difference. Whatever happened, it happened so quickly that the camera on the satellite could not record it. One moment there was open space, then light appeared and vanished, then the steam appeared and dissolved.

Yamashiro played that portion of the video feed three times without saying a word.

“What was that?” asked Takahashi.

“That was the destruction of an infiltration pod,” said Yamashiro. Now that they were out of danger, he seemed drained of energy. He sat slumped in his chair, answering his son-in-law's questions in a soft tone that could most accurately be described as defeated.

Yamashiro ran the loop again, this time even more slowly. The one-second feed lasted nearly ten minutes.

“That can't be a pod,” Takahashi said.

Yamashiro switched to a screen that showed a battleship. One moment she lingered peaceably in space. Something happened. Like the S.I.P., the big ship did not explode. She left no debris. It was like a magician's illusion. For just a moment, the battleship seemed to inflate, then she crumpled, folding in on herself, compressing until nothing remained except a formless wad of space-colored junk leaking tendrils of steam or smoke.

Yamashiro stared at the screen, and, in a soft, broken voice, he said, “The
Onoda
.”

“That cannot be,” said Takahashi. The words were a reflex. He believed his eyes. He did not place as much trust in the absolute laws of physics as he did in his father-in-law's word.

“I can show you what happened to the
Kyoto
and the
Yamato
. They vanished the same way.”

Takahashi heard himself hyperventilating, but he could not stop. “We need to go back. We need to help them. We need to look for survivors.”

“We need to accomplish our mission,” Yamashiro replied in a hushed voice. “They sent us because we are expendable. We are not part of the Unified Authority, we are the Japanese. Our fleet and our men were the price we paid to return to Earth.”

Takahashi looked at the screen again and rewitnessed the destruction of the
Onoda
. It was as if the ship had melted.

More often than not, the Unified Authority colonized planets that came complete with continents and an oxygenated atmosphere. The Galactic Expansion Committee's top criteria for selecting suitable locales included distance from a suitable and stable star, Earth-like size and gravity, and good galactic position.

Since the prime criteria could not be altered, they were nonnegotiable. Other preferences, such as oxygen and water were open to interpretation. Providence Kri, for instance, was something of a fixer-upper when the Unified Authority decided to colonize it. The term “Kri” was attached to planets that required terraforming—a miracle process that could convert rocks and deserts into gardens of Eden.

As I entered the bridge, I saw Providence Kri in its rotation through the view screen. Whatever the planet had looked like before the Unified Authority gave it a makeover, it certainly looked like a hospitable blue-and-green marble afterward.

Having been rescued from the Avatari by clones, the populace of Providence Kri was unfailingly loyal to the Enlisted Man's Empire. That was good. We were too busy fighting natural-borns and aliens to lay down laws, so we trusted the residents of the various planets to govern themselves. We were military clones; our dabbling in politics never worked out the way we hoped.

Looking out of a viewport, I wondered how long we had until the Avatari turned this planet into a dust bowl as well.

In better times, Providence Kri had served as a galactic hub for the Unified Authority. In these times, it served as a galactic hub for the Enlisted Man's Empire. The Cygnus Central Fleet, Admiral Liotta's fleet, a fleet that included seven fighter carriers and thirty battleships, orbited the planet.

The Cygnus Central Fleet was big, but it lacked the firepower needed to defeat the Earth Fleet. The U.A.'s new generation fighter carriers and battleships were smaller, faster, and better shielded than our ships.

Liotta and an entourage of fleet officers flew out to the
Churchill
to meet me. We did not have time to chat. Time had become scarce.

Liotta took me and my team to Engineering, where Lieutenant Mars presented the crew with a new broadcast key. I allowed Admiral Liotta to have a key, but I did not give him a copy of the book that contained the complete set of codes and broadcast locations. The book contained hundreds of thousands of codes, pinpoint coordinates for safe broadcast areas all across the galaxy. Instead, I handed him a highly abbreviated list that included coordinates for the twenty-two remaining planets in the Enlisted Man's Empire along with a few strategic destinations such as New Copenhagen.

“I have a pilot delivering keys and coordinate cards to every fleet,” I said. “He'll have a key to Jolly within the hour.”

Liotta smiled, and said, “So we're back in business,” as he glanced at the list of broadcast coordinates. Then he paused, and asked, “New Copenhagen? I thought they destroyed that planet.”

“They did.”

“Why would we want to go there?”

“That's the point,” I said. “There's absolutely no reason to go there. If there's no good reason to go there, the Unifieds probably aren't patrolling the area.”

Liotta nodded, and said, “So it's a safe place to regroup.”

“Something like that,” I said.

 

I did not say good-bye to Ava. As I said before, time was scarce.

She would be safe on Providence Kri until we evacuated the planet. Once the evacuation was done, and the danger had passed, we would sit down and sort things out ... assuming she had any interest in sorting things out with me.

I had not come to Providence Kri to drop off refugees or meet with officers though I did a little of both. I came to commandeer a new ship. With her shields broken, the
Churchill
needed repairs or retirement, so Freeman and I transferred to a carrier named the
Bolivar
. I met the captain in the bridge, handed him a broadcast key, and told him to take us to New Copenhagen.

Captain Tom Mackay heard my orders, and said, “I heard the aliens scorched that planet.”

“They did,” I agreed.

“Um,” Mackay said. “I just wanted to make sure.”