The Clone Redemption (19 page)

Moments later, the spy ship materialized. I leaned against the cockpit wall and let out my breath. Using my commandLink, I asked, “Did we get any of their ships?”

Admiral Jolly answered. He said, “We got all of them, General.” He sounded ecstatic. “We destroyed two self-broadcasting destroyers and three self-broadcasting battleships.”

Jolly paused for a breath or maybe to let me get in a word. When I did not say anything, he added, “I don't know how many battleships they have left, but I bet they don't have any to spare.”

We did not have any reliable intelligence about the U.A. Fleet, but it had to be small. The Enlisted Man's Navy had taken a big chunk out of their Navy when they fought us at Terraneau at the start of our rebellion, and they'd not had a chance to rebuild.

“No,” I agreed. “Sooner or later, they're going to run out of ships.”

With the lights dimmed, Yamashiro and a few of his officers studied every detail as the holographic image played over the conference table. It showed the destruction of the
Kyoto
. For some reason, the satellite monitoring the
Kyoto
had captured the destruction more clearly than the satellites covering the other ships, not that it made much of a difference. Whatever happened to the three battleships had happened in an instant.

Yamashiro's analysts had searched the transmission for lasers, particle beams, and other rays. Nothing. They found no distortions around the ship in the moments before the attack. There were no signs of missiles, rockets, or enemy ships.

Yamashiro paused the feed. The analysts had added a red arrow to the display to mark the mass that they claimed was the wreckage of the ship. The arrow pointed at an unidentifiable wad of material that looked like a glob of soft wax. Measurements appeared along the bottom of the image. The unidentifiable wad was 336 feet long and 56 feet wide. The measurements were about one-tenth the size of the battleship the wad had supposedly replaced. Intelligence analysts said that properly compressed, the
Kyoto
could fit into an even smaller space.

Admiral Yamashiro spoke in a low, slow voice as he said, “This is all that is left of the ship.”

The other officers remained silent for several seconds.

Captain Takahashi broke the silence. “That cannot be,” he said. “It happened so fast.”

Yamashiro had made the same comment when the analysts showed him the image.

Takahashi rose from his chair and leaned over the conference table until his nose almost poked into the ethereal image. He stared at the thing that had once been a battleship, then moved around the table, studying it from different angles. “It's too small to be the
Kyoto
.”

Yamashiro said, “You need to read Hara's report. He explains it.” Lieutenant Tatsu Hara, a computer-simulations specialist and intelligence officer, ran the
Sakura
's Pachinko parlors, bars, and casinos. Every sailor on the ship knew him. In Japan, the
Yakuza
had always run the Pachinko parlors and casinos. The
Yakuza
ran the fleet's casinos and Pachinko parlors as well. Tatsu Hara was a gangster.

“Hara says that the right amount of heat applied inside the hull, maybe ten thousand degrees, would cause a battleship to melt and implode.”

Takahashi continued studying the display. “Ten thousand degrees inside the ship? How do you heat the inside of the ship? It's not possible.”

Before the Avatari invasion and the Mogat Wars, when his daughter Yoko had first brought a boy named Takahashi Hironobu home, Yamashiro had found the boy impressive. He was studying finance at a good university. Yamashiro approved of the boy's life's goals, though he would not have admitted as much to his daughter. When Takahashi graduated, he took a job as a stockbroker ... a salesman.

Still a salesman,
Yamashiro thought to himself.

Master Chief Corey Oliver showed no emotion as he watched the feed. Sitting beside him, Chief Petty Officer Brad Warren followed his lead. When the feed finished, Oliver asked, “May I have permission to speak candidly, Admiral?”

“Speak,” said Yamashiro, giving his son-in-law, Captain Takahashi, a glare. Takahashi did not demonstrate the same martial intelligence as the SEALs. Though he knew it was based on an old prejudice, Yamashiro could not shake off feelings that Takahashi was more of an administrator than an officer.

“I don't see how this changes anything,” said the master chief.

“You lost three-quarters of your men. You had twelve thousand SEALs, now you have three thousand. I commanded a fleet, now I have one ship, and you have only three thousand SEALs.”

“Three thousand men . . . twelve thousand men, we never had enough men to capture a planet,” said Oliver. “This was a suicide mission from the start. At least it was for us. I still have enough men to accomplish my objectives.”

“What are your objectives?” asked Takahashi.

“The SEALs came to make sure the aliens never attack Earth again,” said Oliver.

“Can you do that with three thousand men?” asked Yamashiro.

“We could do it with three hundred men, sir. We just couldn't do it with conventional tactics.”

“Master Chief, we came here to protect Earth, not to commit suicide,” said Takahashi.

“With all due respect, Captain, we can't protect Earth and ourselves at the same time,” said Corey Oliver.

Listening to the SEAL fascinated Yamashiro. He was a clone. He had the face of a monster, no, a demon ... The nickname
kage no yasha
ran through the admiral's mind, and he dismissed it. Yamashiro gazed at the clone with the oversized bald head. The SEAL's gray skin reminded him of a cadaver lying in a morgue. For the first time, Yamashiro looked past the low, bony brow and saw only admirable qualities.

The SEAL spread his hands on the conference table, and Yamashiro studied his long fingers with their sharp, clawlike tips. They looked like human fingers somehow merged with an eagle's talons.

Senior Chief Warren sat silently beside Oliver. Except for their uniforms, the two SEAL clones looked exactly alike. Yamashiro wondered if they thought alike as well.

“I am not privy to your orders, Admiral, but they can't possibly have included capturing the planet,” said Oliver.

“Ships are not used for capturing planets,” said Yamashiro, spouting dogma he'd read since becoming an officer.

“Neither are SEALs. We're the fifth column,” said Oliver. “The SEALs are the men hiding inside the Trojan horse. We creep inside the walls and open the gate for an invading force. We don't take the town ourselves, that falls to the Marines.”

“There are no Marines,” said Takahashi. “Not on this mission.”

Yamashiro turned to glare at Takahashi. Just for a moment, he felt ashamed of the boy. The admiral's gaze strayed to Senior Chief Warren, sitting silently, allowing his superior to speak as the lone voice. He admired Warren. He admired Oliver. Then he thought about his son-in-law, who had left his wife and children to fly this mission. Yamashiro recognized Takahashi's sacrifices, and his irritation eased.

“What do you suggest, Master Chief?” asked Yamashiro.

Takahashi spoke before the SEAL could reply. He said, “Admiral, we have lost three-fourths of our fleet. We no longer have the firepower we need to carry out our mission. We must return to Earth. We must report that we have located the aliens and request a larger fleet and more troops. As the master chief has suggested, we should have our SEALs open the way, then send in Marines.”

Oliver did not speak. Yamashiro asked a second time, “What do you think we should do, Master Chief?”

Oliver paused to consider his words, and said, “Maybe we should return to Earth.”

“We should return?” Yamashiro repeated.

“We should return and report what we have found. If we attack now and we fail, everything we have learned will be lost. If the Linear Committee sends another fleet after us, that fleet will be forced to begin the search all over again unless you report our findings.

“We should return to Earth, but not for Marines. We need to make our report, then launch our attack. We're not here to defeat this enemy—we need to destroy them.”

Yamashiro listened to the SEAL explain his case and realized something about himself. He didn't want to go back to Earth, not empty-handed. Forced to choose between carrying out a Kamikaze mission and returning to Earth for more ships, he preferred the Kamikaze mission.

Maybe my flagship should have been the
Onoda
,
he thought, reminding himself about the war hero for whom the ship was named.

After the meeting ended, Master Chief Oliver remained standing beside the conference table as Takahashi escaped like an alley cat running from a fight. He waited for Admiral Yamashiro to finish speaking to his assistant, then he asked, “Admiral, sir, this SEAL wishes permission to speak?”

“What is it, Master Chief?” barked Yamashiro.

“We fired weapons at two moons, is that correct?” asked Oliver. “We fired infiltration pods at the moons?”

“That is correct,” the admiral answered in a voice calculated to convey mild irritation.

“As I understand it, only one of the moons was destroyed. Is that correct?”

“What is your point, Master Chief?”

“One of the moons had an atmosphere, the other did not,” said Oliver.

“Do you want to see the video feed?” asked Yamashiro.

“No, sir,” said Oliver. “Admiral, it seems like the aliens' technology only works when there is an atmosphere present. There was no atmosphere on the smaller moon, and the aliens were not able to prevent our attack. The large moon had an atmosphere, and the aliens destroyed our pods.”

Caught off guard by the theory, Yamashiro asked, “What about the battleships?” He figured out the answer to the question even as he asked it.

“Our battleships have atmospheres, sir,” said the SEAL.

“Yes, they do,” thought Yamashiro, remembering that the intelligence report stated that the heat was internal.

“Admiral, that might also explain why the aliens did not attack our transports,” said Oliver. “The pilots purge the oxygen out of our transports.”

The last census reported the population of Gobi at nearly one million, but that was before the Avatari invaded the planet. At the time of the evacuation, slightly less than a half million people resided on Gobi, most of them living in concentrated clusters. We only needed two barges to evacuate the planet.

We could not have designed an easier scenario for an evacuation—a mostly uninhabited planet with a few centralized population sites, an impoverished people who abandoned their homes and belongings without complaining, an underdeveloped world with empty skies. Few of the civilians owned anything as fancy as private planes, so the navigation lanes remained clear. We'd need to deal with rich people who wanted to fly their own yachts on wealthier planets; but anyone who could afford a yacht would have sailed away from Gobi long ago.

While I was off hijacking barges, Admiral Jolly sent a clutch of senior officers to oversee the evacuation. By the time I arrived on the scene, they had nearly completed their work.

I flew to Morrowtown, the largest city on the planet, population fifty-three thousand. Not much of a city.

One of Jolly's officers, a Captain James Holman, ran the operation with ruthless efficiency. He lifted the people out first, allowing them no more luggage than a change of clothes. That part of the lift took approximately eight hours. Once he had the people out, he sent teams of scavengers to look for food, medical supplies, and other essentials. Holman had thought of something I had overlooked. Before the month was out, we would have millions of refugees to house and to feed. We would need more than food and water. When they became sick, they would look to us for medicine, clothing, soap, shelter, bedding, building supplies, everything.

I did not wear my armor on this excursion. Having spent the first three months of my career on Gobi, I knew I would miss the temperature-controlled bodysuit; but I was more concerned about privacy.

Gobi was wall-to-wall desert, with no oceans, no lakes, and no moisture in its air. Wet spots started forming under my arms and around my collar the moment I stepped out of my transport. By the time I reached my ride, drops of sweat rolled along my spine.