The Clone Redemption (21 page)

“I'm what?” asked Jolly.

“Not fit for command,” I repeated. “I am telling you to step down.”

“To what?”

“To retire,” I said. “Go set up a villa by the beach. Go spend time with your grandkids.” He didn't have any grandchildren, of course. He was a clone, and we clones were as sterile as boiling alcohol. You could probably kill germs with the “sperm” we produced.

“Who the hell do you think you are speaking to?” he screamed.

“Admiral Steven R. Jolly, Enlisted Man's Navy, retired,” I said.

“And who do you think will take my place?”

“Probably Admiral Liotta . . . maybe Wallace. I haven't decided.”

“Do you honestly believe Warhawk Wallace is fit for command?”

“Nope,” I admitted. “It really doesn't matter. If Wallace isn't any better than you, I'll retire him.”

Jolly shook his head, laughed, and said, “You can't do this,” so I shot him with the M27. When I reported his death, I'd say that the looter had done it. This wasn't the first time I had killed a superior officer; and, judging by the men lined up to replace Steven Jolly, it wouldn't be the last time, either.

As the last of our transports left the planet, I received a message from Captain James Holman inviting me to the
Bolivar
's observation deck.

I had never met Holman in person, but I liked the way he evacuated Gobi. As I had already rifled through one-third of my top leadership prospects, I made a mental note to watch Holman as a possible alternative once I ran out of one-stars.

I went to the observation deck, and there was Holman, who might have been the oddest-looking clone in history. When I first saw him, I even mistook him for a natural-born.

Holman dyed his hair. Older clones were known to dye their hair blond; but Holman, a man in his early thirties, had dyed his hair a coppery version of fire-engine red. He also had a beard. I had seen clones with whiskers, but a beard ... Like his hair, the beard was that same unnatural color of red.

It was a short beard, trimmed to follow the curve of his jaw. He shaved the beard so that it fell short of his lower lip. The top of his beard followed the curve of his lips to create a well-trimmed look.

“Hello,” said Holman in a deep, throaty voice that did not sound clonelike. He had been sitting, watching the planet through a viewport, but he stood and saluted as I entered the deck.

I returned the salute, and said, “You put together a good operation.”

“Not good enough,” he said. “I understand there were looters.”

“You can bring a horse to water,” I said.

“But they shot Admiral Jolly. This is a blow to the Enlisted Man's Empire.”

I gave him a sly smile, and said, “Not as much a blow as you might think. I understand he planned to retire right after the evacuation.”

“He never told me,” said Holman. He sounded suspicious.

“Yes, well, Admiral Jolly kept his plans pretty quiet.”

With that, we sat and we waited. Death arrived on Gobi six hours late. This had happened before. The virtual ghost of Arthur Breeze tended to err on the safe side with his predictions.

At 03:17 S.T.C. time, the Avatari ignited the Tachyon D particles they had pumped into the atmosphere, and the temperature instantaneously spiked to nine thousand degrees.

Unable to see the destruction through the viewport, Holman and I switched to a computer display. The first thing we saw was the destruction of Gobi Station. Several of the smaller structures around the base exploded. The base itself, a tall spindlelike building armed with cannons and radars and landing pads, seemed untouched by the heat for twenty seconds. Laser cannons exploded, launchpads melted, but the base remained erect.

The heat continued for precisely eighty-three seconds. During that time, the sand around Gobi Station turned orange and melted into a shallow ocean of glass. Outcroppings of rock exploded.

The superheating of the planet caused the atmosphere to rise in its own convection. As it rose, the atmospheric pressure lifted with it, and Gobi Station burst like a balloon. The inner framework remained, but the outer walls blew off the building, leaving the inner structure to wilt in the extreme heat.

When the eighty-three-second attack ended, the atmosphere cooled and fell back into place, crushing the remains of Gobi Station into a twisted pile of girders.

I thought about the looter I had allowed to escape. He'd probably died in the first second of the attack. One moment he'd have been looking at whatever swag he'd accumulated, and the next moment, he was dust.

At least he'd died happy, after all; he'd outwitted a dumb Marine.

The Japanese Fleet had begun its mission in 2514, right after the aliens were turned back on New Copenhagen. At the time they embarked, it looked like the war for the Milky Way had ended and the Unified Authority had won.

Yamashiro Yoshi recognized the decrepit state of the Unified Authority and saw it as dangerous. The Unified Authority was an empire in collapse. One more attack, be it from renegades like the Morgan Atkins Believers or aliens, and the empire would fall—it was teetering that close to the edge; but an empire teetering on the brink of extinction is also an empire on alert. Fearing that the U.A. Navy might start shooting before the crew of the
Sakura
could identify themselves, Yamashiro decided it would be safer to begin the journey to Earth by stopping by its nearest populated neighbor—New Copenhagen. He would go to the secondary planet first, identify himself and his ship, then continue on to Earth.

The
Sakura
broadcasted in ten million miles off New Copenhagen. The moment the ship cleared the anomaly, Captain Takahashi ordered his engineers to start recharging the broadcast generator ... a preventive measure.

Takahashi, Yamashiro, and Commander Suzuki Hideki stood around the map table staring into a three-dimensional holographic map looking for signs of ships patrolling the area. They saw no movement, but their radar found several wrecks orbiting the planet. They tried to signal the planet but received no response.

“Perhaps they have abandoned the planet,” suggested Commander Suzuki.

Yamashiro grunted his agreement. “Maybe so,” he said. “As I understand it, the cities were destroyed during the war with the aliens.”

“Should we proceed to Earth?” asked Takahashi.

“No,” said Yamashiro. “Send down a transport. There may yet be people on this planet.”

“If there are people on New Copenhagen, then they are hiding. We've tried to signal them on every frequency, military and civilian,” said Takahashi. “They should have a robot transponder on this planet at the very least.”

“New Copenhagen was the Unified Authority's final colony. The Linear Committee would not abandon its final colony without a fight,” said Yamashiro. “If they have abandoned the planet, I want to know why.” And then he said the words he wished did not need saying, “We may be defending a people who are already extinct.”

He gave his son-in-law a sympathetic gaze as he said this, but Takahashi looked away.
She is my daughter as well as your wife. Your children are my grandchildren. We would share in the loss,
he thought.

“Admiral, do you think the aliens have attacked Earth?” asked Suzuki. The conversation did not weigh as heavily on the commander as it did on Yamashiro and Takahashi. He was a bachelor.

Takahashi answered. “It's been three years since we have had contact with Earth. Any one of a million fates may have befallen it during our absence. History may have left us behind. Perhaps the known laws of time do not apply in Bode's Galaxy. By our clock, we have been absent for three years, but one thousand centuries may have passed on Earth.”

“Do you really think that is possible?” asked Suzuki.

“Possible? Anything is possible,” said Yamashiro. Then he spoke in a hollow whisper as he added, “Perhaps we only saw the first wave of a more massive assault before we set off for their galaxy.”

Time passed as the
Sakura
approached New Copenhagen. The mood on the bridge remained grim. “Admiral, do you want to send SEALs to search the planet?” asked Suzuki.

“Our transports will cover more territory from the sky,” said Yamashiro.

“Satellites are even faster,” said Takahashi.

Yamashiro began to brush off the suggestion as cowardice, then realized that what Takahashi had said was true. “Ah, satellites, they would be faster still.”

 

The transport deployed three satellites and returned to the ship. Fearing the worst, Yamashiro had the satellite feed sent directly to him. He sat alone in his office, reviewing a live video that confirmed the worst of his fears.

When the Joint Chiefs had briefed him about his mission, they told Yamashiro that the aliens destroyed cities and left them in ruins. He had seen footage of soldiers and Marines fighting battles in forests. General Alexander Smith, the head of the Joint Chiefs, complained that the aliens had “knocked us back to the Stone Age.”

The New Copenhagen Yamashiro saw in the video feed was not in the Stone Age; it looked like a planet that would not support life. Where there had once been forests on this planet, the trees had all burned away leaving fields of charred stumps and scorched earth. Yamashiro searched for leaves, moss, ferns, grass, and animals. He found no signs of life, not even around the rivers and lakes.

He studied the ruined landscape for fifteen minutes, then he shut his eyes and pressed his fingers against his eyelids. He thought about the
Onoda
, the
Kyoto
, and the
Yamato
, reasoning that any weapon that could scald an entire planet could certainly melt a battleship into a lump of clay. Trying to repress the fear and anger he felt, he returned to the video feed and was hypnotized by the devastation.

The feed showed a city in which few buildings stood. He saw the frame of a skyscraper. The glass and skin of the building had fallen away from the frame. He saw an old-fashioned brick tower that leaned as if it had melted. The tower reminded him of an ice sculpture left in the sun.

Scanning the remains of the city, Yamashiro did not see flagpoles, steel roofs, glass, or bridges. The ground sparkled like broken crystals. The deserts he saw might once have been pasturelands. Where there once had been deserts and beaches, the sand had melted into glass.

Yamashiro winced when the feed identified Valhalla, the capital city of New Copenhagen. A few buildings still stood in downtown Valhalla, but most had been crushed. The streets had melted. The remaining cars, mostly melted hulks without paint, tires, or windows, sat mired in the street, sunk down to their axles.

They escaped the frying pan only to perish by fire,
thought Yamashiro. In this war, the first wave was invasion. The second wave was death by fire.
There can be no question about my duty now,
Yamashiro decided. He and his crew would return to Bode's Galaxy. They would repay death with death.

Should we go to Earth?
he asked himself. Few of his sailors knew that they had returned to their home galaxy. Yamashiro decided to show the video feed to Takahashi and the master chief of the SEALs. They would decide together whether or not they should return to Earth.

That was Yamashiro's strategy before the attack. After the attack, he changed his mind.

 

Three ships broadcasted into New Copenhagen space less than one million miles from the
Sakura
. The ships glowed. Captain Takahashi had never seen ships that glowed like these ships, and the
Sakura
's sensors could not identify them.

The ships were long and narrow. The only naval ships Takahashi had ever seen were wide and wedge-shaped.

“Can you hail them?” asked Takahashi.

His communications officer said, “No.”

His helmsman reported that the ships were closing in at thirty-nine million miles per hour. The fastest Unified Authority ships Takahashi had ever seen had a maximum speed of thirty million miles per hour.

With the ships only one minute away, Takahashi gave the order to broadcast out, and the
Sakura
returned to Bode's Galaxy.

The Unified Authority sent a spy ship into space near Gobi. The ship dropped a communications satellite and broadcasted out. The satellite carried a video feed that the Unifieds wanted us to see ... a warning. It showed the fleet of ships we had patrolling Magus, a planet in the Sagittarius Arm.