The Clone Redemption (22 page)

 

Admiral Liotta, the newly appointed commander and chief of the Enlisted Man's Empire, froze the video as a torpedo struck the forward shield of the fighter carrier. He let the feed run for another second, froze it, then pointed to the antennae that projected the shields. “Do you see what's happening here? Right here. Look at the antennae. Did you see how they caught fire and exploded. Did you see that? These new torpedoes make our shields overcharge.

“Now look at this. See here, on the shields.”

Fire smoldered where the torpedo had struck the shield of a battleship. It wasn't a flaming fire, not the kind of fire that gets extinguished by the vacuum of space. This looked like phosphorous, as if the chemical had somehow attached itself to the shield and fed on itself.

“One hit. One hit. All they needed was one specking torpedo to knock out our shields,” he said. “There's no telling what other damage it did inside the ship.”

He started the video feed rolling again, this time closing in on one of the Unified Authority battleships as it attacked.

 

 

Admiral Liotta stopped the feed. “It appears they are using two kinds of torpedoes, one for shields and one for ships.” He replayed the attack, this time without pausing for explanations.

 

Seen in real time, the demolition looked even more brutal than it did in slow motion. The Unifieds knew they only needed two shots to destroy our ships. The first shot was the jab. The second shot was the fatal blow.

We all sat in silence for several seconds after the feed ended. “Damn,” I whispered quietly so that no one else would hear me.
Why should we even try to defend ourselves?
I thought. If the Unifieds attacked those ships to send us a message, the message they were sending was, “Give up all hope.”

“We did not lose every ship in that encounter. After they destroyed the fighter carrier, the Unifieds allowed our remaining ships to escape,” said Liotta.

“What were the damages?” asked Admiral Wallace. “How many specking ships did we lose?”

Liotta looked at his notes, and said, “Nine ships. Seven fighters.”

“Only seven fighters?” I asked.

“We're in contact with the other fighters. As soon as we are sure the coast is clear, we'll send a carrier out to retrieve them.”

“Admiral, who shot the video?” I asked.

“Unknown,” said Liotta. “We should assume the Unifieds sent a spy ship to record the battle.”

“The sons of bitches sent a spy ship to record a specking massacre,” said Wallace. “What a nightmare. What a specking nightmare.”

“Well?” asked Liotta. “Any suggestions?”

“It seems obvious,” said Captain Holman, who had been the late Admiral Jolly's right-hand man. Holman and I were still orbiting Gobi, still in the Perseus Arm. Liotta and Wallace appeared through the magic of a confabulator.

“What's obvious?” asked Liotta, shooting Holman an icy glare. He did not like having a captain at a summit for admirals; and he especially disliked having that captain participate as if he'd been invited to speak.

Holman looked around the table to see if anyone had seen whatever he had seen. If he was looking for support, he had wasted his time. Not finding any backers, he turned to Admiral Liotta, and said, “We don't need to fight them, they're not trying to take our planets from us. They want their barges back; but they can't fire at the barges because they need them as much as we do. You with me so far?”

He was exactly right. The Unifieds wouldn't waste time trying to conquer colonies they knew were going to be burned. All they wanted was the barges, and they could not take the barges by force.

Holman was a straight shooter. The admirals might not have appreciated his candor, but I did.

“So they want their barges back, so what?” asked Wallace.

“Don't you get it, sir? They can't just take the barges,” said Holman.

“What do you mean they can't take the barges? We can't defend our ships against those torpedoes,” said Liotta.

Holman said, “Admiral, they can't use those torpedoes on the barges. They need the barges as much as we do. If they break the barges, everybody dies.

“Even if they board the barges, where are they going to take them?”

“They'll specking take them back to Earth,” said Wallace.

“How?” asked Holman. “Those barges don't have broadcast engines. They would need our broadcast stations to take the barges back to Earth.”

“Shit,” said Wallace.

“You're right,” said Liotta. “They can't take the barges without our help. They'd need us to surrender so they can use the broadcast network.”

“That's why they're trying to scare us,” Holman said, starting to sound more confident. “That's why they're using the killer torpedoes. They're trying to scare us into submission. They want us to surrender the barges and the broadcast network without a fight.”

“Assuming you're right,” said Liotta, “what does that get us?”

There he goes,
I thought,
Curtis “the Snake” Liotta living up to his dismal reputation.
Holman had seen things the rest of us had missed, now Liotta wanted to make sure the young captain did not get credit for it. I liked Holman. He was an officer I could follow into war.

Holman did not take the bait. He leaned forward in his chair, stared at Admiral Liotta's holographic image through the window, and said, “We don't need to fight. They won't attack our ships if they don't get anything for their trouble. They want us to stand and fight because they know they won't lose. If we run and take the barges with us, they can't come after us if we enter a broadcast zone.”

“That's your strategy?” asked Liotta. He laughed. “That's your observation? You think we should just run away.” He turned to Admiral Wallace, and said, “I'm sorry. I shouldn't have let a . . .”

Holman interrupted Liotta. He asked, “Do you have a better idea?”

“Captain, I think you'd better . . .”

Holman interrupted Liotta a second time. He said, “Admiral, if we keep our ships close enough to our broadcast zones, the Unifieds won't be able to attack them.”

No longer willing to tolerate Holman's insubordination, Liotta slammed a fist on the table. Watching him, I realized that he was no more real to me than Sweetwater or Breeze. Sure, he was actually alive, but what I saw was a holographic hand striking a holographic table. I watched the scene in silence, wondering how long I should wait before relieving Admiral Curtis Liotta of his useless command.

Admiral Wallace cleared his throat, and said, “I'm not sure that a goddamned specking mass retreat counts as a strategy, Admiral; but the kid's got a point.”

“What point?” shouted Liotta. “What is his point?” He sounded frustrated. His holographic image stood, paced along its side of the table.

“If we keep our ships just outside the broadcast zones and run when the Unifieds arrive, they won't be able to hit us.”

“That's a coward's way of running a navy,” sneered Liotta.

“But it will work,” said Wallace.

“How about you, Harris? You're the big, hairy-chested fighting machine. How do you feel about ducking for cover every time we see the Unifieds?”

“Works for me,” I said. “I think it's an ingenious strategy.”

“An ingenious strategy,” repeated Liotta. “Well, if we're going to employ the captain's
ingenious strategy
from here on out, let's just hope the Unifieds don't turn up while we're evacuating Bangalore.”

Bangalore was the next planet slated by the Avatari for execution. We had already begun evacuating it.

“I'll tell you what,” Liotta continued. “We'll leave a hell of a lot of people to fry if we run away at Bangalore.” He sat back down and rubbed his eyes, then pressed his hands together as if saying a prayer. “God, I hope they do not attack us at Bangalore.”

I wondered if his rantings were the result of theatrics or fatigue? He seemed sincere.

Holman said, “If it comes to a choice between evacuating Bangalore or evacuating all of our other planets, we'll need to abandon Bangalore, Admiral.”

Liotta turned to look at me. His eyes were bloodshot, and dark bags circled their bottoms. He asked, “Do you think the Unifieds know that Bangalore is next?”

“They know,” I said. They got their information from the same source we got ours—from the virtual ghosts of the late, great scientists William Sweetwater and Arthur Breeze.

What took a couple of hours on Gobi had already taken an entire day on Bangalore, and the end was not in sight.

Admiral Liotta tried to write off the clusterspeck as a question of population. Gobi had a population of under five hundred thousand. Bangalore had eight million residents. It took two barges to evacuate Gobi. If we filled all twenty-five barges to capacity on the first round, we'd still need to send some of them for a second pass.

And it wasn't just a question of loading the people onto the barges. Once we loaded them on, we carted them to Providence Kri, where we had to transport them down to the planet. Offloading passengers went more quickly than loading them, but not quickly enough.

Once we airlifted the people off the planet, assuming we were able to airlift all of them, we'd still need time to search for food and supplies. We might have been able to evacuate the people and the supplies had Liotta's team not cataclysmically botched the opening hours of the operation.