The Clone Redemption (23 page)

Liotta's officers were afraid to go down to the planet. They had heard that Bangalore was going to go up in smoke, so they sent seaman and petty officers to run the show in case the Avatari attacked before they were supposed to attack. So battalions of seaman and petty officers went down to the planet and did the heavy lifting, while Liotta's chickenhearted senior officers tried to run the show from orbiting battleships. The arrangement did not work well.

The junior officers running the evacuation were used to taking orders, not giving them. Trying to run things from their Mount Olympus above the clouds, the officers in charge were too removed from the operation to adjust the logistics. Five hours into the operation, the wheels were so badly specked that only one million people had been lifted off the planet, and the officers in charge admitted they would not be able to airlift all of the remaining seven million. By the time I reached Bangalore, searching for food and medicine had become a pipe dream.

Despite all of his bluster at the summit, Admiral Liotta was an idiot who surrounded himself with idiots. It's a popular form of camouflage that many officers use. Hoping to hide their ineptitude behind the greater stupidity of others, morons surround themselves with other morons. There's an old saying that, “In the valley of the blind, the one-eyed man shall be king.” In officer country, men with two eyes and two testicles are hard to come by.

Seven hours into the evacuation, Admiral Liotta flew to Bangalore to run the show himself. He began his salvage operation by sending thousands of officers down to the planet and telling them that he would not allow them back on their ships until the evacuation was complete.

Score one point for “Curtis the Snake.”

The ground operation progressed slowly, with sailors and Marines herding entire towns into spaceports and makeshift way stations. Transports ran on tight schedules. Loading and unloading times were cut in half, and the pace of the rescue picked up. Sadly, no one realized that they needed to stage the evacuation in waves. The clusterspeck that once slowed operations on the ground simply shifted to a clusterspeck that tied up operations on the barges.

I traveled down to Bangalore to inspect the evacuation and crack a few skulls. As we left the
Bolivar
, I saw six barges hovering in a group just above the atmosphere, looking like a neighborhood of warehouses. Lights flashed along their hulls, directing the lines of transports to open landing pads.

Except for my shuttle, the only ships approaching the planet were transports. Thousands of them climbed in and out of the atmosphere, forming a Y-axis traffic jam that would take hours to untangle. Had the barges been able to fly down to the planet, we could have finished the evacuation in one-tenth the time; but they were big bulky boxes without wings, designed to float weightless in space, free of the forces of friction and gravity.

Off in the distance, a huge fleet of warships loitered just outside the local broadcast zone like clown fish swimming beside an anemone. If the U.A. attacked, our ships would dart into the sanctuary of the zone, where self-broadcasting ships could not follow.

And if the Unifieds went after the barges ... We'd rigged them with bombs. We were prepared to blow ourselves up one barge at a time until the Unified Authority realized that if we had to die, we'd die happy in the knowledge that we were dragging our natural-born creators down with us.

I started the trip to Bangalore in the luxurious main cabin of my personal command shuttle—a remnant from happier days. A minute after we cleared the
Bolivar
, I entered the cramped cockpit. My pilot, Lieutenant Nobles, and I had developed a friendship; I felt an obligation to go chat with him.

“Do you think they're out there?” Nobles asked as I entered.

“Who? The Unifieds? They've got eyes out there. You can count on it,” I said.

Somewhere out there, a U.A. spy ship would be watching, recording our every move. They recorded the destruction of New Olympus and Terraneau. Why stop there? They probably recorded our evacuations and evaluated what worked and what failed. They'd have an evacuation of their own soon enough. If they got started right away, they could probably even build a new fleet of barges by the time the Avatari arrived; but they would not do that. We had stolen their property. The bastards wanted it back.

As we neared the atmosphere, a flash appeared in the distance as one of the barges entered the broadcast zone, ferrying another quarter of a million people to temporary shelters on Providence Kri.

We could not continue storing people on Providence Kri forever. The clock was ticking on that planet as well. We'd eventually need to pull everybody off that rock, too. The logistics of evacuating Providence Kri would be staggering, tens of millions of people.

Five hundred thousand evacuees from Gobi, eight million from Bangalore—the numbers added up quickly. Sooner or later, we'd be hauling fifty million refugees. What would we do at that point?

The Avatari were rolling through the galaxy, and we were trying to keep ahead of the storm instead of working our way around it. Sooner or later, we would need to start settling one of the planets that the aliens had already incinerated. If we moved refugees anywhere else, we would need to move them again.

“What do you think the Unifieds will do when the aliens reach Earth?” Nobles asked. “Think they'll ask us for help?”

“They might,” I said. “I think they'd rather kill us and take their barges back. If they can't, they'll probably ask for help.”

“Yeah, well, if Tobias Andropov asks me for a ride, I'll tell him to kiss my ass,” said Nobles. Andropov was the senior member of the Linear Committee, making him the most powerful politician in a mortally wounded republic.

We entered the atmosphere, the shuttle's sleek profile piercing the bubble with very little resistance. When transports fly down to planets, they batter their way into the atmosphere with all of the grace of a hammer hitting glass. My shuttle pierced it like a needle.

“I heard they wanted to set up undersea cities,” said Nobles.

Before becoming a Unified Authority signee, the French government had launched an undersea mining and colonization program called the Cousteau Oceanic Exploration program. They hoped to form an alliance that would rival the U.A.'s space-exploration alliance, but only Tahiti signed on.

“I heard that, too,” I said.

“Think they can go deep enough?” Nobles asked.

“Depth isn't the problem.” Forty feet down would be deep enough. The French built a city called Mariana that was three miles down. It only held five thousand people. I said, “Size is the problem. Their undersea cities are too specking small.”

“That's funny,” said Nobles. “Now they know how it feels.”

The shuttle handled atmospheric travel like a jet, channeling air currents to turn and rise and dive. Nobles slowed us to a sluggish three hundred miles per hour as we dropped toward the clouds. It was night, moonlight made the clouds gray, and the ocean below us was black. Wherever I looked, I saw transports muscling their way through the sky, looking no more aerodynamic than bumblebees, and exceptionally clumsy at that.

Nobles whistled, and said, “Man, we really specked them over when we stole their barges.”

“They specked themselves,” I said, remembering how the Unified Authority had forced the clone military into rebellion.

A twisted peel of clouds veiled my view of the city below. Pockets of lights sparkled in the darkness on the ground.
Evacuation centers,
I thought.

A few minutes passed, and we flew over the city. We slowed as we approached a sports stadium that had been converted into a spaceport. Three transports rose from its rim, dozens more sat side by side on its open field. The lines of people packed around them looked like grains of sand.

The entire scene was awash with light. Bright lights showered down around the rim of the stadium, orange-tinted lights mapped the parking lot, and a long, slow-moving line of headlights traced the street leading into stadium.

Just a few moments later, we passed a bubble of light that resolved itself into a shopping mall, its enormous parking lot converted into a landing strip. A sea of people covered the parking area.

We flew to the Bangalore pangalactic spaceport, the hub of the evacuation. Transports, which have skids instead of wheels, can land in tight spaces and on tiny platforms in sports stadiums and shopping centers. My shuttle had wheels. We needed a runway.

The control tower cleared us, and Nobles set us down. It happened that fast. Three officers met us as we left the shuttle. As I left the shuttle, I inhaled a jolt of ozone. Some of our transport pilots were flying with their shields up. The shields generated ozone. With so many transports flying in and out of the atmosphere, I wondered what kind of pollution problems the ozone might create. Whatever problems it created, they would not last long.

The officers had a sedan waiting on the runway. They hustled me into my seat, and we drove into the city.

In the minutes it took me to get through Gandhi Spaceport, I saw two, maybe three, hundred passengers charging toward a transport made to carry one hundred people. The stampede left bloody bodies in its wake.

We passed roads clogged with panicked refugees and a city with masses who looked ready to riot. “Slow down,” I told the driver, as we passed a corner on which armed soldiers manning a chest-high barricade tried to hold back a crowd.

“Stop the car,” I said.

I climbed out of the car. The people looked terrified, so did the officers who had come to organize the evacuation.

“A hundred at a time,” I mumbled.

“What was that?” asked one of the officers.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just thinking out loud.” Evacuating a planet with eight million people in transports that were only capable of carrying one hundred refugees at a time seemed incredibly inefficient. It took ten thousand transports to move one million people, and it would take eighty thousand to empty this planet. Eighty thousand liftoffs . . . Eighty thousand dockings . . .

The officers drove me to an Air Force base, where a small knot of Marines came out to greet me. We traded salutes and pleasantries. Admiral Liotta had placed my Marines in charge of looking for food and dealing with looters. Armed troops carrying M27s patrolled the streets. Looters would not be offered evacuation. The Marines had orders to shoot them on sight.

“How is the evacuation going?” I asked one of the Marines.

“It's a mess, sir,” said the colonel in charge. “I don't know who came up with these evacuation plans, but we're finding looters on every street. It's a mess.”

A Marine captain said, “General, these people are scared. We're herding them like cattle, and they're scared of us. They're even more scared we're going to leave them behind.”

“I can take you to see what we're dealing with if you want, General,” the colonel offered.

I shook my head and turned to one of Liotta's officers. “Will we get them all out?” I asked.

“It's going to be close, sir,” he said.

“How about supplies?” I asked. “Do we have enough time to gather supplies?”

“We already gathered 'em. We've had teams out all day. We have the food and the medicine. All we need now is transports to lift the supplies out.”

“Where are the supplies?” I asked.

“Stacked up and ready at the spaceport.”

“Outstanding,” I said. “So the supplies we need will be in neat stacks when they burn to dust.”

“But, sir . . .” Liotta's officer started to explain himself, then thought better of it and fell silent.

“Where is Admiral Liotta?” I asked the officer.

“I'm not sure, sir. He might be at Gandhi.”

“Back at the spaceport?” I asked. “Well that's excellent. Let's go find him. You can show me the supplies when we get there.”

I'd lost track of Ray Freeman since the last time we'd contacted Sweetwater. I ran into him as we left the Air Force base. He stood outside the gate looking more tired and old than I had ever seen him, his dark skin blending into the shadows as he waited for my car to clear the gate.

I told the driver to wait for me and climbed out of the car. I walked on the loose gravel along the side of the road and approached Freeman. I asked, “What are you doing here?”

“You listed me as a civilian advisor,” he said. “I came here to advise.”

“Looks like these guys need all the advice they can get,” I said.

“We don't have enough time to get everyone off the planet,” Freeman agreed.

“Yeah, I know. I think it's time I relieved the officer in charge,” I said. “I hear he's at the spaceport.”

“You mean Liotta?” asked Freeman.

“That's the man,” I said.

“He's left the planet,” said Freeman.

“Know where he went?”

Freeman said, “I can find him for you.”

I smiled, and said, “Ray Freeman, welcome to the Praetorian Guard.”