The Clone Redemption (24 page)

When we returned to the spaceport, I noticed things that had eluded my attention when I first arrived. I asked the commanding officer to take me on a tour. He pointed out the crates and pallets along the runways. I saw trucks loaded with supplies waiting by the hangars.

Five hangars, each the size of a college auditorium, stood in a row behind the airfield. The doors of the first four hangars hung open, revealing stacks of supplies that seemed to overflow from within their walls. I asked one of my guides about the fifth hangar.

He answered, “That's the crematorium, sir.”

“The crematorium?” I asked.

“A civilian came through ... a big man. He was a black man, bald and built like a mountain. He had orders identifying him as a civilian advisor.”

One thing about Freeman, he always left a lasting impression.

“He took a jeep into town. When he came back, he had a busful of prisoners,” said the officer. “He identified most of them as gangsters, but a few of them were fleet officers as well.

“He said he caught the gangsters bribing their way onto a transport.”

“And the officers?” I asked.

“They accepted the bribes.”

Freeman had probably spotted some civilian driving a truck up to a transport and gone in to investigate. He'd come to Bangalore hoping to save lives, but Ray Freeman did not mind killing people who got in the way of salvation.

“He left the prisoners in the bus and parked the bus in the hangar. That's why we call it the crematorium. He left them there to burn.”

I looked at the hangar and smiled. A private crematorium for gangsters and crooked officers ... it had a certain ring to it.

I got the feeling Admiral Liotta suspected me of having something to do with Admiral Jolly's untimely demise. Liotta conducted his business via the confabulator, holding daily summits and refusing to grant me a face-to-face interview. I did not understand the Navy way. In the Marines, we treated our subordinates like missiles, we told them what to do and launched them in the right direction, knowing that destruction would follow. In the Navy, the officers seemed so damn political.

Once again finding myself in a war room, speaking through a confabulator, I missed the halcyon days of summits with Gary Warshaw. Back when he ruled the Enlisted Man's Empire, he held summits in which all the top brass met behind closed doors.

At least I was not alone in the conference room. Captain Morris Dempsey, the officer Liotta placed in charge of evacuating Bangalore sat to my left. Captain Jim Holman, the redheaded clone, sat to my right. Dempsey looked stressed. Holman looked like a man who didn't have a care in the world.

“What is the status of the evacuation?” asked Liotta.

Dempsey said, “It's in progress, sir.” Then he quietly muttered, “Whatever happened to briefing and debriefing, and leaving me to do my job in between?”

“Is it running according to schedule?”

Dempsey fielded the question. He said, “We fell behind schedule at the start, sir, but things are looking up now.”

Holman, who was pretending to take notes, lazily wrote “Bullshit” on his notepad.

“Glad to hear it,” said Admiral Liotta. He sounded enthusiastic about the news. By that time, I had come to realize that Liotta was both a coward and entirely inept.

Admiral Wallace seemed surprised by the report. Using Liotta's undermining tactics, he asked, “Will you be able to rescue the entire population?”

“Yes, sir, Admiral,” said Dempsey.

“Really,” said Wallace. “Every man, woman, and child?”

“Yes, sir. We almost certainly will.”

His expression serious and intent, Holman made obscene gestures with his hand under the table. Since he managed to keep his shoulders steady, the admirals had no clue. Dempsey saw it, though. His eyes turned to daggers.

“Well done, Dempsey,” said Liotta, giving Wallace a crooked smile.

“How about supplies?” asked Wallace.

Momentarily distracted by Holman, Dempsey could not prevent his insecurity peeking from behind the façade. “I . . . I need to get back to you on that one, Admiral. I'm not certain where we stand, sir,” he said.

Under the table, Holman's hand stopped in midmotion and returned meekly to his lap.

Liotta sighed, and asked, “So are you telling me, Captain, that we are evacuating millions of people but we will not have food to feed them? Is that what you are telling me? Why the hell should we evacuate them? If they're going to die either way, we might as well leave them to burn on Bangalore, Captain. That way they will die faster.” As Liotta's rant built into a scream, a ton of blood must have pumped into his head. His face turned the bright red of oxygenated blood. It looked like he had a fever.

I had the feeling that Liotta did not feel as concerned about the supplies as he pretended. Wallace had just shown him up, and that affected Liotta deeply. He shouted, “Start pulling supplies, Dempsey. Do not leave Bangalore with an ounce less than one million tons of supplies. That is an order.”

Dempsey said, “Sir, zero hour is at 08:00.” That was three hours away.

“Son of a bitch,” muttered Liotta. He wasn't calling the captain a son of a bitch, he was referring to the situation. “Then you had better come up with something fast. Don't even try leaving that planet without the supplies, or I'll leave your ass there to burn.”

It was a pathetic threat made by a cowardly leader. Even with the supplies waiting in the hangars, we lacked the manpower and space needed to load one million tons of supplies onto transports in a three-hour stretch.

Dempsey took a moment to compose his thoughts. He breathed in deeply, held it, exhaled. His shoulders hunched, and his back drooped. He said, “Yes, sir. I will do my best, sir.”

Holman had returned to taking notes. He wrote “Pucker Up Slut” on his notepad.

“Don't do your best,” said Liotta. “I've already seen your best. Your best is what got us into this situation.” He sounded so smug, so sanctimonious. The admiral had dumped a nearly impossible task on a useless lackey; and now that the lackey showed he was not up to the job, Liotta wanted to dodge any blame.

I decided to take some of the heat off Dempsey's shoulders. I asked, “Admiral, what is happening with the rest of our fleet?”

“Nothing important,” said Liotta.

“That's funny, I heard the Unifieds attacked our ships in the Cygnus and Perseus Arms,” I said. “Maybe it's just me, but that sounds important.”

On Holman's pad I saw:

He tilted the notepad for me to see, stifling a smile. Next time I attended one of these meetings, I'd make him leave the notepad outside.

“We kicked their asses,” said Wallace.

Still playing with his notepad, Holman wrote “Truth” and “Bullshit,” with a little box beside each choice. He placed a check mark under “Bullshit.”

“Is that so?” I asked. “I heard the Unifieds kicked our asses.”

“Specking lies,” said Wallace.

Holman ticked a second check under “Bullshit.”

“Did we lose any ships?” I asked. I knew the answer. We'd lost fifteen ships, including five battleships and a fighter carrier.

“Well, yes. We took losses.”

A tick under “Truth.”

“Did we destroy any of their ships?” I asked.

“Damn straight we did. We destroyed three of their ships.”

Holman placed a check in the middle of the pad, halfway between “Truth” and “Bullshit.”

Somebody needs to teach Wallace the difference between winning and losing,
I thought to myself. He seemed to believe that winning a fight meant losing more ships.

I changed the subject. “Admiral, we have eighteen more planets to evacuate,” I said. “We're in trouble on Bangalore, but that will just be the start of our problems if we can't find a permanent place to relocate evacuees.”

“How about Earth?” asked Admiral Wallace.

“Be serious,” said Admiral Liotta.

“I'm being serious,” said Wallace.

“So am I,” said Admiral Liotta. “Now shut the speck up.”

Maybe I had emboldened Wallace by calling his bluff, or maybe he sensed Liotta's fear. Either way, he did not back down as Liotta had expected. He said, “Admiral, we buy ourselves a reprieve by taking the Unifieds out of the equation. They have food to spare, space to spare, and their planet is the last one on the aliens' agenda.”

“We don't have time for this, Admiral,” said Liotta. “Right now we need to concentrate on getting people off Bangalore.”

“You want to know about Bangalore; I'll tell you about specking Bangalore,” said Wallace. “A lot of people are going to die on that goddamned rock. We are not going to pull any specking supplies in time. Your shit-for-brains evacuation plan failed, and now we're wasting our specking time trying to play catch-up. That's what is happening on Bangalore, Admiral.”

“Wallace, you are out of line,” growled Liotta.

I did not like Wallace, and I hated myself for agreeing with him; but he was right. He sat there calm and self-satisfied, the skeletal remains of a man, so skinny and pale and covered with scars that he looked near death.

Rattled, angry, and trying to regain control of a meeting that seemed to have left him behind, Admiral Liotta turned to me, and asked, “Do we know which planet is next? Please, for God's sake, don't say it's Solomon.”

But, of course, it was Solomon.

“How did you know it was Solomon?” I asked.

“We had five ships patrolling Solomon,” said Liotta. “As of two hours ago, we lost contact with them.”

They must have been under Wallace's command. He squirmed in his chair as Liotta delivered this information. Wallace wiped sweat from his forehead and loosened his collar but remained absolutely silent.

Five more ships,
I thought. “Why didn't they broadcast out?” I asked.

“That's the problem with Solomon, the broadcast station is too far from the planet,” said Liotta. “It's the same setup as Earth with the Mars broadcast station, depending on where the planet is in its orbit, the trip can take ten hours.”

Liotta let that sink in, then he said something chilling. “I've put a lot of thought into this one, Harris. We're not going to evacuate Solomon. It's not worth the risk.”

“What do you mean by ‘not going to evacuate'?” I asked.

“I mean that we are not going to sacrifice ships and men on a mission that cannot possibly succeed,” Liotta said. “Harris, the Solomon broadcast station is currently sixty-three million miles from Solomon. It would take two hours to cover that space in our fastest ships. Those barges don't even fly five million an hour. It would take them a full day just to fly to the planet and back.

“If you think we're having trouble getting people off Bangalore, just try figuring out the logistics for Solomon,” Liotta said, sounding totally at peace with his decision.

“So you are not even going to warn them?”

“What could we accomplish by warning them?”

“They can find caves and tunnels and basements. They can go underground,” I said.

“That's not what would happen,” said Admiral Liotta. “If you tell those people that their planet is going to explode, you get riots and chaos. Some people might survive . . .”

“There are seven million people on Solomon,” Wallace announced in a cold, cold voice. “You make the call, Harris. Maybe we should lift the kids from the planet, that's the humanitarian move, yes? We rescue the children, then transfer them across the galaxy as a shipload of orphans.

“Of course we could take the pragmatic approach ... save the scientists, the politicians, the people with something to contribute. Or we could be practical. We can save everyone on one of the continents, maybe even an entire hemisphere.”

“Get specked,” I snarled, though I knew the son of a bitch was right. He was also an asshole. He had come to the right decision but I doubted he had made that decision out of a sense of duty or propriety. Liotta and Wallace were bastards first and officers afterward. They would abandon the people on Solomon because it was easy to abandon them, not because it was necessary. That was my take.

Having made the tough call, neither Liotta nor Wallace showed interest in debating their decision. For once they were in agreement.

“We need to warn those people, we owe them that much,” I said.

“You warned Terraneau,” Wallace pointed out. “How did it work out?”

“Solomon is a lost cause, General,” said Admiral Liotta. “It's time you accept that.”

Maybe he was right, but I specialized in lost causes.

It was as if every man on the bridge had forgotten to breathe.

Takahashi felt it. Looking over at Yamashiro, he saw that his father-in-law felt it, too.

Reentering the solar system felt like climbing into an open grave. They were tempting fate. The aliens had destroyed three battleships in this solar system, melting them from the inside out.

“I've located the transports, sir,” said the communications officer.

That was a relief. Takahashi had half-expected to find the melted shells of the two transports floating lost in space. “Tell the pilots we are on our way,” he said.