The Clone Redemption (25 page)

The
Sakura
had reentered the minefield, and every sailor knew it. No one spoke unless there was an official reason. Takahashi had never seen a bridge so quiet for so long.

“I want the broadcast engines charged and ready,” he told Suzuki. He spoke in a whisper though he had no idea why. It was as if he suspected that the aliens might be eavesdropping on them.

“Yes, sir. It's already begun.”

The
Sakura
did not have room for two more transports in her landing bays. Takahashi planned to create room for the stealth birds by jettisoning two standard-issue transports. He needed stealth transports for an experiment.

When the aliens had destroyed the
Onoda
and her sister ships, they did not attack the transports. Maybe the aliens could not see through the transports' stealth shields. To test the theory, Takahashi planned to purge the oxygen from a stealth transport and send her out as a drone. If he could sneak stealth transports past the aliens, maybe he could send them to their planet for an old-fashioned bombing run. Maybe.

Moments after entering the solar system, Takahashi learned that the mission would fail.

His chief navigator approached the table where he stood with Admiral Yamashiro and Commander Suzuki. All three men turned to look at him, but the navigator spoke directly to the captain.

“Captain, sir, the aliens have placed an ion shield around their planet,” said the navigator.

He pointed to a display showing a planet that looked like a ball bearing. Instead of clouds and continents, the planet's surface appeared to be sheathed in a white gold sleeve.

“Thank you, Lieutenant. That will be all,” Takahashi said. He tried to appear unconcerned even as he felt his heart sinking.

“Yes, sir,” said the navigator. He saluted, turned, and walked back to his post.

Deafening silence followed.

Takahashi looked back at the image of the planet, a gleaming white gold ball surrounded by the luxuriant darkness of space. It looked like a gem, or possibly the eye of a demon. It looked both beautiful and evil.

“They've sleeved themselves,” said Yamashiro. “Just like they sleeved Shin Nippon.”

Frustrated beyond words, Takahashi looked down and shook his head. He felt a momentary urge to shout, but he swallowed down his emotion, just as he had swallowed down every other emotion over the last three years of his life. “The dice never break our way,” he said.

“Captain, sir, we still need to rescue those pilots,” said Suzuki.

“Rescue our pilots and fire our bombs,” Takahashi told Commander Suzuki. “We proceed with our mission as we planned it.”

He looked to his father-in-law for approval. Grim-faced as ever, Yamashiro met his gaze and gave him a single nod.

When the Japanese Fleet had first left for Bode's Galaxy, Yamashiro considered the SEALs expendable, maybe even disposable. He also believed he could locate the aliens and destroy their planet without needing the SEALs' services. After seeing three of his battleships destroyed, the admiral no longer held either belief.

Sitting in his stateroom, the lights dimmed so low he could not read from paper, he rubbed his temples, stared into a dark corner, and thought about the honored dead. He pictured Captain Miyamoto Genyo, whom he had come to regard as the last of the Samurai. Yamashiro had admired Miyamoto more than any man he had ever known. He revered Miyamoto above even his own father. When the aliens had destroyed the
Onoda
, they destroyed a portion of Yamashiro's soul. With the burning of the
Onoda
, much of Yamashiro's strength melted as well. He had leaned on Miyamoto's resolve throughout the mission.

Yamashiro believed he was different than other men. Other men joked about having angels and devils on their shoulders; his voices came from fear and aggression. An angel and a devil would have been easier to deal with. The devil might have been persuasive, but you always knew it was lying to you. Unable to ignore fear or aggression, Yamashiro found himself performing a balancing act. Sometimes, despite instincts telling him to wait, he needed to pull the trigger and finish the job. Sometimes it went the other way.

Now that Miyamoto was gone, Yamashiro Yoshi had to divine his own philosophy of war. Under Miyamoto's tutelage, the admiral had come to equate honor with death in battle. Now, having seen three battleships melt, he'd come to realize that there was no honor in a pointless death. He was not afraid of dying in battle, doing his duty even when it might cost him his life. Having a chance to succeed, that changed the landscape of Yamashiro's mortality. He did not mind dying during the invasion of the alien home world. Dying during the destruction of an abandoned base on a forgotten moon, though, that was pointless.

Yamashiro did not mind laying down his life invading the Avatari. By extension, he would willingly ask every man and woman under his command to make the same sacrifice ... if they had a chance of accomplishing their mission.

If death took on meaning in battle, Yamashiro realized he had dishonored the noble dead by assigning every dangerous detail to the SEALs. He admired the SEALs. He respected their courage. He would not deny the SEALs their chance to die with honor; nor would he deny his sailors that opportunity, men and women alike.

The flashing light on Yamashiro's communications console interrupted the darkness and his thoughts alike. He knew who was calling and why, his assistant had already warned him. Though he did not feel like having the discussion at that time, Yamashiro answered the call.

“Moshi Moshi,”
he said.

“Admiral.”

“What do you need, Captain?”

“The master chief of the SEALs came to see me.”

“So I understand.”

“He says he has men who have been trained to pilot a transport.”

“Yes. He left a similar message with my assistant.”

“He offered to have his men fly a mission to A-361-B.” Takahashi sounded excited, like he had made a great discovery and expected Yamashiro to applaud. He waited for Yamashiro to say something, but the admiral did not respond.

“Admiral, we don't need to risk our men,” said Takahashi.

“Hiro,” Yamashiro said in a cheerless whisper, “the SEALs are our men.”

Takahashi did not argue the point.

“Tell Master Chief Oliver that his offer is appreciated, but that on this mission, I would prefer to send Japanese.”

Yamashiro knew that the SEAL would misinterpret this response. He would mistake it for prejudice, but that was okay. In his dealings with Illych and Oliver, he had seen how well the SEAL clones dealt with prejudice. The worse he treated them, the more happily they seemed to respond. Yamashiro did not think they would cope with his concern for their well-being quite so easily.

Before the destruction of the
Onoda
, the
Kyoto
, and the
Yamato
, Yamashiro considered the Kamikaze farewell an appropriate tribute. On this day, he did not see the two transports off as they left for A-361-B. The time for ceremony had passed.

A few friends came to see the crews as they boarded their ships. The crews entered the launch area and noticed the deck more empty than usual. The only sailors they saw were a couple of mechanics bending over the open engine compartment of a transport. When the pilot looked in their direction, the mechanics turned away.

“We're flying a mission, right?” one of the technicians asked the pilot of the lead transport.

“Last I heard,” said the pilot.

“What relief. For a moment I thought maybe we had leprosy.”

The open hatch at the rear of the transport reminded the pilot of a mausoleum. He took one last breath before putting on his helmet, held the air in his lungs, then sighed as it escaped through his lips.

He placed his helmet over his head, and the technicians followed his example. They walked up the ramp and into the kettle, no one speaking. An even dozen stealth infiltration pods lay on the deck of the kettle, strapped along the wall, their polished tops reflecting the light from the technicians' helmets.

“The SEALs call them caskets,” one of the techs told the pilot.

“Yes, I've heard that,” said the pilot. He felt hollow inside. He felt scared. This was the part of the mission that worried him most, thinking he might reveal the fear he so wanted to hide. The pilot believed he would have better control once his transport left the
Sakura
; but at present, he doubted his own courage.

It was not the pilot's first mission. He'd flown Illych and his team to A-361-F, the fatal mission. He'd observed their Kamikaze farewell and remembered thinking the ceremony was a waste of time as he watched the SEALs board his transport.

“Secure the cargo,” he told the technicians as he climbed the ladder to the cockpit.

The pilot walked the narrow catwalk between the ladder and the cockpit, a man facing the destiny he could no longer escape. He walked slowly, his head down, arms dangling by his sides. In his heart, he hoped that Admiral Yamashiro would call off the mission; but he knew that would not happen. Now that the hatch was sealed, and he had entered his cockpit, the pilot found the resolve that would enable him to carry out his duty.

“Flight Control, this is Transport 1,” he began, and he went through the launch steps as if they were the five stages of death. He contacted the pilot of the second transport to make sure his ship was ready.

Flying at its top speed of thirty million miles per hour, the
Sakura
ferried the transport to a delivery point approximately three million miles off A-361-B. That would leave the transports with a long, slow flight; but that was how it had to be. If they launched too close to A-361-B, the aliens would surely spot the
Sakura
.

When he received the message that the ship had arrived, the pilot purged the air out of the kettle and launched.

Calling from the kettle of the transport, one of the technicians asked the pilot, “If the aliens made the air in the
Onoda
nine thousand degrees, what's going to stop them from igniting the air in our helmets?”

“Probably it's not enough air,” said the pilot. “They have ignored our helmets so far.”

“They had better targets last time,” said the technician.

“No one forced you to take this mission,” the pilot pointed out.

It was true. Per Admiral Yamashiro's orders, none of the crew had been required to accept this mission. Before assigning pilots and technicians, Captain Takahashi asked them if they believed they could carry out their duty. They all said they could.

“Are you kidding? This is my ticket to the Yasukuni Shrine
before the SEALs fill it up
,” said the technician, sounding almost serious. The Yasukuni Shrine was a Shinto temple in old Japan that served as a designated resting place for the spirits of soldiers and heroes. Tradition had it that the spirits of the Kamikaze went to Yasukuni.

When the Japanese Fleet had begun this mission, only a handful of crew members had heard of Yasukuni. Now every man and woman in the fleet knew about the shrine. Not many sailors claimed to believe the stories, but no one made jokes about the shrine the way they used to.

“This is not a Kamikaze mission,” said the pilot. “Yamashiro would have given a farewell if it were.”

“He should have given us a farewell,” said the technician.

“You should tell him that when we return,” said the pilot.

Both transports crews were made up of lieutenants. Captain Takahashi had decided that this mission was too important for enlisted men and too likely to fail to dump in the lap of a senior officer.

It's going to be a long mission,
thought the pilot. He had six million miles to travel in a transport with a top speed of two hundred thousand miles per hour.

Liotta pulled the
Bolivar
out from under my feet. He left strict orders with all of his ships' captains that they were forbidden to fly their ships to Solomon.

As long as I traveled in ships belonging to the Enlisted Man's Fleet, Solomon would remain out of reach. So I chose a ship that did not belong to the fleet. I took the spy ship. I captured it. As far as I was concerned, it belonged to the Wayson Harris Fleet, a growing armada that now included one shuttle, eight transports, and one scuffed-up Unified Authority cruiser complete with stealth shield and broadcast engine.