The Clone Redemption (37 page)

I stood on the bridge beside Captain Cutter, staring out the viewport. I'd known this man for only a month, but we had the familiarity of the battlefield. We'd faced death together. In military circles, that made us family.

“Do you think they've figured out a way of peeking through our cloak?” I asked.

“They probably don't even know we have a stealth cruiser,” said Cutter.

I thought about the day Holman and I had attacked their Solomon patrol, and said, “I think they've figured that out.”

Cutter looked at me, and said, “General, has anybody ever mentioned that you're a pessimistic man? You go through life a lot happier if you're an optimist.”

“I'm not pessimistic,” I said, though I knew he was right. I hadn't always been a pessimist. How had I changed? Was it fatigue? Was I worn-out from fighting wars on two fronts? Maybe it was the drugs? For the last few weeks, I'd been taking stimulants so I could work around the clock. The medics warned me that the drugs could have side effects—rollercoaster emotions, the sensation of feeling hyperalert, paranoia. Light hurt my eyes. Sounds made me jumpy. Looking around the little bridge of the spy ship, I felt closed in.

“Do they have ships out there?” I asked.

Sounding more calm than he reasonably should have, Cutter said, “Dozens of them. They're searching everywhere, but they can't see us. We came to look at their fleet, right? You wanted a peek at their forces; here they are.”

I nodded.

“So let's look,” he said as he led me to his tactical display. The holographic display showed a chunk of space that included Earth and its moon. A rainbow of different-colored threads, each as thin as a strand of a spider's web, traced the paths of ships as they circled the planet in search of the intruder. The scene fit Cutter's description precisely. The Unifieds were everywhere. We had kicked the hornets' nest.

Cutter pointed to the legend at the bottom. Red lines marked courses traveled by the new generation fighter carriers. There were only two of them. Gold threads marked the paths of three new generation battleships. The computer tracked five Perseus-class battleships and three Perseus-class carriers. Even throwing in cruisers, dreadnaughts, destroyers, and frigates, the Unifieds only had fifty-eight capital ships.

“Ah, look, here comes the cavalry,” Cutter said. He did not sound worried.

The tactical display marked broadcast anomalies with Xs. Seven of them appeared. Three of them dissolved into the red lines that marked new generation fighter carriers. The other four resolved into the gold of new generation battleships.

The U.A. ships concentrated their search on an area close to Earth. Hidden by a stealth shield, we watched the U.A. ships from a half million miles away. They never came near us.

Clearly, Cutter enjoyed spying on the enemy with impunity. He laughed when ships searched in the wrong direction, tracing their flight paths with his finger and making lame jokes.

“Sixty-five ships? Do you think that's all they have?” I asked.

“They'd have a lot more if you hadn't stranded them at Olympus Kri,” said Cutter.

We spent another half hour watching their movements. No new ships appeared on the scene though a few ships broadcasted out. “Do you have what you need?” Cutter asked. He almost never addressed me as “sir.” From anyone else I might have taken that as a sign of disrespect but not from him.

“How close can we get to Earth without their spotting us?” I asked.

“They're already on alert,” Cutter said, a crooked smile forming across his lips. In the time that we had been standing by the tactical display, the multicolored threads representing the various ships had knitted themselves into a fabric. “We'd be taking a risk.”

“How big a risk?” I asked.

“Those ships are traveling at thousands of miles per hour,” he said, pressing a button to expand the ledger. Now it showed single-line readouts on every ship. The battleships and destroyers traveled at a uniform fifty thousand miles per hour.

“The fighter carriers aren't moving,” I said.

“They're preparing to launch attack wings,” Cutter said.

“But they don't know where we are.”

“That's the standard procedure when you're dealing with an invisible threat. In another minute, they will start firing particle charges.”

I stared down at the display. With their fighters launched, the Unifieds expanded their net. They had started out between the Earth and its moon; now they had spread their search beyond it.

“Particle charges?” I repeated. I thought about the rickety hull of the ship, with its many patches. “Could we withstand a direct hit?”

“Easily. They don't use particle charges to destroy enemies; they use the charges to locate them.”

Though I did not keep current with Navy weaponry, I knew what he meant. The charges exploded in bursts of energy-seeking ionized particles that attached themselves to energy fields like the electricity in our shields. In the vacuum of space, those particles would travel thousands of miles, while techs aboard the U.A. ships traced their movements.

“What if we lowered our shields?” I asked.

“How do you feel about radiation poisoning?”

I smiled, and said, “I'm not committing suicide until I can take the Unified Authority down with me.”

Who do you trust in a time of war?

I once had a lieutenant named Thomer with a debilitating drug addiction. He used to sit through staff meetings in a near-catatonic state staring at walls, never speaking unless he was spoken to. Against my better judgment, I kept him in place during a big showdown with the Unified Authority Marines. He fought brilliantly and saved lives.

The first time I had met Ray Freeman, I wrote him off as a thug. Now I considered him my closest friend. I needed more friends.

Freeman and I sat in an empty transport. On a ship as small as the cruiser, the transports were the only place you could go to be alone. Freeman sat in the pilot's chair. “Have you reached Sweetwater and Breeze?” I asked as I sat down in the copilot's chair.

“I'm here,” said Breeze. Freeman must have routed the signal to the transport's communications system. We had an audio signal, but the video was off.

“Is Dr. Sweetwater there as well?” I asked, as we only had an audio connection. I heard him through the communications console.

“It's just me this time. William is checking the results from the survivability survey,” he said.

Freeman sat silent, staring straight ahead through the windshield. He looked big and strong and vanquished, like an evil giant in a fairy tale who has been tricked but not yet killed.

“General, do you remember William's mentioning the auditors that the Linear Committee has sent to oversee our work? He is leading them on quite a wild-goose chase. I think he has them counting the number of stars in the Galactic Eye.”

I thought he was joking; there were billions of stars in the Eye. When I laughed, he asked, “Why are you laughing?”

“He's really making them count stars?” I asked. “Aren't there billions of stars in the Galactic Eye?”

“Seventy-eight billion in the section he has given them,” Breeze said.

“They can't count seventy-eight billion stars. It would take a lifetime.”

Freeman sat beside me, either not listening to us or not caring what we said. He stared out the window, his face impassive.

“No one is going to count that many stars,” I said.

“He told them it was an accounting irregularity,” Breeze said.

“An accounting error in the stars?” It didn't make sense.

“He found a glitch in their programming,” Breeze said.

That caught Freeman's attention. He stared at the communications console, and I saw the old intensity in his eyes.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“How long have we been dead?” Breeze asked.

I did not answer.

“Am I a brain scan? Is this a simulation of the Arthur Clarke Wheel?”

“What are you talking about?” I asked, desperate, scrambling to take control of the conversation.

“Sweetwater loaded a list of stars and locations into an accounting ledger and gave it to those men. They didn't even bother looking at the number of entries. They didn't care that there were billions of entries. Men get overwhelmed when you hand them a ledger with seventy-eight billion entries. Computer programs begin counting without checking the volume of the work.”

“They're government number crunchers,” I said. “They probably get paid by the line.”

“Seventy-eight billion lines?” Breeze asked. “William built a randomizing engine into the database. Every time they complete one billion lines, the engine shuffles the data and reinserts it back into the file.”

“They probably think they hit the jackpot.”

Beside me, Freeman looked up from the console and shook his head in warning. Real or not, we needed the scientists' help. Their work could determine the future of mankind; and if Breeze shut down, Sweetwater would follow.

“Whoever programmed this simulation didn't understand the physics of the Arthur Clarke Wheel,” Breeze said. “It uses centripetal force to create gravity instead of a generator.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“I visited the control room last night. It has a gravity generator.”

“Maybe it's there for backup,” I said. “Maybe it's there in case something goes wrong with the rotation.”

“It's cosmetic,” said Breeze. “I turned it off, and nothing happened.” I heard an odd tone in his voice that might have been irritation or anger.

Freeman remained mute. He ran the show during assassinations and invasions, but this was a delicate matter. He left it up to me.

“Maybe the people who built the Wheel built the switch in as a joke,” I said. “You said it yourself, the Wheel generates its own gravity.”

“When did I die?” asked Breeze. “When,” not “if.”

I did not answer.

“How did I die?” he asked. He sounded so reasonable. I heard no panic in his voice. No hysteria.

“You died on New Copenhagen,” I said.

Still absolutely silent, Freeman gave me the slightest nod. He approved. I had risked everything. Hearing that he was dead, the ghost of Arthur Breeze could shut down, and he could very well take Sweetwater with him; but Freeman wanted him to know the truth.

“I died in the mines, didn't I?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And William? He died, too?”

“He died taking the bomb into the mines.”

Breeze sighed. I imagined him taking off his glasses and smearing the dandruff and grease on the lenses as he tried to wipe them away. Maybe the Unifieds did too good a job programming his emotions. He must have felt hollow at that moment, the moment in which he learned that he was not human. I'd been through that.

“I remember the day I learned that I was synthetic,” I said.

“I never liked that term, ‘synthetic,'” Breeze said. “General, you have a heart beating in your chest. It's not made out of plastic. You have a brain and hands and lungs that hold air. None of those organs are synthetic. You're not
like
a human, you
are
a human.

“I suppose I am, too,” Breeze said. He sounded dazed. He sounded like a young soldier coming off the battlefield for the first time, alive and questioning his own existence.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

He grunted as if he had just hurt himself.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I just pricked my finger,” he said.

“What?”

“I pricked my finger with a dissection pin,” he said. “The pain was exactly as I always remembered it.” This was a tall, dried-up old man. He had spent his life in science labs. He did not handle pain well. His real, violent death must have been excruciating while it lasted.

“Why did you do that?” I asked.

“I wanted to see my blood. I bleed like a living creature.

“You've seen me, General. Do I look like a real man through human eyes?”

Homely as ever,
I thought as I said, “Exactly like you looked the day you went into those caves.”

“They did a better job simulating my blood than they did simulating the space station,” Breeze said. “It's perfect.”

I answered, “You are a perfect virtual model of the man I knew on New Copenhagen.”

The heads of every major religion could only find one topic on which they all agreed—cloning. They said clones did not have souls and, therefore, were less than humans. They might have been right, too; but as I spoke to the ghost of Arthur Breeze, I realized the computer program that brought him back to life had perfectly captured his soul.

“But I am stuck in this machine,” he said.

“Your universe is as vast as mine,” I said. “You can visit simulations of every known world.”

“How about a world in which I would really exist?” he asked.

I did not answer.

“When Andropov figures out we're helping you, he'll unplug us. I suppose that wouldn't be as bad as dying.”

The real Arthur Breeze had been ripped apart by giant spiders.

I did not say anything.

“Thank you for being honest,” he said. “You and Raymond, you were always truthful with us. You always were.” His voice seemed to shrink as he spoke. “What did you do when you found out you were a clone?”

“I went to a bar with my sergeant. We drank three glasses of Sagittarian Crash and got so drunk we nearly died.”