The Clone Redemption (4 page)

Unlike the tint shields in standard combat armor, the tinting in SEAL armor filtered light instead of simply darkening it. Illych saw everything clearly, but the glare was gone. He saw the crystal white sphere and the dirty brown gas that leaked from its base. Illych also saw the aliens inside the globe, ten-foot-tall translucent yellow shadows with arms and legs but no facial features except grapefruit-sized chromesilver eyes. The first humans who saw these creatures had labeled them “space angels.”

The apparitions stepped out of the sphere, and the SEALs opened fire. Their bullets passed through the aliens the same way they passed through light or air. They hit nothing and did not explode.

Above the fight, the ion curtain had spread across both horizons. Illych was too busy to notice, but if he'd tried to contact
Onoda
, his transmissions would have gone unanswered. Somewhere in the back of his mind, the master chief understood that he was cut off from the fleet. Communications could not penetrate the curtain. Ships could not pass through it. There would be no airlift. He and his men would fight until they died.

But Illych would still achieve one of his objectives. As mission leader, he had access to controls in his visor that the other men on his team did not have. He started the process.

Illych knew his SEALs could not win this firefight. They specialized in stealth combat. They infiltrated bases, sabotaged targets, and occasionally assassinated enemies. This was open combat, the specialty of soldiers and Marines.

When he saw Kapeliela die, Illych felt a stab of doubt and asked himself if the stealth infiltration pods would charge in time.

Kapeliela had run along the side of the building. He came within a few feet of the creatures and fired his weapon. His bullets passed through them as if they were ghosts. He threw a grenade. It exploded without harming them.

One of the creatures swung its chrome-barreled rifle at Kapeliela and fired a yard-long bolt of light that passed through the SEAL and into the ground behind him. The bolt passed so smoothly through the man and his armor that, seen from the side, it looked like the shot missed. Kapeliela's body did not explode. No blood splashed from the wound. He simply fell backward. Mercifully, he was dead before he hit the ground.

As Illych watched, the aliens' bodies slowly solidified. “Aim for their rifles,” Illych yelled to his men over the interLink.

A bullet glanced off one of the aliens' rifles even before Illych finished speaking. It had to have come from one of his snipers, a pinpoint shot that hit the barrel and exploded without leaving a mark.

Hiding behind a pipe, Illych leveled his M27, and fired a long burst. He expected the aliens to return fire, but they didn't. They stood outside the building, their glowing, translucent hides cooling to the color of honey, and they waited.

For just an instant, Illych considered stopping the countdown, but he decided against it. He read the timer in his visor. In three minutes and twenty-six seconds the field-resonance engines in the twelve stealth infiltration pods would overcharge and explode. Once overcharged, the field-resonance engines inside the pods would become unstable. They'd be like dams holding back an endless flow of energy. In three minutes and twenty seconds, the pods would use that energy to self-destruct, taking the entire planet with them.

One of Illych's snipers ran out into the open, looking for a shot. An alien fired first, its bolt hit the SEAL in the chest, and he collapsed in a violent spasm that lasted only a few seconds.

“It looks like they don't want to come in after us,” said Humble.

Illych checked the timer. He and his men needed to hold out for three minutes and twelve seconds. They had to defend the S.I.P.s. If the aliens found the pods and shot them first, the overcharging engines would not explode.

One of the aliens walked to the edge of the building and stopped. Dozens of bullets passed through its body and head without leaving a trace. Several shots hit its weapon.

“Transport, you there?” Illych asked, though he would not get through.

Three of the aliens walked toward the building. They moved slowly, taking shaky steps like drunks or maybe toddlers learning to walk. The SEALs hit the aliens with grenades and bullets and rockets, but their attacks meant nothing. One of the aliens came closer, raised its weapon, scanned back and forth for targets, but did not fire or step onto the foundation.

“You there?” Illych asked again. “I hope they're getting this.”

The alien either wouldn't or couldn't enter the building. It did not fire its weapon at the SEALs. Having read the reports and seen the video feeds, Illych knew the bolts these aliens fired bored through brick, metal, wood, and men alike. Humble's bullets had not hurt the silo, but this creature's bolts would probably pierce it.

Illych checked the time.
One minute forty-eight seconds.

“It's not coming after us,” said Humble.

All five of the aliens gathered at the edge of the building. They did not speak to each other. Their skins still glowed the color of honey, but dark scales had begun to form.

“Maybe it has orders not to hurt the building,” said Call.

“So we have a standoff,” said Humble.

“For another minute and a half,” said Illych.

“You're charging the caskets?” asked Humble.

“Eighty-seven seconds and counting.”

Humble laughed, and said, “I knew I should have read my death poem.”

They say God created the plants on the third day, the animals on the fifth, and man on the sixth. What God did in three days the aliens undid in less than a minute and a half. It took the bastards eighty-three seconds to kill everything that walked the surface of Terraneau, right down to the microbes.

I was one of the 1,037 people who survived the attack on the once-grand planet of Terraneau. We survived because we hid in a tunnel that ran under a lake.

By far, the vast majority of the survivors were clones, members of Scutum-Crux Fleet's Corps of Engineers. There was an even thousand of them.

I was one of two Marines who survived. The other survivors included Ava Gardner, the woman I had once loved, and the man who had replaced me as her lover. My pilot, Lieutenant Christian Nobles, was the other Marine. Ray Freeman, the mercenary/homicidal humanitarian who busted me out of jail in time to save me from getting cooked with everybody else, survived as well.

The thirty-two other lottery winners were members of the local militia. In the moments before the aliens attacked, the local militia raided the tunnel hoping to haul me back to prison. They entered with hundreds of men, but only thirty-two had traveled far enough into the tunnel to survive the heat. They attacked our sanctuary moments before the Avatari performed their pyrotechnic magic, raising the surface temperature of Terraneau to 9,000 degrees. The temperature outside the tunnel spiked 8,927 degrees and remained at 9,000 degrees for precisely eighty-three seconds, then dropped back to normal almost as quickly.

During those eighty-three seconds, the temperature created a convection, causing the atmosphere to rise off the surface of the planet. When the Avatari shut off the heat, the atmosphere dropped back into place, crushing buildings, kicking a thick layer of dust and ash into the air, and sending a shock wave across the planet.

Hiding behind a thick steel door in the depths of a tunnel, my engineers and I rode out the attack unharmed. When we opened the doors, just about everyone on the planet had been killed and cremated; and their dust was carried on the largely carbon-dioxide winds. Just behind the door, we found thirty-two militiamen cowering in the dark. They were good to go except for burst eardrums, a few broken bones, and the shock of knowing that everything and everyone they loved had been burned.

The rest of the tunnel was littered with the bodies of men who were cooked but not cremated. The first bodies we found were covered with blisters, their clothes singed and their hair burned brittle. Grease leaked from breaks in their scalded hides.

As I wandered toward the entrance of the tunnel, the corpses became more badly burned. One hundred feet from daylight, the bodies were papery ash that turned to dust at the slightest touch.

I walked to the mouth of the tunnel, taking in the lake, the sky, and the distant ruins of Norristown. From where I stood, Lake Norris looked as big as an ocean, so far across that I would not be able to see its farthest shores ... even on a clear day. On this day, the air around me was the color of tea, and clouds of smoke and ash filled the sky. Incinerating five million people and all their belongings puts a lot of dust in the wind.

The militiamen, the engineers, and Ava's lover remained in the tunnel, standing in the darkness, staring at nothing in particular. Their crying carried in the stillness like an echo.

Ava came to me as I stood in the entrance. Though I tried to stop her, she looked back toward the city and saw the ruins.

“What about my girls?” she asked. Before the cataclysm, she had taught drama at an orphanage for girls. She stared toward the ruins of the city, and tears rolled down her face. I did not blame her. I'd tried to warn her, but she couldn't envision destruction on this scale without having seen it. Once you see an attack of this sort, a part of your humanity closes forever.

This was the third time I'd seen an attack of this kind, and it still left me numb.

I had come to warn these people, and they threw me in jail. Freeman rescued me, and the people burned as if I'd never arrived.

“General Harris, are you there?” The call came from Captain Don Cutter, commander of the E.M.N.
Churchill
. E.M.N. stood for Enlisted Man's Navy, my Navy. I was a Marine, but I was the highest-ranking officer in the fleet.

Cutter contacted me over my commandLink, part of the communications network built into my combat armor. “General Harris, are you there?”

“Harris here,” I said. I hoped I sounded in control. This was the first outside communication I had received since entering the tunnel.

“What's the situation, sir?” asked Cutter.

“The worst,” I said.

“How many survivors?”

“A thousand and change,” I said. “How do things look up there?”

Cutter was calling from a badly damaged fighter carrier, supposedly the only operational ship in Terraneau space. He said, “The Unifieds sent a spy ship into the area.”

“How were you able to spot it?” I asked.

The Unified Authority, the Earth-based empire that created me and my fellow clones, used modified cruisers for surveillance and reconnaissance. The spy ships were fast, small, and equipped with cloaking technology that rendered them utterly invisible.

“We parked in the debris and turned off our lights,” said Cutter. “They didn't know we were here.”

By “debris,” he meant a graveyard of ships. More than a hundred dead ships floated in the space around Terraneau, remnants of a forgotten battle that had happened earlier this year.

“Didn't they cloak?”

“They cloaked all right; but they dropped their skirts when they launched their ‘eye.'”

I knew that “eye” was Navy-speak for a spy satellite. The part about the skirts made no sense to me. “Come again?” I asked.

“They had to lower their shields to deploy their satellite. Weapons picked up the energy fluctuation.”

“Nice work,” I said.

“Thank you, sir. Do you want us to destroy the eye?”

“Hell no,” I said. Then, realizing I might be coming off harsh, I said, “Leave it alone, Captain. Having an enemy satellite in place might come in handy.”

Terraneau was in the Scutum-Crux Arm, the outermost arm of the Milky Way. Earth was located in the Orion Arm, clear across the galaxy. The only way for the Unifieds to pull any data from that satellite would be by sending their spy ship back to retrieve it.

When their spy ship returned, we would give her a proper reception.

Earthdate: November 19, A.D. 2517

 

The spy ship sneaked out of the anomaly the way mice sneak out of their holes—quickly, carefully, silently. Anomalies are like electrical tears in the fabric of space. They occur when ships travel using broadcast technology. In this case, the Unified Authority spy ship had a built-in broadcast engine that enabled her to make the hundred-thousand-light-year jump from Earth to Terraneau instantaneously. She arrived in Scutum-Crux space approximately fourteen million miles from Terraneau, far enough out of casual surveillance range that we would not have noticed the disturbance had we not been looking for it. With her stealth generator, the spy ship was invisible to our equipment. Only the anomaly showed on the readouts.

The spy ship was small and unarmed, the naval equivalent of a hummingbird. She had the ability to slip in behind enemy lines and listen to our communications, track our movements, and watch our production without threat of detection.

But this ship had been detected. We saw where she broadcasted into our space, and we knew her final destination. It didn't matter that we lost track of the ship as she traveled the fourteen million miles from the anomaly to the satellite because we knew precisely where she would end her journey.

She was the mouse in the night, we were the cat. When she materialized beside the satellite, we would pounce. Even if we never saw the ship, our equipment would detect a momentary energy fluctuation when she lowered her shields to retrieve the satellite. She would be vulnerable when she lowered her shields.