The Clone Redemption (8 page)

Seeing himself as the only blond-haired, blue-eyed natural-born in the entire Enlisted Man's Navy, Cutter would naturally become suspicious if I did not recognize him. So would every other clone on the ship.

The door to the conference room opened, and in walked Captain Don Cutter. I pretended to recognize him when in fact the only thing that stood out was the eagle on his collar.

I was not the same make of clone as Cutter, by the way, though I was no less synthetic. I was a Liberator, a discontinued model with a penchant for violence. Instead of a gland with a deadly toxin, Liberators had a gland that released a mixture of testosterone and adrenaline into our blood during battle. They called that the “combat reflex,” and it worked too well. My forerunners became addicted to violence, which was why my kind were discontinued and replaced by a class of clones with a fail-safe mechanism.

Cutter and I traded salutes and formalities, then I asked, “What is the status of your ship?”

“We wouldn't do well in a fight, but she'll get us where we want to go,” he said.

“Can she broadcast?” I asked. Even as I asked it, I realized it was a dumb question.

“She broadcasted here,” Cutter said without a hint of sarcasm. One thing I noticed about Cutter, he always gave me the benefit of the doubt. I had just asked an obvious question, and he did not call me on it.

“What happens if we find ourselves in a fight?” I asked.

“It depends who we're fighting, sir,” Cutter said. “As things stand now, the
Churchill
should do right well against transports and civilian ships.”

“How about U.A. battleships and carriers?” I asked.

“Permission to speak frankly, sir?”

“I wish you would.”

“The attack at Olympus Kri specked us up good,” he said, his formal tone now gone. “Our forward shield is fine, but our ass is exposed. If the enemy comes up behind us, we'll go down fast.”

We had gone to Olympus Kri to help the Unified Authority evacuate the planet, then the bastards attacked us.

The Enlisted Man's Empire and the Unified Authority were entangled in an antagonistic triangle in which every side had two enemies. Our enemies were the Unified Authority, the Earth-bound empire that once ruled the Milky Way, and the Avatari, the alien race that was systematically destroying the galaxy for mining purposes. The Unifieds had to contend with us and the Avatari. The Enlisted Man's Empire and the Unified Authority would have loved to destroy the Avatari; but their world was in another galaxy. We were more concerned with survival than conquest.

So the Avatari came to Olympus Kri and incinerated the planet the same way they incinerated Terraneau. Working with the Unifieds, we managed to evacuate the population before the aliens arrived; then the Unifieds ambushed our ships. The
Churchill
was the only ship that escaped.

“They specked us up good,” I agreed, reflecting on the other ships that did not manage to broadcast out of the trap. We lost our entire command structure when the Unifieds ambushed us at Olympus Kri.

I thought about what he had said. The U.A. Navy had newer ships than ours. Their ships had shields that wrapped around their hulls like constantly renewing second skins. Our ships had six independent shields that formed a box around the hull. If a shield gave out, parts of the ship were left unprotected.

“Can you repair the rear shields?” I asked.

“They got the antenna, sir. We're going to need to build a new rear array.”

“I see,” I said. “Has Lieutenant Mars had a look at it?”

“He says he can fix her if we take her into the dry docks.”

I sighed, thanked Cutter for his report, and dismissed him. All in all, the news could have been worse. We had a working ship and a way to communicate with Sweetwater and Breeze. Given a little time, Mars and his engineers might even get the spy ship operational. All just a matter of time, but we did not have time.

Glad to have a moment to myself, I reviewed the situation in my head.

The good news was that we had liberated the Golan Dry Docks from the Unified Authority, so we had facilities for repairing the
Churchill
. Fixing the spy ship was another story. Mars might be able to make her broadcast-worthy if he got her to the dry docks, but the dry docks were thousands of light-years away. We couldn't get her to the dry docks without broadcasting.

And then there were the Avatari. Over the last two weeks, the bastards had attacked New Copenhagen, Olympus Kri, and Terraneau. They were destroying planets every three or four days. Unless we stopped them, we'd be galactic nomads in another few months.

The room was oblong, brightly lit, its nearly soundproofed walls devoid of art and windows. Sitting in the well-lit silence, I stared straight ahead, taking in the sterile emptiness around me.

I could not win this war, yet I felt compelled to fight. We could attack and defeat the Unifieds, but they were more of a distraction than a problem. They had massacred our leadership while holding up a flag of truce, but we wouldn't make the mistake of trusting them again.

If it came to a fight with the aliens, on the other hand, we didn't stand a chance. We couldn't even strike back at them if we wanted.

How the speck do you defend planets from spontaneous combustion? If anyone could figure out a solution, it was Sweetwater and Breeze. Freeman was right, we needed them. Finding that communications computer was worth the risk ... assuming they would be willing to help us. The last time I had spoken with them, they had not known that the Unified Authority and the Enlisted Man's Empire had gone to war. Hell, they didn't even know that the enlisted men had an empire; they thought we were loyal to the Unified Authority.

I sat lost in my thoughts, for maybe fifteen minutes.

The Avatari did not attack arbitrary targets. They went after the planets we had reclaimed after their first sweep through the galaxy. Once they finished attacking our planets, they would turn their sights on Earth. Sooner or later, we might need to evacuate the Unifieds from Earth along with the people living on our planets.

Thinking about the situation made my head hurt, the kind of low, thudding ache you get with a hangover. I sat and I stared and I rubbed my temples, and finally I got up, still staring blankly ahead, and left the conference room. I went to the temporary quarters that Cutter had assigned me in officer country—a comfortable suite generally reserved for visiting politicians, with its own office and a spacious shower in the head.

When I opened the door to my billet, I found Ava waiting for me. Ava Gardner, the cloned incarnation of a twentiethcentury movie star, was my ex. When the Unifieds decided to jettison all clones from their republic, they didn't just aim that animosity at military clones; they extended it to the only known cloned goddess in the galaxy.

First, she was under my protection, and the next thing I knew, we were in love. Well, maybe I was in love. She moved on before I did. Thinking they were doing me a favor, my engineers rescued Ava and her natural-born lover when the Avatari incinerated Terraneau.

I'm not being fair. Ava left me because I talked nonstop about conquering Earth when I should have been saying sweet nothings in her ear. She thought I was married to the Corps. She was right.

“How did you get in here?” I asked as I entered the room. Officers' quarters were supposedly as secure as prison cells.

She stood about ten feet away from me, swaying slightly and looking nervous. She wore a wrinkled yellow dress, and her hair and makeup needed tidying, but that couldn't be helped; her clothes, makeup, and brushes would have gone up in smoke when the Avatari fried Terraneau.

“A sailor let me in,” Ava said.

“They're not supposed to let passengers into officers' quarters,” I said.

“He thought you'd be glad to see me,” she said.

I'll bet he did,
I thought, and his respect for me had probably doubled. “He was wrong,” I said. I was lying.

I wouldn't have described Ava as top-heavy, but she had a notable figure. Fire smoldered in her wide-set olivine-colored eyes. She knew how to smile at a man and dismiss him at the very same moment. I did not know if she could read every man, but she always seemed to know what I was thinking.

“Wayson, I need to be with you,” she said, sounding so damned sincere. She pressed herself against me, trusting that I would wrap my arms around her. When I did not respond, she took a step away from me.

She usually referred to me as “Harris,” but she did it in a way that was informal and endearing. When she became brassy, I was “Honey” and when she was angry, I was “Dear.” And now, having seen the destruction of Terraneau, she added “Wayson” to her vocabulary.

“You need to be with me?” I asked. “You moved on, remember?”

“Everything changed yesterday. I don't think I ever understood your world,” she said. “Yesterday it became real.” Here came the tears. Right on time. God, I hated dealing with women.

It wasn't the crying that bothered me. I'd seen grown men cry. Hell, I'd seen Marines get weepy. Who would not cry after seeing an entire population cremated. What bothered me was the way women cried, like they weren't embarrassed about it ... like they expected you to do something about it.

“I don't see how that changes anything,” I said.

“Wayson, they killed my girls.”

“Go tell it to . . .”

“I don't love Kyle. I never did,” Ava said as she stepped back in my orbit. She reached out and placed her hand against my chest.

She might have been acting or sincere or possibly she was acting but thought she was sincere. I believed her.

I did not know if she was my roommate or my girlfriend, but we spent the next few hours together.

Only the captains of the four ships saw the video feed; Admiral Yamashiro would not risk showing it to anyone else.

They met in a conference room on the command deck of the
Sakura
, Yamashiro's flagship. First they watched the mission through Illych's eyes—video feed recorded by the camera in his visor. The master chief petty officer had not known it, but the commandLink broadcasted his entire mission to the transport. Communications transponders on the transport relayed the signal back to the fleet.

The captains saw the bleak landscape and the giant silos. They watched in silence as Illych scraped ice and analyzed it. A timer in the corner of the screen showed that the SEALs had been on the planet for ten minutes and seventeen seconds when the light appeared in the sky.

Yamashiro stood at the front of the room. He said, “Matsuda thinks the aliens detected the infiltration pods the moment they entered the atmosphere.” Matsuda Takashi ran Fleet Intelligence.

“How could they have done that?” asked Captain Yokoi Shigeru. “We cannot track those pods. How would the aliens track them?”

Yamashiro ignored the question, and the video feed resumed with Illych telling his men to take positions. When Humble spun around to fire rounds at the silo, a small window appeared in a corner of the screen. The window showed the scene through the late Chief Petty Officer Humble's eyes as his bullets exploded against the silo's icy surface.

“I wish he had tried a laser and a particle beam as well,” said Takeda Gunpei, the only captain with an engineering background.

Captain Miyamoto said, “Good point. You should tell him if you see him.” They all knew that the SEALs did not return; but Miyamoto Genyo was a hard-ass, an old-style Japanese military man who never smiled and had no sympathy for weakness. “You may soon get your chance.”

The feed showed the globe of light with creatures forming inside it and the ion curtain forming across the sky. The transmission ended, but the video feed continued. The screen showed the planet as seen from the stealth transport that launched the pods.

The image on the screen looked like a barren planet partially dipped in white gold.

“The ‘sleeving' process went quickly,” said Takeda as he watched the shiny skin move across the atmosphere.

A jolt ran across the planet, and the ion curtain dissolved, revealing a partially imploded planet. A flat and fiery dent showed on the otherwise-iron-colored globe. With the planet's symmetry broken, it looked as though the stress of its own rotation might cause it to come apart. “The
kage no yasha
detonated their ejector pods,” said Miyamoto, a smile of admiration on his face. “I am glad we gave them a traditional farewell.”

Miyamoto was the captain of the
Onoda
, a battleship named after a Japanese soldier who fought in the Second World War. At the end of the war, Onoda hid in the jungles of the Philippines for twenty-nine years rather than surrender. Like the man for whom his ship was named, Miyamoto held those who died in battle in high regard.

“So we have destroyed an alien way station on an obscure planet. What have we learned?” asked Yamashiro.

“We know they can detect the pods,” said Takahashi Hironobu, captain of the
Sakura
. Takahashi was Yamashiro's son-in-law.

Yamashiro grunted, a sound that might have signaled agreement or disgust. “We have been searching their galaxy for nearly three years. Why has it taken the aliens so long to detect us?”

“They don't have a navy,” said Captain Yokoi. As the youngest of the ships' captains, he generally remained quiet during staff meetings, but this time he spoke up. “Maybe they did not view us as a threat because we were in open space.”