The Clone Redemption (27 page)

According to every major religion, clones did not have souls and therefore had no place in Heaven.

We were on a spaceship manned by clones, flying through enemy territory on a mission to save natural-borns. According to religious authority, the people who wanted to sink us had souls, and so did the people we wanted to save; but we were the saviors here, and, according to every major religion, we were soulless.

“I don't believe in souls,” said Freeman.

“You don't believe in souls?” I asked.

“I don't know if there is a life after this one; but if there is, I think that everyone gets a part of it. You're a walking, breathing man, Harris. That makes you just like everybody else.”

But Freeman was wrong, I wasn't like everybody else. I was sterile. All clones were sterile. I might walk and breathe, but much of my thinking was the direct result of neural programming that my designers had hardwired into my brain.

“So is God the reason you're here?” I asked. “Is God the reason you're risking your life?”

Freeman shook his head but said nothing. The man was a sphinx.

The wreckage of the E.M.N. ships floated still and silent above Solomon's radiant atmosphere. Seeing the dark outlines of our ruined ships, I wondered how much the people on the planet understood. So close to the atmosphere, the space battle would have been visible through civilian telescopes and traffic radars. Some of the explosions might have been visible to the naked eye.

Could the people have known that the battle signaled their planet's demise? Did they know that the bad guys had won and that the darkened carcasses above their planet were ships that had come to protect them?

“Ah, damn, they got our ships,” Holman said, as we approached the wreckage.

“Mystery solved,” I said.

I sat on the bridge, an invited guest of Captain Holman. Freeman waited for me on the transport, two decks below. Once we knew the coast was clear, I would join Freeman, and we'd fly down to the planet.

Holman had his crew on full alert. Our shields were up, our stealth generator was on, and the first round of torpedoes was loaded into the tubes.

We slowed to a near crawl as we circled the remains of the ships. I had grown numb to this morbid form of sightseeing. I no longer thought about the people who had died on the ships or the terror of their last moments. We cruised by slowly like mourners passing an open casket, and we stared in silence.

The first wreck we passed was a frigate, a small ship designed to block fighter attacks. I identified the frigate by her size. The Unified Authority's killer torpedoes had smashed every other recognizable feature from the hull. The mothshaped frame had exploded into three separate sections still connected by a few shreds of metal. The nose of the ship was a jagged twist. No light shone from its remains, not even the flicker of electricity.

“These ships came from the Perseus Outer Fleet,” Holman said. He stood trancelike, staring at the scene. “I served in that fleet.”

Behind the frigate, the other ships assigned to the patrol looked equally demolished. They showed in silhouette only, dark and dead, silent forms floating over the sunlit sphere of Solomon.

“Captain Holman, I've located two U.A. battleships,” called one of the bridge officers.

“We should introduce ourselves,” said Holman.

Naval battles. As the ship goes, so does every man aboard her. During ground battles, Marines can conceal themselves or fight their way out of danger. One Marine can turn the course of an entire battle. It doesn't work that way on a ship. I had my share of phobias—nukes and naval battles were at the top of my list.

“You okay, General Harris? You look a little pale,” said Holman.

I didn't answer. Better to let him wonder if I was nervous than to let him hear it in my voice.

Moving slowly, we came around, circling the wreckage so that we were between the dead ships and the planet. We were so small. As we passed the ruins of a battleship, I realized that there was more than enough room for us to park on one of her busted wings.

A few moments passed, then I spotted them, two small shapes glowing like phosphorescent sea creatures as they came around the planet. It was always possible that they had spotted us. Our ship was a spy ship and had the finest stealth technology that the Unifieds had developed, but it used Unified Authority technology. Could they really have been so stupid as to create stealth generators without also developing a technology for seeing through the cloak?

The U.A. ships showed no signs of detecting us. They held their ground as we approached them.

“Captain, there's a third ship about eighty thousand miles away, halfway around the planet.”

“Good to know,” said Holman.

Holman turned to me, his face beaming as he asked, “General, do you care which ship we sink first?”

“It's your show,” I said.
Like shooting fish in a barrel,
I thought. With the stealth generator hiding us from detection, they would not be able to find us or protect themselves. Perhaps they would even think the first ship had suffered a malfunction. It would never occur to the arrogant bastards that a crew of lowly clones would use their ship and their torpedoes against them.

If we hit the second ship before they realized that an enemy had attacked, the third ship would try to flee the scene. Our spy ship was small, invisible, and fast, a predatory bird with a deadly strike. If we moved quickly, we might even hit the third ship before she engaged her broadcast engine.

“Fire blue
pill
,” Holman said.

“Blue torpedo away.”

“Fire red
pill
,” said Holman, spacing the torpedoes no more than three seconds apart.

“Red torpedo away, sir.”

“Now bring us around.”

Holman was a good officer, a careful officer. Firing the torpedoes would give away our position. By giving the order to “bring us around,” he was telling his helmsman to find a new place for us to hide.

We attacked that first ship from a few hundred miles out. It took the torpedoes a couple of seconds to cover the distance.

The moments passed slowly. Every man on the bridge stared at the viewport. My breath had caught in my throat.

The first torpedo struck, splashing a wave of electricity that arced along the shields—a gush of blue-white light flashed and vanished along the glowing golden sheen of the enemy ship's shields. But the shields remained along the U.A. ship like a translucent skin.

Three seconds later, the red torpedo struck—a brilliant light that popped and vanished leaving the ship untouched.

“Fire another blue,” Holman barked.

“Aye, aye. Torpedo away.”

“Fire another after that. Helm, steer us below the target.”

The silence. The tension. The moment. I had no idea what was happening in the cargo hold/torpedo room; but on the bridge, the only people not sitting in stone silence were the officer steering the ship and Holman, who was telling him where to go.

I traced the small blue dots on the tactical display, then turned to the viewport in time to see the torpedoes hit their mark one right after another. The first pill struck, creating a flash that splashed across the shield. Before the first flash disappeared, the second torpedo renewed it. This time the blinding bright light engulfed the entire ship. Then the third torpedo struck. The torpedoes were powerful, no doubt; but so were the new shields on those ships. The torpedoes did damage, but they weren't battering their shields as thoroughly as they had battered ours.

The tint shields spread, leaving the viewport as dark as a mirror in a room with no light, its shiny surface reflecting light from the bridge, but the viewport itself was opaque.

Holman shouted to his helmsman, “Hard about. Put us on top of them.”

Our torpedoes might or might not have destroyed the U.A. ship; either way she wasn't moving. We could no longer see the scene on the viewport, the tint shields were too thick. The circle marking that ship on the tactical display remained as still as an island.

Our attack must have caught the other two ships unawares. All three ships remained perfectly still for half a minute then the navigator shouted, “Captain, two of the ships are approaching fast.”

While the ship we had hit remained listless, her mates circled the area, randomly firing lasers into pockets of space as they groped in the darkness to find us.

“What do you know; they can't see through their own stealth technology,” Holman said.

“Did you think they might be able to?” I asked.

“They still might. They might also have a code that shuts down our generator.”

“To prevent someone from turning their own technology against them,” I suggested.

“Exactly right,” Holman said. “Right now, they're looking for a needle in a haystack and hoping they'll get lucky.”

“But they won't?” I asked. Naval battles made me nervous. Sitting on a tiny ship hiding from two enormous ships had me on the verge of panic.

“They'd need to get very lucky. We're a moving target, and we're invisible. We'll be safe as long as we don't do anything that gives away our position.”

“What would give away our position?” I asked.

Holman met my gaze, paused, and said, “Launching a transport would give us away.” Then he turned from me, and said into his communications console, “Fire a red at the crippled ship.”

“Torpedo away, sir.”

“Fire another one.” Speaking in a cold calm voice, he said, “Fire another.”

“Aye, aye.”

“Helm, down and away.”

The tactical showed the U.A. battleships as shapes, not ships. The circles representing the live ships had been moving like the hands of a clock, circumscribing a circular pattern, firing lasers while sniffing for targets. Once we launched the torpedoes, both ships streaked in our direction.

The dot representing our ship scurried to safety as the first of our red torpedoes struck the target ship, then the second.

Moments passed, and the tint shields evaporated from the viewport. At first, I could not tell what I was looking at. The helmsman clapped his hands, and said, “Hell yeah!” Then everyone on the bridge cheered. The final torpedoes had penetrated the crippled ship's shields.

The Unified Authority battleship sat battered and lifeless but not destroyed. She would not fly anytime soon. We would need to fire another torpedo to deal the fatal blow, but her shields were down. She had twists and cracks along her dagger-shaped hull. Lights still blazed throughout the ship, but the new torpedoes had ruptured the hull, not broken it.

Holman looked at me, and said, “We could finish her.”

“She looks done,” I said, not sure if the instinct that led me to say this had more to do with mercy or self-preservation. “After this point, it's not combat, it's murder.”

“That's what they did to our ships,” Holman said.

“Yeah. They're murderers.”

He turned to his helmsman, and said, “Power up the broadcast engine. We're going home.”

“What about Solomon?” I asked.

“General, there are still two more battleships out there. They're on high alert. They will destroy us and the transport if we try to launch.”

He was right. So were Liotta and Wallace. They'd been right all along. Seven million people would die on Solomon. We could not evacuate the planet. If we tried to warn the people, there'd be riots and chaos. Warning the people to go underground might save lives but not many. Most of the lucky few who found shelter underground would be sealed in once the heat melted the ground above them.

“We need to send a warning,” I said, though in my heart I had already abandoned the mission.

“Those U.A. ships can trace our signals,” said Holman.

I tried to convince myself that it was for the best. We could never have saved more than a small fraction of the population. By leaving them in ignorance, we would allow the people of Solomon to live their last few hours in peace.

They would not know they'd been incinerated until God told them what had happened. It wasn't a bad way to go, I suppose; but I didn't feel good about letting it happen.

On the surface, Freeman appeared to take the news about leaving Solomon with cold indifference. I told him about the Unified Authority ships and the battle, and he listened in silence. His expression remained impassive, as slack as a death mask. His eyes, though. His eyes bored through me.

If you could see into a man's soul through his eyes, I thought I glimpsed the fires of Hell deep within Freeman. His skin was dark as wet stone. His head was bald and scarred. He'd abandoned a religious home for a life of battlefields and gunfights; now death followed him like a shadow as he returned to his roots.

“I asked Holman about warning them,” I said.

“The Unifieds would track the signal,” Freeman answered, speaking mechanically. “Even if they got the message, we wouldn't save many people,” he said, parroting Curtis Liotta's words. He paused, stared straight ahead the way blind men stare straight ahead, then he said, “Dust to dust.”

We stood together in the kettle of the transport, a large metal cavern with steel-girder ribs along its iron walls. Freeman wore his custom-made battle armor with his helmet off. I had come in my Charlie service uniform.

At six-foot-three, I was the tallest clone in the Enlisted Man's Empire. Freeman stood nine inches taller than I and might well have packed twice my weight. He was big and strong and deadly, a fierce man who'd spent most of his life caring about no one but himself. He'd become a murderous messiah, a man on a quest.