The Clone Redemption (32 page)

Looking sorry for his outburst, Harmer lowered his eyes, and said, “No, Master Chief.” Judging by his posture, he might even have called the master chief, “sir,” but that would not have been appropriate. The SEALs were enlisted men, they did not refer to each other as, “sir.”

“It's just, Master Chief ... Why are you assigning me this duty?” asked Harmer.

Oliver smiled, but he did not respond in a soft voice. “What is your MOS, Senior Chief?” he asked.

“Special Reconnaissance,” Harmer said, sounding like a child caught in a lie.

“And your training included?” asked Oliver.

“Survival tactics.”

“And?”

“Geographical assessment.”

“And?”

“And assault planning and damage assessment.”

“You have an appropriate skill set, so you go,” Oliver said. “You and a company of SEALs will work as survival specialists, policemen, and drill sergeants. Once a sustainable living situation is achieved, you will train the colonists in defensive tactics.”

“Nursemaids,” said Harmer.

“Protectors,” said Oliver, his voice every bit as grim as the words he said. “You will report to your transport in thirty minutes, Harmer. Go prep your men.”

Harmer nodded. He did not salute. Enlisted men did not salute each other. He rose to his feet and walked out of the room without saying a word.

“I'll tell you what,” said Oliver, “if any of you are having second thoughts about returning to A-361-B, Harmer will switch places with you. Any takers?” Oliver looked over the nine remaining senior chiefs. “No one?”

No one raised a hand. No one spoke. They sat in their chairs, staring up at Oliver, the ugliest men the master chief had ever seen.

Do you want to die?
Oliver silently asked his men in his head.
Do I?
He could not answer for his men; but for himself, the answer was, “No.” He had no desire to die, nor did life as a colonist appeal to him. If everything went right, if the crops grew, and they found enough oxygen and water, Harmer and his men would serve as policemen and soldiers until they were too old to matter; then they would go on for years, eating food meant for reproducing humans, outcasts, weak and alone among a tribe of people who cared for them only because they felt indebted. The thought made Oliver cringe.

He could not imagine a worse fate. In truth, Corey Oliver, a man with no ambitions, hated command. For some reason the fates had not only condemned him to replace Illych but to order men to their deaths.

“Captain Takahashi tells me he can fly this ship with 120 men,” said Oliver. Warren started to ask a question, and Oliver put up a hand to stop him. He added, “That's just what it takes to keep this ship flying. It takes an additional two hundred men to keep things running in a battle situation. That's 320 trained sailors.

“For this mission, he's got a thousand sailors and us. Admiral Yamashiro is taking most of the bridge crew with him to New Copenhagen. We're taking the old and the sick sailors with us.”

“Are any women coming with us?” asked Senior Chief Billings.

Oliver stopped speaking, glared at the man, and asked, “What's the matter, Billings? You hoping for a first fling before you die?”

The other clones laughed.

“No. No women. No young men, either. The average age on this boat just jumped from twenty-nine to thirty-six,” said Oliver.

“Are you factoring us in those statistics?” asked Senior Chief Warren.

Was this part of their programming?
Oliver wondered. Some of Illych's Kamikaze team had acted the same way before they left on their mission. They made jokes as they boarded the transport. Even normally somber SEALs kidded each other before their final missions.

Not all of them, though. Oliver remembered that Illych did not join in the banter. Just as Oliver now felt the weight of command, Illych must have felt it at the end. His men were going to die, and Illych would have felt the weight of their lives on his shoulders, just as it was Oliver's turn to feel that weight.

Oliver smiled, looked at his notepad, and said, “I factored you animals in as twenty-six-year-olds. Factoring you in as five-year-olds, the average age drops to twenty-five.”

He looked around the room, meeting his men's eyes and searching their faces for fear, and Oliver realized they could relax only if he relaxed with them. They would go. They would fight, and they would die, and they would never complain; but he saw that he could give them strength if he would just relax and joke with them. He said, “You should have seen what happened to the average IQ on the ship when I factored you animals in. We cut it in half.”

The senior chiefs laughed, their morale restored.

Transferring twenty-two hundred colonists—one thousand women, eleven hundred men, and one hundred SEAL clones—to New Copenhagen took an hour. Stripping the
Sakura
and shipping supplies down to the planet took two days.

Every morsel of food, be it frozen, dehydrated, powdered, extruded, or fresh, was sent to the planet. Power generators were removed from the ship and sent down to the planet, leaving entire decks without electricity. Weapons, everything that wasn't built into the
Sakura
's hull, were sent down, including fifteen low-gravity tanks that consumed such massive amounts of fuel that the colonists would never operate them—they would be torn apart and used for scrap metal; their engines were too inefficient for anything else. Beds, portable storage facilities, and furniture were sent down. So were cooking and eating utensils. Engineers even scavenged metal and wiring from the wall panels and floors.

Yamashiro stayed aboard the
Sakura
, overseeing the operation as men stripped the ship of nonessential items to send down with nonessential personnel. By the time they finished, the medical bay was empty, the team having pillaged light fixtures, wiring, and electrical panels as well as medicines, furniture, equipment, and flooring.

The entire third deck had been stripped down to its iron girders. Once the location of living quarters, rec rooms, Pachinko parlors, bars, and galleys, it now sat dark and empty. Eviscerated. Yamashiro and Takahashi quietly observed the carnage as the admiral made his final inspection of the ship.

“Admiral on deck!”

The crew, about eighty men and fifty SEALs, stood to salute Yamashiro. He returned their salute.

As they entered, Takahashi said something about his new bridge crew being ready. Yamashiro scanned the area, taking in the desks, the booths, the computers, the table at which he had spent the last three years looking at tactical displays and reading three-dimensional maps. He would not miss the bridge of the
Sakura
, not in the least.

Yamashiro nodded to sailors and returned their salutes. He shook a few men's hands even though he wanted to leave. He felt old, even ancient. His head hurt, and he needed a nap.
All these men will die saving me and the colony,
he thought, and the weight of the thought pushed down on him.

Yamashiro no longer saw himself as an admiral. The bridge had become a foreign land to him, one that he needed to escape. He thanked the men nearest the hatch and left, a silent Takahashi at his side. As they stepped through the door, Yamashiro whispered, “How much do they know?”

“The SEALs know everything,” said Takahashi.

“And the sailors?”

“They know we are going to broadcast into the atmosphere and that it will be dangerous,” Takahashi said.

The hall was empty.

When it sailed into the Orion Arm, the
Sakura
had carried six thousand hands. Now it had thirty-eight hundred, most of them SEALs, who seldom ventured onto the upper decks.

“Are you going to tell them?”

Takahashi looked back to make sure no one had left the bridge behind them, then asked, “What should I tell them? It's not a mission, it's a death sentence. If I tell them what we're really going to do . . .”

“Would you blame them?” asked Yamashiro.

“I can't fight my crew and the aliens at the same time,” said Takahashi.

The hall was long and dim and silent. Half of the light fixtures had been stripped from the ceiling. They passed a row of dormant elevators, their bulky metal doors removed. The doors and the cables would not be used for their intended purposes by the colony. They would be melted down.

You will go down to your grave with a heavy conscience,
thought Yamashiro, but he did not say it. Instead, he simply said, “I do not envy you, Hironobu, you carry too much weight on your shoulders.”

They continued down the hall until they reached the stairs.

“I won't carry that weight for long,” said Takahashi. “No more than three minutes once we are under way.”

They reached the crowded corridors of the bottom deck. With their compound stripped empty and most of the crew off the ship, the SEALs milled about in the halls.

Yamashiro looked up and down the hall. In the muted light, the SEALs looked more like shadows than people. Groups of SEALs stood in dark corners speaking quietly among themselves. When they recognized the admiral, they snapped to attention.

Seeing them in their lines, as unmoving as statues, Yamashiro remembered the words
kage no yasha
and dismissed them quickly.

“Admiral, sir, Master Chief Oliver was looking for you,” said one of the SEALs.

“I would like to speak with him,” said Yamashiro.

The SEAL, a lowly petty officer third class, saluted and walked off in search of the master chief. In his dark suit, with his dark skin, the clone disappeared into his surroundings as he hurried down the hall. A moment later, two shadows appeared in the distance.

Both men stopped and saluted.

Takahashi and Yamashiro returned the salute, then Yamashiro said, “Master Chief, I wish you . . . success.”

“It's been an honor, sir,” said Oliver.

Yamashiro took a deep breath, held it in his lungs for seconds, then slowly released the air. He searched the hallway, taking in every detail. This was the last time any of these sights would be seen by surviving eyes.
From this moment on, everything that happens on this ship will be a secret that the dead will take with them.

Yamashiro wanted to say something. He wanted to tell the SEAL how much he admired his courage. He wanted to thank all of these men; but his throat and tongue felt swollen, and he found himself struggling to breathe.

“Admiral, may I make one last request on behalf of my men?” asked Oliver.

“Anything,” said Yamashiro.

“Sir, the men and I were wondering . . .”

As Oliver spoke, the hatch behind him opened and light spilled out. Looking over the SEAL's shoulder, Yamashiro saw thousands of men standing at attention in rows. The master chief stopped speaking, and Yamashiro stepped around him to look in the doorway.

Wearing dress uniforms, the SEALs all faced a dais upon which ten men waited at attention. On that dais stood a barrel, and on that barrel sat a ceramic bottle of sake and a line of thimble-sized cups.

“Sir, if you would give us a proper send-off,” said Master Chief Oliver.

Yamashiro Yoshi bowed to the SEAL clone and marched into the room without saying a word. He had already transmogrified from an officer into a politician; but now he struggled against the tide of his instincts and forced himself to behave like an admiral. He scowled at the men as he stalked past them, neither smiling nor showing his pain.

And so the retired admiral climbed the steps of the dais, took his place behind the barrel, and, barking out orders in Japanese, told the ten senior chiefs and the master chief to step forward. He poured sake into the twelve
ochoko
and stood at attention as the men met his gaze. At his order, the men took their cups, and he took his. He toasted them; and then, at his order, they drank their wine, and replaced the cups on the barrel. The SEALs saluted him.

Yamashiro, standing at attention, extended his return salute as he looked up and down the rows of men. Struggling to hide his emotions, he dismissed the senior chiefs. Then he turned to the master chief, and said, “I must return to the colony.”

Oliver saluted one last time, and Yamashiro left the
Sakura
.

 

Yamashiro Yoshi felt overwhelmed by emotion. He walked quickly to the landing bay and wasted no time entering the transport that would take him to New Copenhagen. At the base of the ramp, he turned to his son-in-law.

Takahashi stood erect and saluted. His shoulders trembled, and Yamashiro knew the younger man was scared. He did not return the salute; instead, he embraced Takahashi Hironobu, the husband of his daughter, Yoko. “You're a fine officer, Hiro,” he said. “I wish my daughter could see the man she has married.”