The Clone Redemption (35 page)

Maybe the tachyon sleeve was distorting their readings. The sensors and computers inside the ship could only map the area around the ship. Suzuki and the weapons officer had located the threat using old-fashioned radar, but the data did not show on Takahashi's holographic display.

Takahashi chewed on the knuckle of his right thumb as he thought. He weighed his options. The broadcast engine needed another minute to charge. So much could happen in a minute. The aliens could fire weapons. The world could explode.

“Turn us around,” he said. “Take us back over the city. We don't want to fight.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” said Suzuki.

Takahashi looked around the bridge. It was the only choice he could make. Perhaps the aliens would think twice before engaging a battleship over their city.

“It's coming after us,” said the weapons officer.

Takahashi hit the communications panel. “Landing Bay Three,” he said. “Oliver, are you launching?”

“This is Senior Chief Warren. The transport is passing the second lock, Captain. The outer door is opening. It's out!”

“Shields up!” yelled Takahashi. With the transport safely away, he could raise his shields.
We need to engage them,
Takahashi thought.
We
need to
buy Oliver time.

When the threat appeared on his holographic map, he saw it was not a ship or a fleet, but a swarm. It looked like a cloud of fine lines. He tried to get a clearer picture, but his computer would not cooperate. All it showed him was a cloud of tiny lines. If the hologram was right, the alien defenders flew ships no bigger than a pencil.

“They're robotic,” shouted one of the sailors. “I'm detecting a signal.”

“Block it!” yelled Takahashi. “Disrupt the signal!”

He turned to his weapons officers, and shouted, “Lasers! Torpedoes, fire everything we've got!”

The enemy drones looked small and weak on the holographic display, but they moved quickly. Even before the lasers fired, the swarm scattered. “Clear a path. We need to break through!” shouted Takahashi.

The
Sakura
's lasers obliterated drones by the hundreds, but that barely thinned the swarm. Torpedoes cleared pockets, not paths; and the pockets filled with new drones almost immediately. The
Sakura
's weapons were designed for shipsized enemies, not swarms of tiny ones.

The drones did not return fire. They formed a cloud in which the individual units moved independently, like a swarm of mosquitoes. Seeing that his ship was now surrounded by short-range weapons, Takahashi realized that the end was near. He had come all this way only to find out he was unprepared.

One of the drones neared the ship. From a mile off the
Sakura
's bow, the drone fired a single bolt of light that seared through the shields and punctured the hull. There were no casualties and no explosions, but the wound was fatal. With a breach in the hull, the
Sakura
could not broadcast.

Takahashi heard the report and looked back at the map in time to see the swarm close around his ship.

 

Corey Oliver left his transport on autopilot. He stepped onto the ladder that led into the kettle, climbed down two rungs, then dropped the rest of the way. He would give the
Sakura
a minute to launch, then he would fire the five S.I.P.s he had loaded in the launch device. They were overcharged and ready.

The hatch stood open at the rear of the transport. Oliver went to the computer station and looked at the timer, then peered back at the sky through the open hatch. The
Sakura
should have broadcasted already, but he could see her hovering slowly over the city. Smoke rose from her bow, but the master chief decided to give her another moment. As he watched, the battleship fell from the sky. He sighed, inwardly apologized to the men he had hoped would escape, and fired the pods at the planet below.

Michael Khumalo, probably the greatest military philosopher of the modern era, said, “Give a fool a rope, and he will hang himself. Give that fool an Army, and he will hang his nation.”

Truer words were never spoken.

With its population of somewhere between three and four million people, Nebraska Kri should have been an easy evacuation. A farming planet with several centralized population centers but no large cities, the planet was a logistical dream. All Admiral Liotta needed to do was escort the barges to the planet, park them above the major townships, and arrange a semiefficient shuttle service.

Too timid to risk a confrontation with the Unified Authority, Liotta only flew three of the twenty-five barges to Nebraska Kri at a time. He kept the barges in a tight cluster near the broadcast station. Instead of a short trip in and out of the atmosphere, the transports were forced to travel halfway across the planet, turning a twenty-minute hop into an hour-long journey.

Because he only had a few million refugees to rescue, Liotta would get all the people off the planet all right; but Nebraska Kri was a galactic breadbasket. This was a planet with three million people that produced food enough to feed a hundred million people for an entire year. Most of that food sat crated and ready to load; but thanks to Liotta's incompetence, all of that food would end up as ash when the Avatari scorched the planet.

By that time, botched civilian airlifts had become a joke around the officer corps. In private, some of the officers referred to them as
ejacuations
instead of “evacuations.” Captain Dempsey, for instance, told me, “You just wait until Admiral Liotta gets started on Nebraska Kri. It's going to be a premature
ejacuation
.”

When I pointed out that the
evacuation
of Bangalore, an operation Dempsey ran, had not gone so smoothly, he said, “Don't you blame me; I followed Admiral Liotta's orders to a T. It wasn't my fault that the
ejacuation
went so slowly that no one could tell that we came.”

“You were the officer on the ground. You should have found some way to speed it up,” I said. I pointed out that Admiral Jolly got everybody off Gobi.

“No, sir, General. That wasn't Jolly. It was Jim Holman got those folks off Gobi. If it had been up to Jolly, no one would have
gotten off
at all.”

When I reported that conversation to Holman, he took it in stride, shrugging his shoulders, and saying, “I guess that's why Admiral Jolly kept me in a subordinate position.”

Sitting in a one-on-one virtual debriefing with the soon-toretire Admiral Liotta, I allowed my mind to wander as he bragged about botched evacuations and battles in which our casualties had been way too high. When he boasted, “We lifted nearly every person off Bangalore, and we will have rescued the entire population of Nebraska Kri. Not a bad record,” I wondered whether he was trying to con me or himself.

“What about the U.A. attacks?” I asked.

“I am happy to report that we have held them off,” Liotta said with a cocky smile that dared anyone to prove him wrong. I think he already knew I had lost patience with him, and he now exuded the petulance of an emancipated child.

“As I understand it, we have lost fifteen more ships since beginning this rescue operation,” I said. “It sounds like the Unifieds have stepped up their attacks.”

“Yes, there have been more attacks.”

“Do we know what set them off?” I asked.

“I'll ask my pal Andropov next time he calls,” Liotta said.

“So, to sum it up, we have lost fifteen ships, and we are not going to get enough supplies off Nebraska Kri to feed the people we are rescuing, but you are pleased with how things are going,” I said.

I knew I was being unfair, but I didn't care. This was high comedy. I was talking to a naïve mountain climber who sprays himself with shark repellent and brags about never being bit.

“Fifteen ships,” he said. “That's not a lot of ships. Our fleet is a thousand times larger than theirs. We can crush them anytime that we choose.”

Coward that he was, Liotta refused to come anywhere near me. Since I had returned to the Perseus Arm to inspect the evacuation at Nebraska Kri, he remained in the Cygnus Arm, circling Providence Kri, fifty thousand light-years away.

“Anytime we choose, Admiral?” I asked. “I choose now. Let's put together an attack plan. I want to put those bastards out of business before we lose another boat.”

“It's not that easy, General. Invasions need careful planning. How are you going to deal with the broadcast problem? Once we get our ships there, we won't be able to bring them back. The Unifieds aren't going to sit back while we hack into their station again.”

“Admiral, right now we are losing two wars at once. The aliens have us on the run, and the Unifieds are picking off our ships,” I said. “At least one of those situations must be fixed.”

Deciding that he outranked me, Liotta went on the offensive. He said, “General Harris, Intel intercepted a distress signal from the Norma Arm. Know anything about it?”

“Not offhand,” I said.

Liotta continued to push. “Someone destroyed a U.A. battleship near Solomon. Do you know anything about that?”

“Sure. I was there.”

“You were given orders to stay away from Solomon, General.”

Like you have the balls or the authority to give me orders,
I thought as I said, “I am aware of that, sir.”

“Were you anywhere near New Copenhagen?” asked Liotta.

“No, sir,” I said.

“Three Unified Authority ships were destroyed near New Copenhagen.”

“No shit?” I asked. “That's great.”

“Did you have anything to do with it?” asked Liotta.

“I wish I had,” I said. “Do we know who did it?”

“I am asking you,” said Liotta.

“I wish I knew, I'd give him a cigar,” I admitted.
I might even promote him to emperor,
I told myself.

Liotta shook his head. He said, “I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt, Harris. You admitted going to Solomon, so I am going to assume you're telling the truth about New Copenhagen.”

Don't do me any favors,
I thought. What I said was, “I'm leaving for Terraneau in a few hours. We need a permanent home for our refugees. They can't stay on Providence Kri.”

“And you think Terraneau is the place?” he asked.

“It's got oceans and lakes. There's a reasonable amount of oxygen in the atmosphere.”

“I thought all the plants were destroyed,” said Liotta. “That's what happened on Bangalore.”

“Not in the deep water,” I said. “Seaweed and algae are good oxygen producers.” I would not have known that on my own, of course. I was channeling the wisdom of the late Arthur Sweetwater. The disembodied circuits of Sweetwater and Breeze suggested I take a closer look at Terraneau.

Liotta asked, “What about Olympus Kri? That planet had oceans and lakes.”

“It's in the Orion Arm,” I said. “It's too close to Earth.” He should have known that.

I said, “Admiral Liotta, I think you might be in over your head commanding the Enlisted Man's Navy.”

“What?” he snapped.

“I don't think you are fit to command the Enlisted Man's Navy.”

“Who the hell do you think you are, Harris!”

“I think you should step down,” I said.

Liotta smiled. He said, “I bet you do. Is that what you told Jolly, too, that ‘he should step down'?”

“Admiral Jolly was killed by a looter,” I said.

“I am not giving up my command,” Liotta said. He paused, smiled, and added, “Don't look so smug, Harris. If I were you, I'd watch my back.”

Before leaving the conference room, I contacted Ray Freeman. I started the conversation by asking, “Ray, have you ever wondered who made the decision to abandon Solomon?”

“You did,” he said in that low, dark voice that made me think of storm clouds.

I said, “I didn't have any choice. We needed more ships. We needed a fleet and barges. Admiral Liotta made the decision to abandon the planet. I wanted to send barges and an armada, but Admiral Liotta overrode my suggestions.”

“Why are you telling me this?” asked Freeman.

“I just tried to relieve him of command. He doesn't want to step down.”

Freeman did not respond.

I said, “In case you're interested, he's touring Providence Kri at the moment. I guess he feels safe there.”

Silence. Freeman broke the connection about ten seconds later. Five hours after that, I received news that Admiral Curtis Liotta had been shot while visiting the planet. The sniper vanished without a trace.

 

Apparently the late Admiral Curtis Liotta had called Admiral Wallace sometime before his demise. Wallace did not tell me what they discussed; but when I asked him about taking command, he had decided to retire from the Navy instead.

I never asked Freeman about Liotta's death. He'd become something of a shadow of his former self, spending most of his time alone. We were back on the
Bolivar
, Holman's ship. Freeman, who had never been much of a talker, spent most of his time on the observation deck, sitting alone.

Something about him had changed; I could see it in his eyes. Freeman's gaze had always had this menacing intensity. Looking into those eyes used to remind me of staring down the muzzle of a double-barreled shotgun. He didn't just look at the world around him; he seemed to X-ray it, peel it apart with his stare, and coerce it into revealing secrets.