The Clone Redemption (41 page)

“We stole your barges.”

“Yes you did, and make no mistake, we will take them back.”

“You attacked our fleet.”

“A ship here or there, mostly fighter carriers. Strategic hits. We wanted to weaken you. We were playing with you, testing your abilities. I must say, your Navy was always pathetic.”

“We have enough ships to . . .”

Andropov shook his head. “You still don't understand. Harris, it doesn't matter how many ships you send here; they're as good as dead.

“You gave us a scare with that device that you used off New Copenhagen; but it won't work this time, not unless you plan on destroying the planet.” He paused to smirk.

“New Copenhagen?” I muttered.
He must mean Solomon,
I thought.
He's talking about the torpedoes Holman fired.
Maybe the test had gone better than we thought.

Andropov turned away from the camera, but he continued speaking. He said, “Ah, I see your fleet has arrived. Sixty-eight carriers. Two hundred battleships.” He nodded, turned to face me, and said, “Very impressive.”

Even as he said this, the Klaxons began their howling call to stations.

No longer able to stop myself, I looked down at the communications console and saw that I had not succeeded at powering it up. Holman had not heard a word of the conversation, not that it would have mattered. The gears of the invasion were already in motion.

Looking back at Freeman's two-way, I said, “Just so you know, it's personal between us. I'm coming for you.”

He nodded, and said, “Don't you have a transport to catch?”

I did not know if I signed off or he did. My hand was on the two-way, but I did not remember killing the power. I reached for the communications console, signaled the bridge, and spoke to Captain Cutter. I said, “Better kill the engines. I think they're expecting us.”

We searched the space lanes and found only a few U.A. ships. The Unifieds had six Perseus-class ships in the area. These were older ships, the same make as our ships. They didn't pose any threat at all.

The Unifieds might have had spy ships watching us; but just as Andropov had said, their fleet had gone.

I sat in a conference room with Cutter. We had an audio link to all the top officers in the fleet. Cutter repeated everything I had told him, then said, “I'm open to suggestions.”

Several officers mumbled indistinct answers, but no one spoke up.

Cutter looked at me and shook his head. “It's hard to know what to do when you don't know what you're up against.”

We were just off the bridge of the
Alexander
, a recently refurbished ship that still seemed only partially ready for battle. The engines worked fine. As far as I could tell, the shields worked right. Maybe it was just my nerves.

“If he has some kind of superweapon, why doesn't he fire it?” asked one of the disembodied voices.

“Could be short-range,” said another.

“Or proximity-based,” said another. “They could have laid mines. If he salted the space lanes, he'll need to keep his ships out of the area.”

“He knows we're not going anywhere,” I said, “not unless he hands over the keys to the Mars broadcast station.”

Cutter interrupted me. “The station is gone. There's no trace of it.”

“They must have destroyed it,” I said.

“I don't think so. There would still be wreckage unless they towed it away,” said Cutter.

“So we're stuck here,” I muttered. “What are they doing?”

Cutter said, “You know, he could be bluffing. It's always possible that we caught the bastard with his pants down, and he's trying to stall the attack until his fleet returns.”

“If it returns,” I said.

Several people asked, “What?”

“Holman stole the shield-buster torpedoes from the ships we destroyed when we took the barges,” I said. “Andropov thinks we have them. The bastard's in for a surprise if he sends his fleet to Terraneau. Holman's still got them.”

“Holman's battleships are carrying shield-busters?” asked Cutter.

I said, “Not his battleships, his fighters,” and I told him about my meeting with Mars. I went over it quickly, leaving out the shit about Mars praying for our salvation.

Cutter listened carefully and smiled. “Brilliant strategy. He's letting the Unifieds go after the nest when they should be chasing the hornets.”

“He still only has three carriers,” said one of the ships' captains.

“That's why it works,” Cutter said in a voice so bright you would have thought we'd already won the war. “The Unifieds will go after the carriers first. They'll home right in on them. Once they do, Holman will slip his fighters right past them. He's going to hit the bastards in the gut, and they won't know where it came from.”

“They'll figure it out before he finishes off their ships,” I said.

“Those fighters are going to give Holman the element of surprise, and they'll be hard to track. The Unifieds won't know which fighters have shield-busters and which ones have lasers,” said Cutter. “One thing about Holman—he always thought ahead of the curve.”

“That doesn't help us,” said one of the captains.

I disagreed. Every ship Holman sank in the Scutum-Crux Arm was another ship that would not return to Earth. If he sank enough of them, we might be able to take the Sol System uncontested ... except that still left the question about Andropov's superweapon.

Cutter sat silent while the voices on the communications console debated scenarios and outcomes. I sensed uncertainty as I listened to them.

One officer suggested we approach slowly and prepare to retreat. Another wanted to send two battleships to probe their defenses, then regroup. It sounded intelligent.

Cutter responded quickly, interrupting the man. He said, “No. We go in hard and fast, and present a moving target. Whatever they have, it's got to be a surface-to-space weapon. They might have cannons, but it's probably rockets. It's almost sure to be rockets ... a lot of rockets. That's why they haven't rebuilt their Navy, they've been allocating their resources to a rocket defense. We need to go in fast, land our Marines, and get the speck out of there.”

That ended the debate.

Cutter finished by saying, “God help us if I called this wrong.”

Lieutenant Mars couldn't have said it better.

I told Freeman about the meeting, and he said, “Missiles, not rockets.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“They recently built three high-security missile bases around Washington, D.C.”

“There must be more,” I said.

“Just those three.”

“Why would they build all of them in Washington?” I asked.

Freeman glared at me. “This is the Unified Authority.”

“Yeah. The whole damned planet belongs to the Unified Authority,” I said.

“Where are you planning to attack?” asked Freeman.

“The capital,” I said.

He was right. They were right. It did not matter where else we attacked, the war would be decided on the eastern seaboard of the former United States. In their minds, no other target was worth invading. It was the only target in my mind as well. The Unified Authority would remain in place so long as Washington, D.C., remained.

“Damn it,” I said.

Freeman watched me silently.

“How dangerous?” I asked.

“They're big bases. They have millions of missiles,” he said.

“So we're screwed,” I said.

“I can shut them down.”

He was a skilled saboteur. I asked, “Do you have a way to hack into their system?”

He shook his head. “I wouldn't even try; the security is too solid.”

“Do you know how to break into the bases?” I asked.

He shook his head.

I thought he'd probably come up with something elegant, some imaginative loophole. I was wrong. He said, “I bought warehouses near each of the missile bases and filled them with bombs.”

I had to laugh. “You said you weren't sure which side you were going to take,” I pointed out.

Freeman looked down at me, blinked once, and asked, “Do you want me to tell you about the bombs I set up next to your bases?”

After speaking with Freeman, I spent fifteen minutes throwing together a strategy for establishing a beachhead, then I told Cutter to launch the invasion.

I boarded a transport and sat in the cockpit, in the copilot's seat. Beside me, Lieutenant Christian Nobles ran the controls. “Sir, do you know what we're up against?” he asked, as the sled dragged our transport through the first set of locks.

“You're going to have plenty to deal with on the way down,” I said. “The Unifieds have a new missile defense.”

“What about the Earth Fleet? What did they do with their fleet?” Nobles asked.

“We don't know. If I had to guess, I'd say the bastards sent it to intercept the barges at Terraneau.” I did not mention my conversation with Tobias Andropov. Nobles had not returned to Earth for most of a decade. Tobias Andropov had risen to power during Nobles's absence, and I doubted that the name would have meant anything to him. The sled began dragging our transport into the launch tubes.

“It sounds like the Unifieds are in the shit,” Nobles said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“We captured the Golan Dry Docks, right? That left them high and dry without anyplace to build new ships. We don't have anyone who can design ships. They don't have anyplace to build them. Either way, you end up stranded once you run out of ships. I bet that's why they're using a missile defense.”

I silently stewed over Nobles's words as we entered the second atmospheric lock and the huge metal door closed behind us, sealing off the rest of the carrier as the outer hatch opened, revealing space. We left the artificial-gravity field. Nobles gave the thrusters a slight kick, and the transport coasted out to space.

We were at the head of an enormous armada, flying toward Earth at several million miles per hour. In space, where there is no friction to slow you down, a slow-flying bird like a military transport can travel a million miles per hour riding on the inertia of the ship from which it launched.

The first wave of fighters led the way, and we followed, an enormous swarm of transports. Ahead of us, I saw the sun, the Earth, and its moon. The engines of our Tomcats looked like tiny sparks. They traveled ahead of us, looking like a field of ambercolored stars. Above them, a few capital ships cleared the way.

At that point, the transport pilots used their thrusters to slow their ships as the invasion fleet left us behind. The change in speed played havoc with the gravity inside the transports. I felt a wave of nausea roll over me as the artificially generated gravity that rooted me to the floor did a tugof-war with the genuine gravity that pulled me forward.

As the gravity from our deceleration stabilized, I put on my helmet and used the commandLink to speak to Ray Freeman. We did not fly down to Earth on the same transport.

“Ray, you there?”

“Yeah.”

“How long will it take you to destroy the bases?” I asked.

“Depends how far I need to travel.”

“We're going to try and come in as close to Washington, D.C., as possible,” I said. “If we run into resistance, you may have a trek.”

That was when the shelling began. Far ahead of us, so distant that the explosions looked like light shining through hundreds of pinholes, U.A. missiles lashed out at our capital ships.

“Harris,” Cutter called. His voice came on a direct line over the interLink and on the communications console.

“Harris, here,” I said.

“We found their missiles,” Cutter shouted. He probably did not mean to shout, but the man must have been drowning in adrenaline. His voice rang in my ears. “We're losing ships. Damn, we're losing ships.”

Cutter had planned the pass correctly. Our big ships streaked by at several million miles per hour, traveling so fast that the missiles could not lock in on individual targets.

Cutter mumbled something, then said, “We lost twenty-seven ships.” Having seen the extent of the damage, he sounded more stressed than panicked.

Twenty-seven ships did not sound like a lot. I said, “They only nicked you. This could end early.”

Cutter put the damage into perspective. “We lost twenty-seven ships passing four hundred thousand miles outside of Earth's atmosphere at three million miles per hour. You'll be entering the atmosphere at two thousand miles per hour.”

“We're going to get nailed,” I said.

He did not respond.

“Warn your men,” I told Cutter. “They deserve to know what they're up against.”

Cutter signed off and changed frequencies. A moment later, speaking on an open line that every fighter and transport pilot would hear, he made his report.

“This is Captain Donald Cutter of the E.M.N.
Alexander
.

“The Unified Authority is using nuclear-tipped missiles to defend its space. The Unifieds' defense strategy involves flooding our path with these missiles. We can minimize the damage using defensive tactics, but we expect to take casualties.

“This mission will succeed or fail based on our ability to land our transports in strategic locations. That places a heavy burden on you fighter pilots. We are asking you to give this everything you've got. We need you to escort our transports to Earth. Do not return to the fleet until the Marines have landed.