The Clone Redemption (7 page)

Hidden and protected by a thick steel wall of transport construction, I lay on my back and laughed.

Freeman must have mistaken my laughter for combat strain. He asked, “Harris, where are you?”

“I'm fine,” I said.

“What is the situation?” Freeman asked.

“I'm in a transport in the third landing bay.”

“Where is the Marine?”

“You call this shithead a Marine?” I asked, still laughing. “I'll tell you what—the Unifieds are scraping the bottom of the barrel. The only thing this guy's trained for is KP duty or maybe scrubbing the head.” As I said this, the doors at the back of the transport clanged shut. I was trapped in the transport with an enemy wearing shielded armor, and I could not have been happier about it.

“Harris, hang on. I'm on my way.”

“Take your time, Ray,” I said. “There's no rush.”

The U.A. Marine knew enough about his armor to switch to heat vision. He either used heat vision or possibly radar. One way or another, he spotted me on the catwalk and fired. His fléchettes hit the iron walls and dropped to the floor. This bird was made to withstand missiles and particle beams, depleted uranium fléchettes could barely scratch it.

Tracking the guy with my heat vision, I sat with my S9 pistol ready and watched as the poor bastard wasted his endless supply of fléchettes. I laughed. “You can't hit me, asshole. Not from down there,” I yelled. He didn't hear me. I was talking to myself.

Down on the deck, the guy kept firing fléchettes in my direction. I switched from interLink to external speaker on the off chance he might be listening. I yelled, “Hey, shit for brains, you're wasting ammunition.”

In response, the bastard shot five more fléchettes, then yelled, “Get specked.” The term, “speck,” was sometimes used as a noun referring to bodily fluids and sometimes used as a verb referring to the transmission of those fluids. On the hierarchy of modern profanities, “speck” was as bad as a word could get.

“Have it your way,” I called back. “You've been chasing me for about ten minutes now. That leaves you with about half an hour before the battery powering your shields runs out.”

He answered with a flurry of needles. Some struck the ledge below me, some flew over the catwalk. Nothing came close to hitting me.

When he came to his senses, the bastard would realize that he had two choices—he could climb the ladder to come after me, or he could open the rear hatch and escape. Either way, he would need to lower his shields. The shields would prevent him from wrapping his hands around the ladder, and they would short out the circuits if he tried to work the hatch.

Using heat-vision lenses, I watched as he worked out his options. Hoping to keep me honest, he fired sporadic fusillades of fléchettes in my direction. After a minute or two, he started toward the ladder. The bastard must have known that his shields would repulse anything he touched, but he had to make sure.

I moved toward the edge of the catwalk on the off chance he was stupid enough to lower the shields and start climbing. He stood at the base of the ladder and weighed his options, growling like a caged animal and firing fléchettes into the impenetrable steel of the kettle walls.

Apparently rejecting the ladder as an option, he paced back and forth across the floor of the cargo hold. I could not see him, per se, just the red-orange oval of his heat signature. He walked toward one corner of the cabin, maybe looking for a better shot at me, then he stormed off in the other direction.

By this time, he had figured out an indisputable truth—he could not exit the transport without opening the rear hatch. There were only two mechanisms for opening that hatch. One was up in the cockpit, one was in the kettle. He walked to the panel at the far end of the kettle.

At that point, I needed to do more than track heat signatures—I needed to watch the bastard. Needing to catch him the moment he lowered his shields, I crawled to the edge of the catwalk and stared down at him.

He stood a foot from the panel with his back to me, staring at the button. He stayed that way for several seconds, then spun and fired six shots my way. His shots were wild. Most of them struck the wall somewhere below me and ricocheted around the kettle.

Now we were both in trouble. He could not hit that button without lowering his shields; but I could not watch him without placing myself in his line of fire. Realizing my trap was not as bulletproof as I had surmised, I ducked back behind the ledge and used my heat-vision lenses to watch as his hand edged toward the button. He fired a couple of shots at me, reached for the button, and stopped. I could not tell if he was waiting to shoot me or looking at the button. When I rose to my knees, he fired. Suddenly, the bastard knew how to aim; his first shot missed me by an inch.

I dropped to my stomach. When I raised myself with my elbows, he fired again. In the brief glimpse I got, I saw him there, standing two feet from the button, his right arm pointing up toward me and his left probing toward the button. Like him, I was using heat-vision tracking. I switched to tactical view, the unenhanced view we used on the battlefield.

I rose to a crouch and dropped, not hoping to shoot so much as to keep the bastard honest. I wanted to keep him on his toes. I wanted him to know I was watching, waiting, biding my time until he dropped his shields; and then I would have my shot.

I wanted him to think that I was blind, but I was not blind, not anymore. He was using heat vision to track me. Using the tactical view, I could see the glow his shields projected on the wall.

Another moment passed, and he began shooting faster, maybe five shots per second. The shots cut a line above me, some pinged off the side of the catwalk.

And then he made his move. He lowered his shields, and the cabin went dark. The moment the cabin went dark, I rolled to my side and fired three shots blindly as I engaged my night-for-day lenses. Even before the lenses showed me the cabin floor, I instinctively knew I had hit the target.

The bastard lay on the cold steel deck, rolling and writhing like a fish on a line. Blood leaked out of his armor at the shoulder and gut. The two shots that hit him in the shoulder probably hurt more than the one in the gut, but it was the latter that would kill him.

I'd seen too many men kill the enemy who had dealt them the fatal blow, so I waited on the catwalk and watched as the poor bastard bled to death. I watched as his convulsions slowed into tremors, and his tremors slowly went still.

“Does the computer work?” I asked.

“I haven't tested it yet,” he said.

That made sense. You'd want to make sure you had everything ready before you booted a computer that conjured up ghosts.

The Enlisted Man's Empire had men and ships and a recently rebuilt broadcast network. What we did not have were the “ghosts.” We needed the computer from the spy ship to reach the Unified Authority's top secret ghosts.

Okay, well, I called them ghosts. In truth, they were virtual reproductions of William Sweetwater and Arthur Breeze, the two dead scientists who had helped thwart the Avatari's first invasion.

Shortly before they died, the real Sweetwater and Breeze allowed a team of medical technicians to scan their brains and take samples of their DNA. Somewhere along the line, the Unifieds used the scans and samples to re-create the scientists inside a computer. They used the DNA to construct virtual models of their bodies that were realistic enough to make their scanned brain waves feel right at home.

In order to keep the virtual versions of Sweetwater and Breeze from figuring out that they weren't real, the models had all of the original scientists' mental and physical flaws. In life, William Sweetwater had been an overweight, middleaged dwarf who got winded climbing a single set of stairs. When virtual Sweetwater climbed a flight of stairs, his pulse rose dangerously high, and sweat stains formed under his arms. I'd placed a few calls to virtual Sweetwater. When he had to run to the monitor to catch the call, he came panting.

In his computer universe, virtual Arthur Breeze was a six-foot-six balding beanpole with dandruff and oily skin who needed to clean the grease from his glasses every couple of minutes. He stuttered when he became nervous, which was most of the time since he suffered from an intense inferiority complex.

The flaws were almost as entertaining as the men themselves.

But the tiny computer Freeman showed me had neither a broadcast engine for pangalactic communications nor the power to host the complex models of Sweetwater and Breeze.

“That's it?” I asked. “I played hide-and-seek with a guy in shielded armor for that?”

The computer was the size of a man's wallet, and most of it was screen. “Where's the broadcast engine?”

“Broken,” said Freeman.

“Broken? So we're out of business,” I said.

“The computer works, I just need to connect it to a broadcast engine before we can reach Sweetwater and Breeze,” Freeman said.

“Did you have one in mind?” I asked. Broadcast engines were complex and dangerous machinery. You didn't find them lying around.

“The E.M.E. broadcast network,” said Freeman. He was so big and so menacing, I sometimes wondered if he realized just how frightening he could be.

The Enlisted Man's Empire had a broadcast network. It was the backbone of the empire. Friend or foe, it didn't matter, I was not about to give a mercenary access to the network.

“You're out of luck, Ray,” I said. “I won't give you that access.”

He sat on the edge of my desk, staring down at me. His wide-set eyes reminded me of the barrels of a shotgun. Even though he spoke softly, his voice had a thunderlike rumble. The voice and the eyes were intimidating, but not as intimidating as the implicit threat of his enormous arms and chest.

Freeman sat silent for a moment, then he said, “You're going to need Sweetwater and Breeze if you're planning to evacuate planets.”

“I'm not giving you our broadcast codes,” I said.

Freeman's expression did not change. He did not smile or snarl or do anything threatening. He simply spoke in a quiet voice as he asked, “Are you saying that the Enlisted Man's Empire is going to abandon its planets and citizens?”

Oh, shit,
I thought. With that simple question, he had served notice. If the Enlisted Man's Empire was no more committed to saving lives than the Unified Authority, his loyalties might shift.

I could have shot him, of course. We were on the
Churchill
, an E.M.N. fighter carrier. I had thousands of sailors and Marines at my disposal. Even the mighty Ray Freeman would not escape if I sounded the alarm ... maybe. I did not want him as an enemy, and he made a powerful ally.

I weighed all of the possibilities in my mind, then I smiled, and said, “We won't have much of an empire if we let everybody die.”

The compromise was obvious. Freeman probably expected it from the start. He said, “The computer stays with me. When we need to contact Sweetwater, I control the computer, and you control the broadcast access.”

I was the commanding officer of the largest navy in the galaxy, and he was nothing more than a mercenary, but he had just proposed an equal partnership. I thought about it for a second, and said, “I can live with that.”

 

Freeman and I sat side by side in a conference room on the
Churchill
. Freeman's little communications computer, now jacked into the ship's communications network, sat on the table between us.

Freeman toyed with the links going to his computer, and asked, “What time is it?”

I looked over at the wall and saw what Freeman already knew. “01:00 STC,” I said. STC was short for “Space Travel Clock,” the twenty-four-hour clock used for synchronized space travel.

“They're asleep,” he said.

As nothing more than sophisticated computer animations, Sweetwater and Breeze should have been able to work around the clock; but they had been programmed to eat, sleep, and shit. They didn't know they were dead. No longer needing sleep might tip them off to their virtual state; and if they learned they were virtual, no one could predict how they might react. They might go into a depression or refuse to work.

If some virtual lab assistant answered our call, he'd undoubtedly warn the Unifieds that we had broken into their system. “Maybe we should wait until 10:00,” I said. “We wouldn't want to disturb them.”

Freeman, being Freeman, did not note the irony in the situation, and said, “They'll be in the lab by 07:00.”

I nodded. “Not much we can do until then,” I said, meaning there was not much for Freeman to do. I, on the other hand, had a hundred hours' worth of work to fit into the next six hours.

As Freeman took his communications device and left the conference room, I called Captain Cutter and asked him to join me.

I did not know Cutter well, and I needed to find ways to distinguish him from other clones. He was a standard-issue U.A. military clone. He stood five feet ten inches tall, had brown hair cut to regulation length, and brown eyes. Every clone of his make, which included every last sailor on the ship, fit Cutter's description.

The Unifieds did not consider clones to be human. Since standard-issue clones like Cutter were programmed to think they were natural-born, they tended to be a little antisynthetic as well. When clones like Cutter found out the truth, all hell would break loose. A gland built into their brains released a fatal hormone into their systems; it was a fail-safe that was supposed to prevent a clone rebellion. They called it the “Death Reflex.”

When clones like Cutter looked in a mirror, their neural programming made them see themselves as blond-haired and blue-eyed. Like every clone, including me, Cutter had grown up thinking he was the only natural-born resident in an “orphanage” that trained military clones. He had memories programmed into his head. We all did.