Rogue Clone

by Steven L. Kent

  I dragged Sam into the cell and hoisted him on to the cot facedown, then spread my blanket over him.

  Yamashiro’s gift was a Japanese naval uniform. I slipped it on quickly. My hour was almost over. He would return for me.

  The uniform fit nearly perfectly, though it was a bit wide in the shoulders and gut. Anybody looking closely would see that I was not Japanese long before they would notice the baggy blouse.

  I did not know whether I should wait in my cell or hide in the jailor’s office. Yamashiro answered that question for me when he and seven officers strolled into the corridor. Yamashiro wore his customary dark wool suit and tie. He looked at Sam’s lumpy body on my cot, then down at the pistol on the floor. “It appears as if we have interrupted an execution.”

  “That was the general plan,” I said.

  “Stay close to us,” Yamashiro said.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Another ship.”

  All of the officers in Yamashiro’s cadre were tall; three stood an inch or two taller than me. Yamashiro arranged these men in a loose formation around me, then led us out of the brig. We moved at a brisk, businesslike pace, walking like men who had someplace important to go. Confederate sailors in tan uniforms stopped to watch as we passed.

  As we got farther from the brig, more Japanese officers turned out to join us. We formed a solemn parade. While the rest of the ship celebrated, the Japanese marched quietly, gaining in number. By the time we reached the landing bay, where three transports awaited, there were easily two hundred officers in our ranks.

  While we officers boarded the transports, Yamashiro went to have a word with the Confederate officer running the landing bay. After a brief chat, Yamashiro returned and the transport took off.

  The mood on the transport remained solemn. The men did not speak or joke. Most of the men stared at the ground as if ashamed. There was a distinct air of defeat.

  “What is going on?” I asked Yamashiro, who sat beside me on the bench lining the outer wall. He stared at me for a moment then spoke. “The officers of the Hinode Fleet are meeting for a victory celebration,” he said. “We will have four battleships to ourselves.”

  “Celebration?” I asked. “This looks more like a wake.”

  “After a fashion. Like you, we are making our escape. The enemy will have several hundred ships. We will have four. We view this battle as a defeat.”

  “You could not have planned all of this since last night,” I said.

  Yamashiro shook his head. “We knew where we stood long ago . . . long before you and I spoke. We have been planning our escape for months.

  “One thing did come out of our conversation. I have long felt a debt to Admiral Klyber. Had it not been for him, the Navy would have attacked Ezer Kri. He persuaded the Senate to settle with an occupation. When you tried to warn me, I decided to repay my debt by bringing you along.”

  The entire Broadcast Network would have shut down the moment a Hinode battleship fired its lasers into the Mars broadcast station. The discs, mile-wide mirrors with little more than electrical wiring and razor-fine welds to hold them together, shattered instantly. Think of it—the Unified Authority, the largest and most powerful empire in the history of humanity, was held together by electrical wiring and a bit of welding.

  Now that the Network was down, all fleets were stuck in the areas they were patrolling. When the Mars discs broke, the entire Broadcast Network shut down. The U.A. Navy ships could fly thirty million miles per hour, but that was still one-sixth the speed of light, and most inhabited planets were located thousands of light years apart from each other. The U.A. Navy had a fleet in the Scutum-Crux Arm that could have defeated the Hinode Fleet, but those ships were 10,000 light years away. Without the Broadcast Network it would take those ships 60,000 years to reach Earth.

  Without the Broadcast Network, the galaxy was no longer a Republic, it was a loose collection of inhabited planets. Throughout the six arms, there were only a very few instances in which any two inhabited planets were within traveling distance of each other.

  And then there was the question of communications. The discs worked as a transom, broadcasting and directing radio waves so that Earth could communicate across its empire. Now, even using laser messaging, it would take messages minutes just to reach Mars. As Tom Halverson later described it, human communications had been knocked back to the days of the Pony Express.

  In Scutum-Crux, Sagittarius, and all the outer arms, Earth had suddenly gone silent. Most people would know that Hinode ships had attacked Earth. That was all they would know. Suddenly every planet was alone in the universe. No fleet could hope to go beyond the territory it was currently patrolling. Struggling planets could never hope to receive support or supplies.

  Only the allies—the Confederate Arms, the Mogats, and the Japanese—could traverse the galaxy now that the Broadcast Network was destroyed. With the exception of small scientific craft designed for exploration, the U.A.’s entire self-broadcast fleet was aboard the Doctrinaire. Now, the alliance between the Japanese, the Mogats, and the Confederate arms was splitting. I had not lied when I told Yamashiro my dire predictions.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  If the Confederate Arms or the Morgan Atkins Believers suspected that the Japanese planned to flee, they did not care. The Japanese said they required four battleships for their victory celebration, and the Mogats and Confederates agreed. Why not? After their losses against the Doctrinaire, that left them with 486 ships in their fleet.

  Yamashiro’s men searched their four-ship squadron for bombs and traps and found them clean. Their broadcast generators already powering up, the new four-ship Hinode Fleet flew away from the Confederate/Mogat ships. Officers on the other ships should have figured out that the Japanese planned to leave. Had they been paying attention, they would have seen that the broadcast generators were powered up.

  Once we broadcasted away from the other ships, we were safe. The Milky Way was so spread out that no one would ever find us without knowing where to look. Forget the analogy about looking for a needle in a haystack. The odds of accidentally running into an enemy fleet in the Milky Way were more along the lines of accidentally finding a particular grain of sand in the Sahara desert.

  The mood throughout the ship became more relaxed once all four ships materialized. Most of the crew attended a mass briefing to which I was not invited. I stayed in a ready room not far from the bridge realizing that for all intents and purposes, I was still a prisoner.

  I sat at one end of a large conference table, my eyes fastened at an indistinct spot on the wall. For the last few years of my life, I had suffered from disconnect. I felt alienated. I was not a normal clone, nor was I a natural-born, and I felt I owed no allegiance to anyone synthetic or natural. Now, knowing that the Republic I had been created to defend was gone, I felt sick and hollow. The Unified Authority had been so vast and so undeniable that it never occurred to me that it could actually end. What happens when the universe comes to an end? Who knows? Who cares? We’d all be dead.

  But the universe of my creation had come to an end, and I survived. I sat alone in the conference room contemplating the end of Earth-brewed beer and orphanages filled with military clones. Would the Navy’s various outer fleets find food, or would they starve? The tens of thousands of men on the Golan Dry Docks would surely die unless somebody saved them, but the only ships that could reach them were Confederate State ships.

  The briefing took hours, but I did not notice. I wondered what strange debt Yoshi Yamashiro thought he owed Bryce Klyber, and why he thought he could pay it off by saving me. I wondered how deep that debt extended. Was it paid off by sparing my life? Would payment include integrating me into the Hinode Navy?

  The door to the conference room opened, but I did not look up. I might as well have been back on my cot in the brig. In came Yamashiro and four officers. Yamashiro sat across the table from me. His four officers positioned themselves, two on either s
ide of him. They did not sit at the table but formed a V around him, like samurai guarding their shogun. For the next few minutes, I sat in silence.

  “The second war has already begun,” Yamashiro said in a whisper that nonetheless shattered the silence. “A battle has broken out between the Mogats and the Confederate Arms. The Mogats have seized control of most of the fleet.”

  “How can you know that?” I asked.

  “We took a lesson from you and placed transmitters on every ship,” Yamashiro said.

  “You bugged your own ships? But that would mean we were still nearby?”

  “We are five million miles from the fleet. You might say we traveled a safe distance to listen.”

  “Can’t they detect you?” I asked.

  “How would they do that?”

  “Radar,” I said. “Radar stations pick up the anomaly when you broadcast in.”

  “And transmit the information over the Broadcast Network,” Yamashiro said. “Only the Broadcast Network is no more.”

  “And your transmitters have a direct link,” I said.

  “Even if the Morgan Atkins Believers detected us, we would be able to broadcast away before they could reach us. But, as you might guess . . .”

  “The Mogats and Confederates have bigger fish to fry.”

  “I would say they are distracted at the moment,” Yamashiro said.

  “So where does that leave me?” I asked. “Am I now a citizen of Shin Nippon?”

  “I am sorry to inform you, Colonel Harris, that my officers and I have discussed this and we do not feel it would be advisable to bring a man of your destructive capacity to our planet.”

  “You mean a Liberator?” I asked.

  “I mean a killer,” Yamashiro said. “Some of my men watched you kill your jailor. Liberator or natural-born, you are a dangerous man.”

  “I’m not the only killer. You and your men are wearing uniforms,” I pointed out.

  “We are engineers. We modernized the ships and helped fly them,” Yamashiro said. “The Mogats and the Confederates did all of the fighting. We never wanted to enter a war.”

  “So this was just a reprieve,” I said, thinking Yamashiro meant to execute me.

  “I do not understand,” Yamashiro said. “We will take you wherever you wish to go as long as it does not endanger our ship.”

  “You’re joking,” I said.

  Yamashiro looked confused.

  “Why are you helping me?” I asked.

  “We owe a debt to . . .”

  “Bryce Klyber. Yes, you mentioned that before. But you also showed a Mogat assassin how to kill Klyber by rigging his transport.”

  “We had no choice,” Yoshi Yamashiro said. “Admiral Halverson said that we could not have won the war if Klyber commanded the Doctrinaire.”

  “I don’t understand how that can be. I served under both Klyber and Admiral Thurston. I saw them square off in a battle simulation. Thurston ran circles around Klyber.

  “Why was it so important that Thurston take command? From what I saw, you had something more powerful than the Doctrinaire all along.”

  Yamashiro looked back at the officers sitting on either side of him as if looking for permission or perhaps support. Some of them seemed not to be paying attention. The ones who acknowledged his glance nodded.

  “Now that the battle has ended, I suppose there is no reason for this to remain a secret. I understand Admiral Halverson loaned you a portable display unit. Is that correct?”

  I nodded.

  “When the battle started, one of our cruisers remained behind.”

  I thought about this and remembered a ship sputtering forward and falling behind the rest. I assumed it had mechanical problems. Then, as the battle progressed, I forgot all about it.

  “That was the weapon,” Yamashiro said this with the self-satisfied air of a man who believes that he has satisfactorily explained a great mystery.

  “That cruiser destroyed the Doctrinaire?” I asked, doubting.

  Yamashiro looked back at his officers, then decided to give up the goods. “Admiral Klyber was a very aggressive commander. He would send his command ship into battle along side his other ships. Robert Thurston was more of an organizer. With a super-ship like the Doctrinaire, he preferred to shoot enemy ships as his support fleet herded them in his direction.

  “Klyber would have flown the Doctrinaire as it was meant to be flown, like a gigantic battleship. Thurston used it like a floating fortress. Do you see now?”

  I shook my head, though the pieces were starting to come together.

  “Klyber would have flown his ship up and down the battlefield. Thurston remained in one place, destroying every ship that came within range. He remained in one place long enough for us to chart his position and . . .”

  “You broadcasted that cruiser into the center of the Doctrinaire ,” I said. My admiration was immense. “Absolutely brilliant.”

  “We placed a nuclear bomb on the bridge of the cruiser.”

  “So the cruiser was a drone?” I asked.

  “You can’t self-broadcast a drone ship. You might lose control during the broadcast. We could not trust a drone ship, not with so much depending on it. We trained a crew of Morgan Atkins Believers to fly a suicide mission.”

  “A kamikaze mission? You trained kamikaze pilots?” The irony was remarkable, but Yamashiro seemed unimpressed. He gazed at me with a stony expression. “You taught a bunch of Mogats how to run their own broadcast computer?” I asked. “Did you give them some engineering tips?”

  Yamashiro nodded.

  “And they would have passed that information on to their friends,” I said. “You won the war and made yourselves expendable. From here on out, the Mogats will be able to pilot their own ships.”

  Yamashiro pulled out his cigarettes and lit one. He drew the smoke in very deeply and held it for several seconds in his lungs. His eyes never flickered. He never blinked. He stared off into the distance as he performed the calculations that now ran through his head. He was stocky and strong, but still an old man. His allies had outmaneuvered him, and he knew it.

  Dressed in his suit and red necktie, his black hair brushed back and oiled, Governor Yoshi Yamashiro considered the alliances to which he had sold his soul. Whom did he hate more, the Confederate Arms, the Morgan Atkins Believers, the Unified Authority, or himself?

  “We cannot fly you back to Earth,” Yamashiro finally said, after blowing a stream of cigarette smoke. “That entire system is a battle zone. Is there anyplace else you would like to go?”

  “Anyplace?” I asked. “Take me to New Columbia.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  I had a lot of reasons why I wanted to return to New Columbia. If I had to be stranded on a planet, being stranded on a planet with a large agricultural base and a small population was attractive. Thanks to the evacuation, New Columbia had far more food than people.

  Even before the evacuation, New Columbia had the kind of economy that could survive on its own. In Safe Harbor and other cities, it had both industrial and financial infrastructures. Outside of those cities, it had large farms. The planet had started out as a farming colony. Granted, I had enemies in Safe Harbor. If Jimmy Callahan survived the attack on the Marine base, he would have a score to settle with me. There might be Marines who would consider me a deserter for not staying on base during the attack.

  But I also had my reasons for wanting to go to New Columbia. The first was Ray Freeman. The last time I spoke with Freeman, he was headed to that very planet to meet with me. While he and I were not exactly friends, we were partners. I felt as connected to him as I did to any man in the galaxy. Since the Mogats destroyed the Doctrinaire, I had begun to place more importance on people.

  My other reason for wanting to go to New Columbia was my plane, the self-broadcasting Starliner I had borrowed from the Doctrinaire. The ship was mine now, free and clear. With the destruction of that great ship, no one even knew that Johnston Aerodynamics had eve
r built a self-broadcasting Starliner. Once I had the Starliner, I would no longer be stranded on New Columbia . . . assuming it survived the attack.

  From the bridge of the Hinode battleship, a deck officer took a satellite scan of Safe Harbor and reported to Governor Yamashiro. “The city was evacuated before the attack,” he said. “It still appears mostly empty. The primary targets were all destroyed. I did locate a tank and some armored personnel carriers moving in the city limits. I also recorded a firefight.”

  “Artillary?” Yamashiro asked.

  “Small weapons,” the officer reported.

  “Are you certain this is where you want to go?” Yamashiro asked me.

  “Yes,” I said.

  He turned to his deck officer. “Can we send a transport safely?”

  “From what I can tell, there are no people around Safe Harbor spaceport.”

  “You think it’s safe to land there?” Yamashiro asked.

  “I doubt anyone would even see us flying in. The spaceport is several miles out of town. Even if they pick up the transport on the way down, we should be able to lift off again well before anyone comes within twenty miles of us.”

  “How does the airport look?” I asked.

  “Undamaged,” said the officer. “I don’t think any looters have made it out there yet. It’s pretty far from town and the roads were destroyed.”

  “What about the Marine base?” I asked.

  “Destroyed.”

  “The Army base?” I asked.

  The officer shook his head. “All primary targets were destroyed.”

  Maybe Callahan was dead, I thought. Even as I thought this, a voice deep in my head scoffed at the idea.

  Yoshi Yamashiro suggested that I wear old Galactic Central Fleet work fatigues rather than the uniform of a Hinode officer. Actually, he told me to change into the fatigues, but he made it sound like a suggestion by saying, “Maybe you would present less of a target by wearing fatigues.”