“It doesn’t seem like anybody here knows about the war,” I said.
“We hear things. Well, truth be told, we all heard things. The missionaries that flew us here told us about it, but it didn’t sound serious. It didn’t sound like more than a little uprising.”
“You never followed the war on the mediaLink?”
“And what would that be?” she asked.
“What would what be?” I asked feeling thoroughly confused.
“You said something about following the war on something or other.”
“The mediaLink,” I said. “That’s the news source.”
“I can’t say I have ever heard of it,” she said.
“It’s too late now,” I said. “It receives communications signals sent through the Broadcast Network. You do know about the Broadcast Network.”
“Yes,” she said, feigning that she was offended. “I know about the Broadcast Network.”
“When they destroyed the Network, they shut down communications as well as travel. Close as I can figure, it would take a laser signal 70,000 years to get from Earth to Delphi. Without the Broadcast Network, they might as well be sending smoke signals.”
“So it’s all true. The entire Republic is shut down,” Marianne said.
“Everyone is on their own,” I said. “It’s just that some planets are better off than others.”
“So why did you come here?” Marianne asked. “You have that self-broadcasting ship. You can go anywhere.”
“I asked Ray where he wanted to go, and he said he wanted to come here.”
“And you went where he asked. ‘Where you go, I will go . . . Where you lodge, I will lodge also . . . Your people shall be my people.’ You’re a modern version of Ruth, Mr. Harris.”
I didn’t know what that meant and I had never heard of Ruth, but Marianne’s smile charmed me. “Maybe we should look in on the meeting,” I said. “I don’t want to start tongues wagging.”
“Are you worried about my reputation?” Marianne asked. “Don’t worry about me. Those tongues are already wagging. That’s how life goes on a small planet.”
“How did it go?” I asked Freeman as we settled down to sleep in the Starliner. Archie could not find beds for us. He could not find sheets for us, but he did have pillows.
“They don’t want to leave,” Freeman said. He stripped off his chest armor and stepped out of his coveralls. Stripped down to his boxers, he stretched out as best he could. “They think they can talk their way out of this.”
“They want to reason it out with a fighter carrier?” I asked.
I had never seen Freeman stripped down. The massive muscles in his chest and arms looked powerful, but not defined. He did not look like a bodybuilder. He had the build of a blacksmith or a construction worker. “They think God delivered them here.”
Marianne had said as much when we were talking. Images of Marianne ran through my head. Was I infatuated, I asked myself, or just lonely? So many new emotions clouded my thinking since the fall of the government that I no longer trusted myself. I wanted to ask Freeman about his sister, but I was afraid of tipping him off to my thoughts.
We slept on reclining seats that only reclined to a forty-five-degree angle. The weight of our heads never left our necks.
“You landed on an engineered planet once, didn’t you?” Freeman asked.
“Ezer Kri,” I said. “That’s where we caught Kline. You were there, remember?”
“No, an unpopulated one,” Freeman said.
“Ronan Minor,” I said, remembering the mission.
“It wasn’t called something Kri?” The term kri denoted a planet with an engineered atmosphere.
“It was a shitty place.” I rolled over in my seat and hit the panel to turn out the lights. “What do you think is happening on Earth?”
Freeman thought about this. “Depends who comes out on top. If the Confederate Arms win, they’ll fly in armies. The outer arms always had good ground forces, they just couldn’t protect them.
“If the Mogats made out, it will be worse. The Mogats, they don’t care about colonizing. They don’t want to occupy Earth. All they want is to erase every vestige of the Unified Authority.
“It’s only been a few days . . . The Mogats and the Confederates may not be through killing each other yet,” I said.
“Harris, you think we could relocate these folks on Ronan Minor?”
“They wouldn’t like it,” I said. “It was a jungle and the only life on it is cockroaches and rats.”
Freeman understood what I meant immediately. Ships are not allowed to land on engineered planets until they are declared stable. When squatters trespass on these planets, vermin escape from their ships. On a planet like Ronan Minor, where the vegetation is profuse and there are no natural predators, rat and cockroach populations proliferate.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Talk about your flat-world society . . . Archie Freeman did not believe that there could still be a fighter carrier floating out somewhere around his planet. It took some arm-twisting, but Ray talked him and three of the elders into a trip to the broadcast discs. We would show them that the discs were dead, do a radar sweep to see if we could find any trace of the fighter carrier, and maybe look around. Ray Freeman did not come for the ride.
Archie and his brethren were novices at space travel. They had never been in a self-broadcsting ship, and the idea of it scared the hell out of them. The old man had to brace himself just to climb into the copilot’s seat of the Starliner. He did not complain or ask me to be careful. He looked around the cabin nervously and tried to sound comfortable.
“You know,” he said in a confidential tone that suggested this was a big confession, “I always wondered what it would be like to go up in one of these.” He laughed. Now that he was in true confession mode, he went on. “Self-broadcasters remind me of the early days of airplanes and daredevils flying through barns. Ho, ho, ho.” He laughed a beautiful baritone laugh.
The elders, men in their thirties if I had to guess, sat in the first row of the cabin. They strapped themselves in and did not speak. They seemed to share Archie’s outer fear of self-broadcasting ships not his inner enthusiasm.
“Do you understand how self-broadcasting works?” I asked Archie as we strapped ourselves into our seats. I, of course, only had the shallowest grasp, but a farmer/colonist like Archie would not care about the specifics. All he cared about would be the base fundamentals.
“It will be just like flying into a broadcast disc,” I said.
“The broadcast discs were destroyed,” Archie said.
“Not destroyed . . . just unplugged,” I said, for lack of finding a better way to explain myself.
“They don’t have power?” Archie clarified.
“Right. This ship can broadcast itself. There will be an electrical field around the ship right before we broadcast. It’s supposed to be there. There will be a bright flash, and when we come out, we’ll be near the broadcast discs.”
“What if we run into that carrier?” Archie asked as I powered up my console.
“We could,” I said, “but I’m betting that they went to the discs, found them dead, and have already turned back toward Little Man.”
“Delphi,” Archie said.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“We call the planet Delphi.”
“Right. Sorry.”
“What happens if we run into that carrier? I don’t see any guns on your ship.”
“I don’t have any.”
“Can you outrun a carrier?”
I hit the button to start charging the broadcast engine. “Not a chance. Those ships hit thirty million per hour. I might be able to do six million miles at best.”
“So what will we do?” Archie asked.
“Look, Archie, it’s a big galaxy. You don’t run into ships out here by accident. You can go out looking for other ships and never see them. If you and I were the only people on Delphi, what do you think
the chances would be of our accidentally running into each other? The galaxy is a billion times bigger than Delphi.”
We took off at a steep angle and left the atmosphere quickly. Now that we had left the ground, Archie gripped the sides of his chair, his bony knuckles curved in like cats’ claws. He seemed unable to look away from the window. The sight of the planet below us seemed to hypnotize him.
I looked back in the cabin and saw that the three elders had the same reaction. They leaned into the nearest windows and stared.
“Okay, I am going to broadcast us now,” I said as I brought up the tint shield.
“What’s that?” Archie asked. “The window went black.”
“It’s a tint shield. It protects your eyes,” I said. “Things get bright out there when we broadcast. Unless you tint the windows, the brightness will blind you.”
“Oh, okay,” he said, sounding somewhat reassured.
Strings of electricity showed through the blackened windscreen, then the flash showed through. Archie was startled. He looked around the cockpit nervously. His legs, which did not fit behind that seat much better than his son’s, went stiff, and he lifted himself part way out of his chair. In that moment of fear, he lost partial control of his body. He did not wet himself or drop a load, but he farted something loud and smelly.
I had started to say, “We’re here,” but seeing the shocked look on Archie’s face, I could not stop from laughing.
“Oh, you think that’s funny?” Archie asked. “You goddamned clone.”
Some things you regret saying even before you finish saying them. I saw embarrassment and anger on Archie’s face. He settled back in his seat and stared straight ahead.
Out of habit, I started up the generator to charge the broadcast engine the moment we arrived. That habit saved our lives.
We arrived just a few miles from the broadcast discs and drifted over to see them. Coming to an almost dead stop, I took the Starliner around the defunct discs.
“Those are the discs?” Archie asked.
He probably did not see the discs when he came to Delphi. He and his fellow settlers had most likely traveled in a cargo ship. Even if they flew in a commercial craft, the tint shields would have been up long before they came this close to the discs.
“That is the broadcast station,” I said.
“You fly into it?” Archie asked.
I remembered that he lived on a planet without modern conveniences. “You fly toward it. It sends out an energy field to transport your ship.”
“I see.”
“If the discs were live, they would have a white glow. There would be traffic lights and warning lights along the top. There’s not so much as a volt of electricity in this station.” My broadcast gear included an enhanced radar display. As I reached to turn on the display, the Harrier buzzed us. It was a gray-white blur that streaked past the cockpit and totally vanished.
“Good God! What was that?” Archie yelled.
Red lights flashed in the canopy and on my heads-up display. A warning sign flashed on my instruments. Alarms buzzed. I switched on the radar with one hand and pulled the wheel sharp to the right with the other. “Hold on,” I yelled.
“What’s going on?” Archie yelled. It was not a scream. He had control of himself. “What was that?”
“You asked me what would happen if we ran into that carrier,” I said. “We just did.”
He pressed his face against the cockpit and stared out the window. “I don’t see anything.”
“Archie,” I said, as I stared into the radar, “that ship travels thirty million miles per hour. They could come right up our nose and ram us before you see them if they wanted.”
“Do they want to kill us?” Archie asked.
“We’d already be dead if they did. That was a fighter. The pilot could flame us with a single shot if he wanted.” I glanced at the broadcast gear. It would need another two minutes of charging before I could use it.
The Harrier did not came upon us from behind. It slowed so that we would see it, flashed over the top of the Starliner, and vanished into space. The radar tracked its path.
“They’re not going to shoot us yet,” I said.
“How do you know that?” Archie asked.
“They’re stuck out here and the broadcast station is down, right?” I asked. “They’ll want to know how we got here before they start shooting. If they figure out that we’re self-broadcasting, they’ll want to capture our ship.”
“Unidentified space craft, this is the U.A.N. Grant. Identify yourself.”
“The Grant,” I whispered to myself. I knew the ship.
“What are we going to do?” Archie asked.
“They want to know how we got here,” I said. “I’m going to show them.” An amber light winked on above the broadcast engine to show that it was ready. I had already programmed in the coordinates for Little Man, and now I initiated the broadcast.
They had no way of knowing where I broadcasted to, but they could certainly make an educated guess. If I had come from within this galactic sector, I could only have come from Little Man—Delphi as Archie called it. That was the only habitable planet in the area.
With that short visit, I set events in motion. I started the countdown. Archie could no longer evacuate his colony. We had time to fly his people to safety, but he would need to leave his buildings and equipment behind. But Archie did not want to leave. He believed that God had deeded him Little Man and that God would protect him. All he needed was faith.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
“Raymond was right,” Archie said in a soft voice to his people. He looked dejected. His arms hung at his side as he spoke, his head hung at a slight tilt. “That carrier did not make it through the broadcast disc. It will not arrive at Delphi today, and it may not come back for a week; but sooner or later, it will return.”
The congregation let out a collective gasp. “Deliver us, Lord,” one woman yelled. She stretched her arms above her head, her fingers extended, imploring.
I sat alone in a corner in the back of the town hall ready to leave. Freeman sat with Marianne and her son. They sat one row behind the rest of the congregation. They were with the people but not part of them.
“Raymond believes that we should leave this planet. He believes that the Philistines are at the gate, and we must abandon our promised land.
“God has promised us deliverance. We will not abandon our planet. I have seen the enemy with my own eyes. His fighters are as fast as light. But we must not fear the puny arm of man, for God will protect us.”
As the congregation let out a collective hiss, Freeman looked back at me, and our eyes met. In the silence that passed between us, we communicated disbelief.
If they wanted to call Little Man their “promised land,” well, they had the right to interpret it any way that they wanted. Saying that God would deliver them from the Grant, however, that was bullshit. No one could deliver them from the Grant, and the only ones who might try were the “goddamned clone” and the colony pariah.
The thing was, I couldn’t leave them. Klyber once told me that military clones were programmed with an altruistic streak. We were made to serve and protect, especially when it meant killing enemies of the Republic. But now my programming was twisting in on itself, I was programmed to fight for the Unified Authority. In the back of my mind, I constantly reminded myself that the Unified Authority no longer existed and that whoever was flying the Grant, they were not receiving orders from Washington D.C. I did not know if I could convince myself of this. I would not know until I either performed in battle, or froze because my programming would not let me continue.
I watched these people and I hated them. I regretted coming to Delphi. All of the anger I felt for the Unified Authority now focused itself on this congregation. And yet, none of them had done anything to harm me. Not even Archie.
Archie launched into a prayer. In that prayer he gave thanks for the planet of Delphi. Still praying, Archi
e said that Ray and I were led to the planet by God so that we could be instruments of deliverance. We were “tools in God’s hand.”
When the meeting ended, I asked Ray how he could ever have lived with these people. He shrugged his shoulders and walked away.
“Wayson,” Marianne said as she watched Ray leave, “this is Caleb. This is my boy.” She rested her hands on the shoulder of a young man who stood just a tad under six feet tall. His head came up to my nose.
“Good to meet you,” I said, trying to sound like I was comfortable around kids. I did not know what to say to the boy.
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Harris,” said Caleb.
And then we had an awkward moment when none of us knew what to say next. Archie came and tapped me on the shoulder. “May I speak with you?” he asked.
I nodded, grateful for the escape.
Archie led me to a quiet corner of the building. We could see people filing out the door. No one came to speak with us. I think they could read in Archie’s posture that he had serious business to discuss.
“Mr. Harris, I owe you an apology,” he said. Speaking in that baritone voice, he sounded truly humbled. He looked down at the ground as he spoke and rocked back and forth on the soles of his feet. “I don’t know what came over me.”
As I heard this, I could not help but remember the journal entry that the Catholic priest wrote about Sergeant Shannon. “I should not have laughed,” I said.
Archie looked up at me and smiled. “It must have looked awfully funny . . . me farting with that stunned look on my face.”
I returned the smile. “It did.”
“Mr. Harris, you and Raymond did not need to come here. No one asked you to help us, but you came. And now, once again, we are asking you to extend your generosity.”
I put up my hand. “It’s okay. Coming here was Ray’s idea. You should thank him.”
“He says it’s your ship.”
I nodded.
“Well, I wanted to thank you.” Archie turned and started to walk away.
“Can I ask you a question?” I said.
Rogue Clone Page 33
