The ensign led me out of the launch bay and down the corridor. I studied the walls, the ceiling, the lights. Everything looked familiar. With the exception of the orphanage, I had spent more time on this ship than anyplace else in the universe.
Back when I served on the Kamehameha, they’d called the lowest deck “Marine Camp.” On that level we had our own barracks, gymnasiums, and training grounds. Marine clones caught on other decks of the ship were apt to receive rude treatment by sailors, officers and clones alike, who considered them nothing more than cargo.
During my day, Marine Camp was home to two thousand sea soldiers. Walking these halls during business hours, you would see men in fatigues drilling or jogging, or rushing to the firing range. Eighty percent of them were general-issue clones—five-foot-ten and stocky, with a full head of brown hair, brown eyes, and a light complexion.
Now the deck belonged to Navy SEALs. Some men wore fatigues, and some wore jumpsuits. They were short, maybe five-five. The few that did not shave their heads had stubbly light hair. They all had dark skin, and fingers that came to sharp points.
They trained differently, too. In battle, Marines marched up the street and shot everything that got in their way. SEALs specialized in stealth and infiltration. I’d seen their work. They could sneak up behind you, slit your throat, and slip away into the night before you gurgled your last breath.
From what I could see, there were no officers among them. Men sauntered up and down halls in small groups. They talked quietly. Everyone had the same face, the same tan, the same brantoo on his forearm—a map of the six arms of the galaxy with banners above and below. The banner above said “NAVY SEALS.” The banner below said “THE FINAL SOLUTION.” The banners and each of the arms of the Milky Way were branded into their forearms, then dye was injected into the wound to add color. Brand the pattern and color the skin, and you end up with an embossed tattoo. I have never felt the need to get a brantoo, though having one is considered a mark of machismo.
I could not get over the feeling of déjà vu as we walked the halls. Oh, the layout had been changed a bit, and the clones did not look like the clones with whom I served, but I still recognized the rec room and mess hall. When we passed by the door to my former barracks, I wanted to stop and peer in. Finally, the ensign delivered me to a small briefing room.
The SEAL who came to the door and saluted us wore a star and three red stripes on his arms. That made him a master chief petty officer. He had gone as far as he could go in the noncommissioned ranks. In the world of cloned SEALs, this man was the ultimate authority.
“Colonel Harris, this is Illych. He pretty much runs things down here,” the ensign said.
This was the first time I had seen a Boyd clone so close without fighting him. I had not realized exactly how ugly they would be. He had a small mouth and almost no lips. A thick ridge of bone ran along the tops of his eye sockets. That ridge would offer protection in hand-to-hand combat. I knew from experience that it made them hell with a head butt.
I stood ten inches taller than Illych. Looking down and trying to hide my nervousness, I returned his salute. I had seen Boyd clones in action. They killed without hesitation.
“Illych,” I said, using the bored voice that officers use when addressing enlisted men.
“Colonel,” Illych said.
“Ensign, perhaps Mr. Illych and I could have a word,” I said.
The ensign saluted, turned, and left us. During my tour as an active Marine, I had two actions in which I fought clones of Illych’s make. Luck played a large part in my survival. No one and nothing I have ever seen scared me quite so much as Boyd clones.
Illych seemed to recognize me. I thought I saw tension in his face. The intense look in his eyes reminded me of a pit bull guarding its den, but a slight grin played on his lips. He had a mysterious Cheshire Cat smile that was too big to disregard and too small to label as insubordination.
I tried to ignore that smirk as we sat to discuss my orders, but I kept coming back to it. “Is there something on your mind, Chief?” I asked.
“You’re a Liberator clone,” Illych said.
Feeling a little nervous, I said, “Nothing gets past you Boyd clones,” hoping to put Illych in his place. To the contrary, however, his grin only broadened.
“You know, Colonel, Admiral Huang always referred to us as ‘Special Operations clones.’ We were never called Adam Boyd clones. There was a clone from our outfit who went by the name Adam Boyd, but the official term was ‘Special Operations clone.’
“Interesting thing about Adam Boyd, Colonel. He was killed in a tough-man competition on an Earth island called Oahu. That was our original base of operations.
“Have you ever been to the Hawaiian islands?” Illych asked.
I could feel the muscles in my stomach tensing. My sphincter had probably shrunk to the size of a pin. We were getting far afield, but this had to be resolved. “As a matter of fact, I have.”
“So you’ve been to Hawaii, sir. May I ask, is that where you got that scar over your eye?”
I had a half-inch-thick scar over my left eye. It made a bald stripe across my eyebrow. “That is correct,” I said.
“A swimming accident?” Illych asked.
“Not swimming,” I said.
“Rock-climbing accident?” Illych asked.
“Not exactly. I was at a place called Sad Sam’s Palace,” I said.
“I’ve heard of the place,” Illych said. “Don’t they hold tough-man competitions there on Friday nights?”
“Yes, they do. As it turns out, I was there on a Friday night. I went to watch the fights, but I got suckered into entering.”
The petty officer sat still and silent for several seconds, that strange grin unchanged as he studied me. I could not tell what went through his mind. For all I knew, he had been in the audience watching as I beat his brother clone to death. Time passed as we sat and regarded each other, neither of us wanting to be the one to end the silence.
I pulled out the orders Admiral Brocius had given me and slid them across the table. They glided across the slick surface, coming to a stop in front of Illych. Without saying a word, he picked them up and read them to himself. Then he looked up, that grin still in place, and said, “Got anything exciting in mind, sir?”
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
Space is not black. Looking into a night sky or staring out the portholes of some large starship, it’s easy to think that outer space is black. It’s not black. It’s clear. It is so wide and immense and open that it seems to crowd around you, but only because the human mind cannot comprehend the length of a single light-year, let alone a hundred thousand light-years.
An enemy ship could easily hide in the vastness of space. With their charcoal-colored hulls, Mogat ships could slip into an empty pocket of space and vanish.
I took a team of SEALs with me to view the battlefield where the Mogats had made short work of the Outer Perseus Fleet.
Inside the explorer, an unarmed vessel, the SEALs had a good reason to feel nervous. Designed for scientific expeditions, the explorer’s top speed was under ten million miles per hour. Its broadcast engine needed a full twenty minutes to recharge between broadcasts. Mogat battleships and cruisers had a top speed of thirty million miles per hour. They could charge their broadcast engines in eight minutes. If the Mogats spotted us, they could outrun and outshoot us. If it came to a battle, we might as well have been flying in a coffin.
Considering the number of ships Admiral Porter lost, his battle with the Mogats took place on a relatively condensed field. A swarm of dead fighters floated in a tight formation around our ship. Looking from the deck of a battleship or a fighter carrier, the dead fighters might have looked like the carcasses of insects caught in an old spiderweb. Looking through the window of a small explorer with no armor and no shields, the broken ships looked ominous. Our explorer might have been five times the size of those fighters. They did not look so small from where I
now sat.
Bigger wrecks loomed in the distance. No lights showed through their portholes, and their observation decks were dark. We passed within a couple hundred feet of a U.A. fighter carrier. I could see its fatal wounds. Ten-foot-wide holes dotted the front section of its bow. The big ship hung motionless.
“They’re like ghosts,” Illych said as he fastened his armor. He looked tense as he checked and rechecked his gear.
Maybe it was SEAL culture or maybe it was in their programming, but Adam Boyds behaved differently than Marines before combat. General-issue clones hid their nerves behind crude jokes and loud boasting as they waited for the doors to open on a mission. Clones who were too scared to bluff became sullen and sometimes despondent. These guys carried on quiet conversations. They talked about sports or plans for the next time they took leave. Did they feel nervous at all? I wondered. Fighting in open space would take them out of their element.
Marines wore armor in all combat situations. SEALs did not. They had armor for deep-space operations, but I doubt they found much use for it. While I practically jumped into my armor, they moved more tentatively. They fastened their armor on one piece at a time. Watching them, I was reminded of a swimmer climbing into cold water. I wondered if their helmets made them claustrophobic.
Working in armor did not make me nervous, but the derelict fighters floating around our ship gave me a shiver. The explorer pushed through this graveyard at a slow drift, giving us a good look at each broken craft as we slid by. Around us, everything was silence, stillness, and death.
The old sailors who traveled Earth’s seas were said to have loved the ocean. The great captains said they were married to the sea or called the sea their mistress. Modern sailors held no such fantasies about outer space. Space did not love or hate, it simply killed anything it touched.
“Pardon me, sir, but what are we looking for out here?” one of the Boyd clones asked. So far, the Boyd clones kept to themselves mostly. It took a moment before I realized that someone had asked me a question.
The man who had approached me had scars around his mouth and nose. Several white lines streaked his lips and faded into his chin. All of the Boyds bore scars. They were inevitable when you did not wear armor in battle.
“Sir,” the clone repeated, “what are we looking for on the Mogat ship?” If this SEAL was scared, he hid it well. I would have described him as “on edge,” but not scared.
“I want their broadcast computer for openers,” I said. “If we can figure out where their ships have been, we might be able to drop in on the Mogats’ home base.”
The Boyd nodded. I did not need to elaborate about what treasures that computer might hold. If the boys back in Naval Intelligence could tap into its databanks, assuming the databanks had survived the battle, we might find enough information to win the war.
Functioning battleships give off virtual beacons that identify their name and fleet. According to Admiral Porter’s report, a derelict Mogat battleship lay somewhere in this mess; but the ship’s computers had all gone dark. We could not locate the beacon, so we had to fly past every wreck and identify it by sight.
“Colonel Harris,” a voice called over the intercom.
“Have you got something?” I asked.
“We found their ship,” the pilot said.
“I’m on my way,” I said. I turned to Illych. “You want to come up?”
He nodded.
The explorer had three distinct compartments—a cockpit, a cabin for passengers, and a cargo area/engine room. The SEALs had moved to the cargo hold waiting to deploy, leaving the cabin empty.
One of the chief uses of this particular ship was space cartography. It had an all-glass cockpit. Looking at the view from the cockpit felt like floating in space. The only light in the pilot’s area came from the low glow of the instrumentation.
“It’s that one over there,” the pilot said, pointing at a huge wreck. The explorer moved very slowly past the wreckage of a Tomcat, nudging the crumpled fuselage out of its way.
Off to the right, I saw the target. At first it looked more like a shadow than a battleship. It was a black hole in the middle of a field of stars. Then I recognized the shape—the bulbous bow and the wide-diamond hull. I did not actually see the ship. I saw the shape of its silhouette against a backdrop of stars.
Illych asked, “How do we get in?”
“That’s your problem,” the pilot said. “My job is to bring you here. I’ve done my part.”
“We look for an open door,” I said.
Illych nodded. As he turned to leave the cockpit, he said, “I thought you would say something along those lines.”
We went back to the cargo hold and put on our helmets. The SEALs wore armor made specifically for them. My armor was green. Their armor had smart camouflage. As they maneuvered, sensors in their helmets would read the color and lighting in the environment, changing the color of their suits. There were limitations, the armor could only match basic coloration. It offered camouflage, not invisibility.
We stepped onto the cargo elevator at the very back of the ship. It lifted us into an air lock in the roof, where we boarded a ten-man space sled. There were only seven of us, and the SEALs were small. It might have held twelve of them.
“Are you ready, Colonel?” the pilot asked over the interLink connection in my helmet.
“Open the lock,” I said.
The metal dome that covered the air lock peeled back slowly to reveal the stars behind it. I hit the release button to retract the sleeves that clamped our sled in place. With a small burst of air, the sled dislodged from the explorer and lifted into open space.
Normally we would attach jetpacks to our armor before traversing open space. We did not on this occasion. Once we entered the derelict battleship, we would likely enter unstable areas with radiation and chemical contamination. Who could predict what we would find on that ship? We could not risk wearing jetpacks.
We had half a mile to traverse between the explorer and the battleship. As we covered the silent distance, some of the Boyd clones played their search beams along the hull of the derelict ship. The hull looked smooth and untouched from what I could see. Their lights cast yard-wide circles that bleached the ship’s armor gray. The circles of light stretched and deformed as they played over the various portholes, gun placements, and hatches.
“It doesn’t look like there are any open doors on the top side, sir,” Illych’s voice came over the interLink.
“Not that I can see,” I agreed. “Not that I can see.” I sighed. These things never came easy.
Something else was missing. Not only did I not see any breaks in the hull, I did not see scorch marks. That part of the battleship looked pristine, as if it had never been hit. We flew over the top of the diamond-shaped hull. Because of the curve of its fuselage, the battleship’s bulky wings seemed to dissolve into space.
We flew over the bridge. On a ship like this, the bridge more closely resembled government offices than the wheelhouses of the old seafaring ships. There was no wheel. The navigation was handled by a set of computers. Touring the bridge of any capital ship, you would find six large computer stations. One station handled navigation, another facilitated internal and external communications, another monitored radar and tracking, and another managed the weapons systems. Gone were the days when marksmanship mattered in ship-to-ship combat.
Gone, too, were the days when specialized technicians sat around the engine monitoring its performance. Modern ships had a set of computers that constantly checked every flange and dial.
The final computer sat in the command station. That computer lifted information from the other five and organized it. On working ships, you would find groups of sailors clustered around each of these stations. Looking into the viewport of this wreck as we flew by, I saw nothing but darkness.
We dropped down the front edge of the ship. In space, of course, down is a relative thing. With no gravity determining what was up and what was
down, I set my bearings by focusing on the battleship. We had just flown across its top side, and now we dropped down to examine its underbelly.
“What happened here?” Illych asked.
An enormous gash ran half the length of the ship. It almost looked as if some giant had grabbed the battleship by its wings, stabbed a knife into its underside, then slashed it across its belly.
“Shit. Someone specked them over bad,” I said.
“Yes, sir,” Illych said.
Illych’s voice had an offended tone to it. It took me a moment to decipher what might have bothered him. As I thought about it, I realized I had never heard Illych swear. None of the Special Operations clones did. They might slip up behind you and slit your throat, but they would not use bad language. Admirable…very specking admirable.
As we dropped under the battleship, its keel extended over us like a pitch-black sky. The breach across it looked like a gigantic crater. Four of the SEALs played their lights across it exposing a forty-foot-wide gash through which a careful pilot might successfully fly a small ship. From the look of things, the outer shell around these wounds had simply melted away. Bubbles, some popped and some whole, pocked the blackened edges of the gash.
As we flew toward the opening, one of the SEALs shined his light directly into it, illuminating the ship’s skeletal girders. The light uncovered torn wires and something that I first thought might be a ladder and later realized was the aluminum framing between the ceiling of one deck and the floor of the next. The gash through the hull extended up three decks of the ship.
So this is what it’s like when you die out in space, I thought to myself. “There’s our open door,” was what I said. I steered the sled into the gash.
Sitting in an enclosed spaceship, you develop misconceptions about how things work in space. In a ship, you get the feeling that you can simply cut the gas and coast to a stop. I always envisioned pilots stepping on the brakes to stop their ships the way I would in a car. When we studied space combat in boot camp, we trained in smaller vehicles than this sled; but those vehicles had armor plating to shield their works. I never appreciated everything that went into changing direction and coming to a stop.
The Clone Alliance Page 10
