The Clone Empire

by Steven L. Kent

  “There’s more going on out here than meets the eye,” I told Hollingsworth. “Watch.”

  “What does this have to do with the fleet?” he asked.

  Five, four . . . I continued counting silently to myself. Without answering, I aimed the rocket out the rear of the ship.

  Three, two, one . . .

  There was a barely visible blue-white flash as the rear shield of the transport came off-line. I fired the RPG.

  Rifles, pistols, and rockets shoot perfectly well in space. If anything, projectiles fly faster and travel along a much more rigid trajectory without the distractions of friction and gravity. In a breathable atmosphere, the little rocket might never have broken the sound barrier. Here in space, it lit off at Mach 2 and would have kept at that rate forever, or at least until it bumped into a meteor or a ship or a planet. On this day, it found something else.

  “Shield up,” I told the pilot over a direct link.

  “What is this about?” asked Mars, who clearly wanted more than a demonstration of physics in space.

  The explosion took place about five hundred miles away, straight ahead of us, in the vast emptiness. Some of the shrapnel came back and struck our shields, creating sparks against the invisible pane of electrical energy.

  “What was that?” asked Mars. “What just happened?”

  “Gentlemen, we are at the edge of a battlefield. The area around us is crowded with broken ships and debris, and yet the space we are facing is almost entirely empty. Do either of you have any idea why no ships entered this zone?” I asked.

  “You said ‘almost empty,’ ” Hollingsworth observed. “What do you mean by ‘almost’?”

  “There’s a broadcast station in the center of it,” I said.

  “A broadcast station?” asked Mars. “Are you saying Warshaw broadcasted the fleet?” Gary Warshaw was the clone sailor the Unifieds had promoted to command the Scutum-Crux Fleet.

  “That can’t be,” said Hollingsworth. “The Broadcast Network was shut down during the Mogat Wars, that was years ago.”

  Hollingsworth missed the big picture, but Mars pieced it together. “The broadcast engines weren’t broken, they just needed power. Warshaw must have installed generators on the station.”

  “That’s my guess,” I said.

  “If he got the station running, he could have made it out with hundreds of ships,” Hollingsworth said.

  “Twenty-one carriers, seventy-two battleships, and who knows how many frigates and cruisers,” I said.

  The visor in my combat armor had equipment for surveillance, reconnaissance, and battle, such as lenses that could illuminate the darkness, see over long distances, and detect heat. Lieutenant Mars’s soft-shelled armor had an entirely different set of lenses designed for engineers. When he whistled, and said, “The current out there is off the charts,” I knew he had run some kind of test. “How far are we from the broadcast station?”

  “Fifteen hundred miles,” I said.

  “And no ships got any closer than this?” Mars asked.

  “Not much,” I said.

  There was a pause, then Mars asked, “Does the field go all the way around the station?”

  “As far as I can tell, it forms a perfect sphere,” I said.

  “Warshaw must have supercharged the broadcast engines to create a hot zone,” Mars said.

  “If you say so,” I said. I was a combat Marine. What did I know about supercharging broadcast engines?

  “No. No, it doesn’t make sense. Why didn’t the Unifieds blast the station?” Hollingsworth asked. “They would have destroyed this station the same way the Mogats destroyed the Mars broadcast station.”

  “No, they couldn’t,” I said. “They couldn’t hit it with a torpedo. You saw what just happened to that rocket.”

  “So they would have used a particle beam or a laser,” Hollingsworth said.

  I handed Hollingsworth a shoulder-held laser cannon, and said, “Be my guest.”

  “What about our shields?” Hollingsworth asked.

  I had already asked the pilot to lower them. I told him, “They’re already down.”

  Hollingsworth aimed the cannon out the back of the transport and fired. The silver-red beam disappeared only a few hundred feet from the ship.

  “How did you do that?” Hollingsworth asked.

  “The current from the broadcast station disassembled it,” Mars said.

  “It what?” asked Hollingsworth.

  “Disassembled it. Pulled it apart,” said Mars. “We used to communicate across the galaxy sending laser signals over the Broadcast Network. The current from the broadcast station must translate light waves.”

  “So what? We fire a laser at the station, and it comes out in another galactic arm?” Hollingsworth asked.

  I shrugged my shoulders, an action made almost invisible by my combat armor.

  “Not without an encoded address built into the signal to specify where it is supposed to go,” Mars said. “Without an address, the waves stay broken apart.”

  “Have you tried contacting the people on the other side?” Hollingsworth asked.

  “What do you suggest, shouting into it? Maybe we could float a tin cup on a really long string into the zone and see if someone picks up on the other side,” I said.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Why didn’t the Unifieds send ships in after them?” Hollingsworth asked, as the transport doors closed.

  The mood in the kettle had changed. Hollingsworth, who began the flight hostile, had suddenly become my pal. Lieutenant Mars, who’d boarded the transport confused about the fate of the Scutum-Crux Fleet, began dispensing answers about broadcast physics as if he had invented the technology.

  “You wouldn’t want to enter a hot zone unless you had a ship designed for network travel. The current from a zone like this would overload the engines in a self-broadcasting ship.”

  The Unified Authority Navy’s new fleet was entirely composed of self-broadcasting warships.

  “What would happen if one of their ships did go in?” Hollingsworth asked.

  “It would cause a massive explosion,” Mars explained.

  “How massive?” asked Hollingsworth.

  “Massive,” Mars said, giving off the air of one who knows.

  “You mean like a nuclear explosion?” asked Hollingsworth. Like any good Marine, he wanted things spelled out in combat terms.

  Sounding more like a college professor than a boot-strapped engineer, Mars said, “Nuclear bombs come in all sizes, don’t they? I suspect it would be the equivalent of a very small nuclear device.”

  That was bullshit, of course. Mars had no idea what he was talking about.

  The pilot addressed me on an open interLink channel that Mars and Hollingsworth would hear as well. “General, the air and heat are online,” he said. “You can remove your helmet.”

  I thanked him and removed my lid. Mars and Hollingsworth followed.

  A dark emotion seemed to come over Hollingsworth. The excitement left his face. He sat in the shadows, quiet and sullen. Finally, he said, “I don’t see how this changes anything. We know how they got away, but we can’t go after them. I mean, what are we going to do, put a message in a bottle and toss it through the zone?”

  “Not a message in a bottle,” I said. “I’m going to fly a ship into the hot zone.”

  They greeted this statement with the kind of silence generally reserved for people discussing suicide. Hollingsworth broke the silence. “You’re joking, right?” he asked, though he must have known I meant what I had said. “Unless you have a ship we don’t know about, the only thing you have that flies is a transport.”

  “He’s right,” Mars said. “Only an idiot would enter a broadcast zone in a transport.”

  I wished he hadn’t added that last line. Ray Freeman, my old business partner, and I once tried to modify a transport to self-broadcast. Freeman got electrocuted, and we ended up stranded in space.

  I held up my hands
, palms out, and said, “No working ships up my sleeves, but there’s a whole fleet out there.”

  Hollingsworth shot me an incredulous look, and asked, “You mean the wrecks?”

  “One man’s wreckage may well be another man’s pangalactic barge,” I said.

  Hollingsworth laughed, and said, “You’re going to ride a wreck into a broadcast zone? That’s suicide.”

  “Do you have any better ideas?” I asked.

  He thought it over and shook his head, then admitted, “No, sir, I don’t.”

  Still sounding enthusiastic, Mars offered, “I’ll work out the details.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  It took Mars and his engineers more than a month to work out the kinks. That meant that a month had passed since the night I promised Ava I would take her with me when I left Terraneau. I meant what I said when I made the promise; but now that I knew the gory details, I needed to renege.

  In truth, I was not sure she cared either way. An indefinable coldness had entered our relationship. We did not argue, but the passion was gone. We ate meals together and we had sex, but we didn’t talk much. In her past life, she’d lived with generals and movie stars and billionaires. Was this how she ended relationships, by allowing them to dry up and blow away?

  I did not want that to happen with us. Maybe the passion was gone, but she had become an important part of my world. I did not feel passionately about my right hand, but I could not imagine living without it.

  I arrived at Ava’s house just after sunset; the last fibers of sunlight streaked across the sky, making the clouds look like the embers of a dying fire. Above the clouds, the sky dithered from paper white to a blue so dark it qualified as black. Her house was in the Norristown foothills, overlooking the city in all of its stages of repair. In the dark world below, streetlights shimmered like tracer fire. Cars crowded onto newly opened streets. From her backyard, it looked like Norristown had more cars than people.

  On this evening, I came bearing an offering for my Hollywood goddess—beer rescued from a derelict ship. She would have preferred wine, but the only way to get wine would have been through Ellery Doctorow, and sacrifice has its limits.

  I didn’t believe in fortune-telling, but I sensed negative energy in the air. I had the same feeling I got playing blackjack when I had twelve on the table and knew the next card off the deck would be worth ten.

  I went to the front door and knocked. Ava opened the door. She looked beautiful. Her hair, which she frequently wore in an organized tangle of locks and tresses, hung down over her back. She wore a red dress that left her shoulders bare and showed just the right preview of cleavage.

  “Hi, there,” she said as she let me in. Her gaze met mine for half a second, but I thought I saw sadness in her eyes.

  “I come bearing gifts,” I said, brandishing the beers. “They’re even cold.”

  She smiled, and said, “You know how to make a girl feel special,” but her voice sounded distracted, and her eyes did not quite hold with mine.

  “Is everything okay?” I asked, feeling nervous.

  Ava sighed. She thought for a moment, then finally said, “We’d better eat while the food is hot and your beers are cold.”

  Her home was small but stylish. The dining table was about the right size for an end table. She had spread a white linen cloth across the top and wedged a candle between our plates. Her china was bone white, her utensils were silver and gleamed in the candlelight.

  As we reached the table, she excused herself to get glasses for the beers. I waited for her to return before sitting down. I pulled her chair out for her, though I was not sure she wanted me to. There was something in the air, something cold and distancing.

  Ava handed me a glass, and said, “There’s a rumor going around about you leaving Terraneau.”

  “Really? Who’s spreading it?” I asked, trying to outmaneuver the truth. “I hope you’re not listening to Sarah.”

  “I didn’t hear it from Sarah. I heard about it from Julie Neberker.”

  “Who is that?” I asked. I had never heard the name.

  “She lives a few doors down,” Ava said.

  “Is she dating one of my Marines?” I asked, trying to figure out if she might have access to anything more than gossip.

  “No.”

  “You can’t take anything she says very seriously, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

  “She heard about it from Rachel Johnson. Rachel heard Sarah and Ellery joking about you leaving at a bridge party,” Ava said.

  I always knew Sarah Doctorow had a big mouth. By that time, I had confided the information about the broadcast zone to Doctorow.

  “I see,” I said. “Did they happen to give any specifics?”

  “No. All she knew was that you found a working broadcast station.”

  “I see.”

  “Are you going after the missing ships?” Ava asked.

  “I think so,” I said.

  I expected her to ask if I planned to take her with me, but she surprised me. Instead of asking about going with me, she said, “Julie says they’re not going to let you back on Terraneau once you leave.”

  “Who’s not going to let me back on?”

  She thought about that, and said, “Ellery, I guess.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “He’d need an air force to stop me. All he has is a civilian militia armed with popguns.”

  She studied my face, her olivine green eyes boring into me and seeing through my bluster. Did I see hurt in her eyes or anger? Maybe I was fooling myself, and all that was there was indifference. “I don’t think it’s just Ellery. I think Hollingsworth is with him. “

  “Hollingsworth?” I asked. I did not know what to say. I knew he didn’t like me, but he was a Marine. Marines did not turn on each other. I sat motionless, my head reeling. Our meal sat before us ignored—her food and my beers.

  “Wayson, if you come back, they might shoot you down,” she said.

  “Not likely.” I shook my head. Hollingsworth was a good Marine. He wouldn’t do that, it was not in his programming. “Not Hollingsworth. He might ignore me, but he wouldn’t shoot at me.”

  “What if he and Doctorow want to take over the planet?” she asked.

  “Now there’s an unholy alliance.” I said it as a joke. “Ellery Doctorow doesn’t want to conquer Terraneau, he wants to be elected king. He’s an idealist, not a dictator, and he’s not going to tag team with Philo Hollingsworth. It’s not just me. Doctorow thinks every Marine is a serpent in his garden of Eden.”

  “That doesn’t scare you?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Wayson, tell me the truth. Are you leaving soon?” Ava asked.

  That seemed pretty obvious at this point. I nodded.

  “How are you going to do it?”

  “It’s just like Doctorow said, there’s a working broadcast station. I’m going to ride a busted ship through it.”

  “What do you mean by ‘busted’?” Ava asked.

  “That’s classified,” I said, hoping to avoid telling her the details.

  “How busted is it, Wayson?” Ava repeated.

  “It was destroyed during the battle with the Earth Fleet,” I said. I still had no idea which ship I would ride, but whichever one it was, it would be a victim of that battle.

  “But you have it running now?” Ava asked.

  “Not exactly,” I said.

  “Not exactly?” she asked.

  I didn’t say anything. I was divulging classified information. That made me worse than Doctorow. At least he was a civilian.

  “If you haven’t repaired the ship, how are you going to fly it?”

  “Ava, that’s classified information.” I hoped the term would put her off.

  “Classified? We’re not at war, who are you trying to hide it from?” She pursed her lips and stared at me angrily, and I felt my resolve turn to mush.

  “Scott Mars is going to seal me in a der
elict ship and launch it toward the station,” I said.

  “Have you even tested to see if it’s safe?” she asked.

  “Why don’t we have this out after dinner?” I suggested. I pulled the bowl of MRE beef stew she had heated and ladled some on my plate. As the highest-ranking officer on Terraneau, I made sure Ava’s pantry was stocked with Meals Ready to Eat.

  Her voice more stern, Ava repeated herself. “Have you flown anything else into the station?”

  “A couple of grenades,” I said as I took a bite of cold stew.

  “How about something with people in it?” she asked, her voice as cold as ice and as hard as steel. “You have to send another ship through before you go yourself,” she said.

  “How will we know if it made it through?” I asked. I took another bite of stew; it needed reheating.

  “Maybe you should send a guinea pig first to see if it’s safe,” she said.

  “I suppose that’s me,” I said. Commanding officer and head guinea pig Wayson Harris. Give me enough rope, and I’ll hang myself.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Launching a derelict ship into the broadcast zone required more planning than I had anticipated.

  The first problem was finding a ship that was solid enough to stand the stresses of the electrical current. It had to be one of ours. The Unified Authority’s ships were closer to the zone; but they were all self-broadcasting, which meant they lacked the kind of insulation needed to keep me safe.

  As we mapped the battlefield, a pattern quickly emerged. While we had lost almost three times as many ships as the Unified Authority in the battle, all of the wrecks around the broadcast zone were from the Earth Fleet. They had all been destroyed from the inside out. Apparently they had entered the outer reaches of the broadcast zone and exploded when exposed to the current flowing from the broadcast station.

  Mars held a briefing to explain the situation. Using a three-dimensional holographic map to show the area, he said, “These ships marked in blue are U.A. ships. Our job would be a whole lot easier if we could send you in one of these ships, but it wouldn’t be safe.”