The Clone Redemption

by Steven L. Kent

  “Why help us?” I asked. “Why not the Unifieds?”

  “I’m not taking sides,” said Freeman.

  “The hell you’re not,” I said. “We’re about to attack a Unified Authority boat. If you don’t care who wins, you don’t belong on this ride.”

  I trusted Freeman though he had been vague about his loyalties. Freeman was not the type who started the mission as your friend, then shot you in the back. He made his alliances public and sniped his targets from a mile away. In my experience, Freeman’s loyalty was never in question.

  “I don’t care about sides, just saving lives,” Freeman said. “That’s it. It’s not about loyalty. The only planet the Unifieds care about is Earth; you’re out to save what’s left of the galaxy.”

  “What’s left of the galaxy . . .” Before the first alien invasion, the Unified Authority had 180 colonized planets scattered around the Milky Way. The aliens “sleeved” 178 of them. The Enlisted Man’s Empire, a nation composed of the cloned military that the Unified Authority had ejected, reestablished contact with 23 of those planets before the aliens began incinerating rescued planets.

  Freeman’s entire family had been on the first planet the Avatari, the aliens, incinerated. Having lost everyone he might have ever loved, the galaxy’s best professional killer became a self-appointed savior.

  When dealing with people like Ray Freeman, as if there were anyone else like Freeman, there is no room for ambiguity. I decided to reconfirm his motivation. “As long as we’re saving more lives than the Unifieds, you’re on our side?”

  He nodded.

  “Good enough for me,” I said, though inwardly I still had doubts. The clones of the Enlisted Man’s Empire had been bred to save the lives of natural-borns, and the Unified Authority had thanked us for it with one betrayal after another. I felt a need to save the natural-born residents of our planets, but I could not come up with any logical reason to do it.

  Satisfied that I could trust Freeman for now, I turned my attention to the mission at hand. “Cutter, are the traps in position?” I asked over the commandLink.

  Asking that question was my form of fidgeting. Captain Don Cutter was a good officer, not the kind of man who left things undone. Still, we were dealing with an invisible foe, and we would only get one shot at the bastards. It was one of those pivotal moments on which the future hung. If we failed to bag that spy ship, the war would end before it began.

  “Yes, sir,” said Cutter. He spoke in a whisper.

  Five transports floated within a few hundred yards of the satellite. They were not debris from the graveyard of ships but fully functional birds Cutter had placed himself. One of the transports carried a team of engineers. Freeman and I sat in the kettle of the second. The others sat facing away from the satellite, their rear hatches open, their kettles carefully packed with explosives. When the spy ship lowered her shields, we would use these transports like old-fashioned cannons.

  The bombs were not especially powerful. We needed to cripple the spy ship, not decapitate her. I didn’t care if the crew lived or died; I didn’t owe the bastards. The ship’s computers, on the other hand, they mattered.

  Five million people had just died on Terraneau, and millions more had their necks on the chopping block on other planets. The key to saving them was on those computers. We could not win the war with the aliens; but armed with the right information, we might survive it.

  “How long has it been since you detected the anomaly?” I asked Cutter.

  “Fifty-two minutes, sir,” he said.

  Fifty-two minutes, I thought. Fifty-two minutes to travel fourteen million miles, either the bastards are taking their time or they’ve figured us out. In conventional travel, U.A. cruisers topped out at a speed of thirty-eight million miles per hour. Traveling the fourteen million miles from the anomaly should have taken less than half an hour.

  “Maybe they know we’re here.” I said the words out loud but meant them for myself.

  “Not likely,” said Cutter.

  Listening over the interLink, Freeman heard every word we said but did not comment. He lived in a world of absolutes. Either the spy ship was coming, or she was not. He saw no value in second-guessing the situation.

  I looked back at the video screen and saw nothing but empty space. The satellite was so small that it did not even appear on my screen. A little bubble of light represented the area around it.

  “Mars, are your men ready?” I asked on a different frequency. Mars, Lieutenant Scott Mars, ran my corps of Navy engineers. I would have preferred using a demolitions team on this mission, but Mars’s men were handy with explosives.

  “Yes, sir. You stop the ship, sir, and we’ll kick her doors in,” he said.

  “Minimal damage,” I reminded him for what might have been the hundredth time.

  “You said you wanted a hole,” he reminded me.

  “Right,” I said.

  “If you know a way to put a hole in a ship without doing damage . . .”

  “I take your point.”

  “We’ll keep the damage to a minimum, sir,” said Mars.

  Cutter interrupted us. “It’s a go!”

  Nothing had changed on my screen. The ash-choked atmosphere of Terraneau still showed in one corner of the screen. Our transports still hid at the edge of the debris.

  I did not see the spy ship. Of course I didn’t see her, not yet at least. But the spy ship must have been in place beside the satellite, and her crew must have lowered her shields or Cutter would not have sent that message. His sensors detected energy fluctuations.

  Cutter detonated the bombs in the three open transports, firing a barrage of bearings and shrapnel at the invisible target. In the silence of space, the detonations made no noise; but the explosions flashed and vanished on my video screen.

  Had it been a civilian ship caught in that storm, the debris would have broken her to pieces. The spy ship took the beating and survived. Her stealth generators failed, and she came into view. Air and flames leaked from small holes in her hull, and a large outer panel had been ripped from her bow, all cosmetic damage that would nonetheless prove fatal for her crew.

  The ship was shaped like the head of a gigantic spear, fifty feet wide at her stern and two hundred feet long. Tiny electrical eruptions burst across her cylindrical hull. That bird would need repairs before she flew again. No problem. Mars’s engineers could repair her.

  Our ambush nearly sheared off one of her three aft engines. It hung limp at an odd angle, like an arm in a cast. Liquid fuel escaped from the back of the engine, flying into space in bubbles. If the pilot of the spy ship tried to light the other engines, he’d ignite a fire that would consume the entire ship; but judging by the damage to the bridge, I did not worry about survivors among the flight crew. The bridge had gone dark, and the spy ship wasn’t going anywhere.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “We’re up,” I told Freeman, though he was already moving toward the sled. A flatbed hauling device used for spacewalks, the sled looked like a scale for weighing cattle. It had a ten-foot-long base lined with tiny booster rockets. It did not have walls or rails or even a dashboard, only a column with handles for steering.

  We climbed onto the sled, Freeman driving. Freeman always drove. A moment later, he had the boosters fired, and we hovered down the ramp at the rear of the transport, traveling at the sled’s top speed of ten miles per hour.

  And there was the spy ship, long and gray and sleek, little bursts of air emanating from her many wounds. Parts of the ship had gone dark, but light showed from some of her viewports.

  Ahead of us, the team of engineers assigned to open the ship approached the hull on a sled as well. They drifted along the fuselage, finally stopping behind the darkened maw of the bridge. They worked quickly, using a laser saw to slice a five-foot hole into the side of the ship.

  Had the debris we fired at the spy ship not already lacerated her hull, that door would have exploded from the ship in a pressure-bl
asted burst of oxygen; but any atmospheric pressure had already leaked out.

  “Now we know how we’re going to get in,” I told Freeman.

  He puttered our sled toward the hole. As we drew nearer, the spy ship no longer looked so remarkably small. She was three stories tall. I reached out an armor-covered hand and ran my fingers along an undamaged stretch of hull as we pulled up to the opening.

  For his purposes, Freeman only needed to salvage a specific communications computer; but I wanted the entire ship. My goals were more military-minded. I would not throw away a ship that was both invisible and self-broadcasting no matter how damaged.

  Under normal circumstances, Freeman and I would have used particle-beam weapons when entering a disabled ship. This time we brought fléchette-firing S9 stealth pistols. He was concerned about a communications computer; I worried about everything else. Lieutenant Mars would need to fix everything we broke if we ever planned to fly this ship. Hit a computer or a circuit panel with a fléchette, and you may get lucky. The dart could pass through without hitting vital organs. Anything hit with a particle beam would end up a pile of molten metal.

  Using a magnetic clamp, Freeman anchored our sled to the hull of the ship, and I launched myself in through the door. Emergency lights flashed along the ceiling of the mostly darkened main corridor. This was the spine of the ship, a hall that led from the bridge to the galley.

  When the hull of a capital ship is punctured, emergency bulkheads slide into place to prevent the depressurization from shooting sailors into space. In theory, the bulkheads created pressurized safety compartments in which sailors could wait for the atmospheric pressure to stabilize. In practice, the bulkheads created death chambers. Sometimes, sailors got lucky, and the bulkheads sealed them into compartments with armor or rebreathers. Usually, they didn’t. The bulkheads opened once the atmosphere equalized, which meant that someone had patched the holes or that the atmosphere had bled out completely.

  If the emergency bulkheads were still in place, we might find crew members trapped in the various compartments. If they had already retracted, we might run into armed sailors hoping for a little revenge.

  Using night-for-day vision, I looked toward the bridge. Cruisers don’t really have bridges; they have oversized cockpits. I saw no signs of life. I looked toward the aft of the ship.

  “The emergency doors have retracted,” I told Freeman, Mars, and Cutter on an open frequency. The ship would need extensive repairs. We’d miscalculated the damage when we set the trap, and we did not have a working shipyard for making repairs. I began to have doubts about Lieutenant Mars’s ability to resurrect this spy ship.

  Freeman drew his pistol as he entered the ship. His desire to save lives en masse would not prevent him from killing anyone who got in his way. He floated through the hole like a ghost passing through a wall. “Any signs of life?” he asked.

  “Not on this deck,” I said.

  There were a couple of bodies, men iced up like statues. The smaller debris must have flushed out through the holes. Looking down the hall, I saw empty floors and battered walls.

  “Do you have any idea where they stowed your computer?” I asked.

  Not much of a conversationalist, even in the best of times, Freeman said, “Second deck.” I should have guessed as much. The Unifieds usually housed the spy gear and communications equipment on that deck.

  “Are we looking for anything in particular?” Ships like that one might have a thousand different computers on board.

  “It might be attached to a broadcast apparatus,” he said.

  “A broadcast computer? You’re looking for a specking broadcast computer?” I asked. In my experience, broadcast computers were strictly navigational tools, and they were big.

  “Not the main broadcast engine. This will be attached to a small, secondary broadcast engine.”

  That made sense. The Mogats, an extinct band of terrorists who had plunged the Unified Authority into a costly civil war, established a pangalactic communications network using ships equipped with tiny broadcast engines to route their signals.

  We might have knocked out the spy ship’s air and lights, but her gravity generator still worked. We were standing, not floating above the floor.

  “This wreck may be beyond repair,” said Freeman.

  I had the same fear. Deployed properly, a ship like this could turn the course of a war. I was just about to tell Lieutenant Mars to send over some engineers when I glimpsed the glow just beyond the next bulkhead.

  “There’s a live one,” I told Freeman, not that he needed the heads-up. Always aware of everything around him, Freeman held his S9 out as he moved to cover.

  In a calm voice, he said, “Shielded armor.” He did not say “damn shielded armor” or “specking shielded armor,” just “shielded armor,” because he seldom wasted time assigning values and judgments.

  The bastard walked right up the hall showing no fear at all. He might have been a Marine or sailor, but he was wearing the shielded combat armor of a Unified Authority Marine, the new shielded armor that the Unified Authority created after expelling us clones from its military. Knowing that we had no weapons that could penetrate his ethereal electromagnetic coat, the cocky son of a bitch walked right up to the hole we had created as an entrance and casually surveyed the area.

  I hid behind a storage locker. Freeman knelt beside a desk.

  The man did not carry a gun. The shielding prevented him from holding external weapons. That did not leave him unarmed. A fléchette-firing tube ran along the top of his right sleeve.

  I needed a better hiding place. If the bastard spotted me, his depleted uranium fléchettes would cut through the locker, through me, and probably through the bulkhead behind me as well. Even a shot through the arm would be fatal since the fléchettes were coated with a neurotoxin.

  “Get ready to run,” I told Freeman. “I’m going to hit him with a grenade.” The shrapnel would not penetrate his shielding, but the percussion from the blast would still knock him on his ass.

  Freeman did not respond.

  Scanning the cabin, his right arm out straight and slightly bent at the wrist, the man zeroed in on my hiding spot without seeing me. The bastard probably was a Marine, but a new Marine. It was hard to believe what passed as a Marine in the Unified Authority military.

  In a situation like this, a real Marine would have shot first and checked later. This guy lacked that kind of instinct; but dressed in combat armor and waving a fléchette gun, he was still dangerous. I’d seen armor like his in action. The fléchette gun could fire thirty shots per second. The darts were tiny splinters. He probably had a thousand rounds packed in a pocket on his sleeve.

  I made ready to throw my grenade.

  “You want this ship in one piece?” Freeman asked.

  “If you have a better idea . . .” I started.

  Freeman pulled a thumb-sized device from his ammunition belt and slid it onto the desk.

  Speaking over the interLink, Freeman said, “Look at the floor and don’t look up.” I had just enough time to avert my eyes before his device lit the area so brightly that the floor looked bleached beneath my knee.

  The man in the Marine armor pivoted around and reached out with both hands like a drunk groping down a dark alley. He’d looked into the light before the tint shields had formed on his visors, and it temporarily blinded him. A moment later, the sensors in his visors would detect the lumens from Freeman’s lamp, but by then it would be too late.

  I looked away from the lamp to keep the tint shields from blocking my vision as I followed Freeman around the Marine and down the corridor. Freeman stopped long enough to place another light to shine at the man from the opposite direction. Now the bastard would be blinded until he groped his way out of the trap.

  We ran down the corridor, hugging the walls in case the blinded Marine tried to shoot us. A short way down the corridor, we found stairs leading to the lower decks. I figured we would search together, wa
tching each other’s back. I figured wrong. Starting down the stairs, Freeman said, “Stall him.”

  “Stall him?” I asked.

  “Keep him busy while I look for the computer.”

  As far as I knew, I was the highest-ranking officer in the Enlisted Man’s military. I didn’t take orders from anyone ... anyone but Freeman. He knew more about the computer than I did.

  “Got any suggestions about how to keep him busy without getting myself killed?” I asked as I watched him disappear down the stairs.

  Questions like that could lead to all kinds of smart-ass answers, but Ray Freeman did not have a mind for humor. He said, “Call out if you get trapped,” and vanished down the stairs.

  Trapped, I thought to myself. I might have said it out loud as well. The thought resonated. I was on a relatively small ship, a hundred thousand miles from the nearest planet, fighting a Marine in armor my weapons could not penetrate. I was trapped.

  The glare died out at the other end of the corridor. The Marine must have found Freeman’s lamps and smashed them, leaving the long hall dark except for the flash of the emergency lights and the glow of his armor.

  Hoping to catch the bastard’s attention, I aimed my S9 and fired a few shots in his direction. The fléchettes were meant as a message. Even if they hit him, they would do no harm. But the stupid bastard didn’t even notice the darts when they hit him.

  Needing to grab his attention, I stepped into the open, catching the silly bastard by surprise. I fired three shots that hit him square in the face, then jumped down the first flight of stairs and waited for him to chase me.

  Mission accomplished.

  The Marine came after me; but when he reached the top of the stairs, he stopped. So he had sufficient brain cells to sense a trap, big specking deal. Even monkeys hide when they sense danger. I waited for the bastard to start down the stairs. When he didn’t, I cautiously climbed back up to see what had happened.

  Hoping to ambush me, the stupid son of a bitch had waited in an open hatch at the top of the stairs. I spotted him easily enough. The light from his shielded armor glowed like a moon.