“What about the other ships?” asked Suzuki.
His face turning red, Yamashiro hissed the word, “Now!”
Tint shields formed on the viewport, blocking any hint of the one remaining moon. A moment later, the Sakura had broadcasted out of Solar System A-361.
He’s lost his mind, thought Takahashi. Wondering if his father-in-law was still fit for command, he asked, “How will we find the other ships?”
Slowly turning in his chair so that he faced his son-in-law, his dark eyes burning with more intensity than Takahashi had ever seen in them, Yamashiro said, “They have been destroyed.”
The video feeds were clear and mysterious.
The feed of A-361-D/Satellite 1 showed a bird’s-eye view of the deck and the surface of the moon. For a tenth of a second, maybe only a hundredth of a second, light flared across the screen. A small wisp of steam formed and dissipated. Steam and smoke vanish quickly in the absolute zero temperature and vacuum conditions of space.
Slowing the feed to five seconds per frame did not make a difference. Whatever happened, it happened so quickly that the camera on the satellite could not record it. One moment there was open space, then light appeared and vanished, then the steam appeared and dissolved.
Yamashiro played that portion of the video feed three times without saying a word.
“What was that?” asked Takahashi.
“That was the destruction of an infiltration pod,” said Yamashiro. Now that they were out of danger, he seemed drained of energy. He sat slumped in his chair, answering his son-in-law’s questions in a soft tone that could most accurately be described as defeated.
Yamashiro ran the loop again, this time even more slowly. The one-second feed lasted nearly ten minutes.
“That can’t be a pod,” Takahashi said.
Yamashiro switched to a screen that showed a battleship. One moment she lingered peaceably in space. Something happened. Like the S.I.P., the big ship did not explode. She left no debris. It was like a magician’s illusion. For just a moment, the battleship seemed to inflate, then she crumpled, folding in on herself, compressing until nothing remained except a formless wad of space-colored junk leaking tendrils of steam or smoke.
Yamashiro stared at the screen, and, in a soft, broken voice, he said, “The Onoda.”
“That cannot be,” said Takahashi. The words were a reflex. He believed his eyes. He did not place as much trust in the absolute laws of physics as he did in his father-in-law’s word.
“I can show you what happened to the Kyoto and the Yamato . They vanished the same way.”
Takahashi heard himself hyperventilating, but he could not stop. “We need to go back. We need to help them. We need to look for survivors.”
“We need to accomplish our mission,” Yamashiro replied in a hushed voice. “They sent us because we are expendable. We are not part of the Unified Authority, we are the Japanese. Our fleet and our men were the price we paid to return to Earth.”
Takahashi looked at the screen again and rewitnessed the destruction of the Onoda. It was as if the ship had melted.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Earthdate: November 21, A.D. 2517
Location: Providence Kri
Galactic Position: Cygnus Arm
Astronomic Location: Milky Way
More often than not, the Unified Authority colonized planets that came complete with continents and an oxygenated atmosphere. The Galactic Expansion Committee’s top criteria for selecting suitable locales included distance from a suitable and stable star, Earth-like size and gravity, and good galactic position.
Since the prime criteria could not be altered, they were nonnegotiable. Other preferences, such as oxygen and water were open to interpretation. Providence Kri, for instance, was something of a fixer-upper when the Unified Authority decided to colonize it. The term “Kri” was attached to planets that required terraforming—a miracle process that could convert rocks and deserts into gardens of Eden.
As I entered the bridge, I saw Providence Kri in its rotation through the view screen. Whatever the planet had looked like before the Unified Authority gave it a makeover, it certainly looked like a hospitable blue-and-green marble afterward.
Having been rescued from the Avatari by clones, the populace of Providence Kri was unfailingly loyal to the Enlisted Man’s Empire. That was good. We were too busy fighting natural-borns and aliens to lay down laws, so we trusted the residents of the various planets to govern themselves. We were military clones; our dabbling in politics never worked out the way we hoped.
Looking out of a viewport, I wondered how long we had until the Avatari turned this planet into a dust bowl as well.
In better times, Providence Kri had served as a galactic hub for the Unified Authority. In these times, it served as a galactic hub for the Enlisted Man’s Empire. The Cygnus Central Fleet, Admiral Liotta’s fleet, a fleet that included seven fighter carriers and thirty battleships, orbited the planet.
The Cygnus Central Fleet was big, but it lacked the firepower needed to defeat the Earth Fleet. The U.A.’s new generation fighter carriers and battleships were smaller, faster, and better shielded than our ships.
Liotta and an entourage of fleet officers flew out to the Churchill to meet me. We did not have time to chat. Time had become scarce.
Liotta took me and my team to Engineering, where Lieutenant Mars presented the crew with a new broadcast key. I allowed Admiral Liotta to have a key, but I did not give him a copy of the book that contained the complete set of codes and broadcast locations. The book contained hundreds of thousands of codes, pinpoint coordinates for safe broadcast areas all across the galaxy. Instead, I handed him a highly abbreviated list that included coordinates for the twenty-two remaining planets in the Enlisted Man’s Empire along with a few strategic destinations such as New Copenhagen.
“I have a pilot delivering keys and coordinate cards to every fleet,” I said. “He’ll have a key to Jolly within the hour.”
Liotta smiled, and said, “So we’re back in business,” as he glanced at the list of broadcast coordinates. Then he paused, and asked, “New Copenhagen? I thought they destroyed that planet.”
“They did.”
“Why would we want to go there?”
“That’s the point,” I said. “There’s absolutely no reason to go there. If there’s no good reason to go there, the Unifieds probably aren’t patrolling the area.”
Liotta nodded, and said, “So it’s a safe place to regroup.”
“Something like that,” I said.
I did not say good-bye to Ava. As I said before, time was scarce.
She would be safe on Providence Kri until we evacuated the planet. Once the evacuation was done, and the danger had passed, we would sit down and sort things out ... assuming she had any interest in sorting things out with me.
I had not come to Providence Kri to drop off refugees or meet with officers though I did a little of both. I came to commandeer a new ship. With her shields broken, the Churchill needed repairs or retirement, so Freeman and I transferred to a carrier named the Bolivar. I met the captain in the bridge, handed him a broadcast key, and told him to take us to New Copenhagen.
Captain Tom Mackay heard my orders, and said, “I heard the aliens scorched that planet.”
“They did,” I agreed.
“Um,” Mackay said. “I just wanted to make sure.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Shortly after the Bolivar broadcasted into the Orion Arm, Freeman and I met in a small conference room off the bridge. He brought the computer, I brought the codes, and we put in another call to the late Dr. Sweetwater. This time, more than one ghost answered the call.
Arthur Breeze stared at me from the little oblong screen of the communications computer. He sat on what must have been a standard-sized rolling lab stool. Beside him, William Sweetwater sat on an oversized barstool. Their heads were just about even, but Sweetwater’s seat came all the way up to Arthur Breeze’s ribs.
Breeze was that tall and Sweetwater that short.
Bald except for the ring of cotton-fluff fuzz that ran level with his ears, Breeze had thick glasses and teeth so big they belonged in the mouth of a horse. “When William told me about your call, I couldn’t believe it,” Breeze said, his eyes bouncing back and forth between Freeman and me. “He said you were on Terraneau when the Avatari attacked.”
“Something like that,” I said.
“We understand Terraneau was a total loss,” said Sweetwater. We’d already told Sweetwater the gory details. Apparently, he wanted us to rehash them for Breeze’s benefit. “Did you arrive too late to evacuate the planet?”
I said, “We didn’t have the barges. Andropov had no interest in evacuating Terraneau.”
The Unifieds had built a fleet of space barges that could carry 250,000 people at a time. Without those barges, it would take months to evacuate a planet.
“Why would the government leave them to die?” Breeze asked. He looked thunderstruck, his eyebrows riding halfway up his forehead and his mouth hanging slack.
Sweetwater, on the other hand, knew the answer. He sat silent, his hands pressed against his lap. William Sweetwater was both a brilliant scientist and a bureaucrat. He understood the political world.
“The local leadership declared independence when we liberated the planet. Terraneau wasn’t part of the Unified Authority,” I said, neglecting to mention that it was not part of the Enlisted Man’s Empire, either. I did not know if either scientist knew that the clones had formed their own empire. Breeze certainly didn’t.
“What did you think you could accomplish going alone?” Sweetwater asked.
“I tried to get the government to send everyone underground,” I said.
“Terraneau had a sizable population. Were there facilities for that many people?” asked Breeze.
“I don’t know. I didn’t think it through,” I admitted.
Freeman, sitting beside me, could have jumped in to add his part of the story, but he let me do the talking. As long as I didn’t give out unnecessary information, he was content.
I had the distinct feeling that Sweetwater had left Breeze in the dark about Freeman and me. He did not know that we were fugitives. As far as he knew, we were still loyal citizens.
I also got the feeling that Sweetwater did not want us to complete Breeze’s education in a single call. He cleared his throat and attempted to steer the conversation by saying, “So counting Olympus Kri and Terraneau, we’ve managed to liberate twenty-four planets so far. Is that correct?” He placed obvious emphasis on the word “we,” suggesting that I might still be part of the Unified Authority.
“Twenty-four planets including Terraneau, that’s right,” I said.
“Did any other planets wish to remain independent?” Breeze asked. He sounded painfully naïve. Tall and skinny, his eyes almost buglike behind his thick glasses, he stared into the screen, never questioning a word we said.
I was about to say no when Sweetwater said, “Didn’t I hear something about Gobi demanding independence?”
“Gobi?” I asked. Gobi, a backwater planet in the Perseus Arm, had most recently been the headquarters of the Enlisted Man’s Fleet.
“Gobi broke from the republic?” Breeze asked, thinking out loud. He ran a hand across his ring of white fluff hair. “That might explain their attitude toward the planet.”
“Whose attitude?” I asked
Breeze turned and stared into the camera, showing a profile that was nearly deformed. “Mr. Andropov’s . . . General Hill’s . . . The Joint Chiefs’ . . . We held a briefing with them a day ago. When I told them that the aliens would attack Gobi by the end of the week, they didn’t seem to care.”
“The end of the week?” I asked.
“It will happen within the next three days judging by the Tachyon D levels,” Breeze said.
Tachyon D was the harbinger of disaster. From what we could tell, the Avatari built their technology around the manipulation of tachyons—subatomic particles that moved faster than the speed of light. Before the Avatari invaded the galaxy, scientists considered tachyons a “theoretical probability.”
Once the aliens moved in on us, tachyons moved from “theoretical possibility” to “lethal reality.” With Sweetwater and Breeze spearheading the work, U.A. physicists not only learned how to detect tachyons, but apparently they’d now figured out how to classify them.
“To be honest, the Joint Chiefs haven’t shown much interest in any planet since we discovered Tachyon D levels in Earth’s atmosphere,” said Breeze.
“You found Tachyon D in Earth’s atmosphere?” I asked. I expected the aliens would work their way to Earth, but this was too fast.
“We’ve found traces of it on every habitable planet,” Sweetwater said. “The gears are definitely in motion.”
We were out of options. We were out of answers, and we were still at war with ourselves.
I had given Admiral Steve Jolly command of the Navy, but I kept Sweetwater and Breeze to myself. I did not have much of a choice in the matter. Freeman owned our only portal for reaching the scientists, and he wasn’t about to turn the device over to a fool like Jolly.
For what it was worth, I agreed with Freeman. Real or virtual, I felt a deep obligation toward the scientists. I’d served with them on New Copenhagen and seen them die with honor. In the Marine Corps, we took death, debts, and honor seriously.
We took the chain of command seriously, too. Leaving out the source of my information, I notified Admiral Jolly about the pending attack on Gobi.
“How did you come upon this information?” asked Jolly. He was on the Windsor, a fighter carrier in the Perseus Arm.
“Stray intel,” I said, hoping it would make the question go away.
“Stray intelligence?” he repeated.
“Yes, sir.”
“What exactly does that mean, Harris?” He gave me a hard look, a surveying look, maybe trying to decide whether or not to trust me.
I said, “It means that I am not willing to divulge my source.” I sat placid, relaxed, returning his inspection with a calm gaze.
A more self-confident officer would have pushed the issue. Jolly simply said, “Your stray intelligence just happens to match my findings. It turns out Gobi was the first planet we took after Terraneau. From what we know, that should make it the aliens’ next target.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“You said something about hiding underground on Terraneau. Can we do that on Gobi?”
Fat and old and something of a coward, Admiral Jolly was the quintessential survivor. He’d probably never gone a day without brushing his teeth. The idea of saving lives without risking ships and personnel appealed to officers of his kind.
“Have you ever visited Gobi, Admiral?” I asked.
“Yes, and you were there at the same time,” he said. “I attended Warshaw’s summit with Admiral Huxley.” I had not known the late Admiral Huxley. He was one of the victims of the Olympus Kri Massacre.
“I hid in a tunnel under a lake on Terraneau,” I said. “As far as I know, Gobi doesn’t have tunnels or lakes.”
Jolly said, “If I am not mistaken, Gobi Station has underground levels.” Gobi Station was the base that the late Admiral Warshaw had used as his Pentagon. “What if we evacuated people to the base?” he asked.
I considered the idea and dismissed it. “We might be able to stash a few hundred people there, but I’m not sure we’d be able to get them out after the attack. Gobi Station is made out of plastic and metal. It’s going to melt when things get hot.”
“Melt?”
“The atmospheres of Terraneau and Olympus Kri hit nine thousand degrees. Everything made out of glass, steel, or plastic ended up in a puddle,” I said.
“Nine thousand degrees?” Jolly had some idea about how the aliens operated, but he did not know the specifics. “That doesn’t sound possible. Nine thousand degrees ... how do you heat a planet to nine thousand degrees?
”
“If we knew how the bastards did it, we’d do it to them,” I said.
Jolly massaged his brow with a pudgy thumb and sausageshaped pointer finger, sitting silently as he considered his options. “How are we supposed to evacuate an entire planet?” he asked.
“Gobi’s only the first. We’ll need to evacuate all of our planets,” I pointed out. “At least we’re starting light. The population of Gobi is less than a million.”
“Do you know how many ships we’d need to transport a million civilians?”
“Four,” I said.
“You’re planning on stealing the Unifieds’ barges,” Jolly said. He sounded impressed.
“The word ‘stealing’ has such a negative connotation,” I said. “Let’s just say I plan on commandeering the barges. We’ll give them back once the emergency passes.”
“Do you even know where the barges are moored?” Jolly asked.
“Last I heard, they were orbiting Mars.”
“It sounds like you have it all worked out, General. Is that just bluster, or do you really believe you can hijack those barges?”
I laughed. “Oh, I’ll get them. The Unifieds aren’t going to shoot at us once we board the barges. They need those scows as much as we do.”
“Then what?” asked Jolly.
That question took me by surprise. I asked, “Then what ... what?”
“If I understand what you are saying, you and a small team of operatives plan to sneak behind enemy lines and board twenty-five ships that are not self-broadcasting and have no defenses. Your only protection is that the Unifieds probably won’t risk shooting at the ships, but you’re still trapped in Unified Authority space,” Jolly pointed out. “General, you haven’t thought this through.”
“The Unifieds have a temporary broadcast station orbiting Mars. They used it to broadcast the barges to Olympus Kri.”
“Are you sure it’s still there?” asked Liotta.
“Yes,” I said. In truth, I had no idea.
The Clone Redemption Page 11
