“The fighter carriers aren’t moving,” I said.
“They’re preparing to launch attack wings,” Cutter said.
“But they don’t know where we are.”
“That’s the standard procedure when you’re dealing with an invisible threat. In another minute, they will start firing particle charges.”
I stared down at the display. With their fighters launched, the Unifieds expanded their net. They had started out between the Earth and its moon; now they had spread their search beyond it.
“Particle charges?” I repeated. I thought about the rickety hull of the ship, with its many patches. “Could we withstand a direct hit?”
“Easily. They don’t use particle charges to destroy enemies; they use the charges to locate them.”
Though I did not keep current with Navy weaponry, I knew what he meant. The charges exploded in bursts of energy-seeking ionized particles that attached themselves to energy fields like the electricity in our shields. In the vacuum of space, those particles would travel thousands of miles, while techs aboard the U.A. ships traced their movements.
“What if we lowered our shields?” I asked.
“How do you feel about radiation poisoning?”
I smiled, and said, “I’m not committing suicide until I can take the Unified Authority down with me.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
Who do you trust in a time of war?
I once had a lieutenant named Thomer with a debilitating drug addiction. He used to sit through staff meetings in a near-catatonic state staring at walls, never speaking unless he was spoken to. Against my better judgment, I kept him in place during a big showdown with the Unified Authority Marines. He fought brilliantly and saved lives.
The first time I had met Ray Freeman, I wrote him off as a thug. Now I considered him my closest friend. I needed more friends.
Freeman and I sat in an empty transport. On a ship as small as the cruiser, the transports were the only place you could go to be alone. Freeman sat in the pilot’s chair. “Have you reached Sweetwater and Breeze?” I asked as I sat down in the copilot’s chair.
“I’m here,” said Breeze. Freeman must have routed the signal to the transport’s communications system. We had an audio signal, but the video was off.
“Is Dr. Sweetwater there as well?” I asked, as we only had an audio connection. I heard him through the communications console.
“It’s just me this time. William is checking the results from the survivability survey,” he said.
Freeman sat silent, staring straight ahead through the windshield. He looked big and strong and vanquished, like an evil giant in a fairy tale who has been tricked but not yet killed.
“General, do you remember William’s mentioning the auditors that the Linear Committee has sent to oversee our work? He is leading them on quite a wild-goose chase. I think he has them counting the number of stars in the Galactic Eye.”
I thought he was joking; there were billions of stars in the Eye. When I laughed, he asked, “Why are you laughing?”
“He’s really making them count stars?” I asked. “Aren’t there billions of stars in the Galactic Eye?”
“Seventy-eight billion in the section he has given them,” Breeze said.
“They can’t count seventy-eight billion stars. It would take a lifetime.”
Freeman sat beside me, either not listening to us or not caring what we said. He stared out the window, his face impassive.
“No one is going to count that many stars,” I said.
“He told them it was an accounting irregularity,” Breeze said.
“An accounting error in the stars?” It didn’t make sense.
“He found a glitch in their programming,” Breeze said.
That caught Freeman’s attention. He stared at the communications console, and I saw the old intensity in his eyes.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“How long have we been dead?” Breeze asked.
I did not answer.
“Am I a brain scan? Is this a simulation of the Arthur Clarke Wheel?”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, desperate, scrambling to take control of the conversation.
“Sweetwater loaded a list of stars and locations into an accounting ledger and gave it to those men. They didn’t even bother looking at the number of entries. They didn’t care that there were billions of entries. Men get overwhelmed when you hand them a ledger with seventy-eight billion entries. Computer programs begin counting without checking the volume of the work.”
“They’re government number crunchers,” I said. “They probably get paid by the line.”
“Seventy-eight billion lines?” Breeze asked. “William built a randomizing engine into the database. Every time they complete one billion lines, the engine shuffles the data and reinserts it back into the file.”
“They probably think they hit the jackpot.”
Beside me, Freeman looked up from the console and shook his head in warning. Real or not, we needed the scientists’ help. Their work could determine the future of mankind; and if Breeze shut down, Sweetwater would follow.
“Whoever programmed this simulation didn’t understand the physics of the Arthur Clarke Wheel,” Breeze said. “It uses centripetal force to create gravity instead of a generator.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“I visited the control room last night. It has a gravity generator.”
“Maybe it’s there for backup,” I said. “Maybe it’s there in case something goes wrong with the rotation.”
“It’s cosmetic,” said Breeze. “I turned it off, and nothing happened.” I heard an odd tone in his voice that might have been irritation or anger.
Freeman remained mute. He ran the show during assassinations and invasions, but this was a delicate matter. He left it up to me.
“Maybe the people who built the Wheel built the switch in as a joke,” I said. “You said it yourself, the Wheel generates its own gravity.”
“When did I die?” asked Breeze. “When,” not “if.”
I did not answer.
“How did I die?” he asked. He sounded so reasonable. I heard no panic in his voice. No hysteria.
“You died on New Copenhagen,” I said.
Still absolutely silent, Freeman gave me the slightest nod. He approved. I had risked everything. Hearing that he was dead, the ghost of Arthur Breeze could shut down, and he could very well take Sweetwater with him; but Freeman wanted him to know the truth.
“I died in the mines, didn’t I?”
“Yes,” I said.
“And William? He died, too?”
“He died taking the bomb into the mines.”
Breeze sighed. I imagined him taking off his glasses and smearing the dandruff and grease on the lenses as he tried to wipe them away. Maybe the Unifieds did too good a job programming his emotions. He must have felt hollow at that moment, the moment in which he learned that he was not human. I’d been through that.
“I remember the day I learned that I was synthetic,” I said.
“I never liked that term, ‘synthetic,’” Breeze said. “General, you have a heart beating in your chest. It’s not made out of plastic. You have a brain and hands and lungs that hold air. None of those organs are synthetic. You’re not like a human, you are a human.
“I suppose I am, too,” Breeze said. He sounded dazed. He sounded like a young soldier coming off the battlefield for the first time, alive and questioning his own existence.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
He grunted as if he had just hurt himself.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I just pricked my finger,” he said.
“What?”
“I pricked my finger with a dissection pin,” he said. “The pain was exactly as I always remembered it.” This was a tall, dried-up old man. He had spent his life in science labs. He did not handle pain well. His real, violent
death must have been excruciating while it lasted.
“Why did you do that?” I asked.
“I wanted to see my blood. I bleed like a living creature.
“You’ve seen me, General. Do I look like a real man through human eyes?”
Homely as ever, I thought as I said, “Exactly like you looked the day you went into those caves.”
“They did a better job simulating my blood than they did simulating the space station,” Breeze said. “It’s perfect.”
I answered, “You are a perfect virtual model of the man I knew on New Copenhagen.”
The heads of every major religion could only find one topic on which they all agreed—cloning. They said clones did not have souls and, therefore, were less than humans. They might have been right, too; but as I spoke to the ghost of Arthur Breeze, I realized the computer program that brought him back to life had perfectly captured his soul.
“But I am stuck in this machine,” he said.
“Your universe is as vast as mine,” I said. “You can visit simulations of every known world.”
“How about a world in which I would really exist?” he asked.
I did not answer.
“When Andropov figures out we’re helping you, he’ll unplug us. I suppose that wouldn’t be as bad as dying.”
The real Arthur Breeze had been ripped apart by giant spiders.
I did not say anything.
“Thank you for being honest,” he said. “You and Raymond, you were always truthful with us. You always were.” His voice seemed to shrink as he spoke. “What did you do when you found out you were a clone?”
“I went to a bar with my sergeant. We drank three glasses of Sagittarian Crash and got so drunk we nearly died.”
“Did it help?”
“The next morning, I felt like someone had stabbed a knife into my skull, that wasn’t helpful. I was still a clone, getting drunk didn’t change that. It softened the blow. It got me through that first night.”
“Maybe I need to do that,” he said. “We’ve got an excellent bar on the Wheel.”
“Don’t hit it too hard, we need you sober. They made you so you puke and piss and fall down when you get drunk. The original you didn’t handle liquor so well, and the virtual you won’t handle it any better,” I said.
“I doubt they will allow me to die in an intoxicated stupor.”
Still sounding battle-weary, Breeze said, “There’s enough air to start a colony on Terraneau, but you’re going to need an oxygen generator until you establish a significant plant population. Farming is going to be a problem. The surface soil is ruined. Your colonists are going to need to dig three feet down to find soil that can sustain life.”
“But it can be done?” I asked.
“I am always amazed by the things human beings achieve when their backs are against a wall, General.”
Was he talking about our colonists or the men who programmed him? Was he talking to them or me?
“We ran soil and atmosphere samples on an area near Norristown. Planetwide, the radiation levels are stable and acceptable. The air quality is low but tolerable. I recommend wearing rebreathers until you get oxygen generators in place. I’ve also checked for tachyon residue. There is no trace of Tachyon D on Terraneau.” Breeze was all business as he said this. Then his tone lightened as he added, “Now, if you’ll excuse me, General, I am going to go drink myself into a coma.”
With that he signed off.
Ray Freeman smiled. He even laughed. It wasn’t much of a laugh, just a quick “Huh” that sounded a little like the noise some Marines make when they are doing sit-ups.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have told him,” I mumbled to myself.
Freeman shook his head, and said, “I would have shot you if you’d lied.”
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Location: Providence Kri
Galactic Position: Cygnus Arm
Astronomic Location: Milky Way
During their stints as commander in chief, Steven Jolly and Curtis Liotta had given orders, but they never really took charge. They were apprehensive leaders, too fainthearted to issue orders and face the consequences. Once Jim Holman ascended to admiral, he took charge.
Watching him conduct this meeting, I realized just how much I liked Holman’s style. There was nothing imperial in his demeanor. He cared about his men, but he also made the tough decisions when he needed to. Seeing him speak, I realized that the empire was finally in capable hands now that its highest-ranking officers were out of the way.
Holman began his command by calling his captains together. He did not use a confabulator for the meeting. This was no remote conference with people popping in from all over the galaxy. Nor was it a lavish summit for fleet commanders only.
The captains of every destroyer, dreadnaught, battleship, and carrier sat in the audience. So did every regiment commander from the Marines. I sat beside the commanders of the thirteen fleets on the dais, watching them try to look comfortable though they had no idea why Holman had called the assembly.
Most of the commanders I had known during my career took charge slowly, giving their officers time to gossip and spread rumors. Given the opportunity, fear will work its way through fleets like a virus, infecting every sailor and Marine. Holman did not wait for that to happen. Now that he ran the show, he took charge.
Before the rumors spread, he called his men together. He did not mince words. Instead of starting with standard-issue apologies and promises, he began the meeting by saying, “Let me explain the situation. We have evacuated the populations of Gobi, Bangalore, and Nebraska Kri to Providence Kri. In all, there are now twenty million people on Providence Kri. We now need to move them off the planet.
“From what we can tell, the aliens will burn Providence Kri sometime within the next eight days. That gives us eight days to move twenty million refugees and gather as many supplies as we can.”
There were fourteen of us sitting on the dais—thirteen fleet commanders and me. We sat in simple chairs with straight backs and hard seats. Holman stood at a podium about twenty feet in front of us, wearing the proud white dress uniform of the Unified Authority Navy. (It had only been a year since we had declared independence, and new uniforms were not a priority.) Mostly, from where I sat, he was a silhouette. The bright lights in the ceiling above the audience pointed back on him, their crystal white glare both blinding and bleaching. For us at the back of the dais, the gallery below the stage and the lights was a sea of black, as silent as it was dark.
“It’s not just a question of evacuating Providence Kri. New Carillon, Uchtdorf, and St. Augustine will all be burned within the next seven days. The next week will be a nonstop rescue operation.” Here Holman laid his cards out on the table, spelling out the size and scope of the operation so that every man in the room could understand. “By this time next week, we will have transported thirty-two million people to a new planet. Know this, gentlemen. Anyone we miss will die.”
The officers respected Holman. They did not whisper among themselves as he spoke.
“Our only chance of survival is to establish a colony on a planet that the aliens have already attacked. I’m not going to lie to you. It’s not going to be easy. Scientists have run tests on the air, water, and soil. The air is breathable but thin. We will take oxygen generators. The water is polluted, but not so badly polluted that it cannot be filtered. We will need to dig a few feet down to plant crops. These are obstacles we can overcome.”
A soft rumble rose from the audience. Holman ignored it. He stood behind the podium, short and slender, with the glare of the lights making his red hair and beard look like they were on fire. He might have been a clone, but he was an instantly recognizable one.
He told the audience, “We are going to colonize Terraneau.”
That shut everybody down. They all knew the planet. Terraneau had been the capital of the Scutum-Crux Arm, the outermost arm of the Milky Way. We had all been raised to judge places by their p
osition relative to Earth. Terraneau was just about as far as you could get from Earth without leaving the galaxy.
“As many of you know, the Unified Authority patrols that area. Our barges will be vulnerable.” Holman stood silent for several seconds. When he began speaking again, he changed his train of thought.
“The Navy has asked a lot of you over the last month, and you have delivered. Now I’m going to ask even more of you than ever. Some of you will be asked to make the ultimate sacrifice. In order for this plan to work, we will need to draw the U.A. Fleet away from Providence Kri and Terraneau. That means opening a front that will draw the Unified Authority’s forces away. We are going to invade Earth.”
Down in the darkness, a single voice shouted, “Hell, yeah!” The entire room went silent for a moment, then burst into laughter and applause. Holman made no attempt to stop the applause. He let it run its course.
“We’ve run a recon mission to evaluate the Unified Authority’s military strength. We sent a spy ship into Earth space and found fewer than sixty capital ships patrolling the lanes. They detected our anomaly, and seven more ships broadcasted in. As far as we can tell, that is their entire fleet, sixty-five capital ships.
“It is entirely possible they have a few additional ships in reserve. They may have as many as eighty ships, but we have seen most of what they have.”
A possibility of eighty ships ... Fifteen hundred men sat in the audience, each representing a capital ship in the Enlisted Man’s Navy. We had seventy-seven fighter carriers and 229 battleships. Maybe they sank our ships when they caught our stragglers, but they would never survive an all-out assault. Their ships would not last long outnumbered seventy-seven to one. Our numbers would be overwhelming ... at least they would be overwhelming in space.
“We’re going to send a ground force as well as a naval attack,” Holman said. “Crippling their navy will not be enough for us to achieve our objectives. We need to uproot the Unified Authority government and all. We need to occupy Earth.”
The Clone Redemption Page 28
