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The Clone Redemption

Page 29

by Steven L. Kent


  Everyone in the room knew what that meant—we would send our Marines to fight their soldiers and Marines. At last count, we had three million fighting men. We’d have the numbers and the superior firepower. They’d have shielded armor that would neutralize our firepower and render our numerical advantage meaningless.

  Forty-five minutes, I reminded myself. The batteries that powered their shields would only last forty-five minutes. If we survived the first hour ... If ...

  “Win or lose, there will be no returning from Earth. The Unified Authority has a temporary broadcast station near Mars. We believe they will destroy the station at the first sign of an invasion. Before I assign men to the invasion, I am going to ask for volunteers.”

  The enthusiasm vanished. No one spoke as the electricity drained from the air.

  “We’re going to reserve one-third of our fleet to escort our barges, the rest of you will be assigned to the invasion. Any captain who wishes to enlist his ship in the invasion, please stand.”

  The blinding lights rolled from Holman and down to the audience. My eyes were tired from the glare, and the druginduced drumming in my head made it difficult to concentrate; but when the lights shone on the gallery, it looked like every man was on his feet.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  The meeting ended much the way it had begun. Holman got the ball rolling by summing up a bad situation. He finished by thanking his officers for their courage, then reminded them that our struggles would extend long beyond the combat.

  “Once we establish our colony on Terraneau, every day will bring new battles. We will need to fight to plant crops, then keep those crops alive. Finding water will be a struggle. So will establishing a new nation.

  “Those of us invading Earth will be tasked with governing a hostile planet. You will guard the planet until the aliens attack, then, if you survive, you will face the same day-to-day challenges that we will face on Terraneau.

  “We are going to divide our forces, and neither side will ever know if the other side survived. Earth will be removed from our broadcast grid. The only way we will know if the invasion of Earth succeeded is if it fails, and the Unified Authority attacks us.”

  As he closed the meeting, Holman said, “I came here hoping for a few volunteers. Nearly all of you have volunteered. Because of your bravery, I must decide which of you will escort our barges to Terraneau. Those of you I assign to Terraneau will have the easier job.”

  He should have known these men would volunteer for the harder duty once he leveled with them. I’d wager that none of them had ever seen an admiral willingly level with his men. With one quick speech, Holman had raised himself from admiral to messiah.

  Besides, their neural programming included the drive to volunteer. They would pick the harder job, and they would fight; but that didn’t mean they would like it. I knew, because I didn’t like it. Holman had originally asked me to ride the barges, and I refused. I was going to face the Earth Fleet. If I survived, I would face the aliens. If I survived again, I would colonize a scorched planet. I volunteered for the hard fight. I hated myself for doing it.

  Earth was due for a baking, and Holman would not send the barges back to Earth once he’d landed everyone on Terraneau. He couldn’t; without a working broadcast station, the Sol System would become a dead end. No one and nothing he sent to Earth would ever return, including his Fleet and his Marines.

  With eight hours to go before I left for Earth, I flew to Hightower—a city left desolate after the first Avatari invasion, now densely populated with refugees from other planets and the clone servicemen who rescued them. Ava was there, somewhere.

  In the past, I could always find her. She was a celebrity, a movie star, and always the prettiest woman in town. Men learned where she lived for the same reason that true believers memorize the locations of religious shrines. Before the Avatari had reduced the planet to ashes, Ava-fascination had spread like a virus on Terraneau. Ask any woman in Norristown if she’d ever seen Ava, and she would tell you where Ava lived, her place of employment, and the latest gossip.

  I flew down to Providence Kri, believing I would find a similar situation in Hightower. As I left the spaceport, I asked a civilian security guard if he knew where I could find Ava Gardner. An older man with salt-and-pepper hair and sixty pounds of extra gut, the guard grinned at me, said, “In my dreams,” and walked away.

  The spaceport was all but abandoned. Military transports flew in and out of the city, but Holman had not yet begun the evacuation. I walked long, empty halls, brightly lit and large enough to accommodate thousands of people at a time. In another few hours, refugees would fill the halls beyond capacity. I’d seen too many evacuations over the last few years. Given a choice between a battlefield or a mass evacuation, I would take the battlefield every time.

  When I reached the terminal lobby, I saw that work had already begun to stage the evacuation. Marines in Charlie service uniforms, complete with MP armbands, were lining up guardrails and assembling checkpoints and help stations. They saw my uniform and snapped to attention. A major, a clone well into his fifties, stepped out to meet me.

  “General, sir, no one notified us that you were coming,” he said as he saluted.

  I returned the salute, and said, “Yes, I’m a bit surprised myself.”

  “Are you here to oversee our preparation?”

  “No, Major, I’m here looking for Ava Gardner.”

  He must have mistaken the comment for sarcasm. He turned pale and stiffened. Sputtering, he said, “Um, I . . . sir.”

  “At ease, Major,” I said. I began to feel annoyed. I hated unearned shows of respect. Having stars on my collar did not make me a better man. Steven Jolly and Curtis Liotta both had stars, and they died buffoons.

  “Yes, sir,” he said, though he remained rigid.

  Behind him, the other Marines still stood at attention, watching us carefully and not sure what to do.

  “This is not an inspection, so just relax,” I said. “Get your men back to work.” Knowing the scene that lay ahead, I gave in to a sympathetic impulse, and said, “And, Major, I am here looking for an old friend.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, but still he stood there, a sputtering old waxwork, an old man whose career should probably have ended many years ago.

  “Is there something else?” I asked.

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “Did you want a car, sir? I can arrange for a car.”

  “Good thought,” I said. “A car would be helpful.” The major’s version of a car would come complete with a driver, hopefully someone who knew his way around town.

  “Sir, if you can give me your friend’s name, I’ll run it through the computer,” he added nervously.

  “Ava Gardner,” I said. “Her name is Ava Gardner.”

  “Like the actress?” he asked.

  I smiled, and said, “Like the actress.”

  He doesn’t know she’s here, I thought. Back in Norristown, every man, woman, and child in town knew about Ava. Granted, Hightower had a transient population, the city had sat empty until we populated it with refugees; but this clone didn’t even know Ava was on the planet.

  “Yes, sir. Give me a moment, sir, I’ll get you an address and arrange for a vehicle.” He saluted, I saluted, and he trotted off, leaving me in a lobby filled with Marines still standing at attention.

  “As you were,” I growled at the men. They went back to work.

  The military is filled with ass-wipe officers who try to link themselves to higher brass at every opportunity. If this major was of that persuasion, he would return with some lame excuse why he should escort me. I started to suspect that the doddering old boy would do just that, and I felt my temper rising. When he returned, he saluted, told me the car was waiting outside the terminal, and returned to work with his troops.

  “What’s your name?” I called back to him.

  “Perry, sir. Major Andrew Perry. Is there a problem?”

  “No, Perry. No problem,” I sa
id.

  “What year did you attend the Academy?” I knew he had not attended Annapolis, but that was not the point. He was a clone, and not a Liberator. I did not want to kill the old boy, and asking him about orphanages might cause him to figure out he was synthetic. It could trigger a death reflex.

  “I didn’t attend the Academy, sir. I grew up in an orphanage and got field-promoted when we started the empire.”

  “In an orphanage?” I repeated. “I grew up in UAO 553,” I said. UAO stood for Unified Authority Orphanage. There had been hundreds of orphanages, clone farms churning out young conscripts whose highest aspiration was to become a sergeant.

  “Three-O-Nine, sir,” he said; but his focus was not on me; he kept stealing glances at his men. He did not want to gab, he wanted to work.

  I saluted, grunted “Carry on,” and walked to the street. Perry, I thought. With a last name, a rank, and an orphanage number, I should be able to track him down. I planned to take most of the E.M.N.’s Marines with me to Earth in a few hours, but I would leave Perry behind. Holman would need the old boy more than I would—a man who cared about mission more than career. Traveling with Holman, the major might even survive.

  As for me, I did not expect to survive the day. That our ships would destroy the Earth Fleet, I had no doubt. We’d take casualties, but we’d control the solar system. We would come with more fighter carriers than the Unified Authority had ships. They’d hurt us; but based on size alone, our fleet would smother theirs.

  Once we landed on Earth, though ... We would outnumber them on Earth just like we did in space; but on Earth the numbers would not matter. “Specking shielded armor,” I muttered quietly enough that I hoped no one would notice.

  “General,” the driver said as he snapped to attention. He was a Marine sergeant who looked to be about my age, a man reaching thirty. He opened the door of the sedan, and I climbed in.

  “Do you know where we’re going?” I asked as he sat behind the wheel.

  “Yes, sir,” he said, and off we went. Perry, I reminded myself. Orphanage 309.

  I’d found the abandoned neighborhoods on Bangalore and Gobi depressing. As we drove through Hightower, I saw something worse. We drove past parks and playgrounds filled with people. We passed kids playing football in a street.

  The evacuation would begin in two hours; but for now, these people were happy, naïve, and enjoying life. They were already refugees, I reminded myself. They had only been in Hightower for a couple of weeks at most. Here they lived in an overcrowded city with parks and buildings. In another few hours, they would be herded like sheep and taken to a planet with charred soil and ash in the air. Some would fall into deep depressions that would last for the rest of their lives. Some of these people would commit suicide, and others would starve. The survivors would fantasize about dying under blue skies and being buried in green fields. Would any of them ever really live again?

  I imagined a park on Solomon with families playing and young couples kissing and old couples holding hands. In my mind’s eye, I saw the sky turn the orange-red color of live coals. I imagined the trees and grass bursting into flames; but I could not bring myself to see what happened to the people. Try as I might, I could no longer see them.

  Strange as it sounds, I saw the people of Solomon as the lucky ones. I could not see how life in a colony on a cinder in deep space would be worth living. Freeman was wrong. We weren’t saviors rushing from one planet to the next to prevent disasters; we were the recruiters for Hell, packing up the dead and crating them off to an inferno.

  My driver stopped beside a large apartment building with an arched awning over its doorway and abandoned storefronts. He opened my door, stood at attention, and waited for me.

  I climbed out of the car.

  Still standing at attention, he said, “She’s in apartment 8201, sir. I can run up and get her for you if you prefer.”

  “No,” I said, distracted by my thoughts. “No, that won’t be necessary.” I stared up the side of the building thinking, Eighty-two-O-one, the eighty-second floor. How many people lived in a building of this size? How many people could it house? In another few hours they would have no shelter and a limited supply of food. The air would be thin, the water bitter with the taste of ash.

  We did the people of Solomon a favor when we left them behind, I thought. They knew less than a second of discomfort as death knocked on their door.

  These people had a fight ahead of them. They would scratch hard earth to plant seeds that might or might not grow. What stories would their descendants tell?

  “Wait for me in the car. This shouldn’t take long,” I said.

  Maybe God is just like us, running from planet to planet, trying to save people from the disaster He knows is going to happen. Freeman’s words echoed in my head. I shook my head, and whispered, “Bullshit.”

  The doors to the building were not locked, and the security booth in the lobby sat empty. This may once have been a luxury high-rise, but the building now housed the poor and rich alike. I noted the handprints on the walls and the mud stains on the carpet.

  The elevator panel had buttons for 120 floors. Ava did not live in a penthouse apartment. I wondered if such things still mattered to her.

  I pressed the button marked 82, the elevator doors slid shut, and I listened to the whir of air as the car turboed up eighty-two floors. The doors slid open a moment later.

  The hall was dark. An unlit chandelier hung from the ceiling, unlit lamps leaned out of the walls like round shadows. I heard muffled conversations as I passed doors. In former times, the building must have been a showpiece. The doors were nearly soundproof. I heard voices as I passed some of the apartments. They sounded like the ghosts of earlier occupants.

  Where do you go when you die? I asked myself. Every major religion agrees, I reminded myself. Clones turn to dust. I wasn’t afraid, just resigned.

  They said that clones could not have souls ... “they” being the top dogs of just about every major religion. They said you could clone genes, but there was no DNA in the soul. So far as they were concerned, I would simply cease to exist when I died. Maybe that was for the best. I never much cared for the whole God thing anyway.

  Eighty-two-O-one was a corner apartment with a shiny brass address plate. I knocked on the door, not sure why I had come or what I would say. I did not think that I loved Ava anymore. She had moved on, and so had I. I had no good reason for coming to say good-bye; but still. I knocked a second time. When she did not answer, I knocked a third time. I waited another minute, then gave it one last try.

  The door opened an inch. There was a pause in which I heard her sigh, then Ava opened the door to me. She stood in a sheer white robe that might have been made of silk or satin. The sleeves ended at her elbows, and the hem was down to her knees. “Wayson?” she asked, then she reached out like a child just learning to walk and wrapped her arms around me.

  She held me. She did not kiss me, but she hugged me and pressed her face into the hollow between my chest and shoulder.

  It was the middle of the afternoon. When I saw her in the robe, I thought maybe I had walked in on her and a lover; but that was not the case. It was late in the day and she was alone, the shades on her windows drawn against the sunlight. Her apartment smelled of dirty clothes and inactivity.

  My eyes had adjusted to the darkness in the halls, so I saw the room around me clearly. There was furniture in the room, probably left behind by the original occupants. She had a couch and matching chairs, lamps, tables, bookshelves, and a thick oval carpet.

  “Can I turn on the lights?” I asked.

  “We don’t have electricity,” she said. “They hooked a generator to the lift. It’s the only thing that works on this floor.”

  “Can I open the blinds?”

  “I wish you wouldn’t,” she muttered.

  I did it anyway.

  She had aged a decade in the days since I had last seen her. She had changed in ways that time alone c
annot accomplish. You sometimes see a fleshy softness in the faces of the depressed. It had happened to Ava, almost as if the muscles in her cheeks had atrophied. The Hollywood goddess who viewed the world with an ironic smile seemed more like a forgotten dream than a recent memory. She still had the same olivine green eyes, but the lids had grown thicker, giving her the look of exhaustion.

  And she had lost weight. Her face had been a perfect oval broken only by the cleft in her chin. Now her face was long, and her cheeks looked sunken. I did not need to ask what happened, I knew. I had gone through it as a young Marine. Maybe I was still going through it.

  “Do you ever get out?” I asked.

  “Get out for what?” she asked.

  “For food?”

  “I have my rations.”

  “To talk to people?”

  “What would we talk about?”

  “To breathe fresh air?”

  “If I want fresh air, I can open a window.”

  I looked at the windows, and said, “They’re fixed in place. They don’t open.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “They must have power going to the air-conditioning,” I said. “You’d suffocate if they didn’t.”

  She turned and walked toward her bedroom. I followed.

  Ava sat on the bed and her robe fell open all the way up her thigh, not that she noticed. Her hair hung lank and tangled. The air in her bedroom was even more musty than the air in her living room.

  “Are you hungry? I can fix you some food. I still have most of this week’s rations.”

  “I’ve eaten,” I said.

  “Well, that’s all right then.”

  She no longer looked like a movie star. Walking down the street like this, she would no longer turn heads; even so, she was an attractive woman. She sat on the bed, staring ahead, not looking at me but not ignoring me, either. I stood beside her.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” I asked.

  “About what?”

  Neither of us said anything for several seconds.

  Finally, she looked at me, and said, “I had two hundred girls in one of my classes.” The way she said it was so plain and matter-of-fact. She did not cry, nor did tears form in her eyes. She’d probably cried herself dry days ago.

 

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