And then it was over and I never did use that damned knife. It was a one-minute storm that rained intensely and went away. I looked around the kettle with its bitter stew of dead Marines. The walls were covered with blood. The floor was littered with men in dark green armor. With all of the blood and flesh around them, they looked more like squashed insects than like men.
They had once been my comrades. A few years earlier, I would gladly have stood shoulder-to-shoulder with these men. Time draws great gulfs.
We only had a small window of time. The first men we shot had barely moved. They sat lethargically by and let us butcher them. As we moved into the transport, the Marines we encountered became more aware. Some of them seemed to awaken out of their drunken stupor entirely. That meant we had to get to the Grant as quickly as possible. If that fighter carrier was already filled with alert clones, it was time to surrender.
I invited the elders to come have a look. Most of them vomited as they came up the ramp, but that was expected. They did not know the workings of death; they were farmers.
The elders—carried the bodies out of the ship. They worked in groups of two, holding the corpses by their feet and hands. They tossed the bodies into an untidy pile just outside the ship. These elders became acclimated with death quickly. When they first began clearing the bodies, the elders handled them gently. By the time they finished clearing out the kettle, these good Christian men lugged the corpses no more reverently than they would handle a sack of grain.
My job was different. I was the grave robber. I mixed and matched armor from the dead guards, wiped away the blood, and put together a full combat suit. This was the exact same thing I had done to Derrick Hines, the technician on that Confederate Arms ship, but it bothered me more. In fact, this entire bloody mission left me unnerved.
Ray climbed into the pilot’s chair. He had never flown a transport before, but he had flown some pretty big ships. As for me, I had never flown anything but a couple of private spacecraft. Everything I had ever flown was made by Johnston Aerospace.
The rest of the mission lasted only four minutes. I followed Ray up the ladder and into the cockpit. He had no trouble figuring out the controls. I heard the whine of the ramp doors closing. I heard the hiss of the thruster engines as we performed a very smooth vertical takeoff.
“That went well,” Freeman said, taking his eye from the wind screen for just a moment.
“Did it look like the medicine was already wearing off?” I asked.
Freeman nodded. “There are almost two thousand men up there. It’s not going to be this easy.”
“We need to go wholesale . . . sabotage the ship and kill them all with one big bang,” I said.
We stared at each other in silence, both of us knowing that we did not stand a chance of pulling this off, both of us knowing it was far too late to back out.
“Transport Pilot, this is Grant. Fred, what the speck are you doing?” The voice came over the radio and it sounded lucid and irritated. There was no trace of the drug slurring his voice.
We were only half way between the planet and the ship, but they had already spotted us. The sky around us had thinned. In a matter of seconds, we would leave the atmosphere.
“Fred, respond. Transport pilot . . .”
In the distance, I could see the Grant hovering in space like a great white moth. Radiant light from the atmosphere glowed on its underbelly. The top of the ship was lit by external lights. Beyond the ship, the textured blackness of space stretched in every direction.
“Fred, your orders were to remain on Little Man. Come in.”
Freeman and I exchanged glances. I went to the communications console. By this time I had checked the virtual dog tag on the combat armor I took from the guard. I was now Private First Class Thomas Cain. “Grant traffic control, this is Cain. Our pilot is down,” I said. “He got sick last night. We’re bringing him in.”
Clap. Clap. Clap. The sound of somebody clapping his hands three times in sardonic applause rang from the communications console. “If Fred’s sick, who is flying the transport? Fred’s the only enlisted man on the Grant who knows how to fly a transport.
“Wayson Harris. You never change.” I recognized the voice. It belonged to Vince Lee.
“Harris, their shields are up,” Freeman whispered. By now we were close to the Grant. Shields were invisible in space, but their energy reading showed on our computers. More importantly, their cannons and missiles must have been locked in on us.
“Lee?” I asked, “that you?”
“You’re making this too easy, Wayson. I pretty much decided I would have to take you out, but you’re coming to me. Whoever heard of anybody raiding a carrier? And in an unarmed transport, Wayson, that’s great.”
And that was when it happened. Flames burst out of several areas along the length of the Grant. The entire hull seemed to breathe in and out like a bellow. Then the ship exploded. It looked nothing like the grand explosion of the Doctrinaire. This explosion was not nearly as big nor as bright. Twenty-foot fireballs ignited from the hull and extinguished in the vacuum of space. Pieces of the ship crumbled and flew off into space.
The superstructure of the Grant never fell apart. The ship just seemed to turn off. The windows in the bridge went dark, and the ship listed slightly, then floated out of position.
We landed the kettle and hiked back through the woods. As expected, the Starliner was gone when we returned.
The congregation assumed I had flown off in it. Upon seeing me, Marianne started a frantic search for Caleb. She found him out in the field. Only then did I understand.
Archie must have listened when I taught Caleb how to broadcast a ship. Caleb said that Archie ordered him off the Starliner early that morning. It must have taken the old man a long time to program the location of the Grant into the computer. Once he did, he started up the ship.
Around the camp, people compared Archie Freeman to Samson and said that he died a martyr. I don’t think he saw it that way. He would have described himself as a shepherd protecting his fold, the bastard. But he had left me stranded on goddamned Little Man. Marianne and Caleb would adopt me, and I thought I could love them, but I was made for space, not farming. Ray, I thought, would have even more trouble adapting than me. He’d abandoned this life once before.
EPILOGUE
“This is a short-range transport. It isn’t made for long trips,” I told Ray as he sealed the rear of the kettle. “It’s going to take us a month just to reach the broadcast station if we reach it at all.
“Even if we get there, this will probably be a one-way trip. You don’t really think we can make it work.”
“Death in space or the rest of my life stuck here on Delphi,” Freeman said. “I’ll take my chances.” Less than one month had passed since our battle with the Grant, and he was already going stir-crazy. Dying out in space might have been easier for him.
His plan was a shade shy of suicide. He wanted to fly this navy transport out to the broadcast station. I had never seen a kettle fly for more than a day, and we would be out for a full month. If we made it to the broadcast discs, Freeman hoped to strip the sending gear out of them and adapt it for this ship.
The shuttle’s engine produced the energy for it. It generated joules and joules of energy for its shields. But this shuttle wasn’t designed for the stresses of self-broadcasting. It did not even have tint shields. Even if we made it to the discs and somehow Ray adapted the broadcast equipment to work, it could all go wrong. I had first-hand knowledge about what happens when broadcasts go wrong.
“Even if this works, we’ll be lucky to get one flight with this,” I said.
“I’m willing to risk it,” Freeman answered. So was I, if it meant I could get back in the war.
THE ULTIMATE IN SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY!
From magical tales of distant worlds to stories of technological advances beyond the grasp of man, Penguin has everything you need to stretch your imagination to its limits.
penguin.com
ACE
Get the latest information on favorites like William Gibson, T.A. Barron, Brian Jacques, Ursula Le Guin, Sharon Shinn, and Charlaine Harris, as well as updates on the best new authors.
Roc
Escape with Harry Turtledove, Anne Bishop, S.M. Stirling, Simon Green, Chris Bunch, Jim Butcher, E.E. Knight, and many others—plus news on the latest and hottest in science fiction and fantasy.
DAW
Mercedes Lackey, Kristen Britain, Tanya Huff, Tad Williams, C.J. Cherryh, and many more-DAW has something to satisfy the cravings of any science fiction and fantasy lover. Also visit dawbooks.com.
Get the best of science fiction and fantasy at your fingertips!
Rogue Clone Page 38