The Clone Redemption

by Steven L. Kent

  “Feeling lucky?” he asked, as I entered the bridge. He and his three-man bridge crew wore the soft armor used by technicians and engineers.

  “Mars says the ship is fine,” I said.

  “With all due respect, sir, that’s bullshit. The engines work and the holes are plugged, but this ship is several miles south of fine.”

  “Just get us out there,” I said.

  “Yes, sir,” said Cutter. “You should probably use the tint shields in your visor, sir.”

  Larger ships such as battleships and carriers did not have viewports at the front of their bridges. They had display screens, which they shut off during broadcasts. Cruisers and frigates had actual honest-to-goodness viewports. If the people in the bridge did not shield their eyes during broadcasts, they’d most likely go blind.

  The tint shields in my visor normally came on automatically; but a quick glimpse of the glare from the anomaly could do a great deal of damage if you looked into it before your shields kicked in. Using optical commands, I initiated the shields. The only problem was that in the moments before the broadcast, the shields left me blind.

  Then the broadcast began. Even through the blackness of my tint shields, I could see the anomaly, its thick tendrils of electricity wrapping like ivy around the hull of the ship. I should have looked away from the viewport, but I was mesmerized. To me, the anomaly was like a passageway to death, and death fascinated me.

  And then I saw nothing. We had completed the broadcast and left the anomaly to fade behind us. I deactivated the tint shields, and there was Mars—the planet—a tawny-colored globe in a solitary orbit. We had broadcasted in only ten thousand miles off the surface of Mars, on the side of the planet facing away from Earth and the sun. Our ship was small and designed to create a diminished anomaly. Unless they were looking for us, or a ship happened to be passing nearby, no one would notice the anomaly. The Unifieds did not know we had stolen their self-broadcasting ship. As far as they knew, we needed a network for pangalactic travel.

  Our stealth generator purring like a newborn, we circled Mars. The planet was dark and still below us. It only took a minute to locate the barges. They sat unguarded and alone.

  Everything had gone according to plan so far.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I entered Landing Bay One, which was dark as death and silent.

  The night-for-day lenses in my visor lit the scene well enough. The landing-bay floor was enormous and packed tight with seven transports. Parked with their rear hatches open, the heavy birds sat so close together that their stubby wings interlocked like a cog. I had to walk along the outer wall of the landing bay to get to my ride; the space between the ships was too tight.

  The men in my company had already boarded the transports. I expected to find them swarming the deck like ants at a picnic; but there was no room on the deck, so they huddled in the kettles, readying for war. If I listened in over the interLink, I would hear some of the men muttering final prayers and others swapping jokes, the more profane the better. Some men faced death in quiet meditation; some tried to hide their fear from everyone, especially themselves.

  A few of the boys gave in to the dangerous temptation of rechecking their weapons. Marines clean and load their weapons the day before the mission, when they are calm. There’s always a temptation to distract yourself by stripping and cleaning your piece on the way to battle, but nervous men tend to speck up. Guns that worked perfectly sometimes jammed when stripped and assembled right before battle. Equipment that was safely packed sometimes fell out of your go-pack if you tried to reorganize on the way to the battlefield.

  The spy ship was still a few minutes from the barges but closing in quickly when I entered the lead transport. The sailor coordinating the mission gave the signal, and our pilot sealed the rear hatch and prepared to launch.

  A sled towed the transport through the flight tube, past disabled atmospheric locks. We did not launch when we reached the end of the runway. Our transports weren’t cloaked. Once they launched, the Unifieds would spot them, and the countdown would begin. Instead of leaving our transports lined up on the deck, Flight Control lined us up in the tube. As each bird left the ship, the next one would follow on her tail.

  Along with a company of Marines, our transport carried a team of three sailors. Once we secured the barge, it would fall upon these men to pilot her out. I hoped they were up to the challenge. We had no intel about what we might find inside the barges. For all we knew, they worked off brain waves or fart commands.

  As I waited in the kettle, a Marine approached me and saluted. He said, “General Harris, sir, the other transports are in place.” My visor read his identity from a chip in his visor and labeled him Major Hunter Ritz.

  I returned his salute. “Ritz,” I said. “Didn’t you serve on Terraneau?”

  “Yes, sir. From the beginning, sir,” he said. “I went down with you and Hollingsworth when you liberated the planet.”

  He couldn’t see through the visor of my helmet, but a smile worked its way across my lips. Not many men had survived that battle. “And now you’re a company commander?” I asked.

  “Yes, sir,” he said.

  I was glad to have a battle-tested Marine in my ranks, a man who would not lose control if things headed south.

  “I’m going up to the cockpit,” I said.

  “Aye, sir,” Ritz said.

  Heading into this battle, he was all spit and polish, but I remembered Ritz on Terraneau. He stumbled into a dormitory filled with orphaned girls and referred to it as a harem. Spit and polish were the last fluids on his mind that day.

  Those were the same girls Ava had taught in her classes. They were all dust now. Everyone remaining on Terraneau was dust.

  The sea of men parted for me as I crossed the kettle. I climbed the ladder, walked the tight catwalk, and entered the cockpit.

  My pilot was Lieutenant Christian Nobles, the Marine I had adopted as my private pilot. He wore combat armor. Once all the transports were docked, he would join in the fight. On missions like this, every man joined in the fighting ... everyone but the sailors we brought to fly the barges. Marines are interchangeable parts. Flight crews are not.

  We traded salutes, and I sat in the copilot’s chair. I sighed, and said, “Once more into the breach.”

  Nobles said, “I saved your seat for you, sir; but I wasn’t sure you were coming. I thought maybe you forgot about me.”

  Maybe Nobles thought I was invincible. He never complained when I dragged him into deadly situations. If he thought my invincibility would protect him as well, he’d never looked at my record and had no idea how many friends had died around me. If he’d known, he might not have been so confident.

  Some pilots sit as still as statues while they wait to take off; Lieutenant Nobles was a tinkerer. As we waited for the outer hatch to open, he fiddled with the instrumentation around his seat. He checked dials and flipped switches. I tried to ignore him as he pulled out his M27, but ultimately asked, “When was the last time you stripped and oiled your piece?”

  “Yesterday, sir,” he said.

  “Can you think of any reason why you would have botched the job?”

  “No, sir,” he said.

  “Is there any reason why anyone would have specked with your weapon?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Have you dropped it in mud since you stripped it?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Were you drunk when you assembled it?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then leave it alone,” I said.

  “Aye, sir. Yes, sir.”

  Nobles sat back in his chair and crossed his arms. A few seconds passed, and pretty soon, he was testing the controls again.

  I received a message over my commandLink. “General, we are almost in place, sir. Fifty miles and closing.”

  Outside the cruiser, the space around Mars was silent. Inside our transport, amber lights flashed and Klaxons tolled. In the last moment befor
e we launched, the ship went silent. The outer hatch slid open, revealing a galaxy of stars and darkness. With a tap of our thrusters, Nobles lifted the transport off the sled and we glided into space.

  By this time, we had circled Mars and come around to the side facing the sun. A dust-colored planet glowed below us, and I saw Mars Spaceport, a white-and-gray plateau that looked too large to be man-made. It formed a plain across a small corner of the planet’s surface.

  And above the spaceport, moored in five razor-straight rows, were the barges we had come to collect. They did not look like ships. They looked like floating boxes.

  “Listen up,” I said over the interLink, opening a channel that every man on every transport would hear, both sailors and Marines. “This is General Wayson Harris. I am personally overseeing this operation. You’ve all been briefed. You know your objectives.

  “You know your assignments. Shoot anyone who gets in your way on this op. With all of the planets we need to evacuate, every one of these barges is worth millions of lives. We can’t afford to lose a single barge.” Even as I said it, I wondered how many other missions of mercy had begun with similar instructions—kill anyone who crosses your path.

  “We don’t have time for mistakes or mercy on this one,” I said, and with that, I signed off.

  No long motivational speech, no threats or cussing. Maybe I was getting soft.

  It might have been that no one was guarding the barges, or it might have been that we caught them napping. The big ships remained stationary, silent, and dark as we sidled up beside them.

  Seeing the mammoth barges from a lowly transport, I felt like a flea approaching a dog . . . no, an elephant. We had just come out of a cruiser that ferried twenty-one transports crammed into three overcrowded landing bays. With a little creative packing, we could have fit a thousand transports inside one these behemoths.

  The barge did not have landing bays. It was designed for quick evacuations; and the slow act of towing transports in and out through launch tubes and atmospheric locks did not fit the mode. The hulls of the barges were dotted with landing pads, hard points with magnetic clamps and retractable entryways. These ships did not have weapons or shields. They were leviathans, giant whales traveling the galaxy, defenseless against attack.

  The first four transports to leave the spy ship had to fly double duty. While the rest of the transports docked, they would return to the cruiser for a second set of Marines, who they would deliver to a second barge. The transports themselves were meaningless. Even if everything went according to plan, we would lose them when we broadcasted out. They would fall from the clamps along the hulls of the barges like flakes of dead skin.

  Our transports touched down on the landing pads, and the entryways automatically extended. They attached to the rear hatches of our transports, creating a seal. I reminded myself that entering the barges would, in theory, be no more difficult than entering a grocery store.

  Time was of the essence. I left the cockpit, breezed across the short catwalk, and slid down the ladder. As lieutenants and sergeants organized the platoons, I made my way to the hatch.

  The muffled bang and thud of the struts touching down sounded through walls, and the metal floor bounced and settled under our feet.

  There we stood, in the dark metal can that was our military transport, our ranks organized into fire teams, squads, and platoons, our M27s ready in case of resistance.

  My heart pounding hard and steady, my combat reflex already begun, I stood at the front of my company, like a private on point duty, my finger already over the trigger of my gun as I watched the doors of the transport slowly grind open.

  Cross this line, and the Unifieds will never let you rest, I told myself. The Unified Authority had declared this war, not I; but by stealing their barges, we would take this conflict to a fiery new level. They would come after us. They would hunt us. If we took these barges, the population of Earth would be trapped on a targeted planet. They had already decided to leave every man, woman, and child on every one of our planets to die; now they would see how it felt to be alone with their fate. Bastards.

  Since the barge had hundreds of landing pads along its hull, there was no way a skeleton security patrol could have guarded every entrance, so it was no surprise when the hatch opened to an empty tube.

  From that point on, I would no longer speak to the entire team on an open frequency. A designated coordinator would take control of the mission. The platoon leaders called the shots with their men.

  We charged down the entryway—two platoons, each with its own commanding and executive officers. I led the way. We were one hundred men entering a ship designed to ferry 250,000 people at a time.

  The entryway was a hall wide enough for ten men walking side by side. As I ran ahead, the shifting field of gravity played with my balance. The floor was a gravitational field that twisted along the outside wall like the thread of a screw. What had been the ceiling when I entered the tube became the floor twenty feet in. To the men behind me, it must have looked like I was running upside down. When I reached the exit, the orientation of the entryway floor matched the deck of the barge.

  Though I had seen the barges during the evacuation of Olympus Kri, I had never set foot on one. The grand size of it took me aback. Maybe it would look smaller crowded with people; but seeing the long, empty deck overwhelmed my senses. It looked like an unfinished spaceport. The floors were flat and wide and open. The glint of naked aluminum girders accented the ceiling. The walls were so far away that they seemed to press themselves into a distant horizon. The frame supporting the deck above us was so low that I could reach up and touch it. Had Freeman come on this mission, he might have bumped his head every few steps.

  Dozens of spiraling stairwells twisted up from the floor like giant corkscrews. There was no furniture.

  Since I had assigned myself to point position, Major Ritz expected me to report. He asked, “General, do you see anyone?”

  “Either they’re hiding in the heads or this deck is secure,” I said. “Head” was Marine-speak for bathroom.

  “Aye, sir, I’ll send a couple of men to flush out the head.”

  I started to laugh at the man’s juvenile pun, then realized that he had made the pun inadvertently. “You do that. We don’t want anyone sneaking out from behind the toilets.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  Then I said, “Tell your men to stay alert. If there’s anybody on this bird, they’re going to hit us as we go up the stairs. That’s how I would do it. The stairs or the cockpit.”

  “Stairs and cockpit, aye, sir,” said Ritz.

  A couple of men split off to check the toilets, the rest of us started toward the stairs. That was when the shooting began.

  Ritz divided his men into platoons, then he broke the platoons into squads, allowing him to cover eight sets of stairs at one time. The spiral stairwells were a natural bottleneck. Even worse, they were a bottleneck with a blind spot. Anyone climbing the stairs would be defenseless as he passed through the ceiling and entered the floor above.

  The stairs were wide enough for three men to climb at a time, but we stuck to procedure, offering up a point man who peered from the top of the stairs into the next deck as a vulnerable gopher climbing out of its hole.

  We sent men up eight flights of stairs, and every single one came rolling back down with blood leaking from large holes in his helmet. The men guarding this bird used guns with bullets. That was good. It meant they were wearing standard armor. If they’d been wearing shielded armor, they would have fired fléchettes that left little pinprick holes.

  On any other mission, we would have lobbed grenades up the stairs. We would have hit them with grenades, then come running in on the heels of the explosions to mop up any survivors. We couldn’t do that on this mission, though. We needed the barge in working condition. Even a low-yield grenade might cause the walls to buckle in this enclosed environment.

  As Major Ritz pulled his men back, I sprinted aft
, away from the action. As wide as the barge was, built to carry ten thousand passengers on each of its twenty-five decks, there were hundreds of sets of stairs. They’d need an entire battalion to cover every set of stairs on a bird this big.

  I sprinted a couple of hundred yards to reach the far side of the deck and climbed the last set of stairs. I crept up quietly, paused just below the ceiling, my finger on the trigger of my M27. I peered up from the top of the stairs and saw a wideopen floor. I spotted the unfriendlies, but they were a long way away and very distracted at the moment. They did not notice as I continued up the stairs to the next deck.

  I called Ritz once I was safely stashed one floor above the disputed deck. “Do you read me?” I asked.

  “General.”

  “Got any flash grenades?” I asked as I crept across the empty deck. I lay on the floor and stared down a stairwell at the attackers. They were not dressed in armor. I got the feeling they were maintenance, deck sweepers, and latrine wipers ; but I could not get a count of their numbers.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Lob a couple up the stairs, then give me a few seconds to clear out the debris,” I said.

  Flash grenades did not make a violent percussion. They might burn the floor, but they would not blow holes in walls or change the air pressure.

  “Are you up there?” asked Ritz.

  Borrowing a tactic from Freeman, I answered the question by ignoring it. Instead, I told him, “Make sure your grenadiers know which pills to throw; we can’t afford to damage the ship.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And Ritz, make sure your men don’t shoot me when they come up the stairs. I’m the only one wearing combat armor.”

  “Aye, sir,” said Ritz.

  I activated the tint shields to protect my eyes as I lay still and waited. Two, maybe three, seconds passed, and the explosions began, brilliant flashes that changed the atmosphere from brightly lit to blinding. I only saw a trace of the flash through the tint shields. The glare evaporated quickly, and I switched back to tactical vision as I leaped down the stairs.