He was exactly right. The Unifieds wouldn’t waste time trying to conquer colonies they knew were going to be burned. All they wanted was the barges, and they could not take the barges by force.
Holman was a straight shooter. The admirals might not have appreciated his candor, but I did.
“So they want their barges back, so what?” asked Wallace.
“Don’t you get it, sir? They can’t just take the barges,” said Holman.
“What do you mean they can’t take the barges? We can’t defend our ships against those torpedoes,” said Liotta.
Holman said, “Admiral, they can’t use those torpedoes on the barges. They need the barges as much as we do. If they break the barges, everybody dies.
“Even if they board the barges, where are they going to take them?”
“They’ll specking take them back to Earth,” said Wallace.
“How?” asked Holman. “Those barges don’t have broadcast engines. They would need our broadcast stations to take the barges back to Earth.”
“Shit,” said Wallace.
“You’re right,” said Liotta. “They can’t take the barges without our help. They’d need us to surrender so they can use the broadcast network.”
“That’s why they’re trying to scare us,” Holman said, starting to sound more confident. “That’s why they’re using the killer torpedoes. They’re trying to scare us into submission. They want us to surrender the barges and the broadcast network without a fight.”
“Assuming you’re right,” said Liotta, “what does that get us?”
There he goes, I thought, Curtis “the Snake” Liotta living up to his dismal reputation. Holman had seen things the rest of us had missed, now Liotta wanted to make sure the young captain did not get credit for it. I liked Holman. He was an officer I could follow into war.
Holman did not take the bait. He leaned forward in his chair, stared at Admiral Liotta’s holographic image through the window, and said, “We don’t need to fight. They won’t attack our ships if they don’t get anything for their trouble. They want us to stand and fight because they know they won’t lose. If we run and take the barges with us, they can’t come after us if we enter a broadcast zone.”
“That’s your strategy?” asked Liotta. He laughed. “That’s your observation? You think we should just run away.” He turned to Admiral Wallace, and said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have let a . . .”
Holman interrupted Liotta. He asked, “Do you have a better idea?”
“Captain, I think you’d better . . .”
Holman interrupted Liotta a second time. He said, “Admiral, if we keep our ships close enough to our broadcast zones, the Unifieds won’t be able to attack them.”
No longer willing to tolerate Holman’s insubordination, Liotta slammed a fist on the table. Watching him, I realized that he was no more real to me than Sweetwater or Breeze. Sure, he was actually alive, but what I saw was a holographic hand striking a holographic table. I watched the scene in silence, wondering how long I should wait before relieving Admiral Curtis Liotta of his useless command.
Admiral Wallace cleared his throat, and said, “I’m not sure that a goddamned specking mass retreat counts as a strategy, Admiral; but the kid’s got a point.”
“What point?” shouted Liotta. “What is his point?” He sounded frustrated. His holographic image stood, paced along its side of the table.
“If we keep our ships just outside the broadcast zones and run when the Unifieds arrive, they won’t be able to hit us.”
“That’s a coward’s way of running a navy,” sneered Liotta.
“But it will work,” said Wallace.
“How about you, Harris? You’re the big, hairy-chested fighting machine. How do you feel about ducking for cover every time we see the Unifieds?”
“Works for me,” I said. “I think it’s an ingenious strategy.”
“An ingenious strategy,” repeated Liotta. “Well, if we’re going to employ the captain’s ingenious strategy from here on out, let’s just hope the Unifieds don’t turn up while we’re evacuating Bangalore.”
Bangalore was the next planet slated by the Avatari for execution. We had already begun evacuating it.
“I’ll tell you what,” Liotta continued. “We’ll leave a hell of a lot of people to fry if we run away at Bangalore.” He sat back down and rubbed his eyes, then pressed his hands together as if saying a prayer. “God, I hope they do not attack us at Bangalore.”
I wondered if his rantings were the result of theatrics or fatigue? He seemed sincere.
Holman said, “If it comes to a choice between evacuating Bangalore or evacuating all of our other planets, we’ll need to abandon Bangalore, Admiral.”
Liotta turned to look at me. His eyes were bloodshot, and dark bags circled their bottoms. He asked, “Do you think the Unifieds know that Bangalore is next?”
“They know,” I said. They got their information from the same source we got ours—from the virtual ghosts of the late, great scientists William Sweetwater and Arthur Breeze.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Earthdate: November 24, A.D. 2517
Location: Bangalore
Galactic Position: Norma Arm
Astronomic Location: Milky Way
What took a couple of hours on Gobi had already taken an entire day on Bangalore, and the end was not in sight.
Admiral Liotta tried to write off the clusterspeck as a question of population. Gobi had a population of under five hundred thousand. Bangalore had eight million residents. It took two barges to evacuate Gobi. If we filled all twenty-five barges to capacity on the first round, we’d still need to send some of them for a second pass.
And it wasn’t just a question of loading the people onto the barges. Once we loaded them on, we carted them to Providence Kri, where we had to transport them down to the planet. Offloading passengers went more quickly than loading them, but not quickly enough.
Once we airlifted the people off the planet, assuming we were able to airlift all of them, we’d still need time to search for food and supplies. We might have been able to evacuate the people and the supplies had Liotta’s team not cataclysmically botched the opening hours of the operation.
Liotta’s officers were afraid to go down to the planet. They had heard that Bangalore was going to go up in smoke, so they sent seaman and petty officers to run the show in case the Avatari attacked before they were supposed to attack. So battalions of seaman and petty officers went down to the planet and did the heavy lifting, while Liotta’s chickenhearted senior officers tried to run the show from orbiting battleships. The arrangement did not work well.
The junior officers running the evacuation were used to taking orders, not giving them. Trying to run things from their Mount Olympus above the clouds, the officers in charge were too removed from the operation to adjust the logistics. Five hours into the operation, the wheels were so badly specked that only one million people had been lifted off the planet, and the officers in charge admitted they would not be able to airlift all of the remaining seven million. By the time I reached Bangalore, searching for food and medicine had become a pipe dream.
Despite all of his bluster at the summit, Admiral Liotta was an idiot who surrounded himself with idiots. It’s a popular form of camouflage that many officers use. Hoping to hide their ineptitude behind the greater stupidity of others, morons surround themselves with other morons. There’s an old saying that, “In the valley of the blind, the one-eyed man shall be king.” In officer country, men with two eyes and two testicles are hard to come by.
Seven hours into the evacuation, Admiral Liotta flew to Bangalore to run the show himself. He began his salvage operation by sending thousands of officers down to the planet and telling them that he would not allow them back on their ships until the evacuation was complete.
Score one point for “Curtis the Snake.”
The ground operation progressed slowly, with sailors and Marines herd
ing entire towns into spaceports and makeshift way stations. Transports ran on tight schedules. Loading and unloading times were cut in half, and the pace of the rescue picked up. Sadly, no one realized that they needed to stage the evacuation in waves. The clusterspeck that once slowed operations on the ground simply shifted to a clusterspeck that tied up operations on the barges.
I traveled down to Bangalore to inspect the evacuation and crack a few skulls. As we left the Bolivar, I saw six barges hovering in a group just above the atmosphere, looking like a neighborhood of warehouses. Lights flashed along their hulls, directing the lines of transports to open landing pads.
Except for my shuttle, the only ships approaching the planet were transports. Thousands of them climbed in and out of the atmosphere, forming a Y-axis traffic jam that would take hours to untangle. Had the barges been able to fly down to the planet, we could have finished the evacuation in one-tenth the time; but they were big bulky boxes without wings, designed to float weightless in space, free of the forces of friction and gravity.
Off in the distance, a huge fleet of warships loitered just outside the local broadcast zone like clown fish swimming beside an anemone. If the U.A. attacked, our ships would dart into the sanctuary of the zone, where self-broadcasting ships could not follow.
And if the Unifieds went after the barges ... We’d rigged them with bombs. We were prepared to blow ourselves up one barge at a time until the Unified Authority realized that if we had to die, we’d die happy in the knowledge that we were dragging our natural-born creators down with us.
I started the trip to Bangalore in the luxurious main cabin of my personal command shuttle—a remnant from happier days. A minute after we cleared the Bolivar, I entered the cramped cockpit. My pilot, Lieutenant Nobles, and I had developed a friendship; I felt an obligation to go chat with him.
“Do you think they’re out there?” Nobles asked as I entered.
“Who? The Unifieds? They’ve got eyes out there. You can count on it,” I said.
Somewhere out there, a U.A. spy ship would be watching, recording our every move. They recorded the destruction of New Olympus and Terraneau. Why stop there? They probably recorded our evacuations and evaluated what worked and what failed. They’d have an evacuation of their own soon enough. If they got started right away, they could probably even build a new fleet of barges by the time the Avatari arrived; but they would not do that. We had stolen their property. The bastards wanted it back.
As we neared the atmosphere, a flash appeared in the distance as one of the barges entered the broadcast zone, ferrying another quarter of a million people to temporary shelters on Providence Kri.
We could not continue storing people on Providence Kri forever. The clock was ticking on that planet as well. We’d eventually need to pull everybody off that rock, too. The logistics of evacuating Providence Kri would be staggering, tens of millions of people.
Five hundred thousand evacuees from Gobi, eight million from Bangalore—the numbers added up quickly. Sooner or later, we’d be hauling fifty million refugees. What would we do at that point?
The Avatari were rolling through the galaxy, and we were trying to keep ahead of the storm instead of working our way around it. Sooner or later, we would need to start settling one of the planets that the aliens had already incinerated. If we moved refugees anywhere else, we would need to move them again.
“What do you think the Unifieds will do when the aliens reach Earth?” Nobles asked. “Think they’ll ask us for help?”
“They might,” I said. “I think they’d rather kill us and take their barges back. If they can’t, they’ll probably ask for help.”
“Yeah, well, if Tobias Andropov asks me for a ride, I’ll tell him to kiss my ass,” said Nobles. Andropov was the senior member of the Linear Committee, making him the most powerful politician in a mortally wounded republic.
We entered the atmosphere, the shuttle’s sleek profile piercing the bubble with very little resistance. When transports fly down to planets, they batter their way into the atmosphere with all of the grace of a hammer hitting glass. My shuttle pierced it like a needle.
“I heard they wanted to set up undersea cities,” said Nobles.
Before becoming a Unified Authority signee, the French government had launched an undersea mining and colonization program called the Cousteau Oceanic Exploration program. They hoped to form an alliance that would rival the U.A.’s space-exploration alliance, but only Tahiti signed on.
“I heard that, too,” I said.
“Think they can go deep enough?” Nobles asked.
“Depth isn’t the problem.” Forty feet down would be deep enough. The French built a city called Mariana that was three miles down. It only held five thousand people. I said, “Size is the problem. Their undersea cities are too specking small.”
“That’s funny,” said Nobles. “Now they know how it feels.”
The shuttle handled atmospheric travel like a jet, channeling air currents to turn and rise and dive. Nobles slowed us to a sluggish three hundred miles per hour as we dropped toward the clouds. It was night, moonlight made the clouds gray, and the ocean below us was black. Wherever I looked, I saw transports muscling their way through the sky, looking no more aerodynamic than bumblebees, and exceptionally clumsy at that.
Nobles whistled, and said, “Man, we really specked them over when we stole their barges.”
“They specked themselves,” I said, remembering how the Unified Authority had forced the clone military into rebellion.
A twisted peel of clouds veiled my view of the city below. Pockets of lights sparkled in the darkness on the ground. Evacuation centers, I thought.
A few minutes passed, and we flew over the city. We slowed as we approached a sports stadium that had been converted into a spaceport. Three transports rose from its rim, dozens more sat side by side on its open field. The lines of people packed around them looked like grains of sand.
The entire scene was awash with light. Bright lights showered down around the rim of the stadium, orange-tinted lights mapped the parking lot, and a long, slow-moving line of headlights traced the street leading into stadium.
Just a few moments later, we passed a bubble of light that resolved itself into a shopping mall, its enormous parking lot converted into a landing strip. A sea of people covered the parking area.
We flew to the Bangalore pangalactic spaceport, the hub of the evacuation. Transports, which have skids instead of wheels, can land in tight spaces and on tiny platforms in sports stadiums and shopping centers. My shuttle had wheels. We needed a runway.
The control tower cleared us, and Nobles set us down. It happened that fast. Three officers met us as we left the shuttle. As I left the shuttle, I inhaled a jolt of ozone. Some of our transport pilots were flying with their shields up. The shields generated ozone. With so many transports flying in and out of the atmosphere, I wondered what kind of pollution problems the ozone might create. Whatever problems it created, they would not last long.
The officers had a sedan waiting on the runway. They hustled me into my seat, and we drove into the city.
In the minutes it took me to get through Gandhi Spaceport, I saw two, maybe three, hundred passengers charging toward a transport made to carry one hundred people. The stampede left bloody bodies in its wake.
We passed roads clogged with panicked refugees and a city with masses who looked ready to riot. “Slow down,” I told the driver, as we passed a corner on which armed soldiers manning a chest-high barricade tried to hold back a crowd.
“Stop the car,” I said.
I climbed out of the car. The people looked terrified, so did the officers who had come to organize the evacuation.
“A hundred at a time,” I mumbled.
“What was that?” asked one of the officers.
“Nothing,” I said. “Just thinking out loud.” Evacuating a planet with eight million people in transports that were only capable of carrying one hundred
refugees at a time seemed incredibly inefficient. It took ten thousand transports to move one million people, and it would take eighty thousand to empty this planet. Eighty thousand liftoffs . . . Eighty thousand dockings . . .
The officers drove me to an Air Force base, where a small knot of Marines came out to greet me. We traded salutes and pleasantries. Admiral Liotta had placed my Marines in charge of looking for food and dealing with looters. Armed troops carrying M27s patrolled the streets. Looters would not be offered evacuation. The Marines had orders to shoot them on sight.
“How is the evacuation going?” I asked one of the Marines.
“It’s a mess, sir,” said the colonel in charge. “I don’t know who came up with these evacuation plans, but we’re finding looters on every street. It’s a mess.”
A Marine captain said, “General, these people are scared. We’re herding them like cattle, and they’re scared of us. They’re even more scared we’re going to leave them behind.”
“I can take you to see what we’re dealing with if you want, General,” the colonel offered.
I shook my head and turned to one of Liotta’s officers. “Will we get them all out?” I asked.
“It’s going to be close, sir,” he said.
“How about supplies?” I asked. “Do we have enough time to gather supplies?”
“We already gathered ’em. We’ve had teams out all day. We have the food and the medicine. All we need now is transports to lift the supplies out.”
“Where are the supplies?” I asked.
“Stacked up and ready at the spaceport.”
“Outstanding,” I said. “So the supplies we need will be in neat stacks when they burn to dust.”
“But, sir . . .” Liotta’s officer started to explain himself, then thought better of it and fell silent.
The Clone Redemption Page 17