The Clone Redemption

by Steven L. Kent

  I realized that I liked her more than ever now that her Hollywood sheen had vanished. The tough, the polished, the beautiful Ava that filled movie screens no longer existed. Given the chance, I thought I might just fall in love with the empty shell that she had left behind. This was a woman scarred by death, a woman who knew my world.

  “We’re going to evacuate Providence Kri,” I said. That was classified information, but this new Ava did not strike me as a security risk.

  “Where are we going?”

  I did not want to tell her about Terraneau, not while she was still in the grieving process. “They’re going to try to resurrect one of the planets that have already been burned.”

  “Terraneau?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, but she saw through me.

  “Liar,” she said. “I can’t go back.”

  “You can’t stay here,” I said.

  “It’s as good a place as any,” she said.

  “The aliens will be here by the end of the week. If you stay here, you’ll die.”

  She thought about that, and asked, “Are you going to Terraneau?”

  “No,” I said.

  I thought I saw the ghost of her old sardonic smile. “Then you came here to say good-bye. You always come to say good-bye. Have you noticed that, Harris? You and I, we say good-bye to each other more than anything else.”

  I did not know what it was about this woman that stirred my heart. I wanted to hold her and to kiss her, and I felt an urge to do more. She was empty and I was lonely and we could never again satisfy each other; but for the first time since I had met Ava Gardner, I knew that I loved her.

  “I love you,” I said.

  She ignored me. She asked, “If you are not going to Terraneau, where are you going?”

  “Earth,” I said. Using the now-familiar line, I added, “It’s a one-way ticket.”

  “I don’t suppose it’s a social call.”

  “No. Not a social call,” I said.

  Ava listened and nodded, but she did not speak.

  Time passed.

  “I love you,” I said.

  “You don’t know love,” she said. “You know war. You know death. You don’t know love.”

  Maybe she’s right, I thought. Whatever I felt for Ava at that moment, it matched up with the way I expected love to feel.

  If I left her alone, she would stay in the apartment and die when the Avatari attacked the planet. I could have begged her to leave, and maybe she would have considered it. I could have sent Major Perry to collect her. He could take her by force. He could drag her to a transport and cart her off to Terraneau, but he couldn’t put the life back into her.

  I bent down, stroked her hair, kissed her on the forehead, and whispered, “This is our final good-bye.”

  Her eyes met mine, and she said two words. “Thank you.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  I wanted to say good-bye to Scott Mars before I left for Earth. Hearing he was aboard the Mandela, one of the handful of fighter carriers headed to Terraneau, I flew out to visit the ship.

  “The Corps of Engineers is down in the fighter bay,” the officer in charge told me when I entered the landing bay.

  “What the hell are they doing down there?” I grumbled.

  “They’re engineers. They’re probably fixing up the fighters, sir,” said the officer.

  “They aren’t mechanics, they’re engineers,” I said. “Engineers don’t fix fighters, they design them.”

  “Good point, sir,” the officer said, a diplomatic way of telling me to speck off.

  Still wondering why the head of the Corps of Engineers was inspecting fighters, I hiked down to the hangar. The place was enormous—a double-tall deck teeming with techs and mechanics. Like most warships, the Mandela had a hot-bunk rotation with three shifts, but that rotation collapsed as the empire prepared for evacuation and war. All three shifts had reported for work, and Mars and his engineers had come to join them. Dressed in red jumpsuits, the mechanics and technicians looked like ants crowded around the fighters.

  I found Mars stooped under the wing of a fighter inspecting who knew what. I stood waiting for him to notice me, but he didn’t. After more than a minute, I finally asked, “Did Holman bust you down to fighter maintenance?”

  Mars spun to face me, still holding a laser probe in his left hand as he saluted me with his right. “I wish to God he had,” said the perennially positive, born-again clone. “I’ll take Tomcats and Phantoms over Stone Age farming.”

  “You’re not excited about Terraneau?”

  “Building tent cities and digging latrines . . . It may be my calling; but no, I’m not excited about it.”

  “It won’t be totally primitive; you’ll still have tractors and cranes,” I said.

  “We’re riding Space Age technology into an Iron Age existence,” he said.

  “You can build churches, too,” I said, trying to appeal to his religious side.

  That brought a smile. He said, “Wanna see the surprise we planned in case we run into resistance?” Mars fixed me with a distinctly un-Christian grin and nodded toward the undercarriage of the Tomcat.

  I squatted and edged my way under the wing, but I did not see anything other than the standard laser array and rockets. “What am I looking at?” I asked.

  “We added a hard point for torpedoes,” Mars said. “Their torpedoes, the shield-busters. They know we have ’em, but they won’t think our fighters are packing them.”

  I liked the idea. Somewhere down inside me, my confidence grew. A weapon like that could turn the tide of the war.

  Mars ran his fingers along the wires at the back of a torpedo tube, then he shined a light into the seam at the top to inspect the joint. He reached for the lid to the electrical panel, paused, then opened it.

  “Not sure it will work?” I asked.

  “It’s going to work perfectly.”

  “Then why are you opening it?”

  He said, “Because I am here and it’s there and that’s what engineers do,” a hint of self-mockery in his voice.

  I patted the fuselage of the fighter the way a man might pat his horse, and asked, “How many of these are we taking?”

  An engineer lit a laser torch under the wing of a nearby Tomcat. Mars shaded his eyes from the glare. He squinted toward me, and said, “None.”

  “What?”

  “They’re all going to Terraneau.”

  “What the hell are you going to use them for on Terraneau?” I asked. “You’re setting up a colony. We’re the ones going into battle.”

  “It wasn’t my idea—Holman’s orders.”

  “Holman?” Hearing who gave the orders, I felt like I’d been kicked in the gut.

  The blue-white light of the laser welder flashed and flickered along the hull of the fighter. It lit one side of Mars’s face. The acrid tang of melting metal filled the air.

  “He says we need them for insurance in case the Unifieds get around you,” said Mars. “Harris, don’t worry. You’re going to outnumber the Earth Fleet a hundred to one.”

  I once saw a man pour a bag with fifty goldfish into a tank with five piranhas. There were ten goldfish for each of the predators, but they lasted less than a minute. Each time a piranha snapped at a goldfish, it left behind nothing more than orange-gold scales and the tips of the fins.

  Was the empty knot in my chest formed by frustration or disappointment? “Those fighters could save a lot of lives during an invasion,” I said. I was also thinking, If they hit us fast enough, we won’t even get the chance to land our troops.

  When Navy ships go to battle, the Marines inside of them sit helplessly as they wait for their turn to fight.

  “General, what you really need to do is appeal to a higher power,” Mars said.

  “I know, Holman’s orders.”

  “No, there’s a higher authority than Jim Holman . . . God helps those who ask for help. You need to pray.”

  A rush of anger ran through
my brain. You pray, and I’ll take the Tomcats with the shield-busters, I thought. Mars and I had been through a lot together. I considered him a friend, and I did not have many friends, so I kept that to myself.

  “I’ve never had much luck with prayer,” I said. I didn’t mind Freeman’s sermons because he had more questions than doctrine. For Freeman, God was a concept that had recently started to make sense. Scott Mars, on the other hand, bought into Christianity with all of its hooks, lines, and sinkers.

  He accepted all its voodoo. He believed that a virgin gave birth to a man who walked on water when he wasn’t changing it into wine. Mars believed in blind men seeing and burning bushes. Make up a story about a dead man rising from his grave, and Lieutenant Mars would praise God and declare it a miracle.

  Freeman tried to extract the truth from the mythology. Mars swallowed it all in one great gulp of faith.

  He followed me out from under the wing of the Tomcat, and asked, “Have you ever actually prayed?”

  Not sure how I would react if he offered to pray with me, I admitted that I had never actually dropped to my knees.

  He smiled, and said, “Whoever came up with that thing about there not being any atheists in the trenches never met you, Harris. I’ll pray for you.”

  “While you’re asking God to spare my synthetic soul, would you mind asking Him to do something about U.A.’s specking shielded armor? That’s the miracle I’d pray for ... if I ever prayed.”

  Mars smiled, and said, “God works in ineffable ways.”

  I said, “So do broadcast stations. If, by some miracle, we find a working broadcast station when we get to Earth, maybe I’ll see you again.”

  Lieutenant Mars saluted, and said, “Wouldn’t that be a miracle.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  Location: Sol System

  Galactic Position: Orion Arm

  Astronomic Location: Milky Way

  We loaded men and guns onto the transports as pilots boarded their fighters. In another minute, our ships would enter the broadcast system, and the invasion would begin. We’d emptied every corner of the Enlisted Man’s Empire. Every working ship would either escort barges or join the invasion.

  One thousand two hundred thirty-six ships now prepared to enter Earth space. We had sixty-eight fighter carriers and two hundred battleships. We had Tomcats, Phantoms, and Harriers by the hundreds. Our landing force included one thousand helicopter gunships and nearly ten thousand transports, which we would use to deploy our three million Marines.

  We had an overwhelming force. Why did I not feel confident?

  When Freeman came to see me, he wore his armor and carried his go-pack. He had a sniper rifle, an M27, laser and particle-beam weapons, and grenades. Strong, smart, and a masterful assassin, he could pulverize men with his fists or snipe at them from two miles away. He knew how to set charges and hack into computer systems. Having Freeman on our side was reason enough to feel positive. Ray Freeman could tip battles and win wars.

  “I ran into Scott Mars. He says he’s going to pray for us,” I said.

  Freeman certainly heard me, but he did not respond. He stepped into my billet, a seven-foot giant as wide around the chest as a wheelbarrow, with ebony skin and scars on his scalp. The improbably wide sleeves of his armor hid the muscles in his arms.

  “I told him to keep his prayers and give us fighters with U.A. torpedoes.”

  Freeman asked, “You go to tell him good-bye?”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  Freeman placed his little two-way communicator on my desk. “We need to warn Sweetwater and Breeze about the invasion.”

  “Warn them? Ray, they aren’t people. They’re software. It’s like kissing your bunk good-bye. You might have had some good times together, but that doesn’t make it human.”

  That sounds a lot like the crap that natural-borns say about clones, I thought to myself. I said, “Let’s give them a call.”

  Freeman placed the communicator on the desk for me to handle the security codes. I felt the weight of his eyes on my neck and the weight of my words on my conscience.

  Living, breathing men would die today. I might die. I had somehow convinced myself that I did not have time to worry about virtual people. I was an asshole. William Sweetwater and Arthur Breeze deserved better. If the Unifieds suspected that the scientists had helped us, they would pull the plug on them. Alive or not, they would cease to exist for having helped us . . . having helped me.

  I muttered, “Next you’re going to want me to tuck them in bed,” but it was just for show. Like Freeman, I’d come to think of the scientists as human.

  “Hello, Harris. Has your invasion begun?”

  The screen did not show an odd pairing of scientists in a lab, it showed a man sitting at an oak desk in a richly furnished office. Instead of Sweetwater’s gravelly voice or Breeze’s low whisper, this man had deep resonance and polish. He had the voice of a politician.

  Tobias Andropov, the youngest member of the Linear Committee, sat alone at his desk. He looked into the camera, smirked, and let his head bob in a way that made him seem all the more arrogant.

  I felt my gut bounce, and my lips involuntarily formed the word, “speck.” Other than that, I sat in silence.

  The camera was aimed at my head and shoulders. Trying to move as little as possible, I reached for my communications console with my right hand. Keeping my eyes on Freeman’s little two-way, on Andropov, I fumbled with the console. If I hit the right buttons, Holman and his aides could listen in.

  Trying to act more sure of myself than I felt, I smiled, and said, “I must have the wrong number.”

  “We knew they were spying for you. We’ve been watching all along, Harris. You had to know we could see everything they did; we programmed them. We programmed their environment. We had access to their thoughts. Hell, Harris, we didn’t need cameras or bugs to listen in on them; everything they did took place on our computers.”

  “Then why did you let them help us?” I asked.

  Andropov laughed. “Let them help you? The synthetic brain ... Sometimes I think we should have given you clones bigger brains.

  “We didn’t let them help you. We let you help us. We wanted you to evacuate those planets.”

  “Bullshit,” I said.

  Andropov shrugged his shoulders, and said, “Think what you want.”

  “We stole your barges.”

  “Yes you did, and make no mistake, we will take them back.”

  “You attacked our fleet.”

  “A ship here or there, mostly fighter carriers. Strategic hits. We wanted to weaken you. We were playing with you, testing your abilities. I must say, your Navy was always pathetic.”

  “We have enough ships to . . .”

  Andropov shook his head. “You still don’t understand. Harris, it doesn’t matter how many ships you send here; they’re as good as dead.

  “You gave us a scare with that device that you used off New Copenhagen; but it won’t work this time, not unless you plan on destroying the planet.” He paused to smirk.

  “New Copenhagen?” I muttered. He must mean Solomon, I thought. He’s talking about the torpedoes Holman fired. Maybe the test had gone better than we thought.

  Andropov turned away from the camera, but he continued speaking. He said, “Ah, I see your fleet has arrived. Sixty-eight carriers. Two hundred battleships.” He nodded, turned to face me, and said, “Very impressive.”

  Even as he said this, the Klaxons began their howling call to stations.

  No longer able to stop myself, I looked down at the communications console and saw that I had not succeeded at powering it up. Holman had not heard a word of the conversation, not that it would have mattered. The gears of the invasion were already in motion.

  Looking back at Freeman’s two-way, I said, “Just so you know, it’s personal between us. I’m coming for you.”

  He nodded, and said, “Don’t you have a transport to catch?”


  I did not know if I signed off or he did. My hand was on the two-way, but I did not remember killing the power. I reached for the communications console, signaled the bridge, and spoke to Captain Cutter. I said, “Better kill the engines. I think they’re expecting us.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  We searched the space lanes and found only a few U.A. ships. The Unifieds had six Perseus-class ships in the area. These were older ships, the same make as our ships. They didn’t pose any threat at all.

  The Unifieds might have had spy ships watching us; but just as Andropov had said, their fleet had gone.

  I sat in a conference room with Cutter. We had an audio link to all the top officers in the fleet. Cutter repeated everything I had told him, then said, “I’m open to suggestions.”

  Several officers mumbled indistinct answers, but no one spoke up.

  Cutter looked at me and shook his head. “It’s hard to know what to do when you don’t know what you’re up against.”

  We were just off the bridge of the Alexander, a recently refurbished ship that still seemed only partially ready for battle. The engines worked fine. As far as I could tell, the shields worked right. Maybe it was just my nerves.

  “If he has some kind of superweapon, why doesn’t he fire it?” asked one of the disembodied voices.

  “Could be short-range,” said another.

  “Or proximity-based,” said another. “They could have laid mines. If he salted the space lanes, he’ll need to keep his ships out of the area.”

  “He knows we’re not going anywhere,” I said, “not unless he hands over the keys to the Mars broadcast station.”

  Cutter interrupted me. “The station is gone. There’s no trace of it.”

  “They must have destroyed it,” I said.

  “I don’t think so. There would still be wreckage unless they towed it away,” said Cutter.

  “So we’re stuck here,” I muttered. “What are they doing?”