The Clone Redemption

by Steven L. Kent

  Cutter said, “You know, he could be bluffing. It’s always possible that we caught the bastard with his pants down, and he’s trying to stall the attack until his fleet returns.”

  “If it returns,” I said.

  Several people asked, “What?”

  “Holman stole the shield-buster torpedoes from the ships we destroyed when we took the barges,” I said. “Andropov thinks we have them. The bastard’s in for a surprise if he sends his fleet to Terraneau. Holman’s still got them.”

  “Holman’s battleships are carrying shield-busters?” asked Cutter.

  I said, “Not his battleships, his fighters,” and I told him about my meeting with Mars. I went over it quickly, leaving out the shit about Mars praying for our salvation.

  Cutter listened carefully and smiled. “Brilliant strategy. He’s letting the Unifieds go after the nest when they should be chasing the hornets.”

  “He still only has three carriers,” said one of the ships’ captains.

  “That’s why it works,” Cutter said in a voice so bright you would have thought we’d already won the war. “The Unifieds will go after the carriers first. They’ll home right in on them. Once they do, Holman will slip his fighters right past them. He’s going to hit the bastards in the gut, and they won’t know where it came from.”

  “They’ll figure it out before he finishes off their ships,” I said.

  “Those fighters are going to give Holman the element of surprise, and they’ll be hard to track. The Unifieds won’t know which fighters have shield-busters and which ones have lasers,” said Cutter. “One thing about Holman—he always thought ahead of the curve.”

  “That doesn’t help us,” said one of the captains.

  I disagreed. Every ship Holman sank in the Scutum-Crux Arm was another ship that would not return to Earth. If he sank enough of them, we might be able to take the Sol System uncontested ... except that still left the question about Andropov’s superweapon.

  Cutter sat silent while the voices on the communications console debated scenarios and outcomes. I sensed uncertainty as I listened to them.

  One officer suggested we approach slowly and prepare to retreat. Another wanted to send two battleships to probe their defenses, then regroup. It sounded intelligent.

  Cutter responded quickly, interrupting the man. He said, “No. We go in hard and fast, and present a moving target. Whatever they have, it’s got to be a surface-to-space weapon. They might have cannons, but it’s probably rockets. It’s almost sure to be rockets ... a lot of rockets. That’s why they haven’t rebuilt their Navy, they’ve been allocating their resources to a rocket defense. We need to go in fast, land our Marines, and get the speck out of there.”

  That ended the debate.

  Cutter finished by saying, “God help us if I called this wrong.”

  Lieutenant Mars couldn’t have said it better.

  I told Freeman about the meeting, and he said, “Missiles, not rockets.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  “They recently built three high-security missile bases around Washington, D.C.”

  “There must be more,” I said.

  “Just those three.”

  “Why would they build all of them in Washington?” I asked.

  Freeman glared at me. “This is the Unified Authority.”

  “Yeah. The whole damned planet belongs to the Unified Authority,” I said.

  “Where are you planning to attack?” asked Freeman.

  “The capital,” I said.

  He was right. They were right. It did not matter where else we attacked, the war would be decided on the eastern seaboard of the former United States. In their minds, no other target was worth invading. It was the only target in my mind as well. The Unified Authority would remain in place so long as Washington, D.C., remained.

  “Damn it,” I said.

  Freeman watched me silently.

  “How dangerous?” I asked.

  “They’re big bases. They have millions of missiles,” he said.

  “So we’re screwed,” I said.

  “I can shut them down.”

  He was a skilled saboteur. I asked, “Do you have a way to hack into their system?”

  He shook his head. “I wouldn’t even try; the security is too solid.”

  “Do you know how to break into the bases?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  I thought he’d probably come up with something elegant, some imaginative loophole. I was wrong. He said, “I bought warehouses near each of the missile bases and filled them with bombs.”

  I had to laugh. “You said you weren’t sure which side you were going to take,” I pointed out.

  Freeman looked down at me, blinked once, and asked, “Do you want me to tell you about the bombs I set up next to your bases?”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  After speaking with Freeman, I spent fifteen minutes throwing together a strategy for establishing a beachhead, then I told Cutter to launch the invasion.

  I boarded a transport and sat in the cockpit, in the copilot’s seat. Beside me, Lieutenant Christian Nobles ran the controls. “Sir, do you know what we’re up against?” he asked, as the sled dragged our transport through the first set of locks.

  “You’re going to have plenty to deal with on the way down,” I said. “The Unifieds have a new missile defense.”

  “What about the Earth Fleet? What did they do with their fleet?” Nobles asked.

  “We don’t know. If I had to guess, I’d say the bastards sent it to intercept the barges at Terraneau.” I did not mention my conversation with Tobias Andropov. Nobles had not returned to Earth for most of a decade. Tobias Andropov had risen to power during Nobles’s absence, and I doubted that the name would have meant anything to him. The sled began dragging our transport into the launch tubes.

  “It sounds like the Unifieds are in the shit,” Nobles said.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “We captured the Golan Dry Docks, right? That left them high and dry without anyplace to build new ships. We don’t have anyone who can design ships. They don’t have anyplace to build them. Either way, you end up stranded once you run out of ships. I bet that’s why they’re using a missile defense.”

  I silently stewed over Nobles’s words as we entered the second atmospheric lock and the huge metal door closed behind us, sealing off the rest of the carrier as the outer hatch opened, revealing space. We left the artificial-gravity field. Nobles gave the thrusters a slight kick, and the transport coasted out to space.

  We were at the head of an enormous armada, flying toward Earth at several million miles per hour. In space, where there is no friction to slow you down, a slow-flying bird like a military transport can travel a million miles per hour riding on the inertia of the ship from which it launched.

  The first wave of fighters led the way, and we followed, an enormous swarm of transports. Ahead of us, I saw the sun, the Earth, and its moon. The engines of our Tomcats looked like tiny sparks. They traveled ahead of us, looking like a field of ambercolored stars. Above them, a few capital ships cleared the way.

  At that point, the transport pilots used their thrusters to slow their ships as the invasion fleet left us behind. The change in speed played havoc with the gravity inside the transports. I felt a wave of nausea roll over me as the artificially generated gravity that rooted me to the floor did a tugof-war with the genuine gravity that pulled me forward.

  As the gravity from our deceleration stabilized, I put on my helmet and used the commandLink to speak to Ray Freeman. We did not fly down to Earth on the same transport.

  “Ray, you there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How long will it take you to destroy the bases?” I asked.

  “Depends how far I need to travel.”

  “We’re going to try and come in as close to Washington, D.C., as possible,” I said. “If we run into resistance, you may have a trek.”
>
  That was when the shelling began. Far ahead of us, so distant that the explosions looked like light shining through hundreds of pinholes, U.A. missiles lashed out at our capital ships.

  “Harris,” Cutter called. His voice came on a direct line over the interLink and on the communications console.

  “Harris, here,” I said.

  “We found their missiles,” Cutter shouted. He probably did not mean to shout, but the man must have been drowning in adrenaline. His voice rang in my ears. “We’re losing ships. Damn, we’re losing ships.”

  Cutter had planned the pass correctly. Our big ships streaked by at several million miles per hour, traveling so fast that the missiles could not lock in on individual targets.

  Cutter mumbled something, then said, “We lost twenty-seven ships.” Having seen the extent of the damage, he sounded more stressed than panicked.

  Twenty-seven ships did not sound like a lot. I said, “They only nicked you. This could end early.”

  Cutter put the damage into perspective. “We lost twenty-seven ships passing four hundred thousand miles outside of Earth’s atmosphere at three million miles per hour. You’ll be entering the atmosphere at two thousand miles per hour.”

  “We’re going to get nailed,” I said.

  He did not respond.

  “Warn your men,” I told Cutter. “They deserve to know what they’re up against.”

  Cutter signed off and changed frequencies. A moment later, speaking on an open line that every fighter and transport pilot would hear, he made his report.

  “This is Captain Donald Cutter of the E.M.N. Alexander.

  “The Unified Authority is using nuclear-tipped missiles to defend its space. The Unifieds’ defense strategy involves flooding our path with these missiles. We can minimize the damage using defensive tactics, but we expect to take casualties.

  “This mission will succeed or fail based on our ability to land our transports in strategic locations. That places a heavy burden on you fighter pilots. We are asking you to give this everything you’ve got. We need you to escort our transports to Earth. Do not return to the fleet until the Marines have landed.

  “Good luck to you,” he said, and signed off.

  If every transport landed, we would start our invasion with three hundred thousand Marines. That would be the first of four waves—three thousand transports, each carrying one hundred troops and equipment. The second wave would have fewer troops and bigger guns, two hundred thousand men plus tanks and artillery.

  Maybe five hundred miles ahead of us, our fighter escort entered into the storm. These were small, agile ships, able to execute tight maneuvers and armed with decoy buoys, sonic shields that could detonate warheads and missiles. They had ghosting technology designed to scramble enemy targeting systems with false readings. They dropped phosphorous-burning target drones that distracted heat-seeking missiles and sent them off course.

  Our defensive tactics were designed for dogfights in mostly empty skies. The wing escorting our transports included thousands of fighters wedged too tightly together to maneuver. The shields on our fighters would offer little protection against nuclear-tipped missiles. With our pilots flying so close together, fooling a missile into missing one fighter might well send it into another.

  Missiles began to burst in flashes that, from our transports, looked no bigger than the flame of a candle, but those explosions burned bright in the darkness.

  Off to the side, Earth revolved as smooth and round as a child’s dream. The sun shone down on the far side of the hemisphere, lighting the nearest edge of Europe and farthest shore of the Atlantic. And directly ahead of us, men in Harriers, Tomcats, and Phantoms did something that will forever color the way I think of fighter pilots. With missiles slamming into them from every side, they slowed their speed.

  Had they bashed their way through at full speed, the vast majority of those fighters would have survived the attack. They would have left us behind, and the Unifieds would have renewed their attack on our unescorted transports. I doubt a single one of our slow-flying birds would have survived.

  The fighters throttled back to a crawl. We caught up to them so gradually, I might not have noticed had it not been for Nobles. He muttered, “Specking hell, they’re almost at a dead stop.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Thirty seconds, sir, and we’ll be in missile range.”

  Then I saw it. We had nearly caught up to the fighters as they weaved around each other and waited for us. With the Earth turning peacefully in the background, I saw a Phantom take a direct hit. The missile struck it just behind the cockpit. The missile hit it “in the gills,” in the pilots’ vernacular.

  The missile exploded outside the shields—an electrical layer that showed like a flat plane of glass, then vanished as the force of the blast tore, shredded, and melted the fighter all at the same time. Pieces of wing, and nose, and fuselage spun into space, scattering like buckshot from a shotgun.

  A few hundred yards away, a Phantom banked, looped, and nose-dived toward Earth, then pulled into a corkscrew as it led multiple rockets away from our transports. I did not have a clear view of the fighter when the first of the missiles hit, I just saw the flare of the explosion.

  Then we entered the pack and found ourselves as much a target as the fighters that protected us. Fighters darted in and out of view. The debris of broken fighters floated around us; and in the distance, Earth was ten or maybe twenty times the size of a full harvest moon.

  I did not see the missile that shot toward our bow, but I caught a glimpse of the particle beam that disabled it and I saw the fighter that fired the beam as she passed. The fighter streaked by so quickly, I could not tell if she was a Tomcat, a Harrier, or a Phantom.

  Nobles said, “That was close.”

  I said, “That fighter almost hit us.”

  Nobles said, “The missile came closer.”

  Until he mentioned the missile, I had not understood. “Can you tell how many transports we’ve lost?” I asked. We were at the front of the wave. I had no idea what had happened behind us.

  “Seventy-five so far,” he said. “The fighters are taking it worse than us. They’re down a few hundred.”

  I barely heard what Nobles said about the fighters because I was already trying to raise Freeman on the interLink.

  “Ray. Ray, are you there?” If we lost Freeman, the mission was over.

  “Here,” he said.

  “We’re losing transports,” I said.

  Just ahead of us, three fighters formed a small wing to clear our path. They stayed in a tight formation for a minute or two, firing lasers and particle beams into the glowing atmosphere ahead of us.

  A missile hit the fighter on the right. It happened so fast I did not see where it hit or if the bird survived. One moment there were three ships, then the tinting over in our windshield darkened. When the tint cleared, there were two fighters instead of three.

  “Just making sure you’re okay,” I said.

  Freeman didn’t answer.

  “Better brace yourself,” Nobles said. “We’re coming in hard.”

  Before I could react, we slammed into the edge of Earth’s atmosphere and glanced off, only to strike it again and break through. The impact of the entry slung me back in my seat, my arms flying to the sides, my head snapped back. The force of the drop held me pinned in my chair. I struggled to sit up, to breathe, to see through the windshield.

  Our fighter escort did not lead us down to the planet. We dived through bright mist and empty sky with no ships leading our way. The sky around us was crisscrossed with slowly evaporating vapor trails.

  The Unifieds would not fire their nuclear-tipped missiles at us now that we had entered the atmosphere, the radiation would have come back to fry them. As we flew through the paper white sky, thick beams of silver-red light slashed the air around us.

  “Lasers,” Nobles mumbled. He said it dismissively. We could survive a direct hit from a laser. He
studied his scopes for a moment, and said, “Whatever is left of us has already entered the atmosphere. The fighters are headed back to the fleet.”

  “How many transports do we have?” I asked.

  Nobles hesitated, swallowed, said, “Two hundred sixty-five.”

  “What the speck do we do now?” I asked. That left us with twenty-six thousand men plus change. We weren’t going to conquer Washington with twenty-six thousand men.

  “We’d better land. Sooner or later, those lasers are going to wear down our shields,” Nobles said. Either a particle beam or possibly a short-range missile hit us. I thought it might have been a particle beam by the way we dropped. A hundred feet ... a thousand feet ... One moment we were flying straight ahead and the next falling straight down.

  We had reached the eastern seaboard of the territory once called the United States. This was the seat of power, the capital of the Unified Authority. The ground below us was trussed with roads and highways. We skirted cities and traversed forests as we traveled up the coast at three times the speed of sound.

  It was a clear day. We might have been ten miles out of Washington, D.C., the city skyline rose out of the tree-covered landscape up ahead. Until that moment, the Unifieds had only fired ground weapons at us, and I finally understood why. They were herding us, guiding us toward the capital itself and Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling, the largest military air base on Earth.

  I shouted, “Put us down.”

  “We’re in the middle of nowhere,” Nobles said. Then he saw fighters on his radar and the flashing amber warning light.

  Nobles was a good pilot and a smart man. He knew we had a better chance of surviving a crash landing than an aerial assault. We had powerful shields but no weapons and limited maneuverability.

  Nobles set off Klaxons to alert the Marines in the kettle about the upcoming crash. He hit the radio, and shouted, “Incoming fighters! Drop where you are! Drop where you are!”

  We nose-dived toward the forest. Our shields obliterated the bare branches of trees that had shed their leaves for the winter. We skipped across the tops of the trees as Nobles cut our speed from thousands of miles per hour to hundreds. He righted our attitude, and our momentum hurled us forward. As I watched Nobles steering us into trees, I realized he was using them to slow us.