The Clone Empire (11 page)

In the isolation of my helmet, I began to panic. “I’m not ready for this,” I said to myself. I said it out loud. There was something comforting in hearing my own voice rolling around in my helmet; and what did it matter, I had shut off the interLink. No one would hear me.

“Did you say something, General?” For a moment I thought I might be hearing voices, then I remembered that I had not severed my Link with Lieutenant Mars.

“No,” I said. “I’m just mumbling to myself.” I thought for a moment, then I said, “I can’t do this. This is crazy, we need to call this off.”

The top screens of the array showed the view from the lead transport drones. The cameras looked out into space, but not open space. A tangle of wrecked warships filled the view, looking as impregnable as a castle wall.

I became aware of the way I was breathing, panting like a winded dog.

Light flared across thirty of the thirty-five screens, turning them white as an afternoon sun. The nuclear explosion. We’d just shot off enough bombs to destroy a small planet. The heat generated by the cataclysm would only last a moment. During that moment, metal would melt—and bodies—then the chill of space would return. What was the power of a few nuclear bombs against the immenseness of space?

The flash of the bombs vanished as quickly as it appeared, but it left ghosts on the video screens. Thirty of the thirty-five screens were outside the ship, placed in transports; the other five showed scenes inside the hull of the battleship . . . the
Tool
. These screens showed dark corridors and braced walls. Mars and his men had done a lot of work preparing the ship.

“I’m not ready for this,” I told Mars. On the other side of the cockpit, Nobles sat comfortably, unbothered by what we were about to do. Apparently, flying through nuclear explosions left him unfazed.

“It’s too late to call off the mission, General,” Mars said in a voice meant to soothe me.

“Shut down the transports,” I said. “You have control of the transports, shut them down.”

“We can’t do that, sir. There’s already too much forward momentum.”

“Shut them off,” I said, feeling frantic. I had no control over the situation, and that terrified me.

“The Tool will still hit Chastity Belt whether we cut the engines or not,” Mars said.

Now he was using the names Spuler had used, and that aggravated me. My anger cut through my panicked thoughts, and I said, “Lieutenant, shut off the specking engines.”

Mars laughed. “Does Ava Gardner know that you’re a coward?”

I heard the words, but it took a moment for them to sink in. I sat in the copilot’s chair in stunned silence, as he added, “Harris, you’re the best kept secret in the whole Marine Corps. Everyone thinks you’re such a badass, and it turns out you’re just another bed wetter.”

“You son of a bitch,” I said, looking away from the monitors. “You specking son of a bitch. If I get out of here . . .”

“Now I’m scared,” Mars said. “General Bed Wetter is threatening me.”

I could not think of anything else but how much I wanted to kill that son of a bitch. “Born-again clone” my ass. I would have hopped out of the battleship and dog-paddled to Terraneau if I thought I could do it. It was as I sat there fuming, trying to invent some form of revenge, that we struck the barrier. We did not slice through the broken ships, we smashed through like a hammer hitting glass, and the force nearly threw me from my chair.

I turned toward the monitors in time to see three of them go dead. The working screens showed a fractal kaleidoscope of shapes—shards of ships tumbling as they floated out of view. The five cameras located inside the battleship showed crumbled walls that looked like they might have been made out of paper.

Two of the screens in the first row showed the bow of one of the U.A. ships floating into open space. Strands of blue electricity formed around it, flexing and dancing; and then, in a flash, the section of ship was gone.

“You’re through the barrier, sir,” Mars said, suddenly sounding respectful once more. “For what it’s worth, I would have resigned my commission before I would have done what you are doing.”

“What?” I asked, my thoughts still entropic.

“You are traveling at a sustained speed of 273 miles per hour,” Mars said. “I hoped you would come through at 290, but 270 is within the margin of error.”

I still did not understand. I looked over at Nobles, who still sat staring into the monitors, looking so damned relaxed. He had his seat swiveled around, his right hand stretched across the arm of his chair and his left hand curled on his lap.

It took me another moment to realize that Mars had said those things to distract me. I took a deep breath, and said, “Thank you, Lieutenant.”

“No problem, sir,” said Mars. I could hear the smile in his voice. “Go with God.”

My blood pressure returning to normal, I turned to look at screens and saw the beginning of the anomaly forming. The electricity of the anomaly was not as bright as the nuclear flare, but it was sustained. It looked like a bubble of light in the darkness of space. Jagged tentacles of electricity reached out from it.

“Here comes the dangerous part of the ride,” I said.

“You’ll be fine, sir,” Mars said.

In less than a second, the lightning from the anomaly stretched and overtook the battleship. The screens on the first row of the array showed a brief flash of white and went dead. The screens on the second row showed lightning dancing on the hull of the battleship. They showed transports peeling away from the hull like dried leaves falling from a tree.

Electricity continued dancing along the hull. More screens went bright, then dark. Somehow, the electricity worked its way inside the battleship; I could see it on three of the internal screens. Unstable light danced inside the hallways, an obscene wattage, multiple millions of joules, more than enough power to stop my heart and sear my skin and melt my eyes.

The electricity ran through the ship like a flood, splashing glare everywhere. It happened so quickly, literally in a flash. One moment I saw monitors winking out of existence, the next moment all was silent. I sat in the cockpit aware that if a catastrophe were going to happen, it would already have occurred.

“Mars, can you hear me?” I asked.

No one responded.

We’ve either made it through, or Mars has died,
I thought. Then I came up with another possibility—my communications gear might have fried.

I tried to raise Mars on several frequencies and had no luck. Then I tried Nobles. When he did not respond, it occurred to me that he might have had a heart attack. The poor son of a bitch might have died right there, sitting in his pilot’s seat just a few feet away from me.

If he was having heart problems, there was nothing I could do. I could not open his armor; we had purged the oxygen from the cabin. Not knowing what else to do, I tapped my fingers on the glass visor of his helmet.

“What are you doing?” Nobles asked, his voice groggy.

“You fell asleep?” I asked, feeling both relieved and embarrassed.

“Sorry, sir,” Nobles said. “When are we going to make the broadcast?”

“You slept through the entire thing?” I asked, now realizing why he looked so relaxed. Wondering if the sleep had helped him avoid a panic attack or if the sleep had been the attack, I patted Nobles on his armored shoulder, and said, “Let’s take our bird out of here and find out where we are.”

“Yes, sir,” Nobles said, sounding as if I had woken him from a trance. He flipped a switch, and the lights came back online in the cockpit. The gauges in the instrument panel shone their low green-and-white glow. The runner lights along the base of the transport started, shining bright light all around the landing bay. Hitting our thrusters ever so slightly, he lifted us off the ground to rotate the transport so that our nose faced the runway.

He tapped a button and looked out the windshield. When he did not get the response he wanted, he tapped the button several more times. “COE 1, this is Marine 1. The atmospheric gates are not responding. Repeat, COE 1, I am unable to open the gates.” He sounded so damn official when he hit the mike.

“Lieutenant Mars warned me that this might happen while we were prepping for launch,” Nobles said.

“Come again,” I said.

“The atmospheric locks are not responding, sir. Mars said that could happen. He said something about taking our fate in our own hands by flying a wreck,” Nobles said. “I didn’t think we’d survive the broadcast, that’s why I took that sleeping pill.”

The doors of the atmospheric locks might have been knocked out of alignment when we crashed through the other ships, or the controls for opening the door may have been fried when we passed through the broadcast zone. We were trapped either way.

Nobles parked the transport and opened the rear hatch for me. The artificial gravity that rooted me to the deck of the transport did not extend beyond its ramp. I leaped into the void and floated across the open landing-bay floor as smoothly as a cloud rolls across the sky. Below me, I saw the rubberized insulation that the Corps of Engineers used to coat the floor, walls, and ceiling. The stuff had probably saved our lives; a lot of electricity had pulsed through this ship.

“Speck,” I said.

“What is it?” asked Nobles.

I drifted right up to the wall and pounded a fist into the insulation. It was rigid. Hoping to peel the rubber away, I tried stabbing my fingers into the rubber. It did not give way.

“They sealed the doors to the ship,” I said. I had hoped to search the ship for explosives or maybe a laser welder, something I could use to cut through the atmospheric locks.

“It’s insulation,” Nobles informed me. “That’s what kept the electricity out of the landing bay.”

“It’s also sealing us in,” I pointed out, my temper starting to get the better of me. I silently toyed with the idea of pulling my combat knife from my rucksack, but I knew I couldn’t even nick industrial-grade insulation using a simple knife. “You wouldn’t happen to have anything we can use to cut our way out?”

“You mean like a laser welder?” asked Nobles.

“Yeah,” I said.

“No, sir. Did you bring any weapons we can use?”

“I have an M27 and a torpedo.”

“Didn’t you say the torpedo was a nuke?” asked Nobles.

“Affirmative.”

“Maybe we should save that for a last resort, sir.”

“There has got to be some way out of here,” I said. Pushing off the rubberized wall, I launched myself past the transport and glided to the far end of the bay. With its electronics off-line, the massive atmospheric lock was just another wall. It was designed to be bulletproof, fireproof, and radiation resistant. I might have been tempted to fire my M27 at it, but firing a gun in a vacuum with neither gravity nor air friction to slow the bullets down was never a good idea.

“Speck,” I muttered as I kicked off the lock, sending myself past the transport. Gliding in the null gravity, I had no more capacity to steer myself than a bullet or a billiard ball. I sailed past the nose of the transport, then along the side and pushed a different wall, reangling myself so that I entered the transport through its ass, where the artificial gravity brought me to my feet.

Dragging my feet along the ramp to stop myself, I turned to take one last look across the landing bay. Surely there had to be a welding torch or a drill. Hell, even a particle beam might do the trick. A particle beam . . . A tiny pistol—its disruptive beam might tear through the insulation.

The standard-issue particle-beam pistol was small . . . so small you could throw one in your rucksack and forget it was there. I hit the button, closing the rear doors, then grabbed my rucksack and headed up to the cockpit.

“What are you doing?” Nobles asked, as I burst into the cabin.

“I have an idea,” I said as I pulled out my clothes. I pulled out my Charlie service pants and blouse, not really flinging them away, but not watching where they landed. I had underwear, shoes, socks, toiletries, my M27, and three clips of ammunition.

And then, at the bottom of my rucksack where I hoped I might find a particle-beam pistol, I found nothing.

“What are you looking for?” Nobles asked.

“A particle-beam weapon,” I said.

“Did you bring one?”

“Apparently not,” I said. “I don’t suppose you did?” I already knew the answer, but he confirmed it. Nobles was a pilot, not a fighter.

“So what do we do now?” Nobles asked.

I dropped into the copilot’s seat, and said, “Isn’t it obvious?”

“We die?” he asked.

“We wait,” I said. “We’re in a battleship that just sailed into occupied space. If the Scutum-Crux Fleet is anywhere near here, Warshaw will send ships out to investigate.”

“Oh, hey, maybe I should send out a distress signal,” Nobles suggested.

“Good idea,” I said, no longer certain either of us imbeciles deserved to live much longer.

The fighters came first. Unseen by us, they circled the battleship, listening to our distress signal for several minutes before asking us to identify ourselves. Trapped within the landing bay, unable to scan the area outside the battleship, we had no idea whether we were dealing with a couple of fighters or an entire fleet.

I identified myself as General Wayson Harris of the Enlisted Man’s Marines.

“It doesn’t look like you have much of a ship there, General,” said one of the fighter pilots.

It occurred to me that the Unified Authority might well have tracked the SC Fleet to this stretch of the galaxy and defeated it. I might have been speaking to a Unified Authority fighter pilot, in which case my name, rank, and serial number would be more than enough information for a court-martial and firing squad.

The pilot had a clonelike voice, however. He sounded pretty much like any man under my command. They were all built with the exact same vocal cords, after all.