The Clone Empire (38 page)

“Check the orbits. The jump from Earth to Mars is over one hundred million miles at the moment. That’s a three-hour trip, even for your ships.” Warshaw held up a little handheld computer he must have been hiding under the table.

I did not know the positions of Earth and Mars in their orbits, but I had considered the problem. “There’s a way around that,” I said.

The solution should have been obvious. “We can store the evacuees in the Mars Spaceport,” I said.

“The spaceport is closed. We haven’t used it since the Mogat War,” Andropov said. The stupid bastard still wanted to fight the Avatari. He wanted to send out the clones like his father did in the good old days. Of course, he would not lead the fight himself. His bravery extended only as far as declaring wars, not fighting them.

“The military used it as a processing station before the battle on New Copenhagen,” I said.

“All of the equipment was operational when we shut it down,” Hill said. He sounded enthusiastic. The Mars Spaceport had dormitory rooms for hundreds of thousands of workers and enough floor space to accommodate millions of visitors. “We should be able to get the power and oxygen running.”

“But that still leaves us with your Trojan horse,” Warshaw said. “I don’t trust you.” He looked directly at Andropov as he said this. “And I don’t want your specking ships in my broadcast network.”

“Admiral, what if you took Olympus Kri off your broadcast grid?” Hughes’s voice was low and nervous and hollow.

“Are you saying I should give the planet away?” Warshaw asked.

“He’s saying we should amputate it,” I said. “The planet is as good as gone. Once we remove it from our network—”

“I won’t know if the aliens came or the whole thing was a fraud,” Warshaw said.

I looked across the table at Gordon Hughes. When we went to New Copenhagen, he saw one planet and thought of another. Now I was doing the same thing. “I’ll stay and oversee the evacuation,” I said, speaking of Olympus Kri and thinking of Terraneau . . . not even Terraneau, really, just one of its residents.

The rescue had been going on for three days now, and I still had not gotten used to the look of the Unified Authority’s new barges. They were little more than biospheres. They looked like floating warehouses as they grew out of their anomalies. They had a nub in the front for a cockpit and enormous rocket engines in the back, but they lacked even the semblance of wings or aerodynamics. They did not have landing bays or atmospheric locks. Transports would land along the hulls of the barges, on special pads with automatic clamps that would fasten onto the transports’ skids. Passengers would enter the barges through umbilical walkways.

Only an idiot would broadcast in something so feeble,
I thought to myself. I almost said something, then I remembered that I had traveled out of the Scutum-Crux Arm to the Cygnus Arm welded into a derelict battleship.

“Those barges have got to be the ugliest ships I have seen in my entire life,” Hollingsworth said, as one of the barges floated toward the
ad-Din
. We were on the observation deck watching the Unified Authority ships arrive.

The barge passed beside a U.A. battleship, positively dwarfing it. “It looks like a packing crate for mailing battleships,” Hollingsworth added. “You’d have more control steering a piece of shit down a toilet.”

“Yeah,” I grunted, still astonished by the size of the barges.

The U.A. battleship was long and narrow like a flying dagger. The barge could have held four of those ships easily and possibly even a fifth. It was that big.

More barges followed in a series of flashes. They floated out of the broadcast zone like boxes on an assembly line.

“It’s getting pretty close to zero hour. Why are you going down to the planet now?” Hollingsworth asked.

I gave him a one-word answer, hoping to brush off the question. “Reconnaissance.”

“Are you coming back to the
ad-Din
to watch the attack?” Hollingsworth asked.

“I’m staying on the planet,” I said.

He paused, grinned at me, and finally said, “I’m just curious. Does your martyr complex ever get in your way?”

“What did you say?” I asked, though I’d heard him perfectly well. If he’d yelled or raised his voice, I would have been certain he was trying insult me, but he sounded calm and sincere.

Alone on the observation deck, we stood side by side, staring out the viewport.

“You assigned yourself to point position when we fought the aliens on Terraneau.”

“I led a team—”

“You were the commanding officer, not some specking platoon leader. You were supposed to observe and direct.”

“I thought I could do a better job if I was on the field with my men,” I said.

“You got stuck in a basement. You got trapped in a specking basement with half the specking Avatari Army swarming around you.”

“You don’t think I did that on purpose?”

“No, but it shouldn’t have happened.”

“We won the battle,” I pointed out.

“Thomer told me you led the team that went into the Avatari mines on New Copenhagen.” Thomer was Kelly Thomer, my second-in-command until he died on Terraneau. He was a good Marine and a great human being, even if he was synthetic.

“He went in right beside me,” I said. “Maybe he was a martyr, too.”

“He’s a dead martyr. You’re a living martyr. People respect dead martyrs. The living ones are just a pain in the ass.”

I did not say anything. We’d both been friends with Thomer.

“I heard you led the attack on the Mogat home world.”

I saw no point in responding.

Outside the ship, a line of ten enormous barges paraded past us. The barges were beige and marked with flashing lights to help transport pilots find landing pads.

“I won’t go down after you,” Hollingsworth said. “If you get in trouble, you will be on your own.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to,” I said.

“I won’t send men down after you, either.”

“What’s your point?” I asked.

“I just . . . Damn it, Harris, you’re so specking self-righteous. No, it’s not even that. You’re not self-righteous; you’re the goddamned real thing. You’re righteous. I don’t know how that happened, how you became right, and I became wrong.”

“I’m not so righteous,” I said, feeling truly offended.

“Sooner or later, you’ll be a martyr, you’re just counting the days,” Hollingsworth said. “Just passing time until you meet your specking maker.”

“I’m a clone, I’ve already met my makers, and I don’t like them,” I said.

“So why go down to Olympus Kri? You say there’s going to be an apocalypse, fine, I believe you. What do you think you will accomplish by riding it out down there? Do you think they’re going to make you a saint or something? Saint Harris, guardian saint of clones and Marines.”

He did not sound angry, but he did sound frustrated. He’d stood by quietly when Warshaw announced the airlift; but now that we were alone, he spoke his mind.

“I don’t think I’m a saint, but I sure as hell am not cut out to be a general,” I said. “I don’t like giving orders, and I don’t like watching battles from a safe distance.”

“Look, Harris, I admire you. You’re the best goddamn—”

Rather than suffer through another eulogy, I interrupted him. “You didn’t like me much on Terraneau.”

“That’s ’cause I thought you were wrong about everything. Turns out you were right about everything.”

“I thought it was about Ava,” I said. “I thought you were mad about my hiding a girl in my quarters while everyone else was confined to the ship.”

Hollingsworth’s face flushed. “Yeah, well, that was more envy than anger. I would have done the same thing if I had a shot at Ava Gardner. Any man would.”

His honesty stunned me.

“You don’t really want to kill yourself, do you?” Hollingsworth asked.

“Kill myself?” I laughed. “I tried that once. It didn’t work. Liberators can’t kill themselves; it goes against our programming.”

I wasn’t lying. Part of my programming gave me a survival instinct. Even if I wanted to, I lacked the ability to pull the trigger—or the pin. The time I did try to commit suicide, my weapon of choice was a grenade.

“It’s not a question of suicide; it’s a question of needing to be in the middle of the action. It’s in my DNA. I can’t kill myself, and I can’t sit out the fight.”

“So you’re screwed,” Hollingsworth said.

An impressive array of ships now filled the space above Olympus Kri. Warshaw sent six additional fighter carriers to watch out for the empire’s interests during the evacuation. They floated in seeming stasis beside enemy battleships. If the Avatari suddenly began traveling in spaceships and appeared in range, I thought they might find themselves in the fight of their lives.

Of course, the Avatari did not travel in ships. They had no time for such primitive contrivances as traveling at the speed of light. In fact, they did not travel at all. We called them the “Avatari” because the army they sent to our galaxy was made of avatars instead of living beings.

They’d used some new weapon during their latest assault on New Copenhagen, and we had no hope of making a stand against them until we knew what they had. That meant having men on the ground as well as eyes in the air. Our satellites would record the destruction from outside the atmosphere while I experienced it firsthand down below. Maybe I would see things or hear things or just feel things hiding underground that we would miss from above.

And if I died? I had a bunch of patriotic and macho responses; but they were all for show. The truth was that I had survived too much already. I was ready to go.

Checking my watch, I saw that I would probably arrive ahead of schedule, but I felt the urge to get started. I could stand around up here, safe and sound on the
Salah ad-Din
, or I could stand around down there, on the planet. Down there I would be in place, ready to react if something went wrong.

Hollingsworth stayed on the observation deck as I went to my quarters and swapped my service uniform for combat armor. “Nickel” Hill had offered to loan me shielded armor; but I turned him down. What a laugh. With shielding from head to toe, the only weapon you could carry was a dart gun that ran along the outside of the right arm. It fired fléchettes made of depleted uranium, good for killing people, but I doubted it would have much effect on the Avatari.

My mood turned dark as I fastened my armor. Hill said that the Avatari we faced on New Copenhagen were just the janitors and that this time we would face the A-team. When I asked the ghost of Sweetwater about it, he said, “Not so much janitors. We think they were more like scarecrows, mostly harmless and designed to scare away pests.”

I had answered him with one word, “Bullshit.”

But it hadn’t been bullshit, and I accepted that now as I prepared to fly down to Olympus Kri. Alone, in my billet, I owned up to the truth.

My armor included a rebreather, temperature-controlling bodysuit, and protection against radiation, yet it only weighed a couple of pounds. My portable arsenal, on the other hand, registered seventy-three pounds and thirteen ounces. My go-pack contained six disposable grenade launchers, six handheld rockets, a particle-beam pistol, a particle-beam cannon, and a handheld laser. Facing anyone but the Avatari, that would have been overkill.

I wondered what weapon the Avatari would use when they attacked and realized that while I was down there, my fate was entirely in their hands. Handing over the controls always made me nervous. No Marine expects to live forever, but we all hope to see the day through.

“Wheel, are you there?” I asked, testing the special interLink connection Hill had given me so that I could contact the virtual version of the Arthur C. Clarke Wheel.

Arthur Breeze answered. “Are you heading down to the planet?”

“That I am,” I said.

“Sweetwater is asleep,” said Breeze.

The virtual versions of Sweetwater and Breeze ate, slept, passed gas, and shat. Whoever designed them had to give them foibles along with strengths to prevent them from figuring out that they lived in a computer. Along with mapping and scanning their brains, the engineers had mapped and scanned their bodies. Nothing was left to chance.

The digital ghosts of Arthur Breeze and William Sweetwater spent their time playing with digital replicas of the finest scientific equipment in their little virtual laboratory on a computer model of the Clarke space station. When interactive Breeze ran atoms in his virtual collider, did he control real equipment accelerating real particles and getting real results? When he peered through his spectroscope, did he examine real samples with virtual eyes? Even now, he was watching the real me through eyes that only existed in a computer. Did the digital program that emulated his brain hear the digital protocol that simulated his voice?

If I allowed myself to play with these questions long enough, I could have driven myself insane. A lab assistant worked at a desk behind Breeze. I wondered if the avatar was attached to a real man and if that man currently stood in a real-world lab working with real-world equipment.

Breeze was a physicist who had published volumes on particles. He was probably a better scientist than Sweetwater, but his lack of confidence was an Achilles’ heel. He stuttered during briefings and used so much jargon that he could never communicate his ideas clearly. Sweetwater, whose expertise extended into chemistry as well as physics, had no shortage of confidence.

“You’re sure fifty feet down will be enough?” I asked.

“Based on my best calculations, ten feet might be enough,” Breeze said. He pulled off his thick glasses, polished them, and replaced them on his face. The grease and dandruff were still there, now wiped into a spiral pattern.