The Clone Empire (6 page)

“No. All she knew was that you found a working broadcast station.”

“I see.”

“Are you going after the missing ships?” Ava asked.

“I think so,” I said.

I expected her to ask if I planned to take her with me, but she surprised me. Instead of asking about going with me, she said, “Julie says they’re not going to let you back on Terraneau once you leave.”

“Who’s not going to let me back on?”

She thought about that, and said, “Ellery, I guess.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “He’d need an air force to stop me. All he has is a civilian militia armed with popguns.”

She studied my face, her olivine green eyes boring into me and seeing through my bluster. Did I see hurt in her eyes or anger? Maybe I was fooling myself, and all that was there was indifference. “I don’t think it’s just Ellery. I think Hollingsworth is with him. “

“Hollingsworth?” I asked. I did not know what to say. I knew he didn’t like me, but he was a Marine. Marines did not turn on each other. I sat motionless, my head reeling. Our meal sat before us ignored—her food and my beers.

“Wayson, if you come back, they might shoot you down,” she said.

“Not likely.” I shook my head. Hollingsworth was a good Marine. He wouldn’t do that, it was not in his programming. “Not Hollingsworth. He might ignore me, but he wouldn’t shoot at me.”

“What if he and Doctorow want to take over the planet?” she asked.

“Now there’s an unholy alliance.” I said it as a joke. “Ellery Doctorow doesn’t want to conquer Terraneau, he wants to be elected king. He’s an idealist, not a dictator, and he’s not going to tag team with Philo Hollingsworth. It’s not just me. Doctorow thinks every Marine is a serpent in his garden of Eden.”

“That doesn’t scare you?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“Wayson, tell me the truth. Are you leaving soon?” Ava asked.

That seemed pretty obvious at this point. I nodded.

“How are you going to do it?”

“It’s just like Doctorow said, there’s a working broadcast station. I’m going to ride a busted ship through it.”

“What do you mean by ‘busted’?” Ava asked.

“That’s classified,” I said, hoping to avoid telling her the details.

“How busted is it, Wayson?” Ava repeated.

“It was destroyed during the battle with the Earth Fleet,” I said. I still had no idea which ship I would ride, but whichever one it was, it would be a victim of that battle.

“But you have it running now?” Ava asked.

“Not exactly,” I said.

“Not exactly?” she asked.

I didn’t say anything. I was divulging classified information. That made me worse than Doctorow. At least he was a civilian.

“If you haven’t repaired the ship, how are you going to fly it?”

“Ava, that’s classified information.” I hoped the term would put her off.

“Classified? We’re not at war, who are you trying to hide it from?” She pursed her lips and stared at me angrily, and I felt my resolve turn to mush.

“Scott Mars is going to seal me in a derelict ship and launch it toward the station,” I said.

“Have you even tested to see if it’s safe?” she asked.

“Why don’t we have this out after dinner?” I suggested. I pulled the bowl of MRE beef stew she had heated and ladled some on my plate. As the highest-ranking officer on Terraneau, I made sure Ava’s pantry was stocked with Meals Ready to Eat.

Her voice more stern, Ava repeated herself. “Have you flown anything else into the station?”

“A couple of grenades,” I said as I took a bite of cold stew.

“How about something with people in it?” she asked, her voice as cold as ice and as hard as steel. “You have to send another ship through before you go yourself,” she said.

“How will we know if it made it through?” I asked. I took another bite of stew; it needed reheating.

“Maybe you should send a guinea pig first to see if it’s safe,” she said.

“I suppose that’s me,” I said.
Commanding officer and head guinea pig Wayson Harris. Give me enough rope, and I’ll hang myself.

Launching a derelict ship into the broadcast zone required more planning than I had anticipated.

The first problem was finding a ship that was solid enough to stand the stresses of the electrical current. It had to be one of ours. The Unified Authority’s ships were closer to the zone; but they were all self-broadcasting, which meant they lacked the kind of insulation needed to keep me safe.

As we mapped the battlefield, a pattern quickly emerged. While we had lost almost three times as many ships as the Unified Authority in the battle, all of the wrecks around the broadcast zone were from the Earth Fleet. They had all been destroyed from the inside out. Apparently they had entered the outer reaches of the broadcast zone and exploded when exposed to the current flowing from the broadcast station.

Mars held a briefing to explain the situation. Using a three-dimensional holographic map to show the area, he said, “These ships marked in blue are U.A. ships. Our job would be a whole lot easier if we could send you in one of these ships, but it wouldn’t be safe.”

“What if you sealed me in?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“What if you took tiles off the hull of an SC Fleet ship and sealed them around one of these ships?” I asked. “Would that be enough to protect me?”

“If it were that easy, we could just weld some armor to a working transport, and you’d have flight controls,” Mars said. “The inadequacy goes deeper. It’s structural.”

Listening to him speak, I realized that Mars genuinely wanted me to survive the mission. Hollingsworth and Doctorow might have seen me as an obstacle, but maybe Mars did not.

“Since we can’t launch you in a U.A. ship, we need to clear them out from between your ship and the zone.”

Inspecting the display, I saw what he meant. The battle had apparently taken place on an almost two-dimensional plane, with the Unified Authority ships forming a solid wall between the battlefield and the hot zone. “Can you drag my ship around them?” I asked.

“And Jesus wept.” Mars sighed. “No offense, General, but your grasp of physics never ceases to amaze me. We’ll be lucky if we can get you moving at all; turns and course corrections are out of the question.

“You are going to be in a great big ship being propelled by tiny ships. Just building inertia will be a feat. Newton’s Second Law . . . mass, force, acceleration?

“You are familiar with Sir Isaac Newton, right, sir? ‘An object in motion’? ‘Equal and opposite reaction’? Once we build up enough velocity to drive your wreck toward the zone, you will be traveling in a straight line. If something is in your way, we need to move it out of the way or break it. Those are the only options—clear a path or scrap this mission.”

Having grown up in Unified Authority Orphanage # 553, I took a “Survey of Science” class that introduced chemistry, physics, astronomy, biology, and anatomy all in a ten-week term. I had never studied any of the sciences since.

“Why can’t you just haul the flotsam and jetsam out of the way?” I asked.

“It’s a matter of size,” Mars said. He fingered his remote device, and the holographic display zoomed in on the wrecks blocking the route to the broadcast zone. Originally shown as squiggles and dots, the images now resolved themselves into discrete shapes.

“These five ships here”—he pointed with his device, which made the hulls glow—“are U.A. fighter carriers. They are thirty-three hundred feet long and eight hundred feet wide. We can’t exactly tie a rope to their gunnels and tow them into port.”

He played with his remote again, and this time an orange light appeared around three ships. “These are U.A. battleships, the new ones,” he said. “They’re twenty-six hundred feet long and five hundred feet wide. Three of these ships rammed into each other and got tangled. We think we can clear a path for you by breaking these ships apart. If it doesn’t work . . .”

“We’ll need to scrub the mission,” I guessed.

“Probably so, sir.”

 

I’d made a tactical error when I told Ellery Doctorow about the broadcast zone so early in the game. With each passing week, Doctorow became more insistent that I leave and take my military with me. After six weeks, he acted up.

The buzz from my communications console woke me from a near sleep. Turning on my side, I saw it was 02:30, sat up, and said, “This better be good.”

“General, someone is breaking into the armory,” Hollingsworth said. That got my attention. The armory was the underground garage, the place with all of the buried weapons.

“Do we know who?” I asked.

“I sent a squad to investigate.”

“What did they find?”

“I’ve lost contact with them, sir.”

I turned on the light and slid off my rack. The only people who would go after those weapons were Doctorow and his militia. He had never struck me as a man who turned to violence; but he if he wanted us off Terraneau badly enough, who knew what he would do.

I told Hollingsworth to muster a single company. “I want them dressed in combat armor and loaded on trucks in five minutes.”

“Won’t we need more men?” Hollingsworth asked. “What if—”

“Put the rest of the base on alert,” I said.

“But what if—”

“You have your orders,” I said.

“Yes, sir,” Hollingsworth said, and signed off. The call to arms sounded a few seconds later. By the time it did, I had my bodysuit on and was fastening my armor.

I thought about the armory. As a show of respect for Doctorow and his government, I had decided against posting guards around the site. Perhaps I had made a mistake. My show of respect, however, only went so far. I might not have posted guards around the caved-in armory, but I’d had my engineers install a discreet security system around the grounds.

I grabbed my M27, left my particle-beam pistol in my locker, and headed out the door.

Sirens wailed. Across the grounds, men in fatigues rushed out of lit barracks, but most of the barracks were dark. Originally built to house twenty-five thousand soldiers, Fort Sebastian was now home to a mere thirty-two hundred men: one thousand naval engineers and twenty-two hundred combat Marines.

Four troop carriers lined up near the gate, their engines purring. Hollingsworth waited beside the first truck, already in his armor. Moments after I arrived, two lines of men in dark green combat armor formed, and a pair of sergeants shepherded the men onto the trucks. Hollingsworth and I rode with the men in the back of the first carrier.

“Has your patrol reported in?” I asked Hollingsworth, as we settled onto the bench at the back of the truck. With twenty-five Marines in camouflaged armor around us, the back of the transport looked like a forest.

“No response, sir,” Hollingsworth said. “The bastards must have hit them.”

“Must have,” I said, though I had my doubts. Doctorow’s militia could not afford to go balls out with us, and they knew it. They outnumbered us, but they did not have the stomach for collateral damage.

I put on my helmet and tried to listen in on my men’s conversations over the interLink, but heard nothing. For a moment I thought something might be wrong with my equipment. I removed my helmet and stared into it. I tapped on the visor, knowing that tapping on the glass would be no more effective at repairing microcircuitry than patting a man on the back would be at removing a brain tumor.

“I’m not Linking,” Hollingsworth said. “It’s like my helmet went deaf.”

As I stared into my helmet, the truck slowed to a stop. A moment later, the sea of men in front of me parted as our driver called out to me from the back of the truck. As I pushed through the crowd, I noticed that all of the men had removed their helmets.

“What is it?” I asked.

“General, I tried to contact you over the interLink, sir, but I could not get a signal.”

“Somebody is jamming the signal,” I said, trying to sound as if I had known that all along.

“Yes, sir,” said the driver. “There’s an overturned jeep about a quarter mile up the road from here.”

“One of ours?” I asked.

“Maybe we should send some men to have a look at it,” Hollingsworth suggested.

“See to it,” I said, deciding to play things safe even as my instincts told me not to worry.

Hollingsworth sent a fire team in to investigate. The team included a rifleman, an automatic rifleman, a grenadier, and a team leader. I watched them as they went up the road, knowing that the time had come to make a tactical decision. I needed to choose between communication and equipment. If we wore our helmets, we would not be able to communicate; but we would have radar, sonar, and optical lenses to provide us a tactical edge. With our helmets off, we would be able to speak; but we would be blind to snipers and traps.

Communications or security?
I asked myself. I opted for security.

Using the heat-vision lenses in my visor, I scanned the road ahead and saw no signs of people other than the men I had just sent out. I pulled off my helmet and barked out orders.

“We’re hiking in from here,” I told Hollingsworth and the noncoms who had gathered around me. “Tell your men to stay in a tight formation and keep their helmets on until we give the signal to remove them.

“There may be snipers out there,” I said. “If there are, I want to see them before they hit us.”

As we fanned out, the men we sent to investigate the jeep were already on their way back. We sent four men, but eight men returned.

“What happened?” I asked the patrol leader.

“They hit the jeep,” the man said.

“Was anybody hurt?”

“The jeep’s in bad shape,” one of them said. With their jeep destroyed and the interLink down, the men in Hollingsworth’s original patrol could neither proceed nor call for help. Their only option had been to dig in and wait for backup.