Rogue Clone

seen Thurston, laughed or gasped at his youthful appearance. Short and skinny, with spiky red hair and an adolescent’s face, Robert Thurston always looked out of place in his uniform, especially standing next to a seasoned officer like Huang. The senators at the back of the dais looked like they could have been Thurston’s grandparents.

The questions continued for ten more minutes. The session would have gone on for hours had Huang allowed it, but he had promised a final demonstration.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I suggest you prepare yourselves. We are about to enter a war zone,” said Huang.

Smoky-colored tinting appeared in the glass ceiling and walls of the observation deck turning them opaque. The reporters spoke nervously among themselves as they saw the muted flashes of lightning all around them. It was one thing to sit in some comfortable commuter craft and pass through the Broadcast Network. This was raw. Here they sat on folding chairs on the glass-encased deck of a monolithic battleship while millions of volts of electricity danced on the glass just above their heads.

When the lightning stopped and the tinting cleared, the Doctrinaire was in a battle zone. Looking around the crown of the observation deck, you could see dozens of ships buzzing around it.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Cygnus Arm. In case it has slipped your attention, this is one of the Confederate Arms. We are forty thousand light years deep in enemy territory.

“What you see flying outside our shields are twenty-five ships from what we in the Navy call the ‘mothball fleet.’ These are vintage ships. These are battleships from 2488 and newer. They are fully functional, space- worthy ships. They were perfectly preserved for just such an occasion as this.

“Who is flying them?” a reporter called out.

“Not to worry,” Huang said, “they are not being manned by live crews.”

Knowing Huang and his disdain for synthetic life, it would not have surprised me to learn that those ships had all-clone crews. But even the cost of raising clones comes out of the budget, so Huang most likely controlled these ships using remotely controlled computers.

Zipping around, weaving in and out and around each other, the old battleships circled around the Doctrinaire from two miles off.

“Before we begin our actual battle,” Huang said, “you should know that the ships around us are using live ammunition. Rear Admiral Thurston, would you direct one of those battleships to attack?”

One of the battleships charged straight at the Doctrinaire and fired. It shot a brilliant burst of bright red laser fire followed by three torpedoes. I could not believe what I saw. This was a full-on assault. A lethal attack. The translucent shields turned milky white where the beam hit. The laser beam was round and red and as thick around as a tree stump, but it stopped dead at the shields. Moments later, the three torpedoes slammed into the shields and burst into puddles of light that dissolved quickly in the vacuum of space.

Most of the reporters gasped and a few screamed.

“As I stated before, the attacking ships are decommissioned U.A. Navy ships. We stopped using these fifteen years ago because their technology was obsolete, surpassed by technologies which are now also considered obsolete. These ships were made twenty years after the ships currently used by the Confederate Arms,” said Huang.

Huang now pulled an old-fashioned analog pocket watch from the podium. He held it up for the reporters to see. “Let the battle begin,” he said.

“Admiral Klyber spared nothing when he designed this ship,” Huang said. “He wanted to make the ship that would end the war …a ship that would terrify enemies into abandoning their Revolution.”

Above Huang’s head, the vacuum of space looked like a thunderstorm. Hundreds of torpedoes pecked at the shields from every angle. They burst and vanished leaving no trace. Laser beams slammed into the canopy creating a crimson light show.

“I think it’s time we teach these marauders a lesson,” Huang said, tensing his thumb over the timer button on the pocket watch. “Admiral Thurston, return fire.” The watch bobbed up and down as he clicked the timer.

Laser bursts fired from the side of the Doctrinaire . I had never seen these cannons tested, so I did not know what to expect. The battleships continued to fire lasers and torpedoes at the Doctrinaire , but nothing penetrated the shields. Seeing these fireworks reminded me of watching a light rain fall through a see-though umbrella.

The cannons on the Doctrinaire fired measured bursts. The cannon fire made a sizzling sound that lasted one-half of a second at most. Dzzzz. Dzzzz . You could see it launch if you happened to look at the right cannon just as it fired. The laser looked like a solid red rod that issued from the cannon and vanished.

The bursts traveled at the speed of light. The time that it took for the laser bursts to pass through the shields was so short that they could not be measured by any instrument. Out in the blackness that engulfed the observation deck, “enemy” ships exploded.

Lasers from the Doctrinaire penetrated the hulls of the attacking ships as if they had no shields. There would be a flash. A ball of fire and smoke would flush out of the injured ship precisely where the laser hit. Everything burst from the laser wound, then the injured ships went dark. They were not crushed. They simply coughed out everything inside them as if all of their innards had been sucked out by space itself.

The computer-controlled targeting system on the Doctrinaire wasted few shots. Lasers burst in all directions. Many of the ships in the attacking fleet were hit two and three times. Dzzzzz , and they burst and died. Dzzzz . Dzzzz , and the crumbled carcasses turned red and somersaulted in space. The lasers might melt the surface of the ships, but the absolute cold of space quenched the damage.

Soon there was so much debris floating around the Doctrinaire that it looked like the ship had entered an asteroid belt.

The last of the attacking ships nearly disintegrated in the laser fire from multiple cannons. The ship continued to glide toward the shields. Huang stopped the time with a flourish, making sure that the reporters knew that the battle had ended. He looked at his watch and smiled. “Two minutes and twenty-three seconds. Not quite the time I hoped for, but not far off pace.”

Putting the watch back on the podium, Huang looked up at the derelict battleship that now hurtled toward the Doctrinaire . “This is a lucky break. Robert, let that ship fly into our shields,” he said.

The battleship tumbled into the shields and stopped instantly. The collision reminded me of a small bird slamming into a windowpane. The shields held that battered hull in place, infusing it with an electrical charge. After a few moments, the charge repulsed the dead ship and it floated away from the Doctrinaire .

“The enemy is using the Galactic Central Fleet, a fleet of U.A. Navy ships that vanished more than forty years ago. It is an incomplete fleet. It has no fighter craft. A fleet without fighters, gentlemen, is like a boxer without a jab. In order to strike, the enemy will be forced to use battleships, and battleships, ladies and gentlemen, big and slow ships that are hard to maneuver, make great targets …great targets.

“The Confederate Navy is perfect for bushwhacking helpless carriers as they emerge from the Broadcast Network. It will be useless against a giant ship that hits the deck running.”

As I watched this first active demonstration of the Doctrinaire , I began to wonder why no one had bothered questioning me about the ship. Perhaps with traitors like Crowley and Halverson, they knew more than I did. Admiral Halverson, until recently the second-in-command on the Doctrinaire , probably knew all about the dual broadcast generators and the rounded shields. He knew everything I knew, plus he knew about the powerful new cannons that could destroy GCF ships with a single shot—something I had not been briefed about.

Halverson assumed I had come to avenge Bryce Klyber. Since I had no means of transmitting information when I was captured, nobody worried about what I might have learned. In their minds, I was an assassin, not a spy.

I lay on my cot thinking about the demonstration I had just seen. What would Warren Atkins make of it? What would Amos Crowley, the general-turned-traitor, think?