“You know, Colonel, Admiral Huang always referred to us as ‘Special Operations clones.’ We were never called Adam Boyd clones. There was a clone from our outfit who went by the name Adam Boyd, but the official term was ‘Special Operations clone.’
“Interesting thing about Adam Boyd, Colonel. He was killed in a tough-man competition on an Earth island called Oahu. That was our original base of operations.
“Have you ever been to the Hawaiian islands?” Illych asked.
I could feel the muscles in my stomach tensing. My sphincter had probably shrunk to the size of a pin. We were getting far afield, but this had to be resolved. “As a matter of fact, I have.”
“So you’ve been to Hawaii, sir. May I ask, is that where you got that scar over your eye?”
I had a half-inch-thick scar over my left eye. It made a bald stripe across my eyebrow. “That is correct,” I said.
“A swimming accident?” Illych asked.
“Not swimming,” I said.
“Rock-climbing accident?” Illych asked.
“Not exactly. I was at a place called Sad Sam’s Palace,” I said.
“I’ve heard of the place,” Illych said. “Don’t they hold tough-man competitions there on Friday nights?”
“Yes, they do. As it turns out, I was there on a Friday night. I went to watch the fights, but I got suckered into entering.”
The petty officer sat still and silent for several seconds, that strange grin unchanged as he studied me. I could not tell what went through his mind. For all I knew, he had been in the audience watching as I beat his brother clone to death. Time passed as we sat and regarded each other, neither of us wanting to be the one to end the silence.
I pulled out the orders Admiral Brocius had given me and slid them across the table. They glided across the slick surface, coming to a stop in front of Illych. Without saying a word, he picked them up and read them to himself. Then he looked up, that grin still in place, and said, “Got anything exciting in mind, sir?”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Space is not black. Looking into a night sky or staring out the portholes of some large starship, it’s easy to think that outer space is black. It’s not black. It’s clear. It is so wide and immense and open that it seems to crowd around you, but only because the human mind cannot comprehend the length of a single light-year, let alone a hundred thousand light-years.
An enemy ship could easily hide in the vastness of space. With their charcoal-colored hulls, Mogat ships could slip into an empty pocket of space and vanish.
I took a team of SEALs with me to view the battlefield where the Mogats had made short work of the Outer Perseus Fleet.
Inside the explorer, an unarmed vessel, the SEALs had a good reason to feel nervous. Designed for scientific expeditions, the explorer’s top speed was under ten million miles per hour. Its broadcast engine needed a full twenty minutes to recharge between broadcasts. Mogat battleships and cruisers had a top speed of thirty million miles per hour. They could charge their broadcast engines in eight minutes. If the Mogats spotted us, they could outrun and outshoot us. If it came to a battle, we might as well have been flying in a coffin.
Considering the number of ships Admiral Porter lost, his battle with the Mogats took place on a relatively condensed field. A swarm of dead fighters floated in a tight formation around our ship. Looking from the deck of a battleship or a fighter carrier, the dead fighters might have looked like the carcasses of insects caught in an old spiderweb. Looking through the window of a small explorer with no armor and no shields, the broken ships looked ominous. Our explorer might have been five times the size of those fighters. They did not look so small from where I now sat.
Bigger wrecks loomed in the distance. No lights showed through their portholes, and their observation decks were dark. We passed within a couple hundred feet of a U.A. fighter carrier. I could see its fatal wounds. Ten- foot-wide holes dotted the front section of its bow. The big ship hung motionless.
“They’re like ghosts,” Illych said as he fastened his armor. He looked tense as he checked and rechecked his gear.
Maybe it was SEAL culture or maybe it was in their programming, but Adam Boyds behaved differently than Marines before combat. General-issue clones hid their nerves behind crude jokes and loud boasting as they waited for the doors to open on a mission. Clones who were too scared to bluff became sullen and sometimes despondent. These guys carried on quiet conversations. They talked about sports or plans for the next time they took leave. Did they feel nervous at all? I wondered. Fighting in open space would take them out of their element.
Marines wore armor in all combat situations. SEALs did not. They had armor for deep-space operations, but I doubt they found much use for it. While I practically jumped into my armor, they moved more tentatively. They fastened their armor on one piece at a time. Watching them, I was reminded of a swimmer climbing into cold water. I wondered if their helmets made them claustrophobic.
Working in armor did not make me nervous, but the derelict fighters floating around our ship gave me a shiver. The explorer pushed through this graveyard at a slow drift, giving us a good look at each broken craft as we slid by. Around us, everything was silence, stillness, and death.
The old sailors who traveled Earth’s seas were said to have loved the ocean. The great captains said they were married to the sea or called the sea their mistress. Modern sailors held no such fantasies about outer space. Space did not love or hate, it simply killed anything it touched.
“Pardon me, sir, but what are we looking for out here?” one of the Boyd clones asked. So far, the Boyd clones kept to themselves mostly. It took a moment before I realized that someone had asked me a question.
The man who had approached me had scars around his mouth and nose. Several white lines streaked his lips and faded into his chin. All of the Boyds bore scars. They were inevitable when you did not wear armor in battle.
“Sir,” the clone repeated, “what are we looking for on the Mogat ship?” If this SEAL was scared, he hid it well. I would have described him as “on edge,” but not scared.
“I want their broadcast computer for openers,” I said. “If we can figure out where their ships have been, we might be able to drop in on the Mogats’ home base.”
The Boyd nodded. I did not need to elaborate about what treasures that computer might hold. If the boys back in Naval Intelligence could tap into its databanks, assuming the databanks had survived the battle, we might find enough information to win the war.
Functioning battleships give off virtual beacons that identify their name and fleet. According to Admiral Porter’s report, a derelict Mogat battleship lay somewhere in this mess; but the ship’s computers had all gone dark. We could not locate the beacon, so we had to fly past every wreck and identify it by sight.
“Colonel Harris,” a voice called over the intercom.
“Have you got something?” I asked.
“We found their ship,” the pilot said.
“I’m on my way,” I said. I turned to Illych. “You want to come up?”
He nodded.
The explorer had three distinct compartments—a cockpit, a cabin for passengers, and a cargo area/engine room. The SEALs had moved to the cargo hold waiting to deploy, leaving the cabin empty.
One of the chief uses of this particular ship was space cartography. It had an all-glass cockpit. Looking at the view from the cockpit felt like floating in space. The only light in the pilot’s area came from the low glow of the instrumentation.
“It’s that one over there,” the pilot said, pointing at a huge wreck. The explorer moved very slowly past the wreckage of a Tomcat, nudging the crumpled fuselage out of its way.
Off to the right, I saw the target. At first it looked more like a shadow than a battleship. It was a black hole in
