The Clone Elite

to speak to them for more than a second, and you don’t know if Earth even exists. That is the best news you have for us? We can’t even call them back, and that’s the good news?”

“No,” Sweetwater said. “The good news is that we believe we have cracked the Avatari’s tachyon-based technology. Give us a little more time and—”

“A little more time?” Of all people, this time it was mild-mannered General James Hill, the Air Force officer who could not even get his pilots in the air, who cracked. “We are down to thirty-five thousand troops. Did you know that? I am about to send highly trained pilots into ground battles …ground battles! We have given you time, and blood, and everything else you have asked for! If you don’t have anything now, then, then …we’re specked. We’re really specked.”

William Sweetwater, short, heavy, with shaggy black hair and thick glasses, hung his head and sighed. The sound of that sigh was long and weary.

“Do you or do you not have a weapon that we can use?” General Newcastle asked in a quiet voice.

“Arthur had an idea,” Sweetwater confessed, “but that idea of his probably cost him his life.”

A stifling three-second pause hung in the room.

“Goddamn! We’ve lost. We’ve lost, do you understand that?” General Newcastle shouted. “We’re out of fighting solutions. So far the only thing you have given us is six useless battleships.” He turned to the other generals. “Gentlemen, the end of humanity came on our watch.”

None of the other officers said anything.

“Arthur believed he found a way to stop the Avatari from assembling,” Sweetwater said.

Another moment of silence followed, after which General Newcastle said in a voice so calm I could not believe it came from him, “Stop them from assembling? I …I don’t understand.”

“Tachyons are not like other kinds of particles, they do not bond together. They are in constant motion. We have never been able to prove their existence because they move faster than the speed of light and we would need an incredible amount of energy to cause them to stop. It must take even more energy to fuse them together, and that is why the Avatari degrade so quickly …it’s not because you destroyed them but because so much energy has leaked out. They no longer have enough energy to keep the tachyons fused,” Sweetwater said.

He typed something into a keyboard, and a video feed of the Avatari spheres appeared on a small screen near his seat. Near the spheres sat the dirty bomb Freeman had used to nuke the site. Sweetwater did not run the feed; he just left the image on the screen.

“Raymond and Lieutenant Harris made an important discovery the first day that the Avatari landed, but we did not have enough data to realize what they had found.” Sweetwater held up a petri dish holding a layer of rust- colored dust. “This was once a bullet.”

The generals crowded for a closer look. Finally, Newcastle asked, “What did you do to it?”

“We didn’t do anything to it in the lab. This was one of the bullets that Raymond fired through the light spheres. Something in the spheres coated the bullet, changing its chemical makeup.

“We initially thought it was some form of radiation. Then we found out about the gas Raymond and Lieutenant Harris discovered in the Avatari mines. Arthur …Doctor Breeze checked the information Raymond gathered about that gas and compared it to this bullet to see if the gas might have caused the changes to this bullet and found a match.

“It appears that the spheres are made out of that gas. They’re like a bubble of gas.

“Now watch this,” Sweetwater said. He started the video feed. The dirty bomb exploded. I relived all of the disturbing images on the screen—the holocaust, the flash that looked like a golden jellyfish as it rose in the air. Sweetwater froze the image before the firestorm re-formed itself into a mushroom cloud.

The scene occurred so quickly at the time that it took place in my head as a single blur. Watching from the helicopter, I had only paid attention to the conflagration itself. Now, on the screen, I saw the spheres. In the moment of the explosion, they seemed to dim.

Sweetwater pointed to one of the spheres with his pen.

“It’s getting darker,” General Glade said. “The bomb made it weaker.”

“That was what we assumed, too,” Sweetwater said. The feed resumed. As wind pushed and tore the forest, and the flash fire turned trees to ash, the spheres went dark. Then came the smoke, and the spheres vanished entirely. By the time that the smoke cleared, the spheres were as bright as before but considerably smaller. I had not noticed it at the time because I had been so focused on the explosion and its apparent failure. Now, in the recording, I saw that the spheres could not have even been a full yard in diameter. And there was something else, too—shit gas. A layer of shit gas covered the ground. Now, viewing everything magnified and in slow motion, I saw that the shit gas formed a layer under the smoke.

“The nuclear explosion had a much greater effect than we initially thought. After careful analysis, Dr. Breeze discovered that the spheres had not become darker, they had become coated with tachyons. The bomb both heated or irradiated the gas in the spheres, charging it so that it temporarily attracted tachyons.”

“Do you know if it was the heat or the radiation?” asked General Hill.

“No, we don’t know,” admitted Sweetwater. “But we will only need to run a few quick tests to find out. Once we know, we should be able to adjust the next explosion to maximize its impact.”

“But how does this help us?” asked Newcastle.

“When the Avatari emerge from their spheres, they attract tachyons and bond them together the same way this bomb attracted the tachyons to the sphere. The Avatari bodies are composed of supercharged gas, which attracts tachyons like a magnet.

“If we supercharge a larger source of the gas—”

“Like the gas in the mines,” interrupted General Hill.

“That radio message we picked up from the Thermopolis was received twenty seconds after Raymond and the lieutenant ran the nuclear test. By charging the spheres, they were able to poke a hole in the ion curtain,” Sweetwater said.

“So you are saying that if we charge the gas in the mines, we can get out of here?” asked General Haight. The mood in the room had changed, suddenly the generals sounded excited as they chattered back and forth.

“No,” said Sweetwater, and the room became quiet.

“First of all, gentlemen, understand that we are discussing an extreme amount of energy. If we could tap the energy it takes to create one Avatari soldier, we might have enough power to run a small city for a year,” Sweetwater said. “Assuming we can generate enough energy and we can take that energy to a large enough source of the gas, we might be able to attract the tachyons before they attach themselves to the Avatari. That was what Breeze believed, and it appears he was right all along.”

“How does that help us?” Newcastle asked.

“Because without the tachyons to create bodies and weapons, the Avatari aren’t much of a threat,” General Glade spoke slowly, a man figuring out the answer to a riddle.

“If it works, the next time the Avatari emerge, they will remain in their pure energy form,” Sweetwater said, “as will their weapons. Without tachyons forming a protective shell around their core, they should dissipate into the atmosphere in a matter of minutes.”

“In simple terms?” Newcastle asked.

“It’s as simple as this …The Avatari as we see them are an energy impulse made solid by a layer of tachyons. If Arthur was right, we can block the tachyons from attaching themselves to the Avatari by attracting them to a larger source of supercharged gas—the caves. The key is creating enough energy to attract tachyons.”

“So we need to break into the alien mines and detonate a device like the one you used on the spheres?” asked General Newcastle.

“No, sir, we are going to need something a great deal bigger than that little half-kiloton bomb we sent Raymond and the Lieutenant to explode. According to our calculations, we’re going to need at minimum a twenty- five-megaton explosion in their caves. We assume you have a device that size.”

Several of the generals groaned. Newcastle remained silent as the other generals complained among themselves. When the groaning stopped, he said, “That, Doctor, is going to be a problem. The Avatari just demolished our armory. We had nuclear weapons, but they’re all buried now.”

“Well, that does present a problem,” said Sweetwater. He turned to me, and said, “Raymond will be back in a half hour. Do you think the two of you could dig out one of those bombs?”

“What’s the point?” General Haight asked. “If we stop the aliens from coming back, we’re still going to fry.”