The Clone Empire

myself someplace where I could find reinforcements.”

“And the torpedo?” Nobles asked.

“It’s nuclear-tipped,” I said. He knew what that meant.

When I arrived in the Scutum-Crux Arm, the Avatari had Terraneau sealed off from rescue by a layer of tachyons. By firing a nuke above the spot where the layer originated, we were able to poke a small hole through the layer. That was how we landed men on the planet.

Of course, with Terraneau, we knew the exact spot to hit with our torpedo. On this run, we might not even know what planet we were circling, let alone the right spot to hit.

“But it’s just a precaution, right? We’re not bringing it because we’re going to fight aliens.”

“Just a precaution,” I agreed.

“And we won’t need it?” he asked.

“No. Probably not.”

He thought about this, nodded, and pivoted his seat so that he faced the flight controls. “You’re a brave man, sir,” he said as he fired up the engines. “It takes a lot of nerve to decide to fly a nuke through a broadcast zone.”

“They used to do that all the time,” I said, feeling relieved that we were finally going wheels up.

“Those ships were sealed. You’ve got us riding in a specking wreck,” Nobles said. He looked back to see if I was suitably panicked, then fired the thrusters and lifted off the ground. “Good thing you’re comfortable around nuclear weapons.”

He knew I wasn’t.

When I thought the situation through, I realized that anything that set off the nuke would probably toast us as well. Logic only went so far, however, when it came to my phobia of things I could not control. Trying to ignore my nerves, I sat in the copilot’s seat and strapped myself in.

We crossed back over Norristown, passing over barren streets and thriving neighborhoods. Going up to gather food and weapons, I had flown over this territory dozens of times, but this time was different. This time I did not know when I would return. It was not just a question of survival. Even if everything worked out just right, I might never return.

Off in the distance, I saw the three towers of the financial district—the boys’ dorm, the girls’ dorm, and the hospital. Only a few minutes had passed since Ava sent me away. She’d still be in that building. Was she thinking of me?

“So if Warshaw broadcasted into wherever we’re going, what’s to say he stayed there?” Nobles asked. “I mean, maybe he wasn’t any safer there than he was over here. Maybe he got there, patched up another broadcast station, and took his fleet to the next stop.” As he asked this, Nobles took us out of the atmosphere. The sky turned dark and was no longer a sky but field of stars.

And maybe the Earth Fleet caught up to him on the other side, I thought. It was entirely possible that we were broadcasting from one graveyard to another.

“If it isn’t the prodigal son come for a visit,” Lieutenant Mars radioed in to us as we slowed to a drift and floated toward the wreckage. “I was beginning to think you changed your mind.”

Nobles, who had become very serious, ignored Mars’s greeting, and said, “This is Marine 1, do you have a target for us?”

“You mean Harris’s Tool?” asked one of the engineers.

“Roger that,” said Nobles.

“Harris’s Tool,” the engineer persisted. “Harris’s Tool. That is the code name for the battleship. The only way Operation Chastity Belt can succeed is for us all to be on the same page. You need to call it ‘Harris’s Tool,’ or we won’t know what you are talking about.”

“Come again?” asked Nobles.

“The names were Spuler’s idea, not mine,” Mars said, sounding somewhat apologetic. Seaman First Class Aaron Spuler was the resident joker of the Corps of Engineers.

“Fine, where is Harris’s Tool?” Nobles asked.

“Where do you think?” asked Spuler.

Several people laughed. I did not, neither did Nobles.

“COE 1, where precisely is the battleship?” Nobles asked, his voice flat. “COE” was short for Corps of Engineers.

“Honestly, Spuler, you’re acting like a ten-year-old,” said Mars. Then he said, “Marine 1, I’ll send over the coordinates.”

The laughter stopped.

We picked our way through the graveyard. Terraneau, a giant blue, green, and tawny globe, spun in one corner of our vision. Far in a distance, a roiling orange-and-yellow sun glowed. Seen from inside our transport, the dead ships floating around us looked as large as continents, their portholes dark, the exposed areas of their decks even darker. Humanity never conquered space, it just learned to travel in bubbles. All around us, the dead ships hung as reminders of what happens when that bubble breaks.

It took us twenty minutes to fly through the graveyard, dodging around the ruins of capital ships, sometimes breaking through a fog of litter. We saw no bodies, though tens of thousands of them floated around us. We pushed through bits of armor plating, folds of molten glass, wings from fighters, and more than one curtain of frozen water, all suspended in space. My pilot might have been used to these sights; he always flew in the cockpit where he could see his surroundings. I generally traveled in the kettle, blissfully ignorant of everything around the ship.

Off in the distance, a derelict battleship sat in a clearing like an island in the night. Three rows of flashing lights ran along the underside of the ship, winking on and off in a sequence of red and yellow squares. At the far end of the ship, four flashing blue lights marked the entrance to the landing bay.

The hull of the battleship was somewhere between beige and gray in color, an enormous moth-shaped wedge with tears in its skin where torpedoes had struck it.

“I don’t like the looks of this scow,” Nobles said.

I did not say anything. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I wanted to treat this whole adventure as if it were a bad dream. I would do what had to be done, but fear lurked in my mind. I tried to ignore it, but I knew it was there.

All along the side of the ship, tiny dark spots stood out against the gray of the hull. They looked no more significant than slugs crawling on a garden wall. These were transports, clamped to the hull on the ship in regular intervals, thirty of them in all. We flew below one, and I stared up at it. No light shone from within the cockpit. The transport looked every bit as dead as the host to which it was now attached.

“They look like ants compared to the battleship,” Nobles said. I expected him to question whether they would be able to move the big ship, but he didn’t. A trained pilot, he understood the physics of space travel better than I did.

We approached the landing bay, a straight-edged passageway shrouded in darkness. In the dead of space, with the landing-pad lights extinguished, the inside of the bay was absolute black. The silhouette of a raven flying across a moonless sky would not have been as dark as the world inside that ship.

“COE1, this is Marine 1,” Nobles began, and hesitated before completing his thought. “We have entered the battleship.”

Spuler started to make another stupid joke, but Mars cut him off. “Understood,” he said. I could hear Spuler grumbling in the background.

“Are the locks open?” Nobles asked. Landing bays incorporated enormous doors for atmospheric control.

“Everything is a go,” Mars said. “We will seal the locks behind you.”

“Yeah, we wouldn’t want anything to shoot out prematurely,” Spuler added.

“Stow it, Seaman,” Mars snapped.

More laughter. Even Mars laughed this time. Then he said, “One more word out of you, Spuler, and you’ll be cleaning the Norristown sewage system for the rest of your career.”

Silence.

I knew Spuler. He had a mouth on him, but he was worth the trouble. Mars had one thousand men in his Corps of Engineers; Spuler might well have been the best of them. He’d probably done more to get this show