The Clone Empire

Bishop laughed. It was a friendly laugh. “Stay put, Harris, I have some engineers on the way. We’ll get you out of there.”

Another hour passed, and the atmospheric gates slid open. A squadron of fighters met our transport as we emerged from the battleship and escorted us to the Kamehameha.

PART II IN DEFENSE OF EMPIRES

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Earthdate: October 28, A.D. 2517

Location: Providence Kri

Galactic Position: Cygnus Arm

When I first transferred to the Scutum-Crux Arm, my orders were to assume command of the fleet. Those orders changed when Gary Warshaw, the fleet’s highest-ranking noncom, made an end run. He paid an unauthorized visit to the Pentagon to whine about a Marine taking command of the fleet.

He might have been acting like a weasel, but he was right. Admiral Brocius, the highest-ranking officer in the Unified Authority Navy, rewrote my orders. Warshaw took command of the fleet, and I became Commandant of the Marines. Then the Earth Fleet attacked, and our bickering came to an end.

The Kamehameha, flagship of the Enlisted Man’s Fleet—formerly the Scutum-Crux Fleet, traveled out to meet us alone. That in and of itself suggested that something was wrong. Fighter carriers, particularly flagships, do not travel without support. But there she sat, in an isolated pocket of space, with no other ships in sight, the Kamehameha, flagship of the Enlisted Man’s Fleet.

Five months had passed since the Unified Authority attacked Terraneau. I’d seen plenty of capital ships since the attack, but they were derelicts floating in space, as dark and lifeless as the vacuum around them.

The Kamehameha, for all her battles, was anything but dead. The entire ship was a patchwork of dark walls and bright spots, with light shining from viewports and observation decks. A squadron of fighters circled her bow.

My loyalty to the Kamehameha ran deep. She was the first ship on which I served, and I served on her twice, once as a newly appointed corporal still trying to earn his chops and more recently as a field-promoted general. But there was something even deeper between us.

We were the same, that ship and I. The Kamehameha was an Expansion-class fighter carrier. She was the only Expansion-class ship still in commission, a one-of-a-kind remnant of the abandoned past. Since her manufacture, the Unified Authority had introduced the bigger, more powerful Perseus- class ships. And now the U.A. Navy had yet another generation of newer, smaller, self-broadcasting ships, with better technology in their shields.

And me …well, I was the last of the Liberators, a class of clone that had been replaced before the Unified Authority abandoned its cloning program altogether.

“Transport, this is Kamehameha Flight Control. Come in.”

“Flight Control, this is Transport,” said Nobles.

“Do not raise your shields on your approach,” the voice warned us. The man spoke in a perfunctory, monotone voice, as if he were reading from a script.

Nobles responded, “Copy that, Flight Control,” then turned to me, and said, “That’s pretty damn obvious. I wonder if they also have a recorded message in their officers’ heads reminding them to wipe their asses after taking a shit.”

Then he remembered something and scrambled for the radio. “Flight Control, please be advised that we are carrying a nuclear torpedo.”

“Transport, please repeat,” the voice said.

“Be advised that this transport has been outfitted with a nuclear-tipped torpedo.”

“Transport, stop your engines and power down. Wait for further instructions.”

Nobles stopped the transport and cut the power. Everything but the emergency lights went dark. The space outside our transport glowed brighter than the inside of our cabin.

“They’re giving us a security scan,” Nobles said. “They don’t trust us. Can’t say I blame them.”

I had seen the litany of security tests—X-ray, spectrum analysis, gamma search, radiation readings. By the time they finished, they would know more about the contents of this bird than we did. All of this security told me that the fleet was still at war. They weren’t just scanning for the torpedo—Nobles had already told them about that. They were looking for bombs, chemical weapons, maybe even robots and spies.

After no more than five minutes, they radioed back, and said, “Transport pilot, we have detected that your ship is armed. Can you confirm?”

“Affirmative. I already told you about it, we have a nuclear-tipped torpedo,” Nobles said.

“What is the purpose of that torpedo?”

I placed a hand on Nobles’s shoulder to stop him from answering and leaned in to the microphone. “It makes a hell of a conversation piece,” I said.

“I will ask you again, what is the purpose of your weapon?”

I started to answer, but the controller asked me to wait. A moment later he returned and gave us clearance to land. Our escort led us to an open docking bay and left. Nobles piloted the transport into the bay and landed on the sled that would pull us through the three atmospheric locks.

I liked Nobles; he was not the kind of man who gets nervous when conversations die away. Too many pilots felt the need to chat while they waited for the locks, but not him. As the manufactured atmospheres equalized around us, and the gigantic metal hatches cut us off from space, he busied himself shutting down his flight controls, pausing only to say, “Bet they’re surprised to see us.”

I agreed, but I wondered how happy Warshaw would be about my reappearance.

I got my answer when the last of the atmospheric locks opened. A platoon of armed Marines stood at the ready inside the bay. So did a bomb squad.

“Please wait to exit your transport,” said the voice on the radio.

Outside the transport, eight techs wearing the yellow soft-shelled armor of systems specialists, waved security sensors along our hull. Nobles seemed to find humor in all these precautions. He watched the men wheel an archway around the side of our ship, and said, “Security post. Man, these guys aren’t missing a trick.”

Whatever humor he found in all the precautions was lost on me. These boys were doing more than simply running a tight ship. Scrambling an armed escort, running five minutes’ worth of tests, and now the posts; the only armies that ran that kind of security were the ones that had already been infiltrated. I wondered if the Scutum- Crux Fleet had escaped destruction only to become a fleet under siege.

“You may now exit your ship,” said the voice on the radio. “If you are wearing armor, remove it before exiting your ship.”

“Good thing I brought a change of clothes,” Nobles said as he pulled out his rucksack and fished out some clothes. I did the same, and we dressed in the cockpit.

It occurred to me that they should already know if we had anything concealed in our armor. When they scanned our ship, they surely must have been able to scan inside our armor as well.

Once we were dressed in our Charlie service uniforms, Nobles tapped the radio, and said, “Flight Control, we’re coming out.” He hit the button that opened the rear of the transport.

We headed down the ladder and across the kettle. Our hands were empty and out where the Marines at the bottom of the ramp could see them. Between us and those Marines, a ten-foot-tall arch made of beige-colored plastic stood. The posts.