The Clone Empire

stood in a real-world lab working with real-world equipment.

Breeze was a physicist who had published volumes on particles. He was probably a better scientist than Sweetwater, but his lack of confidence was an Achilles’ heel. He stuttered during briefings and used so much jargon that he could never communicate his ideas clearly. Sweetwater, whose expertise extended into chemistry as well as physics, had no shortage of confidence.

“You’re sure fifty feet down will be enough?” I asked.

“Based on my best calculations, ten feet might be enough,” Breeze said. He pulled off his thick glasses, polished them, and replaced them on his face. The grease and dandruff were still there, now wiped into a spiral pattern.

“The combustion on New Copenhagen was strictly a surface event. Sweetwater sent a drone down to take soil samples. The heat penetration was only a few feet.”

“So if someone was in a basement apartment on New Copenhagen, they might have survived,” I said, thinking not so much about survivors on New Copenhagen as civilians on Terraneau.

“It’s not likely,” Breeze said. “Concrete calcifies at two thousand degrees. At three thousand, soil melts.”

“Not all of the buildings melted on New Copenhagen,” I said.

“The surface of the planet retained heat longer than the atmosphere,” Breeze said. “The soil and air samples show that the atmosphere reached temperatures of nine thousand degrees before the heat subsided. If you were in a building with any kind of ventilation system, you’d be incinerated.”

“Good to know,” I said.

“Harris, you might want to consider flying down to the planet’s surface after the event. Any structure exposed to those kind of temperatures is going to sustain fundamental damage. You could survive the event and still find yourself buried alive.”

I thanked Breeze and signed off. Buried alive, Hell’s lobby. I thought about the Unified Authority Marines I buried in that underground garage on Terraneau. If I died the very same way, the irony would not be lost on Hollingsworth.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

As my shuttle exited the ad-Din, Lieutenant Nobles offered to stay on Olympus Kri for the mission.

Ahead of us, swarms of transports clambered in and out of the Olympus Kri atmosphere. The planet looked normal and healthy, just another green-and-blue marble no different than Terraneau, or St. Augustine, or Earth for that matter, only this one had a death sentence hanging over it.

“Are you out of your specking mind?” I asked.

“I don’t understand, sir. I heard you were going to stay down there,” he said.

Interesting point.

Here in the cockpit, this shuttle was no more comfortable than a transport. The ceiling was lower. I sat in the copilot’s chair and considered the instrumentation, which was more like the controls in my old Johnston Starliner than the controls in a transport. I might be able to teach myself how to fly this bird in a pinch, I told myself.

I started to say, “I fight, you fly,” but that sounded dismissive. Instead, I asked, “Do you know about any underground runway systems?”

“Not offhand,” he said.

“Then we wouldn’t have anyplace safe to store the shuttle.”

“Oh, yeah. I didn’t think about that,” he said

“See if you can get your hands on a transport for the return trip. If things go wrong, I may need to get off this rock in a hurry.” Unlike transports, which had skids instead of wheels, the shuttle needed a runway. I would have flown down to the planet in a transport as well, but I did not want to risk some other officer commandeering my luxury ride.

As we reached the atmosphere, a convoy of transports rose past us. They looked awkward and overburdened by their own weight. There had to be a better way of emptying the planet than evacuating its population one hundred people at a time; but when I tried to think of an alternative, I came up empty.

Because transports take off vertically, the evacuation was not limited to airports. Sports stadiums, shopping malls, schools, train stations, anyplace with room for processing masses of passengers and an open field for landing became an evacuation center.

Crossing Odessa, I saw hundred of transports flying in wing formations like flocks of geese. Below us, the streets were choked with cars.

“I’ve got your friend’s signal,” Nobles said. “He’s by an airstrip on the edge of town.”

A call came in from Sweetwater, his gravelly voice sounding anxious and excited. “We just got back the results from our atmospheric test,” he said, the “we” meaning him. “The Tachyon D concentration is rising quickly.”

“Are they forming an ion curtain?” I asked.

“Breeze doesn’t think so. He says these new tachyons act differently than the tachyons in the curtain. Their energy levels are off the charts.” Tachyons were subatomic particles traveling at sublight speeds. How Breeze could measure their activity and energy levels was a mystery; but I did not ask about it.

“How much time do I have?” I asked.

“Before the event?” he asked. The event, now there was a euphemism for the ages. Not the cataclysm, or the holocaust, or even the big bang; the event? It sounded so specking benign.

“Yeah, how much time before the event?” I asked.

“We have no frame of reference, General. Your guess is as good as ours.”

We were coming in for a landing, flying just a couple of hundred feet off the ground, slowing, dropping altitude. Freeman’s signal had led us to a private airstrip. Whoever owned the property had apparently abandoned it. No planes sat on the runway.

“We can tell you that the Tachyon D concentration on Olympus Kri has increased significantly over the last hour, perhaps by a factor of four.”

“Does that mean something is about to happen?” I asked as we touched down.

“It may mean several things, General; but we do not have sufficient information to make any predictions,” Sweetwater said.

Nobles taxied. There was a three-story control tower at the far end of the runway. Freeman stood beside the tower, dressed in custom-fitted Marine combat armor. He might well have been listening in on this conversation, Sweetwater had contacted me on an open frequency. If Freeman wasn’t listening, it meant he and Sweetwater had already had this conversation.

“If we have drawn correct conclusions from New Copenhagen, the tachyon particles the Avatari are using for this attack won’t be recycled like the ones they used in their first wave of attacks,” Sweetwater said.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

Nobles slowed the shuttle as we approached the tower.

“In their first invasion, the Avatari kept recycling the same base of particles. They bonded them together to form soldiers and guns. When we destroyed the soldiers, the tachyons returned to the atmosphere, where they recharged. We believe these new particles vanish once their energy is expended.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” I said. Images of atomic explosions danced in my head.

Nobles stopped the shuttle, and the fuselage lowered, but I remained in my seat.

“That is the bad news. The good news is that the Avatari appear to want the planet in one piece.”

“Do they have other options?” I asked.

“General, with the kind of energy those tachyons produce, the aliens could demolish Olympus Kri. They could reduce it to a floating cinder or make it explode into atom-sized fragments. Our analysis of the attack on New Copenhagen leads us to believe that the aliens plan to annihilate any opposition on the planet without destroying the planet itself.”