The Clone Empire

“That’s the good news?” I asked.

“We do feel a little better knowing that they do not want to destroy the planet, yes,” Sweetwater said. I could not tell if the cocky little bastard was joking or not.

“Breeze says we’ll be safe if we’re fifty feet underground.”

There was a pause.

Normally, I let these pauses work themselves out. This time I asked. “What am I missing here?”

“We’ve looked at Arthur’s calculations,” Sweetwater hedged.

“You don’t agree with them?” I asked.

“Arthur’s calculations always add up perfectly,” he said, still not sounding confident. “In fact, we think you would be safe fifteen feet underground. It’s the intangibles that have us worried.”

“The intangibles?” I asked.

“With the kind of power the Avatari have in those Tachyon D particles, they could destroy the entire planet. That is clearly not what they plan to do; but our question is, how much damage will they be willing to inflict on the planet if they know you are on it?”

CHAPTER FIFTY

“Why is your fleet landing men?” Freeman asked me, as we watched the shuttle streak across the runway. I felt like a passenger on the deck of the Titanic watching the last of the lifeboats rowing away.

“Are you sure they’re ours? Maybe the Unifieds are landing troops,” I said, sensing another betrayal.

Freeman shook his head, and said, “No, these men are clones, and they are riding in on E.M.N. transports.”

“Shit,” I said, realizing who those clones would be. They were leaving the Double Ys behind. What do you do with seventeen thousand unwanted prisoners? I asked myself, and I knew the answer. If you considered them an inferior form of humanity, you sent them to burn.

“They’re killing the Double Y clones,” I said.

I felt no urge to prevent the genocide. I could not stop it if I wanted to; but deep down, I did not want to stop it. The Double Ys were volatile, as unstable as primed grenades, and potentially more dangerous. The universe would be a safer place without them.

“Are they in Odessa?” I asked, halfheartedly wondering if perhaps there might be some way to lead them to safety. I would not put my life on the line to save the pathetic bastards, but I might warn them to go underground.

“Jerome, it’s on the other side of the planet,” Freeman said. Jerome was the second largest city on Olympus Kri.

“So it’s out of our hands,” I said.

Freeman said nothing.

Our conversation had hit a stalemate that Sweetwater broke when he contacted us over the interLink. “Gentlemen, you should be aware that the temperature on Olympus Kri has risen by six degrees over the last fifteen minutes.”

Six degrees, I thought, putting the Double Ys out of my mind completely. “That doesn’t sound so out of the ordinary,” I said. It was late in the morning …

“Was that change global?” Freeman asked.

“Global,” said Sweetwater.

“So at this rate, we’ll hit nine thousand degrees in another six months,” I said.

“The surface temperature is unstable; but for what it’s worth, we don’t believe this change is a preamble to the event,” Sweetwater said. “Still, you might want to get to safety as quickly as possible.”

“Have you notified the fleet?” Freeman asked. He meant the Unified Authority Fleet. The Enlisted Man’s Fleet had supposedly come to oversee the evacuation; the Unified Authority had come to conduct it.

“Yes, sir,” Sweetwater said. “They are on the last stages of the evacuation as we speak.”

There were so many transports climbing through the skies over Odessa, they looked like a swarm of flies. How long would it take to lift seventeen million people? At one hundred people per transport, it would take 170,000 trips. How in God’s name did we ever get ourselves into this speck-up? I asked myself. I knew the answer. We didn’t. This one was thrust upon us.

Sweetwater said a quick good-bye and signed off.

Freeman had an all-terrain armored truck waiting just off the airstrip. Without saying a word, he headed toward that truck, knowing that I would follow. And I did.

I walked to the truck and climbed in on the passenger’s side, pausing for one last glance at the metropolis that had been zoned for extinction. The air was still and quiet. The sky was crisp and blue and clear, with frothy clouds floating across it. Twenty miles away, downtown Odessa loomed like a vertical shadow, like a butte that filled the horizon. The thousands of smoke trails rising above the city looked no more substantial than the filaments of a cobweb. They rose in odd angles and twisted into the sky.

“I used to know a girl from Olympus Kri,” I told Freeman. “I met her when I was on leave.”

“So she was scrub,” he said.

“She was my first,” I said, feeling nostalgic. I could not remember her name, but I remembered her smile and her laugh. The truck’s engine growled like some kind of prehistoric beast, and I sat back and closed the door and wondered if the girl had made it off the planet alive. I wondered if she remembered me.

We did not have far to drive. Freeman, as always, considered every contingency when he made plans. We cut across an empty suburb. I had seen many abandoned suburbs in the last few years, but I still got a haunted feeling when I saw them. Driving down avenues in which houses sat empty, the doors of some homes left open, I wondered if I would ever drive down neighborhood streets in which children still played.

Freeman veered toward the mountains, and I saw our destination. We would ride out the event in a power station that had been built into the side of a cliff.

Only the facade of the administrative offices was visible from the street. It was a three-story pillbox made of concrete and steel, with no effort given to ornamentation.

The land in front of the building was parklike, with sprawling hills, a manicured lawn, and a footbridge spanning a man-made river. Freeman drove us across this jade-and-sapphire setting and into a concrete alley that opened to a parking lot in which a fleet of heavy equipment sat unguarded—ladder trucks and cranes and bulldozers. Across the lot, the open maw of a subterranean bunker gaped from the side of a mountain.

“Picturesque,” I said to Freeman, who only grunted. He stopped the truck just inside the bunker, climbed out, and worked some buttons, causing a thick metal curtain to close behind us. Lights bloomed along the ramp leading down deep below.

“Think we’ll be able to exit the same way that we came?” I asked.

“There’s a back door if we need it,” he said as he climbed back in the truck. He had to work to wedge himself in behind the steering wheel. I would have offered to drive, but he would not have accepted the offer. Comfortable or not, he preferred to drive.

We drove down the spiraling ramp, passing floors with twenty-foot ceilings. The walls of the ramp were foot- thick cement. The subterranean structure housed massive turbines and generators. We had entered a shadowy underworld of concrete and steel, driving three floors down beneath the foot of a mountain.

“It doesn’t get much safer than this,” I said. I kept my armor on but took my helmet off. The air in the power station was cold and slightly moist. Once Freeman killed the engine on the truck, I listened for the whir of turbines; but I heard nothing.

Freeman placed his little two-way on the dash of the truck and tapped the button. A moment later, Sweetwater and Breeze appeared.

“I know they’re almost done, but they’re still cutting it too close,” Breeze said without looking into the screen. I got the feeling he was talking to Sweetwater. “The temperature on the planet is fluctuating wildly.”

Hearing this, I envisioned hundred-degree swings with snow falling on burning desert sands and melting into