The Clone Empire

steam, but I knew better. We had just come from the surface.

Sweetwater put the fluctuations in perspective. He turned toward the camera, and said, “We’re seeing ten- degree temperature swings.”

So much for icebergs melting and oceans boiling, I thought.

“Have you told General Hill?” Freeman asked.

“He says they’re going as fast as they can,” answered Sweetwater.

“Oh my,” said Breeze. “They just had a twelve-degree fluctuation.” Shaking his head with decision, he looked into the camera, “It could happen any moment.” He grimaced. His looked like they were meant for chewing hay.

As it turned out, Breeze was wrong, the event did not occur for a long time. One hour passed, then another. Sweetwater and Breeze gave us hourly reports informing us that surface temperatures had stabilized more or less. Strangely, stabilized temperatures panicked Breeze just as much as fluctuations.

Three hours after we sealed ourselves in, Sweetwater called to tell us that the Tachyon D count had doubled over the last hour.

Between calls, I had nothing to do but sit and wait. I explored the power station, examining enormous turbines that reached to the ceiling. At one point, I went looking for something to eat. I found a refrigerator in the employee lounge and stole people’s lunches. Some of them were old, with withered apples and petrified bananas.

Despite the temptation to hoard food for myself, I brought the lunches back to the truck and shared them with Freeman. He chose a plate with several pieces of chicken. I took a sandwich.

“What if the building collapses?” I asked Freeman. “How are we going to dig our way out?”

He took a bite from a drumstick that looked like it might have come off a parakeet in his big hands. He bit off a mouthful of meat and pointed toward a distant wall, where an emergency exit sign glowed.

“Stairs?” I asked. “That’s your answer if the building comes down around us? We can just take the stairs.”

“The rest of the station will collapse before that stairwell,” he said.

We continued divvying the food. Freeman chose meats first. I went with fruits and snacks. By the time we got to the salads, we’d both lost interest.

Another hour passed. I thought about the Double Y clones. Did they know they were in danger?

Breeze called in to tell us that the last of the transports had docked with the barges. He guessed that a few looters might be left on the planet, but not many. He didn’t know that Warshaw was dumping prisoners to be killed. I wondered how he would have reacted to the news.

As Freeman chatted with Sweetwater and Breeze, I found a comfortable curve on the back of the truck and fell asleep against it.

Apparently, I slept right through the event.

PART V AFTERMATH

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

“It’s over.”

Freeman woke me from a light sleep. I opened my eyes, got my bearings, and slid off my spot in the back of the truck.

The air down at the bottom of the station was cool. An odd pattern of emergency lights showed from the ceilings. I looked around the shadowy chamber and thought to myself, It couldn’t have been much of an explosion if I slept through it.

I was still reviewing that thought when an explosion occurred. As cataclysms go, it was not much. The ground did not shake, and the walls did not crumble. An audible thud rang through the underground power station, and that was that. Shit. If that little thud is all that we get, Warshaw’s going to ride my ass forever, I thought to myself. The underground station seemed to have survived the event without so much as a crack.

Putting on his helmet to seal his armor, Freeman started walking up the ramp. I donned my helmet and followed, scanning for radiation as I went. I used the night-for-day lens in my visor so I could see clearly in the dark.

The top level of the station seemed unaffected by whatever had happened. The structure looked sound, no breaks in the walls, no toppled equipment. As we rounded a turn and started toward the exit, I noticed something on the ground. In the blue-gray graphics of my night-for-day lens, the stuff looked like ice. It had an organic look, like a thick liquid that had spilled on the ground and frozen in place.

I switched the lens in my visor to heat vision. Through this lens, frozen objects appeared blue and humans gave off an orange signature. The stuff on the concrete near my feet was white. Had I stepped on it, my armored boot would have melted.

I started to ask Freeman what it was, but when I looked up the ramp, I had my answer. I saw the night sky. The heavy metal shutter Freeman had lowered to block the entrance had melted soft, then imploded. Its soggy cardboardlike remains still blocked the bottom third of the doorway, but some of the metal had melted to liquid and run down the ramp.

“We might as well blow the rest of it right off its tracks,” I said.

“Once it cools down,” Freeman said.

I examined the magmalike liquid using heat vision. It no longer gave off a glowing white signature; in just those few seconds, it had cooled to the color of butter. The concrete around the entrance glowed a dark yellow. Freeman stood fifty feet back from the entrance; the walls around him barely registered on my visor.

“What the speck happened here?” I asked.

Freeman did not answer.

I asked, “Have you checked with Sweetwater and Breeze?” “Communications are out.”

If a nuke went off outside this station, the shock wave would have sent the door flying, but it wouldn’t have specking melted it. Not a thick metal door like this one. I looked back at the remains, noting the way the top curled in like a badly hung curtain. Above the wilting metal, the night sky looked almost ablaze, the lower clouds glowing an eerie orange.

A moment passed before I realized that I wasn’t looking at clouds; I was looking at a sky filled with steam. The rebreather in my armor would protect me if I stepped out; but without it, that air would have poached my lungs.

Whatever had struck Olympus Kri, it wasn’t just powerful, it was cataclysmic. Did it land on the planet or simply strike from space? The Avatari’s new weapon of destruction had an almost velvet touch. The ground had not shook. Hell, I slept through the entire event.

For now, Freeman and I were trapped in the underground station, not buried alive, but trapped. We could not leave the ramp, there was too much molten metal on the ground, and the concrete around the entrance was burning hot, heated to crystal.

Not daring to step any closer, I stared out through the ruined entrance and into the sky. I saw clouds of steam that smoldered against a dirty black sky. With its roiling orange clouds and its layers of steam and smoke, the horizon looked like it was made of embers.

“What do we do now?” I asked.

“We wait,” Freeman answered.

“How long?” I asked.

“Till the planet cools off.”

Had one of my Marines said that, I would have busted the sarcastic prick in the nose. From Freeman, I smiled