The Clone Empire

remote, and a bright yellow glow formed around the car. I knew that glow. I’d seen it around Unified Authority ships. It hung like an aura over the new U.A. combat armor. It stopped bullets and particle beams.

Using a remote to guide the car up the ramp, Freeman asked, “Are you ready?”

“Go ahead, Raymond,” said Sweetwater.

Those shields might have been able to stop bullets or absorb lasers, but they didn’t do shit against tachyons. As the car wound its way into the yard, it burst into flames.

Seeing this, I felt hollow inside. “Could they do the same thing to our ships?” I asked anyone who might answer.

Sweetwater fielded the question like a politician. “We don’t see any reason why they would bother attacking a ship.”

Breeze took a more honest approach. He simply said, “Yes.”

We were running out of time. When Freeman asked, “Should I try the weapons?” Sweetwater said, “By all means.”

Freeman pulled a sniper rifle from the back of the truck. He was the finest marksman I had ever known, but in this case it wouldn’t matter. All he had to do was fire a bullet through a thirty-foot-wide doorway at the top of the ramp. He pointed the gun in the right direction and pulled the trigger. A split second later, with the sound of the shot still echoing off the walls, a tiny flicker of flame ignited just outside the entrance to the tunnel. The bullet had combusted, just like the toy car, just like the drone dragon. It disappeared so quickly, I barely saw it.

“Six feet,” said Breeze.

“Six feet?” I asked.

“The bullet traveled six feet out of the station before it caught fire,” Sweetwater said.

Breezed corrected him. “It might have caught fire the moment it entered open air, but it traveled six feet before it disintegrated.”

Freeman removed a particle-beam cannon and started toward the top of the ramp.

“Are you sure you want to do that?” I asked, knowing that if its ray superheated, the gun would explode.

He did not answer. As he moved up the ramp, I watched the light on the sensor. It stayed mostly white, with an occasional flick of yellow. As Freeman got closer, the light turned yellow. The tachyon activity had shot up; they might even have homed in on him.

“Ray, stop!” I yelled.

He saw it, too, and froze, but the light remained yellow.

“What do I do?” I asked Sweetwater and Breeze.

“Raymond, stay perfectly still,” Sweetwater ordered.

Sounding calm as ever, Freeman asked, “Should I run the test?”

Sweetwater did not even consider the question. “Stay still. According to our latest readings, the tachyon concentration will drop to a safe level in two minutes.”

Freeman chose that moment to do something that was absolutely insane. Instead of concentrating on standing as still as possible, he fired the cannon. The glittering green beam of the particle beam traveled in a perfectly straight line the rest of the way out of the power station and out, into the yard.

My eyes switched from the particle beam to the meter warning panel and back. I had already slipped into the driver’s seat of the truck and started the engine. If the meter turned orange or green or black or any color other than white, I would launch the truck up the ramp to try to distract the tachyons.

Unlike the bullet, the shielded robotic car, and the drones, the beam seemed not to interest the tachyons. The meter flashed orange for a millisecond, and I stomped down on the gas, stayed behind the wheel just long enough to guide the truck around Freeman, then jumped from the cab. Trying to run straight up a spiral path, the truck bumped one wall and skidded across the ramp, a shower of sparks trailing behind it. Armored or not, the truck burst into flames the moment it entered into the yard. The explosion that followed launched the truck fifteen feet in the air. It spun like a corkscrew as it flew ass first, then landed nose down, three-foot flames dancing on its engine and all four wheels.

Freeman said nothing. His silence was icy.

“Sweetwater,” I said. “How much longer?”

Nothing.

“Breeze?”

Nothing.

“They’re gone,” Freeman said. “We were linked to them through the two-way communicator.”

“The one in the truck?” I asked.

Freeman did not answer.

“Does that mean they’re dead?” I asked, wondering if I had somehow destroyed the computer world in which they existed.

Freeman responded with a rare show of humor. He said, “Not any deader than they were before.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

Without Sweetwater and Breeze guiding our next steps, Freeman and I ended up sitting on the ramp for twenty minutes before deciding to take our chances on the street. I still had a go-pack filled with weapons, so I piped a grenade into the parking lot. When it lasted long enough to explode, I hurled the empty launcher after it. The six-inch chrome cylinder clanked when it hit the cement, rolled in a circle, and came to a stop.

“Looks safe,” I said. Freeman climbed to his feet and started hiking toward the entrance without responding.

As we stepped out, I took a temperature reading using the atmospheric thermometer built into my visor. The air temperature had dropped to a mere ninety-three degrees—about one percent of what it had been earlier that evening. I took a Geiger reading and found that the radiation levels were normal, possibly even low.

I looked at what had once been a brick-lined planting bed with large bushes. There was no sign of the bushes or the soil below them. Instead of dirt, the ground was covered with a combination of soot and coal-like crystals that sparkled like fool’s gold.

Wispy spirals of steam rose from the ground below our feet, but our boots did not sink into the ash-covered concrete. Ripples of heat rose from a crane lying on its side a few feet ahead of us.

My brain numbed by the devastation on every side of me, I followed Freeman around the administration building and out to the street. Newly formed air pockets in the sidewalk caved in under my feet as I walked along the road; crystalline glass and ash crunched under my boots when we walked on the soil.

Using my commandLink, I signaled for Nobles to come and get us. When he asked if he should come in a transport or the shuttle, I told him to bring the shuttle. Soft seats and a carpeted cabin sounded good at the moment.

A few minutes later, the sleek bird appeared in the sky, winding its way down to us so quickly it looked like it might crash. Nobles touched down on an empty stretch of highway, his wheels sinking two inches into the crumbling ground.

We flew to the ad-Din through almost vacant space. The barges had long since left. So had most of our ships. With Olympus Kri evacuated and burned, there was no reason to maintain a fleet in the area. What remained was a small coven of six E.M.N. cruisers, which included the Kamehameha. That meant that Warshaw had called yet another summit, which I hoped to avoid. Now that Warshaw was grooming Hollingsworth to replace me, I thought he would go as the token Marine.

My ship, the Salah ad-Din, hovered by itself several miles from the others. So did a Unified Authority cruiser. It looked so small beside our fighter carriers. Seeing the U.A. ship, I realized this might be more than an Enlisted Man’s summit. That cruiser had probably ferried some high-level U.A. negotiator.

As we approached the ad-Din, I received a message from Captain Villanueva directing me to the Kamehameha. I acknowledged the transmission and cursed under my breath.