The Clone Redemption

along the tube matched the color precisely.

The tube beside it held a torpedo that glowed ice blue. The senior chief removed the torpedo from the blue tube and brought it to me so that I could have a closer look.

He cradled the ice blue “pill” as he carried it. Small or not, this baby would certainly kill everyone in the cargo bay if it exploded.

As I inspected the torpedo, I realized that it wasn’t marked with blue lights; the glow came from the inside. The outside of the torpedo was made of some kind of thick polymer through which the inner core shone. The dark areas along that shaft were labels of some sort.

“What is this?” I asked.

“These are the torpedoes,” Holman said. He even laughed as he said it.

He watched me, expectation showing in his expression. When I did not pick up on it, he rolled his eyes, and said, “We salvaged them from the battleships.”

“What battleships?” I asked.

“You know, Mars …” He waited.

“Lieutenant Mars?” I asked.

Holman smiled, and said, “The planet Mars.”

And then I understood. I understood everything in a flash that left me dizzy. It was like waking up from a midday nap. We had destroyed several U.A. battleships when we stole the barges. Those battleships might well have been loaded with the torpedoes—the torpedoes that could destroy our ships with a single shot.

“These are the killer torpedoes?” I asked.

“The very ones,” said Holman. “If we’ve got it right, the blue ones dissolve shields. We call them ‘shield- busters.’ The red ones pack the punch.”

“How can you tell?”

“The red ones are nuclear-tipped.”

I looked back at the red torpedo, still snug in its tube, and shivered. I hated nukes. You can have your rats, your sharks, your snakes, and your space aliens. Nothing scared me nearly as much as nuclear weapons.

“How many of these things did you recover?”

“Thirty-six of each,” he said.

“Thirty-six,” I said. “That could be enough to finish off their entire fleet. Last I heard, they didn’t have thirty-six capital ships left in their navy.”

An invisible ship armed with shield-buster torpedoes. The Unifieds would not know danger was near until it was too late for them to protect themselves.

The Unifieds had just destroyed the small fleet we had patrolling the space around Solomon. They almost certainly had ships waiting in the area in case we sent a rescue party. With these torpedoes, we could turn the tables on them. I asked, “Have you run a test fire?” I did not think the cruiser would survive a misfire.

“Like I said, that’s why we’re here. That’s why I volunteered for this mission,” Holman said. “I’m here to test the new weapons system.”

Jim Holman wasn’t the only person who had volunteered for the mission. Ray Freeman had come as well.

Since Holman did not allow civilians on his bridge, Freeman waited for me in the third landing bay. I found him in a transport, sitting by himself in the unlit cockpit. Like any trained sniper, he was immune to boredom.

“Did you hear about the torpedoes?” I asked as I sat down in the copilot’s seat.

Freeman looked up but did not respond right away. Finally he said, “This is a spy ship. It doesn’t carry torpedoes.”

“This one does,” I said, and I told him all about the modifications and the pills.

“Is that why we broadcasted in so far from the planet?” Freeman asked.

“Holman says he did that for camouflage. He broadcasted in near the broadcast zone so the Unifieds would mistake our anomaly for debris.”

Freeman simply nodded. “What happens if we run into U.A. ships?”

“It sounds like he’s thought of everything,” I said. “If it comes to a battle with one-hit-kill torpedoes, the invisible ship wins.”

“What if Solomon is like Terraneau?” asked Freeman. “What if they won’t listen to us?”

“Terraneau was a neutral planet. Solomon is part of the Enlisted Man’s Empire,” I said. “There was no reasoning with Doctorow; he saw us as an enemy.” Doctorow was the late Right Reverend Colonel Ellery Doctorow, a pacifist dictator who had defected from the Unified Authority Army and declared himself president of Terraneau.

“Would you have believed a clone and a mercenary if they told you to evacuate your planet?” Freeman asked.

I shrugged my shoulders, and said, “We’ll do what we can.”

Freeman said, “It’s in God’s hands after that.” He wasn’t being flip. If there was a gene that gave people their sense of humor, Ray Freeman did not have it. His father had been a Neo-Baptist minister; and more and more, Ray’s religious roots were finding their way back into his thinking.

“Yeah, God’s hands,” I said. Ray could take his place among the specking saints if he chose. I did not want any part of it.

“You don’t believe in God,” Freeman said. “You used to.”

“I used to believe that God was a metaphor for government,” I said. “Now I’m a heretic. I don’t believe in governments.”

“And God?” asked Freeman.

“If there’s a God, why did He create the Avatari? Why is He letting them kill entire populations?”

Freeman didn’t answer.

“I find it pretty specking hard to believe that there’s a God out there who loves everybody, but He sends them to Hell if they don’t believe in Him,” I said.

“Maybe He doesn’t send them to Hell,” Freeman said. “Maybe He’s just like us, running from one planet to the next, trying to save as many people as He can from a disaster that’s already occurred.”

“How about clones?” I asked. “Do you think He tries to save clones?”

According to every major religion, clones did not have souls and therefore had no place in Heaven.

We were on a spaceship manned by clones, flying through enemy territory on a mission to save natural-borns. According to religious authority, the people who wanted to sink us had souls, and so did the people we wanted to save; but we were the saviors here, and, according to every major religion, we were soulless.

“I don’t believe in souls,” said Freeman.

“You don’t believe in souls?” I asked.

“I don’t know if there is a life after this one; but if there is, I think that everyone gets a part of it. You’re a walking, breathing man, Harris. That makes you just like everybody else.”

But Freeman was wrong, I wasn’t like everybody else. I was sterile. All clones were sterile. I might walk and breathe, but much of my thinking was the direct result of neural programming that my designers had hardwired into my brain.

“So is God the reason you’re here?” I asked. “Is God the reason you’re risking your life?”

Freeman shook his head but said nothing. The man was a sphinx.

CHAPTER THIRTY

The wreckage of the E.M.N. ships floated still and silent above Solomon’s radiant atmosphere. Seeing the dark outlines of our ruined ships, I wondered how much the people on the planet understood. So close to the atmosphere, the space battle would have been visible through civilian telescopes and traffic radars. Some of the explosions might have been visible to the naked eye.