The Clone Redemption

themselves a few additional hours to live.

His orders were to fire the pods from just outside the ion curtain. Yamashiro’s orders made it clear that firing the pods from a million miles away wasn’t an option, however much it was a temptation.

In his heart, though, the pilot knew it didn’t matter. Nothing would penetrate the tachyon shell. It disassembled waves. Sound and light dissolved into it. The S.I.P.s would hit the outer side of the sleeved atmosphere and explode. Maybe the ion curtain would suck the energy out of them, then repulse them.

The few times the pilot peered out of the cockpit, he found his technicians sitting along opposite ends of the same kettle wall. They could have been talking over the interLink, but he doubted they were.

The pilot made no effort to control the flight. He’d switched the computers to autopilot and spent the time slumped in his seat, reviewing his life. He thought about his failures and successes, remembered his parents, relived the pain of his young wife’s death, and wondered what life might have been like had she had lived. He had no children.

From five thousand miles away, planet A-361-B filled the cockpit’s windshield. He realized that he didn’t see the planet, just the “sleeve” that had closed around its atmosphere. From the outside, it looked like a solid layer, like someone had dipped the planet in white gold.

“We’re here,” the pilot told the technicians. “We’re almost in position. Let’s make this quick.”

He did not want to die, though having accepted that his death was imminent, it did not scare him as it had back when he began the flight. Since leaving the Sakura, he had gone through all the steps. Denial and anger came first but ended almost after takeoff. The bargaining stage did not last long because he had some measure of control over his fate. If the pilot turned the transport around, he would survive the mission and live as a coward. A man of duty, he preferred death over a life of shame …and maybe a short life at that. He’d seen what had happened to the Onoda, the Kyoto, and the Yamato.

The pilot did not believe in God, and the idea of an afterlife trapped in the Yasukuni Shrine held no fascination for him. Now, as he spun the transport so that the rear hatch faced the planet, depression and acceptance glided along parallel tracks in his head.

The pilot did not hesitate as he worked the controls. Maybe the aliens could target the oxygen in his armor, or maybe they would target the air in his lungs and sear him from the inside out. It no longer mattered. All that mattered was the mission, and the pilot would give his life and the lives of his technicians to see it through.

He switched off the controls for what he believed would be the very last time and walked out of the cockpit. In the kettle, the technicians had already loaded the S.I.P.s into the launching device but had not yet pulled the device into position. As the pilot watched from the catwalk, one of the techs hit the button to open the hatch.

Here it comes, thought the pilot. He was sure that it would be the moment, and he braced himself. A soft tremor ran through the belly of the transport as the thick iron doors slowly ground into place.

Standing on his perch above the kettle, the pilot could not see the ramp. His curiosity got the better of him, and he slid down the ladder. He had not turned off the gravity inside the transport, just notched it down to about one-third gravity level on Earth.

He touched down lightly on the metal deck, turned, and saw the far end of the ship. The rear hatch framed the view of A-361-B glinting like a giant shining sphere of molten silver. As the pilot watched, the technicians pulled the launching device along a rail that ran down the ramp. The device reached from the floor to the ceiling. It looked like a miniature Ferris wheel, with coffins instead of seats. When it locked into place at the bottom of the ramp, blocking his view of the planet, the pilot went even closer. In the distance, he could see the second transport still drifting into position, its rear hatch open.

From initiation to completion, the firing process took five seconds. Once the launching device was in place, a technician pressed a button, and the device fired the S.I.P.s into space. Knowing there was no point in trying to escape, the crew stood in place and watched.

They could not see the infiltration pods. Powered by field-resonance engines, the pods traveled the five thousand miles to the planet in a fraction of a second. Nothing happened. The S.I.P.s did not explode. The air in their rebreathers did not heat up to thousands of degrees.

They stood there, at the edge of the transport, staring out at the planet, realizing that nothing had or would happen. They would return to the Sakura having failed their mission and survived. The technicians slid the launching device back in place, and the pilot began the long flight back.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Location: Open Space Galactic Position: Outside Solar System A-361 Astronomic Location: Bode’s Galaxy“We cannot go back to Earth. There’s no going back if the Unified Authority is at war. They’ll shoot us down before we can identify ourselves,” said Yamashiro.

Where have they gone? he asked himself. Miyamoto Genyo, the modern-day Samurai, had always sat to Yamashiro’s left. With the Onoda destroyed, Miyamoto’s seat remained vacant. Takahashi sat to his right; but the chair beside him, which once belonged to Captain Takeda Gunpei of the Yamato, sat empty. At the far end of the table, an empty chair marked the space once occupied by Yokoi Shigeru, the late captain of the late Kyoto.

Commander Suzuki now sat at the table. This had once been a room for admirals and captains; now it had space for commanders and enlisted men—Master Chief Corey Oliver sat at the table.

Yamashiro harbored no prejudice against clones. He did not care about the master chief’s synthetic conception. His rank was another story. Oliver was a master chief petty officer, an enlisted man; and that, by definition, placed him below real officers.

So there they sat, the admiral of a one-ship fleet, the captain of that ship sitting with his second-in-command, and an enlisted clone. I should invite Lieutenant Hara, Yamashiro thought. He could come representing the underworld element.

“We cannot destroy the enemy, and we cannot return to Earth,” said Takahashi. “It sounds like we have run out of options?”

Yamashiro turned to study the SEAL. He knows what I am going to say, he thought. Somehow, the kage no yasha knows what I am going to say.

“No. We can still destroy the enemy,” he said, and he was not surprised when Oliver gave him a slight nod.

“How can we do that?” asked Takahashi. “We fired our most powerful weapon at their shield, and it failed. If infiltration pods can’t break through, nothing can.”

“I intend to detonate the pods from inside the layer,” said Yamashiro. “We will broadcast this ship into the atmosphere …”

“They’ll melt us like they melted the Onoda,” said Takahashi.

“They won’t,” grunted Yamashiro, his expression cold. “If we broadcast the Sakura inside their atmosphere, they will not be able to incinerate us without incinerating themselves.”

“Broadcast inside the sleeve?” asked Takahashi. “That would not be possible. Nothing gets through the sleeve.”

“We would not broadcast through it. We would materialize inside it,” Yamashiro barked. Then his voice softened, as he said, “We are honor-bound to succeed. This is the only way that we can.”

Takahashi did not believe he had heard his father-in-law correctly. Stunned, he reviewed the sentence in his head. Finally, he said, “Admiral, we won’t be able to fly our ship once we are inside. The sleeve grounded the U.A. Air Force during the battle for Copenhagen. The fighter pilots weren’t able to fly higher than a thousand feet before their jets stopped working. The same thing will happen to us. Our computers …our electrical systems, our defenses …We’ll be just as vulnerable as those fighters were, with less room to maneuver.”

Yamashiro responded with a smile so sour that his son-in-law looked away. He said, “No, Hironobu, we won’t