The Clone Redemption

thirty minutes, Harmer. Go prep your men.”

Harmer nodded. He did not salute. Enlisted men did not salute each other. He rose to his feet and walked out of the room without saying a word.

“I’ll tell you what,” said Oliver, “if any of you are having second thoughts about returning to A-361-B, Harmer will switch places with you. Any takers?” Oliver looked over the nine remaining senior chiefs. “No one?”

No one raised a hand. No one spoke. They sat in their chairs, staring up at Oliver, the ugliest men the master chief had ever seen.

Do you want to die? Oliver silently asked his men in his head. Do I? He could not answer for his men; but for himself, the answer was, “No.” He had no desire to die, nor did life as a colonist appeal to him. If everything went right, if the crops grew, and they found enough oxygen and water, Harmer and his men would serve as policemen and soldiers until they were too old to matter; then they would go on for years, eating food meant for reproducing humans, outcasts, weak and alone among a tribe of people who cared for them only because they felt indebted. The thought made Oliver cringe.

He could not imagine a worse fate. In truth, Corey Oliver, a man with no ambitions, hated command. For some reason the fates had not only condemned him to replace Illych but to order men to their deaths.

“Captain Takahashi tells me he can fly this ship with 120 men,” said Oliver. Warren started to ask a question, and Oliver put up a hand to stop him. He added, “That’s just what it takes to keep this ship flying. It takes an additional two hundred men to keep things running in a battle situation. That’s 320 trained sailors.

“For this mission, he’s got a thousand sailors and us. Admiral Yamashiro is taking most of the bridge crew with him to New Copenhagen. We’re taking the old and the sick sailors with us.”

“Are any women coming with us?” asked Senior Chief Billings.

Oliver stopped speaking, glared at the man, and asked, “What’s the matter, Billings? You hoping for a first fling before you die?”

The other clones laughed.

“No. No women. No young men, either. The average age on this boat just jumped from twenty-nine to thirty- six,” said Oliver.

“Are you factoring us in those statistics?” asked Senior Chief Warren.

Was this part of their programming? Oliver wondered. Some of Illych’s Kamikaze team had acted the same way before they left on their mission. They made jokes as they boarded the transport. Even normally somber SEALs kidded each other before their final missions.

Not all of them, though. Oliver remembered that Illych did not join in the banter. Just as Oliver now felt the weight of command, Illych must have felt it at the end. His men were going to die, and Illych would have felt the weight of their lives on his shoulders, just as it was Oliver’s turn to feel that weight.

Oliver smiled, looked at his notepad, and said, “I factored you animals in as twenty-six-year-olds. Factoring you in as five-year-olds, the average age drops to twenty-five.”

He looked around the room, meeting his men’s eyes and searching their faces for fear, and Oliver realized they could relax only if he relaxed with them. They would go. They would fight, and they would die, and they would never complain; but he saw that he could give them strength if he would just relax and joke with them. He said, “You should have seen what happened to the average IQ on the ship when I factored you animals in. We cut it in half.”

The senior chiefs laughed, their morale restored.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Earthdate: December 1, A.D. 2517

Transferring twenty-two hundred colonists—one thousand women, eleven hundred men, and one hundred SEAL clones—to New Copenhagen took an hour. Stripping the Sakura and shipping supplies down to the planet took two days.

Every morsel of food, be it frozen, dehydrated, powdered, extruded, or fresh, was sent to the planet. Power generators were removed from the ship and sent down to the planet, leaving entire decks without electricity. Weapons, everything that wasn’t built into the Sakura’s hull, were sent down, including fifteen low-gravity tanks that consumed such massive amounts of fuel that the colonists would never operate them—they would be torn apart and used for scrap metal; their engines were too inefficient for anything else. Beds, portable storage facilities, and furniture were sent down. So were cooking and eating utensils. Engineers even scavenged metal and wiring from the wall panels and floors.

Yamashiro stayed aboard the Sakura, overseeing the operation as men stripped the ship of nonessential items to send down with nonessential personnel. By the time they finished, the medical bay was empty, the team having pillaged light fixtures, wiring, and electrical panels as well as medicines, furniture, equipment, and flooring.

The entire third deck had been stripped down to its iron girders. Once the location of living quarters, rec rooms, Pachinko parlors, bars, and galleys, it now sat dark and empty. Eviscerated. Yamashiro and Takahashi quietly observed the carnage as the admiral made his final inspection of the ship.

* * *

“Admiral on deck!”

The crew, about eighty men and fifty SEALs, stood to salute Yamashiro. He returned their salute.

As they entered, Takahashi said something about his new bridge crew being ready. Yamashiro scanned the area, taking in the desks, the booths, the computers, the table at which he had spent the last three years looking at tactical displays and reading three-dimensional maps. He would not miss the bridge of the Sakura, not in the least.

Yamashiro nodded to sailors and returned their salutes. He shook a few men’s hands even though he wanted to leave. He felt old, even ancient. His head hurt, and he needed a nap. All these men will die saving me and the colony, he thought, and the weight of the thought pushed down on him.

Yamashiro no longer saw himself as an admiral. The bridge had become a foreign land to him, one that he needed to escape. He thanked the men nearest the hatch and left, a silent Takahashi at his side. As they stepped through the door, Yamashiro whispered, “How much do they know?”

“The SEALs know everything,” said Takahashi.

“And the sailors?”

“They know we are going to broadcast into the atmosphere and that it will be dangerous,” Takahashi said.

The hall was empty.

When it sailed into the Orion Arm, the Sakura had carried six thousand hands. Now it had thirty-eight hundred, most of them SEALs, who seldom ventured onto the upper decks.

“Are you going to tell them?”

Takahashi looked back to make sure no one had left the bridge behind them, then asked, “What should I tell them? It’s not a mission, it’s a death sentence. If I tell them what we’re really going to do …”

“Would you blame them?” asked Yamashiro.

“I can’t fight my crew and the aliens at the same time,” said Takahashi.

The hall was long and dim and silent. Half of the light fixtures had been stripped from the ceiling. They passed a row of dormant elevators, their bulky metal doors removed. The doors and the cables would not be used for their intended purposes by the colony. They would be melted down.

You will go down to your grave with a heavy conscience, thought Yamashiro, but he did not say it. Instead, he simply said, “I do not envy you, Hironobu, you carry too much weight on your shoulders.”

They continued down the hall until they reached the stairs.