The Clone Redemption

to finish charging.

Ninety seconds, thought Oliver. If I can hold out for ninety seconds, they can escape.

Oliver’s dislocated shoulder hurt, but he ignored the pain. The injury rendered his arm useless for climbing and lifting, but he only needed one arm to fly the transport.

Warren and his men solved the riddles of the control tower quickly. Even before Oliver managed to check the power to his booster rockets, the sled beneath his transport came to life, pulling the bird forward toward the first of the atmospheric locks. Up ahead, the heavy metal door slid open.

Thank you, Senior Chief Warren, Oliver thought. You deserve to survive. He smiled and nodded, then said it again, out loud, “You deserve to live.”

“There’s nothing on the tactical,” said Takahashi.

“Fifteen miles and closing,” said the weapons officer. “It’s moving slowly. It’s shadowing us.”

“It looks like it’s moving into our path,” said Commander Suzuki. “It’s advancing slowly, like it’s stalking us.”

There were dozens of sailors on the bridge, but everyone else had become silent.

“I need a visual,” said Takahashi. His frustration quickened into desperation. There was something out there, possibly sent to destroy his ship; and he could not see the threat. He felt like he was drowning, like someone was holding his head underwater. “What is it? Where is it, Commander?”

Maybe the tachyon sleeve was distorting their readings. The sensors and computers inside the ship could only map the area around the ship. Suzuki and the weapons officer had located the threat using old-fashioned radar, but the data did not show on Takahashi’s holographic display.

Takahashi chewed on the knuckle of his right thumb as he thought. He weighed his options. The broadcast engine needed another minute to charge. So much could happen in a minute. The aliens could fire weapons. The world could explode.

“Turn us around,” he said. “Take us back over the city. We don’t want to fight.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” said Suzuki.

Takahashi looked around the bridge. It was the only choice he could make. Perhaps the aliens would think twice before engaging a battleship over their city.

“It’s coming after us,” said the weapons officer.

Takahashi hit the communications panel. “Landing Bay Three,” he said. “Oliver, are you launching?”

“This is Senior Chief Warren. The transport is passing the second lock, Captain. The outer door is opening. It’s out!”

“Shields up!” yelled Takahashi. With the transport safely away, he could raise his shields. We need to engage them, Takahashi thought. We need to buy Oliver time.

When the threat appeared on his holographic map, he saw it was not a ship or a fleet, but a swarm. It looked like a cloud of fine lines. He tried to get a clearer picture, but his computer would not cooperate. All it showed him was a cloud of tiny lines. If the hologram was right, the alien defenders flew ships no bigger than a pencil.

“They’re robotic,” shouted one of the sailors. “I’m detecting a signal.”

“Block it!” yelled Takahashi. “Disrupt the signal!”

He turned to his weapons officers, and shouted, “Lasers! Torpedoes, fire everything we’ve got!”

The enemy drones looked small and weak on the holographic display, but they moved quickly. Even before the lasers fired, the swarm scattered. “Clear a path. We need to break through!” shouted Takahashi.

The Sakura’s lasers obliterated drones by the hundreds, but that barely thinned the swarm. Torpedoes cleared pockets, not paths; and the pockets filled with new drones almost immediately. The Sakura’s weapons were designed for shipsized enemies, not swarms of tiny ones.

The drones did not return fire. They formed a cloud in which the individual units moved independently, like a swarm of mosquitoes. Seeing that his ship was now surrounded by short-range weapons, Takahashi realized that the end was near. He had come all this way only to find out he was unprepared.

One of the drones neared the ship. From a mile off the Sakura’s bow, the drone fired a single bolt of light that seared through the shields and punctured the hull. There were no casualties and no explosions, but the wound was fatal. With a breach in the hull, the Sakura could not broadcast.

Takahashi heard the report and looked back at the map in time to see the swarm close around his ship.

Corey Oliver left his transport on autopilot. He stepped onto the ladder that led into the kettle, climbed down two rungs, then dropped the rest of the way. He would give the Sakura a minute to launch, then he would fire the five S.I.P.s he had loaded in the launch device. They were overcharged and ready.

The hatch stood open at the rear of the transport. Oliver went to the computer station and looked at the timer, then peered back at the sky through the open hatch. The Sakura should have broadcasted already, but he could see her hovering slowly over the city. Smoke rose from her bow, but the master chief decided to give her another moment. As he watched, the battleship fell from the sky. He sighed, inwardly apologized to the men he had hoped would escape, and fired the pods at the planet below.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Earthdate: December 2, A.D. 2517

Location: Nebraska Kri

Galactic Position: Perseus Arm

Astronomic Location: Milky Way

Michael Khumalo, probably the greatest military philosopher of the modern era, said, “Give a fool a rope, and he will hang himself. Give that fool an Army, and he will hang his nation.”

Truer words were never spoken.

With its population of somewhere between three and four million people, Nebraska Kri should have been an easy evacuation. A farming planet with several centralized population centers but no large cities, the planet was a logistical dream. All Admiral Liotta needed to do was escort the barges to the planet, park them above the major townships, and arrange a semiefficient shuttle service.

Too timid to risk a confrontation with the Unified Authority, Liotta only flew three of the twenty-five barges to Nebraska Kri at a time. He kept the barges in a tight cluster near the broadcast station. Instead of a short trip in and out of the atmosphere, the transports were forced to travel halfway across the planet, turning a twenty- minute hop into an hour-long journey.

Because he only had a few million refugees to rescue, Liotta would get all the people off the planet all right; but Nebraska Kri was a galactic breadbasket. This was a planet with three million people that produced food enough to feed a hundred million people for an entire year. Most of that food sat crated and ready to load; but thanks to Liotta’s incompetence, all of that food would end up as ash when the Avatari scorched the planet.

By that time, botched civilian airlifts had become a joke around the officer corps. In private, some of the officers referred to them as ejacuations instead of “evacuations.” Captain Dempsey, for instance, told me, “You just wait until Admiral Liotta gets started on Nebraska Kri. It’s going to be a premature ejacuation.”

When I pointed out that the evacuation of Bangalore, an operation Dempsey ran, had not gone so smoothly, he said, “Don’t you blame me; I followed Admiral Liotta’s orders to a T. It wasn’t my fault that the ejacuation went so slowly that no one could tell that we came.”

“You were the officer on the ground. You should have found some way to speed it up,” I said. I pointed out that Admiral Jolly got everybody off Gobi.

“No, sir, General. That wasn’t Jolly. It was Jim Holman got those folks off Gobi. If it had been up to Jolly, no