The Clone Redemption

I looked at the windows, and said, “They’re fixed in place. They don’t open.”

“Oh,” she said.

“They must have power going to the air-conditioning,” I said. “You’d suffocate if they didn’t.”

She turned and walked toward her bedroom. I followed.

Ava sat on the bed and her robe fell open all the way up her thigh, not that she noticed. Her hair hung lank and tangled. The air in her bedroom was even more musty than the air in her living room.

“Are you hungry? I can fix you some food. I still have most of this week’s rations.”

“I’ve eaten,” I said.

“Well, that’s all right then.”

She no longer looked like a movie star. Walking down the street like this, she would no longer turn heads; even so, she was an attractive woman. She sat on the bed, staring ahead, not looking at me but not ignoring me, either. I stood beside her.

“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked.

“About what?”

Neither of us said anything for several seconds.

Finally, she looked at me, and said, “I had two hundred girls in one of my classes.” The way she said it was so plain and matter-of-fact. She did not cry, nor did tears form in her eyes. She’d probably cried herself dry days ago.

I realized that I liked her more than ever now that her Hollywood sheen had vanished. The tough, the polished, the beautiful Ava that filled movie screens no longer existed. Given the chance, I thought I might just fall in love with the empty shell that she had left behind. This was a woman scarred by death, a woman who knew my world.

“We’re going to evacuate Providence Kri,” I said. That was classified information, but this new Ava did not strike me as a security risk.

“Where are we going?”

I did not want to tell her about Terraneau, not while she was still in the grieving process. “They’re going to try to resurrect one of the planets that have already been burned.”

“Terraneau?” she asked.

“No,” I said, but she saw through me.

“Liar,” she said. “I can’t go back.”

“You can’t stay here,” I said.

“It’s as good a place as any,” she said.

“The aliens will be here by the end of the week. If you stay here, you’ll die.”

She thought about that, and asked, “Are you going to Terraneau?”

“No,” I said.

I thought I saw the ghost of her old sardonic smile. “Then you came here to say good-bye. You always come to say good-bye. Have you noticed that, Harris? You and I, we say good-bye to each other more than anything else.”

I did not know what it was about this woman that stirred my heart. I wanted to hold her and to kiss her, and I felt an urge to do more. She was empty and I was lonely and we could never again satisfy each other; but for the first time since I had met Ava Gardner, I knew that I loved her.

“I love you,” I said.

She ignored me. She asked, “If you are not going to Terraneau, where are you going?”

“Earth,” I said. Using the now-familiar line, I added, “It’s a one-way ticket.”

“I don’t suppose it’s a social call.”

“No. Not a social call,” I said.

Ava listened and nodded, but she did not speak.

Time passed.

“I love you,” I said.

“You don’t know love,” she said. “You know war. You know death. You don’t know love.”

Maybe she’s right, I thought. Whatever I felt for Ava at that moment, it matched up with the way I expected love to feel.

If I left her alone, she would stay in the apartment and die when the Avatari attacked the planet. I could have begged her to leave, and maybe she would have considered it. I could have sent Major Perry to collect her. He could take her by force. He could drag her to a transport and cart her off to Terraneau, but he couldn’t put the life back into her.

I bent down, stroked her hair, kissed her on the forehead, and whispered, “This is our final good-bye.”

Her eyes met mine, and she said two words. “Thank you.”

CHAPTER FIFTY

I wanted to say good-bye to Scott Mars before I left for Earth. Hearing he was aboard the Mandela, one of the handful of fighter carriers headed to Terraneau, I flew out to visit the ship.

“The Corps of Engineers is down in the fighter bay,” the officer in charge told me when I entered the landing bay.

“What the hell are they doing down there?” I grumbled.

“They’re engineers. They’re probably fixing up the fighters, sir,” said the officer.

“They aren’t mechanics, they’re engineers,” I said. “Engineers don’t fix fighters, they design them.”

“Good point, sir,” the officer said, a diplomatic way of telling me to speck off.

Still wondering why the head of the Corps of Engineers was inspecting fighters, I hiked down to the hangar. The place was enormous—a double-tall deck teeming with techs and mechanics. Like most warships, the Mandela had a hot-bunk rotation with three shifts, but that rotation collapsed as the empire prepared for evacuation and war. All three shifts had reported for work, and Mars and his engineers had come to join them. Dressed in red jumpsuits, the mechanics and technicians looked like ants crowded around the fighters.

I found Mars stooped under the wing of a fighter inspecting who knew what. I stood waiting for him to notice me, but he didn’t. After more than a minute, I finally asked, “Did Holman bust you down to fighter maintenance?”

Mars spun to face me, still holding a laser probe in his left hand as he saluted me with his right. “I wish to God he had,” said the perennially positive, born-again clone. “I’ll take Tomcats and Phantoms over Stone Age farming.”

“You’re not excited about Terraneau?”

“Building tent cities and digging latrines …It may be my calling; but no, I’m not excited about it.”

“It won’t be totally primitive; you’ll still have tractors and cranes,” I said.

“We’re riding Space Age technology into an Iron Age existence,” he said.

“You can build churches, too,” I said, trying to appeal to his religious side.

That brought a smile. He said, “Wanna see the surprise we planned in case we run into resistance?” Mars fixed me with a distinctly un-Christian grin and nodded toward the undercarriage of the Tomcat.

I squatted and edged my way under the wing, but I did not see anything other than the standard laser array and rockets. “What am I looking at?” I asked.

“We added a hard point for torpedoes,” Mars said. “Their torpedoes, the shield-busters. They know we have ’em, but they won’t think our fighters are packing them.”

I liked the idea. Somewhere down inside me, my confidence grew. A weapon like that could turn the tide of the war.

Mars ran his fingers along the wires at the back of a torpedo tube, then he shined a light into the seam at the