The Clone Redemption

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 need to worry about that. We won’t live long enough for it to be a factor.”