The Clone Redemption

CHAPTER ONE

They say God created the plants on the third day, the animals on the fifth, and man on the sixth. What God did in three days the aliens undid in less than a minute and a half. It took the bastards eighty-three seconds to kill everything that walked the surface of Terraneau, right down to the microbes.

I was one of the 1,037 people who survived the attack on the once-grand planet of Terraneau. We survived because we hid in a tunnel that ran under a lake.

By far, the vast majority of the survivors were clones, members of Scutum-Crux Fleet’s Corps of Engineers. There was an even thousand of them.

I was one of two Marines who survived. The other survivors included Ava Gardner, the woman I had once loved, and the man who had replaced me as her lover. My pilot, Lieutenant Christian Nobles, was the other Marine. Ray Freeman, the mercenary/homicidal humanitarian who busted me out of jail in time to save me from getting cooked with everybody else, survived as well.

The thirty-two other lottery winners were members of the local militia. In the moments before the aliens attacked, the local militia raided the tunnel hoping to haul me back to prison. They entered with hundreds of men, but only thirty-two had traveled far enough into the tunnel to survive the heat. They attacked our sanctuary moments before the Avatari performed their pyrotechnic magic, raising the surface temperature of Terraneau to 9,000 degrees. The temperature outside the tunnel spiked 8,927 degrees and remained at 9,000 degrees for precisely eighty-three seconds, then dropped back to normal almost as quickly.

During those eighty-three seconds, the temperature created a convection, causing the atmosphere to rise off the surface of the planet. When the Avatari shut off the heat, the atmosphere dropped back into place, crushing buildings, kicking a thick layer of dust and ash into the air, and sending a shock wave across the planet.

Hiding behind a thick steel door in the depths of a tunnel, my engineers and I rode out the attack unharmed. When we opened the doors, just about everyone on the planet had been killed and cremated; and their dust was carried on the largely carbon-dioxide winds. Just behind the door, we found thirty-two militiamen cowering in the dark. They were good to go except for burst eardrums, a few broken bones, and the shock of knowing that everything and everyone they loved had been burned.

The rest of the tunnel was littered with the bodies of men who were cooked but not cremated. The first bodies we found were covered with blisters, their clothes singed and their hair burned brittle. Grease leaked from breaks in their scalded hides.

As I wandered toward the entrance of the tunnel, the corpses became more badly burned. One hundred feet from daylight, the bodies were papery ash that turned to dust at the slightest touch.

I walked to the mouth of the tunnel, taking in the lake, the sky, and the distant ruins of Norristown. From where I stood, Lake Norris looked as big as an ocean, so far across that I would not be able to see its farthest shores …even on a clear day. On this day, the air around me was the color of tea, and clouds of smoke and ash filled the sky. Incinerating five million people and all their belongings puts a lot of dust in the wind.

The militiamen, the engineers, and Ava’s lover remained in the tunnel, standing in the darkness, staring at nothing in particular. Their crying carried in the stillness like an echo.

Ava came to me as I stood in the entrance. Though I tried to stop her, she looked back toward the city and saw the ruins.

“What about my girls?” she asked. Before the cataclysm, she had taught drama at an orphanage for girls. She stared toward the ruins of the city, and tears rolled down her face. I did not blame her. I’d tried to warn her, but she couldn’t envision destruction on this scale without having seen it. Once you see an attack of this sort, a part of your humanity closes forever.

This was the third time I’d seen an attack of this kind, and it still left me numb.

I had come to warn these people, and they threw me in jail. Freeman rescued me, and the people burned as if I’d never arrived.

“General Harris, are you there?” The call came from Captain Don Cutter, commander of the E.M.N. Churchill. E.M.N. stood for Enlisted Man’s Navy, my Navy. I was a Marine, but I was the highest-ranking officer in the fleet.

Cutter contacted me over my commandLink, part of the communications network built into my combat armor. “General Harris, are you there?”

“Harris here,” I said. I hoped I sounded in control. This was the first outside communication I had received since entering the tunnel.

“What’s the situation, sir?” asked Cutter.

“The worst,” I said.

“How many survivors?”

“A thousand and change,” I said. “How do things look up there?”

Cutter was calling from a badly damaged fighter carrier, supposedly the only operational ship in Terraneau space. He said, “The Unifieds sent a spy ship into the area.”

“How were you able to spot it?” I asked.

The Unified Authority, the Earth-based empire that created me and my fellow clones, used modified cruisers for surveillance and reconnaissance. The spy ships were fast, small, and equipped with cloaking technology that rendered them utterly invisible.

“We parked in the debris and turned off our lights,” said Cutter. “They didn’t know we were here.”

By “debris,” he meant a graveyard of ships. More than a hundred dead ships floated in the space around Terraneau, remnants of a forgotten battle that had happened earlier this year.

“Didn’t they cloak?”

“They cloaked all right; but they dropped their skirts when they launched their ‘eye.’”

I knew that “eye” was Navy-speak for a spy satellite. The part about the skirts made no sense to me. “Come again?” I asked.

“They had to lower their shields to deploy their satellite. Weapons picked up the energy fluctuation.”

“Nice work,” I said.

“Thank you, sir. Do you want us to destroy the eye?”

“Hell no,” I said. Then, realizing I might be coming off harsh, I said, “Leave it alone, Captain. Having an enemy satellite in place might come in handy.”

Terraneau was in the Scutum-Crux Arm, the outermost arm of the Milky Way. Earth was located in the Orion Arm, clear across the galaxy. The only way for the Unifieds to pull any data from that satellite would be by sending their spy ship back to retrieve it.

When their spy ship returned, we would give her a proper reception.