The Clone Redemption

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

We were running reconnaissance. For the mission, we took the spy ship.

I asked Don Cutter to captain the ship. He had time on his hands. Mars and his Corps of Engineers had not even begun working on the Churchill; and, now that Holman was running the Navy, he did not have time to play chauffeur.

If we’d broadcasted in behind Jupiter or Saturn, we might have come in undetected; but Jupiter was four hundred million miles from Earth and Saturn was eight hundred million miles away. Even flying balls-out, at thirty-nine million miles per hour, it would have taken twenty hours to cover that distance, and we did not have a day to spare.

We broadcasted in behind Mars, knowing that the Unifieds had figured out that trick. They might detect our entrance, but that did not necessarily translate into their tracking our route. The moment we entered the Sol System, Cutter engaged the stealth generator, and our spy ship became invisible …we hoped.

In the old moon-shot and satellite days, navigators planned trajectories that curved around the sun as they plotted routes from Earth to Mars. Back in that day, spaceships traveled only twenty-four thousand miles in an hour. At fifteen hundred times that speed, we took a more direct approach, pausing to add the occasional curve to make our route less predictable.

I stood on the bridge beside Captain Cutter, staring out the viewport. I’d known this man for only a month, but we had the familiarity of the battlefield. We’d faced death together. In military circles, that made us family.

“Do you think they’ve figured out a way of peeking through our cloak?” I asked.

“They probably don’t even know we have a stealth cruiser,” said Cutter.

I thought about the day Holman and I had attacked their Solomon patrol, and said, “I think they’ve figured that out.”

Cutter looked at me, and said, “General, has anybody ever mentioned that you’re a pessimistic man? You go through life a lot happier if you’re an optimist.”

“I’m not pessimistic,” I said, though I knew he was right. I hadn’t always been a pessimist. How had I changed? Was it fatigue? Was I worn-out from fighting wars on two fronts? Maybe it was the drugs? For the last few weeks, I’d been taking stimulants so I could work around the clock. The medics warned me that the drugs could have side effects—rollercoaster emotions, the sensation of feeling hyperalert, paranoia. Light hurt my eyes. Sounds made me jumpy. Looking around the little bridge of the spy ship, I felt closed in.

“Do they have ships out there?” I asked.

Sounding more calm than he reasonably should have, Cutter said, “Dozens of them. They’re searching everywhere, but they can’t see us. We came to look at their fleet, right? You wanted a peek at their forces; here they are.”

I nodded.

“So let’s look,” he said as he led me to his tactical display. The holographic display showed a chunk of space that included Earth and its moon. A rainbow of different-colored threads, each as thin as a strand of a spider’s web, traced the paths of ships as they circled the planet in search of the intruder. The scene fit Cutter’s description precisely. The Unifieds were everywhere. We had kicked the hornets’ nest.

Cutter pointed to the legend at the bottom. Red lines marked courses traveled by the new generation fighter carriers. There were only two of them. Gold threads marked the paths of three new generation battleships. The computer tracked five Perseus-class battleships and three Perseus-class carriers. Even throwing in cruisers, dreadnaughts, destroyers, and frigates, the Unifieds only had fifty-eight capital ships.

“Ah, look, here comes the cavalry,” Cutter said. He did not sound worried.

The tactical display marked broadcast anomalies with Xs. Seven of them appeared. Three of them dissolved into the red lines that marked new generation fighter carriers. The other four resolved into the gold of new generation battleships.

The U.A. ships concentrated their search on an area close to Earth. Hidden by a stealth shield, we watched the U.A. ships from a half million miles away. They never came near us.

Clearly, Cutter enjoyed spying on the enemy with impunity. He laughed when ships searched in the wrong direction, tracing their flight paths with his finger and making lame jokes.

“Sixty-five ships? Do you think that’s all they have?” I asked.

“They’d have a lot more if you hadn’t stranded them at Olympus Kri,” said Cutter.

We spent another half hour watching their movements. No new ships appeared on the scene though a few ships broadcasted out. “Do you have what you need?” Cutter asked. He almost never addressed me as “sir.” From anyone else I might have taken that as a sign of disrespect but not from him.

“How close can we get to Earth without their spotting us?” I asked.

“They’re already on alert,” Cutter said, a crooked smile forming across his lips. In the time that we had been standing by the tactical display, the multicolored threads representing the various ships had knitted themselves into a fabric. “We’d be taking a risk.”

“How big a risk?” I asked.

“Those ships are traveling at thousands of miles per hour,” he said, pressing a button to expand the ledger. Now it showed single-line readouts on every ship. The battleships and destroyers traveled at a uniform fifty thousand miles per hour.

“The fighter carriers aren’t moving,” I said.

“They’re preparing to launch attack wings,” Cutter said.

“But they don’t know where we are.”

“That’s the standard procedure when you’re dealing with an invisible threat. In another minute, they will start firing particle charges.”

I stared down at the display. With their fighters launched, the Unifieds expanded their net. They had started out between the Earth and its moon; now they had spread their search beyond it.

“Particle charges?” I repeated. I thought about the rickety hull of the ship, with its many patches. “Could we withstand a direct hit?”

“Easily. They don’t use particle charges to destroy enemies; they use the charges to locate them.”

Though I did not keep current with Navy weaponry, I knew what he meant. The charges exploded in bursts of energy-seeking ionized particles that attached themselves to energy fields like the electricity in our shields. In the vacuum of space, those particles would travel thousands of miles, while techs aboard the U.A. ships traced their movements.

“What if we lowered our shields?” I asked.

“How do you feel about radiation poisoning?”

I smiled, and said, “I’m not committing suicide until I can take the Unified Authority down with me.”