The Clone Redemption

CHAPTER THREE

“We’re up,” I told Freeman, though he was already moving toward the sled. A flatbed hauling device used for spacewalks, the sled looked like a scale for weighing cattle. It had a ten-foot-long base lined with tiny booster rockets. It did not have walls or rails or even a dashboard, only a column with handles for steering.

We climbed onto the sled, Freeman driving. Freeman always drove. A moment later, he had the boosters fired, and we hovered down the ramp at the rear of the transport, traveling at the sled’s top speed of ten miles per hour.

And there was the spy ship, long and gray and sleek, little bursts of air emanating from her many wounds. Parts of the ship had gone dark, but light showed from some of her viewports.

Ahead of us, the team of engineers assigned to open the ship approached the hull on a sled as well. They drifted along the fuselage, finally stopping behind the darkened maw of the bridge. They worked quickly, using a laser saw to slice a five-foot hole into the side of the ship.

Had the debris we fired at the spy ship not already lacerated her hull, that door would have exploded from the ship in a pressure-blasted burst of oxygen; but any atmospheric pressure had already leaked out.

“Now we know how we’re going to get in,” I told Freeman.

He puttered our sled toward the hole. As we drew nearer, the spy ship no longer looked so remarkably small. She was three stories tall. I reached out an armor-covered hand and ran my fingers along an undamaged stretch of hull as we pulled up to the opening.

For his purposes, Freeman only needed to salvage a specific communications computer; but I wanted the entire ship. My goals were more military-minded. I would not throw away a ship that was both invisible and self-broadcasting no matter how damaged.

Under normal circumstances, Freeman and I would have used particle-beam weapons when entering a disabled ship. This time we brought fléchette-firing S9 stealth pistols. He was concerned about a communications computer; I worried about everything else. Lieutenant Mars would need to fix everything we broke if we ever planned to fly this ship. Hit a computer or a circuit panel with a fléchette, and you may get lucky. The dart could pass through without hitting vital organs. Anything hit with a particle beam would end up a pile of molten metal.

Using a magnetic clamp, Freeman anchored our sled to the hull of the ship, and I launched myself in through the door. Emergency lights flashed along the ceiling of the mostly darkened main corridor. This was the spine of the ship, a hall that led from the bridge to the galley.

When the hull of a capital ship is punctured, emergency bulkheads slide into place to prevent the depressurization from shooting sailors into space. In theory, the bulkheads created pressurized safety compartments in which sailors could wait for the atmospheric pressure to stabilize. In practice, the bulkheads created death chambers. Sometimes, sailors got lucky, and the bulkheads sealed them into compartments with armor or rebreathers. Usually, they didn’t. The bulkheads opened once the atmosphere equalized, which meant that someone had patched the holes or that the atmosphere had bled out completely.

If the emergency bulkheads were still in place, we might find crew members trapped in the various compartments. If they had already retracted, we might run into armed sailors hoping for a little revenge.

Using night-for-day vision, I looked toward the bridge. Cruisers don’t really have bridges; they have oversized cockpits. I saw no signs of life. I looked toward the aft of the ship.

“The emergency doors have retracted,” I told Freeman, Mars, and Cutter on an open frequency. The ship would need extensive repairs. We’d miscalculated the damage when we set the trap, and we did not have a working shipyard for making repairs. I began to have doubts about Lieutenant Mars’s ability to resurrect this spy ship.

Freeman drew his pistol as he entered the ship. His desire to save lives en masse would not prevent him from killing anyone who got in his way. He floated through the hole like a ghost passing through a wall. “Any signs of life?” he asked.

“Not on this deck,” I said.

There were a couple of bodies, men iced up like statues. The smaller debris must have flushed out through the holes. Looking down the hall, I saw empty floors and battered walls.

“Do you have any idea where they stowed your computer?” I asked.

Not much of a conversationalist, even in the best of times, Freeman said, “Second deck.” I should have guessed as much. The Unifieds usually housed the spy gear and communications equipment on that deck.

“Are we looking for anything in particular?” Ships like that one might have a thousand different computers on board.

“It might be attached to a broadcast apparatus,” he said.

“A broadcast computer? You’re looking for a specking broadcast computer?” I asked. In my experience, broadcast computers were strictly navigational tools, and they were big.

“Not the main broadcast engine. This will be attached to a small, secondary broadcast engine.”

That made sense. The Mogats, an extinct band of terrorists who had plunged the Unified Authority into a costly civil war, established a pangalactic communications network using ships equipped with tiny broadcast engines to route their signals.

We might have knocked out the spy ship’s air and lights, but her gravity generator still worked. We were standing, not floating above the floor.

“This wreck may be beyond repair,” said Freeman.

I had the same fear. Deployed properly, a ship like this could turn the course of a war. I was just about to tell Lieutenant Mars to send over some engineers when I glimpsed the glow just beyond the next bulkhead.

“There’s a live one,” I told Freeman, not that he needed the heads-up. Always aware of everything around him, Freeman held his S9 out as he moved to cover.

In a calm voice, he said, “Shielded armor.” He did not say “damn shielded armor” or “specking shielded armor,” just “shielded armor,” because he seldom wasted time assigning values and judgments.

The bastard walked right up the hall showing no fear at all. He might have been a Marine or sailor, but he was wearing the shielded combat armor of a Unified Authority Marine, the new shielded armor that the Unified Authority created after expelling us clones from its military. Knowing that we had no weapons that could penetrate his ethereal electromagnetic coat, the cocky son of a bitch walked right up to the hole we had created as an entrance and casually surveyed the area.

I hid behind a storage locker. Freeman knelt beside a desk.

The man did not carry a gun. The shielding prevented him from holding external weapons. That did not leave him unarmed. A fléchette-firing tube ran along the top of his right sleeve.

I needed a better hiding place. If the bastard spotted me, his depleted uranium fléchettes would cut through the locker, through me, and probably through the bulkhead behind me as well. Even a shot through the arm would be fatal since the fléchettes were coated with a neurotoxin.

“Get ready to run,” I told Freeman. “I’m going to hit him with a grenade.” The shrapnel would not penetrate his shielding, but the percussion from the blast would still knock him on his ass.

Freeman did not respond.

Scanning the cabin, his right arm out straight and slightly bent at the wrist, the man zeroed in on my hiding spot without seeing me. The bastard probably was a Marine, but a new Marine. It was hard to believe what passed as a Marine in the Unified Authority military.

In a situation like this, a real Marine would have shot first and checked later. This guy lacked that kind of instinct; but dressed in combat armor and waving a fléchette gun, he was still dangerous. I’d seen armor like his in action. The fléchette gun could fire thirty shots per second. The darts were tiny splinters. He probably had a thousand rounds packed in a pocket on his sleeve.

I made ready to throw my grenade.

“You want this ship in one piece?” Freeman asked.

“If you have a better idea …” I started.

Freeman pulled a thumb-sized device from his ammunition belt and slid it onto the desk.

Speaking over the interLink, Freeman said, “Look at the floor and don’t look up.” I had just enough time to avert my eyes before his device lit the area so brightly that the floor looked bleached beneath my knee.

The man in the Marine armor pivoted around and reached out with both hands like a drunk groping down a dark alley. He’d looked into the light before the tint shields had formed on his visors, and it temporarily blinded him. A moment later, the sensors in his visors would detect the lumens from Freeman’s lamp, but by then it would be too late.

I looked away from the lamp to keep the tint shields from blocking my vision as I followed Freeman around the Marine and down the corridor. Freeman stopped long enough to place another light to shine at the man from the opposite direction. Now the bastard would be blinded until he groped his way out of the trap.

We ran down the corridor, hugging the walls in case the blinded Marine tried to shoot us. A short way down the corridor, we found stairs leading to the lower decks. I figured we would search together, watching each other’s back. I figured wrong. Starting down the stairs, Freeman said, “Stall him.”

“Stall him?” I asked.

“Keep him busy while I look for the computer.”

As far as I knew, I was the highest-ranking officer in the Enlisted Man’s military. I didn’t take orders from anyone …anyone but Freeman. He knew more about the computer than I did.

“Got any suggestions about how to keep him busy without getting myself killed?” I asked as I watched him disappear down the stairs.

Questions like that could lead to all kinds of smart-ass answers, but Ray Freeman did not have a mind for humor. He said, “Call out if you get trapped,” and vanished down the stairs.

Trapped, I thought to myself. I might have said it out loud as well. The thought resonated. I was on a relatively small ship, a hundred thousand miles from the nearest planet, fighting a Marine in armor my weapons could not penetrate. I was trapped.

The glare died out at the other end of the corridor. The Marine must have found Freeman’s lamps and smashed them, leaving the long hall dark except for the flash of the emergency lights and the glow of his armor.

Hoping to catch the bastard’s attention, I aimed my S9 and fired a few shots in his direction. The fléchettes were meant as a message. Even if they hit him, they would do no harm. But the stupid bastard didn’t even notice the darts when they hit him.

Needing to grab his attention, I stepped into the open, catching the silly bastard by surprise. I fired three shots that hit him square in the face, then jumped down the first flight of stairs and waited for him to chase me.

Mission accomplished.

The Marine came after me; but when he reached the top of the stairs, he stopped. So he had sufficient brain cells to sense a trap, big specking deal. Even monkeys hide when they sense danger. I waited for the bastard to start down the stairs. When he didn’t, I cautiously climbed back up to see what had happened.

Hoping to ambush me, the stupid son of a bitch had waited in an open hatch at the top of the stairs. I spotted him easily enough. The light from his shielded armor glowed like a moon.

“So much for the element of surprise, asshole,” I muttered. Not only did the light from his shields ruin the ambush; it showed his position. He was kneeling. The glow only filled the bottom half of the hatch.

So I waited for him as he waited for me. I had my pistol out and aimed. When he peered out of the doorway to look for me, I shot him in the face. It was a moral victory. My fléchette hit him between the eyes, but it only hurt his pride.

Caught off guard, the Marine tried to spring up, lost his footing, and fell on his ass. He climbed off the floor and returned fire; but by that time, of course, I had jumped back down the stairs.

I needed him to follow me to the bottom deck, so I waited on the landing. If he lost my trail and strayed onto the second deck, he might find Freeman.

Up at the top of the stairs, the glow of his shields diluted the darkness. The squirrelly Marine was in no rush to chase me. He moved cautiously, as if he thought I could actually hurt him. He aimed down the stairs and fired a dozen shots to flush me out of hiding.

Had I still been on that landing, his darts would have passed through my armor as if it weren’t there. The needles themselves would only do minimal damage unless they hit a vital organ, but the poison would leave me numb as it paralyzed my limbs and stopped my heart.

Under his shields, he had the same armor as I and the same smart visor. He could track body heat with his heat-vision lenses if he knew how to use them, but he wasn’t paying attention. I waited until he reached the landing by the second deck, then I drilled several shots into him. The fléchettes did no damage, but they kept the guy on my tail.

I called Freeman over the interLink as I ran to the bottom deck. He did not answer, but I knew he was listening. “Have you found your computer yet?” I asked, though I already knew the answer. We’d only parted ways a minute ago; there was no way he could have found it yet.

“You in trouble?” he asked.

“No, I’m good,” I said. I heard a soft thwack, thwack, thwack, and looked back in time to see the last of the fléchettes bore a wire-thin hole in the landing wall above me. “I’m having a great time keeping our friend off the second deck.”

Freeman did not respond.

“I think I’ll take my new friend for a tour of the bottom deck,” I said.

Freeman did not answer.

My job was to keep the Marine off the second deck so Freeman could search. No problem. The trap I had in mind could only be sprung on the bottom deck.

Trying not to offer myself as a target, I spun and fired a couple of shots to let the bastard know which way I was going.

Having survived being shot in the face multiple times, the Marine had come to realize that I could not harm him. Now he stormed the hall like a bull in a china shop, firing badly aimed fléchettes that skimmed the walls and the ceiling.

I leaped over dead sailors lying in frozen heaps along the floor. When we had blown holes in the hull, we exposed these men to space, with its vacuum conditions and true-zero temperatures. They froze in a flash, dying too quickly to suffocate ; but as the spy ship’s atmosphere leaked, bodies broke open from their own internal pressure.

The hall before me was long and straight, with no place for me to hide. If the Marine had had better training, he would have drilled those fléchettes into my back.

“How are you doing?” I asked Freeman. Only a minute had passed since the last time I asked.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Peachy,” I said.

He did not respond.

The first of the landing bays was just a few yards up the corridor. The door slid open, revealing ten thousand square feet of empty hangar floor without paper, furniture, or bodies. Everything had been sucked out through the jagged thirtyfoot wound in the far wall.

The area was full of shadows, but my night-for-day lenses let me see through the darkness. There was no other way out than the hatch I had just used, so I hid in a corner, squeezed in as best I could, and hoped I could sneak out of the dead end.

The hatch opened, and the glow of shielded armor spilled in. Seconds passed. Then the bastard walked into the landing bay without so much as a glance to the side, marching right past me. If this was what passed as a Marine in the Unified Authority these days, I was glad the clones revolted. No selfrespecting clone Marine would make such a foolish mistake.

He walked straight to the far wall and examined the gaping hole that looked like a mural of open space. If I’d thrown a grenade, the percussion might have knocked the bastard through the gap, and he could have floated to the next galaxy for all I cared. I couldn’t risk it, though. I waited a second, then dashed toward the hatch.

This time his fléchettes barely missed me. I saw holes appear on the wall ahead of me and laughed. He was toying with me. He thought he was a cat playing with a mouse, but he was mistaken. Sure, he had the protective armor, and that made him confident, but I controlled this fight. Unless he got very lucky, his time in the U.A. Marines was about to end.

“Any luck finding your computer?” I asked as I sprinted down the hall.

“Yes,” Freeman said. “These guys were at Olympus Kri.” Olympus Kri was another planet that the Avatari had burned.

“Sounds like they had a disaster fetish,” I said.

“You safe?” asked Freeman.

“I have an angry Unified Authority Marine in shielded combat armor chasing me down a dead end,” I said.

Freeman did not say anything. He knew the situation.

I said, “I’ve got things under control.”

The next landing bay was almost right across the hall. I ran to the hatch, but it did not open. As I pushed off and started for the last landing bay, a trio of fléchette holes appeared in the wall near my head. The bastard’s aim kept improving.

I streaked down the hall in a balls-out race. Cocky or not, this guy would win the fight if the next hatch did not open. Hell, he might get lucky even if it did.

I hurled myself at the hatch, and the door slid open. Bolting through as fast as I could, I tripped over a dead sailor, barely managed to catch my feet, and ran toward the transport that sat with its hatch open. I jumped over the frozen corpse of a dead tech lying on the ramp, entered the kettle, and hit the button to close the doors at the rear of the ship. Then I climbed the ladder that led to the cockpit three rungs at a time.

As I reached the top, I looked back over my shoulder. I could not see the doors at the bottom of the ramp, but I knew how slowly they moved. They were eighteen inches thick and made of metal. It would take them twenty seconds to close.

The man in the armor made it through the doors and up the ramp. I could not see him, but I saw the glow that his shields cast on the wall as he strolled up the ramp. He moved slowly, casually, probably keeping a wary eye for more grenades.

I slipped from the ladder to the catwalk that led to the cockpit. Then I knelt low against the metal walkway and watched the bastard as he reached the top of the ramp.

“I have the computer,” Freeman said over the interLink.

Hidden and protected by a thick steel wall of transport construction, I lay on my back and laughed.

Freeman must have mistaken my laughter for combat strain. He asked, “Harris, where are you?”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“What is the situation?” Freeman asked.

“I’m in a transport in the third landing bay.”

“Where is the Marine?”

“You call this shithead a Marine?” I asked, still laughing. “I’ll tell you what—the Unifieds are scraping the bottom of the barrel. The only thing this guy’s trained for is KP duty or maybe scrubbing the head.” As I said this, the doors at the back of the transport clanged shut. I was trapped in the transport with an enemy wearing shielded armor, and I could not have been happier about it.

“Harris, hang on. I’m on my way.”

“Take your time, Ray,” I said. “There’s no rush.”

The U.A. Marine knew enough about his armor to switch to heat vision. He either used heat vision or possibly radar. One way or another, he spotted me on the catwalk and fired. His fléchettes hit the iron walls and dropped to the floor. This bird was made to withstand missiles and particle beams, depleted uranium fléchettes could barely scratch it.

Tracking the guy with my heat vision, I sat with my S9 pistol ready and watched as the poor bastard wasted his endless supply of fléchettes. I laughed. “You can’t hit me, asshole. Not from down there,” I yelled. He didn’t hear me. I was talking to myself.

Down on the deck, the guy kept firing fléchettes in my direction. I switched from interLink to external speaker on the off chance he might be listening. I yelled, “Hey, shit for brains, you’re wasting ammunition.”

In response, the bastard shot five more fléchettes, then yelled, “Get specked.” The term, “speck,” was sometimes used as a noun referring to bodily fluids and sometimes used as a verb referring to the transmission of those fluids. On the hierarchy of modern profanities, “speck” was as bad as a word could get.

“Have it your way,” I called back. “You’ve been chasing me for about ten minutes now. That leaves you with about half an hour before the battery powering your shields runs out.”

He answered with a flurry of needles. Some struck the ledge below me, some flew over the catwalk. Nothing came close to hitting me.

When he came to his senses, the bastard would realize that he had two choices—he could climb the ladder to come after me, or he could open the rear hatch and escape. Either way, he would need to lower his shields. The shields would prevent him from wrapping his hands around the ladder, and they would short out the circuits if he tried to work the hatch.

Using heat-vision lenses, I watched as he worked out his options. Hoping to keep me honest, he fired sporadic fusillades of fléchettes in my direction. After a minute or two, he started toward the ladder. The bastard must have known that his shields would repulse anything he touched, but he had to make sure.

I moved toward the edge of the catwalk on the off chance he was stupid enough to lower the shields and start climbing. He stood at the base of the ladder and weighed his options, growling like a caged animal and firing fléchettes into the impenetrable steel of the kettle walls.

Apparently rejecting the ladder as an option, he paced back and forth across the floor of the cargo hold. I could not see him, per se, just the red-orange oval of his heat signature. He walked toward one corner of the cabin, maybe looking for a better shot at me, then he stormed off in the other direction.

By this time, he had figured out an indisputable truth—he could not exit the transport without opening the rear hatch. There were only two mechanisms for opening that hatch. One was up in the cockpit, one was in the kettle. He walked to the panel at the far end of the kettle.

At that point, I needed to do more than track heat signatures—I needed to watch the bastard. Needing to catch him the moment he lowered his shields, I crawled to the edge of the catwalk and stared down at him.

He stood a foot from the panel with his back to me, staring at the button. He stayed that way for several seconds, then spun and fired six shots my way. His shots were wild. Most of them struck the wall somewhere below me and ricocheted around the kettle.

Now we were both in trouble. He could not hit that button without lowering his shields; but I could not watch him without placing myself in his line of fire. Realizing my trap was not as bulletproof as I had surmised, I ducked back behind the ledge and used my heat-vision lenses to watch as his hand edged toward the button. He fired a couple of shots at me, reached for the button, and stopped. I could not tell if he was waiting to shoot me or looking at the button. When I rose to my knees, he fired. Suddenly, the bastard knew how to aim; his first shot missed me by an inch.

I dropped to my stomach. When I raised myself with my elbows, he fired again. In the brief glimpse I got, I saw him there, standing two feet from the button, his right arm pointing up toward me and his left probing toward the button. Like him, I was using heat-vision tracking. I switched to tactical view, the unenhanced view we used on the battlefield.

I rose to a crouch and dropped, not hoping to shoot so much as to keep the bastard honest. I wanted to keep him on his toes. I wanted him to know I was watching, waiting, biding my time until he dropped his shields; and then I would have my shot.

I wanted him to think that I was blind, but I was not blind, not anymore. He was using heat vision to track me. Using the tactical view, I could see the glow his shields projected on the wall.

Another moment passed, and he began shooting faster, maybe five shots per second. The shots cut a line above me, some pinged off the side of the catwalk.

And then he made his move. He lowered his shields, and the cabin went dark. The moment the cabin went dark, I rolled to my side and fired three shots blindly as I engaged my night-for-day lenses. Even before the lenses showed me the cabin floor, I instinctively knew I had hit the target.

The bastard lay on the cold steel deck, rolling and writhing like a fish on a line. Blood leaked out of his armor at the shoulder and gut. The two shots that hit him in the shoulder probably hurt more than the one in the gut, but it was the latter that would kill him.

I’d seen too many men kill the enemy who had dealt them the fatal blow, so I waited on the catwalk and watched as the poor bastard bled to death. I watched as his convulsions slowed into tremors, and his tremors slowly went still.

“Does the computer work?” I asked.

“I haven’t tested it yet,” he said.

That made sense. You’d want to make sure you had everything ready before you booted a computer that conjured up ghosts.