The Clone Redemption

CHAPTER FOUR

The Enlisted Man’s Empire had men and ships and a recently rebuilt broadcast network. What we did not have were the “ghosts.” We needed the computer from the spy ship to reach the Unified Authority’s top secret ghosts.

Okay, well, I called them ghosts. In truth, they were virtual reproductions of William Sweetwater and Arthur Breeze, the two dead scientists who had helped thwart the Avatari’s first invasion.

Shortly before they died, the real Sweetwater and Breeze allowed a team of medical technicians to scan their brains and take samples of their DNA. Somewhere along the line, the Unifieds used the scans and samples to re-create the scientists inside a computer. They used the DNA to construct virtual models of their bodies that were realistic enough to make their scanned brain waves feel right at home.

In order to keep the virtual versions of Sweetwater and Breeze from figuring out that they weren’t real, the models had all of the original scientists’ mental and physical flaws. In life, William Sweetwater had been an overweight, middleaged dwarf who got winded climbing a single set of stairs. When virtual Sweetwater climbed a flight of stairs, his pulse rose dangerously high, and sweat stains formed under his arms. I’d placed a few calls to virtual Sweetwater. When he had to run to the monitor to catch the call, he came panting.

In his computer universe, virtual Arthur Breeze was a six-foot-six balding beanpole with dandruff and oily skin who needed to clean the grease from his glasses every couple of minutes. He stuttered when he became nervous, which was most of the time since he suffered from an intense inferiority complex.

The flaws were almost as entertaining as the men themselves.

But the tiny computer Freeman showed me had neither a broadcast engine for pangalactic communications nor the power to host the complex models of Sweetwater and Breeze.

“That’s it?” I asked. “I played hide-and-seek with a guy in shielded armor for that?”

The computer was the size of a man’s wallet, and most of it was screen. “Where’s the broadcast engine?”

“Broken,” said Freeman.

“Broken? So we’re out of business,” I said.

“The computer works, I just need to connect it to a broadcast engine before we can reach Sweetwater and Breeze,” Freeman said.

“Did you have one in mind?” I asked. Broadcast engines were complex and dangerous machinery. You didn’t find them lying around.

“The E.M.E. broadcast network,” said Freeman. He was so big and so menacing, I sometimes wondered if he realized just how frightening he could be.

The Enlisted Man’s Empire had a broadcast network. It was the backbone of the empire. Friend or foe, it didn’t matter, I was not about to give a mercenary access to the network.

“You’re out of luck, Ray,” I said. “I won’t give you that access.”

He sat on the edge of my desk, staring down at me. His wide-set eyes reminded me of the barrels of a shotgun. Even though he spoke softly, his voice had a thunderlike rumble. The voice and the eyes were intimidating, but not as intimidating as the implicit threat of his enormous arms and chest.

Freeman sat silent for a moment, then he said, “You’re going to need Sweetwater and Breeze if you’re planning to evacuate planets.”

“I’m not giving you our broadcast codes,” I said.

Freeman’s expression did not change. He did not smile or snarl or do anything threatening. He simply spoke in a quiet voice as he asked, “Are you saying that the Enlisted Man’s Empire is going to abandon its planets and citizens?”

Oh, shit, I thought. With that simple question, he had served notice. If the Enlisted Man’s Empire was no more committed to saving lives than the Unified Authority, his loyalties might shift.

I could have shot him, of course. We were on the Churchill, an E.M.N. fighter carrier. I had thousands of sailors and Marines at my disposal. Even the mighty Ray Freeman would not escape if I sounded the alarm …maybe. I did not want him as an enemy, and he made a powerful ally.

I weighed all of the possibilities in my mind, then I smiled, and said, “We won’t have much of an empire if we let everybody die.”

The compromise was obvious. Freeman probably expected it from the start. He said, “The computer stays with me. When we need to contact Sweetwater, I control the computer, and you control the broadcast access.”

I was the commanding officer of the largest navy in the galaxy, and he was nothing more than a mercenary, but he had just proposed an equal partnership. I thought about it for a second, and said, “I can live with that.”

Freeman and I sat side by side in a conference room on the Churchill. Freeman’s little communications computer, now jacked into the ship’s communications network, sat on the table between us.

Freeman toyed with the links going to his computer, and asked, “What time is it?”

I looked over at the wall and saw what Freeman already knew. “01:00 STC,” I said. STC was short for “Space Travel Clock,” the twenty-four-hour clock used for synchronized space travel.

“They’re asleep,” he said.

As nothing more than sophisticated computer animations, Sweetwater and Breeze should have been able to work around the clock; but they had been programmed to eat, sleep, and shit. They didn’t know they were dead. No longer needing sleep might tip them off to their virtual state; and if they learned they were virtual, no one could predict how they might react. They might go into a depression or refuse to work.

If some virtual lab assistant answered our call, he’d undoubtedly warn the Unifieds that we had broken into their system. “Maybe we should wait until 10:00,” I said. “We wouldn’t want to disturb them.”

Freeman, being Freeman, did not note the irony in the situation, and said, “They’ll be in the lab by 07:00.”

I nodded. “Not much we can do until then,” I said, meaning there was not much for Freeman to do. I, on the other hand, had a hundred hours’ worth of work to fit into the next six hours.

As Freeman took his communications device and left the conference room, I called Captain Cutter and asked him to join me.

I did not know Cutter well, and I needed to find ways to distinguish him from other clones. He was a standard-issue U.A. military clone. He stood five feet ten inches tall, had brown hair cut to regulation length, and brown eyes. Every clone of his make, which included every last sailor on the ship, fit Cutter’s description.

The Unifieds did not consider clones to be human. Since standard-issue clones like Cutter were programmed to think they were natural-born, they tended to be a little antisynthetic as well. When clones like Cutter found out the truth, all hell would break loose. A gland built into their brains released a fatal hormone into their systems; it was a fail-safe that was supposed to prevent a clone rebellion. They called it the “Death Reflex.”

When clones like Cutter looked in a mirror, their neural programming made them see themselves as blond-haired and blue-eyed. Like every clone, including me, Cutter had grown up thinking he was the only natural-born resident in an “orphanage” that trained military clones. He had memories programmed into his head. We all did.

Seeing himself as the only blond-haired, blue-eyed natural-born in the entire Enlisted Man’s Navy, Cutter would naturally become suspicious if I did not recognize him. So would every other clone on the ship.

The door to the conference room opened, and in walked Captain Don Cutter. I pretended to recognize him when in fact the only thing that stood out was the eagle on his collar.

I was not the same make of clone as Cutter, by the way, though I was no less synthetic. I was a Liberator, a discontinued model with a penchant for violence. Instead of a gland with a deadly toxin, Liberators had a gland that released a mixture of testosterone and adrenaline into our blood during battle. They called that the “combat reflex,” and it worked too well. My forerunners became addicted to violence, which was why my kind were discontinued and replaced by a class of clones with a fail-safe mechanism.

Cutter and I traded salutes and formalities, then I asked, “What is the status of your ship?”

“We wouldn’t do well in a fight, but she’ll get us where we want to go,” he said.

“Can she broadcast?” I asked. Even as I asked it, I realized it was a dumb question.

“She broadcasted here,” Cutter said without a hint of sarcasm. One thing I noticed about Cutter, he always gave me the benefit of the doubt. I had just asked an obvious question, and he did not call me on it.

“What happens if we find ourselves in a fight?” I asked.

“It depends who we’re fighting, sir,” Cutter said. “As things stand now, the Churchill should do right well against transports and civilian ships.”

“How about U.A. battleships and carriers?” I asked.

“Permission to speak frankly, sir?”

“I wish you would.”

“The attack at Olympus Kri specked us up good,” he said, his formal tone now gone. “Our forward shield is fine, but our ass is exposed. If the enemy comes up behind us, we’ll go down fast.”

We had gone to Olympus Kri to help the Unified Authority evacuate the planet, then the bastards attacked us.

The Enlisted Man’s Empire and the Unified Authority were entangled in an antagonistic triangle in which every side had two enemies. Our enemies were the Unified Authority, the Earth-bound empire that once ruled the Milky Way, and the Avatari, the alien race that was systematically destroying the galaxy for mining purposes. The Unifieds had to contend with us and the Avatari. The Enlisted Man’s Empire and the Unified Authority would have loved to destroy the Avatari; but their world was in another galaxy. We were more concerned with survival than conquest.

So the Avatari came to Olympus Kri and incinerated the planet the same way they incinerated Terraneau. Working with the Unifieds, we managed to evacuate the population before the aliens arrived; then the Unifieds ambushed our ships. The Churchill was the only ship that escaped.

“They specked us up good,” I agreed, reflecting on the other ships that did not manage to broadcast out of the trap. We lost our entire command structure when the Unifieds ambushed us at Olympus Kri.

I thought about what he had said. The U.A. Navy had newer ships than ours. Their ships had shields that wrapped around their hulls like constantly renewing second skins. Our ships had six independent shields that formed a box around the hull. If a shield gave out, parts of the ship were left unprotected.

“Can you repair the rear shields?” I asked.

“They got the antenna, sir. We’re going to need to build a new rear array.”

“I see,” I said. “Has Lieutenant Mars had a look at it?”

“He says he can fix her if we take her into the dry docks.”

I sighed, thanked Cutter for his report, and dismissed him. All in all, the news could have been worse. We had a working ship and a way to communicate with Sweetwater and Breeze. Given a little time, Mars and his engineers might even get the spy ship operational. All just a matter of time, but we did not have time.

Glad to have a moment to myself, I reviewed the situation in my head.

The good news was that we had liberated the Golan Dry Docks from the Unified Authority, so we had facilities for repairing the Churchill. Fixing the spy ship was another story. Mars might be able to make her broadcast-worthy if he got her to the dry docks, but the dry docks were thousands of light-years away. We couldn’t get her to the dry docks without broadcasting.

And then there were the Avatari. Over the last two weeks, the bastards had attacked New Copenhagen, Olympus Kri, and Terraneau. They were destroying planets every three or four days. Unless we stopped them, we’d be galactic nomads in another few months.

The room was oblong, brightly lit, its nearly soundproofed walls devoid of art and windows. Sitting in the well-lit silence, I stared straight ahead, taking in the sterile emptiness around me.

I could not win this war, yet I felt compelled to fight. We could attack and defeat the Unifieds, but they were more of a distraction than a problem. They had massacred our leadership while holding up a flag of truce, but we wouldn’t make the mistake of trusting them again.

If it came to a fight with the aliens, on the other hand, we didn’t stand a chance. We couldn’t even strike back at them if we wanted.

How the speck do you defend planets from spontaneous combustion? If anyone could figure out a solution, it was Sweetwater and Breeze. Freeman was right, we needed them. Finding that communications computer was worth the risk …assuming they would be willing to help us. The last time I had spoken with them, they had not known that the Unified Authority and the Enlisted Man’s Empire had gone to war. Hell, they didn’t even know that the enlisted men had an empire; they thought we were loyal to the Unified Authority.

I sat lost in my thoughts, for maybe fifteen minutes.

The Avatari did not attack arbitrary targets. They went after the planets we had reclaimed after their first sweep through the galaxy. Once they finished attacking our planets, they would turn their sights on Earth. Sooner or later, we might need to evacuate the Unifieds from Earth along with the people living on our planets.

Thinking about the situation made my head hurt, the kind of low, thudding ache you get with a hangover. I sat and I stared and I rubbed my temples, and finally I got up, still staring blankly ahead, and left the conference room. I went to the temporary quarters that Cutter had assigned me in officer country—a comfortable suite generally reserved for visiting politicians, with its own office and a spacious shower in the head.

When I opened the door to my billet, I found Ava waiting for me. Ava Gardner, the cloned incarnation of a twentiethcentury movie star, was my ex. When the Unifieds decided to jettison all clones from their republic, they didn’t just aim that animosity at military clones; they extended it to the only known cloned goddess in the galaxy.

First, she was under my protection, and the next thing I knew, we were in love. Well, maybe I was in love. She moved on before I did. Thinking they were doing me a favor, my engineers rescued Ava and her natural-born lover when the Avatari incinerated Terraneau.

I’m not being fair. Ava left me because I talked nonstop about conquering Earth when I should have been saying sweet nothings in her ear. She thought I was married to the Corps. She was right.

“How did you get in here?” I asked as I entered the room. Officers’ quarters were supposedly as secure as prison cells.

She stood about ten feet away from me, swaying slightly and looking nervous. She wore a wrinkled yellow dress, and her hair and makeup needed tidying, but that couldn’t be helped; her clothes, makeup, and brushes would have gone up in smoke when the Avatari fried Terraneau.

“A sailor let me in,” Ava said.

“They’re not supposed to let passengers into officers’ quarters,” I said.

“He thought you’d be glad to see me,” she said.

I’ll bet he did, I thought, and his respect for me had probably doubled. “He was wrong,” I said. I was lying.

I wouldn’t have described Ava as top-heavy, but she had a notable figure. Fire smoldered in her wide-set olivine-colored eyes. She knew how to smile at a man and dismiss him at the very same moment. I did not know if she could read every man, but she always seemed to know what I was thinking.

“Wayson, I need to be with you,” she said, sounding so damned sincere. She pressed herself against me, trusting that I would wrap my arms around her. When I did not respond, she took a step away from me.

She usually referred to me as “Harris,” but she did it in a way that was informal and endearing. When she became brassy, I was “Honey” and when she was angry, I was “Dear.” And now, having seen the destruction of Terraneau, she added “Wayson” to her vocabulary.

“You need to be with me?” I asked. “You moved on, remember?”

“Everything changed yesterday. I don’t think I ever understood your world,” she said. “Yesterday it became real.” Here came the tears. Right on time. God, I hated dealing with women.

It wasn’t the crying that bothered me. I’d seen grown men cry. Hell, I’d seen Marines get weepy. Who would not cry after seeing an entire population cremated. What bothered me was the way women cried, like they weren’t embarrassed about it …like they expected you to do something about it.

“I don’t see how that changes anything,” I said.

“Wayson, they killed my girls.”

“Go tell it to …”

“I don’t love Kyle. I never did,” Ava said as she stepped back in my orbit. She reached out and placed her hand against my chest.

She might have been acting or sincere or possibly she was acting but thought she was sincere. I believed her.

I did not know if she was my roommate or my girlfriend, but we spent the next few hours together.