Steven Kent - The Clone Redemption

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.

Only the captains of the four ships saw the video feed; Admiral Yamashiro would not risk showing it to anyone else.

They met in a conference room on the command deck of the Sakura , Yamashiro’s flagship. First they watched the mission through Illych’s eyes—video feed recorded by the camera in his visor. The master chief petty officer had not known it, but the commandLink broadcasted his entire mission to the transport. Communications transponders on the transport relayed the signal back to the fleet.

The captains saw the bleak landscape and the giant silos. They watched in silence as Illych scraped ice and analyzed it. A timer in the corner of the screen showed that the SEALs had been on the planet for ten minutes and seventeen seconds when the light appeared in the sky.

Yamashiro stood at the front of the room. He said, “Matsuda thinks the aliens detected the infiltration pods the moment they entered the atmosphere.” Matsuda Takashi ran Fleet Intelligence.

“How could they have done that?” asked Captain Yokoi Shigeru. “We cannot track those pods. How would the aliens track them?”

Yamashiro ignored the question, and the video feed resumed with Illych telling his men to take positions. When Humble spun around to fire rounds at the silo, a small window appeared in a corner of the screen. The window showed the scene through the late Chief Petty Officer Humble’s eyes as his bullets exploded against the silo’s icy surface.

“I wish he had tried a laser and a particle beam as well,” said Takeda Gunpei, the only captain with an engineering background.

Captain Miyamoto said, “Good point. You should tell him if you see him.” They all knew that the SEALs did not return; but Miyamoto Genyo was a hard-ass, an old-style Japanese military man who never smiled and had no sympathy for weakness. “You may soon get your chance.”

The feed showed the globe of light with creatures forming inside it and the ion curtain forming across the sky. The transmission ended, but the video feed continued. The screen showed the planet as seen from the stealth transport that launched the pods.

The image on the screen looked like a barren planet partially dipped in white gold.

“The ‘sleeving’ process went quickly,” said Takeda as he watched the shiny skin move across the atmosphere.

A jolt ran across the planet, and the ion curtain dissolved, revealing a partially imploded planet. A flat and fiery dent showed on the otherwise-iron-colored globe. With the planet’s symmetry broken, it looked as though the stress of its own rotation might cause it to come apart. “The kage no yasha detonated their ejector pods,” said Miyamoto, a smile of admiration on his face. “I am glad we gave them a traditional farewell.”

Miyamoto was the captain of the Onoda , a battleship named after a Japanese soldier who fought in the Second World War. At the end of the war, Onoda hid in the jungles of the Philippines for twenty-nine years rather than surrender. Like the man for whom his ship was named, Miyamoto held those who died in battle in high regard.

“So we have destroyed an alien way station on an obscure planet. What have we learned?” asked Yamashiro.

“We know they can detect the pods,” said Takahashi Hironobu, captain of the Sakura . Takahashi was Yamashiro’s son-in-law.

Yamashiro grunted, a sound that might have signaled agreement or disgust. “We have been searching their galaxy for nearly three years. Why has it taken the aliens so long to detect us?”

“They don’t have a navy,” said Captain Yokoi. As the youngest of the ships’ captains, he generally remained quiet during staff meetings, but this time he spoke up. “Maybe they did not view us as a threat because we were in open space.”

“We have entered their solar system. They won’t ignore us anymore,” said Miyamoto.

Though he seldom agreed with the “old man,” Takahashi agreed with Miyamoto this time. He said, “If they detected the SEALs, they must know we are here as well.”

Admiral Yamashiro’s manner remained gruff, even when answering his son-in-law. He said, “That is a possibility. What do you suggest?”

“We must proceed with caution. They may attack at any time,” said Takahashi.