Steven Kent - The Clone Redemption

Oliver did not raise an eyebrow or cock his head. His lips did not twitch, and he did not look away from Yamashiro though his gaze still fell just below the admiral’s eyes.

Yes, thought Yamashiro. He is very Japanese.

“Sir, if you are concerned for my welfare …”

Yamashiro scowled and raised a hand to stop the SEAL. These are the true Kamikaze, he thought. He has no fear of death. And then he lied. “I do not have time to worry about your welfare.

“Sending your highest-ranking man into an action is inefficient. Commanding officers remain with the fleet and coordinate the movements. I was not aware that Illych accompanied the team to A-361-F. If I had been, I would not have allowed it.”

“Sir …” Oliver began.

Yamashiro shook his head to signal that he did not want to continue the discussion. “You have your orders.”

“Yes, sir.”

A moment of silence passed, then Yamashiro asked, “Do you have any questions, Master Chief?”

“Yes, sir. Did Illych accomplish anything on A-361-F?”

Yes. Yes he showed us that detonating S.I.P.s can destroy an entire planet. We learned that the aliens can detect our movements even when we cannot detect them ourselves. We learned that the aliens can detect us and defeat us from halfway across the solar system in six minutes.

Yamashiro kept these thoughts to himself, and said, “We’ll be in position by A-361-D in twenty hours, Master Chief. Have your men ready.”

“Yes, sir,” said Oliver.

Yamashiro looked away from the SEAL, and said, “That will be all.”

If Yamashiro did not want Oliver to show the video feed to all of his SEALs, he should have voiced his preference. The SEALs shared information unless given orders to conceal it. Oliver routed copies of the video feed to the senior chiefs on each of the four battleships; and they, in turn, held mass briefings in which they showed the footage to their men.

Master Chief Oliver sat in the back of a large auditorium with his two closest friends watching the video feed along with his men. No one in the auditorium spoke a word until the feed ended. When the lights came on, the SEALs divided themselves by platoon and discussed what they had seen. Oliver and his two friends, Senior Chief Jeff Harmer and Senior Chief Brad Warren, remained where they were.

“What did you see?” asked Oliver.

Down in the gallery, chief petty officers led similar discussions.

“We can’t outgun them,” said Warren. “It doesn’t look like we can even touch them.”

“Agreed,” said Oliver.

“They only sent five defenders,” said Warren.

“What’s your point?”

“They must have had a pretty good idea about how many men we had, or they would have sent a larger force to intercept us.”

“Maybe they didn’t have anyone else available,” said Harmer.

Warren shook his head, and replied, “They always sent armies of fifty thousand soldiers on New Copenhagen. It didn’t matter how many men we sent, they always sent fifty thousand.”

“But if we caught them by surprise,” Harmer began.

“They could only find five men …Are you joking?” asked Warren.

“Okay, so you think they counted our caskets?” Oliver asked.

“Aren’t the caskets untraceable?” asked Warren.

“They are to us …with our technology,” said Oliver. “Who knows what they have. For all we know, they may be able to track us by our brain waves.”

“How would you track an S.I.P.?” asked Warren.

“Light field, vision, and sound tracking are out; but who’s to say they don’t have technology that senses every time anything breaches their atmosphere,” said Harmer.

Warren gave Harmer an incredulous glare, and asked, “How in the world did you come up with that?”

“It’s Occam’s razor, yes? The simplest explanation …

“Their technology is more advanced than ours, but from what we know, it’s centered around the use of tachyons and particles. Invisible or not, infiltration pods are still made out of matter. They still caused a physical disruption when they entered an atmosphere. Matter displaces matter, it’s going to cause a disruption.

“The simplest solution is that the aliens counted the disruptions.”

Senior Chief Warren muttered, “A tachyon early-warning system …like a burglar alarm. How do we get around something like that?”

Oliver asked, “Do either of you see any holes in the theory?”

Neither of them did, so the discussion moved ahead.

“They may have been bulletproof, but that final explosion did them in,” said Warren. He enjoyed looking for holes in everything Harmer suggested. They were friends, but they were also rivals.

“We don’t know that,” said Oliver. “We know what it did to the planet, and we know that the tachyon curtain dissolved, but the alien avatars may have survived.”

“The avatars are made of tachyons. If the explosion dispersed the tachyons, then we can take it for granted that the individual avatars were destroyed,” said Harmer.

“That is the first time anyone has detonated a field-resonance engine. We don’t know how much radiation it generated. Maybe it was the radiation that destroyed the curtain,” said Oliver.

“But we all agree that the caskets did the job, right? I mean, come on, those babies zapped the whole planet,” said Warren.

Harmer agreed. He said, “They are our best weapon.”

“They may be our only weapon,” said Oliver.

“So do we win the war by blowing ourselves up?” asked Warren. He did not seem bothered by the idea, just curious.

“We win the war by any available means,” said Oliver. He thought about using them as torpedoes instead of transports. They flew themselves. So long as they were preprogrammed to overcharge and explode, they did not need live cargo for seek-and-destroy missions.

Harmer and Warren agreed.

Master Chief Oliver looked at the time. Two hours to go before the launch. In another hour, he would board a shuttle to the Onoda and escort one hundred of his men to their Kamikaze farewell. He would watch as they drank the ceremonial sake. They would leave on a hazardous mission, and he would call in their orders from the safety of a ship. They would face danger, and he would command them from far away. Oliver chided himself for hiding on a ship while his men faced the enemy on otherwise-uninhabited moons. He felt humiliated.

Replacing Emerson Illych as master chief of the SEALs was a nightmare for Oliver. Like an undergraduate secondstringer replacing an injured varsity athlete, Oliver saw himself as having inherited the promotion instead of earning it. He thought about Illych’s dying on A-361-F while he would not go on the mission to A-361-D, and experienced a stab of the self-loathing that had been hardwired into every SEAL clone’s brain.

He went to the landing bay and boarded an interfleet shuttle that flew him to the Onoda . Five Japanese sailors rode the same flight. They were enlisted men, as he was. Oliver did not speak to the sailors, and they paid little attention to him as they talked loudly among themselves in Japanese.

They were not really ignoring him, though. English was the first language on Ezer Kri, as it was in all of the 180 colonies. Many of the colonists learned to speak Japanese and read Kanji out of pride in their heritage, but English remained their first and native language. Had a SEAL clone not been on their shuttle, the sailors would have spoken in English.

Bred for stealth and almost invisible, Oliver told himself. He sat alone in the back of the shuttle for the ten-minute flight. A few rows ahead, the sailors chatted among themselves, confident in the knowledge that the master chief could not understand them. One of them commented that Oliver had the face of a bat. Another said, “Not all bats are that ugly. I once saw a fruit bat that was much better-looking than this kage no yasha .”