Steven Kent - The Clone Redemption

My mind wandered as the three admirals bickered among themselves. Maybe they knew this was an audition. The thought of one of these fools as my commanding officer left me depressed until I remembered a lesson from ancient Rome, the Praetorian Guard.

The Praetorian Guard protected the emperors of Rome. They also killed several of the emperors. When they did not like an emperor, they assassinated him and chose his replacement.

I hated the idea of placing Steven Jolly in charge; but if I looked at him the way the Praetorians viewed their emperors, as a disposable figurehead who got to make decisions until he proved his inability to make sound choices, then the prospects improved. The thought made me smile.

As I came back to the conversation, I heard Admiral Wallace say, “Who gives a shit about Terraneau? I’m glad those speckers died; the universe is better off without them.”

“I am not here to discuss the people of Terraneau or their place in the universe,” I said.

The look Wallace shot me could have set off a fire alarm. His face flushed red. As he glared at me, he clenched his teeth so hard that his chin quivered.

“The aliens are retaking the planets we liberated from them, and they’re not going to stop until they reach Earth,” I said. “They’re following our schedule. First we beat them on New Copenhagen, so they burned New Copenhagen first. The first planets we rescued were Olympus Kri and Terraneau. Does anybody know which planet came next?”

Some quiet discussion followed, holographic men whispering to the holographic shades beside them. Obviously, no one knew the answer. It didn’t matter, Sweetwater and Breeze would know …assuming they were willing to divulge information to enemies of the state.

“It may not have occurred to you, General, but our hands are pretty well tied,” said Jolly. “I’m here in the Perseus Arm. Curtis is in Cygnus Central. Until we find some method to program our broadcast stations, we’re stuck where we are.”

He did not mention Admiral Wallace.

“You don’t have keys?” I should have known. The late Admiral Warshaw only gave the keys to control the broadcast system to his fleet commanders—the guys who died in the ambush.

“They weren’t exactly standard-issue,” said Admiral Liotta.

“Fleet commanders only,” said Jolly.

“And all of the fleet commanders were on the Kamehameha ,” I said, finishing the statement as I held up a little device for the officers to see. It was the size of a deck of playing cards and a quarter of an inch thick. It was all black, with a touch screen.

“Warshaw gave this to me right before the attack,” I said. “I needed it to get to Terraneau.”

“Why did he give a shit about Terraneau?” asked Wallace. I noticed a certain rhythm about his speech. He managed to work profanity into every sentence. If he were a religious man, his prayers would have been specking incredible.

“If you saw what happened on Olympus Kri, you’d understand,” I said.

“What exactly happened?” asked Admiral Jolly.

“They ignited the atmosphere …lit the planet to nine thousand degrees and let it burn. By the time they got through, every living thing was incinerated.”

“And you think they’re going to do that to all of our planets?” asked Jolly.

“Not if we hit them first,” said Liotta.

Only an ass-wipe who’d never seen battle would talk like that, I thought; but I didn’t speak my mind. If things did not work out the way I hoped, I might need Liotta. Now that I had decided to turn my Marines into the new Praetorian Guard, I might need all three of these ass-wipes. The good news was that I’d only need them one at a time.

“We can’t hit them, Admiral,” I said. “It’s not like they’re flying to planets and attacking from ships. They’re hitting us from some other galaxy, a billion light-years away. We’ve already lost the war. We’re not fighting, we’re evacuating refugees.”

Silence.

“But we only have one broadcast key,” said Admiral Jolly.

“My engineers can make more,” I said.

“So we have our broadcast network back,” said Jolly.

“The way I see it, Admiral, we will be one big happy Navy in a couple of hours,” I said. Hiding my distaste for what I had to do next, I said, “Admiral Jolly, we’re going to need a supreme commander.”

“Are you placing me in charge?” asked Jolly.

“Yes, sir.”

“But you outrank Admiral Jolly,” said Liotta.

“Rank isn’t everything,” I said. “Have any of you ever heard of the Praetorian Guard?” When they shook their heads, I smiled, and said, “No? Maybe it’s for the best. They were the troops who guarded the emperors of Rome. Caesar, Caligula, Otho, they guarded all of them.”

“What’s your point?” asked Liotta, clearly unaware that the three emperors I had listed all died prematurely.

“I’m a Marine. I’m a combat officer, not the kind of man who runs empires,” I said. I gave them a crooked smile, and said, “I’m the kind of guy who guards the throne, not the kind who sits in it.”

They liked that. Admiral Jolly bobbed his head up and down, his real chin vanishing behind the folds of his jowls. He said, “Well done, General. That makes perfect sense.”

Liotta gave me a casual salute.

“But the bastard still has more stars than us?” said Wallace.

“You can have ’em if you want,” I offered. “As of this moment, Admiral Jolly, you are in charge.”

“You’ve just relinquished your command, General. You no longer have the authority to make that kind of decision,” said Admiral Liotta, waking from his revelry. He must have thought I would put him in charge.

“I still have three stars,” I said. I turned to Jolly, and added, “Unless you plan to strip me of command.” I knew he wouldn’t. If Liotta and Wallace conspired against him, he’d need a strong ally.

Jolly shook his head. “No, General, I think you should hold on to those stars.” He was weak, and no one values alliances more than the weak.

Before calling the summit, I had visited Engineering and shown the broadcast key to Lieutenant Mars. When he saw it, he laughed, and said, “Mary Mother of God, you have got to be kidding. A frequency-modulation transmitter?” He looked at me and saw that I had no idea what he was talking about, so he said, “It transmits FM radio waves. This is very old technology …ancient even. Kids build these things as history projects in grade school. These things came out between the Internet and smoke signals.”

“What is the Internet?” I asked.

He laughed, and said, “No wonder the Unifieds never cracked it; only a fool would use such a primitive technology to control a broadcast network. It’s inspired.”

Ava waited for me in my billet. What else could she do? As the only woman aboard the Churchill , she didn’t dare leave the protection of my quarters. Fighting the effects of a growing depression, she sat on my rack, watching a movie on a pair of mediaLink shades. When she heard me come in, she tore off the shades.

In better times, those shades could have provided news and editorial; now they only accessed preprogrammed materials—books, movies, and educational curricula that had been created a decade earlier.

“I was watching your movie,” she said.

“My movie?” I asked.

“ The Battle for Little Man .”

The name did not register for a few seconds. Then it hit me. The Battle for Little Man , an old propaganda film released at the beginning of the Mogat Wars, depicted a battle in which a division of Marines was sent to an unsettled planet called Little Man. We went expecting to find a small detachment of Morgan Atkins Believers. What we found was an army that outnumbered us two to one. Outnumbered and cut off from help, we made our stand. I was one of only seven survivors.