Steven Kent - The Clone Redemption

As I entered the bridge, I saw Providence Kri in its rotation through the view screen. Whatever the planet had looked like before the Unified Authority gave it a makeover, it certainly looked like a hospitable blue-and-green marble afterward.

Having been rescued from the Avatari by clones, the populace of Providence Kri was unfailingly loyal to the Enlisted Man’s Empire. That was good. We were too busy fighting natural-borns and aliens to lay down laws, so we trusted the residents of the various planets to govern themselves. We were military clones; our dabbling in politics never worked out the way we hoped.

Looking out of a viewport, I wondered how long we had until the Avatari turned this planet into a dust bowl as well.

In better times, Providence Kri had served as a galactic hub for the Unified Authority. In these times, it served as a galactic hub for the Enlisted Man’s Empire. The Cygnus Central Fleet, Admiral Liotta’s fleet, a fleet that included seven fighter carriers and thirty battleships, orbited the planet.

The Cygnus Central Fleet was big, but it lacked the firepower needed to defeat the Earth Fleet. The U.A.’s new generation fighter carriers and battleships were smaller, faster, and better shielded than our ships.

Liotta and an entourage of fleet officers flew out to the Churchill to meet me. We did not have time to chat. Time had become scarce.

Liotta took me and my team to Engineering, where Lieutenant Mars presented the crew with a new broadcast key. I allowed Admiral Liotta to have a key, but I did not give him a copy of the book that contained the complete set of codes and broadcast locations. The book contained hundreds of thousands of codes, pinpoint coordinates for safe broadcast areas all across the galaxy. Instead, I handed him a highly abbreviated list that included coordinates for the twenty-two remaining planets in the Enlisted Man’s Empire along with a few strategic destinations such as New Copenhagen.

“I have a pilot delivering keys and coordinate cards to every fleet,” I said. “He’ll have a key to Jolly within the hour.”

Liotta smiled, and said, “So we’re back in business,” as he glanced at the list of broadcast coordinates. Then he paused, and asked, “New Copenhagen? I thought they destroyed that planet.”

“They did.”

“Why would we want to go there?”

“That’s the point,” I said. “There’s absolutely no reason to go there. If there’s no good reason to go there, the Unifieds probably aren’t patrolling the area.”

Liotta nodded, and said, “So it’s a safe place to regroup.”

“Something like that,” I said.

I did not say good-bye to Ava. As I said before, time was scarce.

She would be safe on Providence Kri until we evacuated the planet. Once the evacuation was done, and the danger had passed, we would sit down and sort things out …assuming she had any interest in sorting things out with me.

I had not come to Providence Kri to drop off refugees or meet with officers though I did a little of both. I came to commandeer a new ship. With her shields broken, the Churchill needed repairs or retirement, so Freeman and I transferred to a carrier named the Bolivar . I met the captain in the bridge, handed him a broadcast key, and told him to take us to New Copenhagen.

Captain Tom Mackay heard my orders, and said, “I heard the aliens scorched that planet.”

“They did,” I agreed.

“Um,” Mackay said. “I just wanted to make sure.”

Shortly after the Bolivar broadcasted into the Orion Arm, Freeman and I met in a small conference room off the bridge. He brought the computer, I brought the codes, and we put in another call to the late Dr. Sweetwater. This time, more than one ghost answered the call.

Arthur Breeze stared at me from the little oblong screen of the communications computer. He sat on what must have been a standard-sized rolling lab stool. Beside him, William Sweetwater sat on an oversized barstool. Their heads were just about even, but Sweetwater’s seat came all the way up to Arthur Breeze’s ribs. Breeze was that tall and Sweetwater that short.

Bald except for the ring of cotton-fluff fuzz that ran level with his ears, Breeze had thick glasses and teeth so big they belonged in the mouth of a horse. “When William told me about your call, I couldn’t believe it,” Breeze said, his eyes bouncing back and forth between Freeman and me. “He said you were on Terraneau when the Avatari attacked.”

“Something like that,” I said.

“We understand Terraneau was a total loss,” said Sweetwater. We’d already told Sweetwater the gory details. Apparently, he wanted us to rehash them for Breeze’s benefit. “Did you arrive too late to evacuate the planet?”

I said, “We didn’t have the barges. Andropov had no interest in evacuating Terraneau.”

The Unifieds had built a fleet of space barges that could carry 250,000 people at a time. Without those barges, it would take months to evacuate a planet.

“Why would the government leave them to die?” Breeze asked. He looked thunderstruck, his eyebrows riding halfway up his forehead and his mouth hanging slack.

Sweetwater, on the other hand, knew the answer. He sat silent, his hands pressed against his lap. William Sweetwater was both a brilliant scientist and a bureaucrat. He understood the political world.

“The local leadership declared independence when we liberated the planet. Terraneau wasn’t part of the Unified Authority,” I said, neglecting to mention that it was not part of the Enlisted Man’s Empire, either. I did not know if either scientist knew that the clones had formed their own empire. Breeze certainly didn’t.

“What did you think you could accomplish going alone?” Sweetwater asked.

“I tried to get the government to send everyone underground,” I said.

“Terraneau had a sizable population. Were there facilities for that many people?” asked Breeze.

“I don’t know. I didn’t think it through,” I admitted.

Freeman, sitting beside me, could have jumped in to add his part of the story, but he let me do the talking. As long as I didn’t give out unnecessary information, he was content.

I had the distinct feeling that Sweetwater had left Breeze in the dark about Freeman and me. He did not know that we were fugitives. As far as he knew, we were still loyal citizens.

I also got the feeling that Sweetwater did not want us to complete Breeze’s education in a single call. He cleared his throat and attempted to steer the conversation by saying, “So counting Olympus Kri and Terraneau, we’ve managed to liberate twenty-four planets so far. Is that correct?” He placed obvious emphasis on the word “we,” suggesting that I might still be part of the Unified Authority.

“Twenty-four planets including Terraneau, that’s right,” I said.

“Did any other planets wish to remain independent?” Breeze asked. He sounded painfully naïve. Tall and skinny, his eyes almost buglike behind his thick glasses, he stared into the screen, never questioning a word we said.

I was about to say no when Sweetwater said, “Didn’t I hear something about Gobi demanding independence?”

“Gobi?” I asked. Gobi, a backwater planet in the Perseus Arm, had most recently been the headquarters of the Enlisted Man’s Fleet.

“Gobi broke from the republic?” Breeze asked, thinking out loud. He ran a hand across his ring of white fluff hair. “That might explain their attitude toward the planet.”

“Whose attitude?” I asked

Breeze turned and stared into the camera, showing a profile that was nearly deformed. “Mr. Andropov’s …General Hill’s …The Joint Chiefs’ …We held a briefing with them a day ago. When I told them that the aliens would attack Gobi by the end of the week, they didn’t seem to care.”