Steven Kent - The Clone Redemption

Figuring that the security signal stopping our barges must be coming from the broadcast station, I said, “The Unifieds must have remote access to our controls.”

“I am aware of the situation,” said the coordinating officer. He sounded so damned cool. What did he care about the approaching ships? He was safe in an invisible ship.

“Are you also aware that half the damned U.A. Navy just broadcasted in to stop us?” I wasn’t scared. Hell, I was in the middle of a combat reflex; fear would have felt good at the moment. Frustration, on the other hand …

“They won’t attack, General. The Unifieds need those barges.” The bastard threw my arguments for launching this mission back in my face.

I looked out the cockpit and into space. The U.A. ships had already closed the gap and were hovering less than a hundred miles away. I could not see the ships themselves, just the goldcolored glow of their shields. The Unified Authority had placed their ships between us and the broadcast station. We were trapped.

“They have us cornered,” I told the officer.

“I have the situation under control,” he said.

Outside our barge, the Unified Authority continued to close in on us. Now I could see the shapes of their ships. They were long and narrow, shaped like daggers. They slowly inched toward us, circling the area like sharks smelling blood, evaluating the situation.

Our barges sat defenseless. We sat defenseless. They would not attack us with their cannons and fighters, but we weren’t going anywhere with our engines down and our power off.

“You better do something,” I said.

“Not yet,” he said.

“What the speck are you waiting for?” I asked, the beginnings of desperation sounding in my voice as I watched the U.A. ships wade toward us. I felt helpless. I felt vulnerable; but I did not feel afraid. I did not like the idea of being shot, but I feared failure more than dying. Pathetic as it sounds, I only cared about completing my specking mission.

“General, you do realize that the Unifieds may be listening in on our conversation,” the officer said.

The Unifieds had sent five ships to stop us, five capital ships. I could see them clearly. I could see the sharp tips of their bows and the flares from their engines. Only a few miles away, they drifted toward us, circling in for the kill. One of the ships lowered its shields and a line of transports drifted out from each of its landing bays.

The same lack of precautions that had enabled us to enter this barge would now work against us. In another five minutes, those transports would attach themselves to our barge.

The coordinating officer’s next comment came over the interLink on a frequency that every man on the mission would hear. He said, “Engage tint shields.” I obeyed, but I did not understand.

“Shit,” said my pilot, as he pointed out into space. He was not looking at the advancing Unified Authority transports or the battleships.

Behind the battleships, the Mars broadcast station flared into overdrive, its power glowing as bright as a star. It was closer to the Unified ships than I had imagined and moving in fast with threads of lightning flashing across its dish.

I did not know how they accomplished it, but somehow our hackers had freed the station from its orbit and sent it flying in our direction. In another moment, its anomaly would destroy the Unified Authority’s self-broadcasting ships. Ships with built-in broadcast engines need to avoid broadcast stations because exposure to an externally generated anomaly overloads their broadcast generators. The anomaly destroyed the U.A. transports as well.

And then the juice from the broadcast station engulfed the barges. I saw the lightning through my tint shields, jagged, dancing slabs of white fire that wrapped around the cockpit, then vanished. When I lowered my tint shields and looked out into space, we were orbiting Gobi.

Moments later, the spy ship materialized. I leaned against the cockpit wall and let out my breath. Using my commandLink, I asked, “Did we get any of their ships?”

Admiral Jolly answered. He said, “We got all of them, General.” He sounded ecstatic. “We destroyed two self-broadcasting destroyers and three self-broadcasting battleships.”

Jolly paused for a breath or maybe to let me get in a word. When I did not say anything, he added, “I don’t know how many battleships they have left, but I bet they don’t have any to spare.”

We did not have any reliable intelligence about the U.A. Fleet, but it had to be small. The Enlisted Man’s Navy had taken a big chunk out of their Navy when they fought us at Terraneau at the start of our rebellion, and they’d not had a chance to rebuild.

“No,” I agreed. “Sooner or later, they’re going to run out of ships.”

With the lights dimmed, Yamashiro and a few of his officers studied every detail as the holographic image played over the conference table. It showed the destruction of the Kyoto . For some reason, the satellite monitoring the Kyoto had captured the destruction more clearly than the satellites covering the other ships, not that it made much of a difference. Whatever happened to the three battleships had happened in an instant.

Yamashiro’s analysts had searched the transmission for lasers, particle beams, and other rays. Nothing. They found no distortions around the ship in the moments before the attack. There were no signs of missiles, rockets, or enemy ships.

Yamashiro paused the feed. The analysts had added a red arrow to the display to mark the mass that they claimed was the wreckage of the ship. The arrow pointed at an unidentifiable wad of material that looked like a glob of soft wax. Measurements appeared along the bottom of the image. The unidentifiable wad was 336 feet long and 56 feet wide. The measurements were about one-tenth the size of the battleship the wad had supposedly replaced. Intelligence analysts said that properly compressed, the Kyoto could fit into an even smaller space.

Admiral Yamashiro spoke in a low, slow voice as he said, “This is all that is left of the ship.”

The other officers remained silent for several seconds.

Captain Takahashi broke the silence. “That cannot be,” he said. “It happened so fast.”

Yamashiro had made the same comment when the analysts showed him the image.

Takahashi rose from his chair and leaned over the conference table until his nose almost poked into the ethereal image. He stared at the thing that had once been a battleship, then moved around the table, studying it from different angles. “It’s too small to be the Kyoto .”

Yamashiro said, “You need to read Hara’s report. He explains it.” Lieutenant Tatsu Hara, a computer-simulations specialist and intelligence officer, ran the Sakura ’s Pachinko parlors, bars, and casinos. Every sailor on the ship knew him. In Japan, the Yakuza had always run the Pachinko parlors and casinos. The Yakuza ran the fleet’s casinos and Pachinko parlors as well. Tatsu Hara was a gangster.

“Hara says that the right amount of heat applied inside the hull, maybe ten thousand degrees, would cause a battleship to melt and implode.”

Takahashi continued studying the display. “Ten thousand degrees inside the ship? How do you heat the inside of the ship? It’s not possible.”

Before the Avatari invasion and the Mogat Wars, when his daughter Yoko had first brought a boy named Takahashi Hironobu home, Yamashiro had found the boy impressive. He was studying finance at a good university. Yamashiro approved of the boy’s life’s goals, though he would not have admitted as much to his daughter. When Takahashi graduated, he took a job as a stockbroker …a salesman.