Steven Kent - The Clone Redemption

“Satellites are even faster,” said Takahashi.

Yamashiro began to brush off the suggestion as cowardice, then realized that what Takahashi had said was true. “Ah, satellites, they would be faster still.”

The transport deployed three satellites and returned to the ship. Fearing the worst, Yamashiro had the satellite feed sent directly to him. He sat alone in his office, reviewing a live video that confirmed the worst of his fears.

When the Joint Chiefs had briefed him about his mission, they told Yamashiro that the aliens destroyed cities and left them in ruins. He had seen footage of soldiers and Marines fighting battles in forests. General Alexander Smith, the head of the Joint Chiefs, complained that the aliens had “knocked us back to the Stone Age.”

The New Copenhagen Yamashiro saw in the video feed was not in the Stone Age; it looked like a planet that would not support life. Where there had once been forests on this planet, the trees had all burned away leaving fields of charred stumps and scorched earth. Yamashiro searched for leaves, moss, ferns, grass, and animals. He found no signs of life, not even around the rivers and lakes.

He studied the ruined landscape for fifteen minutes, then he shut his eyes and pressed his fingers against his eyelids. He thought about the Onoda , the Kyoto , and the Yamato , reasoning that any weapon that could scald an entire planet could certainly melt a battleship into a lump of clay. Trying to repress the fear and anger he felt, he returned to the video feed and was hypnotized by the devastation.

The feed showed a city in which few buildings stood. He saw the frame of a skyscraper. The glass and skin of the building had fallen away from the frame. He saw an old-fashioned brick tower that leaned as if it had melted. The tower reminded him of an ice sculpture left in the sun.

Scanning the remains of the city, Yamashiro did not see flagpoles, steel roofs, glass, or bridges. The ground sparkled like broken crystals. The deserts he saw might once have been pasturelands. Where there once had been deserts and beaches, the sand had melted into glass.

Yamashiro winced when the feed identified Valhalla, the capital city of New Copenhagen. A few buildings still stood in downtown Valhalla, but most had been crushed. The streets had melted. The remaining cars, mostly melted hulks without paint, tires, or windows, sat mired in the street, sunk down to their axles.

They escaped the frying pan only to perish by fire, thought Yamashiro. In this war, the first wave was invasion. The second wave was death by fire. There can be no question about my duty now, Yamashiro decided. He and his crew would return to Bode’s Galaxy. They would repay death with death.

Should we go to Earth? he asked himself. Few of his sailors knew that they had returned to their home galaxy. Yamashiro decided to show the video feed to Takahashi and the master chief of the SEALs. They would decide together whether or not they should return to Earth.

That was Yamashiro’s strategy before the attack. After the attack, he changed his mind.

Three ships broadcasted into New Copenhagen space less than one million miles from the Sakura . The ships glowed. Captain Takahashi had never seen ships that glowed like these ships, and the Sakura ’s sensors could not identify them.

The ships were long and narrow. The only naval ships Takahashi had ever seen were wide and wedge-shaped.

“Can you hail them?” asked Takahashi.

His communications officer said, “No.”

His helmsman reported that the ships were closing in at thirty-nine million miles per hour. The fastest Unified Authority ships Takahashi had ever seen had a maximum speed of thirty million miles per hour.

With the ships only one minute away, Takahashi gave the order to broadcast out, and the Sakura returned to Bode’s Galaxy.

The Unified Authority sent a spy ship into space near Gobi. The ship dropped a communications satellite and broadcasted out. The satellite carried a video feed that the Unifieds wanted us to see …a warning. It showed the fleet of ships we had patrolling Magus, a planet in the Sagittarius Arm.

On the screen, the ships and the planet are plainly visible. A pair of mile-wide discs, the Magus broadcast station, floats in a distant corner of the screen. The station blends into the vastness of space though an occasional flare in its electrical field gives its position away.

Made up of ships from the Sagittarius Inner and Central Fleets, the fleet patrolling Magus includes one fighter carrier, seven battleships, and a fringe of destroyers, cruisers, and frigates. The ships sit in a loose cluster, the smaller ships toward the edge and the fighter carrier in the center.

The first two anomalies appear between the ships and the broadcast station. They look like budding flowers made out of electricity. Unified Authority battleships emerge from the anomalies.

The shields protecting the U.A. ships glow the color of a fading sun. The hulls of the ships are sharp and sleek, they seem to slice through space as they approach the patrol.

Our carrier launches her fighters. Our battleships fire torpedoes and particle beams. Our destroyers fall into place, flanking the intruders, allowing our ships to hit the enemy from every angle. In past battles, the Unified Authority’s new shield technology has been strong but not impenetrable. Hit it with a sufficient amount of strength, and it will break down. In a prolonged fight, our fleet has more than enough torpedoes to break through the shields.

A third U.A. battleship broadcasts in on the other side of our fleet, between our ships and the planet. The enemy approaches our ships like wolves attacking a flock. They are predators, unafraid, ready to kill.

If our ships had broken formation and run, some of them would have made it to the safety of the broadcast zone. The U.A. ships are self-broadcasting, they cannot follow ours into the broadcast zone without being destroyed.

With his fighters launched, however, the captain of the carrier cannot cut and run, so our battleships slowly shift into position, forming a border around the carrier.

The Unifieds have a new toy that they want us to see—upgraded torpedoes.

As the U.A. ships muscle their way into our formation, they fire torpedoes at our battleships. Instead of stressing the shields, these new torpedoes obliterate them. They strike the clear, electric panes that form our ships’ shields and explode in a glittering flash of red and yellow and gray. The shields light up like glass reflecting bright sunlight, then they vanish.

Admiral Liotta, the newly appointed commander and chief of the Enlisted Man’s Empire, froze the video as a torpedo struck the forward shield of the fighter carrier. He let the feed run for another second, froze it, then pointed to the antennae that projected the shields. “Do you see what’s happening here? Right here. Look at the antennae. Did you see how they caught fire and exploded. Did you see that? These new torpedoes make our shields overcharge.

“Now look at this. See here, on the shields.”

Fire smoldered where the torpedo had struck the shield of a battleship. It wasn’t a flaming fire, not the kind of fire that gets extinguished by the vacuum of space. This looked like phosphorous, as if the chemical had somehow attached itself to the shield and fed on itself.

“One hit. One hit. All they needed was one specking torpedo to knock out our shields,” he said. “There’s no telling what other damage it did inside the ship.”