Steven Kent - The Clone Redemption

“If we keep our ships just outside the broadcast zones and run when the Unifieds arrive, they won’t be able to hit us.”

“That’s a coward’s way of running a navy,” sneered Liotta.

“But it will work,” said Wallace.

“How about you, Harris? You’re the big, hairy-chested fighting machine. How do you feel about ducking for cover every time we see the Unifieds?”

“Works for me,” I said. “I think it’s an ingenious strategy.”

“An ingenious strategy,” repeated Liotta. “Well, if we’re going to employ the captain’s ingenious strategy from here on out, let’s just hope the Unifieds don’t turn up while we’re evacuating Bangalore.”

Bangalore was the next planet slated by the Avatari for execution. We had already begun evacuating it.

“I’ll tell you what,” Liotta continued. “We’ll leave a hell of a lot of people to fry if we run away at Bangalore.” He sat back down and rubbed his eyes, then pressed his hands together as if saying a prayer. “God, I hope they do not attack us at Bangalore.”

I wondered if his rantings were the result of theatrics or fatigue? He seemed sincere.

Holman said, “If it comes to a choice between evacuating Bangalore or evacuating all of our other planets, we’ll need to abandon Bangalore, Admiral.”

Liotta turned to look at me. His eyes were bloodshot, and dark bags circled their bottoms. He asked, “Do you think the Unifieds know that Bangalore is next?”

“They know,” I said. They got their information from the same source we got ours—from the virtual ghosts of the late, great scientists William Sweetwater and Arthur Breeze.

What took a couple of hours on Gobi had already taken an entire day on Bangalore, and the end was not in sight.

Admiral Liotta tried to write off the clusterspeck as a question of population. Gobi had a population of under five hundred thousand. Bangalore had eight million residents. It took two barges to evacuate Gobi. If we filled all twenty-five barges to capacity on the first round, we’d still need to send some of them for a second pass.

And it wasn’t just a question of loading the people onto the barges. Once we loaded them on, we carted them to Providence Kri, where we had to transport them down to the planet. Offloading passengers went more quickly than loading them, but not quickly enough.

Once we airlifted the people off the planet, assuming we were able to airlift all of them, we’d still need time to search for food and supplies. We might have been able to evacuate the people and the supplies had Liotta’s team not cataclysmically botched the opening hours of the operation.

Liotta’s officers were afraid to go down to the planet. They had heard that Bangalore was going to go up in smoke, so they sent seaman and petty officers to run the show in case the Avatari attacked before they were supposed to attack. So battalions of seaman and petty officers went down to the planet and did the heavy lifting, while Liotta’s chickenhearted senior officers tried to run the show from orbiting battleships. The arrangement did not work well.

The junior officers running the evacuation were used to taking orders, not giving them. Trying to run things from their Mount Olympus above the clouds, the officers in charge were too removed from the operation to adjust the logistics. Five hours into the operation, the wheels were so badly specked that only one million people had been lifted off the planet, and the officers in charge admitted they would not be able to airlift all of the remaining seven million. By the time I reached Bangalore, searching for food and medicine had become a pipe dream.

Despite all of his bluster at the summit, Admiral Liotta was an idiot who surrounded himself with idiots. It’s a popular form of camouflage that many officers use. Hoping to hide their ineptitude behind the greater stupidity of others, morons surround themselves with other morons. There’s an old saying that, “In the valley of the blind, the one-eyed man shall be king.” In officer country, men with two eyes and two testicles are hard to come by.

Seven hours into the evacuation, Admiral Liotta flew to Bangalore to run the show himself. He began his salvage operation by sending thousands of officers down to the planet and telling them that he would not allow them back on their ships until the evacuation was complete.

Score one point for “Curtis the Snake.”

The ground operation progressed slowly, with sailors and Marines herding entire towns into spaceports and makeshift way stations. Transports ran on tight schedules. Loading and unloading times were cut in half, and the pace of the rescue picked up. Sadly, no one realized that they needed to stage the evacuation in waves. The clusterspeck that once slowed operations on the ground simply shifted to a clusterspeck that tied up operations on the barges.

I traveled down to Bangalore to inspect the evacuation and crack a few skulls. As we left the Bolivar , I saw six barges hovering in a group just above the atmosphere, looking like a neighborhood of warehouses. Lights flashed along their hulls, directing the lines of transports to open landing pads.

Except for my shuttle, the only ships approaching the planet were transports. Thousands of them climbed in and out of the atmosphere, forming a Y-axis traffic jam that would take hours to untangle. Had the barges been able to fly down to the planet, we could have finished the evacuation in one-tenth the time; but they were big bulky boxes without wings, designed to float weightless in space, free of the forces of friction and gravity.

Off in the distance, a huge fleet of warships loitered just outside the local broadcast zone like clown fish swimming beside an anemone. If the U.A. attacked, our ships would dart into the sanctuary of the zone, where self-broadcasting ships could not follow.

And if the Unifieds went after the barges …We’d rigged them with bombs. We were prepared to blow ourselves up one barge at a time until the Unified Authority realized that if we had to die, we’d die happy in the knowledge that we were dragging our natural-born creators down with us.

I started the trip to Bangalore in the luxurious main cabin of my personal command shuttle—a remnant from happier days. A minute after we cleared the Bolivar , I entered the cramped cockpit. My pilot, Lieutenant Nobles, and I had developed a friendship; I felt an obligation to go chat with him.

“Do you think they’re out there?” Nobles asked as I entered.

“Who? The Unifieds? They’ve got eyes out there. You can count on it,” I said.

Somewhere out there, a U.A. spy ship would be watching, recording our every move. They recorded the destruction of New Olympus and Terraneau. Why stop there? They probably recorded our evacuations and evaluated what worked and what failed. They’d have an evacuation of their own soon enough. If they got started right away, they could probably even build a new fleet of barges by the time the Avatari arrived; but they would not do that. We had stolen their property. The bastards wanted it back.

As we neared the atmosphere, a flash appeared in the distance as one of the barges entered the broadcast zone, ferrying another quarter of a million people to temporary shelters on Providence Kri.

We could not continue storing people on Providence Kri forever. The clock was ticking on that planet as well. We’d eventually need to pull everybody off that rock, too. The logistics of evacuating Providence Kri would be staggering, tens of millions of people.