Steven Kent - The Clone Redemption

Holman ticked a second check under “Bullshit.”

“Did we lose any ships?” I asked. I knew the answer. We’d lost fifteen ships, including five battleships and a fighter carrier.

“Well, yes. We took losses.”

A tick under “Truth.”

“Did we destroy any of their ships?” I asked.

“Damn straight we did. We destroyed three of their ships.”

Holman placed a check in the middle of the pad, halfway between “Truth” and “Bullshit.”

Somebody needs to teach Wallace the difference between winning and losing, I thought to myself. He seemed to believe that winning a fight meant losing more ships.

I changed the subject. “Admiral, we have eighteen more planets to evacuate,” I said. “We’re in trouble on Bangalore, but that will just be the start of our problems if we can’t find a permanent place to relocate evacuees.”

“How about Earth?” asked Admiral Wallace.

“Be serious,” said Admiral Liotta.

“I’m being serious,” said Wallace.

“So am I,” said Admiral Liotta. “Now shut the speck up.”

Maybe I had emboldened Wallace by calling his bluff, or maybe he sensed Liotta’s fear. Either way, he did not back down as Liotta had expected. He said, “Admiral, we buy ourselves a reprieve by taking the Unifieds out of the equation. They have food to spare, space to spare, and their planet is the last one on the aliens’ agenda.”

“We don’t have time for this, Admiral,” said Liotta. “Right now we need to concentrate on getting people off Bangalore.”

“You want to know about Bangalore; I’ll tell you about specking Bangalore,” said Wallace. “A lot of people are going to die on that goddamned rock. We are not going to pull any specking supplies in time. Your shit-for-brains evacuation plan failed, and now we’re wasting our specking time trying to play catch-up. That’s what is happening on Bangalore, Admiral.”

“Wallace, you are out of line,” growled Liotta.

I did not like Wallace, and I hated myself for agreeing with him; but he was right. He sat there calm and self-satisfied, the skeletal remains of a man, so skinny and pale and covered with scars that he looked near death.

Rattled, angry, and trying to regain control of a meeting that seemed to have left him behind, Admiral Liotta turned to me, and asked, “Do we know which planet is next? Please, for God’s sake, don’t say it’s Solomon.”

But, of course, it was Solomon.

“How did you know it was Solomon?” I asked.

“We had five ships patrolling Solomon,” said Liotta. “As of two hours ago, we lost contact with them.”

They must have been under Wallace’s command. He squirmed in his chair as Liotta delivered this information. Wallace wiped sweat from his forehead and loosened his collar but remained absolutely silent.

Five more ships, I thought. “Why didn’t they broadcast out?” I asked.

“That’s the problem with Solomon, the broadcast station is too far from the planet,” said Liotta. “It’s the same setup as Earth with the Mars broadcast station, depending on where the planet is in its orbit, the trip can take ten hours.”

Liotta let that sink in, then he said something chilling. “I’ve put a lot of thought into this one, Harris. We’re not going to evacuate Solomon. It’s not worth the risk.”

“What do you mean by ‘not going to evacuate’?” I asked.

“I mean that we are not going to sacrifice ships and men on a mission that cannot possibly succeed,” Liotta said. “Harris, the Solomon broadcast station is currently sixty-three million miles from Solomon. It would take two hours to cover that space in our fastest ships. Those barges don’t even fly five million an hour. It would take them a full day just to fly to the planet and back.

“If you think we’re having trouble getting people off Bangalore, just try figuring out the logistics for Solomon,” Liotta said, sounding totally at peace with his decision.

“So you are not even going to warn them?”

“What could we accomplish by warning them?”

“They can find caves and tunnels and basements. They can go underground,” I said.

“That’s not what would happen,” said Admiral Liotta. “If you tell those people that their planet is going to explode, you get riots and chaos. Some people might survive …”

“There are seven million people on Solomon,” Wallace announced in a cold, cold voice. “You make the call, Harris. Maybe we should lift the kids from the planet, that’s the humanitarian move, yes? We rescue the children, then transfer them across the galaxy as a shipload of orphans.

“Of course we could take the pragmatic approach …save the scientists, the politicians, the people with something to contribute. Or we could be practical. We can save everyone on one of the continents, maybe even an entire hemisphere.”

“Get specked,” I snarled, though I knew the son of a bitch was right. He was also an asshole. He had come to the right decision but I doubted he had made that decision out of a sense of duty or propriety. Liotta and Wallace were bastards first and officers afterward. They would abandon the people on Solomon because it was easy to abandon them, not because it was necessary. That was my take.

Having made the tough call, neither Liotta nor Wallace showed interest in debating their decision. For once they were in agreement.

“We need to warn those people, we owe them that much,” I said.

“You warned Terraneau,” Wallace pointed out. “How did it work out?”

“Solomon is a lost cause, General,” said Admiral Liotta. “It’s time you accept that.”

Maybe he was right, but I specialized in lost causes.

It was as if every man on the bridge had forgotten to breathe.

Takahashi felt it. Looking over at Yamashiro, he saw that his father-in-law felt it, too.

Reentering the solar system felt like climbing into an open grave. They were tempting fate. The aliens had destroyed three battleships in this solar system, melting them from the inside out.

“I’ve located the transports, sir,” said the communications officer.

That was a relief. Takahashi had half-expected to find the melted shells of the two transports floating lost in space. “Tell the pilots we are on our way,” he said.

The Sakura had reentered the minefield, and every sailor knew it. No one spoke unless there was an official reason. Takahashi had never seen a bridge so quiet for so long.

“I want the broadcast engines charged and ready,” he told Suzuki. He spoke in a whisper though he had no idea why. It was as if he suspected that the aliens might be eavesdropping on them.

“Yes, sir. It’s already begun.”

The Sakura did not have room for two more transports in her landing bays. Takahashi planned to create room for the stealth birds by jettisoning two standard-issue transports. He needed stealth transports for an experiment.

When the aliens had destroyed the Onoda and her sister ships, they did not attack the transports. Maybe the aliens could not see through the transports’ stealth shields. To test the theory, Takahashi planned to purge the oxygen from a stealth transport and send her out as a drone. If he could sneak stealth transports past the aliens, maybe he could send them to their planet for an old-fashioned bombing run. Maybe.

Moments after entering the solar system, Takahashi learned that the mission would fail.