Steven Kent - The Clone Redemption

Rather than rewiring the old lights, the engineers had placed temporary domes along the walls at twenty-foot increments. The domes glowed softly, producing enough light for us to see the doors along the corridor.

“You know, General, I have to admit, I was surprised when you put Admiral Jolly in charge. He was a joke as an officer.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “He was a mistake.”

“And ‘Curtis the Snake’ is more of a politician than an officer,” said Holman. He was out of line saying this. He was way out of line; but we were flying an unauthorized mission in a stolen ship. I decided I could overlook the impropriety.

“From what I understand, Liotta is considering an early retirement,” I said.

Holman stopped walking, and asked, “No kidding? Early retirement, just like Admiral Jolly? Do you think he’ll be killed by looters as well?” The man was smart. He’d figured out what happened to Jolly. At least, he had his suspicions.

Holman started walking again. “Listen, here’s why you shouldn’t have put Liotta in charge. He’s not going to run into looters. If he thinks he’s due for an early retirement, he’s going to hide someplace safe, where no one can touch him.”

“You don’t have much respect for the man,” I said.

“Not much,” he said. “He’d have been a good senator if he wasn’t a clone.”

“You mean for the Unifieds.”

“Yeah, a good man for Unified Authority politics.”

We entered a cargo hold at the bow of the ship. Like the corridor outside, the room was dark. Most of the light in the hold came from the low glow of dials along a far wall. Three sailors saluted as we entered. Holman returned their salutes, and they went back to work.

The light, by the way, was not the pale white that shone from the domes in the hall. In one part of the room, the light glowed red. In the other, the light glowed blue. This was a cargo hold. It should have sat empty except for crates and supplies. As my eyes adjusted to the dim lumens, I saw equipment built into the walls and deck.

“This is why I volunteered for this mission,” Holman said. “What do you think?”

“You didn’t volunteer. I asked you,” I said.

“Okay, this is why I agreed to come. That’s kind of like volunteering. So what do you think?”

“I don’t know what I’m looking at,” I said.

“It’s a torpedo room.”

“Mars built a torpedo room in a spy ship?” The ship was small and relatively harmless, designed for flying stealth missions and gathering information, not fighting battles.

Having torpedoes made sense on one level, though. With its stealth generator going, the cruiser flew virtually invisible. We’d be able to catch our targets unawares.

“Those skinny things are torpedo tubes?” I asked. “They look more like peashooters.”

Holman called one of the sailors over, and said, “Senior Chief, can you show General Harris the pills.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” the sailor said. It’s not hard to read how sailors feel about their commanding officers. This guy not only respected Holman, he also liked him. I could see it in the way he responded. The senior chief petty officer spun around and headed toward the twin chrome-and-iron tubes.

“You’re right about the tubes, they are small,” Holman said, a hint of pride in his voice. “Standard tubes have a thirty-two-inch bore. These tubes have an eight-inch bore.”

“You’re firing quarter-sized torpedoes?” I asked, fighting the urge to laugh.

“Don’t blame me, I didn’t design them,” Holman said.

“This was Mars’s idea?” Maybe he’s lost his touch, I thought.

“He didn’t make the torpedoes; he just installed the tubes. Oh, and he told me where to find the torpedoes.”

Nestled in the nearest tube, as snug as a bullet in the chamber of a gun, sat a three-foot-long torpedo with red lights etched along its shaft. The glow from the torpedo was the lurid color of blood oranges, and the lights along the tube matched the color precisely.

The tube beside it held a torpedo that glowed ice blue. The senior chief removed the torpedo from the blue tube and brought it to me so that I could have a closer look.

He cradled the ice blue “pill” as he carried it. Small or not, this baby would certainly kill everyone in the cargo bay if it exploded.

As I inspected the torpedo, I realized that it wasn’t marked with blue lights; the glow came from the inside. The outside of the torpedo was made of some kind of thick polymer through which the inner core shone. The dark areas along that shaft were labels of some sort.

“What is this?” I asked.

“These are the torpedoes,” Holman said. He even laughed as he said it.

He watched me, expectation showing in his expression. When I did not pick up on it, he rolled his eyes, and said, “We salvaged them from the battleships.”

“What battleships?” I asked.

“You know, Mars …” He waited.

“Lieutenant Mars?” I asked.

Holman smiled, and said, “The planet Mars.”

And then I understood. I understood everything in a flash that left me dizzy. It was like waking up from a midday nap. We had destroyed several U.A. battleships when we stole the barges. Those battleships might well have been loaded with the torpedoes—the torpedoes that could destroy our ships with a single shot.

“These are the killer torpedoes?” I asked.

“The very ones,” said Holman. “If we’ve got it right, the blue ones dissolve shields. We call them ‘shield-busters.’ The red ones pack the punch.”

“How can you tell?”

“The red ones are nuclear-tipped.”

I looked back at the red torpedo, still snug in its tube, and shivered. I hated nukes. You can have your rats, your sharks, your snakes, and your space aliens. Nothing scared me nearly as much as nuclear weapons.

“How many of these things did you recover?”

“Thirty-six of each,” he said.

“Thirty-six,” I said. “That could be enough to finish off their entire fleet. Last I heard, they didn’t have thirty-six capital ships left in their navy.”

An invisible ship armed with shield-buster torpedoes. The Unifieds would not know danger was near until it was too late for them to protect themselves.

The Unifieds had just destroyed the small fleet we had patrolling the space around Solomon. They almost certainly had ships waiting in the area in case we sent a rescue party. With these torpedoes, we could turn the tables on them. I asked, “Have you run a test fire?” I did not think the cruiser would survive a misfire.

“Like I said, that’s why we’re here. That’s why I volunteered for this mission,” Holman said. “I’m here to test the new weapons system.”

Jim Holman wasn’t the only person who had volunteered for the mission. Ray Freeman had come as well.

Since Holman did not allow civilians on his bridge, Freeman waited for me in the third landing bay. I found him in a transport, sitting by himself in the unlit cockpit. Like any trained sniper, he was immune to boredom.

“Did you hear about the torpedoes?” I asked as I sat down in the copilot’s seat.

Freeman looked up but did not respond right away. Finally he said, “This is a spy ship. It doesn’t carry torpedoes.”

“This one does,” I said, and I told him all about the modifications and the pills .

“Is that why we broadcasted in so far from the planet?” Freeman asked.

“Holman says he did that for camouflage. He broadcasted in near the broadcast zone so the Unifieds would mistake our anomaly for debris.”

Freeman simply nodded. “What happens if we run into U.A. ships?”

“It sounds like he’s thought of everything,” I said. “If it comes to a battle with one-hit-kill torpedoes, the invisible ship wins.”