Steven Kent - The Clone Redemption

At six-foot-three, I was the tallest clone in the Enlisted Man’s Empire. Freeman stood nine inches taller than I and might well have packed twice my weight. He was big and strong and deadly, a fierce man who’d spent most of his life caring about no one but himself. He’d become a murderous messiah, a man on a quest.

I did not know the Bible from front to back, but I remembered a few words here and there. Six of those words came back to me. I said, “Let the dead bury the dead.”

The words woke Freeman from his stupor. He glared at me, and growled, “What is that supposed to mean?” That was the first time I’d ever heard rage in his voice.

“It means that we can kill ourselves trying to warn people who cannot be saved, but we cannot save them. It means that I would rather get caught by a sniper’s bullet than be stood in front of a firing squad. They will spend their last hours humping girlfriends, fishing, reading, going to the specking ballet …doing whatever it is they like to do. I’d rather go that way than spend my last hours panicking about death.”

As I said this, I thought about mothers holding their children. What does a mother do when she learns that all of her children will die at the end of the day? Does she tuck them into bed and tell them a story? Does she give them candy for their final meal? Does she think about her own death? Having never had a mother, I imagined each of them as superhuman, a cross between a saint, a martyr, and a drill sergeant.

I had no concept of what it meant to lose family. Freeman did. His father, a Neo-Baptist minister, died defending his colony. The Avatari had burned Freeman’s last relations when they attacked New Copenhagen. I was haunted by my imagination. He was haunted by his memories.

Sounding like Admiral Liotta and hating myself for it, I said, “Solomon was a lost cause.”

Freeman, big as he was, standing there so still and silent, reminded me of a spider on a web in some abandoned archway. I was a weakling, and he was a spider, and we lived in a universe that was crumbling around us. He spun webs, and I made plans, but we were feeble. Neither his webs nor my plans mattered in the end.

There is nothing I hate more than the feeling of helplessness, I told myself; but it was not the truth. I hated the Unified Authority more than I hated feeling helpless; and I hated the Avatari more than anything else.

Under normal circumstances, the pilot of the first transport was a talkative man. So were the two technicians. But flying a mission they all expected to result in their deaths, they had lost interest in chatting.

From one million miles out, planet A-361-B looked like a very small moon. Each hour brought them two hundred thousand miles closer to their destination, and from their current position, the pilot could see that the planet was the color of platinum rather than the dull white of a moon.

He sat alone in the cockpit. They did not need to spend these hours flying to A-361-B; the S.I.P.s could have traveled to the planet in one-one-hundredth the time. The pilot thought about mentioning that fact to his crew, then decided against it. What if the aliens tracked the S.I.P.s to their transport? This way, maybe they could buy themselves a few additional hours to live.

His orders were to fire the pods from just outside the ion curtain. Yamashiro’s orders made it clear that firing the pods from a million miles away wasn’t an option, however much it was a temptation.

In his heart, though, the pilot knew it didn’t matter. Nothing would penetrate the tachyon shell. It disassembled waves. Sound and light dissolved into it. The S.I.P.s would hit the outer side of the sleeved atmosphere and explode. Maybe the ion curtain would suck the energy out of them, then repulse them.

The few times the pilot peered out of the cockpit, he found his technicians sitting along opposite ends of the same kettle wall. They could have been talking over the interLink, but he doubted they were.

The pilot made no effort to control the flight. He’d switched the computers to autopilot and spent the time slumped in his seat, reviewing his life. He thought about his failures and successes, remembered his parents, relived the pain of his young wife’s death, and wondered what life might have been like had she had lived. He had no children.

From five thousand miles away, planet A-361-B filled the cockpit’s windshield. He realized that he didn’t see the planet, just the “sleeve” that had closed around its atmosphere. From the outside, it looked like a solid layer, like someone had dipped the planet in white gold.

“We’re here,” the pilot told the technicians. “We’re almost in position. Let’s make this quick.”

He did not want to die, though having accepted that his death was imminent, it did not scare him as it had back when he began the flight. Since leaving the Sakura , he had gone through all the steps. Denial and anger came first but ended almost after takeoff. The bargaining stage did not last long because he had some measure of control over his fate. If the pilot turned the transport around, he would survive the mission and live as a coward. A man of duty, he preferred death over a life of shame …and maybe a short life at that. He’d seen what had happened to the Onoda , the Kyoto , and the Yamato .

The pilot did not believe in God, and the idea of an afterlife trapped in the Yasukuni Shrine held no fascination for him. Now, as he spun the transport so that the rear hatch faced the planet, depression and acceptance glided along parallel tracks in his head.

The pilot did not hesitate as he worked the controls. Maybe the aliens could target the oxygen in his armor, or maybe they would target the air in his lungs and sear him from the inside out. It no longer mattered. All that mattered was the mission, and the pilot would give his life and the lives of his technicians to see it through.

He switched off the controls for what he believed would be the very last time and walked out of the cockpit. In the kettle, the technicians had already loaded the S.I.P.s into the launching device but had not yet pulled the device into position. As the pilot watched from the catwalk, one of the techs hit the button to open the hatch.

Here it comes, thought the pilot. He was sure that it would be the moment, and he braced himself. A soft tremor ran through the belly of the transport as the thick iron doors slowly ground into place.

Standing on his perch above the kettle, the pilot could not see the ramp. His curiosity got the better of him, and he slid down the ladder. He had not turned off the gravity inside the transport, just notched it down to about one-third gravity level on Earth.

He touched down lightly on the metal deck, turned, and saw the far end of the ship. The rear hatch framed the view of A-361-B glinting like a giant shining sphere of molten silver. As the pilot watched, the technicians pulled the launching device along a rail that ran down the ramp. The device reached from the floor to the ceiling. It looked like a miniature Ferris wheel, with coffins instead of seats. When it locked into place at the bottom of the ramp, blocking his view of the planet, the pilot went even closer. In the distance, he could see the second transport still drifting into position, its rear hatch open.

From initiation to completion, the firing process took five seconds. Once the launching device was in place, a technician pressed a button, and the device fired the S.I.P.s into space. Knowing there was no point in trying to escape, the crew stood in place and watched.