Steven Kent - The Clone Redemption

They could not see the infiltration pods. Powered by field-resonance engines, the pods traveled the five thousand miles to the planet in a fraction of a second. Nothing happened. The S.I.P.s did not explode. The air in their rebreathers did not heat up to thousands of degrees.

They stood there, at the edge of the transport, staring out at the planet, realizing that nothing had or would happen. They would return to the Sakura having failed their mission and survived. The technicians slid the launching device back in place, and the pilot began the long flight back.

Location: Open Space Galactic Position: Outside Solar System A-361 Astronomic Location: Bode’s Galaxy“We cannot go back to Earth. There’s no going back if the Unified Authority is at war. They’ll shoot us down before we can identify ourselves,” said Yamashiro.

Where have they gone? he asked himself. Miyamoto Genyo, the modern-day Samurai, had always sat to Yamashiro’s left. With the Onoda destroyed, Miyamoto’s seat remained vacant. Takahashi sat to his right; but the chair beside him, which once belonged to Captain Takeda Gunpei of the Yamato , sat empty. At the far end of the table, an empty chair marked the space once occupied by Yokoi Shigeru, the late captain of the late Kyoto .

Commander Suzuki now sat at the table. This had once been a room for admirals and captains; now it had space for commanders and enlisted men—Master Chief Corey Oliver sat at the table.

Yamashiro harbored no prejudice against clones. He did not care about the master chief’s synthetic conception. His rank was another story. Oliver was a master chief petty officer, an enlisted man; and that, by definition, placed him below real officers.

So there they sat, the admiral of a one-ship fleet, the captain of that ship sitting with his second-in-command, and an enlisted clone. I should invite Lieutenant Hara, Yamashiro thought. He could come representing the underworld element.

“We cannot destroy the enemy, and we cannot return to Earth,” said Takahashi. “It sounds like we have run out of options?”

Yamashiro turned to study the SEAL. He knows what I am going to say, he thought. Somehow, the kage no yasha knows what I am going to say.

“No. We can still destroy the enemy,” he said, and he was not surprised when Oliver gave him a slight nod.

“How can we do that?” asked Takahashi. “We fired our most powerful weapon at their shield, and it failed. If infiltration pods can’t break through, nothing can.”

“I intend to detonate the pods from inside the layer,” said Yamashiro. “We will broadcast this ship into the atmosphere …”

“They’ll melt us like they melted the Onoda ,” said Takahashi.

“They won’t,” grunted Yamashiro, his expression cold. “If we broadcast the Sakura inside their atmosphere, they will not be able to incinerate us without incinerating themselves.”

“Broadcast inside the sleeve?” asked Takahashi. “That would not be possible. Nothing gets through the sleeve.”

“We would not broadcast through it. We would materialize inside it,” Yamashiro barked. Then his voice softened, as he said, “We are honor-bound to succeed. This is the only way that we can.”

Takahashi did not believe he had heard his father-in-law correctly. Stunned, he reviewed the sentence in his head. Finally, he said, “Admiral, we won’t be able to fly our ship once we are inside. The sleeve grounded the U.A. Air Force during the battle for Copenhagen. The fighter pilots weren’t able to fly higher than a thousand feet before their jets stopped working. The same thing will happen to us. Our computers …our electrical systems, our defenses …We’ll be just as vulnerable as those fighters were, with less room to maneuver.”

Yamashiro responded with a smile so sour that his son-in-law looked away. He said, “No, Hironobu, we won’t need to worry about that. We won’t live long enough for it to be a factor.”

“The information we are going to discuss is classified,” Yamashiro grunted the words. He had received the information twenty-four hours ago but postponed the briefing until he had time to compose his thoughts.

Yamashiro did not hold the briefing in the conference room just off the bridge, the place he normally conducted business. The conference room was secure, but secure was not secure enough, not when the discussion involved the destruction of the Sakura and her crew. He held the briefing in the small office attached to his billet.

Starting the moment the briefing ended, he would never again allow himself to speak kindly in public. When asked questions, he would grunt single-word answers. When he wanted work done, he would bark his commands. He could reveal no weakness and no indecision. Kindness and civility could be mistaken for weakness, so he would keep his eyes hard and his expression flat.

Yamashiro presided over the briefing, but it was Lieutenant Tatsu Hara’s show. As the intelligence officer who ran the computer simulations, Hara supplied the critical information.

Though every person on the Sakura knew Hara, Yamashiro began the meeting by introducing him, then he sat down.

Tatsu Hara was young, and tall, and skinny, a man in his early twenties with the moon-shaped face of a sixteen-year-old. His hair was regulation length, short at the back and off the ears; but his inch-long locks had been pressed into tight curls and bleached brown and blond. He lived on the edge of regulations, brantoos—a tattooing process that involved burning the skin, then tinting the scar—of lotus flowers, Kanji characters, women, and demons covered his arms and neck. He wore dark glasses and, as he stood, paused one second to remove them before opening his mouth, then placed the shades in the pocket of his blouse. The man was an officer but also a gangster. The brantoos, the hair, and the shades were the tokens of the Yakuza .

Hara ran the Pachinko parlors and the bars aboard the ship, but he performed his MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) well. He was a gifted computer tech; and his side operations contributed to crew morale. Had he been asked what he thought of Lieutenant Tatsu Hara, Yamashiro would have described him as an asset to the mission.

Lieutenant Hara briefly explained his responsibilities as a computer-simulations specialist in intelligence, then spent a few minutes explaining the simulations process. Commander Suzuki, who had been a lawyer before the Mogat Wars, thought the man talked like an expert witness in a court case.

Hara carried an antiquated clipboard computer. His computer established a wireless connection with the computer in the Intelligence division. Without giving any explanation, Hara ran the video feed of a battleship, probably the Kyoto , imploding. The holographic image appeared in the space above Yamashiro’s desk, cropped tight to display every detail of the destruction.

“Lieutenant, we’ve all seen this feed,” said Takahashi.

“Maybe you have not seen this particular simulation, sir,” said Hara. Traditional in his mannerisms, Hara did not want to contradict a superior officer. Yamashiro and Takahashi understood him perfectly. As he had just used it, the word “maybe” was for decoration. What he really meant was, This is a simulation, not the video feed you have seen.

Hara slowed the feed so that the attack occurred over a period of nearly two minutes. As the initial hit began, the hull of the ship expanded ever so slightly. Hara pressed a button on his computer, and the outer hull of the ship faded, revealing its inner workings. “I only finished running this simulation an hour ago.”