Steven Kent: The Clone Redemption

During those eighty-three seconds, the temperature created a convection, causing the atmosphere to rise off the surface of the planet. When the Avatari shut off the heat, the atmosphere dropped back into place, crushing buildings, kicking a thick layer of dust and ash into the air, and sending a shock wave across the planet.

Hiding behind a thick steel door in the depths of a tunnel, my engineers and I rode out the attack unharmed. When we opened the doors, just about everyone on the planet had been killed and cremated; and their dust was carried on the largely carbon-dioxide winds. Just behind the door, we found thirty-two militiamen cowering in the dark. They were good to go except for burst eardrums, a few broken bones, and the shock of knowing that everything and everyone they loved had been burned.

The rest of the tunnel was littered with the bodies of men who were cooked but not cremated. The first bodies we found were covered with blisters, their clothes singed and their hair burned brittle. Grease leaked from breaks in their scalded hides.

As I wandered toward the entrance of the tunnel, the corpses became more badly burned. One hundred feet from daylight, the bodies were papery ash that turned to dust at the slightest touch.

I walked to the mouth of the tunnel, taking in the lake, the sky, and the distant ruins of Norristown. From where I stood, Lake Norris looked as big as an ocean, so far across that I would not be able to see its farthest shores …even on a clear day. On this day, the air around me was the color of tea, and clouds of smoke and ash filled the sky. Incinerating five million people and all their belongings puts a lot of dust in the wind.

The militiamen, the engineers, and Ava’s lover remained in the tunnel, standing in the darkness, staring at nothing in particular. Their crying carried in the stillness like an echo.

Ava came to me as I stood in the entrance. Though I tried to stop her, she looked back toward the city and saw the ruins.

“What about my girls?” she asked. Before the cataclysm, she had taught drama at an orphanage for girls. She stared toward the ruins of the city, and tears rolled down her face. I did not blame her. I’d tried to warn her, but she couldn’t envision destruction on this scale without having seen it. Once you see an attack of this sort, a part of your humanity closes forever.

This was the third time I’d seen an attack of this kind, and it still left me numb.

I had come to warn these people, and they threw me in jail. Freeman rescued me, and the people burned as if I’d never arrived.

“General Harris, are you there?” The call came from Captain Don Cutter, commander of the E.M.N. Churchill . E.M.N. stood for Enlisted Man’s Navy, my Navy. I was a Marine, but I was the highest-ranking officer in the fleet.

Cutter contacted me over my commandLink, part of the communications network built into my combat armor. “General Harris, are you there?”

“Harris here,” I said. I hoped I sounded in control. This was the first outside communication I had received since entering the tunnel.

“What’s the situation, sir?” asked Cutter.

“The worst,” I said.

“How many survivors?”

“A thousand and change,” I said. “How do things look up there?”

Cutter was calling from a badly damaged fighter carrier, supposedly the only operational ship in Terraneau space. He said, “The Unifieds sent a spy ship into the area.”

“How were you able to spot it?” I asked.

The Unified Authority, the Earth-based empire that created me and my fellow clones, used modified cruisers for surveillance and reconnaissance. The spy ships were fast, small, and equipped with cloaking technology that rendered them utterly invisible.

“We parked in the debris and turned off our lights,” said Cutter. “They didn’t know we were here.”

By “debris,” he meant a graveyard of ships. More than a hundred dead ships floated in the space around Terraneau, remnants of a forgotten battle that had happened earlier this year.

“Didn’t they cloak?”

“They cloaked all right; but they dropped their skirts when they launched their ‘eye.’”

I knew that “eye” was Navy-speak for a spy satellite. The part about the skirts made no sense to me. “Come again?” I asked.

“They had to lower their shields to deploy their satellite. Weapons picked up the energy fluctuation.”

“Nice work,” I said.

“Thank you, sir. Do you want us to destroy the eye?”

“Hell no,” I said. Then, realizing I might be coming off harsh, I said, “Leave it alone, Captain. Having an enemy satellite in place might come in handy.”

Terraneau was in the Scutum-Crux Arm, the outermost arm of the Milky Way. Earth was located in the Orion Arm, clear across the galaxy. The only way for the Unifieds to pull any data from that satellite would be by sending their spy ship back to retrieve it.

When their spy ship returned, we would give her a proper reception.

The spy ship sneaked out of the anomaly the way mice sneak out of their holes—quickly, carefully, silently. Anomalies are like electrical tears in the fabric of space. They occur when ships travel using broadcast technology. In this case, the Unified Authority spy ship had a built-in broadcast engine that enabled her to make the hundred-thousand-light-year jump from Earth to Terraneau instantaneously. She arrived in Scutum-Crux space approximately fourteen million miles from Terraneau, far enough out of casual surveillance range that we would not have noticed the disturbance had we not been looking for it. With her stealth generator, the spy ship was invisible to our equipment. Only the anomaly showed on the readouts.

The spy ship was small and unarmed, the naval equivalent of a hummingbird. She had the ability to slip in behind enemy lines and listen to our communications, track our movements, and watch our production without threat of detection.

But this ship had been detected. We saw where she broadcasted into our space, and we knew her final destination. It didn’t matter that we lost track of the ship as she traveled the fourteen million miles from the anomaly to the satellite because we knew precisely where she would end her journey.

She was the mouse in the night, we were the cat. When she materialized beside the satellite, we would pounce. Even if we never saw the ship, our equipment would detect a momentary energy fluctuation when she lowered her shields to retrieve the satellite. She would be vulnerable when she lowered her shields.

I had no sympathy for the crew of the spy ship; they had come to the Scutum-Crux Arm to watch people die. Instead of offering assistance, the bastards placed a satellite so that scientists could study the death of an entire planet.

The satellite was smaller than a golf ball and armed with a camera so powerful that it could pick out a single grain of sand in an open desert. The satellite’s unblinking eye undoubtedly recorded us as we pulled our shuttle out of the tunnel and launched into space. It must have spotted us setting our trap as well; but the crew of the spy ship would have no access to those data until they retrieved the satellite.

“Anything?” I asked Cutter. Under normal circumstances, I would have used ship-to-ship communications; but the spy ship might have overheard us. Instead, we used the short-range interLink, a network designed for battlefield communications.

Cutter spoke to a tech officer, then said, “Nothing yet, sir.”

We kept our communications short in case the Unifieds tried to listen in.

Freeman and I watched the scene on a small video screen as we waited inside the kettle of a transport. The screen showed a panoramic view of open space. Terraneau spun in a corner of the screen, its oceans still blue but hidden behind a global cloud of smoke and ash. The alien attack had erased the green from the continents. Gone, too, were the ice caps that had once marked the poles at the top and bottom of the planet. Soot from the attack had turned the atmosphere a rusty gray.