Steven Kent - The Clone Redemption

“Terraneau?” she asked.

“No,” I said, but she saw through me.

“Liar,” she said. “I can’t go back.”

“You can’t stay here,” I said.

“It’s as good a place as any,” she said.

“The aliens will be here by the end of the week. If you stay here, you’ll die.”

She thought about that, and asked, “Are you going to Terraneau?”

“No,” I said.

I thought I saw the ghost of her old sardonic smile. “Then you came here to say good-bye. You always come to say good-bye. Have you noticed that, Harris? You and I, we say good-bye to each other more than anything else.”

I did not know what it was about this woman that stirred my heart. I wanted to hold her and to kiss her, and I felt an urge to do more. She was empty and I was lonely and we could never again satisfy each other; but for the first time since I had met Ava Gardner, I knew that I loved her.

“I love you,” I said.

She ignored me. She asked, “If you are not going to Terraneau, where are you going?”

“Earth,” I said. Using the now-familiar line, I added, “It’s a one-way ticket.”

“I don’t suppose it’s a social call.”

“No. Not a social call,” I said.

Ava listened and nodded, but she did not speak.

Time passed.

“I love you,” I said.

“You don’t know love,” she said. “You know war. You know death. You don’t know love.”

Maybe she’s right, I thought. Whatever I felt for Ava at that moment, it matched up with the way I expected love to feel.

If I left her alone, she would stay in the apartment and die when the Avatari attacked the planet. I could have begged her to leave, and maybe she would have considered it. I could have sent Major Perry to collect her. He could take her by force. He could drag her to a transport and cart her off to Terraneau, but he couldn’t put the life back into her.

I bent down, stroked her hair, kissed her on the forehead, and whispered, “This is our final good-bye.”

Her eyes met mine, and she said two words. “Thank you.”

I wanted to say good-bye to Scott Mars before I left for Earth. Hearing he was aboard the Mandela , one of the handful of fighter carriers headed to Terraneau, I flew out to visit the ship.

“The Corps of Engineers is down in the fighter bay,” the officer in charge told me when I entered the landing bay.

“What the hell are they doing down there?” I grumbled.

“They’re engineers. They’re probably fixing up the fighters, sir,” said the officer.

“They aren’t mechanics, they’re engineers,” I said. “Engineers don’t fix fighters, they design them.”

“Good point, sir,” the officer said, a diplomatic way of telling me to speck off.

Still wondering why the head of the Corps of Engineers was inspecting fighters, I hiked down to the hangar. The place was enormous—a double-tall deck teeming with techs and mechanics. Like most warships, the Mandela had a hot-bunk rotation with three shifts, but that rotation collapsed as the empire prepared for evacuation and war. All three shifts had reported for work, and Mars and his engineers had come to join them. Dressed in red jumpsuits, the mechanics and technicians looked like ants crowded around the fighters.

I found Mars stooped under the wing of a fighter inspecting who knew what. I stood waiting for him to notice me, but he didn’t. After more than a minute, I finally asked, “Did Holman bust you down to fighter maintenance?”

Mars spun to face me, still holding a laser probe in his left hand as he saluted me with his right. “I wish to God he had,” said the perennially positive, born-again clone. “I’ll take Tomcats and Phantoms over Stone Age farming.”

“You’re not excited about Terraneau?”

“Building tent cities and digging latrines …It may be my calling; but no, I’m not excited about it.”

“It won’t be totally primitive; you’ll still have tractors and cranes,” I said.

“We’re riding Space Age technology into an Iron Age existence,” he said.

“You can build churches, too,” I said, trying to appeal to his religious side.

That brought a smile. He said, “Wanna see the surprise we planned in case we run into resistance?” Mars fixed me with a distinctly un-Christian grin and nodded toward the undercarriage of the Tomcat.

I squatted and edged my way under the wing, but I did not see anything other than the standard laser array and rockets. “What am I looking at?” I asked.

“We added a hard point for torpedoes,” Mars said. “Their torpedoes, the shield-busters. They know we have ’em, but they won’t think our fighters are packing them.”

I liked the idea. Somewhere down inside me, my confidence grew. A weapon like that could turn the tide of the war.

Mars ran his fingers along the wires at the back of a torpedo tube, then he shined a light into the seam at the top to inspect the joint. He reached for the lid to the electrical panel, paused, then opened it.

“Not sure it will work?” I asked.

“It’s going to work perfectly.”

“Then why are you opening it?”

He said, “Because I am here and it’s there and that’s what engineers do,” a hint of self-mockery in his voice.

I patted the fuselage of the fighter the way a man might pat his horse, and asked, “How many of these are we taking?”

An engineer lit a laser torch under the wing of a nearby Tomcat. Mars shaded his eyes from the glare. He squinted toward me, and said, “None.”

“What?”

“They’re all going to Terraneau.”

“What the hell are you going to use them for on Terraneau?” I asked. “You’re setting up a colony. We’re the ones going into battle.”

“It wasn’t my idea—Holman’s orders.”

“Holman?” Hearing who gave the orders, I felt like I’d been kicked in the gut.

The blue-white light of the laser welder flashed and flickered along the hull of the fighter. It lit one side of Mars’s face. The acrid tang of melting metal filled the air.

“He says we need them for insurance in case the Unifieds get around you,” said Mars. “Harris, don’t worry. You’re going to outnumber the Earth Fleet a hundred to one.”

I once saw a man pour a bag with fifty goldfish into a tank with five piranhas. There were ten goldfish for each of the predators, but they lasted less than a minute. Each time a piranha snapped at a goldfish, it left behind nothing more than orange-gold scales and the tips of the fins.

Was the empty knot in my chest formed by frustration or disappointment? “Those fighters could save a lot of lives during an invasion,” I said. I was also thinking, If they hit us fast enough, we won’t even get the chance to land our troops.

When Navy ships go to battle, the Marines inside of them sit helplessly as they wait for their turn to fight.

“General, what you really need to do is appeal to a higher power,” Mars said.

“I know, Holman’s orders.”

“No, there’s a higher authority than Jim Holman …God helps those who ask for help. You need to pray.”

A rush of anger ran through my brain. You pray, and I’ll take the Tomcats with the shield-busters, I thought. Mars and I had been through a lot together. I considered him a friend, and I did not have many friends, so I kept that to myself.

“I’ve never had much luck with prayer,” I said. I didn’t mind Freeman’s sermons because he had more questions than doctrine. For Freeman, God was a concept that had recently started to make sense. Scott Mars, on the other hand, bought into Christianity with all of its hooks, lines, and sinkers.