Steven Kent: The Clone Redemption

“You’re still on our side, right?” I asked Freeman.

Ray Freeman, one of the deadliest men who ever lived, said nothing as he watched the screen. The man was huge, seven feet tall. He was wide and thick and covered with muscle. He was also the last of his kind. In a galaxy that had outlawed ethnicities a century ago, Ray Freeman was proudly African-American. A lot of men saw him as someone to fear. I admired him.

Freeman was a human sphinx. He answered questions only when he felt like answering. Generally, he ignored them. He was a mercenary, but money did not determine his loyalty.

“Why help us?” I asked. “Why not the Unifieds?”

“I’m not taking sides,” said Freeman.

“The hell you’re not,” I said. “We’re about to attack a Unified Authority boat. If you don’t care who wins, you don’t belong on this ride.”

I trusted Freeman though he had been vague about his loyalties. Freeman was not the type who started the mission as your friend, then shot you in the back. He made his alliances public and sniped his targets from a mile away. In my experience, Freeman’s loyalty was never in question.

“I don’t care about sides, just saving lives,” Freeman said. “That’s it. It’s not about loyalty. The only planet the Unifieds care about is Earth; you’re out to save what’s left of the galaxy.”

“What’s left of the galaxy …” Before the first alien invasion, the Unified Authority had 180 colonized planets scattered around the Milky Way. The aliens “sleeved” 178 of them. The Enlisted Man’s Empire, a nation composed of the cloned military that the Unified Authority had ejected, reestablished contact with 23 of those planets before the aliens began incinerating rescued planets.

Freeman’s entire family had been on the first planet the Avatari, the aliens, incinerated. Having lost everyone he might have ever loved, the galaxy’s best professional killer became a self-appointed savior.

When dealing with people like Ray Freeman, as if there were anyone else like Freeman, there is no room for ambiguity. I decided to reconfirm his motivation. “As long as we’re saving more lives than the Unifieds, you’re on our side?”

He nodded.

“Good enough for me,” I said, though inwardly I still had doubts. The clones of the Enlisted Man’s Empire had been bred to save the lives of natural-borns, and the Unified Authority had thanked us for it with one betrayal after another. I felt a need to save the natural-born residents of our planets, but I could not come up with any logical reason to do it.

Satisfied that I could trust Freeman for now, I turned my attention to the mission at hand. “Cutter, are the traps in position?” I asked over the commandLink.

Asking that question was my form of fidgeting. Captain Don Cutter was a good officer, not the kind of man who left things undone. Still, we were dealing with an invisible foe, and we would only get one shot at the bastards. It was one of those pivotal moments on which the future hung. If we failed to bag that spy ship, the war would end before it began.

“Yes, sir,” said Cutter. He spoke in a whisper.

Five transports floated within a few hundred yards of the satellite. They were not debris from the graveyard of ships but fully functional birds Cutter had placed himself. One of the transports carried a team of engineers. Freeman and I sat in the kettle of the second. The others sat facing away from the satellite, their rear hatches open, their kettles carefully packed with explosives. When the spy ship lowered her shields, we would use these transports like old-fashioned cannons.

The bombs were not especially powerful. We needed to cripple the spy ship, not decapitate her. I didn’t care if the crew lived or died; I didn’t owe the bastards. The ship’s computers, on the other hand, they mattered.

Five million people had just died on Terraneau, and millions more had their necks on the chopping block on other planets. The key to saving them was on those computers. We could not win the war with the aliens; but armed with the right information, we might survive it.

“How long has it been since you detected the anomaly?” I asked Cutter.

“Fifty-two minutes, sir,” he said.

Fifty-two minutes, I thought. Fifty-two minutes to travel fourteen million miles, either the bastards are taking their time or they’ve figured us out. In conventional travel, U.A. cruisers topped out at a speed of thirty-eight million miles per hour. Traveling the fourteen million miles from the anomaly should have taken less than half an hour.

“Maybe they know we’re here.” I said the words out loud but meant them for myself.

“Not likely,” said Cutter.

Listening over the interLink, Freeman heard every word we said but did not comment. He lived in a world of absolutes. Either the spy ship was coming, or she was not. He saw no value in second-guessing the situation.

I looked back at the video screen and saw nothing but empty space. The satellite was so small that it did not even appear on my screen. A little bubble of light represented the area around it.

“Mars, are your men ready?” I asked on a different frequency. Mars, Lieutenant Scott Mars, ran my corps of Navy engineers. I would have preferred using a demolitions team on this mission, but Mars’s men were handy with explosives.

“Yes, sir. You stop the ship, sir, and we’ll kick her doors in,” he said.

“Minimal damage,” I reminded him for what might have been the hundredth time.

“You said you wanted a hole,” he reminded me.

“Right,” I said.

“If you know a way to put a hole in a ship without doing damage …”

“I take your point.”

“We’ll keep the damage to a minimum, sir,” said Mars.

Cutter interrupted us. “It’s a go!”

Nothing had changed on my screen. The ash-choked atmosphere of Terraneau still showed in one corner of the screen. Our transports still hid at the edge of the debris.

I did not see the spy ship. Of course I didn’t see her, not yet at least. But the spy ship must have been in place beside the satellite, and her crew must have lowered her shields or Cutter would not have sent that message. His sensors detected energy fluctuations.

Cutter detonated the bombs in the three open transports, firing a barrage of bearings and shrapnel at the invisible target. In the silence of space, the detonations made no noise; but the explosions flashed and vanished on my video screen.

Had it been a civilian ship caught in that storm, the debris would have broken her to pieces. The spy ship took the beating and survived. Her stealth generators failed, and she came into view. Air and flames leaked from small holes in her hull, and a large outer panel had been ripped from her bow, all cosmetic damage that would nonetheless prove fatal for her crew.

The ship was shaped like the head of a gigantic spear, fifty feet wide at her stern and two hundred feet long. Tiny electrical eruptions burst across her cylindrical hull. That bird would need repairs before she flew again. No problem. Mars’s engineers could repair her.

Our ambush nearly sheared off one of her three aft engines. It hung limp at an odd angle, like an arm in a cast. Liquid fuel escaped from the back of the engine, flying into space in bubbles. If the pilot of the spy ship tried to light the other engines, he’d ignite a fire that would consume the entire ship; but judging by the damage to the bridge, I did not worry about survivors among the flight crew. The bridge had gone dark, and the spy ship wasn’t going anywhere.

“We’re up,” I told Freeman, though he was already moving toward the sled. A flatbed hauling device used for spacewalks, the sled looked like a scale for weighing cattle. It had a ten-foot-long base lined with tiny booster rockets. It did not have walls or rails or even a dashboard, only a column with handles for steering.