Steven Kent - The Clone Empire

Hollingsworth and Mars, both of whom knew I had been restocking the base with weapons, laughed softly as I spoke. “Remember when I offered to salvage food and rations from those derelict ships? I figured since we were up there, we might as well restock our armory while we were at it. You wanted rations, I wanted rockets. We both made out.”

“You son of a—”

“You already said that,” I reminded Doctorow.

“What do you plan to do with those weapons, General?” Doctorow asked. “Are you planning on recapturing Terraneau?”

I laughed. “We both want the same thing. You want me off your planet, and I can’t wait to leave.”

“But that didn’t stop you from building your arsenal. Why stockpile weapons if you aren’t planning a war?”

I shrugged my shoulders, and said, “I’m a Marine. Marines like things that are loud. It’s all part of speaking softly and carrying a big stick.”

Doctorow took a step forward and drove his right fist into his open left palm. “This is unacceptable. This is an act of—”

“We didn’t leave an empty gas canister outside your door last night,” I said. “If we ever do leave you a message, you can bet that the canister won’t be empty.”

Doctorow glared at me, but I didn’t care. He had delivered his message last night, and I brought him to this meeting so that I could deliver mine. He now knew that I was leaving, and that if it came to a fight, I held all of the aces in my hand.

Now that everything was in the open, it was time to turn our attention back to the mission. “So you’re suggesting that we light up the wrecks and bash through in a battleship?”

“Considering the situation, sir, that’s the best we’ve come up with.”

“What are the odds of success?” I asked.

Lieutenant Mars let a second pass before he answered. He was a young clone, maybe not even in his thirties. Fatigue and frustration showed on his face. “General, there are so many variables; I can’t even begin to guess. It’s a matter of velocity. With the right speed and God’s good grace, this should work.”

“It sounds like you’ve got everything you need,” said Doctorow, suddenly sounding cheerful again. Perhaps hearing the suicidal nature of my mission had cheered him up. He bent over the display, looking the scene over closely. “Which ship is going to carry Harris?”

The display showed the entire battlefield, which was spread out over thousands of cubic miles of open space. With the camera panned so far out, the fighter carriers were indistinguishable from the fighters they carried. Everything was represented by tiny motes of light.

Mars said, “You won’t really be able to see the ship from this angle.” He adjusted the display so that it zoomed in on the wreckage of a Scutum-Crux Fleet battleship. “I had originally thought we would use a smaller ship, maybe even a minesweeper. A minesweeper would only have about one-tenth the overall mass of this battleship.

“Setting a battleship in motion is going to be challenge.” He laughed nervously.

“What do you have in mind?” I asked. I was the one putting his ass on the line, not Mars, not Hollingsworth, not Doctorow; and I did not like the plan so far. The ideas sounded too damn theoretical, and the wall of dead ships blocking my way sounded too concrete.

“General, sir, we’re going to attach a fleet of transports to the hull of the ship and use them like booster rockets,” Mars said.

“What about the men in the transports?” asked Hollingsworth. “What about the pilots?”

“No live pilots; everything will be remote control,” said Mars. “This mission involves guiding a battleship into a nuclear explosion. No one in his right mind would fly into a nuclear blast.”

“But that’s what I’m doing?” I asked.

Nobody answered.

The plan was to attach thirty remotely controlled transports to the hull of a derelict battleship to use as external rockets. No one had ever used transports to move a derelict battleship or anything of like size. Everything was theoretical, but Mars assured me that it would work.

When you place your life in other men’s hands, you want to know that they take their work seriously. The Corps of Engineers called their plan “Operation Chastity Belt” and referred to the battleship as “Harris’s Tool.” They probably took the mission seriously, but they were also enlisted men; juvenile humor was part of their makeup.

They had clever names for every element of the operation. “Harris’s Tool,” the battleship, would travel nearly three hundred miles gathering speed in a linear acceleration before poking “Chastity Belt,” the wall of destroyed Unified Authority ships that blocked the way to “Virginity,” the hot zone. When the Tool was precisely forty-seven miles from Chastity Belt, the engineers would fire a series of nuclear devices that would both damage and superheat the U.A. ships, but the blast would not destroy them. They labeled this part of the operation “Foreplay.” Just as the negative 450-degree temperature of space would set in, turning the metal brittle, the Tool would ram into the ships. If everything went right, the Tool would hit with sufficient velocity to break through the barrier.

Lieutenant Mars might have been counting on “God’s good grace,” but he carefully calculated acceleration and timing as well. Without the proper velocity, I would not have the power to smash through the ships.

My battleship/barge/battering ram would be wedge-shaped and wider from wing to wing than from bow to stern. This meant that I would have a better chance of survival traveling sideways, leading with the starboard wing while I hid in the landing bay on the port side of the ship.

I explained all of this to Sergeant Nobles, and he said, “It sounds like you’re trying to kill yourself, sir.” Nobles was a trained transport pilot. Officially, I did not have a personal pilot; but when I took rides in transports, he generally flew the bird.

We sat in the empty mess area of a vacant wing of Fort Sebastian. I wanted privacy as I explained the mission.

It was raining outside; gusts of wind blew a steady stream of water against the windows. The mess had a wall of windows overlooking Sebastian Commons—a park in the center of the base. The lawns outside those windows were as flat and even as a gymnasium floor. Even though we did not have enough men to fill the base, I had my men mow the grass. When forts become run-down, the men surely follow.

“Then it may be a double suicide,” I said.

“Oh shit,” he said. “You’re asking me to come with you.”

“I’ll need a pilot,” I said.

He’d been my pilot for nearly a year, making him one of my oldest friends on Terraneau; but until this conversation, I’d only known him as “my pilot.” We’d flown missions in which we both nearly died, and I didn’t even know his name. Was it because he was a clone? Had I become antisynthetic?

“Please say this is a joke, General,” Nobles said.

“Once I get through to the other side, I’m going to need someone to fly the transport off the battleship.”

“You mean the Tool ?” Nobles asked.

“Yeah, okay, the Tool ,” I conceded.

“General, do you know where we’ll be when we get to the other side?”

“I have no idea,” I admitted.

“And you want me to come along for the ride?” he asked. “Are you ordering me to come?”

“I was hoping you would volunteer.”

“Have you asked for other volunteers?”

I shook my head and told the truth, “There’s no point placing additional lives in harm’s way.”

“No, sir. Why would you want to put anyone else in danger?”