Steven Kent - The Clone Empire

The doors of the atmospheric locks might have been knocked out of alignment when we crashed through the other ships, or the controls for opening the door may have been fried when we passed through the broadcast zone. We were trapped either way.

Nobles parked the transport and opened the rear hatch for me. The artificial gravity that rooted me to the deck of the transport did not extend beyond its ramp. I leaped into the void and floated across the open landing-bay floor as smoothly as a cloud rolls across the sky. Below me, I saw the rubberized insulation that the Corps of Engineers used to coat the floor, walls, and ceiling. The stuff had probably saved our lives; a lot of electricity had pulsed through this ship.

“Speck,” I said.

“What is it?” asked Nobles.

I drifted right up to the wall and pounded a fist into the insulation. It was rigid. Hoping to peel the rubber away, I tried stabbing my fingers into the rubber. It did not give way.

“They sealed the doors to the ship,” I said. I had hoped to search the ship for explosives or maybe a laser welder, something I could use to cut through the atmospheric locks.

“It’s insulation,” Nobles informed me. “That’s what kept the electricity out of the landing bay.”

“It’s also sealing us in,” I pointed out, my temper starting to get the better of me. I silently toyed with the idea of pulling my combat knife from my rucksack, but I knew I couldn’t even nick industrial-grade insulation using a simple knife. “You wouldn’t happen to have anything we can use to cut our way out?”

“You mean like a laser welder?” asked Nobles.

“Yeah,” I said.

“No, sir. Did you bring any weapons we can use?”

“I have an M27 and a torpedo.”

“Didn’t you say the torpedo was a nuke?” asked Nobles.

“Affirmative.”

“Maybe we should save that for a last resort, sir.”

“There has got to be some way out of here,” I said. Pushing off the rubberized wall, I launched myself past the transport and glided to the far end of the bay. With its electronics off-line, the massive atmospheric lock was just another wall. It was designed to be bulletproof, fireproof, and radiation resistant. I might have been tempted to fire my M27 at it, but firing a gun in a vacuum with neither gravity nor air friction to slow the bullets down was never a good idea.

“Speck,” I muttered as I kicked off the lock, sending myself past the transport. Gliding in the null gravity, I had no more capacity to steer myself than a bullet or a billiard ball. I sailed past the nose of the transport, then along the side and pushed a different wall, reangling myself so that I entered the transport through its ass, where the artificial gravity brought me to my feet.

Dragging my feet along the ramp to stop myself, I turned to take one last look across the landing bay. Surely there had to be a welding torch or a drill. Hell, even a particle beam might do the trick. A particle beam …A tiny pistol—its disruptive beam might tear through the insulation.

The standard-issue particle-beam pistol was small …so small you could throw one in your rucksack and forget it was there. I hit the button, closing the rear doors, then grabbed my rucksack and headed up to the cockpit.

“What are you doing?” Nobles asked, as I burst into the cabin.

“I have an idea,” I said as I pulled out my clothes. I pulled out my Charlie service pants and blouse, not really flinging them away, but not watching where they landed. I had underwear, shoes, socks, toiletries, my M27, and three clips of ammunition.

And then, at the bottom of my rucksack where I hoped I might find a particle-beam pistol, I found nothing.

“What are you looking for?” Nobles asked.

“A particle-beam weapon,” I said.

“Did you bring one?”

“Apparently not,” I said. “I don’t suppose you did?” I already knew the answer, but he confirmed it. Nobles was a pilot, not a fighter.

“So what do we do now?” Nobles asked.

I dropped into the copilot’s seat, and said, “Isn’t it obvious?”

“We die?” he asked.

“We wait,” I said. “We’re in a battleship that just sailed into occupied space. If the Scutum-Crux Fleet is anywhere near here, Warshaw will send ships out to investigate.”

“Oh, hey, maybe I should send out a distress signal,” Nobles suggested.

“Good idea,” I said, no longer certain either of us imbeciles deserved to live much longer.

The fighters came first. Unseen by us, they circled the battleship, listening to our distress signal for several minutes before asking us to identify ourselves. Trapped within the landing bay, unable to scan the area outside the battleship, we had no idea whether we were dealing with a couple of fighters or an entire fleet.

I identified myself as General Wayson Harris of the Enlisted Man’s Marines.

“It doesn’t look like you have much of a ship there, General,” said one of the fighter pilots.

It occurred to me that the Unified Authority might well have tracked the SC Fleet to this stretch of the galaxy and defeated it. I might have been speaking to a Unified Authority fighter pilot, in which case my name, rank, and serial number would be more than enough information for a court-martial and firing squad.

The pilot had a clonelike voice, however. He sounded pretty much like any man under my command. They were all built with the exact same vocal cords, after all.

“This battleship is deader than dinosaur shit,” I said. “My pilot and I are sitting in a transport inside the battleship. The transport works. The battleship was just an empty husk we used to surf through the broadcast zone.”

The fighter pilot repeated my story back to me to make sure he had heard correctly. “You say you rode a dead battleship through the broadcast zone?”

“That just about sums it up,” I said.

He didn’t believe me. I didn’t blame him. “Tell you what, General, you just fly out, and we will escort you down to the planet.”

“Um, I can’t,” I said. “The landing-bay hatch is broken.”

“This just keeps getting more interesting,” the pilot said. He thought for a moment, then asked in a suspicious voice, “Is this a readiness drill?”

“Pilot, what is your name?” I asked.

“Stanford, sir. Petty Officer First Class Jefferson Stanford.”

“I assure you, Petty Officer First Class Stanford, this is not a drill. This is not a specking joke,” I said, and I ordered him to call his commander and report his findings.

Another hour of silence followed. Nobles suggested we pipe air and heat into the cockpit so we could remove our helmets. Taking off the old lid felt good after what we had been through. A few minutes later, he suggested we air out the main kettle. Once that was done, he went to the head and relieved himself.

“Did I miss anything?” he asked when he returned.

I shook my head.

“What if they don’t come back?”

“They will,” I said.

Another hour passed, and they came back en masse.

“Harris, is that really you in there?”

“Who am I speaking with?” I asked.

“Are you a message in a bottle or a guinea pig?” The voice could have belonged to just about any clone, but the attitude sounded familiar.

“Who is this?” I repeated.

“This is Hank Bishop, Captain of the E.M.F. Kamehameha ,” he said, “E.M.F.” being short for “Enlisted Man’s Fleet.” Just a few months ago, it was still the Scutum-Crux Fleet; but now that the break with the Unified Authority was formal, it was the Enlisted Man’s Fleet, and the Kamehameha was its flagship.