Steven Kent - The Clone Empire

“Does that include sound waves?” I asked.

Mars considered the idea. “That might do it. We didn’t try that, but it probably would work.”

“What might work?” Hollingsworth asked.

“Using sonic waves to deplete the batteries,” Mars said.

“You sneaky bastard,” Hollingsworth said, quickly adding “sir” to avoid the appearance of insubordination.

My pilot spoke to us over the intercom. “General, we’re in position.”

“How close?” I asked.

“Fifteen hundred miles, sir,” he said.

“Give us a moment to suit up,” I told the pilot. I turned to Hollingsworth and Mars, and said, “Helmets on, gentlemen. For today’s demonstration, we will be opening the rear hatch.”

After we pulled on our helmets, I contacted my pilot via the interLink. “Ready,” I told him, giving him the signal to vent the air from the kettle. Once the oxygen had been evacuated, he opened the massive iron doors at the rear of the ship, revealing a wide field of stars and empty space.

“You brought us out here to see this?” Hollingsworth asked. “There’s nothing here.”

“It’s what you don’t see that counts,” I told Hollingsworth as I picked up a handheld rocket launcher.

Speaking over the interLink on a direct frequency that only my pilot would hear, I said, “Lower the rear shields in ten, nine, eight …” I continued the count in my head.

“There’s more going on out here than meets the eye,” I told Hollingsworth. “Watch.”

“What does this have to do with the fleet?” he asked.

Five, four … I continued counting silently to myself. Without answering, I aimed the rocket out the rear of the ship.

Three, two, one …

There was a barely visible blue-white flash as the rear shield of the transport came off-line. I fired the RPG.

Rifles, pistols, and rockets shoot perfectly well in space. If anything, projectiles fly faster and travel along a much more rigid trajectory without the distractions of friction and gravity. In a breathable atmosphere, the little rocket might never have broken the sound barrier. Here in space, it lit off at Mach 2 and would have kept at that rate forever, or at least until it bumped into a meteor or a ship or a planet. On this day, it found something else.

“Shield up,” I told the pilot over a direct link.

“What is this about?” asked Mars, who clearly wanted more than a demonstration of physics in space.

The explosion took place about five hundred miles away, straight ahead of us, in the vast emptiness. Some of the shrapnel came back and struck our shields, creating sparks against the invisible pane of electrical energy.

“What was that?” asked Mars. “What just happened?”

“Gentlemen, we are at the edge of a battlefield. The area around us is crowded with broken ships and debris, and yet the space we are facing is almost entirely empty. Do either of you have any idea why no ships entered this zone?” I asked.

“You said ‘almost empty,’ ” Hollingsworth observed. “What do you mean by ‘almost’?”

“There’s a broadcast station in the center of it,” I said.

“A broadcast station?” asked Mars. “Are you saying Warshaw broadcasted the fleet?” Gary Warshaw was the clone sailor the Unifieds had promoted to command the Scutum-Crux Fleet.

“That can’t be,” said Hollingsworth. “The Broadcast Network was shut down during the Mogat Wars, that was years ago.”

Hollingsworth missed the big picture, but Mars pieced it together. “The broadcast engines weren’t broken, they just needed power. Warshaw must have installed generators on the station.”

“That’s my guess,” I said.

“If he got the station running, he could have made it out with hundreds of ships,” Hollingsworth said.

“Twenty-one carriers, seventy-two battleships, and who knows how many frigates and cruisers,” I said.

The visor in my combat armor had equipment for surveillance, reconnaissance, and battle, such as lenses that could illuminate the darkness, see over long distances, and detect heat. Lieutenant Mars’s soft-shelled armor had an entirely different set of lenses designed for engineers. When he whistled, and said, “The current out there is off the charts,” I knew he had run some kind of test. “How far are we from the broadcast station?”

“Fifteen hundred miles,” I said.

“And no ships got any closer than this?” Mars asked.

“Not much,” I said.

There was a pause, then Mars asked, “Does the field go all the way around the station?”

“As far as I can tell, it forms a perfect sphere,” I said.

“Warshaw must have supercharged the broadcast engines to create a hot zone,” Mars said.

“If you say so,” I said. I was a combat Marine. What did I know about supercharging broadcast engines?

“No. No, it doesn’t make sense. Why didn’t the Unifieds blast the station?” Hollingsworth asked. “They would have destroyed this station the same way the Mogats destroyed the Mars broadcast station.”

“No, they couldn’t,” I said. “They couldn’t hit it with a torpedo. You saw what just happened to that rocket.”

“So they would have used a particle beam or a laser,” Hollingsworth said.

I handed Hollingsworth a shoulder-held laser cannon, and said, “Be my guest.”

“What about our shields?” Hollingsworth asked.

I had already asked the pilot to lower them. I told him, “They’re already down.”

Hollingsworth aimed the cannon out the back of the transport and fired. The silver-red beam disappeared only a few hundred feet from the ship.

“How did you do that?” Hollingsworth asked.

“The current from the broadcast station disassembled it,” Mars said.

“It what?” asked Hollingsworth.

“Disassembled it. Pulled it apart,” said Mars. “We used to communicate across the galaxy sending laser signals over the Broadcast Network. The current from the broadcast station must translate light waves.”

“So what? We fire a laser at the station, and it comes out in another galactic arm?” Hollingsworth asked.

I shrugged my shoulders, an action made almost invisible by my combat armor.

“Not without an encoded address built into the signal to specify where it is supposed to go,” Mars said. “Without an address, the waves stay broken apart.”

“Have you tried contacting the people on the other side?” Hollingsworth asked.

“What do you suggest, shouting into it? Maybe we could float a tin cup on a really long string into the zone and see if someone picks up on the other side,” I said.

“Why didn’t the Unifieds send ships in after them?” Hollingsworth asked, as the transport doors closed.

The mood in the kettle had changed. Hollingsworth, who began the flight hostile, had suddenly become my pal. Lieutenant Mars, who’d boarded the transport confused about the fate of the Scutum-Crux Fleet, began dispensing answers about broadcast physics as if he had invented the technology.

“You wouldn’t want to enter a hot zone unless you had a ship designed for network travel. The current from a zone like this would overload the engines in a self-broadcasting ship.”

The Unified Authority Navy’s new fleet was entirely composed of self-broadcasting warships.

“What would happen if one of their ships did go in?” Hollingsworth asked.

“It would cause a massive explosion,” Mars explained.

“How massive?” asked Hollingsworth.

“Massive,” Mars said, giving off the air of one who knows.

“You mean like a nuclear explosion?” asked Hollingsworth. Like any good Marine, he wanted things spelled out in combat terms.