Steven Kent - The Clone Elite

“It’s all hypothetical, of course,” he admitted. Tall, slightly built, and obviously insecure, Breeze tended to decorate his speech with more scientific terms than Sweetwater.

“Eight hundred miles per week?” General Haight asked. “That doesn’t seem like much. I mean, at eight hundred miles per week, it could take them years to hollow out the planet.”

“They don’t need to hollow out the planet,” Sweetwater said. “We think they are just trying to make enough space to hold their catalyst.”

Breeze leaned over the projector, and said, “William, perhaps we should show them the cave.”

“Good idea,” said Sweetwater.

On the screen, the cave in which Freeman and I had found the spheres appeared. Freeman entered first and examined the spheres and the gas leaking out of them. He pulled out the meter Sweetwater gave him and held it over the mud-colored gas.

“This is not the extreme-hydrogenation elemental compound distillation that was found in other Avatari settlements such as the Mogat home world and Hubble,” Breeze announced.

Nobody responded.

“The military term is ‘distilled shit gas,’ ” Sweetwater said.

“Oh, sure, that,” the generals responded. They all knew about distilled shit gas.

“Raymond ran a number of tests on the gas, and we have been able to make some educated guesses about its properties,” Breeze said.

“That is a gas? It looks like muddy water,” General Glade observed.

“It is very dense; so dense, in fact, that it is on the border of the definition of both a gas and a liquid,” admitted Breeze.

“That’s what those things are after? They just want that mud stuff?” General Haight asked.

“Quite the opposite,” Sweetwater said. “That is what they are pouring into the planet.

“We think they are seeding the planet.” He waddled over to Breeze and handed him a data chip to place in the projector. When the picture resumed, it showed the same map of the galaxy that Brocius showed me back on Mars.

“We assume you are all familiar with this map?” Sweetwater asked. Then, without waiting for an answer, he approached the screen, and continued. “Arthur, can you close in on Hubble?”

The screen switched to a close-up view of Hubble, the burned-out cinder of a planet on which a colony of Mogats tried to make a stand.

“Oh, sorry; would you display the prenova image of the Templar System?” Sweetwater asked.

A moment later the image of a very crowded solar system appeared. The system had three planets orbiting so close to its sun that the planets could not have been habitable. There was a fourth planet that had surface area covered by water, a fifth planet that resembled Earth, and seven more planets that looked too dark to provide productive habitation.

“This is the Templar System,” said Sweetwater. “The fifth planet is about the same distance from its sun as our Earth is from Sol.

“About fifty thousand years ago, some event caused Templar to expand suddenly, then go supernova,” Breeze said. “Please understand, gentlemen, that fifty thousand years is a very short amount of time in astronomical terms. In astronomy, we generally measure events by millions of years. In this case, a sun expanded and cooked everything around it in a matter of fifty thousand years.

“As you can see, the first three planets in this system vanished entirely. But this planet”—he pointed to the fifth planet again—“this planet survived after a fashion.”

The screen now showed the familiar murky landscapes of Hubble.

“We sent a military force to this planet a few years back and found that everything on it was made of the extreme-hydrogenation elemental compound,” Sweetwater said.

“Distilled shit gas?” one of the generals asked.

“That was not the only time we ever encountered that gas,” Sweetwater said. “Arthur, will you please show us the Mogats’ solar system?”

The screen showed a new solar system. Like the Templar System, this one had gone dark. “This is the planet on which the Mogats built their home world,” Sweetwater said.

General Hill, from the Air Force, started to speak, but Sweetwater cut him off. “Their home world was nearly the exact same distance from its sun as Hubble was from Templar …as Earth is from Sol …as New Copenhagen is from Nigellus.”

The generals remained silent. They stared at the screen, which once again showed the map with the Avatari movements across the galaxy. “We have come to the conclusion that the same solar positioning that makes planets productive for human habitation also makes them desirable to the Avatari,” Sweetwater said. “That would explain why they have only sleeved the planets we have colonized or planned to colonize.”

“Why would they pump distilled shit gas into a planet?” General Newcastle asked, now rejoining the discussion.

“It’s not shit gas,” said Sweetwater. “The stuff they’re importing into New Copenhagen is something else that we think can be turned into shit gas. It’s highly toxic. Direct contact with the gas would be fatal. A healthy man who breathed this gas would die in under a minute. A few traces of this gas seeped into Lieutenant Harris’s helmet and left him with a second-degree burn.”

“The toxicity level from this gas is extreme,” Breeze added. “If you poured a single gallon of that gas into Valhalla Lake, you would contaminate the water. That would be a ratio of one part gas to 160 million parts water, and the water would be rendered unsalvageable.”

“From what the data tell us, this gas will expand exponentially when superheated. That is why we are more concerned about what the Avatari are doing with the sun than we are concerned about their work in the mountains,” said Sweetwater.

“To the sun?” Several of the generals asked this at the same time.

“Dr. Breeze,” Sweetwater said with a nod.

Now that we had entered his specialty, Breeze took over the meeting. He paused to collect his thoughts and steel his confidence, then said, “I have not been able to experiment on the gas itself, of course, but from w-what I have been able to observe, this gas is a catalyst. Hypothetically, it has the ability to transmogrify everything around it into the same extreme-hydrogenation elemental compound distillation found on Hubble and the Mogat home world. Of course, before it can do that, it must be superheated.”

“And how exactly do you expect the aliens to superheat the gas?” asked General Newcastle.

“By causing the nearest star to supernova,” Breeze answered. He showed no emotion as he said this, merely blinking as he saw the commotion his announcement had caused.

“You think they are going to blow up the sun?” General Newcastle asked, his voice cutting through the confusion.

“They do not want to cause Nigellus to explode, they want to make it expand until it is large enough to incinerate New Copenhagen,” Breeze said.

“That is what they did to the stars in the Templar and Hadriean systems,” added Sweetwater.

This caused even more commotion.

“You’re telling us that it’s not going to make any difference if we beat these bastards or not; our goose is still cooked?” asked General Haight, who was clearly struggling to make sense of this.

“As a worst-case scenario, yes, that seems to be the case,” Sweetwater said.

“We’re stuck on a planet with an alien army we can’t kill. The sons of bitches are filling the mountains with enough toxic gas to poison the entire specking planet. Now you’re telling us that they’re getting ready to blow up the sun and incinerate the entire specking solar system. Sweetwater, you don’t think this qualifies as a worst-case scenario?” asked General Haight.