Rogue clone (29 page)

“No,” the man admitted.

“Shut up,” the jailor snapped.

“He’s in jail, Sam, and he’s down to his skivvies. How is he going to tell anyone?” Then the man seemed to think twice about this before adding, “We will ask the questions from here on out, Harris. We have not decided what to do with you yet. I suggest you conduct yourself properly. Execution is not out of the question.”

They left me in my cell with nothing to do and no way of knowing how much time passed. I laid on the cot in my underwear staring at the ceiling and tried to piece together all of the little fragments of information I had collected. It seemed like the separatists had a genuine Power Struggle on their hands. They had an alliance, but all three sides were claiming the Navy for themselves. Why did the Japanese officers wear different uniforms than the other men? Did the Mogats consider themselves part of the Confederate Arms? Did the Japanese? My thoughts drifted and I fell asleep.

“I knew it was you the moment I heard they had a prisoner.” “Smiling” Tom Halverson, my nickname for him, stood outside my cell looking dapper in his dress whites, with the three gold stripes of a full admiral on his shoulder boards. He’d cut his graying hair into a flattop, but otherwise he looked no different than the first time I saw him, on the bridge of the
Doctrinaire
. “Hello, Harris.”

“Get specked,” I said.

“Watch yourself, clone.” Sam, my blond-haired jailor, warned me. Whenever people visited me, Sam accompanied them.

“That’s all right, Sergeant. Colonel Harris and I are old acquaintances,” Halverson said. “Is that why you’re here, Harris? Did you come for me?”

I did not respond.

“No comment, Harris? That doesn’t sound good.”

“The admiral asked you a question,” Sam said in his most menacing voice.

“That’s all right, Sergeant,” Halverson said.

“You know, Harris, you really are amazing. The rest of them can’t even locate our ships and you turn up on one of them. It’s a good thing the Unified Authority doesn’t have one hundred more of you. Of course if they want to win the war they can make more of you. But then, I get the feeling that all you want is a little revenge.”

“Why did you kill him?” I asked, propping myself up to look at Halverson. “You and Klyber were friends.”

“I should have thought that was obvious, Harris. He’s with the Unified Authority. I defected to the Confederate Arms. We were on different sides.”

“Get specked,” I said, slumping over on my back.

“I brought you a present, Harris.”

I did not respond.

“You can break these if you want, but I went to a lot of trouble to get them for you, so don’t expect me to replace them if you do.” He tossed a pair of mediaLink shades in through the bars.

“Bryce said you liked to keep up with current events. There should be some dandy news for you to follow over the next few weeks.

“And don’t bother trying to send messages out on those. I had the sending gear disabled.” With this, Halverson turned and left.

“You were stupid,” I yelled as he reached the door to the brig. “Killing Admiral Klyber was a stupid mistake.”

Halverson paused. “Why is that, Colonel?” he asked.

“Huang already planned to replace him with . . .”

“With Robert Thurston, no doubt,” Halverson said. He watched me for a moment with that implacable smile, and then he left.

Sam, who remained just outside the bars of my cell, continued to stare at me with those narrow green eyes that looked both alert and angry. Sometimes he looked like he could barely control himself. “If you break the lenses, they’d make real sharp blades. You might be able to save us some trouble and slit your own throat with ’em,” he said. “I’d like that.” Then he favored me with his backside, leaving me to pick up the shades.

I picked them up and turned them over in my hands to examine them from every angle. This was an expensive pair, far more stylish than the plastic shades I took from the late Derrick Hines. These shades had gold wire frames and honest-to-goodness glass lenses that automatically adjusted to ambient light levels.

The strip along the bottom of the lenses with the microphones had been removed. When I slipped the shades over my eyes and jacked in, I saw they had been hobbled so that the sending functions no longer worked. The browsing functions worked well however.

We were somewhere in the Norma Arm. Not only could I browse the Unified Authority-approved channels, I also found local broadcasts that were banned and filtered out of the U.A. media. Calendars were everywhere on the Link, and I knew that it was now March 26. Eleven days had passed since Bryce Klyber’s death. Thirty-six hours had passed since the attack on New Columbia. It was here that I watched the video feeds of the attack on New Columbia. I got to see how both sides reported the battle. The big story on the U.A. feeds was the unveiling of the
Doctrinaire
. Admiral Huang, now officially the highest-ranking man in the Navy after Klyber’s death, could not have been any better suited for the role of tour guide. He began his tours by telling the press how the late Fleet Admiral Klyber conceived the project and spearheaded the construction of the ship.

Huang escorted a large group of reporters on a tour of the
Doctrinaire
. He charmed them with his enthusiasm as he led them into battle turret after battle turret, then showed them the observation deck from which they could view the rest of the ship.

Huang did not reveal classified secrets like the dual broadcast generators, but he highlighted many of the obvious innovations. No reporter could possibly have missed the four launch tubes that ran the length of the hull of the
Doctrinaire
, so Huang talked about the fighter squadrons at length. He pointed out that most fighter carriers had a single tube and a compliment of seventy Tomcat fighters. The
Doctrinaire
, with its four tubes, had 280 fighters. With their rounded antennas’ the new shield technology was impossible to miss; so Huang told the reporters about the rounded shields and gave a cursory explanation about the technology that made them possible.

As Huang finished speaking, he was joined by the other Joint Chiefs and several senators. Hundreds of reporters sat in folding chairs, the way they might have attended the unveiling of the old Earth-bound battleships five hundred years earlier. They would have fit more comfortably in one of the ship’s briefing auditoriums than on the observation deck, but Huang saw a great photo opportunity and had the media sense to take advantage of it.

This was a side of Huang that I had never known about. He stood behind a small podium looking absolutely resplendent in his white uniform with its many medals. He and Halverson had the same number of gold stripes across their shoulder boards—three, but Huang cut a more commanding figure with the gray in his hair and his athletic build. Huang and Halverson were about the same age, but Huang wore it better. Huang looked like a middle-aged man. Halverson looked like a man closing in on his sixties. Smiling pleasantly, Huang opened the floor for questions, and every hand shot up. Reporters clambered for his attention until he finally selected a man near the front of the audience.

“This is unquestionably an amazing ship. But it is still just one ship. How can it possibly fare against an attack force like the sixty-five ships that sacked New Columbia?”

“Excellent question,” Huang said. “We have arranged a demonstration to address that very point. If you are not satisfied after our demonstration, we can discuss it further.”

Every reporter’s hand went up again. Huang selected a woman from the front row. “Can a ship this size self-broadcast reliably?”

“I think Admiral Klyber struggled a long time with that question,” Huang said. “The engines on this ship are perfectly reliable. We have tested them thoroughly . . .”

“Didn’t Admiral Klyber die in a broadcast malfunction?” the reporter followed up her own question.

“An unfortunate irony, if you like,” said Huang. “The broadcast equipment in this ship is completely stable.”

The reporters raised their hands. Huang selected his next inquisitor.

“Admiral Klyber was going to command this ship, was he not? Who will command it in his place?”

“Admiral Klyber never intended to command this ship. He was a fleet admiral, you know. You don’t assign a fleet admiral to a single ship. Rear Admiral Robert Thurston was selected to command the
Doctrinaire
while Klyber commanded the entire fleet.”

“Rear Admiral Thurston?” the reporter asked quickly, before Huang could open the floor for the next question. “The commander of the Scutum-Crux Fleet?”

“Yes,” said Huang. “As you may recall, he commanded our forces to victory at Hubble and Little Man.”

Thurston stepped onto the dais in his whites. A few of the less experienced reporters, the ones who had never seen Thurston, laughed or gasped at his youthful appearance. Short and skinny, with spiky red hair and an adolescent’s face, Robert Thurston always looked out of place in his uniform, especially standing next to a seasoned officer like Huang. The senators at the back of the dais looked like they could have been Thurston’s grandparents.

The questions continued for ten more minutes. The session would have gone on for hours had Huang allowed it, but he had promised a final demonstration.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I suggest you prepare yourselves. We are about to enter a war zone,” said Huang.

Smoky-colored tinting appeared in the glass ceiling and walls of the observation deck turning them opaque. The reporters spoke nervously among themselves as they saw the muted flashes of lightning all around them. It was one thing to sit in some comfortable commuter craft and pass through the Broadcast Network. This was raw. Here they sat on folding chairs on the glass-encased deck of a monolithic battleship while millions of volts of electricity danced on the glass just above their heads. When the lightning stopped and the tinting cleared, the
Doctrinaire
was in a battle zone. Looking around the crown of the observation deck, you could see dozens of ships buzzing around it.

“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Cygnus Arm. In case it has slipped your attention, this is one of the Confederate Arms. We are forty thousand light years deep in enemy territory.

“What you see flying outside our shields are twenty-five ships from what we in the Navy call the

‘mothball fleet.’ These are vintage ships. These are battleships from 2488 and newer. They are fully functional, space-worthy ships. They were perfectly preserved for just such an occasion as this.

“Who is flying them?” a reporter called out.

“Not to worry,” Huang said, “they are not being manned by live crews.”

Knowing Huang and his disdain for synthetic life, it would not have surprised me to learn that those ships had all-clone crews. But even the cost of raising clones comes out of the budget, so Huang most likely controlled these ships using remotely controlled computers.

Zipping around, weaving in and out and around each other, the old battleships circled around the
Doctrinaire
from two miles off.

“Before we begin our actual battle,” Huang said, “you should know that the ships around us are using live ammunition. Rear Admiral Thurston, would you direct one of those battleships to attack?”

One of the battleships charged straight at the
Doctrinaire
and fired. It shot a brilliant burst of bright red laser fire followed by three torpedoes. I could not believe what I saw. This was a full-on assault. A lethal attack. The translucent shields turned milky white where the beam hit. The laser beam was round and red and as thick around as a tree stump, but it stopped dead at the shields. Moments later, the three torpedoes slammed into the shields and burst into puddles of light that dissolved quickly in the vacuum of space.

Most of the reporters gasped and a few screamed.

“As I stated before, the attacking ships are decommissioned U.A. Navy ships. We stopped using these fifteen years ago because their technology was obsolete, surpassed by technologies which are now also considered obsolete. These ships were made twenty years after the ships currently used by the Confederate Arms,” said Huang.

Huang now pulled an old-fashioned analog pocket watch from the podium. He held it up for the reporters to see. “Let the battle begin,” he said.

“Admiral Klyber spared nothing when he designed this ship,” Huang said. “He wanted to make the ship that would end the war . . . a ship that would terrify enemies into abandoning their Revolution.”

Above Huang’s head, the vacuum of space looked like a thunderstorm. Hundreds of torpedoes pecked at the shields from every angle. They burst and vanished leaving no trace. Laser beams slammed into the canopy creating a crimson light show.

“I think it’s time we teach these marauders a lesson,” Huang said, tensing his thumb over the timer button on the pocket watch. “Admiral Thurston, return fire.” The watch bobbed up and down as he clicked the timer.

Laser bursts fired from the side of the
Doctrinaire
. I had never seen these cannons tested, so I did not know what to expect. The battleships continued to fire lasers and torpedoes at the
Doctrinaire
, but nothing penetrated the shields. Seeing these fireworks reminded me of watching a light rain fall through a see-though umbrella.

The cannons on the
Doctrinaire
fired measured bursts. The cannon fire made a sizzling sound that lasted one-half of a second at most.
Dzzzz. Dzzzz
. You could see it launch if you happened to look at the right cannon just as it fired. The laser looked like a solid red rod that issued from the cannon and vanished. The bursts traveled at the speed of light. The time that it took for the laser bursts to pass through the shields was so short that they could not be measured by any instrument. Out in the blackness that engulfed the observation deck, “enemy” ships exploded.

Lasers from the
Doctrinaire
penetrated the hulls of the attacking ships as if they had no shields. There would be a flash. A ball of fire and smoke would flush out of the injured ship precisely where the laser hit. Everything burst from the laser wound, then the injured ships went dark. They were not crushed. They simply coughed out everything inside them as if all of their innards had been sucked out by space itself. The computer-controlled targeting system on the
Doctrinaire
wasted few shots. Lasers burst in all directions. Many of the ships in the attacking fleet were hit two and three times.
Dzzzzz
, and they burst and died.
Dzzzz
.
Dzzzz
, and the crumbled carcasses turned red and somersaulted in space. The lasers might melt the surface of the ships, but the absolute cold of space quenched the damage. Soon there was so much debris floating around the
Doctrinaire
that it looked like the ship had entered an asteroid belt.