The Clone Redemption (28 page)

I did not know the Bible from front to back, but I remembered a few words here and there. Six of those words came back to me. I said, “Let the dead bury the dead.”

The words woke Freeman from his stupor. He glared at me, and growled, “What is that supposed to mean?” That was the first time I'd ever heard rage in his voice.

“It means that we can kill ourselves trying to warn people who cannot be saved, but we cannot save them. It means that I would rather get caught by a sniper's bullet than be stood in front of a firing squad. They will spend their last hours humping girlfriends, fishing, reading, going to the specking ballet ... doing whatever it is they like to do. I'd rather go that way than spend my last hours panicking about death.”

As I said this, I thought about mothers holding their children. What does a mother do when she learns that all of her children will die at the end of the day? Does she tuck them into bed and tell them a story? Does she give them candy for their final meal? Does she think about her own death? Having never had a mother, I imagined each of them as superhuman, a cross between a saint, a martyr, and a drill sergeant.

I had no concept of what it meant to lose family. Freeman did. His father, a Neo-Baptist minister, died defending his colony. The Avatari had burned Freeman's last relations when they attacked New Copenhagen. I was haunted by my imagination. He was haunted by his memories.

Sounding like Admiral Liotta and hating myself for it, I said, “Solomon was a lost cause.”

Freeman, big as he was, standing there so still and silent, reminded me of a spider on a web in some abandoned archway. I was a weakling, and he was a spider, and we lived in a universe that was crumbling around us. He spun webs, and I made plans, but we were feeble. Neither his webs nor my plans mattered in the end.

There is nothing I hate more than the feeling of helplessness,
I told myself; but it was not the truth. I hated the Unified Authority more than I hated feeling helpless; and I hated the Avatari more than anything else.

Under normal circumstances, the pilot of the first transport was a talkative man. So were the two technicians. But flying a mission they all expected to result in their deaths, they had lost interest in chatting.

From one million miles out, planet A-361-B looked like a very small moon. Each hour brought them two hundred thousand miles closer to their destination, and from their current position, the pilot could see that the planet was the color of platinum rather than the dull white of a moon.

He sat alone in the cockpit. They did not need to spend these hours flying to A-361-B; the S.I.P.s could have traveled to the planet in one-one-hundredth the time. The pilot thought about mentioning that fact to his crew, then decided against it. What if the aliens tracked the S.I.P.s to their transport? This way, maybe they could buy themselves a few additional hours to live.

His orders were to fire the pods from just outside the ion curtain. Yamashiro's orders made it clear that firing the pods from a million miles away wasn't an option, however much it was a temptation.

In his heart, though, the pilot knew it didn't matter. Nothing would penetrate the tachyon shell. It disassembled waves. Sound and light dissolved into it. The S.I.P.s would hit the outer side of the sleeved atmosphere and explode. Maybe the ion curtain would suck the energy out of them, then repulse them.

The few times the pilot peered out of the cockpit, he found his technicians sitting along opposite ends of the same kettle wall. They could have been talking over the interLink, but he doubted they were.

The pilot made no effort to control the flight. He'd switched the computers to autopilot and spent the time slumped in his seat, reviewing his life. He thought about his failures and successes, remembered his parents, relived the pain of his young wife's death, and wondered what life might have been like had she had lived. He had no children.

From five thousand miles away, planet A-361-B filled the cockpit's windshield. He realized that he didn't see the planet, just the “sleeve” that had closed around its atmosphere. From the outside, it looked like a solid layer, like someone had dipped the planet in white gold.

“We're here,” the pilot told the technicians. “We're almost in position. Let's make this quick.”

He did not want to die, though having accepted that his death was imminent, it did not scare him as it had back when he began the flight. Since leaving the
Sakura
, he had gone through all the steps. Denial and anger came first but ended almost after takeoff. The bargaining stage did not last long because he had some measure of control over his fate. If the pilot turned the transport around, he would survive the mission and live as a coward. A man of duty, he preferred death over a life of shame ... and maybe a short life at that. He'd seen what had happened to the
Onoda
, the
Kyoto
, and the
Yamato
.

The pilot did not believe in God, and the idea of an afterlife trapped in the Yasukuni Shrine held no fascination for him. Now, as he spun the transport so that the rear hatch faced the planet, depression and acceptance glided along parallel tracks in his head.

The pilot did not hesitate as he worked the controls. Maybe the aliens could target the oxygen in his armor, or maybe they would target the air in his lungs and sear him from the inside out. It no longer mattered. All that mattered was the mission, and the pilot would give his life and the lives of his technicians to see it through.

He switched off the controls for what he believed would be the very last time and walked out of the cockpit. In the kettle, the technicians had already loaded the S.I.P.s into the launching device but had not yet pulled the device into position. As the pilot watched from the catwalk, one of the techs hit the button to open the hatch.

Here it comes,
thought the pilot. He was sure that it would be the moment, and he braced himself. A soft tremor ran through the belly of the transport as the thick iron doors slowly ground into place.

Standing on his perch above the kettle, the pilot could not see the ramp. His curiosity got the better of him, and he slid down the ladder. He had not turned off the gravity inside the transport, just notched it down to about one-third gravity level on Earth.

He touched down lightly on the metal deck, turned, and saw the far end of the ship. The rear hatch framed the view of A-361-B glinting like a giant shining sphere of molten silver. As the pilot watched, the technicians pulled the launching device along a rail that ran down the ramp. The device reached from the floor to the ceiling. It looked like a miniature Ferris wheel, with coffins instead of seats. When it locked into place at the bottom of the ramp, blocking his view of the planet, the pilot went even closer. In the distance, he could see the second transport still drifting into position, its rear hatch open.

From initiation to completion, the firing process took five seconds. Once the launching device was in place, a technician pressed a button, and the device fired the S.I.P.s into space. Knowing there was no point in trying to escape, the crew stood in place and watched.

They could not see the infiltration pods. Powered by field-resonance engines, the pods traveled the five thousand miles to the planet in a fraction of a second. Nothing happened. The S.I.P.s did not explode. The air in their rebreathers did not heat up to thousands of degrees.

They stood there, at the edge of the transport, staring out at the planet, realizing that nothing had or would happen. They would return to the
Sakura
having failed their mission and survived. The technicians slid the launching device back in place, and the pilot began the long flight back.

“We cannot go back to Earth. There's no going back if the Unified Authority is at war. They'll shoot us down before we can identify ourselves,” said Yamashiro.

Where have they gone?
he asked himself. Miyamoto Genyo, the modern-day Samurai, had always sat to Yamashiro's left. With the
Onoda
destroyed, Miyamoto's seat remained vacant. Takahashi sat to his right; but the chair beside him, which once belonged to Captain Takeda Gunpei of the
Yamato
, sat empty. At the far end of the table, an empty chair marked the space once occupied by Yokoi Shigeru, the late captain of the late
Kyoto
.

Commander Suzuki now sat at the table. This had once been a room for admirals and captains; now it had space for commanders and enlisted men—Master Chief Corey Oliver sat at the table.

Yamashiro harbored no prejudice against clones. He did not care about the master chief's synthetic conception. His rank was another story. Oliver was a master chief petty officer, an enlisted man; and that, by definition, placed him below real officers.

So there they sat, the admiral of a one-ship fleet, the captain of that ship sitting with his second-in-command, and an enlisted clone.
I should invite Lieutenant Hara,
Yamashiro thought.
He could come representing the underworld element.

“We cannot destroy the enemy, and we cannot return to Earth,” said Takahashi. “It sounds like we have run out of options?”

Yamashiro turned to study the SEAL.
He knows what I am going to say,
he thought.
Somehow, the
kage no yasha
knows what I am going to say.

“No. We can still destroy the enemy,” he said, and he was not surprised when Oliver gave him a slight nod.

“How can we do that?” asked Takahashi. “We fired our most powerful weapon at their shield, and it failed. If infiltration pods can't break through, nothing can.”

“I intend to detonate the pods from inside the layer,” said Yamashiro. “We will broadcast this ship into the atmosphere . . .”

“They'll melt us like they melted the
Onoda
,” said Takahashi.

“They won't,” grunted Yamashiro, his expression cold. “If we broadcast the
Sakura
inside their atmosphere, they will not be able to incinerate us without incinerating themselves.”

“Broadcast inside the sleeve?” asked Takahashi. “That would not be possible. Nothing gets through the sleeve.”

“We would not broadcast through it. We would materialize inside it,” Yamashiro barked. Then his voice softened, as he said, “We are honor-bound to succeed. This is the only way that we can.”

Takahashi did not believe he had heard his father-in-law correctly. Stunned, he reviewed the sentence in his head. Finally, he said, “Admiral, we won't be able to fly our ship once we are inside. The sleeve grounded the U.A. Air Force during the battle for Copenhagen. The fighter pilots weren't able to fly higher than a thousand feet before their jets stopped working. The same thing will happen to us. Our computers ... our electrical systems, our defenses ... We'll be just as vulnerable as those fighters were, with less room to maneuver.”

Yamashiro responded with a smile so sour that his son-in-law looked away. He said, “No, Hironobu, we won't need to worry about that. We won't live long enough for it to be a factor.”

“The information we are going to discuss is classified,” Yamashiro grunted the words. He had received the information twenty-four hours ago but postponed the briefing until he had time to compose his thoughts.

Yamashiro did not hold the briefing in the conference room just off the bridge, the place he normally conducted business. The conference room was secure, but secure was not secure enough, not when the discussion involved the destruction of the
Sakura
and her crew. He held the briefing in the small office attached to his billet.

Starting the moment the briefing ended, he would never again allow himself to speak kindly in public. When asked questions, he would grunt single-word answers. When he wanted work done, he would bark his commands. He could reveal no weakness and no indecision. Kindness and civility could be mistaken for weakness, so he would keep his eyes hard and his expression flat.

Yamashiro presided over the briefing, but it was Lieutenant Tatsu Hara's show. As the intelligence officer who ran the computer simulations, Hara supplied the critical information.

Though every person on the
Sakura
knew Hara, Yamashiro began the meeting by introducing him, then he sat down.

Tatsu Hara was young, and tall, and skinny, a man in his early twenties with the moon-shaped face of a sixteen-year-old. His hair was regulation length, short at the back and off the ears; but his inch-long locks had been pressed into tight curls and bleached brown and blond. He lived on the edge of regulations, brantoos—a tattooing process that involved burning the skin, then tinting the scar—of lotus flowers,
Kanji
characters, women, and demons covered his arms and neck. He wore dark glasses and, as he stood, paused one second to remove them before opening his mouth, then placed the shades in the pocket of his blouse. The man was an officer but also a gangster. The brantoos, the hair, and the shades were the tokens of the
Yakuza
.

Hara ran the Pachinko parlors and the bars aboard the ship, but he performed his MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) well. He was a gifted computer tech; and his side operations contributed to crew morale. Had he been asked what he thought of Lieutenant Tatsu Hara, Yamashiro would have described him as an asset to the mission.