Rogue Clone: The Clone Betrayal Part 8

The other carriers would take longer as they were Perseus-cla.s.s, vessels twice as big as the Kamehameha. While the basic crew of a Perseus-cla.s.s fighter carrier was only slightly larger than the crew of an Expansion-cla.s.s s.h.i.+p, Perseus carriers stowed five times as many Marines and twice as many fighters. All fighter pilots were natural-born.

And the carriers only formed the backbone of the Scutum-Crux Fleet. There were 90 battles.h.i.+ps, 150 frigates, 120 cruisers, and sundry communications s.h.i.+ps, minelayers and minesweepers, and scouts, and more. At four hundred men per trip, it would take Pers.h.i.+ng months to ferry all natural-born officers back to Earth. Maybe years.

Sitting in the windowless kettle of the transport, I did not get a view of the cruiser as we left, nor did I catch a glimpse of the Kamehameha as we approached her. I sat in the darkness of the cabin with my men listening to the noise of the landing gear. The rear doors ground open, and the officer on duty came up the ramp.

I told my NCOs to keep their helmets on, then removed my helmet and went to meet the duty officer. I met him on the ramp, saluted, and said, "Requesting permission to come aboard, sir."

The officer returned my salute, and said, "Permission granted, Captain." With that simple ceremony, we took up residence in the Scutum-Crux Fleet.

Rear Admiral Lawrence Thorne met me as I came off the transport. He stood with an entourage of no less than seventeen officers. I counted them. You can tell a lot about an officer by the number of remora fish trailing behind him.

One of the men in Thorne's group had an anchor and two stars on his collar-the insignia of a master chief petty officer. The rest wore eagles, cl.u.s.ters, and bars. These were high-ranking officers. Thorne stood out because he was the only officer with a star. His single star identified him as a lower-half rear admiral.

I could not help but wonder at the Scutum-Crux Fleet's drop in stature. Years ago, when I arrived as a young corporal, a five-star admiral had command of the fleet. He was replaced by Rear Admiral Robert Thurston, an upper-half rear admiral with two stars. With Thorne in command, the fleet was down to one star. Once I took over, the stars would be replaced by the silver bars of a captain.

Admiral Thorne and his parade of officers greeted me as I stepped from the ramp. With all those younger officers trailing behind him, Thorne looked like a broken old man. My first impression of him was not good.

I saluted the admiral, and he returned my salute.

"You must be Captain Harris," he said. "Welcome aboard, Captain."

"Thank you, sir," I said.

"Warshaw, see to Captain Harris's gear." Thorne called over his shoulder, not looking back when the one noncom in the entourage acknowledged the order. "Your men are in good hands, Captain. In the meantime, why don't I get you up to speed with your new fleet."

I turned to look at Warshaw. He was a master chief petty officer, the ranking enlisted man in the Scutum-Crux Fleet. He gave me a smart salute.

He was, of course, a clone, but he stood out because he looked short for a clone. He was as tall as any clone of his make, of course; but he was more squat. He had broad, bulging shoulders and a neck like a bull's-the earmarks of a dedicated bodybuilder. The forms of his biceps and triceps filled his sleeves.

Warshaw barked rapid-fire orders to his men. Watching the master chief, I got the feeling that he pretty much ran the show on this s.h.i.+p.

"Perhaps we should begin your tour, Captain," Thorne said to me, interrupting my thoughts.

The docking bay of the Kamehameha was brightly lit, every bit as immaculate as I remembered it, and large enough to hold twenty-five transports. Pers.h.i.+ng might have been able to fit half of his cruiser in this docking bay, and the other half in the second docking bay on the other side of the s.h.i.+p.

As we crossed the deck, Thorne said, "Your crew is as competent as any crew that has ever flown this fleet. We spent the last year training them.

"There is an all-clone crew manning the bridge at this very moment. There are enlisted-man crews flying every s.h.i.+p in the fleet. At this point, my officers are acting in an advisory role."

"Is that so?" I asked, unable to come up with a more interested response.

"You have a full complement of fighter pilots, all clones, all noncommissioned officers. It's a shame we didn't experiment with clone pilots earlier, this fleet has never run so smoothly," the admiral said in a loud voice, sounding like a salesman with a hearing problem. After a moment I realized that he was speaking as much for the benefit of the remora fish entourage as for mine.

He stopped and handed me a folder. "This is your new chain of command. You'll want to meet with your staff as soon as possible. There are a million things that can go wrong transferring command of a fleet, and I want this transfer to go as smoothly as possible."

"You sound anxious to get home," I said in as friendly a voice as I could. I did not want the admiral to know just how bitter I felt.

Thorne was an old man with a wrinkled face and alert blue eyes. He heard my comment and detected the disrespect hidden underneath my words. His smile did not falter, but his eyes narrowed. "Captain, I have officers who would kill to get home. Some of those boys thought they might never see home again. You bet they want to get home."

Since I had presumably been stationed here for the remainder of my life, I felt less than sympathetic. I took the folder without opening it.

Thorne turned and continued down the hall. He looked to be in his sixties. His hair had gone all white and thinned around the corners. Instead of a beard, he had powdery stubble on his cheeks and chin. Tall but bent by age, he had a stooped back, though his scrawny shoulders were as straight across as lumber.

Admiral Thorne's entourage followed behind as we left the hangar and entered a corridor that led all the way across the s.h.i.+p. "You once served on this s.h.i.+p, did you not?" Thorne asked.

"I did, sir," I said.

"Was that under Admiral Klyber? I was a.s.signed to the Scutum-Crux Inner Fleet when Klyber combined the fleets," Thorne said.

I was on the Kamehameha when Klyber combined the fleets and said so. Then, in an attempt to show polite interest, I asked, "Have you been rea.s.signed to the Earth Fleet?" I knew the Navy would not bother a.s.signing a fossil like Admiral Thorne to another fleet, his career was over.

To his credit, Admiral Thorne did not take well to flattery. "The new Navy has almost as much room for overage officers as it has for clones. They're putting us both out to pasture." Then he lowered his voice to a croak, and said, "The difference between my new a.s.signment and yours is that the Pentagon does not see me as a threat."

I wondered if I had heard him correctly. This was something I had not expected-honesty.

As I sorted this out, Thorne dismissed his entourage. They scattered in every direction like a flock of birds. When two officers lingered, he growled, "Did you need something?"

One man in particular, a captain, looked stunned, even fl.u.s.tered. "But sir, Admiral Brocius said . . ."

Apparently the soon-to-retire Lawrence Thorne did not give a flying speck what Admiral Brocius might or might not have said. "This is a conference for fleet commanders, Captain Stone. The last time I checked, you weren't on the invite list."

"But, sir, Admiral . . ."

"I give the orders on this s.h.i.+p," Thorne said in a voice so sarcastic it did not sound like something that could come from an old man's mouth. He licked his lips. "And here is a direct order, 'You are dismissed.'"

Stone took a step, stopped, took another step, and stopped again. Confusion showed on his face. He had orders from a higher authority than this broken-down admiral, but the officer who had issued them was too far away for an appeal.

"Don't make me repeat myself, Stone," Thorne said, now raising his voice.

Captain Stone turned smartly and strode away; quite the dignified officer. Once he disappeared around a corner, Admiral Thorne said, "Have they told you that rubbish about commanding the most powerful fleet in the galaxy?"

"Yes, sir," I said.

"Did they tell you the entire arm would be at your command?"

"Something along that line," I said.

"You do know it's all bulls.h.i.+t?"

"I had that feeling," I said.

Thorne laughed. "They tried to sell me the same line. Let me give you the skinny, Harris. Even if everything goes according to plan, you're still stuck out here a trillion miles from home. You and your men are going to be marooned out here, and nothing is ever going to change that."

I nodded.

"I bet you think it's an antisynthetic conspiracy. Do you think they sent you out here because you're a clone?" Thorne asked. "Somebody told me that you knew you were a Liberator clone and not to worry about the death reflex." He looked at me, concern showing in his sky-blue eyes.

"I know that I am a clone, sir."

"You're a Liberator, right?" He said the term "Liberator" with little emotion. "I've gone over your record. Not a bad record. It might even be a great record if they hadn't flagged you for killing superior officers.

"You're a Liberator; they should have expected a little fratricide from you. That's why they discontinued your kind."

Thorne walked as he spoke, leading me through the halls at a pace so fast that no one could follow us without looking suspicious. "We're outdated, Captain Harris. I'm old and you're obsolete. Didn't they stop making your kind fifty years ago? We're both marked for extinction."

The old man chattered nervously. He might have been scared of Liberators, but he might have just been giddy knowing that my arrival meant he could soon go home.

He paused to take a breath or possibly to let me respond. I had nothing to say. When I first saw him, I thought Admiral Thorne was a dried-up relic, a paper-pusher who had been pressed into commanding an inconsequential fleet. I might have been partly right, but there was something more to this man.

"They sold me the same line when I took command of the fleet three years ago. That was right after the aliens sleeved Terraneau. I was fifth in the command chain at the time. Admiral Chen should have taken command, but he had a brother in the Senate. Admiral Long was under him. He had an uncle on the Linear Committee. They both went home. I didn't have any high-ranking relatives, so they promoted me to admiral and congratulated me for becoming 'the most powerful man in the galaxy.'

"They had to reach a long way down the chain to find someone they could leave behind," Thorne said. "That was three years ago."

I heard what he said, but my attention strayed. Three sailors walked past us down the hall, and I could have sworn that two of them had blue eyelids. It wasn't a dark p.r.o.nounced blue, just a light, faint shade that could easily be overlooked.

I watched them walk past, my eyes following them even as they turned a corner and headed away from us.

"Is something the matter?" Thorne asked.

"No, just . . . I saw something I didn't . . . I'm fine," I said, feeling confused.

I knew the layout of the Kamehameha well, so I was surprised when Admiral Thorne walked past the bank of elevators that led to the fleet decks. He caught me looking back at the elevator, and asked, "What's the matter?"

"Aren't those the elevators to Fleet Command?"

"We're not going to Fleet Command, Captain."

"Where are we going?"

"Those men you saw following me when you arrived, they are all fleet officers. They're waiting for us on the fleet deck so they can give you a proper briefing. I want to take a few minutes to brief you improperly."

"That's very kind of you," I said, feeling a little suspicious.

By this time Thorne had led me across the s.h.i.+p to the second docking bay. Here he stopped, and said, "I want to start by showing you the things I am supposed to show you, then I thought I might show you what that p.r.i.c.k Stone did to this s.h.i.+p behind my back. I've got something to show you that neither of us is supposed to know about."

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

A fleet of five transports sat in the darkened hangar. These were obese, ugly s.h.i.+ps with immoderately small wings sticking out of the distended bellies of their cabin. The spine that stretched from the c.o.c.kpit to the tail along the top of the transports looked like it had been thrown on as an afterthought. The transports stood on struts instead of wheels, though they struggled with vertical takeoffs in atmospheric conditions. Lacking even the semblance of aerodynamics and entirely unable to glide, they dropped like bricks when their thrusters cut out; but they were the workhorses of the Unified Authority's invasion force. Without them, the Army and Marines would have been grounded.

Admiral Thorne led me to the first bird in the line and pointed between the struts. "This is the one with the torpedo tube," he said.

I bent down but still could not see the modification, so I dropped to my knees. A cylinder the size and shape of an Army boot hung from the bottom of the s.h.i.+p. It looked almost as if someone had welded a boot to the cha.s.sis.

"That's it?" I asked, amazed that such a small barrel could house a nuclear-tipped torpedo. I remained on my knees, staring into that tube. Deep inside it, I could see the rounded point of a red-tipped cone.

"Armed and ready," Thorne said. He coughed a dry, wheezing sort of cough. It was an old man's cough, not one caused by congested lungs or something in his throat.

I fired off a nuclear device once. The sight was dazzling and mesmerizing and horrible. Heat, or radiation, or maybe it was just force, rose from the center of the explosion like an electric sheet. I remember thinking that with some skill, you could protect yourself from a bullet or a knife; but with a nuke, there was nothing you could do. It would kill you, then incinerate your body no matter how you tried to protect yourself. The realization that I would once again be dealing with a weapon designed to destroy areas instead of people left me nervous.

"Per your request, the other transports are not armed. You have one armed transport, and that transport is armed with one torpedo. If the shot fails, you're going to need to return to the s.h.i.+p for another torpedo, Captain. I don't understand why you wouldn't want us to place tubes on the other transports."

"If we need another one, we can come back easily enough," I said. "It's not like we have to work around a window of time."

I was making up excuses. The truth was that nuclear weapons scared me. We would need one nuclear-tipped torpedo to get through the ion curtain; and once we made it through the curtain, I did not want any superfluous warheads distracting me.

"No, there isn't. Not for you," Thorne said. "How long do you think you will need to capture the planet?"

What would happen once we landed on Terraneau was anybody's guess. A few weeks had pa.s.sed since Admiral Thorne received the message from the survivors. Apparently he had not heard anything since. He told me this along with his belief-that we would find ourselves on a ghost planet once we landed. I did not like that prospect, but I could think of a worse scenario-finding the atmosphere saturated with the gas the aliens used in their mining. The gas was so corrosive that it would dissolve our transports around us as soon as we punched our way through the curtain.

"Is the big package ready as well?" I asked.

"It's on board, Captain. So is the other equipment you requested," Thorne said. "Did you want to inspect it?"

"No," I said. The big package was a fifty-megaton bomb. If Thorne said it was ready and aboard the s.h.i.+p, that was good enough for me.

"Excellent. Now that that's out of the way, let's move on to the Engine Room," Thorne said.

I asked, "What's in the Engine Room?" giving Thorne an opening he could not resist. "The s.h.i.+p's engine," he said. Then he added, "Admiral Brocius authorized Captain Stone to make a modification without telling me, Captain. I became aware of it quite by accident last week, and I thought you might find it interesting."

What Thorne showed me next opened my eyes. I had not told anyone my plans, not even Thomer or Ava, but the bra.s.s suspected me just the same. Somebody had hobbled this s.h.i.+p.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

I spent hours touring the s.h.i.+p and discussing the fleet with Admiral Thorne. After that, I went to my billet to rest. A pile of combat armor belonging to Corporal Mike Rooney sat in the corner of the room. Rooney herself, now in Ava attire, sat cleaned and dressed in the booth-sized head across the room.

One thing about Ava; she kept her wits about her. Sitting in that tight bathroom could not have been comfortable, but it would give her some level of concealment if someone stepped into the room other than me. "How do you like the s.h.i.+p?" I asked.

"It beats the h.e.l.l out of Clonetown, Honey."

"We had more s.p.a.ce back at Fort Bliss," I pointed out.

"I had to pee in a bucket," she said. "I like the cool air."

"Glad you're satisfied," I said.

"Satisfied? Aren't you some kind of important officer. Why did they stick you in such a tiny apartment?" She stood up and examined herself in the mirror over my sink until she found a smudge on her forehead. Then she ran the water to wet a tissue and dabbed at the spot.