Rogue Clone: The Clone Betrayal Part 30

Men in overalls hung suspended just off the ground, their limbs so stiff and brittle they might have been made of gla.s.s. I spotted a man whose face hung from his head like a flap of skin on a badly stubbed toe. The exposed parts of his skin had the blue-white color of an evening cloud. The skinned remains of his head sparkled like coal. His blood hung above him in a tangle of beaded icicles.

The team leader started to say something and vomited. I felt bad for the man, I did. Once the transport came, he could clean his equipment; but without steam cleaning, the air in that armor would never be sweet again.

"Good G.o.d," the team leader bawled.

"Get used to it, Ensign. Everybody on this ship is going to look like that," I said.

n.o.body said anything after that, at least they did not say anything to me. For all I knew, the rest of the team was playing twenty questions. I doubted it, though. Most of the men stood in a huddle staring at the body, the lights from their visors shining on a loose flap of skin that had once been a face.

Trying to get the mission back on track, I asked the team leader, "Ensign, are you planning on bringing our transport inside to dock?"

"Yes, sir," he said, his voice so mechanical that I could not tell if he understood what I'd said.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE.

In the blackness of the runway, the transport's runner lights showed crystal white, bleaching everything they shone on. With the ship destroyed and no power for the runway sleds, our pilot had to fly the transport all the way in, a slow and testing process.

Negotiating past one of the locks, the transport shined its lights directly over me, and I learned the hard way that engineering armor did not have automatic tint shields. Unaware that my visor would not protect my eyes from the glare, I watched the transport's lights as it taxied up the runway. Then the lights. .h.i.t me. Even after I looked away, orange and yellow ghosts blurred my vision.

The transport touched down and Admiral Gary Warshaw congratulated A Team for opening the docking bay. He followed up with, "Okay, men, you have your a.s.signments. Let's get this ship finished quickly, we have three hundred more to go."

The rear of the kettle opened, and a swarm of technicians slid out, carrying toolboxes and meters and equipment I could not have identified.

As Alpha Team made its way into the ship, four of its members had to return to the transport. Poor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds-they were the ones who threw up inside their armor. Their teammates would give them grief once the mission ended.

"Harris, you still dry inside your armor or do you need to visit the head?" Warshaw asked.

"Marines don't lose their lunch when they see breakage," I said, hoping to h.e.l.l that he had not somehow heard about my little vomiting fit on Terraneau. He hadn't.

"Get specked, Harris," he said.

I spotted Warshaw gliding down the ramp. He moved with the ease of a man who has logged time in zero-gravity situations.

Looking around the bay, I decided that we had come to the right place if we wanted outdated transports or other obsolete equipment. A row of salvageable transports lined the far wall of the landing area. Tools, bodies, and furniture lay in an avalanche blocking our way to the ship. A couple of engineers pushed their way through the debris and jimmied the door open.

This battleship was a long-dead twin of the one we flew in on. They had the exact same floor plan. The halls of this ship were dark and silent, but they had the same turns and pa.s.sages.

I did not use my motivator to fly through the halls. I kicked off surfaces and redirected my momentum by pushing off the walls. I pa.s.sed through a mess hall so large it could have subst.i.tuted for an aircraft hangar. The tables, which were bolted to the floor, had not moved, but a pile of bodies lay stacked against one wall. Strands of blood formed a web over the jumble of corpses. I had to break that web to reach the hatch on the far side of the mess.

Warshaw and his men had tasks to accomplish on this ship. For now, I was little more than a tourist come to see the grisly sights. I traveled through officer country across a rec room and finally down toward the lower decks. When I reached the Engineering sections, I spotted Warshaw and his men gathering around the broadcast generator-a group of eighteen bullet-shaped cylinders that stood thirty feet tall.

"Looks like it's in solid condition," I said, noting that none of the bra.s.s cylinders had so much as a dent.

"Nah, this one's a complete bust," said Warshaw.

"The cylinders look fine," I said.

"Yeah, well, they would look perfectly sound to a Marine, they're big, unbreakable, and made of metal. It's the rigging on top that takes all the damage." He sounded confident, but I wondered just how much time and training Warshaw had when it came to broadcast technology.

"How about the broadcast computer?" I asked.

Warshaw did not answer for several seconds, but I knew better than to repeat the question. I waited. He put a finger over the part of his helmet that covered his ears, and I realized he wasn't ignoring me, he was receiving a message. Finally, he said, "Harris, the team on the bridge has spotted incoming battleships."

"Franks must be in a hurry, he's not due back for . . ."

"U.A. battleships, the ones we spotted by the dry docks," Warshaw said.

"s.h.i.t," I said.

There was no way those could have tracked us here. There was no way to track where ships broadcasted themselves. "Maybe it's some kind of routine patrol," I said.

Warshaw ignored that idea, and said, "Who knows what they have on those ships. They probably read the data off our computers before we broadcasted out." He was guessing, but it sounded like a reasonable guess.

Warshaw and I headed to the bridge together, flying through the dark corridors as quickly as we could. By sticking to inner corridors, we managed to skirt around most of the damage, but we pa.s.sed a lot of bodies. The sailors in the outer halls would have been sucked out into s.p.a.ce. In the heart of the ship, though, the dead remained, floating forever in their cryogenic sepulcher.

Flying up an elevator shaft, we made our way to the bridge. In a working ship, it would have taken ten minutes to sprint from Engineering to the bridge. Floating weightless in this ghost ship, we made the trip in less than five.

"Have all of the transports docked?" I asked.

"You s.h.i.tting me?" Warshaw asked. "Three of 'em are socked away. The other nine are playing possum."

In a graveyard like this, with four hundred capital ships, turning off your engines and letting your transport float would leave you all but invisible.

Two men dressed in the red armor of weapons techs met us at the command area. They spoke on a direct frequency. I could not hear anyone with my Link unless I called them or they called me. Warshaw was well within his rights when he labeled this a "naval operation," but he'd stuck it to me when he a.s.signed me standard communications equipment instead of a commandLink. b.a.s.t.a.r.d.

Without a word of explanation, Warshaw headed toward one of the off-bridge conference rooms. I had no idea whether I should follow him or not. I trailed after him, feeling more isolated by the minute.

The oblong room had a table and a viewport with a panoramic view of utter blackness. I went to the viewport and stared into the void outside, the light from my visor forming bright spots on the gla.s.s.

"Harris, kill the light on your visor," Warshaw said. He sounded angry.

Now I was embarra.s.sed and angry at myself. He was right. It was less significant than a needle, but a pa.s.sing ship might spot the light from my helmet.

Though I could not see it through the viewport, a vast outer-s.p.a.ce battlefield lay on display outside this ship. Without outside illumination, I could not see the broken ships or the desolate planet beyond them. And then, off in the distance, I saw the first trace of light.

"I see one," I said to Warshaw.

I could not see the ship itself, just a gold-tinted luminescence that slowly hovered in our direction. As it glided toward us, I recognized the knife-blade shape of the hull. A general glow poured out of it, shining on the derelicts and debris as the battleship pushed past them.

Warshaw and two of his men came for a look. I wondered what they said to each other, and was reminded how much I hated Warshaw for sticking me with a standard Link.

The ship ambled closer, the glow from its hull lighting up everything it pa.s.sed. The battleship floated by a defunct Mogat ship. In the gold glow, I saw scars along the dead ship's sides. The hole in the bridge was so large, a skilled pilot could have steered a transport through it.

I noticed something about the glow around that battleship as it approached. It was like a skin.

"Admiral," I said. By this time, he had left the viewport and stood talking with his techs. "Warshaw," I repeated.

"Not now, Harris," he said.

This was a new technology. The ships I had served on had projected shields that formed an invisible box around the ship. I chanced a quick glance back at Warshaw and saw that he had spread some kind of chart across the conference table. He and four of his men stood huddled together over the table, Warshaw pointing to a spot above the chart. As a ranking officer, I belonged in their conference. I looked back at the oncoming battleship, then went over to the table.

At first, I thought it must be a joke. The map or chart Warshaw had spread was blank, just a square of plasticized cloth with no marks at all. It took me a moment to understand. The cloth projected a virtual display that Warshaw and his techs saw through their visors. That function had not been activated on my visor. Paraphrasing Warshaw's mantra in my head, I mumbled, "specking naval operations." I returned to the viewport and saw a second battleship cruising toward us.

"Warshaw, there is a second battleship out there," I said.

"I'm aware of that," Warshaw said, his voice sounding testy. "I'm also tracking a third ship coming in at about five o'clock. Now, if you don't mind, Harris, I'm busy at the moment."

I did mind.

The first battleship came closer, cutting through the empty s.p.a.ce with the confidence of a shark gliding through open waters. I studied the way its shields adhered around it like a second skin, as if the ship had been dipped and coated in glowing plastic. Sparks flashed in the shield when anything struck the ship-tiny explosions that flared and faded in the silent darkness.

I looked back toward Warshaw and saw him pointing at invisible details above that mat. Was it a map? A schematic? I should have been in on the planning. Yes, I was a lowly Marine, but I was also the highest-ranking officer in the fleet, d.a.m.n it. Except, of course, Brocius had given Warshaw a third star. We had the same specking rank, even if this was a naval operation.

"General, would you like to join us?" Warshaw asked. It was not a friendly invitation. He was not asking me to help with the planning. He wanted to give me an obligatory briefing, the same kind of briefing company commanders give their platoon sergeants before throwing them into a battle.

Outside the viewport, the first battleship pulled even with us, then flashed past. I stared out into the darkness for another second, unable to tell whether the light to my left was the second battleship or a visual echo burned into my irises from the first ship.

"Harris, care to join us?" Warshaw repeated, a note of annoyance in his voice.

"They have new technology in their shields," I said, as I turned to join the planning.

"Yes, I suspect they do," Warshaw agreed.

"It looks like it's based on Avatari technology," I said.

"What kind of technology?" A perfunctory question.

"The technology the aliens used," I said.

"I wasn't aware that the aliens used ships," Warshaw said. I could hear other people on the Link as well. I had been invited into a conference.

"They didn't, but they lent the technology to the Mogats," I said.

"The Mogats used alien technology in their shields? That explains a lot," Warshaw said. I heard notes of agreement in the background. "We found disabled shield generators on almost every ship we've boarded. A few of the ships didn't have any shield systems at all."

"That's because they used a central generator that the aliens gave them," I said.

"Do you think the aliens might have given a similar generator to the Unified Authority?"

Of course not, you pompous, preening son of a b.i.t.c.h, I thought. "I think the Navy may have deciphered their technology. Lord knows, they've had enough scientists trying to work it out.

"If they do have it worked out, we're screwed," I added.

"We're going to find out," Warshaw said. "In fifteen minutes, we're going to open fire on those ships."

CHAPTER FORTY.

A three-dimensional map of the area appeared in the air above the table. The hulls of twelve ships appeared in red, surrounded by the hulls of another three hundred ships in green.

"The red ships are the ones we've boarded," Warshaw said.

I wanted to congratulate him for his ability to state the obvious, but I knew better. If he reverted into "naval operation" mode, he would leave me in the dark until we either died or returned to the fleet. "I thought we had more teams out," I said.

"Some of the teams have not been able to break into their ships," Warshaw said. Poor them. That meant those teams would spend the battle playing possum in their transports.

"Judging by the way they are patrolling, the U.A. ships know we are here, but they have no idea where we are hiding. One of them b.u.mped into a transport without scanning it."

"How is the transport?" I asked.

"The pilot is shook-up, but . . ."

"No, how is the transport itself?"

One of the techs said, "The pilot did not report any problems."

"What are you getting at, Harris?" Warshaw asked.

"Just curious," I said.

The shields the Mogats used absorbed energy. If a Mogat ship b.u.mped a transport, its shields would have drained the transport's batteries. I decided to file the information away rather than share it.

"My teams have found functional weapons systems on seven of the ships," Warshaw said. As he said this, the display darkened as five of the red ships turned a swampy blue. The seven remaining red ships formed a misshapen ring.

I pictured the landscape in my head. If I had it right, the ships the U.A. sent to chase us down had pa.s.sed right through that ring. a.s.suming Warshaw's men could get those weapons systems up and running, they could incinerate those ships the next time they pa.s.sed through. It sounded too good to be true. In fact, it sounded downright impossible.

"How can these wrecks have working weapons systems?" I asked. These derelicts had been floating in s.p.a.ce for years. I did not understand how they could have working systems.

"Functional, not working," Warshaw said. "We've isolated the weapons systems from the rest of the ship and supplied our own power."

"What about shields?" I asked. "Can you get them working?"

Warshaw laughed. "It sounds like those U.A. battleships make you nervous."

That summed up my feelings accurately. On the battlefield, I had some control over the environment. Out here, all I could do was sit back and watch. If the ship went down, I would go down with it.

"What do you have, lasers and torpedoes?" I asked. Having seen all of the damage along the hull of this ship, I wondered how reliable the torpedo tubes might be.