The Clone Empire by Steven L. Kent Page A

saying a word, I crossed the kettle and climbed the ladder to the cockpit. Storm-filtered sunlight shone through the windshield.
    A thick wall of mercury-colored storm clouds hid the sun but not its light. Driven by blustering winds, the rain fell at sharp angles and splash-landed in puddles along the side of the landing strip.
    The airfield was little more than a landing strip with a couple of newly built hangars surrounded by a wall of chain link and razor wire. We had built guard towers in the corners of the fence to keep the locals out, but that was for show. No one manned the towers.
    The landing strip was too short for anything but transports, a species of air-/spacecraft that took off vertically. You couldn’t land so much as a fighter on this strip, but it had enough room for dozens of transports.
    “What’s that?” Nobles asked, pointing to the bright red switch one of Mars’s engineers had installed over his throttle.
    “Oh, that,” I said, feeling a little bit guilty. “That fires the torpedo.”
    “We need a torpedo?” he asked, sounding nervous and more than a little skeptical. He probably wondered if there was more danger to this mission than I had let on about. There wasn’t.
    “It never hurts to be prepared,” I said.
    Nobles sat in the pilot seat but made no move toward the instrumentation around him. He folded his arms across his chest, and asked, “Prepared for what exactly?”
    “Well, you know, there’s no way of knowing where the broadcast will send us.”
    Nobles started to say something, but I put up my hand and stopped him.
    “Hear me out,” I said. “Admiral Warshaw flew his ships through this broadcast zone; it’s going to be safe,” I said. Having spent six years assigned to the Scutum-Crux Fleet, Nobles knew Warshaw. He might or might not have known Warshaw personally, but they’d both served on the Kamehameha , the flagship of the fleet.
    “Did Warshaw strike you as having a death wish?” I asked. “If he used this zone to broadcast himself out, I’m betting it will send us someplace safe.”
    Nobles thought about this for a moment, then asked, “So where do you think we’ll come out?”
    “Where will we come out?” I repeated. “I have no specking idea, but I can make an educated guess. When the top brass decided to eliminate the cloning program, they shipped off whatever clones were left to twelve of the outer fleets. I don’t know about you; but if I were Warshaw, and I had the Earth Fleet chasing after me, I’d send myself someplace where I could find reinforcements.”
    “And the torpedo?” Nobles asked.
    “It’s nuclear-tipped,” I said. He knew what that meant.
    When I arrived in the Scutum-Crux Arm, the Avatari had Terraneau sealed off from rescue by a layer of tachyons. By firing a nuke above the spot where the layer originated, we were able to poke a small hole through the layer. That was how we landed men on the planet.
    Of course, with Terraneau, we knew the exact spot to hit with our torpedo. On this run, we might not even know what planet we were circling, let alone the right spot to hit.
    “But it’s just a precaution, right? We’re not bringing it because we’re going to fight aliens.”
    “Just a precaution,” I agreed.
    “And we won’t need it?” he asked.
    “No. Probably not.”
    He thought about this, nodded, and pivoted his seat so that he faced the flight controls. “You’re a brave man, sir,” he said as he fired up the engines. “It takes a lot of nerve to decide to fly a nuke through a broadcast zone.”
    “They used to do that all the time,” I said, feeling relieved that we were finally going wheels up.
    “Those ships were sealed. You’ve got us riding in a specking wreck,” Nobles said. He looked back to see if I was suitably panicked, then fired the thrusters and lifted off the ground. “Good thing you’re comfortable around nuclear weapons.”
    He knew I wasn’t.
    When I thought the situation through, I