The Clone Redemption Read Online Free PDF

the wind.
    The militiamen, the engineers, and Ava’s lover remained in the tunnel, standing in the darkness, staring at nothing in particular. Their crying carried in the stillness like an echo.
    Ava came to me as I stood in the entrance. Though I tried to stop her, she looked back toward the city and saw the ruins.
    â€œWhat about my girls?” she asked. Before the cataclysm, she had taught drama at an orphanage for girls. She stared toward the ruins of the city, and tears rolled down her face. I did not blame her. I’d tried to warn her, but she couldn’t envision destruction on this scale without having seen it. Once you see an attack of this sort, a part of your humanity closes forever.
    This was the third time I’d seen an attack of this kind, and it still left me numb.
    I had come to warn these people, and they threw me in jail. Freeman rescued me, and the people burned as if I’d never arrived.
    â€œGeneral Harris, are you there?” The call came from Captain Don Cutter, commander of the E.M.N. Churchill . E.M.N. stood for Enlisted Man’s Navy, my Navy. I was a Marine, but I was the highest-ranking officer in the fleet.
    Cutter contacted me over my commandLink, part of the communications network built into my combat armor. “General Harris, are you there?”
    â€œHarris here,” I said. I hoped I sounded in control. This was the first outside communication I had received since entering the tunnel.
    â€œWhat’s the situation, sir?” asked Cutter.
    â€œThe worst,” I said.
    â€œHow many survivors?”
    â€œA thousand and change,” I said. “How do things look up there?”
    Cutter was calling from a badly damaged fighter carrier, supposedly the only operational ship in Terraneau space. He said, “The Unifieds sent a spy ship into the area.”
    â€œHow were you able to spot it?” I asked.
    The Unified Authority, the Earth-based empire that created me and my fellow clones, used modified cruisers for surveillance and reconnaissance. The spy ships were fast, small, and equipped with cloaking technology that rendered them utterly invisible.
    â€œWe parked in the debris and turned off our lights,” said Cutter. “They didn’t know we were here.”
    By “debris,” he meant a graveyard of ships. More than a hundred dead ships floated in the space around Terraneau, remnants of a forgotten battle that had happened earlier this year.
    â€œDidn’t they cloak?”
    â€œThey cloaked all right; but they dropped their skirts when they launched their ‘eye.’”
    I knew that “eye” was Navy-speak for a spy satellite. The part about the skirts made no sense to me. “Come again?” I asked.
    â€œThey had to lower their shields to deploy their satellite. Weapons picked up the energy fluctuation.”
    â€œNice work,” I said.
    â€œThank you, sir. Do you want us to destroy the eye?”
    â€œHell no,” I said. Then, realizing I might be coming off harsh, I said, “Leave it alone, Captain. Having an enemy satellite in place might come in handy.”
    Terraneau was in the Scutum-Crux Arm, the outermost arm of the Milky Way. Earth was located in the Orion Arm, clear across the galaxy. The only way for the Unifieds to pull any data from that satellite would be by sending their spy ship back to retrieve it.
    When their spy ship returned, we would give her a proper reception.

CHAPTER TWO
    Earthdate: November 19, A.D. 2517
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    The spy ship sneaked out of the anomaly the way mice sneak out of their holes—quickly, carefully, silently. Anomalies are like electrical tears in the fabric of space. They occur when ships travel using broadcast technology. In this case, the Unified Authority spy ship had a built-in broadcast engine that enabled her to make the hundred-thousand-light-year jump from Earth to Terraneau instantaneously. She arrived in Scutum-Crux space