The Clone Empire (24 page)

Once he was in, he snaked a hand out to close the door, then paused. “How do I find you?” he asked.

I told him about Scrubb’s, the restaurant on St. Augustine, and promised to check the restaurant the following Thursday night.

“Doesn’t sound very private,” Freeman said.

“So we meet and go for a walk,” I said.

He nodded and closed the door of his plane. The Bandit was small and he was a giant. He filled the cockpit as snug as a bullet in the chamber of a gun.

 

There were many lessons they never taught us in the Marine Corps, foremost among them was instruction on how to be magnanimous in defeat. Trash a Marine, and you have an enemy for life.

At the moment, I did not feel especially charitable toward Ellery Doctorow; but what I had in mind for this visit might just save lives, Ava’s life in particular. He’d kicked me off his rock and made an end run on my engineers; his last-minute concern about my well-being struck me as gloating. I considered him a pompous, arrogant, self-important windbag, and that was why I hated what I had to do next.

Before returning to Fort Sebastian, I would visit Doctorow one last time. If he was no longer in his office, I would go to his home. I would find him, and, despite my desire to break his neck, I would do him a favor.

I told my driver to take me to the new capitol building.

Freeman had found his Bandit on a civilian airfield on the south side of town. The south and west sides of Norristown had taken the brunt of the war against the aliens. The Corps of Engineers, formerly my Corps of Engineers, began restoring the west side as soon as we liberated the planet. The south side, however, remained in tatters. If I were trying to hide a plane near Norristown, I would hide it in the wreckage of a southern suburb.

I stared out at broken buildings and empty space as we headed north, then I saw a massive work project—the Norris Lake Tunnels. The southern edge of Norristown fronted on a large lake that sparkled like a giant mirror across the landscape. The sun shone across its endless blue surface and shimmered. At one corner of the lake, a pair of tunnels grew out of the water like a set of sleeping leviathans, their four-lane mouths stitched shut by a latticeworks of scaffolding and heavy equipment.

So they’re working on the tunnels,
I thought to myself. That was why Doctorow wanted my Corps of Engineers. It would have taken the locals a decade to finish the project; Mars and his engineers would polish it off in a few weeks. The tunnels ran three miles along the bottom of the lake. Once they finished, Norristown would be reconnected to Ephraim, its long-abandoned sister city.

Driving from the south side of town to the governmental seat took fifteen minutes. We started in a place of ruins and ended in a canyon of marble and glass. I had my driver wait in the car while I went to speak with Doctorow. As I reached the door of the capitol, two guards blocked my way.

I told them whom I had come to see, and one of them escorted me to the receptionist. The receptionist, in turn, contacted Doctorow’s office and told me that an aide would come out and speak with me.

I was not impressed, but at least the charades were over. Doctorow had my assurance I was leaving. He had everything he wanted from me, the bastard, so I was no longer worth his time.

A few moments later, out came this snooty kid in a nice suit and silk tie. His wrist went limp as he shook my hand, then he suggested that we sit and talk in the lobby. As far as he was concerned, he was as close to Doctorow as I was going to get.

When the kid asked, “What can I do for you?” I wanted to tell him to douse his hair with gasoline and light up a cigar; but I behaved. I looked him in the eye, and said, “You can tell Colonel Doctorow—”

“President Doctorow.”

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“His title is president.”

“Oh, I see. Well, that’s different. I had no idea,” I said, trying to sound contrite. “You can tell
Colonel
Doctorow that I am here and wish to see him.”

“The president is a busy man,” the kid said.

“Yes, so am I,” I said.

“Perhaps if you have a message—”

“I just told you my message. I am here, and I wish to see him.”

“Perhaps you would like to tell me what this is about,” the kid said, his patience wearing thin.

“If I wanted to tell you why I was here, I would have already done so,” I said.

The kid controlled his temper better than I would have. He sat unmoved by my sarcasm. “If you would prefer to write—”

“If I wanted to send the
president
a letter, I would have written one.”

The kid just sat there. He started to say something, but only said, “Hmmmm.”

I stood up.

The kid thought I was leaving, and said, “What should I tell President Doctorow?” He started to get up and reached out to shake hands.

“I’ll tell him myself,” I said, and started for the door to the offices.

The kid threw himself in front of me as the guards from the entrance came trotting across the lobby. The receptionist started speaking frantically into a panel on his desk. I had not come to make a scene, but I was about to make one just the same; then the door to Doctorow’s office flew open, and out came “the president.”

“Are you quite finished, General Harris?” Doctorow asked in a loud but calm voice.

“Do you see anybody bleeding?” I asked.

“That is precisely why we want you off our planet.” Doctorow pronounced this judgment with finality.

“You know what, I can’t wait to leave,” I said.

Doctorow took a deep breath, and asked, “What do you need, Harris?”

“I came here to do you a favor, but you probably don’t want anything from someone like me.”

“No, I probably do not,” he agreed.

I took a deep breath, and said, “I came to give you an escape hatch . . . in case the aliens ever return.”

Now I had Doctorow’s attention. He surveyed the scene one last time, then said, “Perhaps we should speak in my office.” He turned to leave without speaking, and I followed, like an obedient dog.

Doctorow returned to his seat behind his desk. “How are your preparations going?”

“I hope to be out of here tonight,” I said.

“Well, that is good news.”

“Look . . .” I paused to take a deep breath because if I didn’t, I might have killed the bastard. I didn’t even know what to call Doctorow anymore. I did not want to call him president, the title was bullshit. I would not call him by his first name, we were not friends.

In the end, I decided not to call him anything, and simply said, “Listen, there’s a small plane hidden somewhere in Norristown, a Piper Bandit. If I had to guess, I would say it’s somewhere just south of town.”

“Why should I care about a small plane?” Doctorow asked.

“Because it can reach Earth,” I said.

“How is that possible?” Doctorow asked, sounding more than a little concerned.

“It’s self-broadcasting,” I explained. Even as I said this, I realized that I had overlooked an important question. Freeman said the battery was only good for one broadcast. That meant the Unified Authority had ferried the plane and its pilot to Terraneau space and dropped it off. But how had he, Freeman, traveled to Terraneau?

“A self-broadcasting plane,” Doctorow repeated.

“It’s very small, just a two-seater, and the broadcast engine is only good for one use. If the aliens come back, you can use it to send for help,” I said. I hated handing the plane over to Doctorow. I specking hated it. I was doing it for Ava. If the aliens did come back, I hoped like hell these assholes would send their distress signal in time for us to help them. I had my doubts.

“I appreciate your telling me about this,” Doctorow said. “Now if you could direct us to the plane before its owner returns.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” I said.

“No?” Doctorow asked.

“The original pilot will be leaving with me and my men,” I said. It was true. What I neglected to mention was that he’d be traveling in a body bag.

There was not a single trained surgeon in the entire Enlisted Man’s Navy. We had medical technicians who could set broken bones, remove a bullet, or treat a burst appendix; but medical school was the domain of natural-born officers. The closest clones got to that kind of education was training as a nurse.

I didn’t need a surgeon to run the autopsy, but I wanted someone who knew his way around a corpse. I needed someone with the right eyes and skill set to examine the body of the late faux Sergeant Kit Lewis, someone who could tell me what the security posts had been missing.

“I don’t know the first thing about forensics,” said the chief medical officer of the
Salah ad-Din
. We were in sick bay. The body, still wrapped in a self-chilling body bag, lay on the table before us.

“Understood,” I said as I unzipped the bag. There he was, Sergeant Lewis, his remaining eye staring straight ahead, the jagged remains of his skull poking out from areas where his face had shriveled.

The doctor looked at the corpse and swallowed, then quickly recovered. “Want my official opinion about what killed him?”

“I know what killed him. I was there,” I said. “What I want to know is what makes him different than everyone else.”

“Half his skull is missing, that’s different,” said the doctor.

“Besides that,” I said.

“Besides that he’s exactly like everyone else, he’s a clone,” the doctor said.

I gave up and started to leave. When I reached the hatch, I looked back, and said, “This boy was different. I want to know why.”

I left the sick bay and walked to the bridge.

The
Salah ad-Din
was a Perseus-class fighter carrier—a moth-shaped monstrosity that measured fifty-one hundred feet from wingtip to wingtip and forty-five hundred feet from bow to stern. The walk to the bridge took nearly ten minutes.

Captain Villanueva sat waiting for me when I arrived. He was a clone, of course. Villanueva was in his late forties. The crow’s-feet along his eyes stretched down to his cheeks when he smiled. His tiny sideburns had gone white, and he had a spackling of white hairs.

The man was twenty years older than me, but he showed proper respect for my rank. I liked him. Unlike so many officers, Villanueva had no political ambitions. He had his fighter carrier and his crew, and he was satisfied.

“I hear you brought luggage aboard my ship,” he said. When he saw that I had not caught his meaning, he said, “A dead man. I just got a call from sick bay. They said you dropped off a dead guy.”

Maybe I was having trouble focusing. Try as I might to ignore her, Ava still haunted my thoughts. I was angry and jealous; but more than anything else, I just wanted to know that someone would protect her.

“What do you want with a dead clone?” Villanueva asked.

“He’s got secrets,” I said.

“What kind of secrets?” Villanueva asked.

“If I knew, I wouldn’t bother lugging him around,” I said. It seemed like a polite way of telling the captain to mind his own business, but Villanueva did not take it that way. He bobbed his head like a fighter ducking a punch, and said, “Yes, sir.”

Villanueva’s lack of ambition made him easy to work with, but it also left him a trifle unmotivated. With remora fish like Admiral Cabot, ambition meant initiative. Cabot might have been preening for glory, but he got things done. Cabot did not wait for orders, he looked for ways to draw attention to himself. Villanueva, on the other hand, would happily stand around letting the proverbial moss grow under his feet.

As we spoke, I saw officers glancing in our direction. There was no privacy on the bridge of the
ad-Din
, the deck was designed with no interior walls so that its officers could synchronize a thousand separate operations during attacks. The decks of the big ships were filled with desks and computer stations. Even the helm had more to do with keyboards and touch screens than steering yokes. The
ad-Din
was nearly a mile wide. You didn’t control a big bird like that using a stick and pedals.

“Is there somewhere else we can speak?” I asked.

Villanueva nodded and led me to a closet-sized conference room off the bridge floor. I sat across the narrow table from him, and asked, “What is the status of our evacuation?” I hated the term “evacuation”; it made it sound as if Doctorow had chased us away. In my mind, we were abandoning Terraneau, not evacuating it. The semantics mattered to me, but not to anyone else.

“Your Marines are on board, sir,” Villanueva said.

“All of them?” I asked, feeling a bit stunned.

“All twenty-two hundred men are accounted for, sir. Are you sure you want to leave all of that equipment behind?”

The equipment was the rather extensive arsenal of weapons I had procured from the graveyard of ships. It must have seemed strange to Villanueva that I would leave guns, grenades, rocket launchers, tanks, and even a half dozen transports in the hands of the local militia. Maybe it was a bad idea, but I wanted Doctorow to have the weapons. If the Avatari came back, he’d need them . . . she’d need them. Ava. Everything was about protecting Ava.

“The Marine compound on this ship is fully stocked,” I said.

“Aren’t we arming a potential enemy?” he asked.

“You see Terraneau as a potential enemy?” I asked. “It’s an undeveloped planet with leaders who want to create a utopia. Hell, the locals probably don’t even want our guns.

“I’ve got more important things on my mind.” I did. I had a complement of two thousand two hundred Marines that needed screening. We would leave for St. Augustine immediately, but I would keep my men under quarantine until I had searched them for infiltrators. With that many men, it could take a full day to check them all out. I gave Villanueva the order to take us to St. Augustine and excused myself.