The Clone Empire (29 page)

“So he’s crazy,” I said.

“Not crazy.”

“And you think the Unified Authority purposely made him this way?” I asked.

“The tissue from the clone in the morgue suggests he had the same disorder.” Dr. Morman took a long look at Sua, then turned back to me, and said, “Judging by the NAA samples, he was an extreme case as well.”

“Why in the world would the Unified Authority want an army of pathologically insecure clones?” I asked.

Dr. Morman took a deep breath, then spoke in a whisper. “People with BPD have a nearly debilitating fear of abandonment. If his superiors threatened him, maybe told him to kill you or they would give him a dishonorable discharge, Sua would see you as the cause of all his fears. He’d rather die than have his superiors abandon him.”

“Okay, that explains Lewis’s behavior,” I said. When Dr. Morman gave me a funny look, I said, “The one in the morgue.

“But Sua didn’t put up a fight at all. I came unarmed, and he surrendered.”

“I asked him about that. He said you caught him off guard when you came in unarmed and alone,” said Dr. Morman. “BPD creates a fascinating dichotomy. Patients have a false sense of confidence. In extreme cases, like Sua’s, the patient thinks of himself as undefeatable. He had unreasonable overconfidence; but once you challenged that confidence, he was crushed. He said you disarmed him the first time he attacked you.”

“The only time he attacked me,” I said.

“Right. The second time you found him, you came in alone and unarmed, and that made him believe that you had no fear of him. When you treated him like a helpless child, he decided he did not stand a chance against you and gave up.”

“So he’s useless,” I said.

“So he’s dangerous,” Dr. Morman corrected me. “This man hates you. He has personalized his fight with you. If he were to get free, he would dedicate his life to destroying you, and he would find a way to do it.

“And something else, he feels that way about the entire Enlisted Man’s Empire. He believes you and the other clones left him behind on Earth to die.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said.

“General, it’s not ridiculous to him. That is how he interprets information. He’s not just an enemy soldier, not just some kind of spy; because of his built-in insecurities, this man takes every offense as if it were personal. He is strong, he is intelligent, and he is willing to dedicate his life to your destruction.

“If you’re not worried by an enemy like that . . .” She shook her head. “You are a Liberator. Everyone knows what you are capable of doing; but I would hate to have someone like him hunting me, General Harris.”

During breakfast, I gave Admiral Cabot an assignment. We sat alone at a small table in a corner of the mess. I was tired from my early-morning meeting with the forensic psychologist. He looked well rested.

“I need you to do something,” I said as I downed my third cup of coffee. “I need you to get me some information about cruisers.”

Cabot put down his coffee and pulled out his notepad. “What are you looking for?” he asked.

“I need to know about landing bays on cruisers.”

“Okay, what about the landing bay?” he asked. He sounded confident, like he already had the answers.

“The measurements. I need to know the number of bays and the square footage.”

“One bay, it holds four transports. I’d put it at three thousand square feet, not including the tunnel.”

He leaned forward, put up a hand as if blocking outsiders from overhearing what he had to say next, and added, “I spent three years on a cruiser.”

“Not our cruisers,” I said. “Theirs. I need to know about the new ones, the cruisers the Unifieds have been using to spy on us.”

“Oh.” Cabot sounded disappointed. He knew I wanted the information right away, and that meant missing part of the summit. I was getting in the way of his ass-kissing and politicking; and from his expression, I could tell that he resented it.

“You can start by going to Navy Intel; you might get lucky,” I said.

“What if they don’t have the information?” he asked.

“Then fly out to the
ad-Din
and have Villanueva take you to Terraneau. There’s all kinds of wreckage floating around out there; you’re bound to find a cruiser.”

“You want me to measure a wreck? How am I supposed to do that?”

“I don’t care if you use your dick, just get me the specking dimensions. You got that?”

It was crude talk, but I needed to get through to him. As we spoke, Cabot sat there watching the other admirals enter the briefing room. I could read his thoughts. He wanted to pawn the assignment off on an underling. He wanted to be in the summit rubbing shoulders with the two-stars.

“By the way, don’t use your dick,” I said. “You’re going to need something longer.”
And something that doesn’t change size every time a superior officer walks past,
I thought.

“Aye, aye, sir,” he said, barely trying to disguise the snarl in his voice.

I had my reasons for wanting Cabot to handle this himself. Like him or hate him, J. Winston Cabot got things done. When I gave him orders, he executed them as if his next promotion depended on it. The information he brought me would check out; and since he would not be able to enter the summit until he got those dimensions, he’d be fast.

“You better get going, Admiral,” I said. “I’m presenting this afternoon. I need that information before I start my presentation.”

“Yes, sir,” he said. He took one last fawning look at the door to the summit, then put down his coffee and headed off.

The morning’s meetings went quickly. We discussed fleet readiness. Warshaw had run a series of drills to test how quickly he could shift forces to meet an invasion. When he simulated an attack on the Golan Dry Docks in his first exercise, only six fleets responded. While the first ships arrived in thirteen minutes, the bulk took between forty minutes and an hour. The final three ships to arrive on the scene did not broadcast in for three hours.

Heads rolled. High-ranking officers were offered early retirements. Rumor had it that one man shot himself rather than face Warshaw’s wrath.

The next fire drill went better. It took less than ten minutes for the first few carriers to arrive. The entire armada broadcasted in within fifty minutes. Some of those ships went through four broadcast transfers, traveling as many as eighty-three thousand light-years to arrive on the scene.

This time Warshaw acknowledged that his captains had carried out their orders. He then took his frustrations out on the officers who designed the ERP—the “Emergency Response Protocol,” stating that the response times could be cut in half again if the routes were better organized.

All of this came as old news to everyone else in the room; but I had never heard any of it. Until a few weeks ago, I had been safely tucked away on Terraneau worrying about the locals breaking into an underground parking lot. Now I had galactic security on my mind, and spy ships, and infiltrator clones.

When Warshaw’s staff simulated a surprise attack on Olympus Kri, twenty-six fighter carriers and sixty-three battleships arrived on the scene within seventeen minutes. Another fifty ships arrived by the half-hour mark.

As he spoke, I came to realize that Gary Warshaw had morphed into the Napoleon specking Bonaparte of his time.
Maybe all clone brains weren’t created equal,
I thought. But then again, maybe they were. Maybe the U.A. had accidentally packed two brains into Warshaw’s wide, bald pate.

Standing at the lectern, looking mildly deformed with his hairless head and endless stream of muscles, Warshaw smiled and announced the results of his most recent exercise. Twenty-eight ships had responded to a simulated attack on Gobi within six minutes. Within twenty minutes, fifty-two ships had arrived on the scene.

“You know what that tells me,” Warshaw said. “That tells me that the Enlisted Man’s Navy has the will to survive.”

Applause rose from the audience. Were they applauding themselves for their fast response or Warshaw for working miracles? I didn’t know, and neither did he. I doubt the admirals knew, but they clapped until Warshaw raised his hands, signaling for them to stop. Warshaw’s presentation included charts and holographic displays. It lasted four hours. By the time he finished, it was time for lunch.

I was next on the agenda, right after lunch. With a sinking feeling, I searched the dining hall for Cabot. He was nowhere to be seen.

 

Not feeling especially hungry, I went to my billet. I called Station Security to see if Cabot had returned. They checked their records and reported that he’d left Gobi Station shortly before the morning session began. He had not yet returned.

I left orders for them to rush Cabot to the summit the moment he passed through security. Even if it meant interrupting a closed session, they were to send him in.

Before rejoining Warshaw and his fleet commanders, I contacted the morgue. Sam had gone home for the day; but Myron, the senior coroner, was there. He gave me some very good news.

I returned to the summit slightly before 13:00, just in time for the meeting to begin. Warshaw stopped at my desk, and said, “I didn’t see you at lunch. I hope you don’t get all weird when you make presentations.”

“Just nailing down a few loose ends,” I said.

“So are you ready to present?” he asked.

I nodded, and he headed to the lectern. Introducing me only as “Harris,” he told the group that I would report about a “special intelligence operation” under my command. He then turned the next session of the meeting over to me.

Not feeling especially nervous, I walked up to the stand. I knew a few of the men, but not many. With the exception of Warshaw, not a one of them had done anything to earn my respect. Their idea of combat involved sitting on the bridge of a carrier while Marines and fighter pilots did the heavy lifting.

I began with a bombshell.

“The Unified Authority is tracking our movements,” I said. I turned to Warshaw, and added, “When you ran that last ERP, you revealed your fleet movements, emergency protocols, and readiness to the Pentagon.”

I doubted there was so much as a single officer in the room who believed me. I was a Marine speaking to Navy men. They trusted me to shoot guns and throw grenades, but they didn’t respect my intelligence-gathering ability any more than I respected their hand-to-hand combat experience.

Repeating the scraps of information I’d learned from Ray Freeman, I continued. “The Unified Authority has set up spy satellites to monitor our broadcast activity. Every time our ships broadcast in or out of an area, those satellites read the anomaly.”

The room went quiet. Men who had originally doubted now began wondering just how much I knew. Spy satellites reading distant anomalies, the technology was basic and nearly impossible to track. Reading anomalies was child’s play, and the data could be synchronized to track the entire empire’s movements.

“Why haven’t we spotted any of their satellites?” one admiral asked. He sounded cynical. I didn’t blame him.

“Have you looked for satellites?” I asked. “We’re talking satellites the size of golf balls floating in millions of miles of open space. What are the odds of finding them?”

That shut him up. There was no point sending ships out to look for the satellites. It would be like combing a ten-mile stretch of beach for one specific grain of sand.

“How are they deploying them?” another admiral asked.

Warshaw stood, and the room went quiet. He asked, “Is that what the cruisers were doing, dropping spy satellites?”

“If we chart the cruisers’ courses, maybe we can find their satellites,” another admiral suggested. The idea had not occurred to me. It touched off a discussion.

As the admirals discussed ways to search for satellites, the door opened, and in walked Admiral Cabot. He stared at me, waited until we had eye contact, gave me a nod, then went to the desk where I’d been seated. I breathed a sigh of relief. The pretentious little bastard would not have come without completing his mission.

An admiral sitting a few tables from Warshaw yelled, “If they really have those satellites, then they’ve analyzed our Emergency Response Protocol.” His voice rose above the din.

“We need to destroy the satellites,” somebody yelled. I did not see who.

“Don’t be in too big a hurry to destroy them,” I said, quieting down the room. I repeated this, and added, “It’s always a good idea to give your enemies a little misinformation before killing their spies.”

A general hush fell over the room as the admirals considered this.

“Misdirection, I like it,” Warshaw said. “Norma ships responding to Orion . . . Perseus ships covering Sagittarius. Do it right, and we could really speck with their intel.”

With the meeting dissolving into many conversations, I asked Warshaw if he would mind giving me a fifteen-minute break. I used the time to catch up with Cabot.

“We had to go all the way to Terraneau,” he complained.

“What did you find?”

“Their cruisers are built for spying, not combat. They have cloaking equipment, and they’re fast. They have a top speed of thirty-eight million miles per hour.”

Our ships topped out at thirty million.

“So you found one at Terraneau?” I asked.

“Three of ’em. I boarded one myself. It had three landing bays, all kinds of spy gear, and no weapons . . . just bays and bunks. And the landing bays were big, almost ten thousand square feet of parking space.”

I heard him, but it didn’t sound possible. “Ten thousand feet per bay?”

He nodded.

I considered the ramifications, and said, “Oh, shit.”

I started the meeting with another explosion.

“I caught the assassin who killed Admiral Franks,” I began. It was sort of true. Whoever killed Lilburn Franks, his DNA would be identical to Philip Sua’s DNA. His chromosomes would match as well.