The Clone Empire (33 page)

Freeman did not speculate. When he knew the answers, he gave them; but he was not one for guessing.

“Have they figured out a way to attack our broadcast stations?” I asked.

Freeman downed a large glass of juice. “I haven’t heard anything either way,” he said. His low voice gave the words a rumbling timbre. His father had been a minister. Had he followed in his father’s shoes, Ray Freeman would have been one of those preachers who seemed to call down the heavens when they speak.

“Once the attack begins, we can call in a thousand ships if we need them,” I said.

Freeman said nothing.

I wondered what card he was hiding.

“I’m taking the
ad-Din
to Olympus Kri. If you want a ride back, I can take you,” I offered.

“I have a ship,” he said.

“What are you hiding, Ray?” I asked.

He did not answer.

 

At 11:00 STC (Space Travel Clock), Captain Villanueva held a shipwide briefing; attendance was mandatory. I personally prescreened two hundred Marines to run the security posts and patrol the corridors during the briefing. Villanueva screened a team of officers to man the bridge and Engineering.

On the
Salah ad-Din
, Marines and sailors did not commingle, not even for an all-hands briefing. The leathernecks attended a broadcast on the bottom deck, in the Marine complex. Sailors attended their briefing in a huge auditorium on the third deck.

I watched the scene outside the third-deck auditorium from an overlook as men lined up in crooked queues and waited to file through the doors. The talk was loud and came in indecipherable waves. I could not focus on a single conversation, there were too many going on at once, and I could not untangle the chatter of four thousand simultaneous discussions.

The MPs stood out with their helmets, armbands, and batons. At this stage, they would make no arrests. They had one standing order: “Everyone has to enter the auditorium through the security posts, no exceptions. Anyone discovered to have the Double Y chromosome will be quietly pulled aside.”

We had recalibrated posts on the inside of the auditorium doors. Prescreened MPs manned the computers. An army of MPs monitored the lines. If anyone tried to slip away, he was escorted back to his place.

Immediately below me, a sailor broke ranks, and four MPs descended upon him. They formed a circle, blocking his way. I tried to listen to what was said but could not hear a word of it.

Looking almost straight down on the scene, I could not see faces or expressions. Two of the MPs brandished their sticks, one of them slapping the end of it into his palm in a way that suggested he would gladly hit the sailor. The conversation went on for several seconds. When the sailor did not turn back, one of the MPs reached out and grabbed his shoulder. The man jerked free, then turned and returned to his place in line, unescorted.

Maybe he had argued that he needed to go to the head. Maybe the MPs had convinced him that he would not find his equipment in working order if he did.

As the sailor approached the door to the auditorium, he made a few furtive glances over his shoulder; but the MPs were right behind him. They remained in place, watching him as he stepped through the door.

A fight broke out in another line. A man grabbed the sailor in front of him and threw him to the floor. Three MPs ran to break up the fight, pushing gawking sailors out of their way and stepping between the downed man and his assailant.

They moved like cattle, these sailors did. They took slogging steps. They formed fuzzy lines that snaked down the hall. They moved slowly, more interested in talking and searching the crowd for friends than getting where they were going.

The sailor who had started the fight took a menacing step toward one of my MPs as he arrived on the scene. The MP drew his baton, but that seemed to mean nothing. The sailor took another step. When one MP tried to club him, the man caught his wrist and stopped the blow.

The other two MPs stepped in to help. One of them hit the man in the ribs, causing him to wince and cover the wound. Pressing his elbow over his battered ribs, the errant sailor returned to his spot in line. He might have been tough, but I did not think he was a Double Y.

Watching the drama closely, I almost missed the man at the end of the hall as he stole into the shadows with the grace of a phantom.

I shouted for help, but no one could hear me over all of the noise. Using the security Link built into my collar, I called for backup, then I charged after our rabbit. I dashed along the corridor, running in the same direction as the phantom, but one floor up. I could not see him; if he turned right or left, I would not know, and I would lose him.

Sprinting, swinging wide around a corner, I dashed down a set of stairs. I leaped the first flight, my arms pinwheeling as I flew through the air, and I crashed on the deck and into the wall, turned, and leaped the second flight.

“Where are you?” I yelled over the Link when I did not see MPs coming my way.

“They’re on their way. These halls are packed.”

“Get them here quickly,” I shouted.

The short sprint did not wind me, but my legs took a jolt as I came down the stairs. Behind me, I heard the cloud of conversations coming from outside the auditorium. I was at a T-junction. The corridors were empty to the right and to the left. I turned right, then changed my mind, and sprinted left.

The halls of the
ad-Din
were a labyrinth, with offshoots and avenues and hatches. Without seeing which way my rabbit had run, I had no prayer of finding him. And then I heard three shots. I ran back in the direction from which I had just come and spotted the blood on the wall and the two dead Marines. One sat with his back against the wall like a man taking a rest; the hole in his chest was large enough for me to fit my fist into it. The other man lay on the floor with his arms stretched before him.

So much for my backup. I radioed in for more reinforcements.

I was only a few seconds behind the clone. Now I could hear him running. It was the only sound in the hall.

If I could hear him, then he could hear me. He must have known I called in for help. Now in full pursuit, I ran around a corner, spotted the gun, and stepped back behind the wall in time to make him miss. He fired one shot, then silence. Hoping he was not waiting to ambush me, I jumped forward, dropped to my knees, and returned fire.

He was already gone.

My combat reflex began. I ran faster now, and the world seemed to slow down around me. I could hear the clone running and knew I would catch him. I sprinted down one hall, took a right turn, and spotted him. He spun, fired, missed by more than a yard, and took off running. I did not return fire.

He’d fired at least five shots. I suspected he took the gun from one of the dead MPs, meaning he had a clip that carried thirty rounds, with at least five spent.

He took a right turn into a long, narrow passage where he didn’t dare turn to shoot because there was nowhere to duck for cover. I was right behind him, my gun out. In the time it would take him to stop, spin, and aim, he knew I could cap him.

He was forty feet ahead of me, and I was gaining on him. My legs were longer. Another moment, and he was thirty-five feet ahead of me, then thirty, then twenty-five, my footsteps drowning out the sound of his. He was one of those full-body runners, every inch of him swinging with every step. His elbows cut through the air like pistons.

His steps slowed, his stride shortened, and he glided, then coasted, then stopped. He held his hands in the air, the muzzle of his pistol pointing to the ceiling, and he slowly turned to face me.

“Drop it,” I said.

He hesitated for just a moment, undoubtedly calculating the odds in his head, and the pistol fell from his hand. Without my giving the order, he stepped on the gun and slid it toward me.

The hallway was no more than ten feet wide, but it extended for hundreds of feet behind and before us. We stood there staring at each other, both of us panting from the long sprint. We were not alone for long. Two MPs came dashing around the corner about one hundred feet ahead of us, their pistols drawn.

I wanted to kill this rabbit. I wanted him to scream and wave his arms in the air like a madman on fire, then rush me. If he did, I might have shot him, or I just might have thrown my gun away and beaten him to death. I thought about Dr. Morman lying dead, a quirky woman with a dark obsession who meant harm to no one.

“Are you going to shoot me?” the rabbit asked, his eyes not on me but on my gun.

Few things would give me more pleasure,
I thought. I said, “No. You’re missing a mandatory briefing. We’re going to escort you back to the auditorium.”

I didn’t even cuff the bastard. Of course, I hoped he would run or put up a fight. He didn’t. And when he passed through the posts and the computer identified him as a Double Y, we cuffed him. He lowered his head and said nothing as we led him to the brig.

We captured seven infiltrator clones on the
ad-Din
. We caught seventeen thousand Double Y clones in our net as we swept every ship and base. Next, we had to decide what to do with them.

Warshaw held an emergency convocation on the
Kamehameha
to discuss plans for disposing of the Double Y clones. This was a meeting for fleet commanders and fleet commanders only—attendance mandatory. Much to Winston Cabot’s displeasure, attendees checked their entourages at the door.

Warshaw held the meeting in a conference room on the fleet deck. He was still in the Perseus Arm, still circling Gobi, but he no longer feared for his life. He still had MPs manning posts around the ship, but guards no longer stood inside and outside his office door.

He began the meeting by saying, “From what I hear, we have seventeen thousand prisoners of war. How the speck did the Unified Authority manufacture seventeen thousand new clones in under a year? I thought the Mogats destroyed all the old orphanages.”

I had an idea of where they might have come from. Toward the end of the Mogat War, an enterprising admiral created his own private clone farm for making SEALs. It was secret and small, which was why the Mogats missed it. Small as it was, that clone factory might have been able to mass-produce seventeen thousand clones in a few short months if its assembly line was on overdrive.

I kept my mouth shut though.

“Ah well, at least we tagged ’em and bagged ’em,” Warshaw said. And then he banged me with a stealth attack. He said, “Any of you ever worked with Philo Hollingsworth before? He ran the tagging operation . . . did a pretty good job.”

None of the other officers seemed to know Hollingsworth. Hearing this, Warshaw said, “I served with him in Scrotum-Crotch for a few years. Smart guy.”

Message received,
I thought to myself.
Message received.

The operation, of course, had been mine. I planned it, I directed it. By giving all of the credit to Hollingsworth, Warshaw played down my involvement and consequently my value to the empire, the bastard.

“So what do we do with our prisoners?” Warshaw asked. Several admirals made nebulous suggestions, broaching the subject of executing the Double Y clones but never quite coming right out and saying it. One admiral said, “They’re too dangerous to keep in prison.”

Everyone agreed.

“So what do we do with them?” Warshaw repeated.

No one spoke. The answer loomed in the air like a ghost, like an intangible presence that anyone could see but no one wanted to acknowledge. I had the feeling that Warshaw had come to the same conclusion as all of his men but wanted someone else to say it first.

Admiral Nelson of the Orion Inner Fleet took the bait. “We should dump the bastards in deep space,” Nelson said. It made sense that he would speak up. Of all the officers in this meeting, he was the one living closest to the front line.

“Kill them?” Warshaw asked, as if the idea had not occurred to him.

“We wouldn’t be
killing
them; we would be
executing
them,” Nelson said. “They’re spies. They were caught wearing our uniforms.”

That was not exactly right. Since designing new uniforms had never been a priority, we were still wearing the uniforms that the Unified Authority had provided us. No one felt like arguing the point. I sure as hell did not. Now that we had them behind bars, I felt a certain sympathy for the Double Ys. I didn’t like the idea of exterminating the pathetic bastards, but I sure as shooting would not let them go free, either.

Admiral Adrian Tunney, commander of the Orion Central Fleet, bawled out, “Speck! Why are we even having this discussion? Those bastards aren’t human; they’re deformed clones. They’re synthetics gone wrong.”

I always considered Warshaw a deformed clone, but I kept that opinion to myself.

“Deformed clones,” Warshaw repeated. To his credit, he treated the comment with contempt. “Why don’t we eliminate all the synthetics?” he asked. “That way I won’t have to hear so many stupid comments during my staff meetings.”

Almost every officer in the room laughed, but they sounded nervous. Each man at the table incorrectly believed that the joke was about everyone but himself. Unlike the other officers, I had no delusions.

Warshaw roused me from my contemplations by asking, “Harris, you helped us catch them. What do you think the Unified Authority hoped to accomplish with those clones?”

Now there was a question for the ages. “I have no idea,” I admitted. I kept thinking about what Freeman had told me, that the Unified Authority wanted to kill off our officers so it could take control of our ships. The idea sounded too simplistic to me.

“You have no idea,” Warshaw repeated, his frustration showing. “That’s it? Not even a theory?”

“You want a theory?” I asked. I wanted to tell him that “Marines don’t speculate.” I wanted to tell him that the Unifieds probably told the Double Ys to kill every officer whose brains were bigger than his balls, and that after Franks and Thorne, the killer clones ran out of targets. “Here’s a theory,” I said. “Maybe the Unified Authority wants its ships back.”