The Clone Empire (9 page)

I parked my jeep along the curb right beside the girls’ dormitory. When I opened my door, a cold wind blew rain onto the dashboard. I jumped out, and the wind slammed the door shut behind me. My shoulders hunched against the cold and my right hand holding down my lid, I ran to the entrance. As I approached the covered walkway that led to the door of the building, an armed guard stepped out of nowhere and planted himself in my path.

He was a civilian, a kid in his twenties with a little beef on him.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he asked.

A year ago, I would have planted the kid on his ass, but that was before the shoot-out with the U.A. Marines. I had not had a combat reflex since the Marines shot me with five neurotoxin-coated fléchettes. Instead of feeling the warmth of testosterone and adrenaline in my blood, I felt a slight tinge of nerves. That tiny glimpse of fear bothered me far more than the kid himself. I could not afford to hesitate when challenged, not even for a millisecond, so I responded with more prejudice than needed. Instead of explaining why I had come, I said, “Out of my way.”

The boy started to raise his rifle; but my reflexes, quick as ever, were faster. I grabbed the gun, directing the muzzle away from me, and pulling as if trying to wrench it out of the kid’s hands. When he yanked back, I gave the rifle a shove in his direction, driving the butt into his chest. The boy dropped to the ground, fighting for breath, while I held on to the rifle.

“Now if you will excuse me,” I said. I dropped the gun a few feet from where the boy lay gasping and continued toward the door. Two more armed guards stood just inside the glass door, their rifles drawn.

Those two needed a lesson in depth perception that I would happily give them. They had miscalculated the distance between themselves and the door. I threw the door open, hitting the guard to the right on the nose. Some stupid instinct caused him to fire his weapon as he spun to the ground, and the bullets shattered the glass in the door, sending shards and blades across the lobby. The noise and destruction startled the second guard for a split second—long enough for me to grab his rifle and sweep his legs out from under him. The sound of the gunfire still ringing in my ear, I pulled the clip from the rifle, emptied the chamber, and dropped the gun to the floor. Then I turned to the first guard, and asked, “Excuse me, I’m here to see Ava Gardner. Could you tell her that I’m here?”

The kid scampered backward a couple of paces on his hands and ass, then climbed to his feet and disappeared into the building. I would not set foot beyond the lobby of the girls’ dormitory; some taboos cannot be ignored. Doctorow might overlook my assaulting his three armed guards, but he would not look kindly upon my entering his home for orphaned girls.

As it turned out, my decision to semibehave proved wise. The next person to enter the lobby was not Ava, as I had hoped, but the Right Reverend Colonel Ellery Doctorow. He stormed out of the elevator, came halfway across the lobby, saw the shattered door, and froze where he stood.

“What happened here?” he barked in a voice that was nearly as loud as gunfire.

Only then did I notice the blood on the ground. There was a small puddle to my left, where the second guard sat wiping his face. Blood ran down from his cheeks and squeezed between his fingers. The flying glass must have slashed him.

“Your men pointed their weapons at me, I felt I had to take them away,” I said. “The blood and the door, they did that on their own.”

Outside the door, that first guard managed to sit up but remained on the concrete rubbing his chest, his rifle still resting on the ground beside him.

A dozen people crowded behind Doctorow gaping at the destruction that had been the door of the lobby. They chattered in tiny, half-whispering voices. No one came any closer than Doctorow, who remained thirty feet from me.

I had come unarmed, and I remained unarmed, having given the rifles back to the guards. Standing there in my Charlie service uniform, I tried to look as harmless as possible. If the locals ignored the bits of glass and blood on the ground, the injured men, and the rifles, they might have found me charming.

Attempting to compose himself, Doctorow asked, “What are you doing here?”

The words had barely left his mouth when an elevator opened, and Ava stepped into view. She saw the destruction around me and gave me a somewhat motherly smile—the smile mothers must sometimes give their children as they prepare to scold them. She worked her way through the crowd and stood beside me.

“What are you doing here, General? You know this building is off-limits to you and your men,” Doctorow repeated. He was right, of course; I did know. Until this moment, I had always honored that rule. Even now, I stood just outside the building. I had barely entered its threshold. Once the guards were down, I could have waltzed in at leisure; instead, I remained at the door.

“I came to tell Ava good-bye,” I told Doctorow.

“So you attacked my men and shot up my building?” Doctorow asked.

I did not know how to respond. The way he spun the story, I was the aggressor.

“Honey, next time, why don’t you paint your message on a tank of poison gas and leave it outside the building?” Ava said in her tart voice. Her sarcasm was biting, but it was not aimed at me.

Ava saw things that completely skirted my range of vision. In the bigger scheme of things, Doctorow had fired the first shots.

He lifted a hand to his face and ran his fingers along his beard. “You’re leaving?” he asked, sounding more in control.

“I came to say good-bye,” I repeated.

“You stepped way out of line, Harris; but under the circumstances, I suppose we’ll overlook it,” Doctorow said. What else was he going to do? If he threw me in jail, I couldn’t leave his planet.

Doctorow turned and went back to the elevators, his entourage following after him like a pack of well-trained dogs.

The three guards remained, though they now kept well away from me. Congregating in a distant corner of the lobby, they looked in my direction and whispered among themselves.

“Thank you so much for not making a scene,” Ava said. Now the scorn focused on me, and I wished I hadn’t come.

“Sorry,” I said. It might not have made any difference to Ava, but I felt embarrassed. As we walked through the shattered doorway, glass crunching under our shoes, I wondered if Doctorow might have been right about me. Maybe I couldn’t be trusted.

The rain continued to fall in windblown streaks. My Army green jeep blended in with the darkened streets and gray sky.

“When are you leaving?” Ava asked, as we reached the edge of the awning.

“Now,” I said. “I’m driving to the airfield from here.”

“That seems rather sudden. How long have you known you were leaving?”

“A week.”

“You don’t give a girl much notice.”

“I thought maybe we could have lunch before I left.” I used lunch as bait, but I had something else in mind.

“Harris, it’s three in the afternoon.”

“I haven’t eaten,” I said.

“I have,” she said. I looked in her eyes and knew that she understood what I wanted. Having run out of things to say, I fumbled for a moment, then decided to go for broke. “I could drive you home.”

“What about my car?” she asked.

“We could drive in separate cars,” I said.

“I have classes.”

I could not tell if the wall between us was because she had already moved on from me or if she wanted to protect herself. The last two men in her life had cast her aside; maybe she built mental walls to insulate herself from pain. They were natural-borns, and they had dropped her because she was a clone. She was a clone, and I was a clone; we were together because society had very little use for us. Then again, she was beautiful, and beautiful women seldom hurt for company.

Hoping she had not simply moved on from me, I said, “I will come back.”

I expected to hear more brass from her. I expected Ava to say some line that started with, “Honey.” Instead, she drew close to me. I felt her warm breath as she pressed her lips to my mouth, then I tasted her. She held the kiss for most of a minute, then said, “Harris, you better come back.”

With that, she spun on her heels and walked back into the dormitory, where she knew I could not follow.

I pulled over in an empty area and changed into my combat armor, then drove to the airfield. The wind and rain picked up as I drove. A constant stream of droplets cascaded down my windshield.

I noticed the weather, but my mind was on Ava. If I came back, would we pick up where we left off? How long would she wait? Why hadn’t she agreed to let me take her home? I knew the answer to that last question: She didn’t want to have sex at that moment. But did that mean we were done? I had to clear my mind for the mission, but I didn’t want to.

As I pulled along the edge of the airfield, I saw Sergeant Nobles waiting in his jeep. Like me, he’d come wearing combat armor. He stepped out of his ride as I approached. Nobles stood at attention and saluted, drops the size of toenails splattering against his armor. “Sir, we’ve fallen a little behind schedule, but we shouldn’t be very late,” he said.

“They won’t start the mission without us,” I said.

He laughed.

If things had gone the way I planned, we would have taken off an hour later, but I would have faced the unknown feeling a bit more satisfied. In the end, though, sex with Ava would have changed nothing.

As we walked around the transport, I watched to see if Nobles would comment on the boot-sized tube attached under the nose of the bird—a tube with a nuclear-tipped torpedo I’d had specially fitted. If he saw it, he didn’t mention it. He might not have noticed the tube hidden the way it was. Me, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Amazing that such a tiny package could do so much damage.

We entered the transport, walking up the rear ramp into the darkness of the kettle, and my heart dropped. I had learned to live with saluting superiors and taking orders from banal-brained officers whose only qualification was that they were natural-born; but the gloomy feeling of entering a transport always gave me a chill. On this day, though, the chill turned icy.

Without 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.