“Yes,” I said, and I repeated my question, “Have you heard anything about dead clones turning up in other cities?”
“I . . . I haven’t, sir. Nothing,” he said.
We stood in the morgue, three occupied body bags lying on tables before us. I had come with my entourage, and the ensign had come with his as well. It made for a crowded room.
“Perhaps you could get one of your men on the horn to find out,” I suggested.
“Yes, sir.” He turned to one of his men and communicated his orders without speaking. The man saluted and left, making the room one body less crowded.
“Do you have information on any of these men?” I asked the ensign. “Names? Units? Which ships they came from?”
“No, sir.”
Pushing my way through the crowd, I approached the first bag and opened it far enough to reveal the head and face within. The mess that stared out at me did not look like a clone. Its skin was the purple of a fresh plum. The face was moon-shaped, a fat blue tongue poking out between black lips. The hair was the correct color—regulation cut and the right shade of brown.
Seeing the body, a few of the men in my entourage groaned. Sailors . . . They were not as used to dealing with death as Marines.
“What happened to him?” I asked.
“He drowned,” said the ensign.
“Are you sure he’s a clone?” asked Admiral Cabot. He looked pale, his eyes locked on the corpse’s flat doll’s eyes. “He doesn’t look like a clone.”
The ensign looked back into the crowd. Obviously not seeing the person he wanted, he called, “Andy, can you come in here? Tell the general what you told me.”
Unlike everyone else in the room, Andy was a natural-born, probably a local doctor pressed into performing forensic medicine. He was a short man with fiery orange hair and heavily freckled skin. He looked at the body, then at the ensign, then settled his gaze on me. “He was three days dead when he washed up.”
“Are you sure he was a clone?” Cabot repeated.
Andy nodded up and down like a horse, and said, “Oh, he’s a clone, there’s no doubt about that. I ran a tissue sample. I checked his teeth, too. You can always tell by the teeth.” He reached down and squeezed the corners of the dead man’s mouth, making the lips open in a puckered smile.
“Jeez,” Cabot hissed. “Show some respect.”
“Respect.” The word hung in the air as the examiner unzipped the body bag farther, revealing open incisions in the cadaver’s throat, chest, and gut. I wondered if it was possible to respect a body and run an autopsy at the same time.
“We drained a quart of water from his lungs,” the examiner said.
“So he died of natural causes?” asked Cabot.
In my mind, “natural causes” meant a heart attack or kidney failure. Death by drowning seemed no more natural than eating poison or having an underground garage cave in around you.
“We didn’t find anything to suggest he was murdered if that’s what you mean.”
“How about this one?” I asked, taking a step toward the next table. I opened the bag enough to reveal the badly deformed face. Great pains had been taken to clean this corpse, but the skin around the cheeks looked like melted plastic. Bone showed through his skin along the top of his forehead. Despite all of the wreckage to the rest of his face, the man’s undamaged eyes stared up at the ceiling.
What was left of the dead man’s hair had been singed and turned to wire. If he’d had any facial hair, the fire had burned it away. The merely blackened strip of skin along the point of his chin reminded me of a beard.
Hoping to demonstrate his command of the situation, the ensign said, “This one died in a fire.”
“Yes, I see that,” I said. “One man drowns and the next one burns. St. Augustine is a dangerous planet.”
“Actually, he died of asphyxiation,” the examiner said. “It’s fairly common. Most people choke on the smoke long before the fire gets them.”
“Did you find anything to suggest—” I started.
“Foul play? Murder? It’s hard to tell,” said the examiner. He probed the skin along the cadaver’s throat with his fingers. “No broken bones; but on a body like this, burning can hide contusions and abrasions.” He pulled one of the man’s hands free of the body bag, holding it up by the wrist for me to get a closer look. “There’s not much we can get from this. His hands could have been cuffed or tied together before he died, and we wouldn’t know, not when the body is this badly burned.”
“That’s very convenient,” I observed.
“We didn’t find any cuffs or rope at the scene,” the ensign said.
“Have you investigated the cause of the fire?” I asked.
“We haven’t looked into it, sir.”
“Maybe you’d better get someone on that,” croaked Cabot, his face pale and clammy.
“Yes, sir.” The ensign hesitated, then said what Cabot should have known. “Um, sir, I don’t have anyone with that kind of MOS.”
Investigating arson was not a typical “military occupation specialty,” and none of the local MPs had any experience in that field. These guys knew how to break up street fights and how to haul drunken sailors to the brig. The Navy trained them to handle “drunk and disorderly” conduct, not forensics and crime-scene investigations.
“Tell me about this one?” I asked, moving to the last of the corpses.
“He didn’t die of natural causes. Someone snapped his neck,” the examiner said as he opened the bag.
The dead man had a startled expression, his glassy eyes open so wide they looked like they might roll out of their sockets. His skin was the color of curdled milk, and a familiar set of bruises ran along the base of his jaw. He’d died like Admiral Thorne—somebody had twisted his head around until the spinal column broke.
“Ensign, why weren’t we notified about this?” one of the lieutenants from my entourage demanded. He sounded outraged.
“We were notified,” I said. “That’s why we’re here.”
“Yes, sir,” the lieutenant whispered. He sounded contrite. Perhaps he had read my mind . . . more likely my expression. I was tired of seeing the officers in my entourage grandstanding.
“Lieutenant, come here,” I said, making no attempt to hide my annoyance.
He came over, his steps short and tentative. He reminded me of a pet dog being called over to a scolding.
Normally, I simply ignored fools, but in this case I made a point of reading the lieutenant’s name tag. When we got back to the ship, I would assign him to some other duty.
I pointed to the dead man’s jaw, and said, “Lieutenant Granger, place your fingers over these bruises.” He was a sailor, not a coroner; the order must have seemed ghoulish to him. To show that I was not making sport, I demonstrated. The spread of my fingers did not fit the bruises.
“I don’t see what you’re—”
“Just humor me,” I said.
He placed his hand across the point of the jaw, his thumb on one side and the fingers on the other. The fit, of course, was perfect. He stared down at the way his fingers covered the bruises in shock.
“Sir, you can’t possibly think . . .”
“Not at all,” I said. The lieutenant did not know why his hand fit the bruises so perfectly, but everyone else understood my point—the killer was a clone.
The body tally was at thirty-nine and counting.
St. Augustine had twenty-five cities and one hundred thirty resort areas. We had military police patrolling most of the big resorts, but the smaller ones provided their own security. Apparently it never occurred to the locals to call for help when bodies trickled in.
“We just heard back from Goshen Beach Station,” one of my lieutenants reported. “They’ve got four stiffs.”
The room was warm and crowded. It smelled of chemicals and perspiration. The men in the body bags smelled of soap and formaldehyde, but that might have been my imagination. I did not mind the morgue or the bodies, but the entourage and the politicking made me claustrophobic.
“I’m going for a walk,” I said.
“Where are you going?” Admiral Cabot asked, sounding like a little child afraid his parents are abandoning him.
“Out for fresh air,” I said. He started after me, so I added, “Alone.”
“There may be a murderer out there,” he said.
“At least one,” I said.
“Maybe I should—”
I put up a hand, and asked, “You don’t really think I need you along for protection?”
He gave a nervous laugh, and said, “That’s a good one, sir.”
Officious prick,
I thought as I escaped out the door. It was early in the evening. The sky had not gone dark, but the streetlights had come on.
From the reports, I expected to see nothing but women, children, and clones on the planet. That was not the case. Groups of teenage boys roamed the streets. Old men worked the shops. And there were fighting-age men as well, locals who had survived the invasion. Maybe half the men I passed were clones, maybe only a third.
Petersborough was no resort town. It had probably been an industrial center before the Avatari invaded. Though I saw an occasional empty lot heaped high with debris, most of the buildings had survived the war in one piece. The aliens hadn’t set out to destroy this city, but they sure as shit did nothing to improve it.
I walked along streets decorated by an odd combination of iron doors and glittering storefronts. One block gave way to the next. As I neared an open-air casino, I saw scores of sailors with women on their arms. In the alley behind the casino, I passed couples groping and kissing and thought of Ava.
Another block, and I had entered an abandoned industrial district with dilapidated warehouses made of cinder block and steel. Even though they were only a few streets back, the storefronts and casinos seemed like a memory from another town.
Wandering off by myself was asking for trouble, and I knew it. I stopped, searched the street. Seeing that I was completely alone, I returned to the bright lights and amorous crowds of the hospitality district.
A parade of couples marched by me—clones with natural-born dates, their loud laughter carrying on the breeze. I saw unattached women on the prowl outside several bars. The Marine term for these women was “scrub.” I sometimes wondered what names they had for us.
It was nearing 20:00, and I had not eaten since lunch, so I found a promising-looking restaurant/bar and headed in. Ironically enough, the place was called Scrubb’s, spelled with two Bs. The name could have been an accident, but I doubted it.
Two hours after the dinner hour, the place was still half-full, with a few couples leaving as I came in. The clones who remained eyed me nervously as I came through the door.
The tall, well-curved hostess approached me and introduced herself as Debbie. I stood six-three, and she came up to my eyes. She studied my blouse for a moment, smiled, and said, “You must be an important man.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“You have a lot of ribbons,” she said, pointing to my chest.
She had olive skin and silky brown hair that hung straight down past her shoulders, then formed curls at the end. She had blue eyes that were narrow and small. Her eyes had an angry set, but her smile was friendly. She wore a dark blue dress with a cut that showed the tops of her breasts.
“You see action, and they give you ribbons,” I said.
“You must have seen a lot of action.”
I could have taken that comment several ways. I chose to take it as innocent, and said, “More than I like to admit.”
“Is that how you got those stars?” she asked, pointing to my collar. “I’ve seen men with bars and leaves pinned on their collars, but I’ve never seen stars.”
“Lieutenants wear bars, majors wear clusters.”
I expected her to say something stupid such as asking if that made me a sergeant. Instead, she said, “Let me find you a table, General.”
When I asked, “How do you know I’m a general?” she just laughed and led me across the floor.
The eatery was not all candles and violins, but it wasn’t burgers and fries, either. The lighting was low, and the waitresses wore dresses instead of uniforms. Some customers spoke in hushed tones, and others told stories and laughed in voices that boomed like kettledrums.
Debbie sat me at a table near the back of the restaurant, about ten feet from a hearth with foot-tall flames dancing on a stack of logs. Cool air poured out of the ceiling, causing the temperature to remain comfortable. It reminded me of a hot shower on a cold night, leaving me relaxed.
I half hoped she would give me a card, a phone number, or a slip of paper stating what time she got off work. At the moment, Ava seemed far, far away. Debbie touched me on the shoulder, and said, “Your waitress will be right with you.”
I wondered what would happen if I pursued her? Ava was more beautiful than this girl, but not as young . . . smooth-skinned youth had its own kind of beauty. Not that gravity had caught up with Ava; it probably wouldn’t for another few years. I watched the girl walk away and knew that I might well fantasize about her for the next night or two.
Compared to the hostess, my waitress seemed positively plain. She was short and slender, with shoulder-length blond hair. Before taking my order, she asked, “Are you really a general?”
“I am,” I said.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“You mean besides what I want to eat?” She didn’t laugh. “Sure. What is it?”
“Are we safe now? Are the aliens gone for good?”
I studied the girl closely. The restaurant was dim, so I could not see every detail. She might have been twenty or maybe twenty-five years old.
I saw no scars on her skin, but I heard them in her voice and decided to lie. “Gone for good,” I said, unwilling to say anything further. I so wanted to believe my own words that it almost made them true. Modern alchemy—turning lies into gold.
She said nothing, and I wondered if she believed me. Maybe she realized the same thing I did, that sometimes it is better not to know what lurks around the corner.