The Clone Empire (19 page)

I knew why he added the “sir.” It was like telling someone they look like shit, then finishing up with, “No offense.”

So he’s not all bad,
I thought.
At least he speaks his mind.

“You thirsty?” I asked. “I brought a bottle of Scotch for the ride.”

Cabot shook his head, and said, “I’ll pass.” Maybe he didn’t like me any more than I liked him. Until this moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that my lack of respect for him might be mutual.

“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world,” I said. It was one of those ancient sayings you heard from time to time, though nobody actually knew where it came from anymore. “Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence. What if there’s a guy like that in every bar in every city on St. Augustine?”

“I think we would know about something so massive,” Cabot said. “Sooner or later, somebody is going to notice something like that.”

“Maybe somebody did notice,” I said. “Maybe one of the MPs guarding Sunmark got curious, so they killed him; and then they killed off everyone else in the precinct just in case he told someone.

“Maybe that’s what happened. They killed him, then they killed the others, then they dragged their bodies into the jungle and dissolved them with Noxium.”

“It’s a possibility,” Cabot said slowly as he considered the theory. “That would explain who did it and why.”

“But you don’t think that’s what happened?” I asked.

“I don’t have any better explanations, but I’m at a disadvantage here, this is the first time you’ve told me about your mysterious barfly.”

He thought for a moment, then shook his head. “It doesn’t wash, sir. They couldn’t land that many replacements on the planet without people noticing.”

“There are eighty thousand clones on St. Augustine taking leave at any moment. Who’s going to notice a few hundred infiltrators?” I asked.

“They’d notice if a bunch of clones disappeared . . .” Cabot began, but he stopped himself.

“We found 550 victims give or take a few. Did anybody notice anything before we started counting bodies?”

We had thirteen fleets filled with clones who had not been ashore for at least two years. For the men on leave, St. Augustine was a bottomless supply of booze, women, and freedom. From the moment they landed to the moment they returned to duty, they left their brains behind.

I had a slightly different view of the planet. I saw St. Augustine as a malignant tumor that had metastasized and was now spreading cancerous poison throughout the Enlisted Man’s Empire.

Cabot and I spoke for another few minutes before I dismissed him. He’d done his job.

An hour later, I had typed up my report and my recommendations, weak as they were. The only answer I could come up with was to be on the lookout for clones in their midtwenties who seemed alienated from the rest of the crew. Maybe we would catch a spy, and maybe he would break under interrogation. Then we would have more.

In the short term, I was placing my investigation on hold. I knew someplace where I could assemble an elite brigade of Marines that I knew had not been infiltrated. The only question in my mind was, “Would they follow me?”

I sailed out of the Scutum-Crux Arm on a wrecked battleship and returned on a yacht . . . more or less. I rode a frigate to Gobi, then requisitioned the
Salah ad-Din
, a Perseus-class fighter carrier.

In demographic terms, the
ad-Din
had the oldest crew of any carrier in the Enlisted Man’s Navy, its youngest sailor being thirty-two years old. Beyond that, having not yet been granted leave, the crew of the
Salah ad-Din
could not have picked up pests from St. Augustine. If any ship was secure, it was the
Salah ad-Din
, and she had plenty of space for transporting Marines since the eleven-thousand-man Marine compound on her bottom deck now sat vacant.

There were twenty-two hundred Marines stationed on Terraneau. The
ad-Din
had room to spare.

I toured the Marine complex as the
ad-Din
broadcasted out through a station that was specially programmed for a single broadcast to Terraneau. Walking through the barracks, I imagined them filled with men. I went to the firing range, the ghosts of ancient gunfire echoing in my head.

“General Harris?” The voice of Captain Pete Villanueva spoke to me from a squawk box on the wall. I wondered if his voice had sounded from every speaker in the Marine complex or if some onboard system had tracked my movements.

I went to the box. “Harris here.”

“We are in Scutum-Crux space, sir.”

“What is the situation?”

“All clear, sir.”

Several months had passed since the U.A. Navy attacked Terraneau. If the Unifieds were coming back, I figured they would have done it months ago.

“Have you made contact?” I asked.

“We reached Fort Sebastian, the Marines are expecting you, sir.”

“Very well. All I need now is a transport and a pilot,” I said.

“Your staff pilot is ready and waiting for you, sir.”

“My staff pilot?” I asked. He might have meant Nobles, but to the best of my knowledge, Nobles was still on the
Kamehameha
.
Maybe I picked up a tick on St. Augustine,
I thought, and the thought made me smile.

“Captain, please send a security detail to the landing bay,” I said. “Have them seal off the bay and wait for me in the hall.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Under no circumstances are they to enter the bay before I arrive,” I said.

“Aye, aye, sir.”

I didn’t need to worry about them arriving before me as the Marine complex was on the same deck as the landing bay. Running through the hall, I arrived in about three minutes. My security detail—six men armed with M27s—arrived a few seconds later. Villanueva ran a tight ship; I was impressed.

“There’s a transport waiting for takeoff,” I told the men. “The man piloting that transport may be a Unified Authority assassin.”

If these men had been SEALs instead of MPs, I would have sent them in first. I’d seen SEALs at work; they could slip into a hangar, sneak onto a transport, and knock out the pilot more smoothly than most men could zip their pants.

MPs had a different calling. They arrested drunken sailors and escorted troublemakers to the brig. “I’m going in first. I want you to come in fifteen seconds after me. If there’s an enemy in there, I want to take him alive,” I said.

They answered with nods and sirs.

“Fifteen seconds, then you come in with your fingers off your triggers. I don’t want you shooting me in the back,” I said.

Months had passed since the last time I’d seen combat. During that time, I had not so much as fired a gun at a range; so as I entered the landing bay, it came as no surprise that I felt a nervous rush of adrenaline. I had not slipped into a combat reflex, but it wasn’t far off.

I stepped through the hatch, took three steps forward, and heard the familiar greeting.

“General Harris.” Sergeant Nobles waved and greeted me like an old friend. Then he remembered himself, stiffened, and gave me a proper salute.

“Nobles?” He fit the profile of the U.A. assassins—a clone in his twenties. He was neither heavy nor thin, neither muscular nor frail. Put him in any platoon, and he would blend in.

I had burst through the hatch and run toward the transport, then I slowed to the speed of a drill sergeant inspecting his platoon. A few seconds passed and the hatch opened again and six M27-carrying MPs charged in behind me and ground to a stop. I did not even need to look back to know they had confused expressions on their faces.

They had come in locked and loaded, expecting a fight. Instead, they got a dawdling general and an unarmed man standing at attention.

I ignored them and returned Nobles’s salute.

“Are we bringing an escort, sir?” he asked. The guy was so positive, so innocent. Six armed MPs had just stormed the transport, and it never occurred to him that he was under suspicion.

I said no and dismissed the MPs.

Thus began one of the more dismal missions of my career.

I did not expect Philo Hollingsworth to greet me with open arms, but I thought he would be interested in what I had to say. As things currently stood, he commanded a tiny base on a backwater world that was cut off from the rest of the universe.

No cars waited as we touched down on the airfield outside of Norristown. I wasn’t hoping for a ticker-tape parade, but I expected something. Nobles secured the transport, and we stood there wondering if perhaps we’d landed in the wrong place.

Two jeeps arrived fifteen minutes later. Colonel Hollingsworth did not come himself. Instead, he sent a couple of enlisted men to drive me. Glad for the chance to gather his gear, Nobles rode back to base in one of the jeeps. The driver of the second jeep took me to Norristown.

“Where exactly are we going?” I asked, as we drove past the road to Fort Sebastian.

“To the capitol building, sir,” the man said.

I did not know that Terraneau had a capitol building.

We drove almost all the way across Norristown. I had seen the city in ruins, now I saw it in reclamation, like a forest three years after a major fire. Collapsing structures had been torn down. Lots had been cleared. The locals had begun work on a scattering of small buildings, nothing too aggressive, just two- and three-story affairs. In another year, they might begin work on new skyscrapers.

Hollingsworth must have ignored my orders and alerted Doctorow that I was coming if we were headed to the capitol. I didn’t like it, but it could have been worse. Hollingsworth could have sent a firing squad out to shoot me when I stepped off the transport.

We drove into the prewar government sector.

For a moment, I thought we might end up outside the collapsed garage, with Doctorow telling me he had excavated the weapons; but the new fence we had built around the lot remained closed, and the ground looked undisturbed.

We stopped in front of a building with a polished onyx façade and working fountains. Its windows, once crusted with dust, now sparkled in the sun. A stream burbled down the tiered waterway that ran along the front of the building. The buildings in this part of town had not been destroyed, but they hadn’t been in use when I’d left. Someone had done a lot of work in a very little time on this structure. Taking in the amazing restoration around me, I hopped out of the jeep and entered Terraneau’s new “government center.”

The lobby of the building was a giant cavern paved in black marble and sparsely populated by men in expensive suits. The room could have held five hundred people. I saw no more than two hundred.

Hollingsworth met me at the door, his expression belying something deeper than anger. He saluted. I saluted.

“Did you really go through that broadcast zone?” he asked in a whisper, his eyes switching between me and the lobby. “It wasn’t just a trick?”

“What do you think?” I asked.

“Did you find anyone on the other side?”

We were just inside the door. Across the floor, maybe one hundred feet away, Doctorow spotted us and started in our direction. Others noticed us as well, and the din dropped noticeably.

“I found Warshaw,” I said.

“He made it?”

“He’s got a growing empire with twenty-three planets,” I said in a soft voice. “Looks like the Unifieds want their planets back.”

Sarah Doctorow floated in her husband’s wake. She smiled in my direction, her lipstick the bright red color of oxygenated blood. Her face was as round as a full moon, and her body was tapered up like a pyramid. She moved through the gathering with the grace of a queen.

“I don’t believe it. You were right about everything,” he said in a voice that betrayed aggravation instead of admiration.

And then Doctorow was upon us. I had never seen him dressed like this before. He wore a freshly pressed dark suit. He’d trimmed his beard so that it no longer covered his neck. He had also cut his hair. It still hung past his ears, but gone were the dried-out tresses that had once brushed his shoulders.

“Welcome back,” Doctorow said as he approached us.

“General Harris, thank God you’re safe. It’s just a miracle,” Sarah said, sounding too enthusiastic to be sincere.

“It’s good to see you,” I told Sarah, my pleasure in seeing her every bit as genuine as her gratitude for my safe return.

Doctorow came up beside me. We traded handshakes and glances with about as much affection as boxers touching gloves before a fight.

The last time I had checked, Doctorow had been running Norristown out of his house, with his wife snooping over his shoulder. As for this building, I did not notice any cleaning crews in the government complex the last time I came by. Now it had a gleaming chandelier cascading from its ceiling, water fixtures decorating its lobby, acres of shining black marble, and air-conditioning.