The Clone Empire (25 page)

I was still feeling the effects from a couple of long days, and I should have gone to my quarters for an hour’s rest. Instead, I went down to the Marine complex for a quick inspection.

The men were unpacking, and most of the barracks were dark. A team had begun setting up the shooting range. The cooks and their assistants clanged pots and fired up the stoves in the mess. Hollingsworth met me as I watched a few of his men mopping their barracks. I asked him how the move was progressing, and he told me he had it under control. Our conversation lasted a few antiseptic seconds, and I left for my billet.

 

Villanueva sent an ensign to my quarters with the news that we had reached St. Augustine. When the ensign asked if I had any orders for him to relay back to the bridge, I shook my head and closed the door on the kid. I was genuinely tired, but I did not want to go to sleep. I had too much to do.

I decided to rest for a few hours, then I would check my troops for intruders, then I would return to St. Augustine. I was stalling. I did not want to return to St. Augustine. It wasn’t the planet that bothered me; it was the group of ambitious officers who awaited me there.

I hated having an entourage, but I had little choice in the matter. My preference was to travel quietly and alone, and to drop in on bases unannounced. I preferred traveling under the radar; but if I wanted to flush out the infiltrators, I needed them to see me coming and make the first move. Having a troop of worthless comfort-class officers in my wake made me easy to spot. So I would go back to wearing a bull’s-eye and waiting for someone to shoot.

There was something else I wanted to avoid as well—contacting Admiral Warshaw. He wanted regular progress reports; but unless a coroner found something useful about the late Sergeant Lewis, I would have nothing to report.

I turned off the lights and lay down for a nap, wondering what secrets the autopsy would reveal. A ship’s medic might not find anything, but that coroner on St. Augustine was another story. He’d know what to search for and how to find it.
Yes,
I told myself,
I would bring in a trained coroner, then there would be results.

My thoughts ran their course.
Had I been Lewis’s first victim? No, of course not. We never found the body, but he must have killed a real Kit Lewis.

What would have happened if Freeman had not followed us?
I asked myself. The answer was obvious. I would have died. The answer was as obvious as the bruises on my face, arms, and neck.

I drifted into a light sleep.

If the man had waited a few more seconds, he might have caught me fast asleep instead of just dozing off. He had his gun ready when he slipped through the door, but I had already heard the soft hiss of the pneumatic piston and rolled off the bed.

He must have thought he’d found an empty room. He stepped in and closed the door behind him, pausing when he saw my unmade rack. Peering from a gap between my desk and my bed, I saw the man’s legs and the silenced pistol he held in front of him.

My billet was small, a bed, desk, closet, and head all built around each other as tightly as the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The lights of my communications console blinked on and off on the far wall; someone was trying to reach me. I hoped they would come to check on me when I did not answer.

His gun at the ready, the man took a step toward my bed. Maybe he knew I was in here, maybe he thought I left it unmade like a guest in a hotel; but he took no chances. He walked to the edge of my rack, and said, “You might as well come out.”

I heard uncertainty in his voice. He didn’t know I was in the room.

“I know you’re here, Harris. I saw you come in.”

I did not believe him. I sat quiet and waited. Hidden by the desk, I managed to crawl along the far side of the bed toward the bathroom. I was as silent as a cat on the prowl, and I felt the beginning of a combat reflex running through my veins.

The man laughed, and said, “I can see you.” The stupid son of a bitch had his back to me when he said that. He was aiming his gun into my closet when I lunged at him from the door of the head.

The bastard had lightning reflexes. He spun and clipped me across the jaw with his pistol. Lights popped behind my eyes, and my head spun for a moment, but I grabbed his gun hand with both of my hands as my momentum slammed both of us into my tiny work desk. He smashed a fist into my head as I knocked the pistol out of his hand.

The man brought his knee into my chest as I slid to the floor and grabbed the pistol. He stomped at my hand, then kicked me across the jaw; but I held on to the gun. The fight was as good as over. He kicked me in the chest, sending me to the floor, then he bolted from the room. I took a moment to recover, then I leaped to my feet and ran through the door. By the time I reached the hall, the speedy bastard was gone.

 

I reported the attack and placed the ship on alert even though I knew it was a waste of energy. Captain Villanueva placed security posts throughout the
ad-Din
, he set up security cameras and posted MPs to guard vital areas.

He reacted thoroughly and by the book; but if stopping the infiltration had been that easy, Warshaw would have nipped our infiltration problem long ago.

 

That night I received a message from Warshaw summoning his admirals to Gobi for a summit. As the “highest-ranking” officer in the E.M. Marines, I was required to attend.

St. Augustine would have to wait. Screening my men would have to wait as well. They would be trapped on the
ad-Din
with an infiltrator in their midst. I had Villanueva send a transport to retrieve Cabot, then we set off for Gobi.

I brought the dead sergeant with me to the summit.

Before wheeling him out of sick bay, I opened his cryogenic body bag to make sure it held a stiff instead of a stowaway. Frozen mist rose out as I spread the seam. The dead and partially dissected Kit Lewis stared back at me with his one remaining eye, little folds of skin peeled back from his cheek, ear, and neck.

Seeing the frozen body, I realized that no one in their right mind would hide in a cryogenic bag. The temperature inside the bag remained a constant zero degrees, and there was no air.

“You know you wouldn’t be in there if you had just dropped me at Fort Sebastian,” I said as I closed the bag. I slung it from the table to the cart and wheeled it toward the landing bay.

In the meantime, a team of twenty MPs swept the landing bay and the transports for signs of tampering or unwanted visitors. After I heard the bay was clean, I posted the MPs by the door. The only people allowed in the landing area were me, Admiral Cabot, and my pilot—Sergeant Nobles.

I found Nobles and Cabot when I arrived at the landing bay. They met me as I came up the transport ramp. Nobles, clearly uncomfortable around Cabot, shrugged off his generally casual attitude and stood at attention as he said, “Sir, this Marine does not mean any disrespect, but that body bag looks full.”

“A coroner is going to have a look at him while we’re on Gobi,” I said.

“From what this Marine has heard, sir, there are plenty of dead men at Gobi Station. Do you have any idea what killed them?”

I nodded toward the gurney, and said, “He did.”

“Sir?” asked Cabot.

“Before I bagged him, our passenger was a Unified Authority infiltrator clone,” I said. Both Cabot and Nobles stared at the bag as if its contents might try to climb out; but Cabot understood, he’d been in on the investigation on St. Augustine. Nobles, like most of the men in the fleet, had no idea that Unified Authority had cooked up a new line of clones.

“How soon can we go wheels up?” I asked Nobles, stealing him from his thoughts.

“Whenever you are ready, sir,” he said.

“I’m ready,” I said.

I sent Cabot to go sit with Nobles in the cockpit while I remained in the kettle with the cadaver. The cabin was silent, filled with shadows and cold. I looked over the still form of Kit Lewis in his blue-gray body bag and remembered his fury as he attacked me. He’d had murder in his eyes and charged at me with not so much as a moment’s hesitation.

These bastards could kill, no doubt about it. If we did not discover their secrets, they would spread and destroy us.

I left the
Salah ad-Din
in lockdown. The ship was quarantined, and a search had begun for the man who attacked me in my quarters.

Every ship in the fleet was under lockdown. Until we figured out some way to protect ourselves, the best we could hope to do was stop the disease from spreading. For now, we would settle with a tourniquet approach, but soon enough we would upgrade to amputation.

The summit began the next day.

For lack of a safer place, Warshaw decided to hold his summit in Gobi Station. Why not? He had a small army guarding the place. He had posts taking meaningless DNA samples at every door. Gobi Station was the safest spot in an entirely unsecured empire.

Warshaw assigned human guards and robot sentries to patrol the grounds outside Gobi Station. Armored vehicles ran the perimeter. A battery of rocket launchers waited inside the gates. Gobi Station was prepared for war, not infestation.

Inside the station, fleet officers mingled, followed by entourages of high-ranking hangers-on. As far as I could tell, I was the only Marine in attendance. I wore a tan uniform in a sea of white.

Warshaw kicked the meetings off with a banquet. I sent Cabot in my place and used the time to hold a summit of my own in the morgue.

Warshaw had brought two coroners in from Morrowtown, the capital of Gobi. When I entered the morgue, I found them hard at work, standing over gleaming steel trays holding carefully washed body parts. In the background, Sergeant Kit Lewis’s cadaver lay partially skinned and disassembled. It reminded me of the holographic “visible man” display my teacher used in physiology class.

The coroners had peeled the skin from Lewis’s right cheek and pulled the pipes from his throat. The skin and ribs had been removed from the left side of his chest, revealing layers of soft pink meat. Any blood had been washed away. The cavity that once held his heart now sat empty like a secret compartment in a waxwork dummy.

Whatever portion of the faux sergeant’s brain remained in his head had been scooped out, washed, weighed, and examined. Seeing the eviscerated body with its cubbyholes and cavities left me queasy, but seeing the organs on trays and in bowls did not bother me much. They had been carefully cleaned so that they were no more offensive than the meat in a butcher case.

When I stepped into their lab, the two coroners turned to greet me. I walked over to the table, took a look at Lewis, then turned to them, and asked, “Have you found anything?”

The taller of the two men, a man in his forties with bushy red hair and round glasses, asked, “Were you the one who brought him in?” In his gloved right hand he held a waxy-looking organ.

I nodded.

The second man, a pudgy kid who stood no more than five feet and five inches, spoke through his mask. He said, “It was the gunshot that killed him.”

I’d heard that joke too many times already. “Yes. I was there,” I said in an officious voice. “What else can you tell me?”

“Were you the one who shot him?” the taller, older man asked. When he placed the organ in a tray, I realized he’d been holding the dead clone’s heart.

“I didn’t pull the trigger,” I said.

“Was this an execution?” he persisted.

“No,” I said.
It was supposed to be my execution,
I thought.

“You were putting him out of his misery, right?” the younger coroner asked. He sounded slightly cocky, the promising young apprentice who believes he knows more than his master.

The older man turned to his student and corrected him, saying, “You’re jumping to conclusions, Sam. All he said was that it wasn’t an execution.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

The older coroner pointed to a spot on the cadaver where the ribs had been cut away, and said, “This fellow was badly beaten. When I first saw him, I thought he had been hit by a car, but then I got a closer look at the damage. Was he tortured?”

The younger man picked bone fragments out of a dish. Some of the pieces were an inch long. Some were shorter. “These are pieces of his ribs. We pulled them out of his lungs. His liver was so badly traumatized it was leaking like a sponge.”

“Injured that badly,” I said, thinking about how quickly he moved when he attacked me.

“Not just injured, he was dying,” the younger man said.

The older coroner glared at me, and asked, “Aren’t there laws against torturing prisoners? Do you know who did this? It’s, it’s inhuman.” He looked down at Lewis and shook his head.

“No one tortured him,” I said.

“What happened?” the old man asked.

Staring down at the cadaver, I said, “He got in a fight. All things considered, I’d say he won it.” When I looked up, I saw that both coroners were staring at me and I became very self-conscious. The bruises Lewis had given me had not even begun to heal before I was attacked on the
ad-Din
and given a new set of gashes.

“I assume you were involved,” the older coroner said. His posture stiffened, and he looked nervous.

“Yes,” I said.

He must have believed that I’d tortured and murdered the dead clone. Carefully choosing his words, he said, “This man was in no condition to defend himself at the time of his death. Many of his bones were broken, and his internal organs were hemorrhaging. He had a collapsed lung. He could not defend himself, not with a collapsed lung. I doubt he even had the strength to stand.

“General, you didn’t need to shoot him. If you’d given him another minute or two, he would have bled to death.”