“Five suits in perfect condition, aye,” Lieutenant Mars said, making no effort to hide his frustration. He relayed my orders down to his men, whispering something extra into his microphone so I would not hear.
Finding armor in working condition might take time. Once the shielding turned off, the armor would be crushed under the weight of rocks and concrete; but the garage was big and cavernous. With three thousand Unified Authority Marines buried in its depths, there had to be five undestroyed suits down there.
Nearly an hour passed before the engineers returned with their next specimen. I examined the armor. There was no dust on the seals around the shoulder plates. One of Mars’s engineers had taken a helmet from one cadaver and added it to the body armor of another. Clever. I pretended not to notice the switch.
“Send it to the labs,” I told Mars.
“Aye, aye, sir,” he said, trying to hide a smile. He must have known about the switch and thought he had pulled one over on me.
As his commanding officer, I could not allow him to think he was smarter than me, so I added, “And, Lieutenant, tell your men to stop with the mix-and-match armor. Next time, I’ll send it back.”
“Yes, sir,” he said.
Mars called down my orders as his men loaded the body onto a jeep and left for Fort Sebastian. As I watched the jeep bounce away, Colonel Hollingsworth said, “Looks like we’ve got us an audience.”
“Damn.” I sighed.
A small crowd of locals had gathered around the chain-link fence that we’d built around the area as a perimeter. Leaning on the fence and watching us, they reminded me of inmates staring out of a prison yard.
“Maybe you should have a word with them,” Hollingsworth suggested.
“Don’t tell them that you are planning to invade Earth,” Mars added. “You wouldn’t want to upset them.”
“Just get me the specking armor,” I muttered to Mars as I headed for the gate, hating what would come next. The locals had caught me with my hand in the cookie jar. By mutual agreement, the underground garage had become a designated no-man’s-land forbidden to both us and the civilian government. Along with Unified Authority Marines, we had buried an armory filled with guns, grenades, mines, vehicles, and bombs when we blew up the garage. The locals didn’t want us visiting the armory, and we didn’t want them raiding it, either.
Throughout the morning, low clouds had floated in from the east, blocking out the sun and threatening to rain. Now the first drops of rain fell, splattering on shards of concrete, turning their gray surface to taupe.
I walked to the fence where the locals waited. Rain fell on them, but they did not seem to care.
“This is a flagrant violation of our agreement,” the Right Reverend Colonel Ellery Doctorow said as I approached. He stood a few inches from the chain link, his arms folded across his chest, an angry scowl on his face.
“I’m not here for weapons,” I explained.
“I don’t care why you are here,” Doctorow said. “Pull your men out and leave immediately.”
Doctorow was at least halfway through his sixties. The highest-ranking chaplain in the Unified Authority Army in his former life, he had come to Terraneau five years ago as the Army prepared to fight off an alien invasion. After the aliens massacred the fighting men, Doctorow shrugged off both his uniform and his cassock and became a civilian leader. He hated the military, and he viewed God as some kind of cosmic voyeur instead of a supreme being.
“We’re exhuming bodies, not weapons,” I explained. “You can hang around and observe if you like. You won’t see any weapons come out of that hole, just bodies and armor.”
Lieutenant Mars trotted over to tell me that his men had located a suitable stiff.
“How’s his armor?” I asked.
Mars repeated my question into his microphone, pressed his finger against his earpiece, then said, “The legs were crushed. The helmet is perfect.”
Under different circumstances I would have given the order to throw it back, but I did not know how long I could hold Doctorow and his civilian posse at bay.
“Take the legs from the first guy you found, the one with the cracked visor,” I said.
“Praise Jesus, God is good,” Mars told the men in the hole. “He says we can keep it.”
“Why are you digging up dead Marines?” Doctorow asked.
I started to answer, but Lieutenant Mars spoke first. “He’s preparing for the invasion.”
“Is the Earth Fleet coming back?” asked Doctorow.
“It’s the other way around. He’s planning on invading them,” Mars said, the glimmer in his eyes revealing the lightness with which he regarded my ambition.
“That’s not funny,” Doctorow said.
“He’s not joking,” I said.
“You’re planning to invade Earth?” Doctorow asked.
When I nodded, he smiled, and said, “Well, if that’s the case, Harris, dig away. If it gets you off my planet, I’m all for it.”
PART I
SECRETS AND COMBINATIONS
CHAPTER ONE
Once Lieutenant Mars’s engineers broke through to the third level of the underground garage, the work went quickly. They found hundreds of bodies, many of which were as neatly preserved as eggs in a carton. The engineers filled their body quota and radioed Mars to say they had found guns, jeeps, and ammunition.
“They’ve found a mother lode of munitions,” Mars told me.
“Leave it,” I said.
“Are you sure you want to do that, sir?” Mars asked.
I looked back at Ellery Doctorow and his militia lined up along the fence. The bastards didn’t trust us, and I didn’t blame them. “Leave it,” I repeated. “I gave them my word.”
Cheerful as ever, Mars said, “Yes, sir,” and told his men to exit the underground garage and seal it behind them. “We don’t want to tempt the locals,” he said. The engineers said something, I could not hear what, and he said, “It’s the golden rule. Yeah . . . You know, ‘Arm thy neighbor as thyself.’ We don’t get the weapons, and neither do they.”
Mars must have felt my eyes upon him. He looked at me and flashed an innocent smile.
It took the engineers about an hour to carry the last of the bodies out, set the charges, and clear the pit. They made sure no one lingered too close to the hole, then they sealed the tunnels they had dug, sending a thirty-foot plume of dust into the air.
Seeing that our work was done and that we had not exhumed any weapons, Doctorow and his militia returned to their homes.
Hollingsworth joined Mars and me as we watched Doctorow and company load into their trucks and cars. “Specking antisynthetic pricks,” Hollingsworth muttered. Colonel Philo Hollingsworth was a clone. Scott Mars was a clone. Every man under my command was cloned, and none of them knew it. They were programmed to think they were natural-born.
“He’s not so bad,” I told Hollingsworth. “Now his wife . . .”
Sarah Doctorow was an antisynthetic bitch; but Doctorow didn’t share her prejudice. She saw no difference between clones and robots. He, on the other hand, did not care whether people came from a fallopian tube or a test tube.
Mars excused himself and went to help his engineers load the stiffs onto their truck. A few minutes later, Hollingsworth and I climbed into our jeep and headed back to Fort Sebastian, locking the security fence behind us. We did not electrify the fence, but we placed sensors around it to make sure no one climbed it or cut their way through.
“So what do you think they will call the war?” I asked Hollingsworth, as we pulled onto the street leading through the ruins of Norristown.
“Who are you talking about?” Hollingsworth asked.
“You know, a hundred years from now. What do you think people will call the war?”
“I don’t think anyone will remember it ever happened,” he said.
“Sure they will. Maybe they’ll call it a revolutionary war,” I said. “Isn’t it a revolutionary war when you fight for independence?”
That was an exaggeration. In truth, we were already quasi-independent. Having decided to eliminate its clone military program, the Pentagon marooned us on its fifteen abandoned fleets. The goal was to use us for military exercises as they developed newer and more powerful ships.
“It wasn’t a revolution,” Hollingsworth said. “It’s not a revolution unless you win.”
“Well, okay, maybe we didn’t win, but neither did they. I don’t see any Unified Authority guard towers. Do you?” I asked, ignoring the obvious.
“We got crushed. We didn’t win shit. They crushed us,” Hollingsworth said, stating the obvious, which I had tried to ignore.
“Okay, so we didn’t exactly win, but we didn’t totally lose. Maybe that makes it a civil war,” I said. “Like the American Civil War.”
Hollingsworth shook his head. “It wasn’t a civil war, either, sir. It wasn’t important enough to be a civil war. I bet the local media on Earth didn’t even report the battle.”
“They reported it. They lost a decorated war hero, they didn’t have any choice,” I said. “People notice when someone like Ted Mooreland goes missing.” Mooreland was a general in the Unified Authority Marines. He had led the ground assault that ended in the underground garage.
“They’ll just announce that he died in a training exercise,” Hollingsworth said.
“You’re probably right,” I agreed.
“Damn right they’ll say that,” Hollingsworth went on. “That’s all this was to them, just a training exercise. It wasn’t a civil war, and it sure as hell wasn’t a revolutionary war.”
“Maybe it was a coup,” I said, feeling a little brighter now that I had found a word to describe our insignificant revolt.
Hollingsworth shook his head, and said, “Don’t flatter yourself. A year from now, no one remembers it.”
“Oh, they’ll remember it,” I said. “The Unified Authority lost twenty-three ships. They lost three fighter carriers, five battleships, and three thousand Marines. Damn straight they’ll remember it. Anytime the Navy loses three fighter carriers, it’s a big deal.”
Hollingsworth thought about this and gave ground. “A big battle, but a minor war.”
“But it was a war,” I said.
“Okay, so it was a war, and the war is over, sir. Unless they come back to finish us, your war is dead.”
We drove across the newly restored viaduct that led along the southern outskirts of Norristown. Like seedlings springing up in the wake of a volcanic eruption, new buildings had begun to appear around the city.
“Maybe you’re right,” I said. “Only time will tell.”
“Maybe I’m right about what?” Hollingsworth asked, sounding surprised.
“About the war being on hold,” I said.
“I didn’t say it was on hold; I said it was dead.”
I could not fault Hollingsworth for his pessimistic attitude. Based on the information he had at hand, our chances of winning a war with the Unified Authority seemed bleak. I had more information than he did, but now was not the time to discuss it. I needed to get back to Fort Sebastian to clean up. I had dinner plans that night, and I wanted to look my best.
CHAPTER TWO
Ava, my significant other/girlfriend, and I ate dinner with Ellery Doctorow and his wife every month. It was never a friendly occasion. Doctorow considered me and my Marines a relic of Unified Authority intervention and wanted us to leave. As far as he and everyone else knew, we were landlocked on his planet. We couldn’t very well fly off into space in a fleet of short-range transports, so he tolerated our settling into the Army base on the east side of town.
“Ellery tells me you want to attack Earth,” said Sarah Doctorow, the Right Reverend’s clone-hating wife.
“Wayson, are you planning attacks without telling me?” Ava pretended her feelings were hurt.
Sarah was Ellery Doctorow’s common-law wife. Ava was more like my fiancée than my wife. I got the better deal.
Wearing an ivy-colored dress, Sarah Doctorow looked like a turtle—tiny flesh-colored limbs and head, massive green shell in the middle. Her breasts hung like watermelons, and her third chin sagged so far down her neck, it could have hidden an Adam’s apple.
She looked over at Ava, gave her a warm smile, and said, “You need to keep a close eye on that man of yours. He’s planning a war behind your back.”
Ava answered Sarah in kind, smiling graciously, and saying, “That’s my Wayson.”
Ava had once been the hottest actress in Hollywood. She was a dark-haired, green-eyed goddess who might have been remembered among Hollywood’s greatest legends had word not gotten out that she had inherited her name and her DNA from an ancient actress.
U.A. society turned its back on Ava along with the rest of its synthetic progeny. About the same time that the gossip columnists began flogging Ava, the Joint Chiefs of Staff decided to jettison their clones. They sent us to the farthest reaches of the galaxy; and Ava Gardner, the fallen star, hitched a ride with us.
Sarah loathed Ava because she was a clone. Ava detested Sarah because Doctorow’s wife was a bigot and a bitch. Both women put on a great show. The first time I saw them chatting, I thought they liked each other.
“What happened to your cane?” Doctorow asked, as our better halves conversed.
“I think I’ve outgrown it,” I said.
“Congratulations on your remarkable recovery,” Doctorow said. “Your doctor gave you even chances of survival two months ago, now you’re walking around without a cane.” He lifted his wineglass for a toast. “To what should we attribute your amazing recovery? Good genes, I suppose?”
Doctorow had a talent for delivering insults as backhanded compliments. I was a Liberator, a class of clone that had been discontinued because of a tendency toward uncontrollable violence. The reason I survived was because my Liberator physiology included a special gland that pumped testosterone and adrenaline into my system to help Liberators adjust to battle. They called that feat of anatomical engineering a “combat reflex.”