Firing a gun into the ceiling would not have captured their attention as quickly. From the moment an aide had found Thorne’s and Franks’s bodies, these men had been living in fear. With the Unifieds killing top officers, every man in the room was a target.
I waited for the admirals to respond, but no one spoke. No one challenged me.
“The Unified Authority breached our security by creating a strain of clones based on the same DNA as our clones. That made their clones impossible to detect.”
Silence. I went on. “Over the last few days, we have managed to isolate two of their clones. We arrested one and killed the other.”
I spent the next five minutes talking about Sergeant Kit Lewis, feeling every man’s eyes on the bruises that still covered my face. I told them how I had, for all intents and purposes, beaten Lewis to death, and how he nearly killed me in return. Then I told them about Seaman First Class Philip Sua, who allowed MPs to arrest him without a fight.
“These new clones have the same DNA as general-issue clones, but they don’t have the same chromosomes. I’ve issued orders for Gobi Security to update its security posts. If any of the new clones have infiltrated Gobi Station, we should have them shortly.
“Any questions?”
Only one admiral, one I did not recognize, raised his hand, and asked, “How can you have the same DNA but different chromosomes?” It took guts to ask the question that everyone else was afraid to ask.
I pretended to mull over my answer, then I stole the bit about glass and sand and bowls and syringes. Trying to come across like a man-in-the-know, I damn near quoted Sam the coroner verbatim.
“I’m impressed,” said Warshaw. “I never realized you knew so much about science.”
Feeling more confident now that I had spoken with Cabot, I continued on to the topic I had meant to discuss before the break. “Those cruisers you’ve been spotting, they’ve been carrying more than satellites. They have been ferrying infiltrator clones into our space. The infiltrators are flying into our territory on cruisers, then penetrating our blockades in planes with stealth shields.
“While we’ve been looking for battleships or cargo carriers, they’ve been using private planes. They’re flying Piper Bandits.”
Warshaw put up his hand. “Bandits? You mean the little two-man jobs? That thing’s got a range of what, one or two hundred thousand miles.”
“Not if they are outfitted with broadcast engines,” I said.
“Out of the question,” one of the admirals said. “There is no way anyone is going to wedge a broadcast engine into a little two-seater.”
The natives were getting restless. A dozen private conversations ignited across the room.
“I’ve seen a modified Bandit,” I said. “The broadcast engine is not much bigger than a shoebox. Instead of a broadcast generator, it has a single-use battery. You use it once, then you have to recharge it.”
“That’s it? That’s your big theory of how they are getting here?” Warshaw asked. “You think they are flying them in on cruisers? How many Bandits do you think they can fit on a cruiser, Harris? I started out on a cruiser. You’d be lucky to fit five planes on one.”
Entourage officers, men like J. Winston Cabot, live in a black-and-white world in which they judge everything by the way it impacts their careers. They view anyone or anything that slows their career as the enemy, and they remember every indiscretion.
By sending Cabot to measure a cruiser, I had made myself his enemy. I could probably have repaired the damage by citing him as the source of some of my information. Instead, I called him up to the dais.
He came up slowly. I had caught him off guard, and that made him nervous.
“Admiral, tell us what you were doing this morning and what you found.”
He looked across the gallery and focused on Warshaw as he said, “I took the
Salah ad-Din
to Scutum-Crux space looking for a U.A. cruiser.”
“Did you have any luck?” I asked Cabot, trying to prompt him. God he was stiff.
“We found several in the wreckage around Terraneau. Per your orders, sir, I boarded one and measured her landing bays.”
“What did you find?” I asked.
“The new Unified Authority cruisers have three landing bays. Each landing bay has ten thousand square feet of floor space, sir. If you packed them carefully, you could fit eighteen Piper Bandits in each bay. That means they can transport and launch fifty-four Bandits per ship per mission.”
Stunned silence.
Cabot seemed to inflate before my eyes.
I turned toward Warshaw, and said, “Your fleets have spotted cruisers near every planet in the empire. Is that correct?” Not waiting for an answer I already knew, I added, “The cruisers have been particularly active around St. Augustine. Is that correct?” And then I told them about the massacre on St. Augustine.
I had hoped to finish my presentation by having Jen Morman report her findings, but she never appeared.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
I rounded up a squad of MPs and rode the elevator down to the basement. As the elevator descended, I warned them that we would find armed killers, and that was all the briefing I gave.
We reached the bottom floor of the station.
The doors slid apart, and the light from the elevator formed a stripe across the leg of the dead guard lying on the hallway floor. I saw the body and hit the emergency button, setting off an alarm and causing the elevator doors to close. So much for the element of surprise.
The two men beside me had seen the body as well.
“Why did he close the door?” asked an MP in the back of the lift.
“We’re sitting ducks,” I said. “It’s dark out there and bright in here.”
“I thought I saw a dead man,” one of MPs said.
Another one whispered, “I wonder if there is any connection between this and that plane we saw in the desert?”
“What plane?” I asked.
“We found a plane in the desert, sir,” the MP said. “We found it while we were patrolling for bandits.”
Which explained why they had not notified me, the silly pricks saw the word “bandit” in their orders and thought I meant robbers.
“When was that?” I asked in as measured a voice as I could muster.
“Last night, sir.” He sounded nervous.
“You,” I said, singling out an MP with an earpiece in his ear. “You just became my radioman. Contact Station Security. Tell them to place the entire station on emergency lockdown. I want the exits sealed, the elevators stopped, and the emergency stairwells closed off while they run a floor-by-floor search of the entire facility.”
“What about the landing bays?” the MP asked.
“That goes double for the landing bays.”
“Yes, sir.” He turned and faced the wall, his shoulders hunched, and whispered in emphatic tones.
The panel beside the emergency cutoff held a flashlight, an oxygen mask, and a fire extinguisher. I took the flashlight.
“Who wants to hold this?” I asked.
Two men volunteered.
“You’ll be a target,” I warned them. “Those bastards out there are going to aim at the light.”
One of the men lowered his hand. I handed the flashlight to the other.
We were trapped in a cramped elevator. Seven men pressed together like fish in a barrel.
“There are enemy assassins out there,” I said. “I’m guessing that there are two of them. They’ll look like general-issue clones. At least one of them might be dressed like an MP.
“One of them will have just come off a cage, and the sides of his head will be shaved. If you see him, shoot him and keep shooting him until you are sure he is dead. If he’s got a friend with him, shoot them both.”
That was all the advice I had to give them. It wasn’t much.
We pulled our guns—the thirty-shot pistols preferred by military police, with limited muzzle velocity that made them safer for indoor use. Fire a powerful weapon like an M27 in a building, and the bullets could bore through two or three walls.
I used my first bullet shooting out the light in the elevator. The lift went dark, and the elevator buttons lit up. I found the button that opened the door and pressed it.
The infiltrators had shut off the lights, but they had not been able to shut off the emergency power. Rows of tiny colored lights winked on and off on a far wall.
The first shot hit the man with the flashlight. A single shot, the muzzle flash appeared and disappeared like a drop of lightning, the sound from the suppressed weapon no louder than a muffled cough.
I leaped from the elevator like a swimmer diving from a starting block. I landed on the dead MP with the flashlight and rolled across the floor, ending up in a crouching position, my gun out. The other MPs clambered off the elevator, at least one of them stumbling over the guards. An infiltrator fired two more shots, and two more of my men died. I heard them groan as they fell, then I heard silence instead of labored breathing, and I knew that they were dead.
I returned fire, aiming at the flares of the muzzle. Neither shot hit anything except the wall, but I must have come close. The man panicked. He ran past a communications panel and I saw his silhouette against the lights on that panel. I squeezed off two shots and hit the bastard, pausing to listen to the sound he made when he crashed into the wall and collapsed. I didn’t think I’d killed him, but he wasn’t happy. I heard him rolling around on the hard, cold floor.
“Sound off,” I called to my MPs.
Only three men answered.
We closed in around each other in a protective circle, our backs pointing in, our guns pointing out. We remained in a crouch as we slithered toward the spot where I had hit the infiltrator, feeling our way through the darkness.
Another shot. Hidden by the darkness, the bastard fired a single shot, then we were three. I returned fire, wasting three bullets. The guy next to me returned fire, too. Neither of us hit anything.
The clone I’d shot continued to spasm as we neared him. He kicked at me, but he was weak. I’d aimed low, hoping to hit him in the gut. If I’d shot right, he should have lost a lot of blood. I heard him wheezing, fighting for air. I might have hit him in the lungs or the stomach.
He kicked at me again as I knelt beside him. I grabbed his ankle with one hand and fired two shots along his leg. He went limp. Trying to emulate a coroner’s disregard for the dead, I worked my way along the body and found the dead man’s head. I wasn’t checking to make sure of my kill. I wanted his goggles.
No more than twenty feet away from us, but hidden by darkness, the second infiltrator clone made too much noise as he entered the hall, and I fired at him. My two surviving MPs fired as well. We didn’t hit the bastard, but we chased him away long enough for me to grab the goggles from the dead clone’s head.
Warm liquid smeared along my forehead as I pulled the goggles over my eyes. As a Marine in combat mode, I was trained to ignore the feel of the other man’s blood; but as a Liberator, I took a certain pleasure in it. It added to the combat reflex already spreading through me.
Now wearing night-vision goggles, I could see in the dark. I had not hit the man in the chest as I had thought. My shot had hit him where his shoulders met his neck, leaving a messy wound. Anyone else would have quietly bled to death, but this infiltrator tried to kick me as his life bled out of him.
The goggles had bulky, thick lenses, but they cut through the darkness. I could see the hall around me as clearly as if the noon sun shone through it. I glanced at the body beside me and knew that it was Sua, the sides of his head shaved clean. Filaments as fine as an old man’s whiskers stuck out of the bald patch—the wires that had conducted the electricity into his brain to disable him while he was on the cage.
Keeping my gun out and ready, I grabbed my last MPs by their shoulders and stood them up. As they fell in behind me, the infiltrator peered out from behind a corner, and I caught a glimpse of him. He wore Marine combat armor. Even if he went to the morgue, the armor would have gotten him through the updated security posts. With that armor, he would have been able to pass through posts without them reading his DNA.
I fired a shot and missed. He answered with a grenade. “Shit!” I yelled as I turned and shoved my men around a corner. Three seconds passed before the grenade exploded. By the time it finally went off, we had dashed around one corner, then the next, working our way back toward the elevator.
I pushed one of my MPs into the elevator, then forced the second one down to the floor. He must have felt the blood and known what I was doing because he smeared the gore on his chest and face.
I left him there, lying still as a corpse with his gun hidden under his ass.
For me, with my combat reflex in full swing, I might have taken a perverse pleasure lying there, blinded by darkness, knowing an assassin lingered nearby. The MP did not have the benefit of a gland flooding his blood with synthetic courage. Instead, he had nerve.
Marine combat armor had many uses, but it was not designed for stealth. The infiltrator’s armored boots clattered on the floor. His body plates clacked softly when they brushed against the walls. Me, I was dressed in a Charlie service uniform. My shoes had hard soles, but they weren’t extruded from a compound of plastic and steel.
Time was on my side. The infiltrator could hide if he wanted, but sooner or later an army of MPs would show up. It might take one minute, it might take ten; but once they finished securing the upper corridors, the MPs would arrive. The lights would come on and he would be trapped. He had to know that.
I reached a corner, knelt low to the floor, flashed around the wall for a fleeting look. The two men guarding the psychology lab lay dead on the floor. One was inside the open entrance to the lab. The door slid partway closed, struck his body, then slid back into its recess. A moment later, it repeated the process.