The Clone Empire

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

When I first transferred to the Scutum-Crux Arm, my orders were to assume command of the fleet. Those orders changed when Gary Warshaw, the fleet’s highest-ranking noncom, made an end run. He paid an unauthorized visit to the Pentagon to whine about a Marine taking command of the fleet.

He might have been acting like a weasel, but he was right. Admiral Brocius, the highest-ranking officer in the Unified Authority Navy, rewrote my orders. Warshaw took command of the fleet, and I became Commandant of the Marines. Then the Earth Fleet attacked, and our bickering came to an end.

The Kamehameha, flagship of the Enlisted Man’s Fleet—formerly the Scutum-Crux Fleet, traveled out to meet us alone. That in and of itself suggested that something was wrong. Fighter carriers, particularly flagships, do not travel without support. But there she sat, in an isolated pocket of space, with no other ships in sight, the Kamehameha, flagship of the Enlisted Man’s Fleet.

Five months had passed since the Unified Authority attacked Terraneau. I’d seen plenty of capital ships since the attack, but they were derelicts floating in space, as dark and lifeless as the vacuum around them.

The Kamehameha, for all her battles, was anything but dead. The entire ship was a patchwork of dark walls and bright spots, with light shining from viewports and observation decks. A squadron of fighters circled her bow.

My loyalty to the Kamehameha ran deep. She was the first ship on which I served, and I served on her twice, once as a newly appointed corporal still trying to earn his chops and more recently as a field-promoted general. But there was something even deeper between us.

We were the same, that ship and I. The Kamehameha was an Expansion-class fighter carrier. She was the only Expansion-class ship still in commission, a one-of-a-kind remnant of the abandoned past. Since her manufacture, the Unified Authority had introduced the bigger, more powerful Perseus-class ships. And now the U.A. Navy had yet another generation of newer, smaller, self-broadcasting ships, with better technology in their shields.

And me …well, I was the last of the Liberators, a class of clone that had been replaced before the Unified Authority abandoned its cloning program altogether.

“Transport, this is Kamehameha Flight Control. Come in.”

“Flight Control, this is Transport,” said Nobles.

“Do not raise your shields on your approach,” the voice warned us. The man spoke in a perfunctory, monotone voice, as if he were reading from a script.

Nobles responded, “Copy that, Flight Control,” then turned to me, and said, “That’s pretty damn obvious. I wonder if they also have a recorded message in their officers’ heads reminding them to wipe their asses after taking a shit.”

Then he remembered something and scrambled for the radio. “Flight Control, please be advised that we are carrying a nuclear torpedo.”

“Transport, please repeat,” the voice said.

“Be advised that this transport has been outfitted with a nuclear-tipped torpedo.”

“Transport, stop your engines and power down. Wait for further instructions.”

Nobles stopped the transport and cut the power. Everything but the emergency lights went dark. The space outside our transport glowed brighter than the inside of our cabin.

“They’re giving us a security scan,” Nobles said. “They don’t trust us. Can’t say I blame them.”

I had seen the litany of security tests—X-ray, spectrum analysis, gamma search, radiation readings. By the time they finished, they would know more about the contents of this bird than we did. All of this security told me that the fleet was still at war. They weren’t just scanning for the torpedo—Nobles had already told them about that. They were looking for bombs, chemical weapons, maybe even robots and spies.

After no more than five minutes, they radioed back, and said, “Transport pilot, we have detected that your ship is armed. Can you confirm?”

“Affirmative. I already told you about it, we have a nuclear-tipped torpedo,” Nobles said.

“What is the purpose of that torpedo?”

I placed a hand on Nobles’s shoulder to stop him from answering and leaned in to the microphone. “It makes a hell of a conversation piece,” I said.

“I will ask you again, what is the purpose of your weapon?”

I started to answer, but the controller asked me to wait. A moment later he returned and gave us clearance to land. Our escort led us to an open docking bay and left. Nobles piloted the transport into the bay and landed on the sled that would pull us through the three atmospheric locks.

I liked Nobles; he was not the kind of man who gets nervous when conversations die away. Too many pilots felt the need to chat while they waited for the locks, but not him. As the manufactured atmospheres equalized around us, and the gigantic metal hatches cut us off from space, he busied himself shutting down his flight controls, pausing only to say, “Bet they’re surprised to see us.”

I agreed, but I wondered how happy Warshaw would be about my reappearance.

I got my answer when the last of the atmospheric locks opened. A platoon of armed Marines stood at the ready inside the bay. So did a bomb squad.

“Please wait to exit your transport,” said the voice on the radio.

Outside the transport, eight techs wearing the yellow soft-shelled armor of systems specialists, waved security sensors along our hull. Nobles seemed to find humor in all these precautions. He watched the men wheel an archway around the side of our ship, and said, “Security post. Man, these guys aren’t missing a trick.”

Whatever humor he found in all the precautions was lost on me. These boys were doing more than simply running a tight ship. Scrambling an armed escort, running five minutes’ worth of tests, and now the posts; the only armies that ran that kind of security were the ones that had already been infiltrated. I wondered if the Scutum-Crux Fleet had escaped destruction only to become a fleet under siege.

“You may now exit your ship,” said the voice on the radio. “If you are wearing armor, remove it before exiting your ship.”

“Good thing I brought a change of clothes,” Nobles said as he pulled out his rucksack and fished out some clothes. I did the same, and we dressed in the cockpit.

It occurred to me that they should already know if we had anything concealed in our armor. When they scanned our ship, they surely must have been able to scan inside our armor as well.

Once we were dressed in our Charlie service uniforms, Nobles tapped the radio, and said, “Flight Control, we’re coming out.” He hit the button that opened the rear of the transport.

We headed down the ladder and across the kettle. Our hands were empty and out where the Marines at the bottom of the ramp could see them. Between us and those Marines, a ten-foot-tall arch made of beige-colored plastic stood. The posts.

The column on the left side was “the sprayer.” It shot a blast of air filled with a fine mist of oil and water vapor. The sprayer dislodged loose flecks of skin, dandruff, and hair, which the column on the right, “the receiver,” drew in and analyzed. The findings were fed through a computer system. In the second it would take me to step through the posts, the techs on the other end of the security gate would know my make of clone, my age, any major illnesses I had suffered, and my blood type. For all I knew, they could even tell the last time I had sex.

The MPs at the bottom of the ramp signaled for one of us to pass through the posts. Nobles went first, not hesitating for even a moment. I followed a step behind. The perceivably moist breath of the sprayer blasted me on one side, and the receiver drew in the raw information. The entire process took less time than it took me to walk between the posts, and the results came up almost instantaneously.

Behind us, teams of docking-bay techs rushed to inspect our transport. I turned in time to see them scurrying up the ramp. As I watched the techs, a sailor in a captain’s uniform came up beside me. He had the confident smile of an old friend who knows he will be recognized. He was, of course, a clone on a ship filled with clones. Though he did not know it, he had the exact same face as everyone around him. Fortunately, he did not wear the same uniform. I did know the man, but I would not have been able to distinguish him from any other clone had I not recognized the captain’s insignia on his uniform. I saluted, and said, “Permission to come aboard?”

“Permission granted,” he said, returning my salute.

“Are we near a front?” I asked.

Bishop shook his head. “Not out here in Cygnus. The only fighting in the Cygnus Arm is infighting.”

“So what’s with all the security?” I asked. “I half expected your MPs to check my body cavities.”

“We are at war, you know,” Bishop said, a nonanswer designed to brush off the question.

“This isn’t wartime security,” I said. “Wartime security is a fighter escort and armed guards at the door.”

He took a deep breath, held it for just a moment, then exhaled. “It’s not the war that’s got us worried. The war is going well, everything else is falling apart.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Four Marines followed from a few feet back as Bishop led me out of the landing bay. The rest of the platoon hung back with Nobles as he secured the transport.

The Kamehameha was a warship with a complement of fighters and Marines, but it was also the mobile administrative headquarters of the Enlisted Man’s Fleet. Fleet headquarters was spread across an upper deck of the ship. At least, it used to be there. We did not take the lift to the fleet deck. Instead, Bishop led me to the bridge.

“We’re not going to Fleet Command?” I asked.

“Not now, no,” Bishop said.

“Is Warshaw up there?” I asked.

Bishop stopped walking and turned to face me. I saw deep-seated suspicion in the way he examined my face. “Why are you in such a rush to see Warshaw?” he asked.

Oh, there were so many good responses, both politic answers and flaming. Warshaw was the only officer in my pay grade in the fleet; I wanted to congratulate him for saving the fleet, but I also wanted to poke him in the nose for leaving me stranded on Terraneau. Instead, I said, “I get the feeling I’m still being screened.”

“Something like that,” Bishop admitted.

I didn’t know him all that well; we’d only been on the same ship for a few months before the Earth Fleet attacked. We occupied different worlds—he was Navy, I was a Marine. We’d gotten along, but the standard prejudices applied. Sailors thought of Marines as cargo.

“I’m not a spy,” I said. “You don’t really think the Unified Authority captured me, trapped me in a battleship, and sent me through that broadcast zone.”

“General, I don’t know what to think. You’re not even supposed to be alive.”

“I walked through the posts. What did your computers tell you?”

“You’ve got the DNA of a Liberator Clone. We’ve verified that.”

That was my genetic fingerprint. That was as specific as the computers could get with clones. They could tell one natural-born from the next by their DNA; but since clones were cut from the same helix, genetic fingerprinting only went so far. The security station could identify our make and our age and catalog any major or recent illnesses.

“That should narrow the field,” I said. “How many Liberators do you know?”

Bishop did not answer my question.

We went up to the bridge deck, but we did not enter the bridge. With his MPs still tailing us, Bishop led me into an off-bridge conference room. Wanting to believe Warshaw would join us, I took a seat at the table. The room was empty, except for a table, chairs, and a media/communications display.

We sat in silence for a moment, then I asked, “What am I missing here?”

“What do you mean?” Bishop asked, playing the role of the obtuse ship’s captain.

“You say the war is going well,” I said.

“I believe I said it was going better than we could have hoped for.”

“Okay, but you’re hiding like a mouse in a hole. What’s with the siege mentality?” I asked.

I waited several seconds for him to answer. To this point, I had not yet become angry, but my tension level was rising.

“What happened on Terraneau?” he asked.

“Is that an official question?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“Who else is listening in on our conversation?”

“No one,” he said, shaking his head.

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

Before the big attack, the Corps of Engineers set up a prison called Outer Bliss on Terraneau. They rigged a mike and a camera in the prison’s interrogation room that were so small, trained experts would need equipment to locate them. When I interrogated prisoners in Outer Bliss, Warshaw listened in on the conversations from the Kamehameha. I suspected he would listen in on this conversation as well.

“What happened on Terraneau?” Bishop repeated.

“Do you mean before or after you guys ditched the party?” I asked.

“What happened on the planet?” he asked. “How did you get out alive?”

“The Unified Authority landed three thousand Marines; I had five thousand men. The cocky bastards didn’t even bother landing more men after you left. That’s how sure they were that they would win.”

“You faced their Marines, and you survived?” Bishop asked, ignoring the obvious evidence that we were having a conversation, not a séance.

“Something like that,” I said.

“Was there anything unusual about their troops?” Bishop asked. Now he was probing.

“Do you mean the shielded armor?”

“Maybe,” he said. “Tell me about it.” The son of a bitch was testing me.

“They had shielded armor,” I said. “What do you want to know? Their armor was just like ours except that it projected a shield. Even the palms of their hands were shielded; they couldn’t carry guns. They fired fléchettes from tubes that ran along their arms inside their armor. Sound familiar?” I placed my right hand on the table, palm up, and showed him pea-sized scars in my wrist and forearm. The fléchettes had passed through my arm and armor with the ease of a sewing needle poking through a cotton sheet.

“You were shot?” he asked.

“Five times,” I said.

“You’re lucky to be alive.”

“I wouldn’t have the pleasure of sitting through this interrogation if I had died,” I said. “And Warshaw wouldn’t be listening in on us,” I added, hoping to get Warshaw’s goat and flush him out of hiding.

“Just answer the specking questions, okay, hotshot?” said the voice that came out of the ceiling. Admiral Gary Warshaw had the same voice box as every other clone, but he had his own way of talking.

Bishop winced. I smiled.

“They’re using poison on their fléchettes now,” Warshaw said. “They hit you, you die.”

“That’s how it went on Terraneau, too. They killed everyone they hit,” I said.

“Everyone but you,” Bishop pointed out.

“Genetics. I’m a Liberator. I had the mother of all combat reflexes. The doctor said there was so much adrenaline and testosterone in my blood that I should have died of a heart attack.”

“But you survived.”

“More or less. That may be my last combat reflex. The poison injured the gland.” In truth, the gland had mostly healed, but I decided to keep that to myself. With Bishop holding his cards close to the vest and Warshaw playing hide-and-seek behind a camera, I would hold on to my secrets as well.

“That’s how you survived the fight, but how did you win it?” Warshaw asked.

I explained how we lured General Mooreland and the U.A. Marines into the underground garage, then demolished the structure while we escaped through the subterranean train station in the back.

“And you just left them there?” Warshaw asked. “You just left them there to starve?”

“Yes.”

“You specking bastard.” Warshaw meant this as a compliment. “Bastard” is one of those all-purpose words in the military. “Your doctor was wrong about you, Harris; you don’t have adrenaline running through your veins, you’ve got ice.”

“Brilliant move,” Bishop said in a voice just slightly above a whisper.

“Damn specking right it’s brilliant,” Warshaw said. “And I bet our boy Harris came up with the idea all on his own. Am I right, Harris?”

It was my idea, but I did not say so. I did not respond. I felt like Warshaw and Bishop were herding me somewhere I did not want to go.

Bishop asked, “What happened after you buried the Marines?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Why didn’t the fleet send more Marines?” Bishop asked.

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

“So they just left?” Bishop asked.

“Some of them left, some of them stayed,” I said. “You sank twenty-three of their ships.”

“Twenty-three,” Warshaw said. He sounded pleased. “I wondered what kind of damage we left behind.”

“They lost twelve ships trying to chase you into your broadcast zone,” I said.

“They didn’t even need to send more men down to the planet,” Bishop said. “Why didn’t they just bombard you from space?”

He still did not trust me.

“Maybe they didn’t think we were worth the trouble,” I said. “We were landlocked; they probably didn’t consider us a threat.”

“Then they didn’t know you as well as I do,” Warshaw said. “Anyone who knew you would be scared. He’s clean. You can bring him down.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Bishop told me the fleet decks were empty, then offered to let me inspect them for myself if I did not believe him. I believed him.

He remained, however, unwilling to explain the situation. When I asked what happened to Fleet Command, he put up a hand, and said, “Take it up with Warshaw.”

“You can’t tell me anything?” I asked.

“Not my pay grade, sir. I just steer the ship.”

We had that discussion over an early dinner in the last vestige of Fleet Command, a mess reserved for captains and up. Bishop ate chicken, I ate beef, and we both had potatoes and salad. There was a linen sheet across the table, and the utensils appeared to be made out of silver instead of some chrome-coated alloy.

“Can you tell me where we are?” I asked.

Bishop laughed, and asked, “You don’t know your galactic position?”

“How the speck would I know that?”

He thought about that, and said, “It takes real balls to fly into a broadcast zone without knowing where you’ll come out.” He shook his head, and added, “I’ve got to hand it to you.

“You’re in the Cygnus Arm, Enlisted Man’s territory.” He pointed to the viewport, and added, “The planet down there is Providence Kri.”

“Is that where Warshaw is hiding?” I asked.

Bishop shook his head. “Nope; he’s not even in this arm.”

“Are you going to tell me where he is?”

“He’s in the Tube.”

“What is the Tube?” I asked.

“It’s our high command. The Unifieds have their Pentagon, and we have our Tube,” Bishop said, clearly enjoying my frustration. “Times have changed, General. Admiral Warshaw has thirteen fleets under him. We don’t just have an Enlisted Man’s Fleet anymore, we have an Enlisted Man’s Navy.”

“You’re shitting me,” I said.

“I told you, the war is going well.”

“So where is the Tube?” I asked.

Bishop’s smile spread so wide, it looked painful as he said, “That’s on a need-to-know basis. You’re not navigating, so you don’t need to know.”

You could broadcast from one end of the galaxy to the other and never know it inside a big bird like a fighter carrier. At some point, the Kamehameha entered a broadcast zone. We might have entered several for all I knew. I went to my temporary billet to wash up and rest. A few minutes later, I got a message informing me that we had reached Naval Command and directing me to report to the landing bay.

Bishop met me at the bay and escorted me into my transport. We traded salutes.

“Well, General, you’re Warshaw’s problem now,” he said.

“Anything I should watch out for?” I asked.

“You’ll be fine, sir. He’s happy to see you,” Bishop said.

I looked around the transport, and asked, “Am I flying with the same pilot I came in with?”

“You have a personal pilot?” Bishop asked, sounding surprised.

“More or less,” I said.

“You’re stuck with a loaner pilot for this trip. Your identity checked out, but we haven’t started on the guy you flew in with.”

I nodded and crossed the kettle on my way to the cockpit. The door of the transport slowly closed behind me, clapping shut as I reached the top of the ladder and stepped onto the narrow catwalk.

We launched into space, and I immediately saw that we were not headed for Providence Kri. The term “Kri” was given to planets with “engineered” atmospheres. Back in the days of the great expansion, the Senate selected planets based on several factors, location being the most important. If a planet with a breathable atmosphere was roughly the same distance from its nearest star as Earth was from the sun, it became a candidate for colonization.

Some planets were “retreads,” meaning they had all the ingredients to support life but needed the right infusions of hydrogen and oxygen along with some plant life to sustain the mixture. Seen from space, Providence Kri was a green-and-blue marble with layers of clouds and ice caps. It looked a lot like Earth. “God makes ’em good, and terraforming makes ’em better” was the old motto of the now-defunct Unified Authority Planetary Engineering Corps.

The planet we were heading for was arid, the color of sand, with few clouds and bone-dry poles. In the distance, a hot sun blazed. I could see its flare peeking out beyond the equatorial horizon.

“What a shit hole,” I said.

My pilot smiled but did not respond.

“What planet is that?” I asked, thinking perhaps he had been told to ignore my questions.

“Gobi, sir.”

“Gobi?” I asked, then I laughed so hard he must have thought I’d lost my mind. I began my career on Gobi. Wanting to make sure this was the same planet, I asked, “If that’s Gobi, then we must be in the Perseus Arm, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

Nearly ten years ago, in 2508, I had meandered into Gobi Station as a new Marine fresh out of boot camp. Now, almost a decade and three wars later, to Gobi I returned, a general.

Hundreds of ships crowded the space around the planet. A trio of fighter carriers floated in the distance. Beyond them, a broadcast station blended into the darkness around it. Had it not been for the ring of lights along its mile-wide discs, I would never have spotted the station.

Closer to the planet, Navy ships hovered in silhouette against the atmosphere. Squadrons of fighters flew in and out of view. A school of battleships passed around the wide equatorial curve of the planet at a lazy pace. The first time I had landed on Gobi, it struck me as a backwater planet and a dead end for my fledgling military career. It had the galaxy’s smallest Marine installation and the Navy, Army, and Air Force were nowhere to be seen.

We dropped into the atmosphere.

“Last time I came here, the fort looked like a house of cards after an earthquake,” I said. The old base was a sandstone fortress made more for show than warfare. When the Mogats attacked, the bulky walls caved in around us.

“You’ve been here before, sir?” the pilot asked.

“Yeah, but it’s been a while. I was stationed here.”

“No offense, sir, but you must have really pissed someone off. I wouldn’t station a dog on this planet.”

I felt the same way.

The new Gobi Station rose out of the desert like a modern-day minaret, a single, nearly indefensible column as sleek and straight as an old-world rocket preparing to launch into space.

The original station, the fort I’d once called home, was built along the side of a cliff. Not this building. The desert spread out in every direction around it.

The structure stood thirty stories tall. As we approached, I spotted a ring of bunkers around the base of the structure. Tawny and mostly submerged in the sand, those bunkers could have housed five thousand men. Particle-beam-cannon and missile arrays ran along the sides of the cylindrical fort like rows of spines. “How long has this building been around?” I asked. It sure as hell had not existed ten years ago, or we wouldn’t have been living in a prehistoric rat hole.

The pilot shrugged, and said, “It was here when we got here.”

I always hated the way transports handled in atmospheric conditions. They were built for space, relying on boosters and skids instead of wings and wheels. They had wings, but they were small and useless for gliding. Cut the power in a bird like that, and it would fall like a rock. My pilot knew his trade, but he wasn’t good at it. As we approached the landing pad, he missed a mark, and we dropped sixty feet below the platform; then he righted the bird, and we had to fly around the building and come in again.

“Sorry about that, sir,” he said as he fumbled with the controls.

We touched down on the second pass, and the ground crew converged on our transport. The landing pad was open-air. Why not? Rain was never a problem on this planet.

A security station with armed guards hiding behind a wall of bulletproof glass waited just inside the doorway. The glass formed a funnel that led to a set of security posts. As I walked through the posts, a team of security techs confirmed my identity while men with M27s kept close watch on me.

The techs only needed a moment to clear me, and the guards waved me on.

Even after all of the other precautions, two of the guards paired off with me. They herded me into a lift, and down we went. Judging by the lights, the numbers, and the length of the drop, it seemed clear we had gone deep underground. When the elevator doors opened, we had arrived at another security station with another set of posts.

There was no way to enter this building without passing through posts that scanned your DNA, and yet they scanned me again when I left the elevator. These people weren’t just digging in for a war; they were terrified.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

If you did not know that Gary Warshaw was a clone, you might have mistaken him for a natural-born. He didn’t have general-issue standard brown hair. In fact, he didn’t have any hair at all. The man shaved his entire head from his crown to his chin, including the eyebrows. He shaved in the morning. By the end of the day, dark grainlike stubble covered his chin, neck, and head. The eyebrows, though, he might have removed with lasers. They never grew back.

From a distance, Warshaw looked shorter than other clones. He wasn’t, of course. He stood the standard five-foot-ten just like every other government-issue clone; but he looked smaller because he was wide. A fanatical bodybuilder, Warshaw began and ended every day in the gym, then supplemented his achievements with ample doses of chemistry.

He had the basic facial features of a clone—the correct shade of brown in his eyes, the right shape of nose and mouth; but his skull seemed to have stretched to keep up with the tree-trunk diameter of his neck. His face had taken on a flattened appearance. A skein of veins bobbed in and out of view along the sides of his neck.

Warshaw had an office the size of a basketball court, which he divided into distinct areas that did not blend into one another. We met in the conference area, which included a desk and a ring of chairs. No more than forty feet from us, and not partitioned off by walls or screens, was a gym with weights, exercise equipment, and a personal sauna. Scanning the space, I saw a drafting room, a chartroom, and a lounge.

Warshaw looked at me, his eyes sparkling, and he said, “I doubt you’ll believe me, but I’ll say it anyway. If I thought there had been the slightest chance that you survived the attack, I would have gone looking for you.”

He sat behind his desk, looking both lost and out of place. He had a weight room, and food, and men to command; but he was an engineer, and one thing he did not have in his fortress was an engine room. He belonged on a ship.

“It wouldn’t have been worth the trouble,” I said. “No point sending your fleet clear across the galaxy to pick up a few thousand Marines.” As a commander, Warshaw tended to err on the side of caution. He wouldn’t have risked a trip to Terraneau.

“It depends on the Marines. For guys like you and Thomer—”

“Thomer is dead,” I said.

“The Unifieds got him?”

“He survived the attack and died a few days later,” I said. Kelly Thomer had been my second-in-command.

“Sorry to hear that,” Warshaw said. He sounded gloomy. “He was a good man, Thomer.”

We both gave Thomer a spontaneous and perfunctory moment of silence; and after that, neither of us seemed to have anything to say. For my part, I had so many questions that I did not know where to begin. I wanted to ask about the war with Earth and about the size of our fleet. Just as I was about to ask my first question, Warshaw spoke up.

“Look, Harris, I don’t feel like playing ‘twenty questions’ with you, so I’ll lay it all out. The Unifieds are running scared. We hooked up with twelve of the abandoned fleets. That gives us thirteen fleets and twenty-three planets. Throw in Terraneau, and I guess I have twenty-four planets. You think that speck Doctorow wants to play ball with us?” Warshaw asked.

I shook my head.

“Then he’s an asshole, and we don’t need him,” Warshaw said. “And he’s alone. Earth isn’t looking for new colonies, especially colonies on the far side of the galaxy. The Unifieds may be down to two planets, but they’re not looking to grow their operation.

“They still have New Copenhagen, but we took something else they wanted to keep. We got the Golan Dry Docks, for all the good that does us. The Unifieds destroyed the computers and evacuated most of the personnel before we got there.”

“You went after the Golan Dry Docks,” I said. I was impressed.

“They have better ships than we do. I figure one of theirs is as good as three of ours in a fair fight, so we don’t fight fair. Anytime we see one of their ships, we send ten of ours. It’s good policy. It cuts our losses.”

Warshaw stared down at his right hand as he spoke. He clenched the hand into a tight fist and squeezed, causing the veins to rise in his massive forearm. He traced the patterns with his eyes, then relaxed his hand.

“Have they launched any counterattacks?” I asked.

Warshaw laughed. “Harris, their ships are better than ours, but they’re still only as good as the crew sailing them. Their officers are scared. We catch a glimpse of them outside our planets, and they run away like little girls.”

It all sounded so good, so victorious. And then I remembered all of the security stations Warshaw had dotting his base.

“If the war is going so well, what’s with all of the security? You’ve got posts at every door.”

“You noticed that?” Warshaw asked.

“And why place your headquarters on Gobi; it’s the shittiest planet in the galaxy.” Until I said those words, I never realized how deeply I resented beginning my career on this planet.

“I didn’t come here for sightseeing,” Warshaw said in a cold, matter-of-fact voice. He waited a moment, then decided that he trusted me, and said, “It’s not the war that’s the problem. It’s the cancer that came with it. We’ve been infiltrated.

“The Unifieds can’t beat us in a fight, so they’re just going to hang back and wait for us to die.”

There were guards and posts right outside Warshaw’s office. There were guards and posts right outside the elevator on Warshaw’s floor. There were guards and posts outside the elevator five floors down, and more guards and posts outside the door of the infirmary. I began to wonder if I would find guards and posts at the opening of the toilet stalls in the officers’ head.

Walking like a man who means business, Warshaw led me through the front of the infirmary into its darker reaches.

“At least this building is secure,” I said, as we stepped into an antiseptic world of plastic sheets, stainless-steel tables, and air that smelled of formaldehyde. Tools both primitive and modern arrayed on chrome-plated trays, coffin-sized tables, laser saws, and bladed scalpels—this part of the infirmary reminded me of a medieval dungeon.

“You would think a place like Gobi Station would be safe,” Warshaw said, starting a new conversation. He waved to a doctor—a short, skinny natural-born in a lab coat. Warshaw asked, “Can you get Admiral Thorne?” and the doctor left the room.

“Thorne? He’s on Gobi?” I asked.

Thorne—Rear Admiral Lawrence Thorne—was a natural-born who had allied himself with the clone cause. He had been the commander of the Scutum-Crux Fleet when Warshaw and I took over. The rest of the natural-borns transferred out, but he stayed on with us.

“Yeah, as of last week,” Warshaw said.

The double doors spread open, and the doctor rolled a gurney into view. Until I saw that gurney, the significance of our surroundings had not occurred to me. We had walked through the infirmary and entered the morgue. We had entered the meat locker.

The man whom I had mistaken for a physician must have been a coroner. He pulled back the sheet, and there was Lawrence Thorne, flat on his back, his hands by his sides, an old man with skin so bleached and wrinkled he might have spent the last twenty years sitting in a bath. His legs were as skinny as a bird’s, but a roll of flab orbited his gut. Seeing Thorne laid out in this butcher shop, I felt a pang of regret.

“What happened to him?” I asked, still staring down at the body. He looked small and frail.

“His neck was broken,” said the coroner.

“How did he break it?” I asked.

“Somebody broke it for him,” Warshaw said. He looked to the coroner for confirmation.

“There’s bruising along the jaw,” the coroner said. Showing the coroner’s familiarity with the dead, he turned Thorne’s head to one side. Along the bottom of his wrinkled cheek, faint bruises showed in bluish ovals. The death tech placed his hand over the bruises, his fingers reaching toward the spot where the jaw met the ear. It wasn’t a perfect fit, but the spread of his fingers matched the angles of the bruises.

I’d killed a man or two using that very technique.

“Can you tell anything about the killer from the bruises? Size? Weight? Anything?” I asked.

Warshaw answered. “Yeah, they tell us something.” He walked to the door and asked one of the guards to join us. Clearly nervous around Admiral Warshaw, the petty officer approached the table.

Warshaw pointed at Thorne’s corpse, specifically at the dead admiral’s jaw, then said, “Put your fingers over the bruises.”

The man hesitated.

“Don’t worry, he won’t bite. This old boy won’t bite anyone ever again.”

The petty officer slowly lowered his hand over Thorne’s cheek. He spread his fingers so that they covered the bruises. It was a perfect fit. He kept his trembling hand on the dead man’s face and turned to look at Warshaw.

“That will do,” Warshaw said.

The hand shot up.

“Go wash up and get back to your post,” Warshaw said.

Still looking shaken, the petty officer said, “Aye, aye, sir,” and left in a hurry.

Warshaw grimaced, and said, “It’s like Cinderella; only this time, everybody’s foot fits the slipper.”

“He was killed by a clone?” I asked.

“Yeah. Doesn’t narrow down the list much, does it?” Warshaw said. “The only ones on this base we can be sure did not do it are you and me. I’m natural-born and you’re a Liberator; our fingers don’t fit.”

The coroner said, “I’m not synthetic.”

Warshaw said, “Yeah, and the good doctor here, he’s natural-born, too.”

Warshaw’s fingers would fit, of course, but I saw no reason to point that out.

“It’s not just Thorne. They killed Lilburn Franks,” Warshaw said. “They got him the same way—broke his neck. One of his lieutenants found him on the floor in his quarters.

“Specking nasty way to go, a broken neck.”

Actually, in the litany of ways to go, a broken neck ranked just below death by sexual exhaustion in my book. Thorne might never have known he was in danger. He might have simply walked around a corner, felt a quick tug, then never felt anything again.

All of the swagger had washed out of Warshaw. He spoke quietly. “They killed three of my top five officers, Harris. Two of them were killed right here, right in this base.

“They hit us even harder a few pay grades down. The Unifieds hit so many officers in the Central Norma Fleet that we had to shut down one of our fighter carriers. We didn’t have enough officers for the chain of command.

“How do you fight back against something like this? It’s like they hit us with a specking ghost. You know what the worst part is? I don’t know what to do about it. It’s like we conquered the whole specking galaxy, and now we’re dying of cancer.”

I did not know what to say.

We left the morgue. Warshaw invited me to have dinner with him, and I told him I needed to rest. My mind was reeling. I had started the day on Terraneau, spent hours sealed in a derelict battleship in the Cygnus Arm, and now I was talking mass murders on Gobi.

Warshaw laughed when I declined his invitation. “Rest? Harris, I’m about to paint a specking target on your back, and you want a nap? I haven’t even begun your briefing.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Warshaw gave me a couple of hours to rest before dinner.

I had a tiny billet, not much more than a rack and a head, with a writing desk that folded out of the wall. I went to the head, shaved and showered, and used the Blue-Light to laser clean my teeth. And then I crawled onto my rack, not to rest, but to think.

The “Enlisted Man’s Empire”—that was what we called ourselves now that they had twenty-three planets and thirteen fleets. None of that conquest would have been possible had Warshaw not created his own miniature version of the Broadcast Network. The Unified Authority had built broadcast stations near each of its planets, now Warshaw was using them to link our planets together. He’d built his own pangalactic superhighway using the ruins of another empire.

He could even reach Earth. In fact, reaching Earth would be easy. Any of our broadcast stations could be rigged to send ships there. Getting back would be another story. The Mogats had destroyed the Mars broadcast station, the station that used to broadcast ships out of the Sol System. Without the Mars Station, any ships we broadcasted into Earth space would be stuck there.

The U.A. Navy did not have the same constraints thanks to its fleet of self-broadcasting ships. It was a small fleet, too small to confront us; but the U.A.’s ships could travel anywhere at any time.

My thoughts drifted to the late Admiral Lawrence Thorne. Why would they kill Thorne? Was it revenge for changing loyalties? Maybe Warshaw was right, and the Unifieds were after senior officers. Thorne was a thirty-year man, the most experienced man in our fleet and the only one ever to attend Annapolis; but he had little combat experience. I liked him. He was a capable administrator, but from a strategic point of view, his death was not much of a loss.

They had also killed Lilburn Franks. That was another story. Franks was a clone with an inordinate amount of command experience. He’d seen war firsthand, riding on the bridge of some of the Unifieds’ most decorated warships. He knew tactics, and he didn’t back away from a fight. Warshaw always struck me as a bit of a coward. Franks came across like a man spoiling for a battle. They balanced each other out.

Two dead admirals, the number two and number three men in the fleet. No wonder Warshaw dug a hole for himself on Gobi. Hiding in a backwater desert must have sounded good once his lieutenants started dying; but if the Unifieds did have clones working for them, posting guards and analyzing DNA samples would not do a lick of good.

I tried to consider all of the angles as I turned off the lights in my quarters. I would sleep for an hour, then meet Warshaw for dinner. We had a lot to discuss.

“Hope you don’t mind eating in my office. I eat all my meals here.”

Warshaw had a dining room tucked away in one corner of his office/living complex. The table was large enough to seat a dozen officers. Sitting alone at that table, he looked big and strong and terrified. He had two armed guards posted inside the door to his complex and four more just outside.

A steward waited by the door as well. He watched me sit, gave me a moment to get comfortable, then came to ask what we wanted to drink.

“Just water,” I said.

“Give me a beer,” Warshaw said.

The steward brought us our drinks and left without another word.

“I served on this planet,” I said. “We were stationed in an old sandstone fortress with a swamp for a courtyard. We drank filtered sludge from the swamp.”

“I know the place. It’s out near Morrowtown, right?” Warshaw asked. “I went out to see the ruins.”

I nodded, and asked, “Is that far from here?”

“Other side of the planet,” Warshaw said. He looked so unhappy. He sat slumped in his chair, his arms folded across his lap and his shoulders hunched. “When I first got here, they told me there were these ruins from the original Gobi Station. It’s like a historic site, you know, something for tourists …as if any tourists ever came to this place.

“They treat the place like a museum exhibit. They have guides and tours, and they take you into the living quarters and shit. There’s a plaque that says something about the attack on Gobi being the first shots fired in the Mogat War.”

I had never thought about it that way; but as I considered it, perhaps those were the opening shots of the war.

“I was there during the attack,” I said. “The fort had a regional armory. That’s what the Mogats were after. Crowley led them on that one.” “Crowley” was General Amos Crowley, a U.A. Army officer who defected to the Morgan Atkins Believers.

Warshaw whistled, and said, “Crowley? No wonder the fort got so banged up.”

“I was lucky to get out of there alive,” I said.

“Yeah, well, speaking of being lucky, you got lucky on Terraneau. Every time my Marines run into the Unifieds, we get our nuts flattened.”

As I started to say something about that, the steward came back to take our orders. Since I had no idea what was on the menu, I decided to order whatever Warshaw did. He ordered salmon.

When the steward left, I asked, “They have salmon here?” We were on a planet with no lakes or oceans.

“It’s flown in,” Warshaw said. “So you got any ideas for stopping U.A. Marines that don’t involve demolishing an underground garage?”

“I do: Wait till their batteries run out, then stick it to ’em,” I said, and I explained about the short-life batteries. He laughed. “Good call, Harris. You’ll beat the whole damned Unified Authority Marine Corps as long as they don’t bring spares.”

I laughed politely, then said, “We dug some of them out.”

“You dug them out? That doesn’t sound like you. An act of compassion? That’s something new. I didn’t know you had it in you.”

“After they were dead,” I said. “I wanted a better look at their armor. That was how we found out about the batteries.”

Warshaw nodded.

Our fish arrived, sautéed and dusted with almonds. The smell of salmon and onions filled the air. It was the best meal I had eaten in over a year. My plate was large and buried under enough fish and wild rice to last me a week. The meal came with white wine.

Warshaw took a sip of wine, loaded salmon and wild rice onto his fork, then paused to ask, “Did you test the batteries yourself?”

“Do you remember Scott Mars?”

Warshaw toasted Mars with his wine. “Yeah, I know Mars. Good engineer. I heard he went born-again Christian.”

“They call him the ‘born-again clone,’” I said.

“And Mars found out about the batteries?”

“The shielding works off a forty-five-minute battery,” I said. “The battery drains even quicker when anything touches the shields.”

“Mobility versus power,” Warshaw observed. He had more than twenty years in the Navy, all of them spent in engineering. As an enlisted man and a clone, he would never have qualified for engineering school, but he had plenty of practical education. “They can’t make the battery too big or the Marines can’t move.”

Warshaw put down his fork and stretched his arms, moving his bald head from side to side. He had the physique of a buffalo, overstuffed at the chest and shoulders, tiny at the waist. Staring at me, a slight smile on his face, he said, “The Enlisted Man’s Marine Corps needs a Commandant. Of course, now that we know you’re alive, you get the job. From here on out, Harris, you and I are equals.”

“You didn’t believe that back at Terraneau,” I said.

“Things have changed,” Warshaw said. “We need a man like you.”

“Someone to wear a bull’s-eye on his back,” I said.

“I wouldn’t put it in so many words,” Warshaw said.

“How would you put it?”

“How would I put it? I’d put it this way. We’ve got a security problem, General. I want you to find our rats, lead them into some underground rat hole, and bury them for good.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Warshaw had one lead, one thin lead to help me track down the security breach. That lead came in the form of three dead bodies on a planet called St. Augustine.

Back in my billet, I pulled on a pair of mediaLink shades and read about the planet. It didn’t take long to realize that if I wanted to track down a breach in security, St. Augustine—the rest-and-recreation capital of the Enlisted Man’s Empire—was a promising place to start. If there was a place where our sailors would let down their guard, it was St. Augustine, a planet with beaches, hotels, and very few men.

Several years ago, when the Avatari attacked St. Augustine, the Unified Authority had left the locals to fend for themselves. The people of St. Augustine fought to the figurative last man. Once they ran out of men, the women and children went into hiding, and the aliens simply went away. That was how the Avatari ran things. Once they captured a planet, they left you alone as long as you didn’t disturb their toxic mining operations.

When the Enlisted Man’s Empire liberated the planet, the women of St. Augustine welcomed our sailors and Marines. Having lived without men for more than two years, they welcomed us rather intimately.

One of the first factories to open on St. Augustine manufactured condoms. Now, the clones in the Enlisted Man’s Empire were as sterile as a surgeon’s gloves—“built to copulate, not populate” as the saying goes; but they were also programmed to think they were natural-born, so some enterprising resident came up with the idea of selling condoms to a population of “dead-end Joes” who thought they were potent.

If the news stories were true, that factory did a lot of business. On a planet with a population of six million adult females, more than one hundred million condoms had been sold.

I left for St. Augustine the following day.

As the Commandant of the Marines, I traveled with an entourage. Warshaw assigned me a staff that included a one-star admiral, three captains, and enough lieutenants to man a small fleet—all of them tainted. These were men who had played the power game and come up short for one reason or another; now they wanted to redeem themselves. I brought them along as camouflage, but I did not trust them. I did not like traveling with remora fish in my wake; but fleet officers were expected to have an entourage, and a lone-wolf general would elicit suspicion.

Admiral J. Winston Cabot, supposedly my liaison to Warshaw and Naval Command, was officious, petty, politically motivated, and, I suspected, something of a coward. I decided that much about him during the fifteen minutes it took us to travel from Gobi and land on St. Augustine.

A simpering politician by nature, Cabot all but attached himself to my person. Once Warshaw introduced us, the little ferret swooped right in on me, warning the other officers of the entourage away with a threatening glance. He chattered mindlessly in the beginning, but giving credit where credit is due, the little bastard read me accurately after a couple of minutes and settled down, allowing me to think.

Had he known what I was thinking, Cabot might have given me more space. What came to my mind was how incredibly interchangeable he was, like a gear in an old-fashioned clock. There he sat, a fifty-two-year-old general-issue clone with brown eyes and slightly grayed brown hair, and nothing to distinguish himself beyond his uniform.

And therein was the problem.

If the Unified Authority had developed some kind of new cloning program, there would be no way to stop them from infiltrating our military. If their clones truly had the same DNA as ours, they would be identical. We could place posts by every hatch on every ship and run hourly DNA scans of every sailor, and the bastards would slip through our net.

We flew from Gobi to St. Augustine on the Kamehameha. Bishop walked me to the landing bay, where I expected to see a shuttle waiting. As the Commandant of the Marines, I should have traveled down to the planet in a shuttle, but nothing was available. Instead, I would fly down in the familiar steel-and-shadows world of a transport.

“That’s the best you could get me?” I asked Bishop. “I’m the specking Commandant of the Enlisted Man’s Marines.”

“That’s the best I have.”

My entourage hung around me like flies. I told them to board the transport, and all of them did except for Cabot. He lingered, having decided that the order was meant for everyone but him.

“Do you need something, Admiral?” I asked.

“No, sir,” he said.

“Then board the transport,” I said.

He reluctantly left.

“How do you put up with this shit?” I asked.

“You’ll learn to love it,” Bishop said.

“Bullshit,” I said.

We traded salutes, and I boarded the transport. I started the trip in the kettle with my entourage. After five minutes, I found myself so irritated by their company that I excused myself and climbed up to the cockpit. And there, through the windshield, I saw St. Augustine.

After reliving the uniform dryness of Gobi, I had a greater appreciation for the greens and blues of St. Augustine. The planet had oceans, rivers, and lakes. It had pastures, mountains, and ice-capped poles. From space, Gobi looked like a ball carved out of unfinished wood. By comparison, St. Augustine looked like a well-polished opal.

Cabot came up to the cockpit to check in on me. “General, will we have time to inspect the officers’ R & R facilities while we are on St. Augustine?” he asked. “I haven’t tried them myself, but I hear good things.”

“We’re not here to inspect the facilities,” I said.

“Yes, sir. I’m just saying that I understand they’re supposed to be nice, you know, if we get the chance.” When he saw that he wasn’t getting anywhere, Cabot asked, “Why are we here?”

“We’re here to look at corpses,” I said.

The transport shook and rattled as it punched into the atmosphere.

“Corpses?” Cabot asked.

“Three of them,” I said. “Maybe more if we’re lucky.”

“Who died, sir?” He did not know that the Unified Authority had infiltrated our security. Warshaw would not have trusted a weasel like Cabot with that kind of sensitive information. I felt bad for the bastard. Not knowing that I was little more than a moving target, he still believed that being assigned to me would help his career.

“Clones,” I said. “There are three dead clones on St. Augustine, but none of the ships have reported any of missing men.”

“I’m not sure what you are getting at, sir,” Cabot said.

“Three men died on R & R, right? So they couldn’t have reported for duty when their leave ran out. Only they found these guys last week, and none of our ships have reported anyone missing.”

“Someone must have reported in their place,” Cabot said. “Spies?”

“Worse,” I said. “Assassins.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

By prewar standards, St. Augustine qualified as an emerging world. The planet had a fledgling banking system, a global government, and a world market. The Avatari had knocked out the planet’s mediaLink during their invasion; but other than a lack of communications services, the planet of St. Augustine had all the amenities.

St. Augustine had three continents and twenty-five cities, each of which had a police department manned by MPs. It did not take long to determine that the various law-enforcement groups did not share information among themselves.

“Bodies found in other cities?” asked the commander of the Petersborough police—a lowly ensign on loan from one of our ships. The Petersborough Police Department consisted of seven officers and thirty-five enlisted men, an unsatisfactorily small count, especially considering that Petersborough was the capital city of St. Augustine.

“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.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Lyra.”

“Lyra, those aliens weren’t soldiers, they were businessmen,” I said. “They didn’t come looking for a war, and when we gave them one, they went to bother someone else.”

Lyra saw things as they were. I spoke to her the way I would speak to a scared child, but she knew war and death as intimately as I did, and she took no comfort from my reassurance. She let me say my piece, thanked me, then recited the specials of the day. I ordered baked fish and wild rice, hoping it would be as good as the meal I’d eaten with Warshaw.

Looking around the restaurant, I saw only couples. A meal in this place would cost more than most sailors or Marines wanted to pay; but men on leave will sometimes pony up the credits if they think it will change the outcome of their date.

Scrubb’s had a bar near the front, the kind of place that would attract conscripts and officers alike. The bar sat on a slightly raised floor that overlooked the rest of the restaurant. Debbie, the hostess, must have worked the bar as well as the restaurant floor. I saw her walk in, heads turning to follow her, and disappear into the darkness of the bar.

That was when I spotted the phantom. He sat alone at a small table, quietly looking around the floor. He might have been either a Marine or a sailor, a clone to be sure; but dressed in a bright tropical shirt and slacks …the typical serviceman on leave.

Like any other single man drinking alone in a room filled with couples, he looked out of place as he scanned the floor around him. Something did not seem right about him. I could not put my finger on it, but he just came across wrong. Like a tree in a desert or maybe a wolf among sheep, I thought to myself.

The man was not trolling for girls, that much was clear. Time passed as he slowly nursed his beer. A waitress ran her rounds in his part of the bar. When she saw his untouched glass, she approached the table and said something to him. He answered, and she rolled her eyes and walked away.

The man leaned back and rested his arm on the rail that separated the bar from the rest of the restaurant. He casually surveyed the bar, then the eatery. The move looked so relaxed, so subtle. Too relaxed, it felt calculated to put people at ease.

Why would he come here alone? I asked myself; but even as I thought this, I realized that I had come here alone, and just like the phantom, I was looking around the floor and studying the wildlife. Did I make him suspicious? But this guy wasn’t drinking. His beer was a prop.

As he scanned the restaurant, his gaze eventually drifted to my table. I saw him looking in my direction, and he saw me staring back. I expected him to turn away, but he didn’t. His eyes stayed on me as he took in my insignia or possibly counted the stars on my collar. He met my gaze with a look that showed neither fear nor nervousness, then calmly pulled out his wallet and dropped a few bills on the table. Without looking back, he abandoned his money and his half-finished beer.

I started to go after him. I stood, then questioned myself. What did I have? Why would I stop him? He didn’t finish his beer, big specking deal. What did that prove? I only hesitated for a moment, then I went after him; but that moment was enough. By the time I reached the street, the phantom was gone.

I went back into the restaurant wondering if I had made a mistake. As I tried to reason out my suspicions, my fish arrived.

I sat, and I ate, and I rewound the scene and watched it over and over again in my head—a clone comes into the bar. He sits alone. So what?

I took a bite of fish and chased it with a forkload of wild rice. The rice had pepper and butter. The food tasted good, but it was wasted on me. I would have been just as happy eating bad food camouflaged with ketchup. I took another bite of fish and realized one difference me and the phantom—I was eating my fish; he had only been hiding behind his beer.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

After my meal, I returned to the police station and found Cabot.

He saw me, growled, “General,” then caught himself and paused.

“Spit it out, Cabot,” I said. For a moment, the little asslicker had shown a bit of backbone.

“Where the hell have you been?” he asked. He looked relieved to have said his piece, then he winced as he braced himself for me to respond.

Finding humor in his discomfort, I smiled, and asked, “Did you just say ‘hell’?”

Cabot turned red and stared at the floor.

“Did you just ask me where the hell I went?” I continued, sincerely enjoying his discomfort.

“Sorry, sir,” he said.

“I went out for a quick dinner.”

Cabot looked up from his feet, and said, “You left three hours ago, sir. We have MPs combing the city for you.”

“Good Lord. You’re like an obsessive mother and a nagging wife all rolled into one.” I said this in a chiding tone, not really caring how derisive it sounded. “You called the police because you didn’t know how to find me?”

“General, you were gone three hours. We were just looking at bodies, sir. I have every MP in the city searching for you. The station is on high alert.”

I looked around, and said, “High alert? Cabot, we need to do some serious field training on police procedures down here. I was able to walk in here without anyone even noticing me.”

Cabot pursed his lips as he fought to control his anger. He might have been a hanger-on, but he was also a one-star admiral, the kind of man who normally talks down the chain, not up. When he next opened his mouth, he spoke in an even tone as if the conversation had started anew.

“We’ve received body counts from every precinct on the planet except for one, a town called Sunmark,” he said.

“What’s the count at?” I asked.

“We’re up to 503 bodies found in the last three weeks.”

“That’s a lot bodies,” I said. “Five hundred stiffs, and it never occurred to anyone that there might be an epidemic?”

“General, that’s 503 bodies planetwide on a planet that doesn’t have centralized communications,” Cabot said. He had a point; no one on St. Augustine knew what anyone else was doing.

“Any idea when we’ll hear from the last station?” I asked.

“We haven’t been able to reach them. The town is not very far from here; I sent some men to knock on their door.”

Cabot heard back from his men an hour later. The Sunmark police station was empty. As far as anyone could tell, all our MPs were M.I.A. and probably worse.

The ghost precinct was less than one hundred miles away. By the time I arrived with my entourage to investigate, it was 00:13, a cursed time if such a thing could exist.

Bright light shone through the windows of the precinct building as we pulled up. A few men searched the alley around the building. The inside of the precinct building looked as busy as an anthill, with MPs bustling in every direction.

I did not recognize any of the men beyond their uniforms and the fact that they were clones, but some of them had undoubtedly come as my support staff. At that moment, another piece of the puzzle fell into place for me.

What if somebody killed a member of my staff? I thought to myself. I don’t know them well enough to tell them apart. If someone quietly murdered one of my men and showed up in his place, I wouldn’t notice it.

As I waited by the car, Cabot went to the door of the building and spoke to the officer in charge of the investigation. He came back a moment later, and said, “Someone attacked the building.”

“Have they found any bodies?” I asked.

Cabot shook his head. “No, sir.”

Sunmark was only a hundred miles from Petersborough, but the air was slightly cooler here and far more humid. This was a coastal town. I enjoyed the combination of warm night and ocean-chilled breeze. Taking a deep breath and letting the moist air hold in my lungs, I walked toward the building, Cabot hopping close on my heels.

The men outside the precinct building snapped to attention as I walked past them. I saluted and told them to carry on.

Standing outside the building, I saw rows of flood lamps through one of the windows. I heard a generator purring in the distance.

“What happened to the lights?” I asked a nearby officer.

“Someone shut off the power, sir,” he said.

The station was two stories tall and rather narrow. It was shaped like a book. My men must have set up an emergency generator behind the building. Arteries from the generator covered the floor, a confusion of power cords that led in every direction. The Marine sergeant who met me at the door was not part of my entourage, and I was glad to see him. When it came to dirty work, I preferred having Marines around me.

“Found anything?” I asked.

“They fought a small war in here, sir.”

“Any survivors?”

“So far, we can’t tell, sir. The people who were manning the station are M.I.A.,” he said.

“No bodies?” I asked. I stepped around him.

Just inside the door, the first splash of dried blood started about five feet up on the wall and stretched to the floor in dribbles. A foot-wide, rust-colored pool had formed below it.

They’d caught their first victim off guard, I thought. He’d been standing tall when he was shot in the head. I was no detective, but I’d participated in a stealth operation or two. I knew how men reacted when they spotted you, and how they died when you took them by surprise.

“Was this the only victim?” I asked.

“The whole goddamned building looks like this, sir,” the sergeant said. “We’re taking blood samples and scraping shit off the walls.”

“Good idea,” I said. It wasn’t, though. All of the blood would be the same general-issue clone blood. If we knew anything about these assassins, it was that they were clones just like us. The good guys and bad guys would have the exact same makeup in this fight, right down to their DNA.

The next victim had been caught unawares as well. He must have been at a desk. The chair he’d been sitting in lay on its back on the floor. There was no blood on the chair, but blood and brains covered the wall and the filing cabinet behind the desk.

“Do you have any idea about what happened to the bodies?” I asked.

“No, sir.” That was the proper answer, no excuses, no promises, no explanations, and no speculation. “Marines never speculate. They always speck you right on time”—wisdom I picked up from my drill instructor in boot camp.

The sergeant interrupted my thoughts. “Sir, whoever attacked the station destroyed the computers.”

“Destroyed them?” I repeated.

Across the floor, computer cases and cabinets lay spread across the floor like trash. No big loss, though. A platoon of MPs had been temporarily assigned to man a precinct on a stretch of sandy beach. They probably had not kept careful records.

“Do we know how long the power has been out?” I asked.

“No, sir. Not yet.”

“Do we know what happened to it? Do we know if the neighbors still have power?” I asked. I looked out the window and saw light in some of the windows across the street.

The sergeant peered out the window as well, and said, “This appears to be the only building without power.”

I nodded and moved on. “Shit,” I whispered to myself.

Whatever happened in this building was not a war or a battle; it was an assassination. Someone had come in with suppressed weapons and caught the entire staff off guard. Judging by the gore and bullet patterns, they might have gone through the entire building without any of ours returning fire.

Magic restored.

In the old days, communication signals were routed across the galaxy using the Broadcast Network. Somehow, Gary Warshaw and his enlisted engineers had restored pangalactic communications using their limited broadcast network. It was nothing short of a miracle.

Warshaw called me that evening.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“I’m on Gobi,” he said, sounding a little surprised. “Something wrong with that?”

“I didn’t know you had pangalactic communications,” I said. It should have occurred to me back when I was on the Kamehameha. Warshaw wasn’t even in the same arm as the Kamehameha, but he had been able to watch Bishop interrogating me. I should have figured it out back then.

“Yeah, well, we got a network up, so why not?” he asked. “You making any progress on your investigation?”

“We’ve found a lot of bodies,” I said. “Over five hundred of them so far.”

“All clones?”

“Yeah,” I said, “all clones. There were a few in every city.”

“Murdered?” Warshaw asked.

“Drownings, car accidents, fires …a couple of outright murders. St. Augustine is a revolving door with eighty thousand men running through at any time.” Five hundred men … I wondered if it was a revolving door or a meat grinder.

“I bet we haven’t even found half the breakage yet,” I said. “All we have are the bodies that floated to the surface.”

“That’s what I like about you, Harris, always the optimist,” Warshaw said.

“I contacted the ships that went to St. Augustine on leave and had them check their service logs. In the last two months, less than thirty men were reported absent without leave. Every last one of them showed up sooner or later. According to the logs, none of those five hundred stiffs came from your ships.”

“But you think the logs are wrong,” said Warshaw.

“They have to be,” I said. “And that’s five hundred bodies so far. Who knows how many bodies we’ll find by the time we finish here.”

“You think I have five hundred saboteurs on my ships?” Warshaw asked.

“Sooner or later, it’s going to get ugly.” I thought about the clone at the restaurant. We had no hope of ferreting them out, not with camouflage like that.

“Are you keeping yourself safe?” I asked.

“Maybe I’ll move my operation back to the Kamehameha,” he said. “How are they going to hit me on a big ship like that?”

“Where was Franks when they got him?” I asked.

“On the Obama.”

That was another fighter carrier.

“Yeah, well, Franks didn’t know what he was hiding from,” Warshaw said. “I have a better idea, thanks to you.”

“Glad to be of service,” I said. “So what are you watching for?”

“Anything that moves.” Warshaw let the comment ride for a moment, then asked, “How about you? What are you doing to keep safe?”

“If you wanted me to play it safe, you shouldn’t have painted a specking target on my back.”

He must have expected a different answer. Sounding defensive, he said, “At least you’ve got the toe-touchers brigade watching your back, and I hear you called in an intelligence unit.”

“Toe-touchers brigade?” I asked.

“Yeah, Cabot didn’t tell you why he lost his command? Remember Fahey?” Perry Fahey was a ship’s-captain-turned-spy for the Unified Authority.

“Cabot was a spy?” I asked.

“Shit, Harris, I just told you, he was a toe-toucher. He lost his command for conduct unbecoming an officer. I thought having him along might help you relieve any stress.”

“Get specked,” I said. In the years that many of our fleets were stranded in deep space with no hope of rescue, some of our sailors and officers had traded unfulfillable heterosexuality for a convenient alternative.

Warshaw laughed. “At least I didn’t paint the bull’s-eye on your ass.”

He still did not get it. Every Marine and sailor in the entire empire was a potential assassin. Thinking he had deflected the danger onto me, he did not notice the noose tightening around his own neck as well.

When I did not respond, Warshaw said, “You’ll survive this one, Harris. You always survive.” Perhaps he meant the comment as an olive branch, but it was meaningless.

I changed the subject. “I’m in a town called Sunmark. Ever heard of it?”

“Can’t say I have,” Warshaw said.

“It’s a small coast town surrounded by a lot of jungle.”

“Yeah, so?”

“I have two hundred men searching the jungle for bodies. Let’s say one of my guys gets nixed while taking a leak in the woods, next thing you know, one of the men watching my back is an assassin. Then how safe will I be?”

“You sound paranoid.”

I laughed. “Paranoid? The last time I saw you, you were hiding in a high-security base in the middle of a desert with guards and DNA-reading posts by every entrance and elevator.”

“What’s your point?” Warshaw asked, though he damn well knew exactly what I meant.

“How many guards are you going to have around you on the Kamehameha?”

“Four, same as always.”

“How many guards are you going to have posted on your deck?” I pushed.

“Having a platoon is standard operating procedure.”

Posting an entire platoon to guard the deck of a ship was hardly standard operating procedure. “Are you going to tour the ship?” I asked.

“Maybe.”

“Are you going to take the whole platoon with you?”

“Okay, I apologize for calling you paranoid. What are you going to do next?”

I thought about this. “First we find out how badly we’ve been infiltrated, then we stop the leaks, then we catch a spy and figure out what makes him different from a run-of-the-mill clone.”

“And that fixes everything?” Warshaw asked.

“Then we need to round up the enemy clones. That’s going to be the hard part.”

The ax came down that afternoon. We might have been able to stop the leaks, we might have been able to catch a killer clone and examine him under a microscope, but it did not look like we would ever untangle how badly we’d been infiltrated.

At 15:00, Admiral Cabot informed me that the intelligence unit had found a mass grave in the jungle. Bored stiff from two days spent sitting in an office, I took the news more enthusiastically than he expected. In fact, I insisted we drive into the jungle and oversee the excavation.

By that time, a large security detail of locals and clones had arrived in Sunmark. Armed civilians patrolled the streets. MPs and militiamen manned the police station. The town was beginning to look like a prison.

I had hoped to escape all of the security precautions by going out to the grave site, but it didn’t work that way. Cabot arranged for a convoy escort. As we left town, I watched the trucks and guards, and muttered, “You’d think we were headed to a battle, not a burial.”

“Did you say something, sir?” Cabot asked. His mind had been elsewhere.

My driver heard me, though. He was a Marine. I caught his sardonic smile in the mirror.

I wondered how many men we might find in that grave. No one had given me the details. The grave could have been huge or small.

We drove away from the coast and into the jungle, trading bright sun for dappled light and shadows. Following a guidance signal from the site, we turned down a dirt path that led through trampled plants and into heavy undergrowth. The road led us through a maze of broad-leafed plants that looked like bloodred banana trees, vines, bamboo, and tall trees with wide trunks.

“It’s going to get bumpy from here, sir,” my driver said. Hearing this, Cabot sighed and slumped back in his seat.

Fortunately, we had a heavy troop mobile ahead of us. The big truck bashed all obstacles out of its way. It slowed and took turns wide, practically paving the path for us. We bounced along for another fifteen miles before we reached a clearing in which men in fatigues prowled a low ridge.

The first man to reach my car wore an air filter over his nose and mouth. He pulled it off, and said, “General, you will probably want to stay in your car unless you have an oxygen mask.”

When I asked, “That bad?” the man simply nodded.

“Poisonous or just smelly?” I asked.

“Reeking,” he said.

“I hate this shit,” I said as I climbed from the car. I would not like what I saw, but I’d seen death and decay before. Over the last ten years, I’d lost my emotional virginity.

The steamy air hit my chest like a hammer, and blood rushed to my head as I adjusted to the heat. There was not so much as a breeze in this blasted hellhole. The leaves on the plants sat so still they might have been painted on, and the flies were everywhere. They filled the air, their buzzing so strong it sounded electronic.

The men near the grave wore jumpsuits that were wet and soiled. They wore full face masks with clear hoods over their ears, hair, and necks.

The air smelled bad, sweet and putrid at the same time. I recognized the scent of rotting bodies in the liquid air. I also smelled the acrid scent of vomit. Whatever they had seen had left seasoned men sick.

The pit was twenty feet long, no more than six feet wide, and shallow. A small silver canister lay on the ground beside it. The word NOXIUM ran down the length of both sides.

Suddenly, looking into that pit was the last thing I wanted to do. Thinking of a long-ago battle on a distant planet in which scores of men had been killed with Noxium, I wanted to return to the air-conditioned comfort of the police station. I wanted to put on a pair of mediaLink glasses and read a good book, maybe something philosophical or religious …something that explained the meaning of life.

There were no bodies inside the grave, not even so much as a human finger. What I saw was a writhing carpet of pearly white maggots feeding in the flesh-colored soup that might once have been forty or fifty men. Soggy uniforms lay in the mix along with boots, belts, and weapons.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“Quarantine the solar system? You mean blockade it, right?”

“You already have a blockade, and it didn’t work,” I said. “It didn’t keep the bad guys out; but that’s not the problem now. Now we want to keep the bad guys in.”

“We haven’t caught anyone running our blockade,” said Captain Tom Wesker, commander of the fleet Warshaw had assigned to guard St. Augustine.

Something about Wesker; he was a defensive speck.

“That makes sense,” I said.

“What’s that?” He sounded nervous.

“It makes sense that you haven’t seen them running your blockade. If you had seen them, you might have caught them, and we wouldn’t have five hundred dead clones on our hands.”

“That’s not fair! We’ve only been here two months. Maybe they got here before we did,” Wesker whined like a little kid.

“Good point,” I said, trying to be diplomatic. On the other hand, Warshaw had only liberated St. Augustine three months ago. “Unless the enemy landed during the alien occupation, they pretty much had to have arrived on your watch.”

I decided to make things easy on him. “Look at it this way. You should have an easier time keeping ships on the planet than you did chasing them away; it gives you a smaller area to patrol.”

He wanted to tell me that was bullshit, but he knew better. He was a captain, I was a three-star; if he pissed me off, I’d have him scrubbing toilets for life. He took a deep breath, drank back his anger, and asked, “What are you trying to keep on the planet?”

“The same people we wanted to keep off the planet for the last two months,” I said.

“Who exactly is that?” he asked, his frustration so close to the surface his eyes twitched.

“If I knew who the speck they were, don’t you think I’d arrest them?” I asked. “I can tell you this much, they look like us, they talk like us, and they kill senior officers. If I were you, I’d do everything in my power to keep them on the ground, you know, as if the planet were under quarantine.”

“Yes, sir. Understood, sir.”

“Also, put every available man on security at all times,” I said.

“On the planet?”

“On your ships. I’m betting you’ve already been infiltrated.”

I had traveled from Gobi to St. Augustine on a battleship with a crew of 1,800 enlisted men and 150 officers. I returned on a frigate, a small ship with a crew of 170 men. I felt like I was rowing home on a dinghy.

The man I had seen in the restaurant looked like he might have been in his midtwenties, making him slightly on the young side for the Enlisted Man’s Navy. We hadn’t seen a new cadet since the Mogats destroyed the clone farms six years ago. Our youngest clones were twenty-four, and most of our men were in their thirties.

One of the benefits of flying in a frigate was that the ship was so small I could assemble my own crew. I had undoubtedly assembled the oldest crew in the short history of the Enlisted Man’s Navy. By the time I finished, the youngest man on the ship was in his early forties. It was possible that some infiltrator might have stowed away aboard the ship, but he would stand out once he left his hidey-hole.

Why had I hesitated before going after that bastard at Scrubb’s? Even if I’d had to kill him, we might have found something to go on. The autopsy might have provided clues about how we could identify the infiltrators. And maybe I would not have had to kill him. With any luck, I might have captured him alive with nothing worse than a broken leg or spine.

On the frigate, my quarters were both my billet and my stateroom. It didn’t matter much. My time on the ship was short. We spent fifteen minutes traveling untold trillions of miles and then another two hours circling Gobi as I considered my options and decided where I should go and what I should do.

Someone knocked on my door, and I knew who it was. When I opened the door, Admiral J. Winston Cabot saluted and asked for permission to enter. I did not like the guy. I would dump him when I got the chance. I had already abandoned half my entourage on St. Augustine.

I asked him in.

“Did you send for me, sir?” Cabot asked. It must have galled him, calling me “sir.” He was nearly twice my age, and he had reached the rank of admiral. Once you obtain a certain rank, you expect to leave the sirs and salutes behind.

“Have a seat,” I said.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“Let’s forget the senior officer stuff for now,” I said.

Cabot nodded and quietly sat down. He had aged well. He had plenty of white in his hair, but he had neither put on pounds nor turned frail after fifty. He looked fit, like a man who runs five or six miles every day.

“I think I may have seen one of their assassins,” I said.

Cabot perked up. “On St. Augustine?”

“Yes, in Petersborough, after I left the morgue. Remember when I went off on my own?”

“I remember,” he said.

“I walked around for an hour, then I ended up at a restaurant. There was a man in the restaurant …a clone.”

“What makes you think he was the killer?” Cabot asked.

“He was alone in the bar. Everyone else came with friends or dates, but he was there alone, looking around the room like a man on a hunt.”

“Maybe he came looking for a date,” Cabot suggested.

“Yeah, maybe,” I agreed. “But he wasn’t there for the girls.” Considering Cabot’s reputation as a “toe-toucher,” I wondered if that was a sensitive topic. He seemed unfazed, so I went on. “He sat by himself in a corner. He didn’t eat. He didn’t talk to anybody. He ordered a beer, but he didn’t drink it. When he spotted me watching him, he paid his tab and left.”

“What makes you think he was an assassin?” Cabot asked.

“He left when he spotted me.”

“Maybe you scared him.”

“Maybe, but let’s go on the assumption that he is a Unified Authority assassin.”

“Was there anything besides the beer that made you think he was an assassin?” Cabot asked. It was a fair question.

I sighed. I had nothing to go on, just my instincts. “I don’t know.”

Cabot shook his head. “It sounds pretty thin, sir. I mean, what are the odds? The entire Navy uses St. Augustine for R & R. How many bars do you think there are in Petersborough? I bet there are hundreds, maybe even thousands; and here you stepped into the one bar in the entire city where a Unified Authority assassin sits waiting. Do you really think we got that lucky, sir?”

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?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

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.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

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.

“When did you move here?” I asked.

“This is our new capitol building,” Doctorow said, the friendly smile never leaving his face.

“For Norristown?” I asked.

“For all of Terraneau,” Hollingsworth said.

“Now you’re the governor of the planet,” I said. “Congratulations on your promotion.”

“We all have our ambitions, General,” Doctorow said in a booming voice. “You want to conquer Earth. My plans are not nearly so grand. I’ll settle for rebuilding Terraneau.”

The small crowd that had gathered around us chuckled …everybody but me.

We adjourned to the assembly room. It reminded me of the capitol building on Earth, only in miniature. The men Doctorow had assembled to help him run his utopian planet were the inquisitors; I was the criminal.

We entered a three-story auditorium in which a lectern and a couple of seats waited on a stage at the bottom of the well. Doctorow led the way down the stairs, bounding each step with energy I would not have expected from a man in his sixties, his excitement unmistakable.

He led me to the stage and asked me to take a seat. Behind us, extending out like a small wall, stood the type of raised bench that judges use in courtrooms. The stand rose a full eight feet above the stage, and Doctorow sat behind it, leaving me alone on display.

The audience quietly assembled along the tiers of the auditorium. Were they Doctorow’s appointees or elected officials? How had so many changes happened so quickly? I’d only been gone a week. Doctorow must have started the ball rolling before I left. Maybe that was why he’d wanted me off his planet so badly.

Hollingsworth sat the meeting out, leaving me to the lions …the bastard.

Once everyone was seated, Doctorow started the meeting by congratulating me on my safe return. He assured me that the “assembled body” had been briefed about the circumstances of my departure and that the meeting was nothing more than a briefing. “We’re simply curious about what you found,” he said, sounding so specking diplomatic. He must have seen himself as cordial, but his demeanor made me think of a rancher giving a steer a friendly pat before leading it to the slaughterhouse.

Instead of letting me speak, Doctorow invited the gallery to ask questions. Not a moment passed before five or six people stood in place, signaling that they wanted the floor. Doctorow called each of them by name.

“General, you left to find your fleet. Did you find it?” asked the first man.

“Yes,” I said.

“Was it destroyed?” the man continued.

“No. I returned on the Salah ad-Din, one of the ships from the fleet.”

Back when the Unified Authority ran the galaxy, every planet had security stations monitoring nearby space. If a ship broadcasted in within a couple of million miles of that planet, the equipment detected the anomaly and tracked the ship. Judging by the nervous twitters filling the room, I got the feeling that the ad-Din had slipped into Terraneau space unnoticed. Doctorow would have that problem fixed. He’d make it a priority.

“The Salah ad-Din, General, isn’t that a fighter carrier?” the man continued.

I nodded.

“Is there any particular reason you chose to return in a fighter carrier, General?” he asked, the first strains of hostility beginning to sound in his voice.

“Are you asking if there was a reason other than its being a ship capable of traveling through space?” I asked.

“I am trying to ascertain why you chose to travel in one of the largest and most aggressive ships in your fleet when you returned to Terraneau. Are you trying to send us a message, General Harris?”

Arguments broke out throughout the gallery.

Doctorow spoke up from behind me. “Please. We are getting ahead of ourselves. Give the general a chance to explain what he found on his mission.

“I apologize for this outburst,” Doctorow said, holding his right hand over his heart to show his sincerity. “Please, tell us about the status of your fleet.”

The well of the auditorium was three stories deep, with rows forming rings around the stage. Only the area directly behind me was blocked off.

I felt no fear facing down these politicians …these nouveau-bureaucrats. That these men and women had promoted themselves to a planetary council meant nothing to me. What did I care about glorified postmen pretending to be governors and heads of states? When I came to Terraneau, these people lived in fear like rabbits cowering in a warren, and now they’d made themselves kings. What a joke.

I no longer gave a damn about getting along with the Right Reverend Colonel Ellery Doctorow, governor of Norristown and apparently emperor of Terraneau, or with the pompous men and women who made up his choir, so I told it to them straight. “The Enlisted Man’s Empire controls twenty-three planets and thirteen fleets. The empire has not attacked Earth, but no one is ruling the possibility out.”

The initial silence that filled the auditorium pushed in on my eardrums like the pressure from a deep-sea dive. Pandemonium replaced silence. Half the representatives stood to ask questions. When Doctorow did not call on them, they started shouting.

“Are you saying the Clone Navy is preparing to attack Earth?” Doctorow asked.

The room went quiet.

Unsure how I could have stated it any more clearly, I said, “No, I did not say that. I simply stated that attacking Earth is an option.”

A woman ran down the stairs shouting, “But you can’t do that! That would be an act of aggression. The clones would be declaring war on their—”

“Let me make this clear to you,” I said, raising my voice so it would be heard above the din. “We did not break off from the Unified Authority, they abandoned us. We owe them nothing. They abandoned their clone military. They abandoned their outworld territories. They discarded their fleets.”

My comments were greeted with a scared silence.

“You say you have twenty-three planets in your empire? Did you conquer them, or did they join willingly?” Doctorow asked, shattering the hush.

He didn’t understand. He was so lost in his vision of a perfect society that he could not comprehend anyone’s rejecting his views. He resented any outside authority, and he instinctively believed that everyone else felt the same way.

“No one held a gun to anyone’s head,” I said, not entirely sure that was the case. I hadn’t asked.

The meeting lapsed into some form of order—even chaos runs out of energy. The wildfire conversations burned out, and I explained the situation as I understood it, leaving out one small detail—that our forces were infested with U.A. assassins.

“Is it still your goal to conquer Earth?” Doctorow asked, his voice solemn and flat.

I turned and looked up at him. From his lofty seat, Doctorow stared down on me, the light forming shadows across his face. The shadows added grim punctuation to his solemn expression.

“I am not the one who would make that decision,” I admitted.

“I’m sure you’re an important man in your empire,” Doctorow persisted, then he dredged up ghosts from a distant conversation, and asked, “Do you want revenge?”

Revenge? I’d spent the last week concerned with survival.

“Conquering Earth makes no sense. Why declare war on the Unified Authority? Why fight a war at all?” Doctorow asked. “The Unified Authority is not your enemy.”

“I would not call them my friends,” I mumbled in a voice that no one else would hear.

“You came in a fighter carrier. Do you plan to force us to join your empire?” Doctorow asked.

“No,” I said. I felt an odd sense of defeat. I had not come expecting a warm welcome, but this mix of fear and hostility caught me off guard. “You’re welcome to join, I suppose,” I said. And there it was, I had reverted back to acting like a guest on Doctorow’s planet.

“We’ll consider your offer, General Harris, but I don’t expect the people of Terraneau will want to join you.”

“No, I suppose not,” I said. I hadn’t really offered them membership. In truth, Terraneau was far more trouble than it was worth.

The auditorium had become so quiet that I could hear people breathing. “My vote will be against any form of treaty,” Doctorow told the auditorium. “I will resign before I sign a treaty with the clones or with the Unified Authority, and I will do everything in my power to ensure that Terraneau remains a neutral planet.”

“Not even for protection?” I asked, more out of curiosity than concern.

“General, men like you bring wars upon yourselves,” Doctorow said, sounding so damn sympathetic as he condemned me with his words. “We don’t need protection. Take away the armies and the battleships, and we won’t need to protect ourselves.

“Nations, empires, armies …we don’t want any of that on Terraneau. We’ll vote on your offer, General Harris, but I can tell you the outcome already.”

“You probably can,” I agreed. I didn’t care. With a government like this, Terraneau would make an unreliable ally at best.

“My vote is for you to take your Marines and go away,” Doctorow continued.

Applause broke out in the auditorium. A woman rose to her feet, nodded, and clapped her hands. More representatives stood and joined her. Pretty soon, every person on every tier had risen to their feet and begun to applaud Doctorow’s statement. The sound echoed through the well, drowning everything else out.

I did not hate these people, but I did not care what became of them.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

What should I have called it? An interrogation? An inquisition? Doctorow might have described it as a hearing, but that sounded too benevolent by my book. I was glad when it ended.

As we drove away from the government center, Hollingsworth asked a question that came so out of the blue that it took me aback. He asked, “What if it came to a choice between her and us?”

“You sound like a jealous girlfriend,” I said. “The relationships do not overlap. She’s my girl, you’re my Marines. It’s completely different.”

Night had fallen over Norristown. Streetlights blazed, as did lights in windows and headlamps on cars. Just a few short months ago, nothing but fires and flashlights had lit the city after dark, now it sparkled.

“Not all that different,” Hollingsworth said. Now that I had returned, he had not once bothered using the word, “sir.” “You screw her. You screw us. It’s a different kind of screwing, but you’re still screwing us.”

If I’d been driving, I would have pulled over and hit the bastard. We could have had it out with our fists. It sounds primitive, but it’s better than letting things fester. A couple of black eyes, a bloody nose, and maybe some bruised ribs, and we would get on with our lives. Unfortunately, he was driving.

I worked with what I had. I pulled the corner of my collar and held it out for Hollingsworth to see. “Listen here, you self-pitying waste of speck. See these stars? You may not like it, but these stars make me a more important person than you. You got that? You’ve got a bird and I’ve got stars and that means you will either show me respect or I will throw your ass in the brig.”

He did not speak for several seconds. Finally, he said, “Sorry, sir.”

“Get this through your skull, Hollingsworth, I did not start the war with the Unified Authority. If you haven’t figured that out, it’s time that you did. They sent us out here to use us for target practice. You got that?”

“Yes, sir.” He stared straight ahead as if driving through hazardous traffic instead of empty streets, his hands wrapped tight around the steering wheel.

“I wasn’t the one who started the war. So if you are going to blame me for something, blame me for saving the specking fleet.”

This woke him from his stupor like a slap across his jaw. He looked at me, and said, “Begging your pardon, General, but the way this Marine sees it, Admiral Warshaw saved the fleet when he started up the broadcast zone.”

“Who came up with the idea of salvaging broadcast equipment in the first place, asshole? Who came up with the idea of hijacking those self-broadcasting battleships?” I asked.

Hollingsworth went back to staring straight ahead. He did not answer my questions.

“By the way, I hope you don’t plan on staying on Terraneau,” I said. “Your pal Doctorow told me to pack up my Marines and leave.”

More silence.

This was not how I wanted the conversation to go. When we left the meeting, I had half expected we could have a friendly conversation. I thought we might stop somewhere to talk over a couple of beers. As I saw Hollingsworth seething with anger, I realized that friendly conversation would never happen. He and I would never be friends.

“Turn up here,” I said, pointing to a road that headed to the northern edge of town.

“I thought you wanted to head to base,” Hollingsworth said.

“I changed my mind,” I said. I told myself I was being logical, that Hollingsworth could order the men to pack; but logic had nothing to do with my decision. I felt alone, and I wanted reassurance.

I knew the way to Ava’s house like I knew the scars on the back of my hands, and I told Hollingsworth every turn well in advance.

“Do you want me to send a jeep for you, sir?” he asked, as I climbed out.

“No, Colonel, I think I’ll find my own way back to the base,” I said.

He saluted and drove away.

I knocked on the door, but no one answered. I had to laugh. I had just traveled across three galactic arms only to find myself stuck in a suburb without a phone or a jeep. Maybe Ava was working late, maybe she was having dinner at a friend’s house, maybe she was spending the night in the girls’ dorm. She might arrive any minute or be gone all night.

The house was completely dark. I tried the door, but it was locked. For no real reason, I knocked again. No one answered. I walked to the edge of her front porch, sat, and waited. Time passed. Night turned to early morning.

By the time she finally arrived, the first streaks of sunlight showed in the sky. The car pulled into the driveway, stopped, and Ava climbed out of the passenger’s side. She started toward the front door, then she saw me and froze. A look of anger replaced her surprised expression.

Why did I come back? I asked myself when I spotted the silhouette of a man in the driver’s seat. I wished I hadn’t returned.

Ava and I stood staring at each other for a few seconds.

“You’re back,” she said.

“I told you I would come for you,” I said. I wished the driver had been a clone. I would have accused the bastard of being an infiltrator and performed his autopsy on the spot, but he was a natural-born.

She saw where I was staring, and said, “I’m sorry,” her voice as cold and hard as marble.

“I was only gone for a week,” I said, not feeling so much angry as sad. Anger might come later, but for now I felt a deep sense of loss. A strange numbness spread across my brain, and with it came feelings of helplessness.

“Harris, we need to talk,” she said, not trying to disguise the scene as anything other than how it looked.

“No, we don’t,” I said. I stepped off the porch and walked past the car, not even bothering to look inside.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

I did not answer her. I had no idea where I would go.

“I’m sorry,” she said, as I reached the end of her driveway.

“Yeah,” I said. I might have said, “Me, too,” but it would have been a lie. I was no longer sorry. Sadness had already turned to anger.

I reached the end of the block before I realized that I had no way of calling for a ride. I could have gone back and called the base from Ava’s house, but my pride would not allow it.

Ellery Doctorow lived a few miles away. I could have found my way to his house easily enough, but that pompous bastard was the last person I would go to for assistance. I would not give him the satisfaction.

Deciding that a good walk would give me time to think things through, I turned the corner and started down the hill. I wanted to be alone with my anger, so I walked.

Your perspective changes when you walk streets you’ve only driven in the past. Rises stretch into hills, and slopes become steeper. Seconds turn into minutes. It took me twenty minutes to reach the bottom of Norristown Heights, and Fort Sebastian was still twenty minutes away by car.

The air had a cool morning chill. Dew glistened on the grass. Cars passed me on the road every few seconds, speeding down streets that were nearly empty. I ran across a four-lane road, the nearest cars so far away that I could not hear their engines.

A few moments later, a Marine sped by in a jeep going at least eighty miles per hour. He spotted me, and his head turned to track me as he drove past.

I expected him simply to drive away, but he didn’t. The jeep did not screech to a halt, but the tires did squeal just a bit as the driver pulled a U-turn. He cut across several empty lanes, then drifted in my direction, pulling to the side of the road about ten feet ahead of me.

“General Harris?” He said my name as if it were a question.

“Yes,” I said.

“Colonel Hollingsworth sent me to pick you up, sir,” he said.

“Did he? Well, that’s excellent,” I said, remembering full well that the last thing I told Hollingsworth was that I would get myself back to base.

“Yes, sir,” the sergeant said.

It was possible. Ava might have called Hollingsworth and told him what happened. They did not know each other well, but they had run into each other a time or two, and she might have wanted to make sure I got back to Fort Sebastian safely. He might have decided to send a car even if she did not call. It wasn’t likely, but it could happen.

Instead of climbing into the rear of the jeep, as I might normally have done, I stepped into the passenger’s seat.

“Where are we going?” I asked as we pulled away.

“The colonel is waiting for you at Fort Sebastian, sir,” said the sergeant.

“Excellent,” I said. I spoke the words around a yawn. I’d just spent the entire evening standing outside Ava’s house. We headed south and east, the right general direction for Fort Sebastian, skirting downtown Norristown but still driving through other urban districts. My driver did not speak. I sensed an odd intensity in his focus.

I asked him a few questions, and his answers seemed right enough, but something about him, some indefinable quality, left an unpleasant impression. He was the kind of guy who can’t tell a joke because nothing he said could ever be funny. Here he sat, saying all the right things, and I had already decided that I did not like him.

“What is your name, Sergeant?” I asked.

“Lewis, sir,” he said. He sounded respectful enough, but he looked away from me as he answered and gave off a sense of disregard.

“Is that your first name or your last?” I asked.

“It’s my last name, sir. My first name is Kit …Kit Lewis,” he said.

“Well, Kit Lewis, you just missed the road to Fort Sebastian,” I said. We had actually passed the turn two miles back, but I decided to wait until we had passed any likely detours before mentioning it.

“A work crew is laying a cable on the main road, sir,” he explained. “The regular roads are closed.”

“Is that so?” I asked.

“Yes, sir. We need to take a service route.”

“I see,” I said. “It must be quite a project; this detour of yours is taking us pretty far out of the way.”

“Yes, sir.”

Lewis shrugged his shoulders, then faked a laugh, and said, “Oh, we’re not going to Fort Sebastian, sir. Colonel Hollingsworth wants to meet you at the airfield.”

The road we were on would take us past the field, that much was true. “So he’s at the airfield? I could have sworn you said we were meeting at Fort Sebastian,” I said.

The sergeant responded with another nervous laugh. “Did I? I always do that, sir. I was thinking about Fort Sebastian when I meant to say we were meeting the colonel at the airfield, and I switched it around.” His voice was friendly, and he said all the right words.

It was a trap, of course. I had suspected it from the moment I saw the jeep. Stuck behind the wheel, though, he could not pull a gun on me. I had control of the situation.

We were driving at eighty miles per hour. A few miles ahead of us, the edge of the airfield was visible behind a row of small buildings. I pretended not to notice it. We passed two roads that wound around to the airfield. Lewis did not slow down as we reached the third. I doubted he would slow down at the fourth.

“How long have you been here, kid?” I asked.

“Six years, sir,” he said.

If this kid operated like the ones on St. Augustine, we’d find the real Kit Lewis’s body in a day or two. I wondered if he had been strangled, drowned, burned, or dissolved.

“I’m not asking how long Kit Lewis has been here,” I said. “I’m asking how long you have been here.”

“Three days,” he said, the friendly sheen missing from his voice. If he had a gun, he made no move to draw it. He did not need to worry about me. Traveling in a jeep at eighty miles per hour, I would not attack the driver.

The stalemate would last until we came to a stop. He might pull a gun at that point, but I doubted it. The kid showed no signs of fear. He clearly thought he could kill me anytime he wanted. I felt the same way about him. Only one of us could be right.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

“How did you get here?” I asked. “You’re a long way from Earth.”

Lewis laughed, and not in the friendly way that he laughed when he still wanted to convince me we were going to Fort Sebastian. Now he sounded disdainful and possibly unhinged. “Are you going to interrogate me right up to the end?”

“It’s better than dying curious,” I said.

“Sorry to disappoint you, General, but I didn’t come here to answer questions.”

“I suppose not,” I said. “But out of curiosity, how did you get here?”

He laughed. “I don’t know the name of the ship.”

We were rapidly approaching the east end of town. The buildings became smaller, and the lots became larger. Civilization gave way to countryside. We passed a stand of trees. Off in the distance, I saw hills and forests. The end of the road, I thought.

“Are you working for the Unified Authority?” I asked, pretending to be a little afraid. I wasn’t afraid at that point, not in the least. My combat reflex had not kicked in, but I didn’t care. I did not think I would need it. The fight would not last long. I’d fought this make of clone a thousand times. He was just a clone, just an ordinary standard-issue clone.

“Sure,” he said.

He slowed to thirty miles per hour as we approached the trees.

“So you’re not Avatari,” I said.

“What the speck is Avatari?”

“Alien,” I said.

“I’m property of the Unified Authority Marines, just like you.”

“You’re a different make,” I pointed out.

He slowed the jeep to fifteen miles per hour as he turned onto a small dirt road. When we bounced over a bump, I grabbed Lewis behind the neck and slammed his face into the steering wheel, then I slammed the bottom edge of my fist into the base of his skull.

During the moment that he blacked out, I slipped the gear into park, hoping the jeep would come to a stop; but its gears ground together, its engine whined, and the wheels locked as we skidded into a ditch. Bracing myself for the slow collision, I watched Lewis’s already bloody face slam into the wheel a second time, tearing gashes across his forehead and eyebrows.

We landed nose down in a three-foot ditch. I climbed out of the jeep, pulling Lewis out as well, carrying him away from the ditch and slinging his limp ass down on the hard forest floor. I checked his pockets. He’d come unarmed. No gun. No knife.

He moaned as he started to wake, so I kicked him in the ribs, probably shattering two or three of them. The man did not call out in pain. He made a grunting noise, but he did not writhe or cough up blood. He was awake enough to know that I’d kicked him, but he did not curl up to protect himself.

“Get up, asshole,” I said, and I kicked him again, in the same spot, doing damage to organs that were no longer protected by bones.

“You kick me again, Harris, and I’ll break your specking legs,” he said calmly.

“I don’t think so,” I said, and I kicked him again. I kicked him hard, and I felt the side of his body give way like the side of an overripe melon.

Lewis sat up coughing. When the coughing stopped, he looked to his right and spat blood.

“How many of you are there?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, sounding as if he did not take my question seriously.

My next kick was not to the ribs. It was a roundhouse, and it struck him across the cheek. Had I connected two inches higher, I would have shattered his eye socket, but I did not intend to inflict that kind of damage. Not yet.

The kick to the face knocked Lewis flat. He lay there, rubbing his cheek, and said, “I’m going to break your arms and legs and your ribs before I kill you.” The words rang hollow, but his voice radiated anger instead of fear.

“I don’t think you understand what’s going on here. See, now, I am the one standing, and you are the one on the ground who just got his face kicked. Correct me if I’m wrong; but the way I see it, you are in the shithouse, pal.”

“It looks that way,” he said as he sat up.

I kicked him again. This time I kicked him in the ribs first, and then doubled up on the kick and fetched him a simple soccer kick across the face.

Lying on his back, staring up at me as he felt his injured ribs, he said, “Stop kicking me.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“You won’t get anything out of me if I’m dead.”

I wasn’t sure that was true; his autopsy might provide all kinds of answers. “Tell me what I need to know, and maybe we can both walk out of here,” I lied.

“Why the speck would I let you walk?” he asked. He rolled backward, toward the jeep and slid into the trench headfirst. I felt sorry for the bastard, until I saw how quickly he sprang to his feet.

The expression on his face looked more animal than human. His eyes focused on me to the exclusion of anything else, his lips formed a sneer.

My combat reflex kicked in quickly. A reviving soup of adrenaline and testosterone flowed through my veins, clearing my mind and sharpening my reflexes. There was no fight or flight once the reflex began, there was only fight. Lewis lunged at me quickly, striking first high, then low, then crashing into me with all of his weight. I fell backward, with him attaching himself around my waist, still slamming his fists into my ribs and gut. I hit the ground hard, knocking the air out of my lungs. As I struggled for breath, he pounded his left hand into my chest and his right hand into my face.

Ignoring the flashing lights that filled my eyes, I fought back. I grabbed his blouse and pulled him toward me as I hit him in the face again and again. I worked a knee loose and drove it into his ribs. That slowed him, and I threw him off me; but I was dizzy, and it took me a moment to climb to my feet.

He recovered more quickly than I did. As I tried to clear my head, he jumped to his feet and came at me again. I kicked at his knees and struck his broken ribs with the heel of my right hand. The blow should have put him down, he had to be badly injured; but he grabbed me and threw me backward to the ground, then stomped a heavy boot into my gut, knocking the fight and the air out of my lungs.

Lewis dropped a knee into my chest and wrapped his fingers around my throat. “I’m going to enjoy this, Harris,” he said in a voice that sounded triumphant and insane.

A single shot rang out, echoing through the forest, and Lewis flew off me, smashing into a tree a few feet away. A quarter of his head was missing, from the right eye to the top. Still gasping for oxygen, I sat up and stared at the bloody mess of his head.

The air slowly returned to my lungs. It felt like fire inside my chest.

Sitting on that rocky ground, fighting for breath, the pains in my back and arm and shoulder starting to register, I knew who had saved me even before I saw him. A few moments passed before he stepped into my view.

Seven feet tall, thick as an oak tree and just as stout, his shaved head as bare as a billiard ball and his skin as dark as mahogany, Ray Freeman came and stood over me, his sniper rifle hanging loose in his right hand. Here was a powerful man who could snap a man’s bones or crush his skull with his bare hands, but he preferred the work of the sniper.

“Nice shot,” I said, my throat not quite able to add voice to my words.

My vision was still a bit blurred. The light was to Freeman’s back, so I could not see his face. I didn’t need to see it to know that I would find no sympathy in his gaze.

He was not a man given to compassion. We were friends, of a sort; but the last time I had seen him, he fired that very rifle at me. He’d shot me with a “simi,” simunition, a gel cartridge loaded with fake blood used to simulate an assassination. He’d come all the way across the galaxy to deliver a message for the Unified Authority. They wanted me to know that I was not beyond reach. The U.A. attacked Terraneau the following day.

Despite the burning in my chest and throat, I inhaled enough air to speak. “You could have popped him before he started choking me.”

“I wanted to see how you would do.”

Freeman spoke slowly, and his voice was so low it sometimes didn’t sound human. His voice was the sound of cannon fire or a lion’s roar.

“How did I do?” I asked.

Freeman did not answer. He wasn’t the kind of man who wastes his breath stating the obvious. He was a man of few words.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The jeep wasn’t going anywhere, not without a winch and a tow truck to pull it out of the ditch. Even if we did pull it out, I wasn’t in any shape to drive it. My right eye was nearly swollen shut, and I could barely stand, let alone drive.

Freeman offered to take me back to the base in his car. He’d only parked a few dozen yards from the jeep, but I covered the distance like an old man suffering acute appendicitis. I’d walked one hundred times the distance earlier that morning when the only things that hurt were my feelings. Now my head was spinning, and the ground seemed to roll under my feet like the deck of a ship in a storm.

“So what brought you to this neck of the woods?” I asked.

Freeman did not respond. He did not take well to humor. I knew this, but it only made me wisecrack around him all the more. His sphinxlike persona presented a challenge.

Speaking in a language he was more likely to answer, I asked, “How did you find me?”

“I followed the clone.”

“Was there any reason why you followed that particular clone?” I asked.

We reached the car. Anyone else might have opened the door for his poor, crippled friend, but Freeman climbed in, started the engine, and waited for me to catch up.

I opened the door, jerked my head back toward the trees, and said, “I want to bring him along.”

“Get in,” Freeman said. I got in without knowing whether he would refuse to pick up the stiff or if he planned to back his car into the forest and get it. He backed the car up the dirt road and stopped a few feet from the abandoned jeep.

“Put him in the trunk,” Freeman said.

Having barely been able to walk to the car, I wanted to protest, but I knew better. I was the one who wanted the corpse, not Freeman, so it stood to reason that I should be the one carrying the corpse with a head like a smashed-in gourd.

I climbed out of the car, limped over to the dead faux sergeant, and lifted him from where he had landed beside the tree. Rigor mortis had not yet set in. As I lifted him, his shattered head bounced backward, then rebounded forward and rested on my shoulder. His arms hung limp.

I slung Lewis over my shoulder like a dockworker carrying a sack of potatoes, then tossed him into the trunk. Noticing blood and brain tissue and skull fragments on my shirt, I cursed under my breath as I slammed the trunk and hobbled back into the car.

“How did you know where to find me?” I asked as I closed the door.

“I told you, I followed the clone,” Freeman said.

“There are a whole lot of clones living in Fort Sebastian. How did you know which one to follow?”

“I followed him here from Earth,” Freeman said.

“He said he arrived three days ago,” I said.

Freeman did not respond. I took his silence as confirmation.

I tried to imagine Freeman hiding near Fort Sebastian, hoping to observe the base without being seen for three days. It didn’t sound possible. Freeman stood seven feet tall and weighed well over three hundred pounds. He was a black man living in a galaxy that had spent centuries diluting its races. The man stood out.

“When I heard that the Navy was sending an assassin to Terraneau, I figured he was coming after you,” Freeman said.

“The Navy thinks I’m dead. They all think I am dead.”

Freeman shrugged. “There’s no one else on Terraneau worth shooting.”

I had my own opinions about who should be shot on Terraneau, but I kept them to myself, and asked, “So why send someone now? They could have sent someone to finish me five months ago.”

Freeman said, “They saw the anomaly.”

“They saw the anomaly,” I repeated. “From the broadcast zone …from when I broadcasted out,” I muttered to myself. It didn’t make sense. How the hell would they spot an anomaly from Earth? Even if they had a telescope pointed right at us, the light from that anomaly would not reach Earth for one hundred thousand years.

Feeling uncharacteristically chatty, Freeman filled in the gap without my asking. “The Navy has spy ships cruising your territory. They have satellites monitoring your broadcast stations.”

Spy ships and satellites …I had gone through that broadcast zone a week ago, and the clone in the trunk landed on Terraneau a few days later. Until we sent a ship through that zone, it really didn’t matter if I was alive because I was cut off.

“What are we dealing with?” I asked. “Should I send some fighters out to look for the satellite?”

Freeman shook his head. “Don’t bother. The satellites are too small to locate.”

“And the spy ships?”

“You don’t see them unless they want you to.”

I did not bother thanking Freeman for saving me. In his ruthlessly self-sufficient heart, Ray Freeman didn’t care about my gratitude. He didn’t need gratitude or approval, and he did not concern himself with things he did not need.

Freeman and I had once been partners. We might have been friends, too, but you could never tell with him. As far as I could tell, Freeman did not have friends. Raised by Baptist colonists before becoming a mercenary, he was an outcast among his own people, and he just plain didn’t care what the universe thought of him.

We drove in silence. As I said before, Ray Freeman was a man of few words. If I’d tried to strike up a conversation, he’d probably have ignored me.

When we pulled up to the security gate at Fort Sebastian, I heard the guard radio in. “Holy shit, he’s got himself a specking giant,” before coming to my side of the car, saluting, and letting us in.

Freeman pretended not to notice, but I knew he’d heard the guard as well. He could do that. Freeman could outwait you. He had many strengths, patience was among his best.

We drove to the administration building, where Hollingsworth and a small group of junior officers waited to meet us. It was still early in the morning. A lot had happened, but it was only 09:00, and dew still glistened on the grass.

Hollingsworth walked up to the car, took one look at my face, and laughed. “Let me guess, the big guy caught you stealing his car,” he said, pointing at Freeman.

When I did not say anything, Hollingsworth laughed even harder, and said, “No? Don’t tell me. Your girlfriend hit you with a shovel?” His entourage joined in on the joke.

Hollingsworth was still busy laughing as I climbed out of the car and opened the trunk. I smiled, and said, “You think I look bad? Have a look at the other guy.” As I said this, I reached in, grabbed the faux Sergeant Lewis by his collar and belt, and flipped him onto the ground.

By that time, some rigidity had entered the body, and the arms remained bent at the elbows. The blood on his forehead, what remained of it, at least, had crusted over.

“What the hell?” Hollingsworth asked, shocked and serious.

“I’ll tell you about it sometime,” I said. “In the meantime, would you mind putting him on ice? I want a coroner to have a look at him.”

“Is he one of ours?” asked one of Hollingsworth’s cronies.

“He said his name was Lewis, Sergeant Kit Lewis. Ever heard of him?” I asked.

Hollingsworth shook his head. So did his friends.

“That’s funny. He swore you sent him to pick me up at Ava’s.”

“I didn’t send anyone after you.”

“No? How’d he know where to find me?”

“A lot of people knew where you went. I mean, it wasn’t classified information. I—I mentioned it to …” He stopped. “Why did you kill him?”

“I didn’t kill him,” I said. “Freeman did.” I tapped on the roof of the car, and Ray Freeman came out. The top of the car came up to my chest. It came up to his stomach. He stood there, hulking, huge, intimidating, silent.

“The late sergeant said you wanted to meet with me, then he drove me out to the woods west of town. That was when things got physical.”

“Shit,” Hollingsworth hissed.

“Wrap him up and throw him in a cooler,” I ordered. “There’s something special about this clone. We’re going to need an autopsy to find out what it is.”

“Yes, sir,” Hollingsworth said, suddenly sounding like a proper Marine.

“Something else. If this son of a bitch called himself Sergeant Lewis, that means there’s probably a dead Sergeant Lewis lying around here somewhere. Send out a team. I want to know what happened to him.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Ellery Doctorow summoned me to his office, the political equivalent of a master whistling for his dog. Worse yet, I responded. Even knowing what he was going to tell me, I came running. Some duty-bound voice inside me reminded me that this was his planet. I would be gone soon, and he would still be here, the emperor of this little rock. He whistled, I came, and the chain of command was preserved, goddamn it.

So I climbed in a jeep with a twentysomething-year-old corporal I did not know. I took two precautions before climbing in the jeep with the kid. I asked his platoon leader if the corporal had been acting strange lately. When the sergeant asked what I meant, I simply said, “Never mind.” If the guy had to ask, there was no point in explaining.

I also brought a sidearm. That last infiltrator clone had nearly killed me even after I’d dealt him enough damage to leave him spitting blood. I was in no mood to go for a second round. But the corporal did not give off the same aura of outrage and danger that the faux Sergeant Lewis had. This kid just came off nervous.

We drove to the capitol building, and the corporal waited for me in the jeep as I went in to see Doctorow. Armed guards watched me from inside the door as I approached. I saw them and remembered a little more than a week earlier when guards had tried to stop me from going to see Ava …Going to see Ava, had it really been such a short time ago?

I asked myself if I still loved Ava, and I had no answer. Whatever I once felt for her, it was the closest I had ever come to love. And now? I told myself that I would get over her the same way I had with so many other girls. She was just more scrub, I told myself, but I didn’t believe it.

The guards stayed out of my way as I entered the building. They did their best imitation of the sentinel statues in a giant cathedral, eyes straight ahead, standing silent and stiff. Maybe they knew me by reputation. Perhaps one or two of them had been at the girls’ dorm.

I did not need to introduce myself to the man at the reception desk. He greeted me by name and called Doctorow’s office to let them know that I had arrived. A few moments later, an aide came to escort me in.

Ellery Doctorow, former Right Reverend, former Army chaplain, and former colonel, had gone grand. He had an office the size of a small parade ground. His floor had a foot of black marble running like a border around two-inch-thick carpet. Bookshelves and paintings lined the walls. In the center of this opulence, Doctorow had an oak-and-mahogany desk that looked large enough to use as a landing pad.

As I entered the office, Doctorow met me at the door and shook my hand. Not even a second passed before he noticed the breakage on my face. How could he miss it? My right eye was a purple goose egg. I had multiple bruises on my jaw, a badly swollen cheek, and cuts on my lips. I saw disapproval in the way his eyes narrowed. He pursed his lips, but he said nothing.

“General Harris, I am glad you came,” he said as he shook my hand.

“I had the impression attendance was mandatory,” I said.

“Oh please,” he said as he led me toward a set of chairs. “You have twenty-two hundred fighting Marines and enough weapons to destroy this planet three times over. You don’t take orders from me, and we both know it.”

He sat down behind his fortress of a desk. I sat in the wood-and-leather seat in front of the desk.

“The planetary council rejected your proposal, General. We won’t be joining your empire,” he said. “We would like you and your Marines to leave Terraneau as soon as possible.” He did not say this in an angry fashion or in a demeaning way. If anything, he sounded serene.

“Are we making way for the Unified Authority?” I asked, though I already knew what he would say.

“No. When and if they contact us, we will give them the same answer we gave you. Terraneau is a neutral planet.”

“I see,” I said.

“A few council members felt we should join the Unified Authority,” he confessed. He sounded so specking magnanimous, it was a bit surreal. Here he was telling me, “Thanks for rescuing us from the aliens, now close the door on your way out,” but he managed to convey this in the comforting voice of a father telling his son about the facts of life.

“They wanted to join the Unified Authority?” I asked, hardly believing my ears. The Unified Authority had abandoned these people. We saved them, and they still preferred the U.A. to us.

“After we discussed the issues, there was a nearly unanimous vote to remain neutral. In the meantime, we all agreed that we wanted you and your Marines to leave our planet.

“I’ve always been up-front with you, Harris. You and your Marines and your warships represent nothing but a threat to us. I mean, look at you. You’ve been here one night, and what happened?”

“I was attacked,” I said.

“By my people?” Doctorow asked. He sounded concerned.

“No,” I admitted.

He said nothing. He did not need to say anything; I had already made his point.

“So you’re done with us?” I asked. “That’s it.”

“What are you looking for, General? Do you want me to thank you for rescuing us?”

“We also restored your power and fixed your roads,” I said. “The Corps of Engineers is military, too.”

That shut him up for a half of a second. “I wanted to speak with you about that. As we discussed before, we would like you to leave your engineers here, on Terraneau. We could use their help for another year or two.”

It was hard not to smile, but I managed it. “You certainly have a set of balls on you,” I said.

“General, there is no cause for profanity,” Doctorow said, and this time he showed no signs of embarrassment for saying it.

“You don’t want me around, but you want me to leave my engineers.”

“Engineers aren’t trained killers. They pose no threat to our goals. Engineers don’t carry guns.

“Harris, you and your men and the whole military way …You bring trouble on yourselves. Look at you. You’re like a lightning rod. You attract violence.”

“That’s a bit simplistic,” I said. “We didn’t bring the aliens.”

“Yes you did. They came back when you arrived.”

“They never left. They were always here, always destroying the planet, you just didn’t know it.”

“Have you had a look at yourself in the mirror this morning? Your face is covered with bruises,” he said. “I’m sure it wasn’t your fault. You were attacked. I understand that, but what happened to the men who attacked you?”

“One man,” I said.

“Where is he now?” Doctorow asked. “Is he dead? Did you kill him?”

“Dead, but I didn’t kill him,” I said. I hated this. The bastard had put me on the defensive.

“You didn’t kill him, but he’s still dead,” Doctorow said. “That is why we don’t want you or your kind on our planet.”

“How will you protect yourselves?” I asked.

“Protect ourselves from what? With you and your Marines off the planet, we won’t need to defend ourselves. Without you, we’ll be safe.”

“What happens when the Unified Authority arrives?” I asked.

“With you gone, they won’t have any reason to come here. We’re not at war with them.”

“Do you think they will respect your sovereignty?” Actually, I was pretty sure they would. They’d given up colonizing years ago.

“Yes, I believe they will. Look, we don’t want you here. I really don’t see that there is anything else for us to discuss.”

“What happens if the aliens come back?” I asked.

It was my ace in the hole, but I had played it too often, and I knew it. This time Doctorow was ready for it. “That’s a possibility, I suppose,” he said. “Personally, I am less concerned about that possibility than I am about getting you and your men off my planet.”

“You didn’t feel that way when we chased them away,” I said.

“If you recall, we did feel that way. We asked you to go away. I’m glad you ignored our request, but we didn’t want you here in the first place. And now, General Harris, it is time for you to leave.”

I stared at him angrily, he returned my gaze, looking calm and smug, neither of us willing to look away.

“We’ll leave,” I said, “but we are taking our engineers with us.”

“Have you asked them what they want?” Doctorow asked. “I have. I took the liberty of speaking with Lieutenant Mars last night.”

“You ran an end run to my engineers?” I asked, barely able to contain my anger. Why the speck had I come back to Terraneau? My girlfriend left me, an assassin nearly beat me to death, now this bastard was kicking me off the planet. “Have you spoken with anyone else? Perhaps you want my pilot.”

“I spoke with Ava this morning,” Doctorow volunteered.

“You spoke with Ava.” I muttered.

“She wants to stay,” he said.

“I saw her last night,” I said. “I got the same feeling.”

Doctorow’s composure never wavered throughout the interview. My temper flared. I became sullen. I wanted to kill the bastard. My emotions betrayed me and made Doctorow look all the more prescient.

“Hollingsworth would probably stay if you asked him,” I said.

“I don’t plan on extending that invitation,” Doctorow said.

“So I guess we are done,” I said as I started to stand.

“Not yet,” Doctorow said. “What are your plans, General? The Council would prefer for you to leave within the week.”

My thoughts had become a double helix. One strand contained logic and the other emotion. I never wanted Terraneau to sign a treaty with the Enlisted Man’s Empire; but now that they had rejected me, damn it, I felt judged and devalued by the people whose worthless lives I had saved.

“It won’t take long for us to pack,” I said, admitting my defeat.

“And your engineers?” he asked.

“I’ll speak to Mars. They can decide for themselves.” The Enlisted Man’s Empire would have plenty of engineers. If Mars wanted to stay, we’d get by without him. He’d earned that.

“Good man,” Doctorow said.

Had he just called me a “good man”? Had this specking antiestablishment son of a bitch just called me a “good man”? I quietly contemplated ripping his throat out of his neck.

He stood up to signal that the interview had ended, then he did something that almost set me off. As we walked to his door, he patted me on the shoulder and repeated his comment that I was “a good man.” Shoot me, stab me, kick me off your specking planet, but for God’s sake don’t make a show of being magnanimous in victory.

“So, I suppose that concludes our business together, General,” he said as he led me toward the door.

I turned to say something to Doctorow and found that I could not look the bastard in the eye. I wasn’t ashamed, just angry beyond reason.

And so I left. I walked out of that marble-lined office and found my own way out of the building. I stormed out to my car and told my driver to take me downtown.

He wanted us off his planet by the end of the week. I wanted us off by the end of the day.

Ava looked so pretty in her cream-colored blouse and sky blue skirt. The blouse was loose, but it showed off her figure. She wore her hair down, and her makeup was perfect. She applied her makeup discreetly so that it blended with her face. I wouldn’t have known she was wearing makeup had I not seen her without it. She looked at me and smiled.

“I’m leaving,” I said.

“L told me,” she said. “L” was the name Doctorow’s closest associates used to address him. Apparently Ava had joined that elite circle of friends. Maybe she had joined it long ago, and I had never noticed.

“So I guess that’s it. I’m done here,” I said, feeling rather foolish for having come to see her again.

Tears formed in the corners of her eyes. Were they real? I reminded myself that she was an actress.

“You can come with me?” I said.

“And live on a battleship?” she asked. “Honey, I’ve done that before. I think I’m done with big guns and seamen.”

She’d slipped into her brassy persona. For a moment I felt hope. Then she dashed it. She looked at me with deep-seated sympathy and touched me on the cheek. “I can’t come with you, Wayson,” she said. “There’s nothing for me out there.”

“I’d be there,” I said, sounding so specking pathetic I thought I might never forgive myself.

One of the tears broke free from its nest and slid down her cheek. “You? You were never there for me. After the Unified Authority attacked, when you were in the hospital, and you were so weak, I thought you needed me. I thought maybe we had a chance.

“But once you got better, you started looking for a way off the planet.”

“I told you, I wouldn’t leave you here.”

“You never needed me. You had your big plans and your Marines, and that was everything you needed.” She smiled for a moment, brushed a tear from the corner of her eye, and said, “You never even pretended to need me.”

“So when did he happen?” I asked, not bothering to explain that I meant the other man.

“I fell in love with him while you were planning how to escape Terraneau,” she confessed.

“In love?” I whispered.

“I’m sorry.”

I swallowed and asked the question I had to ask. “Did you ever love me?”

“Back in the beginning, you asked me how you compared to other guys. Do you remember that?” She took my hand in hers, and said, “You are the only one who ever broke my heart.”

I smiled when I heard this though it meant nothing to me.