The Clone Empire

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

This was my day for good-byes. Within the last two hours I’d already said good-bye to Ava and Ellery Doctorow. In a few more hours, I’d bid a happy farewell to Terraneau, which had lately replaced Gobi as my least favorite planet in the galaxy. Now Freeman was leaving.

I looked at Freeman’s Piper Bandit, a private commuter craft that the Unified Authority had outfitted with a tiny broadcast engine, and remembered the days when I had a Johnston R-56 Starliner of my own. The Johnston was a nicer ride—a twenty-seat luxury corporate number flown by rich executives with private pilots.

Civilians were not allowed to own self-broadcasting planes; hence, broadcast engines were never offered as standard equipment. The Unified Authority Navy had placed the broadcast rig under the hood of my Starliner. The jet had been built for a four-star admiral, and I sort of inherited it when he died.

My Starliner was considered a luxury ride. Freeman’s plane was known in some quarters as an “interplanetary mosquito.”

It was supposed to be a two-seater, apparently designed to fit two anorexic midgets. Ray Freeman was not fat, but his seven-foot frame was thick and filled with muscle. To wedge himself into that tiny cockpit, he would need to curl his legs in odd angles under the instrumentation. The seats were narrow, and his massive shoulders would probably rub against both walls of the cockpit. Worst of all, he’d have to fly with his head bowed to fit it under the low ceiling. As we stood beside the Bandit, I gave it a dubious glance. That cockpit would be a tight fit for me, and Freeman had nine inches and a hundred pounds on me.

Not only was the Bandit too small for Freeman; it was also too small to house a broadcast generator. Someone had outfitted the plane with a tiny broadcast engine that had a single destination setting—Earth—instead of a broadcast computer. In lieu of a broadcast generator, it had a one-use battery. You got one broadcast out of this bird, and the preprogrammed computer made sure it ended up near Earth.

“Where’d you get this?” I asked.

“I took it from a clone,” he said.

“This is what infiltrator clones fly?” I asked. “No shit? Did this one belong to the guy who tried to kill me?”

Freeman shook his head.

“You mean there’s another one in Norristown?”

Freeman did not answer. If Freeman had the plane, the guy who was supposed to fly it was dead.

There had to be at least one more of these planes hidden somewhere around Norristown. I wondered how many I would find when I searched St. Augustine. Now we had something to look for—clones traveling in Piper Bandits.

“How does it fly?” I asked.

“Slow,” Freeman said. “A half million miles per hour.”

That was slow. Most naval ships had a top speed of thirty million miles per hour. You needed that kind of speed when you traveled billions of miles.

I changed the subject and asked Freeman the question that had been bothering me since he’d first shown up. “What are you doing here?”

“Besides saving your ass?”

“Are you here for money or revenge?” I asked. He was a mercenary first and foremost. Those were the only reasons he did anything besides eat, shit, and sleep. “You didn’t come all this way just to save me.”

“We were partners,” he said.

“You didn’t come here for old time’s sake,” I said. “How did you know about the clone in the first place?”

Then, recognizing the flaw in the story, I said, “You wouldn’t have known about him unless you were already in the war. What’s your stake?”

Freeman said nothing, and I would not push it. When the time came, he would tell me his reasons. He was ruthless and violent, but he also lived by a personal code of conduct. I trusted him.

“You can’t fly that into the broadcast zone,” I said. “You know that, right?”

Again, he did not answer. It was a stupid question.

“It’s a one-way zone,” I said, another inane comment. “It goes straight to Providence Kri.”

I wanted to make sure he knew how to find me. “Any chance that I will see you there?” I asked.

Freeman opened the door of his plane and folded himself into the cockpit. He slid his right leg all the way across the cabin and into the well for the passenger’s feet, then exhaled all the air from his lungs before wedging his chest behind the yoke. He pressed his chin to his collarbone as he crammed his shoulders and head into the tiny space under the ceiling.

Once he was in, he snaked a hand out to close the door, then paused. “How do I find you?” he asked.

I told him about Scrubb’s, the restaurant on St. Augustine, and promised to check the restaurant the following Thursday night.

“Doesn’t sound very private,” Freeman said.

“So we meet and go for a walk,” I said.

He nodded and closed the door of his plane. The Bandit was small and he was a giant. He filled the cockpit as snug as a bullet in the chamber of a gun.

There were many lessons they never taught us in the Marine Corps, foremost among them was instruction on how to be magnanimous in defeat. Trash a Marine, and you have an enemy for life.

At the moment, I did not feel especially charitable toward Ellery Doctorow; but what I had in mind for this visit might just save lives, Ava’s life in particular. He’d kicked me off his rock and made an end run on my engineers; his last-minute concern about my well-being struck me as gloating. I considered him a pompous, arrogant, self-important windbag, and that was why I hated what I had to do next.

Before returning to Fort Sebastian, I would visit Doctorow one last time. If he was no longer in his office, I would go to his home. I would find him, and, despite my desire to break his neck, I would do him a favor.

I told my driver to take me to the new capitol building.

Freeman had found his Bandit on a civilian airfield on the south side of town. The south and west sides of Norristown had taken the brunt of the war against the aliens. The Corps of Engineers, formerly my Corps of Engineers, began restoring the west side as soon as we liberated the planet. The south side, however, remained in tatters. If I were trying to hide a plane near Norristown, I would hide it in the wreckage of a southern suburb.

I stared out at broken buildings and empty space as we headed north, then I saw a massive work project—the Norris Lake Tunnels. The southern edge of Norristown fronted on a large lake that sparkled like a giant mirror across the landscape. The sun shone across its endless blue surface and shimmered. At one corner of the lake, a pair of tunnels grew out of the water like a set of sleeping leviathans, their four-lane mouths stitched shut by a latticeworks of scaffolding and heavy equipment.

So they’re working on the tunnels, I thought to myself. That was why Doctorow wanted my Corps of Engineers. It would have taken the locals a decade to finish the project; Mars and his engineers would polish it off in a few weeks. The tunnels ran three miles along the bottom of the lake. Once they finished, Norristown would be reconnected to Ephraim, its long-abandoned sister city.

Driving from the south side of town to the governmental seat took fifteen minutes. We started in a place of ruins and ended in a canyon of marble and glass. I had my driver wait in the car while I went to speak with Doctorow. As I reached the door of the capitol, two guards blocked my way.

I told them whom I had come to see, and one of them escorted me to the receptionist. The receptionist, in turn, contacted Doctorow’s office and told me that an aide would come out and speak with me.

I was not impressed, but at least the charades were over. Doctorow had my assurance I was leaving. He had everything he wanted from me, the bastard, so I was no longer worth his time.

A few moments later, out came this snooty kid in a nice suit and silk tie. His wrist went limp as he shook my hand, then he suggested that we sit and talk in the lobby. As far as he was concerned, he was as close to Doctorow as I was going to get.

When the kid asked, “What can I do for you?” I wanted to tell him to douse his hair with gasoline and light up a cigar; but I behaved. I looked him in the eye, and said, “You can tell Colonel Doctorow—”

“President Doctorow.”

“Excuse me?” I asked.

“His title is president.”

“Oh, I see. Well, that’s different. I had no idea,” I said, trying to sound contrite. “You can tell Colonel Doctorow that I am here and wish to see him.”

“The president is a busy man,” the kid said.

“Yes, so am I,” I said.

“Perhaps if you have a message—”

“I just told you my message. I am here, and I wish to see him.”

“Perhaps you would like to tell me what this is about,” the kid said, his patience wearing thin.

“If I wanted to tell you why I was here, I would have already done so,” I said.

The kid controlled his temper better than I would have. He sat unmoved by my sarcasm. “If you would prefer to write—”

“If I wanted to send the president a letter, I would have written one.”

The kid just sat there. He started to say something, but only said, “Hmmmm.”

I stood up.

The kid thought I was leaving, and said, “What should I tell President Doctorow?” He started to get up and reached out to shake hands.

“I’ll tell him myself,” I said, and started for the door to the offices.

The kid threw himself in front of me as the guards from the entrance came trotting across the lobby. The receptionist started speaking frantically into a panel on his desk. I had not come to make a scene, but I was about to make one just the same; then the door to Doctorow’s office flew open, and out came “the president.”

“Are you quite finished, General Harris?” Doctorow asked in a loud but calm voice.

“Do you see anybody bleeding?” I asked.

“That is precisely why we want you off our planet.” Doctorow pronounced this judgment with finality.

“You know what, I can’t wait to leave,” I said.

Doctorow took a deep breath, and asked, “What do you need, Harris?”

“I came here to do you a favor, but you probably don’t want anything from someone like me.”

“No, I probably do not,” he agreed.

I took a deep breath, and said, “I came to give you an escape hatch …in case the aliens ever return.”

Now I had Doctorow’s attention. He surveyed the scene one last time, then said, “Perhaps we should speak in my office.” He turned to leave without speaking, and I followed, like an obedient dog.

Doctorow returned to his seat behind his desk. “How are your preparations going?”

“I hope to be out of here tonight,” I said.

“Well, that is good news.”

“Look …” I paused to take a deep breath because if I didn’t, I might have killed the bastard. I didn’t even know what to call Doctorow anymore. I did not want to call him president, the title was bullshit. I would not call him by his first name, we were not friends.

In the end, I decided not to call him anything, and simply said, “Listen, there’s a small plane hidden somewhere in Norristown, a Piper Bandit. If I had to guess, I would say it’s somewhere just south of town.”

“Why should I care about a small plane?” Doctorow asked.

“Because it can reach Earth,” I said.

“How is that possible?” Doctorow asked, sounding more than a little concerned.

“It’s self-broadcasting,” I explained. Even as I said this, I realized that I had overlooked an important question. Freeman said the battery was only good for one broadcast. That meant the Unified Authority had ferried the plane and its pilot to Terraneau space and dropped it off. But how had he, Freeman, traveled to Terraneau?

“A self-broadcasting plane,” Doctorow repeated.

“It’s very small, just a two-seater, and the broadcast engine is only good for one use. If the aliens come back, you can use it to send for help,” I said. I hated handing the plane over to Doctorow. I specking hated it. I was doing it for Ava. If the aliens did come back, I hoped like hell these assholes would send their distress signal in time for us to help them. I had my doubts.

“I appreciate your telling me about this,” Doctorow said. “Now if you could direct us to the plane before its owner returns.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” I said.

“No?” Doctorow asked.

“The original pilot will be leaving with me and my men,” I said. It was true. What I neglected to mention was that he’d be traveling in a body bag.

CHAPTER THIRTY

There was not a single trained surgeon in the entire Enlisted Man’s Navy. We had medical technicians who could set broken bones, remove a bullet, or treat a burst appendix; but medical school was the domain of natural-born officers. The closest clones got to that kind of education was training as a nurse.

I didn’t need a surgeon to run the autopsy, but I wanted someone who knew his way around a corpse. I needed someone with the right eyes and skill set to examine the body of the late faux Sergeant Kit Lewis, someone who could tell me what the security posts had been missing.

“I don’t know the first thing about forensics,” said the chief medical officer of the Salah ad-Din. We were in sick bay. The body, still wrapped in a self-chilling body bag, lay on the table before us.

“Understood,” I said as I unzipped the bag. There he was, Sergeant Lewis, his remaining eye staring straight ahead, the jagged remains of his skull poking out from areas where his face had shriveled.

The doctor looked at the corpse and swallowed, then quickly recovered. “Want my official opinion about what killed him?”

“I know what killed him. I was there,” I said. “What I want to know is what makes him different than everyone else.”

“Half his skull is missing, that’s different,” said the doctor.

“Besides that,” I said.

“Besides that he’s exactly like everyone else, he’s a clone,” the doctor said.

I gave up and started to leave. When I reached the hatch, I looked back, and said, “This boy was different. I want to know why.”

I left the sick bay and walked to the bridge.

The Salah ad-Din was a Perseus-class fighter carrier—a moth-shaped monstrosity that measured fifty-one hundred feet from wingtip to wingtip and forty-five hundred feet from bow to stern. The walk to the bridge took nearly ten minutes.

Captain Villanueva sat waiting for me when I arrived. He was a clone, of course. Villanueva was in his late forties. The crow’s-feet along his eyes stretched down to his cheeks when he smiled. His tiny sideburns had gone white, and he had a spackling of white hairs.

The man was twenty years older than me, but he showed proper respect for my rank. I liked him. Unlike so many officers, Villanueva had no political ambitions. He had his fighter carrier and his crew, and he was satisfied.

“I hear you brought luggage aboard my ship,” he said. When he saw that I had not caught his meaning, he said, “A dead man. I just got a call from sick bay. They said you dropped off a dead guy.”

Maybe I was having trouble focusing. Try as I might to ignore her, Ava still haunted my thoughts. I was angry and jealous; but more than anything else, I just wanted to know that someone would protect her.

“What do you want with a dead clone?” Villanueva asked.

“He’s got secrets,” I said.

“What kind of secrets?” Villanueva asked.

“If I knew, I wouldn’t bother lugging him around,” I said. It seemed like a polite way of telling the captain to mind his own business, but Villanueva did not take it that way. He bobbed his head like a fighter ducking a punch, and said, “Yes, sir.”

Villanueva’s lack of ambition made him easy to work with, but it also left him a trifle unmotivated. With remora fish like Admiral Cabot, ambition meant initiative. Cabot might have been preening for glory, but he got things done. Cabot did not wait for orders, he looked for ways to draw attention to himself. Villanueva, on the other hand, would happily stand around letting the proverbial moss grow under his feet.

As we spoke, I saw officers glancing in our direction. There was no privacy on the bridge of the ad-Din, the deck was designed with no interior walls so that its officers could synchronize a thousand separate operations during attacks. The decks of the big ships were filled with desks and computer stations. Even the helm had more to do with keyboards and touch screens than steering yokes. The ad-Din was nearly a mile wide. You didn’t control a big bird like that using a stick and pedals.

“Is there somewhere else we can speak?” I asked.

Villanueva nodded and led me to a closet-sized conference room off the bridge floor. I sat across the narrow table from him, and asked, “What is the status of our evacuation?” I hated the term “evacuation”; it made it sound as if Doctorow had chased us away. In my mind, we were abandoning Terraneau, not evacuating it. The semantics mattered to me, but not to anyone else.

“Your Marines are on board, sir,” Villanueva said.

“All of them?” I asked, feeling a bit stunned.

“All twenty-two hundred men are accounted for, sir. Are you sure you want to leave all of that equipment behind?”

The equipment was the rather extensive arsenal of weapons I had procured from the graveyard of ships. It must have seemed strange to Villanueva that I would leave guns, grenades, rocket launchers, tanks, and even a half dozen transports in the hands of the local militia. Maybe it was a bad idea, but I wanted Doctorow to have the weapons. If the Avatari came back, he’d need them …she’d need them. Ava. Everything was about protecting Ava.

“The Marine compound on this ship is fully stocked,” I said.

“Aren’t we arming a potential enemy?” he asked.

“You see Terraneau as a potential enemy?” I asked. “It’s an undeveloped planet with leaders who want to create a utopia. Hell, the locals probably don’t even want our guns.

“I’ve got more important things on my mind.” I did. I had a complement of two thousand two hundred Marines that needed screening. We would leave for St. Augustine immediately, but I would keep my men under quarantine until I had searched them for infiltrators. With that many men, it could take a full day to check them all out. I gave Villanueva the order to take us to St. Augustine and excused myself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I drifted into a light sleep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

I brought the dead sergeant with me to the summit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sir?” asked Cabot.

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

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

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

“I’m ready,” I said.

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

The summit began the next day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I nodded.

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

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

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

“I didn’t pull the trigger,” I said.

“Was this an execution?” he persisted.

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

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

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

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

“No one tortured him,” I said.

“What happened?” the old man asked.

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

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

“Yes,” I said.

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

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

“If he’d had another minute or two, he would have taken me with him,” I said.

“That simply isn’t possible,” said the older coroner.

I saw no reason to argue the point, so I asked, “What else have you found? Have you taken a DNA sample?”

“DNA? You’re joking, right?” asked the young coroner.

I shook my head.

“You brought us here to check his DNA? He’s a clone. He’s a Unified Authority military clone. He has the exact same DNA stuff as any other soldier. It’s the most common DNA in the galaxy.”

“There’s got to be something more,” I said. “Is there some way his DNA could have been altered?”

The older, wiser coroner let his apprentice field the questions. The younger guy said, “Alter it to do what? I mean, look at this guy. He’s a normal, garden-variety clone. The only thing different about him is that he got pounded into mush, and half of his frigging head is missing.”

Lying on that table, his skin peeled away, Kit Lewis did not look like other clones. He might have looked like other cadavers, but nothing about him looked specifically clonelike.

The senior coroner said, “Sam, read back what we have so far.”

The younger man tapped a computer screen and read in a flat voice, “Subject, Male; Unified Authority military clone; approximate age 28; weight at time of autopsy, 168 pounds …” He looked up from the screen, and said, “With his brains and organs intact, he’d probably go 180.”

He turned back to the monitor and continued reading. “Hair: brown; eye: brown …” That might have been coroner humor—the cadaver came in with only one eye.

“Yes, I see that,” I said. “If that was all I was looking for, I would not have asked for your help.”

“What are you looking for?”

“You see those broken bones,” I said, pointing to the tray holding the broken ribs. “I did that to him. I kicked him, and he got up, so I kicked him again. I felt his ribs go, but he still got up. It didn’t matter what I did to him, he just kept coming at me.

“The last time I hit him, it was like he didn’t even have any ribs. It was like hitting a water bag. Do you know what he did when I hit him that time?”

“Collapsed to the ground and coughed up blood,” the younger coroner guessed.

He had coughed up blood, I remembered that much. “He lunged at me, threw me down, and started strangling me,” I said.

“I don’t blame him,” said Sam, the younger coroner.

Wanting nothing more than to hit the kid, I shook my head, and said, “You say he was dying. You say he was bleeding internally. Fine. I believe you. That makes him even more dangerous, because he still almost killed me.”

“He’s dead now,” Sam said.

“He’s a specking clone! They can make more of him!” I heard my words echo across the morgue and realized I was yelling at them.

I dialed my voice down, and said, “This man damn near beat me to death when he was supposedly bleeding to death, I want to know how the hell he did that. Pull his genes apart under a microscope, run chemical tests on what’s left of his brains. I don’t care what you do, but get me answers.”

Sam, the younger of the coroners, reached down, turned the skull so that it stared back at him, and said, “Maybe he had a surge of adrenaline.”

For a moment, I wanted to scream in frustration. Instead, I said, “Look, there’s got to be something different going on here. I need you to find out what it is.”

We began the summit with reports from the thirteen fleets.

Unified Authority Navy cruisers had been spotted throughout our territory. They may have been testing our security measures, they may have been spying on us. Cruisers were small and fast, better suited for hit-and-run tactics than confrontations. Phantom U.A. ships had been spotted in all six arms and near most of our twenty-three planets. We never got more than a brief glimpse of them, and they were always cruisers. The most sightings occurred around St. Augustine and Olympus Kri, the only two planets we held in the Orion Arm. Apparently, there had been dozens of incidents around St. Augustine.

Admiral Glenn Nelson, Commander of the Orion Inner Fleet, shared his opinions freely. “The Unifieds want Orion back because we’re too close to Earth. They’re going to try to run us out of the Orion Arm, the gutless pricks.

“We should take the fight to them …end the war once and for all.”

I had my own theory about what the Unified Authority wanted and how we should respond, but I was in no rush to share my opinions in a room filled with admirals. They were Navy. I was a Marine.

“Have any of you gotten close enough to fire at one of their cruisers?” Warshaw asked.

“I got within a million miles,” Nelson answered. “We were down to about six hundred fifty thousand when the ship broadcasted out.”

“Was she one of the new ships or an older model?” Warshaw asked.

“New. We got a signature reading from its shields,” Nelson said. Other admirals grunted approvingly.

“Did you have enough guns to win if she stood her ground?” Warshaw asked.

Nelson frowned and nodded. “Three carriers and a battleship …it wouldn’t have been much of a fight.”

The commander of the Sagittarius Central Fleet came even closer to nailing a U.A. ship. “She broadcasted in five million miles off Donwyn Kri. We had four ships in the area. We were almost on top of her.”

“But she got away,” Nelson said in a bored voice.

There was one exception. One of the Unified Authority ships put up a brief fight in the Norma Arm. Norma was the innermost arm, the vortex of the six spiral arms—or in sailor terms, the “asshole of the galaxy.”

“If they want Norma, we should give it to them,” one of the admirals offered. This comment earned him laughs and nods.

Sitting in a room filled with clones wearing admiral’s uniforms left me feeling slightly disoriented. They all looked alike, more or less. Some were as old as fifty and one was barely thirty, but they had the same face. Warshaw, the fanatical bodybuilder, stood out. He outweighed the next heaviest clone in the room by a good twenty pounds. Also, the others had hair. Warshaw shaved anything resembling hair from his head …though, judging by his nearly comic overabundance of muscle, the absence of hair might have had more to do with steroid use.

“So you think they’re up to something? What are they up to?” Warshaw asked, looking for volunteers. “We know they’re watching us. Obviously, they’re infiltrating us with assassins. Are they running scared? Are they planning an attack?”

No one answered.

“They’re going to attack us,” said Admiral Nelson. “Sooner or later, they are going to attack us. They have to. They don’t have any choice.”

“They don’t want to fight us,” said Admiral Swift, the officer in charge of guarding the space around Olympus Kri. “Those are cruisers they’re sending. Cruisers are the most expendable ships in the U.A. Navy. I bet they even have clone crews flying them, the bastards.

“If they wanted to fight, they’d send carriers and battleships. They’re running scared.”

“So why are they spying on us?” Warshaw asked Swift.

“Because they’re scared, sir. They want to make sure we’re not coming after them.”

“Bullshit! They are planning their attack,” said Nelson.

Swift turned on Nelson, and said, “You don’t know your shit from your ass. We’re talking about Alden Brocius. I’ve seen rabbits with bigger balls than Brocius. The bastard is going to play it safe as long as he can. He’ll send scouts to make sure we’re not planning anything, then he’ll wait until he has the biggest fleet and the most guns before he commits. That son of a bitch will take us into the next century before he attacks. Guys like Brocius don’t make their move till they’re sure they’ll win.”

At that point, the meeting moved on its own inertia. Warshaw tried to take control, but no one was interested.

I watched the quagmire with some satisfaction. I found the officers pretentious. Not a one of them had attended Annapolis or received any other form of officer training. They grew up in the same orphanages as the clones they commanded, and yet they had already adopted the air of superiority I despised in natural-born officers.

Sitting beside me, Admiral Cabot ignored the confusion. He looked pleased just to be in attendance. The summit was officially for fleet commanders, admirals with two stars and up. Cabot, a lower-half rear, had only one star. He would not get to speak unless I invited him to say something on my behalf, but he did not seem to care.

I sat through the meeting, biding my time, speculating about the cadaver in the morgue. When speakers droned on too long, I let my thoughts wander to Ava. I listened for items of interest as the admirals pontificated; but they were talking Navy, I spoke Marine.

When the meeting adjourned for lunch, I found a quiet table where I hoped to sit alone. I did not have the table to myself for long. Cabot came to join me. Like any successful entourage officer, he knew how to read his benefactor. He instinctively knew that I did not feel like talking, so he sat and ate, silent and serene.

A few moments later, Warshaw slid into the seat beside Cabot.

“Mind if I join you?” he asked.

Cabot leaped to his feet. He snapped to attention so quickly that his thigh struck the edge of the table and it slid an inch. Fortunately, I had sipped enough of my water that it did not slosh out of the glass. Cabot’s water splashed on to his plate, though. “Good thing we weren’t eating soup,” I said. They both looked at me curiously, not understanding my joke.

Warshaw, a man who’d risen to master chief petty officer before the Unified Authority gave us field promotions and cut us loose, returned Cabot’s salute as he dropped into his seat, and said, “At ease, Cabot. Let’s just enjoy our meal.”

“Yes, sir,” Cabot said, sounding embarrassed. He sat down and proceeded to stare into his plate.

“Harris, do you plan on joining the discussion, or are you here to enjoy the show?” Warshaw asked.

A waiter came and placed dishes before Warshaw, took his drink request, and left.

Warshaw looked at the plate, and said in disgust, “Is this a chicken or a dove?”

“It’s a local game bird,” I said. “I guess they don’t grow too big in the desert.”

Warshaw changed the subject. “Harris, I get the feeling you’ve been avoiding me.”

“Avoiding you?” I asked. “Why would I do that?”

“You tell me,” he said.

“Nothing comes to mind,” I said.

“Made any progress on your investigation?”

“Some,” I said.

“Okay, I want you to present tomorrow. Tell us what you got so far.”

“I won’t have much to talk about,” I said.

“Maybe you can tell us what happened to your face. That should be a fascinating story,” Warshaw suggested. Cabot had probably wanted to ask about it as well but had lacked the guts and the rank.

“As a matter of fact, that’s not a bad idea,” I said.

“And you brought a stiff with you,” Warshaw said.

“Yeah, he’s down in the morgue.”

“One of ours?”

“Theirs,” I said. “Our first confirmed infiltrator.”

“And he’s a clone?”

“He was. Now he’s a cadaver.”

“Sounds to me like you’ve got a lot to talk about. Look, Harris, right now you’re the highest-ranking target in the Enlisted Man’s Empire. I bet you have some harrowing tales.”

After that, we mostly ate in silence. Warshaw asked me a few friendly questions. Except for a question about touching his toes during his morning stretches, Warshaw pretty much ignored Cabot. I did notice that Warshaw emphasized the word “rear” when he referred to Cabot’s rank.

Just as I finished my lunch, one of Cabot’s lieutenants came to deliver a note. Cabot read it and passed it on to me. It was from Villanueva, informing me that his MPs had located a suspicious clone on the ad-Din. The note ended with an offer to “detain” the man.

I thought about the last infiltrator and wondered what would have happened if MPs had tried to arrest him. I had the feeling it would have ended up with wounded MPs and another bullet-ridden corpse.

I wrote, “Keep him bottled up. I am on my way,” and sent the note back.

“I may be late to the next meeting,” I told Warshaw. “Something important has come up.”

“Something you can discuss in your briefing?” he asked.

“If everything goes right, we’ll be doing show-and-tell instead of a lecture.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Where do you look for a cold-blooded killer? The MPs guarding the Salah ad-Din found theirs in a cargo hold, inventorying food supplies.

We huddled together in a small room a few doors from the cargo hold watching him on a security screen. The man looked like a general-issue clone, just another enlisted sailor counting crates on an inventory tablet.

“He’s been in that exact same spot for sixteen hours now, ever since you left for Gobi,” Villanueva explained.

“What’s he doing, counting every specking noodle?” asked Nobles. No one had briefed Nobles on the situation.

Villanueva ignored him. Nobles was a Marine. As far as Pete Villanueva was concerned, that made him my problem.

“Camouflage,” I told Nobles. “He’s a stowaway, and he’s trying to blend in.”

“So he’s hiding?” Nobles asked.

Hoping he would just keep quiet and figure things out by listening in on the conversation, I ignored him.

“Is he a spy or something?” Nobles asked. He was too comfortable around me. Maybe that happened with pilots and drivers; they spent so much time with superior officers that they thought of them as friends.

“Spy, assassin, saboteur, the bastard’s a one-man wrecking crew,” I said.

Noble dropped out of the conversation after that.

“Have you sent anyone in after him?” I asked Villanueva. I’d warned him not to send anyone in, but orders sometimes slip through the cracks.

“No, sir.”

“Do you know if he’s armed?”

“We can’t be sure, sir, not without sending a team in to apprehend him,” said one of the MPs.

“But you haven’t seen anything?”

“No, sir,” said the MP.

The clone on the screen did not look dangerous. If anything, he looked neurotic. He had that tablet, but he wasn’t writing anything. He kept yelling something, maybe even screaming like a man out of control. Every so often he stopped talking and smacked himself on the head with the tablet.

“Is there any way to pick up what he’s saying?” I asked.

The MP controlling the monitoring station fielded the question. “No, sir. The camera does not have audio. It’s for checking inventory.”

“Too bad,” I said.

“He’s been doing that the entire time,” Villanueva said, sounding somewhat disgusted.

“Doing what?” I asked.

“Beating himself up. Watch his lips. When you see him pucker and grimace like that, he’s saying the word, ‘SPECK.’ He says ‘speck’ just about every other word.”

As Villanueva said this, the man rapped himself across his forehead with his tablet three times in rapid succession. He puckered, then grimaced, puckered, then grimaced, puckered, then grimaced. Watching his lips move, I imagined him shouting the word.

“Dangerous or not, he sure as hell is crazy,” Villanueva said.

“He’s both,” I said.

If everything the coroners had said about Sergeant Lewis proved true, he’d kept fighting long after he should have curled up and died. Guys like that don’t throw in the towel. You can pull a gun on them, and they just keep fighting.

“I’m going in after him,” I said.

“You don’t need to go in there yourself,” Villanueva said.

“I have plenty of men …”

“Alone,” I added. Was I afraid? Was I facing my fears? Was I climbing back on the proverbial horse? God, I hoped not.

“Sir …”

“I have a better shot at nabbing this guy without your boys getting in my way.”

“That’s bullshit,” one of Villanueva’s MPs whispered to the man beside him. Then in a louder voice, he said, “Sir, may I suggest that we send in ten men and piggy-pile him, sir.”

It was not a question of climbing back on the horse; I wanted a rematch. I hadn’t taken Lewis seriously, and he’d damn near killed me. If this lunatic was the same clone who’d attacked me in my quarters, I’d managed to scare him away the first time we met; but I was the one on the ground when he ran away.

Commanding officers do not generally participate in arrests, and I should have sat this one out. At most, I should have notified Hollingsworth and had him send Marines to assist in the arrest. I was running this operation too far from the rule book, but I didn’t care.

“You really plan to go in alone?” Villanueva asked, the mirth in his voice too apparent.

“I do,” I said.

“General, we’ll be able to watch you on the surveillance cameras,” said one of the MPs. “I’ll have men waiting right outside the door if something happens.”

“That’s good, but I don’t want you jumping the gun on this one.”

“No, sir.”

“This is almost sure to come to a fight,” I said. “Don’t come running at the first sign of trouble.”

“At what point should I send in help?” Villanueva asked.

“Good question,” I said, not sure how to answer the question. “If I give the distress signal, come in running.”

“What’s the signal?” The MPs sounded worried. They didn’t want a general dying on their watch.

“If you see me flat on my ass and begging for mercy, come in after me.”

The MPs laughed. Villanueva did not. “Begging your pardon, sir, but I hope that’s not the same signal you used last time?”

The MPs stifled their laughter, but the point was well taken, I still had plenty of bruises on my face.

“I’ve got the situation under control, Captain,” I said, fixing Villanueva with my coldest glare, “and you have your orders. Give me five minutes, then send your men after me.”

Villanueva followed me as I left the security room. “You do know that this is crazy, right?” he asked, as I headed toward the cargo hold.

“I know,” I said. He was correct, but a combat reflex had already begun to flood my veins with hormonal courage, and I felt the old excitement. “Don’t sweat it. Just get my safety net ready. I seriously doubt he will kill me in the time it takes your MPs to break things up.”

The cargo hold had twelve-foot ceilings lined with bright lights. It was a maze with crates and shelves instead of walls. I entered, heard someone shouting, and followed the sound. The infiltrator’s tone of voice reminded me of a man scolding a dog. As I got closer, I heard the thwack of him smacking himself with his tablet.

“Stupid. Gawd, you are so specking stupid. And now you’re stuck here! And what, you think he’s ever specking coming back?” A pause, then he shrieked the word, “SPECK!” Agony and probably insanity rang in his voice.

When I turned around a corner, the clone, the sailor, the infiltrator heard my footsteps and turned. There was nothing spectacular about him, just a standard-issue clone, standing five-foot-ten, with brown hair cut to regulation length and wearing a sailor’s uniform. His brown eyes fell on me, and I saw recognition. He went silent, dropped the hand with the tablet to his side, and saluted.

I returned the salute, and asked, “Who are you speaking to, sailor?”

He gave me an embarrassed grin, and said, “I was talking to myself, sir. It’s an old habit.” In his eyes, recognition turned into hope. I was his target, and I had returned.

I pretended to think about what he had said, then responded, “You might want to work on that; people won’t understand. They might think you are dangerous.”

“Dangerous, sir?” he asked.

“I don’t think you’re dangerous. I don’t think you’re dangerous at all.”

“No, sir?” he asked.

“No, not in the slightest,” I said. “You couldn’t even finish me off when you had a gun, and now you’re not even armed.”

Still standing at attention, he smiled. “Maybe you got lucky.”

“Maybe I did. On the other hand, maybe you got lucky, too,” I said.

His smile faded as he said, “Maybe.” Then he said, “You know who I am and you still came. Doesn’t that seem a little foolish?” Amazingly, he remained at attention, chest out, shoulders back. I’d seen how fast he could make his move, though. I wasn’t fooled.

“I know what I’m doing,” I said.

“How do you know I’m not armed?” he asked.

“Because my MPs have been watching you for hours. If you had a gun, you would have shot yourself instead of trying to beat your head in with an inventory tablet.” I pointed to a camera hanging from the track along the ceiling. It was not the small and discreet kind of camera preferred by security personnel. The camera hanging from its bracket was as big as a boxing glove and had robotic claws for pulling cases.

“You were watching me on an inventory drone?” he asked.

I shrugged. “You were entertaining.” As we spoke, he seemed to collapse in on himself. He was like the kid who comes into the game full of bravado, then misses a shot and falls apart.

“Are they still watching us?”

“Sure,” I said. “But I can signal them to look away if you think you want another shot at me.” I was kicking a handicapped man, taking candy from a kid. He was broken. He was still trying to stand at attention, but now his shoulders slumped, and his expression fell.

“Are you going to arrest me, sir?” he asked.

“Unless you give me a reason to have you shot,” I said.

“No, sir,” he said. “I won’t do that.”

The clone made no move as I signaled Villanueva to send in his MPs.

Like Samson without his hair, I thought. He stood at dazed attention as a pair of MPs entered the cargo hold and put him in cuffs. I watched the scene with bemusement, my combat reflex fading into a pleasant memory.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

“I heard you brought in a live one,” Sam, the apprentice coroner, said. He sounded impressed.

“More or less,” I said.

Seaman First Class Philip Sua was bound, drugged, dressed in a straitjacket, and placed in an incapacitation cage. He had remained awake for the trip down to Gobi, but that didn’t make him lucid. A river of drool cascaded from his lips, and his eyes stared straight ahead, unblinking and corpselike.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “The first clone is beaten until his insides turn to pudding, but he keeps fighting. The second clone surrenders without a fight. A coward and a maniac cut from the same DNA, that doesn’t add up. Maybe something went wrong with their neural programming.”

It was now 03:00, Gobi time, and the station was silent except for the swarms of guards patrolling the corridors. Down in the subterranean levels, the halls remained bright as ever.

“The first one must have known he was going to die,” Sam guessed. “You know, maybe he knew he was as good as dead, so he kept fighting as one last act of defiance.”

“Okay, that explains why the first one fought to the death, but why did the second one give up so easily.”

“Was he bleeding?”

“No.”

“Injured in any way?”

“No.”

Sam thought for a moment, then said, “Maybe he didn’t feel like committing suicide.”

We were alone in the morgue, well, mostly alone. Sergeant Kit Lewis was in the room. He was all over the room. His mostly skinned carcass lay on a table. What was left of his face, now rolled inside out and pulled below his chin, hung like the collar of a turtleneck sweater.

Sam blinked to clear his tired eyes, and asked, “Who do you have examining the live one?”

“They’re flying some kind of crime shrink in from Morrowtown,” I said.

“Dr. Morman?”

“You know him?” I asked.

“I’ve worked with Morman before,” he said, speaking quickly, as if giving the doctor short shrift.

Why couldn’t Terraneau have been like Gobi? I asked myself. The locals respected us here. And it wasn’t just Gobi. We were greeted as heroes on all of the worlds we had liberated except for Terraneau.

“Have you found out anything more about Lewis?” I asked. Anything more than cause of death?

“Good timing. If you’d asked that question an hour ago, I wouldn’t have had anything to show you,” the kid said. “Then I had another look at the DNA. How much do you know about DNA?”

“I thought DNA was a dead end,” I said.

Sam shook his head, and said, “It is and it isn’t. The DNA itself isn’t much help.”

“I don’t follow,” I said.

“There’s gene expression and gene regulation. With gene expression, you can create two radically different creatures using identical strands of DNA. You said this man was unusually strong. It’s basic epigentics—same DNA, different cell divisions.”

“And in English?” I asked.

“Instead of looking at his DNA, I had a look at his chromosomes.”

“Chromosomes? The stuff that make you a boy or a girl?”

“I take it biology is not your strong suit,” Sam said as a joke, but it sounded so patronizing that I wanted to hit him.

He pointed to a slide on the wall. “Lewis, here, has the exact same DNA as any other military clone, it’s just arranged differently.”

“If Lewis had the same DNA as every other clone, why isn’t he like them?” I asked. “Same DNA, same everything, right?”

“That’s what I am trying to explain,” Sam said, his irritation starting to show. I think he was used to being the student. Now I was the one with a million questions, and he lacked the patience to answer them.

“DNA is the basic building block. Genes are made of DNA; but you can change genes by changing the layout of the DNA.”

Seeing I was still confused, he picked up a syringe and a glass dish. “What do these have in common?” he asked.

“They’re lab equipment,” I guessed.

“They’re made of glass. Glass is made of sand. If I have molten glass, I can make a bowl or a syringe, right. Once I melt the sand, I can use the glass to make a bowl or a syringe.”

“Okay, I get that,” I said.

Apparently I didn’t get it, though, because he sighed, and said, “It’s not like bowls are made from bowl sand and syringes are made from syringe sand. Glass fruit sand doesn’t come from glass fruit deserts. It’s all the same sand from the same desert.”

“Yeah, okay, one desert, one kind of sand,” I said, slowing as I finished the sentence because the meaning of what he had said finally dawned on me.

“Okay, so they don’t make bowls out of ‘bowl sand’ and syringes out of ‘syringe sand.’ It’s just sand. What you do with the sand once you melt it is up to you,” Sam said, making sure I understood.

I thought about what he was saying and saw a problem with it. “But it’s not the same with DNA,” I said. “They selected the specific genes when they made us. They spent—”

He put up a hand to stop me. “You said this clone was created as a spy. They designed him to break into your forts, right? Can you think of better camouflage than making him out of your DNA?

“Do you know what chromosomes are made of? You pair a strand of DNA with a protein. Do your security posts test for chromosomes?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“His DNA is identical to any other clone’s, but his chromosomes are different. Once I started with his chromosomes, the difference became obvious,” said Sam.

“Chromosomes?” I asked, shaking my head. It didn’t make sense to me. “I can see how you might make different chromosomes, but what does that get you. That’s the stuff that determines your sex, right? Women have two X chromosomes and men have an X and a Y.”

“Women have two Xs, most men have an X and a Y, but Lewis had an X and two Ys. He has the same DNA but a different set of chromosomes.”

“Two Y chromosomes? And the Y is what separates men from women. Does that make him more …” I almost said “manly.” “Would that make him strong?” Even as I asked the question, a more pressing concern came to mind—Could we configure the posts to read chromosomes instead of DNA?

“It could make him much stronger than other clones. The potential exists. Lewis was like any other clone on the surface, but his muscles could have been stronger, his heart was stronger …”

“What about his brain?” I asked. “What would that do to his brain?”

“Oh, yes, his brain. You know, the autopsy would have been a lot more productive if you hadn’t shot the subject in the head.”

“I didn’t shoot him,” I said.

“Okay, well, whoever shot him really specked up the works,” Sam said, holding both hands up in frustration. “The bullet blew more than half of his brain out of his skull, and the part that was left was in bad shape.”

He walked over to Lewis and placed his fingers around the bone-and-muscle remains of his chin. “It wasn’t a complete washout.”

He turned the head so the empty brain cavity faced toward me. “It’s not conclusive; but considering the amount of trauma done to this man, we’re lucky we found anything.”

“Found what?” I asked.

“I took a tissue scraping from the area just inside here.” The kid stuck his hand into the gaping brainpan and pointed to the part of the forehead that had not been destroyed by the bullet. During my time as a Marine, I had shot, stabbed, strangled, and exploded enemies, but I never played with their remains. I did not peel away their skins or pull out their organs. Watching Sam the cocky student coroner twist and turn the body made me queasy.

“We got this from his brain,” he said, using tweezers to hold up a gauss-thin strip of meat. “Its NAAs are so low, they’re almost not there.”

I asked the obvious question, “What is NAA?”

“N-acetylaspartatic acid.”

“That doesn’t tell me anything,” I said.

The kid was many things, but he was not a snob. When he continued, he did not speak in a condescending way. “It’s a compound you find in a normally functioning brain. Things go wrong when it’s not there. The lower the NAA level, the bigger the problems, and this guy’s levels were really low.”

This information was interesting but not practical. I asked a practical question, “Is there any way we can configure our security equipment to track this?”

He smiled, nodded, and said, “Dead men don’t walk, blind men don’t see …”

It was a limerick or maybe a line from an old song. The second half went, “I gave her my heart, and she crucified me.”

“General,” he said, “I checked your chromosomes when you came through the door. A coroner can’t be too careful.”

Before leaving the morgue, I asked the kid to write up his findings and send them to Station Security along with recommendations about how the posts could be upgraded to scan chromosomes instead of DNA.

I returned to my quarters and stripped and showered and ran a laser across my teeth, then went to bed, all the while asking the same questions I had been asking before seeing the coroner—Why would one clone fight to the death and another surrender?

Part of the answer was obvious, self-determination. Clones start out alike, but that does not mean they stay that way. I grew up among clones. I knew brave ones and not-so-brave clones, but I never met a clone who was an outright coward. I went to boot camp with men who would not flinch in the face of death and clones who might hesitate before a charge but none who would run from the field.

But the clones I knew had been raised from infancy. These new clones had to have “crawled out of the tube” in their twenties. The Unified Authority did not have time to raise their clones, they needed them out and killing.

As I slid onto my rack, I thought about bowls and syringes and manufactured chromosomes. Sleep did not come so easily that night because along with the bowl and the syringe came images of the cadaver. I’d seen worse. I’d seen rotted, maggot-infested bodies of men. I once stepped on the body of a man killed by Noxium gas. My boot crushed through his chest. It was like stepping on overripe fruit.

It wasn’t the cadaver that bothered me; it was the casual way the damn apprentice coroner handled it that got under my skin. Lewis was a maniac and assassin, but he was still as human as me.

As I played the scene over in my mind, thoughts gave way to fitful sleep, and I dreamed of men fighting a war in which they killed each other with glass bullets. The men who died were buried in glass coffins in a cemetery with glass headstones. Watching them lower the coffins, I wondered if the men who lived and the men who died were made from the same kind of sand.

I could not tell if it came the minute I fell asleep or six hours later. I woke up disoriented, groped for the communications console beside my bed, and croaked the word, “What?”

The voice on the other end belonged to a woman. “General Harris, this is Jennifer Morman.”

“Morman?” I asked. I did not recognize the name or the voice.

“I’m the forensic psychologist you brought in from Morrowtown.”

I recognized each of the words as she spoke them, but it took a moment before I pieced them together into a coherent stream. Sitting up, I said, “Right …right. Have you had a look at the clone I brought in?”

“I’ve never seen anything quite like him,” she said.

I glanced at the clock in the console. The time was 05:28. It no longer mattered whether it was 01:00 or 10:00; it was time for me to get moving. “Have you made any progress?” I asked as I climbed out of bed and slipped into my uniform. I still had sixty minutes before I had planned to wake up.

“Oh, I’ve made progress all right,” she said. “I’ve made a lot of progress.”

I told Morman I would be right over and headed out of my billet. Gobi Station did not have a “forensic psychology” lab, so I’d stuck her in an unused office in the station’s lowest basement. Five armed guards stood outside the lab …just in case.

The guards knew me by sight. They stood at attention and let me through. Morman, on the other hand, had never seen me. She heard the door open, turned to say hello, and froze. A strange smile formed across her lips as she said, “Oh my Lord, you’re a Liberator.”

Feeling a bit awkward, I said, “Dr. Morman, I’m General Harris.”

“You are a Liberator, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I am a Liberator clone. Is that going to be a problem?” Even the most open-minded people were afraid of Liberators. We were the pit bulls of the synthetic crowd.

“God, no,” she said. “It’s exciting to meet you. I thought the Liberators were extinct.”

“As far as I know, I’m the last,” I said, no longer caring whether or not she felt comfortable around me. She made me uncomfortable. I got the feeling she was dissecting me with her eyes.

“General, for a forensic psychologist like me, you are a gold mine. I’d love to sit down with you and maybe pick your brain.”

Images of Sam the coroner manhandling Sergeant Lewis still played in my head. I did not want this woman giving me the psychological equivalent of an autopsy. “We’ll see,” I said, making a mental note not to spend any unnecessary time down here.

As if she had read my thoughts, Dr. Morman nodded and became somewhat guarded. “Maybe we should stick to Sua,” she said.

“What can you tell me about him?” I asked.

“Oh well, he’s an interesting study,” she said in an all-business tone. “I don’t believe his name is Sua.”

“It’s not. We found the real Philip Sua shortly after we arrested this man. Your patient had stuffed him into a meat locker.”

“Was he all right?” Morman asked.

I pulled a Freeman and answered the question by ignoring it.

“Have you looked at Myron’s report?” she asked.

Maybe I was still tired. It took me a moment to figure out that Myron must have been the older coroner. Myron and Sam, I told myself. “I’ve spoken with his assistant,” I said.

“Okay, well, did he tell you about the low brain activity?” she asked. “I would have come to the same conclusion without Myron’s help. I mean, you don’t need to spend more than a minute with Sua to see what’s wrong with him, but the autopsy confirmed my findings. Philip Sua’s problems wouldn’t be any more obvious if he had three heads.”

Or if he was a Liberator clone, I thought as I asked, “And what exactly is his problem?”

“What are his problems? Sua’s problems are legion, General. This man has more devils in him than anyone could ever hope to exorcise.”

“I don’t understand. Are you saying he’s insane?” I thought about the bastard standing for hours in that cargo hold, hitting himself with his tablet and berating himself. A lunatic? It made sense. Maybe a sociopath, too. His kind killed easily enough. Maybe the Unified Authority had developed a strain of mass-murderer clones. “Is he psychotic?”

“Psychotic,” she said, the word lingering on her lips. She was an older woman, maybe in her forties, the first traces of gray showing in her hair. She wore glasses. She was trim and energetic, and she approached her work with this queer enthusiasm. I might have described her as a playful authority. Maybe she found irony in the notion of a Liberator clone accusing anyone else of being psychotic.

“Clinically speaking, he is not psychotic. He hasn’t lost contact with reality,” she said. “Sua’s problems are more along the lines of neurosis than psychosis. I mean, he does have an induced physical condition, but his behavior is clearly neurotic.”

She must have thought I knew more about forensic psychology than I did. I knew a few psychological terms, but Marines used those terms as pseudoobscenities not diagnosis. When an officer goes out of control, we may report him as a “loose cannon,” but in private conversation we’d refer to him as a “psychotic bastard.”

“What do you mean by neurotic?” I asked.

In answer, she winked, and said, “Let’s go have a word with Mr. Sua, shall we?” She led me through the door at the back of the office into the area that had become her makeshift lab. The only furniture in her lab was a desk, a few stools, and three long-necked floor lamps bunched close together like a trio of storks.

In the center of the room, Philip Sua lay on the contraption that law-enforcement professionals referred to as an “incapacitation cage.” The cage did not rely on anything as primitive as bars or straps or clamps. If Sua managed to sit up, he could have walked right out of the laboratory. The problem was, his muscles weren’t listening to his brain.

He lay on a table with two diodes a pin’s breadth away from the nape of his neck. Metal filaments inserted into the base of his skull channeled the steady stream of electricity running between those diodes through his spine, rendering his body helpless from the neck down. He could not turn his head or uncurl his fingers.

Sua lay conscious on the table, watching us as we entered the room. His eyes switched back and forth between us; but he did not speak. If I expected a psychotic madman with a confident grin and dangerous eyes, that was not what I found. Sua looked nervous.

“Can he speak?” I asked.

“Oh yes, see, hear, speak …everything but move. He’s been very cooperative,” Morman said.

I stepped closer to the cage. I did not hear the crackle of electricity or feel a tingle on my skin. The current running through Sua’s body was a mere trickle. “Hello, Sua,” I said.

Dr. Morman introduced me as well. “Philip, this is General Harris.”

“We’ve met,” he said, his brown eyes on my face but never quite meeting my gaze.

I was glad to see two MPs standing in the far corner of the lab with guns on their belts. Despite her ghoulish fascination with Liberators, I liked Dr. Morman. She struck me as smart and competent, but also as a delicate woman playing with forces far more dangerous than she understood.

That thought reminded me of the question that had been nagging me since we arrested Sua. Still watching the captive clone, I said, “Doctor, I’ve run into two of these clones so far. There is the tissue donor down at the morgue, then there is Sua.

“The one in the morgue wouldn’t give up. He was coughing up blood, and we still had to shoot him.

“Then there is Sua. He gave up without a fight.”

Morman had her answer ready. What she said made me forget all about sand, syringes, and bowls. Her answers were far more enlightening. Once she explained herself, everything fell into place.

I asked her if she would be willing to present this information to the admirals during the afternoon session, and she said that would be fine. With the pieces of the puzzle she had given me, I finally understood the infiltrators. What the coroners found was good. What she uncovered was gold.

“They built his brain with a slight abnormality,” Dr. Morman told me. She sat on her rolling stool, I stood. We were still in the lab, close enough for Sua to overhear our conversation.

“You said that Myron and Sam told you about the slowed activity level in the dead clone’s frontal lobe.”

I nodded.

“It’s a symptom of BPD, Borderline Personality Disorder. It’s not uncommon …well, not among clones, it’s not. Mr. Sua is something of an extreme case.”

I got as far as, “I don’t understand. What is Borderline Personality—” but she interrupted me.

“Borderline Personality Disorder. It’s a neurophysiological condition that interferes with the patient’s ability to regulate emotion. It affects the way they interpret social questions. If someone told you or me that we had lint on our clothing or a smudge on our face, we’d go clean up and not give it a second thought. It’s a normal interaction, something you fix and forget.

“Someone like Mr. Sua would take it as a personal affront.”

“So he’s crazy,” I said.

“Not crazy.”

“And you think the Unified Authority purposely made him this way?” I asked.

“The tissue from the clone in the morgue suggests he had the same disorder.” Dr. Morman took a long look at Sua, then turned back to me, and said, “Judging by the NAA samples, he was an extreme case as well.”

“Why in the world would the Unified Authority want an army of pathologically insecure clones?” I asked.

Dr. Morman took a deep breath, then spoke in a whisper. “People with BPD have a nearly debilitating fear of abandonment. If his superiors threatened him, maybe told him to kill you or they would give him a dishonorable discharge, Sua would see you as the cause of all his fears. He’d rather die than have his superiors abandon him.”

“Okay, that explains Lewis’s behavior,” I said. When Dr. Morman gave me a funny look, I said, “The one in the morgue.

“But Sua didn’t put up a fight at all. I came unarmed, and he surrendered.”

“I asked him about that. He said you caught him off guard when you came in unarmed and alone,” said Dr. Morman. “BPD creates a fascinating dichotomy. Patients have a false sense of confidence. In extreme cases, like Sua’s, the patient thinks of himself as undefeatable. He had unreasonable overconfidence; but once you challenged that confidence, he was crushed. He said you disarmed him the first time he attacked you.”

“The only time he attacked me,” I said.

“Right. The second time you found him, you came in alone and unarmed, and that made him believe that you had no fear of him. When you treated him like a helpless child, he decided he did not stand a chance against you and gave up.”

“So he’s useless,” I said.

“So he’s dangerous,” Dr. Morman corrected me. “This man hates you. He has personalized his fight with you. If he were to get free, he would dedicate his life to destroying you, and he would find a way to do it.

“And something else, he feels that way about the entire Enlisted Man’s Empire. He believes you and the other clones left him behind on Earth to die.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said.

“General, it’s not ridiculous to him. That is how he interprets information. He’s not just an enemy soldier, not just some kind of spy; because of his built-in insecurities, this man takes every offense as if it were personal. He is strong, he is intelligent, and he is willing to dedicate his life to your destruction.

“If you’re not worried by an enemy like that …” She shook her head. “You are a Liberator. Everyone knows what you are capable of doing; but I would hate to have someone like him hunting me, General Harris.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

During breakfast, I gave Admiral Cabot an assignment. We sat alone at a small table in a corner of the mess. I was tired from my early-morning meeting with the forensic psychologist. He looked well rested.

“I need you to do something,” I said as I downed my third cup of coffee. “I need you to get me some information about cruisers.”

Cabot put down his coffee and pulled out his notepad. “What are you looking for?” he asked.

“I need to know about landing bays on cruisers.”

“Okay, what about the landing bay?” he asked. He sounded confident, like he already had the answers.

“The measurements. I need to know the number of bays and the square footage.”

“One bay, it holds four transports. I’d put it at three thousand square feet, not including the tunnel.”

He leaned forward, put up a hand as if blocking outsiders from overhearing what he had to say next, and added, “I spent three years on a cruiser.”

“Not our cruisers,” I said. “Theirs. I need to know about the new ones, the cruisers the Unifieds have been using to spy on us.”

“Oh.” Cabot sounded disappointed. He knew I wanted the information right away, and that meant missing part of the summit. I was getting in the way of his ass-kissing and politicking; and from his expression, I could tell that he resented it.

“You can start by going to Navy Intel; you might get lucky,” I said.

“What if they don’t have the information?” he asked.

“Then fly out to the ad-Din and have Villanueva take you to Terraneau. There’s all kinds of wreckage floating around out there; you’re bound to find a cruiser.”

“You want me to measure a wreck? How am I supposed to do that?”

“I don’t care if you use your dick, just get me the specking dimensions. You got that?”

It was crude talk, but I needed to get through to him. As we spoke, Cabot sat there watching the other admirals enter the briefing room. I could read his thoughts. He wanted to pawn the assignment off on an underling. He wanted to be in the summit rubbing shoulders with the two-stars.

“By the way, don’t use your dick,” I said. “You’re going to need something longer.” And something that doesn’t change size every time a superior officer walks past, I thought.

“Aye, aye, sir,” he said, barely trying to disguise the snarl in his voice.

I had my reasons for wanting Cabot to handle this himself. Like him or hate him, J. Winston Cabot got things done. When I gave him orders, he executed them as if his next promotion depended on it. The information he brought me would check out; and since he would not be able to enter the summit until he got those dimensions, he’d be fast.

“You better get going, Admiral,” I said. “I’m presenting this afternoon. I need that information before I start my presentation.”

“Yes, sir,” he said. He took one last fawning look at the door to the summit, then put down his coffee and headed off.

The morning’s meetings went quickly. We discussed fleet readiness. Warshaw had run a series of drills to test how quickly he could shift forces to meet an invasion. When he simulated an attack on the Golan Dry Docks in his first exercise, only six fleets responded. While the first ships arrived in thirteen minutes, the bulk took between forty minutes and an hour. The final three ships to arrive on the scene did not broadcast in for three hours.

Heads rolled. High-ranking officers were offered early retirements. Rumor had it that one man shot himself rather than face Warshaw’s wrath.

The next fire drill went better. It took less than ten minutes for the first few carriers to arrive. The entire armada broadcasted in within fifty minutes. Some of those ships went through four broadcast transfers, traveling as many as eighty-three thousand light-years to arrive on the scene.

This time Warshaw acknowledged that his captains had carried out their orders. He then took his frustrations out on the officers who designed the ERP—the “Emergency Response Protocol,” stating that the response times could be cut in half again if the routes were better organized.

All of this came as old news to everyone else in the room; but I had never heard any of it. Until a few weeks ago, I had been safely tucked away on Terraneau worrying about the locals breaking into an underground parking lot. Now I had galactic security on my mind, and spy ships, and infiltrator clones.

When Warshaw’s staff simulated a surprise attack on Olympus Kri, twenty-six fighter carriers and sixty-three battleships arrived on the scene within seventeen minutes. Another fifty ships arrived by the half-hour mark.

As he spoke, I came to realize that Gary Warshaw had morphed into the Napoleon specking Bonaparte of his time. Maybe all clone brains weren’t created equal, I thought. But then again, maybe they were. Maybe the U.A. had accidentally packed two brains into Warshaw’s wide, bald pate.

Standing at the lectern, looking mildly deformed with his hairless head and endless stream of muscles, Warshaw smiled and announced the results of his most recent exercise. Twenty-eight ships had responded to a simulated attack on Gobi within six minutes. Within twenty minutes, fifty-two ships had arrived on the scene.

“You know what that tells me,” Warshaw said. “That tells me that the Enlisted Man’s Navy has the will to survive.”

Applause rose from the audience. Were they applauding themselves for their fast response or Warshaw for working miracles? I didn’t know, and neither did he. I doubt the admirals knew, but they clapped until Warshaw raised his hands, signaling for them to stop. Warshaw’s presentation included charts and holographic displays. It lasted four hours. By the time he finished, it was time for lunch.

I was next on the agenda, right after lunch. With a sinking feeling, I searched the dining hall for Cabot. He was nowhere to be seen.

Not feeling especially hungry, I went to my billet. I called Station Security to see if Cabot had returned. They checked their records and reported that he’d left Gobi Station shortly before the morning session began. He had not yet returned.

I left orders for them to rush Cabot to the summit the moment he passed through security. Even if it meant interrupting a closed session, they were to send him in.

Before rejoining Warshaw and his fleet commanders, I contacted the morgue. Sam had gone home for the day; but Myron, the senior coroner, was there. He gave me some very good news.

I returned to the summit slightly before 13:00, just in time for the meeting to begin. Warshaw stopped at my desk, and said, “I didn’t see you at lunch. I hope you don’t get all weird when you make presentations.”

“Just nailing down a few loose ends,” I said.

“So are you ready to present?” he asked.

I nodded, and he headed to the lectern. Introducing me only as “Harris,” he told the group that I would report about a “special intelligence operation” under my command. He then turned the next session of the meeting over to me.

Not feeling especially nervous, I walked up to the stand. I knew a few of the men, but not many. With the exception of Warshaw, not a one of them had done anything to earn my respect. Their idea of combat involved sitting on the bridge of a carrier while Marines and fighter pilots did the heavy lifting.

I began with a bombshell.

“The Unified Authority is tracking our movements,” I said. I turned to Warshaw, and added, “When you ran that last ERP, you revealed your fleet movements, emergency protocols, and readiness to the Pentagon.”

I doubted there was so much as a single officer in the room who believed me. I was a Marine speaking to Navy men. They trusted me to shoot guns and throw grenades, but they didn’t respect my intelligence-gathering ability any more than I respected their hand-to-hand combat experience.

Repeating the scraps of information I’d learned from Ray Freeman, I continued. “The Unified Authority has set up spy satellites to monitor our broadcast activity. Every time our ships broadcast in or out of an area, those satellites read the anomaly.”

The room went quiet. Men who had originally doubted now began wondering just how much I knew. Spy satellites reading distant anomalies, the technology was basic and nearly impossible to track. Reading anomalies was child’s play, and the data could be synchronized to track the entire empire’s movements.

“Why haven’t we spotted any of their satellites?” one admiral asked. He sounded cynical. I didn’t blame him.

“Have you looked for satellites?” I asked. “We’re talking satellites the size of golf balls floating in millions of miles of open space. What are the odds of finding them?”

That shut him up. There was no point sending ships out to look for the satellites. It would be like combing a ten-mile stretch of beach for one specific grain of sand.

“How are they deploying them?” another admiral asked.

Warshaw stood, and the room went quiet. He asked, “Is that what the cruisers were doing, dropping spy satellites?”

“If we chart the cruisers’ courses, maybe we can find their satellites,” another admiral suggested. The idea had not occurred to me. It touched off a discussion.

As the admirals discussed ways to search for satellites, the door opened, and in walked Admiral Cabot. He stared at me, waited until we had eye contact, gave me a nod, then went to the desk where I’d been seated. I breathed a sigh of relief. The pretentious little bastard would not have come without completing his mission.

An admiral sitting a few tables from Warshaw yelled, “If they really have those satellites, then they’ve analyzed our Emergency Response Protocol.” His voice rose above the din.

“We need to destroy the satellites,” somebody yelled. I did not see who.

“Don’t be in too big a hurry to destroy them,” I said, quieting down the room. I repeated this, and added, “It’s always a good idea to give your enemies a little misinformation before killing their spies.”

A general hush fell over the room as the admirals considered this.

“Misdirection, I like it,” Warshaw said. “Norma ships responding to Orion …Perseus ships covering Sagittarius. Do it right, and we could really speck with their intel.”

With the meeting dissolving into many conversations, I asked Warshaw if he would mind giving me a fifteen-minute break. I used the time to catch up with Cabot.

“We had to go all the way to Terraneau,” he complained.

“What did you find?”

“Their cruisers are built for spying, not combat. They have cloaking equipment, and they’re fast. They have a top speed of thirty-eight million miles per hour.”

Our ships topped out at thirty million.

“So you found one at Terraneau?” I asked.

“Three of ’em. I boarded one myself. It had three landing bays, all kinds of spy gear, and no weapons …just bays and bunks. And the landing bays were big, almost ten thousand square feet of parking space.”

I heard him, but it didn’t sound possible. “Ten thousand feet per bay?”

He nodded.

I considered the ramifications, and said, “Oh, shit.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

I started the meeting with another explosion.

“I caught the assassin who killed Admiral Franks,” I began. It was sort of true. Whoever killed Lilburn Franks, his DNA would be identical to Philip Sua’s DNA. His chromosomes would match as well.

Firing a gun into the ceiling would not have captured their attention as quickly. From the moment an aide had found Thorne’s and Franks’s bodies, these men had been living in fear. With the Unifieds killing top officers, every man in the room was a target.

I waited for the admirals to respond, but no one spoke. No one challenged me.

“The Unified Authority breached our security by creating a strain of clones based on the same DNA as our clones. That made their clones impossible to detect.”

Silence. I went on. “Over the last few days, we have managed to isolate two of their clones. We arrested one and killed the other.”

I spent the next five minutes talking about Sergeant Kit Lewis, feeling every man’s eyes on the bruises that still covered my face. I told them how I had, for all intents and purposes, beaten Lewis to death, and how he nearly killed me in return. Then I told them about Seaman First Class Philip Sua, who allowed MPs to arrest him without a fight.

“These new clones have the same DNA as general-issue clones, but they don’t have the same chromosomes. I’ve issued orders for Gobi Security to update its security posts. If any of the new clones have infiltrated Gobi Station, we should have them shortly.

“Any questions?”

Only one admiral, one I did not recognize, raised his hand, and asked, “How can you have the same DNA but different chromosomes?” It took guts to ask the question that everyone else was afraid to ask.

I pretended to mull over my answer, then I stole the bit about glass and sand and bowls and syringes. Trying to come across like a man-in-the-know, I damn near quoted Sam the coroner verbatim.

“I’m impressed,” said Warshaw. “I never realized you knew so much about science.”

Feeling more confident now that I had spoken with Cabot, I continued on to the topic I had meant to discuss before the break. “Those cruisers you’ve been spotting, they’ve been carrying more than satellites. They have been ferrying infiltrator clones into our space. The infiltrators are flying into our territory on cruisers, then penetrating our blockades in planes with stealth shields.

“While we’ve been looking for battleships or cargo carriers, they’ve been using private planes. They’re flying Piper Bandits.”

Warshaw put up his hand. “Bandits? You mean the little two-man jobs? That thing’s got a range of what, one or two hundred thousand miles.”

“Not if they are outfitted with broadcast engines,” I said.

“Out of the question,” one of the admirals said. “There is no way anyone is going to wedge a broadcast engine into a little two-seater.”

The natives were getting restless. A dozen private conversations ignited across the room.

“I’ve seen a modified Bandit,” I said. “The broadcast engine is not much bigger than a shoebox. Instead of a broadcast generator, it has a single-use battery. You use it once, then you have to recharge it.”

“That’s it? That’s your big theory of how they are getting here?” Warshaw asked. “You think they are flying them in on cruisers? How many Bandits do you think they can fit on a cruiser, Harris? I started out on a cruiser. You’d be lucky to fit five planes on one.”

Entourage officers, men like J. Winston Cabot, live in a black-and-white world in which they judge everything by the way it impacts their careers. They view anyone or anything that slows their career as the enemy, and they remember every indiscretion.

By sending Cabot to measure a cruiser, I had made myself his enemy. I could probably have repaired the damage by citing him as the source of some of my information. Instead, I called him up to the dais.

He came up slowly. I had caught him off guard, and that made him nervous.

“Admiral, tell us what you were doing this morning and what you found.”

He looked across the gallery and focused on Warshaw as he said, “I took the Salah ad-Din to Scutum-Crux space looking for a U.A. cruiser.”

“Did you have any luck?” I asked Cabot, trying to prompt him. God he was stiff.

“We found several in the wreckage around Terraneau. Per your orders, sir, I boarded one and measured her landing bays.”

“What did you find?” I asked.

“The new Unified Authority cruisers have three landing bays. Each landing bay has ten thousand square feet of floor space, sir. If you packed them carefully, you could fit eighteen Piper Bandits in each bay. That means they can transport and launch fifty-four Bandits per ship per mission.”

Stunned silence.

Cabot seemed to inflate before my eyes.

I turned toward Warshaw, and said, “Your fleets have spotted cruisers near every planet in the empire. Is that correct?” Not waiting for an answer I already knew, I added, “The cruisers have been particularly active around St. Augustine. Is that correct?” And then I told them about the massacre on St. Augustine.

I had hoped to finish my presentation by having Jen Morman report her findings, but she never appeared.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

I rounded up a squad of MPs and rode the elevator down to the basement. As the elevator descended, I warned them that we would find armed killers, and that was all the briefing I gave.

We reached the bottom floor of the station.

The doors slid apart, and the light from the elevator formed a stripe across the leg of the dead guard lying on the hallway floor. I saw the body and hit the emergency button, setting off an alarm and causing the elevator doors to close. So much for the element of surprise.

The two men beside me had seen the body as well.

“Why did he close the door?” asked an MP in the back of the lift.

“We’re sitting ducks,” I said. “It’s dark out there and bright in here.”

“I thought I saw a dead man,” one of MPs said.

Another one whispered, “I wonder if there is any connection between this and that plane we saw in the desert?”

“What plane?” I asked.

“We found a plane in the desert, sir,” the MP said. “We found it while we were patrolling for bandits.”

Which explained why they had not notified me, the silly pricks saw the word “bandit” in their orders and thought I meant robbers.

“When was that?” I asked in as measured a voice as I could muster.

“Last night, sir.” He sounded nervous.

“You,” I said, singling out an MP with an earpiece in his ear. “You just became my radioman. Contact Station Security. Tell them to place the entire station on emergency lockdown. I want the exits sealed, the elevators stopped, and the emergency stairwells closed off while they run a floor-by-floor search of the entire facility.”

“What about the landing bays?” the MP asked.

“That goes double for the landing bays.”

“Yes, sir.” He turned and faced the wall, his shoulders hunched, and whispered in emphatic tones.

The panel beside the emergency cutoff held a flashlight, an oxygen mask, and a fire extinguisher. I took the flashlight.

“Who wants to hold this?” I asked.

Two men volunteered.

“You’ll be a target,” I warned them. “Those bastards out there are going to aim at the light.”

One of the men lowered his hand. I handed the flashlight to the other.

We were trapped in a cramped elevator. Seven men pressed together like fish in a barrel.

“There are enemy assassins out there,” I said. “I’m guessing that there are two of them. They’ll look like general-issue clones. At least one of them might be dressed like an MP.

“One of them will have just come off a cage, and the sides of his head will be shaved. If you see him, shoot him and keep shooting him until you are sure he is dead. If he’s got a friend with him, shoot them both.”

That was all the advice I had to give them. It wasn’t much.

We pulled our guns—the thirty-shot pistols preferred by military police, with limited muzzle velocity that made them safer for indoor use. Fire a powerful weapon like an M27 in a building, and the bullets could bore through two or three walls.

I used my first bullet shooting out the light in the elevator. The lift went dark, and the elevator buttons lit up. I found the button that opened the door and pressed it.

The infiltrators had shut off the lights, but they had not been able to shut off the emergency power. Rows of tiny colored lights winked on and off on a far wall.

The first shot hit the man with the flashlight. A single shot, the muzzle flash appeared and disappeared like a drop of lightning, the sound from the suppressed weapon no louder than a muffled cough.

I leaped from the elevator like a swimmer diving from a starting block. I landed on the dead MP with the flashlight and rolled across the floor, ending up in a crouching position, my gun out. The other MPs clambered off the elevator, at least one of them stumbling over the guards. An infiltrator fired two more shots, and two more of my men died. I heard them groan as they fell, then I heard silence instead of labored breathing, and I knew that they were dead.

I returned fire, aiming at the flares of the muzzle. Neither shot hit anything except the wall, but I must have come close. The man panicked. He ran past a communications panel and I saw his silhouette against the lights on that panel. I squeezed off two shots and hit the bastard, pausing to listen to the sound he made when he crashed into the wall and collapsed. I didn’t think I’d killed him, but he wasn’t happy. I heard him rolling around on the hard, cold floor.

“Sound off,” I called to my MPs.

Only three men answered.

We closed in around each other in a protective circle, our backs pointing in, our guns pointing out. We remained in a crouch as we slithered toward the spot where I had hit the infiltrator, feeling our way through the darkness.

Another shot. Hidden by the darkness, the bastard fired a single shot, then we were three. I returned fire, wasting three bullets. The guy next to me returned fire, too. Neither of us hit anything.

The clone I’d shot continued to spasm as we neared him. He kicked at me, but he was weak. I’d aimed low, hoping to hit him in the gut. If I’d shot right, he should have lost a lot of blood. I heard him wheezing, fighting for air. I might have hit him in the lungs or the stomach.

He kicked at me again as I knelt beside him. I grabbed his ankle with one hand and fired two shots along his leg. He went limp. Trying to emulate a coroner’s disregard for the dead, I worked my way along the body and found the dead man’s head. I wasn’t checking to make sure of my kill. I wanted his goggles.

No more than twenty feet away from us, but hidden by darkness, the second infiltrator clone made too much noise as he entered the hall, and I fired at him. My two surviving MPs fired as well. We didn’t hit the bastard, but we chased him away long enough for me to grab the goggles from the dead clone’s head.

Warm liquid smeared along my forehead as I pulled the goggles over my eyes. As a Marine in combat mode, I was trained to ignore the feel of the other man’s blood; but as a Liberator, I took a certain pleasure in it. It added to the combat reflex already spreading through me.

Now wearing night-vision goggles, I could see in the dark. I had not hit the man in the chest as I had thought. My shot had hit him where his shoulders met his neck, leaving a messy wound. Anyone else would have quietly bled to death, but this infiltrator tried to kick me as his life bled out of him.

The goggles had bulky, thick lenses, but they cut through the darkness. I could see the hall around me as clearly as if the noon sun shone through it. I glanced at the body beside me and knew that it was Sua, the sides of his head shaved clean. Filaments as fine as an old man’s whiskers stuck out of the bald patch—the wires that had conducted the electricity into his brain to disable him while he was on the cage.

Keeping my gun out and ready, I grabbed my last MPs by their shoulders and stood them up. As they fell in behind me, the infiltrator peered out from behind a corner, and I caught a glimpse of him. He wore Marine combat armor. Even if he went to the morgue, the armor would have gotten him through the updated security posts. With that armor, he would have been able to pass through posts without them reading his DNA.

I fired a shot and missed. He answered with a grenade. “Shit!” I yelled as I turned and shoved my men around a corner. Three seconds passed before the grenade exploded. By the time it finally went off, we had dashed around one corner, then the next, working our way back toward the elevator.

I pushed one of my MPs into the elevator, then forced the second one down to the floor. He must have felt the blood and known what I was doing because he smeared the gore on his chest and face.

I left him there, lying still as a corpse with his gun hidden under his ass.

For me, with my combat reflex in full swing, I might have taken a perverse pleasure lying there, blinded by darkness, knowing an assassin lingered nearby. The MP did not have the benefit of a gland flooding his blood with synthetic courage. Instead, he had nerve.

Marine combat armor had many uses, but it was not designed for stealth. The infiltrator’s armored boots clattered on the floor. His body plates clacked softly when they brushed against the walls. Me, I was dressed in a Charlie service uniform. My shoes had hard soles, but they weren’t extruded from a compound of plastic and steel.

Time was on my side. The infiltrator could hide if he wanted, but sooner or later an army of MPs would show up. It might take one minute, it might take ten; but once they finished securing the upper corridors, the MPs would arrive. The lights would come on and he would be trapped. He had to know that.

I reached a corner, knelt low to the floor, flashed around the wall for a fleeting look. The two men guarding the psychology lab lay dead on the floor. One was inside the open entrance to the lab. The door slid partway closed, struck his body, then slid back into its recess. A moment later, it repeated the process.

I moved toward that door slowly, my gun ready, my eyes searching for the slightest hint of motion. The way the door chewed on the dead man distracted me. Staying low and searching the hall around me, I darted into the lab and kicked the dead guard out to the corridor.

A moment after I entered the lab, I heard a shot followed seconds later by more shots in rapid succession. Not waiting for the shooting to stop, I hurried back to the elevator. I did not run. I moved ahead slowly, methodically, always expecting a trap.

When I reached the elevator, I saw my MPs sitting on the floor, talking. One held a gun in his hand, the other held the flashlight. They heard me coming, spotted me with their light, then shined it on the heap of combat armor lying dead on the floor.

I went to the dead clone and kicked him hard enough to send his helmet spinning across the floor. I kicked him again. These were dangerous clones, the kind of enemy who plays possum, then shoots you in the back as you walk away. Not this one, though. He was dead.

* * *

The cavalry finally arrived, and only ten minutes too late. At least they figured out how to restore the lights.

With the lights in the hall shining brightly above me, I returned to the psychology lab. Two MPs lay dead in the anterior office, their guns lying lame beside them. They’d tried to cover the door, but they were blind in the dark. At least they’d stayed at their post to the end.

I hesitated a moment and entered the lab. There was the cage, now little more than an empty table. Beside it, toppled to the floor, was the stool Dr. Morman had used as she interviewed her captive patient.

She wasn’t by the stool. Her body lay in a bloodstained heap in a corner of the lab. Sua—it must have been Sua—had beaten her to death. Uncontrolled outrage had been built into his psyche. From the angle of her neck and the twists in her body, I got the feeling that simply killing Jennifer Morman had not been enough to quench Sua’s fury.