The Clone Empire

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

The dynamics of the summit changed on the final day.

Gobi Station Security sent gunships on hourly sweeps of the desert. When they found fifteen Piper Bandits hidden in caves and under tarps, they issued an order to fire on any unidentified vehicles or people seen within a ten-mile radius of the base.

The first speaker of the day was Lieutenant Pearce, the naval engineer who modified Gobi Station security posts so that they would read chromosomes instead of DNA.

“It was easy,” he began. “We’ve had no problems reconfiguring the posts to catch double wise.”

Warshaw put up a hand, and asked, “What is a ‘double wise’?”

“Double wise, you know, clones with two Y chromosomes. The infiltrators. Now that we know what they are, the guys down in Security call them ‘Double Ys.’ Fixing the posts to read chromosomes instead of DNA was a snap.”

“So the posts can detect them?” Warshaw asked.

“Yes, sir, no problem. We had some up and running yesterday. We would have caught the one who killed that woman, except he was wearing armor. Not much we can do about that.”

“I understand that,” said Warshaw, his frustration rising to the surface. “I want to know how quickly you can convert the entire fleet over. What equipment do you need to send out so you can fix the posts on our ships?”

“They won’t need new equipment, Admiral. They’ve got everything they need built right in.”

Pearce was a clone, of course, and a man in his twenties. He fit the exact demographic for which we would soon be screening. If he’d shaved the sides his head and implanted a couple of wires behind his ear, he could have passed himself off as the late Philip Sua.

“Turns out you can use the posts for MRIs as well,” Pearce added.

“You can fix meals with them?” asked an admiral.

“That’s MREs, asshole,” snapped Warshaw. He massaged his brow and shook his head, looking so miserable I felt sorry for him.

Another admiral, possibly the only honest man in the room, put up a hand and asked, “What is an MRI?”

I knew what an MRI was because I’d read the late Dr. Morman’s report. None of the admirals would have bothered with something so mundane as a psychological inventory taken by a forensic psychologist. They commanded fleets, what did they care about psychological profiles and medical reports …now that we knew how to catch the infiltrators?

Lieutenant Pearce used more tech-speak than he should have for communicating with admirals. They pretended to listen, but now that they knew the problem could be solved, they didn’t really care about the details.

“Magnetic imaging? A resonance scan,” Pearce explained. “The clones you’re looking for …their brains are slightly deformed. It was in the lab report.”

According to the late Dr. Jennifer Morman, MRI scanning could be used to detect reduced activity in the limbic areas of the brain. In her final report, she recommended running MRI scans as a secondary method of identifying clones like Sua.

Pearce clearly enjoyed presenting to the admirals. I got the feeling he saw them as dumb, dependent, and ignorant, and he liked talking down to them. He smiled, and said, “There’s a side benefit to running MRIs, we’ll be able to spot brain tumors as well.”

Thinking he was joking, several admirals laughed.

“It really will spot tumors,” Pearce said, sounding a bit defensive.

“If you can configure the posts to cut hair, maybe we can use them for barber duty,” one of the admirals suggested.

Everybody laughed. The mood in the room had turned jovial, almost euphoric. A few of the admirals stood and applauded Pearce.

Warshaw did not join in the festivity. He sat in his seat, quietly watching. I suspected that he and I shared a common concern. Identifying armed and dangerous enemies would be the easy part, arresting them would be another story.

After Pearce finished his presentation, Warshaw went to the lectern, and said, “You did good work, Harris. You did good.” It was a magnanimous statement, but his handing out kudos reemphasized for everyone who was in charge. Warshaw and I might have been peers coming into the summit; but now that he no longer needed me as a decoy target, he would return to the role of supreme commander.

“We still have a problem,” I said.

“What’s that?” Warshaw asked.

“Combat armor. It’s like Pearce says: The clone we caught in the psychology lab got around the posts by wearing combat armor.”

“Do you think he knew you were reconfiguring the posts?” Warshaw asked.

That was one of those million-dollar questions. If he knew …He would have had to have breached Station Security to have known what we were doing. As I thought about it, I realized he must have breached our security; he knew we had Sua. “He might have,” I said. “There’s a chance we got him before he reported anything. We should have picked up the signal if he transmitted from here.”

Warshaw thought this over, and asked, “So it is your opinion, Harris, that the other infiltrator clones do not know that we can modify our security posts.” When I nodded, he said, “Okay, then we’re still in business. Order your Marines to turn in their armor.”

“Won’t that tip our hand if we issue a fleetwide order recalling all combat armor?” asked one of the admirals. It was a fair question. I thought it might.

“What if we said we were going to update their armor with shields? We could say we know how the Unifieds added shielding to their armor,” another admiral suggested.

“No one would believe it,” Warshaw said.

“We could say we were going to update our interLink hardware so the Unifieds can’t pick up our signals,” I suggested.

The best lies were the ones that incorporated the truth. Since the Unified Authority designed and manufactured our armor, there was no doubt that they eavesdropped on our conversations.

“I like it,” Warshaw said. “Tell them that the latest intel shows that the Unifieds have been listening in on us. We’ll say that we have a new circuit that will keep the Unifieds out.”

Co-opting my ideas and pretending like they’re his, he really is in charge, I thought. Maybe it was part of my programming, or maybe it was just conditioned into me as a Marine, but I needed to know who was in charge. Once I knew who was boss, I instinctively stepped in line behind him. I was not made for command, and neither was Warshaw; but he had adapted to it much better than I had.

“We’re going to have to root the infiltrators out like weeds,” I said, and I told them about Philip Sua and how he hid in a cargo hold pretending to take inventory for sixteen hours.

“One quick cut,” Warshaw said. “We do it all at once, one swipe, all the way across the empire. We send out teams to update the posts on every ship and base, then we scan everyone all at the same time. That way, they can’t warn their friends.”

“What about the planets?” an admiral asked. “What about the men on leave?”

“Maybe we don’t get them all,” Warshaw agreed, “but we’ll get most of them, and the residuals will run for cover. They’ll know we are onto them, and they will run.”

He was right, of course. Then he said something cold and calculating and true. “All that leaves are their planes. You see someone flying a Piper Bandit, don’t even ask them for identification, just blow them out of the sky.”

The last time I saw him, Ray Freeman was flying one of those planes.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

We searched the airports, the fields, even the open deserts, and we came up with 6,323 Bandits on St. Augustine. A few of the planes belonged to legitimate civilian pilots, but most were U.A. modified with a tiny broadcast engine, a single-use broadcast battery, and an energy-efficient stealth shield. Considering the odd places in which we located a few of these planes, I suspected we had not yet found all of them.

One Bandit turned up in the parking garage of an abandoned sewage treatment plant. Another was hidden in a cave filled with bats, its wings and windshield buried in guano. The most creative hiding place was a pawnshop for high-ticket items. The local police located that particular plane during an investigation; the man who ran the shop had been murdered.

Some of the planes had been on the planet for weeks. There was no telling what had become of the clones who had piloted them or how much damage they had done.

By the time I arrived on St. Augustine, the Easter egg hunt had ended. I hadn’t come looking for planes.

I went to Scrubb’s, the restaurant where I had spotted an infiltrator clone my first night on St. Augustine. Having no other means for contacting Freeman, I had suggested this restaurant as a place where we could meet. I told him I would come here every Thursday night.

I spotted Freeman the moment I entered.

He sat at a two-man table, looking as out of place as an adult at a child’s tea party. His knees arched above the top of the table, and his feet poked out the other side. Had he tried to wedge himself into a booth, he would not have fit.

Freeman spotted me but made no move to invite me over. He sat quietly, pretending to look the other way while watching me in his peripheral vision.

Piano music wafted on the air in the bar, weaving its rhythm through soft conversations. The floor was busier than the last time I had come, heavily packed with sailors and Marines in civilian clothing.

“There are a lot of clones in here. Are you sure they’re all friendly?” I asked as I sat down.

“One of them wasn’t,” Freeman said.

“Where’d you leave the corpse?” I asked.

“In a bin out back,” Freeman said.

“Was he much of a problem?”

Freeman’s gaze floated past me and across the floor. He gave his head the slightest shake. “No. Not much of a problem.”

I wondered how he identified the clone; no one had told him about Double Y chromosomes. He probably went by his gut instincts. If I had to choose between chromosome scans and Freeman’s gut instinct, I’d go with the latter. I had that much confidence in him.

I wanted to tell Freeman about chromosome scans and how we would soon take care of the infiltrators, but I kept quiet. I only trusted him so far. He was a mercenary. In the end, he was loyal only to himself.

“They’re going to invade Olympus Kri,” Freeman said. Had anyone else said this, I would not have taken it seriously; but Freeman did not suffer small talk or gossip.

“You’re behind on the news,” I said. “They’re already on the planet. We found a couple of hundred Bandits hidden—”

“I’m not talking about clones,” Freeman said.

“When?” I asked, surprised that the Unified Authority would launch a full-scale invasion on an E.M.E. target.

“Five days.”

“Are you sure about that?” I asked.

He didn’t answer, not so much as a shrug. He just looked at me and gave me the standard penetrating glare, his coal black eyes boring into my head. “They want the Orion Arm back. Sooner or later, they’ll come here, too.”

“That doesn’t sound like Brocius,” I said. “We have more ships, more men, and more resources. That puts the odds in our favor, and he never moves unless he has the upper hand.”

I’d had plenty of experience with Admiral Alden Brocius. He was a competent officer, but he was also the kind of officer who refuses to play unless he gets house odds.

“Brocius is out. Brocius, NewCastle, Smith, they’re all gone. The Linear Committee cleaned house two months ago.” The Linear Committee was the executive arm of the Unified Authority government.

Now that was news to bring a smile to my face. I could only come up with one reason for the committee finally giving those bastards the boot—our little rebellion. They were the ones who lit the fuse. They were the ones who came up with the idea of stranding us in nonbroadcasting ships and using us for target practice.

“Have I met any of the new brass?” I asked.

“Hill is still around. He replaced General Smith at the top.”

“Nickel Hill?” I asked. General George Nicholas Hill had run the Air Force effort on New Copenhagen during the alien attack. Not the bravest officer in the military, but a bright guy and a man who spoke his mind. He always struck me as fair.

“All the new leaders served on New Copenhagen,” Freeman said. “That’s the new litmus test. Officers who ducked New Copenhagen get field assignments.”

“The Linear Committee only trusts veterans of New Copenhagen …I don’t suppose that means they want to kiss and make up with the clones who actually won the war?” I asked, feeling bitter indeed. The Linear Committee had sat back and watched as Congress placed the thirty thousand clone veterans of New Copenhagen in concentration camps.

Most of the officers who fought on New Copenhagen kept well away from the front line. Us clones …we were the front line. They gave the orders, we paid the price. The normal ratio of enlisted men to officers was six to one, but the ratio on New Copenhagen was fifteen to one. The survival rate among clones sent to New Copenhagen was one in seventeen. Out of every seventeen clones sent to fight, sixteen ended up dead. The officer corps had it better. Out of every one hundred officers on New Copenhagen, eighteen were killed, and eighty-two returned home to a hero’s welcome.

A waitress stopped at our table, and I ordered a beer. She looked at Freeman’s drink and said nothing to him. Like that infiltrator I’d spotted, Freeman used his drink for camouflage, not that a seven-foot man can hide behind a single glass of beer. Every person in the bar was aware of Freeman. He was tall, he was dark, and even when he smiled, he was menacing.

“Hill isn’t stupid,” I said. “He’s got to know we have ten times more ships than he does. Even if he takes Olympus Kri, we’ll just take it right back again.”

“You have a hundred times more ships,” Freeman said. “Their self-broadcasting fleet took a real hit on Terraneau.”

“I knew they lost ships,” I said.

“A lot of ships. They had to decommission half the ships that returned home,” Freeman said.

We’d lost a lot of ships, too; but we could better afford to lose them. “If that’s true, it only makes an attack on Olympus Kri more ridiculous. That doesn’t sound like Hill.”

When Freeman did not answer, I asked, “What aren’t you telling me? There is something you aren’t telling me.”

He shook his head.

“Why should I trust you?”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he changed the subject. “Have you figured out why the Pentagon sent out those clones?”

“The Double Ys,” I said, hoping the name would irritate Freeman. He had no patience for clever nicknames.

“Is that what you call them?” he asked, obviously unperturbed.

“I don’t know if you heard about their chromosomes, they have an X and two Ys. Apparently that makes them more dangerous. Sending out saboteurs isn’t going to sink our fleet.”

Freeman sat still and placid, but his eyes burned holes in my head as he said, “You still don’t get it. Hill doesn’t want to sink your fleet; he wants to take it back whole.

“You’re looking for war while he’s slipping you rat poison. He figures if he kills off enough of your officers, your enlisted clones will just hand the ships over. He doesn’t care about clones. It’s the ships he’s after.”

“Then he’s out of luck,” I said. “We’ve pretty much cracked our infestation problems.”

“They’re tracking your movements, too,” Freeman said.

“Right, the satellites. You were the one who clued us in about them, remember?” I felt frustrated. This was Ray Freeman, nothing ever slipped his mind, yet here he was, telling me things he had already told me. The pieces did not fit.

“So if it comes to a fight, are you taking sides?” I asked.

“We’re talking,” Freeman said.

“Are you looking for work?” I asked. “If you have an angle on Olympus Kri, name your price.”

Freeman did not answer right away.

I downed my beer and signaled to the waitress for another one. She brought it over.

I watched him closely. Freeman wasn’t in this for the money; he’d made over a billion dollars on New Copenhagen. “What are you looking for?”

“We’re all after the same thing.”

“Yeah, and what’s that?” I asked, not even bothering to hide my irritation. He wasn’t being straight with me, and I was tired of it.

“Survival,” he said. As he said the word, his fingers tightened around his unfinished beer.

CHAPTER FORTY

I called Warshaw to give him the news.

“The Unified Authority is planning to attack Olympus Kri,” I said. A simple announcement that I hoped would start the gears of war turning.

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Warshaw said. “If they ever get around to picking a fight, that’s where they’re going to start it. Everyone knows that.”

“In five days,” I said.

“Five days?”

“The attack is coming in five days?”

“No shit? Who’s your source?” He wasn’t taking me seriously, but I had his attention.

“Ray Freeman, the same guy who warned us about the satellites,” I said. Warshaw had never met Freeman, but he’d certainly heard tales about the man.

“Wasn’t he the bastard who shot you on Terraneau?”

“And told us the U.A. was about to attack,” I pointed out.

“But he was working for them,” Warshaw countered. “He was delivering a message for Admiral Brocius. What if he’s still working for them?”

“He says he isn’t.”

“You believe him?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

“He sounds like a real saint, Harris.”

“He was right about the satellites,” I said.

“Maybe he was right. We still haven’t found one. It makes sense that they’re spying on us, but that doesn’t make it true.

“U.A. spy satellites and God …you can’t prove either exists, but your questions are answered the moment you accept they’re out there.”

Warshaw had no interest in taking a leap of faith based on Freeman’s word, and I didn’t blame him. The Unified Authority had apparently stopped sending cruisers into our territory, and there was no way we would find those satellites without U.A. cruisers leading us to them.

“I’ve never met this friend of yours. Do you think he knows what he’s talking about?”

“He always knows what he’s talking about. That’s not the problem. It’s not a question of confidence, it’s a question of trust. Freeman’s out for himself. Even when he picks a side, he’s still out for himself. He keeps his cards hidden and plays his angles tight. So far, he hasn’t even told me why he’s helping us.”

“So why trust him?”

“History,” I said. “Until now, he and I always ended up on the same side. He makes a damn good ally.”

“Harris, that doesn’t even sound like you. You’re a brute. You’re a specking Liberator clone. If he’s not telling you what you want, catch the bastard and beat it out of him?”

I laughed. I could not stop myself. “Beat information out of Ray Freeman?” Killing him might not be too much of a problem, not with satellite surveillance and high-altitude air strikes; but trying to interrogate the son of a bitch would be like trying to tackle a bull elephant.

“If you think he’s a spy …”

“Not a spy,” I said. The man stood seven feet tall. He was an “African-American,” living in a time when races had been abolished. He was a purebred living among synthetics and mutts. Stealth was not among his long suits. Brutal strength, patience, and cunning intelligence were. He was a mercenary and an assassin, not a spy.

I felt tired. It had been a long day. I wished I could do something about the buzzing in my head, and sleep seemed like the best solution.

Planets had time zones, but outer space did not. The Space Travel Clock (officially Coordinated Universal Time) coincided with a zone that used to be known as Greenwich Mean Time on Earth. To avoid confusion, the Unified Authority had set up an arbitrarily selected twenty-four-hour clock for an endless void with an infinite number of suns but neither sundown nor sunup. St. Augustine, which had a faster rotation than Earth, had twenty-two-hour days. Warshaw and I spoke at the same time every night by his clock, but each of our meetings kept getting later and later by mine.

“It sounds like a trap,” Warshaw said.

“Maybe, but we’d still better get more ships out there,” I said. “I don’t see that we have any other choice.”

“What about the Double Ys?” he asked.

“We take care of them first. We can close that chapter today if we need to. All the pieces are in place.” Before leaving for St. Augustine, I had put Hollingsworth in charge of the project. Reconfigured posts were set up on every ship and in every fort. We could recall the armor in the morning and spring our trap in the afternoon.

“Hollingsworth says everything is ready. All he has to do is pull the trigger.” Warshaw knew Hollingsworth, they’d served on the same ship.

“Then pull the trigger,” he said. “The sooner we close that door, the better.”

“That still leaves Olympus Kri,” I said. This conversation was not going as I had hoped.

“I’m not sending more ships,” Warshaw said.

“What if the Unifieds have figured out a way to knock out our broadcast stations?” I asked.

“Not very likely,” Warshaw said, but he didn’t sound confident. Without a broadcast network lacing it together, the Enlisted Man’s Empire would come apart.

“Probably not,” I agreed. “I’m just thinking out loud.”

But my comment had the desired effect. Still nervous, Warshaw said, “I could send a few more ships …just in case.”

“I’m going to take the ad-Din out there,” I said. “I want to get as many Marines on the ground there as possible.”

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

We were coming down to zero hour for the infiltrators. Hollingsworth began the day by sending out a fleetwide order recalling all combat armor. Until we sent out new orders, any man caught in armor would be detained, questioned, and ultimately have his chromosomes scanned.

With the cogs quickly falling in place, Freeman and I met at Fort Greeley, the local Marine base, for breakfast. Wanting to stay alert, I ate light that morning, a boiled egg, a cup of coffee, and toast. Freeman ate relatively light as well, four eggs, a whole damn pig’s worth of bacon, two cups of juice, no coffee, no toast.

“How did you get to St. Augustine?” I asked.

“I flew here,” he said.

“Another one-way ticket?” He could not have flown in on a stolen Bandit; the broadcast computers on those ships were set for Earth.

He shook his head. “I caught a ride in your broadcast network.”

Ships with onboard broadcast equipment blew up when they entered our network. If Freeman was telling the truth, he would have had to have come from one of our planets. I had a good idea which one it was.

“How is the weather in Odessa?” I asked. Odessa was the capital city of Olympus Kri.

Freeman favored me with a half smile, and said, “It depends how you feel about rain.”

“It beats the hell out of living in a desert,” I countered. I thought about the summer I’d spent in that concentration camp in the Texas badlands.

“I thought you liked the sun,” Freeman said.

I liked St. Augustine, with its coastal cities and languid days. I liked waking up to tropical mornings and going to sleep on balmy nights. I had no trouble forgetting time and seasons in places like this. Before the Avatari invasion, I’d spent a year living like a civilian in the Hawaiian Islands on Earth.

“Does Olympus Kri have the same seasons as Earth?” I asked.

“More or less,” Freeman said. “It rains hard in Odessa during the winter.”

I looked at the calendar on the wall and saw that the Earthdate was November 12.

In the time we were talking, Freeman methodically cleared his tray, occasionally gulping down an egg in a single bite.

“I’m not sure I can get any more ships to Olympus Kri,” I said. “Warshaw wants proof.”

Freeman nodded, and said, “Tell him to get used to having twenty-two planets in his empire.”

“We have a fleet circling the planet. We’ll outnumber them. Even if they send everything they have, we’ll still outnumber them.”

“You have sixty-eight ships in the area,” Freeman said.

“You know the size of our fleet?”

Freeman said nothing.

Sixty-eight ships, that was just a small fraction of what we’d had at Terraneau when the Unifieds came knocking. The Unified Authority attacked Terraneau with eighty-five ships and sent the four-hundred-ship Scutum-Crux Fleet running for cover.

“And you do not think that’s enough to protect the planet?” I asked.

Freeman did not speculate. When he knew the answers, he gave them; but he was not one for guessing.

“Have they figured out a way to attack our broadcast stations?” I asked.

Freeman downed a large glass of juice. “I haven’t heard anything either way,” he said. His low voice gave the words a rumbling timbre. His father had been a minister. Had he followed in his father’s shoes, Ray Freeman would have been one of those preachers who seemed to call down the heavens when they speak.

“Once the attack begins, we can call in a thousand ships if we need them,” I said.

Freeman said nothing.

I wondered what card he was hiding.

“I’m taking the ad-Din to Olympus Kri. If you want a ride back, I can take you,” I offered.

“I have a ship,” he said.

“What are you hiding, Ray?” I asked.

He did not answer.

At 11:00 STC (Space Travel Clock), Captain Villanueva held a shipwide briefing; attendance was mandatory. I personally prescreened two hundred Marines to run the security posts and patrol the corridors during the briefing. Villanueva screened a team of officers to man the bridge and Engineering.

On the Salah ad-Din, Marines and sailors did not commingle, not even for an all-hands briefing. The leathernecks attended a broadcast on the bottom deck, in the Marine complex. Sailors attended their briefing in a huge auditorium on the third deck.

I watched the scene outside the third-deck auditorium from an overlook as men lined up in crooked queues and waited to file through the doors. The talk was loud and came in indecipherable waves. I could not focus on a single conversation, there were too many going on at once, and I could not untangle the chatter of four thousand simultaneous discussions.

The MPs stood out with their helmets, armbands, and batons. At this stage, they would make no arrests. They had one standing order: “Everyone has to enter the auditorium through the security posts, no exceptions. Anyone discovered to have the Double Y chromosome will be quietly pulled aside.”

We had recalibrated posts on the inside of the auditorium doors. Prescreened MPs manned the computers. An army of MPs monitored the lines. If anyone tried to slip away, he was escorted back to his place.

Immediately below me, a sailor broke ranks, and four MPs descended upon him. They formed a circle, blocking his way. I tried to listen to what was said but could not hear a word of it.

Looking almost straight down on the scene, I could not see faces or expressions. Two of the MPs brandished their sticks, one of them slapping the end of it into his palm in a way that suggested he would gladly hit the sailor. The conversation went on for several seconds. When the sailor did not turn back, one of the MPs reached out and grabbed his shoulder. The man jerked free, then turned and returned to his place in line, unescorted.

Maybe he had argued that he needed to go to the head. Maybe the MPs had convinced him that he would not find his equipment in working order if he did.

As the sailor approached the door to the auditorium, he made a few furtive glances over his shoulder; but the MPs were right behind him. They remained in place, watching him as he stepped through the door.

A fight broke out in another line. A man grabbed the sailor in front of him and threw him to the floor. Three MPs ran to break up the fight, pushing gawking sailors out of their way and stepping between the downed man and his assailant.

They moved like cattle, these sailors did. They took slogging steps. They formed fuzzy lines that snaked down the hall. They moved slowly, more interested in talking and searching the crowd for friends than getting where they were going.

The sailor who had started the fight took a menacing step toward one of my MPs as he arrived on the scene. The MP drew his baton, but that seemed to mean nothing. The sailor took another step. When one MP tried to club him, the man caught his wrist and stopped the blow.

The other two MPs stepped in to help. One of them hit the man in the ribs, causing him to wince and cover the wound. Pressing his elbow over his battered ribs, the errant sailor returned to his spot in line. He might have been tough, but I did not think he was a Double Y.

Watching the drama closely, I almost missed the man at the end of the hall as he stole into the shadows with the grace of a phantom.

I shouted for help, but no one could hear me over all of the noise. Using the security Link built into my collar, I called for backup, then I charged after our rabbit. I dashed along the corridor, running in the same direction as the phantom, but one floor up. I could not see him; if he turned right or left, I would not know, and I would lose him.

Sprinting, swinging wide around a corner, I dashed down a set of stairs. I leaped the first flight, my arms pinwheeling as I flew through the air, and I crashed on the deck and into the wall, turned, and leaped the second flight.

“Where are you?” I yelled over the Link when I did not see MPs coming my way.

“They’re on their way. These halls are packed.”

“Get them here quickly,” I shouted.

The short sprint did not wind me, but my legs took a jolt as I came down the stairs. Behind me, I heard the cloud of conversations coming from outside the auditorium. I was at a T-junction. The corridors were empty to the right and to the left. I turned right, then changed my mind, and sprinted left.

The halls of the ad-Din were a labyrinth, with offshoots and avenues and hatches. Without seeing which way my rabbit had run, I had no prayer of finding him. And then I heard three shots. I ran back in the direction from which I had just come and spotted the blood on the wall and the two dead Marines. One sat with his back against the wall like a man taking a rest; the hole in his chest was large enough for me to fit my fist into it. The other man lay on the floor with his arms stretched before him.

So much for my backup. I radioed in for more reinforcements.

I was only a few seconds behind the clone. Now I could hear him running. It was the only sound in the hall.

If I could hear him, then he could hear me. He must have known I called in for help. Now in full pursuit, I ran around a corner, spotted the gun, and stepped back behind the wall in time to make him miss. He fired one shot, then silence. Hoping he was not waiting to ambush me, I jumped forward, dropped to my knees, and returned fire.

He was already gone.

My combat reflex began. I ran faster now, and the world seemed to slow down around me. I could hear the clone running and knew I would catch him. I sprinted down one hall, took a right turn, and spotted him. He spun, fired, missed by more than a yard, and took off running. I did not return fire.

He’d fired at least five shots. I suspected he took the gun from one of the dead MPs, meaning he had a clip that carried thirty rounds, with at least five spent.

He took a right turn into a long, narrow passage where he didn’t dare turn to shoot because there was nowhere to duck for cover. I was right behind him, my gun out. In the time it would take him to stop, spin, and aim, he knew I could cap him.

He was forty feet ahead of me, and I was gaining on him. My legs were longer. Another moment, and he was thirty-five feet ahead of me, then thirty, then twenty-five, my footsteps drowning out the sound of his. He was one of those full-body runners, every inch of him swinging with every step. His elbows cut through the air like pistons.

His steps slowed, his stride shortened, and he glided, then coasted, then stopped. He held his hands in the air, the muzzle of his pistol pointing to the ceiling, and he slowly turned to face me.

“Drop it,” I said.

He hesitated for just a moment, undoubtedly calculating the odds in his head, and the pistol fell from his hand. Without my giving the order, he stepped on the gun and slid it toward me.

The hallway was no more than ten feet wide, but it extended for hundreds of feet behind and before us. We stood there staring at each other, both of us panting from the long sprint. We were not alone for long. Two MPs came dashing around the corner about one hundred feet ahead of us, their pistols drawn.

I wanted to kill this rabbit. I wanted him to scream and wave his arms in the air like a madman on fire, then rush me. If he did, I might have shot him, or I just might have thrown my gun away and beaten him to death. I thought about Dr. Morman lying dead, a quirky woman with a dark obsession who meant harm to no one.

“Are you going to shoot me?” the rabbit asked, his eyes not on me but on my gun.

Few things would give me more pleasure, I thought. I said, “No. You’re missing a mandatory briefing. We’re going to escort you back to the auditorium.”

I didn’t even cuff the bastard. Of course, I hoped he would run or put up a fight. He didn’t. And when he passed through the posts and the computer identified him as a Double Y, we cuffed him. He lowered his head and said nothing as we led him to the brig.

We captured seven infiltrator clones on the ad-Din. We caught seventeen thousand Double Y clones in our net as we swept every ship and base. Next, we had to decide what to do with them.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Warshaw held an emergency convocation on the Kamehameha to discuss plans for disposing of the Double Y clones. This was a meeting for fleet commanders and fleet commanders only—attendance mandatory. Much to Winston Cabot’s displeasure, attendees checked their entourages at the door.

Warshaw held the meeting in a conference room on the fleet deck. He was still in the Perseus Arm, still circling Gobi, but he no longer feared for his life. He still had MPs manning posts around the ship, but guards no longer stood inside and outside his office door.

He began the meeting by saying, “From what I hear, we have seventeen thousand prisoners of war. How the speck did the Unified Authority manufacture seventeen thousand new clones in under a year? I thought the Mogats destroyed all the old orphanages.”

I had an idea of where they might have come from. Toward the end of the Mogat War, an enterprising admiral created his own private clone farm for making SEALs. It was secret and small, which was why the Mogats missed it. Small as it was, that clone factory might have been able to mass-produce seventeen thousand clones in a few short months if its assembly line was on overdrive.

I kept my mouth shut though.

“Ah well, at least we tagged ’em and bagged ’em,” Warshaw said. And then he banged me with a stealth attack. He said, “Any of you ever worked with Philo Hollingsworth before? He ran the tagging operation …did a pretty good job.”

None of the other officers seemed to know Hollingsworth. Hearing this, Warshaw said, “I served with him in Scrotum-Crotch for a few years. Smart guy.”

Message received, I thought to myself. Message received.

The operation, of course, had been mine. I planned it, I directed it. By giving all of the credit to Hollingsworth, Warshaw played down my involvement and consequently my value to the empire, the bastard.

“So what do we do with our prisoners?” Warshaw asked. Several admirals made nebulous suggestions, broaching the subject of executing the Double Y clones but never quite coming right out and saying it. One admiral said, “They’re too dangerous to keep in prison.”

Everyone agreed.

“So what do we do with them?” Warshaw repeated.

No one spoke. The answer loomed in the air like a ghost, like an intangible presence that anyone could see but no one wanted to acknowledge. I had the feeling that Warshaw had come to the same conclusion as all of his men but wanted someone else to say it first.

Admiral Nelson of the Orion Inner Fleet took the bait. “We should dump the bastards in deep space,” Nelson said. It made sense that he would speak up. Of all the officers in this meeting, he was the one living closest to the front line.

“Kill them?” Warshaw asked, as if the idea had not occurred to him.

“We wouldn’t be killing them; we would be executing them,” Nelson said. “They’re spies. They were caught wearing our uniforms.”

That was not exactly right. Since designing new uniforms had never been a priority, we were still wearing the uniforms that the Unified Authority had provided us. No one felt like arguing the point. I sure as hell did not. Now that we had them behind bars, I felt a certain sympathy for the Double Ys. I didn’t like the idea of exterminating the pathetic bastards, but I sure as shooting would not let them go free, either.

Admiral Adrian Tunney, commander of the Orion Central Fleet, bawled out, “Speck! Why are we even having this discussion? Those bastards aren’t human; they’re deformed clones. They’re synthetics gone wrong.”

I always considered Warshaw a deformed clone, but I kept that opinion to myself.

“Deformed clones,” Warshaw repeated. To his credit, he treated the comment with contempt. “Why don’t we eliminate all the synthetics?” he asked. “That way I won’t have to hear so many stupid comments during my staff meetings.”

Almost every officer in the room laughed, but they sounded nervous. Each man at the table incorrectly believed that the joke was about everyone but himself. Unlike the other officers, I had no delusions.

Warshaw roused me from my contemplations by asking, “Harris, you helped us catch them. What do you think the Unified Authority hoped to accomplish with those clones?”

Now there was a question for the ages. “I have no idea,” I admitted. I kept thinking about what Freeman had told me, that the Unified Authority wanted to kill off our officers so it could take control of our ships. The idea sounded too simplistic to me.

“You have no idea,” Warshaw repeated, his frustration showing. “That’s it? Not even a theory?”

“You want a theory?” I asked. I wanted to tell him that “Marines don’t speculate.” I wanted to tell him that the Unifieds probably told the Double Ys to kill every officer whose brains were bigger than his balls, and that after Franks and Thorne, the killer clones ran out of targets. “Here’s a theory,” I said. “Maybe the Unified Authority wants its ships back.”

“And they don’t have the brass to come after us in a fight,” Warshaw said. Clearly he liked that line of thought. It stroked his ego. He saw himself as the hero of Terraneau. If the Unified Authority was scared, that meant they were scared of him. Maybe he deserved the credit, too. He’d come up with the idea of using the broadcast stations to create a new network.

Warshaw nodded, and asked, “So they kill off the officers, and anyone left is so scared they just hand over command of our ships? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Something like that,” I said. “It’s just a possibility.” Most clones lacked the initiative to take over once the officers went down.

We had found a solution to the Double Y problem before we fully understood its significance. Interrogating the Double Ys didn’t help, the pathetic bastards did not even know as much as we did.

Freeman understood what was going on, though. I would ask him again.

“What are we going to do about Olympus Kri?” I asked.

Warshaw must not have told the other admirals about Freeman’s warning. I heard confusion in their whispering.

There was a moment of silence in which Warshaw sat glaring at me, clenching his right fist, then letting it relax, making his forearm and biceps bulge. If he had not mentioned this bit of intelligence to anyone, it was because he did not take it seriously. He probably hoped it would just go away. Now I had thrown it back in his face in front of his admirals.

By way of explanation, Warshaw said, “Harris believes the Unifieds are going to attack Olympus Kri.”

“That’s a pretty safe bet,” said Admiral Nelson. Of all of the admirals, he had the biggest stake in the matter. As the commander of the Orion Inner Fleet, protecting Olympus Kri was his responsibility.

“He says they’re going to attack early next week,” Warshaw said.

“How solid is your information?” asked Admiral Nelson.

“Pretty solid,” I said, not offering any details. Had any of them asked me that question a week ago, I would have vouched for Freeman without question. Now, though, I had reservations.

“How many ships do we have patrolling the planet?” Warshaw asked.

“Sixty-eight,” I said.

All heads turned to stare at me. That was not the kind of information admirals expected to hear from a Marine.

Nelson looked at his pocket computer and confirmed my number.

“How did you know that?” Warshaw asked.

“From the same source that told me the Unifieds were on their way,” I said.

“Maybe your man isn’t blowing steam after all,” Warshaw said. “What do you think we should do?”

“We need to send more ships to the area and land more Marines on the ground,” I said. I kept one recommendation to myself—that we needed to pray Freeman was really on our side.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Philo Hollingsworth met me as I arrived back on the ad-Din to tell me about his promotion. He waited for me in the landing bay and waylaid me as I came off my transport.

“Has Admiral Warshaw contacted you?” he asked. He gave me a proper salute. I did not yet know why he had come, but I could tell he was uncomfortable by the way he approached me. I half expected him to inform me that I had been relieved of command.

“I was just in a meeting with Warshaw,” I said. The staff meeting had ended a couple of hours ago. While the other officers rushed back to their ships, I went down to the officers’ mess and ate a leisurely meal.

Hollingsworth bobbed his head in agreement a bit too quickly, his eyes never quite meeting mine. Whatever news he had, he knew I would not like it, and he seemed almost apologetic. “Warshaw gave me a promotion,” he said.

He’d been a full-bird colonel; the next step up was general and the promotion was well deserved. Hollingsworth and I did not get on all that well, but he was a good Marine.

“You got your star,” I said, putting out my hand to shake his. “It’s about specking time.”

“Three stars, sir. He promoted me to major general.”

I had no doubt Warshaw had made that promotion to send me another message, and he’d been none too subtle. The promotion put Hollingsworth and me in the same pay grade.

“Congratulations,” I said, though I already had a premonition that his rise in the ranks signaled my fall.

I wished him luck. Hollingsworth suffered from the same character flaw that got in my way as an officer. He had the temperament of a combat Marine, not a fleet officer. Infighting and backroom deals did not appeal to him.

“When are you shipping out?” I asked.

“I’m not shipping out; my orders are to remain on the ad-Din,” he said.

That sealed the deal, I was on my way out. Warshaw might leave me marooned on Olympus Kri, or he might send me back to Terraneau. One thing was certain, the ad-Din did not have enough room for two three-star generals. Hell, there wasn’t enough room for two three-stars in the entire Enlisted Man’s Marines.

For now, I still had the upper hand. I’d held the rank longer. Trying to sound unconcerned, I said, “The last update I received, we were heading for Olympus Kri. Is that still the case?”

“Yes, sir,” Hollingsworth said. “I wanted to speak with you about that.”

I nodded and started toward the exit. Hollingsworth fell into step.

“Admiral Warshaw says you think the Unifieds are going to attack.”

“I do,” I said.

“We have a half million troops stationed on Olympus Kri,” Hollingsworth said.

“I did not know that,” I said, wondering why Freeman had neglected to mention it.

“Yes, sir.” Now that we were on equal footing, Hollingsworth seemed more anxious to get along.

“That’s a lot of men,” I said.

“I gave them orders to look for sonic cannons …in case the Unifieds attack.”

I had to think about that for a moment. Finally, I flashed back to Lieutenant Mars’s findings on Terraneau. “In case they have shielded armor,” I said. I vaguely remembered the conversation, as if it had happened years earlier instead of weeks.

“It was your idea,” he said.

I smiled and answered, “Yes, and if it doesn’t work, we can always try to get them to chase us into an underground garage.”

There were always wild cards in battle. If a sniper targeted you from two miles away, for instance, you would never know what hit you until God gave you the details. Even factoring land mines, snipers, and atom bombs, I always felt that as a combat Marine I had more control of my fate than sailors had of theirs.

When the shooting started, I could attack or run for cover. If I stayed alert, I would probably survive. Sailors, on the other hand, lived and died with their ships. Speed and reflexes cannot save a man when his ship explodes around him. Maybe it was a phobia; but I felt helpless riding into a combat zone on the Salah ad-Din.

Most of my Marines shared that phobia. The twenty-two hundred Marines on the ad-Din had survived the land battles of Terraneau, then seen what happened to the men on the ships. Walking around the Marine complex, I felt the tension. Fuses burned quickly. Tempers ran short. Stumble into another man, and he might curse at you. Step on another man’s toe, and a fistfight would likely follow.

Olympus Kri was not an especially large planet. With the Salah ad-Din and two more carriers transferring in, the space around it became even tighter. Admiral Nelson had his ships arrayed in perfect order. His sixty-eight ships patrolled well-defined routes. Battleships and carriers patrolled larger zones. Frigates and cruisers stirred in smaller circles. The blockade formed a nearly perfect net.

Nelson was that rare officer who comes off cocky, smart, and competent. I did not appreciate the logic of his tactics until Captain Villanueva explained the blockade.

“I don’t see any holes. How about you?” I asked.

Villanueva looked at the displays, and said, “Here. This one is probably the biggest.” He pointed to a spot near the top of the planet, circumscribing the vulnerable area with his finger.

“Think you could squeeze a ship through there unnoticed?” I asked.

“Not a big ship,” said Villanueva. “Maybe a frigate. I could slip a whole squadron of Piper Bandits through that hole unnoticed if they were cloaked.”

“So he did a good job blockading the planet?” I asked.

“Textbook,” Villanueva said.

“If the Unifieds attack, do you think we’ll be able to fight them off?” I asked.

“Depends what they send.”

I nodded, taking a certain satisfaction from the feeling of being prepared.

“How about your Marines?” Villanueva asked. “Can you hold out if you need to?”

“It depends what they send,” I said.

Villanueva laughed.

The Olympus Kri broadcast station floated 230,000 miles above the planet. We kept the blockade well clear of the station. The last thing we needed was for our patrolling ships to stumble into a broadcast zone and end up in the Cygnus Arm.

“What if they go after the broadcast station?” I asked.

“He has two carriers and three battleships watching it,” Villanueva said.

“Is that enough to keep it safe?” I asked.

He gave me a wicked smiled. I interrupted him before he could answer. “I know, it depends on what they—”

“Ain’t that the truth?” Villanueva said. “The way Nelson has his blockade set up, he can shift fifteen ships to any spot at any time. It’s a thing of beauty.

“See these ships over here? They can shift over to the broadcast station in under a minute.” He pointed to a battleship, three dreadnaughts, and a couple of cruisers. “I never liked Nelson, but the bastard knows his tactics.”

We had all the pieces in place, but I still worried. If Freeman knew how many ships we had patrolling the area, who else knew? What other secrets did Freeman know? I wanted to trust Freeman. I wanted to think of him as a friend; but Ray Freeman did not have friends.

“You look worried,” Villanueva said.

“I am,” I admitted.

“The blockade is solid,” he said, no doubt trying to reassure me.

Thinking there must be a flaw, I took another look at the plans. I saw nothing. We still had time to make changes. If Freeman had his facts right, the Unifieds would come in another day and a half.

The plan was for me to meet Freeman on Olympus Kri. I went to my billet, packed a small knife and a fléchette-firing pistol, and left for the landing bay. Sergeant Nobles met me at the door and told me he had requisitioned a new ship for me. He smiled like a boy with a new bicycle as he said this. He rubbed his hands together, and he had more spring in his step.

We entered the bay, and there it sat.

“A shuttle?” I asked. “Where the hell did you find a specking shuttle?”

Compared to the boxy transports around it, the shuttle looked sleek and modern. Transports had tiny wings that looked more like stubs. Shuttles had broad graceful wings.

“All of the admirals have them,” Nobles said. “I put in a requisition while you were at the summit.”

We entered the shuttle. It had a living-room-like main cabin, which included couches, chairs, and a wet bar. Aft, there would be a small office complete with sleeping accommodations.

“You bucking for a promotion, Sergeant?” I asked.

“No, sir,” he said. The man was always so damn cheerful.

“Well, that’s too bad,” I said. “Anyone who can pull off a coup like this belongs in the officers’ corps.”

He did not know if I was joking and looked at me, hoping to find a sign one way or the other. “I’ll put in your paperwork when this business is over, Lieutenant.”

“Are you serious about that, sir?” he asked.

“Just don’t start angling for captain, or we’re going to have a problem,” I said. “I hate wasting a perfectly good enlisted man by giving him bars.”

So the always cheerful Christian Nobles made his way to the cockpit a happy new officer. I sat in the cabin, still troubled. As we taxied through the atmospheric locks, I looked around my luxurious new digs. This bird was made for officers with entourages, Cabot would have felt at home.

I did not even notice when we took off, we moved so smoothly. Our entry into the atmosphere went the same way. Military transports entered most atmospheres like a hammer battering a nail. They rumbled and they shook, their fuselages audibly rattling as they pounded their way in from space. Not this shuttle. It sliced into the pocket like a sharpened scalpel cutting through skin.

I pivoted my armchair so that I could look out a window. It was nighttime on this side of Olympus Kri, the clouds below us were so thick that they blocked out the city lights below as we flew through. For a moment, the world outside my windows was all mist and cotton, then sheets of water streaked the glass, and I saw Odessa below me, a million million tiny amber-colored lights forming patterns that arranged themselves into streets and neighborhoods and tall buildings and riverside docks.

Odessa, capital of Olympus Kri, had survived the Avatari invasion pretty much intact. During the darkest days of the war, with the aliens closing in on Earth, the Unified Authority all but ceded Olympus Kri to the aliens. Without an army to defend it, the planet fell quickly; and because no one put up much of a fight, the Avatari ignored the people. They dug their mine, filled it with gas, and moved on to New Copenhagen.

“We’re coming in for a landing, sir,” Nobles radioed from the cockpit.

Looking out of the rain-coated window, I saw the sprawling lights of the spaceport. Runways stretched more than a mile in five different directions, their blue lights forming a pentagonal constellation.

We touched down smoothly, then taxied toward the multifaceted glass castle that served as Odessa’s air terminal. Once we stopped taxiing, the shuttle’s pneumatic struts compacted until the fuselage was only a few inches from the ground.

A car waited for me on the runway. I trotted the few feet to the car and was surprised to see who waited inside.

“Admiral Cabot,” I said. “Aren’t you supposed to be on St. Augustine?”

“Not much left for me to do over there,” he said.

The clouds were so thick that I could not see stars in the sky. The rain fluctuated somewhere between drizzle and mist, forming a film on my skin and uniform.

I patted beads of water off my shoulders and stepped into the car.

“How did you know where to find me?” I asked.

“Colonel Hollingsworth sent me your itinerary, sir,” Cabot said.

“General Hollingsworth,” I said.

“Warshaw made him a general?” Cabot said.

I nodded, not sure if I should tell him how many stars came with the promotion. I changed the subject. “I’m here looking for a civilian named Ray Freeman. Heard of him?”

“He’s waiting for you at Camp Marshall.” Camp Marshall was the largest military base in Odessa. It had been an Army base; but, the Enlisted Man’s Empire did not have an Army, so it now housed Marines.

“Are you sure he’s there?” I asked.

“He’s a hard man to miss,” Cabot said.

I watched the surroundings out the window as we drove through the city. We crossed a suspension bridge, and I saw a shoreline bustling with life. Rows of skyscrapers lined the freeway like the cliffs along a river canyon. “I have not seen a city like this for a while,” I said.

“Yes, sir. It’s like the war never came here,” Cabot agreed.

You can only dodge bullets for so long, I thought. These people might have ducked the Avatari; but the Unifieds would make up for it. The next war would begin in a day and a half.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

“Evacuate the planet?” I asked. The suggestion was ridiculous. It didn’t matter what the Unified Authority had up its sleeve, evacuation was out of the question. “I have five hundred thousand men here.”

“I’m not just talking about your men, I mean the civilian population,” Freeman said. He sat unflinching, his eyes narrowed in on mine.

“That isn’t going to happen,” I said. Then I thought about what he had just said. “The Unifieds aren’t going after civilians.”

We sat alone in the camp commander’s office. The pictures on the walls were placed there for soldiers, not Marines. They showed scenes with tanks and gunships and fighting men wearing fatigues. The clock showed 22:13.

“You are talking about millions of people. I couldn’t evacuate them if I wanted to. I don’t have enough ships.”

“You’re going to need more,” Freeman agreed.

“You wouldn’t happen to have a few lying around that you could loan me?” I asked with so much sarcasm that even Freeman could not ignore it.

“I have twenty-five of them,” he said. “They carry a quarter of a million passengers apiece.”

That gave me pause. I would have accused him of joking, but Freeman never joked. He was more likely to build twenty-five gargantuan ships than tell a joke.

“Bullshit! Nothing but a planet can carry a quarter of a million people,” I muttered, though I already knew that the ships must exist.

“They’re barges,” Freeman said.

“Where the speck did you find something like that?” I asked; but as soon as I asked, I realized the only possible answer. I shelved that information away, Freeman was on the verge of showing me his hidden cards. Taking a deep breath, I asked, “Ray, why do we need to evacuate?”

Always enigmatic, Freeman did not answer. He studied me for a moment, his expression impassive, then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small device that looked like a notepad with a screen. Whatever it was, it looked tiny in Freeman’s gigantic right hand.

He placed it flat on the table.

The two-way communicator was six inches long, less than three inches wide, and flat as a shingle. The edges of the communicator were shiny black plastic. The screen that filled the frame was already lit. A face I recognized stared up from it.

“Good morning, Harris,” said the familiar gravelly voice.

“Good morning,” I said, wondering if somewhere along the line, I had lost my mind.

“We hear you’ve been promoted to general. Congratulations.”

“Thank you,” I said, staring at the screen and trying to figure out its magic. Few people had earned my respect as thoroughly as Dr. William Sweetwater. He died more bravely than any man I knew.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

William Sweetwater died on New Copenhagen. He led the team of scientists that unraveled the aliens’ technology. He was a brilliant, fearless dwarf who always referred to himself in the royal plural.

I started to ask Freeman if this was some sort of a prank, but he put up a hand to stop me. He had pointed the communicator toward me, so that the pin-sized camera mounted under the screen would not catch his movements, then he put up a finger across his lips.

On the screen, Sweetwater continued chatting amiably. He watched me with eyes that I had seen burned by toxic air. He spoke with lips I had seen blister so badly they burst. In this new incarnation, the little man was once again whole.

The diminutive scientist chattered on. “We hear you’ve been busy resurrecting planets, Harris.”

I almost spoke up when I heard his use of the word “resurrected.” He looked real enough, but any schoolkid could scan a photograph into a computer and convert it into a three-dimensional animation. Making the animation interactive, though, giving it the exact right voice and mannerisms, that would require familiarity with Sweetwater and extensive audio files. The character on the screen not only looked and sounded like Sweetwater, it acted like him.

“You mean the revolution?” I asked. Now Freeman waved his hand to stop me, then picked up the communicator and turned it toward himself.

“Doctor, give me a moment to speak with General Harris?” Freeman asked.

The avatar on the screen smiled, and said, “Certainly, Raymond.”

Freeman switched the two-way off, then told me, “He doesn’t know you are at war with the Unified Authority.”

“Of course he doesn’t, he’s been dead for three years,” I said. “The only thing going through his mind is worms.”

“He thinks he’s alive and that he has been assigned to the Clarke space station.” The Arthur C. Clarke Space Station, or the “Wheel,” as most people called it, was a scientific observation post on the extreme outer edge of the Orion Arm. The Wheel was huge, three miles in diameter. It took its name from a prehistoric science-fiction writer who had popularized ideas like spinning space stations and spaceflights to nearby planets.

“He doesn’t think anything,” I pointed out. “He’s dead. He’s more than dead, he’s incinerated. We left him lying next to a fifty-megaton bomb.”

“He may only be a V-job of Sweetwater, but he thinks he’s real, and we need to keep it that way,” Freeman said. “They replicated Sweetwater’s brain.”

“What about Breeze?” I asked. Arthur Breeze had been Sweetwater’s partner in science and his polar opposite. Sweetwater was barely four feet tall, plump, with a scraggly beard and long reddish brown hair. He was mildly cocky, acted hip, walked with a swagger.

Breeze, on the other hand, stood six-foot-four and weighed a bony buck fifty at best. He was forehead-bald past the crown of his head with a garland of cotton-fluff hair that ran between his ears but no lower. He wore thick glasses that were always smudged with fingerprints and dusted with dandruff. He had teeth the size of gravestones that would have looked just about right in the mouth of a horse.

“Breeze is in there, too,” Freeman said. “No point having one without the other.”

“In there? On the Wheel?”

“They believe they are alive and that they are on the Wheel for their own protection,” Freeman said.

“For their own protection,” I repeated. “Protection from what? They’re dead?”

“From the Avatari,” Freeman said.

Hearing Freeman mention the Avatari, I felt a moment of elation. I’d been expecting Freeman to play whatever ace card he’d been hiding, but he didn’t have a card at all. Instead, he had the missing piece of a very frightening puzzle.

The Double Y clones, the rush to get as many ships to Olympus Kri as possible, the way the Unified Authority never pressed the attack …they all fit together in a flash of clarity. The Double Y clones were never meant to destroy our Navy, they were meant to behead its leadership, to kill the officers and leave the ships and crews operational. Once our Navy fell apart, the Unifieds hoped to assimilate the ships and the crews. Clones were designed to follow orders, not to give them. Kill all the leaders, and the followers might well give up without a fight when ordered to surrender. Then what? Then send the ships here? Send the entire Navy to Olympus Kri to …If the Unifieds weren’t planning to attack, why did Freeman want me here? I asked myself, and I knew the answer.

The Unified Authority wasn’t going to invade Olympus Kri, but somebody else might, somebody the Unifieds feared …the Avatari.

“The barges you were talking about, they’re U.A. ships, right?” I asked.

Freeman nodded.

“It’s New Copenhagen all over again,” I said, now starting to feel a chill as the reality of what this meant set in.

Freeman shook his head, fixed his eyes on mine, then said in rumbling whisper, “This isn’t New Copenhagen. This is Armageddon.”

Before resurrecting Sweetwater on the two-way, Freeman gave me one last warning. He said, “Sweetwater doesn’t know that he’s dead. Neither does Breeze. It’s got to stay that way. There is no way of knowing how they will react if they find out they are dead.”

The psychology of the virtual soul, I thought. Clones die when they learn they are synthetic. Do virtual people shut down when they find out they exist only on a computer?

“What about the mine on New Copenhagen?” I asked.

Sweetwater came with my platoon as we entered the underground cavern that the Avatari had created. The bottom of that mine was filled with corrosive gas, the fumes of which slowly dissolved the little man’s skin and lungs. He insisted on accompanying us as we delivered the bomb, even though we did not have armor that would fit him. His heroism cost him his life in one long, slow, painful, installment.

“He doesn’t know about it.”

“And Breeze doesn’t know he was torn apart by a giant spider?”

Freeman shook his head. “They think we evacuated them from New Copenhagen. They know you liberated some planets, but they think you did it for the Unified Authority.”

“And I’m supposed to lie to them?” I asked.

“Lives are depending on it,” Freeman said.

“Lives are depending on my lying to a computer?” I asked. If it had really been Sweetwater, instead of a computer program, I wouldn’t have agreed to lie to him. Sweetwater deserved better.

“If you can’t be trusted—” Freeman began.

“What do you care about saving lives? You’ve never cared about anybody.”

He did not answer.

I might have walked away from this meeting; but Olympus Kri belonged to the Enlisted Man’s Empire. If the Avatari annihilated this planet, they would be killing citizens of the Enlisted Man’s Empire, not the Unified Authority.

“You haven’t become some kind of homicidal humanitarian, have you?” I asked.

“Are you ready to talk to Sweetwater?” Freeman asked, ignoring my question.

“Not even remotely,” I said. The cogs were clicking together in my head. I nodded toward the two-way communicator, and asked, “When did they boot up the ghost?”

“When we lost New Copenhagen.”

“Lost New Copenhagen?” I asked. The pieces finally fell into place. “I bet that was right about the same time you showed up on Terraneau.”

Freeman said nothing.

“They sent two clones to kill me …”

“Five clones,” Freeman said. “I hit three of them before you came back from St. Augustine.”

“They sent the clones, then they lost New Copenhagen, so they sent you to keep me alive.”

Freeman sat silent and impassive. He was big and dark and powerful and oddly serene. Here was a man who avoided friendships, who might never have loved anyone, even as a child; but now he exuded a sense of ominous serenity.

“Why attack Olympus Kri?” I asked. It didn’t make sense. Granted, Olympus Kri was the closest colony to New Copenhagen, but astrogeography did not matter to the Avatari. They had the technology to leapfrog entire galaxies when they chose to.

“New Copenhagen was the first planet we liberated from the aliens,” Freeman said. “We liberated Olympus Kri next.”

“No we didn’t. The first planet we liberated was Terraneau,” I said.

Freeman shook his head, and said, “The Inner Orion Fleet landed here while you were still in Bliss.” He meant Fort Bliss, the concentration camp the Unified Authority built as a home away from home for the clones who fought in the battle of New Copenhagen.

“Oh,” I said. Then I mumbled, “That’s not good …not good at all.” If the Avatari were taking planets by the order of their liberation, Terraneau was next in line. And here I learned something about myself. I thought I had washed my hands of Ava Gardner and Ellery Doctorow and the stupid, stupid people who lived on Terraneau; but now, knowing that they might all be killed, I had a change of heart. Fantasizing about them getting what I felt they deserved was one thing; knowing that they all might die was entirely different.

I thought about Ava and wondered if we could possibly evacuate Terraneau before the zero hour.

“You ready to talk to Sweetwater?” Freeman asked.

I nodded. He was a ghost, just one more ghost with which I would have to reckon, one more occupant in a life already overpopulated by the dead.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Peace does not always come with a signed treaty. Sometimes it is foisted upon sworn enemies when they realize they must either work together or perish.

“Do you trust them?” Warshaw asked, when I reported to him about my meeting with Freeman. He was still on the Kamehameha, still orbiting Gobi.

“Who? Freeman, the dead scientist, or the Unified Authority? I think Freeman is telling the truth,” I said. I believed him from the start, I just didn’t trust him. “Sweetwater is—”

“I don’t care about Sweetwater, he’s just a cartoon.”

“I believe Freeman,” I said.

“Yeah? You believed him when he said the U.A. was going to invade us. That turned out to be a lie.”

“He never said it was the Unified Authority. I misread him.”

“It sounds like he was counting on you misreading him,” Warshaw said.

“Probably,” I agreed.

“I don’t see any reason why I should trust Freeman. He’s your pal, not mine,” Warshaw said.

“What if he can prove what he’s saying?” I asked.

“How is he going to do that?”

“I’m flying out to New Copenhagen in an hour,” I said.

“New Copenhagen? That’s off our broadcast grid. How are you going to get there?”

“As a guest of the Unified Authority; they’re sending out an explorer,” I said. Explorers were unarmed research vessels. The first self-broadcasting ships were explorers. The U.A. used them for mapping the galaxy.

“Sounds like a cozy arrangement,” Warshaw said, hinting at all kinds of sins. “They’re just going to send a ship, and you’re just going to specking climb aboard. It sounds like you’re getting in bed with them.”

“We’re running out of time,” I said.

“I did some checking, Harris. There are seventeen million people living on Olympus Kri. Evacuating the planet is not going to be easy,” Warshaw said.

I had witnessed a planetary evacuation once. I saw the chaos and the confusion. Warshaw was right. Those new barges would simplify matters, but some tasks take time. Persuading families to leave their homes, then leave their planet would not be easy. Ferrying seventeen million people out of the atmosphere would take more time.

“Did your friend happen to mention where the aliens are going after Olympus Kri?” Warshaw asked, sounding more than a little suspicious.

“Terraneau.”

Warshaw laughed. “Terraneau? Oh, that’s rich. Serves those assholes right for kicking us off their specking planet.”

I did not appreciate the irony. Warshaw was thinking of Doctorow. I was thinking of Ava. “We need to clear them out,” I said.

Looking like a god in a Greek statue display, Warshaw folded his arms across his barrel chest, fixed me with a cold stare, and said, “We can’t evacuate every specking planet.”

“We have to try,” I said. “We’re talking about millions of people.”

“Not our people,” Warshaw said. “Remember, Harris, they didn’t want anything to do with us.”

“We can’t just sit back and watch it happen,” I said.

“Where would we put the refugees? We can’t keep moving them from planet to planet. We can’t even specking fit that many passengers in our ships. Even if the Unifieds come out with a fleet of million-man barges, we can’t fit ’em all.

“And that’s assuming that Freeman and the Unifieds are telling us the truth. I’m not convinced.”

“They sent me a video file taken by a satellite over New Copenhagen. Want to have a look?” I asked. I’d had the file queued and ready before I called Warshaw, now I simply touched a corner of the screen to upload the file.

I studied Warshaw’s reaction as he reviewed the devastation. For the first twenty seconds, he scrutinized the images with the air of detachment one would expect from a high-ranking officer. After that, wrinkles appeared across his broad face, and his scowl went slack.

“Did you get to Valhalla?” I asked.

“Valhalla?”

“The city,” I said.

“I’m there now. It doesn’t look as bad as Norristown did after the aliens attacked.”

It was and it wasn’t, I thought. “Look at the buildings. Look at the windows. Everything is burned.” Everything was charred, so that even the bricks looked like they were covered with soot.

“Did they set off a nuke?” Warshaw asked.

“The Avatari don’t use bombs,” I said. He was right, though, Valhalla had that burned-out look you see in the aftermath of a nuclear blast; but it didn’t have the blasted look. Most of the buildings were standing; and the buildings that had collapsed looked like they had been crushed from the top. There was no rhyme or reason to the destruction.

“Maybe they did it to themselves,” Warshaw said. He did not look up as he said this. His eyes remained fixed on the images of New Copenhagen, taking in every last prurient detail.

“What are you saying? Do you think this was some sort of accident? You can’t possibly think they did this on purpose. You don’t believe that any more than I do.”

Warshaw grunted some indistinguishable response.

“Sweetwater says the destruction was global, not an inch of the planet was spared. The Unifieds couldn’t do that even if they wanted to. They don’t have anything powerful enough to do that. If they did, they would have used it on us instead of themselves.”

“I don’t trust them,” Warshaw said.

“Yeah, me either.”

The anomaly spread like a budding flower, and an explorer emerged. The explorer had neither the sharp edges of a warship nor the boxy profile of a transport. It had a long, cylindrical fuselage with wide, jutting wings that could provide glide in an atmosphere.

The explorer was not outfitted with weapons or armor, not even shields. It had barely cleared the corona of the broadcast anomaly when two squadrons of E.M.N. Tomcats circled in behind it. If the ship varied from its prescribed course, the fighters would blow it apart.

Seeing our fighters close in tight around the explorer stirred an odd emotion in me. Fighters were small ships. The sight of them attacking a capital ship always reminded me of bees going after a bear. This time, though, they had surrounded another small target. The explorer was nearly twice as long as the Tomcats and considerably wider; but it looked helpless ringed by our birds of prey.

Decelerating as it glided toward our armada, the explorer approached the Salah ad-Din. Coming to Olympus Kri in a lone ship, unescorted and unarmed had been an act of faith and desperation. A rodent among lions, the little U.A. ship threaded a path between battleships and fighter carriers. Any ship in our fleet could have destroyed that scientific explorer with a swipe of its shields or a single shot from its cannons.

The explorer and its escort slowed down to three-minute miles as ad-Din security ran tests for explosives, weapons, and chemicals. Once cleared, the explorer retracted its gangly wings, then hovered into a landing tunnel. I waited and watched as the explorer cleared through the locks.

“Are you sure you want to go alone?” Hollingsworth asked.

We stood at the edge of the track. A team of MPs dressed in ground-crew uniforms crowded around the explorer with pistols in their pockets and tools in their hands while a genuine traffic ace guided the explorer into its parking slot.

The hatch opened, and our armed MPs/ground crew boarded the ship to “service” it. They weren’t fooling anyone. They boarded like Marines, not engineers, rushing up the steps, stopping to scan for enemies as they entered the cabin, then bowling ahead.

A few moments later, a second crew entered the explorer and checked the engines and batteries. Before entering the bird, I made a show of telling Hollingsworth to keep our fleet on high alert, as if he had any sort of authority in the fleet. We traded salutes, then I entered the U.A. ship alone.

Three men met me as I stepped into the cabin. I recognized all of them—Tobias Andropov, the newest member of the Unified Authority Linear Committee; General George “Nickel” Hill, now the highest-ranking officer in the U.A. military; and Gordon Hughes, a native of Olympus Kri who had risen to the highest seats of power in the Unified Authority before defecting to the Confederate Arms Treaty during the Mogat War.

Like me, these men had made a show of good faith, arriving without guards or weapons. Of the three, I knew Hill best, having served with him on New Copenhagen. We’d attended briefings together. I’d met Hughes once before as well. He’d torn me apart on the floor of the House of Representatives.

I’d never met Andropov though I felt like I knew him better than the others. He was one of the architects of the program that placed clones in concentrations camps and ultimately abandoned us in space. Hill and Hughes had played forgettable parts in my life, Andropov had made a memorable contribution.

I had no time for sulking or harboring grudges on this outing, though. Andropov and I shook hands. We greeted each other with somber smiles and looked each other in the eye as we exchanged pleasantries.

“General Harris, I have heard so much about you. It’s good of you to meet with us,” Andropov said.

“Sounds like we have a lot to talk about,” I said.

Next came Hughes, an old man with the face of an ancient. The bags under his eyes were the color of dead skin. His hair was brown, with large shocks of white. It tapered off around his temples. A fine network of blue-black arteries formed a fishnet pattern on the right side of his nose. Years back, this man had cut a heroic figure, one of those rare politicians who had fought in the wars. Now he had red-rimmed eyes and bleached skin. His handshake was firm, but his palm was a sponge.

“It’s been a while, Congressman,” I said as I shook his hand.

“How is my planet?” he asked.

So asks the once-powerful representative of Olympus Kri, I thought. Still shaking his hand, I pledged, “We will do everything we can to protect it.”

General Hill and I traded salutes grudgingly. We were members of antagonistic forces. He did not recognize my authority, and I despised his.

“So,” he said, “back to New Copenhagen.”

“Back to New Copenhagen,” I agreed. Hill had been against the deportation of clones. I felt anger toward the man, but it was unjustified. The politics that made us enemies were not of his making.

The ground crew turned the explorer around, and we launched. Fighters followed us as we flew away from the Salah ad-Din. To me, they no longer looked like protection. They looked like my last line of support. It occurred to me that I was now a prisoner of the Unified Authority. If we broadcasted to Earth instead of New Copenhagen, I would be tried and executed.

We flew out into space for several minutes. Our fighter escort fell away, and soon the fleet vanished in the distance.

“I was always very interested to meet you, General,” said Tobias Andropov. He was the youngest man in the cabin. Well, he was the youngest natural-born among us, younger than Hill and a great deal younger than Hughes. He was forty-four, making him fifteen years older than me. His black hair had the flat look of hair that is dyed, but his skin was smooth, and his blue eyes were clear of veins and bags.

“I read a lot of military history as a boy. I don’t know if you knew this, but my father was a general in the Marines.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said, though, in fact, I was very aware of his father. Brigadier General Mikhail Andropov never shied away from a fight, and he never lost, but he maintained that perfect record by drawing deeply from an endless pool of cloned conscripts.

“I’ve read a lot about Liberators, and I found something interesting. They never lost a battle, not even so much as a skirmish,” he said.

“There was Little Man,” I said. That was a famous land battle in which 2,300 Marines were sent to capture a planet. Only seven of them survived. “We had four Liberators in that battle.” I was the only Liberator who made it out.

Sounding surprised, Andropov said, “We won that battle.”

Historians would see it as a great victory, but the survivors didn’t. We had seven survivors, and the Mogats had none. As our forces fought the Mogats on the planet, the Scutum-Crux Fleet ambushed and destroyed three Mogat battleships. From the historian’s point of view, we had won a great victory, destroying three of their ships and all of their ground forces.

Tint shields formed over the windows. Hill and Hughes, deep in a conversation of their own, probably did not even notice the anomaly as we broadcasted across the Orion Arm.

“What about New Prague and Albatross Island?” I asked.

“Those weren’t battles, General; they were police actions, and the Liberators came out on top.”

“They went berserk and killed civilians,” I said.

“You’re not looking at it with a clinical eye,” Andropov said. “They accomplished their objectives in both cases, then lost control of themselves afterward. It wasn’t the battles that they lost; they destroyed the enemy.”

“That’s one way of looking at it,” I said.

“And you are the last of the Liberators. I find it interesting that even after you defected to the Enlisted Man’s Empire, you’re still winning every battle,” Andropov went on.

Defected to the Enlisted Man’s Empire? I thought. First this son of a bitch had me locked in a concentration camp, then he had me marooned in space, where he planned to use me for target practice; and now he says I defected. I decided to shut him out. From here on out, I would only pretend to listen to him.

As I started to let my mind wander, Gordon Hughes joined our conversation. He said, “But we’re not here to discuss military history; we’re here to plan an evacuation.”

“Right,” Andropov agreed. “That is why we’ve come.”

“Mr. Andropov is of the opinion that we might be able to fight our way out of this situation,” Hughes said.

“I suggested the possibility,” Andropov said. He turned to me, and explained, “I simply meant that there are other avenues to explore besides evacuation. We could make the entire Navy available for the fight thanks to your empire’s new broadcast network. Should the aliens try to capture Olympus Kri, well, we now know how to blast through their ion-curtain defense.”

General Hill spoke a word into the intercommunications system, then leaned into our conversation and spoke softly. “Mr. Andropov, our pilot informs me that we are about to enter the atmosphere.”

The explorer did not inject itself into the atmosphere with the grace of my shuttle, but it broke through more smoothly than a transport would have. The sky outside our ship was dark with clouds as fine as lace.

“Before you experiment with military options, you’d better evacuate the planet,” Hughes reminded Andropov. “We all agreed that the first thing we need to do is to evacuate Olympus Kri.”

He looked so old, a caved-in, wilted wax model of the one-time political heavyweight known as Gordon Hughes.

Andropov drummed the fingers of his right hand along the top of his armrest, then asked, “Where do you suggest we take them, Gordon?”

“Take them to Earth,” Hughes said. “God knows there’s enough room for them there.”

“What are we going to do with the population of Terraneau?” Andropov asked.

“As I understand it, there are only five million people left on Terraneau,” Hughes said. “There’s plenty of room for them on Earth.”

“And Providence Kri? What about the people on Providence Kri?”

“Take them all to Earth.”

It sounded like the bastards expected to evacuate our whole damned empire.

The lower we descended, the more grim the atmosphere became. I could see the planet below through a hazy sky that was black, but not pitch-black. It was a dirty, rusty black.

The thing that surprised me most was the snow. A fresh layer of fluffy gray snow covered the burned-out countryside, blanketing forests in which the burned-out hulls of pine trees pointed into the sky, as straight and naked as sewing needles.

There could be no question that this was New Copenhagen, I’d fought in these woods under very different conditions. I recognized the terrain. I recognized the roll of the forest floor, even spotted clearings in which our Marines and soldiers had ambushed the enemy.

Clearings? The entire specking forest was a goddamned clearing. I could not see so much as a hint of a leaf or a pine needle.

“What kind of weapon does something like this?” I asked.

“Sweetwater thinks the Avatari ignited the atmosphere,” said General Hill.

“Ignited the atmosphere?” I asked. “What the hell does that mean?” I was angry. I was irritable. I was scared.

No one responded. They didn’t know.

“Have you debriefed the survivors?” I asked.

Hughes answered in a hushed voice. “That is the point, General. There are no survivors.”

When I looked back out the window, we were flying above Valhalla, the capital city of New Copenhagen. I had seen this city destroyed; but in the three years since I left, the residents had undoubtedly rebuilt it.

“It looks a lot better now than it did when the Avatari left the first time,” Nickel Hill said.

“Igniting the atmosphere” had toppled some buildings and left others standing. I saw no logic in the buildings that remained and the ones that fell. We flew over tall buildings that stood and piles of rubble that might have once been great skyscrapers. On one side of the street a three-story building might stand untouched, while across the street, a building of seemingly similar size lay in ruins.

Our pilot took us lower and lower until the roofs of the tallest buildings passed only a few feet below our wings. I saw melted roadways below us and streetlamps with posts that had wilted like old sticks of celery. We flew over an intersection in which cars had sunk axle deep into the road below them. The cars were all the same color now, the dull nickel gray of burned metal.

“We landed drones down there to gather data,” Hill said. He always struck me as a man with a love of gadgets and an appreciation for science. “The radiation levels are normal. The carbon monoxide is off the charts, but that’s predictable. Whatever did this, it killed off the plant life. It burned everything. We haven’t found a patch of ground that has not been burned.”

Flying low to the ground, we passed a tall skyscraper that reached well above us. The glass in some of its windows had melted and run down the side of the building like wax from a candle. The entire building was covered with soot.

“I can tell you what Sweetwater says happened here if you’re interested,” General Hill said. Of all the generals stationed on New Copenhagen, George Hill was the only one who took Sweetwater seriously. “Sweetwater doesn’t think we fought the Avatari Army that first time out. He thinks they sent their exterminators, maybe only their janitorial squad. He says they sent their C-team to sweep us cockroaches out of the way. That’s what we fought.

“He thinks they’re sending their army this time. Last time they wanted us to leave. That was before we took our planets back. Now they’re sending their army.”

I turned from Hill and stared out the window. Below us was a park in which a blackened and mostly melted slide stood on a glittering mound that looked like it was made of glass. Scanning the grounds, I did not see so much as a single blade of grass.

We left the city, flying no more than fifty feet above a residential suburb. Some of the homes below us had exploded. For the most part, the neighborhood looked like it could be washed clean with a hose, just spray the soot away and move right in.

“I don’t want to fight them again,” Hill admitted. “I think we got lucky last time. I think we got lucky, and they didn’t take us seriously, and they were fighting with one arm tied behind their backs, and they still almost won.”

“We don’t have any other options,” Andropov said. “Even if we move everyone to Earth, how long do you think it will be before they come kill us there?”

The pilot banked and turned so that he could take us back for another pass across Valhalla. As he did, I saw a park with a large reflection pool. The pool was empty, but the ground reflected our lights in smeared streaks, as if it were made of crudely made glass.

“Did you ever hear the story of the gossamer moth?” Hughes asked. He stared out the window, his eyes drinking in the devastation. Did he see New Copenhagen or Olympus Kri below?

“I used to tell my children a bedtime story about a moth that lived near an air force base. It watched the fighters as they flew in and out of the base. It watched them dogfight and studied their maneuvers. One night a lizard crawled up into its tree, and the moth attacked the lizard, using the tactics it had learned by watching the fighters; but it forgot that it was just a moth, and the lizard ate it.

“I don’t know what the Avatari are like; but I think to them, we’re just another moth.”

We passed over a section of street with fancy-looking storefronts and outdoor restaurants, the kind of place that gets crowded on weekends. I looked for bodies or signs of life and saw nothing. No clothes. No toys. No shoes or hats. Anyone stuck down there must have been cremated, I thought; but what I said was, “Just a million moths.”

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Apparently Freeman wasn’t the only person with a direct line to important ghosts. He did not attend the negotiation with the Unified Authority, but a member of the U.A. Academy of Science with a direct link to Sweetwater and Breeze did. He was the liaison. He was the buffer. His job was to keep Sweetwater and Breeze informed while weeding out any information that might tip them off to their virtual reality.

We sat in the conference room on the Kamehameha. Andropov, Hughes, Hill, and the scientist sat on one side of the table. I sat across from them. I was alone. Warshaw sat at the head of the table, running the meeting. Andropov, representing the highest power in the Unified Authority, should have conducted; but Warshaw would not allow it. We were in Enlisted Man’s space on an Enlisted Man’s ship. He insisted on calling the shots.

Warshaw sat at the head of the table, making no effort to hide his disdain for everyone else in the room, including me. Methodically flexing his muscles in an effort to make himself more menacing, he sneered, “You give the orders in your corner of the galaxy, and I give the orders around here.”

His eyes still locked on Andropov, he asked, “Harris, are you sure that was New Copenhagen they showed you?”

“Yes,” I said, letting my annoyance show. We all knew Warshaw had big muscles, big specking deal. His physique wasn’t intimidating anybody in the room.

“How do you know?” he asked me.

“I recognized it,” I said.

“I thought it’s all burned up,” Warshaw said. “How did you recognize it?”

I saw no point answering; he would not accept anything I said. He wanted to make a point.

“Admiral, we have to get moving,” Hughes said climbing partway out of his chair. “We need to begin the evacuation immediately. There may not be enough time as it is.”

Appearing to weigh his options, Warshaw rubbed his jaw and sat in silence. His forearms bulged, then his biceps, then the muscles in his neck. The way he worked his muscles was impressive, but it was also pathetic.

Hughes dropped back in his chair and threw his hands up in frustration. “Look, we’ll fly you to New Copenhagen, we’ll fly a team of clone scientists to take soil samples, we’ll do whatever it takes to make you believe us; but we need to start the evacuation. Every second could mean lives lost.”

Warshaw turned to face him, smiled, and said, “I’m not convinced.”

He was playing with us, with all of us. He wanted to show everyone who was in control.

Accustomed to working with self-important officers and politicians, the academy scientist tried to get the meeting back on track. “Admiral, we can provide scientific findings. We’ve sent drones to run tests on several of your planets.”

“My planets?” Warshaw asked. “What planets are my planets?”

“The planets you stole from the Unified Authority,” Andropov said.

“Oh, stole them. So you were trespassing on some of the planets we stole. Which ones?” Warshaw asked.

“Olympus Kri, St. Augustine, Terraneau …” the academy man began.

“Yeah? And how did you run tests on those planets?” Warshaw asked.

“They sent in Double Ys,” I said.

“What’s that?” Hughes asked.

“Those were the clone assassins Andropov and his pals sent to kill me and my officers,” Warshaw said.

Andropov flushed with anger. Hill looked nervous as well. “I didn’t know about that,” said Hughes.

“You didn’t know about the clone assassins? Don’t worry about it; we’ve got the situation under control,” said Warshaw.

“We found traces of a particle we’re calling ‘Tachyon D’ on New Copenhagen. There are large concentrations of that same particle on a few of your planets,” said the scientist.

“Oh, we’re back to them being my planets,” Warshaw said, clearly trying to be unreasonable.

“The highest concentration is on Olympus Kri. We also found it on Terraneau.”

“So you think we should abandon our planets because you found this particle?” Warshaw asked.

“There’s no point staying,” I said. “Whatever hit New Copenhagen, it didn’t leave much behind.”

Warshaw softened, and asked, “How many people died on New Copenhagen?”

Had I not been sitting right across from him, I would not have heard Andropov quietly whisper, “All of them.” I could not tell if the comment rose out of sarcasm or pain.

“Seven million,” said Hughes.

No one said anything for a few moments after that.

Warshaw broke the silence. “What is the population on Olympus Kri?”

“Seventeen million,” said Hughes, answering quickly, sounding desperate. “We have twenty-five barges capable of transporting 250,000 people at a time.”

“Big boats,” Warshaw said, sounding impressed. “Are they self-broadcasting?”

Hill answered, “No, sir, they are not.”

“So how are you going to get them here?” Warshaw asked. Hill answered again. “We need you to link the Mars broadcast station into your network.”

“Mars station? I thought the Mogats busted it,” Warshaw said, finally sitting up straight and taking the meeting seriously. Now it wasn’t just a question of saving lives; our military security was at stake. Warshaw might not have cared about lives and evacuations, but he took security seriously.

“We’ve constructed a temporary station,” Hill said. “It’s primitive, but it will do the job for now.”

Warshaw’s eyes narrowed and hardened. His mouth worked itself into a sneer. “So we open the gates and let you roll your horse in. I’m not biting,” he said. He turned to me, and added, “And you, Harris, I never figured you for a collaborator.”

“Admiral …” Andropov began, at the same time as Hughes, Hill, and the scientist from the academy.

But I was the one who had been challenged. I spoke over them. “Get this through your head, you overinflated son of a bitch. We have a new enemy, someone too big and mean to beat. There’s no question who is going to win this one. The only question is how many people we are going to lose.”

“If they’re telling the truth,” Warshaw muttered.

“Oh, right, we can’t trust the Unifieds. Tell you what. Let’s run a test on Olympus Kri,” I said. “We’ll just wait and watch, and after seventeen million people burn, then we’ll know it’s time to evacuate Terraneau. Is that what you want?”

An angry silence filled the room. We all sat staring into the table.

“Okay, so let’s say you’re right. Even if we get everybody off Olympus Kri, where do you plan on putting them?” Warshaw asked. It was the closest thing to an olive branch that he was willing to offer. He sat rigid in his chair, no longer flexing his muscles.

“We have to save them,” Hughes said, sounding tired and discouraged.

“If you’re routing them through Mars and taking them to Earth, your barges better have broadcast engines,” Warshaw said.

“I told you, we’ve got a temporary station by Mars,” Andropov said.

“Check the orbits. The jump from Earth to Mars is over one hundred million miles at the moment. That’s a three-hour trip, even for your ships.” Warshaw held up a little handheld computer he must have been hiding under the table.

I did not know the positions of Earth and Mars in their orbits, but I had considered the problem. “There’s a way around that,” I said.

The solution should have been obvious. “We can store the evacuees in the Mars Spaceport,” I said.

“The spaceport is closed. We haven’t used it since the Mogat War,” Andropov said. The stupid bastard still wanted to fight the Avatari. He wanted to send out the clones like his father did in the good old days. Of course, he would not lead the fight himself. His bravery extended only as far as declaring wars, not fighting them.

“The military used it as a processing station before the battle on New Copenhagen,” I said.

“All of the equipment was operational when we shut it down,” Hill said. He sounded enthusiastic. The Mars Spaceport had dormitory rooms for hundreds of thousands of workers and enough floor space to accommodate millions of visitors. “We should be able to get the power and oxygen running.”

“But that still leaves us with your Trojan horse,” Warshaw said. “I don’t trust you.” He looked directly at Andropov as he said this. “And I don’t want your specking ships in my broadcast network.”

“Admiral, what if you took Olympus Kri off your broadcast grid?” Hughes’s voice was low and nervous and hollow.

“Are you saying I should give the planet away?” Warshaw asked.

“He’s saying we should amputate it,” I said. “The planet is as good as gone. Once we remove it from our network—”

“I won’t know if the aliens came or the whole thing was a fraud,” Warshaw said.

I looked across the table at Gordon Hughes. When we went to New Copenhagen, he saw one planet and thought of another. Now I was doing the same thing. “I’ll stay and oversee the evacuation,” I said, speaking of Olympus Kri and thinking of Terraneau …not even Terraneau, really, just one of its residents.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

The rescue had been going on for three days now, and I still had not gotten used to the look of the Unified Authority’s new barges. They were little more than biospheres. They looked like floating warehouses as they grew out of their anomalies. They had a nub in the front for a cockpit and enormous rocket engines in the back, but they lacked even the semblance of wings or aerodynamics. They did not have landing bays or atmospheric locks. Transports would land along the hulls of the barges, on special pads with automatic clamps that would fasten onto the transports’ skids. Passengers would enter the barges through umbilical walkways.

Only an idiot would broadcast in something so feeble, I thought to myself. I almost said something, then I remembered that I had traveled out of the Scutum-Crux Arm to the Cygnus Arm welded into a derelict battleship.

“Those barges have got to be the ugliest ships I have seen in my entire life,” Hollingsworth said, as one of the barges floated toward the ad-Din. We were on the observation deck watching the Unified Authority ships arrive.

The barge passed beside a U.A. battleship, positively dwarfing it. “It looks like a packing crate for mailing battleships,” Hollingsworth added. “You’d have more control steering a piece of shit down a toilet.”

“Yeah,” I grunted, still astonished by the size of the barges.

The U.A. battleship was long and narrow like a flying dagger. The barge could have held four of those ships easily and possibly even a fifth. It was that big.

More barges followed in a series of flashes. They floated out of the broadcast zone like boxes on an assembly line.

“It’s getting pretty close to zero hour. Why are you going down to the planet now?” Hollingsworth asked.

I gave him a one-word answer, hoping to brush off the question. “Reconnaissance.”

“Are you coming back to the ad-Din to watch the attack?” Hollingsworth asked.

“I’m staying on the planet,” I said.

He paused, grinned at me, and finally said, “I’m just curious. Does your martyr complex ever get in your way?”

“What did you say?” I asked, though I’d heard him perfectly well. If he’d yelled or raised his voice, I would have been certain he was trying insult me, but he sounded calm and sincere.

Alone on the observation deck, we stood side by side, staring out the viewport.

“You assigned yourself to point position when we fought the aliens on Terraneau.”

“I led a team—”

“You were the commanding officer, not some specking platoon leader. You were supposed to observe and direct.”

“I thought I could do a better job if I was on the field with my men,” I said.

“You got stuck in a basement. You got trapped in a specking basement with half the specking Avatari Army swarming around you.”

“You don’t think I did that on purpose?”

“No, but it shouldn’t have happened.”

“We won the battle,” I pointed out.

“Thomer told me you led the team that went into the Avatari mines on New Copenhagen.” Thomer was Kelly Thomer, my second-in-command until he died on Terraneau. He was a good Marine and a great human being, even if he was synthetic.

“He went in right beside me,” I said. “Maybe he was a martyr, too.”

“He’s a dead martyr. You’re a living martyr. People respect dead martyrs. The living ones are just a pain in the ass.”

I did not say anything. We’d both been friends with Thomer.

“I heard you led the attack on the Mogat home world.”

I saw no point in responding.

Outside the ship, a line of ten enormous barges paraded past us. The barges were beige and marked with flashing lights to help transport pilots find landing pads.

“I won’t go down after you,” Hollingsworth said. “If you get in trouble, you will be on your own.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to,” I said.

“I won’t send men down after you, either.”

“What’s your point?” I asked.

“I just …Damn it, Harris, you’re so specking self-righteous. No, it’s not even that. You’re not self-righteous; you’re the goddamned real thing. You’re righteous. I don’t know how that happened, how you became right, and I became wrong.”

“I’m not so righteous,” I said, feeling truly offended.

“Sooner or later, you’ll be a martyr, you’re just counting the days,” Hollingsworth said. “Just passing time until you meet your specking maker.”

“I’m a clone, I’ve already met my makers, and I don’t like them,” I said.

“So why go down to Olympus Kri? You say there’s going to be an apocalypse, fine, I believe you. What do you think you will accomplish by riding it out down there? Do you think they’re going to make you a saint or something? Saint Harris, guardian saint of clones and Marines.”

He did not sound angry, but he did sound frustrated. He’d stood by quietly when Warshaw announced the airlift; but now that we were alone, he spoke his mind.

“I don’t think I’m a saint, but I sure as hell am not cut out to be a general,” I said. “I don’t like giving orders, and I don’t like watching battles from a safe distance.”

“Look, Harris, I admire you. You’re the best goddamn—”

Rather than suffer through another eulogy, I interrupted him. “You didn’t like me much on Terraneau.”

“That’s ’cause I thought you were wrong about everything. Turns out you were right about everything.”

“I thought it was about Ava,” I said. “I thought you were mad about my hiding a girl in my quarters while everyone else was confined to the ship.”

Hollingsworth’s face flushed. “Yeah, well, that was more envy than anger. I would have done the same thing if I had a shot at Ava Gardner. Any man would.”

His honesty stunned me.

“You don’t really want to kill yourself, do you?” Hollingsworth asked.

“Kill myself?” I laughed. “I tried that once. It didn’t work. Liberators can’t kill themselves; it goes against our programming.”

I wasn’t lying. Part of my programming gave me a survival instinct. Even if I wanted to, I lacked the ability to pull the trigger—or the pin. The time I did try to commit suicide, my weapon of choice was a grenade.

“It’s not a question of suicide; it’s a question of needing to be in the middle of the action. It’s in my DNA. I can’t kill myself, and I can’t sit out the fight.”

“So you’re screwed,” Hollingsworth said.

An impressive array of ships now filled the space above Olympus Kri. Warshaw sent six additional fighter carriers to watch out for the empire’s interests during the evacuation. They floated in seeming stasis beside enemy battleships. If the Avatari suddenly began traveling in spaceships and appeared in range, I thought they might find themselves in the fight of their lives.

Of course, the Avatari did not travel in ships. They had no time for such primitive contrivances as traveling at the speed of light. In fact, they did not travel at all. We called them the “Avatari” because the army they sent to our galaxy was made of avatars instead of living beings.

They’d used some new weapon during their latest assault on New Copenhagen, and we had no hope of making a stand against them until we knew what they had. That meant having men on the ground as well as eyes in the air. Our satellites would record the destruction from outside the atmosphere while I experienced it firsthand down below. Maybe I would see things or hear things or just feel things hiding underground that we would miss from above.

And if I died? I had a bunch of patriotic and macho responses; but they were all for show. The truth was that I had survived too much already. I was ready to go.

Checking my watch, I saw that I would probably arrive ahead of schedule, but I felt the urge to get started. I could stand around up here, safe and sound on the Salah ad-Din, or I could stand around down there, on the planet. Down there I would be in place, ready to react if something went wrong.

Hollingsworth stayed on the observation deck as I went to my quarters and swapped my service uniform for combat armor. “Nickel” Hill had offered to loan me shielded armor; but I turned him down. What a laugh. With shielding from head to toe, the only weapon you could carry was a dart gun that ran along the outside of the right arm. It fired fléchettes made of depleted uranium, good for killing people, but I doubted it would have much effect on the Avatari.

My mood turned dark as I fastened my armor. Hill said that the Avatari we faced on New Copenhagen were just the janitors and that this time we would face the A-team. When I asked the ghost of Sweetwater about it, he said, “Not so much janitors. We think they were more like scarecrows, mostly harmless and designed to scare away pests.”

I had answered him with one word, “Bullshit.”

But it hadn’t been bullshit, and I accepted that now as I prepared to fly down to Olympus Kri. Alone, in my billet, I owned up to the truth.

My armor included a rebreather, temperature-controlling bodysuit, and protection against radiation, yet it only weighed a couple of pounds. My portable arsenal, on the other hand, registered seventy-three pounds and thirteen ounces. My go-pack contained six disposable grenade launchers, six handheld rockets, a particle-beam pistol, a particle-beam cannon, and a handheld laser. Facing anyone but the Avatari, that would have been overkill.

I wondered what weapon the Avatari would use when they attacked and realized that while I was down there, my fate was entirely in their hands. Handing over the controls always made me nervous. No Marine expects to live forever, but we all hope to see the day through.

“Wheel, are you there?” I asked, testing the special interLink connection Hill had given me so that I could contact the virtual version of the Arthur C. Clarke Wheel.

Arthur Breeze answered. “Are you heading down to the planet?”

“That I am,” I said.

“Sweetwater is asleep,” said Breeze.

The virtual versions of Sweetwater and Breeze ate, slept, passed gas, and shat. Whoever designed them had to give them foibles along with strengths to prevent them from figuring out that they lived in a computer. Along with mapping and scanning their brains, the engineers had mapped and scanned their bodies. Nothing was left to chance.

The digital ghosts of Arthur Breeze and William Sweetwater spent their time playing with digital replicas of the finest scientific equipment in their little virtual laboratory on a computer model of the Clarke space station. When interactive Breeze ran atoms in his virtual collider, did he control real equipment accelerating real particles and getting real results? When he peered through his spectroscope, did he examine real samples with virtual eyes? Even now, he was watching the real me through eyes that only existed in a computer. Did the digital program that emulated his brain hear the digital protocol that simulated his voice?

If I allowed myself to play with these questions long enough, I could have driven myself insane. A lab assistant worked at a desk behind Breeze. I wondered if the avatar was attached to a real man and if that man currently stood in a real-world lab working with real-world equipment.

Breeze was a physicist who had published volumes on particles. He was probably a better scientist than Sweetwater, but his lack of confidence was an Achilles’ heel. He stuttered during briefings and used so much jargon that he could never communicate his ideas clearly. Sweetwater, whose expertise extended into chemistry as well as physics, had no shortage of confidence.

“You’re sure fifty feet down will be enough?” I asked.

“Based on my best calculations, ten feet might be enough,” Breeze said. He pulled off his thick glasses, polished them, and replaced them on his face. The grease and dandruff were still there, now wiped into a spiral pattern.

“The combustion on New Copenhagen was strictly a surface event. Sweetwater sent a drone down to take soil samples. The heat penetration was only a few feet.”

“So if someone was in a basement apartment on New Copenhagen, they might have survived,” I said, thinking not so much about survivors on New Copenhagen as civilians on Terraneau.

“It’s not likely,” Breeze said. “Concrete calcifies at two thousand degrees. At three thousand, soil melts.”

“Not all of the buildings melted on New Copenhagen,” I said.

“The surface of the planet retained heat longer than the atmosphere,” Breeze said. “The soil and air samples show that the atmosphere reached temperatures of nine thousand degrees before the heat subsided. If you were in a building with any kind of ventilation system, you’d be incinerated.”

“Good to know,” I said.

“Harris, you might want to consider flying down to the planet’s surface after the event. Any structure exposed to those kind of temperatures is going to sustain fundamental damage. You could survive the event and still find yourself buried alive.”

I thanked Breeze and signed off. Buried alive, Hell’s lobby. I thought about the Unified Authority Marines I buried in that underground garage on Terraneau. If I died the very same way, the irony would not be lost on Hollingsworth.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

As my shuttle exited the ad-Din, Lieutenant Nobles offered to stay on Olympus Kri for the mission.

Ahead of us, swarms of transports clambered in and out of the Olympus Kri atmosphere. The planet looked normal and healthy, just another green-and-blue marble no different than Terraneau, or St. Augustine, or Earth for that matter, only this one had a death sentence hanging over it.

“Are you out of your specking mind?” I asked.

“I don’t understand, sir. I heard you were going to stay down there,” he said.

Interesting point.

Here in the cockpit, this shuttle was no more comfortable than a transport. The ceiling was lower. I sat in the copilot’s chair and considered the instrumentation, which was more like the controls in my old Johnston Starliner than the controls in a transport. I might be able to teach myself how to fly this bird in a pinch, I told myself.

I started to say, “I fight, you fly,” but that sounded dismissive. Instead, I asked, “Do you know about any underground runway systems?”

“Not offhand,” he said.

“Then we wouldn’t have anyplace safe to store the shuttle.”

“Oh, yeah. I didn’t think about that,” he said

“See if you can get your hands on a transport for the return trip. If things go wrong, I may need to get off this rock in a hurry.” Unlike transports, which had skids instead of wheels, the shuttle needed a runway. I would have flown down to the planet in a transport as well, but I did not want to risk some other officer commandeering my luxury ride.

As we reached the atmosphere, a convoy of transports rose past us. They looked awkward and overburdened by their own weight. There had to be a better way of emptying the planet than evacuating its population one hundred people at a time; but when I tried to think of an alternative, I came up empty.

Because transports take off vertically, the evacuation was not limited to airports. Sports stadiums, shopping malls, schools, train stations, anyplace with room for processing masses of passengers and an open field for landing became an evacuation center.

Crossing Odessa, I saw hundred of transports flying in wing formations like flocks of geese. Below us, the streets were choked with cars.

“I’ve got your friend’s signal,” Nobles said. “He’s by an airstrip on the edge of town.”

A call came in from Sweetwater, his gravelly voice sounding anxious and excited. “We just got back the results from our atmospheric test,” he said, the “we” meaning him. “The Tachyon D concentration is rising quickly.”

“Are they forming an ion curtain?” I asked.

“Breeze doesn’t think so. He says these new tachyons act differently than the tachyons in the curtain. Their energy levels are off the charts.” Tachyons were subatomic particles traveling at sublight speeds. How Breeze could measure their activity and energy levels was a mystery; but I did not ask about it.

“How much time do I have?” I asked.

“Before the event?” he asked. The event, now there was a euphemism for the ages. Not the cataclysm, or the holocaust, or even the big bang; the event? It sounded so specking benign.

“Yeah, how much time before the event?” I asked.

“We have no frame of reference, General. Your guess is as good as ours.”

We were coming in for a landing, flying just a couple of hundred feet off the ground, slowing, dropping altitude. Freeman’s signal had led us to a private airstrip. Whoever owned the property had apparently abandoned it. No planes sat on the runway.

“We can tell you that the Tachyon D concentration on Olympus Kri has increased significantly over the last hour, perhaps by a factor of four.”

“Does that mean something is about to happen?” I asked as we touched down.

“It may mean several things, General; but we do not have sufficient information to make any predictions,” Sweetwater said.

Nobles taxied. There was a three-story control tower at the far end of the runway. Freeman stood beside the tower, dressed in custom-fitted Marine combat armor. He might well have been listening in on this conversation, Sweetwater had contacted me on an open frequency. If Freeman wasn’t listening, it meant he and Sweetwater had already had this conversation.

“If we have drawn correct conclusions from New Copenhagen, the tachyon particles the Avatari are using for this attack won’t be recycled like the ones they used in their first wave of attacks,” Sweetwater said.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

Nobles slowed the shuttle as we approached the tower.

“In their first invasion, the Avatari kept recycling the same base of particles. They bonded them together to form soldiers and guns. When we destroyed the soldiers, the tachyons returned to the atmosphere, where they recharged. We believe these new particles vanish once their energy is expended.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” I said. Images of atomic explosions danced in my head.

Nobles stopped the shuttle, and the fuselage lowered, but I remained in my seat.

“That is the bad news. The good news is that the Avatari appear to want the planet in one piece.”

“Do they have other options?” I asked.

“General, with the kind of energy those tachyons produce, the aliens could demolish Olympus Kri. They could reduce it to a floating cinder or make it explode into atom-sized fragments. Our analysis of the attack on New Copenhagen leads us to believe that the aliens plan to annihilate any opposition on the planet without destroying the planet itself.”

“That’s the good news?” I asked.

“We do feel a little better knowing that they do not want to destroy the planet, yes,” Sweetwater said. I could not tell if the cocky little bastard was joking or not.

“Breeze says we’ll be safe if we’re fifty feet underground.”

There was a pause.

Normally, I let these pauses work themselves out. This time I asked. “What am I missing here?”

“We’ve looked at Arthur’s calculations,” Sweetwater hedged.

“You don’t agree with them?” I asked.

“Arthur’s calculations always add up perfectly,” he said, still not sounding confident. “In fact, we think you would be safe fifteen feet underground. It’s the intangibles that have us worried.”

“The intangibles?” I asked.

“With the kind of power the Avatari have in those Tachyon D particles, they could destroy the entire planet. That is clearly not what they plan to do; but our question is, how much damage will they be willing to inflict on the planet if they know you are on it?”

CHAPTER FIFTY

“Why is your fleet landing men?” Freeman asked me, as we watched the shuttle streak across the runway. I felt like a passenger on the deck of the Titanic watching the last of the lifeboats rowing away.

“Are you sure they’re ours? Maybe the Unifieds are landing troops,” I said, sensing another betrayal.

Freeman shook his head, and said, “No, these men are clones, and they are riding in on E.M.N. transports.”

“Shit,” I said, realizing who those clones would be. They were leaving the Double Ys behind. What do you do with seventeen thousand unwanted prisoners? I asked myself, and I knew the answer. If you considered them an inferior form of humanity, you sent them to burn.

“They’re killing the Double Y clones,” I said.

I felt no urge to prevent the genocide. I could not stop it if I wanted to; but deep down, I did not want to stop it. The Double Ys were volatile, as unstable as primed grenades, and potentially more dangerous. The universe would be a safer place without them.

“Are they in Odessa?” I asked, halfheartedly wondering if perhaps there might be some way to lead them to safety. I would not put my life on the line to save the pathetic bastards, but I might warn them to go underground.

“Jerome, it’s on the other side of the planet,” Freeman said. Jerome was the second largest city on Olympus Kri.

“So it’s out of our hands,” I said.

Freeman said nothing.

Our conversation had hit a stalemate that Sweetwater broke when he contacted us over the interLink. “Gentlemen, you should be aware that the temperature on Olympus Kri has risen by six degrees over the last fifteen minutes.”

Six degrees, I thought, putting the Double Ys out of my mind completely. “That doesn’t sound so out of the ordinary,” I said. It was late in the morning …

“Was that change global?” Freeman asked.

“Global,” said Sweetwater.

“So at this rate, we’ll hit nine thousand degrees in another six months,” I said.

“The surface temperature is unstable; but for what it’s worth, we don’t believe this change is a preamble to the event,” Sweetwater said. “Still, you might want to get to safety as quickly as possible.”

“Have you notified the fleet?” Freeman asked. He meant the Unified Authority Fleet. The Enlisted Man’s Fleet had supposedly come to oversee the evacuation; the Unified Authority had come to conduct it.

“Yes, sir,” Sweetwater said. “They are on the last stages of the evacuation as we speak.”

There were so many transports climbing through the skies over Odessa, they looked like a swarm of flies. How long would it take to lift seventeen million people? At one hundred people per transport, it would take 170,000 trips. How in God’s name did we ever get ourselves into this speck-up? I asked myself. I knew the answer. We didn’t. This one was thrust upon us.

Sweetwater said a quick good-bye and signed off.

Freeman had an all-terrain armored truck waiting just off the airstrip. Without saying a word, he headed toward that truck, knowing that I would follow. And I did.

I walked to the truck and climbed in on the passenger’s side, pausing for one last glance at the metropolis that had been zoned for extinction. The air was still and quiet. The sky was crisp and blue and clear, with frothy clouds floating across it. Twenty miles away, downtown Odessa loomed like a vertical shadow, like a butte that filled the horizon. The thousands of smoke trails rising above the city looked no more substantial than the filaments of a cobweb. They rose in odd angles and twisted into the sky.

“I used to know a girl from Olympus Kri,” I told Freeman. “I met her when I was on leave.”

“So she was scrub,” he said.

“She was my first,” I said, feeling nostalgic. I could not remember her name, but I remembered her smile and her laugh. The truck’s engine growled like some kind of prehistoric beast, and I sat back and closed the door and wondered if the girl had made it off the planet alive. I wondered if she remembered me.

We did not have far to drive. Freeman, as always, considered every contingency when he made plans. We cut across an empty suburb. I had seen many abandoned suburbs in the last few years, but I still got a haunted feeling when I saw them. Driving down avenues in which houses sat empty, the doors of some homes left open, I wondered if I would ever drive down neighborhood streets in which children still played.

Freeman veered toward the mountains, and I saw our destination. We would ride out the event in a power station that had been built into the side of a cliff.

Only the façade of the administrative offices was visible from the street. It was a three-story pillbox made of concrete and steel, with no effort given to ornamentation.

The land in front of the building was parklike, with sprawling hills, a manicured lawn, and a footbridge spanning a man-made river. Freeman drove us across this jade-and-sapphire setting and into a concrete alley that opened to a parking lot in which a fleet of heavy equipment sat unguarded—ladder trucks and cranes and bulldozers. Across the lot, the open maw of a subterranean bunker gaped from the side of a mountain.

“Picturesque,” I said to Freeman, who only grunted. He stopped the truck just inside the bunker, climbed out, and worked some buttons, causing a thick metal curtain to close behind us. Lights bloomed along the ramp leading down deep below.

“Think we’ll be able to exit the same way that we came?” I asked.

“There’s a back door if we need it,” he said as he climbed back in the truck. He had to work to wedge himself in behind the steering wheel. I would have offered to drive, but he would not have accepted the offer. Comfortable or not, he preferred to drive.

We drove down the spiraling ramp, passing floors with twenty-foot ceilings. The walls of the ramp were foot-thick cement. The subterranean structure housed massive turbines and generators. We had entered a shadowy underworld of concrete and steel, driving three floors down beneath the foot of a mountain.

“It doesn’t get much safer than this,” I said. I kept my armor on but took my helmet off. The air in the power station was cold and slightly moist. Once Freeman killed the engine on the truck, I listened for the whir of turbines; but I heard nothing.

Freeman placed his little two-way on the dash of the truck and tapped the button. A moment later, Sweetwater and Breeze appeared.

“I know they’re almost done, but they’re still cutting it too close,” Breeze said without looking into the screen. I got the feeling he was talking to Sweetwater. “The temperature on the planet is fluctuating wildly.”

Hearing this, I envisioned hundred-degree swings with snow falling on burning desert sands and melting into steam, but I knew better. We had just come from the surface.

Sweetwater put the fluctuations in perspective. He turned toward the camera, and said, “We’re seeing ten-degree temperature swings.”

So much for icebergs melting and oceans boiling, I thought.

“Have you told General Hill?” Freeman asked.

“He says they’re going as fast as they can,” answered Sweetwater.

“Oh my,” said Breeze. “They just had a twelve-degree fluctuation.” Shaking his head with decision, he looked into the camera, “It could happen any moment.” He grimaced. His looked like they were meant for chewing hay.

As it turned out, Breeze was wrong, the event did not occur for a long time. One hour passed, then another. Sweetwater and Breeze gave us hourly reports informing us that surface temperatures had stabilized more or less. Strangely, stabilized temperatures panicked Breeze just as much as fluctuations.

Three hours after we sealed ourselves in, Sweetwater called to tell us that the Tachyon D count had doubled over the last hour.

Between calls, I had nothing to do but sit and wait. I explored the power station, examining enormous turbines that reached to the ceiling. At one point, I went looking for something to eat. I found a refrigerator in the employee lounge and stole people’s lunches. Some of them were old, with withered apples and petrified bananas.

Despite the temptation to hoard food for myself, I brought the lunches back to the truck and shared them with Freeman. He chose a plate with several pieces of chicken. I took a sandwich.

“What if the building collapses?” I asked Freeman. “How are we going to dig our way out?”

He took a bite from a drumstick that looked like it might have come off a parakeet in his big hands. He bit off a mouthful of meat and pointed toward a distant wall, where an emergency exit sign glowed.

“Stairs?” I asked. “That’s your answer if the building comes down around us? We can just take the stairs.”

“The rest of the station will collapse before that stairwell,” he said.

We continued divvying the food. Freeman chose meats first. I went with fruits and snacks. By the time we got to the salads, we’d both lost interest.

Another hour passed. I thought about the Double Y clones. Did they know they were in danger?

Breeze called in to tell us that the last of the transports had docked with the barges. He guessed that a few looters might be left on the planet, but not many. He didn’t know that Warshaw was dumping prisoners to be killed. I wondered how he would have reacted to the news.

As Freeman chatted with Sweetwater and Breeze, I found a comfortable curve on the back of the truck and fell asleep against it.

Apparently, I slept right through the event.