The Clone Republic

CHAPTER ONE

“Name?” The sergeant barked the question without bothering to look up from his desk. I heard the indifference in his voice and could not fault him for his callous attitude. Nothing important ever happened in dried-up stink holes like Gobi. Once you got assigned to a planet like this, your only option was to sit and wait for a transfer. It could take years. I’d heard rumors about Marines spending their entire careers on backwater planets praying for any excuse to leave, even a war.

“Private First-class Wayson Harris reporting as ordered, sir.” I saluted, then handed him the sealed file that contained my orders.

I had shown up for this transfer wearing my Charlie Service uniform, not my armor. The uniform left me exposed to the desert air, and sweat had soaked through the material under my arms, not that this guy would notice. With his faded armor and stubble beard, this sergeant looked like he hadn’t bathed in years. All the same, I could barely wait to change into my armor. It wasn’t the protective chestplate and helmet I wanted. It was the climate-controlled bodysuit, which had kept me cool in temperatures even less livable than this desert.

“PFC Harris,” he echoed under his breath, not even bothering to look up. I shouldn’t have saluted. Once you leave basic training, you only salute officers or Marines acting under command authority. You don’t salute sergeants, and you certainly don’t call them “sir,” but it’s a hard habit to break.

Having just spent three months living the spit-and-polish discipline of boot camp, I had come to fear drill sergeants for the gods they were. This sergeant, however, struck me as a heretic. His camouflage-coated armor had dulled, and there was sand and oil caked in the joints. His helmet sat on the ground beside his seat. I had never seen a Marine remove his helmet while on duty. If the job required combat armor, you wore the whole thing, or you were technically out of uniform.

The sergeant sat slumped in his chair with his armor loosened to fit his wilting posture. My drill sergeant would have given me a week in a detention cell if he saw me sitting like that; but I didn’t think this guy worried about the brig. The brass doesn’t punish you unless it catches you, and I doubted that any officers had set foot in this outpost in years. Why visit a place like Gobi Station and risk having a superior order you to stay. It could end your career.

“PFC Harris…PFC Harris…Let’s see what we have here,” he mumbled as he broke the red strip sealing my files. He flipped through the pages, occasionally stopping to scan a line. Apparently having found what he wanted, he spread the file on his desk and absentmindedly wrapped his fingers around his bristle-covered chin, as he browsed my records. “Fresh out of recruit training,” he muttered. Something caught his eye, and he paused and mulled over the information before looking up at me. “A ‘1’ in combat readiness?” He sounded like he wanted to laugh. “I’ve never seen anyone score under four hundred.”

“It’s a performance ranking, sir,” I said.

He sneered when he heard the word, “sir.” “You say something, private?”

“That number was my school rank. I drew top marks in hand-to-hand combat and marksmanship.”

Godfrey cocked an eyebrow in my direction, then returned to my paperwork. “Son of a bitch, perfect scores,” he whispered. “Why waste a perfectly good Marine on a shithole planet like this?”

He looked up at me. “You have a problem following orders, Harris?”

“No, sir,” I said. I was, in fact, quite obedient by human standards. The military, however, had considerably higher standards. Most conscripts came out of clone farms that the government euphemistically referred to as “orphanages.” Designed specifically for military life, the clones raised in these orphanages reacted to orders by reflex, even before their conscious minds could grasp what they had been asked to do. If an officer told them to dig a hole in the middle of a sidewalk, concrete chips and sparks would fly before the conscripts stopped to analyze the command. The clones weren’t stupid, just programmed to obey first and think later. As a natural-born human, I could not compete with their autonomic obedience. My brain took a moment to sort out orders.

My inability to react to orders without thinking had caused me problems for as long as I could remember. I grew up in a military orphanage. Every child I knew was a clone. I might have entered Unified Authority Orphanage #553 the old-fashioned way—by having dead parents—but as a resident of UAO #553, I grew up with two thousand clones.

You would not believe the diversity that exists among two thousand supposedly identical beings. The Unified Authority “created all clones equal,” taking them from a single vat of carefully brewed DNA; but once they came out of the tube, time and experience filled in the cracks in their personalities. Look at a mess hall filled with two thousand clones, and they appear exactly alike. Live with them for any length of time, and the differences become obvious.

“Your file says that you are slow following orders,” Godfrey said.

“It’s comparing me to clones,” I said.

He nodded and flashed that wary smile sergeants use when they think you’re spouting bullshit. “Did you speck some officer’s daughter?”

“No, sir,” I said.

“No,” he grunted, and went back to my file. “Just wondering why they wasted a perfectly good recruit on a planet like this,” he said.

“Random assignment, I suppose, sir,” I said.

“Sure,” he said, and his smile turned caustic. “Well, Private First-class Harris, I am Glan Godfrey. You can call me ‘Glan,’ ‘Godfrey,’ or ‘Gutterwash.’ Do not call me ‘sir.’ Gobi is pretty much a long-term assignment. Get sent here, and you’re stuck for life. As long as you know that I am the sergeant and therefore the one you obey, you can forget everything they taught you in basic.”

Growing up in an orphanage, you learn how to spot clones—they’re all cut from the same helix. With Gutter-wash Godfrey, however, I could not readily tell. He had sun-bleached blond hair that nearly reached his shoulders. Every clone I had ever known had brown hair and an assembly-line flattop haircut. A decade on a desert planet could have fried the color out of Godfrey’s hair, I supposed. But the loose armor and the thick stubble on his cheeks and chin…I thought that the spit and polish was programmed into their DNA. Could ten years on a desert planet bleach a man’s programming the way it bleached his hair?

Godfrey pressed a button on his console. “Got a rack?” he asked, without identifying himself.

“Fresh meat arrive?” a voice asked back.

“Or a reasonable facsimile.”

“Send him down, I’ll put him in Hutchins’s old rack,” the voice said.

“Hutchins?” I asked, when Godfrey closed the communication. “Shipped out?”

“Nope,” Godfrey said.

“Killed in action?” I asked.

“Nope. Suicide,” Godfrey said. “Corporal Dalmer will meet you down that hall.” He pointed ahead.

“Thank you, sir,” I said instinctively, wasting another salute.

Godfrey responded with that sardonic smile. “The sooner you lose that, the better we’ll get along.”

I grabbed my two travel cases and started down the open-air hall. I had clothes and toiletries in one bag. The other bag held my gear—one helmet, a complete set of body armor, one body glove, one weapons-and-gear belt, one government-issue particle-beam pistol with removable rifle stock, one government-issue M27 pistol with removable rifle stock, and one all-purpose combat knife/bayonet with seven-inch diamond blade. Thanks to lightweight plastic-titanium alloys, the bag with the armor weighed less than the one with my clothes.

Halfway down the hall, I stopped to stare at my surroundings. After three months in the immaculate white-walled corridors of Infantry Training Center 309, I had forgotten that places like Gobi Station existed. No, that’s not true. I never suspected that the Unified Authority set up bases in such decrepit buildings.

Judging by the name, “Gobi,” I knew it was an early settlement. The cartographers used to name planets after Earth locations in the early days of the expansion. Back then, we settled any planet with a breathable atmosphere. That was before the science of terraformation passed from theoretical possibility to common practice.

The open-air hall from Godfrey’s office to the barracks buzzed with flies. One side of the hall overlooked a stagnant pool of oily water surrounded by mud and reeds. I noticed the tail end of an animal poking out through the reeds. As I looked closer, I realized that it was an Earth-bred dog, a German shepherd, and that it was lying dead on its side.

“Don’t worry, we run that through filters before we drink it,” the corporal at the other end of the hall said. Like Godfrey, this man wore his armor and body glove without his helmet. The environmental climate control in the bodysuit must have felt good. I was perspiring so much that the back of my uniform now clung to the curve of my spine. Rivulets of sweat had run down the sides of my ribs.

“We drink that?” I asked.

“You either drink that or you buy water from the locals. The locals jack you. You could blow a full week’s pay buying a glass of water from them. Only Guttman has that kind of money.” He looked off toward the pond. “That sludge doesn’t taste bad once you strain it.

“Name’s Tron Dalmer,” the corporal said as he stepped out from the doorway. “Whatever you did to get stationed here, welcome to the asshole of the friggin’ universe. Did Gutter-wash mention that we here at Gobi Station are the few and the proud?”

“No,” I said, feeling depressed.

“This here is the smallest Marine outpost in the whole damned U.A. Empire.”

I did not flinch, but Dalmer’s use of the word “Empire” gave me a start. The commanders who ran both the orphanage and the basic training facility continually grilled us on the difference between expansion and imperialism.

“How many men?” I asked, not sure that I wanted to know. Most outposts had anywhere from three thousand to five thousand Marines. I had heard of outposts on isolated moons that only had fifteen hundred men. Judging by the size of this three-story barracks building, I guessed the population of Gobi Station to be at least one thousand.

“Including you, forty-one,” Dalmer said. “The good news is that you don’t have to share your room. The bad news is that if the locals ever decide they don’t like us, they could trample our asses out of here. Of course, they barely notice us. Even with you we’re one man shy of a full platoon. Besides, they are so busy with their own wars, they hardly notice us.”

“So there is some action out here?” I asked.

Dalmer stared at me. “Fresh out of boot and in a rush to kill, eh?”

“I would hate to think that I wasted my time in boot camp,” I said.

Dalmer laughed. “You wasted it, Harris. We have standing orders to stay out of local feuds.” He led me into the barracks, an ancient building constructed of thick sandstone blocks with rows of modern dormitory cells wedged into its bulky framework. Each cell was designed to house four people, but no one lived in the cells on this floor. The doors hung open revealing dusty quarters. Gobi might once have played an integral part in the Unified Authority’s grand expansion, but that time clearly had passed. A thin layer of sand covered the floor, and I saw twisting trails where snakes had slithered across the floor.

“You can have this entire floor to yourself if you want,” Dalmer said. “Most of us prefer the bottom floor; it’s cooler in the summer. Cooler in the winter, too.”

“I take it this is summer?” I asked.

Dalmer snickered. “Boy, this is the dead of winter. Why do you think everybody’s got their helmets off? We want to enjoy the cool air while it lasts.”

He might have been joking, but I doubted it. He might have been hazing me. Maybe a battalion of grunts was hiding in some far end of the base watching me on a monitor and giggling as Godfrey and Dalmer dressed up in faded armor and tricked the gullible newbie into believing he had been assigned to Hell. My suspicions abruptly died when Dalmer brought me to the bottom floor. An entire division would not have cluttered the barracks so convincingly if they had worked on it for an entire month.

The only light in the chamber came from windows carved in the meter-thick walls. As my eyes adjusted, I saw hundreds of particle-beam pistols piled in one corner of the floor.

Dalmer followed my gaze and figured out what had caught my attention. “Broken,” he said. “Sand gets in the housing and scratches the mirrors. Leaves ’em worthless.”

On the open market, PB pistols sold for $2,000. Around the Corps, bullets were the ammunition of choice, but you could not count on them in low gravity or thin air. Particle-beam weapons were more difficult to maintain. You had to worry about prisms and energy coils—modular components that needed to be changed on a regular basis. “Why don’t you change out the mirrors?” I asked.

Dalmer spit out a bitter laugh. “Fix them? Gobi Station used to be the outermost armory of the Cygnus Arm. We have a thousand guns for every man on this base.” He stopped and thought for a moment. “Make that two thousand. We use them for shooting lizards. It’s easier to grab a new gun than to requisition replacement parts. Hell, Harris, it’s been two years since anybody’s even been out to the firing range. This is Gobi.”

He paused and stared into my eyes, probably wondering if I grasped his meaning. When I did not ask any questions, Dalmer continued. “Of course, we can’t just throw broken weapons away, or the locals will steal them. Godfrey dumped a load once. I think we armed half the planet.”

“Are there problems with the locals?” I asked.

“Not much. Some of them consider themselves gunslingers, but it’s all petty stuff. I doubt the Senate loses much sleep over Gobi.” Dalmer turned and headed into the barracks.

Most of the windows opened to that pond in the courtyard. Flies and a sulfurous smell wafted in on the trace of a breeze. I could barely wait to snap on my helmet and breathe filtered air, but Tron Dalmer did not seem to mind the stench. Nor was he bothered by the rest of the squalor— uniforms left hanging off furniture, plates of stale food, unmade bunks. Looking around the floor, I would have thought that spoiled children manned this outpost, not Marines.

“That was Hutchins’s cell over there,” Dalmer said.

The door swung open at my touch, and I immediately knew that someone, likely Dalmer or Godfrey, had searched through Hutchins’s belongings. His clothes were piled on the floor, his desk was swept clean, and his bed was stripped bare. Every drawer in the cell hung open from the wall.

“How long has this room been empty?” I asked. I wanted to ask Dalmer if he had found anything of value.

“Two, maybe three months,” Dalmer said. “Did Godfrey tell you about Hutchins?”

“Only that Hutchins committed suicide.”

“Put a goddamned particle-beam pistol in his mouth…Set his goddamned brain on fire.”

Dalmer left and I set up my quarters. Using a bloodstained sheet I found wadded in a drawer, I wrapped the late Private Hutchins’s belongings into a tight ball and stuffed them in a corner of the room. “Why am I here?” I asked myself. “Why the hell am I here?”

The only time we met as a platoon was at breakfast. Once or twice per week, Glan Godfrey briefed us about recent communiqués from fleet headquarters as we ate. Nobody listened during Godfrey’s briefings. We were as far from fleet headquarters as you could get without leaving the galaxy, and nothing command had to say seemed of any significance out here.

On most days, the platoon divided up after breakfast. Godfrey and Dalmer generally hung around the base. God knows why. The rest of the platoon piled into a couple of trucks and rode into town. They generally returned before supper. I think they wanted to stay out later, but the locals closed shop before sundown.

I spent my first month jogging around the outside wall of the base, holding target practice at the firing range, and trying to convince other men to join me. Most of the men laughed at the idea of drilling. Godfrey and Dalmer would not even discuss it. One corporal, Lars Rickman, came out and trained with me twice, but he quickly lost interest.

After six weeks I gave up on training alone and took my first trip into Morrowtown. Godfrey congratulated me on having more starch than Hutchins. The last new recruit before me, Hutchins, stopped training after less than one week. Life around the outpost became friendlier after I said I would go to Morrowtown.

Located a mere two hundred miles west of our outpost, Morrowtown had sixty thousand residents. On Gobi, it was the big league.

A word about our trucks—they were open-air transports with no armor and no guns. Beside the trucks, the only other vehicle in our motor pool was a dilapidated tank, generally referred to as “Godfrey’s Go-Cart,” that sat up to its axles in mud in the center of our courtyard. Oil trickled from the Go-Cart’s crank case and seeped into the pond; but as Dalmer often reminded us, “It all gets filtered out.”

Our trucks could have passed for farm equipment except that they had tank treads instead of tires. They were flatbeds with removable benches. Sizing up these twenty-foot-long Jurassic beasts, I could not begin to guess their age. They might have arrived with the first ship to land on Gobi.

“Shouldn’t these have guns or rockets mounted on them?” I asked Rickman, as we loaded up.

“Why?” he asked, looking mildly interested. He was the only man stationed on Gobi who even partially resembled a Marine. Not only had he at least attempted to train with me, he still polished his armor and carried a sidearm. When I did not answer his question about why we might want to carry a rocket launcher on the trucks, however, he mumbled something about hating fresh recruits.

Rickman was a clone, of course. All of the other Marines on Gobi were clones. Like Godfrey, Rickman had bleached hair and a gaunt face. The only Marine that Gobi had not made thin was Taj Guttman. Guttman had grown so fat that he no longer fit into his armor. He did not bother with his leg shields or boots; and he fastened his chestplate only at the top, wearing it around his neck like a stiff poncho. I doubt he would have bothered with armor if it were not for the climate controls in the bodysuit. Godfrey referred to Guttman as “Four-Cheeks,” meaning he had enough ass for two men. The name stuck, and everybody used it.

As the new kid on base, I got to sit next to Guttman as we drove to Morrowtown. He only talked about one thing— poker. I had never played cards. No one gambled at UAO #553. We talked about gambling and how much we would enjoy it, but young clones are not much for breaking rules. As the lone human in the orphanage, I had tried my best to blend in.

We didn’t play cards in boot camp, either. Until I arrived on Gobi, I assumed that all Marines trained hard and obeyed the rules. Of course, none of these Marines knew they were clones. Straight out of the tube, combat clones had brown hair and brown eyes, but through the miracle of neural programming, they thought of themselves as natural-born people with blond hair and blue eyes. That was how they saw themselves, too. When clones looked at themselves in the mirror, they saw blond hair and blue. God knows how the scientists pulled that off, but they did. And since clones were also hardwired not to speak about cloning among themselves, orphanages managed to raise thousands of clones without one clone telling the next he was synthetic.

Growing up, I used to eat in a cafeteria with thousands of identical cadets who never mentioned that everybody around them looked and sounded precisely alike. They could eat, shower, and shave side by side and not see the similarities they shared with the men next to them because of cerebral programming in their DNA. Even though they knew everyone else was a clone, they never suspected their own synthetic creation. Around the orphanage, people used to say that clones were wired to self-destruct if they ever understood the truth of their origin.

“Have you ever played poker?” Guttman asked. “It’s a great game. Laying your cards and catching everyone flatfooted”—he grinned as if in ecstasy—“there’s no better feeling.”

“I’ve never played,” I said.

“Stick with me, you’ll make a fortune,” Guttman said, sounding elated finally to have somebody who would listen to him.

Not having much to say to Guttman, I watched the desert as we drove. All I saw was sand and rock and clear blue sky. The ride lasted two hours—two hours trapped with Guttman. I was ready to hop off the truck and walk after the first hour. By the time we finally saw the city, my head hurt from all of Guttman’s babbling.

Built almost entirely out of sandstone bricks, Morrow-town blended into its environment. I saw the shapes of the buildings long before I realized what they were.

“Here we are,” Rickman yelled as he parked in a wide alleyway. Our muffler sputtered, and the chassis trembled as the engine coughed smoke.

“I hate these trucks,” Guttman moaned.

With few words spoken, the platoon divided into groups. Some men went to a saloon where they got drunk on a daily basis. They could not afford clean water, but whiskey and beer were in the budget. Others quietly kept girlfriends in town. Not wanting a generation of half-clone children, Unified Authority scientists designed clones that were sterile, but that did not mean that they left out the sex drive. “The goal is to copulate, not populate,” a drill sergeant once told me.

Guttman waited for me beside the truck. “Come with me. I’ll get you into the best game in Morrowtown,” he said in a secretive tone. Not having heard any better offers, I went with Guttman. “Leave your helmet in the truck. It makes you look silly,” he added.

“I think I’ll keep it on just the same.” Okay, I was already absent without leave, technically speaking, but I saw no point in adding “out of uniform” to the list of charges.

“Suit yourself, but you’re going to scare the locals,” Guttman said, sounding a bit deflated. But nobody seemed scared of me. The people ignored us. Children played happily as we passed them on the street. A gang of teenagers stood on a sidewalk flipping coins against a wall. They paused to stare at us, then went on gambling.

It shouldn’t be like this, I thought to myself. They should be a little afraid of us. Guttman, bobbing his head and waving at everyone we passed, clearly did not agree with me. His juvenile excitement showed in his chubby smile as he led me into a squat building that looked more like a bunker than a bar. Perhaps he liked the idea of showing off a new friend. Maybe he just loved playing cards. He came to this game every day and never grew tired of it.

“Ah, good, Taj Guttman. Excellent,” a soft voice mumbled with an accent so thick that I could barely understand it. A short man with a round body and a head that was as bald as an egg approached us. He could not have been taller than five-foot-two. He smiled as if he was glad to see us, but something in his oily voice said otherwise.

“Kline.” The name splashed out of Guttman’s mouth.

“You are early today,” the little round man continued, as I strained to decipher his words. This was the first time I had actually heard a Gobi native speak. He stretched vowels and slurred consonants so that when he next said, “And you have brought a friend,” it sounded like, ’aaaant you heeef broood a fryent.” He flashed his smile at me as he sized me up. “We have another visitor today as well.” In Kline’s thick tongue, the word “visitor” sounded like “fiztor.”

Guttman turned to me, and said in an unnecessarily loud voice, “This ugly mutt is Kline.” Up to this point in the trip, Guttman had struck me as being slow and stupid, but he had a way with languages. He matched Kline’s accent perfectly when speaking to the locals, but had not a trace of an accent when speaking to me. Then he turned to Kline, and said, “And this is Harris. Sorry about the helmet; I told him that it makes him look silly.”

“Harris” sounded like “Haaritz.” “Silly” was “tziillie.”

“I’m just here to watch,” I said.

“Watch?” Kline asked as his smile faded. “This game is for players only.”

“He’ll play,” Guttman said.

“Perhaps I should leave then,” I said. “I’ve never played, and from everything Guttman tells me, this is no game for beginners.”

“Nonsense,” Guttman chimed in. “Of course he’ll play.”

“I wish you would,” a soft voice said in beautiful Earth English. Someone had moved in behind me as Guttman and Kline led the way to the card room where several more players milled around a table. “I’m new at the game myself, and I hate the idea of getting swindled alone.” A tall man with thinning white hair and a well-trimmed beard stepped out from the shadows along the wall.

“You must have money to burn,” I said. “Guttman here is a card shark.”

“Is he?” the man said, his eyes narrowing. His mouth was all teeth and grins, but the warm smile did not extend to his eyes.

Guttman giggled nervously. “It’s all just fun.”

“I’m living on enlisted-man wages,” I said, “and my next check does not arrive for a week. I doubt I even have enough cash to buy my way into the game.”

“You may wager your weapon,” Kline said. “Sidearms are as good as cash at this table.”

“What was that?” I asked in astonishment.

“Don’t worry,” Guttman said, giggling nervously. He stepped closer to me, and whispered, “I never come here with cash.”

“I think I’m in the wrong place,” I said, already deciding that I would report this to Godfrey the moment we got back to base. I had never imagined such insubordination.

“I have no objection to your watching the game,” the bearded man said.

“They’ll pass information over their communications link,” another player complained, looking at my helmet. “He’ll tell Taj what we have in our hands.”

“As I understand it, that link only works if both soldiers are wearing helmets,” the bearded man said.

“What do you say?” Guttman asked Kline.

Kline considered. “Sit behind Guttman, and no walking around.”

I agreed.

“And I insist that you check your weapon,” said Kline, pointing at my pistol.

Seeing me hesitate, Guttman chimed in. “It will be safe. You cannot go anywhere in Morrowtown wearing your sidearm.”

Though I did not like the idea, I unstrapped my holster and handed it to Kline.

The seven men closed in around a large round table. I sat in a chair behind Guttman and watched as Kline dealt each player five cards—two facing up and three facing down. Guttman slipped his pudgy thumb under the corner of the three downturned cards and peered at their values.

The card room had no windows. The only light in the room was the pale glow of a lamp hanging over the table. I would not have been able to read Guttman’s cards had I removed my helmet. Our visors had lenses and filters designed for battle situations. Using optical commands, I activated a night-for-day lens that brightened my vision, then I used a magnification lens to get a better look at Guttman’s cards. When he bent the corners to have a look, I saw that he had two threes and an ace on the table. The cards that had been placed faceup were a king and a six.

Guttman slid the ace, the king and the six forward. Kline collected each man’s rejected cards and replaced them with cards from the deck. As Guttman fanned out his new cards, I saw that he had added a face card, a ten, and another three. He closed his hand and started bouncing in his seat.

The bids went around the table. When it came to Guttman, he pushed his pistol into the center of the table, and Kline handed him a tray covered with chips. I had no idea what Guttman’s new cards meant, but judging by his happy wheezing, he liked them.

The man with the beard looked pleased as well. “Well, this is a rare pleasure,” he said, and he spilled a stack of gold-colored chips on the table. The other players groaned as Kline circled the table again, gathering cards and replacing them with new ones.

“I’ll raise you,” Guttman said, and he carelessly tossed a stack of chips into the pot.

Some of the other players placed their cards on the table facedown and backed out of the game.

“Very aggressive move,” the bearded man said as he matched Guttman’s bid. “I have three kings.”

Guttman sighed and leaned back in his chair as the man raked in his winnings, including the pistol.

I watched this with growing irritation. Guttman, apparently enthralled by this situation, looked back at me and winked. Fortunately, no one could hear what I was uttering inside my helmet.

“Do all soldiers carry these?” the man with the beard said as he hefted Guttman’s particle-beam pistol. He did not touch the grip or the trigger. Instead, he treated the gun as if it might explode, gingerly pinching the barrel with his thumb and forefinger.

“Mostly we carry M27s,” Guttman said, “like the one Harris was wearing. I prefer the particle beam though, it’s worth a lot more money.” He laughed and squirmed in his seat, apparently anxious to start the next hand and win his weapon back.

“Quite a hefty weapon,” the man said. “It must be very sturdy.”

“You’d think so,” Guttman replied, “but they don’t do so well in the desert. We have piles of broken guns lying around our barracks.”

“Is that so?” the man asked. “Replacements must be easy to come by?”

“You kidding?” Guttman laughed. “Gobi Station used to be an armory. The place is a damned munitions depot. Isn’t that right?” Guttman asked, turning in his chair to look at me.

I did not answer.

“I see,” said the bearded man. He seemed to sense the tension coiling between Guttman and me. “So I shall need to take special precautions to keep this in working order.”

“Can we get on with the game?” a player called from across the table.

Kline dealt another hand of cards. This time Guttman had two queens and a king facing down, with a four and eight facing up. From what I could tell, he was not happy with these cards. As he had done in the last game, Guttman pushed three cards forward, then tossed some chips into the center of the table. Everybody else followed.

Kline pivoted around the table a second time, giving Guttman two fives and an ace. A few of the other players grimaced. Kline tapped his cards against his tiny chin. Guttman ripped a thunderous fart, then feigned embarrassment while giggling under his breath. Throughout the last hand, he had kept one platinum chip hidden under his cards. When his third bid came, he selected that chip and slid it forward. “I call,” he said.

Three of the other players grumbled and threw down their cards. Kline rolled his slow brown eyes. He looked at his cards, looked at the chips on the table, looked at his cards, and dropped his hand as well. “I’m out,” he said.

The bearded man stayed in.

Silently, Kline proceeded to move around the table changing cards for the three players who stayed in the game.

Guttman took two.

So did the man with the beard. Whatever the man got, it made him happy. He grinned and threw a platinum chip and two gold ones onto the table. They jingled and spun as they settled on the pile.

Guttman’s beefy hands hid his cards from my view; but I got the feeling he was strong. He started bouncing so hard in his chair that I expected it to splinter. He looked like a drowning man fighting for air. His chips were low, and I thought he might need to leave the game; but Guttman whispered something to Kline, and the dealer handed him another rack of chips. With a wicked grin, Guttman selected three gold chips and tossed them in the pot. Only then did I realize how Guttman had gotten that second rack of chips: He’d wagered my pistol.

I started to get up, but Guttman raised a hand to stop me.

“It’s okay, Harris,” he said. “I have everything under control.”

I wanted to kill Guttman, but I couldn’t. My pistol was gone, and the only chance I had to get it back would be if Guttman won the hand.

The bearded man’s eyes positively sparkled now. He smiled across the table at Guttman. “You are quite the player,” he said.

“How many?” Kline asked.

“Two,” said Guttman, and he pushed two cards forward.

Kline leaned forward and took the cards, then dealt new ones. I saw what they were as Guttman inspected them— two queens. Guttman spilled two-thirds of his chips onto the table.

“Unexpected,” the man with the beard said. “Wiser men…” With this he slid Guttman’s blaster into the pot. “This sees and raises the stakes, does it not?”

Guttman pressed his fingers on the tops of his cards. “You must be pretty confident,” he said.

I sure as hell did not feel confident.

Perhaps it finally dawned on Guttman that he might have to explain how he had lost both of our pistols. Perhaps, having no more guns to pawn, Guttman finally noticed the jagged edges behind the bearded man’s smile. He gathered up the few chips he had left, and said, “Let’s see what you have.”

The mystery man showed all of his cards—three kings and two aces.

Guttman let out a long breathy whistle. “A crowded house? Nice hand,” he said as he turned over his cards, showing four queens, “but I think the pot is mine.”

He turned to grin at me, but his smile vanished when he saw that I had climbed out of my chair. “I would like my pistol,” I said to Kline.

“Don’t leave now,” Guttman said. He jumped to his feet and walked over to me. Putting his hand by his mouth to block others from hearing, he whispered, “I’m just getting my stride. I’m about to clean these suckers dry.”

Stepping around Four-Cheeks, I grabbed my gun.

“Listen, pal,” Guttman said, grabbing me by my shoulder. Before I realized what I was doing, I spun and slammed my fist into Guttman’s mouth. His legs locked and fell out from under him as he dropped flat on his ass. Rather than attempt to get up, he sat where he fell, wiping blood from his split lip.

“I’m leaving now,” I said. This time, Guttman made no attempt to stop me.

CHAPTER TWO

Old and sparse and dilapidated, Gobi Station did not have air-conditioning or any other form of climate control. It did not matter during the winter, when a cooling draft blew through the open-air corridors and enormous verandas, but winter ended so suddenly that it seemed like somebody switched it off. One day we had a breeze and the next morning the winds were withering. Daytime temperatures reached a dry 120 degrees. When the desert cooled after sunset, the temperature dropped to a tolerable 90 degrees.

Glan Godfrey continued making his cursory announcements every few days as we ate breakfast out of Meals Ready to Eat (MRE) tins. He didn’t care if we listened or if we whispered back and forth as he spoke. A couple of weeks after my first visit to Morrowtown, however, Godfrey showed up for breakfast with a regulation haircut and a shave. He told us to put down our forks and pay attention.

Godfrey passed around a photograph. Someone called, “Pictures from home?”

“Shut up and listen,” Godfrey said in an uncharacteristically severe voice. “The entire Central Cygnus Fleet is on alert. Command is looking for this man. His name is…”

Godfrey paused to check the bulletin. “Amos Crowley. Have any of you grunts seen him?”

“Doesn’t he live in Morrowtown?” Lars Rickman joked with the man sitting next to him.

I was laughing with everybody else when Dalmer passed the picture my way. Crowley had intense dark eyes, white hair, and a thick white beard. I looked over at Taj Guttman squirming in his seat. We both recognized him, though Guttman clearly did not want to say anything. It was the man from the card game.

“What is he wanted for?” I asked.

“The bulletin doesn’t say much about what he’s done,” Godfrey said. He held his notes up and read in a soft voice that almost seemed meant for a private conversation. “ ‘Crowley is sought for involvement in several seditious activities.’ The brass in Washington labeled him an enemy of the Republic.”

“He’ll fit right in on Gobi; nobody likes the U.A. over here,” someone bawled from the back of the room.

“Crowley was a general in the Army,” Godfrey said. The laughing stopped, but I could hear men whispering to each other. “That makes him special. He was the highest-ranking general in the Perseus Arm before he disappeared. Now Washington wants a word with him in the worst way.”

“He might be here,” I said, and the hall went silent. “I saw him two weeks ago. One of Guttman’s card games.”

Glan Godfrey turned toward me. “Are you certain about this, Harris?”

“Yes,” I said, suddenly feeling like a Marine again.

“What about you, Guttman?”

“It was a while ago…” he said. “I mean, I guess that looks like him, but I was…”

“You festering sack of eye pus,” Godfrey said in a voice that echoed a dawning realization. “Did you bet your sidearm?” When Guttman did not answer, Godfrey’s glare hardened. “Shit, Guttman, you lost your sidearm, didn’t you?”

“I won it back with the next hand.” Guttman sounded scared.

“Shut your speck-receptacle!” Godfrey snapped. “Fleet Command is going to want a full report. I’ll be surprised if we don’t all end up in front of a firing squad for this, Four-Cheeks.” He glared at Guttman for another moment, then turned toward me, and said, “Harris, come with me.”

Taking short, brisk strides, and not saying a word, Godfrey ushered me to his office. He worked in a cavernous chamber that had probably once served as an entire office complex. The platoon could have bunked in the space. Real estate was never a problem on Gobi.

Godfrey’s desk sat in a far corner. Light poured in through arc-shaped windows along the domed ceiling. “I need you to report what you saw to Fleet Command,” Godfrey said, as we walked toward his desk.

“You want me to do it?”

“I’m not letting Guttman anywhere near Command. Harris, we’re in trouble here. Admiral Brocius has taken a personal interest in this hunt. You think I’m going to show him that moron?”

“Brocius?” I asked, feeling numb in the knees. Vice Admiral Alden Brocius, the highest-ranking officer in the Central Cygnus Fleet, had a reputation for being hard-nosed.

Godfrey chuckled bitterly. “Brocius is personally directing the manhunt.” He looked at me and smiled. “Don’t worry about your career, Harris. You’re on Gobi, you’re already in the shits.”

Godfrey crouched in front of his communications console and typed in a code. A young ensign appeared on the screen. He studied Godfrey for a moment, then asked the nature of the call. Godfrey said he had a positive sighting of Amos Crowley, and the ensign put the call on hold. When the screen flashed on again, Brocius, a tall and slender man with jet-black hair and brown eyes, stared back at us.

“What is it, Sergeant?” the admiral asked in a brusque voice.

“Two of my men spotted General Crowley.”

“I see,” Brocius said, sounding more interested. “You have a positive identification?”

“Yes, sir. One of the men who identified him is with me now.”

“Let’s have a word with him,” Brocius said.

Godfrey saluted and moved back. I stepped forward and saluted.

“What is your name, son?”

“PFC Wayson Harris, sir.”

“You saw Amos Crowley?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you believe he is still on Gobi?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Do you have any reason to believe he has left the planet?”

“No, sir.”

“Then you believe he is still on Gobi?”

“He did not tell the private his plans, sir.”

“I realize that,” Brocius said, starting to sound irritated. “Do you think he is still on Gobi?”

I did not know how to answer. I had no idea if Crowley was still on Gobi, and Brocius did not seem to care. It seemed like the admiral wanted me to say that Crowley was still here. I stole a glance at Godfrey and saw him nodding.

“Well, which is it?”

“He may be here, sir.”

“I see. Very well then, put the sergeant back on.”

Godfrey stepped up to the receiver. “Your man does not seem confident,” Brocius said. “Still, if there is anything to it…I’ll send someone to investigate.”

Perhaps I overestimated Crowley’s importance. I don’t think that I expected the Central Cygnus Fleet to converge on Gobi, but I did expect a significant force. I expected marshals guarding the spaceport and a surveillance fleet blockading the planet…a full-blown manhunt. Admiral Brocius did not send any of those things. He sent one man—Ray Freeman.

Three days after my interview with Admiral Brocius, a beat-up barge appeared in the sky above our base. It was early in the morning, and the barge left a contrail of oily smoke in the otherwise immaculate sky. Lars Rickman and I happened to be standing in a breezeway enjoying the 90-degree morning chill when the ship first appeared. We watched as it touched down on the loading area beside our outer wall, its gear making a shrill grinding noise as it settled on the tarmac.

“What a wreck,” Rickman said, as we trotted down for a closer look.

The barge had battered armor. Some of the plates around its cockpit had curled along the edges. There were rows of inset doors along its forty-foot hull that looked as if they might have housed an impressive array of weapons.

“This bitch has been through a war,” Rickman said. He had a bemused smile as he looked back and forth along the spaceship’s dilapidated hull. As we walked around the rear of the ship, the hatch opened, and Ray Freeman emerged— the biggest man I have ever met, standing at least seven feet tall with arms and legs as thick as most men’s chests.

Freeman was a “black man.” Understand that since the United States brought the world together in a single “unified authority,” racial terms like “African,” “Oriental,” and “Caucasian” had become meaningless. Under the Unified Authority, the Earth became the political center of the galaxy. Most commerce, manufacturing, and farming were done in the territories, and the territories were fully integrated. I heard rumors about certain races refusing to marry outside of their own; but for the most part, we had become a one-race nation. So when Ray Freeman, whose skin was the color of coffee without a trace of cream, stepped out of his ship, it was like the return of an extinct species.

It wasn’t just that Freeman was taller and several shades darker than any man I had ever seen. It was that his biceps were the size of a grown man’s skull when he bent his arms, and his triceps looked like slabs of rock when his arms hung straight. And it was that you could see the outlines of those muscles through the stiff, bulletproof canvas of his sleeves.

Freeman’s shaved head was so massive that it looked like he was wearing a helmet. A small knot of scars formed a paisley pattern on the back of his skull. He had a wide nose, which looked as if it had been broken several times, and thick lips. His neck was as wide around as either of my thighs. It completely filled the collar of his jumper, a garment that looked lost between Army fatigues and a pilot’s uniform. Dents and scratches dotted every inch of the massive armored plate that covered his chest and shoulders. Judging by the scars and battered armor, I knew this man had enemies.

“Who commands this outpost?” Freeman asked.

“That would be Sergeant Godfrey,” Rickman said, looking more than a little intimidated.

“Take me to him,” Freeman said, in a soft and low voice that reminded me of gunfire echoing in a valley.

Without saying a word, Rickman turned and walked straight to Godfrey’s office. Relieved to get away from the giant, I stayed back to examine this strange, old ship. When Rickman returned a few moments later, he mumbled something like, “tear off his friggin’ head and spit in the holes.”

“Who is he?” I asked.

“Don’t know,” Rickman said.

“I think I’ll stay out of his way,” I said.

“Don’t count on it,” Rickman said. “He sent me out here to get you.”

“You’re joking.”

“No, I’m not. You get to go meet with Chuckles down in Godfrey’s office.”

I took a deep breath and headed for the barracks to grab my helmet. By that time, it occurred to me that Admiral Brocius might have sent the visitor, and I did not want to be caught out of uniform twice in one night. When I reported to Godfrey, I saw Freeman sitting cramped behind the sergeant’s desk as if it were his own. Godfrey met me as I closed the door.

“Harris, this is Ray Freeman. He is here on orders from Admiral Brocius,” Godfrey said, using the interLink system built into our helmets so that Freeman would not hear us.

“Here to catch…?” I asked.

“He’s a mercenary,” Godfrey said, “and a real charmer.”

“Two men saw Crowley,” Freeman said in that same implacable voice.

“The other man was Private Guttman,” Godfrey answered on his open microphone.

“Get him,” Freeman said.

“Go get him, Harris,” Godfrey said.

As I started to leave, Freeman said, “You go get him, Sergeant. I want to speak with the private.” Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to go look for Guttman.

Sergeant Godfrey left without looking back.

“Remove your helmet,” Freeman said as he placed a folder with the Central Cygnus Fleet seal on the desk. “This is the man you saw?” he asked, pulling a photograph from the top of the folder.

“Yes,” I said. “I saw him enter a poker game in Morrow-town.”

“You’re sure this was the man?”

I nodded.

“Tell me about the game,” Freeman said, with that low, rumbling voice. He listened carefully as I told the story, his face betraying no emotion. He did not say anything when I finished. Looking through me, he reached over and pressed the intercom button on Godfrey’s desk, and said, “Send in the other one.”

Godfrey and Guttman stepped into the room. Sergeant Godfrey retreated to a far corner and sat quietly.

Guttman, sweat rolling down his pale and puffy face, stood trembling before the desk. He had tried to dress properly for the meeting, but his armor would not cooperate. He wore his helmet, which no longer fit over his globe-shaped head, like a crown around his forehead. Guttman’s chest-plate dangled from his neck. He’d used belts to lash his forearm guards and thigh plates in place. If I had not known that Taj Guttman was a Marine, I would have guessed that he was a comedian doing a parody of military life.

Freeman seemed not to notice. No glint of humor showed in his face as he directed Guttman to a chair by the desk with a nod. Once Guttman lowered himself into his chair, Freeman showed him the picture of Crowley. “This the man?”

“I’m not sure. It may have been him. It could be him. I really did not get a good look at that man,” Guttman twittered nervously. “I suppose Harris told you where we saw him?”

“He mentioned a card game,” Freeman said.

“I see,” said Guttman. “Whoever he was, he wasn’t very good at cards. He won the first hand, then I cleaned him out on the second. He quit after the third hand.”

“What were the stakes?” Freeman asked.

“Morrowtown isn’t exactly a gambler’s paradise,” Guttman said, as sweat dribbled down his forehead. “You might take home $50 if the locals are feeling dangerous.”

“I understand you can also win government-issue sidearms?” Freeman said.

Guttman turned completely white. He must have hoped that I would hide that part of the story. He glared at me for a moment, then turned back to Freeman. “Yes, I suppose. I don’t think he had ever seen one before. He held it like he was afraid it would bite him.”

“Is that the pistol?” Freeman asked, pointing down at Guttman’s holster.

Guttman fished it out of its sleeve and placed it on the desk. Freeman picked it up between his thumb and forefinger, exactly as Crowley had done. Dangling from the mercenary’s thick fingers, Guttman’s gun looked like a child’s toy. “Is this how he held it?”

“Yeah. Yeah, just like that.”

“Idiot,” Freeman said, placing the pistol back on the desk. “He shut off the charge guard outtake valve. This pistol will explode the next time you fire it.”

Guttman looked at the weapon as if it had suddenly grown fangs. Spinning it in place rather than picking it up, he checked the energy meter, gasped, then moved his hands away quickly. “What do I do with it? Will it blow up?”

Freeman did not bother answering. Turning toward the communications console, he quietly said, “Take your weapon and wait in the hall.” Guttman picked up his pistol and held it out in front of him as far as his arms could reach. Keeping both eyes fixed on the gun, he shuffled out of the office. I did not know which scared him more, carrying a sabotaged pistol or talking to Freeman.

“You wait outside, too,” Freeman said to me.

I started to leave, then stopped. “Excuse me, sir,” I said. “I remembered something else.”

Freeman, who was now standing behind the desk, stared down at me. He did not say anything as he waited for me to speak.

“When Guttman lost that first game, he said something about sand ruining these guns. He told Crowley that we had

thousands of them around the base.”

Freeman looked at me and nodded.

“That will be all, Harris,” Godfrey said over the interLink.

“Don’t go far,” Freeman said.

As I left the room, I found Guttman pacing in the hallway. He stormed over to me and stared into my visor. His pudgy face turned red, and his lips were blue as he snarled at me. “Great job, pal! Now I’m in deep.”

“Guttman, that gun would have blown up in your face if you ever got around to shooting it,” I said.

Guttman stopped for a moment and thought. His breathing slowed. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” He pointed down the hall where his pistol lay on a table. “Do you know how to fix it?”

If there is one thing you learn in basic training, it’s how to maintain a sidearm. All he had to do was open the buffer valve and discharge some gas. But Guttman had forgotten basic training. It must have been years since he had last stripped and cleaned a pistol.

“Drain the chamber,” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “Can you help me?”

The door opened behind us, and Godfrey peered out. “Harris. Mr. Charming would like another word with you.”

As I stepped back into Godfrey’s office, I saw Freeman talking to Admiral Brocius on the communications console. “What is your next step?” Brocius asked.

“I want to have a look around Morrowtown,” Freeman replied.

“Keep me informed,” Brocius said as he signed off. Freeman placed the photograph of Crowley back in his folder. Then he turned to look at me. “Do you have any civilian clothing?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Dress down; I need you to take me into Morrowtown.”

As we climbed into the truck, I said, “We’ll save a couple of hours if we go in your flier.”

Freeman glared down at me, and said, “We’ll take the truck.”

“Is there a reason I am wearing civilian clothes?”

“Yes,” Freeman said, and he did not speak again for the entire two-hour trip. I tried to distract myself with memories of boot camp, but you cannot ignore a man whose very presence radiates intensity. I could feel him sitting beside me. I suppose he chose the truck to avoid calling attention to himself; but there was no way this black-skinned giant was going to slip into Morrowtown unnoticed. Just thinking about Freeman trying to be inconspicuous made the long ride pass more quickly.

The townspeople may have grown accustomed to Marines, but the sight of Freeman sent them running. People hurried out of our way as we walked through the streets. When we got to the gambling house, we found it locked tight. “Do you think anyone is in there?” Freeman asked.

It was late in the afternoon, but Guttman usually played well into the evening. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Good enough for me,” Freeman replied. He drew an oversized particle-beam pistol from his belt and aimed it at the door. Without warning, he fired a sparkling green beam at the door, which disappeared behind a cloud of smoke and sparks. Then, lifting a massive boot, he kicked the smoldering remains out of the doorway.

“We could have knocked,” I said.

Freeman did not answer as he disappeared into the smoke.

Kline had struck me as somewhat timid the first time I saw him. On this occasion, he went from timid to terrified. As I stepped through the doorway, I saw him standing beside the liquor bar inside the foyer, the same place he had been standing the time I came with Guttman.

Looking both scared and surprised, Kline stared unblinkingly at the remains of the door, then raised his hands in the air to show that he held no weapons. His gaze shifted in our direction, and he said, “May I help you?”

Freeman walked over to Kline and placed the photograph of Crowley on the bar. “We’re looking for this man.”

Kline looked down at the photograph and studied it for a minute. “He came in a month ago. That was the only time I ever saw him.”

“What do you remember about him?” Freeman asked.

“He played a few hands and left; that’s all I know,” Kline said, trying to sound casual.

“Maybe this will jog your memory,” Freeman said, pulling out his pistol and pressing its muzzle into the fleshy area between Kline’s eyes.

Kline’s eyes crossed as they looked up the barrel, but he remained composed. “I think he came here looking for soldiers. He asked me if any of the Marines from the base were coming and offered me $100 to let him join the game.” Kline’s voice trembled, but only slightly. Considering the size of the pistol pressed against his head and the damage that pistol had done to his door, I thought Kline remained amazingly calm.

“Anything else?” Freeman asked.

“That’s everything,” Kline said.

Never shifting his gaze from Kline’s face, Freeman placed his pistol on the bar. He did so very gently, taking great care not to scratch the finish. Then he reached into a pocket below his chestplate. After fishing around for a moment, he removed a small silver tube.

“Your name is Kline, is that right?”

“Yes,” Kline said, staring at the tube.

“Do you know how to kill ants, Mr. Kline?”

“By stepping on them?” Kline asked.

“Yes, you can kill one ant that way, but I mean a whole hill of ants.”

Kline shook his head.

“You poison one ant with something slow and highly toxic. Kill it too fast, say, by stepping on it or using a fast poison, and all you have is a dead ant. But if you use the right poison, something that works real slow, that ant will infect his entire colony.”

“Is that poison?” Kline asked.

“No, sir,” Freeman said, shaking his head. “Just a little Super Glue.” He pushed one of Kline’s hands down on the bar with the palm up. Kline tried to close his fingers; but when Freeman squeezed his wrist, the hand fell open. “Now you keep that hand right there, right like that, Mr. Kline.”

Freeman pulled the eyedropper out of the tube and squeezed, forcing several drops of clear white liquid to ooze onto Kline’s trembling palm. “See, that didn’t hurt. A little glue won’t hurt you.”

Kline sighed with relief.

“Now this, this could hurt you.” Freeman pulled something that looked like a lime from his pocket and pressed it into Kline’s freshly glued hand.

Kline was no soldier, but he recognized the grenade the moment he saw it. “What are you doing?”

Freeman closed Kline’s fingers around the grenade and held them shut as he quietly counted to sixty. When he released Kline’s fingers, he wiggled the grenade to make sure the glue held fast. Then he pulled the pin from the grenade. “Ever seen one of these?”

Kline was speechless.

“This is a grenade. A high-yield grenade will take out a full city block. This here is a low-yield grenade. Small ones like this aren’t nearly so bad. It might only destroy a couple of buildings.”

“I see,” Kline said, his composure gone.

“I made this one just for situations like this,” Freeman continued. “This grenade senses body heat. As long as there are no temperature fluctuations, you’ll be perfectly safe. You might want to use your other hand when you grab ice out of that freezer over there. Freezing air would set it off for sure. Don’t pry the grenade from your palm. A change in temperature like that’ll set it off, too. You wouldn’t want to hit it with a hammer or drill into it, either.”

“I see,” said Kline.

“See that hole where I took the pin? If anything goes in that hole except this exact pin, that grenade will explode. Don’t stick anything in that hole. You understand?”

“Yes,” Kline stuttered.

“You might lose some skin when I pry the grenade out of your hand.”

“When?” Kline asked.

“Think you can remember all that?” Freeman asked, ignoring the question.

“When will you take it?” Kline responded.

“The grenade is set to explode in forty-eight hours,” Freeman said. “If I don’t see you before then, I guess you can keep it.”

Kline’s generally nonplussed facade melted, and his lips pulled back into a grimace. “But…but how will I find you? Why are you doing this?”

“We’ll call this an incentive, Mr. Kline. I think you know more information than you are telling me,” Freeman said.

Kline looked at me for help, but only for a moment. “How will I find you?”

“I’ll be at the Marine base, Mr. Kline. You come down and visit me if you remember something. But don’t wait too long. Don’t show up in forty-seven hours and fifty-nine minutes because I won’t want to talk to you.” With that, Freeman packed up his picture of Crowley and his gigantic pistol. He screwed the cover back on the tube and started for the door. I followed.

“What makes you so sure he’s hiding something?” I asked, as we stepped out onto the empty street.

Freeman did not answer. Having reverted to his silent self, he walked to the next building. “Stop here,” he said, ignoring my question.

The air was hot and dry. Since I was not wearing my climate-controlled bodysuit, the early evening felt like an oven. The sun started to set, and the sky above Morrowtown filled with crimson-and-orange clouds. The buildings, mostly two- and three-story sandstone structures, took on a particularly gloomy look in the dying daylight. Lights shone in some nearby windows. Freeman’s khaki-colored clothes looked gray in the growing darkness.

“How do you know Kline is hiding something?” I asked again.

“I’m not sure he is,” Freeman said. “I want to track him if he leaves town.”

“In case he goes to warn Crowley?” I asked.

Freeman did not answer.

“So that wasn’t a grenade? It was just a tracking device?” Suddenly Freeman seemed almost human. I laughed, remembering Kline’s terrified expression.

“No, that was a homemade grenade. I placed a radioactive tracking filament inside the glue.”

I did not see the point in gluing a grenade to Kline’s hand. I believed him when he said that he did not know anything.

Despite his lack of social skills, Freeman knew how to read people. Moments after we left the bar, Kline popped his head out of the door. He spotted us and jogged over, carefully cradling his left hand, the one with the grenade, as if he were holding an infant.

“You won’t leave Gobi?” Kline asked.

“Do you remember something?” I asked.

“No,” he said, shaking his head but never taking his eyes off Freeman.

“I’ll be at the base,” Freeman said in his rumbling voice.

Freeman turned and walked toward the truck. I followed. “Do you think he is a spy of some sort?” I asked quietly.

“I don’t trust him,” Freeman said.

Freeman and I did not speak to each other during the drive back to base, but the silence did not bother me this time. He sat very still, his eyes forming sharp slits as he surveyed the moonlit landscape.

Perhaps I was slow. We were nearly back to Gobi Station before I realized that Freeman was looking for enemies. For all we knew, Crowley had an entire army on the planet, and he could easily ambush us on our way back to the fort. A lone soldier and a mercenary would not stand much of a chance in an ambush, but Freeman, well armed and always watchful, would not go down so easily.

If we drove past any enemies that night, they did not make a move. Except for the hollow cry of distant lizards scurrying along some far-off dune, I never saw any signs of life.

Gobi Station might have been the grandest building on the entire planet. Several times larger than any building in Morrowtown, the outpost had huge sandstone walls lined with columns and arches. A domed roof covered each corner of the structure. The first settlers on Gobi were probably Moslem—Gobi Station had a Moorish look about it. The outpost’s sturdy walls and thick ramparts made for a good fortress. The yellow light of our poorly powered lanterns poured out from the outpost’s arches and reflected on the gold-leafed domes. As we drove toward the motor pool, I felt warm relief in the pit of my stomach. We parked the truck, and I returned to my cell to sleep. Freeman headed toward Gutterwash Godfrey’s office. I suppose he wanted to report to Vice Admiral Brocius.

Taj Guttman met me at the door of the barracks. At night, he wore a long, white robe that he cinched with a belt around his gelatinous stomach. The belt looked equatorial. “What happened in town?”

“Not much,” I said, pulling off my shirt. I walked into my cell hoping to get away from Guttman. He followed. Trying to ignore him, I dropped my pants.

“Did you find Crowley?”

“No, but Freeman made quite an impression on Kline. That Freeman is a real prick. He glued a grenade to Kline’s hand.”

“He what?” Guttman sounded shocked. He made a whistling noise. “So do you think I’m going to get in trouble?”

“I don’t think Freeman cares about you. I don’t think he cares about anybody. Just stay out of his way. You’ll be okay unless he decides to shoot you.”