The Clone Republic

CHAPTER THREE

Kline had a secret, and Freeman must have figured it out. Working with subtle clues that escaped my attention, Freeman pieced that secret together and shared it only with Admiral Brocius, leaving the rest of us unprepared.

Looking back, I should have seen it coming. A stockpile of military-grade weapons in a tiny garrison would be too easy a prize for a struggling army of traitors to ignore. Judging by Guttman and the other men who went into town, Crowley would expect little resistance if he attacked Gobi Station. Who knew how long he had had our base under surveillance. He had probably known our numbers, might even have been watching when Ray Freeman landed. Freeman’s arrival probably worked like a catalyst, spurring Crowley to act sooner than he had intended.

Freeman knew that someone like General Crowley would not come to a backwater planet like Gobi for no reason. If Crowley was here and weapons were here, Crowley undoubtedly wanted the weapons. Freeman didn’t share this useful information, however, because he had come on a bounty-hunting expedition and wanted to capture Crowley. If he had warned us, we would have prepared for the attack and Crowley would have seen us mounting guns and sending out patrols. He might have tried to flee the planet, and Freeman did not want that. Freeman had sized up the situation and decided to offer up my platoon as bait.

Crowley made his move the following morning. It started with a single explosion that shattered the silence and shook the desert like cracking thunder. The explosion came from the north side of the base, rattling the outpost’s massive walls.

I jumped from my bed and looked out a window in time to see the last remnants of an enormous fireball dissolving into the sunrise. The bomb had demolished Ray Freeman’s ship, cutting off our only escape route and destroying our only hope of air support.

Silence followed.

For the next ten seconds, the Gobi desert returned to its peaceful self. A burned red sunrise filled the horizon as the echo of the explosion rolled across the desert. I felt the last of the evening breeze through my window as I turned to throw on my armor. It took me less than thirty seconds to slip on my armor and helmet. I snapped the rifle stock on my M27 and exited my cell. Rickman came running from his cell and the others followed, including Taj Guttman, with his helmet stuck to the top of his head like a hat.

Their armor still worked. The smart-lenses in my visor registered signals transmitted by the other Marines’ armor. When I looked at Rickman, Sarris, and Guttman, a computer in my helmet picked up signals from their armor and displayed their names and ranks in red letters. I heard several of the men asking questions over the interLink.

“What the hell was that?” Rickman shouted above the noise. Before I could tell Rickman about seeing the fireball, Sergeant Godfrey leaped down the stairs to join us.

“Everybody up top. Cover the entrances,” Godfrey yelled. He carried a particle-beam pistol in his hand and used it to point up the stairs. I could hear men hyperventilating as they ran up and realized that I was about to go to battle with men who no longer had soldiering in their blood.

As we reached the top of the barracks, a rocket struck just outside the arched entrance. A cloud of dust and smoke filled the open-air hallway leading to the main gate.

“I see them,” one man shouted, firing wildly through an outer window.

I looked over his shoulder, but did not see anything. Even when I scanned the area using the heat-vision lens in my visor, I saw nothing, though the smoke and flames from the explosion almost certainly distorted my view.

Switching back to standard combat vision, I peered through the thinning dust cloud. A ring of small fires still burned around the ten-meter-wide hole that the rocket had left in our walkway. Constructed of massive sandstone blocks, the outpost could withstand gunfire, but not rocket attacks.

Looking at the jagged remains of the hall and hearing the chaotic chatter of the Marines around me, I did not feel scared or confused. I felt soothed. That must sound odd. It was the same feeling I have when I eat a favorite food or hear a familiar song. The world seemed to slow down, and my thoughts became clearer. It felt good. Everything around me was chaos, but I felt happy. It had never happened to me during the simulations back at the orphanage or during basic. If that was how it felt to be in a real combat situation, I didn’t mind it.

“Sarris, Mervin, Phillips. Secure the main hall.” Godfrey shouted orders over the interLink. Without so much as a moment’s hesitation, three Marines pulled their pistols and charged down that shattered hallway. Automatic fire struck Sarris as he left the cover of the barracks. The first shot banked off the back of his shoulder plates, spitting chips of armor. Two more shots struck his head, shattering his helmet and spraying blood and brains in the air. He twisted and fell to the ground. Mervin and Phillips ran past him and sprinted through a volley of bullets and laser fire.

“Harris, go with them,” Godfrey yelled.

Clones like Sarris reacted to orders by reflex, but I needed a moment. “Move out!” Godfrey shouted again, as I reached the door. I leaped over Sarris, landed on a layer of grit and debris, and slid, almost falling over. Bullets ricocheted off the walls around me. Clutching my gun close to my chest, I ran toward the crumbling ledge where the rocket had blasted through the walkway.

A few feet ahead of me, Mervin lay on the ground beside the shredded wall. He had been shot in the head and part of his helmet and visor littered the ground around him. I saw the singed skin and one brown eye, crazy with fear, staring at me.

“Harris, what are you doing?” Godfrey snapped. “What are you waiting for?”

“Mervin’s alive,” I said.

Rockets had destroyed the promenade around Mervin. I could not get to him without exposing myself. Judging by the way they hit Sarris and Mervin, Crowley had a dead-eyedick sniper out there. I dropped to my stomach and pulled myself forward.

“Forget Mervin,” Godfrey screamed. “I want that side of the base secured. Do you understand me?”

“I can get him out of here,” I said.

Someone shot at me. A slug passed just over my back and tore into the wall behind. Rubble showered my head and shoulders.

“I gave you an order,” Godfrey yelled.

Just then, I heard a hissing sound that I recognized at once. Rolling to one side, I hid behind a pile of rubble as a rocket slammed into the remains of the walkway about thirty feet ahead of me. My visor instantly polarized, shielding my eyes from the blinding flash.

Already weakened from the first blast, the breezeway collapsed. My armor protected me from shrapnel and flying fragments of sandstone as I fell amidst the rubble. I landed on my stomach, crushing the air out of my lungs.

“Harris. Harris!” Godfrey’s voice rang in my ears, but I could not suck enough air into my lungs to answer.

“Damn,” Godfrey said, but his grieving did not last long. “Phillips get to my office and contact Fleet Command. We need reinforcements, and now.” Why Godfrey would ask for reinforcements from a fleet that was thousands of light-years away was beyond me.

I rolled from side to side, trying to draw air in my lungs and find the strength to stand. My back ached. My chest burned. My helmet protected my head from damage, not from pain. As I squirmed to lie on my side, my vision cleared. I saw the words “Theo Mervin, Private, First Class” superimposed over the cloud of dust to my right. As the air settled, I saw a pile of blocks and shattered tiles. A long crossbeam that must have weighed multiple tons stuck out of the top of the pile at a nearly straight angle. The top of Mervin’s shattered helmet peeked out from beneath it.

The avalanche had dumped me in the courtyard. Kneeling, still dizzy from the blast and winded from the fall, I peered over the waist-high ruins of the outer wall. Increasing the magnification in my visor, I scanned the desert and saw four figures crouched along a distant ridge—three men in camouflaged fatigues and Kline, who had not changed out of his black-and-white card dealer’s outfit. He still had that grenade glued to his hand. Clearly, Kline had not come to fight. He came to scavenge.

As Freeman had suspected, the grenade had worked like a catalyst, forcing Crowley to attack. If Kline had ever wondered whether or not to join forces with Crowley, Freeman’s grenade had surely made the decision for him. There he was, watching the action, hoping to find the key on Ray Freeman’s dead body and disarm the grenade.

“Harris?” Godfrey asked, likely having spotted me from a barracks window. “Harris, report.”

“Just a little shook up,” I said.

“Not your condition, you idiot,” Godfrey said. “What do you see?”

“I see some of them…Four of them, a hundred thirty yards out.” A tool in my visor measured the distance.

“There are three more a few yards to the east,” Ray Freeman interrupted.

“I don’t see…No, there they are. He’s right.” They wore sand-colored camouflage suits. Even after increasing the magnification in my visor, I did not know how Freeman had spotted them. There they were—Crowley and two other men standing around a table with a map and some kind of control console. Seeing the console explained a lot. Crowley hadn’t come with an army, he’d come with trackers—motiontracking robots that registered movement in a designated area and fired at that movement with incredible accuracy. Shaped like a barber pole, with radar equipment crammed into the ball at the top, one of these single-task devices cost almost nothing to build and could be used to fire anything from pistols to rockets.

“He’s got trackers,” I called out to Godfrey. “I can’t see them, but I can see the control console.”

“He has six trackers,” said Freeman. “Four guarding the front wall of the base, one on the west, and one on the east.”

“You’re sure about that count?” I asked.

“Crowley has twenty men watching the west wall of the base,” Freeman continued, “and ten to the east.”

“Where are you, Freeman?” Godfrey asked. “Are you near the armory?”

Freeman did not answer.

“What is your position?” Godfrey repeated. What he should have asked was how the hell Freeman had tapped into our communications. The interLink was supposedly secure from civilian interference.

Freeman did not care about Gobi Station, defending the Republic, or protecting its Marines. Wherever he had hidden himself, he did not plan to go down with a platoon of clones. He was, after all, a mercenary, not a soldier. As far as I could tell, the only things he cared about were staying alive and capturing Crowley.

“Dammit! Where are you, Freeman?” Godfrey demanded.

Freeman said nothing.

“Do you have a clean shot at them?” Godfrey asked.

Still no answer.

I started to shuffle along the wall to get a better look at Crowley’s position.

“Do not move, Harris,” Freeman said.

“I see movement out the main gate,” Rickman broke in.

Peering over the wall, I saw three Marines run toward a heap of rocks and dive behind it. They moved so quickly that I did not have a chance to scan their names. Two of the men took cover behind the massive front arch of the outpost and fired. They fired six quick shots, to which Crowley’s men responded with a token spray of automatic fire.

“What the hell are you doing?” I screamed into the interLink. The arch would offer protection from bullets, but a particle beam or a rocket would reduce it to rubble.

“Get your men out of there,” Freeman said. But he was too late. The top of a tracker popped up from behind a sand dune; and before anyone could react, two rockets came flying toward the arch. At first I only saw the contrails, then a bright flash bleached the air around the arch where the men were hiding. The entire desert rumbled with reverberation. Rock chips and large chunks of pillars flew across the courtyard. A fist-sized stone struck my helmet. Adding to the cacophony, the domed roof of the main hall caved in. As the smoke and dust cleared, the jagged remains of the arch poked out of the ground in haphazard spikes. The rockets had destroyed the entrance and much of the main hall. From where I stood, I could look directly into Glan Godfrey’s office. A huge block had fallen from the roof and crushed his desk, and I saw no sign of the communications console, our link to the outside world. Godfrey tried to raise Rickman and Phillips on his interLink, but no one responded.

“Harris, get to the armory,” Godfrey said.

The armory was in the far corner of the base, just beyond the office. That last rocket had smashed most of the building, but the doorway to the armory remained standing. I started across the courtyard, cutting through the shallow edges around the stagnant pond area of the courtyard.

“Harris, stop,” Freeman’s voice shouted through the audio piece in my helmet. “Those trackers have you. Check for scanners with your radar sensors.”

For a civilian, Ray Freeman seemed to have an incredible amount of information about Marine Corp combat armor. Our helmets included a sensor warning system that detected radar devices. I should have switched on the sensor the moment I knew there were trackers outside the wall.

I ran the scan and froze in midstep, still standing in the shallows of that polluted brackish pond. A blue ring appeared around the edges of my visor as the sensor kicked in. The ring remained blue for a moment, then turned yellow, then orange. The trackers were bathing the courtyard with radar, and they could only be looking for me. If the ring in my visor turned red, it meant that the sensors had fixed on my location. Orange meant they had detected me, but I had stopped moving before they could fire. A strong wind blew across the courtyard, shaking some reeds, and the ring around my visor turned yellow momentarily as the trackers homed in on the reeds. I dropped to the ground and felt my knees sink into the mud. My only hope was that the trackers would not notice me.

Moments passed slowly. In the air-conditioned comfort of my helmet, I felt both an odd elation and fear. Large drops of sweat rolled down the sides of my face, but kneeling in the mud and the reeds with trackers searching to find me, I felt strangely relaxed. I listened for the hiss of incoming rockets as the seconds passed and the ring in my visor fluctuated from yellow to orange and back to yellow again. It never turned blue or red.

“Harris, get to the armory,” Godfrey yelled.

“Crowley doesn’t care about the armory,” Freeman said. “He wants the barracks.” And Godfrey must have understood. Crowley wanted to keep the platoon bottled up in one place where he could hit it without risk of destroying the weapons he had come to steal.

“We need to attack,” Freeman said.

“Are you insane?” Godfrey asked. “Harris, either get to the armory or get your ass back to the barracks.”

They haven’t located Freeman and they have me pinned down in the courtyard, I thought as I peered out through the reeds. Everybody else is right where Crowley wants them.

“Godfrey, you can’t hide in the barracks,” Freeman said. “You’re playing into his hands.”

“Harris, get over here,” Godfrey ordered. “We’ll cover you.”

“Freeman, got any suggestions?” I asked.

Enemies around the west and north walls fired into the courtyard. Poorly aimed, possibly not aimed at all, their bullets chipped into the sandstone wall, making sparks and dust. They must have been hoping to coax me into running back to the barracks or returning fire.

“Make a break for the northeast corner,” Freeman said.

I looked across the yard toward the northeast corner of the outpost—the nearly disintegrated northeast corner where Rickman and Phillips had made their stand. The rockets had destroyed Phillips so thoroughly that his armor did not even register. “You’re shitting me, right?” I asked, as I squeezed the rifle stock against my chest and prepared to run.

“I’ll take care of the trackers,” Freeman answered.

“You have a shot at them?” I asked. Even as I spoke, someone fired a spray of bullets along the wall behind me.

“Are you listening, Harris?” Godfrey piped in. “Get your ass over here.”

“Leave them to me,” Freeman said. “Move on the count of three.”

“Got it,” I said.

“It’s your court-martial,” Godfrey said.

“Get specked,” I answered.

“One.”

Some kind of strange creature shot into the air along the southeast corner of the outpost. I did not see it clearly, but it looked something like a giant flying snake as it jumped nearly thirty feet in the air, then darted behind a wall.

“Two.”

Whatever Freeman had unleashed, it distracted the trackers. The ring around my visors went blue. I heard the hiss of rockets, but they flew well over my head and slammed into a wall along the back of the courtyard. In the wake of the explosion, a large rock slammed across the top of my helmet, almost knocking me senseless.

Three.

I did not hear Freeman count that last number. The impact of the rock hitting my helmet must have disabled my interLink circuit. In the echoing silence, I climbed to my feet and sprinted. Ahead of me, I saw Freeman leap to the top of a huge pile of rubble. He fired a grenade launcher toward the trackers, turned, then slid back down the mound for cover as men outside the outpost answered him with a hail of bullets. The shock wave of Freeman’s grenade knocked me slightly off course. No one fired at me, and the sensor rings in my helmet remained blue. I dived headlong and joined him behind the rubble.

“Crowley has already left,” Freeman said, as I sat up and pulled off my helmet.

“How do you know?” Using my rifle stock as a crutch, I pushed myself up and peered over the rubble. I saw nothing but open desert.

Freeman handed me a palm-top computer display that showed Gobi Station and the surrounding landscape. Freeman had either established a link with some satellite tracking our area or placed cameras around the outside of the base. The northern and western walls were ruins. The display showed people as small white ovals.

“You placed sensors?”

“Two days ago,” Freeman said.

“You only flew in yesterday morning,” I said.

“Don’t you ever wake up?” Freeman asked. “I’ve been on this damned planet for three days now …came quietly with a second ship in tow. The one they hit was a decoy; my real ship is down there,” Freeman said, nodding toward the canyon behind our base. “I can take you in the hold as far as the next outpost.”

“I can’t leave Gobi,” I said.

“Have it your way.” Freeman laughed and flashed a toothy smile. “Don’t suppose you would cover me while I make a run for my ship.”

“I suppose not,” I said.

“The ship has missiles and a chain gun,” Freeman said. “Help me get to my ship, and I’ll fix this.”

“I don’t trust you,” I said. I tried to peer around the rubble to get a look at the enemy. Somebody fired a wild shot that hit several feet wide of me.

“They’re moving south. They will leave a few men to keep us pinned down while the rest of their force flanks the barracks,” Freeman said, pointing at his display. “Godfrey could take them if he had any brains.”

“He won’t,” I agreed.

A small trickle of blood ran down the side of Freeman’s bald head. He didn’t bother with helmets or battle gear other than the chestplate that was built into his fatigues. He placed one foot on a partially destroyed sandstone block and unloaded the grenade launcher he kept slung over his shoulder. He must have known that I did not trust him, but he also knew that I was trapped. I could either help him escape or pull him down with me.

“What do you have in mind?” I asked.

“They’re gathering around the barracks.” Freeman handed me his computer. Even as I watched, the little ovals representing Crowley’s men moved toward the ridges along the barracks. “You storm them here, and I’ll go get the ship.”

“There are five men there,” I pointed out.

Freeman took back his palm display and said nothing.

“Take out five men armed with a pistol?”

“How busted is your helmet?” Freeman asked.

“The sound is out,” I said.

“Does the polarizing lens still work?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said placing the helmet over my head. The nonfunctioning interLink turned the inside of my helmet into an echo chamber. Using a few optical commands, I ran a diagnostic. “It works,” I said, removing the helmet again.

No sooner had I said this than the strange flying animal that had distracted the trackers popped up from behind the far wall of the base. It skirted the top of the wall and dropped to the ground, traveling through the swamp and reeds. Only it wasn’t an animal. It was a service drone that Freeman controlled with a small remote.

Dragging a ten-foot train of shimmering brown cloth behind it, the drone snaked toward us and stopped. Freeman unclipped the thermal blanket he had tied around it and attached a thin silver disc. “You’ll want to cover your eyes in a moment,” Freeman said.

Replacing my helmet, I watched the little drone pick its way through the debris that had once been the outpost’s massive front wall. The drone zigged around broken pillars and scrambled through a large pipe. It disappeared behind the wall, but I could still see it on Freeman’s readout as it approached the terrorists’ bunker.

If Crowley’s men saw it coming, they didn’t seem to care. When the drone got within fifty feet of their location, the little sphere exploded in a chemical flash so bright that it drowned out the desert sun.

“Go!” Freeman yelled, and he slapped my helmet to make sure that I had heard him.

Even looking through polarizing lenses, I could barely see. The Gobi landscape looked faded and white. I felt as if I had been staring into the sun. Running half-blind, I did not see the knee-high ridge left from the broken wall. The toe of my boot jammed into the remains of a heavy sandstone block, and I lurched forward but managed to regain my balance without falling.

Over the top of the sand dune I saw three of Crowley’s men squirming on the ground rubbing their eyes with both hands. One of the men heard me coming and patted the ground around him until he found a gun. He squinted as he aimed at the sound of my footfalls. I squeezed off two rounds hitting him in the face and chest. One of his friends screamed, “What happened?” I shot him and the other man.

Two of Crowley’s soldiers had seen the drone coming and shielded their eyes at the last moment. They had sprung from their hiding place and chased Ray Freeman as he ran toward his ship. Taking less than a second to aim, I hit one of them in the shoulder from over a hundred yards away. He spun and fell. His friend skidded to a stop and turned to look for me. I fired a shot, hitting him in the face.

Freeman’s ship must not have been hidden very far away. Moments after he disappeared over the edge of the canyon, a small spaceworthy flier that looked like a cross between a bomber and transport rose into the air. Unlike the barge that Freeman had used as a decoy, the ship was immaculate, with rows of dull white armor lining its bulky, oblong hull. Gun and missile arrays studded its wings. From where I stood, I had a clear view of the cockpit, but the glass was mirror-tinted and I could not see in. The ship hovered over me for a few moments, then launched across the desert in the direction of Morrowtown.

At first I thought Freeman had abandoned the base, but then he doubled back toward the barracks. I could see some of the guns along the wings glinting as I ran to view the fight. There was no hurry, however. Crowley’s men were not prepared to fight a ship like Freeman’s.

Its titanium-barreled chain guns made one continuous flash as they spent hundreds of bullets per second. Some of the guerillas tried to escape, but there was no escape, not from Freeman. Two men lunged into an armored truck. Before they could get the vehicle moving, he fired a missile that reduced it to flames and twisted metal. Freeman sprayed a dune with that chain gun, churning up sprays of blood and sand. When he finished, shreds of smoldering cloth floated in the air like autumn leaves. The only man left standing was Kline.

“Bastards!” Kline shrieked in his thick accent as I approached him. “You bastards! Are you going to kill me, too?”

Kline still cradled the grenade with both hands. His clothes were spattered and dripping with blood, none of it his own. He looked down at the pulverized remains of his allies. “Oh…goddamn…” he muttered.

Freeman hovered over the dune and landed his ship in a rippling heat cloud. He climbed out and came over to inspect his work. In the distance, Godfrey emerged from the barracks and started toward us.

Freeman stared at Kline with disgust. “Go,” he said.

Kline looked down at his hand, then held the grenade out for Freeman. “Please?”

“Keep it,” Freeman said. He turned his back on Kline and walked away. Kline cradled the grenade against his chest as he staggered into the desert. I didn’t know if he would die of thirst or be blown to pieces, and I tried not to care. That useless moron had tried to sell my platoon for the slaughter, I told myself. But when he paused and looked back in what seemed like a plea for help, I felt a sharp pang of guilt. A moment later, he disappeared over a dune.

Any sympathy I might have felt for Kline disappeared when Godfrey uncovered a stockpile of gas canisters. Hoping to kill the platoon and leave the weapons intact, Crowley had brought three canisters of Noxium gas. Once he’d herded the Marines back into the barracks, he must have planned to fire the canisters into the building.

Readily available around the territories, Noxium acted like a gas, but it was really a microscopic life-form that was stored and used like lethal gas. It was really a swarm of particle-sized organisms that attacked living tissue. Upon release from a vacuum canister, the creatures would bore into anything that breathed. They were small enough to slip through combat armor and chew through flesh so quickly that it seemed to dissolve in their wake. Terrorists liked Noxium gas because it was cheap, easily stored, and cruel.

Admiral Brocius never came to Gobi, but he sent an envoy, Captain James Troy. Troy, with a small army, landed three days after the action ended. He sent troops to search Morrowtown, but he personally never left the safety of his ship.

One at a time, Troy called us all into his ship for ten-minute debriefings. He met with Glan Godfrey first, then detained him as he met with the other survivors. Freeman and I were the last men called in.

I walked over to where he was standing, and said, “You’re going to be a hero, Freeman. You saved a platoon.”

He smiled for a moment. It was the first time I had seen any emotion from him. “It won’t come down like that. All Brocius cares about is that Crowley got away.”

Godfrey appeared in the door of the ship wearing his faded uniform. He must have lost a lot of weight in his years on Gobi; you could not even see the shapes of his legs in his pants. “Think they’ll leave him in charge?” I asked Freeman.

“Probably,” Freeman croaked in that low rumbling voice. “After Gobi, life in a military prison would be a promotion.”

“How about me?” I asked.

“You’ll be the hero,” Freeman said, with a bitter edge in his voice. “They don’t want to talk about some mercenary saving the day. Harris, you never belonged on this planet in the first place. There are people watching over you.”

I started to ask what that meant, but Godfrey called us over. He led us into Troy’s flagship.

Freeman had not dressed for the occasion. He wore the same ugly jumpsuit. I suspected he would wear those clothes if he were invited to meet with God. As for me, I wore the Charley Service uniform I had worn when I first landed on Gobi. Except for some nicks from the fireworks, I looked precisely as I had when I landed on that godforsaken planet.

Troy sat behind a large black desk that shone like a mirror. The Cygnus Fleet seal hung on the wall behind him, just above a cluster of flags. He did not stand as we entered, but studied us with indifference. “You are the mercenary?” he asked. “Freeman, is it?”

Freeman nodded.

“I suppose you expect payment,” Troy said. “As I understand it, you were hired to capture Amos Crowley.”

Freeman said nothing. His face betrayed no emotion.

“Sergeant Godfrey says you routed the terrorists,” Troy said. He glared back at Godfrey, who looked quite pale. “I can’t imagine why we would pay you good money for saving this sorry pack. As I understand it, Admiral Brocius offered you twenty-five thousand dollars for capturing Crowley. You may continue your manhunt.”

Freeman did not say anything.

By that time, I had a good idea about how Freeman’s mind worked. The captain undoubtedly angered him, but Freeman would never give him the satisfaction of seeing that anger.

Troy leaned back in his chair. “You are dismissed, Freeman.”

Freeman turned and left without a word. Standing at attention, I could not turn to watch him leave. I listened to his heavy boots as he trudged toward the boarding ramp. The room seemed to become cooler once Freeman left.

Troy turned to me, then pulled a piece of paper from his desk. After studying his notes, he said, “And you are?”

“PFC Harris, sir,” I said.

“Harris. I understand that you are the only man on this planet who knows his ass from his knees. Sergeant Godfrey said that you ignored orders that would have resulted in the deaths of every man in the platoon. You are hereby promoted to the rank of corporal. I recommended giving you command of Gobi Station, but Admiral Brocius wants you transferred out.”

***

Years later I had the chance to read my record and discovered that my promotion was based on misinformation. Whether he did it on purpose or he just did not know differently, Troy exaggerated my role in the battle. He said that I rushed an enemy gun emplacement, which was true, but he neglected to mention Freeman’s role in the assault.

CHAPTER FOUR

Unified Authority society was based on two documents— the U.S. Constitution and the third book of Plato’s Republic. Two strata of U.A. society, the ruling class and the citizenry, resembled life in the old United States. The third layer, “the military class,” was taken from Plato’s three-tiered society of rulers, warriors, and citizens.

The Unified Authority’s government was a synthesis. The U.S. Constitution called for a three-branch representative government with an executive branch, a judicial branch, and a legislative branch. The framers of the U.A. Constitution kept the judicial branch of the former United States intact, swallowing it whole into their government without a single alteration. The political branches, however, were greatly altered. Plato, that ancient sage, considered democracy little more than rule by a mob and blamed it for the death of Socrates, his mentor. That view suited the designers of the United Authority, who, having conquered the rest of the globe, did not relish giving every citizen an equal voice. In the U.A.’s case, thesis and antithesis merged to create a plutocracy.

In a nod to tradition, the Unified Authority retained its capital along the eastern seaboard of the former United States. It was the seat of all galactic politics and the home of all three branches of the federal government. It was also the home of the only voters that carried any authority. With it was the concession that progovernment historians might one day call “the great compromise” and the opponents “the beginnings of tyranny.”

The Senate, clearly the most powerful political body in the Unified Authority, was not composed of members who were elected by popular vote. The House of Representatives, a far less powerful assembly, was. Analysts referred to the two chambers of the legislative branch as “the power and the politics.” “The politics” was the House of Representatives, an odd assembly of legislators who truly represented their constituents back in the frontier worlds. “The power” was the Senate, an august body of lawmakers who had grown up among the population that Plato would have referred to as “the ruling class,” the elite population of Washington, DC. Senators were not elected, they were appointed by the Linear Committee—which was the executive branch of the government. New senators were selected from a pool of well-groomed tenth-generation politicians living in the capital city—men and women who had attended elite schools.

The executive branch of the government was even more select. Called the “Linear Committee,” this branch was made up of five senior senators. Analysts complained about the exclusive nature of this particular club. Looking back, I would have to agree. Only the Linear Committee could appoint new senators, and the Senate chose the members of the Linear Committee from among its ranks. I once read an article in which an author called the system “Royalty Reborn!” In that same article, she proclaimed, “America has finally attained a royal class.” I do not know who that author writes for, but I have never seen her writings again.

In theory, the Senate ruled the Republic and the House was filled with figureheads. In truth, the House enjoyed so much popular support from the frontier states that a clever congressman could cause havoc.

Looking back, I can see why the Senate was so unpopular. The galactic seat was benevolent, so long as the member states did not openly challenge it. The individual planets could govern themselves as they wished, set up whatever sort of economies and industries they wished, and even create their own militias. What they could not do was break ranks from the Union. Any hint of sedition was dealt with harshly. As long as member states were seen as loyal to the capital, they had nothing to fear.

Along with the ruling class, Earth was home to the “warrior class.” Washington eyed the growing power of the military with a wary eye; but as the Republic pushed deeper into the galaxy, Congress needed a strong arm to maintain order and protect the territories from external threats. Synthetic soldiers were deemed both more manageable and expendable than natural men, so Congress opted for an army of carefully engineered clones. That lent itself well to Plato’s view of the military as a class of persons who would never know any life other than that of a soldier.

I think Plato would have approved of neural programming had it existed in his day. Through neural programming,

U.A. scientists implanted algorithms into their soldiers’ brains like code on a computer chip. Generals and politicians collaborated on the cloning project, hammering out the perfect specimen—soldiers who respected authority and who were strong, patriotic, and ignorant of their origins.

Once Congress and the Joint Chiefs had a mix they liked, they set the oven to mass production, cranking out an average of 1.2 million new fighting men every year. Of course, the soldiers did not come out of the vat fully formed. They needed to be raised, formed in the U.A. military’s own image, and indoctrinated with the belief that God charged man to rule the galaxy.

Earth became the military-processing center, home to six hundred all-male orphanages, each of which graduated nearly two thousand combat-ready orphans per year. The orphanages were little more than clone incubators, though real orphans, like me, were sometimes brought in from the frontier.

We were the flatfoots, the conscripts. No clone or orphan ever reached officer status. The most we could hope for was sergeant. With the exception of some natural-born implants from frontier families, officers came from the ruling class. Children of politicians who did poorly in school or lacked “refinement” were shunted off to Officer Training School in Australia, a land that was originally settled as a penal colony. How ironic.

With three days of liberty before my transfer to the Scutum-Crux Fleet, I decided to visit the only home I’d ever known—Unified Authority Orphanage #553. That may sound dull or sentimental…maybe it was. I did not understand the concept of vacationing. They did not explain the concept to us in the orphanage or in basic. So with a few free days and a new promotion, I decided to go home and show the second triangle over my shoulder off to my instructors.

Located deep in the Olympic Mountains near North America’s northwest coast, #553 sat between evergreen forests and a major waterway known as the Straits of Juan de Fuca. My home was a brick-and-steel campus with a five-acre firing range, a dome-covered parade ground, and a white picket fence. It was there that I spent my youth drilling, playing, and never wondering why my classmates all looked alike.

An “entrance by permit” sign hung over the main gate of the orphanage. I ran my identity card through a reader and the automatic gate slid open, revealing the long dirt road that led to the school. This was the veil, the hedge that separated the boys from the world. The ancients thought the world was flat, and the boys of #553 thought it ended outside the automatic gate.

Walking along the road, avoiding puddles, and surveying the woods, I let my mind wander until I reached the campus itself. In the distance, I saw dormitory buildings. Home. The road stopped at the door of the administrative area—a complex of red brick buildings surrounded by a beautiful meadow. Five- and six-year-old kids, all boys and all with the same broad face and brown hair, wrestled on the wet grass. The government maintained orphanages for girls, but they were on frontier planets.

Two boys paused to stare at me as I opened the gate. They studied my uniform, noting that I had two stripes on my sleeve, not just the single stripe of a private. “Are you a Marine?” one of the boys asked in an almost worshipful tone. He knew the answer. Clone orphans learn uniforms and insignia in kindergarten.

I nodded.

“Whoa!” Both boys sighed.

I walked past them and entered the administration building. Nothing had changed at UAO #553 in the six months since my graduation. The windows sparkled, the walkways shone, the endless parade of slugs still clung to the walls. Groundskeepers squished them, poisoned them, and powdered them with salt; but still they came back, clinging to the brick like six-inch scars.

I walked past the administrative offices, down a hall past several instructional buildings, and past the cafeteria. None of those buildings interested me. I did not miss my math teachers or the counselors who held me hostage when I misbehaved. After passing the administrative building, I stepped onto the walkway that led past obstacle courses. Rifles crackled in the distance. A squad of students dressed in red athletic shorts and blue T-shirts ran across my path. Judging by their size, the boys may have been in their freshman year—fourteen years old and dying to leave the orphanage and begin boot camp. In another few years, they would report to the military induction center in Salt Lake City, where life really began.

Across a sloping hill, a squad of seniors entered the obstacle course. I knew their age because only seniors ran the course wearing combat armor. They needed it. I watched them scale walls, belly-crawl under electrical wiring, and fly across gullies using jetpacks. A line of instructors fired M27s with rubber bullets at the boys as they drilled. Armor or no armor, the bullets left inch-wide bruises wherever they hit. They would knock you senseless if they hit your helmet.

As I watched, an instructor shot down one of his boys. The kid’s arms fell limp, and his jetpack cut off as he flopped to the ground like a wet towel. The instructors ignored him and started firing at other students. The boy would survive, but he would have a ringing in his ears for the rest of the day. Like every other kid at UAO #553, I had been nailed dozens of times.

After watching two more boys get shot down, I continued toward the Tactical Training Building. Located at the far end of the campus, the TT building looked like a two-story warehouse or possibly an aircraft hangar. The building had no windows, just double-wide steel doors. Some teachers called it “the shed.”

You could not survive #553 without a mentor. Mine was Aleg Oberland—the man in charge of the Tactical Training simulations. Most cadets preferred the strapping sadists who ran the obstacle course—former enlisted men with frontline experience, battle scars, medals, and colorful stories. Oberland was the only retired officer on the teaching staff. He fought in historic campaigns—the kinds of wars that historians argue over, but he never talked about his time on the line.

He was six inches shorter than the other teachers and twenty years older. He had white hair that he kept in a thinning flattop. Most people thought of him as old and sullen, but they did not see what I did. What Oberland showed us was magic.

Oberland drilled juniors and seniors with holographic combat situations. His labs looked empty when you entered; but the moment you put on your combat visor, you would find yourself in a vivid and three-dimensional battle in a desert or on an enemy ship. Lasers in our visors projected the scenery into our eyes, painting it on our retinas, and Oberland had simulations of everything from territorial invasions to ship-to-ship combat. He even had programs simulating attacks on Washington, DC.

As I entered the dark front hall of the TT building I smelled the moldy air-conditioning, and my head filled with memories of the fear and rumors the building had inspired. Students were not allowed to enter the TT building until they turned ten, and even then, they only attended lectures on the top floor. We heard stories about what happened in the basement, but they were all false. Only students in their last two years at the orphanage could enter simulations labs, and they were not allowed to talk about it.

A spiral stairwell in the back of the building ran from the basement to the second floor. I squeezed down the stairs, brushing by dozens of students who stopped to admire my uniform. The stairs ended just outside Oberland’s classroom. Glad to be back, I opened the door and went in.

Class must have ended just as I arrived. A crowd of students came up the steps and passed me while a few stragglers milled around their seats. Oberland stood on a dais at the bottom of the theater shuffling papers as I approached. He turned toward me as I came down the stairs. First he looked at my uniform, then he looked at my face. He squinted, and a flicker of recognition crossed his eyes, and his normal frown melted into a smile. “Harris?”

“Hello, Mr. Oberland,” I said.

Oberland’s gaze kept slipping toward my sleeve. “You’re a corporal?” He looked up toward the ceiling as he did the math in his head. “You’ve only been gone for six months.”

“A bit less than that,” I said. “It’s a long story.”

“I just finished my last class for the day,” Oberland said as he gathered his books and notes. “And I like long stories. Maybe we can talk about it over dinner.”

“In the teachers’ mess?” I asked.

“Unless you know someplace else.” He stole another glance at my stripes as if to check if they were real. “What are you doing here?”

We started up the stairs. The last boys in the class ran past us. Oberland scowled at them.

“You haven’t changed much,” I said.

“I learned an important lesson in the Army, Wayson,” Oberland said, in his usual gruff voice. “Just because people smile at you doesn’t mean that they like you.” He looked back down the hall. “I didn’t come to #553 to make friends.”

I thought about Amos Crowley. He had made friendly banter even as he rigged Guttman’s gun to explode. “I know what you mean.”

We went to the faculty cafeteria, a café-style eatery with square tables and an open buffet line. Though we were early, a few other teachers had already arrived. Oberland placed his books on a table and headed for the food. There were more than one dozen dishes to choose from—casseroles, soups, roast chicken, and salads. There was a dessert bar with fruit, cakes, and chocolates. “I didn’t know you teachers ate so well,” I said.

“Freeman?” Oberland asked.

“Ray Freeman, a mercenary. Cygnus Command sent him when we reported seeing Crowley.”

Oberland’s expression went flat, and he rubbed his chin. “A mercenary saved your platoon? Please tell me you’re kidding.”

I could feel tension welling up in my gut. “You never saw Marines like the ones on Gobi,” I said, hating the defensive tone in my voice. “Men with long hair, men walking around without helmets…One of our guys was so fat he could not pull his helmet over his head. There was no discipline.”

Oberland leaned forward, and whispered, “Were they clones?”

I nodded.

“I didn’t know that could happen with clones.”

“Mr. Oberland, these guys were on permanent R and R. They practically lived in the nearest town.”

“Okay, so the mercenary saved the day. Why were you promoted?”

“ ‘Meritorious service,’ ” I said. “I helped Freeman while the rest of the platoon hid in the barracks.”

Oberland smiled. “And you got a promotion and a transfer?”

“The transfer was the best part. I’ve been assigned to the Scutum-Crux Fleet, a fighter carrier called the Kamehameha.”

“The Kamehameha? Not bad, Harris.” He nodded. “That’s Bryce Klyber’s ship. He’s got to be the most powerful man in the military today.”

“He’s not one of the Joint Chiefs?” I said. I would have known his name if he was one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“Oh no, no, no.” Oberland shook his head. “That would be Fleet Admiral Klyber to you, and he is much more powerful than the Joint Chiefs. They’re just appointees; Klyber has friends and family on Capitol Hill. There are some interesting political goings-on in Scutum-Crux. One of the planets was just hauled before the Senate.”

I shook my head. “Galactic news didn’t seem all that important back on Gobi. Nothing ever happened there, and nothing that happened anywhere else mattered there.”

“That’s what they told you when you got there?” Oberland asked.

“That’s what they told me.”

“And you still believe them?” Oberland’s smile turned acid. “Wayson, a renegade general from a different arm of the galaxy showed up on your planet and tried to blow up your base.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess so.”

“You might have known who he was if you kept up with events, Wayson. You’re going to be on the flagship carrier of the Scutum-Crux Fleet. Everything you do will have consequences.”

“And Klyber?” I asked, wanting to change the subject from my own shortcomings.

Oberland leaned forward as if he wanted to whisper a secret, then spoke in a normal voice. “Admiral Klyber is the most connected man in the Navy. Perform a little meritorious service under his command, and you may be the first enlisted man to earn a commission.”

CHAPTER FIVE

On my last day of leave, I flew from Seattle to Salt Lake City, then took a military shuttle to Mars. Possibly the single most commercial spot in the universe, the Mars way station was not a colony but a conglomeration of stores, transport facilities, and dormitories. The first building constructed away from Earth, the ever-changing structure was always under renovation but never fully modernized—a sprawling structure with a gigantic military base and a civilian port filled with restaurants, shops, and overnight hotels. It was the Unified Authority’s gateway to the galaxy.

I cut through the crowds and reported for duty at the military transfers’ desk. A young corporal reviewed my orders and passed me through to a gate where I spent another two hours sitting around before boarding the long-distance transport that would take me to the Central Scutum-Crux Fleet.

All flights out of the Sol System passed through the broadcast station orbiting Mars. We had barely cleared the atmosphere when the “prepare for jump” sign flashed over the passenger compartment. Tint shields formed over the windows, but they only muffled the glare shining off the two gigantic elliptical discs that formed the broadcast station. The discs looked like giant mirrors; they were more than one mile across. Ships did not enter the discs, they merely approached and lowered their shields. The jagged electrical stream pouring out of the mirrors was so bright that glancing at it could blind you for life.

Though sending ships through the broadcast system cost nothing, keeping the discs powered was expensive. Private citizens paid a fifty-dollar-per-cubic-yard toll for entering the broadcast system. Corporations got lower rates when shipping products. Navy ships and government transports passed for free. A team of accountants probably spent their entire careers transferring funds to cover fleet movements.

The pilots cut the engines as we approached the broadcast discs. Our ship slowed to a glide while a silvery red laser scanned the outside of the ship, verifying our registration and checking for hazardous substances and weapons. The pilot said, “Prepare to jump,” over the speaker system, and the sending disc, the one that translated ships into impulses and transmitted them, splashed its blue-white lightning against our hull. The air in the cabin began to crackle, and the electricity made my clothes conform to my body as if doused with water. Pressing my face against the tinted window for a better look, I got a quick glance of the orbital Army post guarding the disc before we flashed into the Sagittarius Arm.

The Unified Authority took broadcast station security very seriously, especially Mars Station security. Three F-19 Falcon fighters from the Air Force’s Mars base patrolled the reception disc at all times and long-range cannons guarded the area from the surface of nearby moons. Lights illuminated every inch of the discs and the posts that guarded them. If there were some way to light space itself, I think the area around the disc station would have been lit.

It took us five minutes to travel the five hundred miles from the surface of Mars to the broadcast discs, and less than one second to travel nearly ten thousand light-years to the Sagittarius Arm. My trip from the Sagittarius Arm to the Scutum-Crux Arm took less than five seconds—just long enough for the transport to materialize and glide from the receiving disc to the transmission disc of the next station.

Using the broadcast corridor, you could travel from one galactic arm to the next in a matter of moments. Traveling within that arm to your final destination could take weeks.

The network did not rely on wormholes or black holes or any other natural phenomenon, it was purely devised by man. Sending discs emitted some kind of energy wave that absorbed matter and waves as they approached. The disc would simply communicate everything it translated to a receiving disc, where it could be turned back into its original form.

In theory, the disc orbiting Mars could have broadcast us to a disc near SC Command, but interLinking the galaxy would compromise Sol System security. To control broadcast traffic and prevent invaders from tapping into their system, U.A. engineers designed the broadcast corridor in a linear fashion. The Mars disc would only accept transmissions from four transmission discs—the two closest discs in the Orion Arm and the interarm transmitters in the Sagittarius and Perseus Arms. Transmissions from unknown sources were deflected into space and never materialized again.

Our final jump placed us in the center of Scutum-Crux, a mere 500 million miles from Command headquarters. Once away from the discs, most military vehicles were required to travel at a standard 30 million miles per hour. That meant approximately seventeen hours of flying time. Most of the other passengers on the ship were officers who chatted quietly among themselves. A corporal sat splayed across several seats in the row across the aisle from where I sat. I had seen him get on. He stowed his bags, dropped into his seat, and passed out, for all intents and purposes. I did not know if he was drunk or hungover, but he was dead to the world.

With nothing better to do, I decided to follow Aleg Oberland’s advice and browsed the latest news broadcasts. I clipped on a pair of mediaLink shades and tapped the power button beside the right lens.

MediaLinks let you browse the news, send letters, or place calls. They were the basis of civilian communications, but their signal could not be secured. Enemies could tape them or jam them in combat. The shades worked very much like the visual controls in my combat helmet. Selecting topics and scrolling through menus by twitching my eye, I began searching for the Senate hearings that Oberland told me about. I selected the “News and Information” option rather than “Entertainment Programming” or “Correspondence.” A menu appeared offering “Pangalactic Highlights,” “Local News,” “Sports,” “Entertainment News,” and “Business.” I chose Local News for Scutum-Crux.

Stereophonic speakers along the sides of the shades rumbled a businesslike tune as two newscasters discussed big stories around Scutum-Crux, a backwater arm politically, with important strategic implications. The first story involved a planet called Ezer Kri sending a delegation to Washington to meet with the Senate.

At first glance, I thought I must have tapped into the wrong story. This was not about a planet that wanted to break from the Republic. All the people of Ezer Kri wanted to do was rename their planet. They held an election and a sizable majority voted to rename the planet “Shin Nippon.” The report explained that “Shin Nippon” was Japanese for “New Japan.” When the governor of Ezer Kri notified the Senate, he was informed that the name change was out of the question. The governor and a delegation of Ezer Kri politicians were summoned to DC to discuss the matter before the Senate. No arrests, no rebellion…why had this seemed important to Oberland?

I paused the broadcast. Though I had never heard of Ezer Kri, I remembered hearing something about a colony of Japanese people refusing to integrate. The rumors did not mean anything to me when I first heard them, but there must have been more to it. I scanned ahead.

When the Unified Authority first settled Ezer Kri, (I’m not sure what the name “Ezer” referred to, but “Kri” was a notation used for planets that had engineered atmospheres.) in 2303, the planetary administrator was of Japanese ancestry. Working quietly, he appointed several people of similar descent to his cabinet. When the administrator retired, he appointed his own successor. Not surprisingly, the new administrator was Japanese.

Over the next two hundred years, there was a Japanese migration to Ezer Kri. While the rest of the galaxy integrated, 35 percent of the population of Ezer Kri was Japanese. The non-Japanese population complained about discrimination, but a U.A. investigation found that Ezer Kri was productive and law-abiding—a model planet with an excellent educational system and one of the best economies in the Republic. For some reason Oberland equated the proposed name change with sedition. So did the Senate, apparently. It meant nothing to me, and trying to reason it out gave me a headache. I switched off my media shades and went to sleep.

Including stops at several space stations, the trip took nearly twenty hours. By the time we reached SC Command, thirty new passengers had boarded and divided up by rank and phylum. Pilots and other officers sat in the front of the cabin. Tight clusters of sailors sat in the back. There were an even dozen Marine grunts on board.

“We’re coming up on the Kamehameha,” one of the officers said, waking me out of a light sleep. Hearing this, I looked out my window. All I saw was an endless field of stars.

The corporal in the row across the aisle woke up and stretched. He saw me pressing against the window and decided to help. “Do you see a pale gray star at one o’clock?”

There were a lot of gray stars. I felt the cramp in my back, heard my stomach growl, and knew that my patience had worn thin. Then I saw it. The other specks of light twinkled. The Kamehameha was a pasty gray dot.

“See it?” he asked.

“Flat-colored speck?” I asked. “It looks pretty small.”

“It gets bigger.”

It did indeed. As we approached, the bat wing shape of the hull seemed to stretch for miles. The top of the ship was so smooth that it looked like a running track. The top of the ship was the color of a shark, and its front face was lined with windows and weapons arrays. The bottom of the ship was beige in color. Huge antennae, at least fifty feet long and ten feet wide, protruded out of the top and bottom of the wing at each corner. During battle, these antennae emitted the magnetic currents that formed the ship’s protective shielding.

The Kamehameha grew larger by the moment. Soon I could see blue-and-white plumes flaring from its giant engines. We might still have been fifty miles away when we slowed to approaching speed, but the old fighter carrier already looked considerably larger than the transport in which I had traveled. Another minute passed, and I could make out the individual gun placements.

“It’s huge!” I said.

“First time on a carrier?” the Marine asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“It gets a lot bigger.”

Again, he was correct. I lost sight of the ship as we circled it from above to make our final approach. When we came around, we were less than a hundred yards from the rear of the ship. We could have landed our transport inside one of the dormant emergency engines, and the emergency engines were less than half the size of the main engines. Our pilot adjusted his approach, and we coasted onto a landing dock in the terraced rear of the ship.

Then something made sense. I had heard stories about these ships intimidating insurgents into submission, but I never understood. Teachers back at the orphanage told us the sterile facts about fighter carriers. They showed us holographic images. They cited measurements. Images and measurements meant nothing until you saw this ship in person; any impressions I formed listening to measurements and staring at images were dwarfed by its immense size.

“You won’t even know you are on a ship,” the corporal said. “It’s not like being on a transport or a frigate. You won’t feel it move or hear the engines. It’s like living on base.”

The corporal looked like a freshly minted clone. He had the stubble-cut hair of a young cadet but the small scars on his face and neck suggested he’d seen action. Military clones were a squat and powerful breed standing just shy of six feet tall. This man, however, clearly a bodybuilder, was wider than most. His shoulders and packed arms were not government-issue.

“You must have spent a lot of time at your last assignment,” he said. “I’ve never met a corporal with less than two years’ time on a carrier. This is my third, and I was lucky—I made corporal in five years.”

The transport’s booster rockets hissed as our pilot jostled the ship into position. I heard motors whine as electromagnetic skids dropped out of the transport, and locked us into place in the docking bay. Deckhands opened the hatch from outside the transport and the officers at the front of the cabin filed out.

“Unless I miss my guess, we’ll probably end up in the same platoon,” the corporal said. “I’m Vince Lee, just transferred up from Outer Scrotum.” Seeing my confused reaction, he laughed. “The Outer Scutum-Crux Fleet.”

“Wayson Harris.” I said, standing up and pulling my gear from the locker above my seat. I followed Lee off the transport and into a large receiving area. Two officers, a young Marine captain and a slightly older Naval commander, stood on deck. The other passengers had already grouped by branch by the time we stepped down the ramp—the sailors proceeded on ship, the Marines and pilots remained. Lee and I took our spots at the head of the Marines.

Had I not recognized their uniforms, I would have guessed that the captain was the pilot and the lieutenant commander was the Marine. The lieutenant commander stood well over six feet tall and had the barrel chest and the intensity of a fighting man. I had trouble imagining him crammed into a cockpit. He called out the names of his pilots, and each responded, then he looked at his clipboard and smiled. “All accounted for.”

Though I had not been told that these men were pilots, I had no trouble identifying them. Pilots were natural-born and came in various shapes and sizes. Being officers, they also did not carry duffel bags. You’d never see officers washing their own laundry or carrying their own bags. They left such menial tasks to enlisted men.

“I am Lieutenant Commander Mack Callahan,” the lieutenant commander said as his new pilots stepped forward. “I run the fighter squads on this bucket.” He approached one of the pilots and read the name tag on his uniform. “Where

were you stationed last, Jordan?”

“Mars, sir.”

“Mars?” Callahan nodded his head. “Some of you flew in from Orion? Long flight. I’ll tell you what, Jordan, why don’t you and the boys unpack, get plenty of rest, and report to my briefing room in thirty minutes.” The pilots groaned, then followed Callahan off deck.

The captain stepped forward. “At ease.” He reviewed at our ranks. “I am Captain Gaylan McKay.”

From the side of my eye, I watched the pilots vanish down a gleaming hallway. I did not see so much as a finger smudge on the walls. Every light in every ceiling fixture shone brightly, and the floors sparkled. Captain McKay looked as if he had been polished, too. He was small for a Marine, certainly no more than five feet six inches tall with a wiry build. A strip of blond stubble covered the top of his head, and the sides were shaved clean. He had more of a smirk than a smile, but I liked the informal way in which he appraised us. He’d probably be a prick most of the time, but that came with the uniform.

“I’ll take you to your quarters.” As we followed McKay down the hall, he continued his orientation. “You boys are lucky,” McKay said. “Marines get a good shake in this fleet. Admiral Klyber doesn’t play favorites with pilots and sailors. Sea-soldier chow is as good as any on this ship.”

McKay led us to a series of cabins in which bunk beds lined the walls. Reading from a list, McKay sent men to various barracks; but when he came to Lee and me, he said, “Let’s talk in my office. Harris, I’ll start with you.”

He led me through an empty barrack. “Throw your bags on any rack.”

I dropped my bags on the nearest bunk.

“Is your gear in working order, Corporal?” McKay asked.

No one had asked me about the condition of my armor since the battle on Gobi, nor had I thought about it. “No, sir,” I said. “The interLink is out in my helmet.”

“Bring it along, Harris,” McKay called over his shoulder as he walked off. I quickly snatched my helmet and followed the captain down the hall. He entered a small office. I

stepped in after him.

“Take a seat, Corporal,” McKay said.

“We’re starting up a new platoon. Your sergeant arrives tomorrow. He’s transferring in from the Inner SC Fleet,” McKay said with emphasis, as if that sector should have meant something to me. It didn’t. “Admiral Klyber believes that something is going to break loose in outer Scutum-Crux.”

McKay waited for me to respond. When I said nothing, he picked up my personnel file and began reading.

He turned a few pages, reading quickly, apparently taking in the details. “Ah yes, I remember your record. You were the one who made corporal in three months …Must be some kind of a record. Exactly what sort of meritorious service did you perform on Gobi?” As he asked, McKay closed the folder and watched me carefully.

“Terrorists attacked our outpost, sir. I…”

“Attacked an outpost? Were you working out of an embassy?”

“No, sir,” I said.

“You mentioned a problem with your helmet.”

“Yes, sir. My interLink equipment failed during the battle.”

“I don’t know who designed this shit, but you can always count on something breaking when you need it most. My visor went black during a firefight, and I nearly shot my commanding officer.” McKay smiled as if thinking about what might have been, then continued in a more businesslike tone. “Around here you turn your headgear in for routine maintenance after every battle. Fleet policy. We take maintenance seriously in this fleet. Show up for an engagement with a broken helmet, and you’ll be lucky if the enemy gets you before I do. Got that, Corporal?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You can bring your helmet back from battles melted to your head if you like. That’s your business. But show up with broken gear, and I’ll send you to the brig.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And, Corporal, in case you have not guessed, showing up to new assignments with busted gear makes a bad first impression.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Leave the helmet; I’ll requisition repairs.” Changing subjects, McKay pointed to the Scutum-Crux Arm insignia on the wall behind him—a fleet of ships in silhouette superimposed against the whirlpool shape of the Milky Way. “You have been assigned to the flagship of the Outer SC Fleet, Corporal. We don’t put up with sloppiness on this ship.”

He handed me a three-inch stack of papers. “Get this read ASAP. That will be all.”

Without looking up, McKay added, “Send in Corporal Lee.”

Until Amos Crowley’s visit, the U.A. Marines maintained Gobi Station with forty-one men, one man shy of a full platoon. The bowels of the Kamehameha housed two full divisions of Marines—over twenty-three hundred of the Republic’s finest.

Bryce Klyber’s authority extended beyond the ship and even the fleet; every unit in the Scutum-Crux Arm was under his command. He was the only officer in the U.A. Navy to hold the rank of fleet admiral, a rank generally reserved for wartime.

Captain Thaddeus Olivera commanded the Kamehameha, and Vice Admiral Absalom Barry commanded the Outer Scutum-Crux Fleet. Klyber, who I soon learned was a notorious microcommander, preferred to work out of an office on the ship so that he could observe operations firsthand.

There were three fleets in the Scutum-Crux Arm, placing more than one thousand ships, more ships than the Earth Fleet, under Klyber’s command. That did not mean he could stage a revolution. Unlike Caesar, crossing the Rubicon line as he brought his forces into Rome, Klyber would never be able to bring his fleet to Earth. Klyber’s Rubicon was the Mars discs of the Broadcast Corridor, which were too small to receive or send capital ships such as fighter carriers and destroyers. The Broadcast Corridor ensured that Klyber’s ships remained in place. Without the discs, it would take a thousand lifetimes to fly from Scutum-Crux to the Sol System in the Orion Arm.

The documentation McKay gave me described the protocol and command structure of the Outer SC Fleet. Most of the information was standard procedure, but I needed to relearn standard procedures and chain of command after three months on Gobi. Judging by the way Klyber ran the Scutum-Crux territories, he was the kind of commander who required his subordinates to march to his own drum.

As a young Marine, I did not know much about Navy workings. It struck me as odd that Klyber, supposedly a powerful admiral, retained an old ship like the Kamehameha for his flagship. The Kamehameha might have worked well as Klyber’s movable command post, but it was obsolete as a fighter carrier. Klyber built each of his three fleets around a core of twelve fighter carriers. The Kamehameha was an old Expansion-class carrier, the only carrier of its class that was still in operation. All of the other carriers were Perseus-class, a newer breed of brute measuring forty-five hundred feet long and almost fifty-one hundred feet wide—nearly twice as long as their Expansion-class predecessors. Perseus-class carriers bore a complement of eleven thousand Marines, five times the fighting force that traveled on the Kamehameha. Perseus-class carriers stowed three times more tanks, transports, gunships, and fighters than Expansion-class carriers and had much quicker means for deploying units.

Lee and I spent our first night in half-empty barracks. Ten of the men assigned to our platoon had trickled in throughout the day, but most of the racks remained empty. Huddled in my bunk, I quietly read Scutum-Crux Fleet documentation well into the sleep period. Along with command structure and regulations, the documentation also laid out our daily regiment. Klyber expected his grunts to drill three hours per day, holding physical training, marksmanship drills, and practical simulations into the daily routine. After reading these daily requirements I sighed, and whispered, “Harris, you’re a long, long way from Gobi.”

Lee, laid out on the bunk next to mine, rolled to face me, and asked, “Wayson, what are you doing?”

“Reading regs,” I said. “You finished reading already?”

“I don’t need to read them,” Lee said. “We had the exact same regulations at my last post. I was already under Klyber’s command.”

Travel had warped my internal timetable. Late as it was, I did not have a prayer of falling asleep. “I think I’m still on Earth time,” I said, though I had no idea what time it might be back at the orphanage.

“I’m having trouble sleeping myself,” Lee admitted. He rolled over on his side and checked his wristwatch, then quietly cursed. “Tell you what, you want to go have a look around the ship?” he asked.

“We can do that?” I asked.

“Damn, Harris! You’re not in boot camp. Nobody cares what corporals do after hours,” Lee said, sitting up and swinging his legs over the edge of his bunk.

“Boot camp wasn’t that long ago,” I admitted. “After basic I got sent to a planet called Gobi. Regulations didn’t matter much there. I don’t want to screw up.”

“Okay, on behalf of Fleet Admiral Klyber, I formally give you permission to climb out of your bunk. You may grab a bite to eat, visit the bar, or have a look around the ship. Just keep out of restricted areas,” Lee said as he pulled on his pants.

After numbing my brain with rules and command structure, the idea of a late-night walk sounded good. We got dressed and slipped out of the barracks. The ship had an eerie, abandoned feel to it. The hall lights burned as brightly as they did during the day, but the only footsteps we heard were mostly our own. I peered through the window of our chow area as we passed. The lights were turned low. Tables that had been crowded with Marines a few hours earlier now sat empty.

Our barracks and training areas were located amidships on one of the lower decks of the Kamehameha, not all that far from the docking bay. In the time that I had been on board, I had only seen the landing bay, the barracks, and the mess area. Lee, who had never served aboard that particular ship but had a working knowledge of carriers, had no problem conducting an impromptu tour.

We passed armories, a library, and file rooms—all populated with skeleton crews. At three in the morning, even the bars sat empty. Lee led me to an elevator, and we went up three floors to the crew area. “This area is not restricted, but don’t expect to spend much time up here,” Lee said, as we stepped off the lift. “Sailors think of us as cargo.”

It hadn’t taken me long to strike up a friendship with Lee. After Gobi, I was glad to meet a Marine who stowed his gear properly and cut his hair to regulation. Like the clones back in Orphanage #553, Lee had created his own kind of personality. He did not know he was a clone, of course; and he thought one day he might be bootstrapped into the ranks of the officers. From there, he wanted to enter politics.

It was hopeless, of course. He was a clone; and because the Unified Authority did not recognize the potential of its own synthetic creations, Lee would never be promoted past master sergeant.

Unlike our barracks, the crew area showed signs of life. Duty officers patrolled the halls. We passed a mess area that smelled of fried eggs and meat. I peered in the door and saw sailors hunched over trays. A little farther, we passed a rec room with game tables, card tables, and a bar. I saw the marquee of a movie theater along the back wall. At that early hour, the recreation center sat empty and dark, but I could imagine it filled with lights and sounds and people during the early evening.

“They have a movie theater in there,” I complained. “I’ll bet my next paycheck that our rec doesn’t have a theater.”

“That’s a good way to go bankrupt,” Lee said. “Congress spares no expense when it comes to keeping its Marines entertained.”

“You boys looking for something?” We turned around as a sailor approached us.

“We’re new on the ship,” Lee said. “Just having a look around.”

The sailor was a clone, a petty officer with a single red chevron on his sleeve. He bore no more authority than Lee or I; but we were on his turf. “You must be new. This here is the crew area. We stow Marines below,” he sneered. He grabbed Lee by the arm, then took a quick step back. Lee’s arms and chest were thick with muscle.

“Didn’t mean to intrude,” Lee said with an easy smile as he turned back toward the elevator. “Not very hospitable. I thought we were all fighting on the same side.”

Then Lee said something under his breath that struck me as very odd. “Specking clone.”

I had only met Vince Lee earlier that day when he and I went to explore the Kamehameha, so I did not notice the anomaly then. With time I would notice that though he was friendly and outgoing with me, Lee did not socialize with the other men in our platoon. He and I normally found a table off on our own.

When Lee bought drinks, he purchased Earth-made beer. An avid bodybuilder, he asked for permission to work out in the officers’ gym. In fact, he had as little contact as possible with other clones. No enlisted man saw himself as a clone, though most of them were indeed just that. Even so, antisyntheticism was rare among clones because they were raised with other clones, and the only people they knew growing up were clones. They did not know how to associate with natural-born people. But Lee, Lee was different. Like so many

U.A. citizens, Vince Lee was quietly prejudiced against clones. He thought clones were beneath him. The difference was that other people were natural-born, Vince was synthetic. Many officers were antisynthetic; they despised their underlings. Vince was different. He despised his own kind.

The rest of the platoon arrived the following afternoon. That included our new sergeant—Tabor Shannon. As Vince might have put it, life aboard the Kamehameha became less “hospitable” the moment Shannon arrived.

Master Gunnery Sergeant Tabor Shannon landed on a late-afternoon shuttle. Shannon was the personification of the word “paradox.” He was gruff, ruthless, and often profane. He openly favored the men who transferred in with him and even referred to them as “my men” because they came with him from his previous platoon. He was a belligerent and battle-hardened Marine. But I soon found out that Shannon’s sense of duty added oddly smoothed edges to the jagged shards of his personality.

Captain McKay sent Lee and me to meet Shannon and the other men at the landing bay. We rushed down to the boarding zone. As the bay door opened, Lee said, “I bet he’s a prick. What do you want to bet he’s a real prick among men?”

We watched several officers disembark. Four pilots and a number of crewmen breezed past us without so much as a sideward glance. Shannon came next. He was tall and thin, with steep shoulders and a wiry frame. His fine white hair, the hair of an old man, did not match his sunburned face. Except for crow’s-feet and white hair, he looked like a thirty-year-old.

Shannon walked up to us and paused long enough to bark, “Twelfth Platoon, you part of my outfit?” When we nodded, he dropped his bags at our feet, and said, “Stow these on my rack.”

Under other circumstances that kind of arrogance pissed me off, but I had noticed something about Shannon’s bags that left me too stunned to care. Lee saw it, too. The letters “GCF” were stenciled large and red on the side of the bag. When I was growing up, every kid in the orphanage knew what those letters stood for—Galactic Central Fleet. That was a name with a dark history. “You don’t think he’s a Liberator?” I asked.

“Damn, I heard that they were all dead,” Lee said, staring at Shannon’s back as he left the bay. Watching Shannon disappear down the corridor, I felt a cold shiver run down my spine.

The truth was that I did not know much about the Galactic Central Fleet or the special strain of clones that were created to fight in it. The history books called them “Liberators,” but that was mostly because calling them “Butchers” seemed disrespectful.

The government deemed the battles in the Galactic Central War classified information and never released accounts of what took place. But the government could not classify the events that led up to war. Unified Authority ships began prospecting the “eye” of the galaxy—the nexus where the various arms of the Milky Way meet in a spiral—about forty years ago. That was during the height of the expansion. We had long suspected that we had the galaxy to ourselves, and exploration into the farthest and deepest corners of the frontier only increased the belief that the universe belonged to mankind. By this time we had traveled to the edge of the Milky Way but not to the center.

The media covered every detail of that first expedition to the center of the Galaxy, including its disastrous ending. Five self-broadcasting Pioneer-class vessels were sent. All five disappeared upon arrival in the Galactic Eye.

There was no information about what happened to the ships. Some people speculated that radiation or possibly some unknown element destroyed them as they emerged from their broadcast. The most common theory, of course, was that the expedition was attacked, but whatever really became of those ships happened so quickly that no information was relayed back to Earth. If the politicians and military types knew more than the general public, they did not let on.

Congress went into an emergency session and commissioned a special fleet to investigate—the Galactic Central Fleet, the largest and most-well-armed fleet in U.A. Naval history. The hearings and the creation of the Galactic Central Fleet were matters of public record. Reporters were taken out to the shipyards where the fleet’s 200 cruisers, 200 destroyers, and 180 battleships were under construction. It took three years to build the fleet. During that time, the entire Republic braced for an alien attack.

Once the fleet was constructed, however, the news accounts stopped. This much I knew—that the Galactic Central Fleet was launched on February 5, 2455, and that it vanished. The ships were sent to the Galactic Eye and never heard from again.

I heard tales about the events that followed, but they were all gossip and myths. To avoid increased panic, the government imposed a news blackout immediately after the fleet disappeared. Then, two months after the disappearance, the Senate announced that the galactic core was under U.A. control. The only historical record of the event was a statement from the secretary of the Navy stating that a battery of specially trained soldiers conquered ground zero. Some time after that, a congressional panel announced that the men in the GC regiment were an experimental class of clones known only as “Liberators.” There were no pictures of Liberator clones in our history texts; and though I searched, I never found any pictures on the mediaLink, nor did I ever find any information about the aliens that the Liberator clones fought in the Galactic Eye.

“The bag says ‘GCF,’ ” I said. “You don’t think he could be

a Liberator?”

“You?” Lee asked, shaking his head.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I had a teacher who served with some Liberators. He said that they were taller and slimmer than other clones. He also said that they massacred entire planets.”

“One of my teachers said that they enjoyed killing people and that they killed civilians when they ran out of enemy soldiers,” said Lee. “That must have been an old rucksack,” he added, though he did not sound as if he believed it. “He didn’t look much older than us.”

Like me, he had probably done the math in his head. If the GCF disappeared forty years ago, that would put Gunny Sergeant Shannon in his late fifties or early sixties. He looked bright-eyed, spry, and mean as hell. He was clearly a clone…a different species of clone, but still a clone. He had the same dark features as Lee, though he was a few inches taller. They looked like brothers.

“Like seeing a ghost,” I muttered to myself. Having heard all kinds of rumors about Liberators in the orphanage, I should not have been surprised that Shannon looked so young. Liberators were supposed to have a synthetic gene that kept them young. Of course, I also heard that they had a fish gene that enabled them to breathe underwater and a slug gene that made them self-healing. I stopped believing the slug story by the time I was ten, but suddenly the youth gene seemed possible.

“We’d better stow his stuff,” Lee said. “I would hate to piss him off.”

Lee was too late. Just about everything pissed Shannon off. He marched into the barracks like a one-man wrecking crew, rearranging the racks and placing “his” Marines along the right side of the room. When Lee and I arrived, we walked into chaos. Acting on Shannon’s orders, the newly arrived PFCs dumped other men’s bags, books, and bedding to the floor. When one of the displaced privates asked Shannon what was happening, the gunny shouted a chain of obscenities and nearly hit him. “What is your name, Private?” Shannon shouted, strings of spit flying out of his mouth.

“Private First Class Christopher Charla,” the private answered as he snapped to attention.

“Did the Congress of the Unified Authority award you that bunk, PFC Charla?”

“No,” Charla mumbled quietly.

“I did not hear you, Charla. What did you say to me?” Shannon stood on his toes, his shoulders hunched, every conceivable vein puffed out of his neck.

“No, Sergeant,” Charla bellowed back.

“Then this rack does not belong to you?” Shannon shouted. “Is that correct, Charla?”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

Judging by the concern on Lee’s face, I could tell that Shannon’s was not standard sergeant behavior. All I had to go by was Glan Godfrey—and old Gutterwash did not give me much to go by.

Sergeant Shannon turned to look at Lee and me. “I told you to stow those bags in my office,” he said, “then set up your racks. You sleep over there.” He pointed to the farthest bunks from his office, and I realized that he had just demoted us to the bottom of the platoon.

My situation became worse the following morning.

Still unable to adjust to Scutum-Crux time, I woke up at 0500 and fidgeted in my bunk until I was sure I could not fall back to sleep. I noticed that Vince Lee’s bunk lay empty. His clone frame lent itself well to bodybuilding, and he trained daily. My interests lay elsewhere. The one topic that interested me more than anything was battle-readiness. Weapons and hand-to-hand training lent themselves well to that preparation. After my discussion with Oberland, I had come to believe that knowing current events might also prepare me for battle. Knowing who I might have to fight and what they were fighting for had value. I put on my mediaLink shades to see if Ezer Kri was still in the news.

On-air analysts billed the Ezer Kri story as a crisis in the making. Apparently the Ezer Kri delegation asked the Linear Committee for a new senator. They wanted to hold a planetwide election and choose their senator by popular vote, the same way they elected their member of the House. According to the story, nearly every elected official on Ezer Kri was of Japanese descent. Though they were not stating it outright, the members of the committee seemed to want to excise everything Japanese from the planet. The request was refused. “Your request, Governor Yamashiro, is unconstitutional,” the committee chair said. “The Constitution specifically calls for appointed representation.”

Yoshi Yamashiro, the governor of Ezer Kri and the head of the delegation, next resubmitted a petition asking for permission to change the name of his planet from Ezer Kri to “Shin Nippon.”

The chairman of the Linear Committee pointed out that “Shin Nippon” meant “New Japan,” and refused to consider the petition.

At this point the story switched to video footage shot in the Committee chambers. The Ezer Kri delegation, made up of elderly men in black suits, sat at a huge wooden table covered with charts and computers. Their table faced a towering gallery packed with senators. The seven men in the delegation chatted among themselves in a language that I had never heard. Their voices rose and fell dramatically, and they did a lot of bowing. “Mr. Chairman,” one of them said in a breathless voice. “We ask that the official language of Ezer Kri be changed to Japanese. That is the language spoken by a plurality of our population,” he said, with a slight bow.

Angry chatter erupted in gallery.

“Governor Yamashiro,” the speaker shouted, banging his gavel. “I will not entertain such a request. You are entirely out of bounds. Your behavior signifies contempt for this body.”

The Japanese men spoke quietly among themselves. Yamashiro stood up. He was a short man with a stout chest and broad shoulders. He bowed. “I apologize for my offense, Mr. Chairman,” Yamashiro said. The room calmed, then Yamashiro spoke again. “I humbly suggest that you change the name of the Republic to the ‘Unified Singular Authority.’ ”

There was a moment of shocked silence, as if Yamashiro had performed some crude act that stunned every man in the room. Then hisses and angry conversation filled the chamber. The chairman pounded his gavel as the video segment ended.

The picture of the hearing faded and my shades now showed three analysts sitting around a table. One of them leaned forward. “This was footage of the Ezer Kri delegation’s meeting with the Linear Committee this morning. After having several requests denied, Governor Yoshi Yamashiro suggested that the Unified Authority be renamed ‘the Unified Singular Authority.’As you can see, the reaction was swift and angry.”

“Jim,” a woman analyst cut in, “that reaction was to Yamashiro’s veiled suggestion that the government is really an extension of the old United States. The point of his comment was that we should take on the initials USA. Yamashiro made some good points,” the woman continued. “The Linear Committee has been openly antagonistic toward the Ezer Kri delegation. We’re not talking about a planet trying to break from the Republic, forgod’ssake, they just want to rename their planet.”

“It’s not just the planet name…” the first male analyst started.

“There are already planets named Athens, Columbia, Jerusalem!” another analyst added.

“Those are city names, and they do not have majority populations of Greek or Israeli descent. It’s not just the name, it’s the language. Governor Yamashiro wants to speak an entirely different language than the rest of the Republic.”

“Jim,” the woman commentator said, with a patient and all-knowing smile, “when was the last time you watched a broadcast from outside the Orion Arm? By the end of the century, linguistic scholars predict the dialects spoken in the outer arms will have evolved into unique languages. You cannot expect people who live ten thousand light-years apart to go on speaking the same language forever.”

“And you think switching from English to Japanese is part of that evolution?”

“What I find most disturbing is the paranoia that is surrounding this entire issue,” the woman said, ignoring the question. “It’s as if the committee believes that switching the language is the first step to an invasion. It’s ridiculous.”

The woman made more sense, but I agreed with the male commentator. Perhaps it was my upbringing in a military orphanage, but I could not see how letting planets speak different languages would bring the galaxy closer together.

By that time I was losing interest in the story, so I switched off my shades. When I removed my shades, I saw a message light blinking over my bunk. Sergeant Shannon wanted me to come to his office. I climbed out of bed and dressed quickly, but Shannon was not in his office when I arrived. I found my helmet waiting on his desk.

Lee, just back from the gym, came into the barracks as I was stowing my helmet. “Hey, how was your workout?” I asked, as Lee passed my rack.

“Fine,” he said, sounding brusque. I waited for him to shower and change, then we went to the commissary for breakfast. We had eaten almost every meal together since landing on the ship. I think we had sort of adopted each other. I hadn’t yet figured out that Lee liked me because I was not a clone. As for me, after my time on Gobi, I was just glad to have a friend who truly fit the description “government- issue.” Lee was acting odd and distant. I wanted to ask him what his problem was, but I figured he would cough it up in good time. As we walked toward the mess area, I saw a strangely familiar sight on some of the monitors along the hall—a picture of General Amos Crowley bent over a stack of poker chips, holding a particle-beam pistol. I recognized the table, the room, and the way Crowley pinched the pistol with his fingers. “Enemy of the Republic,” was the headline. “Former general and noted terrorist Amos Crowley stands accused of sedition, rebellion, and murder.”

I stared at the display hardly believing my eyes. “Son of a bitch,” I mumbled.

“Do you know him?” Vince asked.

“I think I took that photograph,” I said.

“You don’t know if you took it?” Lee asked, suddenly interested in me again.

“I was at that card game, but I didn’t have a camera. Neither did anybody else.”

“Somebody had one,” Lee said dismissively. “Do you play cards with traitors on a regular basis?”

I stared at the image for a moment, then continued down the hall. And then it struck me. All those gadgets packed into our visors…polarizing lenses, telescopic lenses, communications systems. Add a little data storage, and you could record everything.

“Do our visors record data?” I asked.

“Sure,” Lee said, sounding as if I should have known that without asking. “How long have you been…” He paused to stare at me and laughed. “You wore your helmet to a card game? Harris”—he seemed to warm up as he sensed my embarrassment—“you’re all right.”

“Glad I’ve got your seal of approval,” I said. I was again tempted to ask what was bothering him, but held back.

He looked back at the picture. “That’s not your sidearm, is it?” he said, struggling not to laugh.

“No, it’s not,” I snapped.

“Just asking,” Lee said, still sounding more than amused. The corners of his mouth still twitched. “Whose is it?”

“It belonged to a guy named Taj Guttman,” I said, as we entered the mess hall.

“He wagered his firearm? I bet he wasn’t wearing his helmet.”

“No, he wasn’t,” I said.

“His goose is fried,” Lee said.

We grabbed trays and moved to the chow line. Vince clearly wanted to ask more questions but had the good sense to wait until we had our chow and had moved to a quieter corner of the room. I felt a wave of panic. How many people knew what I had done—that I had lost my pistol to an enemy agent in a card game? I seriously doubted that McKay would keep the information to himself.

“Can’t say I think much of a Marine who bets his pistol in a card game, Harris,” Sergeant Shannon sneered as he sat down at the table next to ours. “I don’t think much of that at all.”

Not many of my memories are associated with a particular day of the week, but I have no trouble recalling what day my helmet was returned to me. It was on a Sunday. I know that because later that day, hoping to get away from all of the questions about Crowley and the card game, I went to the rec room to watch a movie. Sincerely wanting to be alone, I chose the emptiest route through the Marine compound— and that took me by the chapel. Nobody went anywhere near that area on Sunday.

The military was always trying to push religion; but in my experience, fear of God was one of the things that science never managed to build into its neural programming. Many of the officers attended church services, but none of the clones I knew believed in God.

As I passed by the open door of the chapel on this day, however, I happened to catch a glance of somebody sitting alone at the rear of the chapel. His back was to me, but the tall wiry frame and fine, white old man’s hair were unmistakable. There, wearing his dress uniform, was Sergeant Shannon…swearing, bullying, belligerent Sergeant Shannon.