Rogue clone (14 page)

God, I had to fly somewhere. All of this introspection had to be a sign of depression, but it felt nice to be alone with time to reflect. I needed to sort my feelings and figure out my future. Sitting in a self-broadcasting ship, I realized that I had many options. I could fly anywhere. Klyber had only loaned me the Starliner; but now that he was gone, I considered the touring ship mine. With Klyber out of the picture, where could I return it? I could not bring myself to join the other side. I might have been able to bend my programming enough to ditch the Unified Authority Marines, but I could not even consider joining the Mogats or the Confederates. And the truth was, I liked the Mogats and the Confederate Arms even less than the Republic.

Unified Authority officers may have considered clones no more valuable than any other supply; but the Mogats equated clones with U.A. bullets—lethal tools of the enemy. The Unified Authority may have banned my kind from entering the Orion Arm, but the Mogats would exterminate me. The one thing I knew I wanted was revenge. Father or creator, friend or manipulator, Klyber died on my watch. He trusted me and I failed. My job had been to get him off the ship, through the conference, and back on his C-64 transport alive. By the letter of my contract, I succeeded, but that did not make me feel any better. And the truth was, even after all of my tough talk, when I shut my eyes and thought about the people I cared about, Fleet Admiral Bryce Klyber was the first person to come to mind. Letting my mind wander, I donned my mediaLink shades to check my mail. With Bryce Klyber out of the way, there was no one stopping Admiral Huang from hunting me down. On the other hand . . .

I had a private message from somebody named Clarence McAvoy. The name meant nothing to me until I noticed the sender’s address: Golan Dry Docks Security. Until that moment, I had never stopped to think of him as anything more than “the colonel,” just a cog in the Dry Docks security works. As I thought about this, I realized the way I considered the people around me was not all that different than the way so many officers viewed clones.

Harris,

We have identified all of the passengers on Klyber’s transport. According to the manifest, there
were 21 people aboard that flight. We found 19 bodies. As you said, Rear Admiral Thomas
Halverson was not aboard the transport. Neither was Captain Leonid Johansson.
We found Johansson’s name on a passenger manifest for a transport headed to Washington, D.C.
He returned to the Pentagon with Admiral Huang.

Huang transferred Johansson to his personal staff early this morning. Isn’t that just about the
most goddamn lucky transfer you ever heard of?

Colonel C. McAvoy

PS. The attached is the security record of the only people who entered Klyber’s ship. It was a
maintenance team. We have not been able to locate all of the techs on that team.

With a couple of quick optical commands, I cued the file McAvoy sent and watched the video record. A team of five technicians passed through the security gates outside the hangar. Each presented identification cards at the desk. Each man passed through a set of security posts, submitting himself to DNA profiling.

One of the men was short—no more than five feet tall—and mostly bald with a ring of sandy blond hair. The man wore the jumper of a janitor—a dirty number with short sleeves that ended just beyond the elbow. The suit looked loose around his compact, wiry physique. His exposed forearms had incredible muscle tone. And there was something else, not that I needed it to identify this man. The edge of a colorful forearm brantoo poked out of his sleeve.

Brantooing
was the earmark of the rugged. Brantoo artists branded their clients with a hot iron to raise their skin, then injected colored pigment into the scar. The result was an embossed tattoo. Thugs and barroom brawlers loved brantoos because the average citizen went numb at the sight of them. I recognized this brantoo—it was the emblem of the Navy SEALS. It was a wheel with six spokes, each spoke tinted a different color. This was a crude map of the six arms of the Milky Way. Every SEAL had it brantooed on his forearm.

But this man wasn’t just a Navy SEAL. This was an “Adam Boyd” clone. These were special clones from a highly-classified operation under the personal direction of Admiral Che Huang. No need to worry about anybody recognizing this guy. For the most part, the only people who saw Boyd clones in action were Marines who had very little time to live.

Ravenwood, the outpost where I had supposedly died, was a training ground for Adam Boyd clones. Huang assigned platoons of forty-two Marines to defend the outpost on Ravenwood, then sent ten-man assault teams of Adam Boyd SEALS to kill them. I was the only Marine who ever escaped. In the video feed, the Adam Boyd clone stepped through the posts without a moment’s hesitation. A guard put up a hand to stop him, and the midget smirked up at him with a look of pure disdain. Using an optic command I stopped the video feed and brought up the clone’s identification badge.

“Name: Adam Boyd. Title: Maintenance, Sixth Detail. Security Clearance: All Levels. Years with company: Five.”

The guard said something that was not picked up by the security camera. The Adam Boyd clone answered satisfactorily, and he was allowed to pass. The maintenance team cleared the security station then entered and cleaned each of the ships parked on the high-security deck, including Admiral Klyber’s C-64.

I watched this scene with a mixture of prurient interest and utter awe. The maintenance team stepped into transports belonging to each member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Had he wanted to, that little Boyd bastard could have blown up the entire hierarchy of the U.A. military. Once the Boyd clone left Klyber’s C-64, I rewound the file and watched him enter the transport a second time. Then I rewound and watched it again in slow motion. I looked for any sign of the copper cable. I timed how long it took him to enter and leave. I noted that the Boyd entered Klyber’s ship three minutes before any of the other workers. He was on the ship for eighteen minutes and thirty-two seconds. He carried a small box of tools as he boarded the ship and brought the same box out. He could have easily smuggled a short length of cable in that box.

After watching that clone enter and leave the transport two more times, I finally allowed the video feed to play to its end. What I saw at the end hurt the most.

The security camera followed the maintenance team as it left the transport and then the landing area. They walked through the security gate. There, standing just inside the gate on almost the exact same spot where I would see him later that evening, stood Tom Halverson dressed like a civilian. He leaned with his back against the wall, smoking a cigarette. For a moment he seemed to ignore the maintenance crew. Then he saw the Boyd clone. His eyes locked on the little clone as he continued his smoke. Once the maintenance men walked by, Halverson tossed his cigarette aside and fell in behind them, remaining a few steps back as they walked down the hall and disappeared from the screen.

“Why aren’t you at the summit meeting?” I asked Halverson as he appeared in my mediaLink shades. Then it occurred to me. Why should he stay at the meeting? He was Huang’s man. His job was to oversee the sabotage of Klyber’s ship.

Expecting simply to leave a message, I used my shades to place a call to the colonel’s office. He took the call.

“Harris?” Colonel McAvoy’s face appeared in my shades.

“Colonel, I got your message. Thank you for sending the video feed.”

“Did you find anything?”

“Did you watch the feed all the way through?” I asked.

“Sure,” the colonel said. “I thought you might find the last few moments especially enlightening. We’ve searched the Dry Docks. Halverson isn’t here. My guess is that he had another identity programmed into our computers and left using a false ID. I don’t suppose you approve of officers using false identification codes, Commander Brocius?”

I had used so many false identities over the last few years that it took me a moment before I remembered coming into Golan as Commander Brocius.

“Is there any chance that Halverson flew back to Earth with Huang?”

“He did not,” the colonel said. “Huang left before Klyber. I have a feed of the passengers boarding. Do you want it?”

“No,” I said. “But I would like to see any video you might have from the summit.”

“Good joke,” the colonel said.

“I’m not joking.”

“Yes, you are. You seem like a bright guy. You cannot possibly think I would have a feed from a high-level summit. And even if I did, you cannot possibly think I would throw away my career by giving it to you.”

“The highest-ranking officer in U.A. Navy just died on your watch,” I said, trying to sound calm with just a hint of menace. I was bluffing, of course.

“Military intelligence is going to be all over this, Harris,” the colonel said. “They’ll get it sorted out.”

“Yes, they will. And they are going to blame it on you.”

“How’s that?”

“Follow the trail far enough and you’ll see that Admiral Huang was behind this. When it comes to somebody taking a fall, who do you think they are going to go after, you or the secretary of the Navy?”

The colonel laughed. “You think Huang killed Admiral Klyber?”

“I can prove it,” I said. “Do you have a video feed from the summit?”

“No,” the colonel said.

“Good,” I said, not believing him. High-level meetings like the summit were always recorded, and McAvoy was the man with the recording equipment at the Dry Docks. “Klyber and Huang will have gotten into a hot debate. Check out their brawl, then watch the feed of the maintenance team . . . and check out the short, bald guy.”

“I should have shot you while I had the chance,” the colonel said. “Suppose I just say you planted the cable . . .”

“Your own video record proves that I never went near Klyber’s ship,” I said. “Are you planning to doctor your records?”

“Get specked,” the colonel said.

“Look, Colonel, if you have access to the summit records, and we both know that you do, I suggest you view them. Once you’ve done that, send it to me, and I will try to help . . .”

“And you think I trust you?” the colonel asked.

“If you don’t want my help, that’s fine. The best of luck to you. You’re going to need it.”

“If you’re right and there’s something there, I’ll get you that feed. If you’re lying to me, Harris, I’ll have you hauled back to my station for an immediate court-martial,” the colonel said. “How do you like that deal, Liberator?” With this, he ended the transmission.

I did not like that deal. I sat in the cockpit of the Starliner, stared out into space, and stewed. As the fleet admiral’s security officer, I felt duty-bound to find Klyber’s killer. As a Liberator, I felt an almost pathological need for revenge. Beyond that, the evidence suggested that Admiral Huang murdered Klyber and just thinking about putting a bullet between his eyes made me feel happy. Killing Huang . . . killing Huang. A simple bullet in the head would be too easy. A gun, a bomb, or maybe a knife so that he would know it was personal. Our eyes would meet in the last moment, and he would know who killed him and why.

McAvoy contacted me within an hour. He did not call or write a message. Instead, he sent a virtual delivery. A massive, encrypted file and the key with which to open it.

“Klyber’s death is all over the Link,” Freeman said on my mediaLink shades. Judging by the ugly furniture and plain room behind him, he was staying in a cheap hotel. “The Navy says it was a tragic accident.”

“If you call sabotage an accident,” I said. “Otherwise it was a tragic murder.” I was still out in space, still a few million miles from the Golan Dry Docks. I had spent the last four hours viewing the summit and had more to go.

“You think it was murder?” Freeman asked.

“Yes, and Huang was behind it,” I said.

“Can you prove it?”

“No.”

Freeman was sitting on a bed. The shape of the mattress turned from a square to a funnel under his weight. “What do you have?” he asked.

“I have a security tape showing the maintenance team that cleaned Klyber’s transport. There was an Adam Boyd with them.” I paused to see how Freeman would react.

He raised an eyebrow, and said, “That’s it?”

“Huang created those little speckers.”

“Was Thurston at the summit?” Freeman asked.

I remembered seeing him on the video feed and nodded.

“The only Boyd clones I’ve ever seen were assigned to one of Thurston’s ships. Maybe he did it.”

It was true. To the best of my knowledge, every last Adam Boyd clone had been transferred to the
Kamehameha
, the command ship of the Scutum-Crux Fleet—Robert Thurston’s purview. That tidbit did not fit in with my theory. I wanted Huang to be the killer. “Thurston is Huang’s man. He doesn’t have anything against Admiral Klyber.”

“You can’t prove Huang has anything against Klyber.” Freeman replied.

“Get specked,” I said, knowing that Freeman was right.

“The only thing you have is a picture of an Adam Boyd clone boarding Klyber’s ship. Is that right? You can’t even prove he did anything to sabotage it.”

I nodded. “He was carrying a toolbox,” I said. “And he was on the ship for eighteen minutes and thirty-two seconds.”

“Was he alone?”

“Some of the time. He got on first.”

“So you are saying he had the opportunity to open the broadcast engine and place the cable even though the rest of the maintenance crew was coming?”

“Must have,” I said. “How did you know about the cable?”

“That’s how you sabotage self-broadcasting ships.” Freeman said. “Do you have anything else?”

“I’ve got a security feed from the summit. You should have seen the sparks. Klyber and Huang really hated each other.”

“The way I see it, we can either drop this or go after the Boyd,” Freeman said. “That’s the best we can do until we can tie Huang to the clone.”

I knew the Adam Boyd clones were trained on Earth, on an island called Oahu. I stumbled into one of them while on R and R on that island. I knew that their base of operations was now the U.A.
Kamehameha
, a fighter carrier in the Scutum-Crux Arm. Of the two places, Hawaii sounded more hospitable.