Rogue clone (36 page)

Dressed in his suit and red necktie, his black hair brushed back and oiled, Governor Yoshi Yamashiro considered the alliances to which he had sold his soul. Whom did he hate more, the Confederate Arms, the Morgan Atkins Believers, the Unified Authority, or himself?

“We cannot fly you back to Earth,” Yamashiro finally said, after blowing a stream of cigarette smoke.

“That entire system is a battle zone. Is there anyplace else you would like to go?”

“Anyplace?” I asked. “Take me to New Columbia.”

I had a lot of reasons why I wanted to return to New Columbia. If I had to be stranded on a planet, being stranded on a planet with a large agricultural base and a small population was attractive. Thanks to the evacuation, New Columbia had far more food than people.

Even before the evacuation, New Columbia had the kind of economy that could survive on its own. In Safe Harbor and other cities, it had both industrial and financial infrastructures. Outside of those cities, it had large farms. The planet had started out as a farming colony. Granted, I had enemies in Safe Harbor. If Jimmy Callahan survived the attack on the Marine base, he would have a score to settle with me. There might be Marines who would consider me a deserter for not staying on base during the attack. But I also had my reasons for wanting to go to New Columbia. The first was Ray Freeman. The last time I spoke with Freeman, he was headed to that very planet to meet with me. While he and I were not exactly friends, we were partners. I felt as connected to him as I did to any man in the galaxy. Since the Mogats destroyed the
Doctrinaire
, I had begun to place more importance on people. My other reason for wanting to go to New Columbia was my plane, the self-broadcasting Starliner I had borrowed from the
Doctrinaire
. The ship was mine now, free and clear. With the destruction of that great ship, no one even knew that Johnston Aerodynamics had ever built a self-broadcasting Starliner. Once I had the Starliner, I would no longer be stranded on New Columbia . . . assuming it survived the attack.

From the bridge of the Hinode battleship, a deck officer took a satellite scan of Safe Harbor and reported to Governor Yamashiro. “The city was evacuated before the attack,” he said. “It still appears mostly empty. The primary targets were all destroyed. I did locate a tank and some armored personnel carriers moving in the city limits. I also recorded a firefight.”

“Artillary?” Yamashiro asked.

“Small weapons,” the officer reported.

“Are you certain this is where you want to go?” Yamashiro asked me.

“Yes,” I said.

He turned to his deck officer. “Can we send a transport safely?”

“From what I can tell, there are no people around Safe Harbor spaceport.”

“You think it’s safe to land there?” Yamashiro asked.

“I doubt anyone would even see us flying in. The spaceport is several miles out of town. Even if they pick up the transport on the way down, we should be able to lift off again well before anyone comes within twenty miles of us.”

“How does the airport look?” I asked.

“Undamaged,” said the officer. “I don’t think any looters have made it out there yet. It’s pretty far from town and the roads were destroyed.”

“What about the Marine base?” I asked.

“Destroyed.”

“The Army base?” I asked.

The officer shook his head. “All primary targets were destroyed.”

Maybe Callahan was dead, I thought. Even as I thought this, a voice deep in my head scoffed at the idea.

Yoshi Yamashiro suggested that I wear old Galactic Central Fleet work fatigues rather than the uniform of a Hinode officer. Actually, he told me to change into the fatigues, but he made it sound like a suggestion by saying, “Maybe you would present less of a target by wearing fatigues.”

I knew better than to argue the point.

Yamashiro and his senior officers walked me to the landing bay and escorted me on to the transport. Yamashiro bowed and his officers saluted as I walked up the ramp. I turned and returned the salute. The kettle was large and gloomy, big enough to hold one hundred men and entirely empty except for me. I looked around the poorly-lit cabin, taking in the metal walls and shadowy compartments. There was a box on one of the benches. The card on the box had my name on it. As the thruster rockets lifted the ship off the deck, I sat down and opened that box. Inside it, I found an M27 complete with a detachable rifle stock. I found a particle beam pistol. I also found a combat knife with an eighteen-inch serrated blade and a blood gutter that looked remarkably similar to the knife that the Hollywood version of me carried in the movie,
The Battle for Little Man
. The knife that I had once thought no self-respecting Marine would carry, I now connected to my belt. In the quagmire of Safe Harbor, that knife might indeed come in handy. The box also held an ammo belt. Under the belt I found five spare clips for my M27 and a half-dozen golf ball-sized grenades.

The ride down to Safe Harbor spaceport only took a couple of minutes. During that time I stripped and reassembled my M27. I loved the way the snaps and clicks echoed against the walls of the empty cabin. I stuck a clip into the slot and set the safety.

“We’re coming in for a landing,” the pilot called from the cockpit. That was all the warning I got. I heard the thrusters, felt the padded bounce as the landing gear struck the pavement, and headed down the ramp as the heavy metal doors opened ahead of me.

The transport, with its landing light and area lanterns, created a small island of light. As soon as I stepped off the ramp, the doors closed behind me and jets of blue flame formed in the thruster rockets. Crouching out of instinct, I jogged a safe distance and watched as the bulky drop ship lifted itself off the tarmac, rotated in the air, then roared out of sight. For a few seconds, I tracked the light of the transport’s engines as they shrank from view.

The air was still and humid on the tarmac. It was a warm night lacking so much as a simple breeze. Crickets or some similar insect made an electronic sounding buzz off in the distance. Other than the buzz of the insects, there were no other sounds in that liquid night.

The vast dark plateau of the spaceport runway looked as dark as coal in the moonless night. Maybe it was the torture, or maybe it was the fall of the seemingly invincible Unified Authority, but something left me feeling small and alone. Not long ago, I had avoided people. Now I felt keenly aware of some new emotion, some barren emptiness, that rose in my stomach whenever people left me alone. I considered this new emotion and decided that it had nothing to do with fear. It came from a new understanding that life was fragile.

I thought about the way I felt after I killed Sam in my cell. Regret for the murder of a man who planned to murder me was not logical. Was it loneliness? Had I somehow become untethered?

Judging by what I saw around me, there was not so much as a stray volt of electricity anywhere in the spaceport. The buildings stood mute and dark like mountains with unnaturally straight cliffs. Runway lights sprouted mute from the pavement. From what I could see through this shroud of darkness, the spaceport had not been touched during the attack. I saw the profile of the terminal building off in the distance. It appeared as a silhouette with straight lines.

The runway stretched out before me vast and smooth. I ran its length with little fear of tripping. The stark white walls of the hangars looked dark gray as I passed them. The large entry doors of the first few hangars hung open. When I peered inside, I found them emptied of everything except tools and equipment.

I had a moment of panic when I found the hangar in which I left the Starliner wide open and empty. I felt that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach as I looked around the cavernous blackness. Just as I began to lose hope, I saw a similar hangar not too far away and realized that I might have gone to the wrong building.

Feeling my pulse quicken, I rushed to the next hangar. The door was locked on this one. I thought about pulling out my particle beam pistol and shooting the door off its tracks, but decided against it. If my Starliner was in there, I should be grateful for a door that hid it from prying eyes. Along the side of the hangar, I found an office door and smashed the glass in with my pistol. Reaching in, I turned the lock and let myself in. The power was out. The only light in the office came from an EXIT

sign that faded as it fed on the last fumes of its emergency batteries. The sign’s green light formed a luminous puddle over the door. That the emergency batteries could have lasted so long amazed me until I realized that the attack on New Columbia had happened less than one week ago. I opened the door beneath the EXIT sign. The hangar was small by spaceport standards. Despite its thirty-foot ceiling, the building was far too narrow to hold a military transport such as the one I had just come in on. It had just enough real estate to house three commuter-class ships side by side. Wan light shown in through a window in the back wall and dissolved into the eerie blackness. My eyes could not adjust to such total darkness. The hangar was not only dark but silent. It was an auditory vacuum, devoid of so much as a cricket chirping, or a dripping faucet, or a breeze, or even a ticking clock.

Reaching a hand in front of my face to keep from smashing into something, I stumbled forward. I worried about tripping on a power cord or a toolbox, but the floor was clear. I imagined reaching out and finding something cold and dead, a victim of the invasion, but that did not happen. The only people in the spaceport during the attack were allowed to leave the planet unmolested. I found the smooth, rounded, metal of a spaceship. It was almost too large a ship to be in this hangar. My Starliner was big by private ship standards, but it wasn’t as big as this ship. This ship was tall and bulky. Brushing my hand along its nearly vertical hull, I felt my way around the floor. I could not be sure in the dark, but I felt confident that I recognized this ship.

Once again I felt my way through the darkness, walking slowly and blindly, afraid that at any moment I might bump my head on a wing or shelf. Not far from the first ship, I found the edge of a diagonal wing belonging to a second ship. I followed that wing toward the front of the Starliner. Punching my security code into the pad, I unlocked the hatch.

Now I found myself on familiar ground. I flipped a switch and lights turned on around the cabin. The cabin was long and narrow, with white leather seats and surrounded by wood-paneled walls. From this angle, the cabin looked like a miniature movie theater fitted into a tube. Instead of a screen it had a cockpit.

I switched on the landing lights and had a look at the other ship. As I suspected, it was Freeman’s ship. He had come this far. I had not known whether or not he made it to Safe Harbor before the Confederate Navy destroyed the Broadcast Network. Freeman must not have realized that my Starliner was self-broadcasting or he would have taken it.

I slept in the Starliner that night. The chairs only reclined so far, but they were soft and comfortable. Safe Harbor Spaceport was thirty miles out of town. At the first light of day, I stole a car from a parking lot outside the passenger terminal and began the trip into town. The highway was empty and still with forests lining one side of the road and open fields on the other. There were no cars along the road and no signs of people. Except for the occasional billboard or road sign, this might have been a natural path on an uninhabited planet.

Five miles down the road, however, I ran into the ruins of an armored column. Tanks, missile carriers, personnel carriers, jeeps . . . military vehicles of all makes lay burned and broken. Some were upside down, their wheels in the air.

When the enemy demolished this column, they destroyed the road as well. Ten-and twenty-foot trenches scarred the road. Rough craters pocked much of the landscape. One particularly large trough cut across a bend in the road and may well have extended beyond it. It looked like an enormous knife wound in the earth, and the exposed soil within that gouge was charred black.

Seeing no point in trying to drive any farther, I climbed out of my car and shouldered my gear. I was not the first person to park here. A civilian van was parked near the front of the convoy. Like me, somebody had stolen a vehicle and driven in as far as he could from the spaceport. I stole a luxury car. The other person had stolen a family van—a utilitarian vehicle with cargo space and headroom. It had to have been Freeman.

I went to have a closer look at a broken tank before starting the hiking portion of my trip to town. It was an Alsance-Blake, a make of tank generally used by the Army. The same powerful laser that gashed the ground hit the tank’s turret and melted it. Molten metal had poured down the side of the tank like wax flowing down the side of a candle. The soldiers inside this tank would have drowned in a bath of melted steel if they were not incinerated first.

A few days earlier, I would not have equated human lives with this destruction. Now I felt something akin to pity for the men who died here. They would have been clones, like me, but not like me as well. They would have been standard GI clones. They were not my kind, but not far from it. I hopped a small gully the lasers had cut into the road and continued to the next vehicle, a truck that had been sheered in two. This was the work of a battleship. That was the strength of attacking with battleships. You could scour the planet from above the atmosphere, using laser cannons to destroy enemy emplacements that were so far away they could not return fire. At least thirty men had died on this truck. Corpses in battle gear, their skin charred and their lips and eyelids burned away, grinned down at me.

I heard the caw of birds in the distance. Whether or not the birds had already picked over this particular carrion, they were coming now. If any of these dead had moist flesh, the birds would peck at it and strip it away. That might be good. The air around these vehicles reeked of burned meat. I doubted anyone would come out to bury these poor bastards.

A few vehicles later, I came to a spot where an explosion had blown a twenty-foot hole in the road. The blast radius was thirty or forty feet long. Judging by the debris I saw around the hole, the laser had likely struck a missile truck, detonating its deadly munitions. Had that truck carried a nuclear payload, I would have been irradiated long before reaching the convoy. I might not have made it out of the spaceport alive. A wonderful cooling breeze blew across this scene. The tops of the trees swayed in that breeze. The wind brushed across the velvety carpet of tall grass that stretched across the fields. Beyond the fields a blue lake twinkled in the bright morning sun. And ahead of me, the scorched supply line stretched on and on and vanished behind a hill. To the best of my reckoning, the column stretched on for another seven miles.