Rogue clone (44 page)

“Ray.” I did not whisper. They would not hear me through the Starliner’s thick walls. Knowing that Freeman slept light, I did not bother repeating myself. He woke up alert. I asked, “You seeing this?”

“How many?” he asked, already in combat mode.

“I’m guessing forty-two.” There were forty-two men in a platoon.

Watching them move, I felt strangely annoyed. These men seemed to have forgotten everything they learned in basic. Platoons divide into fire teams with a rifleman, an automatic rifleman, a grenadier, and a team leader. They flank their target. They don’t just walk in a haphazard picket line. Freeman fitted his armored chest pad over his head and shoulders, then pulled out his arsenal. He chose an automatic rifle, a pistol and three grenades. I took my M27. We both knew that we could not outshoot an entire platoon of Marines, even a platoon that had forgotten the basics. Some of the Marines waited at the other end of the camp-site, M27s at the ready, in case the people in the tents came out. The rest of the men walked in past the tents and started across the open ground toward my ship.

I knew the Marines outside the ship would not be able to see into the Starliner, not even with all of the nifty lenses in their helmets; but I ran to the cockpit in a crouch. “I’m going to level the playing field,” I said.

“Turn on the lights?” Freeman asked.

Neither of us bothered to tell the other what we both knew—they had come for the Starliner. They had come to take my free ticket to any place in the galaxy. I powered up the control console and looked at the readout. Sure enough, it showed a U.A. battleship flying above the atmosphere.

“Anything on the radar?” Ray asked.

By now the men were close, less than ten feet from the ship. I could see them squatting, hustling into position.

“They have a battleship about a thousand miles up.” I lit the landing lights, flooding the entire settlement area with bright, blinding light. Tint shields in the Marines’ visors would protect their eyes from the glare. They could stare right into the light and it would not bother them.

Most of the Marines dropped to the ground or looked for cover. Three ran to the ship, and Ray accommodated them by opening the hatch.

Standard Marine training—you don’t walk into a situation blind. You flank the enemy. You always pin the enemy down and flank him. These boys had forgotten that. Guns drawn, they rushed up the ramp yelling something. I have no idea what they said, however, because Freeman picked them off immediately. His automatic rifle had a silenced muzzle. The noise that the armor made as the dead Marines rolled down the ramp was louder than Freeman’s gunfire. The dead men formed a small pile at the base of the ship.

Outside the Starliner, people climbed out of their tents looking absolutely terrified. Seeing the dead Marines topple down the ramp, women screamed. One young wife collapsed to her knees and wailed. Her husband stood beside her, obviously confused whether he should help her or stand still. I never knew that negotiation was among Freeman’s skills, but his technique was impeccable. First, he dropped a grenade down the ramp. It rolled smoothly, plunked on the three dead men, then continued to roll to the ground.

The Marines scrambled back and waited.

Seeing the grenade, a man jumped out of his tent only to be hit across the top of the head with the butt of a Marines’ rifles. The men and women of Delphi were settlers, not soldiers. This was more than they could handle. They were desperately scared.

Caleb, who had slept through most of this, woke and placed a hand in front of his face to block the glare.

“That one still has its pin,” Freeman yelled.

“What’s happening?” Caleb, now more awake, shouted.

One of the Marines ventured forward to verify this. He picked up the grenade, examined it, then tossed it in one hand like a kid with a baseball. Freeman shot him in the head.

“Oh, God!” Caleb screamed when he saw the Marine fall.

“This one doesn’t have a pin!” Freeman shouted. He did not scream. Freeman sounded like a man in control. But he did not toss the grenade down the ramp this time, he tossed the pin. “Do I have your attention?”

Freeman and his grenade remained in the Starliner. Caleb came out with me. Most of the Marines acted nonchalant as I stepped down the ramp. A few trained their guns on me, but most stood their ground, carefully watching my every twitch. The Marines may have been chatting over the comLinks in their helmets, but I could not hear them.

Caleb stood right behind me, a boy working so hard to be a man. If he wanted me to hold him or protect him, he kept it to himself. He walked at my side, a couple feet away from me. He did not whimper or cry. He did not cringe, but he took tentative steps like a man walking on thin ice.

“We have a standoff,” I called.

“It’s not such a standoff,” one of the Marines shouted for me to hear. He bent down and grabbed a man out of a tent. The Marine held his M27 to the man’s head. He started to say something more, and I shot him.

The ring of Marines in the front raised their guns, then lowered them immediately. Whoever was giving the orders, he did not want to test me.

“What do you want?” one of the Marines asked.

“I want you to leave,” I said. This, of course, was impossible. They had no place to go. Little Man was the only livable planet around. They could fly one hundred light years in any direction and not find a suitable planet. “But you can’t do that, can you?”

A Marine stepped forward and removed his helmet. I did not like what I saw. He held his M27 in his right hand. In his left, he gripped his helmet by the lip as if it were a bucket. He was a clone, of course. The man may have been in his late thirties, a veteran so to speak. His eyes had that calculated confidence you generally saw in the eyes of veteran Marines.

But there was something odd about him. His eyelids rode high on his eyes, showing whites both above and below his pupils. He had a nervous tick which caused him to glance to the sides. Like me, the man had brown hair and brown eyes. He stood just under six feet tall. Something else caught my attention. The man looked emaciated, as if he hadn’t eaten for weeks. This was not the thin face of a man who eats sparingly, this was the bony face of a man who had lost a lot of weight in a very short time.

It had only been two weeks since the Network was destroyed. Even on a ship trapped in a remote part of the galaxy, the pantries should have had enough inventory to last for months.

“You think you’re in control, don’t you, asswipe?” the Marine asked. He acted as if the entire situation struck him funny.

“That depends how badly you want my ship,” I said.

“Who says I want your ship?” He made a strange, high-pitched whinnie. “Maybe I just want to poke a few women and go home.”

This, of course, was not the way Marines talked to outsiders. Had the man not been a clone, I would have thought he was a pirate or a guerilla wearing stolen combat armor. Marianne stood outside her tent, watching all of this anxiously. She took little stuttering steps as if she wanted to start running to Caleb then she pulled herself back. She looked at me with a pleading expression.

“This your boy?” the Marine asked, pointing his rifle at Caleb. I loved that boy, and I had no idea what this crazed Marine might do. Bringing my right hand up, I batted the rifle away from Caleb, then grasped the muzzle and thrust it backward as hard as I could. The rifle butt struck the Marine in the shoulder.

“Watch yourself,” he snarled at me.

“Yeah, you’re here for the ship,” I said with a sneer as I let go of the rifle. Tension showed in his face. He wanted to shoot me, but he couldn’t. If he shot me, he would lose the Starliner. Thanks to Ray Freeman’s opening gambit—shooting three Marines then tossing out the pin of a grenade, no one dared accuse us of bluffing. “I could kill you,” the man’s gaunt face with its hollow cheeks and bulging eyes contorted into a snarl.

“Mad Dog,” I said, “you wouldn’t even be a warm-up.”

He raised his M27. The other Marines all raised their M27s. For a moment I had no idea what would happen. Then I heard
clink, clink, clink,
and a second pin dropped out of the Starliner.

“Why don’t you put me in touch with the officer in command?” I asked. The guns did not go down. The Marine continued to stare into my face. “I’m going to pull your brains out through your ass,” he said.

“You know, you do a lot more talking than thinking,” I said. “There is at least one man on that ship holding live grenades. Unless you want to set up permanent residence on Delphi . . . Little Man, I suggest you lower that specking M27 and get me your commanding officer.”

Eyes still fixed on mine, the Marine lowered his rifle again. “You want to speak to the man in command?

I’ll get him for you. But you won’t like him. You won’t like the general, but he might have some fun with you.”

The Marine replaced his helmet so he could use the comLink. I was glad not to see his face, it took the edge off the situation. I looked over at Caleb and told him to go to Marianne. Without saying a word, the boy ran over to his mother and they hugged. She kissed him several times on the head and looked at me. Combat helmets drowned out sounds. They had an external speaker that let you communicate with people around you. “You want to come up to the ship?” the Marine asked using the speaker.

“Sure. I’ll just hop in the kettle of that transport you have hidden somewhere in the woods, and we’ll all fly off to the mothership like we’re best friends. Get real, Marine.”

There was a pause while the Marine relayed my message. “Okay, General Lee says that he will come down.”

I did not know the name of every general in the Marine Corps and I did not know every officer in the Scutum-Crux Fleet, but I took a gamble on this one. “General Lee?” I asked. “Would that be General Vince Lee?”

There was a pause, and then the Marine said, “The general thought you might recognize the name, Harris. He also says you’d better have a damned good reason for being here.”

The three of us, Ray, Archie, and I, met alone in the Starliner. Either Ray or I had to remain in the ship at all times. With their satellites and observation equipment, the crew of that battleship could watch us closely, and they might yet have commandoes or snipers around our camp. As long as one of us remained on the ship, grenade in hand, they could not gas, rush, or shoot us.

“We were better off before you came,” Archie yelled in his booming baritone. He stood a couple of inches taller than me, and despite his age, there was a menacing quality to his angry stare. His eyes were as dark as shotgun barrels, and when he frowned, the wrinkles formed concentric Vs on his forehead. It was still night outside, but now no one slept. The congregation sat around a bonfire. I could see them through the window. The fire glowed bright and warm. Its sparks rose into the sky. Archie paced back and forth in the aisle as he thought and spoke. “I should have known better than to trust professional killers. I should have known you would start a war.”

Maybe he was right. With the exceptions of Ray and myself, no one had fired a shot, but that would undoubtedly change.

“All they want is your ship,” Archie said. “I say you give it to them.”

I wanted to remind Archie that I was not a member of his congregation, but I fought back the urge. I also wanted to tell him that this wasn’t just a question of me giving up my ride to help build his clone-hating kingdom of Christ. Before I could do that, Ray told him what I should have been thinking.

“You think they’ll take the ship and leave?” Ray asked.

Archie did not answer for a moment. “There’s no reason for them to stay,” he said, watching the members of his congregation through one of the windows. “There’s no reason for them not to leave once we give them what they want.”

“How many people do you think they have up there on their carrier?” Ray asked. Archie shook his head. “Couple hundred?”

“Have you ever seen a carrier?” Ray snorted. He turned to me. “Harris, how big is the crew on a U.A. carrier?”

“Full crew? Twenty-five hundred,” I said.

“A couple thousand,” Ray repeated. “And how many people do you think could fit on this little ship?”

“A dozen, maybe two,” Archie said.

“How long do you think it would take those Marines to fly a couple thousand men to whereever they want to go? Five months? Six months? That’s assuming the broadcast engine holds up under the strain of extended use. What if it breaks? You saw that Marine. Do you think he would be able to repair it?” Ray spoke in actual paragraphs. I was used to him speaking in single syllables and an occasional sentence.

“Some of those Marines are going to have to stay here for a long time. When half of them are gone, they won’t even have enough of a crew to man their ship. Sooner or later they are going to need to leave it. Do you think they’re going to make good neighbors? Do you think they’re planning on sharing this planet or taking it?”

“I bet they are planning to share,” I said. “Who’s going to plant the crops and grow the food? Those clones are programmed for combat, not farming.” I remembered that clone quipping, “Maybe he wanted to poke a few women,” and hoped Archie remembered it, too.

“So after six months of servitude, we would be free. Our lives for six months as slaves; that sounds like a fair trade,” Archie kept on arguing, but he sounded desperate.

“You think they’ll behave themselves for the six months?” I asked. “They’re clones. They’re the ones with the guns. You can bet that the commanding officers will be the first to go, so the enlisted men will be in control. They’re sterile, not impotent.”

“Harris means that there are going to be rapes,” Freeman said.

“Copulate, not populate,” I said in a glib tone. “It’s a Marine Corps motto.”

That got through to Archie. He heard this and froze, wringing his hands as he thought. “And you think you can get them to leave without giving up your ship?” Archie asked. “They may just decide that if they can’t have your ship, neither should anybody else. They may decide to simply kill us all.”