The Clone Empire (22 page)

The air slowly returned to my lungs. It felt like fire inside my chest.

Sitting on that rocky ground, fighting for breath, the pains in my back and arm and shoulder starting to register, I knew who had saved me even before I saw him. A few moments passed before he stepped into my view.

Seven feet tall, thick as an oak tree and just as stout, his shaved head as bare as a billiard ball and his skin as dark as mahogany, Ray Freeman came and stood over me, his sniper rifle hanging loose in his right hand. Here was a powerful man who could snap a man’s bones or crush his skull with his bare hands, but he preferred the work of the sniper.

“Nice shot,” I said, my throat not quite able to add voice to my words.

My vision was still a bit blurred. The light was to Freeman’s back, so I could not see his face. I didn’t need to see it to know that I would find no sympathy in his gaze.

He was not a man given to compassion. We were friends, of a sort; but the last time I had seen him, he fired that very rifle at me. He’d shot me with a “simi,” simunition, a gel cartridge loaded with fake blood used to simulate an assassination. He’d come all the way across the galaxy to deliver a message for the Unified Authority. They wanted me to know that I was not beyond reach. The U.A. attacked Terraneau the following day.

Despite the burning in my chest and throat, I inhaled enough air to speak. “You could have popped him before he started choking me.”

“I wanted to see how you would do.”

Freeman spoke slowly, and his voice was so low it sometimes didn’t sound human. His voice was the sound of cannon fire or a lion’s roar.

“How did I do?” I asked.

Freeman did not answer. He wasn’t the kind of man who wastes his breath stating the obvious. He was a man of few words.

The jeep wasn’t going anywhere, not without a winch and a tow truck to pull it out of the ditch. Even if we did pull it out, I wasn’t in any shape to drive it. My right eye was nearly swollen shut, and I could barely stand, let alone drive.

Freeman offered to take me back to the base in his car. He’d only parked a few dozen yards from the jeep, but I covered the distance like an old man suffering acute appendicitis. I’d walked one hundred times the distance earlier that morning when the only things that hurt were my feelings. Now my head was spinning, and the ground seemed to roll under my feet like the deck of a ship in a storm.

“So what brought you to this neck of the woods?” I asked.

Freeman did not respond. He did not take well to humor. I knew this, but it only made me wisecrack around him all the more. His sphinxlike persona presented a challenge.

Speaking in a language he was more likely to answer, I asked, “How did you find me?”

“I followed the clone.”

“Was there any reason why you followed that particular clone?” I asked.

We reached the car. Anyone else might have opened the door for his poor, crippled friend, but Freeman climbed in, started the engine, and waited for me to catch up.

I opened the door, jerked my head back toward the trees, and said, “I want to bring him along.”

“Get in,” Freeman said. I got in without knowing whether he would refuse to pick up the stiff or if he planned to back his car into the forest and get it. He backed the car up the dirt road and stopped a few feet from the abandoned jeep.

“Put him in the trunk,” Freeman said.

Having barely been able to walk to the car, I wanted to protest, but I knew better. I was the one who wanted the corpse, not Freeman, so it stood to reason that I should be the one carrying the corpse with a head like a smashed-in gourd.

I climbed out of the car, limped over to the dead faux sergeant, and lifted him from where he had landed beside the tree. Rigor mortis had not yet set in. As I lifted him, his shattered head bounced backward, then rebounded forward and rested on my shoulder. His arms hung limp.

I slung Lewis over my shoulder like a dockworker carrying a sack of potatoes, then tossed him into the trunk. Noticing blood and brain tissue and skull fragments on my shirt, I cursed under my breath as I slammed the trunk and hobbled back into the car.

“How did you know where to find me?” I asked as I closed the door.

“I told you, I followed the clone,” Freeman said.

“There are a whole lot of clones living in Fort Sebastian. How did you know which one to follow?”

“I followed him here from Earth,” Freeman said.

“He said he arrived three days ago,” I said.

Freeman did not respond. I took his silence as confirmation.

I tried to imagine Freeman hiding near Fort Sebastian, hoping to observe the base without being seen for three days. It didn’t sound possible. Freeman stood seven feet tall and weighed well over three hundred pounds. He was a black man living in a galaxy that had spent centuries diluting its races. The man stood out.

“When I heard that the Navy was sending an assassin to Terraneau, I figured he was coming after you,” Freeman said.

“The Navy thinks I’m dead. They all think I am dead.”

Freeman shrugged. “There’s no one else on Terraneau worth shooting.”

I had my own opinions about who should be shot on Terraneau, but I kept them to myself, and asked, “So why send someone now? They could have sent someone to finish me five months ago.”

Freeman said, “They saw the anomaly.”

“They saw the anomaly,” I repeated. “From the broadcast zone . . . from when I broadcasted out,” I muttered to myself. It didn’t make sense. How the hell would they spot an anomaly from Earth? Even if they had a telescope pointed right at us, the light from that anomaly would not reach Earth for one hundred thousand years.

Feeling uncharacteristically chatty, Freeman filled in the gap without my asking. “The Navy has spy ships cruising your territory. They have satellites monitoring your broadcast stations.”

Spy ships and satellites . . . I had gone through that broadcast zone a week ago, and the clone in the trunk landed on Terraneau a few days later. Until we sent a ship through that zone, it really didn’t matter if I was alive because I was cut off.

“What are we dealing with?” I asked. “Should I send some fighters out to look for the satellite?”

Freeman shook his head. “Don’t bother. The satellites are too small to locate.”

“And the spy ships?”

“You don’t see them unless they want you to.”

I did not bother thanking Freeman for saving me. In his ruthlessly self-sufficient heart, Ray Freeman didn’t care about my gratitude. He didn’t need gratitude or approval, and he did not concern himself with things he did not need.

Freeman and I had once been partners. We might have been friends, too, but you could never tell with him. As far as I could tell, Freeman did not have friends. Raised by Baptist colonists before becoming a mercenary, he was an outcast among his own people, and he just plain didn’t care what the universe thought of him.

We drove in silence. As I said before, Ray Freeman was a man of few words. If I’d tried to strike up a conversation, he’d probably have ignored me.

When we pulled up to the security gate at Fort Sebastian, I heard the guard radio in. “Holy shit, he’s got himself a specking giant,” before coming to my side of the car, saluting, and letting us in.

Freeman pretended not to notice, but I knew he’d heard the guard as well. He could do that. Freeman could outwait you. He had many strengths, patience was among his best.

We drove to the administration building, where Hollingsworth and a small group of junior officers waited to meet us. It was still early in the morning. A lot had happened, but it was only 09:00, and dew still glistened on the grass.

Hollingsworth walked up to the car, took one look at my face, and laughed. “Let me guess, the big guy caught you stealing his car,” he said, pointing at Freeman.

When I did not say anything, Hollingsworth laughed even harder, and said, “No? Don’t tell me. Your girlfriend hit you with a shovel?” His entourage joined in on the joke.

Hollingsworth was still busy laughing as I climbed out of the car and opened the trunk. I smiled, and said, “You think I look bad? Have a look at the other guy.” As I said this, I reached in, grabbed the faux Sergeant Lewis by his collar and belt, and flipped him onto the ground.

By that time, some rigidity had entered the body, and the arms remained bent at the elbows. The blood on his forehead, what remained of it, at least, had crusted over.

“What the hell?” Hollingsworth asked, shocked and serious.

“I’ll tell you about it sometime,” I said. “In the meantime, would you mind putting him on ice? I want a coroner to have a look at him.”

“Is he one of ours?” asked one of Hollingsworth’s cronies.

“He said his name was Lewis, Sergeant Kit Lewis. Ever heard of him?” I asked.

Hollingsworth shook his head. So did his friends.

“That’s funny. He swore you sent him to pick me up at Ava’s.”

“I didn’t send anyone after you.”

“No? How’d he know where to find me?”

“A lot of people knew where you went. I mean, it wasn’t classified information. I—I mentioned it to . . .” He stopped. “Why did you kill him?”

“I didn’t kill him,” I said. “Freeman did.” I tapped on the roof of the car, and Ray Freeman came out. The top of the car came up to my chest. It came up to his stomach. He stood there, hulking, huge, intimidating, silent.

“The late sergeant said you wanted to meet with me, then he drove me out to the woods west of town. That was when things got physical.”

“Shit,” Hollingsworth hissed.

“Wrap him up and throw him in a cooler,” I ordered. “There’s something special about this clone. We’re going to need an autopsy to find out what it is.”

“Yes, sir,” Hollingsworth said, suddenly sounding like a proper Marine.

“Something else. If this son of a bitch called himself Sergeant Lewis, that means there’s probably a dead Sergeant Lewis lying around here somewhere. Send out a team. I want to know what happened to him.”

Ellery Doctorow summoned me to his office, the political equivalent of a master whistling for his dog. Worse yet, I responded. Even knowing what he was going to tell me, I came running. Some duty-bound voice inside me reminded me that this was his planet. I would be gone soon, and he would still be here, the emperor of this little rock. He whistled, I came, and the chain of command was preserved, goddamn it.

So I climbed in a jeep with a twentysomething-year-old corporal I did not know. I took two precautions before climbing in the jeep with the kid. I asked his platoon leader if the corporal had been acting strange lately. When the sergeant asked what I meant, I simply said, “Never mind.” If the guy had to ask, there was no point in explaining.

I also brought a sidearm. That last infiltrator clone had nearly killed me even after I’d dealt him enough damage to leave him spitting blood. I was in no mood to go for a second round. But the corporal did not give off the same aura of outrage and danger that the faux Sergeant Lewis had. This kid just came off nervous.

We drove to the capitol building, and the corporal waited for me in the jeep as I went in to see Doctorow. Armed guards watched me from inside the door as I approached. I saw them and remembered a little more than a week earlier when guards had tried to stop me from going to see Ava . . . Going to see Ava, had it really been such a short time ago?

I asked myself if I still loved Ava, and I had no answer. Whatever I once felt for her, it was the closest I had ever come to love. And now? I told myself that I would get over her the same way I had with so many other girls. She was just more scrub, I told myself, but I didn’t believe it.

The guards stayed out of my way as I entered the building. They did their best imitation of the sentinel statues in a giant cathedral, eyes straight ahead, standing silent and stiff. Maybe they knew me by reputation. Perhaps one or two of them had been at the girls’ dorm.

I did not need to introduce myself to the man at the reception desk. He greeted me by name and called Doctorow’s office to let them know that I had arrived. A few moments later, an aide came to escort me in.

Ellery Doctorow, former Right Reverend, former Army chaplain, and former colonel, had gone grand. He had an office the size of a small parade ground. His floor had a foot of black marble running like a border around two-inch-thick carpet. Bookshelves and paintings lined the walls. In the center of this opulence, Doctorow had an oak-and-mahogany desk that looked large enough to use as a landing pad.

As I entered the office, Doctorow met me at the door and shook my hand. Not even a second passed before he noticed the breakage on my face. How could he miss it? My right eye was a purple goose egg. I had multiple bruises on my jaw, a badly swollen cheek, and cuts on my lips. I saw disapproval in the way his eyes narrowed. He pursed his lips, but he said nothing.

“General Harris, I am glad you came,” he said as he shook my hand.

“I had the impression attendance was mandatory,” I said.

“Oh please,” he said as he led me toward a set of chairs. “You have twenty-two hundred fighting Marines and enough weapons to destroy this planet three times over. You don’t take orders from me, and we both know it.”

He sat down behind his fortress of a desk. I sat in the wood-and-leather seat in front of the desk.

“The planetary council rejected your proposal, General. We won’t be joining your empire,” he said. “We would like you and your Marines to leave Terraneau as soon as possible.” He did not say this in an angry fashion or in a demeaning way. If anything, he sounded serene.

“Are we making way for the Unified Authority?” I asked, though I already knew what he would say.

“No. When and if they contact us, we will give them the same answer we gave you. Terraneau is a neutral planet.”