The Clone Empire (31 page)

I moved toward that door slowly, my gun ready, my eyes searching for the slightest hint of motion. The way the door chewed on the dead man distracted me. Staying low and searching the hall around me, I darted into the lab and kicked the dead guard out to the corridor.

A moment after I entered the lab, I heard a shot followed seconds later by more shots in rapid succession. Not waiting for the shooting to stop, I hurried back to the elevator. I did not run. I moved ahead slowly, methodically, always expecting a trap.

When I reached the elevator, I saw my MPs sitting on the floor, talking. One held a gun in his hand, the other held the flashlight. They heard me coming, spotted me with their light, then shined it on the heap of combat armor lying dead on the floor.

I went to the dead clone and kicked him hard enough to send his helmet spinning across the floor. I kicked him again. These were dangerous clones, the kind of enemy who plays possum, then shoots you in the back as you walk away. Not this one, though. He was dead.

The cavalry finally arrived, and only ten minutes too late. At least they figured out how to restore the lights.

With the lights in the hall shining brightly above me, I returned to the psychology lab. Two MPs lay dead in the anterior office, their guns lying lame beside them. They’d tried to cover the door, but they were blind in the dark. At least they’d stayed at their post to the end.

I hesitated a moment and entered the lab. There was the cage, now little more than an empty table. Beside it, toppled to the floor, was the stool Dr. Morman had used as she interviewed her captive patient.

She wasn’t by the stool. Her body lay in a bloodstained heap in a corner of the lab. Sua—it must have been Sua—had beaten her to death. Uncontrolled outrage had been built into his psyche. From the angle of her neck and the twists in her body, I got the feeling that simply killing Jennifer Morman had not been enough to quench Sua’s fury.

The dynamics of the summit changed on the final day.

Gobi Station Security sent gunships on hourly sweeps of the desert. When they found fifteen Piper Bandits hidden in caves and under tarps, they issued an order to fire on any unidentified vehicles or people seen within a ten-mile radius of the base.

The first speaker of the day was Lieutenant Pearce, the naval engineer who modified Gobi Station security posts so that they would read chromosomes instead of DNA.

“It was easy,” he began. “We’ve had no problems reconfiguring the posts to catch double wise.”

Warshaw put up a hand, and asked, “What is a ‘double wise’?”

“Double wise, you know, clones with two Y chromosomes. The infiltrators. Now that we know what they are, the guys down in Security call them ‘Double Ys.’ Fixing the posts to read chromosomes instead of DNA was a snap.”

“So the posts can detect them?” Warshaw asked.

“Yes, sir, no problem. We had some up and running yesterday. We would have caught the one who killed that woman, except he was wearing armor. Not much we can do about that.”

“I understand that,” said Warshaw, his frustration rising to the surface. “I want to know how quickly you can convert the entire fleet over. What equipment do you need to send out so you can fix the posts on our ships?”

“They won’t need new equipment, Admiral. They’ve got everything they need built right in.”

Pearce was a clone, of course, and a man in his twenties. He fit the exact demographic for which we would soon be screening. If he’d shaved the sides his head and implanted a couple of wires behind his ear, he could have passed himself off as the late Philip Sua.

“Turns out you can use the posts for MRIs as well,” Pearce added.

“You can fix meals with them?” asked an admiral.

“That’s MREs, asshole,” snapped Warshaw. He massaged his brow and shook his head, looking so miserable I felt sorry for him.

Another admiral, possibly the only honest man in the room, put up a hand and asked, “What is an MRI?”

I knew what an MRI was because I’d read the late Dr. Morman’s report. None of the admirals would have bothered with something so mundane as a psychological inventory taken by a forensic psychologist. They commanded fleets, what did they care about psychological profiles and medical reports . . . now that we knew how to catch the infiltrators?

Lieutenant Pearce used more tech-speak than he should have for communicating with admirals. They pretended to listen, but now that they knew the problem could be solved, they didn’t really care about the details.

“Magnetic imaging? A resonance scan,” Pearce explained. “The clones you’re looking for . . . their brains are slightly deformed. It was in the lab report.”

According to the late Dr. Jennifer Morman, MRI scanning could be used to detect reduced activity in the limbic areas of the brain. In her final report, she recommended running MRI scans as a secondary method of identifying clones like Sua.

Pearce clearly enjoyed presenting to the admirals. I got the feeling he saw them as dumb, dependent, and ignorant, and he liked talking down to them. He smiled, and said, “There’s a side benefit to running MRIs, we’ll be able to spot brain tumors as well.”

Thinking he was joking, several admirals laughed.

“It really will spot tumors,” Pearce said, sounding a bit defensive.

“If you can configure the posts to cut hair, maybe we can use them for barber duty,” one of the admirals suggested.

Everybody laughed. The mood in the room had turned jovial, almost euphoric. A few of the admirals stood and applauded Pearce.

Warshaw did not join in the festivity. He sat in his seat, quietly watching. I suspected that he and I shared a common concern. Identifying armed and dangerous enemies would be the easy part, arresting them would be another story.

 

After Pearce finished his presentation, Warshaw went to the lectern, and said, “You did good work, Harris. You did good.” It was a magnanimous statement, but his handing out kudos reemphasized for everyone who was in charge. Warshaw and I might have been peers coming into the summit; but now that he no longer needed me as a decoy target, he would return to the role of supreme commander.

“We still have a problem,” I said.

“What’s that?” Warshaw asked.

“Combat armor. It’s like Pearce says: The clone we caught in the psychology lab got around the posts by wearing combat armor.”

“Do you think he knew you were reconfiguring the posts?” Warshaw asked.

That was one of those million-dollar questions. If he knew . . . He would have had to have breached Station Security to have known what we were doing. As I thought about it, I realized he must have breached our security; he knew we had Sua. “He might have,” I said. “There’s a chance we got him before he reported anything. We should have picked up the signal if he transmitted from here.”

Warshaw thought this over, and asked, “So it is your opinion, Harris, that the other infiltrator clones do not know that we can modify our security posts.” When I nodded, he said, “Okay, then we’re still in business. Order your Marines to turn in their armor.”

“Won’t that tip our hand if we issue a fleetwide order recalling all combat armor?” asked one of the admirals. It was a fair question. I thought it might.

“What if we said we were going to update their armor with shields? We could say we know how the Unifieds added shielding to their armor,” another admiral suggested.

“No one would believe it,” Warshaw said.

“We could say we were going to update our interLink hardware so the Unifieds can’t pick up our signals,” I suggested.

The best lies were the ones that incorporated the truth. Since the Unified Authority designed and manufactured our armor, there was no doubt that they eavesdropped on our conversations.

“I like it,” Warshaw said. “Tell them that the latest intel shows that the Unifieds have been listening in on us. We’ll say that we have a new circuit that will keep the Unifieds out.”

Co-opting my ideas and pretending like they’re his, he really is in charge,
I thought. Maybe it was part of my programming, or maybe it was just conditioned into me as a Marine, but I needed to know who was in charge. Once I knew who was boss, I instinctively stepped in line behind him. I was not made for command, and neither was Warshaw; but he had adapted to it much better than I had.

“We’re going to have to root the infiltrators out like weeds,” I said, and I told them about Philip Sua and how he hid in a cargo hold pretending to take inventory for sixteen hours.

“One quick cut,” Warshaw said. “We do it all at once, one swipe, all the way across the empire. We send out teams to update the posts on every ship and base, then we scan everyone all at the same time. That way, they can’t warn their friends.”

“What about the planets?” an admiral asked. “What about the men on leave?”

“Maybe we don’t get them all,” Warshaw agreed, “but we’ll get most of them, and the residuals will run for cover. They’ll know we are onto them, and they will run.”

He was right, of course. Then he said something cold and calculating and true. “All that leaves are their planes. You see someone flying a Piper Bandit, don’t even ask them for identification, just blow them out of the sky.”

The last time I saw him, Ray Freeman was flying one of those planes.

We searched the airports, the fields, even the open deserts, and we came up with 6,323 Bandits on St. Augustine. A few of the planes belonged to legitimate civilian pilots, but most were U.A. modified with a tiny broadcast engine, a single-use broadcast battery, and an energy-efficient stealth shield. Considering the odd places in which we located a few of these planes, I suspected we had not yet found all of them.

One Bandit turned up in the parking garage of an abandoned sewage treatment plant. Another was hidden in a cave filled with bats, its wings and windshield buried in guano. The most creative hiding place was a pawnshop for high-ticket items. The local police located that particular plane during an investigation; the man who ran the shop had been murdered.

Some of the planes had been on the planet for weeks. There was no telling what had become of the clones who had piloted them or how much damage they had done.

By the time I arrived on St. Augustine, the Easter egg hunt had ended. I hadn’t come looking for planes.

I went to Scrubb’s, the restaurant where I had spotted an infiltrator clone my first night on St. Augustine. Having no other means for contacting Freeman, I had suggested this restaurant as a place where we could meet. I told him I would come here every Thursday night.

I spotted Freeman the moment I entered.

He sat at a two-man table, looking as out of place as an adult at a child’s tea party. His knees arched above the top of the table, and his feet poked out the other side. Had he tried to wedge himself into a booth, he would not have fit.

Freeman spotted me but made no move to invite me over. He sat quietly, pretending to look the other way while watching me in his peripheral vision.

Piano music wafted on the air in the bar, weaving its rhythm through soft conversations. The floor was busier than the last time I had come, heavily packed with sailors and Marines in civilian clothing.

“There are a lot of clones in here. Are you sure they’re all friendly?” I asked as I sat down.

“One of them wasn’t,” Freeman said.

“Where’d you leave the corpse?” I asked.

“In a bin out back,” Freeman said.

“Was he much of a problem?”

Freeman’s gaze floated past me and across the floor. He gave his head the slightest shake. “No. Not much of a problem.”

I wondered how he identified the clone; no one had told him about Double Y chromosomes. He probably went by his gut instincts. If I had to choose between chromosome scans and Freeman’s gut instinct, I’d go with the latter. I had that much confidence in him.

I wanted to tell Freeman about chromosome scans and how we would soon take care of the infiltrators, but I kept quiet. I only trusted him so far. He was a mercenary. In the end, he was loyal only to himself.

“They’re going to invade Olympus Kri,” Freeman said. Had anyone else said this, I would not have taken it seriously; but Freeman did not suffer small talk or gossip.

“You’re behind on the news,” I said. “They’re already on the planet. We found a couple of hundred Bandits hidden—”

“I’m not talking about clones,” Freeman said.

“When?” I asked, surprised that the Unified Authority would launch a full-scale invasion on an E.M.E. target.

“Five days.”

“Are you sure about that?” I asked.