ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The tough part about writing a sequel is that while the author and the characters remember every last detail about the previous book, readers who are new to the series do not. Just after I finished my first draft of this book, a friend named Dustin Johnson asked for a peek. As it turned out, his wife, Rachel, got to the book first and did me the greatest kindness a reader can do. She complained. (That greatest favor bit applies to pre-print. Once the book is out, insecure authors like myself prefer to be lavished with praise.)

Rachel had not read the first book in this series, and what she found was that while I and my characters knew the difference between the Republic, the Mogats, and the Confederate Arms, she did not. She wanted to like the story, but she could not tell which characters were fighting for which organizations. Thank you, Rachel. Thank you, Dustin. Thank you, Andrew Perry, who I went to after Rachel. Andrew agreed with Rachel and my sizzling James Bond-style introduction was replaced with something a lot more expository.

I want to thank Mark Adams and my mother and father, readers to whom I resort for advice whenever I finish my first drafts. I want to thank Richard and Michael at Richard Curtis Associates for helping this book come about; and I especially wish to thank Anne Sowards and the crew at Ace for cleaning up after my many messes.

The cover of this book was created by Christian McGrath. It’s not often that a writer wants people to judge his book by its cover, but with Christian doing the art, I don’t mind.

EPILOGUE

“This is a short-range transport. It isn’t made for long trips,” I told Ray as he sealed the rear of the kettle.

“It’s going to take us a month just to reach the broadcast station if we reach it at all.

“Even if we get there, this will probably be a one-way trip. You don’t really think we can make it work.”

“Death in space or the rest of my life stuck here on Delphi,” Freeman said. “I’ll take my chances.” Less than one month had passed since our battle with the Grant , and he was already going stir-crazy. Dying out in space might have been easier for him.

His plan was a shade shy of suicide. He wanted to fly this navy transport out to the broadcast station. I had never seen a kettle fly for more than a day, and we would be out for a full month. If we made it to the broadcast discs, Freeman hoped to strip the sending gear out of them and adapt it for this ship. The shuttle’s engine produced the energy for it. It generated joules and joules of energy for its shields. But this shuttle wasn’t designed for the stresses of self-broadcasting. It did not even have tint shields. Even if we made it to the discs and somehow Ray adapted the broadcast equipment to work, it could all go wrong. I had first-hand knowledge about what happens when broadcasts go wrong.

“Even if this works, we’ll be lucky to get one flight with this,” I said.

“I’m willing to risk it,” Freeman answered. So was I, if it meant I could get back in the war.

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CHAPTER ONE

Earthdate: March 1, 2512 A.D.

City: Safe Harbor; Planet: New Columbia; Galactic

Position: Orion Arm

“You look like a . . .” The boy got a stunned look on his face and stopped without finishing the sentence. He was about to tell me that I looked like a clone and changed his mind. Clever boy. Finishing that thought would either end in disaster or embarrassment. If I were a regular clone, hearing this might trigger a death reflex that released a flood of fatal hormones into my brain, killing me instantly. A more likely outcome might be my not knowing what he was talking about. I would laugh at him or possibly threaten him.

Few clones knew they were clones. Government-issue military clones had brown hair and brown eyes, but the neural programming synapse in their brains made them see themselves as having blond hair and blue eyes. It was the government’s way of preventing an uprising from within the warrior class.

“I look a lot like an Army clone?” I asked, trying to sound relaxed and conversational. “I hear that a lot.”

The boy might have been in his twenties. His shoulder-length orange-red hair was stringy and lank. Large red pimples formed a constellation across his forehead. I was twenty-two, but I had seen death and battle and betrayal. Walking among the general civilian population, I considered most males under the age of thirty to be boys. The few who did not strike me as morons were thugs, like the one I had come here to meet.

The boy looked stunned. He was neither a policeman nor a guard, just an usher in a movie house. His mouth hung open as he pondered my answer, and his eyes showed a mixture of confusion and fear.

“I’m a lot like them,” I said as if confiding a family secret. “The Pentagon used my grandfather’s DNA to make those clones.”

“No shit,” the boy said. A smile formed on his face. Of the six arms of the Milky Way galaxy, four had recently declared independence from the Unified Authority—the Earth government. The Orion Arm, Earth’s home arm, remained loyal to the Republic; but this planet—New Columbia—was suspect. The New Columbian government swore allegiance to the Unified Authority, but its government was filled with politicians who openly sympathized with the Confederate Arms.

“Yeah,” I said. “You might say half the Army and I are cousins. For the record, Army clones are about four inches shorter than me and a lot wider around the shoulders.”

“Yeah,” said the boy, and he laughed nervously. “I knew something was different.”

There were a couple hundred thousand military clones assigned to New Columbia, but they seldom strayed far from their bases. The U.A. government had to tread lightly because of the planet’s skewed neutrality.

The boy looked at my ticket. “Oh, wow, you’re going to The Battle for Little Man . Lots of clones in that flick.” He smiled at me. “Third holotorium on the right.”

The hall was wide and bright with 3-D lenticular posters from upcoming movies on the walls. It was early in the afternoon on a weekday, and I had most of the theater to myself. The only people ahead of me were a young couple on a date—an uptight boy holding hands with a fresh-faced girl. The boy must have wanted to get to his movie. He walked quickly, his girlfriend in tow. The girl floated along lazily and paused to study each movie poster they passed.

“C’mon,” he said, as he opened the door to their holotorium. “We’re missing the coming attractions.”

I went two doors farther. The Battle for Little Man had already begun. It was a war movie recounting a recent battle in which a regiment of U.A. Marines was massacred on a planet near the edge of the galaxy. I knew the battle intimately. Of the 2,300 Marines sent on that mission, only seven survived. On the screen, a blond-haired, blue-eyed, barrel-chested Hollywood stud played Lieutenant Wayson Harris, the highest-ranking survivor of the Little Man campaign. As I took my seat, six enlisted men let themselves into Harris’s quarters and asked him about the mission. These men were clones. They all looked exactly alike. They had brown hair and brown eyes . . . like me. They stood about five feet eleven inches tall—four inches shorter than me.

The people who made this film may have hired retired clones to play the enlisted men. I was impressed.

“What will happen down there, Lieutenant Harris?” one of the clones in the movie asked. Respect and adoration were evident in his voice and demeanor. The leathernecks on the screen must have been computer animations. No Marine could have said that line with a straight face.

“I don’t know, Lee, ” said Harris. “It’s going to be tough. It’s going to be dangerous. But we are the Unified Authority Marines. We don’t back down from a fight.” As he said this, the actor playing Harris stuffed an eighteen-inch combat knife into a scabbard that hung from his belt. I had to hold my breath to keep from laughing. None of the Marines I had ever met carried eighteen-inch combat knives and none of them sounded as heroic as the Hollywood Harris on the screen.

“What if we die?” another Marine asked.

“You listen here, Marine, ” barked the Hollywood Harris on the screen, “don’t worry about death. We’re here fighting for the Republic. The Republic needs us. The people need us as they have never needed us before.”

I slumped in my seat. This movie was supposed to be authentic with real combat footage taken from the actual battle. Maybe the battle scenes would be more realistic, but this portrayal of military clones was painfully propagandistic. This movie was the kind of jingoistic shit that Hollywood always churned out during times of war; something meant to build patriotic morale. On a planet like New Columbia, that effort was wasted. I was the only person in the holotorium.

At least, I was the only person in the theater up until that moment. As Harris finished his soliloquy about defending the Republic, the door at the back of the holotorium opened. I heard men whispering among themselves as they moved into empty seats directly behind me.

By this time, Lieutenant Harris and a platoon of Marines were being drop-shipped behind enemy lines. They landed about one mile in from the beach where the rest of the Marines were pinned down by a group of Mogat Separatists. Harris and twenty-two commandoes snuck into the enemy’s bunker. Using knives and pistols, Harris and his men made short work of at least two hundred enemy soldiers. God, it was glorious.

The scene was played out with a combination of two-dimensional projectors creating the background behind three-dimensional holographic images. The result was a battlefield that virtually burst out of the screen. As shown in this film, the battle for Little Man was filled with heroism and valor. Everything was bright colors and patriotic music. . . . And in the middle of all of the action stood Lieutenant Wayson Harris, twenty feet tall and covered with enemy blood as he ran from one room to the next brandishing that gigantic knife.

“Hello, Harris,” whispered one of the men behind me. “Let’s talk.”

“Can it wait?” I asked. “I want to see how this turns out.”

“You know how it turns out,” the man said. “You were there.”

“Not at this battle, I wasn’t,” I said. “The invasion of Little Man that I saw didn’t look anything like this. We got pinned down on the beach. The Navy had to nuke those Mogat bunkers just to get us off the sand.”

“That so?” the man asked. “I thought this movie was supposed to be accurate.”

Up on the screen, Hollywood Harris led the charge across Little Man Valley. The charge was famous. Some 2,300 Marines ran across the floor of the valley thinking they were up against two or maybe three thousand Separatists. They did not know about the ten thousand reinforcements hiding just over the hill.

“You led the charge?” the man behind me asked. “That took guts.”

“I wasn’t even on the field. I was way off on the side. My platoon was assigned to flank the enemy,” I said.

“Really?” the man said. “Sounds like you gave yourself the easy job.”

Some of this footage was undoubtedly taken from the battle records. Watching untold numbers of enemy soldiers charge over the far ridge of the valley, I felt my skin prickle on the back of my neck. I saw the way they poured over the rise like ants swarming out of a hill. They had rust-red armor that sparkled in the sunlight. They shouted in unison. Seeing their advance, the Marines stopped and dug in.

“I didn’t have much to say in the matter. I was a sergeant. They didn’t make me an officer until after the battle.” The filmmakers probably had little choice about this last piece of deception. Portraying me as an enlisted man would lead to questions about whether or not I was a clone. And I was not a general-issue clone. I was something far more dangerous.

The battle raged on. Trapped and hopelessly outnumbered, the U.A. Marines circled their wagons and tried to withstand the advancing horde. Marine riflemen formed a picket line in front of a battery of men with mortars and grenade launchers.

“They make these movies look real,” the man behind me said.

“That is real,” I said. “The part about me is a specking myth, but this part . . .” Speck , a slang word which referred to sperm, was one of the strongest words in our modern vocabulary. The movie cut to a dogfight in space, a part of the battle I had only seen in the news feeds. Seeing the holographically-enhanced image on the big screen was a dizzying experience. The Separatists sent four battleships to destroy a lone Unified Authority fighter carrier patrolling Little Man. What the Mogat Separatists did not know was that Rear Admiral Robert Thurston, who commanded the Scutum-Crux Central Fleet, had carriers and destroyers hidden behind a nearby moon. Hundreds of fighters poured out of those hidden carriers and swarmed the Mogat battleships. Three of the battleships exploded in space. The fourth crashed into the valley just as the Mogats polished off the last of the Marines. I watched the destruction from the safety of a nearby ridge, and I remember thinking that it looked like a portrait of Dante’s Inferno.

The movie recreated the entire scene faithfully except that it had me leading my six survivors into a nearby cave. Having placed me on the front line of the battle, the scriptwriters would not have been able to explain how I sprinted to safety up the side of the canyon.

“Damn, Harris. You escaped in a cave?” the man asked. I heard newfound respect in his voice.

“Something like that,” I said.

The screen cut to a scene showing six of the survivors saluting Hollywood Harris as he boarded a transport to Earth. Those six would attend officer training in Australia. They were the first clones ever to become officers in the Unified Authority Marines. As his transport flew out of the docking bay, a lone bugle played Taps and the screen went black. The words, “Lieutenant Wayson Harris died five months after the battle of Little Man while defending the Unified Authority outpost on Ravenwood,” appeared in the center of the screen.

“That’s heart-breaking, Harris,” the man behind me said. “It’s specking heart-breaking. I’ve seen this show a couple of times now, and that part always gets to me. Know what I mean?”

CHAPTER TWO

“Okay, so you weren’t a lieutenant and you didn’t lead the charge on Little Man . . . yeah, and you didn’t die on Ravenwood? Should I believe the rest of that stuff?” The man who sat behind me in the theater was Jimmy Callahan, a New Columbian thug who hoped he could make a name for himself by playing the local espionage game. Sometimes I missed the mark with first impressions, but I felt relatively confident that Callahan was a punk and a prick. On the plus side, I was pretty sure I could trust him to deliver as promised so long as I was the highest bidder.

Callahan and two buddies had taken me to an outdoor cafe and we took a table on a terrace overlooking a trendy part of town. “You know, Harris, it just goes to show you, you can’t trust anyone anymore. I mean, here’s a movie that’s supposed to make people feel all warm and patriotic; and what do you tell me? It’s a pack of lies. Nothing happened the way they said it did.”

A line of shrubs formed a waist-high wall that ran along the edge of the terrace. Small green birds, no larger than an infant’s fist, darted in and out of its leaves.

Below us, a steady stream of pedestrians flowed across sidewalks lined with clothing stores, banks, and eateries. The workday had just ended. Men in suits and women in dresses waited at intersections, peered in store windows, and eventually ambled into a nearby train station. Now that I had met him in person, Callahan struck me as a lightweight trying to make a name for himself. He had a menacing presence. I gave him that much. His muscular chest and shoulders filled his T-shirt and his bulging arms stretched the fabric of its sleeves. But Callahan had a soft, manicured, almost pansy-fied face. His cheeks were pudgy and his skin was smooth. He marbled his brown hair with blond streaks.

“From what I hear, you’ve got information on some pretty big fish?” I said, trying to show him respect he had not earned.

“Big fish?” Callahan asked. “Yeah, I suppose you could call them big fish.”

“How do we know we can trust you?” I asked.

“I’m good for it,” Callahan said, and he turned to smile at the two men sitting behind him. They returned his smile. These were his bodyguards, I supposed, though I sensed the relationship went beyond mere protection. These other two were not as big or as strong looking as Callahan and I began to wonder if they were perhaps his younger brothers. Despite the gruff way he treated them, there was some kind of affection hidden in his voice.

“I suppose the reason you’re going to trust me is that I have what you want,” Callahan said, and his cronies chuck-led. “The only reason we’re talking is I got information and you’ve got money. Am I right?”

He paused. He wanted me to appreciate his rich sense of humor. I did not speak or nod. After a moment, he went on.

“An alert guy like me with an unlimited supply of information . . . I figure you can take a chance on me. As long as your friends in D.C. have a bottomless wallet and I’ve got good information, Harris, it’s the world’s greatest romance.”

Callahan spoke in superlatives. Everything was the “best” or the “most.” He irritated me, but I would put up with him as long as his leads checked out.

A waitress came to our table. “Have you decided what you want?” She turned to me first.

“Got anything in that’s Earth-grown?” Callahan interrupted.

The waitress smiled. Customers typically paid nearly twice as much money for food made with Earth-grown ingredients. Outworld-grown products tasted just as good, but there was a snobbish appeal to buying Earth-grown.

“We received a shipment yesterday,” she said. “The salad bar is entirely Earth-grown tonight. Oh, and we received a shipment of Earth-brewed beers.”

Callahan stopped to think about this. His small, dark eyes sparkled in the late afternoon sunlight. He stroked a finger along his right cheek. “It’s too early for dinner. Tell you what, you fix me a small salad and bring me a bottle of your best Earth brew.”

The waitress moved to one of Callahan’s thugs.

“I’ll take a beer . . .”

Callahan turned to scowl at the man.

“Tea, please,” he said sounding disappointed. The other thug ordered the same. She turned to me and smiled. “What would you like?” the waitress asked.

“I’m fine,” I said taking a sip of water.

“All right,” Callahan said, nodding approval. “So are we going to do business today? I hope you didn’t come all this way just to see yourself in the movies. Know what I mean?”

I leaned back in my chair and sipped my water. A stiff evening breeze blew across the terrace knocking menu cards from some of the tables. Across the plaza, the sun started to set behind the skyline. The traffic was tied up in the intersection below us and the street looked like a parking lot.

“You’ve given us some good stuff so far,” I said. “Nothing great, but good enough . . . a couple of low-level operatives.”

Callahan greeted this with a wide, knowing smile. “Hear that boys? I’ve given them some good stuff so far.” He bobbed his head as if in agreement with himself.

They nodded and laughed.

“Are all clones this tight-lipped or is that just your personality?” Callahan asked. He smoothed his hair with his right hand, leaned forward in his chair, and rubbed his palms together. “Tell you what, Harris. I’m just like this restaurant. I’ve got a menu, know what I mean?

“You want to eat outworld-grown stuff, we’ll give it to you cheap. You want low-level operatives, I’ll give them to you. They’re worth what, one thousand dollars a pop?”

The waitress returned with Callahan’s salad. Callahan remained silent until she left. He stuffed a forkload of greens in his mouth. “Earth-grown is the best tasting,” he said around a wad of lettuce. “The goddamn best.”

“So let’s talk big fish. What’s Crowley worth? What do I get for a big fish like Amos Crowley?”

I feigned nonchalance. Amos Crowley was someone in whom I took a personal interest. A former general in the U.A. Army, Crowley nearly killed me twice—once when he sent a band of terrorists to attack a backwater Marine base and once when he sent an inept assassin to even the score for the role I played in saving the base.

“Crowley?” I asked. “He might be worth one hundred grand . . . if your information was good.”

“One hundred grand,” Callahan echoed, his head perpetually bobbing up and down. “I like that. The math adds up. Small fish . . . one thousand dollars. Crowley is like one hundred times more important, so he’s worth one hundred times more dough. I like that.”

The conversation seemed pointless. I didn’t believe Callahan had information about Crowley. The boy was a big talker, nothing more.

“How about Yoshi Yamashiro? Is he worth something?”

“I know several parties who would be interested,” I said. Yamashiro was the former governor of Ezer Kri. I had nothing against the man personally, but the Department of Justice took a dimmer view of him. When Yamashiro became governor of Ezer Kri, he inherited a planet with a large population of people of Japanese descent. Since the territories were supposed to be a great galactic melting pot, Ezer Kri’s ethnically pure population concerned several senators back in Washington, D.C. The situation came to a head when a plurality of Ezer Kri citizens voted to formalize Japanese as their official language and rename the planet Shin Nippon .

The Senate accused Yamashiro and his cabinet of sedition and sent the Navy to declare martial law. Shortly thereafter, Yamashiro and most of the Japanese people vanished from the planet.

“And what do I get for Warren A.?”

“Warren A.” was Warren Atkins. The “AT” in Mogat was short for Atkins, named after Warren Atkins’s famous father, Morgan Atkins.

“Ambitious,” I said. “Leading us to Atkins would make you a millionaire. Of course, everything would depend on the quality of your information.”

“So let’s talk about the biggest prize, Harris.” Callahan paused to empty his beer. “What if I get you the biggest deal of them all? What do I get if I lead you to the Galactic Central Fleet?”

The Galactic Central Fleet (GCF) was a very large fleet of antique Naval ships. The Mogats had already used GCF ships in two minor attacks—one of them being the battle at Little Man.

“As I recall, there is a ten million dollar bounty for anyone who can lead us to the fleet,” I said, still sure that Callahan was nothing but talk.

“Hear that, boys?” Callahan looked back and gave his cronies a cocky simper. “I could wind up rich.”

They nodded at him and smiled. He turned back to me and his good humor vanished. “You don’t trust me, Harris, do you? How about I give you a sample, just this one time?”

“You offering a freebie?” I asked.

All three thugs laughed. “You must be mistaking me for the halfway house down the street. I don’t do charity. Know what I mean?

“How much do I get for Billy ‘the Butcher’?”

“William Patel?” I asked. Patel was a harbinger of death—a Confederate Arms spymaster blamed for terrorist attacks on civilian targets. He had a high enough price on his head. Whenever intelligence reviewed satellite footage of terrorist bombings, Patel’s face appeared somewhere in the feed. “Last I heard, he was worth twenty-five thousand dollars for a tip and maybe twice that for a capture.”

“That so? How about if he’s practically gift-wrapped?” As he said this, Callahan flicked his eyes toward the street. “See that red Paragon?” He pointed to a far away car. “That’s Patel’s car.”

The avenue below us was shaped like a horseshoe. The street ran in a sweeping curve around the outside of an enormous marble and glass fountain with thirty-foot waterfalls. Glass tunnels served as walkways through the cascading water. The tunnels were packed with pedestrians as the work day had officially ended about an hour ago. The bumper-to-bumper downtown traffic had not cleared up. Parked at the far end of the curve, well beyond the fountain, was a Paragon—a luxury sports car that looked like a shoehorn with windows. The car was burnt orange, not red. Its tapered rear window mirrored the amber and pink glow of the evening sun.

“Sure,” I said, not taking Callahan seriously. “And the dump truck up the street belongs to General Crowley. Saw him drive it there myself.”

“You don’t believe me.” Callahan placed his hand over his heart and did his best to look pained.

“Sure. I believe you. Patel drives a Paragon . . . nice car. I always took him as more of a armored tank-man, myself.”

“You don’t think much of me, do you, Harris?” Callahan asked.

“Is there any reason why I should believe that car belongs to Patel?”

“Is that reason enough for you?” Callahan asked. He pointed toward the street. There, stepping out of a delicatessen, was William Patel. He wore a black leather trench coat that swept along the sidewalk. He was tall and wiry with black hair and dark glasses hiding his eyes. He was too far away to shoot from this terrace, but close enough for me to recognize the face once Callahan pointed it out.

“I did some business with Billy this week. My boys have been following him ever since he came to Safe Harbor. He comes here for coffee. . . . He goes to the same damned stores every day. Loves this friggin’

block. Maybe he’s visiting his sweetie. Know what I mean?”

Down on the street, Billy the Butcher pushed his way through the crowd. I lost him as he took the tunnel through the fountain, then caught him again as he emerged on the other side. He shoved a woman out of his way as he stepped toward the street.

Taking only a quick glance at the stalled traffic, he skipped from the sidewalk to the road and wove his way through the cars. He was still in the middle of the traffic when he turned, looked in our direction, and peered over his shades. From this distance, I could not see the sneer on his mouth, but I knew that it was there. Having paused only for a quick glance, Patel walked past his expensive burnt orange Paragon and vanished around the corner.

I jumped from my seat.

“Where you going, Harris?” Jimmy Callahan asked. “You don’t think you can catch him from here?”

I grabbed Callahan by his collar with my left hand and clipped the first of his bodyguards with my right. The goon was just getting to his feet, giving me a warning glare, and reaching for his gun when the heel of my palm struck the corner of his jaw. He gasped and fell to the ground. I instinctively knew that his jawbone had broken.

The second goon stepped in my way. I brought the edge of my foot down on the instep of his leg, pressing hard against his knee. The man’s kneecap snapped like a dried branch. He made a faint whimpering noise as he fell to the ground and wrapped his arms around the knee, cradling it against his stomach.

“Harris, you speck! What the hell do you think you are doing?” Callahan shouted. Muscles or no muscles, the man followed without a fight. I tugged and he came running.

“Real tough boys you’ve got there, Callahan,” I said to myself in a whisper. Behind me, the first explosions showered the street with fire, glass, and smoke. Pausing for less than a second, I caught a glimpse of flames bursting out of a distant storefront.

“What the sp . . . ?” Callahan asked as I pushed him forward through the door that lead from the outdoor terrace into the restaurant.

“Hey,” someone yelled from a nearby table. I did not notice if it was a man or a woman.

“Move it, asshole,” I said to Callahan, as I continued shoving him.

Behind us, the next set of explosions tore into the street. They sounded closer and more powerful. This was the trap. The first bombs, at the far end of the curving boulevard, sealed us in so that no one could escape. The only thing we could do was sit and watch as the explosions moved toward us. Only I didn’t plan on cooperating.

The noise and percussion from the next set of bombs shook the restaurant. People jumped from their seats but the panic had not yet sunk in.

By this time, I had made my way through most of the restaurant, with Callahan stumbling ahead of me. The shock wave from this blast knocked glasses and silverware from the tables. The doors to a wine cabinet flew open. Bottles of fine wine crashed to the floor and bounced like bowling pins. Rubble from glass and china crunched under my shoes.

The sounds of panic started to waft across the restaurant. A woman shrieked. Someone yelled something about calling the police. Most of the people headed to the terrace for a closer look at the action. The explosions happened in ten-second intervals. Even with smoke and dust filling the air and the explosions getting close, people still crowded the terrace so they could watch. I stole one last glimpse of them. Then, with my back hunched and my right arm bent around the top of my head to shield my eyes, I shoved the stupefied Jimmy Callahan through the swinging doors and into the kitchen. The big room was empty. Steam and froth boiled out of five-gallon pots along the stove.

“What’s . . . What are you doing?” Callahan screamed.

The final explosion erupted from somewhere back in the restaurant. The sound was booming and short, a brilliant clap of thunder that rattles the world then leaves a vacuum in its wake. The entire building seemed to leap from its foundation and slide backward. A large metal table in the center of the kitchen flew in the air and landed upside down. Five-gallon pots flew from the stove, splashing scalding soups and water across the floor.

The force of the blast sent me sprawling. I did not know if I was flipped into the air or if the floor dropped out from under me. Callahan landed face first beside me. “God almighty,” he screamed as he sat up like a baby waking from a nap. Blood gushed from his forehead and nose. “My boys!” he half moaned. “Tommy! Eddie!”

I stood up and pulled him to his feet. I could see in his eyes that no one was home. I saw panic, not thought. The mark of my kind was that chaos gave our thoughts a warm kind of clarity and it irritated me to see Callahan so out of it. I spun him around and launched him face first through the service entrance at the back of the kitchen.

We entered a long service corridor that ran behind all of the buildings. There were none of the awnings or pretty trappings out here, just concrete block walls, empty palettes, and trash bins. This area was unscathed. The explosions had blown up the façades of these buildings, not the backs.

“Harris . . . What the speck happened. Where are my boys?” Callahan, looking dazed, turned to me for help. He did not bother wiping the blood from his pudgy face. He probably did not know it was there. So much for his swagger. Callahan’s shock irritated me beyond reason. I grabbed him by the lapels and slammed his back into a wall. Still pinning him down, his lapels in my fists which were pressed against his chest, I spoke in little more than a whisper. “They’re dead, Jimmy. Everyone in that restaurant is dead. Maybe one day they will make a movie about the way the terrorists blew up this restaurant and they can make you the hero. Wouldn’t that be a great idea for movie? Know what I mean?”

CHAPTER THREE

A moment of terrible silence followed the explosions. I knew that silence. It was filled with shock and disbelief, as if something so outrageous had just occurred that even the buildings could not understand what happened. This envelope of silence lasted a few brief seconds, then moaning and screaming filled the vacuum.

With their façades blown off, the buildings along the block looked desecrated and bare. The delicatessen, the building Patel visited right before the explosions, drooped like a tent in a storm. Its bright red awning lay in a rumpled heap across the sidewalk.

The explosions reduced several buildings to nothing more than mounds of brick and debris. Some of the cars on the street remained right side up. The force of the blast sent others tumbling and they now lay wheels up like dead insects fallen around a hive.

Walking outside the bottom floor of the restaurant in which I had just been sitting, I took in the extent of the damage. The front wall of the building was gone, terrace and all. What remained was an open-faced building with wide open floors and a blanket of bricks, broken furniture, and concrete debris spilling out to the street.

“God almighty,” Callahan said. His eyes flitted over the damage. His mouth hung slightly open.

“Your pals are under there,” I said.

He nodded and said nothing.

Sirens blared in the distance. Fire engines and ambulances appeared at the end of the block where William Patel’s burnt orange Paragon still sat parked. The emergency vehicles could get no closer. The street was choked with cars. It looked like a junkyard. The cars were smoke-stained and heavily dented. Firemen with extinguisher packs and evacuation equipment jumped from their trucks. They ran down the street in companies, splitting up to search each building for survivors. Medics set up an emergency station around the outside of the fountain. Casualties that could not walk were rushed to that station on stretchers. Even before the first tables were open, the walking wounded came for medicine and stitches. As the firemen dug through the wreckage, the medics started sorting victims. Freight helicopters swooped in from overhead. Policemen waded through the road pulling people from vehicles. Once the cars were empty, the police attached cables to them and the helicopters dragged them away.

“You’ve seen this before?” Callahan asked.

“I’ve seen worse than this,” I said. I thought about the battle on Little Man and the parts that were left out of the movie. I remembered staring at the valley and seeing its rock walls glowing like hot embers. Callahan’s dark eyes narrowed as he began to comprehend what happened. He ran to the ruins of the terrace and dug into the debris. He pulled up a helmet-sized chunk of concrete, brought it to his chest, then threw it aside. “Tommy!” He found something and tugged at it until he unearthed the remains of a chair.

Not all of the wounded made it to the field hospital across the street. One man lay on his back staring peacefully into the sky. He held his arm over his face covering his eyes. A small trickle of blood ran from his gaping mouth. I saw this and knew he was dead. A woman kneeling beside him whispered in his ear. Blood poured from gouges in her cheeks and forehead. Sticks, paper, and shards of glass littered her dirty hair. All in all, the woman looked more battered than the corpse beside her. There was no river of blood along the street, just dirty bodies, some alive, some dead. Jimmy Callahan might find an arm or a leg, as he pulled up chunks of brick and plaster. Panic showed in his movements. He’d already cut his fingers and palms and his blood splashed on the debris as he threw it behind him, but he did not notice.

“You gonna help me?” he shouted.

I shook my head.

He stood up and stared at me. “There are people under here,” he shouted so loud that his voice cracked. Some nearby rescue workers heard Callahan and mistook his shouting to mean that he had located a survivor. Grabbing gas-powered lifts and laser cutters, they ran over to join us. “Where are they?” one of the firemen asked.

Callahan looked down at the ground and shook his head. “Sorry,” he said. “I was just trying . . . I was wrong.”

The muscles tensed in the fireman’s cheeks as he clenched his jaws. Then he relaxed. “Don’t worry about it, pal. We’re all desperate.” He dug into his jacket and found a pair of protective gloves which he handed to Callahan. “Try these.”

Callahan took the gloves and stood there as stiff and lifeless as a waxwork dummy. He held his hands palm up, as if he were cupping water. Somewhere along the way I got the feeling that Eddie and Tommy, the bodyguards, meant more to Callahan than hired muscle, but I didn’t know what was going on between them. Callahan looked like he was going into shock as he looked at the pile of concrete and metal.

“You take the right glove, I’ll take the left,” I said to Callahan. He looked at me but said nothing as I picked one of the gloves out of his outstretched hand.

I was right-handed, but my genetic engineering gave me nearly equal dexterity with both hands. I found a long, rough slab of concrete. Holding it with my gloved left hand and balancing it with my right, I pushed it away from the pile.

“How did you know?” Callahan asked as he pulled on his glove. “How did you know this would happen?”

“I knew because Billy Patel is a galactic-class terrorist and you’re nothing but a two-bit punk,” I said as I traced the fallen arch of a doorway.

“A punk?” Callahan asked. He sounded more stupefied than offended. “What does that mean?” He got his foot twisted in some wire and fell on his back.

“It means that there was no way you and your two-bit operation was going to sell out a big player like Billy the Butcher without him knowing it. He knew we were watching him. He knew you were watching him all along.

“When he ditched his car and turned to look back at us. He knew exactly where to look. We were right where he wanted us and he couldn’t resist a quick look back just to gloat. He must have figured you were too stupid to guess what he was up to. Know what I mean?”

“Get specked, Harris.”

“You asked,” I said.

“So why did you pull me out?” Callahan asked. “You would have made it out more easily on your own.”

“Look at this,” I said. I was standing beside a long heavy beam that looked like it might have been made out of white marble. I found leaves from the hedge that had run around the edge of the terrace. The man who gave Callahan the gloves returned. “You found something?”

“We were just leaving the building when the bombs went off,” I said. “There were people right about here.” I squatted and brushed away a layer of dust, then picked up a smashed branch with five teardrop-shaped leaves.

The man wore a radio clipped into his collar. As he knelt down to see the crushed shrub, he whispered into the radio. “Send a team. Full gear. We might have something.”

Now that they had located a promising spot, the firemen ushered Jimmy Callahan and me away as they did serious excavation. They placed jacks and lifts under that beam, which must have weighed a good five tons.

“You think anyone is alive down there?” Callahan asked as two burley rescue workers wrestled a large ultrasonic cannon over to their dig. By this time it was late at night. Now that the helicopters had cleared the streets, fire engines and ambulances could drive right up to the buildings. The firemen placed tripods with spotlights around the dig. The spotlights were tiny, about the size and shape of a coffee cup, but their beams could be seen from twenty miles away.

We stood huddled at the front of a crowd that had gathered just behind the lights. Somebody had handed Callahan a blanket and a cup of coffee. His clothes were torn and bloody from the dig. He had wiped his cut up hands on his shirt and pants, and the dust and blood made him look like he had been in the heart of the explosion.

“I’ve never seen anyone pulled out alive,” I said. I supposed that they probably did find survivors sometimes, but I had never seen it happen.

The rescue team’s ultrasonic cannon reduced rock and glass to powder. If they fired it at the marble beam that stretched across their dig, they could destroy it, but that was not their goal. With the jacks supporting its weight, that beam now acted as a roof over their dig, protecting any survivors buried beneath.

The ultrasonic cannon fired sound waves that passed through liquid, air, and wood. You could fire it into a pond without bothering the fish, but the rocks in the pond would disintegrate. It did not hurt people. The shock waves from the ultrasonic cannons did not affect plastic or steel, but they reduced stone to dust.

The firemen used the cannon to clear a three-feet deep crevice under the beam. Two rescuers lugged a stiff, wide-bore hose into the hole. The hose was almost a full yard in diameter with some kind of cage in its opening.

“What is that?” Callahan asked.

I’d never seen anything like it and did not answer.

“Stand clear,” one of the men with the cannon shouted, and the other rescue workers backed away from the site. There was so much dust in the air that I could watch the shock wave as it fired from the cannon. It looked like a pattern of ripples as it passed through the airborne dust. There was a soft sound, not unlike the sound made by a quick shake of a baby’s rattle, and suddenly the rubble beneath that gigantic hose compressed into a powder that was finer than sand. The hose sucked the dust up. A fireman with a tow cord strung around his waist walked up to the crevice left by the hose. He stared down into it for a moment. The man wore an oxygen mask over his face and held a crowbar in one hand. Another fireman approached and handed him something small that he tucked in his belt. “You ready, Greg?” the second fireman asked as he patted the first one’s shoulder. The fireman wrapped his hands around the cord, turned so his back was toward the hole, and rappelled out of sight. A moment later his voice echoed over multiple radios. “I found one. It’s a woman.”

“Condition?” a man on the fire engine asked.

“Alive.” The crowd around me cheered. Jimmy Callahan rocked back and forth on the soles of his feet blowing warm breath nervously into badly gashed hands.

Two more firemen lowered themselves into the hole. Someone handed a stretcher down to them as a fire engine and an ambulance drew just a few feet away. The fire engine extended a ladder over the hole and dropped a winch to the firemen. Tense silence followed. Then the rope tightened. Most people cheered and a few even cried as the winch raised the stretcher from the hole. Two medics received that stretcher. They detached the cord from the stretcher and pulled the woman into the back of their ambulance. In less than one minute, they loaded her, sealed up their rig, and sped away into the darkness. Another ambulance immediately filled the vacancy.

The rescue workers found seventy-six people in that one area—sixty-two were alive. Tommy and Eddie were alive. As the explosions had come closer, they had crawled under a table and made it out virtually untouched. Tommy had a badly broken jaw. Eddie’s knee was shattered. Both of those injuries were my doing. The explosion barely scratched them.

I was glad Jimmy Callahan’s boys were alive. Callahan was going to need all the help he could get. He had some powerful enemies. Considering the devastation that I had just seen, I doubted that “Silent”

Tommy and “Limping” Eddie could protect Callahan from much of anything.

CHAPTER FOUR

How to describe Ray Freeman?

Freeman stood over seven feet tall. When he walked through a crowd, other men came up to his chest. His hands were so large that he could bury your face in his palm and plug your ears with his thumb and little finger.

Every inch of him was sinew . . . no gawky limbs on Freeman. He had a large head, heavily muscled arms, and shoulders so wide that he had to move sideways through narrow doors. His body was hard and cylindrical, his waist being nearly as wide as his chest, and all of it muscle. In the galactic melting pot of the frontier, race meant nothing. Terms like African, Caucasian, and Oriental were obsolete. The population was so intermarried that the physical characteristics could no longer be matched to specific races. In the cosmopolitan collective of the territories, Ray Freeman stood out. He was a black man, a man of African descent born centuries after that Earth continent had been turned into the galaxy’s most prestigious zoological exhibit.

Freeman’s skin was such a dark shade of brown that it almost looked charcoal. Looking into Ray Freeman’s far-set eyes was like staring down the muzzle of a double-barreled shotgun. Utterly ruthless, he was the most intimidating man in the galaxy. He was my partner.

Two years earlier, when I limped out of the ambush on Ravenwood Station barely alive, Ray Freeman rescued me. He placed my helmet beside the remains of Corporal Arlind Marsten, staging my death, then carried me out of Ravenwood. Instead of wearing dog tags, U.A. Marines wore helmets with virtual identifiers. Placing my helmet next to Marsten’s remains was tantamount to changing our identities. Since we were both clones, no one would think of checking our DNA.

Now Freeman and I were in business together, freelance bounty hunters.

“I hear there was some action on New Columbia,” Freeman said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I was in the middle of it. You seeing much?” He was on Providence, an evacuated planet in the Cygnus Arm—one of the renegade arms. We were speaking over the mediaLink. He was using a communications console with a camera so I could see him.

“Have a look,” Freeman said, and then he stepped away from the camera to give me a panoramic view of downtown Jasper, the capital city of Providence. The streets were completely empty. The only cars were parked along the curb. No children playing. No pedestrians. Everyone had fled the city.

“What time is it over there?” I asked.

“Nighttime,” Freeman said. Providence was indeed dark, but the streets were lit.

“Do the streetlights turn on automatically?” I asked.

“Yes.” That was my partner, a man of few syllables.

“So is anybody left in the city?” I asked.

“Looters,” he said. “Even the guerillas are gone.”

The people leading the Cygnus Arm had declared independence without considering the consequences. They had no Navy of their own. The U.A. Navy had two fleets patrolling their space and the Cygnus Arm military complex had no way of fighting those U.A. ships. When one of those fleets had entered Providence’s solar system, the only thing the Cygnus government could do was assemble an armada of unarmed commercial spacecraft or evacuate the planet.

“Is it safe for you to be on New Columbia?” Freeman asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Is it safe for you to be on Providence?”

“No one knows I’m here,” Freeman said. The question he left hanging was, “Was that bombing aimed at you?”

“Fair enough,” I admitted. “My flight leaves in a couple of hours. Maybe you should do the same . . . get out of Jasper before the troops arrive.”

Freeman responded with his “get real” glare—a deadpan expression, a slight narrowing of the eyes, and a barely perceptible shrug of the shoulders.

“I met a guy who says he can find Crowley,” I said.

“I’m listening,” Freeman said. His voice was so quiet and filled with base tones that you almost felt it as much as heard it. It was the sound of distant thunder or cannons firing a half-mile away.

“Guy’s name is Jimmy Callahan. He’s a local who bags supplies and runs deals for the Mogats,” I said.

“Did he say that before or after the bombs went off?” Freeman asked.

“About the same time,” I said. “Callahan and I were negotiating.”

“Do you think the bombs were aimed at you?” Freeman asked, not so much as a speck of concern in his voice.

“At him,” I said. “It was Billy the Butcher, one of Callahan’s clients.”

“Where is Callahan now?” Freeman asked. “We need to put him someplace safe and sit on him.”

“He’s in the brig at Fort Washington along with two of his bodyguards.” In my mind I added, for whatever good that does him . Fort Washington was the local Marine base. Safe Harbor was a well-fortified city. The Marines, Army, and Air Force all had bases there.

“You stashed him in the Marine base?” Freeman asked.

“Admiral Klyber sent for me. I figure the Marines can keep him till I can come back.”

Freeman and I were partners, but we came to the business from different angles. I worked as an errand boy, mostly for Fleet Admiral Bryce Klyber, the highest-ranking man in the Navy and my personal benefactor. Freeman was more of the lone wolf type. As far as I could tell, he had no connection to anybody.

Freeman’s camera shook as a bomb or a shell exploded somewhere near him. “I’d better go,” he said.

“That might be the people I came to see.”

I had already stayed too long in Safe Harbor, not that anybody was looking for me. Having skeletons like the ones I had hiding in my closet meant that you could never settle down. For openers, I was absent without leave from the Marine Corps. Well, thanks to Freeman I had supposedly died in battle, but if the Marine Corps knew I was alive, they would list me as absent without leave. And I had even more damning skeletons than that.

I drove my rental car to the commercial spaceport, a sprawling complex that was one part runway, one part passenger terminal, and two parts parking lot. Just finding the building to return the rental took half an hour. The search ended on a ten-story spiral rampway in which each floor was occupied by a different car rental agency.

An attendant pointed me toward a lane filled with a line of parked cars. There would be no paperwork. The car registered its own return, measured its fuel level, reported its own condition, and then issued an electronic receipt to Arlind Marsten, the “missing in action” Marine Corporal who received my helmet on Ravenwood. The police should have arrested Marsten or me when I returned the car, but friends in high places had already made certain that would not happen.

Since Marsten and I were both clones and one clone is supposedly indistinguishable from the next, the personal identifiers in our helmets were the only way the military could tell us apart. That was the theory. In truth, I was not identical to Marsten. He and I came from different batches. My form of clone, the Liberators, had a dark history. Most people believed that the Senate had outlawed my kind. It wasn’t true, by the way. They only banned us from entering the Orion Arm—the arm I was currently in. I was a one-of-a-kind clone, an oxymoronic descriptor if ever there was one. By the time I dropped off the assembly line, my kind had been out of production for nearly thirty years because of our violent tendencies. I did not want to advertise this to the good people of New Columbia. Prosperous and located in the all-important Orion Arm, New Columbia attracted tourists and businesses from around the galaxy. Its spaceport was the size of a small town with ten times the population. Police and military guards kept the tides of people flowing efficiently enough. If they only knew what kind of shark had swum in with their minnows. I passed the queue for baggage. During my years in the military I learned to live light and travel lighter. I spent four days in Safe Harbor, two more days than I expected. Everything I brought fit in a small briefcase that I could carry on my lap. From New Columbia I would fly to Mars, the galaxy’s biggest spaceport. Once on Mars, I would either receive my next assignment or I would find a hotel room and rest until my next job arrived—I didn’t care which.

Assignments meant money, but it also meant fighting for the good old Unified Authority. I didn’t really mind having bombs explode around me. Even when an assignment meant risking my life to save a worthless punk like Jimmy Callahan, I preferred it to lounging around some hotel. I could not help myself, it was in my neural programming.

I enjoyed the study of philosophy, politics, and intergalactic relations, but only as they applied to combat. I was designed for battle, and a soldier was all I could be. I was screwed. I went to the gate to wait for my flight, which would leave in another three hours. I cherished short breaks like this. It was the long ones that drove me crazy.

I put on my mediaLink shades, streamline glasses with retinal displays built into their hinges. Lasers painted images on my retinal tissue, opening a world of books, magazines, and video feeds. I could play games, watch movies, write letters, or catch up on the news. On this particular day, I decided to read. My favorite reading was ethical philosophy. At the time, I was reading The Complete Works of Spinoza

. Spinoza argued that men could not feel love, desire, or passion without already having a germ of that emotion within them. It was an interesting concept that was especially true of military clones. Our loyalty was programmed into us. We loved the government that made us. Even when we realized that the government hated our kind, we still loved it. Even when we hated the government back, we remained loyal.

Clones were also programmed to think they were natural-born. Your average soldier clone did not know he was cloned and programmed to love nothing but their country. They just thought of themselves as patriotic citizens.

Was Spinoza so depressing, or was it just my overapplied interpretation of his work? I looked around the gate. This particular flight was a business flight. Men in suits sat scanning the mediaLink or writing memos. Women in suits did the same. A young mother tried to busy two small children by reading to them. I had no love, desire, or passion for any of these people. They were natural-born, I was synthetic .

. . a rare synthetic. I was a clone who knew he was a clone. My model was designed before the Senate added a death-reflex to its military clones to prevent them from rebelling against their makers. When other clones learned they were clones, a gland in their brain killed them. When I learned I was a clone, I went to a bar and got drunk.

If Spinoza was right, perhaps I felt no love or passion for humanity because the germ did not exist in me. Perhaps the germ of love required a soul. Most religions stated that clones do not have souls. Perhaps I proved them right.

The Unified Authority was right to build neural programming and the death reflex into its clones. Judging by my example, once clones knew they were apart from humanity, they closed themselves off to it. As I said before, I was a one of a kind clone. The rest of my kind were created at a time when the Republic was under siege. The Galactic Central Fleet, an armada of warships, had vanished. As a last resort, the military created battalions of Liberator clones and sent them to the Galactic Eye to kill whatever unknown enemy was there.

The battle ended quickly. The problem was that having created a living, breathing super weapon, the Unified Authority did not know what to do with it. When the generals sent Liberators to settle smaller battles and domestic problems, they did not like the results.

Liberators were sent to stop a riot on Albatross Island, a penal planet in the Perseus Arm. The Liberators killed the prisoners and then turned on the guards and the hostages. With the exception of a few prison workers, the Liberators killed everyone on the planet.

In the end, Congress banned Liberator clones from the Orion Belt and let attrition thin them out. I stepped off the assembly line in 2490. By that time only four Liberators still existed. Three were wild and bloodthirsty, caring only about their own survival. One was religious and completely loyal to his U.A. creators. He was my mentor. To this day, I do not know whether to admire or despise him. I feel them all inside of me, struggling for control of my emotions. When I close my eyes at night, I sometimes think I can hear the ghost of Sergeant Tabor Shannon, a Marine who happily gave his life for the Republic. When I pass through great crowds, I feel isolated and I imagine Sergeant Booth Lector sneering at everyone around him. Both men were Liberators. Both died in battle. Shannon remained patriotic to the last, hoping for the best in a world that considered him an insect. Yes, I was still putting my life on the line for the Unified Authority; but as a mercenary. I could at least tell myself that my allegiance was to myself. But Lector was the only one whose allegiance was truly just to himself. He remained in the Marines because he could not figure out a way to escape the Corps. Looking back, I think Shannon and Lector were both full of shit.

In the Marines, you scuttled into your transport when your sergeant yelled for you to get your ass on board. But on a civilian flight, pretty flight attendants ask the passengers to board their flights. The door to our commuter flight opened and an attendant with long dark hair welcomed us. We formed a line and quietly took our seats.

The flight took off smoothly, rising through the sky. When we were about two hundred miles outside of New Columbia, the blue and white atmosphere ended and turned into the blackness of space. To this point, the ship traveled slowly in the climb, never moving more than two thousand miles per hour. We picked up speed and traveled another eight hundred miles to the Broadcast Network in a couple of minutes—a painfully slow pace.

I reclined my seat and stretched out for the short ride. We were traveling 240 trillion miles to Mars. The flight would take just over an hour, and I had had enough of Spinoza and needed the rest. I turned my head toward the porthole beside my chair and watched the tint shields form over the glass, dimming out stars and planets under a blanket of inky blackness. We would soon reach the Broadcast Network. I could not see the discs through the shields, but I knew what was coming. A thousand miles outside of Safe Harbor, our spacejet slowed to a crawl as it approached the two gigantic elliptical discs that formed the New Columbian sector’s broadcast station. The discs were approximately one mile across and reflected everything around them like giant mirrors. Many things happened over the next few moments. A silver-red security laser, able to X-ray a ship, its contents, and its passengers, searched the spacejet for criminals and contraband. Once the U.A. Port Authority completed its search, the galaxy’s largest super computer sequenced our travel to make sure no other ships would enter our travel space.

The spacejet did not enter the discs. As it approached, jagged tendrils of electricity stretched out of the glossy face of the sending disc. The blue-white lightning was so bright that I could see it through the tint shielding on the window. The air in the cabin crackled with static electricity. Had the tinting failed, the glare of the Broadcast Network’s electrical field would have blinded me. Even if I closed my eyes and placed my hands over my face, that light would blind me.

“Prepare for broadcast,” the pilot said over the loud speaker.

And then the first 10,000-light-year jump was over. We had traveled sixty trillion miles in less than one second. We traveled the remaining one hundred eighty trillion miles in the next few minutes—the time it took to emerge from a receiving disc and glide to the broadcast disc beside it. The transfers took approximately thirty seconds and we made four of them.

Clearing Mars security, however, was a different story. The Unified Authority was at war and Mars was its most important port. Mars was the gateway to Earth.

Mars Spaceport was the galaxy’s largest shopping mall. It was the hub of all space flight to and from Earth. Consequently, anybody on the planet qualified for duty-free shopping. Even the Mars port employees qualified. The jewelry stores on Mars sold more diamonds than jewelers on the next ten richest planets combined. As the advertisements said, “Serious shoppers shop on Mars.” Even people who were not planning on traveling sometimes flew to Mars for the tax breaks on gems, fine liquors, and other luxury items.

Fluorescent light poured out of the storefronts. Pretty girls in short skirts stood just outside stores offering to mist passersby with samples of expensive perfumes. A robotic cigar store Indian turned back and forth proffering plastic cigars to all who passed. The shopping arcade I had entered stretched as far as the eye could see, and there were ten more like it.

Nearly one million people flew in and out of Mars on any given day. The planet did not have a breathable atmosphere, just a series of domes with a city-sized spaceport and a military base that was jointly run by the Air Force and the Army.

I did not like going to Mars. I came here because it was the most crowded spot in the galaxy, and the best jumping point for meeting Admiral Klyber. The traffic around this planet was so congested that no one paid undue attention when ships took off and headed out to space, and Klyber’s pilots could meet me here and smuggle me away without attracting attention.

I scanned the crowd around me for known Confederates and Mogats. Having just survived a terrorist attack on New Columbia I was more cautious than ever. I also kept an eye out for people who might identify me as a Liberator—or even worse, recognize me.

“You ready to go, Marsten?” a man asked as I passed the door of a dimly-lit bar. The pilot knew my real name. He also knew better than to refer to me as Wayson in public.

“Sure,” I said, not even pausing to look back.

The pilot walked quickly and caught up with me. Dressed in a long leather jacket and khaki pants, he wore the traditional uniform of civilian pilots. His short black hair was slicked back and a pair of dark aviator glasses poked out of his shirt pocket. He was not a civilian. He was an officer in the Navy. We left the shopping arcade and entered a food court. Lines of people formed in front of small restaurants. Janitors bussed tables and cleared trash bins. Loud talk echoed in the rafters of this cavernous hall with its bright lights and gleaming white floors.

“You are the hot topic on the ship these days,” the pilot said. “Is it true?”

“Is what true?” I asked.

“Were you in Safe Harbor when the bombs went off?”

“Where did you hear that?” I asked.

“One of my friends heard Klyber say you were there.”

“If Admiral Klyber says I was there, I must have been there,” I said. The pilot laughed. We crossed the food court and entered an unmarked door. This led us into a narrow service hall that seemed to stretch for miles. The white tile floor gleamed but the walls were unfinished plaster. Bright fluorescent fixtures provided the hall with dry luminescence.

“So were you there when the bombs went off?”

“Yeah, I was there. I helped dig out a few of the survivors.”

The service hall branched off to two different sections of the Mars Spaceport. We entered from one of the bustling commercial terminals. Had we headed left, we would have entered administrative offices. We turned right and wound up in the commuter terminal. This was the area used by private pilots and large corporations. It was smaller than the commercial terminals, far less crowded, and much less flashy. Instead of a large food court, it had a coffee shop where pilots went to relax as they filled out flight reports or studied their flight plans. The general mood in the commuter terminal was quiet, like the lobby of a library.

A couple dozen pilots stood in pockets scattered around the floor of the terminal. Most of these flyboys seemed to know each other. None of them recognized my pilot. They stole mildly curious glances. His was a new face that had stumbled into their tight-knit fraternity.

Once we left the terminal, my pilot swapped his camouflage—the leather jacket and civilian accoutrements—for a Navy jacket. His spacecraft, however, remained camouflaged. We crossed the tarmac and climbed into a Johnston R-27, the kind of twelve-seater light craft favored by small corporations. The Johnston was white with dark gray trim along its wings. It had neither armor nor hidden gun arrays, the prosaic sign of a military craft. This innocuous Johnston had something far more impressive.

“You strapped in?” the pilot asked as I fitted the last of the safety harness across my chest, a useless gesture. Any accidents in this little craft would end in death.

“This is Johnston R-twenty-seven zero four, four, nine Rectal, Anus, Penile five requesting permission to taxi. Again, this is Johnston zero, four, four, nine RAP five requesting permission.”

“Roger, Johnston R-twenty-seven. You are cleared to taxi.” I could hear other flight controllers squawking in the background as the man on the radio struggled to keep from laughing.

“Aren’t there regulations about what you can say on the air?” I asked.

“To the tower?” the pilot asked, sounding genuinely surprised. “The controllers love it when I talk dirty. It’s their supervisors who get pissed, and that’s all right. They can’t touch me. I have military clearance and they’re just civilians.”

The commuter runway was a mile-long tunnel with several airlocks. A crewman towed us to the first airlock using a cart. When he reached the far wall of the airlock, the crewman detached our tow cable, gave us a quick wave, and drove back to the terminal. The runway behind us vanished as the thirty-foot door closed behind us, sealing in the spaceport’s manufactured atmosphere. The wall in front of us was thick and heavy, the color of oxidized iron. After two minutes, a seam showed in the center of this great metal barrier. The cogs at the base and top of the wall groaned as they pulled it open along their zipper-like causeway.

This time we rolled forward under our own power and stopped just shy of a final barrier, an electroshield. The first two barriers we passed through protected the atmosphere inside the spaceport. This next shield was in place for military purposes. It was a force field designed to stop intruders and deflect attacks. The electroshield could dampen particle beam and laser attacks, and anything solid that hit the shield would be instantly fried. I could see the surface of Mars ahead through the electroshield’s translucent white aurora.

“Do they know you’re self-broadcasting?” I asked.

Having a “self-broadcasting” ship meant that this highly modified Johnston R-27 did not need to enter the Broadcast Network to travel long distances. The ship was equipped with its own broadcast engine that, used in conjunction with the right navigational computer, could transport the ship anywhere in the galaxy.

“It’s sort of hard to hide something as big as an anomaly,” the pilot said. Anomaly was the term used to describe the electrical field through which broadcast objects vanished and appeared. “They track us the moment we leave Mars. We’re the only ship that flies toward Saturn instead of Earth or the Broadcast Network. That kind of thing gets all kinds of attention these days.”

“I suppose,” I said.

The surface of Mars looked like an Earth desert from our cockpit. Peering out as we arched away from the planet, I saw dented plains that stretched around the horizon. Huge as the Mars Spaceport building was when seen from the inside, it became a mere speck as we pulled away from the planet. Soon enough, Mars looked no larger than a coin, and all of its features vanished. The only broadcast discs in the Sol System, Earth’s solar system, hovered a few hundred miles above the spaceport. Normally spacecraft either flew up to the discs or headed toward Earth, the only populated planet in the solar system. We, however, flew in the opposite direction. We headed out toward space, toward Saturn, and traveled more than 100,000 miles. Only the most powerful tracking systems like the ones on Mars would detect what happened next.

Sitting out in space, we glided as the contraption in the back of our craft came to life. The glass around our cockpit became as black as space. It was opaque but not dark enough to block out the electrical storm caused by our broadcast engine. Lightning danced across the edges of the Johnston R-27. I could see its squirming outline through the tinting. It looked like neon chalk lines as the cabin filled with the acrid scent of ozone.

“Welcome to the Perseus Arm,” the pilot said.

“Still in Perseus?” I asked. “I thought they would have moved the ship by now. We are at war.”

“Why move?” the pilot said. “No one knows we are here. We’re protected from both sides.”

CHAPTER FIVE

March 7, 2512 A.D.

Ship: Doctrinaire ; Galactic Position: Perseus Arm

Sections of the Doctrinaire were still under construction and probably would be for the next thousand years.

The Doctrinaire was so incredibly large that its size created an anomaly. Viewing the ship alone in space, you could not estimate its size. At first glance, she looked like any other fighter carrier—the same wedge-shaped body, the same beige hull and light gray underbelly. In the vast panorama of space, size and distance become blurred. Seeing the Doctrinaire floating beside a Perseus-class fighter carrier, you would think they were identical ships and that the Doctrinaire was closer to you because she was so much larger than the other.

The hull of the Doctrinaire filled the view from our cockpit long before we reached its landing bay. The ship was shaped like a bat—its wing span measuring two miles wide and its hull was about 1.3 miles in length. The great ship had four launch tubes, hollow tunnels used for launching fighter craft that stretched the entire length of the ship. The Doctrinaire had an additional four landing bays for transports and supply ships.

The pilot flew the Johnston toward Bay three. We slowed to a mere hover and the pilot used thruster engines to guide us into place in one of those docking bays.

“Well, Corporal Marsten, it’s been a pleasure flying you on Doctrinaire Spacelines. Fly with us again sometime,” the pilot said as he climbed from his seat. He gave me a sloppy, mock-salute. This was not an unfriendly gesture—he knew that I was AWOL.

I left the ship and walked to a nearby locker room. I pulled a key from my pocket and looked for the matching cubicle. Once I found it, I stowed my civilian clothes and dressed in the charley service uniform of a U.A. Marines corporal. For all appearances, I was just another enlisted clone on active duty. The trip from the landing bay to the bridge was lengthy and fast. The Doctrinaire had twelve decks, plus a bridge and an observation deck. The ship had nearly twenty square miles of deck space. Just getting from the landing bay to the central elevator bank required a ride on the recently installed tram. Officers might spend their careers on this ship without visiting the bridge or the engineering decks. I lived on this ship two years ago. Back then everything but the shell of the ship was still under construction. Last time I traveled this path, the corridors were covered with scaffolding. Welders used to work in these halls around the clock, the white glare from their torches shining up and down the halls like a continuous flash of lightning. Back when I was assigned to the Doctrinaire , the ship housed more builders than crew. You might pass ten construction workers walking down a hall and not see a single sailor.

A lot had changed. The cylindrical corridors I entered on this occasion had smooth shining walls. Bright light shined down from inlaid ceiling fixtures and polished chrome address plates adorned most doors. The Doctrinaire had several banks of elevators, but only the central bank reached the bridge. As I entered one of these elevators, a security computer scanned and identified me. The doors closed behind me. Moments later they opened on to the bridge of the Doctrinaire —a sweeping deck manned by dozens of officers.

Three officers came in my direction. The man on the right was a captain—a heady rank in the U.A. Navy. He was young, stout, and very attentive. He looked like the kind of aggressive officer who runs a tight ship and accomplishes his mission at any cost. The man on the left was a rear admiral. He had a single star in his collar. He was an older officer whose casual smile and soft eyes gave the impression of patience.

The man in the center was Fleet Admiral Bryce Klyber, possibly the most powerful man in the entire Republic. Klyber was an accomplished Naval officer. He rose through the ranks by answering every challenge. With the exception of Bryce Klyber, no one had worn the fifth star of a fleet admiral for forty years.

Klyber was one of the last active officers who had fought in the Galactic Central War—the last full-blown war. Klyber, of course, won that war when he unveiled his battalion of top-secret Liberator clones.

“Marsten,” Klyber said, and eyebrow cocked to show his surprise at seeing me. “I thought I left orders for you to meet me in my quarters. Just as well. Corporal, this is Rear Admiral Halverson and Captain Johansson.”

I saluted.

They saluted back.

Klyber looked over at the rear admiral. “Admiral Halverson, have you met Corporal Marsten?”

Something about Captain Johansson caught my attention. He was tall and skinny with a shaved head and squinting dark eyes. He did not even bother looking at me as he saluted. He seemed to want to ignore me, not in the “you’re not worth my time” way that many officers greeted clones, but in a way that seemed far more contemptuous.

“Corporal, I don’t believe we’ve met,” the older officer said. “Rear Admiral Halverson.” He looked to be in his late fifties, an officer nearing retirement. Halverson looked like a youngster beside old man Klyber, however, a painfully skinny man who looked like he could have been one of the slaves forced into building the Pyramids of Egypt.

“Marsten here is retired from active duty,” Klyber said. “I, um, reactivate him on occasion. He’s got a knack for security.”

Klyber was tall. I was six feet three inches tall and he had me by an inch or two. On the other hand, he may well have weighed less than 150 pounds. Klyber stood perfectly erect, his rigid posture and skinny body made him look like he was made out of the outer limbs of an old oak tree. He had icy blue eyes that looked as focused and intense as sapphire lasers.

He turned to the two senior officers. “Perhaps we can take this up again later this evening. I have some business to take care of with the corporal.”

Halverson and Johansson saluted and walked off to continue their discussion.

“What do you think, Harris?” Klyber asked, looking around the bridge.

“She looks ready to run,” I said, noting the brightly lit navigational panels.

“More or less,” Klyber said. “It’s not the equipment that worries me. I worry more about the men at her helm. You get a limited selection of officers with top-secret projects. My crew was chosen for security clearance, not battle experience. If I wanted a ship full of military police and intelligence officers, this would be the ideal crew.”

“You worked with Halverson in Scutum-Crux,” I pointed out.

“Tom Halverson does what he can. I like Halverson,” Klyber said. He looked around to make sure that no one was within earshot of us and lowered his voice. “What did you think of Johansson?”

“Not especially friendly,” I said. “He doesn’t make a great first impression.”

Klyber smiled and took one last look around the bridge. “Let’s head down to my quarters.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

We entered the elevator.

“What happened on New Columbia?” Klyber asked.

“Mogat terrorists happened,” I said. The elevator doors slid closed and I felt the slightest vibration as we dropped three decks and sixty feet. The doors opened.

“Anyone I have heard of?” Klyber asked.

“William Patel,” I said.

“Billy the Butcher? Are you sure it was him?”

“I saw him myself, sir,” I said. We entered the corridor that led to officer country. “Callahan, the informant you sent me to meet, fingered him. Callahan thought he could earn himself some credibility and a nice reward by handing him over to us.”

Officers walked past us in groups of two and three. They all stopped to salute as Klyber walked by. Klyber returned their salutes without breaking stride.

“Patel was wise to him?”

“Have you met Callahan? He figured he could pinch both sides of the loaf. He sold Patel supplies and us information. It takes a subtle hand to play both sides off like that. Subtlety is not one of Callahan’s stronger suits.”

We entered the admiral’s suite which included his quarters, a large office, and his war room. “So you don’t think the bombs were meant for you?”

“Not a chance,” I said.

“What tipped you off to the bombs?” Klyber asked.

“We were sitting on this balcony overlooking the street and out comes Patel, practically right on cue. He’s too far away to nab, but somehow he knows where we are sitting and he looks up at us. I mean, he’s a hundred yards away and he looks right at us.

“I didn’t trust Callahan. He struck me as a punk . . . a small brain with a big mouth. So when Patel looks right at us, I figure he knows exactly what Callahan is up to. The only question I had was if we could make it out in time.

“The big question is, who tipped Patel off?”

Klyber listened to this, his blue-fire eyes seeming to X-ray my thoughts as I spoke. “Do you have any theories?”

“Somebody on your staff,” I said.

“Interesting that you would say that. Of course, you realize that parked as we are so far from the Broadcast Network, we don’t have communications with the outside world. In order to get a message to Patel, our spy would need to travel . . . broadcast to another location.

“Given that, do you still think the leak came from here?”

This quadrant of the galaxy was dark. Communications were transferred through the Broadcast Network and the Doctrinaire was nearly 20,000 light years from the nearest discs.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Whoever leaked the information traveled.”

Klyber sat silent behind his desk and rubbed the thinning hairline around his temple. He seemed deep in thought, then brightened. “I have something for you,” he said as he stood and opened a closet hidden in the wall beside his desk. “A friend sent this to me. He did not know anything about you, of course; but I think you will appreciate this.”

When Klyber turned back toward me, he held a small book with tan leather binding that looked parched and old. The leather had gone stiff with age and drying. The words, Personal Journal of Father David Sanjines , were emblazoned in dark brown letters that stood out against the dust-colored leather.

“A friend in the Vatican sent this to me. Most of it is of no interest. It’s the journal of an archbishop. But there is a small section concerning a mutual acquaintance of ours.”

I looked down at the journal as Admiral Klyber held it out to me.

Klyber said. “I want you to have it.”

I took the old book and it seemed to fall open of its own accord. The pages had a faint red tinge to them that I knew was from clay dust, though it looked more like rust.

The book had a five-inch strip of blue velvet ribbon sewed into its binding for a bookmark. Parts of that ribbon had turned nearly black with age. I noted the date—April 10, 2494—on the open page. Klyber watched me. “That is the only entry of interest. It goes on for a few pages.” He thought about the book for a few more moments, then shifted his attention. “I would like to revisit your impression of Captain Johansson.”

“You think Johansson is a spy?” I asked, closing the book.

Klyber did not answer. He smirked as he watched me from behind his desk. “Oh, I know he’s a spy, the question is for whom.”

“A spy?” I asked. “Do you think he’s a Mogat?”

“I’m guessing he’s worse,” Klyber said. “I think he works for Admiral Huang.”

Admiral Klyber had a long-standing feud with Che Huang, the secretary of the Navy and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Admiral Huang wanted to see himself as the most powerful man in the Navy, but Klyber, with his political connections, was generally recognized as having more clout.

“Huang?” I asked. “That would be bad.” Klyber could legally execute an enemy spy. A spy working for Huang, however, could only be transferred.

Possibly because Klyber headed the Liberator cloning project, Huang had a thing about Liberators. Huang was the officer who had assigned me to Ravenwood. To the best of his knowledge, I had died on that planet, and I wanted him to continue believing me dead.

“We’re a thousand light years from the nearest planet,” I said. “Dump him in space and say he had an accident.”

“It’s too late for that,” Klyber said, putting up a hand to stop me. “Whatever he’s looking for, I assume he has already found it.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s been able to report everything he’s found,” I said.

“Whatever information he was after, he transmitted it the first time we sent him out. The safest thing to do with Johansson right now is to keep him onboard the Doctrinaire . That way we can observe him.”

“Assuming he doesn’t have any friends on board,” I said.

“I hope he does,” Klyber agreed. “We’re keeping an eye on him.

“If he’s Huang’s boy, you’re in for a fight in the Senate. If Huang hears about the Doctrinaire , he’s going to ask for control of the project. He’ll probably put Wonder Boy in command of the ship.”

“Wonder Boy,” a.k.a. Rear Admiral Robert Thurston, was Che Huang’s protégé, the brilliant young officer who replaced Klyber as the admiral of the Scutum-Crux Fleet. Bryce Klyber was no slouch when it came to strategy, but Thurston crushed him in a battle simulation. I did not like Thurston. He had a mile-wide anti-synthetic streak. Thurston saw clones as supplies and nothing else. He used them like any other kind of inventory, something to be expended and reordered.

“I’m meeting with Huang and the Joint Chiefs next week at the Golan Dry Docks for a top secret briefing,” Klyber said, interrupting my thoughts. “I would very much like to return from that conclave alive.”

I spent the night on the Doctrinaire , sleeping in one of the state rooms that Admiral Klyber reserved for visiting dignitaries. My bunk was hard, my room was sparse, and the bathroom was entirely made of stainless steel. I felt at home.

Stripping to my general-issue briefs and top, I took the book Klyber gave me and climbed into my rack. The sheets were coarse and stiff, stretched so tight that you could bounce a coin on them. It felt good to lie down.

Klyber had said that the book had a passage in it about a friend of mine. I opened the journal to the section marked by the thin strip of ribbon. As I looked at the handwritten entry, I realized that Admiral Klyber had been wrong. The man described in this journal was more of a mentor than a friend. The passage was about Tabor Shannon, whom I had met while serving on the Kamehameha, Klyber’s old flagship.

Shannon was a living paradox. He was a Liberator. He’d killed hundreds of enemies in battle, but he also went to Mass. He was the only clone I ever met with a religious streak. His religious feeling made no sense because, as a Liberator, he knew he was a clone and therefore knew God had nothing to do with his creation. Catholic doctrine held that clones had no souls. Almost every church taught that. Shannon was intelligent, but he remained blindly loyal to the Republic to his last breath. He died in battle, fighting for the nation that had banned his existence. At the time he died I admired him more than anyone I ever knew, but I grew to despise him. He seemed pathologically determined to devote his life to those who cared least about him—the nation that had outlawed his kind and the God who disavowed his existence.

Since leaving the Marines, I had come to question the line that separated devotion and delusion. Granted, I was still working for the same side as always, risking my life for the same Republic that never shed a tear for Tabor Shannon; but I was different. I had gone freelance. I made money for my services. I was also free to leave. If the Confederate Arms offered me a better deal one day, I wanted to believe that I would take it.

Having seen what I had seen, I did not believe in nations or deities. And as for Shannon, who did believe, I could not decide whether he had been a quixotic hero or just a fool. Either way, I had no intention of following in his footsteps.

CHAPTER SIX

From the Journal of Father David Sanjines, archbishop and chief administrator of Saint Germaine:

Entry: Earth Date June 4, 2483

I received an urgent message from spaceport security this morning. When I called to look into the matter, the captain asked me to watch a feed from his security monitor. They had detained a marine named Tabor Shannon. I only needed a moment to identify the problem. “Is that a Liberator?” I asked the captain. “Haven’t they been banned?”

“Liberators are not allowed in the Orion Arm,” the captain said. “They can travel Cygnus freely. If you want my opinion, I think they should all be executed.”

The ecumenical council of 2410 held that clones did not have souls and therefore did not fit the Catholic definition of human life, but I did not think that made them machines. Church canon dating back to Saint Francis forbade cruelty to animals. Perhaps this Liberator clone had more in common with a mad dog than a man, but he had blood running through his veins, not oil. He was no machine.

The captain told me that he checked with the U.A. Consulate. “We don’t have to let him on our planet. Should I send him away?”

The captain knew better than to tell me what to do. Saint Germaine being a Catholic mission, I was the one who made the decisions. “Do you know what he is doing here?” I asked.

“He says he is on a pilgrimage.”

“You must be joking,” I said.

“No sh—er, no, Father. I am sorry about that, Father.”

“I understand, my son,” I said. The presence of a murderer on our little planet would put everyone on edge. A religious pilgrimage? I was skeptical to say the least. “He is on a pilgrimage?”

“That’s what he says.”

I asked the captain if he would detain the man in question until I could arrive. I thought that might be soon, but this was Friday and a holy day—the immaculate heart of Mother Mary. I needed to attend to Mass and then I had a full day of meetings. The Liberator would have to wait until tomorrow.

Entry: Earth Date June 5, 2483

I did not know how I would react to meeting a Liberator face-to-face. As a young priest, I served in the Albatross Island penal colony. I was there during the riot of 2472. A force of Liberators came to the planet to stop the rioting. They put down the riot, all right. They also killed the prisoners and the guards and almost everybody on the planet.

Before seeing Liberators in action, I believed that clones were human even if they had no immortal souls. I even questioned the ecumenical convention that decreed clones were created of man and not God. That changed for me on Albatross Island.

You cannot understand a lion until you have seen one devour its prey. I thought that all people were created in God’s own image until I saw the Liberators, demons who looked like men but who rejected all goodness. I saw them kill thousands of innocent, helpless men. Just thinking about that massacre is painful. Once I witnessed the way the Liberators fought and killed, I saw the wisdom of the ecumenical counsel’s judgment. These monsters could not have had souls. I arrived at the spaceport before lunch and found an office in which I could interview this Liberator. His name was Tabor Shannon. I arranged for us to be alone. I was an old man now, and I had no time to fear devils, not even cloned ones.

Three soldiers walked the prisoner into the room. I dismissed them at the door. The leader of the soldiers did not want to leave. He said I would not be safe alone with a Liberator. I told him I would take my chances, and I dismissed him a second time. All the while the Liberator sat in one of the seats I had arranged in the middle of the room, watching us. If I ever felt scared during my interview with the Liberator, it was when I turned and saw the way he watched us. I believed his expression was implacable. Now, as I think about it, I have changed my mind. I think that his expression was merely one of curiosity.

“I am Father Sanjines,” I said as I came to sit across from him. We were nearly knee-to-knee, just a foot or two separated us. I knew this man could easily spring from his chair and strangle me, but I sensed that he did not come to do violence. “You are Corporal Tabor Shannon?” I asked.

“That is correct, Father.”

I looked around the room. Maybe I was unconsciously looking for a door through which to escape. What I saw instead was a small wet bar with a crystal decanter. “I am an old man, Corporal Shannon. I took my vows nearly fifty years ago.”

He said nothing.

“Would you like some sherry? We don’t have many fine things on Saint Germaine, but we do have a superb distillery. I personally oversaw the building of it. I’ve been in this mission from its start.”

The clone did not accept my offer. Perhaps he was not much of a drinker or perhaps he wanted to leave a good impression, I could not tell.

“You’ll want to try it before you leave,” I told him.

“What is this about?” the Liberator asked, still trying to sound civil. “Why have you detained me?”

“Mr. Shannon, this mission is nearly twenty years old, and I have been the chief administrator and archbishop here for all of that time. Before coming here, I was a chaplain on a penal planet.”

“Was it Albatross Island?” he asked.

“It was,” I said. “You can imagine my feelings when I received a call alerting me that a Liberator had arrived in our spaceport.”

The Liberator said nothing.

“You claim that you have come on a pilgrimage. Is that correct?”

“It is, Father,” the clone said, sounding as determined as a young boy wanting to enter a seminary.

“You will forgive me if I find that hard to believe, Mr. Shannon, but you see, I watched three hundred of your kind butcher prisoners, both rioting and innocent. Perhaps you were not involved in that . . . that . . .”

“Action.”

The Liberator used the word action. I was offended.

“I was trying to decide whether to call it a slaughter or a massacre,” I told him. “I think a more appropriate word might be extermination. As best as I can remember it, one thousand five hundred inmates rioted and the marines sent a battalion of Liberator clones to restore order. That was five rioting inmates for each Liberator. I should have thought that would have been enough blood to satisfy them.”

“I wasn’t there,” the Liberator told me.

“When they finished killing the rioters, they slaughtered prisoners who did not riot. Then they turned on the guards and hostages. By that time, they weren’t even using bullets anymore. They beat men to death with their rifles. I helped reclaim the bodies of the victims, Mr. Shannon. It was the most terrible thing I have ever seen.

“That was the closest I ever came to renouncing my vows. When I saw what those Liberators had done, I did not believe that a just God would have allowed the creation of such monsters. A few weeks later, the Senate outlawed Liberators. Is that not so?”

“They outlawed the manufacture of Liberator clones,” Shannon said to me. His gaze still met mine. I did not know if I saw glee or defiance in his expression, but I did not like what I saw.

“We don’t, as a rule, receive many clones on this planet.” Having said this, I felt a tinge of guilt. This clone had been nothing but pleasant, and I had acted adversarial from the start. “Forgive me,” I said. “I have been too straightforward. Are you sure you will not have a sherry?”

I climbed from my seat and went to the bar to pour myself a glass.

“Are you refusing me entry?” the clone asked.

“We Catholics like to believe that our church runs this planet, but the Unified Authority maintains an embassy just down the street from the Archdiocese. The U.A. runs this spaceport facility, as a matter-of-fact. That is not a symbiotic relationship. We do not welcome government intervention on our planet.”

I shut my eyes and thought about Liberators as I sipped the sherry. Perhaps I was reliving those last hours of the siege on Albatross Island, those awful moments when our rescuers became predators. I thought about a cell block in which the blood and brains on the walls were so thick that I could no longer see the bricks and mortar.

We Catholics are anti-synthetic by our very nature. According to our doctrine, only God can create life. The use of clones in the military caused the Vatican to release a statement defining life as a being with an immortal soul. Science can clone sheep, snakes, and soldiers that breathe air and move of their own volition, but science cannot prove that its creations have souls.

“They were without compassion,” I said. “Ravenous dogs lusting for blood. You will forgive me if I have been impolite, Mr. Shannon, but I see nothing even remotely redeeming about your kind. I once questioned the doctrine that clones have no souls. Having seen the work of Liberators, I determined that the butchers who came to Albatross Island were soulless creatures. I saw nothing redeeming in them.”

“‘But if there be no virtue to take away, consequently there can be no vice,’” Shannon said. I heard this and smiled and took a long sip of sherry. “You’ve read Saint Augustine. Impressive. But you’ve misquoted him. Augustine said, ‘If there be no good to take away.’ He also said, ‘It is impossible that there should be a harmless vice.’”

“He did say that, didn’t he?” the Liberator said cheerfully.

“The Liberators who invaded Albatross Island did a lot of harm. I believe that their existence is a vice,” I said. “It is a vice of the Unified Authority government.”

“I never cared much for Saint Augustine, anyway,” Shannon said. “What about the secular philosophers? Friedrich Nietzsche said that no man has an eternal soul. If he was correct, that would put us all on equal ground. None of us would be alive by the Vatican’s definition.”

“Quoting a philosopher who referred to himself as ‘the anti-Christ’ does not generally lead to a favorable impression in a Catholic colony,” I said. “I suggest you restrict yourself to Saint Augustine while you are on Saint Germaine, Mr. Shannon. Better yet, I suggest you avoid discussion of philosophy entirely. The people on this planet have strong opinions.”

“While I’m on Saint Germaine?” Shannon asked, “Are you allowing me to stay?”

“What is the object of your pilgrimage?” I asked.

“The same as any pilgrim,” the Liberator said. “I seek truth. I want to know who I am and how I fit into the universe.”

“And you believe you can find those answers on our little planet?” I asked.

“I’m curious about Catholicism,” the Liberator said.

“I can tell you where the Catholic Church stands when it comes to you and your place in the universe. The Catholic Church holds that you have no soul and that you are an abomination.”

“And yet I am created in God’s own image.”

“Man was created in God’s image,” I told him.

“And I was created in man’s image,” he said.

I said, “I will allow you to visit our planet, and I hope that the answers you find here will not leave you discomfited.”

I did not let him stay because of his amateurish attempts to grasp philosophy. I let him stay because I believed he was sincere, and that intrigued me. If this man was a Liberator, then he was by nature a killer and a creation without a soul. I knew this to be true, though in his case, I am not certain that I believed it was true.

CHAPTER SEVEN

March 13, 2512 A.D.

Location: Golan Dry Docks; Galactic Position:

Norma Arm

The Golan Dry Docks were considered one of the “seven man-made wonders of the galaxy.” Other wonders included the Capitol Building in Washington D.C., the outer-galactic scientific observatory on the outer edge of the Orion Arm, the planetary food storage and production facility on Nebraska Kri, the all-faiths military burial facility near the center of the Norma Arm, the Sol science station on the surface of the sun, and, of course, the Broadcast Network.

Funny how the mundane wonders get overlooked. I considered the spaceport on Mars far more wondrous than the Sol science station or the Nebraska Kri food-packing plant. That place was so big that it needed a resort-sized dormitory to house clerks and waiters. Mars Spaceport even had a smaller secondary dormitory that housed the people who ran special stores, theaters, and restaurants for the employees living in the primary dormatory.

My mind wandered when I traveled through space. The light flashing on my radio brought me back to reality. “Starliner A-ten-twenty-thirty-four, this is Dry Docks traffic control, please come in.”

“Traffic control, this is Starliner A-ten-twenty-thirty-four.”

Ahead of me, the Golan Dry Docks looked like a cross between bleached bones and a giant spider web. Eight-mile pillars described the outside of the platform in lilting arches like the ribs of a gigantic skeleton. Between these pillars was a haphazard warren of walls that divided the structure into mooring slips and construction zones. Scaffolding lined the insides of those slips. From out in space, the scaffolds looked like threads instead of twenty-foot-wide metal platforms. The dry docks housed over eight hundred cubic miles of space for building ships.

Golan did not orbit a planet. It was a free-floating space station.

“Starliner pilot, please identify yourself and prepare for security scan.”

This request did not worry me. The Golan Dry Docks were one of the most security-intensive facilities in the galaxy. Knowing that Admiral Klyber had picked me for this assignment, the head of Doctrinaire security crafted my new identity and logged my clearance and flight plans while I was still on New Columbia. He knew where I was headed before I knew, it seemed. Rather than enter the Dry Docks as Corporal Arlind Marsten or Lieutenant Wayson Harris, both of whom had damning skeletons in their closets, I now traveled as Lieutenant Commander Jeff Brocius of the U.A. Navy assigned to the Central Cygnus Fleet.

I flew a Johnston R-56 Starliner, a 20-seat luxury craft on loan to me from the Doctrinaire fleet. The R-56 was generally flown by corporate pilots. Like every other pair of wings on the Doctrinaire , this R-56 had been outfitted with its own broadcast engine.

“Please state your identity.”

“Lieutenant Commander Jeff Brocius, U.A. Navy.”

“Lieutenant Commander Brocius, copy. Are there passengers aboard your flight?”

“No, sir.”

“Thank you, Starliner.”

Traffic Control was acting unusually polite and I had a pretty good idea why. Security gave me the name Brocius because Admiral Alden Brocius, the officer-in-command of the Central Cygnus Fleet, was headed to the Golan Dry Docks for the summit. For all the men in the traffic tower knew, I was the admiral’s son or nephew.

“Starliner R-fifty-six, we are under heightened security at this time. Please switch off all onboard controls. Our traffic computers will guide your ship into port.”

“Aye,” I said.

The traffic tower took control of my ship the moment my hands left the panel. Lights turned on and off as traffic control accessed all of my instrumentation. They might discover that I had unusual equipment on board, but they would not know it was a broadcast engine unless they tracked me from millions of miles away. I had disconnected the power after broadcasting in. Without a generator pouring tera-volts into it, the broadcast engine would look like nothing more than spare parts to their security computers. My ship slowed to a near standstill as it joined the queue waiting to enter the Phase 2 landing bays. Unlike the rest of the platform, Phase 2 of the Golan platform was totally enclosed. Seen from this side, the Dry Docks had a sleek teardrop shape. The outer skin of the station had a pattern of shining black squares against a flat white base. As I flew closer, I realized that those black squares were enormous solar energy cells.

This side of the Dry Docks facility had three landing bays, each marked by two half-mile wide circular entrances called “apertures.” All ships entering or exiting the docks would have to pass through those doors. As traffic control led me toward one of those openings, I saw the distinctive silver-red of a security laser and knew someone in the dry docks had X-rayed my ship. Leaning back in my seat, I took in the sights as my ship dropped into place before one of the apertures. Inside, I could see the brightly-lit landing area and the staging area that planes entered just before takeoff. Ships and transports of all shapes and sizes sat quietly at the back of the runway. Beyond that, so far away that it looked no bigger than my fist, was the half-mile-wide aperture for departing flights. Whether by computer or human talent, traffic control brought me in for a perfect landing. Thruster rockets in the wings of my Starliner fired as I entered the quarter-gravitational field of the tarmac. My ship landed with no perceptible bounce. A runway technician towed me through the atmosphere locks and into the staging area. There would be no old-fashioned blast door on the ultra-modern Golan Dry Docks. No, sir. On Golan, the locks were completely transparent electroshields. I grabbed my bags and climbed out of the Johnston. Two guards armed with M27s approached and saluted as I stepped on to the deck. These were Army MPs. Golan had thousands of them. I, wearing my Charlie service uniform and looking like the quintessential officer, saluted back.

“Commander Brocius?” one of the guards asked. “May I take your bag?” It was not an offer or a courtesy. He spoke in that robotic tone that grunt soldiers use when speaking to an officer. They would search my bag and find that I had a government-issue M27 of my own. They would also see that I had combat armor, something that was not general-issue among naval officers.

“Aye,” I said, handing him my rucksack.

The guards did not scare me.

“Please follow us, sir,” said the officer with my bag. The please was as perfunctory as the request to take may bag. With this, the two guards turned on their heels so smartly that they looked like they were on spindles.

Now came the only part of this duty that did make me nervous. The soldiers led me to the security station, a well-lighted island in the otherwise dim light of this enormous spacecraft hangar. Ahead of me, several dozen soldiers milled around a booth enclosed by bulletproof glass. Some smoked. Some talked. Some manned personal computers and monitored everyone and every thing that passed. All I had to do was walk between “the posts”—an innocuous ten-foot archway made of beige-colored plastic. Terrorists and criminals feared the posts. They made supposedly extinct clones edgy as well. The post on the left side of the archway housed a device called “the sprayer” which emitted a fine mist of oil and water and a sudden blast of air. The jam on the right was “the receiver,” a micron-filtered vacuum that drew in the air, the mist, and anything that the sprayer dislodged. There was no disguising your identity from the posts. You could wash, shower, and shave your entire body with a micron-bladed scalpel, and the gust from the left post would still find dandruff, flecks of skin, loose hairs, lint, or sweat. A bank of computers analyzed every substance the right post drew in.

“Commander Brocius,” one of the MPs said. He motioned toward the posts. I hesitated for a moment. I looked around. A security camera watched me from overhead. All of the soldiers behind the bulletproof glass wore firearms. None of them looked old enough to know what Liberators looked like, and they paid little attention to me. As far as they could see, this was another routine entry. I had to pass through security funnels like this one on every planet. The difference was that this was the Golan Dry Docks, a high-security facility. The computers would recognize that I was a Liberator. But the men manning the computers were no more screening for Liberators than they were screening for dinosaurs or dragons. As long as my identity cleared, my Liberator DNA would not trigger an alarm. I stepped into the arch, my mind already focusing on what I would do once I left the security station. The Joint Chiefs had already arrived. Admiral Klyber and the other field officers would arrive in another two hours. As soon as I left this station, I would make a preliminary sweep of the corridors just beyond this security station. Then I would move to Klyber’s quarters. If I worked quickly, I would finish an hour before he arrived.

The post on my left blew out a milli-second-long burst of air. It did not last long enough to mess my hair. In its wake I felt slightly moist, as if I had jumped in and out of a steam room. In the booth beside the posts, four soldiers sat beyond the glass playing poker. One had just turned over his hand. The others tossed their cards onto the table in disgust.

Suddenly the security station went on alert. Bright red warning lights flashed on and off over my head. Clear sheets of bulletproof plastic slid out of the walls creating a bulletproof cell. By the time I realized what had happened, every soldier in the security station had drawn his gun and closed in around me. They stood in a semicircular ring. A few of the officers lowered their guns when they saw that I had no weapon.

The MP holding my bag stepped to the glass and held up a piece of paper for me to read. It was a computer printout with my picture and bio on it.

“Lieutenant Harris, we got a tip that you might stop by.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

My arrest had Che Huang’s fingerprints all over it. The MPs who arrested me had no idea what laws I might have broken. They made no effort to charge me. By now they knew that I was a Liberator; but they could not arrest me for that. It was illegal to manufacture Liberators, and I had clearly not manufactured myself. Liberators were banned from the Orion Arm—Earth’s home arm—but the Golan Dry Docks were located in the Norma Arm. Thinking everything through, I decided that the only crime Huang had on me was being absent without leave.

Having a relatively clean slate would not get me out of the brig in time to help Klyber. I was vaguely aware of the time and decided that Klyber must have arrived. He would have his regular security detail around him. Unless given misinformation, Klyber would notice my absence. Would he look for me?

Would he become suspicious and alert his guard? My absence might or might not have been warning enough that Huang might have an ambush in mind.

I needed to get to Klyber. If Huang was behind this . . .

The last time I ran into Huang, the bastard didn’t even bother having me arrested. He simply paraded me across Mars Spaceport in handcuffs, transferred me to his cronies in the Scutum-Crux Fleet, and had me placed on Ravenwood to die. As it turned out, Huang and Rear Admiral Thurston used Ravenwood as a testing ground for a new breed of clone they had secretly developed to use as Navy SEALS. Huang sent platoons of armed Marines to guard the outpost, then trained his new breed of SEALS by sending them in to slaughter those Marines.

What would Huang do this time? If the soldiers who had captured me had allowed me to make a call, I could have sent a message to Freeman, and he could have warned Klyber that a trap had been sprung. I was cut off and helpless, able only to wait and see what would happen. I sat on the edge of my cot and looked around the cell for a way out. I must have been in the cell for a few hours, but I had no idea how many. Escape was out of the question. The air vents along the top of the wall were only three inches wide. I could not even fit my fist in them. Unless I could figure out a method for passing through steel walls and bulletproof glass, I might be stuck in this cell for a long time. Bright light and heat blazed from arc lamps set into the roof of my cell. Cool air blew out of the line of vents just under the seam of the ceiling. Without the cooled air, I would have fried; and without the overbright lights, I would have frozen.

An officer approached the door of my cell and spoke into the intercom.

“You’re free to go,” the man said.

“Free to go?” I asked, both surprised and sardonic. I stood up and walked toward the door. The man outside was a colonel, probably the head of the security station and likely the highest ranking officer assigned to the Dry Docks. Golan was a civilian operation with military security—a lot of military security.

“I apologize for the misunderstanding, Harris.” The glass slid open. The colonel had two guards with him. All three men were armed. Apparently they did not want to take any chances with the dangerous Liberator clone. “Fleet headquarters sent us a message telling us to be on the lookout for a Lieutenant Wayson Harris who was falsely reported as killed in action.”

“That sounds like me,” I said as I followed the colonel and his escort out of my cell and down a hall. Like my cell, the security complex had that odd combination of vents spewing chilled air and blazing hot arc lights.

“And now I’m free to go?” I asked. I did not expect them to let me loose in the Dry Docks. We reached a table at the end of the hall. My bag sat on the table. One of the guards handed me the bag.

“Everything is in there,” the colonel said, “including your gun.” He sounded apologetic. I decided to play smart and act like I expected this. Taking the bag, I zipped it open and sifted through my gear as if suspicious something might be missing. I knew everything would be there, and it was. The colonel watched me. “This is all a misunderstanding,” he said. “My men mistook the bulletin for orders to arrest you. Once we reported the arrest to fleet command, Admiral Huang’s office contacted us.”

“That so?” I asked, acknowledging the colonel with just a glance as I zipped my bag shut. I wanted to come across as officious.

“Nobody told us that you were on a high-security mission for Admiral Klyber. I’m sorry about this. You’re here running security for the Joint Chiefs meeting, aren’t you? I hope we didn’t screw it up.”

“When did Klyber’s party arrive?” I asked.

The colonel’s dark eyes and tight frown created a grave expression. “They’ve been here for several hours.”

“Then we’ll know the extent of the damage pretty soon, won’t we?” I said. The colonel nodded. “Admiral Huang called my office . . . the admiral himself,” the colonel said, now sounding desperate.

“Really? What did old Che have to say?” I asked.

The colonel took a deep breath, then lowered his voice to a near whisper. “Admiral Huang says that he missed you.” He paused to see how I would react to the message, then added, “He says he’s surprised to hear you’re alive and that he can’t wait to catch up with you.”

In preparation for the Joint Chiefs arrival, Golan adopted Earth time, and more precisely, Eastern Standard Time. I had arrived at 1400 hours, spent five hours in the brig, and emerged as the summit kicked off with a banquet.

If I rushed, I could get to my room and change before the banquet started. Nothing had happened so far; and if I had to guess, a dining hall filled with security men and armed officers would not be the place for an ambush. As I thought about it, it occurred to me that perhaps Klyber was just paranoid. Sure, Che Huang was a prick, but he was also an officer. Officers didn’t murder each other. Officers ruined each other’s careers and sometimes sent rivals on suicide missions, but they did not kill each other. Rather than house me in the barracks with his men, the colonel booked me a room in the civilian dormitories—not far from Klyber and the other attendees. He had one of his men drive me to my room in a fast-moving cart. He drove me through a service tunnel, dropping me off in a corridor behind my room. I ran the rest of the way.

Not even bothering to look around my quarters, I tossed my bag on my bed and started to strip off my blouse. The rest of the room was dark, but the glare from the entryway light was enough for me to see what I was doing. I had my blouse off and was just beginning to step out of my pants when I heard the hiss of the pneumatic door sliding open. By the time I heard the noise, it was too late.