CHAPTER NINE

I was bent over with my ass in the air just stepping out of my pants when the door opened. I managed to swivel around just far enough to see the boot before it kicked me across the chin. Bright lights popped in my head as I tipped over and fell into the darkness of my room.

I had no time to react before the man rushed forward, brought up his boot and kicked me in the base of the ribs. My lungs seemed to implode. He kicked with the top of his foot like a soccer player. My ribs already hurt and I saw him bring back the boot for another strike. Behind the kicker, I saw two more men but I did not have time to see their faces.

The next kick struck me across the point of the chin. Had he aimed farther in, the man might have broken my jaw. The fireworks in my head were intense; but by this time my Liberator combat reflex had started. Adrenaline and endorphins ran through my bloodstream. My thoughts were clear, the pain was distant, and this fellow would have to kill me before he could knock me out.

He changed his kick. This time he brought back his boot and prepared to strike toe-first. He aimed at my throat or face, I could not tell which. Using my left foot to push off the bed, I lashed forward with my right, scooping the man’s leg off the floor. He fell to the carpet.

I wanted to retaliate. I wanted to lunge for him and snap his neck, but that would come later. I was down on the floor and he had friends. Pushing up to my knees, I sprung to my bed and grabbed my rucksack with one hand while rolling over the far edge for cover.

As I dug through my bag with one hand, I stole a quick glance over the bed. The two men in the entryway pulled pistols. I ducked back behind my bed and lay flat on the floor as bullets tore through my mattress and slammed into the wall behind me. My fingers found the butt of my M27. Feeling the cool steel of the grip, I smiled, visualized the room, and sprung to my feet. I fired one shot, shattering the lamp above their heads.

The ambushers had silenced weapons. The report of my M27 was loud and reverberated through the room like a train wreck.

“What do we do?” one of the attackers called.

Three more bullets cut through the mattress. By this time, I had moved. The room was completely dark. I had no reason to hide.

My shoes were off and I moved along the edge of the wall toward the entryway in complete silence. I watched the muzzles flash and knew where two of the men stood. Taking in a long, deep breath, but not exhaling, I crouched and prepared to shoot.

I heard the flak of a heaving object hitting the quilted blanket that covered my bed, followed by a thud from that same object dropping to the floor. “Get out of here!” one of the men yelled. I took his advice. Grabbing my bag off the floor, I sprinted for the entryway. The door slid open and I jumped out into the hall dressed in nothing but my underwear with my rucksack in my left hand and my M27 in my right, blood pouring from several spots on my face and purple bruises starting to form on my ribs. If there had been any civilians in the hall, they might have passed out. One of the assailants peeked out from behind a corner and fired a shot at me. I leaped in his direction, firing shots I knew would miss. The shots did what I needed them to do—they scared the man away. He disappeared around the corner, and I managed to get clear of the door. I was lying flat on the ground with my side pressed against the wall of the next room when the grenade exploded, disintegrating my quarters in a storm of debris and shrapnel.

Smoke alarms shrieked across the hallway. Security alarms bellowed. A sheet of water poured out of sprinklers hidden in the ceiling.

The assailants got away. Rocked by the percussion and covered with the shredded remains of my room, I was in no condition to chase them. I struggled just climbing to my feet. Had the attackers waited around to see if I had survived their grenade, they could have killed me easily enough. They’ll be back, I thought. Next time I’ll be ready for them .

Other than a bunch of officers with political aspirations giving long-winded speeches, nothing bad happened at the banquet. Of course, nothing happened at the banquet. What was Huang supposed to do, lean across the dinner table and stab Klyber with his butter knife?

My job at the Dry Docks was to protect Klyber; but more and more, it looked as if he had come to protect me. Golan security drove me to the infirmary where an orderly diagnosed me as having three cracked ribs. No collapsed lung, no life-threatening injuries, just a bruised-up face and a lot of hostility. Had my attackers put a boot into my testicles, they would have done a lot more damage. As it was, the medic strapped some bandages around my torso, handed me a bottle of painkillers, and gave me a clean bill of health.

As I buttoned my blouse, Admiral Klyber came into the room. He wore his dress whites and could not help smiling. “I suppose that is an effective way to run a security detail,” he said.

“How is that, sir?” I asked.

“Get all of the assassins to come after you.”

“Very clever, sir,” I said.

“You always were a lightning rod for trouble,” Klyber said. “When I sent you to Gobi on your first assignment to hide you from some Liberators, a Mogat general found you instead.”

“Hazards of the career,” I said. “Marines and mercenaries get shot at. It comes with the pay.”

“And you always survive,” Klyber said. “Extraordinary.” I had lacerations just under my left eye. Bruises covered my chin and cheeks and one side of my face was swollen. Admiral Klyber watched as I buttoned my blouse over my bandaged ribs, and his smile faded.

“Are they after you or after me?” he asked.

“Without you,” I said, “there’s no reason to go after me.”

“I suppose not,” Klyber said, now looking a bit gray.

“But look on the bright side,” I said. “If this is the best they can do with three gunmen and a grenade, by the time they get to you they might run out of ammunition.”

Klyber smiled. “Thanks,” he said. “I feel better.”

Golan security arranged for my new room, complete with guards posted outside the door. I was a bodyguard with bodyguards. In short, I was useless. When I finished stowing my gear, I put on my mediaLink and contacted Ray Freeman.

“So much for traveling as Arlind Marsten,” Freeman said when I finished telling him about my day.

“Yes,” I said. “Corporal Marsten can finally rest in peace. As far as I’m concerned, Huang did me a favor. Now I can come and go freely. I don’t have to worry about guards finding out that I’m a Liberator every time I pass through security stations anymore. They’ll know, and they’ll know that I’m legal.

“Thanks to Huang, I can carry my gun in public. The head of security asked me how many men I need. Hell, he even upgraded my room.”

I was lying on a bed with a queen-sized mattress covered by a blue and white quilt. My room in the Dry Docks dormitory looked like a suite for important executives. My bedroom included a media center with a holographic screen and there was a separate office with a desk and reference shelf. The setup included a wet bar complete with liquor and tumblers, an ice maker, a sink and three stools. Having grown up in an orphanage and spent most of my life living in barracks, this was a lifestyle I had never imagined.

“What does Klyber have to say about Huang?” Freeman asked.

“He’s got other things on his mind,” I said. “He’s going to tell the Joint Chiefs about his ship tomorrow.”

Klyber built the Doctrinaire working directly with friends on the Linear Committee, just as he had worked in secret with the committee with the Liberator project. Huang and the other members of the Joint Chiefs supposedly knew nothing about the Doctrinaire . At least they should have known nothing about it. I wondered whether Rear Admiral Halverson was also spying for Huang. Johansson did not know me from Marston. Halverson knew my real name and make.

“Will you be there when he makes the announcement?” Freeman asked.

“I’m not allowed in. Only top brass gets in that room.”

“No guards? No wonder Klyber’s nervous,” Freeman said.

“It’s all top brass,” I said. “He’s with civilized company.”

“They stabbed Caesar to death on the floor of the Senate,” Freeman said, giving a historical reference I would never have guessed him to know. “Caesar thought he was in civilized company, too.”

Freeman would not have learned about Caesar from the works of Shakespeare. War and the engines of death interested him, not literature. I thought about this for a moment and decided that Klyber would be safe enough on the floor of the summit. It was out of my control, anyway. Once Klyber entered the conference room, there was nothing I could do.

“You flying back with Klyber after the summit?” Freeman asked, ending my chain of thought.

“Nope,” I said. “My job is to get him from his transport to the meeting, and from the meeting to the transport.”

“Think you will see Huang at the meeting tomorrow?” Freeman asked.

“Yeah, I need to thank him for the swank accommodations,” I said. I sounded more confident than I felt. Huang, never hid his hate of all clones, especially Liberators. All clones, except his own top secret model. Before initiating the attack on Little Man, Huang transferred every last Liberator in the Unified Authority military to the invading force. If he wanted me dead, sooner or later he would succeed.

“How did Huang’s office know you were headed to Golan?” Freeman asked. “Who told them about you?” His low voice reminded me of distant gunfire. His flat expression conveyed no emotion. If he were a poker player, no one would read his bluffs. But Ray Freeman did not trouble himself with card games. That would be far too social an activity for him.

“I’ve got a pretty good idea.” Half of Klyber’s senior staff officers had arrived the day before. I checked the manifest. Captain Leonid Johansson was among them.

“Don’t jump to any conclusions,” Freeman said after a long moment of thought. “Those weren’t Huang’s men in your room. He could have let you rot in jail if he wanted to hurt you.”

I was about to sign off when Freeman changed the subject. “What do you know about Little Man?”

“The battle or the movie?” I asked, trying to sound smarter than I felt.

“The planet,” Freeman said.

I had only seen a hundred-mile strip of the planet at tops—just a straight swatch from the beach where we landed to the valley in which we fought the battle. Before landing, we had a briefing. I tried to remember what the briefing officer had said. “It’s a fully habitable planet,” I said. “Well, not fully habitable. That valley where the Mogat ship crashed is plenty hot.”

“Hot as in radioactive?” Freeman asked.

“As in highly radioactive. You wouldn’t want to go anywhere near there. Every place else should be OK. Why do you want to know about Little Man?”

“My family is moving there.”

It never occurred to me that Freeman had a family. I thought of him as a freak of nature . . . like me, the last clone of his kind. “Your family? A wife and kids?”

“My parents and my sister.”

“What are they doing on Little Man?”

“Colonizing,” Freeman said.

“Colonizing?”

“They’re neo-Baptist,” Freeman said.

“Which means? Why are the neo-Baptists colonizing Little Man?”

“The neo-Baptists want to establish colonies, like the Catholics.”

“And they got permission to land on Little Man?” I asked.

“Does it matter?” Freeman asked.

“It matters,” I said. “That planet is in the Scutum-Crux Arm . . . one of the hostile arms. If the U.A. finds them, they’ll think it’s a Mogat colony. That was why we went to Little Man in the first place . . . to kill Mogats. The planet is listed as uninhabited, and the last I heard, Congress wanted to keep it that way.”

Freeman did not like long conversations. This current conversation was epic by his standards. We spoke for another minute or two, then signed off.

I lay in bed thinking about what he’d said. Freeman was right. Why would Huang spring me from the brig, then send a trio of goons after me? It made no sense.

Before falling asleep, I browsed the news. U.A. forces had claimed another three planets in the Cygnus Arm, including Providence. During the last week, they had claimed control of five planets in the Perseus Arm, four planets in Norma, and one in Scutum-Crux.

“These are all outlying planets,” an Army spokesman told news analysts. He gave a cautious spin on the latest events. “The insurgents tend to evacuate them before our troops arrive. The fighting should be much more fierce as we approach more settled territory.”

What he was not saying was that the Navy could easily have obliterated the insurgents’ transports. That was the problem with winning a civil war. Sooner or later you had to repatriate the enemy, and you didn’t want the sons of bitches to hold a grudge.

From everything I could tell, this civil war was unspectacular. The big media outlets tried to build it up as if the entire Republic was unraveling before our eyes; but the truth was that except for a very few terrorist attacks such as the one on Safe Harbor, the Confederate forces were in retreat. Except for the self-broadcasting fleet, which they had only used twice, the Confederate Arms had no Navy and no way to defend themselves from Naval attacks.

CHAPTER TEN

Bryce Klyber sat at the breakfast table in his dress whites. The man made the uniform; but in this case, the uniform was something special. Fleet Admiral Klyber had four stripes and a block on his shoulder boards. He was the first man in nearly several decades to have that much gold on his shoulders. When he wore his khakis, he had five stars laid out in a pentagonal cluster. The climate of this summit must have agreed with Klyber. He looked thoroughly energized as he spread marmalade over a triangle of toast. His posture, erect as always, now looked pert. A slight smile showed on his face as he looked up to greet me.

“Lieutenant Harris,” he said.

I saluted, and he returned the gesture.

“You look surprisingly fit, considering your adventures from last night. Did you sleep well?”

“Yes, sir.” I did not feel surprisingly good. In fact, I felt predictably dour. My ribs hurt. It felt like the bandages around my chest shrank over the course of the evening making it considerably harder to breath. The left side of my skull felt like it had caved in.

Before him, spread across the snowy white of the linen tablecloth, Admiral Klyber had a plate of scrambled eggs with a side of bacon and smaller dishes with toast, a half grapefruit, and sausage. Banished to the far side of his table sat a bowl of grits. The spread also included carafes holding coffee, orange juice, grapefruit juice, and hot water for tea. The admiral, who would walk away from this meal with less than 150 pounds on his six-foot, four-inch frame, hardly looked like he knew where to begin. I would have gladly joined him for the meal, but the invitation did not come. Using his fork, Klyber stabbed at a strip of lightly-cooked bacon and twirled it as if eating pasta. He stabbed the individual kernels of his scrambled eggs with the fork. He scooped a segment of grapefruit and savored it for several seconds. In the end, he ate a small portion of each dish except the grits, which he did not touch at all.

“Permission to speak, sir?”

“What is it, Lieutenant?”

“Sir, I was wondering about my status with the Marines. Now that Huang knows I am alive, am I back on active duty?” I asked. Considering my narrow escape from my last tour of duty, I had no desire to rejoin the Marines.

“Ah, that is the question,” Klyber observed. He folded his napkin and placed it on the table, then fitted his cap on his head. “I’ve wondered about that myself. What would be the safest course with Admiral Huang lurking about? Do you have any suggestions?”

“No, sir,” I said, though I considered killing Huang a solid option.

“I have taken the liberty of reassigning you to the Doctrinaire for now. You are on my roster. I doubt Huang’s men will arrest you right under my nose.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Klyber nodded. “I assume you have no desire to go back on active duty?” He tried to act nonchalant; but his cold, blue eyes met mine and I saw a glint of excitement which I quickly dashed.

“Join the Marines again? No, sir.”

“Understood, Lieutenant. Then I suppose we should regroup after the summit and discuss your options. You’ve spent two years on the lam as it were, and I see no reason why you could not turn up absent without leave again.” With this he started for the door.

“Thank you, sir,” I said.

He turned back and gave me a sharp-edged grin that revealed his top row of teeth. “And now, Lieutenant, perhaps we should head out to the conference room.”

Four armed guards met us as we stepped out of Klyber’s suite. They were Army, dressed in formal olive greens and armed with M27s. They marched with perfect precision, matching our pace as they walked in a pack directly behind us.

I also had my M27. Beyond that, I had spent some time earlier this morning patrolling the route from Klyber’s room to the conference area. Golan security had posted guards along the route the day before. My job was to escort Admiral Klyber to the door of the conference room and then, after the conference, to deposit him safely on his transport.

We traveled down a brightly-lit hall with gleaming white walls and bright ceiling fixtures. Our footsteps echoed off the walls as we approached the final stretch of the corridor. As we drew closer, I heard loud chatter. From here, the summit sounded like a cocktail party.

We rounded that final corner and there it was, a large glowing lobby, obviously prepared especially for the purpose of this summit. Surrounded by the stark white corridors of the Golan executive complex, this lobby looked like a mirage. An oversized Persian carpet covered the floor. Black and red leather furniture sat in small formations around the room. There was a long table covered with bowls of fruit, pastry trays, and silver carafes.

From what I saw, the meeting looked more like a college reunion than a military summit. Officers in dress uniforms spoke cheerfully as they caught up on old times. I saw more bars and stripes floating around that gathering than I had ever seen in my life. Old generals with graying hair, stout bellies, and well-trimmed mustaches talked in genial tones like old friends swapping stories in a bar. One Army officer held a fat cigar in his fingers. He waved his hands as he spoke. The cigar smoke seemed to tie itself in a knot above his fingers.

Behind every swaggering general and admiral stood a couple of lesser officers watching quietly and taking mental notes about everything that was said. Admiral Halverson, Captain Johansson, and a handful of Navy men stood off in one corner waiting for Fleet Admiral Klyber. He was their shark. They were his remoras. When they saw Klyber, they drifted out to greet him, then silently fell into his entourage. Having delivered Admiral Klyber to the summit, I started to leave. I had rounds to make. I wanted to check in with the security station and do one last sweep of Klyber’s quarters, but Klyber summoned me back. “Stay for a moment, Harris,” he said, making a very discreet nod to the right. Following his eyes, I saw Admiral Huang heading in our direction. “This may be my moment to do a bit of body guarding on your behalf.”

“Admiral Klyber,” Huang said in a tone that was rigidly formal but not unfriendly. Admiral Che Huang stood just over six feet tall. He had broad shoulders, a massive chest, and a commanding presence. Standing beside Huang, Klyber looked old and frail. More than two years had passed since the last time I had run into Huang, years that had not been especially kind to the man. I remembered him as having brown hair with streaks of gray. Over the last two years his hair had changed to salt and pepper with large gray patches around his temples. His cheeks had hollowed.

Huang’s eyes narrowed as he turned toward me. “Lieutenant Harris. I heard you were here.”

I saluted. The admiral did not bother returning the salute.

“The lieutenant is here with me,” Admiral Klyber said.

“Yes,” said Huang. “So he’s on the crew of your mysterious ship.” With this he left us. We watched him walk away, then Klyber gave me a wry smile. “How much does he know about my ship, I wonder?”

“He should not know that you have a ship at all,” I said.

“Yes,” Klyber agreed. “I really must have a word with Captain Johansson before we return to the Doctrinaire .”

General Alexander Smith, secretary of Air Force and head of the Joint Chiefs, called everyone to attention. “Gentlemen, it’s time we begin,” he said, and the party started to funnel through a nearby doorway.

“This should be an all-day affair,” Klyber said.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Do you have plans for the day?” Klyber asked. “I hope you’re not going to waste the entire time checking and rechecking these same hallways.”

“That’s the plan, sir,” I said.

“Have you read the book I gave you?” Klyber asked.

I nodded. “The story about Shannon?”

“Did you learn anything?” he asked.

“Not to expect hospitality in the Catholic colonies,” I said.

“That’s one lesson,” Klyber said. “See you after the summit.” He joined up with Admiral Brocius and they entered the conference room.

As I turned to leave, I had a dark premonition. I imagined Admiral Klyber stepping up to a podium to explain about the Doctrinaire . I pictured Admiral Huang stepping up behind him and whispering something. Klyber turns pale and looks back at him with a stunned expression just as Huang plunges a diamond-edged combat knife into his back.

In my bizarre fantasy, I watch Huang’s knife jab in and out of Klyber’s white uniform. Huang stabs him four times as he turns to run and the other summit attendees close in around him. They stab Klyber again and again until his dress whites turn red.

My disconcerting daydream ends with Huang looking down at Kyber’s corpse and saying the phrase that must have been hovering in my subconscious: “Beware the Ides of March.”

According to the Earth date, it was indeed Tuesday, March 15.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The summit lasted ten hours. I met Klyber at the door when it adjourned. More than anything else, he seemed tired as he emerged from the meeting. He walked slowly, talked softly, and stared straight ahead. His breeding did not allow for slumped shoulders or bad posture; but he was, nonetheless, a defeated man. “We’re in for a tougher fight than any of them know,” he said. “Stupid bastards are too young to remember the last war. Kellan wasn’t even born yet.”

General John Kellan, the new secretary of the Army, made big news a few years back by attaining the rank of general before his thirty-fifth birthday. His father and two uncles, all three of them senators, threw a party to commemorate the achievement on the floor of the Senate.

When it came to mixing politics and service, Kellan was a mere piker compared to the illustrious fleet admiral. Nobody respected Kellan’s combat-free war record. Klyber had political connections that ran all the way up to the Linear Committee, more than forty years of active service, and an impressive war record. Even his role in the creation of Liberator clones meant something in Washington. The politicians may not have liked his Liberators, but it was the Liberators who saved the day in the last war. But Klyber did not look like a war hero now. His frosty blue eyes seemed lost in their sockets. He looked fragile instead of vibrant. This morning I might have described him as haughty. Seeing him now, the only word that came to mind was “wilted.”

I led Klyber back to his room, our four-man Army escort in tow. We went to his room, and he stood silently near the door. I wanted to ask what happened, but I knew better.

“Did you tell the Joint Chiefs about the Doctrinaire ?” I asked. Klyber, pouring gin and water over ice, nodded. “Yes. You should have seen Huang. Admiral Huang said that he knew all about it. He sounded so familiar with the ship you would think I had invited him aboard for tea. Arrogant bastard stared me right in the eye and all but admitted that he had spies on board . . . didn’t flinch . . . didn’t even bat an eye.”

“Johansson?” I asked.

“Undoubtedly,” Klyber said. “I have a score to settle with our Captain Johansson.” Klyber stood beside his wet bar holding his glass of gin and staring at me with not so much as a glint of a smile.

“What do we do about Huang?” I asked.

“The million-dollar question. I don’t have to do anything about Huang. The man will destroy himself. There is no place in the Unified Authority for an officer with his lack of judgment. I seriously doubt he and his career will survive the war.” Klyber saluted me with his gin and took another sip.

“Perhaps we should leave,” he said as he placed his drink on the bar. The cup was still mostly full. A caravan of security carts waited to drive us to the docking bay. The front and rear carts were loaded with MPs. Klyber and I climbed into the backseat of the middle car. We drove through brightly-lit service halls that were so wide three cars could travel through them side by side. The hollow growl of our motors echoed in the halls and our tires squealed on the polished floor. Klyber sat silent through the ride. He stared straight ahead, a small frown forming on his lips, as he let his mind wander. It took ten minutes to drive to the security gate.

Leaving the Golan Dry Docks was easier than entering. You did not pass through the posts. No one checked your DNA. Guards checked luggage and passengers for stolen technology, but the officers who attended this summit were allowed to forego that formality. The six soldiers guarding the security gate snapped to attention and saluted Admiral Klyber as he approached. They stayed at attention as he walked past.

“Huang’s got nerve. I’ll give him that much,” Klyber said as we left the security gate. “The other Joint Chiefs don’t know what they are up against with him. They’re simple soldiers. He’s Machiavellian. You get a Machiavelli in the ranks when you’ve been at peace for too long. Without war, officers advance by politics instead of merit.”

We reached the staging area where VIP passengers boarded their ships. Ahead of us, the landing pad stretched out for miles. It was so immense that its floor and ceiling seemed to form their own peculiar horizon.

Klyber’s transport sat on the tarmac just one hundred feet ahead of us. One of Klyber’s pilots milled at the foot of the ramp smoking a cigarette. He tossed the butt on the ground and crushed it out with his shoe as Klyber approached.

Klyber turned to look at me. “You are not interested in a life as a Marine,” he said. “I understand. When you get to the Doctrinaire , I’ll make arrangements for an honorable discharge. What you do beyond that is up to you.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said. “What about you?”

Klyber gave me a terrible, withered smile. “The Doctrinaire is going to end this war, Harris, then we can rebuild the Republic. Once we shake the deadwood out, there will be a need for rebuilding. I suppose it will be time for me to enter politics.”

The triumphant words did not match the defeated posture. He looked so old. The only explanation I could imagine was that having finally revealed his plans, Admiral Klyber had become more acutely aware of the challenges ahead.

We had reached the door of the transport. I snapped to attention and saluted Klyber. He returned my salute. I wanted to talk more, but I was not boarding the ship.

“Admiral,” I said with a final nod as I ended my salute.

Klyber smiled. “Good day, Lieutenant Harris.” He turned and walked up the ramp into his transport. I watched him—a tall, emaciated man with a long face and a narrow head. He had twig-like arms and legs like broomsticks; but even in his late sixties he was the picture of dignity walking proud and erect. His starched white uniform hung slack around his skin-and-bones frame, but Bryce Klyber was the quintessential officer.

A sense of relief washed through me as I saw an attendant seal the transport hatch. There had been an assassination attempt, but it was on me. Were they after Klyber and just trying to get me out of the way?

Maybe so. Maybe I scared them away when I chased them out of my room. Golan was on high alert after that.

Unlike my little Johnston, Klyber’s eighty-foot long C-64 Mercury-class transport ship was not designed to fly in an atmosphere with oxygen or gravity. The big ship rolled to the first door of the locks under its own power. This particular ship was big and boxy with a bulging hull that looked unworthy of flight. Even rolling toward the runway, it had a clumsy, overstuffed feel about it. An electroshield door sealed behind the C-64. I could still see the craft through that first door, but it now had an unsteady appearance, as if I was watching it through heat waves. The ship lumbered on through two more electroshield doors, entering the low gravity area.

The tower gave Klyber’s ship immediate clearance—fleet admiral’s privilege, who could out rank him?—and it levitated from the deck on a cloud of steaming air. The ship hung above the deck for a few seconds as it rotated to face the aperture. I watched the ship and thought about receiving an honorable release from the Marines. I had to smile.

As I turned to leave, I saw something that did not make sense. At first I did not even realize what I was seeing. Five or six civilians stood on the far side of the security gate watching ships take off. Aware that something felt wrong, I headed toward them for a better look.

Then I realized what I saw. I knew one of the men, only he was not a civilian. Rear Admiral Tom Halverson, dressed in a suit and tie like an ordinary businessman, stood at the front of the group. I smiled thinking he must have missed the transport. “Miss your ride?” I called out as I walked toward the gate. Halverson turned to look at me. He paused, stared at me for just a moment, then turned and bolted into the service halls behind the security station. “Grab that man!” I yelled at the men guarding the exit. They looked over at me so slowly they reminded me of cows grazing in a field.

“Stop him!” I screamed as I pulled my M27.

All five guards pulled their guns. Two ran off after Halverson, but the other three kept their M27s trained on me. Red warning lights flashed from the ceiling for the second time since I had landed on Golan. Soldiers with drawn weapons rushed out of the security booth and surrounded me. I placed my gun on the ground then laced my hands behind my head without being asked.

As the MPs closed in around me, I looked back at the launch area expecting to see Klyber’s ship explode. The C-64 had dragged itself to the airspace just in front of the aperture, and the transport seemed to dangle precariously as it approached that opening. But instead of exploding, it rose steadily higher.

“What is going on, Harris?”

I turned to see the colonel who had sprung me from the brig pushing his way toward me. He looked angry.

“Colonel, there’s a bomb on Klyber’s ship!”

The colonel did not hesitate. “Out of the way,” he yelled. He pulled a discrete communications stem from his collar. “Traffic control, hold Klyber’s ship! I repeat, this is urgent, hold Klyber’s transport!”

The MPs lowered their guns and cleared out of my way. I could not hear what was said, but traffic control apparently got the colonel’s message. “Yeah, that’s right . . . Yes, I’ve got a man out here who says that there is a bomb on board the admiral’s ship. Shit . . . no. . . . don’t bring it down. If we have a bomber around here, he might set it off. Yes. Yes! Look, we’re on our way over. Just have the pilot hang tight.”

And that was what happened. Klyber’s massive transport continued to hover in front of the aperture like a bee waiting to enter a flower. I paused to look at it for just a moment.

“Move it, Harris.” The colonel did not need to ask twice. We headed into the control tower, a tinted glass tower that reached to the ceiling of the landing area. The tower was seventeen stories tall. We entered the elevator and the colonel stabbed the button for the floor he wanted.

“You’d better be right about this, Harris.” He panted as he spoke.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“What did you see?”

“Rear Admiral Halverson,” I said. “He didn’t get on the flight.”

“You set off the alarms because you saw some guy standing around?” The colonel screamed so hard that streamers of spit flew from his lips.

“Rear Admiral Halverson is Klyber’s second-in-command,” I said.

“So he missed the specking flight!” The colonel shook his head. “Oh, I’m specked. I had to trust a goddamned clone.”

“Halverson ran when he saw me. He was . . .”

“You’re a damned Liberator!” the colonel shouted louder than ever. He did this just as the elevator doors opened. Everyone on the floor turned to look at us. “Damned specking right he ran when he saw you. You’re a goddamned Liberator clone. You’re a friggin’ disaster waiting to happen. Anyone in his right mind is going to run when he sees you. I should have run when I saw you. No, I should have had my men shoot you while I had the chance. Oh, I am specked.”

The floor of the control room was dim, lit only by the green and red phosphorous glow of several large radar screens. The air was moist from recirculation and carried a bad combination of scents—mildew and cigarette smoke. Entering this heavily air-conditioned floor felt like being sealed in an old refrigerator. Around the room, men sat beside radar consoles in clusters of three. “How should we handle this?” one of the men at the nearest console called over. The colonel and I went over to join him.

“Traffic control, this is U.A. Transport five-Tango-Zulu. Do you read me?”

“We read you five-Tango-Zulu,” replied one of the controllers.

“What seems to be the hang-up down there?” the pilot asked. This was the same man who picked me up on Mars a few days earlier. I recognized his voice.

“Want me to bring them back?” the controller asked.

The colonel thought for a moment, then shook his head. “Not based on the evidence Lieutenant Harris just gave me.”

“Is there a problem, traffic control?” the pilot squawked over the radio. Through the black tinted windows, I could see Klyber’s transport hanging just below the lip of the aperture. There was very little gravity on that part of the deck, but the C-64 still looked awkward. A long line of ships started to form below the transport.

“Colonel, we have to do something. My queue is cataclysmically specked.”

The colonel walked to the dark glass wall of the tower and stared out for several seconds. “Can you laser scan the transport in midair?” he asked.

“Sure,” the controller said.

“Five-Tango-Zulu, this is traffic control. Prepare for a scan. Do you copy?”

“Don’t you save scans for incoming?” the pilot asked.

I didn’t realize they had scanners by the outbound aperture, but they did. A silver-red beam locked on to the hull of the C-64. It moved up and down the Mercury-class transport.

“Find anything?” the colonel asked.

“Clean, sir,” the traffic controller said.

The colonel glared at me.

“You see any unidentified ships in the area?” I asked, desperation starting to sink in. The controller ran his finger over the radar screen, tracing a line above the information the scan found.

“All clear. Look for yourself.”

The markings on his radar monitors could have been written in Sanskrit as far as I could tell. The notations they used to identify the ships used symbols and numbers, not letters.

“What am I looking at?” I asked.

“Control, should I land this bird?” the pilot asked. Irritation showed in his voice.

“What do you think?” the head controller asked the colonel. Still staring into the monitor, the controller pointed at it, drawing invisible circles around different areas on the screen.

“What do the markings mean?” I asked.

“These red triangles are Air Force. They’re guarding our air space. These blue boxes are civilian ships. These green ones are government, strictly non-combat . . . surveyors, that kind of shit.”

The colonel took a long breath, gave me another angry glare, and said, “Send them on their way.”

“No problem,” said the controller. “Five-Tango-Zulu, this is traffic control. Sorry about the tie-up. We had a false alarm.”

“Are we cleared to leave?” the pilot asked.

“You are clear for takeoff.” The controller looked back at me and smiled. I heard nerdy enthusiasm in his voice as he said, “Klyber’s transport is self-broadcasting. You don’t see self-broadcasters often. Now comes the cool part.”

The controller pointed at a blue square with symbols that meant absolutely nothing to me. “See that?

That’s Five-Tango-Zulu. That’s the Admiral’s transport. He’ll fly a few minutes out, and then poof. The ship vanishes off the screen so quickly that the computers don’t know what to do about it. The screen goes blank because the system resets. If you ever wanted to see a computer wet itself, watch this. Weirdest damn thing you ever saw.”

“Hurting for entertainment,” I muttered to myself as I turned to gaze out the window. The colonel still stood in front of the window. Now that he cleared the transport to leave, he wanted to make sure he made the right call. Once the big transport departed safely, he would deal with me. I took another look at the radar screen and tried to make sense of the rainbow of symbols. The low glow of the screen seemed to dissolve into the overall darkness of the room. I walked over to the window in time to see the tail of Klyber’s C-64 escaping into the black void beyond the aperture. Strobe lights along the wing and tail of the transport flashed white, then yellow, then red.

“Huang or no Huang, Harris, you’re up shit creek this time,” the colonel said in a soft voice. “You know that, don’t you?”

I did not answer.

He turned to look at me. “We’ll just wait until your friend Klyber’s transport is away, then you and I can settle up.”

For a moment I wished they had found a bomb on the transport, then I remembered Rear Admiral Halverson. Surely they would catch the admiral . . . but what would that prove? “Shit creek,” the colonel repeated under his breath. Watching Klyber’s ship grow smaller and smaller as it drifted into space, I realized just how far up that creek I had traveled.

“That’s it,” the colonel said. “They’re gone. Now let’s you and me go over to the brig and have a discussion. How does that sound?”

It did not sound good. The colonel started toward the elevator and I turned to follow.

“Wait,” the controller said as the colonel walked past the radar console. “You’re going to miss the show.”

The colonel paused to see what he was talking about.

The controller pointed into the radar screen to show us Klyber’s ship. Blocking the low glow of the screen, his hand looked like a swollen shadow. “See, he’s already ten miles out. He’s going to want to get at least one thousand miles away before he broadcasts. That will put him here,” the controller said pointing to a ring about four inches away from the circle that represented the Dry Docks.

“Now you see these?” the controller went on. “These are the local broadcast discs.” He pointed at two orange rectangles. “The transport has to be at least one thousand miles away from them. Self-broadcasting too close to the network really mucks with the discs, see, so the transport has to go in the other direction.”

The colonel nodded impatiently. It didn’t interest me, either. I found that I wanted to get to security and get on with whatever the colonel had planned. Without saying a word, the colonel turned and started to leave.

By this time, a crowd had formed around us. At least thirty traffic control workers had drifted to the station to watch “the show.” Men in white shirts carrying coffee cups stared into the big computer screen as if it were a work of art. Some pointed, others whispered to each other and nodded as if noticing significant secrets.

“What is going on here?” the colonel snapped angrily as he tried to push through the gawkers.

“I told you, this is the show. We don’t get many self-broadcasting ships out here. They want to watch it speck with my computer.” We stood about ten feet from the controller by this time. He had to raise his voice for us to hear him.

The colonel watched out of courtesy. He placed his arms across his chest, folding his hands over his biceps, and stood stiff as a pillar. His lips pressed into a single line and his eyes were hard as stone.

“Any second now . . .” the controller said. A few seconds passed, but nothing happened. “What the hell!” the controller said, sweeping clutter away from his console. Coffee cups, ashtrays, and papers fell to the floor. He flipped a switch. “U.A. Transport five-Tango-Zulu. Come in five-Tango-Zulu. Come in.”

There was no response, not even static.

“Come in, five-Tango-Zulu.”

Silence.

“What’s going on?” the colonel asked the exact same question, starting to sound nervous. The traffic controller ignored him. He flipped switches, tried to hail the C-64 again, and flipped more switches. He moved quickly, like a man trying to stave off a catastrophe.

“Mark, get to your station. Get me a reading,” the controller called, and one of the controllers who had been gawking at the radar sprinted across the floor. It seemed like silent communication passed from the floor leader to the other controllers. The rest of the onlookers scattered.

“What is going on?” the colonel repeated.

“I can’t reach the transport,” the controller said without looking back. He pressed a button and spoke into his microphone. “Emergency station, we have a possible stiff!”

“I read you, control,” a voice on the intercom said.

The controller stood up and looked out toward the aperture, then gazed back into his console. “Make that a definite stiff. Look on your radar for five-Tango-Zulu. It’s a few miles off deck in Sector A-twelve.”

“A-twelve?” the voice asked.

“Hold on,” the controller said. “I’ll try raising visual contact with the pilot.”

Under normal circumstances, only the people in the cockpit initiated visual communications; but for security reasons, the Dry Docks’ computers had special protocols that enabled the traffic controllers to override ship systems. A little screen the size of a playing card winked to life on the console next to the radar readout.

Centered in that screen was Klyber’s pilot. He sat strapped in his chair, his head hanging slack. At first I thought he was reading something. Then I noticed the tell-tale details—white skin with a slight blue tint, the blood blister color of the lips, the frozen eyes—and realized that only his harness held him strapped in his seat. “He’s dead,” I said.

“Shit!” the controller gasped. “Shit! Shit! Shit!

“Oh my God! Emergency station, Mary, mother of God, it’s a ghost ship. Repeat, emergency station, five-Tango-Zulu is a ghost ship. The pilot is dead!” he said. “Holy shit! Mary, mother of God. Repeat, the pilot is dead.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

A network of emergency lights flashed red, then green, then white, then yellow around the launch pad. I walked over to the window and watched twelve floors below as emergency teams moved into position around the enormous hangar. Rescue workers piled on to carts and trucks and rode to the outer edge of the locks. Five ambulances arrived and medics set up emergency stations. Watching from the cool, stale environment of the control tower, I saw everything and heard just a shade of the chaos below. Soft-shells climbed out of rigs and set up emergency equipment. Soft-shells was Marine-ese for spaceport emergency personnel who wore soft armor designed to protect against flames, toxins, and radiation.

Watching them now, I noted their color-coding. Medtechs wore white. Firemen wore yellow. The bomb squad wore black.

“They’ll do what they can,” the colonel said as he took a place beside me to look out the window. He spoke in a near whisper. “We get a lot of crashes when we test prototypes. These guys know how to scramble.”

“The Triple Es are ready,” the traffic controller called from behind us.

“Triple Es?” I asked.

“Emergency evaluation engineers,” the colonel said. “They’ll inspect the ship and board her if possible. Their control room is two floors up. We can watch what they do from there.”

I followed the colonel into the elevator. A moment later, we entered a universe that bore no resemblance to the traffic control floors below. The sterile glare of fluorescent lights lit an endless expanse of cubicles. People didn’t just speak on this floor, they shouted at each other.

“Hey, Clarence, this isn’t a good time. We have a ghost ship,” somebody yelled at the colonel as we stepped off the elevator. A short, chubby man in a messy white shirt and dark blue pants came toward us.

“That’s why we’re here,” the colonel said. “Harris here is familiar with that ship. He’s Klyber’s head of security. Maybe he can help.”

The colonel turned to me. “Just don’t get in the way,” he said. We followed the colonel’s friend into a control room lined with video monitors.

A bank of four monitors along the wall displayed the scene in full color. The first screen showed only Klyber’s ship, which hung in mid-space, silent and motionless. I saw light through the portholes but no movement. Strobe lights along the tail and the wings of the ship flashed white then red. The next screen showed a five-man security ship approaching the derelict transport from the rear. The security ship was tiny compared to the C-64. It looked like a minnow approaching a whale. I became mesmerized by the glow of the transports’ strobes as it reflected along the hull of the transport . . . red, then white, red, then white. When the security ship shined a powerful searchlight on the hull, the glow of the strobes seemed to vanish.

All of this took place in the eerie silence of space.

The third screen was a close-up of Klyber’s ship, illuminated by the bleaching eye of that searchlight.

“Are you bringing the ship in?” I asked the man who led us to this bank of screens.

“Hell, no. We don’t know what killed them. That ship could be leaking radiation. That’s all I need, a dirty bomb in the middle of my landing field. They could have been killed with some kind of germ agent.”

“You scanned it,” I said to the colonel.

“We must have missed something,” he answered.

“McAvoy.” Somebody stuck his head out of an office and called to the colonel. The colonel walked over to that office for a chat.

“Scanning the target,” a voice said. It came from a small speaker below the bank of screens. The man who led the boarding team pressed a button, changing the view of one of the screens on the wall. “Keep sharp, boys. They ran a scan on this bird before it left the docks and it came up empty.”

“Roger,” the voice said over the speakers. “Scanning for bombs.”

The background in the scanning screen turned red. Everything on the screen turned red. The space around the exterior of the ship was empty and black with a slight red tint. The Mercury Class transport showed a bold red. The nose of the transport turned bright pink as a laser shined on it. Three columns of text appeared across the bottom of the screen displaying an on-the-spot object, substance, and element analysis.

The laser beam moved ever so slowly as it scanned the ship. I watched, nearly needing to bite my tongue to stop myself from screaming. There was no bomb on that ship. If there had been a bomb, the ship would have blown up.

“Harris,” the colonel returned, “you sure you saw Halverson?”

I nodded.

“Rear Admiral Thomas Halverson?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, now feeling a little frustrated. I was tense to begin with, and I did not think there were many admirals in the U.A. Navy with the last name Halverson.

“That can’t be,” the colonel said. “He’s registered as a passenger on Klyber’s ship.”

“You have the passenger manifest?” I asked.

The colonel nodded.

“Can I see it? We might get some answers by comparing the list of passengers with the people we find on the ship.”

“I’ll get a printout,” the colonel said. “And I’ll put out an all-points bulletin for Halverson. If he’s still in the Dry Dock facility, we’ll find him.”

I nodded. “Can you run another DNA search in the apartment they blew up last night?” I asked. “Maybe you missed something. If you find anything, compare it to Halverson’s file.”

“You think that was Halverson?” the colonel asked.

“Or some of his friends,” I said.

“The room was pretty well scorched, but we’ll give it a try.”

“Okay, explosives came up clean. Let’s run for chemicals and anomalies,” the tech at the screens said. As the chemical scan began, the single color on the screen turned from red to white. A line pulsed across the face of the screen, and a three-dimensional wire frame diagram replaced the video image of the transport. The lines in the image changed color as the security ship scanned for chemicals, radiation, power surges, and temperature fluctuations. This scan moved more quickly, but not by much.

“Can you bring it in now?” I asked.

“No,” the controller said without looking away from his monitor.

“Admiral Klyber could still be alive,” I said.

“We don’t know what happened on that ship. We can’t risk it.”

I felt my insides coiling. I clenched my fists and rapped my knuckles against my thigh.

“Ready to board the ship,” the voice said over the speaker.

I looked back at the screens on the walls. Dry dock emergency must have sent two teams out to the transport, one to run scans and the other to board the ship. The smaller ship, the one that had looked like a minnow beside the C-64, had attached itself to the transport. Now that it sat snuggly connected just behind the cone-shaped cockpit section of the big transport, it looked more like an enormous tick. This was a civilian operation. Instead of giving orders, the guy at the screen growled suggestions such as,

“Let’s have a look.”

The first three screens now showed nothing but static shots of the outside of Admiral Klyber’s transport. All the action took place on the fourth screen, which was mostly dark. This screen showed a helmet camera view of the action. It showed the accordion walls and temporary gangway that connected the Triple E ship to the transport. The only light on the screen came from the torches in the evaluation crew’s helmets.

One of the engineers pressed a three-pronged key into a slot on the side of the C-64’s hull, and the hatch opened. There was a brief blast of air as the cabin repressurized. A loud slurping noise blasted over the speakers, then stopped as suddenly as it began.

“Okay, we’re moving in.”

The cabin within was brightly lit. I recognized the ivory-colored carpeting in the quick glance that I got.

“I’ll check the cockpit. You search the ship,” the lead engineer said. On the screen, the eye of a single torch beam lit the door to the cockpit as a hand came out of nowhere and tried the handle. The door opened.

The pilot and copilot sat upright in their seats, their heads hanging chin to chest as if they were asleep. Lights winked on and off in the dimly-lit space. The pilot’s coloring was off—the blue tones in his skin more pronounced then before. I might have mistaken it for bad lighting had his brownish black hair not looked the right hue.

“Any idea what killed him?” the colonel asked into a microphone.

“I can guess,” the voice over the speaker said. “It seems pretty obvious. Want me to take a tissue sample or wait for the medics to arrive?”

“Take it,” the controller said.

On the screen, the camera drew closer to the pilot. A gloved hand reached under the pilot’s chin and drew his head up. Blank, glassy eyes and blue lips faced the camera. “Any vital signs on your end?”

“He’s dead,” the controller said. “Jab him.”

The gloved hand released the pilot and his head flopped back toward the floor, bobbing with the whiplash of the neck. The gloved hand on the screen dug through a small pouch and produced a plastic packet. The hand tore the packet open and pulled a three-inch long needle with a little hilt on one end.

“God, I hate this shit,” the controller said.

On the screen, the tech pressed the needle into the fleshy area just under the pilot’s jaw. The point was sharp enough to pierce the skin instantly. A single drop of blood formed around the needle as the tech pushed it into the hilt. “You getting a reading?”

“Yeah,” the controller said. “Cardiac arrest.”

“You want me to do the copilot, too?”

“What’s the point?”

“Cardiac arrest?” I asked.

“Means they got electrocuted,” the controller said. He did not look back. Nothing could induce him to take his eyes from the screens.

“Live and learn,” I said to myself.

“We’ve found bodies,” another voice said over a speaker. More screens lit. On one of the new screens, a tech sorted his way through the passengers in the main cabin. This part of Admiral Klyber’s transport had a living room-like décor with couches and padded chairs arranged in intimate clusters and workstations.

The tech shuffled from one passenger to the next, lifting heads and occasionally using a handheld device to check for pulses and other vital signs. Looking at this scene, I remembered attending elementary school at the orphanage and how the teachers sometimes made us put our heads on our desks when we misbehaved. Apparently all of the passengers had misbehaved. One officer had fallen off of a couch and now lay slumped over a coffee table. Whatever had killed these men did not so much as jostle the ship. Nothing had fallen out of place and the three men sitting at the bar had not fallen off their stools. This guy was not as reverent as his partner in the cockpit. He moved through quickly, moving the bodies as little as possible, and saying, “Dead. This one’s dead, too. Dead. Dead.”

He reached a body in a corner of the cabin. This man’s arm hung in the air like a school kid looking to ask his teacher a question. “This one got flamed,” the tech said over the speaker. The man’s hair and uniform had apparently caught on fire. The flames had singed his skin, burning it up like a log in a fire. The face, with its lips parted to reveal a skeletal smile, was unidentifiable. Back on the first screen, the engineer in the cockpit took readings using the C-64’s sensors. He took an air reading. “High ozone. High carbon dioxide. You reading this?”

“I see it,” the controller said.

“Am I cleared to retrieve the ship?”

“Unless one of the passengers objects’,” the controller said.

Both men laughed.

“What did he find?” I asked.

“Ozone,” said the emergency systems operator. “That means the broadcast engine malfunctioned.”

I did not understand the relationship between the broadcast engine and ozone. “How do you know it was the broadcast engine?” I asked.

“Ozone is what you get when you fire up a broadcast engine.”

“How do you know it malfunctioned?” I asked.

“They’re dead, ain’t they?” the operator quipped.

I could not argue with that one.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The colonel had a cart waiting for us at the bottom of the control tower. An MP drove us out to the edge of the docks, and there we waited for ten long minutes while the tower guided Admiral Klyber’s C-64

transport in through the aperture.

Through the wavy lens of the electroshields, I saw the big Mercury-class transport sidle into the aperture. It entered the landing bay nose first, then hung in the air for several seconds, its bloated fuselage swaying slightly like a chandelier in a breeze.

“What is a ghost ship?” I asked the MP.

“Dead crew,” he said.

“And the passengers?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he shrugged as he spoke. “Once the crew is dead there’s not much hope for the passengers.”

Landing gear extended from the bottom of Klyber’s “ghost ship” as it dropped down to the deck on the other side of the lock. Before this moment, I had never appreciated the sheer bulk of a C-64. The rods that held the landing gear were four inches in diameter, as big around as a mortar shell. The struts were thick as beer bottles. The ship was solid but it looked like an apparition through the turbulent veil of the electroshields. I watched it closely as I pulled on the blue soft-shell jacket of a civilian security man.

“What the speck do you think you’re doing?” somebody barked at me. I turned around to see the head of Golan Dry Docks emergency services, a slightly chubby man with a thick neck and a spiky buzz cut. He was a civilian, and he apparently had very little respect for the military.

“Lay off, Smith,” the colonel said. “He’s with me.”

“That’s just what I need, a damned Liberator running around loose in my operation.” The man’s face turned a deep red as he spoke. He lowered his voice but his tone remained unreasonable. Since the Golan facility was a public sector operation, this man undoubtedly outranked the colonel. Struggling to keep control of his temper, the colonel zipped the front of his soft-shell coat closed. The quarter-inch-thick plasticized material was just stiff enough to form a tent-like slope over his shoulders. Frowning fiercely, he said, “Harris is Klyber’s head of security. He has the right to be here.”

“He doesn’t have shit in my landing bay,” the emergency services chief snapped.

“I’ll take responsibility for him,” the colonel said.

“Then it’s your ass,” the chief said. He looked down at the tarmac and shook his head. While they had this conversation, the transport rolled through the first gate of the docks. Once that sealed behind it, the second electroshield opened and the C-64 pulled within a few feet of the emergency teams. Five medics boarded the transport first. The colonel and I came in on their heels. They stopped to inspect the bodies in the main cabin, an area that looked more like the executive suite of a luxury hotel than the interior of a military transport. The soothing soft light of table lamps illuminated the cabin. Even in my emergency armor I could smell the acrid scent of ozone, the smell of overheated batteries, and charged copper wires, as I entered the cabin. This smell was soon drowned out by a stronger scent—the dusty smell of burned meat. Two medics crouched in front of the charred body in the corner of the cabin.

I hurried across the thick ivory-colored carpeting and past the living room fixtures and entered a hall that led to the rear of the craft. I had traveled with Bryce Klyber in the past. He always reserved a private cabin for himself in the rear of the ship. I knew where I would find him. Two Marines—clones—had stood guard by his door. Both men had collapsed in place, their M27s still strapped across their shoulders. The color of their faces had turned to a deep violet, and their black tongues hung from their mouths. I did not have time to feel sorry for them. That might come later, though I doubted it would. Pity and empathy were emotions that seldom troubled me. The door to Klyber’s cabin was locked. Without looking back to the colonel for permission, I kicked the door open. The door swished across the carpeting, stirring a small cloud of dust. I touched the surface of the door then looked at my glove. A fine layer of dust covered the tip of my finger.

“Ash,” a medical tech said as he and a partner squeezed past the colonel and entered the narrow hallway. They carried a stretcher. “It’s everywhere in here . . . the carpets, the walls, the bodies.”

Hearing the word “bodies,” I snapped out of my haze. I watched for a moment as the medics pulled one of the guards onto their stretcher, then I turned and entered Admiral Klyber’s cabin. I spotted the admiral immediately.

The room was a perfect cube—fifteen feet in every direction. It had a captain’s bed built into one wall and a workstation built into another. Bryce Klyber sat flaccid at his desk, still wearing his whites, the gold epilates gleaming across his hunched shoulders. The admiral’s head lay on the desk, his left cheek resting on the keyboard of his computer, his blue-black lips spread slightly apart and his swollen black tongue lolling out. Klyber’s bright blue eyes stared at the wall across the room. Klyber seemed to have shrunk in death the way large spiders curl in their legs and compress when you kill them. Tall, thin, and intense, Klyber’s presence used to fill the room. Now, slumped over his desk, he looked like nothing more than a fragile old man.

Seeing Klyber splayed over his desk, with his posture curved and his eyes so vacant, seemed almost indecent, like I was seeing him naked. Here was a man whose uniform was always pressed and whose posture was always erect. He was the epitome of the aristocratic officer. Now his cap sat upside down on the desk before him and his arms dangled to the floor. A small stream of saliva ran from the corner of his mouth. It simply wasn’t dignified—and above all else in life, Bryce Klyber had always been dignified. Standing in the door, the colonel watched me as I checked Klyber for a pulse. I don’t know why I bothered. I suppose I did not know what else to do. I thought about propping Klyber upright in his seat, replacing his cap, and letting him pass into history with his majesty intact, then dismissed the idea. As if reading my thoughts, the colonel asked, “You’re not going to leave him like that?”

“What do you suggest I do with him?” I asked.

“Sit him up,” the colonel said.

“I don’t think he’s worried about appearances,” I said. I waited for the colonel to move out of my way so that I could leave the cabin. I don’t think I felt anger yet, though I knew that emotion would come. At the moment, I simply felt numb.

“Let the dead bury the dead,” I whispered to myself as I left the room. I was a Liberator. I was Klyber’s brew. We had not been built to mourn the dead, we were programmed to avenge them.

“What do we have here?” I heard a cheery voice through the open doorway of the engine compartment as I walked down the hall. The cabin that housed the broadcast equipment was nearly twice the size of Klyber’s small cabin. I peered in the door and saw two demolition men in black armor kneeling side by side in front of the broadcast engine.

The broadcast engine looked like a giant replica of a box of rifle shells. The engine casing was a rectangular black box with chrome stripes. Inside the case stood eighteen brass cylinders that looked like three-foot-tall replicas of long-point bullets. A network of wires and tubes connected these cylinders.

“Was it sabotage?” I asked.

The two men turned back to look at me. I could see their faces through the glass in their protective masks. “So much for mystery,” one of the men said, holding up a foot-long length of perfectly clean copper cable. “I could have told them what happened the moment the ship went dark.”

I felt a hand grasp my shoulder. “You okay, there, Harris?” the colonel asked.

“That cable?” I asked.

“Oh, hello, Colonel McAvoy,” the second bomb squadder said.

“Boys,” said the colonel. “You were about to explain something to the lieutenant?”

“This is what happens when a broadcast goes wrong,” the first guy said. “And there are too many things that can go wrong. No one in their right mind ever travels in a self-broadcasting ship.”

I, of course, had traveled to the Golan Dry Docks in a self-broadcasting ship. The impact of the technicians’ statement had just begun to sink in when I heard, “And that, Lieutenant Harris, is how you allowed the deaths of every one on this transport.” I turned to see the chief of emergency services glaring down at me.

“Easy, Fred,” warned the colonel.

“If you came here to protect the admiral, you did a shitty job. This ship was sabotaged right under your specking nose, bud.” He stepped past me and took the copper cable from the bomb squad technician. Brandishing it like a newspaper at a misbehaving dog, he added, “Do you know how these people died?”

“I heard something about cardiac arrest,” I said.

“Cardiac malfunction caused by electrocution would be more accurate. Somebody strung a cable from inside the broadcast engine to the frame of the ship. When the pilot turned on the broadcast engine, he sent four million volts through the entire ship for one one-hundredth of a second.”

“One one-hundredth of a second . . .” I echoed.

“Do you understand how broadcasting works?” the tech asked. “The engine generates . . .”

“Yes,” I said. “I know how broadcasting works.” From what I had heard, only a select few in the entire galaxy truly understood the principles that made the broadcast process work, and they were elite scientists. I doubted some lowly corpse bagger understood the theory of broadcast travel any better than I did. I knew that broadcast engines coated ships with highly-charged particles that could be translated and transferred instantaneously, and that was enough for me.

“Yeah, well, apparently other people know how it works, too,” said Fred, the Golan Dry Docks emergency services czar. “’Cause somebody snuck on to this ship under your nose and planted this cable. The admiral died on your watch, asshole.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I did not return to the Doctrinaire . I boarded the Johnston Starliner that Klyber loaned me for my trip to the Golan Dry Docks, and I charted a course into space. I flew straight out into deep space, away from the Dry Docks and the broadcast network, for four hours. This far out, the blackness seemed to fold in on itself like a blanket closing around me. By that time I had flown millions of miles to nowhere. A more experienced pilot might have understood the navigational hazards of deep space travel, but I neither understood nor cared. And, of course, I had a self-broadcasting ship. Before initiating the broadcast engine, I climbed out of the cockpit and squeezed down the aisle through the cabin. The Johnston R-56 Starliner was a luxury craft. It did not have a living room-like main cabin, but it had enough headroom for me to walk nearly erect. It was designed to carry twenty passengers in six rows, but the last two rows of this particular craft were blocked off by a felt-covered bulkhead. Behind that bulkhead sat the broadcast engine.

I had pulled the power cables from the broadcast engine before approaching Golan. Without juice running through it, the broadcast engine was nothing more than a mess of brass, silicon, copper, and cables—undetectable with remote surveillance equipment. Now, before reconnecting those cables, I thought about what happened to Klyber’s transport and gave the broadcast equipment a quick diagnostic.

I shimmied around to the back of the engine and checked for cables. Everything looked fine. I inspected the far corners, looking between the engine and the inner wall of the fuselage. Nothing. Moving on to the special generator that powered the engine, I removed a few of the cylinders and inspected the floor using a mirror to peer around corners. The floor looked clean.

Taking a deep breath, I stretched the power cables to the proper terminals on the broadcast engine and snapped them into place. I closed the hood over the engine and returned to my seat in the cockpit. And there I sat.

I thought about the dangers of self-broadcasting. A competent assassin could certainly have hidden a grounding cable somewhere in my ship where I would not find it.

As I thought about it, Klyber and his crew could scarcely have found a better way to go. All they knew was that their ship had traveled a safe distance from the Dry Docks and then they were dead. A powerful charge ran through them for one one-hundredth of a second. It stopped their hearts, turned some of their skin and hair to dust, and went away.

Even the officer who happened to have his hand on a door handle died painlessly. The metal handle prolonged the charge into his already-dead body and he charred. Had “Major Burns’s” ghost hung around, it would have had reason to cringe; but “Burns” himself felt nothing. When I first heard the med techs referring to him as “Major Burns,” I thought it was yet another example of morbid med tech humor. Ironically enough, his real name was Major James T. Burns. My thoughts returned to Bryce Klyber—my last tie to the Unified Authority, my former commander, and ultimately my creator, since he had led the team that engineered the Liberators. A creator was a cold and unattainable relation. I told myself that if I had once loved Klyber, it was only in the way that a man lost in a tunnel loves the light when he finds a way out. Klyber was kind to me. He protected me. In the end, though, he saw me as a way of justifying his career. I was not a son to him, not even a colleague. Admiral Klyber wanted to use me to clear his name. History remembered Liberator clones as brutal and uncontrollable killers. Klyber’s agenda was simple. He wanted to remind the people that his Liberators had saved the Republic. I wasn’t a person to Bryce Klyber, I was a means to an end. Perhaps that was all any person was to another—a means to an end. Certainly the synthetic population was a means for helping natural-borns achieve certain ends.

God, I had to fly somewhere. All of this introspection had to be a sign of depression, but it felt nice to be alone with time to reflect. I needed to sort my feelings and figure out my future. Sitting in a self-broadcasting ship, I realized that I had many options. I could fly anywhere. Klyber had only loaned me the Starliner; but now that he was gone, I considered the touring ship mine. With Klyber out of the picture, where could I return it? I could not bring myself to join the other side. I might have been able to bend my programming enough to ditch the Unified Authority Marines, but I could not even consider joining the Mogats or the Confederates. And the truth was, I liked the Mogats and the Confederate Arms even less than the Republic.

Unified Authority officers may have considered clones no more valuable than any other supply; but the Mogats equated clones with U.A. bullets—lethal tools of the enemy. The Unified Authority may have banned my kind from entering the Orion Arm, but the Mogats would exterminate me. The one thing I knew I wanted was revenge. Father or creator, friend or manipulator, Klyber died on my watch. He trusted me and I failed. My job had been to get him off the ship, through the conference, and back on his C-64 transport alive. By the letter of my contract, I succeeded, but that did not make me feel any better. And the truth was, even after all of my tough talk, when I shut my eyes and thought about the people I cared about, Fleet Admiral Bryce Klyber was the first person to come to mind. Letting my mind wander, I donned my mediaLink shades to check my mail. With Bryce Klyber out of the way, there was no one stopping Admiral Huang from hunting me down. On the other hand . . .

I had a private message from somebody named Clarence McAvoy. The name meant nothing to me until I noticed the sender’s address: Golan Dry Docks Security. Until that moment, I had never stopped to think of him as anything more than “the colonel,” just a cog in the Dry Docks security works. As I thought about this, I realized the way I considered the people around me was not all that different than the way so many officers viewed clones.

Harris,

We have identified all of the passengers on Klyber’s transport. According to the manifest, there were 21 people aboard that flight. We found 19 bodies. As you said, Rear Admiral Thomas Halverson was not aboard the transport. Neither was Captain Leonid Johansson. We found Johansson’s name on a passenger manifest for a transport headed to Washington, D.C. He returned to the Pentagon with Admiral Huang.

Huang transferred Johansson to his personal staff early this morning. Isn’t that just about the most goddamn lucky transfer you ever heard of?

Colonel C. McAvoy

PS. The attached is the security record of the only people who entered Klyber’s ship. It was a maintenance team. We have not been able to locate all of the techs on that team.

With a couple of quick optical commands, I cued the file McAvoy sent and watched the video record. A team of five technicians passed through the security gates outside the hangar. Each presented identification cards at the desk. Each man passed through a set of security posts, submitting himself to DNA profiling.

One of the men was short—no more than five feet tall—and mostly bald with a ring of sandy blond hair. The man wore the jumper of a janitor—a dirty number with short sleeves that ended just beyond the elbow. The suit looked loose around his compact, wiry physique. His exposed forearms had incredible muscle tone. And there was something else, not that I needed it to identify this man. The edge of a colorful forearm brantoo poked out of his sleeve.

Brantooing was the earmark of the rugged. Brantoo artists branded their clients with a hot iron to raise their skin, then injected colored pigment into the scar. The result was an embossed tattoo. Thugs and barroom brawlers loved brantoos because the average citizen went numb at the sight of them. I recognized this brantoo—it was the emblem of the Navy SEALS. It was a wheel with six spokes, each spoke tinted a different color. This was a crude map of the six arms of the Milky Way. Every SEAL had it brantooed on his forearm.

But this man wasn’t just a Navy SEAL. This was an “Adam Boyd” clone. These were special clones from a highly-classified operation under the personal direction of Admiral Che Huang. No need to worry about anybody recognizing this guy. For the most part, the only people who saw Boyd clones in action were Marines who had very little time to live.

Ravenwood, the outpost where I had supposedly died, was a training ground for Adam Boyd clones. Huang assigned platoons of forty-two Marines to defend the outpost on Ravenwood, then sent ten-man assault teams of Adam Boyd SEALS to kill them. I was the only Marine who ever escaped. In the video feed, the Adam Boyd clone stepped through the posts without a moment’s hesitation. A guard put up a hand to stop him, and the midget smirked up at him with a look of pure disdain. Using an optic command I stopped the video feed and brought up the clone’s identification badge.

“Name: Adam Boyd. Title: Maintenance, Sixth Detail. Security Clearance: All Levels. Years with company: Five.”

The guard said something that was not picked up by the security camera. The Adam Boyd clone answered satisfactorily, and he was allowed to pass. The maintenance team cleared the security station then entered and cleaned each of the ships parked on the high-security deck, including Admiral Klyber’s C-64.

I watched this scene with a mixture of prurient interest and utter awe. The maintenance team stepped into transports belonging to each member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Had he wanted to, that little Boyd bastard could have blown up the entire hierarchy of the U.A. military. Once the Boyd clone left Klyber’s C-64, I rewound the file and watched him enter the transport a second time. Then I rewound and watched it again in slow motion. I looked for any sign of the copper cable. I timed how long it took him to enter and leave. I noted that the Boyd entered Klyber’s ship three minutes before any of the other workers. He was on the ship for eighteen minutes and thirty-two seconds. He carried a small box of tools as he boarded the ship and brought the same box out. He could have easily smuggled a short length of cable in that box.

After watching that clone enter and leave the transport two more times, I finally allowed the video feed to play to its end. What I saw at the end hurt the most.

The security camera followed the maintenance team as it left the transport and then the landing area. They walked through the security gate. There, standing just inside the gate on almost the exact same spot where I would see him later that evening, stood Tom Halverson dressed like a civilian. He leaned with his back against the wall, smoking a cigarette. For a moment he seemed to ignore the maintenance crew. Then he saw the Boyd clone. His eyes locked on the little clone as he continued his smoke. Once the maintenance men walked by, Halverson tossed his cigarette aside and fell in behind them, remaining a few steps back as they walked down the hall and disappeared from the screen.

“Why aren’t you at the summit meeting?” I asked Halverson as he appeared in my mediaLink shades. Then it occurred to me. Why should he stay at the meeting? He was Huang’s man. His job was to oversee the sabotage of Klyber’s ship.

Expecting simply to leave a message, I used my shades to place a call to the colonel’s office. He took the call.

“Harris?” Colonel McAvoy’s face appeared in my shades.

“Colonel, I got your message. Thank you for sending the video feed.”

“Did you find anything?”

“Did you watch the feed all the way through?” I asked.

“Sure,” the colonel said. “I thought you might find the last few moments especially enlightening. We’ve searched the Dry Docks. Halverson isn’t here. My guess is that he had another identity programmed into our computers and left using a false ID. I don’t suppose you approve of officers using false identification codes, Commander Brocius?”

I had used so many false identities over the last few years that it took me a moment before I remembered coming into Golan as Commander Brocius.

“Is there any chance that Halverson flew back to Earth with Huang?”

“He did not,” the colonel said. “Huang left before Klyber. I have a feed of the passengers boarding. Do you want it?”

“No,” I said. “But I would like to see any video you might have from the summit.”

“Good joke,” the colonel said.

“I’m not joking.”

“Yes, you are. You seem like a bright guy. You cannot possibly think I would have a feed from a high-level summit. And even if I did, you cannot possibly think I would throw away my career by giving it to you.”

“The highest-ranking officer in U.A. Navy just died on your watch,” I said, trying to sound calm with just a hint of menace. I was bluffing, of course.

“Military intelligence is going to be all over this, Harris,” the colonel said. “They’ll get it sorted out.”

“Yes, they will. And they are going to blame it on you.”

“How’s that?”

“Follow the trail far enough and you’ll see that Admiral Huang was behind this. When it comes to somebody taking a fall, who do you think they are going to go after, you or the secretary of the Navy?”

The colonel laughed. “You think Huang killed Admiral Klyber?”

“I can prove it,” I said. “Do you have a video feed from the summit?”

“No,” the colonel said.

“Good,” I said, not believing him. High-level meetings like the summit were always recorded, and McAvoy was the man with the recording equipment at the Dry Docks. “Klyber and Huang will have gotten into a hot debate. Check out their brawl, then watch the feed of the maintenance team . . . and check out the short, bald guy.”

“I should have shot you while I had the chance,” the colonel said. “Suppose I just say you planted the cable . . .”

“Your own video record proves that I never went near Klyber’s ship,” I said. “Are you planning to doctor your records?”

“Get specked,” the colonel said.

“Look, Colonel, if you have access to the summit records, and we both know that you do, I suggest you view them. Once you’ve done that, send it to me, and I will try to help . . .”

“And you think I trust you?” the colonel asked.

“If you don’t want my help, that’s fine. The best of luck to you. You’re going to need it.”

“If you’re right and there’s something there, I’ll get you that feed. If you’re lying to me, Harris, I’ll have you hauled back to my station for an immediate court-martial,” the colonel said. “How do you like that deal, Liberator?” With this, he ended the transmission.

I did not like that deal. I sat in the cockpit of the Starliner, stared out into space, and stewed. As the fleet admiral’s security officer, I felt duty-bound to find Klyber’s killer. As a Liberator, I felt an almost pathological need for revenge. Beyond that, the evidence suggested that Admiral Huang murdered Klyber and just thinking about putting a bullet between his eyes made me feel happy. Killing Huang . . . killing Huang. A simple bullet in the head would be too easy. A gun, a bomb, or maybe a knife so that he would know it was personal. Our eyes would meet in the last moment, and he would know who killed him and why.

McAvoy contacted me within an hour. He did not call or write a message. Instead, he sent a virtual delivery. A massive, encrypted file and the key with which to open it.

“Klyber’s death is all over the Link,” Freeman said on my mediaLink shades. Judging by the ugly furniture and plain room behind him, he was staying in a cheap hotel. “The Navy says it was a tragic accident.”

“If you call sabotage an accident,” I said. “Otherwise it was a tragic murder.” I was still out in space, still a few million miles from the Golan Dry Docks. I had spent the last four hours viewing the summit and had more to go.

“You think it was murder?” Freeman asked.

“Yes, and Huang was behind it,” I said.

“Can you prove it?”

“No.”

Freeman was sitting on a bed. The shape of the mattress turned from a square to a funnel under his weight. “What do you have?” he asked.

“I have a security tape showing the maintenance team that cleaned Klyber’s transport. There was an Adam Boyd with them.” I paused to see how Freeman would react.

He raised an eyebrow, and said, “That’s it?”

“Huang created those little speckers.”

“Was Thurston at the summit?” Freeman asked.

I remembered seeing him on the video feed and nodded.

“The only Boyd clones I’ve ever seen were assigned to one of Thurston’s ships. Maybe he did it.”

It was true. To the best of my knowledge, every last Adam Boyd clone had been transferred to the Kamehameha , the command ship of the Scutum-Crux Fleet—Robert Thurston’s purview. That tidbit did not fit in with my theory. I wanted Huang to be the killer. “Thurston is Huang’s man. He doesn’t have anything against Admiral Klyber.”

“You can’t prove Huang has anything against Klyber.” Freeman replied.

“Get specked,” I said, knowing that Freeman was right.

“The only thing you have is a picture of an Adam Boyd clone boarding Klyber’s ship. Is that right? You can’t even prove he did anything to sabotage it.”

I nodded. “He was carrying a toolbox,” I said. “And he was on the ship for eighteen minutes and thirty-two seconds.”

“Was he alone?”

“Some of the time. He got on first.”

“So you are saying he had the opportunity to open the broadcast engine and place the cable even though the rest of the maintenance crew was coming?”

“Must have,” I said. “How did you know about the cable?”

“That’s how you sabotage self-broadcasting ships.” Freeman said. “Do you have anything else?”

“I’ve got a security feed from the summit. You should have seen the sparks. Klyber and Huang really hated each other.”

“The way I see it, we can either drop this or go after the Boyd,” Freeman said. “That’s the best we can do until we can tie Huang to the clone.”

I knew the Adam Boyd clones were trained on Earth, on an island called Oahu. I stumbled into one of them while on R and R on that island. I knew that their base of operations was now the U.A. Kamehameha , a fighter carrier in the Scutum-Crux Arm. Of the two places, Hawaii sounded more hospitable.

“Guess I’m headed to Earth to have a look at their farm,” I said. “You coming?”

Freeman nodded. “The only time I’ve ever seen Boyd clones was after you got through with them. It’d be interesting to see one that is still breathing.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

General Alexander Smith, secretary of the Air Force and ranking member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stands in front of an electronic display board holding a laser pointer. Like most of the members of the Joint Chiefs, Smith is in his sixties, a short man with a medium build and graying hair. His mustache covers the entire length of his upper lip.

The display board is an old-fashioned two-dimensional model, strictly low-tech. How he smuggled such an antique into the Dry Docks is beyond me, but there is no way this is Golan equipment. All of the big corporations gave up on 2-D displays long before this facility was built. The summit takes place around a U-shaped table that is fifty feet long. Only generals and admirals sit at this table. Staffs members sit behind them in chairs set against the wall. At the moment, General Smith’s 2-D display shows a diagram of the galaxy. Large red circles appear in several areas of the diagram. The general turns and points at them.

“As you know, we have engaged enemy troops in the following locations.” He points to the circles. “The Mogats seem to have set up power bases here . . .” He points at the lower flank of the outer Cygnus Arm. “Here . . .” He circles a parallel segment on the Perseus Arm. “And throughout these portions of Scutum-Crux.”

Smaller red splotches appear throughout the map. “The Mogats have free access throughout the galaxy. These are hotspots for spying and illegal activity. The only red zones in the Orion Arm are the planets New Columbia and Olympus Kri.”

Three of the galactic arms turn bright green. “The Cygnus, Perseus, and Scutum-Crux Arms have declared independence and formed the Organization of Confederate Arms. The Norma Arm has also declared independence. From what we can tell, this arm has ejected all Mogat colonists and is not a member of the OCS.

“Only the Orion and Sagittarius Arms have remained loyal; and in all candor, the U.A. government is funding an all-out covert war in Sagittarius that is costing us trillions of dollars. That’s the bad news.”

The colored areas vanish from the display, leaving a white and blue-black map of the stars. “The pink areas represent the territories in which our enemies currently enjoy military superiority.”

All of the men in the room laugh. There are no pink areas.

With the introductions and joking out of the way, General Smith suddenly turns serious. “About three weeks ago, Air Force intelligence intercepted the message, ‘Alterations complete. Will test in NGC three thousand six hundred and twelve.’

“Obviously, we had no way of knowing what the message meant then.”

“NGC,” Klyber calls out, “Norma Galactic Center?”

“Correct,” Smith says with a slight bow. “NGC did indeed refer to the inner curve of the Norma Arm, an unpopulated sector of the galaxy.” He walks to the edge of the dais, his eyes still focused on Admiral Klyber. “Care to venture a guess as to their usage of alterations or three thousand six hundred and twelve ?’” There is nothing confrontational in the way he does this. This is a friendly challenge between two fellow officers.

“It sounds like a date,” Klyber says, shaking his head and sitting back in his seat.

“You missed your calling, Bryce,” says Smith. “You should have been in intelligence. You would have really risen up the ranks.”

This comment gets scattered laughs as Klyber is the highest ranking officer in any branch.

“We do not have any outposts in the central part of the Norma Arm, it’s just too remote. We do, however, have an experimental radar station. This is what that radar readout looked like nine days ago—March 6, 2512.”

The screen turns flat black with concentric rings marking distances from the radar station. Except for the wand effect of the screen refreshing itself, the screen remains still and black for several seconds. When the radar wand finishes its third sweep, a litter of dots appear in one small section of the screen.

The wand sweeps by refreshing the radar reading every thirty seconds and the dots do not move. They stay in place for sixteen complete sweeps of the wand, a total of eight minutes. Eight minutes pass and the next pass of the wand reveals that the dots are gone. They vanished without a trace. The wand sweeps on, but the radar reading remains clear.

“Do we have a more detailed reading, sir?” asks Admiral Brocius. “I’d like to see an analysis of that.”

“This radar reading was taken over a four-million-mile distance. I’m afraid the ship designs and serial numbers were out of focus,” General Smith quips. “The best we could do was dots.”

The patch with the dots reappears, then grows until it fills the entire screen. The dots look like a clutch of glowing eggs laid across a black surface in no particular order.

“There are precisely five hundred and seventy-six dots in this picture,” Smith says. “There were five hundred eighty ships in the Galactic Central Fleet—”

“Admiral Thurston shot down four of the Galactic Central destroyers during the battle at Little Man,” Huang interrupts, standing up as he speaks. Sitting behind Huang, Leonid Johansson nods complacently, as if he has some ownership in that victory.

Once I notice Johansson, I turn my attention to the wall behind Klyber. Halverson is sitting behind Klyber taking careful notes. Beside him sits an officer I do not know . . . could be the ill-fated Major Burns for all I know. Each officer attending the summit has three aides. The last seat behind Klyber must have been Captain Johansson’s. It now sits empty.

“That would mean that every last ship was up and running,” an Air Force general I do not recognize calls out.

“Why not?” Huang shoots back, still standing, “they’ve had more than forty years to tune them up.”

“Admiral Huang makes a good point,” says Admiral Brocius.

As the inertia of this discussion builds up among the other officers, Admiral Klyber leans back in his chair and mumbles something to Halverson. The way Klyber leans back and the sly smile on his face suggest that he is telling the rear admiral a joke, but the startled look on Halverson’s face is anything but amused.

“Those ships are antiques. They belong in a museum,” the unidentified Air Force general responds.

“I wish I shared your confidence,” General Smith says in a raised voice, trying to arrest control of the floor.

“Come on, Alex . . . one sighting in two years . . . Before that it was forty years,” the unidentified Air Force general replies.

The board behind General Smith clears itself and turns into a map of the Scutum-Crux Arm.

“There have been eighteen sightings of those ships in the last three days. They appeared here, here, and here . . .”

“That’s only a few million miles from the Scutum-Crux Fleet,” Huang says in astonishment.

“Perhaps they plan to engage Admiral Thurston.”

“Yeah, too bad your boy missed them,” The unidentified Air Force general taunts Huang. Rear Admiral Robert Thurston, sitting quietly in a corner in the back of the room, says nothing. He is a quiet, deliberate man. He has red spiky hair and the face of a high school student. His short waif ’s physique adds to the illusion that he is a boy just out of secondary school.

“Don,” General Smith says, turning toward his fellow Air Force man, “we have a radar record of three hundred ships appearing within six hundred thousand miles of your base. They come in, reprogram their broadcasting computers, and flash out. One theory is that they are testing our level of preparedness.”

“It looks like those old ships are flying circles around you boys,” says an Army officer. It is easy for him to talk. His forces aren’t expected to guard open space.

“You cannot possibly expect us to patrol every inch of space,” Don says, now sounding defensive.

“We’ve got a bigger problem than that,” says Smith. “Whatever fleet this is, it has an uncanny awareness of our movements.”

Earthdate: March 16, 2512 A.D.

City: Honolulu; Planet: Earth; Galactic Position:

Orion Arm

The last time I flew into Hawaii, I was a young sergeant in the Marines on leave. I played like a kid, swam in the ocean like a kid, and had a meaningless romance with a girl whom I could only describe as ornamental. Within a month of returning to duty, I landed on Little Man. After seeing the massacre on Little Man, I would never be a boy again. Looking back, I see my stay in Hawaii as the last chapter in my youth.

I did not fly directly from the Dry Docks to Earth. As a Liberator, I was not allowed to enter the Orion Arm and I did not want to take the chance of attracting attention.

Having a self-broadcasting ship allowed me to bypass the broadcast network and Mars security. I broadcasted myself to the “dark side” of the solar system, the spot exactly opposite Mars in its orbit. That left me with nearly one hundred million miles to fly to reach Earth—twenty hours of travel at the Starliner’s top non-atmospheric speed was five million miles per hour. Even more hours of flying awaited me once I entered Earth’s atmosphere. The Starliner had a top speed of three thousand miles per hour in atmospheric conditions. The Mach 3 speed limit was a convention imposed throughout the Unified Authority.

“Harris, you there?” Ray Freeman’s voice sounded on my mediaLink.

“Yeah. I’m here,” I said. I had been watching the summit and was lost in the politics of it. Hearing Freeman’s voice brought me back to the real world. “Are you in Hawaii yet?”

“Not yet.”

“When you went to Little Man, were you hunting Mogats?” Freeman asked.

“That’s what they told us,” I said. “This about your family?”

“What do you think the Navy will do if they find neo-Baptists there?”

“It’s a valuable planet,” I said. “There aren’t many planets capable of sustaining life without engineering. At the very least they will consider them squatters. How many people are there?”

“About one hundred,” Freeman said.

“That’s tiny. The Navy may not even notice them,” I said.

“They noticed them,” Freeman said. “My father contacted me. He said that they’re sending a carrier to review the situation.”

“Know which one?” I asked.

“The Grant, I think. Does it matter?”

“It might if it’s the Grant. Remember Vince Lee?” Vince was my best friend when I was a Marine. I had not talked with him since going AWOL. “He’s an officer on the Grant.”

“Lee?” Freeman said, not making a connection.

“You tried to kill him once,” I said. “You paid him a few bucks to wear my helmet without telling him there was an assassin looking for me.”

“Yeah,” Freeman said.

“He’s a fair man,” I said. “I’ve met the captain of that ship, too . . . Pollard. Both good men. They’ll give your father a fair shake. They might tell them to leave, but they won’t be harsh about it. Hell, once they know the colony doesn’t pose a threat, they may choose to ignore it. How long ago did they make contact?”

“A day or two.”

“Well, they won’t get there anytime soon. It takes a long time to travel to Little Man. The nearest broadcast disc is several days away.”

Freeman and I spoke for a few more minutes, then he signed off. I leaned back in my chair to watch more of the summit. I had ninety-five million miles to go, time was on my side.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“The GC Fleet’s movements show an increasing amount of sophistication,” General Smith says as a new set of circles appear on the screen behind him. “In the radar reading from Central Norma, they appear to have been testing their ability to broadcast. That was the first reading that we took. The ships broadcasted in, they remained perfectly still for eight minutes, and they left. From what we can tell, they remained just long enough to generate the power they needed to broadcast out.”

“Eight minutes between broadcasts?” Klyber asks, unconsciously using a voice that is just loud enough to catch everyone’s attention. “That hardly seems possible.”

“Bryce?” Smith asks. “Did you say something?”

“The broadcast generators on those ships should take fifteen minutes to build up enough energy for a broadcast,” Klyber says. He looks and sounds deeply concerned. Seeing this, I wonder how long it takes the Doctrinaire to charge up and broadcast.

“You will recall the intercepted message—‘alterations complete,’” says General Smith. “We believe they have updated their equipment.”

“What’s the problem, Admiral Klyber?” Huang calls. He is sitting directly across from Klyber; now the two officers face each other. “How long does it take the generators on the Doctrinaire to power up for a broadcast?”

The floor of the summit goes silent. The atmosphere of that great chamber suddenly becomes a vacuum of sound. Bryce Klyber turns his narrow, bony head toward Che Huang. Klyber is a fleet admiral, the highest-ranking man in the Unified Authority Navy, but Admiral Che Huang is the secretary of the Navy and a member of the Joint Chiefs. Klyber has powerful friends on Capitol Hill. Huang has the backing of the Pentagon. Neither man is about to back down.

“The Doctrinaire ?” General Smith asks. Smith clearly has no clue what Huang is talking about.

“Admiral Klyber has been developing a self-broadcasting fighter carrier,” Huang says in a voice that is both arrogant and bored. “Haven’t heard of it, Alex? Don’t feel bad. It’s Klyber’s little secret. He’s been building it with funding from his pals on the Linear Committee.”

“Is that true?” General Smith asks.

If there is one thing that senior officers do not like, it is being left out of the loop. This feeds into their paranoia and leaves them feeling ambushed. Anger and astonishment show on General Alex Smith’s face. Triumph shows on Huang’s.

“Of course it’s true,” says Huang. “This is Bryce Klyber. He has a long record of calling on friends in high places to skirt regulations. This is the same officer who made the Liberator clones .

. . one of which is in this very facility.”

The room remains silent.

“I’m prepared to discuss the Doctrinaire ,” Klyber says. Then he turns to Huang and adds, “And after that, perhaps we should discuss your furtive cloning projects.”

Che Huang turns stark white, but for only a moment, and then he turns blood red. He slams his fist on the table but says nothing.

“May I take the floor?” Klyber asks. Not until General Smith nods and leaves the dais does the well-cultivated Bryce Klyber leave his place at the table. Klyber is urbane, discreet, and circumspect in his approach. Across the table, Huang is so angry he can barely stay in his chair. He fidgets and his hands are clenched into fists.

Klyber has clearly come to this meeting planning to discuss his top-secret project. He takes a data chip from a case by his seat and places it into a slot in the display board. A schematic of the Doctrinaire appears.

“Gentlemen, let me begin by apologizing for not informing you about this project sooner. You should know that the project was not even discussed within the Senate. National security the way it is at this time, the members of the Linear Committee specifically requested that I wait until a moment like this to discuss the project.

“As this project was paid for using the Linear Committee’s discretionary funds rather than the military budget, it seemed like a fair request.”

When it comes to the merging of military matters and politics, Bryce Klyber has no equal. Huang must already have realized that he picked the wrong venue for this fight. He picks up a data pad and pretends to read notes, his eyes fixed on a spot in the middle of the pad. When Johansson leans forward and whispers something, Admiral Huang’s jaw tightens and he acts as if he does not hear him.

Dressed in civilian clothes, a cap covering my hair, and carrying no visible weapons, I passed through Honolulu Airport without being noticed. This was not like entering the spaceports on Mars or in Salt Lake City where they had large security stations. Flights in and out of airports like the one in Honolulu originate on Earth and never leave the atmosphere. By the time you were on an Earth-bound jet, you were clean. You were clean, that is, unless you flew a rare self-broadcasting craft. Freeman did not meet me in the airport. Being met by a seven-foot black man with arms like anacondas and tree trunks for legs did not lend itself to inconspicuousness. With nothing but an innocuous overnight bag slung over my shoulder, I strolled through the open air lobby of the private craft terminal and headed for the street. A few minutes later, Freeman swung by in a small rental car and I hopped into the passenger’s seat.

Freeman had selected a convertible. Most people drove these cars so that they could enjoy warm island weather; however, sun worship had nothing to do with Freeman’s decision. He simply did not fit in most cars. He sat scrunched behind the steering wheel, and everything above his nose was higher than the windshield. He looked like an adult trying to squeeze into a child’s go-cart.

“Have you ever been to this island before?” I asked Freeman, trying to ignore the sight of him in that driver’s seat.

He shook his head.

The Unified Authority maintained vacation spots on Earth as a way of reminding citizens on the 180

outworlds which planet was home. Hawaii was a living museum, and the only commerce conducted was tourist-related. Hawaii had a police force, garbage men, and air traffic controllers, but the only reason they were there was to keep the place nice for tourists. There were pineapple and sugarcane farms, but they were productive museum exhibits run by the government. They existed only to show visitors what island life had been like five hundred years before. Their production methods were antiquated and much of the produce was sold as souvenirs.

“Where are we going?” he asked.

“There’s a place called Sad Sam’s Palace,” I said.

“The boxing arena you told me about?”

“Boxing, wrestling, professional fighters, amateur challenge. It all depends what night you go,” I said.

“The Palace is near Waikiki. Can you find it?”

The March sky was a mixture of sunshine and shadow, and the city was drenched with moist air. Clouds the color of stainless steel gathered around the mountains to our left, choking out sunlight. To the right, the sky over the ocean was nearly clear.

Freeman and I drove along the outskirts of Honolulu. He sat in his seat, cramped behind the wheel, watching the road and quietly scanning every turn and approaching vehicle.

“I came in clean,” Freeman said. To avoid drawing attention to himself on Earth, as if a seven-foot black man could somehow make himself inconspicuous in this homogonous society, he took public transportation in from Mars. With a war brewing and security at an all-time high, he didn’t even bother trying to smuggle a gun in with him. “Any idea where I can find something?”

I thought about that for a moment. “No. Colorful shirts, yes. Alcohol, yes. I know where they sell a fruit drink that will knock you flat.”

“Where do you get the shirts?” Freeman asked.

“The International Marketplace,” I said. “It’s a bazaar for tourists. You want bathing suits, hats made with coconut leaves, candles, or Hawaiian shirts, that’s the spot. Guns . . .” I didn’t see any.

“Clean wholesome place?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

“Think you can find it?”

Finding the International Marketplace was no problem. It was in the middle of Waikiki, the heart of the tourist area. It was a wide open lot with trees and carts and buildings with walls made of faux lava rock. The time was just 1700 hours on what looked like a slow day. There was only a sprinkling of tourists around, and the sales people aggressively chased anyone who walked by their stands.

“You looking for sandals, sugar?” a girl called to me as we walked by her store. Not one customer stirred inside the store, just the sales girl and rows of shelves with leather and rubber sandals. Freeman turned and glared at the woman and she shrank back.

“Didn’t see anything that you wanted?” I asked.

Freeman said nothing.

“Probably a good thing,” I said. “I doubt she had anything your size.”

We passed jewelry, candle, and clothes shops, and Freeman ignored them. Hucksters came to show us shirts and luggage. Freeman pushed past them without looking back. Then we passed a stand selling perfume and Freeman stopped. Beside the stand was a warty little man in shorts and a golf cap. The man had no shirt. His body was skinny but muscled. His stomach muscles showed distinctly, and his chest was flat and carved with sinew.

“Wait here,” Freeman growled. He went to the man and they spoke very quietly.

“Get specked!” the man yelled suddenly. “What kind of a store do you think this is.” He threw his hands in the air. Even reaching all the way up, the man’s fingers barely came level with Freeman’s eyes. Freeman said something in his soft-thunder voice and the man lowered his hands.

“Go speck yourself!” the man yelled. “Who do you think you are?”

Freeman dug into his pocket and rolled out some dollars. I could not see how many dollars he peeled off, but I saw him place them on the counter. The warty man shook his head. Freeman laid out more. The man shook his head. Freeman peeled off two more bills. When Freeman went to retrieve his cash, the little man placed his hand over it.

Putting the money in the front pocket of his shorts, the warty little man trotted into a service corridor. He returned a few minutes later with a colorful red shirt folded into a neat square. The shirt did indeed look large enough for Freeman to wear.

Without saying a word, Freeman took the shirt and left. When we got back to the car, Freeman unfolded the shirt. Inside it he found a pistol and three clips filled with bullets.

“How did you know he’d have guns?” I asked.

Freeman looked at me in surprise. “Who would buy perfume from an asshole like that?”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“In the interest of time, I will not go into every detail of this ship,” Klyber says. “A complete . . .”

“Why not give us the complete rundown?” Huang interrupts.

“As I was saying,” Klyber continues, a trace of a smile showing in his expression, “a complete set of plans has been forwarded to each of you. As the Linear Committee has not gone public with this project, your discretion is requested.” He is laying an obvious trap, knowing full well that Huang will not be able to control his arrogance long enough to avoid it.

“I would, however, like to go over a few of the finer points of the ship. The Doctrinaire has twelve decks and a bridge. She measures a full two miles from wingtip to wingtip.

“The Doctrinaire has four launch tubes, each of which is loaded with a complete squadron of seventy Tomcat fighters for deep space combat. She also has . . .”

Leaning back in his chair with a bored expression that demonstrates that he has heard all of this information before, Huang says, “Two-thirds of the ship is taken up by the engines.”

Klyber smiles. “Quite right, Admiral Huang. With a ship of this size, power generation is a major concern. Especially for a ship that is self-broadcasting.”

The response to that is so enthusiastic you might have thought Klyber has announced that God himself has enlisted in the Marines. One dozen small conversations open up across the room. Several officers turn back to whisper to their aides while others begin speaking among themselves in louder voices.

“Admiral Klyber, you have not yet told us the regeneration time needed to power your broadcast engine,” Huang calls out in a voice that cuts through the din, a sneer across his face.

“I believe we just learned that the Mogats have reoutfitted their broadcast engines so that they can charge and broadcast every eight minutes. How long will it take your colossus to charge its broadcast engine, Admiral Klyber?”

Klyber nods to acknowledge the question. “Fair question. Our best intelligence showed that the ships in the Galactic Central Fleet required fifteen minutes per broadcast. We set a higher standard, of course . . .”

“How long?” Huang asks.

“The broadcast engines in the Doctrinaire require ten minutes,” Klyber admits, but he does not seem unhappy to admit this. In fact, his smile only broadens. Either he is bluffing or he has an ace up his sleeve that neither Che Huang nor Leonid Johansson know about.

“Ten minutes?” Huang asks.

“That is correct.”

Stepping away from his chair, Huang repeats, “Ten minutes.” He moves around the table and approaches the dais. “So, assuming you manage to fly this juggernaut to the battle before the GCF ships depart, they will simply be able to broadcast off before you can recharge your engines and follow them.”

Klyber pauses to consider this. The look of confidence on his face does not fade. “Well, of course, you realize that we have no way of tracking a self-broadcasting ship? We’d have no way of knowing where the GCF ships had broadcast themselves.”

Huang’s expression turns to fury. “We’re all quite aware of that, Admiral Klyber. My point is simple. If the GC Fleet appears . . . oh, for the purposes of this discussion, we’ll say they appear near Olympus Kri. And let’s say you have a three-minute response time. It seems unlikely, but let’s say you manage to get your colossus ship there in three minutes. Your ship will have five minutes to engage the enemy before they fly off to another target, very likely their primary target, while you sit around charging up the Doctrinaire’s broadcast engine.

“Brilliant plan, Admiral,” Huang snickers. “You’ve created a trillion-dollar boondoggle.” He stands triumphant, his arms folded across his chest, his head high, and his eyes staring angrily at Klyber.

“That is a concern,” General Smith says. Several of the officers around the table nod in agreement.

It is at this moment that Klyber drops a bomb that even Johansson does not expect. “Admiral Huang, you’ll note that I said ‘broadcast engines.’ The Doctrinaire does, in fact, have two such units, each working independent of the other.

“One engine recharges while the other one broadcasts. The Doctrinaire can self-broadcast every five minutes. Admiral Huang, we never believed that the Separatists would be so foolish as to commit their entire fleet into a single battle. The Doctrinaire was built around the notion that they would stage their battles with decoys and feigned attacks along several fronts.”

At first there is silence as the officers assimilate this information. Then applause erupts. General Smith is the first to clap his hands, and the Air Force officers soon join in. Admiral Brocius stands up from his chair and applauds. He slaps his hands together so hard that the noise echoes. A moment later, Rear Admiral Thurston joins him, an appreciative smile on his youthful face. A general from the Marines stands silently and salutes. The applause lasts for several minutes.

“What about armament?” Thurston asks, his enthusiasm evident.

The board behind Klyber shifts to an exterior schematic of the ship. Klyber picks up an old-fashioned wooden pointer instead of the laser pointer that General Smith had used earlier.

“She has two massive forward cannons for bombarding stationary targets such as cities and military bases. These cannons are both laser-and particle-beam enabled.” This is friendly talk, like friends telling each other about a new car over a round of drinks. Klyber slides the pointer along the outer edge of the wing. “The ship has three hundred particle beam turrets along with twenty missile stations and fifteen torpedo stations. And, as I mentioned a moment ago, she has a compliment of two hundred and eighty Tomcat fighters. Should the enemy attempt to attack her, the Doctrinaire could annihilate the entire GC Fleet.

“Oh, and Thurston, you’ll appreciate this . . . Look at the shield antennas.” Klyber watches expectantly. “This is an entirely new technology.”

There are rings around the antenna at the ends of the wings. Other U.A. ships do not have rings connecting their antennas. Their shields are flat panes broadcast from pole-like antennas.

“We’ve developed a cylindrical shield,” Klyber says with the air of a father boasting about his son. “Those rings project a seamless shield that covers the entire ship.”

“And the Mogats haven’t got a clue,” General Smith marvels.

“Perhaps,” Klyber says in a voice that carries across the room, “but I am concerned about that. We paid for the ship with Linear Committee funds so that we could slip under the radar, but . .

.”—Klyber turns toward Admiral Huang—“apparently we didn’t go undetected.”

Suddenly, everyone in the room becomes silent. Huang looks at the other officers, hoping for support. Rear Admiral Thurston, Huang’s closest ally, is too busy lusting over the schematics to see that Huang needs help.

“Yes,” says General Smith, “it does appear that you had a breach of security.” Smith takes the dais and formality creeps back into the session. The officers return to their seats. Smith calls the meeting back to order. He turns toward Huang. “Admiral, while we are on the subject of secret operations . . .”

Bryce Klyber’s combination of political and military acumen now comes to bear. It becomes obvious that he has briefed General Smith about Huang’s Adam Boyd cloning project. Klyber used himself as a decoy, and now that Huang has fired all his guns, Smith flanks and attacks.

“General,” Huang interrupts. “My intelligence unit located the construction of a large project in deep space. Our radar showed repeated broadcasts in the Perseus Arm. We had no idea that this was Admiral Klyber’s operation when we began investigating . . .”

But General Smith puts up a hand to stop him. Smith is smiling. He has no interest in beating the Doctrinaire horse any further. Everyone on the floor has now heard about the ship and shown their approval. The smile on Smith’s face is one of supreme satisfaction. He is the gambler who has no need to bluff. He is the only man at the table with all four aces in his hand.

“Admiral Huang, general accounting found an anomaly in your books. Apparently, your branch has had a six billion dollar increase in spending on toilet paper and uniforms.” Smith’s smile turns wicked as he says, “We all hope the lack of one of these items has not led to a need for the other.”

Huang does his best to look confused, but he is no actor. Instead of dropping his jaw, he clenches it. He glares at General Smith. “I have a staff that goes through the books and reports to . . .”

“But a six billion dollar expenditure, surely that would not go unnoticed,” Smith observes.

“Perhaps our inventory was . . .”

“When my staff looked into it, we discovered that your procurement team placed no additional orders for either toilet paper or uniforms, Admiral. What we found was that a mothballed Military base was reactivated on Earth.” Alex Smith picks up his data pad. Huang says nothing. He stares back at Smith defiantly.

“I understand that you have a cloning plant on the island of Oahu. Is that correct?” Smith asks. Huang shows no sign of fear or remorse. “That is correct, General. The Navy is experimenting with a new set of genes to improve our SEAL operations. I was unaware of any regulations stating that the Navy had to clear its research projects with members of other branches.”

A video feed of an Adam Boyd in a firefight appears on the display board. It is a brief five-second loop that repeats itself again and again. I recognize the image. It is from the battle on Ravenwood—the one in which I supposedly died. The footage was taken from cameras placed in the helmet I wore during the battle on Ravenwood. Ray Freeman placed my helmet by the body of a different marine before lifting me off the planet.

Across the room, Admiral Thurston looks particularly interested in this discussion. Huang’s newly cloned SEALs operate off of Thurston’s command ship.

“When were you planning on telling us about this new project?” asks General John Kellan, the thirty-nine-year-old secretary of the Army. There is a centuries-old tradition of jealousy that runs between the SEALs and Kellan’s Rangers.

We headed for Sad Sam’s at 2100 hours. It was Thursday night during a slow season for tourists, and the city seemed deserted. We found a drive-in restaurant just up the street from the Palace and ordered hamburgers, then ate in the car.

Except for the streetlamps and an occasional car, the only lights on the entire street came from the façade of the Palace. The marquee was studded with old-fashioned bulbs that winked on and off, casting their warm manila glare. Foot-tall letters announced the name, Sad Sam’s Palace. Below that, the event for the night—“Ultimate Fighting Competition: Mixed Martial Arts”—showed over a glowing ivory panel. The Palace was the modern world’s answer to the Roman coliseum. Instead of Christians and lions, it featured professional wrestlers, boxers, and mixed martial artists. It had an open challenge on Friday nights. If you were a military clone, and you happened to be in the audience during the Open Challenge, an announcer called you down to fight. The standing champion of that Open Challenge was a fighter named Adam Boyd, obviously one of Huang’s clones.

“You got that scar here?” Freeman asked.

The scar ran through the eyebrow over my left eye. Three smaller scars formed parallel stripes across my left cheek, just under the eye socket.

“This is the place,” I said.

I got the scars fighting an Adam Boyd clone. I beat him, had certainly put him in the hospital, but not before he dug into my face and back with his talonlike fingers, giving me lacerations that went all the way to the bone.

Freeman finished his burger and drink in what looked like a single motion, then sat without saying a word. As I finished my burger, the front doors opened and a mob flowed out. “Fights must be over,” I said, crumpling the wrapper and throwing it in the bag. “That’s our cue.” I climbed out of the car. The crowd thinned as we made our way across the empty street. Most of the people had walked in from the waterfront where the buses ran. Now they walked back, their excited chatter filling the street. An usher in a white shirt and black vest approached me as I came through the door. He must have seen Freeman, too, but he did not dare approach that giant of a man. “Show’s over,” he said.

“My friend dropped his wallet somewhere around his seat,” I said.

The man looked at Freeman, nodded, and stepped out of my way. If I had said it was my wallet, he would likely have told me to “come back tomorrow.”

We walked through the dark hall toward the auditorium, the usher following from a safe distance. Bright arc lights blazed in the center of the auditorium, their true white glare shining bright. A wall of bleachers surrounded the outer edges of the floor. These bleachers curved up, ending just below the first of two balconies. On busy nights during the tourist season, Sad Sam’s Palace must have played host to five thousand people per night. Now the floor was empty except for janitors sweeping food, cups, and wrappers from the floor. Under the lights, a small crew disassembled the steel cage and octagonal ring they used for mixed martial arts. Friday night was Open Challenge night. That show would take place on a raised platform with glass walls.

Freeman and I walked across the floor and headed for the tunnel to the dressing rooms. I paused for a moment to look at the ring, then pushed the door open.

“Where are you going?” the usher yelled. I did not bother answering. The answer was obvious. The metal doors opened to a brightly-lit hallway with a concrete floor and cinderblock walls. Some of the fluorescent lights that ran the length of the hall had gone dark, occasionally flashing on and off in a Morse code pattern. Our footsteps echoed, and the steel door slamming behind us sounded like a volcanic eruption.

“Do you know where we’re going?” Freeman asked.

“I’ve never been back here,” I said. That was not quite true. As I understand it, paramedics carried me back here on a stretcher after my fight, but I was only semiconscious during that ride. Halfway down the hall, we found a pair of emerald-green double doors. With the usher and three security guards storming down the hall yelling at us, I tried the door. It was unlocked, so I let myself in. Freeman remained outside to deal with the security guards.

The men inside the locker room seemed not to care that I had entered. A man with a towel wrapped around his waist strode past me without so much as a sideways glance. His hair was wet. He had a square chest and muscular arms, all of which was covered with welts and bruises. He sported a superb shiner over his right eye.

Another man, sitting stark naked on a wooden bench in front of a row of lockers, watched me. “I know you,” he said, rubbing his chin.

“Not likely,” I said.

The security guards had caught up to Freeman. It should have been a four-against-one battle; but from the sound of things, Freeman took out the first guard so quickly that it really was more accurately described as three-against-one. I heard, “Hey, you’re not . . .” Then there was the thunderous sound of something slamming against the outside of the door, followed by a moment of absolute silence.

“Shit. I’m calling the . . .” The door muffled the shouting.

Then the door flew open. In ran the usher, stumbling over the body of the fallen security guard. “There’s a giant black man out there!”

“That’s nothing,” said the naked man as he stood and stepped into his briefs. “There’s a Liberator clone in here.”

The usher looked at me, and the blood drained from his face. He did not say another word.

“You’re the one who killed that Adam Boyd guy,” the man said as he pulled up his pants. By this time several other fighters came to investigate. Outside, the commotion ended quickly. I heard a click, which I assumed was the last security guard’s head hitting the concrete, then Freeman stepped through the door looking as nonplussed as if he had come from a grocery store.

The usher was willing to share a locker room with me, but Freeman was another story. Freeman had barely come through the door when the usher bolted to the safety of the bathroom stalls.

“Everything moving along in here?” Freeman asked.

“Just fine,” I said. I turned back to the fighter. “You say he died?”

“Yeah, I helped drag his ass from the ring. That boy was dead. You caved in the front of his skull.”

I thought I might have killed him. In truth, I felt no regret about it. “I heard he went on to win another fifty fights,” I said.

“Not that Boyd.”

The other fighters eyed Ray Freeman nervously, gave me a curious glance at most, and went back to finish dressing.

The air in the room had that sweaty, unpleasant humidity that comes with locker rooms and open showers. The floor was wet and slick. Near the door, a canvas basket on rollers overflowed with wet towels, some of which were streaked with blood.

“What makes you think I’m a Liberator?” I asked. This guy was a natural-born, a muscular man, maybe thirty-five years of age with sun-bronzed skin and bleached-blond hair.

“Boyd said you were,” the fighter said.

“I thought you said I killed him?”

“Not the one you killed, the next one. We had at least three of ’em . . .” He smiled as if remembering a joke. “At least three. They were clones. Had to be. You off-ed one and two others got busted up pretty bad.

“So you are a Liberator, right?”

I chose to ignore the question. “Is there going to be a Boyd fighting tomorrow?”

“Nah,” said the fighter. “The Boyds stopped coming a couple years ago. They’re gone . . . left the island.”

“Do you know where they went?” I asked.

“No, but I know where they used to live.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“But what is the point of creating a new strain of clones?” General Kellan asks. “We’ve been using volunteers in special forces for six hundred years.”

“My clones are more effective in battle,” Huang says. “They are more expendable, less concerned about self-preservation, and far more lethal.

“This new strain was developed specifically for commando operations. They are quick, think independently, and are programmed to kill.”

“That sounds an awful lot like Liberator clones,” an officer calls out. Huang laughs. “Klyber’s Liberators were never in the same league,” he says with a confident laugh. “Klyber’s clumsy attempt at clone-making may have been enough for the Mogats . . .”

“Is that so?” asks General Smith. “I understand that you lost a squad of ten clones in an operation in Scutum-Crux.”

Klyber sits this battle out, preferring to let his allies ask questions and pose charges. He watches quietly from his seat, smiling as he follows the direction of the conversation.

“They were killed running drills on a planet called Ravenwood,” Huang admits. “Over a four-year period, we ran hundreds of drills and only lost one squad.”

“And how many Marines did you kill off?” the Marine general asks, sounding angry.

“I’d guess in the neighborhood of five to six hundred. Ravenwood was a major success. We sent squads of ten clones against platoons of forty-two Marines, and we only lost once. Most drills ended without the loss of a single commando.

“We also ran tests in a tough-man competition in Hawaii.”

“Sad Sam’s Palace?” asks the Marine.

Huang nods. Hawaii is a popular vacation and retirement spot for high-ranking officers and Sad Sam’s Palace attracts military types like a magnet. “I suspect many of you are familiar with the Palace’s tough-man challenge. If there’s a better testing ground for hand-to-hand combat, I have not found it.

“We had a clone fighting under the name Adam Boyd entered in that competition. He racked up a record of two hundred and fifty wins and one loss.”

“Two hundred wins and one loss?” General Kellan observes. “How do we get our hands on the guy who beat him? That’s who we should be cloning.”

The last time I visited Honolulu I stayed in a vacation home with a courtyard and a well-stocked kitchen. I came with a pal from my platoon, Vince Lee. He was a corporal, I had just been promoted to sergeant. I met a beautiful blonde named Kasara on the beach and we had a fling. She had a friend named Jennifer, so Vince got to share in the fun.

That was a vacation. This time I came on business.

Freeman and I drove out of town after visiting the Palace. We found a wooded area and pulled our car off the road. Then I curled up in the backseat for five hours and he pulled guard duty. Living with combat armor, you learn how to make yourself comfortable in all sorts of situations. Lying in the fetal position, with my knees propped up against my gut, I slept very soundly until 4:00 A.M., when Freeman and I switched places.

Massive as he was, Freeman breathed heavily in his sleep. He took long hard pulls of air, then exhaled in three-second drafts. His breathing sounded like waves rolling in and out of shore. We were up in the slopes just north of town. I held Freeman’s pistol on my lap, well out of sight in case anyone passed by.

The sun rose at 0800. Sitting behind the wheel, feeling sweaty, with stubble covering my cheeks, I watched the sunrise. I watched the violet sky turn copper colored and then eventually blue. Down below us, the town filled with shadows as the streetlamps faded. Honolulu was a tourist town, but it had its share of traffic. I watched thousands of cars roll into the city in stop-and-go traffic. From my vantage point, they looked like a column of ants.

I did not notice when the current of Freeman’s breathing vanished behind me. The sunrise had just finished, and I watched mynah birds nimbly hopping back and forth on the branches of a nearby tree.

“You ready to go?” Freeman asked as he lay folded on the backseat of the car. It was early in the morning and his voice rumbled more softly than ever. His words came in a thunderous whisper.

“Good morning to you,” I said, knowing that the humor would be wasted on Freeman.

“Give me a moment.” With this, the big man reached across the seat and opened the door by his legs. He stretched his legs out and found the ground with his feet, then he sat up just enough to grab the edges of the open doorway and pull himself out. Once in the open air, he stretched and yawned. The sunlight reflected in a dull streak across his shaved head as he unfurled his long arms and rotated his back. Next, he walked into the woods to relieve himself. When he came back, I handed him his pistol and did the same.

We stopped at a drive-in restaurant and bought a couple of greasy egg sandwiches which we ate as we drove, passing signs with mostly incomprehensible names like Waipahu and eventually Wahiawa. We passed a defunct naval base called “Pearl Harbor.” The base was enormous. We headed out of town and into the countryside where farmers grew pineapples. The pineapples grew in immaculate rows that made the landscape appear as if someone had raked an enormous comb across it. The pineapples themselves were knee-high clumps with football-shaped fruits in the center, like some sort of alien cactus.

We drove deep into the farming country where sugarcane fields stretched out along the sides of the road. We passed large stretches where only scrub trees grew. Antique railroad tracks ran along the side of the road at one point, and we crossed a steel-framed bridge that spanned a stream. I thought the countryside was beautiful. Freeman seemed not to notice it at all.

We passed Wheeler Air Force base. It was dark and abandoned. We did not stop. A few miles farther, we approached another military complex called Schofield Barracks, a defunct Army base. Schofield Barracks looked a lot like Wheeler and the defunct Naval base at Pearl Harbor, just an empty campus with sturdy two-and three-story buildings. From the road it looked a good deal larger than Wheeler but not even half the size of the Pearl Harbor facility. There were no immediate signs of life, but there was one difference at Schofield Barracks—the main gate was wide open. A length of chain link fence blocked the main gate of Wheeler and some of the gates around Pearl Harbor were bricked shut.

“You think they’re expecting us?” I asked.

“Looks that way,” Freeman said.

We originally planned to drive by the base a few times before going in. I did not know about Freeman, but I felt a strong desire to avoid stumbling into a hive filled with Adam Boyd clones. Seeing the gates left open did not deter Ray Freeman. He was not the type of man who looked for trouble, but he did not back down from it. He turned into the entryway. Finding our way across the base was easy enough. Most of the roads were overgrown with weeds, but one artery was trimmed and neat. The sidewalks in this part of the base gleamed in the sunlight and the asphalt on the streets was not cracked. We passed a courtyard in which the weeds had only started to grow wild. The grass was knee-high and the trees wanted trimming. We found a parking lot in which the stalls were clearly painted, and Freeman parked.

“We’re supposed to go there,” Freeman said, pointing straight ahead. The building was three stories tall. Its architecture was a cross between twentieth century American military and sixteenth century Spanish, combining rounded arches and thick stucco walls. The sun was behind this building and its verandas were buried in shadow. Had there been lights on in the building, we would have seen them. The lights were off but the front doors of the building hung wide open.

“An open invitation,” I said, embarrassed by my own flat humor. Strangely enough, Freeman cracked a small smile at that lame joke. Freeman was a bright and dangerous man with absolutely no sense of humor. Perhaps jokes had to be obvious for him to appreciate them.

I had no gun, but Freeman had his pistol. He carried it in the open now, holding it in his right arm which hung almost limp at his side. He seemed so relaxed.

We walked straight toward the building and right in the door. Leaving the sunshine and entering this shadowy realm was like falling into a deep cave. Even after Freeman found a light switch and turned on the lights, the darkness in this building seemed almost palpable.

Most of the furniture had been removed from this hallway. There were no chairs. A large reception desk wrapped around one doorway. Bulletin boards lined one of the walls. One of these bulletin boards was covered with rows of eight by ten photographs, and the light from the windows reflected on their glossy finish. Beside the bulletin board sat a communications console.

We approached. Five rows of five photographs—twenty-five pictures in all—stretched across the bulletin board. Each of them was a picture of me. There were pictures of me entering Klyber’s C-64

transport right after the evacuation team brought it back into the hangar at the Dry Docks. There was a picture of me climbing out of my Starliner in Honolulu. There was one picture of me in the International Marketplace and two of me and Freeman outside of Sad Sam’s Palace—one of us entering and one of us leaving.

The last row of pictures had been taken this very morning. One showed me pissing outside the car. Another showed me taking a big bite out of my breakfast sandwich. The most recent photograph showed me opening the gate to the barracks. The picture was no more than five minutes old. Whoever placed these pictures had time to print this last photo and escape unnoticed between the time that I opened the gate and the moment we walked in the door. I had been under surveillance and never even knew it.

“I think they are sending you a message,” Freeman said.

The message was obvious. The photographer could just as easily have used a rifle with a sniper scope as a camera with a telephoto lens. I reached over and switched on the communications console. Che Huang’s face appeared on the screen.

“Are you always this slow, Lieutenant?” he asked.

“Hello, Huang,” I said. I was supposed to salute him at this point. Instead, I folded my arms and stared into the screen. “What do you want?”

I tried to sound calm, but my heart was pounding so hard I could hear it pulsing. Liberators were known for their primal instincts. Though I was still in control, I could feel the rage building inside me.

“I did not kill Klyber,” Huang said in a matter-of-fact tone.

“Not by yourself,” I said. “You had one of your SEAL clones do it for you. I have the video feed from the Dry Docks security. You had a clone on the maintenance team that cleaned Klyber’s transport.”

“I did send a SEAL to visit Klyber’s transport,” Huang admitted. “He installed listening and video devices throughout the ship.”

“I didn’t hear anything about bugs on the transport,“ I said.

“Golan security didn’t look for surveillance equipment. Why don’t you have your friends back at the Dry Docks sweep the main cabin and the late admiral’s room for bugs?”

I did not respond.

“Think about it Harris, why would I kill Klyber?” Huang asked.

“Let’s see . . . petty jealousy, old rivalries, just for the fun of it, to take control of the Doctrinaire . . .”

“I already had control of the Doctrinaire ,” Huang said. “I took it away from Klyber during the summit.”

“I saw the summit. You didn’t have anything,” I said.

“You have been busy,” Huang said. “Perhaps you weren’t watching the feed closely. By the time the summit ended, I had command of the Doctrinaire and Klyber had nothing but the fleet.”

“Commanding the fleet isn’t being in control?” I asked.

“Once the battle begins, the ship’s captain makes the decisions. When historians discuss great battles, they won’t bother mentioning the fleet. Klyber knew it. I suppose you saw the old fool sulking once I got my suggestion past Smith and the rest of them. He did not say a word for the rest of the meeting. He just sat there, stewing. I got everything I wanted.

“History will remember me as the secretary of Navy who won the war. I’ll place Robert Thurston over the ship. He’ll be the commander who won the key battle. And Klyber . . . Klyber would have been a footnote. He would have been the man who brought up the rear.

“Harris, if you don’t believe anything else I tell you, believe this—I got what I wanted.”

Huang generally seemed on the verge of a tirade. Not this time. Now he explained himself with gloating patience. I thought about what he said. When the meeting ended, I met Klyber at the door. He looked tired and old and withdrawn. He talked about the members of the Joint Chiefs being too young to understand war, and he said that the fight would not be as easy as they thought.

“Why come to me?” I asked.

“I want your help,” Huang said.

“Help you?” I laughed. “Why should I help you?” Across the hall, Ray Freeman stood as still as a statue, watching Huang. His face showed no emotion. His eyes never left the screen.

“We both want the same thing, Harris. We want to kill the people who killed Klyber. Now that I have the Doctrinaire, I won’t be safe until they are dead.

“You can clear my name while you’re at it. You are not the only one who thinks I sabotaged Klyber’s transport. Once Smith and the other Joint Chiefs see the video feed with that SEAL entering the ship. . .

.” He shook his head.

“I saw your SEAL in the feed. I saw your spy, too,” I said.

“My spy?” Huang asked, sounding frustrated. The ragged edges of his personality began to show.

“What about Halverson? He was in the landing bay, too.”

“Halverson?” Huang repeated.

I did not like or trust Huang, but I had never known him to lie. He was a storm-the-front-gates type of enemy. He did not smile at people he disliked. If he wanted you dead, he let you know it. Except for his political maneuvering on the floor of the summit, I had never seen anything resembling subtlety from the man.

“Wasn’t Rear Admiral Halverson working for you?” I asked.

“Halverson?” Huang asked. “I wouldn’t work with an idiot like Tom Halverson. He was Klyber’s man.”

“He was your spy on the Doctrinaire ,” I said.

“Johansson was my spy,” Huang said. “I should have thought that was obvious. He sat with my staff during the summit. He flew back to D.C. with me. Leonid Johansson was my eyes on the project.”

“So what was Halverson doing by the hangar?” I asked.

“I’ve seen the security feed,” Huang said. “Halverson isn’t on it.”

“Perhaps you weren’t watching the feed closely,” I said, using Huang’s words against him to get under his skin. “When the janitors left the hangar, they passed Admiral Halverson. He was there having a smoke. He watched your boy come in, then followed him away from the hangar.”

“Halverson? He may have been there, but he wasn’t working for me,” Huang said. “It sounds to me as if you’ve got your first clue, Sherlock. What you need now is to follow up on it.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

This is the moment when Che Huang demonstrates his prowess in the dark arts of politics. It should be obvious that he is a political creature—an officer with no actual combat experience who has risen to the Joint Chiefs. Now that he has weathered the counter-attack about his clones, Huang draws back his fangs and sinks them into Admiral Klyber.

“Admiral Klyber, powerful as this super ship of yours is, do you really think it can handle more than five hundred enemy ships?” Huang asks this question in an uncharacteristically reasonable tone.

“No, of course not,” says Klyber. “We’ll need support ships, and the optimum situation is to engage no more than ten or twenty dreadnoughts per battle.”

“I really must congratulate you. You have created a fine weapon. I honestly believe that this ship will be the weapon that wins the war.”

Klyber only nods to acknowledge this compliment. His eyes remain coldly fixed on Huang. He does not trust the man.

“How would a fleet be able to support this ship? You haven’t talked the Linear Committee into funding a self-broadcasting fleet, have you?”

Appreciative laughter rings through the room.

“I have assembled a ready-alert fleet that will remain near the Broadcast Network. It’s a small fleet now, but we’ll find more ships for it. The fleet will have flash access to the broadcast computer on board the Doctrinaire . Anytime she self-broadcasts, her travel information will be relayed to the ships in the fleet.”

“But will they be able to get to her in time to assist?” General Smith asks.

“The ready-alert ships can override the Network. They can enter the discs and override the system to broadcast them directly to the Doctrinaire .”

At this point, I notice that both of the seats behind Klyber are empty. Admiral Halverson has gone somewhere. I check summit clock and note the time. It is three in the afternoon according to Washington, D.C., time, which is the clock used by the Dry Docks for the duration of the summit. Suddenly it occurs to me where Halverson has gone, and I feel a chill. He is at the hangar observing Huang’s clone as he plants the cable on Klyber’s transport.

“Brilliant,” Huang cheerily admits. “Absolutely brilliant. Of course, you’ll need a skilled administrator to handle the logistics.” Perhaps he means Leonid Johansson, but that does not seem likely. Johansson is barely paying attention to the proceedings at this point. He is leaning in his chair causally looking toward the back of the room. He is, in fact, looking at baby-faced Robert Thurston—the man who replaced Klyber as commander of the Scutum-Crux Fleet. Thurston’s brilliant battle tactics are legendary.

“Strategy and logistics,” Huang continues. “They seem to be the keys. A great battle strategist at the helm of the Doctrinaire and the right logistical support to make sure that the ship does not fail.”

“What is your point?” General Smith asks.

“It seems to me that the fleet admiral’s skills are wasted commanding a lone ship, even a great ship such as the Doctrinaire ,” Huang begins. I recognize that he is trying to take command of the Doctrinaire away from Klyber and I feel as if I have been slapped across the face. I cannot even imagine the thoughts going through Klyber’s head. “You are the highest ranking officer in the Unified Authority Navy. Your command should not be limited to one lone boat. You should be in command of a fleet.”

“I will not relinquish control of the Doctrinaire .”

“Of course not,” Huang says. “This is your project. The Doctrinaire is your ship. I am simply suggesting that you should command the entire fleet as well as the ship itself. If the Doctrinaire is part of a fleet, you should have the highest authority in that fleet.”

“Avoid all tangles in the chain of command,” General Kellan, the 39-year-old secretary of the Army, adds. “I can’t speak for you Annapolis graduates, but that was one of the first things we learned at West Point.”

“Of course you would use the Doctrinaire as your command ship,” Huang adds as slick as any salesman trying to close a deal. “She is your ship. The Doctrinaire will always be your ship.”

Like all of the senior officers in that room, I see nothing wrong with Huang’s suggestion, except that I do not trust the man who has made it. Klyber, on the other hand, looks beaten. He is the only officer at the table without an entourage, and he now looks small and lonely sitting at the table by himself. He looks to General Smith for support, but Smith does not seem to have a problem with Huang’s suggestion. In fact, one minute later, Smith agrees with it. The remainder of the meeting is unspectacular. Neither Che Huang nor Bryce Klyber speak again. And when the meeting adjourns, Klyber is the first officer to reach the door of the conference room. He meets me at the door looking old and depressed.