ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to thank my editors John Morgan (who moved on before this project could be finished) and Anne Sowards (who took over) for everything they have done to help me. Mark Adams, of Texas Instruments fame, helped out a lot with this project, as did my parents. My parents always help a lot. Special thanks to Evan Nakachi, who gave me just the right encouragement at exactly the right moment to keep me going.

On the technical side, I need to thank Lewis Herrington, a former Marine colonel and a good friend. He spent a long time trying to help me understand the lifestyle, history, and tactics of the Marines—though his knowledge of cloning certainly left something to be desired.

Finally, I wish to thank my agent, Richard Curtis, because I am very lucky to have an agent like Richard Curtis.

CONCLUSION

It was only a matter of time, really. The Kamehameha would wait for a signal from its SEALs. When the signal did not arrive, a second team of SEALs would come down to investigate. That team would find me bleeding and weak and finish the execution. The job was three-quarters done already. Feeling around on the floor, I found my helmet and tried to switch to night-for-day, but my eyes twitched so erratically that I could not access the optical menus. I would spend my remaining hours of life lying blind on this floor, praying that the Noxium gas did not reach me.

When I awoke, I found myself on a narrow cot with a blanket pulled over my knees. I was in some kind of prison or cage, but the door was left open. I tried to sit up and bumped my head. My whole body ached.

“Still want to be a Marine?” a familiar, rumbling voice asked.

“Freeman? Is that you?” I asked. “How did you . . .”

“Klyber sent me to get you.” Freeman called back. “He contacted me before they even escorted you off Mars.

“He left you a message. Check the shades by your bed.”

There was a pair of mediaLink shades on the floor. It hurt to lean over the edge of the cage to grab the shades, but I forced myself to do it. My hands trembled too much to slip the shades in place. After a moment, Ray Freeman’s giant hands pulled the shades from mine, and he slipped them over my eyes.

Freeman let me know that he found you. When I heard that Admiral Huang arrested you on Mars, I didn’t know what to expect.

A lot has happened over the last few days. You may not know it, but the Cygnus, Perseus, and Scutum-Crux Arms have all declared independence. They call themselves the Confederate States. In response, the Linear Committee has shut down the House of Representatives. We have a lot to discuss, Wayson. But for now, you must stay hidden. Huang thinks you died on Ravenwood, and you should do nothing to make him think otherwise. Stay with Freeman. I have paid him to take care of you until I return.

I finished reading this and had an epiphany. I no longer cared. I did not care if Klyber wanted to protect me, and I did not care if his supership battered the Mogats into oblivion. Whether the Republic marched on to victory or burst into flames really did not matter.

I lay perfectly still for several minutes considering the message. “Was I reported missing?” I asked Freeman.

“Dead,” he answered. “Corporal Arlind Marsten is missing. I switched your helmets.”

“Marsten,” I said to myself. “He was a good kid. Good with computers.” I was sad to hear that he had died. All of them had died, I supposed.

“That means my military days are over,” I said. “I’m dead, and Marsten is AWOL.”

“I figure so,” Freeman said.

“Are you still looking for a partner?” I asked.

CHAPTER ONE

A.D. 2508

Gobi Station

“Name?” The sergeant barked the question without bothering to look up from his desk. I heard the indifference in his voice and could not fault him for his callous attitude. Nothing important ever happened in dried-up stink holes like Gobi. Once you got assigned to a planet like this, your only option was to sit and wait for a transfer. It could take years. I’d heard rumors about Marines spending their entire careers on backwater planets praying for any excuse to leave, even a war.

“Private First-class Wayson Harris reporting as ordered, sir.” I saluted, then handed him the sealed file that contained my orders.

I had shown up for this transfer wearing my Charlie Service uniform, not my armor. The uniform left me exposed to the desert air, and sweat had soaked through the material under my arms, not that this guy would notice. With his faded armor and stubble beard, this sergeant looked like he hadn’t bathed in years. All the same, I could barely wait to change into my armor. It wasn’t the protective chestplate and helmet I wanted. It was the climate-controlled bodysuit, which had kept me cool in temperatures even less livable than this desert.

“PFC Harris,” he echoed under his breath, not even bothering to look up. I shouldn’t have saluted. Once you leave basic training, you only salute officers or Marines acting under command authority. You don’t salute sergeants, and you certainly don’t call them “sir,” but it’s a hard habit to break. Having just spent three months living the spit-and-polish discipline of boot camp, I had come to fear drill sergeants for the gods they were. This sergeant, however, struck me as a heretic. His camouflage-coated armor had dulled, and there was sand and oil caked in the joints. His helmet sat on the ground beside his seat. I had never seen a Marine remove his helmet while on duty. If the job required combat armor, you wore the whole thing, or you were technically out of uniform.

The sergeant sat slumped in his chair with his armor loosened to fit his wilting posture. My drill sergeant would have given me a week in a detention cell if he saw me sitting like that; but I didn’t think this guy worried about the brig. The brass doesn’t punish you unless it catches you, and I doubted that any officers had set foot in this outpost in years. Why visit a place like Gobi Station and risk having a superior order you to stay. It could end your career.

“PFC Harris . . . PFC Harris . . . Let’s see what we have here,” he mumbled as he broke the red strip sealing my files. He flipped through the pages, occasionally stopping to scan a line. Apparently having found what he wanted, he spread the file on his desk and absentmindedly wrapped his fingers around his bristle-covered chin, as he browsed my records. “Fresh out of recruit training,” he muttered. Something caught his eye, and he paused and mulled over the information before looking up at me. “A ‘1’ in combat readiness?” He sounded like he wanted to laugh. “I’ve never seen anyone score under four hundred.”

“It’s a performance ranking, sir,” I said.

He sneered when he heard the word, “sir.” “You say something, private?”

“That number was my school rank. I drew top marks in hand-to-hand combat and marksmanship.”

Godfrey cocked an eyebrow in my direction, then returned to my paperwork. “Son of a bitch, perfect scores,” he whispered. “Why waste a perfectly good Marine on a shit-hole planet like this?”

He looked up at me. “You have a problem following orders, Harris?”

“No, sir,” I said. I was, in fact, quite obedient by human standards. The military, however, had considerably higher standards. Most conscripts came out of clone farms that the government euphemistically referred to as “orphanages.” Designed specifically for military life, the clones raised in these orphanages reacted to orders by reflex, even before their conscious minds could grasp what they had been asked to do. If an officer told them to dig a hole in the middle of a sidewalk, concrete chips and sparks would fly before the conscripts stopped to analyze the command. The clones weren’t stupid, just programmed to obey first and think later. As a natural-born human, I could not compete with their autonomic obedience. My brain took a moment to sort out orders.

My inability to react to orders without thinking had caused me problems for as long as I could remember. I grew up in a military orphanage. Every child I knew was a clone. I might have entered Unified Authority Orphanage #553 the old-fashioned way—by having dead parents—but as a resident of UAO #553, I grew up with two thousand clones.

You would not believe the diversity that exists among two thousand supposedly identical beings. The Unified Authority “created all clones equal,” taking them from a single vat of carefully brewed DNA; but once they came out of the tube, time and experience filled in the cracks in their personalities. Look at a mess hall filled with two thousand clones, and they appear exactly alike. Live with them for any length of time, and the differences become obvious.

“Your file says that you are slow following orders,” Godfrey said.

“It’s comparing me to clones,” I said.

He nodded and flashed that wary smile sergeants use when they think you’re spouting bullshit. “Did you speck some officer’s daughter?”

“No, sir,” I said.

“No,” he grunted, and went back to my file. “Just wondering why they wasted a perfectly good recruit on a planet like this,” he said.

“Random assignment, I suppose, sir,” I said.

“Sure,” he said, and his smile turned caustic. “Well, Private First-class Harris, I am Glan Godfrey. You can call me ‘Glan,’ ‘Godfrey,’ or ‘Gutterwash.’ Do not call me ‘sir.’ Gobi is pretty much a long-term assignment. Get sent here, and you’re stuck for life. As long as you know that I am the sergeant and therefore the one you obey, you can forget everything they taught you in basic.”

Growing up in an orphanage, you learn how to spot clones—they’re all cut from the same helix. With Gutterwash Godfrey, however, I could not readily tell. He had sun-bleached blond hair that nearly reached his shoulders. Every clone I had ever known had brown hair and an assembly-line flattop haircut. A decade on a desert planet could have fried the color out of Godfrey’s hair, I supposed. But the loose armor and the thick stubble on his cheeks and chin . . . I thought that the spit and polish was programmed into their DNA. Could ten years on a desert planet bleach a man’s programming the way it bleached his hair?

Godfrey pressed a button on his console. “Got a rack?” he asked, without identifying himself.

“Fresh meat arrive?” a voice asked back.

“Or a reasonable facsimile.”

“Send him down, I’ll put him in Hutchins’s old rack,” the voice said.

“Hutchins?” I asked, when Godfrey closed the communication. “Shipped out?”

“Nope,” Godfrey said.

“Killed in action?” I asked.

“Nope. Suicide,” Godfrey said. “Corporal Dalmer will meet you down that hall.” He pointed ahead.

“Thank you, sir,” I said instinctively, wasting another salute.

Godfrey responded with that sardonic smile. “The sooner you lose that, the better we’ll get along.”

I grabbed my two travel cases and started down the open-air hall. I had clothes and toiletries in one bag. The other bag held my gear—one helmet, a complete set of body armor, one body glove, one weapons-and-gear belt, one government-issue particle-beam pistol with removable rifle stock, one government-issue M27 pistol with removable rifle stock, and one all-purpose combat knife/bayonet with seven-inch diamond blade. Thanks to lightweight plastic-titanium alloys, the bag with the armor weighed less than the one with my clothes.

Halfway down the hall, I stopped to stare at my surroundings. After three months in the immaculate white-walled corridors of Infantry Training Center 309, I had forgotten that places like Gobi Station existed. No, that’s not true. I never suspected that the Unified Authority set up bases in such decrepit buildings.

Judging by the name, “Gobi,” I knew it was an early settlement. The cartographers used to name planets after Earth locations in the early days of the expansion. Back then, we settled any planet with a breathable atmosphere. That was before the science of terraformation passed from theoretical possibility to common practice.

The open-air hall from Godfrey’s office to the barracks buzzed with flies. One side of the hall overlooked a stagnant pool of oily water surrounded by mud and reeds. I noticed the tail end of an animal poking out through the reeds. As I looked closer, I realized that it was an Earth-bred dog, a German shepherd, and that it was lying dead on its side.

“Don’t worry, we run that through filters before we drink it,” the corporal at the other end of the hall said. Like Godfrey, this man wore his armor and body glove without his helmet. The environmental climate control in the bodysuit must have felt good. I was perspiring so much that the back of my uniform now clung to the curve of my spine. Rivulets of sweat had run down the sides of my ribs.

“We drink that?” I asked.

“You either drink that or you buy water from the locals. The locals jack you. You could blow a full week’s pay buying a glass of water from them. Only Guttman has that kind of money.” He looked off toward the pond. “That sludge doesn’t taste bad once you strain it.

“Name’s Tron Dalmer,” the corporal said as he stepped out from the doorway. “Whatever you did to get stationed here, welcome to the asshole of the friggin’ universe. Did Gutterwash mention that we here at Gobi Station are the few and the proud?”

“No,” I said, feeling depressed.

“This here is the smallest Marine outpost in the whole damned U.A. Empire.”

I did not flinch, but Dalmer’s use of the word “Empire” gave me a start. The commanders who ran both the orphanage and the basic training facility continually grilled us on the difference between expansion and imperialism.

“How many men?” I asked, not sure that I wanted to know. Most outposts had anywhere from three thousand to five thousand Marines. I had heard of outposts on isolated moons that only had fifteen hundred men. Judging by the size of this three-story barracks building, I guessed the population of Gobi Station to be at least one thousand.

“Including you, forty-one,” Dalmer said. “The good news is that you don’t have to share your room. The bad news is that if the locals ever decide they don’t like us, they could trample our asses out of here. Of course, they barely notice us. Even with you we’re one man shy of a full platoon. Besides, they are so busy with their own wars, they hardly notice us.”

“So there is some action out here?” I asked.

Dalmer stared at me. “Fresh out of boot and in a rush to kill, eh?”

“I would hate to think that I wasted my time in boot camp,” I said.

Dalmer laughed. “You wasted it, Harris. We have standing orders to stay out of local feuds.” He led me into the barracks, an ancient building constructed of thick sandstone blocks with rows of modern dormitory cells wedged into its bulky framework. Each cell was designed to house four people, but no one lived in the cells on this floor. The doors hung open revealing dusty quarters. Gobi might once have played an integral part in the Unified Authority’s grand expansion, but that time clearly had passed. A thin layer of sand covered the floor, and I saw twisting trails where snakes had slithered across the floor.

“You can have this entire floor to yourself if you want,” Dalmer said. “Most of us prefer the bottom floor; it’s cooler in the summer. Cooler in the winter, too.”

“I take it this is summer?” I asked.

Dalmer snickered. “Boy, this is the dead of winter. Why do you think everybody’s got their helmets off?

We want to enjoy the cool air while it lasts.”

He might have been joking, but I doubted it. He might have been hazing me. Maybe a battalion of grunts was hiding in some far end of the base watching me on a monitor and giggling as Godfrey and Dalmer dressed up in faded armor and tricked the gullible newbie into believing he had been assigned to Hell. My suspicions abruptly died when Dalmer brought me to the bottom floor. An entire division would not have cluttered the barracks so convincingly if they had worked on it for an entire month. The only light in the chamber came from windows carved in the meter-thick walls. As my eyes adjusted, I saw hundreds of particle-beam pistols piled in one corner of the floor. Dalmer followed my gaze and figured out what had caught my attention. “Broken,” he said. “Sand gets in the housing and scratches the mirrors. Leaves ’em worthless.”

On the open market, PB pistols sold for $2,000. Around the Corps, bullets were the ammunition of choice, but you could not count on them in low gravity or thin air. Particle-beam weapons were more difficult to maintain. You had to worry about prisms and energy coils—modular components that needed to be changed on a regular basis. “Why don’t you change out the mirrors?” I asked. Dalmer spit out a bitter laugh. “Fix them? Gobi Station used to be the outermost armory of the Cygnus Arm. We have a thousand guns for every man on this base.” He stopped and thought for a moment.

“Make that two thousand. We use them for shooting lizards. It’s easier to grab a new gun than to requisition replacement parts. Hell, Harris, it’s been two years since anybody’s even been out to the firing range. This is Gobi.”

He paused and stared into my eyes, probably wondering if I grasped his meaning. When I did not ask any questions, Dalmer continued. “Of course, we can’t just throw broken weapons away, or the locals will steal them. Godfrey dumped a load once. I think we armed half the planet.”

“Are there problems with the locals?” I asked.

“Not much. Some of them consider themselves gun-slingers, but it’s all petty stuff. I doubt the Senate loses much sleep over Gobi.” Dalmer turned and headed into the barracks. Most of the windows opened to that pond in the courtyard. Flies and a sulfurous smell wafted in on the trace of a breeze. I could barely wait to snap on my helmet and breathe filtered air, but Tron Dalmer did not seem to mind the stench. Nor was he bothered by the rest of the squalor—uniforms left hanging off furniture, plates of stale food, unmade bunks. Looking around the floor, I would have thought that spoiled children manned this outpost, not Marines.

“That was Hutchins’s cell over there,” Dalmer said.

The door swung open at my touch, and I immediately knew that someone, likely Dalmer or Godfrey, had searched through Hutchins’s belongings. His clothes were piled on the floor, his desk was swept clean, and his bed was stripped bare. Every drawer in the cell hung open from the wall.

“How long has this room been empty?” I asked. I wanted to ask Dalmer if he had found anything of value.

“Two, maybe three months,” Dalmer said. “Did Godfrey tell you about Hutchins?”

“Only that Hutchins committed suicide.”

“Put a goddamned particle-beam pistol in his mouth . . . Set his goddamned brain on fire.”

Dalmer left and I set up my quarters. Using a bloodstained sheet I found wadded in a drawer, I wrapped the late Private Hutchins’s belongings into a tight ball and stuffed them in a corner of the room. “Why am I here?” I asked myself. “Why the hell am I here?”

The only time we met as a platoon was at breakfast. Once or twice per week, Glan Godfrey briefed us about recent communiqués from fleet headquarters as we ate. Nobody listened during Godfrey’s briefings. We were as far from fleet headquarters as you could get without leaving the galaxy, and nothing command had to say seemed of any significance out here.

On most days, the platoon divided up after breakfast. Godfrey and Dalmer generally hung around the base. God knows why. The rest of the platoon piled into a couple of trucks and rode into town. They generally returned before supper. I think they wanted to stay out later, but the locals closed shop before sundown.

I spent my first month jogging around the outside wall of the base, holding target practice at the firing range, and trying to convince other men to join me. Most of the men laughed at the idea of drilling. Godfrey and Dalmer would not even discuss it. One corporal, Lars Rickman, came out and trained with me twice, but he quickly lost interest.

After six weeks I gave up on training alone and took my first trip into Morrowtown. Godfrey congratulated me on having more starch than Hutchins. The last new recruit before me, Hutchins, stopped training after less than one week. Life around the outpost became friendlier after I said I would go to Morrowtown.

Located a mere two hundred miles west of our outpost, Morrowtown had sixty thousand residents. On Gobi, it was the big league.

A word about our trucks—they were open-air transports with no armor and no guns. Beside the trucks, the only other vehicle in our motor pool was a dilapidated tank, generally referred to as “Godfrey’s Go-Cart,” that sat up to its axles in mud in the center of our courtyard. Oil trickled from the Go-Cart’s crank case and seeped into the pond; but as Dalmer often reminded us, “It all gets filtered out.”

Our trucks could have passed for farm equipment except that they had tank treads instead of tires. They were flatbeds with removable benches. Sizing up these twenty-foot-long Jurassic beasts, I could not begin to guess their age. They might have arrived with the first ship to land on Gobi.

“Shouldn’t these have guns or rockets mounted on them?” I asked Rickman, as we loaded up.

“Why?” he asked, looking mildly interested. He was the only man stationed on Gobi who even partially resembled a Marine. Not only had he at least attempted to train with me, he still polished his armor and carried a sidearm. When I did not answer his question about why we might want to carry a rocket launcher on the trucks, however, he mumbled something about hating fresh recruits. Rickman was a clone, of course. All of the other Marines on Gobi were clones. Like Godfrey, Rickman had bleached hair and a gaunt face. The only Marine that Gobi had not made thin was Taj Guttman. Guttman had grown so fat that he no longer fit into his armor. He did not bother with his leg shields or boots; and he fastened his chestplate only at the top, wearing it around his neck like a stiff poncho. I doubt he would have bothered with armor if it were not for the climate controls in the bodysuit. Godfrey referred to Guttman as “Four-Cheeks,” meaning he had enough ass for two men. The name stuck, and everybody used it.

As the new kid on base, I got to sit next to Guttman as we drove to Morrowtown. He only talked about one thing—poker. I had never played cards. No one gambled at UAO #553. We talked about gambling and how much we would enjoy it, but young clones are not much for breaking rules. As the lone human in the orphanage, I had tried my best to blend in.

We didn’t play cards in boot camp, either. Until I arrived on Gobi, I assumed that all Marines trained hard and obeyed the rules. Of course, none of these Marines knew they were clones. Straight out of the tube, combat clones had brown hair and brown eyes, but through the miracle of neural programming, they thought of themselves as natural-born people with blond hair and blue eyes. That was how they saw themselves, too. When clones looked at themselves in the mirror, they saw blond hair and blue. God knows how the scientists pulled that off, but they did. And since clones were also hardwired not to speak about cloning among themselves, orphanages managed to raise thousands of clones without one clone telling the next he was synthetic.

Growing up, I used to eat in a cafeteria with thousands of identical cadets who never mentioned that everybody around them looked and sounded precisely alike. They could eat, shower, and shave side by side and not see the similarities they shared with the men next to them because of cerebral programming in their DNA. Even though they knew everyone else was a clone, they never suspected their own synthetic creation. Around the orphanage, people used to say that clones were wired to self-destruct if they ever understood the truth of their origin.

“Have you ever played poker?” Guttman asked. “It’s a great game. Laying your cards and catching everyone flat-footed”—he grinned as if in ecstasy—“there’s no better feeling.”

“I’ve never played,” I said.

“Stick with me, you’ll make a fortune,” Guttman said, sounding elated finally to have somebody who would listen to him.

Not having much to say to Guttman, I watched the desert as we drove. All I saw was sand and rock and clear blue sky. The ride lasted two hours—two hours trapped with Guttman. I was ready to hop off the truck and walk after the first hour. By the time we finally saw the city, my head hurt from all of Guttman’s babbling.

Built almost entirely out of sandstone bricks, Morrowtown blended into its environment. I saw the shapes of the buildings long before I realized what they were.

“Here we are,” Rickman yelled as he parked in a wide alleyway. Our muffler sputtered, and the chassis trembled as the engine coughed smoke.

“I hate these trucks,” Guttman moaned.

With few words spoken, the platoon divided into groups. Some men went to a saloon where they got drunk on a daily basis. They could not afford clean water, but whiskey and beer were in the budget. Others quietly kept girlfriends in town. Not wanting a generation of half-clone children, Unified Authority scientists designed clones that were sterile, but that did not mean that they left out the sex drive. “The goal is to copulate, not populate,” a drill sergeant once told me.

Guttman waited for me beside the truck. “Come with me. I’ll get you into the best game in Morrowtown,” he said in a secretive tone. Not having heard any better offers, I went with Guttman.

“Leave your helmet in the truck. It makes you look silly,” he added.

“I think I’ll keep it on just the same.” Okay, I was already absent without leave, technically speaking, but I saw no point in adding “out of uniform” to the list of charges.

“Suit yourself, but you’re going to scare the locals,” Guttman said, sounding a bit deflated. But nobody seemed scared of me. The people ignored us. Children played happily as we passed them on the street. A gang of teenagers stood on a sidewalk flipping coins against a wall. They paused to stare at us, then went on gambling.

It shouldn’t be like this, I thought to myself. They should be a little afraid of us. Guttman, bobbing his head and waving at everyone we passed, clearly did not agree with me. His juvenile excitement showed in his chubby smile as he led me into a squat building that looked more like a bunker than a bar. Perhaps he liked the idea of showing off a new friend. Maybe he just loved playing cards. He came to this game every day and never grew tired of it.

“Ah, good, Taj Guttman. Excellent,” a soft voice mumbled with an accent so thick that I could barely understand it. A short man with a round body and a head that was as bald as an egg approached us. He could not have been taller than five-foot-two. He smiled as if he was glad to see us, but something in his oily voice said otherwise.

“Kline.” The name splashed out of Guttman’s mouth.

“You are early today,” the little round man continued, as I strained to decipher his words. This was the first time I had actually heard a Gobi native speak. He stretched vowels and slurred consonants so that when he next said, “And you have brought a friend,” it sounded like, ’aaaant you heeef broood a fryent.”

He flashed his smile at me as he sized me up. “We have another visitor today as well.” In Kline’s thick tongue, the word “visitor” sounded like “fiztor.”

Guttman turned to me, and said in an unnecessarily loud voice, “This ugly mutt is Kline.” Up to this point in the trip, Guttman had struck me as being slow and stupid, but he had a way with languages. He matched Kline’s accent perfectly when speaking to the locals, but had not a trace of an accent when speaking to me. Then he turned to Kline, and said, “And this is Harris. Sorry about the helmet; I told him that it makes him look silly.”

“Harris” sounded like “Haaritz.” “Silly” was “tziillie.”

“I’m just here to watch,” I said.

“Watch?” Kline asked as his smile faded. “This game is for players only.”

“He’ll play,” Guttman said.

“Perhaps I should leave then,” I said. “I’ve never played, and from everything Guttman tells me, this is no game for beginners.”

“Nonsense,” Guttman chimed in. “Of course he’ll play.”

“I wish you would,” a soft voice said in beautiful Earth English. Someone had moved in behind me as Guttman and Kline led the way to the card room where several more players milled around a table. “I’m new at the game myself, and I hate the idea of getting swindled alone.” A tall man with thinning white hair and a well-trimmed beard stepped out from the shadows along the wall.

“You must have money to burn,” I said. “Guttman here is a card shark.”

“Is he?” the man said, his eyes narrowing. His mouth was all teeth and grins, but the warm smile did not extend to his eyes.

Guttman giggled nervously. “It’s all just fun.”

“I’m living on enlisted-man wages,” I said, “and my next check does not arrive for a week. I doubt I even have enough cash to buy my way into the game.”

“You may wager your weapon,” Kline said. “Sidearms are as good as cash at this table.”

“What was that?” I asked in astonishment.

“Don’t worry,” Guttman said, giggling nervously. He stepped closer to me, and whispered, “I never come here with cash.”

“I think I’m in the wrong place,” I said, already deciding that I would report this to Godfrey the moment we got back to base. I had never imagined such insubordination.

“I have no objection to your watching the game,” the bearded man said.

“They’ll pass information over their communications link,” another player complained, looking at my helmet. “He’ll tell Taj what we have in our hands.”

“As I understand it, that link only works if both soldiers are wearing helmets,” the bearded man said.

“What do you say?” Guttman asked Kline.

Kline considered. “Sit behind Guttman, and no walking around.”

I agreed.

“And I insist that you check your weapon,” said Kline, pointing at my pistol. Seeing me hesitate, Guttman chimed in. “It will be safe. You cannot go anywhere in Morrowtown wearing your sidearm.”

Though I did not like the idea, I unstrapped my holster and handed it to Kline. The seven men closed in around a large round table. I sat in a chair behind Guttman and watched as Kline dealt each player five cards—two facing up and three facing down. Guttman slipped his pudgy thumb under the corner of the three downturned cards and peered at their values. The card room had no windows. The only light in the room was the pale glow of a lamp hanging over the table. I would not have been able to read Guttman’s cards had I removed my helmet. Our visors had lenses and filters designed for battle situations. Using optical commands, I activated a night-for-day lens that brightened my vision, then I used a magnification lens to get a better look at Guttman’s cards. When he bent the corners to have a look, I saw that he had two threes and an ace on the table. The cards that had been placed faceup were a king and a six.

Guttman slid the ace, the king and the six forward. Kline collected each man’s rejected cards and replaced them with cards from the deck. As Guttman fanned out his new cards, I saw that he had added a face card, a ten, and another three. He closed his hand and started bouncing in his seat. The bids went around the table. When it came to Guttman, he pushed his pistol into the center of the table, and Kline handed him a tray covered with chips. I had no idea what Guttman’s new cards meant, but judging by his happy wheezing, he liked them.

The man with the beard looked pleased as well. “Well, this is a rare pleasure,” he said, and he spilled a stack of gold-colored chips on the table. The other players groaned as Kline circled the table again, gathering cards and replacing them with new ones.

“I’ll raise you,” Guttman said, and he carelessly tossed a stack of chips into the pot. Some of the other players placed their cards on the table facedown and backed out of the game.

“Very aggressive move,” the bearded man said as he matched Guttman’s bid. “I have three kings.”

Guttman sighed and leaned back in his chair as the man raked in his winnings, including the pistol. I watched this with growing irritation. Guttman, apparently enthralled by this situation, looked back at me and winked. Fortunately, no one could hear what I was uttering inside my helmet.

“Do all soldiers carry these?” the man with the beard said as he hefted Guttman’s particle-beam pistol. He did not touch the grip or the trigger. Instead, he treated the gun as if it might explode, gingerly pinching the barrel with his thumb and forefinger.

“Mostly we carry M27s,” Guttman said, “like the one Harris was wearing. I prefer the particle beam though, it’s worth a lot more money.” He laughed and squirmed in his seat, apparently anxious to start the next hand and win his weapon back.

“Quite a hefty weapon,” the man said. “It must be very sturdy.”

“You’d think so,” Guttman replied, “but they don’t do so well in the desert. We have piles of broken guns lying around our barracks.”

“Is that so?” the man asked. “Replacements must be easy to come by?”

“You kidding?” Guttman laughed. “Gobi Station used to be an armory. The place is a damned munitions depot. Isn’t that right?” Guttman asked, turning in his chair to look at me. I did not answer.

“I see,” said the bearded man. He seemed to sense the tension coiling between Guttman and me. “So I shall need to take special precautions to keep this in working order.”

“Can we get on with the game?” a player called from across the table. Kline dealt another hand of cards. This time Guttman had two queens and a king facing down, with a four and eight facing up. From what I could tell, he was not happy with these cards. As he had done in the last game, Guttman pushed three cards forward, then tossed some chips into the center of the table. Everybody else followed.

Kline pivoted around the table a second time, giving Guttman two fives and an ace. A few of the other players grimaced. Kline tapped his cards against his tiny chin. Guttman ripped a thunderous fart, then feigned embarrassment while giggling under his breath. Throughout the last hand, he had kept one platinum chip hidden under his cards. When his third bid came, he selected that chip and slid it forward.

“I call,” he said.

Three of the other players grumbled and threw down their cards. Kline rolled his slow brown eyes. He looked at his cards, looked at the chips on the table, looked at his cards, and dropped his hand as well.

“I’m out,” he said.

The bearded man stayed in.

Silently, Kline proceeded to move around the table changing cards for the three players who stayed in the game.

Guttman took two.

So did the man with the beard. Whatever the man got, it made him happy. He grinned and threw a platinum chip and two gold ones onto the table. They jingled and spun as they settled on the pile. Guttman’s beefy hands hid his cards from my view; but I got the feeling he was strong. He started bouncing so hard in his chair that I expected it to splinter. He looked like a drowning man fighting for air. His chips were low, and I thought he might need to leave the game; but Guttman whispered something to Kline, and the dealer handed him another rack of chips. With a wicked grin, Guttman selected three gold chips and tossed them in the pot. Only then did I realize how Guttman had gotten that second rack of chips: He’d wagered my pistol.

I started to get up, but Guttman raised a hand to stop me. “It’s okay, Harris,” he said. “I have everything under control.”

I wanted to kill Guttman, but I couldn’t. My pistol was gone, and the only chance I had to get it back would be if Guttman won the hand.

The bearded man’s eyes positively sparkled now. He smiled across the table at Guttman. “You are quite the player,” he said.

“How many?” Kline asked.

“Two,” said Guttman, and he pushed two cards forward.

Kline leaned forward and took the cards, then dealt new ones. I saw what they were as Guttman inspected them—two queens. Guttman spilled two-thirds of his chips onto the table.

“Unexpected,” the man with the beard said. “Wiser men . . .” With this he slid Guttman’s blaster into the pot. “This sees and raises the stakes, does it not?”

Guttman pressed his fingers on the tops of his cards. “You must be pretty confident,” he said. I sure as hell did not feel confident.

Perhaps it finally dawned on Guttman that he might have to explain how he had lost both of our pistols. Perhaps, having no more guns to pawn, Guttman finally noticed the jagged edges behind the bearded man’s smile. He gathered up the few chips he had left, and said, “Let’s see what you have.”

The mystery man showed all of his cards—three kings and two aces.

Guttman let out a long breathy whistle. “A crowded house? Nice hand,” he said as he turned over his cards, showing four queens, “but I think the pot is mine.”

He turned to grin at me, but his smile vanished when he saw that I had climbed out of my chair. “I would like my pistol,” I said to Kline.

“Don’t leave now,” Guttman said. He jumped to his feet and walked over to me. Putting his hand by his mouth to block others from hearing, he whispered, “I’m just getting my stride. I’m about to clean these suckers dry.”

Stepping around Four-Cheeks, I grabbed my gun.

“Listen, pal,” Guttman said, grabbing me by my shoulder. Before I realized what I was doing, I spun and slammed my fist into Guttman’s mouth. His legs locked and fell out from under him as he dropped flat on his ass. Rather than attempt to get up, he sat where he fell, wiping blood from his split lip.

“I’m leaving now,” I said. This time, Guttman made no attempt to stop me.

CHAPTER TWO

Old and sparse and dilapidated, Gobi Station did not have air-conditioning or any other form of climate control. It did not matter during the winter, when a cooling draft blew through the open-air corridors and enormous verandas, but winter ended so suddenly that it seemed like somebody switched it off. One day we had a breeze and the next morning the winds were withering. Daytime temperatures reached a dry 120 degrees. When the desert cooled after sunset, the temperature dropped to a tolerable 90 degrees. Glan Godfrey continued making his cursory announcements every few days as we ate breakfast out of Meals Ready to Eat (MRE) tins. He didn’t care if we listened or if we whispered back and forth as he spoke. A couple of weeks after my first visit to Morrowtown, however, Godfrey showed up for breakfast with a regulation haircut and a shave. He told us to put down our forks and pay attention. Godfrey passed around a photograph. Someone called, “Pictures from home?”

“Shut up and listen,” Godfrey said in an uncharacteristically severe voice. “The entire Central Cygnus Fleet is on alert. Command is looking for this man. His name is . . .” Godfrey paused to check the bulletin. “Amos Crowley. Have any of you grunts seen him?”

“Doesn’t he live in Morrowtown?” Lars Rickman joked with the man sitting next to him. I was laughing with everybody else when Dalmer passed the picture my way. Crowley had intense dark eyes, white hair, and a thick white beard. I looked over at Taj Guttman squirming in his seat. We both recognized him, though Guttman clearly did not want to say anything. It was the man from the card game.

“What is he wanted for?” I asked.

“The bulletin doesn’t say much about what he’s done,” Godfrey said. He held his notes up and read in a soft voice that almost seemed meant for a private conversation. “‘Crowley is sought for involvement in several seditious activities. ’ The brass in Washington labeled him an enemy of the Republic.”

“He’ll fit right in on Gobi; nobody likes the U.A. over here,” someone bawled from the back of the room.

“Crowley was a general in the Army,” Godfrey said. The laughing stopped, but I could hear men whispering to each other. “That makes him special. He was the highest-ranking general in the Perseus Arm before he disappeared. Now Washington wants a word with him in the worst way.”

“He might be here,” I said, and the hall went silent. “I saw him two weeks ago. One of Guttman’s card games.”

Glan Godfrey turned toward me. “Are you certain about this, Harris?”

“Yes,” I said, suddenly feeling like a Marine again.

“What about you, Guttman?”

“It was a while ago . . .” he said. “I mean, I guess that looks like him, but I was . . .”

“You festering sack of eye pus,” Godfrey said in a voice that echoed a dawning realization. “Did you bet your sidearm?” When Guttman did not answer, Godfrey’s glare hardened. “Shit, Guttman, you lost your sidearm, didn’t you?”

“I won it back with the next hand.” Guttman sounded scared.

“Shut your speck-receptacle!” Godfrey snapped. “Fleet Command is going to want a full report. I’ll be surprised if we don’t all end up in front of a firing squad for this, Four-Cheeks.” He glared at Guttman for another moment, then turned toward me, and said, “Harris, come with me.”

Taking short, brisk strides, and not saying a word, Godfrey ushered me to his office. He worked in a cavernous chamber that had probably once served as an entire office complex. The platoon could have bunked in the space. Real estate was never a problem on Gobi.

Godfrey’s desk sat in a far corner. Light poured in through arc-shaped windows along the domed ceiling.

“I need you to report what you saw to Fleet Command,” Godfrey said, as we walked toward his desk.

“You want me to do it?”

“I’m not letting Guttman anywhere near Command. Harris, we’re in trouble here. Admiral Brocius has taken a personal interest in this hunt. You think I’m going to show him that moron?”

“Brocius?” I asked, feeling numb in the knees. Vice Admiral Alden Brocius, the highest-ranking officer in the Central Cygnus Fleet, had a reputation for being hard-nosed.

Godfrey chuckled bitterly. “Brocius is personally directing the manhunt.” He looked at me and smiled.

“Don’t worry about your career, Harris. You’re on Gobi, you’re already in the shits.”

Godfrey crouched in front of his communications console and typed in a code. A young ensign appeared on the screen. He studied Godfrey for a moment, then asked the nature of the call. Godfrey said he had a positive sighting of Amos Crowley, and the ensign put the call on hold. When the screen flashed on again, Brocius, a tall and slender man with jet-black hair and brown eyes, stared back at us.

“What is it, Sergeant?” the admiral asked in a brusque voice.

“Two of my men spotted General Crowley.”

“I see,” Brocius said, sounding more interested. “You have a positive identification?”

“Yes, sir. One of the men who identified him is with me now.”

“Let’s have a word with him,” Brocius said.

Godfrey saluted and moved back. I stepped forward and saluted.

“What is your name, son?”

“PFC Wayson Harris, sir.”

“You saw Amos Crowley?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you believe he is still on Gobi?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Do you have any reason to believe he has left the planet?”

“No, sir.”

“Then you believe he is still on Gobi?”

“He did not tell the private his plans, sir.”

“I realize that,” Brocius said, starting to sound irritated. “Do you think he is still on Gobi?”

I did not know how to answer. I had no idea if Crowley was still on Gobi, and Brocius did not seem to care. It seemed like the admiral wanted me to say that Crowley was still here. I stole a glance at Godfrey and saw him nodding.

“Well, which is it?”

“He may be here, sir.”

“I see. Very well then, put the sergeant back on.”

Godfrey stepped up to the receiver. “Your man does not seem confident,” Brocius said. “Still, if there is anything to it . . . I’ll send someone to investigate.”

Perhaps I overestimated Crowley’s importance. I don’t think that I expected the Central Cygnus Fleet to converge on Gobi, but I did expect a significant force. I expected marshals guarding the spaceport and a surveillance fleet blockading the planet . . . a full-blown manhunt. Admiral Brocius did not send any of those things. He sent one man—Ray Freeman.

Three days after my interview with Admiral Brocius, a beat-up barge appeared in the sky above our base. It was early in the morning, and the barge left a contrail of oily smoke in the otherwise immaculate sky. Lars Rickman and I happened to be standing in a breezeway enjoying the 90-degree morning chill when the ship first appeared. We watched as it touched down on the loading area beside our outer wall, its gear making a shrill grinding noise as it settled on the tarmac.

“What a wreck,” Rickman said, as we trotted down for a closer look.

The barge had battered armor. Some of the plates around its cockpit had curled along the edges. There were rows of inset doors along its forty-foot hull that looked as if they might have housed an impressive array of weapons.

“This bitch has been through a war,” Rickman said. He had a bemused smile as he looked back and forth along the spaceship’s dilapidated hull. As we walked around the rear of the ship, the hatch opened, and Ray Freeman emerged—the biggest man I have ever met, standing at least seven feet tall with arms and legs as thick as most men’s chests.

Freeman was a “black man.” Understand that since the United States brought the world together in a single “unified authority,” racial terms like “African,” “Oriental,” and “Caucasian” had become meaningless. Under the Unified Authority, the Earth became the political center of the galaxy. Most commerce, manufacturing, and farming were done in the territories, and the territories were fully integrated. I heard rumors about certain races refusing to marry outside of their own; but for the most part, we had become a one-race nation. So when Ray Freeman, whose skin was the color of coffee without a trace of cream, stepped out of his ship, it was like the return of an extinct species. It wasn’t just that Freeman was taller and several shades darker than any man I had ever seen. It was that his biceps were the size of a grown man’s skull when he bent his arms, and his triceps looked like slabs of rock when his arms hung straight. And it was that you could see the outlines of those muscles through the stiff, bulletproof canvas of his sleeves.

Freeman’s shaved head was so massive that it looked like he was wearing a helmet. A small knot of scars formed a paisley pattern on the back of his skull. He had a wide nose, which looked as if it had been broken several times, and thick lips. His neck was as wide around as either of my thighs. It completely filled the collar of his jumper, a garment that looked lost between Army fatigues and a pilot’s uniform. Dents and scratches dotted every inch of the massive armored plate that covered his chest and shoulders. Judging by the scars and battered armor, I knew this man had enemies.

“Who commands this outpost?” Freeman asked.

“That would be Sergeant Godfrey,” Rickman said, looking more than a little intimidated.

“Take me to him,” Freeman said, in a soft and low voice that reminded me of gunfire echoing in a valley. Without saying a word, Rickman turned and walked straight to Godfrey’s office. Relieved to get away from the giant, I stayed back to examine this strange, old ship. When Rickman returned a few moments later, he mumbled something like, “tear off his friggin’ head and spit in the holes.”

“Who is he?” I asked.

“Don’t know,” Rickman said.

“I think I’ll stay out of his way,” I said.

“Don’t count on it,” Rickman said. “He sent me out here to get you.”

“You’re joking.”

“No, I’m not. You get to go meet with Chuckles down in Godfrey’s office.”

I took a deep breath and headed for the barracks to grab my helmet. By that time, it occurred to me that Admiral Brocius might have sent the visitor, and I did not want to be caught out of uniform twice in one night. When I reported to Godfrey, I saw Freeman sitting cramped behind the sergeant’s desk as if it were his own. Godfrey met me as I closed the door.

“Harris, this is Ray Freeman. He is here on orders from Admiral Brocius,” Godfrey said, using the interLink system built into our helmets so that Freeman would not hear us.

“Here to catch . . . ?” I asked.

“He’s a mercenary,” Godfrey said, “and a real charmer.”

“Two men saw Crowley,” Freeman said in that same implacable voice.

“The other man was Private Guttman,” Godfrey answered on his open microphone.

“Get him,” Freeman said.

“Go get him, Harris,” Godfrey said.

As I started to leave, Freeman said, “You go get him, Sergeant. I want to speak with the private.”

Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to go look for Guttman.

Sergeant Godfrey left without looking back.

“Remove your helmet,” Freeman said as he placed a folder with the Central Cygnus Fleet seal on the desk. “This is the man you saw?” he asked, pulling a photograph from the top of the folder.

“Yes,” I said. “I saw him enter a poker game in Morrowtown.”

“You’re sure this was the man?”

I nodded.

“Tell me about the game,” Freeman said, with that low, rumbling voice. He listened carefully as I told the story, his face betraying no emotion. He did not say anything when I finished. Looking through me, he reached over and pressed the intercom button on Godfrey’s desk, and said, “Send in the other one.”

Godfrey and Guttman stepped into the room. Sergeant Godfrey retreated to a far corner and sat quietly. Guttman, sweat rolling down his pale and puffy face, stood trembling before the desk. He had tried to dress properly for the meeting, but his armor would not cooperate. He wore his helmet, which no longer fit over his globe-shaped head, like a crown around his forehead. Guttman’s chestplate dangled from his neck. He’d used belts to lash his forearm guards and thigh plates in place. If I had not known that Taj Guttman was a Marine, I would have guessed that he was a comedian doing a parody of military life. Freeman seemed not to notice. No glint of humor showed in his face as he directed Guttman to a chair by the desk with a nod. Once Guttman lowered himself into his chair, Freeman showed him the picture of Crowley. “This the man?”

“I’m not sure. It may have been him. It could be him. I really did not get a good look at that man,”

Guttman twittered nervously. “I suppose Harris told you where we saw him?”

“He mentioned a card game,” Freeman said.

“I see,” said Guttman. “Whoever he was, he wasn’t very good at cards. He won the first hand, then I cleaned him out on the second. He quit after the third hand.”

“What were the stakes?” Freeman asked.

“Morrowtown isn’t exactly a gambler’s paradise,” Guttman said, as sweat dribbled down his forehead.

“You might take home $50 if the locals are feeling dangerous.”

“I understand you can also win government-issue sidearms?” Freeman said. Guttman turned completely white. He must have hoped that I would hide that part of the story. He glared at me for a moment, then turned back to Freeman. “Yes, I suppose. I don’t think he had ever seen one before. He held it like he was afraid it would bite him.”

“Is that the pistol?” Freeman asked, pointing down at Guttman’s holster. Guttman fished it out of its sleeve and placed it on the desk. Freeman picked it up between his thumb and forefinger, exactly as Crowley had done. Dangling from the mercenary’s thick fingers, Guttman’s gun looked like a child’s toy. “Is this how he held it?”

“Yeah. Yeah, just like that.”

“Idiot,” Freeman said, placing the pistol back on the desk. “He shut off the charge guard outtake valve. This pistol will explode the next time you fire it.”

Guttman looked at the weapon as if it had suddenly grown fangs. Spinning it in place rather than picking it up, he checked the energy meter, gasped, then moved his hands away quickly. “What do I do with it?

Will it blow up?”

Freeman did not bother answering. Turning toward the communications console, he quietly said, “Take your weapon and wait in the hall.” Guttman picked up his pistol and held it out in front of him as far as his arms could reach. Keeping both eyes fixed on the gun, he shuffled out of the office. I did not know which scared him more, carrying a sabotaged pistol or talking to Freeman.

“You wait outside, too,” Freeman said to me.

I started to leave, then stopped. “Excuse me, sir,” I said. “I remembered something else.”

Freeman, who was now standing behind the desk, stared down at me. He did not say anything as he waited for me to speak.

“When Guttman lost that first game, he said something about sand ruining these guns. He told Crowley that we had thousands of them around the base.”

Freeman looked at me and nodded.

“That will be all, Harris,” Godfrey said over the interLink.

“Don’t go far,” Freeman said.

As I left the room, I found Guttman pacing in the hallway. He stormed over to me and stared into my visor. His pudgy face turned red, and his lips were blue as he snarled at me. “Great job, pal! Now I’m in deep.”

“Guttman, that gun would have blown up in your face if you ever got around to shooting it,” I said. Guttman stopped for a moment and thought. His breathing slowed. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” He pointed down the hall where his pistol lay on a table. “Do you know how to fix it?”

If there is one thing you learn in basic training, it’s how to maintain a sidearm. All he had to do was open the buffer valve and discharge some gas. But Guttman had forgotten basic training. It must have been years since he had last stripped and cleaned a pistol.

“Drain the chamber,” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “Can you help me?”

The door opened behind us, and Godfrey peered out. “Harris. Mr. Charming would like another word with you.”

As I stepped back into Godfrey’s office, I saw Freeman talking to Admiral Brocius on the communications console. “What is your next step?” Brocius asked.

“I want to have a look around Morrowtown,” Freeman replied.

“Keep me informed,” Brocius said as he signed off. Freeman placed the photograph of Crowley back in his folder. Then he turned to look at me. “Do you have any civilian clothing?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Dress down; I need you to take me into Morrowtown.”

As we climbed into the truck, I said, “We’ll save a couple of hours if we go in your flier.”

Freeman glared down at me, and said, “We’ll take the truck.”

“Is there a reason I am wearing civilian clothes?”

“Yes,” Freeman said, and he did not speak again for the entire two-hour trip. I tried to distract myself with memories of boot camp, but you cannot ignore a man whose very presence radiates intensity. I could feel him sitting beside me. I suppose he chose the truck to avoid calling attention to himself; but there was no way this black-skinned giant was going to slip into Morrowtown unnoticed. Just thinking about Freeman trying to be inconspicuous made the long ride pass more quickly. The townspeople may have grown accustomed to Marines, but the sight of Freeman sent them running. People hurried out of our way as we walked through the streets. When we got to the gambling house, we found it locked tight. “Do you think anyone is in there?” Freeman asked. It was late in the afternoon, but Guttman usually played well into the evening. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Good enough for me,” Freeman replied. He drew an oversized particle-beam pistol from his belt and aimed it at the door. Without warning, he fired a sparkling green beam at the door, which disappeared behind a cloud of smoke and sparks. Then, lifting a massive boot, he kicked the smoldering remains out of the doorway.

“We could have knocked,” I said.

Freeman did not answer as he disappeared into the smoke.

Kline had struck me as somewhat timid the first time I saw him. On this occasion, he went from timid to terrified. As I stepped through the doorway, I saw him standing beside the liquor bar inside the foyer, the same place he had been standing the time I came with Guttman.

Looking both scared and surprised, Kline stared unblinkingly at the remains of the door, then raised his hands in the air to show that he held no weapons. His gaze shifted in our direction, and he said, “May I help you?”

Freeman walked over to Kline and placed the photograph of Crowley on the bar. “We’re looking for this man.”

Kline looked down at the photograph and studied it for a minute. “He came in a month ago. That was the only time I ever saw him.”

“What do you remember about him?” Freeman asked.

“He played a few hands and left; that’s all I know,” Kline said, trying to sound casual.

“Maybe this will jog your memory,” Freeman said, pulling out his pistol and pressing its muzzle into the fleshy area between Kline’s eyes.

Kline’s eyes crossed as they looked up the barrel, but he remained composed. “I think he came here looking for soldiers. He asked me if any of the Marines from the base were coming and offered me $100

to let him join the game.” Kline’s voice trembled, but only slightly. Considering the size of the pistol pressed against his head and the damage that pistol had done to his door, I thought Kline remained amazingly calm.

“Anything else?” Freeman asked.

“That’s everything,” Kline said.

Never shifting his gaze from Kline’s face, Freeman placed his pistol on the bar. He did so very gently, taking great care not to scratch the finish. Then he reached into a pocket below his chestplate. After fishing around for a moment, he removed a small silver tube.

“Your name is Kline, is that right?”

“Yes,” Kline said, staring at the tube.

“Do you know how to kill ants, Mr. Kline?”

“By stepping on them?” Kline asked.

“Yes, you can kill one ant that way, but I mean a whole hill of ants.”

Kline shook his head.

“You poison one ant with something slow and highly toxic. Kill it too fast, say, by stepping on it or using a fast poison, and all you have is a dead ant. But if you use the right poison, something that works real slow, that ant will infect his entire colony.”

“Is that poison?” Kline asked.

“No, sir,” Freeman said, shaking his head. “Just a little Super Glue.” He pushed one of Kline’s hands down on the bar with the palm up. Kline tried to close his fingers; but when Freeman squeezed his wrist, the hand fell open. “Now you keep that hand right there, right like that, Mr. Kline.”

Freeman pulled the eyedropper out of the tube and squeezed, forcing several drops of clear white liquid to ooze onto Kline’s trembling palm. “See, that didn’t hurt. A little glue won’t hurt you.”

Kline sighed with relief.

“Now this, this could hurt you.” Freeman pulled something that looked like a lime from his pocket and pressed it into Kline’s freshly glued hand.

Kline was no soldier, but he recognized the grenade the moment he saw it. “What are you doing?”

Freeman closed Kline’s fingers around the grenade and held them shut as he quietly counted to sixty. When he released Kline’s fingers, he wiggled the grenade to make sure the glue held fast. Then he pulled the pin from the grenade. “Ever seen one of these?”

Kline was speechless.

“This is a grenade. A high-yield grenade will take out a full city block. This here is a low-yield grenade. Small ones like this aren’t nearly so bad. It might only destroy a couple of buildings.”

“I see,” Kline said, his composure gone.

“I made this one just for situations like this,” Freeman continued. “This grenade senses body heat. As long as there are no temperature fluctuations, you’ll be perfectly safe. You might want to use your other hand when you grab ice out of that freezer over there. Freezing air would set it off for sure. Don’t pry the grenade from your palm. A change in temperature like that’ll set it off, too. You wouldn’t want to hit it with a hammer or drill into it, either.”

“I see,” said Kline.

“See that hole where I took the pin? If anything goes in that hole except this exact pin, that grenade will explode. Don’t stick anything in that hole. You understand?”

“Yes,” Kline stuttered.

“You might lose some skin when I pry the grenade out of your hand.”

“When?” Kline asked.

“Think you can remember all that?” Freeman asked, ignoring the question.

“When will you take it?” Kline responded.

“The grenade is set to explode in forty-eight hours,” Freeman said. “If I don’t see you before then, I guess you can keep it.”

Kline’s generally nonplussed facade melted, and his lips pulled back into a grimace. “But . . . but how will I find you? Why are you doing this?”

“We’ll call this an incentive, Mr. Kline. I think you know more information than you are telling me,”

Freeman said.

Kline looked at me for help, but only for a moment. “How will I find you?”

“I’ll be at the Marine base, Mr. Kline. You come down and visit me if you remember something. But don’t wait too long. Don’t show up in forty-seven hours and fifty-nine minutes because I won’t want to talk to you.” With that, Freeman packed up his picture of Crowley and his gigantic pistol. He screwed the cover back on the tube and started for the door. I followed.

“What makes you so sure he’s hiding something?” I asked, as we stepped out onto the empty street. Freeman did not answer. Having reverted to his silent self, he walked to the next building. “Stop here,”

he said, ignoring my question.

The air was hot and dry. Since I was not wearing my climate-controlled bodysuit, the early evening felt like an oven. The sun started to set, and the sky above Morrowtown filled with crimson-and-orange clouds. The buildings, mostly two-and three-story sandstone structures, took on a particularly gloomy look in the dying daylight. Lights shone in some nearby windows. Freeman’s khaki-colored clothes looked gray in the growing darkness.

“How do you know Kline is hiding something?” I asked again.

“I’m not sure he is,” Freeman said. “I want to track him if he leaves town.”

“In case he goes to warn Crowley?” I asked.

Freeman did not answer.

“So that wasn’t a grenade? It was just a tracking device?” Suddenly Freeman seemed almost human. I laughed, remembering Kline’s terrified expression.

“No, that was a homemade grenade. I placed a radioactive tracking filament inside the glue.”

I did not see the point in gluing a grenade to Kline’s hand. I believed him when he said that he did not know anything.

Despite his lack of social skills, Freeman knew how to read people. Moments after we left the bar, Kline popped his head out of the door. He spotted us and jogged over, carefully cradling his left hand, the one with the grenade, as if he were holding an infant.

“You won’t leave Gobi?” Kline asked.

“Do you remember something?” I asked.

“No,” he said, shaking his head but never taking his eyes off Freeman.

“I’ll be at the base,” Freeman said in his rumbling voice.

Freeman turned and walked toward the truck. I followed. “Do you think he is a spy of some sort?” I asked quietly.

“I don’t trust him,” Freeman said.

Freeman and I did not speak to each other during the drive back to base, but the silence did not bother me this time. He sat very still, his eyes forming sharp slits as he surveyed the moonlit landscape. Perhaps I was slow. We were nearly back to Gobi Station before I realized that Freeman was looking for enemies. For all we knew, Crowley had an entire army on the planet, and he could easily ambush us on our way back to the fort. A lone soldier and a mercenary would not stand much of a chance in an ambush, but Freeman, well armed and always watchful, would not go down so easily. If we drove past any enemies that night, they did not make a move. Except for the hollow cry of distant lizards scurrying along some far-off dune, I never saw any signs of life. Gobi Station might have been the grandest building on the entire planet. Several times larger than any building in Morrowtown, the outpost had huge sandstone walls lined with columns and arches. A domed roof covered each corner of the structure. The first settlers on Gobi were probably Moslem—Gobi Station had a Moorish look about it. The outpost’s sturdy walls and thick ramparts made for a good fortress. The yellow light of our poorly powered lanterns poured out from the outpost’s arches and reflected on the gold-leafed domes. As we drove toward the motor pool, I felt warm relief in the pit of my stomach. We parked the truck, and I returned to my cell to sleep. Freeman headed toward Gutterwash Godfrey’s office. I suppose he wanted to report to Vice Admiral Brocius. Taj Guttman met me at the door of the barracks. At night, he wore a long, white robe that he cinched with a belt around his gelatinous stomach. The belt looked equatorial. “What happened in town?”

“Not much,” I said, pulling off my shirt. I walked into my cell hoping to get away from Guttman. He followed. Trying to ignore him, I dropped my pants.

“Did you find Crowley?”

“No, but Freeman made quite an impression on Kline. That Freeman is a real prick. He glued a grenade to Kline’s hand.”

“He what?” Guttman sounded shocked. He made a whistling noise. “So do you think I’m going to get in trouble?”

“I don’t think Freeman cares about you. I don’t think he cares about anybody. Just stay out of his way. You’ll be okay unless he decides to shoot you.”

CHAPTER THREE

Kline had a secret, and Freeman must have figured it out. Working with subtle clues that escaped my attention, Freeman pieced that secret together and shared it only with Admiral Brocius, leaving the rest of us unprepared.

Looking back, I should have seen it coming. A stockpile of military-grade weapons in a tiny garrison would be too easy a prize for a struggling army of traitors to ignore. Judging by Guttman and the other men who went into town, Crowley would expect little resistance if he attacked Gobi Station. Who knew how long he had had our base under surveillance. He had probably known our numbers, might even have been watching when Ray Freeman landed. Freeman’s arrival probably worked like a catalyst, spurring Crowley to act sooner than he had intended.

Freeman knew that someone like General Crowley would not come to a backwater planet like Gobi for no reason. If Crowley was here and weapons were here, Crowley undoubtedly wanted the weapons. Freeman didn’t share this useful information, however, because he had come on a bounty-hunting expedition and wanted to capture Crowley. If he had warned us, we would have prepared for the attack and Crowley would have seen us mounting guns and sending out patrols. He might have tried to flee the planet, and Freeman did not want that. Freeman had sized up the situation and decided to offer up my platoon as bait.

Crowley made his move the following morning. It started with a single explosion that shattered the silence and shook the desert like cracking thunder. The explosion came from the north side of the base, rattling the outpost’s massive walls.

I jumped from my bed and looked out a window in time to see the last remnants of an enormous fireball dissolving into the sunrise. The bomb had demolished Ray Freeman’s ship, cutting off our only escape route and destroying our only hope of air support.

Silence followed.

For the next ten seconds, the Gobi desert returned to its peaceful self. A burned red sunrise filled the horizon as the echo of the explosion rolled across the desert. I felt the last of the evening breeze through my window as I turned to throw on my armor. It took me less than thirty seconds to slip on my armor and helmet. I snapped the rifle stock on my M27 and exited my cell. Rickman came running from his cell and the others followed, including Taj Guttman, with his helmet stuck to the top of his head like a hat. Their armor still worked. The smart-lenses in my visor registered signals transmitted by the other Marines’ armor. When I looked at Rickman, Sarris, and Guttman, a computer in my helmet picked up signals from their armor and displayed their names and ranks in red letters. I heard several of the men asking questions over the interLink.

“What the hell was that?” Rickman shouted above the noise. Before I could tell Rickman about seeing the fireball, Sergeant Godfrey leaped down the stairs to join us.

“Everybody up top. Cover the entrances,” Godfrey yelled. He carried a particle-beam pistol in his hand and used it to point up the stairs. I could hear men hyperventilating as they ran up and realized that I was about to go to battle with men who no longer had soldiering in their blood. As we reached the top of the barracks, a rocket struck just outside the arched entrance. A cloud of dust and smoke filled the open-air hallway leading to the main gate.

“I see them,” one man shouted, firing wildly through an outer window. I looked over his shoulder, but did not see anything. Even when I scanned the area using the heat-vision lens in my visor, I saw nothing, though the smoke and flames from the explosion almost certainly distorted my view.

Switching back to standard combat vision, I peered through the thinning dust cloud. A ring of small fires still burned around the ten-meter-wide hole that the rocket had left in our walkway. Constructed of massive sandstone blocks, the outpost could withstand gunfire, but not rocket attacks. Looking at the jagged remains of the hall and hearing the chaotic chatter of the Marines around me, I did not feel scared or confused. I felt soothed. That must sound odd. It was the same feeling I have when I eat a favorite food or hear a familiar song. The world seemed to slow down, and my thoughts became clearer. It felt good. Everything around me was chaos, but I felt happy. It had never happened to me during the simulations back at the orphanage or during basic. If that was how it felt to be in a real combat situation, I didn’t mind it.

“Sarris, Mervin, Phillips. Secure the main hall.” Godfrey shouted orders over the interLink. Without so much as a moment’s hesitation, three Marines pulled their pistols and charged down that shattered hallway. Automatic fire struck Sarris as he left the cover of the barracks. The first shot banked off the back of his shoulder plates, spitting chips of armor. Two more shots struck his head, shattering his helmet and spraying blood and brains in the air. He twisted and fell to the ground. Mervin and Phillips ran past him and sprinted through a volley of bullets and laser fire.

“Harris, go with them,” Godfrey yelled.

Clones like Sarris reacted to orders by reflex, but I needed a moment. “Move out!” Godfrey shouted again, as I reached the door. I leaped over Sarris, landed on a layer of grit and debris, and slid, almost falling over. Bullets ricocheted off the walls around me. Clutching my gun close to my chest, I ran toward the crumbling ledge where the rocket had blasted through the walkway. A few feet ahead of me, Mervin lay on the ground beside the shredded wall. He had been shot in the head and part of his helmet and visor littered the ground around him. I saw the singed skin and one brown eye, crazy with fear, staring at me.

“Harris, what are you doing?” Godfrey snapped. “What are you waiting for?”

“Mervin’s alive,” I said.

Rockets had destroyed the promenade around Mervin. I could not get to him without exposing myself. Judging by the way they hit Sarris and Mervin, Crowley had a dead-eye-dick sniper out there. I dropped to my stomach and pulled myself forward.

“Forget Mervin,” Godfrey screamed. “I want that side of the base secured. Do you understand me?”

“I can get him out of here,” I said.

Someone shot at me. A slug passed just over my back and tore into the wall behind. Rubble showered my head and shoulders.

“I gave you an order,” Godfrey yelled.

Just then, I heard a hissing sound that I recognized at once. Rolling to one side, I hid behind a pile of rubble as a rocket slammed into the remains of the walkway about thirty feet ahead of me. My visor instantly polarized, shielding my eyes from the blinding flash.

Already weakened from the first blast, the breezeway collapsed. My armor protected me from shrapnel and flying fragments of sandstone as I fell amidst the rubble. I landed on my stomach, crushing the air out of my lungs.

“Harris. Harris!” Godfrey’s voice rang in my ears, but I could not suck enough air into my lungs to answer.

“Damn,” Godfrey said, but his grieving did not last long. “Phillips get to my office and contact Fleet Command. We need reinforcements, and now.” Why Godfrey would ask for reinforcements from a fleet that was thousands of light-years away was beyond me.

I rolled from side to side, trying to draw air in my lungs and find the strength to stand. My back ached. My chest burned. My helmet protected my head from damage, not from pain. As I squirmed to lie on my side, my vision cleared. I saw the words “Theo Mervin, Private, First Class” superimposed over the cloud of dust to my right. As the air settled, I saw a pile of blocks and shattered tiles. A long crossbeam that must have weighed multiple tons stuck out of the top of the pile at a nearly straight angle. The top of Mervin’s shattered helmet peeked out from beneath it.

The avalanche had dumped me in the courtyard. Kneeling, still dizzy from the blast and winded from the fall, I peered over the waist-high ruins of the outer wall. Increasing the magnification in my visor, I scanned the desert and saw four figures crouched along a distant ridge—three men in camouflaged fatigues and Kline, who had not changed out of his black-and-white card dealer’s outfit. He still had that grenade glued to his hand. Clearly, Kline had not come to fight. He came to scavenge. As Freeman had suspected, the grenade had worked like a catalyst, forcing Crowley to attack. If Kline had ever wondered whether or not to join forces with Crowley, Freeman’s grenade had surely made the decision for him. There he was, watching the action, hoping to find the key on Ray Freeman’s dead body and disarm the grenade.

“Harris?” Godfrey asked, likely having spotted me from a barracks window. “Harris, report.”

“Just a little shook up,” I said.

“Not your condition, you idiot,” Godfrey said. “What do you see?”

“I see some of them . . . Four of them, a hundred thirty yards out.” A tool in my visor measured the distance.

“There are three more a few yards to the east,” Ray Freeman interrupted.

“I don’t see . . . No, there they are. He’s right.” They wore sand-colored camouflage suits. Even after increasing the magnification in my visor, I did not know how Freeman had spotted them. There they were—Crowley and two other men standing around a table with a map and some kind of control console. Seeing the console explained a lot. Crowley hadn’t come with an army, he’d come with trackers—motion-tracking robots that registered movement in a designated area and fired at that movement with incredible accuracy. Shaped like a barber pole, with radar equipment crammed into the ball at the top, one of these single-task devices cost almost nothing to build and could be used to fire anything from pistols to rockets.

“He’s got trackers,” I called out to Godfrey. “I can’t see them, but I can see the control console.”

“He has six trackers,” said Freeman. “Four guarding the front wall of the base, one on the west, and one on the east.”

“You’re sure about that count?” I asked.

“Crowley has twenty men watching the west wall of the base,” Freeman continued, “and ten to the east.”

“Where are you, Freeman?” Godfrey asked. “Are you near the armory?”

Freeman did not answer.

“What is your position?” Godfrey repeated. What he should have asked was how the hell Freeman had tapped into our communications. The interLink was supposedly secure from civilian interference. Freeman did not care about Gobi Station, defending the Republic, or protecting its Marines. Wherever he had hidden himself, he did not plan to go down with a platoon of clones. He was, after all, a mercenary, not a soldier. As far as I could tell, the only things he cared about were staying alive and capturing Crowley.

“Dammit! Where are you, Freeman?” Godfrey demanded.

Freeman said nothing.

“Do you have a clean shot at them?” Godfrey asked.

Still no answer.

I started to shuffle along the wall to get a better look at Crowley’s position.

“Do not move, Harris,” Freeman said.

“I see movement out the main gate,” Rickman broke in.

Peering over the wall, I saw three Marines run toward a heap of rocks and dive behind it. They moved so quickly that I did not have a chance to scan their names. Two of the men took cover behind the massive front arch of the outpost and fired. They fired six quick shots, to which Crowley’s men responded with a token spray of automatic fire.

“What the hell are you doing?” I screamed into the interLink. The arch would offer protection from bullets, but a particle beam or a rocket would reduce it to rubble.

“Get your men out of there,” Freeman said. But he was too late. The top of a tracker popped up from behind a sand dune; and before anyone could react, two rockets came flying toward the arch. At first I only saw the contrails, then a bright flash bleached the air around the arch where the men were hiding. The entire desert rumbled with reverberation. Rock chips and large chunks of pillars flew across the courtyard. A fist-sized stone struck my helmet. Adding to the cacophony, the domed roof of the main hall caved in. As the smoke and dust cleared, the jagged remains of the arch poked out of the ground in haphazard spikes. The rockets had destroyed the entrance and much of the main hall. From where I stood, I could look directly into Glan Godfrey’s office. A huge block had fallen from the roof and crushed his desk, and I saw no sign of the communications console, our link to the outside world. Godfrey tried to raise Rickman and Phillips on his interLink, but no one responded.

“Harris, get to the armory,” Godfrey said.

The armory was in the far corner of the base, just beyond the office. That last rocket had smashed most of the building, but the doorway to the armory remained standing. I started across the courtyard, cutting through the shallow edges around the stagnant pond area of the courtyard.

“Harris, stop,” Freeman’s voice shouted through the audio piece in my helmet. “Those trackers have you. Check for scanners with your radar sensors.”

For a civilian, Ray Freeman seemed to have an incredible amount of information about Marine Corp combat armor. Our helmets included a sensor warning system that detected radar devices. I should have switched on the sensor the moment I knew there were trackers outside the wall. I ran the scan and froze in midstep, still standing in the shallows of that polluted brackish pond. A blue ring appeared around the edges of my visor as the sensor kicked in. The ring remained blue for a moment, then turned yellow, then orange. The trackers were bathing the courtyard with radar, and they could only be looking for me. If the ring in my visor turned red, it meant that the sensors had fixed on my location. Orange meant they had detected me, but I had stopped moving before they could fire. A strong wind blew across the courtyard, shaking some reeds, and the ring around my visor turned yellow momentarily as the trackers homed in on the reeds. I dropped to the ground and felt my knees sink into the mud. My only hope was that the trackers would not notice me.

Moments passed slowly. In the air-conditioned comfort of my helmet, I felt both an odd elation and fear. Large drops of sweat rolled down the sides of my face, but kneeling in the mud and the reeds with trackers searching to find me, I felt strangely relaxed. I listened for the hiss of incoming rockets as the seconds passed and the ring in my visor fluctuated from yellow to orange and back to yellow again. It never turned blue or red.

“Harris, get to the armory,” Godfrey yelled.

“Crowley doesn’t care about the armory,” Freeman said. “He wants the barracks.” And Godfrey must have understood. Crowley wanted to keep the platoon bottled up in one place where he could hit it without risk of destroying the weapons he had come to steal.

“We need to attack,” Freeman said.

“Are you insane?” Godfrey asked. “Harris, either get to the armory or get your ass back to the barracks.”

They haven’t located Freeman and they have me pinned down in the courtyard, I thought as I peered out through the reeds. Everybody else is right where Crowley wants them.

“Godfrey, you can’t hide in the barracks,” Freeman said. “You’re playing into his hands.”

“Harris, get over here,” Godfrey ordered. “We’ll cover you.”

“Freeman, got any suggestions?” I asked.

Enemies around the west and north walls fired into the courtyard. Poorly aimed, possibly not aimed at all, their bullets chipped into the sandstone wall, making sparks and dust. They must have been hoping to coax me into running back to the barracks or returning fire.

“Make a break for the northeast corner,” Freeman said.

I looked across the yard toward the northeast corner of the outpost—the nearly disintegrated northeast corner where Rickman and Phillips had made their stand. The rockets had destroyed Phillips so thoroughly that his armor did not even register. “You’re shitting me, right?” I asked, as I squeezed the rifle stock against my chest and prepared to run.

“I’ll take care of the trackers,” Freeman answered.

“You have a shot at them?” I asked. Even as I spoke, someone fired a spray of bullets along the wall behind me.

“Are you listening, Harris?” Godfrey piped in. “Get your ass over here.”

“Leave them to me,” Freeman said. “Move on the count of three.”

“Got it,” I said.

“It’s your court-martial,” Godfrey said.

“Get specked,” I answered.

“One.”

Some kind of strange creature shot into the air along the southeast corner of the outpost. I did not see it clearly, but it looked something like a giant flying snake as it jumped nearly thirty feet in the air, then darted behind a wall.

“Two.”

Whatever Freeman had unleashed, it distracted the trackers. The ring around my visors went blue. I heard the hiss of rockets, but they flew well over my head and slammed into a wall along the back of the courtyard. In the wake of the explosion, a large rock slammed across the top of my helmet, almost knocking me senseless.

Three.

I did not hear Freeman count that last number. The impact of the rock hitting my helmet must have disabled my interLink circuit. In the echoing silence, I climbed to my feet and sprinted. Ahead of me, I saw Freeman leap to the top of a huge pile of rubble. He fired a grenade launcher toward the trackers, turned, then slid back down the mound for cover as men outside the outpost answered him with a hail of bullets. The shock wave of Freeman’s grenade knocked me slightly off course. No one fired at me, and the sensor rings in my helmet remained blue. I dived headlong and joined him behind the rubble.

“Crowley has already left,” Freeman said, as I sat up and pulled off my helmet.

“How do you know?” Using my rifle stock as a crutch, I pushed myself up and peered over the rubble. I saw nothing but open desert.

Freeman handed me a palm-top computer display that showed Gobi Station and the surrounding landscape. Freeman had either established a link with some satellite tracking our area or placed cameras around the outside of the base. The northern and western walls were ruins. The display showed people as small white ovals.

“You placed sensors?”

“Two days ago,” Freeman said.

“You only flew in yesterday morning,” I said.

“Don’t you ever wake up?” Freeman asked. “I’ve been on this damned planet for three days now . . . came quietly with a second ship in tow. The one they hit was a decoy; my real ship is down there,”

Freeman said, nodding toward the canyon behind our base. “I can take you in the hold as far as the next outpost.”

“I can’t leave Gobi,” I said.

“Have it your way.” Freeman laughed and flashed a toothy smile. “Don’t suppose you would cover me while I make a run for my ship.”

“I suppose not,” I said.

“The ship has missiles and a chain gun,” Freeman said. “Help me get to my ship, and I’ll fix this.”

“I don’t trust you,” I said. I tried to peer around the rubble to get a look at the enemy. Somebody fired a wild shot that hit several feet wide of me.

“They’re moving south. They will leave a few men to keep us pinned down while the rest of their force flanks the barracks,” Freeman said, pointing at his display. “Godfrey could take them if he had any brains.”

“He won’t,” I agreed.

A small trickle of blood ran down the side of Freeman’s bald head. He didn’t bother with helmets or battle gear other than the chestplate that was built into his fatigues. He placed one foot on a partially destroyed sandstone block and unloaded the grenade launcher he kept slung over his shoulder. He must have known that I did not trust him, but he also knew that I was trapped. I could either help him escape or pull him down with me.

“What do you have in mind?” I asked.

“They’re gathering around the barracks.” Freeman handed me his computer. Even as I watched, the little ovals representing Crowley’s men moved toward the ridges along the barracks. “You storm them here, and I’ll go get the ship.”

“There are five men there,” I pointed out.

Freeman took back his palm display and said nothing.

“Take out five men armed with a pistol?”

“How busted is your helmet?” Freeman asked.

“The sound is out,” I said.

“Does the polarizing lens still work?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said placing the helmet over my head. The nonfunctioning interLink turned the inside of my helmet into an echo chamber. Using a few optical commands, I ran a diagnostic. “It works,” I said, removing the helmet again.

No sooner had I said this than the strange flying animal that had distracted the trackers popped up from behind the far wall of the base. It skirted the top of the wall and dropped to the ground, traveling through the swamp and reeds. Only it wasn’t an animal. It was a service drone that Freeman controlled with a small remote.

Dragging a ten-foot train of shimmering brown cloth behind it, the drone snaked toward us and stopped. Freeman unclipped the thermal blanket he had tied around it and attached a thin silver disc. “You’ll want to cover your eyes in a moment,” Freeman said.

Replacing my helmet, I watched the little drone pick its way through the debris that had once been the outpost’s massive front wall. The drone zigged around broken pillars and scrambled through a large pipe. It disappeared behind the wall, but I could still see it on Freeman’s readout as it approached the terrorists’ bunker.

If Crowley’s men saw it coming, they didn’t seem to care. When the drone got within fifty feet of their location, the little sphere exploded in a chemical flash so bright that it drowned out the desert sun.

“Go!” Freeman yelled, and he slapped my helmet to make sure that I had heard him. Even looking through polarizing lenses, I could barely see. The Gobi landscape looked faded and white. I felt as if I had been staring into the sun. Running half-blind, I did not see the knee-high ridge left from the broken wall. The toe of my boot jammed into the remains of a heavy sandstone block, and I lurched forward but managed to regain my balance without falling.

Over the top of the sand dune I saw three of Crowley’s men squirming on the ground rubbing their eyes with both hands. One of the men heard me coming and patted the ground around him until he found a gun. He squinted as he aimed at the sound of my footfalls. I squeezed off two rounds hitting him in the face and chest. One of his friends screamed, “What happened?” I shot him and the other man. Two of Crowley’s soldiers had seen the drone coming and shielded their eyes at the last moment. They had sprung from their hiding place and chased Ray Freeman as he ran toward his ship. Taking less than a second to aim, I hit one of them in the shoulder from over a hundred yards away. He spun and fell. His friend skidded to a stop and turned to look for me. I fired a shot, hitting him in the face. Freeman’s ship must not have been hidden very far away. Moments after he disappeared over the edge of the canyon, a small spaceworthy flier that looked like a cross between a bomber and transport rose into the air. Unlike the barge that Freeman had used as a decoy, the ship was immaculate, with rows of dull white armor lining its bulky, oblong hull. Gun and missile arrays studded its wings. From where I stood, I had a clear view of the cockpit, but the glass was mirror-tinted and I could not see in. The ship hovered over me for a few moments, then launched across the desert in the direction of Morrowtown. At first I thought Freeman had abandoned the base, but then he doubled back toward the barracks. I could see some of the guns along the wings glinting as I ran to view the fight. There was no hurry, however. Crowley’s men were not prepared to fight a ship like Freeman’s. Its titanium-barreled chain guns made one continuous flash as they spent hundreds of bullets per second. Some of the guerillas tried to escape, but there was no escape, not from Freeman. Two men lunged into an armored truck. Before they could get the vehicle moving, he fired a missile that reduced it to flames and twisted metal. Freeman sprayed a dune with that chain gun, churning up sprays of blood and sand. When he finished, shreds of smoldering cloth floated in the air like autumn leaves. The only man left standing was Kline.

“Bastards!” Kline shrieked in his thick accent as I approached him. “You bastards! Are you going to kill me, too?”

Kline still cradled the grenade with both hands. His clothes were spattered and dripping with blood, none of it his own. He looked down at the pulverized remains of his allies. “Oh . . . goddamn . . .” he muttered. Freeman hovered over the dune and landed his ship in a rippling heat cloud. He climbed out and came over to inspect his work. In the distance, Godfrey emerged from the barracks and started toward us. Freeman stared at Kline with disgust. “Go,” he said.

Kline looked down at his hand, then held the grenade out for Freeman. “Please?”

“Keep it,” Freeman said. He turned his back on Kline and walked away. Kline cradled the grenade against his chest as he staggered into the desert. I didn’t know if he would die of thirst or be blown to pieces, and I tried not to care. That useless moron had tried to sell my platoon for the slaughter, I told myself. But when he paused and looked back in what seemed like a plea for help, I felt a sharp pang of guilt. A moment later, he disappeared over a dune.

Any sympathy I might have felt for Kline disappeared when Godfrey uncovered a stockpile of gas canisters. Hoping to kill the platoon and leave the weapons intact, Crowley had brought three canisters of Noxium gas. Once he’d herded the Marines back into the barracks, he must have planned to fire the canisters into the building.

Readily available around the territories, Noxium acted like a gas, but it was really a microscopic life-form that was stored and used like lethal gas. It was really a swarm of particle-sized organisms that attacked living tissue. Upon release from a vacuum canister, the creatures would bore into anything that breathed. They were small enough to slip through combat armor and chew through flesh so quickly that it seemed to dissolve in their wake. Terrorists liked Noxium gas because it was cheap, easily stored, and cruel.

Admiral Brocius never came to Gobi, but he sent an envoy, Captain James Troy. Troy, with a small army, landed three days after the action ended. He sent troops to search Morrowtown, but he personally never left the safety of his ship.

One at a time, Troy called us all into his ship for ten-minute debriefings. He met with Glan Godfrey first, then detained him as he met with the other survivors. Freeman and I were the last men called in. I walked over to where he was standing, and said, “You’re going to be a hero, Freeman. You saved a platoon.”

He smiled for a moment. It was the first time I had seen any emotion from him. “It won’t come down like that. All Brocius cares about is that Crowley got away.”

Godfrey appeared in the door of the ship wearing his faded uniform. He must have lost a lot of weight in his years on Gobi; you could not even see the shapes of his legs in his pants. “Think they’ll leave him in charge?” I asked Freeman.

“Probably,” Freeman croaked in that low rumbling voice. “After Gobi, life in a military prison would be a promotion.”

“How about me?” I asked.

“You’ll be the hero,” Freeman said, with a bitter edge in his voice. “They don’t want to talk about some mercenary saving the day. Harris, you never belonged on this planet in the first place. There are people watching over you.”

I started to ask what that meant, but Godfrey called us over. He led us into Troy’s flagship. Freeman had not dressed for the occasion. He wore the same ugly jumpsuit. I suspected he would wear those clothes if he were invited to meet with God. As for me, I wore the Charley Service uniform I had worn when I first landed on Gobi. Except for some nicks from the fireworks, I looked precisely as I had when I landed on that godforsaken planet.

Troy sat behind a large black desk that shone like a mirror. The Cygnus Fleet seal hung on the wall behind him, just above a cluster of flags. He did not stand as we entered, but studied us with indifference.

“You are the mercenary?” he asked. “Freeman, is it?”

Freeman nodded.

“I suppose you expect payment,” Troy said. “As I understand it, you were hired to capture Amos Crowley.”

Freeman said nothing. His face betrayed no emotion.

“Sergeant Godfrey says you routed the terrorists,” Troy said. He glared back at Godfrey, who looked quite pale. “I can’t imagine why we would pay you good money for saving this sorry pack. As I understand it, Admiral Brocius offered you twenty-five thousand dollars for capturing Crowley. You may continue your manhunt.”

Freeman did not say anything.

By that time, I had a good idea about how Freeman’s mind worked. The captain undoubtedly angered him, but Freeman would never give him the satisfaction of seeing that anger. Troy leaned back in his chair. “You are dismissed, Freeman.”

Freeman turned and left without a word. Standing at attention, I could not turn to watch him leave. I listened to his heavy boots as he trudged toward the boarding ramp. The room seemed to become cooler once Freeman left.

Troy turned to me, then pulled a piece of paper from his desk. After studying his notes, he said, “And you are?”

“PFC Harris, sir,” I said.

“Harris. I understand that you are the only man on this planet who knows his ass from his knees. Sergeant Godfrey said that you ignored orders that would have resulted in the deaths of every man in the platoon. You are hereby promoted to the rank of corporal. I recommended giving you command of Gobi Station, but Admiral Brocius wants you transferred out.”

Years later I had the chance to read my record and discovered that my promotion was based on misinformation. Whether he did it on purpose or he just did not know differently, Troy exaggerated my role in the battle. He said that I rushed an enemy gun emplacement, which was true, but he neglected to mention Freeman’s role in the assault.

CHAPTER FOUR

Unified Authority society was based on two documents—the U.S. Constitution and the third book of Plato’s Republic . Two strata of U.A. society, the ruling class and the citizenry, resembled life in the old United States. The third layer, “the military class,” was taken from Plato’s three-tiered society of rulers, warriors, and citizens.

The Unified Authority’s government was a synthesis. The U.S. Constitution called for a three-branch representative government with an executive branch, a judicial branch, and a legislative branch. The framers of the U.A. Constitution kept the judicial branch of the former United States intact, swallowing it whole into their government without a single alteration. The political branches, however, were greatly altered. Plato, that ancient sage, considered democracy little more than rule by a mob and blamed it for the death of Socrates, his mentor. That view suited the designers of the United Authority, who, having conquered the rest of the globe, did not relish giving every citizen an equal voice. In the U.A.’s case, thesis and antithesis merged to create a plutocracy.

In a nod to tradition, the Unified Authority retained its capital along the eastern seaboard of the former United States. It was the seat of all galactic politics and the home of all three branches of the federal government. It was also the home of the only voters that carried any authority. With it was the concession that progovernment historians might one day call “the great compromise” and the opponents “the beginnings of tyranny.”

The Senate, clearly the most powerful political body in the Unified Authority, was not composed of members who were elected by popular vote. The House of Representatives, a far less powerful assembly, was. Analysts referred to the two chambers of the legislative branch as “the power and the politics.” “The politics” was the House of Representatives, an odd assembly of legislators who truly represented their constituents back in the frontier worlds. “The power” was the Senate, an august body of lawmakers who had grown up among the population that Plato would have referred to as “the ruling class,” the elite population of Washington, DC. Senators were not elected, they were appointed by the Linear Committee—which was the executive branch of the government. New senators were selected from a pool of well-groomed tenth-generation politicians living in the capital city—men and women who had attended elite schools.

The executive branch of the government was even more select. Called the “Linear Committee,” this branch was made up of five senior senators. Analysts complained about the exclusive nature of this particular club. Looking back, I would have to agree. Only the Linear Committee could appoint new senators, and the Senate chose the members of the Linear Committee from among its ranks. I once read an article in which an author called the system “Royalty Reborn!” In that same article, she proclaimed,

“America has finally attained a royal class.” I do not know who that author writes for, but I have never seen her writings again.

In theory, the Senate ruled the Republic and the House was filled with figureheads. In truth, the House enjoyed so much popular support from the frontier states that a clever congressman could cause havoc. Looking back, I can see why the Senate was so unpopular. The galactic seat was benevolent, so long as the member states did not openly challenge it. The individual planets could govern themselves as they wished, set up whatever sort of economies and industries they wished, and even create their own militias. What they could not do was break ranks from the Union. Any hint of sedition was dealt with harshly. As long as member states were seen as loyal to the capital, they had nothing to fear. Along with the ruling class, Earth was home to the “warrior class.” Washington eyed the growing power of the military with a wary eye; but as the Republic pushed deeper into the galaxy, Congress needed a strong arm to maintain order and protect the territories from external threats. Synthetic soldiers were deemed both more manageable and expendable than natural men, so Congress opted for an army of carefully engineered clones. That lent itself well to Plato’s view of the military as a class of persons who would never know any life other than that of a soldier.

I think Plato would have approved of neural programming had it existed in his day. Through neural programming, U.A. scientists implanted algorithms into their soldiers’ brains like code on a computer chip. Generals and politicians collaborated on the cloning project, hammering out the perfect specimen—soldiers who respected authority and who were strong, patriotic, and ignorant of their origins. Once Congress and the Joint Chiefs had a mix they liked, they set the oven to mass production, cranking out an average of 1.2 million new fighting men every year. Of course, the soldiers did not come out of the vat fully formed. They needed to be raised, formed in the U.A. military’s own image, and indoctrinated with the belief that God charged man to rule the galaxy.

Earth became the military-processing center, home to six hundred all-male orphanages, each of which graduated nearly two thousand combat-ready orphans per year. The orphanages were little more than clone incubators, though real orphans, like me, were sometimes brought in from the frontier. We were the flatfoots, the conscripts. No clone or orphan ever reached officer status. The most we could hope for was sergeant. With the exception of some natural-born implants from frontier families, officers came from the ruling class. Children of politicians who did poorly in school or lacked

“refinement” were shunted off to Officer Training School in Australia, a land that was originally settled as a penal colony. How ironic.

With three days of liberty before my transfer to the Scutum-Crux Fleet, I decided to visit the only home I’d ever known—Unified Authority Orphanage #553. That may sound dull or sentimental . . . maybe it was. I did not understand the concept of vacationing. They did not explain the concept to us in the orphanage or in basic. So with a few free days and a new promotion, I decided to go home and show the second triangle over my shoulder off to my instructors.

Located deep in the Olympic Mountains near North America’s northwest coast, #553 sat between evergreen forests and a major waterway known as the Straits of Juan de Fuca. My home was a brick-and-steel campus with a five-acre firing range, a dome-covered parade ground, and a white picket fence. It was there that I spent my youth drilling, playing, and never wondering why my classmates all looked alike.

An “entrance by permit” sign hung over the main gate of the orphanage. I ran my identity card through a reader and the automatic gate slid open, revealing the long dirt road that led to the school. This was the veil, the hedge that separated the boys from the world. The ancients thought the world was flat, and the boys of #553 thought it ended outside the automatic gate.

Walking along the road, avoiding puddles, and surveying the woods, I let my mind wander until I reached the campus itself. In the distance, I saw dormitory buildings. Home. The road stopped at the door of the administrative area—a complex of red brick buildings surrounded by a beautiful meadow. Five-and six-year-old kids, all boys and all with the same broad face and brown hair, wrestled on the wet grass. The government maintained orphanages for girls, but they were on frontier planets. Two boys paused to stare at me as I opened the gate. They studied my uniform, noting that I had two stripes on my sleeve, not just the single stripe of a private. “Are you a Marine?” one of the boys asked in an almost worshipful tone. He knew the answer. Clone orphans learn uniforms and insignia in kindergarten.

I nodded.

“Whoa!” Both boys sighed.

I walked past them and entered the administration building. Nothing had changed at UAO #553 in the six months since my graduation. The windows sparkled, the walkways shone, the endless parade of slugs still clung to the walls. Groundskeepers squished them, poisoned them, and powdered them with salt; but still they came back, clinging to the brick like six-inch scars.

I walked past the administrative offices, down a hall past several instructional buildings, and past the cafeteria. None of those buildings interested me. I did not miss my math teachers or the counselors who held me hostage when I misbehaved. After passing the administrative building, I stepped onto the walkway that led past obstacle courses. Rifles crackled in the distance. A squad of students dressed in red athletic shorts and blue T-shirts ran across my path. Judging by their size, the boys may have been in their freshman year—fourteen years old and dying to leave the orphanage and begin boot camp. In another few years, they would report to the military induction center in Salt Lake City, where life really began.

Across a sloping hill, a squad of seniors entered the obstacle course. I knew their age because only seniors ran the course wearing combat armor. They needed it. I watched them scale walls, belly-crawl under electrical wiring, and fly across gullies using jetpacks. A line of instructors fired M27s with rubber bullets at the boys as they drilled. Armor or no armor, the bullets left inch-wide bruises wherever they hit. They would knock you senseless if they hit your helmet.

As I watched, an instructor shot down one of his boys. The kid’s arms fell limp, and his jetpack cut off as he flopped to the ground like a wet towel. The instructors ignored him and started firing at other students. The boy would survive, but he would have a ringing in his ears for the rest of the day. Like every other kid at UAO #553, I had been nailed dozens of times.

After watching two more boys get shot down, I continued toward the Tactical Training Building. Located at the far end of the campus, the TT building looked like a two-story warehouse or possibly an aircraft hangar. The building had no windows, just double-wide steel doors. Some teachers called it “the shed.”

You could not survive #553 without a mentor. Mine was Aleg Oberland—the man in charge of the Tactical Training simulations. Most cadets preferred the strapping sadists who ran the obstacle course—former enlisted men with frontline experience, battle scars, medals, and colorful stories. Oberland was the only retired officer on the teaching staff. He fought in historic campaigns—the kinds of wars that historians argue over, but he never talked about his time on the line. He was six inches shorter than the other teachers and twenty years older. He had white hair that he kept in a thinning flattop. Most people thought of him as old and sullen, but they did not see what I did. What Oberland showed us was magic.

Oberland drilled juniors and seniors with holographic combat situations. His labs looked empty when you entered; but the moment you put on your combat visor, you would find yourself in a vivid and three-dimensional battle in a desert or on an enemy ship. Lasers in our visors projected the scenery into our eyes, painting it on our retinas, and Oberland had simulations of everything from territorial invasions to ship-to-ship combat. He even had programs simulating attacks on Washington, DC. As I entered the dark front hall of the TT building I smelled the moldy air-conditioning, and my head filled with memories of the fear and rumors the building had inspired. Students were not allowed to enter the TT building until they turned ten, and even then, they only attended lectures on the top floor. We heard stories about what happened in the basement, but they were all false. Only students in their last two years at the orphanage could enter simulations labs, and they were not allowed to talk about it. A spiral stairwell in the back of the building ran from the basement to the second floor. I squeezed down the stairs, brushing by dozens of students who stopped to admire my uniform. The stairs ended just outside Oberland’s classroom. Glad to be back, I opened the door and went in. Class must have ended just as I arrived. A crowd of students came up the steps and passed me while a few stragglers milled around their seats. Oberland stood on a dais at the bottom of the theater shuffling papers as I approached. He turned toward me as I came down the stairs. First he looked at my uniform, then he looked at my face. He squinted, and a flicker of recognition crossed his eyes, and his normal frown melted into a smile. “Harris?”

“Hello, Mr. Oberland,” I said.

Oberland’s gaze kept slipping toward my sleeve. “You’re a corporal?” He looked up toward the ceiling as he did the math in his head. “You’ve only been gone for six months.”

“A bit less than that,” I said. “It’s a long story.”

“I just finished my last class for the day,” Oberland said as he gathered his books and notes. “And I like long stories. Maybe we can talk about it over dinner.”

“In the teachers’ mess?” I asked.

“Unless you know someplace else.” He stole another glance at my stripes as if to check if they were real.

“What are you doing here?”

We started up the stairs. The last boys in the class ran past us. Oberland scowled at them.

“You haven’t changed much,” I said.

“I learned an important lesson in the Army, Wayson,” Oberland said, in his usual gruff voice. “Just because people smile at you doesn’t mean that they like you.” He looked back down the hall. “I didn’t come to #553 to make friends.”

I thought about Amos Crowley. He had made friendly banter even as he rigged Guttman’s gun to explode. “I know what you mean.”

We went to the faculty cafeteria, a café-style eatery with square tables and an open buffet line. Though we were early, a few other teachers had already arrived. Oberland placed his books on a table and headed for the food. There were more than one dozen dishes to choose from—casseroles, soups, roast chicken, and salads. There was a dessert bar with fruit, cakes, and chocolates. “I didn’t know you teachers ate so well,” I said.

“We don’t,” Oberland said. “It isn’t Earth-grown.” Supposedly, Earth-grown meats and vegetables tasted better than foods grown on the frontier. Military chow and school food were made with Earth-grown ingredients, but I hadn’t noticed much of a difference. From what I could tell, turnips were turnips and it didn’t matter where they came from, they still tasted like shit. All of that Earth-grown hype was pure propaganda.

I slopped a scoop of beef casserole onto my plate, knowing it would taste better than the vacuum-packed Earth-grown MRE chow I ate on Gobi. I took a chicken breast and green salad.

“I just got my first transfer,” I said as I placed my tray on the table.

“Transferred already?” Oberland sounded concerned. He sat across the table. “You can’t have been at your last assignment for more than a few months.”

“Four months,” I said. “Have you ever heard of Gobi?”

Oberland thought for a moment. “Never heard of it, but that doesn’t mean much. It’s a big galaxy.” He paused, and added, “Nice place?”

“Beautiful skies,” I said, “a dilapidated base, and toxic water for drinking. Gobi Station is the Marine Corps’ smallest outpost. Forty-one grunts stuck in the middle of nowhere. That was my first assignment.”

“That sounds like the kind of place they leave you until you die,” Oberland said, with a low whistle.

“I think that might have been the plan,” I said, “but we saw some unexpected action. A band of malcontents led by a former general attacked our outpost.”

“Was the general named Amos Crowley?” Oberland asked.

I nodded. “How do you know Crowley?” I asked.

“I served under Crowley,” Oberland said. “You know about him, don’t you?”

I shook my head.

“Amos Crowley was a brilliant officer.”

“I don’t know about brilliant, but he damned near wiped out Gobi Station. He would have taken us if it had not been for Freeman.”

“Freeman?” Oberland asked.

“Ray Freeman, a mercenary. Cygnus Command sent him when we reported seeing Crowley.”

Oberland’s expression went flat, and he rubbed his chin. “A mercenary saved your platoon? Please tell me you’re kidding.”

I could feel tension welling up in my gut. “You never saw Marines like the ones on Gobi,” I said, hating the defensive tone in my voice. “Men with long hair, men walking around without helmets . . . One of our guys was so fat he could not pull his helmet over his head. There was no discipline.”

Oberland leaned forward, and whispered, “Were they clones?”

I nodded.

“I didn’t know that could happen with clones.”

“Mr. Oberland, these guys were on permanent R and R. They practically lived in the nearest town.”

“Okay, so the mercenary saved the day. Why were you promoted?”

“‘Meritorious service,’” I said. “I helped Freeman while the rest of the platoon hid in the barracks.”

Oberland smiled. “And you got a promotion and a transfer?”

“The transfer was the best part. I’ve been assigned to the Scutum-Crux Fleet, a fighter carrier called the Kamehameha .”

“The Kamehameha ? Not bad, Harris.” He nodded. “That’s Bryce Klyber’s ship. He’s got to be the most powerful man in the military today.”

“He’s not one of the Joint Chiefs?” I said. I would have known his name if he was one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“Oh no, no, no.” Oberland shook his head. “That would be Fleet Admiral Klyber to you, and he is much more powerful than the Joint Chiefs. They’re just appointees; Klyber has friends and family on Capitol Hill. There are some interesting political goings-on in Scutum-Crux. One of the planets was just hauled before the Senate.”

I shook my head. “Galactic news didn’t seem all that important back on Gobi. Nothing ever happened there, and nothing that happened anywhere else mattered there.”

“That’s what they told you when you got there?” Oberland asked.

“That’s what they told me.”

“And you still believe them?” Oberland’s smile turned acid. “Wayson, a renegade general from a different arm of the galaxy showed up on your planet and tried to blow up your base.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess so.”

“You might have known who he was if you kept up with events, Wayson. You’re going to be on the flagship carrier of the Scutum-Crux Fleet. Everything you do will have consequences.”

“And Klyber?” I asked, wanting to change the subject from my own shortcomings. Oberland leaned forward as if he wanted to whisper a secret, then spoke in a normal voice. “Admiral Klyber is the most connected man in the Navy. Perform a little meritorious service under his command, and you may be the first enlisted man to earn a commission.”

CHAPTER FIVE

On my last day of leave, I flew from Seattle to Salt Lake City, then took a military shuttle to Mars. Possibly the single most commercial spot in the universe, the Mars way station was not a colony but a conglomeration of stores, transport facilities, and dormitories. The first building constructed away from Earth, the ever-changing structure was always under renovation but never fully modernized—a sprawling structure with a gigantic military base and a civilian port filled with restaurants, shops, and overnight hotels. It was the Unified Authority’s gateway to the galaxy.

I cut through the crowds and reported for duty at the military transfers’ desk. A young corporal reviewed my orders and passed me through to a gate where I spent another two hours sitting around before boarding the long-distance transport that would take me to the Central Scutum-Crux Fleet.

All flights out of the Sol System passed through the broadcast station orbiting Mars. We had barely cleared the atmosphere when the “prepare for jump” sign flashed over the passenger compartment. Tint shields formed over the windows, but they only muffled the glare shining off the two gigantic elliptical discs that formed the broadcast station. The discs looked like giant mirrors; they were more than one mile across. Ships did not enter the discs, they merely approached and lowered their shields. The jagged electrical stream pouring out of the mirrors was so bright that glancing at it could blind you for life. Though sending ships through the broadcast system cost nothing, keeping the discs powered was expensive. Private citizens paid a fifty-dollar-per-cubic-yard toll for entering the broadcast system. Corporations got lower rates when shipping products. Navy ships and government transports passed for free. A team of accountants probably spent their entire careers transferring funds to cover fleet movements.

The pilots cut the engines as we approached the broadcast discs. Our ship slowed to a glide while a silvery red laser scanned the outside of the ship, verifying our registration and checking for hazardous substances and weapons. The pilot said, “Prepare to jump,” over the speaker system, and the sending disc, the one that translated ships into impulses and transmitted them, splashed its blue-white lightning against our hull. The air in the cabin began to crackle, and the electricity made my clothes conform to my body as if doused with water. Pressing my face against the tinted window for a better look, I got a quick glance of the orbital Army post guarding the disc before we flashed into the Sagittarius Arm. The Unified Authority took broadcast station security very seriously, especially Mars Station security. Three F-19 Falcon fighters from the Air Force’s Mars base patrolled the reception disc at all times and long-range cannons guarded the area from the surface of nearby moons. Lights illuminated every inch of the discs and the posts that guarded them. If there were some way to light space itself, I think the area around the disc station would have been lit.

It took us five minutes to travel the five hundred miles from the surface of Mars to the broadcast discs, and less than one second to travel nearly ten thousand light-years to the Sagittarius Arm. My trip from the Sagittarius Arm to the Scutum-Crux Arm took less than five seconds—just long enough for the transport to materialize and glide from the receiving disc to the transmission disc of the next station. Using the broadcast corridor, you could travel from one galactic arm to the next in a matter of moments. Traveling within that arm to your final destination could take weeks.

The network did not rely on wormholes or black holes or any other natural phenomenon, it was purely devised by man. Sending discs emitted some kind of energy wave that absorbed matter and waves as they approached. The disc would simply communicate everything it translated to a receiving disc, where it could be turned back into its original form.

In theory, the disc orbiting Mars could have broadcast us to a disc near SC Command, but interLinking the galaxy would compromise Sol System security. To control broadcast traffic and prevent invaders from tapping into their system, U.A. engineers designed the broadcast corridor in a linear fashion. The Mars disc would only accept transmissions from four transmission discs—the two closest discs in the Orion Arm and the interarm transmitters in the Sagittarius and Perseus Arms. Transmissions from unknown sources were deflected into space and never materialized again.

Our final jump placed us in the center of Scutum-Crux, a mere 500 million miles from Command headquarters. Once away from the discs, most military vehicles were required to travel at a standard 30

million miles per hour. That meant approximately seventeen hours of flying time. Most of the other passengers on the ship were officers who chatted quietly among themselves. A corporal sat splayed across several seats in the row across the aisle from where I sat. I had seen him get on. He stowed his bags, dropped into his seat, and passed out, for all intents and purposes. I did not know if he was drunk or hungover, but he was dead to the world.

With nothing better to do, I decided to follow Aleg Oberland’s advice and browsed the latest news broadcasts. I clipped on a pair of mediaLink shades and tapped the power button beside the right lens. MediaLinks let you browse the news, send letters, or place calls. They were the basis of civilian communications, but their signal could not be secured. Enemies could tape them or jam them in combat. The shades worked very much like the visual controls in my combat helmet. Selecting topics and scrolling through menus by twitching my eye, I began searching for the Senate hearings that Oberland told me about. I selected the “News and Information” option rather than “Entertainment Programming” or

“Correspondence.” A menu appeared offering “Pangalactic Highlights,” “Local News,” “Sports,”

“Entertainment News,” and “Business.” I chose Local News for Scutum-Crux. Stereophonic speakers along the sides of the shades rumbled a businesslike tune as two newscasters discussed big stories around Scutum-Crux, a backwater arm politically, with important strategic implications. The first story involved a planet called Ezer Kri sending a delegation to Washington to meet with the Senate.

At first glance, I thought I must have tapped into the wrong story. This was not about a planet that wanted to break from the Republic. All the people of Ezer Kri wanted to do was rename their planet. They held an election and a sizable majority voted to rename the planet “Shin Nippon.” The report explained that “Shin Nippon” was Japanese for “New Japan.” When the governor of Ezer Kri notified the Senate, he was informed that the name change was out of the question. The governor and a delegation of Ezer Kri politicians were summoned to DC to discuss the matter before the Senate. No arrests, no rebellion . . . why had this seemed important to Oberland?

I paused the broadcast. Though I had never heard of Ezer Kri, I remembered hearing something about a colony of Japanese people refusing to integrate. The rumors did not mean anything to me when I first heard them, but there must have been more to it. I scanned ahead.

When the Unified Authority first settled Ezer Kri, (I’m not sure what the name “Ezer” referred to, but

“Kri” was a notation used for planets that had engineered atmospheres.) in 2303, the planetary administrator was of Japanese ancestry. Working quietly, he appointed several people of similar descent to his cabinet. When the administrator retired, he appointed his own successor. Not surprisingly, the new administrator was Japanese.

Over the next two hundred years, there was a Japanese migration to Ezer Kri. While the rest of the galaxy integrated, 35 percent of the population of Ezer Kri was Japanese. The non-Japanese population complained about discrimination, but a U.A. investigation found that Ezer Kri was productive and law-abiding—a model planet with an excellent educational system and one of the best economies in the Republic. For some reason Oberland equated the proposed name change with sedition. So did the Senate, apparently. It meant nothing to me, and trying to reason it out gave me a headache. I switched off my media shades and went to sleep.

Including stops at several space stations, the trip took nearly twenty hours. By the time we reached SC

Command, thirty new passengers had boarded and divided up by rank and phylum. Pilots and other officers sat in the front of the cabin. Tight clusters of sailors sat in the back. There were an even dozen Marine grunts on board.

“We’re coming up on the Kamehameha ,” one of the officers said, waking me out of a light sleep. Hearing this, I looked out my window. All I saw was an endless field of stars. The corporal in the row across the aisle woke up and stretched. He saw me pressing against the window and decided to help. “Do you see a pale gray star at one o’clock?”

There were a lot of gray stars. I felt the cramp in my back, heard my stomach growl, and knew that my patience had worn thin. Then I saw it. The other specks of light twinkled. The Kamehameha was a pasty gray dot.

“See it?” he asked.

“Flat-colored speck?” I asked. “It looks pretty small.”

“It gets bigger.”

It did indeed. As we approached, the bat wing shape of the hull seemed to stretch for miles. The top of the ship was so smooth that it looked like a running track. The top of the ship was the color of a shark, and its front face was lined with windows and weapons arrays. The bottom of the ship was beige in color. Huge antennae, at least fifty feet long and ten feet wide, protruded out of the top and bottom of the wing at each corner. During battle, these antennae emitted the magnetic currents that formed the ship’s protective shielding.

The Kamehameha grew larger by the moment. Soon I could see blue-and-white plumes flaring from its giant engines. We might still have been fifty miles away when we slowed to approaching speed, but the old fighter carrier already looked considerably larger than the transport in which I had traveled. Another minute passed, and I could make out the individual gun placements.

“It’s huge!” I said.

“First time on a carrier?” the Marine asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“It gets a lot bigger.”

Again, he was correct. I lost sight of the ship as we circled it from above to make our final approach. When we came around, we were less than a hundred yards from the rear of the ship. We could have landed our transport inside one of the dormant emergency engines, and the emergency engines were less than half the size of the main engines. Our pilot adjusted his approach, and we coasted onto a landing dock in the terraced rear of the ship.

Then something made sense. I had heard stories about these ships intimidating insurgents into submission, but I never understood. Teachers back at the orphanage told us the sterile facts about fighter carriers. They showed us holographic images. They cited measurements. Images and measurements meant nothing until you saw this ship in person; any impressions I formed listening to measurements and staring at images were dwarfed by its immense size.

“You won’t even know you are on a ship,” the corporal said. “It’s not like being on a transport or a frigate. You won’t feel it move or hear the engines. It’s like living on base.”

The corporal looked like a freshly minted clone. He had the stubble-cut hair of a young cadet but the small scars on his face and neck suggested he’d seen action. Military clones were a squat and powerful breed standing just shy of six feet tall. This man, however, clearly a bodybuilder, was wider than most. His shoulders and packed arms were not government-issue.

“You must have spent a lot of time at your last assignment,” he said. “I’ve never met a corporal with less than two years’ time on a carrier. This is my third, and I was lucky—I made corporal in five years.”

The transport’s booster rockets hissed as our pilot jostled the ship into position. I heard motors whine as electromagnetic skids dropped out of the transport, and locked us into place in the docking bay. Deckhands opened the hatch from outside the transport and the officers at the front of the cabin filed out.

“Unless I miss my guess, we’ll probably end up in the same platoon,” the corporal said. “I’m Vince Lee, just transferred up from Outer Scrotum.” Seeing my confused reaction, he laughed. “The Outer Scutum-Crux Fleet.”

“Wayson Harris.” I said, standing up and pulling my gear from the locker above my seat. I followed Lee off the transport and into a large receiving area. Two officers, a young Marine captain and a slightly older Naval commander, stood on deck. The other passengers had already grouped by branch by the time we stepped down the ramp—the sailors proceeded on ship, the Marines and pilots remained. Lee and I took our spots at the head of the Marines.

Had I not recognized their uniforms, I would have guessed that the captain was the pilot and the lieutenant commander was the Marine. The lieutenant commander stood well over six feet tall and had the barrel chest and the intensity of a fighting man. I had trouble imagining him crammed into a cockpit. He called out the names of his pilots, and each responded, then he looked at his clipboard and smiled.

“All accounted for.”

Though I had not been told that these men were pilots, I had no trouble identifying them. Pilots were natural-born and came in various shapes and sizes. Being officers, they also did not carry duffel bags. You’d never see officers washing their own laundry or carrying their own bags. They left such menial tasks to enlisted men.

“I am Lieutenant Commander Mack Callahan,” the lieutenant commander said as his new pilots stepped forward. “I run the fighter squads on this bucket.” He approached one of the pilots and read the name tag on his uniform. “Where were you stationed last, Jordan?”

“Mars, sir.”

“Mars?” Callahan nodded his head. “Some of you flew in from Orion? Long flight. I’ll tell you what, Jordan, why don’t you and the boys unpack, get plenty of rest, and report to my briefing room in thirty minutes.” The pilots groaned, then followed Callahan off deck.

The captain stepped forward. “At ease.” He reviewed at our ranks. “I am Captain Gaylan McKay.”

From the side of my eye, I watched the pilots vanish down a gleaming hallway. I did not see so much as a finger smudge on the walls. Every light in every ceiling fixture shone brightly, and the floors sparkled. Captain McKay looked as if he had been polished, too. He was small for a Marine, certainly no more than five feet six inches tall with a wiry build. A strip of blond stubble covered the top of his head, and the sides were shaved clean. He had more of a smirk than a smile, but I liked the informal way in which he appraised us. He’d probably be a prick most of the time, but that came with the uniform.

“I’ll take you to your quarters.” As we followed McKay down the hall, he continued his orientation.

“You boys are lucky,” McKay said. “Marines get a good shake in this fleet. Admiral Klyber doesn’t play favorites with pilots and sailors. Sea-soldier chow is as good as any on this ship.”

McKay led us to a series of cabins in which bunk beds lined the walls. Reading from a list, McKay sent men to various barracks; but when he came to Lee and me, he said, “Let’s talk in my office. Harris, I’ll start with you.”

He led me through an empty barrack. “Throw your bags on any rack.”

I dropped my bags on the nearest bunk.

“Is your gear in working order, Corporal?” McKay asked.

No one had asked me about the condition of my armor since the battle on Gobi, nor had I thought about it. “No, sir,” I said. “The interLink is out in my helmet.”

“Bring it along, Harris,” McKay called over his shoulder as he walked off. I quickly snatched my helmet and followed the captain down the hall. He entered a small office. I stepped in after him.

“Take a seat, Corporal,” McKay said.

“We’re starting up a new platoon. Your sergeant arrives tomorrow. He’s transferring in from the Inner SC Fleet,” McKay said with emphasis, as if that sector should have meant something to me. It didn’t.

“Admiral Klyber believes that something is going to break loose in outer Scutum-Crux.”

McKay waited for me to respond. When I said nothing, he picked up my personnel file and began reading.

He turned a few pages, reading quickly, apparently taking in the details. “Ah yes, I remember your record. You were the one who made corporal in three months . . . Must be some kind of a record. Exactly what sort of meritorious service did you perform on Gobi?” As he asked, McKay closed the folder and watched me carefully.

“Terrorists attacked our outpost, sir. I . . .”

“Attacked an outpost? Were you working out of an embassy?”

“No, sir,” I said.

“You mentioned a problem with your helmet.”

“Yes, sir. My interLink equipment failed during the battle.”

“I don’t know who designed this shit, but you can always count on something breaking when you need it most. My visor went black during a firefight, and I nearly shot my commanding officer.” McKay smiled as if thinking about what might have been, then continued in a more businesslike tone. “Around here you turn your headgear in for routine maintenance after every battle. Fleet policy. We take maintenance seriously in this fleet. Show up for an engagement with a broken helmet, and you’ll be lucky if the enemy gets you before I do. Got that, Corporal?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You can bring your helmet back from battles melted to your head if you like. That’s your business. But show up with broken gear, and I’ll send you to the brig.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And, Corporal, in case you have not guessed, showing up to new assignments with busted gear makes a bad first impression.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Leave the helmet; I’ll requisition repairs.” Changing subjects, McKay pointed to the Scutum-Crux Arm insignia on the wall behind him—a fleet of ships in silhouette superimposed against the whirlpool shape of the Milky Way. “You have been assigned to the flagship of the Outer SC Fleet, Corporal. We don’t put up with sloppiness on this ship.”

He handed me a three-inch stack of papers. “Get this read ASAP. That will be all.”

Without looking up, McKay added, “Send in Corporal Lee.”

Until Amos Crowley’s visit, the U.A. Marines maintained Gobi Station with forty-one men, one man shy of a full platoon. The bowels of the Kamehameha housed two full divisions of Marines—over twenty-three hundred of the Republic’s finest.

Bryce Klyber’s authority extended beyond the ship and even the fleet; every unit in the Scutum-Crux Arm was under his command. He was the only officer in the U.A. Navy to hold the rank of fleet admiral, a rank generally reserved for wartime.

Captain Thaddeus Olivera commanded the Kamehameha, and Vice Admiral Absalom Barry commanded the Outer Scutum-Crux Fleet. Klyber, who I soon learned was a notorious microcommander, preferred to work out of an office on the ship so that he could observe operations firsthand.

There were three fleets in the Scutum-Crux Arm, placing more than one thousand ships, more ships than the Earth Fleet, under Klyber’s command. That did not mean he could stage a revolution. Unlike Caesar, crossing the Rubicon line as he brought his forces into Rome, Klyber would never be able to bring his fleet to Earth. Klyber’s Rubicon was the Mars discs of the Broadcast Corridor, which were too small to receive or send capital ships such as fighter carriers and destroyers. The Broadcast Corridor ensured that Klyber’s ships remained in place. Without the discs, it would take a thousand lifetimes to fly from Scutum-Crux to the Sol System in the Orion Arm.

The documentation McKay gave me described the protocol and command structure of the Outer SC

Fleet. Most of the information was standard procedure, but I needed to re-learn standard procedures and chain of command after three months on Gobi. Judging by the way Klyber ran the Scutum-Crux territories, he was the kind of commander who required his subordinates to march to his own drum. As a young Marine, I did not know much about Navy workings. It struck me as odd that Klyber, supposedly a powerful admiral, retained an old ship like the Kamehameha for his flagship. The Kamehameha might have worked well as Klyber’s movable command post, but it was obsolete as a fighter carrier. Klyber built each of his three fleets around a core of twelve fighter carriers. The Kamehameha was an old Expansion-class carrier, the only carrier of its class that was still in operation. All of the other carriers were Perseus-class, a newer breed of brute measuring forty-five hundred feet long and almost fifty-one hundred feet wide—nearly twice as long as their Expansion-class predecessors. Perseus-class carriers bore a complement of eleven thousand Marines, five times the fighting force that traveled on the Kamehameha . Perseus-class carriers stowed three times more tanks, transports, gunships, and fighters than Expansion-class carriers and had much quicker means for deploying units.

Lee and I spent our first night in half-empty barracks. Ten of the men assigned to our platoon had trickled in throughout the day, but most of the racks remained empty. Huddled in my bunk, I quietly read Scutum-Crux Fleet documentation well into the sleep period. Along with command structure and regulations, the documentation also laid out our daily regiment. Klyber expected his grunts to drill three hours per day, holding physical training, marksmanship drills, and practical simulations into the daily routine. After reading these daily requirements I sighed, and whispered, “Harris, you’re a long, long way from Gobi.”

Lee, laid out on the bunk next to mine, rolled to face me, and asked, “Wayson, what are you doing?”

“Reading regs,” I said. “You finished reading already?”

“I don’t need to read them,” Lee said. “We had the exact same regulations at my last post. I was already under Klyber’s command.”

Travel had warped my internal timetable. Late as it was, I did not have a prayer of falling asleep. “I think I’m still on Earth time,” I said, though I had no idea what time it might be back at the orphanage.

“I’m having trouble sleeping myself,” Lee admitted. He rolled over on his side and checked his wristwatch, then quietly cursed. “Tell you what, you want to go have a look around the ship?” he asked.

“We can do that?” I asked.

“Damn, Harris! You’re not in boot camp. Nobody cares what corporals do after hours,” Lee said, sitting up and swinging his legs over the edge of his bunk.

“Boot camp wasn’t that long ago,” I admitted. “After basic I got sent to a planet called Gobi. Regulations didn’t matter much there. I don’t want to screw up.”

“Okay, on behalf of Fleet Admiral Klyber, I formally give you permission to climb out of your bunk. You may grab a bite to eat, visit the bar, or have a look around the ship. Just keep out of restricted areas,”

Lee said as he pulled on his pants.

After numbing my brain with rules and command structure, the idea of a late-night walk sounded good. We got dressed and slipped out of the barracks. The ship had an eerie, abandoned feel to it. The hall lights burned as brightly as they did during the day, but the only footsteps we heard were mostly our own. I peered through the window of our chow area as we passed. The lights were turned low. Tables that had been crowded with Marines a few hours earlier now sat empty.

Our barracks and training areas were located amidships on one of the lower decks of the Kamehameha

, not all that far from the docking bay. In the time that I had been on board, I had only seen the landing bay, the barracks, and the mess area. Lee, who had never served aboard that particular ship but had a working knowledge of carriers, had no problem conducting an impromptu tour. We passed armories, a library, and file rooms—all populated with skeleton crews. At three in the morning, even the bars sat empty. Lee led me to an elevator, and we went up three floors to the crew area. “This area is not restricted, but don’t expect to spend much time up here,” Lee said, as we stepped off the lift. “Sailors think of us as cargo.”

It hadn’t taken me long to strike up a friendship with Lee. After Gobi, I was glad to meet a Marine who stowed his gear properly and cut his hair to regulation. Like the clones back in Orphanage #553, Lee had created his own kind of personality. He did not know he was a clone, of course; and he thought one day he might be bootstrapped into the ranks of the officers. From there, he wanted to enter politics. It was hopeless, of course. He was a clone; and because the Unified Authority did not recognize the potential of its own synthetic creations, Lee would never be promoted past master sergeant. Unlike our barracks, the crew area showed signs of life. Duty officers patrolled the halls. We passed a mess area that smelled of fried eggs and meat. I peered in the door and saw sailors hunched over trays. A little farther, we passed a rec room with game tables, card tables, and a bar. I saw the marquee of a movie theater along the back wall. At that early hour, the recreation center sat empty and dark, but I could imagine it filled with lights and sounds and people during the early evening.

“They have a movie theater in there,” I complained. “I’ll bet my next paycheck that our rec doesn’t have a theater.”

“That’s a good way to go bankrupt,” Lee said. “Congress spares no expense when it comes to keeping its Marines entertained.”

“You boys looking for something?” We turned around as a sailor approached us.

“We’re new on the ship,” Lee said. “Just having a look around.”

The sailor was a clone, a petty officer with a single red chevron on his sleeve. He bore no more authority than Lee or I; but we were on his turf. “You must be new. This here is the crew area. We stow Marines below,” he sneered. He grabbed Lee by the arm, then took a quick step back. Lee’s arms and chest were thick with muscle.

“Didn’t mean to intrude,” Lee said with an easy smile as he turned back toward the elevator. “Not very hospitable. I thought we were all fighting on the same side.”

Then Lee said something under his breath that struck me as very odd. “Specking clone.”

I had only met Vince Lee earlier that day when he and I went to explore the Kamehameha, so I did not notice the anomaly then. With time I would notice that though he was friendly and outgoing with me, Lee did not socialize with the other men in our platoon. He and I normally found a table off on our own. When Lee bought drinks, he purchased Earth-made beer. An avid bodybuilder, he asked for permission to work out in the officers’ gym. In fact, he had as little contact as possible with other clones. No enlisted man saw himself as a clone, though most of them were indeed just that. Even so, antisyntheticism was rare among clones because they were raised with other clones, and the only people they knew growing up were clones. They did not know how to associate with natural-born people. But Lee, Lee was different. Like so many U.A. citizens, Vince Lee was quietly prejudiced against clones. He thought clones were beneath him. The difference was that other people were natural-born, Vince was synthetic. Many officers were antisynthetic; they despised their underlings. Vince was different. He despised his own kind.

The rest of the platoon arrived the following afternoon. That included our new sergeant—Tabor Shannon. As Vince might have put it, life aboard the Kamehameha became less “hospitable” the moment Shannon arrived.

Master Gunnery Sergeant Tabor Shannon landed on a late-afternoon shuttle. Shannon was the personification of the word “paradox.” He was gruff, ruthless, and often profane. He openly favored the men who transferred in with him and even referred to them as “my men” because they came with him from his previous platoon. He was a belligerent and battle-hardened Marine. But I soon found out that Shannon’s sense of duty added oddly smoothed edges to the jagged shards of his personality. Captain McKay sent Lee and me to meet Shannon and the other men at the landing bay. We rushed down to the boarding zone. As the bay door opened, Lee said, “I bet he’s a prick. What do you want to bet he’s a real prick among men?”

We watched several officers disembark. Four pilots and a number of crewmen breezed past us without so much as a sideward glance. Shannon came next. He was tall and thin, with steep shoulders and a wiry frame. His fine white hair, the hair of an old man, did not match his sunburned face. Except for crow’s-feet and white hair, he looked like a thirty-year-old.

Shannon walked up to us and paused long enough to bark, “Twelfth Platoon, you part of my outfit?”

When we nodded, he dropped his bags at our feet, and said, “Stow these on my rack.”

Under other circumstances that kind of arrogance pissed me off, but I had noticed something about Shannon’s bags that left me too stunned to care. Lee saw it, too. The letters “GCF” were stenciled large and red on the side of the bag. When I was growing up, every kid in the orphanage knew what those letters stood for—Galactic Central Fleet. That was a name with a dark history. “You don’t think he’s a Liberator?” I asked.

“Damn, I heard that they were all dead,” Lee said, staring at Shannon’s back as he left the bay. Watching Shannon disappear down the corridor, I felt a cold shiver run down my spine.

The truth was that I did not know much about the Galactic Central Fleet or the special strain of clones that were created to fight in it. The history books called them “Liberators,” but that was mostly because calling them “Butchers” seemed disrespectful.

The government deemed the battles in the Galactic Central War classified information and never released accounts of what took place. But the government could not classify the events that led up to war. Unified Authority ships began prospecting the “eye” of the galaxy—the nexus where the various arms of the Milky Way meet in a spiral—about forty years ago. That was during the height of the expansion. We had long suspected that we had the galaxy to ourselves, and exploration into the farthest and deepest corners of the frontier only increased the belief that the universe belonged to mankind. By this time we had traveled to the edge of the Milky Way but not to the center.

The media covered every detail of that first expedition to the center of the Galaxy, including its disastrous ending. Five self-broadcasting Pioneer-class vessels were sent. All five disappeared upon arrival in the Galactic Eye.

There was no information about what happened to the ships. Some people speculated that radiation or possibly some unknown element destroyed them as they emerged from their broadcast. The most common theory, of course, was that the expedition was attacked, but whatever really became of those ships happened so quickly that no information was relayed back to Earth. If the politicians and military types knew more than the general public, they did not let on.

Congress went into an emergency session and commissioned a special fleet to investigate—the Galactic Central Fleet, the largest and most-well-armed fleet in U.A. Naval history. The hearings and the creation of the Galactic Central Fleet were matters of public record. Reporters were taken out to the shipyards where the fleet’s 200 cruisers, 200 destroyers, and 180 battleships were under construction. It took three years to build the fleet. During that time, the entire Republic braced for an alien attack. Once the fleet was constructed, however, the news accounts stopped. This much I knew—that the Galactic Central Fleet was launched on February 5, 2455, and that it vanished. The ships were sent to the Galactic Eye and never heard from again.

I heard tales about the events that followed, but they were all gossip and myths. To avoid increased panic, the government imposed a news blackout immediately after the fleet disappeared. Then, two months after the disappearance, the Senate announced that the galactic core was under U.A. control. The only historical record of the event was a statement from the secretary of the Navy stating that a battery of specially trained soldiers conquered ground zero. Some time after that, a congressional panel announced that the men in the GC regiment were an experimental class of clones known only as

“Liberators.” There were no pictures of Liberator clones in our history texts; and though I searched, I never found any pictures on the mediaLink, nor did I ever find any information about the aliens that the Liberator clones fought in the Galactic Eye.

“The bag says ‘GCF,’” I said. “You don’t think he could be a Liberator?”

“You?” Lee asked, shaking his head.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I had a teacher who served with some Liberators. He said that they were taller and slimmer than other clones. He also said that they massacred entire planets.”

“One of my teachers said that they enjoyed killing people and that they killed civilians when they ran out of enemy soldiers,” said Lee. “That must have been an old rucksack,” he added, though he did not sound as if he believed it. “He didn’t look much older than us.”

Like me, he had probably done the math in his head. If the GCF disappeared forty years ago, that would put Gunny Sergeant Shannon in his late fifties or early sixties. He looked bright-eyed, spry, and mean as hell. He was clearly a clone . . . a different species of clone, but still a clone. He had the same dark features as Lee, though he was a few inches taller. They looked like brothers.

“Like seeing a ghost,” I muttered to myself. Having heard all kinds of rumors about Liberators in the orphanage, I should not have been surprised that Shannon looked so young. Liberators were supposed to have a synthetic gene that kept them young. Of course, I also heard that they had a fish gene that enabled them to breathe underwater and a slug gene that made them self-healing. I stopped believing the slug story by the time I was ten, but suddenly the youth gene seemed possible.

“We’d better stow his stuff,” Lee said. “I would hate to piss him off.”

Lee was too late. Just about everything pissed Shannon off. He marched into the barracks like a one-man wrecking crew, rearranging the racks and placing “his” Marines along the right side of the room. When Lee and I arrived, we walked into chaos. Acting on Shannon’s orders, the newly arrived PFCs dumped other men’s bags, books, and bedding to the floor. When one of the displaced privates asked Shannon what was happening, the gunny shouted a chain of obscenities and nearly hit him. “What is your name, Private?” Shannon shouted, strings of spit flying out of his mouth.

“Private First Class Christopher Charla,” the private answered as he snapped to attention.

“Did the Congress of the Unified Authority award you that bunk, PFC Charla?”

“No,” Charla mumbled quietly.

“I did not hear you, Charla. What did you say to me?” Shannon stood on his toes, his shoulders hunched, every conceivable vein puffed out of his neck.

“No, Sergeant,” Charla bellowed back.

“Then this rack does not belong to you?” Shannon shouted. “Is that correct, Charla?”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

Judging by the concern on Lee’s face, I could tell that Shannon’s was not standard sergeant behavior. All I had to go by was Glan Godfrey—and old Gutterwash did not give me much to go by. Sergeant Shannon turned to look at Lee and me. “I told you to stow those bags in my office,” he said,

“then set up your racks. You sleep over there.” He pointed to the farthest bunks from his office, and I realized that he had just demoted us to the bottom of the platoon.

My situation became worse the following morning.

Still unable to adjust to Scutum-Crux time, I woke up at 0500 and fidgeted in my bunk until I was sure I could not fall back to sleep. I noticed that Vince Lee’s bunk lay empty. His clone frame lent itself well to bodybuilding, and he trained daily. My interests lay elsewhere. The one topic that interested me more than anything was battle-readiness. Weapons and hand-to-hand training lent themselves well to that preparation. After my discussion with Oberland, I had come to believe that knowing current events might also prepare me for battle. Knowing who I might have to fight and what they were fighting for had value. I put on my mediaLink shades to see if Ezer Kri was still in the news. On-air analysts billed the Ezer Kri story as a crisis in the making. Apparently the Ezer Kri delegation asked the Linear Committee for a new senator. They wanted to hold a planetwide election and choose their senator by popular vote, the same way they elected their member of the House. According to the story, nearly every elected official on Ezer Kri was of Japanese descent. Though they were not stating it outright, the members of the committee seemed to want to excise everything Japanese from the planet. The request was refused. “Your request, Governor Yamashiro, is unconstitutional,” the committee chair said. “The Constitution specifically calls for appointed representation.”

Yoshi Yamashiro, the governor of Ezer Kri and the head of the delegation, next resubmitted a petition asking for permission to change the name of his planet from Ezer Kri to “Shin Nippon.”

The chairman of the Linear Committee pointed out that “Shin Nippon” meant “New Japan,” and refused to consider the petition.

At this point the story switched to video footage shot in the Committee chambers. The Ezer Kri delegation, made up of elderly men in black suits, sat at a huge wooden table covered with charts and computers. Their table faced a towering gallery packed with senators. The seven men in the delegation chatted among themselves in a language that I had never heard. Their voices rose and fell dramatically, and they did a lot of bowing. “Mr. Chairman,” one of them said in a breathless voice. “We ask that the official language of Ezer Kri be changed to Japanese. That is the language spoken by a plurality of our population,” he said, with a slight bow.

Angry chatter erupted in gallery.

“Governor Yamashiro,” the speaker shouted, banging his gavel. “I will not entertain such a request. You are entirely out of bounds. Your behavior signifies contempt for this body.”

The Japanese men spoke quietly among themselves. Yamashiro stood up. He was a short man with a stout chest and broad shoulders. He bowed. “I apologize for my offense, Mr. Chairman,” Yamashiro said. The room calmed, then Yamashiro spoke again. “I humbly suggest that you change the name of the Republic to the ‘Unified Singular Authority.’”

There was a moment of shocked silence, as if Yamashiro had performed some crude act that stunned every man in the room. Then hisses and angry conversation filled the chamber. The chairman pounded his gavel as the video segment ended.

The picture of the hearing faded and my shades now showed three analysts sitting around a table. One of them leaned forward. “This was footage of the Ezer Kri delegation’s meeting with the Linear Committee this morning. After having several requests denied, Governor Yoshi Yamashiro suggested that the Unified Authority be renamed ‘the Unified Singular Authority.’ As you can see, the reaction was swift and angry.”

“Jim,” a woman analyst cut in, “that reaction was to Yamashiro’s veiled suggestion that the government is really an extension of the old United States. The point of his comment was that we should take on the initials USA. Yamashiro made some good points,” the woman continued. “The Linear Committee has been openly antagonistic toward the Ezer Kri delegation. We’re not talking about a planet trying to break from the Republic, forgod’ssake, they just want to rename their planet.”

“It’s not just the planet name . . .” the first male analyst started.

“There are already planets named Athens, Columbia, Jerusalem!” another analyst added.

“Those are city names, and they do not have majority populations of Greek or Israeli descent. It’s not just the name, it’s the language. Governor Yamashiro wants to speak an entirely different language than the rest of the Republic.”

“Jim,” the woman commentator said, with a patient and all-knowing smile, “when was the last time you watched a broadcast from outside the Orion Arm? By the end of the century, linguistic scholars predict the dialects spoken in the outer arms will have evolved into unique languages. You cannot expect people who live ten thousand light-years apart to go on speaking the same language forever.”

“And you think switching from English to Japanese is part of that evolution?”

“What I find most disturbing is the paranoia that is surrounding this entire issue,” the woman said, ignoring the question. “It’s as if the committee believes that switching the language is the first step to an invasion. It’s ridiculous.”

The woman made more sense, but I agreed with the male commentator. Perhaps it was my upbringing in a military orphanage, but I could not see how letting planets speak different languages would bring the galaxy closer together.

By that time I was losing interest in the story, so I switched off my shades. When I removed my shades, I saw a message light blinking over my bunk. Sergeant Shannon wanted me to come to his office. I climbed out of bed and dressed quickly, but Shannon was not in his office when I arrived. I found my helmet waiting on his desk.

Lee, just back from the gym, came into the barracks as I was stowing my helmet. “Hey, how was your workout?” I asked, as Lee passed my rack.

“Fine,” he said, sounding brusque. I waited for him to shower and change, then we went to the commissary for breakfast. We had eaten almost every meal together since landing on the ship. I think we had sort of adopted each other. I hadn’t yet figured out that Lee liked me because I was not a clone. As for me, after my time on Gobi, I was just glad to have a friend who truly fit the description

“government-issue.” Lee was acting odd and distant. I wanted to ask him what his problem was, but I figured he would cough it up in good time. As we walked toward the mess area, I saw a strangely familiar sight on some of the monitors along the hall—a picture of General Amos Crowley bent over a stack of poker chips, holding a particle-beam pistol. I recognized the table, the room, and the way Crowley pinched the pistol with his fingers. “Enemy of the Republic,” was the headline. “Former general and noted terrorist Amos Crowley stands accused of sedition, rebellion, and murder.”

I stared at the display hardly believing my eyes. “Son of a bitch,” I mumbled.

“Do you know him?” Vince asked.

“I think I took that photograph,” I said.

“You don’t know if you took it?” Lee asked, suddenly interested in me again.

“I was at that card game, but I didn’t have a camera. Neither did anybody else.”

“Somebody had one,” Lee said dismissively. “Do you play cards with traitors on a regular basis?”

I stared at the image for a moment, then continued down the hall. And then it struck me. All those gadgets packed into our visors . . . polarizing lenses, telescopic lenses, communications systems. Add a little data storage, and you could record everything.

“Do our visors record data?” I asked.

“Sure,” Lee said, sounding as if I should have known that without asking. “How long have you been . . .”

He paused to stare at me and laughed. “You wore your helmet to a card game? Harris”—he seemed to warm up as he sensed my embarrassment—“you’re all right.”

“Glad I’ve got your seal of approval,” I said. I was again tempted to ask what was bothering him, but held back.

He looked back at the picture. “That’s not your sidearm, is it?” he said, struggling not to laugh.

“No, it’s not,” I snapped.

“Just asking,” Lee said, still sounding more than amused. The corners of his mouth still twitched. “Whose is it?”

“It belonged to a guy named Taj Guttman,” I said, as we entered the mess hall.

“He wagered his firearm? I bet he wasn’t wearing his helmet.”

“No, he wasn’t,” I said.

“His goose is fried,” Lee said.

We grabbed trays and moved to the chow line. Vince clearly wanted to ask more questions but had the good sense to wait until we had our chow and had moved to a quieter corner of the room. I felt a wave of panic. How many people knew what I had done—that I had lost my pistol to an enemy agent in a card game? I seriously doubted that McKay would keep the information to himself.

“Can’t say I think much of a Marine who bets his pistol in a card game, Harris,” Sergeant Shannon sneered as he sat down at the table next to ours. “I don’t think much of that at all.”

Not many of my memories are associated with a particular day of the week, but I have no trouble recalling what day my helmet was returned to me. It was on a Sunday. I know that because later that day, hoping to get away from all of the questions about Crowley and the card game, I went to the rec room to watch a movie. Sincerely wanting to be alone, I chose the emptiest route through the Marine compound—and that took me by the chapel. Nobody went anywhere near that area on Sunday. The military was always trying to push religion; but in my experience, fear of God was one of the things that science never managed to build into its neural programming. Many of the officers attended church services, but none of the clones I knew believed in God.

As I passed by the open door of the chapel on this day, however, I happened to catch a glance of somebody sitting alone at the rear of the chapel. His back was to me, but the tall wiry frame and fine, white old man’s hair were unmistakable. There, wearing his dress uniform, was Sergeant Shannon . . . swearing, bullying, belligerent Sergeant Shannon.

CHAPTER SIX

Some people say that the most glorious sight they ever saw was a beautiful moon or a perfect sunrise. For me, it was the three fleets of the Scutum-Crux Arm converging in orbit over Terraneau. Each fleet was set in array with its twelve Perseus-class fighter carriers set in a row like the jagged teeth of an enormous saw. Frigates and transports, awesome ships in their own right, seemed insignificant beside the mighty bulk of these dreadnoughts. The massive shadow of the fleets cast a discernible outline on the watery surface of the planet below.

Seeing so many ships huddled together fascinated me. I spent hours watching them from one of the Kamehameha ’s observation stations. I watched attack wings of Tomcats and Harriers escorting transports between the capital ships and the planet below. With their black-and-gray finish and sliver-shaped hulls, the Tomcats vanished like ghosts in open space only to reappear as fast-moving specks when they sped across the bows of carriers.

“The U.A. Navy is awesome,” I said to myself with pride. I wondered how anyone could hope to stand against it.

“I spent some time stationed on Nebraska Minor,” Vince Lee said as he leaned against a guardrail. “Ever heard of Nebraska Minor?”

“I cannot say that I have,” I said.

“They do a lot of farming there. The whole planet is like one big farm,” Lee said.

“Exciting assignment,” I joked.

Lee thought about my quip for a moment, then chose to ignore it. “People on Nebraska Minor used to say, ‘You should always kill the pig before you eat it.’ You ever heard that before?”

“I feel deprived,” I said. “On Gobi we had sayings like, ‘You should never eat your children after they are six years old.’”

Lee pretended to ignore that comment, too. “It’s a big fleet; a lot of firepower . . .” Lee’s voice trailed off for a moment. “Greece and Rome weren’t able to hold on to Europe, how can we possibly hope to control a whole galaxy? If there are planets that want out of the Republic, Wayson, I am not sure we should force them to stay in.”

“I don’t see how they can stand up to a fleet like this,” I said.

“What happened on Gobi?” Lee asked as he followed my gaze out the window. “Crowley attacked a Marine base?”

A shuttle with a three-fighter escort silently approached our ship, drifting past the window. The ships passing by reminded me of fish in an aquarium. Lee’s question did not surprise me; people had been asking about the Gobi story quite a bit lately. A team of security officers had given me an official debriefing, and Captain McKay had questioned me about it.

“You after the blow-by-blow?” I asked in a sardonic voice. He nodded, and I told him the whole story, including the part about becoming a corporal in three months. I think the promotion was the part that embarrassed me the most.

“The Unified Authority has long provided safety and prosperity for its member states. Now it has come to our attention that certain factions wish to divide our Republic. These terrorists would destroy the fabric of our society to satisfy their own selfish needs. Though their insurrection poses no significant threat to our great Republic, it must be dealt with.”

I noticed two things about Fleet Admiral Bryce Klyber as I watched his high-definition image on the three-dimensional screen: his nearly starved physique and his overwhelming intensity. Klyber’s cheekbones stuck out like ridges across his chiseled face and his skull looked dented at the temples. He had long arms that reminded me of twigs. The overall impression was that you could snap the man over your knee like a stick.

First fascinated by Klyber’s skeletal appearance, I soon found myself mesmerized by the intensity in his icy blue eyes. He stared into the camera, seldom blinking as he plowed through his speech. When he paused to look at his notes, Klyber pursed his mouth so tightly that his lips formed a single line, and wrinkles formed on his chin.

“In future years, historians will look back upon the Unified Authority as one of man’s crowning achievements. As a nation, we have conquered space. We have conquered the galaxy. Our progress will not be slowed by a band of hooligans.”

The impact of Klyber’s words was immediate and universal. Applause echoed through the Kamehameha . Klyber was speaking in an auditorium on Terraneau, but his speech was shown on every monitor on every deck of every ship in all three Scutum-Crux fleets. As he said those words, I have no doubt that all 2 million men under Klyber’s command shouted with excitement.

“I have spoken with both the Joint Chiefs and the Linear Committee, and they have authorized me to subdue the enemy by all means necessary. As we speak, enemy strong-holds are being targeted in all six galactic arms, and terrorist leaders are being sought out.”

The platoon watched Klyber’s speech on a small monitor hanging from the ceiling of our barracks. Everyone around me fidgeted with excitement except Shannon, who stood mute and slack-jawed with an expression that betrayed no emotion. His arms were folded across his chest, and he seemed to consider the weight of the challenges ahead.

“I will not discuss our tactics at this time, but every officer will be briefed. The details and goals of our missions will become apparent over the next few days.

“Dismissed.”

The screen blinked off. As it did, the barracks began to echo with loud conversations.

“What do you think?” Lee asked me.

“Sounds like war,” I said. “We will overwhelm them.”

“If we can find them,” Vince reminded me.

Like a crew heading into combat, we had the rest of the day to relax and think about the battles that might lie ahead. By the time Vince and I went to the sea-soldier’s bar late that afternoon, it was already packed with noncoms. Tight knots of combat-ready Marines stood along the bar slapping each other across the shoulders and speaking in booming voices. They toasted Admiral Klyber and made dunderheaded statements about Congress.

A private from our platoon waved to us as we surveyed the bar. He came to us. “Lee, Harris, we have a table back there,” he said, pointing with a frothy mug.

“I’m never quite sure, but wasn’t that one of Shannon’s men?” Lee asked, after the private left.

“Couldn’t be. They don’t talk to us.”

Lee shrugged. “I suppose we should at least drop in on them.”

“You find them, I’ll get the beer,” I said as I pushed my way through the crowd. I reached the bar and looked around. It was a big night. By all appearances, we were headed for a fight. The mood was wild. When the bartender asked what I wanted, I ordered two bottles of Earth-brewed beer.

“The best I have left is brew made with Earth-grown malt.”

“That will do,” I said handing him a twenty.

The bartender smiled and gave me very little change.

It took a few minutes to fight through the crowd and find the table. I handed Vince his beer. He looked at the label, and asked, “Earth-grown malt? I thought you didn’t taste any difference?”

“I don’t.” I smiled, nodded, took a swig of my beer. “But you’ve sprung for Earth-grown so many times, I felt guilty.”

Drinks did not come free on board the Kamehameha, but they were pretty damn cheap. Even hard stuff like vodka and whiskey cost only one dollar per drink.

As far as I was concerned, the only difference between Earth-grown and outworld beers was the cost. The snobbish crowd said they tasted a difference, but I never did. For reasons I could not peg at the time, Lee preferred Earth-grown brew; but I had not bought the beer for the taste, I bought it for the occasion.

Most of our platoon sat around this table in two nearly concentric circles. “Guess we’re standing,” Lee said.

“Have you guys heard anything?” someone asked.

“You kidding?” a familiar voice burst out. “They’re corpses. Corporals are always the last to hear shit.”

Just across from me, Sergeant Shannon sat with one leg up on the table. He looked relaxed, and his smile was almost friendly.

“We’ll all know soon enough,” Lee said.

The banter continued. We no longer seemed like a divided platoon. Shannon leaned back in his chair and listened to the conversations around him.

“Harris?”

Captain McKay, probably fresh from the officers meetings on Terraneau and still wearing his whites, tapped me on the shoulder. He smiled and spoke in a quiet tone that was just loud enough for me to hear him above the crowd. “Harris, I suspect that you are just about the most important person in the fleet right now.”

“Begging your pardon, sir, I don’t understand.”

“That an Earth-grown brew you’re drinking?” he asked, looking at my bottle. “The record from your helmet . . . that was the key to all of this. I showed it to Klyber, and he showed it to the Linear Committee.

“Do you know what Admiral Klyber told the Committee? He told them that our enemies ‘no longer fear us.’ ‘No longer fear us,’ that was what finally woke them up. That and your video feed. Life in the galaxy just got a little more exciting thanks to that goddamned helmet of yours.”

“I’m not sure what to say,” I said. I could not tell if McKay was angry or pleased. He sounded sarcastic, but I wasn’t sure if he was joking or angry. He did not stay long, either. A moment later he waved to the platoon and disappeared into the crowd.

“We have our orders,” Sergeant Shannon said as he called Lee and me into his office the next day.

“Have a seat.”

We pulled chairs up to his desk. Judging by the time mark on the communiqué, Captain McKay had sent the orders less than an hour earlier. “The Kamehameha has been assigned to a planet called Ezer Kri. Ever heard of it?”

“No, Sergeant,” Lee said.

“We’re invading Ezer Kri?” Lee and Shannon stared at me. “Ezer Kri has been in the news. I’ve been following the story.”

“You know about Ezer Kri?” Shannon asked. He picked up a combat knife and wiped its blade on his forearm.

I began to feel self-conscious. “The story is all over the news. Ezer Kri has a large population of ethnically pure Japanese people who want to make Japanese the official language of the planet. The governor of the planet went to DC and the Linear Committee said no.”

Shannon smiled. “Japanese? There’s got to be something more. You can’t invade a planet just because a bunch of people want to speak Japanese.”

“I thought the old races disappeared,” Vince said.

“You run into it a bit out here,” Shannon said. “But I’ve never seen an entire planet like that.”

“So we’re sending a fleet?” I asked. “Are we going to blockade the planet or something?”

“I don’t know what Klyber has in mind,” Shannon said. “He is sending the Kamehameha and a few support ships.”

“Is Admiral Klyber coming along for the ride?” Lee asked.

“I don’t know if he returned to ship after Terraneau,” Shannon said. “We’re still six days out from Ezer Kri. Harris, see that every man in the platoon gets his armor shined and ready.”

“Yes,” I said.

“You should be keen on maintenance considering all the trouble your faulty helmet has caused,” Shannon said.

“One other thing . . . I worked you both over when I got here. The whole deal changes now that we have an assignment. You understand? I’ll be depending on you.”

“Yes,” Lee said.

“Understood,” I said.