CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Clones may come out of the tube identical, but experience takes over where genetic engineering and neural programming leave off. Most of the platoon followed soccer, boxing, and basketball. Gambling was rampant. But Vince Lee did not gamble or watch professional sports. He napped whenever he got the opportunity. He read books about self-improvement and told me that his time in the Marines would give him an excellent platform to launch into politics. He was a dedicated bodybuilder who started each morning lifting weights in the officers’ gym. Of all of the clones I ever knew, Lee was the only one who openly worried about not being natural-born.

Lee was also the only man in our platoon who talked about retiring from the Corps. “When I get out,” he would often begin a conversation, “I’m going to a frontier planet,” he would say, “someplace where they appreciate hard work.” Around the time we went to Ronan Minor, Lee sometimes talked about building a resort on the shore of Lake Pride, a few miles west of Rising Sun. Ever since meeting with Oberland, keeping up with current events had become my hobby. It was an obsession, maybe even an addiction. I began each day with a quick glance at the headlines. I did so before crawling out of bed. If I found something interesting, I stopped to read it. I usually spent a good hour reading before tossing my mediaLink shades aside and heading for the mess. And after breakfast, I found time for more reading.

Two days after we left Ronan Minor I found a story with the headline: “24 SEALS LOST IN CRASH.”

They don’t release information when clones die. We don’t have parents or relatives, so nobody notices. SEALs, natural-borns with families, merit a news story, even if it’s completely fabricated. In this case, the official story was that twenty-four Navy SEALs were killed when their transport malfunctioned during a training exercise in a remote sector of the Scutum-Crux Arm.

“The accident occurred as the squad practiced landing maneuvers on an uninhabited planet.” True enough, unless you count rats, roaches, and Liberators.

“‘The accident was caused by an equipment failure,’ said Lieutenant Howard Banks of Naval public affairs. ‘We are conducting a thorough investigation to determine the cause of the accident.’”

“There’s already been a thorough investigation,” I mumbled to myself. I knew that because my ass was on the line. Admiral Huang had Shannon and me held in custody while he and Admiral Klyber played back the data in our helmets. Huang called us a disgrace to the uniform and ranted about court-martials and executions; but in the end, we were cleared.

Other stories caught my eye. Back on Earth, the Senate seemed unaware of the war brewing in the outer arms while the House of Representatives seemed intent on stoking it. The big story out of the Senate was about a senior senator retiring and the party his friends threw to celebrate his years of service. The story listed the celebrities in attendance, and there was a side story critiquing gowns worn by politicians’ wives. As far as the Senate was concerned, life on the frontier was just aces. In the House of Representatives, congressmen were arguing about gun laws. Many powerful representatives wanted the gun laws preventing the private ownership of automatic weapons repealed. One congresswoman argued that citizens should be allowed to buy a battleship if they could afford it. Delegations from the Cygnus, Perseus, and Norma Arms flew to Washington to meet with their congressmen. There was no mention whether these delegations also visited the Senate.

“Something’s happening,” Lee said as he entered the mess hall. “The fleet’s moving.” He had just come from the gym, and jagged vein lines bulged across his biceps and forearms.

“Moving where?” I asked as I took a drink of orange juice.

Lee, whose hair was still wet from the shower, smelled of government-issue soap. “I’m not sure where we are headed, but a guy at the gym said we’re going to rendezvous with the Inner SC Fleet.”

“Really?” I asked. “What about the Outer Fleet?”

Lee sat down next to me. “He says we’re combining into one fleet.

“Wayson, I’ve never seen this before. You don’t send twenty-four carriers to one corner of space for peacekeeping. This is war.”

“That’s drastic talk,” I said. “How does the guy at the gym know so much? Are you sure he knew what he was talking about?”

It seemed like a fair question. When it came to the “need to know” hierarchy, we grunts were the bottom rung. I wolfed down the rest of my breakfast and waited for Lee to finish. Once he finished eating, we rushed to the rec room to look out the viewport.

We were no longer orbiting Ronan Minor. I saw an endless starfield and not much else. “Did your friend say anything about where we are headed?”

“Nope,” Lee said. “Nothing at all.”

“Do not learn the wrong lesson from Ronan Minor,” Bryce Klyber said. He might have maintained a sparse office—the only things you ever saw on his desk were an occasional file and a set of pens—but his dining area was like an art museum. Track lighting on the ceiling shone down on a row of fine oil paintings along one wall. The outer wall of the room was a viewport overlooking the bow of the ship. Another wall was lined with two one-thousand-gallon aquariums.

One tank held schools of colorful fish that dived and darted among coral formations. The other tank was only half-full. A strange animal called a man-of-war floated along the top of the water. Perhaps it is an exaggeration to call a man-of-war an “animal,” but I don’t know what else to call it. It looked like a violet-colored bubble with long, silky threads dangling to the bottom of the tank.

“Do you follow the news? Have you heard the one about the twenty-four SEALs who died in a transport accident?” Klyber asked me in the kind of singsong tone you would use when asking a friend if he’d heard the one about the secretary of the Navy and the farmer’s daughter.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“The Pentagon uses that story far too often.” He shook his head. “One of these days, the Linear Committee will launch an investigation into AT disasters and learn that we haven’t had a legitimate accident for thirty years.”

I did not know if Admiral Klyber was serious. He sat by himself in an austere, uncomfortable-looking chair, picking pieces of chicken out of his salad. Klyber was the epitome of the aristocrat-soldier, elegant and well-spoken, sitting in his uniform at a table with fine wine in crystal goblets. With his sunken cheeks and puny arms, he looked so fragile, but anger and intelligence radiated from his cold, gray eyes. “I suppose we shall never know if that compound was rigged or if Huang’s SEALs blew themselves up.”

“You don’t think it was a trap, sir?” I asked.

Admiral Klyber mused for a moment, smiled, shook his head ever so slightly. “No. If Huang could not take prisoners, he would have wanted to leave bodies in his wake. Ours or theirs, it wouldn’t matter to Huang as long as there were bodies.” His mouth curved into a smile as he chewed a bite of salad. “Never occurred to you that those SEALs might have done it to themselves? Sergeant Shannon said that you were impressed by them.”

“Yes, sir.”

Klyber finished his salad. He laid his fork across the top of the plate and pushed the plate aside. Then he sipped his wine and turned toward his main course, a thick slab of roast beef.

“Corporal, I have served in the U.A. Navy for over forty years. I had my own command before Che Huang entered officer training school. In all of that time, the Liberators are the only blemish on my record.”

“They won the war,” I said, trying not to feel offended.

“Indeed they did,” Klyber agreed. “Made the galaxy safe, didn’t they? Unfortunately, history remembers them as unnecessarily cruel, and Congress outlawed them. You are going to help me prove otherwise, Corporal Harris. That is why I have taken such an interest in you. The climate has changed. We are headed toward war, and a fighting man with your talents will be recognized, clone or natural-born.”

“Even a Liberator?” I asked.

“I believe so, yes,” Klyber said as he sliced the meat on his plate. “Especially a Liberator.

“No clone has ever been promoted beyond the rank of sergeant. Only one quarter of the clone boys from your orphanage will become NCOs, Harris. You beat the odds in your first six months.” He speared the prime rib with a quick stab and chewed it with small, mechanical bites. “Perhaps you and I can expand that field of promotions.”

“Only natural-born are admitted into officer candidate school,” I said. Still chewing, Klyber neatly placed his utensils on his plate. He took a sip of wine and leaned back to savor it. “When I was at the academy, only Earth-born cadets were admitted. ‘Earth-born, Earth-loyal,’

that was the old saying.

“They’ve let that slide quite a bit over the years. Politicians have replaced tradition with political expedience. The citizens in the territories complained that they did not have all of the opportunities given to Earth-born children, so Congress used the military for a social experiment. They integrated and enrolled some out-born cadets,” Klyber said, not even trying to mask the disdain in his voice.

“As you know, Huang saw fit to replace Admiral Barry. Our new fleet commander will be Rear Admiral Robert Thurston, an outworlder born and raised in the Orion Arm. If an out-born can command a fleet . .

.” Klyber looked at me and smiled.

Life on the Kamehameha settled into a schedule of drills and drinking. Something was brewing out there beyond the horizon, but nobody knew any details.

Two weeks after we left Ronan Minor, the Kamehameha rendezvoused with the rest of the Central SC

Fleet in orbit around Terraneau. Two days later, the Inner SC Fleet joined our orbit. Down on Terraneau, officers from both the Inner and Central SC Fleets attended meetings as Admiral Klyber created a new command structure. As bits of information trickled in, talk around the platoon was enthusiastic.

Most of the sea-soldiers I spoke with liked the idea of merging with the Inner SC Fleet. The combined fleet would have over a hundred thousand fighting Marines, a force that we believed capable of wiping out any threat.

None of the Marines seemed to care that a new fleet commander had replaced Admiral Absalom Barry. The name Robert Thurston meant nothing; and besides, he was Navy, we were Marines. As long as his boats brought us to the fight on time, we’d do the rest.

That indifference changed on the day that Thurston boarded the Kamehameha. Admiral Klyber took him on a tour of the ship. The last stop on the tour was our deck. A party of officers dressed in whites passed by our barracks, and we all caught a brief glimpse of the little troll. Robert Thurston looked younger than most of the privates in my platoon. He had thick red hair and pimples; honest to God, pimples all over his face. He cut his hair to regulation length, but it stood in spiky clumps under his cap. I was most taken by his size. Thurston was five-foot-five at best, with a slender, almost effeminate build. Needless to say, talk at the bar was wilder than ever that evening.

“You see that kid? He’s barely out of diapers,” one clone shouted as he entered the bar.

“What do you think of Thurston?” Lee asked me as I found the platoon’s watering spot for the night.

“I wonder if he drinks milk or Scotch,” a private from the platoon joked.

“So he looks a bit green,” I said as I downed half my beer.

“Yeah, he looks a little green,” Lee agreed. “I’d hate to find myself nuked just because somebody’s congressman-daddy pushed his boy up the ranks.”

“I don’t think you need to worry about that,” I said. “From what I hear, Thurston earned his way up the ranks.”

“Is that a fact?” Shannon asked, nosing his way into our crowd.

“That is a fact,” I said.

Shannon, who knew damned well that I had met with Admiral Klyber the day before, considered my words. “That’s good news,” he said as he saluted me with his glass. “Did you all hear that? Harris heard that Thurston pulls his own weight, and Harris has good sources.” Lowering his voice, Shannon added,

“The boy must have one hell of a record.”

“And there’s something else,” I said, moving toward Shannon so that no one else would hear me. “He’s out-born.”

I expected Shannon to spit out his beer, but he didn’t. He stood frozen for a moment, then swallowed.

“No shit?” he said. “Born off Earth? That little speck-sucker must really know his stuff.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Kamehameha sat listless, while the frigates and fighters that surrounded her remained in constant motion. Nearly a dozen frigates orbited her hull, circling it in odd patterns. They would keep the flagship safe from fighter attacks. Of course, any fighter carrier, even an ancient one like the Kamehameha, had strong shields and powerful cannons.

The Inner and Central Scutum-Crux Fleets hovered along opposite hemispheres of Terraneau. For a moment, the two fleets looked like mirror reflections of each other; then the Central Fleet pulled back from the planet and arrayed itself in battle formation with six carriers launching fighters and six carriers in reserve. Harriers and Tomcats poured out of six carriers at the front of the formation like angry hornets defending their nest. The Harriers moved so quickly that they could not be tracked with the human eye. Admiral Klyber, commander of the Central Fleet, attacked first. A wave of his Tomcats, fighters made for nonatmospheric conditions with particularly powerful missiles and particle-beam cannons, vanished from radar. When they reappeared, they were approaching the al-Sadat, the flagship fighter carrier of the Inner SC Fleet.

I watched the virtual representation of the battle in real time on a three-dimensional holographic display. Floating in midair, the display looked like a glowing green grid with models of ships. Five meters long and three meters deep, it was large enough to show every detail of the battle.

“Man, that’s fierce,” Lee whispered to me.

“Shhh,” I hissed. Everyone else in the room was silent.

Klyber’s attack made perfect sense. The al-Sadat sat isolated from the other capital ships in the Inner SC Fleet. The nearest frigates were hundreds of miles away and headed in the wrong direction—toward what would likely become the front line of the battle. Klyber’s fighters skirted that line, flanking Robert Thurston’s formation and attacking an unguarded pocket near the rear. It would take a couple of minutes for Thurston’s closest carrier to arrive on the scene.

Thurston commanded his forces from a simulated bridge in one corner of the auditorium. I had a good view of him from my seat.

“Shields,” Thurston said, in a voice that seemed far too calm considering the situation.

“Should we take evasive action, sir?” a crewman asked.

“That will not be necessary,” Thurston said as he paced the deck.

“Shall I signal for frigate support?” the crewman asked.

Admiral Thurston did not have the tactical advantage of watching the battle on a three-dimensional display. From my omniscient seat, I could see every aspect of the battle. I knew that Klyber had already launched a second wave of fighters. Thurston, with nothing more than a battle map that displayed in-ship radar readings, could not know what a forceful assault Admiral Klyber had planned.

“He’s sunk. Klyber’s going to end this fast,” Lee whispered.

“Shhhhh!” I hissed. A few of the people sitting near us gave Lee and me some chilly glares. On the other side of the room, where the officers sat, a loud cheer erupted. They wanted blood. “Bet the boy never saw anything like this at the Academy,” one overexcited officer blurted in a voice that carried. With that, the officers became silent.

I glanced back at the 3-D display to see what all the cheering was about, but I was more interested in watching Admiral Thurston. He looked too young to command a ship. With his spiky, rust red hair and pimples, he looked like a teenage boy pretending to stand at the helm.

“A very aggressive attack,” Thurston said, cocking a single eyebrow. “Either he intends to win early or he wishes to back us into a . . .”

I looked back at the full-battle display in the center of the auditorium. Klyber’s fighters were closing in on the al-Sadat . Thurston showed amazing patience for a man whose ship was about to be attacked by 140 armed fighters. Warning lights flared along the ceiling and floor of the mock bridge. The sirens near the helm console blared so loudly that they choked my thoughts.

I doubted Thurston’s grasp of the situation. Just behind that initial wave of fighters, half of the Central SC

Fleet was in position for the second wave of the attack. Klyber had an unfair advantage—the Kamehameha, a thirteenth fighter carrier. She might have been old and small by carrier standards, but the Kamehameha still bore a complement of sixty fighter craft.

“Send the Washington and the Grant to sector 14-L. Tell them to launch fighters on my orders and power up shields on my mark,” Thurston said as he studied his battle map.

“Sir, we are undefended,” the crewman said.

“Prepare our pilots,” Thurston said in a voice that made the order sound like a compromise, “but do not give the order to launch.”

“Enemy fighters’ ETA is less than one minute,” another crewman yelled.

“What the hell is he doing?” Lee asked.

“Tell the captains of the Washington and the Grant to launch fighters . . . now!” Thurston’s voice was emphatic. He looked so much like a boy in puberty that I expected his voice to crack, but he remained very much in control.

Two events happened simultaneously. Klyber’s fighters arrived and commenced a meaningless attack. His Tomcats buzzed around the hull of the al-Sadat, but their pilots seemed uncommitted. Instead of firing missiles, they seemed more interested in flying defensive patterns. As they circled, the gun batteries lining the hull of the al-Sadat flashed green.

At the exact same moment, a much more important event took place on a distant part of the map. The Washington and the Grant launched fighters as two of Klyber’s carriers and a complement of frigates entered the sector.

“Order the fighters in sector 14-L to attack the enemy carriers,” Thurston said. “Have the Harriers concentrate their fire on their shield stations. The Tomcats can pick off any fighters they manage to launch.”

“Yes, sir,” the crewman said, a new note of excitement evident in his voice.

“Instruct the captains of the Washington and the Grant to attack the frigate escort. We can’t allow those frigates to sneak up on our fighters.”

“Yes, sir,” the crewman responded.

Unlike the al-Sadat, which had its shields up, the carriers from the Central SC Fleet had lowered their shields so that they could launch their fighters. Thurston’s Harriers fired missiles at the shield antennae on those carriers, quickly obliterating their best defense.

I watched as the tiny fighters moved in on the carriers like a swarm of ants. Their missiles would do little good against shielded carriers, but Thurston had timed the attack precisely right. Red lights appeared along the edges of the Central Fleet ships showing that their shield stations were destroyed. Having destroyed the shield antennae, Thurston’s fighters suddenly became a serious threat. Not far away, Admiral Klyber’s frigates were completely mismatched against Thurston’s carriers. In less than two minutes, the Washington destroyed five Central Fleet frigates and the Grant annihilated three more. Any frigates that survived this attack would limp away from the fight. Somehow Robert Thurston had peered into Klyber’s mind and uncovered a weakness. The bulk of the Central Fleet’s frigates fled back toward the protection of the fleet; but the Inner Fleet’s Harriers and Tomcats continued to pummel the carriers, cutting off any hope of escape.

“How did he do that?” Lee asked.

Nobody shhhhed Lee that time. We all wondered the same thing.

Thurston began pouring out a steady stream of commands. “Have the Grant send out bombers,”

Thurston said. “We need to finish those carriers before the rest of their fleet can regroup.”

“Hail the nearest frigate,” Thurston said. “Tell the captain that we require assistance.”

“Only one?” the communications officer asked.

“One will suffice,” Thurston said.

Until that moment, I had not noticed the toll that the al-Sadat ’s cannons had taken on the Inner Fleet’s fighters. They began their assault with 140 Harriers; now fewer than 50 of those fighters remained. As I tried to count the fighters, two large flashes lit up a far corner of the map. Thurston’s bombers made short work of the trapped carriers.

“Excellent,” Thurston said. I still expected his voice to crack. It didn’t. “Recall the attack wings to the Washington and the Grant .”

Thurston’s fighters broke off their attack as Klyber’s ships stuttered back to their end of the field.

“They’re running!” the communications officer yelled, no longer trying to conceal his excitement. “They’re leaving their fighter escort stranded!”

“It would seem so,” Admiral Thurston said.

I stopped to consider the tides of this battle. The Central Fleet had begun the fight with thirteen fighter carriers, sixtyfive frigates, and nine hundred fighter craft. The fleet still had eleven carriers. According to the scorecard at the base of the holographic display, Thurston had destroyed more than three hundred of Klyber’s fighters.

The war was won. I waited for Thurston to send his ships in for a final assault, but he sat silently watching his battle map.

“Admiral, the Central Fleet is preparing to evacuate,” a deck officer said.

“Yes, it is,” Thurston said.

“Shall we attack?”

“No. Let them go.”

A stunned silence filled the auditorium. Moments later, a door near Thurston’s mock helm slid open, and Admiral Klyber, flanked by several aides, stormed in. “You allowed my fleet to escape, Admiral Thurston?”

“Yes, sir,” Thurston said.

“Explain yourself,” Klyber demanded.

Robert Thurston sighed. “In its current configuration, the Inner SC Fleet is designed to win battles, Admiral, not wars.”

“You had my fleet at your mercy,” Klyber snapped. “You should have finished us.”

“If we pressed the attack, we would have joined you in a battle of attrition—my twelve carriers against your eleven,” Thurston said. “If we went in for the kill, I would have lost ships unnecessarily.”

Klyber smiled. “Sensible decision, Admiral. How would you reconfigure the fleet?” Klyber sounded interested, but there was something dangerous about the way he stared at Thurston. Sharp teeth hid behind his smile.

“Fighters and frigates are excellent ships for repelling enemy attacks,” Thurston said. “Having neutralized one-third of your fighters, I would need battleships and destroyers to finish your fleet.”

The simulation took place in the largest briefing room on the Kamehameha , an auditorium capable of seating three thousand people that was only used for important occasions. A more-than-capacity crowd had packed in. Once the seats were filled, lines of people squeezed in along the walls. We had come for theater-in-the-round.

Klyber asked several more questions. When he finished, Thurston’s three-man crew stood up from behind their computer consoles and applauded. Klyber and his aides clapped as well. Soon the theater erupted in applause.

Our new fleet commander nodded to his crew and walked briskly from the stage. He strode out of the auditorium without so much as a sideward glance. The applause, however, continued. If his legend was to be believed, Klyber had never lost a combat simulation, not even as a freshman cadet. Of course, good records have a way of becoming unblemished when there is little chance of verification. Whether or not he was truly undefeated, prior to that match, Bryce Klyber was generally considered unbeatable in simulated space battles.

Over the next three weeks, the seemingly tireless Robert Thurston visited all twenty-five carriers in the Scutum-Crux Fleet. He took on all but one of the captains in simulated battles. (Captain Dickey Friggs of the St. Ignatius complained of fatigue and said he was in no condition for a fight.) The simulations always ended quickly and decisively, with Thurston on top.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Admiral Klyber’s campaign to legitimize Robert Thurston succeeded in every corner of the fleet except one. Walking toward Bryce Klyber’s office on what would turn out to be my last visit, I saw signs of open disdain toward the new fleet commander.

Everywhere else in the fleet they called him Admiral Thurston; but on the command deck, he was

“Bobby, boy genius” or sometimes simply “the boy.” In the time that I spent waiting to meet Admiral Klyber, I heard jokes about “the boy’s” voice changing, his testicles dropping during battle, and a pretty good one-liner about him offering spiked milk and cookies to his officers so that they would let him stay up past his bedtime.

Sitting in the waiting room, I listened to the bits of humor in silence. What kind of jokes did they tell about clones? And another question—If Thurston hadn’t wowed these people with his strategic skills, what would impress them?

The door to Admiral Klyber’s office slid open, and he entered the doorway. “Corporal Harris,” he said. As I followed Klyber into his office, I heard an aide whisper, “The admiral’s pet clone.” It took real effort to pretend I had not heard it.

“Your mercenary friend is making quite a name for himself,” Klyber said, as we crossed his office.

“Freeman is walking a very fine line. He does a lot of piecework in this arm. According to the local authorities, some of his clients are worse than the hoodlums he brings in.”

Klyber sat down behind his desk. I looked over his shoulder for a moment and stared out the viewport behind him. The Kamehameha had entered an odd phase of its orbit. I could not see Terraneau, just the blanket of space and an occasional frigate.

“Sit down, Corporal,” Klyber said, pointing toward one of the chairs before his desk. As I took my seat, he asked, “What do you think of Rear Admiral Thurston?”

“He knows his way around a combat simulation,” I said.

“I’ve never seen the like,” Klyber agreed. “I hear there is a rumor going around that I let Thurston win. I would never stage a loss, not even to improve fleet morale. I don’t see how my losing could possibly boost morale.”

“No, sir,” I said. I had not heard that rumor, and I doubted that anybody outside SC Command had. Rumors like that only existed among ass-kissing officers vying for a promotion. As far as I could tell, Thurston’s victories had gone a long way toward improving ship morale. Once the topic shifted to Thurston, Klyber spoke in short bursts. He leaned over his desk as he spoke, then sat back in his chair and drummed his fingers on the armrests of his chair when I answered his questions.

“That was a very unorthodox move, leaving a capital ship unguarded during a fighter attack. Moves like that can cost an entire battle.”

“Did he tell you how he knew where to send the Washington and the Grant , sir?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Klyber, sounding aggravated. “Yes, he did. He said that my flash attack meant that I wanted to put him in a defensive posture. He said my opening attack was either the wasteful move of an amateur strategist or an obvious attempt to herd an enemy out of position. The cocky little prick told one of my aides that he gave me the benefit of the doubt.”

Klyber paused, giving me a moment to respond; but I did not say a word. “Thurston read my attack as a move to spread the battle to three fronts. The bastard was exactly right.”

“He figured that out from your opening attack?” I asked.

“Apparently so,” Klyber said.

“Luck?” I asked.

Klyber smiled, taking my question as welcomed flattery. “I thought it was luck, but he’s taken every captain in the fleet. The captain of the Bolivar managed to last the longest—twenty minutes; but he spent most of the simulation running away.” Thinking of this match brought a wicked grin to Klyber’s narrow face. “I sent a video record of the match to the Joint Chiefs. Che Huang may have something to say to Captain Cory about his tactics.”

“Are you going to act on Thurston’s suggestion about adding new ships to the fleet?” I asked.

“You must be joking,” Klyber snapped. His demeanor changed in a flash. His eyes narrowed, and he pursed his lips so hard that they almost disappeared. Sitting with his back as rigid as a board, he said,

“You give this man entirely too much credit. He won a simulation, nothing more than a game. That is a far cry from proving yourself in battle.”

Knowing that I had touched a nerve, I nodded and hoped the moment would pass.

“We don’t need new ships,” Klyber continued. “Unless you have been briefed about some new enemy that I don’t know about, the Unified Authority is the only naval power in the galaxy. We are the only ones with anything larger than a frigate.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. I thought about the three dreadnoughts that attacked the Chayio , but had the good sense to keep my mouth shut.

Klyber stared angrily at me for another moment. “I would not give that frontier-born mongrel the satisfaction,” he hissed. Having said this, Admiral Klyber relaxed. His shoulders loosened, and he leaned back in his chair.

“People feel the same way about clones,” I said.

A glimmer of Klyber’s earlier humor showed in his smile. “I wouldn’t hold my hopes out for a seat on the Linear Committee,” Klyber said, “but, all in all, I think a clone is more readily welcomed into proper society than a prepubescent from the frontier. After all, clones are raised on Earth and are entirely loyal to the Republic. Can anybody really know where a frontier-born’s loyalties lie?”

“But no clone has ever become an officer,” I said.

“As I have said before, we may be able to change that, you and I.” He turned to look out of the viewport. None of the other ships from the fleet were visible at the moment, so he turned back toward me.

“It’s been forty years since the Unified Authority has seen a full-scale assault, Corporal. That is about to change. I am placing your platoon on point. If you perform well . . . Let’s just say that I will be able to open new doors for you.”

Klyber did not tell me the details at that time. Polished brass ran through his veins, and I was still a corporal. The details became apparent soon enough, however. Admiral Thurston cut the orders the following day.

We filed into the briefing room and sat nervously. People spoke in whispers that steadily grew louder as we waited, and more and more Marines packed into the room. By the time Captain McKay began speaking, four platoons had squeezed into a holotorium that was barely large enough for one. McKay strode up to the podium alone. Sitting one row in, I was close enough to see the way his eyes bounced around the gallery. Then the lights went out. The holographic image of a dark planet appeared. The planet spun in a slow and lop-sided rotation. No sunlight showed on its rocky surface. It did not appear to be a moon, but I saw no signs of plant life or water.

“Naval Intelligence has traced the location of the Mogat separatists who attacked our platoon on Ezer Kri,” McKay said. His voice was low and commanding and tinged with poorly concealed excitement.

“The insurgents have set up on a planet in the uninhabited Templar System called A8Z5. For purposes of this mission, we shall refer to A8Z5 as ‘Hubble.’”

McKay spent the better part of an hour laying out the tactics we would employ to invade Hubble. When he finished, he opened the meeting for questions.

“Excuse me, sir,” a Marine from another platoon asked. “Is that a moon?”

“Hubble is a planet,” McKay said.

“God,” Sergeant Shannon whispered, “what a pit.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I knew the paradise Hubble once was and the hell it had become. One hundred thousand years ago, Hubble, the garden planet of the Templar System, had lakes and forests, mountain pastures and ice-capped peaks. Colorful birds once flew across its skies. During our briefing, they showed us video footage of the very spot on which the battle would occur. It was a paradise. But Hubble no longer had a sky, per se. The noxious, oily gases that passed for its atmosphere could kill a person as surely as a bullet through the head. A thin film of gas swirled overhead, blurring my view of the stars. No sunlight warmed the planet’s rock and powder surface. No plants grew through the hard crust that covered so much of Hubble’s scaly ground.

On Earth, they still saw Hubble as an outer space Eden, but Earth was sixty thousand light-years away. The astronomers who named Hubble’s solar system after an ancient religious order had no way of knowing that they were looking at an extinct vision. The images they saw were older than civilization. Viewed from observatories in the much closer Sagittarius Arm, Hubble was a scene of grand destruction. From their telescopes, scientists watched as Templar, the eponymous central star of the Templar System, expanded. Once a benevolent sun, Templar died as suns often do, swelling until it devoured half of the solar system around it. Before collapsing into itself, Templar engulfed A8Z3, A8Z2, and A8Z1, its three closest neighbors. Those planets vanished entirely.

Fifty thousand light-years away, the flaring red surface of Templar had just begun to spread into the orbits of the next neighboring planets. I have watched video images of it melting entire mountain ranges and boiling seas into steam—images of a fifty-thousand-year-old apocalypse that are still viewable fifty thousand light-years away.

A8Z4 and Hubble (A8Z5), the fourth and fifth planets from Templar, were not completely destroyed, though the dying sun scorched their surfaces. A8Z4 now existed as a wisp of dust particles and gas. You could fire a missile through it. The once-rich soil of Hubble was cooked to ash, and its atmosphere became toxic.

The kettle opened to reveal the rim of a sweeping valley. As the platoon hustled out of the armored transport, I looked across the panorama and noticed how the black sky and gray landscape seemed to stretch forever.

During our briefing, Captain McKay described the full extent of this invasion. Within the hour, armored transports would land thirty thousand Marines on this desecrated planet with another seventy thousand Marines waiting in reserve.

The outer skin of Hubble’s atmosphere was formed of combustible gas that exploded in harmless flashes when heated by rocket engines. We had so many ships passing through the atmosphere that the sky looked like it was on fire.

“Positions, men,” Sergeant Shannon bellowed. “Fan out. Secure the area.”

We knew the drill. Shannon had trained us well. He had rehearsed every step of securing a landing area with us hundreds of times.

“You heard the sergeant,” I said to my fire team. The four men on my team formed a diamond, and we headed south to the ridge. The ash crunched and compressed under my boots. I did not sink; it was not like stepping into water or quicksand. It felt more like walking on dry leaves. The sun that burned up this system might have burned out, but it still generated heat, over two hundred degrees. The planet’s landscape spread before us as a perpetual nightscape. On other worlds I sometimes regretted the way our night-for-day vision blotted out color; but it didn’t matter on a desolate brick, like Hubble. Everything was gray or black except for the amber-colored condensation that formed on my visor. I wiped at it with the tips of my fingers, leaving a translucent swirl. Fine beads of oil hung in the air of the planet like steam after a summer rain.

The first of the barges landed no more than thirty yards from where I stood. Jets of fiery exhaust flared from its engines. The blast blew dust that stuck to the oil on the front of my visor. I tried to clean it, but the hardened plastic on my battle armor only smeared the film. When I looked back at the barge, the smear obscured my view of a column of low-gravity tanks rolling out of its hold. LG tanks were ten feet tall and thirty feet long—built long and low to take advantage of any available gravity. They were iron beasts carrying artillery, particle beams, and missiles. Weighing nearly two hundred thousand pounds each, they sank six inches into the clinker soil.

“Holy shiiiiit,” Lee gasped over the interLink. “Sergeant Shannon, Harris, you’d better have a look at this.” Lee stood at the edge of the valley. I joined him.

“What are you looking at?” I asked.

“Ping it,” Lee said.

Shannon let out a litany of four-letter words.

Using optic commands, I initiated the sonic locator. My helmet emitted an inaudible ping that bounced across the landscape. One moment, I saw the valley below me as a wasted desert with cinder for soil; the next moment, the sonic locator overlaid that scene with a network of translucent green trenches. Hundreds of snake shafts crisscrossed the ground in nonsensical patterns. I did not know what the excavations could be used for. When I discussed them with veteran Marines, I used to get a shrug and a tired look. To them, snake shafts were as baffling as the giant stone heads on Easter Island, something that religious fanatics built for the sake of building. I thought that there had to be more to it than that.

“Those can’t all be snake shafts,” I said. “There are too many of them.”

My sonic locator sent out another ping as the ghosts of the first ping faded. An identical pattern appeared.

“The Mogats could not have dug those,” I said. “They only left Ezer Kri a few weeks ago.”

“Then somebody has been digging into this planet for years,” Lee said. “Think they knew they would hide here someday?”

“I don’t know what to make of it,” Shannon said as he left to return to his squad. As Lee and I debated the improbabilities of the snake shafts, a gust of wind blasted so hard it almost pushed me over. I looked back to see the gray hull of another barge touching down. The barge’s oblong body settled with a loud creak, then made a loud mechanical whine as the cargo bay doors opened. It carried Cobra gunships—low-flying units used to cover ground troops. With their giant racks of guns and rockets, Cobras looked more like gigantic bumble-bees than snakes. The gunships’ engines kicked into gear as a conveyor belt moved them to the front of the cargo bay, and they launched into the air. My vision remained clouded. I tried brushing the oil-based mud from my visor with my glove again, but that only smeared it more.

By that time, over twenty thousand Marines crowded the ridge with another ten thousand on the way. I looked across the scene and took mental inventory of the men and tanks. “Lee, gunships, tanks . . . this is a full-scale invasion,” I said.

“I’ve never seen anything on this scale,” he agreed. “Shannon is probably the only active Marine who has.”

The oil mist that passed for humidity in Hubble’s atmosphere distorted sounds, but it did not smother them. A wing of ten Harriers zoomed over our heads. Two seconds passed before the roar of their engines tore through my helmet. By the time the sound caught up to us, the Harriers had slowed for a methodical sweep of the valley. As the fighters approached the horizon, I heard the thunder of missiles and saw tiny bubbles of light along the valley floor.

“Move out!” McKay’s voice bellowed over the interLink.

“Gentlemen, let’s roll!” Shannon shouted.

That was our call. The first wave of the attack consisted of thirty thousand Marines, a mere five hundred tanks, and thirty gunships. The Harriers that preceded us pounded the enemy’s gun placements, bunkers, and air defense. Whatever ships and airfields the Mogats possessed, would now lie in ruin. As the Harriers wove their fire, our job was to cause chaos. We would breach the Mogat lines and scatter their defenders so that the rest of our landing party could deliver a killing blow. The Mogats were the men who had massacred our platoon. We owed them.

“Lets go!” Lee yelled to his men over a platoon-wide open channel on the interLink. Lunging over the precipice, we used our jetpacks to glide down the sloping valley wall. Our packs set off small fireballs in the gassy air. From above, we must have looked like a swarm of locusts with exploding asses. Once we reached the valley floor, we dropped to our feet and trotted toward battle. From an observation craft far overhead, one of our commanders signaled us to break into a picket line by illuminating a formation symbol in our visors. We rushed to comply. Forming diagonal lines with our fire teams, we stretched the width of the valley.

“There cannot possibly be any living people on this planet,” I said to Shannon over the interLink.

“Shut up, Harris,” Shannon said. “Keep the Link open.” Shannon’s words sounded harsh, but a certain lilt in his voice suggested agreement.

The ground started to vibrate under my feet. I looked back in time to see rows of tanks reaching the bottom of the valley wall. “Skiing” with our jetpacks, we had easily out-paced the heavy LGs down the slope; but now they were catching up to us quickly. Seeing their approach, I radioed my team to pick up speed.

I wiped the glass with the side of my forefinger, scraping the dust and grease as best I could; but the stiff plates that formed my gloves just would not absorb the oil from my visor. The landscape around me remained out of focus.

“Platoon leaders, report,” Captain McKay ordered. He took their reports over the open link so that everyone in our platoon could hear them.

Tim Grayson, the sergeant over the Thirteenth Platoon, responded. Sergeant Shannon said nothing. McKay waited for his report then called, “Sergeant Shannon, report.”

“Have you run a sonic sweep?” Shannon asked.

“Affirmative,” McKay said, in a voice that was both authoritative and efficient. “We are aware of the tunnels. We have scanned the tunnels for enemy personnel and equipment as well.” He sounded impatient. The ships orbiting Hubble had much more sophisticated equipment than the scaled-down sonic locators in our helmets.

I looked back and saw Shannon kneel with one knee in the ash soil. “All clear in this sector, sir,”

Shannon said. I could tell he felt frustrated by McKay’s cool response, but his voice hid it well. The odd atmosphere continued to distort sounds. In an oxygen atmosphere, the rumble of the LG tanks would have rattled my armor. During field exercises on Earth, I could hear gunships from hundreds of yards and could tell which direction the sound came from. On Hubble, I did not hear the gunships until after they had flown past me, and the growl of the tanks seemed to come from all directions.

“Watch yourselves,” McKay shouted over the interLink.

The tanks caught up to us. A less rigid formation flashed in my visor, and my team fell back, keeping pace with the tanks. We moved at a fast jog, maybe six miles per hour. You had to watch your step in the low gravity. We had weights in our boots; but it was easy to stumble. If you fell in front of a tank . . . An LG rumbled past me. The tops of its spools were just about even with my head. The dust it kicked up stuck to my visor, and I was temporarily blinded. I did not dare stop with tanks rolling past, so I stumbled forward as I scraped at the dust with the side of my finger. When I removed my hand, I saw something on the tank that left me numb. The words “PFC Harold Goldberg” appeared over a muddy spot in the tread. The tank must have run over Goldberg, crushing his helmet into fragments, some of which were trapped in the tread.

Ahead, at the end of the valley, I caught a clear view of Harriers circling in the air, dropping bombs and firing missiles. Three gunships flew low overhead, skittering into the distance and joining that battle. Suddenly the night sky boiled as dozens of fighters burst through the combustible outer atmosphere.

“They’re launching ships!” McKay yelled over the interLink. “They’re trying to escape.”

Reality had finally caught up to the Morgan Atkins colony of Ezer Kri. They had caught a platoon unaware in Hero’s Fall, then outsmarted a frigate, but now the U.A. Navy had them trapped. They would pay for their aggression.

“You’re not going to get away this time,” I whispered to myself.

Another minute passed, and I caught a quick glimpse of the battle ahead. A spark of light lit a distant ridge for a moment. The flash was so fast that I almost missed it. Slowing to a trot, I switched my visor to telescopic lenses. My dirty visor obscured my view, and Hubble’s dark atmosphere made a clear sighting almost impossible, but I caught a glimpse of Harriers swarming the air above a lofty fire.

“Lee, have you seen what’s going on up there?”

“I just saw a specking LG run over one of Grayson’s men,” Lee panted over our team frequency. “Stay alert.”

I do not know if I sensed a shift in the ground or simply sensed the danger. For some reason I stopped and turned to watch the LG that had pushed up ahead of me. The ground in front of the tank rumbled and several columns of ash spun into the air. Those twenty-foot twisters were the only warning. As they dissolved, the ground in front of the LG crumbled, leaving a deep trench in its place. Riding so near to the ground, the low-gravity tank was an easy target. It teetered on the edge of the trench for a moment, but its momentum and weight sent it forward, and it tumbled nose first into the hole. The ground shook, and a flash of flame shot into view.

“Holy shit!” Lee shouted into the interLink.

Until I saw the tank topple into that shaft, I had not felt the hormone rush that I had experienced during the battle on Gobi. Suddenly I felt the warmth running through my blood. The feeling was soothing. It was more than soothing. It felt good. “The bastards rigged their friggin’ snake shafts to cave in,” I shouted. I heard Sergeant Shannon. “Command! Command! Stop all movements! Stop all movements!” But Shannon’s warning came too late.

Looking around the valley, I saw the ground crumbling in all directions as dozens of trenches appeared. To my left, an LG tank struggled to reverse itself before it rolled into one trench, then backed into another. The men piloting the tanks did not wear breathing equipment. If they evacuated, they would be strangled by Hubble’s toxic air.

“Stop all movements! Repeat, stop all movements!” Shannon continued. Another tank to my left tried to pivot around a trench, but the powdery soil beneath it caved in. A group of men walking beside it fell in as well. Several more vehicles had fallen farther back; I could see their useless hulls leaning out of the trenches. Flames burst through their armor.

“Repeat, halt all movements!” Shannon bellowed then fell silent. By this time endorphins and adrenaline coursed through my veins.

The officers commanding the invasion would have known about the snake shafts. At least those who were alive would know. Some field officers were stationed aboard a mobile command center that more likely than not was now lying ass up in a ditch.

The invasion force ground to a stop, giving me a moment to survey the damage. I counted sixty-three destroyed tanks, but I might have missed some in the dust and smoke. There was no way of estimating how many men had fallen when the shafts caved in beneath them.

Across the scarred field, the tanks that had not fallen into trenches remained perfectly still. The men within them were trapped. Any movement might send them over a ledge.

“Gather your men,” Shannon ordered his fire team leaders over the interLink.

“Fall in,” I called to my men. Only one man answered.

“Amblin? Schultz? Respond,” I called out. When they did not reply, I hailed them twice more.

“Sergeant,” I said, hailing Shannon.

“What?”

“I’m missing two men,” I said. “Amblin and Schultz. Requesting permission to look for them.”

“You can look; but, Harris, do not drop in the snake shafts,” Shannon barked back. “Even if you find one of your men in a shaft, do not go in after him.”

“Understood,” I said, though I did not understand.

“You have ten minutes to look,” Shannon said. “Find them or not, in ten minutes get back to the platoon.”

I called to my remaining team member. “You heard him. We have fifteen minutes to locate Amblin and Schultz.”

We split up. I turned toward the rear of our stalled forces. What had once been an endless and empty strip of land now looked like a junkyard. The fire-blackened tails of low-gravity tanks poked out of the ground like scattered rocks. The oily Hubble atmosphere had smothered the fires that had erupted out of the ruined tanks, but smoke still rose from their hatches.

I passed a trench and stared down the hull of a derelict tank. It had fallen nose first, smashing its turrets under its own immense weight. Pausing to wipe the grease from my visor, I looked at the wreckage. Under other circumstances I might have hopped on to the back of the tank for a closer look; but with the crew still inside, I did not want to take a chance of making things worse. A layer of sludgy, brown fog filled the bottom of the trench, obscuring the nose of the tank. As I looked more closely, I saw the bodies of dead Marines along the edges of the snake shaft. At first I thought that they might have jumped from the tank, but there were too many bodies, and most wore armor. Some of the bodies were burned. My visor did not register the identity signals from any of them. Whatever the fog inside the trenches was, it destroyed the electronics inside their combat armor. I did not want to know what it might have done to the men wearing the armor.

Amblin’s armor still gave off its identification signal. As I looked across a collapsed snake shaft, I saw him. He must have caught on to a ledge as the ground collapsed around him. He lay sprawled, facedown, over the lip of the trench like a man hanging off the edge of a swimming pool. But Amblin was not moving.

I knelt beside him. When I touched his helmet, it rolled away from the rest of his armor. A layer of darkened blood sloshed around inside his visor. Shocked, I stumbled backward, my attention still fixed on the maroon liquid that seeped out from his shoulder pads.

“Dammmnnn!” I bellowed inside my helmet. Amblin and I had never been friends, but we trained together. I’d known I could depend upon him.

I remained sitting on the cinder soil for another minute, fighting to regain my composure. Everything had gone so wrong. Our invading army sat in a morass. How had they done it? How did these Mogat hoodlums, these small-time criminals and religious fanatics, outsmart our fleet?

“Lee, Harris, come on back,” Shannon said.

“I found Amblin,” I said.

“Is he okay?” Shannon asked, his voice perking up.

“He’s dead,” I answered. “There’s some sort of toxic gas in the snake shafts.”

“I saw shit like this during the Galactic Central War,” Shannon said. “You find it on scorched planets.”

“I hate this place,” I said.

“Then I’ve got some bad news for you,” Shannon said. “Our Harriers destroyed their ships.”

“That’s good,” I said, feeling brighter. “I forgot about the air battle.”

“The speckers ran into caves at the far end of the valley,” Shannon continued, ignoring my comment.

“We’re going after them, Harris. We’re going underground.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The pleated cliffs surrounding the far edge of the valley had nearly vertical walls made of a black, obsidian-like rock that reflected light. From our gathering point a few hundred yards back, we did not have a good view of the dozens of caves in the craggy walls. They might have been formed by erosion, or bubbling heat, or carved by the same Mogat hands that dug the snake shafts. At the moment, our invasion looked more like a rescue operation. Teams of corpsmen brought breathing gear to men trapped in LG tanks, and evacuation teams pulled the crews to safety. From what McKay told Shannon, our engineers had not yet figured out how to pull the surviving tanks off the battlefield. At a hundred tons each, the tanks weighed too much for personnel carriers to lift, and the ground was too broken to land barges. Vince Lee made a joke about building dozens of bridges and rolling the tanks to safety, but that seemed like the most plausible answer.

While engineers and evacuation crews cleaned up after the first stage of our invasion, wings of ATs flew in another regiment to replace the dead and wounded. Captain McKay had his two platoons regroup along one side of the Mogats’ launchpad. We had lost twenty-one men—just less than half of our men, and our platoon had one of the lower casualty rates because we were at the front of the attack. We had almost been across the field by the time the shafts caved in.

We were not the only ones who had suffered. The broken hulls of so many Mogat cargo ships littered the near side of the canyon that I did not bother counting them. Our fighters and gunships had left a smoldering graveyard in their wake. The wrecked ships, strewn like broken eggshells across the ground, glowed with small fires that burned inside their hulls. The flickering flames were only visible through port-holes and cracked hatches.

The Mogats had cargo ships of various sizes in their fleet. Clearly the enemy wanted to escape, not fight. I saw no sign of the dreadnoughts that had destroyed the Chayio , just lightly armed cargo ships and transports.

“I am sending coordinates over your visor,” Captain McKay said, over an open frequency on the interLink. “We’ve been ordered to secure a cave.”

McKay’s mobile command center had survived the trap. His pilot had managed to swerve around three shafts and drive the vehicle to safety. With the airspace over the battlefield secured, the officers overseeing the invasion now commanded us from one of Klyber’s diplomatic cruisers.

“Maybe they could command us from a penthouse in Washington, DC,” Lee joked. “There aren’t many snake shafts around Capitol Hill.”

“Watch your mouth,” Shannon said, his voice snapping like a whip. “Now roll out.” Shannon, always duty-bound, did not let his men criticize officers.

The shortest way to our sector was straight across the launch area. We followed a path through the destroyed ships with our particle-beam rifles raised and ready, prepared to fire at anything that moved. We needn’t have bothered. It quickly became apparent that our pilots had more than evened the score. I passed a large freighter with an oblong, rectangular front and sickle-shaped fins. Two-foot-wide rings dotted its sides, marking the spots where particle beams had blasted the hull. When I got closer, I noticed that the armor plating under the blast rings had blistered. Most of the ships had not even lifted off the ground when the attack started; and their shields were down.

As I walked by this particular wreck, I saw the fatal wound. The engines at the back of the ship, now little more than blackened casings and fried wires, had exploded. The thick and unbreathable Hubble air stifled the fire outside the freighter, but the inside sparkled with dozens of tiny flames. I peered through the open hatch and saw fire dancing on the walls.

I also saw people. If the ship was full at launch, at least three hundred people died inside it. In the brief glimpse that I got, I saw men slumped in their seats like soldiers sleeping on a long transport flight. One dead man’s arms hung flaccid over the armrests.

“Are they all dead?” I asked Lee.

He did not answer at first. Just as I prepared to ask again, he said, “I hope so, for their sake.”

We pushed on, weaving through the wreckage. I passed by a small transport—a ship capable of carrying no more than seven people. It had apparently lifted a few meters off the ground when a missile tore its tail section off. The ship crashed and settled top side down, bashing a hole in its nose section. I looked in the cockpit and saw the pilot hanging from his chair, his restraint belt still binding him into place. The man’s mouth gaped, and blood trickled over his upper lip and into his nostrils. More blood leaked from the tops of his eyes, running across his forehead in little rivulets that disappeared into his thick, dark hair. The pilot’s arms dangled past his head; the ends of his curled fingers rested on the ceiling.

I could not tell if Hubble’s gases had killed him or if he had broken his neck in the crash. I had no problem identifying what killed the copilot hanging from the next seat. A jagged shard of outer plating hung from his neck. From what I could see, that bloodstained wedge had sliced through the man’s throat and become jammed in his spine.

A hand touched my shoulder and I jumped. When I looked over, I saw Shannon’s identifier.

“Don’t get distracted,” Shannon said.

“Remind me never to piss off the U.A. Navy,” I said.

“That’s not the worst of it.” Lee approached us and nodded toward the body. “His pilot’s license was revoked.”

“You’re a sick man, Lee,” I said.

We turned and continued through the wreckage. After a while, one ship looked pretty much like the next, and I no longer bothered to peer inside. The passengers were dead; that was enough. As we reached the edge of the landing area, I noticed piles of melted netting and wires—the ruins of a camouflaged hangar. These people were so desperate to live that they had colonized an uninhabitable planet. No sane person would have ever searched for life on a rock like Hubble, but our intelligence network found them just the same. Perhaps a recon ship just happened to spot them or maybe a loose-lipped friend let the information slip over a drink. In any case, they were trapped. We stopped a hundred yards from the cliffs. I had to ping the wall to locate the caves—night-for-day lenses are not good tools for spotting dark caverns set in jet-black cliffs. The ground was black, the cliffs were black, the sky was black, and the dust and oil on my visor were not helping. My sonic locator outlined the opening with a translucent green orifice, but I still could not tell what machinery might be hiding inside.

“Are we going in?” I asked Sergeant Shannon when I spotted him and his men. He did not dignify the question with an answer. He stared ahead at the cave, his hands tight around the stock of his gun.

“They fight harder when they’re backs are up against a wall like this,” Shannon said. “They’ll be more angry than scared.”

I thought about what he said. “They’re bound to have a few more tricks.”

“No,” Shannon said, sounding resigned to the situation. “They’re at the bottom of their deck. They could never have expected us to find them here. We’ve finally closed every back door unless their friends have enough ships to overwhelm an entire fleet.”

I followed Shannon’s gaze back to the cliffs and the barely visible mouth of the cave. “We could wait them out. They’re going to run out of food and air . . .”

“We’ll take the battle to them, Harris. You want to know why we have all-clone enlistment? It’s so that we can throw an infinite supply of men into any fire and not worry about the public outcry.”

“Clones are equipment,” I echoed.

“Standard-issue, just like guns, boots, and batteries,” Shannon said. Through most of our conversation, Shannon stared at the cliff; then he paused and turned toward me. “We’re still on point, and McKay’s going to give the order soon.”

I nodded and turned. “Lee,” I called over the interLink. “Shannon says it’s almost time to roll.”

Lee came to me and held out his hand. He held a swatch of black cloth. “Wipe your visor, friend,” he said.

“Where’d you get that?” I asked.

“I swiped it from that ship,” he said, pointing toward a small cruiser that had broken wide open. “It’s from the upholstery.”

“Clever,” I said. “Thanks for sharing.”

“No problem,” Lee said. “You’ll do a better job of watching my back if you can see where you’re going.”

“Ha,” I said.

By that time, the reinforcements were positioned all along the valley walls. We had enough men to cover every cave. No matter where they tried to evacuate, the Mogats would run into Marines.

“Okay, Lee . . . Harris,” Shannon called out, “I just got the word. McKay wants us to secure the entrance.”

That was just a courtesy call. The next message, sent over the platoon frequency, was the actual order.

“Okay, gentlemen, secure this area and stay within the goddamned lines!” Shannon barked. Along with missiles, fighters, and tanks, the Unified Authority Marine Corps utilized more subtle technologies. Command divided the battlefield and sent platoon the coordinates of their attack in the form of a visual beacon—a signal that drew virtual walls around our zone in our visors. Looking straight ahead, I saw the black face of the cliffs. If I turned to the right or the left, however, translucent red walls appeared.

Lee and his team took the left edge of the target zone. Shannon sent my fire team to the right edge. He and the rest of the men ran up the middle. Shannon led the charge, leaving small clouds of dust in his wake as he moved forward in a low crouch. There was no cover for hiding, just flat, featureless soil. With the next man crouched ten paces behind me, I sprinted along the right boundary of the target zone. Keeping my finger along the edge of the trigger guard, I pointed the barrel of my particle-beam gun at the cave.

The mouth of the cave—a broad, yawning keyhole in the side of the cliff—was twenty feet high and maybe ten feet wide. If the inside of the cave was as narrow as the mouth, we would be vulnerable as we funneled through it.

Somebody fired at me. Had he used a particle beam or laser, he might have hit me. Instead, he used a regular gun—a weapon that was somewhat unpredictable in the oil-humid air. Instinctively reacting to the first shot, which clipped the dirt near my feet, I jumped to my right and rolled. The world turned red around me. I had left the target zone and entered the no-man’s-land outside the beacon’s virtual walls. I heard more bullets strike the ground in front of me; but with the red light from the beacon filling my visor, I could not see where they hit.

I climbed to my knees and lunged back to the target zone, jumping forward, slamming my chest and face into the soft ground. My helmet sank deep into the ash, which caked onto glass. As I rolled to my left, staying as flat to the ground as I could, a coin-thick layer of ash clogged my sight. Moving slowly to avoid attracting attention, I reached up and tapped my visor with one finger, causing most of the ash to slide off. Then I pulled the swatch of cloth from my belt and wiped away the grime and ash. Using heat vision, I peered into the cave and saw six gunmen hiding in the shadows with three more on the way. As I rolled on my back again, I saw red streaks flash through the air above my head. I wanted to fire into the cave, but I did not dare. If I’d turned to shoot, I would have made an easy target—the enemy had pinned me down. They had pinned all of us down as they hid behind the entrance of the cave.

Of the forty-two men in our platoon, only twenty-one had survived to make the assault, and I suspected the casualties were mounting. Suddenly there it was, that sweet clarity. My body was awash with endorphins and adrenaline. My fear did not disappear, but it no longer mattered. I could see everything clearly and knew that I could handle any situation. The hormone left me feeling in control. I rolled to my left to get a shot, but a laser bolt struck the ground near me. Apparently the Mogats intended to make us earn every inch of ground we took.

Two bullets flew so low over my shoulder that they clipped my armor. One of the other men was not as lucky. As a seemingly endless wave of laser fire flew overhead, the interLink echoed with his scream. Shannon shouted for him to stay down, but the wounded man did not listen. I turned in time to get a glance of him, though not in time to read his identity. The laser must have grazed the front of his visor, superheating the glass, which melted and splashed on his face. He managed to climb to his knees before a combination of bullets and laser bolts tore into his face and chest blowing him apart. Seeing what was left of the soldier collapse back to the ground, I felt that strange, soothing tingle. Some hidden corner of my brain automatically took over, shutting out the panic. “I think I can get a grenade in there,” I called over to Shannon.

“No grenades!” Shannon shouted.

“I can get it in the hole,” I said.

“I said no, goddamn it!” Shannon said. “You hear me, Marine?”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I did not answer as I released the grenade I was pulling from my belt. At that moment, lying in the soil with bolts and bullets streaking over my head, I wondered if Sergeant Shannon might not be the real enemy. Rolling over on to my stomach, I held my gun in front of my face and squeezed off three shots. The men in the cave responded with a hailstorm of laser fire.

If anybody had asked me to guess who would break up the stalemate, I would have said “Shannon.” But he was in a worse predicament than I. He was pinned down under heavy gunfire directly in front of the cave.

It took Vince Lee to turn the battle around. Suddenly pushing off the ground in a cloud of dust, he sprinted toward the mouth of the cave and leaped forward, squeezing rapid shots from his particle-beam rifle. Firing blindly, he managed to hit three of the Mogats guarding the cave. Using my heat-vision lenses, I watched them fall.

Lee landed face-first and slid into a cloud of dust just in time to dodge the return fire. I do not know if Lee and Shannon coordinated their attack on a private frequency; but as the Mogats concentrated their fire on Lee, Shannon rose on one knee, aimed, and fired.

Undoubtedly using heat vision for a clearer view, Shannon did not fire blindly. Each shot hit its mark, and the last of the Mogats fell dead. I expected more shooters to come, but the mouth of the cave remained empty.

“Cover me,” Lee called, over the interLink. Keeping his rifle trained on the cave, Lee stooped into a crouch and cautiously walked toward the foot of the cliffs. He pressed his back against the obsidian wall, then inched his way toward the cave. He came within arm’s reach of the opening and paused. “See anything?” he asked Shannon over an open channel.

“All clear,” Shannon replied.

“Great work, Lee,” Shannon said. “Okay, everybody, stay put. Captain McKay is sending a technician to check for traps.” Shannon and I joined Lee just outside the mouth of the cave, but we did not enter it. Shannon took a single step into the fissure. He patted a clump of obsidian with one hand. Glancing back at us to make certain that no one was too close, he fired into the wall.

“Sergeant?” I said, rushing over to see what happened.

“It’s nothing, Harris,” Shannon said. “I’m just testing a theory.”

An AT hovered toward us, hanging low over the valley and landing in our zone. The kettle opened, and a Navy lieutenant came down the ramp wheeling a bell-shaped case behind him. The engineer wore a breathing suit. It was not stiff like our combat armor, but it protected him from the environment. Shannon met the lieutenant at the bottom of the ramp. I followed.

“What’s that?” I asked Shannon.

“That, Corporal Harris, is our eyes,” Shannon answered. “Right now we have the enemy trapped in these caves. We’re going to send in a recon drone to make sure our positions do not get reversed.”

“A recon drone,” I repeated. “That makes sense.”

The case looked like it had been made to hold a tuba. It was three feet tall and wide on the bottom. The metal wheels under the case clattered as they rolled down the ramp.

“Are you the one that requested a drone?” the lieutenant asked. “What’s the situation?”

“There are hostiles in those caves, sir,” Shannon began.

“I know that, Sergeant,” the lieutenant interrupted. This was no fighting man. He was a technician, the lowest form of engineer—but he was also an officer, and he had all of the attitude that came with wearing a silver bar on his shoulder.

“The enemy had several men guarding this entrance, sir,” Shannon said. “My men were able to neutralize the threat. We want to send your drone to look for traps and locate enemy positions before going in, sir.”

“Playing it safe, Sergeant?” the lieutenant quipped in a voice that oozed sarcasm.

“Yes, sir,” Shannon responded.

“I didn’t know you Leathernecks were so squeamish,” the man mused. “I suppose I can help.” He opened his case.

“What an asshole,” I said over the interLink.

“Steady, Harris,” Shannon answered in a whisper. “He’s not just an asshole, he is an officer asshole . . . a second lieutenant. They’re the buck privates of the commissioned class; and they always have chips on their shoulders. Besides, we need this particular asshole.”

“Heeere’s Scooter,” the tech said to himself as he opened the bottom of the case. Scooter, a chrome disc on four wheels that looked like a slightly oversized ashtray, scurried out of the case. This demented officer treated the robot like a pet, not equipment. He’d painted the name “Scooter” across its front in bright red letters, and he stroked its lid gently before standing up.

“I do not believe I have seen that model of recon drone before, sir,” Shannon said in a respectful voice that would certainly curry favor.

“It’s a prototype. I built it myself,” the man said. I could not see his face clearly through his breathing mask, but the lieutenant’s voice perked up. “Let’s have a look in that cave, shall we.”

The lieutenant pressed a button on the outside of the case, and a four-inch video monitor flipped out of its lid. When he turned on the monitor, I was amazed by the panoramic scope of Scooter’s vision. The silvery top of the robot was a giant fish-eye lens, offering a 180-degree view. Looking at that screen, I saw the case from which Scooter had emerged, the cliffs, and everything in between. The camera caught everything, and the monitor displayed it in stretched, but accurate, detail. This engineer was both a dork and a brilliant engineer.

“Impressive little specker,” I said over the interLink for only Shannon to hear.

“Stow it, Harris,” he replied.

Issuing the command “Scooter, enter cave” into a small microphone, the tech sent the drone on its way.

“Audio commands only?” Shannon asked.

“I programmed Scooter myself. He uses onboard sonar to find the best paths. He has dedicated self-preservation circuits. The only thing a human controller can do is slow him down.”

Judging by what I saw on the monitor, Scooter used the same basic night-for-day vision technology we used in our visors. He was a stealth drone with no lights or weapons. Skirting around rocks and holes, Scooter sped toward the cave like a giant, silvery beetle. The men in our platoon stopped and watched as it scampered by. When it reached the lip of the cave, it paused. For a moment I thought the little tin can might actually be scared.

“It’s taking a sonic reading,” the lieutenant said, as if reading my thoughts.

“Damn,” Shannon said, with respect.

Pulling a small stylus from his case, the lieutenant said, “Sergeant, take this. If you want a closer look at something on the monitor, tap it with the stylus. That will send a message to Scooter.”

The monitor turned dark as Scooter hurried into the cave. The little robot had a good eye for stealth. It traveled in cracks and crevices along the side of the wall, well concealed from enemy eyes. That was good for Scooter, but not so helpful for Shannon. Even with enhanced night-for-day photography, Scooter was not showing us what we needed. It was showing us the safest path for creatures that were less than four inches tall. Also, Scooter moved too quickly. A squad patrolling such terrain might creep along at one or two miles per hour, but Scooter covered it at a steady fifteen miles per hour. Images flew across the monitor. Five minutes into its patrol, Scooter stopped and ran another sonar scan.

“Okay,” the lieutenant said, “the Mogats are at least two miles deep into the caves.”

“You’ve located a path to them?” Shannon asked.

“Sergeant, they’re two miles down,” the technician said, sounding shocked and mildly offended. Scooter has scanned for traps, and the entrance comes up clean. He’s also verified their campsite.”

I turned to look at the cave in time to see Scooter motoring out of the shadows. The lieutenant must have programmed it to think like a puppy when it was not performing a mission. The goddamned little robot detoured into a crowd of Marines milling near the cliffs and ran circles around their feet. When they did not respond, it returned to the lieutenant and parked itself beside his foot.

“But you did not locate the path to the enemy’s position?” Shannon asked.

“Scooter could not get to them; they’re too deep in,” the technician said.

“Does Scooter have a map that leads to their locations?” Shannon asked, his irritation beginning to show.

“If you mean a map to their doorstep, that is out of the question, Sergeant. I am not going to risk a valuable prototype reconnaissance unit.”

“I know a safe dark place where we can stick his drone,” Lee muttered over the interLink as he came up beside me.

“But you’re willing to send in an entire platoon,” Shannon added. “My men . . .”

“Clones,” the technician corrected.

Shannon made one last attempt to explain himself. “I am not going to lead my men into that cave blind,”

he said in a reasonable tone.

“I’ve done what I can, Sergeant,” the lieutenant said as he bent down to pick up his robot. Shannon grabbed the man by his shoulders, pulled him straight, and then slung him backwards against the hull of the transport. “I don’t agree, sir,” Shannon whispered in a dangerous tone. “I think you can do more. I think you want to do more, because if that is all your useless bug-shit robot can do, I’m going to smash it. Do you understand me?”

“I’ll have you in the brig for this.” The lieutenant clutched the robot to his chest. His voice trembled as if he was about to cry.

Shannon picked up his particle beam and pointed it at the robot. “Right now, the safest place for Scooter is in that cave. Do you understand me, sir?”

The lieutenant’s show of officer anger faded, and behind it we saw the scared technician. “I spent a lot of time programming Scooter,” he pleaded. “If you want to locate hostiles, you can requisition a combat drone. That’s what they are made for.”

“I’m tired of arguing with you,” Shannon said as he reached for the robot. “If you aren’t going to send that bug into that cave, then it’s useless to me.”

“You’re insane,” the technician said.

“Even worse,” Lee said to me only. “He’s a Liberator.”

“Get specked,” I shot back.

“Sorry.”

Staring at Sergeant Shannon, the technician must have realized that he had no options. Shannon was out of control, of course, and there might be a court-martial awaiting him when he returned to the fleet. But for the moment, with no available help, the lieutenant had no choice but to do as he was told. He passed Scooter over to Shannon.

Taking great care to be gentle, Shannon placed the robot on the ground.

“Scooter, enter cave,” the lieutenant spoke into the microphone in a pouting voice. He turned to Shannon. “You will have hell to pay.”

“No doubt,” Shannon mumbled.

Shannon, Lee, and I bent over the monitor to follow Scooter’s progress. The little robot zipped past our men and into the cave, then resumed its original path. The lieutenant kept his microphone close to his lips, issuing whispered orders. “Proceed at half speed.” “Slower. Slower.” “Stay close to the wall.” “Pause and hide at the first sign of activity.” “Scan for electrical fields.”

“Can you brighten this transmission?” Shannon asked.

“The monitor has gamma controls, but you’ll lose screen resolution,” the lieutenant said. He fiddled with the controls, brightening the scene. The gamma controls made a big difference. Suddenly we could see footprints and tire tracks on the ground.

Fifteen minutes after Scooter entered the cave, the robot started to detect sound waves. They were faint, but the robot registered them as human speech.

“Okay, Sergeant, here is a voiceprint. I’m bringing my robot back.”

“Can you give me a visual feed of the men?” Shannon asked.

Still not looking at Shannon, the technician uttered a few inaudible words. Shannon repeated the question, and the man shook his head.

“The robot stays down there until I see people.”

Looking around the cave from our Scooter’s-eye point of view, I began to feel motion sickness. The fish-eye distortion left me dizzy, and I really had no idea what we were looking for.

“I don’t see any people,” Shannon complained.

“Sound carries well in caverns; they may still be a half mile farther in,” the tech answered. “This is obviously the right chamber. You’ve located your target. I’m bringing my robot back.”

“Not until I get my visual confirmation,” Shannon snapped. “I want to know the best way to get to the enemy. I want to know how many men they have and how well fortified they have made their position. Most of all, I want to see how close Scooter can get to those Mogats before they start shooting. And, Lieutenant, I really do not give a shit if they hit Scooter. Got it?” Shannon said all of this in a single breath. As soon as the robot heard voices, its self-preservation programming became active. Scooter moved at an unbearably slow pace, hugging closer to the wall than ever. The reduced speed was helpful. Scooter was several miles into the caves, and his path exposed tributaries and side caverns. Its slowing down gave us more time to study the video images.

Eventually, Scooter turned a corner and neared the spot where the Mogats had dug in. We could not see them, but we could see the dim reflection of distant lights on obsidian walls. The robot continued its slow roll forward, inching ahead like a scared mouse.

We heard the guards before we saw them. Scooter rounded a huge knob in a wall, and suddenly we heard voices echoing. The image on the monitor turned bright as a man stepped right over Scooter. The robot watched as two men walked away, swinging lanterns.

“They almost spotted him,” the technician said. “Are you satisfied?”

“Not really,” said Shannon.

“Get specked!” the lieutenant shouted. I thought he would recall his robot, but he made no move to pick up his microphone. We watched on the monitor as Scooter continued ahead for another few minutes, until the little robot reached a fork in the path. It paused and hid behind a rock, blocking most of our view on the monitor.

That time, even Shannon did not complain. Four men walked right next to the camera. One of them almost stepped on Scooter. They did not see the probe. They kept talking as they walked through the passage and disappeared into a tributary. Once they were gone, Scooter’s self-preservation programming went into overdrive, and the little robot scurried in the opposite direction.

“Wh—” Shannon started to say something and stopped. He bent forward, practically pressing his visor against the monitor. “Can you roll the video signal back?”

The scene on the monitor ran in reverse.

“Stop,” Shannon said. He studied the image and traced it with his finger. He scrolled the image forward and backward on the monitor. “Can you analyze this through other lenses?”

I looked over Shannon’s shoulder and saw what he was looking at. There were two large metal cases; machines of some sort. A series of pipes ran through and around them.

“I have heat and sound readings,” the tech said.

The heat reading was immense. The heat signatures showed yellow with a bleached corona. I didn’t know what the Mogats used the machines for, but they were practically on fire.

“Can you ID this equipment?” Shannon asked.

The technician shook his head.

Shannon turned back to the monitor. “Has your robot left virtual beacons?” Shannon asked.

“Yes.”

“All the way down?”

“Yes,” the lieutenant said. “All the way.”

“Can you upload that information to me on the interLink?” Shannon asked.

“No problem,” the lieutenant hissed. A moment later, Scooter rushed from the cave and streaked right to the lieutenant, who picked it up and loaded it into its case.

“That’s a magnificent robot you have, sir. The Navy needs more of them,” Shannon said with a crazed laugh.

“Harris, I need to contact mobile command. I think we might be off this rock in another few hours.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“Dammit, Shannon!” McKay snapped. “What in God’s name did you do? There’s a lieutenant demanding a firing squad. A firing squad! He claims you assaulted him and threatened to shoot him.”

I could not tell if Shannon had purposely included me in their conversation, so I listened in silence.

“In point of fact, sir, that would not be correct. I threatened to shoot Scooter.”

“What the speck is Scooter?” McKay asked.

“The lieutenant’s recon robot, sir.”

“You threatened to shoot his robot?” McKay asked. There was a tremble in his voice, and I heard other officers laughing in the background. “Threatening Scooter is a serious offense, Sergeant. You may be looking at a long stay in the brig.”

“Not meaning any disrespect, Captain, we need to settle that account later. I believe I have found a way to force the enemy to surrender.”

“I’m listening, Sergeant.” Gaylan McKay had an unnerving ability to read unspoken nuances in any conversation. “What have you got?”

My interLink connection went silent. Shannon might have wanted me to hear him call Captain McKay, but the fine details would be on a “need to know” basis.

For the first time since I repeated the oath, I felt the weight and isolation of my armor. It wasn’t that I cared about the plan. I cared about Shannon. I suddenly realized that Tabor Shannon, master gunnery sergeant and Liberator, was the closest thing I would ever have to family. Suddenly I felt cut off, trapped inside my helmet. I listened to the rhythmic hiss of my breathing. I became aware of claustrophobia causing my nerves to tingle. Strangest of all, I still felt glad to be a Marine fighting on Hubble. “God, what a mess,” I said quietly as I considered my situation—a clone on a toxic planet fighting to protect the government that created him, then outlawed his existence.

“Harris, we’re going in,” Sergeant Shannon said, waking me from my momentary epiphany.

“How many of us?” I asked.

“This time it’s just you and me, Corporal.” Shannon switched to an open frequency. “Lee, you’re in charge. Harris and I are going to do a little spelunking.”

“You might want to leave the rifle stock behind,” Shannon said, as we started for the cave. Not waiting for an explanation, I detached the stock and left it with Lee.

Shannon stepped into the cave and stopped to wait for me. His armor was coated with ash, but his visor was clean. “You should give your visor a quick wipe,” he said. “You might not get a chance to do that later.”

I pulled the swatch of cloth from my belt and wiped the glass carefully. As I entered the cave, I saw the bodies of the men Shannon and Lee had cut down. Two sat slumped against the walls as if resting, the others lay on the ground. One had died clutching his mask. If the gunfire didn’t get you on Hubble, the atmosphere would.

Shannon waited for me to get a few steps closer, then drew his particle-beam pistol and pointed it at the wall. “I want to show you something,” he said, and he fired a bright green bolt into the shiny black rock. The bolt bored into the wall of the cave. Slag and vapor poured out of the hole.

“Recognize it?” Shannon asked me.

“It’s the shit from the trenches,” I said.

“It’s like being in an iceberg,” Shannon said. “Make too much heat, and you will bring the whole damned cliff down.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “The rock melts into vapor?”

“It’s the other way around, the vapor hardens into rock,” Shannon said. “The vapor gets cold and hardens. That’s why the rock looks so shiny; it’s just hardened gas.”

“Now you’re a geologist?” I asked.

“Don’t get smart, asshole,” Shannon said. “Like I said before, I saw shit like this in the Galactic Center War. Since Liberators and Mogats are the only people who were at that little rumble, you can bet they know about it, too.

“Harris, I don’t suppose the good lieutenant uploaded Scooter’s data to you?”

I scanned for beacons, and a thin red line appeared on my visor marking the robot’s path. There was nothing wrong with Scooter’s self-preservation programming. The little robot had explored the caves hidden from danger by traveling in a groove along one of the walls. No wonder the Mogats had walked by the little rodent without seeing it. “Okay, I can read his beacon trail.”

“That’s good. If we get split, you’ll need to find your way out on your own.” Shannon started forward along Scooter’s virtual trail. “You know those machines Scooter passed? Did you recognize them?”

I did not recognize the first machine, though it had looked familiar. I did recognize the second device.

“The one on the left was a power generator,” I said. “You planning on turning out the lights?”

“We’re going to do a lot more than that,” Shannon said. “The bigger machine is an oxy-gen.” The term

“oxy-gen” was Marine-speak for oxygen genitor.

“I don’t think they know we took out the guys guarding this gate. As long as they didn’t see Scooter, we should be able to slip up to the generators without too much trouble. I brought you along just in case, Harris. You get to run interference for me.”

The ground, the air, and the walls in the cave were all shades of black. I had no sense of depth. Running my elbow against the wall as I walked helped me balance myself, but I constantly felt as if I might bump my head against one of the boulders that bulged from the low ceiling. The Mogats had it worse than us, though. Not wanting to leave a telltale trail, they did not string lights along the cave. They had to find their way in and out using lanterns and flashlights. If guards came anywhere near us, Shannon and I would see the glare from their lights. We walked softly, barely lifting our feet and hugging the wall with our backs. Though the darkness in the tunnel meant that we were alone, we kept our pistols drawn.

The path had an almost imperceivable downward slope. It bent and meandered around thick knots in the rock, and continued on its gentle incline, always downward, constantly downward. We moved through one long, straight stretch. When I looked behind me, it looked like the floor and the ceiling had merged. Seeing it left me momentarily dizzy, then I realized that the illusion was caused by my faltering sense of depth.

“Something the matter, Harris?” Shannon grunted.

“I’m fine,” I said.

We would have lost our way in these caverns had it not been for Scooter’s beacons. When I watched the monitor, I had not noticed how many capillaries led from the main path. The path curved around one wall, then another. It split and sometimes seemed to disappear entirely behind sharp bends. More than an hour passed before we rounded a corner and saw the first traces of light. “This is where it gets tricky,”

Shannon said. “Scooter was just ahead of us when it ran into the first guards.”

Shannon stopped, and we knelt behind a rock to talk. “This tunnel leads to Mogat-central. Got it? The shaft with the generators is somewhere between us and them. That shaft is only big enough for one of us, Harris, so you’re on watch while I speck with their equipment. Any questions?”

The cave was absolutely silent. Far ahead, I could see an odd-shaped circle of light. Its distorted reflection on the obsidian walls might have extended for hundreds of yards. My heart thudded hard in my chest, but the endorphins had not yet begun to flow.

“Once I’m through screwing with the equipment, I’m going to give you a signal, and you are going to run like your shitter’s on fire. Don’t wait for me. Just run, and I will catch up to you.”

“You’ll be cut off,” I said.

“I’m getting out the same way Scooter did. This side tunnel loops back into the main cavern. I’ll crawl through and catch up with you.”

In the darkness, I could barely make out the shape of Shannon’s green armor. His helmet looked like a shadow cast on those charcoal-colored walls.

“Sergeant?”

“What is it, Harris?”

“Why did you bring me? I’ve got less combat experience than anyone else in the platoon.”

“You can’t possibly consider Ezer Kri combat experience,” he said in a harsh voice. “Harris, that’s all any of them have . . . skirmishes. You’re a Liberator, Harris. That makes you more dangerous than any of them. Now move out.”

I climbed back to my feet but remained slightly crouched. By that time I had my finger on the trigger. I hated the idea of splitting up with Shannon. I felt like I was abandoning him, like I should go in the tunnel with him.

I passed the shaft with the generators and looked back in time to see Shannon crawling into it. From here on out, I could no longer navigate using Scooter’s beacons. Scooter had gone no farther into the cave. That was the point where the little drone got scared and hid. From here on out, Shannon would be following the path blazed by the robot scout. I was in new territory. Far ahead, the Mogats had set up some sort of temporary shelter. There would be thousands of them. The men who fried our patrol on Ezer Kri were probably somewhere up ahead. My finger still on the trigger of my particle-beam pistol, I moved on. Would Amos Crowley be there?

“How’s it going?” I called to Shannon over the interLink.

“Where are you?”

I looked around. “In a tunnel on the biggest shit hole planet in the galaxy.”

“There are worse ones,” Shannon said. “Now, where are you precisely, asshole?”

“I’m about forty yards from you. I found a good ridge to hide behind in case . . .”

“Harris?”

The part of the cave I had entered was about as brightly lit as a night with a full moon. Up ahead of me, I saw two bobbing balls of light that looked no bigger than a fingernail. Using my telescopic lenses, I got a better look—two men were walking in my direction. Both men wore oxygen masks and carried rifles.

“Piss-poor excuse for sentries,” I said.

“You see something?”

“Two men,” I said. “They might be the ones who walked past Scooter.”

“Pick them off before they spot you,” Shannon said.

“Not a problem,” I said, sighting the first one with my pistol. I took a deep breath, held it for a moment.

“They turned around.” When I switched back to my telescopic lenses, I saw that they were walking away. From that distance, they were nothing more than gray silhouettes.

“Think they saw you?” Shannon asked.

“Not unless they’re telepathic. How’s it going with the equipment?”

There was no way the two guards could have heard me speaking inside my helmet, nonetheless they turned back in my direction. Shannon was saying something about one of the generators, but I stopped listening.

“They’re coming back,” I said, raising my particle-beam pistol. I kept my aim on the more erect of the two men. My hand as steady as the dead air in the cave, I pulled the trigger. The walls of the cave reflected my pistol’s green flash, and sparks flew when my bolt struck its target. Knowing that I would not miss under such circumstances, I fired at the second man without waiting to see if the first one fell. My shot hit the second man in the chest, but it did not kill him. He flew backward against the wall. The man spun around to run and my second shot hit his oxygen tube. Flames burst from his breathing equipment, then snuffed out the moment the oxygen was gone. The explosion produced a brilliant flash and created a loud bang that echoed through the caves.

“What was that?” Shannon asked.

“The bastard’s oxygen tube flamed,” I said.

“Are you dug in?” Shannon asked.

The flange in the rocks behind which I hid was thick, but only three feet tall. I glanced ahead, then crouched as low as I could behind it. “They’re coming,” I said. I saw torch beams bouncing on a far wall.

“How many?”

“About a million of them,” I said. “Wish I could use a grenade. How much more time do you need?”

A red laser bolt struck the rock in front of me. Sparks flew over the top, and I heard hissing as the laser boiled its way into the stone. Another bolt sliced across the top of my barricade, dumping molten slag and brown vapor over the edge. Remembering the way Amblin’s helmet had slid from his body, I moved as far from the vapor stream as I could. Suddenly I felt the soothing warmth in my blood. The Mogats weren’t about to let me enjoy it. Shots began raining in my direction. So many shots struck the shelf in front of me that the black obsidian glowed red as laser bolts liquefied and hollowed it. One of the people shooting at me began targeting the ceiling above my head, and slag and vapor poured out to the floor, just missing my shoulders. I started to peek around the corner of my barricade, and bullets glanced off the rock.

“I’m getting massacred out here!” I said to Shannon.

“It’s tighter than I expected,” Shannon said. “Hold them off!”

I could hear the Mogats yelling to each other. Their fire thinned, and I heard somebody running. I rolled to my right along the ground, fired three shots into the bastard without so much as a pause, and ducked behind a tiny ridge along the other wall. I moved just in time. The Mogats had pumped so much laser fire into the rocks on the other side of the tunnel that they glowed.

Reaching my hand around my new cover as far as I could, I fired blindly. They answered with a hail of laser and bullets. The ridge on this side of the cave was too small to protect me. I fired shots into the roof above them and backed up a couple of yards to a larger rock formation. The Mogats did not see me back away. They continued to fire at the spot that I abandoned. I stole a glance and saw bubbles forming on the back side of the obsidian ridge as the center of the rock boiled red.

“I’m trapped,” I said.

“I’ve got it, Harris. Run!” Shannon ordered.

As I turned to run, the thin light in the cavern flickered out. Light no longer shone from behind the Mogats. They were in total darkness, with only their flashlights and lanterns. Whatever Shannon had done, it doused their electricity. Once again I saw the world without depth through night-for-day lenses. For once I was grateful. I sprinted up the tunnel, laser blasts and bullets blindly spraying the rock walls behind me.

I reached the passage to the generators and saw a beautiful sight. Orange-red light glowed from the opening. It was not the flickering light of a struggling flame; it showed bright, warm, and strong. I got only a brief glimpse of Shannon’s work as I ran past, but it was enough. White-and-blue flames jetted away from the oxy-gen, heating walls farther down the tunnel. Shannon had ignited a fire in the oxy-gen’s piping, turning it into a torch. The flames carved into the obsidian walls. The surface of the rock was already orange and melting, belching thousands of gallons of vile fog. I could not tell if there was a hunting party behind me. If there was, they weren’t using flashlights—I did not see beams on the wall around me. Somehow I doubted that they were following me. More likely than not, they had run back to camp when Shannon turned out the lights.

Wanting to present the smallest possible target, I crouched as I ran. I sprinted around a bend and chanced one last look back. What I saw made me shutter. A thick tongue of vapor rolled out of the generator tunnel. Given a few hours, the vapor would flood the entire cave system. I had seen the way random laser fire had superheated the rock. The fire from Shannon’s torch was not as hot, but it was broad and steady.

“Harris, are you out of there?” Shannon asked over the interLink.

“That shit’s pouring out of that hole like a waterfall,” I answered.

“Get moving uphill,” Shannon said. “Meet me at the top.”

I had not realized how much space we had covered. The path led on and on, and the slope no longer seemed so gentle now that it was uphill. My calves burned, and my pistol felt heavy in my hands. I found myself fighting for breath, then I thought about the Mogats trapped in the dark with their air supply cut off. “Dead or captured,” I mused. For those speckers, that was one hell of a choice. I continued up the slope, my run slowing into a jog, then a walk as I bumped my way forward. “Are you getting through that tunnel okay?” I asked Shannon.

“It’s tight,” he said. “But it seems to be getting wider.”

“I wasn’t paying attention when Scooter went through there,” I said.

“Neither was I,” Shannon said.

“I don’t know how you figured this all out,” I said. “They’re not even following me. That vapor cut them off.”

“Hang on a moment,” Shannon said. “I need to concentrate.” That was the last time we spoke. I walked around one final bend and saw the mouth to the cave. When I looked at the interLink menu in my visor, I did not see Shannon’s frequency.

“Sergeant? Sergeant Shannon!” I called again and again. I called on the platoon frequency. I tried an open frequency. I turned around and shouted his name at the top of my lungs.

“Harris, is that you?” Vince Lee asked. “What’s the matter?”

“I think Shannon is dead!” I said, wanting to go back to look for him. But I could not go back. I realized that. The vapor Shannon had unleashed had flooded the chamber behind me. It had probably flooded the tunnel around him as well. I imagined him crawling in the darkness of that narrow pass, struggling to get through a tight squeeze as he noticed the vapor creeping up behind him. Perhaps he was wedged in so tightly that he could not even turn to see the vapor until it had seeped around him. Whatever toxin that vapor held, it corroded its way through the rubber in our body suits, turning armor into a worthless exoskeleton. It ate through flesh and tissue. If I found Shannon, all I would find would be the hard stuff—the armor and bones, Everything else would be melted. God I hated Hubble.

A very comfortable cruiser landed near our platoon, and Captain McKay ordered me aboard. He wanted to introduce me to the colonels and commodores who would take credit for Tabor Shannon’s tactical genius. Dressed in immaculate uniforms, the colonels and commodores showed no interest in me, but they allowed me to watch as they mopped up the battle.

Nearly ten thousand Mogats surrendered, more than enough for Bryce Klyber’s judicial circus. Their quota met, the officers aboard the cruiser sent airborne battle drones into the caves. The drones looked like little giant pie plates. They were about three feet long and a foot tall. Most of their housing was filled with a broad propeller shaft. They had particle-beam guns mounted on their sides. We called them “RODEs,” but their technical name was Remote Operated Defense Engines. The officers sent ten RODEs into the cavern. The little beasts hovered about five feet over the vapor, and the officers made a game of seeing who could fly the lowest. One swabbie flew his RODE too low, and the vapor shorted it out. Everybody laughed at him. There was a jolly atmosphere inside the cruiser. I could not think. The atmosphere inside the cruiser was suffocating me. I wanted to find a way to rescue Shannon. Even if he was dead, I wanted to pull his body out. I did not want to leave him stranded in a cave filled with dead Mogats. I asked if I could leave, but Captain McKay told me I had to stay. Most RODEs are black, but the ones the colonels and commanders used were special. They had shiny gold chassis and bright headlights. They were not made for stealth.

“The angel of death, come to claim her victims,” one of the colonels joked in a loud voice. I saw that he had a microphone. He was broadcasting his voice inside the cave.

Maybe if I got to Shannon quickly . . . Perhaps he was in the caves, breathing the Mogats’ generated oxygen. I asked McKay a second time if I could leave, and he told me that the officers wanted me to stay.

The officers huddled around tracking consoles, watching the scene inside the cave through their RODEs’

eyes. “Permission to go join my platoon?” I asked McKay.

“Denied,” McKay said, sounding very irritated.

From where I sat, I could see one of the officers steering his RODE. I had a clear view of the monitor that showed him the world as his RODE saw it.

It took less than ten minutes for this officer to steer his RODE past the capillary that led to the generators. Thick fog still chugged out of it like viscous liquid. The RODE’s bright headlight cut through the darkness with a beam that was straight and hard. It shined momentarily on the ridge I used for protection during the shoot-out with the Mogats. The obsidian walls sparkled in the bright beam, but the headlight was not powerful enough to penetrate the thick layer of vapor that blanketed the floor of the cavern. Whatever secrets lay hidden under that gas would remain concealed.

“I found one!” an officer on the other side of the cabin yelled. He got a giddy response from other officers, who wanted hints about how he got there so quickly.

The colonel closest to me had found a grand cavern. His drone flew laps around the outer walls of the cavern like a shark looking for prey. The officer began to search the fog for survivors, and it did not take long until he found his first.

Whatever chemicals made up the vapor were heavier than the atmosphere. The vapor was heavy; it melted flesh and circuitry. What other pleasant surprises could it hold, I wondered. The RODE edged along the outer walls. It had a near miss as it dodged another RODE, and two officers shouted playful insults at each other.

A few Mogats had died while trying to pull themselves to safety, much the way Private Amblin had died in the trench. The colonel steered his way over to one of them for a closer look. The man’s chest, arms, and head lay flat on a rock shelf in a puddle that looked more like crude oil than blood. The gas had dissolved everything below his chest except his clothing.

The colonel circled the camera around the dead man. Vapor must have splashed against the right side of his face. The left side seemed normal enough, but the skin had dissolved from the right side, revealing patches of muscle and skull. Brown strings, maybe skin or maybe sinew, still dangled between the cheek and jaw. His left eye was gone.

Then the colonel found his first survivor—a man in torn clothes perched on a narrow lip of rock. His back was to the RODE. His arms were wrapped around a pipe for balance.

“We’ll certainly have none of that,” the colonel said in a jovial voice. On the screen I saw a particle-beam gun flash, and the man fell from his perch.

The cruiser erupted with laughter.

“Watch this,” another officer shouted. He, too, had found a survivor—a woman. He steered his RODE

toward the woman in a slow hover, then shined its blinding headlight on her face. She screamed and tried to shield her eyes with her forearm, but managed to stay balanced on a narrow rock ledge. The colonel fired a shot at her feet. Trying to back away from the RODE, the woman stumbled and fell. Her face struck the ledge, and she caught herself, but her body had fallen into the pool of vapor that covered the floor. She tried to pull herself up, but the skin on her face and arms was melting. The officers laughed.

“Captain, may I please return to my men?”

McKay looked around the ship. If the officers had ever known we were there, they had forgotten about us by then. “You are dismissed, Corporal,” he said in a hushed voice. Forty thousand Mogats landed on Hubble. We captured ten thousand as they fled the caves and another fifteen thousand died when our Harriers hit their ships. The rest died in the caves.

CHAPTER TWENTY

First I was an orphan, then I was a clone, then I was both. Tabor Shannon had not been my father or my brother, but he had been my family. For a brief few weeks I belonged to a tiny and hated fraternity. So where did all that leave me? I was the last member of a discontinued line of clones fighting to protect the nation that outlawed their existence. All in all, I thought I had it better than Vince Lee and the 2,299

other enlisted Marines on the Kamehameha . I knew I was a clone, and I knew I could live with that knowledge. It now seemed to me that it was impossible that they did not suspect their origins on some level, and they must have lived in fear of the fatal confirmation.

By the time we left Hubble, I had spent more than eighteen months on active duty without asking for leave. The idea sounded foreign when Vince Lee first suggested it.

“Hello, Sergeant Harris,” Vince Lee said as he placed his breakfast tray on the table and sat down beside me. “Sergeant Harris . . . It almost sounds right. The next step is officer, pal. You could actually do it. Hell. You made sergeant in under two years.”

“I did not ask for the promotion,” I said. That was Lee, obsessed with promotions and success. Lee smiled. “You were made for it. You’re a Liberator.”

“So?”

“Every Liberator I’ve ever known made sergeant,” Lee said.

“Get specked.” I knew he was joking, but he struck the wrong nerve. Though they gave me the field promotion before I left Hubble—that was why McKay took me to the cruiser—the paperwork did not get approved for another month. As with my promotion to corporal, I did not feel that I had earned it.

“Look, Harris, I know you miss Shannon, but you need to lighten up,” Lee said. He spooned the meat out of his grapefruit half, then gobbled down two strips of bacon. “HQ reviewed the record before giving your promotion the go-ahead. You did what you could. Let it go.”

I finished my orange juice and placed the cup on my tray. “I guess so,” I said, in an unconvincing voice.

“Okay, well, I had an idea,” Lee said. “You’ve got more leave stored up than any man on this ship. I’ve got a couple of weeks. Let’s take some R and R.”

“That doesn’t . . .”

Lee put up his hand to stop me. “Look at yourself, Wayson. You’re moping around. You should see yourself around the men. You’re on a hair trigger. If you don’t take some time to relax, I think you’re going to shoot somebody.”

“They just gave me a platoon. Do you think they’d let me take leave?” I asked.

“Harris, if they don’t let you go now, they’re never going to. This is the beginning of Klyber’s war. Things will only get hotter from here. Mogats on other planets are going to rally around their dead.”

“Not Mogats,” I said. “Atkins Separatists. That came straight from HQ. We are no longer to refer to the group formerly known as Mogats by any name other than ‘Separatists’ or ‘Atkins Separatists.’”

Lee was right about the Separatists’ rallying. For a man who never followed the news, Vince Lee had an uncanny ability to read the winds.

“Two weeks,” McKay snapped when I requested a leave of absence. “Two weeks of liberty? You only took command of your platoon a few weeks ago. This is not the time for you to take a holiday, Sergeant.”

We stood in a small booth in the gunnery range. Looking through the soundproof window, I could see Lee drilling the remaining members of the platoon as they fired at holographic targets with live ammunition—bullets and grenades. The M27s and automatic rifles hardly made a sound, but the report of the grenades thundered so loud that it shook the booth.

In preparation for fighting the Separatists, we now shot at animated targets with human faces. The targets in the rifle range bled, screamed, and moved like living soldiers. I peered through the window to watch my men as McKay spoke. A holographic target materialized less than twenty feet from the shooting platform. Vince Lee fired once and missed. His second shot hit the target in its chest. The enemy screamed and vanished.

“You have four new privates on the way,” McKay said, staring at me angrily. “One of them is fresh out of boot. Your new corporal has not even arrived. Who is going to command the platoon with you and Lee out?”

“I understand, sir,” I said.

“When was your last leave?” McKay asked.

“I’ve never taken leave, sir,” I said. “I had a few free days before transferring to the Kamehameha .”

“And nothing since?”

“No, sir.”

McKay sat on the desk at the far end of the room, his legs draped to the floor. “Corporal Lee says that you have . . .” he paused to consider his words, “concerns.”

“Concerns?” I asked.

“You do not feel that you earned your promotion.”

Good old Lee . . . diarrhea of the mouth, constipation of the brain. “The corporal was speaking out of turn, sir. When I have concerns, I am completely able to lodge them myself.”

“I see,” said McKay, sounding a bit too paternal. He looked right into my eyes, not challenging me, but observing. “Lee says that you blame yourself for Sergeant Shannon’s death.”

“I never said that.”

“Do you blame yourself?”

I felt my stomach turn and my palms sweat. I looked out the window and watched one of my men miss five shots before finally hitting a target no more than ten feet away. Sloppy shooting. He wasn’t bothering to aim before firing rounds.

“I should have waited,” I said. “I left him in there. And I gave away our position when I missed that shot.”

“I saw the video feed, Sergeant. You did not miss.”

“I was too loud.”

“You hit a moving target from over a hundred yards in a bad light,” he said, shaking his head. “Look out that window. Do you think anyone else in your platoon would have done better?”

“I should have aimed for a head shot.”

“Do you think that was what killed Shannon? Do you think he died because the man’s oxygen tube exploded?”

I watched another private. Three targets popped up a good sixty feet out from him. He hit all three in short order, never missing a shot. How could identical beings be so different?

I mulled McKay’s question over in my head. Freeman had won the battle on Gobi. I’d just been along for the ride. Shannon had done all the work on Hubble, and I got him killed. I did not say that. I did not want Captain McKay to consider demoting me . . . maybe court-martialing me.

“Harris, he was dead the moment he touched Lieutenant Williams.”

“Williams?”

“The tech with the robot,” McKay said. “Williams might have been a prick, but he was a superior officer, and a Navy man at that. I might have been able to smooth things over if Shannon roughed another Marine, but Williams wanted blood, and I goddamned don’t blame him.”

I did not say anything.

Outside the command booth, Lee gathered the platoon. I could not hear him, but I could see him yelling at the men. Lee singled out one man and gave him a shove as he stepped into line. The man stumbled. McKay saw none of that. He continued to look at me, not so much staring, but certainly studying me carefully. I glanced back at him, but just for a moment. He sighed. “I am going to grant your request, Harris. I’ll assign Grayson from the Thirteenth Platoon to cover for you.

“Do you have any idea where you are going?”

“I haven’t thought about it.”

“I don’t think Lee wants to waste two weeks of leave drifting around Scrotum-Crotch,” McKay said.

“We’re going to pass a disc station in two days. I’m going to grant your request, on the condition that you take your leave on Earth.”

“Earth?” I liked the idea. “I could visit the orphanage . . .”

“God, Harris, talking to you is more depressing than sitting through a funeral. Most of the officers on this ship visit a group of islands. I told Lee about the place.”

McKay slid off the desk. “You’ve got two weeks, Harris. Don’t waste them.” He returned my salute and left the office shaking his head and muttering the word “orphanage.”

The Scutum-Crux Central Fleet needed rebuilding. We had lost seven thousand men on Hubble. I noticed an eerie emptiness around our section of the ship. I saw vacant racks in squad bay, and the sea-soldier bar always felt empty.

After the nonstop rush of battle, life unwound at an uneven pace aboard the Kamehameha . The first weeks after the battle on Hubble passed so slowly. The two days after McKay granted my leave were a blur.

I put off packing until the morning we left for Earth. I drilled my men harder than ever the day before we left. I tried to combine the late Tabor Shannon’s tirades and Aleg Oberland’s intelligent doggedness in my orders. I think I pushed everybody beyond his limits. When one of my privates missed ten shots on the range, allowing a holographic target of a woman separatist to stroll right up to the stand, I screamed until spit flew from my lips. Shannon would have been proud. I removed the man’s helmet, then I placed it over his head backward and hammered it down with my rifle butt. “Having trouble seeing through your visor?” I yelled.

Nobody laughed at my antics. The squad watched silently. I sent that same private to clean latrines during lunch and invited him to spar with me during hand-to-hand drills later that afternoon. That evening, I spied him practicing on his own in the rifle range. He showed marked improvement despite the two swollen black eyes I had given him earlier in the day.

Then, at 0500 the next morning, I woke from a deep sleep to see Sergeant Elmo Grayson dropping his rucksack beside my bunk. “What are you doing here?” I asked.

“What are you doing here?” Grayson answered. “Your ride leaves in less than an hour.”

The blood surged to my head when I sat up too quickly. Still feeling sluggish, I swung my feet out of bed and forced myself up.

“Anything I need to know?” Grayson asked, as I pulled on my shirt.

I thought for a moment. “I’ve been drilling them on their shooting skills. Most of these grunts are pretty sorry shots. Take them to the range a couple of times per day. If they screw up, drill them again . . . especially the one with the two black eyes.”

“Black eyes?” Grayson asked. “Maybe that’s what messed up his shooting.”

“Actually, they’ve improved his accuracy,” I said. It was true.

Lee came into my office as I threw the last of my clothes in a duffel bag. “They don’t hold shuttles for sergeants, you know,” he said.

“I know,” I answered as I slung on my shoulder strap.

The men sat up in their bunks and watched as we left. No one said anything, but they seemed glad to see me go.

Lee and I raced to the launch bay, arriving as a small line of men started entering the transport. We joined the queue, panting from our run.

Fifteen men, six in civilian clothing, boarded the flight. Lee and I traveled in our Charlie Service greens. My civilian shirt and denim pants waited at the top of my bag.

The entire flight, over sixty thousand light-years, took under an hour. As Captain McKay had said, the Kamehameha happened to be near a disc station. Once we entered the network, we flashed through eight sets of discs, ending up at Mars Station, where we boarded a five-hour flight to Salt Lake City. The flight from Salt Lake City to the islands would be aboard a civilian airliner. As we disembarked in Salt Lake City, I looked at my ticket. The name of the final destination looked so foreign. “How did you say they pronounce this town?”

“Hon-o-lu-la,” Lee said.

“Hon-o-lu-la? The second ‘U’ sounds like an ‘A’? What the hell kind of name is that?”

From the window of the plane, the ocean around the islands looked like a luminous patchwork of aqua, green, and blue. Parts of the island matched Gaylan McKay’s description—longs strips of beach and gorgeous forests. Other areas looked nothing like I expected. I saw a large city and long stretches that looked parched. A mountain range seemed to dissect the island. Thick rain forests ran along the mountain.

“It’s beautiful,” Lee said.

“Did you know it would look like this?” I asked.

“I heard stories,” he said, staring out a window across the aisle. “Mostly from officers. McKay says Admiral Klyber always comes here on leave.”

As the airplane began its descent, it flew parallel to the shoreline. We rounded a crater. I watched the scrolling landscape as the plane approached the runway.

Lee and I grabbed our bags before the plane touched down. We stayed in our seats with our bags on our laps. Heat, glare, and humid air poured into the cabin when the flight attendant opened the hatch. Squinting against the sunlight, I drew in a deep breath and felt the warmth in my lungs. Moments after leaving the plane, I felt sweat on my forehead.

Like so many places on Earth, Honolulu was a living museum exhibit. The airport was hundreds of years old, with thick concrete pillars and open-air walkways. It reminded me of the Marine base on Gobi. As we walked through the airport, I rolled up my sleeves. My shirt already felt moist under my arms. The heat felt great on my face and neck.

“Are you beginning to thaw?” Lee asked me.

I knew what he meant. Back on the Kamehameha , every room was climate-controlled. So was our armor.

Lee handled all of the logistics on the trip. He arranged our flights, found a place for us to stay, and rented the transportation—a beat-up buggy with a retractable cloth top. I was just along for the ride. “I hope you know where we’re going?” I said as I chucked my bag in the back of the car.

“Don’t sweat it, we have a map,” he said, tapping his finger on the map window in the dashboard.

“Besides, who could get lost on a little rock like this?”

We got very lost indeed. The twisting network of highways that ran from the airport led in all directions. None of the signs said “Honolulu.” They had equally odd names like “Waikiki,” “Wahiawa,” and

“Kaneohe,” none of which meant anything to either of us.

I didn’t mind being lost. We drove around with the top down, feeling the sun bake our shoulders. We passed beaches and streets lined with people. Over the last few months I had forgotten how to relax, but it was coming back to me.

Lee pulled onto the side of the road to look at his map. We were on the outskirts of an area called

“Waikiki.” Tall hotels lined the roads.

“Okay. If we are where I think we are, the beach is over there, just beyond those buildings. We will see it if we go down this street. And we can follow this street to Diamondhead.”

“Look at that,” I said. “It’s a hotel for military personnel.” Just up the street from us was a large hotel with a sign that said “Hale Koa. U.A. Military Temporary Residents.” The building was not as elaborate as some of the towering structures around it, but the grounds were simple and pretty.

“Oh yeah, the Hail Ko. McKay told me about it.”

“Hail Ko? How did they come up with these names?” I joked.

Locating the Hale Koa Hotel gave Lee the bearings he needed to find his way through town. As we drove away, I glanced back at the hotel. It looked beautiful. “Why aren’t we staying there?” I asked.

“McKay suggested this other place,” Lee said. “He sounded pretty sure of himself. I get the feeling he knows his way around Honolulu.”

We drove through Waikiki, passing splendid hotels, streets packed with tourists, and crowded beaches. The road led us past parks and up a hill. There the road twisted back and forth as it followed the jagged coastline. At the top of the hill, we found streets lined with homes. Our pad was down one of those streets.

Lee had rented the house sight unseen based on Captain McKay’s recommendation. The place belonged to a retired combat officer who rented it to him for $200 per day. McKay said that that price was cheap, and that was undoubtedly correct. The truth was that everything in Honolulu was cheap; the U.A. government subsidized the economy and encouraged off-duty military men to visit. Rooms at the Hale Koa, for instance, were free to enlisted men.

I half expected to find that Lee had rented a dilapidated hut. When we reached the rough-hewn stone wall that surrounded the house, I thought Lee had the wrong address. The wall was tall and thick and made of perfectly matched lava stones. He typed a code into the computerized lock, and the gate slid open.

“Vince, you got this for two hundred dollars per day?” I asked.

Looking as stunned as I felt, Lee nodded. We stepped into a perfectly manicured courtyard. A pond ran one length of the yard. Reeds grew in the pond, and fish swam near the top of the water, causing ripples on its smooth surface.

A tree with white and yellow flowers stood in the center of the small courtyard. I stepped into its shade, and for the first time since I had landed, I felt a cool breeze. “Lee,” I said, “this is the prettiest place I have ever seen.”

Mynx’s eyes narrowed on its prey and its triangular ears smoothed back against its skull. It kept its gold and black body low to the ground, hiding in the brush as it prepared to pounce. The sinewy muscles in its haunches visibly tightened.

I leaned over and scooped Mynx up with one hand, and the cat purred as I lowered her into my lap. She had claws, this skinny feline, but she did not swipe at me. She stretched and made herself comfortable across my thighs, plucking gently at my pants with her claws. As Mynx curled up to sleep, her intended prey, a butterfly, flitted out of the garden.

“Careful, Wayson, you might get scratched,” Lee warned as he joined me for a beer in the courtyard.

“The note in the kitchen says that Mynx is friendly,” I said, absentmindedly stroking her back. She took a lazy swipe at my hand, but her claws were not extended.

“Don’t say that I didn’t warn you,” Lee said in a singsong voice. He flipped the cap off the old-fashioned bottle. “To many days of absolute boredom.”

I held up my bottle and nodded. Mynx, still lying across my lap, stretched her body and dug her claws into my legs again. I laughed, though it hurt a little.

Warm air, cool shade, cold beer, green plants, and garish flowers—it was paradise. “I don’t imagine that life gets much better than this,” I said.

“It beats the hell out of Hubble,” Lee said.

I saluted that comment with my bottle, though it reminded me of my open wounds. We found beer in the refrigerator. It tasted sweet, but it was weak. I could never have gotten drunk on the stuff.

“Hubble,” I said. “I was just starting to forget about that shit hole.” I rubbed Mynx behind her ears, and she purred.

“I saw you packing,” Lee said. “It looks like most of your clothes are government-issue. Want to do some shopping?” Unlike me, Lee owned plenty of civilian clothes.

“I’d like that,” I said. Sweat had soaked through the long-sleeved shirt I wore on the plane. At the moment, I was lounging with no shirt.

“Either that or you can go around in your armor. That ought to attract some scrub,” Lee said. “Scrub”

was the term we used for one-night romances.

I looked down at the nearly sleeping cat on my lap. “Careful, Vince, or I might toss you a Mynx ball.”

In many ways Honolulu was designed to accommodate vacationing military men. The store owners recognized every clone as a potential customer. As we walked past storefronts and street-side vendors, people looked at Vince and launched into sales spiels or tried to attract his attention by yelling, “Hey, soldier!”

“Liberators must have come here a lot in the old days,” Lee commented. “They recognize you.” He never appreciated the tightrope act that the neural programming performed in his head. We followed heavy foot traffic into an alley marked “International Marketplace.” “Waikiki Bazaar”

would have been more appropriate. Once we entered the market we saw stands, carts, and small shops selling toys, tropical drinks, and gaudy clothing with overly bright colors. Lee led me to a woman selling clothing out of a cart, which she kept shaded under a bright red canopy. The woman was tall . . . taller than me. She had long, blond hair that fell past her rather butch shoulders. The caked-on makeup around her eyes made her look old. Seeing Vince, she smiled daintily, and said,

“Can I help you find something?”

“We’re looking for shirts,” he said.

“Oh, I’ve got shirts,” she said as she batted her eyes.

“We’ll have a look,” Vince said.

The woman watched as I sorted through a bin of T-shirts with pictures of colorful fish. The shirts and shorts on her cart looked like they might fall apart after a single wash. I felt threads break when I picked up a pair of shorts and snapped the waistband.

“Two shirts for ten dollars,” the woman said. “Five for twenty.”

“That’s cheap,” I whispered to Lee. He apparently thought that I wanted help haggling. “Twenty dollars!”

he gasped with such awful melodrama that I wanted to laugh. “Twenty dollars for this? C’mon, Harris. No one in his right mind would pay these prices. Every cart on this street is selling the exact same shit.”

Twenty dollars for five shirts sounded good to me, no matter how poor the quality. I didn’t want them to last my career, just two weeks.

The woman gave Lee a wily smile. “Eighteen dollars, but you buy now. If you leave, that price goes away.”

“Is that a good deal?” I asked.

“I only know one way to find out,” Lee said loud enough so that the woman could hear. “Let’s go check some other stands.”

“She said she wouldn’t give us that price again,” I said.

“Look around here, Harris. This place is filled with carts just like this selling clothes just like these.” He spoke in a loud voice, making sure that the woman would hear. Even on vacation, Lee was political. But Lee was right. The marketplace was crowded with stores selling bright shirts and shorts like the ones I was holding. And there I was, in my long-sleeved shirt and heavy and dark pants, sweating up buckets. Every shopkeeper in the International Marketplace would welcome me.

I decided to risk spoiling the deal. Purposely establishing eye contact with the woman, I tossed the shirts back into the bin and turned to leave.

“Twelve dollars,” she barked angrily. “Twelve dollars for five shirts or three pairs of shorts.”

“What do you think?” Lee asked.

“They’re not great, but they’ll hold up for the next two weeks,” I said.

“You have shit for taste, Marine,” Lee said.

“Get specked,” I said.

“Okay, smart guy,” Lee said. I did not like the mischievous smile that formed on his lips. He walked over to the woman and spoke to her in hushed tones that I could not hear.

“Mmmmm,” she said, bouncing her head in agreement. She turned to me and winked, putting up a finger to ask me to wait for a moment. When she returned, she held five genuinely nice shirts all neatly folded. She handed me the shirts.

“What do you think?” she asked.

I looked down and saw a photograph at the top of the pile. The woman had given me a portrait of herself. In the photo, she had a sly, alluring smile. She wore a bright pink bathing suit that did nothing to hide her masculine shoulders.

“Looks like you found yourself some scrub,” Lee said, choking down a laugh. I looked at the photograph again and understood. The hips, the shoulders, the makeup . . . this was a man.

I handed the shirts and the photograph back. “My friend . . .”

“Leave my store,” the woman said with a very male voice and an impressive air of dignity. As we walked away from the cart, Lee laughed convulsively. I thought he might collapse on the ground. He clapped his hand on my shoulder and leaned his weight on my back.

“Go speck yourself, asshole,” I said in a quiet voice. Then I thought about it and laughed. “Bastard,” I said.

Lee started to respond, then gave up in another fit of laughter.

Despite Lee’s sense of humor, I bought six shirts, three pairs of pants, and a pair of sandals before leaving the Marketplace. My entire wardrobe cost forty dollars.

At night, the streets of Waikiki took on a Roman Circus air. Rows of glowing red lanterns lined the streets. Strings of white Christmas lights blinked from every tree. Tourists and party-loving locals filled the sidewalks. Bartenders and sober-looking businessmen came to take advantage of them. Lee walked over to a small tiki hut to purchase a drink. I watched him carefully, purposefully memorizing the look of his clothes. Half the crowd seemed to be made up of vacationing clones, and I was not sure how I would find him if we got separated.

When he returned, Lee had a yellow-and-green fruit that looked like a squat bowling pin. Holding the fruit with both hands, he sipped from a straw that poked out of its stem.

“What is that?” I asked.

“Don’t know,” Lee said. “The fruit is papaya, but I have no idea what they’ve poured inside it.” He took a sip. “It makes you feel like your head is on fire.”

A gang of boys stopped to watch Lee drink from that odd fruit. “What’s their problem?” Lee slurred.

“Probably don’t like drunks,” I said.

“Oh,” said Lee. “Me neither. You wanna try this?”

I did not know what was in Lee’s drink, but I decided it would be safer if only one of us tried it. I led the way up the street, trying to keep Vince from bumping into people. It took a lot of work. A few more sips, and he could barely stand. Whatever else they put inside that drink, some of it must have come from Sagittarian potatoes.

A double-decker bus with a banner that said, “Free Historic Tour,” came rolling up the street. Vince did not look like he could walk much farther, and I thought the night might go easier if I kept him off his feet. I waved, and the bus stopped for us. Our ride took us away from the crowded streets of Waikiki and out toward the airport. We drove past a harbor filled with boats and large ships.

“This is historic Honolulu Harbor,” the bus driver said over an intercom.

“Oh, look at the ships,” Lee said, moments before vomiting. The woman sitting across the aisle from us focused all of her attention straight ahead, completely denying our existence. The young couple in the next seat acknowledged us. Lee’s vomit splashed their feet, and they turned back and glared. When the bus stopped to let people walk around the harbor, I led Lee away from the tour group. No one seemed sorry to see us go.

We stopped on a bridge and watched swells roll across the top of the moonlit water. The salt air seemed to do Lee good. He took deep breaths and regained some strength, then threw up again over the top of the bridge.

“Pathetic bastard,” I said as I patted him on the back.

This part of town was not nearly as crowded as Waikiki, but a steady trickle of pedestrians moved along the streets. “Are you up for a walk?” I asked Lee.

He did not answer. I took that for a yes.

Most of the buildings along the streets were dark. We passed a bar, and I heard dance music and noisy chatter. The farther we walked from the water, the more people we saw, until we reached a building that looked like an auditorium or maybe a movie theater. The sign over the door said, “Sad Sam’s Palace” in foot-tall letters. Under the sign was a marquee that said, “Big-Time Professional Wrestling.”

Dozens of clones in civilian clothing milled around the entrance. Some sat on benches, others lounged along the walls. Many of them had been on leave for a while and had bronzed tans. A few also had women tucked under their arms.

“Want to watch wrestling?” I asked Lee as I led him toward the door.

“Do we get to sit?” he asked.

“As long as you don’t puke,” I said.

Lee leaned on the pedestal of a bronze statue as I went to buy the tickets. When I returned, he said,

“Sad Sam Itchy-nose,” and laughed.

“What?” I asked.

“This is Sad Sam Itchy-nose,” he said pointing to the sign.

I looked at the plaque. It said, “Sad Sam Ichinose, 1908-1993.” “He must have been a famous wrestler,” I said. “Are you okay now?” I asked. “Are you going to puke?”

Lee shook his head, but he looked awfully pale.

On closer inspection, Sad Sam’s Palace reminded me of an oversized bar. The building was old, with chipped walls and no windows. We entered the lobby and found ourselves in a crowd waiting for the doors to open.

“What’s wrong with him?” a clone in a bright shirt asked as we came through the door.

“He bought a fruit drink that didn’t agree with him,” I said.

“Hey, I did that my first night. They fill that specker with Sagittarian Crash. I’ll never do that again,” he said cheerfully.

“Is this wrestling good?” I asked.

“Best show in town,” the clone said. “Just don’t come on Friday night.”

“What happens on Friday?” I asked.

“That’s open challenge night,” he said. I had no idea what that meant; but the doors swung open as he spoke, and the crowd pushed inside.

“We should get a beer,” Lee said, as we passed the concession stand. He swayed where he stood. His jaw was slack, and slobber rolled over his bottom lip.

“You’ve had enough,” I said. I wondered if I should take him home.

Thick red carpeting covered every inch of Sad Sam’s Palace. Inside the second door, we entered a large, square theater with bleachers along its walls and a balcony. I estimated that a thousand spectators had come for the show—and the building was half-empty.

There was a small boxing ring surrounded by tables. The only lights in the room hung over the ring, but the glare made the room bright enough for everybody.

An usher asked for my ticket at the door. When I showed her, she smiled and led us to bleachers about a hundred feet from the ring.

“Think we could be any farther from the action?” Lee asked.

“Lee,” I hissed, “these are good seats.”

He squinted at me. “My head hurts,” he said.

A man in an old-fashioned black-and-white tuxedo entered the ring carrying a microphone. “Laaaaaadies and gentlemeeeeen, Sad Sam’s Palace is proud to present, Big-Time Wrestling.”

The crowd roared. Lee covered his ears and moaned.

“For our first match, weighing in at two hundred sixtyfive pounds . . . Crusher Kohler.” A fat man with bleached blond hair, yellow tights, and no shirt strode to the ring, growling at people who booed his arrival.

“Weighing in at two hundred thirty-seven pounds, Tommy Tugboat.” In came a man with balding black hair, dark eyes, and black swim trunks. The crowd cheered for this one. Crusher? Tugboat? God, what kinds of names are those? I asked myself. I might have asked Lee, but he sat slumped forward with his head hanging.

We had mandatory judo and wrestling at the orphanage. I knew what wrestling looked like, and it looked nothing like this. For openers, this fight was in a boxing ring, not on a mat. Tugboat and Crusher ran face-first into the ropes then bounced backward as if the ropes around the ring were made of elastic. The crowd roared.

Tugboat smashed Kohler across the mouth, and the guy staggered like a drunkard. Another punch, and Kohler fell to his knees. Remaining on his knees, he put up his hands and begged for mercy. The crowd roared.

“They’re faking it,” I said. “They must be.”

By the time it was over, both Tugboat and Kohler had stumbled around as if half-dead, only to suddenly recover. Tugboat once lifted the flabby Kohler over his head, no small feat, then dropped him face first to the mat. After both men had been so pulverized that they should have been dead, the match ended with a simple pin.

The crowd loved it.

There were three more fights. Each took about fifteen minutes. Each had men who looked to be near death, then came back to health and performed Herculean feats of strength. I did not believe a moment of it, but it was fun to watch.

When the last fight ended, the audience filed out quickly. Lee, however, still lay sprawled on the bleachers massaging the sides of his head.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Honolulu was a city on an island called Oahu, which was part of the Hawaiian Islands, which was a state of the former United States on the planet Earth. Perhaps I should have known all of that. I studied geography in the orphanage; but consider, the galaxy had six arms. Each of which had thirty member planets. There were one hundred eighty member planets in the Republic. Before serving aboard the Kamehameha, I had never heard of Ezer Kri or Ronan Minor. Hell, I had never heard of the Templar System before landing on Hubble.

My education was lacking in more than geography. The retired officers running the orphanage had left the term “transvestite” out of my education. They also neglected to mention professional wrestling.

Our small villa had a common kitchen, dining room, and den. It had two bungalows for bedrooms. Lee remained in his room late into the morning. Still hungover from that fruit drink concoction, Lee slept until 1000. I could hear him snoring as I drank a cup of coffee in the courtyard. I fixed myself a small breakfast of fruit and fish and went back to the courtyard to eat it. Mynx came over and joined me. She curled up in my lap and made herself comfortable. As I scooped meat out of pineapple, the sneaky cat filched my fish and ran off with it. The slice was nearly as big as her head, but that did not stop her.

“Hey!” I yelled, for all the good it did me. Mynx hopped off the table, my fish hanging from her mouth, and paused to look at me. If I’d had my pistol, I might have shot that cat. Instead, I watched her leave with her tail sticking straight up in the air. I laughed and enjoyed a moment of complete relaxation. That moment ended when I put on my media shades and searched for stories. A coalition from the House of Representatives was calling for the Linear Committee to reduce the military budget. “We have an unprecedented stockpile of weapons,” said Speaker of the House Gordon Hughes, who represented Olympus Kri, a thriving colony a few hundred light-years from Earth in the Orion Arm. “We have more than twenty million clones on active duty, and the government keeps churning out nearly one and a half million more every year. The cost of supporting this build-up will pull our entire economy down.”

Gordon Hughes of Olympus Kri appeared on the news quite often in those days. He wanted lower taxes, less military, greater territorial autonomy. He questioned the need of a U.A. Naval base on Olympus Kri and asked for a direct disc link with trading partners in the Sagittarius and Perseus Arms. In the House, Hughes was widely praised for his bold initiatives. In the Senate, they talked about the million-member march that the Atkins Separatists made to his planet’s capital.

In a small sidebar, I read that the congressman from Ezer Kri challenged Hughes’s ideas. No surprise there. Ever since the invasion, Ezer Kri had supported the Linear Committee on every issue. Had the Linear Committee called for a ban on oxygen, the honorable congressman from Ezer Kri would have supported it.

In another story out of Washington, DC, the Senate unanimously approved a bill calling for two hundred new orphanages. Open war between the House and Senate was nothing new. The Senate would naturally spin the request to sound like an attempt to help homeless children, but that would not fool anybody. The Speaker of the House called for fewer orphanages and the Senate unanimously thumbed its nose at him. Isn’t that how it goes? As a product of the New Order orphanage system, and a military clone, I shared the Senate’s view on the issue. So did somebody else. I looked at the visual feed that accompanied the story. As the Senate leader announced that the vote had been unanimous, the camera swept the gallery to show senators and onlookers giving a standing ovation. The camera panned the VIP box. Most of the men in the picture wore civilian clothing; but there was a tall, skeletal man dressed in Navy whites. I stopped the feed. The picture was blurred, but the face was unmistakable. “What are you doing in DC?” I asked out loud. “I thought you were on the Kamehameha

.”

Klyber could have flown to DC quickly enough. Had he flown in for an important vote, or was there something else going on, I wondered.

“I don’t feel so good,” said Lee as he slid open the glass door of his bungalow. He did not look so good either. He stood in the doorway rubbing his head. His dark hair stood up in spikes, and he had huge sallow bags under badly bloodshot eyes.

“You cannot possibly feel as bad as you look,” I said.

“I don’t remember much. Did I do anything stupid last night?” Lee walked to his chair, then stood and stared at it as if deciding whether he was physically capable of sitting. He turned and dropped into the chair.

“Whatever you drank . . .”

“That fruit thing!” Lee interrupted. “I remember. That goddamn fruit thing.” He groaned and rubbed his head.

“You got sick on a bus,” I said.

“I don’t remember a bus,” Lee said.

“We went to wrestling matches,” I said. “There was this place called Sad Sam’s Palace, where they have fake wrestling matches in a boxing ring.”

“Doesn’t ring a bell,” Lee said. He spent most of the morning moping around the house, trying to get his head straight. He seldom drank anything stronger than beer. Now I knew why. By early afternoon, Lee became restless and wanted to drive into town. Neither of us had eaten lunch, and the idea of ordering a burger sounded good. The sun was up and hot, and I wanted to walk, but Lee insisted on driving.

The ocean glistened as we drove down to Waikiki. Lee wanted to put the top up and use the air-conditioning, but I vetoed him on that one. I wanted the heat of the sun on my head, and I liked the warmth, though I could have done without the humid air.

We left the car by a beach park and started to walk the last few blocks into town, but I heard the roar of the waves. “Let’s check out the beach,” I said.

“How about after lunch?” Lee asked.

“It’s right over there,” I said. I turned and started for the beach without waiting for Lee to answer. He followed, muttering words to himself that did not sound happy.

I took off my shoes when I reached the beach; the hot sand burned the soles of my feet. That part of the beach was almost empty. Sprinting past sunbathers, I wrapped my shoes and wallet into my shirt and dropped the wad in an empty spot, and trotted into the water.

The water was cold, but my body adjusted quickly. I loped forward through the shallows until the water was up to my waist, then I dived in. Lee followed me as far as the water’s edge, but his willingness to continue vanished the moment he felt the water. He walked back to my shirt and shoes and sat down beside the pile.

The water was clear and bitter to the taste. The salt burned my eyes when I dived down for a look, but I kept my eyes open. There were fish all around me. I swam up for air, then dived to the bottom for a closer view. I saw small, silver fish and bright yellow fish that were about the size of my hand. A gentle current swept me farther out, and when I dived again, I could no longer reach the bottom. The fish knew no fear. Thousands of red, green, blue, and yellow fish huddled together in a lazy cloud that barely parted when I swam too close. Even when I grabbed at them, they sped out of my reach but did not swim away. I stayed down too long and my lungs burned when I swam to the surface and gulped for air.

Back on the beach, Lee stood on the shore and waved at me. The current had pulled me a few hundred feet from shore. I needed to get back.

I took a deep breath and dived for another look at the fish. What I saw was far more exciting. A white silhouette passed sleekly along the ocean floor deep below me. At first I did not realize what I was looking at, but only for a moment. It was a very trim woman with short blond hair trailing behind her in a silky web. This woman had long tanned legs and she cut through the water with otterlike grace. She wore swim fins and a diver’s mask, and with a kick from her perfectly toned thighs, she sprang forward over the coral reef.

The woman’s face mask must have had an air supply because she held her breath for a very long time. In the time that she admired the coral shelf, I had come up for air twice and was about to swim up a third time. I would never have caught up to her had she swum away. Fortunately, she turned, looked at me, and came up with me. She broke through the surface just a few feet from me. She pulled off her mask and smiled. “And they said there was nothing dangerous in these waters.”

We finished the preliminaries that quickly.

Kasara swam to shore with me. As we waded out of the water, I saw Lee. Still sitting by my shirt and shoes, his expression was a mixture of jealousy and hate. He picked up my shirt and trotted out to meet us.

I turned to Kasara. “I want you to meet Vince,” I said.

Kasara smiled at Vince. She had a slightly mischievous smile—the big, unabashed smile of a child. I looked at her smile and her blue eyes and knew that my leave had unalterably changed. She was about six inches shorter than I—about five-foot-ten. She wore a bright red bikini that contrasted sharply against her tanned skin. She had a flat stomach with just a hint of visible ribs and muscular definition. I had to concentrate to keep from staring.

“Vince, this is . . .”

“Kasara,” she said in a soft voice.

“You don’t happen to have a roommate?” Lee asked.

“As a matter of fact . . .” Kasara laughed. She looked embarrassed. “I’d better get back to her.”

“What are you doing tonight?” I asked.

“What do you want me to do tonight?” she asked.

Clearly she was used to more experienced players than me. I pulled my shirt over my head and shoulders. “We just got here last night. Maybe you and your friend could show us the better spots.”

“Show you around?” Kasara said with a grin. “That sounds fun.” She pointed up toward the street. “See that two-story building over there?”

We were on the outskirts of Waikiki, well away from the luxurious towers and glossy hotels. The twoand three-story buildings that lined the far side of the street were wedged together like books on a crowded shelf. “Which one do you mean?” I asked.

She moved even closer until our bodies touched. In a moment, I would need to dive back into the cold water. Wrapping one hand around my waist, she pulled me so that I could see exactly where she was pointing. “You see that pink two-story building?”

“Oh,” I said, feeling my legs go numb. I felt the side of her breast rub against my arm.

“Think you can meet us there at seven o’clock?” she asked, her voice sounding husky.

“Seven it is,” I said.

“Don’t be late,” Kasara said, releasing me. I could barely stand. She, on the other hand, walked away down the beach as if nothing had happened.

“Not bad, Harris,” Lee said. “I hope her roommate looks that good.”

The sun set as we arrived at Kasara’s hotel, but the sky remained bright for another two hours. The warm night air, so pleasant compared to the burdensome humidity of the day, was filled with the smell of the ocean.

Kasara stayed in a rattrap hotel with pink adobe walls and stubby, Moorish archways. The manager had plastered the walls of the lobby with advertisements for car rentals and island tours. “How much do you think they charge per night?” I asked Lee.

Lee was not listening. “Wayson,” he said excitedly, “if the roommate is as good-looking as Kasara, I’ll really owe you, pal.”

Kasara and her roommate came gliding down the steps into the lobby. Kasara wore a short, white dress that stopped at the very tops of her thighs. Jennifer, her roommate, wore a green sundress. Kasara was the prettier of the two, but Jennifer was not off by much. I liked her dark brown hair and green eyes. So did Lee. He and Jennifer matched up well and started chatting almost immediately.

“You look beautiful,” I said to Kasara.

“Thank you,” Kasara purred, and gave me that young girl smile. As we turned to leave, she moved very close to me, and I felt an urge to put my arm around her waist. She rubbed up against me, and my hand seemed to slide around her of its own accord. She looked at me and beamed.

“Are you hungry?” I asked.

“Let’s walk around,” Kasara said. By that time, the street vendors had rolled their carts out along the sidewalk. A couple with two young boys was looking at a cart covered with toys. Vince and Jennifer paused in front of that cart, and he bought her a surfer doll. They seemed happy.

“I could get you one of those,” I offered.

“You’ve got to be kidding, Harris,” she said. From then on, I let Kasara do most of the talking. She told me about her job. She worked as a cocktail waitress on Olympus Kri. When I asked her what she thought about the row in Congress, she did not know what I meant. I asked her if she voted for Gordon Hughes, but she did not know the name.

She was just a girl who worked in a bar saving up tips for an annual vacation on Earth. She hated her job. She had a boyfriend back home, but did not like him much, either. We quickly established that she did not care about politics, professional sports, or novels. Movies and dancing, on the other hand, she talked about endlessly.

Kasara did not ask many questions, not even which branch Lee and I served in. I suppose she already knew my basic story. She might not have known if I was in the Army or the Navy, but she knew I was military and probably guessed that I grew up in an orphanage.

A little way down the road, I saw a familiar stand surrounded by flaming torches. “Hey, Vince,” I called back. “This is where you bought that papaya thing last night.” A crowd had already lined up around the stand.

“I want to try one,” Kasara said, sounding excited.

“It practically killed Vince,” I said. “He was still getting over it when we went to the beach this afternoon.”

“Did you try it?” Kasara asked.

“I think it’s mostly Sagittarian Crash,” I said.

“Wayson, I work in a bar, remember? I can handle it. It’s for tourists, probably half fruit syrup and ice cream. Let’s get one.”

I gave in and Kasara smiled and nuzzled her head against my shoulder. It reminded me a bit of Mynx, purring on my lap as she grabbed the fish from my breakfast. But Kasara was exactly the right height to fit against my chest, and I felt the warmth of her body. “Do too much of that, and we may have to make it an early night,” I warned her.

She flushed. “Don’t be too sure of yourself, Harris,” she said, with a sheepish smile. I wasn’t. My heart was beating so hard, I expected my Liberator glands to start filling my blood with endorphins and adrenaline like they did in battle.

“What the hell do you think you are doing?” Lee gasped as we approached the fruit stand. “That thing wiped me out last night.”

“We’re going to split one,” I said.

“It’s your funeral, Harris,” said Vince. “Jennifer and I are going to walk around a bit. Maybe we will run into you again later.” Jennifer gave Kasara a friendly peck on the cheek, then Lee and Jennifer vanished into the crowd.

“How many?” the man running the cart barked as we approached.

“One,” I said, then seeing Kasara’s disappointed expression, I corrected myself. “Two.”

“Four dollars,” the man said, holding out his hand.

I paid.

Crash loses a bit of its bite when diluted with sugar. The fruit juice and ice cream might have made this drink sweet, but I still felt the nearly toxic alcohol in my blood. Kasara worked away at her drink slowly, taking little sips and talking cheerfully. The more she sipped, the more she rubbed against me as we walked. I would have proposed going back for seconds, but I was afraid it would kill her.

“This is so good,” she said. “We make these at the bar, but it’s not the same without fresh papaya.”

By that time the sky had gone completely dark. Tourists of all descriptions now filled the streets. “Are you hungry?” I asked.

Kasara laughed. “Are you kidding? I just drank enough for two meals.” As we walked toward the beach, we passed a bin with an open fire. Kasara tossed her half-finished fruit into the flames, and we both jumped when we heard the explosion.

“You want to sit and talk?” I asked.

“Talk?” she asked suspiciously, though I doubt she would have minded if I proved her suspicions correct.

We walked across the beach and sat down near the water. Waves rolled in stopping just short of where we sat. A cold breeze came in off the ocean. Leaning back on my elbows, I looked into a sky brimming with stars. Somewhere out there was the Kamehameha .

She placed her hand on my thigh and I knew that I did not know what was ahead.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

I looked over at Kasara sleeping beside me and did not know what to do. I wanted more of what we had done last night, but I also wanted to get away from her. It might have been unknown territory for me, but it was certainly nothing new for her. I did not know if I had embarrassed myself. She slept so soundly, and she looked like an angel as she slept. Her hair, straight and golden, was spread across the pillow. With her eyes shut and a slight smile playing on her lips, she looked sweet . . . almost innocent. She barely stirred, and I did not want to wake her.

I climbed out of bed and looked around my room. I would not describe myself as a naturally neat person, but as a military orphan and a Marine, I had been forced to maintain orderly quarters. From childhood up to the moment I set foot on Gobi, I had been subjected to weekly and sometimes daily inspections. If my bed was not made just right, if I did not fold my clothing properly in my locker, if the floor around my rack was not spotless, I was virtually assured KP duty or time cleaning the latrine. Kasara, apparently, did not have the same discipline.

Her dress was tossed over a chair in the corner of the room. Her shoes and socks were in two separate piles. Her bra hung from the top of my dresser. We had taken off our clothes pretty quickly the night before, but how had she managed to scatter everything like that? I thought about picking up after her, then decided against it.

Knowing that I might later regret the decision, I pulled my media shades off my dresser and went to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. Sitting down and taking a sip, I booted up my shades and scanned the pangalactic headlines. Klyber’s judicial sideshow had begun. The ten thousand Mogat Separatists we captured on Hubble were now appearing in court on Ezer Kri.

The story included a quote from Nester Smart, the provisional governor of Ezer Kri. I was not aware that there had been a change. The story did not mention anything about Governor Yamashiro. There were several lengthy video segments from the courtroom floor. Every feed showed the same thing—male prisoners sitting in groups of four to ten at a time, remaining absolutely stone-faced as judges read the accusations.

I watched two of the feeds. I found it hard to concentrate; thoughts of the previous night kept clouding my mind. What I really wanted to do was wake Kasara and see what might happen, but I thought I should let her sleep for another few minutes.

I viewed one last clip. Just another judge reading the exact same four charges—sedition, assault against officers of the Unified Authority military, premeditated murder, willfully obstructing the law . . . The camera panned around the court to show the jury. And then it dawned on me. Not one member of the jury had black hair. Nobody had Asian eyes. No one in the previous video feeds had Japanese features, either.

I found a sidebar showing man-on-the-street interviews conducted in downtown Rising Sun. The streets looked empty, and the few people who gave interviews looked cosmopolitan. The first time I read about Ezer Kri, the article said that the planet had nearly 12.6 million people of Japanese descent. The population of Rising Sun was over 80 percent Japanese. It would have taken one hell of an airlift operation to slip that many people off the planet. Later I searched for the latest demographic statistics from Ezer Kri. I found an article that was only one month old. There was no mention of a Japanese population.

“Damn, Wayson. You’re reading the news,” Vince Lee said in disgust.

“They’ve started the trials on Ezer Kri,” I said.

“You need to get your head out of those shades,” Lee said. “Kasara and Jennifer came as a package deal, and I am not going to let you speck this up.”

Lee had a point. Bright sunlight shone through my kitchen windows. The curtains fluttered in a gentle breeze. I sipped my coffee and discovered that it had gone cold.

“You and Jennifer had a good time last night?” I asked.

“We did,” he said. “From the sound of things, you and Kasara did okay. I promised Jennifer that we’d all drive around the island. Hope you don’t mind.”

“Sounds like fun,” I said. I went to wake Kasara up. She and I had breakfast about forty minutes later.

We drove east, following the coast. The highway wound around bays and mountains, through small towns and wide-open countryside. Vince drove and Jennifer sat beside him. Kasara and I sat in the back. She nuzzled against me and occasionally stroked her hand over my thighs. She did not say much. She seemed wistful.

The coastal road led along the outside of dormant volcanoes. One side of the street was barren, the other side dropped straight down to the ocean, a fathomless mosaic of blues and greens. Kasara leaned forward and spoke to Jennifer. “Let’s stop.”

Jennifer put her hand to Lee’s ear and relayed the request. He pulled into a scenic parking area overlooking the ocean, and we went to have a look.

I had seen enough from the car and didn’t need to look much longer. Vince and Jennifer didn’t care about much of anything. She held his arm and smiled. They talked happily. Kasara held my arm, too; but her thoughts were elsewhere. Soon she would return home. She dreaded the idea. She was a girl who lived for one week out of every year—the week she spent on vacation. Kasara stared down at the waves as they dashed against the black rock walls of the cliff. Wind blew her silky hair across her face. She did not smile, and her eyes seemed far away.

“The view is beautiful,” I said, mostly because I was tired of looking at it and hoped to wake her from her trance.

“I could watch this all day,” she muttered.

God help us, I thought, but I did not say anything. There was no peace in her face. The girlish smile that had so lured me had vanished. Without it, she was more beautiful than ever.

“Do you think there are fish down there? Wouldn’t the waves kill them?” she asked.

“I don’t know anything about oceans,” I said, “but those currents look strong.”

“We have an ocean on Olympus Kri,” she said, prying her eyes from the view. She looked at me and smiled. It was not the same smile I had seen the day before.

“Does it look like this?” I asked.

“I’ve only seen pictures,” she said. “I’ve never gone out to the coast.”

She tightened her grip around my biceps. “You’ve probably seen all kinds of oceans.”

“I’ve only been to four planets so far,” I said. “One was a desert and one was toxic.”

“Poor Wayson,” she said. “I’m sure you’ve seen some amazing places. So exciting to spend your life on a ship traveling around different worlds.” As she spoke, her thoughts drifted, and her smile became more pure. She reached an arm around my waist and we kissed.

“Seen enough?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said.

We turned toward the car. Vince and Jennifer were already there, watching us and talking.

“Hey,” I said. “Vince, did you see that sign?”

The sign behind the car said “Scenic Area.” Above the words was the silhouette of a man in a cape wearing a primitive war helmet with a fin along the top. It was the insignia of our ship.

“What’s that doing here?” Lee asked.

Once we were alert to it, we spotted Kamehameha everywhere. He was on scenic signs and the sides of buses. There was a caricature of him on our map. Lee drove us to the spot on the way home. There, immortalized in an cast-iron statue with gold leaf, was King Kamehameha: “Conqueror of the Islands.”

“No wonder all of those officers vacation here,” Lee said. “The ship was named after a Hawaiian king.”

The statue stood ten feet tall and stood upon a pedestal that added another five feet. I read the plaque at the base of the statue. Kamehameha had been a warrior king who paddled from island to island by canoe and conquered villages with spears and clubs. He was also a statesman. Once he finished conquering his island kingdom, he set up treaties with France, England, and the United States of America that played great nations against each other and ensured his primitive kingdom’s survival. This told me something about Bryce Klyber, too. The aristocratic admiral had selected our antiquated Expansion-class fighter carrier as his flagship because he liked the name. He liked the idea of the statesman warrior. He saw himself as both a statesman and a warrior, and he believed that his statesmanship ultimately differentiated him from the likes of Admiral Huang.

When we dropped Kasara and Jennifer off at their hotel in the midafternoon, Lee looked at me, and said,

“Shit, now I’m stuck with you.” He was joking, but the feeling was mutual. We moped around the villa until 1700, then headed down the hill. The sun had not even begun to set. The last of the tourists still lingered on the beach, lying on the sand or wading in the shallows. In another hour the sun would go down, and even they would leave. Younger, trendier tourists would commandeer the streets once night fell.

We could not find anyplace to park, so Lee drove around the block while I went to find Kasara and Jennifer. As I entered the lobby, I realized that I did not know their floor or room number. I did not even know Kasara’s last name.

“You’re late,” Kasara called from the second-story balcony. She was not much of an actress. She tried to sound angry, but she did a poor job of it.

I looked up. Kasara, wearing a sundress with an orange-and-red flower print, leaned over the rail of the balcony. Another Waikiki special, I thought. Her dress matched my shirt. “I’m half an hour early.”

“Come on up,” she said.

I skipped up the steps. Kasara’s apartment bore a striking resemblance to my room earlier that morning—her clothes were everywhere. She had two pair of dress shoes, tennis shoes, and slippers scattered around the outside of her closet. Her clothes were on the bed and furniture. A bra hung from the knob on the bathroom door.

And there was more. I saw two sinks through the open bathroom door. One was littered with cosmetics, brushes, and toothpaste. The other was neat, with a simple toiletry bag leaning against its mirror. That must have been Jennifer’s.

“You should have come earlier. We’ve been sitting around waiting for you,” Kasara said, brushing some clothes from a chair as she retrieved her purse. She fixed those sparkling blue eyes on me, and I became oblivious to the clutter as well.

As we started to leave, Kasara loped off to the bathroom and closed the door. Thinking that was very sudden, I turned to Jennifer. “Is she okay?”

“You don’t expect her to leave without touching up her hair?” Jennifer asked.

“But it was perfect,” I said.

Jennifer shook her head. “Wayson, that girl spends two hours every morning doing exercises, touching up her hair, and putting on her makeup. Then she spends another thirty minutes making sure it’s perfect before she leaves the hotel. But try to get her to clean up the room . . .”

It was Kasara and Jennifer’s last night in Hawaii. Lee and I wanted to make a big deal of it. In many ways, it would turn out to be the last night of my vacation, too.

Kasara wanted to go shopping for trinkets. Jennifer and Lee wanted to get out of Waikiki. Both ideas sounded good. We drove to the Honolulu Harbor. There we found a mall that would be far less crowded.

Kasara went on a spending spree. In one store, she found hats with “I LOVE HAWAII” stitched across their bills in rainbow colors. She bought five of them “for the other gals at work.” She also bought a case of locally made chocolates in the next store and canned oysters with cultured pearls in another. As we left, she saw a photo booth. Without even saying a word, she turned to me and rested her head on my shoulder, batting her eyelashes and pretending as if she was pleading for permission.

“What?” I asked.

She nodded toward the booth and grinned.

“Isn’t that a bit dangerous? What will your boyfriend say?”

“I didn’t tell you?” Kasara said. “We broke up.”

“When did that happen?” I asked.

Kasara shrugged and smiled. She grabbed my hand and dragged me toward the booth.

“They broke up?” Vince asked Jennifer while we were still in earshot.

“They will when she gets home.”

The thought of Kasara breaking up with her boyfriend left me both excited and scared. I ran my hands over my hair, trying to push it in place for the picture. Kasara slid onto the bench inside the booth and pulled me next to her. The people who designed the booth had kids or singles in mind. Even when I pushed in and squeezed against Kasara as best I could, my right shoulder still hung out of the door. We looked into a small mirror as lights around the booth flashed on and off. Kasara let her hand slide up my thigh. I tried to ignore the jolt running through my body and look relaxed.

“I didn’t think nice girls did things like that,” I teased as I stepped out of the booth.

“Nice girls don’t,” Kasara agreed. “Working girls on their last night of vacation do all kinds of things.”

“What kinds of things?” I asked.

“You’ll see.” She stepped closer to me and stared deep into my eyes.

“I have to ask . . .” I said. “Your boyfriend . . . That wasn’t because of me, was it?”

“You’re so self-centered,” she said, laughing. “You had nothing to do with it.” I felt relieved. I also felt disappointed.

Something happened between Vince and Jennifer during the short time that Kasara and I spent in the photo booth. Perhaps Jennifer told Vince that she wanted to stay in touch with him, and he said he had other plans. Perhaps it was the other way around. They held hands for the rest of the evening, but I heard lags in their conversation and moments passed when they seemed reluctant to look at each other. When we passed a stand selling the Crash and fruit drink, Kasara pointed. Jennifer, Lee, and I groaned. Pretending to ignore us, Kasara looked at the people waiting, and chirped, “Oh well, the line is too long, anyway.”

“We haven’t had dinner yet,” said Jennifer.

Jennifer was the more sensible of the two. She did not flirt the way Kasara did, and she spoke less frivolously. Fun and flirtatious as Kasara was, I wondered what would have happened had Lee first met Kasara on the beach and I dated Jennifer.

We strayed into a courtyard in which people sold various kinds of foods from large, wooden carts. One cart had skewers of fruits, fish, chicken, and beef cooked over a charcoal grill. Kasara and I bought meat sticks and munched them while sitting on a bench overlooking the docks as Vince and Jennifer walked off to look for more options. We looked at ships and watched the sunlight vanish in the horizon.

“What’s it like on Olympus Kri?” I asked.

“It’s not like this,” Kasara said. “The night sky is kind of like the day sky, only darker. We’re pretty far from our sun, so it’s cold and gray. I mean, it’s not like we never see the sun. It’s like a shiny patch in the clouds.” She sighed. “We don’t have a moon.”

After our meal, we continued along the waterfront. I noticed that the sidewalks became more crowded. Men and boys were bustling up the street in droves. Then I saw the distant lights. “Sad Sam’s Palace,” I said.

“Sad Sam’s,” Kasara said. “I’ve heard about that place.”

“We were here two nights ago,” Lee said. “Didn’t you say the fights were all fake?”

“You were there, too, weren’t you?” Jennifer asked.

“He went,” I said. “He just doesn’t remember anything.”

“I was drunk,” Lee said. “That was the night I had the fruit drink.”

Faked wrestling matches did not seem like something Kasara or Jennifer would enjoy, but they surprised me. “Can we go?” Kasara asked.

“You want to see the fights?” I asked.

I meant to ask Jennifer, but Kasara intercepted the question. “I’ve always wondered about this place.”

“Are you up for this, too?” Lee asked Jennifer.

“Sure.”

Lee and I shot each other amused smiles.

As we started toward the door, an old, white-haired man in a tank top called to us. He might have been a long-retired soldier. He had tattoos on his back and shoulders that looked ridiculous against his wrinkled skin. “Hey, you, you don’t want to go in there.” He had the gravelly voice of an old drill sergeant.

“We’ve been here before,” said Lee, though he certainly had no memory of that last visit. I went to pay for the tickets, or I would have heard what the man said next. Unfortunately, I did not hear it until several days later. The man said, “You want to stay clear of the Palace on Friday.”

Had I heard that, I might have thought twice about going inside. I might have noticed that as far as I could see, Lee and I were the only clones in the crowd. By the time I returned with our tickets, Lee had already told the man to mind his own business.

An usher led us to our seats. Coming late as we had, I expected to sit on the first or second balcony. Instead, the usher led us to the first floor. Threading his way around tables filled with screaming fight fans, he found an empty table just one row from the ring.

The venue had changed. Instead of ropes, ten-foot walls made of chain-link fencing now surrounded the ring. The fighters had changed, too. Instead of flabby men in colorful tights, the ring now held two large and muscular men.

“Are you sure they’re faking this?” Lee asked. “It looks real.”

One man grabbed the other by the hair and rammed his fist into the man’s face several times. Blood sprayed. The fight ended a moment later when two medics carried the loser out on a stretcher.

“It wasn’t like this last time,” I said. “It was all headlocks and bouncing off the ropes.”

A waitress came by our table between bouts and we asked her about it. “You came on Wednesday,”

she guessed. “That was Big-Time Wrestling night. Tonight is an Iron Man competition.”

“What’s that?” Jennifer asked.

The waitress smiled. “Open challenge, honey. Anything goes.”

“Ladies and gentleman, we have your winner by knockout, Kimo Turner.” The announcer raised Turner’s arm and polite applause rose from the crowd. Considering Turner’s impressive size and the vicious way he fought, I found the lack of enthusiasm surprising.

“Which branch are you boys in?” the waitress asked when she returned with our drinks. All of us ordered beer except Kasara, who ordered something fruity with layers of blue liquor and white smoothie.

“Marines,” Lee answered.

“Where you in from?” the waitress asked.

“Scrotum . . .” Lee corrected himself. “The Scutum-Crux Fleet.”

“You’re a long way from home,” she commented as she took the money for the drinks.

“Keep the change,” Lee said. He was feeling generous. I was, too. It was a magical evening. We could feel the electricity in the air. In another twenty-four hours we would send the girls home, but not until we had made a complete night of it.

“And now, ladies and gentlemen, for the next preliminary match, please welcome once again, Kimo Turner.” The audience applauded more readily that time. People shouted encouragement to the big man as he returned to the ring. Turner had a strong, rounded physique with bulging chest muscles, mountainous shoulders, and thick arms. I looked from him to Lee, a dedicated bodybuilder. Lee’s arms and shoulders were more defined, but Turner looked far more powerful.

“And now . . . your returning champion, with a record of two hundred and zero in Sad Sam’s Iron Man competition, Adam Boyd.” The crowd went insane. Three stories of spectators began screaming at the tops of their lungs. Someone in the balconies began clanking a gong. Men stood on tables and whistled. The clamor was deafening.

Boyd entered the arena, walking a path that led him right past our table. A spotlight shone from the ceiling, and the people around us rose to their feet. Though he passed within five feet of our table, I had to stand to get a good look at him. The man I saw was nothing like I expected. I had thought this undefeatable Adam Boyd must be seven feet tall and built out of bricks. Instead, an undersized and thin fellow with a receding hairline strode past. I would have had trouble believing that he was even five feet tall without seeing him measured.

“Key-riste! That’s the champion?” Lee gasped.

“They’re putting that little man in with that monster?” Jennifer gasped.

“The midget is the champion,” Lee said.

The announcer left the ring, and the fight began. Boyd, whose head barely reached his opponent’s shoulders, moved in warily. He crouched low, held his hands high in front of his head, and circled the floor rather than charging straight ahead.

Kimo Turner lunged straight in, throwing a massive punch that might have decapitated Boyd had it landed. The punch was slow. Boyd easily dodged it, but Kimo was a cagey fighter. The punch was a ruse. His body pivoted with the massive momentum of the missed punch, and he threw a back kick that should have hit Boyd in the chest or throat.

It was a smart move that did not work. Boyd had the reflexes of a demon. He dodged, shot in under the kick, and swept Kimo’s other leg. Kimo fell. The crowd cheered.

Adam Boyd moved in for the kill without a moment’s hesitation. He pounced on Kimo, drilling punches straight down around his eyes and jaw. The entire fight lasted less than one minute.

“Shit!” howled Vince. “Shit, shit, shit! I’ve never seen anything like that. That guy is a friggin’ killer!”

I cannot accurately describe how the fight made me feel. It was like a challenge, as though Adam Boyd’s abilities shook my self-confidence. “I think I like Big-Time Wrestling better,” I said. The announcer stepped back into the ring. “Ladies and gentleman, your winner, by early knockout, Adam Boyd.” As Boyd and the announcer left the ring, the crowd roared. When they returned five minutes later, the applause became all the noisier.

“Ladies and gentleman,” the announcer went on, “it appears we have been graced with a visit from the Republic’s finest.” Suddenly a blinding spotlight pointed at our table. I had to squint to see my own hands.

“Gentlemen, which one of you will represent the Scutum-Crux Fleet against our champion?” the announcer asked.

I looked over at Lee. In the glaring light, his skin looked white, flat white. He looked as nervous as I felt. We stared at each other for a moment, then Lee started to stand.

“Vince,” Jennifer said as she reached for his arm.

“Sit down, Corporal,” I said, pulling rank.

“Oh, come on, Wayson. Don’t be like that,” Lee said, sitting back in his chair.

“He said something about our Republic’s finest, and that sure as hell isn’t you, Corporal.” I did not believe that, of course. But that Boyd character was fast and brutal. I’d sparred with Vince on several occasions. He was powerful but slow, and very predictable. He would have made an easy meal for this Adam Boyd fellow.

“You shouldn’t do this, Wayson,” Jennifer said. “You don’t need to go up there.”

“Kick his ass, Wayson,” Kasara said. She clapped excitedly, and her face beamed. She loved the attention. I’d never seen her so excited.

“I think I do need to go,” I said to Jennifer. Looking at her, I felt a pang of jealousy. Lee did not know it, but he had been the luckier one all along.

The spotlight followed me as I walked toward the ring, blinding me to everything outside its bright circle. I heard people applauding, but they sounded miles away. So did the announcer’s voice. The bright lights above the ring made everything look black and white. The announcer, with his pale skin and black tuxedo, completed the effect.

Standing on the far side of the platform, Adam Boyd watched me calmly. The closer I came, the more things I noticed about him. From the steps along the side of the ring, I saw that his fingers ended in sharp points, almost like claws. That’s going to be a problem, I thought. I also spotted the thick ridge of bone that ran under his eyebrows and into his hair. He was human, no doubt about that, but it was as if someone had engineered him for battle.

Once I stepped onto the platform, I found myself cut off from the rest of the world. I heard spectators shouting, but it blurred into a dull, indistinct roar. It sounded like waves on the beach. The announcer had already finished speaking and started out of the ring.

The flimsy shirt and shorts I had on would not slow me down in a fight, but they would offer no protection from Boyd’s clawlike fingers. I looked at his claws, then expanded my glance to include the tightly muscled arms. There was a circular brantoo on his forearm. I only saw it for a moment, but I recognized the sweep of colors. “You’re a SEAL?” I whispered to myself. Then the bell rang and thought turned into instinct.

Boyd immediately dropped into that cautious stance, his knees flexed and his clawlike fingers pointed right at me. His wide-set dark eyes fixed on my face and shoulders. He circled toward my left, moving so smoothly that he seemed to glide across the canvas.

My first instinct was to grapple. Growing up, I had studied judo and jujitsu. I’d won the orphanage wrestling title three years in a row. Boyd slipped around the arena so gracefully, however, that I doubted I would ever get close enough to knock him off his feet. Against that speed, my only chance was to keep him at long range, where he could not reach me. I jabbed with my left, keeping my right hand high to protect my eyes and chin.

Seeming to evaporate into the thick air, Boyd dodged my punch and lashed across my face with an open hand. Sharp fingers cut into my right cheek, just below my eye. Jumping back to get out of his range, I wiped the wound with the back of my hand. A thick layer of blood covered my knuckles. That swipe across the cheek might have been a warning. Boyd could have just as easily sliced across my eye or throat. Even then, he paused a couple of feet away, allowing me to check my wound. I doubted he would be polite much longer.

I needed to rush the bastard after all. Win or lose, I needed to trap him quickly. If the fight wore on, Boyd could weave in and out, bleeding me dry until I could no longer defend myself. I looked into his brown eyes and assumed a boxer’s stance with my fists high, guarding my face. Boyd leaped forward with inhuman speed. Flinging himself at me, he suddenly veered to my right. I felt a white-hot pain across my face, but knew better than to check the damage. I had just been scratched above my right eyebrow, across the bridge of my nose, and down to the left side of my mouth. Blood started to pour from the gash on my forehead, stinging my eyes and blurring my vision. With no other choice, I dived at Boyd, hoping to catch him off guard. Unsure whether I should keep my arms in front of my face for protection or grab for Boyd’s knees, I kept my arms too low for protection and too close together for a good grab. I should have done one or the other; either would have been somewhat effective. Instead, I left myself open. Boyd swiped his talons across my forehead and pranced out of range.

Already out of breath, with my right eye swollen and stinging, I became vaguely aware of hooting and catcalls coming from the spectators. They could already see the fight coming to an end. So much blood had flowed across my right eye that I could not see through it. Boyd read the damage. He circled toward my right, working his way toward the hazy blind spot. I knew what he was doing, but I had no way to counter his move.

Perhaps, seeing the blood flow, Boyd had overestimated the damage he had caused. Though my right eye was blind, my sense of the ring was not. Hurt but not broken, I threw a blind backhanded fist that caught Boyd on the mouth and cheek. It was a powerful blow that left him temporarily senseless. I spun into him, wrapping my arms around his chest. If I could throw him off his feet, I would take away his speed. We stood toe-to-toe, our chests pressed together. I cinched my arms around his and clamped them at the wrists. Our faces were so close we might have been kissing. As I heaved to lift him, I noticed that his skin was smooth, even under his eyes.

Small and compact, Adam Boyd weighed considerably more than I expected. I squeezed tighter. Straining my back and arms, I pulled him off the ground. I meant to throw him headlong into the cage walls, but he managed to slip his forearms around my back and stabbed those dagger fingers into my skin. I squeezed tighter and smashed my forehead down on the bridge of Boyd’s nose. Boyd was strong and fast, but he was not immune to pain. I had butted my forehead on the soft landing of his nose and felt the fleshy structure buckle under the force. When I saw Boyd’s face again, his nose was purple and twisted so badly that one nostril pointed down and the other up. Blood gushed from both sides.

He did not give up. Digging his sharp fingers into my skin like corkscrews, he clawed into my back. His nails slit my skin and pressed into my ribs. He scratched deeper, twisting his fingers into the wounds. The pain and frustration made me scream.

I was losing blood and the pain sent white-hot flashes through my body. My head spun, but my thoughts remained focused. I reeled my head back and slammed my forehead back down against Boyd’s badly crushed nose. His fingers loosened from my back. He was probably already unconscious, might even have been dead, but I did not wait to find out. I flipped the little bastard into the chain-link wall around the ring, smashing his face into it as hard as I could. His body slumped against the hard wire, and I dug my knee into his spine. He fell to the mat. Planting my knee across his throat, I threw three hard rights, battering the remains of his nose and left eye. A puddle of dark blood formed under his head. My final punches were entirely wasted. Boyd did not move. He did not flinch or twitch. If an air bubble had not formed in the blood under his flattened nostrils, I would have thought I’d killed him. Sighing heavily and taking no pride in what I had just done, I stood up. By that time the announcer stood in the ring. “Mary, mother of Joseph,” he muttered, “I thought Boyd was going to kill you.”

I started to say, “Looks like it was the other way around,” but my knees buckled, and I swooned to the mat. The announcer quickly grabbed my hand and raised it. I heard the mob shouting hysterically outside the ring. Lights came on all over the arena, and I saw men hanging from the balconies. Lee ran into the ring and placed an arm under my shoulder.

“Vince,” I said, unable to say any more.

“Wayson, that was amazing. Unbelievable! I’ve never seen anybody fight like that. No shit, Harris, you were friggin’ amazing!”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I did not say good-bye to Kasara. On my way out of Sad Sam’s Palace, I collapsed from loss of blood. Lee spent the morning driving Kasara and Jennifer to the airport and waiting with them for their plane. I spent the next two days drugged into peaceful oblivion with an IV needle in my arm. Lee was in the room when I woke up on Sunday afternoon. “You going to stay awake this time?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m awake.”

“How do you feel?”

“Like my back is on fire.” I could hear Lee, and I could see his blurred shape, but my sight remained fuzzy. “How long have I been out?”

“Going on three days,” Lee said.

“Kasara?” I asked, feeling lower and lower by the second.

“She left two days ago,” Lee said. “She wants you to call her. She was really worried about you.”

I tried to sit up, but my blurred vision began to spin. I slumped back on my mattress, aggravating the lacerations on my back. I winced.

“That guy would have killed me,” Lee said.

I thought about it. “He might have. He damn near killed me.”

“He’s damn near killed a lot of people,” Vince said. My vision cleared as we spoke. I could see the features on Vince’s face. I could make out details around the room. There were empty seats all around us, but Lee was sitting on the edge of my bed. We were in a hospital recovery room. There were empty beds on either side of me.

“The announcer said he had two hundred straight victories,” Lee said. I tried to sit up again. The tears along the small of my back stretched and I gritted my teeth. “I’ve had some time to think about that, too,” I said. “My match might have been the little bastard’s first fight.”

“What are you talking about?” Lee sounded confused.

“Boyd didn’t have any scars on his face,” I said. “I got really close to him in that fight. He had baby skin—no scars, no cuts. Either he’s so fast that in two hundred fights nobody ever hit him, or . . .”

“You think the announcer was lying?” Lee asked, slipping off the bed. The mattress bounced and I moaned. “Sorry. Want some water?” He picked up a plastic pitcher and poured me a cup.

“I think Adam Boyd is a clone,” I said. “I think several Adam Boyd clones share that two hundred and zero record. Nobody could go two hundred fights in a ring like that without picking up scars.”

“Two hundred wins and one loss,” Lee corrected me. “You killed him last night. Maybe he doesn’t scar. Wayson, having baby skin doesn’t make you a clone. If it did, Jennifer would be a clone. I got really, really close to her and she didn’t have any scars.”

“Jennifer does not have a brantoo.”

“What?”

“Boyd has a brantoo, right here,” I said, pointing at my forearm. “He has the same brantoo the SEALs had on Ronan Minor.”

“No shit,” Lee said. “A midget SEAL clone. Why would they clone a midget?” We both knew the answer. We’d seen Boyd in action. Fast and small and agile, he was the perfect commando. I had come on vacation to sort out my feelings, and that was pretty much all I did for the rest of my stay. I never left the hospital, never visited the beach. Lee wanted to stay with me, but I sent him away. It was my chance to think about undeserved promotions, friends lost in dark caves, and learning I was the last of my kind. My sort of misery did not love company.

I also needed to sort out what it meant to be a Liberator. Sergeant Shannon might have devised a cruel way to flush the Mogats out of their caves, but I doubt he wanted to massacre them. He was tough in drills, but hadn’t I given one of my men two black eyes? And why had I assaulted the man—because he missed some shots? If Shannon had felt the same level of rage I had, he did a brilliant job of controlling it. Of course that could have been his religious side. From what I had seen, Shannon never missed Sunday services.

I continued to whale on Adam Boyd after I knocked him unconscious. Was I trying to kill him or was I just swept along by my own momentum? Maybe Congress was right to ban Liberators. What would a regular clone or a natural-born have done? I turned these thoughts over in my mind. Had Lee known about my maudlin musings, he would have regretted bringing me.

Nothing short of a medically induced coma could have protected me during the excruciating flight back to the fleet. Fortunately for me, we timed our trip around the fleet’s movements. The Kamehameha was near the broadcast network, and our flight time was under ten hours. My back hurt a little as they wheeled me out of the hospital. It hurt a little more when I climbed into Lee’s rental car. I took some pain medication as we drove, and don’t remember much after that. By the time we got to Mars, I had run out of medicine. The transport from Mars was a military ship with stiff seats. I felt pinching in my back as I sat. What I did not realize was that that dull ache was actually a very acute pain that was masked by a slight overdose of painkillers.

“How are you feeling?” Lee asked.

“Not bad,” I said. “I think I’m pretty well healed after all.”

The transport struggled slightly as it left Mars’s gravity. My seat shook, and I got my first hint that the medicine was beginning to wear off.

Lee looked at me. “You okay, Harris?”

I took a deep breath. My ribs expanded as I inhaled. It hurt. “I’ll be glad to get back.”

We approached the disc station. The lightning flashed and, of course, the transport shook. The shaking made my back hurt. We ended up passing through seven disc stations to reach the fleet. By that time, the small of my back felt swollen and some of the lacerations had begun to bleed. As we approached the fleet, I looked out my porthole. “Lee. Lee, look at this. We must have boarded the wrong flight.”

He leaned over me to have a look. “What are you . . .” Seeing what I meant, Lee stood up and opened the locker above our seats. He pulled out our flight information.

“Don’t bother,” I said. “I see the Kamehameha .” The last Expansion-class fighter carrier in operation, the Kamehameha had a distinct profile in space.

As our shuttle glided toward the fleet, I could see four Orion-class star destroyers in the distance and the familiar sight of frigates circling like remora fish. Other ships floated about. I counted at least twenty Athens-class light missile carriers, oblong ships with diamond-shaped bows, hovering along one edge of the fleet. Five Interdictor-class battleships—bat-shaped ships that looked like miniature carriers—led the fleet.

“Looks like Admiral Thurston persuaded Klyber to expand the fleet. It’s about time,” Lee said. I recognized other kinds of ships, too—ships I had heard about but never actually seen. We passed under a minesweeper—a short, sturdy ship that looked like a flying tunnel. Tiny communications ships buzzed around the fleet. The new ships had no armament at all, only large, retractable antenna arrays that pointed in every direction. Off in the distance, three huge barges sat perfectly still.

“I don’t think Klyber had anything to do with this,” I said.

“You can’t order this kind of hardware without HQ’s permission,” Lee said. As our transport landed on the Kamehameha, I told Lee about the news story I had seen. When I described seeing Klyber in the Senate, he shook his head. “And leave the fleet to an underaged outworlder?” He smiled. “Klyber wouldn’t do that.”

But we both knew that he had.

Under Bryce Klyber, the fleet ran efficiently. Under Thurston, it ran precisely. Prior to returning from leave of absence, I would have thought running efficiently and operating precisely meant the same thing. When Lee and I reached the barracks, we saw a training schedule posted on the wall. The schedule had slots for the gunnery range, exercise, obstacle and field training, tactical review, and meals. Nights were generally open. With Admiral Klyber at the helm, sergeants evaluated their own platoons and trained them accordingly. Now that Thurston controlled the fleet, officers attended drills and gave out evaluations.

“Damn,” said Lee. “Somebody is serious about this.”

According to the schedule, the platoon was drilling when we arrived. Looking at that schedule, I felt a cold spot in my stomach. Yes, it addressed important issues like tighter discipline, but I could not ignore the gnawing feeling that officers had wrestled away my authority over my men.

“I wonder what else has changed,” I said, as we went to stow our gear.

“Judging by this schedule, I don’t think you are going to need to worry about marksmanship anymore,”

he said.

Maybe it was the emptiness of the barracks or maybe it was the pain in the small of my back. I looked around at the quarters. The beds were made, the lockers were neat. The air in the Kamehameha was dry and cool, and bright lights cast a dull glare in every inch of the room. I thought about the villa we rented in Hawaii. I thought about Kasara, her messy apartment, and the way she looked when I first saw her on the beach. I opened my locker, stowed my clothes, and saw my armor. As I folded my duffel and placed it in the back of my locker, the clatter of boots cut through the silence. The hatch opened and my men clambered in. I expected to see Sergeant Grayson leading the group, so I was surprised when a man I had never seen before bellowed out orders. The man was a Liberator—First Sergeant Booth Lector.

Liberator clones, like Lector and me, stand just over six feet, three inches tall—four inches taller than later models. Something in Lector’s demeanor made him seem even taller. He seemed to fill the room. He had iron gray hair and a bushy mustache that came down along the corners of his mouth. His face, neck, and hands were covered with small scars, including a bald strip through his right eyebrow. Seeing that particular scar, I became very aware of a similar one I brought home as a souvenir from my fight with Boyd.

Upon seeing me in the office at the back of the barracks, Lector dismissed the men. His mouth curled into a snarl, revealing two missing teeth. The Corps did not waste other prosthetics on enlisted men, but even clones could get their teeth replaced.

“Sergeant Harris,” Lector said in a voice that was surprisingly high and stiff. “May I have a word with you?” He had entered my office, a soundproof cubbyhole of a room with a large window that opened to the rest of the barracks.

Glancing out the window, I saw the men in the platoon gathering around Vince Lee. By the pats on the back and the excited expressions, I could tell they were glad to see him. This new sergeant had clearly worked them hard, and they probably hoped that Lee and I would return things to normal. Not all of the men came to see Lee, however. Several younger-looking privates quietly stowed their rifles and armor. It was difficult to separate the new faces from the old in an all-clone platoon, but I assumed these were replacements who had arrived while Lee and I were away on leave.

“Sure,” I said, feeling a bit off-balance. As I reached to shut the door, Vince Lee, who had already changed into uniform, stepped into the office. He stood silently in the entrance.

“Perhaps we could find someplace more private to speak,” said Lector. “Why don’t you come with me to the gunnery range.”

Standing behind Lector, where the sergeant would not see him, Lee shook his head. His mouth hung slightly open, and his eyes fixed directly on mine. Vince looked nervous, but he need not have worried. I was not about to go to the range with this man. Lector’s rage was primal and open.

“Look, Sergeant . . .” I realized that I did not know his name.

“Lector.”

“Sergeant Lector,” I said, “I just got back from two weeks’ leave. Perhaps we can talk later.”

“Excuse me, Harris,” Lee broke in. “I’m sorry to interrupt. I heard that Captain McKay is looking for you.”

“Maybe we can have that conversation when I get back,” I said, glad to excuse myself. Lector gazed at me. There was an angry chill in his expression. He also had an unmistakable air of competence. Talking to Lector, I had the feeling that he was a man who accomplished whatever he set out to do, good or bad. I remembered how angry Shannon was the first time I met him, but Shannon was a cool breeze compared to Lector. Lector’s anger seethed. It felt focused and vicious.

“We’ll speak later,” Lector snarled, turning sharply and leaving the office.

“That was scary,” I said. I thought Lee had made up that story about McKay to help me escape Lector. That was not the case. Captain McKay really was looking for me. Stopping only to put on my cap, I left the barracks.

McKay worked out of a small office in an administrative section, two decks above our barracks. He was a young officer on the fast track. Few majors or colonels had offices so near the top brass. But a lot had changed in the two weeks that I was away. Stepping off the elevator, I saw a small, wooden plaque on the door. The plaque was new and so was the name—“Lt. Colonel Stephen Kaiser.”

Not grasping the concept that McKay could have moved, I stood by the door puzzling the obvious. Kaiser opened the door. “Can I help you, Sergeant?” he asked.

“I was looking for Captain Gaylan McKay, sir,” I said, feeling uncertain of myself.

“McKay?” he asked. “This used to be his office. I think they moved him two decks down.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said, with a salute.

Captain McKay had been knocked down. He now worked out of an office near the rifle range, in the Marine compound. “Like this office?” McKay asked as he opened the hatch to let me in. He made no attempt to hide the irritation in his voice.

“You’ve got a lot more space, sir,” I said.

“Yes, it certainly is an improvement space-wise,” McKay agreed, stepping back and allowing me in.

“I’ve got more than twice as much floor space as I used to have.” He looked around the room. I could not help but notice his sour expression. He pressed his lips together, and his eyes narrowed. “Couldn’t ask for more space.

“Have a seat, Harris,” McKay said, sitting down behind his desk. He stared hard at my face for a second. “You look like shit.”

Without thinking about what I was doing, I reached up and rubbed the scar over my eyebrow. “I got in a fight, sir.”

“A fight?” McKay said, sitting forward and looking concerned. “I hope I am not going to receive a misconduct report.”

“No chance of that, sir,” I said. “I entered an Iron—”

“You went to Honolulu, didn’t you?” McKay interrupted.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Didn’t anybody warn you about going to Sad Sam’s on Friday night?” McKay laughed. “You’re lucky to be alive, Harris.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

McKay smiled and leaned back in his chair. “One of the good things about being a Marine, Sergeant, is that you cover your scars with a helmet when you are on duty.” He laughed. “I don’t know who did that to your face, but I hope I never run into him.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Do you know why I have been given this spacious new office?” McKay asked.

“No, sir,” I said.

“It’s a demotion,” McKay said. “I’ve been moved down two decks and one million miles from command. I’m not sure if anybody has told you yet, but Admiral Klyber was transferred out.”

I could understand the bitterness in Captain McKay’s voice. Captain Gaylan McKay might have only commanded a couple of platoons; but under Klyber, he’d had access. He oversaw the color guard and had high-profile assignments. He attended briefings with generals and admirals. With Klyber no longer there to protect him, the officers that McKay had bypassed would make him pay dearly.

“Has Admiral Thurston taken command of all three Scutum-Crux Fleets?” I asked. McKay laughed, and the full weight of his bitterness showed. “No. I’m not sure Klyber would have relinquished command to the boy. Admiral Huang is overseeing Scutum-Crux in the interim.”

“Huang?”

“So far he’s been running the Scutum-Crux Arm from DC.” McKay seemed to take comfort from my shock. “Thank God for small miracles. I get the feeling Huang wanted this post all along. He and Thurston march in perfect lockstep. I think old Che Huang wanted Barry out and Thurston in before he took over. Now that he has what he wants, all we can do is sit back and see what he does with it.”

“When did Admiral Klyber leave?” I asked.

“He was gone before we landed on Hubble,” McKay said. “I did not hear about the change until a week ago. It’s a different fleet now. Did you see the new ships when you flew in?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I never thought I would see battleships in the Central Fleet.”

“Yes,” said McKay. “And minesweepers, and communications ships. You don’t gin ships out of thin air. Huang and Thurston must have had them ready before Klyber transferred out.

“We got another present from Huang—new men. We’re back up to two thousand three hundred sea-soldiers on board the Kamehameha .”

“That’s a step in the right—”

“And we have three new platoon sergeants. They’re Liberators,” McKay said.

“I met one,” I said, “Sergeant Lector.”

“That would be First Sergeant Booth Lector,” McKay said, rubbing the sides of his head as he spoke.

“That one is a piece of work. He’s probably the worst of them.”

“The worst?” I asked.

“He took your platoon from Grayson a few days after you left. He came in the same day we got the new drill schedule. I don’t suppose you’ve seen it.”

“I saw it,” I said.

“The drill schedule came down from Thurston’s office. Admiral Thurston is an officer who never leaves anything to chance.”

“Where did he find three Liberators?” I asked.

“Where did Admiral Thurston find the ships?” McKay asked, stepping out from behind his desk. He walked over to his shelves and looked at a model of the Kamehameha . “Where did he get the new ships? Where did he get the new officers? Harris, Thurston does whatever Huang wants, and Huang gives Thurston anything he needs. The bastards have an unholy alliance.”

Turning back toward me, he added, “You need to watch your back around these Liberators, especially Lector. He’s just plain nasty. Two of your men have ended up in sick bay after hand-to-hand combat training, and it turns out that both were sparring with him.”

“How bad?” I asked.

“One had a dislocated shoulder. The other had a broken wrist. They both came in with concussions. Frankly, neither of them looked nearly as bad as you do.”

McKay walked around his desk, then sat on the edge of it. “I’m afraid that I’m not going to be much help to you. Under the restructuring, I’ve been assigned to other duties besides your platoon.”

“Understood, sir,” I said.

“I’ve had a look at Lector’s files,” McKay said. “I’m surprised he hasn’t been executed. Do you know anything about New Prague?”

I thought for a moment. The teachers at U.A. Orphanage #553 seldom talked about military crimes, but New Prague was too big to ignore. “That was the massacre, the one in which an entire colony was wiped out.”

“Albatross Island?” McKay asked.

“The prison planet,” I said.

“Did you ever hear about the uprising?”

“Every prisoner was killed,” I said. “Even the guards were killed.”

“Dallas Prime? Volga? Electra?”

“All massacres where U.A. forces lost control of their troops,” I said. “Officers ended up in jail for those battles.”

“Those were the first battles after the victory in the Galactic Central War. Those were the battles that convinced Congress to outlaw Liberators. Lector fought in every one of them. So did Marshall and Saul.”

“Are Marshall and Saul the other Liberators?” I asked.

“Yes. Tony Marshall and Clearance Saul.

“I don’t know where Thurston found three Liberators. It’s almost like he collects certain kinds of soldiers. He’s big on SEALs and Liberators.”

“SEALs, sir?”

McKay returned to his seat. “Just before I got moved down hear, I heard that Admiral Thurston put in for ten full squads of SEALs. The way things are going, I think Huang has to be behind all of this, and that can’t be good for either of us. I get the feeling that Admiral Thurston wants the remnants of Klyber’s old fleet swept under the rug, if you know what I mean.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The Kamehameha separated from the rest of the fleet without any warning. One night I went to the rec room and watched the new ships through the viewport. When I returned the next day, all I could see was stars. Thanks to Thurston’s mania for security, nobody knew where we were going. Even Vince’s gym buddies were in the dark.

We spent three days traveling to the nearest broadcast disc station, during which time Command did not see fit to release information. My men started getting nervous. They were ready to fight, but they wanted to know something about the enemy. I had a hunch that we might attack the Japanese refugees of Ezer Kri. Huang and several politicians spent a lot of time trying to convince the public that these “ethnic purists” were a dangerous enemy. I did not think the Japanese were a threat and I did not want to hunt them down.

Under our restructured chain of command I no longer drilled my own men. Sergeant Lector ran the firing range and Marshall and Saul ran the training grounds. Needless to say, my platoon’s performance spiked, and its morale dropped. Under Lector’s guidance, our overall marksmanship score improved by 18 percent. Marshall and Saul coaxed an average of five seconds off the platoon’s obstacle course times. But absenteeism rose, too. The men disliked drilling under the new Liberators. Some feigned illness. Two privates from another platoon showed up at sick bay claiming they had appendicitis. After an examination, the doctor determined they were fit. On the way back to their platoon, both men

“stumbled.” They limped back to the infirmary with broken ankles. I never heard if they broke their own ankles or if they were ambushed.

After passing through several discs, the Kamehameha headed into open space. We traveled for nine days before we finally received our briefing.

Captain McKay led our platoon into an auditorium for the session. I had never seen that particular chamber before. It was on the third deck, deep in swabbie country. No one turned us away, however. Twenty-three hundred Marines, all dressed in Charlie Service greens, filed into the semicircular auditorium, with its gleaming white walls and black, mirrored floor. I did not recognize the Navy captain who conducted the briefing. A short, slender man whose red hair and ruddy skin contrasted sharply with his gleaming white uniform, the officer was undoubtedly part of Thurston’s new regime. He paid little attention to us fighting men as we entered. By the sound of things, I got the feeling no one else recognized the briefing officer either. A steady stream of anxious chatter echoed through the gallery. In the row behind me, a sergeant made a pointless attempt to quiet his men.

“Now listen up, sea-soldiers, and maybe we can teach you something new today,” the captain called in a flat and well-practiced manner. He stood and switched on a holographic projector. The translucent image of a planet appeared on a screen above his head. The planet was shown in 3-D and seemed to bulge out of the screen as it rotated.

“Our subject today is real estate and how to protect your land against squatters. The Unified Authority owns the land.” The captain broke every word into syllables and pronounced every syllable with equal emphasis. Rolling from his tongue, Unified Authority was pronounced “Un-if-ied [a half second pause]

Au-thor-it-tay.”

“The Unified Authority decides who uses the land. When anybody steps on land without the express consent of the Unified Authority, they are squatters and trespassers. Do you understand me, sea-soldiers?”

The captain paused, giving us a chance to grasp his meaning.

“The planet you see twirling above my head is currently known as ‘Little Man.’ The reason I say

‘currently known’ is because the planet has not been colonized. When Little Man is officially settled, the Senate will rename it. But then, I am sure you all knew that.”

Actually, I did not know that planets received new names when they were colonized. The captain picked up a laser pointer from the podium and shined it into the image on the screen. The translucent planet turned solid wherever the red beam of the pointer touched. Some of the planet was covered with steel gray seas, but much of it was covered with green lands and dust-colored mountains. The laser pointer cut across the surface of the planet uncovering valleys and lakes.

“Gentlemen, Little Man has a breathable atmosphere. Little Man is the right distance from a star to grow crops. God made Little Man capable of sustaining life without help from Unified Authority science. We could land a colony on Little Man this very day and it would be self-sufficient within three years.

“Since our topic is real estate, sea-soldiers, I want you to know that this naturally life-sustaining atmosphere makes Little Man a very valuable piece of property. Do you understand me, sea-soldiers?”

“Sir, yes, sir,” we shouted as a group.

“And they said you Leathernecks could not be taught,” the captain muttered into his microphone.

“The only problem with Little Man is location.” The screen dissolved into a map of the galaxy, with its six spiral arms. A glowing red ball showed on the outermost edge of the Scutum-Crux Arm. “Some of you sea-soldiers may not be familiar with astronomical maps. This is a map of our galaxy. As you can see, Little Man is located on the edge of the galaxy. In real estate terms, this is not a prime location.” The captain pointed to the red ball with his laser pointer.

“The edge of the galaxy is called ‘the extreme frontier.’ For strategic reasons, the Unified Authority has not seen fit to settle the extreme frontier.

“It has come to our attention that squatters have trespassed on this valuable piece of property. Your government wants these extreme frontier trespassers evicted with extreme frontier prejudice.

“Do you understand me, Marines?”

“Sir, yes, sir!” we yelled, and we meant it. For all of his disdain and his condescending attitude, the captain knew how to communicate with Marines. Give us an enemy and aim us at said enemy, then let us do what we do best. Electricity surged through every man in the auditorium. The image shifted to the surface of the planet. “This will be a land-op. The enemy has established a stronghold along the west coast of this continent. That means, sea-soldiers, you will launch your attack here.” The pointer landed on a long stretch of beach. “You will establish a beachhead and force these squatters off our property. Do you understand me, Marines?”

“Sir, yes, sir.”

“Once we have broken the enemy’s backbone, we will proceed through these foothills, chasing the enemy inland. You will be provided with limited air support for that part of your mission.” As the captain said that, a red trail appeared on the screen, marking the path we would take. The map vanished from the screen and was replaced by the face of a middle-aged Japanese man with graying hair and wire-rimmed spectacles. “This is Yoshi Yamashiro. From what Captain Olivera tells me, you sea-soldiers have a score to settle with Mr. Yamashiro from Ezer Kri. For those of you with short memories, he is the man who looked the other way when one of your platoons was massacred.

“I may not be a Marine, but I understand that U.A. Marines always collect on debts. Is that correct?”

At those words the enthusiasm doubled. “Sir, yes, sir!”

“Sea-soldiers, the Unified Authority does not care if you return with prisoners from this conflict. You are to carry out your duties with extreme prejudice. I should not have to say this to you Leathernecks, but I will. Do not hesitate to fire when fired upon. Do you understand me, Marines?”

“Sir, yes, sir!”

The briefing ended at 1800 hours. Lee and I stopped by the sea-soldier’s bar on the way to the barracks. We found a table in the back and spoke quietly as we watched other men enter.

“Was I hearing things or were we just given permission to massacre everybody on that planet?” I asked, as the bartender brought us our beers.

“That’s what it sounded like to me,” Lee agreed.

“I may be mistaken, but isn’t that considered a criminal act?” I asked.

“Shit, Wayson! We’re trying to prevent a war. Those bastards ambushed a platoon. They shot down a frigate.” He picked up his beer and downed it in two long swigs.

Never before had I noticed the dangerous side of Vince’s programming. Vince Lee had received instructions from a superior officer, and he accepted those instructions without further examination. That was how his generation of clones was programmed to act.

“If the news of this massacre gets out, we may find our citizenship officially revoked,” I said. “The Liberators who fought in the Galactic Central War were never allowed back into the Orion Arm for massacring prisoners on Albatross Island.”

“I heard that they killed the guards,” Lee said. “And how would that news get out, anyway? We’re on the extreme frontier.”

I knew about neural programming. Dammit, I knew that the new clones were programmed to take orders, but still I could not believe my ears. “You’re not bothered by any of this?”

“Hold that thought,” Lee said. He got up from the table and went to the bar. By that time, a pretty big crowd of noncoms and conscripts had drifted in. It took Lee nearly fifteen minutes to order four beers and return with the bottles.

“Okay,” he said as he sat down. “I think you were just telling me your latest conspiracy theory.”

“Get specked,” I said. “Look, Lee, we’re not going to do this drop in boats. If the plan is to trap and massacre the enemy, why not drop down on the land side of the foothills and chase the enemy into the sea.”

“They’re Japanese,” Lee said. “Maybe they are good swimmers.” He shrugged and downed his next beer.

“You think that’s funny?” I asked.

“Calm down. Robert Thurston planned this invasion. The guy is a friggin’ genius. He kicked Klyber’s ass.”

I put up my hand to quiet Lee. So many noisy Marines had come to the bar to celebrate by then that I could barely hear him anyway. But not all of the patrons were enlisted men. Captain McKay sat at a nearby table flanked by Lector, Saul, and Marshall.

“What is it?” Lee asked. He started to turn for a look, but stopped when I told him to sit still.

“It’s McKay,” I said. “He’s sitting three tables from us with Lector and his boys.” I had never spoken with Saul or Marshall, but they were cut from the same helix as Lector. The three ghouls spent their free time clustered together, speaking in quiet tones and bullying enlisted men. Just then, they were huddled around McKay.

“The Kamehameha was a better place before they transferred in,” one of the privates from our platoon said as he joined us. “Got room at your table?”

“Have a seat,” Lee said, smiling. His expression turned serious again quickly. “Those bastards are evil. I thought Shannon was bad. No offense, Harris, but you and Shannon are defective. Lector is the real Liberator. He almost killed a guy in Doherty’s platoon today . . . sent him to sick bay with a dislocated shoulder and a broken collarbone.”

“I don’t think Captain McKay likes them,” the private said. “I saw them come in together. McKay looked nervous.”

Risking a quick glance, I peered around Lee and noticed the stiff way McKay sat in his chair. He stared angrily at Lector. Though all three of the new sergeants had the exact same face, I had no trouble telling them apart by their scars. Lector had that wide gash through his left eyebrow and a long, spiraling scar on his left cheek. Marshall had bald spots, probably the result of shrapnel, in his thinning white hair. Of the three, Saul might have had it the worst. The skin on his face was lumpy and blotched. He must have been burned in some kind of chemical fire. The scarring most likely covered his entire body. McKay said something quietly. I could not hear him above the chatter in the bar. He placed his hand on the table and started to stand, but Lector placed a hand over McKay’s and held him down. They traded more inaudible talk. Lector said something, and Captain McKay nodded. Lector removed his hand from McKay’s, and the captain stormed away from the table.

Lee had turned to watch the exchange. “Look at them, Wayson,” Lee whispered. “I’d kill myself if I were a clone.”

“How you going to do it?” I asked distractedly.

Lee laughed. “I would not joke about that if I were you.”

Apparently, Admiral Thurston believed one ship could handle our mission. The Kamehameha was almost alone in the quadrant. We had no accompanying frigates or cruisers; only one lone communications ship hovered nearby.

The logistics were simple enough. The Kamehameha carried fifteen armored transports, each of which could carry two platoons and supplies. Two trips per transport, and all twenty-three hundred Marines would be in position. My platoon, of course, got to land in the first wave. As we prepared to take our place in the kettle, I found out what Lector and McKay were discussing in the bar. Captain McKay’s command included the Twelfth and Thirteenth Platoons—Sergeant Grayson’s. But it wasn’t Grayson I saw at the head of the Thirteenth when I led my squad into the kettle. Lector paced the floor goading his men. Marshall and Saul sat at the stern of the ship.

“Harris.” I turned and was surprised to see Captain McKay, wearing full armor with his helmet off, boarding the AT.

I saluted. “You’re coming down in the kettle, sir?” This was the first time I had seen an officer ride with the ground fodder. Usually they stayed a safe distance away.

“Orders,” McKay said, returning my salute. “Harris, you saw that they switched Grayson out of the thirteenth Platoon. Somebody placed all four Liberators in one company. I get the feeling they want to make a clean sweep.”

“I get that feeling too, sir.”

McKay signaled toward Lector with the slightest of eye motions. “Watch my back, Harris. I want to survive this mission. I don’t want to die on Little Man.”

“I will do what I can for you, sir.” In my gut, I had the sinking feeling that it wouldn’t be much.

We were both sergeants, but Booth Lector outranked me. I was just a sergeant. He was a first sergeant. In the noncommissioned ranks, Lector was just one step from the top.

“Okay, so now I am nervous,” Lee said over a private interLink frequency. “What are Lector and Saul doing on our AT? What is McKay doing here? God, I hate Liberators.”

“They shuffled the sergeants,” I said. “And you are speaking to a Liberator.”

“You’re only a Liberator in theory,” Lee said. “Lector’s the real thing.”

Several of my men removed their helmets and placed them on the floor. Judging by their expressions, I got the feeling that the grim mood had spread across the kettle. No one spoke. No one, that is, except Sergeants Lector, Marshall, and Saul. After liftoff, while the rest of the men quietly attached rifle stocks to their M27s or inspected the inventory in their belts, Lector and his friends continued to chat. I sat with Lee in the back of the ship, whispering back and forth with him over the interLink.

“Why would McKay trade Grayson for those three?” Lee asked.

“I don’t think McKay calls the shots anymore,” I said. “He looked pretty nervous at the bar last night. He must have gotten a memo about the change in platoons right after the briefing. He probably took Lector to the bar to discuss the transfer.

“Remember when McKay tried to leave and Lector stopped him? McKay must have told them how he wanted to run things and found out that Lector and his pals had ideas of their own.”

“You think they threatened him?” Lee asked.

“He’s staying as far from them as he can. Lector probably said something about friendly fire or battlefield accidents.”

“That cuts two ways,” Lee said.

“It should,” I agreed. Looking around the kettle, I knew that it did not. Standard clones were incapable of that kind of initiative; it was not in their programming.

A yellow light flashed over the cabin, warning us that we were broaching the atmosphere. The kettle shuttered. Men who were standing jolted forward but did not lose their balance. Then the amber light turned red.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“They must be firing at us,” Lee said.

The men who had removed their helmets fastened them in place so that they would not smell the acrid ozone stench of the shields. In the vacuum of space, the shields were odorless. In an atmosphere, they burned oxygen and produced quite a stink.

The thick walls of the kettle muffled outside sounds. We heard the soft plink as bullets struck our hull. They must have been enormous bullets. The average M27 bullets turned to steam as they pierced the shields, but these shots had enough mass and momentum to tap the hull. Whoever the “squatters” were, they had lots of firepower. Artillery shells burst all around us. All we heard in the kettle was a soft rumble as our shields disintegrated the shrapnel in the air. The bigger explosions created air pockets, causing our clumsy, armored transport to drop a few feet at a time. The kettle shook violently. The lights flashed off, and we dropped at least a hundred feet before the lights kicked on again and the pilots regained control.

“They have a particle-beam cannon!” McKay yelled over the interLink.

“Take positions,” I called to my men.

We were hit with another particle-beam barrage. That time, as we dropped, I heard the rat-a-tat sound of bullets striking the side of the ship. The shields were out, and bullets were hitting our unprotected hull. There was a loud, hollow boom as a shell struck the top of the kettle, flopping the entire AT on its side. Two more struck. We were like a boxer who is out on his feet, taking shots with no way to protect himself.

In the flashing red emergency light, I saw a private jump to his feet and run toward the front of the cabin. As if out of nowhere, someone reached out a hand and smashed the man across the front of his helmet with so much force that the Marine fell to the floor. My visor identified Sergeant Marshall as he pulled back his M27 and knelt over the fallen man.

The lights came back on, and within moments, we were down on the beach.

The ATs landed in a row, their shields facing the bluffs at the top of the beach. The enemy’s guns could not penetrate the barrier created by the shields—the only danger came from accidentally stumbling into them.

Under other circumstances the coastline might have been beautiful. A bright blue sky with puffy clouds stretched off to the horizon. We had landed on a beach with white sand and still, gray water. Ahead, through the electrified window of our shields, I saw sandy bluffs leading to coral rock foothills. The melting air in front of the shields blurred my vision, but I thought I saw men scurrying along the tops of the bluffs.

Then I heard the guttural growl of gunships. Two ships waddled across the sky, traveling over our heads and stopping over the enemy. They hovered in the air firing rockets and side-mounted chain guns. A huge explosion churned up a geyser of sand and a blinding green flash as the enemy’s particle-beam cannon exploded.

Debris from the explosion flew in all directions. Concrete, dirt, and bits of rocks rained down around us. Fire burned at the top of the bluffs. The radioactive core of the particle-beam cannon might well have irradiated the enemy. The firefight seemed to have ended.

Though we did not have tanks with us, our transports brought several cavalry units with gun-mounted, all-terrain vehicles—sprite four-wheel two-man buggies—with mounted chain guns and missile launchers. As the platoons organized behind the shields, the ATVs sped up the beach, kicking plumes of sand in their wake.

They drove in a zigzagging pattern, weaving toward the bluffs. When the first unit drove within a hundred yards of the hill, a single rocket fired. It was all so fast. I heard the hiss, saw the contrail, and the ATV

vanished in a ball of flames.

The two gunships that had pulled back from the scene flew back and hovered over the area looking for targets. They continued over the area for minutes without firing. Whoever was down there was well hidden.

With no other options, we prepared to rush the bluffs. “Prepare for attack,” McKay yelled over the interLink. The shield in front of our AT extinguished. For a moment I saw the distant hills clearly.

“Attack.”

We started up the beach, running hard and kicking up loose sand. I kept my eye on the top of the bluffs, the enemy fortification. “Vince, do you see anything?” I called on a private frequency.

“If anybody’s alive up there,” Lee panted, “they’re either wearing radiation armor or they glow in the dark.”

The body gloves we wore under our armor would protect us from radiation poisoning, but technicians would need to neutralize the radiation before we could remove so much as a glove. In that kind of battle, radioactivity worked for us.

The gunships continued to float over the attack area looking for targets. They did not fire. Perhaps Lee was right. Perhaps some dying soldier flamed our ATV as his last act of defiance. As the first men reached the flaming, smoking remains of that ATV, gunfire erupted from the hillside.

“Drop!” I yelled over the platoon frequency.

Up ahead, machine guns fired so many shots into the first few men that their armor exploded, spraying blood and shredded plastic.

The gunships fired, but their shots were blind. The men on the ships must have been hunting human targets. Their heat sensors and radar would not locate motion-tracking drones.

“It’s trackers,” I said to Lee.

“It looks that way,” Lee agreed.

“Think we can go around them?” I asked.

“It’s not worth the trouble,” Lee answered. “You watch, they’re going to light up the hill.”

As if on cue, the gunships fired incendiary rockets. One moment the bluffs were green and white, covered with sand and vines, the next they glowed ocher as chemical fires superheated the ground to well over eighteen hundred degrees. The flash heat vanished quickly; but wiring melted and munitions exploded as the bunkers at the far end of the beach turned into ovens. The air boiled with the crackle of bullets and the boom of artillery shells as the once-smooth ridge at the top of the bluffs convulsed into a jagged scar.

The problem with “lighting the hill” was that it took three hours for the heat to dissipate. Until the temperature went down, the most our ground forces could do was sit. Thurston sent Harriers and bombers to patrol the other side of the foothills, but the heavily forested terrain made flybys ineffective. We’d gone to Little Man to annihilate the enemy; but for the time being, all we could do was sit tight as the enemy fled to safety.

When we crested the hill, we saw the remains of a mile-long concrete bunker with yard-thick walls. With its ground cover blown to the winds, the concrete shell of the bunker lay exposed like a giant trench. Heat and explosions had blown the top off the structure, leaving a mazelike complex beneath. No other path was left for us, so we dropped down into the ruins.

I could not smell the outside world through my helmet. I sometimes smelled my own sweat after a long march or battle, but that was about it. Walking across the bunker’s concrete floors, I thought I smelled death. It did not smell like burned meat. The dry and dusty scent of ash filled my helmet. Looking back, I am sure that I imagined the smell, of course I imagined it; but at the time, it seemed very real to me. The floor was littered with the cinder remains of wooden beams. It wasn’t until we got deeper into the bunker that we discovered the bodies.

The charred remains of hundreds of men covered the floor in the center of the compound. There was no way to identify the bodies; they were scorched beyond recognition. They looked mummified, with all traces of hair burned away and skin that looked like parched leather. The fleshy, loose skin around their lips had shrunk, leaving their mouths with toothy grins. When one of my men accidentally stepped on a body, it crumbled into dust and bone beneath his boot.

“Think they’re Japanese?” Vince asked, as we left a room in which four bodies had fallen on top of each other as if stacked.

“How could you possibly tell?” I asked. “What could these people have done to deserve this?”

Vince did not answer. That was the only reasonable response.