Rogue clone (13 page)

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

“I see it,” the controller said.

“Am I cleared to retrieve the ship?”

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

Both men laughed.

“What did he find?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

I could not argue with that one.

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

transport in through the aperture.

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

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

“Dead crew,” he said.

“And the passengers?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sit him up,” the colonel said.

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

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

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

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

“Was it sabotage?” I asked.

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

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

“That cable?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

“Easy, Fred,” warned the colonel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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