Rogue clone (22 page)

I stole a car. I didn’t have any other options. Supposing that a city-wide evacuation and naval attack might hurt their business, the car rental agencies had closed for the night . . . and the next night, and the night after that. In honor of Billy the Butcher, I found a sporty little Paragon in the parking lot and wired it. Patel’s Paragon was orange and this one was red, but they both had the same shoehorn-shaped chassis.

I did not bother myself with fables about returning the car or justifications about the owner of the car having cast it away. I needed wheels, this car looked nice. Once I had the engine going, I threaded my way though the spaceport parking lot and drove into town.

There was something eerie about traveling through an abandoned city that reminded me of swimming underwater. It might have been the emptiness or the silence or the lack of movement. The electricity was out almost everywhere. Without their red, yellow, and green glow, the traffic lights looked like misshapen trees. I did not care for crowds, but I found this emptiness unsettling. Driving down dark streets lined by lifeless buildings, my isolation seemed to amplify itself. I looked into storefronts that were as dark as caves. It wasn’t just that the lights were off—life itself was gone. It was like climbing up an escalator that has been turned off. For psychological reasons, climbing dead escalators seems harder than walking up stairs. It feels like civilization has failed. I drove past the movie house where I had met Jimmy Callahan and watched
The Battle for Little Man
. The entrance was a black hole. The holotoriums would be empty and the projection rooms dark. It seemed unnatural.

Jimmy Callahan, I mused, with his bulging muscles and his big, big talk, would be one of the last men on New Columbia. The Mogats and the Secessionists may have chased everybody else away, but Callahan was still on the planet, right where I left him, locked up in a Marine base brig. The irony was that the very spot where I placed him for safekeeping would soon be the most dangerous location on the planet. I was driving through uptown Safe Harbor and turned a corner. The block in front of me was completely demolished. For a moment I thought the attack must have begun, and then I recognized where I was. This was the neighborhood that Patel bombed. Only three weeks had passed since that bombing . . . two weeks and an era.

Something far more dangerous than Billy the Butcher Patel was coming to New Columbia. Who would have believed it? Jimmy Callahan who had talked so big and gotten himself into so much trouble might just be the key to winning the war.

I expected to see looters hiding in shadows, moving through alleys, and breaking into buildings. Instead, I ran into roadblocks. The Army was out in force. I turned a corner and saw a chrome and titanium barrier stretched across the road. A string of bright blue lights winked on and off sequentially across the top of their barricade. Five soaked and miserable-looking soldiers in camouflaged ponchos flagged me down. They had M27s strapped over their shoulders, and there were machine-gun nests on either side of their barricade.

I stopped and lowered my window.

“Nice car,” a soldier said as he approached. He was a corporal. He was a clone. He had brown hair, broad shoulders and a round chest. He was short and squat, and powerful. He and I might have been raised in the same orphanage for all I knew. Rain poured down on him. Drops hit his poncho and burst.

“You mind if I don’t get out?” I asked. “I don’t want to get the upholstery wet.”

He smiled and nodded. “I don’t suppose you have papers for that car?” he asked.

“How about these?” I handed him my military ID.

He took the card and read it over several times. “Colonel,” he said, acknowledging my identity, but the barrier did not open. “Our scanner says this car belongs to James Walker. I don’t suppose you can prove that he loaned you this vehicle?”

“No, Corporal, I can’t,” I said.

“Then we have a bit of a problem, Colonel. We’ve been sent out to prevent looting. That includes the borrowing of cars.”

Colonel McAvoy had issued me a pistol. I had it under my car seat. I could have shot the corporal.

“How far is Fort Washington from here?”

The corporal’s expression tightened. Fort Washington was the local Marine base. If I was indeed a colonel in the Marines, I should have known how to get there.

“I just flew in, Corporal,” I said. “Fleet Headquarters dispatched me to see what I can do to prepare this planet for an attack.”

“I heard air traffic was stacked up for hours,” the corporal said, a dubious note in his tone.

“Getting out is a problem,” I said. “There’s a line all the way up to the disc and more people waiting in the spaceport. Coming in is a breeze. Who wants to go to a planet that’s about to get smashed?”

That seemed to satisfy him. The corporal smiled and nodded. “Sir, I can’t let you pass in that car.”

“I understand,” I said.

“Tell you what, sir. You park the car over there,” he said, pointing to a nearby alley, “and I’ll give you a ride to Washington in our jeep.”

“You don’t mind?” I asked.

“Base Command, Base Command, this is post fifteen in Sector A, come in,” he said into an interLink microphone that was attached to his poncho. He must have received the response through an unseen earpiece.

“I have an incoming Marine colonel looking for Fort Washington. Requesting permission to drive him.”

He put a hand over his ear to block outside sounds. “That is correct. I said a Marine colonel . . . yes, that would be the equivalent of colonel in the Marine Corps.”

The corporal bent down again and said, “Okay, I’m cleared to drive you to the base.”

“I appreciate it,” I said.

Then, lowering his voice just shy of a whisper, he added, “Leave the keys in the Paragon . . . just in case.”

I couldn’t really leave the keys in the ignition since I had hot-wired the car. “You know anything about hot-wiring cars?”

“No sir,” the corporal said.

“I’ll leave the ignition running,” I said. I turned the car around, backed into the nearest alley, and stepped out into the rain. The downpour was hard and steady, but the air was warm. Sitting in an open-air bungalow on an evening like this could have been very pleasant, I thought, assuming you had the right company.

The corporal led me to his jeep, a sturdy little five-seat auto with a hard top. It did not have mounted machine guns or a missile carriage—clearly the Army did not expect to face ground forces. I was not so confident. Once out of the rain, I put my pistol in my ruck and pulled out my M27. I grabbed two extra clips and hid them in my jacket.

“You expecting a war?” the corporal asked as he climbed in.

“Better safe than specked,” I said.

“Colonel, we have road blocks set up every eight blocks across Safe Harbor. Intel ran a scan. There may be a couple thousand looters out there, but the last thing they want is to mess with us.”

“You’re probably right,” I said. “This just makes me feel a little more relaxed.” I patted the M27.

“Sort of a security blanket, sir?”

“Ever been in combat, Corporal?”

“Mostly police actions.”

“That’s good,” I said. “You’ll know what I am talking about soon enough.” Dead is dead. It doesn’t matter if you’re shot by a scared looter or a separatist sniper.

The strange sensation of driving through empty streets never went away. We drove through the financial district with its tall skyscrapers, the light of our headlights reflecting on marble and glass façades the way it might reflect on the surface of a still lake. I kept looking for men in suits. We drove past a row of apartment complexes and grocery stores, and I automatically checked the buildings for lights. The only time we saw people was when we passed roadblocks.

The soldiers would see us, slow us for visual inspection, and salute us on our way.

“Spotted any looters, sir?” the corporal asked. I didn’t answer.

The most haunting thing we passed was a LAWSONS convenience store. These were stores that never closed. Lights were always supposed to be on in these stores and the doors were never supposed to be locked. Yet here was a LAWSONS that was as dark and deserted as any dance club on Sunday. Even the LAWSONS sign over the door was dark.

The corporal drove like a maniac. He streaked down the wet streets so quickly that he could not possibly have swerved in time to avoid hitting another car had one appeared. When he came around corners, he did not slow down, causing the jeep to drift more than it turned.

“You know, I’ve been stationed in Safe Harbor for two years now and I’ve seen more of the town over the last five hours than the last twenty-four months. It’s not a bad place, really . . . a little dark, maybe.”

“Did you see the feed from New Gibraltar?” I asked.

“I’d like to see them try something like that around here. McCord would send one thousand fighters and shoot their asses down,” the corporal said.

“From what I hear, the Separatists only had four ships at Gateway,” I said.

“Yeah?” the corporal said.

“And from what I understand, they have over five hundred ships in their fleet.”

The corporal frowned. The dim green glow of the dashboard lights lit up the lower half of his face. It lit his bottom lip, the bottom of his nose, and the folds of skin under his eye sockets. The strange lighting made his expression grim. “Five hundred ships? I didn’t know that.”

The entrance to Fort Washington Marine base was up ahead. You did not need to know military tactics to see that it was also on high alert. Bright lights lit the main gate to the base. Red strobes flashed on and off on the half dozen radar dishes that spun around the wall of the fort. Unlike New Gibraltar, which looked like a modernized version of an old medieval castle, Fort Washington was a sprawling campus that took up several square miles.

Looking beyond the gate, I saw the taillights of jeeps rushing between buildings. They drove by headlight only. The streetlights were out. There were no lights on the outsides of the buildings. Throughout the grounds, the only bubbles of light were emplacements for long-range cannons capable of hitting ships outside the atmosphere.

Crazy driver that he was, I expected the corporal to race up to the front gate and screech to a stop. He showed more common sense than that. With the base on alert and armed guards all around the entrance, the corporal slowed to a crawl and coasted to the gate.

The guard who approached the jeep did not draw his M27, but I could sense a dozen other weapons pointed in our direction.

“Corporal,” the guard said.

“Just bringing you one of your own,” the corporal said, nodding toward me. I handed the guard my ID. “I brought in a local thug named Jimmy Callahan about a week ago. Your MPs have been keeping him and a couple of buddies in the brig for safekeeping,” I said. The guard walked around the jeep for a better look at me. He read my ID, considered it, and reread.

“Wait here, sir,” he said and went into his booth to phone command. When he hung up the phone, he handed me my card and saluted. A moment later the gate went up, and the other guards saluted as we drove by.

The corporal may have been Army, but he knew his way around this Marine base. He skirted the motor pool and the barracks and brought me right to the administration building. I thanked the man and he saluted me, then he drove off.

Jimmy Callahan and his two bodyguards sat in an interrogation room. Both of Callahan’s stooges smoked, he didn’t. The three of them sat without speaking to each other. Callahan did not even look in the other boys’ direction. He occasionally reached up to smooth his hair as he considered his various options.

I watched this scene on a security screen in the chief ’s office hoping for a clue about Callahan’s general mood. The man was a sphinx for nearly five minutes, then he gave me a clear insight by staring into a supposedly hidden camera and sticking his middle finger out at it.

Two MPs escorted me to the interrogation room and locked the door behind me.

“You’re a colonel now?” Callahan asked as he turned to look at me. “You must have run away from something really big this time. Know what I mean?” He bobbed his head in that arrogant way as he spoke. Behind him, Silent Tommy and Limping Eddie, the two bodyguards I maimed right before the explosions, stubbed out their cigarettes and sat like statues. They did not seem as happy to see me as their boss was.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.

“Allow me to explain. You run away from the battle at Little Man and they make you lieutenant. Now, in two short weeks, you’re a specking colonel. What did you do, run away from New Gibraltar?”

It became very apparent that there were two Jimmy Callahans. The first, the one speaking to me at this moment, was a petulant prick who thought he had the world by the balls. The other was a scared little kid.

“That’s clever,” I said. “Don’t you think that’s clever?” I asked Silent Tommy. He did not answer. “How about you, Eddie? Don’t you think Jimmy’s joke is clever?”

“See, now, Harris, they don’t want to answer because they’re scared of you. They don’t have anything you want. Me . . . I have information you want, so I’m not scared. In fact, I think it’s about time you did me some favors.”

“Really?” I asked, sitting on the edge of the table in the center of the room. “You don’t think saving your ass from Patel was enough?”

Callahan’s mouth bent in a comical frown that took the corners of his lips halfway down his chin. “I’ve been thinking about that, and I don’t think Patel was after me. I think he was after you. Know what I mean? I never did anything to Billy. What would he have against me?”

“Well, there is this little issue about you fingering him to the Marines.” I said.

“You cannot possibly be talking about yourself, Harris? You’re not the Marines. Hell, you’re a specking deserter.” Callahan smiled at his own joke and flexed his biceps. “And as for saving my ass, who says that you saved it? Tommy and Eddie were there. They came out just fine ’cept what you did to them.”

Tommy’s jaw was wired shut and mending. Eddie was on crutches. Both my doing.