Rogue clone (8 page)

“I can tell you where the Catholic Church stands when it comes to you and your place in the
universe. The Catholic Church holds that you have no soul and that you are an abomination.”

“And yet I am created in God’s own image.”

“Man was created in God’s image,” I told him.

“And I was created in man’s image,” he said.

I said, “I will allow you to visit our planet, and I hope that the answers you find here will not
leave you discomfited.”

I did not let him stay because of his amateurish attempts to grasp philosophy. I let him stay
because I believed he was sincere, and that intrigued me. If this man was a Liberator, then he was
by nature a killer and a creation without a soul. I knew this to be true, though in his case, I am not
certain that I believed it was true.

March 13, 2512 A.D.

Location: Golan Dry Docks; Galactic Position:

Norma Arm

The Golan Dry Docks were considered one of the “seven man-made wonders of the galaxy.” Other wonders included the Capitol Building in Washington D.C., the outer-galactic scientific observatory on the outer edge of the Orion Arm, the planetary food storage and production facility on Nebraska Kri, the all-faiths military burial facility near the center of the Norma Arm, the Sol science station on the surface of the sun, and, of course, the Broadcast Network.

Funny how the mundane wonders get overlooked. I considered the spaceport on Mars far more wondrous than the Sol science station or the Nebraska Kri food-packing plant. That place was so big that it needed a resort-sized dormitory to house clerks and waiters. Mars Spaceport even had a smaller secondary dormitory that housed the people who ran special stores, theaters, and restaurants for the employees living in the primary dormatory.

My mind wandered when I traveled through space. The light flashing on my radio brought me back to reality. “Starliner A-ten-twenty-thirty-four, this is Dry Docks traffic control, please come in.”

“Traffic control, this is Starliner A-ten-twenty-thirty-four.”

Ahead of me, the Golan Dry Docks looked like a cross between bleached bones and a giant spider web. Eight-mile pillars described the outside of the platform in lilting arches like the ribs of a gigantic skeleton. Between these pillars was a haphazard warren of walls that divided the structure into mooring slips and construction zones. Scaffolding lined the insides of those slips. From out in space, the scaffolds looked like threads instead of twenty-foot-wide metal platforms. The dry docks housed over eight hundred cubic miles of space for building ships.

Golan did not orbit a planet. It was a free-floating space station.

“Starliner pilot, please identify yourself and prepare for security scan.”

This request did not worry me. The Golan Dry Docks were one of the most security-intensive facilities in the galaxy. Knowing that Admiral Klyber had picked me for this assignment, the head of
Doctrinaire
security crafted my new identity and logged my clearance and flight plans while I was still on New Columbia. He knew where I was headed before I knew, it seemed. Rather than enter the Dry Docks as Corporal Arlind Marsten or Lieutenant Wayson Harris, both of whom had damning skeletons in their closets, I now traveled as Lieutenant Commander Jeff Brocius of the U.A. Navy assigned to the Central Cygnus Fleet.

I flew a Johnston R-56 Starliner, a 20-seat luxury craft on loan to me from the
Doctrinaire
fleet. The R-56 was generally flown by corporate pilots. Like every other pair of wings on the
Doctrinaire
, this R-56 had been outfitted with its own broadcast engine.

“Please state your identity.”

“Lieutenant Commander Jeff Brocius, U.A. Navy.”

“Lieutenant Commander Brocius, copy. Are there passengers aboard your flight?”

“No, sir.”

“Thank you, Starliner.”

Traffic Control was acting unusually polite and I had a pretty good idea why. Security gave me the name Brocius because Admiral Alden Brocius, the officer-in-command of the Central Cygnus Fleet, was headed to the Golan Dry Docks for the summit. For all the men in the traffic tower knew, I was the admiral’s son or nephew.

“Starliner R-fifty-six, we are under heightened security at this time. Please switch off all onboard controls. Our traffic computers will guide your ship into port.”

“Aye,” I said.

The traffic tower took control of my ship the moment my hands left the panel. Lights turned on and off as traffic control accessed all of my instrumentation. They might discover that I had unusual equipment on board, but they would not know it was a broadcast engine unless they tracked me from millions of miles away. I had disconnected the power after broadcasting in. Without a generator pouring tera-volts into it, the broadcast engine would look like nothing more than spare parts to their security computers. My ship slowed to a near standstill as it joined the queue waiting to enter the Phase 2 landing bays. Unlike the rest of the platform, Phase 2 of the Golan platform was totally enclosed. Seen from this side, the Dry Docks had a sleek teardrop shape. The outer skin of the station had a pattern of shining black squares against a flat white base. As I flew closer, I realized that those black squares were enormous solar energy cells.

This side of the Dry Docks facility had three landing bays, each marked by two half-mile wide circular entrances called “apertures.” All ships entering or exiting the docks would have to pass through those doors. As traffic control led me toward one of those openings, I saw the distinctive silver-red of a security laser and knew someone in the dry docks had X-rayed my ship. Leaning back in my seat, I took in the sights as my ship dropped into place before one of the apertures. Inside, I could see the brightly-lit landing area and the staging area that planes entered just before takeoff. Ships and transports of all shapes and sizes sat quietly at the back of the runway. Beyond that, so far away that it looked no bigger than my fist, was the half-mile-wide aperture for departing flights. Whether by computer or human talent, traffic control brought me in for a perfect landing. Thruster rockets in the wings of my Starliner fired as I entered the quarter-gravitational field of the tarmac. My ship landed with no perceptible bounce. A runway technician towed me through the atmosphere locks and into the staging area. There would be no old-fashioned blast door on the ultra-modern Golan Dry Docks. No, sir. On Golan, the locks were completely transparent electroshields. I grabbed my bags and climbed out of the Johnston. Two guards armed with M27s approached and saluted as I stepped on to the deck. These were Army MPs. Golan had thousands of them. I, wearing my Charlie service uniform and looking like the quintessential officer, saluted back.

“Commander Brocius?” one of the guards asked. “May I take your bag?” It was not an offer or a courtesy. He spoke in that robotic tone that grunt soldiers use when speaking to an officer. They would search my bag and find that I had a government-issue M27 of my own. They would also see that I had combat armor, something that was not general-issue among naval officers.

“Aye,” I said, handing him my rucksack.

The guards did not scare me.

“Please follow us, sir,” said the officer with my bag. The
please
was as perfunctory as the request to take may bag. With this, the two guards turned on their heels so smartly that they looked like they were on spindles.

Now came the only part of this duty that did make me nervous. The soldiers led me to the security station, a well-lighted island in the otherwise dim light of this enormous spacecraft hangar. Ahead of me, several dozen soldiers milled around a booth enclosed by bulletproof glass. Some smoked. Some talked. Some manned personal computers and monitored everyone and every thing that passed. All I had to do was walk between “the posts”—an innocuous ten-foot archway made of beige-colored plastic. Terrorists and criminals feared the posts. They made supposedly extinct clones edgy as well. The post on the left side of the archway housed a device called “the sprayer” which emitted a fine mist of oil and water and a sudden blast of air. The jam on the right was “the receiver,” a micron-filtered vacuum that drew in the air, the mist, and anything that the sprayer dislodged. There was no disguising your identity from the posts. You could wash, shower, and shave your entire body with a micron-bladed scalpel, and the gust from the left post would still find dandruff, flecks of skin, loose hairs, lint, or sweat. A bank of computers analyzed every substance the right post drew in.

“Commander Brocius,” one of the MPs said. He motioned toward the posts. I hesitated for a moment. I looked around. A security camera watched me from overhead. All of the soldiers behind the bulletproof glass wore firearms. None of them looked old enough to know what Liberators looked like, and they paid little attention to me. As far as they could see, this was another routine entry. I had to pass through security funnels like this one on every planet. The difference was that this was the Golan Dry Docks, a high-security facility. The computers would recognize that I was a Liberator. But the men manning the computers were no more screening for Liberators than they were screening for dinosaurs or dragons. As long as my identity cleared, my Liberator DNA would not trigger an alarm. I stepped into the arch, my mind already focusing on what I would do once I left the security station. The Joint Chiefs had already arrived. Admiral Klyber and the other field officers would arrive in another two hours. As soon as I left this station, I would make a preliminary sweep of the corridors just beyond this security station. Then I would move to Klyber’s quarters. If I worked quickly, I would finish an hour before he arrived.

The post on my left blew out a milli-second-long burst of air. It did not last long enough to mess my hair. In its wake I felt slightly moist, as if I had jumped in and out of a steam room. In the booth beside the posts, four soldiers sat beyond the glass playing poker. One had just turned over his hand. The others tossed their cards onto the table in disgust.

Suddenly the security station went on alert. Bright red warning lights flashed on and off over my head. Clear sheets of bulletproof plastic slid out of the walls creating a bulletproof cell. By the time I realized what had happened, every soldier in the security station had drawn his gun and closed in around me. They stood in a semicircular ring. A few of the officers lowered their guns when they saw that I had no weapon.

The MP holding my bag stepped to the glass and held up a piece of paper for me to read. It was a computer printout with my picture and bio on it.

“Lieutenant Harris, we got a tip that you might stop by.”

My arrest had Che Huang’s fingerprints all over it. The MPs who arrested me had no idea what laws I might have broken. They made no effort to charge me. By now they knew that I was a Liberator; but they could not arrest me for that. It was illegal to manufacture Liberators, and I had clearly not manufactured myself. Liberators were banned from the Orion Arm—Earth’s home arm—but the Golan Dry Docks were located in the Norma Arm. Thinking everything through, I decided that the only crime Huang had on me was being absent without leave.

Having a relatively clean slate would not get me out of the brig in time to help Klyber. I was vaguely aware of the time and decided that Klyber must have arrived. He would have his regular security detail around him. Unless given misinformation, Klyber would notice my absence. Would he look for me?

Would he become suspicious and alert his guard? My absence might or might not have been warning enough that Huang might have an ambush in mind.

I needed to get to Klyber. If Huang was behind this . . .

The last time I ran into Huang, the bastard didn’t even bother having me arrested. He simply paraded me across Mars Spaceport in handcuffs, transferred me to his cronies in the Scutum-Crux Fleet, and had me placed on Ravenwood to die. As it turned out, Huang and Rear Admiral Thurston used Ravenwood as a testing ground for a new breed of clone they had secretly developed to use as Navy SEALS. Huang sent platoons of armed Marines to guard the outpost, then trained his new breed of SEALS by sending them in to slaughter those Marines.

What would Huang do this time? If the soldiers who had captured me had allowed me to make a call, I could have sent a message to Freeman, and he could have warned Klyber that a trap had been sprung. I was cut off and helpless, able only to wait and see what would happen. I sat on the edge of my cot and looked around the cell for a way out. I must have been in the cell for a few hours, but I had no idea how many. Escape was out of the question. The air vents along the top of the wall were only three inches wide. I could not even fit my fist in them. Unless I could figure out a method for passing through steel walls and bulletproof glass, I might be stuck in this cell for a long time. Bright light and heat blazed from arc lamps set into the roof of my cell. Cool air blew out of the line of vents just under the seam of the ceiling. Without the cooled air, I would have fried; and without the overbright lights, I would have frozen.

An officer approached the door of my cell and spoke into the intercom.

“You’re free to go,” the man said.

“Free to go?” I asked, both surprised and sardonic. I stood up and walked toward the door. The man outside was a colonel, probably the head of the security station and likely the highest ranking officer assigned to the Dry Docks. Golan was a civilian operation with military security—a lot of military security.

“I apologize for the misunderstanding, Harris.” The glass slid open. The colonel had two guards with him. All three men were armed. Apparently they did not want to take any chances with the dangerous Liberator clone. “Fleet headquarters sent us a message telling us to be on the lookout for a Lieutenant Wayson Harris who was falsely reported as killed in action.”

“That sounds like me,” I said as I followed the colonel and his escort out of my cell and down a hall. Like my cell, the security complex had that odd combination of vents spewing chilled air and blazing hot arc lights.