The Clone Empire (23 page)

“I see,” I said.

“A few council members felt we should join the Unified Authority,” he confessed. He sounded so specking magnanimous, it was a bit surreal. Here he was telling me, “Thanks for rescuing us from the aliens, now close the door on your way out,” but he managed to convey this in the comforting voice of a father telling his son about the facts of life.

“They wanted to join the Unified Authority?” I asked, hardly believing my ears. The Unified Authority had abandoned these people. We saved them, and they still preferred the U.A. to us.

“After we discussed the issues, there was a nearly unanimous vote to remain neutral. In the meantime, we all agreed that we wanted you and your Marines to leave our planet.

“I’ve always been up-front with you, Harris. You and your Marines and your warships represent nothing but a threat to us. I mean, look at you. You’ve been here one night, and what happened?”

“I was attacked,” I said.

“By my people?” Doctorow asked. He sounded concerned.

“No,” I admitted.

He said nothing. He did not need to say anything; I had already made his point.

“So you’re done with us?” I asked. “That’s it.”

“What are you looking for, General? Do you want me to thank you for rescuing us?”

“We also restored your power and fixed your roads,” I said. “The Corps of Engineers is military, too.”

That shut him up for a half of a second. “I wanted to speak with you about that. As we discussed before, we would like you to leave your engineers here, on Terraneau. We could use their help for another year or two.”

It was hard not to smile, but I managed it. “You certainly have a set of balls on you,” I said.

“General, there is no cause for profanity,” Doctorow said, and this time he showed no signs of embarrassment for saying it.

“You don’t want me around, but you want me to leave my engineers.”

“Engineers aren’t trained killers. They pose no threat to our goals. Engineers don’t carry guns.

“Harris, you and your men and the whole military way . . . You bring trouble on yourselves. Look at you. You’re like a lightning rod. You attract violence.”

“That’s a bit simplistic,” I said. “We didn’t bring the aliens.”

“Yes you did. They came back when you arrived.”

“They never left. They were always here, always destroying the planet, you just didn’t know it.”

“Have you had a look at yourself in the mirror this morning? Your face is covered with bruises,” he said. “I’m sure it wasn’t your fault. You were attacked. I understand that, but what happened to the men who attacked you?”

“One man,” I said.

“Where is he now?” Doctorow asked. “Is he dead? Did you kill him?”

“Dead, but I didn’t kill him,” I said. I hated this. The bastard had put me on the defensive.

“You didn’t kill him, but he’s still dead,” Doctorow said. “That is why we don’t want you or your kind on our planet.”

“How will you protect yourselves?” I asked.

“Protect ourselves from what? With you and your Marines off the planet, we won’t need to defend ourselves. Without you, we’ll be safe.”

“What happens when the Unified Authority arrives?” I asked.

“With you gone, they won’t have any reason to come here. We’re not at war with them.”

“Do you think they will respect your sovereignty?” Actually, I was pretty sure they would. They’d given up colonizing years ago.

“Yes, I believe they will. Look, we don’t want you here. I really don’t see that there is anything else for us to discuss.”

“What happens if the aliens come back?” I asked.

It was my ace in the hole, but I had played it too often, and I knew it. This time Doctorow was ready for it. “That’s a possibility, I suppose,” he said. “Personally, I am less concerned about that possibility than I am about getting you and your men off my planet.”

“You didn’t feel that way when we chased them away,” I said.

“If you recall, we did feel that way. We asked you to go away. I’m glad you ignored our request, but we didn’t want you here in the first place. And now, General Harris, it is time for you to leave.”

I stared at him angrily, he returned my gaze, looking calm and smug, neither of us willing to look away.

“We’ll leave,” I said, “but we are taking our engineers with us.”

“Have you asked them what they want?” Doctorow asked. “I have. I took the liberty of speaking with Lieutenant Mars last night.”

“You ran an end run to my engineers?” I asked, barely able to contain my anger. Why the speck had I come back to Terraneau? My girlfriend left me, an assassin nearly beat me to death, now this bastard was kicking me off the planet. “Have you spoken with anyone else? Perhaps you want my pilot.”

“I spoke with Ava this morning,” Doctorow volunteered.

“You spoke with Ava.” I muttered.

“She wants to stay,” he said.

“I saw her last night,” I said. “I got the same feeling.”

Doctorow’s composure never wavered throughout the interview. My temper flared. I became sullen. I wanted to kill the bastard. My emotions betrayed me and made Doctorow look all the more prescient.

“Hollingsworth would probably stay if you asked him,” I said.

“I don’t plan on extending that invitation,” Doctorow said.

“So I guess we are done,” I said as I started to stand.

“Not yet,” Doctorow said. “What are your plans, General? The Council would prefer for you to leave within the week.”

My thoughts had become a double helix. One strand contained logic and the other emotion. I never wanted Terraneau to sign a treaty with the Enlisted Man’s Empire; but now that they had rejected me, damn it, I felt judged and devalued by the people whose worthless lives I had saved.

“It won’t take long for us to pack,” I said, admitting my defeat.

“And your engineers?” he asked.

“I’ll speak to Mars. They can decide for themselves.” The Enlisted Man’s Empire would have plenty of engineers. If Mars wanted to stay, we’d get by without him. He’d earned that.

“Good man,” Doctorow said.

Had he just called me a “good man”? Had this specking antiestablishment son of a bitch just called me a “good man”? I quietly contemplated ripping his throat out of his neck.

He stood up to signal that the interview had ended, then he did something that almost set me off. As we walked to his door, he patted me on the shoulder and repeated his comment that I was “a good man.”
Shoot me, stab me, kick me off your specking planet, but for God’s sake don’t make a show of being magnanimous in victory.

“So, I suppose that concludes our business together, General,” he said as he led me toward the door.

I turned to say something to Doctorow and found that I could not look the bastard in the eye. I wasn’t ashamed, just angry beyond reason.

And so I left. I walked out of that marble-lined office and found my own way out of the building. I stormed out to my car and told my driver to take me downtown.

He wanted us off his planet by the end of the week. I wanted us off by the end of the day.

 

Ava looked so pretty in her cream-colored blouse and sky blue skirt. The blouse was loose, but it showed off her figure. She wore her hair down, and her makeup was perfect. She applied her makeup discreetly so that it blended with her face. I wouldn’t have known she was wearing makeup had I not seen her without it. She looked at me and smiled.

“I’m leaving,” I said.

“L told me,” she said. “L” was the name Doctorow’s closest associates used to address him. Apparently Ava had joined that elite circle of friends. Maybe she had joined it long ago, and I had never noticed.

“So I guess that’s it. I’m done here,” I said, feeling rather foolish for having come to see her again.

Tears formed in the corners of her eyes. Were they real? I reminded myself that she was an actress.

“You can come with me?” I said.

“And live on a battleship?” she asked. “Honey, I’ve done that before. I think I’m done with big guns and seamen.”

She’d slipped into her brassy persona. For a moment I felt hope. Then she dashed it. She looked at me with deep-seated sympathy and touched me on the cheek. “I can’t come with you, Wayson,” she said. “There’s nothing for me out there.”

“I’d be there,” I said, sounding so specking pathetic I thought I might never forgive myself.

One of the tears broke free from its nest and slid down her cheek. “You? You were never there for me. After the Unified Authority attacked, when you were in the hospital, and you were so weak, I thought you needed me. I thought maybe we had a chance.

“But once you got better, you started looking for a way off the planet.”

“I told you, I wouldn’t leave you here.”

“You never needed me. You had your big plans and your Marines, and that was everything you needed.” She smiled for a moment, brushed a tear from the corner of her eye, and said, “You never even pretended to need me.”

“So when did he happen?” I asked, not bothering to explain that I meant the other man.

“I fell in love with him while you were planning how to escape Terraneau,” she confessed.

“In love?” I whispered.

“I’m sorry.”

I swallowed and asked the question I had to ask. “Did you ever love me?”

“Back in the beginning, you asked me how you compared to other guys. Do you remember that?” She took my hand in hers, and said, “You are the only one who ever broke my heart.”

I smiled when I heard this though it meant nothing to me.

This was my day for good-byes. Within the last two hours I’d already said good-bye to Ava and Ellery Doctorow. In a few more hours, I’d bid a happy farewell to Terraneau, which had lately replaced Gobi as my least favorite planet in the galaxy. Now Freeman was leaving.

I looked at Freeman’s Piper Bandit, a private commuter craft that the Unified Authority had outfitted with a tiny broadcast engine, and remembered the days when I had a Johnston R-56 Starliner of my own. The Johnston was a nicer ride—a twenty-seat luxury corporate number flown by rich executives with private pilots.

Civilians were not allowed to own self-broadcasting planes; hence, broadcast engines were never offered as standard equipment. The Unified Authority Navy had placed the broadcast rig under the hood of my Starliner. The jet had been built for a four-star admiral, and I sort of inherited it when he died.

My Starliner was considered a luxury ride. Freeman’s plane was known in some quarters as an “interplanetary mosquito.”

It was supposed to be a two-seater, apparently designed to fit two anorexic midgets. Ray Freeman was not fat, but his seven-foot frame was thick and filled with muscle. To wedge himself into that tiny cockpit, he would need to curl his legs in odd angles under the instrumentation. The seats were narrow, and his massive shoulders would probably rub against both walls of the cockpit. Worst of all, he’d have to fly with his head bowed to fit it under the low ceiling. As we stood beside the Bandit, I gave it a dubious glance. That cockpit would be a tight fit for me, and Freeman had nine inches and a hundred pounds on me.

Not only was the Bandit too small for Freeman; it was also too small to house a broadcast generator. Someone had outfitted the plane with a tiny broadcast engine that had a single destination setting—Earth—instead of a broadcast computer. In lieu of a broadcast generator, it had a one-use battery. You got one broadcast out of this bird, and the preprogrammed computer made sure it ended up near Earth.

“Where’d you get this?” I asked.

“I took it from a clone,” he said.

“This is what infiltrator clones fly?” I asked. “No shit? Did this one belong to the guy who tried to kill me?”

Freeman shook his head.

“You mean there’s another one in Norristown?”

Freeman did not answer. If Freeman had the plane, the guy who was supposed to fly it was dead.

There had to be at least one more of these planes hidden somewhere around Norristown. I wondered how many I would find when I searched St. Augustine. Now we had something to look for—clones traveling in Piper Bandits.

“How does it fly?” I asked.

“Slow,” Freeman said. “A half million miles per hour.”

That was slow. Most naval ships had a top speed of thirty million miles per hour. You needed that kind of speed when you traveled billions of miles.

I changed the subject and asked Freeman the question that had been bothering me since he’d first shown up. “What are you doing here?”

“Besides saving your ass?”

“Are you here for money or revenge?” I asked. He was a mercenary first and foremost. Those were the only reasons he did anything besides eat, shit, and sleep. “You didn’t come all this way just to save me.”

“We were partners,” he said.

“You didn’t come here for old time’s sake,” I said. “How did you know about the clone in the first place?”

Then, recognizing the flaw in the story, I said, “You wouldn’t have known about him unless you were already in the war. What’s your stake?”

Freeman said nothing, and I would not push it. When the time came, he would tell me his reasons. He was ruthless and violent, but he also lived by a personal code of conduct. I trusted him.

“You can’t fly that into the broadcast zone,” I said. “You know that, right?”

Again, he did not answer. It was a stupid question.

“It’s a one-way zone,” I said, another inane comment. “It goes straight to Providence Kri.”

I wanted to make sure he knew how to find me. “Any chance that I will see you there?” I asked.

Freeman opened the door of his plane and folded himself into the cockpit. He slid his right leg all the way across the cabin and into the well for the passenger’s feet, then exhaled all the air from his lungs before wedging his chest behind the yoke. He pressed his chin to his collarbone as he crammed his shoulders and head into the tiny space under the ceiling.