“Close,” said Cutter. “He’s a captain, not an admiral. He’s over interrogations. He keeps offering to go to Mars to collect Tasman from Hughes.
“Hughes said no clones, right? Healer’s a clone, but he thinks he’s a natural-born. They all do, it’s in their programming; so he keeps volunteering to go.”
“You can’t send him,” said Watson.
Cutter said, “I walk a fine line. If Healer figures out that I turned him down because he’s a clone, he’s going to have a death reflex.”
“You have to lie to him,” said Watson.
“I can’t. He’s a trained and experienced interrogator. He can hear it in your voice. He can see it in your eyes. The clone is a walking, talking lie detector.”
“Send him a memo,” said Watson.
“He’ll call to follow up.”
“Don’t take the call,” said Watson.
Cutter smiled, and said, “Yeah, that’s pretty much what I plan to do.”
Then he became more serious. He said, “Look, Watson, I need a natural-born with a security clearance. That doesn’t leave a lot of options.”
“You’re sending me to Mars?” Watson asked, his spirits plunging.
“I’d go myself, but I’m too old for this,” said Cutter. “At least you’re young.”
Even the clone at the top doesn’t know he’s a clone, Watson thought. He said, “You can’t go, they’d recognize you.” Whoever they are, he thought.
“They might,” Cutter agreed. “Listen, Watson, I watched the video feed of your bodyguard’s debriefing. I heard how you panicked in the archive. Panic like that on Mars, and you will get yourself killed.”
“I hear most people lose their head their first time in combat,” said Watson. “Maybe I’m used to it now.”
Cutter said nothing.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-NINE
Location: Mars
Date: April 30, 2519
Watson did not think money would help him on Mars, but he thought it might help him get off the planet if things went bad, so he brought a wad of it. He brought three tubes of nutrient paste, something he’d hoped never to eat. He also took a tiny pistol, which he hid in the pocket of his jacket.
He stood among the crates in the back of a freighter wearing dirty clothes he hoped would help him blend in with the New Olympians. Compared to the civilian dockworkers off-loading the crates, he looked like a vagrant. By Earth standards their uniforms were scuffed, but Watson would have had to have washed, patched, mended, and tailored his clothes before they could be described as merely scuffed.
The freighter was huge, almost too large a ship to fly in atmosphere. She would not fit inside a landing bay. Instead, she touched down on a freight platform. Once the ship was settled, a mechanical gangway closed around her entrance, forming a seal, then the cargo hatch opened, and the work began. Men used forklifts and lifters to transfer crates onto trailers. The work was loud. Engines growled. Men shouted at one another.
The cold dry air in the freighter turned to steam and vanished when it mixed with the humid spaceport air. Condensation dripped down the gangway walls and formed an inch-deep stream that ran down the ramp. When carts ran through the water, their tires squealed.
Nobody paid attention to Watson as he entered the spaceport. Carts with ten-foot stacks of crates sped by him. Bright lights shone down on him. Men with robotic lifters stomped nearby, some carrying crates, some stacking them.
So this is how they came to Earth, Watson thought. The escape hatch cut both ways. He strolled unmolested through a warehouse that seemed to stretch forever. He followed an aisle between rows of shelves. Maybe it was an optical illusion, but the aisle seemed to stretch into its own horizon.
He’d been cold on the freighter. His breath formed clouds of steam as he’d waited to make this walk. Now sweat formed on his hands and feet and back. Drops of perspiration raced down his sides.
“Hey you. Yeah, you,” a man yelled at Watson. The man was large and fat and dirty. Whiskers lined his cheeks and jowls. “Th’speck you think you’re going?”
“I’m on break,” said Watson.
“Yeah? Well, we got a shipment to clear.”
Watson heard something in the man’s voice, menace, but not anger. The man wasn’t threatening him. He seemed to think that Watson would happily spin around and jog right back up the dock.
Watson did not know how to work any of the equipment, and he did not understand the procedures. He needed to leave the docks as quickly as possible, or his ignorance would attract attention. He said, “I’ve been here since last night. I should have gone home three hours ago.”
“I don’t care when you got here, hole. It’s another load, you got to stick it out.”
“Give me a specking break.”
“Yeah? You got a name, kid?”
Not wanting to give his own name, Watson almost said Wayson Harris. That was the first name that came into his mind; but the man might have recognized it. Instead, he said, “The name’s Freeman.”
Having identified himself as Freeman, Watson decided to behave in a Freeman-esque style. He said, “Pleased to meet you. Now are you going to get out of my way, or are we going to have a problem?”
Even as he said this, Watson realized he sounded nothing like Freeman. Freeman didn’t try to intimidate people, it came naturally as breathing for him.
The other man was older than Watson, shorter than him, and fatter; but he was probably not afraid to fight. Watson had not been in a fight since grade school. The thought of being hit in the face scared him.
The man sneered, and said, “You watch your mouth, kid. I’ll kick your specking teeth in.”
Watson thought about the things he knew about Ray Freeman. He was not a big talker. Harris said he seldom spoke, so Watson did not answer.
The old guy was tough, but he was no taller than five-ten, the same size as a clone. He was fat and fifty and Watson was six-five, dressed like a bum, and fit. He towered over the dockworker; and now that he was silent, the dockworker took note of it. He said, “The guys in charge see you walking out, they’ll can your ass. You really want to spend the rest of your life sitting around out there?” He pointed over his shoulder with his thumb.
Watson said nothing and stepped around the man.
He had bluffed and gotten away with it. Once again he had relied on his size, and the other man backed down. Watson knew that someday someone would call his bluff. He hoped it didn’t happen on Mars.
He walked out a door at the back of the warehouse and passed through a break room in which a handful of men lounged and chatted as they drank coffee. These men ignored Watson, but he could not ignore them. They smelled like year-old laundry.
The next door he took led him out to halls.
You knew what it’s like, he reminded himself. He’d seen video feeds on the mediaLink. He’d seen some of the feeds Harris sent back, and he was still unprepared. The sights and sounds overwhelmed him. The smell of sweat and garbage filled his nostrils, and made his head swim.
Within three minutes of stepping off the freighter, he started scratching his scalp and remembered about the lice.
The pungent air was so thick that Watson felt smothered. The crowds seemed to close in around him. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, he saw that no one had moved.
No one seemed to notice the tall stranger standing outside the warehouse door. A dozen preteen boys ran down the hall, snapping and yelling like a pack of wild dogs. Men and women drove by in slow-moving carts hauling food and supplies. Watson folded his arms across his chest, not because he was cold or tired but because he wanted to reassure himself that his pistol was still hidden in his jacket. Pinching his fingers over the barrel, he traced the shape of the gun until he reached the butt.
The gun was an S9 stealth pistol, a fléchette-firing weapon good for close-range combat but useless past twenty yards. Watson would have preferred a more powerful weapon, but the ammuni
tion for the S9 came in the form of playing-card-sized metal wafers, each one of which held three hundred needle-sized fléchettes. Three hundred bullets would be heavy and hard to hide. But with one wafer in his pistol and three more wafers in his pockets, Watson carried enough ammunition for twelve hundred shots.
Feeling nervous, he looked down the hall.
Watson had never visited the spaceport before. As a boy, he’d never traveled outside the solar system. By the time he graduated college, the Morgan Atkins Fanatics had already destroyed the Broadcast Network, and civilians no longer traveled across the galaxy.
He and Cutter had spent hours discussing the mission. His objectives were simple: first, find Gordon Hughes and determine if he was trustworthy. If he could not be trusted, Cutter wanted Watson to kill him. “Kill him, or he will kill you,” Cutter had said.
When Watson pointed out that Hughes was now a tired old man, the admiral answered, “He could kill you from his deathbed, Watson. A single word would do it. All he’d need to do is expose you while you are behind enemy lines.”
Watson hoped he could trust Hughes. He’d never killed anybody. He hoped he never would.
Before leaving Washington, Watson memorized the layout of the spaceport. He knew the spot in which he stood and where he had to go. After taking a deep breath, he started walking. When people spoke to him, he ignored them.
He did not blend in. His dirty, tattered clothes were too clean. He was tall and skinny, but he looked fat compared to the people around him. These people were not starving, but they were not far from it.
He thought about the fat old guy who had stopped him as he left the loading dock. The guy had said something about not wanting to end up sitting in the halls. It wasn’t a threat so much as a warning. Maybe workers were paid with food.
In preparation for Mars, Watson had shaved his head. On the video feeds, shaved heads seemed to be the fashion on Mars. Now that he walked the halls, he saw it was not a fashion statement. The reality of taking five-minute showers twice per month manifested itself in head lice. Men who did not want to become overly acquainted with Mars’s first indigenous species shaved their heads.
The warehouse was connected to a major trunk in the spaceport floor plan that would lead to the grand arcade. The corridor had low ceilings, maybe twelve feet high. It was packed with people and lined with openings that led into what had once been the loading docks for stores and restaurants.
Watson entered the two-mile-long grand arcade. One hundred feet above him, condensation dripped from the dirty, steam-stained glass. He tried to find the Martian sky through the atrium roof, but the roof’s dusty patina blocked out the light.
Watson thought the air in the service hall had smelled bad, but he could barely breathe once he entered the grand arcade. Sewage, garbage, mass flatulence. He nearly gagged, realized that the sharp smell of his vomit would be drowned by the other odors, and the thought of the other odors made him all the more nauseous.
Looking at the balconies above him, he realized that millions of people had shoehorned their lives into this long narrow corridor. What must once have been a miracle mile was now a nightmare alley. This was where the trouble had begun for Harris. This was where the two clones died.
Watson looked at the stores around him. He took in the darkened signs, many with familiar names. The jewelry store to his right was part of a chain with locations in Washington, D.C. An enormous department store, now a sea of people, belonged to a chain that only operated in pangalactic spaceports. With all of humanity returned to Earth and Mars, there were no more pangalactic spaceports. Space travel had disappeared, taking the department stores with it.
Watson had heard Harris use the term “picnicker,” but until he saw how the people were living for himself, it had never made sense. These people lived on blankets. Blankets had become their floors, their beds, their homes.
His thoughts returned to the fat old man in the loading dock. He had asked Watson, “You really want to spend the rest of your life sitting around out there?” Now Watson knew what he meant. The dockworkers were the lottery winners, the men and women who could leave their blankets because they had jobs.
Doing the math in his head, Watson estimated the number of people needed to run the spaceport might be less than one hundred thousand, maybe only fifty thousand. That left more than 16.9 million people with nothing to do.
The Martian Legion suddenly made sense, as did the religious revival. Men living on blankets with nothing would grasp at fool’s gold promises of self-respect and redemption. Fanaticism comes naturally when you have nothing to lose, he thought.
As Watson cut across the grand arcade, he passed empty fountains now used as platforms for handing out food. Workers arranged boxes on tables. People milled around below them like stray cats in an alley. They created a fuzzy sort of line, but Watson thought any hint of organization would disintegrate into entropy once the food appeared.
Harris is right about this place, he thought. We need to get these people out of here.
When he reached the hall that led from the arcade to the administrative area, Watson took one last look at the stores. People noticed him. He was tall and heavy by Martian standards, and he stood erect. These people slept on blankets and concrete, they had little to eat, and they had little opportunity to exercise. Their bodies had degraded.
He entered the hall—ten-foot ceilings, offices instead of stores. This had been a public-access area of the spaceport, one used by travelers who had lost their luggage or needed assistance. He passed generic office spaces from which the doors had been removed. People seemed to occupy every inch of available floor space.
As he neared the administrative complex, Watson smelled a sharp odor of burned plastic in the air, something he had not smelled in other parts of the spaceport. He turned the last corner and saw the buildings…what was left of them.
The area was a cul-de-sac, a rounded dead end with a raised ceiling. In the briefings, the buildings of the administrative complex looked like they were three buildings on a street. They had façades like office buildings with doorways and windows.
Two of those buildings had burned to the ground. Their walls had melted, and glass from the shattered windows sparkled among the debris. The buildings had been made of plastic, but now only their twisted and shriveled skeletons remained.
Unlike the grand arcade and the halls, the cul-de-sac was abandoned. This was the first empty stretch Watson had seen since the warehouse. He had not liked the crowding. Now he liked the emptiness even less.
His arms crossed over his chest, he reached a hand into his jacket and gripped the S9 pistol as he looked right, then left, and walked to the third building, the one that had not been burned.
As he took a step, he felt pressure on the spot between his eyebrows. It was not hot or hard. As he reached a finger to touch the spot, he saw the scarlet light play on his fingertips. It was a laser, an old-fashioned aiming device. Someone wanted him to know there was a gun trained on his head.
Watson stopped. He left the pistol in his jacket and held his hands out so that anyone watching would know they were empty.
He waited. No one spoke. The person aiming the laser did not ask for his name or tell him to go away, and the laser continued to shine on him.
Keeping his hands up and out, Watson traced the beam to an open window four floors up. He saw the pixel-sized glowing red dot and the barrel of the rifle below it.
A young woman came out of the building. Moving with graceful self-assurance, she picked her way toward Watson. She stopped twenty feet away from him, and asked, “What are you doing here?”
The girl was pretty, but Watson did not care. He could still feel the laser on his forehead. He could feel his heart pounding. He said, “Governor Hughes sent for me.”
She said, “I doubt that,” and turned to leave.
Beginning to panic, Watson said, “It’s the truth. He sent the message to Admiral Cutter.”
She
stopped and stared at him quizzically. “What message?”
“He said that he had Howard Tasman. He told the admiral not to send a clone.”
“You’re not a clone,” the girl agreed.
“I work for Admiral Cutter.”
Her long blond hair hid the discreet earpiece that she wore. Watson didn’t notice it until she pressed a finger against her ear. She stood listening for a moment, then she said, “He says you can come to the building, but he’ll kill you if you’re lying.”
“Who will kill me?” asked Watson.
“Mr. Ray Freeman, that’s who. He’s the one who sent the message.”
CHAPTER
FORTY
Freeman was not one of the three armed men who met Watson as the woman led him to the door of the building. Those men were just over six feet, athletic, and so uniform in appearance that Watson nearly mistook them for some new class of clone. He thought they might be brothers.
The men moved in quick, precise motions. One held the door, another stood to the side, pointing a military-grade M27, the third dodged behind Watson and shoved him into the building. Watson didn’t know about the other two, but the one who shoved him had powerful arms.
“Ease up, Liston,” said the one at the door.
The girl gave Watson an apologetic glance. She said, “This is only the welcoming committee, just wait until you meet Freeman.”
Watching the three men, Watson saw what they were hiding. They were scared. Their eyes darted back and forth. They spoke in fast bursts. They were irritable, men on edge.
Watson watched the girl and realized that she, too, was scared. She hid it better than the three men; but for all of her talk about the terrors of Freeman, she was petrified of something else.
One of the men—Watson thought it might have been Liston, he seemed to be the man in charge—shoved Watson into the wall, then searched him for weapons. Without saying a word, he reached into Watson’s jacket and pulled out the S9 pistol. He said, “You’ll be safer without this.”
The Clone Sedition Page 22