“When my staff looked into it, we discovered that your procurement team placed no additional orders for either toilet paper or uniforms, Admiral. What we found was that a mothballed Military base was reactivated on Earth.” Alex Smith picks up his data pad.
Huang says nothing. He stares back at Smith defiantly.
“I understand that you have a cloning plant on the island of Oahu. Is that correct?” Smith asks.
Huang shows no sign of fear or remorse. “That is correct, General. The Navy is experimenting with a new set of genes to improve our SEAL operations. I was unaware of any regulations stating that the Navy had to clear its research projects with members of other branches.”
A video feed of an Adam Boyd in a firefight appears on the display board. It is a brief five-second loop that repeats itself again and again. I recognize the image. It is from the battle on Ravenwood—the one in which I supposedly died. The footage was taken from cameras placed in the helmet I wore during the battle on Ravenwood. Ray Freeman placed my helmet by the body of a different marine before lifting me off the planet.
Across the room, Admiral Thurston looks particularly interested in this discussion. Huang’s newly cloned SEALs operate off of Thurston’s command ship.
“When were you planning on telling us about this new project?” asks General John Kellan, the thirty-nine-year-old secretary of the Army. There is a centuries-old tradition of jealousy that runs between the SEALs and Kellan’s Rangers.
We headed for Sad Sam’s at 2100 hours. It was Thursday night during a slow season for tourists, and the city seemed deserted. We found a drive-in restaurant just up the street from the Palace and ordered hamburgers, then ate in the car.
Except for the streetlamps and an occasional car, the only lights on the entire street came from the façade of the Palace. The marquee was studded with old-fashioned bulbs that winked on and off, casting their warm manila glare. Foot-tall letters announced the name, Sad Sam’s Palace. Below that, the event for the night—“Ultimate Fighting Competition: Mixed Martial Arts”—showed over a glowing ivory panel.
The Palace was the modern world’s answer to the Roman coliseum. Instead of Christians and lions, it featured professional wrestlers, boxers, and mixed martial artists. It had an open challenge on Friday nights. If you were a military clone, and you happened to be in the audience during the Open Challenge, an announcer called you down to fight. The standing champion of that Open Challenge was a fighter named Adam Boyd, obviously one of Huang’s clones.
“You got that scar here?” Freeman asked.
The scar ran through the eyebrow over my left eye. Three smaller scars formed parallel stripes across my left cheek, just under the eye socket.
“This is the place,” I said.
I got the scars fighting an Adam Boyd clone. I beat him, had certainly put him in the hospital, but not before he dug into my face and back with his talonlike fingers, giving me lacerations that went all the way to the bone.
Freeman finished his burger and drink in what looked like a single motion, then sat without saying a word. As I finished my burger, the front doors opened and a mob flowed out. “Fights must be over,” I said, crumpling the wrapper and throwing it in the bag. “That’s our cue.” I climbed out of the car.
The crowd thinned as we made our way across the empty street. Most of the people had walked in from the waterfront where the buses ran. Now they walked back, their excited chatter filling the street.
An usher in a white shirt and black vest approached me as I came through the door. He must have seen Freeman, too, but he did not dare approach that giant of a man. “Show’s over,” he said.
“My friend dropped his wallet somewhere around his seat,” I said.
The man looked at Freeman, nodded, and stepped out of my way. If I had said it was my wallet, he would likely have told me to “come back tomorrow.”
We walked through the dark hall toward the auditorium, the usher following from a safe distance. Bright arc lights blazed in the center of the auditorium, their true white glare shining bright.
A wall of bleachers surrounded the outer edges of the floor. These bleachers curved up, ending just below the first of two balconies. On busy nights during the tourist season, Sad Sam’s Palace must have played host to five thousand people per night. Now the floor was empty except for janitors sweeping food, cups, and wrappers from the floor. Under the lights, a small crew disassembled the steel cage and octagonal ring they used for mixed martial arts. Friday night was Open Challenge night. That show would take place on a raised platform with glass walls.
Freeman and I walked across the floor and headed for the tunnel to the dressing rooms. I paused for a moment to look at the ring, then pushed the door open.
“Where are you going?” the usher yelled. I did not bother answering. The answer was obvious.
The metal doors opened to a brightly-lit hallway with a concrete floor and cinderblock walls. Some of the fluorescent lights that ran the length of the hall had gone dark, occasionally flashing on and off in a Morse code pattern. Our footsteps echoed, and the steel door slamming behind us sounded like a volcanic eruption.
“Do you know where we’re going?” Freeman asked.
“I’ve never been back here,” I said. That was not quite true. As I understand it, paramedics carried me back here on a stretcher after my fight, but I was only semiconscious during that ride.
Halfway down the hall, we found a pair of emerald-green double doors. With the usher and three security guards storming down the hall yelling at us, I tried the door. It was unlocked, so I let myself in. Freeman remained outside to deal with the security guards.
The men inside the locker room seemed not to care that I had entered. A man with a towel wrapped around his waist strode past me without so much as a sideways glance. His hair was wet. He had a square chest and muscular arms, all of which was covered with welts and bruises. He sported a superb shiner over his right eye.
Another man, sitting stark naked on a wooden bench in front of a row of lockers, watched me. “I know you,” he said, rubbing his chin.
“Not likely,” I said.
The security guards had caught up to Freeman. It should have been a four-against-one battle; but from the sound of things, Freeman took out the first guard so quickly that it really was more accurately described as three-against-one. I heard, “Hey, you’re not . . .” Then there was the thunderous sound of something slamming against the outside of the door, followed by a moment of absolute silence.
“Shit. I’m calling the . . .” The door muffled the shouting.
Then the door flew open. In ran the usher, stumbling over the body of the fallen security guard. “There’s a giant black man out there!”
“That’s nothing,” said the naked man as he stood and stepped into his briefs. “There’s a Liberator clone in here.”
The usher looked at me, and the blood drained from his face. He did not say another word.
“You’re the one who killed that Adam Boyd guy,” the man said as he pulled up his pants. By this time several other fighters came to investigate. Outside, the commotion ended quickly. I heard a click, which I assumed was the last security guard’s head hitting the concrete, then Freeman stepped through the door looking as nonplussed as if he had come from a grocery store.
The usher was willing to share a locker room with me, but Freeman was another story. Freeman had barely come through the door when the usher bolted to the safety of the bathroom stalls.
“Everything moving along in here?” Freeman asked.
“Just fine,” I said. I turned back to the fighter. “You say he died?”
“Yeah, I helped drag his ass from the ring. That boy was dead. You caved in the front of his skull.”
I thought I might have killed him. In truth, I felt no regret about it. “I heard he went on to win another fifty fights,” I said.
“Not that Boyd.”
The other fighters eyed Ray Freeman nervousl
y, gave me a curious glance at most, and went back to finish dressing.
The air in the room had that sweaty, unpleasant humidity that comes with locker rooms and open showers. The floor was wet and slick. Near the door, a canvas basket on rollers overflowed with wet towels, some of which were streaked with blood.
“What makes you think I’m a Liberator?” I asked. This guy was a natural-born, a muscular man, maybe thirty-five years of age with sun-bronzed skin and bleached-blond hair.
“Boyd said you were,” the fighter said.
“I thought you said I killed him?”
“Not the one you killed, the next one. We had at least three of ’em . . .” He smiled as if remembering a joke. “At least three. They were clones. Had to be. You off-ed one and two others got busted up pretty bad.
“So you are a Liberator, right?”
I chose to ignore the question. “Is there going to be a Boyd fighting tomorrow?”
“Nah,” said the fighter. “The Boyds stopped coming a couple years ago. They’re gone . . . left the island.”
“Do you know where they went?” I asked.
“No, but I know where they used to live.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“But what is the point of creating a new strain of clones?” General Kellan asks. “We’ve been using volunteers in special forces for six hundred years.”
“My clones are more effective in battle,” Huang says. “They are more expendable, less concerned about self-preservation, and far more lethal.
“This new strain was developed specifically for commando operations. They are quick, think independently, and are programmed to kill.”
“That sounds an awful lot like Liberator clones,” an officer calls out.
Huang laughs. “Klyber’s Liberators were never in the same league,” he says with a confident laugh. “Klyber’s clumsy attempt at clone-making may have been enough for the Mogats . . .”
“Is that so?” asks General Smith. “I understand that you lost a squad of ten clones in an operation in Scutum-Crux.”
Klyber sits this battle out, preferring to let his allies ask questions and pose charges. He watches quietly from his seat, smiling as he follows the direction of the conversation.
“They were killed running drills on a planet called Ravenwood,” Huang admits. “Over a four-year period, we ran hundreds of drills and only lost one squad.”
“And how many Marines did you kill off?” the Marine general asks, sounding angry.
“I’d guess in the neighborhood of five to six hundred. Ravenwood was a major success. We sent squads of ten clones against platoons of forty-two Marines, and we only lost once. Most drills ended without the loss of a single commando.
“We also ran tests in a tough-man competition in Hawaii.”
“Sad Sam’s Palace?” asks the Marine.
Huang nods. Hawaii is a popular vacation and retirement spot for high-ranking officers and Sad Sam’s Palace attracts military types like a magnet. “I suspect many of you are familiar with the Palace’s tough-man challenge. If there’s a better testing ground for hand-to-hand combat, I have not found it.
“We had a clone fighting under the name Adam Boyd entered in that competition. He racked up a record of two hundred and fifty wins and one loss.”
“Two hundred wins and one loss?” General Kellan observes. “How do we get our hands on the guy who beat him? That’s who we should be cloning.”
The last time I visited Honolulu I stayed in a vacation home with a courtyard and a well-stocked kitchen. I came with a pal from my platoon, Vince Lee. He was a corporal, I had just been promoted to sergeant. I met a beautiful blonde named Kasara on the beach and we had a fling. She had a friend named Jennifer, so Vince got to share in the fun.
That was a vacation. This time I came on business.
Freeman and I drove out of town after visiting the Palace. We found a wooded area and pulled our car off the road. Then I curled up in the backseat for five hours and he pulled guard duty. Living with combat armor, you learn how to make yourself comfortable in all sorts of situations. Lying in the fetal position, with my knees propped up against my gut, I slept very soundly until 4:00 A.M., when Freeman and I switched places.
Massive as he was, Freeman breathed heavily in his sleep. He took long hard pulls of air, then exhaled in three-second drafts. His breathing sounded like waves rolling in and out of shore.
We were up in the slopes just north of town. I held Freeman’s pistol on my lap, well out of sight in case anyone passed by.
The sun rose at 0800. Sitting behind the wheel, feeling sweaty, with stubble covering my cheeks, I watched the sunrise. I watched the violet sky turn copper colored and then eventually blue. Down below us, the town filled with shadows as the streetlamps faded. Honolulu was a tourist town, but it had its share of traffic. I watched thousands of cars roll into the city in stop-and-go traffic. From my vantage point, they looked like a column of ants.
I did not notice when the current of Freeman’s breathing vanished behind me. The sunrise had just finished, and I watched mynah birds nimbly hopping back and forth on the branches of a nearby tree.
“You ready to go?” Freeman asked as he lay folded on the backseat of the car. It was early in the morning and his voice rumbled more softly than ever. His words came in a thunderous whisper.
“Good morning to you,” I said, knowing that the humor would be wasted on Freeman.
“Give me a moment.” With this, the big man reached across the seat and opened the door by his legs. He stretched his legs out and found the ground with his feet, then he sat up just enough to grab the edges of the open doorway and pull himself out. Once in the open air, he stretched and yawned. The sunlight reflected in a dull streak across his shaved head as he unfurled his long arms and rotated his back. Next, he walked into the woods to relieve himself. When he came back, I handed him his pistol and did the same.
We stopped at a drive-in restaurant and bought a couple of greasy egg sandwiches which we ate as we drove, passing signs with mostly incomprehensible names like Waipahu and eventually Wahiawa. We passed a defunct naval base called “Pearl Harbor.” The base was enormous.
We headed out of town and into the countryside where farmers grew pineapples. The pineapples grew in immaculate rows that made the landscape appear as if someone had raked an enormous comb across it. The pineapples themselves were knee-high clumps with football-shaped fruits in the center, like some sort of alien cactus.
We drove deep into the farming country where sugarcane fields stretched out along the sides of the road. We passed large stretches where only scrub trees grew. Antique railroad tracks ran along the side of the road at one point, and we crossed a steel-framed bridge that spanned a stream. I thought the countryside was beautiful. Freeman seemed not to notice it at all.
We passed Wheeler Air Force base. It was dark and abandoned. We did not stop. A few miles farther, we approached another military complex called Schofield Barracks, a defunct Army base.
Schofield Barracks looked a lot like Wheeler and the defunct Naval base at Pearl Harbor, just an empty campus with sturdy two- and three-story buildings. From the road it looked a good deal larger than Wheeler but not even half the size of the Pearl Harbor facility. There were no immediate signs of life, but there was one difference at Schofield Barracks—the main gate was wide open. A length of chain link fence blocked the main gate of Wheeler and some of the gates around Pearl Harbor were bricked shut.
“You think they’re expecting us?” I asked.
“Looks that way,” Freeman said.
We originally planned to drive by the base a few times before going in. I did not know about Freeman, but I felt a strong desire to avoid stumbling into a hive filled with Adam Boyd clones.
Seeing the gates left open did not deter Ray Freeman. He was not the type of man who looked for trouble, but he did not back down from it. He turned into the entryway.
Finding our way across the base was easy e
nough. Most of the roads were overgrown with weeds, but one artery was trimmed and neat. The sidewalks in this part of the base gleamed in the sunlight and the asphalt on the streets was not cracked. We passed a courtyard in which the weeds had only started to grow wild. The grass was knee-high and the trees wanted trimming. We found a parking lot in which the stalls were clearly painted, and Freeman parked.
“We’re supposed to go there,” Freeman said, pointing straight ahead. The building was three stories tall. Its architecture was a cross between twentieth century American military and sixteenth century Spanish, combining rounded arches and thick stucco walls. The sun was behind this building and its verandas were buried in shadow. Had there been lights on in the building, we would have seen them. The lights were off but the front doors of the building hung wide open.
“An open invitation,” I said, embarrassed by my own flat humor. Strangely enough, Freeman cracked a small smile at that lame joke. Freeman was a bright and dangerous man with absolutely no sense of humor. Perhaps jokes had to be obvious for him to appreciate them.
I had no gun, but Freeman had his pistol. He carried it in the open now, holding it in his right arm which hung almost limp at his side. He seemed so relaxed.
We walked straight toward the building and right in the door. Leaving the sunshine and entering this shadowy realm was like falling into a deep cave. Even after Freeman found a light switch and turned on the lights, the darkness in this building seemed almost palpable.
Most of the furniture had been removed from this hallway. There were no chairs. A large reception desk wrapped around one doorway. Bulletin boards lined one of the walls. One of these bulletin boards was covered with rows of eight by ten photographs, and the light from the windows reflected on their glossy finish. Beside the bulletin board sat a communications console.
We approached. Five rows of five photographs—twenty-five pictures in all—stretched across the bulletin board. Each of them was a picture of me. There were pictures of me entering Klyber’s C-64 transport right after the evacuation team brought it back into the hangar at the Dry Docks. There was a picture of me climbing out of my Starliner in Honolulu. There was one picture of me in the International Marketplace and two of me and Freeman outside of Sad Sam’s Palace—one of us entering and one of us leaving.
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