Rogue Clone

by Steven L. Kent

  The last row of pictures had been taken this very morning. One showed me pissing outside the car. Another showed me taking a big bite out of my breakfast sandwich. The most recent photograph showed me opening the gate to the barracks. The picture was no more than five minutes old. Whoever placed these pictures had time to print this last photo and escape unnoticed between the time that I opened the gate and the moment we walked in the door. I had been under surveillance and never even knew it.

  “I think they are sending you a message,” Freeman said.

  The message was obvious. The photographer could just as easily have used a rifle with a sniper scope as a camera with a telephoto lens. I reached over and switched on the communications console. Che Huang’s face appeared on the screen.

  “Are you always this slow, Lieutenant?” he asked.

  “Hello, Huang,” I said. I was supposed to salute him at this point. Instead, I folded my arms and stared into the screen. “What do you want?”

  I tried to sound calm, but my heart was pounding so hard I could hear it pulsing. Liberators were known for their primal instincts. Though I was still in control, I could feel the rage building inside me.

  “I did not kill Klyber,” Huang said in a matter-of-fact tone.

  “Not by yourself,” I said. “You had one of your SEAL clones do it for you. I have the video feed from the Dry Docks security. You had a clone on the maintenance team that cleaned Klyber’s transport.”

  “I did send a SEAL to visit Klyber’s transport,” Huang admitted. “He installed listening and video devices throughout the ship.”

  “I didn’t hear anything about bugs on the transport,“ I said.

  “Golan security didn’t look for surveillance equipment. Why don’t you have your friends back at the Dry Docks sweep the main cabin and the late admiral’s room for bugs?”

  I did not respond.

  “Think about it Harris, why would I kill Klyber?” Huang asked.

  “Let’s see . . . petty jealousy, old rivalries, just for the fun of it, to take control of the Doctrinaire . . .”

  “I already had control of the Doctrinaire,” Huang said. “I took it away from Klyber during the summit.”

  “I saw the summit. You didn’t have anything,” I said.

  “You have been busy,” Huang said. “Perhaps you weren’t watching the feed closely. By the time the summit ended, I had command of the Doctrinaire and Klyber had nothing but the fleet.”

  “Commanding the fleet isn’t being in control?” I asked.

  “Once the battle begins, the ship’s captain makes the decisions. When historians discuss great battles, they won’t bother mentioning the fleet. Klyber knew it. I suppose you saw the old fool sulking once I got my suggestion past Smith and the rest of them. He did not say a word for the rest of the meeting. He just sat there, stewing. I got everything I wanted.

  “History will remember me as the secretary of Navy who won the war. I’ll place Robert Thurston over the ship. He’ll be the commander who won the key battle. And Klyber . . . Klyber would have been a footnote. He would have been the man who brought up the rear.

  “Harris, if you don’t believe anything else I tell you, believe this—I got what I wanted.”

  Huang generally seemed on the verge of a tirade. Not this time. Now he explained himself with gloating patience. I thought about what he said. When the meeting ended, I met Klyber at the door. He looked tired and old and withdrawn. He talked about the members of the Joint Chiefs being too young to understand war, and he said that the fight would not be as easy as they thought.

  “Why come to me?” I asked.

  “I want your help,” Huang said.

  “Help you?” I laughed. “Why should I help you?” Across the hall, Ray Freeman stood as still as a statue, watching Huang. His face showed no emotion. His eyes never left the screen.

  “We both want the same thing, Harris. We want to kill the people who killed Klyber. Now that I have the Doctrinaire, I won’t be safe until they are dead.

  “You can clear my name while you’re at it. You are not the only one who thinks I sabotaged Klyber’s transport. Once Smith and the other Joint Chiefs see the video feed with that SEAL entering the ship. . . .” He shook his head.

  “I saw your SEAL in the feed. I saw your spy, too,” I said.

  “My spy?” Huang asked, sounding frustrated. The ragged edges of his personality began to show.

  “What about Halverson? He was in the landing bay, too.”

  “Halverson?” Huang repeated.

  I did not like or trust Huang, but I had never known him to lie. He was a storm-the-front-gates type of enemy. He did not smile at people he disliked. If he wanted you dead, he let you know it. Except for his political maneuvering on the floor of the summit, I had never seen anything resembling subtlety from the man.

  “Wasn’t Rear Admiral Halverson working for you?” I asked.

  “Halverson?” Huang asked. “I wouldn’t work with an idiot like Tom Halverson. He was Klyber’s man.”

  “He was your spy on the Doctrinaire,” I said.

  “Johansson was my spy,” Huang said. “I should have thought that was obvious. He sat with my staff during the summit. He flew back to D.C. with me. Leonid Johansson was my eyes on the project.”

  “So what was Halverson doing by the hangar?” I asked.

  “I’ve seen the security feed,” Huang said. “Halverson isn’t on it.”

  “Perhaps you weren’t watching the feed closely,” I said, using Huang’s words against him to get under his skin. “When the janitors left the hangar, they passed Admiral Halverson. He was there having a smoke. He watched your boy come in, then followed him away from the hangar.”

  “Halverson? He may have been there, but he wasn’t working for me,” Huang said. “It sounds to me as if you’ve got your first clue, Sherlock. What you need now is to follow up on it.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  This is the moment when Che Huang demonstrates his prowess in the dark arts of politics. It should be obvious that he is a political creature—an officer with no actual combat experience who has risen to the Joint Chiefs. Now that he has weathered the counter-attack about his clones, Huang draws back his fangs and sinks them into Admiral Klyber.

  “Admiral Klyber, powerful as this super ship of yours is, do you really think it can handle more than five hundred enemy ships?” Huang asks this question in an uncharacteristically reasonable tone.

  “No, of course not,” says Klyber. “We’ll need support ships, and the optimum situation is to engage no more than ten or twenty dreadnoughts per battle.”

  “I really must congratulate you. You have created a fine weapon. I honestly believe that this ship will be the weapon that wins the war.”

  Klyber only nods to acknowledge this compliment. His eyes remain coldly fixed on Huang. He does not trust the man.

  “How would a fleet be able to support this ship? You haven’t talked the Linear Committee into funding a self-broadcasting fleet, have you?”

  Appreciative laughter rings through the room.

  “I have assembled a ready-alert fleet that will remain near the Broadcast Network. It’s a small fleet now, but we’ll find more ships for it. The fleet will have flash access to the broadcast computer on board the Doctrinaire. Anytime she self-broadcasts, her travel information will be relayed to the ships in the fleet.”

  “But will they be able to get to her in time to assist?” General Smith asks.

  “The ready-alert ships can override the Network. They can enter the discs and override the system to broadcast them directly to the Doctrinaire.”

  At this point, I notice that both of the seats behind Klyber are empty. Admiral Halverson has gone somewhere. I check summit clock and note the time. It is three in the afternoon according to Washington, D.C., time, which is the clock used by the Dry Docks for the duration of the summit. Suddenly it occurs to me where Halverson has gone, and I feel a chill. He is at the hangar
observing Huang’s clone as he plants the cable on Klyber’s transport.

  “Brilliant,” Huang cheerily admits. “Absolutely brilliant. Of course, you’ll need a skilled administrator to handle the logistics.” Perhaps he means Leonid Johansson, but that does not seem likely. Johansson is barely paying attention to the proceedings at this point. He is leaning in his chair causally looking toward the back of the room. He is, in fact, looking at baby-faced Robert Thurston—the man who replaced Klyber as commander of the Scutum-Crux Fleet. Thurston’s brilliant battle tactics are legendary.

  “Strategy and logistics,” Huang continues. “They seem to be the keys. A great battle strategist at the helm of the Doctrinaire and the right logistical support to make sure that the ship does not fail.”

  “What is your point?” General Smith asks.

  “It seems to me that the fleet admiral’s skills are wasted commanding a lone ship, even a great ship such as the Doctrinaire ,” Huang begins. I recognize that he is trying to take command of the Doctrinaire away from Klyber and I feel as if I have been slapped across the face. I cannot even imagine the thoughts going through Klyber’s head. “You are the highest ranking officer in the Unified Authority Navy. Your command should not be limited to one lone boat. You should be in command of a fleet.”

  “I will not relinquish control of the Doctrinaire.”

  “Of course not,” Huang says. “This is your project. The Doctrinaire is your ship. I am simply suggesting that you should command the entire fleet as well as the ship itself. If the Doctrinaire is part of a fleet, you should have the highest authority in that fleet.”

  “Avoid all tangles in the chain of command,” General Kellan, the 39-year-old secretary of the Army, adds. “I can’t speak for you Annapolis graduates, but that was one of the first things we learned at West Point.”

  “Of course you would use the Doctrinaire as your command ship,” Huang adds as slick as any salesman trying to close a deal. “She is your ship. The Doctrinaire will always be your ship.”

  Like all of the senior officers in that room, I see nothing wrong with Huang’s suggestion, except that I do not trust the man who has made it. Klyber, on the other hand, looks beaten. He is the only officer at the table without an entourage, and he now looks small and lonely sitting at the table by himself. He looks to General Smith for support, but Smith does not seem to have a problem with Huang’s suggestion. In fact, one minute later, Smith agrees with it.

  The remainder of the meeting is unspectacular. Neither Che Huang nor Bryce Klyber speak again. And when the meeting adjourns, Klyber is the first officer to reach the door of the conference room. He meets me at the door looking old and depressed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The carrot that Bryce Klyber dangled in front of me, Che Huang delivered: an honorable discharge. With just a word from Huang, I was Lieutenant Wayson Harris, Unified Authority Marines retired. My permanent record did not even contain the word, “Liberator,” not that I doubted Huang’s intention to add it back the moment I caught up to Halverson.

  “What are you going to do next?” Freeman asked me as we left Schofield Barracks.

  “I need to pick up Halverson’s trail,” I said. “Whoever put the cables on Bryce Klyber’s ship was working with Halverson. That means Halverson was spying for the Separatists or the Confederate Arms.”

  “It looks that way,” Freeman agreed.

  “Last place I saw him was in the Golan Dry Docks. I figure that’s the place to start.”

  Freeman dropped me off at Honolulu Airport, then went to return his rental car. I did not trust Huang. I would never trust him, but I thought this might be a good time to see if he had kept his word. Instead of going out to the field with the private planes, I passed through the tighter security at the commercial terminal where they had DNA-scanning posts for outgoing passengers.

  The last time I had passed through one of these stations was just two days earlier, and I had been spotted as Wayson Harris the Liberator. This time I had no idea how the computer would label me. I might be an AWOL Marine or a Liberator or a dead Marine. As I approached the posts, I heard the quick blast of air as it wafted across the man ahead of me. I looked at the armed guards inside the station and wondered if testing my identity so soon was a mistake.

  The guard on the other side of the posts, a civilian in an outfit designed to look like an old fashion police uniform, motioned me forward. As I stepped forward, I considered everything that would happen in the next three seconds. One of the jams would hit me with a burst of air. The other jam would inhale the air and any debris it shook loose. A bank of computers would scan my DNA. If the computer warned the guards that I was a Liberator in the Orion Arm . . . as I thought about it, being recognized here would be more dangerous than being recognized in the Golan Dry Docks. Here, in the Orion Arm, where Liberators were illegal, being spotted might be fatal. I was betting my life that Admiral Che Huang was a man of his word. What was wrong with me?

  The guard, a grubby man whose shirt barely fit over his jostling beer belly, hardly noticed me as I stepped between the posts. He had a pistol. There was no bulletproof glass around this security station, but I noticed a dozen armed guards around the area.

  A warm and humid breeze blew through the open-air lobby of the terminal. Most people stepped right through the posts, but I stood my ground waiting to see what would happen.

  The security guard looked at me curiously. “You okay?” he asked.

  I looked around the station, other people were watching me curiously as well. No one reached for their guns. “Yes,” I said. “I’m more than okay. I’m street-legal.”

  The man gave me a suspicious look, but what could he do? His high-tech security equipment had searched both me and my identity.

  I walked across the terminal and followed signs to the private pilots/corporate jets terminal. Nobody stopped me when I asked for my plane, and I left Hawaii without incident. I was for all intents and purposes, a free man.

  This time I would use the Broadcast Network. I saw no point in advertising that I still had my hands on a self-broadcasting transport. If Huang knew I had a self-broadcasting ship from the Doctrinaire, he would demand its return and possibly keep the ship for himself. After all, the good will that now existed between us only went so far.

  I put in a call to Colonel McAvoy, the head of security at the Golan Dry Docks as I started the long trip to Mars. I asked him if he had searched Klyber’s C-64 for listening devices. He said, “No,” but said that he would and that he would get back to me shortly. The Unified Authority’s only fleet admiral had died on his watch. McAvoy’s career would be as good as over unless he caught the murderer. Ten minutes after we hung up, Colonel McAvoy called back to say that he had located a wide array of spying devices.

  “That clears Adam Boyd,” I said.

  “Spying devices clear the guy?” McAvoy asked.

  “I talked with Huang,” I said. “Boyd was Huang’s man, and Huang admits having Boyd plant the devices. Why bother planting mikes and cameras on the ship if you plan to kill the passengers?”

  “Spying as an alibi for murder,” the colonel observed. “That’s a new one.”

  “I need whatever information you can get me on the rest of the maintenance team,” I said. “And get me anything you can on Admiral Halverson. I need to know where he went when he left the Dry Docks, and I need to know if he went alone.”

  One of the niceties of crossing such highly trafficked airspace as the lanes between Earth and Mars was that you did not need to pilot your own ship. With thousands of ships traveling at millions of miles per hour in a relatively small pocket, collisions would be inevitable without computers seizing control of every spacecraft. Pilots who refused to relinquish control were given mere moments to turn around before squadrons were scrambled from Mars Station to shoot them down.

  Now that I was a legitimate citizen, I chose the conservative route. I logged my travel plans into the Mars traffic control co
mputer and allowed it to schedule my route through the Broadcast Network. From here on out, I would not need to touch a flight stick or turn a knob until the Network spilled me out a few minutes from the Dry Docks.

  I leaned back in my chair and stared out the window at the endless blackness of outer space. Stars winked in the distance. Out here I could see the colors of the planets. Jupiter, a dust-colored marble with horizontal stripes, loomed off to the right. Mars, not really red but tan with a rust-colored patina, floated in the darkness dead ahead.

  I looked back at the dimly lit cabin behind me. The passenger seating was no more comfortable than my pilot’s chair, but I liked the idea of leaving the cockpit. Taking my mediaLink shades, I slipped into the first chair behind the cockpit and reclined it as far back as it would go.

  The top story of the day was Bryce Klyber’s funeral. Several sites, both civilian and military, showed the service in its entirety. The faces of the guests taking up the front two rows of Arlington Chapel were remarkably similar to to those sitting around the table at the summit. Smith and the other Joint Chiefs were there along with their aides. In enlisted man lingo, “There were so many stars and bars in that funeral you would have sworn you were touring a flag factory.”

  Huang was there. I expected him to have a secret grin or at least the smug sneer with which he customarily greeted the world, but he did not. Huang stared straight ahead at the glossy black casket that lay on the stand. He did not look arrogant or satisfied. If anything, he looked worried.

  “Hello, Judas,” I said when I saw Captain Leonid Johansson was there as well. Captain was a much higher rank in the Navy than it was in the Marines. But even as a Navy captain, Johansson looked like a piker in this setting. The chapel was filled with admirals, generals, and famous politicians. The Joint Chiefs and members of the Linear Committee sat on the front pew. I looked for people who might be Klyber’s family and saw no one. After the service, as I filtered through ancillary stories, I learned that Klyber had never married. He’d outlived his siblings. Except for the Navy, he was alone.