We only caught a glimpse of the ship as it vanished. The ships in the Galactic Central Fleet had charcoal-colored hulls. The combination of speed and dark coloration acted as camouflage against the backdrop of space.
“Once we enter the atmosphere, they’re bound to spot us,” Freeman said.
Earth loomed ahead, a glowing green-and-blue sphere with polar white caps, tan-colored deserts, and swirls of cloud. We came in toward the coast of Europe, adjusted our angle parallel to the ocean below us, and flew west. A blue sky with clouds the size of city blocks stretched out before us.
“We’re about two thousand miles from Washington airspace,” Freeman said.
“Do you think they saw us coming?” I asked.
Freeman nodded.
“Do you think they will try to intercept us?” I asked.
“It depends on just how bad the city was hit,” Freeman said.
“Yamashiro said that the Mogats only took out the clone farms and the bases,” I said.
“Maybe,” said Freeman. “I don’t think he has spent much time around here. His officers seem nervous about running into the Mogat fleet.”
We entered the atmosphere at Mach 2, though we could have flown at well over Mach 3. Before the Unified Authority fell, all atmospheric travel was limited to a maximum speed of three thousand miles per hour.
Soon Ray cut our speed to one thousand miles per hour. At that speed it took us two hours to reach Washington, DC. The Atlantic Ocean stretched out beneath us like a gray-blue carpet, but it did not seem long before we reached the end. Up ahead of us, I could see the coast. Green forests and rocky cliffs marked the edge of the sea. Clouds so effervescent they should have been steam melted into the horizon.
“Here comes our escort,” I said. Up ahead, three fighters scrambled out to meet us. They left billowing contrails across the sky.
“We’ve got three more behind us,” Freeman said. I looked at the radar screen. It showed three blips behind us and three more ahead.
“How long have they been there?” I asked.
“Within radar range?” Freeman asked. “A few seconds. They picked us up back at Iceland. They’ve been giving us room to maneuver.”
“But they haven’t tried to contact us?” I asked. That did not make sense.
Freeman shook his head.
“Maybe they’re scared,” I said.
Freeman responded with one of his glacial “you don’t know what you are talking about” glares.
Three of the fighters formed an ellipse behind us, and the other three formed an arc just below the nose of the transport. Their contrails formed a carpet of cloud. They were clearly sent as an escort, not a guard.
“Transport pilot, this is Dulles Civil Traffic Control, please respond.”
“He seems awfully polite,” I observed.
“They think we are Mogats?” Freeman said. “We just came out of a GCF battleship.”
“I’ll bet you’re right,” I said. Our transport was the same make and model that the Mogats used. There were six fighters surrounding us, and they hadn’t even aimed a missile in our direction. They thought we were Mogats, and they did not want to get us mad. “They’re either scared or glad to see us,” I said.
We were getting close to Dulles Spaceport.
“Dulles Civil, this is transport pilot,” Freeman said into the radio.
“What is your destination, transport pilot?”
“We wish to land at Dulles Spaceport,” Freeman said.
“You are cleared for Runway One.”
“That was easy,” Freeman said to me.
“I’ve never felt so welcomed,” I agreed.
By this time we had crossed greenbelts and the bays. Flying at one thousand miles per hour, we passed from sea to city in four minutes. Freeman slowed the transport to landing speed, and we followed our fighter jet escort to the runway.
“Leave your gear in the transport,” I told Freeman as we touched down and taxied into a hangar.
The Spaceport Authority would almost certainly send security to meet us. We didn’t want to come off the transport with a bunch of small weapons in our hands. It would not take them long to figure out we were not Mogats, and the last thing I wanted was to give them an excuse to shoot.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
“We’ve got them, sir.” The sergeant paused for a moment. He was clearly uncomfortable about my hearing what he had to say next. “Sir, they can’t be Mogats. One of them is a clone.”
He should have been uncomfortable. The soldier was a general-issue military clone. He was programmed not to talk about clones and cloning; but he was also programmed to obey orders, and some officer had clearly ordered him to report when we stepped off our ship. The cognitive dissonance this must have caused that poor grunt.
He came with a squad of twenty soldiers. These men were regular Army, dressed in standard Army fatigues, on loan to the Dulles Spaceport Authority. They all carried M27s as a matter of course. None of them pointed their weapons at us.
The sergeant listened to a receiver concealed in his helmet. He cleared his throat. “Do you have any cargo you wish to unload?”
“No,” I said.
Freeman pressed a button, and the rear of the transport shut behind us. The motor that moved those thick metal doors worked quietly, but the cogs and sprockets in the doors ground. When the doors closed, they sealed with a soft clang.
“Um, you don’t have a messiah on that transport do you?” the sergeant asked. He sounded nervous.
“A what?” I asked.
“A messiah?” he repeated.
“Not so much as an angel,” I said.
“Just checking,” the sergeant said. “You didn’t bring pamphlets or Space Bibles did you?”
“Sergeant, I have no idea what you are talking about,” I said.
“Okay. Okay, just checking,” the sergeant said. “Why don’t you gentlemen come with us? There are people waiting to debrief you.”
So much for sodden babies and an entropic society. As far as I could tell, Washington, DC, had not changed. Dulles Spaceport looked as pristine as I had ever seen it. Through the open door of the hangar, I could see atmospheric jets taking off and landing. The terminal building, a five-story box with black windows encased in white marble frames, sparkled in the sunlight.
The soldiers had parked a “covered wagon” just outside the hangar. “Covered wagon” meant an Army transport truck with a heat-shielded tarp. In a world with satellites and other orbiting spacecraft, tarps could make all the difference in hiding troop movements from prying eyes.
The soldiers, GI clones who stood just under six feet, hopped into the back of the truck without having to worry about hitting their heads on the Army green canvas tarp or the metal frame that held it in place. At six-three, I had to duck my head as I came up the three steps that led into the back of the truck. Then came Freeman, seven feet tall and hugely broad-shouldered.
There is a tendency to think of a Goliath like Freeman as slow and powerful. The stereotype did not fit in this case. Freeman was powerful all right, but he was also agile. He stepped onto the middle rung of the three-step ladder and bounded into the back of the truck. He was so tall, however, that he had to drop to his knees to scoot under the lip of that tarp. Once in, he had to crouch as he moved to an empty spot on the bench.
The clones noticed his agility, too. Some stared at him. Others simply stole sideways glances. I thought back to the first time I had laid eyes on Freeman. He had made me just as nervous as he made these boys.
Since I had never served with any of these clones, they all looked alike to me. To make matters worse, only a little sunlight penetrated the canvas tarp, leaving us pretty much in the dark. Had I served with them, I suppose I would have noted subtle differences. When I ran a platoon in the Marines, I could tell my men apart. But looking around the benches, these guys looked as identical as eggs in a carton. I wondered how the sergeant could tell his boys apart.
“You guys aren’t Morgan Atkins Separatists?” the sergeant asked.
“Not likely,” I said.
The sergeant had identified me as a clone when he met us outside our ship. I had the same brown hair and brown eyes as other clones. My facial features looked somewhat similar to the features on all of these boys. If you stood us beside each other, people would have thought I was their taller and more-scarred-up brother.
“Our traffic guys tracked you coming in from a Mogat ship,” the sergeant said. “Your transport looks like it’s Galactic Central vintage.”
“It is,” I said. “Not all of those ships are under Mogat control.”
“No shit?” the sergeant asked.
“No shit,” I agreed.
“Does that mean the Separatists are fighting among themselves?”
We rumbled up a ramp and into a covered tunnel. Looking out the back of the truck, I could see a concrete ceiling with rows of fluorescent fixtures.
“The Confederates, the Mogats, and the Japanese, it’s a three-way split,” I said.
“Damn,” the sergeant said. “Who’s winning?”
“The Mogats,” I said.
“Damn,” the sergeant repeated.
“What did you mean about having a messiah on our ship?” I asked.
“Oh, that? That was a Mogat thing. They dressed a transport up so that it looked like a golden chariot, then they set it down in Israel. They had some guy dressed in a white robe come out the back and say he was Jesus returning to claim the world.”
We went down a ramp. The soldiers all swayed with the direction of the truck, but Freeman did not move.
“You’re joking,” I said.
The sergeant shook his head.
“How do you know it wasn’t Jesus?” I asked.
“The guy died,” the sergeant said. “He landed by some old temple in Jerusalem. They think he was hoping for Christian pilgrims, but he got Jews and Moslems instead. They stoned him to death before the police could arrive.
“Anyway, his chariot came out of a GCF ship just like yours.”
The truck pulled to a stop in an underground parking area. One of the soldiers flipped the ladder out of the back of the truck, and the others started filing out.
After most of the soldiers climbed out of the truck, Freeman climbed out. He did not use the ladder to climb down. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed and hopped down. It was not much of a hop.
“And the Space Bible?” I asked. The sergeant and I were the last people out of the truck. I knew what Space Bibles were. That was the name people commonly called Man’s True Place in the Universe: The Doctrines of Morgan Atkins, the book that the Mogats called the centerpiece of their religion. It was illegal for servicemen to read it. Frankly, the book never interested me.
“Proselyting,” the sergeant practically spit the word out like a gob from his throat. “That’s their latest. They come by every few weeks and chuck pamphlets and Space Bibles out of their ships. I guess they’re looking for converts.”
The soldiers led us into an office complex that appeared devoid of people. There seemed to be nothing wrong with the building itself, the lights and the air-conditioning worked fine. I could not tell whether it had been abandoned or evacuated, but this wing of the building was empty.
“The Mogats want to start a church on Earth?” I asked. That did not sound likely. One of the major tenets of Mogat belief was independence from Earth.
“They’re not getting many converts. Sometimes they fly over cities, see; and then they start shoveling out them pamphlets and Space Bibles. I figure they’ve hit a few thousand people…killed most of ’em, too.
“Shit, you drop a two-pound book from a few miles up, and you got to figure you’re going to deal some damage.”
CHAPTER
NINE
The sergeant took Freeman and me to a small office. Before we could enter that office, however, we needed to pass through “the posts.”
The posts were a high-tech security device connected to a galaxywide security database. Well, it should have been a galaxywide database. With the Broadcast Network down, the database would only be Earth-wide. But even limited to a planetwide network, the posts would have no trouble identifying us.
The posts looked like plasticized pillars creating an archway. “The sprayer,” the jamb to the left, emitted a short blast of oil, water, and air in the form of a fine mist. The jamb on the right, “the receiver,” vacuumed in that mist along with any dandruff, hair, flecks of skin, and other debris that the blast dislodged. Computers inside the receiver analyzed the DNA inside the hairs and other debris and spit out the person’s identity.
You could not fool the posts. You could wash your clothes, shave your head, and scrub every inch of your body with pumice, and it would make no difference. You could pour buckets of dandruff from one or one thousand other people over your head, and the posts would sort it out. The sprayer would always find some eyelash or scale of skin that belonged to you. The receiver would analyze every molecule and identify the ones that were yours.
According to my Marine Corps record, I had been killed in action. In truth, I swapped identities with a dead Marine, making me absent without leave.
Like any other criminal on the lam, I dreaded passing between the posts.
Freeman and I passed through the security check and entered a small office in which the only furniture was a desk and chairs. The sergeant followed us in and sat on the desk. I selected a chair. Freeman preferred to stand near the door and stare out at the other soldiers who stood guard just beyond the posts.
Bringing us into this waiting room may have seemed like a wasted effort, but I knew why we came. Somebody wanted to identify us. Once they knew our names and read our files, they would send us along.
There were no lights in the office. The only light came from the hall. We waited for nearly an hour in that dark room, then the sergeant received a message on his radio. We might have been cleared; but for all I knew, he might have been told to place me in the nearest brig.
“Time to deliver you both,” the sergeant said, and he led us out to the hall. He and his men marched us into a much larger room. It was an auditorium with a well-shaped gallery that could easily hold two hundred people. The sergeant had Freeman and me sit on two chairs placed on the stage at the bottom of the room. Beside our chairs was a podium with a carving of an eagle carrying arrows. The eagle was the emblem of the Linear Committee—the executive branch of the U.A. government.
Freeman and I sat silently as men and women entered the auditorium and filled the gallery. I recognized most of these people, and many of them seemed to recognize me. The group included high-ranking officers such as Admiral Alden Brocius of the Central Cygnus Fleet and General Alexander Smith of the Air Force, who had been head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when the Separatists attacked Earth. Both of them had been closely allied with the late Admiral Bryce Klyber, the officer who’d had me created and overseen much of my career. In all, approximately fifty people came in to observe or interrogate Freeman and me.
“They don’t know what to do with us,” Freeman said in that low, rumbling voice. He did not whisper, but his voice was so low and filled with bass that I felt what he had to say more than heard it.
“If they thought we were Mogat, they don’t anymore,” I said, trying to decide what information those posts might have given about us.
William Grace, a member of the Linear Committee at the outset of the war, approached the stage. He stopped to examine Freeman and me, then stepped behind the podium.
“Men and women of the security council, good afternoon,” Grace said. “For the record, on this, the third day of October, 2512, we are convening an emergency meeting of the Unified Authority Security Council.
“Will the visitors please rise.”
Freeman and I got to our feet.
“Please identify yourselves,” Grace asked.
“Raymond Freeman,” Freem
an said.
Grace looked down into his podium. I supposed he had a computer readout built into it. He took a moment to examine Freeman’s record. Then he looked back at Freeman and considered him for several seconds. I had the feeling he was studying the bandages on Freeman’s face and neck. “Are you injured, Mr. Freeman?”
“We had an accident,” Freeman said.
“Do you require medical assistance?”
“No,” Freeman said, his voice low and distant.
“I see that you are a freelance contractor who has worked with the U.A. military on several occasions. Is this correct?” Grace had to have read that from an official dossier.
Freeman nodded.
“According to this record, you have provided valuable services to the U.A. Navy in the past.”
Freeman said nothing. What was there to say? Grace moved on to me.
“And you?” Grace asked. “Please identify yourself.”
“Colonel Wayson Harris,” I said.
By the reaction my name elicited, you would have thought that I had identified myself as George Washington. Individual conversations flared up around the gallery. A few people shouted questions down at me. William Grace picked up a gavel and banged it on the top of his podium until the room quieted down.
“Colonel Harris,” Grace echoed my name back to me. He stared into his chest-high podium. “My records show that you were raised in Unified Authority Orphanage #553. Is this correct?”
“U.A.O. #553. That is correct, sir,” I said.
“According to one of your former commanding officers, you are aware of your nature,” Grace stated.
“If you are asking whether or not I know that I am a military clone, I am aware that I am a clone,” I said.
“And you are a Liberator-class clone. Is that correct? You are, as far as you know, the last of your kind?”
Grace knew I was a Liberator. Hell, they’d once announced it on the floor of the House of Representatives. Once he established that I was a Liberator, he could probably have me hauled away and executed. I had the feeling of being played like a toy. At any moment, the smile would disappear, and he would bare teeth as sharp as daggers.
The Clone Alliance Page 6