As a group of men walked past me, one stopped to give me a second glance and said something to his friends as they walked away. His pals did not give me a second glance as they continued down the street, but the first guy turned back for one more look. I decided to head in the opposite direction, turning at the next corner to disappear from view. As I passed the façade of a long, two-story building, a man in a Mogat Navy uniform stepped out. He seemed to watch me for a moment, then smiled to himself and shook his head. Perhaps he had mistaken me for a friend. Maybe I had made some mistake with my officer’s uniform. In the moment that the man seemed to think he recognized me, I thought I saw fear in his expression.
Walking alone in enemy territory made me paranoid. Atkins Believers considered clones evil. In their pantheon of wrong and right, Liberator clones were the kith and kin of Satan himself. Fortunately, after those first few encounters, no one else seemed to take notice of me.
I found a train station and entered. Apparently it did not cost money to ride the trains. I saw no booths or machines for taking money. Just inside the station, I found a large map, which I stopped to study.
The Mogats had laid their world out in sectors. In one corner of that map, I saw a diagram showing all of the sectors on the planet. It included industrial, residential, and government districts. I saw no financial sector. I was in their military sector, one of the smaller portions of the metropolis.
In the center of everything was a compound marked only as the “Morgan Atkins Society.” I had no idea what that might be, but I suspected it was religious.
So the Mogats had grouped their entire military complex into one concentrated area. From a tactical standpoint, that was idiotic. By grouping their military, they had presented the Unified Authority a perfect target. If we could reach this planet, we could neutralize their entire military complex with one shot. Maybe they knew that. Their subterranean location would protect them from an orbital attack.
The map offered a street-by-street detail of the military sector. I located several munitions depots within striking distance of where I stood. I thought about the chicanery I hoped to accomplish and started to formulate a plan.
I also picked up a shadow while I was at the train station.
CHAPTER
THIRTY
He was an old man. He might have been in his eighties, he might have been in his nineties. That old fellow might have lived on Earth when man first attempted instantaneous travel, for all I knew. After a certain point, the ravages of age do no more damage. This ancient fellow had long since left that point behind. His white hair was as fine as cotton filaments. The hint of pink on his wrinkled white skin was the only color in his face, and his stiffly hunched shoulders rode high on his neck.
He made no effort to hide his curiosity about me but walked right up to me and stared into my face. His dark eyes did not flinch under their bushy white eyebrows, and his thin lips seemed to curl over his gums as he stared up at me. He squinted, and then put on old-fashioned glasses with half-inch-thick lenses that made his eyes look too large for his face.
It did not occur to me at the moment, but I should have realized that an old Mogat like that might well know my face. Well, he would not know me, but he would know my kind. Fifty years earlier, a battalion of Liberators invaded the Mogat stronghold and ended the Galactic Central War. But, as I say, that had not yet occurred to me as the old man gaped at me.
“Can I help you?” I asked.
“You.” His voice was as dry as a reed in December. “You, what is your name?” he demanded.
I did not want to alarm the old fellow, so I humored him. “Klein,” I said. A large portion of the Mogat population went by a single name. Klein was a Mogat I met shortly after joining the Marines. He tried to kill me twice. The first time he lost a hand. His second attempt ended with his execution.
“Klein,” the man repeated. His lips worked the name a few more times, but only whistling breath came out of his mouth. Then he shook his head and walked away.
I thought he was gone and breathed a sigh of relief. Five minutes later the old man returned with a solider—a tall, muscular-looking gent. The soldier wore the jade green fatigues of the Mogat Army. He had a sidearm. He might well have been with the military police.
Withered old prick, I thought to myself as I saw the old man and his companion heading toward the train platform. They were about two hundred feet away. The soldier clearly wanted to run after me, but the old man now clung on to him for support. As the soldier studied me, our eyes met. Even from this distance, I did not like what I saw.
At that moment, a cool wind blew across my neck and a train rocketed into the station. The train was long, low, and squat—about thirty feet wide and ten feet tall, traveling on a cushion of magnetic levitation.
I chanced a quick look back and saw the soldier running in my direction. The old man stood watching the scene, still pointing at me. It was at that moment that I finally woke up to the possibility that the old man might well have fought in the Galactic Central War. Suddenly I realized that he might not have mistaken me for someone else. With that momentary epiphany, I jumped onto the train, not caring where it took me. Had I realized where the train was headed, I would never have boarded. It took me to Military Administration—the Mogat Pentagon.
Looking through the train window, I could see the soldier sprinting after me. Come and get it, big boy, I thought to myself, knowing that the best outcome for me would be for the soldier to catch me before he reported sighting a Liberator. Right now it was just the soldier, the old man, and me. I would not feel bad about killing the soldier or the old man if I had to.
The soldier scrambled past pedestrians and leaped up onto the platform. I lost sight of him from there, but he certainly boarded the train before it pulled out of the station.
Each car in the train could carry a hundred passengers, but mine was almost empty. There were only about ten or maybe twelve other passengers. I stood on one end of the car. The soldier entered from the opposite side. He stood staring at me for a moment as he caught his breath. Even if the old man had recognized me as a Liberator, why should the soldier believe such a thing? We had supposedly gone extinct decades ago. I was even more of a fossil than the old geezer who spotted me.
Deciding to take the straightforward approach, I walked right up to that soldier, and asked, “What was with that old man?”
The soldier was a big man. He stood an inch or two taller than me. He probably stood six-five, and he might have outweighed me by forty pounds. He had bristly red hair cropped well above his ears.
“He came up to me in the station looking upset about something,” I continued, still hoping to defuse the situation.
The soldier glared at me and nodded. “He thinks you’re a clone.”
“A clone?” I asked.
“A Liberator clone,” the soldier said.
“A Liberator clone?” I asked, trying to sound as if I had just heard a joke. “I’ve been called a lot of things, but this is the first time anyone has accused me of being a Liberator.”
“You and I are going to step off the train at the next station,” the soldier said. He sounded angry. The insignia on his sleeves must have identified him as military police of some sort. He did not hesitate to order me off the train. If I read his bars correctly, he was a sergeant. I was disguised as a lieutenant. He should not have been speaking to me this way. Only an MP would act so rashly.
“I’m late for a…”
Up to this point, we spoke to each other in polite tones. None of the other passengers should have heard us. “Get off at the next stop,” he growled. He punctuated the command by resting his hand on his pistol.
“If I miss this meeting, it will be your ass,” I said.
As the train started to slow, a young couple stood up to leave. The woman had her arm around the young man’s biceps. They looked like they were in love. The man, a sailor in uniform, saw me, and did a double take. Then he saw the soldi
er with his hand on his pistol grip. He scurried out of the car the moment the doors opened, pulling the woman behind him.
“What’s the rush?” she asked.
“Hurry!” he snapped.
By the time we stepped onto the platform, the young lovers were halfway down the stairs to the street. I stood in front with the MP inches behind me and to my left. “That old man was wrong,” I said, without looking back.
I could see the MP’s reflection in the train window. He still had that angry expression. His hand was still on the pistol in his belt. I was unarmed.
“They showed us video feeds from the invasion when I was in school. The Liberators in those records looked just like you,” the MP said.
I did not respond. With those words, he had sealed his fate.
By this time the sailor and his girlfriend had completely disappeared and the train had continued down the track. The MP shoved me from behind. Up ahead, I saw a doorway. It might have led to a security station or maintenance closet.
I felt something poking into my back and knew that the man had pulled his gun. “This way,” the MP barked. The man was big and tough. He held the gun steady, but he held it too close. He stood too close.
“Move,” he said.
“You don’t need the pistol,” I said.
“I’m tired of telling you to move,” he said.
I looked around the platform. We were alone. I could see people walking along the sidewalks outside the station, but there was a fence around the platform. The pedestrians could not see us clearly.
“For the last time, clone, move.”
The MP shoved me a second time. I spun on my right heel, sweeping the barrel of the pistol away from me with my right hand and slamming the edge of my left hand into the man’s neck. The strike to his neck stunned him and stopped his breathing. I kept my hand on his neck to control him as I slammed my knee into his groin, knocking the wind and fight out him. Then I slid my hand from his neck to his shoulder and guided him down to the ground. Low and out of sight, I snapped the man’s neck.
It was an easy kill. It happened so fast that my combat reflex did not kick in.
I would have liked to have borrowed his gun. I even toyed with the idea of switching uniforms, but ended up playing the game safe. I rolled the MP into the magnetic slot through which the trains ran, gun and all. The electricity flowing through that track would not hurt the body but with any luck, the next train would smash him and run over the leftovers before more commuters arrived. Whatever was left behind would not be worth the cost of the autopsy.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-ONE
Somewhere not too far from the train station, somebody set off a bomb. The reverberation of the explosion rushed through the buildings like a flood. Several columns of black smoke rose high into the air. The percussion was powerful, but the black color of the smoke and narrowness of the plumes suggested very little damage had been done.
All around me, men in green, blue, and tan officers’ uniforms ran out of the various buildings and headed toward the explosion. Women in uniforms joined the queue. They formed a steady stream of humanity that funneled down the streetlike tributaries gathering into a river. I followed. As we got closer to the blast site, the crowd grew thicker. By the time I turned a corner and saw ground zero, I stood in a crowd of thousands.
No one paid any attention to me. All they cared about was the bombing. So the Morgan Atkins Believers had a terrorist among them, and I had a pretty good idea who that terrorist might be.
The smoke came from a row of cars that now lay on their sides with flames bursting out of the chassis. Because the air inside the cavernous settlement had a pleasant chill, I could feel the heat from the burning cars two hundred feet away.
“That’s every day this week,” a man complained. He shook his head. “I’d love to catch them myself…specking murderers.”
“Every day this month,” another officer corrected.
“Not again,” a man said to no one in particular.
“Can’t they catch the bastards?” asked a woman who stood behind me.
Up ahead, a team of emergency techs sprayed foam on the smoldering automobiles to douse the flames. The techs wore yellow soft-shelled armor. They had red foam tanks on their backs. A blast that topples cars should damage buildings as well. This one did not. As the smoke cleared, I saw that the buildings around the explosion looked untouched. Perhaps the terrorist wanted to assassinate the drivers.
I did not look for long. I squared myself to the center of the explosion, then turned and walked away. Threading my way through the crowd, I formed a compass in my head and set a heading for 110 degrees. I headed west, southwest, pushing my way through a growing tide of people.
I found Illych standing in the middle of a crowd, craning his neck with all the other people to get a look at what had happened. He was shorter than the men around him, shorter than some of the women, too. He wore the uniform of a Mogat Marine. He wore leather gloves that hid his sharp-ended fingers, but nothing hid that ugly ridge of bone that ran above his eyes. The ridge gave him a caveman forehead.
“I hope they catch that bastard and wring his nuts,” I said as I approached Illych.
“Yes, sir. Security has really gone to pot around here.”
“Gone to pot,” I thought. Not “specked beyond repair,” or “for shit.” The man had just left a bomb that blew up cars and presumably drivers, but heaven help us if he swore.
Illych looked at me, and the smile of recognition crossed his lips. “Clever disguise, sir. Coming to a Mogat planet masquerading as a Liberator carrying a big suspicious box. I would never have thought of that one.”
“Shall we get back to work, Sergeant,” I said. He had a sergeant’s uniform.
“Yes, sir, Lieutenant,” Illych said. “The sooner we get you under wraps, the better.”
“Get me under wraps?” I asked. “I’m not the terrorist here.”
“I knew you would come,” he added as we walked away. “I knew you would come.”
“What made you think a stupid thing like that?” I asked.
“You had to come. It’s in your programming.”
I shook my head. “No. That’s SEAL programming.” We were walking past hundreds of people, and no one noticed us. Anyone within earshot could hear what we said, but that did not matter. No one looked in our direction. We were just a Navy lieutenant and a Marine sergeant comparing notes about this latest terrorist attack.
Behind us, the emergency team had doused the cars, and a truck came to carry the wreckage away. The show had ended. The rest of the crowd would soon head back to work.
“How many more of you are there?” Illych asked.
“Just me. I came alone.”
Illych looked at me and nodded. “This is a switch,” he said. “Now you’re in the Navy, and I’m the grunt Marine.”
“Is there anyplace we can talk?” I asked.
“Sure,” Illych said. “I’ll show you my new digs.”
“What happened?” A man in an army uniform came jogging toward us.
“Another bomb,” Illych said.
“Did they get anything?”
“Couple of cars.” Illych laughed. “I don’t know why those bastards bother.” There was a bitter edge to his voice.
“Damn. I hope they get that guy,” the man said.
“Yeah, don’t we all,” Illych agreed.
“Why cars?” I asked, as the army man walked past us to gawk at the latest terrorist attack.
“Harris, I attached the bomb to the building behind the cars. You cannot hurt these buildings.
“Remember when you said that the Mogats lowered the shields on that battleship? They have the same thing going on down here. Bombs and mines don’t hurt these buildings. I’ve tried particle beams. I’ve tried grenades. I’ve tried rockets. The buildings have some kind of shield on their outer walls. Nothing gets through.”
Illych led me several miles across the milita
ry sector. We left the admin area far behind, entering a neighborhood of warehouses and motor pools. He gave me a running commentary as if he had lived in the city all his life. He knew which motor pool had the latest equipment and which ones had lazy mechanics.
“How do you know all of this?” I asked.
“Word gets around” is all he would say.
The phosphorus layer in the sky was turning dark by the time we reached Illych’s “digs.” He’d found himself a small armory with enough weapons to wage a tribal war. He had rifles, rocket launchers, Jeeps, and a particle-beam cannon.
“How in the world did you secure these premises?” I asked, trying to talk Marine-colonel talk.
“I killed the former occupants,” he said.
“No one comes looking for them?” I asked.
“An MP came by. I told him that the guys never showed for work.”
“And that was it? The Marines never followed up?”
“Harris, as far as the Marines are concerned, the old guys went AWOL and everything else is running right. I work the desk. If someone wants to requisition a Jeep or a tractor, I give them the paperwork and issue the equipment.” He handed me the inventory chart. Over the weeks that he had been here, Illych received shipments of uniforms, machine parts, and munitions. He logged everything.
“Very thorough,” I said. “You expecting an inspection?”
“Luck favors the prepared, sir,” Illych said.
“Lose the ‘sir,’” I said. “They busted me back down to master sergeant.”
“How does it feel to be back among the ranks of the enlisted?” Illych asked.
“I like it,” I said. “I always felt embarrassed when people saluted me.”
The Clone Alliance Page 21