Rogue clone (4 page)

The man wore a radio clipped into his collar. As he knelt down to see the crushed shrub, he whispered into the radio. “Send a team. Full gear. We might have something.”

Now that they had located a promising spot, the firemen ushered Jimmy Callahan and me away as they did serious excavation. They placed jacks and lifts under that beam, which must have weighed a good five tons.

“You think anyone is alive down there?” Callahan asked as two burley rescue workers wrestled a large ultrasonic cannon over to their dig. By this time it was late at night. Now that the helicopters had cleared the streets, fire engines and ambulances could drive right up to the buildings. The firemen placed tripods with spotlights around the dig. The spotlights were tiny, about the size and shape of a coffee cup, but their beams could be seen from twenty miles away.

We stood huddled at the front of a crowd that had gathered just behind the lights. Somebody had handed Callahan a blanket and a cup of coffee. His clothes were torn and bloody from the dig. He had wiped his cut up hands on his shirt and pants, and the dust and blood made him look like he had been in the heart of the explosion.

“I’ve never seen anyone pulled out alive,” I said. I supposed that they probably did find survivors sometimes, but I had never seen it happen.

The rescue team’s ultrasonic cannon reduced rock and glass to powder. If they fired it at the marble beam that stretched across their dig, they could destroy it, but that was not their goal. With the jacks supporting its weight, that beam now acted as a roof over their dig, protecting any survivors buried beneath.

The ultrasonic cannon fired sound waves that passed through liquid, air, and wood. You could fire it into a pond without bothering the fish, but the rocks in the pond would disintegrate. It did not hurt people. The shock waves from the ultrasonic cannons did not affect plastic or steel, but they reduced stone to dust.

The firemen used the cannon to clear a three-feet deep crevice under the beam. Two rescuers lugged a stiff, wide-bore hose into the hole. The hose was almost a full yard in diameter with some kind of cage in its opening.

“What is that?” Callahan asked.

I’d never seen anything like it and did not answer.

“Stand clear,” one of the men with the cannon shouted, and the other rescue workers backed away from the site. There was so much dust in the air that I could watch the shock wave as it fired from the cannon. It looked like a pattern of ripples as it passed through the airborne dust. There was a soft sound, not unlike the sound made by a quick shake of a baby’s rattle, and suddenly the rubble beneath that gigantic hose compressed into a powder that was finer than sand. The hose sucked the dust up. A fireman with a tow cord strung around his waist walked up to the crevice left by the hose. He stared down into it for a moment. The man wore an oxygen mask over his face and held a crowbar in one hand. Another fireman approached and handed him something small that he tucked in his belt. “You ready, Greg?” the second fireman asked as he patted the first one’s shoulder. The fireman wrapped his hands around the cord, turned so his back was toward the hole, and rappelled out of sight. A moment later his voice echoed over multiple radios. “I found one. It’s a woman.”

“Condition?” a man on the fire engine asked.

“Alive.” The crowd around me cheered. Jimmy Callahan rocked back and forth on the soles of his feet blowing warm breath nervously into badly gashed hands.

Two more firemen lowered themselves into the hole. Someone handed a stretcher down to them as a fire engine and an ambulance drew just a few feet away. The fire engine extended a ladder over the hole and dropped a winch to the firemen. Tense silence followed. Then the rope tightened. Most people cheered and a few even cried as the winch raised the stretcher from the hole. Two medics received that stretcher. They detached the cord from the stretcher and pulled the woman into the back of their ambulance. In less than one minute, they loaded her, sealed up their rig, and sped away into the darkness. Another ambulance immediately filled the vacancy.

The rescue workers found seventy-six people in that one area—sixty-two were alive. Tommy and Eddie were alive. As the explosions had come closer, they had crawled under a table and made it out virtually untouched. Tommy had a badly broken jaw. Eddie’s knee was shattered. Both of those injuries were my doing. The explosion barely scratched them.

I was glad Jimmy Callahan’s boys were alive. Callahan was going to need all the help he could get. He had some powerful enemies. Considering the devastation that I had just seen, I doubted that “Silent”

Tommy and “Limping” Eddie could protect Callahan from much of anything.

How to describe Ray Freeman?

Freeman stood over seven feet tall. When he walked through a crowd, other men came up to his chest. His hands were so large that he could bury your face in his palm and plug your ears with his thumb and little finger.

Every inch of him was sinew . . . no gawky limbs on Freeman. He had a large head, heavily muscled arms, and shoulders so wide that he had to move sideways through narrow doors. His body was hard and cylindrical, his waist being nearly as wide as his chest, and all of it muscle. In the galactic melting pot of the frontier, race meant nothing. Terms like African, Caucasian, and Oriental were obsolete. The population was so intermarried that the physical characteristics could no longer be matched to specific races. In the cosmopolitan collective of the territories, Ray Freeman stood out. He was a black man, a man of African descent born centuries after that Earth continent had been turned into the galaxy’s most prestigious zoological exhibit.

Freeman’s skin was such a dark shade of brown that it almost looked charcoal. Looking into Ray Freeman’s far-set eyes was like staring down the muzzle of a double-barreled shotgun. Utterly ruthless, he was the most intimidating man in the galaxy. He was my partner.

Two years earlier, when I limped out of the ambush on Ravenwood Station barely alive, Ray Freeman rescued me. He placed my helmet beside the remains of Corporal Arlind Marsten, staging my death, then carried me out of Ravenwood. Instead of wearing dog tags, U.A. Marines wore helmets with virtual identifiers. Placing my helmet next to Marsten’s remains was tantamount to changing our identities. Since we were both clones, no one would think of checking our DNA.

Now Freeman and I were in business together, freelance bounty hunters.

“I hear there was some action on New Columbia,” Freeman said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I was in the middle of it. You seeing much?” He was on Providence, an evacuated planet in the Cygnus Arm—one of the renegade arms. We were speaking over the mediaLink. He was using a communications console with a camera so I could see him.

“Have a look,” Freeman said, and then he stepped away from the camera to give me a panoramic view of downtown Jasper, the capital city of Providence. The streets were completely empty. The only cars were parked along the curb. No children playing. No pedestrians. Everyone had fled the city.

“What time is it over there?” I asked.

“Nighttime,” Freeman said. Providence was indeed dark, but the streets were lit.

“Do the streetlights turn on automatically?” I asked.

“Yes.” That was my partner, a man of few syllables.

“So is anybody left in the city?” I asked.

“Looters,” he said. “Even the guerillas are gone.”

The people leading the Cygnus Arm had declared independence without considering the consequences. They had no Navy of their own. The U.A. Navy had two fleets patrolling their space and the Cygnus Arm military complex had no way of fighting those U.A. ships. When one of those fleets had entered Providence’s solar system, the only thing the Cygnus government could do was assemble an armada of unarmed commercial spacecraft or evacuate the planet.

“Is it safe for you to be on New Columbia?” Freeman asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Is it safe for you to be on Providence?”

“No one knows I’m here,” Freeman said. The question he left hanging was, “Was that bombing aimed at you?”

“Fair enough,” I admitted. “My flight leaves in a couple of hours. Maybe you should do the same . . . get out of Jasper before the troops arrive.”

Freeman responded with his “get real” glare—a deadpan expression, a slight narrowing of the eyes, and a barely perceptible shrug of the shoulders.

“I met a guy who says he can find Crowley,” I said.

“I’m listening,” Freeman said. His voice was so quiet and filled with base tones that you almost felt it as much as heard it. It was the sound of distant thunder or cannons firing a half-mile away.

“Guy’s name is Jimmy Callahan. He’s a local who bags supplies and runs deals for the Mogats,” I said.

“Did he say that before or after the bombs went off?” Freeman asked.

“About the same time,” I said. “Callahan and I were negotiating.”

“Do you think the bombs were aimed at you?” Freeman asked, not so much as a speck of concern in his voice.

“At him,” I said. “It was Billy the Butcher, one of Callahan’s clients.”

“Where is Callahan now?” Freeman asked. “We need to put him someplace safe and sit on him.”

“He’s in the brig at Fort Washington along with two of his bodyguards.” In my mind I added,
for
whatever good that does him
. Fort Washington was the local Marine base. Safe Harbor was a well-fortified city. The Marines, Army, and Air Force all had bases there.

“You stashed him in the Marine base?” Freeman asked.

“Admiral Klyber sent for me. I figure the Marines can keep him till I can come back.”

Freeman and I were partners, but we came to the business from different angles. I worked as an errand boy, mostly for Fleet Admiral Bryce Klyber, the highest-ranking man in the Navy and my personal benefactor. Freeman was more of the lone wolf type. As far as I could tell, he had no connection to anybody.

Freeman’s camera shook as a bomb or a shell exploded somewhere near him. “I’d better go,” he said.

“That might be the people I came to see.”

I had already stayed too long in Safe Harbor, not that anybody was looking for me. Having skeletons like the ones I had hiding in my closet meant that you could never settle down. For openers, I was absent without leave from the Marine Corps. Well, thanks to Freeman I had supposedly died in battle, but if the Marine Corps knew I was alive, they would list me as absent without leave. And I had even more damning skeletons than that.

I drove my rental car to the commercial spaceport, a sprawling complex that was one part runway, one part passenger terminal, and two parts parking lot. Just finding the building to return the rental took half an hour. The search ended on a ten-story spiral rampway in which each floor was occupied by a different car rental agency.

An attendant pointed me toward a lane filled with a line of parked cars. There would be no paperwork. The car registered its own return, measured its fuel level, reported its own condition, and then issued an electronic receipt to Arlind Marsten, the “missing in action” Marine Corporal who received my helmet on Ravenwood. The police should have arrested Marsten or me when I returned the car, but friends in high places had already made certain that would not happen.

Since Marsten and I were both clones and one clone is supposedly indistinguishable from the next, the personal identifiers in our helmets were the only way the military could tell us apart. That was the theory. In truth, I was not identical to Marsten. He and I came from different batches. My form of clone, the Liberators, had a dark history. Most people believed that the Senate had outlawed my kind. It wasn’t true, by the way. They only banned us from entering the Orion Arm—the arm I was currently in. I was a one-of-a-kind clone, an oxymoronic descriptor if ever there was one. By the time I dropped off the assembly line, my kind had been out of production for nearly thirty years because of our violent tendencies. I did not want to advertise this to the good people of New Columbia. Prosperous and located in the all-important Orion Arm, New Columbia attracted tourists and businesses from around the galaxy. Its spaceport was the size of a small town with ten times the population. Police and military guards kept the tides of people flowing efficiently enough. If they only knew what kind of shark had swum in with their minnows. I passed the queue for baggage. During my years in the military I learned to live light and travel lighter. I spent four days in Safe Harbor, two more days than I expected. Everything I brought fit in a small briefcase that I could carry on my lap. From New Columbia I would fly to Mars, the galaxy’s biggest spaceport. Once on Mars, I would either receive my next assignment or I would find a hotel room and rest until my next job arrived—I didn’t care which.

Assignments meant money, but it also meant fighting for the good old Unified Authority. I didn’t really mind having bombs explode around me. Even when an assignment meant risking my life to save a worthless punk like Jimmy Callahan, I preferred it to lounging around some hotel. I could not help myself, it was in my neural programming.

I enjoyed the study of philosophy, politics, and intergalactic relations, but only as they applied to combat. I was designed for battle, and a soldier was all I could be. I was screwed. I went to the gate to wait for my flight, which would leave in another three hours. I cherished short breaks like this. It was the long ones that drove me crazy.

I put on my mediaLink shades, streamline glasses with retinal displays built into their hinges. Lasers painted images on my retinal tissue, opening a world of books, magazines, and video feeds. I could play games, watch movies, write letters, or catch up on the news. On this particular day, I decided to read. My favorite reading was ethical philosophy. At the time, I was reading
The Complete Works of Spinoza

. Spinoza argued that men could not feel love, desire, or passion without already having a germ of that emotion within them. It was an interesting concept that was especially true of military clones. Our loyalty was programmed into us. We loved the government that made us. Even when we realized that the government hated our kind, we still loved it. Even when we hated the government back, we remained loyal.