“Get all of the assassins to come after you.”
“Very clever, sir,” I said.
“You always were a lightning rod for trouble,” Klyber said. “When I sent you to Gobi on your first assignment to hide you from some Liberators, a Mogat general found you instead.”
“Hazards of the career,” I said. “Marines and mercenaries get shot at. It comes with the pay.”
“And you always survive,” Klyber said. “Extraordinary.” I had lacerations just under my left eye. Bruises covered my chin and cheeks and one side of my face was swollen. Admiral Klyber watched as I buttoned my blouse over my bandaged ribs, and his smile faded.
“Are they after you or after me?” he asked.
“Without you,” I said, “there’s no reason to go after me.”
“I suppose not,” Klyber said, now looking a bit gray.
“But look on the bright side,” I said. “If this is the best they can do with three gunmen and a grenade, by the time they get to you they might run out of ammunition.”
Klyber smiled. “Thanks,” he said. “I feel better.”
Golan security arranged for my new room, complete with guards posted outside the door. I was a bodyguard with bodyguards. In short, I was useless. When I finished stowing my gear, I put on my mediaLink and contacted Ray Freeman.
“So much for traveling as Arlind Marsten,” Freeman said when I finished telling him about my day.
“Yes,” I said. “Corporal Marsten can finally rest in peace. As far as I’m concerned, Huang did me a favor. Now I can come and go freely. I don’t have to worry about guards finding out that I’m a Liberator every time I pass through security stations anymore. They’ll know, and they’ll know that I’m legal.
“Thanks to Huang, I can carry my gun in public. The head of security asked me how many men I need. Hell, he even upgraded my room.”
I was lying on a bed with a queen-sized mattress covered by a blue and white quilt. My room in the Dry Docks dormitory looked like a suite for important executives. My bedroom included a media center with a holographic screen and there was a separate office with a desk and reference shelf. The setup included a wet bar complete with liquor and tumblers, an ice maker, a sink and three stools. Having grown up in an orphanage and spent most of my life living in barracks, this was a lifestyle I had never imagined.
“What does Klyber have to say about Huang?” Freeman asked.
“He’s got other things on his mind,” I said. “He’s going to tell the Joint Chiefs about his ship tomorrow.” Klyber built the
“Will you be there when he makes the announcement?” Freeman asked.
“I’m not allowed in. Only top brass gets in that room.”
“No guards? No wonder Klyber’s nervous,” Freeman said.
“It’s all top brass,” I said. “He’s with civilized company.”
“They stabbed Caesar to death on the floor of the Senate,” Freeman said, giving a historical reference I would never have guessed him to know. “Caesar thought he was in civilized company, too.”
Freeman would not have learned about Caesar from the works of Shakespeare. War and the engines of death interested him, not literature. I thought about this for a moment and decided that Klyber would be safe enough on the floor of the summit. It was out of my control, anyway. Once Klyber entered the conference room, there was nothing I could do.
“You flying back with Klyber after the summit?” Freeman asked, ending my chain of thought.
“Nope,” I said. “My job is to get him from his transport to the meeting, and from the meeting to the transport.”
“Think you will see Huang at the meeting tomorrow?” Freeman asked.
“Yeah, I need to thank him for the swank accommodations,” I said. I sounded more confident than I felt. Huang, never hid his hate of all clones, especially Liberators. All clones, except his own top secret model. Before initiating the attack on Little Man, Huang transferred every last Liberator in the Unified Authority military to the invading force. If he wanted me dead, sooner or later he would succeed.
“How did Huang’s office know you were headed to Golan?” Freeman asked. “Who told them about you?” His low voice reminded me of distant gunfire. His flat expression conveyed no emotion. If he were a poker player, no one would read his bluffs. But Ray Freeman did not trouble himself with card games. That would be far too social an activity for him.
“I’ve got a pretty good idea.” Half of Klyber’s senior staff officers had arrived the day before. I checked the manifest. Captain Leonid Johansson was among them.
“Don’t jump to any conclusions,” Freeman said after a long moment of thought. “Those weren’t Huang’s men in your room. He could have let you rot in jail if he wanted to hurt you.”
I was about to sign off when Freeman changed the subject. “What do you know about Little Man?”
“The battle or the movie?” I asked, trying to sound smarter than I felt.
“The planet,” Freeman said.
I had only seen a hundred-mile strip of the planet at tops—just a straight swatch from the beach where we landed to the valley in which we fought the battle. Before landing, we had a briefing. I tried to remember what the briefing officer had said. “It’s a fully habitable planet,” I said. “Well, not fully habitable. That valley where the Mogat ship crashed is plenty hot.”
“Hot as in radioactive?” Freeman asked.
“As in highly radioactive. You wouldn’t want to go anywhere near there. Every place else should be OK. Why do you want to know about Little Man?”
“My family is moving there.”
It never occurred to me that Freeman had a family. I thought of him as a freak of nature …like me, the last clone of his kind. “Your family? A wife and kids?”
“My parents and my sister.”
“What are they doing on Little Man?”
“Colonizing,” Freeman said.
“Colonizing?”
“They’re neo-Baptist,” Freeman said.
“Which means? Why are the neo-Baptists colonizing Little Man?”
“The neo-Baptists want to establish colonies, like the Catholics.”
“And they got permission to land on Little Man?” I asked.
“Does it matter?” Freeman asked.
“It matters,” I said. “That planet is in the Scutum-Crux Arm …one of the hostile arms. If the U.A. finds them, they’ll think it’s a Mogat colony. That was why we went to Little Man in the first place …to kill Mogats. The planet is listed as uninhabited, and the last I heard, Congress wanted to keep it that way.”
Freeman did not like long conversations. This current conversation was epic by his standards. We spoke for another minute or two, then signed off.
I lay in bed thinking about what he’d said. Freeman was right. Why would Huang spring me from the brig, then send a trio of goons after me? It made no sense.
Before falling asleep, I browsed the news. U.A. forces had claimed another three planets in the Cygnus Arm, including Providence. During the last week, they had claimed control of five planets in the Perseus Arm, four planets in Norma, and one in Scutum-Crux.
“These are all outlying planets,” an Army spokesman told news analysts. He gave a cautious spin on the latest events. “The insurgents tend to evacuate them before our troops arrive. The fighting should be much more fierce as we approach more settled territory.”
What he was not saying was that the Navy could easily have obliterated the insurgents’ transports. That was the problem with winning a civil war. Sooner or later you had to repatriate the enemy, and you didn’t want the sons of bitches to hold a grudge.
