loves the light when he finds a way out. Klyber was kind to me. He protected me. In the end, though, he saw me as a way of justifying his career. I was not a son to him, not even a colleague.
Admiral Klyber wanted to use me to clear his name. History remembered Liberator clones as brutal and uncontrollable killers. Klyber’s agenda was simple. He wanted to remind the people that his Liberators had saved the Republic. I wasn’t a person to Bryce Klyber, I was a means to an end. Perhaps that was all any person was to another—a means to an end. Certainly the synthetic population was a means for helping natural-borns achieve certain ends.
God, I had to fly somewhere. All of this introspection had to be a sign of depression, but it felt nice to be alone with time to reflect. I needed to sort my feelings and figure out my future.
Sitting in a self-broadcasting ship, I realized that I had many options. I could fly anywhere. Klyber had only loaned me the Starliner; but now that he was gone, I considered the touring ship mine. With Klyber out of the picture, where could I return it? I could not bring myself to join the other side. I might have been able to bend my programming enough to ditch the Unified Authority Marines, but I could not even consider joining the Mogats or the Confederates. And the truth was, I liked the Mogats and the Confederate Arms even less than the Republic.
Unified Authority officers may have considered clones no more valuable than any other supply; but the Mogats equated clones with U.A. bullets—lethal tools of the enemy. The Unified Authority may have banned my kind from entering the Orion Arm, but the Mogats would exterminate me.
The one thing I knew I wanted was revenge. Father or creator, friend or manipulator, Klyber died on my watch. He trusted me and I failed. My job had been to get him off the ship, through the conference, and back on his C-64 transport alive. By the letter of my contract, I succeeded, but that did not make me feel any better. And the truth was, even after all of my tough talk, when I shut my eyes and thought about the people I cared about, Fleet Admiral Bryce Klyber was the first person to come to mind.
Letting my mind wander, I donned my mediaLink shades to check my mail.
With Bryce Klyber out of the way, there was no one stopping Admiral Huang from hunting me down. On the other hand …
I had a private message from somebody named Clarence McAvoy. The name meant nothing to me until I noticed the sender’s address: Golan Dry Docks Security. Until that moment, I had never stopped to think of him as anything more than “the colonel,” just a cog in the Dry Docks security works. As I thought about this, I realized the way I considered the people around me was not all that different than the way so many officers viewed clones.
With a couple of quick optical commands, I cued the file McAvoy sent and watched the video record.
A team of five technicians passed through the security gates outside the hangar. Each presented identification cards at the desk. Each man passed through a set of security posts, submitting himself to DNA profiling.
One of the men was short—no more than five feet tall—and mostly bald with a ring of sandy blond hair. The man wore the jumper of a janitor—a dirty number with short sleeves that ended just beyond the elbow. The suit looked loose around his compact, wiry physique. His exposed forearms had incredible muscle tone. And there was something else, not that I needed it to identify this man. The edge of a colorful forearm brantoo poked out of his sleeve.
I recognized this brantoo—it was the emblem of the Navy SEALS. It was a wheel with six spokes, each spoke tinted a different color. This was a crude map of the six arms of the Milky Way. Every SEAL had it brantooed on his forearm.
But this man wasn’t just a Navy SEAL. This was an “Adam Boyd” clone. These were special clones from a highly-classified operation under the personal direction of Admiral Che Huang. No need to worry about anybody recognizing this guy. For the most part, the only people who saw Boyd clones in action were Marines who had very little time to live.
Ravenwood, the outpost where I had supposedly died, was a training ground for Adam Boyd clones. Huang assigned platoons of forty-two Marines to defend the outpost on Ravenwood, then sent ten-man assault teams of Adam Boyd SEALS to kill them. I was the only Marine who ever escaped.
In the video feed, the Adam Boyd clone stepped through the posts without a moment’s hesitation. A guard put up a hand to stop him, and the midget smirked up at him with a look of pure disdain.
Using an optic command I stopped the video feed and brought up the clone’s identification badge. “Name: Adam Boyd. Title: Maintenance, Sixth Detail. Security Clearance: All Levels. Years with company: Five.”
The guard said something that was not picked up by the security camera. The Adam Boyd clone answered satisfactorily, and he was allowed to pass. The maintenance team cleared the security station then entered and cleaned each of the ships parked on the high-security deck, including Admiral Klyber’s C-64.
I watched this scene with a mixture of prurient interest and utter awe. The maintenance team stepped into transports belonging to each member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Had he wanted to, that little Boyd bastard could have blown up the entire hierarchy of the U.A. military.
Once the Boyd clone left Klyber’s C-64, I rewound the file and watched him enter the transport a second time. Then I rewound and watched it again in slow motion. I looked for any sign of the copper cable. I timed how long it took him to enter and leave. I noted that the Boyd entered Klyber’s ship three minutes before any of the other workers. He was on the ship for eighteen minutes and thirty-two seconds. He carried a small box of tools as he boarded the ship and brought the same box out. He could have easily smuggled a short length of cable in that box.
After watching that clone enter and leave the transport two more times, I finally allowed the video feed to play to its end. What I saw at the end hurt the most.
The security camera followed the maintenance team as it left the transport and then the landing area. They walked through the security gate. There, standing just inside the gate on almost the exact same spot where I would see him later that evening, stood Tom Halverson dressed like a civilian.
He leaned with his back against the wall, smoking a cigarette. For a moment he seemed to ignore the maintenance crew. Then he saw the Boyd clone. His eyes locked on the little clone as he continued his smoke. Once the maintenance men walked by, Halverson tossed his cigarette aside and fell in behind them, remaining a few steps back as they walked down the hall and disappeared from the screen.
“Why aren’t you at the summit meeting?” I asked Halverson as he appeared in my mediaLink shades. Then it occurred to me. Why should he stay at the meeting? He was Huang’s man. His job was to oversee the sabotage of Klyber’s ship.
Expecting simply to leave a message, I used my shades to place a call to the colonel’s office. He took the call.
“Harris?” Colonel McAvoy’s face appeared in my shades.
“Colonel, I got your message. Thank you for sending the video feed.”
“Did you find anything?”
“Did you watch the feed all the way through?” I asked.
“Sure,” the colonel said. “I thought you might find the last few moments especially enlightening. We’ve searched the Dry Docks. Halverson isn’t here. My guess is that he had another identity programmed into our computers and left using a false ID. I don’t suppose you approve of officers using false identification codes,
