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,
“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
