The Clone Alliance

Here is how I contacted Yoshi Yamashiro. On the appointed night, I went to Dulles Spaceport, boarded the transport, and sent out a kind of signal known as a virtual beacon. All very-low-tech mundane stuff. Sending a virtual beacon was the military equivalent of passing notes in school.

The beacon contained three words: “red light, go.”

Let the clowns in Intelligence try to decipher the message. In this case, the medium was the message. Yamashiro and I agreed that it would not matter what message the beacon carried. What mattered was that I sent out the beacon at all. When the communications officer on the Sakura located a beacon on that frequency, no matter what it said, he would tell Yamashiro to send an envoy to Washington, DC.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I did not hear about Yamashiro landing in Washington, DC, until four days after he arrived. Gordon Hughes, “Wild Bill” Grace, and an honor guard met his transport as it landed. What an entrance for a man who until recently was considered an enemy of the republic. Soldiers with flags, an honor guard with guns, and the two most powerful men in the galaxy all waited for Yamashiro at the bottom of the ramp as he stepped out of the transport.

A few months earlier those same soldiers and weapons would have stood in a firing squad had Yamashiro shown his face. Apparently returning to the scene of the crime with four self-broadcasting battleships covered up a multitude of sins in the political game of “What have you done for me lately?”

That was a ceremony to which I received no invitation. Lowly sergeants did not, as a rule, attend diplomatic functions. Whether Brocius or somebody else made the decision, I was recalled to active service as a master gunnery sergeant. That meant that my men would likely call me “Master Guns.” I hated that nickname. A few smart-asses might call me “Master Blaster.”

Fortunes of war.

When I asked Admiral Brocius about the rank, he gazed at me and asked in a voice drenched with boredom, “Not high enough for you?” He spoke with the sort of menacing civility that officers often pull when they wish to put enlisted men in their place. Every admiral I had ever met could use that voice; I suppose they learned it at the academy.

“Last time I checked, I was a colonel. That’s one hell of a demotion,” I said.

“Welcome back,” Brocius said with a grin that dared me to challenge him. Then, as a consolation, he said, “Look, Harris, there are no other clone officers in the…”

“What about the Little Man Seven?” I asked. I did not normally interrupt admirals in midsentence, but six other clones who survived the battle on Little Man had been bootstrapped. I cared about them. They came from my platoon.

“Yes, I thought you might ask that, so I hedged my bets. Dealer’s odds, right, Harris?” Brocius pulled a sheet of paper from his drawer and scanned it.

“Four of your pals died when the Mogat Fleet attacked Earth. Three of them were on the Doctrinaire. One was on a frigate called the McDermott.

“One of your pals died during routine exercises in the Norma Arm.

“Now here’s the interesting one. Lieutenant Vincent Lee was assigned to the Grant. The Scutum-Crux Fleet sent that carrier to investigate reports of squatters on Little Man. The Grant set out just before the Mogats downed the Broadcast Network. Fleet Command originally presumed that the ship was trapped in space, but we have never been able to locate her.

“No one knows what became of the Grant.”

I knew what became of Vince Lee and the Grant, but I knew better than to offer that information.

“The truth be told, Harris, it doesn’t matter what rank we give you. Every officer around you is going to know that you are the one calling the shots when it comes to you and your platoon.

“What I need is for you to keep doing what you have been doing. You got a man into Mogat space. Now I want you to find some way for us to get a whole platoon there. You got me, Harris? I want to turn this whole war around so that the chips start to fall in our favor.”

In truth, I didn’t mind being bucked down to sergeant. I actually felt more comfortable around enlisted men than officers. As a boy growing up in U.A. Orphanage #553, my highest aspiration in life had been to make sergeant.

I offered token resistance, then accepted my new life among the conscripts. I remained on the Navy base outside Washington, DC, until further orders arrived, my career entering a two-week period of almost-cryogenic stasis. I had no duties and no assignments.

I spent a lot of time lying around and watching current events on my mediaLink shades. Time wasted. Without the Broadcast Network, the only galactic information the analysts could find came stripped down, prepackaged, and fully spun from the government. The general population had no idea about the attack on the Outer Perseus Fleet. The only events the public heard about were ones that occurred on Earth.

Most political news came in the form of feel-good stories about the Unified Authority restoring its natural glory. “Troop readiness is at an all-time high,” “Wild Bill” Grace said in a State of the Republic address. Members of the Linear Committee met with key senators to discuss opening several new orphanages. Construction could start any day, but it never did. A new shipyard was under construction orbiting Earth. The global stock exchange rebounded nicely after a lackluster week. The Seattle Mariners, the oldest and winningest sports organization in the galaxy, looked like a shoo-in to win its fifth straight Galactic Series. There was no news from space and no hint that Washington, DC, was in contact with the fleets of its former enemies.

I switched off the mediaLink shades that had come with my room and pulled out a disposable pair I’d purchased with my hundred-dollar winnings. The disposables came with a temporary account that I set up under the name Arlind Marsten—an alias I used during my two years away from the Marines. This would not stop Naval Intelligence or any other organization from tapping into my calls, but it might lull them into thinking I was trying to get around them. Using an optical command, I punched in the code that I wanted to call.

“Hello?” the voice asked cautiously. It was the voice of a little girl.

“How is life on the lam?” I asked.

“Who is this?” the girl asked.

The voice was young and innocent, but the inflections were incongruent. They made her sound indifferent.

“Cut the shit,” I said. Then I added, “All of the Intelligence agencies have computerized receivers that see right through voice masking.”

“Did they recall you yet?” Freeman asked. He continued to use the voice mask, making him sound like an eight-year-old girl. Try as I might, I could not envision the seven-foot hulking giant on the other end of that voice.

“Yeah. I’m a sergeant. How’s that for a demotion? They haven’t told me where I’m going to be stationed.”

Freeman did not respond. A moment later, he asked, “Has Yamashiro shown up yet?”

“Yeah, he arrived a couple of days ago. I only heard about it this afternoon. I don’t know how the negotiations are going. I wasn’t invited.”

“You expected an invitation?” the little girl’s voice asked.

“Did you hear about the Outer Perseus Fleet?” I asked. Freeman said no, so I told him what Brocius had told me, then followed by telling him about my visit to the Mogat ship. I told him every last high-security detail, including the part about the working broadcast engine.

Freeman listened carefully, then changed the subject. “The Mogats have a base near Washington. It’s an old brownstone mansion in Chevy Chase.”