get demoted, and thinking of you as a colonel makes me feel better about the boys with bars and clusters.
“So, can I buy you a drink, Colonel?”
“How do you feel about doubling up?” I asked.
“Doubling up?”
We were in the administrative offices of the Golan Dry Docks. The polished plastic floor showed our reflection as cleanly as any mirror. The white walls gleamed under the bright fluorescent lights. The halls ran as far as the eye could see. Men in pressed uniforms and men in business suits, natural-borns all, walked the floor.
At the end of the hall was a sight that seemed incongruous in these polished premises. Thirty-six men in Marine tans stood loitering near an elevator. Everyone around them moved silently and efficiently. The boys joked in loud voices and laughed like drunks.
“I promised to take my boys out. You mind drinking with a bunch of Leatherneck clones?”
“Can I bring my SEALs?”
“We’ll drink with them if they’ll drink with us,” I said.
Illych gave me a rare smile. “I’ll get them.”
“Did you have to invite them SEALs?” Philips asked as he watched Illych and his SEALs enter the bar. “Those boys give me the willies.” Philips sat on a stool with his back to the bar. He held his beer in his right hand and leaned back on his left elbow.
“They should scare you,” I said. “Those ‘boys’ are death dressed in a Navy uniform.”
The bar was big and dim with brass lamps and lots of mirrors. Along the walls were models of the many different spacecrafts designed in this facility. Behind the bar, three bartenders in white shirts and red vests sorted through shelves of odd-shaped bottles.
This was a businessman’s bar. People came here to talk, not to drink. Soft music rolled from the speakers.
“Do they make you nervous?” Philips asked.
“Not especially. Not as much as you do,” I lied.
In truth, Philips would be more dangerous than the SEALs in most battlefield situations. He had absolutely no fear of dying. He could shoot as well as any man I knew, and he did not hesitate when it came to pulling the trigger. With his temperament, Philips would have washed out of recon training, but he knew how to carry himself on the battlefield.
“Shit, Master Sarge, you’re embarrassing me,” Philips said as he downed the rest of his beer. He immediately turned around and asked the bartender for another one.
I’d known men who preferred hard drinks or insisted on Earth-brewed beers. Not Philips. The man held no pretensions. He wanted his drinks cheap and fast and plentiful.
Thomer came to join us just as Illych and his company arrived.
“Are we still invited?” Illych asked as he strolled up.
There was something I noticed about Illych and his strain of clone—they all had an inferiority complex. They seemed to think that no one could like them.
When I first met them, the SEALs’ quiet mannerisms impressed me as independence. Later I amended that and thought they were introverts. Now I realized that they considered themselves somehow beneath the rest of society, even other clones.
“It’s an open bar,” Philips said, waving his beer to show the mostly empty tavern. “Pull up a seat.”
“I’m Kelly Thomer. Most folks just call me Thomer,” Thomer said, reaching out to shake Illych’s hand.
“Emerson Illych,” Illych said.
Thomer broke the ice with his easy style. The SEALs fell in around us, trying to start up conversations, then letting the Marines do most of the talking. Just watching them I knew these boys had demons that vexed them. When they stood on friendly soil, the Boyd clones reminded me of lonely children. If any of my Marines paid for another drink that night, I would have been surprised. The SEALs gladly caught the tabs and offered to buy more.
“You the one that went off to that Mogat planet?” Philips asked Illych.
“Illych, this is Philips,” I said.
Illych listened to me and nodded, then turned to Philips. “Mogatopolis.”
“Mogatopolis?” I asked. “Official name?”
“That’s what we’re calling it,” Illych said.
“You couldn’t come up with anything better than Mogatopolis?” Philips asked
“Can you come up with something better?” Illych asked.
Philips thought for a moment. “You could call it Planetary Home of Morgan.”
“That’s better?” Illych asked.
“Planet HomeMo for short,” Philips said.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Illych said. There it was again, the revulsion to vulgarity. The revulsion had to have been programmed into his brain, just like vulgarity was tattooed onto Philips’s supposedly nonexistent soul.
“It beats the hell out of Mogatopolis,” Philips said. He knocked down another beer and excused himself to go “siphon the pond.”
I laughed when Philips said that, but Illych did not even smile. He stood in silence as Philips walked to the bathroom.
“Don’t be so hard on him,” I said.
“He’s a clown,” Illych said. He changed the subject. “Did you look around that battleship?”
“Which one, the wreck or the one we flew back?” I asked.
“Both?”
“Sure. Are we talking about anything in particular?” I asked.
“The engine rooms are completely different,” Illych said. “The one we brought home only has one broadcast engine. Did you notice that?”
“I didn’t look,” I admitted.
“Did you know that we’ve had run-ins with the Mogats in all six arms now?” Illych asked. “They’ve lost a ship in every fight. They’ve lost four in the Orion Arm.”
“They lost a lot more than that around Earth,” I said.
“No,” Illych said, “I mean over the last three weeks.” Illych drank gin, not beer. He took long, slow sips that lasted for seconds. Watching him closely, I had the feeling he was not very interested in his drink.
“Do you know who Yoshi Yamashiro is?” I asked.
“The governor of Shin Nippon,” Illych said.
I had not expected him to know Yamashiro. “He thinks they are purposely scuttling those ships to set up a communications network.”
“Did I miss anything?” Philips asked as he rejoined us.
“We were just talking about Mogat battleships,” I said. I could tell by the way Illych tightened up that he did not want to continue the conversation in front of Philips. They were polar opposites, those two. Illych was quiet, thoughtful, and very calculated. Philips let his whims make his decisions. Illych spoke in a hushed voice and never swore. Philips swore and could not manage a whisper. That they should not trust each other seemed inevitable.
I decided to show Illych what he would never have guessed about Private Mark Philips. “Philips, you were on both Mogat ships.”
“Both ships? You mean the sucker we sank and the one we stole?”
I nodded. “Did you see any differences between them?”
“You mean besides the forty-foot laser gash on the bottom of the dead one?”
“Yeah, besides that,” I said.
“Not outside of the engine room,” Philips said. “But the engine rooms were completely different.” He went on to describe the two broadcast engines and the special shielding around the working engine on the derelict ship.
Illych listened to this and nodded, looking impressed. “I noticed the same things. Do you have any theories about the differences?”
