He’d been my pilot for nearly a year, making him one of my oldest friends on Terraneau; but until this conversation, I’d only known him as “my pilot.” We’d flown missions in which we both nearly died, and I didn’t even know his name. Was it because he was a clone? Had I become antisynthetic?
“Please say this is a joke, General,” Nobles said.
“Once I get through to the other side, I’m going to need someone to fly the transport off the battleship.”
“You mean the
“Yeah, okay, the
“General, do you know where we’ll be when we get to the other side?”
“I have no idea,” I admitted.
“And you want me to come along for the ride?” he asked. “Are you ordering me to come?”
“I was hoping you would volunteer.”
“Have you asked for other volunteers?”
I shook my head and told the truth, “There’s no point placing additional lives in harm’s way.”
“No, sir. Why would you want to put anyone else in danger?”
I would not order Nobles to go. I could. He was a clone. In theory, his programming would make him comply. In theory, our battleship would break through the barrier, and we would sail into the broadcast zone safe and sound. In theory, military clones were incapable of fighting against the Unified Authority. I’d never placed much faith in theoretical solutions, but that wasn’t stopping me from placing my life on the line.
“You’ve been my pilot since they transferred me to the Scutum-Crux Fleet. I’d hate to go without you,” I said. It sounded weak, but Nobles liked the distinction of being my pilot. From what I could tell, he did not mind high-risk missions, either.
He gave me a sly, one-sided smile, and asked, “Since you put it that way, when do we leave?”
“Oh, our schedule,” I said, feeling a bit ashamed. I had not told him about the mission until the last minute because, assuming he agreed to fly me, I did not want to give him enough time to change his mind. “We leave within the hour.”
“Aye, sir, an hour,” he said. “I’ll go pack my things.”
I didn’t give my pilot time to have second thoughts, but I also secretly hoped for a delay. One man’s delay is another man’s reprieve. I had not yet told Ava that I was ready to leave. She knew about the mission, but she had no idea about my schedule.
I went to visit her at work. She worked in one of the three skyscrapers left standing in a cluster in the Norristown financial district. One of the buildings served as a dormitory for orphaned boys, another for girls. Now that Mars and the Corps of Engineers had restored the power, the locals used the third building as a hospital, among other things. Ava taught literature and drama classes in the girls’ dormitory.
I drove up to the building in my jeep, rain thrumming on the removable roof, making a noise like a thousand fingers tapping on a desk. The triangle of streets between the three buildings stood empty. One of the streets had been dug up and railed off from traffic. The Corps of Engineers had been laying cable there; but with my mission about to begin, the project had stalled as they were needed elsewhere.
I parked my jeep along the curb right beside the girls’ dormitory. When I opened my door, a cold wind blew rain onto the dashboard. I jumped out, and the wind slammed the door shut behind me. My shoulders hunched against the cold and my right hand holding down my lid, I ran to the entrance. As I approached the covered walkway that led to the door of the building, an armed guard stepped out of nowhere and planted himself in my path.
He was a civilian, a kid in his twenties with a little beef on him.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he asked.
A year ago, I would have planted the kid on his ass, but that was before the shoot-out with the U.A. Marines. I had not had a combat reflex since the Marines shot me with five neurotoxin-coated flechettes. Instead of feeling the warmth of testosterone and adrenaline in my blood, I felt a slight tinge of nerves. That tiny glimpse of fear bothered me far more than the kid himself. I could not afford to hesitate when challenged, not even for a millisecond, so I responded with more prejudice than needed. Instead of explaining why I had come, I said, “Out of my way.”
The boy started to raise his rifle; but my reflexes, quick as ever, were faster. I grabbed the gun, directing the muzzle away from me, and pulling as if trying to wrench it out of the kid’s hands. When he yanked back, I gave the rifle a shove in his direction, driving the butt into his chest. The boy dropped to the ground, fighting for breath, while I held on to the rifle.
“Now if you will excuse me,” I said. I dropped the gun a few feet from where the boy lay gasping and continued toward the door. Two more armed guards stood just inside the glass door, their rifles drawn.
Those two needed a lesson in depth perception that I would happily give them. They had miscalculated the distance between themselves and the door. I threw the door open, hitting the guard to the right on the nose. Some stupid instinct caused him to fire his weapon as he spun to the ground, and the bullets shattered the glass in the door, sending shards and blades across the lobby. The noise and destruction startled the second guard for a split second—long enough for me to grab his rifle and sweep his legs out from under him. The sound of the gunfire still ringing in my ear, I pulled the clip from the rifle, emptied the chamber, and dropped the gun to the floor. Then I turned to the first guard, and asked, “Excuse me, I’m here to see Ava Gardner. Could you tell her that I’m here?”
The kid scampered backward a couple of paces on his hands and ass, then climbed to his feet and disappeared into the building. I would not set foot beyond the lobby of the girls’ dormitory; some taboos cannot be ignored. Doctorow might overlook my assaulting his three armed guards, but he would not look kindly upon my entering his home for orphaned girls.
As it turned out, my decision to semibehave proved wise. The next person to enter the lobby was not Ava, as I had hoped, but the Right Reverend Colonel Ellery Doctorow. He stormed out of the elevator, came halfway across the lobby, saw the shattered door, and froze where he stood.
“What happened here?” he barked in a voice that was nearly as loud as gunfire.
Only then did I notice the blood on the ground. There was a small puddle to my left, where the second guard sat wiping his face. Blood ran down from his cheeks and squeezed between his fingers. The flying glass must have slashed him.
“Your men pointed their weapons at me, I felt I had to take them away,” I said. “The blood and the door, they did that on their own.”
Outside the door, that first guard managed to sit up but remained on the concrete rubbing his chest, his rifle still resting on the ground beside him.
A dozen people crowded behind Doctorow gaping at the destruction that had been the door of the lobby. They chattered in tiny, half-whispering voices. No one came any closer than Doctorow, who remained thirty feet from me.
I had come unarmed, and I remained unarmed, having given the rifles back to the guards. Standing there in my Charlie service uniform, I tried to look as harmless as possible. If the locals ignored the bits of glass and blood on the ground, the injured men, and the rifles, they might have found me charming.
Attempting to compose himself, Doctorow asked, “What are you doing here?”
The words had barely left his mouth when an elevator opened, and Ava stepped into view. She saw the destruction around me and gave me a somewhat motherly smile—the smile mothers must sometimes give their children as they prepare to scold them. She worked her way through the crowd and stood beside me.
“What are you doing here, General? You know this building is off-limits to you and your men,” Doctorow repeated. He was right, of course; I did know. Until this moment, I had always honored that rule. Even now, I stood just outside the building. I had barely entered its threshold. Once the guards were down, I could have waltzed in at leisure; instead, I remained at the door.
“I came to tell Ava good-bye,” I told Doctorow.
“So you attacked my men and shot up my building?” Doctorow asked.
I did not know how to respond. The way he spun the story, I was the aggressor.
“Honey, next time, why don’t you paint your message on a tank of poison gas and leave it outside the
