building?” Ava said in her tart voice. Her sarcasm was biting, but it was not aimed at me.
Ava saw things that completely skirted my range of vision. In the bigger scheme of things, Doctorow had fired the first shots.
He lifted a hand to his face and ran his fingers along his beard. “You’re leaving?” he asked, sounding more in control.
“I came to say good-bye,” I repeated.
“You stepped way out of line, Harris; but under the circumstances, I suppose we’ll overlook it,” Doctorow said. What else was he going to do? If he threw me in jail, I couldn’t leave his planet.
Doctorow turned and went back to the elevators, his entourage following after him like a pack of well-trained dogs.
The three guards remained, though they now kept well away from me. Congregating in a distant corner of the lobby, they looked in my direction and whispered among themselves.
“Thank you so much for not making a scene,” Ava said. Now the scorn focused on me, and I wished I hadn’t come.
“Sorry,” I said. It might not have made any difference to Ava, but I felt embarrassed. As we walked through the shattered doorway, glass crunching under our shoes, I wondered if Doctorow might have been right about me. Maybe I couldn’t be trusted.
The rain continued to fall in windblown streaks. My Army green jeep blended in with the darkened streets and gray sky.
“When are you leaving?” Ava asked, as we reached the edge of the awning.
“Now,” I said. “I’m driving to the airfield from here.”
“That seems rather sudden. How long have you known you were leaving?”
“A week.”
“You don’t give a girl much notice.”
“I thought maybe we could have lunch before I left.” I used lunch as bait, but I had something else in mind.
“Harris, it’s three in the afternoon.”
“I haven’t eaten,” I said.
“I have,” she said. I looked in her eyes and knew that she understood what I wanted. Having run out of things to say, I fumbled for a moment, then decided to go for broke. “I could drive you home.”
“What about my car?” she asked.
“We could drive in separate cars,” I said.
“I have classes.”
I could not tell if the wall between us was because she had already moved on from me or if she wanted to protect herself. The last two men in her life had cast her aside; maybe she built mental walls to insulate herself from pain. They were natural-borns, and they had dropped her because she was a clone. She was a clone, and I was a clone; we were together because society had very little use for us. Then again, she was beautiful, and beautiful women seldom hurt for company.
Hoping she had not simply moved on from me, I said, “I will come back.”
I expected to hear more brass from her. I expected Ava to say some line that started with, “Honey.” Instead, she drew close to me. I felt her warm breath as she pressed her lips to my mouth, then I tasted her. She held the kiss for most of a minute, then said, “Harris, you better come back.”
With that, she spun on her heels and walked back into the dormitory, where she knew I could not follow.
CHAPTER TEN
I pulled over in an empty area and changed into my combat armor, then drove to the airfield. The wind and rain picked up as I drove. A constant stream of droplets cascaded down my windshield.
I noticed the weather, but my mind was on Ava. If I came back, would we pick up where we left off? How long would she wait? Why hadn’t she agreed to let me take her home? I knew the answer to that last question: She didn’t want to have sex at that moment. But did that mean we were done? I had to clear my mind for the mission, but I didn’t want to.
As I pulled along the edge of the airfield, I saw Sergeant Nobles waiting in his jeep. Like me, he’d come wearing combat armor. He stepped out of his ride as I approached. Nobles stood at attention and saluted, drops the size of toenails splattering against his armor. “Sir, we’ve fallen a little behind schedule, but we shouldn’t be very late,” he said.
“They won’t start the mission without us,” I said.
He laughed.
If things had gone the way I planned, we would have taken off an hour later, but I would have faced the unknown feeling a bit more satisfied. In the end, though, sex with Ava would have changed nothing.
As we walked around the transport, I watched to see if Nobles would comment on the boot-sized tube attached under the nose of the bird—a tube with a nuclear-tipped torpedo I’d had specially fitted. If he saw it, he didn’t mention it. He might not have noticed the tube hidden the way it was. Me, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Amazing that such a tiny package could do so much damage.
We entered the transport, walking up the rear ramp into the darkness of the kettle, and my heart dropped. I had learned to live with saluting superiors and taking orders from banal-brained officers whose only qualification was that they were natural-born; but the gloomy feeling of entering a transport always gave me a chill. On this day, though, the chill turned icy.
Without saying a word, I crossed the kettle and climbed the ladder to the cockpit. Storm-filtered sunlight shone through the windshield.
A thick wall of mercury-colored storm clouds hid the sun but not its light. Driven by blustering winds, the rain fell at sharp angles and splash-landed in puddles along the side of the landing strip.
The airfield was little more than a landing strip with a couple of newly built hangars surrounded by a wall of chain link and razor wire. We had built guard towers in the corners of the fence to keep the locals out, but that was for show. No one manned the towers.
The landing strip was too short for anything but transports, a species of air-/spacecraft that took off vertically. You couldn’t land so much as a fighter on this strip, but it had enough room for dozens of transports.
“What’s that?” Nobles asked, pointing to the bright red switch one of Mars’s engineers had installed over his throttle.
“Oh, that,” I said, feeling a little bit guilty. “That fires the torpedo.”
“We need a torpedo?” he asked, sounding nervous and more than a little skeptical. He probably wondered if there was more danger to this mission than I had let on about. There wasn’t.
“It never hurts to be prepared,” I said.
Nobles sat in the pilot seat but made no move toward the instrumentation around him. He folded his arms across his chest, and asked, “Prepared for what exactly?”
“Well, you know, there’s no way of knowing where the broadcast will send us.”
Nobles started to say something, but I put up my hand and stopped him.
“Hear me out,” I said. “Admiral Warshaw flew his ships through this broadcast zone; it’s going to be safe,” I said. Having spent six years assigned to the Scutum-Crux Fleet, Nobles knew Warshaw. He might or might not have known Warshaw personally, but they’d both served on the
“Did Warshaw strike you as having a death wish?” I asked. “If he used this zone to broadcast himself out, I’m betting it will send us someplace safe.”
Nobles thought about this for a moment, then asked, “So where do you think we’ll come out?”
“Where will we come out?” I repeated. “I have no specking idea, but I can make an educated guess. When the top brass decided to eliminate the cloning program, they shipped off whatever clones were left to twelve of the outer fleets. I don’t know about you; but if I were Warshaw, and I had the Earth Fleet chasing after me, I’d send
