physique of a buffalo, overstuffed at the chest and shoulders, tiny at the waist. Staring at me, a slight smile on his face, he said, “The Enlisted Man’s Marine Corps needs a Commandant. Of course, now that we know you’re alive, you get the job. From here on out, Harris, you and I are equals.”
“You didn’t believe that back at Terraneau,” I said.
“Things have changed,” Warshaw said. “We need a man like you.”
“Someone to wear a bull’s-eye on his back,” I said.
“I wouldn’t put it in so many words,” Warshaw said.
“How would you put it?”
“How would I put it? I’d put it this way. We’ve got a security problem, General. I want you to find our rats, lead them into some underground rat hole, and bury them for good.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Warshaw had one lead, one thin lead to help me track down the security breach. That lead came in the form of three dead bodies on a planet called St. Augustine.
Back in my billet, I pulled on a pair of mediaLink shades and read about the planet. It didn’t take long to realize that if I wanted to track down a breach in security, St. Augustine—the rest-and-recreation capital of the Enlisted Man’s Empire—was a promising place to start. If there was a place where our sailors would let down their guard, it was St. Augustine, a planet with beaches, hotels, and very few men.
Several years ago, when the Avatari attacked St. Augustine, the Unified Authority had left the locals to fend for themselves. The people of St. Augustine fought to the figurative last man. Once they ran out of men, the women and children went into hiding, and the aliens simply went away. That was how the Avatari ran things. Once they captured a planet, they left you alone as long as you didn’t disturb their toxic mining operations.
When the Enlisted Man’s Empire liberated the planet, the women of St. Augustine welcomed our sailors and Marines. Having lived without men for more than two years, they welcomed us rather intimately.
One of the first factories to open on St. Augustine manufactured condoms. Now, the clones in the Enlisted Man’s Empire were as sterile as a surgeon’s gloves—“built to copulate, not populate” as the saying goes; but they were also programmed to think they were natural-born, so some enterprising resident came up with the idea of selling condoms to a population of “dead-end Joes” who thought they were potent.
If the news stories were true, that factory did a lot of business. On a planet with a population of six million adult females, more than one hundred million condoms had been sold.
I left for St. Augustine the following day.
As the Commandant of the Marines, I traveled with an entourage. Warshaw assigned me a staff that included a one-star admiral, three captains, and enough lieutenants to man a small fleet—all of them tainted. These were men who had played the power game and come up short for one reason or another; now they wanted to redeem themselves. I brought them along as camouflage, but I did not trust them. I did not like traveling with remora fish in my wake; but fleet officers were expected to have an entourage, and a lone-wolf general would elicit suspicion.
Admiral J. Winston Cabot, supposedly my liaison to Warshaw and Naval Command, was officious, petty, politically motivated, and, I suspected, something of a coward. I decided that much about him during the fifteen minutes it took us to travel from Gobi and land on St. Augustine.
A simpering politician by nature, Cabot all but attached himself to my person. Once Warshaw introduced us, the little ferret swooped right in on me, warning the other officers of the entourage away with a threatening glance. He chattered mindlessly in the beginning, but giving credit where credit is due, the little bastard read me accurately after a couple of minutes and settled down, allowing me to think.
Had he known what I was thinking, Cabot might have given me more space. What came to my mind was how incredibly interchangeable he was, like a gear in an old-fashioned clock. There he sat, a fifty-two-year-old general-issue clone with brown eyes and slightly grayed brown hair, and nothing to distinguish himself beyond his uniform.
And therein was the problem.
If the Unified Authority had developed some kind of new cloning program, there would be no way to stop them from infiltrating our military. If their clones truly had the same DNA as ours, they would be identical. We could place posts by every hatch on every ship and run hourly DNA scans of every sailor, and the bastards would slip through our net.
We flew from Gobi to St. Augustine on the
“That’s the best you could get me?” I asked Bishop. “I’m the specking Commandant of the Enlisted Man’s Marines.”
“That’s the best I have.”
My entourage hung around me like flies. I told them to board the transport, and all of them did except for Cabot. He lingered, having decided that the order was meant for everyone but him.
“Do you need something, Admiral?” I asked.
“No, sir,” he said.
“Then board the transport,” I said.
He reluctantly left.
“How do you put up with this shit?” I asked.
“You’ll learn to love it,” Bishop said.
“Bullshit,” I said.
We traded salutes, and I boarded the transport. I started the trip in the kettle with my entourage. After five minutes, I found myself so irritated by their company that I excused myself and climbed up to the cockpit. And there, through the windshield, I saw St. Augustine.
After reliving the uniform dryness of Gobi, I had a greater appreciation for the greens and blues of St. Augustine. The planet had oceans, rivers, and lakes. It had pastures, mountains, and ice-capped poles. From space, Gobi looked like a ball carved out of unfinished wood. By comparison, St. Augustine looked like a well- polished opal.
Cabot came up to the cockpit to check in on me. “General, will we have time to inspect the officers’ R & R facilities while we are on St. Augustine?” he asked. “I haven’t tried them myself, but I hear good things.”
“We’re not here to inspect the facilities,” I said.
“Yes, sir. I’m just saying that I understand they’re supposed to be nice, you know, if we get the chance.” When he saw that he wasn’t getting anywhere, Cabot asked, “Why are we here?”
“We’re here to look at corpses,” I said.
The transport shook and rattled as it punched into the atmosphere.
“Corpses?” Cabot asked.
“Three of them,” I said. “Maybe more if we’re lucky.”
“Who died, sir?” He did not know that the Unified Authority had infiltrated our security. Warshaw would not have trusted a weasel like Cabot with that kind of sensitive information. I felt bad for the bastard. Not knowing that I was little more than a moving target, he still believed that being assigned to me would help his career.
“Clones,” I said. “There are three dead clones on St. Augustine, but none of the ships have reported any of missing men.”
