“Lewis, sir,” he said. He sounded respectful enough, but he looked away from me as he answered and gave off a sense of disregard.
“Is that your first name or your last?” I asked.
“It’s my last name, sir. My first name is Kit …Kit Lewis,” he said.
“Well, Kit Lewis, you just missed the road to Fort Sebastian,” I said. We had actually passed the turn two miles back, but I decided to wait until we had passed any likely detours before mentioning it.
“A work crew is laying a cable on the main road, sir,” he explained. “The regular roads are closed.”
“Is that so?” I asked.
“Yes, sir. We need to take a service route.”
“I see,” I said. “It must be quite a project; this detour of yours is taking us pretty far out of the way.”
“Yes, sir.”
Lewis shrugged his shoulders, then faked a laugh, and said, “Oh, we’re not going to Fort Sebastian, sir. Colonel Hollingsworth wants to meet you at the airfield.”
The road we were on would take us past the field, that much was true. “So he’s at the airfield? I could have sworn you said we were meeting at Fort Sebastian,” I said.
The sergeant responded with another nervous laugh. “Did I? I always do that, sir. I was thinking about Fort Sebastian when I meant to say we were meeting the colonel at the airfield, and I switched it around.” His voice was friendly, and he said all the right words.
It was a trap, of course. I had suspected it from the moment I saw the jeep. Stuck behind the wheel, though, he could not pull a gun on me. I had control of the situation.
We were driving at eighty miles per hour. A few miles ahead of us, the edge of the airfield was visible behind a row of small buildings. I pretended not to notice it. We passed two roads that wound around to the airfield. Lewis did not slow down as we reached the third. I doubted he would slow down at the fourth.
“How long have you been here, kid?” I asked.
“Six years, sir,” he said.
If this kid operated like the ones on St. Augustine, we’d find the real Kit Lewis’s body in a day or two. I wondered if he had been strangled, drowned, burned, or dissolved.
“I’m not asking how long Kit Lewis has been here,” I said. “I’m asking how long you have been here.”
“Three days,” he said, the friendly sheen missing from his voice. If he had a gun, he made no move to draw it. He did not need to worry about me. Traveling in a jeep at eighty miles per hour, I would not attack the driver.
The stalemate would last until we came to a stop. He might pull a gun at that point, but I doubted it. The kid showed no signs of fear. He clearly thought he could kill me anytime he wanted. I felt the same way about him. Only one of us could be right.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“How did you get here?” I asked. “You’re a long way from Earth.”
Lewis laughed, and not in the friendly way that he laughed when he still wanted to convince me we were going to Fort Sebastian. Now he sounded disdainful and possibly unhinged. “Are you going to interrogate me right up to the end?”
“It’s better than dying curious,” I said.
“Sorry to disappoint you, General, but I didn’t come here to answer questions.”
“I suppose not,” I said. “But out of curiosity, how did you get here?”
He laughed. “I don’t know the name of the ship.”
We were rapidly approaching the east end of town. The buildings became smaller, and the lots became larger. Civilization gave way to countryside. We passed a stand of trees. Off in the distance, I saw hills and forests.
“Are you working for the Unified Authority?” I asked, pretending to be a little afraid. I wasn’t afraid at that point, not in the least. My combat reflex had not kicked in, but I didn’t care. I did not think I would need it. The fight would not last long. I’d fought this make of clone a thousand times. He was just a clone, just an ordinary standard-issue clone.
“Sure,” he said.
He slowed to thirty miles per hour as we approached the trees.
“So you’re not Avatari,” I said.
“What the speck is
“Alien,” I said.
“I’m property of the Unified Authority Marines, just like you.”
“You’re a different make,” I pointed out.
He slowed the jeep to fifteen miles per hour as he turned onto a small dirt road. When we bounced over a bump, I grabbed Lewis behind the neck and slammed his face into the steering wheel, then I slammed the bottom edge of my fist into the base of his skull.
During the moment that he blacked out, I slipped the gear into park, hoping the jeep would come to a stop; but its gears ground together, its engine whined, and the wheels locked as we skidded into a ditch. Bracing myself for the slow collision, I watched Lewis’s already bloody face slam into the wheel a second time, tearing gashes across his forehead and eyebrows.
We landed nose down in a three-foot ditch. I climbed out of the jeep, pulling Lewis out as well, carrying him away from the ditch and slinging his limp ass down on the hard forest floor. I checked his pockets. He’d come unarmed. No gun. No knife.
He moaned as he started to wake, so I kicked him in the ribs, probably shattering two or three of them. The man did not call out in pain. He made a grunting noise, but he did not writhe or cough up blood. He was awake enough to know that I’d kicked him, but he did not curl up to protect himself.
“Get up, asshole,” I said, and I kicked him again, in the same spot, doing damage to organs that were no longer protected by bones.
“You kick me again, Harris, and I’ll break your specking legs,” he said calmly.
“I don’t think so,” I said, and I kicked him again. I kicked him hard, and I felt the side of his body give way like the side of an overripe melon.
Lewis sat up coughing. When the coughing stopped, he looked to his right and spat blood.
“How many of you are there?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, sounding as if he did not take my question seriously.
My next kick was not to the ribs. It was a roundhouse, and it struck him across the cheek. Had I connected two inches higher, I would have shattered his eye socket, but I did not intend to inflict that kind of damage. Not yet.
The kick to the face knocked Lewis flat. He lay there, rubbing his cheek, and said, “I’m going to break your arms and legs and your ribs before I kill you.” The words rang hollow, but his voice radiated anger instead of fear.
“I don’t think you understand what’s going on here. See, now, I am the one standing, and you are the one on the ground who just got his face kicked. Correct me if I’m wrong; but the way I see it, you are in the shithouse, pal.”
“It looks that way,” he said as he sat up.
I kicked him again. This time I kicked him in the ribs first, and then doubled up on the kick and fetched him a simple soccer kick across the face.
Lying on his back, staring up at me as he felt his injured ribs, he said, “Stop kicking me.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“You won’t get anything out of me if I’m dead.”
I wasn’t sure that was true; his autopsy might provide all kinds of answers. “Tell me what I need to know, and maybe we can both walk out of here,” I lied.
“Why the speck would I let you walk?” he asked. He rolled backward, toward the jeep and slid into the trench
