The Clone Empire

headfirst. I felt sorry for the bastard, until I saw how quickly he sprang to his feet.

The expression on his face looked more animal than human. His eyes focused on me to the exclusion of anything else, his lips formed a sneer.

My combat reflex kicked in quickly. A reviving soup of adrenaline and testosterone flowed through my veins, clearing my mind and sharpening my reflexes. There was no fight or flight once the reflex began, there was only fight. Lewis lunged at me quickly, striking first high, then low, then crashing into me with all of his weight. I fell backward, with him attaching himself around my waist, still slamming his fists into my ribs and gut. I hit the ground hard, knocking the air out of my lungs. As I struggled for breath, he pounded his left hand into my chest and his right hand into my face.

Ignoring the flashing lights that filled my eyes, I fought back. I grabbed his blouse and pulled him toward me as I hit him in the face again and again. I worked a knee loose and drove it into his ribs. That slowed him, and I threw him off me; but I was dizzy, and it took me a moment to climb to my feet.

He recovered more quickly than I did. As I tried to clear my head, he jumped to his feet and came at me again. I kicked at his knees and struck his broken ribs with the heel of my right hand. The blow should have put him down, he had to be badly injured; but he grabbed me and threw me backward to the ground, then stomped a heavy boot into my gut, knocking the fight and the air out of my lungs.

Lewis dropped a knee into my chest and wrapped his fingers around my throat. “I’m going to enjoy this, Harris,” he said in a voice that sounded triumphant and insane.

A single shot rang out, echoing through the forest, and Lewis flew off me, smashing into a tree a few feet away. A quarter of his head was missing, from the right eye to the top. Still gasping for oxygen, I sat up and stared at the bloody mess of his head.

The air slowly returned to my lungs. It felt like fire inside my chest.

Sitting on that rocky ground, fighting for breath, the pains in my back and arm and shoulder starting to register, I knew who had saved me even before I saw him. A few moments passed before he stepped into my view.

Seven feet tall, thick as an oak tree and just as stout, his shaved head as bare as a billiard ball and his skin as dark as mahogany, Ray Freeman came and stood over me, his sniper rifle hanging loose in his right hand. Here was a powerful man who could snap a man’s bones or crush his skull with his bare hands, but he preferred the work of the sniper.

“Nice shot,” I said, my throat not quite able to add voice to my words.

My vision was still a bit blurred. The light was to Freeman’s back, so I could not see his face. I didn’t need to see it to know that I would find no sympathy in his gaze.

He was not a man given to compassion. We were friends, of a sort; but the last time I had seen him, he fired that very rifle at me. He’d shot me with a “simi,” simunition, a gel cartridge loaded with fake blood used to simulate an assassination. He’d come all the way across the galaxy to deliver a message for the Unified Authority. They wanted me to know that I was not beyond reach. The U.A. attacked Terraneau the following day.

Despite the burning in my chest and throat, I inhaled enough air to speak. “You could have popped him before he started choking me.”

“I wanted to see how you would do.”

Freeman spoke slowly, and his voice was so low it sometimes didn’t sound human. His voice was the sound of cannon fire or a lion’s roar.

“How did I do?” I asked.

Freeman did not answer. He wasn’t the kind of man who wastes his breath stating the obvious. He was a man of few words.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The jeep wasn’t going anywhere, not without a winch and a tow truck to pull it out of the ditch. Even if we did pull it out, I wasn’t in any shape to drive it. My right eye was nearly swollen shut, and I could barely stand, let alone drive.

Freeman offered to take me back to the base in his car. He’d only parked a few dozen yards from the jeep, but I covered the distance like an old man suffering acute appendicitis. I’d walked one hundred times the distance earlier that morning when the only things that hurt were my feelings. Now my head was spinning, and the ground seemed to roll under my feet like the deck of a ship in a storm.

“So what brought you to this neck of the woods?” I asked.

Freeman did not respond. He did not take well to humor. I knew this, but it only made me wisecrack around him all the more. His sphinxlike persona presented a challenge.

Speaking in a language he was more likely to answer, I asked, “How did you find me?”

“I followed the clone.”

“Was there any reason why you followed that particular clone?” I asked.

We reached the car. Anyone else might have opened the door for his poor, crippled friend, but Freeman climbed in, started the engine, and waited for me to catch up.

I opened the door, jerked my head back toward the trees, and said, “I want to bring him along.”

“Get in,” Freeman said. I got in without knowing whether he would refuse to pick up the stiff or if he planned to back his car into the forest and get it. He backed the car up the dirt road and stopped a few feet from the abandoned jeep.

“Put him in the trunk,” Freeman said.

Having barely been able to walk to the car, I wanted to protest, but I knew better. I was the one who wanted the corpse, not Freeman, so it stood to reason that I should be the one carrying the corpse with a head like a smashed-in gourd.

I climbed out of the car, limped over to the dead faux sergeant, and lifted him from where he had landed beside the tree. Rigor mortis had not yet set in. As I lifted him, his shattered head bounced backward, then rebounded forward and rested on my shoulder. His arms hung limp.

I slung Lewis over my shoulder like a dockworker carrying a sack of potatoes, then tossed him into the trunk. Noticing blood and brain tissue and skull fragments on my shirt, I cursed under my breath as I slammed the trunk and hobbled back into the car.

“How did you know where to find me?” I asked as I closed the door.

“I told you, I followed the clone,” Freeman said.

“There are a whole lot of clones living in Fort Sebastian. How did you know which one to follow?”

“I followed him here from Earth,” Freeman said.

“He said he arrived three days ago,” I said.

Freeman did not respond. I took his silence as confirmation.

I tried to imagine Freeman hiding near Fort Sebastian, hoping to observe the base without being seen for three days. It didn’t sound possible. Freeman stood seven feet tall and weighed well over three hundred pounds. He was a black man living in a galaxy that had spent centuries diluting its races. The man stood out.

“When I heard that the Navy was sending an assassin to Terraneau, I figured he was coming after you,” Freeman said.

“The Navy thinks I’m dead. They all think I am dead.”

Freeman shrugged. “There’s no one else on Terraneau worth shooting.”

I had my own opinions about who should be shot on Terraneau, but I kept them to myself, and asked, “So why send someone now? They could have sent someone to finish me five months ago.”

Freeman said, “They saw the anomaly.”

“They saw the anomaly,” I repeated. “From the broadcast zone …from when I broadcasted out,” I muttered to myself. It didn’t make sense. How the hell would they spot an anomaly from Earth? Even if they had a telescope pointed right at us, the light from that anomaly would not reach Earth for one hundred thousand years.

Feeling uncharacteristically chatty, Freeman filled in the gap without my asking. “The Navy has spy ships cruising your territory. They have satellites monitoring your broadcast stations.”