The Clone Empire

He shook his head. “I caught a ride in your broadcast network.”

Ships with onboard broadcast equipment blew up when they entered our network. If Freeman was telling the truth, he would have had to have come from one of our planets. I had a good idea which one it was.

“How is the weather in Odessa?” I asked. Odessa was the capital city of Olympus Kri.

Freeman favored me with a half smile, and said, “It depends how you feel about rain.”

“It beats the hell out of living in a desert,” I countered. I thought about the summer I’d spent in that concentration camp in the Texas badlands.

“I thought you liked the sun,” Freeman said.

I liked St. Augustine, with its coastal cities and languid days. I liked waking up to tropical mornings and going to sleep on balmy nights. I had no trouble forgetting time and seasons in places like this. Before the Avatari invasion, I’d spent a year living like a civilian in the Hawaiian Islands on Earth.

“Does Olympus Kri have the same seasons as Earth?” I asked.

“More or less,” Freeman said. “It rains hard in Odessa during the winter.”

I looked at the calendar on the wall and saw that the Earthdate was November 12.

In the time we were talking, Freeman methodically cleared his tray, occasionally gulping down an egg in a single bite.

“I’m not sure I can get any more ships to Olympus Kri,” I said. “Warshaw wants proof.”

Freeman nodded, and said, “Tell him to get used to having twenty-two planets in his empire.”

“We have a fleet circling the planet. We’ll outnumber them. Even if they send everything they have, we’ll still outnumber them.”

“You have sixty-eight ships in the area,” Freeman said.

“You know the size of our fleet?”

Freeman said nothing.

Sixty-eight ships, that was just a small fraction of what we’d had at Terraneau when the Unifieds came knocking. The Unified Authority attacked Terraneau with eighty-five ships and sent the four-hundred-ship Scutum-Crux Fleet running for cover.

“And you do not think that’s enough to protect the planet?” I asked.

Freeman did not speculate. When he knew the answers, he gave them; but he was not one for guessing.

“Have they figured out a way to attack our broadcast stations?” I asked.

Freeman downed a large glass of juice. “I haven’t heard anything either way,” he said. His low voice gave the words a rumbling timbre. His father had been a minister. Had he followed in his father’s shoes, Ray Freeman would have been one of those preachers who seemed to call down the heavens when they speak.

“Once the attack begins, we can call in a thousand ships if we need them,” I said.

Freeman said nothing.

I wondered what card he was hiding.

“I’m taking the ad-Din to Olympus Kri. If you want a ride back, I can take you,” I offered.

“I have a ship,” he said.

“What are you hiding, Ray?” I asked.

He did not answer.

At 11:00 STC (Space Travel Clock), Captain Villanueva held a shipwide briefing; attendance was mandatory. I personally prescreened two hundred Marines to run the security posts and patrol the corridors during the briefing. Villanueva screened a team of officers to man the bridge and Engineering.

On the Salah ad-Din, Marines and sailors did not commingle, not even for an all- hands briefing. The leathernecks attended a broadcast on the bottom deck, in the Marine complex. Sailors attended their briefing in a huge auditorium on the third deck.

I watched the scene outside the third-deck auditorium from an overlook as men lined up in crooked queues and waited to file through the doors. The talk was loud and came in indecipherable waves. I could not focus on a single conversation, there were too many going on at once, and I could not untangle the chatter of four thousand simultaneous discussions.

The MPs stood out with their helmets, armbands, and batons. At this stage, they would make no arrests. They had one standing order: “Everyone has to enter the auditorium through the security posts, no exceptions. Anyone discovered to have the Double Y chromosome will be quietly pulled aside.”

We had recalibrated posts on the inside of the auditorium doors. Prescreened MPs manned the computers. An army of MPs monitored the lines. If anyone tried to slip away, he was escorted back to his place.

Immediately below me, a sailor broke ranks, and four MPs descended upon him. They formed a circle, blocking his way. I tried to listen to what was said but could not hear a word of it.

Looking almost straight down on the scene, I could not see faces or expressions. Two of the MPs brandished their sticks, one of them slapping the end of it into his palm in a way that suggested he would gladly hit the sailor. The conversation went on for several seconds. When the sailor did not turn back, one of the MPs reached out and grabbed his shoulder. The man jerked free, then turned and returned to his place in line, unescorted.

Maybe he had argued that he needed to go to the head. Maybe the MPs had convinced him that he would not find his equipment in working order if he did.

As the sailor approached the door to the auditorium, he made a few furtive glances over his shoulder; but the MPs were right behind him. They remained in place, watching him as he stepped through the door.

A fight broke out in another line. A man grabbed the sailor in front of him and threw him to the floor. Three MPs ran to break up the fight, pushing gawking sailors out of their way and stepping between the downed man and his assailant.

They moved like cattle, these sailors did. They took slogging steps. They formed fuzzy lines that snaked down the hall. They moved slowly, more interested in talking and searching the crowd for friends than getting where they were going.

The sailor who had started the fight took a menacing step toward one of my MPs as he arrived on the scene. The MP drew his baton, but that seemed to mean nothing. The sailor took another step. When one MP tried to club him, the man caught his wrist and stopped the blow.

The other two MPs stepped in to help. One of them hit the man in the ribs, causing him to wince and cover the wound. Pressing his elbow over his battered ribs, the errant sailor returned to his spot in line. He might have been tough, but I did not think he was a Double Y.

Watching the drama closely, I almost missed the man at the end of the hall as he stole into the shadows with the grace of a phantom.

I shouted for help, but no one could hear me over all of the noise. Using the security Link built into my collar, I called for backup, then I charged after our rabbit. I dashed along the corridor, running in the same direction as the phantom, but one floor up. I could not see him; if he turned right or left, I would not know, and I would lose him.

Sprinting, swinging wide around a corner, I dashed down a set of stairs. I leaped the first flight, my arms pinwheeling as I flew through the air, and I crashed on the deck and into the wall, turned, and leaped the second flight.

“Where are you?” I yelled over the Link when I did not see MPs coming my way.

“They’re on their way. These halls are packed.”

“Get them here quickly,” I shouted.

The short sprint did not wind me, but my legs took a jolt as I came down the stairs. Behind me, I heard the cloud of conversations coming from outside the auditorium. I was at a T-junction. The corridors were empty to the right and to the left. I turned right, then changed my mind, and sprinted left.

The halls of the ad-Din were a labyrinth, with offshoots and avenues and hatches. Without seeing which way my rabbit had run, I had no prayer of finding him. And then I heard three shots. I ran back in the direction from which I had just come and spotted the blood on the wall and the two dead Marines. One sat with his back against the wall like a man taking a rest; the hole in his chest was large enough for me to fit my fist into it. The other man lay on the floor with his arms stretched before him.

So much for my backup. I radioed in for more reinforcements.