Steven Kent - The Clone Empire

“Hollingsworth would probably stay if you asked him,” I said.

“I don’t plan on extending that invitation,” Doctorow said.

“So I guess we are done,” I said as I started to stand.

“Not yet,” Doctorow said. “What are your plans, General? The Council would prefer for you to leave within the week.”

My thoughts had become a double helix. One strand contained logic and the other emotion. I never wanted Terraneau to sign a treaty with the Enlisted Man’s Empire; but now that they had rejected me, damn it, I felt judged and devalued by the people whose worthless lives I had saved.

“It won’t take long for us to pack,” I said, admitting my defeat.

“And your engineers?” he asked.

“I’ll speak to Mars. They can decide for themselves.” The Enlisted Man’s Empire would have plenty of engineers. If Mars wanted to stay, we’d get by without him. He’d earned that.

“Good man,” Doctorow said.

Had he just called me a “good man”? Had this specking antiestablishment son of a bitch just called me a “good man”? I quietly contemplated ripping his throat out of his neck.

He stood up to signal that the interview had ended, then he did something that almost set me off. As we walked to his door, he patted me on the shoulder and repeated his comment that I was “a good man.” Shoot me, stab me, kick me off your specking planet, but for God’s sake don’t make a show of being magnanimous in victory.

“So, I suppose that concludes our business together, General,” he said as he led me toward the door.

I turned to say something to Doctorow and found that I could not look the bastard in the eye. I wasn’t ashamed, just angry beyond reason.

And so I left. I walked out of that marble-lined office and found my own way out of the building. I stormed out to my car and told my driver to take me downtown.

He wanted us off his planet by the end of the week. I wanted us off by the end of the day.

Ava looked so pretty in her cream-colored blouse and sky blue skirt. The blouse was loose, but it showed off her figure. She wore her hair down, and her makeup was perfect. She applied her makeup discreetly so that it blended with her face. I wouldn’t have known she was wearing makeup had I not seen her without it. She looked at me and smiled.

“I’m leaving,” I said.

“L told me,” she said. “L” was the name Doctorow’s closest associates used to address him. Apparently Ava had joined that elite circle of friends. Maybe she had joined it long ago, and I had never noticed.

“So I guess that’s it. I’m done here,” I said, feeling rather foolish for having come to see her again.

Tears formed in the corners of her eyes. Were they real? I reminded myself that she was an actress.

“You can come with me?” I said.

“And live on a battleship?” she asked. “Honey, I’ve done that before. I think I’m done with big guns and seamen.”

She’d slipped into her brassy persona. For a moment I felt hope. Then she dashed it. She looked at me with deep-seated sympathy and touched me on the cheek. “I can’t come with you, Wayson,” she said. “There’s nothing for me out there.”

“I’d be there,” I said, sounding so specking pathetic I thought I might never forgive myself.

One of the tears broke free from its nest and slid down her cheek. “You? You were never there for me. After the Unified Authority attacked, when you were in the hospital, and you were so weak, I thought you needed me. I thought maybe we had a chance.

“But once you got better, you started looking for a way off the planet.”

“I told you, I wouldn’t leave you here.”

“You never needed me. You had your big plans and your Marines, and that was everything you needed.” She smiled for a moment, brushed a tear from the corner of her eye, and said, “You never even pretended to need me.”

“So when did he happen?” I asked, not bothering to explain that I meant the other man.

“I fell in love with him while you were planning how to escape Terraneau,” she confessed.

“In love?” I whispered.

“I’m sorry.”

I swallowed and asked the question I had to ask. “Did you ever love me?”

“Back in the beginning, you asked me how you compared to other guys. Do you remember that?” She took my hand in hers, and said, “You are the only one who ever broke my heart.”

I smiled when I heard this though it meant nothing to me.

This was my day for good-byes. Within the last two hours I’d already said good-bye to Ava and Ellery Doctorow. In a few more hours, I’d bid a happy farewell to Terraneau, which had lately replaced Gobi as my least favorite planet in the galaxy. Now Freeman was leaving.

I looked at Freeman’s Piper Bandit, a private commuter craft that the Unified Authority had outfitted with a tiny broadcast engine, and remembered the days when I had a Johnston R-56 Starliner of my own. The Johnston was a nicer ride—a twenty-seat luxury corporate number flown by rich executives with private pilots.

Civilians were not allowed to own self-broadcasting planes; hence, broadcast engines were never offered as standard equipment. The Unified Authority Navy had placed the broadcast rig under the hood of my Starliner. The jet had been built for a four-star admiral, and I sort of inherited it when he died.

My Starliner was considered a luxury ride. Freeman’s plane was known in some quarters as an “interplanetary mosquito.”

It was supposed to be a two-seater, apparently designed to fit two anorexic midgets. Ray Freeman was not fat, but his seven-foot frame was thick and filled with muscle. To wedge himself into that tiny cockpit, he would need to curl his legs in odd angles under the instrumentation. The seats were narrow, and his massive shoulders would probably rub against both walls of the cockpit. Worst of all, he’d have to fly with his head bowed to fit it under the low ceiling. As we stood beside the Bandit, I gave it a dubious glance. That cockpit would be a tight fit for me, and Freeman had nine inches and a hundred pounds on me.

Not only was the Bandit too small for Freeman; it was also too small to house a broadcast generator. Someone had outfitted the plane with a tiny broadcast engine that had a single destination setting—Earth—instead of a broadcast computer. In lieu of a broadcast generator, it had a one-use battery. You got one broadcast out of this bird, and the preprogrammed computer made sure it ended up near Earth.

“Where’d you get this?” I asked.

“I took it from a clone,” he said.

“This is what infiltrator clones fly?” I asked. “No shit? Did this one belong to the guy who tried to kill me?”

Freeman shook his head.

“You mean there’s another one in Norristown?”

Freeman did not answer. If Freeman had the plane, the guy who was supposed to fly it was dead.

There had to be at least one more of these planes hidden somewhere around Norristown. I wondered how many I would find when I searched St. Augustine. Now we had something to look for—clones traveling in Piper Bandits.

“How does it fly?” I asked.

“Slow,” Freeman said. “A half million miles per hour.”

That was slow. Most naval ships had a top speed of thirty million miles per hour. You needed that kind of speed when you traveled billions of miles.

I changed the subject and asked Freeman the question that had been bothering me since he’d first shown up. “What are you doing here?”

“Besides saving your ass?”

“Are you here for money or revenge?” I asked. He was a mercenary first and foremost. Those were the only reasons he did anything besides eat, shit, and sleep. “You didn’t come all this way just to save me.”