Steven Kent - The Clone Empire

“Yes, sir,” Cabot said, sounding embarrassed. He sat down and proceeded to stare into his plate.

“Harris, do you plan on joining the discussion, or are you here to enjoy the show?” Warshaw asked.

A waiter came and placed dishes before Warshaw, took his drink request, and left.

Warshaw looked at the plate, and said in disgust, “Is this a chicken or a dove?”

“It’s a local game bird,” I said. “I guess they don’t grow too big in the desert.”

Warshaw changed the subject. “Harris, I get the feeling you’ve been avoiding me.”

“Avoiding you?” I asked. “Why would I do that?”

“You tell me,” he said.

“Nothing comes to mind,” I said.

“Made any progress on your investigation?”

“Some,” I said.

“Okay, I want you to present tomorrow. Tell us what you got so far.”

“I won’t have much to talk about,” I said.

“Maybe you can tell us what happened to your face. That should be a fascinating story,” Warshaw suggested. Cabot had probably wanted to ask about it as well but had lacked the guts and the rank.

“As a matter of fact, that’s not a bad idea,” I said.

“And you brought a stiff with you,” Warshaw said.

“Yeah, he’s down in the morgue.”

“One of ours?”

“Theirs,” I said. “Our first confirmed infiltrator.”

“And he’s a clone?”

“He was. Now he’s a cadaver.”

“Sounds to me like you’ve got a lot to talk about. Look, Harris, right now you’re the highest-ranking target in the Enlisted Man’s Empire. I bet you have some harrowing tales.”

After that, we mostly ate in silence. Warshaw asked me a few friendly questions. Except for a question about touching his toes during his morning stretches, Warshaw pretty much ignored Cabot. I did notice that Warshaw emphasized the word “rear” when he referred to Cabot’s rank.

Just as I finished my lunch, one of Cabot’s lieutenants came to deliver a note. Cabot read it and passed it on to me. It was from Villanueva, informing me that his MPs had located a suspicious clone on the ad-Din . The note ended with an offer to “detain” the man.

I thought about the last infiltrator and wondered what would have happened if MPs had tried to arrest him. I had the feeling it would have ended up with wounded MPs and another bullet-ridden corpse.

I wrote, “Keep him bottled up. I am on my way,” and sent the note back.

“I may be late to the next meeting,” I told Warshaw. “Something important has come up.”

“Something you can discuss in your briefing?” he asked.

“If everything goes right, we’ll be doing show-and-tell instead of a lecture.”

Where do you look for a cold-blooded killer? The MPs guarding the Salah ad-Din found theirs in a cargo hold, inventorying food supplies.

We huddled together in a small room a few doors from the cargo hold watching him on a security screen. The man looked like a general-issue clone, just another enlisted sailor counting crates on an inventory tablet.

“He’s been in that exact same spot for sixteen hours now, ever since you left for Gobi,” Villanueva explained.

“What’s he doing, counting every specking noodle?” asked Nobles. No one had briefed Nobles on the situation.

Villanueva ignored him. Nobles was a Marine. As far as Pete Villanueva was concerned, that made him my problem.

“Camouflage,” I told Nobles. “He’s a stowaway, and he’s trying to blend in.”

“So he’s hiding?” Nobles asked.

Hoping he would just keep quiet and figure things out by listening in on the conversation, I ignored him.

“Is he a spy or something?” Nobles asked. He was too comfortable around me. Maybe that happened with pilots and drivers; they spent so much time with superior officers that they thought of them as friends.

“Spy, assassin, saboteur, the bastard’s a one-man wrecking crew,” I said.

Noble dropped out of the conversation after that.

“Have you sent anyone in after him?” I asked Villanueva. I’d warned him not to send anyone in, but orders sometimes slip through the cracks.

“No, sir.”

“Do you know if he’s armed?”

“We can’t be sure, sir, not without sending a team in to apprehend him,” said one of the MPs.

“But you haven’t seen anything?”

“No, sir,” said the MP.

The clone on the screen did not look dangerous. If anything, he looked neurotic. He had that tablet, but he wasn’t writing anything. He kept yelling something, maybe even screaming like a man out of control. Every so often he stopped talking and smacked himself on the head with the tablet.

“Is there any way to pick up what he’s saying?” I asked.

The MP controlling the monitoring station fielded the question. “No, sir. The camera does not have audio. It’s for checking inventory.”

“Too bad,” I said.

“He’s been doing that the entire time,” Villanueva said, sounding somewhat disgusted.

“Doing what?” I asked.

“Beating himself up. Watch his lips. When you see him pucker and grimace like that, he’s saying the word, ‘SPECK.’ He says ‘speck’ just about every other word.”

As Villanueva said this, the man rapped himself across his forehead with his tablet three times in rapid succession. He puckered, then grimaced, puckered, then grimaced, puckered, then grimaced. Watching his lips move, I imagined him shouting the word.

“Dangerous or not, he sure as hell is crazy,” Villanueva said.

“He’s both,” I said.

If everything the coroners had said about Sergeant Lewis proved true, he’d kept fighting long after he should have curled up and died. Guys like that don’t throw in the towel. You can pull a gun on them, and they just keep fighting.

“I’m going in after him,” I said.

“You don’t need to go in there yourself,” Villanueva said.

“I have plenty of men …”

“Alone,” I added. Was I afraid? Was I facing my fears? Was I climbing back on the proverbial horse? God, I hoped not.

“Sir …”

“I have a better shot at nabbing this guy without your boys getting in my way.”

“That’s bullshit,” one of Villanueva’s MPs whispered to the man beside him. Then in a louder voice, he said, “Sir, may I suggest that we send in ten men and piggy-pile him, sir.”

It was not a question of climbing back on the horse; I wanted a rematch. I hadn’t taken Lewis seriously, and he’d damn near killed me. If this lunatic was the same clone who’d attacked me in my quarters, I’d managed to scare him away the first time we met; but I was the one on the ground when he ran away.

Commanding officers do not generally participate in arrests, and I should have sat this one out. At most, I should have notified Hollingsworth and had him send Marines to assist in the arrest. I was running this operation too far from the rule book, but I didn’t care.

“You really plan to go in alone?” Villanueva asked, the mirth in his voice too apparent.

“I do,” I said.

“General, we’ll be able to watch you on the surveillance cameras,” said one of the MPs. “I’ll have men waiting right outside the door if something happens.”

“That’s good, but I don’t want you jumping the gun on this one.”

“No, sir.”

“This is almost sure to come to a fight,” I said. “Don’t come running at the first sign of trouble.”

“At what point should I send in help?” Villanueva asked.

“Good question,” I said, not sure how to answer the question. “If I give the distress signal, come in running.”

“What’s the signal?” The MPs sounded worried. They didn’t want a general dying on their watch.