Steven Kent - The Clone Alliance

“Thanks,” I said, glad to have some money in my pocket for the first time in months. “Let me know if you want to go double or nothing.”

“So?” the driver asked.

I looked at him, purposely donning a confused expression.

“Where is Freeman?”

“How should I know?” I asked.

“I hear you had quite an adventure,” Brocius said, as an aide let me into his office. A file with my name across the top sat on his desk. He picked it up. Flipping between the pages he said, “Entered enemy-held territory without clearance…boarded an enemy ship…”

“A wreck,” I pointed out. “It was the battleship that we sank. As I understand the aeronautical law, that made it common property.”

Brocius looked up from his report as I spoke, then looked back down giving no sign that he heard me. “Unauthorized reconnaissance operation…engaged the enemy…Your unauthorized side trip cost us a valuable self-broadcasting ship. It cost your pilot his life.

“Oh, here’s my favorite. You impersonated an officer. You led a team of SEALs to believe that you were a colonel in the U.A. Marine Corps.”

“You said you were going to recall me,” I pointed out.

“Not to the rank of colonel.” Brocius almost yelled this.

“I never told anyone I was a colonel.”

“You went in a colonel’s uniform!” Now he was yelling.

“I didn’t have any choice. That was the only uniform I had,” I said. “Hell, except for the clothes I arrived in, those were the only clothes I had.

“Admiral, if you wanted me to go to the Kamehameha dressed like a civilian, you should have said something.” He had me dead to rights, but I had to say something.

“So you misled six highly trained Navy SEALs into believing they were on an authorized mission with a colonel in the Marine Corps. One of those men is still missing in action,” Brocius said, lowering his voice.

He closed the report and stared at me, his face unreadable. “Admiral Brallier is calling for your head.” I did not know the name, but I assumed he was the commander of the Outer Scutum-Crux Fleet.

“Sorry, sir,” I said. But I wasn’t sorry. That was my first taste of combat in months. I had done what I was made to do, engage the enemy. I had felt the hormone in my blood, and it felt good. Even as I stood and apologized, I already had started plans for my next big excursion.

“Did you really send one of those SEALs back with the Mogats?”

“Yes, sir, assuming they didn’t catch him.”

Brocius shook his head. “Damn it, Harris, I don’t know whether to shake your hand or shoot you.”

“Semper fi,” I said.

“You’re not officially back in the Corps,” Brocius said. “As far as the Marines are concerned, you are still absent without leave or killed in action. Either one will land you in the brig.”

“I suppose,” I said. More than ever, I wished I was back on active duty.

“Do yourself a favor. Help us catch your friend, Freeman, and maybe I can get HQ to overlook your little adventure.

“Any idea where we can find him?” Brocius asked.

“Can’t say,” I said.

“Can’t say or won’t say, Harris?” Brocius asked. When I did not answer, he mumbled, “I suspected as much.”

“When are you contacting Yamashiro?” he asked.

“Not for a few more days,” I said.

“How do you plan on doing it?”

I did not answer. Brocius must have known I would not tell him.

“Have your labs downloaded the video record from our helmets?” I asked.

“They are working on it at this moment, Harris. What exactly will they find?”

I told the admiral everything. He listened quietly from the start. When I got to the broadcast engine, he pulled out a pad and began to scribble notes. “A working broadcast engine,” he grunted. “Sounds as if Warren Atkins has found some new technology to stack the cards in their favor.” Warren, Morgan Atkins’s son, presumably ran all Mogat operations.

“When Yamashiro comes, we’ll want to show those records to his engineers,” I said. “Maybe they can figure it all out.” I did not tell Brocius what I really thought. I doubted that the Mogats had come up with any of this on their own. Someone with a good grasp of strategy and technology had helped them.

Here is how I contacted Yoshi Yamashiro. On the appointed night, I went to Dulles Spaceport, boarded the transport, and sent out a kind of signal known as a virtual beacon. All very-low-tech mundane stuff. Sending a virtual beacon was the military equivalent of passing notes in school.

The beacon contained three words: “red light, go.”

Let the clowns in Intelligence try to decipher the message. In this case, the medium was the message. Yamashiro and I agreed that it would not matter what message the beacon carried. What mattered was that I sent out the beacon at all. When the communications officer on the Sakura located a beacon on that frequency, no matter what it said, he would tell Yamashiro to send an envoy to Washington, DC.

I did not hear about Yamashiro landing in Washington, DC, until four days after he arrived. Gordon Hughes, “Wild Bill” Grace, and an honor guard met his transport as it landed. What an entrance for a man who until recently was considered an enemy of the republic. Soldiers with flags, an honor guard with guns, and the two most powerful men in the galaxy all waited for Yamashiro at the bottom of the ramp as he stepped out of the transport.

A few months earlier those same soldiers and weapons would have stood in a firing squad had Yamashiro shown his face. Apparently returning to the scene of the crime with four self-broadcasting battleships covered up a multitude of sins in the political game of “What have you done for me lately?”

That was a ceremony to which I received no invitation. Lowly sergeants did not, as a rule, attend diplomatic functions. Whether Brocius or somebody else made the decision, I was recalled to active service as a master gunnery sergeant. That meant that my men would likely call me “Master Guns.” I hated that nickname. A few smart-asses might call me “Master Blaster.”

Fortunes of war.

When I asked Admiral Brocius about the rank, he gazed at me and asked in a voice drenched with boredom, “Not high enough for you?” He spoke with the sort of menacing civility that officers often pull when they wish to put enlisted men in their place. Every admiral I had ever met could use that voice; I suppose they learned it at the academy.

“Last time I checked, I was a colonel. That’s one hell of a demotion,” I said.

“Welcome back,” Brocius said with a grin that dared me to challenge him. Then, as a consolation, he said, “Look, Harris, there are no other clone officers in the…”

“What about the Little Man Seven?” I asked. I did not normally interrupt admirals in midsentence, but six other clones who survived the battle on Little Man had been bootstrapped. I cared about them. They came from my platoon.

“Yes, I thought you might ask that, so I hedged my bets. Dealer’s odds, right, Harris?” Brocius pulled a sheet of paper from his drawer and scanned it.

“Four of your pals died when the Mogat Fleet attacked Earth. Three of them were on the Doctrinaire . One was on a frigate called the McDermott .

“One of your pals died during routine exercises in the Norma Arm.

“Now here’s the interesting one. Lieutenant Vincent Lee was assigned to the Grant . The Scutum-Crux Fleet sent that carrier to investigate reports of squatters on Little Man. The Grant set out just before the Mogats downed the Broadcast Network. Fleet Command originally presumed that the ship was trapped in space, but we have never been able to locate her.