Steven Kent - Rogue Clone

He turned to the two senior officers. “Perhaps we can take this up again later this evening. I have some business to take care of with the corporal.”

Halverson and Johansson saluted and walked off to continue their discussion.

“What do you think, Harris?” Klyber asked, looking around the bridge.

“She looks ready to run,” I said, noting the brightly lit navigational panels.

“More or less,” Klyber said. “It’s not the equipment that worries me. I worry more about the men at her helm. You get a limited selection of officers with top-secret projects. My crew was chosen for security clearance, not battle experience. If I wanted a ship full of military police and intelligence officers, this would be the ideal crew.”

“You worked with Halverson in Scutum-Crux,” I pointed out.

“Tom Halverson does what he can. I like Halverson,” Klyber said. He looked around to make sure that no one was within earshot of us and lowered his voice. “What did you think of Johansson?”

“Not especially friendly,” I said. “He doesn’t make a great first impression.”

Klyber smiled and took one last look around the bridge. “Let’s head down to my quarters.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

We entered the elevator.

“What happened on New Columbia?” Klyber asked.

“Mogat terrorists happened,” I said. The elevator doors slid closed and I felt the slightest vibration as we dropped three decks and sixty feet. The doors opened.

“Anyone I have heard of?” Klyber asked.

“William Patel,” I said.

“Billy the Butcher? Are you sure it was him?”

“I saw him myself, sir,” I said. We entered the corridor that led to officer country. “Callahan, the informant you sent me to meet, fingered him. Callahan thought he could earn himself some credibility and a nice reward by handing him over to us.”

Officers walked past us in groups of two and three. They all stopped to salute as Klyber walked by. Klyber returned their salutes without breaking stride.

“Patel was wise to him?”

“Have you met Callahan? He figured he could pinch both sides of the loaf. He sold Patel supplies and us information. It takes a subtle hand to play both sides off like that. Subtlety is not one of Callahan’s stronger suits.”

We entered the admiral’s suite which included his quarters, a large office, and his war room. “So you don’t think the bombs were meant for you?”

“Not a chance,” I said.

“What tipped you off to the bombs?” Klyber asked.

“We were sitting on this balcony overlooking the street and out comes Patel, practically right on cue. He’s too far away to nab, but somehow he knows where we are sitting and he looks up at us. I mean, he’s a hundred yards away and he looks right at us.

“I didn’t trust Callahan. He struck me as a punk …a small brain with a big mouth. So when Patel looks right at us, I figure he knows exactly what Callahan is up to. The only question I had was if we could make it out in time.

“The big question is, who tipped Patel off?”

Klyber listened to this, his blue-fire eyes seeming to X-ray my thoughts as I spoke. “Do you have any theories?”

“Somebody on your staff,” I said.

“Interesting that you would say that. Of course, you realize that parked as we are so far from the Broadcast Network, we don’t have communications with the outside world. In order to get a message to Patel, our spy would need to travel …broadcast to another location.

“Given that, do you still think the leak came from here?”

This quadrant of the galaxy was dark. Communications were transferred through the Broadcast Network and the Doctrinaire was nearly 20,000 light years from the nearest discs.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Whoever leaked the information traveled.”

Klyber sat silent behind his desk and rubbed the thinning hairline around his temple. He seemed deep in thought, then brightened. “I have something for you,” he said as he stood and opened a closet hidden in the wall beside his desk. “A friend sent this to me. He did not know anything about you, of course; but I think you will appreciate this.”

When Klyber turned back toward me, he held a small book with tan leather binding that looked parched and old. The leather had gone stiff with age and drying. The words, Personal Journal of Father David Sanjines , were emblazoned in dark brown letters that stood out against the dust-colored leather.

“A friend in the Vatican sent this to me. Most of it is of no interest. It’s the journal of an archbishop. But there is a small section concerning a mutual acquaintance of ours.”

I looked down at the journal as Admiral Klyber held it out to me.

Klyber said. “I want you to have it.”

I took the old book and it seemed to fall open of its own accord. The pages had a faint red tinge to them that I knew was from clay dust, though it looked more like rust.

The book had a five-inch strip of blue velvet ribbon sewed into its binding for a bookmark. Parts of that ribbon had turned nearly black with age. I noted the date—April 10, 2494—on the open page.

Klyber watched me. “That is the only entry of interest. It goes on for a few pages.” He thought about the book for a few more moments, then shifted his attention. “I would like to revisit your impression of Captain Johansson.”

“You think Johansson is a spy?” I asked, closing the book.

Klyber did not answer. He smirked as he watched me from behind his desk. “Oh, I know he’s a spy, the question is for whom.”

“A spy?” I asked. “Do you think he’s a Mogat?”

“I’m guessing he’s worse,” Klyber said. “I think he works for Admiral Huang.”

Admiral Klyber had a long-standing feud with Che Huang, the secretary of the Navy and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Admiral Huang wanted to see himself as the most powerful man in the Navy, but Klyber, with his political connections, was generally recognized as having more clout.

“Huang?” I asked. “That would be bad.” Klyber could legally execute an enemy spy. A spy working for Huang, however, could only be transferred.

Possibly because Klyber headed the Liberator cloning project, Huang had a thing about Liberators. Huang was the officer who had assigned me to Ravenwood. To the best of his knowledge, I had died on that planet, and I wanted him to continue believing me dead.

“We’re a thousand light years from the nearest planet,” I said. “Dump him in space and say he had an accident.”

“It’s too late for that,” Klyber said, putting up a hand to stop me. “Whatever he’s looking for, I assume he has already found it.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s been able to report everything he’s found,” I said.

“Whatever information he was after, he transmitted it the first time we sent him out. The safest thing to do with Johansson right now is to keep him onboard the Doctrinaire . That way we can observe him.”

“Assuming he doesn’t have any friends on board,” I said.

“I hope he does,” Klyber agreed. “We’re keeping an eye on him.

“If he’s Huang’s boy, you’re in for a fight in the Senate. If Huang hears about the Doctrinaire , he’s going to ask for control of the project. He’ll probably put Wonder Boy in command of the ship.”

“Wonder Boy,” a.k.a. Rear Admiral Robert Thurston, was Che Huang’s protégé, the brilliant young officer who replaced Klyber as the admiral of the Scutum-Crux Fleet. Bryce Klyber was no slouch when it came to strategy, but Thurston crushed him in a battle simulation.

I did not like Thurston. He had a mile-wide anti-synthetic streak. Thurston saw clones as supplies and nothing else. He used them like any other kind of inventory, something to be expended and reordered.