Steven Kent - Rogue Clone

“Colonel, there’s a bomb on Klyber’s ship!”

The colonel did not hesitate. “Out of the way,” he yelled. He pulled a discrete communications stem from his collar. “Traffic control, hold Klyber’s ship! I repeat, this is urgent, hold Klyber’s transport!”

The MPs lowered their guns and cleared out of my way. I could not hear what was said, but traffic control apparently got the colonel’s message. “Yeah, that’s right …Yes, I’ve got a man out here who says that there is a bomb on board the admiral’s ship. Shit …no…. don’t bring it down. If we have a bomber around here, he might set it off. Yes. Yes! Look, we’re on our way over. Just have the pilot hang tight.”

And that was what happened. Klyber’s massive transport continued to hover in front of the aperture like a bee waiting to enter a flower. I paused to look at it for just a moment.

“Move it, Harris.” The colonel did not need to ask twice. We headed into the control tower, a tinted glass tower that reached to the ceiling of the landing area. The tower was seventeen stories tall. We entered the elevator and the colonel stabbed the button for the floor he wanted.

“You’d better be right about this, Harris.” He panted as he spoke.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“What did you see?”

“Rear Admiral Halverson,” I said. “He didn’t get on the flight.”

“You set off the alarms because you saw some guy standing around?” The colonel screamed so hard that streamers of spit flew from his lips.

“Rear Admiral Halverson is Klyber’s second-in-command,” I said.

“So he missed the specking flight!” The colonel shook his head. “Oh, I’m specked. I had to trust a goddamned clone.”

“Halverson ran when he saw me. He was …”

“You’re a damned Liberator!” the colonel shouted louder than ever. He did this just as the elevator doors opened. Everyone on the floor turned to look at us. “Damned specking right he ran when he saw you. You’re a goddamned Liberator clone. You’re a friggin’ disaster waiting to happen. Anyone in his right mind is going to run when he sees you. I should have run when I saw you. No, I should have had my men shoot you while I had the chance. Oh, I am specked.”

The floor of the control room was dim, lit only by the green and red phosphorous glow of several large radar screens. The air was moist from recirculation and carried a bad combination of scents—mildew and cigarette smoke. Entering this heavily air-conditioned floor felt like being sealed in an old refrigerator.

Around the room, men sat beside radar consoles in clusters of three. “How should we handle this?” one of the men at the nearest console called over. The colonel and I went over to join him.

“Traffic control, this is U.A. Transport five-Tango-Zulu. Do you read me?”

“We read you five-Tango-Zulu,” replied one of the controllers.

“What seems to be the hang-up down there?” the pilot asked. This was the same man who picked me up on Mars a few days earlier. I recognized his voice.

“Want me to bring them back?” the controller asked.

The colonel thought for a moment, then shook his head. “Not based on the evidence Lieutenant Harris just gave me.”

“Is there a problem, traffic control?” the pilot squawked over the radio.

Through the black tinted windows, I could see Klyber’s transport hanging just below the lip of the aperture. There was very little gravity on that part of the deck, but the C-64 still looked awkward. A long line of ships started to form below the transport.

“Colonel, we have to do something. My queue is cataclysmically specked.”

The colonel walked to the dark glass wall of the tower and stared out for several seconds. “Can you laser scan the transport in midair?” he asked.

“Sure,” the controller said.

“Five-Tango-Zulu, this is traffic control. Prepare for a scan. Do you copy?”

“Don’t you save scans for incoming?” the pilot asked.

I didn’t realize they had scanners by the outbound aperture, but they did. A silver-red beam locked on to the hull of the C-64. It moved up and down the Mercury-class transport.

“Find anything?” the colonel asked.

“Clean, sir,” the traffic controller said.

The colonel glared at me.

“You see any unidentified ships in the area?” I asked, desperation starting to sink in.

The controller ran his finger over the radar screen, tracing a line above the information the scan found. “All clear. Look for yourself.”

The markings on his radar monitors could have been written in Sanskrit as far as I could tell. The notations they used to identify the ships used symbols and numbers, not letters.

“What am I looking at?” I asked.

“Control, should I land this bird?” the pilot asked. Irritation showed in his voice.

“What do you think?” the head controller asked the colonel. Still staring into the monitor, the controller pointed at it, drawing invisible circles around different areas on the screen.

“What do the markings mean?” I asked.

“These red triangles are Air Force. They’re guarding our air space. These blue boxes are civilian ships. These green ones are government, strictly non-combat …surveyors, that kind of shit.”

The colonel took a long breath, gave me another angry glare, and said, “Send them on their way.”

“No problem,” said the controller. “Five-Tango-Zulu, this is traffic control. Sorry about the tie-up. We had a false alarm.”

“Are we cleared to leave?” the pilot asked.

“You are clear for takeoff.” The controller looked back at me and smiled. I heard nerdy enthusiasm in his voice as he said, “Klyber’s transport is self-broadcasting. You don’t see self-broadcasters often. Now comes the cool part.”

The controller pointed at a blue square with symbols that meant absolutely nothing to me. “See that? That’s Five-Tango-Zulu. That’s the Admiral’s transport. He’ll fly a few minutes out, and then poof. The ship vanishes off the screen so quickly that the computers don’t know what to do about it. The screen goes blank because the system resets. If you ever wanted to see a computer wet itself, watch this. Weirdest damn thing you ever saw.”

“Hurting for entertainment,” I muttered to myself as I turned to gaze out the window. The colonel still stood in front of the window. Now that he cleared the transport to leave, he wanted to make sure he made the right call. Once the big transport departed safely, he would deal with me.

I took another look at the radar screen and tried to make sense of the rainbow of symbols. The low glow of the screen seemed to dissolve into the overall darkness of the room. I walked over to the window in time to see the tail of Klyber’s C-64 escaping into the black void beyond the aperture. Strobe lights along the wing and tail of the transport flashed white, then yellow, then red.

“Huang or no Huang, Harris, you’re up shit creek this time,” the colonel said in a soft voice. “You know that, don’t you?”

I did not answer.

He turned to look at me. “We’ll just wait until your friend Klyber’s transport is away, then you and I can settle up.”

For a moment I wished they had found a bomb on the transport, then I remembered Rear Admiral Halverson. Surely they would catch the admiral …but what would that prove? “Shit creek,” the colonel repeated under his breath. Watching Klyber’s ship grow smaller and smaller as it drifted into space, I realized just how far up that creek I had traveled.

“That’s it,” the colonel said. “They’re gone. Now let’s you and me go over to the brig and have a discussion. How does that sound?”

It did not sound good. The colonel started toward the elevator and I turned to follow.