I turned a corner and found a street meeting. A priest or pastor stood on a little wooden stand two feet above a large crowd of listeners. Behind him hung a ten-foot-long banner that read, LEGION IS AMONG US.
His flock of listeners provided better camouflage than the shadows. I walked the outside of the throng as if planning to join, all the while thinking about the banner and testing it against the things Gordon Hughes had said.
If Legion referred to demons, then the banner warned that demons or devils had entered the spaceport. Maybe he meant me and my regiment, we had entered the spaceport; but we weren’t the only demonic presence while Colonel Riley had five thousand men. We are the demons, I thought. We are the devils. We are Legion.
I thought about the three men I had killed in Seattle. They were small, soft, nonmilitary types. They would have fit in with this preacher’s flock. I wanted to do a little reconnaissance and listen to the sermon—who knew what messages I might have heard—but I did not have that option. These folks only qualified as religious fanatics; I had assassins to capture.
The lighting in the wide corridor was dimmed enough for families to sleep along the edges. The outlying crowd could not see the preacher’s face clearly in this obscure light, but his voice was sharp. He said, “Be ye wise as serpents yet harmless as doves. We are not supposed to live our lives wearing blinders. We are not supposed to lie down to be sacrificed like lambs.”
At first I thought the crowd was mostly men; but as I pushed my way through, I noticed teenage boys as well. Maybe as many as two thousand men had gathered to hear the sermon, a pretty big crowd until I saw tens of thousands of people still lying on blankets and trying to sleep.
Some revival, I thought. Most of these people don’t give a shit. I registered that thought, but I did not have time to consider its meaning.
I pushed through the revivalist flock and walked down the center of a lane, watching the map on the remote. When I reached a clearing between two neighborhoods, I found a shadowy corner and contacted Jackson. I said, “What is your report?”
“The gas wasn’t a problem, sir. We threw a couple of pellets into the vent and dissolved the gas.”
“Did you test the air?” I asked.
“Yes, sir, we did. It stinks, but it isn’t toxic.”
“And the service corridor?” I asked.
“They’re still out there, sir. It does not look like they want to come in. Per your orders, we haven’t gone out to collect them.”
I said, “Good job,” and I signed off.
The signal from the robot sentry led me through a dark alley. There were no lights on the walls in this area, just a long, narrow corridor in which the light from my remote stood out like a neon target.
If I needed a reminder that I was inside a defunct spaceport, not on a street in a city, I found it at the end of the hall. This area may have been created to look like a city, but the back alley I entered led to a maintenance closet instead of another street.
I pulled the door partially open. Beyond the doorway, I saw a portable oxygen generator, a glass hose that stretched from the top of the geny to a ventilation shaft, and three men. That generator might have been designed to create oxygen, but there wasn’t any oxygen coming out of it on that night. The vomit-colored gas belching into the glass hose had an activated chlorine base.
The oxygen geny did not surprise me, but the three men operating it did. I expected Bible-toting dupes, like the men I had killed in Seattle. What I found was a trio of government-issue military clones—Colonel Martin Riley’s men.
My first impulse was to strike. I didn’t have a gun, but I wouldn’t need a gun to kill a trio of G.I. clones. Take it easy, Harris, I thought, reminding myself that I hadn’t come to kill little fish; I would allow the little fish to swim free in the hope that they would lead me to bigger game.
What can you learn from a dead man? I asked myself.
Backing away from the door without closing it, I left the alley. Up the hall, the street preacher continued delivering his fiery sermon. This part of Mars Spaceport did not have shops or administrative offices or waiting areas. The hall was long and straight, with no doors or turns except for alleys that probably led to janitorial facilities. I looked for someplace I could hide, but the only cover I could find would be to rejoin the congregation.
“Jackson, what’s the status?” I whispered into the remote.
“Same as before. They keep pumping gas, and we keep neutralizing it. Those chickenshit bastards are still loitering in the halls.”
I wondered about the men waiting in the halls outside the food court. Were they clones, too? Had Riley joined forces with the New Olympians? It didn’t make sense. Why would he join the New Olympians? As I thought about it, I realized that I had not seen any of Riley’s men the entire day. He had five thousand troops, supposedly fifteen hundred of whom were on duty at any given time. The combat armor his men wore was different than ours. It was covered with white enamel so it could be spotted from a distance. They belonged to the Corps, but they did the work of policemen.
I hadn’t even seen any of Riley’s men in the grand arcade, and he should have had hundreds of men patrolling the area.
Somebody had to be helping the locals, and Riley was the logical candidate. The only weapons the New Olympians had were cleaning supplies. Not even Alexander the Great or Napoleon could launch a revolution with janitorial supplies.
Stunned by what I had found, I said, “Speck. Riley is behind this?” I needed to report the defection to Cutter; but before I mentioned this to anyone, I needed to make sure this was Riley’s work and not the work of a few rogue Marines.
I had not meant to mention this to anyone until I knew what was what, but Curtis Jackson, who was still on the Link, overheard me talking to myself. He said, “Riley? Colonel Riley? He’s working with the Martians? You mean those are turncoat Marines out there in the hallway? We oughta go out and kill those bastards!”
The term “Martians” was a derogatory name a lot of Marines used to refer to the New Olympians.
“Negative, Colonel. Do not engage the enemy.”
“General, those clone bastards have attempted to murder my men.”
“How many men have you lost?”
“If they had better weapons, they’d use them,” said Jackson. “I’d have lost a lot of men if that gas had turned out to be Noxium instead of chlorine.”
“If Riley is behind this, he’s got M27s and five thousand men,” I said.
“We better inform Cutter that Riley’s gone south.”
As far as I knew, Colonel Martin Riley was still a loyal EME Marine, and I did not want to blight his record with an unfounded accusation. I said, “Let’s hold off on that court-martial until we know what’s what, Jackson.”
“Yes, sir.”
I held the remote right by my face so I could whisper, and I covered the screen with my hand to block the glow. I stood about twenty feet from the edge of the congregation and just a few feet from a row of picnickers. Looking around the hall, I saw people watching me. They did not seem to know who I was, but they knew I did not fit in.
“Jackson, have your techs track my signal and get ready to move.”
“Ready to move, sir?”
“I’m going to follow those clones and see where they take me. If I give them enough space, maybe they’ll show me who’s in charge.”
People were looking at me now. The preacher had stopped speaking and stared in my direction, so did most of his congregation. Along the nearest wall of the hallway, people stood on their blankets and watched me.
It had not occurred to me before that moment, but now I saw it clearly—these people did not have electronic devices. No flashlights, no mediaLink shades, no communications devices, no computers. The muffled glow from my remote communicator might as well have been a spotlight.
As casually as I could, I lowered the remote and continued down the hall, away from the congregation. People watched me, but
nobody approached. When I glanced back, though, I saw a group of men coming after me.
There was a T-junction up ahead. I could go left or I could go right, but I could not go straight. I chose to turn left, the direction that took me farther away from the grand arcade.
CHAPTER
TEN
My instincts told me that people seldom crossed neighborhood lines in the spaceport. The picnickers along the walls eyed me carefully as I crossed the clearing that marked the border between one neighborhood and the next. I heard people mumbling to each other, some asking questions about me, some speculating why I had entered their domain.
I slowed and waited to see if the men would follow me.
They did, and they didn’t. Three men turned the same way I had, walked a few feet into the hall, and slowed to a stop. They stood at the edge of the new neighborhood, searching the gloomy corridor, looking for me.
Deciding to blend in with the locals, I spotted a vacancy along one of the walls and walked right up to it as if I belonged. Nobody said anything until I sat down.
The man on the blanket to my right leaned over, and asked, “Who the speck are you?” He sounded angry, but he kept his voice low because it was the quiet hour, and most of the people around us were asleep.
Trying my best to make this look like a friendly conversation, I said, “Just visiting.”
“Yeah, well go visit someplace else. That is not your spot.”
“Who does it belong to?” I asked. “Where are they?”
“Sanitary pass,” the man said. “Not that it’s any of your specking business.”
I pretended to lavish all of my attention on my new neighbor while watching the men who had been following me in my peripheral vision. They stared in my direction; but the hall was dark, and I was hidden in the shadows. They might have seen where I had gone, but they did not come after me. As I watched them disappear around the corner, I apologized to my temporary neighbor and told him, “Sorry to have bothered you, I was just trying out the new neighborhood.”
“Yeah? Next time go someplace else,” he said.
Hostile bastard, I thought; but he was protecting his neighbor’s property, something I could respect. I said, “Sorry.”
I killed another minute strolling the neighborhood. Had this part of the spaceport been multitiered like the grand arcade, I might have taken the stairs to an upper floor. That would have made my job so much easier. I could have watched the alley from the next floor up; tracking hostiles is always easier from higher ground.
The spaceport was still in dusk mode, so people could not see me clearly. As long as I did not use the remote, I would not attract attention. I wanted to know what was going on back at the food court, and I wanted to radio Cutter, but I did not want to risk giving myself away.
I waited another minute or two to make sure the coast was clear, then I walked back to the alley. If anyone noticed me, they ran their recon a lot more subtly than the guys who followed me up the hall. People tracked me as I left one neighborhood and entered the next; but no one said anything. With the glow from my remote hidden, I had become a New Olympian.
I strode to the alley and entered. The open door was just as I had left it, and I heard the voices of general-issue clones speaking inside.
I hope this finishes quick.
You still nervous?
Hell, yes. I hear Harris is in there.
Harris isn’t so scary.
Get specked! The son of a bitch is a specking Liberator.
Bullshit, there aren’t any specking Liberators left.
A third man said, There won’t be any Liberators once Harris breathes this shit, I promise you that. This shit makes your lungs blister.
I’m just saying I’m nervous.
Don’t sweat it. If Harris breathed this, he’s already dead.
They were clones fighting against the Enlisted Man’s Empire; it made no sense. They must have joined forces with the New Olympians, though I was not sure which New Olympians. Governor Hughes would not have sanctioned something like this. Were they religious converts out to kill Legion? If the term “Legion” referred to clone converts, they could have been out to kill for Legion. “Legion is among us.” What the hell did it mean?
No matter how I tried to fit the pieces together, the end result made no sense.
If I’d been wearing combat armor, I could have recorded their conversation and given it to Intel for analysis; but I had come dressed as a civilian. Apparently, these clones had the same idea. I peered in the doorway and saw they had come in slacks and tees.
The night period ended, and the light around the spaceport started to brighten when the first two members of the trio finally emerged from the alley. The illumination level had not reached daylight levels, only the murky shadows of the early morning.
The third guy must have been in charge of the oxygen geny; his friends left the alley empty-handed. I watched them from across the hall as they turned right and disappeared.
My instincts told me to wait for the final traitor.
A few early-rising natural-borns drifted through the area. The street revival had long since cleared away. A twenty-three-man crew set up food tables where the preacher had been.
A clone wearing white security armor but no helmet drove up in an old-fashioned electric-powered cart with a flatbed for hauling cargo. He parked outside the alley and beeped the horn.
The third clone came out to meet him. They traded salutes, then the new clone drove his cart into the alley. Five minutes later, with the light level just below breaking dawn, the two men drove out of the alley with the oxygen generator in the back of their cart.
They drove slowly, talking happily, not looking back. Staying about fifty feet behind them, I followed as they left one neighborhood and entered the next. The floor was smooth, and the cart glided over it without making much noise.
I followed the cart through a crowded maze of halls and corridors. The illumination hit midmorning levels, and I thought about using my remote to check in with Jackson; but the bastards in the cart kept driving forward. I would lose them if I stopped to chat.
We turned a corner, and there it was…the grand arcade, with its five-tiered ring of stores that now served as a campground for refugees. This time, though, no one noticed me. I was just another New Olympian, walking around the spaceport at the break of another unhappy day. People noticed the clones driving the cart with the oxygen geny, however. I saw a few heads turn to follow them.
We crossed the arcade and continued down a main hall. Arteries such as this one had been constructed to handle tens of thousands of harried travelers at a time.
The cart entered a nearly empty hallway and started to pull away. By the time I reached the corner, it had disappeared. Fortunately for me, there was only one place it could have gone, a doorway with a sign that said, MILITARY PERSONNEL ONLY.
A hand-painted banner hung below that sign. It read, BELIEVE IN LEGION.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
I knew where I was before I saw the trains and the tracks that led ten miles across the desert from Mars Spaceport to Mars Air Force Base.
The train station was brightly lit and nearly empty—only military allowed, no picnickers. I stood on a large mezzanine overlooking three tracks, three loading platforms, and three trains. An escalator slanted down to the platforms below on one side of the mezzanine and a cargo elevator lowered from the other. Peering over a rail, I saw the cart parked beside the nearest train. The clones had removed the oxygen geny from the back of the cart and left it on the edge of the platform. They stood gabbing inside the train. As an officer in the Marines, I felt ashamed of the bastards, not because they had turned their backs on the Corps but because they had no more purpose in life than a pair of specking ninety-year-old grandmothers. They took a five-minute gossip break. One told a joke, and the other laughed and slapped him on the back. If they weren’t traitors, I would have dogged them for goldbricking.
&nbs
p; We were alone in the train station. With them laughing and gossiping and horsing around, I had no trouble slipping down the escalator without being seen. I reached the platform and started toward the train before the lazy bastards started back to work.
The geny was not light. Struggling together, they managed to pull it onto the train without dropping it. Then they surprised me. They paused and gave the platform a security sweep. Had I hesitated a moment, they would have caught me. They entered the train’s lead car. I had already boarded the rear car. There were six cars between us.
I sat quietly as the train glided into motion.
The train slid through a tunnel that ran under the spaceport. It rolled along the track as smooth as wind. After we passed what had once been a stop for Norma-Arm-bound passengers, the tunnel went dark. We passed platforms for passengers heading to the Perseus and Cygnus Arms as well.
Bright lights illuminated the inside of the train. I left the last car and walked into the next. It was as bright and empty as the one I had just left. Looking through the windows, I had a blurry, blinded view into the car in front of me. I could not see clearly enough to distinguish between men and machinery, so I checked for movement instead. The next car was empty and the one after that. It soon became clear that my quarry had remained in the lead car with the oxygen generator.
I made it to the second car, peered through the window, and found them sitting on a bench, gabbing.
I made my move. I eased open the door of their car. They might have noticed the door, but they didn’t react until they saw me charging toward them; but by that time, it was too late. They did not have time to draw weapons, and they had nowhere to run.
I slammed the edge of my hand across the throat of the first clone as he stood to face me. He gasped and fell, and lay on the floor choking for air.
The second man rushed me. He was young and stupid, I saw it in his brawny gait. I needed to keep the bastard alive, though, and that meant I needed him more than he needed me.
The Clone Sedition Page 8
