Rogue Clone

by Steven L. Kent

  “So let’s talk about the information I need, Colonel Harris.” The man sat down on a rolling chair and glided up to the side of the table so that our heads almost met. “Should I call you Wayson? Can I call you Wayson?” He laughed. “I suppose at this point I can call you anything I want. Just don’t pull out my magic wand—is that what you are thinking, Wayson?”

  Thanks to the hormone in my blood, I began to forget just how painful that jolt had been. I had to work to stop myself from telling the man to “get specked.”

  “So, Wayson, I’m going to ask you some questions. Whether you answer or not, I’m going to give you another jolt. One of the things they teach us in intelligence training is, ‘Never accept the first offer.’

  “So you tell me as much or as little as you want, and I’ll still fry you after that. Then I will ask you the same questions again. And we’ll keep that up until I think you’ve told me the truth. All of the truth.”

  He leaned still farther in so that our faces were almost touching. “Tell me, Wayson, how did you know that we were going to attack Tuscany?”

  I continued rolling my head back and forth and groaning softly. My acting must have been decent enough. “Didn’t know about Tuscany,” I said, clenching my fists lightly to raise my bio-readings.

  Out came the wand. He pulled it from his lab coat with a snap of his wrist. He did not look at me. He watched the monitor as he brought the wand toward me, and I suppose he liked what he saw. My heart rate must have been skyrocketing and now I was not acting. He placed the wand on the table beside my arm.

  “Wayson, you cannot possibly expect anyone to believe that,” the man said, though something in the tone of his voice made me think that he might.

  “I suppose if you didn’t know about the attack, the next question makes no sense. Still, you must be in contact with someone, Wayson. A bright man like you would not come out to the enemy fleet without telling somebody.”

  Sighing slightly, the man climbed to his feet and I saw that he had the harness in his hands. There was a plastic bar in the middle of the harness. This he slipped into my mouth, pinning my tongue in place behind my teeth. I put up some resistance; but I was weak and he won easily enough. He laced the harness around my face then synched it to the strap across my forehead.

  “Is there another spy on this ship?”

  I could not speak, of course; and now that my face was bound and my breathing obstructed, my pulse, heartbeat, and stress readings were no doubt off the charts.

  “Nothing to say for yourself?” the man said as he picked up the wand. This time he touched the wand to my throat, just below the corner of my jaw. The pain was all encompassing. My muscles clamped and my thoughts turned into a silver explosion.

  The wand traveled slowly down my neck, over my collar-bone, and then paused just above my heart. The agony was exquisite. My hands clenched into fists, and my fists pounded involuntarily up and down between the table and the restraints. My jaw clamped down on that plastic bit. My eyes screwed into tiny slits, which was good because I lay staring up into that blinding light.

  During the moment itself, as the stream of electricity seemed to stab into my body like an endless blade, I lost all thought and control. If the man had asked me a question and I had somehow been able to hear him and I was intelligent enough to understand and answer, I would have told him anything he wanted. I do not know if he asked questions during the torture itself. He must have known that I could not hear, could not think, could not speak. I lay on that table a straining, suffering, quivering mass, no more intelligent than the electricity that so overwhelmed my brain.

  From my heart, the wand moved down across the flat of my stomach. Had I been cognizant, I would have worried about the man dragging that wand across my genitals, but he paused over my lower abdominal muscles, and then he placed the wand back on the table.

  “Wayson, you just survived three minutes and twenty-two seconds of two thousand volts. If you were truly riding the lightning in an old-fashioned electric chair, your eyes would have melted and your hair would have caught on fire. Do you still say that you’ve never heard of Tuscany?” the man asked.

  Thanks to the hormone, which likely flooded my veins in excessive quantities, my thoughts came back the moment the wand went away. I was in pain, no doubt about that. I felt worn out and weak, but I was back in control the moment the electricity stopped.

  A whimper left my lips. I was not sure if it was real or I pretended it. I did not cry. I did not even whimper again. When the man removed the harness from my mouth, I whispered, “I did not know about Tuscany.”

  “Is there another spy on this ship?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.” All the strength left my body this time. I lay flat on the table without enough strength to so much as turn my head. A layer of sweat covered my body. The cold air in the office bit into my damp skin, but I was calm. The hormones left me calm and resigned.

  “You know what, Harris,” the man said in a voice so informal that I might not have recognized it, “I think I believe you.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Between the initial beating I received from Sam the jailor and the time that I woke up again inside my cell, nearly twenty-four hours had passed. The ringing in my head was the worst I had ever felt, but my body did not hurt too badly. Sam had left some nasty bruises on my ribs. That was the worst of it. My left bicep and right calf had deep charley horses where the interrogator stabbed me with his needles. As for the electrocution, some of my muscles were strained from fighting against the restraining straps. For the most part, I felt no worse than I would have felt after a really tough day at the gym.

  During the time I was being interrogated, I caught a lucky break. The Confederate Arms sent ten ships to Odessa, a wealthy planet in the Sagittarius Arm that supported the Revolution. They did not intend to attack the planet, this was a blockade-running mission.

  A flotilla of U.A. Navy destroyers and fighter carriers met them as they emerged. The Confederate ships tried to escape without engaging the Sagittarius Fleet. The U.A. ships followed. Two Hinode battleships were destroyed. The others fled until they could broadcast to safety.

  Since I was deep in the bowels of the ship, stripped to my briefs and strapped to an interrogation table when the battle occurred, Crowley must have decided that I had nothing to do with it. The Confederate Arms said there was a leak in the chain of command and blamed the Mogats. The Mogats said that the Japanese should have been better prepared for the battle. I personally wanted all sides to blame Tom Halverson. With any luck, they might even shoot the bastard and me with the same firing squad.

  The door down the hall opened. Someone walked toward my cell, his hard-soled shoes clanked against the metal grid floor. I did not bother climbing from my cot. At any moment, I thought, Sam would step into view. If he came close enough, I would kill him. I would snap his neck. I was marked to die anyway, and dying sooner might mean avoiding another torture session. So I lay on my cot facing the far wall of my cell, curled into a ball and acting defeated.

  The steps stopped at the edge of my cell. “I have a gift for you, Colonel Harris,” Yamashiro said. “This is a gentleman’s gift. No one else needs to know that I gave it to you.”

  For one wild moment I thought he had smuggled a gun into the brig. I spun over on my cot so that I faced him. Yamashiro stood right in front of my cell leaning forward into the bars. He held on to the bars with his right hand, and reached toward me with his left. That hand was cupped around something, my “gentleman’s gift.”

  I sat up and stared through the bars at the man. Our eyes met for a moment, then he nodded down toward the gift he had offered me. I stood and approached.

  “You’re not supposed to stand so close to the bars,” I said. “It’s dangerous. A prisoner could grab your arm and pin you against the bars.”

  “I’m not worried about it,” Yamashiro said. As I drew closer and looked at his offered hand, I notice
d the calloused skin along the edge of it. A short and powerful build, sandpaper hands—these were the signs of training in judo or jujitsu.

  Yamashiro turned his hand so that the palm faced up. His fingers still curled over the gift hiding it. As I approached, the fingers spread revealing their secret. I saw nuggets of glass and wadded up wires that looked like they were made of gold. Yamashiro smiled. “It was a fine magic trick.”

  Seconds passed as I stared at that hand filled with sparkling gems of broken glass, my heart sinking in my chest. Then I realized that the pulverized mediaLink shades he held had gold frames. The ones I left on the bridge had cheap black plastic frames. “A young ensign found them in a communications station on the bridge.”

  “Then you have more than one spy on your hands,” I said. “I’ve never seen those before.”

  Yamashiro’s smile spread. “No? The shades you left had black frames. These were the best I could do on short notice.” He closed his fist again and pulled his hand back through the bars.

  “Where are the real ones?” I asked.

  “Right where you left them,” Yamashiro said. “I thought they might be more valuable just as you left them. Having unseen ears can be a powerful tool.”

  I worried about Halverson setting a trap by giving faux orders in range of those shades. I imagined intelligence relaying those orders to Huang and Huang sending the Doctrinaire into an ambush. What kind of trap could stop a ship like that? Then I remembered that Yamashiro had called this a “gentleman’s gift.” Why had he come and why had he not told Crowley about my little trick?

  “Who did your ensign tell about the shades?” I asked.

  “He told his commanding officer, who told his commanding officer,” Yamashiro said, an infectious, mischievous grin spreading across his face.

  “And it went all the way to the top?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said Yamashiro.

  “But Admiral Halverson did not hear about it?” I asked.

  “He is with the Confederate Arms Fleet,” Yamashiro said, as if those few words explained everything. “The ensign was an officer in the Hinode Fleet. The information came to me.”

  “And you don’t share intelligence between fleets?” I asked.

  “Sadly, no. Like you, we also suspect that our allies in the Confederate Arms may not be reliable.”

  “I see,” I said. “In my opinion, the Mogats aren’t much better. You know how they got these ships in the first place?”

  Without waiting for a response, I answered my own question. “They gassed the original crew.”

  “So you would not trust them?” Yamashiro asked.

  “If I were you, you mean? I would trust the Arms before I would trust the Mogats,” I said. “You know who you should have trusted? You should have trusted Klyber. Klyber did not want to invade your planet. He tried to keep the Senate off your back as much as possible.”

  Yamashiro’s smile did not fade, but his eyes seemed to harden and his expression became more serious. “I admired Admiral Klyber but I did not trust the Senate.”

  I stared straight into Yamashiro’s eyes. “The Mogats would not have known how to rig Klyber’s ship like that.”

  For a long moment, Yamashiro returned my glare, looking me in the eyes. Then he looked down at the floor and shook his head. “Klyber was an honorable man. I did not want him killed.”

  “But you showed them how to do it,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Yamashiro, still looking down. He produced a package of cigarettes and lit one. “A Hinode engineer figured out how to sabotage the generators and taught some of their engineers.”

  “Did you know what they would do with it?”

  “Yes.”

  I laughed. It was an angry laugh. “Is it irony or karma? Now that they know how to sabotage broadcast engines, what makes you think that they won’t do it to you?”

  “The Believers could barely fly these ships when they helped us escape Ezer Kri,” Yamashiro said. “They had no idea how to maintain or repair them. We renovated the fleet. Our engineers did all of it.”

  “The Mogats learn quickly,” I said, “so watch your back. Once they know enough, they won’t need you or your fleet officers. As I recall, you’re a student of history. Right now, your officers are playing the role of Poland to the Confederate Arms’s Soviet Union and the Mogats’ Nazi Germany.”

  Yamashiro took a drag on his cigarette, stared at me for a moment, then shook his head. Clearly his history was civil, not military.

  “The Nazis and the Soviets had a shaky alliance. It ended the moment they both invaded Poland to try and get a better shot at each other. Once your war with the Unified Authority is done, you’d better have an exit plan.”

  Yamashiro thought to himself as he listened. He took one last long drag from his cigarette and exhaled the smoke through his nostrils in dual streams. His smile had vanished and he wore a serious and thoughtful expression. “One way or another, the war ends tomorrow. We’re attacking Earth,” he said.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Time never moved so slowly for me as it did after Yoshi Yamashiro’s visit. I was locked in the brig of a ship that was about to go to battle against the most powerful navy in history. This was the command ship. If the Doctrinaire located this ship, it would undoubtedly destroy it. With those big cannons, one shot could finish the job.

  If the Secessionists won, the Confederate Arms and Mogats would agree that it was time for me to die. If the Unified Authority carried the day, Huang might execute me. For somebody who had supposedly given up on life and survived purely by instinct, I cared more than I should have.

  I tried to sleep but found that I could not lie still on my cot. Sam came in to check on me every hour. He stood outside my cell and stared in at me.

  “You want something?” I asked once.

  He gave me a cocky smile. “Comfortable?” he asked.

  “You want to come in and fluff my pillow?” I asked.

  “You know, Harris, I used to want to shoot you. After seeing what they did to you in the interrogation room, I’d rather keep you alive. I might enjoy giving you the wand a time or two myself.”

  “Why don’t you come in here and we can discuss it,” I said.

  “You might show me some respect after what happened last time. Maybe I went too easy on you.” Sam actually seemed to believe what he was saying.

  “I’d love to go another round. Maybe this time you can hit me when I’m looking.” I knew I was baiting him, and I knew it would have the desired effect. Sam considered himself a pretty tough guy.

  He turned red then fought back his rage. “Watch yourself,” he said. “Things could go worse for you next time. I wonder how that wand would feel if you went in with a broken jaw.”

  “Lets find out. Why don’t you come in here and break it?” I asked. Sam heard this and stormed down the hall.

  The next person to call on me was Admiral Halverson. As he had before, Halverson came bearing gifts. This time, he carried a small red visor on a two-legged stand. The unit was no more than eighteen inches tall, wobbly support frame and all. Sam accompanied him. In the admiral’s wake, the jailor acted more civil. “You’ve got a visitor, Harris,” he said.

  The last time he said that, of course, he caught me unaware and pummeled me. This time he stayed outside my cell, as did Halverson.

  “Hello, Colonel,” Halverson said.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “This?” Halverson held the visor up so that I could get a better look at it. “This is how sailors used to view their battles forty years ago, back when this ship was made. This is a remote strategic display.” Halverson walked to the door of my cell and placed the display on the floor.

  “Be careful with it, Harris. It’s an antique.”

  I sat on the edge of my cot, my legs dangling over the side. “So you really plan to attack Earth today?” I asked. “Doesn’t that seem a bit . . . suicidal? The Doctrinaire will be waiting.”

>   “I’m counting on it,” Halverson said with a bright air. “I should hope that the Unified Authority’s most powerful ship will come to protect its capital world. Believe it or not, Harris, we sped up our plans because of you.

  “Ever since you arrived, we seem to have lost the element of surprise. So now, thanks to you, we have very little choice but to finish the war.”

  “May I?” I asked, looking first at the remote display, then at Sam.

  Halverson nodded. I stepped off the cot and walked over to the door of the cell. Kneeling rather than bending over, so that I could keep an eye on Sam, I reached through the bars and picked up the display.

  The thing weighed no more than a pound. The visor itself was made of cheap, hollow plastic. The outside of the display was convex. The inside had two eyepieces surrounded by spongy padding. A black cable hung between the back of the visor and a U-shaped control pad.

  “The display is monochrome, I’m afraid. It’s red against black. Old technology, but it’s the best I could find.”

  “I can’t watch from the bridge?” I asked.

  “Harris, I don’t know how you tipped Huang off, but resourceful as you’ve proven yourself to be, I wouldn’t trust you anywhere near the bridge.”

  “So you think you can win?” I asked. “You have what . . . roughly six hundred ships? Didn’t the Galactic Central Fleet have about six hundred ships? That was before Thurston blasted four of them at Little Man.”

  “Some of the fleet is too old or too badly maintained to fight.” Halverson continued to smile. “And they’ve shot down seventeen more of our ships since you came aboard, Harris. We’re down to five hundred and forty. Well, five hundred and thirty-nine.”

  “Did you hear what Huang said about a fleet with no fighters?” I asked.

  “That it’s like a boxer without a jab? He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The man is a politician, not a sailor. He puts on a good show.”