“Do you know what to shoot?” Freeman asked.
“The tank?”
“Not the tank, the fuel depot.”
Located at the edge of the darkness was the fuel depot that the late Jimmy Callahan used to fill his vehicles. Somehow it had survived the Hinode Fleet’s attack. I aimed the rocket at a fuel tank and fired, triggering a grand explosion that lit up the night. The explosion was deafening.
Hidden up on that hill, I heard it and felt the percussion. The force of the blast shook the ground and the sound thundered in my ears so that the vibrations became intermingled as one in my head. A fireball shot sixty feet into the air. It towered over smaller eruptions as underground tanks, pumps, and piping blew into shrapnel. Flames shot in all directions lighting the area with a golden glow.
The rocket set off a chain reaction, igniting a network of underground fuel tanks that extended below the road. Fuel tank after fuel tank exploded leaving huge craters in the road. Made for use in a low gravity theater, that LG tank could not possibly come out after us.
Callahan’s troops were thugs, not soldiers. They would not regroup as quickly as Marines, but they would regroup. They would send scouts and assassins out to find us soon enough. We did not wait. Once he was sure that the tank and the jeeps could not follow, Freeman turned to leave.
I watched men running around near the flames. The muffled bang of underground explosions, so different from the crackle of gunfire, echoed through the night air. The late Colonel Callahan’s men would not get their LG tank out of that cul de sac anytime soon. They might fill the craters if they became desperate or ambitious enough to mix tons and tons of concrete. That might work. They certainly did not have enough technical know-how to build a bridge over those pits.
Looking back behind me as I left the rise, I saw the tree under which I had hid. I saw the bodies dangling from its lowest boughs like strange black fruit against the orange hue of the fire.
“You didn’t have to kill Callahan,” I said as we crossed the fence and left the base.
“I wanted to,” Freeman said. He led me to a house on the same street as the house I had used.
“My Starliner is self-broadcasting,” I said, sounding even more annoyed than I felt. “We can leave anytime that we want.”
Freeman stiffened and looked back at me. “Self-broadcasting? We’re getting off this rock.”
“It wouldn’t have mattered if Callahan was president of the friggin’ Orion Arm,” I said. “He wouldn’t have been able to touch us.”
Freeman thought about this for a moment then grinned. “So killing him was a bonus.”
Ray Freeman did not talk much. When he did speak, he seldom talked about himself. I gleaned some of what had happened from things he said over the next few days and constructed the rest of it in my mind. This is what I think happened when Freeman landed in Safe Harbor.
Freeman came in a few days before me. He arrived before the Hinode Fleet defeated the Earth Fleet and destroyed the Doctrinaire.
Freeman stole a van at the spaceport and drove until he reached that stretch of road that was too destroyed to pass. He left his van and hiked into town and found his way to the Marine base. Like me, Freeman did not believe that the Hinode Fleet could survive a battle with the Doctrinaire. I think he hoped to find Callahan and bring him to Earth for safekeeping.
When he got to Fort Washington, he found men wearing fatigues and armed with M27s gathering bodies. Here Freeman made a rare mistake. He assumed the men with the M27s were Marines. When he asked about their commanding officer, they took him to go see “the colonel.” Freeman did tell me that Callahan referred to himself as “the colonel.”
Alert as he was, Freeman would have noticed that Callahan’s thugs did not carry themselves like real Marines. He would have noticed the casual way they handled their firearms, the way they spoke to each other, and the slow pace at which they worked. Real enlisted men were clones. Unless all of Callahan’s men wore officers’ insignia, Freeman would have noticed that the men around him were not government-issue.
They took Freeman to the building Callahan used as his headquarters. That was a mistake. Freeman quietly surveyed the field, looking for strategic locations and tactical advantages. He had an eye for this. He would have spotted the tree at the top of the rise and known it was the perfect spot for an attack.
By the time Callahan came out to speak, Ray Freeman knew how many snipers Callahan had on the roof and where they were positioned. He knew how many machine-gun nests were along the veranda. He would have seen the LG tank rumbling around the parade grounds, and he would have taken note of the fuel depot as well.
Callahan decided to have Freeman killed. He must have decided that since he and his thugs had the guns, they would have no trouble executing the gigantic black man. They probably took him to the same field where they did their officer executions. The moment Freeman decided the odds were right, he killed his would-be executioners.
Freeman never left an attack unavenged. He hiked to Fort Clinton the following day. Knowing that the Army base would be under gang control as well, he presented himself with a winning offer. In exchange for a sniper rifle, a rocket launcher, and a ride back to Callahan territory, Freeman offered to cripple the gang holding Fort Washington. How could the gangsters at Fort Clinton refuse? They gave him a stealth jeep and the best sniper rifle they could find.
That night, as he returned to even the score with Callahan, he found me.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Freeman had a stealth jeep, but he did not want to use it. The gangs whose territories bordered the Marine base would have heard the shooting. Anybody within thirty miles would have heard the fuel depot explode. Our attack would have touched off a feeding frenzy in Safe Harbor.
“How long did it take you to get in from the spaceport?” Freeman asked.
“Two days,” I said. “One day to reach town and one day to cross town.”
“Two days,” Freeman repeated.
“We could cross town in less than an hour in that jeep,” I said. “We’d be at the spaceport by sunup.”
Freeman shook his head. The house was dark inside. We were in a basement with only subterranean windows. We could see up and down the street from our ankle-high perspective. The street was dark and still, but we expected marauders to follow soon. Callahan’s troops would come looking for us. So would his enemies.
“How did you come through town?” Freeman asked.
“On foot,” I said.
“Did you cross main roads?”
“Alleys, mostly,” I said. “I hiked through a couple of department stores to avoid being seen.”
“The main roads are broken up,” Freeman said. “We’d end up driving through the neighborhoods.”
“We would be sitting ducks,” I said. “There are gangs everywhere. All it would take is some hotshot with a roadblock and a bazooka.”
Freeman watched me figure this out. Too silent by nature to help me catch up, he was often one step ahead of me. There was a flicker of movement on the street. He rose to his feet and moved toward the window, his massive body forming a black silhouette in the thin light.
Up the street, five men moved slowly toward us. Four of them formed an uneven picket line, with the fifth covering their back. These were, as I said before, thugs, not soldiers.
They walked right up the middle of the street apparently giving no thought to cover. They had torches attached to the barrels of their rifles, and they swept the ground before them with the beams of those torches. They made splendid targets.
“Think those are the scouts or the hunting party?” I asked.
“What difference does it make?” Freeman asked as he raised that sniper rifle and pointed it out the window.
“They’ll be looking for us,” I said. “However many men Callahan had in his gang with whatever weapons they have left, they will be looking for us.”
Freeman nodded. In the waning light, I could just make out the fea
tures of his face. “Smashing a crippled gang is easier than smashing a whole one.”
“So do we stay here tonight?” I asked. I could not help wondering when the killing would end.
We could simply hide in the basement and pick off gang members as they approached. Freeman could hold down the fort, but one of us, meaning me, would need to check the street. I pointed this out, then ran up the stairs and slipped out of the house.
It was a silent, balmy night with the first hints of a cooling breeze. The snap and crackle of the fire on the base carried in the air, but it was far away and the big explosions had stopped. It now sounded like a large bonfire. I moved along the edge of the house then crossed twenty feet of grass to crouch behind a hedge. Maybe eighty feet away, the men with their glaring flashlights marched up the street. Their whispering carried so well on the soft breeze that they might just as well have been shouting.
Sprinting to a tree, then crawling behind a hedge, then kneeling beside a garage, I advanced along the street. From where I hid, I could see the dark barrel of Freeman’s rifle poking out from the basement window.
As I watched the white eyes of the torch beams travel up and down the street crossing and tangling and illuminating bushes and lawns, I realized that I was about to do what I was created to do. I was designed for combat and for killing. This would be murder. These men had no chance of saving themselves.
I recounted their flashlight beams. There were five of them.
Freeman and I needed to kill these men so quickly that they would not make a sound. There might be another party of five searching the next street and another five on the street after that. There might be an army of thirty or forty men waiting to hear what happened with these five scouts. I remembered the soldier with the rocket launcher slung over his shoulder. Now, with Freeman hiding in the basement of a house, that rocket launcher was worth a dozen machine guns. Fire a rocket at a bungalow like the one in which Freeman now hid, and no one could possibly survive the attack.
“I’m not sure what we’re going to do about that damn tank,” I heard one of the men say. “Maybe we can take it apart and rebuild it on the other side.”
“What? And carry the parts? That specking thing must weigh one million pounds. Just them treads weigh a ton!”
“What about fuel?” a third man asked. “They got the depot.”
“Shit, there’s more gas,” the first man said. “It’s a big base. There’s got to be more fuel.”
They were so wrapped up in their conversation that they did not even notice when the man in the rear got hit. He had been walking a good twenty paces back from the rest of the group. Freeman picked him off with a shot to the head, and he fell in the deep grass. No one even looked back for him.
Freeman’s next shot was not so skillful. He hit the man in the head, but the man managed to yelp as he died. He staggered forward and dropped his machine gun on the road. It did not fire, but the racket was jarring on this otherwise silent street.
I fired my pistol and hit the two men closest to me. The green beam caused their torsos to burst. The kills were neither silent nor pretty. Both men dropped their guns, causing more racket.
The last man turned and tried to run. Freeman’s silent shot struck him from behind, tearing away two-thirds of his neck. He flopped to the ground as if there was not so much as a rigid bone in his body.
Others would come. If they did not locate us, they might burn the entire neighborhood down.
We needed to put a couple of miles between us and Callahan’s remaining soldiers before daybreak. We started down one street, saw men with lights, and then went down the next street. We zigged and zagged our way through the sleepy officer’s suburb hiding beside houses and sometimes dashing into backyards.
Like the base itself, this housing area was a maze. Roads formed cul de sacs and concentric circles. Tall brick walls separated communities that should not have been divided. Coming to an intersection of two small roads, I heard voices and stopped Freeman. I pointed to a hedge, and we both hid behind it. Seconds later, a parade of forty or fifty men walked by. These men carried rifles and pistols. They were not dressed in fatigues but in a variety of civilian clothes.
These men did not speak. They meandered ahead. They did not use flashlights or bright lights that would give themselves away. Hiding a mere five feet from these ghostly soldiers, I watched them pass then turned to Freeman. “Those aren’t Callahan’s,” I said.
“Scavengers,” Freeman said, “coming to see what caused the explosions.” He did not need to say more.
The first signs of daylight showed on the horizon. The sky brightened behind distant buildings. We traveled through an exurb, then a suburb and finally the metro, winding our way through alleys and small streets. Once in the city, I had an idea about climbing down a manhole. I lifted the lid from the manhole, and Freeman watched skeptically. The problem was that we did not know where the tunnels might be collapsed. In the end we continued above ground.
We never did run into gangs as we passed through Safe Harbor. I saw a man once. He watched us from the top of a three-story building. He sat on the ledge of the building with his feet dangling over the edge, and calmly watched us walk. Whether he was resting or maybe a guard on watch, I could not tell. But he seemed to be more interested than concerned about us.
It took a day to reach the outer edge of Safe Harbor and another day to make our way down the highway. When we reached the vehicles we’d stolen, we hopped into Freeman’s van and drove to the spaceport.
I had not slept much since landing on New Columbia, neither had Freeman. We decided to rest for the night. He slept in his ship and I slept in the Starliner. As I made my bed, I found an old book with dried-up leather binding. With all that had happened, I did not immediately recognize it. Then I saw the words, Personal Journal of Father David Sanjines, and remembered reading the book the night that Bryce Klyber gave it to me. This was the diary of that Catholic priest who hated Liberators but made an exception for Sergeant Shannon. I reread the passage and wondered what this man would have thought about me.
Considering his prejudices, what would Father Sanjines have thought if he had lived to see the entire Republic fall? What would he think of the chaos in Safe Harbor? Liberators had not caused this entropy, though some had died trying to prevent it. As a priest, Sanjines would have agreed that evil can come from natural men. Would he also have agreed that good can come from synthetic soldiers?
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
While I slept, Ray Freeman went scavenging around the spaceport. Most of what he found was packaged food, cookies, candies, and pastries that tasted like plastic. He got it by breaking into vending machines. He loaded this food into a galley at the back of the Starliner. He also brought a few changes of clothes, some combat gear, and a couple favorite guns including the sniper rifle they gave him at Fort Clinton.
We had not yet opened the hangar doors. The lights under the wings of the Starliner cast a faint red glow around us. Other than that, the area around the ship was as black as space.
For a man who prided himself in not caring whether he lived or died, I spent a lot of time fussing over safety checks. I examined the housings around the broadcast generator and the broadcast engine. I checked the instrumentation. I also refueled the Starliner, siphoning thousands of gallons of fuel from an underground tank outside the hangar. Space flight required very little fuel and the energy I needed for self-broadcasting was created by a broadcast generator, but atmospheric flight ate into my fuel supplies and I had no idea when or where I would be able to refuel.
Freeman sat silently in the copilot’s seat through much of this. The seat was a squeeze for him. It was too close to the controls. The wheel brushed against Freeman’s massive chest. He had to curl his tree-stump legs under his seat because the niche under the dash was both too small and too short to accommodate them.
Freeman sat in that seat, staring out the window and looking like an adult in a child’s playhouse
. It took a moment before I realized what had so captured his attention. He was looking at his plane, which he had owned for years. With the Broadcast Network out, his ride could no longer attempt anything more ambitious than continent-hopping.
I knew better than to inquire about it. Ask him how he felt, and Ray Freeman would simply stare at you.
“Any suggestions about where to go?” I asked as I powered up.
“Delphi,” Freeman said.
“Never heard of it,” I said.
“You’ve heard of it,” Freeman said. “The neo-Baptists renamed the place. Before my father arrived there, the planet was called Little Man.”
“Little Man?” I asked.
“I was headed there before you called me.”
So much had happened over the last few days that I forgot all about Freeman’s family. They had set up a colony on Little Man. The U.A. Navy had sent a fighter carrier to the planet to tell them to leave. And then . . . and then the Republic went dark.
“A fighter carrier dropped in on them,” I said. “How long ago was that?”
“Four, maybe five days,” Freeman said. “Why?”
“I might be wrong about this, but if I remember correctly, it takes over a hundred hours to travel from the nearest broadcast disc to Little Man . . . and that is at top speed. If that carrier only left Little Man four days ago, it would not have made it to the discs in time to broadcast out.”
“Yeah,” Freeman said, rising to his feet. “I figured that. I’ll open the hangar.” He climbed out of the cockpit. The low ceiling of the Starliner was an uncomfortable fit for me, and I was only six-three. Freeman, who stood at least nine inches taller than me, had to bow his head, curl his back, and waddle sideways to wedge himself through the cabin. To climb in and out of the hatch, he had to drop into a low squat.
I turned on the landing lights as he walked across the hangar, bathing the floor in bright white glow. The door was still locked. Freeman pulled out his particle beam pistol and shot the locking mechanism, blasting a hole in the center of the door through which a beam of bright daylight stabbed.
Rogue Clone Page 31
