“You didn’t believe that back at Terraneau,” I said.
“Things have changed,” Warshaw said. “We need a man like you.”
“Someone to wear a bull’s-eye on his back,” I said.
“I wouldn’t put it in so many words,” Warshaw said.
“How would you put it?”
“How would I put it? I’d put it this way. We’ve got a security problem, General. I want you to find our rats, lead them into some underground rat hole, and bury them for good.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Earthdate: October 29, A.D. 2517
Location: St. Augustine
Galactic Position: Orion Arm
Warshaw had one lead, one thin lead to help me track down the security breach. That lead came in the form of three dead bodies on a planet called St. Augustine.
Back in my billet, I pulled on a pair of mediaLink shades and read about the planet. It didn’t take long to realize that if I wanted to track down a breach in security, St. Augustine—the rest-and-recreation capital of the Enlisted Man’s Empire—was a promising place to start. If there was a place where our sailors would let down their guard, it was St. Augustine, a planet with beaches, hotels, and very few men.
Several years ago, when the Avatari attacked St. Augustine, the Unified Authority had left the locals to fend for themselves. The people of St. Augustine fought to the figurative last man. Once they ran out of men, the women and children went into hiding, and the aliens simply went away. That was how the Avatari ran things. Once they captured a planet, they left you alone as long as you didn’t disturb their toxic mining operations.
When the Enlisted Man’s Empire liberated the planet, the women of St. Augustine welcomed our sailors and Marines. Having lived without men for more than two years, they welcomed us rather intimately.
One of the first factories to open on St. Augustine manufactured condoms. Now, the clones in the Enlisted Man’s Empire were as sterile as a surgeon’s gloves—“built to copulate, not populate” as the saying goes; but they were also programmed to think they were natural-born, so some enterprising resident came up with the idea of selling condoms to a population of “dead-end Joes” who thought they were potent.
If the news stories were true, that factory did a lot of business. On a planet with a population of six million adult females, more than one hundred million condoms had been sold.
I left for St. Augustine the following day.
As the Commandant of the Marines, I traveled with an entourage. Warshaw assigned me a staff that included a one-star admiral, three captains, and enough lieutenants to man a small fleet—all of them tainted. These were men who had played the power game and come up short for one reason or another; now they wanted to redeem themselves. I brought them along as camouflage, but I did not trust them. I did not like traveling with remora fish in my wake; but fleet officers were expected to have an entourage, and a lone-wolf general would elicit suspicion.
Admiral J. Winston Cabot, supposedly my liaison to Warshaw and Naval Command, was officious, petty, politically motivated, and, I suspected, something of a coward. I decided that much about him during the fifteen minutes it took us to travel from Gobi and land on St. Augustine.
A simpering politician by nature, Cabot all but attached himself to my person. Once Warshaw introduced us, the little ferret swooped right in on me, warning the other officers of the entourage away with a threatening glance. He chattered mindlessly in the beginning, but giving credit where credit is due, the little bastard read me accurately after a couple of minutes and settled down, allowing me to think.
Had he known what I was thinking, Cabot might have given me more space. What came to my mind was how incredibly interchangeable he was, like a gear in an old-fashioned clock. There he sat, a fifty-two-year-old general-issue clone with brown eyes and slightly grayed brown hair, and nothing to distinguish himself beyond his uniform.
And therein was the problem.
If the Unified Authority had developed some kind of new cloning program, there would be no way to stop them from infiltrating our military. If their clones truly had the same DNA as ours, they would be identical. We could place posts by every hatch on every ship and run hourly DNA scans of every sailor, and the bastards would slip through our net.
We flew from Gobi to St. Augustine on the Kamehameha. Bishop walked me to the landing bay, where I expected to see a shuttle waiting. As the Commandant of the Marines, I should have traveled down to the planet in a shuttle, but nothing was available. Instead, I would fly down in the familiar steel-and-shadows world of a transport.
“That’s the best you could get me?” I asked Bishop. “I’m the specking Commandant of the Enlisted Man’s Marines.”
“That’s the best I have.”
My entourage hung around me like flies. I told them to board the transport, and all of them did except for Cabot. He lingered, having decided that the order was meant for everyone but him.
“Do you need something, Admiral?” I asked.
“No, sir,” he said.
“Then board the transport,” I said.
He reluctantly left.
“How do you put up with this shit?” I asked.
“You’ll learn to love it,” Bishop said.
“Bullshit,” I said.
We traded salutes, and I boarded the transport. I started the trip in the kettle with my entourage. After five minutes, I found myself so irritated by their company that I excused myself and climbed up to the cockpit. And there, through the windshield, I saw St. Augustine.
After reliving the uniform dryness of Gobi, I had a greater appreciation for the greens and blues of St. Augustine. The planet had oceans, rivers, and lakes. It had pastures, mountains, and ice-capped poles. From space, Gobi looked like a ball carved out of unfinished wood. By comparison, St. Augustine looked like a well-polished opal.
Cabot came up to the cockpit to check in on me. “General, will we have time to inspect the officers’ R & R facilities while we are on St. Augustine?” he asked. “I haven’t tried them myself, but I hear good things.”
“We’re not here to inspect the facilities,” I said.
“Yes, sir. I’m just saying that I understand they’re supposed to be nice, you know, if we get the chance.” When he saw that he wasn’t getting anywhere, Cabot asked, “Why are we here?”
“We’re here to look at corpses,” I said.
The transport shook and rattled as it punched into the atmosphere.
“Corpses?” Cabot asked.
“Three of them,” I said. “Maybe more if we’re lucky.”
“Who died, sir?” He did not know that the Unified Authority had infiltrated our security. Warshaw would not have trusted a weasel like Cabot with that kind of sensitive information. I felt bad for the bastard. Not knowing that I was little more than a moving target, he still believed that being assigned to me would help his career.
“Clones,” I said. “There are three dead clones on St. Augustine, but none of the ships have reported any of missing men.”
“I’m not sure what you are getting at, sir,” Cabot said.
“Three men died on R & R, right? So they couldn’t have reported for duty when their leave ran out. Only they found these guys last week, and none of our ships have reported anyone missing.”
“Someone must have reported in their place,” Cabot said. “Spies?”
“Worse,” I said. “Assassins.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
By prewar standards, St. Augustine qualified as an emerging world. The planet had a fledgling banking system, a global government, and a world market. The Avatari had knocked out the planet’s mediaLink during their invasion; but other than a lack of communications services, the planet of St. Augustine had all the amenities.
St. Augustine had three continents and twenty-five cities, each of which had a police department manned by MPs. It did not take long to determine that the various law-enforcement groups did not share inform
ation among themselves.
“Bodies found in other cities?” asked the commander of the Petersborough police—a lowly ensign on loan from one of our ships. The Petersborough Police Department consisted of seven officers and thirty-five enlisted men, an unsatisfactorily small count, especially considering that Petersborough was the capital city of St. Augustine.
“Yes,” I said, and I repeated my question, “Have you heard anything about dead clones turning up in other cities?”
“I . . . I haven’t, sir. Nothing,” he said.
We stood in the morgue, three occupied body bags lying on tables before us. I had come with my entourage, and the ensign had come with his as well. It made for a crowded room.
“Perhaps you could get one of your men on the horn to find out,” I suggested.
“Yes, sir.” He turned to one of his men and communicated his orders without speaking. The man saluted and left, making the room one body less crowded.
“Do you have information on any of these men?” I asked the ensign. “Names? Units? Which ships they came from?”
“No, sir.”
Pushing my way through the crowd, I approached the first bag and opened it far enough to reveal the head and face within. The mess that stared out at me did not look like a clone. Its skin was the purple of a fresh plum. The face was moon-shaped, a fat blue tongue poking out between black lips. The hair was the correct color—regulation cut and the right shade of brown.
Seeing the body, a few of the men in my entourage groaned. Sailors . . . They were not as used to dealing with death as Marines.
“What happened to him?” I asked.
“He drowned,” said the ensign.
“Are you sure he’s a clone?” asked Admiral Cabot. He looked pale, his eyes locked on the corpse’s flat doll’s eyes. “He doesn’t look like a clone.”
The ensign looked back into the crowd. Obviously not seeing the person he wanted, he called, “Andy, can you come in here? Tell the general what you told me.”
Unlike everyone else in the room, Andy was a natural-born, probably a local doctor pressed into performing forensic medicine. He was a short man with fiery orange hair and heavily freckled skin. He looked at the body, then at the ensign, then settled his gaze on me. “He was three days dead when he washed up.”
“Are you sure he was a clone?” Cabot repeated.
Andy nodded up and down like a horse, and said, “Oh, he’s a clone, there’s no doubt about that. I ran a tissue sample. I checked his teeth, too. You can always tell by the teeth.” He reached down and squeezed the corners of the dead man’s mouth, making the lips open in a puckered smile.
“Jeez,” Cabot hissed. “Show some respect.”
“Respect.” The word hung in the air as the examiner unzipped the body bag farther, revealing open incisions in the cadaver’s throat, chest, and gut. I wondered if it was possible to respect a body and run an autopsy at the same time.
“We drained a quart of water from his lungs,” the examiner said.
“So he died of natural causes?” asked Cabot.
In my mind, “natural causes” meant a heart attack or kidney failure. Death by drowning seemed no more natural than eating poison or having an underground garage cave in around you.
“We didn’t find anything to suggest he was murdered if that’s what you mean.”
“How about this one?” I asked, taking a step toward the next table. I opened the bag enough to reveal the badly deformed face. Great pains had been taken to clean this corpse, but the skin around the cheeks looked like melted plastic. Bone showed through his skin along the top of his forehead. Despite all of the wreckage to the rest of his face, the man’s undamaged eyes stared up at the ceiling.
What was left of the dead man’s hair had been singed and turned to wire. If he’d had any facial hair, the fire had burned it away. The merely blackened strip of skin along the point of his chin reminded me of a beard.
Hoping to demonstrate his command of the situation, the ensign said, “This one died in a fire.”
“Yes, I see that,” I said. “One man drowns and the next one burns. St. Augustine is a dangerous planet.”
“Actually, he died of asphyxiation,” the examiner said. “It’s fairly common. Most people choke on the smoke long before the fire gets them.”
“Did you find anything to suggest—” I started.
“Foul play? Murder? It’s hard to tell,” said the examiner. He probed the skin along the cadaver’s throat with his fingers. “No broken bones; but on a body like this, burning can hide contusions and abrasions.” He pulled one of the man’s hands free of the body bag, holding it up by the wrist for me to get a closer look. “There’s not much we can get from this. His hands could have been cuffed or tied together before he died, and we wouldn’t know, not when the body is this badly burned.”
“That’s very convenient,” I observed.
“We didn’t find any cuffs or rope at the scene,” the ensign said.
“Have you investigated the cause of the fire?” I asked.
“We haven’t looked into it, sir.”
“Maybe you’d better get someone on that,” croaked Cabot, his face pale and clammy.
“Yes, sir.” The ensign hesitated, then said what Cabot should have known. “Um, sir, I don’t have anyone with that kind of MOS.”
Investigating arson was not a typical “military occupation specialty,” and none of the local MPs had any experience in that field. These guys knew how to break up street fights and how to haul drunken sailors to the brig. The Navy trained them to handle “drunk and disorderly” conduct, not forensics and crime-scene investigations.
“Tell me about this one?” I asked, moving to the last of the corpses.
“He didn’t die of natural causes. Someone snapped his neck,” the examiner said as he opened the bag.
The dead man had a startled expression, his glassy eyes open so wide they looked like they might roll out of their sockets. His skin was the color of curdled milk, and a familiar set of bruises ran along the base of his jaw. He’d died like Admiral Thorne—somebody had twisted his head around until the spinal column broke.
“Ensign, why weren’t we notified about this?” one of the lieutenants from my entourage demanded. He sounded outraged.
“We were notified,” I said. “That’s why we’re here.”
“Yes, sir,” the lieutenant whispered. He sounded contrite. Perhaps he had read my mind . . . more likely my expression. I was tired of seeing the officers in my entourage grandstanding.
“Lieutenant, come here,” I said, making no attempt to hide my annoyance.
He came over, his steps short and tentative. He reminded me of a pet dog being called over to a scolding.
Normally, I simply ignored fools, but in this case I made a point of reading the lieutenant’s name tag. When we got back to the ship, I would assign him to some other duty.
I pointed to the dead man’s jaw, and said, “Lieutenant Granger, place your fingers over these bruises.” He was a sailor, not a coroner; the order must have seemed ghoulish to him. To show that I was not making sport, I demonstrated. The spread of my fingers did not fit the bruises.
“I don’t see what you’re—”
“Just humor me,” I said.
He placed his hand across the point of the jaw, his thumb on one side and the fingers on the other. The fit, of course, was perfect. He stared down at the way his fingers covered the bruises in shock.
“Sir, you can’t possibly think . . .”
“Not at all,” I said. The lieutenant did not know why his hand fit the bruises so perfectly, but everyone else understood my point—the killer was a clone.
The body tally was at thirty-nine and counting.
St. Augustine had twenty-five cities and one hundred thirty resort areas. We had military police patrolling most of the big resorts, but the smaller ones provided their own security. Apparently it never occurred to the locals to call for help when bodi
es trickled in.
“We just heard back from Goshen Beach Station,” one of my lieutenants reported. “They’ve got four stiffs.”
The room was warm and crowded. It smelled of chemicals and perspiration. The men in the body bags smelled of soap and formaldehyde, but that might have been my imagination. I did not mind the morgue or the bodies, but the entourage and the politicking made me claustrophobic.
“I’m going for a walk,” I said.
“Where are you going?” Admiral Cabot asked, sounding like a little child afraid his parents are abandoning him.
“Out for fresh air,” I said. He started after me, so I added, “Alone.”
“There may be a murderer out there,” he said.
“At least one,” I said.
“Maybe I should—”
I put up a hand, and asked, “You don’t really think I need you along for protection?”
He gave a nervous laugh, and said, “That’s a good one, sir.”
Officious prick, I thought as I escaped out the door. It was early in the evening. The sky had not gone dark, but the streetlights had come on.
From the reports, I expected to see nothing but women, children, and clones on the planet. That was not the case. Groups of teenage boys roamed the streets. Old men worked the shops. And there were fighting-age men as well, locals who had survived the invasion. Maybe half the men I passed were clones, maybe only a third.
Petersborough was no resort town. It had probably been an industrial center before the Avatari invaded. Though I saw an occasional empty lot heaped high with debris, most of the buildings had survived the war in one piece. The aliens hadn’t set out to destroy this city, but they sure as shit did nothing to improve it.
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