The Clone Assassin

by Steven L. Kent

  The only cars on the street were police cars.

  Freeman said, “Keep walking.”

  As they passed the car that had chauffeured them from the spaceport, the driver—a policeman—stepped out.

  Watson said, “Wait for us here. We’ll just be a moment.”

  They walked to the end of the block, crossed the street, walked another block, then turned a corner. They were several blocks from the ocean, but the wind carried a hint of salt.

  “Why am I leaving?” Watson asked.

  “Because I work better alone,” said Freeman.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Watson asked, though he already knew the answer and didn’t want to be reminded.

  Freeman obliged him. He said, “You went to law school; you’re not trained for this.”

  “What are you planning to do?”

  Freeman didn’t answer immediately. They walked around another corner. The block ahead had been a storefront with tinted windows and a black marble frieze, a style of building that looked out of place in a coastal tourist town. Ahead of them, business buildings gave way to parks.

  Freeman said, “I want them to see us board a shuttle, and I want them to see the shuttle leave. I want them to think we’ve gone home.”

  “You can’t possibly think you can slip back here and blend in unseen,” said Watson.

  Freeman stood seven feet tall. He was a black man, a pure-blooded African-American living in a society that had outlawed races several centuries ago. His family had been part of an all-African-American Neo-Baptist colony that had not been touched by the Unified Authority’s integration efforts.

  Freeman and Harris had something in common: they were both the last of their kind. Harris had been minted decades after Congress had nixed the Liberator project. Freeman’s Neo-Baptist relatives died when the Avatari incinerated a planet called New Copenhagen.

  Freeman didn’t respond to Watson’s comment. In his mind, answering questions only invited further discussion, and Ray Freeman didn’t like to chat. He said, “Harris is still here.”

  Watson stopped walking. He asked, “How do you know?”

  “They didn’t come here to capture him,” Freeman said. “They came here to kill him.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  They entered a park with overgrown hedges and an empty fountain riddled with bird droppings. The grass had grown knee high. Shrubs and palm trees lined the walkways.

  Freeman said, “Let’s cross the street.”

  “Don’t you like parks?” asked Watson.

  “Not as much as I like privacy,” said Freeman. “If we step out of their line of sight, the New Olympians will send soldiers to keep an eye on us.”

  By this time, three police cars and a truckload of soldiers trailed behind them. Having lost the second-highest-ranking officer in the Enlisted Man’s Empire, the New Olympians weren’t taking any chances.

  The police cars and troop transport waited in the distance as they crossed the street, then lingered a hundred yards back.

  “How do you know they didn’t come to kidnap Harris?” Watson asked, as they stepped onto the next sidewalk.

  Freeman asked, “If you were going to kidnap a clone like Harris, would you shoot him?”

  Watson thought for a moment. He said, “Not if I wanted him alive. I’d try to convert him, get him to walk out on his own.”

  “Did you smell any chlorine? Did you smell ammonia?” asked Freeman.

  “It’s been more than twenty-four hours; the smell might have gone away,” said Watson.

  Freeman shook his head. He said, “The police checked. They wrote about it in their report.”

  “So that’s it? You’re taking me out of the loop?” asked Watson.

  “You’ll be safer in Washington,” Freeman said. “You wouldn’t like the direction I’m headed out here.” And that, as far as Freeman was concerned, was all that remained to be said. He steered Watson back to the police station in silence, and their driver took them out to the spaceport.

  Gordon Hughes Spaceport was technically an “airport,” not a spaceport. It was designed to handle atmosphere-only flights though its runway was long enough to handle fighters. The spaceport could easily accommodate military transports, which were vertical-landing crafts, but it lacked the upgraded equipment needed for fueling extra-atmospheric freighters and commuter crafts. Any space birds landing in Mazatlán would need to pack sufficient fuel to fly home.

  Freeman considered the logistics of extra-atmospheric flights from Mazatlán as the caravan rolled onto the spaceport grounds. He saw cargo planes and atmospheric commuters, but no extra-atmospheric freight haulers.

  Hughes Spaceport did have enough space for a fleet of transports, and those were extra-atmospheric birds that carried large amounts of fuel. Even if a ship’s tanks were nearly empty, there were spaceports in California, Texas, and Utah where an extra-atmospheric ship could refuel.

  Freeman mulled this over in silence.

  Humiliated that he was being sent home, Watson remained quiet as the car approached the spaceport. He told himself he was angry, but he knew the truth. He was embarrassed.

  The car caravan drove into the hangar in which the government shuttle was parked. While Watson thanked the New Olympian driver and policemen, Freeman entered the shuttle. The escort stayed to watch as the pilot powered up the shuttle’s engines and taxied out of the hangar.

  No one noticed that Freeman had already exited the plane. He had entered the main cabin, walked to the galley, and exited through the service hatch at the rear of the plane.

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  Returning to town meant a ten-mile hike, but Freeman didn’t mind. Hiking back to town would give him time to piece together the information he had learned.

  The airport was south and east of town, far from the beaches. It was late at night now, with a sky so purely black in which the stars looked ripe and ready to fall. Freeman drew in breaths of dry desert air. He didn’t run and saw no reason to rush. Crossing parking lots, alleys, and fields, he shadowed the road. The few times that cars passed, he calmly ducked out of sight. Mostly, though, he had the country to himself, just him and the sounds of the wind and the insects.

  He would need a gun, but that didn’t worry him. He had money, both cash and credit, and a man could always find guns if he knew where and how to look, even in a newly formed territory. Black markets grew spontaneously. They were indigenous in all societies.

  Freeman entered an open field, saw a dilapidated farmhouse three hundred yards away, and knew that the land had been out of use for centuries. Scabs of grass grew, but most of the ground remained bare, the soil modified to withhold nutrients from seeds that did not contain the proper genetic sourcing. Once the New Olympians established their territory, they would restore the farmhouse and plant the land.

  The field had space for an armada of transports, and there were other fields nearby that were just as large. He asked himself if those clones could have come in transports, but gave the idea no credence.

  The gunship that attacked Sheridan Federal Correctional Facility seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. EME radar had not picked up the bird until she had nearly reached the coast. There had been three transports as well. According to radar tracking, they materialized about one hundred miles off the Oregon coast. A mystery.

  The same tracking system showed no unidentified aircraft entering New Olympian airspace—not near the sea, not leaving the atmosphere. The Enlisted Man’s Navy had established a blockade around Earth. Transports penetrating that blockade would not go unnoticed.

  Freeman jogged some of the distance, but mostly he walked. He walked up a hill, crested the rise, and saw Mazatlán in the near distance. A few lights glittered in buildings and along the streets, but mostly the city showed as a solid silhouette against the less absolute darkness of the night. On the other side of town, the lights of the relocation center glowed like a field of embers.


  The scene before him sat silent in the desert air, heavy and dry. Freeman could see the sea from this spot as well. A nearly full moon hung above it, illuminating waters as black and shiny as obsidian, with gray breakers rolling into shore.

  CHAPTER

  ELEVEN

  Location: En route to Washington, D.C.

  Date: July 17, 2519

  Travis Watson called Emily, his fiancée, from the shuttle a few minutes after takeoff. He didn’t worry about waking her. She was a night owl; call her anytime before three in the morning, and she would be alert and awake. Call her before noon, and she would sleep through the call.

  She answered on the first ring, and said, “Baby, what is going on down there?”

  Watson said, “I’m on my way home.”

  “Do they know what happened to Wayson?”

  Though Harris’s disappearance had not been released to the public, Emily knew about it. Gordon Hughes, the late governor of the New Olympian refugees, had been her grandfather. She didn’t live or work with the New Olympians, but she kept up with news of the Territories, even when the news included classified information. Few EME generals or admirals had been informed about Harris, but Emily knew all about it, as if all people associated with New Olympia absorbed the information through the airwaves by osmosis.

  Since he saw no point denying information that she already knew, he said, “No.”

  “Is he still missing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jeez,” she said. “What a nightmare. It’s like everything is happening all at once, the attack on the Pentagon, the one on the prison, and now Harris. Someone said they all happened at the exact same time, like it had all been synchronized.”

  Watson said, “I can’t talk about that.” Then he admitted, “It must have been.”

  “What does Don have to say about it?” “Don,” the late Admiral Don Cutter, was Watson’s boss.

  “I haven’t spoken with him,” he said, trying to sound natural. Cutter had been killed in space. Only a small group knew about the assassination—the crew of the Churchill, a few select officers in the Pentagon, Freeman, and the people behind it.

  “I don’t get how the military works,” said Emily. “I would have thought Harris’s disappearance would be a top priority.”

  Hoping to prevent the conversation from evolving into a guessing game, Watson said, “Look, Emily, Sunny doesn’t know about Wayson.”

  “You haven’t told her anything?”

  “I wanted to wait until we had something . . . something more than an empty hotel room.” He wondered what he could tell Emily and what she already knew. As the late Gordon Hughes’s granddaughter, Emily had well-placed friends in the New Olympian hierarchy.

  He said, “I saw Harris’s hotel room. If they got him, he didn’t go down without a fight.”

  “Do you think they killed him?” Emily asked, the shock apparent in her voice.

  “No. I don’t think so,” he said, remembering his final conversation with Freeman. “He killed three of theirs. There may have been a fourth, but I don’t think they would have taken his body if they got him,” said Watson. They left Cutter sitting at his desk, he added, but only in his thoughts.

  “M, I’m going to call Sunny next,” he said, trying again to take control of the conversation.

  Silence. Then after several seconds, Emily said, “Oh, Trav, I don’t know if that’s a good idea. I mean, how is she going to take it? You know, she’s kind of, I mean, she’s kind of . . .”

  “Pampered” was the first word that came to Watson’s mind. Other words like “spoiled,” “controlling,” “clingy,” and “needy” followed.

  Emily didn’t like her, either. Sunny Ferris was a smart, beautiful, well-educated lawyer who knew both how to turn on the charm and how to shut it off. Even when she smiled, and she normally only smiled for Harris, there was something unpleasant about her.

  Emily, who had spotted it first, hadn’t liked Sunny from the start. Watson fell for her charm in the beginning, but the pretty face and the witty banter soon wore thin for him as well.

  He dismissed it as a consequence of her wealthy upbringing. Sunny had grown up in mansions, spending vacations in the best resorts around the galaxy. Neither the alien invasion nor the clone uprising had touched her family or their wealth. Her father’s shoe-manufacturing company continued producing shoes, and his sports-gear business kept on selling sports gear. Over dinner, she sometimes talked about the trials of maintaining friendships on both coasts and of taking extravagant vacations.

  “Look, M, I want you to go to her apartment . . .”

  “Oh, Trav, no. Don’t do this to me.”

  “M . . . M, somebody has to go sit with her. You know how she is. We can’t let her go through this alone.”

  “Yes we can,” said Emily.

  “No we can’t,” said Watson.

  “Call her when you get home, then you can sit with her.”

  “What if someone else tells her?” asked Watson.

  “Who?”

  They both knew who. The law firm that employed Sunny represented the New Olympians.

  Emily changed her tactics. She said, “Send somebody else. Travis, she doesn’t like me. She always ignores me when we go out with them. She only talks to you and Wayson. You know that. That’s why I told you I didn’t want to go out with them anymore.”

  “What if it was me who was missing?” asked Watson. “Wayson would send Sunny to help you . . . and she’d go.” The words rang hollow in Watson’s ears as he said them. He knew better, and so did Emily.

  She said, “No he wouldn’t. Harris? He wouldn’t bother telling me. He’d wait until I found out on my own. And Sunny . . . Wayson never sends his little princess anywhere she doesn’t want to go.”

  It was true. Watson didn’t try to deny it. He said, “M.”

  “I don’t like her, Travis. No, that’s not true. I specking hate her. I do. I hate that bitch. I don’t know why I hate her so much, but I hate her. I’m not going. Don’t ask me again.”

  She remained silent for a few moments, then she sighed and asked, “What’s her address?”

  • • •

  During the minutes between his call to Emily and the call he dreaded, Watson poured himself a drink, a half-filled tumbler of Scotch and ice. He didn’t bother watering the Scotch, not on this night. He hoped the drink would take the edge out of the guilt he felt about sending Emily.

  In his heart, Watson hoped Sunny would not pick up the phone, but she answered on the third ring. Sounding tired and confused, she said, “This is Sunny.”

  “Sunny, this is Travis Watson.” The clock on the cabin wall showed the time as 10:23 P.M., but that would be Mazatlán time, which was two hours behind Washington, D.C. For Sunny, it would be just after midnight. He said, “Sorry to call so late.”

  “It’s okay, Trav. I wasn’t asleep.”

  A chime sounded on her end of the connection. She said, “That’s strange, there’s somebody downstairs. Can you hold for a second?”

  The line went silent.

  During the next few moments, Watson allowed his thoughts to meander. Sunny was Harris’s girlfriend. At least, Harris had stopped seeing other women when he took up with her. Watson didn’t know if Sunny shared the commitment.

  “That’s strange,” she said, sounding more confused. “That was building security. Emily is downstairs. I told them to send her up. Did you send her?”

  “Yes, I did,” Watson admitted.

  “Travis, is everything okay?” she asked.

  “Fine . . . fine,” he lied, too nervous to begin the explanation.

  Sunny had read his silence. He heard it in the way she paused. Sounding both scared and suspicious, she asked, “Where are you?”

  “I’m on a shuttle. I’m just flying in from the New Olympian Territories.”

  Another pause, then, “Wayson went there last week. Were you down there with him? Is he on the shuttle with you?”

>   “No, he isn’t?”

  The doorbell rang. Sunny ignored it. She swallowed loudly. Her voice quavered as she asked, “Is he all right?”

  Watson said, “Maybe you should let Emily in.”

  “Travis, is Wayson all right?”

  Watson sighed.

  Sunny couldn’t have known that someone had assassinated Don Cutter, but if she kept up with the news, she’d know about the other attacks. There had been no point trying to hide them, not when civilians were involved.

  Emily rang the doorbell a second time.

  “Travis?”

  “Why don’t you let Emily in?” he said.

  “Is he alive? Will you at least tell me if he is alive?”

  He couldn’t. He didn’t know himself. He said, “Sunny, this is classified information. I’m not supposed to tell you any of this.”

  “Please, Travis, give me that much. Is he alive?”

  Watson sighed and gave the only answer he could. He said, “I don’t know.”

  The phone went silent for several seconds. In a quiet, defeated-sounding whisper, Sunny said, “I’d better get the door.” He heard her set down the phone. It fell off the edge of the table and clattered to the floor. A moment later he heard Emily’s voice. And then the crying began.

  Watson was glad he had chosen an audio connection instead of a video feed. He wouldn’t have wanted to watch Sunny cry. Crying women made him anxious.

  He heard Sunny say, “Travis is on the phone. I better get back to him.”

  She already knows the worst of it, Watson told himself, giving himself permission to rush off.

  Sunny picked the phone up from the floor. In a mechanical voice, she said, “Travis, Emily is here now. She’s in the other room. Now, please tell me what has happened to Wayson.” Her voice had a crushed quality to it. She sounded calm, but that calm was a thin veneer.

  Thinking about how little he knew, Watson said, “I don’t know what to tell you.”