I had a private message from somebody named Clarence McAvoy. The name meant nothing to me until I noticed the sender’s address: Golan Dry Docks Security. Until that moment, I had never stopped to think of him as anything more than “the colonel,” just a cog in the Dry Docks security works. As I thought about this, I realized the way I considered the people around me was not all that different than the way so many officers viewed clones.
Harris,
We have identified all of the passengers on Klyber’s transport. According to the manifest, there were 21 people aboard that flight. We found 19 bodies. As you said, Rear Admiral Thomas Halverson was not aboard the transport. Neither was Captain Leonid Johansson.
We found Johansson’s name on a passenger manifest for a transport headed to Washington, D.C. He returned to the Pentagon with Admiral Huang.
Huang transferred Johansson to his personal staff early this morning. Isn’t that just about the most goddamn lucky transfer you ever heard of?
Colonel C. McAvoy
PS. The attached is the security record of the only people who entered Klyber’s ship. It was a maintenance team. We have not been able to locate all of the techs on that team.
With a couple of quick optical commands, I cued the file McAvoy sent and watched the video record.
A team of five technicians passed through the security gates outside the hangar. Each presented identification cards at the desk. Each man passed through a set of security posts, submitting himself to DNA profiling.
One of the men was short—no more than five feet tall—and mostly bald with a ring of sandy blond hair. The man wore the jumper of a janitor—a dirty number with short sleeves that ended just beyond the elbow. The suit looked loose around his compact, wiry physique. His exposed forearms had incredible muscle tone. And there was something else, not that I needed it to identify this man. The edge of a colorful forearm brantoo poked out of his sleeve.
Brantooing was the earmark of the rugged. Brantoo artists branded their clients with a hot iron to raise their skin, then injected colored pigment into the scar. The result was an embossed tattoo. Thugs and barroom brawlers loved brantoos because the average citizen went numb at the sight of them.
I recognized this brantoo—it was the emblem of the Navy SEALS. It was a wheel with six spokes, each spoke tinted a different color. This was a crude map of the six arms of the Milky Way. Every SEAL had it brantooed on his forearm.
But this man wasn’t just a Navy SEAL. This was an “Adam Boyd” clone. These were special clones from a highly-classified operation under the personal direction of Admiral Che Huang. No need to worry about anybody recognizing this guy. For the most part, the only people who saw Boyd clones in action were Marines who had very little time to live.
Ravenwood, the outpost where I had supposedly died, was a training ground for Adam Boyd clones. Huang assigned platoons of forty-two Marines to defend the outpost on Ravenwood, then sent ten-man assault teams of Adam Boyd SEALS to kill them. I was the only Marine who ever escaped.
In the video feed, the Adam Boyd clone stepped through the posts without a moment’s hesitation. A guard put up a hand to stop him, and the midget smirked up at him with a look of pure disdain.
Using an optic command I stopped the video feed and brought up the clone’s identification badge. “Name: Adam Boyd. Title: Maintenance, Sixth Detail. Security Clearance: All Levels. Years with company: Five.”
The guard said something that was not picked up by the security camera. The Adam Boyd clone answered satisfactorily, and he was allowed to pass. The maintenance team cleared the security station then entered and cleaned each of the ships parked on the high-security deck, including Admiral Klyber’s C-64.
I watched this scene with a mixture of prurient interest and utter awe. The maintenance team stepped into transports belonging to each member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Had he wanted to, that little Boyd bastard could have blown up the entire hierarchy of the U.A. military.
Once the Boyd clone left Klyber’s C-64, I rewound the file and watched him enter the transport a second time. Then I rewound and watched it again in slow motion. I looked for any sign of the copper cable. I timed how long it took him to enter and leave. I noted that the Boyd entered Klyber’s ship three minutes before any of the other workers. He was on the ship for eighteen minutes and thirty-two seconds. He carried a small box of tools as he boarded the ship and brought the same box out. He could have easily smuggled a short length of cable in that box.
After watching that clone enter and leave the transport two more times, I finally allowed the video feed to play to its end. What I saw at the end hurt the most.
The security camera followed the maintenance team as it left the transport and then the landing area. They walked through the security gate. There, standing just inside the gate on almost the exact same spot where I would see him later that evening, stood Tom Halverson dressed like a civilian.
He leaned with his back against the wall, smoking a cigarette. For a moment he seemed to ignore the maintenance crew. Then he saw the Boyd clone. His eyes locked on the little clone as he continued his smoke. Once the maintenance men walked by, Halverson tossed his cigarette aside and fell in behind them, remaining a few steps back as they walked down the hall and disappeared from the screen.
“Why aren’t you at the summit meeting?” I asked Halverson as he appeared in my mediaLink shades. Then it occurred to me. Why should he stay at the meeting? He was Huang’s man. His job was to oversee the sabotage of Klyber’s ship.
Expecting simply to leave a message, I used my shades to place a call to the colonel’s office. He took the call.
“Harris?” Colonel McAvoy’s face appeared in my shades.
“Colonel, I got your message. Thank you for sending the video feed.”
“Did you find anything?”
“Did you watch the feed all the way through?” I asked.
“Sure,” the colonel said. “I thought you might find the last few moments especially enlightening. We’ve searched the Dry Docks. Halverson isn’t here. My guess is that he had another identity programmed into our computers and left using a false ID. I don’t suppose you approve of officers using false identification codes, Commander Brocius?”
I had used so many false identities over the last few years that it took me a moment before I remembered coming into Golan as Commander Brocius.
“Is there any chance that Halverson flew back to Earth with Huang?”
“He did not,” the colonel said. “Huang left before Klyber. I have a feed of the passengers boarding. Do you want it?”
“No,” I said. “But I would like to see any video you might have from the summit.”
“Good joke,” the colonel said.
“I’m not joking.”
“Yes, you are. You seem like a bright guy. You cannot possibly think I would have a feed from a high-level summit. And even if I did, you cannot possibly think I would throw away my career by giving it to you.”
“The highest-ranking officer in U.A. Navy just died on your watch,” I said, trying to sound calm with just a hint of menace. I was bluffing, of course.
“Military intelligence is going to be all over this, Harris,” the colonel said. “They’ll get it sorted out.”
“Yes, they will. And they are going to blame it on you.”
“How’s that?”
“Follow the trail far enough and you’ll see that Admiral Huang was behind this. When it comes to somebody taking a fall, who do you think they are going to go after, you or the secretary of the Navy?”
The colonel laughed. “You think Huang killed Admiral Klyber?”