“So Vince turned up on Little Man, only he wasn’t himself anymore. He’d gotten himself hooked on Fallzoud and figured out he was a clone, kind of like you.
“Things went from bad to worse after that. He started calling himself the ‘King of Clones,’ and the next thing you know, he got all of the other clones on his ship hooked. Once he got everyone all good and luded, he told the whole crew they were clones, and nobody died from it.
“And that’s where things hit rock bottom. Vince and his buddies killed all of the natural-borns on the Grant and declared independence.”
“What became of him?” Thomer asked.
“I killed him,” I said, offering no explanation.
Thomer reacted no more strongly to this bit of information than he might have reacted to my telling him that temperatures were cold in space. He sat slumped in his seat, eyes vacant, muscles relaxed. I wondered if he even noticed the implicit threat in my story.
“Thomer, you need to get off Fallzoud,” I said.
“Why?”
“You’re turning into a specking zombie. You say that you haven’t shot up for a while, but you’re acting like you just dosed.”
“Maybe I did take it this morning,” he said.
What could I do? When his head was clear, Thomer was the most dependable man I had, a battle-tested Marine with an analytical mind and a reliable temperament. I did not want to write him off as a burnout, but I could not afford to keep this husk of a man as my first in command.
“We have a staff meeting,” I said.
Thomer tried a bite of toast, then drank his juice. We tossed our trays down the cleaning line and left the mess. Walking in silence, we headed up to the fleet deck.
Only six officers attended the meeting: Gary Warshaw, Lilburn Franks, Perry Fahey, Kelly Thomer, Philo Hollingsworth, and me. We had ten stars among us, even if they were only “field” stars.
Warshaw had already let me know that he planned to conduct the briefing. As he pointed out, until I got around to killing him, he was in command.
The six of us sat in a room with enough space for thirty officers, huddled tight around a table and speaking so loudly our voices echoed.
“So, Harris, I hear you got to command your own ship.” Fahey sounded almost gleeful. He batted his shadow-dusted eyes at me. Fortunately, the lipstick and rouge had gone away. “Commanding a specking transport with a one-man crew, was that a lifelong ambition?”
Sitting beside Fahey, Warshaw looked at the ground and fidgeted. The battle between Fahey and me had taken on a life of its own, independent of Warshaw. He no longer had any control over it.
Franks stared at Fahey, true annoyance showing on his face.
But Fahey went on. “What did you call your cruise? ‘A Marine operation’? Slick, Harris.”
“You got a point you’re trying to make?” I asked, hoping to get the meeting back on track. We did not have time to waste with all of this infighting. Now that the Golan engineers had branched out into broadcast engines, they could have established some kind of permanent broadcast Link with Earth. The entire Unified Authority might know about our trip to Mogat home world.
“You killed off the Marines you took to Terraneau. You killed off half the sailors you took to the Mogat Fleet. What’s next, Harris?” Fahey screamed this last jab, spit flying from his lips. I wondered if maybe he had lost a lover on the Mogat mission. He half stood in his chair, looking ready to leap across the table.
I killed half the sailors I took to the Mogat Fleet? I did not know what he meant at first, but I figured it out quickly. There had to have been men manning the lasers on those derelict ships. Of course there had been men, engineers and technicians, and they died when the Unified Authority battleships fired back at them. But their deaths were not my fault …they couldn’t be.
“I told you, it wasn’t like that,” Warshaw said in a subdued voice.
“The speck it wasn’t!” Fahey yelled. “I can’t believe you’re defending this asshole. Who’s next, Harris? Are you going to keep killing us off till you have the fleet to yourself?”
“I was in charge, Fahey,” Warshaw said.
“You weren’t in charge of that specking transport. That was General Harris’s show, his ‘Marine Operation.’ We lost five hundred qualified techs because of this bastard. That’s what happens when you treat a Marine clone …”
“One more word, Fahey, and I will slam your ass in the brig so hard you’ll be shitting cots and bars,” I said.
Warshaw put up a hand to stop me. He spoke the words quietly and forcefully as he said, “Stow it, Fahey. One more word out of you, and I’ll throw you in the brig myself.”
Fahey turned to look at him. The two clones looked like distortions of each other. They were cut from the same helix, but little about them matched. Fahey was young and thin, his makeup making his brown eyes look large and doelike. Warshaw was in his forties, a mighty man with huge muscles and a shaved head.
Their faces were identical, but their expressions could not have been more different. Warshaw looked calm, maybe a little sad. Fahey looked out of control, as wild as a dog pulled from a fight. Whites showed all the way around his eyes, and beads of sweat formed on his forehead.
“What are you going to do, Gary, take away my command? Is that what you want? Are you out of your specking mind?” Fahey’s mouth worked into a sneer that showed most of his teeth.
Warshaw did not look crazy. He looked tired and focused, like a man finishing a twelve-hour work shift, as he said, “Senior Chief, you are relieved of command.”
Fahey fell back into his seat. “Gary,” he said. “What are you doing? You’re taking his side?” At that moment it struck me that there was nothing feminine about Perry Fahey other than his makeup. He did not speak in a falsetto or behave like a woman.
“I am relieving you of command and stripping you of your field rank,” Warshaw said. He turned to me, and said, “General Harris, would you have one of your Marines escort this man to the brig?”
“Aye,” I said. I turned to Hollingsworth and issued the order.
Hollingsworth rose from his seat and walked over to Fahey. “Senior Chief, I have orders to deliver you to the brig. Please come with me,” he said, in a flat voice.
The two men had once been friends, it showed in both their expressions. Fahey stared at Hollingsworth, anger and amazement showing in his eyes. Hollingsworth looked stiff, like a man gearing up for an unpleasant task.
“Idiots. You’re all idiots,” Fahey muttered, as he rose to his feet. He allowed Hollingsworth to lead him out of the room without speaking another word. Watching them leave, I wondered if I should have had Thomer escort Fahey instead. Hollingsworth and Fahey had served together, and I still had questions about his loyalties.
“It’s about time somebody put him away,” Thomer said, shattering the tense silence in the room.
“I apologize, General Harris. I do not know how Fahey came up with that shit. When I told him about what had happened, it never occurred to me that he would twist it like that,” Warshaw said.
“I never liked that asshole,” said Franks.
Listening to them, I knew we needed to change our chain of command. Warshaw was right, I could not run this fleet. Ships and the strategies of open-space combat were not my forte. Unfortunately, Warshaw, the veteran engineer, was not much more qualified than I was. He knew how to fix ships, not how to run them.
I took a deep breath, flashed a weary smile, and said, “Let’s move on.”