For some reason I had the feeling things were not going to go smoothly. I sat in my quarters, the curtains drawn, the room nearly dark, as I wrestled with ghosts from my past and nervousness about my near future. I had a copy of the Bible, a book that I once misinterpreted and now no longer believed. Beside it sat a copy of the Space Bible, a book I once dismissed and now believed and despised. Originally titled Man’s True Place in the Universe: The Doctrines of Morgan Atkins, the Space Bible told the implausible story of how scientists had encountered an alien they called a “Space Angel.”
Someone threw open the door to my room with so much force that it left a dent in the wall. The crash made me jump.
“I hear you’ve been looking for me, Harris.” First Lieutenant Warren Moffat stomped into my room, drunk off his ass, swaying as he stood there glaring down at me with heavily bloodshot eyes. “You think you’re scary shit, don’t you, clone?” He shut the door behind him.
“I haven’t been looking for you,” I said, which was true. I sort of hoped we would run into each other, but the thought of looking for Moffat had not occurred to me.
“You think you’re something, don’t you, Harris? The general’s pet clone. I heard you were an admiral’s pet, too. Frigging Liberator clone.”
He had his M27 with him, strapped to his belt. Even drunk, a good Marine never forgets how to use his weapon. I did not consider Moffat a good Marine.
The civil thing would have been to tell him to go home. I, however, was not feeling civil. My combat reflex had already started; the warm sensation of testosterone and adrenaline flowing through my blood had begun. What I felt for Moffat was not anger, it was hate. I wanted to kill the man. My combat reflex filled me with clarity of thought and the desire to kill. I had never hated anyone before, but I hated this man. The reflex had never given me the desire to kill before, but it did now. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I was aware of all the things that had come undone—clones spraying graffiti, Thomer wanting to kill an officer, Philips ignoring orders, and now I was ready to give in to the Liberator bloodlust. Things come undone in the end.
I pushed away from my desk and stood up. “You carrying that gun for show, or are you planning to use it?” I asked.
“Look at you, the big Liberator!” Moffat laughed. He was just like Philips—a Marine in self-destruct mode who planned to use a fellow Marine as the instrument of his suicide. He had to know I would kill him. I could kill him sober, he’d be no trouble drunk. He stared me in the eyes, no fear showing on his face. His body vaguely swayed as he stood there.
“Go sleep it off, asshole,” I said, knowing the message would only piss him off. I took a small step toward him. I did not want him to go sleep it off, I wanted him to reach for his gun. I took another step in his direction. The dorm room was small, and he was only a few feet away.
“Do you think winning this war will make you human? Do you think it’s going to make you a natural-born? Specking synth,” he said. And then he did it. He reached for his gun. It was just a twitch. He could not have possibly meant to draw it, but it was enough for me.
I swatted his hand from the grip of his M27 with my left hand and slammed the blade of my right into his throat. As he gasped for air, I grabbed him by the chin and the nape of his neck and snapped his head to the side. There was a soft click as the chain of bones that made up his neck twisted apart
Moffat collapsed. That was death—your body goes limp, you piss and shit yourself, nothing more. No one-way ticket to heaven. As far as I could tell, Moffat’s journey ended when his head bounced against the floor.
Killing Moffat did not bring Philips back, but it left me feeling slightly better about life. The only problem was that now that he was dead, now that the threat had passed, I felt an emotional vacuum forming. The hormone began to thin in my blood, and I didn’t want it to go.
“What do you think now, hotshot?” I asked Moffat. He lay on the floor as lifeless as a puppet cut from its strings. “Where are your natural-born buddies now, asshole?” I kicked him.
Kicking Moffat’s corpse was not as satisfying as snapping his neck. It was not even a close substitute, and I wanted to feel that first satisfaction again. At that moment, I needed something exciting to happen, and I would sacrifice anything to get it. If I could have, I would have resuscitated Moffat so I could kill him a second time.
Now I understood why cats play with mice instead of simply killing them. The moment of death comes so quickly; and once it’s gone, what do you do? I could sense the heat draining from my blood, and I felt desperate to make it stay.
There was Captain Everley, Glade’s officious aide. I didn’t like him much, maybe I could go kill him. Maybe, if I killed him …But he was such a weakling. And then it came to me—Baxter, the prick from the Army that I took into the garage …I could …I could …
I looked down at Moffat and nudged the antisynthetic bastard with my toe. There was no question about what I had done this time—I had committed murder. I’d suckered the poor bastard into reaching for his gun and snapped his neck. I felt bad, but I did not feel bad for him. I felt bad because he was dead, and I wanted more of the hormone in my rapidly chilling veins.
“My God,” I said. This was how the Liberators became what they were. This was why my kind were outlawed. I went to the communications console and sent a signal to Command. There would be repercussions from this killing. The man was in my room, he had booze in his blood and his gun in his hands, but he was a natural-born and I …I was a Liberator.
“Harris, shouldn’t you be getting ready?” Captain Everley asked as he answered the call.
“You might want to send somebody to collect my company commander,” I said. “We had a bit of a run-in.”
“Should I send a doctor?”
“No, but a priest might be good.”
“Oh, shit,” Everley said. “What have you done, Harris? I better call General Glade.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
“I heard about Lieutenant Moffat,” Major Burton said, as I climbed into the jeep. He had suited up in combat armor, not the white armor we’d worn out in the open but the standard-issue dark stuff—the stuff we would wear as we entered the Avatari dig, the same armor I now wore. “Let’s go,” he said to the driver. A caravan of four trucks followed behind us.
“Think there’s going to be an inquest?” I asked. I felt curious but not concerned.
“I’m not entirely sure there’s going to be anyone alive to hold one,” Burton answered. “Even if there is an inquest, I think you will come off clean. There were two men outside your room when he smashed the door in. They said they heard him yelling at you and you telling him to go home.”
“Did they?” I asked. “Did they happen to mention why they didn’t call for an MP?”
“Yes, they did,” Burton said. “When they heard Moffat fall, they thought he had passed out.”
Had I been thinking, I might not have said what I said next. “The bastard did me a favor when he came to my quarters; he saved me the trouble of looking for him.”
“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” Burton said. “Lieutenant, you went a long way toward proving that the killing was not premeditated when you reported it right away; don’t spoil it now.”
“So there could still be trouble?” I asked.
“We have an impossible mission, and everyone agrees that you are the best man to lead it. If we make it out alive, I don’t think anyone is going to ask about last night.”