“They stabbed Caesar to death on the floor of the Senate,” Freeman said, giving a historical reference I would never have guessed him to know. “Caesar thought he was in civilized company, too.”
Freeman would not have learned about Caesar from the works of Shakespeare. War and the engines of death interested him, not literature. I thought about this for a moment and decided that Klyber would be safe enough on the floor of the summit. It was out of my control, anyway. Once Klyber entered the conference room, there was nothing I could do.
“You flying back with Klyber after the summit?” Freeman asked, ending my chain of thought.
“Nope,” I said. “My job is to get him from his transport to the meeting, and from the meeting to the transport.”
“Think you will see Huang at the meeting tomorrow?” Freeman asked.
“Yeah, I need to thank him for the swank accommodations,” I said. I sounded more confident than I felt. Huang, never hid his hate of all clones, especially Liberators. All clones, except his own top secret model. Before initiating the attack on Little Man, Huang transferred every last Liberator in the Unified Authority military to the invading force. If he wanted me dead, sooner or later he would succeed.
“How did Huang’s office know you were headed to Golan?” Freeman asked. “Who told them about you?” His low voice reminded me of distant gunfire. His flat expression conveyed no emotion. If he were a poker player, no one would read his bluffs. But Ray Freeman did not trouble himself with card games. That would be far too social an activity for him.
“I’ve got a pretty good idea.” Half of Klyber’s senior staff officers had arrived the day before. I checked the manifest. Captain Leonid Johansson was among them.
“Don’t jump to any conclusions,” Freeman said after a long moment of thought. “Those weren’t Huang’s men in your room. He could have let you rot in jail if he wanted to hurt you.”
I was about to sign off when Freeman changed the subject. “What do you know about Little Man?”
“The battle or the movie?” I asked, trying to sound smarter than I felt.
“The planet,” Freeman said.
I had only seen a hundred-mile strip of the planet at tops—just a straight swatch from the beach where we landed to the valley in which we fought the battle. Before landing, we had a briefing. I tried to remember what the briefing officer had said. “It’s a fully habitable planet,” I said. “Well, not fully habitable. That valley where the Mogat ship crashed is plenty hot.”
“Hot as in radioactive?” Freeman asked.
“As in highly radioactive. You wouldn’t want to go anywhere near there. Every place else should be OK. Why do you want to know about Little Man?”
“My family is moving there.”
It never occurred to me that Freeman had a family. I thought of him as a freak of nature …like me, the last clone of his kind. “Your family? A wife and kids?”
“My parents and my sister.”
“What are they doing on Little Man?”
“Colonizing,” Freeman said.
“Colonizing?”
“They’re neo-Baptist,” Freeman said.
“Which means? Why are the neo-Baptists colonizing Little Man?”
“The neo-Baptists want to establish colonies, like the Catholics.”
“And they got permission to land on Little Man?” I asked.
“Does it matter?” Freeman asked.
“It matters,” I said. “That planet is in the Scutum-Crux Arm …one of the hostile arms. If the U.A. finds them, they’ll think it’s a Mogat colony. That was why we went to Little Man in the first place …to kill Mogats. The planet is listed as uninhabited, and the last I heard, Congress wanted to keep it that way.”
Freeman did not like long conversations. This current conversation was epic by his standards. We spoke for another minute or two, then signed off.
I lay in bed thinking about what he’d said. Freeman was right. Why would Huang spring me from the brig, then send a trio of goons after me? It made no sense.
Before falling asleep, I browsed the news. U.A. forces had claimed another three planets in the Cygnus Arm, including Providence. During the last week, they had claimed control of five planets in the Perseus Arm, four planets in Norma, and one in Scutum-Crux.
“These are all outlying planets,” an Army spokesman told news analysts. He gave a cautious spin on the latest events. “The insurgents tend to evacuate them before our troops arrive. The fighting should be much more fierce as we approach more settled territory.”
What he was not saying was that the Navy could easily have obliterated the insurgents’ transports. That was the problem with winning a civil war. Sooner or later you had to repatriate the enemy, and you didn’t want the sons of bitches to hold a grudge.
From everything I could tell, this civil war was unspectacular. The big media outlets tried to build it up as if the entire Republic was unraveling before our eyes; but the truth was that except for a very few terrorist attacks such as the one on Safe Harbor, the Confederate forces were in retreat. Except for the self-broadcasting fleet, which they had only used twice, the Confederate Arms had no Navy and no way to defend themselves from Naval attacks.
CHAPTER TEN
Bryce Klyber sat at the breakfast table in his dress whites. The man made the uniform; but in this case, the uniform was something special. Fleet Admiral Klyber had four stripes and a block on his shoulder boards. He was the first man in nearly several decades to have that much gold on his shoulders. When he wore his khakis, he had five stars laid out in a pentagonal cluster.
The climate of this summit must have agreed with Klyber. He looked thoroughly energized as he spread marmalade over a triangle of toast. His posture, erect as always, now looked pert. A slight smile showed on his face as he looked up to greet me.
“Lieutenant Harris,” he said.
I saluted, and he returned the gesture.
“You look surprisingly fit, considering your adventures from last night. Did you sleep well?”
“Yes, sir.” I did not feel surprisingly good. In fact, I felt predictably dour. My ribs hurt. It felt like the bandages around my chest shrank over the course of the evening making it considerably harder to breath. The left side of my skull felt like it had caved in.
Before him, spread across the snowy white of the linen tablecloth, Admiral Klyber had a plate of scrambled eggs with a side of bacon and smaller dishes with toast, a half grapefruit, and sausage. Banished to the far side of his table sat a bowl of grits. The spread also included carafes holding coffee, orange juice, grapefruit juice, and hot water for tea. The admiral, who would walk away from this meal with less than 150 pounds on his six-foot, four-inch frame, hardly looked like he knew where to begin. I would have gladly joined him for the meal, but the invitation did not come.
Using his fork, Klyber stabbed at a strip of lightly-cooked bacon and twirled it as if eating pasta. He stabbed the individual kernels of his scrambled eggs with the fork. He scooped a segment of grapefruit and savored it for several seconds. In the end, he ate a small portion of each dish except the grits, which he did not touch at all.
“Permission to speak, sir?”
“What is it, Lieutenant?”
“Sir, I was wondering about my status with the Marines. Now that Huang knows I am alive, am I back on active duty?” I asked. Considering my narrow escape from my last tour of duty, I had no desire to rejoin the Marines.
“Ah, that is the question,” Klyber observed. He folded his napkin and placed it on the table, then fitted his cap on his head. “I’ve wondered about that myself. What would be the safest course with Admiral Huang lurking about? Do you have any suggestions?”
“No, sir,” I said, though I considered killing Huang a solid option.
“I have taken the liberty of reassigning you to the Doctrinaire for now. You are on my roster. I doubt Huang’s men will arrest you right under my nose.”