Just before I stepped out into the street, I heard General Newcastle say, Senator, if you want to know what went wrong on New Copenhagen, we crumbled from the bottom up. Our enlisted men proved ineffective, undisciplined, and unreliable in battle. What went wrong was that we entrusted our future in the hands of clones.
That was the explosion.
CHAPTER FOUR
It was an unseasonably warm day for March; the sun had broken through the morning drizzle, and steam rose from the streets.
In another hour, lunch crowds would spill out of every building, but for now, just a few pedestrians strolled along the sidewalks. Men and women in suits walked at businesslike speeds in self-imposed isolation. Nobody paid any attention to me as I hurried to the car I had checked out of the motor pool. With my Charlie service uniform and clone genes, I almost expected people to see me and shout, “Traitor!” as I climbed into my Army green sedan with its Pentagon plates. Nobody did. These people had obviously not watched the hearing.
An old man walked toward me as I opened my car door. He had white hair so fine I could see his pink scalp between the strands. He had faded blue eyes, and his lips were the same bloodless color as the skin on his face. When our eyes locked, he smiled, and said, “Hello.”
“Good morning,” I said.
He nodded and walked away without looking back.
I sensed an imminent calamity, the same feeling I had when I pulled the pin from a grenade. Perhaps I was being paranoid, but that did not mean I was wrong. I had the brown hair, brown eyes, and olive complexion of a military clone. And thanks to the exhibit in the Smithsonian, everyone in town could now recognize Liberator clones.
I drove around Union Station, then up Massachusetts. A police car stopped beside me at the last light before the freeway. The patrolman driving the car stared in my direction. He might have recognized me as a Liberator, but he would not have known what was said in the hearings. Other people might listen to the hearings as they drove, but not the police.
When the light turned green, I pulled slowly away, wanting nothing more than to blend in with the traffic around me. The cop car hovering behind me like an angry hornet preparing to sting, I kept to within five miles of the speed limit. A few minutes later I took the bridge across the river. When I checked my mirror, the police car was gone.
Once across the bridge, it was a short drive to the Pentagon. A guard checked my papers and said nothing as I pulled onto the lot. I entered the underground garage and parked my ride. As I walked away from the car, I looked up and down the rows of parked vehicles. No one seemed to notice me. A voice in my head tried to dismiss the whole thing, to laugh and say I had overreacted.
As I entered the elevator to the street-level lobby, two officers called out for me to hold the door. I tensed, but they kept talking to each other, not even noticing me. I started to think that maybe I had overreacted, then we reached the lobby. The elevator door slid open, and I entered a world of marble and glass in which large mediaLink screens hung from walls showing live news coverage of the hearings.
The lobby was huge and sparsely furnished, with a high ceiling. Men and women in business suits sat on rows of chairs, and officers in various uniforms stood in clusters. Everywhere I turned, people stared back at me. A few people looked from me to the screens on the walls and back again.
General Newcastle’s words echoed from the screens …what went wrong on New Copenhagen, we crumbled from the bottom up. Our enlisted men proved ineffective, undisciplined, and unreliable in battle.
The image of the hearing shrank into the upper right corner of the screens and an analyst appeared. While testifying before Congress this afternoon, General Morris Newcastle blamed the cloning program for setbacks suffered during the alien invasion. According to historian Michael Maynard, Newcastle’s testimony marks a sharp departure from other reports that cloned soldiers have been one of the strengths of the Unified Authority military.
Most of the people froze as I passed them. They acted as if I might be carrying a bomb, and one man whispered the word, “Liberator.”
I walked across the floor, my eyes focused straight ahead as I tried to ignore the uneasy silence around me. The Pentagon had its own police force, a complement of enlisted men with sidearms and armbands. Two of those MPs stood guarding the elevators to the upper floors. As I approached, they stood at attention and saluted.
I took the elevator to the third floor. When I stepped off the lift, I heard someone say, “Lieutenant Harris? Ah, Lieutenant Harris. Lieutenant?”
The man was an ensign, dressed in the crisp tan uniform of the U.A. Navy. He was short and slender, very likely a kid just out of the Naval Academy. “Are you Lieutenant Wayson Harris?” he asked.
“I am,” I said.
“Admiral Brocius sent me to find you,” said the ensign. “Would you mind coming with me, sir?”
Judging by his anxious demeanor, I knew he had not come to arrest me. He looked from side to side as though he thought someone might sneak up on us.
“Where are we headed?” I asked.
“B-ring, top floor …Office of the Navy,” the ensign said.
We started down the hall. I attracted attention everywhere we went. On the elevator ride up to the top floor, a couple of commanders stood staring at me, not even attempting to hide their fascination.
I started to say something, but the ensign beat me to the punch. “What’s the matter, you never seen an officer-killing Liberator clone before?” He asked this in a voice drenched with sarcasm so that everyone knew he was lampooning the commanders.
“Watch your mouth, Ensign,” one of the officers said.
“Why don’t you report me, I’m on my way to Admiral Brocius’s office right now?”
That ended the conversation. Apparently the combination of an “officer-killing Liberator clone” and an aide to the highest-ranking man in the Navy made the commanders nervous. They got off on the next floor. As they stepped out, the ensign smiled, and said, “Good afternoon, gentlemen.” Neither of the commanders bothered to respond.
“Assholes,” the ensign said, as the elevator doors closed.
We rode in silence as the elevator rose to the fifth and final floor. When the doors opened, the ensign asked me, “Where have you been for the last hour, Lieutenant?”
“I was out running errands,” I said.
“You didn’t happen to catch the hearings while you were out?”
“Yeah, I saw it,” I said. “That bastard Newcastle …”
“You had to know it was coming, Harris. It’s an old military tradition—when things go wrong, blame the speck-up on somebody else. That’s why all four branches have enlisted men; so that officers have someplace to dump the blame.”
When we arrived at Brocius’s office, the ensign walked me past the secretaries and MPs and knocked on the admiral’s door.
CHAPTER FIVE
Admiral Brocius kept a personal casino on the second floor of his family estate, but he did not gamble. He owned roulette tables, craps tables, and an array of slot machines, both antique and modern, among other things; but he never used them himself. A few times a year, he threw gambling parties attended by top brass and politicians. They did the gambling. He was the house. In everything he did, Alden Brocius insisted on house odds. That made him a safe bet but an unreliable partner—he didn’t mind improving his chances at the expense of everyone around him.
Admiral Brocius was, for instance, the officer in charge of the invasion of the Mogat home world, a strategically brilliant offensive that included assigning sixty thousand Marines to pin the enemy down until the Army arrived. The Army never arrived. Brocius skewed the odds in his favor by leaving those Marines stranded while the planet melted around them. As one of the few Marines to make it off that rock, I had an old score to settle with the admiral.