As I waited by the car, Cabot went to the door of the building and spoke to the officer in charge of the investigation. He came back a moment later, and said, “Someone attacked the building.”
“Have they found any bodies?” I asked.
Cabot shook his head. “No, sir.”
Sunmark was only a hundred miles from Petersborough, but the air was slightly cooler here and far more humid. This was a coastal town. I enjoyed the combination of warm night and ocean-chilled breeze. Taking a deep breath and letting the moist air hold in my lungs, I walked toward the building, Cabot hopping close on my heels.
The men outside the precinct building snapped to attention as I walked past them. I saluted and told them to carry on.
Standing outside the building, I saw rows of flood lamps through one of the windows. I heard a generator purring in the distance.
“What happened to the lights?” I asked a nearby officer.
“Someone shut off the power, sir,” he said.
The station was two stories tall and rather narrow. It was shaped like a book. My men must have set up an emergency generator behind the building. Arteries from the generator covered the floor, a confusion of power cords that led in every direction. The Marine sergeant who met me at the door was not part of my entourage, and I was glad to see him. When it came to dirty work, I preferred having Marines around me.
“Found anything?” I asked.
“They fought a small war in here, sir.”
“Any survivors?”
“So far, we can’t tell, sir. The people who were manning the station are M.I.A.,” he said.
“No bodies?” I asked. I stepped around him.
Just inside the door, the first splash of dried blood started about five feet up on the wall and stretched to the floor in dribbles. A foot-wide, rust-colored pool had formed below it.
They’d caught their first victim off guard, I thought. He’d been standing tall when he was shot in the head. I was no detective, but I’d participated in a stealth operation or two. I knew how men reacted when they spotted you, and how they died when you took them by surprise.
“Was this the only victim?” I asked.
“The whole goddamned building looks like this, sir,” the sergeant said. “We’re taking blood samples and scraping shit off the walls.”
“Good idea,” I said. It wasn’t, though. All of the blood would be the same general-issue clone blood. If we knew anything about these assassins, it was that they were clones just like us. The good guys and bad guys would have the exact same makeup in this fight, right down to their DNA.
The next victim had been caught unawares as well. He must have been at a desk. The chair he’d been sitting in lay on its back on the floor. There was no blood on the chair, but blood and brains covered the wall and the filing cabinet behind the desk.
“Do you have any idea about what happened to the bodies?” I asked.
“No, sir.” That was the proper answer, no excuses, no promises, no explanations, and no speculation. “Marines never speculate. They always speck you right on time”—wisdom I picked up from my drill instructor in boot camp.
The sergeant interrupted my thoughts. “Sir, whoever attacked the station destroyed the computers.”
“Destroyed them?” I repeated.
Across the floor, computer cases and cabinets lay spread across the floor like trash. No big loss, though. A platoon of MPs had been temporarily assigned to man a precinct on a stretch of sandy beach. They probably had not kept careful records.
“Do we know how long the power has been out?” I asked.
“No, sir. Not yet.”
“Do we know what happened to it? Do we know if the neighbors still have power?” I asked. I looked out the window and saw light in some of the windows across the street.
The sergeant peered out the window as well, and said, “This appears to be the only building without power.”
I nodded and moved on. “Shit,” I whispered to myself.
Whatever happened in this building was not a war or a battle; it was an assassination. Someone had come in with suppressed weapons and caught the entire staff off guard. Judging by the gore and bullet patterns, they might have gone through the entire building without any of ours returning fire.
Magic restored.
In the old days, communication signals were routed across the galaxy using the Broadcast Network. Somehow, Gary Warshaw and his enlisted engineers had restored pangalactic communications using their limited broadcast network. It was nothing short of a miracle.
Warshaw called me that evening.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“I’m on Gobi,” he said, sounding a little surprised. “Something wrong with that?”
“I didn’t know you had pangalactic communications,” I said. It should have occurred to me back when I was on the Kamehameha. Warshaw wasn’t even in the same arm as the Kamehameha, but he had been able to watch Bishop interrogating me. I should have figured it out back then.
“Yeah, well, we got a network up, so why not?” he asked. “You making any progress on your investigation?”
“We’ve found a lot of bodies,” I said. “Over five hundred of them so far.”
“All clones?”
“Yeah,” I said, “all clones. There were a few in every city.”
“Murdered?” Warshaw asked.
“Drownings, car accidents, fires …a couple of outright murders. St. Augustine is a revolving door with eighty thousand men running through at any time.” Five hundred men … I wondered if it was a revolving door or a meat grinder.
“I bet we haven’t even found half the breakage yet,” I said. “All we have are the bodies that floated to the surface.”
“That’s what I like about you, Harris, always the optimist,” Warshaw said.
“I contacted the ships that went to St. Augustine on leave and had them check their service logs. In the last two months, less than thirty men were reported absent without leave. Every last one of them showed up sooner or later. According to the logs, none of those five hundred stiffs came from your ships.”
“But you think the logs are wrong,” said Warshaw.
“They have to be,” I said. “And that’s five hundred bodies so far. Who knows how many bodies we’ll find by the time we finish here.”
“You think I have five hundred saboteurs on my ships?” Warshaw asked.
“Sooner or later, it’s going to get ugly.” I thought about the clone at the restaurant. We had no hope of ferreting them out, not with camouflage like that.
“Are you keeping yourself safe?” I asked.
“Maybe I’ll move my operation back to the Kamehameha,” he said. “How are they going to hit me on a big ship like that?”
“Where was Franks when they got him?” I asked.
“On the Obama.”
That was another fighter carrier.
“Yeah, well, Franks didn’t know what he was hiding from,” Warshaw said. “I have a better idea, thanks to you.”
“Glad to be of service,” I said. “So what are you watching for?”
“Anything that moves.” Warshaw let the comment ride for a moment, then asked, “How about you? What are you doing to keep safe?”
“If you wanted me to play it safe, you shouldn’t have painted a specking target on my back.”
He must have expected a different answer. Sounding defensive, he said, “At least you’ve got the toe-touchers brigade watching your back, and I hear you called in an intelligence unit.”
“Toe-touchers brigade?” I asked.
“Yeah, Cabot didn’t tell you why he lost his command? Remember Fahey?” Perry Fahey was a ship’s-captain-turned-spy for the Unified Authority.
“Cabot was a spy?” I asked.
“Shit, Harris, I just told you, he was a toe-toucher. He lost his command for conduct unbecoming an officer. I thought having him along might help you relieve any stress.”