“The same people we wanted to keep off the planet for the last two months,” I said.
“Who exactly is that?” he asked, his frustration so close to the surface his eyes twitched.
“If I knew who the speck they were, don’t you think I’d arrest them?” I asked. “I can tell you this much, they look like us, they talk like us, and they kill senior officers. If I were you, I’d do everything in my power to keep them on the ground, you know, as if the planet were under quarantine.”
“Yes, sir. Understood, sir.”
“Also, put every available man on security at all times,” I said.
“On the planet?”
“On your ships. I’m betting you’ve already been infiltrated.”
I had traveled from Gobi to St. Augustine on a battleship with a crew of 1,800 enlisted men and 150 officers. I returned on a frigate, a small ship with a crew of 170 men. I felt like I was rowing home on a dinghy.
The man I had seen in the restaurant looked like he might have been in his midtwenties, making him slightly on the young side for the Enlisted Man’s Navy. We hadn’t seen a new cadet since the Mogats destroyed the clone farms six years ago. Our youngest clones were twenty-four, and most of our men were in their thirties.
One of the benefits of flying in a frigate was that the ship was so small I could assemble my own crew. I had undoubtedly assembled the oldest crew in the short history of the Enlisted Man’s Navy. By the time I finished, the youngest man on the ship was in his early forties. It was possible that some infiltrator might have stowed away aboard the ship, but he would stand out once he left his hidey-hole.
Why had I hesitated before going after that bastard at Scrubb’s? Even if I’d had to kill him, we might have found something to go on. The autopsy might have provided clues about how we could identify the infiltrators. And maybe I would not have had to kill him. With any luck, I might have captured him alive with nothing worse than a broken leg or spine.
On the frigate, my quarters were both my billet and my stateroom. It didn’t matter much. My time on the ship was short. We spent fifteen minutes traveling untold trillions of miles and then another two hours circling Gobi as I considered my options and decided where I should go and what I should do.
Someone knocked on my door, and I knew who it was. When I opened the door, Admiral J. Winston Cabot saluted and asked for permission to enter. I did not like the guy. I would dump him when I got the chance. I had already abandoned half my entourage on St. Augustine.
I asked him in.
“Did you send for me, sir?” Cabot asked. It must have galled him, calling me “sir.” He was nearly twice my age, and he had reached the rank of admiral. Once you obtain a certain rank, you expect to leave the sirs and salutes behind.
“Have a seat,” I said.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
“Let’s forget the senior officer stuff for now,” I said.
Cabot nodded and quietly sat down. He had aged well. He had plenty of white in his hair, but he had neither put on pounds nor turned frail after fifty. He looked fit, like a man who runs five or six miles every day.
“I think I may have seen one of their assassins,” I said.
Cabot perked up. “On St. Augustine?”
“Yes, in Petersborough, after I left the morgue. Remember when I went off on my own?”
“I remember,” he said.
“I walked around for an hour, then I ended up at a restaurant. There was a man in the restaurant …a clone.”
“What makes you think he was the killer?” Cabot asked.
“He was alone in the bar. Everyone else came with friends or dates, but he was there alone, looking around the room like a man on a hunt.”
“Maybe he came looking for a date,” Cabot suggested.
“Yeah, maybe,” I agreed. “But he wasn’t there for the girls.” Considering Cabot’s reputation as a “toe-toucher,” I wondered if that was a sensitive topic. He seemed unfazed, so I went on. “He sat by himself in a corner. He didn’t eat. He didn’t talk to anybody. He ordered a beer, but he didn’t drink it. When he spotted me watching him, he paid his tab and left.”
“What makes you think he was an assassin?” Cabot asked.
“He left when he spotted me.”
“Maybe you scared him.”
“Maybe, but let’s go on the assumption that he is a Unified Authority assassin.”
“Was there anything besides the beer that made you think he was an assassin?” Cabot asked. It was a fair question.
I sighed. I had nothing to go on, just my instincts. “I don’t know.”
Cabot shook his head. “It sounds pretty thin, sir. I mean, what are the odds? The entire Navy uses St. Augustine for R & R. How many bars do you think there are in Petersborough? I bet there are hundreds, maybe even thousands; and here you stepped into the one bar in the entire city where a Unified Authority assassin sits waiting. Do you really think we got that lucky, sir?”
I knew why he added the “sir.” It was like telling someone they look like shit, then finishing up with, “No offense.”
So he’s not all bad, I thought. At least he speaks his mind.
“You thirsty?” I asked. “I brought a bottle of Scotch for the ride.”
Cabot shook his head, and said, “I’ll pass.” Maybe he didn’t like me any more than I liked him. Until this moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that my lack of respect for him might be mutual.
“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world,” I said. It was one of those ancient sayings you heard from time to time, though nobody actually knew where it came from anymore. “Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence. What if there’s a guy like that in every bar in every city on St. Augustine?”
“I think we would know about something so massive,” Cabot said. “Sooner or later, somebody is going to notice something like that.”
“Maybe somebody did notice,” I said. “Maybe one of the MPs guarding Sunmark got curious, so they killed him; and then they killed off everyone else in the precinct just in case he told someone.
“Maybe that’s what happened. They killed him, then they killed the others, then they dragged their bodies into the jungle and dissolved them with Noxium.”
“It’s a possibility,” Cabot said slowly as he considered the theory. “That would explain who did it and why.”
“But you don’t think that’s what happened?” I asked.
“I don’t have any better explanations, but I’m at a disadvantage here, this is the first time you’ve told me about your mysterious barfly.”
He thought for a moment, then shook his head. “It doesn’t wash, sir. They couldn’t land that many replacements on the planet without people noticing.”
“There are eighty thousand clones on St. Augustine taking leave at any moment. Who’s going to notice a few hundred infiltrators?” I asked.
“They’d notice if a bunch of clones disappeared …” Cabot began, but he stopped himself.
“We found 550 victims give or take a few. Did anybody notice anything before we started counting bodies?”
We had thirteen fleets filled with clones who had not been ashore for at least two years. For the men on leave, St. Augustine was a bottomless supply of booze, women, and freedom. From the moment they landed to the moment they returned to duty, they left their brains behind.
I had a slightly different view of the planet. I saw St. Augustine as a malignant tumor that had metastasized and was now spreading cancerous poison throughout the Enlisted Man’s Empire.
Cabot and I spoke for another few minutes before I dismissed him. He’d done his job.
An hour later, I had typed up my report and my recommendations, weak as they were. The only answer I could come up with was to be on the lookout for clones in their midtwenties who seemed alienated from the rest of the crew. Maybe we would catch a spy, and maybe he would break under interrogation. Then we would have more.