The officers laughed.
“Captain, may I please return to my men?”
McKay looked around the ship. If the officers had ever known we were there, they had forgotten about us by then. “You are dismissed, Corporal,” he said in a hushed voice.
Forty thousand Mogats landed on Hubble. We captured ten thousand as they fled the caves and another fifteen thousand died when our Harriers hit their ships. The rest died in the caves.
CHAPTER TWENTY
First I was an orphan, then I was a clone, then I was both. Tabor Shannon had not been my father or my brother, but he had been my family. For a brief few weeks I belonged to a tiny and hated fraternity.
So where did all that leave me? I was the last member of a discontinued line of clones fighting to protect the nation that outlawed their existence. All in all, I thought I had it better than Vince Lee and the 2,299 other enlisted Marines on the Kamehameha. I knew I was a clone, and I knew I could live with that knowledge. It now seemed to me that it was impossible that they did not suspect their origins on some level, and they must have lived in fear of the fatal confirmation.
By the time we left Hubble, I had spent more than eighteen months on active duty without asking for leave. The idea sounded foreign when Vince Lee first suggested it.
“Hello, Sergeant Harris,” Vince Lee said as he placed his breakfast tray on the table and sat down beside me. “Sergeant Harris…It almost sounds right. The next step is officer, pal. You could actually do it. Hell. You made sergeant in under two years.”
“I did not ask for the promotion,” I said. That was Lee, obsessed with promotions and success.
Lee smiled. “You were made for it. You’re a Liberator.”
“So?”
“Every Liberator I’ve ever known made sergeant,” Lee said.
“Get specked.” I knew he was joking, but he struck the wrong nerve. Though they gave me the field promotion before I left Hubble—that was why McKay took me to the cruiser— the paperwork did not get approved for another month. As with my promotion to corporal, I did not feel that I had earned it.
“Look, Harris, I know you miss Shannon, but you need to lighten up,” Lee said. He spooned the meat out of his grapefruit half, then gobbled down two strips of bacon. “HQ reviewed the record before giving your promotion the go-ahead. You did what you could. Let it go.”
I finished my orange juice and placed the cup on my tray. “I guess so,” I said, in an unconvincing voice.
“Okay, well, I had an idea,” Lee said. “You’ve got more leave stored up than any man on this ship. I’ve got a couple of weeks. Let’s take some R and R.”
“That doesn’t …”
Lee put up his hand to stop me. “Look at yourself, Wayson. You’re moping around. You should see yourself around the men. You’re on a hair trigger. If you don’t take some time to relax, I think you’re going to shoot somebody.”
“They just gave me a platoon. Do you think they’d let me take leave?” I asked.
“Harris, if they don’t let you go now, they’re never going to. This is the beginning of Klyber’s war. Things will only get hotter from here. Mogats on other planets are going to rally around their dead.”
“Not Mogats,” I said. “Atkins Separatists. That came straight from HQ. We are no longer to refer to the group formerly known as Mogats by any name other than ‘Separatists’ or ‘Atkins Separatists.’”
Lee was right about the Separatists’ rallying. For a man who never followed the news, Vince Lee had an uncanny ability to read the winds.
***
“Two weeks,” McKay snapped when I requested a leave of absence. “Two weeks of liberty? You only took command of your platoon a few weeks ago. This is not the time for you to take a holiday, Sergeant.”
We stood in a small booth in the gunnery range. Looking through the soundproof window, I could see Lee drilling the remaining members of the platoon as they fired at holographic targets with live ammunition—bullets and grenades. The M27s and automatic rifles hardly made a sound, but the report of the grenades thundered so loud that it shook the booth.
In preparation for fighting the Separatists, we now shot at animated targets with human faces. The targets in the rifle range bled, screamed, and moved like living soldiers. I peered through the window to watch my men as McKay spoke. A holographic target materialized less than twenty feet from the shooting platform. Vince Lee fired once and missed. His second shot hit the target in its chest. The enemy screamed and vanished.
“You have four new privates on the way,” McKay said, staring at me angrily. “One of them is fresh out of boot. Your new corporal has not even arrived. Who is going to command the platoon with you and Lee out?”
“I understand, sir,” I said.
“When was your last leave?” McKay asked.
“I’ve never taken leave, sir,” I said. “I had a few free days before transferring to the Kamehameha.”
“And nothing since?”
“No, sir.”
McKay sat on the desk at the far end of the room, his legs draped to the floor. “Corporal Lee says that you have …” he paused to consider his words, “concerns.”
“Concerns?” I asked.
“You do not feel that you earned your promotion.”
Good old Lee…diarrhea of the mouth, constipation of the brain. “The corporal was speaking out of turn, sir. When I have concerns, I am completely able to lodge them myself.”
“I see,” said McKay, sounding a bit too paternal. He looked right into my eyes, not challenging me, but observing.
“Lee says that you blame yourself for Sergeant Shannon’s
death.”
“I never said that.”
“Do you blame yourself?”
I felt my stomach turn and my palms sweat. I looked out the window and watched one of my men miss five shots before finally hitting a target no more than ten feet away. Sloppy shooting. He wasn’t bothering to aim before firing rounds.
“I should have waited,” I said. “I left him in there. And I gave away our position when I missed that shot.”
“I saw the video feed, Sergeant. You did not miss.”
“I was too loud.”
“You hit a moving target from over a hundred yards in a bad light,” he said, shaking his head. “Look out that window. Do you think anyone else in your platoon would have done better?”
“I should have aimed for a head shot.”
“Do you think that was what killed Shannon? Do you think he died because the man’s oxygen tube exploded?”
I watched another private. Three targets popped up a good sixty feet out from him. He hit all three in short order, never missing a shot. How could identical beings be so different?
I mulled McKay’s question over in my head. Freeman had won the battle on Gobi. I’d just been along for the ride. Shannon had done all the work on Hubble, and I got him killed. I did not say that. I did not want Captain McKay to consider demoting me…maybe court-martialing me.
“Harris, he was dead the moment he touched Lieutenant Williams.”
“Williams?”
“The tech with the robot,” McKay said. “Williams might have been a prick, but he was a superior officer, and a Navy man at that. I might have been able to smooth things over if Shannon roughed another Marine, but Williams wanted blood, and I goddamned don’t blame him.”
I did not say anything.
Outside the command booth, Lee gathered the platoon. I could not hear him, but I could see him yelling at the men. Lee singled out one man and gave him a shove as he stepped into line. The man stumbled.