My final punches were entirely wasted. Boyd did not move. He did not flinch or twitch. If an air bubble had not formed in the blood under his flattened nostrils, I would have thought I’d killed him.
Sighing heavily and taking no pride in what I had just done, I stood up. By that time the announcer stood in the ring. “Mary, mother of Joseph,” he muttered, “I thought Boyd was going to kill you.”
I started to say, “Looks like it was the other way around,” but my knees buckled, and I swooned to the mat. The announcer quickly grabbed my hand and raised it. I heard the mob shouting hysterically outside the ring. Lights came on all over the arena, and I saw men hanging from the balconies. Lee ran into the ring and placed an arm under my shoulder.
“Vince,” I said, unable to say any more.
“Wayson, that was amazing. Unbelievable! I’ve never seen anybody fight like that. No shit, Harris, you were friggin’amazing!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I did not say good-bye to Kasara. On my way out of Sad Sam’s Palace, I collapsed from loss of blood. Lee spent the morning driving Kasara and Jennifer to the airport and waiting with them for their plane. I spent the next two days drugged into peaceful oblivion with an IV needle in my arm.
Lee was in the room when I woke up on Sunday afternoon. “You going to stay awake this time?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m awake.”
“How do you feel?”
“Like my back is on fire.” I could hear Lee, and I could see his blurred shape, but my sight remained fuzzy. “How long have I been out?”
“Going on three days,” Lee said.
“Kasara?” I asked, feeling lower and lower by the second.
“She left two days ago,” Lee said. “She wants you to call her. She was really worried about you.”
I tried to sit up, but my blurred vision began to spin. I slumped back on my mattress, aggravating the lacerations on my back. I winced.
“That guy would have killed me,” Lee said.
I thought about it. “He might have. He damn near killed me.”
“He’s damn near killed a lot of people,” Vince said. My vision cleared as we spoke. I could see the features on Vince’s face. I could make out details around the room. There were empty seats all around us, but Lee was sitting on the edge of my bed. We were in a hospital recovery room. There were empty beds on either side of me.
“The announcer said he had two hundred straight victories,” Lee said.
I tried to sit up again. The tears along the small of my back stretched and I gritted my teeth. “I’ve had some time to think about that, too,” I said. “My match might have been the little bastard’s first fight.”
“What are you talking about?” Lee sounded confused.
“Boyd didn’t have any scars on his face,” I said. “I got really close to him in that fight. He had baby skin—no scars, no cuts. Either he’s so fast that in two hundred fights nobody ever hit him, or…”
“You think the announcer was lying?” Lee asked, slipping off the bed. The mattress bounced and I moaned. “Sorry. Want some water?” He picked up a plastic pitcher and poured me a cup.
“I think Adam Boyd is a clone,” I said. “I think several Adam Boyd clones share that two hundred and zero record. Nobody could go two hundred fights in a ring like that without picking up scars.”
“Two hundred wins and one loss,” Lee corrected me. “You killed him last night. Maybe he doesn’t scar. Wayson, having baby skin doesn’t make you a clone. If it did, Jennifer would be a clone. I got really, really close to her and she didn’t have any scars.”
“Jennifer does not have a brantoo.”
“What?”
“Boyd has a brantoo, right here,” I said, pointing at my forearm. “He has the same brantoo the SEALs had on Ronan Minor.”
“No shit,” Lee said. “A midget SEAL clone. Why would they clone a midget?” We both knew the answer. We’d seen Boyd in action. Fast and small and agile, he was the perfect commando.
***
I had come on vacation to sort out my feelings, and that was pretty much all I did for the rest of my stay. I never left the hospital, never visited the beach. Lee wanted to stay with me, but I sent him away. It was my chance to think about undeserved promotions, friends lost in dark caves, and learning I was the last of my kind. My sort of misery did not love company.
I also needed to sort out what it meant to be a Liberator. Sergeant Shannon might have devised a cruel way to flush the Mogats out of their caves, but I doubt he wanted to massacre them. He was tough in drills, but hadn’t I given one of my men two black eyes? And why had I assaulted the man— because he missed some shots? If Shannon had felt the same level of rage I had, he did a brilliant job of controlling it. Of course that could have been his religious side. From what I had seen, Shannon never missed Sunday services.
I continued to whale on Adam Boyd after I knocked him unconscious. Was I trying to kill him or was I just swept along by my own momentum? Maybe Congress was right to ban Liberators. What would a regular clone or a natural-born have done? I turned these thoughts over in my mind. Had Lee known about my maudlin musings, he would have regretted bringing me.
Nothing short of a medically induced coma could have protected me during the excruciating flight back to the fleet. Fortunately for me, we timed our trip around the fleet’s movements. The Kamehameha was near the broadcast network, and our flight time was under ten hours.
My back hurt a little as they wheeled me out of the hospital. It hurt a little more when I climbed into Lee’s rental car. I took some pain medication as we drove, and don’t remember much after that.
By the time we got to Mars, I had run out of medicine. The transport from Mars was a military ship with stiff seats. I felt pinching in my back as I sat. What I did not realize was that that dull ache was actually a very acute pain that was masked by a slight overdose of painkillers.
“How are you feeling?” Lee asked.
“Not bad,” I said. “I think I’m pretty well healed after all.”
The transport struggled slightly as it left Mars’s gravity. My seat shook, and I got my first hint that the medicine was beginning to wear off.
Lee looked at me. “You okay, Harris?”
I took a deep breath. My ribs expanded as I inhaled. It hurt. “I’ll be glad to get back.”
We approached the disc station. The lightning flashed and, of course, the transport shook. The shaking made my back hurt. We ended up passing through seven disc stations to reach the fleet. By that time, the small of my back felt swollen and some of the lacerations had begun to bleed.
As we approached the fleet, I looked out my porthole. “Lee. Lee, look at this. We must have boarded the wrong flight.”
He leaned over me to have a look. “What are you…” Seeing what I meant, Lee stood up and opened the locker above our seats. He pulled out our flight information.
“Don’t bother,” I said. “I see the Kamehameha.” The last Expansion-class fighter carrier in operation, the Kamehameha had a distinct profile in space.
As our shuttle glided toward the fleet, I could see four Orion-class star destroyers in the distance and the familiar sight of frigates circling like remora fish. Other ships floated about. I counted at least twenty Athens-class light missile carriers, oblong ships with diamond-shaped bows, hovering along one edge of the fleet. Five Interdictor-class battleships—bat-shaped ships that looked like miniature carriers—led the fleet.