“You want to hear something strange? I think he was a clone.”
Oberland shook his head. “SEALs are natural-born.”
“That’s the way of things, isn’t it? Replace the valuable with the expendable. Get rid of the natural-borns with their relatives and their political pratfalls and exchange them for clones. You can tailor clones to fit your needs.”
“I suppose that was what Klyber did when he made Liberators,” Oberland said, in a tired voice.
“The best Marine I ever met was a Liberator, a sergeant named Tabor Shannon. He and I got drunk together the night that I found out I was a clone. You know what he told me? He said that being a clone meant that you never wondered about right and wrong. He said that we were man-made, and our commanding officer was our god and creator. That sounds bad when I think about massacres like New Prague, but this guy was nothing like Lector. I think Liberators make their own choices, just like everybody else.”
“Wayson, I’m already late for my transport,” Oberland said as he stepped out of the booth.
“I’m glad you came,” I said. “It’s nice seeing a friendly face.”
I stood up and shook Oberland’s hand. He grabbed his overnight bag and trotted out the door, pausing for only a moment to look back at me. Oberland, a small, trim man with messy white hair, blended into the transport station crowd and vanished. I wished that I could go with him and return to the orphanage. “Good-bye, old friend,” I whispered to myself.
It turned out to be my day for meeting old friends.
I did not feel like returning to base and sitting around, ignored by Baxter and the other sailors, so I went to a nearby bar and found a small table in a dark corner where I thought no one would notice me. It was a nice place, more lavish than the sea-soldiers’ drinking hole on the Kamehameha. The place had dim red lights that gave the beige walls a dark, cozy feel. During the quiet hours of the late afternoon, the bartender struck up conversations with the customers seated around the bar as he poured drinks.
I felt at home. The Earth-grown brew flowed freely enough there, and nobody looked like a politician. Everything seemed right in the universe except that I could not seem to get even remotely drunk. Then off-duty sailors started rolling into the bar. The first stray dogs showed around 1700 hours. By 1900, gabbing, happy swabbies filled the place. A few stragglers hovered around the counter swilling down drinks as fast as they could order them while dozens more crowded around tables swapping jokes and smacking each other on the arms. Sitting morosely in my quiet little corner, drinking my tenth or possibly fifteenth beer, I thought how much I hated this city.
Ray Freeman entered the bar.
I don’t think anybody knew who he was; they just knew he was dangerous. Dressed in his jumpsuit with its armored breastplate, Freeman looked like he had come in from a war. He stood more than a foot taller than most of the men he passed.
Silence spread across the bar like an infection. Sailors stepped out of his way as he crossed the floor. Freeman walked through the crowd without stopping for a drink. He came to my table. “Hello, Harris,” he said.
“How’d you recognize me without my helmet?” I quipped.
“Liberators aren’t hard to spot,” Freeman said. “At least that’s what they’re saying on the mediaLink.”
“Neither are seven-foot mercenaries,” I said.
Freeman sat down across the table from me.
“The chair isn’t taken,” I said. “Why don’t you join me?”
“You were lucky to get off Little Man alive,” Freeman said.
So much for small talk, I thought. “Thank you for that insight. Next time I get chased by ten thousand angry Mogats, I won’t mistakenly think that I have everything under control.”
With his dark skin and clothes, Freeman looked like a shadow in the dim ambiance of the bar. He smiled and looked around. “You should quit the Marines,” he said. “Why don’t you quit?”
“It’s in my genes,” I responded, pleased with my little joke. Freeman did not laugh, not even a chuckle. “You didn’t come to Washington, DC, just to tell me to quit the Corps?”
By that time the sailors around the bar had forgotten about us. They joked, laughed, and told stories at the tops of their lungs. Freeman, however, made no adjustment to compensate for their rising decibels. He spoke in the same quiet, rumbling voice that he always used. “We could be partners,” he said.
“What did you say?” I asked. “I didn’t understand you. It sounded like you said I should become your partner.”
“We’d do good together.”
I paused to stare at him. Ray Freeman, the perfect killing machine and the coldest man alive, had just asked me to be his partner.
“Partners?” I repeated, not sure that I wasn’t having a hallucination brought on from nearly twenty glasses of beer. “Go into business? With you?”
Freeman did not respond.
“Leave the Marines?”
“You weren’t supposed to survive Little Man,” Freeman said. “You may not survive next time.”
“Next time?” I asked. I knew I could leave the Marines, but deep inside, I did not want to leave. Even after the massacre at Little Man and everything they put me through in the House of Representatives…even knowing that my kind was extinct and the people I was protecting wanted to end my life, I wanted to stay in the Marines.
“I can’t leave the service. I’m a Liberator, remember? You can’t drive spaceships underwater. I’m doing the thing I was made to do, and I can’t do anything else.” I knew I was lying. I could leave, but something in my programming kept me coming back for more.
Suddenly my mouth went dry. “Goddamn,” I hissed to myself. Back when I was sober, I assured Aleg Oberland that I would not become like Booth Lector because Liberators made their own choices. But, faced with the knowledge that I would die if I remained in the corps, I wanted to stay where I was. My head hurt, and I started to feel sick to my stomach. I rubbed my eyes. When I looked up, Ray Freeman was gone, if he’d ever been there at all.
CHAPTER THIRTY
One sure sign of a high-security military operation is the means of transportation used for bringing in new recruits. I could have taken public transportation to Gobi. Military transports flew in and out of the SC Central Fleet on a daily basis. This transfer was different. On the morning I was supposed to transfer to the Doctrinaire, Admiral Klyber’s new ship, a driver showed up at my door.
“Lieutenant Harris?” the petty officer asked, as I opened my door.
“Can I help you?” It was 0800. I was packed and dressed but had not yet eaten my breakfast.
“I’m your ride,” the petty officer said.
“My ride? I don’t even know where I’m supposed to go; I can’t leave the station yet.”
“You’re transferring to the Doctrinaire,” the petty officer said. “It’s not like they run a shuttle at the top of every half hour, sir.”
The petty officer loaded my rucksack into the back of his jeep and drove me out to the airfield. A little Johnston R-27 sat ready on the field. The Johnston was the smallest noncombat craft in military employ. It carried a maximum of twelve passengers.
I looked at the little transport. It was raining that morning. Beads of rain ran down the sides and windows. “I hope we are not going very far,” I said.
“We’ll put on a few light-years before nightfall,” the petty officer responded. “That Johnston is self-broadcasting.”
“You’re shitting me,” I said.
“No, sir,” the petty officer said as he grabbed my bags from the back of the jeep.