The Clone Sedition (33 page)

Her expression shifted from anger to something resembling shock. She said, “I had no idea. I…I did not know anything about that.”

I said, “Mostly he captured and executed clones.”

“Really?” she asked.

“He is a low-priority war criminal,” I said. “If I’d known who he was, I might not have shot him. Now we need to wait until he heals before we can hang him.”

What was it about this woman that hit me so hard? In another minute, she would leave my office, and I would feel a void. I did not think the emptiness would last long, maybe a week or two; but why had I fallen so hard for her in the first place? She was beautiful, but I had seen many beautiful women. I had lived with an actress that people described as “one of the most beautiful woman of all time.” Surely this girl, this lawyer, was not nearly as beautiful as Ava had been; and yet Ava never stunned me like this.

You will never see her again,
I reminded myself. Washington, D.C. was a big city made even bigger because lawyers and generals did not travel in the same circles. As her parting gift, I said, “I’ll clear you to see your client, Miss Farris.”

She thanked me and left.

I watched her walk away, knowing that I would think about her.

Location: Mars Spaceport
Date: May 2, 2519

Watson, who had always hidden behind his size, no longer saw Freeman and Harris as heroic figures. Having now experienced violence, Watson saw them as demigods. They operated comfortably in a world that now terrified him.

Until entering the barracks, the worst pain Watson had endured in his adult life was a headache brought on by an overchilled vodka tonic. He’d begun to think he had a high pain threshold.

His jaw throbbed. When he moved it, he heard a clicking noise. It was a soft noise, almost drowned out by the silvery flash of pain that filled his brain.

Sharp pain stabbed at him under his ribs when he took a deep breath or moved. He thought the ribs were probably broken. He touched a finger to an area that had turned a florid purple just below his chest—pain. He gasped, and his jaw clicked. The sharp pain from his jaw smothered the ache from his chest. For the first time in his life, Travis Watson understood the difference between an ache and a pain. Aches hung around; pains shot through him and disappeared.

His eyelids were swollen, squeezing his eyes in their sockets. It felt like somebody was pressing the heel of their hands against each eye. When he tried to look from side to side, dull ache filled his head.

His nose was broken as well. Because he couldn’t breathe through his nose, he gulped air through his mouth, which meant he had to keep his mouth open so that his jaw would not move.

Those aches and pains and injuries had come from a beating.
The cramps and bruises and charley horses below his neck had come afterward. His spine and pelvis hurt from lying on a cold, hard floor. It was a morning-after kind of ache, the kind of persistent throb that came with a hangover.

In other situations, that soreness would have consumed him; but Watson had no idea where he was. He did not know if he was a patient or a prisoner.

He sat up and tried to massage the knots out of his shoulders. He rolled his head to the left and felt a sharp stab of pain. He rolled his shoulder to the right and felt a similar stab. He moaned, but he did not give in. Flexing and swiveling his shoulders, he got the blood to return to his arms, bringing with it the feeling of a million microscopic needles pricking his skin. The sensation burned in the beginning, but that burn soon felt pleasant.

Watson’s eyes had already adjusted to the dim environment. His vision was poor, but he understood the shapes around him. He had been placed in a bathroom. A toilet poked out of the wall beside his head. Not far from the toilet, a paper dispenser hung on the wall.

It was a small bathroom, not the communal latrines Watson had seen in the moments before he was attacked. He did not know where he was, but he suspected he was no longer in the barracks.

When he moved his mouth to yell for help, pain filled his head and silenced him. It barreled around his skull like a train through a tunnel. Bright spots appeared before his eyes, distorting his vision. He kicked in a spasm and banged his shin hard against the toilet, but he barely noticed. The pain in his skull overshadowed the sting in his shin.

Blinded by the synapses in his head, Watson reached his right arm out and groped the wall for balance. His eyes closed against the pain, he stuck his hand into the toilet without hearing the water splash or feeling the wet. His hand slipped on the slick surface, and he slid.

Trying to balance himself, he kicked a stall door, which slammed into a wall, creating a thunderlike racket reverberating through the empty bathroom.

A door opened on the far side of the bathroom.

First a female voice. “He must be awake.”

A cheerful male voice followed. “Lazarus come forth.” Then the man saw Watson lying face-first on the ground with his hand stuck in the toilet. He said, “Shit, that’s embarrassing.”

“Shut up, Dempsey,” said the female voice.

The man reached a hand under one of Watson’s arms and helped him to his feet, then steadied him as he started to lose his balance.

“I’ll tell you what, son, I don’t know whether you’re the luckiest man I ever met or the unluckiest.” The man seemed to find humor in Watson’s suffering, but he did not sound unkind.

Watson recognized the name. Dempsey was one of Gordon Hughes’s bodyguards. He also recognized the girl’s voice. She was Hughes’s granddaughter, Emily.

He started to ask Emily where he was, but the movement pinched a nerve in his broken jaw. The pain shot through him, and his legs gave way.

Dempsey caught him by the arm. He said, “We don’t have many of these, and you’re going to need them for the trip, but now might be a good time to use one.” He opened an envelope and pulled out a paper patch about the size of a postage stamp. One side of the patch was smooth, the other covered with millimeter-long needles.

Dempsey pressed the side with the needles into Watson’s neck. The effect was nearly instantaneous, a mind-clearing, pain-reducing burst of energy.

Emily said, “Your jaw is broken.”

“He’s probably figured that out by now,” said Dempsey.

Emily touched his shoulder gently, and added, “Your nose is broken. So are some of your ribs.”

“If they hit your right nut any harder, it might have shot out of your nose,” Dempsey joked. “That patch is going to hide the pain, but it won’t fix things. We won’t be able to fix you till we get to the base.”

Emily shushed Dempsey, but she need not have bothered. Watson sank to his knees as his strength disappeared. Dempsey caught his left arm and eased him down, then leaned his back against a wall.

Watson heard him speak a few words, then he faded.

“His name is Franklin Nailor,” Gordon Hughes was saying. “You might say he’s the new Unified Authority’s chief recruiting officer on Mars. If a more satanic man has ever lived, I’ve never met him.”

“The new Unified Authority?” Watson asked. He should not have spoken, the pain punished him for forgetting about his jaw, but hearing the term “new Unified Authority” had caught him off guard.

“That’s what we call it around here. I’m not sure if anyone is using that name.

“The fact is that we don’t really know who he works for, just who he used to work for,” said Hughes. “He was an Intelligence officer with the Unifieds. I assume he still is, only now that makes him a criminal.”

Someone had moved a mattress into the bathroom while Watson lay comatose.

Now Hughes, sitting on a nearby toilet, explained the situation.

“You know why he let you live, don’t you? He thinks you’re working for Harris.” He paused and thought. “You know, I’d give everything I own to see what happens when Harris gets his hands on Nailor. That will be…artistic.”

Along with the mattress, Watson found a new pain patch. As Hughes spoke, Watson applied the patch to his neck. The warmth bloomed in his neck and spread across his body.

Knowing that the pain would return, Watson took stock of his injuries. He rolled his tongue along the inside of his jawbone and found three breaks along the contour. Each time he felt a break, an electric jolt ran the length of his spine, but the patch reduced the sting from those jolts.

Along with the mattress and pain patch, Hughes produced a third gift that morning: an interactive notepad that he gave to Watson as a replacement for speaking. Dragging his finger like a pen over the glass surface, Watson wrote, “Where is Freeman?” He showed the question to Hughes.

“Freeman? Ah, Freeman? To use his terminology, he is
clearing the path
.” Hughes, the veteran politician, knew how to work a crowd. He gave Watson three seconds to ponder the term, then explained, “Our defenses are woefully depleted.
We’re down to three M27s, Freeman’s sniper rifle, and some butter knives.

“The window of opportunity is closing around us. We are running out of bullets and food, Watson. If we don’t exit Mars Spaceport soon, we’ll never make it out.

“Well, that is not entirely true. Nailor has offered to allow us to leave if we hand over Tasman. I bet he’d even let us hop on the next freighter to Earth. He doesn’t care about you or me or even Freeman. All he wants is Tasman…and another shot at Harris.”

Watson wrote something on his comms pad and showed it to Hughes.

“What does Nailor have against Harris?”

The governor’s wispy white hair was messed and clumped, oily because he had not been able to shower for over a week. Red splotches had formed on his face and neck, but there was a charisma about him. He had a rugged chin for an old man, and the wrinkled face gave him character. Watson had to remind himself that Hughes was in his seventies.

“Everything, I suppose. Wayson Harris brought about the downfall of the Unified Authority.

“I don’t know when Nailor entered the spaceport. I don’t even know if he was on Mars when Harris arrived last month. He might have been here. For all we know, he could have been hiding on Mars since the Unifieds first built the spaceport.

“All we really know is that after Harris left, Nailor showed up, then Freeman showed up; and the trouble began.”

Emily stole into the bathroom quietly. She carried a bowl filled with warm water and a clean, soft sponge. When Watson squirmed on his mattress to see who had entered, she said, “I’m supposed to clean you.”

Since his arms were not broken, Watson was entirely capable of cleaning himself. His mind was not broken, either. He knew that Freeman, who did not bother with other people’s hygiene, had not sent the girl. He also doubted that Gordon Hughes, who seemed to have a puritanical side, had sent her.

Watson lay silently on the bare mattress and watched her silhouette as she moved through the near darkness. She placed the bowl on the floor and sat beside him.

He could tell that she was a player in the same way that he had always been a player. She was pretty, but in his current state, Watson had no interest in playing.

He heard her dipping the sponge, but she had moved into one of his blind spots. He could not see what she was doing. He heard the splash of excess water as she wrung it out. She moved in front of him, and he watched her silhouette. He saw her lean over him, felt the gentle touch, the warm sponge on his cheek.

He started to say something. She said, “Shhhh,” and touched her finger to his lips so gently that it soothed him. She stroked the sponge along the length of his forehead, then dabbed it so softly along his jaw that he only felt the warmth.

She held a new pain patch, which she gently applied just below his ear. The medicine spread across his body quickly. She washed him more, and the warm water helped him relax.

She unbuttoned his shirt and cleaned his chest. Even though she tried to be careful, he drew in a sharp breath when she touched the bruises just below his heart. She cleaned his
chest and worked her way down to his stomach; but he stopped her hand before she could go lower. Even with the new patch, intimacy was an impossibility.

He pulled her down and she lay on the mattress beside him, and that was how they fell asleep.

They were still asleep when Gordon Hughes walked into the bathroom the next morning, and shouted, “Oh good Lord. Get your hands off my granddaughter.”

They were not only leaving the administrative complex; they were leaving the spaceport. Freeman said that the safest place on Mars would be the Air Force base. Once there, they might even be able to signal Cutter for help.

Hughes thought that meant they would have open radio contact with Cutter and his ships. Though Freeman privately told Watson the entire planet was sludged, he allowed Hughes and the others to believe differently.

To get to the base, they would need to cross the spaceport and enter the train station.

Under normal circumstances, a party of thirty people would not be easy to follow in the overcrowded environment of the spaceport, but Freeman said that Nailor had sent clones and allies to watch in case they tried to escape. Here, though, the sludging worked against Nailor and Riley. The sludging left their men cut off.