Rogue Clone: The Clone Betrayal Part 45

One of the guards leads Fahey around the table and pulls out a stool for him. Even with his hands cuffed together, he has a snakelike fierceness. He looks incensed that Thomer has come. He leers at Thomer and says nothing. Nearly a minute pa.s.ses before Thomer breaks the silence.

"A lot of good men died because of you," he says.

Fahey laughs, and says, "You don't know what you are talking about."

"You're a spy," Thomer says. "You reported everything we did to Admiral Brocius."

"Was that something that Harris told you, or did you come up with it yourself?"

"Is it true?" Thomer asks.

"Of course it isn't true. How would I have gotten information to Brocius?"

"I'm betting you sent it back to Earth with the natural-borns when they transferred home."

"Get specked," says Fahey.

"And I'm betting that you left holes in the blockade when you set it up so that the U.A. could place a spy on Terraneau. We located their spy. His name is Freeman."

This time Fahey does not say anything. He licks his lips, starts to say something, decides against it.

"Once you got yourself thrown in this stockade, the spy listened in on your conversations with the fleet. You knew he was out there, and you furnished him everything you knew by chatting with your friends on an open frequency."

"Bulls.h.i.+t. That's all bulls.h.i.+t," says Fahey. He looks at the guards to make sure they believe him.

"After the Unifieds landed here, they took all the prisoners back to their fleet . . . all of the prisoners except for you. Why did they leave you behind?"

A subtle s.h.i.+ft is taking place. Now Thomer has the snakelike confidence and Fahey seems to shrink. He forces a smile, and says, "They wouldn't have left me here if I was their spy."

Thomer says, "Sure they would. You're not one of them," and he stands up and reaches into his pocket. One of the guards draws his pistol, but he only pulls out a pocketknife.

"What are you doing?" the guard asks.

"I want to try an experiment," he says to the guard.

"What are you up to?" Fahey asks.

Thomer slides the knife across the table. "Senior Chief, give me some of your hair."

"What?" Fahey asks.

"Give me a lock of your hair," Thomer repeats.

"You're joking," Fahey says.

Thomer sits down, and says, "Humor me."

Thomer is fully in control now. He is, after all, the only man in the room with an active field commission. When he gives orders, the other clones will obey them unless they have standing orders to the contrary. It's in their programming.

Fahey cuts off a lock of his hair. He gives the hair and the knife back to Thomer, who uses the knife to cut off some of his own hair.

Thomer's hair is less than an inch long. Fahey's hair is nearly four inches long. Since they are both clones of roughly the same age, they have identical brown hair except for the length; but Fahey sees his hair as blond. That, too, is in his programming. Thomer, who is aware of his synthetic nature, knows his hair is brown.

"Now for the experiment," Thomer says. He takes his own hair in his right hand and Fahey's in his left and puts both hands behind his back.

From my bird's-eye angle, I see things Fahey cannot see. Thomer drops the hair from his right hand and replaces it with some of Fahey's hair. Then he holds out both hands so only the ends of the hairs are sticking out from under his thumb.

"Whose hair is this?" he asks. "Yours or mine?"

Fahey sneers because to him the answer is obvious. The hair is brown. "It's yours," he says.

Without saying a word, Thomer rolls his hand so that the palm is facing up. He spreads his fingers revealing a twist of long hairs. "They left you behind because you are not one of them, Fahey. You're a clone."

Until that moment, I had never seen a death reflex.

Fahey stares at Thomer's open hand. He starts to rise to his feet, his entire body trembling, he remains mesmerized by the hair in Thomer's hand. His skin turns pale as he mouths words that do not escape his lips. There is a slight shudder of the shoulders, a quick twitch of the head, and Fahey falls facedown on the table, a thin stream of blood leaking out of his ear.

5.

"They hung Thomer the next day," Hollingsworth said.

"But Fahey was a spy." It didn't make sense that Thomer should die for executing a spy.

"The guards were from the Was.h.i.+ngton. Everyone from Outer Bliss came from the Was.h.i.+ngton, Harris. Besides, Thomer didn't care. I offered to come get him so he could stand trial. He didn't want a trial."

He'd already been through too many trials, I thought. He'd convicted himself. He was guilty of surviving New Copenhagen when all of his friends had died. For him, that was a capital offense.

6.

Hollingsworth drove me out to see the place where the ghosts had been.

"They're gone now," he said. "The last one died a few days ago. The b.a.s.t.a.r.d hung on for fifteen days. Fifteen days."

"What about Mooreland?" I asked.

"He didn't even last the week," Hollingsworth said. "I think he might have broken something when the building came down on him. Maybe he got gangrene or something."

A long chain-link fence ran the border. Four Marines in combat armor stood at the gate. Hollingsworth drove our jeep up to the fence and parked. We both climbed out. He waited as I pulled out my crutches and struggled to my feet.

Beyond the guards, the scene looked no different than most of Norristown. Rubble covered the ground. The partial walls of the government building stood as jagged as knife blades. If anything, we had not been as thorough as the Avatari would have been. The area of the building over the garage entrance had crumbled to nothing. The far wall of the building still stood.

"Hear any voices?" Hollingsworth asked the guards.

"Silent as a tomb," the man replied.

They traded salutes.

"Did you ever hear them?" I asked.

"Every day," Hollingsworth said.

The admitted us through the gate. Buildings like the ones we had demolished still stood on every side of the lot, but we were in a vast field of concrete and steel. Where the building once stood, a twenty-foot mound rose from the ground with girders and concrete blocks poking out. A strong wind blew across the destruction, causing half-buried papers to flap. Two ten-foot strands of rebar jutted from a concrete slab. They jangled in the breeze.

"They spoke to us over the interLink. The first few days, they tried to bargain with us," Hollingsworth said. "They wanted us to dig them out, but they wouldn't promise to surrender.

"Thomer was still here at that point. He was the only officer with the authority to negotiate . . . him and you. We didn't know if you were going to make it. Anyway, Thomer left orders for the men guarding the grave to leave their helmets back at the fort. He didn't want us talking to them. He was afraid Mooreland would order some clone to dig him out . . ."

Leaning heavily on my crutches, I walked to the edge of the rubble, knowing exactly where I was. This was the area between the two wings. It was our gauntlet. This was the spot the scouts entered first. They came this far, then they stopped.

"A few days later, Thomer was gone, and I was in charge. I put on my helmet, and that was the first time I heard them. They were begging for help by then. Some of them had already died.

"I only heard Mooreland once. He wanted to talk to you," Hollingsworth said. "He sounded as good as dead already. I think he knew his time was up."

"The locals never heard about this?" I asked.

"h.e.l.l no," Hollingsworth said. "That's why we posted guards. Thomer thought they would try to dig Mooreland out if they knew he was down there."

He was right, they would have.

The whole building had been turned into a ma.s.s grave. Maybe all of Terraneau qualified as a ma.s.s grave. The Unified Authority used the planet to bury its clones, trapping them in the far end of s.p.a.ce. Then we returned the favor, burying their new Marines under their own government building.

"This isn't over," I said in a voice so soft I was sure that Hollingsworth would not hear it. "This war is not over."

AUTHOR'S NOTES.

Where do ideas come from?

No man is an island, but some authors seem to be. Some authors can shut themselves off from the world for a month and emerge with masterpieces. I am no such magician.

I had just completed the first draft of this book in August, when I stumbled across an interesting review of my second novel, Rogue Clone, on goodreads.com, in which the reviewer called my book "dudely" and pointed out that the first female character to have a name did not appear until the forty-fifth chapter of a fifty-three chapter book.

The romance with Ava Gardner already existed in this book before I read that review. In fact, if you must pin the blame on someone for young Harris in love, pin it on Anne, my amazing editor at Ace. I started The Clone Elite with the line, "Until the first half of humanity was gone, all anybody wanted to talk about was the actress Ava Gardner."

I liked that line because I thought it begged all kinds of questions, not the least of which was, "What the heck was Ava Gardner doing in the twenty-sixth century?" Anne told me that I could only use the line if I gave Ava more of a role than simply appearing in an opening sentence. Since I had just signed a deal for three more Harris books, I asked if I could put her in the next series.

The Goodreads reviewer went on to comment that my clones were oddly restrained when it came to s.e.x among themselves. Brown Betty on Goodreads, Perry Fahey owes much of his very existence to you.

And speaking of idea generators, I want to thank the disembodied voices of SadSamsPalace.com, my website. I have a crew of usual suspects who haunt my blog and often give me good ideas. Aaron Spuler, whose son Kaleb will have been born a few months before this book comes out, reminded me how much I like it when old characters make cameo appearances in novels.

Nope, Freeman's brief appearance was not Aaron's idea. I knew from the start that Freeman had to show up sooner or later. As both John Thorpe and Mark Adams put it, "Harris may be optional in a Wayson Harris novel, but Freeman is mandatory."

Expect a lot more Freeman in the next two books. In fact, I had toyed with the idea of creating a graphic novel called Freeman Stories. Then I read Watchmen and gave in to deep-seated feelings of inadequacy.

Harris will face a new kind of threat in the next installment of this series, and I wanted to thank a few guys for coming up with this idea. Kit Lewis, another constant customer at Sad Sam's, first proposed the idea. I have left his posting up, but you are going to need to do a lot of digging to find it.

Kit's idea had never ever occurred to me, and it made a lot of sense. Thanks, Kit.

And thank you to KillerBit. Once Kit came up with the idea, KillerBit did a little digging and fleshed it out with a little scientific fact-finding.

One last note about my blog . . . When The Clone Elite came out, Chris n.o.bles (aka Sniperae) was one of the first guys on my blog to finish the book. He could have simply called it "a masterpiece." I would have liked that, actually. Instead, he gave me mild grief about ending the book too abruptly.

I did not like that, especially because I knew he was right. Chris, I apologize. It won't happen again. (Until Chris brought this up, this novel had a very abrupt ending as well.) On the positive side, Jon (Jaffe) said he liked the time line I put at the beginning of The Clone Elite. I originally updated the time line and included it in this book, then removed it, then put it back again following Jon's advice.

BTW-you may have noticed that I only refer to this novel as "this novel" in the author's notes. There is a perfectly good reason for that. As of this writing, the book is called Clones Have Ghosts. Anne, my brilliant and kind editor whose advice reigns supreme, has asked me to change the t.i.tle.

Today is November 28, and I have eighty pages to finish proofreading before I submit the book to Ace. I will send the ma.n.u.script to the long-suffering and very wonderful Anne on Wednesday along with a letter of apology. I am not a diva, at least I do not think I am. Of course, what diva ever thinks of himself/herself as a diva?

As of this writing, Christian McGrath has not begun work on the cover for this book; but once he finishes, I know it will be magnificent. I want to thank Anne and Cam and the people at Ace who spend so much time cleaning up my work.

Before beginning my career in fiction, I spent fifteen years as a freelance journalist covering the video game industry. When I first started, Penthouse magazine always had a booth at trade shows for some interactive product. There were posters of three models on the walls of the Penthouse booth, and those same models sat at a table, signing autographs. The thing is, if I had not known that the women in the pictures were the same ones signing the autographs, I would never have guessed. The makeup, the lighting, the lenses, and the photo editors transformed those normal three women into G.o.ddesses.

Rachel Johnson, Jordan Green, Anne, and Cam have achieved an even more magical transformation on my behalf. Readers, you have no idea what this book looked like when they received it.

I need to thank Richard Curtis, my agent and adviser. Jeez, this sounds like I'm giving an acceptance speech at the Academy Awards, and I haven't even gotten around to thanking my wife and parents. Mom, Dad, Brooke, thanks.

My biggest thanks go to you, my readers. I hope you enjoyed this book.

Steven L. Kent.

November 28, 2008.

AUTHOR'S ADDENDUM.