CHAPTER.

ELEVEN.

I knew where I was before I saw the trains and the tracks that led ten miles across the desert from Mars Spaceport to Mars Air Force Base.

The train station was brightly lit and nearly empty-only military allowed, no picnickers. I stood on a large mezzanine overlooking three tracks, three loading platforms, and three trains. An escalator slanted down to the platforms below on one side of the mezzanine and a cargo elevator lowered from the other. Peering over a rail, I saw the cart parked beside the nearest train. The clones had removed the oxygen geny from the back of the cart and left it on the edge of the platform. They stood gabbing inside the train. As an officer in the Marines, I felt ashamed of the bastards, not because they had turned their backs on the Corps but because they had no more purpose in life than a pair of specking ninety-year-old grandmothers. They took a five-minute gossip break. One told a joke, and the other laughed and slapped him on the back. If they weren't traitors, I would have dogged them for goldbricking.

We were alone in the train station. With them laughing and gossiping and horsing around, I had no trouble slipping down the escalator without being seen. I reached the platform and started toward the train before the lazy bastards started back to work.

The geny was not light. Struggling together, they managed to pull it onto the train without dropping it. Then they surprised me. They paused and gave the platform a security sweep. Had I hesitated a moment, they would have caught me. They entered the train's lead car. I had already boarded the rear car. There were six cars between us.

I sat quietly as the train glided into motion.

The train slid through a tunnel that ran under the spaceport. It rolled along the track as smooth as wind. After we passed what had once been a stop for Norma-Arm-bound passengers, the tunnel went dark. We passed platforms for passengers heading to the Perseus and Cygnus Arms as well.

Bright lights illuminated the inside of the train. I left the last car and walked into the next. It was as bright and empty as the one I had just left. Looking through the windows, I had a blurry, blinded view into the car in front of me. I could not see clearly enough to distinguish between men and machinery, so I checked for movement instead. The next car was empty and the one after that. It soon became clear that my quarry had remained in the lead car with the oxygen generator.

I made it to the second car, peered through the window, and found them sitting on a bench, gabbing.

I made my move. I eased open the door of their car. They might have noticed the door, but they didn't react until they saw me charging toward them; but by that time, it was too late. They did not have time to draw weapons, and they had nowhere to run.

I slammed the edge of my hand across the throat of the first clone as he stood to face me. He gasped and fell, and lay on the floor choking for air.

The second man rushed me. He was young and stupid, I saw it in his brawny gait. I needed to keep the bastard alive, though, and that meant I needed him more than he needed me.

Under normal circumstances, I would have hit him in the nose or throat as he raced toward me. A shot to the crotch or the eyes would have worked as well; but I wanted to chat, so I kicked out his kneecap instead. His leg buckled under him, but momentum carried him into me and we tumbled backward. As we wrestled on the ground, he tried to wedge his forearm under my chin to choke me. He worked his way on top of me, slammed a fist into my face, and tried to pry my chin up.

The blow left me dazed for just a moment, but I recovered quickly. I was in the midst of a combat reflex, my senses heightened, my brain moving in double time.

I wrapped a hand around the man's wrist and twisted it over. He tried to pull the hand free as the smaller bones popped and separated, and he screamed in pain as I pulled him off my body, using his broken hand like a lever. A few feet away, his friend lay on the floor, suffocating slowly, his face turning blue, his hands clenched around the crushed larynx. In another minute, he would die.

With his leg and wrist broken and his friend dying, the Marine forgot he was a Marine. He backed away on his ass and tried to climb to his feet. I grabbed one of his ankles and pulled his feet out from under him. As he fell, he tried to break his fall with his broken hand. He howled in pain when he hit the ground.

I grabbed his arm and wrenched the broken hand out from under his body. I was in full combat reflex now; seductive warmth filled my head. As I climbed to my feet, I placed a foot on his broken wrist and pressed my weight on it.

I might not have wanted to kill them before the reflex; but now, with the hormone running through my veins, murder appealed. I looked at the clone with the crushed throat. His eyes bulged, his mouth formed an O, and his lips had turned blue. He'd die in a few more seconds; only a field-trained surgeon could save him.

For just a moment, I wondered if slicing the man's neck and forcing a tube in his throat would continue my combat reflex. I asked myself if I could possibly keep the hormone flowing with an act of mercy? The notion intrigued me, but I let the bastard die.

The survivor lay on the floor cradling his hand, which had swollen to the size of a catcher's mitt and turned purple. I said, "I need to make a quick call. Don't run off."

Battlefield humor. The bastard was not about to leave; he had gone into shock.

I pulled out the remote. "Jackson, you there?"

No one responded.

I tried again. "Jackson, report."

Nothing.

Thinking I might have broken the remote during my wrestle, I switched to an open channel and listened for chatter. My men had gone silent.

The train had crossed the spaceport by this time. Looking out the window, I saw the automated air locks. Once we passed the air locks, we would enter the Martian badlands. The train slowed as the first door of the air lock slid shut behind it, preserving the breathable atmosphere inside Mars Spaceport. The outer door opened, and we slid into the wastelands.

"Churchill command, come in." I contacted the ship to see if the remote still worked.

One of Cutter's lieutenants answered. He asked, "General, do you need to be sent through to Admiral Cutter?"

I said yes.

When Cutter came on, I said, "I have a hot mess down here. Somebody tried to gas my men."

"Do you know who?" asked Cutter.

I said, "I'm still investigating, but I think it was Riley?"

"Did you say Riley?" asked Cutter.

"I caught the men with the gas. They're clones. The question is, who sent them? They were on their way to the Air Force base."

"I see a train leaving the spaceport on my monitor," said Cutter. "Want me to stop it?"

"Hell no. I'm on that train."

"What about your men?" asked Cutter.

"I can't find them," I said. "I told Jackson to circle the wagons, now he's not answering."

"You went out on your own," said Cutter, demonstrating a knack for stating the obvious.

I looked down at my two victims. One was dead. The other had pulled himself together. He sat on the floor holding the arm, his face pale. I said, "There is a lot going on here. More than we know. There are a couple of Spaceport Security men on the train with me; one's a bit stiff but the other looks like he might be helpful."

Cutter asked, "General, will you be able to control yourself long enough to have a productive conversation?"

I told Cutter, "I'm sure we will get along fine," and signed off.

I sat down beside the man with the broken wrist. He looked like a scared child as he regarded me. I asked, "Ever wondered about life after death?"

He did not answer.

"You will know the answers very soon, Marine."

He said nothing. No surprise.

I said, "I heard you and your buddies chatting. One of you said I was a Liberator clone, another one didn't believe him. Which one were you?" There had been a third clone, but I was trying to make a point.

He asked, "Are you Harris?"

I said, "In the Liberator flesh."

He surprised me by showing some backbone. He gathered his strength, and said, "Get specked, you alien-loving bastard."

"What happened to my men?" I asked.

The son of a bitch did not utter a word. He might have cowered during our fight, but now he was acting like a Marine. This wasn't a scared little lamb like the idiots back in Seattle; this man had faced death before.

"Listen up, Marine," I said. "It has been a long day, and I am not in a good mood. Now tell me what happened to my men. That is an order."

It should have been in his programming. Post-Liberator military clones followed orders automatically. Tell them to do push-ups, and they start humping the ground before their brains register what they're doing. At least, that was how it was supposed to work. I had just ordered this son of a bitch to answer me, but he wasn't talking.

"You specking tried to gas them, asshole," I said. "You tried to gas them, now I can't reach them. What happened to them?"

He stared at me like a young, scared cadet trying to stand up to a drill sergeant. I said, "Okay, then let's start with the easy stuff. What's that?" I pointed to the oxygen generator.

He said, "It's an oxygen generator."

"What were you doing with it?"

He whispered, "Generating oxygen." He closed his eyes and laughed, but terror showed on his face when he opened his eyes again. By that time I was wringing his shattered wrist like a soggy towel.

I said, "We've got a few minutes before we reach the base. Come clean, and I might even let you live."

He stared at me in silence.

I said, "Maybe you've already made up your mind to play it the hard way. Do you have any idea how much pain I can cause you before we dock?" As I said this, I wrung his wrist a second time.

He did not scream. He whimpered.

I loosened my grip. "Why do you want to kill my men?"

"We weren't trying to kill them," he said. I started to squeeze again, and he shouted, "No. No. Really! We knew you would stop the gas. It was a distraction. We were supposed to distract you."

"Distract us," I said, relaxing the pressure on his arm. The gas was a feint, and I had fallen for it. "Distract us from what?"

The man did not answer. I got the feeling he did not know. I asked, "Who sent you? Riley?"

"The colonel is not in charge," he said.

He turned toward the front of the train. I followed his gaze. Looking through the windshield, I could see Mars Air Force Base in the nearing distance. It looked like a butte in a desert, tall and flat and deep in shadow.

"Kill me," he said.

I stood, as if I wanted to get a closer look at the base, and then I kicked him across the face. I had probably broken his jaw, which was not my intent, and I gave him a concussion from which he would not soon wake up. I stripped the bastard naked and tied his hands, feet, and mouth with his clothes. I wanted him to stand before a military tribunal. I wanted him tried, interrogated, and hung, so I stowed him with his dead friend in a cargo compartment for safekeeping.

If I was killed while exploring the Air Force base, the bastard would starve to death or die of thirst. Maybe he would develop a gangrenous infection and die in delirium. We both had a stake in my survival.

The train slowed as it approached an air lock that led to the base. The outer door slid open, and we rumbled into the tube. The door closed. There was a soft whoosh as indigenous gases were flushed away, then the inner door slid open.

I did not know who would greet the train. The train station was brightly lit. I could not afford to be seen. Because I had a clone's face and stood over six feet tall, any clones who saw me would instantly identify me as a Liberator.

The train rolled slowly as it left the air lock and approached an empty passenger platform.

I recognized the base from the time I had visited it many years ago.

"General?" a voice purred from the remote. I reached down to shut it off, but stopped when I saw who it was.

"Jackson? Where the speck have you been?"

"Right here, sir."

"I have been trying to contact you," I said.

"The bastards must have blocked our signal."

He sounded fine. A security force like Riley's probably did have "sludging" equipment for blocking interLink signals. Such equipment was not uncommon, but I did not think my regiment's disappearance could be explained that simply. If they had blocked the signal five minutes ago, why had they stopped blocking it?

I did not have time to ask. The train had rolled up to the platform, and I had to move.

I said, "I need to go," and signed off.

Places like Mars Air Force Base have discreet security cameras built into their walls and in the ceilings. They have electronic ears that can detect footsteps, breathing, beating hearts; and thermostats that can detect the change in temperature when a body enters a room. There was no question the security system had detected my presence. Whether or not anyone watched the monitors was another story. Maybe they did, and maybe they didn't. I only knew one way to find out.

I stepped off the train and crossed the platform without bothering to look for cameras. If they had people staring into monitors, they'd already seen me.

The only way from the train tracks to the base was up a steep escalator. I climbed the stairs two at a time as the escalator whisked me up. No one met me at the top.

The base lobby was dimly lit, spacious, and clean. The air was cold, my breath turned to steam; but there were no picnickers, which made this icebox the Garden of Eden in my mind. Moving at a fast creep, I crossed the shiny, black, granite floor. I was not alone.

When I reached the door that led from the lobby to the offices, I heard voices. I stopped, listened, then took a few steps back. I pulled out my communications remote. "Jackson."

"Yes, sir."

"Load your men on the transports, double speed."

"Yes, sir. Are we going back to the Churchill?"