Rogue Clone: The Clone Betrayal Part 10

I knew right then and there that the man was going to be a problem for me; the question was, how big a problem.

"Does that mean you will remain on Terraneau?" Fahey asked.

"No," I said, "I'll remain on the Kamehameha."

"But I will have command of the fleet?" Warshaw asked.

"That's what he said," growled Thomer. "Do you have a hearing problem?"

"That will be enough, Sergeant," I said. Then I turned to Warshaw, and said, "Our field ranks don't come into play until Thorne and the other natural-borns are gone."

"What's your point?" asked Warshaw.

"It could take months before the transfer is complete, that should give us plenty of time to work out any kinks in the command structure."

Warshaw did not say anything, but he nodded.

I could read the man easily enough. As the highest-ranking noncommissioned officer in the Scutum-Crux Fleet, he had expected to take over. Frankly, he had two thousand years of naval tradition supporting his position. The swabbies steered the ships, and the leathernecks ran the invasions. It had always been that way. The natural animosity between Marines and sailors only made things worse.

For a moment, I thought Warshaw or one of the other officers would threaten to go over my head about the promotion. Then we really would have had a problem. In the Marines, we did not tolerate the kind of politicking and political maneuvering that took place as a matter of course among ships' captains.

Warshaw fixed his glare on me, and his mouth worked into a nasty grin that reflected the hate in his eyes. I could just about hear his thoughts, they were somewhere between insubordination and mutiny. But Warshaw was a clone just like everyone else in the room. Angry or not, he had neural programming that in theory prevented him from disobeying orders, no matter how he felt about having a Marine in the chain of command.

I wondered what steps Warshaw would willingly take to correct the chain of command. I had heard stories about Navy officers wrangling for positions and honors in ways that a simple Marine could never comprehend.

Warshaw started to say something, and I put up my hand to stop him. "Our first order of business is to retake Terraneau, Master Chief. I think everybody here can agree that capturing the planet is very much a Marine operation."

There were nods of agreement around the table.

"Who says we'll let you back on our boats once you're through?" asked Fahey. That sent me over the edge. I had a combat reflex. Anger and peace merged together in my brain. Thomer started to say something, but I spoke over him. "Let's see . . . Senior Chief Petty Officer Perry Fahey?" I asked, making a show of looking down at the roster. "It says here that you're on the Washington. That's a Perseus-cla.s.s fighter carrier."

Fahey, his made-up eyes now fluttering, said, "That's correct."

"That means there are ten thousand armed Marines on your ship, Senior Chief. Would you like to try and explain why you are scuttling the local commandant of the Marines on an alien-held planet to ten thousand combat Marines?"

Fahey was not stupid. He had to know that my Marines would seize control of his ship.

"No one is leaving anyone behind," Warshaw said. "My men obey orders, Captain Harris, even when they come from a Marine."

That ended the meeting. I dismissed the sailors, and they returned to their ships.

"That was specked," Thomer said after the last sailor left. "Warshaw's an a.s.s."

"Do you blame him?" I asked. "He thought he was going to command the fleet."

"He has a point, too," Herrington said.

"No he doesn't," said Thomer.

"Yes he does," said Herrington. "Would you want a sailor calling the shots when we take Terraneau?"

"Okay, he's got a point," Thomer conceded.

"But what was that stuff on Fahey's eyes?" I asked. "It looked like eye makeup . . . like the stuff women use."

"It is," Herrington said.

"He's wearing makeup?" I asked.

"He's a b.i.t.c.h," Herrington said.

"What is that supposed to mean?" I asked.

"Harris, none of these boys have had R & R for four years now."

"And?" I knew where this was going, but I wanted to see how Herrington would handle it.

"And the makeup identifies Fahey as a pleasure vehicle."

"G.o.d, I'm glad he's not a Marine," I said.

"You haven't toured the compound yet, have you?" Herrington asked.

I shook my head.

Thomer and Herrington exchanged a glance, then laughed.

"Where the speck are they getting makeup?" I asked. I knew what Herrington wanted to say next. He wanted to ask something along the lines of whether or not I needed it for myself.

I gave Herrington an order to search the Marine compound for any cosmetics. When he found them, he had orders to "confiscate without repercussions."

At the end of the day, when I went back to my billet, I had lipstick, eye shadow, rouge, and a pair of man-sized silk stockings. I came into the room and placed the cache on the bed, then called for Ava-she was hiding in the bathroom.

She stood at the edge of the bed, staring down at the various tubes and bottles as if they were antiques from a foreign land.

"What do you think?" I asked. "Can you use any of it?"

"Use it for what?" she asked.

"It's makeup," I said.

"Honey, back home we called this 'queer gear,' " she said.

"Queer gear?" I asked.

"These are cosmetics for men," she said, picking up the stockings. "I could use these for a hammock, but I wouldn't want to wear them. Harris, stockings are not one size fits all."

Feeling deflated, I went to the mess to get us our first meal. While I was gone, Ava removed the makeup from my rack. She played coy, but I noticed the faint smear of red on her cheeks and the enhanced shadow above her eyes when I returned.

It looked good.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

A week pa.s.sed between the day I boarded the Kamehameha and the time we would start the mission. I spent some of my time on the Washington, welcoming shuttles as Captain Pershing's cruiser ferried Marines in and natural-borns out at the snail's pace of four hundred men per trip. Walking the upper corridors of the ship, I heard officers complaining about the slow pace of the transfers.

In my off-hours, I stockpiled MREs in my quarters so that Ava would have food to eat while I was on Terraneau. If everything went well, the mission might only take a day. If things went wrong, I might not return for weeks, if I returned at all. Preparing for the worst, I hid a month's worth of meals around my billet.

I had Ava sample each of the meals to see which ones she liked. She didn't like any of them, but she did not complain. After sampling the spaghetti, she groaned, and said, "Can't we just use room service?"

When I said, "They'd probably just bring you more of the same stuff," she said, "Honey, that's fine with me as long as the waiter looks good."

"Charming," I said. "He'd probably look a lot like me since they're all clones."

We could have smuggled a spare rack into the billet; we had the floor s.p.a.ce. Instead, Ava and I slept in the same bed. I liked the warmth of her body under the sheets, though she showed little interest in me. She generally came to bed dressed in her bra and panties, both of which were made of a satiny white material that had been stained and dulled by the heat and sweat of Clonetown.

Ava slept with her back toward me. If I reached out and touched her, she did not pull away so long as my hands stayed around her back or her waist. When I reached too high, she wrapped her arms across her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and curled into a ball.

She probably would have allowed me to grope her if I forced the issue, but I never did. Instead, I would lie there, smelling her scent and feeling her warmth, entirely unable to sleep.

We talked a lot. Ava told me all about her life. She treated conversations like an autobiography. I didn't mind, though; her life was interesting.

Ava had known that she was a clone from an early age. When she was young, the man who claimed to be her father employed a series of lab technicians to help raise her. Although they treated her well, they were not especially careful about what they said around her or about keeping her safely away from the truth of her birth. As an eight-year-old, she sneaked into the lab where she was cloned and saw the equipment that reproduced her. She wanted to believe she was real, but seeing that equipment, she had her doubts.

She lost her virginity and decided she was a clone all on the same night. She had her first period at the age of fifteen. Exactly one week later, her "father" came to visit her after she'd gone to bed. By the time he left, her virginity was gone along with any illusions that the man was really her father.

She related this tale in a matter-of-fact style without shedding a single useless tear. After telling me this story, she stared at me for several seconds, then asked, "What's wrong with you?"

Her question caught me off guard. I did not know anything was wrong with me. "Wrong with me?"

"Don't you feel sorry for me?" she asked.

"Why the speck would I feel sorry for you?" I asked.

"He raped me and took away my dreams."

"Oh," I said. "Sorry." I grew up with thousands of clones who never knew any parents other than instructors at military orphanages. Our instructors lied to us and sent us to war. The closest thing we had to a dream was the goal that we might one day reach the rank of sergeant. s.e.x and reality at the age of fifteen sounded pretty good to me.

That night and the next, Ava and I slept in the same rack but a million miles apart. I call them nights, but they were just sleep periods. Life on a starship . . . the halls are constantly bright as day, and the world around you is generally dark as night. I had work shifts, shifts in which I was off duty, and shifts in which I slept.

Ava's att.i.tude thawed the day before I left for Terraneau. From the moment I entered my quarters, she wanted to talk.

I came in sweating from a day spent working out, sparring, and drilling my men. Ava, pretending as if she had not given me ice for the last forty-eight hours, followed me into the bathroom and asked about my day as I stripped off my clothes. I grunted that I had worked hard and that my crew looked ready.

"That's good," she said. "Are you excited to get to the planet?"

I turned to look at her. Dressed in the smallest sailor suit I could find, she looked clean and childlike. The tunic looked stylish and loose on her, but the trousers were baggy around her waist. She had rolled the cuffs back on the denim sleeves to prevent them from covering her hands. There was something vulnerable and oddly erotic about seeing this pet.i.te woman wearing a sailor's suit.

She had also applied the makeup I brought her. Her eyes looked wide and the blue of the eye shadow played well against the green of her eyes. The makeup looked a lot better on her than it had on Fahey.

"Are you excited or scared?" she repeated in a soft voice.

I stood there naked and sweaty, considered her question, and said, "I'm both," no longer thinking about the mission. I was excited and scared by the beautiful woman standing in the doorway. For a sliver of a second, I thought of Pavlov and his dog. He rang a bell, and his dog salivated. Ava dressed right, and I did the same.

"Excited to fight?" she asked. The other half of her question hung in the air entirely tangible but unasked. Was I anxious to get away from her?

"I was designed to fight," I said.

I stepped into the shower. Ava had once said the difference between women and Marines was that women did not only shower when they wanted to have s.e.x. She was wrong, of course, the Corps demands hygiene. That said, she had certainly pegged the motivation behind this particular shower.

Ava stepped into the bathroom so we could hear each other over the water. She didn't mind the fact that I was naked. Ava was many things, but she was not shy. Rather than sit on the toilet, she stood just outside the shower and half sat on the washbasin. She kept her arms folded across her chest.

"Do you think it's going to be dangerous?"

"Any time the Avatari are involved, things are going to get dangerous," I said. The term "Avatari" was highly cla.s.sified, but I had shared a lot of cla.s.sified information with Ava. I was an outcast now; what did I care about Unified Authority security?

"Is Thomer ready?" she asked. She knew all about Thomer and his drug problems.

"He's as ready as he's going to get," I said.

"Can you count on him?" she asked.

"I think so," I said. He did a good job drilling the men today-not perfect, but good enough. "He still moves slowly; but once he gets a little adrenaline running through him, I think he'll do okay."

"What about Warshaw? Are you worried about him?" she asked.

"There's not much I can do there," I said.

"What if he doesn't let you off the planet?" she asked. "Would he try to shoot your transport?"

"He could," I said. "I don't think he will. If he shoots my transport, he's going to answer to some angry Marines."

"Does he know that?" Ava asked.

"He'd better."

After my shower, I dressed and went to the mess. We had hundreds of MREs stowed by now, but we would save those meals. I brought back a tray covered with food-two steaks, two bowls of soup, two potatoes, and an oversized salad.

Ava mostly ate salad and picked at a potato. I ended up eating both steaks, which was just fine.

After dinner, I dropped off my dishes and went to the officers' club to grab some bottles of beer. Ava preferred wine to beer, but she would need to make do. No one paid attention to off-duty officers walking around with a beer, but a bottle of wine would attract all kinds of notice. So far no one had asked me if I had a Hollywood starlet hidden in my quarters, and I wanted to keep it that way.

I stepped through the door. Silence. Always aware of her precarious situation, Ava never called out my name when I came back. She waited for me to identify myself, then came out of her hiding places-usually the shower.