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Two medics received that stretcher. They detached the cord from the stretcher and pulled the woman into the back of their ambulance. In less than one minute, they loaded her, sealed up their rig, and sped away into the darkness. Another ambulance immediately filled the vacancy.

    The rescue workers found seventy-six people in that one area—sixty-two were alive. Tommy and Eddie were alive. As the explosions had come closer, they had crawled under a table and made it out virtually untouched. Tommy had a badly broken jaw. Eddie’s knee was shattered. Both of those injuries were my doing. The explosion barely scratched them.
    I was glad Jimmy Callahan’s boys were alive. Callahan was going to need all the help he could get. He had some powerful enemies. Considering the devastation that I had just seen, I doubted that “Silent”
    Tommy and “Limping” Eddie could protect Callahan from much of anything.
CHAPTER FOUR
    How to describe Ray Freeman?
    Freeman stood over seven feet tall. When he walked through a crowd, other men came up to his chest. His hands were so large that he could bury your face in his palm and plug your ears with his thumb and little finger.
    Every inch of him was sinew . . . no gawky limbs on Freeman. He had a large head, heavily muscled arms, and shoulders so wide that he had to move sideways through narrow doors. His body was hard and cylindrical, his waist being nearly as wide as his chest, and all of it muscle. In the galactic melting pot of the frontier, race meant nothing. Terms like African, Caucasian, and Oriental were obsolete. The population was so intermarried that the physical characteristics could no longer be matched to specific races. In the cosmopolitan collective of the territories, Ray Freeman stood out. He was a black man, a man of African descent born centuries after that Earth continent had been turned into the galaxy’s most prestigious zoological exhibit.
    Freeman’s skin was such a dark shade of brown that it almost looked charcoal. Looking into Ray Freeman’s far-set eyes was like staring down the muzzle of a double-barreled shotgun. Utterly ruthless, he was the most intimidating man in the galaxy. He was my partner.
    Two years earlier, when I limped out of the ambush on Ravenwood Station barely alive, Ray Freeman rescued me. He placed my helmet beside the remains of Corporal Arlind Marsten, staging my death, then carried me out of Ravenwood. Instead of wearing dog tags, U.A. Marines wore helmets with virtual identifiers. Placing my helmet next to Marsten’s remains was tantamount to changing our identities. Since we were both clones, no one would think of checking our DNA.
    Now Freeman and I were in business together, freelance bounty hunters.
    “I hear there was some action on New Columbia,” Freeman said.
    “Yeah,” I said. “I was in the middle of it. You seeing much?” He was on Providence, an evacuated planet in the Cygnus Arm—one of the renegade arms. We were speaking over the mediaLink. He was using a communications console with a camera so I could see him.
    “Have a look,” Freeman said, and then he stepped away from the camera to give me a panoramic view of downtown Jasper, the capital city of Providence. The streets were completely empty. The only cars were parked along the curb. No children playing. No pedestrians. Everyone had fled the city.
    “What time is it over there?” I asked.
    “Nighttime,” Freeman said. Providence was indeed dark, but the streets were lit.
    “Do the streetlights turn on automatically?” I asked.
    “Yes.” That was my partner, a man of few syllables.
    “So is anybody left in the city?” I asked.
    “Looters,” he said. “Even the guerillas are gone.”
    The people leading the Cygnus Arm had declared independence without considering the consequences. They had no Navy of their own. The U.A. Navy had two fleets patrolling their space and the Cygnus Arm military complex had no way of fighting those U.A. ships. When one of