Rogue clone Read Online Free PDF Page B

those fleets had entered Providence’s solar system, the only thing the Cygnus government could do was assemble an armada of unarmed commercial spacecraft or evacuate the planet.
    “Is it safe for you to be on New Columbia?” Freeman asked.
    “I don’t know,” I said. “Is it safe for you to be on Providence?”
    “No one knows I’m here,” Freeman said. The question he left hanging was, “Was that bombing aimed at you?”
    “Fair enough,” I admitted. “My flight leaves in a couple of hours. Maybe you should do the same . . . get out of Jasper before the troops arrive.”
    Freeman responded with his “get real” glare—a deadpan expression, a slight narrowing of the eyes, and a barely perceptible shrug of the shoulders.
    “I met a guy who says he can find Crowley,” I said.
    “I’m listening,” Freeman said. His voice was so quiet and filled with base tones that you almost felt it as much as heard it. It was the sound of distant thunder or cannons firing a half-mile away.
    “Guy’s name is Jimmy Callahan. He’s a local who bags supplies and runs deals for the Mogats,” I said.
    “Did he say that before or after the bombs went off?” Freeman asked.
    “About the same time,” I said. “Callahan and I were negotiating.”
    “Do you think the bombs were aimed at you?” Freeman asked, not so much as a speck of concern in his voice.
    “At him,” I said. “It was Billy the Butcher, one of Callahan’s clients.”
    “Where is Callahan now?” Freeman asked. “We need to put him someplace safe and sit on him.”
    “He’s in the brig at Fort Washington along with two of his bodyguards.” In my mind I added, for whatever good that does him . Fort Washington was the local Marine base. Safe Harbor was a well-fortified city. The Marines, Army, and Air Force all had bases there.
    “You stashed him in the Marine base?” Freeman asked.
    “Admiral Klyber sent for me. I figure the Marines can keep him till I can come back.”
    Freeman and I were partners, but we came to the business from different angles. I worked as an errand boy, mostly for Fleet Admiral Bryce Klyber, the highest-ranking man in the Navy and my personal benefactor. Freeman was more of the lone wolf type. As far as I could tell, he had no connection to anybody.
    Freeman’s camera shook as a bomb or a shell exploded somewhere near him. “I’d better go,” he said.
    “That might be the people I came to see.”

    I had already stayed too long in Safe Harbor, not that anybody was looking for me. Having skeletons like the ones I had hiding in my closet meant that you could never settle down. For openers, I was absent without leave from the Marine Corps. Well, thanks to Freeman I had supposedly died in battle, but if the Marine Corps knew I was alive, they would list me as absent without leave. And I had even more damning skeletons than that.
    I drove my rental car to the commercial spaceport, a sprawling complex that was one part runway, one part passenger terminal, and two parts parking lot. Just finding the building to return the rental took half an hour. The search ended on a ten-story spiral rampway in which each floor was occupied by a different car rental agency.
    An attendant pointed me toward a lane filled with a line of parked cars. There would be no paperwork. The car registered its own return, measured its fuel level, reported its own condition, and then issued an electronic receipt to Arlind Marsten, the “missing in action” Marine Corporal who received my helmet on Ravenwood. The police should have arrested Marsten or me when I returned the car, but friends in high places had already made certain that would not happen.
    Since Marsten and I were both clones and one clone is supposedly indistinguishable from the next, the personal identifiers in our helmets were the only way the military could tell us apart. That was the theory. In truth, I was not identical to Marsten. He and I came from different batches. My form of