The Clone Sedition

by Steven L. Kent

  This ship had missiles and particle-beam cannons and torpedoes and fighters and thousands of trained fighting men. On this one ship, we had more firepower than the New Olympians and the conquered people of Earth combined; and the Churchill was only one of the sixty-three fighter carriers in our fleet. Cutter had more than five hundred ships under his command.

  I had no doubt that Cutter saw the same thing I saw, that the New Olympians posed no threat to the Enlisted Man’s Empire.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-ONE

  NAME: CALL, MATTHEW C

  RANK: FIRST LIEUTENANT

  SERIAL NUMBER: CM768-74-951

  AGE: 27 RAISED IN ORPHANAGE #351

  CLASSIFICATION: CLONE (Standard Make)

  STATUS: KILLED IN ACTION Death by propafenone poisoning.

  Call’s personnel file had hundreds of bits of information, but those first six fields said it all. He was a clone, he’d risen to lieutenant, and he died from a death reflex. Watson ignored the photos, the metals, the requisite blood type, hair color, skin color, and eye color. Once you classified Call as a clone, the physical description became irrelevant.

  Watson skipped the findings from the autopsy and read ahead in the file.

  Like every sailor, soldier, and Marine in the Enlisted Man’s Military, Call had seen action. He’d fought aliens on St. Augustine. He’d participated in the evacuations of St. Augustine and Gobi. When the Enlisted Man’s Empire invaded Earth, Call had taken part in the first wave of the invasion.

  Like most clone servicemen, Call had a clean record. He’d never been arrested.

  “Looks like you were a model citizen,” Watson observed.

  Before joining Tarawa, the recently reinstated Second Regiment of the Second Division, Call had been stationed at the Mountain Warfare Training Facility, a base located on the West Coast of the former United States. His Military Occupational Specialty was infantry.

  On January 9, 2519, Lt. Call was attacked by three civilian men while on leave in Los Angeles. He killed one of the men, the other two escaped. The bodies of men fitting their descriptions were later found dead in an apartment. They had committed suicide.

  Both the local and military police investigated the crime. Both determined that Call’s actions were in self-defense.

  “You were a target on the Night of the Martyrs,” said Watson. He laughed, and said, “You and Harris, two homicidal peas in a psychopathic pod.”

  Don Cutter’s voice came from the console. “Watson, you there?”

  “Speaking,” said Watson.

  “Speaking…sir,” said Cutter. He continued, “Your old boss is back from the dead. We just had a long chat about Mars.”

  “What did he say?” asked Watson.

  “I’m not going to answer that?”

  “Classified information?”

  “No. Not at all. If what he told me is true, there’s nothing worth classifying,” Cutter said, sounding neither irritated nor sarcastic.

  He said, “I have a job for you, Watson. Have you ever met Colonel Curtis Jackson?”

  “The commanding officer?” asked Watson

  “The commanding officer of Second Regiment,” Cutter said.

  Watson frowned as he realized that he liked working for the brainwashed Marine more than the admiral with the stick up his ass.

  “I want you to debrief Jackson,” said Cutter.

  “How do I debrief him?” Watson asked. He was not familiar with the term.

  “By asking him what happened,” Cutter answered, irritation obvious in his voice. “Debrief, interview, interrogate, ask…Look, just get me a feed of him telling you what happened on Mars. I want to compare his story to the one Harris told me. I want to see how they match up.”

  Watson went to the Marine compound and asked for Jackson. He was taken to an office near the barracks, where he sat and waited. Outside the window, the compound bustled with life. Marines jogged past in packs. Lines of men exercised.

  A clone walked into the office. Watson knew him by his name tag and by the eagle on his collar. He reached out an arm to shake the clone’s hand as he said, “Colonel Jackson, I’m Travis Watson. Admiral Cutter sent me to debrief you about Mars.”

  Jackson shook his hand. Still gripping Watson’s hand, he said, “I thought you worked for General Harris.”

  “The admiral transferred me to his staff while you were on Mars,” Watson said as he returned to his seat.

  Jackson’s normally intense expression split into a smile, and he laughed long and loud. He said, “Isn’t that rich? I always hear about wives running off while their husbands are on missions. This is the first time I heard about an unfaithful staff member doing it.” He sat down in the seat next to Watson’s. “How did Harris take the news?”

  “He keeps calling me ‘Mr. Navy Man.’”

  “‘Mr. Navy Man,’” Jackson repeated. “You know, there’s a lot of bad blood between the Marines and the Navy.”

  “To hear Harris tell the story, there’s bad blood between everyone and the Navy,” said Watson.

  Jackson grinned and nodded. He liked that. He said, “I guess that’s true. The Army and the Air Force don’t have much use for swabbies.” He thought it over for a moment, and added, “As Navy brass go, Cutter’s better than most.”

  Watson placed his computing tablet on the desk, angling it so the pinhole-sized camera pointed toward Jackson. It was a wasted effort. The camera had a 360-degree fish-eye view of the room, and it turned everything it saw into blurry distorted data that the tablet’s processor interpolated and set right.

  Watson had never used the video-feed function on this particular tablet, but the application and equipment were nearly ubiquitous in twenty-sixth-century technology. He said, “Tell me what happened on Mars.”

  “What happened on Mars? That’s a tall order, isn’t it? A lot of things happened.”

  Watson leaned back in his chair, and said, “Start at the beginning.”

  Jackson drew a deep breath through his nose, held it in his lungs for several seconds, then exhaled. His eyes opened wide for a moment, then narrowed as he considered what to say. A man in his late forties, he had scattered white strands in his bristly regulation-cut brown hair. He sat with his back perfectly erect and placed his hands on his knees.

  “We landed. We marched around a bit, and then we went to visit the speck who was supposed to be in charge.”

  “You mean Governor Hughes?”

  “Yeah, Hughes. He was supposed to be in charge, but he wasn’t. The bastard was just another grasshopper hopping around the anthill.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Watson.

  “What do you think it means? Grasshoppers are bigger than ants, aren’t they? If an ant and a grasshopper scuffle, the grasshopper wins because it’s a hundred times bigger than the ant. The grasshopper can crush it, bite it in half, or stomp the little bastard into the dirt, no problem. But, see, there’s no such thing as one solitary ant in nature, am I right?”

  “I’ve seen scouts,” said Watson.

  “Me, too; and there’s always another one a few inches away. Maybe that grasshopper sees the second scout and stamps the little bastard out as well; but that doesn’t make him king of the anthill because there’s another scout after that and another one after that until you get all the way to the anthill, and there’s a whole sea of ants waiting inside that hill. There’s a flood of ants, just waiting there, under the surface…ready to erupt from that hill.”

  “And Hughes is the grasshopper?”

  “He knows he’s not in control.”

  “What about the Martian Legion?” Watson asked.

  “History. Gone. We butchered the bastards.”

  Watson watched the colonel speak, fascinated by his individuality. Jackson had the same face as a million other clones, but his expressions, his posture, and the way he spoke made him unique. He spoke slowly in clipped sentences, as if he had just woken up.

  As far as Watson knew, no c
lone had ever attended college, but the ones in the Pentagon seemed educated. Harris was well-read. He talked about philosophy and history. Cutter’s interests were not as wide, but he had good diction. Jackson did not. He didn’t swear much, less than Harris, but his vocabulary was limited, and he did not strike Watson as particularly bright.

  Jackson launched into how the Legion had tried to attack the regiment that first night. He said, “They should’a come straight at us then. There were five thousand of them against a lone regiment. We were fish in a barrel. No place to run. No place to hide. Shot beats bullets at close range.

  “You heard what they did instead?”

  “The chlorine gas?” asked Watson.

  “Yeah. Chlorine, right. We neutralized it while it was still in the vents, then Harris went out after them.”

  “What happened after he left? I heard he lost contact with you.”

  “For a minute or two. They blocked our signal.”

  “How did they do that?”

  “Speck, easiest thing in the world. They call it ‘sludging.’ You jam the airwaves with a strong signal that drowns everything else out. The interLink isn’t an easy signal to block, but I’ve seen it happen. They sludge the airways and they off their own transmissions, too. I guess they didn’t have anyone they needed to contact.”

  Watson said, “They could have warned their partners in the Air Force base.”

  “If they knew Harris was coming.”

  “How did you get your signal back?”

  That seemed to confuse Jackson. He shrugged, and said, “We got it back.”

  “That was when Harris ordered you to go to the Air Force base?”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “How did you get there?”

  “We flew in transports.”

  Watson nodded, and said, “Let me make sure I have the details in the correct order. You landed on Thursday.”

  “Late Thursday,” Jackson corrected.

  “You marched to Governor Hughes’s office.”

  “Yeah, what a waste of time that was.”

  “Then you stopped for the night.”

  “Something like that. We bivouacked in an abandoned food court…Course we had to convince the locals to abandon it.”

  “Later that night, the New Olympians attacked…”

  “And Harris followed them out. He contacted us from the Air Force base, and we followed him out.”

  “And all of that took place on Friday?”

  “I suppose so, I lost track of time. The whole mission flew by. We spent some time searching the base, then we had a firefight with the Martian Legion, next thing I knew, we’d landed on the Churchill, and we’d been gone for a week.”

  Watson asked, “Did you sleep while you were exploring the Air Force base?”

  “Damn well right we slept. We hot bunked—eight hours of duty, eight hours R&R, not that there was much recreation to be had, eight hours sleep.”

  “How many rest periods did you have?”

  “I don’t remember. They all blur together, don’t they?”

  “I suppose,” said Watson, though Jackson’s spotty memory had raised some suspicions. “Do you think we should move the New Olympians to Earth?”

  Jackson said, “That’s Harris’s story.”

  “But you don’t agree?”

  “We took their shotguns. They don’t have guns as far as I can tell. I suppose that makes them peaceful.”

  “But…?” Watson prompted.

  “We took away their shotguns; that doesn’t mean we took away their fight. That’s not the same thing.”

  “So you don’t believe we should relocate the New Olympians to Earth?” Watson asked, genuinely interested in Jackson’s response.

  “I don’t get paid to think. I’m a Marine. I get paid to kill people and break things. My opinion doesn’t matter.”

  “Do you have an opinion?”

  “About bringing the New Olympians to Earth?”

  Watson nodded.

  “I don’t trust them.”

  “I see,” said Watson. They talked for fifteen minutes longer with no substantive results. Realizing that he was spinning his wheels, Watson turned off the camera in his tablet. Now that the interview had ended, he asked as an aside, “Did you ever know a Lieutenant Matthew Call?”

  “The name sounds familiar. How do I know him?”

  “He was one of the men that died during the fighting at the Air Force base.”

  “One of the lucky fifty,” said Jackson.

  “Not so lucky,” said Watson. “It wasn’t just Mars. The poor guy was attacked on the Night of the Martyrs.”

  “Another member of the club,” said Jackson.

  “What do you mean?” Watson asked, though he thought he knew. He thought Jackson was referring to Harris.

  “I didn’t know Call, but I guess he’s number six,” said Jackson. “I got three majors in this regiment. All three of them were attacked. I contributed a few martyrs myself that night. Then there’s Harris. I guess you already knew the bastards attacked him in Seattle.”

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-TWO

  Watson returned to his quarters and the personnel files. Instead of sitting at the desk, he kicked back on his bed, tipped off his shoes, and rested his head on a pillow. He looked at personnel files.

  NAME: JACKSON, CURTIS C

  RANK: COLONEL (Commander Second Division, Second Regiment)

  SERIAL NUMBER: FM721-65-039

  AGE: 42 RAISED IN ORPHANAGE #018

  CLASSIFICATION: CLONE (Standard Make)

  STATUS: ACTIVE DUTY

  The man had seen action. Back when the clones were still part of the Unified Authority, Jackson fought against Mogats on Hubble and aliens on New Copenhagen. When the Unified Authority sent clones to recapture lost planets, he’d been one of the Marines who’d gone to liberate Providence Kri. After the rise of the Enlisted Man’s Empire, Jackson saw action on Bangalore and Earth.

  Of the Night of the Martyrs his file said:

  On January 9, 2519, Colonel Jackson was attacked by three civilian men in Los Angeles. He killed two of the men, the other escaped. A man fitting Jackson’s description of his attacker was found dead by hanging two days later. After an investigation, the Los Angeles coroner office pronounced the hanging a suicide.

  Local and military police determined Jackson’s actions were in self-defense.

  He looked through Second Regiment’s line of command and found the three majors. As Jackson had said, all three had been attacked on the night of January 9. Picking the names of Second Regiment Marines at random, Watson worked his way down to the privates. Every man had been attacked on the Night of the Martyrs.

  Watson tried to call Cutter, but an aide took the call. Watson said, “I need to speak to the admiral.”

  “He’s busy,” said the aide. “Can I take a message?”

  “It’s urgent,” said Watson.

  “Then you’d better leave your message quickly,” said the aide.

  Watson hung up on him.

  Since boarding the Churchill, Watson had sensed discrimination at every turn. The sailors saw the ship as their domain and made no attempt to hide the disrespect they felt for their natural-born passenger.

  Not deterred by an officer he considered little more than a receptionist, Watson walked to Cutter’s office. The same aide met him at the door. Watson recognized the name and the attitude.

  He said, “I told you, the admiral is busy.”

  Watson said, “Fair enough. Please tell the admiral that there is a bomb on the ship.” He turned around and walked out.

  The aide, a lieutenant, followed him out the door saying, “Excuse me. Excuse me! Excuse me!”

  Watson stopped but did not say anything.

  “Did you say a bomb?”

  Bureaucratic prick, Watson thought as he kept walking past the man.

  The lieutenant ran ahead and stepped in Watson’s path. He repeated, “You said there is
a bomb?”

  “Yes. You might inform the admiral when his schedule is clear?”

  “Where is it?” demanded the aide. “I’ll send security.”

  Watson did not break stride, and the aide, a much shorter man, had to run to keep pace with him. Funny little man, thought Watson. Like a yelping lapdog. He wondered if other naval officers were cut from the same cloth.

  “Wait.”

  Watson walked to the elevator and stopped.

  “Is it armed?” asked the aide.

  Watson said, “Armed, primed, and ready to explode.”

  “Come with me,” said the lieutenant.

  “Admiral Cutter can contact me when he has time to speak…assuming it’s not too late.”

  The aide spoke into his communicator. He said, “Admiral, that civilian wants to see you. He said something about…”

  Cutter said, “Lieutenant, I hope you haven’t kept Watson waiting.”

  A look of desperation spreading across his face, the aide looked at Watson, and said, “Sir, you…You said you did not want to be disturbed.”

  “Lieutenant, please show Mr. Watson in.” That was all he said, but the chill in his voice presented other implications.

  The lieutenant led Watson to Admiral Cutter’s door and left without a word. Watson knocked on the door.

  “That you, Watson? Come on in.”

  Admiral Cutter sat at his desk holding a heavily creamed cup of coffee. He said, “You find something good?” and drank half the cup.

  Watson asked, “Do you know how they selected the men in the Second Regiment?” He sat in one of the chairs beside the admiral’s desk.

  Cutter laughed, and said, “How the hell would I know that? That’s Marine business. Ask Harris.”

  “Do you know anything about the regiment?”

  “I work with fleets, not regiments.” He sat back in his seat, laced his fingers, sat deep in thought. After a few seconds, he leaned forward and typed something on the keyboard built into his desk. He looked at the screen, and said, “It’s a newly formed regiment.”

  “How new?” asked Watson.

  “Formed last month.”

  “Was Harris the one who formed it? Did he select the men?”