The Clone Sedition

by Steven L. Kent

  His eyelids were swollen, squeezing his eyes in their sockets. It felt like somebody was pressing the heel of their hands against each eye. When he tried to look from side to side, dull ache filled his head.

  His nose was broken as well. Because he couldn’t breathe through his nose, he gulped air through his mouth, which meant he had to keep his mouth open so that his jaw would not move.

  Those aches and pains and injuries had come from a beating. The cramps and bruises and charley horses below his neck had come afterward. His spine and pelvis hurt from lying on a cold, hard floor. It was a morning-after kind of ache, the kind of persistent throb that came with a hangover.

  In other situations, that soreness would have consumed him; but Watson had no idea where he was. He did not know if he was a patient or a prisoner.

  He sat up and tried to massage the knots out of his shoulders. He rolled his head to the left and felt a sharp stab of pain. He rolled his shoulder to the right and felt a similar stab. He moaned, but he did not give in. Flexing and swiveling his shoulders, he got the blood to return to his arms, bringing with it the feeling of a million microscopic needles pricking his skin. The sensation burned in the beginning, but that burn soon felt pleasant.

  Watson’s eyes had already adjusted to the dim environment. His vision was poor, but he understood the shapes around him. He had been placed in a bathroom. A toilet poked out of the wall beside his head. Not far from the toilet, a paper dispenser hung on the wall.

  It was a small bathroom, not the communal latrines Watson had seen in the moments before he was attacked. He did not know where he was, but he suspected he was no longer in the barracks.

  When he moved his mouth to yell for help, pain filled his head and silenced him. It barreled around his skull like a train through a tunnel. Bright spots appeared before his eyes, distorting his vision. He kicked in a spasm and banged his shin hard against the toilet, but he barely noticed. The pain in his skull overshadowed the sting in his shin.

  Blinded by the synapses in his head, Watson reached his right arm out and groped the wall for balance. His eyes closed against the pain, he stuck his hand into the toilet without hearing the water splash or feeling the wet. His hand slipped on the slick surface, and he slid.

  Trying to balance himself, he kicked a stall door, which slammed into a wall, creating a thunderlike racket reverberating through the empty bathroom.

  A door opened on the far side of the bathroom.

  First a female voice. “He must be awake.”

  A cheerful male voice followed. “Lazarus come forth.” Then the man saw Watson lying face-first on the ground with his hand stuck in the toilet. He said, “Shit, that’s embarrassing.”

  “Shut up, Dempsey,” said the female voice.

  The man reached a hand under one of Watson’s arms and helped him to his feet, then steadied him as he started to lose his balance.

  “I’ll tell you what, son, I don’t know whether you’re the luckiest man I ever met or the unluckiest.” The man seemed to find humor in Watson’s suffering, but he did not sound unkind.

  Watson recognized the name. Dempsey was one of Gordon Hughes’s bodyguards. He also recognized the girl’s voice. She was Hughes’s granddaughter, Emily.

  He started to ask Emily where he was, but the movement pinched a nerve in his broken jaw. The pain shot through him, and his legs gave way.

  Dempsey caught him by the arm. He said, “We don’t have many of these, and you’re going to need them for the trip, but now might be a good time to use one.” He opened an envelope and pulled out a paper patch about the size of a postage stamp. One side of the patch was smooth, the other covered with millimeter-long needles.

  Dempsey pressed the side with the needles into Watson’s neck. The effect was nearly instantaneous, a mind-clearing, pain-reducing burst of energy.

  Emily said, “Your jaw is broken.”

  “He’s probably figured that out by now,” said Dempsey.

  Emily touched his shoulder gently, and added, “Your nose is broken. So are some of your ribs.”

  “If they hit your right nut any harder, it might have shot out of your nose,” Dempsey joked. “That patch is going to hide the pain, but it won’t fix things. We won’t be able to fix you till we get to the base.”

  Emily shushed Dempsey, but she need not have bothered. Watson sank to his knees as his strength disappeared. Dempsey caught his left arm and eased him down, then leaned his back against a wall.

  Watson heard him speak a few words, then he faded.

  “His name is Franklin Nailor,” Gordon Hughes was saying. “You might say he’s the new Unified Authority’s chief recruiting officer on Mars. If a more satanic man has ever lived, I’ve never met him.”

  “The new Unified Authority?” Watson asked. He should not have spoken, the pain punished him for forgetting about his jaw, but hearing the term “new Unified Authority” had caught him off guard.

  “That’s what we call it around here. I’m not sure if anyone is using that name.

  “The fact is that we don’t really know who he works for, just who he used to work for,” said Hughes. “He was an Intelligence officer with the Unifieds. I assume he still is, only now that makes him a criminal.”

  Someone had moved a mattress into the bathroom while Watson lay comatose.

  Now Hughes, sitting on a nearby toilet, explained the situation.

  “You know why he let you live, don’t you? He thinks you’re working for Harris.” He paused and thought. “You know, I’d give everything I own to see what happens when Harris gets his hands on Nailor. That will be…artistic.”

  Along with the mattress, Watson found a new pain patch. As Hughes spoke, Watson applied the patch to his neck. The warmth bloomed in his neck and spread across his body.

  Knowing that the pain would return, Watson took stock of his injuries. He rolled his tongue along the inside of his jawbone and found three breaks along the contour. Each time he felt a break, an electric jolt ran the length of his spine, but the patch reduced the sting from those jolts.

  Along with the mattress and pain patch, Hughes produced a third gift that morning: an interactive notepad that he gave to Watson as a replacement for speaking. Dragging his finger like a pen over the glass surface, Watson wrote, “Where is Freeman?” He showed the question to Hughes.

  “Freeman? Ah, Freeman? To use his terminology, he is clearing the path.” Hughes, the veteran politician, knew how to work a crowd. He gave Watson three seconds to ponder the term, then explained, “Our defenses are woefully depleted. We’re down to three M27s, Freeman’s sniper rifle, and some butter knives.

  “The window of opportunity is closing around us. We are running out of bullets and food, Watson. If we don’t exit Mars Spaceport soon, we’ll never make it out.

  “Well, that is not entirely true. Nailor has offered to allow us to leave if we hand over Tasman. I bet he’d even let us hop on the next freighter to Earth. He doesn’t care about you or me or even Freeman. All he wants is Tasman…and another shot at Harris.”

  Watson wrote something on his comms pad and showed it to Hughes.

  “What does Nailor have against Harris?”

  The governor’s wispy white hair was messed and clumped, oily because he had not been able to shower for over a week. Red splotches had formed on his face and neck, but there was a charisma about him. He had a rugged chin for an old man, and the wrinkled face gave him character. Watson had to remind himself that Hughes was in his seventies.

  “Everything, I suppose. Wayson Harris brought about the downfall of the Unified Authority.

  “I don’t know when Nailor entered the spaceport. I don’t even know if he was on Mars when Harris arrived last month. He might have been here. For all we know, he could have been hiding on Mars since the Unifieds first built the spaceport.

  “All we really know is that after Harris left, Nailor showed up, then Freeman showed up; and the trouble began.”

  CHAPTER<
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  FORTY-NINE

  Emily stole into the bathroom quietly. She carried a bowl filled with warm water and a clean, soft sponge. When Watson squirmed on his mattress to see who had entered, she said, “I’m supposed to clean you.”

  Since his arms were not broken, Watson was entirely capable of cleaning himself. His mind was not broken, either. He knew that Freeman, who did not bother with other people’s hygiene, had not sent the girl. He also doubted that Gordon Hughes, who seemed to have a puritanical side, had sent her.

  Watson lay silently on the bare mattress and watched her silhouette as she moved through the near darkness. She placed the bowl on the floor and sat beside him.

  He could tell that she was a player in the same way that he had always been a player. She was pretty, but in his current state, Watson had no interest in playing.

  He heard her dipping the sponge, but she had moved into one of his blind spots. He could not see what she was doing. He heard the splash of excess water as she wrung it out. She moved in front of him, and he watched her silhouette. He saw her lean over him, felt the gentle touch, the warm sponge on his cheek.

  He started to say something. She said, “Shhhh,” and touched her finger to his lips so gently that it soothed him. She stroked the sponge along the length of his forehead, then dabbed it so softly along his jaw that he only felt the warmth.

  She held a new pain patch, which she gently applied just below his ear. The medicine spread across his body quickly. She washed him more, and the warm water helped him relax.

  She unbuttoned his shirt and cleaned his chest. Even though she tried to be careful, he drew in a sharp breath when she touched the bruises just below his heart. She cleaned his chest and worked her way down to his stomach; but he stopped her hand before she could go lower. Even with the new patch, intimacy was an impossibility.

  He pulled her down and she lay on the mattress beside him, and that was how they fell asleep.

  They were still asleep when Gordon Hughes walked into the bathroom the next morning, and shouted, “Oh good Lord. Get your hands off my granddaughter.”

  CHAPTER

  FIFTY

  They were not only leaving the administrative complex; they were leaving the spaceport. Freeman said that the safest place on Mars would be the Air Force base. Once there, they might even be able to signal Cutter for help.

  Hughes thought that meant they would have open radio contact with Cutter and his ships. Though Freeman privately told Watson the entire planet was sludged, he allowed Hughes and the others to believe differently.

  To get to the base, they would need to cross the spaceport and enter the train station.

  Under normal circumstances, a party of thirty people would not be easy to follow in the overcrowded environment of the spaceport, but Freeman said that Nailor had sent clones and allies to watch in case they tried to escape. Here, though, the sludging worked against Nailor and Riley. The sludging left their men cut off.

  Freeman “neutralized the threat,” then returned and said it was time to leave.

  Freeman separated the people into smaller groups. He was the first to go. Dressed in combat armor that did nothing to hide his size, he left the administration building and vanished into the shadows, where he waited for the next group—Liston, Dempsey, and Sharkey, carrying Howard Tasman on a stretcher, draped in a blanket, as if he were a corpse headed for disposal. With seventeen million people living in squalor, death was common enough in the spaceport that no one would ask questions. Freeman, tracking them from the shadows, would eliminate anyone who did.

  After warning Watson not to touch his granddaughter, Gordon Hughes left with his three sons. He wore a hat that covered much of his face.

  The Hughes wives and grandchildren left as a group. The women looked grave, the kids excited. They blended into the sea of people and disappeared.

  Watson and Emily Hughes were the last to leave. Like Gordon Hughes, Watson wore a large hat that covered his face in shadow. Hughes wore the hat because he was easily recognized. Watson wore it to hide the bruises and cuts on his face.

  The various groups took different routes. Watson and Emily would travel through the heart of the grand arcade.

  Following Freeman’s instructions, Watson kept an arm around Emily to make sure they were not separated. If they lost each other in the overcrowded spaceport hub, it might take them an hour to find each other again.

  Instead of skirting around the crowds, they pushed upstream. Watson normally avoided crowded areas, but Freeman had told them they would be safer surrounded by people. Freeman instructed them to enter the grand arcade, climb the stairs, and cross on the second floor, claiming they would be harder to follow if they left the main floor.

  Hunched over Emily the way that he was, Watson did not look especially tall. Standing together in their dirty clothes, passing through the crowd, they blended in just as Freeman had predicted.

  People pushed and shoved against Watson. An elbow struck one of his broken ribs, sending a wave of pain through his body, but he had two epidural patches stuck to his neck, and the medicine kept him going.

  Emily seldom spoke as they walked. Acting as Watson’s crutch, she carried some of his weight.

  Emily whispered, “I’m scared,” but Watson did not hear her. Realizing that her voice had been drowned out, she repeated herself, nearly yelling to be heard above the din. “I’m scared.”

  Watson responded by tightening the arm he had around her waist, pulling her into him. He did not speak.

  People whirled past them like leaves in a strong wind.

  Watson stood straighter so he could see up ahead. In the dim of the simulated evening and with his battered eyes, he had trouble recognizing the arcade’s features. He knew they would soon turn down a hall, but he could not see the hallway. He searched for clones. He searched for Nailor.

  Families on blankets lined walls. Watson saw the hall they needed to enter. He saw the stairs that would take them back to the main floor. People camped on the stairs. Kids sat along the walls. A steady stream of people walked up and down the stairs. Watson patted Emily’s shoulder as he led her down a set of stairs. They turned and entered the hall that led away from the arcade.

  After the hundred-foot ceiling of the grand arcade, the hall looked small and tight and dark. Its twenty-foot ceiling seemed dangerously low to Watson, as if it might crush them. He knew it was a trick of the shadows, but he could not shake the claustrophobic feeling.

  “Shit!” said Emily.

  “What?” Watson mumbled through clenched teeth.

  “Three clones.”

  “Clones? Are they wearing white armor?” he asked, though he knew they had to be dressed in the white armor of Spaceport Security. Harris was a hundred million miles away. The only clones left on Mars were Spaceport Security.

  They continued walking forward, pushing through the crowd. Watson tightened his arm around the girl, not wanting to lose her as he accelerated his pace.

  Emily needed to jog to keep up with him.

  He said, “Don’t run.”

  She said, “It’s the only way I can keep up with you.”

  Knowing that the door to the train station could not be more than forty or fifty yards away, Watson slowed, and asked her, “Where are they?” He did not want to fight. If it came to a fight, he would be helpless.

  “We just walked past them.”

  “Did they see us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Watson slowed to a stop.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  “I need to see if they’re following us.” Still hunched over, hoping he was camouflaged by the horde around him, Watson peered over the top of the crowd. Men and women pushed past him. Now that they had slowed, people tried to shove them out of the way.

  “We need to move. We can’t stay here. We need to get to the train,” Emily said.

  “We’ll never make it…if…they…” He saw them, three clones wading int
o the crowd, walking toward him and Emily. After seeing the catatonic state of the clones in the barracks, Watson expected them to move like robots. These men were fast and alert.

  “Damn, they saw us,” he said. He tightened his arm around Emily, and said, “Just stay with me.”

  Emily would not have been able to keep up with him if he ran, but Watson kept a protective arm around her. He walked quickly, ignoring the pain that his patches could only partially hide. He held his left arm out like a battering ram and shoved people out of the way. People complained, a few tried to push back, but mostly they cleared out of his path.

  Ignoring the urge to look back, Watson moved on. Soon they would start down the stairs that led to the train station, and he told himself that he would rest once they arrived.

  His heart pounded. He struggled for breath. His ear was close enough to Emily’s mouth to hear her wheezing, drawing in short shallow breaths.

  “We’re almost there…almost there,” he told her.

  She did not answer.

  Behind them, one of the clones fired three shots. The bullets ricocheted off the walls. People screamed, but the clones did not seem to care.

  People dived to the ground and covered their heads with their hands.

  “You, stop!” yelled one of the clones.

  Still surrounded by a throng, Watson continued to force his way toward the train station. He could hear Emily beside him, sobbing and gasping, terrified, but still staying with him.

  The clones fired more shots. Screams of panic. Screams of pain. Somebody yelled, “He’s been shot!”

  Some of the people remained on the ground, whimpering in fear. Some jumped to their feet and ran for safety. Some stampeded in the same direction as Watson and Emily, toward the forbidden train station.

  The clones fired into the crowd. Watson heard the thud of bullets striking flesh. Five feet from Emily, a man yelped and collapsed. A woman screamed, grabbed her injured arm. She kept running as blood squirted from between her fingers.