Rogue Clone

by Steven L. Kent

  “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 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 clone, the Liberators, had a dark history. Most people believed that the Senate had outlawed my kind. It wasn’t true, by the way. They only banned us from entering the Orion Arm—the arm I was currently in.

  I was a one-of-a-kind clone, an oxymoronic descriptor if ever there was one. By the time I dropped off the assembly line, my kind had been out of production for nearly thirty years because of our violent tendencies. I did not want to advertise this to the good people of New Columbia.

  Prosperous and located in the all-important Orion Arm, New Columbia attracted tourists and businesses from around the galaxy. Its spaceport was the size of a small town with ten times the population. Police and military guards kept the tides of people flowing efficiently enough.

  If they only knew what kind of shark had swum in with their minnows. I passed the queue for baggage. During my years in the military I learned to live light and travel lighter. I spent four days in Safe Harbor, two more days than I expected. Everything I brought fit in a small briefcase that I could carry on my lap.

  From New Columbia I would fly to Mars, the galaxy’s biggest spaceport. Once on Mars, I would either receive my next assignment or I would find a hotel room and rest until my next job arrived—I didn’t care which.

  Assignments meant money, but it also meant fighting for the good old Unified Authority. I didn’t really mind having bombs explode around me. Even when an assignment meant risking my life to save a worthless punk like Jimmy Callahan, I preferred it to lounging around some hotel. I could not help myself, it was in my neural programming.

  I enjoyed the study of philosophy, politics, and intergalactic relations, but only as they applied to combat. I was designed for battle, and a soldier was all I could be. I was screwed.

  I went to the gate to wait for my flight, which would leave in another three hours. I cherished short breaks like this. It was the long ones that drove me crazy.

  I put on my mediaLink shades, streamline glasses with retinal displays built into their hinges. Lasers painted images on my retinal tissue, opening a world of books, magazines, and video feeds. I could play games, watch movies, write letters, or catch up on the news. On this particular day, I decided to read.

  My favorite reading was ethical philosophy. At the time, I was reading The Complete Works of Spinoza. Spinoza argued that men could not feel love, desire, or passion without already having a germ of that emotion within them. It was an interesting concept that was especially true of military clones. Our loyalty was programmed into us. We loved the government that made us. Even when we realized that the government hated our kind, we still loved it. Even when we hated the government back, we remained loyal.

  Clones were also programmed to think they were natural-born. Your average soldier clone did not know he was cloned and programmed to love nothing but their country. They just thought of themselves as patriotic citizens.

  Was Spinoza so depressing, or was it just my overapplied interpretation of his work? I looked around the gate. This particular flight was a business flight. Men in suits sat scanning the mediaLink or writing memos. Women in suits did the same. A young mother tried to busy two small children by reading to them. I had no love, desire, or passion for any of these people. They were natural-born, I was synthetic . . . a rare synthetic. I was a clone who knew he was a clone. My model was designed before the Senate added a death-reflex to its military clones to prevent them from rebelling against their makers.
When other clones learned they were clones, a gland in their brain killed them. When I learned I was a clone, I went to a bar and got drunk.

  If Spinoza was right, perhaps I felt no love or passion for humanity because the germ did not exist in me. Perhaps the germ of love required a soul. Most religions stated that clones do not have souls. Perhaps I proved them right.

  The Unified Authority was right to build neural programming and the death reflex into its clones. Judging by my example, once clones knew they were apart from humanity, they closed themselves off to it.

  As I said before, I was a one of a kind clone. The rest of my kind were created at a time when the Republic was under siege. The Galactic Central Fleet, an armada of warships, had vanished. As a last resort, the military created battalions of Liberator clones and sent them to the Galactic Eye to kill whatever unknown enemy was there.

  The battle ended quickly. The problem was that having created a living, breathing super weapon, the Unified Authority did not know what to do with it. When the generals sent Liberators to settle smaller battles and domestic problems, they did not like the results.

  Liberators were sent to stop a riot on Albatross Island, a penal planet in the Perseus Arm. The Liberators killed the prisoners and then turned on the guards and the hostages. With the exception of a few prison workers, the Liberators killed everyone on the planet.

  In the end, Congress banned Liberator clones from the Orion Belt and let attrition thin them out. I stepped off the assembly line in 2490. By that time only four Liberators still existed. Three were wild and bloodthirsty, caring only about their own survival. One was religious and completely loyal to his U.A. creators. He was my mentor. To this day, I do not know whether to admire or despise him.

  I feel them all inside of me, struggling for control of my emotions. When I close my eyes at night, I sometimes think I can hear the ghost of Sergeant Tabor Shannon, a Marine who happily gave his life for the Republic. When I pass through great crowds, I feel isolated and I imagine Sergeant Booth Lector sneering at everyone around him. Both men were Liberators. Both died in battle.

  Shannon remained patriotic to the last, hoping for the best in a world that considered him an insect. Yes, I was still putting my life on the line for the Unified Authority; but as a mercenary. I could at least tell myself that my allegiance was to myself. But Lector was the only one whose allegiance was truly just to himself. He remained in the Marines because he could not figure out a way to escape the Corps.

  Looking back, I think Shannon and Lector were both full of shit.

  In the Marines, you scuttled into your transport when your sergeant yelled for you to get your ass on board. But on a civilian flight, pretty flight attendants ask the passengers to board their flights. The door to our commuter flight opened and an attendant with long dark hair welcomed us. We formed a line and quietly took our seats.

  The flight took off smoothly, rising through the sky. When we were about two hundred miles outside of New Columbia, the blue and white atmosphere ended and turned into the blackness of space. To this point, the ship traveled slowly in the climb, never moving more than two thousand miles per hour. We picked up speed and traveled another eight hundred miles to the Broadcast Network in a couple of minutes—a painfully slow pace.

  I reclined my seat and stretched out for the short ride. We were traveling 240 trillion miles to Mars. The flight would take just over an hour, and I had had enough of Spinoza and needed the rest.

  I turned my head toward the porthole beside my chair and watched the tint shields form over the glass, dimming out stars and planets under a blanket of inky blackness. We would soon reach the Broadcast Network. I could not see the discs through the shields, but I knew what was coming.

  A thousand miles outside of Safe Harbor, our spacejet slowed to a crawl as it approached the two gigantic elliptical discs that formed the New Columbian sector’s broadcast station. The discs were approximately one mile across and reflected everything around them like giant mirrors. Many things happened over the next few moments. A silver-red security laser, able to X-ray a ship, its contents, and its passengers, searched the spacejet for criminals and contraband. Once the U.A. Port Authority completed its search, the galaxy’s largest super computer sequenced our travel to make sure no other ships would enter our travel space.

  The spacejet did not enter the discs. As it approached, jagged tendrils of electricity stretched out of the glossy face of the sending disc. The blue-white lightning was so bright that I could see it through the tint shielding on the window. The air in the cabin crackled with static electricity. Had the tinting failed, the glare of the Broadcast Network’s electrical field would have blinded me. Even if I closed my eyes and placed my hands over my face, that light would blind me.

  “Prepare for broadcast,” the pilot said over the loud speaker.

  And then the first 10,000-light-year jump was over. We had traveled sixty trillion miles in less than one second. We traveled the remaining one hundred eighty trillion miles in the next few minutes—the time it took to emerge from a receiving disc and glide to the broadcast disc beside it. The transfers took approximately thirty seconds and we made four of them.

  Clearing Mars security, however, was a different story. The Unified Authority was at war and Mars was its most important port. Mars was the gateway to Earth.

  Mars Spaceport was the galaxy’s largest shopping mall. It was the hub of all space flight to and from Earth. Consequently, anybody on the planet qualified for duty-free shopping. Even the Mars port employees qualified. The jewelry stores on Mars sold more diamonds than jewelers on the next ten richest planets combined. As the advertisements said, “Serious shoppers shop on Mars.” Even people who were not planning on traveling sometimes flew to Mars for the tax breaks on gems, fine liquors, and other luxury items.

  Fluorescent light poured out of the storefronts. Pretty girls in short skirts stood just outside stores offering to mist passersby with samples of expensive perfumes. A robotic cigar store Indian turned back and forth proffering plastic cigars to all who passed. The shopping arcade I had entered stretched as far as the eye could see, and there were ten more like it.

  Nearly one million people flew in and out of Mars on any given day. The planet did not have a breathable atmosphere, just a series of domes with a city-sized spaceport and a military base that was jointly run by the Air Force and the Army.

  I did not like going to Mars. I came here because it was the most crowded spot in the galaxy, and the best jumping point for meeting Admiral Klyber. The traffic around this planet was so congested that no one paid undue attention when ships took off and headed out to space, and Klyber’s pilots could meet me here and smuggle me away without attracting attention.

  I scanned the crowd around me for known Confederates and Mogats. Having just survived a terrorist attack on New Columbia I was more cautious than ever. I also kept an eye out for people who might identify me as a Liberator—or even worse, recognize me.

  “You ready to go, Marsten?” a man asked as I passed the door of a dimly-lit bar.

  The pilot knew my real name. He also knew better than to refer to me as Wayson in public.

  “Sure,” I said, not even pausing to look back.

  The pilot walked quickly and caught up with me. Dressed in a long leather jacket and khaki pants, he wore the traditional uniform of civilian pilots. His short black hair was slicked back and a pair of dark aviator glasses poked out of his shirt pocket. He was not a civilian. He was an officer in the Navy.

  We left the shopping arcade and entered a food court. Lines of people formed in front of small restaurants. Janitors bussed tables and cleared trash bins. Loud talk echoed in the rafters of this cavernous hall with its bright lights and gleaming white floors.

  “You are the hot topic on the ship these days,” the pilot said. “Is it true?”

  “Is what true?” I asked.

  “Were you in Safe Harbor when the bombs went off?”

  �
��Where did you hear that?” I asked.

  “One of my friends heard Klyber say you were there.”

  “If Admiral Klyber says I was there, I must have been there,” I said.

  The pilot laughed. We crossed the food court and entered an unmarked door. This led us into a narrow service hall that seemed to stretch for miles. The white tile floor gleamed but the walls were unfinished plaster. Bright fluorescent fixtures provided the hall with dry luminescence.

  “So were you there when the bombs went off?”

  “Yeah, I was there. I helped dig out a few of the survivors.”

  The service hall branched off to two different sections of the Mars Spaceport. We entered from one of the bustling commercial terminals. Had we headed left, we would have entered administrative offices. We turned right and wound up in the commuter terminal. This was the area used by private pilots and large corporations. It was smaller than the commercial terminals, far less crowded, and much less flashy. Instead of a large food court, it had a coffee shop where pilots went to relax as they filled out flight reports or studied their flight plans. The general mood in the commuter terminal was quiet, like the lobby of a library.

  A couple dozen pilots stood in pockets scattered around the floor of the terminal. Most of these flyboys seemed to know each other. None of them recognized my pilot. They stole mildly curious glances. His was a new face that had stumbled into their tight-knit fraternity.

  Once we left the terminal, my pilot swapped his camouflage—the leather jacket and civilian accoutrements—for a Navy jacket. His spacecraft, however, remained camouflaged.

  We crossed the tarmac and climbed into a Johnston R-27, the kind of twelve-seater light craft favored by small corporations. The Johnston was white with dark gray trim along its wings. It had neither armor nor hidden gun arrays, the prosaic sign of a military craft. This innocuous Johnston had something far more impressive.

  “You strapped in?” the pilot asked as I fitted the last of the safety harness across my chest, a useless gesture. Any accidents in this little craft would end in death.