Rogue Clone

by Steven L. Kent

  Klyber seemed to have shrunk in death the way large spiders curl in their legs and compress when you kill them. Tall, thin, and intense, Klyber’s presence used to fill the room. Now, slumped over his desk, he looked like nothing more than a fragile old man.

  Seeing Klyber splayed over his desk, with his posture curved and his eyes so vacant, seemed almost indecent, like I was seeing him naked. Here was a man whose uniform was always pressed and whose posture was always erect. He was the epitome of the aristocratic officer. Now his cap sat upside down on the desk before him and his arms dangled to the floor. A small stream of saliva ran from the corner of his mouth. It simply wasn’t dignified—and above all else in life, Bryce Klyber had always been dignified.

  Standing in the door, the colonel watched me as I checked Klyber for a pulse. I don’t know why I bothered. I suppose I did not know what else to do. I thought about propping Klyber upright in his seat, replacing his cap, and letting him pass into history with his majesty intact, then dismissed the idea.

  As if reading my thoughts, the colonel asked, “You’re not going to leave him like that?”

  “What do you suggest I do with him?” I asked.

  “Sit him up,” the colonel said.

  “I don’t think he’s worried about appearances,” I said. I waited for the colonel to move out of my way so that I could leave the cabin. I don’t think I felt anger yet, though I knew that emotion would come. At the moment, I simply felt numb.

  “Let the dead bury the dead,” I whispered to myself as I left the room. I was a Liberator. I was Klyber’s brew. We had not been built to mourn the dead, we were programmed to avenge them.

  “What do we have here?” I heard a cheery voice through the open doorway of the engine compartment as I walked down the hall. The cabin that housed the broadcast equipment was nearly twice the size of Klyber’s small cabin. I peered in the door and saw two demolition men in black armor kneeling side by side in front of the broadcast engine.

  The broadcast engine looked like a giant replica of a box of rifle shells. The engine casing was a rectangular black box with chrome stripes. Inside the case stood eighteen brass cylinders that looked like three-foot-tall replicas of long-point bullets. A network of wires and tubes connected these cylinders.

  “Was it sabotage?” I asked.

  The two men turned back to look at me. I could see their faces through the glass in their protective masks. “So much for mystery,” one of the men said, holding up a foot-long length of perfectly clean copper cable. “I could have told them what happened the moment the ship went dark.”

  I felt a hand grasp my shoulder. “You okay, there, Harris?” the colonel asked.

  “That cable?” I asked.

  “Oh, hello, Colonel McAvoy,” the second bomb squadder said.

  “Boys,” said the colonel. “You were about to explain something to the lieutenant?”

  “This is what happens when a broadcast goes wrong,” the first guy said. “And there are too many things that can go wrong. No one in their right mind ever travels in a self-broadcasting ship.”

  I, of course, had traveled to the Golan Dry Docks in a self-broadcasting ship. The impact of the technicians’ statement had just begun to sink in when I heard, “And that, Lieutenant Harris, is how you allowed the deaths of every one on this transport.” I turned to see the chief of emergency services glaring down at me.

  “Easy, Fred,” warned the colonel.

  “If you came here to protect the admiral, you did a shitty job. This ship was sabotaged right under your specking nose, bud.” He stepped past me and took the copper cable from the bomb squad technician. Brandishing it like a newspaper at a misbehaving dog, he added, “Do you know how these people died?”

  “I heard something about cardiac arrest,” I said.

  “Cardiac malfunction caused by electrocution would be more accurate. Somebody strung a cable from inside the broadcast engine to the frame of the ship. When the pilot turned on the broadcast engine, he sent four million volts through the entire ship for one one-hundredth of a second.”

  “One one-hundredth of a second . . .” I echoed.

  “Do you understand how broadcasting works?” the tech asked. “The engine generates . . .”

  “Yes,” I said. “I know how broadcasting works.” From what I had heard, only a select few in the entire galaxy truly understood the principles that made the broadcast process work, and they were elite scientists. I doubted some lowly corpse bagger understood the theory of broadcast travel any better than I did. I knew that broadcast engines coated ships with highly-charged particles that could be translated and transferred instantaneously, and that was enough for me.

  “Yeah, well, apparently other people know how it works, too,” said Fred, the Golan Dry Docks emergency services czar. “’Cause somebody snuck on to this ship under your nose and planted this cable. The admiral died on your watch, asshole.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I did not return to the Doctrinaire. I boarded the Johnston Starliner that Klyber loaned me for my trip to the Golan Dry Docks, and I charted a course into space. I flew straight out into deep space, away from the Dry Docks and the broadcast network, for four hours. This far out, the blackness seemed to fold in on itself like a blanket closing around me. By that time I had flown millions of miles to nowhere. A more experienced pilot might have understood the navigational hazards of deep space travel, but I neither understood nor cared. And, of course, I had a self-broadcasting ship.

  Before initiating the broadcast engine, I climbed out of the cockpit and squeezed down the aisle through the cabin. The Johnston R-56 Starliner was a luxury craft. It did not have a living room-like main cabin, but it had enough headroom for me to walk nearly erect. It was designed to carry twenty passengers in six rows, but the last two rows of this particular craft were blocked off by a felt-covered bulkhead. Behind that bulkhead sat the broadcast engine.

  I had pulled the power cables from the broadcast engine before approaching Golan. Without juice running through it, the broadcast engine was nothing more than a mess of brass, silicon, copper, and cables—undetectable with remote surveillance equipment. Now, before reconnecting those cables, I thought about what happened to Klyber’s transport and gave the broadcast equipment a quick diagnostic.

  I shimmied around to the back of the engine and checked for cables. Everything looked fine. I inspected the far corners, looking between the engine and the inner wall of the fuselage. Nothing. Moving on to the special generator that powered the engine, I removed a few of the cylinders and inspected the floor using a mirror to peer around corners. The floor looked clean.

  Taking a deep breath, I stretched the power cables to the proper terminals on the broadcast engine and snapped them into place. I closed the hood over the engine and returned to my seat in the cockpit. And there I sat.

  I thought about the dangers of self-broadcasting. A competent assassin could certainly have hidden a grounding cable somewhere in my ship where I would not find it.

  As I thought about it, Klyber and his crew could scarcely have found a better way to go. All they knew was that their ship had traveled a safe distance from the Dry Docks and then they were dead. A powerful charge ran through them for one one-hundredth of a second. It stopped their hearts, turned some of their skin and hair to dust, and went away.

  Even the officer who happened to have his hand on a door handle died painlessly. The metal handle prolonged the charge into his already-dead body and he charred. Had “Major Burns’s” ghost hung around, it would have had reason to cringe; but “Burns” himself felt nothing.

  When I first heard the med techs referring to him as “Major Burns,” I thought it was yet another example of morbid med tech humor. Ironically enough, his real name was Major James T. Burns.

  My thoughts returned to Bryce Klyber—my last tie to the Unified Authority, my former commander, and ultimately my creator, since he had led the team that engineered the Liberators. A creato
r was a cold and unattainable relation. I told myself that if I had once loved Klyber, it was only in the way that a man lost in a tunnel loves the light when he finds a way out. Klyber was kind to me. He protected me. In the end, though, he saw me as a way of justifying his career. I was not a son to him, not even a colleague.

  Admiral Klyber wanted to use me to clear his name. History remembered Liberator clones as brutal and uncontrollable killers. Klyber’s agenda was simple. He wanted to remind the people that his Liberators had saved the Republic. I wasn’t a person to Bryce Klyber, I was a means to an end. Perhaps that was all any person was to another—a means to an end. Certainly the synthetic population was a means for helping natural-borns achieve certain ends.

  God, I had to fly somewhere. All of this introspection had to be a sign of depression, but it felt nice to be alone with time to reflect. I needed to sort my feelings and figure out my future.

  Sitting in a self-broadcasting ship, I realized that I had many options. I could fly anywhere. Klyber had only loaned me the Starliner; but now that he was gone, I considered the touring ship mine. With Klyber out of the picture, where could I return it? I could not bring myself to join the other side. I might have been able to bend my programming enough to ditch the Unified Authority Marines, but I could not even consider joining the Mogats or the Confederates. And the truth was, I liked the Mogats and the Confederate Arms even less than the Republic.

  Unified Authority officers may have considered clones no more valuable than any other supply; but the Mogats equated clones with U.A. bullets—lethal tools of the enemy. The Unified Authority may have banned my kind from entering the Orion Arm, but the Mogats would exterminate me.

  The one thing I knew I wanted was revenge. Father or creator, friend or manipulator, Klyber died on my watch. He trusted me and I failed. My job had been to get him off the ship, through the conference, and back on his C-64 transport alive. By the letter of my contract, I succeeded, but that did not make me feel any better. And the truth was, even after all of my tough talk, when I shut my eyes and thought about the people I cared about, Fleet Admiral Bryce Klyber was the first person to come to mind.

  Letting my mind wander, I donned my mediaLink shades to check my mail.

  With Bryce Klyber out of the way, there was no one stopping Admiral Huang from hunting me down. On the other hand . . .

  I had a private message from somebody named Clarence McAvoy. The name meant nothing to me until I noticed the sender’s address: Golan Dry Docks Security. Until that moment, I had never stopped to think of him as anything more than “the colonel,” just a cog in the Dry Docks security works. As I thought about this, I realized the way I considered the people around me was not all that different than the way so many officers viewed clones.

  Harris,

  We have identified all of the passengers on Klyber’s transport. According to the manifest, there were 21 people aboard that flight. We found 19 bodies. As you said, Rear Admiral Thomas Halverson was not aboard the transport. Neither was Captain Leonid Johansson.

  We found Johansson’s name on a passenger manifest for a transport headed to Washington, D.C. He returned to the Pentagon with Admiral Huang.

  Huang transferred Johansson to his personal staff early this morning. Isn’t that just about the most goddamn lucky transfer you ever heard of?

  Colonel C. McAvoy

  PS. The attached is the security record of the only people who entered Klyber’s ship. It was a maintenance team. We have not been able to locate all of the techs on that team.

  With a couple of quick optical commands, I cued the file McAvoy sent and watched the video record.

  A team of five technicians passed through the security gates outside the hangar. Each presented identification cards at the desk. Each man passed through a set of security posts, submitting himself to DNA profiling.

  One of the men was short—no more than five feet tall—and mostly bald with a ring of sandy blond hair. The man wore the jumper of a janitor—a dirty number with short sleeves that ended just beyond the elbow. The suit looked loose around his compact, wiry physique. His exposed forearms had incredible muscle tone. And there was something else, not that I needed it to identify this man. The edge of a colorful forearm brantoo poked out of his sleeve.

  Brantooing was the earmark of the rugged. Brantoo artists branded their clients with a hot iron to raise their skin, then injected colored pigment into the scar. The result was an embossed tattoo. Thugs and barroom brawlers loved brantoos because the average citizen went numb at the sight of them.

  I recognized this brantoo—it was the emblem of the Navy SEALS. It was a wheel with six spokes, each spoke tinted a different color. This was a crude map of the six arms of the Milky Way. Every SEAL had it brantooed on his forearm.

  But this man wasn’t just a Navy SEAL. This was an “Adam Boyd” clone. These were special clones from a highly-classified operation under the personal direction of Admiral Che Huang. No need to worry about anybody recognizing this guy. For the most part, the only people who saw Boyd clones in action were Marines who had very little time to live.

  Ravenwood, the outpost where I had supposedly died, was a training ground for Adam Boyd clones. Huang assigned platoons of forty-two Marines to defend the outpost on Ravenwood, then sent ten-man assault teams of Adam Boyd SEALS to kill them. I was the only Marine who ever escaped.

  In the video feed, the Adam Boyd clone stepped through the posts without a moment’s hesitation. A guard put up a hand to stop him, and the midget smirked up at him with a look of pure disdain.

  Using an optic command I stopped the video feed and brought up the clone’s identification badge. “Name: Adam Boyd. Title: Maintenance, Sixth Detail. Security Clearance: All Levels. Years with company: Five.”

  The guard said something that was not picked up by the security camera. The Adam Boyd clone answered satisfactorily, and he was allowed to pass. The maintenance team cleared the security station then entered and cleaned each of the ships parked on the high-security deck, including Admiral Klyber’s C-64.

  I watched this scene with a mixture of prurient interest and utter awe. The maintenance team stepped into transports belonging to each member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Had he wanted to, that little Boyd bastard could have blown up the entire hierarchy of the U.A. military.

  Once the Boyd clone left Klyber’s C-64, I rewound the file and watched him enter the transport a second time. Then I rewound and watched it again in slow motion. I looked for any sign of the copper cable. I timed how long it took him to enter and leave. I noted that the Boyd entered Klyber’s ship three minutes before any of the other workers. He was on the ship for eighteen minutes and thirty-two seconds. He carried a small box of tools as he boarded the ship and brought the same box out. He could have easily smuggled a short length of cable in that box.

  After watching that clone enter and leave the transport two more times, I finally allowed the video feed to play to its end. What I saw at the end hurt the most.

  The security camera followed the maintenance team as it left the transport and then the landing area. They walked through the security gate. There, standing just inside the gate on almost the exact same spot where I would see him later that evening, stood Tom Halverson dressed like a civilian.

  He leaned with his back against the wall, smoking a cigarette. For a moment he seemed to ignore the maintenance crew. Then he saw the Boyd clone. His eyes locked on the little clone as he continued his smoke. Once the maintenance men walked by, Halverson tossed his cigarette aside and fell in behind them, remaining a few steps back as they walked down the hall and disappeared from the screen.

  “Why aren’t you at the summit meeting?” I asked Halverson as he appeared in my mediaLink shades. Then it occurred to me. Why should he stay at the meeting? He was Huang’s man. His job was to oversee the sabotage of Klyber’s ship.

  Expecting simply to leave a message, I used my shades to place a call to the colonel’s office. He t
ook the call.

  “Harris?” Colonel McAvoy’s face appeared in my shades.

  “Colonel, I got your message. Thank you for sending the video feed.”

  “Did you find anything?”

  “Did you watch the feed all the way through?” I asked.

  “Sure,” the colonel said. “I thought you might find the last few moments especially enlightening. We’ve searched the Dry Docks. Halverson isn’t here. My guess is that he had another identity programmed into our computers and left using a false ID. I don’t suppose you approve of officers using false identification codes, Commander Brocius?”

  I had used so many false identities over the last few years that it took me a moment before I remembered coming into Golan as Commander Brocius.

  “Is there any chance that Halverson flew back to Earth with Huang?”

  “He did not,” the colonel said. “Huang left before Klyber. I have a feed of the passengers boarding. Do you want it?”

  “No,” I said. “But I would like to see any video you might have from the summit.”

  “Good joke,” the colonel said.

  “I’m not joking.”

  “Yes, you are. You seem like a bright guy. You cannot possibly think I would have a feed from a high-level summit. And even if I did, you cannot possibly think I would throw away my career by giving it to you.”

  “The highest-ranking officer in U.A. Navy just died on your watch,” I said, trying to sound calm with just a hint of menace. I was bluffing, of course.

  “Military intelligence is going to be all over this, Harris,” the colonel said. “They’ll get it sorted out.”

  “Yes, they will. And they are going to blame it on you.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Follow the trail far enough and you’ll see that Admiral Huang was behind this. When it comes to somebody taking a fall, who do you think they are going to go after, you or the secretary of the Navy?”