The Clone Empire

by Steven L. Kent

I walked along streets decorated by an odd combination of iron doors and glittering storefronts. One block gave way to the next. As I neared an open-air casino, I saw scores of sailors with women on their arms. In the alley behind the casino, I passed couples groping and kissing and thought of Ava.

  Another block, and I had entered an abandoned industrial district with dilapidated warehouses made of cinder block and steel. Even though they were only a few streets back, the storefronts and casinos seemed like a memory from another town.

  Wandering off by myself was asking for trouble, and I knew it. I stopped, searched the street. Seeing that I was completely alone, I returned to the bright lights and amorous crowds of the hospitality district.

  A parade of couples marched by me—clones with natural-born dates, their loud laughter carrying on the breeze. I saw unattached women on the prowl outside several bars. The Marine term for these women was “scrub.” I sometimes wondered what names they had for us.

  It was nearing 20:00, and I had not eaten since lunch, so I found a promising-looking restaurant/bar and headed in. Ironically enough, the place was called Scrubb’s, spelled with two Bs. The name could have been an accident, but I doubted it.

  Two hours after the dinner hour, the place was still half-full, with a few couples leaving as I came in. The clones who remained eyed me nervously as I came through the door.

  The tall, well-curved hostess approached me and introduced herself as Debbie. I stood six-three, and she came up to my eyes. She studied my blouse for a moment, smiled, and said, “You must be an important man.”

  “How do you mean?” I asked.

  “You have a lot of ribbons,” she said, pointing to my chest.

  She had olive skin and silky brown hair that hung straight down past her shoulders, then formed curls at the end. She had blue eyes that were narrow and small. Her eyes had an angry set, but her smile was friendly. She wore a dark blue dress with a cut that showed the tops of her breasts.

  “You see action, and they give you ribbons,” I said.

  “You must have seen a lot of action.”

  I could have taken that comment several ways. I chose to take it as innocent, and said, “More than I like to admit.”

  “Is that how you got those stars?” she asked, pointing to my collar. “I’ve seen men with bars and leaves pinned on their collars, but I’ve never seen stars.”

  “Lieutenants wear bars, majors wear clusters.”

  I expected her to say something stupid such as asking if that made me a sergeant. Instead, she said, “Let me find you a table, General.”

  When I asked, “How do you know I’m a general?” she just laughed and led me across the floor.

  The eatery was not all candles and violins, but it wasn’t burgers and fries, either. The lighting was low, and the waitresses wore dresses instead of uniforms. Some customers spoke in hushed tones, and others told stories and laughed in voices that boomed like kettledrums.

  Debbie sat me at a table near the back of the restaurant, about ten feet from a hearth with foot-tall flames dancing on a stack of logs. Cool air poured out of the ceiling, causing the temperature to remain comfortable. It reminded me of a hot shower on a cold night, leaving me relaxed.

  I half hoped she would give me a card, a phone number, or a slip of paper stating what time she got off work. At the moment, Ava seemed far, far away. Debbie touched me on the shoulder, and said, “Your waitress will be right with you.”

  I wondered what would happen if I pursued her? Ava was more beautiful than this girl, but not as young . . . smooth-skinned youth had its own kind of beauty. Not that gravity had caught up with Ava; it probably wouldn’t for another few years. I watched the girl walk away and knew that I might well fantasize about her for the next night or two.

  Compared to the hostess, my waitress seemed positively plain. She was short and slender, with shoulder-length blond hair. Before taking my order, she asked, “Are you really a general?”

  “I am,” I said.

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “You mean besides what I want to eat?” She didn’t laugh. “Sure. What is it?”

  “Are we safe now? Are the aliens gone for good?”

  I studied the girl closely. The restaurant was dim, so I could not see every detail. She might have been twenty or maybe twenty-five years old.

  I saw no scars on her skin, but I heard them in her voice and decided to lie. “Gone for good,” I said, unwilling to say anything further. I so wanted to believe my own words that it almost made them true. Modern alchemy—turning lies into gold.

  She said nothing, and I wondered if she believed me. Maybe she realized the same thing I did, that sometimes it is better not to know what lurks around the corner.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Lyra.”

  “Lyra, those aliens weren’t soldiers, they were businessmen,” I said. “They didn’t come looking for a war, and when we gave them one, they went to bother someone else.”

  Lyra saw things as they were. I spoke to her the way I would speak to a scared child, but she knew war and death as intimately as I did, and she took no comfort from my reassurance. She let me say my piece, thanked me, then recited the specials of the day. I ordered baked fish and wild rice, hoping it would be as good as the meal I’d eaten with Warshaw.

  Looking around the restaurant, I saw only couples. A meal in this place would cost more than most sailors or Marines wanted to pay; but men on leave will sometimes pony up the credits if they think it will change the outcome of their date.

  Scrubb’s had a bar near the front, the kind of place that would attract conscripts and officers alike. The bar sat on a slightly raised floor that overlooked the rest of the restaurant. Debbie, the hostess, must have worked the bar as well as the restaurant floor. I saw her walk in, heads turning to follow her, and disappear into the darkness of the bar.

  That was when I spotted the phantom. He sat alone at a small table, quietly looking around the floor. He might have been either a Marine or a sailor, a clone to be sure; but dressed in a bright tropical shirt and slacks . . . the typical serviceman on leave.

  Like any other single man drinking alone in a room filled with couples, he looked out of place as he scanned the floor around him. Something did not seem right about him. I could not put my finger on it, but he just came across wrong. Like a tree in a desert or maybe a wolf among sheep, I thought to myself.

  The man was not trolling for girls, that much was clear. Time passed as he slowly nursed his beer. A waitress ran her rounds in his part of the bar. When she saw his untouched glass, she approached the table and said something to him. He answered, and she rolled her eyes and walked away.

  The man leaned back and rested his arm on the rail that separated the bar from the rest of the restaurant. He casually surveyed the bar, then the eatery. The move looked so relaxed, so subtle. Too relaxed, it felt calculated to put people at ease.

  Why would he come here alone? I asked myself; but even as I thought this, I realized that I had come here alone, and just like the phantom, I was looking around the floor and studying the wildlife. Did I make him suspicious? But this guy wasn’t drinking. His beer was a prop.

  As he scanned the restaurant, his gaze eventually drifted to my table. I saw him looking in my direction, and he saw me staring back. I expected him to turn away, but he didn’t. His eyes stayed on me as he took in my insignia or possibly counted the stars on my collar. He met my gaze with a look that showed neither fear nor nervousness, then calmly pulled out his wallet and dropped a few bills on the table. Without looking back, he abandoned his money and his half-finished beer.

  I started to go after him. I stood, then questioned myself. What did I have? Why would I stop him? He didn’t finish his beer, big specking deal. What did that prove? I only hesitated for a moment, then I went after him; but that moment was enough. By the time I reached the street, the phantom was gone.

  I went back into the restaur
ant wondering if I had made a mistake. As I tried to reason out my suspicions, my fish arrived.

  I sat, and I ate, and I rewound the scene and watched it over and over again in my head—a clone comes into the bar. He sits alone. So what?

  I took a bite of fish and chased it with a forkload of wild rice. The rice had pepper and butter. The food tasted good, but it was wasted on me. I would have been just as happy eating bad food camouflaged with ketchup. I took another bite of fish and realized one difference me and the phantom—I was eating my fish; he had only been hiding behind his beer.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  After my meal, I returned to the police station and found Cabot.

  He saw me, growled, “General,” then caught himself and paused.

  “Spit it out, Cabot,” I said. For a moment, the little asslicker had shown a bit of backbone.

  “Where the hell have you been?” he asked. He looked relieved to have said his piece, then he winced as he braced himself for me to respond.

  Finding humor in his discomfort, I smiled, and asked, “Did you just say ‘hell’?”

  Cabot turned red and stared at the floor.

  “Did you just ask me where the hell I went?” I continued, sincerely enjoying his discomfort.

  “Sorry, sir,” he said.

  “I went out for a quick dinner.”

  Cabot looked up from his feet, and said, “You left three hours ago, sir. We have MPs combing the city for you.”

  “Good Lord. You’re like an obsessive mother and a nagging wife all rolled into one.” I said this in a chiding tone, not really caring how derisive it sounded. “You called the police because you didn’t know how to find me?”

  “General, you were gone three hours. We were just looking at bodies, sir. I have every MP in the city searching for you. The station is on high alert.”

  I looked around, and said, “High alert? Cabot, we need to do some serious field training on police procedures down here. I was able to walk in here without anyone even noticing me.”

  Cabot pursed his lips as he fought to control his anger. He might have been a hanger-on, but he was also a one-star admiral, the kind of man who normally talks down the chain, not up. When he next opened his mouth, he spoke in an even tone as if the conversation had started anew.

  “We’ve received body counts from every precinct on the planet except for one, a town called Sunmark,” he said.

  “What’s the count at?” I asked.

  “We’re up to 503 bodies found in the last three weeks.”

  “That’s a lot bodies,” I said. “Five hundred stiffs, and it never occurred to anyone that there might be an epidemic?”

  “General, that’s 503 bodies planetwide on a planet that doesn’t have centralized communications,” Cabot said. He had a point; no one on St. Augustine knew what anyone else was doing.

  “Any idea when we’ll hear from the last station?” I asked.

  “We haven’t been able to reach them. The town is not very far from here; I sent some men to knock on their door.”

  Cabot heard back from his men an hour later. The Sunmark police station was empty. As far as anyone could tell, all our MPs were M.I.A. and probably worse.

  The ghost precinct was less than one hundred miles away. By the time I arrived with my entourage to investigate, it was 00:13, a cursed time if such a thing could exist.

  Bright light shone through the windows of the precinct building as we pulled up. A few men searched the alley around the building. The inside of the precinct building looked as busy as an anthill, with MPs bustling in every direction.

  I did not recognize any of the men beyond their uniforms and the fact that they were clones, but some of them had undoubtedly come as my support staff. At that moment, another piece of the puzzle fell into place for me.

  What if somebody killed a member of my staff? I thought to myself. I don’t know them well enough to tell them apart. If someone quietly murdered one of my men and showed up in his place, I wouldn’t notice it.

  As I waited by the car, Cabot went to the door of the building and spoke to the officer in charge of the investigation. He came back a moment later, and said, “Someone attacked the building.”

  “Have they found any bodies?” I asked.

  Cabot shook his head. “No, sir.”

  Sunmark was only a hundred miles from Petersborough, but the air was slightly cooler here and far more humid. This was a coastal town. I enjoyed the combination of warm night and ocean-chilled breeze. Taking a deep breath and letting the moist air hold in my lungs, I walked toward the building, Cabot hopping close on my heels.

  The men outside the precinct building snapped to attention as I walked past them. I saluted and told them to carry on.

  Standing outside the building, I saw rows of flood lamps through one of the windows. I heard a generator purring in the distance.

  “What happened to the lights?” I asked a nearby officer.

  “Someone shut off the power, sir,” he said.

  The station was two stories tall and rather narrow. It was shaped like a book. My men must have set up an emergency generator behind the building. Arteries from the generator covered the floor, a confusion of power cords that led in every direction. The Marine sergeant who met me at the door was not part of my entourage, and I was glad to see him. When it came to dirty work, I preferred having Marines around me.

  “Found anything?” I asked.

  “They fought a small war in here, sir.”

  “Any survivors?”

  “So far, we can’t tell, sir. The people who were manning the station are M.I.A.,” he said.

  “No bodies?” I asked. I stepped around him.

  Just inside the door, the first splash of dried blood started about five feet up on the wall and stretched to the floor in dribbles. A foot-wide, rust-colored pool had formed below it.

  They’d caught their first victim off guard, I thought. He’d been standing tall when he was shot in the head. I was no detective, but I’d participated in a stealth operation or two. I knew how men reacted when they spotted you, and how they died when you took them by surprise.

  “Was this the only victim?” I asked.

  “The whole goddamned building looks like this, sir,” the sergeant said. “We’re taking blood samples and scraping shit off the walls.”

  “Good idea,” I said. It wasn’t, though. All of the blood would be the same general-issue clone blood. If we knew anything about these assassins, it was that they were clones just like us. The good guys and bad guys would have the exact same makeup in this fight, right down to their DNA.

  The next victim had been caught unawares as well. He must have been at a desk. The chair he’d been sitting in lay on its back on the floor. There was no blood on the chair, but blood and brains covered the wall and the filing cabinet behind the desk.

  “Do you have any idea about what happened to the bodies?” I asked.

  “No, sir.” That was the proper answer, no excuses, no promises, no explanations, and no speculation. “Marines never speculate. They always speck you right on time”—wisdom I picked up from my drill instructor in boot camp.

  The sergeant interrupted my thoughts. “Sir, whoever attacked the station destroyed the computers.”

  “Destroyed them?” I repeated.

  Across the floor, computer cases and cabinets lay spread across the floor like trash. No big loss, though. A platoon of MPs had been temporarily assigned to man a precinct on a stretch of sandy beach. They probably had not kept careful records.

  “Do we know how long the power has been out?” I asked.

  “No, sir. Not yet.”

  “Do we know what happened to it? Do we know if the neighbors still have power?” I asked. I looked out the window and saw light in some of the windows across the street.

  The sergeant peered out the window as well, and said, “This appears to be the only building without power.”

  I nodded and moved on. “Shit,”
I whispered to myself.

  Whatever happened in this building was not a war or a battle; it was an assassination. Someone had come in with suppressed weapons and caught the entire staff off guard. Judging by the gore and bullet patterns, they might have gone through the entire building without any of ours returning fire.

  Magic restored.

  In the old days, communication signals were routed across the galaxy using the Broadcast Network. Somehow, Gary Warshaw and his enlisted engineers had restored pangalactic communications using their limited broadcast network. It was nothing short of a miracle.

  Warshaw called me that evening.

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “I’m on Gobi,” he said, sounding a little surprised. “Something wrong with that?”

  “I didn’t know you had pangalactic communications,” I said. It should have occurred to me back when I was on the Kamehameha. Warshaw wasn’t even in the same arm as the Kamehameha, but he had been able to watch Bishop interrogating me. I should have figured it out back then.

  “Yeah, well, we got a network up, so why not?” he asked. “You making any progress on your investigation?”

  “We’ve found a lot of bodies,” I said. “Over five hundred of them so far.”

  “All clones?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “all clones. There were a few in every city.”

  “Murdered?” Warshaw asked.

  “Drownings, car accidents, fires . . . a couple of outright murders. St. Augustine is a revolving door with eighty thousand men running through at any time.” Five hundred men . . . I wondered if it was a revolving door or a meat grinder.

  “I bet we haven’t even found half the breakage yet,” I said. “All we have are the bodies that floated to the surface.”

  “That’s what I like about you, Harris, always the optimist,” Warshaw said.

  “I contacted the ships that went to St. Augustine on leave and had them check their service logs. In the last two months, less than thirty men were reported absent without leave. Every last one of them showed up sooner or later. According to the logs, none of those five hundred stiffs came from your ships.”