The Clone Empire

by Steven L. Kent

  Galactic Position: Scutum-Crux Arm

  I sailed out of the Scutum-Crux Arm on a wrecked battleship and returned on a yacht . . . more or less. I rode a frigate to Gobi, then requisitioned the Salah ad-Din, a Perseus-class fighter carrier.

  In demographic terms, the ad-Din had the oldest crew of any carrier in the Enlisted Man’s Navy, its youngest sailor being thirty-two years old. Beyond that, having not yet been granted leave, the crew of the Salah ad-Din could not have picked up pests from St. Augustine. If any ship was secure, it was the Salah ad-Din, and she had plenty of space for transporting Marines since the eleven-thousand-man Marine compound on her bottom deck now sat vacant.

  There were twenty-two hundred Marines stationed on Terraneau. The ad-Din had room to spare.

  I toured the Marine complex as the ad-Din broadcasted out through a station that was specially programmed for a single broadcast to Terraneau. Walking through the barracks, I imagined them filled with men. I went to the firing range, the ghosts of ancient gunfire echoing in my head.

  “General Harris?” The voice of Captain Pete Villanueva spoke to me from a squawk box on the wall. I wondered if his voice had sounded from every speaker in the Marine complex or if some onboard system had tracked my movements.

  I went to the box. “Harris here.”

  “We are in Scutum-Crux space, sir.”

  “What is the situation?”

  “All clear, sir.”

  Several months had passed since the U.A. Navy attacked Terraneau. If the Unifieds were coming back, I figured they would have done it months ago.

  “Have you made contact?” I asked.

  “We reached Fort Sebastian, the Marines are expecting you, sir.”

  “Very well. All I need now is a transport and a pilot,” I said.

  “Your staff pilot is ready and waiting for you, sir.”

  “My staff pilot?” I asked. He might have meant Nobles, but to the best of my knowledge, Nobles was still on the Kamehameha . Maybe I picked up a tick on St. Augustine, I thought, and the thought made me smile.

  “Captain, please send a security detail to the landing bay,” I said. “Have them seal off the bay and wait for me in the hall.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Under no circumstances are they to enter the bay before I arrive,” I said.

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  I didn’t need to worry about them arriving before me as the Marine complex was on the same deck as the landing bay. Running through the hall, I arrived in about three minutes. My security detail—six men armed with M27s—arrived a few seconds later. Villanueva ran a tight ship; I was impressed.

  “There’s a transport waiting for takeoff,” I told the men. “The man piloting that transport may be a Unified Authority assassin.”

  If these men had been SEALs instead of MPs, I would have sent them in first. I’d seen SEALs at work; they could slip into a hangar, sneak onto a transport, and knock out the pilot more smoothly than most men could zip their pants.

  MPs had a different calling. They arrested drunken sailors and escorted troublemakers to the brig. “I’m going in first. I want you to come in fifteen seconds after me. If there’s an enemy in there, I want to take him alive,” I said.

  They answered with nods and sirs.

  “Fifteen seconds, then you come in with your fingers off your triggers. I don’t want you shooting me in the back,” I said.

  Months had passed since the last time I’d seen combat. During that time, I had not so much as fired a gun at a range; so as I entered the landing bay, it came as no surprise that I felt a nervous rush of adrenaline. I had not slipped into a combat reflex, but it wasn’t far off.

  I stepped through the hatch, took three steps forward, and heard the familiar greeting.

  “General Harris.” Sergeant Nobles waved and greeted me like an old friend. Then he remembered himself, stiffened, and gave me a proper salute.

  “Nobles?” He fit the profile of the U.A. assassins—a clone in his twenties. He was neither heavy nor thin, neither muscular nor frail. Put him in any platoon, and he would blend in.

  I had burst through the hatch and run toward the transport, then I slowed to the speed of a drill sergeant inspecting his platoon. A few seconds passed and the hatch opened again and six M27-carrying MPs charged in behind me and ground to a stop. I did not even need to look back to know they had confused expressions on their faces.

  They had come in locked and loaded, expecting a fight. Instead, they got a dawdling general and an unarmed man standing at attention.

  I ignored them and returned Nobles’s salute.

  “Are we bringing an escort, sir?” he asked. The guy was so positive, so innocent. Six armed MPs had just stormed the transport, and it never occurred to him that he was under suspicion.

  I said no and dismissed the MPs.

  Thus began one of the more dismal missions of my career.

  I did not expect Philo Hollingsworth to greet me with open arms, but I thought he would be interested in what I had to say. As things currently stood, he commanded a tiny base on a backwater world that was cut off from the rest of the universe.

  No cars waited as we touched down on the airfield outside of Norristown. I wasn’t hoping for a ticker-tape parade, but I expected something. Nobles secured the transport, and we stood there wondering if perhaps we’d landed in the wrong place.

  Two jeeps arrived fifteen minutes later. Colonel Hollingsworth did not come himself. Instead, he sent a couple of enlisted men to drive me. Glad for the chance to gather his gear, Nobles rode back to base in one of the jeeps. The driver of the second jeep took me to Norristown.

  “Where exactly are we going?” I asked, as we drove past the road to Fort Sebastian.

  “To the capitol building, sir,” the man said.

  I did not know that Terraneau had a capitol building.

  We drove almost all the way across Norristown. I had seen the city in ruins, now I saw it in reclamation, like a forest three years after a major fire. Collapsing structures had been torn down. Lots had been cleared. The locals had begun work on a scattering of small buildings, nothing too aggressive, just two- and three-story affairs. In another year, they might begin work on new skyscrapers.

  Hollingsworth must have ignored my orders and alerted Doctorow that I was coming if we were headed to the capitol. I didn’t like it, but it could have been worse. Hollingsworth could have sent a firing squad out to shoot me when I stepped off the transport.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  We drove into the prewar government sector.

  For a moment, I thought we might end up outside the collapsed garage, with Doctorow telling me he had excavated the weapons; but the new fence we had built around the lot remained closed, and the ground looked undisturbed.

  We stopped in front of a building with a polished onyx façade and working fountains. Its windows, once crusted with dust, now sparkled in the sun. A stream burbled down the tiered waterway that ran along the front of the building. The buildings in this part of town had not been destroyed, but they hadn’t been in use when I’d left. Someone had done a lot of work in a very little time on this structure. Taking in the amazing restoration around me, I hopped out of the jeep and entered Terraneau’s new “government center.”

  The lobby of the building was a giant cavern paved in black marble and sparsely populated by men in expensive suits. The room could have held five hundred people. I saw no more than two hundred.

  Hollingsworth met me at the door, his expression belying something deeper than anger. He saluted. I saluted.

  “Did you really go through that broadcast zone?” he asked in a whisper, his eyes switching between me and the lobby. “It wasn’t just a trick?”

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  “Did you find anyone on the other side?”

  We were just inside the door. Across the floor, maybe one hundred feet away, Doctorow spotted us and started in our direction. Others noticed us
as well, and the din dropped noticeably.

  “I found Warshaw,” I said.

  “He made it?”

  “He’s got a growing empire with twenty-three planets,” I said in a soft voice. “Looks like the Unifieds want their planets back.”

  Sarah Doctorow floated in her husband’s wake. She smiled in my direction, her lipstick the bright red color of oxygenated blood. Her face was as round as a full moon, and her body was tapered up like a pyramid. She moved through the gathering with the grace of a queen.

  “I don’t believe it. You were right about everything,” he said in a voice that betrayed aggravation instead of admiration.

  And then Doctorow was upon us. I had never seen him dressed like this before. He wore a freshly pressed dark suit. He’d trimmed his beard so that it no longer covered his neck. He had also cut his hair. It still hung past his ears, but gone were the dried-out tresses that had once brushed his shoulders.

  “Welcome back,” Doctorow said as he approached us.

  “General Harris, thank God you’re safe. It’s just a miracle,” Sarah said, sounding too enthusiastic to be sincere.

  “It’s good to see you,” I told Sarah, my pleasure in seeing her every bit as genuine as her gratitude for my safe return.

  Doctorow came up beside me. We traded handshakes and glances with about as much affection as boxers touching gloves before a fight.

  The last time I had checked, Doctorow had been running Norristown out of his house, with his wife snooping over his shoulder. As for this building, I did not notice any cleaning crews in the government complex the last time I came by. Now it had a gleaming chandelier cascading from its ceiling, water fixtures decorating its lobby, acres of shining black marble, and air-conditioning.

  “When did you move here?” I asked.

  “This is our new capitol building,” Doctorow said, the friendly smile never leaving his face.

  “For Norristown?” I asked.

  “For all of Terraneau,” Hollingsworth said.

  “Now you’re the governor of the planet,” I said. “Congratulations on your promotion.”

  “We all have our ambitions, General,” Doctorow said in a booming voice. “You want to conquer Earth. My plans are not nearly so grand. I’ll settle for rebuilding Terraneau.”

  The small crowd that had gathered around us chuckled . . . everybody but me.

  We adjourned to the assembly room. It reminded me of the capitol building on Earth, only in miniature. The men Doctorow had assembled to help him run his utopian planet were the inquisitors; I was the criminal.

  We entered a three-story auditorium in which a lectern and a couple of seats waited on a stage at the bottom of the well. Doctorow led the way down the stairs, bounding each step with energy I would not have expected from a man in his sixties, his excitement unmistakable.

  He led me to the stage and asked me to take a seat. Behind us, extending out like a small wall, stood the type of raised bench that judges use in courtrooms. The stand rose a full eight feet above the stage, and Doctorow sat behind it, leaving me alone on display.

  The audience quietly assembled along the tiers of the auditorium. Were they Doctorow’s appointees or elected officials? How had so many changes happened so quickly? I’d only been gone a week. Doctorow must have started the ball rolling before I left. Maybe that was why he’d wanted me off his planet so badly.

  Hollingsworth sat the meeting out, leaving me to the lions . . . the bastard.

  Once everyone was seated, Doctorow started the meeting by congratulating me on my safe return. He assured me that the “assembled body” had been briefed about the circumstances of my departure and that the meeting was nothing more than a briefing. “We’re simply curious about what you found,” he said, sounding so specking diplomatic. He must have seen himself as cordial, but his demeanor made me think of a rancher giving a steer a friendly pat before leading it to the slaughterhouse.

  Instead of letting me speak, Doctorow invited the gallery to ask questions. Not a moment passed before five or six people stood in place, signaling that they wanted the floor. Doctorow called each of them by name.

  “General, you left to find your fleet. Did you find it?” asked the first man.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Was it destroyed?” the man continued.

  “No. I returned on the Salah ad-Din, one of the ships from the fleet.”

  Back when the Unified Authority ran the galaxy, every planet had security stations monitoring nearby space. If a ship broadcasted in within a couple of million miles of that planet, the equipment detected the anomaly and tracked the ship. Judging by the nervous twitters filling the room, I got the feeling that the ad-Din had slipped into Terraneau space unnoticed. Doctorow would have that problem fixed. He’d make it a priority.

  “The Salah ad-Din, General, isn’t that a fighter carrier?” the man continued.

  I nodded.

  “Is there any particular reason you chose to return in a fighter carrier, General?” he asked, the first strains of hostility beginning to sound in his voice.

  “Are you asking if there was a reason other than its being a ship capable of traveling through space?” I asked.

  “I am trying to ascertain why you chose to travel in one of the largest and most aggressive ships in your fleet when you returned to Terraneau. Are you trying to send us a message, General Harris?”

  Arguments broke out throughout the gallery.

  Doctorow spoke up from behind me. “Please. We are getting ahead of ourselves. Give the general a chance to explain what he found on his mission.

  “I apologize for this outburst,” Doctorow said, holding his right hand over his heart to show his sincerity. “Please, tell us about the status of your fleet.”

  The well of the auditorium was three stories deep, with rows forming rings around the stage. Only the area directly behind me was blocked off.

  I felt no fear facing down these politicians . . . these nouveau-bureaucrats. That these men and women had promoted themselves to a planetary council meant nothing to me. What did I care about glorified postmen pretending to be governors and heads of states? When I came to Terraneau, these people lived in fear like rabbits cowering in a warren, and now they’d made themselves kings. What a joke.

  I no longer gave a damn about getting along with the Right Reverend Colonel Ellery Doctorow, governor of Norristown and apparently emperor of Terraneau, or with the pompous men and women who made up his choir, so I told it to them straight. “The Enlisted Man’s Empire controls twenty-three planets and thirteen fleets. The empire has not attacked Earth, but no one is ruling the possibility out.”

  The initial silence that filled the auditorium pushed in on my eardrums like the pressure from a deep-sea dive. Pandemonium replaced silence. Half the representatives stood to ask questions. When Doctorow did not call on them, they started shouting.

  “Are you saying the Clone Navy is preparing to attack Earth?” Doctorow asked.

  The room went quiet.

  Unsure how I could have stated it any more clearly, I said, “No, I did not say that. I simply stated that attacking Earth is an option.”

  A woman ran down the stairs shouting, “But you can’t do that! That would be an act of aggression. The clones would be declaring war on their—”

  “Let me make this clear to you,” I said, raising my voice so it would be heard above the din. “We did not break off from the Unified Authority, they abandoned us. We owe them nothing. They abandoned their clone military. They abandoned their outworld territories. They discarded their fleets.”

  My comments were greeted with a scared silence.

  “You say you have twenty-three planets in your empire? Did you conquer them, or did they join willingly?” Doctorow asked, shattering the hush.

  He didn’t understand. He was so lost in his vision of a perfect society that he could not comprehend anyone’s rejecting his views. He resented any outside authority, and he instinctive
ly believed that everyone else felt the same way.

  “No one held a gun to anyone’s head,” I said, not entirely sure that was the case. I hadn’t asked.

  The meeting lapsed into some form of order—even chaos runs out of energy. The wildfire conversations burned out, and I explained the situation as I understood it, leaving out one small detail—that our forces were infested with U.A. assassins.

  “Is it still your goal to conquer Earth?” Doctorow asked, his voice solemn and flat.

  I turned and looked up at him. From his lofty seat, Doctorow stared down on me, the light forming shadows across his face. The shadows added grim punctuation to his solemn expression.

  “I am not the one who would make that decision,” I admitted.

  “I’m sure you’re an important man in your empire,” Doctorow persisted, then he dredged up ghosts from a distant conversation, and asked, “Do you want revenge?”

  Revenge? I’d spent the last week concerned with survival.

  “Conquering Earth makes no sense. Why declare war on the Unified Authority? Why fight a war at all?” Doctorow asked. “The Unified Authority is not your enemy.”

  “I would not call them my friends,” I mumbled in a voice that no one else would hear.

  “You came in a fighter carrier. Do you plan to force us to join your empire?” Doctorow asked.

  “No,” I said. I felt an odd sense of defeat. I had not come expecting a warm welcome, but this mix of fear and hostility caught me off guard. “You’re welcome to join, I suppose,” I said. And there it was, I had reverted back to acting like a guest on Doctorow’s planet.

  “We’ll consider your offer, General Harris, but I don’t expect the people of Terraneau will want to join you.”

  “No, I suppose not,” I said. I hadn’t really offered them membership. In truth, Terraneau was far more trouble than it was worth.

  The auditorium had become so quiet that I could hear people breathing. “My vote will be against any form of treaty,” Doctorow told the auditorium. “I will resign before I sign a treaty with the clones or with the Unified Authority, and I will do everything in my power to ensure that Terraneau remains a neutral planet.”