The Clone Empire

by Steven L. Kent

  “Not even for protection?” I asked, more out of curiosity than concern.

  “General, men like you bring wars upon yourselves,” Doctorow said, sounding so damn sympathetic as he condemned me with his words. “We don’t need protection. Take away the armies and the battleships, and we won’t need to protect ourselves.

  “Nations, empires, armies . . . we don’t want any of that on Terraneau. We’ll vote on your offer, General Harris, but I can tell you the outcome already.”

  “You probably can,” I agreed. I didn’t care. With a government like this, Terraneau would make an unreliable ally at best.

  “My vote is for you to take your Marines and go away,” Doctorow continued.

  Applause broke out in the auditorium. A woman rose to her feet, nodded, and clapped her hands. More representatives stood and joined her. Pretty soon, every person on every tier had risen to their feet and begun to applaud Doctorow’s statement. The sound echoed through the well, drowning everything else out.

  I did not hate these people, but I did not care what became of them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  What should I have called it? An interrogation? An inquisition? Doctorow might have described it as a hearing, but that sounded too benevolent by my book. I was glad when it ended.

  As we drove away from the government center, Hollingsworth asked a question that came so out of the blue that it took me aback. He asked, “What if it came to a choice between her and us?”

  “You sound like a jealous girlfriend,” I said. “The relationships do not overlap. She’s my girl, you’re my Marines. It’s completely different.”

  Night had fallen over Norristown. Streetlights blazed, as did lights in windows and headlamps on cars. Just a few short months ago, nothing but fires and flashlights had lit the city after dark, now it sparkled.

  “Not all that different,” Hollingsworth said. Now that I had returned, he had not once bothered using the word, “sir.” “You screw her. You screw us. It’s a different kind of screwing, but you’re still screwing us.”

  If I’d been driving, I would have pulled over and hit the bastard. We could have had it out with our fists. It sounds primitive, but it’s better than letting things fester. A couple of black eyes, a bloody nose, and maybe some bruised ribs, and we would get on with our lives. Unfortunately, he was driving.

  I worked with what I had. I pulled the corner of my collar and held it out for Hollingsworth to see. “Listen here, you self-pitying waste of speck. See these stars? You may not like it, but these stars make me a more important person than you. You got that? You’ve got a bird and I’ve got stars and that means you will either show me respect or I will throw your ass in the brig.”

  He did not speak for several seconds. Finally, he said, “Sorry, sir.”

  “Get this through your skull, Hollingsworth, I did not start the war with the Unified Authority. If you haven’t figured that out, it’s time that you did. They sent us out here to use us for target practice. You got that?”

  “Yes, sir.” He stared straight ahead as if driving through hazardous traffic instead of empty streets, his hands wrapped tight around the steering wheel.

  “I wasn’t the one who started the war. So if you are going to blame me for something, blame me for saving the specking fleet.”

  This woke him from his stupor like a slap across his jaw. He looked at me, and said, “Begging your pardon, General, but the way this Marine sees it, Admiral Warshaw saved the fleet when he started up the broadcast zone.”

  “Who came up with the idea of salvaging broadcast equipment in the first place, asshole? Who came up with the idea of hijacking those self-broadcasting battleships?” I asked.

  Hollingsworth went back to staring straight ahead. He did not answer my questions.

  “By the way, I hope you don’t plan on staying on Terraneau,” I said. “Your pal Doctorow told me to pack up my Marines and leave.”

  More silence.

  This was not how I wanted the conversation to go. When we left the meeting, I had half expected we could have a friendly conversation. I thought we might stop somewhere to talk over a couple of beers. As I saw Hollingsworth seething with anger, I realized that friendly conversation would never happen. He and I would never be friends.

  “Turn up here,” I said, pointing to a road that headed to the northern edge of town.

  “I thought you wanted to head to base,” Hollingsworth said.

  “I changed my mind,” I said. I told myself I was being logical, that Hollingsworth could order the men to pack; but logic had nothing to do with my decision. I felt alone, and I wanted reassurance.

  I knew the way to Ava’s house like I knew the scars on the back of my hands, and I told Hollingsworth every turn well in advance.

  “Do you want me to send a jeep for you, sir?” he asked, as I climbed out.

  “No, Colonel, I think I’ll find my own way back to the base,” I said.

  He saluted and drove away.

  I knocked on the door, but no one answered. I had to laugh. I had just traveled across three galactic arms only to find myself stuck in a suburb without a phone or a jeep. Maybe Ava was working late, maybe she was having dinner at a friend’s house, maybe she was spending the night in the girls’ dorm. She might arrive any minute or be gone all night.

  The house was completely dark. I tried the door, but it was locked. For no real reason, I knocked again. No one answered. I walked to the edge of her front porch, sat, and waited. Time passed. Night turned to early morning.

  By the time she finally arrived, the first streaks of sunlight showed in the sky. The car pulled into the driveway, stopped, and Ava climbed out of the passenger’s side. She started toward the front door, then she saw me and froze. A look of anger replaced her surprised expression.

  Why did I come back? I asked myself when I spotted the silhouette of a man in the driver’s seat. I wished I hadn’t returned.

  Ava and I stood staring at each other for a few seconds.

  “You’re back,” she said.

  “I told you I would come for you,” I said. I wished the driver had been a clone. I would have accused the bastard of being an infiltrator and performed his autopsy on the spot, but he was a natural-born.

  She saw where I was staring, and said, “I’m sorry,” her voice as cold and hard as marble.

  “I was only gone for a week,” I said, not feeling so much angry as sad. Anger might come later, but for now I felt a deep sense of loss. A strange numbness spread across my brain, and with it came feelings of helplessness.

  “Harris, we need to talk,” she said, not trying to disguise the scene as anything other than how it looked.

  “No, we don’t,” I said. I stepped off the porch and walked past the car, not even bothering to look inside.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  I did not answer her. I had no idea where I would go.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, as I reached the end of her driveway.

  “Yeah,” I said. I might have said, “Me, too,” but it would have been a lie. I was no longer sorry. Sadness had already turned to anger.

  I reached the end of the block before I realized that I had no way of calling for a ride. I could have gone back and called the base from Ava’s house, but my pride would not allow it.

  Ellery Doctorow lived a few miles away. I could have found my way to his house easily enough, but that pompous bastard was the last person I would go to for assistance. I would not give him the satisfaction.

  Deciding that a good walk would give me time to think things through, I turned the corner and started down the hill. I wanted to be alone with my anger, so I walked.

  Your perspective changes when you walk streets you’ve only driven in the past. Rises stretch into hills, and slopes become steeper. Seconds turn into minutes. It took me twenty minutes to reach the bottom of Norristown Heights, and Fort Sebastian was still twenty minutes away by car.

  The air h
ad a cool morning chill. Dew glistened on the grass. Cars passed me on the road every few seconds, speeding down streets that were nearly empty. I ran across a four-lane road, the nearest cars so far away that I could not hear their engines.

  A few moments later, a Marine sped by in a jeep going at least eighty miles per hour. He spotted me, and his head turned to track me as he drove past.

  I expected him simply to drive away, but he didn’t. The jeep did not screech to a halt, but the tires did squeal just a bit as the driver pulled a U-turn. He cut across several empty lanes, then drifted in my direction, pulling to the side of the road about ten feet ahead of me.

  “General Harris?” He said my name as if it were a question.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Colonel Hollingsworth sent me to pick you up, sir,” he said.

  “Did he? Well, that’s excellent,” I said, remembering full well that the last thing I told Hollingsworth was that I would get myself back to base.

  “Yes, sir,” the sergeant said.

  It was possible. Ava might have called Hollingsworth and told him what happened. They did not know each other well, but they had run into each other a time or two, and she might have wanted to make sure I got back to Fort Sebastian safely. He might have decided to send a car even if she did not call. It wasn’t likely, but it could happen.

  Instead of climbing into the rear of the jeep, as I might normally have done, I stepped into the passenger’s seat.

  “Where are we going?” I asked as we pulled away.

  “The colonel is waiting for you at Fort Sebastian, sir,” said the sergeant.

  “Excellent,” I said. I spoke the words around a yawn. I’d just spent the entire evening standing outside Ava’s house. We headed south and east, the right general direction for Fort Sebastian, skirting downtown Norristown but still driving through other urban districts. My driver did not speak. I sensed an odd intensity in his focus.

  I asked him a few questions, and his answers seemed right enough, but something about him, some indefinable quality, left an unpleasant impression. He was the kind of guy who can’t tell a joke because nothing he said could ever be funny. Here he sat, saying all the right things, and I had already decided that I did not like him.

  “What is your name, Sergeant?” I asked.

  “Lewis, sir,” he said. He sounded respectful enough, but he looked away from me as he answered and gave off a sense of disregard.

  “Is that your first name or your last?” I asked.

  “It’s my last name, sir. My first name is Kit . . . Kit Lewis,” he said.

  “Well, Kit Lewis, you just missed the road to Fort Sebastian,” I said. We had actually passed the turn two miles back, but I decided to wait until we had passed any likely detours before mentioning it.

  “A work crew is laying a cable on the main road, sir,” he explained. “The regular roads are closed.”

  “Is that so?” I asked.

  “Yes, sir. We need to take a service route.”

  “I see,” I said. “It must be quite a project; this detour of yours is taking us pretty far out of the way.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Lewis shrugged his shoulders, then faked a laugh, and said, “Oh, we’re not going to Fort Sebastian, sir. Colonel Hollingsworth wants to meet you at the airfield.”

  The road we were on would take us past the field, that much was true. “So he’s at the airfield? I could have sworn you said we were meeting at Fort Sebastian,” I said.

  The sergeant responded with another nervous laugh. “Did I? I always do that, sir. I was thinking about Fort Sebastian when I meant to say we were meeting the colonel at the airfield, and I switched it around.” His voice was friendly, and he said all the right words.

  It was a trap, of course. I had suspected it from the moment I saw the jeep. Stuck behind the wheel, though, he could not pull a gun on me. I had control of the situation.

  We were driving at eighty miles per hour. A few miles ahead of us, the edge of the airfield was visible behind a row of small buildings. I pretended not to notice it. We passed two roads that wound around to the airfield. Lewis did not slow down as we reached the third. I doubted he would slow down at the fourth.

  “How long have you been here, kid?” I asked.

  “Six years, sir,” he said.

  If this kid operated like the ones on St. Augustine, we’d find the real Kit Lewis’s body in a day or two. I wondered if he had been strangled, drowned, burned, or dissolved.

  “I’m not asking how long Kit Lewis has been here,” I said. “I’m asking how long you have been here.”

  “Three days,” he said, the friendly sheen missing from his voice. If he had a gun, he made no move to draw it. He did not need to worry about me. Traveling in a jeep at eighty miles per hour, I would not attack the driver.

  The stalemate would last until we came to a stop. He might pull a gun at that point, but I doubted it. The kid showed no signs of fear. He clearly thought he could kill me anytime he wanted. I felt the same way about him. Only one of us could be right.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “How did you get here?” I asked. “You’re a long way from Earth.”

  Lewis laughed, and not in the friendly way that he laughed when he still wanted to convince me we were going to Fort Sebastian. Now he sounded disdainful and possibly unhinged. “Are you going to interrogate me right up to the end?”

  “It’s better than dying curious,” I said.

  “Sorry to disappoint you, General, but I didn’t come here to answer questions.”

  “I suppose not,” I said. “But out of curiosity, how did you get here?”

  He laughed. “I don’t know the name of the ship.”

  We were rapidly approaching the east end of town. The buildings became smaller, and the lots became larger. Civilization gave way to countryside. We passed a stand of trees. Off in the distance, I saw hills and forests. The end of the road, I thought.

  “Are you working for the Unified Authority?” I asked, pretending to be a little afraid. I wasn’t afraid at that point, not in the least. My combat reflex had not kicked in, but I didn’t care. I did not think I would need it. The fight would not last long. I’d fought this make of clone a thousand times. He was just a clone, just an ordinary standard-issue clone.

  “Sure,” he said.

  He slowed to thirty miles per hour as we approached the trees.

  “So you’re not Avatari,” I said.

  “What the speck is Avatari?”

  “Alien,” I said.

  “I’m property of the Unified Authority Marines, just like you.”

  “You’re a different make,” I pointed out.

  He slowed the jeep to fifteen miles per hour as he turned onto a small dirt road. When we bounced over a bump, I grabbed Lewis behind the neck and slammed his face into the steering wheel, then I slammed the bottom edge of my fist into the base of his skull.

  During the moment that he blacked out, I slipped the gear into park, hoping the jeep would come to a stop; but its gears ground together, its engine whined, and the wheels locked as we skidded into a ditch. Bracing myself for the slow collision, I watched Lewis’s already bloody face slam into the wheel a second time, tearing gashes across his forehead and eyebrows.

  We landed nose down in a three-foot ditch. I climbed out of the jeep, pulling Lewis out as well, carrying him away from the ditch and slinging his limp ass down on the hard forest floor. I checked his pockets. He’d come unarmed. No gun. No knife.

  He moaned as he started to wake, so I kicked him in the ribs, probably shattering two or three of them. The man did not call out in pain. He made a grunting noise, but he did not writhe or cough up blood. He was awake enough to know that I’d kicked him, but he did not curl up to protect himself.

  “Get up, asshole,” I said, and I kicked him again, in the same spot, doing damage to organs that were no longer protected by bones.

  “You kick me again, Harris, and I’
ll break your specking legs,” he said calmly.

  “I don’t think so,” I said, and I kicked him again. I kicked him hard, and I felt the side of his body give way like the side of an overripe melon.

  Lewis sat up coughing. When the coughing stopped, he looked to his right and spat blood.

  “How many of you are there?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said, sounding as if he did not take my question seriously.

  My next kick was not to the ribs. It was a roundhouse, and it struck him across the cheek. Had I connected two inches higher, I would have shattered his eye socket, but I did not intend to inflict that kind of damage. Not yet.

  The kick to the face knocked Lewis flat. He lay there, rubbing his cheek, and said, “I’m going to break your arms and legs and your ribs before I kill you.” The words rang hollow, but his voice radiated anger instead of fear.

  “I don’t think you understand what’s going on here. See, now, I am the one standing, and you are the one on the ground who just got his face kicked. Correct me if I’m wrong; but the way I see it, you are in the shithouse, pal.”

  “It looks that way,” he said as he sat up.

  I kicked him again. This time I kicked him in the ribs first, and then doubled up on the kick and fetched him a simple soccer kick across the face.

  Lying on his back, staring up at me as he felt his injured ribs, he said, “Stop kicking me.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “You won’t get anything out of me if I’m dead.”

  I wasn’t sure that was true; his autopsy might provide all kinds of answers. “Tell me what I need to know, and maybe we can both walk out of here,” I lied.

  “Why the speck would I let you walk?” he asked. He rolled backward, toward the jeep and slid into the trench headfirst. I felt sorry for the bastard, until I saw how quickly he sprang to his feet.

  The expression on his face looked more animal than human. His eyes focused on me to the exclusion of anything else, his lips formed a sneer.

  My combat reflex kicked in quickly. A reviving soup of adrenaline and testosterone flowed through my veins, clearing my mind and sharpening my reflexes. There was no fight or flight once the reflex began, there was only fight. Lewis lunged at me quickly, striking first high, then low, then crashing into me with all of his weight. I fell backward, with him attaching himself around my waist, still slamming his fists into my ribs and gut. I hit the ground hard, knocking the air out of my lungs. As I struggled for breath, he pounded his left hand into my chest and his right hand into my face.