The Clone Empire

by Steven L. Kent

  “I hope to be out of here tonight,” I said.

  “Well, that is good news.”

  “Look . . .” I paused to take a deep breath because if I didn’t, I might have killed the bastard. I didn’t even know what to call Doctorow anymore. I did not want to call him president, the title was bullshit. I would not call him by his first name, we were not friends.

  In the end, I decided not to call him anything, and simply said, “Listen, there’s a small plane hidden somewhere in Norristown, a Piper Bandit. If I had to guess, I would say it’s somewhere just south of town.”

  “Why should I care about a small plane?” Doctorow asked.

  “Because it can reach Earth,” I said.

  “How is that possible?” Doctorow asked, sounding more than a little concerned.

  “It’s self-broadcasting,” I explained. Even as I said this, I realized that I had overlooked an important question. Freeman said the battery was only good for one broadcast. That meant the Unified Authority had ferried the plane and its pilot to Terraneau space and dropped it off. But how had he, Freeman, traveled to Terraneau?

  “A self-broadcasting plane,” Doctorow repeated.

  “It’s very small, just a two-seater, and the broadcast engine is only good for one use. If the aliens come back, you can use it to send for help,” I said. I hated handing the plane over to Doctorow. I specking hated it. I was doing it for Ava. If the aliens did come back, I hoped like hell these assholes would send their distress signal in time for us to help them. I had my doubts.

  “I appreciate your telling me about this,” Doctorow said. “Now if you could direct us to the plane before its owner returns.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that,” I said.

  “No?” Doctorow asked.

  “The original pilot will be leaving with me and my men,” I said. It was true. What I neglected to mention was that he’d be traveling in a body bag.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  There was not a single trained surgeon in the entire Enlisted Man’s Navy. We had medical technicians who could set broken bones, remove a bullet, or treat a burst appendix; but medical school was the domain of natural-born officers. The closest clones got to that kind of education was training as a nurse.

  I didn’t need a surgeon to run the autopsy, but I wanted someone who knew his way around a corpse. I needed someone with the right eyes and skill set to examine the body of the late faux Sergeant Kit Lewis, someone who could tell me what the security posts had been missing.

  “I don’t know the first thing about forensics,” said the chief medical officer of the Salah ad-Din. We were in sick bay. The body, still wrapped in a self-chilling body bag, lay on the table before us.

  “Understood,” I said as I unzipped the bag. There he was, Sergeant Lewis, his remaining eye staring straight ahead, the jagged remains of his skull poking out from areas where his face had shriveled.

  The doctor looked at the corpse and swallowed, then quickly recovered. “Want my official opinion about what killed him?”

  “I know what killed him. I was there,” I said. “What I want to know is what makes him different than everyone else.”

  “Half his skull is missing, that’s different,” said the doctor.

  “Besides that,” I said.

  “Besides that he’s exactly like everyone else, he’s a clone,” the doctor said.

  I gave up and started to leave. When I reached the hatch, I looked back, and said, “This boy was different. I want to know why.”

  I left the sick bay and walked to the bridge.

  The Salah ad-Din was a Perseus-class fighter carrier—a moth-shaped monstrosity that measured fifty-one hundred feet from wingtip to wingtip and forty-five hundred feet from bow to stern. The walk to the bridge took nearly ten minutes.

  Captain Villanueva sat waiting for me when I arrived. He was a clone, of course. Villanueva was in his late forties. The crow’s-feet along his eyes stretched down to his cheeks when he smiled. His tiny sideburns had gone white, and he had a spackling of white hairs.

  The man was twenty years older than me, but he showed proper respect for my rank. I liked him. Unlike so many officers, Villanueva had no political ambitions. He had his fighter carrier and his crew, and he was satisfied.

  “I hear you brought luggage aboard my ship,” he said. When he saw that I had not caught his meaning, he said, “A dead man. I just got a call from sick bay. They said you dropped off a dead guy.”

  Maybe I was having trouble focusing. Try as I might to ignore her, Ava still haunted my thoughts. I was angry and jealous; but more than anything else, I just wanted to know that someone would protect her.

  “What do you want with a dead clone?” Villanueva asked.

  “He’s got secrets,” I said.

  “What kind of secrets?” Villanueva asked.

  “If I knew, I wouldn’t bother lugging him around,” I said. It seemed like a polite way of telling the captain to mind his own business, but Villanueva did not take it that way. He bobbed his head like a fighter ducking a punch, and said, “Yes, sir.”

  Villanueva’s lack of ambition made him easy to work with, but it also left him a trifle unmotivated. With remora fish like Admiral Cabot, ambition meant initiative. Cabot might have been preening for glory, but he got things done. Cabot did not wait for orders, he looked for ways to draw attention to himself. Villanueva, on the other hand, would happily stand around letting the proverbial moss grow under his feet.

  As we spoke, I saw officers glancing in our direction. There was no privacy on the bridge of the ad-Din, the deck was designed with no interior walls so that its officers could synchronize a thousand separate operations during attacks. The decks of the big ships were filled with desks and computer stations. Even the helm had more to do with keyboards and touch screens than steering yokes. The ad-Din was nearly a mile wide. You didn’t control a big bird like that using a stick and pedals.

  “Is there somewhere else we can speak?” I asked.

  Villanueva nodded and led me to a closet-sized conference room off the bridge floor. I sat across the narrow table from him, and asked, “What is the status of our evacuation?” I hated the term “evacuation”; it made it sound as if Doctorow had chased us away. In my mind, we were abandoning Terraneau, not evacuating it. The semantics mattered to me, but not to anyone else.

  “Your Marines are on board, sir,” Villanueva said.

  “All of them?” I asked, feeling a bit stunned.

  “All twenty-two hundred men are accounted for, sir. Are you sure you want to leave all of that equipment behind?”

  The equipment was the rather extensive arsenal of weapons I had procured from the graveyard of ships. It must have seemed strange to Villanueva that I would leave guns, grenades, rocket launchers, tanks, and even a half dozen transports in the hands of the local militia. Maybe it was a bad idea, but I wanted Doctorow to have the weapons. If the Avatari came back, he’d need them . . . she’d need them. Ava. Everything was about protecting Ava.

  “The Marine compound on this ship is fully stocked,” I said.

  “Aren’t we arming a potential enemy?” he asked.

  “You see Terraneau as a potential enemy?” I asked. “It’s an undeveloped planet with leaders who want to create a utopia. Hell, the locals probably don’t even want our guns.

  “I’ve got more important things on my mind.” I did. I had a complement of two thousand two hundred Marines that needed screening. We would leave for St. Augustine immediately, but I would keep my men under quarantine until I had searched them for infiltrators. With that many men, it could take a full day to check them all out. I gave Villanueva the order to take us to St. Augustine and excused myself.

  I was still feeling the effects from a couple of long days, and I should have gone to my quarters for an hour’s rest. Instead, I went down to the Marine complex for a quick inspection.

  The men were unpacking, and most of the barracks were dark. A team had begun se
tting up the shooting range. The cooks and their assistants clanged pots and fired up the stoves in the mess. Hollingsworth met me as I watched a few of his men mopping their barracks. I asked him how the move was progressing, and he told me he had it under control. Our conversation lasted a few antiseptic seconds, and I left for my billet.

  Villanueva sent an ensign to my quarters with the news that we had reached St. Augustine. When the ensign asked if I had any orders for him to relay back to the bridge, I shook my head and closed the door on the kid. I was genuinely tired, but I did not want to go to sleep. I had too much to do.

  I decided to rest for a few hours, then I would check my troops for intruders, then I would return to St. Augustine. I was stalling. I did not want to return to St. Augustine. It wasn’t the planet that bothered me; it was the group of ambitious officers who awaited me there.

  I hated having an entourage, but I had little choice in the matter. My preference was to travel quietly and alone, and to drop in on bases unannounced. I preferred traveling under the radar; but if I wanted to flush out the infiltrators, I needed them to see me coming and make the first move. Having a troop of worthless comfort-class officers in my wake made me easy to spot. So I would go back to wearing a bull’s-eye and waiting for someone to shoot.

  There was something else I wanted to avoid as well—contacting Admiral Warshaw. He wanted regular progress reports; but unless a coroner found something useful about the late Sergeant Lewis, I would have nothing to report.

  I turned off the lights and lay down for a nap, wondering what secrets the autopsy would reveal. A ship’s medic might not find anything, but that coroner on St. Augustine was another story. He’d know what to search for and how to find it. Yes, I told myself, I would bring in a trained coroner, then there would be results.

  My thoughts ran their course. Had I been Lewis’s first victim? No, of course not. We never found the body, but he must have killed a real Kit Lewis.

  What would have happened if Freeman had not followed us? I asked myself. The answer was obvious. I would have died. The answer was as obvious as the bruises on my face, arms, and neck.

  I drifted into a light sleep.

  If the man had waited a few more seconds, he might have caught me fast asleep instead of just dozing off. He had his gun ready when he slipped through the door, but I had already heard the soft hiss of the pneumatic piston and rolled off the bed.

  He must have thought he’d found an empty room. He stepped in and closed the door behind him, pausing when he saw my unmade rack. Peering from a gap between my desk and my bed, I saw the man’s legs and the silenced pistol he held in front of him.

  My billet was small, a bed, desk, closet, and head all built around each other as tightly as the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The lights of my communications console blinked on and off on the far wall; someone was trying to reach me. I hoped they would come to check on me when I did not answer.

  His gun at the ready, the man took a step toward my bed. Maybe he knew I was in here, maybe he thought I left it unmade like a guest in a hotel; but he took no chances. He walked to the edge of my rack, and said, “You might as well come out.”

  I heard uncertainty in his voice. He didn’t know I was in the room.

  “I know you’re here, Harris. I saw you come in.”

  I did not believe him. I sat quiet and waited. Hidden by the desk, I managed to crawl along the far side of the bed toward the bathroom. I was as silent as a cat on the prowl, and I felt the beginning of a combat reflex running through my veins.

  The man laughed, and said, “I can see you.” The stupid son of a bitch had his back to me when he said that. He was aiming his gun into my closet when I lunged at him from the door of the head.

  The bastard had lightning reflexes. He spun and clipped me across the jaw with his pistol. Lights popped behind my eyes, and my head spun for a moment, but I grabbed his gun hand with both of my hands as my momentum slammed both of us into my tiny work desk. He smashed a fist into my head as I knocked the pistol out of his hand.

  The man brought his knee into my chest as I slid to the floor and grabbed the pistol. He stomped at my hand, then kicked me across the jaw; but I held on to the gun. The fight was as good as over. He kicked me in the chest, sending me to the floor, then he bolted from the room. I took a moment to recover, then I leaped to my feet and ran through the door. By the time I reached the hall, the speedy bastard was gone.

  I reported the attack and placed the ship on alert even though I knew it was a waste of energy. Captain Villanueva placed security posts throughout the ad-Din, he set up security cameras and posted MPs to guard vital areas.

  He reacted thoroughly and by the book; but if stopping the infiltration had been that easy, Warshaw would have nipped our infiltration problem long ago.

  That night I received a message from Warshaw summoning his admirals to Gobi for a summit. As the “highest-ranking” officer in the E.M. Marines, I was required to attend.

  St. Augustine would have to wait. Screening my men would have to wait as well. They would be trapped on the ad-Din with an infiltrator in their midst. I had Villanueva send a transport to retrieve Cabot, then we set off for Gobi.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Earthdate: November 6, A.D. 2517

  Location: Gobi

  Galactic Position: Perseus Arm

  I brought the dead sergeant with me to the summit.

  Before wheeling him out of sick bay, I opened his cryogenic body bag to make sure it held a stiff instead of a stowaway. Frozen mist rose out as I spread the seam. The dead and partially dissected Kit Lewis stared back at me with his one remaining eye, little folds of skin peeled back from his cheek, ear, and neck.

  Seeing the frozen body, I realized that no one in their right mind would hide in a cryogenic bag. The temperature inside the bag remained a constant zero degrees, and there was no air.

  “You know you wouldn’t be in there if you had just dropped me at Fort Sebastian,” I said as I closed the bag. I slung it from the table to the cart and wheeled it toward the landing bay.

  In the meantime, a team of twenty MPs swept the landing bay and the transports for signs of tampering or unwanted visitors. After I heard the bay was clean, I posted the MPs by the door. The only people allowed in the landing area were me, Admiral Cabot, and my pilot—Sergeant Nobles.

  I found Nobles and Cabot when I arrived at the landing bay. They met me as I came up the transport ramp. Nobles, clearly uncomfortable around Cabot, shrugged off his generally casual attitude and stood at attention as he said, “Sir, this Marine does not mean any disrespect, but that body bag looks full.”

  “A coroner is going to have a look at him while we’re on Gobi,” I said.

  “From what this Marine has heard, sir, there are plenty of dead men at Gobi Station. Do you have any idea what killed them?”

  I nodded toward the gurney, and said, “He did.”

  “Sir?” asked Cabot.

  “Before I bagged him, our passenger was a Unified Authority infiltrator clone,” I said. Both Cabot and Nobles stared at the bag as if its contents might try to climb out; but Cabot understood, he’d been in on the investigation on St. Augustine. Nobles, like most of the men in the fleet, had no idea that Unified Authority had cooked up a new line of clones.

  “How soon can we go wheels up?” I asked Nobles, stealing him from his thoughts.

  “Whenever you are ready, sir,” he said.

  “I’m ready,” I said.

  I sent Cabot to go sit with Nobles in the cockpit while I remained in the kettle with the cadaver. The cabin was silent, filled with shadows and cold. I looked over the still form of Kit Lewis in his blue-gray body bag and remembered his fury as he attacked me. He’d had murder in his eyes and charged at me with not so much as a moment’s hesitation.

  These bastards could kill, no doubt about it. If we did not discover their secrets, they would spread and destroy us.

  I left the Salah ad-Din in lockdown.
The ship was quarantined, and a search had begun for the man who attacked me in my quarters.

  Every ship in the fleet was under lockdown. Until we figured out some way to protect ourselves, the best we could hope to do was stop the disease from spreading. For now, we would settle with a tourniquet approach, but soon enough we would upgrade to amputation.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The summit began the next day.

  For lack of a safer place, Warshaw decided to hold his summit in Gobi Station. Why not? He had a small army guarding the place. He had posts taking meaningless DNA samples at every door. Gobi Station was the safest spot in an entirely unsecured empire.

  Warshaw assigned human guards and robot sentries to patrol the grounds outside Gobi Station. Armored vehicles ran the perimeter. A battery of rocket launchers waited inside the gates. Gobi Station was prepared for war, not infestation.

  Inside the station, fleet officers mingled, followed by entourages of high-ranking hangers-on. As far as I could tell, I was the only Marine in attendance. I wore a tan uniform in a sea of white.

  Warshaw kicked the meetings off with a banquet. I sent Cabot in my place and used the time to hold a summit of my own in the morgue.

  Warshaw had brought two coroners in from Morrowtown, the capital of Gobi. When I entered the morgue, I found them hard at work, standing over gleaming steel trays holding carefully washed body parts. In the background, Sergeant Kit Lewis’s cadaver lay partially skinned and disassembled. It reminded me of the holographic “visible man” display my teacher used in physiology class.

  The coroners had peeled the skin from Lewis’s right cheek and pulled the pipes from his throat. The skin and ribs had been removed from the left side of his chest, revealing layers of soft pink meat. Any blood had been washed away. The cavity that once held his heart now sat empty like a secret compartment in a waxwork dummy.

  Whatever portion of the faux sergeant’s brain remained in his head had been scooped out, washed, weighed, and examined. Seeing the eviscerated body with its cubbyholes and cavities left me queasy, but seeing the organs on trays and in bowls did not bother me much. They had been carefully cleaned so that they were no more offensive than the meat in a butcher case.