The Clone Empire

by Steven L. Kent

  As I played the scene over in my mind, thoughts gave way to fitful sleep, and I dreamed of men fighting a war in which they killed each other with glass bullets. The men who died were buried in glass coffins in a cemetery with glass headstones. Watching them lower the coffins, I wondered if the men who lived and the men who died were made from the same kind of sand.

  I could not tell if it came the minute I fell asleep or six hours later. I woke up disoriented, groped for the communications console beside my bed, and croaked the word, “What?”

  The voice on the other end belonged to a woman. “General Harris, this is Jennifer Morman.”

  “Morman?” I asked. I did not recognize the name or the voice.

  “I’m the forensic psychologist you brought in from Morrowtown.”

  I recognized each of the words as she spoke them, but it took a moment before I pieced them together into a coherent stream. Sitting up, I said, “Right . . . right. Have you had a look at the clone I brought in?”

  “I’ve never seen anything quite like him,” she said.

  I glanced at the clock in the console. The time was 05:28. It no longer mattered whether it was 01:00 or 10:00; it was time for me to get moving. “Have you made any progress?” I asked as I climbed out of bed and slipped into my uniform. I still had sixty minutes before I had planned to wake up.

  “Oh, I’ve made progress all right,” she said. “I’ve made a lot of progress.”

  I told Morman I would be right over and headed out of my billet. Gobi Station did not have a “forensic psychology” lab, so I’d stuck her in an unused office in the station’s lowest basement. Five armed guards stood outside the lab . . . just in case.

  The guards knew me by sight. They stood at attention and let me through. Morman, on the other hand, had never seen me. She heard the door open, turned to say hello, and froze. A strange smile formed across her lips as she said, “Oh my Lord, you’re a Liberator.”

  Feeling a bit awkward, I said, “Dr. Morman, I’m General Harris.”

  “You are a Liberator, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I am a Liberator clone. Is that going to be a problem?” Even the most open-minded people were afraid of Liberators. We were the pit bulls of the synthetic crowd.

  “God, no,” she said. “It’s exciting to meet you. I thought the Liberators were extinct.”

  “As far as I know, I’m the last,” I said, no longer caring whether or not she felt comfortable around me. She made me uncomfortable. I got the feeling she was dissecting me with her eyes.

  “General, for a forensic psychologist like me, you are a gold mine. I’d love to sit down with you and maybe pick your brain.”

  Images of Sam the coroner manhandling Sergeant Lewis still played in my head. I did not want this woman giving me the psychological equivalent of an autopsy. “We’ll see,” I said, making a mental note not to spend any unnecessary time down here.

  As if she had read my thoughts, Dr. Morman nodded and became somewhat guarded. “Maybe we should stick to Sua,” she said.

  “What can you tell me about him?” I asked.

  “Oh well, he’s an interesting study,” she said in an all-business tone. “I don’t believe his name is Sua.”

  “It’s not. We found the real Philip Sua shortly after we arrested this man. Your patient had stuffed him into a meat locker.”

  “Was he all right?” Morman asked.

  I pulled a Freeman and answered the question by ignoring it.

  “Have you looked at Myron’s report?” she asked.

  Maybe I was still tired. It took me a moment to figure out that Myron must have been the older coroner. Myron and Sam, I told myself. “I’ve spoken with his assistant,” I said.

  “Okay, well, did he tell you about the low brain activity?” she asked. “I would have come to the same conclusion without Myron’s help. I mean, you don’t need to spend more than a minute with Sua to see what’s wrong with him, but the autopsy confirmed my findings. Philip Sua’s problems wouldn’t be any more obvious if he had three heads.”

  Or if he was a Liberator clone, I thought as I asked, “And what exactly is his problem?”

  “What are his problems? Sua’s problems are legion, General. This man has more devils in him than anyone could ever hope to exorcise.”

  “I don’t understand. Are you saying he’s insane?” I thought about the bastard standing for hours in that cargo hold, hitting himself with his tablet and berating himself. A lunatic? It made sense. Maybe a sociopath, too. His kind killed easily enough. Maybe the Unified Authority had developed a strain of mass-murderer clones. “Is he psychotic?”

  “Psychotic,” she said, the word lingering on her lips. She was an older woman, maybe in her forties, the first traces of gray showing in her hair. She wore glasses. She was trim and energetic, and she approached her work with this queer enthusiasm. I might have described her as a playful authority. Maybe she found irony in the notion of a Liberator clone accusing anyone else of being psychotic.

  “Clinically speaking, he is not psychotic. He hasn’t lost contact with reality,” she said. “Sua’s problems are more along the lines of neurosis than psychosis. I mean, he does have an induced physical condition, but his behavior is clearly neurotic.”

  She must have thought I knew more about forensic psychology than I did. I knew a few psychological terms, but Marines used those terms as pseudoobscenities not diagnosis. When an officer goes out of control, we may report him as a “loose cannon,” but in private conversation we’d refer to him as a “psychotic bastard.”

  “What do you mean by neurotic?” I asked.

  In answer, she winked, and said, “Let’s go have a word with Mr. Sua, shall we?” She led me through the door at the back of the office into the area that had become her makeshift lab. The only furniture in her lab was a desk, a few stools, and three long-necked floor lamps bunched close together like a trio of storks.

  In the center of the room, Philip Sua lay on the contraption that law-enforcement professionals referred to as an “incapacitation cage.” The cage did not rely on anything as primitive as bars or straps or clamps. If Sua managed to sit up, he could have walked right out of the laboratory. The problem was, his muscles weren’t listening to his brain.

  He lay on a table with two diodes a pin’s breadth away from the nape of his neck. Metal filaments inserted into the base of his skull channeled the steady stream of electricity running between those diodes through his spine, rendering his body helpless from the neck down. He could not turn his head or uncurl his fingers.

  Sua lay conscious on the table, watching us as we entered the room. His eyes switched back and forth between us; but he did not speak. If I expected a psychotic madman with a confident grin and dangerous eyes, that was not what I found. Sua looked nervous.

  “Can he speak?” I asked.

  “Oh yes, see, hear, speak . . . everything but move. He’s been very cooperative,” Morman said.

  I stepped closer to the cage. I did not hear the crackle of electricity or feel a tingle on my skin. The current running through Sua’s body was a mere trickle. “Hello, Sua,” I said.

  Dr. Morman introduced me as well. “Philip, this is General Harris.”

  “We’ve met,” he said, his brown eyes on my face but never quite meeting my gaze.

  I was glad to see two MPs standing in the far corner of the lab with guns on their belts. Despite her ghoulish fascination with Liberators, I liked Dr. Morman. She struck me as smart and competent, but also as a delicate woman playing with forces far more dangerous than she understood.

  That thought reminded me of the question that had been nagging me since we arrested Sua. Still watching the captive clone, I said, “Doctor, I’ve run into two of these clones so far. There is the tissue donor down at the morgue, then there is Sua.

  “The one in the morgue wouldn’t give up. He was coughing up blood, and we still had to shoot him.

  “Then there is Sua. He gave up without a fi
ght.”

  Morman had her answer ready. What she said made me forget all about sand, syringes, and bowls. Her answers were far more enlightening. Once she explained herself, everything fell into place.

  I asked her if she would be willing to present this information to the admirals during the afternoon session, and she said that would be fine. With the pieces of the puzzle she had given me, I finally understood the infiltrators. What the coroners found was good. What she uncovered was gold.

  “They built his brain with a slight abnormality,” Dr. Morman told me. She sat on her rolling stool, I stood. We were still in the lab, close enough for Sua to overhear our conversation.

  “You said that Myron and Sam told you about the slowed activity level in the dead clone’s frontal lobe.”

  I nodded.

  “It’s a symptom of BPD, Borderline Personality Disorder. It’s not uncommon . . . well, not among clones, it’s not. Mr. Sua is something of an extreme case.”

  I got as far as, “I don’t understand. What is Borderline Personality—” but she interrupted me.

  “Borderline Personality Disorder. It’s a neurophysiological condition that interferes with the patient’s ability to regulate emotion. It affects the way they interpret social questions. If someone told you or me that we had lint on our clothing or a smudge on our face, we’d go clean up and not give it a second thought. It’s a normal interaction, something you fix and forget.

  “Someone like Mr. Sua would take it as a personal affront.”

  “So he’s crazy,” I said.

  “Not crazy.”

  “And you think the Unified Authority purposely made him this way?” I asked.

  “The tissue from the clone in the morgue suggests he had the same disorder.” Dr. Morman took a long look at Sua, then turned back to me, and said, “Judging by the NAA samples, he was an extreme case as well.”

  “Why in the world would the Unified Authority want an army of pathologically insecure clones?” I asked.

  Dr. Morman took a deep breath, then spoke in a whisper. “People with BPD have a nearly debilitating fear of abandonment. If his superiors threatened him, maybe told him to kill you or they would give him a dishonorable discharge, Sua would see you as the cause of all his fears. He’d rather die than have his superiors abandon him.”

  “Okay, that explains Lewis’s behavior,” I said. When Dr. Morman gave me a funny look, I said, “The one in the morgue.

  “But Sua didn’t put up a fight at all. I came unarmed, and he surrendered.”

  “I asked him about that. He said you caught him off guard when you came in unarmed and alone,” said Dr. Morman. “BPD creates a fascinating dichotomy. Patients have a false sense of confidence. In extreme cases, like Sua’s, the patient thinks of himself as undefeatable. He had unreasonable overconfidence; but once you challenged that confidence, he was crushed. He said you disarmed him the first time he attacked you.”

  “The only time he attacked me,” I said.

  “Right. The second time you found him, you came in alone and unarmed, and that made him believe that you had no fear of him. When you treated him like a helpless child, he decided he did not stand a chance against you and gave up.”

  “So he’s useless,” I said.

  “So he’s dangerous,” Dr. Morman corrected me. “This man hates you. He has personalized his fight with you. If he were to get free, he would dedicate his life to destroying you, and he would find a way to do it.

  “And something else, he feels that way about the entire Enlisted Man’s Empire. He believes you and the other clones left him behind on Earth to die.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said.

  “General, it’s not ridiculous to him. That is how he interprets information. He’s not just an enemy soldier, not just some kind of spy; because of his built-in insecurities, this man takes every offense as if it were personal. He is strong, he is intelligent, and he is willing to dedicate his life to your destruction.

  “If you’re not worried by an enemy like that . . .” She shook her head. “You are a Liberator. Everyone knows what you are capable of doing; but I would hate to have someone like him hunting me, General Harris.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  During breakfast, I gave Admiral Cabot an assignment. We sat alone at a small table in a corner of the mess. I was tired from my early-morning meeting with the forensic psychologist. He looked well rested.

  “I need you to do something,” I said as I downed my third cup of coffee. “I need you to get me some information about cruisers.”

  Cabot put down his coffee and pulled out his notepad. “What are you looking for?” he asked.

  “I need to know about landing bays on cruisers.”

  “Okay, what about the landing bay?” he asked. He sounded confident, like he already had the answers.

  “The measurements. I need to know the number of bays and the square footage.”

  “One bay, it holds four transports. I’d put it at three thousand square feet, not including the tunnel.”

  He leaned forward, put up a hand as if blocking outsiders from overhearing what he had to say next, and added, “I spent three years on a cruiser.”

  “Not our cruisers,” I said. “Theirs. I need to know about the new ones, the cruisers the Unifieds have been using to spy on us.”

  “Oh.” Cabot sounded disappointed. He knew I wanted the information right away, and that meant missing part of the summit. I was getting in the way of his ass-kissing and politicking; and from his expression, I could tell that he resented it.

  “You can start by going to Navy Intel; you might get lucky,” I said.

  “What if they don’t have the information?” he asked.

  “Then fly out to the ad-Din and have Villanueva take you to Terraneau. There’s all kinds of wreckage floating around out there; you’re bound to find a cruiser.”

  “You want me to measure a wreck? How am I supposed to do that?”

  “I don’t care if you use your dick, just get me the specking dimensions. You got that?”

  It was crude talk, but I needed to get through to him. As we spoke, Cabot sat there watching the other admirals enter the briefing room. I could read his thoughts. He wanted to pawn the assignment off on an underling. He wanted to be in the summit rubbing shoulders with the two-stars.

  “By the way, don’t use your dick,” I said. “You’re going to need something longer.” And something that doesn’t change size every time a superior officer walks past, I thought.

  “Aye, aye, sir,” he said, barely trying to disguise the snarl in his voice.

  I had my reasons for wanting Cabot to handle this himself. Like him or hate him, J. Winston Cabot got things done. When I gave him orders, he executed them as if his next promotion depended on it. The information he brought me would check out; and since he would not be able to enter the summit until he got those dimensions, he’d be fast.

  “You better get going, Admiral,” I said. “I’m presenting this afternoon. I need that information before I start my presentation.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said. He took one last fawning look at the door to the summit, then put down his coffee and headed off.

  The morning’s meetings went quickly. We discussed fleet readiness. Warshaw had run a series of drills to test how quickly he could shift forces to meet an invasion. When he simulated an attack on the Golan Dry Docks in his first exercise, only six fleets responded. While the first ships arrived in thirteen minutes, the bulk took between forty minutes and an hour. The final three ships to arrive on the scene did not broadcast in for three hours.

  Heads rolled. High-ranking officers were offered early retirements. Rumor had it that one man shot himself rather than face Warshaw’s wrath.

  The next fire drill went better. It took less than ten minutes for the first few carriers to arrive. The entire armada broadcasted in within fifty minutes. Some of those ships went through four broadcast transfers, traveling as many as eighty-
three thousand light-years to arrive on the scene.

  This time Warshaw acknowledged that his captains had carried out their orders. He then took his frustrations out on the officers who designed the ERP—the “Emergency Response Protocol,” stating that the response times could be cut in half again if the routes were better organized.

  All of this came as old news to everyone else in the room; but I had never heard any of it. Until a few weeks ago, I had been safely tucked away on Terraneau worrying about the locals breaking into an underground parking lot. Now I had galactic security on my mind, and spy ships, and infiltrator clones.

  When Warshaw’s staff simulated a surprise attack on Olympus Kri, twenty-six fighter carriers and sixty-three battleships arrived on the scene within seventeen minutes. Another fifty ships arrived by the half-hour mark.

  As he spoke, I came to realize that Gary Warshaw had morphed into the Napoleon specking Bonaparte of his time. Maybe all clone brains weren’t created equal, I thought. But then again, maybe they were. Maybe the U.A. had accidentally packed two brains into Warshaw’s wide, bald pate.

  Standing at the lectern, looking mildly deformed with his hairless head and endless stream of muscles, Warshaw smiled and announced the results of his most recent exercise. Twenty-eight ships had responded to a simulated attack on Gobi within six minutes. Within twenty minutes, fifty-two ships had arrived on the scene.

  “You know what that tells me,” Warshaw said. “That tells me that the Enlisted Man’s Navy has the will to survive.”

  Applause rose from the audience. Were they applauding themselves for their fast response or Warshaw for working miracles? I didn’t know, and neither did he. I doubt the admirals knew, but they clapped until Warshaw raised his hands, signaling for them to stop. Warshaw’s presentation included charts and holographic displays. It lasted four hours. By the time he finished, it was time for lunch.

  I was next on the agenda, right after lunch. With a sinking feeling, I searched the dining hall for Cabot. He was nowhere to be seen.

  Not feeling especially hungry, I went to my billet. I called Station Security to see if Cabot had returned. They checked their records and reported that he’d left Gobi Station shortly before the morning session began. He had not yet returned.