The Clone Empire

by Steven L. Kent

  “Did your friend happen to mention where the aliens are going after Olympus Kri?” Warshaw asked, sounding more than a little suspicious.

  “Terraneau.”

  Warshaw laughed. “Terraneau? Oh, that’s rich. Serves those assholes right for kicking us off their specking planet.”

  I did not appreciate the irony. Warshaw was thinking of Doctorow. I was thinking of Ava. “We need to clear them out,” I said.

  Looking like a god in a Greek statue display, Warshaw folded his arms across his barrel chest, fixed me with a cold stare, and said, “We can’t evacuate every specking planet.”

  “We have to try,” I said. “We’re talking about millions of people.”

  “Not our people,” Warshaw said. “Remember, Harris, they didn’t want anything to do with us.”

  “We can’t just sit back and watch it happen,” I said.

  “Where would we put the refugees? We can’t keep moving them from planet to planet. We can’t even specking fit that many passengers in our ships. Even if the Unifieds come out with a fleet of million-man barges, we can’t fit ’em all.

  “And that’s assuming that Freeman and the Unifieds are telling us the truth. I’m not convinced.”

  “They sent me a video file taken by a satellite over New Copenhagen. Want to have a look?” I asked. I’d had the file queued and ready before I called Warshaw, now I simply touched a corner of the screen to upload the file.

  I studied Warshaw’s reaction as he reviewed the devastation. For the first twenty seconds, he scrutinized the images with the air of detachment one would expect from a high-ranking officer. After that, wrinkles appeared across his broad face, and his scowl went slack.

  “Did you get to Valhalla?” I asked.

  “Valhalla?”

  “The city,” I said.

  “I’m there now. It doesn’t look as bad as Norristown did after the aliens attacked.”

  It was and it wasn’t, I thought. “Look at the buildings. Look at the windows. Everything is burned.” Everything was charred, so that even the bricks looked like they were covered with soot.

  “Did they set off a nuke?” Warshaw asked.

  “The Avatari don’t use bombs,” I said. He was right, though, Valhalla had that burned-out look you see in the aftermath of a nuclear blast; but it didn’t have the blasted look. Most of the buildings were standing; and the buildings that had collapsed looked like they had been crushed from the top. There was no rhyme or reason to the destruction.

  “Maybe they did it to themselves,” Warshaw said. He did not look up as he said this. His eyes remained fixed on the images of New Copenhagen, taking in every last prurient detail.

  “What are you saying? Do you think this was some sort of accident? You can’t possibly think they did this on purpose. You don’t believe that any more than I do.”

  Warshaw grunted some indistinguishable response.

  “Sweetwater says the destruction was global, not an inch of the planet was spared. The Unifieds couldn’t do that even if they wanted to. They don’t have anything powerful enough to do that. If they did, they would have used it on us instead of themselves.”

  “I don’t trust them,” Warshaw said.

  “Yeah, me either.”

  The anomaly spread like a budding flower, and an explorer emerged. The explorer had neither the sharp edges of a warship nor the boxy profile of a transport. It had a long, cylindrical fuselage with wide, jutting wings that could provide glide in an atmosphere.

  The explorer was not outfitted with weapons or armor, not even shields. It had barely cleared the corona of the broadcast anomaly when two squadrons of E.M.N. Tomcats circled in behind it. If the ship varied from its prescribed course, the fighters would blow it apart.

  Seeing our fighters close in tight around the explorer stirred an odd emotion in me. Fighters were small ships. The sight of them attacking a capital ship always reminded me of bees going after a bear. This time, though, they had surrounded another small target. The explorer was nearly twice as long as the Tomcats and considerably wider; but it looked helpless ringed by our birds of prey.

  Decelerating as it glided toward our armada, the explorer approached the Salah ad-Din. Coming to Olympus Kri in a lone ship, unescorted and unarmed had been an act of faith and desperation. A rodent among lions, the little U.A. ship threaded a path between battleships and fighter carriers. Any ship in our fleet could have destroyed that scientific explorer with a swipe of its shields or a single shot from its cannons.

  The explorer and its escort slowed down to three-minute miles as ad-Din security ran tests for explosives, weapons, and chemicals. Once cleared, the explorer retracted its gangly wings, then hovered into a landing tunnel. I waited and watched as the explorer cleared through the locks.

  “Are you sure you want to go alone?” Hollingsworth asked.

  We stood at the edge of the track. A team of MPs dressed in ground-crew uniforms crowded around the explorer with pistols in their pockets and tools in their hands while a genuine traffic ace guided the explorer into its parking slot.

  The hatch opened, and our armed MPs/ground crew boarded the ship to “service” it. They weren’t fooling anyone. They boarded like Marines, not engineers, rushing up the steps, stopping to scan for enemies as they entered the cabin, then bowling ahead.

  A few moments later, a second crew entered the explorer and checked the engines and batteries. Before entering the bird, I made a show of telling Hollingsworth to keep our fleet on high alert, as if he had any sort of authority in the fleet. We traded salutes, then I entered the U.A. ship alone.

  Three men met me as I stepped into the cabin. I recognized all of them—Tobias Andropov, the newest member of the Unified Authority Linear Committee; General George “Nickel” Hill, now the highest-ranking officer in the U.A. military; and Gordon Hughes, a native of Olympus Kri who had risen to the highest seats of power in the Unified Authority before defecting to the Confederate Arms Treaty during the Mogat War.

  Like me, these men had made a show of good faith, arriving without guards or weapons. Of the three, I knew Hill best, having served with him on New Copenhagen. We’d attended briefings together. I’d met Hughes once before as well. He’d torn me apart on the floor of the House of Representatives.

  I’d never met Andropov though I felt like I knew him better than the others. He was one of the architects of the program that placed clones in concentrations camps and ultimately abandoned us in space. Hill and Hughes had played forgettable parts in my life, Andropov had made a memorable contribution.

  I had no time for sulking or harboring grudges on this outing, though. Andropov and I shook hands. We greeted each other with somber smiles and looked each other in the eye as we exchanged pleasantries.

  “General Harris, I have heard so much about you. It’s good of you to meet with us,” Andropov said.

  “Sounds like we have a lot to talk about,” I said.

  Next came Hughes, an old man with the face of an ancient. The bags under his eyes were the color of dead skin. His hair was brown, with large shocks of white. It tapered off around his temples. A fine network of blue-black arteries formed a fishnet pattern on the right side of his nose. Years back, this man had cut a heroic figure, one of those rare politicians who had fought in the wars. Now he had red-rimmed eyes and bleached skin. His handshake was firm, but his palm was a sponge.

  “It’s been a while, Congressman,” I said as I shook his hand.

  “How is my planet?” he asked.

  So asks the once-powerful representative of Olympus Kri, I thought. Still shaking his hand, I pledged, “We will do everything we can to protect it.”

  General Hill and I traded salutes grudgingly. We were members of antagonistic forces. He did not recognize my authority, and I despised his.

  “So,” he said, “back to New Copenhagen.”

  “Back to New Copenhagen,” I agreed. Hill had been against the deportation of clones. I felt anger toward the
man, but it was unjustified. The politics that made us enemies were not of his making.

  The ground crew turned the explorer around, and we launched. Fighters followed us as we flew away from the Salah ad-Din. To me, they no longer looked like protection. They looked like my last line of support. It occurred to me that I was now a prisoner of the Unified Authority. If we broadcasted to Earth instead of New Copenhagen, I would be tried and executed.

  We flew out into space for several minutes. Our fighter escort fell away, and soon the fleet vanished in the distance.

  “I was always very interested to meet you, General,” said Tobias Andropov. He was the youngest man in the cabin. Well, he was the youngest natural-born among us, younger than Hill and a great deal younger than Hughes. He was forty-four, making him fifteen years older than me. His black hair had the flat look of hair that is dyed, but his skin was smooth, and his blue eyes were clear of veins and bags.

  “I read a lot of military history as a boy. I don’t know if you knew this, but my father was a general in the Marines.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said, though, in fact, I was very aware of his father. Brigadier General Mikhail Andropov never shied away from a fight, and he never lost, but he maintained that perfect record by drawing deeply from an endless pool of cloned conscripts.

  “I’ve read a lot about Liberators, and I found something interesting. They never lost a battle, not even so much as a skirmish,” he said.

  “There was Little Man,” I said. That was a famous land battle in which 2,300 Marines were sent to capture a planet. Only seven of them survived. “We had four Liberators in that battle.” I was the only Liberator who made it out.

  Sounding surprised, Andropov said, “We won that battle.”

  Historians would see it as a great victory, but the survivors didn’t. We had seven survivors, and the Mogats had none. As our forces fought the Mogats on the planet, the Scutum-Crux Fleet ambushed and destroyed three Mogat battleships. From the historian’s point of view, we had won a great victory, destroying three of their ships and all of their ground forces.

  Tint shields formed over the windows. Hill and Hughes, deep in a conversation of their own, probably did not even notice the anomaly as we broadcasted across the Orion Arm.

  “What about New Prague and Albatross Island?” I asked.

  “Those weren’t battles, General; they were police actions, and the Liberators came out on top.”

  “They went berserk and killed civilians,” I said.

  “You’re not looking at it with a clinical eye,” Andropov said. “They accomplished their objectives in both cases, then lost control of themselves afterward. It wasn’t the battles that they lost; they destroyed the enemy.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it,” I said.

  “And you are the last of the Liberators. I find it interesting that even after you defected to the Enlisted Man’s Empire, you’re still winning every battle,” Andropov went on.

  Defected to the Enlisted Man’s Empire? I thought. First this son of a bitch had me locked in a concentration camp, then he had me marooned in space, where he planned to use me for target practice; and now he says I defected. I decided to shut him out. From here on out, I would only pretend to listen to him.

  As I started to let my mind wander, Gordon Hughes joined our conversation. He said, “But we’re not here to discuss military history; we’re here to plan an evacuation.”

  “Right,” Andropov agreed. “That is why we’ve come.”

  “Mr. Andropov is of the opinion that we might be able to fight our way out of this situation,” Hughes said.

  “I suggested the possibility,” Andropov said. He turned to me, and explained, “I simply meant that there are other avenues to explore besides evacuation. We could make the entire Navy available for the fight thanks to your empire’s new broadcast network. Should the aliens try to capture Olympus Kri, well, we now know how to blast through their ion-curtain defense.”

  General Hill spoke a word into the intercommunications system, then leaned into our conversation and spoke softly. “Mr. Andropov, our pilot informs me that we are about to enter the atmosphere.”

  The explorer did not inject itself into the atmosphere with the grace of my shuttle, but it broke through more smoothly than a transport would have. The sky outside our ship was dark with clouds as fine as lace.

  “Before you experiment with military options, you’d better evacuate the planet,” Hughes reminded Andropov. “We all agreed that the first thing we need to do is to evacuate Olympus Kri.”

  He looked so old, a caved-in, wilted wax model of the one-time political heavyweight known as Gordon Hughes.

  Andropov drummed the fingers of his right hand along the top of his armrest, then asked, “Where do you suggest we take them, Gordon?”

  “Take them to Earth,” Hughes said. “God knows there’s enough room for them there.”

  “What are we going to do with the population of Terraneau?” Andropov asked.

  “As I understand it, there are only five million people left on Terraneau,” Hughes said. “There’s plenty of room for them on Earth.”

  “And Providence Kri? What about the people on Providence Kri?”

  “Take them all to Earth.”

  It sounded like the bastards expected to evacuate our whole damned empire.

  The lower we descended, the more grim the atmosphere became. I could see the planet below through a hazy sky that was black, but not pitch-black. It was a dirty, rusty black.

  The thing that surprised me most was the snow. A fresh layer of fluffy gray snow covered the burned-out countryside, blanketing forests in which the burned-out hulls of pine trees pointed into the sky, as straight and naked as sewing needles.

  There could be no question that this was New Copenhagen, I’d fought in these woods under very different conditions. I recognized the terrain. I recognized the roll of the forest floor, even spotted clearings in which our Marines and soldiers had ambushed the enemy.

  Clearings? The entire specking forest was a goddamned clearing. I could not see so much as a hint of a leaf or a pine needle.

  “What kind of weapon does something like this?” I asked.

  “Sweetwater thinks the Avatari ignited the atmosphere,” said General Hill.

  “Ignited the atmosphere?” I asked. “What the hell does that mean?” I was angry. I was irritable. I was scared.

  No one responded. They didn’t know.

  “Have you debriefed the survivors?” I asked.

  Hughes answered in a hushed voice. “That is the point, General. There are no survivors.”

  When I looked back out the window, we were flying above Valhalla, the capital city of New Copenhagen. I had seen this city destroyed; but in the three years since I left, the residents had undoubtedly rebuilt it.

  “It looks a lot better now than it did when the Avatari left the first time,” Nickel Hill said.

  “Igniting the atmosphere” had toppled some buildings and left others standing. I saw no logic in the buildings that remained and the ones that fell. We flew over tall buildings that stood and piles of rubble that might have once been great skyscrapers. On one side of the street a three-story building might stand untouched, while across the street, a building of seemingly similar size lay in ruins.

  Our pilot took us lower and lower until the roofs of the tallest buildings passed only a few feet below our wings. I saw melted roadways below us and streetlamps with posts that had wilted like old sticks of celery. We flew over an intersection in which cars had sunk axle deep into the road below them. The cars were all the same color now, the dull nickel gray of burned metal.

  “We landed drones down there to gather data,” Hill said. He always struck me as a man with a love of gadgets and an appreciation for science. “The radiation levels are normal. The carbon monoxide is off the charts, but that’s predictable. Whatever did this, it killed off the plant life. It burned everything. We haven’t found a
patch of ground that has not been burned.”

  Flying low to the ground, we passed a tall skyscraper that reached well above us. The glass in some of its windows had melted and run down the side of the building like wax from a candle. The entire building was covered with soot.

  “I can tell you what Sweetwater says happened here if you’re interested,” General Hill said. Of all the generals stationed on New Copenhagen, George Hill was the only one who took Sweetwater seriously. “Sweetwater doesn’t think we fought the Avatari Army that first time out. He thinks they sent their exterminators, maybe only their janitorial squad. He says they sent their C-team to sweep us cockroaches out of the way. That’s what we fought.

  “He thinks they’re sending their army this time. Last time they wanted us to leave. That was before we took our planets back. Now they’re sending their army.”

  I turned from Hill and stared out the window. Below us was a park in which a blackened and mostly melted slide stood on a glittering mound that looked like it was made of glass. Scanning the grounds, I did not see so much as a single blade of grass.

  We left the city, flying no more than fifty feet above a residential suburb. Some of the homes below us had exploded. For the most part, the neighborhood looked like it could be washed clean with a hose, just spray the soot away and move right in.

  “I don’t want to fight them again,” Hill admitted. “I think we got lucky last time. I think we got lucky, and they didn’t take us seriously, and they were fighting with one arm tied behind their backs, and they still almost won.”

  “We don’t have any other options,” Andropov said. “Even if we move everyone to Earth, how long do you think it will be before they come kill us there?”

  The pilot banked and turned so that he could take us back for another pass across Valhalla. As he did, I saw a park with a large reflection pool. The pool was empty, but the ground reflected our lights in smeared streaks, as if it were made of crudely made glass.