The Clone Empire

by Steven L. Kent

  “Did you ever hear the story of the gossamer moth?” Hughes asked. He stared out the window, his eyes drinking in the devastation. Did he see New Copenhagen or Olympus Kri below?

  “I used to tell my children a bedtime story about a moth that lived near an air force base. It watched the fighters as they flew in and out of the base. It watched them dogfight and studied their maneuvers. One night a lizard crawled up into its tree, and the moth attacked the lizard, using the tactics it had learned by watching the fighters; but it forgot that it was just a moth, and the lizard ate it.

  “I don’t know what the Avatari are like; but I think to them, we’re just another moth.”

  We passed over a section of street with fancy-looking storefronts and outdoor restaurants, the kind of place that gets crowded on weekends. I looked for bodies or signs of life and saw nothing. No clothes. No toys. No shoes or hats. Anyone stuck down there must have been cremated, I thought; but what I said was, “Just a million moths.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Apparently Freeman wasn’t the only person with a direct line to important ghosts. He did not attend the negotiation with the Unified Authority, but a member of the U.A. Academy of Science with a direct link to Sweetwater and Breeze did. He was the liaison. He was the buffer. His job was to keep Sweetwater and Breeze informed while weeding out any information that might tip them off to their virtual reality.

  We sat in the conference room on the Kamehameha. Andropov, Hughes, Hill, and the scientist sat on one side of the table. I sat across from them. I was alone. Warshaw sat at the head of the table, running the meeting. Andropov, representing the highest power in the Unified Authority, should have conducted; but Warshaw would not allow it. We were in Enlisted Man’s space on an Enlisted Man’s ship. He insisted on calling the shots.

  Warshaw sat at the head of the table, making no effort to hide his disdain for everyone else in the room, including me. Methodically flexing his muscles in an effort to make himself more menacing, he sneered, “You give the orders in your corner of the galaxy, and I give the orders around here.”

  His eyes still locked on Andropov, he asked, “Harris, are you sure that was New Copenhagen they showed you?”

  “Yes,” I said, letting my annoyance show. We all knew Warshaw had big muscles, big specking deal. His physique wasn’t intimidating anybody in the room.

  “How do you know?” he asked me.

  “I recognized it,” I said.

  “I thought it’s all burned up,” Warshaw said. “How did you recognize it?”

  I saw no point answering; he would not accept anything I said. He wanted to make a point.

  “Admiral, we have to get moving,” Hughes said climbing partway out of his chair. “We need to begin the evacuation immediately. There may not be enough time as it is.”

  Appearing to weigh his options, Warshaw rubbed his jaw and sat in silence. His forearms bulged, then his biceps, then the muscles in his neck. The way he worked his muscles was impressive, but it was also pathetic.

  Hughes dropped back in his chair and threw his hands up in frustration. “Look, we’ll fly you to New Copenhagen, we’ll fly a team of clone scientists to take soil samples, we’ll do whatever it takes to make you believe us; but we need to start the evacuation. Every second could mean lives lost.”

  Warshaw turned to face him, smiled, and said, “I’m not convinced.”

  He was playing with us, with all of us. He wanted to show everyone who was in control.

  Accustomed to working with self-important officers and politicians, the academy scientist tried to get the meeting back on track. “Admiral, we can provide scientific findings. We’ve sent drones to run tests on several of your planets.”

  “My planets?” Warshaw asked. “What planets are my planets?”

  “The planets you stole from the Unified Authority,” Andropov said.

  “Oh, stole them. So you were trespassing on some of the planets we stole. Which ones?” Warshaw asked.

  “Olympus Kri, St. Augustine, Terraneau . . .” the academy man began.

  “Yeah? And how did you run tests on those planets?” Warshaw asked.

  “They sent in Double Ys,” I said.

  “What’s that?” Hughes asked.

  “Those were the clone assassins Andropov and his pals sent to kill me and my officers,” Warshaw said.

  Andropov flushed with anger. Hill looked nervous as well. “I didn’t know about that,” said Hughes.

  “You didn’t know about the clone assassins? Don’t worry about it; we’ve got the situation under control,” said Warshaw.

  “We found traces of a particle we’re calling ‘Tachyon D’ on New Copenhagen. There are large concentrations of that same particle on a few of your planets,” said the scientist.

  “Oh, we’re back to them being my planets,” Warshaw said, clearly trying to be unreasonable.

  “The highest concentration is on Olympus Kri. We also found it on Terraneau.”

  “So you think we should abandon our planets because you found this particle?” Warshaw asked.

  “There’s no point staying,” I said. “Whatever hit New Copenhagen, it didn’t leave much behind.”

  Warshaw softened, and asked, “How many people died on New Copenhagen?”

  Had I not been sitting right across from him, I would not have heard Andropov quietly whisper, “All of them.” I could not tell if the comment rose out of sarcasm or pain.

  “Seven million,” said Hughes.

  No one said anything for a few moments after that.

  Warshaw broke the silence. “What is the population on Olympus Kri?”

  “Seventeen million,” said Hughes, answering quickly, sounding desperate. “We have twenty-five barges capable of transporting 250,000 people at a time.”

  “Big boats,” Warshaw said, sounding impressed. “Are they self-broadcasting?”

  Hill answered, “No, sir, they are not.”

  “So how are you going to get them here?” Warshaw asked. Hill answered again. “We need you to link the Mars broadcast station into your network.”

  “Mars station? I thought the Mogats busted it,” Warshaw said, finally sitting up straight and taking the meeting seriously. Now it wasn’t just a question of saving lives; our military security was at stake. Warshaw might not have cared about lives and evacuations, but he took security seriously.

  “We’ve constructed a temporary station,” Hill said. “It’s primitive, but it will do the job for now.”

  Warshaw’s eyes narrowed and hardened. His mouth worked itself into a sneer. “So we open the gates and let you roll your horse in. I’m not biting,” he said. He turned to me, and added, “And you, Harris, I never figured you for a collaborator.”

  “Admiral . . .” Andropov began, at the same time as Hughes, Hill, and the scientist from the academy.

  But I was the one who had been challenged. I spoke over them. “Get this through your head, you overinflated son of a bitch. We have a new enemy, someone too big and mean to beat. There’s no question who is going to win this one. The only question is how many people we are going to lose.”

  “If they’re telling the truth,” Warshaw muttered.

  “Oh, right, we can’t trust the Unifieds. Tell you what. Let’s run a test on Olympus Kri,” I said. “We’ll just wait and watch, and after seventeen million people burn, then we’ll know it’s time to evacuate Terraneau. Is that what you want?”

  An angry silence filled the room. We all sat staring into the table.

  “Okay, so let’s say you’re right. Even if we get everybody off Olympus Kri, where do you plan on putting them?” Warshaw asked. It was the closest thing to an olive branch that he was willing to offer. He sat rigid in his chair, no longer flexing his muscles.

  “We have to save them,” Hughes said, sounding tired and discouraged.

  “If you’re routing them through Mars and taking them to Earth, your barges better have broadcast engines,” Warshaw said.<
br />
  “I told you, we’ve got a temporary station by Mars,” Andropov said.

  “Check the orbits. The jump from Earth to Mars is over one hundred million miles at the moment. That’s a three-hour trip, even for your ships.” Warshaw held up a little handheld computer he must have been hiding under the table.

  I did not know the positions of Earth and Mars in their orbits, but I had considered the problem. “There’s a way around that,” I said.

  The solution should have been obvious. “We can store the evacuees in the Mars Spaceport,” I said.

  “The spaceport is closed. We haven’t used it since the Mogat War,” Andropov said. The stupid bastard still wanted to fight the Avatari. He wanted to send out the clones like his father did in the good old days. Of course, he would not lead the fight himself. His bravery extended only as far as declaring wars, not fighting them.

  “The military used it as a processing station before the battle on New Copenhagen,” I said.

  “All of the equipment was operational when we shut it down,” Hill said. He sounded enthusiastic. The Mars Spaceport had dormitory rooms for hundreds of thousands of workers and enough floor space to accommodate millions of visitors. “We should be able to get the power and oxygen running.”

  “But that still leaves us with your Trojan horse,” Warshaw said. “I don’t trust you.” He looked directly at Andropov as he said this. “And I don’t want your specking ships in my broadcast network.”

  “Admiral, what if you took Olympus Kri off your broadcast grid?” Hughes’s voice was low and nervous and hollow.

  “Are you saying I should give the planet away?” Warshaw asked.

  “He’s saying we should amputate it,” I said. “The planet is as good as gone. Once we remove it from our network—”

  “I won’t know if the aliens came or the whole thing was a fraud,” Warshaw said.

  I looked across the table at Gordon Hughes. When we went to New Copenhagen, he saw one planet and thought of another. Now I was doing the same thing. “I’ll stay and oversee the evacuation,” I said, speaking of Olympus Kri and thinking of Terraneau . . . not even Terraneau, really, just one of its residents.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Earthdate: November 16, A.D. 2517

  Location: Olympus Kri

  Galactic Position: Orion Arm

  The rescue had been going on for three days now, and I still had not gotten used to the look of the Unified Authority’s new barges. They were little more than biospheres. They looked like floating warehouses as they grew out of their anomalies. They had a nub in the front for a cockpit and enormous rocket engines in the back, but they lacked even the semblance of wings or aerodynamics. They did not have landing bays or atmospheric locks. Transports would land along the hulls of the barges, on special pads with automatic clamps that would fasten onto the transports’ skids. Passengers would enter the barges through umbilical walkways.

  Only an idiot would broadcast in something so feeble, I thought to myself. I almost said something, then I remembered that I had traveled out of the Scutum-Crux Arm to the Cygnus Arm welded into a derelict battleship.

  “Those barges have got to be the ugliest ships I have seen in my entire life,” Hollingsworth said, as one of the barges floated toward the ad-Din. We were on the observation deck watching the Unified Authority ships arrive.

  The barge passed beside a U.A. battleship, positively dwarfing it. “It looks like a packing crate for mailing battleships,” Hollingsworth added. “You’d have more control steering a piece of shit down a toilet.”

  “Yeah,” I grunted, still astonished by the size of the barges.

  The U.A. battleship was long and narrow like a flying dagger. The barge could have held four of those ships easily and possibly even a fifth. It was that big.

  More barges followed in a series of flashes. They floated out of the broadcast zone like boxes on an assembly line.

  “It’s getting pretty close to zero hour. Why are you going down to the planet now?” Hollingsworth asked.

  I gave him a one-word answer, hoping to brush off the question. “Reconnaissance.”

  “Are you coming back to the ad-Din to watch the attack?” Hollingsworth asked.

  “I’m staying on the planet,” I said.

  He paused, grinned at me, and finally said, “I’m just curious. Does your martyr complex ever get in your way?”

  “What did you say?” I asked, though I’d heard him perfectly well. If he’d yelled or raised his voice, I would have been certain he was trying insult me, but he sounded calm and sincere.

  Alone on the observation deck, we stood side by side, staring out the viewport.

  “You assigned yourself to point position when we fought the aliens on Terraneau.”

  “I led a team—”

  “You were the commanding officer, not some specking platoon leader. You were supposed to observe and direct.”

  “I thought I could do a better job if I was on the field with my men,” I said.

  “You got stuck in a basement. You got trapped in a specking basement with half the specking Avatari Army swarming around you.”

  “You don’t think I did that on purpose?”

  “No, but it shouldn’t have happened.”

  “We won the battle,” I pointed out.

  “Thomer told me you led the team that went into the Avatari mines on New Copenhagen.” Thomer was Kelly Thomer, my second-in-command until he died on Terraneau. He was a good Marine and a great human being, even if he was synthetic.

  “He went in right beside me,” I said. “Maybe he was a martyr, too.”

  “He’s a dead martyr. You’re a living martyr. People respect dead martyrs. The living ones are just a pain in the ass.”

  I did not say anything. We’d both been friends with Thomer.

  “I heard you led the attack on the Mogat home world.”

  I saw no point in responding.

  Outside the ship, a line of ten enormous barges paraded past us. The barges were beige and marked with flashing lights to help transport pilots find landing pads.

  “I won’t go down after you,” Hollingsworth said. “If you get in trouble, you will be on your own.”

  “I wouldn’t ask you to,” I said.

  “I won’t send men down after you, either.”

  “What’s your point?” I asked.

  “I just . . . Damn it, Harris, you’re so specking self-righteous. No, it’s not even that. You’re not self-righteous; you’re the goddamned real thing. You’re righteous. I don’t know how that happened, how you became right, and I became wrong.”

  “I’m not so righteous,” I said, feeling truly offended.

  “Sooner or later, you’ll be a martyr, you’re just counting the days,” Hollingsworth said. “Just passing time until you meet your specking maker.”

  “I’m a clone, I’ve already met my makers, and I don’t like them,” I said.

  “So why go down to Olympus Kri? You say there’s going to be an apocalypse, fine, I believe you. What do you think you will accomplish by riding it out down there? Do you think they’re going to make you a saint or something? Saint Harris, guardian saint of clones and Marines.”

  He did not sound angry, but he did sound frustrated. He’d stood by quietly when Warshaw announced the airlift; but now that we were alone, he spoke his mind.

  “I don’t think I’m a saint, but I sure as hell am not cut out to be a general,” I said. “I don’t like giving orders, and I don’t like watching battles from a safe distance.”

  “Look, Harris, I admire you. You’re the best goddamn—”

  Rather than suffer through another eulogy, I interrupted him. “You didn’t like me much on Terraneau.”

  “That’s ’cause I thought you were wrong about everything. Turns out you were right about everything.”

  “I thought it was about Ava,” I said. “I thought you were mad about my hiding a girl in my quarters while everyone else was
confined to the ship.”

  Hollingsworth’s face flushed. “Yeah, well, that was more envy than anger. I would have done the same thing if I had a shot at Ava Gardner. Any man would.”

  His honesty stunned me.

  “You don’t really want to kill yourself, do you?” Hollingsworth asked.

  “Kill myself?” I laughed. “I tried that once. It didn’t work. Liberators can’t kill themselves; it goes against our programming.”

  I wasn’t lying. Part of my programming gave me a survival instinct. Even if I wanted to, I lacked the ability to pull the trigger—or the pin. The time I did try to commit suicide, my weapon of choice was a grenade.

  “It’s not a question of suicide; it’s a question of needing to be in the middle of the action. It’s in my DNA. I can’t kill myself, and I can’t sit out the fight.”

  “So you’re screwed,” Hollingsworth said.

  An impressive array of ships now filled the space above Olympus Kri. Warshaw sent six additional fighter carriers to watch out for the empire’s interests during the evacuation. They floated in seeming stasis beside enemy battleships. If the Avatari suddenly began traveling in spaceships and appeared in range, I thought they might find themselves in the fight of their lives.

  Of course, the Avatari did not travel in ships. They had no time for such primitive contrivances as traveling at the speed of light. In fact, they did not travel at all. We called them the “Avatari” because the army they sent to our galaxy was made of avatars instead of living beings.

  They’d used some new weapon during their latest assault on New Copenhagen, and we had no hope of making a stand against them until we knew what they had. That meant having men on the ground as well as eyes in the air. Our satellites would record the destruction from outside the atmosphere while I experienced it firsthand down below. Maybe I would see things or hear things or just feel things hiding underground that we would miss from above.

  And if I died? I had a bunch of patriotic and macho responses; but they were all for show. The truth was that I had survived too much already. I was ready to go.