ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I want to thank my editors John Morgan (who moved on before this project could be finished) and Anne Sowards (who took over) for everything they have done to help me. Mark Adams, of Texas Instruments fame, helped out a lot with this project, as did my parents. My parents always help a lot. Special thanks to Evan Nakachi, who gave me just the right encouragement at exactly the right moment to keep me going.
On the technical side, I need to thank Lewis Herrington, a former Marine colonel and a good friend. He spent a long time trying to help me understand the lifestyle, history, and tactics of the Marines—though his knowledge of cloning certainly left something to be desired.
Finally, I wish to thank my agent, Richard Curtis, because I am very lucky to have an agent like Richard Curtis.
CONCLUSION
It was only a matter of time, really. The Kamehameha would wait for a signal from its SEALs. When the signal did not arrive, a second team of SEALs would come down to investigate. That team would find me bleeding and weak and finish the execution. The job was three-quarters done already. Feeling around on the floor, I found my helmet and tried to switch to night-for-day, but my eyes twitched so erratically that I could not access the optical menus. I would spend my remaining hours of life lying blind on this floor, praying that the Noxium gas did not reach me.
When I awoke, I found myself on a narrow cot with a blanket pulled over my knees. I was in some kind of prison or cage, but the door was left open. I tried to sit up and bumped my head. My whole body ached.
“Still want to be a Marine?” a familiar, rumbling voice asked.
“Freeman? Is that you?” I asked. “How did you . . .”
“Klyber sent me to get you.” Freeman called back. “He contacted me before they even escorted you off Mars.
“He left you a message. Check the shades by your bed.”
There was a pair of mediaLink shades on the floor. It hurt to lean over the edge of the cage to grab the shades, but I forced myself to do it. My hands trembled too much to slip the shades in place. After a moment, Ray Freeman’s giant hands pulled the shades from mine, and he slipped them over my eyes.
Freeman let me know that he found you. When I heard that Admiral Huang arrested you on Mars, I didn’t know what to expect.
A lot has happened over the last few days. You may not know it, but the Cygnus, Perseus, and Scutum-Crux Arms have all declared independence. They call themselves the Confederate States. In response, the Linear Committee has shut down the House of Representatives. We have a lot to discuss, Wayson. But for now, you must stay hidden. Huang thinks you died on Ravenwood, and you should do nothing to make him think otherwise. Stay with Freeman. I have paid him to take care of you until I return.
I finished reading this and had an epiphany. I no longer cared. I did not care if Klyber wanted to protect me, and I did not care if his supership battered the Mogats into oblivion. Whether the Republic marched on to victory or burst into flames really did not matter.
I lay perfectly still for several minutes considering the message. “Was I reported missing?” I asked Freeman.
“Dead,” he answered. “Corporal Arlind Marsten is missing. I switched your helmets.”
“Marsten,” I said to myself. “He was a good kid. Good with computers.” I was sad to hear that he had died. All of them had died, I supposed.
“That means my military days are over,” I said. “I’m dead, and Marsten is AWOL.”
“I figure so,” Freeman said.
“Are you still looking for a partner?” I asked.
CHAPTER ONE
A.D. 2508
Gobi Station
“Name?” The sergeant barked the question without bothering to look up from his desk. I heard the indifference in his voice and could not fault him for his callous attitude. Nothing important ever happened in dried-up stink holes like Gobi. Once you got assigned to a planet like this, your only option was to sit and wait for a transfer. It could take years. I’d heard rumors about Marines spending their entire careers on backwater planets praying for any excuse to leave, even a war.
“Private First-class Wayson Harris reporting as ordered, sir.” I saluted, then handed him the sealed file that contained my orders.
I had shown up for this transfer wearing my Charlie Service uniform, not my armor. The uniform left me exposed to the desert air, and sweat had soaked through the material under my arms, not that this guy would notice. With his faded armor and stubble beard, this sergeant looked like he hadn’t bathed in years. All the same, I could barely wait to change into my armor. It wasn’t the protective chestplate and helmet I wanted. It was the climate-controlled bodysuit, which had kept me cool in temperatures even less livable than this desert.
“PFC Harris,” he echoed under his breath, not even bothering to look up. I shouldn’t have saluted. Once you leave basic training, you only salute officers or Marines acting under command authority. You don’t salute sergeants, and you certainly don’t call them “sir,” but it’s a hard habit to break. Having just spent three months living the spit-and-polish discipline of boot camp, I had come to fear drill sergeants for the gods they were. This sergeant, however, struck me as a heretic. His camouflage-coated armor had dulled, and there was sand and oil caked in the joints. His helmet sat on the ground beside his seat. I had never seen a Marine remove his helmet while on duty. If the job required combat armor, you wore the whole thing, or you were technically out of uniform.
The sergeant sat slumped in his chair with his armor loosened to fit his wilting posture. My drill sergeant would have given me a week in a detention cell if he saw me sitting like that; but I didn’t think this guy worried about the brig. The brass doesn’t punish you unless it catches you, and I doubted that any officers had set foot in this outpost in years. Why visit a place like Gobi Station and risk having a superior order you to stay. It could end your career.
“PFC Harris . . . PFC Harris . . . Let’s see what we have here,” he mumbled as he broke the red strip sealing my files. He flipped through the pages, occasionally stopping to scan a line. Apparently having found what he wanted, he spread the file on his desk and absentmindedly wrapped his fingers around his bristle-covered chin, as he browsed my records. “Fresh out of recruit training,” he muttered. Something caught his eye, and he paused and mulled over the information before looking up at me. “A ‘1’ in combat readiness?” He sounded like he wanted to laugh. “I’ve never seen anyone score under four hundred.”
“It’s a performance ranking, sir,” I said.
He sneered when he heard the word, “sir.” “You say something, private?”
“That number was my school rank. I drew top marks in hand-to-hand combat and marksmanship.”
Godfrey cocked an eyebrow in my direction, then returned to my paperwork. “Son of a bitch, perfect scores,” he whispered. “Why waste a perfectly good Marine on a shit-hole planet like this?”
He looked up at me. “You have a problem following orders, Harris?”
“No, sir,” I said. I was, in fact, quite obedient by human standards. The military, however, had considerably higher standards. Most conscripts came out of clone farms that the government euphemistically referred to as “orphanages.” Designed specifically for military life, the clones raised in these orphanages reacted to orders by reflex, even before their conscious minds could grasp what they had been asked to do. If an officer told them to dig a hole in the middle of a sidewalk, concrete chips and sparks would fly before the conscripts stopped to analyze the command. The clones weren’t stupid, just programmed to obey first and think later. As a natural-born human, I could not compete with their autonomic obedience. My brain took a moment to sort out orders.
My inability to
react to orders without thinking had caused me problems for as long as I could remember. I grew up in a military orphanage. Every child I knew was a clone. I might have entered Unified Authority Orphanage #553 the old-fashioned way—by having dead parents—but as a resident of UAO #553, I grew up with two thousand clones.
You would not believe the diversity that exists among two thousand supposedly identical beings. The Unified Authority “created all clones equal,” taking them from a single vat of carefully brewed DNA; but once they came out of the tube, time and experience filled in the cracks in their personalities. Look at a mess hall filled with two thousand clones, and they appear exactly alike. Live with them for any length of time, and the differences become obvious.
“Your file says that you are slow following orders,” Godfrey said.
“It’s comparing me to clones,” I said.
He nodded and flashed that wary smile sergeants use when they think you’re spouting bullshit. “Did you speck some officer’s daughter?”
“No, sir,” I said.
“No,” he grunted, and went back to my file. “Just wondering why they wasted a perfectly good recruit on a planet like this,” he said.
“Random assignment, I suppose, sir,” I said.
“Sure,” he said, and his smile turned caustic. “Well, Private First-class Harris, I am Glan Godfrey. You can call me ‘Glan,’ ‘Godfrey,’ or ‘Gutterwash.’ Do not call me ‘sir.’ Gobi is pretty much a long-term assignment. Get sent here, and you’re stuck for life. As long as you know that I am the sergeant and therefore the one you obey, you can forget everything they taught you in basic.”
Growing up in an orphanage, you learn how to spot clones—they’re all cut from the same helix. With Gutterwash Godfrey, however, I could not readily tell. He had sun-bleached blond hair that nearly reached his shoulders. Every clone I had ever known had brown hair and an assembly-line flattop haircut. A decade on a desert planet could have fried the color out of Godfrey’s hair, I supposed. But the loose armor and the thick stubble on his cheeks and chin . . . I thought that the spit and polish was programmed into their DNA. Could ten years on a desert planet bleach a man’s programming the way it bleached his hair?
Godfrey pressed a button on his console. “Got a rack?” he asked, without identifying himself.
“Fresh meat arrive?” a voice asked back.
“Or a reasonable facsimile.”
“Send him down, I’ll put him in Hutchins’s old rack,” the voice said.
“Hutchins?” I asked, when Godfrey closed the communication. “Shipped out?”
“Nope,” Godfrey said.
“Killed in action?” I asked.
“Nope. Suicide,” Godfrey said. “Corporal Dalmer will meet you down that hall.” He pointed ahead.
“Thank you, sir,” I said instinctively, wasting another salute.
Godfrey responded with that sardonic smile. “The sooner you lose that, the better we’ll get along.”
I grabbed my two travel cases and started down the open-air hall. I had clothes and toiletries in one bag. The other bag held my gear—one helmet, a complete set of body armor, one body glove, one weapons-and-gear belt, one government-issue particle-beam pistol with removable rifle stock, one government-issue M27 pistol with removable rifle stock, and one all-purpose combat knife/bayonet with seven-inch diamond blade. Thanks to lightweight plastic-titanium alloys, the bag with the armor weighed less than the one with my clothes.
Halfway down the hall, I stopped to stare at my surroundings. After three months in the immaculate white-walled corridors of Infantry Training Center 309, I had forgotten that places like Gobi Station existed. No, that’s not true. I never suspected that the Unified Authority set up bases in such decrepit buildings.
Judging by the name, “Gobi,” I knew it was an early settlement. The cartographers used to name planets after Earth locations in the early days of the expansion. Back then, we settled any planet with a breathable atmosphere. That was before the science of terraformation passed from theoretical possibility to common practice.
The open-air hall from Godfrey’s office to the barracks buzzed with flies. One side of the hall overlooked a stagnant pool of oily water surrounded by mud and reeds. I noticed the tail end of an animal poking out through the reeds. As I looked closer, I realized that it was an Earth-bred dog, a German shepherd, and that it was lying dead on its side.
“Don’t worry, we run that through filters before we drink it,” the corporal at the other end of the hall said. Like Godfrey, this man wore his armor and body glove without his helmet. The environmental climate control in the bodysuit must have felt good. I was perspiring so much that the back of my uniform now clung to the curve of my spine. Rivulets of sweat had run down the sides of my ribs.
“We drink that?” I asked.
“You either drink that or you buy water from the locals. The locals jack you. You could blow a full week’s pay buying a glass of water from them. Only Guttman has that kind of money.” He looked off toward the pond. “That sludge doesn’t taste bad once you strain it.
“Name’s Tron Dalmer,” the corporal said as he stepped out from the doorway. “Whatever you did to get stationed here, welcome to the asshole of the friggin’ universe. Did Gutterwash mention that we here at Gobi Station are the few and the proud?”
“No,” I said, feeling depressed.
“This here is the smallest Marine outpost in the whole damned U.A. Empire.”
I did not flinch, but Dalmer’s use of the word “Empire” gave me a start. The commanders who ran both the orphanage and the basic training facility continually grilled us on the difference between expansion and imperialism.
“How many men?” I asked, not sure that I wanted to know. Most outposts had anywhere from three thousand to five thousand Marines. I had heard of outposts on isolated moons that only had fifteen hundred men. Judging by the size of this three-story barracks building, I guessed the population of Gobi Station to be at least one thousand.
“Including you, forty-one,” Dalmer said. “The good news is that you don’t have to share your room. The bad news is that if the locals ever decide they don’t like us, they could trample our asses out of here. Of course, they barely notice us. Even with you we’re one man shy of a full platoon. Besides, they are so busy with their own wars, they hardly notice us.”
“So there is some action out here?” I asked.
Dalmer stared at me. “Fresh out of boot and in a rush to kill, eh?”
“I would hate to think that I wasted my time in boot camp,” I said.
Dalmer laughed. “You wasted it, Harris. We have standing orders to stay out of local feuds.” He led me into the barracks, an ancient building constructed of thick sandstone blocks with rows of modern dormitory cells wedged into its bulky framework. Each cell was designed to house four people, but no one lived in the cells on this floor. The doors hung open revealing dusty quarters. Gobi might once have played an integral part in the Unified Authority’s grand expansion, but that time clearly had passed. A thin layer of sand covered the floor, and I saw twisting trails where snakes had slithered across the floor.
“You can have this entire floor to yourself if you want,” Dalmer said. “Most of us prefer the bottom floor; it’s cooler in the summer. Cooler in the winter, too.”
“I take it this is summer?” I asked.
Dalmer snickered. “Boy, this is the dead of winter. Why do you think everybody’s got their helmets off?
We want to enjoy the cool air while it lasts.”
He might have been joking, but I doubted it. He might have been hazing me. Maybe a battalion of grunts was hiding in some far end of the base watching me on a monitor and giggling as Godfrey and Dalmer dressed up in faded armor and tricked the gullible newbie into believing he had been assigned to Hell. My suspicions abruptly died when Dalmer brought me to the bottom floor. An entire division would not have cluttered the barracks so convincingly if they had worked on it for
an entire month. The only light in the chamber came from windows carved in the meter-thick walls. As my eyes adjusted, I saw hundreds of particle-beam pistols piled in one corner of the floor. Dalmer followed my gaze and figured out what had caught my attention. “Broken,” he said. “Sand gets in the housing and scratches the mirrors. Leaves ’em worthless.”
On the open market, PB pistols sold for $2,000. Around the Corps, bullets were the ammunition of choice, but you could not count on them in low gravity or thin air. Particle-beam weapons were more difficult to maintain. You had to worry about prisms and energy coils—modular components that needed to be changed on a regular basis. “Why don’t you change out the mirrors?” I asked. Dalmer spit out a bitter laugh. “Fix them? Gobi Station used to be the outermost armory of the Cygnus Arm. We have a thousand guns for every man on this base.” He stopped and thought for a moment.
“Make that two thousand. We use them for shooting lizards. It’s easier to grab a new gun than to requisition replacement parts. Hell, Harris, it’s been two years since anybody’s even been out to the firing range. This is Gobi.”
He paused and stared into my eyes, probably wondering if I grasped his meaning. When I did not ask any questions, Dalmer continued. “Of course, we can’t just throw broken weapons away, or the locals will steal them. Godfrey dumped a load once. I think we armed half the planet.”
“Are there problems with the locals?” I asked.
“Not much. Some of them consider themselves gun-slingers, but it’s all petty stuff. I doubt the Senate loses much sleep over Gobi.” Dalmer turned and headed into the barracks. Most of the windows opened to that pond in the courtyard. Flies and a sulfurous smell wafted in on the trace of a breeze. I could barely wait to snap on my helmet and breathe filtered air, but Tron Dalmer did not seem to mind the stench. Nor was he bothered by the rest of the squalor—uniforms left hanging off furniture, plates of stale food, unmade bunks. Looking around the floor, I would have thought that spoiled children manned this outpost, not Marines.
The Clone Republic Page 1