Then Lee said something under his breath that struck me as very odd. “Specking clone.”
I had only met Vince Lee earlier that day when he and I went to explore the Kamehameha, so I did not notice the anomaly then. With time I would notice that though he was friendly and outgoing with me, Lee did not socialize with the other men in our platoon. He and I normally found a table off on our own.
When Lee bought drinks, he purchased Earth-made beer. An avid bodybuilder, he asked for permission to work out in the officers’ gym. In fact, he had as little contact as possible with other clones. No enlisted man saw himself as a clone, though most of them were indeed just that. Even so, antisyntheticism was rare among clones because they were raised with other clones, and the only people they knew growing up were clones. They did not know how to associate with natural-born people. But Lee, Lee was different. Like so many U.A. citizens, Vince Lee was quietly prejudiced against clones. He thought clones were beneath him. The difference was that other people were natural-born, Vince was synthetic. Many officers were antisynthetic; they despised their underlings. Vince was different. He despised his own kind.
The rest of the platoon arrived the following afternoon. That included our new sergeant—Tabor Shannon. As Vince might have put it, life aboard the Kamehameha became less “hospitable” the moment Shannon arrived.
Master Gunnery Sergeant Tabor Shannon landed on a late-afternoon shuttle. Shannon was the personification of the word “paradox.” He was gruff, ruthless, and often profane. He openly favored the men who transferred in with him and even referred to them as “my men” because they came with him from his previous platoon. He was a belligerent and battle-hardened Marine. But I soon found out that Shannon’s sense of duty added oddly smoothed edges to the jagged shards of his personality.
Captain McKay sent Lee and me to meet Shannon and the other men at the landing bay. We rushed down to the boarding zone. As the bay door opened, Lee said, “I bet he’s a prick. What do you want to bet he’s a real prick among men?”
We watched several officers disembark. Four pilots and a number of crewmen breezed past us without so much as a sideward glance. Shannon came next. He was tall and thin, with steep shoulders and a wiry frame. His fine white hair, the hair of an old man, did not match his sunburned face. Except for crow’s-feet and white hair, he looked like a thirty-year-old.
Shannon walked up to us and paused long enough to bark, “Twelfth Platoon, you part of my outfit?” When we nodded, he dropped his bags at our feet, and said, “Stow these on my rack.”
Under other circumstances that kind of arrogance pissed me off, but I had noticed something about Shannon’s bags that left me too stunned to care. Lee saw it, too. The letters “GCF” were stenciled large and red on the side of the bag. When I was growing up, every kid in the orphanage knew what those letters stood for—Galactic Central Fleet. That was a name with a dark history. “You don’t think he’s a Liberator?” I asked.
“Damn, I heard that they were all dead,” Lee said, staring at Shannon’s back as he left the bay. Watching Shannon disappear down the corridor, I felt a cold shiver run down my spine.
The truth was that I did not know much about the Galactic Central Fleet or the special strain of clones that were created to fight in it. The history books called them “Liberators,” but that was mostly because calling them “Butchers” seemed disrespectful.
The government deemed the battles in the Galactic Central War classified information and never released accounts of what took place. But the government could not classify the events that led up to war. Unified Authority ships began prospecting the “eye” of the galaxy—the nexus where the various arms of the Milky Way meet in a spiral—about forty years ago. That was during the height of the expansion. We had long suspected that we had the galaxy to ourselves, and exploration into the farthest and deepest corners of the frontier only increased the belief that the universe belonged to mankind. By this time we had traveled to the edge of the Milky Way but not to the center.
The media covered every detail of that first expedition to the center of the Galaxy, including its disastrous ending. Five self-broadcasting Pioneer-class vessels were sent. All five disappeared upon arrival in the Galactic Eye.
There was no information about what happened to the ships. Some people speculated that radiation or possibly some unknown element destroyed them as they emerged from their broadcast. The most common theory, of course, was that the expedition was attacked, but whatever really became of those ships happened so quickly that no information was relayed back to Earth. If the politicians and military types knew more than the general public, they did not let on.
Congress went into an emergency session and commissioned a special fleet to investigate—the Galactic Central Fleet, the largest and most-well-armed fleet in U.A. Naval history. The hearings and the creation of the Galactic Central Fleet were matters of public record. Reporters were taken out to the shipyards where the fleet’s 200 cruisers, 200 destroyers, and 180 battleships were under construction. It took three years to build the fleet. During that time, the entire Republic braced for an alien attack.
Once the fleet was constructed, however, the news accounts stopped. This much I knew—that the Galactic Central Fleet was launched on February 5, 2455, and that it vanished. The ships were sent to the Galactic Eye and never heard from again.
I heard tales about the events that followed, but they were all gossip and myths. To avoid increased panic, the government imposed a news blackout immediately after the fleet disappeared. Then, two months after the disappearance, the Senate announced that the galactic core was under U.A. control. The only historical record of the event was a statement from the secretary of the Navy stating that a battery of specially trained soldiers conquered ground zero. Some time after that, a congressional panel announced that the men in the GC regiment were an experimental class of clones known only as “Liberators.” There were no pictures of Liberator clones in our history texts; and though I searched, I never found any pictures on the mediaLink, nor did I ever find any information about the aliens that the Liberator clones fought in the Galactic Eye.
“The bag says ‘GCF,’” I said. “You don’t think he could be a Liberator?”
“You?” Lee asked, shaking his head.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I had a teacher who served with some Liberators. He said that they were taller and slimmer than other clones. He also said that they massacred entire planets.”
“One of my teachers said that they enjoyed killing people and that they killed civilians when they ran out of enemy soldiers,” said Lee. “That must have been an old rucksack,” he added, though he did not sound as if he believed it. “He didn’t look much older than us.”
Like me, he had probably done the math in his head. If the GCF disappeared forty years ago, that would put Gunny Sergeant Shannon in his late fifties or early sixties. He looked bright-eyed, spry, and mean as hell. He was clearly a clone . . . a different species of clone, but still a clone. He had the same dark features as Lee, though he was a few inches taller. They looked like brothers.
“Like seeing a ghost,” I muttered to myself. Having heard all kinds of rumors about Liberators in the orphanage, I should not have been surprised that Shannon looked so young. Liberators were supposed to have a synthetic gene that kept them young. Of course, I also heard that they had a fish gene that enabled them to breathe underwater and a slug gene that made them self-healing. I stopped believing the slug story by the time I was ten, but suddenly the youth gene seemed possible.
“We’d better stow his stuff,” Lee said. “I would hate to piss him off.”
Lee was too late. Just about everything pissed Shannon off. He marched into the barracks like a one-man wrecking crew, rearranging the racks and placing “his” Marines along the right side of the room. When Lee and I arrived, we walked into chaos. Acting on Shannon’s orders, the newly arrived PFCs dumped other men’s bags, books, and bedding to
the floor. When one of the displaced privates asked Shannon what was happening, the gunny shouted a chain of obscenities and nearly hit him. “What is your name, Private?” Shannon shouted, strings of spit flying out of his mouth.
“Private First Class Christopher Charla,” the private answered as he snapped to attention.
“Did the Congress of the Unified Authority award you that bunk, PFC Charla?”
“No,” Charla mumbled quietly.
“I did not hear you, Charla. What did you say to me?” Shannon stood on his toes, his shoulders hunched, every conceivable vein puffed out of his neck.
“No, Sergeant,” Charla bellowed back.
“Then this rack does not belong to you?” Shannon shouted. “Is that correct, Charla?”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
Judging by the concern on Lee’s face, I could tell that Shannon’s was not standard sergeant behavior. All I had to go by was Glan Godfrey—and old Gutterwash did not give me much to go by.
Sergeant Shannon turned to look at Lee and me. “I told you to stow those bags in my office,” he said, “then set up your racks. You sleep over there.” He pointed to the farthest bunks from his office, and I realized that he had just demoted us to the bottom of the platoon.
My situation became worse the following morning.
Still unable to adjust to Scutum-Crux time, I woke up at 0500 and fidgeted in my bunk until I was sure I could not fall back to sleep. I noticed that Vince Lee’s bunk lay empty. His clone frame lent itself well to bodybuilding, and he trained daily. My interests lay elsewhere. The one topic that interested me more than anything was battle-readiness. Weapons and hand-to-hand training lent themselves well to that preparation. After my discussion with Oberland, I had come to believe that knowing current events might also prepare me for battle. Knowing who I might have to fight and what they were fighting for had value. I put on my mediaLink shades to see if Ezer Kri was still in the news.
On-air analysts billed the Ezer Kri story as a crisis in the making. Apparently the Ezer Kri delegation asked the Linear Committee for a new senator. They wanted to hold a planetwide election and choose their senator by popular vote, the same way they elected their member of the House. According to the story, nearly every elected official on Ezer Kri was of Japanese descent. Though they were not stating it outright, the members of the committee seemed to want to excise everything Japanese from the planet. The request was refused. “Your request, Governor Yamashiro, is unconstitutional,” the committee chair said. “The Constitution specifically calls for appointed representation.”
Yoshi Yamashiro, the governor of Ezer Kri and the head of the delegation, next resubmitted a petition asking for permission to change the name of his planet from Ezer Kri to “Shin Nippon.”
The chairman of the Linear Committee pointed out that “Shin Nippon” meant “New Japan,” and refused to consider the petition.
At this point the story switched to video footage shot in the Committee chambers. The Ezer Kri delegation, made up of elderly men in black suits, sat at a huge wooden table covered with charts and computers. Their table faced a towering gallery packed with senators. The seven men in the delegation chatted among themselves in a language that I had never heard. Their voices rose and fell dramatically, and they did a lot of bowing. “Mr. Chairman,” one of them said in a breathless voice. “We ask that the official language of Ezer Kri be changed to Japanese. That is the language spoken by a plurality of our population,” he said, with a slight bow.
Angry chatter erupted in gallery.
“Governor Yamashiro,” the speaker shouted, banging his gavel. “I will not entertain such a request. You are entirely out of bounds. Your behavior signifies contempt for this body.”
The Japanese men spoke quietly among themselves. Yamashiro stood up. He was a short man with a stout chest and broad shoulders. He bowed. “I apologize for my offense, Mr. Chairman,” Yamashiro said. The room calmed, then Yamashiro spoke again. “I humbly suggest that you change the name of the Republic to the ‘Unified Singular Authority.’”
There was a moment of shocked silence, as if Yamashiro had performed some crude act that stunned every man in the room. Then hisses and angry conversation filled the chamber. The chairman pounded his gavel as the video segment ended.
The picture of the hearing faded and my shades now showed three analysts sitting around a table. One of them leaned forward. “This was footage of the Ezer Kri delegation’s meeting with the Linear Committee this morning. After having several requests denied, Governor Yoshi Yamashiro suggested that the Unified Authority be renamed ‘the Unified Singular Authority.’ As you can see, the reaction was swift and angry.”
“Jim,” a woman analyst cut in, “that reaction was to Yamashiro’s veiled suggestion that the government is really an extension of the old United States. The point of his comment was that we should take on the initials USA. Yamashiro made some good points,” the woman continued. “The Linear Committee has been openly antagonistic toward the Ezer Kri delegation. We’re not talking about a planet trying to break from the Republic, forgod’ssake, they just want to rename their planet.”
“It’s not just the planet name . . .” the first male analyst started.
“There are already planets named Athens, Columbia, Jerusalem!” another analyst added.
“Those are city names, and they do not have majority populations of Greek or Israeli descent. It’s not just the name, it’s the language. Governor Yamashiro wants to speak an entirely different language than the rest of the Republic.”
“Jim,” the woman commentator said, with a patient and all-knowing smile, “when was the last time you watched a broadcast from outside the Orion Arm? By the end of the century, linguistic scholars predict the dialects spoken in the outer arms will have evolved into unique languages. You cannot expect people who live ten thousand light-years apart to go on speaking the same language forever.”
“And you think switching from English to Japanese is part of that evolution?”
“What I find most disturbing is the paranoia that is surrounding this entire issue,” the woman said, ignoring the question. “It’s as if the committee believes that switching the language is the first step to an invasion. It’s ridiculous.”
The woman made more sense, but I agreed with the male commentator. Perhaps it was my upbringing in a military orphanage, but I could not see how letting planets speak different languages would bring the galaxy closer together.
By that time I was losing interest in the story, so I switched off my shades. When I removed my shades, I saw a message light blinking over my bunk. Sergeant Shannon wanted me to come to his office. I climbed out of bed and dressed quickly, but Shannon was not in his office when I arrived. I found my helmet waiting on his desk.
Lee, just back from the gym, came into the barracks as I was stowing my helmet. “Hey, how was your workout?” I asked, as Lee passed my rack.
“Fine,” he said, sounding brusque. I waited for him to shower and change, then we went to the commissary for breakfast. We had eaten almost every meal together since landing on the ship. I think we had sort of adopted each other. I hadn’t yet figured out that Lee liked me because I was not a clone. As for me, after my time on Gobi, I was just glad to have a friend who truly fit the description “government-issue.” Lee was acting odd and distant. I wanted to ask him what his problem was, but I figured he would cough it up in good time. As we walked toward the mess area, I saw a strangely familiar sight on some of the monitors along the hall—a picture of General Amos Crowley bent over a stack of poker chips, holding a particle-beam pistol. I recognized the table, the room, and the way Crowley pinched the pistol with his fingers. “Enemy of the Republic,” was the headline. “Former general and noted terrorist Amos Crowley stands accused of sedition, rebellion, and murder.”
I stared at the display hardly believing my eyes. “Son of a bitch,” I mumbled.
“Do you know him?” Vince asked.
; “I think I took that photograph,” I said.
“You don’t know if you took it?” Lee asked, suddenly interested in me again.
“I was at that card game, but I didn’t have a camera. Neither did anybody else.”
“Somebody had one,” Lee said dismissively. “Do you play cards with traitors on a regular basis?”
I stared at the image for a moment, then continued down the hall. And then it struck me. All those gadgets packed into our visors . . . polarizing lenses, telescopic lenses, communications systems. Add a little data storage, and you could record everything.
“Do our visors record data?” I asked.
“Sure,” Lee said, sounding as if I should have known that without asking. “How long have you been . . .” He paused to stare at me and laughed. “You wore your helmet to a card game? Harris”—he seemed to warm up as he sensed my embarrassment—“you’re all right.”
“Glad I’ve got your seal of approval,” I said. I was again tempted to ask what was bothering him, but held back.
He looked back at the picture. “That’s not your sidearm, is it?” he said, struggling not to laugh.
“No, it’s not,” I snapped.
“Just asking,” Lee said, still sounding more than amused. The corners of his mouth still twitched. “Whose is it?”
“It belonged to a guy named Taj Guttman,” I said, as we entered the mess hall.
“He wagered his firearm? I bet he wasn’t wearing his helmet.”
“No, he wasn’t,” I said.
“His goose is fried,” Lee said.
We grabbed trays and moved to the chow line. Vince clearly wanted to ask more questions but had the good sense to wait until we had our chow and had moved to a quieter corner of the room. I felt a wave of panic. How many people knew what I had done—that I had lost my pistol to an enemy agent in a card game? I seriously doubted that McKay would keep the information to himself.
The Clone Republic (Clone 1) Page 9