The Clone Sedition

by Steven L. Kent

  Watson was also fresh out of college, brash bordering on disrespectful, and easily distracted by women.

  No one is perfect.

  “You know what I think, Harris?” the detective said, clearly ignoring Watson. “I think these kids came to the bar for a drink, and you lured them out and killed them. You probably had friends hidden out here in the alley. That’s what I think.

  “How many men did you have with you?” The detective was in his forties, a large, pudgy man in a long coat that kept him warm. He glared at me, knowing that I was above his law.

  I said, “That’s an interesting theory. Does unsubstantiated guesswork count as police work these days?”

  He gave me a wolfish smile, and said, “Listen to you. You’ve got three stars and a civilian assistant, General, but you don’t have an alibi. Does your rank let you get away with murder in the Army, too?”

  “I’m a Marine,” I said.

  “Same difference. Marines are like ants, they’re real tough in a group. How tough are you when you’re all alone?”

  “Good question,” I said. “Why don’t you ask them?” I pointed to the three dead men lying on the concrete where I had left them.

  “You want to know what I think…” the detective began.

  “Not really,” I said, shutting him down before he blew off more steam. “Look, we know who killed these men, so there’s no point investigating the murder. I did it. My fingerprints are on the rod, my shoe print is on that one’s neck,” I said, still pointing at the corpses. “Now that we know who killed them, the next step in the investigation would be to find out who the speck they are. I want to know why they came downtown and why they were following me, and why they had two knives and an iron rod. What I really want to know is why that asshole over there was carrying a damn Bible.

  “Do you get that a lot up here…thugs carrying Bibles and butcher knives?”

  “No, we do not have a lot of Bible-toting thugs,” growled the detective.

  I turned to Watson, and asked, “Is it just me, or do you find his taste in books as fascinating as I do?”

  “We’ll look into it,” the detective barked. Clearly, he did not like taking direction from criminals.

  “You might take DNA samples, too. Find out why these clowns attacked a Marine, and you might even save a few lives in the process,” I said.

  “Since when did you care about saving lives?” he asked.

  “Oh, Detective, my entire existence is about saving lives…both natural-born and synthetic.”

  He looked back at the corpses, then turned to me. “You still haven’t told me what you were doing out here.”

  “So what were you doing out here?” asked Watson. Like the detective, my civilian adjutant did not entirely trust me. Like the detective, he had been woken by an early-morning call. But the detective had probably woken up on the wrong side of his own bed.

  Watson, on the other hand, had been in someone else’s. I didn’t even let him go home to change. I told him to get his ass over to Bolling Air Force Base, where a plane would be waiting to take him to Seattle. Three hours later, he met me on the street, still dressed in his bar hopper’s sports coat.

  Watson came across as sensible though I wavered between not approving of his lifestyle and envying it. He was a big, good-looking kid who’d slept in every bed in Washington, D.C., except quite possibly his own. He knew all the bars in town and had a mental catalog of every woman he’d seen in them.

  He didn’t brag about his conquests. Had I not sent spooks to follow him a few evenings, I never would have known. As my aide, he dealt with sensitive information, and I made a point of knowing what he did in his off-hours.

  Nearly a year had passed since the Enlisted Man’s Empire had conquered Earth. It was a fight that nobody wanted, but we didn’t have much choice.

  The government of the Enlisted Man’s Empire was really just an expanded military chain of command, a collection of clones. Originally brewed to serve the Unified Authority, the Earth-centric empire that colonized the Milky Way, we clones began our existence protecting natural-born-mankind’s 180 colonized planets. The Unified Authority wanted to protect its citizens without sacrificing their own children, so the government amassed a vast military with clone enlisted men to do the heavy lifting. The officers were natural-born, but they didn’t stay around when the fighting began.

  That system worked just fine right up until an alien army stormed the galaxy, capturing 179 of our 180 colonies. When the natural-born politicians asked what went wrong, the natural-born officer corps blamed their failures on the clones, and the natural-born public took them at their word.

  In response, the Unified Authority decided to ditch us. We were shipped out to obsolete fleets stranded in deep space. Two things ended our exile. We figured out how to return to Earth, and the aliens launched a new kind of attack. They started incinerating planets to exterminate the inhabitants. With the Avatari burning our bridges behind us one planet at a time, we turned our sights to the home world.

  I led the Enlisted Man’s invasion of Earth. We beat the Unifieds, then we dug in and waited for incineration. A year had passed with no sign of the aliens, not that anyone complained.

  Ask a dozen people why the aliens never reached Earth, and you’d hear a dozen explanations. The prevailing theories were that (a) God destroyed the aliens; (b) having been turned back before reaching Earth on their first invasion, the aliens now ignored the planet; and (c) a small fleet sent out to track down the aliens had located their planet and destroyed them. I personally preferred the third option, though I could not imagine how they’d managed to accomplish such a feat.

  “General?” Watson said, bringing me back to the present again.

  “Yes?”

  “Why did you come into town?”

  That was another of my reasons for hiring Watson, he was persistent. It was one of those chicken-egg quandaries—did he learn persistence hunting for scrub (Marine-speak for one-nighters) or had his bar-hopping safaris ended in success because he was naturally persistent?

  The guy was six-foot-five. He was trim because he had good genes and good eating habits, not because of exercise. As far as I could tell, he had no tolerance for pain. It wouldn’t have taken more than a paper cut to bring tears to his eyes. I could not imagine how he would react to a broken bone or a gunshot wound.

  Watson had an easygoing nature. Angry detectives didn’t bother him, neither did angry Marines. I could swear at him, threaten him, call him out of bed, he never took offense.

  When I responded to his question with, “I don’t see where that is any of your business,” he said, “It is, and it isn’t. You killed three civilians. If you want to label the killings as a ‘need-to-know-basis Marine Corps operation,’ then it’s none of my business. If you want to keep on good terms with the local police, you need to give me something.”

  I said, “Drop it.”

  The final lingerings of the lustrous night still hung over the city. Streetlights and headlights and the occasional lit window pierced the darkness, but daylight was only an hour or two away. The air was still cold and wet, but the fog had thinned.

  We walked in silence for a few seconds, then I said, “I came to meet a friend…well, a business associate, a guy named Freeman.”

  “Did he show up for the meeting?”

  “No.”

  “So he wasn’t one of the three guys back there?” Watson confirmed, sounding a little nervous. Maybe he was starting to take my Marine Corps “killing machine” jargon a bit too seriously.

  “No,” I said. “He is not one of the corpses.”

  “Are you sure your friend is safe?” Watson asked. “Maybe we should have the police look for him?”

  Worrying about Ray Freeman’s well-being was like worrying about the welfare of a shark or a missile. “There’s no point involving the locals,” I said. “If Freeman doesn’t want to be found, the last thing you want to do is find him.”

&nb
sp; “Would you like me to contact Naval Intelligence? Maybe they can track him down.”

  I thought about that and smiled. Naval Intelligence had more than its share of smart-ass officers. Assigning a few of them to track down Freeman would send a wake-up call.

  Watson had flown to Fort Lewis on a military jet and driven to Seattle in a staff car. He’d parked the big sedan far enough up the street to give us a chance to talk. As we reached the car, I said, “Freeman will find me when he’s ready.”

  Watson asked, “Do you want me to take you back to Fort Lewis?”

  “Might as well,” I said. “It’s been a long night.”

  I looked back toward the crime scene. The fog had mostly cleared, and an overcast morning had begun. I wanted to end my day, not begin a new one.

  As he climbed into the car, Watson pulled out his LifePad and stared at it for several seconds. Then he said, “There’s a plane waiting at the base to fly you back to Washington, General. Admiral Cutter wants to meet with you.”

  “Do you know what it’s about?” I asked.

  “Apparently, you weren’t the only Marine mugged last night. The admiral thinks this may have been the first shots fired in a civil war.”

  There were 1,723 Marines attacked on the night of January 9, 2519. The Marine Corps lost 108 men and killed over two thousand.

  All things considered, it was a pretty good night.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  Location: Washington, D.C.

  Date: January 11, 2519

  It was beginning to look like the opening salvo of the war would also be the final shot. The mystery group that attacked so many Marines on January 9 never announced itself. Maybe they were ashamed. They lost almost twenty times as many people as they killed.

  When the police, both military and civilian, found nothing useful, Naval Intelligence took over. Results followed. So did briefings.

  “What do you mean they were from Mars?” I asked the officer from Naval Intelligence.

  “Well…they’re not from Mars. I mean, sir, Mars does not have a native population. They’re New Olympian. The men who attacked you were refugees from Olympus Kri.”

  Olympus Kri was the first planet the Enlisted Man’s Empire evacuated during the second alien attack. We crammed the entire population, seventeen million people, into Mars Spaceport, the enormous and superfluous civilian travel center that had served as the hub of pangalactic travel back in the days when mankind traveled the galaxy.

  “Lieutenant Colonel, I am well aware who is on Mars,” I said. “What I need to know is what the hell six thousand homicidal New Olympians were doing on Earth and how the speck they got here.”

  The officer had brown eyes, brown hair, and stood five feet, ten inches tall. He was a clone. Every man serving in the Enlisted Man’s Military had brown hair and brown eyes. All but one of the men in the Enlisted Man’s Military stood five-foot-ten. I was the only exception. I stood six-three. I was a clone just like everyone else, but I was a discontinued model.

  The lieutenant colonel lowered his voice, and said, “We haven’t had any success answering those questions as of yet, sir.”

  He was scared of me, I could hear it in his voice, and it wasn’t just my rank.

  With one exception, the clones of the Enlisted Man’s Empire did not know they were clones. I was that exception.

  My class of clones was bred for independence and violence. The lieutenant colonel was a newer model than me. My DNA included a gland that released a highly addictive cocktail of testosterone and adrenaline into my blood in battle. The scientists who invented my kind called it the “combat reflex.”

  I was the final specimen of a distinguished class of clones called “Liberators.” Congress discontinued the Liberator Clone Program a few decades before I climbed off the assembly line because we tended to get addicted to the hormones produced by the combat reflex. Once we got hooked, the only way to keep the hormone rolling was through violence, and we sometimes stopped caring who we hurt.

  My kind had been replaced by a breed of clones who were tough, obedient, and docile. They made good soldiers, but most of the independence had been jimmied out of them. Instead of a gland that kept them cool in battle, the new clones had a “death reflex,” which shut them down as swiftly as a bullet to the head.

  Their DNA included neural programming that made them believe they were blond-haired, blue-eyed, natural-born humans instead of clones. When they saw their reflections in mirrors and windows, they saw themselves as having blond hair and blue eyes even if they were standing beside an identical clone whom they recognized as having brown hair and brown eyes.

  Anything that disrupted that programming would set off a death reflex. We called ourselves the “Enlisted Man’s Empire” because the empire might suffer a mass death reflex if we called ourselves the “Clone Empire.”

  “General, these are photographs of the men you killed,” the lieutenant colonel said as their faces appeared on the briefing tablet in my hands. “They’re not the type of people normally associated with violent attacks.”

  Tell me something I don’t know, I thought.

  Autopsy photographs and identification documents appeared on my briefing tablet. Why the hell the Intelligence division ran autopsies on these stiffs was beyond me. I knew damn well how they died, I was there.

  Granted, I was being obtuse. The men in charge of the autopsies, a team of experts that included civilian policemen, military police, and Naval Intelligence officers, searched for signs of drugs and other oddities. The first reports indicated clean blood and no notable brain abnormalities.

  The pictures on my tablet rotated so that the autopsy photo of one of the men came to the top. I had slit his throat. No doubt about the cause of his death, bone showed in the back of the smile-shaped incision I had carved across his neck. Below his pictures, a table listed his vital statistics—Name: Tom Niecy; Height: 5’11”; Weight: 163 lbs.; Age: 37.

  “This is Tom Niecy. From what we can tell, he was the ring-leader,” the lieutenant colonel said. “Prior to the evacuation of Olympus Kri, he appears to have worked as an engineer designing car seats.”

  “He designed seats for cars?” I asked. Now there’s a terrorist profile if I’ve ever seen one, I thought.

  “Yes, sir. He specialized in ‘smart’ seats for luxury cars. The seats he designed read your posterior signature and automatically adjusted to your body temperature, spinal posture, and firmness preferences.”

  I said, “Seats that know you by the spread of your ass.”

  “More or less, sir,” he said.

  “Thirty-seven-year-old car seat designers don’t strike me as much of a security risk,” I said.

  “No, sir.”

  “What makes you think Niecy was in charge?”

  “He was ten years older than Grant or Rand.”

  “Who are Grant and Rand?” I asked.

  “Niecy, Grant, and Rand…the three men you kill—who attacked you, sir.”

  “The other two were named Grant and Rand? I didn’t know their names.”

  “Yes, sir. Tom Niecy was ten years older than the other men. He was the only one with an actual job on Mars. That was one of the patterns we found when we started investigating the ‘Night of the Martyrs.’”

  “The Night of the Martyrs?” I asked. I had never heard the term, but I understood what it meant. The New Olympians lost more men than they killed, and thousands of corpses turned up the next morning as well. Most of the attackers who got away committed suicide. By the end of the next day, we had six thousand New Olympian corpses on our hands.

  “That’s what they’re calling it on the mediaLink.”

  “Three of those martyrs came after me with knives and a pipe,” I said.

  “Yes, sir,” said the lieutenant colonel. What else could he say?

  “Catchy name.” I sighed.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You might as well continue.”

  “Yes, si
r. As I was saying, sir, there was a pattern among all of the teams, an older member, generally with a paying job, leading two younger men…”

  “Was he designing car seats on Mars?”

  “No, sir. Niecy worked in the spaceport loading docks.”

  “He was a stevedore?” I asked.

  “Yes, sir, and the assistant pastor of a spaceport Christian congregation.”

  “A pastor,” I mumbled. That checked out. I remembered the Bible. A Bible and a blade, I thought to myself.

  “Have you contacted Gordon Hughes about this ‘Night of the Martyrs’?” I asked. “What does he have to say about it?”

  Gordon Hughes was the de facto governor of Mars, or at least the population living in Mars Spaceport, which was the only known population on the planet. He’d once been an important man in Unified Authority politics, then he joined a group that wanted to overthrow the Unified Authority, only to return as an ally in the very same war.

  Hughes, who originally hailed from Olympus Kri, used whatever political capital he could muster to evacuate his home planet before the aliens cooked it. Now he and his people were trapped on Mars—seventeen million residents trapped in a revolving-door facility meant to accommodate less than six million transients.

  “He says his people are still loyal to the Enlisted Man’s Empire, sir,” said the lieutenant colonel.

  “Do you believe him?”

  “We’re still trying to piece it all together. I spoke with Colonel Riley before coming here.” Martin Riley was the head of Mars Spaceport Security, a detail of five thousand lucky Marines attached to the spaceport as a peacekeeping force.

  “What does Riley think?”

  “He believes the spaceport is a powder keg with a lit fuse.” The lieutenant colonel checked his notes, and said, “His exact words were, ‘They’re going to start eating their babies and blaming us for it.’”