The Clone Sedition

by Steven L. Kent

  When I passed within ten feet of an old man lying on a blanket, he asked, “Are you speckers invading the spaceport?” Without waiting for me to answer, he added, “You can have this hole as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Do you know who painted that wall?” I asked, pointing to the Legion graffiti.

  “Nope. Must have happened when I was taking a shit,” he said.

  While my fifteen hundred Marines marched past, I approached a woman with three children and asked her the same question. She ignored me.

  My Marines marched with perfect precision down one decrepit corridor and into the next as we made our way to the administrative offices. A woman jumped up from her blanket and threw something at one of my men. Whatever it was, it hit him and splattered across the back of his armor.

  We passed a water dispensary. A line of people carrying pots waited for a turn at the water. Lines for food, lines for water, lines to use the bathroom and bathe, no wonder these people were hostile. Living on Mars, these people were no more self-sufficient than newborn infants.

  Maybe they were right to hate us; but until we sorted out their civil unrest, they would remain on Mars. In their eyes, the same clone military that had saved them from destruction on their home planet had abandoned them in a dump.

  We originally promised them a short layover on Mars. Now, one year later; they were prolonging their incarceration by their actions. The way station had become a quarantine.

  We could have turned into one of the spaceport’s bigger and more populated hallways, but I wanted to avoid the masses for as long as possible. Instead, we followed the service hall as it snaked around a line of passenger-boarding areas.

  I had a copy of the floor plan in my visor, a rotating three-dimensional map that included photographs of Mars Spaceport back in its halcyon days. Using optical commands, I spun the floor plan and viewed it from all sides, looking for detours; but our options diminished as we marched on.

  In order to get to the administrative offices, we would need to enter the grand arcade, a two-mile corridor of stores and restaurants. There would be multiple millions of people in the arcade, maybe even a full five million.

  I looked back down the hallway behind us at the people lying on their blankets with their belongings scattered around them. They were dirty, and their blankets were filthy and tattered. They’d spent a year like this, with no more dignity than cattle locked in stalls.

  Using the commandLink, I contacted Cutter on the Churchill. I said, “Admiral, do you have any spare service blankets.”

  He asked, “How many do you need?”

  “Seventeen million,” I said.

  “How bad is it?” he asked.

  “Dante Alighieri wouldn’t have survived this,” I said.

  “I don’t know Alighieri. Is he Marines or Navy?”

  “Neither,” I said. Cutter was a good officer, but his interests did not extend to the classics. “He’s a civilian.”

  “So what is the situation?” he asked.

  “We had no problem landing,” I said. “The natives aren’t especially friendly, but no incidents. We’ve been avoiding the main areas, but we’re going to need to enter the hub to get to Governor Hughes.”

  Mars Spaceport had six passenger wings, one for each of the Milky Way’s spiral arms, all of which connected to a central hub. We had entered the spaceport through a loading dock in the Orion Wing. Now we were just outside the grand arcade, the hub. The administrative offices were just off the arcade.

  “It’s not too late to withdraw,” said Cutter. “You’re sitting on a ‘powder keg.’”

  I’d never wanted to be an officer. I hated wearing the weight of men’s fates on my shoulders. Depending on what happened next, seventeen million lives could hang in the balance.

  I said, “It’s too late to back out now.”

  I led my men to the end of the service hall, turned a corner, and got my first look at the grand arcade.

  What had once been a glorious atrium ringed by five floors of upscale stores was now a slum of lean-tos and blankets. Sixty feet up, an enormous banner hung from the ceiling. It was not a gleaming, streaming, glorious banner announcing a sale or welcoming travelers to Mars. It was a torn swath of dirt-colored carpeting, forty feet long and twenty feet wide with the words: LEGION: NIGHT OF THE MARTYRS painted across it.

  “Check your console, I’m sending you a streaming feed,” I told Cutter. Using an optic command, I transmitted the images. Now he could see everything I saw. I stared up at the banner.

  “What is that?” he asked.

  “It’s a banner.”

  “I can see that,” he said, sounding peevish.

  “It says ‘Legion: Night of the Martyrs,’” I said.

  “Yeah, I can read,” he said.

  “Then why did you ask what it was?” I asked.

  No answer.

  I looked away from the banner and gave Cutter a panoramic sweep of the area. I showed him throngs of people leaning over the rails of the upper floors. The place was dark and dingy and teeming with refugees. Like I said before, the people crowded together like termites in a nest, and they did not seem happy to see us.

  A loud and angry howl filled the air as we emerged from the service hall. People screamed, they shouted, they booed. Teenage boys ran in front of our column and made obscene gestures. One kid dropped his pants and showed us his ass.

  Crowds of people stood on either side of us. There had to have been more than a million people crowded onto the main floor and hundreds of thousands more along the railings of each of the upper-atrium floors.

  From a tactical perspective, we had walked into an untenable nightmare. I had led my men into a deep ocean never realizing just how helpless we would be against the tides.

  “Keep ’em moving,” I told Jackson.

  “Aye, sir,” he said. Curtis Jackson had a temper. He wasn’t hotheaded, but he wasn’t the type of man who tolerates bullshit and smiles.

  “Order your men to set their sound filters,” I told him.

  “Aye, aye.”

  Our helmets were soundproof and equipped with microphones for picking up ambient sound. People become paranoid when they cannot hear what goes on around them; it’s human nature. So we generally allow the boys to leave their mikes hot.

  Having them turn off their external mikes would cut them off from the outside world, a move that would make them tense; but I compensated by allowing them to speak to each other.

  “General, sir, should we proceed as we are?” asked Jackson.

  “We discussed this route back on the ship,” I said. “There aren’t any alternate routes.”

  “You could return to the Churchill,” said Cutter. I had forgotten he was still Linked in.

  “Begging the general’s pardon, sir, but what this Marine means to say is that perhaps we should give them a show of force. We don’t want them to think we’re scared.”

  “You aren’t scared?” I asked.

  “No, sir.”

  “Not even the least bit nervous?” I asked.

  “No, sir,”

  “You should be, Colonel. There are ten thousand New Olympians for every one of us.”

  Fortunately, we did not need to walk the entire length of the arcade to reach the administrative offices. The alley that led to Hughes was only a hundred yards away.

  We passed what must have once been a water garden, a series of ramps, falls, and pools that now sat as dry as the Martian landscape outside. Unlit signs, some shattered but many still whole, identified stores that had long since been emptied of merchandise and furniture. Inside, in their shadowy reaches, people stood and stared out at us. They looked like ghosts.

  The people on the upper decks began hurling trash at us. It fell like enormous balls of hail. Articles of clothing, shoes, burning shreds of paper, bits of carpet, a grating from a ceiling vent, and more rained down, mostly missing us. Ceiling tiles, so light they seemed to glide on air currents, tumbled through t
he air and shattered a few yards ahead of us.

  For a moment, and just a moment, I turned on my external microphones. I heard such a cacophony that I could not interpret a word of anything that anybody yelled.

  The people seemed to sense that we had not come to fight. Small bits of debris rained down on our heads, but the bigger stuff crashed and splattered fifty feet ahead of us.

  Then it happened. Something about the size of a motorcycle cascaded down from one of the upper floors and hit three of my men. Whatever those people had thrown, it crushed two of my men and grazed a third before hitting the ground and disintegrating into a cloud of dust.

  The two dead Marines lay ruptured on the floor, the exoskeletons of their armor broken to pieces and their legs and arms stretched out so that they looked like man-sized insects that had been crushed. Blood pooled onto the floor around them.

  That stopped our parade. Jackson told the men to halt and guard their flanks while a medic checked the bodies. We didn’t really need the medic, the cracked helmets told the tale well enough. He ran a scanner over the bodies and pronounced both men dead, then he went to see after the injured man, who was struggling to remove his chest plate.

  The parade wasn’t the only thing halted at that moment. The fusillade of debris dried up. So did the shouting.

  “What do we do now?” asked Jackson.

  By this time, I was in the throes of a full-fledged combat reflex, lying to myself that I cared about these people, that they deserved mercy, and that I did not want to kill them all.

  “We walk,” I said, ignoring the way the hormone-tinged blood running through my head screamed for violence.

  “They killed two of my men. They don’t get away with killing my men.”

  “Yeah?” I asked. “And what exactly are you going to do about it, Colonel? What the speck do you suggest we do?”

  “We find the people responsible and make an example.”

  “How are you going to find them?” I asked in a silky, serpentine voice.

  People flooded into the already packed atrium, gawkers hoping we would put on a show, protestors looking to show their anger, and a small battalion of men in suits. The gawkers and protesters kept their distance. The men in suits walked toward us.

  Like any standoff, this one seemed to generate electricity. As many as a million pairs of eyes stared at us, waiting for us to make a move. If we stayed in the center of the atrium, they could stone us to death with their debris. If we opened fire, there was no telling how many people we would kill.

  The combat reflex distorted my thoughts. I wanted revenge. I wanted violence. I wanted to increase the amount of the hormone in my blood, and the only way to do it was to attack, to kill. Think! I told myself. Stay focused.

  The men in suits pushed through the crowd. I did not recognize any of them, but I knew who they were. They would be the politicians. Hughes must have sent them, I told myself. Just hold on. Have these men take you to Hughes.

  “General, are you going to let them get away with killing Marines?” Jackson asked.

  “The men who dropped that…whatever the hell it was, are long gone, Colonel,” I said. The words came out slowly now. I had to force myself to speak calmly. “They’re long gone, and I can just about guarantee you that you won’t find anyone who saw what happened.”

  “Somebody saw,” said Jackson.

  “Sure they did, but they won’t admit it.”

  One of the suits approached Jackson as he stood over the bodies. Speaking over the interLink, Jackson said, “The head assholes are here.”

  I said, “Keep your men on alert,” then I pulled off my helmet and got my first whiff of Spaceport air. It didn’t just smell of sweat; this particular potpourri included feces, garbage, and rot.

  The men in the suits spotted my dead Marines and stopped walking.

  Politicians. I had the feeling that none of these men had ever seen a violent death up close. They stared down at the bodies. By this time, a couple of sergeants were loading the bodies into “ash bags.” We would not leave our dead behind, though the locals could deal with the blood. We would ship the bodies back to the Churchill in the bags, fish out any salvageable equipment, then toss whatever remained into an incinerator.

  As a Liberator clone, I had the same basic architecture as the newer model that replaced my kind. I had the same face, the same brown hair, and the same brown eyes. I stood six-three, five inches taller than any of the clones around me; but, as the politicians didn’t bring a sizing laser for taking measurements, they did not recognize me.

  “Are you in charge of this invasion?” asked the man in the suit.

  “Invasion?” I asked. “Why would we invade Mars?”

  “You have landed on our planet with a large body of armed men.”

  “I have one regiment; that hardly qualifies as a large body.”

  “Why are you here?” the man demanded.

  I said, “Look, I don’t mean to be disrespectful…”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “What?”

  “You have come here to threaten us. If you wanted to talk, you would have contacted Governor Hughes through diplomatic channels. Instead, you came with your regiment of heavily armed men.”

  After that comment, I almost gave in to my combat reflex. I said, “I came to see Gordon Hughes, not you.”

  “Governor Hughes sent me. If you have something to say…”

  “I’ll say it to Hughes.”

  The man was tall and handsome, in his fifties and distinguished-looking. I could tell he’d enjoyed a successful life in politics, and he did not appreciate my attitude toward him. He said, “The Governor is a busy man.”

  I said, “Yeah? Well, I’d hate to inconvenience him. Let him know that General Wayson Harris stopped by.”

  “General Wayson Harris?” he asked. He still wasn’t sure it was me. To him, we all looked the same. “Did you say you were General Harris?”

  “In the synthetic flesh,” I said.

  “Would you like to see the governor now?”

  “That’s why I came.”

  “Yes, sir. We’ll go straight away.”

  “And my men? I don’t think it would be wise to leave them here.”

  “No, sir,” he said, suddenly the cooperative fellow.

  He was not in charge. He was just a lackey for Gordon Hughes, who might not have been in charge as well. Hughes was officially the governor of Mars Spaceport, but the people seemed to have ideas of their own.

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  The suits led the entire regiment to the administrative building, then escorted Jackson and me inside while the rest of the men waited in the hall, which was so wide that it looked like a cul-de-sac. There were areas within the spaceport that looked like buildings inside of buildings.

  Gordon Hughes could have lived a life of luxury if he returned to Earth; instead, he chose to live like his people on Mars. He lived in this three-story building with his extended family and the extended families of his staff and advisors. Apparently, he allowed himself one luxury—he slept on a bed instead of a blanket; but he did not have a personal shower, bathroom, or kitchen.

  The executive offices looked like they must have looked before all the trouble began—bright light shining from the ceiling, a clean beige carpet underneath our feet, and a pretty personal assistant to greet us as we stepped off the elevator.

  She was tall and curvy with long blond hair and pale skin. Her eyes were ice blue. She introduced herself as Emily and ushered us to the governor’s office.

  One of the suits who led us to the building whispered, “That’s Hughes’s granddaughter.”

  I thought, If Watson gets ahold of this one, Hughes will wind up a great-grandfather before his time.

  Emily Hughes caught Jackson staring at her and gave him a shy smile. The colonel couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  “Put it on ice, Colonel,” I whispered as she opened the door. “We want her grandfathe
r on our side.”

  Jackson grunted a soft “yes, sir,” but his eyes remained fixed.

  Hughes met us at his office door. He said, “Good to see you, General,” and reached to shake my hand. He and I had met on a few occasions over the last two decades. Some of our meetings had been cordial, but most had not.

  I shook his hand.

  “Governor, this is Colonel Curtis Jackson,” I said.

  Jackson and Hughes shook hands, and Hughes led us into his office, which apparently doubled as his home. There was a bed in one corner of the room, Hughes’s bed.

  The meeting started off on a civil tone.

  Once he closed the door, Hughes said, “I suppose you are here about the Night of the Martyrs. I can assure you that my office had nothing to do with that unfortunate event. Colonel Riley has asked me about the incident several times.”

  “So he tells me,” I said.

  Hughes said, “I understand EMN Intelligence has had agents investigating as well.” Instead of hiding behind his desk, he stood with Jackson and me.

  “And you still have no idea who could have been behind it?” I asked.

  “No idea.” He paused, folded his arms across his chest, and said, “General, these people are loyal to the Enlisted Man’s Empire. They are aware of the sacrifices your military has made.”

  I interrupted him, and asked, “Did you know I lost two men on the way here?”

  “Yes, I heard about that. Most unfortunate. I am sure Spaceport Security will find the people responsible.”

  “Spaceport Security is my people,” I said. “What about your people? What are you going to do to help?”

  “What do you mean?” Hughes asked. His eyes darted around the room, and he started pacing.

  “Two murders have been committed,” I said. “Help us bring the killers to justice.”

  “General, how would you have me help? Your best course of action is to keep me out of this.”

  “Bullshit,” said Jackson. “You know what I see when I looked around the spaceport? I see the beginning of a war. Those Legion banners on the walls out there, they’re a call for war.”