The Clone Sedition

by Steven L. Kent

  “Not that regiment. All of the men in that regiment asked for the transfer,” said Cutter. He finished his coffee and crumpled the paper cup. “What is this about?”

  “Every man in the Second Regiment was attacked on the Night of the Martyrs,” Watson said.

  “Might be a coincidence,” said Cutter.

  “Admiral, of the one thousand six hundred men who were attacked, fifteen hundred joined the same regiment. That’s one hell of a coincidence.”

  “It’s Tarawa,” said Cutter. “The Second Regiment of the Second Division is a prestigious unit. It’s got history. It’s got tradition. Marines respect tradition,” said Cutter. He thought a little longer, and asked, “What do you think it means?”

  Watson said, “Something must have happened on the Night of the Martyrs.”

  “Yes, something did happen; sixteen hundred Marines were attacked by a suicidal army of imbeciles. You don’t see that every day.”

  “More than that,” said Watson. “I think they were brainwashed during the attacks.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” said Cutter. “It’s not possible. Have you seen the profiles of the New Olympians who died that night? They weren’t scientists. They were religious fanatics. The ones who survived went home and killed themselves.”

  “Maybe they were the bait,” said Watson. “It’s like a magician’s trick. You get the audience to watch your right hand closely, then you pull the sleight of hand with your left. Harris and the other victims were so busy beating off the meaningless dopes that they didn’t notice something bigger.”

  “Can’t be,” said Cutter. He left his desk and poured himself another cup of coffee. As he poured, he mumbled, “Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch.”

  “The Night of the Martyrs was probably just the down payment,” said Watson, “something quick, not a complete reprogramming, just a seed to get things rolling. Then they get to Mars, and it happens all over again. There’s a meaningless attack. Two men are killed in a riot. A few fanatics try to shower them with chlorine gas. Jackson remembered every detail about the attack, but he went vague when I asked him what happened next.”

  “Just like Harris,” said Cutter. Then he repeated himself. He said, “Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch.”

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-THREE

  Cutter tightened security on the ship. There were so many MPs guarding the landing bays, the lifts, and the engine room that I expected to find a skeleton crew on the bridge. Wrong again. He had a full crew on deck and another fifty MPs patrolling the area.

  That meant he was raiding his rotation. Instead of giving his men eight hours to eat and recreate between shifts and lights-out, he had them playing policeman.

  I asked him, “You expecting an invasion?”

  Cutter said, “You can never be too careful.”

  I said, “Yes you can.”

  He said, “Maybe so.”

  So I came right out with it. I said, “Unless the EME declared a new war while I was on Mars, those MPs must be for me and my men.”

  Cutter looked me in the eyes when he responded, and he did not make excuses. The man was honest, I’ll give him that. He said, “Harris, I’m confiscating your weapons.”

  “Just mine?” I asked.

  “Your regiment’s. We’re going to stow them in a secure hold for safekeeping.”

  “Safekeeping from whom?” I asked.

  He did not answer the question, so I asked, “What the speck is going on here?”

  Cutter said, “Let’s go to my office.”

  It seemed like a good idea.

  We entered his office, and he left the MPs outside the door. They weren’t far away; but if I’d wanted to kill him, those men outside the door would not have been able to stop me. Cutter was older than me, and his form of combat involved fighters, torpedoes, and ships as big as shopping malls.

  I said, “Okay, we make you nervous. I can see that. What’s going on?”

  For this showdown, Cutter did not hide behind his desk. He stood in front of it. We stood and faced each other. He crossed his arms, and said, “You and your men may have been compromised on Mars.”

  “What do you mean by compromised?”

  In the last days of the Unified Authority, the U.A. military came up with infiltrator clones—specialized clones that murdered EME clones and assumed their identities. They were assassins and saboteurs, and they broke through our security by the thousands. I said, “I’m not a Double Y.”

  The infiltrators differed from regular clones in that they had two Y chromosomes. It made them stronger. It also made the bastards mentally unstable, which made them all the more dangerous.

  “No. I don’t suppose you are,” said Cutter.

  “Do you think they infiltrated my men?”

  “No.”

  “So what do you think happened?”

  Cutter responded with a question. “What did you mean when you said that anything that can be programmed can be reprogrammed?”

  “You’re not still on about that. I told you, I was sorry. I don’t know what was wrong with me.”

  “Neither do I,” said Cutter.

  “Let me get this straight, you’re lining your decks with military police because I was rude?” I had a sardonic smile on my face. In truth, I was pissed, and I wanted to share my irritation with Cutter.

  It didn’t work. A few seconds of silence passed during which he watched me with the impassive expression of a chess master. This was a man who had always given me the benefit of the doubt in the past. Those days were gone.

  He watched me with eyes that never blinked, at least not in that five-second block. Finally, he asked, “Anything that can be programmed can be reprogrammed. What do you think that means?”

  The words sounded familiar, but I did not remember speaking them. I said as much. “Did I actually say that?”

  Good old Cutter, the son of a bitch was ready for that question. He tapped a few keys on his desk, and there I was, staring out of the screen looking frenzied and angry.

  “Do you want me to leave Watson?” Cutter’s voice asked off camera.

  “Why the speck would I want him here?” I asked. “Give him a message for me, would you. Tell that bastard that anything that can be programmed can be reprogrammed. You tell him that. You tell him that for me.”

  Something was happening to me on the screen. I winced…well, the me in the video feed winced. It was a slight action. I was in pain and trying to hide it.

  The Cutter in the video feed clearly had no idea what that gibberish meant. He asked, “What was that? What was your message?”

  Sounding like a paranoid lunatic, I said, “Not my message, asshole. Tell him Ray Freeman said that.”

  Cutter switched off the screen and stared at me.

  I said, “I don’t think you have enough MPs.” It was a joke. I hoped to ease the tension, a wasted effort.

  Cutter asked, “So what did you mean?”

  “I have no idea. You saw how I looked in the feed. I hadn’t slept in days. I don’t think I was clinically sane.”

  Cutters eyes betrayed no emotion, not anger, not pity. He kept his unblinking gaze as steady as a rifle on a firing line. I wanted to shrink away from his gaze.

  I said, “There’s no meaning in those words. What if I said, ‘Tuna fish eat isotopes’? Meaningless. I was a raving lunatic.” Until that moment, I hadn’t realized how much of a lunatic I’d become. “There is no meaning to what I said, it’s the product of fatigue.”

  “What does Ray Freeman have to do with it?”

  That shut me up. “I haven’t seen Freeman in over a year,” I said.

  “Watson says you went looking for him on the Night of the Martyrs.”

  “I didn’t find him.”

  “Do you know how to find him?”

  I shook my head, and said, “He finds me when he wants to chat.”

  Cutter said, “You were in Seattle on the Night of the Martyrs?” Watson must have told him;
either that, or he looked it up in my files. “What made you think he’d be in Seattle?”

  “The last time I heard from him, he was in Seattle,” I said.

  “You went looking for him, but you didn’t find him?”

  “I was preoccupied,” I said.

  I did not know how to interpret Cutter’s expression. It wasn’t anger. His eyes hardened, and his mouth froze in an unconvincing smile. Behind the mask, I thought I saw disappointment. He said, “General, you are relieved of command.”

  His words stunned me. At first I wanted to laugh. I was the one who had promoted him to admiral in the first place. Okay, yes, I gave him an extra star; but in my mind, I had as much of a right to relieve him as he did to relieve me.

  I wanted to threaten him. I wanted to laugh at him. I wanted to take away his command. Instead, I said, “I am relieved.”

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-FOUR

  “What the hell do you mean you were relieved of command!” Jackson demanded. “Cutter is a damned cargo hauler. Who the speck placed him in charge?”

  “I did.”

  “General, we could take this ship.”

  “That’s why Cutter has so many MPs guarding the decks.”

  Jackson laughed. “We could take care of them rapid, quick, and pronto, couldn’t we? Swabbies with pistols…Hell, we might not lose a single Marine.”

  “He wants us to hand over our guns.”

  “Speck that!”

  “I said we would.”

  We walked around the compound as we spoke.

  “You’ve been relieved of command, sir. That makes it my decision.” We walked in silence for two minutes, before he finally said, “Shit. I’ll deliver the weapons.”

  Then he asked, “Who’s taking your post?”

  “There’s only one general in this man’s corps,” I said.

  “Ritz?” Jackson asked. “‘Run-and-Gun Ritz’? Outstanding. Once Cutter gets a whiff of Ritz, he’ll beg you to come back.”

  I wasn’t so sure. Brigadier General Hunter Ritz had all the reckless bravado of a young Marine; but following orders and observing the chain of command had been hardwired into his brain. He was brash, and he and Cutter would clash, but Ritz always produced in the end. He was irreverent, but he was also inventive, hard-hitting, and ruthless. Cutter would appreciate those qualities.

  “Did Cutter say why he wanted you out?”

  “He thinks I was compromised. He thinks I’m working for the New Olympians.”

  “Bullshit,” said Jackson.

  “I’m not going to do myself any favors when we get back. I am going to push to bring the New Olympians to Earth. We need to get those bastards off Mars.”

  “No, we don’t,” said Jackson.

  “We owe them that much,” I said. “They’re humans living in inhuman conditions.”

  “We don’t owe them anything,” said Jackson. He sounded angry. He said, “We saved their specking hides on Olympus Kri, didn’t we? We pulled them off the specking planet before it burned…and then we got ambushed for helping them!”

  “That was a U.A. attack,” I said. “The New Olympians didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “We lost ships. We lost men. We lost our specking chain of command, all for helping those bastards,” said Jackson. “The way I see it, we’ve done too much for them already. And don’t get me started on that specking Night of the Martyrs shit.

  “Look, General, maybe I’m bigoted against my own kind, but that’s the way it is. I’m natural-born, but I still specking hate the bastards. Give me the company of synths any day.

  “The New Olympians might be loyal, but that doesn’t explain why they formed a Martian Legion.”

  “We killed the Martian Legion,” I said. “We destroyed their army.”

  “We took away their weapons, but they may still have an army.”

  “They need to be repatriated. We can’t leave them on Mars.”

  We had made our way to the firing range. Ahead of us, a company of men fired at targets, some moving and some stationary. Most of the men used special M27s designed for use aboard ships, guns that fired holographic bullets. A few of the men used real M27s that fired live ammo. Cutter would confiscate the real ones in another hour. The holographic guns posed no danger.

  We had seen so much war over the last fifteen years that Darwin’s survival of the fittest had occurred in a nation of clones. Our weak men had died over the last decade. The clones who remained did not miss many shots, nor did they waste bullets. Training hardens men, combat forges them, attrition turns the weak ones into statistics.

  Jackson was right. If we wanted to take the ship, Cutter and his MPs would not pose a problem.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Location: Washington, D.C.

  Date: April 28, 2519

  The message from the office of Gordon Hughes, Governor of Mars Spaceport, came with the governor’s virtual security seal. It said, “I have Howard Tasman. Do not send clones.”

  Cutter read the message and verified the seal. The name, Howard Tasman, meant nothing to him.

  He tried calling Hughes. No one answered. He sent a short message of his own—“Who is Howard Tasman?” An hour passed, then a day, then a week. He received no reply.

  In the meantime, Cutter tried to solve the mystery on his own. Having started his career as an enlisted man, Cutter did not mind doing a little legwork. He started with a quick search of the mediaLink, a mostly entertainment-based network that included magazines, encyclopedias, and reference books.

  There were no references to Howard Tasman, not even a record of his birth. Apparently, he had not been an actor, writer, politician, or professional athlete.

  Cutter accessed military records, using his office computer. Tasman did not appear to have had a military career.

  He called Watson. Instead of saying “hello,” he asked, “Have you found Freeman yet?”

  “Not yet,” said Watson.

  Cutter thought, Not yet, sir. He said, “For God’s sake, Watson, the man is seven feet tall. He eats bullets and shits out dead people. What’s taking so long?”

  Cutter wasn’t really bothered by Watson’s not having found Freeman. It was the boy’s inability to say “sir” that bothered him.

  “I’ve got every satellite and traffic camera on the planet looking for him. It’s like he never steps into the sunlight,” said Watson.

  Or he’s off planet, thought Cutter. When the Enlisted Man’s Empire attacked Earth, its Navy had a self-broadcasting spy ship. That ship disappeared after the war. In the admiral’s view, that ship’s disappearance was a security nightmare. She was a modified cruiser, with three decks and three landing bays, that was capable of carrying nine transports. She had a stealth generator that rendered her invisible until she broadcasted. Like any other self-broadcasting ship, the spy ship created an anomaly that could be detected from millions of miles away whenever she broadcasted; but that was the only time she could be detected.

  “I have another job for you,” he told Watson. “Maybe you’ll be able to get this one done.”

  “What do you want me to do?” asked Watson.

  What do you want me to do, sir? Cutter thought. He asked, “Ever heard the name Howard Tasman?”

  “Can’t say I’ve heard the name; is he important?”

  “Apparently Gordon Hughes thinks he’s important.”

  “Hughes?”

  “Hughes sent me a message saying he has Howard Tasman.”

  “Did he say anything else?”

  “Yeah, he said not to send clones.”

  “Are you sending me to Mars?” asked Watson.

  “Not yet, not until we know something about Tasman first. I want you to go to the U.A. Archives to see what you can dig up.”

  “Not a problem,” said Watson. “Anything else?”

  “Yeah. When you leave Bolling Air Force Base, make sure to take your guard. I know about you sneaking out at night
.”

  CHAPTER

  THIRTY-SIX

  So Cutter knew he went out at night. Watson could not escape the feeling that the admiral was using the bodyguards to look over his shoulder. He felt both angry and embarrassed.

  He did not like living on a military base. The irony was that now that he lived among clones, he identified more with them than before. They grew up in the orphanages believing they were natural-born children living in facilities for synthetics. He now believed the same thing about himself. He was a natural-born citizen living on a base for military clones.

  He knew he was natural-born, of course; but weren’t they as certain of their origins as he was of his?

  Watson was a man who could not sleep unless he’d had an orgasm. He had slept well every night since returning from Mars. Since leaving the Churchill, he had slept in nearly every part of town except Bolling Air Force Base.

  His bodyguards, on the other hand, always looked tired. When he spent the night in a woman’s apartment, they spent the night in the car.

  Watson opened the door of his office. His guards waited on the other side. Two were sitting, the third was asleep on the floor. Their clothes were wrinkled, and their faces were puffy and blotchy from the lack of sleep.

  “We gotta go,” said Watson.

  The bodyguards did not argue. One asked where. Watson told him. The driver went ahead to check the car. One bodyguard walked ten feet ahead of Watson; the other remained a few paces behind him.

  They rode into Washington, D.C., and drove down a ramp into the underground parking lot of the archive building. No one spoke until after they parked, then one of the bodyguards told Watson to stay in the car while he searched the building. The driver and the remaining bodyguard sat in tired silence.

  Once the bodyguard returned, the driver stayed with the car while Watson entered the archive, his bodyguards in tow. The Enlisted Man’s Army guarded the archive. Six clone officers sat behind a bulletproof barricade, all holding M27s.

  Watson went to the security station and showed his identification.

  The officer in charge typed some information into a computer. Watson’s security clearance wasn’t enough, he needed authorization from Admiral Cutter’s office before he could enter.