The Clone Alliance

by Steven L. Kent

Anyone else would have said, “You better go get them,” or “Be careful.” Sitting in the sealed atmosphere of the cockpit, Ray Freeman did not waste oxygen telling me the obvious. He sat and watched silently as I made trip after trip gathering each of the cylinders and bringing it to the transport.

  Now that they had separated, I found I could move the individual cylinders using my jetpack. I would wrap my arms around the cylinder, use the rockets in my jetpack, and drift toward the transport at approximately the same speed as a ninety-year-old woman walking uphill. Once I got the cylinders into the transport, I stacked them on their sides like lumber. Freeman sealed the rear hatch as I brought in the last of them. The doors ground together slowly and sealed with a clank.

  As those cylinders weighed several tons each, Freeman left the gravity off while I tried to use the internal cargo arm to stand them and arrange them. That was when we ran into the next problem. Transports like this were meant for hauling soldiers, not cargo. The average soldier stood just under six feet tall; the cylinders were fifteen feet tall. The kettle, which had plenty of headroom for transporting Marines, had a twelve-foot clearance. Ray said that he needed to come out for a closer look. He flooded the kettle with air and came out to inspect the problem. “It’s too tall,” was all he said.

  I looked from the tops of the cylinders to their bases. “Speck!” I said. “Can we leave them on their sides?”

  Freeman shook his head. “The bottoms are insulated. Everything else is made to conduct electricity. If we left them lying there, the brass would conduct the wrong charge into the hull of the ship.”

  Freeman solved the problem. There were storage compartments under the floor of the kettle. Using my laser torch, Freeman cut away a thirty-foot section of floor, giving us access to the storage compartments below. The compartments were four feet deep, creating one foot of clearance between the tops of the cylinders and the roof of the ship.

  With the problem solved, Freeman went back to the cockpit and purged the oxygen out of the kettle. Then I used the cargo arm to drag those massive cylinders out of the kettle horizontally, bring them in diagonally, and drop them into place vertically.

  Once they were in place, Freeman sent me back to the broadcast station a third time. This time he needed insulation blankets to prevent the electricity running through the cylinders from juicing the entire ship. When I returned, I had yards of rubberized blanket. I also brought every morsel from the vending machine.

  Freeman sealed the doors, pumped some O2 back in the kettle, and came to join me.

  I showed him the blanket, and he nodded. “We’re going to wrap this around the engine?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Won’t that affect the way they conduct electricity?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “So is this going to work?” I asked.

  He glared at me. That look might have meant, “What do you think?” or it might have meant, “Of course it won’t work.” Most likely Freeman’s glare meant, “You knew you were committing suicide when we left Little Man.”

  “You hungry?” I asked.

  “What do you have?” Freeman asked. I showed Freeman the stash I had stolen from the vending machine. He chose some meat sticks. I ate a candy bar.

  Freeman had no trouble reassembling the various components of the broadcast engine. The design was modular. Once the cylinders were in place, he ran cables between them, then he spliced the cables into the generator that powered the shields for our transport. The operation took hours. He worked nonstop, never speaking a word.

  By the time Freeman finished, there were so many cables snaking in and out around the cylinders that we could no longer walk across the kettle without tripping.

  “Think the generator has enough juice for that monster?” I asked.

  “There’s plenty of power,” Freeman said as he inspected his work.

  “Should we boot it up?” I asked.

  My life was coming to a close. The broadcast engines on self-broadcasting ships were attached to computers. The pilot used the computer to calculate a destination, then the engine broadcasted the ship to that exact spot. Without a computer controlling it, there was no telling what the broadcast engine might do. It might simply disintegrate us. It might send us into a star. I was reminded again that coming out to this satellite had never been anything more than a passive form of suicide. We could tell ourselves we were trying to get back into the war, but we were really just killing ourselves either way.

  “You know this isn’t going to work,” Freeman said as he gave his work one final inspection. He turned to stare down at me, those emotionless dark eyes of his showing me neither anger nor mercy.

  The top of the broadcast cylinders came closer to the roof than we expected. Thanks to the storage compartments, we had hoped for a twelve-inch clearance. Once Freeman added all the wires and cables, the clearance came closer to three inches. I could not have wedged my fist between the cylinders and the kettle ceiling.

  Freeman held out his right hand and opened it for me to see what lay on his palm. The back of his hand was dark as chocolate but his palm was nearly as light as mine. In a galactic empire in which racial divisions were thoroughly eliminated, Ray and his people, the Neo-Baptist colonists of Little Man, were living anachronisms. They referred to themselves as “pure-blooded African Americans.” They were, as far as I could tell, the last people in the universe that thought of themselves as “American.”

  The white grenade gleamed in Ray Freeman’s shovel-sized hand. It was a low-yield grenade, about the size of a golf ball; but in his giant paw, it looked smaller than a Ping-Pong ball. If Freeman stretched his hand across my face, he could plug one of my ears with his little finger and the other with his thumb.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “A grenade,” Freeman said.

  “I know what it is,” I said. Having been raised in an orphanage for military clones, I threw my first grenade at the age of eight.

  “What’s it for?” I asked.

  “If the engine doesn’t work,” Freeman said.

  I nodded and took the grenade, doubting that I would need it. The most likely outcome of powering up the broadcast engine would be that it would not work. I would not need the grenade because the broadcast engine would explode or send a lethal current through the transport. Freeman and I would simply fry. If it did work, it would probably send us into unknown space never to materialize again.

  I rolled the grenade in my hand. “Well,” I said, “good luck.” I turned and headed to the cockpit. I would be safe there. Correction–I would not be safe, but I would be safer. If things went wrong, there might be enough left of me to pull the pin.

  The cockpit had a video screen on which I could watch Ray connect a few last cables. Giving his handiwork one final inspection, he dropped to his hands and knees and checked the insulation blankets along the base of the broadcast engine. He crawled beside each cylinder one by one, then he went to the control panel he had rigged beside the broadcast engine.

  Freeman was big, but he looked like a child beside those fifteen-foot brass cylinders. Without so much as a moment’s hesitation, he pressed the power button, routing the electricity from the shield generator into the broadcast engine.

  The disaster started quietly. I could hear as well as see everything on the screen. The shield generator ran smoothly. A few of the cables rattled. The cylinders caught the electrical charge from the generator and amplified it. Diodes at the top of the broadcast engine glowed black, then blue, then green, then yellow, then red as the charge intensified. This did not happen quickly; more than an hour had already passed.

  During all this time, Ray Freeman made no effort to communicate with me. He walked around the engine inspecting contacts and dials and diodes. He spent some time staring straight into the center of the engine, apparently looking at nothing in particular.

  Neither Freeman nor I was all that knowledgeable about broadcast technology. I did n
ot know if the next thing that happened was good or bad. I do not think that Ray expected it.

  An inch-wide arc of bluish white electricity formed along the tops of the cylinders. It was as thick and solid as a rope and it danced between the tips of the cylinders. The roof of the kettle was bare metal, and some of that arc connected with it. At that exact moment, my monitor winked off, and the electrical system inside the transport shut itself down.

  The entire transport went dark for less than half a second, then red emergency lights came on. The cockpit lights winked back to life, but the monitor showing the kettle stayed dark. I jumped out of my chair and started for the kettle.

  I had once seen what happens when things go wrong with a broadcast engine on a self-broadcasting ship. In order to power a broadcast, you need 1 million, million volts of electricity. When things go wrong with billions of volts, they truly go wrong.

  Looking out over the kettle from the cockpit door, I only needed a moment to determine that the transport was still in one piece. I climbed down the ladder to the kettle. “Freeman, what happened?” I yelled. He did not answer. “What happened?” I called.

  A benevolent though considerably smaller arc danced along the points of the broadcast engine’s cylinders. At first I thought there was still current running into the engine, then I saw the charred and melted stump where the shield generator had been. The last fumes of the charge had caused the explosion.

  Freeman lay on the ground beside the shield generator. His face was burned. Shards of metal and plastic poked out of his skin. Rivulets of blood ran down the sweaty leather of his skin. His massive chest continued to heave with the even rhythm of his breathing. He looked bad, but he had survived. Glad to see that my friend was still alive, I pulled out that grenade and wrapped my finger around the pin.

  Ray Freeman was big and strong; a few pieces of shrapnel would not kill him. The grenade I held in my right hand could do it, though. He would want that. But before I pulled the pin, I decided to make Ray comfortable.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  Placing the grenade in a safe spot, I lifted Ray onto a bench and examined his wounds. It did not occur to me to dumb down the gravity, so I got the full brunt of his three hundred and fifty pounds as I reached around his chest and heaved him onto the bench. The tang of his burned flesh filled my nose. His clothes were moist with blood, and there was no strength in his body. His arms hung limp, and his shoulders drooped. Ray Freeman, the biggest and most dangerous man I ever met, lay totally vulnerable beside me.

  I rested him on his back and placed his hands on his stomach. I cleaned his wounds. “We gave it our best,” I said, looking down at him, then I picked up the grenade. It fit neatly in my palm. It was small and white and completely lethal. Rolling the pin with my thumb, I thought about what would happen when I set the grenade off. We would die in an instant. The explosion would blow us apart. It would do more than that. It would grind us to a pulp.

  I looked around the kettle, with its eerie shadows and thick metal walls. Naked girders ran the height of its walls. The grenade would not destroy the transport. Kettle walls were designed to withstand missiles. The architects who designed this bird had envisioned bombs exploding outside the fuselage, but I thought that the walls of the kettle would survive the grenade. Even with the floor cut away, there was enough insulation around the fuel supply and engine to protect them from the explosion. The cockpit had blast shields.

  I looped my finger into the pin, took a deep breath, and started to pull, but I could not do it. Trying to focus my mind on pulling the pin was like grabbing a wet bar of soap. The thoughts just slipped through my grasp.

  “Pull the pin,” I muttered to myself. “Pull the pin.” But every time I tightened my finger around the pin, I suddenly had an irresistible need to check on Freeman or run to the cockpit. It was like my brain purged the thought, and whatever thought filled the void became urgent. I would start to pull, feel a twitch, and momentarily forget what I was doing.

  Programming, I realized. Part of the design process for military clones included intricate neural programming. Clones of a later make than I were programmed to see themselves as natural-born humans. They had brown hair and brown eyes, but they saw themselves as having blond hair and blue eyes. To prevent a clone uprising, Congress insisted that they be built with a gland in their heads that would secrete a deadly hormone into their blood if they learned they were clones. They called this the “death reflex.”

  My make of clone, the Liberators, had a different gland that released a combination of endorphins and adrenaline into our blood during combat. When things heated up, our hormone helped us think more quickly and clearly. Unfortunately, it proved addictive. Many Liberators became hooked on the hormone and required a fix of violence even after they had won their battles. They attacked prisoners, allies, fellow soldiers. It was the fear of Liberators that caused Congress to build the death reflex in later models.

  As a Liberator clone, I was able to recognize my synthetic creation. As a Liberator, I knew that I was built to kill. It had never occurred to me that I had also been programmed to live. I could not force myself to pull the pin from that grenade.

  “Well, that is just specking great!” I snarled, and I threw the grenade on the deck, pin and all. I stormed over to the hatch controls. They were intact. All of the transport’s systems checked out in working order except the shields. Hesitating just for a moment, I reached for the button that would open the hatch. If I hit it, the rear of the kettle would split, and Freeman and I would be sucked into space. Death would come in an instant.

  But I could not get myself to press the button. It was right there, big and bright red, and shaped like a mushroom, but I could not press it.

  “Speck!” I shouted.

  Freeman and I had an agreement to kill ourselves rather than return to Little Man. We never thought we would succeed on this mission. We came out to die. Now, thanks to my programming, I could not help but renege. I could not open the hatch or pull the pin.

  I would try to fly the transport back to Little Man. What a joke. I was a lousy pilot. I could fly a bird like a Starliner, a civilian craft with simple controls that practically flew itself. This transport, however, had next to no guidance gear. Its nearsighted radar system only had a range of one hundred thousand miles, less than half the distance from the Earth to the moon.

  I wasn’t really sure which way to fly to get back to Little Man. With the planet more than four billion miles away, navigation by line of sight was out of the question.

  I looked at the load of snacks I had brought back from the vending machine on the broadcast station. A few minutes ago, it had looked like a hoard. Now, in light of the hundreds of hours it would take to fly to that worthless colony, the food seemed insignificant.

  I left Freeman unconscious in the kettle and entered the cockpit.

  “Unified Authority Transport, come in. Unified Authority Transport, come in.”

  I looked down at the radio in complete disbelief. “This is Transport. Who is this?”

  “Transport, this is the S.N.N. Sakura. Please hold for Governor Yamashiro.”

  I suppose I should have been jumping for joy or saying a prayer to that big municipality in the sky. Instead I laughed. I was four billion miles from a farming colony and untold trillions of miles from civilized space, and whoever had found me wanted me to hold so that I could speak with an old friend. The cavalry had arrived in full force.

  “Colonel Harris, is that you?” the familiar old voice asked.

  “Yamashiro,” I said. “What the hell are you doing out here?”

  “Ah, Harris, that is the question I wanted to ask you. We have been tracking you for some time, and your actions make no sense. Perhaps we can discuss your mission on my ship.”

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  The War…

  Freeman and I freelanced for the Unified Authority, the pangalactic evolution of the nation that had once been
the United States of America. The Unified Authority explored the Milky Way, found that there was no intelligent life in the galaxy other than mankind, and colonized planets in all six of its arms.

  As the exploration continued, a fleet of scientific vessels vanished while mapping out a region of the galactic eye. Fearing we had finally located bug-eyed monsters, the U.A. military went on high alert while the Senate called for the creation of a self-broadcasting fleet of battleships.

  When the fleet launched, Senate Majority Leader Morgan Atkins, who had championed the project, accompanied it on its maiden voyage. The fleet broadcasted into the innermost curve of the Norma Arm and disappeared.

  That was when the Liberators entered the picture. At the same time that Atkins called for his self-broadcasting armada, the Linear Committee—the executive branch of the Unified Authority government—created a superweapon of its own: a new line of military clones. Unlike later clones, which were raised in orphanages, that first batch of Liberators came out of the tube at the age of twenty. They were fast, smart, and more independent-thinking than any clones that had come before them.

  To help them confront an unknown enemy, Liberators were built with a “combat reflex.” When the shooting started, a gland inside the Liberators’ skulls secreted a mixture of endorphins and adrenaline into their blood. It made them vicious, but it also kept them thinking clearly during the heat of battle.

  Using every self-broadcasting vessel available, the Navy sent these Liberator clones to the Galactic Eye, where they soon discovered that Atkins had founded a colony. He had commissioned the self-broadcasting fleet so that he could hijack it. Morgan Atkins, one of the most powerful men in the Unified Authority, had led the first large-scale rebellion against it.

  But he had not known about the Liberators. The clone invasion overran his settlement, forcing Atkins to escape into space with his fleet.

  The first Atkins Evangelists appeared a few years after the battle in the Galactic Eye. They told stories about the good senator discovering a city in the center of a planet and making contact with a radiant being who threatened to eradicate mankind. According to Mogat dogma, Atkins signed a pact with his “Space Angel” in which he promised to deliver the Republic as a vassal nation in order to avert total eradication of mankind.