The Clone Empire

by Steven L. Kent

  Mars was universally perky and ready to please, and we got used to him saying “praise this” and “praise that.” Everybody liked Mars. The hallelujah chorus was just part of having him around.

  I was glad to have a friend, even if he wasn’t so much a friend as a nonhostile acquaintance. In his version of the gospel, smiling at people drew him closer to God. What was the harm in that?

  One of the cranes struggled to pull a thirty-foot section of wall out of the ground. The wreckage looked heavier than the crane, but that did not seem to make a difference. After a short fight, the wall broke free, and the crane pulled it out like a fisherman reeling in a trophy bass.

  Seeing that Lieutenant Mars had everything under control, I returned to Hollingsworth to restart our conversation. “There are fifteen fighter carriers floating up there. What happened to the other twenty-one?” The Scutum-Crux Fleet had had thirty-six fighter carriers when the Earth Fleet attacked. Searching with telescopes and radars, we had located twelve of our carriers. We located three more when we started searching the area with transports.

  “Even if they got away, they wouldn’t have gotten very far,” Hollingsworth said. “Not with those new U.A. ships chasing after them.”

  He was right. The ships that the Unified Authority sent were stronger, faster, and better shielded than our ships.

  Hollingsworth continued his assault. “Just for the sake of argument, let’s say you have twenty-one carriers waiting for you. What are you going to do with them? The Unifieds smashed us when we had thirty-six carriers. They’ll just smash us again.”

  “They didn’t smash us down here,” I said. It was a weak argument, but it was true. “We beat their Marines.”

  As far as the Unified Authority was concerned, the battle had been nothing more than a war game, but not all of the game went as expected. They sent three thousand Marines in shielded armor to attack my five thousand men in old-fashioned unshielded armor. We had the numbers, they had the impenetrable armor that rendered our bullets and particle beams useless. We won by way of a battlefield miracle.

  Of course, what one side labels a miracle, the other sees as murder.

  “You dropped a building on them,” Hollingsworth said. “You buried them. Next time, they won’t be so quick to chase you into an underground garage.”

  Below us, two of the cranes worked in tandem to hoist a long stretch of outer wall from the ruins of that underground garage. With cables pulling at it from two different directions, the concrete crumbled like a giant cracker, and the cranes fished out nothing but shreds.

  “It doesn’t look stable,” Hollingsworth said.

  “You better be grateful for that. We buried three thousand Unified Authority Marines down there; if it were stable, they might have dug themselves out,” I said.

  Mars jogged over to join us. “We’ve dug an entrance, sir,” he said, his fingers covering the microphone on his headset. “I’ve got a team ready. Is there anything you want to tell them before I send them in?”

  I shook my head.

  Down along the wreckage, five men in soft-shelled armor ventured into the gap that the cranes had opened.

  “If you don’t mind my asking, sir, do we really need to do this?” Mars asked, his new born-again values leaving him uncomfortable about excavating graves.

  “I want a better look at their armor,” I said.

  “We’re pulling them out to look at their armor?”

  “You worry about the engineering, I’ll worry about the ethics,” I said.

  “The general wants to examine their armor for weaknesses,” Hollingsworth volunteered.

  “Why does he care about that?” asked Mars

  “He wants to know how to get through their armor before his return engagement,” Hollingsworth answered. He and Mars carried on their conversation around me as if I weren’t there.

  “Are they coming back?” Mars asked.

  “Nope; Harris wants to invade Earth,” Hollingsworth said.

  For a moment, Mars looked stunned, then he laughed. “You’re joking, right?”

  I started to say something, but Lieutenant Mars’s expression suddenly shifted. Something he’d heard over his headset caught his attention. He took a step toward the wreckage, then turned to me, and said, “They’ve got one, sir.”

  “Are they certain it’s one of theirs?” I asked. We had lost nearly as many men as the Unified Authority in that battle. Most of ours were killed on the top level of the underground garage. Most of theirs were killed on the lower levels. They found this stiff so quickly, I thought it might be one of ours.

  “It’s a U.A. Marine,” Mars confirmed.

  “Are his shields still up?” I asked. Six weeks had passed since we brought the garage down on the bastards; the power in their suits should have gone out long ago.

  “No, sir. The suit’s gone dark.”

  “Is the armor in one piece?” I asked.

  Mars relayed the question, then told me, “Good as new.”

  Of course it was good as new. What’s a little thing like a twenty-thousand-ton avalanche to a suit of shielded armor? I asked myself. “Let’s have a look at it.”

  A few minutes later, two engineers came out of the ground, carrying the dead Marine. They brought the body over so I could examine it. Without the glowing skin of its shields, the dead man’s armor looked very much like the combat armor my men wore. It was made of the same dark green alloy. Quarter-inch ridges traced seams along the shoulders, sleeves, legs, and sides of the helmet. The shielding must have been transmitted from those ridges.

  Looking down at the body, I felt no regret for killing this man. The war was of their making, not mine. I was only twenty-eight years old, but I’d spent the last ten years of my life running from one battlefield to the next. Any compassion I had ever felt for the dead had long since burned out of me.

  “The visor’s cracked,” I told Mars.

  A hairline break ran vertically across the glass face of the visor. The crack was thin and shallow, so minor you might not even be able to trace it with a sharpened pencil.

  “Where?” Mars asked as he bent down for a closer look. “That? That’s not a crack, it’s a scratch.”

  “I told you, perfect condition,” I said.

  “As long as the visor works—”

  “You have your orders,” I said.

  “We’re getting four more sets,” he argued.

  “Five more suits,” I corrected him. If I’d left it at four, he might have taken it as tacit permission to keep this suit. “And those five suits had better be perfect, or I’ll send them back.”

  “Five suits in perfect condition, aye,” Lieutenant Mars said, making no effort to hide his frustration. He relayed my orders down to his men, whispering something extra into his microphone so I would not hear.

  Finding armor in working condition might take time. Once the shielding turned off, the armor would be crushed under the weight of rocks and concrete; but the garage was big and cavernous. With three thousand Unified Authority Marines buried in its depths, there had to be five undestroyed suits down there.

  Nearly an hour passed before the engineers returned with their next specimen. I examined the armor. There was no dust on the seals around the shoulder plates. One of Mars’s engineers had taken a helmet from one cadaver and added it to the body armor of another. Clever. I pretended not to notice the switch.

  “Send it to the labs,” I told Mars.

  “Aye, aye, sir,” he said, trying to hide a smile. He must have known about the switch and thought he had pulled one over on me.

  As his commanding officer, I could not allow him to think he was smarter than me, so I added, “And, Lieutenant, tell your men to stop with the mix-and-match armor. Next time, I’ll send it back.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said.

  Mars called down my orders as his men loaded the body onto a jeep and left for Fort Sebastian. As I watched the jeep bounce away, Colonel Hollingsworth said, “Looks
like we’ve got us an audience.”

  “Damn.” I sighed.

  A small crowd of locals had gathered around the chain-link fence that we’d built around the area as a perimeter. Leaning on the fence and watching us, they reminded me of inmates staring out of a prison yard.

  “Maybe you should have a word with them,” Hollingsworth suggested.

  “Don’t tell them that you are planning to invade Earth,” Mars added. “You wouldn’t want to upset them.”

  “Just get me the specking armor,” I muttered to Mars as I headed for the gate, hating what would come next. The locals had caught me with my hand in the cookie jar. By mutual agreement, the underground garage had become a designated no-man’s-land forbidden to both us and the civilian government. Along with Unified Authority Marines, we had buried an armory filled with guns, grenades, mines, vehicles, and bombs when we blew up the garage. The locals didn’t want us visiting the armory, and we didn’t want them raiding it, either.

  Throughout the morning, low clouds had floated in from the east, blocking out the sun and threatening to rain. Now the first drops of rain fell, splattering on shards of concrete, turning their gray surface to taupe.

  I walked to the fence where the locals waited. Rain fell on them, but they did not seem to care.

  “This is a flagrant violation of our agreement,” the Right Reverend Colonel Ellery Doctorow said as I approached. He stood a few inches from the chain link, his arms folded across his chest, an angry scowl on his face.

  “I’m not here for weapons,” I explained.

  “I don’t care why you are here,” Doctorow said. “Pull your men out and leave immediately.”

  Doctorow was at least halfway through his sixties. The highest-ranking chaplain in the Unified Authority Army in his former life, he had come to Terraneau five years ago as the Army prepared to fight off an alien invasion. After the aliens massacred the fighting men, Doctorow shrugged off both his uniform and his cassock and became a civilian leader. He hated the military, and he viewed God as some kind of cosmic voyeur instead of a supreme being.

  “We’re exhuming bodies, not weapons,” I explained. “You can hang around and observe if you like. You won’t see any weapons come out of that hole, just bodies and armor.”

  Lieutenant Mars trotted over to tell me that his men had located a suitable stiff.

  “How’s his armor?” I asked.

  Mars repeated my question into his microphone, pressed his finger against his earpiece, then said, “The legs were crushed. The helmet is perfect.”

  Under different circumstances I would have given the order to throw it back, but I did not know how long I could hold Doctorow and his civilian posse at bay.

  “Take the legs from the first guy you found, the one with the cracked visor,” I said.

  “Praise Jesus, God is good,” Mars told the men in the hole. “He says we can keep it.”

  “Why are you digging up dead Marines?” Doctorow asked.

  I started to answer, but Lieutenant Mars spoke first. “He’s preparing for the invasion.”

  “Is the Earth Fleet coming back?” asked Doctorow.

  “It’s the other way around. He’s planning on invading them,” Mars said, the glimmer in his eyes revealing the lightness with which he regarded my ambition.

  “That’s not funny,” Doctorow said.

  “He’s not joking,” I said.

  “You’re planning to invade Earth?” Doctorow asked.

  When I nodded, he smiled, and said, “Well, if that’s the case, Harris, dig away. If it gets you off my planet, I’m all for it.”

  PART I

  SECRETS AND COMBINATIONS

  CHAPTER ONE

  Once Lieutenant Mars’s engineers broke through to the third level of the underground garage, the work went quickly. They found hundreds of bodies, many of which were as neatly preserved as eggs in a carton. The engineers filled their body quota and radioed Mars to say they had found guns, jeeps, and ammunition.

  “They’ve found a mother lode of munitions,” Mars told me.

  “Leave it,” I said.

  “Are you sure you want to do that, sir?” Mars asked.

  I looked back at Ellery Doctorow and his militia lined up along the fence. The bastards didn’t trust us, and I didn’t blame them. “Leave it,” I repeated. “I gave them my word.”

  Cheerful as ever, Mars said, “Yes, sir,” and told his men to exit the underground garage and seal it behind them. “We don’t want to tempt the locals,” he said. The engineers said something, I could not hear what, and he said, “It’s the golden rule. Yeah . . . You know, ‘Arm thy neighbor as thyself.’ We don’t get the weapons, and neither do they.”

  Mars must have felt my eyes upon him. He looked at me and flashed an innocent smile.

  It took the engineers about an hour to carry the last of the bodies out, set the charges, and clear the pit. They made sure no one lingered too close to the hole, then they sealed the tunnels they had dug, sending a thirty-foot plume of dust into the air.

  Seeing that our work was done and that we had not exhumed any weapons, Doctorow and his militia returned to their homes.

  Hollingsworth joined Mars and me as we watched Doctorow and company load into their trucks and cars. “Specking antisynthetic pricks,” Hollingsworth muttered. Colonel Philo Hollingsworth was a clone. Scott Mars was a clone. Every man under my command was cloned, and none of them knew it. They were programmed to think they were natural-born.

  “He’s not so bad,” I told Hollingsworth. “Now his wife . . .”

  Sarah Doctorow was an antisynthetic bitch; but Doctorow didn’t share her prejudice. She saw no difference between clones and robots. He, on the other hand, did not care whether people came from a fallopian tube or a test tube.

  Mars excused himself and went to help his engineers load the stiffs onto their truck. A few minutes later, Hollingsworth and I climbed into our jeep and headed back to Fort Sebastian, locking the security fence behind us. We did not electrify the fence, but we placed sensors around it to make sure no one climbed it or cut their way through.

  “So what do you think they will call the war?” I asked Hollingsworth, as we pulled onto the street leading through the ruins of Norristown.

  “Who are you talking about?” Hollingsworth asked.

  “You know, a hundred years from now. What do you think people will call the war?”

  “I don’t think anyone will remember it ever happened,” he said.

  “Sure they will. Maybe they’ll call it a revolutionary war,” I said. “Isn’t it a revolutionary war when you fight for independence?”

  That was an exaggeration. In truth, we were already quasi-independent. Having decided to eliminate its clone military program, the Pentagon marooned us on its fifteen abandoned fleets. The goal was to use us for military exercises as they developed newer and more powerful ships.

  “It wasn’t a revolution,” Hollingsworth said. “It’s not a revolution unless you win.”

  “Well, okay, maybe we didn’t win, but neither did they. I don’t see any Unified Authority guard towers. Do you?” I asked, ignoring the obvious.

  “We got crushed. We didn’t win shit. They crushed us,” Hollingsworth said, stating the obvious, which I had tried to ignore.

  “Okay, so we didn’t exactly win, but we didn’t totally lose. Maybe that makes it a civil war,” I said. “Like the American Civil War.”

  Hollingsworth shook his head. “It wasn’t a civil war, either, sir. It wasn’t important enough to be a civil war. I bet the local media on Earth didn’t even report the battle.”

  “They reported it. They lost a decorated war hero, they didn’t have any choice,” I said. “People notice when someone like Ted Mooreland goes missing.” Mooreland was a general in the Unified Authority Marines. He had led the ground assault that ended in the underground garage.

  “They’ll just announce that he died in a training exercise,” Hollingsworth said.


  “You’re probably right,” I agreed.

  “Damn right they’ll say that,” Hollingsworth went on. “That’s all this was to them, just a training exercise. It wasn’t a civil war, and it sure as hell wasn’t a revolutionary war.”

  “Maybe it was a coup,” I said, feeling a little brighter now that I had found a word to describe our insignificant revolt.

  Hollingsworth shook his head, and said, “Don’t flatter yourself. A year from now, no one remembers it.”

  “Oh, they’ll remember it,” I said. “The Unified Authority lost twenty-three ships. They lost three fighter carriers, five battleships, and three thousand Marines. Damn straight they’ll remember it. Anytime the Navy loses three fighter carriers, it’s a big deal.”

  Hollingsworth thought about this and gave ground. “A big battle, but a minor war.”

  “But it was a war,” I said.

  “Okay, so it was a war, and the war is over, sir. Unless they come back to finish us, your war is dead.”

  We drove across the newly restored viaduct that led along the southern outskirts of Norristown. Like seedlings springing up in the wake of a volcanic eruption, new buildings had begun to appear around the city.

  “Maybe you’re right,” I said. “Only time will tell.”

  “Maybe I’m right about what?” Hollingsworth asked, sounding surprised.

  “About the war being on hold,” I said.

  “I didn’t say it was on hold; I said it was dead.”

  I could not fault Hollingsworth for his pessimistic attitude. Based on the information he had at hand, our chances of winning a war with the Unified Authority seemed bleak. I had more information than he did, but now was not the time to discuss it. I needed to get back to Fort Sebastian to clean up. I had dinner plans that night, and I wanted to look my best.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Ava, my significant other/girlfriend, and I ate dinner with Ellery Doctorow and his wife every month. It was never a friendly occasion. Doctorow considered me and my Marines a relic of Unified Authority intervention and wanted us to leave. As far as he and everyone else knew, we were landlocked on his planet. We couldn’t very well fly off into space in a fleet of short-range transports, so he tolerated our settling into the Army base on the east side of town.