The Clone Empire

by Steven L. Kent

  It took us twenty minutes to fly through the graveyard, dodging around the ruins of capital ships, sometimes breaking through a fog of litter. We saw no bodies, though tens of thousands of them floated around us. We pushed through bits of armor plating, folds of molten glass, wings from fighters, and more than one curtain of frozen water, all suspended in space. My pilot might have been used to these sights; he always flew in the cockpit where he could see his surroundings. I generally traveled in the kettle, blissfully ignorant of everything around the ship.

  Off in the distance, a derelict battleship sat in a clearing like an island in the night. Three rows of flashing lights ran along the underside of the ship, winking on and off in a sequence of red and yellow squares. At the far end of the ship, four flashing blue lights marked the entrance to the landing bay.

  The hull of the battleship was somewhere between beige and gray in color, an enormous moth-shaped wedge with tears in its skin where torpedoes had struck it.

  “I don’t like the looks of this scow,” Nobles said.

  I did not say anything. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I wanted to treat this whole adventure as if it were a bad dream. I would do what had to be done, but fear lurked in my mind. I tried to ignore it, but I knew it was there.

  All along the side of the ship, tiny dark spots stood out against the gray of the hull. They looked no more significant than slugs crawling on a garden wall. These were transports, clamped to the hull on the ship in regular intervals, thirty of them in all. We flew below one, and I stared up at it. No light shone from within the cockpit. The transport looked every bit as dead as the host to which it was now attached.

  “They look like ants compared to the battleship,” Nobles said. I expected him to question whether they would be able to move the big ship, but he didn’t. A trained pilot, he understood the physics of space travel better than I did.

  We approached the landing bay, a straight-edged passageway shrouded in darkness. In the dead of space, with the landing-pad lights extinguished, the inside of the bay was absolute black. The silhouette of a raven flying across a moonless sky would not have been as dark as the world inside that ship.

  “COE1, this is Marine 1,” Nobles began, and hesitated before completing his thought. “We have entered the battleship.”

  Spuler started to make another stupid joke, but Mars cut him off. “Understood,” he said. I could hear Spuler grumbling in the background.

  “Are the locks open?” Nobles asked. Landing bays incorporated enormous doors for atmospheric control.

  “Everything is a go,” Mars said. “We will seal the locks behind you.”

  “Yeah, we wouldn’t want anything to shoot out prematurely,” Spuler added.

  “Stow it, Seaman,” Mars snapped.

  More laughter. Even Mars laughed this time. Then he said, “One more word out of you, Spuler, and you’ll be cleaning the Norristown sewage system for the rest of your career.”

  Silence.

  I knew Spuler. He had a mouth on him, but he was worth the trouble. Mars had one thousand men in his Corps of Engineers; Spuler might well have been the best of them. He’d probably done more to get this show rolling than all of the other engineers combined.

  Moving no faster than ten miles per hour, we drifted into that dark hatchway, our runner lights illuminating small swatches along the runway and walls. This part of the ship was in immaculate condition—the walls, pipes, panels, doors, ceiling fixtures, and other furnishings all in perfect trim.

  The runway was designed to accommodate transports, but it was wide enough for larger ships. Part of the design included an artificial-gravity field in which ships entering this passage were supposed to land. The field had not been restored. Instead of riding the sled system through the locks, Nobles had to fly the transport through that needle’s eye.

  “Marine 1, the outer hatch is sealed,” Mars informed us.

  Spuler said nothing. He probably had some smart remark about restoring a foreskin or something along that line, but Mars had warned him off.

  We slowly drifted past the first of the atmospheric shields, a massive iron door that weighed multiple tons. Behind it, in a discrete recess, a tiny red light winked on and off. I was glad to see it. It meant that while the rest of the ship was dormant, the engineers had restored power to the atmospheric locks.

  Nobles pointed to a glowing lever on his flight stick. “Looks like we’ll be able to open the doors from in here,” he said, sounding relieved. I knew how he felt. Everything had gone according to plan so far.

  We floated in past all three of the locks and settled onto the landing-bay deck. In the glare of our runner lights, I saw that Mars and his engineers had cleared as much debris as they could from the area.

  I looked around the empty landing bay outside the window, a world so dark and silent it might have been at the bottom of a sea. Abandoned. Lifeless. How many people had died in this chamber? A crew of three thousand men had died defending this ship. That much I knew. Some had been flushed out to space. Undoubtedly, others were still aboard, floating statues that had once been sailors and Marines.

  The Corps of Engineers had equipped the skids of our transport with special magnetic clamps to hold us in place during our upcoming collision. The magnets came on and locked us into place once we landed.

  “COE 1, we are in place, repeat, we are in place,” Nobles radioed, as our bird touched the deck.

  I hated the sound of those words. They meant we were sealed into this orbiting tomb. They meant I could not turn back. Anxiety built in my gut. I wanted to tell Nobles that this was all a mistake. We needed to go back. Without my combat reflex to calm me, I had to deal with unadulterated fear.

  “Copy that, Marine 1,” Mars said.

  And then, on a direct line that Nobles would not hear, Lieutenant Mars said, “General Harris, a lot of your men will be glad to see you go.”

  “So I hear,” I said. Now it was Mars’s turn to tell me what he thought of me. Why not give me an earful? He wasn’t likely to see me again. I always thought the “born-again clone” liked me, but maybe he simply had a better poker face than Hollingsworth or Doctorow.

  “Serving with you has been an honor, sir. I hope your mission goes as planned, and you return soon,” he said, leaving me stunned. He signed off before I could respond.

  Once again I found myself alone with my thoughts, trying to adjust to the alien feeling of unbridled fear. Flying always bothered me, even when I had a reliable combat reflex. It made me feel helpless. In the fight-or-flight of the battlefield, I had a measure of control. On a ship, I had no control of my fate. Whatever became of the ship would also become of me.

  “Nobles, what’s your first name?” I asked, mostly to clear the suffocating silence from my helmet.

  “Chris, sir,” he said.

  “Short for Christopher?”

  “Short for Christian. My parents must have been religious types.” Like every other clone, he was raised to believe he was a natural-born. In fact, he was programmed to die if he discovered his synthetic heritage. As a Liberator, I was spared that last bit of programming.

  “Must have been,” I agreed. “Too bad you never knew them. Do you know how they died?”

  “They died in a house fire,” Nobles said.

  Funny, I thought, mine, too. Lieutenant Mars broke up our conversation. “Prepare for launch initiation. Repeat, prepare for launch initiation.”

  “Shit, here we go,” I whispered, not even thinking who would hear me.

  “General Harris, we set up a video array if you want to follow the operation’s progress.”

  I thought that he meant some kind of an interLink display. The last thing I wanted at that moment was images of transports dragging the carcass of a battleship showing inside my helmet.

  Willing myself to sound calm, I said, “I’d rather keep the interLink open.”

  “They’re not on the interLink, sir, they’re on the screens behind your seat.”


  “What?” When I looked at the back wall of the cockpit, I saw five rows of four-inch video screens inlaid in the wall. Most of the screens showed a small section of the battleship’s hull and a bird’s-eye view of cluttered space. The engineers must have placed cameras in the transports along the hull.

  “That’s was kind of you,” I said.

  “It was Spuler’s idea,” Mars said.

  “Think of it as an in-flight porno,” said Spuler. “You get to watch the Tool’s penetration.”

  “Spuler,” Mars said.

  I tried to ignore them. Looking at the little displays, I realized just how much I wanted to scrub the mission. I felt the jittering in my hands and the throbbing in my temples. Now that the transport had landed, and the runner lights were out, I sat in darkness, seeing only by the light of the night-for-day lenses in my visor. I was scared already, and soon I would be terrified.

  Trying to sound confident, I told Mars, “Pull the trigger.” Then I did something I knew I would regret; I told Nobles, “I’m shutting down our Link until we get through,” without giving him a reason why. I wasn’t shutting down the entire interLink, we might need to contact Mars; I was just shutting down the Link between me and Nobles because I could feel the panic spreading through my thoughts like a cancer, and I did not want him to hear me.

  “Yes, sir,” said Nobles. He seemed preoccupied as he toyed with the switches and gear around his seat.

  I removed the harness and climbed out of the chair. The artificial gravity drawing my boots to the deck, I walked to the panel of screens. When I took a closer look at some of the monitors, I saw the rear sides of transports in the corners of the screens. The engines were already running. We had started the flight without my noticing. Sometimes, that happens in space.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I couldn’t stop myself from looking at the monitors. It didn’t matter that I wanted to stick my head in the proverbial sand; the screens bore down on me like five rows of unblinking eyes. Even when I looked away, I felt their weight upon me.

  Across the cockpit, Nobles busied himself checking systems and flight controls. He flipped switches, read gauges, then turned his attention to the video array I wanted so much to ignore. He settled comfortably, and there he sat, his gaze transfixed, the reflections of the little screens showing in rows of bright squares in his visor.

  In the isolation of my helmet, I began to panic. “I’m not ready for this,” I said to myself. I said it out loud. There was something comforting in hearing my own voice rolling around in my helmet; and what did it matter, I had shut off the interLink. No one would hear me.

  “Did you say something, General?” For a moment I thought I might be hearing voices, then I remembered that I had not severed my Link with Lieutenant Mars.

  “No,” I said. “I’m just mumbling to myself.” I thought for a moment, then I said, “I can’t do this. This is crazy, we need to call this off.”

  The top screens of the array showed the view from the lead transport drones. The cameras looked out into space, but not open space. A tangle of wrecked warships filled the view, looking as impregnable as a castle wall.

  I became aware of the way I was breathing, panting like a winded dog.

  Light flared across thirty of the thirty-five screens, turning them white as an afternoon sun. The nuclear explosion. We’d just shot off enough bombs to destroy a small planet. The heat generated by the cataclysm would only last a moment. During that moment, metal would melt—and bodies—then the chill of space would return. What was the power of a few nuclear bombs against the immenseness of space?

  The flash of the bombs vanished as quickly as it appeared, but it left ghosts on the video screens. Thirty of the thirty-five screens were outside the ship, placed in transports; the other five showed scenes inside the hull of the battleship . . . the Tool. These screens showed dark corridors and braced walls. Mars and his men had done a lot of work preparing the ship.

  “I’m not ready for this,” I told Mars. On the other side of the cockpit, Nobles sat comfortably, unbothered by what we were about to do. Apparently, flying through nuclear explosions left him unfazed.

  “It’s too late to call off the mission, General,” Mars said in a voice meant to soothe me.

  “Shut down the transports,” I said. “You have control of the transports, shut them down.”

  “We can’t do that, sir. There’s already too much forward momentum.”

  “Shut them off,” I said, feeling frantic. I had no control over the situation, and that terrified me.

  “The Tool will still hit Chastity Belt whether we cut the engines or not,” Mars said.

  Now he was using the names Spuler had used, and that aggravated me. My anger cut through my panicked thoughts, and I said, “Lieutenant, shut off the specking engines.”

  Mars laughed. “Does Ava Gardner know that you’re a coward?”

  I heard the words, but it took a moment for them to sink in. I sat in the copilot’s chair in stunned silence, as he added, “Harris, you’re the best kept secret in the whole Marine Corps. Everyone thinks you’re such a badass, and it turns out you’re just another bed wetter.”

  “You son of a bitch,” I said, looking away from the monitors. “You specking son of a bitch. If I get out of here . . .”

  “Now I’m scared,” Mars said. “General Bed Wetter is threatening me.”

  I could not think of anything else but how much I wanted to kill that son of a bitch. “Born-again clone” my ass. I would have hopped out of the battleship and dog-paddled to Terraneau if I thought I could do it. It was as I sat there fuming, trying to invent some form of revenge, that we struck the barrier. We did not slice through the broken ships, we smashed through like a hammer hitting glass, and the force nearly threw me from my chair.

  I turned toward the monitors in time to see three of them go dead. The working screens showed a fractal kaleidoscope of shapes—shards of ships tumbling as they floated out of view. The five cameras located inside the battleship showed crumbled walls that looked like they might have been made out of paper.

  Two of the screens in the first row showed the bow of one of the U.A. ships floating into open space. Strands of blue electricity formed around it, flexing and dancing; and then, in a flash, the section of ship was gone.

  “You’re through the barrier, sir,” Mars said, suddenly sounding respectful once more. “For what it’s worth, I would have resigned my commission before I would have done what you are doing.”

  “What?” I asked, my thoughts still entropic.

  “You are traveling at a sustained speed of 273 miles per hour,” Mars said. “I hoped you would come through at 290, but 270 is within the margin of error.”

  I still did not understand. I looked over at Nobles, who still sat staring into the monitors, looking so damned relaxed. He had his seat swiveled around, his right hand stretched across the arm of his chair and his left hand curled on his lap.

  It took me another moment to realize that Mars had said those things to distract me. I took a deep breath, and said, “Thank you, Lieutenant.”

  “No problem, sir,” said Mars. I could hear the smile in his voice. “Go with God.”

  My blood pressure returning to normal, I turned to look at screens and saw the beginning of the anomaly forming. The electricity of the anomaly was not as bright as the nuclear flare, but it was sustained. It looked like a bubble of light in the darkness of space. Jagged tentacles of electricity reached out from it.

  “Here comes the dangerous part of the ride,” I said.

  “You’ll be fine, sir,” Mars said.

  In less than a second, the lightning from the anomaly stretched and overtook the battleship. The screens on the first row of the array showed a brief flash of white and went dead. The screens on the second row showed lightning dancing on the hull of the battleship. They showed transports peeling away from the hull like dried leaves falling from a tree.

  Electricity continued
dancing along the hull. More screens went bright, then dark. Somehow, the electricity worked its way inside the battleship; I could see it on three of the internal screens. Unstable light danced inside the hallways, an obscene wattage, multiple millions of joules, more than enough power to stop my heart and sear my skin and melt my eyes.

  The electricity ran through the ship like a flood, splashing glare everywhere. It happened so quickly, literally in a flash. One moment I saw monitors winking out of existence, the next moment all was silent. I sat in the cockpit aware that if a catastrophe were going to happen, it would already have occurred.

  “Mars, can you hear me?” I asked.

  No one responded.

  We’ve either made it through, or Mars has died, I thought. Then I came up with another possibility—my communications gear might have fried.

  I tried to raise Mars on several frequencies and had no luck. Then I tried Nobles. When he did not respond, it occurred to me that he might have had a heart attack. The poor son of a bitch might have died right there, sitting in his pilot’s seat just a few feet away from me.

  If he was having heart problems, there was nothing I could do. I could not open his armor; we had purged the oxygen from the cabin. Not knowing what else to do, I tapped my fingers on the glass visor of his helmet.

  “What are you doing?” Nobles asked, his voice groggy.

  “You fell asleep?” I asked, feeling both relieved and embarrassed.

  “Sorry, sir,” Nobles said. “When are we going to make the broadcast?”

  “You slept through the entire thing?” I asked, now realizing why he looked so relaxed. Wondering if the sleep had helped him avoid a panic attack or if the sleep had been the attack, I patted Nobles on his armored shoulder, and said, “Let’s take our bird out of here and find out where we are.”

  “Yes, sir,” Nobles said, sounding as if I had woken him from a trance. He flipped a switch, and the lights came back online in the cockpit. The gauges in the instrument panel shone their low green-and-white glow. The runner lights along the base of the transport started, shining bright light all around the landing bay. Hitting our thrusters ever so slightly, he lifted us off the ground to rotate the transport so that our nose faced the runway.