The Clone Empire

by Steven L. Kent

  He tapped a button and looked out the windshield. When he did not get the response he wanted, he tapped the button several more times. “COE 1, this is Marine 1. The atmospheric gates are not responding. Repeat, COE 1, I am unable to open the gates.” He sounded so damn official when he hit the mike.

  “Lieutenant Mars warned me that this might happen while we were prepping for launch,” Nobles said.

  “Come again,” I said.

  “The atmospheric locks are not responding, sir. Mars said that could happen. He said something about taking our fate in our own hands by flying a wreck,” Nobles said. “I didn’t think we’d survive the broadcast, that’s why I took that sleeping pill.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The doors of the atmospheric locks might have been knocked out of alignment when we crashed through the other ships, or the controls for opening the door may have been fried when we passed through the broadcast zone. We were trapped either way.

  Nobles parked the transport and opened the rear hatch for me. The artificial gravity that rooted me to the deck of the transport did not extend beyond its ramp. I leaped into the void and floated across the open landing-bay floor as smoothly as a cloud rolls across the sky. Below me, I saw the rubberized insulation that the Corps of Engineers used to coat the floor, walls, and ceiling. The stuff had probably saved our lives; a lot of electricity had pulsed through this ship.

  “Speck,” I said.

  “What is it?” asked Nobles.

  I drifted right up to the wall and pounded a fist into the insulation. It was rigid. Hoping to peel the rubber away, I tried stabbing my fingers into the rubber. It did not give way.

  “They sealed the doors to the ship,” I said. I had hoped to search the ship for explosives or maybe a laser welder, something I could use to cut through the atmospheric locks.

  “It’s insulation,” Nobles informed me. “That’s what kept the electricity out of the landing bay.”

  “It’s also sealing us in,” I pointed out, my temper starting to get the better of me. I silently toyed with the idea of pulling my combat knife from my rucksack, but I knew I couldn’t even nick industrial-grade insulation using a simple knife. “You wouldn’t happen to have anything we can use to cut our way out?”

  “You mean like a laser welder?” asked Nobles.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “No, sir. Did you bring any weapons we can use?”

  “I have an M27 and a torpedo.”

  “Didn’t you say the torpedo was a nuke?” asked Nobles.

  “Affirmative.”

  “Maybe we should save that for a last resort, sir.”

  “There has got to be some way out of here,” I said. Pushing off the rubberized wall, I launched myself past the transport and glided to the far end of the bay. With its electronics off-line, the massive atmospheric lock was just another wall. It was designed to be bulletproof, fireproof, and radiation resistant. I might have been tempted to fire my M27 at it, but firing a gun in a vacuum with neither gravity nor air friction to slow the bullets down was never a good idea.

  “Speck,” I muttered as I kicked off the lock, sending myself past the transport. Gliding in the null gravity, I had no more capacity to steer myself than a bullet or a billiard ball. I sailed past the nose of the transport, then along the side and pushed a different wall, reangling myself so that I entered the transport through its ass, where the artificial gravity brought me to my feet.

  Dragging my feet along the ramp to stop myself, I turned to take one last look across the landing bay. Surely there had to be a welding torch or a drill. Hell, even a particle beam might do the trick. A particle beam . . . A tiny pistol—its disruptive beam might tear through the insulation.

  The standard-issue particle-beam pistol was small . . . so small you could throw one in your rucksack and forget it was there. I hit the button, closing the rear doors, then grabbed my rucksack and headed up to the cockpit.

  “What are you doing?” Nobles asked, as I burst into the cabin.

  “I have an idea,” I said as I pulled out my clothes. I pulled out my Charlie service pants and blouse, not really flinging them away, but not watching where they landed. I had underwear, shoes, socks, toiletries, my M27, and three clips of ammunition.

  And then, at the bottom of my rucksack where I hoped I might find a particle-beam pistol, I found nothing.

  “What are you looking for?” Nobles asked.

  “A particle-beam weapon,” I said.

  “Did you bring one?”

  “Apparently not,” I said. “I don’t suppose you did?” I already knew the answer, but he confirmed it. Nobles was a pilot, not a fighter.

  “So what do we do now?” Nobles asked.

  I dropped into the copilot’s seat, and said, “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “We die?” he asked.

  “We wait,” I said. “We’re in a battleship that just sailed into occupied space. If the Scutum-Crux Fleet is anywhere near here, Warshaw will send ships out to investigate.”

  “Oh, hey, maybe I should send out a distress signal,” Nobles suggested.

  “Good idea,” I said, no longer certain either of us imbeciles deserved to live much longer.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The fighters came first. Unseen by us, they circled the battleship, listening to our distress signal for several minutes before asking us to identify ourselves. Trapped within the landing bay, unable to scan the area outside the battleship, we had no idea whether we were dealing with a couple of fighters or an entire fleet.

  I identified myself as General Wayson Harris of the Enlisted Man’s Marines.

  “It doesn’t look like you have much of a ship there, General,” said one of the fighter pilots.

  It occurred to me that the Unified Authority might well have tracked the SC Fleet to this stretch of the galaxy and defeated it. I might have been speaking to a Unified Authority fighter pilot, in which case my name, rank, and serial number would be more than enough information for a court-martial and firing squad.

  The pilot had a clonelike voice, however. He sounded pretty much like any man under my command. They were all built with the exact same vocal cords, after all.

  “This battleship is deader than dinosaur shit,” I said. “My pilot and I are sitting in a transport inside the battleship. The transport works. The battleship was just an empty husk we used to surf through the broadcast zone.”

  The fighter pilot repeated my story back to me to make sure he had heard correctly. “You say you rode a dead battleship through the broadcast zone?”

  “That just about sums it up,” I said.

  He didn’t believe me. I didn’t blame him. “Tell you what, General, you just fly out, and we will escort you down to the planet.”

  “Um, I can’t,” I said. “The landing-bay hatch is broken.”

  “This just keeps getting more interesting,” the pilot said. He thought for a moment, then asked in a suspicious voice, “Is this a readiness drill?”

  “Pilot, what is your name?” I asked.

  “Stanford, sir. Petty Officer First Class Jefferson Stanford.”

  “I assure you, Petty Officer First Class Stanford, this is not a drill. This is not a specking joke,” I said, and I ordered him to call his commander and report his findings.

  Another hour of silence followed. Nobles suggested we pipe air and heat into the cockpit so we could remove our helmets. Taking off the old lid felt good after what we had been through. A few minutes later, he suggested we air out the main kettle. Once that was done, he went to the head and relieved himself.

  “Did I miss anything?” he asked when he returned.

  I shook my head.

  “What if they don’t come back?”

  “They will,” I said.

  Another hour passed, and they came back en masse.

  “Harris, is that really you in there?”

  “Who am I speaking with?” I asked.

  “Are you a message in a bott
le or a guinea pig?” The voice could have belonged to just about any clone, but the attitude sounded familiar.

  “Who is this?” I repeated.

  “This is Hank Bishop, Captain of the E.M.F. Kamehameha ,” he said, “E.M.F.” being short for “Enlisted Man’s Fleet.” Just a few months ago, it was still the Scutum-Crux Fleet; but now that the break with the Unified Authority was formal, it was the Enlisted Man’s Fleet, and the Kamehameha was its flagship.

  “No shit,” I said.

  Bishop laughed. It was a friendly laugh. “Stay put, Harris, I have some engineers on the way. We’ll get you out of there.”

  Another hour passed, and the atmospheric gates slid open. A squadron of fighters met our transport as we emerged from the battleship and escorted us to the Kamehameha.

  PART II

  IN DEFENSE OF EMPIRES

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Earthdate: October 28, A.D. 2517

  Location: Providence Kri

  Galactic Position: Cygnus Arm

  When I first transferred to the Scutum-Crux Arm, my orders were to assume command of the fleet. Those orders changed when Gary Warshaw, the fleet’s highest-ranking noncom, made an end run. He paid an unauthorized visit to the Pentagon to whine about a Marine taking command of the fleet.

  He might have been acting like a weasel, but he was right. Admiral Brocius, the highest-ranking officer in the Unified Authority Navy, rewrote my orders. Warshaw took command of the fleet, and I became Commandant of the Marines. Then the Earth Fleet attacked, and our bickering came to an end.

  The Kamehameha, flagship of the Enlisted Man’s Fleet—formerly the Scutum-Crux Fleet, traveled out to meet us alone. That in and of itself suggested that something was wrong. Fighter carriers, particularly flagships, do not travel without support. But there she sat, in an isolated pocket of space, with no other ships in sight, the Kamehameha, flagship of the Enlisted Man’s Fleet.

  Five months had passed since the Unified Authority attacked Terraneau. I’d seen plenty of capital ships since the attack, but they were derelicts floating in space, as dark and lifeless as the vacuum around them.

  The Kamehameha, for all her battles, was anything but dead. The entire ship was a patchwork of dark walls and bright spots, with light shining from viewports and observation decks. A squadron of fighters circled her bow.

  My loyalty to the Kamehameha ran deep. She was the first ship on which I served, and I served on her twice, once as a newly appointed corporal still trying to earn his chops and more recently as a field-promoted general. But there was something even deeper between us.

  We were the same, that ship and I. The Kamehameha was an Expansion-class fighter carrier. She was the only Expansion-class ship still in commission, a one-of-a-kind remnant of the abandoned past. Since her manufacture, the Unified Authority had introduced the bigger, more powerful Perseus-class ships. And now the U.A. Navy had yet another generation of newer, smaller, self-broadcasting ships, with better technology in their shields.

  And me . . . well, I was the last of the Liberators, a class of clone that had been replaced before the Unified Authority abandoned its cloning program altogether.

  “Transport, this is Kamehameha Flight Control. Come in.”

  “Flight Control, this is Transport,” said Nobles.

  “Do not raise your shields on your approach,” the voice warned us. The man spoke in a perfunctory, monotone voice, as if he were reading from a script.

  Nobles responded, “Copy that, Flight Control,” then turned to me, and said, “That’s pretty damn obvious. I wonder if they also have a recorded message in their officers’ heads reminding them to wipe their asses after taking a shit.”

  Then he remembered something and scrambled for the radio. “Flight Control, please be advised that we are carrying a nuclear torpedo.”

  “Transport, please repeat,” the voice said.

  “Be advised that this transport has been outfitted with a nuclear-tipped torpedo.”

  “Transport, stop your engines and power down. Wait for further instructions.”

  Nobles stopped the transport and cut the power. Everything but the emergency lights went dark. The space outside our transport glowed brighter than the inside of our cabin.

  “They’re giving us a security scan,” Nobles said. “They don’t trust us. Can’t say I blame them.”

  I had seen the litany of security tests—X-ray, spectrum analysis, gamma search, radiation readings. By the time they finished, they would know more about the contents of this bird than we did. All of this security told me that the fleet was still at war. They weren’t just scanning for the torpedo—Nobles had already told them about that. They were looking for bombs, chemical weapons, maybe even robots and spies.

  After no more than five minutes, they radioed back, and said, “Transport pilot, we have detected that your ship is armed. Can you confirm?”

  “Affirmative. I already told you about it, we have a nuclear-tipped torpedo,” Nobles said.

  “What is the purpose of that torpedo?”

  I placed a hand on Nobles’s shoulder to stop him from answering and leaned in to the microphone. “It makes a hell of a conversation piece,” I said.

  “I will ask you again, what is the purpose of your weapon?”

  I started to answer, but the controller asked me to wait. A moment later he returned and gave us clearance to land. Our escort led us to an open docking bay and left. Nobles piloted the transport into the bay and landed on the sled that would pull us through the three atmospheric locks.

  I liked Nobles; he was not the kind of man who gets nervous when conversations die away. Too many pilots felt the need to chat while they waited for the locks, but not him. As the manufactured atmospheres equalized around us, and the gigantic metal hatches cut us off from space, he busied himself shutting down his flight controls, pausing only to say, “Bet they’re surprised to see us.”

  I agreed, but I wondered how happy Warshaw would be about my reappearance.

  I got my answer when the last of the atmospheric locks opened. A platoon of armed Marines stood at the ready inside the bay. So did a bomb squad.

  “Please wait to exit your transport,” said the voice on the radio.

  Outside the transport, eight techs wearing the yellow soft-shelled armor of systems specialists, waved security sensors along our hull. Nobles seemed to find humor in all these precautions. He watched the men wheel an archway around the side of our ship, and said, “Security post. Man, these guys aren’t missing a trick.”

  Whatever humor he found in all the precautions was lost on me. These boys were doing more than simply running a tight ship. Scrambling an armed escort, running five minutes’ worth of tests, and now the posts; the only armies that ran that kind of security were the ones that had already been infiltrated. I wondered if the Scutum-Crux Fleet had escaped destruction only to become a fleet under siege.

  “You may now exit your ship,” said the voice on the radio. “If you are wearing armor, remove it before exiting your ship.”

  “Good thing I brought a change of clothes,” Nobles said as he pulled out his rucksack and fished out some clothes. I did the same, and we dressed in the cockpit.

  It occurred to me that they should already know if we had anything concealed in our armor. When they scanned our ship, they surely must have been able to scan inside our armor as well.

  Once we were dressed in our Charlie service uniforms, Nobles tapped the radio, and said, “Flight Control, we’re coming out.” He hit the button that opened the rear of the transport.

  We headed down the ladder and across the kettle. Our hands were empty and out where the Marines at the bottom of the ramp could see them. Between us and those Marines, a ten-foot-tall arch made of beige-colored plastic stood. The posts.

  The column on the left side was “the sprayer.” It shot a blast of air filled with a fine mist of oil and water vapor. The sprayer dislodged loose flecks of skin, dandruff, and hair, which the col
umn on the right, “the receiver,” drew in and analyzed. The findings were fed through a computer system. In the second it would take me to step through the posts, the techs on the other end of the security gate would know my make of clone, my age, any major illnesses I had suffered, and my blood type. For all I knew, they could even tell the last time I had sex.

  The MPs at the bottom of the ramp signaled for one of us to pass through the posts. Nobles went first, not hesitating for even a moment. I followed a step behind. The perceivably moist breath of the sprayer blasted me on one side, and the receiver drew in the raw information. The entire process took less time than it took me to walk between the posts, and the results came up almost instantaneously.

  Behind us, teams of docking-bay techs rushed to inspect our transport. I turned in time to see them scurrying up the ramp. As I watched the techs, a sailor in a captain’s uniform came up beside me. He had the confident smile of an old friend who knows he will be recognized. He was, of course, a clone on a ship filled with clones. Though he did not know it, he had the exact same face as everyone around him. Fortunately, he did not wear the same uniform. I did know the man, but I would not have been able to distinguish him from any other clone had I not recognized the captain’s insignia on his uniform. I saluted, and said, “Permission to come aboard?”

  “Permission granted,” he said, returning my salute.

  “Are we near a front?” I asked.

  Bishop shook his head. “Not out here in Cygnus. The only fighting in the Cygnus Arm is infighting.”

  “So what’s with all the security?” I asked. “I half expected your MPs to check my body cavities.”