The Clone Empire

by Steven L. Kent

  From a distance, Warshaw looked shorter than other clones. He wasn’t, of course. He stood the standard five-foot-ten just like every other government-issue clone; but he looked smaller because he was wide. A fanatical bodybuilder, Warshaw began and ended every day in the gym, then supplemented his achievements with ample doses of chemistry.

  He had the basic facial features of a clone—the correct shade of brown in his eyes, the right shape of nose and mouth; but his skull seemed to have stretched to keep up with the tree-trunk diameter of his neck. His face had taken on a flattened appearance. A skein of veins bobbed in and out of view along the sides of his neck.

  Warshaw had an office the size of a basketball court, which he divided into distinct areas that did not blend into one another. We met in the conference area, which included a desk and a ring of chairs. No more than forty feet from us, and not partitioned off by walls or screens, was a gym with weights, exercise equipment, and a personal sauna. Scanning the space, I saw a drafting room, a chartroom, and a lounge.

  Warshaw looked at me, his eyes sparkling, and he said, “I doubt you’ll believe me, but I’ll say it anyway. If I thought there had been the slightest chance that you survived the attack, I would have gone looking for you.”

  He sat behind his desk, looking both lost and out of place. He had a weight room, and food, and men to command; but he was an engineer, and one thing he did not have in his fortress was an engine room. He belonged on a ship.

  “It wouldn’t have been worth the trouble,” I said. “No point sending your fleet clear across the galaxy to pick up a few thousand Marines.” As a commander, Warshaw tended to err on the side of caution. He wouldn’t have risked a trip to Terraneau.

  “It depends on the Marines. For guys like you and Thomer—”

  “Thomer is dead,” I said.

  “The Unifieds got him?”

  “He survived the attack and died a few days later,” I said. Kelly Thomer had been my second-in-command.

  “Sorry to hear that,” Warshaw said. He sounded gloomy. “He was a good man, Thomer.”

  We both gave Thomer a spontaneous and perfunctory moment of silence; and after that, neither of us seemed to have anything to say. For my part, I had so many questions that I did not know where to begin. I wanted to ask about the war with Earth and about the size of our fleet. Just as I was about to ask my first question, Warshaw spoke up.

  “Look, Harris, I don’t feel like playing ‘twenty questions’ with you, so I’ll lay it all out. The Unifieds are running scared. We hooked up with twelve of the abandoned fleets. That gives us thirteen fleets and twenty-three planets. Throw in Terraneau, and I guess I have twenty-four planets. You think that speck Doctorow wants to play ball with us?” Warshaw asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Then he’s an asshole, and we don’t need him,” Warshaw said. “And he’s alone. Earth isn’t looking for new colonies, especially colonies on the far side of the galaxy. The Unifieds may be down to two planets, but they’re not looking to grow their operation.

  “They still have New Copenhagen, but we took something else they wanted to keep. We got the Golan Dry Docks, for all the good that does us. The Unifieds destroyed the computers and evacuated most of the personnel before we got there.”

  “You went after the Golan Dry Docks,” I said. I was impressed.

  “They have better ships than we do. I figure one of theirs is as good as three of ours in a fair fight, so we don’t fight fair. Anytime we see one of their ships, we send ten of ours. It’s good policy. It cuts our losses.”

  Warshaw stared down at his right hand as he spoke. He clenched the hand into a tight fist and squeezed, causing the veins to rise in his massive forearm. He traced the patterns with his eyes, then relaxed his hand.

  “Have they launched any counterattacks?” I asked.

  Warshaw laughed. “Harris, their ships are better than ours, but they’re still only as good as the crew sailing them. Their officers are scared. We catch a glimpse of them outside our planets, and they run away like little girls.”

  It all sounded so good, so victorious. And then I remembered all of the security stations Warshaw had dotting his base.

  “If the war is going so well, what’s with all of the security? You’ve got posts at every door.”

  “You noticed that?” Warshaw asked.

  “And why place your headquarters on Gobi; it’s the shittiest planet in the galaxy.” Until I said those words, I never realized how deeply I resented beginning my career on this planet.

  “I didn’t come here for sightseeing,” Warshaw said in a cold, matter-of-fact voice. He waited a moment, then decided that he trusted me, and said, “It’s not the war that’s the problem. It’s the cancer that came with it. We’ve been infiltrated.

  “The Unifieds can’t beat us in a fight, so they’re just going to hang back and wait for us to die.”

  There were guards and posts right outside Warshaw’s office. There were guards and posts right outside the elevator on Warshaw’s floor. There were guards and posts outside the elevator five floors down, and more guards and posts outside the door of the infirmary. I began to wonder if I would find guards and posts at the opening of the toilet stalls in the officers’ head.

  Walking like a man who means business, Warshaw led me through the front of the infirmary into its darker reaches.

  “At least this building is secure,” I said, as we stepped into an antiseptic world of plastic sheets, stainless-steel tables, and air that smelled of formaldehyde. Tools both primitive and modern arrayed on chrome-plated trays, coffin-sized tables, laser saws, and bladed scalpels—this part of the infirmary reminded me of a medieval dungeon.

  “You would think a place like Gobi Station would be safe,” Warshaw said, starting a new conversation. He waved to a doctor—a short, skinny natural-born in a lab coat. Warshaw asked, “Can you get Admiral Thorne?” and the doctor left the room.

  “Thorne? He’s on Gobi?” I asked.

  Thorne—Rear Admiral Lawrence Thorne—was a natural-born who had allied himself with the clone cause. He had been the commander of the Scutum-Crux Fleet when Warshaw and I took over. The rest of the natural-borns transferred out, but he stayed on with us.

  “Yeah, as of last week,” Warshaw said.

  The double doors spread open, and the doctor rolled a gurney into view. Until I saw that gurney, the significance of our surroundings had not occurred to me. We had walked through the infirmary and entered the morgue. We had entered the meat locker.

  The man whom I had mistaken for a physician must have been a coroner. He pulled back the sheet, and there was Lawrence Thorne, flat on his back, his hands by his sides, an old man with skin so bleached and wrinkled he might have spent the last twenty years sitting in a bath. His legs were as skinny as a bird’s, but a roll of flab orbited his gut. Seeing Thorne laid out in this butcher shop, I felt a pang of regret.

  “What happened to him?” I asked, still staring down at the body. He looked small and frail.

  “His neck was broken,” said the coroner.

  “How did he break it?” I asked.

  “Somebody broke it for him,” Warshaw said. He looked to the coroner for confirmation.

  “There’s bruising along the jaw,” the coroner said. Showing the coroner’s familiarity with the dead, he turned Thorne’s head to one side. Along the bottom of his wrinkled cheek, faint bruises showed in bluish ovals. The death tech placed his hand over the bruises, his fingers reaching toward the spot where the jaw met the ear. It wasn’t a perfect fit, but the spread of his fingers matched the angles of the bruises.

  I’d killed a man or two using that very technique.

  “Can you tell anything about the killer from the bruises? Size? Weight? Anything?” I asked.

  Warshaw answered. “Yeah, they tell us something.” He walked to the door and asked one of the guards to join us. Clearly nervous around Admiral Warshaw, the petty officer approached the table.

>   Warshaw pointed at Thorne’s corpse, specifically at the dead admiral’s jaw, then said, “Put your fingers over the bruises.”

  The man hesitated.

  “Don’t worry, he won’t bite. This old boy won’t bite anyone ever again.”

  The petty officer slowly lowered his hand over Thorne’s cheek. He spread his fingers so that they covered the bruises. It was a perfect fit. He kept his trembling hand on the dead man’s face and turned to look at Warshaw.

  “That will do,” Warshaw said.

  The hand shot up.

  “Go wash up and get back to your post,” Warshaw said.

  Still looking shaken, the petty officer said, “Aye, aye, sir,” and left in a hurry.

  Warshaw grimaced, and said, “It’s like Cinderella; only this time, everybody’s foot fits the slipper.”

  “He was killed by a clone?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Doesn’t narrow down the list much, does it?” Warshaw said. “The only ones on this base we can be sure did not do it are you and me. I’m natural-born and you’re a Liberator; our fingers don’t fit.”

  The coroner said, “I’m not synthetic.”

  Warshaw said, “Yeah, and the good doctor here, he’s natural-born, too.”

  Warshaw’s fingers would fit, of course, but I saw no reason to point that out.

  “It’s not just Thorne. They killed Lilburn Franks,” Warshaw said. “They got him the same way—broke his neck. One of his lieutenants found him on the floor in his quarters.

  “Specking nasty way to go, a broken neck.”

  Actually, in the litany of ways to go, a broken neck ranked just below death by sexual exhaustion in my book. Thorne might never have known he was in danger. He might have simply walked around a corner, felt a quick tug, then never felt anything again.

  All of the swagger had washed out of Warshaw. He spoke quietly. “They killed three of my top five officers, Harris. Two of them were killed right here, right in this base.

  “They hit us even harder a few pay grades down. The Unifieds hit so many officers in the Central Norma Fleet that we had to shut down one of our fighter carriers. We didn’t have enough officers for the chain of command.

  “How do you fight back against something like this? It’s like they hit us with a specking ghost. You know what the worst part is? I don’t know what to do about it. It’s like we conquered the whole specking galaxy, and now we’re dying of cancer.”

  I did not know what to say.

  We left the morgue. Warshaw invited me to have dinner with him, and I told him I needed to rest. My mind was reeling. I had started the day on Terraneau, spent hours sealed in a derelict battleship in the Cygnus Arm, and now I was talking mass murders on Gobi.

  Warshaw laughed when I declined his invitation. “Rest? Harris, I’m about to paint a specking target on your back, and you want a nap? I haven’t even begun your briefing.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Warshaw gave me a couple of hours to rest before dinner.

  I had a tiny billet, not much more than a rack and a head, with a writing desk that folded out of the wall. I went to the head, shaved and showered, and used the Blue-Light to laser clean my teeth. And then I crawled onto my rack, not to rest, but to think.

  The “Enlisted Man’s Empire”—that was what we called ourselves now that they had twenty-three planets and thirteen fleets. None of that conquest would have been possible had Warshaw not created his own miniature version of the Broadcast Network. The Unified Authority had built broadcast stations near each of its planets, now Warshaw was using them to link our planets together. He’d built his own pangalactic superhighway using the ruins of another empire.

  He could even reach Earth. In fact, reaching Earth would be easy. Any of our broadcast stations could be rigged to send ships there. Getting back would be another story. The Mogats had destroyed the Mars broadcast station, the station that used to broadcast ships out of the Sol System. Without the Mars Station, any ships we broadcasted into Earth space would be stuck there.

  The U.A. Navy did not have the same constraints thanks to its fleet of self-broadcasting ships. It was a small fleet, too small to confront us; but the U.A.’s ships could travel anywhere at any time.

  My thoughts drifted to the late Admiral Lawrence Thorne. Why would they kill Thorne? Was it revenge for changing loyalties? Maybe Warshaw was right, and the Unifieds were after senior officers. Thorne was a thirty-year man, the most experienced man in our fleet and the only one ever to attend Annapolis; but he had little combat experience. I liked him. He was a capable administrator, but from a strategic point of view, his death was not much of a loss.

  They had also killed Lilburn Franks. That was another story. Franks was a clone with an inordinate amount of command experience. He’d seen war firsthand, riding on the bridge of some of the Unifieds’ most decorated warships. He knew tactics, and he didn’t back away from a fight. Warshaw always struck me as a bit of a coward. Franks came across like a man spoiling for a battle. They balanced each other out.

  Two dead admirals, the number two and number three men in the fleet. No wonder Warshaw dug a hole for himself on Gobi. Hiding in a backwater desert must have sounded good once his lieutenants started dying; but if the Unifieds did have clones working for them, posting guards and analyzing DNA samples would not do a lick of good.

  I tried to consider all of the angles as I turned off the lights in my quarters. I would sleep for an hour, then meet Warshaw for dinner. We had a lot to discuss.

  “Hope you don’t mind eating in my office. I eat all my meals here.”

  Warshaw had a dining room tucked away in one corner of his office/living complex. The table was large enough to seat a dozen officers. Sitting alone at that table, he looked big and strong and terrified. He had two armed guards posted inside the door to his complex and four more just outside.

  A steward waited by the door as well. He watched me sit, gave me a moment to get comfortable, then came to ask what we wanted to drink.

  “Just water,” I said.

  “Give me a beer,” Warshaw said.

  The steward brought us our drinks and left without another word.

  “I served on this planet,” I said. “We were stationed in an old sandstone fortress with a swamp for a courtyard. We drank filtered sludge from the swamp.”

  “I know the place. It’s out near Morrowtown, right?” Warshaw asked. “I went out to see the ruins.”

  I nodded, and asked, “Is that far from here?”

  “Other side of the planet,” Warshaw said. He looked so unhappy. He sat slumped in his chair, his arms folded across his lap and his shoulders hunched. “When I first got here, they told me there were these ruins from the original Gobi Station. It’s like a historic site, you know, something for tourists . . . as if any tourists ever came to this place.

  “They treat the place like a museum exhibit. They have guides and tours, and they take you into the living quarters and shit. There’s a plaque that says something about the attack on Gobi being the first shots fired in the Mogat War.”

  I had never thought about it that way; but as I considered it, perhaps those were the opening shots of the war.

  “I was there during the attack,” I said. “The fort had a regional armory. That’s what the Mogats were after. Crowley led them on that one.” “Crowley” was General Amos Crowley, a U.A. Army officer who defected to the Morgan Atkins Believers.

  Warshaw whistled, and said, “Crowley? No wonder the fort got so banged up.”

  “I was lucky to get out of there alive,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, speaking of being lucky, you got lucky on Terraneau. Every time my Marines run into the Unifieds, we get our nuts flattened.”

  As I started to say something about that, the steward came back to take our orders. Since I had no idea what was on the menu, I decided to order whatever Warshaw did. He ordered salmon.

  When the steward left, I asked, “They have salmon here?” We were on
a planet with no lakes or oceans.

  “It’s flown in,” Warshaw said. “So you got any ideas for stopping U.A. Marines that don’t involve demolishing an underground garage?”

  “I do: Wait till their batteries run out, then stick it to ’em,” I said, and I explained about the short-life batteries. He laughed. “Good call, Harris. You’ll beat the whole damned Unified Authority Marine Corps as long as they don’t bring spares.”

  I laughed politely, then said, “We dug some of them out.”

  “You dug them out? That doesn’t sound like you. An act of compassion? That’s something new. I didn’t know you had it in you.”

  “After they were dead,” I said. “I wanted a better look at their armor. That was how we found out about the batteries.”

  Warshaw nodded.

  Our fish arrived, sautéed and dusted with almonds. The smell of salmon and onions filled the air. It was the best meal I had eaten in over a year. My plate was large and buried under enough fish and wild rice to last me a week. The meal came with white wine.

  Warshaw took a sip of wine, loaded salmon and wild rice onto his fork, then paused to ask, “Did you test the batteries yourself?”

  “Do you remember Scott Mars?”

  Warshaw toasted Mars with his wine. “Yeah, I know Mars. Good engineer. I heard he went born-again Christian.”

  “They call him the ‘born-again clone,’” I said.

  “And Mars found out about the batteries?”

  “The shielding works off a forty-five-minute battery,” I said. “The battery drains even quicker when anything touches the shields.”

  “Mobility versus power,” Warshaw observed. He had more than twenty years in the Navy, all of them spent in engineering. As an enlisted man and a clone, he would never have qualified for engineering school, but he had plenty of practical education. “They can’t make the battery too big or the Marines can’t move.”

  Warshaw put down his fork and stretched his arms, moving his bald head from side to side. He had the physique of a buffalo, overstuffed at the chest and shoulders, tiny at the waist. Staring at me, a slight smile on his face, he said, “The Enlisted Man’s Marine Corps needs a Commandant. Of course, now that we know you’re alive, you get the job. From here on out, Harris, you and I are equals.”