by Kent, Steven
When the light turned green, I pulled slowly away, wanting nothing more than to blend in with the traffic around me. The cop car hovering behind me like an angry hornet preparing to sting, I kept to within five miles of the speed limit. A few minutes later I took the bridge across the river. When I checked my mirror, the police car was gone.
Once across the bridge, it was a short drive to the Pentagon. A guard checked my papers and said nothing as I pulled onto the lot. I entered the underground garage and parked my ride. As I walked away from the car, I looked up and down the rows of parked vehicles. No one seemed to notice me. A voice in my head tried to dismiss the whole thing, to laugh and say I had overreacted.
As I entered the elevator to the street-level lobby, two officers called out for me to hold the door. I tensed, but they kept talking to each other, not even noticing me. I started to think that maybe I had overreacted, then we reached the lobby. The elevator door slid open, and I entered a world of marble and glass in which large mediaLink screens hung from walls showing live news coverage of the hearings.
The lobby was huge and sparsely furnished, with a high ceiling. Men and women in business suits sat on rows of chairs, and officers in various uniforms stood in clusters. Everywhere I turned, people stared back at me. A few people looked from me to the screens on the walls and back again.
General Newcastle’s words echoed from the screens . . . what went wrong on New Copenhagen, we crumbled from the bottom up. Our enlisted men proved ineffective, undisciplined, and unreliable in battle.
The image of the hearing shrank into the upper right corner of the screens and an analyst appeared. While testifying before Congress this afternoon, General Morris Newcastle blamed the cloning program for setbacks suffered during the alien invasion. According to historian Michael Maynard, Newcastle’s testimony marks a sharp departure from other reports that cloned soldiers have been one of the strengths of the Unified Authority military.
Most of the people froze as I passed them. They acted as if I might be carrying a bomb, and one man whispered the word, “Liberator.”
I walked across the floor, my eyes focused straight ahead as I tried to ignore the uneasy silence around me. The Pentagon had its own police force, a complement of enlisted men with sidearms and armbands. Two of those MPs stood guarding the elevators to the upper floors. As I approached, they stood at attention and saluted.
I took the elevator to the third floor. When I stepped off the lift, I heard someone say, “Lieutenant Harris? Ah, Lieutenant Harris. Lieutenant?”
The man was an ensign, dressed in the crisp tan uniform of the U.A. Navy. He was short and slender, very likely a kid just out of the Naval Academy. “Are you Lieutenant Wayson Harris?” he asked.
“I am,” I said.
“Admiral Brocius sent me to find you,” said the ensign. “Would you mind coming with me, sir?”
Judging by his anxious demeanor, I knew he had not come to arrest me. He looked from side to side as though he thought someone might sneak up on us.
“Where are we headed?” I asked.
“B-ring, top floor . . . Office of the Navy,” the ensign said.
We started down the hall. I attracted attention everywhere we went. On the elevator ride up to the top floor, a couple of commanders stood staring at me, not even attempting to hide their fascination.
I started to say something, but the ensign beat me to the punch. “What’s the matter, you never seen an officer-killing Liberator clone before?” He asked this in a voice drenched with sarcasm so that everyone knew he was lampooning the commanders.
“Watch your mouth, Ensign,” one of the officers said.
“Why don’t you report me, I’m on my way to Admiral Brocius’s office right now?”
That ended the conversation. Apparently the combination of an “officer-killing Liberator clone” and an aide to the highest-ranking man in the Navy made the commanders nervous. They got off on the next floor. As they stepped out, the ensign smiled, and said, “Good afternoon, gentlemen.” Neither of the commanders bothered to respond.
“Assholes,” the ensign said, as the elevator doors closed.
We rode in silence as the elevator rose to the fifth and final floor. When the doors opened, the ensign asked me, “Where have you been for the last hour, Lieutenant?”
“I was out running errands,” I said.
“You didn’t happen to catch the hearings while you were out?”
“Yeah, I saw it,” I said. “That bastard Newcastle . . .”
“You had to know it was coming, Harris. It’s an old military tradition—when things go wrong, blame the speck-up on somebody else. That’s why all four branches have enlisted men; so that officers have someplace to dump the blame.”
When we arrived at Brocius’s office, the ensign walked me past the secretaries and MPs and knocked on the admiral’s door.
CHAPTER FIVE
Admiral Brocius kept a personal casino on the second floor of his family estate, but he did not gamble. He owned roulette tables, craps tables, and an array of slot machines, both antique and modern, among other things; but he never used them himself. A few times a year, he threw gambling parties attended by top brass and politicians. They did the gambling. He was the house. In everything he did, Alden Brocius insisted on house odds. That made him a safe bet but an unreliable partner—he didn’t mind improving his chances at the expense of everyone around him.
Admiral Brocius was, for instance, the officer in charge of the invasion of the Mogat home world, a strategically brilliant offensive that included assigning sixty thousand Marines to pin the enemy down until the Army arrived. The Army never arrived. Brocius skewed the odds in his favor by leaving those Marines stranded while the planet melted around them. As one of the few Marines to make it off that rock, I had an old score to settle with the admiral.
For his part, Brocius kept a wary eye in my direction. If he could, I think he wanted to clear his account with me.
Brocius did not rise as the ensign and I entered his office. He sat behind a desk so sturdy that it might have been able to hold a tank. Like his home, Brocius’s office reflected his family’s wealth. Except for a nook in which a row of three slot machines stood, the walls of the office were lined with bookshelves and paintings. A yard-wide ornamental globe, entirely made of brass, sat in the center of the room.
“Where did you find him?” Brocius asked the ensign.
“He came off the elevator as I was giving up.”
“Better late than never, I suppose,” Brocius said. He turned to me and said, “Did Ensign Kwai brief you on the hearings?”
“I saw them,” I said, making no attempt to cover my dislike of the admiral.
“Newcastle missed his calling. He should have been a politician,” Brocius said.
Brocius looked smaller than I remembered him, perhaps it was stress. He stood around six feet tall and might have been muscular once, but that muscle had gone to seed. The stress and aggravation of the Mogat War had left him with a gut. Then came the Avatari invasion. Now he looked old, fat, and tired. His hair was white, and his skin had a bleached quality to it.
“Newcastle nailed you, Harris. I don’t think the spit on his microphone dried before J. P. Glade received a call from the Judge Advocate General.” J. P. Glade was General James Ptolemeus Glade, the highest-ranking officer in the Marines.
“They cleared me of all charges back on New Copenhagen,” I said. Two witnesses had testified that I did not strike the late Lieutenant Warren Moffat until after he pulled a gun.
“The JAG thinks we should reopen the investigation,” Brocius said. “Look, Harris, Congress wanted a sacrificial goat; and Mo Newcastle handed you over.”
“Me?” I asked.
“Not just you, the whole damned cloning program,” Brocius said. “This isn’t about you. You’re not a big enough target, they can’t blame the whole war on one man.
“This is about knocking the military down a peg and keeping
Congress in control. Nobody gives a rat’s ass about one measly clone, even a Liberator. They want to run the government the way they did before New Copenhagen, with Congress giving the orders and the military as its whipping boy. That makes you the poster child for everything that is wrong in the world.
“Being a Liberator makes a damned easy target. You’re like a gun or an earthquake or a nuclear bomb, yes, a damned nuclear bomb. No one needs to tell people to be scared of nuclear bombs, they already are. It’s automatic.
“From now on, whenever anything goes wrong, Congress will slap your face on it and blame it on the military. You’re the new boogeyman.”
“Where do we go from here?” I asked.
Brocius sighed. “For now we bury you and every other clone we can find. We stick you someplace deep, dark, and ugly until the rest of the universe forgets you exist.”
CHAPTER SIX
The week after the Senate hearings ended, a gang of twelve men jumped three clone soldiers who were on leave in Florida. The clones beat the shit out of the men who attacked them, one of whom spent the next three days in a coma.
The security camera of a nearby bank recorded the entire incident and multiple witnesses told the police that the attack was unprovoked. It made no difference. The clones were thrown in the brig.
The men who started the brawl, it turned out, were officers from MacDill Air Force Base.
The clones made it through the fight with barely a scratch, but they showed up for court the next day looking like they had been in a car accident. The judge did not ask about their black eyes and contusions. He ruled the attack “a military matter,” making the testimonies of civilian eyewitnesses irrelevant. He refused to review the video feed caught by the security camera for the same reason. The JAG bastard found the clones guilty of assaulting superior officers and sentenced them to five years.
One of the men who attacked the clones had a familiar name—Smith. Captain Seth Smith was the attacker who ended up in a coma. His father, General Alexander Smith, reviewed the case personally and commended the judge for justice dispensed.
Florida was just the opening salvo in the war against clones. The synthetics fared better in that battle than they would in the fights that came next.
In April, the Smithsonian Institution closed the doors of the Museum of Military History for an annual cleaning. When the museum reopened the following month, the clone exhibit had been replaced by a display showing the evolution of the combat boot. Asked why the clone exhibit had been replaced, the Smithsonian Institution’s public affairs office issued a statement about wanting to dedicate more space to the “heroic sacrifices made by human soldiers” . . . and their footwear.
When a reporter pressed the curator of the museum about the role of clones in war, the curator said, “Clones, dogs, and propagandists, they’ve all played important roles in military history.”
In a matter of months, the pendulum of public sentiment had swung. Appearing in daily interviews on the mediaLink, members of the Linear Committee called for a “more invested” military—i.e., a military with natural-born conscripts. The Republic could not trust its future to clones or robots, they claimed.
When Congress opened for business in September, Senate Majority Leader Tobias Andropov proposed Resolution #2516-7B, revoking the 250-year-old Synthetic Conscription Act. The resolution called for the permanent closure of the clone orphanages that once produced over a million new recruits every year. It was all show; the Mogats had destroyed those facilities four years earlier.
In the patriotic rush to eliminate cloning, reality no longer mattered as much as intentions. The Linear Committee—the executive branch of the government—unanimously praised Andropov for his courageous decision to close down nonex istent orphanages. News analysts all but nominated him to replace the retiring “Wild Bill” Grace as the chair of the Linear Committee.
Resolution 2516-7B ran through both houses unchallenged. With the already demolished orphanages officially closed, the Unified Authority military complex entered a bold new, all-natural phase in its history.
In truth, the Unified Authority did not need to beef up its military with clones now that it only had two worlds to guard. Sitting a mere three hundred light-years apart, Earth and New Copenhagen were next-door neighbors in astronomical terms.
With the public behind it, Congress moved to deep-six the cloning program once and for all. If they could have, I think the politicians might have classified us clones as obsolete weapons and demolished us like a stockpile of unneeded bombs; but we were constructed of human genes. There were limits as to what they could do with us.
In August, I was finally cleared of any wrongdoing in the unfortunate and untimely death of First Lieutenant Warren Moffat. That same month, I received orders to report to Fort Bliss, an Army base in Texas. So did thousands of other clones—be they soldiers or Marines. Those of us who survived the war on New Copenhagen went to Fort Bliss. Clones who had not served in that battle were sent to equally isolated military bases.
I reported to the base commander and was told that I would not actually be stationed in Fort Bliss. I would live in the ramshackle “relocation camp” erected beside Fort Bliss. Summer in the Texas badlands; the prospect was not very appealing. When I entered the camp, I wondered if it was meant for relocation or extermination.
Officially, our camp was part of Fort Bliss. The inmates, however, called it “Clonetown.”
Clonetown was not large; but that did not matter, there were not all that many survivors of the battle for New Copenhagen. Of the nine hundred thousand cloned troops sent to defend New Copenhagen, only thirty thousand survived. At some point, somebody told me there were another three hundred thousand clones that had remained on Earth in support roles.
The Navy still had multiple millions of clones serving in its fifteen deep-space fleets, but nobody worried about clones in space. They manned the battleships, frigates, cruisers, and carriers that had once relied on a pangalactic transportation system known as the Broadcast Network to travel between occupied solar systems. With the Network down, deep-space clones were even less of a threat than unarmed clones interred in relocation camps. We were merely unarmed and locked up, they were trapped billions of miles from Earth.
I spent my first month in Fort Bliss before finding out what the Pentagon planned to do with us. There were plenty of rumors, most of which began with a line like, “I got a friend who heard General Glade say . . .” Of course, none of the rumors matched up. When it comes to gossip, Marines act like little old ladies in a sewing circle.
The most popular rumor was that the Army had built Clonetown on top of a bomb. Some general would explode that bomb as we slept, solving the nagging problem of what to do with us once and for all. Everyone agreed that the rumor was a joke, but that didn’t stop groups of inmates from digging holes around camp. They didn’t find any bombs, but they did come across an abandoned honey bucket burial site. The air reeked for a week after that.
I didn’t get the feeling that Congress or the Pentagon wanted us dead; they just wanted us to fade away.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Earthdate: October 3, A.D. 2516
Location: Fort Bliss, outside El Paso, Texas
Planet: Earth
Galactic Position: Orion Arm
I sat alone on a row of aluminum bleachers overlooking a parade field on which squads of newly recruited natural-born soldiers drilled. I paid no attention to the platoons doing jumping jacks and running. Instead, I concentrated on squads learning how to fight with pugil sticks. I had endured these same drills nine years and two wars ago. Boot camp was tougher back then; we had veteran drill instructors. The natural-born DIs drilling these boys were fresh out of diapers themselves.
Sergeant Major Lewis Herrington quietly came up and sat on the bleachers behind mine.
I would have demanded a salute from anyone else. As the highest-ranking guest of the Clonetown detention facility, I had that right; but Herrin
gton and I were members of an exclusive club. He and I had both survived the final battle of the Avatari war, a claim only four people in the entire universe could make. He did not need to salute.
“How do they look, sir?”
“Like conquering heroes,” I said.
As natural-borns, the five thousand recruits on the field came in all shapes and sizes. Many of them did not fit well into their government-issue tees and shorts. There was a time when one size fitted all enlisted men because every enlisted man came from the same helix. Some clones packed on a few extra pounds in the orphanages and some reported to boot camp looking skinny. I had five inches on everybody going through boot camp, but that’s how things go when you are a one-of-a-kind clone.
Herrington, who had just turned fifty, had more white hair than brown. He was the oldest inmate in our little camp, but he was bred in a laboratory and born in a tube like the rest of us. We were all created for the same calling, to serve in the military. He had gone through boot camp thirty years before me, but he saw what I saw—substandard training.
Some of the natural-born recruits on the parade ground looked like they could fight, but most of them looked better suited for writing poetry. Unlike us, they grew up civilians, never suspecting they might one day be drafted. Many of them were clearly less than enthusiastic about their new life in the military.
Perhaps as many as a hundred soldiers had paired off for sparring with pugil sticks. In one match, a tall, lanky kid came out swinging against a short, chubby opponent. The short one looked like he wanted to drop his stick and beg for mercy.
The whole point of skirmishing with pugil sticks was to simulate long rifles and bayonets at close range—antiquated stuff, but a good discipline builder. The sticks were four feet long with padded ends, not that “padded” meant “soft.” A solid blow with a pugil stick could break an opponent’s ribs or leave him with a concussion.
