The Clone Betrayal

by Kent, Steven

  Master Chief Petty Officer Gary Warshaw was the first man to step through the doorway. My impressions of Warshaw did not change now that I got a closer look at him. You could not miss the effects of his bodybuilding; he had taken it so far that he looked slightly misshapen. The network of veins along his tree trunk of a neck looked like ivy vines growing in under the skin. His neck was so thick with muscle that I had trouble telling where his neck ended and his skull began. Those veins ran right up the sides of his clean-shaven skull. He stepped into the room, snapped a smart salute, and said, “Captain Harris, you are a legend around these parts, sir.”

  The words sounded sincere; but most ass-kissing subordinates had a talent for sounding sincere. I returned flattery for flattery, “Good to meet you, Master Chief. Admiral Thorne says good things about you.”

  There was an acute alertness about Warshaw. Like a predator on the prowl, he took in every movement around the room. He had such a commanding presence that I barely noticed the next few sailors who entered.

  I needed to stay on good terms with the master chief. Despite my rank and assignment, he would end up as the power behind the chair. Running the Scutum-Crux Fleet was a naval operation, and I was a Marine.

  A few more sailors entered. I recognized their names from the file Admiral Thorne had given me. He had referred to these men as “the backbone of the fleet.”

  Then came Senior Chief Petty Officer Perry Fahey, chief NCO of the U.A.N. Washington, and I lost my train of thought. The man had eye shadow over his eyes. There was no mistaking it. His eyelids were light blue patches. He did not wear rouge, lipstick, or eyeliner; but there was no denying cosmetic coloring above his eyes.

  Fahey saluted me and identified himself.

  I saluted back, but I could not stop myself from staring at the makeup. I was about to make the mistake of asking about it, but Herrington saw what was happening and stepped in. “Senior Chief, you look like a man who knows his way around a ship . . .” And he led Fahey to a seat, asking him about how he could go about expanding the Marine compound on the Kamehameha.

  Even after Herrington pulled him away, I could not take my eyes off the blue shadowing the man had painted around his eyes. I wondered if it was a tattoo. It was a pretty shade, and I wondered where I could get some of that for Ava.

  The meeting started out well enough. Thomer, mostly recovered from his morning dose of Fallzoud, woke from his stupor and chatted with Warshaw. Herrington and Fahey swapped a few stories as if they were old friends.

  When I said, “We might as well get started,” the sailors standing in the back of the room found seats around the table. A good beginning.

  We did a round of introductions first. None of us clones had ever commanded so much as a transport, let alone a fleet. Warshaw and his friends might have sat in on a few high-level meetings, but they would have attended as spectators, not participants.

  “Our first objective is to recapture Terraneau,” I said, trying to put a leash around any stray conversations. “As most of you know, Admiral Thorne recorded a transmission from Norristown. We may as well start there.”

  I tapped a button on the AV-console, and an old man’s voice came from the speakers. The recording lasted less than two seconds. It began with a moment of static followed by the sound of someone taking a deep breath. Then a voice said, “Go away.” The words were hushed, almost whispered, but emphatic. It sounded like a command. After that, the file went silent.

  “That’s it?” Herrington asked.

  “That’s it,” I said.

  “They sent us all the way across the galaxy because of that?” Herrington continued. “He wasn’t even asking for help.”

  “Maybe he thought he was talking to the aliens. Maybe that’s why he told us to go away,” Fahey guessed.

  “That can’t be real.” Herrington shook his head.

  “It’s legitimate,” I said. “Military intelligence ran the feed through a voiceprint computer and came up with a match. According to the Pentagon, that’s the voice of Colonel Ellery Doctorow.”

  “Never heard of him,” Warshaw said.

  “Doctorow was the head chaplain of the Unified Authority Army,” I said. “The Army transferred him to Terraneau right before the assault.” I pulled out a photograph of Doctorow and slipped it across the table to Warshaw. The picture showed a tall man wearing a cassock and stole over a set of Army fatigues. The stole had both religious symbols and military insignia, and the pressed eagle of colonel could be seen on his collar. Colonel Doctorow kept his hair in a coal-colored flattop.

  “Okay, so if he’s Army, why the speck does he want us to leave?” Herrington asked. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “Beats me,” I said.

  “Admiral Thorne’s been punching holes through the curtain for two years now. From what I heard, they’d spotted movement on the planet; this was just the first time we were able to make contact,” Warshaw said. The other sailors seemed content to have Warshaw speak for them.

  “Movement? Are you talking cars . . . airplanes . . . bodies?” Thomer asked.

  Warshaw shrugged. “I don’t know. I just overheard a few conversations.”

  “The report did not cover anything other than the message,” I said. This led to some unorganized chatter. I made a note to ask Admiral Thorne about it.

  After that, we spent the next few minutes discussing the upcoming mission. News of the mission had trickled down through the ranks. Thorne had briefed his officers, who related the information to their key NCOs. I had gone over the details with Thomer and Herrington as well.

  If there were aliens on Terraneau, we would need to slip around them. We couldn’t afford a fight. Our goal was to locate the spot where the aliens were digging their mine and set off our nuclear device there. We had a serious package to deliver—fifty megatons’ worth, enough to destroy the ion curtain if everything went well. Once the curtain was down, we would land more Marines and set up a base on the planet.

  “Who are you sending to lead that mission?” asked Fahey, the sailor. He was young to have made the rank of senior chief, maybe not even in his thirties.

  “I’m going,” I said.

  “Begging your pardon, sir, but is that a good call?” Warshaw asked. “It could get dangerous down there.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” I said.

  “That’s what they said about you. I have a couple of engineers who say they were on the Kamehameha when you went down to Little Man,” Warshaw said. “They said you liked it hot.”

  “I didn’t volunteer for that duty,” I said. “They sent every enlisted man on the ship.”

  This must have synced with the gossip Warshaw heard about me. He smiled, nodded, and whispered something to the sailor sitting next to him.

  “I heard you served on New Copenhagen,” another said. I looked at my notes and saw that he was Senior Chief Petty Officer Hank Bishop. Once the transfers were complete, this man would take command of the Kamehameha.

  “Sergeant Thomer and Sergeant Herrington were also on New Copenhagen,” I said. No one knew how to respond, and we sat in silence.

  “How’s the training going?” I asked Warshaw, trying to get the meeting back on track. “Do your men know everything they need to know to run the fleet?”

  He did not answer. Instead, he looked at the various men who had accompanied him and let them answer individually. To a man, the NCOs all reported they had been sailing with clone crews for months.

  “I can’t remember the last time I saw an officer in our weapons area,” one of the men responded. “The last year has been a paid vacation as far as those bastards are concerned.”

  I almost laughed when I heard this; there was something ironic about a synth-bred clone calling natural-borns “bastards.”

  “I don’t suppose Admiral Thorne has informed you about your new field ranks,” I said.

  “Field ranks, sir?” Warshaw asked.

  I held up the orders and repeated the lectur
e I’d given Thomer and Herrington a few minutes earlier. Field promotions had been written up for every man in the room.

  “May I have a look at that roster?” Warshaw asked. As he studied the new command structure, a change came over him. He had begun the meeting all handshakes and smiles; but as he read the changes, his jaw tightened and his eyes turned to flint. He read the orders a second time, then a third, all the while silently mouthing the words to himself. Finally, he looked up, an angry stitch showing across his forehead. “It says you’re taking command of the fleet. There must be some kind of speck-up, how can they leave a Marine clone in charge?” He did not sound confused or curious, more than anything he sounded insulted.

  Warshaw’s behavior violated his neural programming. He should not have been able to call me a clone or question orders. Under other circumstances, I would have knocked his teeth in, then busted him for insubordination; but I needed him on my side.

  A smoldering silence filled the staff room. Thomer, sounding more like an angry Marine than a Fallzoud jockey waking from a haze, asked, “What did you just say? What the speck did you just say?”

  “Do you have a hearing problem, asshole?” Warshaw snapped. “I said that I cannot believe they are leaving a fleet in the hands of a Marine.” Despite the bravado, Warshaw had just blinked in this game of chicken by not repeating the term, “clone.”

  “You’re not the one handing out the orders, Master Chief,” I said.

  He glared at me, his face so red he might have been choking, but he did not speak a word.

  I got the feeling that whether or not I won this battle, I might well have lost the war. Warshaw had come with twenty other sailors, all men who had served with him for years. They did not care who the Office of the Navy named top dog, their loyalty would remain with him.

  If there was any way to win Warshaw over as a friend, I needed to find it. Trying to defuse the situation, I said, “You’ll be the one running the fleet; I’m more of a figurehead. As I understand it, they’ve put me in as a regional administrator.”

  Warshaw grunted but showed no satisfaction.

  I knew right then and there that the man was going to be a problem for me; the question was, how big a problem.

  “Does that mean you will remain on Terraneau?” Fahey asked.

  “No,” I said, “I’ll remain on the Kamehameha.”

  “But I will have command of the fleet?” Warshaw asked.

  “That’s what he said,” growled Thomer. “Do you have a hearing problem?”

  “That will be enough, Sergeant,” I said. Then I turned to Warshaw, and said, “Our field ranks don’t come into play until Thorne and the other natural-borns are gone.”

  “What’s your point?” asked Warshaw.

  “It could take months before the transfer is complete, that should give us plenty of time to work out any kinks in the command structure.”

  Warshaw did not say anything, but he nodded.

  I could read the man easily enough. As the highest-ranking noncommissioned officer in the Scutum-Crux Fleet, he had expected to take over. Frankly, he had two thousand years of naval tradition supporting his position. The swabbies steered the ships, and the leathernecks ran the invasions. It had always been that way. The natural animosity between Marines and sailors only made things worse.

  For a moment, I thought Warshaw or one of the other officers would threaten to go over my head about the promotion. Then we really would have had a problem. In the Marines, we did not tolerate the kind of politicking and political maneuvering that took place as a matter of course among ships’ captains.

  Warshaw fixed his glare on me, and his mouth worked into a nasty grin that reflected the hate in his eyes. I could just about hear his thoughts, they were somewhere between insubordination and mutiny. But Warshaw was a clone just like everyone else in the room. Angry or not, he had neural programming that in theory prevented him from disobeying orders, no matter how he felt about having a Marine in the chain of command.

  I wondered what steps Warshaw would willingly take to correct the chain of command. I had heard stories about Navy officers wrangling for positions and honors in ways that a simple Marine could never comprehend.

  Warshaw started to say something, and I put up my hand to stop him. “Our first order of business is to retake Terraneau, Master Chief. I think everybody here can agree that capturing the planet is very much a Marine operation.”

  There were nods of agreement around the table.

  “Who says we’ll let you back on our boats once you’re through?” asked Fahey. That sent me over the edge. I had a combat reflex. Anger and peace merged together in my brain. Thomer started to say something, but I spoke over him. “Let’s see . . . Senior Chief Petty Officer Perry Fahey?” I asked, making a show of looking down at the roster. “It says here that you’re on the Washington. That’s a Perseus-class fighter carrier.”

  Fahey, his made-up eyes now fluttering, said, “That’s correct.”

  “That means there are ten thousand armed Marines on your ship, Senior Chief. Would you like to try and explain why you are scuttling the local commandant of the Marines on an alien-held planet to ten thousand combat Marines?”

  Fahey was not stupid. He had to know that my Marines would seize control of his ship.

  “No one is leaving anyone behind,” Warshaw said. “My men obey orders, Captain Harris, even when they come from a Marine.”

  That ended the meeting. I dismissed the sailors, and they returned to their ships.

  “That was specked,” Thomer said after the last sailor left. “Warshaw’s an ass.”

  “Do you blame him?” I asked. “He thought he was going to command the fleet.”

  “He has a point, too,” Herrington said.

  “No he doesn’t,” said Thomer.

  “Yes he does,” said Herrington. “Would you want a sailor calling the shots when we take Terraneau?”

  “Okay, he’s got a point,” Thomer conceded.

  “But what was that stuff on Fahey’s eyes?” I asked. “It looked like eye makeup . . . like the stuff women use.”

  “It is,” Herrington said.

  “He’s wearing makeup?” I asked.

  “He’s a bitch,” Herrington said.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” I asked.

  “Harris, none of these boys have had R & R for four years now.”

  “And?” I knew where this was going, but I wanted to see how Herrington would handle it.

  “And the makeup identifies Fahey as a pleasure vehicle.”

  “God, I’m glad he’s not a Marine,” I said.

  “You haven’t toured the compound yet, have you?” Herrington asked.

  I shook my head.

  Thomer and Herrington exchanged a glance, then laughed.

  “Where the speck are they getting makeup?” I asked. I knew what Herrington wanted to say next. He wanted to ask something along the lines of whether or not I needed it for myself.

  I gave Herrington an order to search the Marine compound for any cosmetics. When he found them, he had orders to “confiscate without repercussions.”

  At the end of the day, when I went back to my billet, I had lipstick, eye shadow, rouge, and a pair of man-sized silk stockings. I came into the room and placed the cache on the bed, then called for Ava—she was hiding in the bathroom.

  She stood at the edge of the bed, staring down at the various tubes and bottles as if they were antiques from a foreign land.

  “What do you think?” I asked. “Can you use any of it?”

  “Use it for what?” she asked.

  “It’s makeup,” I said.

  “Honey, back home we called this ‘queer gear,’ ” she said.

  “Queer gear?” I asked.

  “These are cosmetics for men,” she said, picking up the stockings. “I could use these for a hammock, but I wouldn’t want to wear them. Harris, stockings are not one size fits all.”

  Feeling deflated, I wen
t to the mess to get us our first meal. While I was gone, Ava removed the makeup from my rack. She played coy, but I noticed the faint smear of red on her cheeks and the enhanced shadow above her eyes when I returned.

  It looked good.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A week passed between the day I boarded the Kamehameha and the time we would start the mission. I spent some of my time on the Washington, welcoming shuttles as Captain Pershing’s cruiser ferried Marines in and natural-borns out at the snail’s pace of four hundred men per trip. Walking the upper corridors of the ship, I heard officers complaining about the slow pace of the transfers.

  In my off-hours, I stockpiled MREs in my quarters so that Ava would have food to eat while I was on Terraneau. If everything went well, the mission might only take a day. If things went wrong, I might not return for weeks, if I returned at all. Preparing for the worst, I hid a month’s worth of meals around my billet.

  I had Ava sample each of the meals to see which ones she liked. She didn’t like any of them, but she did not complain. After sampling the spaghetti, she groaned, and said, “Can’t we just use room service?”

  When I said, “They’d probably just bring you more of the same stuff,” she said, “Honey, that’s fine with me as long as the waiter looks good.”

  “Charming,” I said. “He’d probably look a lot like me since they’re all clones.”

  We could have smuggled a spare rack into the billet; we had the floor space. Instead, Ava and I slept in the same bed. I liked the warmth of her body under the sheets, though she showed little interest in me. She generally came to bed dressed in her bra and panties, both of which were made of a satiny white material that had been stained and dulled by the heat and sweat of Clonetown.

  Ava slept with her back toward me. If I reached out and touched her, she did not pull away so long as my hands stayed around her back or her waist. When I reached too high, she wrapped her arms across her breasts and curled into a ball.