by Kent, Steven
2
My Marines did not come to visit me while I was in the hospital, but other people did.
“Maybe I was wrong about you, Harris. It turns out you are not the luckiest man in the Marines, after all,” Ava said.
She looked beautiful but not glamorous. She wore next to no makeup.
“I don’t feel lucky,” I said. I tried to sit up. Blood rushed to my head, leaving me dizzy.
Ava gently placed her hand on my shoulder, giving it a barely perceptible squeeze. “Honey, you and I were meant for each other. We both know what it feels like to be out of luck.”
I wrapped my left arm around Ava’s tiny waist. She leaned down and kissed my forehead. “We’d better be meant for each other, ’cause we’re stuck here now,” she whispered. “El says the whole fleet was destroyed.” El, of course, was Ellery Doctorow.
That was the first time anybody had even mentioned the war since I woke from my coma. The doctor must have decided I was in no shape for bad news. He always pleaded ignorance. Doctorow visited me once, but said he had to leave for an “urgent appointment” when I asked about my men. I had no idea what had happened to Thomer and Hollingsworth.
“The entire fleet?” I asked.
“That’s what El said,” Ava told me. She frowned, then reached down and smoothed my hair. This was a new side to Ava. Now that she had a reason to nurture, it came naturally to her.
“There were over a million men up there,” I said. One million men wiped away in a single day, the thought of it made me sick. One million clones killed in a training exercise.
“How about my Marines?” I asked, scared of what Ava might tell me. If she said they were killed, that would mean I was alone. If she said they were alive, then I would wonder why they had not come to visit me.
I reached for the little plastic pitcher of water that sat on the table beside my bed. Ava stopped me. She poured the glass for me. Did I love her? I thought that I might. I also thought she was right. We were stuck with each other.
“They’re out at the base.”
“Some of them survived?” I asked, feeling both glad and lonely. “Do they know I’m here? None of them have come to see me, not even Thomer.”
“I’m not supposed to tell you any of this,” Ava said. “If Doctor Feeney knew I was doing this, he’d kick me out of the hospital.” She wanted to tell me something, but she was fighting the urge. I could see it in her face. She looked nervous. For a professional actress, she was awfully easy to read.
“I was here when one of your men came to see you,” she whispered, looking back toward the door to make sure no one was near.
“Was it Thomer? Did you see him?”
“Hollingsworth,” she said. “Doctor Feeney says he was the one who brought you here.”
“Hollingsworth,” I repeated. At least he was alive.
“He left when he saw me,” Ava said, and immediately a thousand fractured pieces fit into one ugly picture. I had a girl. It would not matter whether I had smuggled her to Terraneau on the ship or met her on the job. I had some scrub hidden away while they were confined to the ship. They had a right to hate me. Just like a natural-born officer, I ignored their needs because my needs were met.
That was how Hollingsworth would see it.
3
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m the highest-ranking officer on Terraneau, that makes me king,” I said, trying to sound more confident than I felt.
I didn’t look fit for command. The doctor would not check me out of the hospital unless I left in a wheelchair, but I abandoned the wheels the moment Doctorow pulled out of the parking lot. Now I was on crutches. My head spinning, my legs weak, sweat forming on my face and running down my back, I tried to pretend like I was healthy. It was a good thing I had the crutches to lean on. I could not stand for more than a few moments at a time.
Hollingsworth shook his head, and said, “Go home. We don’t want you here.”
The showdown took place just outside the door to the administration building, both Hollingsworth and I glaring at each other in frosty silence. Several gawkers had come to see what would happen.
For a moment I thought it might come down to a fight. That would have been bad. Hollingsworth looked young and strong, and I felt about ready to faint. All I wanted to do at the moment was go into the admin building and sit down; but Hollingsworth was in my way, and he showed no inclination to let me pass.
Until that moment, I had never realized what life would be like without a combat reflex. I was staring into a fight and the only thing running through my veins was blood. I missed the shock of testosterone and adrenaline pumping through me giving me mingled feelings of comfort and invincibility. I should have felt strength and hate and calm. Instead, I felt weak and scared. If my arm and leg never healed, I would learn to live with it, but I wanted that gland to heal on the spot.
Summoning everything I had, I said, “Step aside, Hollingsworth. That is an order.”
And he did.
He looked at the crowd that had gathered around us, then he lowered his head and stepped out of my way. Respect for authority was in his programming. He even held the door open for me as I hobbled up the stairs.
“What the speck do you assholes want?” Hollingsworth asked the people who had come, expecting a fight. Then he followed me into the building.
I made it to the empty reception desk, then dropped into the empty chair. My head swimming, my eyes watering, I turned to watch Hollingsworth coming in behind me.
“You look like shit, Harris.”
“Don’t be fooled, I’m running a double marathon this weekend.”
Hollingsworth did not laugh. He did not even smile.
“I heard you brought me to the hospital,” I said. “Were you the one who hauled me out of the parking garage as well?”
Hollingsworth hesitated. “Yeah.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Was that really Ava Gardner in your hospital room?”
I wanted to tell him it was not what he thought, but my relationship with her was exactly what he thought it was. “That’s her,” I said.
“So the whole time you were telling us to keep it zipped, you were already getting yours. Fahey was right about you. You’re worse than any of the natural-borns. You’re a traitor to clones.”
He waited for me to say something, but I had nothing to say. He was right.
“How long have you had her?”
“I brought her with me,” I said. “She’s a clone. They dumped her off at Clonetown.”
“Son of a bitch,” he said. I could not tell if he was calling me a son of a bitch or commenting on my luck. In Marine-speak, “son of a bitch” can be both a compliment and an insult.
“What is the situation over here?” I asked.
“We’re basically screwed,” Hollingsworth said. He sounded sullen and angry. “Most of the men blame you for everything. They think it’s your fault the Unifieds attacked. They think it’s your fault we’re stuck here.”
“You were already stuck here when I arrived,” I pointed out.
“Stuck on the planet. We’re trapped down here. They blame you.
“If you plan on running the base, you better watch your back; there are a lot of Marines who want to put a knife in it.”
I didn’t bother pointing out that the Navy would have attacked us no matter what happened. He knew. He had to.
“Have you established contact with the fleet?” I asked, hoping to derail the showdown I felt coming my way.
“There is no fleet,” Hollingsworth said. He sat there, staring at the floor as he spoke, his body unmoving, his voice devoid of emotion.
“They destroyed every last ship?” I asked.
“Maybe,” said Hollingsworth. “We can’t account for every last ship. From what we can tell, there are less than a hundred dead ships out there. Most of them are ours. Nobody knows what happened to the rest of the fleet.”
“
What do you mean, ‘nobody knows’? The rest of the ships were either destroyed or they weren’t.”
“They’re not up there,” he said. “All I know is that we can’t reach them. That makes them dead in my book.”
The conversation was getting us nowhere. Hollingsworth was too angry to listen. “Where is Thomer?” I asked.
For the first time since I arrived, a flash of sympathy showed on Hollingsworth’s face. He sighed, and said, “Outer Bliss.”
4
The video feed was taken one week after the U.A. attack, while I was still in a coma.
The video feed shows the interrogation room in Outer Bliss as seen through the hidden camera in the ceiling. Thomer is sitting at the table when the door opens, and the guards lead Senior Chief Fahey into the room.
If I had not known that Thomer asked for Fahey, I might not have recognized the man. He is not wearing makeup. His hair is long for a sailor but not for a civilian. It hangs over his ears.
Thomer tells the guards to wait outside, but they refuse. They tell him it is against regulations to leave visitors alone with prisoners. He believes them and does not argue the point.
One of the guards leads Fahey around the table and pulls out a stool for him. Even with his hands cuffed together, he has a snakelike fierceness. He looks incensed that Thomer has come. He leers at Thomer and says nothing. Nearly a minute passes before Thomer breaks the silence.
“A lot of good men died because of you,” he says.
Fahey laughs, and says, “You don’t know what you are talking about.”
“You’re a spy,” Thomer says. “You reported everything we did to Admiral Brocius.”
“Was that something that Harris told you, or did you come up with it yourself?”
“Is it true?” Thomer asks.
“Of course it isn’t true. How would I have gotten information to Brocius?”
“I’m betting you sent it back to Earth with the natural-borns when they transferred home.”
“Get specked,” says Fahey.
“And I’m betting that you left holes in the blockade when you set it up so that the U.A. could place a spy on Terraneau. We located their spy. His name is Freeman.”
This time Fahey does not say anything. He licks his lips, starts to say something, decides against it.
“Once you got yourself thrown in this stockade, the spy listened in on your conversations with the fleet. You knew he was out there, and you furnished him everything you knew by chatting with your friends on an open frequency.”
“Bullshit. That’s all bullshit,” says Fahey. He looks at the guards to make sure they believe him.
“After the Unifieds landed here, they took all the prisoners back to their fleet . . . all of the prisoners except for you. Why did they leave you behind?”
A subtle shift is taking place. Now Thomer has the snakelike confidence and Fahey seems to shrink. He forces a smile, and says, “They wouldn’t have left me here if I was their spy.”
Thomer says, “Sure they would. You’re not one of them,” and he stands up and reaches into his pocket. One of the guards draws his pistol, but he only pulls out a pocketknife.
“What are you doing?” the guard asks.
“I want to try an experiment,” he says to the guard.
“What are you up to?” Fahey asks.
Thomer slides the knife across the table. “Senior Chief, give me some of your hair.”
“What?” Fahey asks.
“Give me a lock of your hair,” Thomer repeats.
“You’re joking,” Fahey says.
Thomer sits down, and says, “Humor me.”
Thomer is fully in control now. He is, after all, the only man in the room with an active field commission. When he gives orders, the other clones will obey them unless they have standing orders to the contrary. It’s in their programming.
Fahey cuts off a lock of his hair. He gives the hair and the knife back to Thomer, who uses the knife to cut off some of his own hair.
Thomer’s hair is less than an inch long. Fahey’s hair is nearly four inches long. Since they are both clones of roughly the same age, they have identical brown hair except for the length; but Fahey sees his hair as blond. That, too, is in his programming. Thomer, who is aware of his synthetic nature, knows his hair is brown.
“Now for the experiment,” Thomer says. He takes his own hair in his right hand and Fahey’s in his left and puts both hands behind his back.
From my bird’s-eye angle, I see things Fahey cannot see. Thomer drops the hair from his right hand and replaces it with some of Fahey’s hair. Then he holds out both hands so only the ends of the hairs are sticking out from under his thumb.
“Whose hair is this?” he asks. “Yours or mine?”
Fahey sneers because to him the answer is obvious. The hair is brown. “It’s yours,” he says.
Without saying a word, Thomer rolls his hand so that the palm is facing up. He spreads his fingers revealing a twist of long hairs. “They left you behind because you are not one of them, Fahey. You’re a clone.”
Until that moment, I had never seen a death reflex.
Fahey stares at Thomer’s open hand. He starts to rise to his feet, his entire body trembling, he remains mesmerized by the hair in Thomer’s hand. His skin turns pale as he mouths words that do not escape his lips. There is a slight shudder of the shoulders, a quick twitch of the head, and Fahey falls facedown on the table, a thin stream of blood leaking out of his ear.
5
“They hung Thomer the next day,” Hollingsworth said.
“But Fahey was a spy.” It didn’t make sense that Thomer should die for executing a spy.
“The guards were from the Washington. Everyone from Outer Bliss came from the Washington, Harris. Besides, Thomer didn’t care. I offered to come get him so he could stand trial. He didn’t want a trial.”
He’d already been through too many trials, I thought. He’d convicted himself. He was guilty of surviving New Copenhagen when all of his friends had died. For him, that was a capital offense.
6
Hollingsworth drove me out to see the place where the ghosts had been.
“They’re gone now,” he said. “The last one died a few days ago. The bastard hung on for fifteen days. Fifteen days.”
“What about Mooreland?” I asked.
“He didn’t even last the week,” Hollingsworth said. “I think he might have broken something when the building came down on him. Maybe he got gangrene or something.”
A long chain-link fence ran the border. Four Marines in combat armor stood at the gate. Hollingsworth drove our jeep up to the fence and parked. We both climbed out. He waited as I pulled out my crutches and struggled to my feet.
Beyond the guards, the scene looked no different than most of Norristown. Rubble covered the ground. The partial walls of the government building stood as jagged as knife blades. If anything, we had not been as thorough as the Avatari would have been. The area of the building over the garage entrance had crumbled to nothing. The far wall of the building still stood.
“Hear any voices?” Hollingsworth asked the guards.
“Silent as a tomb,” the man replied.
They traded salutes.
“Did you ever hear them?” I asked.
“Every day,” Hollingsworth said.
The admitted us through the gate. Buildings like the ones we had demolished still stood on every side of the lot, but we were in a vast field of concrete and steel. Where the building once stood, a twenty-foot mound rose from the ground with girders and concrete blocks poking out. A strong wind blew across the destruction, causing half-buried papers to flap. Two ten-foot strands of rebar jutted from a concrete slab. They jangled in the breeze.
“They spoke to us over the interLink. The first few days, they tried to bargain with us,” Hollingsworth said. “They wanted us to dig them out, but they wouldn’t promise to surrender.
“Thomer was still here at that po
int. He was the only officer with the authority to negotiate . . . him and you. We didn’t know if you were going to make it. Anyway, Thomer left orders for the men guarding the grave to leave their helmets back at the fort. He didn’t want us talking to them. He was afraid Mooreland would order some clone to dig him out . . .”
Leaning heavily on my crutches, I walked to the edge of the rubble, knowing exactly where I was. This was the area between the two wings. It was our gauntlet. This was the spot the scouts entered first. They came this far, then they stopped.
“A few days later, Thomer was gone, and I was in charge. I put on my helmet, and that was the first time I heard them. They were begging for help by then. Some of them had already died.
“I only heard Mooreland once. He wanted to talk to you,” Hollingsworth said. “He sounded as good as dead already. I think he knew his time was up.”
“The locals never heard about this?” I asked.
“Hell no,” Hollingsworth said. “That’s why we posted guards. Thomer thought they would try to dig Mooreland out if they knew he was down there.”
He was right, they would have.
The whole building had been turned into a mass grave. Maybe all of Terraneau qualified as a mass grave. The Unified Authority used the planet to bury its clones, trapping them in the far end of space. Then we returned the favor, burying their new Marines under their own government building.
“This isn’t over,” I said in a voice so soft I was sure that Hollingsworth would not hear it. “This war is not over.”
AUTHOR’S NOTES
Where do ideas come from?
No man is an island, but some authors seem to be. Some authors can shut themselves off from the world for a month and emerge with masterpieces. I am no such magician.
I had just completed the first draft of this book in August, when I stumbled across an interesting review of my second novel, Rogue Clone, on goodreads.com, in which the reviewer called my book “dudely” and pointed out that the first female character to have a name did not appear until the forty-fifth chapter of a fifty-three chapter book.
