PROLOGUE
TWO HARBINGERS
Location: Hamsho-Kwok Deep Space Tracking Facility
Date: August 16, 2519
Technical Sergeant Timothy Simpson of the Enlisted Man’s Air Force looked at his monitor and saw an unidentified spaceship. “Lieutenant, I have a reading on a ship within our solar system,” he told his commanding officer.
“Ours?”
“Nothing on record, sir.”
“Have you tried to contact her?”
“She’s not responding.”
“Distance?”
“Four hundred sixty million miles from Earth.”
“Is she hiding behind Jupiter?”
“She’s out in the open, sir.” The tracking-systems technician pointed to a screen, and said, “That’s her, right there.”
The screen showed a nondescript dot representing the ship, located in an area two hundred million miles from the nearest planet, which happened to be Mars.
“Is she moving?” asked the lieutenant.
“Drifting, sir. No sign of acceleration.”
“Odd place to park a ship. Are you certain she’s not a wreck from the war?”
The solar system had been littered with the carcasses of warships after two recent battles and a number of smaller skirmishes.
“No, sir. She’s new.”
The lieutenant laughed, and asked, “What are you telling me, T.S., that she just broadcasted in?”
“I don’t have any record of a broadcast, sir, but she’s just appeared on my radar.”
“That would make her . . . If that’s an Explorer, we’d better send somebody to have a look.”
* * *
Lieutenant Walter J. Aspen, the officer on duty at the Hamsho-Kwok Deep Space Tracking Facility would die in five days. Technical Sergeant Timothy Simpson, the tracking-systems technician who discovered Magellan, UAES-539, outlived him by three hours.
* * *
Like the staff of Hamsho-Kwok, the crew of EMN Millard Fillmore was made up of clones. Every last man stood five feet, ten inches tall. Every sailor on the ship had brown hair and brown eyes. Not a one of them knew he was a clone. They all knew all of the other sailors aboard the ship were clones, but their neural programming didn’t allow them to consider that they might be clones as well.
That programming included protocols that caused them to see themselves as having blond hair and blue eyes when they saw their reflections. The clones believed their own eyes even though they knew clones’ eyes lied to them.
Fillmore was a Perseus-class destroyer, a wedge-shaped warship that was wider than she was long. She’d been circling Mars—not orbiting, circling outside the planet’s gravitational influence. It took her eight hours to fly to the location of the mystery ship.
As his ship drifted closer to the target, Captain J. T. Matthews, commanding officer of Fillmore, examined the ship on a three-dimensional, holographic display. His ship had portholes and observation decks, but visual inspection wouldn’t detect details like radiation, heat, toxins, and traps. Matthews searched the ship for signs of violence and structural damage, then he searched the area for enemy ships.
When he called in his first report to Naval Command, he said, “She’s an Explorer. So far we haven’t found any signs of damage.” Designed for pangalactic cartography, Explorers were century-old self-broadcasting relics from the Unified Authority’s early “Manifest Destiny” period.
He didn’t wait for Naval Command to reply. Communications with Earth were slow from four hundred million miles out. In another half hour, he’d receive a message from Earth instructing him how to proceed. In the meantime, he flew within one hundred thousand miles of the wreck. From that distance, he could scan the ship’s engines for energy usage and access her working computers.
Once he got the go-ahead, he would dispatch a transport to fly closer to the ship. Technicians aboard the transport would run another series of tests. If those final tests came back clean, the transport would release a team of engineers to board the Explorer.
Grave robbing; the Enlisted Man’s Empire had robbed a lot of graves over the last few years, most in deep space. Only the Explorer Magellan was no war monument. Her hull was intact. A remote scan revealed that her navigation systems were working as was her communications equipment. Despite the fact that everyone inside the Explorer had died, the gravity generator still ran, and life support continued to fill the cabin with warm, breathable oxygen.
Still waiting for permission to proceed, Matthews sent a drone to have a closer look.
Monitoring the drone’s transmission, Matthews spotted the deceased crewmen. He didn’t even need to X-ray the ship; Magellan had portholes and observation spots on every wall. Directing his drone to peer in the windows, he mapped out the entire ship, locating all ten bodies.
Matthews relayed that information in a message, then began the long wait for further instruction. During that time, his engineers scanned Magellan for biological weapons. They scanned for carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and internal radiation leaks. They checked the internal temperature of the ship. They scanned for broadcast malfunctions.
After each test, Matthews sent the results back to Navy Command, then ordered his men to begin looking for some other hazard. Answers from Earth began trickling in. By the time Navy Command ordered Matthews to open the Explorer’s hatch, his medical team had already attempted to diagnose the pilot’s cause of death by parking a drone outside the windshield and photographing the dead man’s face and limbs.
Matthews called sick bay, and asked, “What did you find?”
“He isn’t moving,” said a medical corpsman, a lieutenant.
“Corpses don’t move much; that’s my experience,” said Matthews.
“We don’t know that,” said the corpsman.
“The hell we don’t!” said Matthews. “I have seen all kinds of dead people over the last few years, and I can tell you with absolute certainty, they don’t move.”
“Yes, sir,” said the corpsman, “but we don’t know if these men are dead.”
“They aren’t moving,” said Matthews.
“He doesn’t appear to be breathing,” the corpsman agreed. “He could be alive, hibernating or in stasis.”
“The temperature in that ship is seventy-eight degrees.”
“Warm for hibernation,” the corpsman conceded.
“Don’t people normally hibernate in a chamber?” asked Matthews.
“Normally.”
“Why would he need to hibernate in a self-broadcasting ship? He could have broadcasted himself anywhere.” Space travelers never hibernated, they never needed to. Hibernation was a way of keeping them alive and sane during prolonged spaceflights. Since self-broadcasting ships could bathe themselves in energy, then transfer themselves to any location instantaneously, staying sane during prolonged spaceflights never became a problem.
The medical corpsman considered this, and said, “Ah damn; they’re probably dead, sir.”
Matthews asked, “Do you think it’s safe to send a boarding team?”
“That ship out there is one hundred years old. For all we know, she’s no longer capable of sustaining life,” said the corpsman.
Matthews said, “I’ll make sure the team wears space suits.”
“In that case, there’s nothing to worry about,” said the corpsman.
* * *
Matthews and his medical corpsman both died five days later, on August 22.
* * *
An away team with six engineers and two medical technicians rode the sled from Fillmore to Magellan. An open platform designed for traveling short distances in space, the sled had tiny booster rockets all along its edges and underside. It did not have walls, rails, or seats, just a floor large enough to accommodate eight men in space gear.
Lieutenant Devin LaFleur steered the rig and led the team. An experienced technician, LaFleur had done everything from rebuilding reactors to plumbing barracks. Though he’d
never boarded an Explorer before, LaFleur had studied Magellan’s layout; he knew enough to park his sled on the roof of the ship, near the rear hatch.
He stepped off the sled and stared into space. Over five hundred million miles away, the sun nearly blended in with more distant stars. Sol was a shining dot, the other stars pinpricks.
Having been built for scientific exploration during a time of expansion, the Explorer didn’t have locks or security systems. LaFleur opened the outer hatch with the press of a button, and he and his engineers crowded into the air lock. The outer door closed behind them, then the air pressure equalized, and the door leading into the ship slid open.
While his engineers ran diagnostics verifying the remote readings, LaFleur contacted Captain Matthews.
“Report,” Matthews ordered.
“Oxygen, good. Temperature, good. Radiation level, normal. No toxins in the air.” That didn’t mean LaFleur would remove his helmet. He knew better; so did his men.
LaFleur noticed something that the remote tests had missed. The air inside Magellan was humid, almost steamy. He ran a test on the mist in the air and found no chemicals other than hydrogen and oxygen.
He spoke to one of his engineers, tasking him with finding the source of the moisture. Moments later, the man radioed back from Magellan’s tiny galley. It had taken him less than a minute to locate the source of the moisture. In the galley, four mugs sat empty beside a spigot designed for dispensing boiling water. A thin but steady stream of vapor leaked out of the improperly sealed valve.
LaFleur thanked the engineer and sent him to examine the cockpit.
The medical corpsmen examined each of the bodies one by one. Like the Fillmore crew and the staff at Hamsho-Kwok, the men manning Magellan were all clones, all five feet ten inches tall, all brown-haired and brown-eyed.
Six bodies lay side by side in the cargo hold. They lay on their backs, their heads facing up.
Corpsman Rich Jackson turned the first body on its side, saw dried blood on the man’s left earlobe, and knew what had killed him. He found dried blood in the hair around the man’s ear as well.
Leaning over the body for a better look, Jackson said, “Brandt, look at this.”
Corpsman Timothy Brandt came for a closer look.
The corpsmen wore the “soft-shelled armor” of engineers, rubberized suits that covered them head to toe and provided air and heat. The suits were airtight and protected them from chemicals and radiation.
Having seen the blood around the ear, Brandt searched the next corpse. He said, “Same.” He surveyed each of the corpses. “They all died the same way.”
“They didn’t die here; there’s not enough blood,” said Jackson. The cause of death was obvious, but there should have been a small puddle of blood under each of the dead men’s heads.
Jackson reported the information to LaFleur, who relayed it to Matthews on Fillmore. He said, “Captain, we know what killed them. You’re not going to like it.”
“I don’t like it already,” Matthews snapped. “Let’s have it.”
“These men had a mass death reflex,” said LaFleur.
“A mass death reflex,” Matthews repeated. “That can’t be good.”
Location: Coral Hills, Maryland
Date: August 16, 2519
Howard Tasman sat in his wheelchair near the window, staring through the break between the curtains, looking down at the street. Most of the people had deserted this part of Coral Hills; those who remained mostly stayed indoors during daylight hours. That was why the man caught Tasman’s attention; he was walking alone on the street.
The man was tall and gangly-looking, with long arms and long legs. As he came closer, Tasman recognized the man’s soulful, sympathetic eyes. Tasman said, “Hey, I know that guy . . .”
Travis Watson, who also lived in the apartment, went to the window to have a look. “Who is he?”
Tasman said, “His name is Rhodes. He works for one of the intelligence agencies.”
Emily Hughes, Watson’s girlfriend, joined Tasman and Watson at the window. Like them, she hid behind the curtain. She said, “He doesn’t look like a spy.”
“He’s not a spy; he’s an administrator,” said Tasman, a man who had spent his life working with both spies and administrators. Now an old man in his nineties, Tasman had lived to see his family die, leaving him bitter and alone.
Watson asked, “Can we trust him?”
“I wouldn’t trust him to wipe my ass.”
Emily sneered at the awful old man, and muttered, “That would be cruel and unusual punishment.” She didn’t like Tasman. She didn’t like him in small doses, and now she’d been stuck in the same apartment as him for weeks.
“What’s wrong with him?” asked Watson.
“He works for EME Intelligence,” said Tasman.
“That mean he’s on our side,” said Emily.
“He worked for U.A. Intelligence before the clones took over,” said Tasman. “I don’t trust anybody who works both sides of a war.”
“You worked both sides,” Emily pointed out.
Tasman only smiled, an unpleasant sight. His teeth had grayed to the color of wet cement. His gums were whiter than his teeth.
She looked around the shitty little one-room apartment with its worn furniture and bare wood floor. The sinks dripped all day, and the only oven was an old-fashioned microwave. In her mind, living in that apartment was punishment enough; sharing it with Tasman was like entering an inner circle of Hell.
The building had stairs instead of an elevator. Emily knew the only way Tasman could leave the building was riding on Watson’s back. She said, “You know what, Howie? We could have left here a month ago if it weren’t for you.”
Tasman said, “Your boyfriend is the president of the Enlisted Man’s Empire. Why don’t you step out on the street and see who salutes him?”
Watson wasn’t really the president of the EME, but he’d spent a few weeks in charge on an interim basis. Now he was in hiding.
They were on the southeastern outskirts of Washington, D.C., the wrong part of town. The neighborhood had become infested with Unified Authority soldiers, and that wasn’t the only problem. Most of the local citizens preferred a government of natural-borns to clone rule. In their eyes, Watson, a natural-born who had risen up the civilian ranks under the clones, was a traitor.
“Rhodes might be able to get us out of here,” said Watson.
Emily asked Tasman, “You said he worked for an intelligence agency?”
“Yeah, one of them.”
“Does he work for the Marines?” she asked.
“Do you associate Marines with intelligence?” asked Tasman. “I said ‘intelligence’; that means he doesn’t work for the Marines.”
In his right hand, Rhodes carried a small case marked with the emblem of the EME Marines—an eagle perched on a globe with an anchor in the background.
Emily said, “Do you see the emblem on his case?”
“That doesn’t make him a Marine,” said Tasman.
Watson started to take Emily’s side, then he realized the old bastard had a point. They were in Unified Authority territory. Only a suicidal fool would carry a case like that on these streets. Either a fool, or someone with powerful friends.
Emily asked, “So what’s he doing with that case?”
“Maybe we should go ask him,” quipped Tasman.
Sounding even more sarcastic, Watson said, “Now there’s an idea.”
Emily said, “Trav, maybe we should stop him.”
Travis Watson stood six-foot-six, but he was a law-school graduate, not a fighter, and he had no tolerance for pain. On the other hand, he had spent the last month of his life on the lam. Though he didn’t realize it, desperation had toughened him.
Emily added, “He might have an encrypted phone. We’d be able to call Wayson or Freeman for help.”
Tasman said, “Watson, if there’s a problem, you can take him. You’re bigger than he is.”
“You said he was a spy,” said Watson. “He might be dangerous.”
“I said he was an administrator.”
It was the middle of the day in an underclass Washington suburb in August. The day was oppressively bright and humid. The buildings across the street seemed to radiate in the heat.
Watson paused, thought of the possible outcomes, and said, “Tasman, you’re coming with me.”
“What about me?” asked Emily.
“You’re staying here,” said Watson.
Emily said, “Get specked, Watson. What if he kicks your teeth in? You might need me.”
Watson loved Emily. He said, “You’ll be safer up here.”
She laughed, and said, “Listen, Galahad, I’ve seen what happens when you lose a fight. You’re going to need me.”
Embarrassed by his girlfriend’s lack of confidence, Watson asked, “You don’t trust me?”
“In a fight?” asked Emily. “Travis, dear, I bet I can take you.”
Tasman laughed, showing his white gums and gray teeth.
Watson loaded Tasman on his back and trotted down the stairs, Emily at his heels. They reached the street a moment after Rhodes had passed by the building.
Watson ducked back in the building and ran through a hallway, still carrying Tasman on his back. The hall led to a narrow alley with a Dumpster and crates and drunks. Rhodes strolled past as they moved down the alley.
Watson lowered Tasman to the ground and hid behind the Dumpster while the old crippled scientist shouted, “Rhodes! Hey, Rhodes, is that you?”
Rhodes stopped and paused as if he recognized Tasman’s raspy voice. He turned to look in the alley and saw the old scientist sitting against the wall like a vagrant. Tasman wore an old suit that might have been nice one month earlier but had now been worn into oblivion.
Sounding confused, Rhodes said, “I know you.”
“Damn straight you do, genius,” said Tasman.
“You’re Howard Tasman,” said Rhodes.
Tasman said, “Can you give me a ride back to Washington?”
The Clone Apocalypse Page 2
