The Clone Apocalypse

by Steven L. Kent

  “What about the crew?” I asked.

  “Dead. Seven clones, five enlisted men, two officers. All hands died by death reflex.”

  “A mass death reflex?” I asked. I knew damn well what could cause that, and I saw Sunny’s fingerprints all over it. I also knew where that Explorer had been. We’d sent her to Terraneau, a former Unified Authority planet located in the Scutum-Crux Arm—the far end of the galaxy. During the weeks before we attacked Earth, as the aliens attacked populated planets throughout the galaxy, we’d divided our Navy in half. One half attacked Earth. The other half transferred refugees to Terraneau, a planet that had already been incinerated and no longer interested the aliens.

  The Unifieds, however, weren’t done with us. As we attacked Earth, they attacked Terraneau. We didn’t know how that battle went. For all we knew, our forces had routed the Unifieds, and we had a thriving empire on the opposite side of the galaxy. Or maybe it had gone the other way. The only ships we’d ever seen from that invasion were thoroughly battered.

  Hauser said, “General Harris and I authorized Magellan to travel to Terraneau last week.”

  “Why wasn’t I informed?” asked Strait.

  MacAvoy answered before Hauser. He said, “It’s on a need-to-know basis.”

  “I should have been informed about this,” complained Strait.

  “Why would you be in the loop?” asked MacAvoy. “Your birds can’t even leave the atmosphere. If the Navy runs a covert operation in Pennsylvania, maybe they’ll let you know.”

  “Did they tell you about the operation?” asked Strait.

  “They did not,” said MacAvoy. “Need-to-know basis . . . the only thing the Army needs to know is who to shoot. That’s why we’re still relevant.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Strait.

  He knew what it meant.

  MacAvoy was playing with Strait and enjoying himself. He asked, “What do you think it means, Flyboy?” Strait tried to ignore him. He started to say something to Hauser, then turned back to MacAvoy, and said, “Get specked, asshole.”

  MacAvoy answered with a satisfied smile.

  Hauser asked, “May we continue?”

  He should be running the empire, I thought. It never should have been me. Marines don’t run governments; they break things and kill people.

  Hauser knew how to run a fleet, a full-blown society. He understood politics. Knowing that my figurative firing squad waited around the corner, I decided to pull the trigger myself. Expecting Hauser to say that someone had leaked information about the operation and prepared to confess my part, I asked, “How did they capture the ship?”

  Hauser said, “We don’t know what happened to her.”

  I asked, “Could somebody have leaked information?”

  “I don’t see how,” said Hauser. “You and I were the only officers who knew about the operation.”

  I got as far as saying, “What if,” before MacAvoy A) kicked me under the table, and not gently, either, and B) shouted, “Could they have been reprogrammed? Tasman says that reprogramming can cause clones to have a death reflex?”

  Hauser covered his mouth with a handkerchief and coughed once, then said, “We’ve analyzed their automated flight log. The ship may have been captured. Something happened after she broadcasted into Terraneau space; the question is what. Once she broadcasted in, her flight records stop.”

  “Are there any signs of battle?” asked Strait.

  “Magellan is an Explorer. There wouldn’t have been enough of her left if she got in a scrape.”

  I said, “If somebody warned the Unifieds . . .”

  MacAvoy kicked me again. Speaking over me, he said, “Okay, if the Unies captured the ship, why kill the crew with a specking death reflex? Wouldn’t it be easier to shoot ’em?”

  The son of a bitch was trying to protect me. Hauser didn’t know about Sunny, and MacAvoy didn’t want me to blow the whistle on myself.

  “Good question,” said Hauser.

  “Have you sent the crew in for autopsies?” asked Strait.

  “There’s no point; we know what killed them,” said Hauser. “They had blood coming out of their ears.”

  “We know how they died,” I agreed, “but that doesn’t mean we know what killed them.” At that point, I had forgotten all about Sunny.

  I looked over at MacAvoy, and said, “Kick me again, and we’re going to have a problem.”

  He nodded.

  Then I turned back to Admiral Hauser. I said, “I just spoke with Howard Tasman. He says the clones we chased out of that underwater city knew they were clones.”

  “And it caused a death reflex?” asked Hauser.

  “No; it didn’t cause a death reflex. The Unifieds reprogrammed them so they could know they were clones. What killed them was surrendering to us. Tasman thinks they were programmed to die before we could capture them.”

  MacAvoy said, “What does that have to do with the ship Hauser found in space? You wouldn’t go to all the trouble of reprogramming clones just to watch them die.”

  “You would if they were guinea pigs,” said General Strait.

  For once, I agreed with him.

  So did Hauser. He stopped and thought about it, then said, “We’d better get started on the autopsies.”

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  We all went our separate ways, Hauser to the Navy offices, MacAvoy to his Army area, me to my presidential palace on the tenth floor, and Strait to the Air Force area on the eighth. Five minutes later, we met in my office, all of us except Strait.

  Strait was new and arrogant, and none of us liked him.

  Hauser came carrying two bottles of bourbon. MacAvoy brought beer, an untapped keg’s worth. I kept bottles of whiskey and Japanese saké in my office. I didn’t keep them for drinking; I kept them for hospitality. As a Liberator clone, I had an impossibly high threshold for alcoholic consumption. The only drinks that got me drunk also came close to killing me. I could drink beer like water; I’d drown in the stuff before I got intoxicated, and let’s face it; the only reason Marines drink is to get drunk.

  Hauser arrived first. My aide showed him in. He came through the door, and asked, “Do Marines drink their bourbon on the rocks or do they take everything straight?”

  I said, “Rocks, lemon wedges, soda water, we don’t have hang-ups when it comes to soft drinks.”

  MacAvoy arrived a few moments later, looked at the bottles of bourbon, and grunted, “Stockade drinks.”

  Hauser nodded at the kegs he’d carried up on his shoulder, and said, “Stockade drink, and Harris here just called it a ‘soft drink’; you know, I’m getting a little tired of ground-pounding chest thumpers. Call my bourbon genteel if you like, but it’s a hell of a lot stronger than that piss,” said Hauser.

  “That so?” asked MacAvoy. “In that case, I’ll take a pint.”

  “Are you planning to drink it or insult it?” asked Hauser.

  “Hey, if it’s stronger than this piss, I might even like it,” MacAvoy said as he brought over a chair for himself.

  “Would you like ice or lemon?” asked Hauser. He was tempting fate. MacAvoy had behaved himself so far, but, so help me, if Hauser offered us tiny umbrellas with our drinks, I’d break into giggles as well.

  Still keeping himself under control, MacAvoy said, “Real men drink it straight.”

  Hauser nodded as if agreeing, and said, “Really? Harris took his with lemon and ice.” He didn’t give MacAvoy the pint that he’d asked for, but he filled most of a tumbler.

  MacAvoy took the drink and finished it before I’d taken more than a sip or two. He smacked his lips, held the empty glass up for a closer look, and said, “Oh hell yeah. That’s a lot stronger than beer.”

  “Want another?” asked Hauser.

  MacAvoy asked, “What’s the matter with you two? This isn’t a drink; it’s medicine. It’s like a headache pill that makes your sober go away.” He filled a quart-sized pitcher with beer from
the keg, then said, “Maybe we should invite Strait.”

  Hauser responded, “Let’s not.”

  On that one, we agreed. It wasn’t that I disliked Strait; I was more indifferent to him than anything else. Hauser, MacAvoy, and I had all fought together. In one fashion or another, we had all emerged from the same fiery furnace.

  This, by the way, would be the last time the three of us would stand in the same room. It was a triumphant meeting. We had the Unified Authority on the run. There were distractions. No one knew quite what to make of the Explorer and the dead clones. I had Sunny on my brain, but not in a way that she would have appreciated.

  Seeing that MacAvoy sat too far away to kick me, I said, “Tasman found video feeds of the Unifieds programming me.”

  “Yes, MacAvoy mentioned that earlier,” said Hauser.

  “How much earlier?” I asked.

  “He contacted me before he told you.”

  I turned to stare at MacAvoy. He saluted me, then downed half of that pitcher and coughed. He said, “I should’a brought my flu fighter. This swill is only good for cooking and pickling.”

  “If he already knew, why did you kick me?” I asked.

  MacAvoy was tough and crude, but he didn’t do all that well with liquor. Having downed a pint of beer and a tumbler of bourbon, he began showing signs of intoxication. It took him several seconds to ingest and absorb my question, then he shrugged his shoulders, and said, “Strait didn’t know.” The moment he finished speaking, he downed the other half of his pitcher.

  It was a fair point. Strait almost certainly would have made a commotion about it. He would have been right, too, but making a commotion after the disaster never fixes the damage. You weren’t careless, I reminded myself. You were brainwashed. Still, my inbred sense of honor demanded punishment.

  Hauser finished his first bourbon. Admittedly, his second glass was a lot more full than his first. He said, “I can’t help thinking they killed those clones in Scutum-Crux and brought them back to show us.” He meant the ones on Magellan. We’d sent that Explorer to Terraneau, a planet in the Scutum-Crux Arm.

  “Mmmmmm,” I said. “That does fit Andropov’s MO.”

  I’d tangled with Tobias Andropov on several occasions. He caved in when danger caught up to him, but when he thought he could get away with it, he liked to flaunt his power. Thinking he had an impenetrable missile shield around Earth, he contacted me in the moments before the EME invasion to taunt me. Once we’d landed and shut down his shield, he went from pit bull to scared pup in a matter of minutes.

  When I started in the Corps, I held duty as my top priority. Now I seemed more motivated by grudges. I traveled to Gendenwitha specifically to kill Franklin Nailor. The encryption bandit had been Tom Hauser’s idea. As the conversation included Tobias Andropov, I realized I wanted to kill him, too. And Sunny? My emotions became conflicted when it came to her. I felt odd when I thought of killing her, as if by killing her, I might release a demon I kept chained inside myself. So would I kill her if I got the chance? I told myself, Yes, but inwardly, I didn’t know.

  CHAPTER

  ELEVEN

  Date: August 21, 2519

  For the first time I could remember in over ten years, I woke up with a hangover, which really wasn’t fair. I’d downed two glasses of bourbon and maybe a pint of beer. Drunkenness and I never spent time in the same vicinity, but now my brain hurt, and my muscles had that fine silvery ache. My head spun when I sat up. It spun even faster when I ignored the spinning and climbed off my rack.

  I had a bad case of cotton mouth, too. I went to the bathroom and ran the blue light over my teeth, which added to the bad taste in my mouth, then I gargled. When I spit out my mouth rinse, the bad taste went with it. I could make the headache go away by dropping a couple of pills, but I avoided unneeded medicine.

  So I dressed and commandeered a car from the motor pool—I lived in the Annapolis Naval Compound north of D.C. Annapolis sat several miles north of the enemy-held part of Maryland, and, because of its large Navy presence, we didn’t worry much about U.A. incursions.

  Hauser wanted me to include bodyguards and chauffeurs as part of my retinue, but I liked driving and I despised officers with entourages. They always reminded me of sharks and remoras, those officers and their hangers-on.

  A beautiful day had begun. The area between Annapolis and the capital was long and flat, with forests of spindly trees. I took a moment to watch the sun rise over the shoreline. It seemed to rise out of the slate-colored ocean, a molten copper coin that cooled into gold as it rose in the sky.

  Pelicans and seagulls glided over the waters and piers. Ravens and magpies flew over the land. The air smelled of sulfur, like eggs or a swamp. I inhaled deeply through my nose, ignoring the taste on my tongue.

  Over the last few months, I’d been shot and kidnapped. Hauser allowed me to drive by myself, but he had finagled a caravan to protect me. Three cars traveled ahead of mine. Three more rode behind me. The cars were filled with guns and Marines. Boy, did I feel protected. Parades of this kind could be spotted from space and easily annihilated.

  Two helicopter gunships flew my route just two minutes ahead of me. As a veteran of several wars, I felt my pulse race when I heard the sound of gunships. I liked them in battle, at least I liked them when they were on my side, but I equated them with death from above. In recent weeks, they’d begun to make me nervous.

  The drive from Annapolis to the LCB took thirty-five minutes. It should have taken over an hour, but my entourage cleared the way for me. On that particular morning, I spent that thirty-five minutes marveling at how wiped out I felt. Maybe the war had worn me down.

  As I pulled into the parking lot under the LCB, the Marine assigned as my valet took my car. A tray with two rolls, coffee, and orange juice awaited me in my office. All in all, the day started off well.

  Howard Tasman called. He said, “Harris, the Unifieds have abandoned their neural programming project.”

  I said, “Yes, you mentioned that yesterday.” Steam rose out of my coffee, ice cubes floated in my orange juice, the butter on my rolls had almost melted, and I had zero interest in leaving my desk.

  Tasman said, “They have a new weapon. I can’t be sure, but I think it’s genetic.”

  “If they have something new, why haven’t they used it?” I asked.

  “It’s possible they already have,” he said. “I’ve just sent you a decoded memo. You’d better have a look at it.”

  He’d actually sent it to my aides, who forwarded it to me. My entire staff had instructions to forward all calls and messages from Tasman without asking for permission. I made the old scientist my top priority, even higher than MacAvoy or Hauser. Strait received a slightly lower priority. My aides always asked before forwarding his calls.

  I opened the message. It contained a communication between two people—TA and MM.

  MM: The weapon works.

  TA: Does it kill them?

  MM: It will kill all but one of them.

  TA: The most dangerous one.

  MM: He’ll be helpless. He’ll be sick and alone and he’ll want to die.

  TA: Wouldn’t that be something.

  “Do you know what the weapon is?” I asked.

  Tasman sighed. He said, “We have the files, but we haven’t been able to open them. The only reason we were able to decode this transmission is because it came from a separate communication.”

  “Am I right in thinking that ‘TA’ is Tobias Andropov?” I asked.

  “That’s how we interpret it.”

  “Do you know where we can find him?” I asked, thinking maybe it was time to take the fight to the Unified Authority. I imagined my Marines closing in on Andropov and him crumbling under pressure. Maybe they had a superweapon, maybe they didn’t, but if we struck hard and fast, we could end the war before they ever used it.

  Tasman said, “That’s not my area of expertise. I’m not an intelligence officer. That’s not in my wheelho
use.

  “I’m more concerned about this weapon. Harris, your empire is made up of clones, people with identical DNA. If they have discovered a peculiarity in your genetic structure, they could create a weapon that kills clones without harming humans.”

  He had used the term, “without harming humans.” In his mind, clones and humans were different. He was helping us, but in his heart, Howard Tasman considered us clones something other than human.

  I coughed onto my fist and noticed a glob of yellow mucus across one of my knuckles. Still on the horn, I pulled out a trash can and flicked my hand over it, spraying the goop onto the pile of papers and cups. Since I didn’t carry a handkerchief or keep a box of tissues on my desk, I’d need to go to the bathroom to wash my hands.

  Tasman said, “As I understand it, Admiral Hauser recovered an Explorer craft on which all of the clones were dead. Is that correct?”

  I looked up from the trash and nodded.

  “Do you know what killed them?”

  “They had death reflexes,” I said. “Could it have something to do with the weapon?”

  Tasman considered. He said, “MM, I’m guessing MM is Mary Mallon, says the weapon will kill every clone except for one. If the weapon caused clones to have a death reflex, it would kill every clone except for you. You have a different gland.”

  The thought had already occurred to me as well.

  He asked, “Where did they find the Explorer?”

  I had to think about that. My answer was vague but honest. I said, “Somewhere in this solar system.”

  “Were you involved in the mission?” he asked.

  “I knew about it.”

  Tasman was old. He’d grown up during the time when the Unified Authority still used Explorers for galactic cartography, not spy missions. He asked, “Why did you use an Explorer for a near-space mission?”

  I said, “We sent her to Terraneau.”

  Sounding astonished, he said, “Isn’t that where the Unified Authority sent its fleet?”