The Clone Republic (Clone 1)

by Steven L. Kent

  My armor shielded me from the heat. I could see the way the humidity affected the SEALs. Underarm stains began to show through their uniforms within minutes of leaving the kettle. Drops of perspiration rolled down the oil-based paint on their faces.

  “Those poor boys look uncomfortable.” Shannon’s voice oozed with mock empathy.

  Though the SEALs used a proprietary channel to communicate with their headsets, I located a faint echo of their chatter on the interLink. They did not speak much, and the few crackling words I understood were all business. “I get the feeling that they’re not thinking about the heat,” I said.

  When McKay first told us we would have a thirty-mile hike through the jungle, I envisioned one long, hot afternoon. The foliage grew thicker than I had imagined, and the SEALs cut ahead slowly, careful not to make unnecessary noise. Instead of trotting twelve-minute miles, we barely traveled two miles per hour. Since Ronan Minor, a small planet with a fast rotation, had sixteen-hour days, we were going camping, like it or not. We pushed to within four miles of the target zone, then stopped for the night.

  When one of the SEALs told us that Shannon and I had drawn guard duty, I wasn’t surprised. With heat vision and night-for-day lenses in our visors, we were the best choice to stand guard, but I could not help feeling snubbed. They were illustrious SEALs, and we were clones. While the rest of the team rested, Shannon and I sat on opposite ends of the camp.

  About an hour after I settled into a nook beside a fern-covered tree, Shannon hailed me over the interLink. “See anything, Harris?” he asked, from the opposite end of the camp.

  “Rats,” I said. “Have you ever seen anything like this?” Using heat vision, I could see the rats’ heat signature through the foliage. They looked like bright red cartoons with even brighter yellow coronas as they scampered back and forth along the ground.

  “Do you see anything else?” Shannon asked.

  “Negative,” I said. “Am I missing something?”

  “Look due west, all the way to the horizon. Keep using your heat vision.”

  We were at the top of a low hill, just a swell in the terrain really. The jungle spread in front of me, and I could see above most of the growth. Off in the distance I saw the dark red silhouette of the oxygen generator. Only the tops of its stacks were giving off heat.

  “The generator,” I said. “I missed it before.”

  “It’s been shut down,” Shannon said. “Stage three seeding—the plant life takes over the oxygen production at this point.”

  Thanks to my heat vision, I saw the aura of a rat running in my direction. I could not shoot it, of course. The noise would give us away. If the bastard came any closer, however, I was not above stomping it with my boot.

  “Now look north of the generator. See anything?”

  I looked but saw nothing. “This isn’t some kind of trick question is it?”

  Shannon laughed. “Use your heat vision. Look at the forest about one mile north of the generator.”

  “I still . . .” But I understood what he wanted me to see. Most of the forest looked velvety black through my visor, but there was a perfectly circular patch with a faint purple tinge. You had to look hard to see it, but it was there. “The Mogats?”

  “The site’s gone cold,” Shannon said. “My guess is that they’ve been gone for months.”

  I stared down at the zone. Little yellow filaments of light dodged in and out. “No people,” I said, “but there are plenty of rats.”

  “The happy little bastards have the planet all to themselves,” Shannon said. “Maybe the SEALs will capture one. I would hate to see them go home empty-handed.”

  “Do we tell them that the target zone is cold?” I asked.

  “Why ruin their night?” Shannon asked.

  If we found the compound crawling with people, the plan was to radio the Kamehameha for backup. We did not make a contingency plan for finding it overrun by rats.

  Night on Ronan Minor lasted nine hours, and the SEALs resumed their march an hour before sunup. Feeling a bit fuzzy-headed, I had a little trouble keeping up with them. Pushing through the unchecked vines and broad-leaved foliage was slow work. The air was thick as steam. Condensation formed outside my visor. I wondered how the SEALs managed to breathe.

  The rats were not the only residents of Ronan Minor; the planet had a healthy cockroach population as well. We didn’t run into many of them on the first day, but as we got closer to the Atkins compound, we saw them clinging to tree trunks and flying rather clumsily through the air. Several of them crashed into my helmet and fell to the ground. These were big roaches, maybe three inches long, with copper-colored bodies. I started when one crawled across the front of my visor. Nobody but Shannon noticed, but I had to put up with him laughing at me over the interLink for the next two miles.

  We climbed over a rise and found the edge of the target. The entire site lay hidden under layers of camouflage netting.

  “Sergeant”—the team leader motioned for Shannon to come—“do you have heat vision?”

  “The compound is empty,” Shannon said in a matter-of-fact voice.

  “Son of a—Shit!” the SEAL said.

  “You gonna tell him you scanned it last night?” I whispered over the interLink.

  “Shut up, Harris,” Shannon hissed.

  “Any chance there is somebody hiding inside?” the SEAL asked.

  “I doubt it. All of the machinery is turned off. If they had machinery going, I would pick up a heat signature from an engine or a generator.”

  By that time the entire team had gathered around Shannon and the SEAL leader. “We’re still going in,” said the SEAL. “Sergeant, you and the corporal wait out here.”

  Shannon saluted and slung his rifle over his shoulder. He turned to me, and said, “Let’s just keep out of their way.” We found a shaded spot overlooking the compound and sat and watched as the SEALS crawled face-first, rifles ready, under the edge of the camouflage nets.

  I switched to heat vision and watched the SEALs’ orange-and-yellow profiles through the netting. I lost track of them once they entered the buildings.

  “Think they’ll find anything?” I asked.

  “Like what?” Shannon asked.

  I did not have an answer. I continued to scan the compound with my heat-vision lens. Every so often I spied a SEAL dashing between buildings, but those glimpses were rare. “They’re amazing,” I said to myself, forgetting that Sergeant Shannon would hear me.

  “Snap out of it, Harris,” Shannon said. “They’re no big deal. The only thing they have done is storm an abandoned compound, and you’re already specking your armor. You watch, they’re going to come up empty-handed, and Huang will blame us.”

  The SEALs spent hours searching the compound, giving me hours to consider Shannon’s prediction. Roaches swarmed the plants around me, and I distracted myself by crunching some of them with the heel of my boot. The sun began to set in the distance, and the roaches became notably more aggressive. One marched right up to where Shannon was sitting, then tumbled onto its back when it tried to crawl over the top of his leg. He looked over and crushed it with his fist.

  “So who is the dominant species,” I joked, “the rats or the roaches?”

  “The goddamned Mogats,” Shannon answered. “They were the only speckers with enough sense to get off this rock.”

  Up ahead, I saw movement in the camouflage covering and switched to heat vision in time to see the first of the SEALs rolling out from under the edge of the net. Ten more were nearby.

  “Look who’s back,” Shannon said a split second before the explosion. I just had time to take in the irony in his voice, then the very air around us seemed to turn white, activating the polarizing lenses in my visor. The explosion cut through the jungle in a wave. Its concussion knocked me flat on my back, but I quickly climbed back to my feet.

  “GODDAMN!” Shannon yelled as he sprinted toward the clearing. I ran after him, rifle at the ready for no part
icular reason.

  “Harris, find the ones who made it out. I’m going under the net to look for survivors.”

  There was no net, not where we were standing. Shreds of flaming camouflage netting floated down from the sky for as far as I could see. I saw Shannon running into the heart of the flames, dropping down a waist-high crater.

  One of the SEALs lay with his back wrapped around the trunk of a tree at an impossible angle. I threw my helmet off and ran over to him. He was already dead.

  Another SEAL lay on his stomach a few feet away. As I ran to him, I saw a streamer of flaming camouflage float over his shoulder. Brushing it away, I turned the man on his back. He was alive, but barely. A shard of metal the size of my hand was buried in his throat. Blood poured out of the wound.

  He would die in a moment no matter what I did for him. I wanted to shake him. I wanted to yell, “What happened here? What the hell did you do?”

  Shannon was wasting his time looking for survivors. Not even the rats and the roaches would have survived that explosion. The only survivors were the Mogats. “They were the only speckers with enough sense to get off this rock.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Clones may come out of the tube identical, but experience takes over where genetic engineering and neural programming leave off. Most of the platoon followed soccer, boxing, and basketball. Gambling was rampant. But Vince Lee did not gamble or watch professional sports. He napped whenever he got the opportunity. He read books about self-improvement and told me that his time in the Marines would give him an excellent platform to launch into politics. He was a dedicated bodybuilder who started each morning lifting weights in the officers’ gym. Of all of the clones I ever knew, Lee was the only one who openly worried about not being natural-born.

  Lee was also the only man in our platoon who talked about retiring from the Corps. “When I get out,” he would often begin a conversation, “I’m going to a frontier planet,” he would say, “someplace where they appreciate hard work.” Around the time we went to Ronan Minor, Lee sometimes talked about building a resort on the shore of Lake Pride, a few miles west of Rising Sun.

  Ever since meeting with Oberland, keeping up with current events had become my hobby. It was an obsession, maybe even an addiction. I began each day with a quick glance at the headlines. I did so before crawling out of bed. If I found something interesting, I stopped to read it. I usually spent a good hour reading before tossing my mediaLink shades aside and heading for the mess. And after breakfast, I found time for more reading.

  Two days after we left Ronan Minor I found a story with the headline: “24 SEALS LOST IN CRASH.”

  They don’t release information when clones die. We don’t have parents or relatives, so nobody notices. SEALs, natural-borns with families, merit a news story, even if it’s completely fabricated. In this case, the official story was that twenty-four Navy SEALs were killed when their transport malfunctioned during a training exercise in a remote sector of the Scutum-Crux Arm.

  “The accident occurred as the squad practiced landing maneuvers on an uninhabited planet.” True enough, unless you count rats, roaches, and Liberators.

  “‘The accident was caused by an equipment failure,’ said Lieutenant Howard Banks of Naval public affairs. ‘We are conducting a thorough investigation to determine the cause of the accident.’”

  “There’s already been a thorough investigation,” I mumbled to myself. I knew that because my ass was on the line. Admiral Huang had Shannon and me held in custody while he and Admiral Klyber played back the data in our helmets. Huang called us a disgrace to the uniform and ranted about court-martials and executions; but in the end, we were cleared.

  Other stories caught my eye. Back on Earth, the Senate seemed unaware of the war brewing in the outer arms while the House of Representatives seemed intent on stoking it. The big story out of the Senate was about a senior senator retiring and the party his friends threw to celebrate his years of service. The story listed the celebrities in attendance, and there was a side story critiquing gowns worn by politicians’ wives. As far as the Senate was concerned, life on the frontier was just aces.

  In the House of Representatives, congressmen were arguing about gun laws. Many powerful representatives wanted the gun laws preventing the private ownership of automatic weapons repealed. One congresswoman argued that citizens should be allowed to buy a battleship if they could afford it.

  Delegations from the Cygnus, Perseus, and Norma Arms flew to Washington to meet with their congressmen. There was no mention whether these delegations also visited the Senate.

  “Something’s happening,” Lee said as he entered the mess hall. “The fleet’s moving.” He had just come from the gym, and jagged vein lines bulged across his biceps and forearms.

  “Moving where?” I asked as I took a drink of orange juice.

  Lee, whose hair was still wet from the shower, smelled of government-issue soap. “I’m not sure where we are headed, but a guy at the gym said we’re going to rendezvous with the Inner SC Fleet.”

  “Really?” I asked. “What about the Outer Fleet?”

  Lee sat down next to me. “He says we’re combining into one fleet.

  “Wayson, I’ve never seen this before. You don’t send twenty-four carriers to one corner of space for peacekeeping. This is war.”

  “That’s drastic talk,” I said. “How does the guy at the gym know so much? Are you sure he knew what he was talking about?”

  It seemed like a fair question. When it came to the “need to know” hierarchy, we grunts were the bottom rung. I wolfed down the rest of my breakfast and waited for Lee to finish. Once he finished eating, we rushed to the rec room to look out the viewport.

  We were no longer orbiting Ronan Minor. I saw an endless starfield and not much else. “Did your friend say anything about where we are headed?”

  “Nope,” Lee said. “Nothing at all.”

  “Do not learn the wrong lesson from Ronan Minor,” Bryce Klyber said. He might have maintained a sparse office—the only things you ever saw on his desk were an occasional file and a set of pens—but his dining area was like an art museum. Track lighting on the ceiling shone down on a row of fine oil paintings along one wall. The outer wall of the room was a viewport overlooking the bow of the ship. Another wall was lined with two one-thousand-gallon aquariums.

  One tank held schools of colorful fish that dived and darted among coral formations. The other tank was only half-full. A strange animal called a man-of-war floated along the top of the water. Perhaps it is an exaggeration to call a man-of-war an “animal,” but I don’t know what else to call it. It looked like a violet-colored bubble with long, silky threads dangling to the bottom of the tank.

  “Do you follow the news? Have you heard the one about the twenty-four SEALs who died in a transport accident?” Klyber asked me in the kind of singsong tone you would use when asking a friend if he’d heard the one about the secretary of the Navy and the farmer’s daughter.

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “The Pentagon uses that story far too often.” He shook his head. “One of these days, the Linear Committee will launch an investigation into AT disasters and learn that we haven’t had a legitimate accident for thirty years.”

  I did not know if Admiral Klyber was serious. He sat by himself in an austere, uncomfortable-looking chair, picking pieces of chicken out of his salad. Klyber was the epitome of the aristocrat-soldier, elegant and well-spoken, sitting in his uniform at a table with fine wine in crystal goblets.

  With his sunken cheeks and puny arms, he looked so fragile, but anger and intelligence radiated from his cold, gray eyes. “I suppose we shall never know if that compound was rigged or if Huang’s SEALs blew themselves up.”

  “You don’t think it was a trap, sir?” I asked.

  Admiral Klyber mused for a moment, smiled, shook his head ever so slightly. “No. If Huang could not take prisoners, he would have wanted to leave bodies in his wake. Ours or
theirs, it wouldn’t matter to Huang as long as there were bodies.” His mouth curved into a smile as he chewed a bite of salad. “Never occurred to you that those SEALs might have done it to themselves? Sergeant Shannon said that you were impressed by them.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Klyber finished his salad. He laid his fork across the top of the plate and pushed the plate aside. Then he sipped his wine and turned toward his main course, a thick slab of roast beef.

  “Corporal, I have served in the U.A. Navy for over forty years. I had my own command before Che Huang entered officer training school. In all of that time, the Liberators are the only blemish on my record.”

  “They won the war,” I said, trying not to feel offended.

  “Indeed they did,” Klyber agreed. “Made the galaxy safe, didn’t they? Unfortunately, history remembers them as unnecessarily cruel, and Congress outlawed them. You are going to help me prove otherwise, Corporal Harris. That is why I have taken such an interest in you. The climate has changed. We are headed toward war, and a fighting man with your talents will be recognized, clone or natural-born.”

  “Even a Liberator?” I asked.

  “I believe so, yes,” Klyber said as he sliced the meat on his plate. “Especially a Liberator.

  “No clone has ever been promoted beyond the rank of sergeant. Only one quarter of the clone boys from your orphanage will become NCOs, Harris. You beat the odds in your first six months.” He speared the prime rib with a quick stab and chewed it with small, mechanical bites. “Perhaps you and I can expand that field of promotions.”

  “Only natural-born are admitted into officer candidate school,” I said.

  Still chewing, Klyber neatly placed his utensils on his plate. He took a sip of wine and leaned back to savor it. “When I was at the academy, only Earth-born cadets were admitted. ‘Earth-born, Earth-loyal,’ that was the old saying.