The Clone Republic (Clone 1)

by Steven L. Kent

  Most RODEs are black, but the ones the colonels and commanders used were special. They had shiny gold chassis and bright headlights. They were not made for stealth.

  “The angel of death, come to claim her victims,” one of the colonels joked in a loud voice. I saw that he had a microphone. He was broadcasting his voice inside the cave.

  Maybe if I got to Shannon quickly . . . Perhaps he was in the caves, breathing the Mogats’ generated oxygen. I asked McKay a second time if I could leave, and he told me that the officers wanted me to stay.

  The officers huddled around tracking consoles, watching the scene inside the cave through their RODEs’ eyes. “Permission to go join my platoon?” I asked McKay.

  “Denied,” McKay said, sounding very irritated.

  From where I sat, I could see one of the officers steering his RODE. I had a clear view of the monitor that showed him the world as his RODE saw it.

  It took less than ten minutes for this officer to steer his RODE past the capillary that led to the generators. Thick fog still chugged out of it like viscous liquid. The RODE’s bright headlight cut through the darkness with a beam that was straight and hard. It shined momentarily on the ridge I used for protection during the shoot-out with the Mogats. The obsidian walls sparkled in the bright beam, but the headlight was not powerful enough to penetrate the thick layer of vapor that blanketed the floor of the cavern. Whatever secrets lay hidden under that gas would remain concealed.

  “I found one!” an officer on the other side of the cabin yelled. He got a giddy response from other officers, who wanted hints about how he got there so quickly.

  The colonel closest to me had found a grand cavern. His drone flew laps around the outer walls of the cavern like a shark looking for prey. The officer began to search the fog for survivors, and it did not take long until he found his first.

  Whatever chemicals made up the vapor were heavier than the atmosphere. The vapor was heavy; it melted flesh and circuitry. What other pleasant surprises could it hold, I wondered.

  The RODE edged along the outer walls. It had a near miss as it dodged another RODE, and two officers shouted playful insults at each other.

  A few Mogats had died while trying to pull themselves to safety, much the way Private Amblin had died in the trench. The colonel steered his way over to one of them for a closer look. The man’s chest, arms, and head lay flat on a rock shelf in a puddle that looked more like crude oil than blood. The gas had dissolved everything below his chest except his clothing.

  The colonel circled the camera around the dead man. Vapor must have splashed against the right side of his face. The left side seemed normal enough, but the skin had dissolved from the right side, revealing patches of muscle and skull. Brown strings, maybe skin or maybe sinew, still dangled between the cheek and jaw. His left eye was gone.

  Then the colonel found his first survivor—a man in torn clothes perched on a narrow lip of rock. His back was to the RODE. His arms were wrapped around a pipe for balance.

  “We’ll certainly have none of that,” the colonel said in a jovial voice. On the screen I saw a particle-beam gun flash, and the man fell from his perch.

  The cruiser erupted with laughter.

  “Watch this,” another officer shouted. He, too, had found a survivor—a woman. He steered his RODE toward the woman in a slow hover, then shined its blinding headlight on her face. She screamed and tried to shield her eyes with her forearm, but managed to stay balanced on a narrow rock ledge. The colonel fired a shot at her feet. Trying to back away from the RODE, the woman stumbled and fell. Her face struck the ledge, and she caught herself, but her body had fallen into the pool of vapor that covered the floor. She tried to pull herself up, but the skin on her face and arms was melting.

  The officers laughed.

  “Captain, may I please return to my men?”

  McKay looked around the ship. If the officers had ever known we were there, they had forgotten about us by then. “You are dismissed, Corporal,” he said in a hushed voice.

  Forty thousand Mogats landed on Hubble. We captured ten thousand as they fled the caves and another fifteen thousand died when our Harriers hit their ships. The rest died in the caves.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  First I was an orphan, then I was a clone, then I was both. Tabor Shannon had not been my father or my brother, but he had been my family. For a brief few weeks I belonged to a tiny and hated fraternity.

  So where did all that leave me? I was the last member of a discontinued line of clones fighting to protect the nation that outlawed their existence. All in all, I thought I had it better than Vince Lee and the 2,299 other enlisted Marines on the Kamehameha . I knew I was a clone, and I knew I could live with that knowledge. It now seemed to me that it was impossible that they did not suspect their origins on some level, and they must have lived in fear of the fatal confirmation.

  By the time we left Hubble, I had spent more than eighteen months on active duty without asking for leave. The idea sounded foreign when Vince Lee first suggested it.

  “Hello, Sergeant Harris,” Vince Lee said as he placed his breakfast tray on the table and sat down beside me. “Sergeant Harris . . . It almost sounds right. The next step is officer, pal. You could actually do it. Hell. You made sergeant in under two years.”

  “I did not ask for the promotion,” I said. That was Lee, obsessed with promotions and success.

  Lee smiled. “You were made for it. You’re a Liberator.”

  “So?”

  “Every Liberator I’ve ever known made sergeant,” Lee said.

  “Get specked.” I knew he was joking, but he struck the wrong nerve. Though they gave me the field promotion before I left Hubble—that was why McKay took me to the cruiser—the paperwork did not get approved for another month. As with my promotion to corporal, I did not feel that I had earned it.

  “Look, Harris, I know you miss Shannon, but you need to lighten up,” Lee said. He spooned the meat out of his grapefruit half, then gobbled down two strips of bacon. “HQ reviewed the record before giving your promotion the go-ahead. You did what you could. Let it go.”

  I finished my orange juice and placed the cup on my tray. “I guess so,” I said, in an unconvincing voice.

  “Okay, well, I had an idea,” Lee said. “You’ve got more leave stored up than any man on this ship. I’ve got a couple of weeks. Let’s take some R and R.”

  “That doesn’t . . .”

  Lee put up his hand to stop me. “Look at yourself, Wayson. You’re moping around. You should see yourself around the men. You’re on a hair trigger. If you don’t take some time to relax, I think you’re going to shoot somebody.”

  “They just gave me a platoon. Do you think they’d let me take leave?” I asked.

  “Harris, if they don’t let you go now, they’re never going to. This is the beginning of Klyber’s war. Things will only get hotter from here. Mogats on other planets are going to rally around their dead.”

  “Not Mogats,” I said. “Atkins Separatists. That came straight from HQ. We are no longer to refer to the group formerly known as Mogats by any name other than ‘Separatists’ or ‘Atkins Separatists.’”

  Lee was right about the Separatists’ rallying. For a man who never followed the news, Vince Lee had an uncanny ability to read the winds.

  “Two weeks,” McKay snapped when I requested a leave of absence. “Two weeks of liberty? You only took command of your platoon a few weeks ago. This is not the time for you to take a holiday, Sergeant.”

  We stood in a small booth in the gunnery range. Looking through the soundproof window, I could see Lee drilling the remaining members of the platoon as they fired at holographic targets with live ammunition—bullets and grenades. The M27s and automatic rifles hardly made a sound, but the report of the grenades thundered so loud that it shook the booth.

  In preparation for fighting the Separatists, we now shot at animated targets with human faces. The targets in the rifle range
bled, screamed, and moved like living soldiers. I peered through the window to watch my men as McKay spoke. A holographic target materialized less than twenty feet from the shooting platform. Vince Lee fired once and missed. His second shot hit the target in its chest. The enemy screamed and vanished.

  “You have four new privates on the way,” McKay said, staring at me angrily. “One of them is fresh out of boot. Your new corporal has not even arrived. Who is going to command the platoon with you and Lee out?”

  “I understand, sir,” I said.

  “When was your last leave?” McKay asked.

  “I’ve never taken leave, sir,” I said. “I had a few free days before transferring to the Kamehameha .”

  “And nothing since?”

  “No, sir.”

  McKay sat on the desk at the far end of the room, his legs draped to the floor. “Corporal Lee says that you have . . .” he paused to consider his words, “concerns.”

  “Concerns?” I asked.

  “You do not feel that you earned your promotion.”

  Good old Lee . . . diarrhea of the mouth, constipation of the brain. “The corporal was speaking out of turn, sir. When I have concerns, I am completely able to lodge them myself.”

  “I see,” said McKay, sounding a bit too paternal. He looked right into my eyes, not challenging me, but observing. “Lee says that you blame yourself for Sergeant Shannon’s death.”

  “I never said that.”

  “Do you blame yourself?”

  I felt my stomach turn and my palms sweat. I looked out the window and watched one of my men miss five shots before finally hitting a target no more than ten feet away. Sloppy shooting. He wasn’t bothering to aim before firing rounds.

  “I should have waited,” I said. “I left him in there. And I gave away our position when I missed that shot.”

  “I saw the video feed, Sergeant. You did not miss.”

  “I was too loud.”

  “You hit a moving target from over a hundred yards in a bad light,” he said, shaking his head. “Look out that window. Do you think anyone else in your platoon would have done better?”

  “I should have aimed for a head shot.”

  “Do you think that was what killed Shannon? Do you think he died because the man’s oxygen tube exploded?”

  I watched another private. Three targets popped up a good sixty feet out from him. He hit all three in short order, never missing a shot. How could identical beings be so different?

  I mulled McKay’s question over in my head. Freeman had won the battle on Gobi. I’d just been along for the ride. Shannon had done all the work on Hubble, and I got him killed. I did not say that. I did not want Captain McKay to consider demoting me . . . maybe court-martialing me.

  “Harris, he was dead the moment he touched Lieutenant Williams.”

  “Williams?”

  “The tech with the robot,” McKay said. “Williams might have been a prick, but he was a superior officer, and a Navy man at that. I might have been able to smooth things over if Shannon roughed another Marine, but Williams wanted blood, and I goddamned don’t blame him.”

  I did not say anything.

  Outside the command booth, Lee gathered the platoon. I could not hear him, but I could see him yelling at the men. Lee singled out one man and gave him a shove as he stepped into line. The man stumbled.

  McKay saw none of that. He continued to look at me, not so much staring, but certainly studying me carefully. I glanced back at him, but just for a moment. He sighed. “I am going to grant your request, Harris. I’ll assign Grayson from the Thirteenth Platoon to cover for you.

  “Do you have any idea where you are going?”

  “I haven’t thought about it.”

  “I don’t think Lee wants to waste two weeks of leave drifting around Scrotum-Crotch,” McKay said. “We’re going to pass a disc station in two days. I’m going to grant your request, on the condition that you take your leave on Earth.”

  “Earth?” I liked the idea. “I could visit the orphanage . . .”

  “God, Harris, talking to you is more depressing than sitting through a funeral. Most of the officers on this ship visit a group of islands. I told Lee about the place.”

  McKay slid off the desk. “You’ve got two weeks, Harris. Don’t waste them.” He returned my salute and left the office shaking his head and muttering the word “orphanage.”

  The Scutum-Crux Central Fleet needed rebuilding. We had lost seven thousand men on Hubble. I noticed an eerie emptiness around our section of the ship. I saw vacant racks in squad bay, and the sea-soldier bar always felt empty.

  After the nonstop rush of battle, life unwound at an uneven pace aboard the Kamehameha . The first weeks after the battle on Hubble passed so slowly. The two days after McKay granted my leave were a blur.

  I put off packing until the morning we left for Earth. I drilled my men harder than ever the day before we left. I tried to combine the late Tabor Shannon’s tirades and Aleg Oberland’s intelligent doggedness in my orders. I think I pushed everybody beyond his limits. When one of my privates missed ten shots on the range, allowing a holographic target of a woman separatist to stroll right up to the stand, I screamed until spit flew from my lips. Shannon would have been proud. I removed the man’s helmet, then I placed it over his head backward and hammered it down with my rifle butt. “Having trouble seeing through your visor?” I yelled.

  Nobody laughed at my antics. The squad watched silently. I sent that same private to clean latrines during lunch and invited him to spar with me during hand-to-hand drills later that afternoon. That evening, I spied him practicing on his own in the rifle range. He showed marked improvement despite the two swollen black eyes I had given him earlier in the day.

  Then, at 0500 the next morning, I woke from a deep sleep to see Sergeant Elmo Grayson dropping his rucksack beside my bunk. “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “What are you doing here?” Grayson answered. “Your ride leaves in less than an hour.”

  The blood surged to my head when I sat up too quickly. Still feeling sluggish, I swung my feet out of bed and forced myself up.

  “Anything I need to know?” Grayson asked, as I pulled on my shirt.

  I thought for a moment. “I’ve been drilling them on their shooting skills. Most of these grunts are pretty sorry shots. Take them to the range a couple of times per day. If they screw up, drill them again . . . especially the one with the two black eyes.”

  “Black eyes?” Grayson asked. “Maybe that’s what messed up his shooting.”

  “Actually, they’ve improved his accuracy,” I said. It was true.

  Lee came into my office as I threw the last of my clothes in a duffel bag. “They don’t hold shuttles for sergeants, you know,” he said.

  “I know,” I answered as I slung on my shoulder strap.

  The men sat up in their bunks and watched as we left. No one said anything, but they seemed glad to see me go.

  Lee and I raced to the launch bay, arriving as a small line of men started entering the transport. We joined the queue, panting from our run.

  Fifteen men, six in civilian clothing, boarded the flight. Lee and I traveled in our Charlie Service greens. My civilian shirt and denim pants waited at the top of my bag.

  The entire flight, over sixty thousand light-years, took under an hour. As Captain McKay had said, the Kamehameha happened to be near a disc station. Once we entered the network, we flashed through eight sets of discs, ending up at Mars Station, where we boarded a five-hour flight to Salt Lake City.

  The flight from Salt Lake City to the islands would be aboard a civilian airliner. As we disembarked in Salt Lake City, I looked at my ticket. The name of the final destination looked so foreign. “How did you say they pronounce this town?”

  “Hon-o-lu-la,” Lee said.

  “Hon-o-lu-la? The second ‘U’ sounds like an ‘A’? What the hell kind of name is that?”

  From the window of the plane,
the ocean around the islands looked like a luminous patchwork of aqua, green, and blue. Parts of the island matched Gaylan McKay’s description—longs strips of beach and gorgeous forests. Other areas looked nothing like I expected. I saw a large city and long stretches that looked parched. A mountain range seemed to dissect the island. Thick rain forests ran along the mountain.

  “It’s beautiful,” Lee said.

  “Did you know it would look like this?” I asked.

  “I heard stories,” he said, staring out a window across the aisle. “Mostly from officers. McKay says Admiral Klyber always comes here on leave.”

  As the airplane began its descent, it flew parallel to the shoreline. We rounded a crater. I watched the scrolling landscape as the plane approached the runway.

  Lee and I grabbed our bags before the plane touched down. We stayed in our seats with our bags on our laps. Heat, glare, and humid air poured into the cabin when the flight attendant opened the hatch. Squinting against the sunlight, I drew in a deep breath and felt the warmth in my lungs. Moments after leaving the plane, I felt sweat on my forehead.

  Like so many places on Earth, Honolulu was a living museum exhibit. The airport was hundreds of years old, with thick concrete pillars and open-air walkways. It reminded me of the Marine base on Gobi. As we walked through the airport, I rolled up my sleeves. My shirt already felt moist under my arms. The heat felt great on my face and neck.

  “Are you beginning to thaw?” Lee asked me.

  I knew what he meant. Back on the Kamehameha , every room was climate-controlled. So was our armor.

  Lee handled all of the logistics on the trip. He arranged our flights, found a place for us to stay, and rented the transportation—a beat-up buggy with a retractable cloth top. I was just along for the ride. “I hope you know where we’re going?” I said as I chucked my bag in the back of the car.

  “Don’t sweat it, we have a map,” he said, tapping his finger on the map window in the dashboard. “Besides, who could get lost on a little rock like this?”