Steven Kent - The Clone Redemption

In his five short years of existence—other military clones were raised in orphanages, but the SEALs “crawled out of the tube” with the bodies and minds of twenty-one-year-old men—Corey Oliver had never seen a SEAL show such insubordination.

They convened in a small room, the ten senior chiefs sitting in a single row of chairs, all looking exactly alike. Each man was short, five feet and two inches tall, with a charcoalcolored tint to his skin and a bald head. We really do look like shadow demons, thought Oliver.

“Are you refusing to follow a direct command?” he asked. Just two weeks earlier, he had been a senior chief petty officer as well. Now he was a master chief, the commander of the SEALs, but he was no older or more experienced than the ten remaining senior chiefs. He had not performed his duties better than they had. In his mind, the selection process had been arbitrary, not by merit.

Looking sorry for his outburst, Harmer lowered his eyes, and said, “No, Master Chief.” Judging by his posture, he might even have called the master chief, “sir,” but that would not have been appropriate. The SEALs were enlisted men, they did not refer to each other as, “sir.”

“It’s just, Master Chief …Why are you assigning me this duty?” asked Harmer.

Oliver smiled, but he did not respond in a soft voice. “What is your MOS, Senior Chief?” he asked.

“Special Reconnaissance,” Harmer said, sounding like a child caught in a lie.

“And your training included?” asked Oliver.

“Survival tactics.”

“And?”

“Geographical assessment.”

“And?”

“And assault planning and damage assessment.”

“You have an appropriate skill set, so you go,” Oliver said. “You and a company of SEALs will work as survival specialists, policemen, and drill sergeants. Once a sustainable living situation is achieved, you will train the colonists in defensive tactics.”

“Nursemaids,” said Harmer.

“Protectors,” said Oliver, his voice every bit as grim as the words he said. “You will report to your transport in thirty minutes, Harmer. Go prep your men.”

Harmer nodded. He did not salute. Enlisted men did not salute each other. He rose to his feet and walked out of the room without saying a word.

“I’ll tell you what,” said Oliver, “if any of you are having second thoughts about returning to A-361-B, Harmer will switch places with you. Any takers?” Oliver looked over the nine remaining senior chiefs. “No one?”

No one raised a hand. No one spoke. They sat in their chairs, staring up at Oliver, the ugliest men the master chief had ever seen.

Do you want to die? Oliver silently asked his men in his head. Do I? He could not answer for his men; but for himself, the answer was, “No.” He had no desire to die, nor did life as a colonist appeal to him. If everything went right, if the crops grew, and they found enough oxygen and water, Harmer and his men would serve as policemen and soldiers until they were too old to matter; then they would go on for years, eating food meant for reproducing humans, outcasts, weak and alone among a tribe of people who cared for them only because they felt indebted. The thought made Oliver cringe.

He could not imagine a worse fate. In truth, Corey Oliver, a man with no ambitions, hated command. For some reason the fates had not only condemned him to replace Illych but to order men to their deaths.

“Captain Takahashi tells me he can fly this ship with 120 men,” said Oliver. Warren started to ask a question, and Oliver put up a hand to stop him. He added, “That’s just what it takes to keep this ship flying. It takes an additional two hundred men to keep things running in a battle situation. That’s 320 trained sailors.

“For this mission, he’s got a thousand sailors and us. Admiral Yamashiro is taking most of the bridge crew with him to New Copenhagen. We’re taking the old and the sick sailors with us.”

“Are any women coming with us?” asked Senior Chief Billings.

Oliver stopped speaking, glared at the man, and asked, “What’s the matter, Billings? You hoping for a first fling before you die?”

The other clones laughed.

“No. No women. No young men, either. The average age on this boat just jumped from twenty-nine to thirty-six,” said Oliver.

“Are you factoring us in those statistics?” asked Senior Chief Warren.

Was this part of their programming? Oliver wondered. Some of Illych’s Kamikaze team had acted the same way before they left on their mission. They made jokes as they boarded the transport. Even normally somber SEALs kidded each other before their final missions.

Not all of them, though. Oliver remembered that Illych did not join in the banter. Just as Oliver now felt the weight of command, Illych must have felt it at the end. His men were going to die, and Illych would have felt the weight of their lives on his shoulders, just as it was Oliver’s turn to feel that weight.

Oliver smiled, looked at his notepad, and said, “I factored you animals in as twenty-six-year-olds. Factoring you in as five-year-olds, the average age drops to twenty-five.”

He looked around the room, meeting his men’s eyes and searching their faces for fear, and Oliver realized they could relax only if he relaxed with them. They would go. They would fight, and they would die, and they would never complain; but he saw that he could give them strength if he would just relax and joke with them. He said, “You should have seen what happened to the average IQ on the ship when I factored you animals in. We cut it in half.”

The senior chiefs laughed, their morale restored.

Transferring twenty-two hundred colonists—one thousand women, eleven hundred men, and one hundred SEAL clones—to New Copenhagen took an hour. Stripping the Sakura and shipping supplies down to the planet took two days.

Every morsel of food, be it frozen, dehydrated, powdered, extruded, or fresh, was sent to the planet. Power generators were removed from the ship and sent down to the planet, leaving entire decks without electricity. Weapons, everything that wasn’t built into the Sakura ’s hull, were sent down, including fifteen low-gravity tanks that consumed such massive amounts of fuel that the colonists would never operate them—they would be torn apart and used for scrap metal; their engines were too inefficient for anything else. Beds, portable storage facilities, and furniture were sent down. So were cooking and eating utensils. Engineers even scavenged metal and wiring from the wall panels and floors.

Yamashiro stayed aboard the Sakura , overseeing the operation as men stripped the ship of nonessential items to send down with nonessential personnel. By the time they finished, the medical bay was empty, the team having pillaged light fixtures, wiring, and electrical panels as well as medicines, furniture, equipment, and flooring.

The entire third deck had been stripped down to its iron girders. Once the location of living quarters, rec rooms, Pachinko parlors, bars, and galleys, it now sat dark and empty. Eviscerated. Yamashiro and Takahashi quietly observed the carnage as the admiral made his final inspection of the ship.

“Admiral on deck!”

The crew, about eighty men and fifty SEALs, stood to salute Yamashiro. He returned their salute.

As they entered, Takahashi said something about his new bridge crew being ready. Yamashiro scanned the area, taking in the desks, the booths, the computers, the table at which he had spent the last three years looking at tactical displays and reading three-dimensional maps. He would not miss the bridge of the Sakura , not in the least.