Steven Kent - The Clone Empire

When the Enlisted Man’s Empire liberated the planet, the women of St. Augustine welcomed our sailors and Marines. Having lived without men for more than two years, they welcomed us rather intimately.

One of the first factories to open on St. Augustine manufactured condoms. Now, the clones in the Enlisted Man’s Empire were as sterile as a surgeon’s gloves—“built to copulate, not populate” as the saying goes; but they were also programmed to think they were natural-born, so some enterprising resident came up with the idea of selling condoms to a population of “dead-end Joes” who thought they were potent.

If the news stories were true, that factory did a lot of business. On a planet with a population of six million adult females, more than one hundred million condoms had been sold.

I left for St. Augustine the following day.

As the Commandant of the Marines, I traveled with an entourage. Warshaw assigned me a staff that included a one-star admiral, three captains, and enough lieutenants to man a small fleet—all of them tainted. These were men who had played the power game and come up short for one reason or another; now they wanted to redeem themselves. I brought them along as camouflage, but I did not trust them. I did not like traveling with remora fish in my wake; but fleet officers were expected to have an entourage, and a lone-wolf general would elicit suspicion.

Admiral J. Winston Cabot, supposedly my liaison to Warshaw and Naval Command, was officious, petty, politically motivated, and, I suspected, something of a coward. I decided that much about him during the fifteen minutes it took us to travel from Gobi and land on St. Augustine.

A simpering politician by nature, Cabot all but attached himself to my person. Once Warshaw introduced us, the little ferret swooped right in on me, warning the other officers of the entourage away with a threatening glance. He chattered mindlessly in the beginning, but giving credit where credit is due, the little bastard read me accurately after a couple of minutes and settled down, allowing me to think.

Had he known what I was thinking, Cabot might have given me more space. What came to my mind was how incredibly interchangeable he was, like a gear in an old-fashioned clock. There he sat, a fifty-two-year-old general-issue clone with brown eyes and slightly grayed brown hair, and nothing to distinguish himself beyond his uniform.

And therein was the problem.

If the Unified Authority had developed some kind of new cloning program, there would be no way to stop them from infiltrating our military. If their clones truly had the same DNA as ours, they would be identical. We could place posts by every hatch on every ship and run hourly DNA scans of every sailor, and the bastards would slip through our net.

We flew from Gobi to St. Augustine on the Kamehameha . Bishop walked me to the landing bay, where I expected to see a shuttle waiting. As the Commandant of the Marines, I should have traveled down to the planet in a shuttle, but nothing was available. Instead, I would fly down in the familiar steel-and-shadows world of a transport.

“That’s the best you could get me?” I asked Bishop. “I’m the specking Commandant of the Enlisted Man’s Marines.”

“That’s the best I have.”

My entourage hung around me like flies. I told them to board the transport, and all of them did except for Cabot. He lingered, having decided that the order was meant for everyone but him.

“Do you need something, Admiral?” I asked.

“No, sir,” he said.

“Then board the transport,” I said.

He reluctantly left.

“How do you put up with this shit?” I asked.

“You’ll learn to love it,” Bishop said.

“Bullshit,” I said.

We traded salutes, and I boarded the transport. I started the trip in the kettle with my entourage. After five minutes, I found myself so irritated by their company that I excused myself and climbed up to the cockpit. And there, through the windshield, I saw St. Augustine.

After reliving the uniform dryness of Gobi, I had a greater appreciation for the greens and blues of St. Augustine. The planet had oceans, rivers, and lakes. It had pastures, mountains, and ice-capped poles. From space, Gobi looked like a ball carved out of unfinished wood. By comparison, St. Augustine looked like a well-polished opal.

Cabot came up to the cockpit to check in on me. “General, will we have time to inspect the officers’ R & R facilities while we are on St. Augustine?” he asked. “I haven’t tried them myself, but I hear good things.”

“We’re not here to inspect the facilities,” I said.

“Yes, sir. I’m just saying that I understand they’re supposed to be nice, you know, if we get the chance.” When he saw that he wasn’t getting anywhere, Cabot asked, “Why are we here?”

“We’re here to look at corpses,” I said.

The transport shook and rattled as it punched into the atmosphere.

“Corpses?” Cabot asked.

“Three of them,” I said. “Maybe more if we’re lucky.”

“Who died, sir?” He did not know that the Unified Authority had infiltrated our security. Warshaw would not have trusted a weasel like Cabot with that kind of sensitive information. I felt bad for the bastard. Not knowing that I was little more than a moving target, he still believed that being assigned to me would help his career.

“Clones,” I said. “There are three dead clones on St. Augustine, but none of the ships have reported any of missing men.”

“I’m not sure what you are getting at, sir,” Cabot said.

“Three men died on R & R, right? So they couldn’t have reported for duty when their leave ran out. Only they found these guys last week, and none of our ships have reported anyone missing.”

“Someone must have reported in their place,” Cabot said. “Spies?”

“Worse,” I said. “Assassins.”

By prewar standards, St. Augustine qualified as an emerging world. The planet had a fledgling banking system, a global government, and a world market. The Avatari had knocked out the planet’s mediaLink during their invasion; but other than a lack of communications services, the planet of St. Augustine had all the amenities.

St. Augustine had three continents and twenty-five cities, each of which had a police department manned by MPs. It did not take long to determine that the various law-enforcement groups did not share information among themselves.

“Bodies found in other cities?” asked the commander of the Petersborough police—a lowly ensign on loan from one of our ships. The Petersborough Police Department consisted of seven officers and thirty-five enlisted men, an unsatisfactorily small count, especially considering that Petersborough was the capital city of St. Augustine.

“Yes,” I said, and I repeated my question, “Have you heard anything about dead clones turning up in other cities?”

“I …I haven’t, sir. Nothing,” he said.

We stood in the morgue, three occupied body bags lying on tables before us. I had come with my entourage, and the ensign had come with his as well. It made for a crowded room.

“Perhaps you could get one of your men on the horn to find out,” I suggested.

“Yes, sir.” He turned to one of his men and communicated his orders without speaking. The man saluted and left, making the room one body less crowded.

“Do you have information on any of these men?” I asked the ensign. “Names? Units? Which ships they came from?”

“No, sir.”

Pushing my way through the crowd, I approached the first bag and opened it far enough to reveal the head and face within. The mess that stared out at me did not look like a clone. Its skin was the purple of a fresh plum. The face was moon-shaped, a fat blue tongue poking out between black lips. The hair was the correct color—regulation cut and the right shade of brown.