Steven Kent - The Clone Empire

I started to go after him. I stood, then questioned myself. What did I have? Why would I stop him? He didn’t finish his beer, big specking deal. What did that prove? I only hesitated for a moment, then I went after him; but that moment was enough. By the time I reached the street, the phantom was gone.

I went back into the restaurant wondering if I had made a mistake. As I tried to reason out my suspicions, my fish arrived.

I sat, and I ate, and I rewound the scene and watched it over and over again in my head—a clone comes into the bar. He sits alone. So what?

I took a bite of fish and chased it with a forkload of wild rice. The rice had pepper and butter. The food tasted good, but it was wasted on me. I would have been just as happy eating bad food camouflaged with ketchup. I took another bite of fish and realized one difference me and the phantom—I was eating my fish; he had only been hiding behind his beer.

After my meal, I returned to the police station and found Cabot.

He saw me, growled, “General,” then caught himself and paused.

“Spit it out, Cabot,” I said. For a moment, the little asslicker had shown a bit of backbone.

“Where the hell have you been?” he asked. He looked relieved to have said his piece, then he winced as he braced himself for me to respond.

Finding humor in his discomfort, I smiled, and asked, “Did you just say ‘hell’?”

Cabot turned red and stared at the floor.

“Did you just ask me where the hell I went?” I continued, sincerely enjoying his discomfort.

“Sorry, sir,” he said.

“I went out for a quick dinner.”

Cabot looked up from his feet, and said, “You left three hours ago, sir. We have MPs combing the city for you.”

“Good Lord. You’re like an obsessive mother and a nagging wife all rolled into one.” I said this in a chiding tone, not really caring how derisive it sounded. “You called the police because you didn’t know how to find me?”

“General, you were gone three hours. We were just looking at bodies, sir. I have every MP in the city searching for you. The station is on high alert.”

I looked around, and said, “High alert? Cabot, we need to do some serious field training on police procedures down here. I was able to walk in here without anyone even noticing me.”

Cabot pursed his lips as he fought to control his anger. He might have been a hanger-on, but he was also a one-star admiral, the kind of man who normally talks down the chain, not up. When he next opened his mouth, he spoke in an even tone as if the conversation had started anew.

“We’ve received body counts from every precinct on the planet except for one, a town called Sunmark,” he said.

“What’s the count at?” I asked.

“We’re up to 503 bodies found in the last three weeks.”

“That’s a lot bodies,” I said. “Five hundred stiffs, and it never occurred to anyone that there might be an epidemic?”

“General, that’s 503 bodies planetwide on a planet that doesn’t have centralized communications,” Cabot said. He had a point; no one on St. Augustine knew what anyone else was doing.

“Any idea when we’ll hear from the last station?” I asked.

“We haven’t been able to reach them. The town is not very far from here; I sent some men to knock on their door.”

Cabot heard back from his men an hour later. The Sunmark police station was empty. As far as anyone could tell, all our MPs were M.I.A. and probably worse.

The ghost precinct was less than one hundred miles away. By the time I arrived with my entourage to investigate, it was 00:13, a cursed time if such a thing could exist.

Bright light shone through the windows of the precinct building as we pulled up. A few men searched the alley around the building. The inside of the precinct building looked as busy as an anthill, with MPs bustling in every direction.

I did not recognize any of the men beyond their uniforms and the fact that they were clones, but some of them had undoubtedly come as my support staff. At that moment, another piece of the puzzle fell into place for me.

What if somebody killed a member of my staff? I thought to myself. I don’t know them well enough to tell them apart. If someone quietly murdered one of my men and showed up in his place, I wouldn’t notice it.

As I waited by the car, Cabot went to the door of the building and spoke to the officer in charge of the investigation. He came back a moment later, and said, “Someone attacked the building.”

“Have they found any bodies?” I asked.

Cabot shook his head. “No, sir.”

Sunmark was only a hundred miles from Petersborough, but the air was slightly cooler here and far more humid. This was a coastal town. I enjoyed the combination of warm night and ocean-chilled breeze. Taking a deep breath and letting the moist air hold in my lungs, I walked toward the building, Cabot hopping close on my heels.

The men outside the precinct building snapped to attention as I walked past them. I saluted and told them to carry on.

Standing outside the building, I saw rows of flood lamps through one of the windows. I heard a generator purring in the distance.

“What happened to the lights?” I asked a nearby officer.

“Someone shut off the power, sir,” he said.

The station was two stories tall and rather narrow. It was shaped like a book. My men must have set up an emergency generator behind the building. Arteries from the generator covered the floor, a confusion of power cords that led in every direction. The Marine sergeant who met me at the door was not part of my entourage, and I was glad to see him. When it came to dirty work, I preferred having Marines around me.

“Found anything?” I asked.

“They fought a small war in here, sir.”

“Any survivors?”

“So far, we can’t tell, sir. The people who were manning the station are M.I.A.,” he said.

“No bodies?” I asked. I stepped around him.

Just inside the door, the first splash of dried blood started about five feet up on the wall and stretched to the floor in dribbles. A foot-wide, rust-colored pool had formed below it.

They’d caught their first victim off guard, I thought. He’d been standing tall when he was shot in the head. I was no detective, but I’d participated in a stealth operation or two. I knew how men reacted when they spotted you, and how they died when you took them by surprise.

“Was this the only victim?” I asked.

“The whole goddamned building looks like this, sir,” the sergeant said. “We’re taking blood samples and scraping shit off the walls.”

“Good idea,” I said. It wasn’t, though. All of the blood would be the same general-issue clone blood. If we knew anything about these assassins, it was that they were clones just like us. The good guys and bad guys would have the exact same makeup in this fight, right down to their DNA.

The next victim had been caught unawares as well. He must have been at a desk. The chair he’d been sitting in lay on its back on the floor. There was no blood on the chair, but blood and brains covered the wall and the filing cabinet behind the desk.

“Do you have any idea about what happened to the bodies?” I asked.

“No, sir.” That was the proper answer, no excuses, no promises, no explanations, and no speculation. “Marines never speculate. They always speck you right on time”—wisdom I picked up from my drill instructor in boot camp.

The sergeant interrupted my thoughts. “Sir, whoever attacked the station destroyed the computers.”

“Destroyed them?” I repeated.

Across the floor, computer cases and cabinets lay spread across the floor like trash. No big loss, though. A platoon of MPs had been temporarily assigned to man a precinct on a stretch of sandy beach. They probably had not kept careful records.