Steven Kent - The Clone Empire

“Do we know how long the power has been out?” I asked.

“No, sir. Not yet.”

“Do we know what happened to it? Do we know if the neighbors still have power?” I asked. I looked out the window and saw light in some of the windows across the street.

The sergeant peered out the window as well, and said, “This appears to be the only building without power.”

I nodded and moved on. “Shit,” I whispered to myself.

Whatever happened in this building was not a war or a battle; it was an assassination. Someone had come in with suppressed weapons and caught the entire staff off guard. Judging by the gore and bullet patterns, they might have gone through the entire building without any of ours returning fire.

Magic restored.

In the old days, communication signals were routed across the galaxy using the Broadcast Network. Somehow, Gary Warshaw and his enlisted engineers had restored pangalactic communications using their limited broadcast network. It was nothing short of a miracle.

Warshaw called me that evening.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“I’m on Gobi,” he said, sounding a little surprised. “Something wrong with that?”

“I didn’t know you had pangalactic communications,” I said. It should have occurred to me back when I was on the Kamehameha . Warshaw wasn’t even in the same arm as the Kamehameha , but he had been able to watch Bishop interrogating me. I should have figured it out back then.

“Yeah, well, we got a network up, so why not?” he asked. “You making any progress on your investigation?”

“We’ve found a lot of bodies,” I said. “Over five hundred of them so far.”

“All clones?”

“Yeah,” I said, “all clones. There were a few in every city.”

“Murdered?” Warshaw asked.

“Drownings, car accidents, fires …a couple of outright murders. St. Augustine is a revolving door with eighty thousand men running through at any time.” Five hundred men … I wondered if it was a revolving door or a meat grinder.

“I bet we haven’t even found half the breakage yet,” I said. “All we have are the bodies that floated to the surface.”

“That’s what I like about you, Harris, always the optimist,” Warshaw said.

“I contacted the ships that went to St. Augustine on leave and had them check their service logs. In the last two months, less than thirty men were reported absent without leave. Every last one of them showed up sooner or later. According to the logs, none of those five hundred stiffs came from your ships.”

“But you think the logs are wrong,” said Warshaw.

“They have to be,” I said. “And that’s five hundred bodies so far. Who knows how many bodies we’ll find by the time we finish here.”

“You think I have five hundred saboteurs on my ships?” Warshaw asked.

“Sooner or later, it’s going to get ugly.” I thought about the clone at the restaurant. We had no hope of ferreting them out, not with camouflage like that.

“Are you keeping yourself safe?” I asked.

“Maybe I’ll move my operation back to the Kamehameha ,” he said. “How are they going to hit me on a big ship like that?”

“Where was Franks when they got him?” I asked.

“On the Obama .”

That was another fighter carrier.

“Yeah, well, Franks didn’t know what he was hiding from,” Warshaw said. “I have a better idea, thanks to you.”

“Glad to be of service,” I said. “So what are you watching for?”

“Anything that moves.” Warshaw let the comment ride for a moment, then asked, “How about you? What are you doing to keep safe?”

“If you wanted me to play it safe, you shouldn’t have painted a specking target on my back.”

He must have expected a different answer. Sounding defensive, he said, “At least you’ve got the toe-touchers brigade watching your back, and I hear you called in an intelligence unit.”

“Toe-touchers brigade?” I asked.

“Yeah, Cabot didn’t tell you why he lost his command? Remember Fahey?” Perry Fahey was a ship’s-captain-turned-spy for the Unified Authority.

“Cabot was a spy?” I asked.

“Shit, Harris, I just told you, he was a toe-toucher. He lost his command for conduct unbecoming an officer. I thought having him along might help you relieve any stress.”

“Get specked,” I said. In the years that many of our fleets were stranded in deep space with no hope of rescue, some of our sailors and officers had traded unfulfillable heterosexuality for a convenient alternative.

Warshaw laughed. “At least I didn’t paint the bull’s-eye on your ass.”

He still did not get it. Every Marine and sailor in the entire empire was a potential assassin. Thinking he had deflected the danger onto me, he did not notice the noose tightening around his own neck as well.

When I did not respond, Warshaw said, “You’ll survive this one, Harris. You always survive.” Perhaps he meant the comment as an olive branch, but it was meaningless.

I changed the subject. “I’m in a town called Sunmark. Ever heard of it?”

“Can’t say I have,” Warshaw said.

“It’s a small coast town surrounded by a lot of jungle.”

“Yeah, so?”

“I have two hundred men searching the jungle for bodies. Let’s say one of my guys gets nixed while taking a leak in the woods, next thing you know, one of the men watching my back is an assassin. Then how safe will I be?”

“You sound paranoid.”

I laughed. “Paranoid? The last time I saw you, you were hiding in a high-security base in the middle of a desert with guards and DNA-reading posts by every entrance and elevator.”

“What’s your point?” Warshaw asked, though he damn well knew exactly what I meant.

“How many guards are you going to have around you on the Kamehameha ?”

“Four, same as always.”

“How many guards are you going to have posted on your deck?” I pushed.

“Having a platoon is standard operating procedure.”

Posting an entire platoon to guard the deck of a ship was hardly standard operating procedure. “Are you going to tour the ship?” I asked.

“Maybe.”

“Are you going to take the whole platoon with you?”

“Okay, I apologize for calling you paranoid. What are you going to do next?”

I thought about this. “First we find out how badly we’ve been infiltrated, then we stop the leaks, then we catch a spy and figure out what makes him different from a run-of-the-mill clone.”

“And that fixes everything?” Warshaw asked.

“Then we need to round up the enemy clones. That’s going to be the hard part.”

The ax came down that afternoon. We might have been able to stop the leaks, we might have been able to catch a killer clone and examine him under a microscope, but it did not look like we would ever untangle how badly we’d been infiltrated.

At 15:00, Admiral Cabot informed me that the intelligence unit had found a mass grave in the jungle. Bored stiff from two days spent sitting in an office, I took the news more enthusiastically than he expected. In fact, I insisted we drive into the jungle and oversee the excavation.

By that time, a large security detail of locals and clones had arrived in Sunmark. Armed civilians patrolled the streets. MPs and militiamen manned the police station. The town was beginning to look like a prison.

I had hoped to escape all of the security precautions by going out to the grave site, but it didn’t work that way. Cabot arranged for a convoy escort. As we left town, I watched the trucks and guards, and muttered, “You’d think we were headed to a battle, not a burial.”

“Did you say something, sir?” Cabot asked. His mind had been elsewhere.