Steven Kent - The Clone Empire

Your perspective changes when you walk streets you’ve only driven in the past. Rises stretch into hills, and slopes become steeper. Seconds turn into minutes. It took me twenty minutes to reach the bottom of Norristown Heights, and Fort Sebastian was still twenty minutes away by car.

The air had a cool morning chill. Dew glistened on the grass. Cars passed me on the road every few seconds, speeding down streets that were nearly empty. I ran across a four-lane road, the nearest cars so far away that I could not hear their engines.

A few moments later, a Marine sped by in a jeep going at least eighty miles per hour. He spotted me, and his head turned to track me as he drove past.

I expected him simply to drive away, but he didn’t. The jeep did not screech to a halt, but the tires did squeal just a bit as the driver pulled a U-turn. He cut across several empty lanes, then drifted in my direction, pulling to the side of the road about ten feet ahead of me.

“General Harris?” He said my name as if it were a question.

“Yes,” I said.

“Colonel Hollingsworth sent me to pick you up, sir,” he said.

“Did he? Well, that’s excellent,” I said, remembering full well that the last thing I told Hollingsworth was that I would get myself back to base.

“Yes, sir,” the sergeant said.

It was possible. Ava might have called Hollingsworth and told him what happened. They did not know each other well, but they had run into each other a time or two, and she might have wanted to make sure I got back to Fort Sebastian safely. He might have decided to send a car even if she did not call. It wasn’t likely, but it could happen.

Instead of climbing into the rear of the jeep, as I might normally have done, I stepped into the passenger’s seat.

“Where are we going?” I asked as we pulled away.

“The colonel is waiting for you at Fort Sebastian, sir,” said the sergeant.

“Excellent,” I said. I spoke the words around a yawn. I’d just spent the entire evening standing outside Ava’s house. We headed south and east, the right general direction for Fort Sebastian, skirting downtown Norristown but still driving through other urban districts. My driver did not speak. I sensed an odd intensity in his focus.

I asked him a few questions, and his answers seemed right enough, but something about him, some indefinable quality, left an unpleasant impression. He was the kind of guy who can’t tell a joke because nothing he said could ever be funny. Here he sat, saying all the right things, and I had already decided that I did not like him.

“What is your name, Sergeant?” I asked.

“Lewis, sir,” he said. He sounded respectful enough, but he looked away from me as he answered and gave off a sense of disregard.

“Is that your first name or your last?” I asked.

“It’s my last name, sir. My first name is Kit …Kit Lewis,” he said.

“Well, Kit Lewis, you just missed the road to Fort Sebastian,” I said. We had actually passed the turn two miles back, but I decided to wait until we had passed any likely detours before mentioning it.

“A work crew is laying a cable on the main road, sir,” he explained. “The regular roads are closed.”

“Is that so?” I asked.

“Yes, sir. We need to take a service route.”

“I see,” I said. “It must be quite a project; this detour of yours is taking us pretty far out of the way.”

“Yes, sir.”

Lewis shrugged his shoulders, then faked a laugh, and said, “Oh, we’re not going to Fort Sebastian, sir. Colonel Hollingsworth wants to meet you at the airfield.”

The road we were on would take us past the field, that much was true. “So he’s at the airfield? I could have sworn you said we were meeting at Fort Sebastian,” I said.

The sergeant responded with another nervous laugh. “Did I? I always do that, sir. I was thinking about Fort Sebastian when I meant to say we were meeting the colonel at the airfield, and I switched it around.” His voice was friendly, and he said all the right words.

It was a trap, of course. I had suspected it from the moment I saw the jeep. Stuck behind the wheel, though, he could not pull a gun on me. I had control of the situation.

We were driving at eighty miles per hour. A few miles ahead of us, the edge of the airfield was visible behind a row of small buildings. I pretended not to notice it. We passed two roads that wound around to the airfield. Lewis did not slow down as we reached the third. I doubted he would slow down at the fourth.

“How long have you been here, kid?” I asked.

“Six years, sir,” he said.

If this kid operated like the ones on St. Augustine, we’d find the real Kit Lewis’s body in a day or two. I wondered if he had been strangled, drowned, burned, or dissolved.

“I’m not asking how long Kit Lewis has been here,” I said. “I’m asking how long you have been here.”

“Three days,” he said, the friendly sheen missing from his voice. If he had a gun, he made no move to draw it. He did not need to worry about me. Traveling in a jeep at eighty miles per hour, I would not attack the driver.

The stalemate would last until we came to a stop. He might pull a gun at that point, but I doubted it. The kid showed no signs of fear. He clearly thought he could kill me anytime he wanted. I felt the same way about him. Only one of us could be right.

“How did you get here?” I asked. “You’re a long way from Earth.”

Lewis laughed, and not in the friendly way that he laughed when he still wanted to convince me we were going to Fort Sebastian. Now he sounded disdainful and possibly unhinged. “Are you going to interrogate me right up to the end?”

“It’s better than dying curious,” I said.

“Sorry to disappoint you, General, but I didn’t come here to answer questions.”

“I suppose not,” I said. “But out of curiosity, how did you get here?”

He laughed. “I don’t know the name of the ship.”

We were rapidly approaching the east end of town. The buildings became smaller, and the lots became larger. Civilization gave way to countryside. We passed a stand of trees. Off in the distance, I saw hills and forests. The end of the road, I thought.

“Are you working for the Unified Authority?” I asked, pretending to be a little afraid. I wasn’t afraid at that point, not in the least. My combat reflex had not kicked in, but I didn’t care. I did not think I would need it. The fight would not last long. I’d fought this make of clone a thousand times. He was just a clone, just an ordinary standard-issue clone.

“Sure,” he said.

He slowed to thirty miles per hour as we approached the trees.

“So you’re not Avatari,” I said.

“What the speck is Avatari ?”

“Alien,” I said.

“I’m property of the Unified Authority Marines, just like you.”

“You’re a different make,” I pointed out.

He slowed the jeep to fifteen miles per hour as he turned onto a small dirt road. When we bounced over a bump, I grabbed Lewis behind the neck and slammed his face into the steering wheel, then I slammed the bottom edge of my fist into the base of his skull.

During the moment that he blacked out, I slipped the gear into park, hoping the jeep would come to a stop; but its gears ground together, its engine whined, and the wheels locked as we skidded into a ditch. Bracing myself for the slow collision, I watched Lewis’s already bloody face slam into the wheel a second time, tearing gashes across his forehead and eyebrows.

We landed nose down in a three-foot ditch. I climbed out of the jeep, pulling Lewis out as well, carrying him away from the ditch and slinging his limp ass down on the hard forest floor. I checked his pockets. He’d come unarmed. No gun. No knife.