Steven Kent - The Clone Empire

In the end, I decided not to call him anything, and simply said, “Listen, there’s a small plane hidden somewhere in Norristown, a Piper Bandit. If I had to guess, I would say it’s somewhere just south of town.”

“Why should I care about a small plane?” Doctorow asked.

“Because it can reach Earth,” I said.

“How is that possible?” Doctorow asked, sounding more than a little concerned.

“It’s self-broadcasting,” I explained. Even as I said this, I realized that I had overlooked an important question. Freeman said the battery was only good for one broadcast. That meant the Unified Authority had ferried the plane and its pilot to Terraneau space and dropped it off. But how had he, Freeman, traveled to Terraneau?

“A self-broadcasting plane,” Doctorow repeated.

“It’s very small, just a two-seater, and the broadcast engine is only good for one use. If the aliens come back, you can use it to send for help,” I said. I hated handing the plane over to Doctorow. I specking hated it. I was doing it for Ava. If the aliens did come back, I hoped like hell these assholes would send their distress signal in time for us to help them. I had my doubts.

“I appreciate your telling me about this,” Doctorow said. “Now if you could direct us to the plane before its owner returns.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” I said.

“No?” Doctorow asked.

“The original pilot will be leaving with me and my men,” I said. It was true. What I neglected to mention was that he’d be traveling in a body bag.

There was not a single trained surgeon in the entire Enlisted Man’s Navy. We had medical technicians who could set broken bones, remove a bullet, or treat a burst appendix; but medical school was the domain of natural-born officers. The closest clones got to that kind of education was training as a nurse.

I didn’t need a surgeon to run the autopsy, but I wanted someone who knew his way around a corpse. I needed someone with the right eyes and skill set to examine the body of the late faux Sergeant Kit Lewis, someone who could tell me what the security posts had been missing.

“I don’t know the first thing about forensics,” said the chief medical officer of the Salah ad-Din . We were in sick bay. The body, still wrapped in a self-chilling body bag, lay on the table before us.

“Understood,” I said as I unzipped the bag. There he was, Sergeant Lewis, his remaining eye staring straight ahead, the jagged remains of his skull poking out from areas where his face had shriveled.

The doctor looked at the corpse and swallowed, then quickly recovered. “Want my official opinion about what killed him?”

“I know what killed him. I was there,” I said. “What I want to know is what makes him different than everyone else.”

“Half his skull is missing, that’s different,” said the doctor.

“Besides that,” I said.

“Besides that he’s exactly like everyone else, he’s a clone,” the doctor said.

I gave up and started to leave. When I reached the hatch, I looked back, and said, “This boy was different. I want to know why.”

I left the sick bay and walked to the bridge.

The Salah ad-Din was a Perseus-class fighter carrier—a moth-shaped monstrosity that measured fifty-one hundred feet from wingtip to wingtip and forty-five hundred feet from bow to stern. The walk to the bridge took nearly ten minutes.

Captain Villanueva sat waiting for me when I arrived. He was a clone, of course. Villanueva was in his late forties. The crow’s-feet along his eyes stretched down to his cheeks when he smiled. His tiny sideburns had gone white, and he had a spackling of white hairs.

The man was twenty years older than me, but he showed proper respect for my rank. I liked him. Unlike so many officers, Villanueva had no political ambitions. He had his fighter carrier and his crew, and he was satisfied.

“I hear you brought luggage aboard my ship,” he said. When he saw that I had not caught his meaning, he said, “A dead man. I just got a call from sick bay. They said you dropped off a dead guy.”

Maybe I was having trouble focusing. Try as I might to ignore her, Ava still haunted my thoughts. I was angry and jealous; but more than anything else, I just wanted to know that someone would protect her.

“What do you want with a dead clone?” Villanueva asked.

“He’s got secrets,” I said.

“What kind of secrets?” Villanueva asked.

“If I knew, I wouldn’t bother lugging him around,” I said. It seemed like a polite way of telling the captain to mind his own business, but Villanueva did not take it that way. He bobbed his head like a fighter ducking a punch, and said, “Yes, sir.”

Villanueva’s lack of ambition made him easy to work with, but it also left him a trifle unmotivated. With remora fish like Admiral Cabot, ambition meant initiative. Cabot might have been preening for glory, but he got things done. Cabot did not wait for orders, he looked for ways to draw attention to himself. Villanueva, on the other hand, would happily stand around letting the proverbial moss grow under his feet.

As we spoke, I saw officers glancing in our direction. There was no privacy on the bridge of the ad-Din , the deck was designed with no interior walls so that its officers could synchronize a thousand separate operations during attacks. The decks of the big ships were filled with desks and computer stations. Even the helm had more to do with keyboards and touch screens than steering yokes. The ad-Din was nearly a mile wide. You didn’t control a big bird like that using a stick and pedals.

“Is there somewhere else we can speak?” I asked.

Villanueva nodded and led me to a closet-sized conference room off the bridge floor. I sat across the narrow table from him, and asked, “What is the status of our evacuation?” I hated the term “evacuation”; it made it sound as if Doctorow had chased us away. In my mind, we were abandoning Terraneau, not evacuating it. The semantics mattered to me, but not to anyone else.

“Your Marines are on board, sir,” Villanueva said.

“All of them?” I asked, feeling a bit stunned.

“All twenty-two hundred men are accounted for, sir. Are you sure you want to leave all of that equipment behind?”

The equipment was the rather extensive arsenal of weapons I had procured from the graveyard of ships. It must have seemed strange to Villanueva that I would leave guns, grenades, rocket launchers, tanks, and even a half dozen transports in the hands of the local militia. Maybe it was a bad idea, but I wanted Doctorow to have the weapons. If the Avatari came back, he’d need them …she’d need them. Ava. Everything was about protecting Ava.

“The Marine compound on this ship is fully stocked,” I said.

“Aren’t we arming a potential enemy?” he asked.

“You see Terraneau as a potential enemy?” I asked. “It’s an undeveloped planet with leaders who want to create a utopia. Hell, the locals probably don’t even want our guns.

“I’ve got more important things on my mind.” I did. I had a complement of two thousand two hundred Marines that needed screening. We would leave for St. Augustine immediately, but I would keep my men under quarantine until I had searched them for infiltrators. With that many men, it could take a full day to check them all out. I gave Villanueva the order to take us to St. Augustine and excused myself.

I was still feeling the effects from a couple of long days, and I should have gone to my quarters for an hour’s rest. Instead, I went down to the Marine complex for a quick inspection.

The men were unpacking, and most of the barracks were dark. A team had begun setting up the shooting range. The cooks and their assistants clanged pots and fired up the stoves in the mess. Hollingsworth met me as I watched a few of his men mopping their barracks. I asked him how the move was progressing, and he told me he had it under control. Our conversation lasted a few antiseptic seconds, and I left for my billet.