Steven Kent - The Clone Empire

These bastards could kill, no doubt about it. If we did not discover their secrets, they would spread and destroy us.

I left the Salah ad-Din in lockdown. The ship was quarantined, and a search had begun for the man who attacked me in my quarters.

Every ship in the fleet was under lockdown. Until we figured out some way to protect ourselves, the best we could hope to do was stop the disease from spreading. For now, we would settle with a tourniquet approach, but soon enough we would upgrade to amputation.

The summit began the next day.

For lack of a safer place, Warshaw decided to hold his summit in Gobi Station. Why not? He had a small army guarding the place. He had posts taking meaningless DNA samples at every door. Gobi Station was the safest spot in an entirely unsecured empire.

Warshaw assigned human guards and robot sentries to patrol the grounds outside Gobi Station. Armored vehicles ran the perimeter. A battery of rocket launchers waited inside the gates. Gobi Station was prepared for war, not infestation.

Inside the station, fleet officers mingled, followed by entourages of high-ranking hangers-on. As far as I could tell, I was the only Marine in attendance. I wore a tan uniform in a sea of white.

Warshaw kicked the meetings off with a banquet. I sent Cabot in my place and used the time to hold a summit of my own in the morgue.

Warshaw had brought two coroners in from Morrowtown, the capital of Gobi. When I entered the morgue, I found them hard at work, standing over gleaming steel trays holding carefully washed body parts. In the background, Sergeant Kit Lewis’s cadaver lay partially skinned and disassembled. It reminded me of the holographic “visible man” display my teacher used in physiology class.

The coroners had peeled the skin from Lewis’s right cheek and pulled the pipes from his throat. The skin and ribs had been removed from the left side of his chest, revealing layers of soft pink meat. Any blood had been washed away. The cavity that once held his heart now sat empty like a secret compartment in a waxwork dummy.

Whatever portion of the faux sergeant’s brain remained in his head had been scooped out, washed, weighed, and examined. Seeing the eviscerated body with its cubbyholes and cavities left me queasy, but seeing the organs on trays and in bowls did not bother me much. They had been carefully cleaned so that they were no more offensive than the meat in a butcher case.

When I stepped into their lab, the two coroners turned to greet me. I walked over to the table, took a look at Lewis, then turned to them, and asked, “Have you found anything?”

The taller of the two men, a man in his forties with bushy red hair and round glasses, asked, “Were you the one who brought him in?” In his gloved right hand he held a waxy-looking organ.

I nodded.

The second man, a pudgy kid who stood no more than five feet and five inches, spoke through his mask. He said, “It was the gunshot that killed him.”

I’d heard that joke too many times already. “Yes. I was there,” I said in an officious voice. “What else can you tell me?”

“Were you the one who shot him?” the taller, older man asked. When he placed the organ in a tray, I realized he’d been holding the dead clone’s heart.

“I didn’t pull the trigger,” I said.

“Was this an execution?” he persisted.

“No,” I said. It was supposed to be my execution, I thought.

“You were putting him out of his misery, right?” the younger coroner asked. He sounded slightly cocky, the promising young apprentice who believes he knows more than his master.

The older man turned to his student and corrected him, saying, “You’re jumping to conclusions, Sam. All he said was that it wasn’t an execution.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

The older coroner pointed to a spot on the cadaver where the ribs had been cut away, and said, “This fellow was badly beaten. When I first saw him, I thought he had been hit by a car, but then I got a closer look at the damage. Was he tortured?”

The younger man picked bone fragments out of a dish. Some of the pieces were an inch long. Some were shorter. “These are pieces of his ribs. We pulled them out of his lungs. His liver was so badly traumatized it was leaking like a sponge.”

“Injured that badly,” I said, thinking about how quickly he moved when he attacked me.

“Not just injured, he was dying,” the younger man said.

The older coroner glared at me, and asked, “Aren’t there laws against torturing prisoners? Do you know who did this? It’s, it’s inhuman.” He looked down at Lewis and shook his head.

“No one tortured him,” I said.

“What happened?” the old man asked.

Staring down at the cadaver, I said, “He got in a fight. All things considered, I’d say he won it.” When I looked up, I saw that both coroners were staring at me and I became very self-conscious. The bruises Lewis had given me had not even begun to heal before I was attacked on the ad-Din and given a new set of gashes.

“I assume you were involved,” the older coroner said. His posture stiffened, and he looked nervous.

“Yes,” I said.

He must have believed that I’d tortured and murdered the dead clone. Carefully choosing his words, he said, “This man was in no condition to defend himself at the time of his death. Many of his bones were broken, and his internal organs were hemorrhaging. He had a collapsed lung. He could not defend himself, not with a collapsed lung. I doubt he even had the strength to stand.

“General, you didn’t need to shoot him. If you’d given him another minute or two, he would have bled to death.”

“If he’d had another minute or two, he would have taken me with him,” I said.

“That simply isn’t possible,” said the older coroner.

I saw no reason to argue the point, so I asked, “What else have you found? Have you taken a DNA sample?”

“DNA? You’re joking, right?” asked the young coroner.

I shook my head.

“You brought us here to check his DNA? He’s a clone. He’s a Unified Authority military clone. He has the exact same DNA stuff as any other soldier. It’s the most common DNA in the galaxy.”

“There’s got to be something more,” I said. “Is there some way his DNA could have been altered?”

The older, wiser coroner let his apprentice field the questions. The younger guy said, “Alter it to do what? I mean, look at this guy. He’s a normal, garden-variety clone. The only thing different about him is that he got pounded into mush, and half of his frigging head is missing.”

Lying on that table, his skin peeled away, Kit Lewis did not look like other clones. He might have looked like other cadavers, but nothing about him looked specifically clonelike.

The senior coroner said, “Sam, read back what we have so far.”

The younger man tapped a computer screen and read in a flat voice, “Subject, Male; Unified Authority military clone; approximate age 28; weight at time of autopsy, 168 pounds …” He looked up from the screen, and said, “With his brains and organs intact, he’d probably go 180.”

He turned back to the monitor and continued reading. “Hair: brown; eye: brown …” That might have been coroner humor—the cadaver came in with only one eye.

“Yes, I see that,” I said. “If that was all I was looking for, I would not have asked for your help.”

“What are you looking for?”

“You see those broken bones,” I said, pointing to the tray holding the broken ribs. “I did that to him. I kicked him, and he got up, so I kicked him again. I felt his ribs go, but he still got up. It didn’t matter what I did to him, he just kept coming at me.