Steven Kent - The Clone Empire

“The last time I hit him, it was like he didn’t even have any ribs. It was like hitting a water bag. Do you know what he did when I hit him that time?”

“Collapsed to the ground and coughed up blood,” the younger coroner guessed.

He had coughed up blood, I remembered that much. “He lunged at me, threw me down, and started strangling me,” I said.

“I don’t blame him,” said Sam, the younger coroner.

Wanting nothing more than to hit the kid, I shook my head, and said, “You say he was dying. You say he was bleeding internally. Fine. I believe you. That makes him even more dangerous, because he still almost killed me.”

“He’s dead now,” Sam said.

“He’s a specking clone! They can make more of him!” I heard my words echo across the morgue and realized I was yelling at them.

I dialed my voice down, and said, “This man damn near beat me to death when he was supposedly bleeding to death, I want to know how the hell he did that. Pull his genes apart under a microscope, run chemical tests on what’s left of his brains. I don’t care what you do, but get me answers.”

Sam, the younger of the coroners, reached down, turned the skull so that it stared back at him, and said, “Maybe he had a surge of adrenaline.”

For a moment, I wanted to scream in frustration. Instead, I said, “Look, there’s got to be something different going on here. I need you to find out what it is.”

We began the summit with reports from the thirteen fleets.

Unified Authority Navy cruisers had been spotted throughout our territory. They may have been testing our security measures, they may have been spying on us. Cruisers were small and fast, better suited for hit-and-run tactics than confrontations. Phantom U.A. ships had been spotted in all six arms and near most of our twenty-three planets. We never got more than a brief glimpse of them, and they were always cruisers. The most sightings occurred around St. Augustine and Olympus Kri, the only two planets we held in the Orion Arm. Apparently, there had been dozens of incidents around St. Augustine.

Admiral Glenn Nelson, Commander of the Orion Inner Fleet, shared his opinions freely. “The Unifieds want Orion back because we’re too close to Earth. They’re going to try to run us out of the Orion Arm, the gutless pricks.

“We should take the fight to them …end the war once and for all.”

I had my own theory about what the Unified Authority wanted and how we should respond, but I was in no rush to share my opinions in a room filled with admirals. They were Navy. I was a Marine.

“Have any of you gotten close enough to fire at one of their cruisers?” Warshaw asked.

“I got within a million miles,” Nelson answered. “We were down to about six hundred fifty thousand when the ship broadcasted out.”

“Was she one of the new ships or an older model?” Warshaw asked.

“New. We got a signature reading from its shields,” Nelson said. Other admirals grunted approvingly.

“Did you have enough guns to win if she stood her ground?” Warshaw asked.

Nelson frowned and nodded. “Three carriers and a battleship …it wouldn’t have been much of a fight.”

The commander of the Sagittarius Central Fleet came even closer to nailing a U.A. ship. “She broadcasted in five million miles off Donwyn Kri. We had four ships in the area. We were almost on top of her.”

“But she got away,” Nelson said in a bored voice.

There was one exception. One of the Unified Authority ships put up a brief fight in the Norma Arm. Norma was the innermost arm, the vortex of the six spiral arms—or in sailor terms, the “asshole of the galaxy.”

“If they want Norma, we should give it to them,” one of the admirals offered. This comment earned him laughs and nods.

Sitting in a room filled with clones wearing admiral’s uniforms left me feeling slightly disoriented. They all looked alike, more or less. Some were as old as fifty and one was barely thirty, but they had the same face. Warshaw, the fanatical bodybuilder, stood out. He outweighed the next heaviest clone in the room by a good twenty pounds. Also, the others had hair. Warshaw shaved anything resembling hair from his head …though, judging by his nearly comic overabundance of muscle, the absence of hair might have had more to do with steroid use.

“So you think they’re up to something? What are they up to?” Warshaw asked, looking for volunteers. “We know they’re watching us. Obviously, they’re infiltrating us with assassins. Are they running scared? Are they planning an attack?”

No one answered.

“They’re going to attack us,” said Admiral Nelson. “Sooner or later, they are going to attack us. They have to. They don’t have any choice.”

“They don’t want to fight us,” said Admiral Swift, the officer in charge of guarding the space around Olympus Kri. “Those are cruisers they’re sending. Cruisers are the most expendable ships in the U.A. Navy. I bet they even have clone crews flying them, the bastards.

“If they wanted to fight, they’d send carriers and battleships. They’re running scared.”

“So why are they spying on us?” Warshaw asked Swift.

“Because they’re scared, sir. They want to make sure we’re not coming after them.”

“Bullshit! They are planning their attack,” said Nelson.

Swift turned on Nelson, and said, “You don’t know your shit from your ass. We’re talking about Alden Brocius. I’ve seen rabbits with bigger balls than Brocius. The bastard is going to play it safe as long as he can. He’ll send scouts to make sure we’re not planning anything, then he’ll wait until he has the biggest fleet and the most guns before he commits. That son of a bitch will take us into the next century before he attacks. Guys like Brocius don’t make their move till they’re sure they’ll win.”

At that point, the meeting moved on its own inertia. Warshaw tried to take control, but no one was interested.

I watched the quagmire with some satisfaction. I found the officers pretentious. Not a one of them had attended Annapolis or received any other form of officer training. They grew up in the same orphanages as the clones they commanded, and yet they had already adopted the air of superiority I despised in natural-born officers.

Sitting beside me, Admiral Cabot ignored the confusion. He looked pleased just to be in attendance. The summit was officially for fleet commanders, admirals with two stars and up. Cabot, a lower-half rear, had only one star. He would not get to speak unless I invited him to say something on my behalf, but he did not seem to care.

I sat through the meeting, biding my time, speculating about the cadaver in the morgue. When speakers droned on too long, I let my thoughts wander to Ava. I listened for items of interest as the admirals pontificated; but they were talking Navy, I spoke Marine.

When the meeting adjourned for lunch, I found a quiet table where I hoped to sit alone. I did not have the table to myself for long. Cabot came to join me. Like any successful entourage officer, he knew how to read his benefactor. He instinctively knew that I did not feel like talking, so he sat and ate, silent and serene.

A few moments later, Warshaw slid into the seat beside Cabot.

“Mind if I join you?” he asked.

Cabot leaped to his feet. He snapped to attention so quickly that his thigh struck the edge of the table and it slid an inch. Fortunately, I had sipped enough of my water that it did not slosh out of the glass. Cabot’s water splashed on to his plate, though. “Good thing we weren’t eating soup,” I said. They both looked at me curiously, not understanding my joke.

Warshaw, a man who’d risen to master chief petty officer before the Unified Authority gave us field promotions and cut us loose, returned Cabot’s salute as he dropped into his seat, and said, “At ease, Cabot. Let’s just enjoy our meal.”