Steven Kent - The Clone Empire

“If you see me flat on my ass and begging for mercy, come in after me.”

The MPs laughed. Villanueva did not. “Begging your pardon, sir, but I hope that’s not the same signal you used last time?”

The MPs stifled their laughter, but the point was well taken, I still had plenty of bruises on my face.

“I’ve got the situation under control, Captain,” I said, fixing Villanueva with my coldest glare, “and you have your orders. Give me five minutes, then send your men after me.”

Villanueva followed me as I left the security room. “You do know that this is crazy, right?” he asked, as I headed toward the cargo hold.

“I know,” I said. He was correct, but a combat reflex had already begun to flood my veins with hormonal courage, and I felt the old excitement. “Don’t sweat it. Just get my safety net ready. I seriously doubt he will kill me in the time it takes your MPs to break things up.”

The cargo hold had twelve-foot ceilings lined with bright lights. It was a maze with crates and shelves instead of walls. I entered, heard someone shouting, and followed the sound. The infiltrator’s tone of voice reminded me of a man scolding a dog. As I got closer, I heard the thwack of him smacking himself with his tablet.

“Stupid. Gawd, you are so specking stupid. And now you’re stuck here! And what, you think he’s ever specking coming back?” A pause, then he shrieked the word, “SPECK!” Agony and probably insanity rang in his voice.

When I turned around a corner, the clone, the sailor, the infiltrator heard my footsteps and turned. There was nothing spectacular about him, just a standard-issue clone, standing five-foot-ten, with brown hair cut to regulation length and wearing a sailor’s uniform. His brown eyes fell on me, and I saw recognition. He went silent, dropped the hand with the tablet to his side, and saluted.

I returned the salute, and asked, “Who are you speaking to, sailor?”

He gave me an embarrassed grin, and said, “I was talking to myself, sir. It’s an old habit.” In his eyes, recognition turned into hope. I was his target, and I had returned.

I pretended to think about what he had said, then responded, “You might want to work on that; people won’t understand. They might think you are dangerous.”

“Dangerous, sir?” he asked.

“I don’t think you’re dangerous. I don’t think you’re dangerous at all.”

“No, sir?” he asked.

“No, not in the slightest,” I said. “You couldn’t even finish me off when you had a gun, and now you’re not even armed.”

Still standing at attention, he smiled. “Maybe you got lucky.”

“Maybe I did. On the other hand, maybe you got lucky, too,” I said.

His smile faded as he said, “Maybe.” Then he said, “You know who I am and you still came. Doesn’t that seem a little foolish?” Amazingly, he remained at attention, chest out, shoulders back. I’d seen how fast he could make his move, though. I wasn’t fooled.

“I know what I’m doing,” I said.

“How do you know I’m not armed?” he asked.

“Because my MPs have been watching you for hours. If you had a gun, you would have shot yourself instead of trying to beat your head in with an inventory tablet.” I pointed to a camera hanging from the track along the ceiling. It was not the small and discreet kind of camera preferred by security personnel. The camera hanging from its bracket was as big as a boxing glove and had robotic claws for pulling cases.

“You were watching me on an inventory drone?” he asked.

I shrugged. “You were entertaining.” As we spoke, he seemed to collapse in on himself. He was like the kid who comes into the game full of bravado, then misses a shot and falls apart.

“Are they still watching us?”

“Sure,” I said. “But I can signal them to look away if you think you want another shot at me.” I was kicking a handicapped man, taking candy from a kid. He was broken. He was still trying to stand at attention, but now his shoulders slumped, and his expression fell.

“Are you going to arrest me, sir?” he asked.

“Unless you give me a reason to have you shot,” I said.

“No, sir,” he said. “I won’t do that.”

The clone made no move as I signaled Villanueva to send in his MPs.

Like Samson without his hair, I thought. He stood at dazed attention as a pair of MPs entered the cargo hold and put him in cuffs. I watched the scene with bemusement, my combat reflex fading into a pleasant memory.

“I heard you brought in a live one,” Sam, the apprentice coroner, said. He sounded impressed.

“More or less,” I said.

Seaman First Class Philip Sua was bound, drugged, dressed in a straitjacket, and placed in an incapacitation cage. He had remained awake for the trip down to Gobi, but that didn’t make him lucid. A river of drool cascaded from his lips, and his eyes stared straight ahead, unblinking and corpselike.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “The first clone is beaten until his insides turn to pudding, but he keeps fighting. The second clone surrenders without a fight. A coward and a maniac cut from the same DNA, that doesn’t add up. Maybe something went wrong with their neural programming.”

It was now 03:00, Gobi time, and the station was silent except for the swarms of guards patrolling the corridors. Down in the subterranean levels, the halls remained bright as ever.

“The first one must have known he was going to die,” Sam guessed. “You know, maybe he knew he was as good as dead, so he kept fighting as one last act of defiance.”

“Okay, that explains why the first one fought to the death, but why did the second one give up so easily.”

“Was he bleeding?”

“No.”

“Injured in any way?”

“No.”

Sam thought for a moment, then said, “Maybe he didn’t feel like committing suicide.”

We were alone in the morgue, well, mostly alone. Sergeant Kit Lewis was in the room. He was all over the room. His mostly skinned carcass lay on a table. What was left of his face, now rolled inside out and pulled below his chin, hung like the collar of a turtleneck sweater.

Sam blinked to clear his tired eyes, and asked, “Who do you have examining the live one?”

“They’re flying some kind of crime shrink in from Morrowtown,” I said.

“Dr. Morman?”

“You know him?” I asked.

“I’ve worked with Morman before,” he said, speaking quickly, as if giving the doctor short shrift.

Why couldn’t Terraneau have been like Gobi? I asked myself. The locals respected us here. And it wasn’t just Gobi. We were greeted as heroes on all of the worlds we had liberated except for Terraneau.

“Have you found out anything more about Lewis?” I asked. Anything more than cause of death?

“Good timing. If you’d asked that question an hour ago, I wouldn’t have had anything to show you,” the kid said. “Then I had another look at the DNA. How much do you know about DNA?”

“I thought DNA was a dead end,” I said.

Sam shook his head, and said, “It is and it isn’t. The DNA itself isn’t much help.”

“I don’t follow,” I said.

“There’s gene expression and gene regulation. With gene expression, you can create two radically different creatures using identical strands of DNA. You said this man was unusually strong. It’s basic epigentics—same DNA, different cell divisions.”

“And in English?” I asked.

“Instead of looking at his DNA, I had a look at his chromosomes.”

“Chromosomes? The stuff that make you a boy or a girl?”

“I take it biology is not your strong suit,” Sam said as a joke, but it sounded so patronizing that I wanted to hit him.