Steven Kent - The Clone Betrayal

“The average citizen doesn’t know and doesn’t care,” I said. “As far as John Citizen is concerned, the sun still rises in the east and the sky is still blue. He sleeps cozy in his bed every night safe in the knowledge that Congress has his back.”

Down on the parade ground, the drill instructor finally broke up the mismatch between the tall guy and his squat victim. I actually felt sorry for these new recruits. How many hundreds of years had passed since the days when the regular Army was made up of regular men?

Herrington sat in silence watching the recruits for a couple of minutes, then asked what we were all wondering: “Sir, how long do you think they’re going to keep us locked up out here?”

“You got someplace to go, Sergeant?” I asked.

“No, sir.”

I knew three answers to his question. As an officer, my job was to give the party line—a simple We’ll leave as soon as we receive our orders would suffice. Then there was the honest answer, the answer Herrington deserved. That answer would be more along the lines of Wherever they send us, it won’t be any better than this . But there was a third train of thought, one that I even hid from myself. The new Army had approximately sixty thousand new dumb-shit recruits guarding the thirty thousand trained fighting machines now residing in this camp. They had the guns and the numbers, but we had the know-how, and the experience. If we decided to make a break, some of us would survive.

Down on the parade grounds, the drill instructor yanked the pugil stick out of the hands of his timid recruit and shook it in the air. He demonstrated the proper way to hold the stick by waving it in the man’s face. I could not hear him from this distance, but it looked like he was giving the entire platoon a good drubbing. You learn how to read DI body language in boot camp. It’s a lesson you never forget.

“The guys we had in our platoon back on New Copenhagen …I bet we could have taken every man on that field,” Herrington said.

“I bet we could,” I said, knowing he was both joking and speaking a truth. We couldn’t really have routed five thousand men with forty-three Marines, but we would have given them a beating they would not have soon forgotten. We had a veteran force—forty-three fully trained and seasoned fighting Marines. Forty of them did not make it off that planet. “Hooha, Marine,” I said. “We would’ve knocked them flat on their asses.”

Herrington watched the raw recruits for several seconds, then said, “General Smith wasn’t even on New Copenhagen. Why does Congress give a shit what that speck thinks?”

I heard what Herrington said, but a different thought ran through my mind, and I laughed.

Herrington misread my laughter. “Do you think it was our fault we lost those planets, sir? Do you think the clones ran scared?” He sounded defensive. Even though he thought of himself as natural-born, Herrington grouped himself with the synthetics. He was an enlisted man. In our world, the terms “enlisted” and “cloned” were synonymous.

“I just had this mental image of Smith leading a squad of grounded fighter pilots into the Avatari cave,” I said. That was the first time I thought about the cave that the aliens had dug on New Copenhagen without an involuntary shudder. That cave …I took a full platoon and two civilians into that cave. Nearly fifty of us went in, but only four of us made it out. On that mission, I discovered a newfound appreciation for Dante and the hell he traveled through in the Inferno .

“General Glade said he would …” Herrington began.

I cut him off. “Herrington, they have us locked up in a camp in a desert. Who do you think cut the orders that put us here?”

“General Smith was the one who …”

“And has Glade done anything to get us out?” As commandant of the Corps and a survivor of New Copenhagen, Glade was generally seen as one of the good guys by most Marines.

“Son of a bitch,” Herrington whispered.

“Yeah, son of a bitch,” I repeated. “These days, it’s a whole lot better to be a son of a bitch than a bastard bred in a tube.”

Herrington snickered, an uncomfortable sort of snicker that hinted that his neural programming was still intact. Even now, locked up in a relocation camp in Texas, he didn’t like saying bad things about superior officers.

Down on the field, the drill instructor gave the stick back to his timid recruit. He pushed the boy back out to fight. The little guy and his bigger opponent circled each other like crabs, occasionally feigning an attack but never committing themselves. After more than a minute, the drill instructor stepped in between them, cuffing them both on their helmets and probably daring them to strike him instead of each other. Neither took the bait.

“I’m glad I didn’t have to babysit assholes like that on New Copenhagen,” I said.

Herrington relaxed and laughed. “Yeah, that would have been bad,” he said.

We watched the drills in silence. After a few minutes, Herrington gave me a nod and went back to the barracks. He was a good Marine, a tough Marine, a man ruled by duty and integrity. His hair had gone white, and some of the starch was missing from his shoulders, but I could still count on him. When the shooting started, Herrington would never cut and run.

Evening gave way to night. The El Paso sky turned orange, then blue, then black. Lights came on around the parade grounds even though the recruits had already turned in for the evening. The lights were a signal for the residents of Clonetown to return to camp for the evening headcount.

A steady trickle of enlisted men walked in through the gate around me. They came in groups of two or three. We fell into lines; the guards took a quick count, and we called it an evening.

With lights blazing in their windows, the guard towers along the fence shone like candles against the night sky. I could see silhouettes of guards in the window of the nearest tower. They aimed their guns into the camp during headcount, then retired to card games once the gates were sealed.

The machinelike chirping of crickets and cicadas filled the languid air. The stuffy evening lacked so much as a trace of a breeze. Off in the distance, a fleet of trucks exited Fort Bliss. I could see their lights in the darkness. The trucks turned onto the highway and vanished. Few vehicles strayed toward our crowded encampment, especially at night.

Around camp, men stood in pockets smoking and talking. Some wore shorts and tank tops. More than a few had stripped down to their briefs. What did they care? No one would throw them in the brig. The brass had already done their worst—they’d abandoned us.

To the casual observer, everyone in this camp looked identical; but I had lived among clones my entire life, and I recognized the diversity that existed among supposedly identical men. It wasn’t just interests or training. Here were thousands of men with the exact same brains physiologically; but some of these men were brilliant and others slow. The equipment these boys packed would not allow them to reproduce. We were built to “copulate, not populate,” as a drill instructor once told me; but natural selection still toyed with their single-generation genes. The dumbest and most foolishly heroic clones died in training and battle.

As the ranking clone and only officer in the camp, I had “officer country,” all to myself. Sadly, in Clonetown, officer country consisted of one small shedlike billet. I shitted and showered with enlisted men and noncommissioned officers, but I had a one-room barrack all to myself.

As I turned down the lane that led to my quarters, I saw the caravan parked outside my door. There was a staff car, a sedan with a GSA license plate sitting center position in a line of four jeeps. Soldiers with M27s sat in the jeeps waiting, but the staff car sat empty.