Steven Kent - The Clone Betrayal

I kept expecting the combat reflex to revive me, but it didn’t. I felt cold and powerless, the weight of my body holding me down. Wondering if it was shock or radiation, I managed to roll onto my left side. I tried to push myself up with no success.

The world seemed to have left me behind. I thought I heard men fighting all around me, but the gunfire and explosions seemed far away. I reminded myself that I was in a garage, but my thoughts had become a slippery stream of images that never quite came into focus.

“I’ve got you, Harris,” somebody said. Whoever had grabbed me did not give me a chance to stand up on my own. He pulled me along the ground first, and then threw me in the air.

I could feel knots twisting in my stomach. I was upside down, the blood rushing to my head.

“Harris, I’m getting you out,” the voice said. A virtual dog tag showed in my visor, but I could not focus my eyes sufficiently to read it.

Slung over the man’s shoulder, I could barely breathe. My head cleared for a moment, then I vomited. You can drown in your own vomit, I thought. Warm liquid ran into my nostrils and into my eyes.

I tried to remove my helmet, but my arms would not cooperate. They hung like ropes as I wrestled with the acrid-sawdust taste of bile in my throat.

The man carrying me came to a stop. Moving slowly, he lowered me onto my back. A moment later, my helmet came off. I tried to stand up, but my body ignored me. The world was dark and cold around me. Nobody spoke.

The last thing I remembered was an explosion, a thunderous, pulverizing sound followed by a rush of smoke and grit that choked out the last of my breath.

“Did we get them?” I asked.

Nobody answered, as the remaining shreds of my consciousness spun into nothing.

I had always prided myself on walking away from battles on the same legs that brought me in. That time, it didn’t happen.

I was already on the mend by the time I woke from an induced coma. A civilian doctor had me make a fist and curl my toes. He poked my fingers with pins and asked me if I could feel the pressure. I assured him I could.

My head hurt. From the moment I opened my eyes, it felt like someone had tried to split my skull in two with an ax.

“You, General Harris, are the pinnacle of genetic engineering. No human could have survived what you went through.”

I wanted water. I was hungry, my head ached, my entire body ached, I felt weak and dizzy and unhappy; but above all, I wanted water. “Can I have some water?” I asked, my voice a gravelly croak.

“Not just yet, General,” the doctor said. I heard the man and saw his blurry silhouette, but I could not get my eyes to focus. The light from the window made my head hurt all the more.

“We still have tests to run now that you are awake.” He sounded young and peppy, excited to run tests on a new patient who should already be dead.

As my head cleared, I became aware of the slings holding my arms and the tubes poking into my flesh. Someone had elevated the back of my bed so that it kept my head raised higher than my feet.

“I was shot,” I said.

The doctor corrected me. “You were shot five times.”

“I got hit in the arm,” I said.

“Two shots pierced your right arm, and three pierced your legs. The darts went right through.”

That accounted for why I was in the hospital, but it did not explain why I felt so sick. Maybe if I took one to the kidney. Something was wrong with me. Then I remembered that the fléchettes were made of uranium. “Am I hot?” I asked.

“You have a fever, but that’s expected after a full blood transfusion. Fortunately, finding blood supplies wasn’t a problem. You have the same blood type as every man in your command.”

“Am I radioactive?”

“Radioactive? No. The darts weren’t radioactive, but they were poisonous. The men you were fighting had a neurotoxin on their darts.

“You were the only one who survived being hit. The poison killed everyone else in a matter of minutes; but you, they hit you five times, and it still didn’t kill you. There was so much adrenaline in your blood that the poison didn’t spread the way it was supposed to.” He sounded excited as he told me this.

“How many men did we lose?” I asked.

As if he did not hear me, the doctor continued raving about my genetic engineering. Then he said, “You are going to have to be more careful next time. We damaged the gland that produced all of that adrenaline when we swapped out your blood. The gland should heal, but I’m not sure how long it will take. Until then, you will need to put up with normal mortality.”

With my eyes out of focus, I saw the world as a fuzzy mixture of bright light and dark colors. I could not see the doctor clearly, but it no longer mattered. I wanted to be alone. I felt tired. All I wanted to do was sleep.

“I need to rest,” I said.

“But we have tests …”

“Later,” I said.

“General Harris, you are not out of the woods just yet. We need to …”

“I’ll take my chances,” I said. I shut my eyes and pretended to sleep. The doctor stood mute, not knowing what to do. I felt his gaze and heard him breathing. Finally, he left the room.

What was I? If the gland that produced my combat reflex was out of commission, I was no longer a Liberator. I did not have the gland for the death reflex, so I was not a general-issue military clone. I was not a natural-born.

I turned to my old friends the philosophers for an answer, but Nietzsche, Hobbes, Plato, and Kant had nothing to say.

My Marines did not come to visit me while I was in the hospital, but other people did.

“Maybe I was wrong about you, Harris. It turns out you are not the luckiest man in the Marines, after all,” Ava said.

She looked beautiful but not glamorous. She wore next to no makeup.

“I don’t feel lucky,” I said. I tried to sit up. Blood rushed to my head, leaving me dizzy.

Ava gently placed her hand on my shoulder, giving it a barely perceptible squeeze. “Honey, you and I were meant for each other. We both know what it feels like to be out of luck.”

I wrapped my left arm around Ava’s tiny waist. She leaned down and kissed my forehead. “We’d better be meant for each other, ’cause we’re stuck here now,” she whispered. “El says the whole fleet was destroyed.” El, of course, was Ellery Doctorow.

That was the first time anybody had even mentioned the war since I woke from my coma. The doctor must have decided I was in no shape for bad news. He always pleaded ignorance. Doctorow visited me once, but said he had to leave for an “urgent appointment” when I asked about my men. I had no idea what had happened to Thomer and Hollingsworth.

“The entire fleet?” I asked.

“That’s what El said,” Ava told me. She frowned, then reached down and smoothed my hair. This was a new side to Ava. Now that she had a reason to nurture, it came naturally to her.

“There were over a million men up there,” I said. One million men wiped away in a single day, the thought of it made me sick. One million clones killed in a training exercise.

“How about my Marines?” I asked, scared of what Ava might tell me. If she said they were killed, that would mean I was alone. If she said they were alive, then I would wonder why they had not come to visit me.

I reached for the little plastic pitcher of water that sat on the table beside my bed. Ava stopped me. She poured the glass for me. Did I love her? I thought that I might. I also thought she was right. We were stuck with each other.