Steven Kent - The Clone Betrayal

“ Is it true?” Thomer asks.

“ Of course it isn’t true. How would I have gotten information to Brocius?”

“ I’m betting you sent it back to Earth with the natural-borns when they transferred home.”

“ Get specked,” says Fahey.

“ And I’m betting that you left holes in the blockade when you set it up so that the U.A. could place a spy on Terraneau. We located their spy. His name is Freeman.”

This time Fahey does not say anything. He licks his lips, starts to say something, decides against it.

“ Once you got yourself thrown in this stockade, the spy listened in on your conversations with the fleet. You knew he was out there, and you furnished him everything you knew by chatting with your friends on an open frequency.”

“ Bullshit. That’s all bullshit,” says Fahey. He looks at the guards to make sure they believe him.

“ After the Unifieds landed here, they took all the prisoners back to their fleet …all of the prisoners except for you. Why did they leave you behind?”

A subtle shift is taking place. Now Thomer has the snakelike confidence and Fahey seems to shrink. He forces a smile, and says, “They wouldn’t have left me here if I was their spy.”

Thomer says, “Sure they would. You’re not one of them,” and he stands up and reaches into his pocket. One of the guards draws his pistol, but he only pulls out a pocketknife.

“ What are you doing?” the guard asks.

“ I want to try an experiment,” he says to the guard.

“ What are you up to?” Fahey asks.

Thomer slides the knife across the table. “Senior Chief, give me some of your hair.”

“ What?” Fahey asks.

“ Give me a lock of your hair,” Thomer repeats.

“ You’re joking,” Fahey says.

Thomer sits down, and says, “Humor me.”

Thomer is fully in control now. He is, after all, the only man in the room with an active field commission. When he gives orders, the other clones will obey them unless they have standing orders to the contrary. It’s in their programming.

Fahey cuts off a lock of his hair. He gives the hair and the knife back to Thomer, who uses the knife to cut off some of his own hair.

Thomer’s hair is less than an inch long. Fahey’s hair is nearly four inches long. Since they are both clones of roughly the same age, they have identical brown hair except for the length; but Fahey sees his hair as blond. That, too, is in his programming. Thomer, who is aware of his synthetic nature, knows his hair is brown.

“ Now for the experiment,” Thomer says. He takes his own hair in his right hand and Fahey’s in his left and puts both hands behind his back.

From my bird’s-eye angle, I see things Fahey cannot see. Thomer drops the hair from his right hand and replaces it with some of Fahey’s hair. Then he holds out both hands so only the ends of the hairs are sticking out from under his thumb.

“ Whose hair is this?” he asks. “Yours or mine?”

Fahey sneers because to him the answer is obvious. The hair is brown. “It’s yours,” he says.

Without saying a word, Thomer rolls his hand so that the palm is facing up. He spreads his fingers revealing a twist of long hairs. “They left you behind because you are not one of them, Fahey. You’re a clone.”

Until that moment, I had never seen a death reflex.

Fahey stares at Thomer’s open hand. He starts to rise to his feet, his entire body trembling, he remains mesmerized by the hair in Thomer’s hand. His skin turns pale as he mouths words that do not escape his lips. There is a slight shudder of the shoulders, a quick twitch of the head, and Fahey falls facedown on the table, a thin stream of blood leaking out of his ear.

“They hung Thomer the next day,” Hollingsworth said.

“But Fahey was a spy.” It didn’t make sense that Thomer should die for executing a spy.

“The guards were from the Washington . Everyone from Outer Bliss came from the Washington , Harris. Besides, Thomer didn’t care. I offered to come get him so he could stand trial. He didn’t want a trial.”

He’d already been through too many trials, I thought. He’d convicted himself. He was guilty of surviving New Copenhagen when all of his friends had died. For him, that was a capital offense.

Hollingsworth drove me out to see the place where the ghosts had been.

“They’re gone now,” he said. “The last one died a few days ago. The bastard hung on for fifteen days. Fifteen days.”

“What about Mooreland?” I asked.

“He didn’t even last the week,” Hollingsworth said. “I think he might have broken something when the building came down on him. Maybe he got gangrene or something.”

A long chain-link fence ran the border. Four Marines in combat armor stood at the gate. Hollingsworth drove our jeep up to the fence and parked. We both climbed out. He waited as I pulled out my crutches and struggled to my feet.

Beyond the guards, the scene looked no different than most of Norristown. Rubble covered the ground. The partial walls of the government building stood as jagged as knife blades. If anything, we had not been as thorough as the Avatari would have been. The area of the building over the garage entrance had crumbled to nothing. The far wall of the building still stood.

“Hear any voices?” Hollingsworth asked the guards.

“Silent as a tomb,” the man replied.

They traded salutes.

“Did you ever hear them?” I asked.

“Every day,” Hollingsworth said.

The admitted us through the gate. Buildings like the ones we had demolished still stood on every side of the lot, but we were in a vast field of concrete and steel. Where the building once stood, a twenty-foot mound rose from the ground with girders and concrete blocks poking out. A strong wind blew across the destruction, causing half-buried papers to flap. Two ten-foot strands of rebar jutted from a concrete slab. They jangled in the breeze.

“They spoke to us over the interLink. The first few days, they tried to bargain with us,” Hollingsworth said. “They wanted us to dig them out, but they wouldn’t promise to surrender.

“Thomer was still here at that point. He was the only officer with the authority to negotiate …him and you. We didn’t know if you were going to make it. Anyway, Thomer left orders for the men guarding the grave to leave their helmets back at the fort. He didn’t want us talking to them. He was afraid Mooreland would order some clone to dig him out …”

Leaning heavily on my crutches, I walked to the edge of the rubble, knowing exactly where I was. This was the area between the two wings. It was our gauntlet. This was the spot the scouts entered first. They came this far, then they stopped.

“A few days later, Thomer was gone, and I was in charge. I put on my helmet, and that was the first time I heard them. They were begging for help by then. Some of them had already died.

“I only heard Mooreland once. He wanted to talk to you,” Hollingsworth said. “He sounded as good as dead already. I think he knew his time was up.”

“The locals never heard about this?” I asked.

“Hell no,” Hollingsworth said. “That’s why we posted guards. Thomer thought they would try to dig Mooreland out if they knew he was down there.”

He was right, they would have.

The whole building had been turned into a mass grave. Maybe all of Terraneau qualified as a mass grave. The Unified Authority used the planet to bury its clones, trapping them in the far end of space. Then we returned the favor, burying their new Marines under their own government building.