Steven Kent - The Clone Elite

“What happened here?” an old fellow asked as he stared along a line of dead stores. Through the darkness, I saw men with flashlights coming to meet us as we gathered in the terminal.

“Is the spaceport on lockdown?” an old recruit asked one of the soldiers as they arrived to greet us.

“Shiiit, have a look around,” the soldier replied. “There ain’t nothing left here to lock down, old-timer. Look around you. This place is deserted. There’s nothing in the stores to steal.”

“What are we doing here?” the old man asked.

“You look like you been around the block a time or two,” the soldier said. “You can’t possibly think I’m going to risk getting some officer on my case by spoiling the surprise.” Our guides were regular government-issue Army clones. When the first two hundred of us had come down the gangway, two corporals paired off with us, leading us away from the gates and into a dim shopping arcade. The arcade floor was so wide that the storefronts on either side of us vanished into the shadows.

“Keep up,” one of the corporals said as he looked back and saw slower recruits lagging behind. “Stay in a group. If one of you gets lost in here, it’s our asses that will answer for it.”

Unlit and empty, the spaceport transformed into a maze in which a person could easily become lost. The corporals led us down two floors to an underground railway system. Before the civil war, the spaceport maintained six separate wings, one for each arm of the galaxy. Passengers used to board these trains to get from one wing to the next.

Maybe the other wings are active, I thought.

Rumbling along at no more than ten miles per hour, we passed by boarding zones for one wing after another, the platforms were all dark. When we reached the wing for Scutum-Crux—the farthest arm of the galaxy—the train slowed and switched tracks, entering a tunnel that led us uphill and through a set of airtight doors.

“The Corps of Engineers just finished this new track a few weeks ago,” said one of the corporals. He wasn’t speaking to anyone in particular, just enjoying the audience of recruits.

When the outer door opened, I saw the Martian landscape. I had flown over this planet many times but never looked across the landscape at ground level. The land was flat and ugly, a featureless desert with rocks and sand and no signs of life.

“Are these cars sealed to hold air?” one of the recruits asked.

“They weren’t before the Corps of Engineers got ahold of them,” the soldier replied. “But don’t you worry your white head over that. They’re sure as shit airtight now.”

Looking at the old-man recruit and corporal leading us was like looking at multiple generations of the same family. All of the men standing in this car stood just under six feet, though many of the older ones were slumped with age. Those recalled soldiers who were still young enough to have color in their hair had brown hair. I did see one or two old fellows who had tried to dye their hair with blond hair dye. Everyone had the same color of brown in their eyes, the same exact cleft in their chins, and the same bridge in their noses.

“I wouldn’t worry about the poisonous air,” our second corporal /guide said. “Hell, it’s so cold out there you’d freeze to death.”

Ah, hazing the recruits, a time-honored tradition in the military. Battle-wary veterans scaring new recruits was a tradition that might even be as ancient as the MREs they served us on the transport. On the other hand, the tradition took on a strange twist in this train car, where the veterans were in their thirties and the naïve victims were in their fifties.

The train took us thirty miles across the surface of Mars to Citadel Air Force Base. There were no roads or fences around this glowing geodesic dome, just a dun-colored building that rose out of the ground like a five-story blister. Rings of blue-white light shone about the foot and cornice of the building.

The tracks led through another air lock and into a tube that took a sharp dive under the wall of the dome. We emerged from the tube in an underground train station. Aluminum ventilation shafts snaked along the red rock wall twenty feet overhead. Bright arc lights shone down on the platform from ten feet above. The ceiling of the station was a slab of rough-hewn red rock.

The door to our train car opened, and frozen air rushed in.

“You want to hurry it up, boys,” one of the corporals yelled as he pushed his way out to the platform. “The air is a few degrees south of zero.” His breath formed a cloud around his mouth.

Soldiers in heated environmental suits ushered us toward the far end of the platform as we left the train. Feeling the cold air burning deep in my lungs, I trotted to the front of the herd and entered another air lock at the far end of the platform. The old men around me remained mostly quiet in the cold, though a few moaned. I suspect the men in the environmental suits enjoyed watching them suffer. I could hear muffled laughter through their masks, and why not—they wore electronically insulated jackets.

So much for Ava Gardner movies and all-you-can-eat MREs; now we were back in the real military.

“We should’a just stayed in the spaceport,” one of the old men said as he stepped into the air lock. Everyone around him agreed. I could have pointed out that enormous as it was, the unshielded spaceport would collapse if hit by a single missile. The Citadel had shielded walls, batteries of defensive missiles, several cannons, and squadrons of fighters protecting it.

Warm air circulated through this tunnel. As soldiers piled in behind me, I followed the tunnel to an escalator that led upward. Two soldiers waited for us at the top.

“Well,” one of them yelled, “hurry it up.”

The automatic stairs took us 150 feet up at a seventy-degree angle. The soldiers that met us at the top of the stairs pointed toward yet another corridor and rushed everyone along. Finally, we passed through one last set of doors and entered the admin area.

The Citadel reminded me of office buildings everywhere. Rows of bright fluorescent light fixtures shone from the ceilings to the endless plains of white, shiny flooring spread beneath our feet. We passed cubicles and small offices, conference rooms and cafeterias.

The building was crowded with servicemen from all branches. Walking past a break room, I saw officers in blue, green, and white sitting at a table drinking coffee. The guards along the wall wore olive drab service uniforms. This was an air base, but with all the branches represented, it felt more like the Pentagon.

One of the recruits paused and asked a soldier, “Where are the billets?”

“Other side of the building,” the soldier grunted, not even bothering to look at the man.

“Are we staying here tonight?” the old recruit asked.

“Not here. We’ll have you back on your transport in a couple of hours.”

We stopped in front of a large auditorium. A group of soldiers met us by the door and waited for us to form a group. “Anyone who served in the Army, fall in on the right. Air Force, front and center. Marines, you fall in on the left.”

“What if I was Navy?” a man called from the back. There was a group of retired sailors, fifty or sixty of them.

The soldier smiled as if this was a great joke. “You’re in the Army now,” he said. This raised a groan from the seamen.

Of the first two hundred recruits to walk off of the transport, I was the only Marine. I stood in a one-man queue.

“You, young blood,” one of the guides called to me. “What’s your name?”

“Harris,” I said.

He looked at his clipboard, then over to the other guide. “Yup, he’s the one. Harris, we have special orders for you.”