Steven Kent - The Clone Elite

“It didn’t stop Philips, though. That guy is crazy. Did you see his tattoo?”

Thomer smiled and nodded. “I saw it.”

“His tattoo?” I asked.

Skittles laughed. “Yeah, he got a Lilly Moffat tattoo.”

Everyone laughed except Thomer and me. “I think Moffat took a shot at Philips during the fighting on Vista Street,” I said. That quieted them down.

“Are you serious?” Thomer asked.

“I can’t prove it,” I said. “He’s called for a firing squad. One way or another, he wants Philips dead. Can’t say that I blame him.”

That killed the conversation, but that was okay. We had just pulled in to the entertainment district. Packs of men in uniforms lined the streets. In fact, downtown looked more crowded than I had ever seen it.

I thought about the barricaded streets we passed, and the parks used for trash dumps. Somebody was closing off entire sections of town, compressing the population into smaller neighborhoods to hide our losses. Not a bad idea. It might keep morale up for a while, until men started noticing that no one along the street had white hair and wrinkles.

As we moved through the streets, I heard the sound of music thumping and the ringing of feminine voices. Hundreds of soldiers and Marines were fighting their way into a little alley. At least a dozen girls in short dresses danced and mooned down on the soldiers from a balcony above.

“I guess you found your Tune and Lude,” Thomer said.

Sharpes, Skittles, and Manning stopped to stare into the crowd. “You guys coming?” Skittles asked.

“Doesn’t interest me,” Herrington said. He was older than the other men, sort of a father figure.

“I think they’re staying,” said Boll.

I placed a hand on Manning’s shoulder, and said, “Give me the truck keys if you’re staying here.”

“Oh,” he said. He took one last longing look at the girls on the balcony and stayed with us. Not far from the Tune and Lude, we found an empty bar and claimed our table.

“Didn’t you used to read a lot of philosophy?” Thomer asked me as we sat. We all ordered beers.

“I used to,” I said. “Then I found religion.”

The beers arrived moments later. With so many men dead and the Tune and Lude attracting most of the survivors, business could not have been good for this hole-in-the-wall.

“Religion?” Herrington asked. “I never thought of you as a religious man.”

“I’m not,” I said. “After we attacked the Mogats, I gave up on religion. Now I don’t believe in anything.”

Herrington saluted this with his beer.

“Doesn’t that make you an atheist?” Boll asked.

“Atheists believe something,” I said. “They believe that they know that there is no God. I don’t even believe that I don’t believe.”

“Wow, that’s kind of bleak,” Thomer said.

“But you still came to fight. It sounds like you believe in the Unified Authority,” Herrington said.

“I especially do not believe in the Unified Authority,” I said. “I used to think it was God.”

Boll downed a whole stein of beer, and said, “Careful, Lieutenant, you’re confusing me.”

Freeman gave me exactly twenty-four hours to rest up from the battle. The next day he called early enough to wake me from bed.

“How soon can you be down to the Army airfield?” he began.

“I’m doing well. Thanks, and how are you?” I said.

Silence.

“Give me an hour,” I said, figuring I would shower, dress, grab a bite to eat, and head out. It would take me a few minutes to commandeer a jeep, and the airfield was fifteen minutes away.

“Thirty minutes,” Freeman said. “Bring full armor.”

“What’s happening in thirty minutes?” I asked.

“We leave in thirty minutes,” Freeman said as he cut the line.

After making sure the line was indeed dead, I said, “Pushy specker.” I dressed in full combat armor, left immediately to find a jeep, and arrived a few minutes late. As I drove through the gate, I saw Freeman waiting for me in a big helicopter, the kind the Army generally used for transporting artillery. The blade over the chopper began to spin as I parked my ride, they were in such a rush.

“What are we doing today?” I asked as I approached the chopper.

“Dr. Sweetwater wants us to run some experiments,” Freeman said.

I paused before climbing into the bird. “Experiments? We’re not going back to those mines, are we?”

“No,” said Freeman. “We’re going out to the Avatari landing zone.”

“In the forest?” I asked. When he said yes, I asked, “You planning on parachuting down? The trees around those spheres are too thick to land.”

“Not anymore,” Freeman said. “They moved them closer to town.”

Against my better judgment, I climbed in the helicopter. Besides our pilot, we were the only ones along for the ride. The chopper lifted off and flew across the western edge of town. The ground below us looked burned over and pulverized. We flew over five miles of city buried under rubble. Fires still burned in some of the ruins. I saw frames and shells of buildings, but nothing stood over two stories tall.

“So you’ve been out here running errands for the Science Lab, I never knew you were so”—I paused and pretended to struggle for the right word—“so altruistic.”

Freeman, who was not much for conversation, gave me a go-speck-yourself glare.

“You know this is going to flush your macho, I-only-care-about-myself reputation down the shitter once and for all,” I said. “From here on out, people are going to expect you to stop for children in crosswalks and help little old ladies cross the street.”

“How much are they paying you, Harris?” Freeman asked, his voice a low rumble and his eyes as dark as the anger behind them. “Last I heard, they pay lieutenants twenty-five hundred dollars per month.”

“I get a combat bonus,” I said.

“Five hundred per month?” Freeman asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Something like that.”

“If we survive this, I get a 1.5-billion-dollar payday,” Freeman said.

“That’s a lot of money,” I admitted. “We’re still partners, right?” We had been partners nearly three years ago. That was during one of my stints away from the Marines.

Freeman did not respond.

“Okay,” I said, “just remember my birthday.”

“You’re a clone. You weren’t born,” Freeman said.

“I was born; I just wasn’t conceived—kinda like Jesus,” I said.

The spheres were in a large clearing just a few miles out of town. I had passed through this very clearing my first day on New Copenhagen, on my way back to town with Philips and the remaining members of his fire team. There had been a tall radio tower in the center of the clearing, but the structure now lay twisted along the ground like the skeleton of a thousand-foot snake.

Twelve Avatari light spheres stood in a line across the clearing. I looked at the scene and asked, “How long have they been here?”

“They moved last night,” Freeman said.

“The aliens moved the spheres here after the attack?” I asked. It did not make sense, but on the other hand, they were balls of light. It wasn’t like they had to lift the spheres onto a truck and drive them here.

Dead bodies littered the floor of the clearing, old soldiers now twenty-four hours gone. I saw M27s and pistols in the mud. Off along one edge of the clearing was a pile of crates and equipment. Freeman must have been busy all morning; the pile included a full-sized steam shovel. “What is that for?” I asked, pointing at the steam shovel.

“An experiment,” was all he would tell me.