Steven Kent - The Clone Alliance

Back when I served on the Kamehameha , they’d called the lowest deck “Marine Camp.” On that level we had our own barracks, gymnasiums, and training grounds. Marine clones caught on other decks of the ship were apt to receive rude treatment by sailors, officers and clones alike, who considered them nothing more than cargo.

During my day, Marine Camp was home to two thousand sea soldiers. Walking these halls during business hours, you would see men in fatigues drilling or jogging, or rushing to the firing range. Eighty percent of them were general-issue clones—five-foot-ten and stocky, with a full head of brown hair, brown eyes, and a light complexion.

Now the deck belonged to Navy SEALs. Some men wore fatigues, and some wore jumpsuits. They were short, maybe five-five. The few that did not shave their heads had stubbly light hair. They all had dark skin, and fingers that came to sharp points.

They trained differently, too. In battle, Marines marched up the street and shot everything that got in their way. SEALs specialized in stealth and infiltration. I’d seen their work. They could sneak up behind you, slit your throat, and slip away into the night before you gurgled your last breath.

From what I could see, there were no officers among them. Men sauntered up and down halls in small groups. They talked quietly. Everyone had the same face, the same tan, the same brantoo on his forearm—a map of the six arms of the galaxy with banners above and below. The banner above said “NAVY SEALS.” The banner below said “THE FINAL SOLUTION.” The banners and each of the arms of the Milky Way were branded into their forearms, then dye was injected into the wound to add color. Brand the pattern and color the skin, and you end up with an embossed tattoo. I have never felt the need to get a brantoo, though having one is considered a mark of machismo.

I could not get over the feeling of déjà vu as we walked the halls. Oh, the layout had been changed a bit, and the clones did not look like the clones with whom I served, but I still recognized the rec room and mess hall. When we passed by the door to my former barracks, I wanted to stop and peer in. Finally, the ensign delivered me to a small briefing room.

The SEAL who came to the door and saluted us wore a star and three red stripes on his arms. That made him a master chief petty officer. He had gone as far as he could go in the noncommissioned ranks. In the world of cloned SEALs, this man was the ultimate authority.

“Colonel Harris, this is Illych. He pretty much runs things down here,” the ensign said.

This was the first time I had seen a Boyd clone so close without fighting him. I had not realized exactly how ugly they would be. He had a small mouth and almost no lips. A thick ridge of bone ran along the tops of his eye sockets. That ridge would offer protection in hand-to-hand combat. I knew from experience that it made them hell with a head butt.

I stood ten inches taller than Illych. Looking down and trying to hide my nervousness, I returned his salute. I had seen Boyd clones in action. They killed without hesitation.

“Illych,” I said, using the bored voice that officers use when addressing enlisted men.

“Colonel,” Illych said.

“Ensign, perhaps Mr. Illych and I could have a word,” I said.

The ensign saluted, turned, and left us. During my tour as an active Marine, I had two actions in which I fought clones of Illych’s make. Luck played a large part in my survival. No one and nothing I have ever seen scared me quite so much as Boyd clones.

Illych seemed to recognize me. I thought I saw tension in his face. The intense look in his eyes reminded me of a pit bull guarding its den, but a slight grin played on his lips. He had a mysterious Cheshire Cat smile that was too big to disregard and too small to label as insubordination.

I tried to ignore that smirk as we sat to discuss my orders, but I kept coming back to it. “Is there something on your mind, Chief?” I asked.

“You’re a Liberator clone,” Illych said.

Feeling a little nervous, I said, “Nothing gets past you Boyd clones,” hoping to put Illych in his place. To the contrary, however, his grin only broadened.

“You know, Colonel, Admiral Huang always referred to us as ‘Special Operations clones.’ We were never called Adam Boyd clones. There was a clone from our outfit who went by the name Adam Boyd, but the official term was ‘Special Operations clone.’

“Interesting thing about Adam Boyd, Colonel. He was killed in a tough-man competition on an Earth island called Oahu. That was our original base of operations.

“Have you ever been to the Hawaiian islands?” Illych asked.

I could feel the muscles in my stomach tensing. My sphincter had probably shrunk to the size of a pin. We were getting far afield, but this had to be resolved. “As a matter of fact, I have.”

“So you’ve been to Hawaii, sir. May I ask, is that where you got that scar over your eye?”

I had a half-inch-thick scar over my left eye. It made a bald stripe across my eyebrow. “That is correct,” I said.

“A swimming accident?” Illych asked.

“Not swimming,” I said.

“Rock-climbing accident?” Illych asked.

“Not exactly. I was at a place called Sad Sam’s Palace,” I said.

“I’ve heard of the place,” Illych said. “Don’t they hold tough-man competitions there on Friday nights?”

“Yes, they do. As it turns out, I was there on a Friday night. I went to watch the fights, but I got suckered into entering.”

The petty officer sat still and silent for several seconds, that strange grin unchanged as he studied me. I could not tell what went through his mind. For all I knew, he had been in the audience watching as I beat his brother clone to death. Time passed as we sat and regarded each other, neither of us wanting to be the one to end the silence.

I pulled out the orders Admiral Brocius had given me and slid them across the table. They glided across the slick surface, coming to a stop in front of Illych. Without saying a word, he picked them up and read them to himself. Then he looked up, that grin still in place, and said, “Got anything exciting in mind, sir?”

Space is not black. Looking into a night sky or staring out the portholes of some large starship, it’s easy to think that outer space is black. It’s not black. It’s clear. It is so wide and immense and open that it seems to crowd around you, but only because the human mind cannot comprehend the length of a single light-year, let alone a hundred thousand light-years.

An enemy ship could easily hide in the vastness of space. With their charcoal-colored hulls, Mogat ships could slip into an empty pocket of space and vanish.

I took a team of SEALs with me to view the battlefield where the Mogats had made short work of the Outer Perseus Fleet.

Inside the explorer, an unarmed vessel, the SEALs had a good reason to feel nervous. Designed for scientific expeditions, the explorer’s top speed was under ten million miles per hour. Its broadcast engine needed a full twenty minutes to recharge between broadcasts. Mogat battleships and cruisers had a top speed of thirty million miles per hour. They could charge their broadcast engines in eight minutes. If the Mogats spotted us, they could outrun and outshoot us. If it came to a battle, we might as well have been flying in a coffin.

Considering the number of ships Admiral Porter lost, his battle with the Mogats took place on a relatively condensed field. A swarm of dead fighters floated in a tight formation around our ship. Looking from the deck of a battleship or a fighter carrier, the dead fighters might have looked like the carcasses of insects caught in an old spiderweb. Looking through the window of a small explorer with no armor and no shields, the broken ships looked ominous. Our explorer might have been five times the size of those fighters. They did not look so small from where I now sat.