Steven Kent - Rogue Clone

I expected to see looters hiding in shadows, moving through alleys, and breaking into buildings. Instead, I ran into roadblocks. The Army was out in force. I turned a corner and saw a chrome and titanium barrier stretched across the road. A string of bright blue lights winked on and off sequentially across the top of their barricade. Five soaked and miserable-looking soldiers in camouflaged ponchos flagged me down. They had M27s strapped over their shoulders, and there were machine-gun nests on either side of their barricade.

I stopped and lowered my window.

“Nice car,” a soldier said as he approached. He was a corporal. He was a clone. He had brown hair, broad shoulders and a round chest. He was short and squat, and powerful. He and I might have been raised in the same orphanage for all I knew. Rain poured down on him. Drops hit his poncho and burst.

“You mind if I don’t get out?” I asked. “I don’t want to get the upholstery wet.”

He smiled and nodded. “I don’t suppose you have papers for that car?” he asked.

“How about these?” I handed him my military ID.

He took the card and read it over several times. “Colonel,” he said, acknowledging my identity, but the barrier did not open. “Our scanner says this car belongs to James Walker. I don’t suppose you can prove that he loaned you this vehicle?”

“No, Corporal, I can’t,” I said.

“Then we have a bit of a problem, Colonel. We’ve been sent out to prevent looting. That includes the borrowing of cars.”

Colonel McAvoy had issued me a pistol. I had it under my car seat. I could have shot the corporal. “How far is Fort Washington from here?”

The corporal’s expression tightened. Fort Washington was the local Marine base. If I was indeed a colonel in the Marines, I should have known how to get there.

“I just flew in, Corporal,” I said. “Fleet Headquarters dispatched me to see what I can do to prepare this planet for an attack.”

“I heard air traffic was stacked up for hours,” the corporal said, a dubious note in his tone.

“Getting out is a problem,” I said. “There’s a line all the way up to the disc and more people waiting in the spaceport. Coming in is a breeze. Who wants to go to a planet that’s about to get smashed?”

That seemed to satisfy him. The corporal smiled and nodded. “Sir, I can’t let you pass in that car.”

“I understand,” I said.

“Tell you what, sir. You park the car over there,” he said, pointing to a nearby alley, “and I’ll give you a ride to Washington in our jeep.”

“You don’t mind?” I asked.

“Base Command, Base Command, this is post fifteen in Sector A, come in,” he said into an interLink microphone that was attached to his poncho. He must have received the response through an unseen earpiece.

“I have an incoming Marine colonel looking for Fort Washington. Requesting permission to drive him.”

He put a hand over his ear to block outside sounds. “That is correct. I said a Marine colonel …yes, that would be the equivalent of colonel in the Marine Corps.”

The corporal bent down again and said, “Okay, I’m cleared to drive you to the base.”

“I appreciate it,” I said.

Then, lowering his voice just shy of a whisper, he added, “Leave the keys in the Paragon …just in case.”

I couldn’t really leave the keys in the ignition since I had hot-wired the car. “You know anything about hot-wiring cars?”

“No sir,” the corporal said.

“I’ll leave the ignition running,” I said. I turned the car around, backed into the nearest alley, and stepped out into the rain. The downpour was hard and steady, but the air was warm. Sitting in an open-air bungalow on an evening like this could have been very pleasant, I thought, assuming you had the right company.

The corporal led me to his jeep, a sturdy little five-seat auto with a hard top. It did not have mounted machine guns or a missile carriage—clearly the Army did not expect to face ground forces.

I was not so confident. Once out of the rain, I put my pistol in my ruck and pulled out my M27. I grabbed two extra clips and hid them in my jacket.

“You expecting a war?” the corporal asked as he climbed in.

“Better safe than specked,” I said.

“Colonel, we have road blocks set up every eight blocks across Safe Harbor. Intel ran a scan. There may be a couple thousand looters out there, but the last thing they want is to mess with us.”

“You’re probably right,” I said. “This just makes me feel a little more relaxed.” I patted the M27.

“Sort of a security blanket, sir?”

“Ever been in combat, Corporal?”

“Mostly police actions.”

“That’s good,” I said. “You’ll know what I am talking about soon enough.” Dead is dead. It doesn’t matter if you’re shot by a scared looter or a separatist sniper.

The strange sensation of driving through empty streets never went away. We drove through the financial district with its tall skyscrapers, the light of our headlights reflecting on marble and glass façades the way it might reflect on the surface of a still lake. I kept looking for men in suits. We drove past a row of apartment complexes and grocery stores, and I automatically checked the buildings for lights. The only time we saw people was when we passed roadblocks.

The soldiers would see us, slow us for visual inspection, and salute us on our way.

“Spotted any looters, sir?” the corporal asked. I didn’t answer.

The most haunting thing we passed was a LAWSONS convenience store. These were stores that never closed. Lights were always supposed to be on in these stores and the doors were never supposed to be locked. Yet here was a LAWSONS that was as dark and deserted as any dance club on Sunday. Even the LAWSONS sign over the door was dark.

The corporal drove like a maniac. He streaked down the wet streets so quickly that he could not possibly have swerved in time to avoid hitting another car had one appeared. When he came around corners, he did not slow down, causing the jeep to drift more than it turned.

“You know, I’ve been stationed in Safe Harbor for two years now and I’ve seen more of the town over the last five hours than the last twenty-four months. It’s not a bad place, really …a little dark, maybe.”

“Did you see the feed from New Gibraltar?” I asked.

“I’d like to see them try something like that around here. McCord would send one thousand fighters and shoot their asses down,” the corporal said.

“From what I hear, the Separatists only had four ships at Gateway,” I said.

“Yeah?” the corporal said.

“And from what I understand, they have over five hundred ships in their fleet.”

The corporal frowned. The dim green glow of the dashboard lights lit up the lower half of his face. It lit his bottom lip, the bottom of his nose, and the folds of skin under his eye sockets. The strange lighting made his expression grim. “Five hundred ships? I didn’t know that.”

The entrance to Fort Washington Marine base was up ahead. You did not need to know military tactics to see that it was also on high alert. Bright lights lit the main gate to the base. Red strobes flashed on and off on the half dozen radar dishes that spun around the wall of the fort. Unlike New Gibraltar, which looked like a modernized version of an old medieval castle, Fort Washington was a sprawling campus that took up several square miles.

Looking beyond the gate, I saw the taillights of jeeps rushing between buildings. They drove by headlight only. The streetlights were out. There were no lights on the outsides of the buildings. Throughout the grounds, the only bubbles of light were emplacements for long-range cannons capable of hitting ships outside the atmosphere.