Steven Kent - Rogue Clone

We arrived just a few miles from the broadcast discs and drifted over to see them. Coming to an almost dead stop, I took the Starliner around the defunct discs.

“Those are the discs?” Archie asked.

He probably did not see the discs when he came to Delphi. He and his fellow settlers had most likely traveled in a cargo ship. Even if they flew in a commercial craft, the tint shields would have been up long before they came this close to the discs.

“That is the broadcast station,” I said.

“You fly into it?” Archie asked.

I remembered that he lived on a planet without modern conveniences. “You fly toward it. It sends out an energy field to transport your ship.”

“I see.”

“If the discs were live, they would have a white glow. There would be traffic lights and warning lights along the top. There’s not so much as a volt of electricity in this station.” My broadcast gear included an enhanced radar display. As I reached to turn on the display, the Harrier buzzed us. It was a gray-white blur that streaked past the cockpit and totally vanished.

“Good God! What was that?” Archie yelled.

Red lights flashed in the canopy and on my heads-up display. A warning sign flashed on my instruments. Alarms buzzed. I switched on the radar with one hand and pulled the wheel sharp to the right with the other. “Hold on,” I yelled.

“What’s going on?” Archie yelled. It was not a scream. He had control of himself. “What was that?”

“You asked me what would happen if we ran into that carrier,” I said. “We just did.”

He pressed his face against the cockpit and stared out the window. “I don’t see anything.”

“Archie,” I said, as I stared into the radar, “that ship travels thirty million miles per hour. They could come right up our nose and ram us before you see them if they wanted.”

“Do they want to kill us?” Archie asked.

“We’d already be dead if they did. That was a fighter. The pilot could flame us with a single shot if he wanted.” I glanced at the broadcast gear. It would need another two minutes of charging before I could use it.

The Harrier did not came upon us from behind. It slowed so that we would see it, flashed over the top of the Starliner, and vanished into space. The radar tracked its path.

“They’re not going to shoot us yet,” I said.

“How do you know that?” Archie asked.

“They’re stuck out here and the broadcast station is down, right?” I asked. “They’ll want to know how we got here before they start shooting. If they figure out that we’re self-broadcasting, they’ll want to capture our ship.”

“Unidentified space craft, this is the U.A.N. Grant . Identify yourself.”

“The Grant ,” I whispered to myself. I knew the ship.

“What are we going to do?” Archie asked.

“They want to know how we got here,” I said. “I’m going to show them.” An amber light winked on above the broadcast engine to show that it was ready. I had already programmed in the coordinates for Little Man, and now I initiated the broadcast.

They had no way of knowing where I broadcasted to, but they could certainly make an educated guess. If I had come from within this galactic sector, I could only have come from Little Man—Delphi as Archie called it. That was the only habitable planet in the area.

With that short visit, I set events in motion. I started the countdown. Archie could no longer evacuate his colony. We had time to fly his people to safety, but he would need to leave his buildings and equipment behind. But Archie did not want to leave. He believed that God had deeded him Little Man and that God would protect him. All he needed was faith.

“Raymond was right,” Archie said in a soft voice to his people. He looked dejected. His arms hung at his side as he spoke, his head hung at a slight tilt. “That carrier did not make it through the broadcast disc. It will not arrive at Delphi today, and it may not come back for a week; but sooner or later, it will return.”

The congregation let out a collective gasp. “Deliver us, Lord,” one woman yelled. She stretched her arms above her head, her fingers extended, imploring.

I sat alone in a corner in the back of the town hall ready to leave. Freeman sat with Marianne and her son. They sat one row behind the rest of the congregation. They were with the people but not part of them.

“Raymond believes that we should leave this planet. He believes that the Philistines are at the gate, and we must abandon our promised land.

“God has promised us deliverance. We will not abandon our planet. I have seen the enemy with my own eyes. His fighters are as fast as light. But we must not fear the puny arm of man, for God will protect us.”

As the congregation let out a collective hiss, Freeman looked back at me, and our eyes met. In the silence that passed between us, we communicated disbelief.

If they wanted to call Little Man their “promised land,” well, they had the right to interpret it any way that they wanted. Saying that God would deliver them from the Grant , however, that was bullshit. No one could deliver them from the Grant , and the only ones who might try were the “goddamned clone” and the colony pariah.

The thing was, I couldn’t leave them. Klyber once told me that military clones were programmed with an altruistic streak. We were made to serve and protect, especially when it meant killing enemies of the Republic. But now my programming was twisting in on itself, I was programmed to fight for the Unified Authority. In the back of my mind, I constantly reminded myself that the Unified Authority no longer existed and that whoever was flying the Grant , they were not receiving orders from Washington D.C. I did not know if I could convince myself of this. I would not know until I either performed in battle, or froze because my programming would not let me continue.

I watched these people and I hated them. I regretted coming to Delphi. All of the anger I felt for the Unified Authority now focused itself on this congregation. And yet, none of them had done anything to harm me. Not even Archie.

Archie launched into a prayer. In that prayer he gave thanks for the planet of Delphi. Still praying, Archie said that Ray and I were led to the planet by God so that we could be instruments of deliverance. We were “tools in God’s hand.”

When the meeting ended, I asked Ray how he could ever have lived with these people. He shrugged his shoulders and walked away.

“Wayson,” Marianne said as she watched Ray leave, “this is Caleb. This is my boy.” She rested her hands on the shoulder of a young man who stood just a tad under six feet tall. His head came up to my nose.

“Good to meet you,” I said, trying to sound like I was comfortable around kids. I did not know what to say to the boy.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Harris,” said Caleb.

And then we had an awkward moment when none of us knew what to say next. Archie came and tapped me on the shoulder. “May I speak with you?” he asked.

I nodded, grateful for the escape.

Archie led me to a quiet corner of the building. We could see people filing out the door. No one came to speak with us. I think they could read in Archie’s posture that he had serious business to discuss.

“Mr. Harris, I owe you an apology,” he said. Speaking in that baritone voice, he sounded truly humbled. He looked down at the ground as he spoke and rocked back and forth on the soles of his feet. “I don’t know what came over me.”

As I heard this, I could not help but remember the journal entry that the Catholic priest wrote about Sergeant Shannon. “I should not have laughed,” I said.