Steven Kent - The Clone Republic

“Didn’t mean to intrude,” Lee said with an easy smile as he turned back toward the elevator. “Not very hospitable. I thought we were all fighting on the same side.”

Then Lee said something under his breath that struck me as very odd. “Specking clone.”

I had only met Vince Lee earlier that day when he and I went to explore the Kamehameha, so I did not notice the anomaly then. With time I would notice that though he was friendly and outgoing with me, Lee did not socialize with the other men in our platoon. He and I normally found a table off on our own.

When Lee bought drinks, he purchased Earth-made beer. An avid bodybuilder, he asked for permission to work out in the officers’ gym. In fact, he had as little contact as possible with other clones. No enlisted man saw himself as a clone, though most of them were indeed just that. Even so, antisyntheticism was rare among clones because they were raised with other clones, and the only people they knew growing up were clones. They did not know how to associate with natural-born people. But Lee, Lee was different. Like so many

U.A. citizens, Vince Lee was quietly prejudiced against clones. He thought clones were beneath him. The difference was that other people were natural-born, Vince was synthetic. Many officers were antisynthetic; they despised their underlings. Vince was different. He despised his own kind.

The rest of the platoon arrived the following afternoon. That included our new sergeant—Tabor Shannon. As Vince might have put it, life aboard the Kamehameha became less “hospitable” the moment Shannon arrived.

Master Gunnery Sergeant Tabor Shannon landed on a late-afternoon shuttle. Shannon was the personification of the word “paradox.” He was gruff, ruthless, and often profane. He openly favored the men who transferred in with him and even referred to them as “my men” because they came with him from his previous platoon. He was a belligerent and battle-hardened Marine. But I soon found out that Shannon’s sense of duty added oddly smoothed edges to the jagged shards of his personality.

Captain McKay sent Lee and me to meet Shannon and the other men at the landing bay. We rushed down to the boarding zone. As the bay door opened, Lee said, “I bet he’s a prick. What do you want to bet he’s a real prick among men?”

We watched several officers disembark. Four pilots and a number of crewmen breezed past us without so much as a sideward glance. Shannon came next. He was tall and thin, with steep shoulders and a wiry frame. His fine white hair, the hair of an old man, did not match his sunburned face. Except for crow’s-feet and white hair, he looked like a thirty-year-old.

Shannon walked up to us and paused long enough to bark, “Twelfth Platoon, you part of my outfit?” When we nodded, he dropped his bags at our feet, and said, “Stow these on my rack.”

Under other circumstances that kind of arrogance pissed me off, but I had noticed something about Shannon’s bags that left me too stunned to care. Lee saw it, too. The letters “GCF” were stenciled large and red on the side of the bag. When I was growing up, every kid in the orphanage knew what those letters stood for—Galactic Central Fleet. That was a name with a dark history. “You don’t think he’s a Liberator?” I asked.

“Damn, I heard that they were all dead,” Lee said, staring at Shannon’s back as he left the bay. Watching Shannon disappear down the corridor, I felt a cold shiver run down my spine.

The truth was that I did not know much about the Galactic Central Fleet or the special strain of clones that were created to fight in it. The history books called them “Liberators,” but that was mostly because calling them “Butchers” seemed disrespectful.

The government deemed the battles in the Galactic Central War classified information and never released accounts of what took place. But the government could not classify the events that led up to war. Unified Authority ships began prospecting the “eye” of the galaxy—the nexus where the various arms of the Milky Way meet in a spiral—about forty years ago. That was during the height of the expansion. We had long suspected that we had the galaxy to ourselves, and exploration into the farthest and deepest corners of the frontier only increased the belief that the universe belonged to mankind. By this time we had traveled to the edge of the Milky Way but not to the center.

The media covered every detail of that first expedition to the center of the Galaxy, including its disastrous ending. Five self-broadcasting Pioneer-class vessels were sent. All five disappeared upon arrival in the Galactic Eye.

There was no information about what happened to the ships. Some people speculated that radiation or possibly some unknown element destroyed them as they emerged from their broadcast. The most common theory, of course, was that the expedition was attacked, but whatever really became of those ships happened so quickly that no information was relayed back to Earth. If the politicians and military types knew more than the general public, they did not let on.

Congress went into an emergency session and commissioned a special fleet to investigate—the Galactic Central Fleet, the largest and most-well-armed fleet in U.A. Naval history. The hearings and the creation of the Galactic Central Fleet were matters of public record. Reporters were taken out to the shipyards where the fleet’s 200 cruisers, 200 destroyers, and 180 battleships were under construction. It took three years to build the fleet. During that time, the entire Republic braced for an alien attack.

Once the fleet was constructed, however, the news accounts stopped. This much I knew—that the Galactic Central Fleet was launched on February 5, 2455, and that it vanished. The ships were sent to the Galactic Eye and never heard from again.

I heard tales about the events that followed, but they were all gossip and myths. To avoid increased panic, the government imposed a news blackout immediately after the fleet disappeared. Then, two months after the disappearance, the Senate announced that the galactic core was under U.A. control. The only historical record of the event was a statement from the secretary of the Navy stating that a battery of specially trained soldiers conquered ground zero. Some time after that, a congressional panel announced that the men in the GC regiment were an experimental class of clones known only as “Liberators.” There were no pictures of Liberator clones in our history texts; and though I searched, I never found any pictures on the mediaLink, nor did I ever find any information about the aliens that the Liberator clones fought in the Galactic Eye.

“The bag says ‘GCF,’ ” I said. “You don’t think he could be

a Liberator?”

“You?” Lee asked, shaking his head.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I had a teacher who served with some Liberators. He said that they were taller and slimmer than other clones. He also said that they massacred entire planets.”

“One of my teachers said that they enjoyed killing people and that they killed civilians when they ran out of enemy soldiers,” said Lee. “That must have been an old rucksack,” he added, though he did not sound as if he believed it. “He didn’t look much older than us.”

Like me, he had probably done the math in his head. If the GCF disappeared forty years ago, that would put Gunny Sergeant Shannon in his late fifties or early sixties. He looked bright-eyed, spry, and mean as hell. He was clearly a clone…a different species of clone, but still a clone. He had the same dark features as Lee, though he was a few inches taller. They looked like brothers.

“Like seeing a ghost,” I muttered to myself. Having heard all kinds of rumors about Liberators in the orphanage, I should not have been surprised that Shannon looked so young. Liberators were supposed to have a synthetic gene that kept them young. Of course, I also heard that they had a fish gene that enabled them to breathe underwater and a slug gene that made them self-healing. I stopped believing the slug story by the time I was ten, but suddenly the youth gene seemed possible.