Steven Kent - The Clone Republic

“Think they’ll find anything?” I asked.

“Like what?” Shannon asked.

I did not have an answer. I continued to scan the compound with my heat-vision lens. Every so often I spied a SEAL dashing between buildings, but those glimpses were rare. “They’re amazing,” I said to myself, forgetting that Sergeant Shannon would hear me.

“Snap out of it, Harris,” Shannon said. “They’re no big deal. The only thing they have done is storm an abandoned compound, and you’re already specking your armor. You watch, they’re going to come up empty-handed, and Huang will blame us.”

The SEALs spent hours searching the compound, giving me hours to consider Shannon’s prediction. Roaches swarmed the plants around me, and I distracted myself by crunching some of them with the heel of my boot. The sun began to set in the distance, and the roaches became notably more aggressive. One marched right up to where Shannon was sitting, then tumbled onto its back when it tried to crawl over the top of his leg. He looked over and crushed it with his fist.

“So who is the dominant species,” I joked, “the rats or the roaches?”

“The goddamned Mogats,” Shannon answered. “They were the only speckers with enough sense to get off this rock.”

Up ahead, I saw movement in the camouflage covering and switched to heat vision in time to see the first of the SEALs rolling out from under the edge of the net. Ten more were nearby.

“Look who’s back,” Shannon said a split second before the explosion. I just had time to take in the irony in his voice, then the very air around us seemed to turn white, activating the polarizing lenses in my visor. The explosion cut through the jungle in a wave. Its concussion knocked me flat on my back, but I quickly climbed back to my feet.

“GODDAMN!” Shannon yelled as he sprinted toward the clearing. I ran after him, rifle at the ready for no particular reason.

“Harris, find the ones who made it out. I’m going under the net to look for survivors.”

There was no net, not where we were standing. Shreds of flaming camouflage netting floated down from the sky for as far as I could see. I saw Shannon running into the heart of the flames, dropping down a waist-high crater.

One of the SEALs lay with his back wrapped around the trunk of a tree at an impossible angle. I threw my helmet off and ran over to him. He was already dead.

Another SEAL lay on his stomach a few feet away. As I ran to him, I saw a streamer of flaming camouflage float over his shoulder. Brushing it away, I turned the man on his back. He was alive, but barely. A shard of metal the size of my hand was buried in his throat. Blood poured out of the wound.

He would die in a moment no matter what I did for him. I wanted to shake him. I wanted to yell, “What happened here? What the hell did you do?”

Shannon was wasting his time looking for survivors. Not even the rats and the roaches would have survived that explosion. The only survivors were the Mogats. “They were the only speckers with enough sense to get off this rock.”

Clones may come out of the tube identical, but experience takes over where genetic engineering and neural programming leave off. Most of the platoon followed soccer, boxing, and basketball. Gambling was rampant. But Vince Lee did not gamble or watch professional sports. He napped whenever he got the opportunity. He read books about self-improvement and told me that his time in the Marines would give him an excellent platform to launch into politics. He was a dedicated bodybuilder who started each morning lifting weights in the officers’ gym. Of all of the clones I ever knew, Lee was the only one who openly worried about not being natural-born.

Lee was also the only man in our platoon who talked about retiring from the Corps. “When I get out,” he would often begin a conversation, “I’m going to a frontier planet,” he would say, “someplace where they appreciate hard work.” Around the time we went to Ronan Minor, Lee sometimes talked about building a resort on the shore of Lake Pride, a few miles west of Rising Sun.

Ever since meeting with Oberland, keeping up with current events had become my hobby. It was an obsession, maybe even an addiction. I began each day with a quick glance at the headlines. I did so before crawling out of bed. If I found something interesting, I stopped to read it. I usually spent a good hour reading before tossing my mediaLink shades aside and heading for the mess. And after breakfast, I found time for more reading.

Two days after we left Ronan Minor I found a story with the headline: “24 SEALS LOST IN CRASH.”

They don’t release information when clones die. We don’t have parents or relatives, so nobody notices. SEALs, natural-borns with families, merit a news story, even if it’s completely fabricated. In this case, the official story was that twenty-four Navy SEALs were killed when their transport malfunctioned during a training exercise in a remote sector of the Scutum-Crux Arm.

“The accident occurred as the squad practiced landing maneuvers on an uninhabited planet.” True enough, unless you count rats, roaches, and Liberators.

“ ‘The accident was caused by an equipment failure,’ said Lieutenant Howard Banks of Naval public affairs. ‘We are conducting a thorough investigation to determine the cause of the accident.’ ”

“There’s already been a thorough investigation,” I mumbled to myself. I knew that because my ass was on the line. Admiral Huang had Shannon and me held in custody while he and Admiral Klyber played back the data in our helmets. Huang called us a disgrace to the uniform and ranted about court-martials and executions; but in the end, we were cleared.

Other stories caught my eye. Back on Earth, the Senate seemed unaware of the war brewing in the outer arms while the House of Representatives seemed intent on stoking it. The big story out of the Senate was about a senior senator retiring and the party his friends threw to celebrate his years of service. The story listed the celebrities in attendance, and there was a side story critiquing gowns worn by politicians’ wives. As far as the Senate was concerned, life on the frontier was just aces.

In the House of Representatives, congressmen were arguing about gun laws. Many powerful representatives wanted the gun laws preventing the private ownership of automatic weapons repealed. One congresswoman argued that citizens should be allowed to buy a battleship if they could afford it.

Delegations from the Cygnus, Perseus, and Norma Arms flew to Washington to meet with their congressmen. There was no mention whether these delegations also visited the Senate.

“Something’s happening,” Lee said as he entered the mess hall. “The fleet’s moving.” He had just come from the gym, and jagged vein lines bulged across his biceps and forearms.

“Moving where?” I asked as I took a drink of orange juice.

Lee, whose hair was still wet from the shower, smelled of government-issue soap. “I’m not sure where we are headed, but a guy at the gym said we’re going to rendezvous with the Inner SC Fleet.”

“Really?” I asked. “What about the Outer Fleet?”

Lee sat down next to me. “He says we’re combining into one fleet.

“Wayson, I’ve never seen this before. You don’t send twenty-four carriers to one corner of space for peacekeeping. This is war.”

“That’s drastic talk,” I said. “How does the guy at the gym know so much? Are you sure he knew what he was talking about?”

It seemed like a fair question. When it came to the “need to know” hierarchy, we grunts were the bottom rung. I wolfed down the rest of my breakfast and waited for Lee to finish. Once he finished eating, we rushed to the rec room to look out the viewport.