Steven Kent - The Clone Republic

We were no longer orbiting Ronan Minor. I saw an endless starfield and not much else. “Did your friend say anything about where we are headed?”

“Nope,” Lee said. “Nothing at all.”

“Do not learn the wrong lesson from Ronan Minor,” Bryce Klyber said. He might have maintained a sparse office— the only things you ever saw on his desk were an occasional file and a set of pens—but his dining area was like an art museum. Track lighting on the ceiling shone down on a row of fine oil paintings along one wall. The outer wall of the room was a viewport overlooking the bow of the ship. Another wall was lined with two one-thousand-gallon aquariums.

One tank held schools of colorful fish that dived and darted among coral formations. The other tank was only half-full. A strange animal called a man-of-war floated along the top of the water. Perhaps it is an exaggeration to call a man-of-war an “animal,” but I don’t know what else to call it. It looked like a violet-colored bubble with long, silky threads dangling to the bottom of the tank.

“Do you follow the news? Have you heard the one about the twenty-four SEALs who died in a transport accident?” Klyber asked me in the kind of singsong tone you would use when asking a friend if he’d heard the one about the secretary of the Navy and the farmer’s daughter.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“The Pentagon uses that story far too often.” He shook his head. “One of these days, the Linear Committee will launch an investigation into AT disasters and learn that we haven’t had a legitimate accident for thirty years.”

I did not know if Admiral Klyber was serious. He sat by himself in an austere, uncomfortable-looking chair, picking pieces of chicken out of his salad. Klyber was the epitome of the aristocrat-soldier, elegant and well-spoken, sitting in his uniform at a table with fine wine in crystal goblets.

With his sunken cheeks and puny arms, he looked so fragile, but anger and intelligence radiated from his cold, gray eyes. “I suppose we shall never know if that compound was rigged or if Huang’s SEALs blew themselves up.”

“You don’t think it was a trap, sir?” I asked.

Admiral Klyber mused for a moment, smiled, shook his head ever so slightly. “No. If Huang could not take prisoners, he would have wanted to leave bodies in his wake. Ours or theirs, it wouldn’t matter to Huang as long as there were bodies.” His mouth curved into a smile as he chewed a bite of salad. “Never occurred to you that those SEALs might have done it to themselves? Sergeant Shannon said that you were impressed by them.”

“Yes, sir.”

Klyber finished his salad. He laid his fork across the top of the plate and pushed the plate aside. Then he sipped his wine and turned toward his main course, a thick slab of roast beef.

“Corporal, I have served in the U.A. Navy for over forty years. I had my own command before Che Huang entered officer training school. In all of that time, the Liberators are the only blemish on my record.”

“They won the war,” I said, trying not to feel offended.

“Indeed they did,” Klyber agreed. “Made the galaxy safe, didn’t they? Unfortunately, history remembers them as unnecessarily cruel, and Congress outlawed them. You are going to help me prove otherwise, Corporal Harris. That is why I have taken such an interest in you. The climate has changed. We are headed toward war, and a fighting man with your talents will be recognized, clone or natural-born.”

“Even a Liberator?” I asked.

“I believe so, yes,” Klyber said as he sliced the meat on his plate. “Especially a Liberator.

“No clone has ever been promoted beyond the rank of sergeant. Only one quarter of the clone boys from your orphanage will become NCOs, Harris. You beat the odds in your first six months.” He speared the prime rib with a quick stab and chewed it with small, mechanical bites. “Perhaps you and I can expand that field of promotions.”

“Only natural-born are admitted into officer candidate school,” I said.

Still chewing, Klyber neatly placed his utensils on his plate. He took a sip of wine and leaned back to savor it. “When I was at the academy, only Earth-born cadets were admitted. ‘Earth-born, Earth-loyal,’ that was the old saying.

“They’ve let that slide quite a bit over the years. Politicians have replaced tradition with political expedience. The citizens in the territories complained that they did not have all of the opportunities given to Earth-born children, so Congress used the military for a social experiment. They integrated and enrolled some out-born cadets,” Klyber said, not even trying to mask the disdain in his voice.

“As you know, Huang saw fit to replace Admiral Barry. Our new fleet commander will be Rear Admiral Robert Thurston, an outworlder born and raised in the Orion Arm. If an out-born can command a fleet…” Klyber looked at me and smiled.

Life on the Kamehameha settled into a schedule of drills and drinking. Something was brewing out there beyond the horizon, but nobody knew any details.

Two weeks after we left Ronan Minor, the Kamehameha rendezvoused with the rest of the Central SC Fleet in orbit around Terraneau. Two days later, the Inner SC Fleet joined our orbit.

Down on Terraneau, officers from both the Inner and Central SC Fleets attended meetings as Admiral Klyber created a new command structure. As bits of information trickled in, talk around the platoon was enthusiastic.

Most of the sea-soldiers I spoke with liked the idea of merging with the Inner SC Fleet. The combined fleet would have over a hundred thousand fighting Marines, a force that we believed capable of wiping out any threat.

None of the Marines seemed to care that a new fleet commander had replaced Admiral Absalom Barry. The name Robert Thurston meant nothing; and besides, he was Navy, we were Marines. As long as his boats brought us to the fight on time, we’d do the rest.

That indifference changed on the day that Thurston boarded the Kamehameha. Admiral Klyber took him on a tour of the ship. The last stop on the tour was our deck. A party of officers dressed in whites passed by our barracks, and we all caught a brief glimpse of the little troll.

Robert Thurston looked younger than most of the privates in my platoon. He had thick red hair and pimples; honest to God, pimples all over his face. He cut his hair to regulation length, but it stood in spiky clumps under his cap. I was most taken by his size. Thurston was five-foot-five at best, with a slender, almost effeminate build. Needless to say, talk at the bar was wilder than ever that evening.

“You see that kid? He’s barely out of diapers,” one clone shouted as he entered the bar.

“What do you think of Thurston?” Lee asked me as I found the platoon’s watering spot for the night.

“I wonder if he drinks milk or Scotch,” a private from the platoon joked.

“So he looks a bit green,” I said as I downed half my beer.

“Yeah, he looks a little green,” Lee agreed. “I’d hate to find myself nuked just because somebody’s congressman-daddy pushed his boy up the ranks.”

“I don’t think you need to worry about that,” I said. “From what I hear, Thurston earned his way up the ranks.”

“Is that a fact?” Shannon asked, nosing his way into our crowd.

“That is a fact,” I said.

Shannon, who knew damned well that I had met with Admiral Klyber the day before, considered my words. “That’s good news,” he said as he saluted me with his glass. “Did you all hear that? Harris heard that Thurston pulls his own weight, and Harris has good sources.” Lowering his voice, Shannon added, “The boy must have one hell of a record.”