The Clone Empire (12 page)

“This battleship is deader than dinosaur shit,” I said. “My pilot and I are sitting in a transport inside the battleship. The transport works. The battleship was just an empty husk we used to surf through the broadcast zone.”

The fighter pilot repeated my story back to me to make sure he had heard correctly. “You say you rode a dead battleship through the broadcast zone?”

“That just about sums it up,” I said.

He didn’t believe me. I didn’t blame him. “Tell you what, General, you just fly out, and we will escort you down to the planet.”

“Um, I can’t,” I said. “The landing-bay hatch is broken.”

“This just keeps getting more interesting,” the pilot said. He thought for a moment, then asked in a suspicious voice, “Is this a readiness drill?”

“Pilot, what is your name?” I asked.

“Stanford, sir. Petty Officer First Class Jefferson Stanford.”

“I assure you, Petty Officer First Class Stanford, this is not a drill. This is not a specking joke,” I said, and I ordered him to call his commander and report his findings.

Another hour of silence followed. Nobles suggested we pipe air and heat into the cockpit so we could remove our helmets. Taking off the old lid felt good after what we had been through. A few minutes later, he suggested we air out the main kettle. Once that was done, he went to the head and relieved himself.

“Did I miss anything?” he asked when he returned.

I shook my head.

“What if they don’t come back?”

“They will,” I said.

Another hour passed, and they came back en masse.

 

“Harris, is that really you in there?”

“Who am I speaking with?” I asked.

“Are you a message in a bottle or a guinea pig?” The voice could have belonged to just about any clone, but the attitude sounded familiar.

“Who is this?” I repeated.

“This is Hank Bishop, Captain of the E.M.F.
Kamehameha
,” he said, “E.M.F.” being short for “Enlisted Man’s Fleet.” Just a few months ago, it was still the Scutum-Crux Fleet; but now that the break with the Unified Authority was formal, it was the Enlisted Man’s Fleet, and the
Kamehameha
was its flagship.

“No shit,” I said.

Bishop laughed. It was a friendly laugh. “Stay put, Harris, I have some engineers on the way. We’ll get you out of there.”

Another hour passed, and the atmospheric gates slid open. A squadron of fighters met our transport as we emerged from the battleship and escorted us to the
Kamehameha
.

When I first transferred to the Scutum-Crux Arm, my orders were to assume command of the fleet. Those orders changed when Gary Warshaw, the fleet’s highest-ranking noncom, made an end run. He paid an unauthorized visit to the Pentagon to whine about a Marine taking command of the fleet.

He might have been acting like a weasel, but he was right. Admiral Brocius, the highest-ranking officer in the Unified Authority Navy, rewrote my orders. Warshaw took command of the fleet, and I became Commandant of the Marines. Then the Earth Fleet attacked, and our bickering came to an end.

The
Kamehameha
, flagship of the Enlisted Man’s Fleet—formerly the Scutum-Crux Fleet, traveled out to meet us alone. That in and of itself suggested that something was wrong. Fighter carriers, particularly flagships, do not travel without support. But there she sat, in an isolated pocket of space, with no other ships in sight, the
Kamehameha
, flagship of the Enlisted Man’s Fleet.

Five months had passed since the Unified Authority attacked Terraneau. I’d seen plenty of capital ships since the attack, but they were derelicts floating in space, as dark and lifeless as the vacuum around them.

The
Kamehameha
, for all her battles, was anything but dead. The entire ship was a patchwork of dark walls and bright spots, with light shining from viewports and observation decks. A squadron of fighters circled her bow.

My loyalty to the
Kamehameha
ran deep. She was the first ship on which I served, and I served on her twice, once as a newly appointed corporal still trying to earn his chops and more recently as a field-promoted general. But there was something even deeper between us.

We were the same, that ship and I. The
Kamehameha
was an Expansion-class fighter carrier. She was the only Expansion-class ship still in commission, a one-of-a-kind remnant of the abandoned past. Since her manufacture, the Unified Authority had introduced the bigger, more powerful Perseus-class ships. And now the U.A. Navy had yet another generation of newer, smaller, self-broadcasting ships, with better technology in their shields.

And me . . . well, I was the last of the Liberators, a class of clone that had been replaced before the Unified Authority abandoned its cloning program altogether.

“Transport, this is
Kamehameha
Flight Control. Come in.”

“Flight Control, this is Transport,” said Nobles.

“Do not raise your shields on your approach,” the voice warned us. The man spoke in a perfunctory, monotone voice, as if he were reading from a script.

Nobles responded, “Copy that, Flight Control,” then turned to me, and said, “That’s pretty damn obvious. I wonder if they also have a recorded message in their officers’ heads reminding them to wipe their asses after taking a shit.”

Then he remembered something and scrambled for the radio. “Flight Control, please be advised that we are carrying a nuclear torpedo.”

“Transport, please repeat,” the voice said.

“Be advised that this transport has been outfitted with a nuclear-tipped torpedo.”

“Transport, stop your engines and power down. Wait for further instructions.”

Nobles stopped the transport and cut the power. Everything but the emergency lights went dark. The space outside our transport glowed brighter than the inside of our cabin.

“They’re giving us a security scan,” Nobles said. “They don’t trust us. Can’t say I blame them.”

I had seen the litany of security tests—X-ray, spectrum analysis, gamma search, radiation readings. By the time they finished, they would know more about the contents of this bird than we did. All of this security told me that the fleet was still at war. They weren’t just scanning for the torpedo—Nobles had already told them about that. They were looking for bombs, chemical weapons, maybe even robots and spies.

After no more than five minutes, they radioed back, and said, “Transport pilot, we have detected that your ship is armed. Can you confirm?”

“Affirmative. I already told you about it, we have a nuclear-tipped torpedo,” Nobles said.

“What is the purpose of that torpedo?”

I placed a hand on Nobles’s shoulder to stop him from answering and leaned in to the microphone. “It makes a hell of a conversation piece,” I said.

“I will ask you again, what is the purpose of your weapon?”

I started to answer, but the controller asked me to wait. A moment later he returned and gave us clearance to land. Our escort led us to an open docking bay and left. Nobles piloted the transport into the bay and landed on the sled that would pull us through the three atmospheric locks.

I liked Nobles; he was not the kind of man who gets nervous when conversations die away. Too many pilots felt the need to chat while they waited for the locks, but not him. As the manufactured atmospheres equalized around us, and the gigantic metal hatches cut us off from space, he busied himself shutting down his flight controls, pausing only to say, “Bet they’re surprised to see us.”

I agreed, but I wondered how happy Warshaw would be about my reappearance.

I got my answer when the last of the atmospheric locks opened. A platoon of armed Marines stood at the ready inside the bay. So did a bomb squad.

“Please wait to exit your transport,” said the voice on the radio.

Outside the transport, eight techs wearing the yellow soft-shelled armor of systems specialists, waved security sensors along our hull. Nobles seemed to find humor in all these precautions. He watched the men wheel an archway around the side of our ship, and said, “Security post. Man, these guys aren’t missing a trick.”

Whatever humor he found in all the precautions was lost on me. These boys were doing more than simply running a tight ship. Scrambling an armed escort, running five minutes’ worth of tests, and now the posts; the only armies that ran that kind of security were the ones that had already been infiltrated. I wondered if the Scutum-Crux Fleet had escaped destruction only to become a fleet under siege.

“You may now exit your ship,” said the voice on the radio. “If you are wearing armor, remove it before exiting your ship.”

“Good thing I brought a change of clothes,” Nobles said as he pulled out his rucksack and fished out some clothes. I did the same, and we dressed in the cockpit.

It occurred to me that they should already know if we had anything concealed in our armor. When they scanned our ship, they surely must have been able to scan inside our armor as well.

Once we were dressed in our Charlie service uniforms, Nobles tapped the radio, and said, “Flight Control, we’re coming out.” He hit the button that opened the rear of the transport.

We headed down the ladder and across the kettle. Our hands were empty and out where the Marines at the bottom of the ramp could see them. Between us and those Marines, a ten-foot-tall arch made of beige-colored plastic stood. The posts.

The column on the left side was “the sprayer.” It shot a blast of air filled with a fine mist of oil and water vapor. The sprayer dislodged loose flecks of skin, dandruff, and hair, which the column on the right, “the receiver,” drew in and analyzed. The findings were fed through a computer system. In the second it would take me to step through the posts, the techs on the other end of the security gate would know my make of clone, my age, any major illnesses I had suffered, and my blood type. For all I knew, they could even tell the last time I had sex.

The MPs at the bottom of the ramp signaled for one of us to pass through the posts. Nobles went first, not hesitating for even a moment. I followed a step behind. The perceivably moist breath of the sprayer blasted me on one side, and the receiver drew in the raw information. The entire process took less time than it took me to walk between the posts, and the results came up almost instantaneously.

Behind us, teams of docking-bay techs rushed to inspect our transport. I turned in time to see them scurrying up the ramp. As I watched the techs, a sailor in a captain’s uniform came up beside me. He had the confident smile of an old friend who knows he will be recognized. He was, of course, a clone on a ship filled with clones. Though he did not know it, he had the exact same face as everyone around him. Fortunately, he did not wear the same uniform. I did know the man, but I would not have been able to distinguish him from any other clone had I not recognized the captain’s insignia on his uniform. I saluted, and said, “Permission to come aboard?”

“Permission granted,” he said, returning my salute.

“Are we near a front?” I asked.

Bishop shook his head. “Not out here in Cygnus. The only fighting in the Cygnus Arm is infighting.”

“So what’s with all the security?” I asked. “I half expected your MPs to check my body cavities.”

“We are at war, you know,” Bishop said, a nonanswer designed to brush off the question.

“This isn’t wartime security,” I said. “Wartime security is a fighter escort and armed guards at the door.”

He took a deep breath, held it for just a moment, then exhaled. “It’s not the war that’s got us worried. The war is going well, everything else is falling apart.”

Four Marines followed from a few feet back as Bishop led me out of the landing bay. The rest of the platoon hung back with Nobles as he secured the transport.

The
Kamehameha
was a warship with a complement of fighters and Marines, but it was also the mobile administrative headquarters of the Enlisted Man’s Fleet. Fleet headquarters was spread across an upper deck of the ship. At least, it used to be there. We did not take the lift to the fleet deck. Instead, Bishop led me to the bridge.

“We’re not going to Fleet Command?” I asked.

“Not now, no,” Bishop said.

“Is Warshaw up there?” I asked.

Bishop stopped walking and turned to face me. I saw deep-seated suspicion in the way he examined my face. “Why are you in such a rush to see Warshaw?” he asked.

Oh, there were so many good responses, both politic answers and flaming. Warshaw was the only officer in my pay grade in the fleet; I wanted to congratulate him for saving the fleet, but I also wanted to poke him in the nose for leaving me stranded on Terraneau. Instead, I said, “I get the feeling I’m still being screened.”

“Something like that,” Bishop admitted.

I didn’t know him all that well; we’d only been on the same ship for a few months before the Earth Fleet attacked. We occupied different worlds—he was Navy, I was a Marine. We’d gotten along, but the standard prejudices applied. Sailors thought of Marines as cargo.

“I’m not a spy,” I said. “You don’t really think the Unified Authority captured me, trapped me in a battleship, and sent me through that broadcast zone.”

“General, I don’t know what to think. You’re not even supposed to be alive.”

“I walked through the posts. What did your computers tell you?”

“You’ve got the DNA of a Liberator Clone. We’ve verified that.”

That was my genetic fingerprint. That was as specific as the computers could get with clones. They could tell one natural-born from the next by their DNA; but since clones were cut from the same helix, genetic fingerprinting only went so far. The security station could identify our make and our age and catalog any major or recent illnesses.