The Clone Empire (15 page)

They had also killed Lilburn Franks. That was another story. Franks was a clone with an inordinate amount of command experience. He’d seen war firsthand, riding on the bridge of some of the Unifieds’ most decorated warships. He knew tactics, and he didn’t back away from a fight. Warshaw always struck me as a bit of a coward. Franks came across like a man spoiling for a battle. They balanced each other out.

Two dead admirals, the number two and number three men in the fleet. No wonder Warshaw dug a hole for himself on Gobi. Hiding in a backwater desert must have sounded good once his lieutenants started dying; but if the Unifieds did have clones working for them, posting guards and analyzing DNA samples would not do a lick of good.

I tried to consider all of the angles as I turned off the lights in my quarters. I would sleep for an hour, then meet Warshaw for dinner. We had a lot to discuss.

 

“Hope you don’t mind eating in my office. I eat all my meals here.”

Warshaw had a dining room tucked away in one corner of his office/living complex. The table was large enough to seat a dozen officers. Sitting alone at that table, he looked big and strong and terrified. He had two armed guards posted inside the door to his complex and four more just outside.

A steward waited by the door as well. He watched me sit, gave me a moment to get comfortable, then came to ask what we wanted to drink.

“Just water,” I said.

“Give me a beer,” Warshaw said.

The steward brought us our drinks and left without another word.

“I served on this planet,” I said. “We were stationed in an old sandstone fortress with a swamp for a courtyard. We drank filtered sludge from the swamp.”

“I know the place. It’s out near Morrowtown, right?” Warshaw asked. “I went out to see the ruins.”

I nodded, and asked, “Is that far from here?”

“Other side of the planet,” Warshaw said. He looked so unhappy. He sat slumped in his chair, his arms folded across his lap and his shoulders hunched. “When I first got here, they told me there were these ruins from the original Gobi Station. It’s like a historic site, you know, something for tourists . . . as if any tourists ever came to this place.

“They treat the place like a museum exhibit. They have guides and tours, and they take you into the living quarters and shit. There’s a plaque that says something about the attack on Gobi being the first shots fired in the Mogat War.”

I had never thought about it that way; but as I considered it, perhaps those were the opening shots of the war.

“I was there during the attack,” I said. “The fort had a regional armory. That’s what the Mogats were after. Crowley led them on that one.” “Crowley” was General Amos Crowley, a U.A. Army officer who defected to the Morgan Atkins Believers.

Warshaw whistled, and said, “Crowley? No wonder the fort got so banged up.”

“I was lucky to get out of there alive,” I said.

“Yeah, well, speaking of being lucky, you got lucky on Terraneau. Every time my Marines run into the Unifieds, we get our nuts flattened.”

As I started to say something about that, the steward came back to take our orders. Since I had no idea what was on the menu, I decided to order whatever Warshaw did. He ordered salmon.

When the steward left, I asked, “They have salmon here?” We were on a planet with no lakes or oceans.

“It’s flown in,” Warshaw said. “So you got any ideas for stopping U.A. Marines that don’t involve demolishing an underground garage?”

“I do: Wait till their batteries run out, then stick it to ’em,” I said, and I explained about the short-life batteries. He laughed. “Good call, Harris. You’ll beat the whole damned Unified Authority Marine Corps as long as they don’t bring spares.”

I laughed politely, then said, “We dug some of them out.”

“You dug them out? That doesn’t sound like you. An act of compassion? That’s something new. I didn’t know you had it in you.”

“After they were dead,” I said. “I wanted a better look at their armor. That was how we found out about the batteries.”

Warshaw nodded.

Our fish arrived, sautéed and dusted with almonds. The smell of salmon and onions filled the air. It was the best meal I had eaten in over a year. My plate was large and buried under enough fish and wild rice to last me a week. The meal came with white wine.

Warshaw took a sip of wine, loaded salmon and wild rice onto his fork, then paused to ask, “Did you test the batteries yourself?”

“Do you remember Scott Mars?”

Warshaw toasted Mars with his wine. “Yeah, I know Mars. Good engineer. I heard he went born-again Christian.”

“They call him the ‘born-again clone,’” I said.

“And Mars found out about the batteries?”

“The shielding works off a forty-five-minute battery,” I said. “The battery drains even quicker when anything touches the shields.”

“Mobility versus power,” Warshaw observed. He had more than twenty years in the Navy, all of them spent in engineering. As an enlisted man and a clone, he would never have qualified for engineering school, but he had plenty of practical education. “They can’t make the battery too big or the Marines can’t move.”

Warshaw put down his fork and stretched his arms, moving his bald head from side to side. He had the physique of a buffalo, overstuffed at the chest and shoulders, tiny at the waist. Staring at me, a slight smile on his face, he said, “The Enlisted Man’s Marine Corps needs a Commandant. Of course, now that we know you’re alive, you get the job. From here on out, Harris, you and I are equals.”

“You didn’t believe that back at Terraneau,” I said.

“Things have changed,” Warshaw said. “We need a man like you.”

“Someone to wear a bull’s-eye on his back,” I said.

“I wouldn’t put it in so many words,” Warshaw said.

“How would you put it?”

“How would I put it? I’d put it this way. We’ve got a security problem, General. I want you to find our rats, lead them into some underground rat hole, and bury them for good.”

Warshaw had one lead, one thin lead to help me track down the security breach. That lead came in the form of three dead bodies on a planet called St. Augustine.

Back in my billet, I pulled on a pair of mediaLink shades and read about the planet. It didn’t take long to realize that if I wanted to track down a breach in security, St. Augustine—the rest-and-recreation capital of the Enlisted Man’s Empire—was a promising place to start. If there was a place where our sailors would let down their guard, it was St. Augustine, a planet with beaches, hotels, and very few men.

Several years ago, when the Avatari attacked St. Augustine, the Unified Authority had left the locals to fend for themselves. The people of St. Augustine fought to the figurative last man. Once they ran out of men, the women and children went into hiding, and the aliens simply went away. That was how the Avatari ran things. Once they captured a planet, they left you alone as long as you didn’t disturb their toxic mining operations.

When the Enlisted Man’s Empire liberated the planet, the women of St. Augustine welcomed our sailors and Marines. Having lived without men for more than two years, they welcomed us rather intimately.

One of the first factories to open on St. Augustine manufactured condoms. Now, the clones in the Enlisted Man’s Empire were as sterile as a surgeon’s gloves—“built to copulate, not populate” as the saying goes; but they were also programmed to think they were natural-born, so some enterprising resident came up with the idea of selling condoms to a population of “dead-end Joes” who thought they were potent.

If the news stories were true, that factory did a lot of business. On a planet with a population of six million adult females, more than one hundred million condoms had been sold.

 

I left for St. Augustine the following day.

As the Commandant of the Marines, I traveled with an entourage. Warshaw assigned me a staff that included a one-star admiral, three captains, and enough lieutenants to man a small fleet—all of them tainted. These were men who had played the power game and come up short for one reason or another; now they wanted to redeem themselves. I brought them along as camouflage, but I did not trust them. I did not like traveling with remora fish in my wake; but fleet officers were expected to have an entourage, and a lone-wolf general would elicit suspicion.

Admiral J. Winston Cabot, supposedly my liaison to Warshaw and Naval Command, was officious, petty, politically motivated, and, I suspected, something of a coward. I decided that much about him during the fifteen minutes it took us to travel from Gobi and land on St. Augustine.

A simpering politician by nature, Cabot all but attached himself to my person. Once Warshaw introduced us, the little ferret swooped right in on me, warning the other officers of the entourage away with a threatening glance. He chattered mindlessly in the beginning, but giving credit where credit is due, the little bastard read me accurately after a couple of minutes and settled down, allowing me to think.

Had he known what I was thinking, Cabot might have given me more space. What came to my mind was how incredibly interchangeable he was, like a gear in an old-fashioned clock. There he sat, a fifty-two-year-old general-issue clone with brown eyes and slightly grayed brown hair, and nothing to distinguish himself beyond his uniform.

And therein was the problem.

If the Unified Authority had developed some kind of new cloning program, there would be no way to stop them from infiltrating our military. If their clones truly had the same DNA as ours, they would be identical. We could place posts by every hatch on every ship and run hourly DNA scans of every sailor, and the bastards would slip through our net.

 

We flew from Gobi to St. Augustine on the
Kamehameha
. Bishop walked me to the landing bay, where I expected to see a shuttle waiting. As the Commandant of the Marines, I should have traveled down to the planet in a shuttle, but nothing was available. Instead, I would fly down in the familiar steel-and-shadows world of a transport.

“That’s the best you could get me?” I asked Bishop. “I’m the specking Commandant of the Enlisted Man’s Marines.”

“That’s the best I have.”

My entourage hung around me like flies. I told them to board the transport, and all of them did except for Cabot. He lingered, having decided that the order was meant for everyone but him.

“Do you need something, Admiral?” I asked.

“No, sir,” he said.

“Then board the transport,” I said.

He reluctantly left.

“How do you put up with this shit?” I asked.

“You’ll learn to love it,” Bishop said.

“Bullshit,” I said.

We traded salutes, and I boarded the transport. I started the trip in the kettle with my entourage. After five minutes, I found myself so irritated by their company that I excused myself and climbed up to the cockpit. And there, through the windshield, I saw St. Augustine.

After reliving the uniform dryness of Gobi, I had a greater appreciation for the greens and blues of St. Augustine. The planet had oceans, rivers, and lakes. It had pastures, mountains, and ice-capped poles. From space, Gobi looked like a ball carved out of unfinished wood. By comparison, St. Augustine looked like a well-polished opal.

Cabot came up to the cockpit to check in on me. “General, will we have time to inspect the officers’ R & R facilities while we are on St. Augustine?” he asked. “I haven’t tried them myself, but I hear good things.”

“We’re not here to inspect the facilities,” I said.

“Yes, sir. I’m just saying that I understand they’re supposed to be nice, you know, if we get the chance.” When he saw that he wasn’t getting anywhere, Cabot asked, “Why are we here?”

“We’re here to look at corpses,” I said.

The transport shook and rattled as it punched into the atmosphere.

“Corpses?” Cabot asked.

“Three of them,” I said. “Maybe more if we’re lucky.”

“Who died, sir?” He did not know that the Unified Authority had infiltrated our security. Warshaw would not have trusted a weasel like Cabot with that kind of sensitive information. I felt bad for the bastard. Not knowing that I was little more than a moving target, he still believed that being assigned to me would help his career.

“Clones,” I said. “There are three dead clones on St. Augustine, but none of the ships have reported any of missing men.”

“I’m not sure what you are getting at, sir,” Cabot said.

“Three men died on R & R, right? So they couldn’t have reported for duty when their leave ran out. Only they found these guys last week, and none of our ships have reported anyone missing.”

“Someone must have reported in their place,” Cabot said. “Spies?”

“Worse,” I said. “Assassins.”

By prewar standards, St. Augustine qualified as an emerging world. The planet had a fledgling banking system, a global government, and a world market. The Avatari had knocked out the planet’s mediaLink during their invasion; but other than a lack of communications services, the planet of St. Augustine had all the amenities.

St. Augustine had three continents and twenty-five cities, each of which had a police department manned by MPs. It did not take long to determine that the various law-enforcement groups did not share information among themselves.

“Bodies found in other cities?” asked the commander of the Petersborough police—a lowly ensign on loan from one of our ships. The Petersborough Police Department consisted of seven officers and thirty-five enlisted men, an unsatisfactorily small count, especially considering that Petersborough was the capital city of St. Augustine.