Rogue Clone Read online

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  ROGUE CLONE

  An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Ace mass-market edition / October 2006

  Copyright © 2006 by Steven L. Kent.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without

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  eISBN : 978-1-436-28310-6

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  This book is dedicated to pioneering audio book reader Frank Muller, whose recording career was cut short by a motorcycle accident in 2001.

  Most people think of writers when they hear the term “literary figure,” but few authors have had as great an impact on my life as Frank Muller. His incredible talent has brought the works of Elmore Leonard, Herman Melville, Stephen King, John Grisham, Charles Dickens and many other great writers to life for me, and I am eternally grateful.

  Mr. Muller, your voice is always with me. Thank you.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The tough part about writing a sequel is that while the author and the characters remember every last detail about the previous book, readers who are new to the series do not. Just after I finished my first draft of this book, a friend named Dustin Johnson asked for a peek. As it turned out, his wife, Rachel, got to the book first and did me the greatest kindness a reader can do. She complained. (That greatest favor bit applies to pre-print. Once the book is out, insecure authors like myself prefer to be lavished with praise.)

  Rachel had not read the first book in this series, and what she found was that while I and my characters knew the difference between the Republic, the Mogats, and the Confederate Arms, she did not. She wanted to like the story, but she could not tell which characters were fighting for which organizations.

  Thank you, Rachel. Thank you, Dustin. Thank you, Andrew Perry, who I went to after Rachel. Andrew agreed with Rachel and my sizzling James Bond-style introduction was replaced with something a lot more expository.

  I want to thank Mark Adams and my mother and father, readers to whom I resort for advice whenever I finish my first drafts. I want to thank Richard and Michael at Richard Curtis Associates for helping this book come about; and I especially wish to thank Anne Sowards and the crew at Ace for cleaning up after my many messes.

  The cover of this book was created by Christian McGrath. It’s not often that a writer wants people to judge his book by its cover, but with Christian doing the art, I don’t mind.

  Fireflies dance in the heat of

  Hound dogs bay at the moon

  My ship leaves in the midnight

  can’t say I’ll be back too soon

  —Aerosmith “Seasons of Wither”

  THE FUEL OF VIOLENCE

  Every clone, including me, believed he was natural-born. We grew up in orphanages, surrounded by 36,000 identical beings. Each clone believed that he was the lone natural-born on the premises. They were programmed to see themselves as having blond hair and blue eyes. When three clones shared one mirror, they all saw themselves with blond hair and blue eyes, while recognizing the brown hair and brown eyes of their comrades.

  But I did not see myself as having blond hair or blue eyes. I was a Liberator-Class clone. Other clone soldiers were built to be strong, patriotic, and ignorant of their origins. They were boy scouts and a little gland inside their brain would release a deadly hormone if they ever accepted the unnatural nature of their origin.

  I was built to be fast, ill-natured, utterly deadly, and addicted to violence. I did not have the death reflex built into my brain. Instead, I had a gland that released an addictive combination of endorphins and adrenaline into my blood to clear my head during combat . . .

  Praise for The Clone Republic

  “A solid debut. Harris is an honest, engaging protagonist and thoughtful narrator, and Kent’s clean, transparent prose fits well with both the main character and the story’s themes . . . Kent is a skillful storyteller, and the book entertains throughout.”—Science Fiction Weekly

  “The first sentence gets you immediately . . . From there, the action begins fast and furious with dark musings, lavish battle scenes, and complex characterizations . . . The Clone Republic feature[s] taut writing and a truly imaginative plot full of introspection and philosophizing.”

  —Village Voice

  PROLOGUE

  Earthdate: 2512 A.D.

  “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .” Charles Dickens laid claim to those words more than 650 years too soon. You want the best of times? The best of times is when you control known space. You’ve explored the galaxy from corner to corner, you haven’t found any opposition, so you claim the whole thing for yourself.

  You want the worst of times? It’s when you’ve been running the galaxy for four centuries, and all of a sudden you find your Republic crumbling from within.

  The battle facing mankind involved either two sides or four sides, depending on how you interpreted it. There were no true allies in this little battle royale, though the three weaker nations pooled their resources to pull down the fourth.

  On the one hand, you had the Unified Authority with its Earth-bound legislatures, its intergalactic highway, and its enormous military complex. The ever-evolving successor to the old United States, the Unified Authority began its expansion in the twenty-first century. First it became a global empire and then a galactic republic. The U.A. colonized the six arms of the Milky Way, creating a cosmopolitan society that superseded race and ethnicity. The galactic territories became a true melting pot as 180 new worlds opened up over the nex
t 400 years.

  The Unified Authority accomplished all of that expansion off the back of an almost all-clone military. By the beginning of the twenty-second century, U.A. clone labs began churning out over 100,000 cloned soldiers per year. By 2200 A.D., clone production was up to over one million per year. That sounds like a lot, but it’s not as much as you’d think when you are conquering and colonizing a galaxy that is 100,000 light years in diameter.

  The first real challenge to the Unified Authority’s hold on the galaxy came in the year 2468 when a scientific expedition exploring the inner curve of the Norma Arm vanished. Afraid that they had located a hostile race, the U.A. Senate authorized the construction of a super fleet of battleships—the Galactic Central Fleet. Senator Morgan Atkins, the most powerful politician of his time, oversaw the creation of the fleet and traveled with it on its first patrol of the Norma Arm. Neither Atkins nor the fleet returned from that first patrol.

  These were desperate times, but a few well-placed politicians had a plan of their own. Working with the U.A. Navy, they manufactured a breed of specially designed clones called “Liberators” which they sent into the Galactic Eye, the spot in the center of the galaxy where the six arms merge. Liberators were designed to be fast, intelligent, and dangerous. Their physiology included a gland that introduced a combination of endorphins and adrenaline into their blood during combat.

  Once they entered the Galactic Eye, the Liberators discovered that Atkins and a large group of followers were behind the disappearances. Had he known about the Liberator project, Atkins might have prepared for an invasion. Instead, the Liberators caught him entirely off guard. They overwhelmed the renegade base, but Morgan Atkins and his followers escaped in their stolen Fleet.

  Sometime during the next three years, colonies of religious fanatics calling themselves “Morgan Atkins Believers” began appearing throughout the galaxy. The Mogats, the common name for the Morgan Atkins religious movement, preached individualism and independence from Earth government.

  As the 180 established worlds became more self-sufficient, the Mogat movement gained converts. A census taken in 2498 A.D. found approximately five million Morgan Atkins Believers. According to the 2508 census, more than 200 million people identified themselves as Mogats. Discovering that more than 200 million people had joined a potentially hostile religious movement, Congress woke up. New laws were drawn and the Atkins movement was loosely labeled subversive.

  In 2510, four of the galactic arms declared independence from the Unified Authority and the civil war began. The Cygnus, Perseus, Norma, and Scutum-Crux arms formed an organization called the Confederate Arms Treaty Organization. Only the Orion Arm, Earth’s home arm, and the Sagittarius Arm remained loyal to the Unified Authority.

  The Morgan Atkins Believers and the Confederate Arms formed an unsteady alliance. The Confederate Arms had an enormous population and large armies, but no fleet to move troops and defend planets. The Mogats had the Galactic Central Fleet, but they lacked the manpower to pilot their ships.

  A third partner was suspected of joining the Mogat/ Confederate alliance—the Japanese people of Ezer Kri. Ezer Kri was a more-or-less law-abiding planet in the Scutum-Crux Arm with a large population of people of Japanese ancestry. As the civil war began, the government of Ezer Kri came into conflict with the Unified Authority. I was in the U.A. Marines at the time. When the Marines invaded Ezer Kri, the Mogat colonists who had settled on that planet fought a guerilla campaign. Our invasion turned into an occupation and the Japanese population vanished from the planet. No one knew what happened to them.

  Then the war broke out. The Confederate Arms and Mogats launched their insurrection. According to our best intelligence, the Japanese population of Ezer Kri signed on with them. Even with the Japanese on their side, the Mogats and Confederate Arms did not seem to pose much of a threat.

  As I said before, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .”

  Part I

  MURDER

  CHAPTER ONE

  Earthdate: March 1, 2512 A.D.

  City: Safe Harbor; Planet: New Columbia; Galactic

  Position: Orion Arm

  “You look like a . . .” The boy got a stunned look on his face and stopped without finishing the sentence. He was about to tell me that I looked like a clone and changed his mind. Clever boy. Finishing that thought would either end in disaster or embarrassment. If I were a regular clone, hearing this might trigger a death reflex that released a flood of fatal hormones into my brain, killing me instantly. A more likely outcome might be my not knowing what he was talking about. I would laugh at him or possibly threaten him.

  Few clones knew they were clones. Government-issue military clones had brown hair and brown eyes, but the neural programming synapse in their brains made them see themselves as having blond hair and blue eyes. It was the government’s way of preventing an uprising from within the warrior class.

  “I look a lot like an Army clone?” I asked, trying to sound relaxed and conversational. “I hear that a lot.”

  The boy might have been in his twenties. His shoulder-length orange-red hair was stringy and lank. Large red pimples formed a constellation across his forehead. I was twenty-two, but I had seen death and battle and betrayal. Walking among the general civilian population, I considered most males under the age of thirty to be boys. The few who did not strike me as morons were thugs, like the one I had come here to meet.

  The boy looked stunned. He was neither a policeman nor a guard, just an usher in a movie house. His mouth hung open as he pondered my answer, and his eyes showed a mixture of confusion and fear.

  “I’m a lot like them,” I said as if confiding a family secret. “The Pentagon used my grandfather’s DNA to make those clones.”

  “No shit,” the boy said. A smile formed on his face. Of the six arms of the Milky Way galaxy, four had recently declared independence from the Unified Authority—the Earth government. The Orion Arm, Earth’s home arm, remained loyal to the Republic; but this planet—New Columbia—was suspect. The New Columbian government swore allegiance to the Unified Authority, but its government was filled with politicians who openly sympathized with the Confederate Arms.

  “Yeah,” I said. “You might say half the Army and I are cousins. For the record, Army clones are about four inches shorter than me and a lot wider around the shoulders.”

  “Yeah,” said the boy, and he laughed nervously. “I knew something was different.”

  There were a couple hundred thousand military clones assigned to New Columbia, but they seldom strayed far from their bases. The U.A. government had to tread lightly because of the planet’s skewed neutrality.

  The boy looked at my ticket. “Oh, wow, you’re going to The Battle for Little Man. Lots of clones in that flick.” He smiled at me. “Third holotorium on the right.”

  The hall was wide and bright with 3-D lenticular posters from upcoming movies on the walls. It was early in the afternoon on a weekday, and I had most of the theater to myself. The only people ahead of me were a young couple on a date—an uptight boy holding hands with a fresh-faced girl. The boy must have wanted to get to his movie. He walked quickly, his girlfriend in tow. The girl floated along lazily and paused to study each movie poster they passed.

  “C’mon,” he said, as he opened the door to their holotorium. “We’re missing the coming attractions.”

  I went two doors farther. The Battle for Little Man had already begun. It was a war movie recounting a recent battle in which a regiment of U.A. Marines was massacred on a planet near the edge of the galaxy. I knew the battle intimately. Of the 2,300 Marines sent on that mission, only seven survived.

  On the screen, a blond-haired, blue-eyed, barrel-chested Hollywood stud played Lieutenant Wayson Harris, the highest-ranking survivor of the Little Man campaign. As I took my seat, six enlisted men let themselves into Harris’s quarters and asked him about the mission. These men were clones. They all looked exactly alike. They ha
d brown hair and brown eyes . . . like me. They stood about five feet eleven inches tall—four inches shorter than me.

  The people who made this film may have hired retired clones to play the enlisted men. I was impressed.

  “What will happen down there, Lieutenant Harris?” one of the clones in the movie asked. Respect and adoration were evident in his voice and demeanor. The leathernecks on the screen must have been computer animations. No Marine could have said that line with a straight face.

  “I don’t know, Lee,” said Harris. “It’s going to be tough. It’s going to be dangerous. But we are the Unified Authority Marines. We don’t back down from a fight.” As he said this, the actor playing Harris stuffed an eighteen-inch combat knife into a scabbard that hung from his belt. I had to hold my breath to keep from laughing. None of the Marines I had ever met carried eighteen-inch combat knives and none of them sounded as heroic as the Hollywood Harris on the screen.

  “What if we die?” another Marine asked.

  “You listen here, Marine,” barked the Hollywood Harris on the screen, “don’t worry about death. We’re here fighting for the Republic. The Republic needs us. The people need us as they have never needed us before.”

  I slumped in my seat. This movie was supposed to be authentic with real combat footage taken from the actual battle. Maybe the battle scenes would be more realistic, but this portrayal of military clones was painfully propagandistic. This movie was the kind of jingoistic shit that Hollywood always churned out during times of war; something meant to build patriotic morale. On a planet like New Columbia, that effort was wasted. I was the only person in the holotorium.

  At least, I was the only person in the theater up until that moment. As Harris finished his soliloquy about defending the Republic, the door at the back of the holotorium opened. I heard men whispering among themselves as they moved into empty seats directly behind me.