The Clone Republic (Clone 1)
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CONCLUSION
BLOOD IN THE SAND
Two of Crowley’s soldiers had seen the drone coming and shielded their eyes at the last moment. They had sprung from their hiding place and chased Ray Freeman as he ran toward his ship. Taking less than a second to aim, I hit one of them in the shoulder from over a hundred yards away. He spun and fell. His friend skidded to a stop and turned to look for me. I fired a shot, hitting him in the face.
Freeman’s ship must not have been hidden very far away. Moments after he disappeared over the edge of the canyon, a small spaceworthy flier that looked like a cross between a bomber and transport rose into the air. Unlike the barge that Freeman had used as a decoy, the ship was immaculate, with rows of dull white armor lining its bulky, oblong hull. Gun and missile arrays studded its wings . . .
At first I thought Freeman had abandoned the base, but then he doubled back toward the barracks. I could see some of the guns along the wings glinting as I ran to view the fight. There was no hurry, however. Crowley’s men were not prepared to fight a ship like this one.
The Gatling guns flashed. Some of the guerillas managed to escape, but there was no escape, not from Freeman.
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THE CLONE REPUBLIC
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Ace edition / April 2006
Copyright © 2006 by Steven L. Kent.
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I would like to dedicate this work to
Professor Ned Williams,
because he taught a bear to dance.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to thank my editors John Morgan (who moved on before this project could be finished) and Anne Sowards (who took over) for everything they have done to help me. Mark Adams, of Texas Instruments fame, helped out a lot with this project, as did my parents. My parents always help a lot.
Special thanks to Evan Nakachi, who gave me just the right encouragement at exactly the right moment to keep me going.
On the technical side, I need to thank Lewis Herrington, a former Marine colonel and a good friend. He spent a long time trying to help me understand the lifestyle, history, and tactics of the Marines—though his knowledge of cloning certainly left something to be desired.
Finally, I wish to thank my agent, Richard Curtis, because I am very lucky to have an agent like Richard Curtis.
Map by Steven J. Kent, adapted from a public domain NASA diagram
“You had good reason, he said, to be ashamed of the lie which you were going to tell.”
“True, I replied, but there is more coming; I have only told you half.”
—Plato
The Republic, Book 3
INTRODUCTION
A.D. 2510
Location: Ravenwood Outpost; Planet: Ravenwood;
Galactic Location: Scutum-Crux Arm
“You picked a hell of a place to die, Marine,” I told myself.
This planet had no economic value, no strategic value, and no scientific worth. The outpost, with its naked concrete walls, was just a primitive fort on a barren planet surrounded by plains and ice. Every Marine in every platoon that came to defend this spot ended up missing in action—a polite way of saying they were dead . . . gone to the halls of Montezuma. Semper fi, Marine.
As I walked through the halls of this shit hole, every boy stopped to salute me. “Ready at your post, Marine?” I would ask, pretending that it mattered.
“Sir, yes, sir!” they would shout, still naïve enough to believe that enthusiasm counted for something.
And I would grunt lines like, “Carry on, Marine,” and salute, then move on knowing that nothing any of us did mattered. These boys were dead. Fresh out of basic, loyal to their last breath, and served up to die. I could not save them any more than I could save myself. In a couple of days, a patrol would come looking for survivors and find the base abandoned. The Corps would list us as missing in action, some officer would say, “Damn, not another platoon,” and send the next forty-two men to replace us.
Legend had it that space monsters prowled the surface of Ravenwood. Most of my boys believed it was space aliens attacking the fort. Facing their deaths, these
boys turned back the clock to the days when authors wrote books about alien invasions. But those authors were wrong. Once we entered space we discovered that we were almost alone in the galaxy. The only thing man had to fear was man himself.
Up ahead, a couple of my boys knelt in the shadow of a doorway and prayed. “You do that,” I mumbled. “You pray. Why not?” Once the guns are loaded and the troops in place, God and chance are all you have left .
Even as I thought this, I realized that I didn’t care what became of these boys. In fact, I did not care whether or not I made it off this planet alive. I had the urge to survive, but that was just instinct.
It was because of the lie. Plato’s lie seems innocent, but it leaves you alienated from everything.
CHAPTER ONE
A.D. 2508
Gobi Station
“Name?” The sergeant barked the question without bothering to look up from his desk. I heard the indifference in his voice and could not fault him for his callous attitude. Nothing important ever happened in dried-up stink holes like Gobi. Once you got assigned to a planet like this, your only option was to sit and wait for a transfer. It could take years. I’d heard rumors about Marines spending their entire careers on backwater planets praying for any excuse to leave, even a war.
“Private First-class Wayson Harris reporting as ordered, sir.” I saluted, then handed him the sealed file that contained my orders.
I had shown up for this transfer wearing my Charlie Service uniform, not my armor. The uniform left me exposed to the desert air, and sweat had soaked through the material under my arms, not that this guy would notice. With his faded armor and stubble beard, this sergeant looked like he hadn’t bathed in years. All the same, I could barely wait to change into my armor. It wasn’t the protective chestplate and helmet I wanted. It was the climate-controlled bodysuit, which had kept me cool in temperatures even less livable than this desert.
“PFC Harris,” he echoed under his breath, not even bothering to look up. I shouldn’t have saluted. Once you leave basic training, you only salute officers or Marines acting under command authority. You don’t salute sergeants, and you certainly don’t call them “sir,” but it’s a hard habit to break.
Having just spent three months living the spit-and-polish discipline of boot camp, I had come to fear drill sergeants for the gods they were. This sergeant, however, struck me as a heretic. His camouflage-coated armor had dulled, and there was sand and oil caked in the joints. His helmet sat on the ground beside his seat. I had never seen a Marine remove his helmet while on duty. If the job required combat armor, you wore the whole thing, or you were technically out of uniform.
The sergeant sat slumped in his chair with his armor loosened to fit his wilting posture. My drill sergeant would have given me a week in a detention cell if he saw me sitting like that; but I didn’t think this guy worried about the brig. The brass doesn’t punish you unless it catches you, and I doubted that any officers had set foot in this outpost in years. Why visit a place like Gobi Station and risk having a superior order you to stay. It could end your career.
“PFC Harris . . . PFC Harris . . . Let’s see what we have here,” he mumbled as he broke the red strip sealing my files. He flipped through the pages, occasionally stopping to scan a line. Apparently having found what he wanted, he spread the file on his desk and absentmindedly wrapped his fingers around his bristle-covered chin, as he browsed my records. “Fresh out of recruit training,” he muttered. Something caught his eye, and he paused and mulled over the information before looking up at me. “A ‘1’ in combat readiness?” He sounded like he wanted to laugh. “I’ve never seen anyone score under four hundred.”
“It’s a performance ranking, sir,” I said.
He sneered when he heard the word, “sir.” “You say something, private?”
“That number was my school rank. I drew top marks in hand-to-hand combat and marksmanship.”
Godfrey cocked an eyebrow in my direction, then returned to my paperwork. “Son of a bitch, perfect scores,” he whispered. “Why waste a perfectly good Marine on a shit-hole planet like this?”
He looked up at me. “You have a problem following orders, Harris?”
“No, sir,” I said. I was, in fact, quite obedient by human standards. The military, however, had considerably higher standards. Most conscripts came out of clone farms that the government euphemistically referred to as “orphanages.” Designed specifically for military life, the clones raised in these orphanages reacted to orders by reflex, even before their conscious minds could grasp what they had been asked to do. If an officer told them to dig a hole in the middle of a sidewalk, concrete chips and sparks would fly before the conscripts stopped to analyze the command. The clones weren’t stupid, just programmed to obey first and think later. As a natural-born human, I could not compete with their autonomic obedience. My brain took a moment to sort out orders.
My inability to react to orders without thinking had caused me problems for as long as I could remember. I grew up in a military orphanage. Every child I knew was a clone. I might have entered Unified Authority Orphanage #553 the old-fashioned way—by having dead parents—but as a resident of UAO #553, I grew up with two thousand clones.
You would not believe the diversity that exists among two thousand supposedly identical beings. The Unified Authority “created all clones equal,” taking them from a single vat of carefully brewed DNA; but once they came out of the tube, time and experience filled in the cracks in their personalities. Look at a mess hall filled with two thousand clones, and they appear exactly alike. Live with them for any length of time, and the differences become obvious.
“Your file says that you are slow following orders,” Godfrey said.
“It’s comparing me to clones,” I said.
He nodded and flashed that wary smile sergeants use when they think you’re spouting bullshit. “Did you speck some officer’s daughter?”
“No, sir,” I said.
“No,” he grunted, and went back to my file. “Just wondering why they wasted a perfectly good recruit on a planet like this,” he said.
“Random assignment, I suppose, sir,” I said.
“Sure,” he said, and his smile turned caustic. “Well, Private First-class Harris, I am Glan Godfrey. You can call me ‘Glan,’ ‘Godfrey,’ or ‘Gutterwash.’ Do not call me ‘sir.’ Gobi is pretty much a long-term assignment. Get sent here, and you’re stuck for life. As long as you know that I am the sergeant and therefore the one you obey, you can forget everything they taught you in basic.”
Growing up in an orphanage, you learn how to spot clones—they’re all cut from the same helix. With Gutterwash Godfrey, however, I could not readily tell. He had sun-bleached blond hair that nearly reached his shoulders. Every clone I had ever known had brown hair and an assembly-line flattop haircut. A decade on a desert planet could have fried the color out of Godfrey’s hair, I supposed. But the loose armor and the thick stubble on his cheeks and chin . . . I thought that the spit and polish was programmed into their DNA. Could ten years on a desert planet bleach a man’s programming the way it bleached his hair?
Godfrey pressed a button on his console. “Got a rack?” he asked, without identifying himself.
“Fresh meat arrive?” a voice asked back.
“Or a reasonable facsimile.”
“Send him down, I’ll put him in Hutchins’s old rack,” the voice said.
“Hutchins?” I asked, when Godfrey closed the communication. “Shipped out?”
“Nope,” Godfrey said.
“Killed in action?” I asked.
“Nope. Suicide,” Godfrey said. “Corporal Dalmer will meet you down that hall.” He pointed ahead.
“Thank you, sir,” I said instinctively, wasting another salute.
Godfrey responded with that sardonic smile. “The sooner you lose that, the better we’ll get along.”
I grabbed my two travel cases and started down the open-air hall. I had
clothes and toiletries in one bag. The other bag held my gear—one helmet, a complete set of body armor, one body glove, one weapons-and-gear belt, one government-issue particle-beam pistol with removable rifle stock, one government-issue M27 pistol with removable rifle stock, and one all-purpose combat knife/bayonet with seven-inch diamond blade. Thanks to lightweight plastic-titanium alloys, the bag with the armor weighed less than the one with my clothes.
Halfway down the hall, I stopped to stare at my surroundings. After three months in the immaculate white-walled corridors of Infantry Training Center 309, I had forgotten that places like Gobi Station existed. No, that’s not true. I never suspected that the Unified Authority set up bases in such decrepit buildings.
Judging by the name, “Gobi,” I knew it was an early settlement. The cartographers used to name planets after Earth locations in the early days of the expansion. Back then, we settled any planet with a breathable atmosphere. That was before the science of terraformation passed from theoretical possibility to common practice.
The open-air hall from Godfrey’s office to the barracks buzzed with flies. One side of the hall overlooked a stagnant pool of oily water surrounded by mud and reeds. I noticed the tail end of an animal poking out through the reeds. As I looked closer, I realized that it was an Earth-bred dog, a German shepherd, and that it was lying dead on its side.
“Don’t worry, we run that through filters before we drink it,” the corporal at the other end of the hall said. Like Godfrey, this man wore his armor and body glove without his helmet. The environmental climate control in the bodysuit must have felt good. I was perspiring so much that the back of my uniform now clung to the curve of my spine. Rivulets of sweat had run down the sides of my ribs.
“We drink that?” I asked.
“You either drink that or you buy water from the locals. The locals jack you. You could blow a full week’s pay buying a glass of water from them. Only Guttman has that kind of money.” He looked off toward the pond. “That sludge doesn’t taste bad once you strain it.
“Name’s Tron Dalmer,” the corporal said as he stepped out from the doorway. “Whatever you did to get stationed here, welcome to the asshole of the friggin’ universe. Did Gutterwash mention that we here at Gobi Station are the few and the proud?”