The Clone Republic Page 7

  We went to the faculty cafeteria, a café-style eatery with square tables and an open buffet line. Though we were early, a few other teachers had already arrived. Oberland placed his books on a table and headed for the food. There were more than one dozen dishes to choose from—casseroles, soups, roast chicken, and salads. There was a dessert bar with fruit, cakes, and chocolates. “I didn’t know you teachers ate so well,” I said.

  “We don’t,” Oberland said. “It isn’t Earth-grown.” Supposedly, Earth-grown meats and vegetables tasted better than foods grown on the frontier. Military chow and school food were made with Earth-grown ingredients, but I hadn’t noticed much of a difference. From what I could tell, turnips were turnips and it didn’t matter where they came from, they still tasted like shit. All of that Earth-grown hype was pure propaganda.

  I slopped a scoop of beef casserole onto my plate, knowing it would taste better than the vacuum-packed Earth-grown MRE chow I ate on Gobi. I took a chicken breast and green salad.

  “I just got my first transfer,” I said as I placed my tray on the table.

  “Transferred already?” Oberland sounded concerned. He sat across the table. “You can’t have been at your last assignment for more than a few months.”

  “Four months,” I said. “Have you ever heard of Gobi?”

  Oberland thought for a moment. “Never heard of it, but that doesn’t mean much. It’s a big galaxy.” He paused, and added, “Nice place?”

  “Beautiful skies,” I said, “a dilapidated base, and toxic water for drinking. Gobi Station is the Marine Corps’ smallest outpost. Forty-one grunts stuck in the middle of nowhere. That was my first assignment.”

  “That sounds like the kind of place they leave you until you die,” Oberland said, with a low whistle.

  “I think that might have been the plan,” I said, “but we saw some unexpected action. A band of malcontents led by a former general attacked our outpost.”

  “Was the general named Amos Crowley?” Oberland asked.

  I nodded. “How do you know Crowley?” I asked.

  “I served under Crowley,” Oberland said. “You know about him, don’t you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Amos Crowley was a brilliant officer.”

  “I don’t know about brilliant, but he damned near wiped out Gobi Station. He would have taken us if it had not been for Freeman.”

  “Freeman?” Oberland asked.

  “Ray Freeman, a mercenary. Cygnus Command sent him when we reported seeing Crowley.”

  Oberland’s expression went flat, and he rubbed his chin. “A mercenary saved your platoon? Please tell me you’re kidding.”

  I could feel tension welling up in my gut. “You never saw Marines like the ones on Gobi,” I said, hating the defensive tone in my voice. “Men with long hair, men walking around without helmets . . . One of our guys was so fat he could not pull his helmet over his head. There was no discipline.”

  Oberland leaned forward, and whispered, “Were they clones?”

  I nodded.

  “I didn’t know that could happen with clones.”

  “Mr. Oberland, these guys were on permanent R and R. They practically lived in the nearest town.”

  “Okay, so the mercenary saved the day. Why were you promoted?”

  “‘Meritorious service,’” I said. “I helped Freeman while the rest of the platoon hid in the barracks.”

  Oberland smiled. “And you got a promotion and a transfer?”

  “The transfer was the best part. I’ve been assigned to the Scutum-Crux Fleet, a fighter carrier called the Kamehameha .”

  “The Kamehameha ? Not bad, Harris.” He nodded. “That’s Bryce Klyber’s ship. He’s got to be the most powerful man in the military today.”

  “He’s not one of the Joint Chiefs?” I said. I would have known his name if he was one of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  “Oh no, no, no.” Oberland shook his head. “That would be Fleet Admiral Klyber to you, and he is much more powerful than the Joint Chiefs. They’re just appointees; Klyber has friends and family on Capitol Hill. There are some interesting political goings-on in Scutum-Crux. One of the planets was just hauled before the Senate.”

  I shook my head. “Galactic news didn’t seem all that important back on Gobi. Nothing ever happened there, and nothing that happened anywhere else mattered there.”

  “That’s what they told you when you got there?” Oberland asked.

  “That’s what they told me.”

  “And you still believe them?” Oberland’s smile turned acid. “Wayson, a renegade general from a different arm of the galaxy showed up on your planet and tried to blow up your base.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess so.”

  “You might have known who he was if you kept up with events, Wayson. You’re going to be on the flagship carrier of the Scutum-Crux Fleet. Everything you do will have consequences.”

  “And Klyber?” I asked, wanting to change the subject from my own shortcomings. Oberland leaned forward as if he wanted to whisper a secret, then spoke in a normal voice. “Admiral Klyber is the most connected man in the Navy. Perform a little meritorious service under his command, and you may be the first enlisted man to earn a commission.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  On my last day of leave, I flew from Seattle to Salt Lake City, then took a military shuttle to Mars. Possibly the single most commercial spot in the universe, the Mars way station was not a colony but a conglomeration of stores, transport facilities, and dormitories. The first building constructed away from Earth, the ever-changing structure was always under renovation but never fully modernized—a sprawling structure with a gigantic military base and a civilian port filled with restaurants, shops, and overnight hotels. It was the Unified Authority’s gateway to the galaxy.

  I cut through the crowds and reported for duty at the military transfers’ desk. A young corporal reviewed my orders and passed me through to a gate where I spent another two hours sitting around before boarding the long-distance transport that would take me to the Central Scutum-Crux Fleet.

  All flights out of the Sol System passed through the broadcast station orbiting Mars. We had barely cleared the atmosphere when the “prepare for jump” sign flashed over the passenger compartment. Tint shields formed over the windows, but they only muffled the glare shining off the two gigantic elliptical discs that formed the broadcast station. The discs looked like giant mirrors; they were more than one mile across. Ships did not enter the discs, they merely approached and lowered their shields. The jagged electrical stream pouring out of the mirrors was so bright that glancing at it could blind you for life. Though sending ships through the broadcast system cost nothing, keeping the discs powered was expensive. Private citizens paid a fifty-dollar-per-cubic-yard toll for entering the broadcast system. Corporations got lower rates when shipping products. Navy ships and government transports passed for free. A team of accountants probably spent their entire careers transferring funds to cover fleet movements.

  The pilots cut the engines as we approached the broadcast discs. Our ship slowed to a glide while a silvery red laser scanned the outside of the ship, verifying our registration and checking for hazardous substances and weapons. The pilot said, “Prepare to jump,” over the speaker system, and the sending disc, the one that translated ships into impulses and transmitted them, splashed its blue-white lightning against our hull. The air in the cabin began to crackle, and the electricity made my clothes conform to my body as if doused with water. Pressing my face against the tinted window for a better look, I got a quick glance of the orbital Army post guarding the disc before we flashed into the Sagittarius Arm. The Unified Authority took broadcast station security very seriously, especially Mars Station security. Three F-19 Falcon fighters from the Air Force’s Mars base patrolled the reception disc at all times and long-range cannons guarded the area from the surface of nearby moons. Lights illuminated every inch of the discs and the posts that guarded
them. If there were some way to light space itself, I think the area around the disc station would have been lit.

  It took us five minutes to travel the five hundred miles from the surface of Mars to the broadcast discs, and less than one second to travel nearly ten thousand light-years to the Sagittarius Arm. My trip from the Sagittarius Arm to the Scutum-Crux Arm took less than five seconds—just long enough for the transport to materialize and glide from the receiving disc to the transmission disc of the next station. Using the broadcast corridor, you could travel from one galactic arm to the next in a matter of moments. Traveling within that arm to your final destination could take weeks.

  The network did not rely on wormholes or black holes or any other natural phenomenon, it was purely devised by man. Sending discs emitted some kind of energy wave that absorbed matter and waves as they approached. The disc would simply communicate everything it translated to a receiving disc, where it could be turned back into its original form.

  In theory, the disc orbiting Mars could have broadcast us to a disc near SC Command, but interLinking the galaxy would compromise Sol System security. To control broadcast traffic and prevent invaders from tapping into their system, U.A. engineers designed the broadcast corridor in a linear fashion. The Mars disc would only accept transmissions from four transmission discs—the two closest discs in the Orion Arm and the interarm transmitters in the Sagittarius and Perseus Arms. Transmissions from unknown sources were deflected into space and never materialized again.

  Our final jump placed us in the center of Scutum-Crux, a mere 500 million miles from Command headquarters. Once away from the discs, most military vehicles were required to travel at a standard 30

  million miles per hour. That meant approximately seventeen hours of flying time. Most of the other passengers on the ship were officers who chatted quietly among themselves. A corporal sat splayed across several seats in the row across the aisle from where I sat. I had seen him get on. He stowed his bags, dropped into his seat, and passed out, for all intents and purposes. I did not know if he was drunk or hungover, but he was dead to the world.

  With nothing better to do, I decided to follow Aleg Oberland’s advice and browsed the latest news broadcasts. I clipped on a pair of mediaLink shades and tapped the power button beside the right lens. MediaLinks let you browse the news, send letters, or place calls. They were the basis of civilian communications, but their signal could not be secured. Enemies could tape them or jam them in combat. The shades worked very much like the visual controls in my combat helmet. Selecting topics and scrolling through menus by twitching my eye, I began searching for the Senate hearings that Oberland told me about. I selected the “News and Information” option rather than “Entertainment Programming” or

  “Correspondence.” A menu appeared offering “Pangalactic Highlights,” “Local News,” “Sports,”

  “Entertainment News,” and “Business.” I chose Local News for Scutum-Crux. Stereophonic speakers along the sides of the shades rumbled a businesslike tune as two newscasters discussed big stories around Scutum-Crux, a backwater arm politically, with important strategic implications. The first story involved a planet called Ezer Kri sending a delegation to Washington to meet with the Senate.

  At first glance, I thought I must have tapped into the wrong story. This was not about a planet that wanted to break from the Republic. All the people of Ezer Kri wanted to do was rename their planet. They held an election and a sizable majority voted to rename the planet “Shin Nippon.” The report explained that “Shin Nippon” was Japanese for “New Japan.” When the governor of Ezer Kri notified the Senate, he was informed that the name change was out of the question. The governor and a delegation of Ezer Kri politicians were summoned to DC to discuss the matter before the Senate. No arrests, no rebellion . . . why had this seemed important to Oberland?

  I paused the broadcast. Though I had never heard of Ezer Kri, I remembered hearing something about a colony of Japanese people refusing to integrate. The rumors did not mean anything to me when I first heard them, but there must have been more to it. I scanned ahead.

  When the Unified Authority first settled Ezer Kri, (I’m not sure what the name “Ezer” referred to, but

  “Kri” was a notation used for planets that had engineered atmospheres.) in 2303, the planetary administrator was of Japanese ancestry. Working quietly, he appointed several people of similar descent to his cabinet. When the administrator retired, he appointed his own successor. Not surprisingly, the new administrator was Japanese.

  Over the next two hundred years, there was a Japanese migration to Ezer Kri. While the rest of the galaxy integrated, 35 percent of the population of Ezer Kri was Japanese. The non-Japanese population complained about discrimination, but a U.A. investigation found that Ezer Kri was productive and law-abiding—a model planet with an excellent educational system and one of the best economies in the Republic. For some reason Oberland equated the proposed name change with sedition. So did the Senate, apparently. It meant nothing to me, and trying to reason it out gave me a headache. I switched off my media shades and went to sleep.

  Including stops at several space stations, the trip took nearly twenty hours. By the time we reached SC

  Command, thirty new passengers had boarded and divided up by rank and phylum. Pilots and other officers sat in the front of the cabin. Tight clusters of sailors sat in the back. There were an even dozen Marine grunts on board.

  “We’re coming up on the Kamehameha ,” one of the officers said, waking me out of a light sleep. Hearing this, I looked out my window. All I saw was an endless field of stars. The corporal in the row across the aisle woke up and stretched. He saw me pressing against the window and decided to help. “Do you see a pale gray star at one o’clock?”

  There were a lot of gray stars. I felt the cramp in my back, heard my stomach growl, and knew that my patience had worn thin. Then I saw it. The other specks of light twinkled. The Kamehameha was a pasty gray dot.

  “See it?” he asked.

  “Flat-colored speck?” I asked. “It looks pretty small.”

  “It gets bigger.”

  It did indeed. As we approached, the bat wing shape of the hull seemed to stretch for miles. The top of the ship was so smooth that it looked like a running track. The top of the ship was the color of a shark, and its front face was lined with windows and weapons arrays. The bottom of the ship was beige in color. Huge antennae, at least fifty feet long and ten feet wide, protruded out of the top and bottom of the wing at each corner. During battle, these antennae emitted the magnetic currents that formed the ship’s protective shielding.

  The Kamehameha grew larger by the moment. Soon I could see blue-and-white plumes flaring from its giant engines. We might still have been fifty miles away when we slowed to approaching speed, but the old fighter carrier already looked considerably larger than the transport in which I had traveled. Another minute passed, and I could make out the individual gun placements.

  “It’s huge!” I said.

  “First time on a carrier?” the Marine asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “It gets a lot bigger.”

  Again, he was correct. I lost sight of the ship as we circled it from above to make our final approach. When we came around, we were less than a hundred yards from the rear of the ship. We could have landed our transport inside one of the dormant emergency engines, and the emergency engines were less than half the size of the main engines. Our pilot adjusted his approach, and we coasted onto a landing dock in the terraced rear of the ship.

  Then something made sense. I had heard stories about these ships intimidating insurgents into submission, but I never understood. Teachers back at the orphanage told us the sterile facts about fighter carriers. They showed us holographic images. They cited measurements. Images and measurements meant nothing until you saw this ship in person; any impressions I formed listening to measurements and staring at images were dwarfed by its immense size.


  “You won’t even know you are on a ship,” the corporal said. “It’s not like being on a transport or a frigate. You won’t feel it move or hear the engines. It’s like living on base.”

  The corporal looked like a freshly minted clone. He had the stubble-cut hair of a young cadet but the small scars on his face and neck suggested he’d seen action. Military clones were a squat and powerful breed standing just shy of six feet tall. This man, however, clearly a bodybuilder, was wider than most. His shoulders and packed arms were not government-issue.

  “You must have spent a lot of time at your last assignment,” he said. “I’ve never met a corporal with less than two years’ time on a carrier. This is my third, and I was lucky—I made corporal in five years.”

  The transport’s booster rockets hissed as our pilot jostled the ship into position. I heard motors whine as electromagnetic skids dropped out of the transport, and locked us into place in the docking bay. Deckhands opened the hatch from outside the transport and the officers at the front of the cabin filed out.

  “Unless I miss my guess, we’ll probably end up in the same platoon,” the corporal said. “I’m Vince Lee, just transferred up from Outer Scrotum.” Seeing my confused reaction, he laughed. “The Outer Scutum-Crux Fleet.”

  “Wayson Harris.” I said, standing up and pulling my gear from the locker above my seat. I followed Lee off the transport and into a large receiving area. Two officers, a young Marine captain and a slightly older Naval commander, stood on deck. The other passengers had already grouped by branch by the time we stepped down the ramp—the sailors proceeded on ship, the Marines and pilots remained. Lee and I took our spots at the head of the Marines.

  Had I not recognized their uniforms, I would have guessed that the captain was the pilot and the lieutenant commander was the Marine. The lieutenant commander stood well over six feet tall and had the barrel chest and the intensity of a fighting man. I had trouble imagining him crammed into a cockpit. He called out the names of his pilots, and each responded, then he looked at his clipboard and smiled.