The Clone Republic Read online

  I heard tales about the events that followed, but they were all gossip and myths. To avoid increased panic, the government imposed a news blackout immediately after the fleet disappeared. Then, two months after the disappearance, the Senate announced that the galactic core was under U.A. control. The only historical record of the event was a statement from the secretary of the Navy stating that a battery of specially trained soldiers conquered ground zero. Some time after that, a congressional panel announced that the men in the GC regiment were an experimental class of clones known only as

  “Liberators.” There were no pictures of Liberator clones in our history texts; and though I searched, I never found any pictures on the mediaLink, nor did I ever find any information about the aliens that the Liberator clones fought in the Galactic Eye.

  “The bag says ‘GCF,’” I said. “You don’t think he could be a Liberator?”

  “You?” Lee asked, shaking his head.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I had a teacher who served with some Liberators. He said that they were taller and slimmer than other clones. He also said that they massacred entire planets.”

  “One of my teachers said that they enjoyed killing people and that they killed civilians when they ran out of enemy soldiers,” said Lee. “That must have been an old rucksack,” he added, though he did not sound as if he believed it. “He didn’t look much older than us.”

  Like me, he had probably done the math in his head. If the GCF disappeared forty years ago, that would put Gunny Sergeant Shannon in his late fifties or early sixties. He looked bright-eyed, spry, and mean as hell. He was clearly a clone . . . a different species of clone, but still a clone. He had the same dark features as Lee, though he was a few inches taller. They looked like brothers.

  “Like seeing a ghost,” I muttered to myself. Having heard all kinds of rumors about Liberators in the orphanage, I should not have been surprised that Shannon looked so young. Liberators were supposed to have a synthetic gene that kept them young. Of course, I also heard that they had a fish gene that enabled them to breathe underwater and a slug gene that made them self-healing. I stopped believing the slug story by the time I was ten, but suddenly the youth gene seemed possible.

  “We’d better stow his stuff,” Lee said. “I would hate to piss him off.”

  Lee was too late. Just about everything pissed Shannon off. He marched into the barracks like a one-man wrecking crew, rearranging the racks and placing “his” Marines along the right side of the room. When Lee and I arrived, we walked into chaos. Acting on Shannon’s orders, the newly arrived PFCs dumped other men’s bags, books, and bedding to the floor. When one of the displaced privates asked Shannon what was happening, the gunny shouted a chain of obscenities and nearly hit him. “What is your name, Private?” Shannon shouted, strings of spit flying out of his mouth.

  “Private First Class Christopher Charla,” the private answered as he snapped to attention.

  “Did the Congress of the Unified Authority award you that bunk, PFC Charla?”

  “No,” Charla mumbled quietly.

  “I did not hear you, Charla. What did you say to me?” Shannon stood on his toes, his shoulders hunched, every conceivable vein puffed out of his neck.

  “No, Sergeant,” Charla bellowed back.

  “Then this rack does not belong to you?” Shannon shouted. “Is that correct, Charla?”

  “Yes, Sergeant.”

  Judging by the concern on Lee’s face, I could tell that Shannon’s was not standard sergeant behavior. All I had to go by was Glan Godfrey—and old Gutterwash did not give me much to go by. Sergeant Shannon turned to look at Lee and me. “I told you to stow those bags in my office,” he said,

  “then set up your racks. You sleep over there.” He pointed to the farthest bunks from his office, and I realized that he had just demoted us to the bottom of the platoon.

  My situation became worse the following morning.

  Still unable to adjust to Scutum-Crux time, I woke up at 0500 and fidgeted in my bunk until I was sure I could not fall back to sleep. I noticed that Vince Lee’s bunk lay empty. His clone frame lent itself well to bodybuilding, and he trained daily. My interests lay elsewhere. The one topic that interested me more than anything was battle-readiness. Weapons and hand-to-hand training lent themselves well to that preparation. After my discussion with Oberland, I had come to believe that knowing current events might also prepare me for battle. Knowing who I might have to fight and what they were fighting for had value. I put on my mediaLink shades to see if Ezer Kri was still in the news. On-air analysts billed the Ezer Kri story as a crisis in the making. Apparently the Ezer Kri delegation asked the Linear Committee for a new senator. They wanted to hold a planetwide election and choose their senator by popular vote, the same way they elected their member of the House. According to the story, nearly every elected official on Ezer Kri was of Japanese descent. Though they were not stating it outright, the members of the committee seemed to want to excise everything Japanese from the planet. The request was refused. “Your request, Governor Yamashiro, is unconstitutional,” the committee chair said. “The Constitution specifically calls for appointed representation.”

  Yoshi Yamashiro, the governor of Ezer Kri and the head of the delegation, next resubmitted a petition asking for permission to change the name of his planet from Ezer Kri to “Shin Nippon.”

  The chairman of the Linear Committee pointed out that “Shin Nippon” meant “New Japan,” and refused to consider the petition.

  At this point the story switched to video footage shot in the Committee chambers. The Ezer Kri delegation, made up of elderly men in black suits, sat at a huge wooden table covered with charts and computers. Their table faced a towering gallery packed with senators. The seven men in the delegation chatted among themselves in a language that I had never heard. Their voices rose and fell dramatically, and they did a lot of bowing. “Mr. Chairman,” one of them said in a breathless voice. “We ask that the official language of Ezer Kri be changed to Japanese. That is the language spoken by a plurality of our population,” he said, with a slight bow.

  Angry chatter erupted in gallery.

  “Governor Yamashiro,” the speaker shouted, banging his gavel. “I will not entertain such a request. You are entirely out of bounds. Your behavior signifies contempt for this body.”

  The Japanese men spoke quietly among themselves. Yamashiro stood up. He was a short man with a stout chest and broad shoulders. He bowed. “I apologize for my offense, Mr. Chairman,” Yamashiro said. The room calmed, then Yamashiro spoke again. “I humbly suggest that you change the name of the Republic to the ‘Unified Singular Authority.’”

  There was a moment of shocked silence, as if Yamashiro had performed some crude act that stunned every man in the room. Then hisses and angry conversation filled the chamber. The chairman pounded his gavel as the video segment ended.

  The picture of the hearing faded and my shades now showed three analysts sitting around a table. One of them leaned forward. “This was footage of the Ezer Kri delegation’s meeting with the Linear Committee this morning. After having several requests denied, Governor Yoshi Yamashiro suggested that the Unified Authority be renamed ‘the Unified Singular Authority.’ As you can see, the reaction was swift and angry.”

  “Jim,” a woman analyst cut in, “that reaction was to Yamashiro’s veiled suggestion that the government is really an extension of the old United States. The point of his comment was that we should take on the initials USA. Yamashiro made some good points,” the woman continued. “The Linear Committee has been openly antagonistic toward the Ezer Kri delegation. We’re not talking about a planet trying to break from the Republic, forgod’ssake, they just want to rename their planet.”

  “It’s not just the planet name . . .” the first male analyst started.

  “There are already planets named Athens, Columbia, Jerusalem!” another analyst added.

  “Those are city names, and they do
not have majority populations of Greek or Israeli descent. It’s not just the name, it’s the language. Governor Yamashiro wants to speak an entirely different language than the rest of the Republic.”

  “Jim,” the woman commentator said, with a patient and all-knowing smile, “when was the last time you watched a broadcast from outside the Orion Arm? By the end of the century, linguistic scholars predict the dialects spoken in the outer arms will have evolved into unique languages. You cannot expect people who live ten thousand light-years apart to go on speaking the same language forever.”

  “And you think switching from English to Japanese is part of that evolution?”

  “What I find most disturbing is the paranoia that is surrounding this entire issue,” the woman said, ignoring the question. “It’s as if the committee believes that switching the language is the first step to an invasion. It’s ridiculous.”

  The woman made more sense, but I agreed with the male commentator. Perhaps it was my upbringing in a military orphanage, but I could not see how letting planets speak different languages would bring the galaxy closer together.

  By that time I was losing interest in the story, so I switched off my shades. When I removed my shades, I saw a message light blinking over my bunk. Sergeant Shannon wanted me to come to his office. I climbed out of bed and dressed quickly, but Shannon was not in his office when I arrived. I found my helmet waiting on his desk.

  Lee, just back from the gym, came into the barracks as I was stowing my helmet. “Hey, how was your workout?” I asked, as Lee passed my rack.

  “Fine,” he said, sounding brusque. I waited for him to shower and change, then we went to the commissary for breakfast. We had eaten almost every meal together since landing on the ship. I think we had sort of adopted each other. I hadn’t yet figured out that Lee liked me because I was not a clone. As for me, after my time on Gobi, I was just glad to have a friend who truly fit the description

  “government-issue.” Lee was acting odd and distant. I wanted to ask him what his problem was, but I figured he would cough it up in good time. As we walked toward the mess area, I saw a strangely familiar sight on some of the monitors along the hall—a picture of General Amos Crowley bent over a stack of poker chips, holding a particle-beam pistol. I recognized the table, the room, and the way Crowley pinched the pistol with his fingers. “Enemy of the Republic,” was the headline. “Former general and noted terrorist Amos Crowley stands accused of sedition, rebellion, and murder.”

  I stared at the display hardly believing my eyes. “Son of a bitch,” I mumbled.

  “Do you know him?” Vince asked.

  “I think I took that photograph,” I said.

  “You don’t know if you took it?” Lee asked, suddenly interested in me again.

  “I was at that card game, but I didn’t have a camera. Neither did anybody else.”

  “Somebody had one,” Lee said dismissively. “Do you play cards with traitors on a regular basis?”

  I stared at the image for a moment, then continued down the hall. And then it struck me. All those gadgets packed into our visors . . . polarizing lenses, telescopic lenses, communications systems. Add a little data storage, and you could record everything.

  “Do our visors record data?” I asked.

  “Sure,” Lee said, sounding as if I should have known that without asking. “How long have you been . . .”

  He paused to stare at me and laughed. “You wore your helmet to a card game? Harris”—he seemed to warm up as he sensed my embarrassment—“you’re all right.”

  “Glad I’ve got your seal of approval,” I said. I was again tempted to ask what was bothering him, but held back.

  He looked back at the picture. “That’s not your sidearm, is it?” he said, struggling not to laugh.

  “No, it’s not,” I snapped.

  “Just asking,” Lee said, still sounding more than amused. The corners of his mouth still twitched. “Whose is it?”

  “It belonged to a guy named Taj Guttman,” I said, as we entered the mess hall.

  “He wagered his firearm? I bet he wasn’t wearing his helmet.”

  “No, he wasn’t,” I said.

  “His goose is fried,” Lee said.

  We grabbed trays and moved to the chow line. Vince clearly wanted to ask more questions but had the good sense to wait until we had our chow and had moved to a quieter corner of the room. I felt a wave of panic. How many people knew what I had done—that I had lost my pistol to an enemy agent in a card game? I seriously doubted that McKay would keep the information to himself.

  “Can’t say I think much of a Marine who bets his pistol in a card game, Harris,” Sergeant Shannon sneered as he sat down at the table next to ours. “I don’t think much of that at all.”

  Not many of my memories are associated with a particular day of the week, but I have no trouble recalling what day my helmet was returned to me. It was on a Sunday. I know that because later that day, hoping to get away from all of the questions about Crowley and the card game, I went to the rec room to watch a movie. Sincerely wanting to be alone, I chose the emptiest route through the Marine compound—and that took me by the chapel. Nobody went anywhere near that area on Sunday. The military was always trying to push religion; but in my experience, fear of God was one of the things that science never managed to build into its neural programming. Many of the officers attended church services, but none of the clones I knew believed in God.

  As I passed by the open door of the chapel on this day, however, I happened to catch a glance of somebody sitting alone at the rear of the chapel. His back was to me, but the tall wiry frame and fine, white old man’s hair were unmistakable. There, wearing his dress uniform, was Sergeant Shannon . . . swearing, bullying, belligerent Sergeant Shannon.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Some people say that the most glorious sight they ever saw was a beautiful moon or a perfect sunrise. For me, it was the three fleets of the Scutum-Crux Arm converging in orbit over Terraneau. Each fleet was set in array with its twelve Perseus-class fighter carriers set in a row like the jagged teeth of an enormous saw. Frigates and transports, awesome ships in their own right, seemed insignificant beside the mighty bulk of these dreadnoughts. The massive shadow of the fleets cast a discernible outline on the watery surface of the planet below.

  Seeing so many ships huddled together fascinated me. I spent hours watching them from one of the Kamehameha ’s observation stations. I watched attack wings of Tomcats and Harriers escorting transports between the capital ships and the planet below. With their black-and-gray finish and sliver-shaped hulls, the Tomcats vanished like ghosts in open space only to reappear as fast-moving specks when they sped across the bows of carriers.

  “The U.A. Navy is awesome,” I said to myself with pride. I wondered how anyone could hope to stand against it.

  “I spent some time stationed on Nebraska Minor,” Vince Lee said as he leaned against a guardrail. “Ever heard of Nebraska Minor?”

  “I cannot say that I have,” I said.

  “They do a lot of farming there. The whole planet is like one big farm,” Lee said.

  “Exciting assignment,” I joked.

  Lee thought about my quip for a moment, then chose to ignore it. “People on Nebraska Minor used to say, ‘You should always kill the pig before you eat it.’ You ever heard that before?”

  “I feel deprived,” I said. “On Gobi we had sayings like, ‘You should never eat your children after they are six years old.’”

  Lee pretended to ignore that comment, too. “It’s a big fleet; a lot of firepower . . .” Lee’s voice trailed off for a moment. “Greece and Rome weren’t able to hold on to Europe, how can we possibly hope to control a whole galaxy? If there are planets that want out of the Republic, Wayson, I am not sure we should force them to stay in.”

  “I don’t see how they can stand up to a fleet like this,” I said.

  “What happened on Gobi?” Lee asked as he followed my gaze ou
t the window. “Crowley attacked a Marine base?”

  A shuttle with a three-fighter escort silently approached our ship, drifting past the window. The ships passing by reminded me of fish in an aquarium. Lee’s question did not surprise me; people had been asking about the Gobi story quite a bit lately. A team of security officers had given me an official debriefing, and Captain McKay had questioned me about it.

  “You after the blow-by-blow?” I asked in a sardonic voice. He nodded, and I told him the whole story, including the part about becoming a corporal in three months. I think the promotion was the part that embarrassed me the most.

  “The Unified Authority has long provided safety and prosperity for its member states. Now it has come to our attention that certain factions wish to divide our Republic. These terrorists would destroy the fabric of our society to satisfy their own selfish needs. Though their insurrection poses no significant threat to our great Republic, it must be dealt with.”

  I noticed two things about Fleet Admiral Bryce Klyber as I watched his high-definition image on the three-dimensional screen: his nearly starved physique and his overwhelming intensity. Klyber’s cheekbones stuck out like ridges across his chiseled face and his skull looked dented at the temples. He had long arms that reminded me of twigs. The overall impression was that you could snap the man over your knee like a stick.

  First fascinated by Klyber’s skeletal appearance, I soon found myself mesmerized by the intensity in his icy blue eyes. He stared into the camera, seldom blinking as he plowed through his speech. When he paused to look at his notes, Klyber pursed his mouth so tightly that his lips formed a single line, and wrinkles formed on his chin.

  “In future years, historians will look back upon the Unified Authority as one of man’s crowning achievements. As a nation, we have conquered space. We have conquered the galaxy. Our progress will not be slowed by a band of hooligans.”