The Clone Betrayal

CHAPTER ONE

“Ava, this is Lieutenant Wayson Harris. I told you about Harris.”

“The big hero,” Ava said, her voice betraying a distinct lack of interest. “Didn’t you say he was a Liberator clone?”

I had been talking with three of the men from my color guard detail, and now found myself speechless.

Colonel Theodore Mooreland stood before us with his date, Ava Gardner—Hollywood’s brightest star and the subject of more debates and fantasies than any woman of her time. Mooreland casually threw his arm around her tiny waist. Maybe it was my imagination, but his expression reminded me of a dog marking its territory. Most of the men in the room would have died happy if they could have placed one of their hands where Mooreland now had his.

“He’s the one,” he said. “Lieutenant Wayson Harris, the toughest man in the Marines.”

Ava threw back her head as if about to laugh. Her lips spread in an inviting smile. Trying to keep from staring at the neckline of her dress, I studied the gentle cleft in her chin.

“How’s it hanging, Lieutenant?” Mooreland asked.

It wasn’t hanging at the moment, but I answered, “Fine, sir,” just the same.

I had never paid much attention to Ava Gardner; but now, seeing her up close, I understood the Ava obsession. She exuded sensuality the way officers exude arrogance and politicians exude snobbishness. She inspected me with her olivine eyes, her gaze both appraising and dismissive. I got the feeling she found me inadequate; but coming from her, even feelings of inadequacy were strangely erotic.

Her hair, a deep and lustrous brown with just a hint of red that only showed in the light, hung over her shoulders in a wave of curls and tresses that somehow managed to look both wild and organized at the same moment. The hair, the eyes, and the body all did their job, but I think it was her indifference that got my blood pumping. The aloof way in which she viewed the world around her came across as a challenge, like the slap of the gauntlet before the duel.

“Where do they have you stationed?” Mooreland more or less grunted his question, wrestling my attention away from the girl in his arms.

“I’m running errands for Glade,” I said. That was General James Ptolemeus Glade, commandant of the Marines.

“An officer like you in the Pentagon, what a specking waste of talent,” Mooreland said. “They should have you out in the field somewhere. Maybe they should send you to the outer planets …see if we can reclaim lost territory.”

“Teddy, I’m ready for a drink,” Ava said.

“Yeah, let’s head over to the bar,” Mooreland said.

“Nice meeting you, Harris,” Ava said in a voice so sweet and soft it sounded like she’d sung the words.

It was like I was in a trance. I extended my arm as if I wanted to shake hands with her. She giggled, took my hand, and gave it a soft squeeze, then she turned away. Mooreland remained another second and gave me a smirk that said it all.

“Better check for frostbite, Lieutenant; I bet that bitch has icebergs flowing in her veins,” one of my Marines said.

“What a ball-buster,” another said.

“I’d kill to put my arm around her like that,” said the third man on my detail. Watching Ava and Mooreland disappear into the crowd, we all agreed with him.

We were at a party that few Marines thought would take place—a New Year’s Eve celebration ushering in the year 2516. I began the year battening down the hatches on a planet called New Copenhagen, making a last stand for mankind against an alien onslaught. Other than Earth, New Copenhagen was the only Unified Authority planet that had not been conquered by the aliens which the top brass now knew as the “Avatari.”

At the time, all we knew was that wherever the Avatari appeared, our planets fell in a matter of minutes. We’d gone from 180 planets spread across the galaxy to two in a couple of years. Even after winning the battle on New Copenhagen, we were still down to two planets.

Across the floor, a handful of silver-haired couples danced to moldy songs performed by a live orchestra. A buffet of desserts and finger foods stood mostly ignored, but a large crowd of men in tuxedos and military uniforms milled around the bar. On the far side of the ballroom, women in sparkling gowns sat and gossiped. Waiters in white uniforms walked the floor carrying trays with champagne and hors d’oeuvres, offering food and drinks to everyone except me and my Marines.

But we only had eyes for Mooreland and his date. We watched Mooreland in astonishment as he guided Ava around the floor, introducing her to officers and politicians.

An air of scandal surrounded the “glamorous” Ms. Gardner. Gossip columnists and Hollywood reporters spread dark rumors about her being cloned from an actress who died five hundred years ago. Despite the fact that the nearly all-clone military had just saved mankind, the natural-born crowd still looked down their un-engineered noses at us clones. If the rumors proved accurate, her career would be ruined; but the hint of scandalous dirty secrets surrounding her only made Ava more intriguing so long as they remained unproven. There is a mystique about a starlet who is rumored to have worked her way into Hollywood as a call girl, but an actress known to have worked as a prostitute is nothing but a whore.

Since I was a lowly lieutenant, I came to this party as the hired help. That was one of the differences between me and Ted Mooreland; he came as a guest, and I came as part of the color guard. He and I were both officers, we both put our asses on the line on New Copenhagen; but I was a clone and he was a natural-born.

The ballroom hummed with the sounds of music, muffled voices, and the clink of ice cubes in glass. The only light in the room came from dimmed chandeliers and candles on tables. When they had the chance, the Washington elite preferred to lurk in shadows.

“I never paid much attention to her movies,” I told the Marine beside me.

“You made up for it just now,” the Marine said. “I thought your eyes were going to fall out.”

“Go speck yourself,” I whispered. A Marine could end his career using that word at an occasion like this.

“I’d rather speck her,” the Marine answered. We both laughed.

“Speck” was the obscenity of choice among the Marines. It referred to the fluid being transferred rather than the act of transferring it.

For the rest of the night, I tried to forget about Ava Gardner. I went about my duty, occasionally catching glimpses of her here and there. As the evening went on, Tobias Andropov, the newest rising star in the Unified Authority Senate, made glowing remarks about the recovery of our Earth-based economy. Generals and admirals gave three-minute speeches about the readiness of the U.A. military. The presentations ended with William Grace, the retiring head of the Linear Committee, presenting plans to rebuild the Republic.

Hiding in the back, I listened to these optimistic speeches and wondered what galaxy these people lived in. From what I could tell, we had barely survived the attack and had no real means of defending ourselves if the aliens returned.

The speeches ended at 2300. With an hour to go before the climax of the evening, the orchestra returned, and the night became festive. Some of the politicians put on party hats and played with noisemakers. The pace of the drinking picked up, and a steady herd remained on the dance floor. I caught a brief glimpse of Colonel Mooreland and Ava on the floor. They cut a striking couple. He was about my height, six-three, but more muscled, with a broad face, a dark crew cut, and a square jaw. She was petite, and her head rested in the hollow between his chest and shoulder.

I had an inexplicable desire to shoot Mooreland as I watched them dance. She was scrub, nothing more, just another girl, prettier than most to be sure; but just a skirt all the same.

At midnight the guests drank, shouted, and shot off party favors. Mooreland and Ava stood in an exclusive knot of revelers that included “Wild Bill” Grace and two of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mooreland was their boy, a man with a thor oughbred bloodline and a good combat record. His father, a former commandant of the Marines, had died fighting the Avatari. Now Ted stood shoulder to shoulder with generals and politicians, a man with a future and Ava Gardner in his arms. Whatever angels looked after him, I hated the speckers.

As I presented the color guard to end the evening, I spotted Ava and Mooreland in the front row of tables. I performed my duties, staring past them into space. The revelers stood at attention as we marched the flags out of the room, and the party came to a close.

For the next few weeks, I fantasized about Ava calling me; but, of course, she never did. All that came of Ava was a string of cold showers. When I went out with other women, I sometimes thought of her; but those daydreams faded away.

It was an exciting time. As the politicians had predicted, the Unified Authority began to rebuild. For the first time that I could remember, no one questioned the military. The Senate enacted a new holiday celebrating the victory on New Copenhagen. In past times, the House of Representatives had been a vipers’ pit of sedition. Since the war, it had become the soldiers’ best friend, calling for improved GI benefits, increased military spending, and the erection of a New Copenhagen Memorial in Washington, DC.

In January 2516, the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of Military History opened a wing dedicated to the history of cloned soldiers. Clones in the Smithsonian—I never thought I would see the day, but there it was.

I visited the exhibit and learned things about clone history that I had never known. One display showed the first cloned soldiers—big, brainless, and brawny; a force of brutes that lived and died like robots. The evolution of synthetic humanity quickly selected those first Neanderthals for extinction, and a new class of smaller, smarter synthetic soldiers replaced them.

One display showed wax figures of the twelve generations of clone evolution. In that lineup was a man with my exact face and physique, a Liberator. Another display depicted Liberators invading the Mogat home world. The display included twenty-five figures that looked exactly like me—six feet three inches tall, wiry frame, and the same brown hair and brown eyes found on every other clone.

The plaque read:

LIBERATOR CLONES

The product of a top secret collaboration between the U.A. Navy and the Linear Committee, Liberator clones were designed as a weapon in the war against aliens believed to inhabit the Galactic Eye. When the Liberators advanced on the enemy stronghold, they discovered a planet populated by humans.

I appreciated the whitewash. What the plaque did not mention was that we Liberator clones were the missing link of synthetic evolution. The Pentagon had its scientists strip our genes from the DNA of all future generations.

The problem with the Liberators was their fundamental addiction to violence. The Liberator physique included a gland that secreted a combination of testosterone and adrenaline into our bloodstreams during combat. The hormone made us faster and fiercer. It kept our thoughts clear during combat; but it was also addictive. Once the fighting was over, most Liberators would happily sell their souls to keep the hormone pumping through their veins. The only way to keep it flowing was to continue fighting. That led to battles like New Prague and Albatross Island, where Liberators slaughtered allies and civilians once they ran out of enemies.

After a few massacres, Liberator clones were banned from the Orion Arm, the galactic arm in which Earth was located, and the Pentagon began manufacturing a new generation of clones.

We did leave our mark on future generations, however. Instead of building a gland with testosterone and adrenaline in later models, Congress opted to build a fail-safe into later generations of clones—a gland that caused their brains to shut down if they discovered their origins. They called it the “Death Reflex.” It was a stopgap designed to prevent clones from rebelling against their natural-born creators.

Along with their deadly new gland, the latest clones received some impressive neural programming. They were raised in special all-clone orphanages by mentors who convinced each clone that he was the only natural-born child in the facility. Neural programming filled in the blanks. When they saw themselves in the mirror, the new clones saw themselves as having blond hair and blue eyes even though they saw perfectly well that the clones around them had brown hair and brown eyes. That same programming made them docile in the face of authority, fearless in combat, and unable to call each other out as clones.

As a Liberator, I did not need to worry about the Death Reflex. I was the last of the Liberators, a one-of-a-kind clone. Twenty-six years ago, someone decided to run one last batch of Liberator juice through the old clone factory, and out I came.

The clone wing in the Museum of Military History had displays and holographic movies offering in-depth explanations of the evolution of clones in the same cheery light that the Air and Space Museum showed the evolution of jet fighters and broadcast technology.

Seeing my kind displayed without a warning that we were all mass murderers brought an ironic smile to my face.

The New Year’s Eve party, the monument, and the new wing all happened in the months before the Joint Hearings. Those hearings changed everything.

CHAPTER TWO

“General Smith, according to your records, the Air Force did not lose a single jet during the battle for New Copenhagen. Is that correct?” Senator MacKay asked as he sifted through his notes.

The eleven other politicians sitting behind the judiciary bar had crisp suits, immaculate hair, and polished personas. Senator Evan MacKay wore a rumpled navy blue suit that had gone out of fashion nearly a decade ago. The spoon-shaped lenses of his reading glasses rode low on the bridge of his nose. With his disheveled clothes and smudged glasses, Senator MacKay had an endearing professorial look.

More than a year had passed since the Avatari invasion, but the Senate investigation into the war had just begun. The politicians and populace in general had spent the last twelve months glad to be alive. Now, a year after the threat had passed, the witch hunt began. The politicians wanted to know what went wrong. They wanted somebody to blame.

So Congress launched an investigation into the war, ostensibly to determine our readiness should the aliens return.

Through the first weeks of the hearings, the mood of the investigation remained friendly but tense. As the investigation continued, it became obvious that the Pentagon had no idea what to do if the aliens returned, and tension turned to hostility. The galaxy-conquering Republic that once claimed to have manifest destiny in its corner now floated as helpless as a raft adrift on a stormy sea.

Senator MacKay did not ask about the fighter jets in an accusatory way, but General Alexander Smith became defensive nonetheless. “Our pilots took their chances just like everybody else, Senator,” he said, sounding defensive—a man with something to hide.

“No one is questioning the Air Force’s role in the war,” MacKay said in a calming voice. “I’m just curious about your methods. From what I can tell, the Army lost nearly six hundred thousand soldiers and sustained a ninety-five percent casualty rate. The Marines sent four hundred thousand soldiers and lost ninety-seven percent of the men they sent.

“It would appear that your fighter pilots had a much higher survival rate. How many pilots did you lose?”

Up to this point, Senator MacKay showed nothing more than polite curiosity. Apparently unaware of these statistics, the congressmen around him looked up from their notes.

“We did not lose any pilots,” General Smith growled. He was a chubby old man with white hair and a bushy white mustache, but all of the decoration on his uniform made him something more. He was the ranking member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest-ranking officer in the Unified Authority military.

“No pilots lost?” MacKay asked, clearly impressed. “Your pilots must be very good.” He paused for nearly a minute as he looked through his notes, then turned his attention to General Morris Newcastle, the highest-ranking officer in the Unified Authority Army.

“As I understand it, General Newcastle, your gunship pilots did not fare so well. Didn’t you suffer a much higher casualty rate with your attack helicopters?”

“Yes, sir,” barked Newcastle.

Smith and Newcastle regarded each other as adversaries. As the head of the Joint Chiefs, Smith held the rank, but he waged his portion of the war from an office in Washington, DC. Mo Newcastle, on the other hand, ran the show on New Copenhagen from ground zero. Smith remained the ranking member of the Joint Chiefs, but Newcastle emerged from the war as a hero.

“You had a higher casualty rate?” Senator MacKay asked again, looking for clarification.

“We lost every gunship we sent out,” Newcastle said.

The senator considered this, then went back to his notes. “That’s a very high rate,” he said. The people in the gallery laughed.

“We sent you out with our finest equipment,” MacKay mumbled as he ran through his notes. “Didn’t you have Limbaugh Attack Helicopters? Was there an equipment failure? Would you have been more effective with Cobra Attack Helicopters?”

“No, sir,” Newcastle said. “The Limbaughs worked just fine. The problem wasn’t the equipment.”

“So attack helicopters were more vulnerable than jets?” another senator asked. He sounded confused.

“Helicopters make easier targets than jets. They fly slower and closer to the ground,” Newcastle said. He and General Smith traded glares. “But I would not say that was the problem.”

“You wouldn’t?” asked MacKay.

“No, sir. We lost most of our gunships during the first battle outside Valhalla, but they were extremely effective …too effective. The enemy made them their chief target.” Newcastle sat back as if satisfied with his answer, then mumbled, “At least our pilots went out.”

“What was that?” a congresswoman asked. “What did you say?”

“I said that our gunships entered the fight,” Newcastle answered.

“Entered the fight?” MacKay asked.

“Yes, sir, our pilots showed up for the fight. General Hill determined that the situation was unsafe and refused to launch his fighters.” General James Hill was the Air Force commander on New Copenhagen.

“What do you mean he refused to launch?” the congresswoman asked. She sounded incredulous.

“The Air Force was grounded,” Newcastle repeated.

“How can that be?” Senator MacKay asked the question first, but several politicians echoed him. Every man and woman behind the bar now stared in Smith’s direction.

General Smith launched into damage control. “We couldn’t fly our jets under those conditions. The alien army had the planet surrounded with some sort of ion sleeve …”

“I believe you referred to it as the ‘ion curtain’ in your report,” MacKay said.

“Yes, sir. The ion curtain shut down the electronics in our jets before my pilots could reach a safe altitude.”

“But that sleeve did not affect your attack helicopters?” MacKay asked.

“Our pilots had to fly low. They kept to a couple of hundred feet. Flying that low made them sitting ducks, but at least they went up,” Newcastle said.

Newcastle and Smith whispered fierce messages to each other which the camera could not record. Smith said something, and Newcastle smiled and nodded.

“How much …” MacKay began, trying to retake control of the meeting. “Excuse me. How much …” He banged his gavel five times, and the noise in the chamber faded. Finally, he asked, “In your opinion, General Newcastle, how much of a difference would the fighters have made?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Newcastle said.

“General, what I’m asking you is, if the Air Force had sent out its fighters, how much of a difference could they have made?”

“Flying low? You mean if they had to fly low like my chopper pilots?”

“Yes, General. If they had entered the battle flying low, would you have taken fewer casualties?”

Newcastle did not even pause to consider the idea. “They would not have made a bit of difference, Senator. The enemy would have shot them out of the sky.”

“I see,” said MacKay. He was not on a witch hunt, not Senator Evan MacKay. The politicians on either side of him would have liked nothing more than to further their careers at the expense of Al Smith or any other sacrificial goat, but not MacKay. “I’ve read your report, General. You stated that your missile defenses were effective. You said you had more than enough equipment. What went wrong, General? Why did we lose so many planets? Why did our military come so close to losing the war on New Copenhagen?”

“It was the first time we encountered an alien army,” explained Alexander Smith. “We never experienced anything like that before. They did not use spacecraft to travel, so we could not attack them until they reached our planets. Then they spread that ion screen around our planets, obliterating any chance of naval support.” He sounded anxious as he spewed a stream of reasons why his military was so badly outgunned.

Newcastle shot Smith a fleeting, mysterious smile that faded quickly as he turned toward the bar, and said, “The problem was lack of discipline.” He paused, and added, “Cowardice.”

“Are you referring to the pilots not flying their fighters?” the congresswoman asked.

“No, ma’am,” Newcastle said. “I am referring to our enlisted men.”

“The cloned soldiers?” MacKay asked. He sounded surprised.

“Yes, sir,” said Newcastle.

“Are you saying you had a problem with the clones?” MacKay repeated.

“Yes, sir. They did not perform well in battle,” said Newcastle.

“As I understand it, clones are programmed to follow orders without question,” MacKay said.

“That is correct, sir,” Newcastle admitted.

“What are you saying, General? Are you telling us that their programming failed?” MacKay asked.

“Senator, their programming broke down under stress. We saw vandalism …graffiti …men disobeying orders. I’m not sure this was in the report, but one of our clones attacked and killed a superior officer.”

“Are you talking about something that happened on the battlefield? Was it friendly fire?” MacKay asked.

“No, sir, it was not friendly fire. Both men were off duty and we were not under attack, and the clone in question was a Liberator. He attacked and killed his superior away from the battlefield.”

Arguments and confusion broke out through the chamber. Senator MacKay banged his gavel and tried to regain order.

As the room quieted, Newcastle continued, “Senator, if you want to know what went wrong on New Copenhagen, we crumbled from the bottom up. Our enlisted men proved ineffective, undisciplined, and unreliable in battle. What went wrong was that we entrusted our future in the hands of clones.”

CHAPTER THREE

Every restaurant in Washington, DC, had the hearings playing for the lunch crowd. This was a town in which the favorite sport was politics, and congressional hearings were the Super Bowl.

I glanced up at the screen as I pulled up to the counter at my favorite diner.

“Corned beef on rye?” the waitress asked as I approached the counter. She looked like she was in her sixties, a stubby woman with badly dyed red hair and a waxy complexion.

“Same as always, Helen,” I told her. Having eaten lunch at her counter at least once a week for over a year, I knew Helen better than any woman alive.

She placed an empty mug on the counter and grabbed a pot of coffee. As she poured, I asked, “Quiet day?”

“You’re early; it’s only eleven,” she said. “We just finished with breakfast.”

The clock on the wall said 10:46.

“Yeah, I was in the neighborhood,” I said. The diner was near Union Station, not far from Capitol Hill. It was a long way to go for lunch, but they made a good sandwich, so I manufactured excuses to come to the area.

I drank my coffee black, not that I liked it that way. I preferred cream and sugar; but I was a Marine. I had an image to uphold.

From across the counter came the voice of Senator MacKay. General Smith, according to your records, the Air Force did not lose a single jet during the battle for New Copenhagen. Is that correct?

I heard this and laughed. “Damn right they didn’t lose a jet. The speckers never left the damn hangar,” I muttered.

On the screen, the senator paid little attention to General Smith as he answered the question. It was a throwaway question. His old man’s glasses riding low on his nose, Senator MacKay sat running his pen over his notes while he waited for an answer.

Our pilots took their chances just like everybody else, Senator, answered General Alexander Smith. He sounded angry.

I heard the annoyance in Smith’s voice and realized a dustup was coming. “This should be good,” I mumbled to myself.

No one is questioning the Air Force’s role in the war. I’m just curious about your methods. Senator MacKay rattled off the casualty statistics, but the camera stayed on Smith. The general looked ready to leap out of his seat and rush the bar. The “old man of the Air Force” clearly thought his bravery had been challenged.

It would appear that your fighter pilots had a much higher survival rate. How many pilots did you lose?

Helen brought me my sandwich, but I didn’t look in her direction. I watched General Smith’s face redden as he said, We did not lose any pilots.

She looked up at the screen and yawned. “I can change the channel if you want,” she offered.

“Leave it,” I said without looking away from the screen. “It’s getting interesting.” I had been grilled in a congressional hearing once. Military types found themselves at the mercy of politicians when they entered the Capitol. If the senators began pissing on General Smith, the most the old man could do to defend himself was comment on the lovely shade of yellow.

“Suit yourself,” Helen said, and she walked away.

As I understand it, General Newcastle, your gunship pilots did not fare so well. Didn’t you suffer a much higher casualty rate with your attack helicopters?

General Newcastle; I knew that bastard. I attended briefings with him on New Copenhagen. He was all bluff and bluster, an officer who talked a fierce fight but stayed away from the battlefield. He returned from New Copenhagen a hero to everyone but the men who served under him.

We lost every gunship we sent out, Newcastle told the committee.

My eyes still on the screen, I picked up half of my sandwich and took a large bite. Watching Senator MacKay and Mo Newcastle gang up on Smith brought a smile to my face. General Newcastle discussed equipment with the committee for a minute, then he showed his fangs.

General Hill determined that the situation was unsafe and refused to launch his fighters. Newcastle’s testimony hung in the air like the mushroom cloud after a nuclear explosion. There was a moment of devastating silence followed by utter confusion.

The moment I heard Newcastle’s charge, I knew it would cause a feeding frenzy. Having finally found a blemish in the military’s new, all-but-sainted image, the politicians moved in to attack.

He refused to launch? asked a lady senator. Senator MacKay might have been the chairman at this hearing, but this gal had a nose for blood. Sensing headlines, she wanted to move in for the kill; but she didn’t know how to close the deal. She had not done her homework as thoroughly as MacKay.

General Smith explained that his fighter jets were unable to reach a safe altitude, but madam politician wasn’t interested. I watched in fascination. This was theater. This was fun. There was something hypnotic and satisfying about watching Al Smith sweat like a stuck pig. Laughing and muttering jokes to myself, I wolfed down the second half of my sandwich in three bites and chased it down with a jolt of black coffee.

The flogging continued until Senator MacKay banged his gavel, and asked, In your opinion, General Newcastle, how much of a difference would the fighters have made?

I don’t know what you mean, Newcastle said.

General, what I am asking is, if the Air Force had sent out its fighters, how much of a difference could they have made?

Flying low? You mean if they had to fly low like my chopper pilots?

Yes, General. If they had entered the battle flying low, would you have taken fewer casualties?

I should have seen it coming. When push came to shove, the fraternal order of natural-born officers presented a united front. They might have it out between themselves in private; but in front of Congress, they protected their own.

They would not have made a bit of difference, Senator. The enemy would have shot them out of the sky, said Newcastle.

I see, said Senator MacKay.

General Smith spewed out a litany of excuses, hoping to explain why fighting the alien invasion was different than fighting a human war. He left out classified information about how we never fought the aliens themselves, just an army of avatars they projected onto the planet. That was why we called them the “Avatari.”

Then General Newcastle joined in. The problem was lack of discipline. He paused for dramatic effect, then added, Cowardice.

Are you referring to the pilots not flying their fighters? asked madam politician. She wanted a shill, some political target she could demolish to fuel her career.

“Don’t do it,” I muttered, knowing exactly what Newcastle would say next.

No, ma’am, I am referring to our enlisted men.

The son of a bitch was going to sacrifice the clones. In battle and now in peacetime, whenever officers felt threatened, they sacrificed the clones.

The cloned soldiers? Senator MacKay asked.

Yes, sir.

You had a problem with the clones? MacKay followed up.

Yes, sir. They did not perform well in battle, said Newcastle.

As I understand it, clones are programmed to follow orders without question, said MacKay.

Senator, their programming broke down under stress. We saw vandalism …graffiti …men disobeying orders. I’m not sure this was in the report, but one of our clones attacked and killed a superior officer.

I was the clone who killed his superior. As far as I knew, I was the only clone on New Copenhagen who killed a superior, and he deserved what he got. My only regret was that I only got to kill the bastard once. In a perfect world, I could have killed him, resuscitated the son of a bitch, and killed him a few more times.

I pulled out my wallet and left enough cash by my plate to cover the sandwich twice over. I needed to get back to the office fast.

Are you talking about something that happened on the battlefield? Was it friendly fire?

No, sir, it was not friendly fire. Both men were off duty and we were not under attack, and the clone in question was a Liberator. He attacked and killed his superior away from the battlefield, said Newcastle, as Helen came to check on me.

Seeing the bills by my plate, she called, “Don’t you want some change?”

“I’m in a rush,” I said as I started out the door. I felt like I was under fire. Watching Newcastle’s testimony was like watching bombs fall from the sky and not knowing where they would explode.

Just before I stepped out into the street, I heard General Newcastle say, Senator, if you want to know what went wrong on New Copenhagen, we crumbled from the bottom up. Our enlisted men proved ineffective, undisciplined, and unreliable in battle. What went wrong was that we entrusted our future in the hands of clones.

That was the explosion.

CHAPTER FOUR

It was an unseasonably warm day for March; the sun had broken through the morning drizzle, and steam rose from the streets.

In another hour, lunch crowds would spill out of every building, but for now, just a few pedestrians strolled along the sidewalks. Men and women in suits walked at businesslike speeds in self-imposed isolation. Nobody paid any attention to me as I hurried to the car I had checked out of the motor pool. With my Charlie service uniform and clone genes, I almost expected people to see me and shout, “Traitor!” as I climbed into my Army green sedan with its Pentagon plates. Nobody did. These people had obviously not watched the hearing.

An old man walked toward me as I opened my car door. He had white hair so fine I could see his pink scalp between the strands. He had faded blue eyes, and his lips were the same bloodless color as the skin on his face. When our eyes locked, he smiled, and said, “Hello.”

“Good morning,” I said.

He nodded and walked away without looking back.

I sensed an imminent calamity, the same feeling I had when I pulled the pin from a grenade. Perhaps I was being paranoid, but that did not mean I was wrong. I had the brown hair, brown eyes, and olive complexion of a military clone. And thanks to the exhibit in the Smithsonian, everyone in town could now recognize Liberator clones.

I drove around Union Station, then up Massachusetts. A police car stopped beside me at the last light before the freeway. The patrolman driving the car stared in my direction. He might have recognized me as a Liberator, but he would not have known what was said in the hearings. Other people might listen to the hearings as they drove, but not the police.

When the light turned green, I pulled slowly away, wanting nothing more than to blend in with the traffic around me. The cop car hovering behind me like an angry hornet preparing to sting, I kept to within five miles of the speed limit. A few minutes later I took the bridge across the river. When I checked my mirror, the police car was gone.

Once across the bridge, it was a short drive to the Pentagon. A guard checked my papers and said nothing as I pulled onto the lot. I entered the underground garage and parked my ride. As I walked away from the car, I looked up and down the rows of parked vehicles. No one seemed to notice me. A voice in my head tried to dismiss the whole thing, to laugh and say I had overreacted.

As I entered the elevator to the street-level lobby, two officers called out for me to hold the door. I tensed, but they kept talking to each other, not even noticing me. I started to think that maybe I had overreacted, then we reached the lobby. The elevator door slid open, and I entered a world of marble and glass in which large mediaLink screens hung from walls showing live news coverage of the hearings.

The lobby was huge and sparsely furnished, with a high ceiling. Men and women in business suits sat on rows of chairs, and officers in various uniforms stood in clusters. Everywhere I turned, people stared back at me. A few people looked from me to the screens on the walls and back again.

General Newcastle’s words echoed from the screens …what went wrong on New Copenhagen, we crumbled from the bottom up. Our enlisted men proved ineffective, undisciplined, and unreliable in battle.

The image of the hearing shrank into the upper right corner of the screens and an analyst appeared. While testifying before Congress this afternoon, General Morris Newcastle blamed the cloning program for setbacks suffered during the alien invasion. According to historian Michael Maynard, Newcastle’s testimony marks a sharp departure from other reports that cloned soldiers have been one of the strengths of the Unified Authority military.

Most of the people froze as I passed them. They acted as if I might be carrying a bomb, and one man whispered the word, “Liberator.”

I walked across the floor, my eyes focused straight ahead as I tried to ignore the uneasy silence around me. The Pentagon had its own police force, a complement of enlisted men with sidearms and armbands. Two of those MPs stood guarding the elevators to the upper floors. As I approached, they stood at attention and saluted.

I took the elevator to the third floor. When I stepped off the lift, I heard someone say, “Lieutenant Harris? Ah, Lieutenant Harris. Lieutenant?”

The man was an ensign, dressed in the crisp tan uniform of the U.A. Navy. He was short and slender, very likely a kid just out of the Naval Academy. “Are you Lieutenant Wayson Harris?” he asked.

“I am,” I said.

“Admiral Brocius sent me to find you,” said the ensign. “Would you mind coming with me, sir?”

Judging by his anxious demeanor, I knew he had not come to arrest me. He looked from side to side as though he thought someone might sneak up on us.

“Where are we headed?” I asked.

“B-ring, top floor …Office of the Navy,” the ensign said.

We started down the hall. I attracted attention everywhere we went. On the elevator ride up to the top floor, a couple of commanders stood staring at me, not even attempting to hide their fascination.

I started to say something, but the ensign beat me to the punch. “What’s the matter, you never seen an officer-killing Liberator clone before?” He asked this in a voice drenched with sarcasm so that everyone knew he was lampooning the commanders.

“Watch your mouth, Ensign,” one of the officers said.

“Why don’t you report me, I’m on my way to Admiral Brocius’s office right now?”

That ended the conversation. Apparently the combination of an “officer-killing Liberator clone” and an aide to the highest-ranking man in the Navy made the commanders nervous. They got off on the next floor. As they stepped out, the ensign smiled, and said, “Good afternoon, gentlemen.” Neither of the commanders bothered to respond.

“Assholes,” the ensign said, as the elevator doors closed.

We rode in silence as the elevator rose to the fifth and final floor. When the doors opened, the ensign asked me, “Where have you been for the last hour, Lieutenant?”

“I was out running errands,” I said.

“You didn’t happen to catch the hearings while you were out?”

“Yeah, I saw it,” I said. “That bastard Newcastle …”

“You had to know it was coming, Harris. It’s an old military tradition—when things go wrong, blame the speck-up on somebody else. That’s why all four branches have enlisted men; so that officers have someplace to dump the blame.”

When we arrived at Brocius’s office, the ensign walked me past the secretaries and MPs and knocked on the admiral’s door.

CHAPTER FIVE

Admiral Brocius kept a personal casino on the second floor of his family estate, but he did not gamble. He owned roulette tables, craps tables, and an array of slot machines, both antique and modern, among other things; but he never used them himself. A few times a year, he threw gambling parties attended by top brass and politicians. They did the gambling. He was the house. In everything he did, Alden Brocius insisted on house odds. That made him a safe bet but an unreliable partner—he didn’t mind improving his chances at the expense of everyone around him.

Admiral Brocius was, for instance, the officer in charge of the invasion of the Mogat home world, a strategically brilliant offensive that included assigning sixty thousand Marines to pin the enemy down until the Army arrived. The Army never arrived. Brocius skewed the odds in his favor by leaving those Marines stranded while the planet melted around them. As one of the few Marines to make it off that rock, I had an old score to settle with the admiral.

For his part, Brocius kept a wary eye in my direction. If he could, I think he wanted to clear his account with me.

Brocius did not rise as the ensign and I entered his office. He sat behind a desk so sturdy that it might have been able to hold a tank. Like his home, Brocius’s office reflected his family’s wealth. Except for a nook in which a row of three slot machines stood, the walls of the office were lined with bookshelves and paintings. A yard-wide ornamental globe, entirely made of brass, sat in the center of the room.

“Where did you find him?” Brocius asked the ensign.

“He came off the elevator as I was giving up.”

“Better late than never, I suppose,” Brocius said. He turned to me and said, “Did Ensign Kwai brief you on the hearings?”

“I saw them,” I said, making no attempt to cover my dislike of the admiral.

“Newcastle missed his calling. He should have been a politician,” Brocius said.

Brocius looked smaller than I remembered him, perhaps it was stress. He stood around six feet tall and might have been muscular once, but that muscle had gone to seed. The stress and aggravation of the Mogat War had left him with a gut. Then came the Avatari invasion. Now he looked old, fat, and tired. His hair was white, and his skin had a bleached quality to it.

“Newcastle nailed you, Harris. I don’t think the spit on his microphone dried before J. P. Glade received a call from the Judge Advocate General.” J. P. Glade was General James Ptolemeus Glade, the highest-ranking officer in the Marines.

“They cleared me of all charges back on New Copenhagen,” I said. Two witnesses had testified that I did not strike the late Lieutenant Warren Moffat until after he pulled a gun.

“The JAG thinks we should reopen the investigation,” Brocius said. “Look, Harris, Congress wanted a sacrificial goat; and Mo Newcastle handed you over.”

“Me?” I asked.

“Not just you, the whole damned cloning program,” Brocius said. “This isn’t about you. You’re not a big enough target, they can’t blame the whole war on one man.

“This is about knocking the military down a peg and keeping Congress in control. Nobody gives a rat’s ass about one measly clone, even a Liberator. They want to run the government the way they did before New Copenhagen, with Congress giving the orders and the military as its whipping boy. That makes you the poster child for everything that is wrong in the world.

“Being a Liberator makes a damned easy target. You’re like a gun or an earthquake or a nuclear bomb, yes, a damned nuclear bomb. No one needs to tell people to be scared of nuclear bombs, they already are. It’s automatic.

“From now on, whenever anything goes wrong, Congress will slap your face on it and blame it on the military. You’re the new boogeyman.”

“Where do we go from here?” I asked.

Brocius sighed. “For now we bury you and every other clone we can find. We stick you someplace deep, dark, and ugly until the rest of the universe forgets you exist.”

CHAPTER SIX

The week after the Senate hearings ended, a gang of twelve men jumped three clone soldiers who were on leave in Florida. The clones beat the shit out of the men who attacked them, one of whom spent the next three days in a coma.

The security camera of a nearby bank recorded the entire incident and multiple witnesses told the police that the attack was unprovoked. It made no difference. The clones were thrown in the brig.

The men who started the brawl, it turned out, were officers from MacDill Air Force Base.

The clones made it through the fight with barely a scratch, but they showed up for court the next day looking like they had been in a car accident. The judge did not ask about their black eyes and contusions. He ruled the attack “a military matter,” making the testimonies of civilian eyewitnesses irrelevant. He refused to review the video feed caught by the security camera for the same reason. The JAG bastard found the clones guilty of assaulting superior officers and sentenced them to five years.

One of the men who attacked the clones had a familiar name—Smith. Captain Seth Smith was the attacker who ended up in a coma. His father, General Alexander Smith, reviewed the case personally and commended the judge for justice dispensed.

Florida was just the opening salvo in the war against clones. The synthetics fared better in that battle than they would in the fights that came next.

In April, the Smithsonian Institution closed the doors of the Museum of Military History for an annual cleaning. When the museum reopened the following month, the clone exhibit had been replaced by a display showing the evolution of the combat boot. Asked why the clone exhibit had been replaced, the Smithsonian Institution’s public affairs office issued a statement about wanting to dedicate more space to the “heroic sacrifices made by human soldiers” …and their footwear.

When a reporter pressed the curator of the museum about the role of clones in war, the curator said, “Clones, dogs, and propagandists, they’ve all played important roles in military history.”

In a matter of months, the pendulum of public sentiment had swung. Appearing in daily interviews on the mediaLink, members of the Linear Committee called for a “more invested” military—i.e., a military with natural-born conscripts. The Republic could not trust its future to clones or robots, they claimed.

When Congress opened for business in September, Senate Majority Leader Tobias Andropov proposed Resolution #2516-7B, revoking the 250-year-old Synthetic Conscription Act. The resolution called for the permanent closure of the clone orphanages that once produced over a million new recruits every year. It was all show; the Mogats had destroyed those facilities four years earlier.

In the patriotic rush to eliminate cloning, reality no longer mattered as much as intentions. The Linear Committee—the executive branch of the government—unanimously praised Andropov for his courageous decision to close down nonex istent orphanages. News analysts all but nominated him to replace the retiring “Wild Bill” Grace as the chair of the Linear Committee.

Resolution 2516-7B ran through both houses unchallenged. With the already demolished orphanages officially closed, the Unified Authority military complex entered a bold new, all-natural phase in its history.

In truth, the Unified Authority did not need to beef up its military with clones now that it only had two worlds to guard. Sitting a mere three hundred light-years apart, Earth and New Copenhagen were next-door neighbors in astronomical terms.

With the public behind it, Congress moved to deep-six the cloning program once and for all. If they could have, I think the politicians might have classified us clones as obsolete weapons and demolished us like a stockpile of unneeded bombs; but we were constructed of human genes. There were limits as to what they could do with us.

In August, I was finally cleared of any wrongdoing in the unfortunate and untimely death of First Lieutenant Warren Moffat. That same month, I received orders to report to Fort Bliss, an Army base in Texas. So did thousands of other clones—be they soldiers or Marines. Those of us who survived the war on New Copenhagen went to Fort Bliss. Clones who had not served in that battle were sent to equally isolated military bases.

I reported to the base commander and was told that I would not actually be stationed in Fort Bliss. I would live in the ramshackle “relocation camp” erected beside Fort Bliss. Summer in the Texas badlands; the prospect was not very appealing. When I entered the camp, I wondered if it was meant for relocation or extermination.

Officially, our camp was part of Fort Bliss. The inmates, however, called it “Clonetown.”

Clonetown was not large; but that did not matter, there were not all that many survivors of the battle for New Copenhagen. Of the nine hundred thousand cloned troops sent to defend New Copenhagen, only thirty thousand survived. At some point, somebody told me there were another three hundred thousand clones that had remained on Earth in support roles.

The Navy still had multiple millions of clones serving in its fifteen deep-space fleets, but nobody worried about clones in space. They manned the battleships, frigates, cruisers, and carriers that had once relied on a pangalactic transportation system known as the Broadcast Network to travel between occupied solar systems. With the Network down, deep-space clones were even less of a threat than unarmed clones interred in relocation camps. We were merely unarmed and locked up, they were trapped billions of miles from Earth.

I spent my first month in Fort Bliss before finding out what the Pentagon planned to do with us. There were plenty of rumors, most of which began with a line like, “I got a friend who heard General Glade say …” Of course, none of the rumors matched up. When it comes to gossip, Marines act like little old ladies in a sewing circle.

The most popular rumor was that the Army had built Clonetown on top of a bomb. Some general would explode that bomb as we slept, solving the nagging problem of what to do with us once and for all. Everyone agreed that the rumor was a joke, but that didn’t stop groups of inmates from digging holes around camp. They didn’t find any bombs, but they did come across an abandoned honey bucket burial site. The air reeked for a week after that.

I didn’t get the feeling that Congress or the Pentagon wanted us dead; they just wanted us to fade away.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I sat alone on a row of aluminum bleachers overlooking a parade field on which squads of newly recruited natural-born soldiers drilled. I paid no attention to the platoons doing jumping jacks and running. Instead, I concentrated on squads learning how to fight with pugil sticks. I had endured these same drills nine years and two wars ago. Boot camp was tougher back then; we had veteran drill instructors. The natural-born DIs drilling these boys were fresh out of diapers themselves.

Sergeant Major Lewis Herrington quietly came up and sat on the bleachers behind mine.

I would have demanded a salute from anyone else. As the highest-ranking guest of the Clonetown detention facility, I had that right; but Herrington and I were members of an exclusive club. He and I had both survived the final battle of the Avatari war, a claim only four people in the entire universe could make. He did not need to salute.

“How do they look, sir?”

“Like conquering heroes,” I said.

As natural-borns, the five thousand recruits on the field came in all shapes and sizes. Many of them did not fit well into their government-issue tees and shorts. There was a time when one size fitted all enlisted men because every enlisted man came from the same helix. Some clones packed on a few extra pounds in the orphanages and some reported to boot camp looking skinny. I had five inches on everybody going through boot camp, but that’s how things go when you are a one-of-a-kind clone.

Herrington, who had just turned fifty, had more white hair than brown. He was the oldest inmate in our little camp, but he was bred in a laboratory and born in a tube like the rest of us. We were all created for the same calling, to serve in the military. He had gone through boot camp thirty years before me, but he saw what I saw—substandard training.

Some of the natural-born recruits on the parade ground looked like they could fight, but most of them looked better suited for writing poetry. Unlike us, they grew up civilians, never suspecting they might one day be drafted. Many of them were clearly less than enthusiastic about their new life in the military.

Perhaps as many as a hundred soldiers had paired off for sparring with pugil sticks. In one match, a tall, lanky kid came out swinging against a short, chubby opponent. The short one looked like he wanted to drop his stick and beg for mercy.

The whole point of skirmishing with pugil sticks was to simulate long rifles and bayonets at close range—antiquated stuff, but a good discipline builder. The sticks were four feet long with padded ends, not that “padded” meant “soft.” A solid blow with a pugil stick could break an opponent’s ribs or leave him with a concussion.

The combatants were supposed to hold their hands a shoulder’s width apart and pivot the stick back and forth while they struck with the ends; but this tall kid came out choking one end of the stick with both hands and swinging it like a baseball bat. If the shorter kid had even the slightest idea about how to fight, he could have blocked one of the other guy’s crazy-ass swings and sent him down for the count; but the kid kept backing away.

I could not decide which bothered me more, the rube swinging his damn stick like a bat, the miscreant cowering in fear, or the pathetic specimen of humanity masquerading as a drill instructor. The man leading the squad was a lieutenant. The Army of the Unified Authority no longer had any actual sergeants to drill its recruits. Sergeants were noncommissioned officers. The military had not seen a natural-born below the rank of lieutenant for over two hundred years. Now that they were building their “more invested” army, they had to use officers to train the first generation of grunts. When it came to the in-your-face nastiness needed to drill new recruits, the silver-spoon boys of the officer corps just did not cut it.

Having eliminated their cloned conscripts, the natural-born officers now found themselves performing tasks formerly relegated to clones. From here on out they’d use natural-borns to rush enemy strongholds, peel potatoes, and mop latrines. The satisfying irony of the situation did not go unnoticed around Clonetown.

Down on the parade grounds, several platoons had pugil stick fights going, but Herrington spotted the fight that interested me at once. “God help them if they ever go to war,” he said. “Those boys would need to improve just to qualify for shit.”

“They’re not all like that,” I said. Just a few feet away from the brute and the wimp, two boys went toe-to-toe, really hacking at each other. Neither man showed any inclination to defend himself. With all the blows they were taking, it looked like they were pummeling each other with pillows. Their drill sergeant should have stepped in and decked them both.

It was late in the afternoon, with the sun still high in the sky. The day had cooled from miserable to unpleasant, and long shadows stretched across the desiccated ground.

Behind us, veterans with actual fighting experience headed back to camp. Clonetown was a fifteen-acre compound built to house ten thousand men and currently hosting thirty thousand. Dual barbed-wire fences surrounded the compound, and sharpshooters with rifles manned the towers along the outer fence, but we were allowed to leave the compound during the day. I came here every day to watch the high comedy of these natural-born recruits; but once the sun went down, I had to report back. We had nightly roll calls, violations would not go unnoticed. After roll call, the guards closed the gates, and we turned in for the night.

“The general population cannot possibly feel safer with these speckers protecting them,” Herrington commented.

“The average citizen doesn’t know and doesn’t care,” I said. “As far as John Citizen is concerned, the sun still rises in the east and the sky is still blue. He sleeps cozy in his bed every night safe in the knowledge that Congress has his back.”

Down on the parade ground, the drill instructor finally broke up the mismatch between the tall guy and his squat victim. I actually felt sorry for these new recruits. How many hundreds of years had passed since the days when the regular Army was made up of regular men?

Herrington sat in silence watching the recruits for a couple of minutes, then asked what we were all wondering: “Sir, how long do you think they’re going to keep us locked up out here?”

“You got someplace to go, Sergeant?” I asked.

“No, sir.”

I knew three answers to his question. As an officer, my job was to give the party line—a simple We’ll leave as soon as we receive our orders would suffice. Then there was the honest answer, the answer Herrington deserved. That answer would be more along the lines of Wherever they send us, it won’t be any better than this. But there was a third train of thought, one that I even hid from myself. The new Army had approximately sixty thousand new dumb-shit recruits guarding the thirty thousand trained fighting machines now residing in this camp. They had the guns and the numbers, but we had the know-how, and the experience. If we decided to make a break, some of us would survive.

Down on the parade grounds, the drill instructor yanked the pugil stick out of the hands of his timid recruit and shook it in the air. He demonstrated the proper way to hold the stick by waving it in the man’s face. I could not hear him from this distance, but it looked like he was giving the entire platoon a good drubbing. You learn how to read DI body language in boot camp. It’s a lesson you never forget.

“The guys we had in our platoon back on New Copenhagen …I bet we could have taken every man on that field,” Herrington said.

“I bet we could,” I said, knowing he was both joking and speaking a truth. We couldn’t really have routed five thousand men with forty-three Marines, but we would have given them a beating they would not have soon forgotten. We had a veteran force—forty-three fully trained and seasoned fighting Marines. Forty of them did not make it off that planet. “Hooha, Marine,” I said. “We would’ve knocked them flat on their asses.”

Herrington watched the raw recruits for several seconds, then said, “General Smith wasn’t even on New Copenhagen. Why does Congress give a shit what that speck thinks?”

I heard what Herrington said, but a different thought ran through my mind, and I laughed.

Herrington misread my laughter. “Do you think it was our fault we lost those planets, sir? Do you think the clones ran scared?” He sounded defensive. Even though he thought of himself as natural-born, Herrington grouped himself with the synthetics. He was an enlisted man. In our world, the terms “enlisted” and “cloned” were synonymous.

“I just had this mental image of Smith leading a squad of grounded fighter pilots into the Avatari cave,” I said. That was the first time I thought about the cave that the aliens had dug on New Copenhagen without an involuntary shudder. That cave …I took a full platoon and two civilians into that cave. Nearly fifty of us went in, but only four of us made it out. On that mission, I discovered a newfound appreciation for Dante and the hell he traveled through in the Inferno.

“General Glade said he would …” Herrington began.

I cut him off. “Herrington, they have us locked up in a camp in a desert. Who do you think cut the orders that put us here?”

“General Smith was the one who …”

“And has Glade done anything to get us out?” As commandant of the Corps and a survivor of New Copenhagen, Glade was generally seen as one of the good guys by most Marines.

“Son of a bitch,” Herrington whispered.

“Yeah, son of a bitch,” I repeated. “These days, it’s a whole lot better to be a son of a bitch than a bastard bred in a tube.”

Herrington snickered, an uncomfortable sort of snicker that hinted that his neural programming was still intact. Even now, locked up in a relocation camp in Texas, he didn’t like saying bad things about superior officers.

Down on the field, the drill instructor gave the stick back to his timid recruit. He pushed the boy back out to fight. The little guy and his bigger opponent circled each other like crabs, occasionally feigning an attack but never committing themselves. After more than a minute, the drill instructor stepped in between them, cuffing them both on their helmets and probably daring them to strike him instead of each other. Neither took the bait.

“I’m glad I didn’t have to babysit assholes like that on New Copenhagen,” I said.

Herrington relaxed and laughed. “Yeah, that would have been bad,” he said.

We watched the drills in silence. After a few minutes, Herrington gave me a nod and went back to the barracks. He was a good Marine, a tough Marine, a man ruled by duty and integrity. His hair had gone white, and some of the starch was missing from his shoulders, but I could still count on him. When the shooting started, Herrington would never cut and run.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Evening gave way to night. The El Paso sky turned orange, then blue, then black. Lights came on around the parade grounds even though the recruits had already turned in for the evening. The lights were a signal for the residents of Clonetown to return to camp for the evening headcount.

A steady trickle of enlisted men walked in through the gate around me. They came in groups of two or three. We fell into lines; the guards took a quick count, and we called it an evening.

With lights blazing in their windows, the guard towers along the fence shone like candles against the night sky. I could see silhouettes of guards in the window of the nearest tower. They aimed their guns into the camp during headcount, then retired to card games once the gates were sealed.

The machinelike chirping of crickets and cicadas filled the languid air. The stuffy evening lacked so much as a trace of a breeze. Off in the distance, a fleet of trucks exited Fort Bliss. I could see their lights in the darkness. The trucks turned onto the highway and vanished. Few vehicles strayed toward our crowded encampment, especially at night.

Around camp, men stood in pockets smoking and talking. Some wore shorts and tank tops. More than a few had stripped down to their briefs. What did they care? No one would throw them in the brig. The brass had already done their worst—they’d abandoned us.

To the casual observer, everyone in this camp looked identical; but I had lived among clones my entire life, and I recognized the diversity that existed among supposedly identical men. It wasn’t just interests or training. Here were thousands of men with the exact same brains physiologically; but some of these men were brilliant and others slow. The equipment these boys packed would not allow them to reproduce. We were built to “copulate, not populate,” as a drill instructor once told me; but natural selection still toyed with their single-generation genes. The dumbest and most foolishly heroic clones died in training and battle.

As the ranking clone and only officer in the camp, I had “officer country,” all to myself. Sadly, in Clonetown, officer country consisted of one small shedlike billet. I shitted and showered with enlisted men and noncommissioned officers, but I had a one-room barrack all to myself.

As I turned down the lane that led to my quarters, I saw the caravan parked outside my door. There was a staff car, a sedan with a GSA license plate sitting center position in a line of four jeeps. Soldiers with M27s sat in the jeeps waiting, but the staff car sat empty.

Some of the men in the jeeps placed their hands on their rifles as I approached. They all watched me carefully, their heads tracking me as I walked to the door to my little one-room shed. Mostly muffled by the walls and window, a strange sound wafted out of my billet. As I opened the door, that strange noise became all the louder. I recognized it by this time; it was the sound of a woman crying.

I had one light fixture in my quarters, a two-bulb affair in a white glass dome. The light was already on, its glare radiating out of the dome filling the closet-sized room in which my humble rack took up nearly three-quarters of the floor.

“I can’t decide whether this is a military base or a ghetto,” Al Smith said, as I stepped through the door. The general stood across the room fanning himself with a folder.

We did not have luxuries like ceiling fans in Clonetown. When the days got hot, we could either leave our quarters or stay in and bake; those were the only choices. This was not an especially hot evening, but the humidity had taken its toll on General Smith. His blouse was opened at the collar, and sweat stains showed under his arms. It might have been the heat or simply his girth, but Smith made a wheezing noise as he breathed; I heard it clearly even over the loud sobbing of the woman on my bed.

“General Smith,” I said without saluting. The bastard did not deserve a salute; his bullshit testimony was the reason I was in this detention camp.

“What’s that?” I pointed to the pile of clothes and hair slumped on my rack.

“You don’t recognize her?” Smith asked. “I thought every man in the Unified Authority knew who she was.”

Now that he mentioned it, I did recognize her. Maybe she had washed the red tint out of her coffee-grounds-colored hair, or maybe it only showed in better light. All of the style had gone out of her locks, which now hung in a mop over her face, and shoulders. Misery had whipped the haughty-movie-star glamour out of Ava, but I did recognize her. She sat on the edge of my rack doubled over as if she were sick, her shoulders heaving convulsively with her sobs.

“The actress,” I said, pretending not to know her name.

“Ava Gardner, the galaxy’s most glamorous clone,” Smith said.

“Glamorous” she wasn’t. It was as if somebody had stripped the magic out of the actress, and all that was left was a sweaty, weeping mess. Ava Gardner had become something less than she seemed at the New Year’s Eve party. She had become human. Wearing a plain cotton blouse, white with no frills, she seemed far removed from the arrogant beauty I had seen the night of the party.

“What is she doing here?” I asked.

“What do you think she’s doing here?” General Smith was an important man, but he was also an old man who was hot and uncomfortable in the Texas heat. When they are hot and uncomfortable, old men often become cranky. Smith seemed ready to explode. “She’s a clone, Harris. This is a camp for clones. She’s moving in.”

“I thought that was just Hollywood gossip,” I said.

“Some of Mo Newcastle’s officers found the lab where they built her on New Copenhagen. It was hidden in a movie studio.”

“So you’re sticking a lone woman in a camp with thirty thousand men?” I asked. “Why not just take her out and shoot her?” General or not, I would show this man no respect.

Ava heard my question and moaned as if I’d kicked her in the gut. Until that moment, I thought she might have been drugged.

Smith laughed, and the corners of his dark eyes crinkled. A faint smile formed on his face as he said, “If clones are so dangerous, maybe it’s a good thing …”

“She wouldn’t be any safer with the natural-borns at the fort, and you know it,” I said.

“You’re right,” Smith admitted, the smile vanishing beneath his mustache.

“So what do you expect me to do with her?” I asked.

“That’s up to you, Harris. General Mooreland asked me to get her here safely. As you can see, I kept my end of the bargain.”

“General Mooreland? They promoted Ted Mooreland to general?” I asked, feeling both envious and disgusted. The last time I had seen that bastard, Ava was tucked under his shoulder, and he was a newly minted colonel.

Smith brightened and the crinkles returned to the corners of his eyes. “I’ve got good news for you, Harris. You’ll be back on active duty by the end of the month. In fact, you’re about to receive a promotion as well. General Glade cleared you to receive your second bar effective next week.” Having two bars on my collar points would make me a captain. “And that’s just for openers. We’ve got big plans for you.”

I heard the words, but I did not trust them. “No shit?”

“No shit,” Smith said, sounding amused. “Let’s head over to Fort Bliss. We’ll find ourselves a nice air-conditioned office where we can discuss your orders in more detail.”

“What about her?” I said, pointing to the crumpled heap of dress and hair that had finally passed out on my rack.

“I can leave a couple of men to watch her if you want,” Smith said; “but from what I hear, this gal can take care of herself.”

Something had to give. The humidity and heat, along with the stillness of the night, turned the air into vapor. Sweat rolled down my sides. General Smith, “the old man of the Air Force,” looked like he was suffocating. As we walked out to his sedan, a cloud broke somewhere in the distance. I didn’t see the flash of lightning, but the extended clap of thunder shook the walls of the temporary tin shed I now called home.

“Sounds like rain,” Smith commented, as his driver opened the car door for him.

“Maybe,” I said as I let myself in behind the driver. “From what I’ve seen, we get more lightning than rain out here.”

The first jagged streak of lightning looked like a hairline crack stretching between the earth and sky. It danced and vanished off to the west. Two seconds of thunder followed.

The air remained still. We were in the muggy doldrums.

“Do you get a lot of lightning out here?” Smith asked.

“Maybe, I haven’t been here that long,” I said, as another streak of lightning flashed.

“Sleeping in a metal structure during lightning storms, doesn’t that make you nervous?” he asked.

“I’d prefer something made out of brick. You want to call in the order, sir?” I asked.

Smith gave me a cursory chuckle.

“I didn’t think so,” I said.

“Captain Harris, you wouldn’t be here long enough to enjoy it if I did call it in.” He told his driver, “Take us to the admin building over at Bliss.”

“Yes, sir,” said the driver.

Heads appeared in windows as our little convoy traveled through Clonetown. The guards opened the gate, and we drove into the demilitarized zone between our camp and the fort. Sheet lightning flashed in the sky just beyond Fort Bliss, illuminating the low-slung silhouettes of buildings and a water tower.

“Have you seen the new recruits?” Smith asked. “What do you think of our new natural-born Army?”

“Promising,” I said in a bored voice. I didn’t feel like making small talk, not with this asshole. Whatever assignment General Smith had for me, it would not be good. It could not be good. I was a military clone, an ugly stepchild of a society that wanted to sweep past indiscretions under the rug for good.

When Congress decided to wash its hands of Liberator clones, it eliminated us through attrition. The military stopped incubating us. The Senate banned us from entering the Orion Arm, and the Pentagon sent us into every combat situation until only a handful of Liberators remained. I wondered if history would repeat itself.

We drove up to the guard post at Fort Bliss. Rain began to fall as the guard saluted and opened the gate. It fell in thimble-sized bombs that crashed into the windshield and burst. The thudding of the rain on the roof of the car sounded like suppressed machine-gun fire. With the rain banging against the tin roof of my billet, Ava must have thought she was trapped inside a snare drum.

The rain fell so hard that deep puddles formed by the time we reached the administration building. More lightning flashed, and thunder followed only a second or two behind.

“Nice weather they have here,” Smith said.

“Yeah, it’s a real vacation spot.”

“Like I said, you’ll be out of here before you know it.”

Moments later, the storm had already poured itself dry.

Compared to Clonetown with its tin-and-tent architecture, Fort Bliss looked like a civilization meant to endure. It had brick buildings, tree-lined streets, and grass-covered lawns. Our car pulled up to a two-story building that could have passed for an old-fashioned schoolhouse. Lights blazed in the windows, and guards waited just inside the doors.

“What happened to the rain?” Smith asked as he stepped out of the car.

I ignored him.

The storm might have vanished, but the air felt as humid as a wet towel. Doldrums. At least the temperature had dropped a few degrees.

Four guards held the doors open for General Smith and me to enter. They led us into a small conference room with an eight-man table, audiovisual equipment, and a screen. Smith asked me if I planned to behave myself. When I assured him I did, he told the guards to wait outside.

Now that we were in an air-conditioned office, I missed the heat. My clothes were damp from sweat and rain, and the overchilled air gave me a shiver.

I had long ago dismissed any illusions that General Smith cared for my welfare. Whatever he had up his sleeve, it would only get me far enough out of the frying pan to assure that I landed in the fire. “You served under Admiral Klyber, didn’t you?” he asked. That was all I needed to hear to know that I was headed to the Scutum-Crux Fleet. The late Admiral Bryce Klyber had spent more than a quarter of a century commanding that fleet.

I said that I had.

“Did you ever visit Terraneau?” Terraneau was the capital of the Scutum-Crux Arm.

“No, sir,” I said.

“I see. It’s a beautiful planet. Lakes, oceans; it’s a lot like Earth.” He slid a folder across the table.

“It’s been four years since the Avatari captured Terraneau, Harris. The first two years, we had no idea how to get through the ion layer in which the Avatari sealed the planet. After the experiments you ran on New Copenhagen, of course, we picked up a few new tricks.”

The fat old man with the graying hair and the piglike eyes, watched me closely as he spoke. He was cordial, but I sensed a sharp blade inside his voice. He did not care what happened to me or the clones who had once served under his command.

“We haven’t tried to reclaim any of the planets we lost during the war. As things now stand, the U.A. doesn’t have enough population to restart lost colonies; and quite frankly, I doubt Congress has the stomach for it.” General Smith slid into briefing mode that quickly. The conversation portion of our interview had ended, and he was giving me my next assignment.

“We have fleets orbiting fifteen of our lost colonies.”

The man had a knack for putting a positive spin on a dismal situation. Our fleets were orbiting those planets because they were trapped. Without the Broadcast Network transmitting our ships across space, our fleets could not travel between solar systems.

“We have attempted to make contact with those planets,” Smith continued. “Nothing big, mind you. Following your lead, we fired nuclear-tipped torpedoes into the ion curtains surrounding those planets and tried radioing in, but until last week, we’ve never made contact.

“Last week the Scutum-Crux Fleet picked up a signal from Terraneau. We’re sending you to look for survivors and retake the planet.”

“Am I going in alone?” I was being sarcastic. We’d stationed over a million men on New Copenhagen, and the Avatari damn near annihilated us.

General Smith ignored my comment. “We don’t know how many survivors are on the planet. We won’t know anything until you report back, but we’re guessing that the Avatari have done whatever damage they were planning to do and have gone home.”

The damage the Avatari planned on doing to New Copenhagen included doping the planet with poisonous chemicals, then charbroiling the place. They had bored a mine deep into the planet and saturated it with a toxic gas. I saw a man blister and die from breathing the fumes.

“What happens if I find the place crawling with Avatari?” I asked.

“Liberate it,” Smith said in a matter-of-fact tone. “That’s your specialty, right? If anyone can retake Terraneau, it’s you.”

Early in my career with the Marines, I developed a taste for philosophy. Now, listening to General Smith, I remembered a line from Nietzsche: A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.

“Just like that?” I asked. “Here’s a planet, go capture it?”

Smith laughed. “You’ll have the entire SC Fleet for support. Take whatever you need to get the job done.”

“And once I retake the planet, then what? You said you didn’t have enough people to reestablish lost colonies.”

“If I were you, I’d start by establishing a base. That’s your call, Harris. We’re transferring our officers out of the Scutum-Crux Arm. Once they are gone, you will assume command of the fleet.” He made it sound so specking magnanimous.

“You’re sending me to the farthest corner of the galaxy to assume command of an abandoned fleet which you want me to use to retake an alien-held planet. Is that right? What if I say no?”

“I’ll hang your ass from the nearest guard tower,” Smith said without a moment’s hesitation.

Another quote from Friedrich Nietzsche occurred to me: Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

CHAPTER NINE

The Unified Authority was handing over more than the Scutum-Crux Fleet. Over the next six months, the Pentagon planned to deploy all-clone crews in twelve of its fifteen stranded fleets. This wasn’t the rumored genocide my men talked about, but it would effectively turn Earth into a clone-free zone. You had to hand it to them, the Joint Chiefs had come up with a hell of a solution for their embarrassing clone situation.

General Smith claimed they were assigning us to the outer fleets so that we could “maintain security on the frontier,” but it seemed more like the Joint Chiefs were doing the military equivalent of ditching an unwanted dog. Without the Broadcast Network or ships with broadcast engines, we would never be able to return home. Some frontier security we would offer, we would not even be able to send warnings to Earth. Pangalactic communications were just as dependent on the Broadcast Network as pangalactic travel.

When I returned to my quarters, I found Ava Gardner passed out on my rack. She looked peaceful for someone who had recently cried herself to sleep. I looked at her and thought about the irony of Ted Mooreland sweeping his own dirty secret under the rug as part of the larger Pentagon action. He would fit in well with those other generals.

There was only one rack in my quarters, and I did not feel especially chivalrous; but fortunately for Ava, sleep was the last thing on my mind. I reread General Smith’s orders. That was when the first germ of my plan occurred to me. I thought it was time somebody taught the bastards a lesson. Not just generals like Smith and Newcastle, but Congress and the society that had turned its back on the men who defended it. The Scutum-Crux Fleet did not have self-broadcasting ships, but it had firepower. It was the strongest fleet in the galaxy, bar none. If I could find a way to sail that fleet back into Earth space, I could bring the Unified Authority to its knees.

Two hundred years ago, the Unified Authority began its cloning program as part of a master plan to colonize the galaxy. For two centuries, natural-born politicians feared us and natural-born generals abused us. They sent us to fight their battles and left us to die in space. And now this.

I reread the orders for the fourth time, then checked my watch. It was 0300. I didn’t feel like sleeping on the floor, nor did I feel like turning the movie starlet out of my bed; so I climbed on the rack beside her. The pretty little kitten turned and snuggled against me without ever opening her eyes.

Ava was a practical woman, I could tell from the start. She was still on the rack when I woke up, though she had managed to put some real estate between us. She looked angry that I moved in on her, but she also knew I had not taken advantage of her during the night. I woke up to find her watching me, the stern set in those green eyes warning me not to cross her.

“Good morning,” I said.

“What are you planning to do with me?” she asked.

“What do you want me to do with you?” I asked.

She sat up. “Well, I’m going to need an apartment of my own.”

“An apartment?” I asked. “This isn’t a specking hotel, it’s a relocation camp.”

“I need to shower,” she said.

“Not as much as you will by the end of your stay,” I said.

She ignored my comment and kept speaking. “I can cook for myself if I have to.”

“Nope, no kitchens,” I said.

She stood and started walking toward the window.

“I wouldn’t get too close to the window,” I said.

“It’s hot in here,” she said. She was sweating, and her skin had turned pink. Her hair was damp at the roots, and her eyes were puffy, but she still looked pretty. Her curves showed well through the sweat-stained blouse, and the shape of her face was addictive.

“It will get a lot hotter if one of those clones out there spots you,” I said. “You’re in a camp full of men who have not seen a woman for months. What do you think will happen if one of them sees you?”

“Well, I understand you’re the commanding officer on this base. That was what Teddy said, that you were in charge here.” She sounded annoyed. This was not the weeping, wilting damsel in distress that I had seen the night before, but neither was she the haughty diva I’d met back at the party. I think she’d cried out her helplessness.

“Teddy?” I asked, then realized she meant the newly minted General Theodore Mooreland. “I’m not in command, I’m just the only officer on the premises. There’s a difference, just ask the guards. You shouldn’t have any trouble spotting them—they’re the ones with the machine guns.”

She glared at me, but she also backed away from the window. That was a good thing, it meant she was thinking. “What about showers? What about food?” she asked.

I did not have running water in my billet, just a rack, a light fixture, and a small table. “I could request a second cot,” I said, “but somebody’s bound to ask why I need it.”

“What happens when I need to use the restroom?” she asked.

“That’s going to be a problem,” I muttered, inwardly wondering what would happen if I suggested she hold it for the next few weeks. “I suppose I can bring you a bucket; I’ll just have to dump it in the latrine every night.”

“A bucket?” She started to raise her voice, then caught herself.

“Unless you have a better idea,” I said.

“Teddy said …”

“If Teddy cared so much about keeping you comfortable, you would not be here right now.”

The words hit her like a slap across the face. She backed farther away from the window and sat on the edge of my bed. I saw tears start to flow, but she didn’t crumble this time. She glared up at me, her eyes boring into mine. It was just like General Smith had said, she was a tough little scorpion. “If it gets any hotter in here, I’ll roast,” she said.

“I can bring in water.”

“What about a fan?” she asked.

“We don’t have fans.”

“How do I shower?”

“Same as going to the bathroom, do it out of a bucket. I’ll find a towel; you can sponge yourself.” She started to say something, so I added, “Or you can take your chances out there.”

She fell quiet. The expression I saw on her face most closely resembled defeat. She must have realized there was nothing more I could do for her. Had Mooreland not sent her to the camp, she might have been able to get some movie producer or Hollywood friend to take care of her; but out here, I was her only option.

A forlorn smile formed on her lips as she whispered, “Thank you.”

I started the day looking for buckets—one for water, one for excrement. I found a couple of rusty buckets around the latrine and took them to the showers to wash them out. It only took a minute of scrubbing to see that they were as clean as they were going to get, so I filled them with water, grabbed a few rolls of toilet paper, and went back to my shed.

“What are those?” Ava asked, when I lugged the buckets inside.

“One is your toilet, the other’s your sink,” I said.

“I hope you don’t expect …”

“I don’t expect anything,” I said. “Tell you what, why don’t you go tell the guards that the facilities aren’t up to your standards, and this whole thing is all one big mistake?”

She looked up at me, and I saw emotions colliding in her moist olivine eyes. Her surprise boiled itself into anger which in turn distilled into desperation. The haughtiness of her expression went stiff, then relaxed, then toppled. She stood silent and distant. Her shoulders slumped as she realized that she could no longer control the world around her.

I felt sorry for the bitch, but, “I’ll go get us some breakfast,” was all I could say.

I went to the mess hall for breakfast, slopping a double portion of oatmeal on my plate, then grabbing four pieces of toast. These I carried back to my billet. When I offered her food, she said she was not hungry; so I started eating. A minute later, she asked if I had anything to spare. I handed her the tray. She considered the food, then barely touched it.

“You really plan to keep me hidden in this tin box?” she asked.

“Some people have skeletons in their closets; I have a movie star,” I said.

She didn’t laugh. Instead, she touched me on the cheek, and said, “I’m not sure if you are my white knight or my tormentor.”

It sounded like a line from a movie. I started to tell her I was both but instead said nothing.

Our eyes met, and I read her. She needed protection, and she would give me anything I wanted if I’d just keep her safe. She was every bit as much a businesswoman as she was an actress.

Ava was beautiful, but I knew her allure would evaporate once I began hauling her shit to the latrine. She needed a shower. Smudges of dirt powdered her forehead. Her makeup had worn off, leaving her with blemishes on her cheeks and flesh-colored lips. Her hair had tangles and knots, and she needed new clothes, but in spite of all that, she still looked good.

Some mornings I woke up and looked into those green eyes and realized I could lose myself in them. There was something calming about them. If I let her, Ava could intoxicate me with her eyes.

I’d spent time with a variety of girls. In the Marines we called them scrub—girls you played with and left behind. I might even have fallen in love once; I couldn’t be sure. I knew more about fear than love.

CHAPTER TEN

There was no question, Master Gunnery Sergeant Kelly Thomer had recently luded up, the only question was, “When?” He sat on the warm ground in the shade of his barracks building, his eyes staring straight ahead. Twenty guys were playing a half-court game no more than ten yards from Thomer, but I doubt he noticed. One team wore tank tops, the other went skins. They swore, they fouled, two guys got in a fistfight; but Thomer sat oblivious to it all. In another couple of hours, the day would heat up, and the players would go rest. Clonetown might close down in the midday heat; but Thomer would stay seated. He was on Fallzoud, nothing mattered to him.

Thomer had once been as perfect a Marine as any man in the Corps. He thought too much, and he had too much compassion for his men; but he obeyed orders with precision, remained clearheaded in battle, and never placed his needs over the good of the Corps. Now thirty-one years old, he was still in his prime physically. He could run ten fast miles or hike fifty with a heavy pack. His subordinates respected him, and his superiors valued him, but the shadow of drug abuse now darkened his career.

New Copenhagen had left Thomer unstable. In the first days after the war, the doctors diagnosed him as clinically depressed and ordered him to take a serotonin inhibitor called Fallzoud. The drug wasn’t supposed to be addictive, but that didn’t stop him from getting hooked. Most clones who took Fallzoud had the same problem.

Most Fallzoud junkies turn into paranoid schizophrenics, but they also became capable of learning they were clones without having a death reflex. The drug was dangerous, but it had its uses.

The attendants manning the Clonetown medical dispensary handed out Fallzoud to anyone who asked. They wanted us on the drug; it made us less of a threat. Hundreds of clones had come to Clonetown with a Fallzoud habit; and thousands would leave here that way.

“Hello, Thomer,” I said as I sat down beside him.

“Good morning,” he said, turning his head and staring at me. His eyes were dull and heavy-lidded. After luding, Thomer sometimes went a half hour at a time without blinking.

“How are you feeling, Master Sergeant?” I asked, wanting to evaluate his condition before starting an important discussion.

“I just sprayed. I feel great,” he said.

Deciding I would do better to come back when he had a few less bats in his belfry, I climbed to my feet. Fallzoud worked its magic quickly and with profound effect. In another hour, Thomer would show signs of intelligence. He’d remain unmotivated and lethargic; but at this moment, I would have described him as closer to catatonic.

“Maybe we should talk later,” I said.

Drug-dulled as he was, Thomer managed to climb to his feet. “It’s okay, sir. You don’t need to leave, I’m a little sluggish, that’s all.”

A little sluggish my ass; if he turned any more sluglike, he’d leave a mucus trail. Not trusting his ability to grasp what I had to tell him, I suggested we find Herrington—my third in command. Maybe keeping Thomer on his feet would circulate some oxygen to his brain.

Herrington and Thomer had once been very similar. Thomer was more of a Boy Scout and Herrington more of a Marine, but they both lived by the rules and led by example. They had something else in common, too. Both of them lost best friends on New Copenhagen. Herrington, who was twenty years older than Thomer, shrugged off the loss. Thomer fell apart at the seams. I thought I could still trust him in battle, though. When a good Marine goes into battle, the drugs, doubts and, all-purpose demons go on the back shelf.

“Think you can go a full day without a Fallzoud breakfast?” I asked, as we crossed a “yard.” They called the open areas of Clonetown yards even though they were dry and bald with not so much as a tuft of grass. The glare from the open sunlight left me squinting, and heat had already begun to radiate off the corrugated tin buildings. I saw ripples of heat in the air and wondered how Ava was doing.

It took us an hour to find Herrington. When we finally did locate him, he was sitting in one of the first places we had looked—a set of bleachers sitting in the shade of a guard tower and overlooking the parade grounds. Herrington saw us coming and waved, then looked back at the field. As we approached, I noticed his venomous grin.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

Looking down on the field, I saw a ring of recruits standing around a fallen comrade. The man lay flat on his back, legs out straight, two pugil sticks near his feet.

“Looks like they finally found a fighter,” I said.

“He’ll be doing it in the brig. The guy on the ground is an officer. One of the recruits lost his grip on his pugil stick, and it flew off and hit him in the head.”

“You’re joking?”

“Knocked him out cold,” Herrington said. “It was the first clean shot I’ve seen all day.”

As Herrington filled me in on the accident, Thomer stared out across the field with a blank expression. His hair was not regulation length and he needed a shave. I wondered if the reliable Marine I once knew still lived in that head.

“I had a visitor last night,” I began. “Anyone want to guess who?”

“It couldn’t have been Ava Gardner; she was too busy in my rack,” Herrington said, an amused look on his face.

The joke hit too close to a truth that I was not yet ready to share, so I answered my own question. “Al Smith favored me with a visit.”

Herrington whistled, then said, “The Old Man of the Air Force himself?”

“I heard something about a convoy driving through last night,” Thomer said.

Herrington asked, “General Smith. I don’t suppose he came bearing an apology?”

“Not exactly,” I said, “but he did say we’re going back on active duty. They’re transferring the entire camp out to the Scutum-Crux Fleet.”

“Back on active duty?” Thomer asked. “That sounds good.” He was almost out of the stupor phase of his intoxication. Next he would begin a short period of paranoia. In another hour he would become withdrawn and stay in his shell until his next dose. Withdrawn would be an improvement.

“Those bastards are just trying to get rid of us by shipping us across the specking galaxy,” Herrington said, stating the obvious. Giving it more thought, he added, “Oh well, at least we’re going to be babysitting battleships. If it gets me out of this shit hole, I’m all for it.”

“Smith says they’ve made contact with survivors on Terraneau. Our mission is to retake the planet and establish it as a base for the fleet,” I said. “They’re pulling all of the natural-borns out. I guess we get to do whatever we want once they’re gone.”

“The universe’s first all-clone fleet,” Herrington observed. “Rape, pillage, and plunder in an abandoned corner of the galaxy. Hooha!”

Thomer, a clone who suspected he might be a clone, shook his head. “What about the death reflex? Won’t we lose a lot of men when they hear they are sailing with an all-clone fleet?”

“Not clones, ‘enlisted men,’ ” I said. “They even covered that in the orders. From here on out, we only refer to ourselves as an ‘Enlisted Man’s Fleet.’ ”

Everything happened the way General Smith said it would. One week after he left, I received a message letting me know that I had been reinstated, given a transfer to the Scutum-Crux Fleet, and handed a new pay grade. I was promoted to captain in the Unified Authority Marines.

Every man in Clonetown received orders the following day. Like me, they had been transferred to the SC Fleet.

Battalions of officers descended on Clonetown to assign men new Military Occupational Specialties. They arranged us into platoons, companies, battalions, and regiments. It didn’t matter what branch the clones were in before, they were all assigned to the Marines from here on out, and I was officially their commanding officer.

Fort Bliss armory issued us combat armor complete with everything but sidearms. Every man received two government-issue rucksacks, one contained a set of regulation Marine combat armor, and the other contained clothes and toiletries.

I was issued two sets of armor. I carried both sets back to my billet to inspect them.

As she always did, Ava hid under my rack when she heard someone approaching the door. The place looked empty, but I knew where she was. Closing the door, I said, “Come on out, it’s me.”

There was a pause as she searched the quarters from beneath the cot to make sure she was safe, then wiggled out. Her white cotton blouse was mostly brown now, and permanent stains had formed under her arms. She constantly washed her face and arms with a rag and water. Her skin was as white and creamy as ever, but her hair was a snarl.

“What’s that?” she asked as she climbed to her feet.

I hated stupid questions; the words “Combat Armor” were clearly displayed on each rucksack. “Government-issue panties,” I said. “All the men are wearing them.”

She flinched as if I had threatened her. It always happened. She asked some stupid question, I answered sarcastically, and she winced and went silent. I hated it. I specking hated living with Ava.

“It’s combat armor,” I said. “They gave me two sets.”

“Why do you need two sets?” she asked.

“One is for you.”

I opened the first set and saw it was mine. The helmet had a discreet cluster near the collar identifying it as command gear. I pulled out the leg shield and chest. Sure enough, they fit me perfectly. I could fit into arm shields and leggings made for general-issue clones, but they were short for me.

I had no trouble spotting the modifications on the second suit of combat armor. The boots had three-inch-thick soles. The arms were short. The chest plates were designed to compress and conceal a woman’s chest. Ava would find them constricting, but they would make her look like a man.

“Somebody went to a lot of trouble putting this together for you,” I said.

Ava took the armor, and said, “Honey, if they wanted to put themselves out for me, they should have put me up in a guest cottage back in Bel Air.” She looked at the chest plates, turning them over so she could see them inside and out. “This part fastens over my shoulders, right?”

I nodded. “It’ll be a tight fit, and the boots are going to be heavy,” I said. “But once you put this on, you’ll look like every other clone in Clonetown.”

I thought Ava would have a smart answer, but she didn’t. Without saying a word, she placed the armor on the table. She looked around my little one-room shit hole and her eyes started to tear up. “We’re really going to leave,” she said.

“Soon,” I said.

“They’re going to open the gates, and we’re going to walk right out.”

“That just about sums it up,” I said. “We’ll be on our way to the Scutum-Crux Fleet.”

“Do the ships have showers with hot water?” she asked.

“You’ll still be confined to my quarters,” I said.

“Yes, I know, but will there be showers with hot water?”

“You’ll still be in hiding.” Even as we spoke, I tried to figure out our living arrangements. Until I assumed command of the fleet, I would live in the Marine complex. I’d have private quarters. They wouldn’t be huge, but they would be larger than my Clonetown digs. I might even be able to scrounge up a second rack. “You’ll still need to eat in my quarters.”

“Yes, but will you have a shower in your room?” she asked. “Do officers take warm showers?”

“Yeah, there will be a shower in my billet,” I said.

“I’m not sure what a billet is; but if it has warm water, I think I’ll love it,” she said.

“Quarters, your billet is where you stay,” I said. “And it will have warm water.”

Ava sat down on the bed and put her face in her hands. She started to sob.

“What is it now?” I asked. This was not the first time I had seen a woman get emotional. Normally I walked away from the relationship when their emotions started to show; this time I couldn’t. Having just given her good news, I could not understand why in the hell she was crying.

“I’m happy,” she said, both laughing and crying at the same damn time.

That night, after I’d emptied the waste bucket, Ava and I finally tested the springs on my rack. We were both hot, and our bodies were slick with sweat. It would have been nicer if a storm had broken; but she was willing enough, and it seemed like a good way to end the evening.