The Clone Sedition (24 page)

I shook my head, and confessed, “Don, I have no idea what came over me. I think I was out of my specking mind.”

Cutter calmed himself as he heard my apology. He said,
“So you entered the spaceport and visited Gordon Hughes on Thursday. On Friday you broke into Mars Air Force Base. What happened next?”

“I did old-fashioned recon until my men arrived. I counted heads, broke into computers, and hid in the rafters,” I said. I remembered everything I did, but I did not really remember doing any of it. The details would not come to mind. It was almost like I was reading an itinerary.

I said, “I didn’t get much sleep before the mission. By the time my men arrived at the base, I’d gone forty hours without sleep.” Were the excuses for my benefit or for his? I didn’t know who I was trying to convince. I said, “It was a specking miracle the bastards running the base didn’t catch me.”

Cutter listened carefully. He seemed to consider every syllable.

“You said the Martian Legion was in the spaceport. Who was on the base?”

“Legionnaires, I suppose,” I said. “There weren’t very many of them.”

“I see,” said Cutter. “And you killed them?”

“They fought to the last man,” I said.

“What did you find once you had control of the base?”

“I found out about the religious movement,” I said. “And I found out how they smuggled five thousand men to Earth for the Night of the Martyrs. They caught rides on freighters. Some of their boys stowed away in empty containers, some bribed their way on, some caught rides as sailors.”

“Five thousand of them?” Cutter asked. “We would have heard something.”

“We should have,” I agreed. “We also found out where the Martian Legion got its shotguns. ‘Nickel’ Hill forgot some crates when he abandoned the base.” General George Nicholas “Nickel” Hill was the last commander of the Unified Authority Air Force.

“And the New Olympians found them,” Cutter guessed.

“All part of their religious revival,” I said. “Some guy found five thousand shotguns and decided to build an Army of God around them. They thought they were on a divine errand and that God would protect them.”

“Seems a little optimistic,” Cutter observed.

“Like I said, having one of the rails intact worked out for the best,” I said.

“We destroyed them.”

“Either way,” I said, not wanting to argue with Cutter. I said, “They came after us. Hunting them down in the spaceport would have been a problem.

“We’ve recovered 4,993 shotguns. I think it’s safe to assume that the Martian Legion is no more.”

As Cutter thought about this, he must have seen the same thing I saw, that Mars and the New Olympians did not pose much of a threat. A small, fanatical portion of the population led an unpopular revolt and was massacred. They smuggled a few helpless slobs to Earth, and we made short work of them as well.

This ship had missiles and particle-beam cannons and torpedoes and fighters and thousands of trained fighting men. On this one ship, we had more firepower than the New Olympians and the conquered people of Earth combined; and the
Churchill
was only one of the sixty-three fighter carriers in our fleet. Cutter had more than five hundred ships under his command.

I had no doubt that Cutter saw the same thing I saw, that the New Olympians posed no threat to the Enlisted Man’s Empire.

NAME: CALL, MATTHEW C

RANK: FIRST LIEUTENANT

SERIAL NUMBER: CM768-74-951

AGE: 27 RAISED IN ORPHANAGE #351

CLASSIFICATION: CLONE (Standard Make)

STATUS:
KILLED IN ACTION
Death by propafenone poisoning.

Call’s personnel file had hundreds of bits of information, but those first six fields said it all. He was a clone, he’d risen to lieutenant, and he died from a death reflex. Watson ignored the photos, the metals, the requisite blood type, hair color, skin color, and eye color. Once you classified Call as a clone, the physical description became irrelevant.

Watson skipped the findings from the autopsy and read ahead in the file.

Like every sailor, soldier, and Marine in the Enlisted Man’s Military, Call had seen action. He’d fought aliens on St. Augustine. He’d participated in the evacuations of St. Augustine and Gobi. When the Enlisted Man’s Empire invaded Earth, Call had taken part in the first wave of the invasion.

Like most clone servicemen, Call had a clean record. He’d never been arrested.

“Looks like you were a model citizen,” Watson observed.

Before joining Tarawa, the recently reinstated Second Regiment of the Second Division, Call had been stationed at the Mountain Warfare Training Facility, a base located on the West Coast of the former United States. His Military Occupational Specialty was infantry.

“You were a target on the Night of the Martyrs,” said Watson. He laughed, and said, “You and Harris, two homicidal peas in a psychopathic pod.”

Don Cutter’s voice came from the console. “Watson, you there?”

“Speaking,” said Watson.

“Speaking…sir,” said Cutter. He continued, “Your old boss is back from the dead. We just had a long chat about Mars.”

“What did he say?” asked Watson.

“I’m not going to answer that?”

“Classified information?”

“No. Not at all. If what he told me is true, there’s nothing worth classifying,” Cutter said, sounding neither irritated nor sarcastic.

He said, “I have a job for you, Watson. Have you ever met Colonel Curtis Jackson?”

“The commanding officer?” asked Watson

“The commanding officer of Second Regiment,” Cutter said.

Watson frowned as he realized that he liked working for the brainwashed Marine more than the admiral with the stick up his ass.

“I want you to debrief Jackson,” said Cutter.

“How do I debrief him?” Watson asked. He was not familiar with the term.

“By asking him what happened,” Cutter answered, irritation obvious in his voice. “
Debrief
, interview, interrogate, ask…Look, just get me a feed of him telling you what happened on Mars. I want to compare his story to the one Harris told me. I want to see how they match up.”

Watson went to the Marine compound and asked for Jackson. He was taken to an office near the barracks, where he sat and waited. Outside the window, the compound bustled with life. Marines jogged past in packs. Lines of men exercised.

A clone walked into the office. Watson knew him by his name tag and by the eagle on his collar. He reached out an arm to shake the clone’s hand as he said, “Colonel Jackson, I’m Travis Watson. Admiral Cutter sent me to debrief you about Mars.”

Jackson shook his hand. Still gripping Watson’s hand, he said, “I thought you worked for General Harris.”

“The admiral transferred me to his staff while you were on Mars,” Watson said as he returned to his seat.

Jackson’s normally intense expression split into a smile, and he laughed long and loud. He said, “Isn’t that rich? I always hear about wives running off while their husbands are on missions. This is the first time I heard about an unfaithful staff member doing it.” He sat down in the seat next to Watson’s. “How did Harris take the news?”

“He keeps calling me ‘Mr. Navy Man.’”

“‘Mr. Navy Man,’” Jackson repeated. “You know, there’s a lot of bad blood between the Marines and the Navy.”

“To hear Harris tell the story, there’s bad blood between everyone and the Navy,” said Watson.

Jackson grinned and nodded. He liked that. He said, “I guess that’s true. The Army and the Air Force don’t have much use for swabbies.” He thought it over for a moment, and added, “As Navy brass go, Cutter’s better than most.”

Watson placed his computing tablet on the desk, angling it so the pinhole-sized camera pointed toward Jackson. It was a wasted effort. The camera had a 360-degree fish-eye view of the room, and it turned everything it saw into blurry distorted data that the tablet’s processor interpolated and set right.

Watson had never used the video-feed function on this particular tablet, but the application and equipment were nearly ubiquitous in twenty-sixth-century technology. He said, “Tell me what happened on Mars.”

“What happened on Mars? That’s a tall order, isn’t it? A lot of things happened.”

Watson leaned back in his chair, and said, “Start at the beginning.”

Jackson drew a deep breath through his nose, held it in his lungs for several seconds, then exhaled. His eyes opened wide for a moment, then narrowed as he considered what to say. A man in his late forties, he had scattered white strands in his bristly regulation-cut brown hair. He sat with his back perfectly erect and placed his hands on his knees.

“We landed. We marched around a bit, and then we went to visit the speck who was supposed to be in charge.”

“You mean Governor Hughes?”

“Yeah, Hughes. He was supposed to be in charge, but he wasn’t. The bastard was just another grasshopper hopping around the anthill.”

“What does that mean?” asked Watson.

“What do you think it means? Grasshoppers are bigger than ants, aren’t they? If an ant and a grasshopper scuffle, the grasshopper wins because it’s a hundred times bigger than the ant. The grasshopper can crush it, bite it in half, or stomp the little bastard into the dirt, no problem. But, see, there’s no such thing as one solitary ant in nature, am I right?”

“I’ve seen scouts,” said Watson.

“Me, too; and there’s always another one a few inches away. Maybe that grasshopper sees the second scout and stamps the little bastard out as well; but that doesn’t make him king of the anthill because there’s another scout after that and another one after that until you get all the way to the anthill, and there’s a whole sea of ants waiting inside that hill. There’s a flood of ants, just waiting there, under the surface…ready to erupt from that hill.”

“And Hughes is the grasshopper?”

“He knows he’s not in control.”

“What about the Martian Legion?” Watson asked.

“History. Gone. We butchered the bastards.”

Watson watched the colonel speak, fascinated by his individuality. Jackson had the same face as a million other clones, but his expressions, his posture, and the way he spoke made him unique. He spoke slowly in clipped sentences, as if he had just woken up.

As far as Watson knew, no clone had ever attended college,
but the ones in the Pentagon seemed educated. Harris was well-read. He talked about philosophy and history. Cutter’s interests were not as wide, but he had good diction. Jackson did not. He didn’t swear much, less than Harris, but his vocabulary was limited, and he did not strike Watson as particularly bright.

Jackson launched into how the Legion had tried to attack the regiment that first night. He said, “They should’a come straight at us then. There were five thousand of them against a lone regiment. We were fish in a barrel. No place to run. No place to hide. Shot beats bullets at close range.

“You heard what they did instead?”

“The chlorine gas?” asked Watson.

“Yeah. Chlorine, right. We neutralized it while it was still in the vents, then Harris went out after them.”

“What happened after he left? I heard he lost contact with you.”

“For a minute or two. They blocked our signal.”

“How did they do that?”

“Speck, easiest thing in the world. They call it ‘sludging.’ You jam the airwaves with a strong signal that drowns everything else out. The interLink isn’t an easy signal to block, but I’ve seen it happen. They sludge the airways and they off their own transmissions, too. I guess they didn’t have anyone they needed to contact.”

Watson said, “They could have warned their partners in the Air Force base.”

“If they knew Harris was coming.”

“How did you get your signal back?”

That seemed to confuse Jackson. He shrugged, and said, “We got it back.”

“That was when Harris ordered you to go to the Air Force base?”

“Yeah, right.”

“How did you get there?”

“We flew in transports.”

Watson nodded, and said, “Let me make sure I have the details in the correct order. You landed on Thursday.”

“Late Thursday,” Jackson corrected.

“You marched to Governor Hughes’s office.”

“Yeah, what a waste of time that was.”

“Then you stopped for the night.”

“Something like that. We bivouacked in an abandoned food court…Course we had to convince the locals to abandon it.”

“Later that night, the New Olympians attacked…”

“And Harris followed them out. He contacted us from the Air Force base, and we followed him out.”

“And all of that took place on Friday?”

“I suppose so, I lost track of time. The whole mission flew by. We spent some time searching the base, then we had a firefight with the Martian Legion, next thing I knew, we’d landed on the
Churchill
, and we’d been gone for a week.”