intelligence, the Japanese population of Ezer Kri signed on with them. Even with the Japanese on their side, the Mogats and Confederate Arms did not seem to pose much of a threat.
As I said before, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times …”
PART I
MURDER
CHAPTER ONE
“You look like a …” The boy got a stunned look on his face and stopped without finishing the sentence. He was about to tell me that I looked like a clone and changed his mind. Clever boy. Finishing that thought would either end in disaster or embarrassment. If I were a regular clone, hearing this might trigger a death reflex that released a flood of fatal hormones into my brain, killing me instantly. A more likely outcome might be my not knowing what he was talking about. I would laugh at him or possibly threaten him.
Few clones knew they were clones. Government-issue military clones had brown hair and brown eyes, but the neural programming synapse in their brains made them see themselves as having blond hair and blue eyes. It was the government’s way of preventing an uprising from within the warrior class.
“I look a lot like an Army clone?” I asked, trying to sound relaxed and conversational. “I hear that a lot.”
The boy might have been in his twenties. His shoulder-length orange-red hair was stringy and lank. Large red pimples formed a constellation across his forehead. I was twenty-two, but I had seen death and battle and betrayal. Walking among the general civilian population, I considered most males under the age of thirty to be boys. The few who did not strike me as morons were thugs, like the one I had come here to meet.
The boy looked stunned. He was neither a policeman nor a guard, just an usher in a movie house. His mouth hung open as he pondered my answer, and his eyes showed a mixture of confusion and fear.
“I’m a lot like them,” I said as if confiding a family secret. “The Pentagon used my grandfather’s DNA to make those clones.”
“No shit,” the boy said. A smile formed on his face. Of the six arms of the Milky Way galaxy, four had recently declared independence from the Unified Authority—the Earth government. The Orion Arm, Earth’s home arm, remained loyal to the Republic; but this planet—New Columbia—was suspect. The New Columbian government swore allegiance to the Unified Authority, but its government was filled with politicians who openly sympathized with the Confederate Arms.
“Yeah,” I said. “You might say half the Army and I are cousins. For the record, Army clones are about four inches shorter than me and a lot wider around the shoulders.”
“Yeah,” said the boy, and he laughed nervously. “I knew something was different.”
There were a couple hundred thousand military clones assigned to New Columbia, but they seldom strayed far from their bases. The U.A. government had to tread lightly because of the planet’s skewed neutrality.
The boy looked at my ticket. “Oh, wow, you’re going to
The hall was wide and bright with 3-D lenticular posters from upcoming movies on the walls. It was early in the afternoon on a weekday, and I had most of the theater to myself. The only people ahead of me were a young couple on a date—an uptight boy holding hands with a fresh-faced girl. The boy must have wanted to get to his movie. He walked quickly, his girlfriend in tow. The girl floated along lazily and paused to study each movie poster they passed.
“C’mon,” he said, as he opened the door to their holotorium. “We’re missing the coming attractions.”
I went two doors farther.
On the screen, a blond-haired, blue-eyed, barrel-chested Hollywood stud played Lieutenant Wayson Harris, the highest-ranking survivor of the Little Man campaign. As I took my seat, six enlisted men let themselves into Harris’s quarters and asked him about the mission. These men were clones. They all looked exactly alike. They had brown hair and brown eyes …like me. They stood about five feet eleven inches tall—four inches shorter than me.
The people who made this film may have hired retired clones to play the enlisted men. I was impressed.
“
“
“
“
I slumped in my seat. This movie was supposed to be authentic with real combat footage taken from the actual battle. Maybe the battle scenes would be more realistic, but this portrayal of military clones was painfully propagandistic. This movie was the kind of jingoistic shit that Hollywood always churned out during times of war; something meant to build patriotic morale. On a planet like New Columbia, that effort was wasted. I was the only person in the holotorium.
At least, I was the only person in the theater up until that moment. As Harris finished his soliloquy about defending the Republic, the door at the back of the holotorium opened. I heard men whispering among themselves as they moved into empty seats directly behind me.
By this time, Lieutenant Harris and a platoon of Marines were being drop-shipped behind enemy lines. They landed about one mile in from the beach where the rest of the Marines were pinned down by a group of Mogat Separatists. Harris and twenty-two commandoes snuck into the enemy’s bunker. Using knives and pistols, Harris and his men made short work of at least two hundred enemy soldiers. God, it was glorious.
The scene was played out with a combination of two-dimensional projectors creating the background behind three-dimensional holographic images. The result was a battlefield that virtually burst out of the screen. As shown in this film, the battle for Little Man was filled with heroism and valor. Everything was bright colors and patriotic music…. And in the middle of all of the action stood Lieutenant Wayson Harris, twenty feet tall and covered with enemy blood as he ran from one room to the next brandishing that gigantic knife.
“Hello, Harris,” whispered one of the men behind me. “Let’s talk.”
“Can it wait?” I asked. “I want to see how this turns out.”
“You know how it turns out,” the man said. “You were there.”
“Not at this battle, I wasn’t,” I said. “The invasion of Little Man that I saw didn’t look anything like this. We got pinned down on the beach. The Navy had to nuke those Mogat bunkers just to get us off the sand.”
“That so?” the man asked. “I thought this movie was supposed to be accurate.”
Up on the screen, Hollywood Harris led the charge across Little Man Valley. The charge was famous. Some 2,300 Marines ran across the floor of the valley thinking they were up against two or maybe three thousand Separatists. They did not know about the ten thousand reinforcements hiding just over the hill.
“You led the charge?” the man behind me asked. “That took guts.”
“I wasn’t even on the field. I was way off on the side. My platoon was assigned to flank the enemy,” I said.