Rogue Clone

the neural program that made Liberators what they were, but I could not imagine life on a farm.

“She could come with us,” I said, thinking I had found a workable alternative. “We could take them to Earth or to …some other planet.”

Freeman shook his head. “She doesn’t want to get out. She wants to bring you in.”

“Ray, the boy is just coming along for the ride,” I said.

“Just know what you’re getting into,” Freeman said. “Marianne isn’t just scrub you met on the beach.” Having delivered his warning, he left the cockpit and climbed out of the ship. His job was to scout the area around the farm. We needed to know where the Grant would send its landing party and how we could defend ourselves.

“You want to sit up here?” I asked Caleb.

His smile brightened and he trotted into the cockpit. He sat in the copilot’s seat.

Archie stood hunched in the door of the cockpit. Caleb and he watched every move I made as I pressed buttons and flipped switches. “What is that for?” “How about that one?” Caleb asked questions like a six-year-old, but he stored up the details like an adult. Archie watched in silence.

When I powered up the broadcast computer, Caleb’s face lit up. “What is that?” he asked.

“This,” I said, “is the reason we can still travel when the rest of the galaxy is stuck in one place. This is a broadcast computer. It lets us go places without having to fly there.”

“Without having to fly?” he asked.

“I tell this computer where I want to go and it puts us right there.”

“That’s the part that scares me,” Archie said.

I was afraid Caleb would ask for details, but he didn’t. Instead, he hovered over the computer and pieced together how it worked. “How do you tell it where to go?”

I showed him how to translate interactive maps into coordinates. “Going to a planet is easy. The computer has coordinates for every star and planet in the galaxy.” I thought I would impress the boy. I mostly ignored Archie. “The hard part is if you want to fly to a pinpoint location, like a certain spot right above a planet. You don’t always aim at something big like a planet. Sometimes you have to fine tune it.”

“Like into deep space?” Caleb asked. “Like where we are now?”

“There used to be a space station called the Golan Dry Docks,” I said. “It was top secret. If you wanted to broadcast yourself there, you needed to put in the coordinates yourself.”

And then I remembered a story that I thought he would find interesting. “You heard there was a war, right? That was the reason your uncle and I came to Delphi.”

“A war against Earth?” Caleb asked.

“Yes, and Earth had this giant ship called the Doctrinaire . It was bigger and stronger than any other ship in the galaxy,” I said. “It was so strong that it could destroy whole fleets of enemy ships. And it had special shields so no other ship could hurt it.”

“So Earth used it to win the war,” Caleb said, his eyes wide with excitement.

“No, Earth lost. The people attacking Earth destroyed that ship with a single shot,” I said. “And they did it with a computer like this.”

We spent two hours on this trip. Caleb and I spent the entire time talking. We could have returned the moment we finished taking the radar readings. Instead, I showed Caleb how the Starliner worked. This fine young man, this kid whose company I so enjoyed, I told him stories from the war. Freeman might have said that I adopted the boy back.

“How can you destroy a ship with a computer?” Archie asked.

“The shields of the Doctrinaire were so strong that nothing could get through them, right? And its cannons were so powerful that it could pick off any ship that came within range. But the captain of the Doctrinaire kept the ship in one place while the smaller ships in his fleet chased the enemy.”

“Why did he do that?” Caleb asked.

“He was smart. Big ships are not maneuverable. They get into trouble when they move out of position. So Thurston, he used the Doctrinaire like a floating fortress. He wanted to trap the enemy with the Doctrinaire on one side and his cruisers and battleships on the other.

“You never saw anything like it. It looked like the Doctrinaire was falling …falling asleep. The ship slid out of formation.” I held my right hand flat to imitate the ship, then let it list the way that the Doctrinaire had done.

“And all of a sudden it just blows up. See, the Mogats, they knew Thurston liked to leave his ship in one place.”

“You’re not saying that they broadcasted another ship into it?” Archie asked. “They killed themselves?”

“And they took the whole damned Unified Authority with them,” I said. “They had a nuclear bomb onboard, but that was just overkill. The anomaly from the broadcast engine probably killed everyone aboard all on its own.”

“Wow,” said Caleb. “And ships can pass through shields when you broadcast them?”

“I don’t understand how it works,” I admitted. “I guess they kind of just appear. I don’t think that cruiser passed through the shields. I think it just appeared inside the other ship.”

Caleb, his eyes still wide, could not think of anything more to ask. He thought about this for several seconds. “So it’s like you’re dead when you’re broadcasting. It’s like you don’t exist for a moment and then you come back to life.” He sounded a little scared.

“It’s safe enough,” I said. “Billions and billions of people have done it. I must have done it a hundred times.”

“But you couldn’t just point to a spot and aim using the computer. How did they know they would hit that ship?” Caleb asked.

I told him about triangulation and how you can calculate an exact target using X, Y, and Z coordinates. Caleb was twelve years old, and he understood the math far better than me. Archie didn’t seem interested. He went back to the passenger cabin.

Caleb asked me if we could manually select a spot near Delphi for our broadcast home. I let him pound out the calculations, enter the coordinates and initiate the broadcast home. If Archie knew who flew us home, he might have prayed for salvation.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

Clones are sterile. The military class was never meant to have children. This idea was old when Christ was born. Plato, upon whose writings the Unified Authority’s social structure was based, believed that warriors should live in communes and that their children should be shared. In modern days, military clones were raised in orphanages and they were incapable of having children of their own.

Marianne provided me an escape clause from Plato’s society. She came with a ready-made family, and best of all, I liked the boy.

Five days had passed since the day Archie and I had flown out and seen the Grant . Marianne and I began taking late night walks every evening. We would sit and I would stare into the sky and tell her stories about planets and battles. I told her about Ezer Kri and the Japanese. I told her about Bryce Klyber and how he died so needlessly.

Sometimes I searched space for signs of battles between the Mogats and Confederate Arms. They were out there somewhere, killing each other. More than once, she asked me if I cared who won that war, and I told her that I did not. I lied. I wanted both sides to destroy each other; but if one side had to survive, I preferred a universe with the Confederate Arms rather than Morgan Atkins and his fanatics.

But on this particular night, she said something that sent a warm thrill through me. She said, “Caleb talks about you all the time. He loves you, Wayson.” And she took my hand in her calloused and leathery hand and said, “And I love you.”

I turned toward her, and we kissed. It was an innocent kiss, the kind of kiss that I would imagine grade-school