just like you said.
“Vince, I was there. Huang sent me to infiltrate their fleet, and they caught me. I was in the brig on Halverson’s command ship.”
“Halverson? Rear Admiral Halverson?”
“He was the one who killed Klyber,” I said. “He defected.”
“Shit,” Lee hissed. “What happens if somebody starts up the Mars broadcast station again? Will the Unified Authority come back to life?”
“You make it sound so easy,” I said. “The Confederates have their whole fleet there, last I heard. That was over five hundred ships.
“I haven’t seen the station, but I’m guessing that they destroyed the discs. That would be a hell of a build job. You’d have to start from scratch.”
“Sounds grim,” Lee said. “Halverson defected? I served under him. I can’t believe he would do that. No wonder they beat us, he and Klyber wrote out the whole playbook together.”
Vince’s sanity seemed to come in and out in waves. He had lucid moments when he acted and sounded like the Corporal Vince Lee with whom I had served. There were also moments when he could not stand still, when his eyes darted in every direction as if we were in a frenzy, and when he cackled loudly at nothing in particular.
This was a lucid moment. We walked together silently as he digested what I had just told him.
“So what does ‘king of clones’ mean?” I asked
“You, of all people, should not have to ask,” Lee said.
“You mean it’s me?” I asked.
“Well, it was you. Now it’s me. Now I am the king of clones.”
The trunks of the trees around us were about fifteen feet in diameter. The leaves overhead were a mixture of green and red. I saw birds and scampering animals in the branches above us.
“You might have been the greatest hero the Corps ever knew,” Lee said. “I mean, the battle on Little Man, and Hubble …and when you killed that SEAL clone in Hawaii. I think that was the best one. The only problem is that except for us, no one ever heard about it.
“You know what was even better than that, Wayson? You remember how you found out you were a clone and it didn’t even phase you? God I envied you! You were the specking perfect Marine. Nothing could kill you, nothing could stop you. Not even the goddamned death reflex.
“Me, I was just another general-issue clone. You were a specking Liberator.”
I stopped.
“Yeah, I know I’m a clone. Everyone on my ship is a clone. It’s the only all-clone crew in the history of Unified Authority.”
“What about the …”
“The death reflex?” Lee interrupted. He did an expert job of steering the conversation. “Interesting thing. Once the Network went dark, the natural-borns began to panic. I don’t know if you knew this, but I always sort of suspected I was a clone.”
“I knew,” I said.
Lee cackled, and I regretted admitting it.
“The officers were in a panic. You remember Captain Pollard? You met him on the way to Ravenwood. Remember, that was the place where you supposedly died?” No sign of sanity remained in Lee’s voice by this time.
“Pollard really lost it. He parked our ship next to that broadcast station and he wanted to just sit there until it switched on again. I told him he was dreaming …that thing wasn’t ever coming back online. We waited, and waited, and waited. Everyone could tell that it wasn’t coming back …at least the clones could.
“Pollard said I became worse every day …”
“Worse?” I asked.
“He used the word
“Because of the waiting?” I asked.
“Because I could tell that the frigging Unified Authority was gone. I could feel it. And we were going to wait there until the goddamned
“So Pollard makes me take some medicine for the stress. He gives me this serotonin inhibitor, and you know what happens?”
“I look in the mirror and see a guy with brown hair and brown eyes. And I figured, damn, I’m just like you now, and if I’m going to be like you, I need to be able to take over in a bad situation. I was going to have to lock the officers up, but if I locked up the officers, sooner or later the enlisted men would figure out that the only people not locked up were clones.”
“Not unless you told them,” I said. “They never figured out that they were clones when they were in the orphanage. If that wasn’t enough to show them, I would think they’d never figure it out.”
“That’s true,” Lee agreed, and he laughed hysterically.
“So I took a bunch of clone sailors to the sick bay, and I had them try the same medicine I was on. Know what happened? Give a swabbie enough serotonin inhibitor, and nothing happens when you tell him he’s a clone. You get it? You lude them up, get them stoned out of their specking minds so that they don’t get stressed about anything, and there’s no death reflex.”
Lee laughed and laughed. “Pretty specking obvious. My entire crew is on some drug called Fallzoud. The joke around the ship is that they’re so friggin’ stoned, they wouldn’t care if their dick falls off.
“The only problem is that they’re not supposed to take it for more than three days straight. I’ve been on it for nine days.”
I did not know what to say. An entire crew of cloned Marines, stoned out their minds, and fully aware that they were clones …they would be a danger to themselves and every one around them.
“What happened to Pollard?”
“I had him arrested, of course. Once we started taking Fallzoud, we sort of restructured the chain of command. We were in charge, and we didn’t need natural-born officers screwing with us, so we put them in the brig.”
“Is he still in the brig?” I started to form a plan. If Freeman and I could slip on board that ship, we might be able to free the officers. Maybe we could put together a counter-mutiny.
“No, you saw to that,” Lee said without any sign of emotion. “Once we spotted you in space, the officers decided to break loose so we had to kill them.”
“You killed them?” I asked. “In their cells? Unarmed officers could not possibly break out of those cells.”
Lee stopped to consider this. “I never really thought about it,” he said, sounding mildly surprised but not at all bothered by this comment. “I sent a platoon to take care of them, and that was the last I heard of it.”
Sunlight poured through the trees in the distance. We had walked near a large clearing in the woods. Here the buzz of cicadas or something similar filled the air. In the distance, the bare metal hull of a military transport sparked in the sunlight. For a moment I thought Vince might have lured me here to shoot me. But that was the last thing on his mind. He was on a drug that shut down his emotions. All of his men were on that drug.
They probably did not eat or sleep much. They just over-medicated in the mornings and lived with the side effects. Paranoia, mood swings, lack of appetite …I knew what was wrong with Lee and that other Marine—they were insane and I had no way of knowing how long their drug supply would hold out.
Lee turned and started back in the direction we had come from. “So what do you say, Wayson? Are you going to give me your self-broadcasting ship?”
I had misunderstood the situation, and it was by sheer luck that we had not all been killed. No sane man would destroy a space ship he needed just because he could not have it. An insane man, however, might. “Can I have a couple of days to consider my options?” I asked.
“Sure,” Lee said, sounding magnanimous. “But if you so much as power your engines, I’ll blow that specking ship of yours into the next galaxy. Do we have a deal?”
