Rogue Clone

We left the shopping arcade and entered a food court. Lines of people formed in front of small restaurants. Janitors bussed tables and cleared trash bins. Loud talk echoed in the rafters of this cavernous hall with its bright lights and gleaming white floors.

“You are the hot topic on the ship these days,” the pilot said. “Is it true?”

“Is what true?” I asked.

“Were you in Safe Harbor when the bombs went off?”

“Where did you hear that?” I asked.

“One of my friends heard Klyber say you were there.”

“If Admiral Klyber says I was there, I must have been there,” I said.

The pilot laughed. We crossed the food court and entered an unmarked door. This led us into a narrow service hall that seemed to stretch for miles. The white tile floor gleamed but the walls were unfinished plaster. Bright fluorescent fixtures provided the hall with dry luminescence.

“So were you there when the bombs went off?”

“Yeah, I was there. I helped dig out a few of the survivors.”

The service hall branched off to two different sections of the Mars Spaceport. We entered from one of the bustling commercial terminals. Had we headed left, we would have entered administrative offices. We turned right and wound up in the commuter terminal. This was the area used by private pilots and large corporations. It was smaller than the commercial terminals, far less crowded, and much less flashy. Instead of a large food court, it had a coffee shop where pilots went to relax as they filled out flight reports or studied their flight plans. The general mood in the commuter terminal was quiet, like the lobby of a library.

A couple dozen pilots stood in pockets scattered around the floor of the terminal. Most of these flyboys seemed to know each other. None of them recognized my pilot. They stole mildly curious glances. His was a new face that had stumbled into their tight-knit fraternity.

Once we left the terminal, my pilot swapped his camouflage—the leather jacket and civilian accoutrements— for a Navy jacket. His spacecraft, however, remained camouflaged.

We crossed the tarmac and climbed into a Johnston R-27, the kind of twelve-seater light craft favored by small corporations. The Johnston was white with dark gray trim along its wings. It had neither armor nor hidden gun arrays, the prosaic sign of a military craft. This innocuous Johnston had something far more impressive.

“You strapped in?” the pilot asked as I fitted the last of the safety harness across my chest, a useless gesture. Any accidents in this little craft would end in death.

“This is Johnston R-twenty-seven zero four, four, nine Rectal, Anus, Penile five requesting permission to taxi. Again, this is Johnston zero, four, four, nine RAP five requesting permission.”

“Roger, Johnston R-twenty-seven. You are cleared to taxi.” I could hear other flight controllers squawking in the background as the man on the radio struggled to keep from laughing.

“Aren’t there regulations about what you can say on the air?” I asked.

“To the tower?” the pilot asked, sounding genuinely surprised. “The controllers love it when I talk dirty. It’s their supervisors who get pissed, and that’s all right. They can’t touch me. I have military clearance and they’re just civilians.”

The commuter runway was a mile-long tunnel with several airlocks. A crewman towed us to the first airlock using a cart. When he reached the far wall of the airlock, the crewman detached our tow cable, gave us a quick wave, and drove back to the terminal. The runway behind us vanished as the thirty-foot door closed behind us, sealing in the spaceport’s manufactured atmosphere.

The wall in front of us was thick and heavy, the color of oxidized iron. After two minutes, a seam showed in the center of this great metal barrier. The cogs at the base and top of the wall groaned as they pulled it open along their zipper-like causeway.

This time we rolled forward under our own power and stopped just shy of a final barrier, an electroshield. The first two barriers we passed through protected the atmosphere inside the spaceport. This next shield was in place for military purposes. It was a force field designed to stop intruders and deflect attacks. The electroshield could dampen particle beam and laser attacks, and anything solid that hit the shield would be instantly fried. I could see the surface of Mars ahead through the electroshield’s translucent white aurora.

“Do they know you’re self-broadcasting?” I asked.

Having a “self-broadcasting” ship meant that this highly modified Johnston R-27 did not need to enter the Broadcast Network to travel long distances. The ship was equipped with its own broadcast engine that, used in conjunction with the right navigational computer, could transport the ship anywhere in the galaxy.

“It’s sort of hard to hide something as big as an anomaly,” the pilot said.

Anomaly was the term used to describe the electrical field through which broadcast objects vanished and appeared. “They track us the moment we leave Mars. We’re the only ship that flies toward Saturn instead of Earth or the Broadcast Network. That kind of thing gets all kinds of attention these days.”

“I suppose,” I said.

The surface of Mars looked like an Earth desert from our cockpit. Peering out as we arched away from the planet, I saw dented plains that stretched around the horizon. Huge as the Mars Spaceport building was when seen from the inside, it became a mere speck as we pulled away from the planet. Soon enough, Mars looked no larger than a coin, and all of its features vanished.

The only broadcast discs in the Sol System, Earth’s solar system, hovered a few hundred miles above the spaceport. Normally spacecraft either flew up to the discs or headed toward Earth, the only populated planet in the solar system. We, however, flew in the opposite direction. We headed out toward space, toward Saturn, and traveled more than 100,000 miles. Only the most powerful tracking systems like the ones on Mars would detect what happened next.

Sitting out in space, we glided as the contraption in the back of our craft came to life. The glass around our cockpit became as black as space. It was opaque but not dark enough to block out the electrical storm caused by our broadcast engine. Lightning danced across the edges of the Johnston R-27. I could see its squirming outline through the tinting. It looked like neon chalk lines as the cabin filled with the acrid scent of ozone.

“Welcome to the Perseus Arm,” the pilot said.

“Still in Perseus?” I asked. “I thought they would have moved the ship by now. We are at war.”

“Why move?” the pilot said. “No one knows we are here. We’re protected from both sides.”

CHAPTER FIVE

March 7, 2512 A.D. Ship: Doctrinaire

Galactic Position: Perseus Arm

Sections of the Doctrinaire were still under construction and probably would be for the next thousand years.

The Doctrinaire was so incredibly large that its size created an anomaly. Viewing the ship alone in space, you could not estimate its size. At first glance, she looked like any other fighter carrier—the same wedge-shaped body, the same beige hull and light gray underbelly. In the vast panorama of space, size and distance become blurred. Seeing the Doctrinaire floating beside a Perseus-class fighter carrier, you would think they were identical ships and that the Doctrinaire was closer to you because she was so much larger than the other.

The hull of the Doctrinaire filled the view from our cockpit long before we reached its landing bay. The ship was shaped like a bat—its wing span measuring two miles wide and its hull was about 1.3 miles in length. The great ship had four launch tubes, hollow tunnels used for launching fighter craft that stretched the entire length of the ship. The Doctrinaire had an additional four landing bays for transports and supply ships.

The pilot flew the Johnston toward Bay three. We slowed to a mere hover and the pilot used thruster engines