intricate neural programming. Clones of a later make than I were programmed to see themselves as natural-born humans. They had brown hair and brown eyes, but they saw themselves as having blond hair and blue eyes. To prevent a clone uprising, Congress insisted that they be built with a gland in their heads that would secrete a deadly hormone into their blood if they learned they were clones. They called this the “death reflex.”
My make of clone, the Liberators, had a different gland that released a combination of endorphins and adrenaline into our blood during combat. When things heated up, our hormone helped us think more quickly and clearly. Unfortunately, it proved addictive. Many Liberators became hooked on the hormone and required a fix of violence even after they had won their battles. They attacked prisoners, allies, fellow soldiers. It was the fear of Liberators that caused Congress to build the death reflex in later models.
As a Liberator clone, I was able to recognize my synthetic creation. As a Liberator, I knew that I was built to kill. It had never occurred to me that I had also been programmed to live. I could not force myself to pull the pin from that grenade.
“Well, that is just specking great!” I snarled, and I threw the grenade on the deck, pin and all. I stormed over to the hatch controls. They were intact. All of the transport’s systems checked out in working order except the shields. Hesitating just for a moment, I reached for the button that would open the hatch. If I hit it, the rear of the kettle would split, and Freeman and I would be sucked into space. Death would come in an instant.
But I could not get myself to press the button. It was right there, big and bright red, and shaped like a mushroom, but I could not press it.
“Speck!” I shouted.
Freeman and I had an agreement to kill ourselves rather than return to Little Man. We never thought we would succeed on this mission. We came out to die. Now, thanks to my programming, I could not help but renege. I could not open the hatch or pull the pin.
I would try to fly the transport back to Little Man. What a joke. I was a lousy pilot. I could fly a bird like a Starliner, a civilian craft with simple controls that practically flew itself. This transport, however, had next to no guidance gear. Its nearsighted radar system only had a range of one hundred thousand miles, less than half the distance from the Earth to the moon.
I wasn’t really sure which way to fly to get back to Little Man. With the planet more than four billion miles away, navigation by line of sight was out of the question.
I looked at the load of snacks I had brought back from the vending machine on the broadcast station. A few minutes ago, it had looked like a hoard. Now, in light of the hundreds of hours it would take to fly to that worthless colony, the food seemed insignificant.
I left Freeman unconscious in the kettle and entered the cockpit.
“Unified Authority Transport, come in. Unified Authority Transport, come in.”
I looked down at the radio in complete disbelief. “This is Transport. Who is this?”
“Transport, this is the S.N.N.
I suppose I should have been jumping for joy or saying a prayer to that big municipality in the sky. Instead I laughed. I was four billion miles from a farming colony and untold trillions of miles from civilized space, and whoever had found me wanted me to hold so that I could speak with an old friend. The cavalry had arrived in full force.
“Colonel Harris, is that you?” the familiar old voice asked.
“Yamashiro,” I said. “What the hell are you doing out here?”
“Ah, Harris, that is the question I wanted to ask you. We have been tracking you for some time, and your actions make no sense. Perhaps we can discuss your mission on my ship.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Freeman and I freelanced for the Unified Authority, the pangalactic evolution of the nation that had once been the United States of America. The Unified Authority explored the Milky Way, found that there was no intelligent life in the galaxy other than mankind, and colonized planets in all six of its arms.
As the exploration continued, a fleet of scientific vessels vanished while mapping out a region of the galactic eye. Fearing we had finally located bug-eyed monsters, the U.A. military went on high alert while the Senate called for the creation of a self-broadcasting fleet of battleships.
When the fleet launched, Senate Majority Leader Morgan Atkins, who had championed the project, accompanied it on its maiden voyage. The fleet broadcasted into the innermost curve of the Norma Arm and disappeared.
That was when the Liberators entered the picture. At the same time that Atkins called for his self-broadcasting armada, the Linear Committee—the executive branch of the Unified Authority government—created a superweapon of its own: a new line of military clones. Unlike later clones, which were raised in orphanages, that first batch of Liberators came out of the tube at the age of twenty. They were fast, smart, and more independent- thinking than any clones that had come before them.
To help them confront an unknown enemy, Liberators were built with a “combat reflex.” When the shooting started, a gland inside the Liberators’ skulls secreted a mixture of endorphins and adrenaline into their blood. It made them vicious, but it also kept them thinking clearly during the heat of battle.
Using every self-broadcasting vessel available, the Navy sent these Liberator clones to the Galactic Eye, where they soon discovered that Atkins had founded a colony. He had commissioned the self-broadcasting fleet so that he could hijack it. Morgan Atkins, one of the most powerful men in the Unified Authority, had led the first large-scale rebellion against it.
But he had not known about the Liberators. The clone invasion overran his settlement, forcing Atkins to escape into space with his fleet.
The first Atkins Evangelists appeared a few years after the battle in the Galactic Eye. They told stories about the good senator discovering a city in the center of a planet and making contact with a radiant being who threatened to eradicate mankind. According to Mogat dogma, Atkins signed a pact with his “Space Angel” in which he promised to deliver the Republic as a vassal nation in order to avert total eradication of mankind.
Atkins disciples preached independence from Earth. They called themselves the Morgan Atkins Believers. The government called them “Mogats,” an abbreviation of the name MOrGan ATkins, and dismissed them as cranks.
Over the next fifty years, however, the Atkins movement grew. The 2460 census found twenty thousand Mogats. In 2480, more than a million people identified themselves as Atkins believers. By 2510, there were over 200 million of them scattered across the 180 worlds of the Republic. They engaged in smuggling, sedition, and petty crimes. Whenever planets talked about breaking away from the Republic, Mogats were involved.
But the Mogats could never have overthrown the Unified Authority on their own.
In 2510, C.A.T.O, the Confederate Arms Treaty Organization, declared independence from the Unified Authority. The Confederate Arms included four of the six arms of the Milky Way. Only the Orion Arm, the arm in which Earth was located, and the neighboring Sagittarius Arm remained loyal. With tens of billions of citizens, the Confederate Arms provided the troops for a revolution, and the Mogats provided the fleet. The government labeled them “Separatists” and set about squashing them until the attack.
The Japanese got involved through the Confederate Arms. They had lived on a planet called Ezer Kri. When they petitioned to rename their planet Shin Nippon, the U.A. Senate branded it an act of sedition and the Mogats helped them escape.
In 2512, the Separatists took the upper hand. By defeating the Earth Fleet and destroying the Broadcast Network, they effectively shut down the Unified Authority by shutting down travel and communications between Earth and its colonies. That same day, the alliance between the Confederate Arms, the Japanese, and the Mogats collapsed. The Mogats seized control of most of the fleet. Yoshi Yamashiro had commandeered four battleships. I ended up on Little Man, not knowing how the battle royale had ended.
For months I wondered what became of Yamashiro and his four-ship fleet. Now, out of nowhere, he and one
