transportation. The jeep rolled right on past the civilian terminal, and we drove to a small Air Force facility at the far end of the runway.
We arrived at the military hangars sometime around 2300. It was a balmy December night with a cool breeze rolling in from the sea. Though hundreds of stars glittered above, the blue-black sky reminded me of the color of bruises. No moon shone in that sky. Gauzy clouds floated slowly in from the sea.
“Is that the guy?” a guard said, as we drove up to the gate.
“That’s him,” our driver said.
The guard stepped back and opened the barrier blocking the entrance to the base. He watched me carefully as we drove past.
“What’s he so curious about?” I asked the major. This was the first time we spoke during the twenty-minute ride from Sad Sam’s.
“He wants to see if you can walk on water,” the major said. “They sent ten MPs and three jeeps to bring your ass in. Normal orders are to shoot conscripts unless they come willingly.”
“So you had orders to shoot me if I put up a fight?” I asked.
“Me, I wouldn’t have bothered with you in the first place. I had orders to bring you in alive and in one piece.”
We drove to the edge of the runway and parked beside a small military atmospheric shuttle.
“What would you have done if I said no?” I asked as I climbed out of the jeep.
“I would have shot you and said you committed suicide,” the major said. “I’ve seen your record, Harris. As far as I’m concerned, you’re worse than a deserter. You were a decorated officer, and you turned your back on the Corps.”
“I was given an honorable discharge,” I said.
“It’s been revoked. How do you like that? You went from deserter to officer status all in one night,” the major said as he loaded me on to a military shuttle, an atmospheric unit used mostly for transfers and cargo.
The commuter flew me to Salt Lake City Pangalactic Spaceport, where I boarded a C-89, a cargo hauler—a massive freighter used for both atmospheric and space hauling. Compared to the little atmospheric shuttle, this huge ship looked like a dinosaur. It could hold more cargo than a normal warehouse, but having spent years on various fighter carriers, I saw the C-89 for what it was—just another cargo jet.
The inside of the C-89 had been decked out for troop movements. Rows and rows of seats filled the cargo hold. Lockers had been built into the bulkheads for small arms and duffel bags. For reasons I did not understand, the pilot had dimmed the lights, giving the cabin a tunnel-like atmosphere. I could see heads full of gray and white hair along the tops of the seats. This wasn’t a troop movement, it was a gathering of the veterans of ancient wars.
“This is the last of them,” a sergeant said, as I boarded the flight. The sergeant was a clone. Until the civil war, every enlisted man in the Unified Authority was a clone.
After besting the Earth Fleet and destroying the Mars broadcast station, the Mogats launched a limited attack on Earth. They went after the orphanages in which the clone soldiers were raised. At the time, the Pentagon believed the attack on the Earth Fleet and the orphanages was in preparation for a full-scale invasion, but that invasion never materialized. Had they come, the Mogats would have won the war. Their first attack had so crippled the Unified Authority’s military infrastructure that, as far as I could tell, no real attempt had yet been made to repair the damage. Even if the military had rebuilt its clone farms, it would have taken another eighteen years before the first graduates entered boot camp.
Illych had been correct when he told me that I only needed a pulse to qualify as “elite” for the Elite Conscription Act. Half the clones on this flight had white hair and wrinkled faces. The youngest man I saw had to be in his forties. I did not have any gear to stow, so I went right to the only open seat I could find.
“Can you believe we got called back?” asked the guy in the seat next to mine. He was a standard-issue clone, just under six feet tall and broad-shouldered. He had brown hair heavily threaded with strands of white. He looked a lot like me, only shorter, broader, and older. “Were you Army?”
“Marines,” I said.
“Marines, eh?” the guy said. “I was Army. I heard you boys took a real shellacking at the end of the Mogat War.”
“That’s what I heard, too,” I said.
“You must have already been out before the invasion,” he said. “I heard no one made it off that planet alive.”
The C-89 took off. I chose to use our launch as an excuse to ignore the comment.
C-class cargo lifts were not built with onboard broadcast engines, so I figured we would fly someplace nearby …maybe dock with one of the Confederate Arms’ self-broadcasting battleships. “When’s the last time you went to Mars, pal? Been years for me.” Apparently the guy in the next seat and I had become pals.
“Is that where we’re headed?” I asked. Nobody told me my final destination on the short flight from Honolulu.
“Off to Mars. Sheesh, the last time I was there was ’95, maybe ’98. Could it really be fifteen years?” He thought for a moment. “No, I passed through Mars in ’07 when I went out to Olympus Kri.”
At thirty million miles per hour, the flight from Earth to Mars could take as long as five hours depending on where each planet stood in its orbit.
“Been a couple of years for me, too,” I said. All flights in and out of Earth passed through the Mars broadcast station, but nobody actually lived there. Even the soldiers and pilots guarding the planet lived on other planets. They went out and stayed in barracks for three-week shifts, then returned home.
The only populated area on Mars was the spaceport—the galaxy’s biggest shopping bazaar. Since no one officially lived on Mars, everyone on the planet qualified for duty-free shopping. Merchants from every corner of the galaxy ran shops and restaurants there. The spaceport had forty-three grand hotels, six hundred restaurants, and three thousand stores. The galaxy’s largest convention center was on the northern outskirts of the spaceport, and its second-largest convention center was in the eastern corner.
One of the best-known advertising slogans in the galaxy was, “Serious shoppers shop on Mars.” It was probably true. Young couples used to travel to Mars from as far away as the Scutum-Crux Arm to purchase their engagement rings. The savings on the diamonds and gems more than covered the cost of the trip. Of course, back then the Broadcast Network was in operation, and you could fly from Scutum-Crux to Mars in a matter of minutes. With the Network down, I figured many of the stores must have closed.
My new buddy kept squinting to get a good look at me. He must have noticed as I sat down that I was too tall to be a standard-issue military clone; but in the darkness, he could not make out more details. Communications between clones included an interesting dance since anything that tipped clones off to their synthetic origins could have a fatal consequence. The “death reflex” was a fail-safe insisted upon by Congress to prevent clones from discovering their “nonhuman” identity and rebelling. The reflex was counterbalanced by neural programming. Clones were programmed not to know they were clones. If I asked the guy sitting next to me what he looked like, he would have said he had blond hair and blue eyes—despite both his hair and eyes being brown. Seeing his reflection in the mirror, he would have seen himself as blond-haired and blue-eyed, even if he was standing next to an identical clone whom he would recognize as having dark hair and eyes. To stop an outbreak of dead clones, that same programming prevented clones from discussing clone-related topics about each other.
“Were you living on Earth?” I asked.
“Not me. I had a small farm on Janus.”
“Janus? That’s not in the Orion Arm, is it?”
“It’s in the Perseus Arm. I’ll tell you what, when the Perseus Arm signed on to the Confederate Arms Treaty, I thought I was going to die. Me living in one of the Confederate Arms …If my parents had not died when I was a kid, that would have killed them.”
Every clone raised in every orphanage was programmed to believe he was the only true orphan on the premises. Learning differently could trigger the death reflex in a standard-issue clone. As a Liberator, I discovered my true origins within a year of joining the Marines. In my case, ignorance was not blissful, and learning the truth had not set me free.
“Did the Confederate Army ask you to join up?”
“Not to fight against the Unified Authority. They knew better. As long as they knew I wasn’t fighting against
