The Clone Empire

I was only a few seconds behind the clone. Now I could hear him running. It was the only sound in the hall.

If I could hear him, then he could hear me. He must have known I called in for help. Now in full pursuit, I ran around a corner, spotted the gun, and stepped back behind the wall in time to make him miss. He fired one shot, then silence. Hoping he was not waiting to ambush me, I jumped forward, dropped to my knees, and returned fire.

He was already gone.

My combat reflex began. I ran faster now, and the world seemed to slow down around me. I could hear the clone running and knew I would catch him. I sprinted down one hall, took a right turn, and spotted him. He spun, fired, missed by more than a yard, and took off running. I did not return fire.

He’d fired at least five shots. I suspected he took the gun from one of the dead MPs, meaning he had a clip that carried thirty rounds, with at least five spent.

He took a right turn into a long, narrow passage where he didn’t dare turn to shoot because there was nowhere to duck for cover. I was right behind him, my gun out. In the time it would take him to stop, spin, and aim, he knew I could cap him.

He was forty feet ahead of me, and I was gaining on him. My legs were longer. Another moment, and he was thirty-five feet ahead of me, then thirty, then twenty-five, my footsteps drowning out the sound of his. He was one of those full-body runners, every inch of him swinging with every step. His elbows cut through the air like pistons.

His steps slowed, his stride shortened, and he glided, then coasted, then stopped. He held his hands in the air, the muzzle of his pistol pointing to the ceiling, and he slowly turned to face me.

“Drop it,” I said.

He hesitated for just a moment, undoubtedly calculating the odds in his head, and the pistol fell from his hand. Without my giving the order, he stepped on the gun and slid it toward me.

The hallway was no more than ten feet wide, but it extended for hundreds of feet behind and before us. We stood there staring at each other, both of us panting from the long sprint. We were not alone for long. Two MPs came dashing around the corner about one hundred feet ahead of us, their pistols drawn.

I wanted to kill this rabbit. I wanted him to scream and wave his arms in the air like a madman on fire, then rush me. If he did, I might have shot him, or I just might have thrown my gun away and beaten him to death. I thought about Dr. Morman lying dead, a quirky woman with a dark obsession who meant harm to no one.

“Are you going to shoot me?” the rabbit asked, his eyes not on me but on my gun.

Few things would give me more pleasure, I thought. I said, “No. You’re missing a mandatory briefing. We’re going to escort you back to the auditorium.”

I didn’t even cuff the bastard. Of course, I hoped he would run or put up a fight. He didn’t. And when he passed through the posts and the computer identified him as a Double Y, we cuffed him. He lowered his head and said nothing as we led him to the brig.

We captured seven infiltrator clones on the ad-Din. We caught seventeen thousand Double Y clones in our net as we swept every ship and base. Next, we had to decide what to do with them.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Warshaw held an emergency convocation on the Kamehameha to discuss plans for disposing of the Double Y clones. This was a meeting for fleet commanders and fleet commanders only— attendance mandatory. Much to Winston Cabot’s displeasure, attendees checked their entourages at the door.

Warshaw held the meeting in a conference room on the fleet deck. He was still in the Perseus Arm, still circling Gobi, but he no longer feared for his life. He still had MPs manning posts around the ship, but guards no longer stood inside and outside his office door.

He began the meeting by saying, “From what I hear, we have seventeen thousand prisoners of war. How the speck did the Unified Authority manufacture seventeen thousand new clones in under a year? I thought the Mogats destroyed all the old orphanages.”

I had an idea of where they might have come from. Toward the end of the Mogat War, an enterprising admiral created his own private clone farm for making SEALs. It was secret and small, which was why the Mogats missed it. Small as it was, that clone factory might have been able to mass-produce seventeen thousand clones in a few short months if its assembly line was on overdrive.

I kept my mouth shut though.

“Ah well, at least we tagged ’em and bagged ’em,” Warshaw said. And then he banged me with a stealth attack. He said, “Any of you ever worked with Philo Hollingsworth before? He ran the tagging operation …did a pretty good job.”

None of the other officers seemed to know Hollingsworth. Hearing this, Warshaw said, “I served with him in Scrotum-Crotch for a few years. Smart guy.”

Message received, I thought to myself. Message received.

The operation, of course, had been mine. I planned it, I directed it. By giving all of the credit to Hollingsworth, Warshaw played down my involvement and consequently my value to the empire, the bastard.

“So what do we do with our prisoners?” Warshaw asked. Several admirals made nebulous suggestions, broaching the subject of executing the Double Y clones but never quite coming right out and saying it. One admiral said, “They’re too dangerous to keep in prison.”

Everyone agreed.

“So what do we do with them?” Warshaw repeated.

No one spoke. The answer loomed in the air like a ghost, like an intangible presence that anyone could see but no one wanted to acknowledge. I had the feeling that Warshaw had come to the same conclusion as all of his men but wanted someone else to say it first.

Admiral Nelson of the Orion Inner Fleet took the bait. “We should dump the bastards in deep space,” Nelson said. It made sense that he would speak up. Of all the officers in this meeting, he was the one living closest to the front line.

“Kill them?” Warshaw asked, as if the idea had not occurred to him.

“We wouldn’t be killing them; we would be executing them,” Nelson said. “They’re spies. They were caught wearing our uniforms.”

That was not exactly right. Since designing new uniforms had never been a priority, we were still wearing the uniforms that the Unified Authority had provided us. No one felt like arguing the point. I sure as hell did not. Now that we had them behind bars, I felt a certain sympathy for the Double Ys. I didn’t like the idea of exterminating the pathetic bastards, but I sure as shooting would not let them go free, either.

Admiral Adrian Tunney, commander of the Orion Central Fleet, bawled out, “Speck! Why are we even having this discussion? Those bastards aren’t human; they’re deformed clones. They’re synthetics gone wrong.”

I always considered Warshaw a deformed clone, but I kept that opinion to myself.

“Deformed clones,” Warshaw repeated. To his credit, he treated the comment with contempt. “Why don’t we eliminate all the synthetics?” he asked. “That way I won’t have to hear so many stupid comments during my staff meetings.”

Almost every officer in the room laughed, but they sounded nervous. Each man at the table incorrectly believed that the joke was about everyone but himself. Unlike the other officers, I had no delusions.

Warshaw roused me from my contemplations by asking, “Harris, you helped us catch them. What do you think the Unified Authority hoped to accomplish with those clones?”

Now there was a question for the ages. “I have no idea,” I admitted. I kept thinking about what Freeman had told me, that the Unified Authority wanted to kill off our officers so it could take control of our ships. The idea sounded too simplistic to me.

“You have no idea,” Warshaw repeated, his frustration showing. “That’s it? Not even a theory?”