The Clone Empire

Nobles turned to me. His eyes tightened, and he asked, “What?” in a hardened angry voice.

“We showed them how to rebuild their empire. The planets, the broadcast network, the Navy …they want to take it all back in one piece,” I said.

The clone assassins failed, so they lured Gary Warshaw and his top admirals into a negotiation, then they massacred the whole lot of them. Now they want to round the rest of the clones up like sheep, I thought. They will round us up like sheep, and send us out like slaves …like eunuchs, the guardians of the republic that massacred their empire.

The Romans manned their legions by filling them with conquered soldiers; why shouldn’t the Unifieds do the same? And then they would …What would they do? Would they hide under the sea in watertight cities while aliens charbroiled the galaxy? They would not need clones for that. Now that they had a broadcast network, if they managed to capture the network, they could send us out to find the Avatari. We’d be the second wave. They would send us out the same way they sent out the Boyd Clones and the Japanese Fleet; only the Japanese Fleet had self-broadcasting ships. They could return from the mission; we would be stuck wherever they sent us.

“The aliens were real, right?” Nobles asked. “The attack on Olympus Kri was real.” He needed assurance. He knew the attack was real; but at times like this, are you ever sure about anything?

“It was real,” I said.

“Then why?”

I thought I finally understood. Andropov wanted to send out a second wave. After winning the battle for New Copenhagen, the Unified Authority sent out the Japanese Fleet, but that was only four ships, four lowly self- broadcasting battleships. The brass hedged their bets by manning them with a special line of SEAL clones instead of Marines, but still only had four ships tracking an alien signal across an entire galaxy.

If they managed to ingest the Enlisted Man’s Navy, the Unifieds would gain thirteen fleets, over one hundred fighter carriers, hundreds of battleships, millions of clones. And they could broadcast their disposable new fleet into space to search for the alien world, never to return. Kill the chain of command, orphan the ships and the crews …it finally made sense. Maybe Andropov even wanted to send a token Liberator out on the mission to bring it luck; after all, the Clone Empire had gone undefeated in open war. Bastard.

I left the cockpit and went to my little stateroom, where I spent the rest of the flight in silence, brooding over how much I hated my creators.

Nobles alerted me when we neared the planet. We entered an atmosphere with clouds instead of smoke. We crossed over snowcapped mountains and frost-dusted forests that would soon be burned to ash. I took in the beauty, knowing that nothing could be done to protect it. No weapon existed that could defend this planet, and humanity had no bargaining chip that could turn the attackers away. The most I could hope for was to save a few people. Ava.

Far ahead of us, Norristown shimmered in the afternoon sun, a city healed from most of its wounds. The wreckage had been cleared, and an extensive patchwork of parks and open markets now filled the void.

We received a message from the spaceport asking us to identify ourselves. When Nobles answered that we were an unarmed envoy from the Enlisted Man’s Fleet, the control tower cleared us to land.

Judging by the lines of military trucks and police cars waiting along the runway as we began our approach, I got the feeling that the locals did not want guests.

“I don’t think they’re happy to see us,” Nobles said.

If understatement were a form of humor, Christian Nobles would have been the funniest man alive.

Police cars closed in behind us as we rolled forward down the runway, moving toward the line of armored trucks and the militiamen with guns. Doctorow did not want Marines on his planet, but that did not stop him from using his militia. Judging by the tanks and transports, he’d helped himself to the weapons we left behind.

We rolled to within twenty feet of the trucks and stopped. The shuttle’s struts compressed, and the fuselage dropped. Men with anxious, angry faces and government-issue M27s stared in at us.

With Nobles following behind me, I opened the shuttle door. Guns pointed directly at us. I could see that much through the glare, but I stopped and had to place a hand over my eyes to block the sun. Somebody yelled for us to step out, so I held my hands above my head and stepped out into the sunlight. Men with guns intercepted me as I stepped to the ground. Dozens of militiamen formed a circle around me. One of them shoved me from behind to get me clear of the shuttle, but most of the militiamen looked scared. They had the numbers and the guns; but I got the feeling that they were more scared of me than I was of them.

For a split second, we all stood there in silence in the cool evening breeze, then a militiaman asked, “Are you carrying weapons?”

I said, “Not on me.”

Nobles shook his head.

A captain in the militia stepped up to me, gave me an embarrassed grin, and asked, “Do you mind if we search your ship?”

Nice of him to ask, I thought. I told him, “We came empty-handed, but feel free.”

The standoff continued as three men in soft-shelled engineering armor carrying an array of detection equipment entered the shuttle. A couple of minutes ticked away as we waited for them to conclude the obvious, that two men traveling in an unarmed shuttle did not pose much of a threat.

There was no point in trying to explain why we had come, not to these men. They were just the foot soldiers. I needed to take my story to the top. I needed to explain everything to the president himself. No one under Doctorow would have the authority to react even if they believed me. In the meantime, every second wasted here on the runway felt like a crime. Had the planet already seen temperature fluctuations? Maybe we would be cooked as we stood on the airfield waiting for locals to search our unarmed ship.

“Any weapons?” the militia leader asked.

I turned and saw one of the men waving the go-pack I had taken to Olympus Kri. He held up the pack, and said, “He’s got combat armor, a couple of grenade launchers, a particle-beam pistol, and a cannon.”

“Was that a particle-beam cannon?” asked the captain. He turned back to me, and said, “I thought you said you came unarmed?”

“I forgot they were there,” I said.

“Anything else you forgot, Harris?” the captain asked. I did not recognize him, but apparently he recognized me. I had spent a lot of time on this planet and made a lot of enemies.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

They did not place us in handcuffs. They led me and Nobles into the back of an armored truck along with a dozen guards, and they drove to town. Jeeps and trucks followed behind us.

Our escort delivered us to a police station, where a platoon of militiamen led us down two flights of stairs and into a basement. The militiamen hauled Nobles away. I watched them lead him down a hall with a sinking feeling.

I ended up locked in an interrogation room, and there I sat and waited. A team of armed guards stood outside the door. I would not have known they were there except that they looked in on me every few minutes. For all I knew, an entire firing squad waited for me just outside that door.

I sat alone in that little room with its soundproofed walls and wondered what happened to all of the big talk about utopian ideals. In Ellery Doctorow’s new order, the terms “police,” “military,” and “militia” seemed nearly interchangeable. From my perspective, liberated Norristown operated like any other police state.

Precious time slipped irretrievably away as I sat alone in that room.

I tried to piece together how much time passed between the attacks on New Copenhagen and Olympus Kri. Had it been a week? Five days? It was possible that nobody knew. The only video Sweetwater had of the attack on New Copenhagen was of the aftermath. The planet might have been a scorched wreck for a week before anyone