Rogue clone

The tough part about writing a sequel is that while the author and the characters remember every last detail about the previous book, readers who are new to the series do not. Just after I finished my first draft of this book, a friend named Dustin Johnson asked for a peek. As it turned out, his wife, Rachel, got to the book first and did me the greatest kindness a reader can do. She complained. (That greatest favor bit applies to pre-print. Once the book is out, insecure authors like myself prefer to be lavished with praise.)

Rachel had not read the first book in this series, and what she found was that while I and my characters knew the difference between the Republic, the Mogats, and the Confederate Arms, she did not. She wanted to like the story, but she could not tell which characters were fighting for which organizations. Thank you, Rachel. Thank you, Dustin. Thank you, Andrew Perry, who I went to after Rachel. Andrew agreed with Rachel and my sizzling James Bond-style introduction was replaced with something a lot more expository.

I want to thank Mark Adams and my mother and father, readers to whom I resort for advice whenever I finish my first drafts. I want to thank Richard and Michael at Richard Curtis Associates for helping this book come about; and I especially wish to thank Anne Sowards and the crew at Ace for cleaning up after my many messes.

The cover of this book was created by Christian McGrath. It’s not often that a writer wants people to judge his book by its cover, but with Christian doing the art, I don’t mind.

“This is a short-range transport. It isn’t made for long trips,” I told Ray as he sealed the rear of the kettle.

“It’s going to take us a month just to reach the broadcast station if we reach it at all.

“Even if we get there, this will probably be a one-way trip. You don’t really think we can make it work.”

“Death in space or the rest of my life stuck here on Delphi,” Freeman said. “I’ll take my chances.” Less than one month had passed since our battle with the
Grant
, and he was already going stir-crazy. Dying out in space might have been easier for him.

His plan was a shade shy of suicide. He wanted to fly this navy transport out to the broadcast station. I had never seen a kettle fly for more than a day, and we would be out for a full month. If we made it to the broadcast discs, Freeman hoped to strip the sending gear out of them and adapt it for this ship. The shuttle’s engine produced the energy for it. It generated joules and joules of energy for its shields. But this shuttle wasn’t designed for the stresses of self-broadcasting. It did not even have tint shields. Even if we made it to the discs and somehow Ray adapted the broadcast equipment to work, it could all go wrong. I had first-hand knowledge about what happens when broadcasts go wrong.

“Even if this works, we’ll be lucky to get one flight with this,” I said.

“I’m willing to risk it,” Freeman answered. So was I, if it meant I could get back in the war.

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Earthdate: March 1, 2512 A.D.

City: Safe Harbor; Planet: New Columbia; Galactic

Position: Orion Arm

“You look like a . . .” The boy got a stunned look on his face and stopped without finishing the sentence. He was about to tell me that I looked like a clone and changed his mind. Clever boy. Finishing that thought would either end in disaster or embarrassment. If I were a regular clone, hearing this might trigger a death reflex that released a flood of fatal hormones into my brain, killing me instantly. A more likely outcome might be my not knowing what he was talking about. I would laugh at him or possibly threaten him.

Few clones knew they were clones. Government-issue military clones had brown hair and brown eyes, but the neural programming synapse in their brains made them see themselves as having blond hair and blue eyes. It was the government’s way of preventing an uprising from within the warrior class.

“I look a lot like an Army clone?” I asked, trying to sound relaxed and conversational. “I hear that a lot.”

The boy might have been in his twenties. His shoulder-length orange-red hair was stringy and lank. Large red pimples formed a constellation across his forehead. I was twenty-two, but I had seen death and battle and betrayal. Walking among the general civilian population, I considered most males under the age of thirty to be boys. The few who did not strike me as morons were thugs, like the one I had come here to meet.

The boy looked stunned. He was neither a policeman nor a guard, just an usher in a movie house. His mouth hung open as he pondered my answer, and his eyes showed a mixture of confusion and fear.

“I’m a lot like them,” I said as if confiding a family secret. “The Pentagon used my grandfather’s DNA to make those clones.”

“No shit,” the boy said. A smile formed on his face. Of the six arms of the Milky Way galaxy, four had recently declared independence from the Unified Authority—the Earth government. The Orion Arm, Earth’s home arm, remained loyal to the Republic; but this planet—New Columbia—was suspect. The New Columbian government swore allegiance to the Unified Authority, but its government was filled with politicians who openly sympathized with the Confederate Arms.

“Yeah,” I said. “You might say half the Army and I are cousins. For the record, Army clones are about four inches shorter than me and a lot wider around the shoulders.”

“Yeah,” said the boy, and he laughed nervously. “I knew something was different.”

There were a couple hundred thousand military clones assigned to New Columbia, but they seldom strayed far from their bases. The U.A. government had to tread lightly because of the planet’s skewed neutrality.

The boy looked at my ticket. “Oh, wow, you’re going to
The Battle for Little Man
. Lots of clones in that flick.” He smiled at me. “Third holotorium on the right.”

The hall was wide and bright with 3-D lenticular posters from upcoming movies on the walls. It was early in the afternoon on a weekday, and I had most of the theater to myself. The only people ahead of me were a young couple on a date—an uptight boy holding hands with a fresh-faced girl. The boy must have wanted to get to his movie. He walked quickly, his girlfriend in tow. The girl floated along lazily and paused to study each movie poster they passed.

“C’mon,” he said, as he opened the door to their holotorium. “We’re missing the coming attractions.”

I went two doors farther.
The Battle for Little Man
had already begun. It was a war movie recounting a recent battle in which a regiment of U.A. Marines was massacred on a planet near the edge of the galaxy. I knew the battle intimately. Of the 2,300 Marines sent on that mission, only seven survived. On the screen, a blond-haired, blue-eyed, barrel-chested Hollywood stud played Lieutenant Wayson Harris, the highest-ranking survivor of the Little Man campaign. As I took my seat, six enlisted men let themselves into Harris’s quarters and asked him about the mission. These men were clones. They all looked exactly alike. They had brown hair and brown eyes . . . like me. They stood about five feet eleven inches tall—four inches shorter than me.

The people who made this film may have hired retired clones to play the enlisted men. I was impressed.

“What will happen down there, Lieutenant Harris?”
one of the clones in the movie asked. Respect and adoration were evident in his voice and demeanor. The leathernecks on the screen must have been computer animations. No Marine could have said that line with a straight face.

“I don’t know, Lee
,
”
said Harris.
“It’s going to be tough. It’s going to be dangerous. But we are
the Unified Authority Marines. We don’t back down from a fight.”
As he said this, the actor playing Harris stuffed an eighteen-inch combat knife into a scabbard that hung from his belt. I had to hold my breath to keep from laughing. None of the Marines I had ever met carried eighteen-inch combat knives and none of them sounded as heroic as the Hollywood Harris on the screen.

“What if we die?”
another Marine asked.

“You listen here, Marine
,
”
barked the Hollywood Harris on the screen,
“don’t worry about death.
We’re here fighting for the Republic. The Republic needs us. The people need us as they have
never needed us before.”

I slumped in my seat. This movie was supposed to be authentic with real combat footage taken from the actual battle. Maybe the battle scenes would be more realistic, but this portrayal of military clones was painfully propagandistic. This movie was the kind of jingoistic shit that Hollywood always churned out during times of war; something meant to build patriotic morale. On a planet like New Columbia, that effort was wasted. I was the only person in the holotorium.

At least, I was the only person in the theater up until that moment. As Harris finished his soliloquy about defending the Republic, the door at the back of the holotorium opened. I heard men whispering among themselves as they moved into empty seats directly behind me.

By this time, Lieutenant Harris and a platoon of Marines were being drop-shipped behind enemy lines. They landed about one mile in from the beach where the rest of the Marines were pinned down by a group of Mogat Separatists. Harris and twenty-two commandoes snuck into the enemy’s bunker. Using knives and pistols, Harris and his men made short work of at least two hundred enemy soldiers. God, it was glorious.