Rogue clone (5 page)

Clones were also programmed to think they were natural-born. Your average soldier clone did not know he was cloned and programmed to love nothing but their country. They just thought of themselves as patriotic citizens.

Was Spinoza so depressing, or was it just my overapplied interpretation of his work? I looked around the gate. This particular flight was a business flight. Men in suits sat scanning the mediaLink or writing memos. Women in suits did the same. A young mother tried to busy two small children by reading to them. I had no love, desire, or passion for any of these people. They were natural-born, I was synthetic .

. . a rare synthetic. I was a clone who knew he was a clone. My model was designed before the Senate added a death-reflex to its military clones to prevent them from rebelling against their makers. When other clones learned they were clones, a gland in their brain killed them. When I learned I was a clone, I went to a bar and got drunk.

If Spinoza was right, perhaps I felt no love or passion for humanity because the germ did not exist in me. Perhaps the germ of love required a soul. Most religions stated that clones do not have souls. Perhaps I proved them right.

The Unified Authority was right to build neural programming and the death reflex into its clones. Judging by my example, once clones knew they were apart from humanity, they closed themselves off to it. As I said before, I was a one of a kind clone. The rest of my kind were created at a time when the Republic was under siege. The Galactic Central Fleet, an armada of warships, had vanished. As a last resort, the military created battalions of Liberator clones and sent them to the Galactic Eye to kill whatever unknown enemy was there.

The battle ended quickly. The problem was that having created a living, breathing super weapon, the Unified Authority did not know what to do with it. When the generals sent Liberators to settle smaller battles and domestic problems, they did not like the results.

Liberators were sent to stop a riot on Albatross Island, a penal planet in the Perseus Arm. The Liberators killed the prisoners and then turned on the guards and the hostages. With the exception of a few prison workers, the Liberators killed everyone on the planet.

In the end, Congress banned Liberator clones from the Orion Belt and let attrition thin them out. I stepped off the assembly line in 2490. By that time only four Liberators still existed. Three were wild and bloodthirsty, caring only about their own survival. One was religious and completely loyal to his U.A. creators. He was my mentor. To this day, I do not know whether to admire or despise him. I feel them all inside of me, struggling for control of my emotions. When I close my eyes at night, I sometimes think I can hear the ghost of Sergeant Tabor Shannon, a Marine who happily gave his life for the Republic. When I pass through great crowds, I feel isolated and I imagine Sergeant Booth Lector sneering at everyone around him. Both men were Liberators. Both died in battle. Shannon remained patriotic to the last, hoping for the best in a world that considered him an insect. Yes, I was still putting my life on the line for the Unified Authority; but as a mercenary. I could at least tell myself that my allegiance was to myself. But Lector was the only one whose allegiance was truly just to himself. He remained in the Marines because he could not figure out a way to escape the Corps. Looking back, I think Shannon and Lector were both full of shit.

In the Marines, you scuttled into your transport when your sergeant yelled for you to get your ass on board. But on a civilian flight, pretty flight attendants ask the passengers to board their flights. The door to our commuter flight opened and an attendant with long dark hair welcomed us. We formed a line and quietly took our seats.

The flight took off smoothly, rising through the sky. When we were about two hundred miles outside of New Columbia, the blue and white atmosphere ended and turned into the blackness of space. To this point, the ship traveled slowly in the climb, never moving more than two thousand miles per hour. We picked up speed and traveled another eight hundred miles to the Broadcast Network in a couple of minutes—a painfully slow pace.

I reclined my seat and stretched out for the short ride. We were traveling 240 trillion miles to Mars. The flight would take just over an hour, and I had had enough of Spinoza and needed the rest. I turned my head toward the porthole beside my chair and watched the tint shields form over the glass, dimming out stars and planets under a blanket of inky blackness. We would soon reach the Broadcast Network. I could not see the discs through the shields, but I knew what was coming. A thousand miles outside of Safe Harbor, our spacejet slowed to a crawl as it approached the two gigantic elliptical discs that formed the New Columbian sector’s broadcast station. The discs were approximately one mile across and reflected everything around them like giant mirrors. Many things happened over the next few moments. A silver-red security laser, able to X-ray a ship, its contents, and its passengers, searched the spacejet for criminals and contraband. Once the U.A. Port Authority completed its search, the galaxy’s largest super computer sequenced our travel to make sure no other ships would enter our travel space.

The spacejet did not enter the discs. As it approached, jagged tendrils of electricity stretched out of the glossy face of the sending disc. The blue-white lightning was so bright that I could see it through the tint shielding on the window. The air in the cabin crackled with static electricity. Had the tinting failed, the glare of the Broadcast Network’s electrical field would have blinded me. Even if I closed my eyes and placed my hands over my face, that light would blind me.

“Prepare for broadcast,” the pilot said over the loud speaker.

And then the first 10,000-light-year jump was over. We had traveled sixty trillion miles in less than one second. We traveled the remaining one hundred eighty trillion miles in the next few minutes—the time it took to emerge from a receiving disc and glide to the broadcast disc beside it. The transfers took approximately thirty seconds and we made four of them.

Clearing Mars security, however, was a different story. The Unified Authority was at war and Mars was its most important port. Mars was the gateway to Earth.

Mars Spaceport was the galaxy’s largest shopping mall. It was the hub of all space flight to and from Earth. Consequently, anybody on the planet qualified for duty-free shopping. Even the Mars port employees qualified. The jewelry stores on Mars sold more diamonds than jewelers on the next ten richest planets combined. As the advertisements said, “Serious shoppers shop on Mars.” Even people who were not planning on traveling sometimes flew to Mars for the tax breaks on gems, fine liquors, and other luxury items.

Fluorescent light poured out of the storefronts. Pretty girls in short skirts stood just outside stores offering to mist passersby with samples of expensive perfumes. A robotic cigar store Indian turned back and forth proffering plastic cigars to all who passed. The shopping arcade I had entered stretched as far as the eye could see, and there were ten more like it.

Nearly one million people flew in and out of Mars on any given day. The planet did not have a breathable atmosphere, just a series of domes with a city-sized spaceport and a military base that was jointly run by the Air Force and the Army.

I did not like going to Mars. I came here because it was the most crowded spot in the galaxy, and the best jumping point for meeting Admiral Klyber. The traffic around this planet was so congested that no one paid undue attention when ships took off and headed out to space, and Klyber’s pilots could meet me here and smuggle me away without attracting attention.

I scanned the crowd around me for known Confederates and Mogats. Having just survived a terrorist attack on New Columbia I was more cautious than ever. I also kept an eye out for people who might identify me as a Liberator—or even worse, recognize me.

“You ready to go, Marsten?” a man asked as I passed the door of a dimly-lit bar. The pilot knew my real name. He also knew better than to refer to me as
Wayson
in public.

“Sure,” I said, not even pausing to look back.

The pilot walked quickly and caught up with me. Dressed in a long leather jacket and khaki pants, he wore the traditional uniform of civilian pilots. His short black hair was slicked back and a pair of dark aviator glasses poked out of his shirt pocket. He was not a civilian. He was an officer in the Navy. We left the shopping arcade and entered a food court. Lines of people formed in front of small restaurants. Janitors bussed tables and cleared trash bins. Loud talk echoed in the rafters of this cavernous hall with its bright lights and gleaming white floors.

“You are the hot topic on the ship these days,” the pilot said. “Is it true?”

“Is what true?” I asked.

“Were you in Safe Harbor when the bombs went off?”

“Where did you hear that?” I asked.

“One of my friends heard Klyber say you were there.”

“If Admiral Klyber says I was there, I must have been there,” I said. The pilot laughed. We crossed the food court and entered an unmarked door. This led us into a narrow service hall that seemed to stretch for miles. The white tile floor gleamed but the walls were unfinished plaster. Bright fluorescent fixtures provided the hall with dry luminescence.

“So were you there when the bombs went off?”

“Yeah, I was there. I helped dig out a few of the survivors.”

The service hall branched off to two different sections of the Mars Spaceport. We entered from one of the bustling commercial terminals. Had we headed left, we would have entered administrative offices. We turned right and wound up in the commuter terminal. This was the area used by private pilots and large corporations. It was smaller than the commercial terminals, far less crowded, and much less flashy. Instead of a large food court, it had a coffee shop where pilots went to relax as they filled out flight reports or studied their flight plans. The general mood in the commuter terminal was quiet, like the lobby of a library.

A couple dozen pilots stood in pockets scattered around the floor of the terminal. Most of these flyboys seemed to know each other. None of them recognized my pilot. They stole mildly curious glances. His was a new face that had stumbled into their tight-knit fraternity.

Once we left the terminal, my pilot swapped his camouflage—the leather jacket and civilian accoutrements—for a Navy jacket. His spacecraft, however, remained camouflaged. We crossed the tarmac and climbed into a Johnston R-27, the kind of twelve-seater light craft favored by small corporations. The Johnston was white with dark gray trim along its wings. It had neither armor nor hidden gun arrays, the prosaic sign of a military craft. This innocuous Johnston had something far more impressive.

“You strapped in?” the pilot asked as I fitted the last of the safety harness across my chest, a useless gesture. Any accidents in this little craft would end in death.

“This is Johnston R-twenty-seven zero four, four, nine Rectal, Anus, Penile five requesting permission to taxi. Again, this is Johnston zero, four, four, nine RAP five requesting permission.”

“Roger, Johnston R-twenty-seven. You are cleared to taxi.” I could hear other flight controllers squawking in the background as the man on the radio struggled to keep from laughing.

“Aren’t there regulations about what you can say on the air?” I asked.

“To the tower?” the pilot asked, sounding genuinely surprised. “The controllers love it when I talk dirty. It’s their supervisors who get pissed, and that’s all right. They can’t touch me. I have military clearance and they’re just civilians.”

The commuter runway was a mile-long tunnel with several airlocks. A crewman towed us to the first airlock using a cart. When he reached the far wall of the airlock, the crewman detached our tow cable, gave us a quick wave, and drove back to the terminal. The runway behind us vanished as the thirty-foot door closed behind us, sealing in the spaceport’s manufactured atmosphere. The wall in front of us was thick and heavy, the color of oxidized iron. After two minutes, a seam showed in the center of this great metal barrier. The cogs at the base and top of the wall groaned as they pulled it open along their zipper-like causeway.

This time we rolled forward under our own power and stopped just shy of a final barrier, an electroshield. The first two barriers we passed through protected the atmosphere inside the spaceport. This next shield was in place for military purposes. It was a force field designed to stop intruders and deflect attacks. The electroshield could dampen particle beam and laser attacks, and anything solid that hit the shield would be instantly fried. I could see the surface of Mars ahead through the electroshield’s translucent white aurora.

“Do they know you’re self-broadcasting?” I asked.

Having a “self-broadcasting” ship meant that this highly modified Johnston R-27 did not need to enter the Broadcast Network to travel long distances. The ship was equipped with its own broadcast engine that, used in conjunction with the right navigational computer, could transport the ship anywhere in the galaxy.

“It’s sort of hard to hide something as big as an anomaly,” the pilot said.
Anomaly
was the term used to describe the electrical field through which broadcast objects vanished and appeared. “They track us the moment we leave Mars. We’re the only ship that flies toward Saturn instead of Earth or the Broadcast Network. That kind of thing gets all kinds of attention these days.”

“I suppose,” I said.

The surface of Mars looked like an Earth desert from our cockpit. Peering out as we arched away from the planet, I saw dented plains that stretched around the horizon. Huge as the Mars Spaceport building was when seen from the inside, it became a mere speck as we pulled away from the planet. Soon enough, Mars looked no larger than a coin, and all of its features vanished. The only broadcast discs in the Sol System, Earth’s solar system, hovered a few hundred miles above the spaceport. Normally spacecraft either flew up to the discs or headed toward Earth, the only populated planet in the solar system. We, however, flew in the opposite direction. We headed out toward space, toward Saturn, and traveled more than 100,000 miles. Only the most powerful tracking systems like the ones on Mars would detect what happened next.