Rogue Clone: The Clone Betrayal Part 4

Sergeant Major Lewis Herrington quietly came up and sat on the bleachers behind mine.

I would have demanded a salute from anyone else. As the highest-ranking guest of the Clonetown detention facility, I had that right; but Herrington and I were members of an exclusive club. He and I had both survived the final battle of the Avatari war, a claim only four people in the entire universe could make. He did not need to salute.

"How do they look, sir?"

"Like conquering heroes," I said.

As natural-borns, the five thousand recruits on the field came in all shapes and sizes. Many of them did not fit well into their government-issue tees and shorts. There was a time when one size fitted all enlisted men because every enlisted man came from the same helix. Some clones packed on a few extra pounds in the orphanages and some reported to boot camp looking skinny. I had five inches on everybody going through boot camp, but that's how things go when you are a one-of-a-kind clone.

Herrington, who had just turned fifty, had more white hair than brown. He was the oldest inmate in our little camp, but he was bred in a laboratory and born in a tube like the rest of us. We were all created for the same calling, to serve in the military. He had gone through boot camp thirty years before me, but he saw what I saw-substandard training.

Some of the natural-born recruits on the parade ground looked like they could fight, but most of them looked better suited for writing poetry. Unlike us, they grew up civilians, never suspecting they might one day be drafted. Many of them were clearly less than enthusiastic about their new life in the military.

Perhaps as many as a hundred soldiers had paired off for sparring with pugil sticks. In one match, a tall, lanky kid came out swinging against a short, chubby opponent. The short one looked like he wanted to drop his stick and beg for mercy.

The whole point of skirmishing with pugil sticks was to simulate long rifles and bayonets at close range-antiquated stuff, but a good discipline builder. The sticks were four feet long with padded ends, not that "padded" meant "soft." A solid blow with a pugil stick could break an opponent's ribs or leave him with a concussion.

The combatants were supposed to hold their hands a shoulder's width apart and pivot the stick back and forth while they struck with the ends; but this tall kid came out choking one end of the stick with both hands and swinging it like a baseball bat. If the shorter kid had even the slightest idea about how to fight, he could have blocked one of the other guy's crazy-a.s.s swings and sent him down for the count; but the kid kept backing away.

I could not decide which bothered me more, the rube swinging his d.a.m.n stick like a bat, the miscreant cowering in fear, or the pathetic specimen of humanity masquerading as a drill instructor. The man leading the squad was a lieutenant. The Army of the Unified Authority no longer had any actual sergeants to drill its recruits. Sergeants were noncommissioned officers. The military had not seen a natural-born below the rank of lieutenant for over two hundred years. Now that they were building their "more invested" army, they had to use officers to train the first generation of grunts. When it came to the in-your-face nastiness needed to drill new recruits, the silver-spoon boys of the officer corps just did not cut it.

Having eliminated their cloned conscripts, the natural-born officers now found themselves performing tasks formerly relegated to clones. From here on out they'd use natural-borns to rush enemy strongholds, peel potatoes, and mop latrines. The satisfying irony of the situation did not go unnoticed around Clonetown.

Down on the parade grounds, several platoons had pugil stick fights going, but Herrington spotted the fight that interested me at once. "G.o.d help them if they ever go to war," he said. "Those boys would need to improve just to qualify for s.h.i.t."

"They're not all like that," I said. Just a few feet away from the brute and the wimp, two boys went toe-to-toe, really hacking at each other. Neither man showed any inclination to defend himself. With all the blows they were taking, it looked like they were pummeling each other with pillows. Their drill sergeant should have stepped in and decked them both.

It was late in the afternoon, with the sun still high in the sky. The day had cooled from miserable to unpleasant, and long shadows stretched across the desiccated ground.

Behind us, veterans with actual fighting experience headed back to camp. Clonetown was a fifteen-acre compound built to house ten thousand men and currently hosting thirty thousand. Dual barbed-wire fences surrounded the compound, and sharpshooters with rifles manned the towers along the outer fence, but we were allowed to leave the compound during the day. I came here every day to watch the high comedy of these natural-born recruits; but once the sun went down, I had to report back. We had nightly roll calls, violations would not go unnoticed. After roll call, the guards closed the gates, and we turned in for the night.

"The general population cannot possibly feel safer with these sp.e.c.k.e.rs protecting them," Herrington commented.

"The average citizen doesn't know and doesn't care," I said. "As far as John Citizen is concerned, the sun still rises in the east and the sky is still blue. He sleeps cozy in his bed every night safe in the knowledge that Congress has his back."

Down on the parade ground, the drill instructor finally broke up the mismatch between the tall guy and his squat victim. I actually felt sorry for these new recruits. How many hundreds of years had pa.s.sed since the days when the regular Army was made up of regular men?

Herrington sat in silence watching the recruits for a couple of minutes, then asked what we were all wondering: "Sir, how long do you think they're going to keep us locked up out here?"

"You got someplace to go, Sergeant?" I asked.

"No, sir."

I knew three answers to his question. As an officer, my job was to give the party line-a simple We'll leave as soon as we receive our orders would suffice. Then there was the honest answer, the answer Herrington deserved. That answer would be more along the lines of Wherever they send us, it won't be any better than this. But there was a third train of thought, one that I even hid from myself. The new Army had approximately sixty thousand new dumb-s.h.i.t recruits guarding the thirty thousand trained fighting machines now residing in this camp. They had the guns and the numbers, but we had the know-how, and the experience. If we decided to make a break, some of us would survive.

Down on the parade grounds, the drill instructor yanked the pugil stick out of the hands of his timid recruit and shook it in the air. He demonstrated the proper way to hold the stick by waving it in the man's face. I could not hear him from this distance, but it looked like he was giving the entire platoon a good drubbing. You learn how to read DI body language in boot camp. It's a lesson you never forget.

"The guys we had in our platoon back on New Copenhagen . . . I bet we could have taken every man on that field," Herrington said.

"I bet we could," I said, knowing he was both joking and speaking a truth. We couldn't really have routed five thousand men with forty-three Marines, but we would have given them a beating they would not have soon forgotten. We had a veteran force-forty-three fully trained and seasoned fighting Marines. Forty of them did not make it off that planet. "Hooha, Marine," I said. "We would've knocked them flat on their a.s.ses."

Herrington watched the raw recruits for several seconds, then said, "General Smith wasn't even on New Copenhagen. Why does Congress give a s.h.i.t what that speck thinks?"

I heard what Herrington said, but a different thought ran through my mind, and I laughed.

Herrington misread my laughter. "Do you think it was our fault we lost those planets, sir? Do you think the clones ran scared?" He sounded defensive. Even though he thought of himself as natural-born, Herrington grouped himself with the synthetics. He was an enlisted man. In our world, the terms "enlisted" and "cloned" were synonymous.

"I just had this mental image of Smith leading a squad of grounded fighter pilots into the Avatari cave," I said. That was the first time I thought about the cave that the aliens had dug on New Copenhagen without an involuntary shudder. That cave . . . I took a full platoon and two civilians into that cave. Nearly fifty of us went in, but only four of us made it out. On that mission, I discovered a newfound appreciation for Dante and the h.e.l.l he traveled through in the Inferno.

"General Glade said he would . . ." Herrington began.

I cut him off. "Herrington, they have us locked up in a camp in a desert. Who do you think cut the orders that put us here?"

"General Smith was the one who . . ."

"And has Glade done anything to get us out?" As commandant of the Corps and a survivor of New Copenhagen, Glade was generally seen as one of the good guys by most Marines.

"Son of a b.i.t.c.h," Herrington whispered.

"Yeah, son of a b.i.t.c.h," I repeated. "These days, it's a whole lot better to be a son of a b.i.t.c.h than a b.a.s.t.a.r.d bred in a tube."

Herrington snickered, an uncomfortable sort of snicker that hinted that his neural programming was still intact. Even now, locked up in a relocation camp in Texas, he didn't like saying bad things about superior officers.

Down on the field, the drill instructor gave the stick back to his timid recruit. He pushed the boy back out to fight. The little guy and his bigger opponent circled each other like crabs, occasionally feigning an attack but never committing themselves. After more than a minute, the drill instructor stepped in between them, cuffing them both on their helmets and probably daring them to strike him instead of each other. Neither took the bait.

"I'm glad I didn't have to babysit a.s.sholes like that on New Copenhagen," I said.

Herrington relaxed and laughed. "Yeah, that would have been bad," he said.

We watched the drills in silence. After a few minutes, Herrington gave me a nod and went back to the barracks. He was a good Marine, a tough Marine, a man ruled by duty and integrity. His hair had gone white, and some of the starch was missing from his shoulders, but I could still count on him. When the shooting started, Herrington would never cut and run.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

Evening gave way to night. The El Paso sky turned orange, then blue, then black. Lights came on around the parade grounds even though the recruits had already turned in for the evening. The lights were a signal for the residents of Clonetown to return to camp for the evening headcount.

A steady trickle of enlisted men walked in through the gate around me. They came in groups of two or three. We fell into lines; the guards took a quick count, and we called it an evening.

With lights blazing in their windows, the guard towers along the fence shone like candles against the night sky. I could see silhouettes of guards in the window of the nearest tower. They aimed their guns into the camp during headcount, then retired to card games once the gates were sealed.

The machinelike chirping of crickets and cicadas filled the languid air. The stuffy evening lacked so much as a trace of a breeze. Off in the distance, a fleet of trucks exited Fort Bliss. I could see their lights in the darkness. The trucks turned onto the highway and vanished. Few vehicles strayed toward our crowded encampment, especially at night.

Around camp, men stood in pockets smoking and talking. Some wore shorts and tank tops. More than a few had stripped down to their briefs. What did they care? No one would throw them in the brig. The bra.s.s had already done their worst-they'd abandoned us.

To the casual observer, everyone in this camp looked identical; but I had lived among clones my entire life, and I recognized the diversity that existed among supposedly identical men. It wasn't just interests or training. Here were thousands of men with the exact same brains physiologically; but some of these men were brilliant and others slow. The equipment these boys packed would not allow them to reproduce. We were built to "copulate, not populate," as a drill instructor once told me; but natural selection still toyed with their single-generation genes. The dumbest and most foolishly heroic clones died in training and battle.

As the ranking clone and only officer in the camp, I had "officer country," all to myself. Sadly, in Clonetown, officer country consisted of one small shedlike billet. I s.h.i.tted and showered with enlisted men and noncommissioned officers, but I had a one-room barrack all to myself.

As I turned down the lane that led to my quarters, I saw the caravan parked outside my door. There was a staff car, a sedan with a GSA license plate sitting center position in a line of four jeeps. Soldiers with M27s sat in the jeeps waiting, but the staff car sat empty.

Some of the men in the jeeps placed their hands on their rifles as I approached. They all watched me carefully, their heads tracking me as I walked to the door to my little one-room shed. Mostly m.u.f.fled by the walls and window, a strange sound wafted out of my billet. As I opened the door, that strange noise became all the louder. I recognized it by this time; it was the sound of a woman crying.

I had one light fixture in my quarters, a two-bulb affair in a white gla.s.s dome. The light was already on, its glare radiating out of the dome filling the closet-sized room in which my humble rack took up nearly three-quarters of the floor.

"I can't decide whether this is a military base or a ghetto," Al Smith said, as I stepped through the door. The general stood across the room fanning himself with a folder.

We did not have luxuries like ceiling fans in Clonetown. When the days got hot, we could either leave our quarters or stay in and bake; those were the only choices. This was not an especially hot evening, but the humidity had taken its toll on General Smith. His blouse was opened at the collar, and sweat stains showed under his arms. It might have been the heat or simply his girth, but Smith made a wheezing noise as he breathed; I heard it clearly even over the loud sobbing of the woman on my bed.

"General Smith," I said without saluting. The b.a.s.t.a.r.d did not deserve a salute; his bulls.h.i.t testimony was the reason I was in this detention camp.

"What's that?" I pointed to the pile of clothes and hair slumped on my rack.

"You don't recognize her?" Smith asked. "I thought every man in the Unified Authority knew who she was."

Now that he mentioned it, I did recognize her. Maybe she had washed the red tint out of her coffee-grounds-colored hair, or maybe it only showed in better light. All of the style had gone out of her locks, which now hung in a mop over her face, and shoulders. Misery had whipped the haughty-movie-star glamour out of Ava, but I did recognize her. She sat on the edge of my rack doubled over as if she were sick, her shoulders heaving convulsively with her sobs.

"The actress," I said, pretending not to know her name.

"Ava Gardner, the galaxy's most glamorous clone," Smith said.

"Glamorous" she wasn't. It was as if somebody had stripped the magic out of the actress, and all that was left was a sweaty, weeping mess. Ava Gardner had become something less than she seemed at the New Year's Eve party. She had become human. Wearing a plain cotton blouse, white with no frills, she seemed far removed from the arrogant beauty I had seen the night of the party.

"What is she doing here?" I asked.

"What do you think she's doing here?" General Smith was an important man, but he was also an old man who was hot and uncomfortable in the Texas heat. When they are hot and uncomfortable, old men often become cranky. Smith seemed ready to explode. "She's a clone, Harris. This is a camp for clones. She's moving in."

"I thought that was just Hollywood gossip," I said.

"Some of Mo Newcastle's officers found the lab where they built her on New Copenhagen. It was hidden in a movie studio."

"So you're sticking a lone woman in a camp with thirty thousand men?" I asked. "Why not just take her out and shoot her?" General or not, I would show this man no respect.

Ava heard my question and moaned as if I'd kicked her in the gut. Until that moment, I thought she might have been drugged.

Smith laughed, and the corners of his dark eyes crinkled. A faint smile formed on his face as he said, "If clones are so dangerous, maybe it's a good thing . . ."

"She wouldn't be any safer with the natural-borns at the fort, and you know it," I said.

"You're right," Smith admitted, the smile vanishing beneath his mustache.

"So what do you expect me to do with her?" I asked.

"That's up to you, Harris. General Mooreland asked me to get her here safely. As you can see, I kept my end of the bargain."

"General Mooreland? They promoted Ted Mooreland to general?" I asked, feeling both envious and disgusted. The last time I had seen that b.a.s.t.a.r.d, Ava was tucked under his shoulder, and he was a newly minted colonel.

Smith brightened and the crinkles returned to the corners of his eyes. "I've got good news for you, Harris. You'll be back on active duty by the end of the month. In fact, you're about to receive a promotion as well. General Glade cleared you to receive your second bar effective next week." Having two bars on my collar points would make me a captain. "And that's just for openers. We've got big plans for you."

I heard the words, but I did not trust them. "No s.h.i.t?"

"No s.h.i.t," Smith said, sounding amused. "Let's head over to Fort Bliss. We'll find ourselves a nice air-conditioned office where we can discuss your orders in more detail."

"What about her?" I said, pointing to the crumpled heap of dress and hair that had finally pa.s.sed out on my rack.

"I can leave a couple of men to watch her if you want," Smith said; "but from what I hear, this gal can take care of herself."

Something had to give. The humidity and heat, along with the stillness of the night, turned the air into vapor. Sweat rolled down my sides. General Smith, "the old man of the Air Force," looked like he was suffocating. As we walked out to his sedan, a cloud broke somewhere in the distance. I didn't see the flash of lightning, but the extended clap of thunder shook the walls of the temporary tin shed I now called home.

"Sounds like rain," Smith commented, as his driver opened the car door for him.

"Maybe," I said as I let myself in behind the driver. "From what I've seen, we get more lightning than rain out here."

The first jagged streak of lightning looked like a hairline crack stretching between the earth and sky. It danced and vanished off to the west. Two seconds of thunder followed.

The air remained still. We were in the muggy doldrums.

"Do you get a lot of lightning out here?" Smith asked.

"Maybe, I haven't been here that long," I said, as another streak of lightning flashed.

"Sleeping in a metal structure during lightning storms, doesn't that make you nervous?" he asked.

"I'd prefer something made out of brick. You want to call in the order, sir?" I asked.

Smith gave me a cursory chuckle.

"I didn't think so," I said.

"Captain Harris, you wouldn't be here long enough to enjoy it if I did call it in." He told his driver, "Take us to the admin building over at Bliss."

"Yes, sir," said the driver.

Heads appeared in windows as our little convoy traveled through Clonetown. The guards opened the gate, and we drove into the demilitarized zone between our camp and the fort. Sheet lightning flashed in the sky just beyond Fort Bliss, illuminating the low-slung silhouettes of buildings and a water tower.

"Have you seen the new recruits?" Smith asked. "What do you think of our new natural-born Army?"

"Promising," I said in a bored voice. I didn't feel like making small talk, not with this a.s.shole. Whatever a.s.signment General Smith had for me, it would not be good. It could not be good. I was a military clone, an ugly stepchild of a society that wanted to sweep past indiscretions under the rug for good.

When Congress decided to wash its hands of Liberator clones, it eliminated us through attrition. The military stopped incubating us. The Senate banned us from entering the Orion Arm, and the Pentagon sent us into every combat situation until only a handful of Liberators remained. I wondered if history would repeat itself.

We drove up to the guard post at Fort Bliss. Rain began to fall as the guard saluted and opened the gate. It fell in thimble-sized bombs that crashed into the windshield and burst. The thudding of the rain on the roof of the car sounded like suppressed machine-gun fire. With the rain banging against the tin roof of my billet, Ava must have thought she was trapped inside a snare drum.

The rain fell so hard that deep puddles formed by the time we reached the administration building. More lightning flashed, and thunder followed only a second or two behind.