Rogue clone (46 page)

“Me, I was just another general-issue clone. You were a specking Liberator.”

I stopped.

“Yeah, I know I’m a clone. Everyone on my ship is a clone. It’s the only all-clone crew in the history of Unified Authority.”

“What about the . . .”

“The death reflex?” Lee interrupted. He did an expert job of steering the conversation. “Interesting thing. Once the Network went dark, the natural-borns began to panic. I don’t know if you knew this, but I always sort of suspected I was a clone.”

“I knew,” I said.

Lee cackled, and I regretted admitting it.

“The officers were in a panic. You remember Captain Pollard? You met him on the way to Ravenwood. Remember, that was the place where you supposedly died?” No sign of sanity remained in Lee’s voice by this time.

“Pollard really lost it. He parked our ship next to that broadcast station and he wanted to just sit there until it switched on again. I told him he was dreaming . . . that thing wasn’t ever coming back online. We waited, and waited, and waited. Everyone could tell that it wasn’t coming back . . . at least the clones could.

“Pollard said I became worse every day . . .”

“Worse?” I asked.

“He used the word
unhinged
,” Lee said.

“Because of the waiting?” I asked.

“Because I could tell that the frigging Unified Authority was gone. I could feel it. And we were going to wait there until the goddamned
Grant
was nothing but a box of bones.

“So Pollard makes me take some medicine for the stress. He gives me this serotonin inhibitor, and you know what happens?”

You lost your mind?
I thought. “No.”

“I look in the mirror and see a guy with brown hair and brown eyes. And I figured, damn, I’m just like you now, and if I’m going to be like you, I need to be able to take over in a bad situation. I was going to have to lock the officers up, but if I locked up the officers, sooner or later the enlisted men would figure out that the only people not locked up were clones.”

“Not unless you told them,” I said. “They never figured out that they were clones when they were in the orphanage. If that wasn’t enough to show them, I would think they’d never figure it out.”

“That’s true,” Lee agreed, and he laughed hysterically.

“So I took a bunch of clone sailors to the sick bay, and I had them try the same medicine I was on. Know what happened? Give a swabbie enough serotonin inhibitor, and nothing happens when you tell him he’s a clone. You get it? You lude them up, get them stoned out of their specking minds so that they don’t get stressed about anything, and there’s no death reflex.”

Lee laughed and laughed. “Pretty specking obvious. My entire crew is on some drug called Fallzoud. The joke around the ship is that they’re so friggin’ stoned, they wouldn’t care if their dick falls off.

“The only problem is that they’re not supposed to take it for more than three days straight. I’ve been on it for nine days.”

I did not know what to say. An entire crew of cloned Marines, stoned out their minds, and fully aware that they were clones . . . they would be a danger to themselves and every one around them.

“What happened to Pollard?”

“I had him arrested, of course. Once we started taking Fallzoud, we sort of restructured the chain of command. We were in charge, and we didn’t need natural-born officers screwing with us, so we put them in the brig.”

“Is he still in the brig?” I started to form a plan. If Freeman and I could slip on board that ship, we might be able to free the officers. Maybe we could put together a counter-mutiny.

“No, you saw to that,” Lee said without any sign of emotion. “Once we spotted you in space, the officers decided to break loose so we had to kill them.”

“You killed them?” I asked. “In their cells? Unarmed officers could not possibly break out of those cells.”

Lee stopped to consider this. “I never really thought about it,” he said, sounding mildly surprised but not at all bothered by this comment. “I sent a platoon to take care of them, and that was the last I heard of it.”

Sunlight poured through the trees in the distance. We had walked near a large clearing in the woods. Here the buzz of cicadas or something similar filled the air. In the distance, the bare metal hull of a military transport sparked in the sunlight. For a moment I thought Vince might have lured me here to shoot me. But that was the last thing on his mind. He was on a drug that shut down his emotions. All of his men were on that drug.

They probably did not eat or sleep much. They just over-medicated in the mornings and lived with the side effects. Paranoia, mood swings, lack of appetite . . . I knew what was wrong with Lee and that other Marine—they were insane and I had no way of knowing how long their drug supply would hold out.

Lee turned and started back in the direction we had come from. “So what do you say, Wayson? Are you going to give me your self-broadcasting ship?”

I had misunderstood the situation, and it was by sheer luck that we had not all been killed. No sane man would destroy a space ship he needed just because he could not have it. An insane man, however, might.

“Can I have a couple of days to consider my options?” I asked.

“Sure,” Lee said, sounding magnanimous. “But if you so much as power your engines, I’ll blow that specking ship of yours into the next galaxy. Do we have a deal?”

I had that ridiculous combat knife, two M27s, and a particle beam pistol. Ray had one pistol that fired bullets and another that fired a particle beam, assorted knives, an oversized particle beam cannon, a sniper rifle, and a satchel filled with grenades. Of course, if the battle went right, we could pick up more weapons as we went along.

“If they’re still living by the book, they’re luding up in the morning. I think that was why it took Lee so long to come down. He had to take his Fallzoud then wait for his brains to unscramble.”

We were holding an emergency conference in the Starliner—the closest thing we had to a war room. Archie and the three elders sat in the front row of the Starliner. Of the 113 people in the congregation, only twenty-three were men of combat age. I held an informal census and found sixty-nine women (girls included), thirteen boys below the age of sixteen, and eight men ages fifty or older. The twenty-three combat-aged men were wedged into the cabin of the Starliner. Three of them sat on the floor.

“Luding?” one of the elders asked. “What is that?”

I had just explained everything I knew. I told them about Fallzoud, and how it had enabled Lee and the other clones to cope with the knowledge of their origins. I told them about how Lee had murdered the natural-born officers and that I thought he was insane.

“Medicating . . .” Archie said. “They take their medicine in the morning . . .”

“Fallzoud? You ever heard of that drug?” Archie looked at Ray whenever he asked questions. So did most of the other men in the cabin. Ray and I were in the cockpit leading this huddle. Ray shook his head.

“Vince said it was a serotonin inhibitor,” I said. “I’m no doctor, but if he’s taking it to stop the death reflex, then Fallzoud is some kind of relaxation drug.”

“And you think the drug leaves him weak?” Archie asked.

“I’m guessing that the drug leaves him limp,” I said. “We wait until they’re strung out, and then we attack.”

“You’ve got to be joking,” one of the elders said. “How many men are on that ship?”

“That ship is the
Grant
,” I said. “It is a U.A. fighter carrier. Fully staffed, it has two thousand and five hundred men, one fifth of whom were officers. All but one of those officers are dead. Ray and I took care of five of the enlisted men. That leaves us with one thousand and nine hundred and ninety-five, give or take a few.

“To have narrowed the odds down that far before even getting started . . . well, I’m feeling pretty confident,” I said.

No one responded.

“Do you have a plan?” Archie asked, rising to his feet.

“I saw the transport that the Marines came in on last night. It’s a couple of miles away through that forest. I suggest we slip in and spy on the transport tomorrow morning. We wait until we are sure they’ve luded up . . .”

“And kill them?” one of the youngest elders asked. He might have been twenty years old. Just a kid, I thought. He was tall and wiry with broad shoulders and long arms.

“We kill them or they kill us,” Ray said in his familiar flat tone. All expression had left his demeanor.

“Sometimes those are your only choices.”

Ray always seemed slightly embarrassed around his people, and the haughty way they acted around him did not help matters.

“Levi and Simeon killed thousands of Hivites in a single day,” Archie said. “They did it just like Raymond and Mr. Harris have suggested.” I did not know the story, but everyone in the congregation apparently did. Whether it was Archie’s story or just his support, the tenor of the meeting changed. The elders nodded, and I’ll be damned if I didn’t hear a couple of quiet hallelujahs.

After the meeting, Marianne told me what happened between Levi, Simeon, and a Hivite prince named Shechem. It was from the Bible, so she knew I wouldn’t know it.

This man named Jacob had 12 sons by different wives. Two of the boys, Levi and Simeon, and a girl named Dinah, came from the same mother. Sechem raped Dinah then asked Jacob, her father, for her hand in marriage. Levi and Simeon told Jacob they would allow the marriage as long as Shechem and all the men of his city got circumcised. Shechem agreed and managed to convince all his men to follow. So Levi and Simeon waited until the men of the town were foreskin-less and helpless, then they grabbed their swords and rode into town. None of the men in town could stand up to them, so to speak, so Levi and Simeon killed every man in the town.

Archie equated Ray and me with two conniving murders. Hallelujah.

It was late at night by the time we adjourned. Stars twinkled in the sky. A distant moon showed in the darkness.

“Do you think one of those stars is their battleship?” Marianne asked me. She, Caleb, and I all sat on the large boulder overlooking the river. She had her hands wrapped around my bicep. The night was cool, her hands were warm. She rested her body against mine. This night might be the night, I thought to myself. She had that kind of sparkle in her eye.

“It’s a thousand miles away,” I said. “You might not even spot it with a telescope. It’s too small and too far away.”

“Are you scared?” Caleb asked me. He did not know the details, but he knew we planned to attack.

“No,” I said. Then I thought about it. “Yes. Yes I’m scared. But this is not the first time I’ve been scared. And I don’t think this is the most dangerous thing that I’ve ever done.”

The water rushing down the river made a cool, crisp churning noise. The sound conjured old images in my head. I thought of Tabor Shannon and Bryce Klyber, friends who had died. I thought of Klein, the clumsy one-handed assassin who tried to shoot Vince Lee because Freeman talked him into wearing my helmet.

The air was cool and the fresh scent of pine carried in the breeze. At that moment, I wanted to live on this planet with Marianne as my wife and Caleb as my son. It was the best offer anyone had given me.

“You have seven guns and a knife,” Caleb said. “And you’re going to attack forty Marines in combat armor. I’d be scared.”

“
Shhhh
,” Marianne said. “Someone could be listening out there.”

“You ever heard of David and Goliath?” Caleb asked.

“Yes, I’ve heard of David and Goliath,” I said. “Goliath was the giant and David was the shepherd king.”

“It’s from the Bible,” Caleb said.

“So I hear.”

“Just making sure,” the boy said.

“Christ is from the Bible, too,” I said. “I’ve heard of him as well.”

“Anyway,” Caleb said, ignoring my comment, “You guys going against those Marines, that’s kind of like David fighting Goliath.”

“I wish it was that easy,” I said.

“Easy?” Caleb picked up a stone and tossed it into the water. “Goliath could have killed any man.”

“You’ve got it all wrong,” I said. “King David was never in danger. Every Goliath has a weakness. David just knew what it was.”

“He knew Goliath’s weakness,” Caleb repeated. “Man, that’s smart.”

Sure it was smart
, I thought,
I was a synthetic Bible scholar
. A few minutes later, Marianne took Caleb to sleep in the Starliner. Archie was in the ship. He was the man with the grenade, just in case Lee’s men came before we got to them. I sat alone on the river bank thinking about Marianne. I imagined taking off her clothes and feeling her warm body. I imagined her lying down with her long hair forming a sheet beneath her back. My body responded to the fantasy.

When Marianne returned, she walked slowly. I could see her clearly in the moonlight. Her skin was smooth. Her eyes remained on mine. She seemed to catch the moonlight in her hair. Without saying a word, she sat beside me and pressed her mouth against mine. She was breathing hard now. The kiss was warm and wet. I reached through her hair, wrapped my hand around her head, and held her close.
It happens like this
, I thought to myself.
Just like this
. The kiss ended and she pulled her face a few inches from mine. “Wayson,” she whispered. I could have had her on that night. Instead, I stood to leave. “I love you,” I said, “but I cannot do this. I cannot stay on this planet, and you’re looking for someone who will stay.”

“It’s all right, Wayson,” she said, taking my hand. “I know and I understand.”

By this time, I had already made up my mind, and the mood was gone.

I could have made love to her that night. I should have made love to her that night. As things turned out, we would never make love.

Ray Freeman crawled forward on his stomach, brought up his sniper scope, and checked on the guards. The scope had night-for-day vision and powerful magnification. The guards were 300 yards away, but that hardly mattered. Using Freeman’s scope, I could have counted the hairs on their heads. Of the twenty-three combat-aged men, we only brought twenty with us. One was too scared. We left two to guard the camp in case we never returned.