The Clone Sedition (6 page)

“Remind me again, Harris. Why are you going to Mars?”

“I want to find out about Legion,” I said.

“As I understand it, the term ‘Legion’ may very well be their code name for us, isn’t that right?” asked Admiral Don Cutter, the highest-ranking officer in the Enlisted Man’s Military. He had four stars, I had three. He didn’t have any stars when the war with the Unifieds began; but having always been a big believer in a clear chain of command, I gave Cutter three stars during the war and a fourth star after it ended. He generally treated me as his equal. In his mind, the fourth star was ceremonial.

The man had brown hair and brown eyes and all of the other clone features. He was in his forties, some of his brown hair was turning white.

He said, “Harris, the New Olympians are an infestation. Have you actually been in the spaceport?”

“Dozens of times.”

“Since we converted it into a flophouse for wayward New Olympians?

“I haven’t been there since the evacuation,” I admitted.

“It’s a cesspool.”

“Flophouse” and “cesspool,” ancient terms still in circulation even though nobody knew precisely what they meant. Despite the certainty in his voice, Cutter had been no closer to Mars than he had been to a cesspool or a flophouse. I reminded him of that.

He went from authoritative to formal, and said, “I have discussed the situation with Spaceport Security. That’s as close as I choose to get to that rat’s nest. Colonel Riley says the air is so bad that he sleeps in his helmet.”

Cutter was a Navy man, clearly he’d never worn combat armor. He was a fine officer, but his breath smelled like coffee.

I knew Marines who had coffee on their breath as well, but their halitosis did not carry the same connotation. While I and my men were out in the battlefield, he was safe on his ship, never more than a few feet away from his next cup of coffee.

“Hyperbole,” I said. “Sleeping in a helmet is like sleeping with your back on a floor and your head on a bookshelf. Next time he says that, ask him if he has ever actually done it.”

“Maybe it’s time we shipped those people to Earth,” said Watson. EMN procedures barred civilians from military ships; but I had brought him along just the same.

“Sure, we can ship them to Earth,” I said, “Once we know who’s loyal and who’s looking for a change of government. They’re not going anywhere until we know who is who.”

Cutter glanced at Watson, and asked, “Who is he again?”

“He’s my adjutant,” I said.

Cutter asked, “Why do you have a civilian adjutant?”

I said, “Because I deal with a lot of civilians.”

“And you’re taking him to Mars as a civilian advisor?” Cutter asked. “As I understand it, this will be a military operation.”

“He’s not going to Mars,” I said. “I’m leaving him with you.”

Cutter arched an eyebrow as he said, “I don’t remember authorizing that.”

Watson said, “Leaving the New Olympians on Mars is a bad idea. The longer they are stuck there, the less loyal they will become.”

“If we ship them to Earth, they’ll infect the general population,” said Cutter, a notion I shared. “I can work around seventeen million angry New Olympians on Mars. If they stir
things up on Earth, we’ll have forty million angry people on our hands.”

“What do you plan to do with them, Admiral?” asked Watson, not showing the admiral proper respect. He was such a damned natural-born. He couldn’t help himself. I suppose he was born that way.

Cutter said, “Like I said before, the place is a cesspool, we should flush it.”

“Admiral, you are talking about killing seventeen million people,” said Watson.

Cutter said, “I don’t want to kill them, I want to wash my hands of them.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?” asked Watson.

“One more time, Harris, who is this man?”

“He’s my civilian aide,” I said.

“And who gave him permission to come aboard my ship?”

“I did.”

“And you plan to leave him aboard my ship? What makes you think he’ll still be alive when you come back?”

“Are you going to wash your hands of me?” asked Watson, then he thought about what he had said and gave me a nervous look.

I said, “Give the kid a chance, Admiral.”

Cutter ignored me. Taking a step toward Watson, he said, “If I wanted to kill those people, I would have cut off their food long ago.”

He was right. The Enlisted Man’s Empire sent an endless supply of freighters between Earth and Mars.

“That would be an interesting way of solving our sedition problem, starving one-third of our citizens to death,” I said, knowing that Cutter’s neural programming would not allow him to take my bait. On some level, the need to protect human society was hardwired into his brain.

Changing the subject, I said, “I have some ideas about the identity of Legion. Have either of you ever read the Bible?”

We were in the stateroom of the
Churchill
, the fighter carrier that served as the flagship of the Enlisted Man’s Fleet. At the moment, Mars was one hundred and fifteen million miles from Earth, meaning we had a four-hour trip ahead of us.

“The Bible?” Cutter asked, barely stifling a laugh. “I’m not a fan of mythology.”

“I haven’t read it,” Watson admitted.

“I’ve read it,” I said.

“You read the Bible?” asked Cutter. He sounded incredulous. “Of all the people I have ever met, you would be the last one I would ever expect to read the Bible.”

He wasn’t commenting on the content of my character but rather the questionable existence of my soul. All of the major religions of the world agreed that clones did not have immortal souls. “I once spent a month trapped on a transport with no one but Ray Freeman,” I said.

Cutter, who had met Freeman, said, “Good Lord! I would have shot myself.”

“I tried,” I said. “My neural programming does not allow for suicide.” That was true though I had not actually tried to shoot myself. My modus operandi had been suicide by grenade.

“Freeman, that’s the guy you were looking for in Seattle. What’s so bad about him?” asked Watson. “I thought you were friends.”

“We are friends,” I said.

“He’s never met Ray Freeman?” asked Cutter.

“Obviously,” I said.

“Ray’s not much for conversation,” I said. “Traveling with him is lonelier than traveling alone.

“Anyway, the only book I had was a Bible. It was read the Bible or talk to Ray. I went through the specking book five or six times as I recall.”

Watson gave me a sly smile, and asked, “Did you just refer to the Bible as a ‘specking book’?” The guy read me well. He knew how to kid around and still get along.

“Did I?” I asked.

The term, “speck,” by the way, referred to that one particular bodily fluid that Marines and other military men lived to excrete. “Specking” was a gerund, the verb form of a noun. It referred to the act of transferring that fluid.

“I take it you were not converted,” said Cutter.

“Oh, but I was,” I said. “Maybe not so much by the New Testament, but the Old Testament made perfect sense once I accepted God as a metaphor for the government. The government
created all things and the government took them away. It made perfect sense.”

Cutter asked, “What does a New Olympian militia have to do with the Bible?”

“The Bible has a story about a guy named Legion who was possessed by demons,” said Watson. “Christ banished the demons, and they went into a herd of pigs, and the pigs killed themselves.

“One of the guys you killed in Seattle had a Bible; but if you’re saying this is about devils and demons, that wouldn’t make sense.”

A chilled silence filled the room when I did not answer immediately. We sat around Cutter’s desk, none of us quite meeting the other men’s eyes.

Cutter said, “The Bibles, the suicides, it has all the trappings of fanatics and zealots.”

Watson laughed, and said, “Harris, maybe they think you’re the antichrist.”

“Maybe they do,” I agreed.

Watson attempted to be serious, then laughed. He said, “I can’t say that I blame them. I kind of do, too.”

“This really could be the Mogats all over again,” said Cutter. Like me, he had fought in the last religious uprising and found no humor in the situation. Watson, on the other hand, had still been in school. He didn’t see the massacre on Little Man or the ugly battle on a cinder of a planet called Hubble. The only natural-borns who fought on the Unified Authority side of the war were officers, and most of them fought from the sidelines.

“Harris, if it is another religious fanatical uprising, you’ll be walking into a real shitstorm when you land on Mars,” said Cutter.

I said, “Just like any other cancer. Catch it early enough, and you might even survive the treatment.”

Location: Mars Spaceport
Date: April 3, 2519

Providing Mars Spaceport with power, water, and oxygen did not pose a problem. With seventeen million refugees living in a facility designed for six to eight million travelers, providing space, food, and bathing facilities did. The refugees lived as crowded together as termites in a nest; and the once-elegant spaceport now smelled of grime and sweat. Lines one hundred people long extended out of every bathroom. Soup lines shuffled along the halls.

For the first time in known history, Mars had an indigenous species of life—a form of lice. The creatures must have come from Olympus Kri, riding in some refugee’s hair; but, as there was no record of a home planet for this particular variety of pest, it was now known as the “Martian louse.” With all of the grime and overcrowding in the space station, the little bastards proliferated.

Spaceport Security sprayed chemicals through the ventilation system in an unsuccessful bid to kill the lice, but there was nothing anyone could do to fix the stench in the air. Engineers built shower facilities and added air filters to the vents, but the place still stunk. Because of the overcrowding, the residents of Mars Spaceport only showered twice per month. A black market had formed for shower passes.

Throughout history, relocation centers had always been breeding grounds for crime, dysentery, and insurrection. Mars was no exception.

I was in one of the fifteen transports preparing to launch when Admiral Cutter contacted me from the bridge. He and
Travis Watson would remain safe on his ship while I went down among the heathen.

“Harris, are you sure you want to run this mission?” Cutter asked. “The empire might be better served…”

“When I come back, we should have a conversation about renaming our government,” I said. “We’re not an empire. We don’t have an emperor and we only have one planet. I think ‘republic’ would be a more accurate term.”

“Harris, you could direct this mission as easily from the ship,” Cutter said, not acknowledging my attempt to change the subject. “You are a general, not a platoon leader. When they talk about boots on the ground, they don’t mean boots with stars.”

“I want to make sure Governor Hughes gets the message,” I said. “If I’m there, he will know we mean business.”

“Call him and tell him,” said Cutter.

“I don’t think it would have the same impact.”

“Do you want me to send Watson down once the area is secured?”

“No,” I said. We were sending fifteen hundred Marines into a hostile population of seventeen million. Nothing short of destroying the spaceport would secure the area.

If it came down to a fight, we didn’t stand a chance. We were going into a battle zone in which tanks, gunships, and air support would be out of the question. Marching like an early-twentieth-century army with only small arms for weapons, we would try to intimidate an enemy that could simply trample us; but we didn’t have a choice. The spaceport was a civilian structure, a thin bubble of life support on a planet with a carbon-dioxide atmosphere. Firing a rocket could cause the spaceport to explode; even a grenade might cause enough added pressure to burst the outer walls.

“Have you told Colonel Riley that you are coming?” he asked.

As the head of the spaceport security detail, Riley had a right to know I was on my way. He was an officer in the Marines, which placed him under my command. Military courtesy dictated my warning him about the mission as a formality. Three-stars do not drop in unannounced.

“Yes and no,” I said. “He knows that I am coming, but he doesn’t know when. I didn’t want to spoil the surprise.”

“Do you have a problem with Riley?” Cutter asked.

“Not at all,” I said. I didn’t. “This is a diplomatic operation, Riley and Spaceport Security should not be involved.”

Watson asked, “What if you run into trouble?”

“I won’t,” I said.

“Harris, if things get hot down there…” Cutter began.

“Just be ready to pick us up when we’re done. I don’t want to bring any indigenous Martian life home with me in my hair,” I said. I signed off.

Our transports had two compartments…three if you included the head. They had a two-man cockpit up front. The rest of the bird was all cargo hold. Most people referred to this area as the “kettle” because it was somewhat domed like an oblong teakettle, made of metal, and had no windows.

We loaded the maximum recommended number of Marines in the kettle of each of our birds—one hundred killing machines in combat armor. Some stood, their bodies attached to harnesses in case we came under fire. Some sat on the bench that ran around the wall. Almost all of them would try to occupy their minds with thoughts about R&R as we flew down to the planet. They’d need that, the accommodations were dreary on the transport, and the destination did not give them much to look forward to.

As we prepared to launch, I climbed the ladder that led to the cockpit. Like every man on board, I wore standard-issue Marine combat armor though I did have one additional piece of equipment built into my helmet—a piece of communications equipment known as a commandLink. Using the commandLink, I could address every man, fire team, platoon, and company under my command, or I could speak to each Marine individually. I could peer through their visors or send them information.

As the commanding officer on this operation, I had the commandLink. Everyone else had interLink equipment.