CHAPTER ONE
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.