Steven L. Kent
The Clone Alliance
This book is dedicated to Dustin, Rachel, and Dillan, mostly because I cannot come up with a more appropriate way to thank them.
Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
PART I
MODERATION…NO VIRTUE
CHAPTER ONE
When we left the colony on Little Man, one of the Neo-Baptists gave me a gift. By its shape and size, I could tell it was a book. Since all of the books on the little farming planet were of the religious sort, I did not bother unwrapping the package.
After pretty much ignoring me for the months that I lived with them, the Neo-Baptists suddenly cared about my salvation. How touching. But why should they care? I was, after all, a clone. As far as they were concerned, I was a living being without a soul.
Ray Freeman, my partner, and I had come to this planet after the fall of the Unified Authority—the Earth-based empire that populated and controlled the galaxy. These Neo-Baptist colonists were his people. He had grown up among them, then abandoned their fold as a teen. I do not know how religion fit into his psyche, but he now made his living as a mercenary. Killing came easily to Freeman.
Killing came naturally to me, too. What did not come naturally was living among religious farmers. We spent months trapped on Little Man, then Freeman got an idea that would either get us back into society or kill us. Either option sounded better than life on Little Man. He wanted to adapt a short-range military transport for pangalactic travel. We might as well have tried flapping our arms and flying the one hundred thousand light-years to Earth.
The colonists gave us a glib, “Thanks for coming,” and handed me a gift wrapped in a swatch of pearl white cotton cloth. They said good-bye and walked off without a backward glance. That was also how Freeman and I left their planet—without a backward glance.
“Think there’s any chance this can work?” I asked Freeman, as we entered our transport through the “kettle”—the windowless cargo and passenger cabin.
“Does it matter?” he asked. That was Freeman, always cutting to the heart of the matter. Conversation did not interest him, so he had hit the proverbial nail on the head. It made little difference to either of us whether our plan worked or we blew up in space, so long as we got away from the Neo-Baptists.
The military shuttle became the instrument of our passive suicide—a short-range ship made to fly distances of twenty thousand or thirty thousand miles at a maximum speed of two hundred thousand miles per hour. We were going to crank up the speed, preferably to a respectable ten million miles per hour, as we flew it to a satellite approximately four billion miles from this planet.
In the unlikely event that we made it to that satellite, we would start the next phase in our suicide. We would attempt to adapt specialized equipment used for transferring ships across the galaxy to work on our transport. Imagine taking a submarine and gluing wings and a rocket engine to its chassis. Your submarine might have wings and a rocket engine, but it would not work in space. That just about summed up what we wanted to do with our transport. Even if we outfitted it with a broadcast engine, that would not mean we could use it to broadcast.
I had no interest in opening the gift that the Neo-Baptists gave me when I first boarded the transport; but traveling with Ray Freeman left me lonelier than traveling alone. I knew I would need some sort of distraction even before I entered the cockpit and watched him silently working the controls.
Freeman ignited the engines, and we took off in an arc. Haze gave way to blue and soon blackness as we left the atmosphere, then Little Man was gone.
The first thing we needed to do was pick up speed. Transports routinely traveled at two hundred thousand miles per hour. Commanders used transports like this to ferry Marines and soldiers from battleships to planets during invasions. The ship had incredibly powerful shields but no weapons. As far as amenities went, the only padding in the entire transport was on the pilot’s seat.
It took us less than a minute to fly from the surface of Little Man to outside the atmosphere, and I already felt lonely sitting beside Freeman. I left the cockpit and climbed into the all-steel kettle. It was a dimly lit cavern with steel walls, a steel ceiling, and a steel floor. There I sat down on the wooden bench that ran along the wall and unwrapped the book. The cotton cloth square slid back revealing an all-black cover made of leather. I was looking at the unmarked back cover of the book, but I recognized the Bible even before I turned it over and saw the gold letters.
A hundred years back, every major church signed the Religious Accordance of 2391, a document that stated that clones were created of man, not God, and therefore did not have souls. Not having to worry about favorable placement in the afterlife, I had abandoned religion altogether. I counted myself among the true nonbelievers, and I knew I would have to be pretty damned desperate before I would crack this book.
“Harris,” Ray’s voice called to me from the intercom station in the wall.
I left the Bible on the bench and went to the station. “Everything okay?” I asked.
“I’m going to have a look at the engine and play with the fuel,” Freeman said. “Think you can keep an eye on the controls?”
“I’ve never flown one of these birds,” I said.
“You won’t be flying,” Freeman said. “I just need you to tell me the speed.”
“On my way,” I said.
I climbed the ladder and stepped into the cockpit. Freeman left without saying a word. Four hundred hours, I thought to myself. That seemed like a long, long time. Then I realized, it would only be four hundred hours if we could coax the ship into flying fifty times faster than it was meant to fly. Otherwise, we might have a twenty-thousand-hour flight ahead of us. The good news was, I would not need to last twenty thousand hours. I would starve to death first.
I sat in the pilot’s seat and watched the little red-lighted display. Ray had us cruising along at two hundred thousand miles per hour. The ship started to sputter. I don’t know what Ray did to the engines, but the transport shook and convulsed, then slowed down. We had dropped to below one hundred thousand when he did something new, and the speed started to build.
“How fast are we going?” Freeman called over the intercom.
“What did you do?” I asked. “We’re at five hundred thousand and climbing.” Gravity in space is based on acceleration. At this rate we could have shut off our gravity generator and gotten on fine.
“We’re up to a million,” I called. I felt elated. My time stuck in the transport with Ray had just been cut from twenty thousand hours to four thousand. We’d still starve to death at this speed, but we’d die closer to the broadcast station.
“We’re up to two million.” A minute later I reported three million miles per hour. Unfortunately the speed topped out at four million miles per hour. That meant one thousand hours, a six-week trip with four weeks’ worth of food.
Once he got the transport flying at a couple million miles per hour, Freeman spent most of his time toying with the electrical system and trying to figure out how he could splice parts from a broadcast station into the systems on the transport. We seldom spoke to each other. To keep from losing my mind, I started reading the Bible that the Neo-Baptists had given me. I originally decided that I would not read the book. I got desperate and read it several times. The Baptists would have been proud.