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For his part, Brocius kept a wary eye in my direction. If he could, I think he wanted to clear his account with me.

Brocius did not rise as the ensign and I entered his office. He sat behind a desk so sturdy that it might have been able to hold a tank. Like his home, Brocius’s office reflected his family’s wealth. Except for a nook in which a row of three slot machines stood, the walls of the office were lined with bookshelves and paintings. A yard-wide ornamental globe, entirely made of brass, sat in the center of the room.

“Where did you find him?” Brocius asked the ensign.

“He came off the elevator as I was giving up.”

“Better late than never, I suppose,” Brocius said. He turned to me and said, “Did Ensign Kwai brief you on the hearings?”

“I saw them,” I said, making no attempt to cover my dislike of the admiral.

“Newcastle missed his calling. He should have been a politician,” Brocius said.

Brocius looked smaller than I remembered him, perhaps it was stress. He stood around six feet tall and might have been muscular once, but that muscle had gone to seed. The stress and aggravation of the Mogat War had left him with a gut. Then came the Avatari invasion. Now he looked old, fat, and tired. His hair was white, and his skin had a bleached quality to it.

“Newcastle nailed you, Harris. I don’t think the spit on his microphone dried before J. P. Glade received a call from the Judge Advocate General.” J. P. Glade was General James Ptolemeus Glade, the highest-ranking officer in the Marines.

“They cleared me of all charges back on New Copenhagen,” I said. Two witnesses had testified that I did not strike the late Lieutenant Warren Moffat until after he pulled a gun.

“The JAG thinks we should reopen the investigation,” Brocius said. “Look, Harris, Congress wanted a sacrificial goat; and Mo Newcastle handed you over.”

“Me?” I asked.

“Not just you, the whole damned cloning program,” Brocius said. “This isn’t about you. You’re not a big enough target, they can’t blame the whole war on one man.

“This is about knocking the military down a peg and keeping Congress in control. Nobody gives a rat’s ass about one measly clone, even a Liberator. They want to run the government the way they did before New Copenhagen, with Congress giving the orders and the military as its whipping boy. That makes you the poster child for everything that is wrong in the world.

“Being a Liberator makes a damned easy target. You’re like a gun or an earthquake or a nuclear bomb, yes, a damned nuclear bomb. No one needs to tell people to be scared of nuclear bombs, they already are. It’s automatic.

“From now on, whenever anything goes wrong, Congress will slap your face on it and blame it on the military. You’re the new boogeyman.”

“Where do we go from here?” I asked.

Brocius sighed. “For now we bury you and every other clone we can find. We stick you someplace deep, dark, and ugly until the rest of the universe forgets you exist.”

CHAPTER SIX

The week after the Senate hearings ended, a gang of twelve men jumped three clone soldiers who were on leave in Florida. The clones beat the shit out of the men who attacked them, one of whom spent the next three days in a coma.

The security camera of a nearby bank recorded the entire incident and multiple witnesses told the police that the attack was unprovoked. It made no difference. The clones were thrown in the brig.

The men who started the brawl, it turned out, were officers from MacDill Air Force Base.

The clones made it through the fight with barely a scratch, but they showed up for court the next day looking like they had been in a car accident. The judge did not ask about their black eyes and contusions. He ruled the attack “a military matter,” making the testimonies of civilian eyewitnesses irrelevant. He refused to review the video feed caught by the security camera for the same reason. The JAG bastard found the clones guilty of assaulting superior officers and sentenced them to five years.

One of the men who attacked the clones had a familiar name—Smith. Captain Seth Smith was the attacker who ended up in a coma. His father, General Alexander Smith, reviewed the case personally and commended the judge for justice dispensed.

Florida was just the opening salvo in the war against clones. The synthetics fared better in that battle than they would in the fights that came next.

In April, the Smithsonian Institution closed the doors of the Museum of Military History for an annual cleaning. When the museum reopened the following month, the clone exhibit had been replaced by a display showing the evolution of the combat boot. Asked why the clone exhibit had been replaced, the Smithsonian Institution’s public affairs office issued a statement about wanting to dedicate more space to the “heroic sacrifices made by human soldiers” …and their footwear.

When a reporter pressed the curator of the museum about the role of clones in war, the curator said, “Clones, dogs, and propagandists, they’ve all played important roles in military history.”

In a matter of months, the pendulum of public sentiment had swung. Appearing in daily interviews on the mediaLink, members of the Linear Committee called for a “more invested” military—i.e., a military with natural-born conscripts. The Republic could not trust its future to clones or robots, they claimed.

When Congress opened for business in September, Senate Majority Leader Tobias Andropov proposed Resolution #2516-7B, revoking the 250-year-old Synthetic Conscription Act. The resolution called for the permanent closure of the clone orphanages that once produced over a million new recruits every year. It was all show; the Mogats had destroyed those facilities four years earlier.

In the patriotic rush to eliminate cloning, reality no longer mattered as much as intentions. The Linear Committee—the executive branch of the government—unanimously praised Andropov for his courageous decision to close down nonex istent orphanages. News analysts all but nominated him to replace the retiring “Wild Bill” Grace as the chair of the Linear Committee.

Resolution 2516-7B ran through both houses unchallenged. With the already demolished orphanages officially closed, the Unified Authority military complex entered a bold new, all-natural phase in its history.

In truth, the Unified Authority did not need to beef up its military with clones now that it only had two worlds to guard. Sitting a mere three hundred light-years apart, Earth and New Copenhagen were next-door neighbors in astronomical terms.

With the public behind it, Congress moved to deep-six the cloning program once and for all. If they could have, I think the politicians might have classified us clones as obsolete weapons and demolished us like a stockpile of unneeded bombs; but we were constructed of human genes. There were limits as to what they could do with us.

In August, I was finally cleared of any wrongdoing in the unfortunate and untimely death of First Lieutenant Warren Moffat. That same month, I received orders to report to Fort Bliss, an Army base in Texas. So did thousands of other clones—be they soldiers or Marines. Those of us who survived the war on New Copenhagen went to Fort Bliss. Clones who had not served in that battle were sent to equally isolated military bases.

I reported to the base commander and was told that I would not actually be stationed in Fort Bliss. I would live in the ramshackle “relocation camp” erected beside Fort Bliss. Summer in the Texas badlands; the prospect was not very appealing. When I entered the camp, I wondered if it was meant for relocation or extermination.

Officially, our camp was part of Fort Bliss. The inmates, however, called it “Clonetown.”

Clonetown was not large; but that did not matter, there were not all that many survivors of the battle for New Copenhagen. Of the nine hundred thousand cloned troops sent to defend New Copenhagen, only thirty thousand survived. At some point, somebody told me there were another three hundred thousand clones that had remained on Earth in support roles.