“I take it this is summer?” I asked.
Dalmer snickered. “Boy, this is the dead of winter. Why do you think everybody’s got their helmets off? We want to enjoy the cool air while it lasts.”
He might have been joking, but I doubted it. He might have been hazing me. Maybe a battalion of grunts was hiding in some far end of the base watching me on a monitor and giggling as Godfrey and Dalmer dressed up in faded armor and tricked the gullible newbie into believing he had been assigned to Hell. My suspicions abruptly died when Dalmer brought me to the bottom floor. An entire division would not have cluttered the barracks so convincingly if they had worked on it for an entire month.
The only light in the chamber came from windows carved in the meter-thick walls. As my eyes adjusted, I saw hundreds of particle-beam pistols piled in one corner of the floor.
Dalmer followed my gaze and figured out what had caught my attention. “Broken,” he said. “Sand gets in the housing and scratches the mirrors. Leaves ’em worthless.”
On the open market, PB pistols sold for $2,000. Around the Corps, bullets were the ammunition of choice, but you could not count on them in low gravity or thin air. Particle-beam weapons were more difficult to maintain. You had to worry about prisms and energy coils—modular components that needed to be changed on a regular basis. “Why don’t you change out the mirrors?” I asked.
Dalmer spit out a bitter laugh. “Fix them? Gobi Station used to be the outermost armory of the Cygnus Arm. We have a thousand guns for every man on this base.” He stopped and thought for a moment. “Make that two thousand. We use them for shooting lizards. It’s easier to grab a new gun than to requisition replacement parts. Hell, Harris, it’s been two years since anybody’s even been out to the firing range. This is Gobi.”
He paused and stared into my eyes, probably wondering if I grasped his meaning. When I did not ask any questions, Dalmer continued. “Of course, we can’t just throw broken weapons away, or the locals will steal them. Godfrey dumped a load once. I think we armed half the planet.”
“Are there problems with the locals?” I asked.
“Not much. Some of them consider themselves gunslingers, but it’s all petty stuff. I doubt the Senate loses much sleep over Gobi.” Dalmer turned and headed into the barracks.
Most of the windows opened to that pond in the courtyard. Flies and a sulfurous smell wafted in on the trace of a breeze. I could barely wait to snap on my helmet and breathe filtered air, but Tron Dalmer did not seem to mind the stench. Nor was he bothered by the rest of the squalor— uniforms left hanging off furniture, plates of stale food, unmade bunks. Looking around the floor, I would have thought that spoiled children manned this outpost, not Marines.
“That was Hutchins’s cell over there,” Dalmer said.
The door swung open at my touch, and I immediately knew that someone, likely Dalmer or Godfrey, had searched through Hutchins’s belongings. His clothes were piled on the floor, his desk was swept clean, and his bed was stripped bare. Every drawer in the cell hung open from the wall.
“How long has this room been empty?” I asked. I wanted to ask Dalmer if he had found anything of value.
“Two, maybe three months,” Dalmer said. “Did Godfrey tell you about Hutchins?”
“Only that Hutchins committed suicide.”
“Put a goddamned particle-beam pistol in his mouth…Set his goddamned brain on fire.”
Dalmer left and I set up my quarters. Using a bloodstained sheet I found wadded in a drawer, I wrapped the late Private Hutchins’s belongings into a tight ball and stuffed them in a corner of the room. “Why am I here?” I asked myself. “Why the hell am I here?”
The only time we met as a platoon was at breakfast. Once or twice per week, Glan Godfrey briefed us about recent communiqués from fleet headquarters as we ate. Nobody listened during Godfrey’s briefings. We were as far from fleet headquarters as you could get without leaving the galaxy, and nothing command had to say seemed of any significance out here.
On most days, the platoon divided up after breakfast. Godfrey and Dalmer generally hung around the base. God knows why. The rest of the platoon piled into a couple of trucks and rode into town. They generally returned before supper. I think they wanted to stay out later, but the locals closed shop before sundown.
I spent my first month jogging around the outside wall of the base, holding target practice at the firing range, and trying to convince other men to join me. Most of the men laughed at the idea of drilling. Godfrey and Dalmer would not even discuss it. One corporal, Lars Rickman, came out and trained with me twice, but he quickly lost interest.
After six weeks I gave up on training alone and took my first trip into Morrowtown. Godfrey congratulated me on having more starch than Hutchins. The last new recruit before me, Hutchins, stopped training after less than one week. Life around the outpost became friendlier after I said I would go to Morrowtown.
Located a mere two hundred miles west of our outpost, Morrowtown had sixty thousand residents. On Gobi, it was the big league.
A word about our trucks—they were open-air transports with no armor and no guns. Beside the trucks, the only other vehicle in our motor pool was a dilapidated tank, generally referred to as “Godfrey’s Go-Cart,” that sat up to its axles in mud in the center of our courtyard. Oil trickled from the Go-Cart’s crank case and seeped into the pond; but as Dalmer often reminded us, “It all gets filtered out.”
Our trucks could have passed for farm equipment except that they had tank treads instead of tires. They were flatbeds with removable benches. Sizing up these twenty-foot-long Jurassic beasts, I could not begin to guess their age. They might have arrived with the first ship to land on Gobi.
“Shouldn’t these have guns or rockets mounted on them?” I asked Rickman, as we loaded up.
“Why?” he asked, looking mildly interested. He was the only man stationed on Gobi who even partially resembled a Marine. Not only had he at least attempted to train with me, he still polished his armor and carried a sidearm. When I did not answer his question about why we might want to carry a rocket launcher on the trucks, however, he mumbled something about hating fresh recruits.
Rickman was a clone, of course. All of the other Marines on Gobi were clones. Like Godfrey, Rickman had bleached hair and a gaunt face. The only Marine that Gobi had not made thin was Taj Guttman. Guttman had grown so fat that he no longer fit into his armor. He did not bother with his leg shields or boots; and he fastened his chestplate only at the top, wearing it around his neck like a stiff poncho. I doubt he would have bothered with armor if it were not for the climate controls in the bodysuit. Godfrey referred to Guttman as “Four-Cheeks,” meaning he had enough ass for two men. The name stuck, and everybody used it.
As the new kid on base, I got to sit next to Guttman as we drove to Morrowtown. He only talked about one thing— poker. I had never played cards. No one gambled at UAO #553. We talked about gambling and how much we would enjoy it, but young clones are not much for breaking rules. As the lone human in the orphanage, I had tried my best to blend in.
We didn’t play cards in boot camp, either. Until I arrived on Gobi, I assumed that all Marines trained hard and obeyed the rules. Of course, none of these Marines knew they were clones. Straight out of the tube, combat clones had brown hair and brown eyes, but through the miracle of neural programming, they thought of themselves as natural-born people with blond hair and blue eyes. That was how they saw themselves, too. When clones looked at themselves in the mirror, they saw blond hair and blue. God knows how the scientists pulled that off, but they did. And since clones were also hardwired not to speak about cloning among themselves, orphanages managed to raise thousands of clones without one clone telling the next he was synthetic.