Lee and I spent our first night in half-empty barracks. Ten of the men assigned to our platoon had trickled in throughout the day, but most of the racks remained empty. Huddled in my bunk, I quietly read Scutum-Crux Fleet documentation well into the sleep period. Along with command structure and regulations, the documentation also laid out our daily regiment. Klyber expected his grunts to drill three hours per day, holding physical training, marksmanship drills, and practical simulations into the daily routine. After reading these daily requirements I sighed, and whispered, “Harris, you’re a long, long way from Gobi.”
Lee, laid out on the bunk next to mine, rolled to face me, and asked, “Wayson, what are you doing?”
“Reading regs,” I said. “You finished reading already?”
“I don’t need to read them,” Lee said. “We had the exact same regulations at my last post. I was already under Klyber’s command.”
Travel had warped my internal timetable. Late as it was, I did not have a prayer of falling asleep. “I think I’m still on Earth time,” I said, though I had no idea what time it might be back at the orphanage.
“I’m having trouble sleeping myself,” Lee admitted. He rolled over on his side and checked his wristwatch, then quietly cursed. “Tell you what, you want to go have a look around the ship?” he asked.
“We can do that?” I asked.
“Damn, Harris! You’re not in boot camp. Nobody cares what corporals do after hours,” Lee said, sitting up and swinging his legs over the edge of his bunk.
“Boot camp wasn’t that long ago,” I admitted. “After basic I got sent to a planet called Gobi. Regulations didn’t matter much there. I don’t want to screw up.”
“Okay, on behalf of Fleet Admiral Klyber, I formally give you permission to climb out of your bunk. You may grab a bite to eat, visit the bar, or have a look around the ship. Just keep out of restricted areas,” Lee said as he pulled on his pants.
After numbing my brain with rules and command structure, the idea of a late-night walk sounded good. We got dressed and slipped out of the barracks. The ship had an eerie, abandoned feel to it. The hall lights burned as brightly as they did during the day, but the only footsteps we heard were mostly our own. I peered through the window of our chow area as we passed. The lights were turned low. Tables that had been crowded with Marines a few hours earlier now sat empty.
Our barracks and training areas were located amidships on one of the lower decks of the Kamehameha, not all that far from the docking bay. In the time that I had been on board, I had only seen the landing bay, the barracks, and the mess area. Lee, who had never served aboard that particular ship but had a working knowledge of carriers, had no problem conducting an impromptu tour.
We passed armories, a library, and file rooms—all populated with skeleton crews. At three in the morning, even the bars sat empty. Lee led me to an elevator, and we went up three floors to the crew area. “This area is not restricted, but don’t expect to spend much time up here,” Lee said, as we stepped off the lift. “Sailors think of us as cargo.”
It hadn’t taken me long to strike up a friendship with Lee. After Gobi, I was glad to meet a Marine who stowed his gear properly and cut his hair to regulation. Like the clones back in Orphanage #553, Lee had created his own kind of personality. He did not know he was a clone, of course; and he thought one day he might be bootstrapped into the ranks of the officers. From there, he wanted to enter politics.
It was hopeless, of course. He was a clone; and because the Unified Authority did not recognize the potential of its own synthetic creations, Lee would never be promoted past master sergeant.
Unlike our barracks, the crew area showed signs of life. Duty officers patrolled the halls. We passed a mess area that smelled of fried eggs and meat. I peered in the door and saw sailors hunched over trays. A little farther, we passed a rec room with game tables, card tables, and a bar. I saw the marquee of a movie theater along the back wall. At that early hour, the recreation center sat empty and dark, but I could imagine it filled with lights and sounds and people during the early evening.
“They have a movie theater in there,” I complained. “I’ll bet my next paycheck that our rec doesn’t have a theater.”
“That’s a good way to go bankrupt,” Lee said. “Congress spares no expense when it comes to keeping its Marines entertained.”
“You boys looking for something?” We turned around as a sailor approached us.
“We’re new on the ship,” Lee said. “Just having a look around.”
The sailor was a clone, a petty officer with a single red chevron on his sleeve. He bore no more authority than Lee or I; but we were on his turf. “You must be new. This here is the crew area. We stow Marines below,” he sneered. He grabbed Lee by the arm, then took a quick step back. Lee’s arms and chest were thick with muscle.
“Didn’t mean to intrude,” Lee said with an easy smile as he turned back toward the elevator. “Not very hospitable. I thought we were all fighting on the same side.”
Then Lee said something under his breath that struck me as very odd. “Specking clone.”
I had only met Vince Lee earlier that day when he and I went to explore the Kamehameha, so I did not notice the anomaly then. With time I would notice that though he was friendly and outgoing with me, Lee did not socialize with the other men in our platoon. He and I normally found a table off on our own.
When Lee bought drinks, he purchased Earth-made beer. An avid bodybuilder, he asked for permission to work out in the officers’ gym. In fact, he had as little contact as possible with other clones. No enlisted man saw himself as a clone, though most of them were indeed just that. Even so, antisyntheticism was rare among clones because they were raised with other clones, and the only people they knew growing up were clones. They did not know how to associate with natural-born people. But Lee, Lee was different. Like so many
U.A. citizens, Vince Lee was quietly prejudiced against clones. He thought clones were beneath him. The difference was that other people were natural-born, Vince was synthetic. Many officers were antisynthetic; they despised their underlings. Vince was different. He despised his own kind.
The rest of the platoon arrived the following afternoon. That included our new sergeant—Tabor Shannon. As Vince might have put it, life aboard the Kamehameha became less “hospitable” the moment Shannon arrived.
Master Gunnery Sergeant Tabor Shannon landed on a late-afternoon shuttle. Shannon was the personification of the word “paradox.” He was gruff, ruthless, and often profane. He openly favored the men who transferred in with him and even referred to them as “my men” because they came with him from his previous platoon. He was a belligerent and battle-hardened Marine. But I soon found out that Shannon’s sense of duty added oddly smoothed edges to the jagged shards of his personality.
Captain McKay sent Lee and me to meet Shannon and the other men at the landing bay. We rushed down to the boarding zone. As the bay door opened, Lee said, “I bet he’s a prick. What do you want to bet he’s a real prick among men?”
We watched several officers disembark. Four pilots and a number of crewmen breezed past us without so much as a sideward glance. Shannon came next. He was tall and thin, with steep shoulders and a wiry frame. His fine white hair, the hair of an old man, did not match his sunburned face. Except for crow’s-feet and white hair, he looked like a thirty-year-old.