“Even back then, Atkins had fanatical followers. We later found out that Atkins planted men on every ship in the Galactic Central Fleet. They put poison gas in the air vents and commandeered the fleet as soon as it arrived in the inner curve. Of course we didn’t know that back on Earth. All we knew was that Atkins and his fleet were gone. We found out the truth after the Liberators arrived; but by that time, Atkins had a base, a hierarchy, and the strongest fleet in the galaxy. He didn’t know about my clones, so he wasn’t prepared.
“We sent a hundred thousand Liberators in explorer ships. Atkins’s land forces never stood a chance. Atkins and most of his men got away in their self-broadcasting fleet. That was the last anybody saw of those ships. At least it was until now.”
“I never heard any of this in school.”
“Of course not,” Klyber snapped. “This was the most classified secret in U.A. history. It was so damned classified that we backed ourselves into a corner. When communes of Atkins followers began springing up around the frontier, we couldn’t arrest them. There would have been too many questions.”
My head still spinning, I tried to understand where Admiral Klyber was taking me. That war ended forty years ago. An image came to my mind. “The sergeant over my platoon…Is he a Liberator?”
“Master Sergeant Tabor Shannon was in that invasion,” Klyber said. “It wasn’t really a war, not even much of a battle. Atkins’s men had no idea what they were fighting.”
Admiral Klyber took a deep breath, stood up from behind his desk, and turned to look out that viewport wall. “Do you have any other questions, Corporal?” he asked. Then, without waiting for me to respond, he turned, and added, “You’re not an orphan, Harris, you are a Liberator. A freshly minted Liberator.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Learning about my creation did not kill me. Identity-programming and the death reflex were components of modern cloning. I was a throwback, an early-production model that somehow found its way back on to the assembly line for a limited run.
“Do you understand what I am telling you?” Admiral Klyber asked me.
A few moments before, I had been wrestling to gain control of my thoughts. Suddenly I could think with absolute clarity. I felt neither sad nor confused. I nodded.
“You are a Liberator, and knowing it will not kill you.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Perhaps we should stop for the evening.” From behind his desk, Klyber stared at me suspiciously, the way I would expect a parent to examine a child who should be hurt but claims to be fine.
“I’m okay, sir,” I said.
“All the same, Corporal, we have accomplished enough for one evening.” Klyber stood up from his desk, and the meeting was over.
***
“It never occurred to us that we were anything but clones,” Sergeant Shannon said as he choked back his first sip of Sagittarian Crash, easily the worst-tasting drink you could find in any civilized—or uncivilized—bar. They called the stuff “Crash,” but it was really vodka made from potatoes grown in toxic soil. Congress once outlawed the stuff; but as it was the only export from an otherwise worthless colony, the lobbyists won out.
Shannon and I picked Crash for one reason—we wanted to get drunk. Crash left you numb after a few thick sips. “Damn, I hate this stuff,” Shannon said, frowning at his glass.
“You ever wonder about …”
Shannon stopped me. “Knowing you are a clone means never having to wonder. You don’t wonder about God—he’s your commanding officer. Good and evil are automatic. Orders are good because they come from God. I even know where I’m going after I die.” He smiled a somewhat bitter smile. “The great test tube in the sky.”
“Isn’t that blasphemous?” I asked.
“Blasphemous?” Shannon’s revelry evaporated upon my using that word. “I’ll be specked! I suppose it is.”
“I thought you were the churchgoer?” I said. “You’re the only one in the platoon who goes to services, and you’re the one Marine I would think was the least likely to attend religious services.”
“Least likely?” Shannon said, looking confused.
“You’re the only Marine on this ship who specking well knows he’s a clone. Clones don’t have souls…Remember, man may be able to create synthetic men, but only God can give them souls. Isn’t that what the peace-and-joy crowd is preaching these days?”
“If you are anything like me, and you are exactly like me, you don’t really give two shits about what peace and joyers are preaching.”
“I still don’t feel like going to church,” I said. “Do you believe that stuff?”
“Yeah,” Shannon said, “I just don’t know where I fit into it.”
It was only seven o’clock. Most of the men were at the mess hall eating dinner. When Shannon saw me returning to the barracks, he had suggested that we drink our meal instead.
Except for the laugh lines around his eyes and his old man’s hair, Shannon looked like a man in his midtwenties in the dim light of the bar. “How old are you?” I asked.
Shannon grinned. “There’s old and then there’s old. After the GC Fleet, the boys on Capitol Hill decided that they wanted kinder, gentler clones, so they opened up orphanages and raised them like pups. Now they have eighteen years to teach you good manners.
“Back in my day, you came out of the tube as a twenty-year-old. I got my first gray hairs as a ten-year-old or a thirty-year-old, depending on how you look at it. Nothing else has changed. I’ve seen my physical charts—nothing’s changed.”
“Are you the last Liberator?” I asked.
“I’d say you are,” Shannon said. “I’ve heard rumors about Liberators in the Inner SC Fleet, but you’re the first one I’ve seen. Klyber is partial to us. If there were other Liberators around, I think he’d be the one to have them.
“What I don’t understand is where you came from. Why make another Liberator after forty years? They didn’t make you by accident.”
“An experiment?” I suggested.
“Maybe Klyber ordered you up special,” Shannon said. “If it was him, he did it without telling the politicos. They hate Liberators on Capitol Hill. Whoever started you on Gobi was trying to protect you. Somebody wanted to keep you a secret as long as possible, but that went down the shitter the moment you were at a card game with Amos Crowley.”
Shannon held up his drink and stared through the glass. He swished it around. “Watch this.”
Shannon took a deep breath, then drained his glass. He shivered, and for a moment he slumped in his chair. Then he looked at the bartender, gave him an evil smile, and turned his glass upside down.
“Goddamn!” the bartender said.
“Another one,” Shannon said.
“Another one will kill you,” the bartender said.
“You try it,” Shannon said to me. “One good thing about Liberators, we don’t get shit-faced.”
I looked at my glass. In the dim light, Crash looked like murky seawater. “Drink it in one shot?” I asked.
“Kid, he’s trying to kill you,” the bartender warned.
Closing my fingers around the glass, I brought it up to my lips and paused.
“Don’t do it, kid,” the bartender warned. “You’ll pickle your brain.”
Sergeant Shannon watched me, his eyes never leaving mine. Heaving a sigh, I put the glass in front of my mouth and tipped it. The syrupy drink spilled over my bottom lip and onto my tongue, leaving a numbing tingle everywhere it touched. I swallowed quickly.
“Whoa!” I said. First my throat felt painfully frozen, then my lungs burned, and finally I felt a flash of nausea; but all of those sensations went away quickly. I looked at the bartender, smiled, and turned my glass over.
“You want another one, too?” the barkeep asked.