The Clone Apocalypse Read Free

sign of acceleration.”
    “Odd place to park a ship. Are you certain she’s not a wreck from the war?”
    The solar system had been littered with the carcasses of warships after two recent battles and a number of smaller skirmishes.
    “No, sir. She’s new.”
    The lieutenant laughed, and asked, “What are you telling me, T.S., that she just broadcasted in?”
    “I don’t have any record of a broadcast, sir, but she’s just appeared on my radar.”
    “That would make her . . . If that’s an Explorer, we’d better send somebody to have a look.”
    *   *   *
    Lieutenant Walter J. Aspen, the officer on duty at the Hamsho-Kwok Deep Space Tracking Facility would die in five days. Technical Sergeant Timothy Simpson, the tracking-systems technician who discovered
Magellan
, UAES-539, outlived him by three hours.
    *   *   *
    Like the staff of Hamsho-Kwok, the crew of EMN
Millard Fillmore
was made up of clones. Every last man stood five feet, ten inches tall. Every sailor on the ship had brown hair and brown eyes. Not a one of them knew he was a clone. They all knew all of the other sailors aboard the ship were clones, but their neural programming didn’t allow them to consider that they might be clones as well.
    That programming included protocols that caused them to see themselves as having blond hair and blue eyes when they saw their reflections. The clones believed their own eyes even though they knew clones’ eyes lied to them.
    Fillmore
was a Perseus-class destroyer, a wedge-shaped warship that was wider than she was long. She’d been circling Mars—not orbiting, circling outside the planet’s gravitational influence. It took her eight hours to fly to the location of the mystery ship.
    As his ship drifted closer to the target, Captain J. T. Matthews, commanding officer of
Fillmore
, examined the ship on a three-dimensional, holographic display. His ship had portholes and observation decks, but visual inspection wouldn’t detect details like radiation, heat, toxins, and traps. Matthews searched the ship for signs of violence and structural damage, then he searched the area for enemy ships.
    When he called in his first report to Naval Command, he said, “She’s an Explorer. So far we haven’t found any signs of damage.” Designed for pangalactic cartography, Explorers were century-old self-broadcasting relics from the Unified Authority’s early “Manifest Destiny” period.
    He didn’t wait for Naval Command to reply. Communications with Earth were slow from four hundred million miles out. In another half hour, he’d receive a message from Earth instructing him how to proceed. In the meantime, he flew within one hundred thousand miles of the wreck. From that distance, he could scan the ship’s engines for energy usage and access her working computers.
    Once he got the go-ahead, he would dispatch a transport to fly closer to the ship. Technicians aboard the transport would run another series of tests. If those final tests came back clean, the transport would release a team of engineers to board the Explorer.
    Grave robbing
; the Enlisted Man’s Empire had robbed a lot of graves over the last few years, most in deep space. Only the Explorer
Magellan
was no war monument. Her hull was intact. A remote scan revealed that her navigation systems were working as was her communications equipment. Despite the fact that everyone inside the Explorer had died, the gravity generator still ran, and life support continued to fill the cabin with warm, breathable oxygen.
    Still waiting for permission to proceed, Matthews sent a drone to have a closer look.
    Monitoring the drone’s transmission, Matthews spotted the deceased crewmen. He didn’t even need to X-ray the ship;
Magellan
had portholes and observation spots on every wall. Directing his drone to peer in the windows, he mapped out the entire ship, locating all ten bodies.
    Matthews relayed that information in a message, then began the long wait for