The Clone Sedition Read Online Free PDF

Olympus Kri.”
    Olympus Kri was the first planet the Enlisted Man’s Empire evacuated during the second alien attack. We crammed the entire population, seventeen million people, into Mars Spaceport, the enormous and superfluous civilian travel center that had served as the hub of pangalactic travel back in the days when mankind traveled the galaxy.
    “Lieutenant Colonel, I am well aware who is on Mars,” I said. “What I need to know is what the hell six thousand homicidal New Olympians were doing on Earth and how the speck they got here.”
    The officer had brown eyes, brown hair, and stood five feet, ten inches tall. He was a clone. Every man serving in the Enlisted Man’s Military had brown hair and brown eyes. All but one of the men in the Enlisted Man’s Military stood five-foot-ten.I was the only exception. I stood six-three. I was a clone just like everyone else, but I was a discontinued model.
    The lieutenant colonel lowered his voice, and said, “We haven’t had any success answering those questions as of yet, sir.”
    He was scared of me, I could hear it in his voice, and it wasn’t just my rank.
    With one exception, the clones of the Enlisted Man’s Empire did not know they were clones. I was that exception.
    My class of clones was bred for independence and violence. The lieutenant colonel was a newer model than me. My DNA included a gland that released a highly addictive cocktail of testosterone and adrenaline into my blood in battle. The scientists who invented my kind called it the “combat reflex.”
    I was the final specimen of a distinguished class of clones called “Liberators.” Congress discontinued the Liberator Clone Program a few decades before I climbed off the assembly line because we tended to get addicted to the hormones produced by the combat reflex. Once we got hooked, the only way to keep the hormone rolling was through violence, and we sometimes stopped caring who we hurt.
    My kind had been replaced by a breed of clones who were tough, obedient, and docile. They made good soldiers, but most of the independence had been jimmied out of them. Instead of a gland that kept them cool in battle, the new clones had a “death reflex,” which shut them down as swiftly as a bullet to the head.
    Their DNA included neural programming that made them believe they were blond-haired, blue-eyed, natural-born humans instead of clones. When they saw their reflections in mirrors and windows, they saw themselves as having blond hair and blue eyes even if they were standing beside an identical clone whom they recognized as having brown hair and brown eyes.
    Anything that disrupted that programming would set off a death reflex. We called ourselves the “Enlisted Man’s Empire” because the empire might suffer a mass death reflex if we called ourselves the “Clone Empire.”
    “General, these are photographs of the men you killed,” the lieutenant colonel said as their faces appeared on thebriefing tablet in my hands. “They’re not the type of people normally associated with violent attacks.”
    Tell me something I don’t know,
I thought.
    Autopsy photographs and identification documents appeared on my briefing tablet. Why the hell the Intelligence division ran autopsies on these stiffs was beyond me. I knew damn well how they died, I was there.
    Granted, I was being obtuse. The men in charge of the autopsies, a team of experts that included civilian policemen, military police, and Naval Intelligence officers, searched for signs of drugs and other oddities. The first reports indicated clean blood and no notable brain abnormalities.
    The pictures on my tablet rotated so that the autopsy photo of one of the men came to the top. I had slit his throat. No doubt about the cause of his death, bone showed in the back of the smile-shaped incision I had carved across his neck. Below his pictures, a table listed his vital statistics—Name: Tom Niecy; Height: 5’11”; Weight: 163 lbs.; Age: 37.
    “This