Rogue clone by Steven L. Kent Page B

clones as supplies and nothing else. He used them like any other kind of inventory, something to be expended and reordered.
    “I’m meeting with Huang and the Joint Chiefs next week at the Golan Dry Docks for a top secret briefing,” Klyber said, interrupting my thoughts. “I would very much like to return from that conclave alive.”

    I spent the night on the Doctrinaire , sleeping in one of the state rooms that Admiral Klyber reserved for visiting dignitaries. My bunk was hard, my room was sparse, and the bathroom was entirely made of stainless steel. I felt at home.
    Stripping to my general-issue briefs and top, I took the book Klyber gave me and climbed into my rack. The sheets were coarse and stiff, stretched so tight that you could bounce a coin on them. It felt good to lie down.
    Klyber had said that the book had a passage in it about a friend of mine. I opened the journal to the section marked by the thin strip of ribbon. As I looked at the handwritten entry, I realized that Admiral Klyber had been wrong. The man described in this journal was more of a mentor than a friend. The passage was about Tabor Shannon, whom I had met while serving on the Kamehameha, Klyber’s old flagship.
    Shannon was a living paradox. He was a Liberator. He’d killed hundreds of enemies in battle, but he also went to Mass. He was the only clone I ever met with a religious streak. His religious feeling made no sense because, as a Liberator, he knew he was a clone and therefore knew God had nothing to do with his creation. Catholic doctrine held that clones had no souls. Almost every church taught that. Shannon was intelligent, but he remained blindly loyal to the Republic to his last breath. He died in battle, fighting for the nation that had banned his existence. At the time he died I admired him more than anyone I ever knew, but I grew to despise him. He seemed pathologically determined to devote his life to those who cared least about him—the nation that had outlawed his kind and the God who disavowed his existence.
    Since leaving the Marines, I had come to question the line that separated devotion and delusion. Granted, I was still working for the same side as always, risking my life for the same Republic that never shed a tear for Tabor Shannon; but I was different. I had gone freelance. I made money for my services. I was also free to leave. If the Confederate Arms offered me a better deal one day, I wanted to believe that I would take it.
    Having seen what I had seen, I did not believe in nations or deities. And as for Shannon, who did believe, I could not decide whether he had been a quixotic hero or just a fool. Either way, I had no intention of following in his footsteps.
CHAPTER SIX
    From the Journal of Father David Sanjines, archbishop and chief administrator of Saint Germaine:

    Entry: Earth Date June 4, 2483
    I received an urgent message from spaceport security this morning. When I called to look into the matter, the captain asked me to watch a feed from his security monitor. They had detained a marine named Tabor Shannon. I only needed a moment to identify the problem. “Is that a Liberator?” I asked the captain. “Haven’t they been banned?”
    “Liberators are not allowed in the Orion Arm,” the captain said. “They can travel Cygnus freely. If you want my opinion, I think they should all be executed.”
    The ecumenical council of 2410 held that clones did not have souls and therefore did not fit the Catholic definition of human life, but I did not think that made them machines. Church canon dating back to Saint Francis forbade cruelty to animals. Perhaps this Liberator clone had more in common with a mad dog than a man, but he had blood running through his veins, not oil. He was no machine.
    The captain told me that he checked with the U.A. Consulate. “We don’t have to let him on our planet. Should I send him away?”
    The captain knew better than to tell me what to do. Saint Germaine being a Catholic