The Clone Empire by Kent Steven L

Author:Kent, Steven L.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PENGUIN group
Published: 2010-09-20T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

The summit began the next day.

For lack of a safer place, Warshaw decided to hold his summit in Gobi Station. Why not? He had a small army guarding the place. He had posts taking meaningless DNA samples at every door. Gobi Station was the safest spot in an entirely unsecured empire.

Warshaw assigned human guards and robot sentries to patrol the grounds outside Gobi Station. Armored vehicles ran the perimeter. A battery of rocket launchers waited inside the gates. Gobi Station was prepared for war, not infestation.

Inside the station, fleet officers mingled, followed by entourages of high-ranking hangers-on. As far as I could tell, I was the only Marine in attendance. I wore a tan uniform in a sea of white.

Warshaw kicked the meetings off with a banquet. I sent Cabot in my place and used the time to hold a summit of my own in the morgue.

Warshaw had brought two coroners in from Morrowtown, the capital of Gobi. When I entered the morgue, I found them hard at work, standing over gleaming steel trays holding carefully washed body parts. In the background, Sergeant Kit Lewis’s cadaver lay partially skinned and disassembled. It reminded me of the holographic “visible man” display my teacher used in physiology class.

The coroners had peeled the skin from Lewis’s right cheek and pulled the pipes from his throat. The skin and ribs had been removed from the left side of his chest, revealing layers of soft pink meat. Any blood had been washed away. The cavity that once held his heart now sat empty like a secret compartment in a waxwork dummy.

Whatever portion of the faux sergeant’s brain remained in his head had been scooped out, washed, weighed, and examined. Seeing the eviscerated body with its cubbyholes and cavities left me queasy, but seeing the organs on trays and in bowls did not bother me much. They had been carefully cleaned so that they were no more offensive than the meat in a butcher case.

When I stepped into their lab, the two coroners turned to greet me. I walked over to the table, took a look at Lewis, then turned to them, and asked, “Have you found anything?”

The taller of the two men, a man in his forties with bushy red hair and round glasses, asked, “Were you the one who brought him in?” In his gloved right hand he held a waxy-looking organ.

I nodded.

The second man, a pudgy kid who stood no more than five feet and five inches, spoke through his mask. He said, “It was the gunshot that killed him.”

I’d heard that joke too many times already. “Yes. I was there,” I said in an officious voice. “What else can you tell me?”

“Were you the one who shot him?” the taller, older man asked. When he placed the organ in a tray, I realized he’d been holding the dead clone’s heart.

“I didn’t pull the trigger,” I said.

“Was this an execution?” he persisted.

“No,” I said. It was supposed to be my execution, I thought.

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