The Clone Alliance

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When we left the colony on Little Man, one of the Neo-Baptists gave me a gift. By its shape and size, I could tell it was a book. Since all of the books on the little farming planet were of the religious sort, I did not bother unwrapping the package.

After pretty much ignoring me for the months that I lived with them, the Neo-Baptists suddenly cared about my salvation. How touching. But why should they care? I was, after all, a clone. As far as they were concerned, I was a living being without a soul.

Ray Freeman, my partner, and I had come to this planet after the fall of the Unified Authority—the Earth-based empire that populated and controlled the galaxy. These Neo-Baptist colonists were his people. He had grown up among them, then abandoned their fold as a teen. I do not know how religion fit into his psyche, but he now made his living as a mercenary. Killing came easily to Freeman.

Killing came naturally to me, too. What did not come naturally was living among religious farmers. We spent months trapped on Little Man, then Freeman got an idea that would either get us back into society or kill us. Either option sounded better than life on Little Man. He wanted to adapt a short-range military transport for pangalactic travel. We might as well have tried flapping our arms and flying the one hundred thousand light-years to Earth.

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