“Exactly. That’s the whole problem. He has a relentless, obsessive need to correct it all. To thin every single genetic defect from the population, whether residual from the Viator War, or just natural—even things that aren’t technically defects, just things he doesn’t like.”
Rake rubbed the nape of her neck, shaking her head. “Admittedly not great. But what’s that have to do with cloning Drudgers?”
“I’d say for now, it’s about trust. The Mercer family supplies the SC with replacements for their Legion soldiers, and they get to send thousands and eventually millions of human daughters and sons and husbands and wives home alive and well. That puts him in a pretty good light in the eye of the general public.”
She shook her head. “Sure, except the general public’s not going to love the idea of using clones—Drudger or otherwise.”
“Five, ten years ago, I’d have said the same thing. But Augustus has been hard at work on that too. The Legion continues to push even peaceful Drudger clans farther into the outer sectors, while any anthropologists or scholars applying for visas to go study their cultures are summarily rejected.”
Rake pinched the bridge of her nose and gave a weary sigh. “They’re dehumanizing them.”
“Exactly. We clone animals all the time, no one gives a shit. If Drudgers are considered nothing more than simple creatures, Augustus will get far less backlash. Then the benefits will easily outweigh any residual distaste for cloning.”
“All right, point taken. So he’s got the people’s trust, he builds his clones, then what?”
“Then he can gain clout for his platform of using that same tech to perfect mankind. Along with a series of intense breeding laws, of course. It probably involves some kind of mass murder he’ll call ‘a horrific accident’ or some shit. It’s just one piece of a massive, probably homicidal puzzle. It’s always a longer game with him.”
She scoffed. “The Quorum would never go for any of that.”
He chewed his lip and didn’t respond at first. She apparently had about as much misplaced faith in mankind’s elected officials as she did the Legion. Why did he have to be the one to break it to her?
“A lot’s changed since the war,” he began carefully. “The Quorum’s more firmly under the thumb of the Allied Monarchies board than ever, and you already know who has control over the board.”
“But genetic cleansing?” she said, tone incredulous. Unease stiffened her expression as she pulled her hair from its tie, the elastic snap loud against her wrist in the lingering quiet of the empty corridor. “It’s one thing to keep the royals all interbreeding, but how could you possibly implement that across the Core? Never mind the outer colonies? It’s too much.”
“Not when you have a mind-controlled army at your disposal to ensure compliance.”
Rake aggressively retied her hair while cutting a hard left into the brightly lit starboard air-lock corridor. Cavalon hurried to catch up.
“If the clones are meant to deputize soldiers,” she said, her tone stiff and flat, as if reciting an official statement, “that means the Guardians are part of the Legion. To use them to administer planetside law enforcement, he’d need martial law.”
“Then he’ll find a way to get it,” Cavalon said. “It wouldn’t be the first time he masked one conflict with another.”
“What?”
“You remember the labor strikes in the Bennius system? Or the riots on Chiran-III?”
Rake kept her brisk pace but threw a discerning look at him, edged with measured curiosity. “No…”
“Exactly. Augustus did his usual housekeeping. It wasn’t systemic discrimination, it was ‘safeguarding our future.’ Not a civil uprising, but ‘an organized terrorist plot.’ Eventually those kind of cover-ups weren’t cutting it, and they would have done anything to stop it—not excluding conveniently happening upon a Viator fleet.”