Free Winds of Vengeance by Jay Allan

good idea. It wasn’t like finding a lost parent…the DNA sponsor was an exact replica genetically, like a twin, but older. He imagined such connections could be difficult, especially on the donor, who might find dozens of closes seeking him or her out.
    That wasn’t an issue for Cameron and his crèche-mates. Gabriel Fortis had survived the journey to Earth Two, but he’d been killed less than six months after his clones were quickened. It had been a routine attack by remnant First Imperium forces, a squadron that had escaped the Regent’s destruct order. The fleet had been ready, and some of the new planetary defenses were functional as well. The First Imperium force had been easily destroyed, eighteen ships blown to atoms…with only a dozen human casualties. But one of those had been Gabriel Fortis, killed instantly when a structural support crashed to the deck and almost crushed him.
    Cameron had never been sure how he felt about that. He regretted the loss of one of his fellow humans, a man who had died in the line of duty, protecting the nascent republic. But he’d never been able to decide if he felt more than that, some kind of connection, a feeling of loss for the closest thing he had to a parent. It was something he still wrestled with in his more pensive moments.
    He’d chosen the second surname himself, on the day he had left the campus on his sixteenth birthday, fully educated and legally an adult. He’d still been a civilian then, unsure of whether he intended to pursue a military career, but he nevertheless selected the name of a Marine who had died almost fifty years before, in the legendary battle known as the Slaughter Pen.
    Kyle Cameron had been a Marine too, and a comrade of the legendary Erik Cain. Cameron couldn’t explain why he’d chosen that namesake over any other, except to note that the story of the original Cameron’s death had resonated with him, how the Marine had stayed behind and held off an enemy platoon with his heavy weapon while the rest of his squad withdrew.
    Many of the Tanks had taken the names of famous warriors. There were Cains, Holms, Garrets, Prestons…just about every celebrated hero of both the Corps and the navy. But Cameron had been drawn to the less renowned hero, feeling he was righting a wrong, giving a courageous Marine the overdue recognition he had long deserved.
    There had been one hundred Fortis clones in that first group, and the last time he’d checked there were ninety-one remaining. Seven had experienced various degrees of replicative failure, and they’d been terminated in the crèche. One had been killed in a military training accident. And one had died of the Plague.
    He still remembered when he first read the entry on the library computer. Evan Fortis-Jackson, an engineer. That had been almost nine years before. The Tanks enjoyed a greatly enhanced immunity to most of the diseases that preyed upon the NBs. They rarely suffered from cancer, heart disease, even the drug-resistant pathogens that had become a moderate danger to their naturally born cousins. For almost twenty years, as the first group of Tanks grew to adulthood and beyond, it was widely believed the cloning process had been successful in screening out harmful susceptibilities.
    Then the first Tank got sick. Not just ailing, not seriously afflicted, but horribly, painfully ill. The Plague had come. Its first victim lasted three days after onset, writhing in indescribable pain the entire time as the cells of his body simply withered and died. Medical science was stumped. Even the Mules, using the medical knowledge of the First Imperium, had been helpless to treat the disease, or even provide effective palliative care.
    Then it struck again. And again. At first, there was fear a deadly epidemic was sweeping through the nascent republic. The Regent had deployed an engineered pathogen against its enemies millennia before, and a public panic almost resulted, a widespread terror that the