Read The Ghost Brigades for Free Online

Jim.”
    â€œThen Charles Boutin is still alive,” Robbins said.
    â€œThat I don’t know,” Winters said. “But this isn’t him. The only good news here is that by all physical indications, this clone was vatted right up until just before it died. It’s extremely unlikely it was ever awake, or even if it was that it was conscious and aware. Imagine waking up and finding your first and last view of the world was a shotgun barrel. That’d be a hell of a life.”
    â€œSo if Boutin’s still alive, he’s also a murderer,” Robbins said.
    Winters shrugged and set down the leg. “You tell me, Jim,” he said. “The Colonial Defense Forces make bodies all time—we create modified superbodies to give to our new recruits, and then when their service is through we give them new normal bodies cloned from their original DNA. Do those bodies really have rights before we put consciousness into them? Each time we transfer their consciousness, we leave a body behind—a body that used to have a mind. Do those bodies have rights? If they do, we’re all in trouble, because we dispose of them pretty damn quick. Do you know what we do with all those used bodies, Jim?”
    â€œI don’t,” Robbins admitted.
    â€œWe mulch them,” Winters said. “There are too many to bury. So we grind them up, sterilize the remains and turn them into plant fertilizer. Then we send the fertilizer to new colonies. Helps to acclimate the soil to the crops humans plant. You could say our new colonies live off the bodies of the dead. Only they’re not really the bodies of the dead. They’re just the cast-off bodies of the living. The only time we actually bury a body is when a mind dies inside of it.”
    â€œThink about taking some time off, Ted,” Robbins said. “Your job is making you morbid.”
    â€œIt’s not the job that makes me morbid,” Winters said, and pointed to the remains of not–Charles Boutin. “What do you want me to do with this?”
    â€œI want you to have it reinterred,” Robbins said.
    â€œBut it’s not Charles Boutin,” Winters said.
    â€œNo, it’s not,” Robbins agreed. “But if Charles Boutin is still alive, I don’t want him to know we know that.” He looked back at the body on the slab. “And whether this body knew what was happening to it or not, it deserved better than what it got. A burial is the least we can do.”
    Â 
    â€œGoddamn Charles Boutin,” General Greg Mattson said, and kicked up his feet on his desk.
    Colonel Robbins stood at the other side of the desk and said nothing. General Mattson disconcerted him, as he always had. Mattson had been the head of the Colonial Defense Forces Military Research arm for almost thirty years, but like all CDF military personnel had a military issued body that resisted aging; he looked—as did all CDF personnel—no more than twenty-five years old. Colonel Robbins was of the opinion that as people advanced in rank through the CDF they should be made to appear to age slightly; a general who looked twenty-five years old lacked a certain gravitas.
    Robbins briefly imagined Mattson appearing to be his true age, which had to be somewhere in the vicinity of 125 years old; his mind’s eye saw something like a scrotal wrinkle in a uniform. This would be amusing to Robbins, save for the fact that at ninety years of age himself, he wouldn’t look all that much better.
    Then there was the matter of the other general in the room, who if his body showed his real age would almost certainly look younger than he already did. Special Forces disconcerted Robbins even more than regular CDF. There was something not quite right about people being three years old, fully grown and totally lethal.
    Not that this general was three. He was probably a teenager.
    â€œSo our Rraey friend told us the truth,” General