The Clone Apocalypse (28 page)

FIFTY-TWO

I never doubted that the SEALs would have their sludging device working by the time we reached the gate. When it came to this kind of op, they didn’t make mistakes.

I pulled up to the bar. The guard smiled at me, then recognition showed in his expression. He might not have recognized me so much as recognized that I was a clone.

He turned to look at the guardhouse, and I shot him.

The two guards waiting in the shack scrambled for their guns, but they were too late. I rammed the shack with my truck. The building was made of thin metal and bulletproof glass, and it collapsed like a house of cards. I drove my personnel carrier over the remains of the shack, crushing the men who had been sitting inside it.

The shooting started quickly, bullets hitting my windshield with a loud
thwack
, leaving cracks and divots in the glass. Bullets struck the roof of my cab, ricocheting into oblivion. A screen in the center of the dashboard showed the view from the rear of the truck, and there were my SEALs, leaping like paratroopers. They stayed low as they dashed around me and in through the gate.

Freeman pulled along my left side, blocking the entrance to the field. He cut his engine, ducked beneath his dashboard, and came up with his rifle.

Harmer emerged from one of the subterranean hangars, still dressed in his U.A. BDUs, but no longer wearing his Conlon mask. He emerged, spotted two Unifieds running for their truck, and gunned them down.

Meanwhile, the rest of the SEALs fanned out around the compound. They traveled in teams of two, running to doorways, one man opened the door, one man looked for traps and targets.

Holding my M27, I jumped from the truck and ran toward the offices. I heard shots fired in quick succession and like loud individual claps of thunder—Freeman and his sniper rifle shooting the men in the guard towers. He could kill them through the bulletproof glass and through the armored sleeve that ran around the sides of their towers.

The SEALs fired in three-shot bursts—a drumroll punctuated by a loud bang every time Freeman pulled his trigger.

I spotted a couple of natural-borns disappearing into the closest hangar. I jumped down the ramp and sprinted through the door, not knowing whether I was following two men or twenty.

The hangar was mostly dark, lit only by the sunlight that filtered in through the window slits lining the ceiling. Rows of Explorers gleamed in the dimness, their hulls reflecting the light. They looked like tin cans to me, maybe tin coffins.

I didn’t want to shoot around the Explorers; they were so breakable. Bullets penetrated them, grenades tore them apart. I moved ahead slowly, taking in the silence, looking for movements instead of men, listening for footsteps and the click of bullets being chambered.

These birds had batteries, ancient batteries, plastic boxes filled with corrosive chemicals and toxic shit. They had atomic engines. They had liquid-oxygen boosters. A bullet might cause one to explode; an explosion could start a chain reaction.

My heart pounded, my temples throbbed; if I’d ever suffered the flu, the final symptoms had long since exited. I felt good, alive, ready to kill.

Somebody fired a shot. I heard the report, saw the scratch the bullet left on the wall just ahead of me. I spun but didn’t fire. The target was gone.

The man ran. His footsteps weren’t loud, but they sounded loud in the near silence.

I heard a squeak, spun, and fired, hitting another man as he sprang from his hiding spot among the tool chests and analytical computers. He fell onto a desk and hung there, his head and chest on the desk, his legs dangling to the floor. I couldn’t tell if had I killed him, but at least he’d stopped moving.

Footsteps coming from two directions. Was there a third man? I remained hidden and silent, fully aware that they could flank me, possibly on both sides. Maybe they knew Marine tactics—keep your enemy pinned down, then flank him. Shoot him in his hiding hole.

I listened for steps, scrapes, breathing.

“Hey, Harris!” It was one of the SEALs walking down the ramp. I needed to warn him of the threat, so I fired my gun in the air, then I somersaulted from my blind and ducked behind new cover.

The SEAL had been smart. He didn’t walk down the center of the ramp. He’d given himself away when he shouted for me, but the moment he realized the fight was still going, he reacted quickly and found cover.

I circled right, crouching beside the shoulder-high wall that separated a parking area for the carts from a mechanic’s bay.

“Harris, how many?” the SEAL called.

Looking around an edge, I saw a gun but I couldn’t see the man holding it. He wanted to flank me, and he was close; another few feet, and I’d be behind him.

I yelled, “Three,” as loud as I could, my voice pounding across the high, cavernous building like a wave. The man with the gun leaped from his cover and tried to dash behind an Explorer for cover. I shot him just as he reached the ship.

“Two,” I said.

I was wrong. Several soldiers, possibly as many as ten, fired in my direction. Bullets drilled the partial wall I was using for cover. Bullets struck the wall of the hangar, bouncing off, marking their impacts with sparks. Bullets hit a metal tool chest a few feet ahead of me, making a racket so loud it hurt my ears.

The SEAL stepped out from behind a steel panel. He moved like a squirrel, twitching movements so quick you would miss them if you blinked. He seemed to disappear from the ramp and magically reappear behind the nearest Explorer, his pistol ready, his eyes alert.

The U.A. soldier hiding behind the workbench had the patience of the dead. He made no more noise than a feather floating in a breeze. He moved so glacially slow that he never attracted my attention. One moment I saw empty floor, the next I saw his M27 pointing toward me.

Still crouched behind an Explorer, the SEAL swung his pistol to the left and shot him. The SEAL didn’t need to aim; it was as if he’d located the man using telepathy. His one shot hit the soldier in the chest slamming him back first into a wall.

The SEAL tried to sprint to the next nearest Explorer, but his luck ran out. He seemed to fly across the floor, as five single shots rang out. I heard them, each one as distinct as a hammer pounding a nail.
Bang . . . bang . . . bang . . . bang . . . bang.

One shot struck the right side of the SEAL’s chest, and he curled like a boxer recoiling from a hook to his ribs. The next bullet struck his jaw, tearing it away from his skull. The third shot hit his left thigh. The SEAL was still up, still running, still holding his pistol, still unaware that death had already struck. The fourth shot struck the left side of his gut, lifting him off the ground. The fifth bullet hit his right forearm as he fell, and his pistol finally dropped from his hand.

His heart kept beating, flushing blood out of bullet holes, and he curled into a ball like a dying spider.

I found a handhold and pulled myself up the tail assembly of an Explorer. The silly bird didn’t open at the back; she had a hatch along the top of her spine. I pulled myself up and kept myself low. I spotted two of the men who had shot the SEAL and shot them.

Three Unifieds tried to circle behind me. I could see them clearly from my elevated vantage point. They crouched in a pack, moving slowly, believing a skein of wires and pipes would conceal them. I might have been able to shoot them, but somebody spotted me and opened fire. Bullets struck the Explorer and passed through her; I had to dive to the ground, or I’d have been shot.

One of the Unifieds decided to follow my lead, the dumb shit. He climbed to the top of an Explorer and ran along her spine, searching for me. He leaped from one ship to the next, landing hard, then scurrying off to the next one as if they were stepping-stones, making so much noise that Beethoven would have heard him.

As he leaped from one Explorer to another, I stepped out from under a retracted wing and shot him in midair. His death did nothing to ruin his trajectory—he reached the next bird, but his legs folded, and he slid down the side of the ship.

Another soldier used that moment to try to sneak behind me. He stepped out from his cover. I caught him and fired three shots. One of my bullets grazed his arm, sending a spray of blood. He screamed and kept running.

A wounded man, even a dying one, can still shoot. This guy wasn’t necessarily dying, either. I would have shot him again . . . tried to shoot him at least, but I was out of bullets.

I watched him for half a heartbeat, taking in the panic in his expression. He was a boy. He might have been twenty-one or twenty-two, and blood gushed through his fingers and streamed down the front of his uniform.

He’d dropped his gun when I shot him. It sat no more than ten feet from me on the polished concrete floor, its trigger and butt pointing in my direction . . . no more than ten very exposed feet away.
Dive for it,
I thought.
Somersault on top of it and skid behind the tail of the next plane.

A couple of soldiers noticed how much time had passed since I fired my weapon and became emboldened. They stepped into the open. The gun was so close. SO close! But I had to leave it.

“Hey! He went down over there! He’s hiding over there!”

I was trapped. I was pinned. I tried to hide between a rolling tool chest and a waist-high brick wall.

“There. Behind there!”

One of the soldiers got too brave for his britches and came looking for me. He stepped around the tool chest, and I tripped him, hit him, took his gun, snuffed out his life. He screamed for help, but he died before any of his friends could arrive.

An officer skidded around the nose of an Explorer. I shot him in the face. Another saw the rapidly expanding puddle of blood on the concrete and ran for safety. I heard the report of a high-powered rifle and saw the body drop; there wasn’t much more than neck left above his shoulders.

A squad of SEALs glided into the building as smoothly as shadows sliding across a well-lit wall. They came too late to help. Freeman had shot the last of enemy.

The battle had lasted ten minutes, longer than it should have. When it ended, we counted up corpses. We had killed forty-seven of theirs; three had either hidden or run away. Master Chief Harmer didn’t think they would matter.

With the enemy dead, we shut down the sludging. Now that the fighting had ended, we advanced to the next stage of the mission.

Freeman, ever the stoic, said nothing as he went to the radar shack and started scanning for U.A. warships. He found them one by one, calling their positions to Harmer who relayed them to his men. The navigation coordinates used by broadcast computers come in long strings of numbers, most have twenty digits, but some have more. Freeman shouted them out, then read along as Harmer repeated them to make sure he repeated them correctly.

The SEALs and I had returned to the personnel carriers and grabbed our demolition gear. Whether they spotted our invasion or ignored us entirely, the Unifieds would see what we did next, and they would react. They’d storm the airfield gates. They’d send in their gunships. We didn’t care. By the time they arrived; we’d be long gone.

The SEALs placed explosives by the gates and around the fuel depot. I placed my kits in the hangars. I entered the first hangar and saw the blood marking the place where that one SEAL had died helping me and saw no reason to mourn him. I felt nothing. Maybe it was the way our time was ticking away. Maybe not. A lot of people had died in messy ways inside this aeronautical museum. Blood and bullet holes scarred several of the ships.

I rigged explosives along walls and under ships, then I left.

The second hangar was considerably larger. It housed over one thousand Explorers. They sat parked in perfectly straight rows. The hangar walls stood thirty feet high, twenty feet of which were buried underground. From the outside, the building looked like the world’s biggest pillbox—long and low to the ground. From the inside, it was so tall and sterile and neat that it reminded me of a cathedral.

I entered, absorbing the absolute silence. There was no blood on these walls. The SEALs had removed six of the planes, leaving a few lines shorter than the ones around them.

I felt like my presence disturbed an inner sanctum, like I was intruding on holy ground. It made no sense. No one had given their lives in this building. These mechanical birds meant nothing. In another few minutes, they would be a thin layer of shattered glass lying beneath a miasma of concrete and steel.

I couldn’t deny the sense of reverence. Strange that I would feel more emotion for a den of ancient aerospace ships than for a battlefield in which men had died.

I placed charges on a fueling station, under Explorers, and on the outer walls of the building. When this hangar went up, I wanted to be sure that nothing survived.

*   *   *

Six Explorers sat on the tarmac looking old and innocuous. They were silver birds with retractable wings and lots of glass. They had been designed for scientific exploration, but in another two minutes, they would wage and win a war against powerful foes.

The Explorers sat in two-hundred-foot intervals, which was still far too close together. It couldn’t be helped; that was all the room we had to work with.

Looking past the row of planes, I saw that several of the SEALs had gathered in a circle. We’d lost two SEALs taking the trucks, one died helping me in the hangar, two more died capturing the airfield. The surviving members of the squad had collected their bodies and carried them to an empty unused corner of the field. Using collapsible spades, they buried the bodies among the tall grass and flowers.

The SEALs always buried their own.

Because we hadn’t yet finished our mission, Harmer didn’t join them. He stood beside me, inspecting the Explorers to make sure they were ready but also watching his men.

“Which men did you lose?” I asked.

He said, “Morris, Hansen, Gomez, Summerland, and Warsol. We’re going to miss Warsol; he had valuable skills.”

In another moment, he’d send six more men to their deaths. Having started with a band of thirteen, he’d soon be down to two.