The Clone Apocalypse (34 page)

I rounded the corner. Freeman was gone, but he had left his sludging device. It sat on the floor, a shoebox-sized device with an antenna, a meter, and a power switch. I shot eight fléchettes into it.

The first shot hit me in the back. The little red icon came up in my visor and with a white dot on my back that froze into place. I pivoted, aimed my cannon, and the second shot hit me in the chest, and there was Freeman, just out of my accuracy range, holding a target pistol.

I looked down at my chest, saw the goop that he had splattered there. The son of a bitch had shot me with a couple of Perry MacAvoy’s shield sappers. “SPECK!” The word erupted from my lips. I aimed my wrist cannon in his direction but slightly high and fired and fired and fired, but he moved behind a wall and my fléchettes vanished and “SPECK!” erupted from my lips again.

I tried to detonate again, but that hadn’t been his only sludging device. It might have been a decoy or a backup, but the airwaves were still sludged, and who the speck knew how much juice I had left in my armor, but freshly charged batteries only lasted six minutes when MacAvoy shot them with this shit.

“Wayson, stop! You don’t want to do this!” Kasara screamed.

I wanted to shoot her, but I ignored the urge. She’d die in another moment. She’d die soon enough. I turned and walked toward the nukes. They were a few minutes away. I needed to get to them quickly. If my shields went out, Freeman would shoot me.

He yelled, “Harris, it needs to be your choice.”

My choice!
I thought, and I laughed. My choice? He was sludging the airwaves and waiting to shoot me. I kept my strides long and fast, turning corners, marching through dark halls.

He wanted me to lower my shields, to let him take me. I turned back, saw him poised over a counter, his rifle trained on me. He was thirty feet out of my range. I looked ahead. There was the nuclear device, far ahead. If I pressed ahead, I could still reach it.

“They turned on you as much as they turned on me!” I screamed. “They want you dead, too!”

“That doesn’t matter,” said Freeman.

“Then what matters? Huh? What the speck matters if that doesn’t matter?

“You know what, Ray? More clones died fighting the Avatari, trying to save these bastards . . . the Avatari killed ten times more clones than that specking flu, and they still turned on us. We protected them, Ray. We followed all of their orders. Duty, right? We did our duty. We made all of the sacrifices.

“Does that count for anything?”

A moment of silence, and then a low, calm response, “Not at the moment.”

In my mind I saw Hunter Ritz. I saw Sergeant Shannon and Lewis Herrington and Kelly Thomer and Mark Phillips, clones who had died bravely fighting to save natural-borns, and I knew I was letting them down. Freeman had outsmarted me. I wasn’t going to avenge them.

Freeman yelled, “Harris, you need to lower your shields. If you don’t walk away from this on your own, I’ll have to kill you. If you walk away, I can help you, but I won’t help you unless you take the first step.”

I hated him. I hated Kasara. I hated myself.

There was something wrong with me. I thought about the way I laughed as I killed the Marines guarding Andropov. I thought about my desire to kill millions of civilians. Something was wrong, I knew there was something wrong with what I wanted to do, but I had no idea what.

The nuke sat there, the risk, the gamble, the possibility of fulfilling my only ambition.

“Wayson, we’re trying to help you,” Kasara said. She was close to me again, running toward me, close enough that I could see the tears on her cheeks. I wasn’t moved.

I should have been moved. She cared about me. I didn’t know if I ever loved her, but I had certainly cared about her as well.

I turned off my shields and dropped onto a marble bench, fully aware that Freeman would shoot me now that I no longer had shields to protect me. He would execute me; that was the only way he could make sure I never changed my mind.

Freeman had always been careful. Instead of approaching me for the traditional shot to the back of the head, he remained a hundred yards away, out of range. My shields were down, but my wrist cannon still worked.

He yelled, “Now take off your helmet.”

It will be a clean shot,
I told myself. That is a good way to die, a clean shot through the brain. Quick. No suffering. The best I could ask for.

Fear of death had seldom bothered me, but surrender didn’t come easily. I sighed, reached for my helmet, and paused. It would be over in a moment. I thought of my ghosts and accepted that I would soon join them, then I removed my helmet.

I caught a brief whiff of the ammonia saturating the air. I didn’t even have time to realize what I had smelled before the world went black.

THE BETRAYER

SIXTY-TWO

Date: August 24, 2519

The flu had washed over the Enlisted Man’s Empire like a tidal wave. All of the clones were dead except for two Generals—Pernell MacAvoy and Wayson Harris. Howard Tasman had no idea what had become of Harris, but he knew precisely what MacAvoy was doing. The last Army man standing was making his final stand, trying to defend the Linear Committee Building, so sick from the flu that he had to fight from a wheelchair.

Tasman’s wheelchair couldn’t climb walls or desks, but it could climb stairs. He didn’t need a perfect ramp to drive the heavy, six-wheeled chair, tiers would do.

He could hear the battle raging outside. That idiot soldier MacAvoy, the only other man in the entire Linear Committee Building, thought he could fight the entire Unified Authority all by himself.

He’ll have to,
Tasman mused.
He’s the last clone.

He drilled a hole through the wall of a bookcase, then he looped an electrical cord through the hole. He tied the other end of the cord to one of the armrests on his chair and rolled away. The bookcase was solid teak, with a fine lacquered finish that reflected light in dull streaks.

Shhhuuuurrrre
, the sound of rockets fired. The rumbling explosion. The walls of the LCB should have muffled those sounds, but Unified Authority soldiers had shot out so many of the windows.

As he pulled toward his desk, peaceful crashes mingled with the noise from the brewing battle. Books fell from the shelf, and metal figurines and a marble bust. Tasman looked back and saw a set of books with color-coded spines topple to the ground as the shelf teetered.
Books,
he thought.

Books.
He hadn’t opened an actual book in decades, maybe since he’d been a young man. The old neural-programming engineer didn’t know who had stacked these books on the shelves in his office, and he’d never touched them. He didn’t need to use them; his computers stored and tabulated any and all information stored in those books.

In his mind, the books had aesthetic value only. He liked antiques, objects that had outlasted their usefulness.
Anything that survives long enough outlives its usefulness,
he thought. The books were old and rare, and probably more valuable in 2519 than on the day they’d been printed.

Some things are more valuable when they are old and useless . . . some things.
The bookshelf must have been fastened into the wall. It put up one last fight, causing the wheelchair to skid and stammer, then the heavy shelf fell stiff and stolid to the floor with a
whoosh
and a
thump
that sounded far more muffled than the grenades and rockets outside the building. Tasman dragged it right up to his desk so that it, with his desk, formed the first and last tiers of his staircase.

He drove his wheelchair into the debris field he’d just created and scooped up books and computer parts, a rack made for displaying swords, a box filled with bric-a-brac Tasman didn’t own or care about. He picked up anything and everything, and he tossed them onto the upside-down bookshelf.

Date: August 18, 2519

Watson had captured the spy, Kevin Rhodes, and used his phone to contact Harris. At first the extraction sounded like a dream, like liberation. Now the dream had become a nightmare.

The battle might have been on the other side of town, but it sounded close, maybe right down the street. Watson had arranged for the battle, but he looked worried. He hid against an inner wall of the apartment, occasionally crawling to the window and peering out at the street.

Kevin Rhodes looked scared as well. Watson and his girlfriend had tied the guy’s hands behind his back. To Tasman’s eye, the knots looked sloppy. He thought Rhodes might have been able to work his hands free if he tried, but the knots around his legs and ankles looked solid, and he’d have needed a knife to remove the gag and sock from his mouth.

He lay face-first on the old carpeting, looking like the world’s largest worm. Awake and alert, Rhodes became more panicked with every explosion. His eyes darted from side to side. He breathed so hard that he reminded Tasman of a woman in labor.

And then there was Emily. Every bang, every crash, even gun chatter caused her to jump. Tasman found it funny. He watched her just for the entertainment value.

She wanted to live. So did Watson. In Tasman’s mind, they had something to live for—youth. Rhodes wanted to live as well. Tasman had no idea why.

“There’s something coming up the street!” Watson yelled.

He sounds so damned excited,
Tasman thought. He didn’t want to admit it to himself, but he wanted to live, too. No, it wasn’t that simple. Living didn’t matter to him; he had long since given up on life; he just didn’t want to die.

“What?” asked Emily. “What do you see?”

“It looks like . . . Holy Hell, it’s tanks and trucks! They’re coming straight up the road! It’s really them! They’re going to get us out!”

Emily crawled over for a look at the street. Rhodes didn’t move. Their rescue was his death sentence.

“How do we know they’re ours?” Emily asked.

Tasman answered. He said, “They haven’t shot the building. If the U.A. Army knew we were here, they’d have blown us up.”

“Their armor isn’t glowing,” said Watson.

“No one’s shooting at them,” said Emily.

As they watched an endless supply of men in armor pouring out of personnel carriers, Watson said, “They look like they’re all about the same size.” They sounded excited. They hugged each other. They kissed. Tasman half expected them to hump each other right there on the floor; it wouldn’t have been the first time he’d seen them do it.

Then there was the knock on the door and an armed escort that led them to an armored personnel carrier. A Marine lugged Tasman down the stairs into the truck. Everyone went into the carrier except for Rhodes. They threw him into the back of a Jackal.

On the far side of the bench, Watson and Emily held each other, but they looked nothing like young lovers. To Tasman, they looked old and stiff, like an ancient couple. He had his arm on her shoulder. She had her hand on his leg. Their hands stayed in one place. They touched, but there was no caress, and they didn’t speak.

Watson kept the briefcase with him, holding it beside him as if he would die without it. It sat between him and Emily on the bench, a short, skinny box with the U.A./EME Marines emblem engraved on its face.

The fighting never stopped. Tasman heard it as they loaded him into his seat. He heard it as the convoy drove him away from the building. At some point he heard an enormous explosion, not just a bomb or a rocket, this thing shook the ground like an earthquake. He froze in his chair. Had his plumbing not been hooked into mechanical collectors, he would have needed new clothes.

And then the truck stopped. Trapped in the back, Tasman and the other passengers could not see where they had stopped or why. Emily asked, “Do you think we’re at some kind of a base?”

Watson shook his head. “No. If we were that close to a base, I would have tried to run to it for help.”

“Maybe they sent a plane for us,” Emily suggested.

The back door of the transport opened. Light flooded through the doorway. Tasman placed a hand over his eyes to block it. Squinting behind his fingers, he saw a woman stepping into the carrier. He could not see her clearly, however, until the door shut, and the blinding light went away.

The woman was clean, and her clothes looked freshly laundered, no wrinkles, no tears. Tasman decided she was pretty and young, with dark hair and blue eyes. Surprise showed in her eyes.

She said, “Travis? Emily?”

They looked at her. At first they didn’t recognize her. Emily figured it out first. She said, “Sunny.” That wasn’t a greeting or a question. If anything, it was a label. There was no warmth in Emily’s voice.

“Sunny? What are you doing here?”

The woman said, “They captured my apartment building. I hid in a friend’s house.”

Nobody spoke after that, not for the rest of the ride. Nearly an hour passed before the carrier stopped again. This time it had reached an extraction point.

Sunny, the pretty one in the clean dress, sat and waited while Watson helped Emily out of the back of the personnel carrier. Tasman couldn’t get himself out. He was old and mostly crippled; a Marine would need to carry him out. Sunny, the woman with the beautiful brown hair and blue eyes waited with him. She looked at him, gave him the sweetest smile, and said, “Listen up, you dried-up piece of shit.”

Silent and scared, Tasman listened.

“We could have killed you on Mars, and we sure as hell can kill you here. The only thing that’s keeping you alive is that you’re just as worthless to them as you are to us. They can’t protect you. They can’t save you. Their empire is about to end.”

Tasman wanted to say something, maybe ask if she was insane, but he was too scared to speak.

She said, “Do you want to live, Howie? Do you want to stay alive another day? Rhodes had an encryption bandit in that case Watson is holding. If you want to stay alive, you just make sure Harris doesn’t see what’s on it . . .”

She became quiet.

He wanted to ask what that meant, but a Marine entered the carrier. The woman smiled at both Tasman and the clone Marine who was carrying him. She radiated love and happiness.

*   *   *

They flew to an Army base, then they flew into Washington, D.C., where General MacAvoy met them. He took them to the top floor of the LCB, to Wayson Harris’s office. They waited outside while MacAvoy chatted with Harris, then they entered a few minutes later.

Tasman wanted to see how Harris would react when he saw Sunny. Did he know she was an enemy agent? Could he warn Harris?

The old man watched the clone and the girl. She seemed genuinely happy to see him. She kissed him again and again, almost forcing her mouth against his even though he clearly wanted to put on a professional front. Tasman watched him closely, saw the way he stole glances and the overwhelming lust in his eyes. Harris wanted her. Tasman saw something else, too. Harris didn’t know that Sunny was the enemy. She was playing with him, but he didn’t see it. Maybe he didn’t want to see it. Seeing how weak Harris became around her, Tasman wondered if Harris already knew the truth and had chosen to ignore it.

They had a short meeting. Harris wanted to talk business. Sunny kept interrupting, making an emotional scene. Tasman watched how she manipulated him and realized that he had joined the losing team. When the meeting ended, he watched Sunny leave. Her emotions were theatrical.

He wanted to stay and warn Harris, but the Liberator clone wasn’t interested in warnings. Harris wanted to chat with General MacAvoy about the battle and the encryption bandit that Watson had taken from Rhodes.

Hearing them speak about the encryption bandit, Tasman began to understand Sunny’s play. There must have been vital information in its memory, but Harris and MacAvoy were Neanderthals.

Watching them speak, Tasman no longer knew which side of the war would win. The clones had more men and were better trained, but they had no vision. They were like medieval knights, all gallant and marching around in armor, convinced of their invincibility. The Unified Authority was vicious.

Tasman volunteered to help with the encryption. If the Unified Authority’s new weapon was as good as Sunny said, he would hide the information. If the clones could survive it, he would warn them.

Tasman offered to take the information off the bandit, and Harris asked, “Howard, how do you feel about bunking in the Linear Committee Building for the next little while?”

Tasman asked, “Is it going to be safer than the Pentagon?”

Harris said, “You’ll be more secure than the gold in Fort Knox.”

“Fort Knox is empty. It’s been empty for centuries. You said the Pentagon was secure. What makes the Linear Committee Building any safer?”

Harris said, “You’ll have me here to protect you.”

Deciding that Sunny had been right, the clones couldn’t protect him, Tasman said, “Harris, you scare me more than all the rest of them.”

Tasman wondered if he had turned himself into a spy.

Date: August 24, 2519

The explosions were getting louder. MacAvoy must have set off charges or bombs or grenades inside the building. There was gunfire, lots of it. Tasman did his best to ignore it.

The rise from the floor to the back of the fallen bookshelf was about a foot. Tasman’s front wheels brushed against the side of the bookshelf and climbed to the top. The other wheels adjusted and followed. He’d climbed the first tier.

The old scientist was a waif, skin, brittle bones, and no padding between them. His wheelchair weighed hundreds of pounds. The wooden panel that covered the back of the bookshelf groaned, but it held.

His chair leaned back so perilously, he thought it might roll over. The spinning wheels kicked books and plaques to the floor. Then they found traction, and Tasman drove the chair up the dune of books and bits and bric-a-brac on his way to the desk.

Date: August 20, 2519

Breaking into the encrypted data had gone like clockwork. Minutes after moving into his office, Tasman had located the file about the flu. He read it, analyzed it, and realized the clones were finished. Most of the clones had already been exposed. Harris sure as hell was carrying; the only reason Sunny had boarded the personnel carrier was to give it to him personally.

What a bitch,
Tasman thought, but he also admired her. She was stronger than Harris. She would destroy him.

That morning, Tasman allied himself with the nation he knew would win the war. Now that he had sided with the Unified Authority, Tasman cared nothing for Harris, maybe even had come to despise him. He began the day by calling MacAvoy and telling him all about Sunny. Then they invited Harris, Tasman practically drooling at the thought of watching the Liberator squirm.

Harris came to meet them.

Tasman didn’t say anything about flu viruses or spy networks. Instead, he talked about inventories and accounting. Harris looked impatient. So much the better.