The Clone Apocalypse (8 page)

NINE

Obviously, I couldn’t hide information about Sunny’s working for the Unified Authority Intelligence. She’d entered both the Pentagon and the Linear Committee Building. As my girlfriend, she’d set foot on military bases and spoken to high-level personnel. Hell, she’d gone on double dates with me and Travis and Emily.

I stormed past my aide as I returned to my office. He put down his cup of water, and asked, “Is everything okay, sir?” Once again, I ignored him. I closed the door behind me and hid behind my desk.

I sat in my big, well-cushioned chair and stared at the door of my office while I relived emotions—the humiliation of watching myself helpless one moment and having sex the next. I thought about MacAvoy’s making jokes and shook my head in disgust. I thought about Tasman apologizing on my behalf. I told myself that I had never loved Sunny, and I felt comfortable that was indeed the case.

My office was brightly lit, with white walls and blue carpeting. The crowded bookshelves and display cases came with the keys, property of the previous occupant. I had inherited the books, the pictures, the art along with the walls and furniture from Tobias Andropov.

Did Andropov know that I had commandeered his office? Sunny had walked through that door, bounded over to this desk, and kissed me. He knew. If she knew, he knew. That’s how the spy game works.

What else did he know? Had he seen the video feeds? Had he seen me tortured?
Bullshit,
I told myself. I didn’t care if he saw Sunny and Franklin torturing me. I cared about the other parts . . . Was he laughing at me?

I’d had sex with Sunny in her apartment. We’d done that on dozens of occasions. Had she recorded those, too?

I wondered if she ever got embarrassed. Did she watch the feeds with her bosses? What would she tell them? Were they laughing?

I contacted MacAvoy, and asked, “Has Tasman found Sunny Ferris’s personnel file?”

“Affirmative.”

“Did you read it?”

“Of course. It’s got a whole lot of useless shit, most of which you already know. Her background is just like you said, rich parents and law school. Sound familiar?”

“How about—?” I started to ask.

MacAvoy cut me off. He said, “There wasn’t anything that should have sent up flags, Harris. She wasn’t an anticlone protester. She didn’t lose a brother or a husband during the war. She isn’t related to any members of the Linear Committee. She never worked as a prostitute or a spy.

“Satisfied?”

“No,” I said, and switched off the console.

Sunny.
The first time I saw her, she had come to my office representing the New Olympians, who were still trapped on Mars. A few days after I met her, I went to Mars on a rescue mission, and Nailor shot me.

I returned to Earth in medical stasis. My first night out of the hospital, Travis and Emily had taken me to a bar, and there she was again. I had taken her appearance for kismet. She’d been at the bar with friends from her law firm. Were they spies, too?

I called Naval Intelligence and told the commanding officer to investigate the Alexander Cross law firm. “If you have any questions, bring Cross in and torture him,” I said.

“Can we do that, sir?” he asked.

“No, but do it anyway,” I said.

He said, “Aye aye,” but he did not sound convinced.

He called back five minutes later, and said, “The firm is closed, sir. Cross disappeared three weeks ago.”

“Can you track down the whereabouts of the lawyers?” I asked.

“Already in progress, sir. General MacAvoy made the same request earlier this morning.”

“Thank you, Major,” I said, and I went back to being alone.

Admiral Hauser would arrive in another hour. I had a conference room ready. Strait and MacAvoy would be there. At least I knew what Hauser wanted to talk about. MacAvoy must have told him about my ex-girlfriend. He would’ve had to do that. Some mistakes are too large to be swept under a rug.

Glad to have time alone, I sat at my desk and reviewed all of my mistakes. I didn’t stop with Sunny. I reviewed my life as a Marine, then as an orphan. What would Kasara say when I told her I’d been sleeping with a spy? Would she laugh at my stupidity or try to make me feel better?

My aide knocked on my door.

“What is it?” I shouted.

“Admiral Hauser has arrived, sir. He’s at the summit. So are General MacAvoy and General Strait.”

The firing squad has assembled,
I told myself. “Tell them I’ll be there in a minute.” Then I called Tasman. I said, “Howard, have you found anything else?”

“About Sunny?” he asked.

“About anything,” I said.

“I ran into a dead end on her a couple of hours ago. There are more files, but I can’t access them.”

“Why?”

“How much do you know about encryption?” Tasman asked me.

“Not much,” I admitted.

“Do you have a secure line for calling Strait and MacAvoy?” he asked. “Do you use the same line when you call for your car?”

I had to think about that. I made all my LCB calls on the same line but used a secure line when contacting people outside the building.

Tasman said, “Our computers have security levels. So did theirs. I haven’t found a key for opening some of their files. And Sunny may have worked under an alias or another identity. I’ve found files with her name in the title that don’t have any information about her. They have information about a woman named Mary Mallon. Ever heard of her?”

“Mary Mallon?” I asked.
Could that be her real name?
I had run a security check on Sunny, at least I got that much right, but it wasn’t particularly thorough.

“Legion produced some unexpected information,” said Tasman. “Do you know what killed the clones you forced out of that underwater city?” He didn’t bother trying to pronounce the name of the city, which happened to be Quetzalcoatl.

The Unified Authority had stashed an entire division of reprogrammed Marines in Quetzalcoatl. Using torpedoes and threats, the EME Navy forced them to abandon the city. They boarded submarines and came to the surface, but when we boarded their submarines, they were dead.

“They died from the death reflex,” I said. There’d been no mistaking that. We found thousands of corpses, all bleeding from their ears.

“So what caused their death reflex?” Tasman asked.

“They must have figured out they were clones,” I said. It seemed pretty obvious.

“They already knew they were clones,” said Tasman.

“What?” I asked. “They knew they were clones, and they didn’t have reflexes?”

This was big news. If we could program our soldiers, sailors, and Marines not to die when they found out they were clones, we’d be lot more secure.

Tasman said, “The death gland isn’t programmed. Neural programming impacts the brain, which impacts that gland. Normal clones are programmed to have a neural overload when they learn they’re synthetic. The overloading stresses the brain, which then signals the gland to release the death hormone.

“Apparently, the Unifieds cared more about your reconverting those clones than they did about their becoming sentient.”

“Sentient?” I asked.

“Self-aware, knowing they were synthetic,” said Tasman. “The death glands were designed to be unstable, like fuses, built to overload and break.”

*   *   *

The elevator doors opened. People watched me as I walked through the hall. Let me amend that. Clones watched me. Very few natural-borns worked in the Linear Committee Building.

I reached the conference room. The sentries standing beside the double doors saluted and stepped out of my way. The room beyond the doors was oval in shape, just slightly dimmed, and luxuriously appointed with wood-lined walls, a bar, an ebony table, and a waterfall.

Hauser, Strait, and MacAvoy stood by the twelve-foot waterfall, gazing into the pond at its base. They turned to welcome me. I saw nothing revealing in General Strait’s posture. Hauser looked glad to see me, maybe even relieved. MacAvoy, on the other hand, had a devious glint in his eye. He didn’t meet my gaze; instead, he stared at the koi swimming near his feet. He looked at me, looked away, took another glance at the waterfall, then floated toward the conference table.

As seniormost officer and acting commander in chief, I should have conducted this summit, but Hauser had called for it. I deferred to him. I said, “Tom, this is your show; maybe you should run it.”
That way,
I thought,
I won’t need to hand over the reins when the MPs remove me from the room.

“If you don’t mind, I think I will take the conn,” he said.

MacAvoy surprised me. He said, “Harris, sit your ass over here. I got a question for you.”

So much for his nervousness. I walked over to the table. As I sat, I noticed he had that “flu fighter” shit in his glass. It was orange and viscous, and I smelled the pepper from a few feet away. The drink didn’t seem to help him, though. The bottom of his nose had turned pink and raw, and he held a napkin which he used every so often to wipe his nose.

“Do you know what this is about?” I asked MacAvoy, feigning ignorance.

He said, “You’re more clued in than me.”

I doubted that, but I didn’t mention it. Once I sat, though, MacAvoy became as silent as a rock. He sat there, didn’t look at me, and pretended to take notes. Let me tell you, that was a joke. Pernell MacAvoy may or may not have known how to read, but he’d never jotted notes.

Hauser sat at the head of the table. He fiddled with the computer station for a moment, then he spoke. He said, “The Earth Fleet discovered a ship floating in space three days ago. She appeared to be unharmed.

“When we went to investigate, we discovered she was
Magellan
, one of the old Explorers we sent out from Smithsonian Field.”

Strait, the officer most out of the loop, said, “So you found an old antique, that’s why you called us here?”

What you don’t know may or may not be able to hurt you, but it can sure leave you looking like an ass. Strait, for instance, didn’t know that we had inherited the entire two-hundred-ship Explorer fleet when we captured Washington, D.C. He didn’t know we had used those ships to transport Marines to a battle on Mars. Apparently he didn’t know that his branch, the Air Force, maintained Smithsonian Field, the hangar facility in which we kept the Explorer fleet.

MacAvoy hadn’t been given that information either. Hauser and I hadn’t told anyone that we had begun sending those ships to lost planets. I wondered what, if anything, this ghost ship had to do with Sunny. And then I saw the connection. I must have tipped her off about the operation.

“What about the crew?” I asked.

“Dead. Seven clones, five enlisted men, two officers. All hands died by death reflex.”

“A mass death reflex?” I asked. I knew damn well what could cause that, and I saw Sunny’s fingerprints all over it. I also knew where that Explorer had been. We’d sent her to Terraneau, a former Unified Authority planet located in the Scutum-Crux Arm—the far end of the galaxy. During the weeks before we attacked Earth, as the aliens attacked populated planets throughout the galaxy, we’d divided our Navy in half. One half attacked Earth. The other half transferred refugees to Terraneau, a planet that had already been incinerated and no longer interested the aliens.

The Unifieds, however, weren’t done with us. As we attacked Earth, they attacked Terraneau. We didn’t know how that battle went. For all we knew, our forces had routed the Unifieds, and we had a thriving empire on the opposite side of the galaxy. Or maybe it had gone the other way. The only ships we’d ever seen from that invasion were thoroughly battered.

Hauser said, “General Harris and I authorized
Magellan
to travel to Terraneau last week.”

“Why wasn’t I informed?” asked Strait.

MacAvoy answered before Hauser. He said, “It’s on a need-to-know basis.”

“I should have been informed about this,” complained Strait.

“Why would you be in the loop?” asked MacAvoy. “Your birds can’t even leave the atmosphere. If the Navy runs a covert operation in Pennsylvania, maybe they’ll let you know.”

“Did they tell you about the operation?” asked Strait.

“They did not,” said MacAvoy. “Need-to-know basis . . . the only thing the Army needs to know is who to shoot. That’s why we’re still relevant.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Strait.

He knew what it meant.

MacAvoy was playing with Strait and enjoying himself. He asked, “What do you think it means, Flyboy?” Strait tried to ignore him. He started to say something to Hauser, then turned back to MacAvoy, and said, “Get specked, asshole.”

MacAvoy answered with a satisfied smile.

Hauser asked, “May we continue?”

He should be running the empire,
I thought.
It never should have been me.
Marines don’t run governments; they break things and kill people.

Hauser knew how to run a fleet, a full-blown society. He understood politics. Knowing that my figurative firing squad waited around the corner, I decided to pull the trigger myself. Expecting Hauser to say that someone had leaked information about the operation and prepared to confess my part, I asked, “How did they capture the ship?”

Hauser said, “We don’t know what happened to her.”

I asked, “Could somebody have leaked information?”

“I don’t see how,” said Hauser. “You and I were the only officers who knew about the operation.”

I got as far as saying, “What if,” before MacAvoy A) kicked me under the table, and not gently, either, and B) shouted, “Could they have been reprogrammed? Tasman says that reprogramming can cause clones to have a death reflex?”

Hauser covered his mouth with a handkerchief and coughed once, then said, “We’ve analyzed their automated flight log. The ship may have been captured. Something happened after she broadcasted into Terraneau space; the question is what. Once she broadcasted in, her flight records stop.”

“Are there any signs of battle?” asked Strait.

“
Magellan
is an Explorer. There wouldn’t have been enough of her left if she got in a scrape.”