Point and Shoot (7 page)

His life, a series of bad decisions that led him to this, the worst predicament of all.

So no.

He wasn’t going to do it anymore.

Hardie knew how this would play out. No matter what he said, this Other Him will try to take control of the satellite and crash it into the ocean or some such shit, promptly sentencing his family to death.

So for once in his life, Hardie decided to preempt the bullshit.

While the Other Him was busy talking about strapping the two of them in and not dying on impact, Hardie reached up, grabbed a fistful of fabric spacesuit, and yanked him with all of his might back down into the tube. The Other Him never saw it coming.

Hardie guessed that sometimes you really could outthink yourself, couldn’t you?

The Other Him’s body bounced once, twice … and then a third time at the bottom of the tube, near the food delivery hatch. The thumps sounded painful, and upon each impact the Other Him let out a strangled cry that sounded strange, because that was essentially Hardie’s own strangled cry. But Hardie didn’t give a shit. He scrambled back up into the control room proper and closed the hatch behind him. Engaged the locks. The Other Him was screaming something down there, but you know what? Too bad.

His body aching from all of the physical activity, Hardie slowly made his way to the main controls and sat down. He just needed a quiet moment to think through his next move.

On the monitor, he could see the Other Him, now standing again, and pounding his fist on the side of the tube, screaming something.

Hardie flicked off the image. Let him cool his heels down there for a while. He should be thankful he didn’t machine-gun his ass out the airlock.

The audio receiver was still engaged, and Hardie could hear the anguished protests of the Other Him.

“It’s too late! You don’t understand! It’s too late!”

Hardie stabbed a button with his finger. “Nope.
You’re
too late.”

For once, Hardie thought, he’d pushed back. Show those evil, sneaky, let’s-control-the-world bastards he was a guy who couldn’t be messed with.

Shit. It was almost a new lease on life.

But then Hardie glanced over at the rows of sensors and controls. Lights he had never seen before were blinking urgently. Stern little warning tones were going bonkers, like a GPS unit that believed you were about to drive into a superhighway column. He’d never seen the spacecraft do anything like this before.

Sabotage
, Hardie thought.
Damn it, the lookalike prick had sabotaged him!
Hardie wondered if he should try to report this to someone, but of course communication only worked in one direction. They could talk to him; he couldn’t say jack shit to them.

And his pre-launch question-and-answer session hadn’t covered this contingency.
Okay, let’s just say I’m really soft-brained after all of those months in orbit, and I, you know, kinda accidentally let someone board the craft who looks just like me, even though you told me not to do that, under any circumstances, no matter who it may be, including my dead grandmother, John Lennon, or Mahatma Gandhi … but I do, and then this guy makes the craft go all haywire … um, what do I do then
?

Meanwhile Hardie began to become aware of a muffled sound. Words. A specific pattern being repeated over and over again. It was faint, but that was only because it was coming from the sealed gun tube.

You, Hardie thought. What in the blue blazes do you want?

That the murmuring was the same string of repeated words led Hardie to believe that his double had something specific to share and wasn’t just telling him how he was going to rip off his head if he ever got out of the gun tube alive.

What else could he do? Information was power, after all. Hardie went over to the control panel near the tube and stabbed the audio button with a finger.

The message came screaming through the speaker:

“—our reentry sequence!”

A pause, then the full message again:

“I’ve already started our reentry sequence!”

Oh.

Fuck.

Me.

Hard.

T
HIS IS NOT
going
at all
how you planned. Or how your handlers planned. Who can plan for a force of living mayhem like Charles D. Hardie? You might as well try to plan for earthquakes or spontaneous combustion.

Making things worse—at least in your own head—is the knowledge that you are the world’s leading expert on all things Charlie Hardie, since you look just like him and have studied him so intensely. You should have called this sequence of events, right?

And now you are inside a steel tube that very soon will eject itself from the main spacecraft and you will tumble to your death. Fortunately, you’ll most likely pass out from the intense heat as the tube starts to smash into the earth’s atmosphere. Just like falling asleep in a tanning booth, you tell yourself.

This doesn’t help.

So instead you do the only thing you can: try to appeal to Charlie Hardie’s compassionate side.

The man has one. You’ve studied it. You’ve seen it in real life. On the run from the LAPD, Charlie Hardie risked everything to double back and go into a fire to save a family of four—TV star Jonathan Hunter, his wife, his son, his daughter. Risked everything—saved them, too—only to get his ass shot. He nearly drowned, and was abducted and drugged and put in a trunk and sent to a secret prison in the middle of nowhere and …

Well, suffice it to say that he knows all about risking everything to help total strangers.

You need him to feel the same compassion now. Granted, Jonathan Hunter didn’t beat the living shit out of him inside a steel tube floating in space. Okay, so maybe compassion was a bit much to expect.

Brains, though … Charlie Hardie was smarter than he looked. And even a man with a low-wattage intellect had to appreciate that killing
you
wouldn’t do a thing to save the Hardie family …

Killing his clone wouldn’t do a thing to help his family.

If he sabotaged the craft, maybe he could be forced to unsabotage it.

Hardie yanked open the hatch, mashing the knuckles of his right hand in the process. Gah, crap,
hell
. The pain centers of his entire arm lit up. As if he didn’t have enough to deal with. He grabbed one of the machine-gun triggers with his left hand, then looked down at his duplicate. The Other Him was bracing himself against the sides of the tube with his arms and legs.

“What did you do to the satellite?” Hardie asked.

“I’ve already done it. I’ve initiated the reentry sequence. We’re going down.”

“What …? Why? Why in the holy
fuck
would you do something like that?”

“I’m not going to lie to you,” the Other Him said. “This has always been part of the plan, with or without your cooperation.”

“Not going to lie to … I’ll seriously kill your ass dead if you don’t tell me how to stop it. And none of this let-me-back-up-into-the-main-craft shit. You tell me from there, and you tell me right now. If you don’t, I’m going to squeeze these triggers and spray you into little tiny chunks. I’ll make it hurt, too.”

“Well, then, go ahead and shoot, because it’s too late. I couldn’t stop the reentry sequence if I was Stephen J. Hawking. We’ve already been bumped out of our orbit. And unless you let me out of this tube, I’m going to be jettisoned and die.”

“I’m not worried so much about
you
dying. I’m worried about stopping this satellite from crashing into the earth.”

“Listen to me,” the Other Hardie said. “The satellite will not crash. It is designed for reuse. It will deploy parachutes to slow its descent. It will gently splash down off the coast of California. It has redundancies and backup systems, GPS and iridium locator beacons. This is what it was designed to do. Get recovered.”

“You sure about that?”

“Absolutely. We did our homework. But that recovery just applies to the capsule portion. In a matter of minutes, maybe even seconds, this gateway tube is going to be blasted away, and I’m going to die, and you will, too, because you have the hatch door still open. And then your family’s going to die, and this whole saga is going to have a very, very sad ending.”

“Or I could just close the hatch, shoot your ass dead, and take my chances.”

The Other Hardie narrowed his eyes. “It’d be the dumbest move of your life.”

Hardie thought about it. “No. I don’t think so.”

Then he slammed the hatch shut. Just before it clanged shut he heard the enraged screams of his double. Hardie did not give a shit. Over the past decade he’d made a series of dumb moves. Leading the Albanian mob straight to his partner and his family. Not believing Lane Madden soon enough when she told him there were people trying to kill her. Not pulling the trigger when the gun was inside that evil lady’s mouth. Hardie decided he was out of the dumb-move business.

He would pull the trigger now.

Do it,
do it
, don’t hesitate. Hesitation gets you killed.

Hardie wrapped his hands around the dual triggers and squeezed.

And there was nothing but a faint double
klik klik
sound.

Hardie knew there was no sound in space—that the booming explosions in
Star Wars
were bullshit. But he should have heard the guns echo through that tube, right? What the hell was going on? Hardie pushed the audio button with one hand and the triggers with the other. Again, a dull
klik
.

Over the tiny speaker: “I’ve disabled the machine guns, too, dumbass. Now, are you going to let me up so we can survive this thing? Or are you going to let both of us die?”

Hardie supposed he was still very much in the dumb-move business.

The Cabal’s super-secret spy satellite continued its descent toward the surface of the earth.

O
F COURSE THERE
was a debate over who should be strapped into the reentry gear. Hardie’s double pled his case quickly: He was the one who knew how to signal his handlers for help once they splashed down. He was stronger and fitter and could tow Charlie Hardie to safety in the event of an emergency water evacuation. He could revive Hardie in case he was knocked unconscious due to the excessive g-forces. He could also defend them in case a Cabal recovery ship found them first.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Hardie said. “Water evacuation? Knocked unconscious? What happened to all of that shit about a gentle splashdown?”

“We’re plunging out of low earth orbit,” the Other Hardie said, “not going down a log flume. It’s going to hurt. You’re never going to experience pain quite like this. Or so they told me during the briefing.”

Hardie had to admit, he didn’t think about coming down so much. It had hurt enough going up; he kind of blocked the whole idea of
coming down
out of his head.

“Let’s just say I let you strap yourself in with that harness. You’ll be nice and cozy. What am I supposed to do? Hang on and pray?”

“No. There’s somewhere else we could strap you.”

“Where? This isn’t a two-seater.”

Hardie followed his clone’s eye path across the craft and over … to the cramped toilet facilities. The only other place where a gentleman could strap himself in for the extended haul.

“Oh,
fuck you
. Seriously? How about you take the shitter? You’re the unwanted guest here. I’ll even throw in a magazine, in case you get bored.”

“We don’t have time for this. We keep arguing, we’re both going to be knocked unconscious in a matter of minutes.”

Hardie didn’t like the bathrooms in airplanes, let alone this.

Yet that’s where Charlie Hardie found himself, on a space toilet, during the most traumatic experience of his life. At some point in the descent he found himself incoherently thanking Christ that he was situated over a toilet because at one point the pressure was so intense it felt like his mashed internal organs were going to come launching out of his ass. On top of that, the heat was way more intense than he had dreamed possible—as if he were lying on a sunny beach the day God decided to crank the thermostat from 102 up to Fahrenheit 451. Toward the end, when Hardie had convinced himself that he was really going to die this time, his bottom lip and nose bust and began to gush blood, splattering all over his face. Hardie would not be looking his best upon his return to his home planet, that was for sure.

And then came splashdown.

It was the exact opposite of gentle.

In theory they were supposed to have parachutes to break the fall, but Hardie didn’t think they slowed down at all. Their descent was as fast and fierce and relentless as the worst car wreck you could ever experience. As if Godzilla had loaded the vessel into a Godzilla-sized shotgun, aimed it point-blank at the planet, and pulled the trigger. Everything hurt all at once—the burning, the straps cutting into his body, the insane pressure on every square inch of his body, inside and out—as the craft slammed into the surface of the Pacific Ocean.

Hardie couldn’t see if his clone was experiencing the same set of miseries. He could only hope and pray that he was.

You?

Well…

You pass out fairly early in the descent—just as things start to heat up nicely.

And you
stay out
.

In your defense, you’ve been through quite a lot in the past twelve hours—being whipped into orbit and back, with a wrestling match and a fistfight and a stressful (and unfruitful) search, for good measure. Even the toughest of pilots go grayout at four Gs, and few can withstand five Gs. That was it. The craft must not have been designed to cancel out enough of the shock. You’re not to blame.

Unfortunately, you’re not conscious, either. Right at the moment you very much need to be conscious.

Somehow Hardie stayed awake the entire time. At the high point of the hurt he thought for sure that he was going be slammed into that not so gentle good night. Alas, he did not. That would be a break from the pain, at least.