The Clone Apocalypse (14 page)

I climbed up to the roof, took a few steps from the ledge, and jumped. In my adrenaline-fired haste, I sprinted and leaped. I jumped far enough, but not high enough. My feet hit the wall and I landed on my gut.

I threw my legs over the edge and pulled myself to my feet, then climbed down the fire escape to a window near the second-story landing. Somebody spotted me from inside the building as I opened the window. She fired a single shot at me, her bullet punching a neat hole through the glass. I returned fire.

Sunny, dressed casually in slacks and a pullover, disappeared as my bullet shattered the window. I jumped through the empty casing, slid on the shard-covered floor, and ran after her.

I entered the hall no more than two seconds behind her, well in time to see her sprinting down the stairs. I raised my gun. I needed her alive, but saw nothing wrong with shooting her shoulders or arms, then somebody grabbed me from behind and I flipped the bastard over my shoulder and shot him in the head. The blast was exquisite. I had taken this gun from a Unified Authority sentry who’d loaded it with dumdums or possibly hollow-point rounds. The bullet obliterated the man’s skull, splashing blood on the floor, walls, and even a portion of the ceiling.

Two more guys came running up the stairs. I shot one before he could aim and hit the other after he’d wasted a shot, then I vaulted over their bodies and dropped onto the last step, skidding forward and hitting my face against the wall. For the first time that evening, I bled. If I’d been thinking about it, I would have wondered why it had taken so long.

My thoughts narrowed, winnowing out everything but my objective, which had now split in two. I wanted to kill Sunny. I wanted to shoot her, to strangle her, to watch her die in my hands. I needed to find the lab, the computers, the files, anything, anything, anything that stored information about . . . I couldn’t force any more details. Killing Sunny seemed more important. She’d shot at me. She’d tortured me. She’d humiliated me. And somewhere, a quiet voice in my head whispered,
She murdered you.

Murdered me? Flu. The flu. Need the lab! Need the files! Save the Enlisted Man’s Empire! Clones are going to die tomorrow!
My thought fell into line like tumblers in a lock. I heard gunfire, saw EME soldiers entering the front of the buildings, and I stopped. I signaled them to make sure they saw me and recognized me. They would have been briefed. No one fired at me.

Sunny had been in that room when I arrived,
I reminded myself. I ran back up the stairs and entered the room.
She was right here, right outside this door,
I reminded myself. I saw nothing significant.

I kicked in the door to the next room and spotted cots and clothing. There were three racks, cases for combat armor, uranium wafers for fléchette cannons.

Same in the next room. The room after that had maps on the walls and computers on the desk. I found a photo—me on a gurney with a tube in my nose. In the picture, my face showed pain.

I saw the desk and the computers and the communications consoles and knew I had found Sunny Ferris’s “nest,” and my pulse quickened. I darted into the room, frantic, spun, looked for wires, receivers, mines, or bombs. Sunny wouldn’t turn her nest over willingly. I checked the lights, the back of the equipment, the desk, both top and bottom, and chair. In my imagination, I saw her laughing and pressing a button, a diode would switch from white to red, and the apartment would explode, maybe the entire building.

I threw the mattresses off the bed. I pulled the pillows apart. Seconds passed, they felt like hours, then I realized, if Sunny were able to destroy the computers, she would have done it by now. I turned and looked at them, and inspected them for damage, but they were fine, unscratched, undented, two of the monitors glowed, words and charts displayed, and I laughed.

Somehow, we had finally caught a break. She’d thought I’d be dead, just like that guy had said. I’d caught her off guard.

An Army major stepped into the room, and said, “General Harris, sir, I have General MacAvoy on the phone.”

I said, “Tell him to meet me at the LCB. Tell him, we have our prize.”

NINETEEN

Date: August 22, 2519

From the air, the silhouette of the eastern suburbs against the dark sky looked like an ancient ruin. Most of the buildings still stood, but entire blocks had been crushed into archways and rubble. MacAvoy’s army had begun its assault using M27s with magic bullets before switching to heavy artillery; my Marines had smashed their way in with a bombardment, then chased down the enemy with jeeps and rockets. Strait had sent in fighters as well.

I hated that we had been forced to rely on a hammerblow, but the Unified Authority had indeed forced our hand. Looking at the ruins beneath my helicopter gunship, I tried to estimate how many civilians might have been caught in the fighting. The answer could have been in the millions.

I heard something that should have sounded a mental alarm—my pilot coughed into his headset. He coughed long and hard, practically spat a lung out.

Staring down through the door, I slowly withdrew from an hourlong combat reflex. The hormone in my blood thinned to the point that I regretted the civilian casualties, but I still blamed the Unifieds for every death.

The glow of tiny individual fires lit the streets below. I saw fragments of buildings standing like the walls of fire pits, shielding bonfires from the wind. Long shadows of people moved along the streets—armed soldiers, Marines in combat armor, and traumatized civilians.

I felt alienated from the refugees; it was as if they were ants, and we had chased them from their hill.
When did you become so callous?
I asked myself. What had made me like this? Was it a life spent at war or maybe just the last round of fighting? Was it Sunny?

I thought about the man I had captured in the bar. When I opened the trunk of the car I had left him in, I found him lying in a coma. His foot had come off, but I felt no pity for him. Sure, I handed him and his foot to an Army medic, but I didn’t care if the son of a bitch lived or died.

Marines in Jackals patrolled the streets below me. Jackals had heat scanning, making them effective for locating and killing U.A. stragglers.

The gunship on which I rode was part of a trio. Fighters streaked back and forth on either side of us, protecting us from nonexistent enemy jets. Just outside the atmosphere, Hauser’s fleet had set up a blockade so tight that the Unified Authority Navy wouldn’t have been able to fire a cloaked missile through it.

We flew over the Memorial Bridge, the uncrossable bridge that separated the eastern suburbs from the rest of the capital. Below me, Army engineers searched for bombs and booby traps.

August 22, 2519, the day the war came to an end,
I thought. Then I changed the statement into a question.
Could August 22, 2519, be the day the war finally ended?

I hadn’t entered the gunship empty-handed; Sunny’s computer sat beside me. We had their computer . . . her computer. If she had the right information, we would no longer need to develop an antidote; we could skip development phase and start manufacturing. We’d simply read their research and bake it right up in our labs.

Peering into the cockpit, I saw a red LED display that showed the time—02:36—a new day had begun. No sunlight showed in the eastern horizon as our convoy reached the Linear Committee Building, but the parking lot and the building shone like a beacon.

The other gunships in the convoy hovered protectively above us as we lowered to the roof of the LCB. At first glance, the landing pad looked clean, but the chop from our blades kicked up a billowing cloud of dust below us. The
WHOOP, WHOOP, WHOOP
of the blades slowed and grew louder as we descended, while men in Army uniforms rushed out to meet us. The moment we touched down, three soldiers ran to our door. They were clones, all the same height and coloring. I inspected the first man closely as he entered the gunship, took hold of Sunny’s computer, then handed it to another clone to carry into the building.

I felt this excitement, nothing violent, but a constant current of electricity igniting every ganglion and nerve ending. We had beaten the odds. We were going to win this thing.

The medicine that the briefing officer gave me had run its course. At some point, I had started coughing. It began so subtly that I never noticed; the coughing might even have begun during the firefight. As I climbed down from the gunship, my cough turned
productive
, supposedly a good sign, and I spat a filmy wad of yellow phlegm.

Not very presidential,
I said to myself. I was a Marine long before I became a politician. Once we ducked this crisis, I would step down once and for all. I might even hand over my commission. I’d been a lot happier as an enlisted man.

The glare from the lights shining around the outside of the LCB left me squinting. I smelled the sharp scent of gunship fuel in the warm August air, heard the chop of the rotors as her engines powered up, then the wind battered my back as the blades rotated faster. The air flushed around her as the gunship pushed off from the pad.

Entering the building, I found myself in a different world. Bright lights shone down from the ceiling of the LCB, illuminating an empty building. The roof entrance led into a hall that led to a foyer. This was a subfloor of the building, a nearly vacant area reserved for people who came in on helicopters.

The men carrying the computers walked about thirty feet ahead of me.

More people appeared as we reached the foyer. The elevator opened; two Marines and a soldier stepped out. The Marines were my aides; I recognized them though I didn’t know their names.

All ants look alike,
I mused. I wondered if ants learned to distinguish one colony mate from the next. I wasn’t an entomologist, but it seemed like ants probably could tell each other apart. I could tell supposedly identical clones apart.

I was in that kind of a mood, happy, letting my mind wander.

“Welcome back, sir,” said Colonel
Whose-it
, my highest-ranking attaché. He saluted. So did the master sergeant beside him. I returned their salutes.

“What was it like out there, sir?” asked the sergeant major.

“This was the big one, the route you wait your entire career to see,” I said. We hadn’t lost a tank. We killed or captured over ten thousand Unified Authority combatants and lost less than five hundred men.

The soldier waited his turn at attention. He said, “General Harris, sir, Mr. Tasman and General MacAvoy are waiting for you on the third floor.”

We entered the elevator. The elevator doors closed on the bright and empty subfloor and opened to the bright and empty third floor. I had expected swarms of soldiers, maybe even an entire division of intelligence officers and computer technicians.

Maybe we don’t need them,
I thought.

The men I saw were the walking wounded, pale and bloodless, their backs curved, their shoulders hunched. I heard coughing, saw men with red, swollen eyes.
Is this an office or a hospital,
I thought, but I didn’t say it.

We’ll get these men fixed up,
I told myself.
We’ll fix them up rapid, quick, and pronto.
I stepped into the conference room, and the door closed behind me.

Wheelchair-bound Howard Tasman was a ninety-year-old waif of a man; he’d have turned ninety-one in another three months had things worked out differently. The man had lost his entire family, children, grandchildren, and all. He’d lived to see the entire population of his home planet massacred. Veins and arteries showed through the thin, colorless skin of his face, but he looked like he could kick Perry MacAvoy’s ass if it came to a fistfight.

MacAvoy sat slumped in a chair, sweating, pale, on the verge of dying. His short hair was wet and clumped as if he’d just climbed out of a shower. On the table beside him sat an enormous pitcher of flu fighter. He looked up at me, his eyes dark and watery, and said, “We’ve lost over nine hundred men so far.”

Nine hundred?
His numbers were wrong. I’d heard it was less than five hundred. “Are you sure about that?” I asked.

He said, “Five hundred in the last hour.”

The last hour?
The fighting ended over an hour ago. “Not possible,” I said. “It’s just cleanup now. We routed them.”

“Harris, 70 percent of my men are incapacitated,” said MacAvoy. “The majority of my men are too sick to stand, and they’re starting to die. The first confirmed casualty turned up this afternoon at 16:00.”

I digested the news, and my head went numb.

“They died just like those clones Hauser found in space,” MacAvoy said. He coughed, licked his lips, and prepared to drink more of his concoction. He clearly hated the damn stuff. He stared at the sludge in his cup, paused to work up his courage, and took a sip. He frowned as he lowered the cup.

“We have Sunny’s computer,” I said. “We’ll make an antidote.” I coughed, too. My strength started to fail. My legs turned weak as I walked to a chair.

Tasman finally spoke. He said, “Harris, this isn’t a poison, it’s a flu. It’s an engineered virus. There is no antidote.

“I could have told you that from the start. It’s basic biology. You can prevent contamination by inoculating patients with a weak strain to build their immunity, but once they have the virus, there is no way to cure it.

“You might as well send out medical kits with gallons of MacAvoy’s drink.”

MacAvoy coughed, then took a deep breath to fill his lungs. “I received a message from Tom. He says he’s scattering the fleet.”

Tom—Hauser—was scattering the fleet. That was bad news. That meant his sailors were dying and that there’d be no one to protect Earth from an invasion. He was scattering his fleet to stop the Unifieds from taking them over. Spread across the solar system, our ships would be harder to locate than inert and in a group.

“What about the computer?” I asked.

“Sunny probably wanted you to have it,” said Tasman. “She probably wanted to show you once and for all that your goose was cooked.”

“Specking bitch,” said MacAvoy. His voice was hoarse, downright raw. He might have had the same DNA as every other clone, but he’d always been an intense physical specimen. Even now, his five-foot-ten frame looked massive, like a warship listing and about to sink. He had his cigar, the totem he generally carried into battle.

He generally didn’t light his cigars during summits and meetings, but he’d fire them up one right after the other during battle. He had his cigar lit now.

“You didn’t happen to shoot that bitch, did you?” he asked.

“I saw her.”

“Did you kill her?” He brightened as he asked that question.

I shook my head. “She got away.”

“Damn, she’s going to outlive us,” he said.

“What are you going to do?” Tasman asked me.

“I know what they’d do if we had them by the shorts,” said MacAvoy. “They’d blow us up, the specks. To hell with the planet; to hell with the people; if they can’t get it, to speck with all of it. Blow it all to hell, people and all, that’s what they’d specking do.”

“We’re not going to do that,” I said.

MacAvoy removed his cigar and looked at the ember. He said, “You’ll be the last man standing, Harris. You get to choose.”

Even as I spoke, I could feel the chill spreading through my body like a fog, and along with that fog came aches and stiffness. I felt like my body had aged thirty years since I entered the conference room.

I said, “I’m not scorching the earth.”

“That’s your call,” MacAvoy muttered.

An aide entered the room, a soldier, an Army lieutenant. He looked no more healthy than MacAvoy. He stood at attention, an anemic attention. He only managed to keep his back ramrod straight for a second, then his spine curled, and his shoulders slumped.

“What do you have, Soldier?” MacAvoy growled.

“The latest casualty report, sir.”

“Let’s hear it?”

“Lewis, Irwin, and Carson are closed, per your orders.”

I recognized the names—they were our largest Army installations in the West.

“What is our readiness level?” asked MacAvoy.

“Fifteen percent, sir,” said the soldier.

“How many dead at last count?”

The soldier paused, using the moment of silence to brace himself. He said, “We’ve lost ten thousand, sir. We’ve lost sixty in this building alone.”

What about my Marines?
I asked myself. It was an urgent question, but I didn’t want to hear the answer.

Tasman repeated his question to me, then he answered it as well. “What are you going to do, Harris? You better find a good place to hide.”

MacAvoy looked at me with his red-rimmed, bag-lined, bloodshot eyes, and said something that should not have been able to pass through his lips. He said, “You better run, Harris. This thing isn’t going to kill you like the rest of us.”