The Clone Apocalypse (15 page)

TWENTY

Is that part of the flu?
I wondered. MacAvoy had all but identified himself as a clone. He’d said, “This isn’t going to kill you like the rest of us.” He’d included himself in the equation.

I wasn’t about to push it. I asked, “What about you?”

MacAvoy took a long drink of flu fighter, frowned, and said, “I’m riding the storm right here.”

Tasman said, “General Harris, you’re wasting time you don’t have. You need to get out of here.”

I thought about the day the Unifieds reprogrammed the clones in the Pentagon. Watson had taken Tasman with him. He’d thrown the old cadaver over his shoulder and carried him into the garage. Was that what Tasman wanted now? Did he want me to take him with me?

MacAvoy asked, “Harris, what are you waiting for?”

I said, “I’m going to stay here with you and fight.”

MacAvoy laughed at me. He said, “You’re such an ass. I’m not going down in a blaze, Harris; I’m staying to spike the cannons.”

In ancient warfare, back when cannons fired metal balls instead of lasers and particle beams, soldiers used to drive metal spikes through their cannons before abandoning forts and castles to prevent their enemies from using them.

That was what Hauser had planned for his fleet as well. He would park his ships in every corner of the solar system, maybe even destroy their engines and computers. He and his men would park their ships in the shadows of Mercury and Pluto, and retire to their racks as they died.

“You going to blow up your bases?” I asked.

MacAvoy shook his head. He said, “I’m going to leave the bases and the corpses for Andropov, let him decide what to do with them.” He coughed and wiped his nose across his arm, then held up his pitcher of flu fighter, and added, “I got enough of this shit to last me a lifetime, at least my lifetime. I think I’ll wait here for Tobias to arrive.”

“You going to kill him?” I asked.

With some effort, MacAvoy lifted a general-issue M27. He said, “That’s the plan.”

Tasman said, “That’s stupid.”

Howard Tasman was an irritant, a dried-up old husk of a man who was unpleasant to his desiccated core, but his decision to help the clones had landed him in the same boat as the rest of us. Like me, he’d survive the flu, but when the Unifieds found him, they’d execute him.

I said, “I think my Marines are doing better than your soldiers. We had more than enough healthy Marines for the action tonight.”

I reached for a nearby communications console and contacted my offices. When my chief aide picked up, I told him to check our bases for casualties. Unlike MacAvoy who’d been keeping a running tally of his casualties, I hadn’t been paying attention to sick rates. My aide spent another fifteen minutes tracking down the information. When he called back, he told me that we’d lost over a thousand men. He said that most of our losses were in our West Coast bases. The bases to the east reported equally high rates of influenza but only a few men had died so far.

Apparently, the virus struck first in the West and was working its way east.

MacAvoy sat lifeless in his chair, his back so relaxed it looked like his spine had melted. He dropped the stub of his chewed, gummed, and smoked cigar into a trash can. It clunked on the bottom, and a couple of sparks floated up. Lighting a new cigar he said, “They can have my bases for all I specking care. Maybe Andropov will bury my men with honors. Lord knows they pulled his ass out of the fryer enough times.”

He brought up his cigar, clenched it in his jaws, and smiled around it. He coughed. He said, “I might forgive him if he buries my men.” He laughed and added, “I might even let him have this building.”

“And if he doesn’t? Are you going to blow it up?” I asked.

“Blow it up? Are you crazy?” MacAvoy placed both of his arms on the table for support, but his neck still sagged. “I want to debrief the bastard. He won’t come if I leave the place in a specking pile.”

I looked over at Tasman, and asked, “What about you?”

He said, “Don’t you worry about me, Harris; I have it all worked out.” Then he smiled, and added, “You know where you need to go. You need to get yourself to Freeman.”

Freeman wouldn’t help me, not now. He had his own survival to work out. I said, “Maybe I’ll stay here. I can help MacAvoy kill our pal Andropov.”

I didn’t expect Tasman to respond the way he did. He said, “You’re as sick as MacAvoy. You’re every bit as infected as he is. Did you know that?”

“He doesn’t look like he’s dying,” said MacAvoy.

Tasman rolled his wheelchair right up to my seat, leaned so that our faces nearly touched, and stared me right in the eye. He said, “Harris, your pupils are almost as wide as your irises. They looked that way yesterday. You’re breathing hard.” He wrapped one of his withered old claws around my right wrist, and said, “You’re pulse is up. I’ll wager it has been for days.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked, trying to hide my irritation. We had just won the war, and this tired old goat wanted to talk about my pulse and my eye dilation.

He said, “Those are all signs of an adrenal rush. You have a heavy flow of adrenaline running through your blood.”

“I just came back from a war zone,” I said. “I had a bit of a combat reflex.”

“Yes, you did,” said Tasman. “I helped program that reflex; I know a little about it. You’re still having a combat reflex. You’ve never stopped having a reflex. The only reason you’ve got enough energy to stand is because you have so much combat hormone in your blood.”

“There are a lot of clones still on their feet,” I said, thinking about the soldiers and Marines who had invaded the eastern suburbs.

“The virus is going to run its course,” said Tasman. “It’s going to get stronger and stronger. In another hour, maybe another day, the hormone isn’t going to matter anymore. You need to be someplace safe when that happens. The reflex isn’t protecting you from the flu, it’s hiding it from you.”

Tasman looked me in the eye, and said, “If you don’t find Freeman, you’re as good as dead. That flu might not kill you, but the Unifieds will. Once you are sick, and your army is dead, killing you will be Andropov’s first order of business.”

TWENTY-ONE

I hated the idea of running to Ray Freeman. I’d gone to him twice; he’d turned me down both times. Maybe he was smarter than me; maybe he’d recognized the writing on the wall before I even knew it was there. I tried to call him on my way down to the motor pool. Nobody answered.

I entered the main depot of the motor-pool office and found the place empty, utterly abandoned. An entire fleet of cars sat unguarded. Town cars, jeeps, Jackals, personnel carriers, forklifts, motorcycles, all sitting in neatly lined rows waiting for drivers.

When I entered the office to pull the keys to a town car, I discovered that the motor pool had not been left unattended. The officer in charge lay on the ground just inside the door, alive and somewhat conscious. He stared up at me and mouthed words I didn’t understand. I dropped to my knees beside him, and said, “Are you okay, Soldier?”

He said, “I’m sick. It feels like every part of me is breaking.” He stared at me. First confusion showed in his eyes, then recognition. He asked, “General Harris? Are you General Harris?”

I touched his head. He had a burning fever; his temperature might have been 110. His skin had turned white, and his sweat-soaked blouse clung to his chest and arms.

I said, “I can help you up.”

He shook his head slowly, and said, “General, I think I might be a clone.”

I started to lie to him. I started to tell him that he had blond hair and blue eyes, but the death reflex had already begun. He convulsed, a weak tremble ran through him like a jolt of low-wattage electricity. A moment passed and the first drops of blood appeared in his ear.

Feeling cold for not burying the man, I left him where he lay and selected the key to a town car. Weak and alone, I went out to the car and drove away.

I tried to call Freeman again, but he didn’t pick up. As I left the motor pool, I considered my options and formed a plan. I would drive to the nearest spaceport. I would commandeer a civilian commuter craft. I knew how to fly the simpler ones. From there, I would fly to safety . . . if there was such a thing as safety.

It was 04:27. The sun wouldn’t rise for at least an hour, and the streets were empty. I spotted police cars and EME jeeps as I drove across town. I was in the heart of the capital in the still hours of the morning. No lights shone in the skyscraper windows, but the streetlights shone bright.

A roll of thunder sounded in the distance, and rain sprinkled the street. When I first heard the thunder, I mistook it for artillery and nearly turned to drive east to the battle, the last battle the Enlisted Man’s Empire would ever win. What would I have found if I crossed the bridge into Maryland? Would I have found my clones in control, or would I have found a listless, ailing force?

Maybe MacAvoy and Hauser had chosen better than me. Maybe the best we could hope for would be to go down with our ships. I thought about returning to the Linear Committee Building.

MacAvoy had sounded like a lunatic when he talked about
debriefing
Andropov, but I hoped he succeeded. Tobias Andropov wouldn’t stop until he knew I was dead. He’d send every man he had to hunt me.

Tasman had been right about the flu’s catching up to me. I felt tired and found myself fighting for breath. My vision had blurred enough to stretch bright light into streaks. The warm morning air felt cold to me, so I turned the heat up in my car. A moment later, I felt hot and opened the window.

We once had an enormous joint Army/Navy base just south of the capital, but the Unifieds destroyed it. The closest airfield was a civilian facility just across the Potomac, south and west, across a long bridge.

If I really was as sick as Perry MacAvoy, I needed to get away fast. Just an hour earlier, I would have said I was fine, now my body seemed to melt around me. I wondered about flying. How far could I get? I felt nauseated and wondered if this was a mistake. Mostly, I just felt weak.

I drove across the river on the Curtis Memorial Bridge, then followed George Washington Memorial past the remains of the Pentagon—another casualty of the war with the Unifieds.

The first time I drove through Carmack Gateway Spaceport, it was a thriving, bustling hub with spaceline terminals serving passengers headed to every corner of the galaxy. Now it had airline terminals for travelers who stayed in the atmosphere.

As I rounded the spaceport beltway for a second pass, I spotted a small, poorly lit access road with a sign that said
SPACEPORT PERSONNEL
.

The clock in my car showed 05:16; my time was running out. The first signs of light showed on the eastern horizon.

I followed that little road to a gate with a small guardhouse. The man who came to check my clearance was a natural-born. I handed him my ID, which identified me as General Wayson Harris, EME Marines. I was a full general, not a brigadier or a major general, and I had all four stars on my collar.

The man looked at my picture, then looked at me. He shined a flashlight in my face. Something was wrong. At first, I thought maybe he worked for the Unifieds. Maybe he’d been told to detain me. He finally said, “You don’t look much like your picture, General.”

He said this as if he thought it was some sort of practical joke.

I had forgotten about the beard, the lightened skin, and eye color. The beard was anything but regulation. I said, “Excuse me one moment,” and ripped it from my face—a painful operation.

The guard shined his light on the picture, then on me. This time he said, “Holy speck.”

I said, “I can’t do anything about the eye color. I’m afraid I’m stuck with green for the next few days.”

“You feeling okay, sir? You look sick.”

“I’ll survive,” I said. He didn’t know it, but I had just told him a joke.

This guy wasn’t an MP; he was just a security guard protecting a facility with no military significance—an employee parking area of a civilian spaceport. He didn’t carry a gun. He was just an old man who’d probably been working all night and had never seen anything significant occur during his shift. He didn’t know that the world was under new management.

The man ran back to his booth, pressed the button that opened the gate, and let me in.

I parked my town car, pocketed the keys, and tried to climb out of the car. I got as far as lowering my feet to the ground; and then I just sat there. I stared across the branching walkways, long, empty sidewalks lined by bright lights. One walkway led toward the terminals. One led toward the airfield. They both looked so long.

I should have been able to walk. It wasn’t as if I had injured the muscles in my thighs and calves. Just a few hours earlier, I had chased a man down. I had jumped from one building to the next. Now I wondered if I had the strength to climb out of my car.

I took a deep breath and did what I had to do. The world seemed to spin around me. When I started walking, the ground started rolling beneath me like the deck of a boat.

I made my way to the walkway and stared at the first lamp ahead of me, changing my focus to the next lamp as I reached the first. Everything was about taking the next step; anything beyond that seemed too far to advance. These legs. How had the muscles in my legs turned so soft?

I’d felt dizzy and weak before this, but I’d always been able to make myself walk another ten miles. That had never been a problem. My arms had never run out of push-ups; I’d always had one more sit-up in my gut. Now I found myself leaning on a lamp to catch my breath as I psyched myself into walking to the next one.

How the speck are you going to fly?
I asked myself. I knew the answer.
Sitting down.

In the sky, layers of peach and violet formed a collage. Clouds so orange they might have caught fire drifted on the horizon.

Day,
I thought. I didn’t greet that day, not that day, not judgment day. By now the infirmaries on our bases would have too many to take care of. Clones who had trained to be field medics would find themselves overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of the sick. They’d be sick themselves. By the end of the day, the doctors would die along with their patients, turning hospitals into crypts.

A few more steps, then a few more. I reached the unguarded field in which the commuter crafts waited. Rows of small planes stretched out before me. I needed to rest, so I leaned on the gate for support, and caught my breath and searched for something I would know how to fly.

I’d once owned a small plane called a Johnston Starliner. That was more of a corporate jet than a commuter, too big and expensive for an open field like this one. I saw other Johnstons, though, and when I regained enough strength, I stumbled out to have a look at them.

Some of the planes were locked. None of them had keys in them, but that didn’t matter. I knew how to make them fly. I’d picked up a trick or two during my mercenary days, when I took time off from the Marines and worked with Ray Freeman.

I found an old Johnston with controls that looked familiar enough, then I switched a few circuits around. Before starting the engine, I checked the fuel. We had a long ride ahead of us, thousands of miles. It didn’t have enough gas.

By this time, the lower horizon had turned white, chasing the colors up into the sky. It must have been the middle of the morning, maybe 06:00, maybe 06:30.

The next Johnston I found didn’t look like it would fly. Sick as I was, I didn’t want to risk my life in a death trap. In the end, I settled on a Johnston Meadowlark, a tiny four-seater with barely recognizable instrumentation, battered seats, and a notice from a mechanic informing me that I owed him $1,750 for replacing my fuel rods.

Early sunlight illuminated the runway. A few stretches of purple and orange still stained the sky, and I had no doubt that I would have spotted the moon if I climbed out of the Meadowlark and looked west.

A few workers walked the runway, checking strobe lights and power stations. No one had noticed me yet.

The Meadowlark’s ignition sat in a tray beneath the yoke. I lowered the tray and examined the circuits. She wasn’t new, but the Meadowlark had nothing so prehistoric as wires running through her controls. Sparking the engines involved twisting a couple of circuits until they allowed electricity to run through them. All I needed was a spark, just enough to ignite the engines, which would generate the electricity for the computers, lights, and controls.

A blue-white flash, and the screens on the dash glowed their displays. Bright running lights flashed into view along the nose, attracting the attention of every worker on the scene. The men on the runways stopped, stood, and stared in my direction. A short, chubby man walked out of the control shack, realized that I had taxied out of my parking slip, and started running.

The radio flared to life as well.

“Meadowlark C29-631, this is tower control, you are not cleared for taxi.”

I ignored it.

“Meadowlark C29-631, this is tower control, you are not cleared for taxi. Respond Meadowlark C29-631.”

The airfield had a tiny runway, just about a quarter of a mile. That would have meant something to me had I had more experience with the Meadowlark, but I’d never even laid eyes on one of these before. I didn’t know how quickly it would be able to take off.

“Meadowlark C29-631, stop your plane and shut off your engines.”

I heard that last order and thought,
Fat specking chance.

The commuter runway ran parallel with its much larger commercial cousin.

“Meadowlark C29-631, you are not cleared to enter the commuter runway. You are not cleared for takeoff. We have heavy commercial traffic in the air, C29-631.”

Now that he’d mentioned it, I saw the traffic up ahead. Off in the distance, airliners as large as grocery stores sat waiting for clearance. Jets swooped in like gigantic birds of prey, like an owl diving to grab a mouse. Their wheels looked like giant talons.

A wind-breaking wall separated the commuter field from the big birds. I noticed an access road running through a gap in the wall and steered my bird toward that gap. Unless the flu had done something to my depth perception, the Meadowlark would have more than enough room to fit through it.

“Meadowlark C29-631, you are not cleared for takeoff.” The flight controller must have paused to watch me. Instead of turning right, toward the northern end of the airfield, I turned left and taxied onto the access road.

“Shit! Shit! The dumb speck is entering the commercial lanes!” he screamed at the other controllers in the tower. Then, to me, he said, “Meadowlark C29-631, you are in violation of commercial space. Stop your engines. Stop your plane now!”

I breezed through the gap between the two runways at a clumsy fifteen miles per hour as I entered lanes reserved for jets. One came streaming by me, looming like a dinosaur, its wings so long and wide I might have been able to hide my plane beneath them. It rumbled past at thirty miles per hour, maybe faster.

As the big jet pulled ahead, dragging its engine noise behind it, I heard distant sirens. I saw police cars and fire trucks headed my way and went full throttle. The bird that had just passed me was going wheels up. Once it did, air control would shut down the runway, and those cars and trucks would surround me. That bird, though, she had gone beyond the point of no return. Racing down the runway at thirty, then forty, and ultimately sixty miles per hour before she lifted from the ground, the commercial jet left winds behind her that would flip cars and trucks on their roofs.

I stayed a hundred yards behind that bird, but it wasn’t enough. Winds brushed me left and right; my controls felt tangled. The little Meadowlark bounced in the wake, its wheels never quite leaving the ground. I wasn’t generating the speed I needed. If I took off in this whirlwind, I’d only get a few feet off the ground before my plane spun over and toppled.

Behind me and to my right, police cars shadowed me from fifty yards back. They could move faster on the ground than me, and they didn’t need to deal with the wake from the jet. They didn’t have wings that picked up air currents to make them unstable.