The Clone Apocalypse (29 page)

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Freeman emerged from the radar shack. His limp more pronounced than usual, he walked past us, glaring at Harmer and ignoring me. He entered each of the Explorers, spent about thirty seconds in each, then moved on to the next.

Watching him, I came to understand that feeling of respect I had felt as I placed charges in that hangar. Yes, the Explorers were scientific ships, but the SEALs had other plans for them. In their hands, these ships would become manned torpedoes. They would be weapons of sacrifice and destruction, the men piloting them becoming both the executed and executioner. They were the firing squad, but they had volunteered to fire themselves off like bullets.

“There has got to be a better way to do this,” I told Harmer.

Staring straight ahead at the Explorers, he said, “I’m open to suggestions.”

Unable to come up with any, I stood mute.

Freeman finished his rounds and came to join us. He stood beside Harmer, towering over him, a mute giant. After several seconds, he asked, “Are you sure your men know how to fly these?”

“I watched you,” said Harmer.

He had watched Freeman when they left New Copenhagen. The SEALs were synthetic marvels—able to pick up piloting skills with a glance. They spoke Japanese better than the Japanese. They had eidetic memories; they glance at a map and reproduce it down to the last detail. Harmer had seen Freeman fly an Explorer, then he described the operation to men who hadn’t even entered the cockpit, let alone handled the controls. I had no doubt they would execute their final operation with flawless precision.

The funeral ended.
Was that for the five who had fallen or the six who shortly would fly to their deaths?
I asked myself.

The Unified Authority never built autopiloting controls into its broadcast computers. In order for self-broadcasting ships to initiate their broadcasts, there had to be somebody aboard to press the button.

Six SEALs strolled up the runway, calm, at ease, cheerful about what lay ahead. They didn’t joke; they would have seen that as disrespectful of their fallen comrades. They formed into a line, and Harmer saluted each of them. He asked, “Are there any questions?” When no one spoke up, he said, “You know what to do.”

Master Chief Harmer held up his earpiece for them to see, then clipped it to his ear. His six pilots did the same. Harmer traded one final salute with each of his men, then the six SEALs strode off to their individual Explorers.

If they have earpieces . . . if they can hear him, why can’t we set up some sort of remote?
I wondered, but I knew the answer. We didn’t have time. Even if the SEALs had asked for robot pilots, we wouldn’t have had time to make them.

Using the earpiece, Harmer could speak to each of them, and they could speak to each other.

I watched those tiny, ugly bastards trot into their Explorers without so much as a moment of hesitation. They didn’t look back or pause before sealing the hatches behind them.

The wind picked up, a long and powerful gust that tore leaves from trees. The chain-link fence that surrounded Smithsonian Field rattled its protest. A few dark clouds rolled over the area, blocking the afternoon sun.

The SEALs didn’t have extrasensory perception, but they spoke so softly when they used their earpieces that they appeared to think to each other. All of the Explorers booted up at once. Flames appeared beneath their boosters.

I didn’t hear the report of the rifle, but I saw Harmer stumble forward as if shoved from behind. He stood, spoke softly, far too softly for me to hear him, and the six Explorers lifted off the ground at the exact same time and to the exact same height. Their boosters holding them in place, they hovered about eighty feet off the ground, far enough above us that their anomalies were unlikely to reach us.

We stood near the main gate, just a foot or two inside. Harmer’s lips moved, giving his pilots the order to broadcast. I covered my face and stared at the ground to protect my eyes. It may have been my imagination, but I thought I felt heat on my head. I thought my hair might have stood on end as well.

The broadcasts themselves were silent, but the anomalies created large pockets of nothingness, and air rushed into those pockets, creating thunder that boomed like a nuclear detonation, and when I opened my eyes, the world was normal, and there was no sign of the anomalies, but Master Chief Harmer lay on the ground. The hole in his back was less than an inch in diameter. The one through his chest was six inches wide with bridges of ribs running across it.

The Unified Authority sharpshooter had hidden himself on the second floor of the two-story control tower. Having seen most of the SEALs boarding the Explorers, he must have decided that the odds had changed in his favor. Not knowing what would happen next, he’d aimed his rifle at the same moment that the Explorers went wheels up. He shot the master chief and just as he turned his sights toward me, the Explorers broadcasted out.

The whiny son of a bitch screamed, “My eyes! My eyes! Oh, shit, I’m blind! I’m blind!”

I would have killed the bastard, but Petty Officer Naens, the last of the SEALs, reached him first. He dashed into the building, and the screaming stopped a few seconds later.

FIFTY-THREE

Using a hack they learned from the late Master Chief Harmer, Travis Watson and Emily Hughes watched our raid and its aftermath through the Unifieds’ satellite network. They didn’t offer to play a part in the operation, and no one invited them to join us.

Watson led us into the computer room, and said, “You hit five of their ships. I’m not sure about the sixth; there’s no sign of it on the screen.”

He pointed to one of Freeman’s monitors, a large screen showing radar readings instead of video images. Freeman and Naens went to look. I didn’t. I’d been battling annoying aches in my back and shoulders and needed to rest.

Freeman, standing a few feet from the screen, bent at the waist so that he could stare into it. He said, “They might have broadcasted out.”

Naens stepped closer and studied what he saw. He didn’t have eyebrows. There was no hair on his gray-tinted head. He tapped controls on the screen, bringing up new data, and said, “They didn’t broadcast out. Change that. They might have broadcasted out, but they didn’t do it in time.”

“How do you know that?” asked Freeman.

“Look at the screen,” said Naens. “Do you see any Explorers on it? If that ship had broadcasted out, there’d be an Explorer sitting in its place.”

“Maybe it flew back to Smithsonian Field,” said Emily.

“There’s no record of an Explorer,” said Naens.

Along with my pains, I felt angry. It wasn’t a specific anger, nothing directed at anyone in particular. It was more of a hate-the-world malaise. I needed a nap . . . something to recharge my batteries.

I said, “You should be happy, Emily; a lot of Unifieds died today.”

That set her off. Her face flushed so red that her lips almost disappeared, and she said, “I’m not like you; I don’t kill people for laughs.”

I looked at her and smiled, then I coughed, which ruined the image I had hoped to affect. I started to say, “I don’t kill people for laughs,” but I realized that I did. Killing the soldiers guarding Smithsonian Field had been entertaining.

I said, “You and Travis better decide what you want. You don’t want to be killers, but you don’t want to be martyrs. I have news for you, you don’t get it both ways. Either get used to killing people or get ready for them to kill you. That’s how it works from now on.”

I noticed that everyone was staring at me, not just Travis and Emily, but Freeman and Naens. I tried to justify myself. I said, “Honey, a lot of people died, and you just became a whole lot safer. You’re not safe, but you’re safer. Want to guess what we need to do to make you safe?”

She didn’t answer.

No one said anything as I left the room.

FIFTY-FOUR

I slept for a couple of hours. When I woke, I lay still on my rack, taking an inventory of my situation.

Ray Freeman had rescued me; he didn’t have to rescue me, but he had. I trusted him.

Naens . . . I didn’t even know if “Naens” was his first name or his last, or possibly both. I decided that I trusted Naens, but only because he was a SEAL.

I now trusted Emily Hughes, too. I didn’t like her, but I trusted her because she kept her cards on the table, right out where everyone could see them. She didn’t approve of me, and that was fine. In a world filled with poisonous snakes, I preferred the ones with rattles on the ends of their tails.

I trusted Watson as well, but it didn’t really matter whether or not I trusted him; he posed no danger. He was weak.

My nap left me clearheaded, but I still had aches and pains. At that moment, it seemed like those pains might remain with me for life. I had never been knocked down by a flu virus before and had no idea how long the illness should last. My throat itched.

Naens must have heard me cough. He came into the room as I sat up on my rack. He didn’t turn on the lights; the only light in the room was the beam that slanted in through the open door.

I suspect he saw me more clearly than I could see him. The SEALs had genes that gave them catlike sight in the dark.

He asked, “Are you awake?”

“I’m sitting up,” I said.

He said, “Yeah.”

“I’m sorry about Harmer,” I said.

“Mistakes happen when time counts most. We needed to get those ships wheels up; some things were bound to fall between the cracks.”

I heard no anger in his voice.

He said, “You kept your end of the deal, Harris. Harmer said you were good for your word. We wouldn’t have been able to hit their ships if it weren’t for you.”

There wasn’t anything I could say to that. Using the self-broadcasting Explorers as weapons had been my suggestion; the SEALs hadn’t known about using them that way.

“Do you still want to go after their president?” asked Naens.

Hearing the question, I forgot about the ache in my back. The itch in my throat went away.

“It isn’t going to be easy,” I said. “We just swatted their entire navy. What do you want to bet they placed their ground forces on high alert?”

“Yeah. Too bad we’re out of Explorers. Taking down their government would go a whole lot easier if we could broadcast a ship into the Linear Committee Building.”

That thought hadn’t occurred to me. I wished he had mentioned it one day earlier; it would have made everybody’s lives a whole lot easier.

Naens said, “I’m sorry.”

I hadn’t expected him to apologize. “Sorry about what?” I asked.

“There were supposed to be seven of us helping you; that was the deal, right? You were supposed to help us sink their ships, and we were supposed to help you after that. We didn’t live up to our side of the bargain.”

“They died in combat,” I said. “That means they did their part.”

FIFTY-FIVE

Date: August 30, 2519

“Andropov knows you’re coming after him,” Watson said, giving me a searching look as if he’d just unraveled one of the great mysteries of the universe.

We’d all been living in Ray Freeman’s hole in the ground for nearly half a week. Life in a can didn’t bother me; I’d spent years living on spaceships. Naens didn’t seem to care either way. Freeman was indifferent. He’d built this shelter; he would have built it bigger or farther out of town if he couldn’t live with it. Emily, who had spent a year living in the Mars Spaceport, didn’t like living in a warren, but she knew how to deal with it. Every morning must have felt like a flashback to Mars for her.

When I didn’t respond, he just kept on carping. “From what I can tell, he’s living in the LCB along with a few thousand U.A. Marines. Marines, Harris, men in shielded armor. He never leaves the building, and neither do the Marines.”

“That’s good,” I said. “If we destroy the building, we take him with it.” I hadn’t expected Andropov to take up residence in the Linear Committee Building, but it didn’t surprise me.

“Can you do that?” Watson asked.

“You planning on using a missile or a bomb?” asked Freeman.

“There’s a train tunnel under the buildings,” I said. “That opens all kinds of possibilities.”

Freeman said, “Think about it, Harris, the U.A. Security Service would never have allowed anyone to dig a tunnel under the LCB; that would have been sending an invitation to the Mogats.”

Trusting that MacAvoy really knew what he was talking about, I said, “They didn’t dig the tunnel under the LCB; the Unifieds built the LCB over the tunnel. We’re not talking recent construction here, this relic dates back to old U.S. times,” I said.

“The Americans wouldn’t have built a tunnel under their White House,” said Freeman.

Watson, the only person in the room who attended a normal elementary school on Earth, said something that every elementary school student learned. He said, “They didn’t build it under the White House. They built it three blocks north of the old White House lot.”

“How do you know that?” asked Emily.

“Because I’ve been to the White House. So have you. Your father used to have an office there. It’s the Colonial Governors’ Hall.”

The Governors’ Hall was like a pangalactic embassy, the governors of each of the 180 populated planets had offices there. Gordon Hughes, Emily’s father, would indeed have had an office there when he was governor of Olympus Kri.

That wasn’t historical trivia; it was culture. No wonder Freeman, Naens, and I hadn’t known that piece of information; it was out of our realm. We specialized in killing people and breaking things.

“Are you sure those tunnels are still there?” asked Freeman.

I nodded. “MacAvoy found them. He wanted to load them with nukes.”

“He wanted to place a nuclear weapon in a tunnel under Washington, D.C.? That would have destroyed the entire city,” Emily said, sounding astonished.

“Depends on the size of the nuke,” I said.

“You’re serious?” asked Emily, who knew damn well that I was.

“You mean about the nukes? That was MacAvoy’s idea. I doubt he had a chance to do anything about it. He was pretty sick by the time he mentioned it.”

“No, I mean you,” said Emily. “You are talking about demolishing the Linear Committee Building, is that correct?”

Fully aware of what would she would say next, I tried to circumvent the storm. I said, “Listen, Emily, if you and Travis are ever going to be safe, we’re going to need to kill a lot of politicians, especially the ones at the top. Tobias Andropov isn’t the only asshole running things now.”

Speaking softly, coldly, as if trying to communicate with a child, Emily said, “There are civilians in that building. There are secretaries and receptionists. Not all of those people are bad.”

“I know that,” I said.

“They don’t all deserve to die,” she said.

“That’s the problem with war,” I said. “A lot of people die.”
Why doesn’t she see that?
I wondered. It seemed so obvious. “Civilians died when the Unifieds attacked Anacostia-Bolling.” Anacostia-Bolling was a joint Army/Air Force base located just south of Washington, D.C. The Unifieds destroyed it without warning; without provocation. “We weren’t at war when they destroyed that base.”

Emily asked, “What are you saying? Are you planning to go on killing people until the Unified Authority waves a white flag? Is that when you’ll stop?”

Put it in those terms, it sounded stupid, but nearly every military victory had been won by those very means. That was exactly what I had in mind. I said, “Of course not.”

Watson said, “But you are planning on evening the score?”

Watson, the law-school graduate, was trying to trap me. I played it obtuse. I asked, “What do you mean?”

“Are you willing to kill civilians?”

“There’s a term for it,” I said. “They call that ‘collateral damage.’”

Emily shouted, “That’s perverse!”

I said, “Don’t blame me. I didn’t coin the term.”

Watson asked, “Will you stop when you’ve killed as many Unifieds as they killed clones?”

Balancing the scales had occurred to me, but I’d dismissed the idea . . . mostly because I no longer had an army to help with the task. I wasn’t specifically going after civilians, but I no longer worried about working around them.

“Collateral damage,”
I thought. The term had a cold, clinical edge to it. It removed the emotion from equations about ending human lives. I looked around the table and asked myself, Who here is collateral?
Is Naens collateral? Is Freeman? Is Emily? Is Travis?

They all were. I liked them . . . well, maybe not Emily, but I would sacrifice them in a pinch.

“There are hundreds of people working in that building, Wayson,” said Watson.

“Seven thousand people,” I said. That was how many people we had working there when the clones ran the government. “There were 24,000 people working in the Pentagon when the Unifieds pumped their gas through the vents. There were 150 people working in the Archive Building. There were 52,000 people living on base at Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling.

“Don’t tell me numbers,” I growled. “I know all of the specking numbers.”

Watson flinched when I shouted. Emily didn’t. She said, “You say there are seven thousand people there. What do you plan to do about them? Are you going to evacuate the building or are you going to bring the building down on top of them?”

They knew the answer.

Watson stood up, and said, “That’s it; I’m out, too.”

“You don’t want me to kill them?” I asked.

Suddenly sounding tender, Watson said, “There’s got to be a limit; even for you.”

Emily tried to draw on our old friendship. She and Travis and I had been friends. Sounding very sober and more than a little condescending, she said, “Wayson, for God’s sake, think about what you are saying! You are talking about killing thousands of people.”

“They killed millions of clones,” I said.

“That doesn’t make it right,” she screamed.

I shouted right back at her. “Synthetic lives are just as valuable as natural-born lives.”

Watson asked, “Are natural-born lives as valuable as synthetic lives?”

Silence. Freeman and Naens had nothing to say. Emily and Watson sat red-faced and breathing hard; fear and anger showing in their eyes. They were civilians at heart. Even with their own lives in danger, they didn’t have the stomach to fight.

I said, “Let me set the scales for you. The value is twenty million to one. There were twenty million clones serving in the Unified Authority military when Andropov declared war on us.

“Does twenty million to one sound too unreasonable? How about ten million to one? There were ten million clones in the Enlisted Man’s Empire when Andropov unleashed his epidemic.”

“You’re not being fair,” said Emily.

“Fair?” I asked. “When the speck did fair become part of this?”

“What are you going to do once you blow up the Linear Committee Building?” asked Watson.

“Maybe I’ll blow up the Senate.”

“And when it’s gone?”

“The Intelligence Agency, military bases, I won’t run out of targets.”

“And you’re going to help him?” Emily asked Naens.

Naens shrugged his shoulders, and said, “Yes.”

Screaming now, Emily said, “It’s immoral! You’re as bad as he is! You’re worse than the Unifieds!”

Travis placed a hand on her shoulder, and said, “Emily . . .”

I could see it. In that little glimpse, I saw that he had turned on me. He was too scared to go join the Unifieds, but he’d be deadweight from here on out.

Emily still had some fight in her. She jerked her shoulder out from under his hand, and said, “Wayson, you’ve lost your mind. You’re sick. Your body is fighting off that flu by giving you a combat reflex, and it’s making you crazy.”

I looked her in the eye, and said, “Bullshit.”

And that was it. Emily gave up as well. She said, “Ray, I’m sorry. I can’t do this.”

He said, “I understand.”

“Can’t do what?” I asked.

“Fight your war,” said Watson. “This is your war now. I’m washing my hands of it. We’re washing our hands of it. We’re leaving.”

“Where are you going to go?” I asked. “I’ll let you walk away, but that doesn’t mean Andropov will. Where are you going to go?”

Emily started crying. No joke, the girl with the cast-iron soul had actual tears leaking out the corners of her eyes. She said, “It doesn’t matter, Wayson. I’ll take my chances with Andropov.”

Freeman said, “I spoke to Pugh. He says he can hide them.”

“That will buy them a little time,” I said. “What are they going to do when the Unifieds invade the Territories?”

Freeman must have had an Explorer hidden somewhere or he wouldn’t have been able to get the SEALs. I hoped he had a more common bird as well. He’d stand out flying a hundred-year-old self-broadcasting antique.

I asked, “Do you have a plane hidden somewhere?” and he said, “We’re going to hitch a ride on a cargo ship.”

Watson shook my hand, but he didn’t wish me luck. I think he wanted me to fail. Emily hugged me. She kissed me on the cheek. She said, “Wayson, think about what you’re doing. You’re making a mistake.”

I said, “Emily, I’m doing what I have to do.”

She didn’t answer.

Emily and Travis wouldn’t be safe, so Freeman went with them. I hoped he’d return.