The Clone Apocalypse (32 page)

FIFTY-NINE

As the elevator rose, Naens looked up toward my face. He couldn’t have seen my face, so he would have been looking at his own reflection or possibly trying to give me the feeling of having him look me in the eyes. After a moment, he said, “You know, if you detonate the bomb, you destroy the building.”

Sixty-two-megaton bomb . . . nothing but hollow structure between the device and the parking lot . . .
“That stands to reason,” I said. “What’s your point?”

“We don’t need to do this.”

“Do what?”

“Raid the LCB.”

“I want to kill Andropov,” I said.

“That’s my point; you’ll kill Andropov when you blow up the bomb.”

“No, you don’t understand. I don’t want to kill Andropov; I want to kill him,” I said, trying very hard to sound reasonable and patient. I wasn’t feeling either reasonable or patient at the moment. I wasn’t calm. I was ready to scream. I was ready to shout. I felt like I had more adrenaline than blood coursing through my veins.

“I don’t want him to be dead as a result of something I did. I want to kill him. I want to see him die. I want him to know it was me.”

The elevator reached the top and stopped. Naens remained in place as the door opened. He said, “Oh, that makes sense.”

The door remained open. Neither of us made a move to step off.

I said, “Travis and Emily aren’t in this anymore. They decided to cut and run, right? This isn’t about keeping them safe anymore.”

“Was it ever about keeping them safe?” he asked.

“That was one of the goals,” I said, feeling sheepish. They had helped pull me out of jail, probably stayed the date of my execution, and what had I given them in return? The most I promised them was the possibility of safety as a result of my hunting Andropov.

I felt a stab of guilt, but it didn’t outlast the moment. I had placed my enemies before my friends.

As a member of the SEALs, Naens knew all about flying in formation. He was a wingman, not a leader. He and Harmer and the SEALs had come to pull me out of prison, and it was to me that they gave their loyalty in the end even if he didn’t approve of my ethics.

Suspecting that he didn’t approve, I said, “Let’s drop it.”

He nodded, and we stepped off the elevator. A moment passed, then he said, “All I’m saying is that if we detonate that device, we win. Why gamble?”

“How are we gambling?” I asked, momentarily intrigued.

“Say we get killed. What happens if you get killed instead of Andropov? How are you going to set off the device?”

“Did you read the note from MacAvoy?”

“Yes, it has an access code,” Naens conceded. “What if your gear gets damaged?”

“I’ve got shielded armor,” I pointed out.

“So do they.”

“Drop it,” I said, starting to feel more irritated.

“Okay. Sorry.”

The elevator didn’t take us all the way to Andropov’s office; technically, it didn’t even take us into the LCB. The building had two basement floors, with three levels of underground parking beneath its basement. The elevator let us out in an abandoned foyer area locked behind an iron door built into the wall at the bottom of the parking garage.

Like the tunnels below, the abandoned chamber at the top of the elevator was completely dark. I surveyed the floor through the night-for-day lenses in my visor. Naens wore goggles he had lifted from Freeman’s nest.

Freeman will never know that they’re gone,
I thought. In another few minutes, the nest would be gone. The street would be gone. The river that separated Washington, D.C., from the state of Virginia might be gone as well.
How much is a megaton?
I asked myself. At first I settled on a thousand tons, but then I reconsidered and decided on a million.

As we walked to the door, Naens said, “Look, this is your operation; you choose the priorities. I’m just saying that operations go south when you add unnecessary details.”

“Details like wanting to see Andropov die?” I asked.

“Once you kill him, you’re going to set off the device, right? So, he’ll be dead, then you’ll be dead. I mean, how much time will you have to enjoy the victory?”

I told him, “Drop it,” but that would have been too easy. As I approached the door, he took one last shot at convincing me. “Look, Harris, all I’m saying is . . .”

“I need to see Tobias Andropov die for my life to be complete. If I see him die, have the pleasure of doing it with my own two hands, then I die before I set off the bomb, I’ll go to my grave a happy man . . . a happy, soulless man.”

“Then why set off the device?”

“SPECKING HELL! Naens, let’s drop it! I specking want to kill Andropov and then make the Unified Authority pay.” I thought about Jim Holman and the clones who had tried to settle on Terraneau—reprogrammed. In my mind, they now lived as slaves. I thought about Ava dying. She didn’t need to die, she made the choice, but her collapse had begun with a Unified Authority betrayal. I thought about my brothers, my empire . . . all dead.

If I was right, I would unleash the blast force of 186 million tons of dynamite below the city. Dynamite, of course, was an archaic construct. I had never used it, never learned about it, and had only seen it in funny old movies in which people lit it with a match.
Funny; dynamite no longer exists; matches still do.

The marble tile floor, made for foot traffic, lay stripped of nearly all furnishings. I spotted the glass-encased display that might have held maps or possibly advertisements, but the benches and trash cans had been removed. Two sets of side-by-side escalators stood as still as stairs in the center of the floor.

Unlike the tunnels, which had been so sterile they reminded me of wrecked ships I’d inspected in deep space, this cavern had a notable sprinkling of dust. I didn’t see cobwebs. Until MacAvoy discovered this place, it had been sealed. Maybe an entire ecosystem had been sealed in, but at some point, the rats would have run out of things to eat, then the bugs, then the spiders that ate the bugs.

Thinking he would go first, Naens reached for the door.

I told Naens, “I’ll go first. I’ve got the armor.”

The little bastard would have happily taken point even though I was the one in the impenetrable armor. He had a suicidal streak. He wouldn’t kill himself, but he didn’t care to live.

On most operations, I preferred to work with people who wanted to live. On this occasion, for obvious reasons, Naens’s suicidal streak was a welcome addition.

He stepped away from the door as I stepped through, entering a corner of the parking garage populated mostly by armored personnel carriers. Their roofs almost brushed the ceiling. Their wheels were over five feet tall; they looked like limbs. Through my night-for-day lenses, the carriers looked like resting dinosaurs and their tires like stubby dinosaur legs curled in beneath their stomachs.

The bottom level of the garage was filled with personnel carriers. A herd of dinosaurs filled this floor. I lay down on the floor so I could peer beneath the chassis and search for people. I saw no one using my night-for-day lenses, which offered little reassurance, and I saw no one when I scanned for heat signatures.

They’d left the floor unguarded. And why not? They didn’t know about the door or the tunnels. As far as the Unifieds were concerned, the bottom floor of the garage was safer than Fort Knox.

A moment passed, and Naens slipped out of the door to join me.

I said, “I don’t see any security cameras.”

This was his element, not mine. He allowed me to select the strategy, but he would pick our tactics. He pointed to several areas along the ceiling, and said, “There, there, and there.”

Scattered lights shone throughout the garage, not enough to make things bright, but my visor had switched to tactical lenses. “I don’t see anything,” I said.

Naens pulled off his goggles and showed me the insides of his lenses. I held them close to my visor, and still had trouble understanding what I saw—three dark, motionless rectangles. In those rectangles, I saw shadowy forms, which I slowly recognized as armored personnel carriers. The brilliant little bastard had tapped into the LCB security system. Hell, he’d probably done it back in Freeman’s nest before we even left for the mission.

I handed the shifty little son of a bitch his goggles, grateful as hell he was on my side, and he led the way through the garage. We weaved between armored transports, avoiding detection as best as possible.

The LCB wasn’t especially wide, its underground parking structure stretched out beneath it like the roots beneath a tree. A single hub sat in the middle of the structure with a single bank of ten elevators and two stairwells leading into the building—a good setup for stopping Unifieds from following us down into the tunnels that would also leave us vulnerable on the way in. It was a bottleneck. Lord, I hated bottlenecks.

On the other hand, I didn’t need to escape. If worst came to worst, I could explode the damn nukes whenever I wanted.

We walked to the door leading into the hub. Looking through the window, I saw brightly lit emptiness, walls with panels of brushed-steel doors, and nothing more.

“Do you want to take the stairs or the elevator?” Naens asked me.

They’re both traps,
I thought.
The stairs are a tube; the elevator is a box.
The elevator was better, though. Once inside the elevator, I could press buttons leading to the top, then climb onto the roof of the car.

“Elevator,” I said.

Naens nodded. “I’ll rig the stairs,” he said.

He wasn’t only going to rig the stairs. His ambitious objectives included sealing off the upper floor so that I had Andropov all to myself and destroying the lobby so the Unifieds couldn’t send in reinforcements. They might send in jets and gunships. The more the merrier. I’d feed them to the nukes once I finished with Andropov.

“Will the stairs still be there if we need them?” I asked.

He shook his head. “If we can get in, so can they,” he said. Then he asked, “Did your suit come with a rappel cord?”

I found a cord in one of the compartments, but I wouldn’t be able to use it with the shields up. “It does,” I said. “Are there cameras on the elevators?”

“Sure there are. I suggest you keep your helmet on for the ride.”

It made sense. The camera wouldn’t see through my helmet. It might record my virtual dog tag, however, the one that said the name of one of the guys I killed back in Quantico. I didn’t tell Naens about riding on the roof of the elevator. On some level, I didn’t trust him.

He’d had plenty of opportunity to speck with me if he’d wanted. He could have contacted the Unifieds, and he hadn’t. He could have sided with Emily Hughes. Hell, he was a specking SEAL. If he’d wanted to kill me in the tunnels, he could have slipped up behind me and put a bullet through my skull.

The little SEAL didn’t bother with packs; he wore a belt and a bandolier, both covered with compartments and cloth loops. I never saw all of the equipment he carried in the compartments, but he carried explosive charges in the loops. The charges had come from Freeman’s nest.

Naens said, “Give me three minutes before you get on the elevator.”

Three minutes didn’t seem like much time.

The thought,
He really does look like a bat
, ran through my mind. He had a small mouth, now drawn tight as he prepared to work, large dark eyes hidden under that thick ridge, and a snout of a nose. His dark, leathery skin offered nearly perfect camouflage in the shadowy garage. You wouldn’t spot him without specifically looking for him.

“Is three minutes enough time?” I asked.

“It’s enough,” he said. His voice remained low and solemn. He took this operation seriously, but it didn’t scare him even though he didn’t intend to survive. Maybe a stray Unified Authority bullet would find him, maybe he’d die when I set off the nukes, but sure as shooting, he’d die.

He asked, “Do you remember going to the Mogat planet to find Illych?”

I did, but I didn’t say anything.

He said, “In case I don’t make it back to the tunnels, it’s been a pleasure working with you,” and he saluted me. It was the oddest thing. Now, at the end, he had suddenly started acting all regulation on me. He waited a moment for me to return his salute. When I did, he spun and headed into the darkness. He was an agile dab of gray on a floor filled with shadows and he vanished into the environment quickly, and I wondered if I would see him again.

I listened for sounds of combat, even boosted the audio in my helmet. I heard nothing. I supposed that meant he had things under control; as a SEAL, he specialized in infiltration.

A few minutes passed, and I called for the elevator.

SIXTY

It took less than a minute for my elevator to arrive. The silver doors slid apart, and I walked in. Naens had been right about the cameras in the elevator. How closely people watched them was another story. I entered on the bottom floor, an entirely deserted floor, so I had the car to myself. I pressed the button for the third floor and the top floor—Andropov’s suite of offices. I didn’t think anyone was watching my car, but if they were, they wouldn’t be watching closely. They might see I planned to get out on the third floor and forget about me as I climbed onto the roof of the car.

The doors slid closed, and I felt a slight change in gravity, something so subtle it could have been psychosomatic. I waited a few seconds, then moved to the corner of the lift and turned my attention to the chrome rails that ran along the walls. I planted my right foot onto one rail and used the wall to balance myself as I pushed up to place my left foot on the adjoining rail. At that point, I was too tall for the lift and had to hunch my back as I pushed up on the panel/trapdoor in the ceiling.

The panel flipped open easily enough, and I climbed onto the roof of the elevator and saw the darkened shafts and the moving cars, and I felt my stomach drop. I once went on a tethered spacewalk. I’d once ridden alone in a submarine to the bottom of the sea. Riding on the top of an elevator, staring up a narrow shaft, and seeing cars drop out of the shadows reminded me of just how miniscule I had felt hanging from a leash in space.

The shaft was dark enough that my visor switched to night-for-day lenses, making everything flat and coloring it all in blue-white scale so that the metal skins of the elevator cars blended in with the concrete walls. I crouched and held tightly on to the pipes along the roof of the elevator as the car came to a stop on the third floor. The LCB stood only ten stories tall, making it a midget by Washington standards. The elevators rose and dropped quickly, maybe a floor per second. As I climbed back to my feet, an elevator dropped behind me, again catching me off guard. My car rose three floors, to the sixth, and stopped.
Are they getting on or off?
I wondered.

This time I felt a slight vibration as the car began to move. We lifted one floor, then another, and I lifted the trapdoor and dropped through without pausing to look for passengers. The three men standing in the car hadn’t seen me peer in coming from above. I dropped on top of one and caught the other two napping, then I shot them all with the fléchette cannon on my right sleeve.

I’d never used one before, though I understood the point-and-flex muscle mechanics that fired the weapon and prevented accidental discharges. I shot the guy to my right, then the guy to my left, then the one under my knees, hitting the standing men’s skulls and the last guy’s neck. The fléchettes were tiny, but blood splattered just the same, leaving splash patterns on the walls.

The elevator door opened to chaos.

Naens had begun his work. He wanted to draw the protection away from Andropov and leave them stranded. His plan involved setting charges, which hadn’t gone off just yet, but it also involved putting on a show. That much must have begun.

As the senior member of the Linear Committee, maybe the only member after MacAvoy’s last stand, Andropov had the floor to himself. Like me, he had kept the floor a wide-open expanse with desks and stations for secretaries and aides. Some workers remained, women in suits and dresses, men in ties and jackets, but most of the population wore combat armor. On a quick scan, I counted about twenty men in armor.

At the far end of the space, the door to Andropov’s office sat open and beguiling. It challenged me to approach. Strange as it sounds, until I stepped out of the elevator and spotted that open door and the men guarding it, it had never occurred to me that a bullet or a fléchette or even a lucky knife could cause me to fail my mission.

If one of the Marines killed me before I entered the detonation code, I would fail. Hell, they wouldn’t even need to kill me. What if they broke the equipment in my visor? What if someone sludged the air waves?

At that moment, I wondered if maybe I should step back in the elevator and explode my nukes. For all I knew, the Unifieds might have already caught Naens. Even as I considered that possibility, the first of his charges blew, a small explosion that sent a ripple through the building followed by two equally tiny explosions, then the avalanche began.

The entire building quivered as the outer wall on the far side of the building crumbled into scales and flakes. Windows shattered and fell from their casings. The power went out. Computer screens turned dark, so did the light fixtures. Walls slowly disintegrated and slid from the building, revealing gauzy clouds floating across a starlit sky with pale beams of moonlight slanting in through the holes.

My visor switched to night-for-day lenses, but I went back to the tactical view, the unenhanced view. Spotting the Unifieds was easier in tactical, they glowed like golden ghosts.

The next explosion hit with volcanic force, shaking the building from its roof to its underpinnings. Something shook the building once, hitting with the overwhelming force of a hammer striking a nail, one cataclysmic shake, and the stairwell doors launched from the wall on which they were fastened and flew fifteen feet across the floor, trailed by an opaque hedge of dust and smoke.

Things would have gone more smoothly had Naens dialed down the pyrotechnics. Seeing the smoke and the devastation, most of the men guarding the floor raised their shields. Hoping to blend in, I raised mine, then I stepped behind a shoulder-high partition and spotted two guys who had frozen under fire no more than ten feet from where I stood. The bastards were all but sleeping on the job, facing each other as if they weren’t wearing helmets and communicating over the interLink, not bothering to raise their shields.

I raised my right arm even with my solar plexus and I shot them low. No one seeing me from the other side of the partition could have known I had done it.

Normally, I aimed for the head; this time, I went for the abdomen. This was U.A. ammo. These fragments had neurotoxin coating them. These targets would die from poison and paralysis before they bled out. Anyway, guys with bleeding holes in their helmets draw unnecessary attention.

Another idiot ran to the blown-out stairwell with his shields off. I let him get past me and shot him in the ass. He stumbled and fell on his face as if he’d tripped, a tiny geyser of blood spurting through his armor.

Naens had warned me that he planned to damage the elevators, but I hadn’t grasped his meaning. I shot that third guy, a silent moment passed, and more bombs exploded. Naens must have placed his charges in the bottom of the elevator shaft, turning the shaft into a cannon.

The LCB had two banks of elevators, each holding five lifts. The walls of the shaft withstood the explosions, meaning that the blasts fired the cars up the shafts like bullets in a barrel. The charges went off, the blast fired the elevator cars into space, destroying the roof’s structural integrity, and slabs of ceiling came tumbling down, cracking sections of the floor beneath them.

Suddenly, I saw clouds and skyline and pipes and wires where ceilings and walls had been. The north face of the building took the worst damage. A twenty-foot square of roof and ceiling collapsed, slamming into the floor with such force that it crushed men and furniture, and when the cloud of dust cleared, I saw that the floor had twisted and bent to a thirty- or thirty-five-degree angle. Men and debris slid down the floor and disappeared over the edge.

And then somebody shot me. I had my shields up. He couldn’t have hurt me with a rocket, at least he couldn’t have penetrated my shields, and his fléchettes left nothing but sparks in their wake.

I might not have noticed I’d been shot, but a red icon appeared on my visor warning me that I’d been hit and showing me where it hit me. Only one person shot at me. I had no idea how that person identified me as the enemy or why none of his fellows had caught on.

Slipping behind a partition, I tried to drop to a knee and learned something about my armor. With my shields raised, only the soles of my boots were allowed to touch the ground. The joints over my knees allowed me no more than twenty-five degrees of mobility, then they became stiff.

No wonder they always moved like zombies,
I thought. When the fighting started, the Unifieds always marched forward. I’d seen them speed up, but I’d never seen them run. I had always assumed it was because they had shields and felt invulnerable, but that wasn’t it. They never ran because they couldn’t. They didn’t have enough mobility in their legs for a full run.

And me, I couldn’t kneel. I suppose I could have tipped over and fallen to the ground like a tree or a bowling pin. Then what? Would I have fused? The only successful strategy we, we meaning the Enlisted Man’s Empire, had found for dealing with shielded armor was burying the men who wore it. We toppled a building over on them. We led them into tunnels and collapsed the tunnels. Not a one of them had ever dug himself out. Maybe they couldn’t. Maybe their armor had frozen around them, like the walls of a coffin.

I thought about the men we’d buried, trapped—some of them had lasted for weeks before dying. I felt no regret.

The son of a bitch kept shooting me. Every few seconds, the icon flashed in the bottom right corner of my visor, a red silhouette, a white dot marking the spot where his fléchettes struck.

The Marine stood no more than twenty feet from me, his arm up and aimed at me. He could shoot me, but he couldn’t hurt me. I could shoot him, but I couldn’t hurt him. With our shields up, we had reached an impasse. I broke the stalemate; I lowered my shields. Well, I stepped behind another partition, shut off my shields, and dropped to a knee at the exact same moment. The bastard might or might not have seen me drop my shields, but he didn’t shoot.

I sat on the carpeted floor, my back against a desk, hidden by a partition as I rifled through compartments in my armor. I found a pistol. Useless. Rappelling cord. I’d need it later. A half dozen grenades.

Crumbling roof . . . damaged floor.
Holding the grenade in my right, I crawled farther, hid behind desks, hid behind partitions. I would need to throw the grenade before I reengaged my shields. If I had the grenade in my hand, the shields would destroy it, maybe even make it explode in my palm.

Where are you, you son of a bitch? Where are you?
I pulled the pin, allowed a few seconds to pass, stood, and tossed the pill where I thought the bastard should be. He wasn’t there, but there were others, standing, watching, not sure what they should do as I stood, tossed the grenade with a quick flip of my wrist, and brought up my shields at just the right moment.

A lone fléchette hit me from the right side, my stalker, and the grenade exploded, causing an avalanche over the heads of three shielded men. Maybe the floor caved in beneath them, or the percussion sent them flying through holes in the walls. When the smoke cleared, those Marines were absent and unaccounted for, and the chaos I had walked in on seemed like a precision drill compared to the scene I now saw.

A couple of Unifieds dropped their shields and ran toward the nonexistent elevators. I shot them from behind before they changed their minds. I had begun to like these poisoned fléchettes; if I so much as nicked my targets’ fingernails, they still died.

I ducked behind a pillar, cut off my shields, dropped to my knees, and hid under a desk. Ten feet from me, the final remains of an outer wall framed a perfect view of monument alley. I saw streets and cars with lit headlights, and colorfully lit fountains and sleepy marble buildings, all ten floors below me, maybe 150 feet down.

The first fléchette missed me by a hair-width. The guy was smart. He didn’t look for me, not by hide-and-seek rules at least; he must have scanned for me using heat vision and spotted me stooped with my shields down under the heavy metal desk. I stood, bringing the desk up with me, balanced on my head, neck, and shoulders, and I sprinted forward. Holes appeared in the desk as he and his comrades fired fléchettes at me, but they didn’t have a clear shot and I was an erratic and clumsy, moving target; and then I threw the desk from my shoulders, flexing my muscles as if doing a bench press. My blood was full of adrenaline and testosterone and had been all night, and the desk traveled about four feet through the air and struck the Marine. There was a bright flash and sparks, and the desk seemed to melt in its center, but it was heavy and had velocity and it carried the bastard with it as it fell through the space that had once been a wall.

Now several Unified Authority Marines shot at me, but I already had my shields up. Their fléchettes had about as much impact as mosquitoes slamming into bulletproof glass. When they hit my shields, they didn’t just melt; they evaporated. They disappeared so completely it was as if they had never been there.

I stood just outside Tobias Andropov’s door, which was closed. At the moment, that simple closed door posed a problem. It didn’t even have a lock, for speck’s sake, but I couldn’t touch the knob without shutting down my shields. I fired a fléchette into the knob. It did nothing; neither did the seven or eight that followed. I thought about kicking through the door, but the joints in my armor fought against me. I couldn’t lift my leg high enough.

Meanwhile, a half dozen pricks shuffled around me, shooting me with fléchettes, angling for shots that didn’t matter in the slightest, making sure I kept my shields up.

One of them came within a few feet of me, made a point of stepping into my line of sight, and fired shot after shot at my visor. The fléchettes flashed and disappeared, flashed and disappeared, but the guy was eating into my battery life. These shields worked off a small battery that ran out after an hour of nonstop use. Every time something touched my shields, the power surged to fight it off.

Frustrated by the door, I glared at the guy, not that he could see my expression through my visor. He shot me several times. I thought about running at him.
What would happen?
I wondered. We’d probably bounce off each other, might even repel each other like similar poles of a magnet.