The Clone Apocalypse (33 page)

Thwack.
Another fléchette hit me in the face.
Thwack.
He shot me again. He wasn’t hurting me, not even touching me. I wanted to kill him. He was a pest. A nuisance.

Using an optical command, I brought up the code again—819. It would take less than a blink to send it, just a twitch of my eye, and the bombs would explode. All of Washington, D.C., would shake and collapse as the ground below it turned to ash and the air filled with radioactive cinders.

I’ll kill them all,
I thought, and with that code still up on my screen so that I could initiate the blast at any time, I rushed at the guy with fléchettes in a movement that came as close to running as I could muster.

I closed on him quickly, just three seconds, and he stood there, unmoving, probably stunned as I plowed into him. The blinding electrical flash might have occurred in the world or possibly just my visor. White and gold and yellow spots danced in my eyes, and I couldn’t see clearly, but I saw enough to know that my shields had shut off and his shields had shut off as we fell to the floor, and I brought my arm up and pumped five fléchettes into the bastard’s gut before we reached the floor. Still partially blinded, I tucked my shoulders, and rolled over his dying corpse and vaulted back to my feet. It took two tries to get my shields back, but they were up before anyone hit me, and the guy I had shot was still down on the ground.

Shoot me again, asshole,
I said, maybe out loud, maybe just in my head, and I laughed, and the jagged sound of my laughter sounded bad, even to me, but it didn’t stop me. It didn’t even worry me. I didn’t have time to worry as I ran at the next Marine, bored into him left shoulder first, and fired fléchettes into his chest and stomach. This time I didn’t fall with him. Our shields went out the moment we made contact, but I had my eyes shut and balanced myself as I ran into the son of a bitch as if he were a door that I needed to break. We hit, our shields went out, and I restored my shields and shot the bastard as he fell to the ground, and I laughed at the way he dropped and stayed where he fell.

Now that the poor fools saw what I was, they didn’t know what to do. I was a cat in a room filled with mice. I was a wolf, and they were small lambs. They didn’t know what to do. They had come to protect; I had come to kill and to die. I had nothing that I didn’t plan on losing; they had lives they wanted to keep. In the heat of battle, those who worry too much about their lives often lose them.

I was enjoying myself, watching the glowing gold ghosts scatter like small fish. There were only three of them left at this point. It would have only taken two of them to kill me—one to charge and one to shoot. Really, one could have done it though he would have died along with me.

They trotted across the floor as quickly as their armor allowed, weaving through desks and partitions, heading in three different directions. One sprinted toward the elevators. Another dashed to the far end of the building, possibly hoping to hide. I watched him and chuckled as I lowered my shields and pulled a grenade. There I was, offering them my hide, but they were running. And suddenly I understood some of their confusion. They must have been watching the entire fight through night-for-day lenses, and unable to see when I had my shields on and off because night-for-day filtered out ambient glow. They wouldn’t have known when to shoot at me.

I threw the grenade sidearm, the way you skip rocks over a lake. It sailed over the tops of several partitions, barely skimming over the top of the last, and exploded in midair. Safely behind my shields again, I watched that partition vanish in a flash of light and a cascade of dust and ceiling tiles and cement. As the cacophony dissolved, I looked for the glow of the man’s shields. The area was dark. I found small flames using heat vision, but nothing large enough for a man.

Killing the bastard with the grenade had worked, but it hadn’t offered much in the way of satisfaction. I mused at how I had become the cocky hunter stalking after the panicking rabbits. I didn’t bother running after them; they had no place to go.

I saw the one who had run to the elevators for safety. He stood by an open shaft, staring into the bottomless empty pit. If he’d packed a cord, he could have rappelled to another floor. He turned, saw me coming, turned back to the hole, and scampered away.

Where are you going?
I asked, unaware if I had said the words or only thought them.

In the distance, I saw the flashing lights of a helicopter sliding across the night sky, probably a gunship. I didn’t care.
Waste of fuel,
I thought. They couldn’t use it, not in this crumbling building, not unless they cared more about killing me than saving Andropov, the man in charge. Andropov had the instincts of a rat; he cared a hell of a lot more about saving his life than ending mine.

Not watching where he set his feet, the man stumbled over a heap of cement and fell onto his knees then his face, and his shields went dark. And there I was, ready for him, holding a five-foot length of jagged-ended pipe that had fallen near him, and I hit him with it. I hit the back of his neck, then his helmet, then his shoulders, then the helmet again, and it cracked, and the cracks spread. And then it caved in and when I hit him again, blood welled out of the crater. I tossed the pipe away, booted my shields, and fired a fléchette between his shoulder blades to make sure he stayed down.

That left one man.

He had hidden in a bathroom. Using heat vision, I saw him quite clearly, cowering against the farthest wall, a faceless orange silhouette, shaped like a man but as scared as a child. I even thought about leaving him, allotting three extra minutes to his life as I killed Andropov, then detonated the nuclear devices . . . the nukes. They no longer scared me the way that they first had. They had become part of my world.

The Unifieds, however, not realizing that they had already lost this fight, sent a gunbird out to kill me. The gunship floated right up to the LCB, stabilized its position no more than ten feet from the outer wall, and started firing chain guns in my direction. Behind my shielded armor, I didn’t worry about bullets, not even bullets from a gun that cut men into ribbons. The guns shattered walls and splintered partitions. They hit me like a strong wind, unable to hurt me but shoving me aside.

And then the gunship exploded. The fireball was gorgeous, a luminous twisting, glowing, yellow-and-orange knot that rose and faded but briefly seemed to fill the sky. Naens was alive. The little son of a bitch was alive, and he’d found rockets of some kind.

The chain-gun fire had penetrated the walls of the bathroom, shattering toilets and sinks and pipes from which water gushed out like they were fountains. The U.A. Marine fired three fléchettes at me as I came through the door; they hit me and evaporated, and then he brought his arm to his body and cradled it as if he had broken it and he curled one leg in front of the other, forming a standing version of the fetal position. He didn’t even look at me. He stared into an empty stall as I lowered my shields, grabbed a grenade, and pulled the pin. I bowled the pill toward that scared child of a soldier, then I turned and walked out of the bathroom without bothering with my shields, which turned out to be a bad mistake.

He fired at me!

Three tiles shattered as I reached for the door. They coughed little puffs of dust into the air.

I laughed and switched on my shields, but not because of that fainthearted bastard. Moments after I stepped through the door, the grenade exploded. Door and wall burst behind me. The shock wave sent me lurching forward, and I twisted my right leg. I lowered my shields again; I was alone. Almost alone.

The next step I took on my leg sent a shock up my spine, but I hid my wound as I walked to the door of Andropov’s office and kicked it aside. Twenty feet ahead of me, behind a desk I had once occupied, sat Tobias Andropov.

SIXTY-ONE

Andropov wore shielded armor, but he hadn’t bothered putting on his helmet. It sat on the desk, and without the optical interface in the visor, the shields did nothing.

I didn’t worry about guards or assassins hidden inside this office. Any protection Andropov had, he’d spent outside, trying to keep me out at all costs. He’d known what would happen when I entered. He’d known how that would end.

I said, “I don’t know if you knew this, but you’re supposed to wear the helmet; it’s not going to protect you sitting on a desk.”

Andropov was still a young man by politician standards, a man in his forties. He looked soft but trim. His hair was still dark.

His face said it all, his wide-eyed stare, his clenched teeth. He didn’t blink.

Even without his helmet, he could still fire the fléchette cannon on the right sleeve of his armor. I’d seen tapes of this man taunting prison guards he knew were about to die. He acted brave when he held the cards. Now, in a cracking voice, he asked, “What do you want me to do?”

Hearing the fear in his voice, I wondered if he had wet himself under the desk.

I said, “You can do whatever you want. You can beg if you want; I don’t care.”

“Killing me won’t fix things,” he said. “It won’t bring your empire back.”

“Nothing will bring it back,” I said. “Nothing will specking bring it back.”

“I can bring it back,” he said.

He looked small behind the desk. He looked like a little boy. Terror makes men into boys. I wondered how many of my men felt terror as they waited for the death reflex to take them. I wondered what tremors ran through Perry MacAvoy’s mind as they sat him back in his wheelchair and shot him.

“Did your scientists develop something that resurrects dead clones?” I asked.

“No,” he admitted.

I raised my right arm, aimed the cannon at him, and said, “I didn’t think so.”

He raised his hands, palms forward, fingers up, a show of submission. I reminded myself that a lot of people would still be alive if he’d quit a few weeks earlier. Just six weeks earlier, and Hunter Ritz would still be alive. If he’d stopped three weeks ago, I’d still have a corps of Marines.

His hands still up, he said, “Seven hundred thousand Marines and thirty-two thousand sailors. That’s how many there are on Terraneau.”

The dumb shit had nothing. He couldn’t hurt me; I had my shields up. Even if he had a bomb or a rocket under his desk, the most he could do is send me flying, maybe kill us both, but he wouldn’t do that. He wanted to live.

He was weak. He was a politician. He sent people to die; he never faced death himself.

“Reprogrammed clones,” I said.

“Cut from the same DNA as the men that you lost.”

“Do you have a way of restoring their programming?” I’d gone over that with Tasman. There’d be a high mortality rate if we tried to set them back.

“It shouldn’t be a problem,” said Andropov.

I fired my first fléchette, hitting the back of his seat just an inch from his face, and said, “I don’t believe you.”

“We programmed them,” he said. “We can reboot them.”

“How are you going to get to them?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t have a self-broadcasting fleet.”

“There are ships . . . cruisers . . . spy ships.”

“Cruisers are small,” I said. “Spy ships have stealth engines. They’re easy to lose, and I don’t trust you.”

“Damn it to Hell! What do you want?” he shouted. That was when I fired my next fléchette. This one hit near his eye. The sound of the fragment going through the back of his seat made him jump.

He said, “Killing me won’t change anything. The Unified Authority still wins.”

“You killed my empire; I’m killing yours,” I said.

“One man at a time?” he asked. He didn’t ask this in a mouthy way. The man was trembling and making no effort to hide it. If he hadn’t emptied his bladder when I came through the door, that last fléchette had undoubtedly broken the dam.

“Not exactly,” I said. “I’m rearranging the map.”

“You’re what? What do you mean?”

“I’m erasing Virginia and Maryland,” I said.

“You’re insane.”

I smiled and fired a fléchette into his desk. It may have hit his thigh, possibly his crotch. I hoped it hadn’t. I didn’t want the fléchette to kill him. I wanted the toxin to do the job.

The fragment was fast, and the pain came slowly. The only signal Andropov sent that the fléchette had hit him was a groan. He moaned and looked down, puzzlement now mixed with the fear in his expression. He must have spotted the little stream of blood spurting up, but he was weak and overcome by shock even before the neurotoxins spread through his system.

He looked up at me. Hate and anger should have shone in his face; instead, I saw fear and surprise. Had he really thought he would talk his way out of this? He didn’t speak. He couldn’t. He was in shock, paralyzed, dying. Five or six seconds after I shot him, Andropov’s head fell to the desk.

He might still have had some life left in him, but not much.

I said, “We both lose our lives and empires.” I laughed. I laughed and I laughed, and I couldn’t stop myself, and I raised my arm and aimed the tiny cannon and fired fléchettes into that dead man’s skull until the top of his head looked like mush.

Then I brought up the code, and I was about to blow up the bombs, but I had a thought. I remembered Naens. He was still alive. He had destroyed the gunship. He was down there, somewhere.

I wanted to thank him. I wanted him to die with honors, to face his death and to know when it arrived. He and I, we would die like soldiers.

During the time I had been chatting with the late Tobias Andropov, several more gunships had arrived. They prowled the air around the building, like cats waiting for a cornered mouse. Those pilots had heat vision. They’d undoubtedly watched me through the walls. The lights on the fronts of their birds searched the ruined floor.

Troops, hundreds of them, thousands of them, had probably surrounded the base of the building. What could they do? Naens had caved walls over the entrances of the building and the parking garage below it.

One of the gunships fired a rocket as I left the office. The gunner who fired it aimed it by me, not at me. They couldn’t hit the building with a rocket, not without caving the whole thing in on itself, and Naens had trapped a lot of natural-born Unified Authority personnel in these crumbling walls, so the rocket sailed in through the remains of one broken wall and out through the gaps in another.

Chain guns fired. One gunship hovered over my head, and some stupid bastard tried to jump out. I shot him before he landed, and he toppled onto the floor in a clump. A torrent of bullets hit a desk beside where I stood, mincing it into sawdust and filings. They hit a bookshelf, filling the air with shreds of paper, some of which caught fire.

The flashing icon in my visor warned me that bullets had hit me on every side.
Just you wait right here,
I thought as I reached the elevators, waiting to lower my shields until I stepped into the barrel of the shaft. Even here the bullets followed me.

Chain guns shot through the walls as I lowered my shields and attached my cord to a girder and dropped faster than the elevators had traveled. I dropped two floors at a time, making sure not to stop by doors in which angry Unifieds might be waiting. The explosions had left a few doors open, but from what I could tell, it had launched all of the elevator cars through the roof of the building.

Zipping past open doors, I saw darkness and destruction. Naens’s bombs had broken these floors even more than they broke Andropov’s floor. I saw bodies and walls demolished into heaps. There was no electricity. Vents as wide as water barrels hung like hoses from holes in the ceilings.

Moments later, I had dropped below the lobby, and three empty levels after that, I unhitched in the garage. The world was pitch-black down here. The sun itself could have followed me into that elevator shaft, and it might not have produced sufficient radiance to light the garage, but I had my night-for-day vision, and I found the small man with a bony ridge over his eyes as I lowered myself to the floor.

“You did a great job,” I said.

“Is he dead?” asked Naens.

“If he isn’t, he isn’t happy,” I said.

“Why are you limping?” Naens asked me as I unlocked the cord and walked past him. I headed out of the hub and toward the door to the tunnels.

“I twisted my leg.”

“I thought the armor was supposed to protect you.”

“It did,” I said. “It kept everything out, but it doesn’t stop you from twisting your own ankle.”

He nodded. I couldn’t see his eyes; he was wearing those goggles. Even he would have been completely blind down here without help.

As he followed me, he asked, “Aren’t we supposed to be dead by now?”

“I want to watch it happen,” I said.

“You want to see the bomb explode?” he asked. “You really are insane.”

Those were his last words. He stepped through the doorway, and a single shot was fired. The bullet struck his head, splattering it against a wall. Standing just outside the doorway, I got splashed with a few drops of blood. I raised my shields and stepped over the body.

I yelled, “You shouldn’t have shot him, Ray.”

Freeman answered, “You won’t be able to flip the switch hiding behind a shield.”

“I don’t need to,” I said. “I have remote access.”

Freeman went silent. He hadn’t considered that possibility. A few seconds passed, and he yelled, “I can’t let you set off the bombs.”

“I don’t see how you can stop me,” I said as I searched the tunnels using both night-for-day lenses and heat vision. Neither worked. He was out there, probably hiding behind a thick wall, far out of the range of my fléchettes. He had that sniper rifle. I wanted to set off the nukes, but I hated the idea of killing Freeman.

As long as I kept my shields up, Freeman couldn’t hurt me. He couldn’t miss me, either. I was a gold-glowing ghost in a universe of black, a human-sized target for a man who could hit a coin from a mile away.

Freeman shouted, “Harris, that flu caused you to have a combat reflex. Your brain is full of hormone. You’re not thinking straight.”

I crossed the foyer and started down the stairs, which wasn’t so easy with my shields up. I had to take each step at its edge so that the backs of my legs didn’t rub against the next one up. A couple of hundred yards ahead of me, something moved. I caught a quick glance of the RPG before it struck the stairs.

He wanted to bury me. He wanted to bury me the way I had buried so many Unifieds in shielded armor. It didn’t work the way he wanted. Freeman knew everything there was to know about demolitions and sniper rifles, but that RPG he’d fired hit low and wide and did next to nothing.

I shouted, “Try that again, Ray, and I’ll set the nukes off from here.”

“Then you’ll kill me, too, Wayson.”

It wasn’t Freeman who stepped into the open lobby; it was Kasara. She’d dressed in khaki BDUs like a soldier, but they looked incredibly baggy on her. She had her hair pulled back.

I stopped and stared at her, and I asked, “Why did you come here? You could have been safe. You would have been safe. Once I’m done, you won’t ever need to worry about the Unified Authority ever again.”

She held a flashlight, a stupid, specking flashlight. It was a civilian-issue flashlight, cheap and small and weak. She took several steps toward me so that we were just a few feet apart.

“I’m not worried about the Unified Authority. Right now, you scare me more than Andropov.”

I looked at her and knew that while I didn’t love her, I did not want to kill her. I said, “Andropov is dead.”

She said, “Wayson, it’s not just Unifieds out there; it’s children and mothers and grandfathers.”

“People who deserve to die,” I said.

“Innocent people!”

“Where were they when the Unifieds massacred my people?” I asked. “Where were they when we fought the aliens on New Copenhagen? Where were they when we rescued your people from Olympus Kri? They don’t deserve to live. We saved them from Mogats and Avatari.”

“And now you want to kill them?” Kasara asked. She was right in front of me now, standing at the base of the stairs, and I had this wild hare of an impulse, I wanted to grab her and to hug her and to allow the joules of condensed electricity that ran through my shields to shock her or burn her like a dried leaf in a fire.
I never loved you,
I told myself.

I saw her face clearly, but her hair and skin were the same damn blue-white color in my lenses. I couldn’t see her eyes clearly, they were bathed in shadow. I switched to heat vision, turning her into a vividly colored shadow, and I stepped around her without giving her a second glance.

She yelled, “Wayson!”

I already had the code up—819, the month, the year, the end, and I looked down at the icon that would initiate the explosion. One twitch of my eye . . . the time had come. I . . .

“Freeman, you’re sludging the airwaves,” I shouted.

He didn’t answer.

Now we both knew something about each other’s plans. I knew Freeman had a sludging device; he now knew that I had tried to detonate my nukes. I would either need to destroy his device or lower my shields in order to set off my nukes, and he would shoot me the moment I did. That meant that I either needed to destroy Freeman’s sludging device, or I needed to destroy him.

I marched ahead, toward the spot from which he had fired the RPG, not as confident as I had been. If he brought the roof down on my head, I would not be able to do a remote detonation.

“Wayson!” Kasara followed after me, calling my name, begging me to stop. “Wayson! Stop, you need help!”

I wanted to turn. I wanted to shoot her, to kill her just like I had killed Andropov, to stand there and watch her die, but I wasn’t sure why I wanted to do it. It was an impulse without a root. It was a thought without a cause. I ignored her.

She shouldn’t have come,
I told myself.
She betrayed me by coming.

There was an alcove straight ahead. The walls around the alcove were tile over cement, and thick, thick enough to hide a man’s heat signature. I aimed my fléchette cannon and stormed ahead, not pausing, confident I would shoot Freeman. He had come. His decision, and the consequences would rest on his head.