The Clone Apocalypse (4 page)

TWO

As I walked into my office, one of my aides, an overaged lieutenant, came to tell me that I had received a call on my private line. Now that my girlfriend, Sunny Ferris, had gone MIA, I hadn’t had much use for that line. That call could have come from her. I should have been excited, but I wasn’t. As far as I was concerned, she had stopped being my girlfriend before she went missing; I just hadn’t had the chance to inform her of her change in status. If she was back, we’d need to have an uncomfortable conversation.

“Got a name and a number?” I asked, dreading the scene Sunny would make.

The lieutenant said that the call came from Kevin Rhodes, the director of encryption at the EME Intelligence Agency.

My first thought was,
Things are looking up.
I didn’t know Rhodes, but the director of encryption didn’t sound like a person who would have an emotional meltdown. Then I realized the obvious.
I don’t know him. Why is he calling me on my private line? How the hell had he even gotten the number?

The EME Intelligence Agency, a civilian organization, had nine directors. I had met all nine, but I seldom dealt with them. I asked, “Did he say why he was calling?”

“He refused to speak with me, sir.”

“Refused to speak with you,” I mused. “Maybe he called on my private line so he could have a private communication.”

“He sounded nervous,” said the lieutenant, who also sounded nervous.

“Do you have his number?” I asked.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “I left it on your desk.”

I’d stopped carrying my phone after we captured Washington. Carrying a phone was like wearing a target into battle. If the Unifieds managed to get their hands on my number, they could use my phone to track me. As president, I had access to secure communications that, in theory, could not be tracked. I also had enemies who put theories like that to the test.

I had the lieutenant leave the room and dialed Rhodes’s number.

“This is Rhodes,” said the voice.

Except that it wasn’t Rhodes’s voice. This voice I knew.

I asked, “Watson, is that you?”

Silence, then, “Harris, do you know if this is a secure line?” He sounded more than nervous; he sounded flat-out scared.

“It’s as secure as they get,” I said. “Where are you?”

He didn’t answer for several seconds. I knew why he was scared. Just one month earlier, he’d been sitting in an office in the Pentagon when the Unifieds started pumping gas through the air-conditioning system. The gas knocked out every clone in the building. By the time they woke up, they’d been reprogrammed, and killing Watson was the first item on their list of things to do.

We had a security feed of Watson and his bodyguards driving a stolen car through the security gate at the entrance to the Pentagon’s underground parking structure. After that, they disappeared. We’d found the bullet-ridden remains of his car in downtown Washington, D.C. One by one, his bodyguards had turned up dead.

After considering his options, Watson said, “I’m in Coral Hills.”

Coral Hills.
I knew the name but needed a moment to locate it on my mental map. “What the speck are you doing there?” I asked.

Coral Hills, I could jog that far,
I thought. Here we’d spent weeks searching for Watson, and he was just across the river. But I couldn’t really jog over and get him; Coral Hills was a U.A. stronghold. MacAvoy called it “the U.C.D.,” the
Unified Central District
.

“Look, Wayson, we need to get out of here. Can you get us out?” he asked.

“An extraction,” I muttered. “Who is we? How many of you are there?”

“Emily is with me.” He let a moment pass before adding, “We have Howard Tasman, too.”

Tasman, that was good news. He was the scientist who invented the neural programming used in clones. If the Unified Authority captured him we’d have all kinds of problems.

Watson said, “And we captured Rhodes.”

“Captured him?” I asked. “He’s on our side.”

“No he isn’t,” said Watson.

I wanted to ask what he meant, but that could wait. I said, “I’ll arrange an extraction.”

Watson seemed confused by my offer. He was a civilian. In his world you extracted teeth and rescued victims. He asked, “Can you get us out of here?”

THREE

A lot of people could handle a rifle. I had badges, pins, and ribbons for marksmanship, one of which I earned by putting three shots in a one-inch center circle from a mile away. Ray Freeman made me look like a piker when it came to the quiet art.

With his skills and scopes, Freeman had hit human targets from three miles away. He had a knack for assassination. His list of kills included gangsters, politicians, soldiers, and the founder of a fanatical religion. When guns weren’t the right tool, he used bombs. Sometimes he used both. He’d beaten men to death with his fists as well; Freeman had a gift.

The man stood seven feet tall and weighed over three hundred pounds. He’d lost weight of late.

He’d been injured just a month earlier. An untreated sprain had turned into an infection which nearly cost him his leg and his life. After weeks in a hospital, he looked frail, but not in the way of mortal men. He didn’t look any less dangerous, just more brittle.

He stood as we talked, his posture a bit less erect, his shoulders tighter than normal, his skin maybe just the slightest bit ashen. He said, “I bet you plan on going in yourself.”

I asked, “You got a better idea?”

Freeman said, “You could stay out of the way. How about we both stay out of the way?”

I felt the irritation welling in me as I said, “You know somebody better than me for this mission?”

He said, “Harris, you’re the president of the Enlisted Man’s Empire; maybe it’s time you started shuffling papers.”

“I’m also a Marine,” I said.

“You’re a general. Generals send people into battle.”

I said, “I was engineered for fighting battles.”

Freeman walked to a tall stool and sat. The man had not fully healed from his wounds. He had a slight limp.

Speaking in his soft, resonant voice, he said, “You’re getting too old to be fighting wars.”

I didn’t answer that, mostly because I agreed with him.

“We’re the wrong men for the job,” said Freeman. “I’m too old, and you’re the president. You’re also the only military clone over six feet tall. If they see you, they’ll recognize you. I’m a seven-foot black man; they’ll certainly recognize me.”

Freeman was the last survivor of a Neo-Baptist colony. His people had been the descendants of African-Americans occupying a tiny planet in an isolated corner of a galaxy in which the government wanted to integrate races. I was the last Liberator, he was the last African-American; we belonged in a museum.

As I started to say something, he asked, “How old are you, Harris? You hit thirty yet?”

I started to admit that I had just turned thirty, but he interrupted me again. He said, “I just spent my forty-seventh birthday lying in a hospital listening to a couple of doctors arguing whether or not they could save my life without amputating my leg.”

He shook his head, and said, “I’m nearly fifty years old, and I walk with a limp. One of my shoulders needs surgery, and the one that’s been repaired still doesn’t work right. I’m retired.”

I said, “Maybe I am the right man for the job. I might not be the right one to get Watson out, but I’d make one hell of a distraction.”

Freeman nodded, and said, “Yes, perhaps you should paint a target on your forehead and go for a stroll in downtown Coral Hills.”

FOUR

I met with Perry MacAvoy in the early evening, about 18:00, to discuss the situation. Admiral Hauser attended as well, but only in spirit. The general and I sat in the same room; Hauser appeared through a confabulator, a device that made it look like virtual people were actually sitting in the room. Around Washington, D.C., the political types called these devices, “social mirages.”

Looking through the confabulator’s window, we saw Hauser as if he were sitting in the room.

I began the conversation with a question for MacAvoy. “You said you’d have five million of those shield-busting bullets by the end of the month. How many do you have now?”

He said, “We haven’t started manufacturing them yet.”

“Do you have any?” I asked.

MacAvoy shrugged his shoulders, and said, “Just handmade loads. We have a few hundred.”

“Not enough.” I sighed.

Hauser asked the question that MacAvoy was about to ask. “What do you need them for?”

I told them about Watson and Rhodes.

Hauser said, “I want to make sure I understand the situation. Watson incapacitated one of the directors of our Intelligence Agency and used his phone to call you?”

“Something like that,” I said.

Seen through the confabulator, Hauser looked as solid and three-dimensional as the wall behind him. The flicker of a smile entered his expression as he asked, “And he wants us to extract him from Unified-held territory?”

I said, “Affirmative.”

“Let me guess, Harris. I bet you want to go in yourself. Is that right?”

Feigning indignation, I said, “Admiral, I am the president of the Enlisted Man’s Empire. I hardly think that running covert extractions befits my pay grade.”

MacAvoy’s jaw dropped. Hauser whistled. An uncomfortable silence filled the room until MacAvoy finally said, “Admiral, maybe they’ve reprogrammed him.”

I said, “Get specked, MacAvoy.”

Still sounding surprised, Hauser said, “He sounds like Harris.”

Ignoring them, I brought up a virtual map of the eastern suburbs. A red dot appeared marking Watson’s location. I said, “General, I want to drop the extraction team here. They’re going to need Jackals, personnel carriers, and a team of shooters. Can you muster your men by 05:00?”

“No problem,” MacAvoy replied without a moment’s hesitation. He examined the map. “No problem delivering men and material to the zone, but they’re not going to last very long once they arrive. That’s the Unified Central District; we could drop a column of Schwarzkopfs there, and they wouldn’t make it out.”

Schwarzkopfs were our best tanks; they were fast, armed with big cannons, and covered with hardened plating, but the Unifieds had rockets that could destroy them, and anything that could destroy a Schwarzkopf would make short work of a Jackal or a personnel carrier.

I said, “They wouldn’t last long under normal circumstances, but I don’t think the Unifieds will notice your team.”

“Why is that?” asked MacAvoy.

I tapped the map and a yellow stripe appeared along the eastern side of the shore of the Anacostia. “They’re going to be busy fighting off a full-scale invasion.”

“You’re sending in the Marines?” asked MacAvoy.

“I bet you plan on leading the invasion,” said Hauser.

I said, “Last time I checked, I was the commandant of the EME Marines.”

*   *   *

I never knew the exact date of Tom Hauser’s death; he died somewhere in space. Perry MacAvoy died on August 24. He was executed by a firing squad.

FIVE

Date: August 17, 2519

The sun wouldn’t rise for another hour.

We preferred to work in the darkness, something the Army couldn’t do. Marines wore combat armor, soldiers fought in fatigues. The armor made us more mobile; you could attach jetpacks to the back and magnetized rappelling cords to the front. Our armor didn’t protect us from bullets, and shrapnel cut it to shreds, but our visors provided us night-for-day vision, heat vision, radar, sonar, telescopic sight, and more. Our armor came with rebreathers that allowed us to operate underwater and in outer space. The bodysuits we wore under our armor protected us against extreme temperatures, both cold and hot. The bodysuits wouldn’t stop us from frying in a nuclear blast, but they keep us comfortable in the absolute zero degrees of deep space.

Few things gave away a night attack more quickly than the telltale glow of lights. Satellites detected columns of vehicles with blaring headlights. Enemy planes and helicopters spotted stadium lights from miles away. We didn’t worry about it. With every man in the outfit wearing armor, we assembled our troops in the dark interior of an indoor stadium, hidden from prying eyes and lenses.

My infantrymen climbed into personnel carriers and my artillery (fifteen Schwarzkopfs and forty Targs) and my cavalry (a fleet of jeeps and Jackals) formed into lines behind them. The men in jeeps wore armor with visors; the men in the tanks and Jackals used computer-enhanced vision in the windshields of their vehicles.

I looked up and down the lines. The Enlisted Man’s Empire controlled all of the satellites, but the Unifieds had been the ones who created the computers; they knew how to hack into our systems and peer through our eyes.

We communicated using the interLink, a military-grade communications network that let sergeants and captains communicate with their platoons, majors communicate with their companies, and lieutenant colonels communicate with their battalions.

As the officer in charge, I had the commandLink. I could listen in on every conversation, look through any Marine’s visor, speak to any man or unit. I vacillated on whether or not there was a God, but if he existed, he probably used something similar to a commandLink to listen in on all of his believers’ prayers.

I had two full-bird colonels working as my right-hand men, but I didn’t know their names. I had become aloof to underlings.

“General Harris, the men are ready, sir.” The man’s name appeared in my visor. Whenever anyone communicated with me over the interLink, their name, rank, and unit appeared in my visor. That didn’t mean I read it.

I wasn’t always like this, indifferent to the men around me. My last right-hand man had been an officer named Hunter Ritz alongside whom I’d fought in several battles. He’d risked his life and pulled my ass out of the fire. Ritz’s death changed me, hardening me to the men around me.

So what if I never learned this clone’s name? We were all cogs, interchangeable parts in a machine. That included me.

I didn’t worry about my Schwarzkopfs; those monsters couldn’t be killed, but the smaller, faster, weaker Targs gave me pause. I asked, “What’s going on with the Targs?”

We had three rows of them. They were as fast as jeeps and just as maneuverable, but not as easily damaged. Targs were exclusively Marine Corps property and the butt of Pernell MacAvoy’s twisted sense of humor. He constantly joked about Targs mating with Rumsfeld Tanks and giving birth to bicycles.

We had other tanks for heavy combat—LGs, Specters, and some ancient Rumsfelds, but those battle wagons didn’t fit with my strategy. I cared more about delivering blows than withstanding them once we crossed to the eastern side of the river. I wanted speed, not lumbering crushers.

Along with my commandLink, I had a communicator that connected me to Perry MacAvoy, who waited back at the base. I got on the horn, and asked, “You ready?”

He said, “I got my cock in one hand and my M27 in the other.”

“Small arms?” I asked. “Interesting strategy.”

MacAvoy, not the wittiest man I ever met, said, “Hooah!”

Marines say
Hoorah
. Soldiers say
Hooah
. Two damn syllables and they can’t even get it right.

I said, “My Marines are locked and loaded.”

MacAvoy said, “Good luck, Harris. Give a signal when you want us to make our move.”

And that was it. We exited the armory in a long column of vehicles, with the Targs and Schwarzkopfs at the front, followed by Jackals and armored personnel carriers—all driving with their lights off. All of our equipment was coated with black, heat-reflecting enamel.

Driving under streetlamps on Independence Avenue, my tanks and trucks were plain to see. I was at street level. They wouldn’t be as easily seen by satellites . . . I hoped.

We could have shut down the streetlights, but that would have given us away more surely than the streetlights.

*   *   *

Under the glow of the streetlights, our half-mile-long parade streamed past greenbelts, strip malls, and an outdoor stadium. The buildings were dark, the streets glowed white, orange, and gold. We drove down Independence to the banks of the Anacostia, but we didn’t cross the bridge. Anyone with a rocket or a demolition kit can destroy a bridge. Marines became targets when they crossed bridges. We turned right when we reached the river, then we took a short drive south, past the twin islands that sat in the middle of the river.

I watched our advance from inside a Jackal, standing in the swiveling turret mounted in the roof. I could see the cannons of my Schwarzkopfs poking over the turrets of my Targs. A herd of six-wheeled personnel carriers brought up the rear. We looked like a line of gigantic black ants. Our windshields were obsidian, our vehicles dark as onyx and as unshining as marble. Moonlight and street glow fell on my column, and my vehicles absorbed them.

The Anacostia was to my left. A galaxy of little lights sparked across that chasm, stars taking the shapes of streets and buildings. Did they know we were coming?

It was exactly 05:00. Though a small nest of officers had stayed up planning this sortie late into the night, the average Marine didn’t hear a word until we roused them from their racks and told them to suit up. Even now, they were just learning the details.

Think they know we’re coming?
I asked myself.

At one time, the Unified Authority could reprogram my clones and send them in to spy on us. I hoped there weren’t any spies in the clutch of generals who had planned this invasion. But who knew? The column slowed as we approached a public park with an open shoreline. This was the moment at which we would give ourselves away; once we entered the river, we’d be visible from miles away. I didn’t trust bridges, and tanks don’t tread water. A fleet of amphibious transports, mobile warehouses designed to convey men and material, waited for us.

The amphibious transports would hover across the river on cushions of air instead of pounding through water. They were slow, but that didn’t matter, not crossing a river that was only five hundred feet wide.

My driver knew the score without my telling him what to do. He drove to a rise from which I could observe my troops and parked. Strings of black vehicles rolled to the shore and vanished into the mouths of transports.

The Anacostia was inconvenient for us but narrow. Had the Unifieds expected our movements, they could have bombarded us from the other shore. They could have battered us with heavy artillery from miles away, but the night remained silent. And no flashes or explosions broke the darkness on the eastern side of the river.

The tanks, Jackals, and personnel carriers loaded quickly. Marines don’t leave things to chance. We drilled and drilled again, until loading onto transports became one of our favorite pastimes.

“We’re about to cross the river,” I told MacAvoy.

“If you see Tobias Andropov, give him a five-toe enema, would you? Say it’s from me,” said MacAvoy.

Tobias Andropov was a Unified Authority politician, not a soldier. He was the one who came up with abandoning the all-clone conscription, transferring the clones to man outdated battleships that the new U.A. Navy would use for target practice. Amazing how ambitious men are brought down by their own avarice. Andropov would still be in charge if he hadn’t turned on us.

I said, “Five-toe enema with your name on it; got it.”

I signed off as my driver pulled up to the last of the amphibious transports. The entrance into the gigantic hovercraft looked like open jaws. We drove up the ramp, trading the sheer darkness behind us for the red-lit interior. All of the vehicles ahead of us were exactly identical, clones, like me and my men. Looking down the row was like looking down a row in a factory; every roof was the same height and size; all the wheels evenly spaced on identical chassis, turrets, hoods, and windshields on every carrier the same as the last. Inside those trucks, every driver was the same as the last. Every man wore identical armor. Remove their armor, and they had identical faces.

The red glow of the interior lights seemed to dissolve into the flat back enamel covering the personnel carriers. Our vehicles were beyond black; they were darkness itself.

I gave the order, and the invasion began.

Unified Authority infiltrators had moved into our shores, and we wanted them out, but we didn’t want to cause too much damage along the way. The buildings, the streets, and the infrastructure were ours. We couldn’t bombard the enemy to soften their defenses without damaging property we considered our own.

Stage one: a sortie of gunships flew overhead as our amphibious transports shuffled us across the river. Using my commandLink, I patched into the visor of my lead gunship pilot and watched the proceedings from his vantage point.

Gunships are flying tanks—slow, heavily armored, carrying enough cannons and machine guns to take out a fortress. They can withstand RPG fire, but missiles, rockets, and particle-beam cannons make short work of them, and the Unifieds had plenty of rockets.

So here’s the scene, the sun started rising on the horizon. Looking through my lead pilot’s visor, I saw a molten-lava sky with clouds ablaze in orange and red as the sun started rising. The city was all silhouettes, a jumble of gaps and boxes with hardly any movement.

The pilot looked to his left, then looked to his right. To his left was a cockpit window. Beyond that was a long row of gunships, a wing, flying slightly behind him. To his right sat his weapons officer. He sat staring into a screen.

The pilot said, “Looks like we caught them sleeping.”

The gunner said, “They’re still here. I got heat signatures.”

The pilot said, “Remember, General Harris said as little damage as possible,” to which the gunner replied, “It’s a war; we’re gonna break stuff.”

And then the fighting began. The first shots fired were five rockets that streamed out of a single-story storefront, maybe a clothing shop, the contrails behind the rockets spread like the fingers of a grasping hand.

Our gunships flew approximately one hundred feet off the ground, traveling at a speed that might have seemed slow to a bicyclist.

The gunner said, “I’m going to feel real guilty about killing these bastards if that’s the best they can do.” He fired a countermeasure in the rockets’ direction. The countermeasure, an exploding canister of flak, ended the barrage in an instant, creating bright explosions that filled the viewing window in my visor as the pilot yelled in triumph.

The gunner fired a Theron rocket in response. Therons killed with heat instead of percussion. The rocket had a lutetium alloy nose that punctured stone, brick, metal, and most armor with the ease of a hypodermic needle stabbing a new recruit in the ass. The rocket struck the building and windows shattered in a spray of glass, smoke, and flame.

“Think they’re dead?” asked the pilot.

“They ain’t happy,” said the gunner.

“What if they’re wearing shielded armor?” asked the pilot.

That didn’t matter. It wasn’t the armor, it was the bodysuit that protected Marines against heat and cold, and at six hundred degrees, bodysuits failed. Theron missiles generated a flash of thirty-five hundred degrees.

My twenty-five gunships broke formation. They scattered across the sky. Looking through the lead pilot’s visor, I watched the carnage. They drifted over the city, like fish circling a reef in search of prey. They were black oblong shapes, nothing more than silhouettes, like the buildings below them.

A little more than a minute had passed when my nameless lieutenant reported, “General, we’ve reached the other side of the river.”

I answered. “Move ’em out.”

Every captain, every lieutenant, and every platoon sergeant had been briefed, and specific assignments had been uploaded into their visors. With a simple ocular command, they could access street maps and compasses. Virtual beacons marked their routes and their objectives.

The door of our transport dropped open, revealing the fiery sky.

Amphibious transports are built to operate like tunnels. You enter one side and leave through the other—first on, first off. We were the last vehicle to enter this transport, meaning we’d be the last one off. I watched the carriers ahead of us as they purred to life and loped down the ramp.

The sky was a swirl of oranges and reds, but the ground remained dark as night. Twenty vehicles ahead of me, the first transport in our column started moving. The vehicle behind it roared to life immediately.

In my Jackal, I remained in the gunner’s turret, my hands on the handles of the 60-caliber. A squeeze of my finger would release a burst of steel-jacketed rounds, four inches long, a half inch across. These bullets could split a twenty-foot tree. Line six men in front of a thick cement wall, and I could produce a half dozen corpses and a hole in that wall behind them with a single round.

The personnel carrier in front of mine began its slow march toward the ramp. A moment later, we followed. Last on; last off.

We drove through the red-lit innards of the amphibious transport, passing metal ribs, traffic-control booths, cameras, and a communications array.