The Clone Apocalypse (6 page)

“General, I can call for a platoon to clear the alley,” one of my rescuers offered.

Now that we had entered the building, we had few options. We couldn’t leave through the front door; that would take us back toward the fire. There might have been a back door, but the fighting in that area had gone hot. Sitting out the fight was not in my Liberator DNA.

I trotted down a hallway. There were no lights. I didn’t know if we had cut the power or the Unifieds had unplugged the building when they set off their fire bomb. Enough morning sunlight floated in through the shattered front window for my visor to switch from night-for-day lenses to tactical. I saw shadows. I would have seen colors, too, had the building not had a black floor and white walls.

We had entered a four-story brownstone with a winding wooden staircase, two flights to every floor. Our plasticized armor clattered as we climbed the stairs.

I ran up the first flight, paused, searched the landing above me using heat vision, and saw no threats. The front window opened to the intersection in which the Unifieds had unleashed their napalm. Below me, I saw a nightmare landscape in which the hulls of Jackals and Targs lay still in a fire- and ash-colored mire. The entire scene looked like a mirage because of the ripples of heat rising above it.

I took in the view as my team passed my position. Distracted as I was, I had secured the first landing. The next man secured the second floor as our third man secured the next landing up. We encountered no resistance and found ourselves trapped.

I had never lived in a civilian tenement. None of us had. I expected the stairs to lead to the roof. They led to the top floor, and there they stopped.

“Now what?” asked one of my men.

“Got a can opener?” asked another.

The hall led to the back of the building. I sprinted in that direction, my men close behind me. I wanted to get back to the fight. I wanted . . . I wanted . . . I didn’t want my combat reflex to end.

My boots slid as I ran on the black marble tile. Using heat vision, I searched the rooms as I passed. I saw a man holding a gun, a pistol. My finger tensed on the trigger and prepared to break into his apartment, then my thoughts overtook my instincts. If he was holding a pistol, he wasn’t wearing shielded combat armor.

“There’s someone in there,” one of my men said.

“Leave him,” I said.

“What if . . .”

“You heard me.”

Despite what I had told my men, I decided that I would shoot the bastard if he stepped out of his doorway.

I glanced back to make sure he didn’t step out behind us, and there he stood, a fat, unkempt man in need of a shave and fresh laundry. He looked at my M27 and dropped his pistol.

I said, “Return to your apartment, sir.”

He wasted a moment staring into my visor, more likely at his own reflection than my eyes, then he stepped back and locked his door.

He’d been a civilian, one stupid enough to try to choose sides. Still, he’d live another day. Using heat vision, I watched his orange silhouette through the door as he stumbled into the bathroom and retched into the toilet.

We found a fire escape outside the back window. Had we been Unifieds, we wouldn’t have been able to climb the ladder, not with our shields up and disintegrating or repulsing everything but the ground.

A ten-foot climb, easy enough. The ladder ran along the back of the building. Looking down, I saw the little mound of bricks that had fallen on the quartet of U.A. Marines. Under different circumstances, I might have scanned the pile with heat vision to see if they were still down there, but the battle had continued on autopilot, and I didn’t want to spend an extra moment hanging from a fourth-story ladder with my ass in the air.

The battle had become messy.

Speeding around tight corners and through narrow alleys, some of our vehicles had collided. Targs may be light and small compared to other tanks, but they bash past Jackals the way bowling balls bash past pins.

Most of the buildings around us were of the three-story variety, allowing me to see the next street over. I saw a Jackal, still on all fours, that had crashed into a building. The windshield had shattered, but I thought the wheels might still turn.

Using ocular commands, I set up a direct Link with one of my aides, and asked, “What’s the report?”

“They’re in full retreat, sir.”

“Which direction are they going?” I asked. Watson’s address had been directly east of us. If the Unifieds caught them leaving his apartment, we’d have a significant problem.

“Backing up, sir,” said the colonel.

“East?” I asked.

“Yes, sir,” he said, sounding confused. He didn’t know about the extraction. As I said before, the Unified Authority had landed spies in our midst; I only revealed the final objective of this mission on a need-to-know basis. The Marines fighting and dying in these streets didn’t need to know about Watson.

Did that make me indifferent to my men?

“Yes, sir. They’re retreating eas—”

I cut him off so I could warn the extraction team.

I said, “MacAvoy.”

“There you are,” he said. “I’ve been trying to catch your sorry jarhead ass for the last thirty minutes.”

“The Unifieds are retreating toward your extraction team,” I said.

“Let ’em,” said MacAvoy. “I got my men out of there half an hour ago. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. We found Watson, Hughes, and Tasman. Speck, man, we even found a spare.”

“They’re safe?” I asked.

He sounded so at ease as he said, “Out of harm’s way and inhaling sandwiches in my officers’ mess.”

SIX

Date: August 18, 2519

The battle raged on after I left, lasting six hours in total. Two hours after MacAvoy’s commandos returned with Watson, Emily Hughes, Howard Tasman, and the unspecified guest, my infantry rolled onto Minnesota Avenue. We’d captured the eastern shore of the Anacostia.

I couldn’t take credit for taking that land. We’d beaten the Unifieds because they didn’t have anything in the way of artillery. They’d smuggled men into the capital using the Potomac, but when they’d tried to airlift their big guns, they’d run into a roadblock named Pernell MacAvoy. He’d kept them on the run, backed them into corners, and ultimately chased them into Maryland.

MacAvoy bullied subordinates, allowed his mind to drift during high-level briefings, and had the intelligence of a rabid bulldog, but I admired him. While other generals nibbled at the edges of big battles, MacAvoy marched his forces straight ahead. I’d always been taught to reserve my best punch for the end of the fight. MacAvoy started out throwing hooks and uppercuts. He didn’t deal in subtleties, just in knockouts.

I sat in my office in the Linear Committee Building, the modern equivalent of the building the ancient Americans referred to as their “White House.” Some early American monuments still stood, and the city retained its original layout, but as the government had changed, so did the buildings that housed it. When the Linear Committee replaced the presidency, the two-story White House was replaced by a ten-story marble mausoleum.

Like the Unified Authority, the Enlisted Man’s Empire retained Washington, D.C., as its seat of power after capturing Earth. After a few necessary personnel changes, we allowed the U.A. Congress to continue business as usual. Some of the old bastards complained about “playing a meaningless role in our puppet show,” but they accepted their paychecks just the same.

The Linear Committee, on the other hand—that was another story. The Committee had been the executive branch of the Unified Authority government. Through most of Unified Authority history, the Linear Committee had been a stabilizing force. That ended when that toxic spider Andropov became the last chairman of the Linear Committee.

As the Unifieds had destroyed the Pentagon during their last big attack, I made the LCB our new capitol and strategic building. MacAvoy now occupied an entire floor of the building. So did General Strait. Admiral Hauser preferred to conduct his business from space.

The office I had inherited from Andropov was thirty-five feet long and twenty-nine feet wide. I sat behind the same desk Andropov had once used. It was an antique, over six hundred years old, and made from the timbers of an ancient sailing ship. It had drawers which I kept empty, a computer that I seldom touched, and landlocked communications gear originally designed to reach the farthest corners of the galaxy.

On this occasion, though, I thought maybe I saw a reprieve in my near future. Now that Travis Watson was back, I planned to make him the man in charge. He was a civilian, which made him better suited for the rigors of leading civilians than me. He could pass laws; I only knew how to give orders.

My aide opened the door. I expected MacAvoy to enter first, but a woman dashed in before him. She zipped around my desk and wrapped her arms around my neck as I stood to greet her. When MacAvoy warned me that he had rescued a “spare,” I thought he meant Kevin Rhodes.

Sunny Ferris, who’d been my fiancée as recently as a month ago, pressed her mouth against mine. A lot had changed during that last month, but she hadn’t been around to hear about it. As far as she knew, I still loved her.

She pressed her mouth so hard against mine that our teeth ground together. She kissed me and then kissed me again. Seemingly oblivious that other people had entered the room, she rolled her tongue over mine, and suddenly I needed to sit before the other guests noticed my reaction. She’d had that effect on me since the first time I’d seen her.

Sunny was beautiful, and she’d always given herself freely, but some quality about her disturbed me. Even now, physically aroused, I both wanted her and wanted to get away from her.

Dressed in fatigues and chomping his cigar, Lieutenant General Pernell M. MacAvoy let his lips slip into an ironic smile as he watched Sunny step away from me. He saluted, and said, “Specking hooah, Marine. We saved your boy, took back half of their land, and got your wench back. Not a bad day’s work.”

With my excitement safely hidden behind my desk, I returned his salute, and said, “Hoorah, Soldier.”

Travis Watson and Emily Hughes had also entered my office. Watson looked starved and tired. Last time I saw him, he’d had the tan and the physique of a gym rat. Both had deserted him. Now he looked like a man who barely survived between meals.

Emily had thinned as well, but nothing that a week in a resort couldn’t fix. Good food, rest on a decent bed, and a little exercise would set her right. Watson’s eyes had gone dull; she still had fire in her big blues.

Howard Tasman had also rolled into the room. Emily looked pale and ragged, Watson needed medical attention, but Tasman looked worse than either of them with his gray teeth, red-rimmed eyes, and colorless skin—and that was his normal appearance. The absence of food and sun hadn’t helped or marred his visage.

I had enough chairs to fill a classroom in my office. MacAvoy, the only guest who had seen my new digs, pulled a chair from along the wall and sat beside my desk. Watson trudged to the wall to fetch seats for Emily and Sunny, then took one more for himself. Happy in his wheelchair, Tasman remained in place.

Watson placed his chair so it touched Emily’s. Sunny and Tasman sat on either side of them, both giving themselves lots of room. I noticed the way Tasman stole glances at Sunny from the corner of his eye, the horny old shit.

“Your plan went like clockwork,” said MacAvoy. “There wasn’t a Uny to be seen, every last one of the mother-specking bastards was busy shooting at you.”

“No trouble at all?” I asked.

“Not a hiccup,” said MacAvoy. “We could have sent chauffeured limousines instead of personnel carriers.”

Watson and Emily showed no interest in joining the conversation. They sat slump-backed in their seats, looking anemic and saying nothing. If humans could achieve osmosis, they would have sucked the adrenaline and iron right out of my bloodstream.

Tasman looked more distracted than anything else. Though he tried to hide it, the old bastard kept glancing over at Sunny. I didn’t blame him though I resented him; Sunny was beautiful beyond reason. Her eyes were this deep-water blue that reminded me of a pool in a desert oasis. She had the silkiest brown hair. It was lustrous, like mink fur. Apparently, she’d taken better care of herself than Watson or Emily; she sat spryly in her chair with the energy of a blushing teen debutante. She was a Harvard-trained lawyer, but the last few weeks seemed to have leeched the upper-crust starch out of her.

She’d disappeared shortly after Watson and Tasman. During the brief period when MacAvoy’s men struggled to equalize their surge on D.C., the U.A. Marines captured the area around her apartment building. By the time we reclaimed the territory, she was already gone. My relationship with Sunny had been based on sexual attraction, maybe
sexual neediness
.

There was something about her, just the sight of her fired up every sexual synapse in my head, but I didn’t like her. I didn’t like talking to her. I didn’t like the way she interacted with my friends. She looked down on them and probably me as well.

MacAvoy nodded toward Sunny, and said, “We found her on their way out. She saw the convoy and came running.”

“What about Rhodes?” I asked.

“He’s safe,” said MacAvoy.

“In the brig?” I asked.

“This is the Army, General; we don’t place criminals in brigs, we place them in prisons.”

“In a cell?” I asked, purposely not adopting his jargon.

“We have him on a cage,” said MacAvoy.

“On a cage” meant on an incapacitation cage, which looked more like an operating table than a cage. Rhodes was lying paralyzed on a table with two filaments surgically implanted in his neck. The filaments conducted a light charge of electricity into his spinal cord. The electricity wouldn’t cause him any pain, but it would leave his body limp as wet laundry.

Placing him on a cage had been a good idea. If Kevin Rhodes was like other operatives in his field, he’d probably try to commit suicide before we could question him if we left him in a jail cell.

I looked at Watson, and asked, “Have you seen a doctor?”

He didn’t answer. He wasn’t catatonic, more lethargic. At first he seemed not to hear me. He stared at me. A moment passed, and he shook his head and seemed to wake from his daydream. He said, “Sorry, Harris, what did you say?”

I repeated, “Have you seen a doctor?”

“I’m sending them to a hospital as soon as we leave,” said MacAvoy.

“Maybe you should put them up in a hotel,” I suggested. “A comfortable bed and good food could be all they need.”

Emily said, “We had a bed where we were.”

Sunny said, “General MacAvoy says you demolished my apartment building.”

“Yeah? Did he mention that it was his men who fired the shells?” I asked. When I learned Unified Authority commandos had captured the area, I had entered the building to look for Sunny and kicked the proverbial hornets’ nest. MacAvoy’s soldiers shelled the building when they came to fish me out.

She looked at MacAvoy, and said, “No. He left that part out.”

MacAvoy laughed, a grinding and evil laugh. He leaned back and saluted me with his cigar.

They presented such an interesting study, these four refugees. Sunny still had energy and a sense of humor. The Unifieds hadn’t been looking for her.

But even though Tasman had been trapped in the same building as Watson and Emily, the decrepit old bastard had almost as much energy as Sunny.

Watson and Emily acted like zombies. When MacAvoy said, “Perhaps we should get Travis and his wife to a doctor,” they didn’t stir.

I said, “They aren’t married.” They had only met a few months ago. Until meeting Emily, Watson had prided himself on overexercising his libido. From what I knew of her, Emily Hughes had lived a similar existence. They were well suited.

“Yeah. I know,” MacAvoy said. “I just wanted to see if they were listening.”

They still gazed into nowhere, completely oblivious of anything happening around them.

I said, “It doesn’t appear that they heard you.”

Watson hadn’t sounded so good when he called. Since then, he’d only gotten worse.

Raising my voice to a drill-sergeant pitch, I said, “Travis.”

He snapped out of his trance and turned toward me.

I said, “I’m sending you and Emily up to Bethesda.”

Watson should have recognized the name, Bethesda; it was close enough to have been a prowling ground back in his bachelor days. He frowned, and asked, “Why are you sending us there?”

“Walter Reed,” I said. When the confusion didn’t clear from his expression, I said, “Walter Reed Center; it’s a military hospital. I’m sending you to get examined. You know, maybe they can jump-start your brain cells.”

Unlike Watson, Emily seemed to follow the conversation. She patted him on the hand, and said, “Walter Reed, isn’t that the place you used to call the ‘Harris Hotel’?”

Over the last year, I had spent time in that facility. Watson, who didn’t approve of my Marines/pseudo-political lifestyle, made all sorts of quips about my injuries. Waking from his daze, he said, “Oh, right, the hospital.”

MacAvoy absorbed what they both had said, then roared. He nearly laughed himself into convulsions. “Harris Hotel? Oh, that’s specking excellent! Maybe they should rename their ambulances ‘Wayson Wagons’!”

“Get specked,” I said.

Sunny got a kick out of the name as well. She stifled a giggle, and said, “Travis, that’s so funny!”

Sunny had a strained relationship with Travis, and Emily openly hated her. We’d invited them over to her apartment several times. More often than not, they declined our invitations.

Truth was, my feelings toward her vacillated. Seeing her now, I wondered what could ever have led me to want to leave her. In the quiet times, there was something about her, something vague and unpleasant. She’d say things, nasty barbs that seemed to come out of nowhere. Sometimes her words and tone contradicted one another, her words were warm, while her voice was frigid. Sometimes she seemed completely unaware of offending people, while other times, she clearly relished their discomfort.

Maybe it was her upbringing. She’d come from money, but so had Emily, and Emily never made me feel uncomfortable.

“Sunny, maybe you should go with them,” I said. Emily turned and shot me an icicle glare.

Sunny either didn’t notice Emily’s reaction or didn’t care. She said, “Wayson, I’m fine. I don’t need to go to see a doctor.” With those blue eyes, those deep-water-blue eyes, she had the most expressive face. Her forehead wrinkled, and her eyebrows curved up in a pleading way.

I said, “All four of you should go for a checkup, just to be safe.”

Sunny smiled, laughed, placed her warm hand on mine, and said, “Don’t worry about me.”

Tasman spoke up. He said, “I don’t need a doctor. I know my physical condition.” He did. That wheelchair of his gave him a continuous physical examination. One look at the panel on his right armrest would reveal his blood pressure, his pulse, his temperature, his heart rate, and a dozen other readings.

MacAvoy told Sunny, “Tell you what, sweetheart, why don’t you give your boyfriend and me a moment. I need to chat with him, you know, general-type stuff.”

Sunny’s eyes narrowed. Without speaking a word, she glared at MacAvoy and pled with me. That face . . . that beautiful, perfect, expressive face.

When I said, “Why don’t you give us a moment?” she frowned, then nodded and left the room with Watson and Emily.

Seeing the anger in her expression, MacAvoy said, “I know who gives the orders in your house.”

I said, “She’ll be fine.”

Tasman stayed put. I stared down at the old prick, and said, “You looking for something?”