The Clone Assassin (32 page)

“I need to know about someone who lives in that building,” I said, repeating the question that MacAvoy had ignored earlier. I pointed to Sunny’s building, and asked, “Is there some way to check?”

MacAvoy listened to me, thought about it, and yelled, “Yes.” He didn’t like my asking for favors, and that was exactly what I was doing, asking for a personal favor, but I didn’t care. I didn’t love Sunny, but I felt like maybe I owed her something. We’d shared moments, and I betrayed her. Betrayal is something we took seriously in the Marines.

Yelling to be heard above the rotors, I said, “The name is Sunny Ferris . . . Sunny spelled S-U-N-N-Y. That’s with a ‘U’ as in ‘uniform.’ Ferris . . . F-E-R-R-I-S.”

MacAvoy stared at me, his face implacable. Had I made him angry with my request? Had I shown weakness? Check that, I knew that I had. He stared at me, muttered something, but didn’t react.

Feeling like I had just made a fool of myself, I didn’t ask if he’d heard me. I sat there, worrying about Sunny, but it wasn’t Sunny I imagined as I studied the building on the edge of the war zone: It was Ava Gardner, Ava, who might have been my one true love or might have been the furthest thing from it.

The last time I’d seen Ava, she was lying on a bed, in an apartment, in a luxury condominium, on a planet called Providence Kri. We were evacuating the planet, but she begged me to leave her behind. She had given up. She no longer cared if she lived or died.

No, once again I was lying to myself. She cared. By that time, she’d seen so much death that life no longer mattered to her. She wanted to die. I kissed her one last time and said she could stay and die if she liked. She thanked me as I left. A few days later, the aliens incinerated the planet.

What if Sunny was still in that apartment building? What if she had missed the evacuation? Stupid as it sounded, even to me, I thought maybe I could make things right with Ava by rescuing Sunny.

At the moment, though, the gunship continued flying in the wrong direction. We cut through a splendid late-summer sky, hovering below lazy clouds and above a battered stretch of city.

Another trio of fighters screamed past us in silence. When the thunder of their engines finally caught up, it drowned out the noise of the rotors. I felt the vibrations of their wake, but it no longer bothered me.

“Harris, she’s not in our records,” said MacAvoy.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” said MacAvoy. “She could have been on vacation somewhere when we evacuated the area or she may have stayed in the building. Sometimes people refused to leave.

“At any rate, she’s not in our records. We didn’t move her.”

I looked back at Sunny’s building. I needed to go there. I needed . . .

MacAvoy interrupted my thoughts. He shouted, “There, Harris, ahead at ten o’clock.”

A column of maybe as many as fifty U.A. Marines moved through an alley between a couple of three-story buildings. They saw us coming. As they moved through the shadows, they switched on their shields. In the daylight and shadows, I noticed the change in color more than the glow of the shields. Their dark green armor turned brown under the orange glow of the shields.

Our pilot fired two rockets at the Unifieds as they raced between the buildings and out to the street. It was a world in reverse, this war with the Unifieds. Normally, soldiers ran for cover in battle; these bastards had to run away from it.

One of the buildings came down on the last third of the platoon burying ten or fifteen men. The bastards would have fired back at us, but the only weapons they could carry once their shields went up were the fléchette cannons attached to their sleeves. They might have been carrying rockets, but they would have dumped them in the alley before switching on their shields.

“Damn fine shooting,” MacAvoy said as he patted the pilot on his shoulder.

The Unifieds didn’t bother firing fléchettes at us; we were a couple hundred yards up and a quarter of a mile away. Their fléchette cannons didn’t hit shit after a few hundred feet, but men in shielded armor can afford to fight up close and personal.

I’d been trained for shoulder-fired rockets; they’re big, five or six times the size of an RPG and several times more powerful, and they weigh nearly thirty pounds. The bastards had fired two at us today, and we hadn’t been in the air for thirty minutes. How could they have smuggled so many rockets into town?

“You got any idea how many of those rockets they have?” I asked MacAvoy.

Hauser, looking nervous now that the rockets were in play, sat quietly watching us. War takes on a different meaning when you find yourself in the center of it.

My question clearly irritated MacAvoy. He asked, “How the speck would I know that?”

“They’ve fired two at us so far,” I said.

MacAvoy said, “Yeah, we call that ‘smooth sailing’ around here. Normally we’d have seen six or seven by now. They have hundreds of ’em.”

“Hundreds?” I asked.

He thought about it, and said, “Thousands.”

“Do they seem to be running out?” I asked.

MacAvoy shook his head, and said, “Maybe. They’ve only shot two at us so far; maybe things are looking up.”

Hauser, listening to us, exhaled sharply, making a dismissive-sounding, fruffing noise. He rolled his eyes, then went back to staring out at the ground.

I thought about the situation. Those rockets were heavy, they weren’t waterproof, and they were clumsy to carry. You couldn’t swim with them, not even if you had the SCUBA rigs the bastards who tried to kill me were wearing.

The Unifieds killed Don Cutter, attacked the prison, and tried to blow up the Pentagon all at the exact same moment, a coordinated strike. A lot of planning goes into that kind of staged assault. The brains behind these assaults wouldn’t make meticulous plans for one attack only to launch the next haphazardly. That wouldn’t make sense.

Say the Unifieds started smuggling rockets and armor into the city weeks or months ago, a luxury apartment building like Sunny’s would make an excellent munitions dump. It was big, protected by a civilian presence, and it had a transient population. People moved in, bringing their possessions in moving trucks that no one inspected. Stuff a dozen large apartments with rockets, and you’d have enough inventory to fight a fourth world war.

With MacAvoy flattening buildings in their part of town, hiding their armory in a neutral zone would make sense. I thought about Sunny’s building. Her neighbors were lawyers and senators and wealthy people, people with influence. Hell, MacAvoy had just complained that he couldn’t just relocate them; he’d had to place them in nicer billets.

No one in their right mind would search a building with such influential residents; you’d end your career.

We toured the front line from four hundred feet up, flying over empty streets and an abandoned waterfront. A few days ago, this area had been as elegant as any riverfront property on Earth. The pilot took us inland, flying over the Capitol; the Mall, with its museums and monuments; and rows of empty government office buildings.

No one had done any shooting around the Mall, not on our side or theirs. Talk about an abandoned city, Capitol Hill looked like it had been cleared using a neutron bomb.

I asked MacAvoy, “Remember that building I asked about when we were flying in?”

He said, “Yeah, the one you kept staring at. You have some scrub stashed in there or something? Was that the girl you asked about?”

When I didn’t answer, MacAvoy realized he had lit off a nerve and went silent.

“Can you drop me there?” I asked.

“Harris, if you’re pining over some gal, I’ll send you a battalion.”

Hauser, who hadn’t said more than a word or two the entire hour, chose this moment to speak up. He waved a hand, and said, “Don’t bother, General. Haven’t you heard about Harris? He can’t get his heart started in the morning without people shooting at him.”

“I heard you got shot a few weeks ago,” said MacAvoy. “Isn’t that why you went missing? You got gutshot?”

He was right, and I hadn’t fully recovered yet. I had a habit of pushing myself too far too quickly. Hauser was right as well; my M.O. included visiting front lines.

“Don’t worry about that. That was last week,” said Hauser. “This week, he’s storming underground caverns . . .”

“It was a mine shaft,” I said.

“. . . running one-man missions behind enemy lines . . .”

“Unless I am mistaken, the general just told us it was on our side of the fence.”

“. . . and you just mentioned the Cousteau undersea cities; are you planning on swimming down to the underwater cities as well?”

Visiting a Cousteau city was exactly what I planned to do though I wasn’t about to admit it. I wouldn’t actually swim down—no one could—but I planned to pay the Unifieds a visit.

And then some of the pieces of the puzzle collided together in my head. I had been abducted by the Unifieds on Mars. They captured me and my entire battalion. That much was known. We also knew that they tried to reprogram me. The scientists who designed the Liberators didn’t give us all of the neural switches they placed in the later models, so the Unifieds settled on brainwashing me instead. They managed to reprogram the rest of my men, though. They all converted to the other side.

And they changed sides at the worst possible time, right as the Unifieds launched an attack on Mars Spaceport. I suppose that was how the Unifieds had planned it.

After we won the battle, we searched the spaceport and Mars Air Force Base, looking for the labs in which the reprogramming had been done. We found nothing. It was as if the entire episode had been a dream.

It hadn’t been, though. When I returned to Earth, I had the ability to commit suicide, something that had originally been programmed out of me. Something else, I had a new phobia—a fear of the ocean. The very thought of traveling down to the Cousteau project had me terrified, with a deep-seated, paralyzing fear. When I looked into the dark blue water, I imagined giant squid and alien fish with sharp teeth and lantern scales. I imagined the fish at the bottom of the deepest trenches. I imagined the creatures that might live around an underwater city.

What if my indoctrination didn’t take place on Mars?
I asked myself. Just because they’d captured us on Mars didn’t mean we’d stayed there. That would explain why we never found the lab. Maybe my newfound fear of swimming didn’t have anything to do with reprogramming; maybe it was an accidental by-product of being trapped at the bottom of the sea.

I saw no reason to discuss my “suicide fetish.” That was what the late Admiral Cutter had called it, a “suicide fetish.” He might well have mentioned it to Hauser.

Ignoring Hauser, I asked, “Can you get me to the building?”

MacAvoy shrugged his shoulders, and said, “No problem. We can get you there. Maybe we can rustle up a box of chocolates and a bottle of wine. Could come in handy.”

I chose to ignore that comment as well.

Hauser said, “At least call in if you need help.”

I said, “That’d work great if I had a phone.”

Hauser wasn’t carrying anything, and neither was MacAvoy. You don’t generally carry telephones or personal communications equipment when you survey the battlefield. Usually, the communications console in your bird is enough.

I said, “Look, General, give me an hour. If you don’t hear from me, send in your troops.”

 • • • 

Head four blocks east from Sunny’s front door and you’d find yourself standing in a Unified Authority barracks building. Four specking blocks. I know this because MacAvoy pointed it out as we flew by. At least his men wouldn’t have far to travel if they came to get me.

As we neared Sunny’s building, I handed out assignments. I told Tom Hauser to find a map showing the Cousteau underwater cities. I wanted precise locations and a means for reaching them.

He said, “I hope you don’t mean submarines. The Navy hasn’t had a submarine fleet for three hundred years.”

“The Unifieds are coming and going,” I pointed out.

“Mais oui,”
he said.

“May we? May we what?” I asked.

“
Mais oui
—it’s a French term. It means that the Unifieds have probably recovered the boats the French used to build those cities and we’re out of luck.”

“You speak French?” asked MacAvoy.

“I speak some French,” Hauser corrected. He added, “Just like you speak some English.” At least, it looked as if that was what he’d said. I couldn’t be sure; he spoke softly enough that the sound of the engine drowned out his voice.

MacAvoy didn’t notice him mumbling or didn’t care. He asked, “Nobody speaks French anymore. Why do you want to learn a language that nobody speaks?”

Hauser answered with a knowing grin. I knew what he was thinking, though. He was thinking that languages were a hobby of intellectuals, something that Neanderthals like MacAvoy could never understand. He probably lumped me in with MacAvoy, the bastard.

Sounding colder and more commanding, I said, “Figure something out and figure it out fast; we need to know how they reach those cities and how we can reach them.”

“So you do plan on going down?” asked Hauser.

“I didn’t say that.”

“Do you plan on going down yourself or sending men?”

“I’m not sure. Are you headed up to the
Churchill
after this?”

He nodded.

I said, “Find out what you can. Once I’m done down here, I’ll take a transport up so we can strategize.”

I turned to MacAvoy and gave him his orders. I said, “Ray Freeman was running a recon op on a city in the mountains in the New Olympian Territories when the trouble started. I’m not sure what he stirred up, but it brought the Unifieds out of hiding.”

“Are you ordering me to open a second front?” asked MacAvoy.

I could generally spot it when officers were afraid or unhappy about the orders I gave. Their voices betrayed them. If the idea of starting a second war bothered Pernell MacAvoy, he did a masterful job of camouflaging it.

We were nearly to Sunny’s now. There had been very little fighting in this part of town and very little damage. The buildings around Sunny’s condominium had survived the fighting and evacuation unbroken. Most of them stood ankle high beside the behemoth in which she lived.

“That depends what kind of reception the locals give you,” I said. The Unifieds upped the ante the last two times I visited.”

MacAvoy smiled, and said, “Maybe they’ll raise it again.”

He liked to fight, that clone.

Not wanting to telegraph my plans to the enemy, I had the gunship touch down three blocks east of the apartment building. She dropped to a few feet off the ground, and I sprang out.

I hadn’t bothered forming a plan. I had entered a demilitarized zone; the Unifieds would shoot any of ours they caught strolling this close to their border, and we would gladly shoot theirs.

As I watched the gunship’s ponderous ascent into the skyline, I realized the fallacy of the stalemate. They would shoot any of our soldiers they spotted and we would shoot any of theirs, but how would we recognize theirs? They were only sending natural-born troops into our territory. How could we identify them? Natural-borns came in all shapes and sizes.

We were clones; in uniform or out, they could recognize us. Even me. I was a different make—taller and meaner, but I had the same face, the same hair, the same complexion. I gave in to impulses far too quickly. Had I thought about it, I would at least have changed out of uniform. Dropping into demilitarized territory wearing my Charlie service uniform . . . why not paint a target on my back and enter with a marching band?

The street was empty. When MacAvoy said his men had evacuated the area, he wasn’t joking. From what I could see, they’d done a good job of it. I cleaved to the shadows and awnings as I traversed that first block. At six-foot-three and wearing Marine khakis, I made an easy target. Had there been people around, I could have tried to blend in with the herd. In this no-man’s-land, there was no camouflage to be found.

I reached the street, looked both ways, and dashed across. There were cars parked on both sides of the road, mostly expensive ones. Sunny came from a wealthy family and was a lawyer, albeit a fairly young lawyer. Judging by the stories she told me, young lawyers served their time in ignominy, doing legwork for lazy partners, bottom-feeding on lousy cases that no experienced lawyer would take.

The next block was one of those downtown shopping malls, an open-air arcade along which all of the buildings had matching façades. I passed an expensive-looking dress shop, maybe one that Sunny frequented.

The two three-story buildings ahead of me were identical twins, with black granite exteriors and tinted-glass windows. The slate-tiled courtyard that separated the twins was lined with benches and picnic tables. The stores were closed and dark and silent: a gourmet coffee shop, a high-priced sandwich shop, a jewelry store, a shoe store for men.

I paused at the next corner to make sure no one would see me, checked both ways in search of guards and loiterers, then trotted across the street.

Sunny’s apartment building filled an entire block, tall and sparkling with silver sides and acres of glass. It jutted out of the ground straight and narrow, a giant sword stabbing out of the earth and into the sky.

I approached the front doors of the building, and they slid open automatically. I hadn’t expected that though I didn’t know why.

Entering the lobby, I spotted two men. They were natural-born and wearing civilian clothing. They might have been Unified Authority Marines or they might have been residents. They could have been both. But if MacAvoy was right, and this building had been evacuated, there was little chance that anyone I saw would be friendly.

Unifieds, sympathizers, or civilians, they were startled by my sudden appearance. They stared at me. One, an older man with patches of white in his hair, looked confused to see me. The other, a boy in his twenties, reached into his jacket for what could have been a gun, a phone, a wallet, or a key.

I didn’t have a gun, or I would have pulled it. Instead, I sprinted across the lobby and caught the boy as he brought out his hand. He had a pistol. It was not an S9. In fact, I didn’t recognize the make. I caught his hand as he brought it out of his coat, and forced the gun free.

The old one tried to slip behind me as the young one took a swing at me with his free hand. Using his right arm like a lever, I pivoted, playing my weight and momentum to force my attacker forward, then drove him face-first into the old guy. They crashed into each other with an
oof
and a
clunk
, and I grabbed the young guy by the hair and slammed his forehead into the bridge of the old guy’s nose, following up with a knee to the small of the young guy’s back, incapacitating him, then I backhanded him across the nape of his neck as he went down.

The old guy might have wanted to jump to action when I first started wrestling his partner, but seeing his pal collapse, he panicked, and I finished him with a slash across the throat.

I hid the stiffs behind the security desk, made sure they’d stay dead, then fleeced them of anything useful. I found a gun on the old guy as well. They both had elevator keys. I checked their wallets. They had credit cards and civilian IDs.

I took the young guy’s jacket. He was shorter than me, and the sleeves of the jacket barely reached my wrists. The jacket concealed my khaki uniform, though, and that was enough. I took their keys and their guns.

Somewhere along the line, my combat reflex had begun, and suddenly Sunny became less important than reconnoitering the premises. EME intelligence had no method for identifying Unified Authority Marines. They could move through our territory unrecognized. We were a clone minority in a natural-born world.

I adjusted the jacket as best I could, then walked to the security door and found it open . . . completely open. Somebody had removed the door from its frame. That somebody might have been one of MacAvoy’s soldiers, by the way. They would have removed security doors and any other obstacles that slowed down the evacuation.

I walked through.

I could have taken the stairs, but I chose the elevator on the off chance that someone might see me. Residents ride elevators, criminals take stairs. I didn’t want to attract any unwanted attention, so I rode the elevator up to the third floor and had a look around. The lights were off, the hall was silent. I stepped out and walked the floor from end to end without seeing people. I thought about forcing the doors of a couple of condos but decided against it.

So far, the building was as advertised, abandoned. Yes, I had run into a couple of gun-toting assholes in the lobby, but they might have come to explore, just as I had. I didn’t really believe they were random assholes, not for a moment. This was a combat zone, and looters generally prefer to travel in locales where they are less likely to be caught. Until I found confirmation one way or another, I would assume they were Unifieds.