by Drew Avera
“We ain’t lookin’ to take him down, Jenny,” Fuller promised. “They just want their friend back.”
Roach snuck another sidelong glance at Jenny. The older woman was chewing on her lip, making a face like they were asking her to invest money in a get-rich-quick scheme.
“The last I heard, Prizrak was in DC. Apparently, there’ve been truckloads of gear going from here in Norfolk to DC.”
“Any particular place in Washington?” Fuller prompted. “It’s a big city.”
“Apparently, if Prizrak is Robert Franklin, he has a certain flare for the dramatic.” She snorted a laugh. “He’s set up in the old White House. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. You can’t miss it.”
Svetlana Grigoryeva felt a pressure at her temples, the first sign of an impending headache. She got them infrequently, much less often than when she was younger, but they had once been nearly debilitating. Why one would be coming now, she wasn’t sure, but the noise didn’t help. Pallet jacks and dollies scraped against the floor tiles with worn treads on wheels badly in need of lubrication, and metal clone gestation tanks clanked against door frames and thumped hard against the walls as the workers pushed them through the hallways with more speed than care.
She didn’t bother to stop any of them to ask what was going on. They wouldn’t have been told. Probably Franklin’s other lieutenants wouldn’t even know, since he hadn’t told her.
Hell, he didn’t even bother to wake me up.
It was three in the morning, but she was a light sleeper even when she wasn’t fighting a headache, and the workmen were loud enough to rival a herd of rhinos in a glass factory. The walk from her quarters, which had once been some famous bedroom, which she couldn’t recall, had taken a good ten minutes, and it seemed to her she became angrier with every step. By the time she reached the lab, and Franklin, she was angry enough and her head was hurting bad enough that she was considering pulling her pistol and either using it on him or herself.
He seemed to be waiting for her, standing in the midst of the chaos like God staring out upon the face of the deep, waiting to begin creation. The lab had been disassembled, or was in the process anyway, and the techs were nowhere to be found. Guards followed the workers, sub machineguns at the ready in case anyone got a wild hair and decided to see how much the equipment might sell for on the black market.
“What the hell is going on, Robert?” she asked him from the doorway, stalking up to him nose-to-nose before he even attempted to answer. “Are we evacuating?”
“In our moment of triumph?” Franklin asked with an uncharacteristic grin. Her eyes narrowed and she tilted her head, confused. Franklin sniffed. “Sorry, classical reference. No, there’s been a problem with transportation and I’ve decided it makes more sense to gestate the duplicates closer to our area of operations.”
She was just as confused now as at his attempt at a joke.
“This was supposed to be our AO,” she reminded him. “The peace talks were to be held in DC. That was always the plan.”
“Plans change. It wasn’t my call. Both sides were concerned with the political stability and potential for violence this far east. The Americans had never been happy about holding the talks so close to a war zone and they finally pushed Secretary Popov to agree to moving them out to Colorado.”
The headache was in full force now, making the pulse pounding in her ears even more painful, and she gritted her teeth against the pain and the anger. Mostly the anger.
“And you didn’t think it was significant enough that I should have been told?”
“Nothing has changed as far as your duties,” he said, seemingly unaffected by her anger. “We won’t be leaving until closer to the conference. It’s simply transferring our resources to a more advantageous location. I didn’t think it was worth interrupting your sleep.”
She worked on her breathing, trying to calm herself down, unsure why she was this infuriated about the whole business. He was the boss, and he was free to tell her as much or as little as he chose.
“What about our prisoner?” she asked, changing her tack. “Is he going to Colorado as well?”
“Not yet. We’ve done another memory reading.” He checked his wrist computer and held up a finger, correcting himself. “We’re doing another memory reading. Kovalev assures me this one has a seventy-three percent chance of a favorable outcome, which isn’t what I’d like, but I’ll take it as an insurance policy. But I’d like to keep working on his motivation, get it closer to an ideal reading and then take that one with us to Colorado and install it when the dupes are fully gestated.”
“Isn’t that a risk?” she wondered. “We haven’t even begun the other phase of the procedure yet. I thought that was your primary motivation for bringing him here…him specifically.”
“Oh, it’s begun, all right.” Franklin practically oozed satisfaction. “The tests on the stem cells we extracted were perfect. I can begin the treatments when we arrive in our new base in Colorado.”
Anger brought more pain, which brought more anger.
“You told me you wished to save your friend as well. You had me tell him this.”
“And you will continue to do so.” Franklin’s voice and expression still seemed casual, relaxed, but there was something behind his eyes that turned the words into an order, almost a threat. “The promise of life, the idea I wish to gift him with this treatment, will go a long way towards giving him the mindset we require for a more certain memory transfer.” His eyes narrowed and he regarded her with a knowing stare. “Don’t tell me you, of all people, are upset I had you lie to him.”
“You know damned well I don’t mind lying. It’s being lied to that I find disturbing.”
“I’ve been more honest with you than I have with any of my other subordinates,” he pointed out, motioning towards the uniformed men overseeing the work, all of them former Spetsnaz. “Each of them only knows enough to do their job. Since your job involves the bigger picture, you know more, but still not everything.” He raised a hand, palm-up. “I needed this duplicate of Nathan Stout to test the procedure because he was the same generation as I am, and, more crucially, I was able to access the stored stem cell samples of his Prime.” He turned over the palm of his other hand. “I also needed an army I could sneak in under the nose of the Americans and the Russians, which meant gestating duplicates. It would be wasteful not to combine the operations into one, would it not?”
He was testing her, judging her reaction. It was the only reason he’d bother to lay everything out plainly. She’d been told most of it, of course, and was able to guess the rest, but Franklin wasn’t a man to lay his cards so plainly on the table.
“The Americans have a philosophy in their military,” she said, “of keeping their subordinate leaders informed of the plan in case they’re needed to take over in an emergency.”
He laughed, more scorn than humor.
“Teach your grandma to suck eggs, girl,” he scoffed.
Svetlana goggled at him, her mouth left half open.
“Why the hell would I want to teach anyone to suck eggs? And why would they care to learn?”
“It’s a figure of speech. It means, don’t try to teach me something I already know better than you. I was working with the U.S. military long before you were a drug-fueled twinkle in your mother’s eye.”
If he’d been looking for a reaction, she gave him one then, her lip quivering with rage, hands balling into fists. Franklin watched her carefully, taking a half-step back, the expression on his face suggesting he realized he might have gone too far.
“I’m sorry, Svetlana,” he said, and his tone actually sounded conciliatory rather than snarky. “When you’ve lived as many lives as I have, you begin to forget other people are real.” He snorted, arms crossed over his chest. “Everyone seems to blur together, the years become indistinct and one city is much like the last. Or the next.”
He turned away from her, staring through the faded paint of the walls into
another time and space.
“It’s a difficult thing living life as an immortal, but in chunks of ten or twelve years at a time. I am one hundred percent certain I am the same man as my Prime was, but I can never be sure if the people who dealt with the last version of me will accept me as the same person they knew. I began working through cutouts, never dealing with people directly from one incarnation to another. It’s something I will have to work on, assuming things go as I’ve planned.”
“And what of the man you called your friend?” she asked. “You spoke as if he were the only one you considered real, the only link to your past. Was that all to prepare me to deceive him? Do you feel nothing for him?”
“I feel pity.” Franklin shook his head. “He’s not a whole man. He lacks a lifetime’s worth of memories and it will forever haunt him. I fear to extend the life he has would only be a punishment. The best thing I could do for him is to put him out of his misery. He’s been a puppet, the latest in a long line of puppets. And yes,” he admitted, spreading his hands in guilt, “I will be creating even more, but their lives will be short, far shorter than his. They will only live long enough to do their job before eternity claims them.”
“Do you believe in the existence of a soul, Robert?”
She asked the question without consideration, without care, surprising herself with the recklessness of it. He regarded her with a look that might have been scorn.
“If you mean some ethereal spirit that inhabits us like a ghost, then no, I most certainly don’t.”
“My mother did. I haven’t thought on it since I was a girl, since I killed my first man. But if there is a soul, do you wonder if you might be fragmenting pieces off of it every time you’re reborn?”
Her gaze was hard and unyielding, beyond caring what he thought of her words.
“I wonder what’s left of yours?”
Chapter Twelve
The place had once been magnificent, Olympian, reminiscent of the most beautiful European capitals. Once. Now the façade of the chapel had crumbled, open sores weeping mud across the curved front face of the Naval Academy chapel.
It was, Anton Varlamov decided, depressing. He was glad it was too dark to see the full ugliness of what remained. America was the enemy, had been the enemy for longer than he’d been alive, but there had been respect for her traditions, her former greatness. Annapolis was, if not ancient, at least venerable. Over two centuries old, its style was classical and elegant for a military institution, and what was left reminded him of the ruins of ancient Rome.
He’d seen Rome, once, a decade ago. The ruins were still there, joined now by more recent ones, one civilization following another into the abyss. Russia was too much like that, now. Everything was falling apart.
No, not falling apart. Ripping itself to pieces, clawing out its own guts like a desperate animal.
“Mischa reports all clear from the west side,” Sgt. Namestnikov told him. “Do you want them to enter?”
Anton didn’t answer him, instead touching the control for his own throat mic.
“Go,” he ordered.
The entry team was only thirty meters away, but nearly invisible even through his night vision glasses. The moon was lost behind a morose blanket of clouds, as if even God Himself didn’t wish to gaze down upon the sins of His creation.
Even the Devil has abandoned this place. Only we remain, rats in the walls.
“Clear,” the report came in his ear. “Nothing here, not even squatters.”
“We’re coming,” he warned. “If anyone shoots at me, they’re fired.”
“You sound like an old woman,” Giorgi Lermontov scoffed. “Come on ahead, fearless leader, we will have the tea ready.”
Anton’s lip curled. Giorgi was becoming a bit too familiar, possibly. It was almost inevitable out here, so far away from the Motherland and any real military structure, but he worried it would erode team discipline. Now was not the time to address it. Perhaps if he waited a few days, neither of them would be alive to worry about it.
He switched off his night vision goggles when he reached the stairs, instead triggering the weapon’s light attached to the underside of his carbine. There was no need to be remain tactical in here. Nothing was left alive in this place to see them except rats, and the occasional cat to prey on them. And cockroaches. They lived through everything. They scurried away from the beam of the light, heading back through holes in the walls.
He tried to remember what the chapel had looked like before the east coast had fallen. He was too young to have seen it live, but he’d been shown videos and pictures while he was in training and he recalled rows of wooden pews, stained glass windows and the massive brass cylinders of pipe organs. All gone now, stripped away by looters, the pews probably burned during the winters, the metal sold for scrap by the human version of the cockroaches who’d run away from his flashlight. Bare floors and bare walls greeted the glowing arcs of the weapons’ lights of his team, a pool of stagnant water in the center of reflecting the glare back at them.
Mosquitoes floated in clouds over the room, hatched in the water deposited year after year, season after season in tiny drips through gaps in the roof. They swarmed the lights and Anton fought an urge to swat at them. There was no need. His fatigues repelled them, as did the balaclava covering his face.
“The stairs are over here,” Giorgi called from off to his right, not over the radio, his booming voice echoing off the walls like an opera singer warming up.
Anton winced at the volume despite their isolation. It was the principle of the thing, but again, he tamped it down and pushed on with the mission. If there was time, he might have to give Giorgi what he’d once heard his American counterparts refer to as “wall-to-wall counseling,” which meant slapping the man around from one wall of the barracks to the other. He hadn’t had to take that approach since he’d been a young lieutenant with his first team, but it might be necessary in this wild land.
Less had been taken from the lower level of the chapel, perhaps because of the difficulty of getting anything up the stairs and through the narrow hallways of the obvious entrances. Here there was vandalism for the sake of destruction, spray-painted graffiti left out of spite. And yet the tomb of John Paul Jones remained, as if protected by some jealous nautical deity. The crypt still rested on tiles faded and cracked, black marble columns still guarding each approach.
A chill crept up his spine at the sight, a feeling this place was haunted somehow, as if they were violating it. But it wasn’t the first haunted place he’d braved nor the holiest tomb he’d desecrated these last twenty years. He wasn’t the first. One of the walls had been knocked out and replaced, long after the looting and the vandalism and the final abandonment by even the scavengers.
A Russian engineering team had performed the task with shaped charges, ever so carefully lest they bring the roof down on top of them, then cleared out the rubble from the other side. What they had erected in its place was plain white plaster, out of place if anyone had been brave and foolish enough to intrude here. Foolish because what they’d left behind the fake wall was guarded by something more tangible than ghosts or gods of the sea. The contact mines were ingenious little devices, ubiquitous here and all throughout the world wherever Russian forces fought. They could be left behind for years, their radioisotope batteries scanning for any unauthorized tampering, ready to reward the miscreant with death or dismemberment. Unless you had a Russian military RFID chip implanted in your hand, in which case it was as harmless as a kitten.
Anton carefully yanked the last of the mines off the wall, their adhesive still stubborn after all these years, taking a layer of plaster with it. He was tempted to just toss it on the floor to demonstrate his bravado to the others, since he knew his chip had rendered it inert. But this was Russian engineering they were dealing with, so instead, he gently placed each one on the floor on the other side of the crypt.
“All right,” he nodded to Giorgi once he’d deposited t
he last one as far away from them as he could. “Bring it down.”
The NCO nodded, waving to the junior members of the team to come forward. They’d brought sledgehammers with them, looted from a hardware store twenty years ago and resold a dozen times in street markets since. One still bore the remains of a price sticker, which Anton found inexplicably amusing. Giorgi took a hammer proffered to him by one of the corporals and the three of them went at the thin, fragile plaster wall. The impacts echoed hollow and tinny in the enclosed chamber, the sounds growing deeper as the wall came down. The space behind the façade was utter blackness, impenetrable shadows behind clouds of plaster dust that diffused the glow of the flashlights.
It was long seconds after the wall was down before the dust began to settle and the light began to make its way through to what lay beneath. Humanoid shapes, ten meters tall, nearly scraping the ceiling despite the fact parts of it had been pulled down to make room for them. The Tagans were painted in brown and green camouflage, bristling with weapons and weighted down with a ton of armor, their isotope power plants still burning hot even after what had to have been three years concealed here beneath the chapel. There were six of them, which would have to be enough.
Anton stepped up to the closest of them, running a hand down the barrel of the chain gun hanging down from its right arm. They didn’t often use mechs. The supply train back to mother Russia was far too long to depend on the machines for anything more than special missions or raids, unless they happened to be near a supply depot set up far in advance. But he surely appreciated the firepower and mobility the mechs offered, and just having them available seemed to give him a feeling of invulnerability.
Have to watch that. You can die just as easily in one of these things as out of it.
Beyond the half-dozen mechs were a few cases of spare ammo, which he would have loaded into the truck just to be thorough, but didn’t expect to have the chance to use. Once they made their incursion and accomplished the mission, the Tagans would be left behind. Beyond the ammo was another wall, this one blocking the way to an exterior entrance and much sturdier than the plaster barrier they’d broken through to get in.
