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.
I looked up into the sky, then down into the shadows. Some of my officers might have wanted to contact me, but I had closed my commandLink to them. They had their orders.
Our tires squealed as we hit the bottom of the ramp, and my driver accelerated. Standing in the turret, I fell back against the wall, then tightened my grip on the handles and pulled myself back toward the gun.
The gunfire had already begun. In the distant darkness, muzzle fire glittered and vanished like sparks from a grinding wheel. I heard the growl of the Jackal’s engine through my armor; these vehicles were louder on the inside than the outside.
First came the gunships, then the Targs and Schwarzkopfs followed. These wagons didn’t lumber like dinosaurs, they scurried like spiders, maneuvering perfectly well at speeds of over seventy miles per hour.
As we drove ahead, two more Jackals joined us, making us the middle car in a trio, speeding down a midtown avenue in a canyon of five- and six-story buildings. Shapes in the windows in some of the buildings glowed softly, barely perceptibly—men in shielded armor.
I spun my gun to the four o’clock position and fired. No need to aim at the windows. A 60-caliber round goes through walls and windows alike, but my 60-caliber man-splitters might as well have been spit wads against their shields.
One of the drawbacks of Unified Authority shielded armor was that you couldn’t use the shields and hold a weapon at the same time. Their armor included wrist-mounted fléchette cannons that ran along the right sleeves, but that was a decidedly close-range weapon. Our Intelligence Agency had found data on remote-controlled rocket launchers that the Unifieds could fire using ocular commands built into their visor. I’d never seen those launchers in action, however.
I fired a string of bullets into the front window of a department-store lobby. The ghostly outlines of men in shielded armor rushed to return fire, but it came too late to do any damage. Like me, they didn’t mind wasting ammo. They shot. I shot. We skidded around a corner, and I lost sight of the building, entering a new street, a lane filled with men in armor. Targets.
I aimed. I fired. My bullets meant nothing. They returned fire. There may have been fifty men there, milling around, glowing like embers in a dying fire. My driver kept clear of them. If we strayed too close, they stood a better chance of hurting us than we did of injuring them.
The cannon sounded so loud that it made my helmet vibrate. When I looked back where the passel of Unifieds had been, I saw a small crater. The Targ that had fired the shot pulled up beside our little convoy, thin wisps of smoke still twisting from its cannon. The shell probably hadn’t hurt those U.A. Marines, but it scattered them beautifully, and who knows, some of them might have landed incorrectly and broken an arm or a leg.
To this point, the engagement was still in the dream state. They had fired a few shots. We had fired a few shots. Maybe we’d killed a few of them, then again, maybe not. The real excitement had yet to begin.
I contacted MacAvoy, and said, “We have our beachhead.”
He responded, “My birds are wheels up, and my rubber’s hit the specking road.
“How is it going down there?”
I asked, “Ever knocked a crippled man out of his wheelchair?”
“Sounds like you caught them napping.”
“Quiet neighborhood, practically a bedroom community,” I said. “Maybe I’ll move here once the riffraff moves out.”
As the last traces of orange and red cleared from the sky, the shelling began. Pillars of flame rose ten feet out of the ground, spraying our light armor with cement and rock as the Unifieds bombed the streets and infrastructure we hoped to preserve. Apparently, the Unifieds had adopted a scorched-earth policy.
An explosion that looked like a fifteen-foot fist punching up through the asphalt sent a Targ swerving. Targs were light and small by tank standards, but they still weighed thirty tons; it takes a powerful jolt to send one careening down the street. Dozens of small FLAWS rockets flew from the windows of a block-long brownstone, striking Jackals, Targs, and one of my Schwarzkopfs. A pair of gunships swooped in to respond.
I voyeured the scene, peering through one of the gunners’ visors, and saw dozens of men swarming out of the back of the building like ants from a hill, their armor glowing. We could bury them, of course, blow up the buildings on either side of the alley and leave them interred under a mountain of shattered bricks.
The gunner had his orders. We wouldn’t destroy two buildings to bury shielded Unifieds, not yet. Not yet. Not today. We had the Unifieds on the run, so we would show our better angels.
These boys didn’t push their luck. They sprinted down the alley instead of trying to hide in the next building. I’d given specific orders about leaving empty buildings intact, but I’d been purposely vague about attacking buildings with enemy soldiers.
I heard the gunner say, “That’s right you little turds, go hide in the nice building.”
The pilot said, “You can shoot it down and say they went in.”
Under normal circumstances I might have complimented the pilot on his bloodthirsty attitude, maybe even promoted him, but civilians lived in these buildings—innocent bystanders trapped in a war zone. In theory, those civilians hadn’t taken sides. I thought they might if we started destroying their homes indiscriminately.
Ironically, the gunner was the sensible one in that cockpit. He said, “Tempting, but we have the general’s orders.”
My driver kept us moving, speeding around the yard-deep divots freshly blown into the street around us. I could barely see the two Targs that led our way through a dusty brown haze that hung low in the streets ahead of us, returning fire at occupied buildings and clearing U.A. soldiers out of our way.
Using heat vision, I spotted the signatures of people in buildings on both sides of the street. They showed as orange silhouettes, colorful shadows against dark backgrounds. I could tell if they were friendly by their posture. Civilians cowered against walls, Unifieds skulked under windows, as if preparing to return fire. I spotted smaller silhouettes, children.
A rocket struck the front grill of the Jackal, sending flames spreading across the windshield and disappearing. Lord it happened quickly. A glimpse of smoke, a flash of fire, and the car stopped so suddenly I thought maybe we had hit a wall. I had the disorienting sense of falling, of time stopping, of t
he world’s spinning on a different axis, then we were upside down.
“General, General, are you okay?”
I lay on my side, the butt of the 60-caliber pressing against my chest. I tasted blood in my mouth and felt a ringing in my head.
The Jackal lay on its side, asphalt visible through the driver’s side window and open sky visible through the passenger’s. I couldn’t see either; I still had the heat vision running in my visor. I looked out the top of the turret, saw an orange silhouette, recognized the posture of a man with a handheld rocket launcher, and I squeezed off twenty, maybe thirty rounds from my 60-caliber.
Someone said, “Oh, nice shot, sir.”
I didn’t know the voice.
A couple of officers came to pull me from the wreckage. I shooed them away.
Despite the ringing, my head was better than clear. I was focused. I was a Liberator-class clone, and my combat reflex had begun. Adrenaline and testosterone now flooded my veins, honing my thoughts and making me more aggressive. Fighting and happiness became synonymous in my head. Victory, like killing, became a means to an end; keeping the hormone in my bloodstream became my chief objective.
Still using heat vision, I searched the nearest building and the buildings around it for targets. I found a man with his arms crossed and his head down and knew what he was doing—he was hiding his heat signature under a cold shower. I squeezed the trigger and shot him, shot him through the walls. He had to be a Unified; civilians don’t think about cooling down their heat signatures.
“How do you know he wasn’t just jerking off?” one of the officers asked. I started to explain before noticing that the man was laughing. He’d seen what I saw.
I spotted other targets, too, people hiding, people running, people crawling. I wanted to kill them all. The combat reflex nearly drove me wild with soothing warmth. Kill them, I told myself. Shoot and the hormone will continue.
I pulled my hands away from the Big Sixty, ducked under the gun, and crawled out of the turret. The driver and copilot of the Jackal were dead. The driver’s helmet pressed against the door, blood leaking out a hole. The safety harnesses held the copilot in his seat, his neck and arms dangling. A rocket had shattered our windshield.
The fire had blasted through the windshield and scorched the dash of the Jackal. I saw what it had done to my men and looked away.
The Jackal that dropped off my rescuers had already sped away; no one in their right mind would have parked on this road. Tanks sped by at top speed. Jackals weaved in and out of the alleyways. We crouched behind the armored chassis of my overturned Jackal, a wheel spinning above my head. Flames played harmlessly over the engine compartment. Any fuel in that reservoir had long since combusted, leaving a twisted frame and a burst fuel tank with sharp flanges that bent outward like the petals of a flower.
One of the men who’d come to get me reported the rescue to his superiors. Using the commandLink, I listened in.
He said, “Yeah, we got him. How the speck do you think he is? His Jackal’s on its side; the guys in the front are confirmed K.I.A., but the general’s still in the turret picking off snipers with the 60-caliber, and as happy as a pig in a mud hole.”
The guy on the other end of the Link said, “Yeah, well, don’t stand too close to General Harris. The guy’s a Liberator; he’s probably having a combat reflex.”
Good to know what your men think of you, I told myself.
A rocket struck the sidewalk about forty feet ahead of us, near enough to make the ground shake. Rocks and dirt, and a flaming scab of grass flew into the air. A string of bullets snicked off the roof and sides of the overturned Jackal.
My rescuer radioed, “You better hurry; they’re homing in on us.”
Targs fired shells that caused the façades of buildings to shatter and crumble to the ground. Gunships danced across the skyline, firing chain guns and dodging rockets. A constant caravan of Jackals streamed in and out of alleys, offering themselves as targets.
Suddenly, the battle had concentrated around us. The fighting along the shore no longer mattered; this block had become the eye of the storm. The Unifieds had chosen the location and made their stand, now we would break their backs or fight our way around it.
I had hoped to see Marines in glowing armor entering the streets by this point in the battle, but the Unifieds played their cards well. They deployed snipers and grenadiers from buildings and watched as we tripped over land mines they had placed in the streets. I felt the ground tremble. The carcass of my Jackal slid in its wake.
“Run!” I shouted, and I darted to the nearest alley, evacuating my cover just as the fire flames belched out of the building across to my right. The first floor of the building seemed to disappear beneath a gush of liquid fire.
“Moveitmoveitmoveit!” I bellowed to myself as well as the men who had rescued me and the vehicles that were coming to secure me. Jellied fuel splashed everywhere, hot enough to melt through iron, possibly radioactive. They must have filled some underground storage tank with the stuff.
As I reached the alley, a Jackal came skidding out. I managed to jump out of the way, then turned and watched as it sped into the flaming fountain and vanished into a blinding flash that left only a skeletal chassis bathed in flames. Jellied fuel splashed three Targs, lining their turrets and cannons with fiery plumes. Two of the tanks rumbled to safety; but I watched the third Targ grind to a halt in the fiery mire. The men inside would have died after a minute; in another minute, the engine would melt.
I watched for a moment, then turned and continued running.
Three men in shielded armor stood at the far end of the alley. Their shields glowed, a pale orange-gold aura that warned us that they couldn’t be hurt. Standing at the far end of the alley, they were four hundred feet away, outside the accurate range of their weapons. One of the two Marines who had come for me raised his M27 and fired. Almost all of his bullets hit the mark, they flashed and disappeared like moths hitting an electric grill. The Unifieds returned fire. Their fléchettes struck walls and ground. A window shattered forty feet ahead of me.
At this distance, the fléchettes might not even penetrate our armor. They couldn’t hit us; we couldn’t hurt them. Then a Targ rumbled by and fired a shell into the wall above them, burying the Unified Authority Marines in an avalanche of bricks and rubble.
It was a shallow grave that might not hold them. They’d be alive, and conscious and angry, and they might still be able to shoot at us.
I saw a door that led into one of the buildings lining the alley and ran for it. The door was locked, so I used my universal key—my M27. Three shots. The handle fell to the ground, and the door swung open. With that jellied-fuel fire to our backs and the buried Unifieds ahead of us, we leaped through that door lickety-split. When your choices are death or the unknown, the unknown becomes a charming option.
We moved cautiously through the dark interior, and facing the unknown quickly lost its charm. We had entered an apartment building. The walls, solid by civilian standards, became clear as windows when I examined our surroundings with heat vision. Orange and yellow spots appeared through every wall, some marking recently used stoves, some revealing people cowering behind beds and dressers and possibly betraying assassins in wait.
Glancing up at the ceiling, I saw indistinct apparitions in orange and red. Civilian, military, male, female, child, adult, wearing armor or diapers, I couldn’t tell. Officers tried to contact me over the Link. I ignored most of them, but opened a channel to the men in the building with me.
“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.
The Clone Apocalypse Page 5
