Tasman had an office to himself. We stepped in and closed the door behind us.
Instead of a desk, Tasman worked at a drafting table. MacAvoy must have had that stick of furniture brought in especially for the old man. Sitting in a bulky motorized wheelchair, Tasman would have had trouble sidling up close to a desk. The table was tall enough for him to scoot in and under without trouble.
I saw strain on Tasman’s withered old face. Seeing this, I noticed that MacAvoy looked like he had a secret as well.
Tasman said, “The bandit isn’t the problem; the Unifieds used a complex encryption system on their computers as well. Opening low-security files hasn’t posed a problem. We know how much they spend on toilet paper and hand grenades every year.”
“What about their fleet?” I asked.
“We haven’t located any information so far,” said MacAvoy.
“But it’s in there, somewhere?” I asked.
“Yeah. Sure. It should be,” said Tasman. He rolled away from the table and turned his chair so that he faced me.
“We found their plans for infiltrating the New Olympians on Mars,” said MacAvoy. “Would you like to guess what they named it?”
“Legion,” I said.
“Right on your first try,” said MacAvoy.
Legion. I knew all about Legion. I’d been there, seen their recruiters preaching in the streets of Mars Spaceport. They’d set up an alliance with a New Olympian gangster named Petrie. We killed him. They reprogrammed an entire division of Marines on Mars. We killed them, too.
I said, “Legion didn’t amount to much.”
“We have several video feeds of their reprogramming experiments,” said Tasman.
I felt a chill run down my spine. I’d been part of those experiments. They’d erased the memories from my conscious mind, but ghosts from that torture still haunted my subconscious.
Tasman pressed a key on a keyboard, and an image spun to life. I saw a large room, all white and sanitary like a wing in a hospital, with Marines laid out on incapacitation cages. They wore hospital gowns. Some were conscious. Some had already died.
I had never seen this feed before, but an impulse deep in my brain reminded me that I had been there. “Is this on Mars?” I asked.
“It’s in an underwater city,” said Tasman. “This one was in the Atlantic. They called it Gendenwitha.”
“I visited that one,” I muttered to myself.
“Show him,” said MacAvoy.
Tasman nodded.
MacAvoy said, “Harris, you’re not going to like this.”
“Show me.”
The feed showed me sitting at a table in a cafeteria packed with Marines in hospital gowns. We were all catatonic. We didn’t speak to each other. We had trays of food in front of us, occasionally we fed ourselves, but mostly we sat like zombies.
The Marine sitting to my right picked up his knife and stared at it. He rolled it in his fingers, all the while studying his reflection. Two orderlies came to watch. They just stood there, joking between themselves as the Marines died. He stood and convulsed gently. It wasn’t like an electrocution, more like a series of coughs. He dropped the knife, fell back onto his seat, and his head hit the table. Blood dribbled out of his ear.
In the video feed, a woman walked over to the table and placed a tray in front of me. She saw the dead Marine and started screaming at the orderlies.
“Is that Sunny?” I asked. I saw her, felt the stirring of a familiar reaction, and sat down to hide my disgrace.
I never saw the woman’s face; the camera was focused on the table. She had lustrous brown hair, it reminded me of mink.
Tasman said, “You were part of their experiment. When they couldn’t reprogram you, they switched to an accelerated form of classical conditioning.”
A new feed began. I was on an operating table, lying flat and unrestrained. If I’d had the strength, I could have stood up and walked away. Sunny stood over me wearing a white lab coat. She reached a hand into my gown and attached wires to me. She clamped some kind of breathing tube to my nose, then she released a stream of gas. I whipped my head from side to side, then I vomited and lay there in my bile. I passed out. She cleaned me and woke me and poisoned me again.
At some point she cleaned me and spoke to me. I couldn’t hear what she said, but I watched her slip her hand into my gown, then she slipped off her smock, then her dress.
“Wow,” said MacAvoy. “Paralyzed one moment and humping like a rabbit the next. Hoorah, Marine!”
Bastard.
“Sunny,” I said. I felt more embarrassed than sad.
Tasman said, “Harris, you were brainwashed. They molded your subconscious into something they could use. There are hours of her toying with you. Hours of it.”
Toying. I repeated the word in my head. It sounded even worse when I said it.
MacAvoy asked, “Did you know that Nailor was there?”
“Nailor?” I asked, slow to place the face with the name.
Franklin Nailor was a U.A. intelligence officer. He had fired a shotgun into my back. Ten days ago, I had believed that nothing mattered more than killing the little prick. Seven days ago I located him in Gendenwitha, beat him to death, and stuffed his corpse into a trash bin; now, my brain reeling and my grasp of reality in doubt, it took me a moment to recognize my worst enemy’s name.
The feed showed me lying paralyzed in a cell. Nailor walked in. He yelled at me, hit me, and posed me like a toy. He urinated in my face. I was awake and paralyzed; there was nothing I could do.
Anger and embarrassment became indistinguishable in my head. I wanted to hurt MacAvoy and Tasman, wanted to rekill Nailor, wanted to murder Sunny, wanted to end myself.
On the screen, the door opened, and Sunny entered the cell. Tasman paused the feed. He said, “You’ve got an erection.”
“What?” I asked, momentarily too stunned to be angry. The comment had caught me off guard.
Tasman said, “We’ve checked all the feeds; you get an erection every time she enters the room.”
MacAvoy said, “The good little Marine stood at attention every time.”
“Get specked,” I said, so ashamed that I could barely control myself. He was joking with me, and that meant that he’d forgiven me. Worse, he didn’t hold me accountable.
I asked Tasman, “How much of this have you watched?”
“You got it up twelve times in four days, if that’s what you’re looking for,” said MacAvoy. “It’s probably not world-record territory, but it’s impressive.”
I didn’t say anything.
MacAvoy said, “Harris, maybe you should change the Marine Corps motto to Semper Paratus.”
“Their information on you is fairly limited,” said Tasman.
“You know what Semper Paratus means, right?” MacAvoy asked.
I tried to ignore him. “How much control do they have over me?” I asked.
MacAvoy said, “It means ‘Always ready.’”
I wanted to tell him to shut the speck up, but I thought it might be more appropriate to hold out my wrists and have him arrest me.
Tasman said, “You aren’t a security risk, if that’s what you’re asking. They weren’t able to reprogram you. They trained you to fear Nailor. They trained you to have a pretty spectacular reaction to Sunny. Now that you know what they did to you, I don’t think she’s going to be much of a problem.”
MacAvoy added, “Harris, I’d trust you with my life. I’d take a bullet for you, son, but your girlfriend’s a bitch.”
CHAPTER
NINE
Obviously, I couldn’t hide information about Sunny’s working for the Unified Authority Intelligence. She’d entered both the Pentagon and the Linear Committee Building. As my girlfriend, she’d set foot on military bases and spoken to high-level personnel. Hell, she’d gone on double dates with me and Travis and Emily.
I stormed past my aide as I returned to my office. He put down his cup of water, and asked, “Is eve
rything okay, sir?” Once again, I ignored him. I closed the door behind me and hid behind my desk.
I sat in my big, well-cushioned chair and stared at the door of my office while I relived emotions—the humiliation of watching myself helpless one moment and having sex the next. I thought about MacAvoy’s making jokes and shook my head in disgust. I thought about Tasman apologizing on my behalf. I told myself that I had never loved Sunny, and I felt comfortable that was indeed the case.
My office was brightly lit, with white walls and blue carpeting. The crowded bookshelves and display cases came with the keys, property of the previous occupant. I had inherited the books, the pictures, the art along with the walls and furniture from Tobias Andropov.
Did Andropov know that I had commandeered his office? Sunny had walked through that door, bounded over to this desk, and kissed me. He knew. If she knew, he knew. That’s how the spy game works.
What else did he know? Had he seen the video feeds? Had he seen me tortured? Bullshit, I told myself. I didn’t care if he saw Sunny and Franklin torturing me. I cared about the other parts . . . Was he laughing at me?
I’d had sex with Sunny in her apartment. We’d done that on dozens of occasions. Had she recorded those, too?
I wondered if she ever got embarrassed. Did she watch the feeds with her bosses? What would she tell them? Were they laughing?
I contacted MacAvoy, and asked, “Has Tasman found Sunny Ferris’s personnel file?”
“Affirmative.”
“Did you read it?”
“Of course. It’s got a whole lot of useless shit, most of which you already know. Her background is just like you said, rich parents and law school. Sound familiar?”
“How about—?” I started to ask.
MacAvoy cut me off. He said, “There wasn’t anything that should have sent up flags, Harris. She wasn’t an anticlone protester. She didn’t lose a brother or a husband during the war. She isn’t related to any members of the Linear Committee. She never worked as a prostitute or a spy.
“Satisfied?”
“No,” I said, and switched off the console.
Sunny. The first time I saw her, she had come to my office representing the New Olympians, who were still trapped on Mars. A few days after I met her, I went to Mars on a rescue mission, and Nailor shot me.
I returned to Earth in medical stasis. My first night out of the hospital, Travis and Emily had taken me to a bar, and there she was again. I had taken her appearance for kismet. She’d been at the bar with friends from her law firm. Were they spies, too?
I called Naval Intelligence and told the commanding officer to investigate the Alexander Cross law firm. “If you have any questions, bring Cross in and torture him,” I said.
“Can we do that, sir?” he asked.
“No, but do it anyway,” I said.
He said, “Aye aye,” but he did not sound convinced.
He called back five minutes later, and said, “The firm is closed, sir. Cross disappeared three weeks ago.”
“Can you track down the whereabouts of the lawyers?” I asked.
“Already in progress, sir. General MacAvoy made the same request earlier this morning.”
“Thank you, Major,” I said, and I went back to being alone.
Admiral Hauser would arrive in another hour. I had a conference room ready. Strait and MacAvoy would be there. At least I knew what Hauser wanted to talk about. MacAvoy must have told him about my ex-girlfriend. He would’ve had to do that. Some mistakes are too large to be swept under a rug.
Glad to have time alone, I sat at my desk and reviewed all of my mistakes. I didn’t stop with Sunny. I reviewed my life as a Marine, then as an orphan. What would Kasara say when I told her I’d been sleeping with a spy? Would she laugh at my stupidity or try to make me feel better?
My aide knocked on my door.
“What is it?” I shouted.
“Admiral Hauser has arrived, sir. He’s at the summit. So are General MacAvoy and General Strait.”
The firing squad has assembled, I told myself. “Tell them I’ll be there in a minute.” Then I called Tasman. I said, “Howard, have you found anything else?”
“About Sunny?” he asked.
“About anything,” I said.
“I ran into a dead end on her a couple of hours ago. There are more files, but I can’t access them.”
“Why?”
“How much do you know about encryption?” Tasman asked me.
“Not much,” I admitted.
“Do you have a secure line for calling Strait and MacAvoy?” he asked. “Do you use the same line when you call for your car?”
I had to think about that. I made all my LCB calls on the same line but used a secure line when contacting people outside the building.
Tasman said, “Our computers have security levels. So did theirs. I haven’t found a key for opening some of their files. And Sunny may have worked under an alias or another identity. I’ve found files with her name in the title that don’t have any information about her. They have information about a woman named Mary Mallon. Ever heard of her?”
“Mary Mallon?” I asked. Could that be her real name? I had run a security check on Sunny, at least I got that much right, but it wasn’t particularly thorough.
“Legion produced some unexpected information,” said Tasman. “Do you know what killed the clones you forced out of that underwater city?” He didn’t bother trying to pronounce the name of the city, which happened to be Quetzalcoatl.
The Unified Authority had stashed an entire division of reprogrammed Marines in Quetzalcoatl. Using torpedoes and threats, the EME Navy forced them to abandon the city. They boarded submarines and came to the surface, but when we boarded their submarines, they were dead.
“They died from the death reflex,” I said. There’d been no mistaking that. We found thousands of corpses, all bleeding from their ears.
“So what caused their death reflex?” Tasman asked.
“They must have figured out they were clones,” I said. It seemed pretty obvious.
“They already knew they were clones,” said Tasman.
“What?” I asked. “They knew they were clones, and they didn’t have reflexes?”
This was big news. If we could program our soldiers, sailors, and Marines not to die when they found out they were clones, we’d be lot more secure.
Tasman said, “The death gland isn’t programmed. Neural programming impacts the brain, which impacts that gland. Normal clones are programmed to have a neural overload when they learn they’re synthetic. The overloading stresses the brain, which then signals the gland to release the death hormone.
“Apparently, the Unifieds cared more about your reconverting those clones than they did about their becoming sentient.”
“Sentient?” I asked.
“Self-aware, knowing they were synthetic,” said Tasman. “The death glands were designed to be unstable, like fuses, built to overload and break.”
* * *
The elevator doors opened. People watched me as I walked through the hall. Let me amend that. Clones watched me. Very few natural-borns worked in the Linear Committee Building.
I reached the conference room. The sentries standing beside the double doors saluted and stepped out of my way. The room beyond the doors was oval in shape, just slightly dimmed, and luxuriously appointed with wood-lined walls, a bar, an ebony table, and a waterfall.
Hauser, Strait, and MacAvoy stood by the twelve-foot waterfall, gazing into the pond at its base. They turned to welcome me. I saw nothing revealing in General Strait’s posture. Hauser looked glad to see me, maybe even relieved. MacAvoy, on the other hand, had a devious glint in his eye. He didn’t meet my gaze; instead, he stared at the koi swimming near his feet. He looked at me, looked away, took another glance at the waterfall, then floated toward the conference table.
As seniormost officer and acting commander in chief, I should have conducted this summit, but Hauser had c
alled for it. I deferred to him. I said, “Tom, this is your show; maybe you should run it.” That way, I thought, I won’t need to hand over the reins when the MPs remove me from the room.
“If you don’t mind, I think I will take the conn,” he said.
MacAvoy surprised me. He said, “Harris, sit your ass over here. I got a question for you.”
So much for his nervousness. I walked over to the table. As I sat, I noticed he had that “flu fighter” shit in his glass. It was orange and viscous, and I smelled the pepper from a few feet away. The drink didn’t seem to help him, though. The bottom of his nose had turned pink and raw, and he held a napkin which he used every so often to wipe his nose.
“Do you know what this is about?” I asked MacAvoy, feigning ignorance.
He said, “You’re more clued in than me.”
I doubted that, but I didn’t mention it. Once I sat, though, MacAvoy became as silent as a rock. He sat there, didn’t look at me, and pretended to take notes. Let me tell you, that was a joke. Pernell MacAvoy may or may not have known how to read, but he’d never jotted notes.
Hauser sat at the head of the table. He fiddled with the computer station for a moment, then he spoke. He said, “The Earth Fleet discovered a ship floating in space three days ago. She appeared to be unharmed.
“When we went to investigate, we discovered she was Magellan, one of the old Explorers we sent out from Smithsonian Field.”
Strait, the officer most out of the loop, said, “So you found an old antique, that’s why you called us here?”
What you don’t know may or may not be able to hurt you, but it can sure leave you looking like an ass. Strait, for instance, didn’t know that we had inherited the entire two-hundred-ship Explorer fleet when we captured Washington, D.C. He didn’t know we had used those ships to transport Marines to a battle on Mars. Apparently he didn’t know that his branch, the Air Force, maintained Smithsonian Field, the hangar facility in which we kept the Explorer fleet.
MacAvoy hadn’t been given that information either. Hauser and I hadn’t told anyone that we had begun sending those ships to lost planets. I wondered what, if anything, this ghost ship had to do with Sunny. And then I saw the connection. I must have tipped her off about the operation.
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