I entered the main depot of the motor-pool office and found the place empty, utterly abandoned. An entire fleet of cars sat unguarded. Town cars, jeeps, Jackals, personnel carriers, forklifts, motorcycles, all sitting in neatly lined rows waiting for drivers.
When I entered the office to pull the keys to a town car, I discovered that the motor pool had not been left unattended. The officer in charge lay on the ground just inside the door, alive and somewhat conscious. He stared up at me and mouthed words I didn’t understand. I dropped to my knees beside him, and said, “Are you okay, Soldier?”
He said, “I’m sick. It feels like every part of me is breaking.” He stared at me. First confusion showed in his eyes, then recognition. He asked, “General Harris? Are you General Harris?”
I touched his head. He had a burning fever; his temperature might have been 110. His skin had turned white, and his sweat-soaked blouse clung to his chest and arms.
I said, “I can help you up.”
He shook his head slowly, and said, “General, I think I might be a clone.”
I started to lie to him. I started to tell him that he had blond hair and blue eyes, but the death reflex had already begun. He convulsed, a weak tremble ran through him like a jolt of low-wattage electricity. A moment passed and the first drops of blood appeared in his ear.
Feeling cold for not burying the man, I left him where he lay and selected the key to a town car. Weak and alone, I went out to the car and drove away.
I tried to call Freeman again, but he didn’t pick up. As I left the motor pool, I considered my options and formed a plan. I would drive to the nearest spaceport. I would commandeer a civilian commuter craft. I knew how to fly the simpler ones. From there, I would fly to safety . . . if there was such a thing as safety.
It was 04:27. The sun wouldn’t rise for at least an hour, and the streets were empty. I spotted police cars and EME jeeps as I drove across town. I was in the heart of the capital in the still hours of the morning. No lights shone in the skyscraper windows, but the streetlights shone bright.
A roll of thunder sounded in the distance, and rain sprinkled the street. When I first heard the thunder, I mistook it for artillery and nearly turned to drive east to the battle, the last battle the Enlisted Man’s Empire would ever win. What would I have found if I crossed the bridge into Maryland? Would I have found my clones in control, or would I have found a listless, ailing force?
Maybe MacAvoy and Hauser had chosen better than me. Maybe the best we could hope for would be to go down with our ships. I thought about returning to the Linear Committee Building.
MacAvoy had sounded like a lunatic when he talked about debriefing Andropov, but I hoped he succeeded. Tobias Andropov wouldn’t stop until he knew I was dead. He’d send every man he had to hunt me.
Tasman had been right about the flu’s catching up to me. I felt tired and found myself fighting for breath. My vision had blurred enough to stretch bright light into streaks. The warm morning air felt cold to me, so I turned the heat up in my car. A moment later, I felt hot and opened the window.
We once had an enormous joint Army/Navy base just south of the capital, but the Unifieds destroyed it. The closest airfield was a civilian facility just across the Potomac, south and west, across a long bridge.
If I really was as sick as Perry MacAvoy, I needed to get away fast. Just an hour earlier, I would have said I was fine, now my body seemed to melt around me. I wondered about flying. How far could I get? I felt nauseated and wondered if this was a mistake. Mostly, I just felt weak.
I drove across the river on the Curtis Memorial Bridge, then followed George Washington Memorial past the remains of the Pentagon—another casualty of the war with the Unifieds.
The first time I drove through Carmack Gateway Spaceport, it was a thriving, bustling hub with spaceline terminals serving passengers headed to every corner of the galaxy. Now it had airline terminals for travelers who stayed in the atmosphere.
As I rounded the spaceport beltway for a second pass, I spotted a small, poorly lit access road with a sign that said SPACEPORT PERSONNEL.
The clock in my car showed 05:16; my time was running out. The first signs of light showed on the eastern horizon.
I followed that little road to a gate with a small guardhouse. The man who came to check my clearance was a natural-born. I handed him my ID, which identified me as General Wayson Harris, EME Marines. I was a full general, not a brigadier or a major general, and I had all four stars on my collar.
The man looked at my picture, then looked at me. He shined a flashlight in my face. Something was wrong. At first, I thought maybe he worked for the Unifieds. Maybe he’d been told to detain me. He finally said, “You don’t look much like your picture, General.”
He said this as if he thought it was some sort of practical joke.
I had forgotten about the beard, the lightened skin, and eye color. The beard was anything but regulation. I said, “Excuse me one moment,” and ripped it from my face—a painful operation.
The guard shined his light on the picture, then on me. This time he said, “Holy speck.”
I said, “I can’t do anything about the eye color. I’m afraid I’m stuck with green for the next few days.”
“You feeling okay, sir? You look sick.”
“I’ll survive,” I said. He didn’t know it, but I had just told him a joke.
This guy wasn’t an MP; he was just a security guard protecting a facility with no military significance—an employee parking area of a civilian spaceport. He didn’t carry a gun. He was just an old man who’d probably been working all night and had never seen anything significant occur during his shift. He didn’t know that the world was under new management.
The man ran back to his booth, pressed the button that opened the gate, and let me in.
I parked my town car, pocketed the keys, and tried to climb out of the car. I got as far as lowering my feet to the ground; and then I just sat there. I stared across the branching walkways, long, empty sidewalks lined by bright lights. One walkway led toward the terminals. One led toward the airfield. They both looked so long.
I should have been able to walk. It wasn’t as if I had injured the muscles in my thighs and calves. Just a few hours earlier, I had chased a man down. I had jumped from one building to the next. Now I wondered if I had the strength to climb out of my car.
I took a deep breath and did what I had to do. The world seemed to spin around me. When I started walking, the ground started rolling beneath me like the deck of a boat.
I made my way to the walkway and stared at the first lamp ahead of me, changing my focus to the next lamp as I reached the first. Everything was about taking the next step; anything beyond that seemed too far to advance. These legs. How had the muscles in my legs turned so soft?
I’d felt dizzy and weak before this, but I’d always been able to make myself walk another ten miles. That had never been a problem. My arms had never run out of push-ups; I’d always had one more sit-up in my gut. Now I found myself leaning on a lamp to catch my breath as I psyched myself into walking to the next one.
How the speck are you going to fly? I asked myself. I knew the answer. Sitting down.
In the sky, layers of peach and violet formed a collage. Clouds so orange they might have caught fire drifted on the horizon.
Day, I thought. I didn’t greet that day, not that day, not judgment day. By now the infirmaries on our bases would have too many to take care of. Clones who had trained to be field medics would find themselves overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of the sick. They’d be sick themselves. By the end of the day, the doctors would die along with their patients, turning hospitals into crypts.
A few more steps, then a few more. I reached the unguarded field in which the commuter crafts waited. Rows of small planes stretched out before me. I needed to rest, so I leaned on the gate for support, and caught my breath and searched for something I would know how to fly.
I’d o
nce owned a small plane called a Johnston Starliner. That was more of a corporate jet than a commuter, too big and expensive for an open field like this one. I saw other Johnstons, though, and when I regained enough strength, I stumbled out to have a look at them.
Some of the planes were locked. None of them had keys in them, but that didn’t matter. I knew how to make them fly. I’d picked up a trick or two during my mercenary days, when I took time off from the Marines and worked with Ray Freeman.
I found an old Johnston with controls that looked familiar enough, then I switched a few circuits around. Before starting the engine, I checked the fuel. We had a long ride ahead of us, thousands of miles. It didn’t have enough gas.
By this time, the lower horizon had turned white, chasing the colors up into the sky. It must have been the middle of the morning, maybe 06:00, maybe 06:30.
The next Johnston I found didn’t look like it would fly. Sick as I was, I didn’t want to risk my life in a death trap. In the end, I settled on a Johnston Meadowlark, a tiny four-seater with barely recognizable instrumentation, battered seats, and a notice from a mechanic informing me that I owed him $1,750 for replacing my fuel rods.
Early sunlight illuminated the runway. A few stretches of purple and orange still stained the sky, and I had no doubt that I would have spotted the moon if I climbed out of the Meadowlark and looked west.
A few workers walked the runway, checking strobe lights and power stations. No one had noticed me yet.
The Meadowlark’s ignition sat in a tray beneath the yoke. I lowered the tray and examined the circuits. She wasn’t new, but the Meadowlark had nothing so prehistoric as wires running through her controls. Sparking the engines involved twisting a couple of circuits until they allowed electricity to run through them. All I needed was a spark, just enough to ignite the engines, which would generate the electricity for the computers, lights, and controls.
A blue-white flash, and the screens on the dash glowed their displays. Bright running lights flashed into view along the nose, attracting the attention of every worker on the scene. The men on the runways stopped, stood, and stared in my direction. A short, chubby man walked out of the control shack, realized that I had taxied out of my parking slip, and started running.
The radio flared to life as well.
“Meadowlark C29-631, this is tower control, you are not cleared for taxi.”
I ignored it.
“Meadowlark C29-631, this is tower control, you are not cleared for taxi. Respond Meadowlark C29-631.”
The airfield had a tiny runway, just about a quarter of a mile. That would have meant something to me had I had more experience with the Meadowlark, but I’d never even laid eyes on one of these before. I didn’t know how quickly it would be able to take off.
“Meadowlark C29-631, stop your plane and shut off your engines.”
I heard that last order and thought, Fat specking chance.
The commuter runway ran parallel with its much larger commercial cousin.
“Meadowlark C29-631, you are not cleared to enter the commuter runway. You are not cleared for takeoff. We have heavy commercial traffic in the air, C29-631.”
Now that he’d mentioned it, I saw the traffic up ahead. Off in the distance, airliners as large as grocery stores sat waiting for clearance. Jets swooped in like gigantic birds of prey, like an owl diving to grab a mouse. Their wheels looked like giant talons.
A wind-breaking wall separated the commuter field from the big birds. I noticed an access road running through a gap in the wall and steered my bird toward that gap. Unless the flu had done something to my depth perception, the Meadowlark would have more than enough room to fit through it.
“Meadowlark C29-631, you are not cleared for takeoff.” The flight controller must have paused to watch me. Instead of turning right, toward the northern end of the airfield, I turned left and taxied onto the access road.
“Shit! Shit! The dumb speck is entering the commercial lanes!” he screamed at the other controllers in the tower. Then, to me, he said, “Meadowlark C29-631, you are in violation of commercial space. Stop your engines. Stop your plane now!”
I breezed through the gap between the two runways at a clumsy fifteen miles per hour as I entered lanes reserved for jets. One came streaming by me, looming like a dinosaur, its wings so long and wide I might have been able to hide my plane beneath them. It rumbled past at thirty miles per hour, maybe faster.
As the big jet pulled ahead, dragging its engine noise behind it, I heard distant sirens. I saw police cars and fire trucks headed my way and went full throttle. The bird that had just passed me was going wheels up. Once it did, air control would shut down the runway, and those cars and trucks would surround me. That bird, though, she had gone beyond the point of no return. Racing down the runway at thirty, then forty, and ultimately sixty miles per hour before she lifted from the ground, the commercial jet left winds behind her that would flip cars and trucks on their roofs.
I stayed a hundred yards behind that bird, but it wasn’t enough. Winds brushed me left and right; my controls felt tangled. The little Meadowlark bounced in the wake, its wheels never quite leaving the ground. I wasn’t generating the speed I needed. If I took off in this whirlwind, I’d only get a few feet off the ground before my plane spun over and toppled.
Behind me and to my right, police cars shadowed me from fifty yards back. They could move faster on the ground than me, and they didn’t need to deal with the wake from the jet. They didn’t have wings that picked up air currents to make them unstable.
“Meadowlark C29-631, either pull over or get your ass in the air,” said a female voice, probably the head controller. She needed the runway, a line of passenger jets and cargo ships had queued in the sky. Taxiing on her runway, I posed a threat to every plane coming or going. She wanted me gone, preferably arrested, but definitely gone.
I didn’t want to tell her who I was. The Enlisted Man’s Empire still owned the airways for the moment. As president, I probably could have put the other traffic to a halt, but then the Unifieds would know how I escaped. They’d probably figure out that I’d stolen the plane soon enough, but I wouldn’t hand them the information.
I hit the gas.
About a quarter of a mile ahead of me, the commercial aircraft lifted off the ground, looking smooth and powerful and graceful. Four lines of white steam rose from her engines in straight lines that evaporated quickly.
I followed, my nose lifting off, dipping so quickly that, for a moment, I thought I might dive into the dirt, then my plane lurched up and almost nearly flipped over. The big bird went wheels up and to the right, so I headed up and to the left. Far above me, I saw more planes, a lot of them, circling like vultures waiting for a meal.
The weather remained clear except for a few hints of wispy clouds. The only noise I heard was the constant growl of the Meadowlark’s engine and the warning from the woman running the control tower.
She said, “Meadowlark C29-631, you better never show your face around D.C. airspace again. If we ever find you, we’ll send your ass to prison.”
I smiled. She was the least of my worries.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
Under different circumstances, a rogue pilot flying a stolen plane across North America should have expected company. The Washington, D.C., police undoubtedly wanted me for questioning. Well, they wanted a plane thief for questioning though they probably had no clue about the identity of their thief.
And what about the guard who let me in? He had a military town car registered to an EME motor pool. The car was filled with clone fingerprints and clone DNA. The police would find the beard I had worn when I invaded the eastern suburbs. I imagined the U.A. police interrogating the security guard, him telling them that he had seen me, and them reminding him that all clones look alike.
I didn’t need to worry about fighters scrambling to intercept me. The pilots who patrolled the airways belonged to the Air Force, an Enliste
d Man’s Military operation; they were clones. They’d all be confined to their barracks by now. Some would have died already. Some would die shortly.
The sky around me was wide and clean and empty, as clear as a vacuum, and now filled with sunlight. I flew at fifteen thousand feet; all of the bigger birds traveled twenty thousand feet above me. That was good, because I’d switched the Meadowlark on autopilot and started slipping in and out of consciousness.
I spent a lot of time toying with my thermostat when I was awake. No temperature worked for long. Cooler settings soon became too cold, hotter settings, too hot. My shoulders and back hurt, so I shifted in my seat and leaned my head against the window, taking in the panorama below me.
I crossed plains as flat as a living-room floor and carpeted in green. I passed over rivers, and cities, and small towns, and military bases.
My coughing had stopped for the most part. My head hurt, and my sweat glands left me mostly dehydrated. I wondered if I had already outsurvived MacAvoy. I thought about Tom Hauser, out in space, parking his ship and waiting to die. Would he jettison dead sailors or leave them in their racks?
That was the way of the Navy, burial out at sea—even when that sea was an endless vacuum with planets instead of islands. I imagined Hauser alone on a fighter carrier, surrounded by dark decks and empty halls. He’d be like a ghost haunting a castle, roaming passages and reliving a life now over. In my imagination, he was so pale that he became translucent and as pale white as moonlight.
Logic told me that the clone I had conjured in my imagination would already be dead, but logic had little control over hallucinations and delirium. I’d been in the air for several hours now. I’d flown from the East Coast to the West, and now headed south.
I woke up with a string of images in my brain, lifted my head, and looked out of the window and saw a city beside an ocean. California? I asked myself. Los Angeles? San Francisco? My head dropped back against the door of the plane.
The Clone Apocalypse Page 16
