I ran toward the slanted beams of moonlight, little islets of light surrounded by a sea of near blackness. Was he behind me? Was he shooting? I juked around a stump. I leaped a log; the ground behind it was lower than I expected and my knees buckled under me, causing me to skid on my shins. I landed on pine needles and stones, pine cones crumbled under me, dried branches dug into my legs. If this hurt me, I wasn’t aware of it. Looking back, I saw the ghostly glowing figure stalking behind me. He brushed against a fern, and it went up in flames.
He moved like a machine, marching quickly, not bothering to look to the right or the left, storming ahead unafraid. He raised his right arm to fire at me, but I had already dashed around a tree.
Up ahead, a jeep sat alone on the side of the road, its top down, its seats empty. I ran, skipped left, skipped right, passed through a pearly-colored ray of moonlight.
The jeep had no doors. I would have preferred doors. Doors don’t stop fléchettes, but they can hide you. I was open, visible, a target. He fired a shot at me. The fléchette drilled through the windshield without shattering it.
I hit the ignition and threw the jeep into reverse despite my nearly overwhelming desire to run, to duck, to hide. I needed to steer.
He was an orange-glowing ghost standing in the red glare of my taillights, confident, unafraid, standing with his arm extended, his wrist cannon pointing toward me, and all I could do was lean farther and farther toward the right as I steered the jeep and hit the gas. The rear of the vehicle hit him hard, like a hammer striking a nail.
It wasn’t so much the impact that killed that U.A. bastard as the velocity. I’d seen those shields dissolve entire clips of machine-gun fire, but the jeep was too big to dissolve. It struck the man, and in the split second after the impact, I saw metal turn to steam as I leaped to the ground. I watched as the man and the vehicle rolled backward and bounced across the road. The energy from his shield must have fused him to the back of the jeep, which nearly stalled as it fought its way over a deep rut, but, carried on by its momentum, it continued rolling backward until it slammed into a tree.
Wrapped inside his cocoon of energy, the U.A. Marine was immune to trees and jeeps, but he wasn’t immune to momentum. So there he was, riding along on the back of the unstoppable jeep when it hit the impenetrable tree, and though nothing passed through his armor, both his spine and his neck snapped. His helmet flew from his head, and his armor went dark.
I combined the short man’s helmet with the tall man’s armor, then I climbed into my jeep and drove back to Washington, D.C. My heart pounded hard in my chest, but by this time, I had grown used to it. I had grown used to the rhythm of the pulse thudding in my neck and wrist. My head felt clear, and I knew that I had begun a combat reflex, but really, my head had been clear all day.
I felt fresh and strong and rested.
A thirty-minute drive to D.C., and I wanted to drive it in fifteen. I drove slowly and methodically through Quantico, the township, passing a gas station and small grocery store, but when I left the glare of streetlights behind me and entered the velvety blackness, I mashed the accelerator to the floor. Up ahead, the town of Triangle glowed like a looming sunrise. There was a highway just beyond Triangle, Highway 95, which would connect with Highway 395 and take me all the way to Washington, D.C.
The road to Triangle was dark and lonely, a tree-lined road leading along the golf course and into nowhere. The lights of the base twinkled insignificantly in my rearview mirror. I watched them shrinking into the past and barely had time to register the sedan as I passed it. The car had waited just outside the gate, it was green, and the driver was an MP.
I slowed my jeep to the speed limit and hoped he’d go away, but the MP followed me like a yellow jacket defending its hive. He slowed his car to one mile above the speed limit and followed me for another five or six hundred yards before flashing his lights. If I tried to outrun him, I’d have cars and gunships chasing after me. I slowed, pulled to the side of the road, and came to a stop.
He parked behind me.
I sat stock-still and watched him in the mirror as he approached my car. He carried a computer for scanning tabs and left his gun in its holster. He was natural-born, a boy. He had brown hair and brown eyes but looked nothing like a clone. His smile said he was sorry for bothering me.
He strolled up to my car, and said, “Brother, you are driving way too fast.” He paused when he noticed that I still wore my helmet, and his smile faltered. Maybe he realized that he had miscalculated, but he might not have known he would pay with his life. I turned, raised my right arm, and shot him once in the stomach and once in the forehead. The boy died before he hit the ground.
I picked up his body and placed it back in his car, using his safety belt to hold him in place so that casual passersby might think he was resting or chatting on his radio.
I didn’t feel bad about killing that kid; he didn’t qualify as collateral damage. He was a Marine. He’d taken the oath. Maybe he had parents. Maybe they lived near Washington, D.C., and they and their homes would disappear in the holocaust later this evening; they could go to their graves never knowing their son had died an hour or two before them.
In another hour or two, I would die as well.
I thought about Ava, Ava Gardner, the only woman I had actually lived with, my fallen Hollywood goddess, my movie star. I said, “I’ll see you soon enough,” and I felt nothing. Her ghost had gone away. She no longer haunted me.
Other ghosts slid from my thoughts as I rolled into Triangle, a good-sized town, a burg with movie holotoriums, restaurants, gas stations, and grocery stores. It was late. The lights turned red at the next block, and I joined a line of cars waiting for green. I looked at the grocery store to my left and saw a woman in a light blue dress carrying a sleeping child.
The child was small, no longer than a cat, and it pressed its face into the woman’s shoulder. I had no idea if that child was a boy or a girl. The woman looked tired. She patted the child’s head and stroked its back.
The light turned green.
As I drove off, I wondered if my bombs would destroy this town. Probably not. Triangle was thirty miles from ground zero, and my bombs were a few hundred feet underground.
A lot of other children will die. So will their mothers. These thoughts brought no remorse; they were simply an admission of fact. I no longer remembered why I chose to explode those bombs. I didn’t bother trying to remember. That was the course I had chosen. I had no interest in changing it.
Night life is as different from life as night light is different from light. Even in the center of the city, with streetlights blaring, billboards glowing, and bright storefronts, no one would ever mistake night for day. A man sat on a street outside a dump of a bar. Couples walked together. A muscular guy in slacks and a tee shirt sat on the trunk of a car; he reminded me of an alley cat surveying its territory.
The ghost of Marianne Freeman glided into my thoughts. She was Ray’s sister, a plainspoken woman with the strength of her conviction. I saw her face now, the swell of her cheeks, her brown eyes, her black hair.
I tried to imagine her and Ava, and Kasara and even Sunny, all standing together like sheep in a flock, and I realized something, the ghost of Marianne wouldn’t audition for me like the others. Anytime another woman appeared in my imagination, Marianne waved a dismissive hand at me and walked away.
Ava had been the prettiest. Sunny had controlled me more than the others. Kasara had been my first. Only Marianne was sacred to me.
All of them but Kasara had died.
I reached the far side of Triangle and merged onto Highway 95.
CHAPTER
FIFTY-EIGHT
I approached the capital from the Virginia side, driving toward the George Mason Bridge. I wouldn’t need to drive over the Potomac because the entrance to the ruins of a train station was five hundred feet under South Courthouse Road; Naens had entered the ruins of a train station.
I arrived late, at 22:
45.
Not much happened along South Courthouse Road at that time of night. The southern end of the street was all houses and apartment buildings, and people had shut down for the night. Lights showed in only a few condominium windows.
This is ground zero, I thought. I imagined people snug in their beds, unaware that Death had just driven past their front door.
The road ended just outside a golf course and I knew precisely where I was. I didn’t play golf, but I had visited this facility; it was the Army Navy Country Club. How ironic, I thought as I parked my jeep.
I walked the short distance to the nearest manhole and used a pry bar to lift the lid. I dropped the tool down the hole, stepped onto the ladder, then dragged the lid back into place.
I had entered a world of complete darkness and very little sound. The darkness no longer mattered. My visor showed me my surroundings in blue-white tones against a black background. Night-for-day lenses showed me the world without depth, but they did show me the world.
I had entered a long and empty concrete valley. Water trickled down a trench in the middle of the floor. For all I knew, the air around me could smell like roses or shit. I didn’t know; the airtight seal around my helmet meant I breathed recirculated air. I could wear this same armor in space or underwater.
I marched ahead.
I didn’t know where I was going, but Naens had been here; that much I knew. He had placed virtual beacons, which I saw through my visor. I reached an intersection where the one tunnel met another. A red arrow visible only through a combat visor told me to turn right. A hundred feet farther, a glowing red square marked the hole Naens had blown into the wall.
I peered through the hole; it was like looking down a very narrow elevator shaft. At the top, the shaft ended in darkness. Looking down, the shaft extended so far that I couldn’t see the end. The walls were unadorned concrete, riddled with cracks and splotches of moss.
Naens had left a rappel line for me. I attached it to my armor, climbed into the chute, and let myself drop and drop and drop. I passed places where the concrete had shattered over the centuries of disuse. Did I see dirt behind the missing pieces, or was it hollow? Darting past, seeing the world in blue-white and black, I couldn’t tell.
Five hundred feet is a long way down. At some point I looked up to see the spot through which I had entered. I didn’t find it. The shaft seemed to have formed its own horizon, a spot in which the four walls merged into one like the sides of a needle.
Except for moss and lichens, I saw no signs of life. I had expected to see bats or rats. Perhaps I had descended through skeins of spiderwebs without ever noticing. The walls seemed clean. The drop seemed to go on forever.
I thought about the Enlisted Man’s Empire, imagining acres of men on parade, all with the same face and physique and mission, all of them enthusiastic about protecting the nation that had betrayed them.
I looked down and saw a floor. Through my night-for-day lenses, it looked no more than ten feet away. Using the sonar gear built into my visor, I took a sounding. It was still fifty feet below me.
I reached the end of the constriction of the shaft and slid into a wide, domed cavern. The Unifieds had left rows of seats behind, as well as trash cans and booths with incredibly antiquated computer equipment. I saw signs leading to railway tracks on which trains no longer ran and signs leading to exits long ago filled in with concrete.
This wasn’t a museum exhibit; it was a tomb. These were the mummified remains of a long-extinct society. A nation known as the United States had used this station during an ancient past in which space travel went no farther than Mars and colonization meant invading other countries. America no longer existed. It had transmogrified into the Unified Authority and converted the world to accept its pangalactic manifest destiny.
There were no spiderwebs down here. Any spiders trapped in this mausoleum had died of starvation three centuries ago and their webs had disintegrated. I walked to a row of seats and ran my finger over the nearest. There was no dust. This train station was dead and sterile.
As I looked around the station, I felt a moment of fear. For just a moment, I thought maybe I had made a mistake. Maybe I had come down too far. Maybe this was a trap. Someone might have sneaked into the sewer behind me, retracted my rappel line, and left me down here trapped like an ant in a jug.
I searched the far wall, then the sides, finally spotting Naens’s beacon—a glowing, silver-red line that led up five marble stairs and down a tiled hallway.
“Thank you, Naens,” I said out loud. No point thinking the words this time, there was no one around to hear me.
I trotted up the stairs and started down the hall. It was wide, maybe forty feet from wall to wall. Ironically, looking through my night-for-day lenses, the light fixtures on the walls were darker than the darkness. They were round and dark, and they reminded me of eye sockets from which the eyes had been removed. They seemed to stare in my direction in blindness.
Naens’s beacon led me to a platform, a gated floor on which passengers had stood and waited to board their rides. In the ancient days, trains had rolled on rails, but these tracks had been built in a more modern period. Instead of traveling on rails, these cars had levitated above magnetically charged trenches. The electricity needed to charge those trenches could have lit a continent in its day. By today’s standards, it would have been negligible. The ancients could have run this track for a year on the energy expended during a single broadcast.
I leaped from the platform to the lip along the trench. The jump from the platform to the bottom of the trench would have been about twelve feet, too far a jump to make safely. I jumped eight feet to the track. The drop down the trench would be another four if I decided to take it.
I had miles to cross now. The tunnel led under the Arlington Cemetery, a burial ground for natural-born soldiers with a proper monument for the unidentified dead and only a ten-foot marble obelisk celebrating the millions of cloned military men who had laid down their lives.
I traveled under the Potomac River as well, not that I could tell the difference between when I was under land and when I was under the water. I just remembered it from the maps. Cities and cemeteries, they all looked alike from this vantage point.
The train station had been like a maze, with its branches and hallways. Now that I had entered an actual train tunnel, the maze had ended. This tunnel ran straight as an arrow for miles, with no identifying features to separate one segment from the next.
After half an hour in that tube, I saw signs that I had crossed the river. A walkway appeared on the right side of the track. The walkway led to a platform. I didn’t need to brush dust or cobwebs from the sign to read it. The sign said INDEPENDENCE AVE STATION.
In few hundred yards, I’d be under “Monument Avenue,” passing statues built for soldiers and presidents. There’d be a giant marble needle and museums and monuments that looked like mausoleums. I imagined the ground erupting beneath them, throwing them over like toys left out in a storm. I imagined the water in the Reflecting Pool boiling, then turning into steam, and glass shattering and like ice in a desert. At that very moment, I might have been under the Smithsonian Museum of Military History, the museum that once opened a wing specifically dedicated to clones, then closed it a couple of months later.
Naens left a beacon that led me off the Arlington Line, across 17th Street Station, and onto the City Center Line. I crossed more empty halls and marble floors. Sitting in the center of the floor like a vending machine set on its side was the first of MacAvoy’s bombs.
It was seven feet long and four feet wide, wrapped in a smooth rectangular sheet-metal box. Naens’s beacon led me right to the bomb, not that I could have missed it, and right to the handwritten note attached to its interface.
Harris, you’re the last man standing. We all knew it’d be you.
Have a blast. Have a specking-big blast, 186 kilotons of fun.
If you’re wearing armor, the code is 819. If yo
u’re hoofing it, just press the button.
MacAvoy
And Harris, if you can’t specking pull the pin, don’t feel like too big an ass; I couldn’t do it.
Oh, but I could push it. I could set off the bomb. I could destroy this city and all of these people. I’d fantasized about it for the last few hours. I no longer needed to rationalize mass murder to myself, I’d absorbed the idea into my thought stream.
Eight-nineteen, I knew why he’d selected that code, that was the month and year in which the Enlisted Man’s Empire collapsed. That was the date that we failed. The bombs were networked, and the network was on the interLink. Using optical commands, I brought up the Link and dialed in the code. Now, with a single wink, I could detonate those bombs. I could do it right there, right then, but I wouldn’t.
Perry had said that he would place his bomb under the Linear Committee Building. I was right beneath it, and there was a hidden door that would take me in. I would kill Andropov if I set off the bomb, no doubt about that, but I didn’t just want to kill him, I wanted to see him die. I wanted the pleasure of murdering him, not just killing him.
Battle. Combat. My heart was pounding, pounding. My pulse was up. My skin prickled. Somewhere near where I stood was a staircase or a ladder. When I climbed to the top, I would enter the LCB. I would find guards and soldiers, and I would kill them. Some of them would have impenetrable armor just like mine. Maybe Andropov had dressed himself in it as well.
Naens’s beacon led away from the platform and the tracks, and there was LCB Station. It looked no grander than any of the others. If anything, it was a tiny bit smaller. The floor was circular, filled with rows of seats and signs showing schedules of trains that no longer ran. There was an abandoned security station, metal detectors, and a bulletproof window through which no guards watched as no passengers stepped through. The darkness, the emptiness. It was outside me and inside me alike.
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