The Clone Apocalypse

by Steven L. Kent

  Naens’s beacon led me to an elevator that should by all rights have been dead. I pressed the button, and the doors slid open, revealing a car large enough to carry a 186-kiloton nuclear bomb. Lights shone in the elevator, bright enough that my visor switched from night-for-day to tactical lenses. A small man with a face like a bat smiled up at me. He said, “Harris, I was beginning to worry about you.”

  CHAPTER

  FIFTY-NINE

  As the elevator rose, Naens looked up toward my face. He couldn’t have seen my face, so he would have been looking at his own reflection or possibly trying to give me the feeling of having him look me in the eyes. After a moment, he said, “You know, if you detonate the bomb, you destroy the building.”

  Sixty-two-megaton bomb . . . nothing but hollow structure between the device and the parking lot . . . “That stands to reason,” I said. “What’s your point?”

  “We don’t need to do this.”

  “Do what?”

  “Raid the LCB.”

  “I want to kill Andropov,” I said.

  “That’s my point; you’ll kill Andropov when you blow up the bomb.”

  “No, you don’t understand. I don’t want to kill Andropov; I want to kill him,” I said, trying very hard to sound reasonable and patient. I wasn’t feeling either reasonable or patient at the moment. I wasn’t calm. I was ready to scream. I was ready to shout. I felt like I had more adrenaline than blood coursing through my veins.

  “I don’t want him to be dead as a result of something I did. I want to kill him. I want to see him die. I want him to know it was me.”

  The elevator reached the top and stopped. Naens remained in place as the door opened. He said, “Oh, that makes sense.”

  The door remained open. Neither of us made a move to step off.

  I said, “Travis and Emily aren’t in this anymore. They decided to cut and run, right? This isn’t about keeping them safe anymore.”

  “Was it ever about keeping them safe?” he asked.

  “That was one of the goals,” I said, feeling sheepish. They had helped pull me out of jail, probably stayed the date of my execution, and what had I given them in return? The most I promised them was the possibility of safety as a result of my hunting Andropov.

  I felt a stab of guilt, but it didn’t outlast the moment. I had placed my enemies before my friends.

  As a member of the SEALs, Naens knew all about flying in formation. He was a wingman, not a leader. He and Harmer and the SEALs had come to pull me out of prison, and it was to me that they gave their loyalty in the end even if he didn’t approve of my ethics.

  Suspecting that he didn’t approve, I said, “Let’s drop it.”

  He nodded, and we stepped off the elevator. A moment passed, then he said, “All I’m saying is that if we detonate that device, we win. Why gamble?”

  “How are we gambling?” I asked, momentarily intrigued.

  “Say we get killed. What happens if you get killed instead of Andropov? How are you going to set off the device?”

  “Did you read the note from MacAvoy?”

  “Yes, it has an access code,” Naens conceded. “What if your gear gets damaged?”

  “I’ve got shielded armor,” I pointed out.

  “So do they.”

  “Drop it,” I said, starting to feel more irritated.

  “Okay. Sorry.”

  The elevator didn’t take us all the way to Andropov’s office; technically, it didn’t even take us into the LCB. The building had two basement floors, with three levels of underground parking beneath its basement. The elevator let us out in an abandoned foyer area locked behind an iron door built into the wall at the bottom of the parking garage.

  Like the tunnels below, the abandoned chamber at the top of the elevator was completely dark. I surveyed the floor through the night-for-day lenses in my visor. Naens wore goggles he had lifted from Freeman’s nest.

  Freeman will never know that they’re gone, I thought. In another few minutes, the nest would be gone. The street would be gone. The river that separated Washington, D.C., from the state of Virginia might be gone as well. How much is a megaton? I asked myself. At first I settled on a thousand tons, but then I reconsidered and decided on a million.

  As we walked to the door, Naens said, “Look, this is your operation; you choose the priorities. I’m just saying that operations go south when you add unnecessary details.”

  “Details like wanting to see Andropov die?” I asked.

  “Once you kill him, you’re going to set off the device, right? So, he’ll be dead, then you’ll be dead. I mean, how much time will you have to enjoy the victory?”

  I told him, “Drop it,” but that would have been too easy. As I approached the door, he took one last shot at convincing me. “Look, Harris, all I’m saying is . . .”

  “I need to see Tobias Andropov die for my life to be complete. If I see him die, have the pleasure of doing it with my own two hands, then I die before I set off the bomb, I’ll go to my grave a happy man . . . a happy, soulless man.”

  “Then why set off the device?”

  “SPECKING HELL! Naens, let’s drop it! I specking want to kill Andropov and then make the Unified Authority pay.” I thought about Jim Holman and the clones who had tried to settle on Terraneau—reprogrammed. In my mind, they now lived as slaves. I thought about Ava dying. She didn’t need to die, she made the choice, but her collapse had begun with a Unified Authority betrayal. I thought about my brothers, my empire . . . all dead.

  If I was right, I would unleash the blast force of 186 million tons of dynamite below the city. Dynamite, of course, was an archaic construct. I had never used it, never learned about it, and had only seen it in funny old movies in which people lit it with a match. Funny; dynamite no longer exists; matches still do.

  The marble tile floor, made for foot traffic, lay stripped of nearly all furnishings. I spotted the glass-encased display that might have held maps or possibly advertisements, but the benches and trash cans had been removed. Two sets of side-by-side escalators stood as still as stairs in the center of the floor.

  Unlike the tunnels, which had been so sterile they reminded me of wrecked ships I’d inspected in deep space, this cavern had a notable sprinkling of dust. I didn’t see cobwebs. Until MacAvoy discovered this place, it had been sealed. Maybe an entire ecosystem had been sealed in, but at some point, the rats would have run out of things to eat, then the bugs, then the spiders that ate the bugs.

  Thinking he would go first, Naens reached for the door.

  I told Naens, “I’ll go first. I’ve got the armor.”

  The little bastard would have happily taken point even though I was the one in the impenetrable armor. He had a suicidal streak. He wouldn’t kill himself, but he didn’t care to live.

  On most operations, I preferred to work with people who wanted to live. On this occasion, for obvious reasons, Naens’s suicidal streak was a welcome addition.

  He stepped away from the door as I stepped through, entering a corner of the parking garage populated mostly by armored personnel carriers. Their roofs almost brushed the ceiling. Their wheels were over five feet tall; they looked like limbs. Through my night-for-day lenses, the carriers looked like resting dinosaurs and their tires like stubby dinosaur legs curled in beneath their stomachs.

  The bottom level of the garage was filled with personnel carriers. A herd of dinosaurs filled this floor. I lay down on the floor so I could peer beneath the chassis and search for people. I saw no one using my night-for-day lenses, which offered little reassurance, and I saw no one when I scanned for heat signatures.

  They’d left the floor unguarded. And why not? They didn’t know about the door or the tunnels. As far as the Unifieds were concerned, the bottom floor of the garage was safer than Fort Knox.

  A moment passed, and Naens slipped out of the door to join me.

  I said, “I don’t see any security cameras.”

  This was his element,
not mine. He allowed me to select the strategy, but he would pick our tactics. He pointed to several areas along the ceiling, and said, “There, there, and there.”

  Scattered lights shone throughout the garage, not enough to make things bright, but my visor had switched to tactical lenses. “I don’t see anything,” I said.

  Naens pulled off his goggles and showed me the insides of his lenses. I held them close to my visor, and still had trouble understanding what I saw—three dark, motionless rectangles. In those rectangles, I saw shadowy forms, which I slowly recognized as armored personnel carriers. The brilliant little bastard had tapped into the LCB security system. Hell, he’d probably done it back in Freeman’s nest before we even left for the mission.

  I handed the shifty little son of a bitch his goggles, grateful as hell he was on my side, and he led the way through the garage. We weaved between armored transports, avoiding detection as best as possible.

  The LCB wasn’t especially wide, its underground parking structure stretched out beneath it like the roots beneath a tree. A single hub sat in the middle of the structure with a single bank of ten elevators and two stairwells leading into the building—a good setup for stopping Unifieds from following us down into the tunnels that would also leave us vulnerable on the way in. It was a bottleneck. Lord, I hated bottlenecks.

  On the other hand, I didn’t need to escape. If worst came to worst, I could explode the damn nukes whenever I wanted.

  We walked to the door leading into the hub. Looking through the window, I saw brightly lit emptiness, walls with panels of brushed-steel doors, and nothing more.

  “Do you want to take the stairs or the elevator?” Naens asked me.

  They’re both traps, I thought. The stairs are a tube; the elevator is a box. The elevator was better, though. Once inside the elevator, I could press buttons leading to the top, then climb onto the roof of the car.

  “Elevator,” I said.

  Naens nodded. “I’ll rig the stairs,” he said.

  He wasn’t only going to rig the stairs. His ambitious objectives included sealing off the upper floor so that I had Andropov all to myself and destroying the lobby so the Unifieds couldn’t send in reinforcements. They might send in jets and gunships. The more the merrier. I’d feed them to the nukes once I finished with Andropov.

  “Will the stairs still be there if we need them?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “If we can get in, so can they,” he said. Then he asked, “Did your suit come with a rappel cord?”

  I found a cord in one of the compartments, but I wouldn’t be able to use it with the shields up. “It does,” I said. “Are there cameras on the elevators?”

  “Sure there are. I suggest you keep your helmet on for the ride.”

  It made sense. The camera wouldn’t see through my helmet. It might record my virtual dog tag, however, the one that said the name of one of the guys I killed back in Quantico. I didn’t tell Naens about riding on the roof of the elevator. On some level, I didn’t trust him.

  He’d had plenty of opportunity to speck with me if he’d wanted. He could have contacted the Unifieds, and he hadn’t. He could have sided with Emily Hughes. Hell, he was a specking SEAL. If he’d wanted to kill me in the tunnels, he could have slipped up behind me and put a bullet through my skull.

  The little SEAL didn’t bother with packs; he wore a belt and a bandolier, both covered with compartments and cloth loops. I never saw all of the equipment he carried in the compartments, but he carried explosive charges in the loops. The charges had come from Freeman’s nest.

  Naens said, “Give me three minutes before you get on the elevator.”

  Three minutes didn’t seem like much time.

  The thought, He really does look like a bat, ran through my mind. He had a small mouth, now drawn tight as he prepared to work, large dark eyes hidden under that thick ridge, and a snout of a nose. His dark, leathery skin offered nearly perfect camouflage in the shadowy garage. You wouldn’t spot him without specifically looking for him.

  “Is three minutes enough time?” I asked.

  “It’s enough,” he said. His voice remained low and solemn. He took this operation seriously, but it didn’t scare him even though he didn’t intend to survive. Maybe a stray Unified Authority bullet would find him, maybe he’d die when I set off the nukes, but sure as shooting, he’d die.

  He asked, “Do you remember going to the Mogat planet to find Illych?”

  I did, but I didn’t say anything.

  He said, “In case I don’t make it back to the tunnels, it’s been a pleasure working with you,” and he saluted me. It was the oddest thing. Now, at the end, he had suddenly started acting all regulation on me. He waited a moment for me to return his salute. When I did, he spun and headed into the darkness. He was an agile dab of gray on a floor filled with shadows and he vanished into the environment quickly, and I wondered if I would see him again.

  I listened for sounds of combat, even boosted the audio in my helmet. I heard nothing. I supposed that meant he had things under control; as a SEAL, he specialized in infiltration.

  A few minutes passed, and I called for the elevator.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTY

  It took less than a minute for my elevator to arrive. The silver doors slid apart, and I walked in. Naens had been right about the cameras in the elevator. How closely people watched them was another story. I entered on the bottom floor, an entirely deserted floor, so I had the car to myself. I pressed the button for the third floor and the top floor—Andropov’s suite of offices. I didn’t think anyone was watching my car, but if they were, they wouldn’t be watching closely. They might see I planned to get out on the third floor and forget about me as I climbed onto the roof of the car.

  The doors slid closed, and I felt a slight change in gravity, something so subtle it could have been psychosomatic. I waited a few seconds, then moved to the corner of the lift and turned my attention to the chrome rails that ran along the walls. I planted my right foot onto one rail and used the wall to balance myself as I pushed up to place my left foot on the adjoining rail. At that point, I was too tall for the lift and had to hunch my back as I pushed up on the panel/trapdoor in the ceiling.

  The panel flipped open easily enough, and I climbed onto the roof of the elevator and saw the darkened shafts and the moving cars, and I felt my stomach drop. I once went on a tethered spacewalk. I’d once ridden alone in a submarine to the bottom of the sea. Riding on the top of an elevator, staring up a narrow shaft, and seeing cars drop out of the shadows reminded me of just how miniscule I had felt hanging from a leash in space.

  The shaft was dark enough that my visor switched to night-for-day lenses, making everything flat and coloring it all in blue-white scale so that the metal skins of the elevator cars blended in with the concrete walls. I crouched and held tightly on to the pipes along the roof of the elevator as the car came to a stop on the third floor. The LCB stood only ten stories tall, making it a midget by Washington standards. The elevators rose and dropped quickly, maybe a floor per second. As I climbed back to my feet, an elevator dropped behind me, again catching me off guard. My car rose three floors, to the sixth, and stopped. Are they getting on or off? I wondered.

  This time I felt a slight vibration as the car began to move. We lifted one floor, then another, and I lifted the trapdoor and dropped through without pausing to look for passengers. The three men standing in the car hadn’t seen me peer in coming from above. I dropped on top of one and caught the other two napping, then I shot them all with the fléchette cannon on my right sleeve.

  I’d never used one before, though I understood the point-and-flex muscle mechanics that fired the weapon and prevented accidental discharges. I shot the guy to my right, then the guy to my left, then the one under my knees, hitting the standing men’s skulls and the last guy’s neck. The fléchettes were tiny, but blood splattered just the same, leaving splash patterns on the walls.

  The ele
vator door opened to chaos.

  Naens had begun his work. He wanted to draw the protection away from Andropov and leave them stranded. His plan involved setting charges, which hadn’t gone off just yet, but it also involved putting on a show. That much must have begun.

  As the senior member of the Linear Committee, maybe the only member after MacAvoy’s last stand, Andropov had the floor to himself. Like me, he had kept the floor a wide-open expanse with desks and stations for secretaries and aides. Some workers remained, women in suits and dresses, men in ties and jackets, but most of the population wore combat armor. On a quick scan, I counted about twenty men in armor.

  At the far end of the space, the door to Andropov’s office sat open and beguiling. It challenged me to approach. Strange as it sounds, until I stepped out of the elevator and spotted that open door and the men guarding it, it had never occurred to me that a bullet or a fléchette or even a lucky knife could cause me to fail my mission.

  If one of the Marines killed me before I entered the detonation code, I would fail. Hell, they wouldn’t even need to kill me. What if they broke the equipment in my visor? What if someone sludged the air waves?

  At that moment, I wondered if maybe I should step back in the elevator and explode my nukes. For all I knew, the Unifieds might have already caught Naens. Even as I considered that possibility, the first of his charges blew, a small explosion that sent a ripple through the building followed by two equally tiny explosions, then the avalanche began.

  The entire building quivered as the outer wall on the far side of the building crumbled into scales and flakes. Windows shattered and fell from their casings. The power went out. Computer screens turned dark, so did the light fixtures. Walls slowly disintegrated and slid from the building, revealing gauzy clouds floating across a starlit sky with pale beams of moonlight slanting in through the holes.