I said, “You can do whatever you want. You can beg if you want; I don’t care.”
“Killing me won’t fix things,” he said. “It won’t bring your empire back.”
“Nothing will bring it back,” I said. “Nothing will specking bring it back.”
“I can bring it back,” he said.
He looked small behind the desk. He looked like a little boy. Terror makes men into boys. I wondered how many of my men felt terror as they waited for the death reflex to take them. I wondered what tremors ran through Perry MacAvoy’s mind as they sat him back in his wheelchair and shot him.
“Did your scientists develop something that resurrects dead clones?” I asked.
“No,” he admitted.
I raised my right arm, aimed the cannon at him, and said, “I didn’t think so.”
He raised his hands, palms forward, fingers up, a show of submission. I reminded myself that a lot of people would still be alive if he’d quit a few weeks earlier. Just six weeks earlier, and Hunter Ritz would still be alive. If he’d stopped three weeks ago, I’d still have a corps of Marines.
His hands still up, he said, “Seven hundred thousand Marines and thirty-two thousand sailors. That’s how many there are on Terraneau.”
The dumb shit had nothing. He couldn’t hurt me; I had my shields up. Even if he had a bomb or a rocket under his desk, the most he could do is send me flying, maybe kill us both, but he wouldn’t do that. He wanted to live.
He was weak. He was a politician. He sent people to die; he never faced death himself.
“Reprogrammed clones,” I said.
“Cut from the same DNA as the men that you lost.”
“Do you have a way of restoring their programming?” I’d gone over that with Tasman. There’d be a high mortality rate if we tried to set them back.
“It shouldn’t be a problem,” said Andropov.
I fired my first fléchette, hitting the back of his seat just an inch from his face, and said, “I don’t believe you.”
“We programmed them,” he said. “We can reboot them.”
“How are you going to get to them?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t have a self-broadcasting fleet.”
“There are ships . . . cruisers . . . spy ships.”
“Cruisers are small,” I said. “Spy ships have stealth engines. They’re easy to lose, and I don’t trust you.”
“Damn it to Hell! What do you want?” he shouted. That was when I fired my next fléchette. This one hit near his eye. The sound of the fragment going through the back of his seat made him jump.
He said, “Killing me won’t change anything. The Unified Authority still wins.”
“You killed my empire; I’m killing yours,” I said.
“One man at a time?” he asked. He didn’t ask this in a mouthy way. The man was trembling and making no effort to hide it. If he hadn’t emptied his bladder when I came through the door, that last fléchette had undoubtedly broken the dam.
“Not exactly,” I said. “I’m rearranging the map.”
“You’re what? What do you mean?”
“I’m erasing Virginia and Maryland,” I said.
“You’re insane.”
I smiled and fired a fléchette into his desk. It may have hit his thigh, possibly his crotch. I hoped it hadn’t. I didn’t want the fléchette to kill him. I wanted the toxin to do the job.
The fragment was fast, and the pain came slowly. The only signal Andropov sent that the fléchette had hit him was a groan. He moaned and looked down, puzzlement now mixed with the fear in his expression. He must have spotted the little stream of blood spurting up, but he was weak and overcome by shock even before the neurotoxins spread through his system.
He looked up at me. Hate and anger should have shone in his face; instead, I saw fear and surprise. Had he really thought he would talk his way out of this? He didn’t speak. He couldn’t. He was in shock, paralyzed, dying. Five or six seconds after I shot him, Andropov’s head fell to the desk.
He might still have had some life left in him, but not much.
I said, “We both lose our lives and empires.” I laughed. I laughed and I laughed, and I couldn’t stop myself, and I raised my arm and aimed the tiny cannon and fired fléchettes into that dead man’s skull until the top of his head looked like mush.
Then I brought up the code, and I was about to blow up the bombs, but I had a thought. I remembered Naens. He was still alive. He had destroyed the gunship. He was down there, somewhere.
I wanted to thank him. I wanted him to die with honors, to face his death and to know when it arrived. He and I, we would die like soldiers.
During the time I had been chatting with the late Tobias Andropov, several more gunships had arrived. They prowled the air around the building, like cats waiting for a cornered mouse. Those pilots had heat vision. They’d undoubtedly watched me through the walls. The lights on the fronts of their birds searched the ruined floor.
Troops, hundreds of them, thousands of them, had probably surrounded the base of the building. What could they do? Naens had caved walls over the entrances of the building and the parking garage below it.
One of the gunships fired a rocket as I left the office. The gunner who fired it aimed it by me, not at me. They couldn’t hit the building with a rocket, not without caving the whole thing in on itself, and Naens had trapped a lot of natural-born Unified Authority personnel in these crumbling walls, so the rocket sailed in through the remains of one broken wall and out through the gaps in another.
Chain guns fired. One gunship hovered over my head, and some stupid bastard tried to jump out. I shot him before he landed, and he toppled onto the floor in a clump. A torrent of bullets hit a desk beside where I stood, mincing it into sawdust and filings. They hit a bookshelf, filling the air with shreds of paper, some of which caught fire.
The flashing icon in my visor warned me that bullets had hit me on every side. Just you wait right here, I thought as I reached the elevators, waiting to lower my shields until I stepped into the barrel of the shaft. Even here the bullets followed me.
Chain guns shot through the walls as I lowered my shields and attached my cord to a girder and dropped faster than the elevators had traveled. I dropped two floors at a time, making sure not to stop by doors in which angry Unifieds might be waiting. The explosions had left a few doors open, but from what I could tell, it had launched all of the elevator cars through the roof of the building.
Zipping past open doors, I saw darkness and destruction. Naens’s bombs had broken these floors even more than they broke Andropov’s floor. I saw bodies and walls demolished into heaps. There was no electricity. Vents as wide as water barrels hung like hoses from holes in the ceilings.
Moments later, I had dropped below the lobby, and three empty levels after that, I unhitched in the garage. The world was pitch-black down here. The sun itself could have followed me into that elevator shaft, and it might not have produced sufficient radiance to light the garage, but I had my night-for-day vision, and I found the small man with a bony ridge over his eyes as I lowered myself to the floor.
“You did a great job,” I said.
“Is he dead?” asked Naens.
“If he isn’t, he isn’t happy,” I said.
“Why are you limping?” Naens asked me as I unlocked the cord and walked past him. I headed out of the hub and toward the door to the tunnels.
“I twisted my leg.”
“I thought the armor was supposed to protect you.”
“It did,” I said. “It kept everything out, but it doesn’t stop you from twisting your own ankle.”
He nodded. I couldn’t see his eyes; he was wearing those goggles. Even he would have been completely blind down here without help.
As he followed me, he asked, “Aren’t we supposed to be dead by now?”
“I want to watch it happen,” I said.
“You want to see the b
omb explode?” he asked. “You really are insane.”
Those were his last words. He stepped through the doorway, and a single shot was fired. The bullet struck his head, splattering it against a wall. Standing just outside the doorway, I got splashed with a few drops of blood. I raised my shields and stepped over the body.
I yelled, “You shouldn’t have shot him, Ray.”
Freeman answered, “You won’t be able to flip the switch hiding behind a shield.”
“I don’t need to,” I said. “I have remote access.”
Freeman went silent. He hadn’t considered that possibility. A few seconds passed, and he yelled, “I can’t let you set off the bombs.”
“I don’t see how you can stop me,” I said as I searched the tunnels using both night-for-day lenses and heat vision. Neither worked. He was out there, probably hiding behind a thick wall, far out of the range of my fléchettes. He had that sniper rifle. I wanted to set off the nukes, but I hated the idea of killing Freeman.
As long as I kept my shields up, Freeman couldn’t hurt me. He couldn’t miss me, either. I was a gold-glowing ghost in a universe of black, a human-sized target for a man who could hit a coin from a mile away.
Freeman shouted, “Harris, that flu caused you to have a combat reflex. Your brain is full of hormone. You’re not thinking straight.”
I crossed the foyer and started down the stairs, which wasn’t so easy with my shields up. I had to take each step at its edge so that the backs of my legs didn’t rub against the next one up. A couple of hundred yards ahead of me, something moved. I caught a quick glance of the RPG before it struck the stairs.
He wanted to bury me. He wanted to bury me the way I had buried so many Unifieds in shielded armor. It didn’t work the way he wanted. Freeman knew everything there was to know about demolitions and sniper rifles, but that RPG he’d fired hit low and wide and did next to nothing.
I shouted, “Try that again, Ray, and I’ll set the nukes off from here.”
“Then you’ll kill me, too, Wayson.”
It wasn’t Freeman who stepped into the open lobby; it was Kasara. She’d dressed in khaki BDUs like a soldier, but they looked incredibly baggy on her. She had her hair pulled back.
I stopped and stared at her, and I asked, “Why did you come here? You could have been safe. You would have been safe. Once I’m done, you won’t ever need to worry about the Unified Authority ever again.”
She held a flashlight, a stupid, specking flashlight. It was a civilian-issue flashlight, cheap and small and weak. She took several steps toward me so that we were just a few feet apart.
“I’m not worried about the Unified Authority. Right now, you scare me more than Andropov.”
I looked at her and knew that while I didn’t love her, I did not want to kill her. I said, “Andropov is dead.”
She said, “Wayson, it’s not just Unifieds out there; it’s children and mothers and grandfathers.”
“People who deserve to die,” I said.
“Innocent people!”
“Where were they when the Unifieds massacred my people?” I asked. “Where were they when we fought the aliens on New Copenhagen? Where were they when we rescued your people from Olympus Kri? They don’t deserve to live. We saved them from Mogats and Avatari.”
“And now you want to kill them?” Kasara asked. She was right in front of me now, standing at the base of the stairs, and I had this wild hare of an impulse, I wanted to grab her and to hug her and to allow the joules of condensed electricity that ran through my shields to shock her or burn her like a dried leaf in a fire. I never loved you, I told myself.
I saw her face clearly, but her hair and skin were the same damn blue-white color in my lenses. I couldn’t see her eyes clearly, they were bathed in shadow. I switched to heat vision, turning her into a vividly colored shadow, and I stepped around her without giving her a second glance.
She yelled, “Wayson!”
I already had the code up—819, the month, the year, the end, and I looked down at the icon that would initiate the explosion. One twitch of my eye . . . the time had come. I . . .
“Freeman, you’re sludging the airwaves,” I shouted.
He didn’t answer.
Now we both knew something about each other’s plans. I knew Freeman had a sludging device; he now knew that I had tried to detonate my nukes. I would either need to destroy his device or lower my shields in order to set off my nukes, and he would shoot me the moment I did. That meant that I either needed to destroy Freeman’s sludging device, or I needed to destroy him.
I marched ahead, toward the spot from which he had fired the RPG, not as confident as I had been. If he brought the roof down on my head, I would not be able to do a remote detonation.
“Wayson!” Kasara followed after me, calling my name, begging me to stop. “Wayson! Stop, you need help!”
I wanted to turn. I wanted to shoot her, to kill her just like I had killed Andropov, to stand there and watch her die, but I wasn’t sure why I wanted to do it. It was an impulse without a root. It was a thought without a cause. I ignored her.
She shouldn’t have come, I told myself. She betrayed me by coming.
There was an alcove straight ahead. The walls around the alcove were tile over cement, and thick, thick enough to hide a man’s heat signature. I aimed my fléchette cannon and stormed ahead, not pausing, confident I would shoot Freeman. He had come. His decision, and the consequences would rest on his head.
I rounded the corner. Freeman was gone, but he had left his sludging device. It sat on the floor, a shoebox-sized device with an antenna, a meter, and a power switch. I shot eight fléchettes into it.
The first shot hit me in the back. The little red icon came up in my visor and with a white dot on my back that froze into place. I pivoted, aimed my cannon, and the second shot hit me in the chest, and there was Freeman, just out of my accuracy range, holding a target pistol.
I looked down at my chest, saw the goop that he had splattered there. The son of a bitch had shot me with a couple of Perry MacAvoy’s shield sappers. “SPECK!” The word erupted from my lips. I aimed my wrist cannon in his direction but slightly high and fired and fired and fired, but he moved behind a wall and my fléchettes vanished and “SPECK!” erupted from my lips again.
I tried to detonate again, but that hadn’t been his only sludging device. It might have been a decoy or a backup, but the airwaves were still sludged, and who the speck knew how much juice I had left in my armor, but freshly charged batteries only lasted six minutes when MacAvoy shot them with this shit.
“Wayson, stop! You don’t want to do this!” Kasara screamed.
I wanted to shoot her, but I ignored the urge. She’d die in another moment. She’d die soon enough. I turned and walked toward the nukes. They were a few minutes away. I needed to get to them quickly. If my shields went out, Freeman would shoot me.
He yelled, “Harris, it needs to be your choice.”
My choice! I thought, and I laughed. My choice? He was sludging the airwaves and waiting to shoot me. I kept my strides long and fast, turning corners, marching through dark halls.
He wanted me to lower my shields, to let him take me. I turned back, saw him poised over a counter, his rifle trained on me. He was thirty feet out of my range. I looked ahead. There was the nuclear device, far ahead. If I pressed ahead, I could still reach it.
“They turned on you as much as they turned on me!” I screamed. “They want you dead, too!”
“That doesn’t matter,” said Freeman.
“Then what matters? Huh? What the speck matters if that doesn’t matter?
“You know what, Ray? More clones died fighting the Avatari, trying to save these bastards . . . the Avatari killed ten times more clones than that specking flu, and they still turned on us. We protected them, Ray. We followed all of their orders. Duty, right? We did our duty. We made all of the sacrifices.
“Does that count for anything?”
&n
bsp; A moment of silence, and then a low, calm response, “Not at the moment.”
In my mind I saw Hunter Ritz. I saw Sergeant Shannon and Lewis Herrington and Kelly Thomer and Mark Phillips, clones who had died bravely fighting to save natural-borns, and I knew I was letting them down. Freeman had outsmarted me. I wasn’t going to avenge them.
Freeman yelled, “Harris, you need to lower your shields. If you don’t walk away from this on your own, I’ll have to kill you. If you walk away, I can help you, but I won’t help you unless you take the first step.”
I hated him. I hated Kasara. I hated myself.
There was something wrong with me. I thought about the way I laughed as I killed the Marines guarding Andropov. I thought about my desire to kill millions of civilians. Something was wrong, I knew there was something wrong with what I wanted to do, but I had no idea what.
The nuke sat there, the risk, the gamble, the possibility of fulfilling my only ambition.
“Wayson, we’re trying to help you,” Kasara said. She was close to me again, running toward me, close enough that I could see the tears on her cheeks. I wasn’t moved.
I should have been moved. She cared about me. I didn’t know if I ever loved her, but I had certainly cared about her as well.
I turned off my shields and dropped onto a marble bench, fully aware that Freeman would shoot me now that I no longer had shields to protect me. He would execute me; that was the only way he could make sure I never changed my mind.
Freeman had always been careful. Instead of approaching me for the traditional shot to the back of the head, he remained a hundred yards away, out of range. My shields were down, but my wrist cannon still worked.
He yelled, “Now take off your helmet.”
It will be a clean shot, I told myself. That is a good way to die, a clean shot through the brain. Quick. No suffering. The best I could ask for.
Fear of death had seldom bothered me, but surrender didn’t come easily. I sighed, reached for my helmet, and paused. It would be over in a moment. I thought of my ghosts and accepted that I would soon join them, then I removed my helmet.
I caught a brief whiff of the ammonia saturating the air. I didn’t even have time to realize what I had smelled before the world went black.
The Clone Apocalypse Page 36
