by Les Petersen
“They’re both dead.” She didn’t look at me when she said it. “Your trick with Medusa’s backup to your implant worked. She reasserted herself right on time.”
“Jeezus,” I mouthed under my breath.
Sam squatted down beside me. “But speaking of time, we don’t have much, Jack. My PAN’s bringing in a chopper to take the Baeder Box; the Mils are about one minute from sending in their Paras; I’m almost out of ammo and my suit won’t take too many more strikes; plus the clones invaded my PAN. I’ve reinstated some of your force, but I’ve got about ten seconds before mine goes down. Can you move?”
I didn’t feel like doing anything. I would rather lie there and do nothing and hope it would all go away, but there had to be some other outcome. It was like a bad movie that went on and on and never reached a conclusion. I slowly got to my feet and tried to make light of the situation. “So, are you enjoying our date, or what?”
At least she smiled.
We heard the chomping of the chopper as it jetted into the area and set down on the western battlements where the Baeder Box was. Over near the doorway I could see the shattered crate Shahn and Kren had died beside, for no reason other than their own twisted belief of what would happen to them. Christ, they’d have survived the Squads’ questioning. I could have had Gilamens take care of them.
Sam tugged my arm. “Come on, Jack. We have to get out of here first.”
I nodded and began to follow her out of the cathedral.
Two seconds later we heard a baby cry. Sam darted a look at me, lifted her SLR and checked the rounds remaining. I knew immediately it was Harry’s voice and despite the intense pain in my head, I drew the combat knives Shotgun had given me. They were the only weapons I had. “You ready,” she asked.
I nodded, and Sam led me out of the cathedral and along the façade toward the east. We could see the troop carriers setting down near the old fort to the north of the cathedral, their doors spitting out Tinmen soldiers who immediately set up a beach head. Any moment they’d begin to close the net on the area.
The child cried out, a strident wail louder than the sound of the troop carriers’ engines. We rounded the corner to find the chopper hovering above a crate just along from us. The crying was coming from within the chopper and hanging from the doorway was a man, my clone. Also hanging from the chopper was a weapon pod.
Two antipersonnel missiles surged away from it toward us. I dived back for the corner, but Sam coolly turned side-on and aimed at the clone, ignoring the missiles screaming toward her. She put a burst of bullets precisely into the hand he was using to hold himself against the door of the chopper and then leapt forward, under the path of the arm-length missiles as the clone fell out of the chopper. Both missiles reacted immediately, but their paths converged and they collided, exploding above her, spraying the area with napalm. I heard her scream in agony before I was blown across the footpath by the shockwave.
I didn’t lose consciousness because I needed to stay awake to save Sam and Harry. I scrambled to my feet, groggy from the blow, grateful I had escaped the fierce blaze of the napalm, but knowing Sam hadn’t been so lucky. She was lying face down in a ball of flickering fire; the whole area looked as if I had dropped into Hades.
The clone rose to his feet and marched through the destruction toward me, yelling instructions into his holoface. I glanced up the hill to see what the Tinmen were doing, hoping they were going to come down to lend a hand., but they were withdrawing quickly and I realised that like the other clones, this one was with the military and it was he who was commanding them to withdraw.
I hate being a hero.
The clone stopped as he neared Sam and I saw her move as he stood over her. Her head was almost stripped of flesh and tendrils of her hair were still smouldering, but she tried to bring her gun around to target him. He cursed her and kicked her hard against the ribs, causing her to convulse in agony and lose her grip on her weapon.
Screaming abuse, emptying my heart of the fear and rage I felt at the first sight of him, I sprinted toward the clone. My hand leapt forward almost of its own accord. A knife flashed across the space between us and speared into the gap between his chin and his chest. He staggered backward, clutching at his throat. I charged at him again and leapt the last few paces, grappling for his throat, swinging my other knife for his face.
He went under me in one fluid action and propelled me onwards into the side of the Baeder Box. I slammed into it and slid to the ground headfirst. As I rose again, a little shaky on my legs, I found the intruder standing away to my left. His holoface was blazing in radiant colours, like a devilish halo. I had barely enough time to register he was at least a head taller than me and built like a brick shit house before he came at me like an express train. In one leap, he was beside me, flicked himself onto one leg and kicked me hard against the crown of my head with the other. It felt like he had lifted my skull clear off. I was falling toward the earth when he went over me like a gymnast, back up into the chopper.
The ground was harder than a first date rejection. It knocked the wind out of my lungs and stars sprayed across my vision as the back of my head cracked against stone. I clung to reality with every tendril of will I possessed, focusing on the sound of the chopper surging with power. A moment later, as I pulled myself from the brink of unconsciousness, he appeared in the doorway, dropped onto the crates and disappeared into the darkness with bullets smashing into the stone around him.
Sam stopped firing. “He has the child with him, Jack,” she explained.
I dragged myself back onto my feet and staggered over to where Sam lay. Kneeling beside her I saw her face was wrapped in a cocoon of new flesh as micromedics slaved away to save her, but her head was raw and weeping. I heard Harry crying as he was carried into the cathedral. Blood dribble out of the cocoon around Sam’s face as she poked her tongue through some of the strands. “I’ll live,” she said. “Get the kid.”
She didn’t have to tell me twice. “Where do you think he is?”
“Inside the cloister, I think. Jack, we’ve got International Immunity. SmartGuy’s arranged our extraction. ETA fifty minutes.”
I looked up at the troop carriers perched above the fort, still there despite the fire fight going on around the cathedral. It was as if they were waiting for something. “You’ll be alright?” I asked Sam.
“I won’t die just yet.”
“I’ll hold you to that. Be back as soon as I can.” I looked about, but all the weapons were damaged or useless. I drew the other dagger Shotgun had given me, kissed Sam on the head as carefully as I could and headed for the cloister.
Chapter 23
The armoured suit had inbuilt lighting and it illuminated the sides of the cathedral as I moved down them., but I might as well have been blind, because I walked right into his trap. I had just stepped around the corner when a pistol was jammed hard against my temple. I could hear him breathing like an express train in my ear, but then he stepped around me while holding the gun against my head. I could see small medibots working at the wound in his throat, stitching the sides together and they looked like flies feasting on a cadaver.
“Only curiosity prevents your death, Jack,” he said, making ‘Jack’ sound like a death knell.
He wrenched me closer to him, then using the pressure of the barrel against my head he pushed my face away so I couldn’t look at him. “Toss the knife away.”
It clattered on the stone. We stood there for a few moments while he gathered his composure. I heard the troop carriers lifting off and through his holoface, the commander’s voice instructing them to return to their bases. I tried to look sideways without moving my head. Half of the clone’s face was in shadow, but the other half I knew so well. He was a younger version of myself. Maybe the early twenties.
He saw me looking and said, “I didn’t tell you to look at me. You do it again and I’ll pull the trigger.”
“Well at least I’ll be killed by a good-looking son of a bitch.”
He backed off four or five paces and stood with the gun held casually at chest height. Ice on the freezer melts faster than I turned and when I was finally facing him I could see the differences between us immediately. I’m a well-built man, but he seemed twice as wide across the shoulders and bulked out with powerful muscles that even the full body armour could not hide., but not only was his physique enhanced, his face was different in subtle ways. He wasn’t just a younger version of me, but also a lot harder in the face; as if he had been brought up on prunes and lemon juice. Maybe it was just the way he used the muscles of his face that made him look more like a younger brother than a duplicate., but the way he stood and the way he used his powerful limbs while he tracked my movements, confirmed that he was definitely not a younger version of me.
I knew he was assessing me in exactly the same way and I had the uneasy feeling I was looking at my perfectly constructed self and yet, in the same moment, I had the powerful image of David facing up to Goliath. I was also aware that he was probably thinking of me as something that wasn’t quite a man and wasn’t worth his worry.
He motioned toward the north and I began walking. He was following me.
I asked over my shoulder “What should I call you?”
“I chose Harry as a name…but then I found out you called all your alternative entities Harry so I changed it to Pat…short for Patroclus.”
“Ah…Greek Mythology…friend to Achilles.”
He sounded surprised. “You know it?”
“Of course. The name means ‘Father’s glory’. Unfortunately, Patroclus was killed in the Trojan Wars by Hector.”
“Such a shame. Still I’m not going to die the same way.”
“Spear through the chest, if I remember rightly.”
“I’m cloned, not reincarnated. And thank you for that insight into ancient history.”
“Mythology, not history. There is a difference.”
“In here,” he said as we approached the Fillols door. As I stepped through the doorway he said, “Do you know this doorway is called the Fillols door because this is the door through, which God’s children enter the cathedral for the first time. Quite appropriate, don’t you think?”
His last three words struck home like a dagger in the back. “Esteve Estany made you, didn’t he?” How else could he have reached the cathedral at almost the same time that we had. “He sent you here to clean up the loose ends.”
Patroclus didn’t deny it. He pushed me toward the front of the cathedral, toward the Chapel of San Pere. “But of course I was created by Esteve, about five years ago,” he confirmed. “He was the only one capable of creating clones of my complexity and then speeding them through their first twenty years. It is his research you were after. And it is his research, which I have recovered.”
He grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and told me to stand still. The sound of a baby chatting to itself was echoing softly from the front of the cathedral. Only the wash from Pat’s holoface illuminated the area and I could not see anything in the darkness beyond., but I knew it lay on the altar in the chapel. I longed to rush forward to rescue the child.
“So, what happens now?” I asked when he came around to face me.
He shrugged with just one shoulder – a habit I had cured myself of years before. “Now? We have a little talk about my child,” he said. “Then you turn and walk away from me. Maybe I’ll shoot you. Maybe I won’t. Maybe you’ll live. Maybe you won’t. We both know I’m a moody kind of guy.”
“Well I’m not moody, just passionate about how I feel.”
“And when you get passionate about feeling inferior, you drink too much.”
I laughed. “Well, I knew my body would someday tell me I drank too much, but I never imagined it would be like this. So, why the kid? What’s he got to do with it?”
“More than you could ever imaging, Jack. I’ve decided I’m taking him with me. I brought him here to trade you for the Baeder Box, but I have that now, so you forfeit the prize.”
I felt the future crash around me. “You son of a bitch!”
He held up one finger and wagged it to and for. “Au contraire, Jack. I’m the son of a bastard because your genetic code was used to create me. Therefore, I’m your son. And this child is my son, not yours.”
“No! He is my son. You are just a––”
He cocked the gun and the sound crashed around the cathedral like clash of blades. Harry stopped chatting in the darkness.
“I’m a charming, attractive man, am I not?” the clone said, raising one eyebrow and thrusting the pistol in my face.
I looked down the barrel of the gun and nodded. “I couldn’t agree more.”
“Good. I’m enhanced and you are just a pathetic little man – all tied up in the frailty of fools who share your pathetic little life. I took the sick, fickle body you have and bolted on the rest of me. I’m you without the mistakes and I am so much better because you have had thirty years to get to where you are and I reached this road in a burst of five.”
I had to smile. “What a mess that makes of the truth of Existence.”
“Existence is not flesh,” he snarled. “It’s not biology or gender or man-made to order. Existence is in our mind, where the real me is. So different. So much better.”
I hate conceit in others. “I bet you don’t even know, which knife to use when you butter your bread.”
He smiled at me, but only with his mouth – his eyes stayed nasty. “I prefer to eat with my fingers. Now turn around.”
“I thought we were going to talk about my child.”
He shook his head at me as if I had said something stupid. “Shall we argue the metaphysics of whose child it is yet again, Jack? I have the experience of being a clone as well as the body parts you guard so jealously. Discussion finished.”
He raised the pistol and took aim between my eyes. “If you were a praying man, this would be the perfect place for it.”
“Should I begin with ‘Forgive me Father for I have sinned?’”
He shook his head at me. “You sad little man.”
“At least let me see him.”
“You never saw the child before, so you will have lost nothing.”
I’d lost everything after he died. I mourned him for years. “Please let me see his face, I won’t touch him or hold him…just let me see his face. Give some relevance to all of this, for God’s sake.”
“Don’t blaspheme, Jack. And turn around.”
“No!”
He pushed me in the face with the barrel. A cold circle of death. “You’ll never see my son, Jack. We are one and the same – he and I – and I’ll bring him up as you never could. Because you could never see what I see; to me he is a child not just another rerun of someone else’s soap opera. Now, turn around and take a step.”
“And after that?”
“Then you take another and another and keep walking.”
I turned away from him, but couldn’t let him do what he was doing. I knew I could never shoot myself in the back and he couldn’t ei–
“I know what you are thinking, Jack,” his voice echoed around the cathedral. “You are thinking what you could or couldn’t do and telling yourself I would do these things also. I know you, Jack, better than I know myself. So, don’t be so foolish. I’m capable of shooting you where you stand.”
I took a step, thinking frantically of something I could say that would be worthwhile. “You should’ve met my father and mother, they were a hell of a couple.”
Genealogy didn’t worry him. “I’ll leave flowers on their graves in memory of you, if you don’t take another step.”
I took another step. “You know, when you look in the mirror, it will be me you see.”
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He laughed at me. “I can live with that. Surgery will fix it up if I get bored with it. Keep walking away from us, Jack, or you will never walk again.”
I took another step and then another. I heard him back away from me. And after the third extra step I took, I began to walk quickly. I walked out of the cathedral and then broke into a run, sprinting around to where the chopper had been. Hoping I would catch a glimpse—
But the chopper had flitted over the building to pick up passengers and then lifted high into the air. Already it tracked away to the north. Sirens were going off all over the place and the flashing lights of emergency vehicles closed in on the area. I walked over to where Sam sat propped against a wall. I sat down beside her, waiting for the chopper to explode when the mines detonated the Baeder Box.
She rolled her head and looked at me. I smiled and opened my hands to show her they were empty. “Gone. All gone.”
She spoke slowly so as not to tear any of the work the nano medics were doing. “I’ve deactivated the mines, Jack. And I left Medusa in the chopper with instructions to aid as she deems fit. I knew you wouldn’t want to kill the kid.”
I just nodded. My chest felt so heavy it could have sunk through my body and I felt tears burning up my cheeks.
“What are you going to do?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all.” I looked at Sam, who had done so much and suffered so much. “It’s just you and me against the world,” I told her as I reached over and carefully tucked an arm around her shoulder and pulled her into an embrace.
The lights of the chopper dimmed into the distance.
“You know,” I said to her, “I’d like to see my parents again. My father could knit two of forks together somehow and make them dance along the edge of a knife blade, just by spinning them slowly. He used to balance it there and call it his magical child…the one who could make the world perfect if only he didn’t let it slip from the knife-edge.”
“What a lovely, strange man.”
“The stupid thing always fell off the knife, though.”