Firedance

by Steven Barnes

  19

  JULY 23

  Silver and blue, a gilded eagle, a U.S. Department of Defense Boeing personnel skimmer was perched at the edge of the southern landing strip when the three of them returned. Two men waited, each holding an attaché case.

  One of the two wasn’t quite five feet tall, almost dwarfish but with a sharp face, light eyebrows, and piercing eyes. His nose was slightly hooked, and his thin mouth bore the barest trace of a smile, as if in memory of a half-forgotten joke. He wore a dark, impeccably tailored brown suit with a narrow gold tie.

  The second man was younger, blond, thin, but almost as tall as Aubry. He wore a deep-blue trenchcoat with a white scarf inside the collar. He was handsome in an arrogant way, brows creasing together to wrinkle his forehead. The trenchcoat was cinched with a tight knot, and the morning wind ruffled its edges.

  Most of the tension had left Aubry. Once again, he moved with his customary effortless glide, and Leslie scurried to keep up with him. Aubry shook hands with the shorter of the two men, his grip as measured as that of a man holding the last egg of an endangered species. Leslie clung to Aubry’s leg, looking up at the strangers with wide-eyed innocence.

  “Mr. Knight?” The short man said. “I’m General Hayward Koskotas, Central Intelligence.” He indicated the taller man to his left. “This is Kramer. We’re sorry about your problem, and we’re here to do whatever we can.”

  Aubry nodded. “Follow me, please.”

  Before they reached the medical building, they were met by Jenna, who measured the intruders with a practiced gaze. Koskotas she relegated to some emotional scrap heap in a moment, but Kramer she seemed to memorize. Their eyes locked, and for an instant, Aubry thought that there was going to be a challenge, verbal or physical. Then she stepped aside and let them enter the building.

  Even at seven a.m. the med center bustled with white-smocked, efficient women. There was no mistaking the fact that this was a vital organ in the body Ephesus. Here were the biological labs, the places where small and delicate magics were practiced, human ova melded one to another, women breeding without the genetic contributions of males.

  As the Intelligence officers were marched through busy halls, they were greeted with suspicion and distaste by the doctors and assistants. They were outsiders. They were men. They were not welcome, tolerated only because Promise and Jenna accompanied them.

  Aubry was another matter. The women seemed amusedly fond of him, almost as if he were a mascot. Say, a pet leopard.

  The six of them descended into the med center’s basement. When the door opened again, they were in a glass-walled room. Two pale assistants—one of them, surprisingly, a balding man in his thirties—helped them trade their jackets for smocks. Their coats were treated like contaminata, and whisked away for irradiation.

  In single file, they were ushered through a narrow door into a room bathed in wavering pink light.

  In the middle of the room was a stainless-steel table. Upon that table was a sheet-draped lump of human dimensions.

  Koskotas looked up at Promise, his narrow face creased with distaste. “Are you certain this is appropriate for the child?”

  Aubry snorted amusement. Promise showed a moment’s concern and then turned to Leslie. “Biological mode, Leslie.”

  Leslie’s eyes grew sharp and then soft, and he nodded.

  Koskotas whisked the sheet off. A younger Aubry Knight stared up at them. His features, relaxed in death, seemed deflated, void of all vitality, an empty vessel. The corpse had been rinsed, but otherwise remained untouched.

  Koskotas opened his briefcase, revealing a screen and keyboard, voice and eye input apparatus, and three thin parallel lines of plastic touch-strip. He ran his fingers along the strips, triggering and adjusting the screen, spoke a few words, and allowed the case to read his retinal patterns. The screen lit with the words AUTOPSY ACCESS STYX HOT FILE, DIRECT INDUCTION ONLY. Koskotas touched the nape of his neck, and Promise caught a silvered glimpse of the implant linking him with the briefcase. The case itself was probably satellite-linked to some data pool in Washington.

  Koskotas spoke as if to an audience of pathologists. “All right. I see a male of very pure Negroid stock, approximately seventy-six inches in length, perhaps three hundred pounds.” He poked and prodded briskly. “The musculature is extremely dense. I’ve seen this only on professional athletes, powerlifters of international caliber, and members of that group known as NewMen.” He turned to Kramer. “We’re checking the gene-print for affiliation now.” To Promise he said, “Would you have your main banks feed me the results of the blood and tissue samples, please.”

  “Frequency?” Jenna asked.

  “Two-oh-nine. Alpha beta zeta.”

  “Coming right up.” She tickled a transceiver pad built into her belt, and Koskotas straightened, eyes widening as the Ephesus computer system linked with the briefcase, and the case fed its information to the general.

  Eyes wide and staring, he spoke again. Promise thought that it might have been her imagination, but it seemed there was a slight feminine lilt to Koskotas’s voice now. “We have found no trace of any artificial ergonometrics. Present theory is that the muscular density is a direct adaptation to stress. The degree of adaptation suggests an override of pain thresholds, but no genetic or endocrinal modifications beyond basic acceleration technology. Physiological age—approximately twenty-five. Chronological age …” He paused. “No data.”

  Promise stared at the corpse, her eyes ranging from its cold, flat features to those of the man she loved. Again and again her gaze made its circuit. The likeness was shocking, beneath the scars and tattoos. These were almost twins—the same man, caught at slightly different stages of development. Her stomach soured and tightened.

  “No evidence of plastic or thermal surgery, no alteration of the bone structure.” Koskotas’s thin, small mouth creased in a mirthless smile. “It’s you, no doubt about it. Turn the body over, please.”

  Aubry and Jenna rolled it over, and the air in the room grew still.

  Across the back of the corpse were two designs. One was a tattoo of a dragon, done in garish colors against the darkness of the skin. The other was a curlicue of keloid scars, running across the back and upper shoulders, down the back of the arms. The two images somehow blended into and reinforced one another.

  Koskotas traced the scars with his finger, and then sighed. “Right here,” he said. “Feel it.” Promise reached out. Her fingers traced a roughly oval outline of keloid scars. Kramer’s face was neutral.

  She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

  “You will. Have the cameras been recording?”

  “Yes. Everything,” Jenna said. Her gaze was frozen to the table.

  “Then let’s go somewhere and talk.”

  20

  The conference room could easily have held forty, and the six of them were dwarfed by its vaulted ceiling and convex walls. Kramer hadn’t spoken during the entire business. Koskotas’s lids were shut, his eyes moving rapidly behind them as if organizing file cards.

  Finally, he opened his eyes. “Mr. Knight,” he said. “What we have is what we were afraid we would find.”

  “Can you be a little more direct?” Aubry asked. His voice was flat with irritation.

  “Certainly,” Koskotas said.

  Koskotas whispered in Kramer’s ear, and they conferred quietly for almost two minutes.

  So the sonofabitch can talk, Aubry thought. He had considered stepping on Kramer’s toe, just to see if he squeaked. Aubry watched them, and listened, but couldn’t pick up enough. Then he caught Leslie’s eyes. The child was watching them in a defocused manner, concentrating on nothing, taking in everything. Aubry matched Leslie, matched his body position and his breathing. Oddly, something in his head relaxed, as if a door were opening. Perception widened. Sounds and colors seemed a hair sharper.

  Watching the two government men again, he noticed something for the first time: more than verbal
conversation was being conducted. Kramer’s fingers rested, almost intimately, upon Koskotas’s hand. His fingers rolled and stroked in a tick-tack rhythm. Two-level communication? Or more?

  Finally Koskotas turned back to them. “Please prepare your processor to receive input. I believe they have already exchanged protocols?”

  Jenna smiled thinly. “I will authorize a partitioned memory cell. You won’t have access to our main banks.”

  “Young lady, I assure you …”

  “Save it.” Jenna’s fingers stroked her belt. “Transmit.”

  “Very well. You are all involved in this incident, so it is pointless to request any kind of formal security arrangement. I assume that a verbal agreement will suffice.” He paused, until all heads nodded shallowly. Leslie’s was a precise imitation of Aubry’s.

  “Very well. I’d like you to take a look at something, something that we knew from the blood and tissue sample you sent us.”

  An image tweaked onto a holo stage, a three-dimensional red and blue animated helix. “This is the assassin’s genetic structure. As you remember, we’ve detected no signs of tampering, or anything to lead us to believe he is a NewMan variant.”

  “That’s a relief.”

  “In a moment, you may change your mind. Take a look at this.” He flashed a second slide. It was identical to the first.

  “I don’t get it,” Aubry said. The tone of his voice suggested that he “got it” all too well.

  “This, Mr. Knight, is you.”

  The room was silent; then Jenna cleared her throat. “That thing was Aubry’s clone?”

  “An accelerated clone?” Promise looked at Leslie.

  “Like your child, yes.”

  Aubry whispered, “Shit.”

  “Of course, we know that the child is one of the accelerated clones created by the renegade Gorgon division Medusa, led by Colonel Quint and Major Ibumi. Your child was designated Medusa-16. The Medusas were utilized for an assassination attempt on President Harris. All of the others died in that attempt.”

  “We’ve made certain of that,” Koskotas said flatly. “And as long as Medusa-16 … ah, ‘Leslie’ … no offense, son—” His eyes were flat and hollow, like gun barrels.

  “None taken,” Leslie said in a remarkably adult voice. His eyes were defocused, and Promise declined to speculate about what had just flashed behind them.

  “As long as, ah, Leslie, remains in your care, no action will be taken against him.”

  “Imagine my relief,” Leslie said flatly. The singsong childish quality was completely gone from his voice.

  “Ah … yes. At any rate, the accelerant technology is well understood. This clone was grown from a tissue sample, accelerated and trained to kill you.”

  Aubry was genuinely perplexed. “Why go to all of that trouble? Who would do something like that?”

  “Much easier to determine once you take a look at the tattoos on the back.”

  A button was pressed, and the visual image became that of the slain assassin. Once again, the dragon and the lion warred upon his trapezius—the dragon in tattooed ink, the lion in ridges of keloid scar. “Yakuza,” Jenna said.

  “Yes. Specifically, the Yakuza keiretsu known as Divine Blossom. And do you recognize the scar patterns?”

  Leslie cocked his head, but said nothing.

  “Our computer says that the patterns are typical of the tribal scars of the Ibandi people. A mountain people of Central Africa. The tribe which spawned Phillipe Swarna.”

  Silence.

  “Swarna,” Aubry said quietly. “I killed Swarna’s son five years ago, in the battle at Death Valley.”

  “Yes. It makes sense now, doesn’t it? One region of scar is in the precise shape of the Ibandi province, in what was once northern Zaire, and which has now been absorbed into PanAfrica. Are you familiar with PanAfrica?”

  Promise nodded. “We have had business dealings. Opened contractual negotiations to build a dam. The PanAfrican Republic incorporates the territory formerly divided into Zaire, Tanzania, and Uganda. A military dictatorship, under a board of generals chaired by Phillipe Swarna.”

  Koskotas’s thin mouth managed another smile. “Excellent. This is what I hypothesize. Phillipe Swarna wants vengeance against you. You foiled his plan to assassinate President Harris, and you killed his son. So he obtained a skin sample.”

  “How?”

  Jenna rolled her eyes. “Give me a break. You’ve left tissue and body fluid all over the West Coast.”

  Promise looked stricken. When she spoke, her voice was small and somehow pale. “How sophisticated would this cloning technology be?”

  “Extremely. Why?”

  “Could they clone Aubry … and make a female?”

  Aubry stared at her incredulously, and Jenna said, “Come on, now …”

  Koskotas shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t have that information at this time.”

  “Yes you do,” Leslie said quietly. “But it’s classified, and you’re lying. Stupid classification. The technique was developed during the Gender Wars, back in ’06 or so.”

  “Young man …” Koskotas said angrily.

  Leslie ignored him. His eyes rolled back in their sockets slightly. Promise gripped his shoulder as Leslie began to recite.

  “Human beings have a double set of twenty-three chromosomes, with twenty-two being identical, and one set being the sex doublet. Thus a girl is forty-six XX, with two X chromosomes, one of which doesn’t work, and a guy is forty-six XY with one Y chromosome.

  “There are at least three ways to accomplish the desired effect. The least difficult is a non-DNA-alteration approach.” Leslie focused his eyes on them, and smiled slightly. “Artificially induce testicular feminization syndrome. Block the protein receptor for testosterone. The cells will automatically default to female development, even though their genotype is forty-six XY.”

  “This is classified …” Koskotas muttered.

  “This is in any medical library in Canada,” Leslie said snidely. “The TFS approach won’t produce a uterus, so if you want a fertile female, you’ve got to lick the dispermy and recombination problems. They did it back in ’05. Or you can take forty-six-XY blood-cell DNA and surgically or biochemically remove the Y and replace it with another X. Then implant it in an empty ovum and bang! Instant female. My guess is that someone whipped that problem, and did it for the government.” Leslie’s smile went nasty. “The ability to make women from men means that if something ever … happened to the women in North America, the U.S. could be up and breeding again in a generation.”

  The room was quiet; then Koskotas cleared his throat. “I’m certain that it’s nothing so absurdly melodramatic.”

  “I saw one,” Promise said. “I saw a feminized clone of Aubry.”

  “So there are at least two. And probably more,” Koskotas said.

  Aubry squeezed Promise’s hand. “So Swarna accelerated the clones, then had them trained by a Divine Blossom assassination clan?”

  “That’s what we figure. Remember, Swarna wouldn’t need the Japanese for their killing skills—he wanted them for their direct-induction educational techniques, developed in the late nineties. They created his brainwashing center.” He flashed another image on the screen, a map of the African continent. “The Japanese own two and a half million acres in the center of PanAfrica. Literally millions of children have been trucked in from surrounding nations since its creation in the nineties.”

  Jenna seemed uncomfortable. “How did he get away with it?”

  “He had the Five Songs. ‘Five songs’ is a rough translation of the word ibandi. It’s some sort of crackpot Sufic splinter religion, but he has every black military leader in Africa under his thumb, using supposedly ‘politically neutral’ Ibandi bodyguards. That’s what made the bloody coup possible in the first place. Ibandi warriors had been in security and assassination all over the world for four decades. Known for intelligence, fearlessness, and skill. Funny thing is—Swarna
won’t have any Ibandi around him now. Seems to have had a falling-out with them. They believe he broke some sort of covenant, one of the basic rules of the Five Songs. His betrayal is referred to as ‘the Abomination.’ We don’t know exactly what this Abomination was. He rules with an iron hand—”

  “Wow, Dad. Is that what they call an original phrase?”

  “Hush.”

  “We tried to trim him back, but … well, you know the result of that.”

  “Two failed assassinations,” Leslie said, “and an abortive coup.”

  Again, Koskotas looked startled. “Why, yes.”

  Promise listened to the information, and sat back and closed her eyes, face placid. “What you are suggesting is that this is a revenge killing, ordered by the enraged ruler of the third most powerful nation on the planet. That he grew the clone to do this in a manner than amused him, or fulfilled some bizarre tribal ritual. And that, although this attempt failed, there is no reason to think that he won’t do it again, and again, and again, until he succeeds.”

  Koskotas nodded. “Yes, I believe you grasp the essentials.”

  “And what would you suggest?”

  “We can provide security for you and your family. You can stay underground—you have enough connections.”

  Beat. And then Aubry said, “Are you going to … take another crack at Swarna?”

  Koskotas coughed. “Not at this time.” He switched gears smoothly. “The clone was trained, and created, and sent here for one and only one reason—to kill you. It fits with his psych profile.”

  “And just what is that profile?” Promise asked.

  Kramer opened a briefcase and took out a disk, slipping it into the projector.

  Koskotas continued. “We have limited information pertaining to the early life and actual physical presence of the man known as Phillipe Swarna. That may not even be his actual name.