It was while I stood by that broken-out window that my combat reflex began. Calm washed over me as testosterone and adrenaline flooded my bloodstream, and my anxiousness disappeared. I heard the music of the battle in my head. The men around me seemed to move in slow motion. They aimed their weapons, fired shots that did not matter, and held their line against an unstoppable enemy that had not yet begun to fire back.
Using the telescoping lenses in my visor, I took a closer look at the Unifieds. Some stumbled as they ran through the snow. They were natural-borns. Their genes were not selected for battle, they did not have our abilities. Some sprinted, some trotted, some had already run out of breath. A few stared back in my direction as they ran. Snow fell on them, and their shields vaporized it. Steam rose from the spots where their shielded boots kicked through the snow.
As I watched, a rocket struck one of the U.A. Marines in the chest, exploding in a flash of fire, steam, and shrapnel. That rocket was designed to fell small buildings and turn tanks upside down. Had he not been in shielded armor, it would have left the man nothing more than a splash of blood on broken concrete. Instead, the blast slammed him to the ground. He hit hard, bounced ten feet in the air, and fell limp into the snow. The fall hurt him, and he rose to his feet like a dazed fighter, stumbling, weak in the knees. He limped as he took a few steps, then he fell to the ground. The bastard had landed badly and hurt his leg. That was the most we could hope for, to make them trip.
They were closing in, twenty-five yards from the terminal building and closing fast. Some paused to fire fléchettes at us. They ran, pointed arms in our direction as if saluting us, and fired darts that mostly hit the ceiling above our heads. A man a few feet from me was hit. He dropped his gun, reached for his neck, and fell to the ground, where he convulsed for several seconds before dying. A thin and steady stream of blood leaked from the hole in his armor.
If we had a bomb, something big but not nuclear, we could set it off once the Unifieds entered the building, I thought to myself. That was how I had beaten them before. I lured the Unifieds into an underground garage, then blew it up as my men exited through the back door.
If we demolished this building, we would die, too. I did not mind that idea. Was the combat reflex influencing my thinking? At least we would take two of theirs for every man we lost.
Outside, the front edge of the Unifieds had almost reached the building. They were close enough to hit us with their fléchettes, and the fusillade had begun. A steady stream of uranium needles flew in through the crashed-out window, forcing us to our knees. I crawled over the jagged glass fringe that remained in the window casing, climbed to one knee, and fired my M27 down at their heads. Fléchettes zinged past me, like wasps chasing prey, but I held my ground and fired, and I ignored everything around me.
“Harris, get out of there,” somebody screamed over the interLink. The name Ritz showed. I did not recognize the name. The part of my brain that recognized people and names had closed down for the evening.
A fléchette brushed across the side of my helmet. I roared in anger and squeezed the trigger of my gun. Men came from my left and my right. The bastards grabbed me and hauled me back away from the window. I screamed and struggled. I would have shot them, but they piled on top of me and held me down.
Somebody pulled my helmet off my head. Still trying to free my arms, I looked up and growled like an animal. “Get off me. Get off me! I’ll kill you all,” I screamed.
Somewhere in the distance, there were muffled explosions. Flames coughed out of open doorways. Clouds of smoke and dust billowed in from the stairwells. Men had tossed bombs or grenades down the stairs. I did not care. All I cared about was killing, I needed to kill, and these crazy bastards were holding me down. I wanted to kill them. Once I killed them, I would go after the enemy. The calm and the music of battle had left me, they faded from my mind like a drug evaporating from the brain of an addict, and all that they left behind was the need for more.
I fought. I struggled to get loose. A man in combat armor slapped me across the face, his hardened armor glove slamming my cheekbone like a hammer. I was a rabid dog. I turned, stared at him, silently dared him to do that again.
They might have been speaking to each other, but they used the interLink. My helmet was gone. I could not hear them as I snarled and fought to free myself.
Until that moment, I still held my M27 in a hand that was buried under a pile of Marines. I felt the stock slipping from my fingers. I felt desperate, crazed, like a man held underwater. God, not my gun; I need it to breathe!
A part of my brain watched the struggle like an innocent bystander witnessing a mugging. In one of my mind’s many eyes, I could see that I had turned into an animal. I could see myself clearly, and I hated what I saw. Stop it. Stop it, stop it, stop it! I thought to myself.
But that part of my brain was a distant satellite. The rest of my consciousness had shut down entirely. All that remained was anger and instinct. I needed to free myself and to kill, I needed to kill more fiercely than a man held underwater needs to breathe. Life, death, right, wrong, nothing mattered except killing, feeling the hormone in my brain, the missing song of battle.
With the gun out of my hand, I managed to pull my right shoulder free of the men who had piled on top of it. The man in the armor slapped me across the face a second time. If he’d lived another minute, he might even have hit me again, but the doors to the stairs slammed open and men in glowing armor invaded our world.
Not even trying to understand the events around me, I watched as fragments of plaster chipped from the ceiling and walls. Men fell to the floor. The men who had wrestled me down now tried to pull me away. I flailed. I kicked. I got one arm free and slammed my fist into one of my attackers. I hit the front of his helmet. His head jerked back, but I did not even put a crack in his visor.
More men dropped. Some fell in spasms. Some fell still, their blood leaking from pin-sized holes in their armor. I brushed men off my other arm, kicked wildly, and I was free.
My desperation slackened. The part of me that still had intelligence told me to put on my helmet. I lay on my stomach, propelling myself along the ground by faking convulsions. With the Unifieds just entering the floor, I rolled to my side so I could slip my helmet back over my head without being seen. Once I had my helmet secured, I wrapped my hand around the stock of my M27, it might have been my M27, and I played dead. I lay in a pile of dead Marines. I saw the men sprawled on the floor around me and realized they’d died trying to save me.
I played possum, a paisley piece in a collage of dead bodies—one that the Unified Authority might never find. Natural-borns ran past the bodies without sparing a second glance. Knowing that anyone they shot would die, they did not worry about the wounded.
Sensibility slowly set in. I was not entirely in control. I felt some semblance of thought coming back to my brain.
“Ritz. You there?” I asked. I felt ashamed of myself; but I did not have time for embarrassment. There would be a time to apologize, but it would come after the battle. For now, I had shown enough weakness already.
“Harris?” I heard doubt, maybe even fear.
“Did you send men to save me?” I asked.
He answered my question with one of his own. “Where are you?”
“What do you have in the way of explosives?” I asked. I was about to suggest demolishing ourselves and the building. My Liberator programming would not allow me to detonate the bomb myself, but I thought maybe I could give the order. Then something caught my attention and I forgot about bombs.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
I lay on the ground, doing my best imitation of a corpse, albeit one that had fallen with a gun still in his grip. My arms stretched past my head, my finger still on the trigger. Thanks to my armor, I could breathe and still look no more alive than the dead men around me. An intelligent Marine might notice the lack of blood leaking from my armor, but there was plenty of blood on the ground around me. About twen
ty U.A. Marines had already walked past without giving me a second glance.
The glow of their shielded armor had died. The batteries must have run out, though I had no idea what could have caused it.
The Unifieds walked through the dead, stepping over bodies, ready to fire fléchettes into anything that moved. These were the men on point, the sacrificial lambs . . . the canaries in the air vents.
“Ritz, listen to me. I think their armor is running out of juice.”
“What?” he asked.
“The batteries in their armor are running out of power.” I shifted ever so slowly, gradually rolling to one side, allowing my left arm to loll in place while shifting the M27 in my right hand so that I could aim it. “Their shields are out.”
No one noticed. I was just another corpse, just another piece of trash on the floor. As I fumbled to free an RPG from my belt, I watched the door to the stairwell. A never-ending parade of men in flickering armor strode through the opening.
Working blind, I managed to snag a grenade from my belt. I twisted it in my hand. An RPG would have worked better, but the grenade would do. I would use it to create a distraction; and then, in the confusion, I would escape.
One of the Unifieds meandered past me, then stopped. He just stood there, sightseeing in the empty spaceport, I supposed, no more than ten feet from me. His armor winked on and off before it went out entirely. He looked in my direction, and I froze. After a moment he took a step toward me. If he inspected me more closely, he might notice that I was holding a grenade in my left hand and an M27 in my right, and that I had no holes in my armor and no blood oozing from my helmet. In fact, I did not look especially corpselike, not that this shit-for-brains natural-born would have noticed.
“Ritz, where are you?” With my helmet over my head, I could talk, and the bastards around me would not hear my voice or see my mouth move.
“I’m on the third floor,” he said.
“What’s the situation?”
“They haven’t sent anyone up here.”
“Yeah, they’re still securing this floor,” I said.
“I can get you out of there, General. I can . . .”
I hissed, “Shut up and listen.” It was harsh. I was still in the tail end of combat reflex, my every instinct was to kill. Ritz, the Unifieds, civilians, at that point it didn’t matter. The violence welling up in my brain no longer cared about sides or alliances.
“There’s going to be some trouble down here,” I said. “Let’s see how they fight without their shields.”
The U.A. bastard hovering around me walked over for a closer look. Would he notice the way I rested my finger over the trigger of my M27? If he did, it would be the last thing he saw before God welcomed him to Heaven.
The bastard moved slowly, like I was some kind of museum exhibit. He twisted his head to see me from different angles, bending far enough forward that he should have seen the pingpong-ball-sized grenade cribbed in the fingers of my left hand. I mean, what kind of corpse cradles a grenade in his hand? If I saw a body like that, I’d pump a couple rounds into the head to make sure it never came back to life; but this idiot stared at me for a few seconds. When I did not move, he walked away.
I made my move. With a subtle flick of my wrist, I half rolled/half tossed the grenade, hoping it would reach the nearest set of stairs. It came up short. Instead of rolling into an open doorway about thirty feet away, the grenade skittered to a stop beside a dead Marine.
I did not know whether or not the upgraded Unified Authority armor would protect its occupants from the blast, but my armor sure as speck would not. A second before the blast made milk shakes of everyone it touched, I sprang to my feet, shot the Unified bastard who’d been hovering around me in the face, and sprinted for the nearest corner.
Several Unifieds saw my miraculous rise from the dead and fired at me with their stupid fléchette guns; but I’d caught them napping and put space between us. They didn’t worry me. When it came to aiming accurately and firing fast, give me a good old-fashioned pistol or an M27 with a short stock any day. I did not return their fire. I sprinted for a corner, then I dived over a row of chairs and slid to safety behind the wall as the blast of the grenade shook the air.
“Ritz, send your men back to the windows. Shoot any Unifieds you see trying to run away. I want them pinned down in the building.”
“You want me to herd them into the building?” he asked.
I managed to say, “Listen to me, Ritz,” before I noticed all of the U.A. Marines crowded around me. Dozens of them. At first I thought I’d been spotted, but most of them ran past me and around the corner. One of them stopped and put out a hand to help me climb to my feet. If he’d known who I was, he would have shot me; but I had created chaos. My grenade must have killed the Unifieds who’d shot at me; and the ones who were left only wanted to see what was going on.
If they saw me carrying a gun, they would have figured out that I was not one of theirs, so I ignored my M27 as the U.A. Marine pulled me to my feet. Without the glow of shields, his armor looked just like my armor. The only notable difference was the tube running along the outside of his right sleeve. I hoped he would not notice that my armor was not equipped to fire fléchettes.
“Listen, Ritz, the exercise is over. Their shields ran out of batteries, and they don’t want a straight fight. As long as we can keep their Marines in here with us, the Unifieds won’t blast the building with fighters and tanks. We need to keep them pinned down. Shoot anyone who tries to get away.”
I blended in with a pack of Unifieds as they walked around the corner to inspect the damage from my grenade. Water gushed from broken pipes in the floor and ceiling. Wires and twisted strips of metal hung above my head. Body parts and pieces of armor littered the floor. Helmets had been blown from bodies, some of them with heads still inside.
“If we keep their men pinned down, they won’t be able to hit the building without burying them,” I said.
“Yes, sir, we’re on it,” said Ritz.
U.A. Marines cautiously sifted through the debris. Seeing their dead, they must have realized that their glorious war game had become a disaster. I had only killed a few of them, maybe thirty at most. A passel of men gathered around some of the fallen, gingerly kneeling beside one of the bodies.
With the Unifieds distracted, I allowed myself a quick glance out the nearest window. A sea of men in dark armor stood in moonlight and snow on the tarmac, just below the building. They were waiting for orders. They must have known that their assault had gone bad; so there they stood, trapped in a purgatory between attack and retreat.
Ritz’s men opened fire with M27s. Firing in small bursts, they hit the outer echelon of the Unifieds, catching the milling enemy by surprise. Ritz’s men had the high-ground advantage and better weapons. In the few seconds that I watched, I saw dozens of men collapse.
Hearing the renewed fighting, the Unifieds went to the window frame and stared down at the scene. Nobody noticed as I backed away; they were too busy watching the slaughter outside. Another few steps, and I turned and started for a hall. As I rounded a corner, I reached down and scooped up an M27.
It’s not as glorious when we can shoot back, is it? I thought. How do you like the war games now? How do you like your specking war games now?
From where I stood, I could see along two sides of the terminal. I saw U.A. Marines standing by the window casings, staring out at the slaughter, helpless. If they had rockets, they could shoot the ceiling and cause a cave in; but they came armed with fléchettes instead of grenades.
One of the U.A. Marines looked back, saw that I was carrying an M27. He stood in a mostly empty hall. He glanced in my direction, started to turn away, then gave me a second pass. He probably tried to speak to me. When he realized he couldn’t, he raised his arm.
I shot him in the head, then opened fire on the three Marines standing near him. Hearing the sound of gunfire, more Unifieds came running. I fired my M27 down the hall, turned
and fired at anyone coming from the other direction, and ran toward the nearest stairs.
I’d been hit by fléchettes before. They cut through armor as if it weren’t there. Between the poison and the shock, your body and brain stopped working in seconds. The last time I had barely survived. If it happened again, I might not be so lucky.
Three Marines tried to make a stand ahead of me. They were a hundred feet away. Two stood. One knelt. Their fléchettes bored through a vending machine as I ducked behind it. Hot drinks bled out of the side of the machine as I spun around its edge and squeezed off twenty rounds. I killed them, then I leaped over their bodies on my way to the stairs.
I pulled a grenade and tossed it behind me without looking back. The hall was long and straight like the barrel of a cannon. It would funnel the percussion and flames from the grenade.
I jetted up a full flight before my grenade went off, and the walls shook. A geyser of flame shot into the stairwell below me. Even if the flames had hit me, they would not have hurt me. My unshielded armor offered that much protection.
I was almost at the top of the stairs when I realized that my own men might shoot me before I could identify myself. “Ritz, I’m coming up the stairs,” I said, and I gave him my location. Then I lowered my gun and waited by the door. A moment later, a team of Marines opened the way and led me in.
The terminal building might have been made to accommodate ten thousand travelers, giving them plenty of space to carry luggage. For ten thousand travelers spread across the two upper floors, the building would be spacious. I now had twenty thousand Marines crammed onto one floor and the roof. That floor had become an unholy zoo. Most of the men stood in the central lobby, crammed close together like passengers on a bus in rush hour.
There were no departure gates on that floor. The outer walls were a continuous observation deck. The inside had storefronts, play areas, bathrooms, offices, restaurants, and bars.
The Clone Redemption Page 34