by G T Almasi
“Darwin, do we care if the Germans know how we got in here?”
He answers, “I’d say no. To your point earlier, we’re probably never coming back.”
I boot up my gun. The door is heavy oak, but we only care about the hinges on the door’s right side. We press ourselves to our left, and Li’l Bertha draws a bead on the hinges. I set her to use .50-caliber Explosives and fire seven shots. Stone shards and wooden splinters crease the air and ricochet into the courtyard. All three of us put our shoulders into the door and shove it open far enough for us to slip inside.
The moment we’re in, Li’l Bertha lights up and frantically spins her gyro. I switch to night vision and spot a charging figure with something shiny in his hand. Boom! Pow! My assailant absorbs two .50-caliber Explosive bullets at point-blank range and flies away from me in three seventy-pound blood-spewing chunks. A fog of mortal remains splatters all over the stone walls and floor. The dead man’s weapon—a sword—clatters to the ground.
“Is this idiot for real?” Brando says. “A sword? We’ve obviously got firearms.”
I switch Li’l Bertha to less dramatic ammunition. “Maybe he thought we were Picts.”
Victor bends down and picks up the sword. He wipes off the handle and flips the weapon back and forth, testing its balance. He shrugs and takes it with him as we move into a large central room. The gore-streaked stone walls loom up sixteen feet or so and support a heavy wooden ceiling.
The Germans are using this area as an office, with rows of desks, filing cabinets, and computer servers. Thick electrical cables snake from the servers, crawl up the walls, and slip into the ceiling. In the back is a kitchen and meeting area. A large conference table in the far corner has sprouted three trembling pairs of hands.
We creep into the room’s center. There’s a lot of furniture and gear in here, plenty of places for troublemakers to pounce from. “Darwin,” I comm, “go get those three people and find out if we’re in the right place.”
My partner calls out, in German, “Stand up!” When the three pairs of hands don’t move, he blares, “Schnell!” Six hands rise into the air to reveal six arms, three heads with frightened faces, and three bodies wearing white dress shirts and neckties.
Victor doesn’t look at our new friends. He studies the rest of the room, in particular a large flight of stone stairs that lead up to the next floor.
Brando corrals the three necktie schnooks and fires questions at them in rapid German. They nod, point upstairs, and answer in even faster German. While my partner interrogates the neckties, he comms to me, “They say there’s a large lab upstairs for cloning humans.” He pauses while the neckties tell him something else, then comms, “The facility is heavily guarded.” Another pause. “It seems like these three are computer programmers. They write software for Carbon.”
“Ask them who attacked us when we came through the front door.”
My partner barks his question at the programmers, listens to their answer, and comms to me, “That was an SZ sergeant assigned to watch them.”
The Staatszeiger. “I assume I can use unlimited force on these shitheads?”
Brando looks back at the crimson film of residue pooling in the corners near the entrance. “Yeah, I’d say the SZ is fair game.”
“Well, all right, then. Let’s go upstairs and get some.”
Victor asks, “What about these three?”
Brando says, “I’ve told them to hide down here. They’ll be perfectly happy to see us eliminate the guards.”
Victor glowers at the neckties and brandishes his sword menacingly. The programmers blanch and retreat behind the conference table. I lead us upstairs with Li’l Bertha in front of me. Brando follows, and Victor brings up the rear. My amplified hearing catches hushed commands being whispered above. I pick out “Jah, Hauptmann.” German for “Yes, Captain.”
As we come up to the second floor, I comm, “Darwin, what floor is Carbon on?”
“The third and fourth floors.” I smile at him and raise one of my eyebrows. He grins at me. “So yes, you can go crazy here.” I flash him a 90-watt smile before I bang a bunch of Madrenaline and charge up the rest of the stairs. My booted feet accelerate to top speed. I wing past the top stair and sail halfway down a large makeshift hallway. This space used to be another large chamber, like downstairs. The SZ has divided it into two rows of rooms and cubicles with sheets of plywood and cheap wooden doors.
Li’l Bertha sights in on a black-shirted Staatszeiger soldier at the end of the hallway. He fires his MP-50 at me. I pop a few .30-caliber slugs into his face and twirl away from his 9-mm burst. A door to my right whips open, and a huge SZ trooper reaches out to grab me. I smack his meaty paw out of the way, leap in the air, and ram my foot into his face. The brute staggers backward but remains upright. Blood runs out of his nose. I execute an arm-swirling swim move to get behind him and forcibly eject him from the room. Private Brute stumbles through a door across the hall, where a flurry of gunfire rips him apart. A cry of dismay rings out. I imagine it translates as, “Oh, shit, Private Brute still owes me two hundred marks!”
Shouted orders bark from the little offices. Crap, there’s still a gang of gorillas in here, and I’m running low on ammo. One challenge of this scuba mission is that I couldn’t carry all of my regular ordnance like grenades and extra ammunition packs for Li’l Bertha. I zoom down the hall and pick up the dead soldier’s MP-50 submachine gun. The big automatic weapon blankets my small frame. I grab a few extra clips from my victim’s ammo belt.
I switch on my infrared vision and kick in the first door on the left. I unload what’s left of the MP-50’s clip into anything warm. I hoist an office chair and chuck it through the wall into the next office. I jam a new clip in my captured weapon and barge through my instant door.
Two SZ men, their body heat glowing through their black uniforms, stand and fire their guns at me. I sail over their shots and bounce across the room. The moment I land, I hurl myself into the air again. Between jumps, I riddle their torsos with 9-mm bullets. I call this move the Scarlet two-step. It lets me put out a ton of offense without becoming a target because I move laterally and vertically at the same time.
Damn, regular guns go through ammo like a kid goes through popcorn. I slap another clip into my MP-50. A warm blob approaches the office’s door. I kneel down and take aim, ready to fill this dunderhead full of lead. He doesn’t come in, though. His hand waves at the door, and then I hear a sharp thunk as something lands on the floor.
Grenade!
I fire myself out of the room, past the stick bomb, and slide into the hallway. Three black-shirted soldiers crouch against the wall, waiting to charge in after the grenade goes off. The first mug’s eyes bug out when I flash past him.
My feet launch me back down the hall, but just as I get airborne, the grenade explodes. Its blast shoves me sideways. I hit the wall as something hot and hard whacks into my lower right leg. I land on my back and bounce down the hall like a tumbleweed. My captured MP-50 flies off my shoulder and slides toward the stairs where Brando and Victor are hiding.
My head is spinning and my leg has gone numb. Three blurry SZ soldiers pick themselves off the floor and turn toward me. They raise their weapons as I rip Li’l Bertha out of her holster. Before I can fire, the three troopers collapse in a thundering hail of bullets. Above my head, Victor waves my MP-50 back and forth like a broom. His angular features appear especially sinister in the gun’s sharp bursts of light. My view of Victor’s killing expression is abruptly blocked by my partner’s worried face. Brando has followed Victor up the stairs to see if I’m okay.
“Scarlet! Holy crap, there’s blood all over you. Where are you hit?”
“I’m fine,” I croak. My throat is as dry as a nun’s love life. ”This is from the competition.”
“No, it isn’t. Your right leg is cut.”
“It’s only a graze.” I hold my hand out. “Help me up.” A searing wave of pain scorches up my leg. “O
w! Fuck!” My neuroinjector pumps some Overkaine into me and the pain subsides to a buzzing tingle.
I catch my breath while Victor collects ammo and another MP-50 from the dead SZ men. He hands me one of the submachine guns. Victor clicks a full clip into his captured weapon. Then he cracks a broad smile, brandishes his new toy, and says, “Ahh, now I feel whole again.” Victor Eisenberg is my kind of people.
Meanwhile, Brando eyeballs my leg. The scuba-suit material over my right calf is torn and has peeled back to show a bleeding gash three inches long. It looks like a piece of grenade shrapnel carved a deep slice across my calf without embedding itself in my flesh. CoAgs automatically flow into my bloodstream.
Brando kneels down. “Let me dress that.”
“Okay, but hurry up. Raj can’t hold that bridge forever.” I sit back down. My partner’s hands dive into his X-bag, whip out his first-aid kit, and quickly wrap up the cut.
I peek at my dad’s watch. Only four minutes have passed since we first entered the White Tower. Nothing like a crazed firefight to make you lose your sense of time.
“That’ll do for now,” Brando says. He helps me up again.
“All right, gents, let’s go.” Me and my MP-50 lead the way upstairs, followed closely by Brando and Victor. A low thrumming sound, like a huge beehive, echoes from upstairs. As we climb, the stairway’s stone walls begin to reflect a pale blue light. The thrumming sound is deeper now, a long, low wOWww … wOWww …
“Darwin, do you hear that?” I comm.
“Yeah,” he comms back. “Sounds like a big generator.”
We emerge into another large chamber. The White Tower is simply a stack of these big rooms with connecting stairs. Here the walls are lined with about thirty metal boxes, each seven feet tall and three feet square. They resemble coffins except they have thick bundles of cables and tubes sprouting from their tops. The cables and tubes all climb up the walls and penetrate the middle of the ceiling.
In the center of this room is a doughnut-shaped desk, like an information desk at a museum, except the desk’s surface is one big computer screen. From behind the desk, two blond women in white lab coats stare at us. One of them has glasses on and the other has short curly hair, so I nickname them Four-Eyes and Curly. Victor and I aim our weapons at them. We each move to a different half of the room. Brando calls out to them to put their hands up.
Four-Eyes grabs for something in her coat pocket. I squeeze the trigger of my submachine gun and pound six rounds into her chest. Four-Eyes twitches and jerks and flips backward over the desk. Curly screams and cringes as her coat and face are spattered with Four-Eyes’s blood. My partner shouts at Curly to stand still. The terrified woman trembles so hard I think she might faint. She cries and breathes in shallow gasps.
Brando walks through a small gap in the desk that serves as the entrance. He takes Curly’s hands and leads her toward the stairs, speaking softly. She docilely follows and nods her head. Then Brando gently rummages through Curly’s pockets and removes a few pens, a small notebook, and a short silver cylinder. He dumps all this stuff on the floor and kicks it away.
I comm, “What’s that silver thing? A cigar tube?”
He comms back, “I think it’s a suicide needle. If Carbon gets breached, this woman is supposed to kill herself to protect what she knows about this program.”
“Ask her what’s on the fourth floor.”
Brando turns to Curly and asks a hushed question. She still shakes as she answers him.
“She says the Originals are all kept upstairs. The specimens here are clones.” He indicates the metal boxes along the walls.
The clone chambers all have glass panels on the front so you can see inside. I inspect the nearest techno-coffin. A young, fair-skinned blond woman stands inside. She’s strapped into place and wired all the hell up. Blondie has a tall forehead and a long straight nose with a strong jaw. Her pale skin is as smooth as polished marble and her pale blue eyes are open—wide open—like she’s startled. Blondie’s frozen expression of terror makes the fine hair on my forearms stand up. I check the next box and do a double take. It’s the same woman.
Duh, Scarlet. Clones.
This Blondie is all strapped and wired too, but her eyes are shut. I circle the room. Each box contains the same woman in varying postures and restraint systems. Three of the chambers are filled with a light amber liquid, with the specimen inside hovering motionlessly. These floating clones don’t wear any breathing apparatus.
“Hey,“ I say, “these three are submerged in fluid. Why haven’t they drowned?”
Curly answers in a mild German accent, “Perfluorocarbons.”
My perplexed expression telegraphs that I have no idea what she just said.
“Liquid breathing,” she clarifies.
“Like deep-sea divers or premature babies,” Brando says. “It looks like the Carbon engineers are testing multiple approaches all at once.”
I back away from the big box of scientific creepiness. Even though my partner is a clone, he seems much less unnatural than these poor lab rats. Yes, he spent exactly zero time in a real mother’s womb, but he and his brothers were raised from infancy as normal kids. Plus, there were only three of them, like triplets. There are thirty copies of this blond woman in here.
There’s no way making so many of the same person can be a good idea. People aren’t Ford Mustangs. You can’t just crank out an endless number of them. I don’t know a lot about psychology, but the moment these poor women get out of these tanks will be the moment they go completely bonkers.
Victor has stopped pointing his gun directly at Curly but holds it ready in case she tries any funny stuff. Brando turns to him, “Mr. Eisenberg, will you watch this woman while my partner and I go upstairs?”
Eisenberg’s lean face creaks into a smile, “Anything for you, my friends. And please, call me Victor.”
21
Same morning, 1:58 A.M. GMT
Tower of London, London, Province of Great Britain, GG
He’s not here. I knew he wouldn’t be, but there was still a part of me that hoped my father was being kept at this Carbon installation.
This uppermost chamber is lined with glass-fronted computer cabinets, deep racks of pressurized tanks, and a swarm of thick tubes slinking through holes in the floor. In one corner is a raised platform holding three computer workstations. It’s obviously the control center. Brando makes a beeline for one of the workstations.
Centered in the space is what appears to be a gigantic electro-sarcophagus: twenty feet long, six feet wide, and five feet tall. It’s like a shipping container for a limousine. This must be the Original.
On top of the container is a thick glass plate for viewing who’s inside. I stand on tiptoe and take a look. Inside is a silvery rectangular slab the size of a big dining room table. A thick rod connects the slab’s short edges to the inside of the sarcophagus, so the slab is mounted in there like a piece of food on a spit.
The slab moves, rotating along its long axis, and smoothly flips over. The other side reveals the Original, a woman, although I can’t see much of her. A breathing tube is mounted over her mouth and nose, and her hair is covered by a chrome helmet with a zillion thin wires coming out of it, like a metal Afro.
From the neck down the woman is tucked into the hollow core of the slab, which is essentially an articulated, padded body envelope. The cloning process must take enough time that the subject’s position has to be shifted periodically. The silvery manvelope has a few large hinges along its length, I think so the subject can be bent at the waist and knees. Maybe to help blood circulation? Jesus, how long do they keep her in there?
She seems to be asleep or unconscious. There are dark circles under her eyes. I can only see the half of the Original’s face. The rest I have to fill in from the clones I saw downstairs. The overhead lights glare off the viewing glass, and I move my head to the side a little so I can see inside better.
The Original’s eyes pop open a
nd stare at me. I yowp and spring away from the sarcophagus. When I lean back over the window, her terrified gaze tracks my face.
“M-my God,” I stammer. “Darwin, she’s awake!”
My partner sits at the control station and reads from the screen in front of him. “Yes. It says here the subject has been placed into a locked-in state with a steady dose of pancuronium bromide.” He leans back and covers his mouth with one hand. “She’s paralyzed but cognizant.”
“Can this lady feel anything?”
“She can feel everything. The Carbon researchers don’t want the subject’s mental activity dulled with anesthetics.”
The woman’s head doesn’t budge. She blinks, and her eyes move. That’s it. Small drops of water course down the sides of her face.
“She’s crying.” I place my hand over the glass. “We’ve got to get her out of there!”
“Oh, my God, Scarlet. No way!”
“She’s in agony, Darwin. They’ve got her on a breathing machine!”
“Yes, exactly. Her respiratory functions are paralyzed along with the rest of her. We don’t have any of the drugs we’d need to reverse the effects of the pancuronium, and—”
“We can’t leave her there.”
“We have to, Scarlet! If we pull her off that ventilator, she’ll suffocate and die.”
The mission that killed my first partner resulted in a heap of intel about Germany’s cloning program, including Carbon’s success at speed-growing clones to the physical equivalent of twenty years old in one-tenth the time it would take naturally. That phase was called Gen-2, and for a few precious moments it was the most mental thing I’d ever heard of.
Trick and I also recovered data about Carbon’s current phase, Gen-3, which then instantly replaced Gen-2 as the most mental thing I’ve ever heard of. Gen-3’s objective is to map an Original’s living consciousness into a clone. This would create an exact age-shifted duplicate with all the maturity, memories, and knowledge of the Original. The Frankenkrauts call it psychogenesis.