The charges might bring down the house, but Freeman doubted it. The walls and ceiling were solid.
Freeman moved on. His goggles let him see through the darkness, but they did nothing more. The Unifieds, if they sent their Marines, would have combat visors—smart equipment that, in Freeman’s experience, was often smarter than the men using it. If they utilized all the tools in their helmets, they would be able to run sonar scans to find weak spots in the floors and hollow pockets in the walls. They’d find his charges and detect his sensors.
In this empty old mine, every floor, ceiling, and doorway was a risk. If the Unifieds brought all the right equipment, they would be able to analyze the tunnels to see where they led. They wouldn’t even need to enter the mine. They could send hunter drones that would locate Freeman by the noise of his breathing and his heartbeat.
Weak walls and crumbling floors wouldn’t bother the drones; some flew through the air, and others weighed less than a pound. Freeman hoped the Unifieds would start out by sending drones. Seeing their drones destroyed sometimes scared the humans out of following.
He walked down a staircase that had been carved into a solid rock floor. Reasoning that the floors would be weakest in their center, Freeman pressed against the walls.
A message appeared in his goggles, warning him that the motion sensors he had placed up near the entrance had detected motion and sound. Before he checked the findings, the message flashed and went dead.
The Unifieds might have destroyed the sensors, or they might have blocked all communications frequencies as a precaution.
The ceiling became lower as Freeman pressed ahead. By this time, his sprained ankle had seized so badly that instead of stepping, he now dragged the foot. He felt dizzy and slightly nauseated, and his breathing grew heavier.
In the opening days of the war between the clones and the Unified Authority, the Unifieds had tried to crush the rebellion by sending Marines to a planet called Terraneau. The U.A. Marines had hoped to fight Harris and his Marines in a traditional battle, but Harris outsmarted them. He lured their force into an underground parking lot attached to a subway station. Once he and his men had exited the structure through the station, he detonated the charges he had hidden in the parking lot, burying the U.A. troops under three stories of rubble.
That maneuver had stayed with Freeman, had influenced him to place the charges in the generator. If the Unifieds were sludging the airwaves, however, the charges would no longer work.
Using the gear in his goggles, Freeman sent the signal to detonate the charges. Nothing happened. The ground did not shake, the air remained still and silent, no flash disturbed the absolute darkness.
If a hunting party had entered the mines, they could no longer use drones. The same equipment that blocked the signals from his sensors would render the drones useless.
Here in the mine, Freeman had lost his sense of time. He didn’t know if he had been underground for an hour or a day. There was no sun, no sky, no shadows, just the variations of tan and yellow that formed into images in his goggles. The tunnel ahead was black. The walls were a bluish white. He passed posts and braces along the walls, some made of wood and others of metal. He looked for snake tracks on the ground but saw nothing. This deep in the mines, there would be little for snakes to eat. Sometimes he smelled ammonia and must in the air. Bats.
The smell of guano had made it hard to breathe in the first caverns he’d crossed. Now, though, he just caught a brief whiff of the bat shit. Bats wouldn’t venture this far into the mine unless they found a nearby exit.
He had no idea how long he had been in the mine or how far he had traveled when he heard the ground crack. As he limped forward looking for a safe spot, the floor disintegrated beneath him. Dust rose, and he plummeted, falling so quickly he wouldn’t have had time to reach for a railing if there had been one to grab. He fell backward, and his backpack struck a post or a wooden beam, something that splintered under his weight.
The fall lasted two or three seconds. He had no idea how far he had fallen. All he knew was that he landed on dust and rock, feetfirst, his legs buckled, and his knees struck the ground. Pain he could not ignore radiated up his thighs and into his spine. He grimaced but made no noise.
He was blind. The goggles had toppled from his head.
Taking a deep breath, he rolled into a crawling position and ran his fingers across the ground in search of his goggles. Freeman, who had never acknowledged his fears, now had to deal with rage and insanity. Neither would help him, but they might overwhelm him if he allowed it.
When he moved his leg, searing pain shot up from the ankle. The boot had become too tight, so tight that it now cut off any circulation into the foot. Soon he would need to cut the boot off his foot. If he didn’t, infection would set in, possibly gangrenous infection. Freeman had brought guns, goggles, charges, and a knife, but he hadn’t brought medicine or painkillers. Those, he had always believed, were the necessities of smaller men.
Freeman didn’t second-guess his decisions and mistakes as he searched the ground for his goggles. Patting the ground around him in an ever-expanding circle, he finally located the goggles laying with their eyepieces pointing up.
He brought the goggles to his mouth and blew the dust off them, then he slipped them over his eyes and realized that the worst had happened. They had broken when they hit the ground. Concentrating on what needed to be done instead of what had been lost, he tossed the goggles aside and forced himself to focus.
He started to pull the hand torch from the shoulder strap of his backpack, but he heard distant voices and let his hand drop. These would be the scouts, the stool pigeons. They would see the hole and most likely come to investigate. Would they drop down the hole? He wasn’t ready to make his stand, but if two men came, or three, or even five, Freeman would attack them.
For him, though, the darkness remained complete at that moment. He held a hand against the wall, limped forward as fast as he could, and hoped he had chosen a direction that would offer him cover. He couldn’t tell if he was walking deeper into the mines or toward stairs.
He grunted softly with each step. The ankle presented a problem. It was no longer just a sprain—bones had broken when he hit the ground. That much he could tell. He limped on another twenty feet before he found a ledge behind which he could hide. He discovered a deep alcove carved into the wall and stuffed himself in, stumbling over a pile of helmet-sized rocks, and there he sat. He pulled the flashlight from the shoulder strap, then shrugged off his backpack and felt inside it for his pistol.
He planned to save his rifle, his most favored weapon, for later. These were the scouts, he could handle them with a pistol, but he needed the scope from his rifle. He was blind without his goggles, and his options were few. He could start a fire or use the flashlight, but the glow would alert the enemy. His only other option was to remove the scope from his rifle.
As he tinkered with the bindings that held the scope in place, Freeman listened for the hunting party. He heard nothing but his own breathing. The acoustics in the mine stifled sound, drowning it the way a gallon of water would douse the flame on a match.
Time crawled on, and then he heard men speaking. The same sludging technology that blocked the signal from Freeman’s sensors and stopped him from detonating the charges now worked against the Unifieds. It blocked all interLink and radio signals. The only way they could communicate was by speaking. Apparently, a few of the men felt they had to shout to be heard.
One of the men said, “He went down that hole.”
His friend shouted the answer, “That’s a cave-in. If he went down there, he fell down.”
“Maybe he died.”
The scouts’ rappel tools purred softly as they paid out line.
Freeman gave up on removing the scope. It was a smart scope, a device that communicated with the rifle’s inner workings. To remove the scope, he would need to disconnect circuits as well as stanchion screws. Now that the hunters had ar
rived, he couldn’t risk giving his position away with a click or a scratch. Instead of removing the scope, he aimed the rifle in the direction from which he had come.
Looking through the scope, he could see the spot where he had landed, then tilted the rifle toward the roof of the cavern and spotted the hole through which he fell. He had fallen twenty feet, striking an old wooden crossbeam on his way down.
As he watched, three rappel lines rolled from the ceiling, looking like giant fishing lines. Keeping his scope trained on the lines, Freeman took a deep breath and tried to clear the pain from his thoughts. He had a harder time focusing now. It wasn’t just the pain; his mind kept drifting.
Removing his eye from the scope, he stared up at the ceiling, hoping the hunters would use flashlights. Nothing. Darkness. Total darkness.
It these men were Marines, they wouldn’t need flashlights. They’d have night-for-day lenses built into the visors.
He pressed his eye to the scope once more and waited until he saw three pairs of armored boots lower from the ceiling, then he leaned his back against the wall of the alcove. He drew in a deep breath and waited.
He would kill the scouts. With the airwaves sludged, they couldn’t call for assistance. The most they could do was leave a beacon to mark their path.
If they were Marines with Marine combat armor, Freeman would take one of their helmets. He would cut a groove in the back of the helmet so that he could fit it over his head. He’d done it before. With a working combat helmet, he would be able to see.
“Hey, check this out; there’s blood on the ground here!”
“Yeah, and a pair of goggles.”
“Hey, Sarge, there’s no doubt the speck came this way,” one of the Marines called in a loud voice. “He left some gear behind, there’s a whole lot of blood.”
Freeman considered the risks and the options. Three men had come down into the tunnel with him. He had no idea how many more watched from overhead. The clip in his rifle held twenty-five rounds, but the weapon was too slow and cumbersome for a close-range shoot-out.
“Man, that speck is bleeding like a stuck pig.”
“I don’t see blood.”
“Yeah. It’s hard to see it with night-for-day vision,” said one of the Marines. “Shine your light.”
By the time the light appeared, Freeman had already switched from his rifle to his pistol. Shining through the dusty dry air, the cone of illumination looked like an object, like a silver arrow, the broad end poised at the floor and the narrow end pointing at the target. Freeman fired his pistol.
The Marine dropped his flashlight as he died. It hit the ground, rolled a lazy half revolution, and inside its beam stood two Marines in combat armor. Freeman shot them, then waited in absolute silence to see what would follow. No more lines dropped from the ceiling; no one returned fire. Ten seconds passed. Twenty.
Willing himself to ignore the pain, Freeman gimp-stepped to the dead Marine and the fallen flashlight as quickly as he could. As he approached, he looked up at the ceiling and spotted a Marine staring down at him. Freeman shot him. He might have grazed the man or merely scared him away, but he didn’t think he had killed the bastard.
After one last look to make sure no one would shoot him from the ceiling, he grabbed one of the dead Marines by the foot and dragged him into the darkness.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-EIGHT
Location: Flying from Mazatlán to Guanajuato, New Olympian Territories
Date: July 30, 2519
“Harris, nine transports appeared directly over the Territories. There’s only one way they got there. The Unifieds are using a spy ship,” said Admiral Hauser.
“A cruiser?” I asked.
“That’s my guess,” said Hauser. “The cruisers they were using at the end of the war had three landing bays. Each bay had room for three transports.
“The Unifieds landed nine transports a couple of hours ago. I’m no mathematician, but three bays holding three transports . . .”
“Do you think they’re using our spy ship?” asked Ritz.
In the early days of the war between the Enlisted Man’s Empire and the Unified Authority, we captured a U.A. cruiser that had been equipped with a stealth generator. That ship quickly became the crown jewel of our fleet, but it vanished shortly after the battle for Earth. One thing about stealth ships—once you lose track of them, they stay lost.
“I have no way of knowing,” said Admiral Hauser.
I said, “If it’s ours, I want it back.”
We were already in the air, already winging our way east, toward the mountains. Ritz and I sat in the cockpit of the lead transport. The sun set behind us as we flew forward into a blue-black sky.
Wanting to oversee his global blockade, Hauser had moved the Churchill to an Earth orbit. He had sixty ships forming a tight net around the planet. We might not have had the tools we needed to stop spy ships from parking outside the atmosphere, but the Unifieds knew better than to send conventional ships.
Hauser said, “Harris, our radar picked up a gunship circling the area, a TR-40. You better watch yourself down there. If the Unifieds smell a shot at Freeman, they’ll throw everything they have at him. If they figure out you’re there . . .”
Gunships were every Marine’s worst nightmare. Shoulder-fired rockets barely dented their armor. Ritz had once knocked a whole flock of them out of the sky with a mortar, but he’d attached an EMP to that shell. No one had packed EMPs for this op.
“How long has it been there?” I asked.
“That’s the problem,” said Hauser. “We didn’t notice it until after you asked us to scan the area. For all we know, they could have an air base somewhere nearby.”
Transports carried one hundred men. If the Unifieds had nine transports outside Petrie’s camp, that gave them a maximum nine hundred troops unless that spy ship returned to deliver another load. How the speck they smuggled a gunship into the area was another question.
“Did Cardston ever get back to you about the summit?” asked Ritz.
Speck, I thought. The summit. Cardston and the summit had completely slipped my mind.
“Oh, I’ve heard from Cardston,” said Hauser. “Did you hear what MacAvoy is up to?”
I was almost afraid to ask . . . almost.
“He declared martial law in Washington.”
“He did what?” I asked.
Ritz went silent for a moment, then laughed. He said, “We’re a military empire; the only kinds of laws we have are martial laws.”
Hauser ignored him. He said, “He landed an entire corps and declared martial law. I swear I’ve eaten MREs with more brains than that clone.”
“Martial law?” I asked. “Are we talking checkpoints and guard stations?”
Hauser groaned and nodded. “He’s quarantined the Pentagon . . . has troops and tanks surrounding the building. He also put out a general call informing every Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine base that the Pentagon is currently off-line. That’s how he put it, ‘off-line.’”
I said, “I really wish he had discussed this strategy with us before pulling the trigger.”
Ritz disagreed. He said, “You got to love MacAvoy. I bet the Unifieds didn’t see that coming.”
I realized that I should have known that a hammerhead like MacAvoy would launch an undeclared war when I told him to watch the Pentagon. The Navy and the Marines had fine, sharp tools for surgical strikes. The Army specialized in blunt-force trauma.
“What’s he doing about the gas?” I asked.
“Gas masks,” said Hauser.
There was a time when Army gas masks had involved large, cumbersome hoods that covered the soldier’s entire head. Newer, sleeker models had replaced those primeval relics. They were now clear plastic discs that covered the mouth, nose, and eyes with filters so powerful they could strain breathable oxygen out of mud.
“He’s forcing them to make their move,” said Ritz. “They’re either going to act fast or lose the
Pentagon.”
“Assuming they really did gas the place,” I said. “Maybe they just gassed Cardston.”
• • •
Nine transports sat in one long row along an ancient highway. Beyond the birds, the remains of a relocation camp smoldered. The flames had died, but the ruins of the buildings still looked hot.
Ritz saw the wreckage from the cockpit, and asked, “Freeman?”
I said, “My pal Ray.”
We were deep in a mountainous area with ridges climbing toward the sky in every direction. I asked the pilot, “Can you scan the location for enemy troops?”
“Sure. They’re over there,” said Lieutenant Chris Nobles, the man who played pilot on most of my missions. He pointed out the cockpit.
The world was dark around us. Looking out the cockpit, I saw slopes that were rocky and steep, leading up to stony cliffs. Though I could not see the army that had gathered on the distant cliff, I saw the lights of their encampment, a tiny bubble of white light in a world otherwise given to darkness. We were too far away to see the men themselves.
“Any sign of the gunship?” I asked.
Nobles looked at his radar and shook his head. We could survive a gunship in this bird though it would be a bumpy ride. Transports were floating bunkers, defenseless but covered with armor and surrounded by powerful shields.
“Get us as close as you can,” I said.
Nobles said, “Aye, sir, but I wouldn’t want to set her down on that trail. Those slopes weren’t meant for transports.”
He was right. The rise was too steep for the skids, our bird would slide as she touched down, maybe even roll. Shields or no shields, I didn’t like the idea of rolling down a mountain.
The Clone Assassin Page 22