The Clone Assassin

by Steven L. Kent

  More U.A. Marines ran through the door looking for targets, sprinting out to the street, their right arms out, their arm cannons ready to shoot.

  “Fire.”

  The remaining grenadiers launched their shoulder-fired rockets. Any one of the rockets would have had enough power to demolish the building; three rockets struck, hitting central spots that supported the weight of the building.

  The smoke from the rockets still hung in the air as they exploded in flashes of white and yellow and red. Shaken down to its foundation, the building fell apart. Its outer walls toppled; its insides collapsed deck upon deck. Alarms roared in the night, and a tide of rubble washed into the street. No fire, no flames, but an eerie orange glow showed through the rubble.

  • • •

  It just never gets old, General MacAvoy thought as he surveyed the aftermath. The building, now a hill of concrete and broken glass, glowed. The demolition had not been neat, but it had been thorough.

  He walked around the foot of the mountain and listened to trapped Unifieds crying for help through his earpiece. Some begged for their lives. Some bargained.

  MacAvoy was not the man who invented the tactic of demolishing buildings on top of troops in impervious armor; that had been Harris. MacAvoy admired the initiative and creativity of Harris’s idea. If you can’t hurt the enemy, bury him.

  On his earpiece, he heard an officer shout, “Who is in charge out there? Who is your commanding officer? I want to speak to him.”

  MacAvoy chuckled. Back on Terraneau, where Harris had first employed this tactic, the Marines had referred to the voices as “ghosts.” It made sense. They were calling from their graves. One thing was certain—no one under his command would dig these bastards out.

  • • •

  MacAvoy thought he had turned the tide of battle. He didn’t know that the H Street building was one of ten buildings that the Unifieds had selected as launch points of a major assault. Sometimes, what you don’t know can kill you.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTY-ONE

  Location: Guanajuato, New Olympian Territories

  Date: August 3, 2519

  We didn’t have food, and our only liquid was the recycled hydration inside our armor. It wasn’t much.

  We were trapped deep in the mountain. As far as I could tell, Freeman’s charges had collapsed the section of the mine stretching from the office complex to the entrance. There might have been some hollow pockets along the way. We couldn’t be sure since we ran into a wall of rock that blocked both ends of the path.

  And then there was Freeman. He’d always struck me as an indestructible man, but it looked like a badly infected leg might kill the man who bullets, knives, and bombs never seemed to stop. He didn’t have enough strength to stand, so he lay on the ground beside the little campfire we’d built out of desiccated posts and studs. He slept mostly, shivering as if we’d laid him on ice.

  I wished I could have stretched my body suit around him. It would have sensed his temperature fluctuations and kept him warm. But my body suit was a snug-fitting unitard that couldn’t possibly stretch across his thick, seven-foot mass.

  I stripped out of my armor so I could rig the hydration wire to keep his mouth moist. If he’d been conscious, he might not have allowed me to do that. Drinking another man’s sweat and urine was an unappetizing thought, filtered or not.

  We had no medicine for his leg. His foot was so swollen that we had to cut a slit around the ankle before the skin burst. His skin had turned slate gray.

  Not all of the news was bad. The fire we’d started with desiccated wood burned so steadily you’d think we’d built it inside a furnace. At least we weren’t hurting for oxygen.

  And Hunter Ritz had survived along with 156 of my men. The last time I had seen Ritz, he was leaping from a ridge while attacking a gunship. I’d figured he’d died. I was wrong. He landed on the same lower ledge that I had used when I flanked the U.A. Marines. The men flying the gunships were so busy chasing down groups of men, they paid no attention to stragglers.

  And then our reinforcements arrived. The sludging might have prevented us from contacting Admiral Hauser, but it didn’t stop the admiral from watching the fight outside the atmosphere. Hauser sent fighters, and the fighters destroyed all three U.A. gunships.

  Hauser also sent swarms of engineers to help dig us out. They scratched at the mountainside with lasers and drills, but they were miles away. They spoke to us, giving us progress reports as they spent hours reclaiming every yard.

  I watched the reflection of the fire on the office’s dusty windows. The flames and embers cast a glow that seemed to fill the entire chamber.

  I had time to think, to consider the day. I thought about Freeman, who had entered the New Olympian Territories to rescue me. He had walked into a trap. I told myself that he would survive this though I had my doubts. He was no longer lucid. There he was, lying beside the fire, I couldn’t speak to him, couldn’t warm him, couldn’t feed him, couldn’t cure his infection. If he lived, he might spend the rest of his life on one leg. If he died, the fault would be mine.

  The Unifieds had killed most of First Battalion. The rescue crew found bodies everywhere. My grenadiers had knocked down one gunship; against three, they’d never stood a chance, and the Unifieds had showed them no quarter. A skirmish, right? The loss of a single brigade means little over the course of a war, but they’d been my men, damn it! They’d come under my command, depending on me to keep them safe, and when the shooting started, it was my specking responsibility to make their deaths count for something. I’d failed.

  Should have been you, I told myself. Here in the mine, in the silence, with hungry men sitting around me and the smell of our existence fouling the air, I decided I wasn’t such a great commandant.

  In truth, I wanted to die, and now, thanks to the Unifieds, I had the ability to make it happen, but there was an account I needed to settle before anything else. This wasn’t an emotional decision. I made it by the light of the cold, clear, unemotional logic of hate. Among Marines, hate isn’t considered emotion, it’s religion.

  Franklin Nailor had made this personal. He had tried to kill me and the friend who’d come to rescue me. I had a reason to live, and that reason was an overwhelming desire to watch Nailor die. I would find him and I would kill him. Okay, yes, I had bought into a personal vendetta. I no longer thought of Nailor as an officer in a hostile army; he had officially graduated to a personal demon. Still, killing the bastard could result in dividends for the entire Enlisted Man’s Empire. Fry his evil ass and maybe the Unifieds would get scared and run. The rest of them didn’t seem nearly as homicidal.

  Freeman moaned softly. His body was two feet from a crackling fire, but he still shivered. His skin had a pallor. When I examined him using heat vision, his signature was almost yellow instead of bright orange. His body heat was feverish.

  My men and I sat in silence. I didn’t know if they blamed me. They probably did, but there was nothing I could do about it.

  Only Nailor mattered. I would find him, and I would end him.

  Outside this mine, in the mythical world of light and fresh air, things had happened, big things, important things, but no one would tell me what they were. Officers chimed in on the interLink. They asked about Freeman’s condition. They asked how I and my men were doing. When I asked about the Unifieds or Travis Watson, they went temporarily silent, then said they would brief me once I escaped from the mine.

  So I sat and reevaluated everything. I thought about leaving the Corps, resigning my commission, and killing Nailor. No one else mattered. Not anymore. Not even Freeman.

  I thought about Sunny and knew that I didn’t love her. I wasn’t sure I ever had. My feelings for her had had a spontaneous quality, as if I fell in love with her every time I saw her, but the feelings disappeared when she went away. I would see her and feel an overwhelming need to touch her, to sleep with her . . . and I would feel a strange need to protect her, but I hat
ed her as well. Once we’d had sex, I couldn’t wait to get away from her. I went through the same emotional cycle every time I saw her, and I always left her apartment trying to sort out my feelings.

  Sunny was pretty. She was smart. She was great in bed. If love entered into that equation, I failed to see where.

  I thought about Kasara and knew that at some point I had loved her. But I had no room for love anymore. Not anymore.

  • • •

  “General Harris?”

  I had lost track of time. My visor had a clock and a calendar, but I wasn’t wearing it. Nothing slows the passage of time as effectively as having a clock right in front of your eyes.

  I had no idea how long we had been trapped inside the mine when the call came in. I put on my helmet, and answered, “Yeah.”

  “General, the civilian engineers think they can pull you out through an air shaft.”

  “An air shaft?” I asked.

  A passel of old pipes ran along one of the walls in this chamber. The bore of the largest pipe looked to be about two feet in diameter. Even stripped and greased, I doubted I could survive a trip through that pipe. Fitting Freeman, the only one of us with a pending expiration date, into that pipe would have been like stuffing a bowling ball into a syringe.

  I said, “If you’re talking about the pipes running up through the ceiling, I think I’ll pass.”

  I didn’t recognize the voice of the man who answered me. He said, “Not pipes, shafts. There is an alternate system of ventilation shafts running along the length of the mine.”

  Judging by the fact that the man neither called me “sir” nor cowered, I decided he was probably a member of Hauser’s Corps of Engineers.

  I later learned that the pipes in the ceiling had nothing to do with ventilation. When the engineer finally reached us, he identified them as having been part of a water system.

  The vent was linked to ducts on every level of the mine. It spilled out on a lower ridge. This was the system that brought air to miners when the main system failed.

  Once I knew that help was on the way, I began watching the clock. Three hours, twelve minutes, and twenty-seven seconds later, somebody poked a hole in the ceiling above us.

  The first man down was a medic. He knelt beside Freeman, ran sensors over his body, and shined a light in his eyes. “This man is in bad shape,” he said as if pronouncing an insightful diagnosis.

  “Will he be able to keep his leg?” I asked. The doctor shook his head, and answered, “I’m not sure this man will survive the trip out.”

  He did, though. The medic loaded Freeman on a travois and strapped him tight, then used a winch to raise him into the ventilation shaft. Not wanting to let Freeman out of my sight, I came up next and insisted on helping with the travois.

  Men always look smaller to me when they are injured, and even Freeman did. Lying on that travois, he looked no larger than a normal man. Dragging him out that vent with its twists and uphill slopes strained my back and arms. I tried to pull my side of the travois the entire way, but I didn’t have the strength. How long had it been since I’d been shot?

  Freeman had come to the Territories to pull my ass out of the fire. It wouldn’t have been the first time he’d saved my ass, either. I went to the front of the travois and pulled as long as I could, but I had been shot in the gut a few weeks earlier, and my strength gave out. The Marines behind the travois traded off regularly, and I think they were stronger than me to begin with.

  When I felt spasms running down my spine, I thought about Nailor and added my pain to the ledger. His was one score I would settle.

  As we neared the top of the shaft, I saw bright light. The rescue team had set up arc lamps and a medical center. Medics met us. They loaded Freeman on a transport and flew away.

  I saw the body bags as I stepped into the open. They lay in several rows in the dimness, just outside the bubble of light cast by the arc lamps. Marines do not stack their dead in haphazard piles. We show respect for our fallen and lay them out in rows. In the poor light, the black plastic bags looked like open graves.

  Revenge, I thought. The only cure for this disease is revenge.

  If I resigned, what I did with my time would be nobody’s business, but generals have privileges that civilians do not. I needed my Corps and my rank to get Nailor.

  An officer escorted me into a transport, and said, “Admiral Hauser is on the horn.”

  I sat in front of the console and stared into the screen.

  Hauser stared back. He studied me, then, in a soft voice, he said, “You need rest, General. I know you won’t listen to me, but you’re killing yourself.”

  “Where are they attacking us?” I asked Hauser.

  “Maybe we should . . .”

  I remembered what Nailor told me, and asked, “What happened in Washington, D.C.?”

  He took a breath as he composed his answer. “MacAvoy has a war on his hands.” Hauser went quiet, purposely giving me a chance to respond. I didn’t. He hadn’t asked me a question. What did he expect me to say?

  “How well do you know Washington?” he asked.

  “I know it.”

  “They’ve taken everything from the Potomac to Stanton Park.”

  That was less than half the city, mostly the southwestern corner. They’d have the Capitol and the Mall, but who cared. I replayed Nailor’s words in my mind. He’d thought he’d have the whole city by the time I climbed out of the mines.

  “What about MacAvoy?” I asked.

  Hauser smiled. He said, “They underestimated him. They thought they were fighting a by-the-book officer, but they got MacAvoy instead. I’m not sure what you know about his tactics . . . they’re barbaric and really, really effective.

  “He’s come up with an answer for shielded armor. He waits until they walk by tall buildings, then he fires artillery at them.”

  “Shells don’t get through shielded armor,” I said.

  Hauser smiled. “Not at the Unifieds, at the buildings. He brings the buildings down on top of them . . . buries them alive.

  “They wanted a general who would try to match wits, but they got MacAvoy instead. They might have captured the entire city by now had they been fighting anybody else.”

  I asked, “How did they land in D.C. without our spotting them?” and Hauser’s smile faded. Okay, yes, it wasn’t meant as a question; it was an accusation. His blockade had failed.

  Hauser told me about the stealth destroyer. He listed the targets . . . Bolling Field to cripple us, the Pentagon to cover their tracks, and the Archive Building. The destruction of the Archive was a death blow to the Enlisted Man’s Empire. The Archive stored the data for cloning. Clones are sterile. Now that we no longer had the ability to build new clones, the Unifieds wouldn’t need to beat us in war; they could simply outwait us.

  PART IV

  THE ASSASSIN

  CHAPTER

  FIFTY-TWO

  Location: Mazatlán, New Olympian Territories

  Date: August 4, 2519

  I found Brandon Pugh in a park in a wealthy residential area not far from shore. Mark Story, the local police chief, had told me where to find him. He also warned me that Pugh was a dangerous criminal, a gangster I’d be foolish to trust.

  I set Story straight. I said, “I can trust him. I can trust him because he’s already crossed me twice, and the next time he steps on my toes, I’ll bury him.”

  Story smiled, and asked, “Would you kill him?”

  I was almost out the door when I turned, and said, “Killing people who disagree with me is how I make my living.”

  Pugh would probably have preferred for me to stay away from Story, but I no longer cared what he wanted.

  It was nighttime. In the weeks since I had first arrived, this part of Mazatlán had morphed into a regular town. Lights shone from the windows of houses in which families now lived. Streetlamps lit sidewalks and streets. There weren’t many cars, but families and young people walked the neighborhood
s.

  Ritz, who drove out with me, said, “I’ve never seen the Martians so content.”

  That just about summed it up.

  The night was warm and dry, a perfect night for swimming or drinking yourself drunk on the beach. In another life, I might have lit a fire on the beach and downed a few beers. That wouldn’t get me drunk, but, depending on the company I kept, I might enjoy myself.

  I had expected to find Pugh surrounded by thugs. Gangsters of his sort are always on guard. Having sent Freeman into the mountains to kill Ryan Petrie, he had a lot to fear . . . more than he knew.

  He was far from alone when Ritz and I rolled up in our jeep. He had his entire organization around him. That included tough guys and bookkeepers, slick operators and thieves. There were women, too, but they looked like wives, not prostitutes.

  Kasara saw me, came to hug me, saw the change in my face, and backed away. Her uncle read me as well. He asked, “Who have you come to kill?”

  Both Ritz and I had M27s in our hands. I suppose we did look like we had come to kill someone.

  As Kasara backed away from me, the park went silent. Kids had been playing, screaming, laughing as we arrived. Now they went silent. After a year trapped in Mars Spaceport, these children had developed a sense about how to behave when the situation turned serious.

  Maybe it wasn’t only our guns that alarmed them. I had showered and changed into a crisp, neatly pressed service uniform. I had shaved and washed my hair. I didn’t look like I had just come from a battlefield. One of the nice things about wearing armor into battle is that you seldom get bruised.

  My eyes, though, they gave me away. Maybe a man’s eyes are the windows to his soul or possibly they’re just the stool pigeons that give away his thoughts and intensions. Kasara looked into my eyes and knew that something was missing. Pugh looked into my eyes and saw something new and dangerous.

  “I’m not here to kill anybody,” I said.

  “Wayson, what happened?” asked Kasara. She hovered a few feet away from me, watching me closely, possibly waiting to see if I would explode. She kept her eyes fastened on mine.