“Last chance to change your mind,” Hauser said.
“Change my mind?” I asked. “Why would I change my mind?”
Ritz remained uncharacteristically mute as he watched the proceedings. He didn’t offer any useless opinions or refer to the clones as “Repromen.” He normally made jokes at times like this, his irreverence sometimes endearing and sometimes a source of irritation.
I asked him, “You see any problems?”
Ritz said, “No, sir.” He’d called me, “sir.” That made me nervous.
“Do you want to proceed, General?” asked Hauser.
“You okay?” I asked Ritz.
He hesitated, then said, “Yeah. Yes, sir.”
I told Hauser, “We agreed upon this operation, Admiral. I believe it is time to execute.”
On the tactical, the swarm of torpedoes hovering near the surface dropped below the line marking the thermocline and scattered. If the clones boarded submarines as we expected them to do, the torpedoes would shadow them from beneath.
The lone torpedo, the one that would target the city itself, drifted within several hundred yards of the large red oval representing the city. I said, “Gentlemen, I give you Quetzalcoatl.”
I had spent several minutes learning how to pronounce the name correctly, and now knew it was the name of a Mesoamerican god as well. I hoped Hauser would refer to it as a Mayan god so I could call him on it. It had actually been a lesser known tribe called the Nahua that worshipped Quetzalcoatl, not the Mayans.
I knew nothing about the Nahua other than their worship of Quetzalcoatl, but that wasn’t the point. Pretending like I knew something, so I could one-up Hauser . . . that was the point.
Hauser made no comment, however.
The torpedo exploded. Had it had a nuclear tip, it would have destroyed the underwater city. The tactical device produced a more controlled explosion calculated to rock the city without destroying it.
“Think we got their attention?” I asked Ritz.
He looked at me and said nothing. He stood slack-jawed and stiff, like a Marine at attention, but I saw sadness in his eyes. Until their reprogramming, those men had been our men.
The Observer had a communications array capable of broadcasting underwater using ELF (extremely low frequency) electromagnetic waves that could travel all the way to the ocean floor. Using those electromagnetic waves, Hauser sent a message to Quetzalcoatl. The message he sent was, “Surrender . . . Surrender . . . Surrender . . . Surrender . . . Surrender . . .”
Nobody involved in planning this operation believed that reprogrammed clones would have the capacity to surrender. It wasn’t in their programming, original or hijacked.
Once the lead torpedo exploded, another torpedo circled in from a different angle, broadcasting a video feed that suggested that the people in Quetzalcoatl had both received our message and understood it.
The outside of the city was encased in an opaque dome that rose above the silt like a mushroom-shaped shadow. Looking on that screen, I had no concept of its size. If anything, the city was dwarfed by the sprawling plains that spread out around it.
We could have hit the dome with more torpedoes, but the clones responded as expected. They evacuated their hideout without putting up a fight.
The first Turtle launched almost immediately. Over the next hour, another thirty took to the sea.
Turtles were the Cousteau equivalent of fighter carriers. They were enormous mobile domes. The French had built them for transporting workers, equipment, and materials to construct the undersea cities. They were designed to carry everything from cranes to girders to desalinization equipment. I’d never actually seen a Turtle, not even a picture of one, but I’d read their design specifications, and they were enormous. If God ever flooded the world again, Noah wouldn’t need to build an ark. He could borrow a Turtle and fit the whole damn zoo inside.
If my suspicions proved true, the Unifieds had used them for more than moving zoos and building supplies. The reason our radar had never detected U.A. gunships until they had nearly reached land was because their gunships and transports had traveled by Turtle, below the surface, below our radar, and out of the range of satellite surveillance.
Each Turtle was a floating disc, 120 feet in diameter, 10 feet tall around the edges, and 40 feet tall at the center of its convex shell, and capable of launching gunboats, transports, even Harriers, anything with a vertical liftoff. To launch its cargo, the Turtle would rise to the surface of the water, and its shell would open like a lid.
Traveling under the water with its shell closed, the Turtle didn’t look like a mobile launchpad; it looked like a flying frying pan with a lid.
“Well, well,” said Hauser, “a UFO.”
“It isn’t flying,” I said.
“An Unidentified Floating Object.”
I sent a message to the Marines piloting our APC. I told them to follow that first Turtle as she came to the surface. We didn’t have enough personnel carriers to shadow every Turtle and sub that emerged from the city. We’d send gunships after some and fighters after others if need be, but I wanted to be there when we captured that first clone-controlled boat.
The giant submersibles had been created for peacetime purposes. They didn’t have guns or torpedo tubes. The Unifieds might have added defenses, but it seemed unlikely. The Observer checked that first one for the seams that would indicate missiles hatches and torpedo tubes.
“Look’s like she’s unarmed,” said Hauser, who sounded just about ready to break out champagne and cigars. The converts had launched their enormous, slow-moving, defenseless underwater platform, which we now chased with a nuclear-tipped torpedo, a gunship, and an amphibious personnel carrier. The clones on that boat couldn’t hold their breath forever. When they surfaced, we would be waiting. If they tried to dive back to the bottom of the ocean, we could blow them out of the water with the torpedo. Sinking the Turtle was a viable option. We would sink one of the converts’ boats to indicate our resolve to the others.
The French may not have armed their Turtles, but they wouldn’t send them to the bottom of the sea swimming blind. That boat undoubtedly had sonar and radar arrays; even if they had been created for navigation purposes, they would detect the torpedo nipping at their heels. They had probably located our gunship and our APC as well, but the men piloting the Turtle seemed not to care.
Watching that floating puck, I realized that a boat that big couldn’t have floated up the Chesapeake Bay unnoticed. Even if it made it across the bay, it couldn’t have traveled the Potomac. It was too wide and too tall.
I looked at the tactical. By this time the converts had launched dozens of Turtles. The floating platforms traveled in every direction. On the display, they looked like a scattering school of jellyfish.
I said, “Admiral, this can’t be all of it. There needs to be something else, something smaller than these boats.”
Hauser had done his homework. He said, “You mean the Mantas. They’ll be out soon. I bet they’re using the Turtles as decoys. They’ll send the enlisted men on the Turtles and load their officers on the Mantas.”
I hadn’t heard about Mantas, but seeing as the boats called “Turtles” were round, slow-moving tin cans, I had a pretty good idea about what a Manta might be.
We tailed the Turtle for two hours. It meandered at a painfully slow ten miles per hour, heading east toward the Territories while rising to within fifteen feet of the surface. When I went outside and peered over the edge of the APC, I could see it clearly though I couldn’t tell if it looked more like an island or an enormous fish.
After two hours spent chasing the ponderous sub, I became bored, so I had a gunship put an end to the chase. The crew fired a couple of RPGs off her bow. The grenades exploded, and the Turtle stopped moving. It just hung there, the world’s biggest dead fish in the world’s largest vat of formaldehyde. All the while, the communications officer on the APC transmitted the message, “Surrender . . . Surrender . . . Surrende
r.”
At that moment, everything seemed so promising. We had no idea what had become of the scientist Howard Tasman, but I thought he might still be alive. I thought we could capture the converts and store them someplace safe until Tasman returned, then he could figure out the riddle to unprogram these clones so that their loyalties returned to the Enlisted Man’s Empire.
The Turtle remained where it had stopped. Other ships rise and descend at odd angles, but not this boat. She remained flat the entire time she slowly ascended from the abyss.
I returned to the bridge and asked the communications officer if the clones had responded. He shook his head.
I stood over him as the communications officer repeated the message, “Surrender . . . Surrender . . . Surrender.”
The Turtle rose again, and the apex of her shell cleared the surface of the water and waves rolled over it. There she floated, like a reef, just under the waves, like a kraken or a whale or some mythical leviathan, the silver hump breaking the surface of the water during the troughs between waves. She hovered at that depth for several minutes, then she rose another few feet like a sandbar in a spectacularly low tide. Waves crashed into her mound and dissolved into foam. The wet skin of the boat sparkled under the sun.
Thinking that the clones meant to surrender, I had the communications officer broadcast a new message. He said, “Attention Unified Authority vessel, according to the Enlisted Man’s Empire Articles of Surrender, we are hereby authorized to commandeer your ship.”
We didn’t have submarines, but we did have divers and watertight combat armor. Men in dark armor dived from the edges of the APC, plunging into the royal blue water. They looked no bigger than minnows as they approached the gigantic silver dish that was the Turtle, placing charges around the submersible to prevent her from submerging again. If the Turtle tried to dive, those charges would blow holes in her shell.
We lowered a ramp from the APC to the roof of the Turtle. A company of armed Marines stormed down the ramp. From a distance, they must have looked no more significant than ants crawling over an egg. As the divers performed their acts of sabotage and the Marines crowded onto the shell, the Turtle sat still and helpless.
I looked over at Hauser, and asked, “Is she sending distress signals?”
He shook his head, and said, “Silent as a lamb.”
There was a tense moment. When the gunship signaled the crew of the Turtle to open hatches, the ship vibrated wildly—she practically convulsed. She shuddered for a moment, causing a few Marines to lose their footing, but she didn’t sink or swim. She stayed where she had breached, a robotic island.
I asked, “Can we open her without breaking her apart?”
“Sure we can,” said Hauser. “It may take a few minutes. If your men have laser torches, tell them to cut the main hatch. My engineers tell me they can fix it.”
“What’s happening with the other Turtles?” I asked. Looking at the tactical display, I saw that many had surfaced.
“They seem to be giving up,” said Hauser.
“It could be a trap,” I said. Those boats almost certainly used nuclear reactors to power their engines. For all we knew, the clones could have rigged the reactors to explode.
I thought about Curtis Jackson, the highest ranking of the converted clones. I’d once considered him among my most promising officers. He’d been tough and resourceful, the kind of Marine who would sacrifice himself and a few volunteers in exchange for destroying an enemy company. Now I had to worry about his sacrificing himself to kill my men.
“Harris, check out the display! Here come the Mantas,” said Hauser.
The tactical display had changed its focus so that it now showed an area that spanned hundreds of miles. The Turtles now showed as discs about the size of the head of a nail. The Mantas, which were one-tenth the size of the Turtles, looked like glowing fleas.
I watched them emerge from their underwater nest and scatter. From this angle, I wouldn’t have attempted to count the little submarines, but I didn’t need to. The tactical display tallied every torpedo, Turtle, and Manta. If a pod of whales swam by, it might have counted them as well.
Seeing the Mantas scatter, I asked, “Do we have enough torpedoes and gunships to catch all of them?”
Hauser laughed me to scorn, and said, “Harris, the fastest Manta is doing sixty-two knots. I could requisition an additional squad of gunboats from Fort Irwin, have them stop for chow in Los Angeles, and still nab those Mantas.
“Unless those clones have added self-broadcasting submarines to their fleet, General, we’ll catch them.”
His confidence was irritating but infectious. All I could say was, “Very well.”
• • •
Still sounding melancholy, Ritz said, “General, the men on the Turtle have opened the hatch.”
“We should go have a look,” I said.
He didn’t answer.
He looked so specking dour, and my anger flared. I shouted, “Damn it, man; what is the matter with you?”
He just stood there looking silent and brittle . . . Hunter Ritz looking “brittle” seemed about as plausible Mount Everest looking small. Ritz was a wild man, as irreverent an officer as any who had ever honored the Corps. He was the man who ran head-on at gunships and never sat still in briefings. No superior officer ever received proper respect from the bastard, and death didn’t faze him; now, here he stood, in a freshly pressed uniform and calling me “General” and “sir.”
In a quiet voice he said, “We’re not going to bring them in alive, sir.”
“We already have,” I said.
He said, “I fought side by side with some of those men on Terraneau, and Earth, and Mars.”
So that explained the freshly pressed uniform. He had dressed for a funeral.
I said, “Ritz, they’ve already come to the surface. That pretty well qualifies as an unconditional surrender.”
He didn’t respond.
I shook my head, and said, “Suit yourself.” He remained on the bridge while I went to help capture the “Repromen.” Ritz’s term, not mine.
• • •
I jogged out to the boarding area, where most of my Marines still waited by the gangplank. As I approached, they snapped to attention and saluted. I returned their salutes as I brushed past them and hopped the foot-high gap between the end of the plank and the roof of the Turtle.
Dressed in my armor and bodysuit, I had no idea if the wind felt boiling hot or freezing cold. I couldn’t smell the salt air or feel the sun on my shoulders. My armored boots slid as they clattered onto the Turtle’s rounded shell, and I struggled for a moment to catch my balance.
The Marines who had gathered around the hatch watched me in silence. I think they feared me more than the converts inside the boat. Well, they didn’t fear me so much as my rank. Generals are trouble. They’re like Greek statues come to life, like gods with hearts made of marble who send men to their deaths. Generals and gods seldom notice men for their good deeds and readily punish them for their bad.
Standing on that curved, metallic shoal, preparing to enter the hatch, I noticed something inside me—I was scared. I was petrified. First, I noticed how fast my heart was pumping, then I realized that I wasn’t scared of anything inside the Turtle. If anything, that hatch looked like an exit from my fears.
It was the water. The great aqua plain stretched to the horizon in every direction, flat and deep and beautiful, like a floor made of polished sapphire. The Turtle had long stopped vibrating; I might have collapsed if it so much as quivered. But it sat solid as a mountain beneath my feet.
This was fear, not just an anxious moment. It festered in my gut. Trying to hide it, I straightened my back, threw my chest out, and kept my chin level. I strode toward the hatch, asking the Marines around me, “What are you waiting for, an engraved invitation?”
My M27 out and ready, I felt my blood pressure drop and my heart slow as I entered the enclosed, shadowy depths . . . and saw the firs
t dead body. Death and darkness welcomed me in.
• • •
Every last man on the boat had died. Some lay on the floor. The dead pilots sat at the controls.
They were all clones, and from the blood welling up in the ears of the men not wearing helmets, they all appeared to have died from a mass death reflex. I had no idea what the death reflex did inside their brains, but it was brutal.
I walked through the corridors that circled the cavernous cargo hold in the center. Dead Marines lay everywhere. Some held guns. Some lay empty-handed.
As I approached the bridge, I heard the automatic broadcast from our APC still droning on. It said, “Surrender . . . surrender . . . surrender.”
The pilots, there were three, sat up nearly straight, strapped in their seats, their heads hanging as if in shame. They must have surrendered, I thought. They brought their boat to the surface. Maybe a conflict in their programming would not let them surrender. Or maybe they could surrender, but not to other clones.
One way or another, they had surrendered themselves to death.
CHAPTER
SIXTY
Location: The EMN Churchill, orbiting Earth
Date: August 12, 2519
“Just what exactly happened down there?” Hauser demanded. “General Harris, you assured me that we were going to capture clones.”
Watching Hauser’s anger fascinated me. He wouldn’t allow himself to swear or pound the table and barely raised his voice, but he was castigating me nonetheless. Back in boot camp, angry drill sergeants screamed at me, threatened me, prognosticated that any girl I ever slept with would be syphilitic, and called my nonexistent mother a whore. Had they dressed me down this gently, I might have mistaken it for praise.
“You were going to capture them. You were supposed to bring them in alive. This wasn’t a battle. This was . . . this was Masada.”
Masada . . . Masada. I ran the name through my memory several times before I pieced it together—Romans versus Jews. The Jews had a fortress on top of a butte, inaccessible and impossible to attack. When the Romans finally broke through the walls, they found only dead Jews. The Jews picked suicide over capture.
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