The Clone Assassin

by Steven L. Kent

  I started to mention that dying from a mass death reflex hardly qualified as suicide, but Perry MacAvoy spoke up in my defense. Unwilling to leave Washington, D.C., he joined us via confabulator.

  He said, “From what you told me, General Harris never said we’d capture anybody. He said we’d capture equipment and an underwater city. We got their city; we got their subs, and we didn’t lose a single man. As far as I can tell, only God could have run this operation any smoother.

  “What were you hoping for, Tommy? Were you hoping the sea would part, and the converts would march out on dry land?

  “I wish the natural-born assholes the Unifieds have out here would die from a death reflex. I’d give my last working nut for a little divine intervention of that sort. Shit, we shoot these bastards, we stab these bastards, we blow their testicles to kingdom come, and the only thing we get outta their damn ears are brains and earwax.”

  We’d already heard the news from the capital. The Unified Authority showed no sign of weakening despite heavy losses. We had more equipment, tanks, gunships, fighters, etc., but they had dug in tight as ticks. They hit us from the buildings we wanted to keep whole with an endless supply of rockets and traveled below streets we could not afford to demolish.

  Even worse, public sentiment had shifted in their direction. We were a military empire, conquerors of a home planet that didn’t welcome our return. Now that the Unifieds had returned, the indigenous population’s attitude toward us had gone from strong dislike to hate.

  Hauser asked, “Do we even know what caused the reflex?”

  I shook my head. “Howard Tasman might be able to explain it.”

  I wished I had some way to ask him. He was gone. Travis Watson was gone. Sunny was gone. I had failed them all.

  MacAvoy took a stab at it. He guessed, “Maybe the Unifieds programmed them to die.”

  “Why would they do that?” asked Hauser.

  “To stop us from programming them back the way they were.”

  “That wasn’t a battle,” Hauser said in a soft voice that resonated with regret. “That was an extermination.”

  “We didn’t exterminate anyone,” said MacAvoy. “Harris didn’t even fire a specking shot.”

  I didn’t respond. We’d fired off a couple of rockets to get their attention, nothing more.

  His voice still softer and sadder, Hauser said, “I served a tour with Curtis Jackson. He served on Bhutto. That was my first command.”

  I had served with Jackson as well. He commanded the regiment I took to Mars on an ill-fated operation. The Unifieds captured us. I was brainwashed; they were reprogrammed. Now they were dead. Hell, to us they’d been worse than dead since we left Mars. They’d been a ticking time bomb waiting to explode, but in the end, they’d imploded instead.

  “I’ll tell you what. If you’re scared that there are clones holed up in Gendamwortha, let me put you at ease,” said MacAvoy. “They’re all natural-born down there. They are all enemy soldiers, and not a one of them is going to have a death reflex.”

  The name of the Cousteau city MacAvoy referred to was Gendenwitha, but he didn’t worry about pronouncing it correctly.

  Hauser ignored the general. Looking at me, he asked, “It’s entirely possible Nailor has left Gendenwitha?”

  Gendenwitha sat halfway between the United States and Europe. Apparently enamored of local mythologies, the French named Gendenwitha after an Iroquois woman who, according to legend, had been transformed into the morning star. I had looked it up.

  The story of Gendenwitha reminded me of Ava, which made me think of Sunny. I felt a familiar wave of guilt. Did I feel guilty for cheating on Sunny or for abandoning Ava?

  “Have you received any intel indicating he is somewhere else?” I asked.

  “We haven’t heard anything,” said Hauser.

  “Then he’s still there,” I said.

  There were only two Cousteau cities in the Atlantic Ocean. Gendenwitha was fifteen hundred miles from Washington. Anansi, the next closest site, was four thousand miles away in an oceanic black hole called the Romanche Trench.

  I really hoped Nailor was in Gendenwitha.

  “What if it turns up empty?” asked Hauser. “What if the Unifieds have moved everyone they have to Washington, D.C.? What if they moved their troops to the Territories?”

  “I’ve got plenty of prisoners. You’re welcome to interrogate them till your nuts fall out,” MacAvoy offered.

  “You’ll still get your intel,” I said. Hauser and I had come to an agreement. He’d agreed to help me get to Gendenwitha if I did some simple reconnaissance while I was down there.

  We were about to destroy all of the underwater cities in one big sweep. Admiral Hauser wanted to make sure we searched one of them for its secrets before we buried it at sea.

  I said, “You’re not after Nailor; he’s my problem. I’ll still deliver your package either way.”

  Hauser thought about this and smiled. He said, “Fair enough.”

  CHAPTER

  SIXTY-ONE

  Location: Norfolk Naval Base, Virginia

  Date: August 13, 2519

  We had to strike the other underwater cities before the Unifieds figured out what happened to Quetzalcoatl. Hauser’s engineers spent the night getting a Manta ready for the mission, and I spent the night doing preparations of my own.

  I dyed my hair blond, placed blue dye in my eyes, and glued a beard to my chin. Would people still recognize that I was a clone?

  Ironically, my disguise made me look like what most clones were programmed to see when they looked in a mirror, except I was taller. I came armed with a sniper rifle and a pistol and a knife. Hauser’s engineers had also built a dirty bomb into the rear compartment of the Manta I was taking, just in case. If that little package went off, it would turn Gendenwitha into a highly radioactive bubble on the bottom of the sea.

  The Manta sat on the water beside the dock, looking like a fighter jet designed by an engineer with a strange sense of humor. She had the same dart-shaped fuselage as a Tomcat, only it looked like her wings had been put on backward. They were broad at the front and tapered at the back. She was also a lot less sleek.

  Most fighters only carried a lone pilot though a few carried a navigator as well. The Manta had tandem seats for a pilot and navigator along with tight accommodations for thirty-six passengers.

  “You say you’ve tested this thing,” I said to the flight instructor.

  “Ten hours’ worth,” he replied.

  The three of us stood around the bird . . . fish; the third being Ritz. Quiet and stolid, he seemed to be in mourning for the Marines who’d died when we captured this boat.

  “Did you recharge the batteries?” I asked. Did this thing even have batteries? More likely she ran on nuclear power, meaning I would be sitting in a miniature nuclear reactor with a second nuclear device, the dirty bomb, just a few feet away. Nukes spooked me—nukes had always spooked me. In another minute, I would pilot this nuclear-powered accident down into the depths.

  Nukes spooked me, but that was a fear I could work around. My fear of the deep was not. Seeing the ocean had temporarily paralyzed me when I boarded the Turtle, and that didn’t involve diving under the surface. Now I was going down, down, down, and, frankly, my ability to perform might turn to mush. I suspected I could make it to Gendenwitha with most of my marbles, but I wouldn’t be in the right frame of mind for a delicate and dangerous op. Fortunately, I didn’t come empty-handed. When I explained my situation to a doctor in the base infirmary, he gave me something powerful to calm my nerves. Remembering the way I had frozen while I entered the Turtle, I hoped the pills rendered me unconscious.

  We had to step on the wings to reach the hatch. I noticed that the bottoms of the wings were deep beneath the water. “Why are the wings so thick?” I asked.

  “They’re not wings. They’re ballast tanks,” said the instructor. “This isn’t like flying, you won’t need wings to stay afloat.”

/>   “What do they do?” I asked. I was nervous. Even stepping off the dock bothered me.

  The water was a chalky, bluish green. The Manta was a steel-colored tube. The sky was gray. Everything looked dismal.

  “Ballast tanks? You fill them with water to make the boat heavier; that’s how you make her go down.”

  “How do I make the boat lighter again?” I asked.

  “By flushing out the water.”

  “Won’t I need that air?” I asked.

  “You’ll have plenty of air, General.”

  I was not entirely ignorant. Hoping to combat my nervousness, I had done some reading. One of the differences between the ships that went into space and the ones that went to the bottom of the sea was the kind of pressure they endured. In space, the pressure came from inside the ship, and the hull was designed to contain it. Undersea vessels had more to deal with; by the time I reached Gendenwitha, this Manta would have thousands of pounds of water pressing down on her every square inch.

  I stepped on the wing, then on the spine, and into the hatch.

  The interior of the Manta was reinforced with steel ribs.

  “Admiral Hauser says you have misgivings about going underwater,” said the instructor.

  Yeah, he gossips like an old witch, I thought.

  “Did he?” I asked. I hadn’t told him about my phobias, but Don Cutter may have. Cutter knew about them because he was the officer in charge when I disappeared on Mars. He’d also temporarily relieved me of command and ordered me to undergo psychiatric evaluation.

  Once he knew he’d be taking Cutter’s seat, Hauser would have gone through his files. He would have read all about me and my psychological inventory; the son of a bitch probably knew things I didn’t know.

  “You’re going to enter the city through a moon pool. Are you familiar with the term, General?” asked the flight instructor.

  I nodded. I knew what a moon pool was, and the very thought of it played havoc with my phobias.

  Moon pools were holes in the understructure of oceanic architecture. Instead of having enclosed docking bays like spaceports, the underwater cities had holes in their floors. The holes didn’t allow water in because the cities had highly pressurized atmospheres that canceled out the pressure of the water.

  The flight instructor said, “General, it takes a great deal of pressure to force the water out at depths like the ones you will be entering. It will take your body nearly a full day to adjust to that pressure and another day to readjust before you can return to the surface.”

  I remembered an old term I’d heard in school. I asked, “Are you sticking me in a hyperbaric chamber?”

  He shook his head, and said, “The submarine will take care of that. Her atmosphere is computerized and self-adjusting. You’ve got a long, slow ride ahead of you, sir. There’s really no way around it.”

  I reminded myself that this man was a flight instructor, not a deep-sea diver. Anything he knew about decompression and submarines was nearly as new to him as it was to me.

  He spent a few minutes going over the controls, and that was really all the time we needed. The instructor didn’t teach me how to “fly” the Manta; the boat piloted herself—type in the destination, and her computers handled the rest. She knew when to fill her ballast tanks and when to purge them. Her communications gear was no different than the gear in our spaceships except that signals couldn’t travel millions of miles underwater. Any messages I sent or received would be short-range.

  That was good. The shorter the range, the better as far as I was concerned. I didn’t want the Unifieds asking me to identify myself as I drifted toward their base.

  It’s funny how phobias play with your mind. Death did not bother me; oceans did.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTY-TWO

  The flight instructor left, but Ritz remained behind. He said, “Harris, maybe I should come with you.”

  I said, “I appreciate the offer, General, but I’d rather go alone.”

  He said, “You’re scared, aren’t you? Are you scared of Nailor or the ocean?”

  “Tough choice,” I said. “I generally spend vacations on a beach, and Nailor, he’s just a tiny speck. I could . . .”

  “Nailor shot you and left you for dead. I don’t know about your vacations, but I heard about the way you acted when you boarded the Turtle. I heard you were scared of the water.”

  “Is that what you heard?” I asked, noting how precisely he had hit both nails on the head.

  “Yes, sir. That’s what I heard.”

  I decided to change the subject. “How about you?” I asked. “You’ve been acting like you’re at a funeral. You’re dressing like an officer bucking for promotion. I don’t know if you noticed, Ritz, but you just called me ‘sir.’”

  “General, we lost most of the First of the First rescuing Freeman. Fifteen thousand clones died yesterday. Fifteen thousand. I told you we wouldn’t bring them back alive, and we didn’t. The only thing those boys did wrong was breathe. They didn’t even know about the possibility of reprogramming when the Unified Authority caught them.”

  “It’s not my . . .”

  “No, General, it’s not your fault. But they still died, and the killing isn’t over. Maybe you’ll survive this mission, maybe you won’t. I get the feeling you don’t care.

  “So maybe we’ll survive this war, and maybe we won’t. We’ve become a disposable empire. We’re throwing away good men to hold on to a planet that doesn’t want us because we don’t have anyplace else to go.

  “That’s what I saw when we were in the mountains. I saw good men dying in a fight they’d already lost.”

  Thank you for the cheerful good-bye, I thought. He’s all done, I thought. When an officer goes into a funk like that, you can’t leave him in command. I thought about bringing him with me, but moods like his were absolutely contagious, so I thanked him for his offer and told him to go ashore.

  Then I took my medicine and hit the autopilot. The sooner I conked out, the happier I would be.

  As I waited for the drugs to make the phobias go away, I told myself that the launch would be the worst part of the trip, floating helpless, staring out across the docks, worrying about what to expect. My fears played havoc with my brain, leading me to see dark shapes under the water that weren’t really there. I imagined fins slicing across the surface and reminded myself that a shark would kill itself before it could harm this boat with her thick hull. Any shark that bit the Manta would end up with shattered teeth.

  Logic and phobia exist on different planes. They are as alien as dinosaurs and angels and just as unlikely to interact.

  The trip to the city would be long. I had over a thousand miles to travel before I reached Gendenwitha, and the Manta topped out somewhere around fifty miles per hour. Twenty hours, I hoped to sleep through it. Even if Nailor was down there, no one was guaranteeing that he would wait around until I arrived.

  This is a mistake, I thought, and I wanted to call it off.

  In the distance, dockworkers loaded crates onto transports. Two APCs sat on a large landing pad. They were a welcome sight. I wouldn’t need to sail this fish all the way back to Norfolk when I returned from Gendenwitha. Hauser was sending those amphibious personnel carriers to retrieve me and the spy equipment he had loaned me.

  I didn’t know if Hauser planned to sail the Manta back to port or sink her, and I truly didn’t care.

  As if piloted by a ghost, the Manta’s autopilot engaged, and she pulled away from the dock and headed out of the harbor. My heart pounding loud and fast, my lungs swelling as they tried to hoard every breath, my head aching, I forced myself to check the gauges. My heart sank when I saw a gauge indicating that the ballast tanks had started to fill with water.

  At some point before the Manta started her long dive, I began talking to myself. The submarine had a plastiscreen up front, and that was the only viewing port on the boat. Once we left the harbor, she started her descent. Water and sky were the o
nly things I could see, and soon the sky disappeared. This was a dark operation, so I didn’t have radio communications.

  “I specking hate this,” I said. A moment later, I added, “The speck am I doing here?”

  Since there was no one else to respond to the question, I answered myself. I said, “This was your idea, asshole. Please tell me you’re not losing your nerve.”

  Then I thought, Shit, I’m talking to myself.

  This would have been a good time to spot Gendenwitha. It didn’t happen that way. The submarine spent the next forty minutes hovering ten feet below the surface while she finished filling her ballast tanks. During that time, I pulled my rifle out of its case and field stripped it.

  Obeying some logical impulse that now escaped me, I had elected to take a sniper rifle with me on this op. With a base accuracy of fifteen hundred yards, this was a great weapon for snipers and hunters, and a shitty choice for indoor combat. From stock to muzzle, the rifle was forty-four inches long, too big for concealment.

  “You know why you brought this,” I chided myself out loud. I did know why, though I didn’t want to admit it to myself. “You didn’t come for recon. You came here to assassinate the bastard.”

  The bastard, of course, was Franklin Nailor, but I’d have happily killed Tobias Andropov or any other Unified Authority war criminals I happened to see while I was down there.

  I was getting sleepy. I told myself it was the medicine that had me talking to myself. Maybe it was.

  A plastic button on the pilot’s yoke lit a pale red and a Klaxon purred a single, lengthy note. I stood in the doorway, holding that rifle, staring at the glowing button, knowing what it meant, and no longer caring. We were about to dive whether I was ready or not.

  This boat didn’t need me to reach her destination. I was a passenger; I had no more control over this rig than a flea has over a dog. Something beeped, something else buzzed. I didn’t care. The Manta shuddered, and my brain drifted, drifted, drifted because of the medicine.