I needed to find Sunny and any other high-ranking U.A. brass who might be waiting across the Anacostia. This didn’t call for an attack so much as an abduction. I would grab them, drug them, and do whatever it took to get everything I needed out of them.
No getting around it, I had mapped out an act of desperation. In another day or two, clones would start dying. They’d die in Washington. They’d die in Hawaii. They’d die in Djibouti. They’d die in space. Unless we figured something out quickly, the entire empire would end.
I met with MacAvoy first. He sat at his desk, a quart-sized pitcher of that foul flu-fighter drink by his side. His mystic sludge hadn’t protected him from the ravages of his cold. His face now looked bloodless, and he sniffled after fighting for every breath.
I began the conversation by saying, “If I wake up looking like you tomorrow, I may just shoot myself.”
“You’re going to look worse than me. I got my flu fighter. I’m going to specking beat this, Harris. You watch. God hasn’t made a bug that can specking kill me.”
I almost reminded him that it wouldn’t be the flu that killed him; it would be a death reflex. Had I said anything, I might have triggered a death reflex. Generally, clones ignored people when dropped hints that they were clones, but in his weakened state, MacAvoy might have been more vulnerable.
I asked, “How is your troop readiness?”
He pulled a gallon jug from the refrigerator in his office and used it to refill the orange goop in the smaller pitcher. The other times I’d seen his flu fighter, it was always in a mug. This time he had it in a glass container. I saw the drink in all of its viscous, speckled, molasses-like glory. He brought the drink to his lips, paused to work up his courage, and guzzled.
“How much of that have you taken?” I asked.
“This is my third pitcher today,” he said.
On some level, he knew. MacAvoy had to have figured out that he was a clone. He had to have known it because he had caught a bug that only bit clones. But most likely, he’d only worked it out in his subconscious.
There was something glorious about MacAvoy—even when he was sick and pale and weak, he had a unique majesty. There was something primitive and raw and unafraid that made him great, even if the only reason he wasn’t afraid was because he was too stupid to be afraid. He was so convinced of his own invincibility that he never gave in to fear. He never hid his feelings. The man’s baldly straightforward approach to combat baffled his enemies. Maybe he’d been lucky all along, but I refused to believe that his luck had finally run out.
MacAvoy coughed and said, “Harris, I have enough healthy clones to bury the specking state of Maryland in synthetic DNA,” and grinned. I couldn’t help noticing that his drink had left an oily orange mustache across his upper lip. “I can have two full divisions of infantry and artillery ready to move on your command.”
“How about bullets?” I asked.
“We have plenty of bullets.”
“Shield busters?” I asked.
“Oh. Yeah. Those,” he said.
“Have you started making them?”
“We started; I’m not certain how many we have.” He raised his hand and coughed into it. He looked down, then wiped his hand clean with a cloth. Almost predictably, his makeshift handkerchief was a standard-issue silicone gun towel.
The poor stiff examined his hand to make sure he’d cleaned all the phlegm from it, then said, “Let me check.” Then he picked up an old-fashioned handset, and said, “Sergeant Dex . . . Yes, sergeant, put me through to the factory. Yes, at this hour. I don’t care if the plant is closed. Call him at his house.”
A moment passed, and someone took the call. MacAvoy said, “Yes, well, I don’t care what time it is. Listen here, have you started manufacturing the rounds I requested?”
“Yes, yes; I am aware of that.”
“We always knew it would be a slow process. How many do you have? A hundred thousand? A hundred thousand, that’s not very many.”
“Yeah. Yes, I understand that.”
“Hold on . . .” He hit a button to switch lines, and said, “Hey, Dex, you got any nukes over there? Yeah? Keep one handy; I may need it.”
Lowering the handset from his mouth, he said, “Civilian contractor.” That explained a lot. Had his soldiers been making those rounds, they would have been at it around the clock.
He and the factory owner exchanged a few pleasantries and MacAvoy lowered the handset. “I have a hundred thousand rounds. If the Unies have more than a hundred thousand men over there, we might have a problem.”
Naval Intelligence estimated that they had under twenty thousand troops.
MacAvoy grinned, and asked, “Want to crush the miserable specks?”
He frowned when I answered, “That’s not what I had in mind.”
“What’s the objective?”
“I want to find Sunny,” I said.
“Oh for speck’s sake, Harris! This isn’t about getting one last . . .”
“She’s high up in their dirty-work chain,” I said, trying to keep my cool. “Why do you think they chose her to infect us, you and me? Do you think she was walking around with that flu for weeks, or do you think she shot herself up with it before the convoy picked her up?
“She probably keeps it in test tubes. She might even have blueprints for brewing up more.”
“Can’t Tasman get that info from the encryption bandit?” asked MacAvoy.
“If it’s in there, it’s encrypted,” I said. “He hasn’t been able to access it.”
“Do you really think she’ll have anything?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I admitted, “but I’d rather be out there killing U.A. soldiers than sitting around here waiting to die.”
That sentiment resonated with MacAvoy. He said, “Harris, you don’t even know if she went back to the Central District. How do you plan on finding her, a door-to-door search?”
“I want to spread a net,” I said. “I’m going to go in alone and ask questions. I’ll shake the bushes while you and your men catch everything that comes out the other side.”
“You know, Harris, sooner or later, you’re going to get yourself killed.”
“Sooner,” I said. “I’m already dying.”
“That’s not what Tasman says; he says you’re the only one that isn’t going to die.”
“Sounds lonely,” I said. “I’d rather go with the herd.”
MacAvoy reminded me of the simple facts. He said, “You won’t have a death reflex.”
“What exactly do you think the Unified Authority will do once I’m alone? Do you think they’re going to let me go? They blame me for the rebellion, for the whole damn war. The ships, the men, the planets; hell, as far as they’re concerned, it’s probably my fault the aliens came back.”
“You could run,” said MacAvoy. “Harris, we’re all going to die. You don’t need to die with us.”
There it was again. He knew he would die. On some level, he knew he was a clone; other clones would have died by now. Something had changed him. Maybe he has a defective death gland, I thought, and I wondered if that was even possible.
“Get out while you still can. Find someplace to hide. Take a specking Explorer and hightail your ass to another specking planet.”
“Another planet?” I asked. “Are you joking? What other planet would you suggest? They’re all ash. The only one with people on it is Terraneau. For all we know, the only people there are the same ones killing us with the flu.
“Look, I’d rather die killing the men who killed me than lying in bed. How about it?”
“You’re joking, right? Is that a trick question? If I’m going, I’m taking as many of those specks with me as I can. I’m shoving grenades up my ass and farting out pins.”
I watched him carefully as he spoke. The color returned to his face. He didn’t cough or rub his nose.
“If I get shot tonight, how much time do you think it will shave off my life?” I asked. �
��A couple of days, maybe.” I answered my own question.
“You’re one day ahead of me, Perry. Tomorrow maybe I’ll look like you. The next day, I’m already laid up in bed, and the Unifieds find me. Then what? I’ll be a circus act. They’ll try me for war crimes; it’ll be a specking circus.”
MacAvoy acquiesced, then we brought Hauser and General Strait in on the discussion. The final plan was simple enough. At 19:00, I’d go behind enemy lines. The Unifieds didn’t have guard posts or barbed-wire fences. The same roads still ran through their side of town and ours.
As I entered from the west, MacAvoy would surround the insurgents on all sides. I’d make trouble, and if that didn’t work, my Marines would come in after me. Once the trouble began, MacAvoy’s soldiers would stop and search anyone trying to flee the scene. Strait’s fighters would target any jets that entered the atmosphere. Hauser’s carriers and destroyers would attack any ships that approached from outside the atmosphere.
Admittedly, we had a weak plan, but everyone acknowledged it as a plan nonetheless. Maybe something would come of it, a virus culture or a blueprint. Maybe I’d spot Sunny and put a bullet through her gorgeous head. Maybe MacAvoy’s soldiers would catch Andropov.
* * *
As the meeting ended, MacAvoy spoke to the other generals in a conspiratorial voice. He said, “You know, I checked my inventory, and I got a bunch of nukes sitting in my armory.”
Strait must have thought he was joking; he said, “Maybe we should light one up.”
MacAvoy said, “Did you boys know there are abandoned train tunnels under this building?”
“Train tunnels? What were the Unifieds doing with underground trains?” I asked. The capital had a train system, but it ran aboveground. As far as I knew, the trains in Washington, D.C., had always run aboveground.
“You’re thinking modern history, Harris. Who lived here before the Unies? We’re talking American-made.”
“American-made? Are they still down there?” asked Hauser.
“I went down for a look,” said MacAvoy.
“They can’t be safe?” said Strait.
“Hell, I’m not looking for a train ride; I want to turn the tunnels into specking missile silos and blow them up.
“If we’re all going to die from that specking flu that they gave us, we might as well go out with a big specking bang, right? Give those evil specks a going-away present.
“I say we run this like a specking church raffle; the last man breathing gets to push the button. That’s probably going to be you, Harris, which is a real kick in the nuts. You get to flame the Unies, the natural-borns, and the whole backstabbing lot.” MacAvoy grinned, laughed, coughed, drank more flu fighter, and grimaced at the bad taste it left in his mouth.
MacAvoy meant every word of it, but Strait still thought he was joking. He said, “General, maybe you should tie a bow around your devices and call them a going-away present.”
I knew MacAvoy well enough to recognize when he was serious. I asked, “How are you going to get them into the tunnels?”
MacAvoy was pale and sweaty, but he had a satisfied grin. Looking more like a lunatic than a man with the flu, he said, “Marine; there are tunnels crisscrossing the whole damn city. My boys have located doorways all over this damn town. Getting bombs into the tunnel isn’t the problem. Getting ’em in unseen might be a bitch.” He winked at me, and asked, “Anyone else want to leave Tobias a going-away present?”
“Who says we’re going away?” I asked.
MacAvoy laughed, and said, “Hoooooahhh, Marine!”
I stifled a cough of my own, and answered, “Hoooorrrrah!”
Strait rolled his eyes and glared at both of us.
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
Back when Ray Freeman was active in his profession, he was a ghost. When he wanted to talk, he found me. It seldom happened the other way around. I never knew where he lived or how he spent his free time. Hell, the entire Unified Authority couldn’t locate the man when he hid. Back in the day, the Unifieds once assigned their entire intelligence apparatus to locate him and came up dry.
We lived in an age of miracles, though. Freeman took my call after two tries. I coughed, and said, “Ray.”
He asked, “You sick?”
I said, “I’ve got the flu.”
Freeman took that information in with no response. Conversations with him often felt one-sided as he listened carefully, considered every shred of information, and seldom spoke. He never wasted energy on pleasantries. Ask him “How are you feeling?” and he would wait for your next question.
I said, “A lot of people have colds these days, pretty much every clone in the Empire.”
“Is the Unified Authority behind it?” he asked.
I sat in my office, comfortable at my desk, not entirely sure that the Unifieds hadn’t figured out some way to listen to my communications.
“This version of the flu ends with clones having a death reflex,” I said.
Stating that part of the story made me cringe. Tasman had found a list of people the Unified Authority considered primary targets to execute after the “Clone Apocalypse.” My name sat at the top of the list. Freeman’s appeared just below mine. Neither of us had death glands, but this flu would kill us indirectly; once the clone military complex was out of the way, the Unifieds would come after us. Despite its being every bit as much a death sentence for him as for me, Freeman took the news without flinching.
“How many clones have died so far?” he asked.
“Six.”
“Are you sure the Unified Authority is behind it?”
I sighed. “Ray, we captured some of their files. The decryption process is going slow, but the stuff we’re getting sounds bad.”
“How long before your epidemic turns critical?” he asked.
“There’s no way of knowing,” I said. “The first victims were on an Explorer we sent to survey Terraneau. She’d been gone six days when we found her. The clones had been dead approximately twenty-four hours. We don’t know when the Unifieds captured the ship or how long they waited before they infected the crew.”
Freeman went silent. He approached conversations the way chess players approach a match, considering all the angles and the implications. “What does the flight record say?”
“That they broadcasted into Terraneau space,” I said. “That’s it. It stops after that.”
“Death in five days, maybe less,” said Freeman. “It all depends how long it took them to catch that Explorer.”
“It’d be easy enough to capture an Explorer,” I said. “They’re slow. They don’t have armor or shields. They need an hour to recharge their broadcast generators.”
“Antique technology,” he said, agreeing with my assessment.
Explorers were tiny little bugs. You could fit twenty of them in the smallest docking bay on a fighter carrier. I said, “If the Unifieds control Terraneau, they might have spotted the anomaly when she broadcasted in.”
Freeman didn’t respond to my comment. Speculation didn’t interest him. He said, “Fire a pulse weapon near an Explorer, and you’ll shut her engines down and wreak havoc on the electrical system.”
Interesting scenario, I thought. Magellan broadcasts into Terraneau space. Broadcasts happen in a blinding bright flash of high-joule electricity that can be spotted from millions of miles away. I imagined Magellan emerging from an anomaly, unshielded, unarmed, and unable to broadcast to safety for an entire hour as her generator recharged.
I hadn’t memorized the speed charts and top acceleration of Explorers, but I knew they were slow. Unified Authority capital ships topped out at thirty-nine million miles per hour. The Explorer would have been a sitting duck. The Unifieds could have paralyzed her using a pulse torpedo. Her crew would have had no chance—six clones armed with M27s trying to hold up against a destroyer or a battleship; no doubt they’d surrendered.
“Those birds are made out of tissue paper and kite string,” I
said. “You’d have a hard time detonating an EMP near one without destroying it.”
Freeman said, “The point is that you have dead clones.”
“Yes, and we don’t have time to develop a vaccine. You do the math; clones are going to start dying tomorrow. We need to capture some high-ranking U.A. officers and see what information they’re holding.”
“Any officers in particular?” asked Freeman.
“Sunny Ferris,” I said.
I heard a noise in the background. Maybe Freeman was in a restaurant or on the street. He wasn’t alone. I heard a woman scream something and go silent. Freeman ignored it. “The girl you were dating?”
“The spy I was dating,” I said.
“She couldn’t have done it by herself,” said Freeman.
“No, not by herself,” I agreed.
“Do you have any other names? Any other targets?”
“No.”
“So you’re just going after her?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“You and the Enlisted Man’s Army are going after your former lover?”
That, of course, sounded worse than bad. He had misread me. I hoped he had misread me. I said, “Ray, I have their flu. As far as I can tell, every man under my command has been infected. It’s too late to stop it from spreading, and we already know the mortality rate; all of my men are going to die.
“It could happen tomorrow, maybe we have an extra day. By the end of the week, every clone in the empire is going to die.” I laughed without noticing. It wasn’t a nervous laugh or an insane cackle, but it still left me questioning my sanity. “We’ve lost the war, Ray. The fighting isn’t over, but we lost. What would you do?”
Again, he didn’t answer my question, and I knew why. If the situation were reversed, Ray Freeman, hit man and mercenary, wouldn’t go on a rampage of revenge. He wouldn’t try to take as many enemies with him as he could. I was a frontline Marine. I believed in my cause. For me, the fighting became personal. He was a killer for hire. In his mind, he was always the bad guy.
The Clone Apocalypse Page 11