Freeman had the ability to hide even the slightest hint of emotion. When I looked into his eyes, I saw no more soul than I might have seen in the eyes of a shark, but this time he exposed a hint of concern. He said, “Killing her won’t save your empire.”
“Neither will sitting around waiting to die,” I said.
“It won’t save your men.”
“Maybe they’ll go to their graves more easily.”
He said nothing.
“They made us, then they abandoned us, then they selected us for target practice. You say I’m doing this because I have a vendetta, and you’re right. Do you know why the Unified Authority created a clone army instead of an army of robots—simple economics. Even with food, housing, and education, clones are cheaper and more expendable than robots. They made us because it costs less to manufacture humans than machines.
“Yes, I’m mad, and I want to make them pay. I’m not going to scorch the earth I leave behind, but I want to burn the people who are taking it from me.”
Freeman allowed me to finish my rant, but he’d already made his decision. He said, “You’re on your own, Harris.”
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
The ocular dye turned my eyes green. I shaved my head and darkened my eyebrows to an absolute black that matched the color of the five-inch beard now hanging past my Adam’s apple. The intelligence officer who glued the beard to my jaw also used a bleaching agent to lighten my skin.
I wouldn’t look like a clone to the casual observer, but the eye color, beard, and whitened complexion wouldn’t have fooled a U.A. spy. My height, seven inches taller than the height of a standard-issue clone, offered additional camouflage. At least I hoped it would.
I wore a gun, but not an M27—which was too big and too obvious. Standard-issue firearms stood out, so I chose a Weinstein Industries semiautomatic, a lightweight, sixteen-shot street piece. People who shoot WI-16s don’t earn medals for marksmanship. It’s a gun for thugs—cheap, disposable, loud, and approximately as accurate as a paper airplane beyond twenty feet—but it had stopping power. Hit your target with a round from a WI-16, and your target would die.
My briefing officer took me to a shooting range so I could get the feel of my little WI-16. The first shot hit low of the heart. I raised the gun and the next shot hit two inches lower. Holding the gun perfectly still, I hit the target wide on either side. Firing a Weinstein Industries pistol, you develop an appreciation for chaos theory.
The briefing officer looked at my weapon disapprovingly, and said, “General, sir, is there a reason you’ve chosen that particular weapon?”
I held it up, tossed it from my right palm to my left and back again, and said, “I need a civilian model.”
“If you want a street gun, sir, I can find a Damon or an O’Donnel. They’re cheap, but they won’t explode in your face. That Weinstein’s more likely to kill you than your target.”
I twirled the gun in my hand, closed my fingers around the barrel, and said, “I can still hit people with it. A club is only as good as the man who is wielding it.”
The officer asked, “What are you driving, sir?”
I said, “I’m entering a war zone; I want to blend in. I’ve got an old Nader.”
“A Nader!” he said. “What are you trying to do, Harris, get yourself killed? Please . . . please, let me get you a decent gun and decent car.”
He had it all wrong. The gun and the car would offer me excellent protection because no one in their right mind would voluntarily choose such crap. Weinstein Industries guns had a nasty reputation for blowing up. Naders were cars that got great mileage, but they topped out at thirty miles per hour and broke down regularly. They were light and small, with tiny engines and recycled aluminum frames. Hit a duck in a Nader, and the duck stood a good chance of walking away from the accident.
No self-respecting Marine would enter enemy territory driving a Nader and packing a Weinstein. For this mission, they were perfect in their imperfection.
I needed to run this mission disconnected; any active communications devices could be detected. The Unifieds had equipment that detected both civilian and military-grade communications equipment when it went hot. If someone spotted me, it would take me longer to call for help, but that was a risk I would need to take.
Once I located a lab, or Sunny, or a computer with information about the flu, I would power up my radio and call in the cavalry. My job was to find the gold mine and protect it while MacAvoy and my Marines closed in around me.
When my briefing officer offered me a wire, I told him, “If I’m going feral, I better play the part.” “Feral” was the term we used to describe natural-borns who had been loyal to the Unified Authority, switched to law-abiding EME-ers, only to change loyalties again now that the U.A. had returned. They were like feral dogs, domesticated pets that had returned to the wild.
At this point, I no longer blamed them. They had, after all, returned to the winning side.
The intelligence officer said, “General, you’ve built your strategy around a flawed stereotype. They’re not all like that.” In all our jokes, ferals hoarded shitty street weapons like WI-16s, drove crappy cars like Naders, and spent their nights alone with their Ava Gardner movies.
What he didn’t know, and I wouldn’t tell him, was the identity of the man who provided the gun and the car. I didn’t know the guy’s name, but he’d been a feral. He died earlier that day. I left his body in a Dumpster.
I said, “If it comes to a fight, I can trade guns and cars with a bad guy. Until then, I’m staying in character.”
The officer gave me a hollow-sounding “Yes, sir.”
I looked in a mirror. The man staring back at me had a pale complexion, green eyes, a shaved head, and a black beard. He was too tall to be a clone. I inspected my face and clothes and nodded my satisfaction. Not even Sunny would recognize me at a glance.
The WI-16 was small enough to fit under my jacket without leaving a notable bulge. The right people would spot it. They’d see it and know I had come with a shitty gun, but they’d also expect me to come armed.
As my handler and a high-ranking member of the military intelligence community, my briefing officer knew about the flu and its ramifications. He asked, “Do you want to take a cough suppressant? That cough could give you away.”
He had a cough, by the way. His cough hadn’t graduated to bad or out of control yet, but his voice was scratchy. Thanks to his neural programming, he hadn’t yet equated his cough with being a clone.
Most commandos avoid alcohol before going on operations, but in my case, a little medicine wouldn’t affect my reflexes. I took the suppressant and thanked the officer, then I walked out to my crappy Nader and drove.
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
Sometimes you sense trouble coming before it arrives. As I crossed the Anacostia on the Capitol Street Bridge, I knew a storm was about to hit. I headed north and east once I crossed the river, working my way past business districts and apartment buildings until I reached Minnesota. There, I crossed an invisible border and entered the area MacAvoy now called the “Unified Central District.”
This wasn’t the same territory my Marines had invaded two days earlier. Two days ago. The thought struck me as absurd. Two days ago we he had the war won. Now I simply wanted to lose it with dignity.
Anyway, I came in from the south, which had evolved into a neutral zone. We controlled it, but we didn’t patrol it. We hadn’t penetrated as far east as Southern Avenue, which was the border between Washington, D.C., and Maryland. We’d stopped more than a mile shy of that landmark.
In theory, MacAvoy and his army were already in place. They wouldn’t come with tanks and artillery, not for this job. They traveled light, guns and checkpoints. They were the net.
The only artillery in this fight would come in from the air. MacAvoy had gunships ready.
My job was to slip into enemy territory, stir up trouble, and locate Sunny and her lab.
If the Unifieds smelled an invasion, they’d burn records and smash computers.
If we captured Sunny, maybe we could get some information out of her. If we captured spies, someone might talk. Capture computers or maybe even a lab, and we might rescue the empire.
Southern Avenue took me through residential areas, big houses and lots of malls and churches. We had forced the Unifieds into suburbia. I continued north into the trendy eastern wing of the city, where glass met brick and a new city evolved around the old. Night had fallen. The neon lights in this part of the city showed me it was an adult playground, studded with bars and dance clubs.
I left my car by the curb and strolled across a park with a few trees and bushes but mostly wide-open space. Four- and five-story apartment buildings surrounded the park. I saw the first people in a park just past the clubs. They congregated in the open space surrounded by a few trees, bushes, and past those, four- and five-story apartment buildings.
I left my car by the curb and strolled into the park.
Seeing balconies and roofs on which snipers might lurk, I thought about Freeman and wished he had come. His talents could tip the scales in an operation like this one.
A lot of adults, both men and women, congregated in the park, but not many children. At first I dismissed them as civilians.
Nobody paid attention to me as I crossed the park. Streetlights illuminated the area, but I stayed mostly near the edge of the halo cast by the streetlights. People looking at me would have seen me as a shape, as a shadow. They might have seen that I was bald and taken in my height, not much else.
I spotted a man with a gun. He was dressed like a civilian. He wore a wind jacket and casual slacks. He held an M27 with a rifle stock attached to it—not a civilian then. I wondered how many other soldiers were in the area. The Enlisted Man’s Empire only had men in its military, but then military clones only came in one gender. For all I knew, the all-natural-born Unified Authority military recruited men and women.
I could have shot him easily enough. He stood beside a wrought-iron fence, his weapon hanging muzzle down from his right hand. He loitered on the grass, staring up into the skyline, smoking a cigarette. He was young, maybe just twenty-five, and looked fit.
As I walked past him, he dropped his cigarette and stubbed it out with his toe. He turned to look at me but didn’t really see me; I was just part of the park.
I didn’t think all the people in the park could have been soldiers. Locals still lived in this area. When the fighting started, if it ever did, they would hide in their homes like rabbits hide in their holes. The Unifieds wouldn’t kick them out of town, they needed them for protection. If they evicted the innocent bystanders, we’d be free to drop bombs. The bombarding would never end.
I reached the far end of the park and saw my destination, the Lion and Compass, the pub that the U.A. brass had adopted as its new officers’ club. They hadn’t taken it over officially. Commandeering the bar would have turned it into a target, but the name featured prominently in messages we’d decoded.
I counted six soldiers near the entrance to the bar. They didn’t hide their affiliations; they wore BDUs and carried M27s. I knew these guards were for show; there’d be men soldiers dressed like civilians both inside and outside the bar. Not all of the pedestrians were what they seemed.
Other than the guards and some of the usual traffic, the street was quiet and dark. I stepped through the door and entered a loud, vivacious world, brightly lit and crowded.
One thing stood out immediately—the locals didn’t view the Unifieds as a conquering army. I saw waitresses and female civilians fraternizing with soldiers. Yes, there were armed men around the room, but the atmosphere was relaxed.
As I stepped through the door, a soldier said, “Hey, you. Yeah you, what’s with the gun?” He hadn’t noticed I was a synth; I could see it in the way he approached me. He saw me as a criminal, more of a rodent than a threat.
I said, “I just came from the war zone.”
“You’re still in a war zone. Where’d you come from?” he asked.
“Lower Central.”
“Damn, that’s practically Clonetown. What were you doing there?” he asked, his voice divulging a grudging respect.
“I live there,” I said.
“Your house is still standing?”
“It’s an apartment building. I live on 46th. The damage stops at 44th.” The addresses were factual even if I didn’t live around there; I’d been briefed. The street names said it all. People who lived in that part of town dealt with drugs, gangs, and all-clone patrols. That was the underbelly of the capital.
The soldier gave me a disdainful smile. He was a smoker who might not have shined a blue light laser on his teeth since the war began. His teeth had yellowed to the color of beer. He nodded once, and said, “Here’s a little advice. If you reach for that pistol, I will shoot you, he will shoot you, he will shoot you, and so will the guy over there.” As he said this, he pointed to soldiers in uniform. He might not have noticed the men in plain clothes, or he might have been holding them in reserve.
“The clones took over your neighborhood; no one blames you for that, but you’re not among friends. You get to keep the gun, but reach for it, and I’ll kill you before your finger touches the trigger.”
I wondered if I should thank him or just walk away. What would a thug do? I asked myself, and decided that street punks don’t put much stock in civility. I said, “Get specked, asshole.”
“I’ll be watching,” said the soldier.
I answered, “I heard you the first time,” and walked away.
The tables were taken. I ordered a beer at the bar and found an empty stool on which I could sit and drink it.
The soldier had followed me. I saluted him with my beer. He saluted me with his middle finger.
I stepped off my stool, walked over to the guy, and said, “I’ll buy you a beer.”
He said, “I don’t drink with criminals.”
I didn’t believe his principled stance. He was on duty. There were higher-ranking soldiers on the floor, officers who would notice men drinking on duty.
When I turned to walk back to my stool, I saw that someone else had already claimed it. For the best, I thought. Now I had an excuse to mill around and listen in on conversations.
I felt a tickle in the back of my throat that might have become a cough had I not taken that medicine. Thanking my lucky stars that I had taken the drug, I gulped down my beer and ordered another. With that soldier scrutinizing my every move, I pretended to look for someplace to sit.
I heard someone say “Sunny” and stopped.
Two men in civilian dress stood at the bar, men in their thirties. They didn’t look like soldiers. Both held drinks, not beers. I mostly looked away from them as I moved in close enough to listen in on them. One of them said something about summer doldrums and humidity, and I quickly realized they weren’t talking about the girl; they were talking about the weather.
I heard part of a conversation that might have meant something to me at some other time. There were five men, all clearly officers, not a one of them in uniform. Technically speaking, that made them spies. I was behind their lines, but they had invaded our empire.
A tall, gaunt man with a receding hairline and thin hair said, “. . . more than enough men to take back the east shore. Just because they caught us napping, that doesn’t mean they get to move in.”
“Be patient,” said a short, squat man.
Does he know about the flu? I wondered.
“Patient for what?” asked the first one.
“Right now they have all the tanks and gunships,” said the short one. “Once our fleet arrives, the scales will tip in our direction.”
“Specking clones,” said a third man.
I looked at them and sized them up for their ages and their swagger. They were older, in their forties, probably colonels. Colonels might run smaller bases and watch battles from the sidelines, but they a
ren’t in the know.
I saw a couple kissing. He had his hand on her breast; she had a hand hidden under the table.
That soldier was still following me, still smiling with his beer-colored teeth. Time was running out. Is it 21:00 or 22:00? I wondered. I berated myself for not having a better plan, but this was all I had to work with. The boys at Intel hadn’t been able to give me names or addresses.
“. . . think they figured it out yet?” a man asked his friend as they walked past me. There were three of them.
“That’s the point. They won’t know till the very end. Even then they won’t.”
I followed them.
“So what if they figure out that it only infects clones? They don’t think they’re clones, right? That’s the beauty of it. They figure it’s just going to affect all of their buddies.”
These guys gave off a vibe different from everyone else. They didn’t talk like soldiers or civilians. They dressed like civilians: slacks, cotton shirts, loafers. They had long hair by military standards; it touched their ears and collars.
They drank beer from bottles, not from mugs.
Two of them had guns in holsters. I couldn’t tell if the third one was armed. He might have been. I could have followed them all night, hoping they would lead me to their laboratory or headquarters. Instead, I decided to persuade them to run, then see where they ran to.
I pulled my useless little WI-16 from its holster and shot the soldier with the yellow teeth. He was five feet away, and I shot him in the face. I meant to hit him between the eyes, but the bullet shattered his forehead instead. So much for Weinsteins.
The back of his head burst open, people screamed and ran, and more shooting followed.
I ditched the Weinstein, tossed it over my shoulder and picked up the dead soldier’s M27. I dropped the rifle butt, which would have proved worse than useless in a close-quarters situation.
Somebody near the back of the bar started shooting. Somebody near the entrance started shooting as well. Strangely enough, they didn’t shoot at me. That soldier must have been bluffing when he said the other sentries were watching me. They had no clue whom they should shoot.
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