“Is Sunny in one of these apartment buildings?” I asked.
“Allison,” he mumbled.
We’d driven east, away from the bar and the trouble I’d stirred up. We traveled so far east that we might have left the Unified Central District behind. This could have been the free zone, maybe even EME territory.
“Is this Coral Hills?” I asked.
“What?”
“What part of town is this?” I asked. I hadn’t ever been to Coral Hills; I just knew of its existence. I said, “Are we in Coral Hills? It’s a suburb.” Travis Watson was hiding there when he contacted us, and Sunny found the convoy we sent to extract him. The pieces of the puzzle fit together.
I didn’t need to ask which building was Sunny’s. Up the street, one building glowed more brightly than the others. High-intensity discharge lamps shone down on the street from the roof. Bright, steady light glowed in the windows. The rest of the street looked like it had been removed from the power grid; this building appeared to have its own generator.
Now I had a job ahead of me, and the last thing I needed was an errant hostage. Part of my brain said to kill the bastard. That was the bloodthirsty wing of my brain, the haunted wing in which my ghosts and demons lived. It was also the part of my brain that gave me the best advice.
I said, “I’m not sure what to do with you.”
He didn’t answer.
“Killing you would be the smart move.”
“Please . . .” He whispered the word.
I said, “I could lock you in the trunk.”
“What if they kill you?” he asked.
“Good point,” I said. “You better hope I survive.”
If he made a lot of noise, started beating on the lid and screaming, he’d attract attention. Some good Samaritan would inevitably let him out. Those damn Samaritans bite you in the ass every time, I thought. I could tie his hands, but I didn’t need to. He’d lost a lot of blood and wouldn’t last long. Hell, he could barely keep his eyes open, let alone scream for help. He’d die before I got back, speeding the process would have been humane.
We drove five blocks north, deeper into the darkness. There were houses around us, maybe people watching. I turned off my headlights and coasted on, driving as silently as my stolen sedan was able, until I reached a sheltered spot. I said, “I can hit you or I can shoot you,” and then I slammed the butt of the M27 across his head to knock him out.
Killing him would have been kinder.
Kindness. I’d killed this man’s friends, shot off his foot, tortured him, kidnapped him, and now I had knocked him unconscious. He would have killed me, I reminded myself. He’d even tried. He worked for Sunny. How many people had she murdered?
I stepped around the car and pulled out my limp and barely breathing hostage. I picked him up, loaded him into the trunk, then I drove back onto the main road, around that building, and parked a few blocks away. If any of the locals saw me stash the guy in the trunk of my car, they’d try to rescue him.
This is the part of town where Travis and Emily hid, I thought as I drove. They must have been somewhere nearby. Could Rhodes have been visiting Sunny when they caught him? Was she looking for Rhodes when she spotted the convoy?
I found a quiet block and pulled up to the curb. Somebody entered a doorway and watched me. Maybe he had mistaken me for a burglar. He showed me his knife. I showed him my gun. He stepped back into his building and closed the door.
August in Maryland, the night was humid and the buzz of the cicadas nearly drowned my thoughts. Languid air, so thick you could feel it, coated the street. The cloudy sky filtered beams of moonlight as they shone down on buildings. The alleyways were dark with shadows.
I’d entered a bad part of town. Crates and boxes and junked bikes littered the lanes. Broken glass sparkled in the gutters along the street. Up ahead, Sunny’s building glowed like a star, bright white floodlights shining down its dingy walls.
I saw movement.
Silhouettes surfaced and disappeared from the windows. I watched long enough to see a man with a rifle peering down from the roof. He’d go first.
I reached into my pocket and pulled the little signal disc my briefing officer had given me. When I hit that button, I would send a signal to MacAvoy. It would give him my location. My Marines would pour in from the west, and MacAvoy’s soldiers would flood in from the east. They would close in on my position. I would only need to secure the building until they arrived, and they would do the rest.
I decided to wait a little longer before sending for MacAvoy.
Sticking to the alleys and watching the skyline, I trotted toward a three-story building that sat kitty-corner to Sunny’s. Two days earlier, I had learned that you can’t reach the roofs of these buildings using their stairs, so I found my way to the rear of the building and climbed to the roof using a creaking, groaning fire-escape ladder.
Sounds carry across quiet streets at night, but nobody paid attention to me. Maybe the languid air muffled the creaking. Maybe these people were used to creaking ladders. When I reached the roof, I huddled beside a ledge and waited. If the sniper on the other roof heard me, he’d be on alert. He’d investigate, but hopefully, seeing nothing, he’d lose interest.
In the game of sniping, the prize always goes to players who are patient and alert. I let one minute pass, then another before I crawled toward the ledge that overlooked Sunny’s building.
The M27 was a versatile weapon, built for use as both a pistol and a rifle. It had a short barrel, too short for serious sniping. Short barrel be damned, the M27 was accurate to five hundred yards. If I missed this shot, it would say more about me than my weapon.
All the lights on the roof shone down from its edges. To spot my target, I’d need to look past the glare and into the darkness—good cover. I sat behind a ledge, and I waited.
Just when I started to suspect that I had imagined the sniper, the man emerged, dressed in black and carrying a darkened weapon. I spotted his movement first, something I sensed more than saw. When he crept by a skylight, I finally got a fix on him for a moment, but he vanished back into the shadows before I could shoot.
I selected one of the skylights, aimed my M27 in the air above it, and waited for the sniper to step into my bead. Seconds passed. A minute. Something moved near the far ledge of the building, but I ignored it. If I chased phantoms in those shadows, I might lose a real shot.
A few drops of rain fell, just a meaningless sprinkle. They dried as soon as they landed. A moment later, the rain stopped.
A shape appeared above the skylight. I squeezed the trigger, a single shot that sounded like a misfiring engine or possibly a car crash. M27s are not particularly loud, and its echo vanished into the night. No one came to see what happened. Maybe they’d seen the rain and mistaken my shot for thunder.
As I climbed down from the roof, people peered at me through a couple of windows, civilians of all ages and sizes. I stared right back at them. Some of them hid; others pretended to look at their own reflections.
One way or another, the battle would hinge on the next three minutes. I reached into my pocket and signaled my troops, then I sprinted toward the building.
Two men came out of the alley to meet me. They had guns, but they hadn’t yet raised them, and I shot them before they identified me. I peered down the alley to make sure they didn’t have friends waiting in the shadows. The alley was empty, a long, tight squeeze between two buildings. Most of the windows were dark, but a few were lit. Toward the back of the alley, both buildings had networks of fire escapes. The buildings sat so close to each other that their balconies and ladders looked laced together.
Having eliminated the guards, I leaped the stairs at the front of the building two at a time. The front door was glass; I could see into a hall that led straight through the building. I saw a staircase and mail slots and men rushing through doorways. They fired at me.
The front door splintered; its glass panels shattered into shards and
needles. I saw men emerging from distant buildings, aimed my M27 at the lights along the roof, and returned the street to its native darkness.
Gunfire slashed at walls on the other side of the street. I couldn’t tell if they were firing at me or at some phantom they’d imagined. A gunman barreled out of a nearby building and fired in my direction; his bullets hit nowhere near me. I sprang from my hiding place, looked through a window, saw men approaching the shattered door they’d shot out, and waited in the shadows. One of the men stepped out to the street. I held my fire until two more came to join him.
The Unifieds returned fire. They weren’t shooting to kill me, they only wanted to keep me pinned in the alley. They must have sent people around the building to trap me, but by the time their friends arrived, I had slipped through a gap in a fence.
Only a few seconds passed before one of them found my escape path and followed, but I was gone. They had to move slowly and methodically in case I had set up an ambush; I didn’t worry about those clumsy specks ambushing me.
The tenement next to Sunny’s was a dilapidated two-story with faux-marble stairs and rugs so threadbare they might as well have been burlap. As I entered the building, a man in combat armor came running into the hall. If he’d looked in my direction, I would have shot him. He didn’t. He entered the door across the way without a second glance as I walked up the stairs.
More Marines streamed down the stairs. I froze. These were Unified Authority Marines, shielded combat armor and all. One of them grabbed me by my collar, and said, “Suit up. Some dumb speck attacked the nest.”
I nodded and continued up the stairs.
There must have been a couple hundred men living in the building, and from what I could tell, every last one of them was a U.A. Marine. I wondered what would happen if one of them recognized me, but the shaved head and the fake beard did their jobs.
So did MacAvoy’s soldiers. I heard gunfire and ran to a window in time to see personnel carriers and Schwarzkopfs round a corner. The trucks were armor-plated and immune to fléchettes.
Soldiers poured out of the backs of the trucks like paratroopers jumping from planes. Seeing the soldiers, the Marines lit up their armor. Unlike the U.A. Marines in their armor, MacAvoy’s men wore sturdy BDUs and carried M27s, which should have been useless against shielded armor, but these boys carried MacAvoy’s special rounds.
The fléchette cannons fired hair-width fragments of depleted uranium coated with neurotoxins. The ammunition was deadly, but light and inaccurate beyond fifty feet. A good marksman with an M27, on the other hand, could hit targets from a few hundred yards. From what I could see, none of the soldiers on that transport would have qualified for a Marine Corps marksmanship ribbon, but their aim was close enough for paintball.
MacAvoy said he only had a hundred thousand armor-busting rounds, but these boys shot like they had an endless supply. They had their M27s on autofire at walls, windows, and shielded Marines alike.
I didn’t waste time watching. Now that the firefight had turned hot, we ran the very real risk that the Unifieds would torch their computers before we got to them.
I sprinted up the stairs to the second floor and entered a hall. The apartments to my right faced Sunny’s building. I kicked out the first door. Her building was so close, no more than ten feet away. Looking through the windows, I saw people running, some with guns and some without.
I ran back out to the hall, spotted a couple of U.A. Marines, and stepped out of their way as they jogged to the stairs. Maybe I should have shot them in the back, but MacAvoy’s men would massacre them soon enough.
I ran to the last door on the right, kicked it in, and saw what must have been the only two civilians who lived in the building. They sat on the floor in the corner of their apartment, two middle-aged women, huddled and crying. They saw me and screamed. My combat reflex told me to shoot them. It warned me that enemy soldiers would hear them wailing. I ignored my reflex, and they stopped screaming though they continued to hug each other and sob.
I opened the window and stepped onto the fire escape. Below me, the fighting continued on the street. By this time, some of the shielding on the Marines’ armor had failed and a trickle of men in darkened armor fled into the alley for safety. Had they spotted me, they still could have shot at me. Even with their shields out, their fléchette cannons would work perfectly well.
Frankly, MacAvoy’s boys scared me more than the Unifieds. The occasional bullet skidded across the buildings, scraping bricks and shattering windows. If I made it through this battle, and the Empire survived the next few weeks, I would have a word with MacAvoy about his soldiers’ marksmanship.
I would need to leap somewhere between ten and fifteen feet to land on Sunny’s building, then I’d need to climb down the fire escape. It was a bit of a jump. I hoped I landed quietly. I didn’t want to attract unfriendly attention.
I climbed up to the roof, took a few steps from the ledge, and jumped. In my adrenaline-fired haste, I sprinted and leaped. I jumped far enough, but not high enough. My feet hit the wall and I landed on my gut.
I threw my legs over the edge and pulled myself to my feet, then climbed down the fire escape to a window near the second-story landing. Somebody spotted me from inside the building as I opened the window. She fired a single shot at me, her bullet punching a neat hole through the glass. I returned fire.
Sunny, dressed casually in slacks and a pullover, disappeared as my bullet shattered the window. I jumped through the empty casing, slid on the shard-covered floor, and ran after her.
I entered the hall no more than two seconds behind her, well in time to see her sprinting down the stairs. I raised my gun. I needed her alive, but saw nothing wrong with shooting her shoulders or arms, then somebody grabbed me from behind and I flipped the bastard over my shoulder and shot him in the head. The blast was exquisite. I had taken this gun from a Unified Authority sentry who’d loaded it with dumdums or possibly hollow-point rounds. The bullet obliterated the man’s skull, splashing blood on the floor, walls, and even a portion of the ceiling.
Two more guys came running up the stairs. I shot one before he could aim and hit the other after he’d wasted a shot, then I vaulted over their bodies and dropped onto the last step, skidding forward and hitting my face against the wall. For the first time that evening, I bled. If I’d been thinking about it, I would have wondered why it had taken so long.
My thoughts narrowed, winnowing out everything but my objective, which had now split in two. I wanted to kill Sunny. I wanted to shoot her, to strangle her, to watch her die in my hands. I needed to find the lab, the computers, the files, anything, anything, anything that stored information about . . . I couldn’t force any more details. Killing Sunny seemed more important. She’d shot at me. She’d tortured me. She’d humiliated me. And somewhere, a quiet voice in my head whispered, She murdered you.
Murdered me? Flu. The flu. Need the lab! Need the files! Save the Enlisted Man’s Empire! Clones are going to die tomorrow! My thought fell into line like tumblers in a lock. I heard gunfire, saw EME soldiers entering the front of the buildings, and I stopped. I signaled them to make sure they saw me and recognized me. They would have been briefed. No one fired at me.
Sunny had been in that room when I arrived, I reminded myself. I ran back up the stairs and entered the room. She was right here, right outside this door, I reminded myself. I saw nothing significant.
I kicked in the door to the next room and spotted cots and clothing. There were three racks, cases for combat armor, uranium wafers for fléchette cannons.
Same in the next room. The room after that had maps on the walls and computers on the desk. I found a photo—me on a gurney with a tube in my nose. In the picture, my face showed pain.
I saw the desk and the computers and the communications consoles and knew I had found Sunny Ferris’s “nest,” and my pulse quickened. I darted into the room, frantic, spun, looked for wires, receivers, mines, or bombs. Sunny wouldn’t
turn her nest over willingly. I checked the lights, the back of the equipment, the desk, both top and bottom, and chair. In my imagination, I saw her laughing and pressing a button, a diode would switch from white to red, and the apartment would explode, maybe the entire building.
I threw the mattresses off the bed. I pulled the pillows apart. Seconds passed, they felt like hours, then I realized, if Sunny were able to destroy the computers, she would have done it by now. I turned and looked at them, and inspected them for damage, but they were fine, unscratched, undented, two of the monitors glowed, words and charts displayed, and I laughed.
Somehow, we had finally caught a break. She’d thought I’d be dead, just like that guy had said. I’d caught her off guard.
An Army major stepped into the room, and said, “General Harris, sir, I have General MacAvoy on the phone.”
I said, “Tell him to meet me at the LCB. Tell him, we have our prize.”
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
Date: August 22, 2519
From the air, the silhouette of the eastern suburbs against the dark sky looked like an ancient ruin. Most of the buildings still stood, but entire blocks had been crushed into archways and rubble. MacAvoy’s army had begun its assault using M27s with magic bullets before switching to heavy artillery; my Marines had smashed their way in with a bombardment, then chased down the enemy with jeeps and rockets. Strait had sent in fighters as well.
I hated that we had been forced to rely on a hammerblow, but the Unified Authority had indeed forced our hand. Looking at the ruins beneath my helicopter gunship, I tried to estimate how many civilians might have been caught in the fighting. The answer could have been in the millions.
I heard something that should have sounded a mental alarm—my pilot coughed into his headset. He coughed long and hard, practically spat a lung out.
Staring down through the door, I slowly withdrew from an hourlong combat reflex. The hormone in my blood thinned to the point that I regretted the civilian casualties, but I still blamed the Unifieds for every death.
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