The glow of tiny individual fires lit the streets below. I saw fragments of buildings standing like the walls of fire pits, shielding bonfires from the wind. Long shadows of people moved along the streets—armed soldiers, Marines in combat armor, and traumatized civilians.
I felt alienated from the refugees; it was as if they were ants, and we had chased them from their hill. When did you become so callous? I asked myself. What had made me like this? Was it a life spent at war or maybe just the last round of fighting? Was it Sunny?
I thought about the man I had captured in the bar. When I opened the trunk of the car I had left him in, I found him lying in a coma. His foot had come off, but I felt no pity for him. Sure, I handed him and his foot to an Army medic, but I didn’t care if the son of a bitch lived or died.
Marines in Jackals patrolled the streets below me. Jackals had heat scanning, making them effective for locating and killing U.A. stragglers.
The gunship on which I rode was part of a trio. Fighters streaked back and forth on either side of us, protecting us from nonexistent enemy jets. Just outside the atmosphere, Hauser’s fleet had set up a blockade so tight that the Unified Authority Navy wouldn’t have been able to fire a cloaked missile through it.
We flew over the Memorial Bridge, the uncrossable bridge that separated the eastern suburbs from the rest of the capital. Below me, Army engineers searched for bombs and booby traps.
August 22, 2519, the day the war came to an end, I thought. Then I changed the statement into a question. Could August 22, 2519, be the day the war finally ended?
I hadn’t entered the gunship empty-handed; Sunny’s computer sat beside me. We had their computer . . . her computer. If she had the right information, we would no longer need to develop an antidote; we could skip development phase and start manufacturing. We’d simply read their research and bake it right up in our labs.
Peering into the cockpit, I saw a red LED display that showed the time—02:36—a new day had begun. No sunlight showed in the eastern horizon as our convoy reached the Linear Committee Building, but the parking lot and the building shone like a beacon.
The other gunships in the convoy hovered protectively above us as we lowered to the roof of the LCB. At first glance, the landing pad looked clean, but the chop from our blades kicked up a billowing cloud of dust below us. The WHOOP, WHOOP, WHOOP of the blades slowed and grew louder as we descended, while men in Army uniforms rushed out to meet us. The moment we touched down, three soldiers ran to our door. They were clones, all the same height and coloring. I inspected the first man closely as he entered the gunship, took hold of Sunny’s computer, then handed it to another clone to carry into the building.
I felt this excitement, nothing violent, but a constant current of electricity igniting every ganglion and nerve ending. We had beaten the odds. We were going to win this thing.
The medicine that the briefing officer gave me had run its course. At some point, I had started coughing. It began so subtly that I never noticed; the coughing might even have begun during the firefight. As I climbed down from the gunship, my cough turned productive, supposedly a good sign, and I spat a filmy wad of yellow phlegm.
Not very presidential, I said to myself. I was a Marine long before I became a politician. Once we ducked this crisis, I would step down once and for all. I might even hand over my commission. I’d been a lot happier as an enlisted man.
The glare from the lights shining around the outside of the LCB left me squinting. I smelled the sharp scent of gunship fuel in the warm August air, heard the chop of the rotors as her engines powered up, then the wind battered my back as the blades rotated faster. The air flushed around her as the gunship pushed off from the pad.
Entering the building, I found myself in a different world. Bright lights shone down from the ceiling of the LCB, illuminating an empty building. The roof entrance led into a hall that led to a foyer. This was a subfloor of the building, a nearly vacant area reserved for people who came in on helicopters.
The men carrying the computers walked about thirty feet ahead of me.
More people appeared as we reached the foyer. The elevator opened; two Marines and a soldier stepped out. The Marines were my aides; I recognized them though I didn’t know their names.
All ants look alike, I mused. I wondered if ants learned to distinguish one colony mate from the next. I wasn’t an entomologist, but it seemed like ants probably could tell each other apart. I could tell supposedly identical clones apart.
I was in that kind of a mood, happy, letting my mind wander.
“Welcome back, sir,” said Colonel Whose-it, my highest-ranking attaché. He saluted. So did the master sergeant beside him. I returned their salutes.
“What was it like out there, sir?” asked the sergeant major.
“This was the big one, the route you wait your entire career to see,” I said. We hadn’t lost a tank. We killed or captured over ten thousand Unified Authority combatants and lost less than five hundred men.
The soldier waited his turn at attention. He said, “General Harris, sir, Mr. Tasman and General MacAvoy are waiting for you on the third floor.”
We entered the elevator. The elevator doors closed on the bright and empty subfloor and opened to the bright and empty third floor. I had expected swarms of soldiers, maybe even an entire division of intelligence officers and computer technicians.
Maybe we don’t need them, I thought.
The men I saw were the walking wounded, pale and bloodless, their backs curved, their shoulders hunched. I heard coughing, saw men with red, swollen eyes. Is this an office or a hospital, I thought, but I didn’t say it.
We’ll get these men fixed up, I told myself. We’ll fix them up rapid, quick, and pronto. I stepped into the conference room, and the door closed behind me.
Wheelchair-bound Howard Tasman was a ninety-year-old waif of a man; he’d have turned ninety-one in another three months had things worked out differently. The man had lost his entire family, children, grandchildren, and all. He’d lived to see the entire population of his home planet massacred. Veins and arteries showed through the thin, colorless skin of his face, but he looked like he could kick Perry MacAvoy’s ass if it came to a fistfight.
MacAvoy sat slumped in a chair, sweating, pale, on the verge of dying. His short hair was wet and clumped as if he’d just climbed out of a shower. On the table beside him sat an enormous pitcher of flu fighter. He looked up at me, his eyes dark and watery, and said, “We’ve lost over nine hundred men so far.”
Nine hundred? His numbers were wrong. I’d heard it was less than five hundred. “Are you sure about that?” I asked.
He said, “Five hundred in the last hour.”
The last hour? The fighting ended over an hour ago. “Not possible,” I said. “It’s just cleanup now. We routed them.”
“Harris, 70 percent of my men are incapacitated,” said MacAvoy. “The majority of my men are too sick to stand, and they’re starting to die. The first confirmed casualty turned up this afternoon at 16:00.”
I digested the news, and my head went numb.
“They died just like those clones Hauser found in space,” MacAvoy said. He coughed, licked his lips, and prepared to drink more of his concoction. He clearly hated the damn stuff. He stared at the sludge in his cup, paused to work up his courage, and took a sip. He frowned as he lowered the cup.
“We have Sunny’s computer,” I said. “We’ll make an antidote.” I coughed, too. My strength started to fail. My legs turned weak as I walked to a chair.
Tasman finally spoke. He said, “Harris, this isn’t a poison, it’s a flu. It’s an engineered virus. There is no antidote.
“I could have told you that from the start. It’s basic biology. You can prevent contamination by inoculating patients with a weak strain to build their immunity, but once they have the virus, there is no way to cure it.
“You might as well send out medical kits with gallons of MacAvoy’s drink.”
MacAvoy coughed, then took a deep breath to fill his lungs. “I received a message from Tom. He says he’s scattering the fleet.”
Tom—Hauser—was scattering the fleet. That was bad news. That meant his sailors were dying and that there’d be no one to protect Earth from an invasion. He was scattering his fleet to stop the Unifieds from taking them over. Spread across the solar system, our ships would be harder to locate than inert and in a group.
“What about the computer?” I asked.
“Sunny probably wanted you to have it,” said Tasman. “She probably wanted to show you once and for all that your goose was cooked.”
“Specking bitch,” said MacAvoy. His voice was hoarse, downright raw. He might have had the same DNA as every other clone, but he’d always been an intense physical specimen. Even now, his five-foot-ten frame looked massive, like a warship listing and about to sink. He had his cigar, the totem he generally carried into battle.
He generally didn’t light his cigars during summits and meetings, but he’d fire them up one right after the other during battle. He had his cigar lit now.
“You didn’t happen to shoot that bitch, did you?” he asked.
“I saw her.”
“Did you kill her?” He brightened as he asked that question.
I shook my head. “She got away.”
“Damn, she’s going to outlive us,” he said.
“What are you going to do?” Tasman asked me.
“I know what they’d do if we had them by the shorts,” said MacAvoy. “They’d blow us up, the specks. To hell with the planet; to hell with the people; if they can’t get it, to speck with all of it. Blow it all to hell, people and all, that’s what they’d specking do.”
“We’re not going to do that,” I said.
MacAvoy removed his cigar and looked at the ember. He said, “You’ll be the last man standing, Harris. You get to choose.”
Even as I spoke, I could feel the chill spreading through my body like a fog, and along with that fog came aches and stiffness. I felt like my body had aged thirty years since I entered the conference room.
I said, “I’m not scorching the earth.”
“That’s your call,” MacAvoy muttered.
An aide entered the room, a soldier, an Army lieutenant. He looked no more healthy than MacAvoy. He stood at attention, an anemic attention. He only managed to keep his back ramrod straight for a second, then his spine curled, and his shoulders slumped.
“What do you have, Soldier?” MacAvoy growled.
“The latest casualty report, sir.”
“Let’s hear it?”
“Lewis, Irwin, and Carson are closed, per your orders.”
I recognized the names—they were our largest Army installations in the West.
“What is our readiness level?” asked MacAvoy.
“Fifteen percent, sir,” said the soldier.
“How many dead at last count?”
The soldier paused, using the moment of silence to brace himself. He said, “We’ve lost ten thousand, sir. We’ve lost sixty in this building alone.”
What about my Marines? I asked myself. It was an urgent question, but I didn’t want to hear the answer.
Tasman repeated his question to me, then he answered it as well. “What are you going to do, Harris? You better find a good place to hide.”
MacAvoy looked at me with his red-rimmed, bag-lined, bloodshot eyes, and said something that should not have been able to pass through his lips. He said, “You better run, Harris. This thing isn’t going to kill you like the rest of us.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY
Is that part of the flu? I wondered. MacAvoy had all but identified himself as a clone. He’d said, “This isn’t going to kill you like the rest of us.” He’d included himself in the equation.
I wasn’t about to push it. I asked, “What about you?”
MacAvoy took a long drink of flu fighter, frowned, and said, “I’m riding the storm right here.”
Tasman said, “General Harris, you’re wasting time you don’t have. You need to get out of here.”
I thought about the day the Unifieds reprogrammed the clones in the Pentagon. Watson had taken Tasman with him. He’d thrown the old cadaver over his shoulder and carried him into the garage. Was that what Tasman wanted now? Did he want me to take him with me?
MacAvoy asked, “Harris, what are you waiting for?”
I said, “I’m going to stay here with you and fight.”
MacAvoy laughed at me. He said, “You’re such an ass. I’m not going down in a blaze, Harris; I’m staying to spike the cannons.”
In ancient warfare, back when cannons fired metal balls instead of lasers and particle beams, soldiers used to drive metal spikes through their cannons before abandoning forts and castles to prevent their enemies from using them.
That was what Hauser had planned for his fleet as well. He would park his ships in every corner of the solar system, maybe even destroy their engines and computers. He and his men would park their ships in the shadows of Mercury and Pluto, and retire to their racks as they died.
“You going to blow up your bases?” I asked.
MacAvoy shook his head. He said, “I’m going to leave the bases and the corpses for Andropov, let him decide what to do with them.” He coughed and wiped his nose across his arm, then held up his pitcher of flu fighter, and added, “I got enough of this shit to last me a lifetime, at least my lifetime. I think I’ll wait here for Tobias to arrive.”
“You going to kill him?” I asked.
With some effort, MacAvoy lifted a general-issue M27. He said, “That’s the plan.”
Tasman said, “That’s stupid.”
Howard Tasman was an irritant, a dried-up old husk of a man who was unpleasant to his desiccated core, but his decision to help the clones had landed him in the same boat as the rest of us. Like me, he’d survive the flu, but when the Unifieds found him, they’d execute him.
I said, “I think my Marines are doing better than your soldiers. We had more than enough healthy Marines for the action tonight.”
I reached for a nearby communications console and contacted my offices. When my chief aide picked up, I told him to check our bases for casualties. Unlike MacAvoy who’d been keeping a running tally of his casualties, I hadn’t been paying attention to sick rates. My aide spent another fifteen minutes tracking down the information. When he called back, he told me that we’d lost over a thousand men. He said that most of our losses were in our West Coast bases. The bases to the east reported equally high rates of influenza but only a few men had died so far.
Apparently, the virus struck first in the West and was working its way east.
MacAvoy sat lifeless in his chair, his back so relaxed it looked like his spine had melted. He dropped the stub of his chewed, gummed, and smoked cigar into a trash can. It clunked on the bottom, and a couple of sparks floated up. Lighting a new cigar he said, “They can have my bases for all I specking care. Maybe Andropov will bury my men with honors. Lord knows they pulled his ass out of the fryer enough times.”
He brought up his cigar, clenched it in his jaws, and smiled around it. He coughed. He said, “I might forgive him if he buries my men.” He laughed and added, “I might even let him have this building.”
“And if he doesn’t? Are you going to blow it up?” I asked.
“Blow it up? Are you crazy?” MacAvoy placed both of his arms on the table for support, but his neck still sagged. “I want to debrief the bastard. He won’t come if I leave the place in a specking pile.”
I looked over at Tasman, and asked, “What about you?”
He said, “Don’t you worry about me, Harris; I have it all worked out.” Then he smiled, and added, “You know where you need to go. You need to get yourself to Freeman.”
Freeman wouldn’t help me, not now. He had his own survival to work out. I said, “Maybe I’ll stay here. I can help MacAvoy kill our pal Andropov.”
I didn’t expect Tasman to respond the way he did. He said, “You’re as sick as MacAvoy. You’re every bit as infected as he is. Did you know that?”
“He doesn’t look like he’s dying,” said MacAvoy.
Tasman rolled his wheelchair right up to my seat, leaned so that our faces nearly touched, and stared me right in the eye. He said, “Harris, your pupils are almost as wide as your irises. They looked that way yesterday. You’re breathing hard.” He wrapped one of his withered old claws around my right wrist, and said, “You’re pulse is up. I’ll wager it has been for days.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, trying to hide my irritation. We had just won the war, and this tired old goat wanted to talk about my pulse and my eye dilation.
He said, “Those are all signs of an adrenal rush. You have a heavy flow of adrenaline running through your blood.”
“I just came back from a war zone,” I said. “I had a bit of a combat reflex.”
“Yes, you did,” said Tasman. “I helped program that reflex; I know a little about it. You’re still having a combat reflex. You’ve never stopped having a reflex. The only reason you’ve got enough energy to stand is because you have so much combat hormone in your blood.”
“There are a lot of clones still on their feet,” I said, thinking about the soldiers and Marines who had invaded the eastern suburbs.
“The virus is going to run its course,” said Tasman. “It’s going to get stronger and stronger. In another hour, maybe another day, the hormone isn’t going to matter anymore. You need to be someplace safe when that happens. The reflex isn’t protecting you from the flu, it’s hiding it from you.”
Tasman looked me in the eye, and said, “If you don’t find Freeman, you’re as good as dead. That flu might not kill you, but the Unifieds will. Once you are sick, and your army is dead, killing you will be Andropov’s first order of business.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
I hated the idea of running to Ray Freeman. I’d gone to him twice; he’d turned me down both times. Maybe he was smarter than me; maybe he’d recognized the writing on the wall before I even knew it was there. I tried to call him on my way down to the motor pool. Nobody answered.
The Clone Apocalypse Page 15