The Unifieds kept a lid on MacAvoy while they secured the building. He was still on the floor, lying in a puddle of flu fighter and blood, when Tobias Andropov stepped out of the stairwell. The two of them had a short conversation, then Andropov’s soldiers lifted MacAvoy up to his feet.
He tried to stand, but he had no strength in his legs, so they placed him back in his wheelchair. They pushed the chair beside a wall.
He’d been a clone. As far as they were concerned, that made him less than human. The Unified Authority didn’t hold war trials for tanks or jeeps or clones. Only humans had a right to a fair trial, and synthetic humans didn’t fit the minimum qualifications.
Lieutenant General Pernell MacAvoy stared into the firing squad as the men aimed the weapons. His smile faded, but he never blinked. The soldiers fired their weapons, and he toppled out of the wheelchair. His jaw must have clenched during that final moment; the cigar remained in place long after his death.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
Despite the battle, the holes in the parking lot and the destruction of the elevators, MacAvoy apparently left the Linear Committee Building fit for occupancy. The only thing anyone told me about MacAvoy’s last stand during my flight to the capital was that he died sitting on his ass. The way they told the story, I imagined him shitting in a latrine with a cigar in his mouth.
I managed to hold on to Pugh’s gift. After Conlon dropped it in my lap, I’d spread my thighs wide enough to pinch my legs around it.
It wouldn’t have mattered if the thermal pack held a grenade, a bomb, or a gun, I wouldn’t have been able to use it during the flight; my guard detail never released my hands. It would have been such poetic justice if the pack had held a grenade, and I had been able to pull the pin—a midair explosion, me taking fifty Unified Authority soldiers and a pilot with me.
Later, after watching the feed of Perry MacAvoy’s meteoric swan song, I decided that destroying a mere transport would have paled in comparison.
No one spoke to me as we flew north and east. I sat alone in the dark, my hands cuffed to the armrests, my legs, and chest and neck all strapped in place. The slip around my neck forced me to sit unnaturally straight, causing a crick in my back and neck that damn near drove me crazy. Then there was the needle in my arm. I didn’t know what drugs and solutions Pugh’s doctors had dripping into my arms, but they ran out halfway to Washington and my aches and pains took on new definition.
I sat there with that empty needle jabbed in my arm, unable to scratch the myriad of psychosomatic itches that formed on my face and neck and back. In truth, I felt lower than I could ever remember. I was sick, but those specking straps kept me sitting at attention for the full three hours.
Transports have a maximum atmospheric speed of two thousand miles per hour. That old Meadowlark I’d stolen flew so slowly that I expected her to drop out of the sky. Flying to Mazatlan in the Meadowlark had taken ten hours, but I had slept through most of it.
I sat facing the ramp and the shadows, so thirsty I thought my throat might tear every time I swallowed. We reached Carmack Gateway and the transport lowered onto a runway. My short flight from Unified Authority justice ended on the same runway that it began, but I had returned weaker and strapped to a wheelchair.
More than anything else, I wanted to drink the gel out of my thermal pack and end everything. Had there been a grenade, I’d gladly have pulled the pin. There’d been a time when my Liberator programming wouldn’t allow me to commit suicide, but Sunny had erased that part of my programming during her experiments. Now I would not only have the ability to pull the pin, I genuinely longed for the opportunity.
The MacAvoy of my delirium was right about me. Placed in my position, any respectable Marine would have dreamed about wreaking a little ungodly revenge. Me, I just wanted to die. If I remembered correctly, he had called me “pathetic.” Good call.
The doors at the rear of the kettle slowly ground open, revealing Carmack Gateway Spaceport, an open runway, terminals lined by planes, and a vast sea of spectators. It was almost like the long-awaited return of a messianic figure. Hundreds of men in military uniforms surrounded a meter-high dais. Behind them stood a swarm of suit-wearing politicians, both men and women. I also spotted reporters, hundreds of them, pushing to get to the front of the crowd. Mostly, I saw civilians, the natural-born citizens of the Unified Authority, all come to see the galaxy’s most notorious terrorist delivered to justice. I was the man of the hour.
Freeman must know about this, I thought. He was the deadliest sniper I’d ever seen. Maybe he would spare me some humiliation. Maybe he’d pick me off as they rolled me down the ramp. He could do it. I’d watched him hit targets from multiple miles away. He had that skill.
The first man to meet me as I came down the ramp was Tobias Andropov, in the flesh. He took three steps forward to greet me, fixing me with a wolf’s smile, and said, “The synthetic Spartacus returns without his troops.”
The history of Rome. I knew a little something about the history of Rome. I said, “I’d watch your back, Caesar. Of Rome’s 150 emperors, only 25 died of natural causes.”
He gave me the slightest bow, and said, “Thanks for the warning, Harris, but you will die long before I do.”
There was no arguing that point.
Forget the transport filled with peon soldiers, just the sight of Andropov filled me with rage. Something strange . . . with my arms and legs strapped into place and a cord around my neck, my back wrenched straight, and the sun in my eyes, I felt a little healthier than I had in the transport. I didn’t feel like dancing or running a marathon, but my brain focused, and my lungs took in more air. The man who had defeated me stood jubilant before me, thousands of people had come hoping to see my execution, and I smiled faintly and relaxed.
Andropov had turned my return into a photo op. He stood heroically at the forefront, overseeing my arrival the way a warden would observe the delivery of a famous criminal. He posed in front of my wheelchair, pointing at me, challenging me, shouting at me.
He said, “Harris, you have been charged with heinous war crimes,” but what he meant was, “Lazarus, come forth.” I was as good as dead. Had he left me in Mazatlan, I might not have survived. Whatever medicines Pugh’s physician had given me, they didn’t strengthen me as much as the hormone now surging through my veins.
People yelled at me. They screamed that they wanted me dead. Some pumped their fists in the air. Some had signs that said things like HANG THE BASTARD! and DEATH TODAY!
Andropov, the conquering hero, climbed onto a large dais on which sat a podium. He pointed at me, and said, “General Harris says you all owe him a debt of gratitude.”
I hadn’t said that. I had never said that, never in my life as far as I could remember. That was a specking lie.
Photographers videoed Andropov as he continued. “Having defeated the clones in battle, we have captured their king. In time, we will heal from the wounds he and his kind have inflicted upon us. In time, we will reestablish our galactic empire, we will renew our pangalactic growth and reclaim our place in the stars, but we will never again place our security in the hands of a synthetic horde.”
The crowd erupted. The commoners cheered, the reporters applauded, the soldiers hooted and hollered, and the politicians were downright orgasmic. The common crowd wouldn’t have known any better, but the soldiers and politicians had to know that this was all bullshit. The Unifieds hadn’t beaten us on the battlefield; they’d beaten us in the laboratory. Their flu virus won the war, not their soldiers.
Andropov could have gone on, but anything he said at this point would have been anticlimactic. The quintessential politician, he knew all about the diminishing returns of bluster. Instead of speaking, he lowered his head as if in prayer, and he silently stepped down from the dais.
The tumult that followed . . .
His head still bowed, Andropov looked at me and smiled broadly, then he walked over to Major Conlon and said some
thing, but the deafening noise drowned him out. Conlon shouted, “WHAT?”
Andropov screamed, “GET HIM OUT OF HERE! GET HIM TO THE FACILITY! MAKE SURE NOTHING HAPPENS TO HIM! LOOK AT THEM; I NEED THE CLONE ALIVE!”
The newly returned senior member of the Linear Committee’s concern for my well-being wasn’t charity; he genuinely needed me. A lot of people had died during the last decade. We’d lost 179 colonies, and our economy had gone to shit. Andropov wanted a scapegoat—an evil genius whom he could blame for everything. He needed a poster boy. You can’t haul dead clones into court. As long as I was alive and on trial, Andropov could point at me and blame me for everything. If I died, I’d be a faceless statistic, and blaming the fall of the Unified Authority on a statistic would be a tough sell.
He gazed back at me one last time, and I saw no emotion in his face. He didn’t hate me, didn’t pity me, and didn’t fear me. I was just another vanquished enemy to him, just another head to mount on his wall. My hide would not be the centerpiece in his trophy case.
Andropov was young by world-conqueror standards, forty-six years old. He’d spent more than a year in prison, a guest of the Enlisted Man’s Empire. Maybe he planned to let me languish for a year as part of my restitution, but sooner or later I would face a circus-act trial, and my execution would follow.
Seeing that the crowd had become something of a mob, and that that mob wouldn’t behave much longer, Conlon acted quickly. He closed his men around me, and they rushed me into an armored personnel carrier. The driver wasted no time. He took us out of Carmack Gateway, taking a runway access road. As we left the spaceport complex, a line of jeeps and tanks fell in behind us.
The personnel carrier didn’t have much in the way of windows, just two face-sized bulletproof glass panels on the rear doors. Sitting with a dozen guards around me, I watched the mob shrinking into the distance.
The mob—politicians whom the Enlisted Man’s Empire had indulged and left in power in a bid to gain support, a citizenry we had tried too hard to placate. Yes, we had returned to Earth as conquerors; we had defeated their government, but only after they had abandoned us in space.
Conlon, who was so short that he didn’t need to duck his head to stand in the back of the personnel carrier, stood beside my chair. He said, “Quite a fan club you have, Harris. If we left you with those people, they would have pulled you apart.”
I didn’t respond. I had nothing to say.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT
The Unifieds took me to the Naval Consolidation Brig, a well-kept but nearly empty facility on the Maryland side of Washington, D.C. Jeremy Reid, my new warden, was a tall, skinny, white-haired bureaucrat with a soft face and wire-framed spectacles, the kind of cat who can change from stripes to spots depending on who runs the pack. He looked at me, and said, “Wayson Harris, you have been assigned to this facility where you shall remain incarcerated until the Unified Authority elects to execute you properly.”
When I answered, “Get specked, asshole,” he favored me with a tight-lipped, prudish smile and said, “If you show us proper respect, your short stay with us will go more pleasantly for everyone.”
After that, he fell into line with the guards and escorted me into the building, which looked more like a bank with human-sized safety-deposit boxes than an actual prison—a two-story building wrapped around a huge lobby. The place was as empty as a school on the first day of vacation, and immaculate, not just sanitary, like a hospital, but clutter-free, lint-free, dust-free, germ-free, like the reactor room in a nuclear power plant.
Looking across the lobby, I saw that the club chairs were the only things on the floor—two rows of chairs with armrests and straight backs, upholstered in white or green Naugahyde. The floors were done in white linoleum tile; the walls were brick painted a stark white. The bright fluorescent lights left not so much as a shadow in which a speck of dust could hide.
Reid strolled to my wheelchair, and said, “Your cell is on the second floor.”
“You run a clean prison,” I said.
“It’s easy to maintain cleanliness in an unoccupied facility, Harris,” he said.
I wondered how long I would live in this sanitarium. For that matter, I wondered how long I would live.
“We had to do some cleaning before we could move you in,” Reid confessed, a cheerful ring to his voice. “Some of the old staff, the synthetic men who worked here before the Unified Authority resumed control, died at their stations.
“We buried them in a mass grave out back. It seemed fitting because that was also the way they disposed of their prisoners.” Reid had this radiant, smug expression. He was in his sixties, maybe his seventies. He was a weak man, a man who tried to associate himself with other people’s triumphs, a worm.
“Very efficient,” I said, “killing every enemy and burying them where they fall. Maybe that was where the Enlisted Man’s Empire went wrong; we should have been more efficient.”
Reid’s smug expression disappeared, but instead of taking the bait, he told Conlon, “I’m remanding the prisoner to your custody until he is prepared.” He marched off, a skinny, prissy, politician, living proof that adult males can survive without balls.
One of my guards stepped beside me and jabbed his elbow into the side of my head. He whispered, “You know, you’re not really the last clone; there are a whole bunch of them on Terraneau.”
“Are there?” I asked. I’d had a lot of friends in the battle of Terraneau.
The man said, “Oh hell yes, bunches of them. We reprogrammed them.” The man stared at me, his eyes sparkling.
We waited in the gleaming lobby while guards went to the second floor and inspected my room. It was a good thing that this idiot had accompanied me all the way from Mazatlan to the brig. He’d been there when Major Conlon inspected my thermal pack and didn’t worry about my holding on to it. Had new guards arrived, they might have confiscated it.
The man asked, “Did you know we kicked your ass on Terraneau?”
“The ass kicking couldn’t have been too complete if a bunch of clones are still alive,” I said.
He said, “We lost a bunch of ships in the beginning, then our brass invited their brass for a summit.”
“A truce?” I asked.
“Not exactly. They fed them a nice meal, then they reprogrammed them. Once their leaders joined our side, the rest of the clones threw in the towel.”
“Their leaders,” Admiral Jim Holman, the officer in command, wasn’t the sanest man I’d ever met, but he was an honorable man. I’d always admired him. He’d known how to run a fleet, and he had a wicked sense of humor.
One mystery solved, I realized. Now I knew how the Unifieds had captured the Explorer without damaging it. The reprogrammed clones must have contacted the Explorer, welcomed the crew to Terraneau, and led them into an ambush.
I looked at the bastard, and said, “Let me get this straight; your officers invited our officers to a peace summit and reprogrammed them.”
“Yeah, that sums it up.”
“So much for honor,” I said. “You invited them in under a white flag, then you doped . . .” Before I could finish the sentence, the bastard slammed his fist into my jaw. Strapped in at the knees, arms, chest, and neck, made me a sitting target—literally.
Conlon saw it happen and barked, “Thompson!”
Thompson snapped to attention, shoulders back, chest out, eyes straight ahead.
Conlon asked, “Did you just strike the prisoner?”
The bastard answered, “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
“Do that again, soldier, and we’ll see how tough you are with men who aren’t strapped into a wheelchair.”
“Yes, sir.”
He’s out of his mind, I thought. Conlon stood barely five feet. He was short and skinny and weak, and this other guy, Thompson, he looked like a bruiser.
As Conlon walked away, I said, “Ambushing officers under a flag of truce, beating up prisoners in wheelchairs, h
onor is in short supply.”
Thompson glared at me, and whispered, “Keep it up, clone. That little prick won’t always be around to save you.” He said this so quietly it didn’t attract attention, but he wasn’t bright enough to stop playing my game. A moment passed, and he said, “Personally I think we should have ordered them to kill themselves after we reprogrammed them.”
“As another shining example of U.A. honor?” I asked.
“Watch yourself.”
Reid returned. He told Major Conlon, “The room is ready.”
Conlon repeated the order to his men and the guards wheeled me up to my new billet. We rolled to an elevator which took me, Reid, Conlon, and four armed men to the second floor.
Reid said, “We brought in a full staff here just for you, thirty-seven guards. Personally, I don’t think we’ll need them.”
I heard him speaking, but I didn’t bother listening to him. I thought about death tolls; mine kept on rising. Along with every man under my command, I had the reprogramming of Jim Holman on my conscience. As far as I was concerned, reprogramming was as bad as death. Holman and his men had become slaves.
“We also have a surgeon on staff,” said Reid. “Personally, I consider the guards an unnecessary redundancy, but Mr. Andropov . . .”
My cell was ten feet wide and twelve feet long, with brick walls and no windows. It had a cot, a toilet, and a sink. I spotted it because it was the only cell with an open door and lights.
As we wheeled closer to the door, I saw that what I had mistaken for a cot was more like a gurney. It was too tall for a cot.
“We will keep you on an incapacitation cage,” said Reid. “You will be paralyzed, but . . .”
They wheeled me past my cell and down the hall, to the “little shop of horrors”; that was the military term for prison infirmaries. The Little Shop of Horrors.
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