Prisoners of War

by Rick Partlow

  “Loyal to his friends,” she repeated. “You certainly haven’t been treating him as a friend. The man has lost everything that has ever been important to him. How do you expect to convince him you’re on the side of the angels when he’s always been a patriot and you’ll be asking him to betray his country?”

  “Sometimes you have to strip away the old before you can build the new.” He shrugged. “You’ll have to trust me, Ms. Grigoryeva, I know what I’m doing. We can transfer selected memories from one dupe to another, but the memories have to exist first; I can’t manufacture them. Were I to hire mercenaries or even find one well trained mercenary and clone an army of him or her, what would I have? Someone who fought only for money. Would they die at my word? Would they trust me over their own government?”

  “And Nate Stout will?” She couldn’t keep the skepticism out of her voice.

  “He will when I am done with him.”

  His words were cold, ruthless, which she should have been used to.

  “Didn’t you tell me you considered this man your friend? Is this how you’d treat your friend? How will this win him to your side?”

  Now he seemed annoyed and she worried she’d pushed too far. Franklin often said he appreciated her as a devil’s advocate, but perhaps even the devil becomes tiresome after long enough.

  “I don’t need him to be on my side,” he said, his tone tightly controlled, as if he’d been about to snap at her and barely restrained himself. “I simply need him to be desperate enough that I am his only source of hope.”

  He placed the lid back on the crate and waved a couple of the workers over to take it inside.

  “And yes, he was my friend. Perhaps somewhere inside there, inside all the hurt and pain and confusion, he still is. But if this is to be a revolution, then sacrifices have to be made.” He sniffed. “The Nate I once knew would understand. Perhaps this one will, also, before it is all over.”

  Sacrifices have to be made, she thought but didn’t say, not wishing to push her luck. Other people’s sacrifices. Never you.

  Robert Franklin, she thought, should have been born a Russian.

  “Well,” Fuller said, eyes scanning back and forth across the row of Hellfire mechs stored in the old Coast Guard base garage, “this is quite the setup you have here.”

  “If you like cockroaches and mold,” Ramirez muttered.

  “I can see why you wouldn’t want to just throw in the towel on it,” the older man went on, ignoring the snarky comment. “You got a sweet, defensible headquarters, still got most of your armory here, except for the U-mechs.” He leaned toward Roach and whispered conspiratorially. “I never thought much of the whole U-mech idea anyway. The damn things are way too easy to shoot down for what they cost.”

  “At least they gave the Russians something else to shoot at,” Ramirez said.

  Fuller glanced back at him, eyes narrowing.

  “What’d they call you again, boy? The jackass? Something like that?”

  “The Mule,” Ramirez corrected him, making a sour face.

  “The thing is,” Fuller went on, “even though I understand wanting to hang onto what you got, this whole business about going after your old boss and rescuing him from the damn Russians with just the three of us seems a lot like suicide.”

  “I’d take more people if I had them,” Roach said flatly, regarding him with a look she reserved for newbies and tax collectors. “He wasn’t your friend, so I understand if you don’t want to be part of it, but we’ll go with just the two of us if we have to.”

  She saw Ramirez blanche behind Fuller and amended the sentiment in her head. I’ll do it myself if I have to.

  “I said it sounded like suicide,” he corrected her, grinning broadly, “not that I wasn’t interested.” He shrugged. “I’m an old man, honey. Why else would I be in Norfolk fighting Russians if I weren’t looking for a good way to die?”

  She blinked at the unexpected answer, her mouth left half-open, unsure how to reply.

  “Close your mouth, honey, before something flies into it.” He made a shooing motion. “Come on, let’s go. Show me this video you were talking about.” He frowned and glanced around them. “Actually, first, Mule, where’s the bathroom?” He patted his stomach. “That burger was a bit greasy. Can’t get away with that like I used to.”

  Nate wished he had a chair. Now that he wasn’t being drugged, the damned floor was getting way too uncomfortable. His back and shoulders and hips seemed to ache constantly from the cold, hard floor and he was sleeping even less than usual despite the pushups and sit-ups and even an attempt to remember the Tae Kwon Do poomse of his youth. That hadn’t gone so well because the floor was slick and he’d wound up flat on his back more than once.

  It also reminded him that his Prime had never been that agile or fast on his feet, and he surely hadn’t gotten any better at it as a dupe.

  I’ve been thinking more and more of myself that way lately. I never used to.

  Maybe because he’d tried every way he knew how to keep himself from thinking of the fact he was the cheap copy of a real person. It was hard not to contemplate it now, not since he’d found out about Bob. Bob had duped himself. He didn’t know why it shocked him. He’d never heard of anyone doing it to themselves before, and he was sure it was all kinds of illegal, but who thought about the law in the middle of an invasion?

  Still, in order to keep his memories backed up, keep a copy of his genetic material around, arrange for someone to dupe him, Bob must have had some idea he was going to die.

  We’re all going to die. He knew someone was going to kill him.

  How the hell was that possible? Bob had died in a Russian attack, hadn’t he? It was so far back, he couldn’t remember if he remembered it or he’d simply read it in a file and conflated it with his own implanted memories.

  Or did someone just decide to leave that memory out?

  He tried not to think about that, about some Department of Defense functionary sitting down with the collected memories of the original Nathan Stout and whichever of the clones they’d bothered to record the brain patterns from and deciding which parts were important and which could just get tossed in the trash. It pissed him off when he thought about it, about being treated like a disposable machine.

  It’s a war though, he reminded himself. Haven’t people always been treated as disposable in war?

  He’d been at war longer than the original Nathan Stout had been alive. He didn’t often sit back and count up the years, because the result was too depressing. The nation had been at war for decades, fighting over this same ground. Sometimes he imagined that the US and Russia had both ceased to exist and their proxies fought on, without purpose, without end.

  Would this end at some point? Would someone give up? Would someone back down? Was that possible anymore? He wasn’t even sure if he was still fighting the Russian government. The country had always been more of a giant organized crime family than a nation-state. Did a kleptocracy have a foreign policy?

  If they’re a mob family, what does that make us?

  The United States hadn’t had an election east of the Mississippi in thirty years. He’d heard news reports of voting in the plains states and the mountain west, but they were landslides for the sitting president.

  What was her name again? Tilde? Tyler? Something with a T.

  If he couldn’t even remember who the president was, what the hell was he fighting for?

  Maybe just a purpose. A reason to keep living.

  The main bolt of the cell door scraped aside and it swung open, letting in more light than he’d seen in days. He blinked and covered his eyes. He could make out dim shapes past the explosion of light, hear boot soles tapping on the concrete, and behind them the sharper clack of high heels. Hands grabbed at his arms and held him tight, the faces behind them rough and bearded and ready to do violence.

  “Easy,” the woman he’d come to know as Svetlana told him, or perhaps she was speaking to them. She
stood in front of him, as tall and well-dressed and malevolently beautiful as he’d remembered. “It starts now,” she told him. She raised a hypodermic needle. “This is a sedative. You’ll want this. You don’t want to be awake when they extract the stem cells.” She shrugged. “You can either allow me to give it to you peacefully, with no struggle, or I can use this.”

  She held up a taser in her other hand. It was probably the same one that had been used on him back at Busch Gardens, when he’d been captured.

  “If I have to use the taser, I will not bother with the sedative. It is your choice.”

  The thugs she’d brought with her looked as if they wanted him to resist, though he noticed they didn’t say a word. They respected her authority, or perhaps feared what she was capable of. Either way, he wasn’t getting out of this cell unless they took him and he really didn’t feel like being awake during surgery, especially not to prove a point.

  “Give me the shot,” he told her, offering his arm.

  She smirked and moved around behind him, yanking at the waistline of his pants.

  Shit. Don’t even get to keep my dignity.

  Something sharp and painful stuck him in the ass and after that, he remembered nothing.

  7

  “Well, shit,” James Fuller said, sitting back from the video display. It had frozen on the image of the mysterious man who’d commanded Nate’s captors and Fuller massaged his knuckles and stared at the face, slightly out of focus, shrouded in a fog of the unknown.

  “I tell you what,” the old man expounded, “your boss Nate has more good in him than I do. I’d have popped a cap in that boy Patty sure as shit and no fooling, just like that fancy blond did. She’s Russian, that’s for damn sure,” he added as if Roach hadn’t been able to figure that out herself from the accent. “FSB most likely. The big question is, who the hell is this guy?” He pointed at the mystery man. “What did Nate call him? Bob? That don’t sound Russian to me.”

  “How did Nate know him?” Roach wondered. “He sounded as if he were surprised as hell to see him.”

  “I feel like I’ve seen his face somewhere,” Fuller said. “I can’t quite recall when.” He grinned at the two younger people as if he were sharing some secret of the universe with them. “As you get older, it gets harder and harder to figure out where you put your memories. Your boss probably knew that.”

  “Nate wasn’t that old,” Ramirez protested. Roach stared daggers at him and he looked confused for a moment until he abruptly realized what he’d done. “I mean he isn’t that old,” he corrected himself.

  “Well, not in terms or pure years,” Fuller admitted, “but he’s a dupe, so they add up faster.”

  Roach shook her head, frowning uncomprehendingly.

  “He’s a what?”

  Fuller blinked as if he wasn’t sure how she didn’t understand.

  “A dupe. Surely you both know that?”

  “Mister Fucking Old Guy,” Ramirez told him, still sounding as if he resented the man, “I ain’t never heard that word before right now. What the hell do you mean Nate is a dupe?”

  “Don’t they teach you kids nothin’ in school anymore?” Fuller sighed and settled back into his chair as if he were about to tell them a bedtime story. “When they first came up with the mechs, like the Hellfires, the isotope reactors leaked radiation like nobody’s business. Back then, they didn’t figure they could get away with sticking just any poor bastard inside anyway and letting them die in ten or fifteen years from cancer, so they came up with the dupes.”

  He rubbed at his chin thoughtfully. “Well, now that I recollect, they musta’ been working on the dupes already and someone just saw how they could be useful and put two and two together and came up with the idea.”

  Roach snarled, already losing patience with the old man.

  “You still haven’t told us what a dupe is,” she ground out.

  “Oh, yeah, right,” Fuller said, laughing. “Guess I forgot that part. You see, they figured out a way to take genetic material from a donor and grow an adult copy Except of course, it’s a blank slate, no memories ‘cause those ain’t in your genes, so they had to come up with how to read memories from the original into the dupes…the genetic duplicates, I think the correct term is.”

  “Wait a fucking minute!” Ramirez interrupted him, his eyes going wide, the blood draining out of his face. “You’re saying Nate is some kind of copy?”

  “Well, yes,” Fuller confirmed. “DoD told me all about it. Didn’t he tell you?”

  Roach couldn’t answer, couldn’t bring herself to speak, but Ramirez was shaking his head.

  “Well, I guess it ain’t anyone else’s business, usually. Anyway, the thing about the dupes is, they got a shorter lifespan, only twelve or fifteen years.”

  “How come I never heard anything about this ever?” Ramirez demanded.

  “Well, it ain’t something you’d want to be bragging about, I suppose. They stopped it all around nine or ten years ago when the shielding technology improved enough for regular people to pilot a mech without getting all fucked up.” He grinned broadly. “Before that, I flew helicopters, but since then I been piloting Hellfires. Best thing I ever did. They’re so much more fun.”

  “Why wouldn’t he tell us?” Ramirez whispered the words, sounding like a kid whose puppy had gotten run over.

  “Why the hell would he?” Roach grunted. She was feeling the same sense of betrayal, but it was important not to let Ramirez see it. “We didn’t need to know. It’s still not important. He’s Nate, whatever else he is. Why should it make any difference?”

  “I don’t know,” Ramirez admitted. “It just seems like a big secret to keep.”

  “Mebbe he just didn’t want to be constantly answering questions about it,” Fuller suggested. “Shit, I’m sorry I brought it up, now, but I thought it might be relevant. You try running that Bob dude’s face through DoD biometrics? You got access to that through your dedicated server, right?”

  “Yeah, though I don’t think we’ve ever actually used it before,” Roach admitted. “I’m not sure I did it right because I didn’t get any result.”

  The older man frowned, scratching at his mustache.

  “That don’t seem right, if he’s really someone important. The DoD may not be worth much when it comes to actionable intelligence, but they keep files on everyone.” He shrugged. “Everyone who ain’t dead already.”

  “They can save themselves some time then,” Roach said. “If this guy hurt Nate, I’ll put him in the ground.”

  Svetlana Grigoryeva had seen terrible things, much worse than the laparoscopic drills going into Nathan Stout’s thigh, yet for some reason she had to look away. She concentrated on Robert Franklin’s voice to shut out the high-pitched whining coming from the makeshift operatory, listening to him lecture the doctor, or technician or whatever the man’s official title was.

  “It’s vital there be no contamination,” he was saying, though Svetlana wasn’t entirely clear what might become contaminated. “I need as clean a sample as you can get for the next phase. The genetic grafting is going to be vital to extending the lifespan.”

  The room was odd. It appeared to have been some sort of police interrogation room with a one-way mirror, though why they would have, or need something like that in what had been the White House was a mystery to her. Franklin probably didn’t know, either, or he would have already launched into some long, boring, overly-detailed explanation to impress her with the breadth and scope of his historical knowledge. The man was brutally efficient and an engineering genius, but he was painfully clumsy with a woman. She was never quite sure if he was trying to be a father figure to her or get into her pants, and either choice was equally creepy.

  “Are you going soft on me, Svetlana?”

  She half-turned back to him, saw him staring at her in obvious amusement. She didn’t try to pretend she didn’t know what he was talking about, simply shrugged noncommittally.

  “He’s
under, you know,” Franklin pointed out. “You made sure of that. It’ll hurt when he wakes up unless we drug him again, but he’s not feeling anything right now.”

  “I am aware, Robert.” She made her voice cold and distant, feigning anger and disdain when she really felt incipient nausea. “I have simply never cared for doctors.”

  “They usually cut people open to try to help them,” Franklin pointed out, “whereas you have been known to have a different motive for slicing into someone’s flesh.”

  She considered telling him the story of her first visit to a doctor, when the FSB agent who’d taken her in had sent her for a checkup before she was allowed to start training. The man had poked and prodded at her, given her inoculation after inoculation, test after test…and then put her under and had her sterilized. He’d seemed jovial when she’d woke in the recovery room, assuring her it was for the best, that her life would be so much less complicated if she didn’t have to worry about children. She rejected the idea. He’d either make light of it or, perhaps worse, attempt to sympathize.

  “Everyone has their phobias,” she said instead. “I would feel the same if it were you on the other side of that glass.”

  “It will be, eventually.” The thought seemed to excite him and she thought he might rub his hands together like some cartoon villain, but he restrained himself. “You don’t know how long I’ve waited for this.”

  “You? Ten years, I assume. Otherwise, you’d be dead.” She smirked at the dig, knowing it would hit home.

  “I’d think a good Russian materialist like yourself would recognize that the continuation of consciousness from one life to another is an illusion.” He sounded grumpy and she knew she’d succeeded in needling him. “I have the same genes, the same shape, the same memories in the same matrix. A difference which makes no difference is no difference. I am as much Robert Franklin as the man born in the previous millennium in Waukegan, Illinois. If anyone is a different person, it’s him.”