by Rick Partlow
He jabbed a finger at the glass and she followed it automatically, mouth curling into a snarl at the sight of the parted flesh at Nate’s thigh, the flecks of blood being wiped away by a nurse. He looked dead, motionless, his face covered by an oxygen mask, the skin of his thigh discolored by the disinfectant. She looked away quickly.
“The real Nathan Stout died decades ago, alone and bitter and purposeless. This man has snippets of Nathan’s memories along with bits and pieces of the dupes since, whatever the Department of Defense technicians deemed important to his job. He’s a chimera, a patchwork man put together by bureaucratic Frankensteins.” He sneered at her. “Yet somehow, you seemed more concerned with his fate than mine.”
“You are concerned enough with your fate for the both of us,” she shot back, losing the reins on her mouth for just a moment, losing control and instantly regretting it but unwilling to go back. “Your purpose is a worthy one or I wouldn’t work for you, but I think you’re more interested in how it aggrandizes you than how it benefits the world.”
She fought not to wince, knowing she’d surely angered him and also knowing how dangerous that could be. But when he met her eyes, there was no anger, but something else. Is it pride? Respect?
“Well, you have come a long way from the FSB assassin I found hunting me down all those years ago,” he said quietly. “I sometimes wonder what would have become of you had I simply let you finish the job.”
“It would have inconvenienced you, nothing more,” she admitted. “My employers didn’t know you were a dupe, and they surely weren’t aware you had the equipment to copy yourself over and over, with each day’s memories backed up on your hard drives.” She laughed, not without bitterness. “You should have heard the moaning and gnashing of teeth each time an agent returned claiming to have killed you and yet the next week, you were back again, still working against us.”
“I wasn’t working against you,” he corrected her. “As you so aptly pointed out, I was working for myself. We have far too many people working for what they think is best for governments that have been dead for decades now.”
He stepped in front of her, taking her face in his hands and she felt her skin crawl at his touch. It wasn’t fair. He wasn’t like the powerful men who’d abused her as a girl, yet she couldn’t get the image out of her head whenever she was close to him.
“It is hard for you to trust me,” he discerned, his eyes boring into hers. “I can understand that. I have my own reasons for seeking the end of the current system, it’s true. They betrayed me, stole my ideas, my company, my life, after everything I had done for them. Revenge kept me going when little else could. But a man can only keep himself going for so long with mere revenge as a motivation.”
“You are a philanthropist now?” she wondered, letting intractable cynicism creep into her tone. “Is that what I am supposed to believe?”
“Philanthropists are rich men with guilty consciences. I want a world without nations because that is the world I would live a full life in, raise a family in, grow old in.” He grinned lopsidedly. “Again. For the last time.”
He let her face drop from his hands and walked back over to the one-way mirror, unafraid to admire the job his surgeons were doing. She rubbed her palms over her face as if she could wipe away the taint of his touch.
“There was a woman who lived back in the 20th Century named Ayn Rand who wrote about something she called Objectivism.” Franklin shot Svetlana a grin. “She was Russian, too. Born in St. Petersburg, like you. Her philosophy was ‘the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.’ Some people have argued this is simplistic, unworkable, that it would lead only to a technocracy.” He snorted derision. “As if what representative democracy has brought has been so wonderful that nothing else can be tried.” He raised a finger. “That is the real failing of the West in the 21st Century, my dear. The idea that nothing but representative democracy can be allowed, that anything else may be tolerated for a brief moment as a stepping point along the way. It has led us to this, hasn’t it?”
He waved around them at the chambers he had appropriated for his work. “Their monuments are wreckage, their government no longer exists except in the minds and hearts of fools such as our Captain Stout. And Europe, it is worse, if that can be imagined, a nightmare of jihad and crusade and retaliation upon retaliation. The time has come to try something different. And I will be the one to bring it about. China will not simply step in and take over what is left of America and Russia. I will build something that can stand against them, a federation not of politicians, but of creators.”
It sounded wonderful when he spoke of it. She’d always thought so, always thought how nice it would be to be free of the politicians and the generals. But she made herself look at what they were doing in the operatory, at what they were doing to the poor dupe who was the key to all these plans.
Maybe, she thought, he is not the only dupe here.
8
“Okay, I think that’s got it,” Ramirez said, clucking his tongue as he peered intently at the readout from the maintenance board and checked off the final item on the tablet with a plain, silver stylus. He stuck his head up into the open hatch of what had been Patty’s Hellfire and yelled up to Fuller. “You’re clear, dude. All checks are good.”
He stepped aside and Fuller dropped down to the ground with surprising agility for a man of his age.
“Nice piece of equipment you got here,” he told Roach, patting the leg of the mech. “Well maintained.”
“Our tech…,” Roach began but then trailed off and started again, the corners of her mouth drawing down. “The guy who used to be our tech was former Navy. Very conscientious.”
“Dix was a good guy,” Ramirez said, as if giving the man’s eulogy over again. He set the tablet down on top of the diagnostic sensor and leaned up against the side of the mech’s maintenance gantry. “I miss him. He taught me everything I know about mechs.”
“He died in combat?” Fuller asked, his tone a bit more respectful and solemn than Roach had grown used to in their short acquaintance.
“Recently,” Roach said, clamping down on the subject with the finality of her tone. She’d put Fuller into Patty’s old mech because she still couldn’t bear the thought of letting anyone take Dix’s machine.
“Your friend died in combat, another turned traitor and a third captured,” Fuller mused. “That’s some hard luck. Gotta be rough on you, being XO when the unit’s falling down around you.”
“You sound like you’ve been there,” she said.
“You don’t get to be as old as I am and never command nothing,” he said. “Eventually, just by surviving, you got the most seniority.” He sagged just a bit, leaning against a worktable. “No one seems to realize you got seniority by everyone around you getting killed.”
“What happened?” she asked him, sensing there was a story he needed to tell.
“Back before they fixed the shielding on mechs, I flew attack helicopters,” he said, a mouth that seemed used to smiling sinking into a frown. “Comanches. I liked them birds, nice and fast and stealthy. Not stealthy enough, though, I guess, since you don’t see ‘em much anymore. We were up near the Cascades about ten years ago, when the Chinese launched the first attacks on the west coast. They were trying to send a force up through the mountains to penetrate into Yakima and from there to the rest of the western states, but we had enough tanks and helicopters to shut them down.”
His expression went bleak and hopeless.
“I saw them Chinese tanks and APCs down there as small as toys in the roads of that mountain pass. And I guess someone in higher didn’t think we’d be able to stop them, ‘cause right about the time we were heading in for our attack run, we got warned off, told to get clear. We tried, but when the nuke went off, we were still close enough for the EMP to take out our engines.”
“Shit,” Ramirez muttered.
“Helicopters can kinda’ glide, can’t they?” Roach asked him, trying to imagine being inside one with no power.
“They autorotate,” he corrected her. “Badly. Enough to let you land alive if you’re not too far up and if you have a nice, flat place to touch down. In a mountain pass, in winter…” He closed his eyes, teeth grinding just a bit with the memory. “I got lucky. Found a ledge in just the right place, high enough for me to crash onto it without dying.” He shrugged. “Without me dying. My gunner broke his neck. I managed to crack three vertebrae and snap my right ankle. I had to cut my straps off and climb down off that mountain on one leg. Lost two toes to frostbite.”
Roach shivered involuntarily. She didn’t like the cold, and the thought of being trapped inside the cockpit of a helicopter with a dead man sounded like ten different versions of hell.
“Mother Mary,” Ramirez said, crossing himself. “How many…”
“Twenty-four birds,” Fuller answered the question before the younger man could finish it. “Forty-eight men and women.” He hooked a thumb back at his own chest. “One survivor, Catfish.”
“Catfish?” Roach asked, eyes narrowing. “What’s a catfish got to do with it?”
“That was my old call sign,” Fuller explained, grinning again, as if the story had wafted away on the wind, taking the bad memories with it. “My maintenance NCO took one look at me and said my mustache looked exactly like the whiskers on a catfish.” He laughed, a wheezing, rasping noise that made it sound as if he were about to die. “I argued against that callsign till I about ran out of breath, but I was stuck with it. Even thought about shaving my mustache, if I’d have believed that would have made a difference, but I decided naw, the stach is who I am.”
“We give our own callsigns here,” Roach told him. She sniffed a quiet laugh. “You think I chose to be called ‘Roach?’ That shit happens to you.”
“I sure as hell didn’t want to be called the Mule,” Ramirez said, his tone sour. Roach thought he was probably realizing without a Nate or Dix around to change it, he’d be stuck with the moniker forever.
Fuller spread his hands invitingly, as if telling them to do their worst.
“So, what’s the verdict?” he asked. “If I’m not Catfish, what am I?”
“I’m thinking F-O-G,” Ramirez said.
“Fog?”
“No.” Ramirez rolled his eyes. “F-O-G, for Fucking Old Guy.”
“I guess I should have expected that sort of lack of imagination from someone your age,” Fuller said archly, looking down his nose at the younger man. He looked at Roach with pleading in his eyes. “Tell me you’re not going along with this shit, missy.”
“Well, I wasn’t,” she allowed, “but you keep calling me ‘missy,’ so the hell with it. Fucking Old Guy sounds good to me.”
“I may be old,” he said, drawing himself up as if rallying whatever dignity he had left, “but at least I’m still on this side of the ground.” He shrugged philosophically. “Could be worse.”
The pain in his leg woke him up. Nate tried to ignore it, tried to bury himself under fuzzy layers of drugged bliss, not wanting to open his eyes to the grim dankness of his cell, but it was a toothache pain that just wouldn’t go away and he finally had to give in to it.
But it wasn’t dank and it wasn’t all that grim anymore. As cells went, it actually wasn’t too bad. He was in a hospital bed, the sort his Prime remembered from decades ago, with metal siderails raised up to keep him inside. His left wrist was handcuffed to one of them, which didn’t surprise him, but otherwise, he was unrestrained. The sheets were soft, the pillow fluffy and the room was well lit and painted a faded yellow he supposed had once been cheerful.
It would have all been perfect except for the bone-deep pan inside his heavily-bandaged thigh. What the hell had they done to him? Was he some sort of experiment? He’d read about Jews during the Holocaust being used as guinea pigs for experiments and he wondered if their fate was to be his, shot or gassed or starved to death and thrown into some unmarked grave. True, this didn’t seem like the sort of dungeon where the bad guys would stick a guinea pig they were bent on tossing aside…
He rested his head back against the pillow, totally confused. Svetlana had said they were extracting…something. What had it been? Everything from just before she’d given him the sedative was a blur, but he thought she’d said stem cells. They were extracting stem cells. For what? The only thing he knew you could do with stem cells was make genetic duplicates.
But why the hell would Bob Franklin want to duplicate him?
He was thirsty and the dry, sandpaper feeling in his throat was making it hard to think. He looked around, wondering if they might have left…they had. A foam cup sat on a metal stand beside the bed. He had to reach across to get it with his free hand, which hurt like hell, but he forgot the pain the instant the water touched his lips. It seemed to wash some of the fog away from his thoughts on the way down.
Why would Bob want to dupe a dupe? The genetic degradation would ensure the copies he made from Nate wouldn’t last more than another five years, tops.
Unless that’s enough for what he has in mind. But why me? He knew me, or his Prime knew my Prime. Is that the whole reason? Did he pick me just because he knew me? Because we used to be friends?
He tried to remember everything the technicians had passed down to him from his Prime about Robert Franklin, but there wasn’t much there, not much they’d deemed important. He’d been the man who’d developed the Hellfire mech, along with a dozen other innovations that had made it possible, and he knew from memories of feelings he’d had during lectures and demonstrations of the technology to his Prime that the two of them had been close friends. Nothing concrete, no memory of how they’d met or what had made them hit it off.
It was frustrating. He knew he had trusted the man, had valued his friendship, but he couldn’t remember why. There were flashes, images of the two of them drinking together, watching old movies and making fun of them to the chagrin of others in the base rec room, laughing at Franklin striking out with women at local bars. The closest he could come with the vague, frayed fragments was that Robert Franklin had been a rich, eccentric genius but had acted like a regular guy.
What had happened to that regular guy? How had he turned into this megalomaniacal crime boss? Was he working for the Russians or, as he claimed, working against both sides? He didn’t know if the man was manipulating him or simply telling him truths he didn’t want to hear?
Nate closed his eyes and tried to use the relaxation techniques he’d learned from the doctors after waking the first time, when they’d explained to him the trouble he would have sleeping. They were supposed to suppress pain as well and this was as good of a test as he’d had for them. But the pain he was feeling wasn’t all in his leg, and his thoughts refused to settle. Because one question that wouldn’t be answered was, what would this version of Bob Franklin do to him once he got what he wanted?
Anton Varlamov snugged the stock of the sniper rifle into his shoulder and watched the sentries pass through the crosshairs. The thermal sight turned armored men into abstract yellow and red figures in the stygian darkness, pacing around and between the cargo trucks parked outside. But the most interesting thing it revealed was what was beyond the walls, through the partially-collapsed front wall of the building. Mechs.
And even more interesting and perplexing, not Tagans. Hellfires, American made. They were immobile, visible only because of their never-resting isotope reactors and the characteristic thermal signature they showed. They were arrayed in rows, probably in maintenance racks, though he was sure some were kept at ready to deal with threats.
Threats like us.
“What do you see, sir?” Giorgi asked from beside him.
The man had infrared night vision goggles, but they couldn’t show anything except for the occasional guard stepping through open space, and not many details of that
at this range. They were set up a good kilometer and a half away, too distant for him to hope to make a shot even with the sniper rifle.
“I see enough to know we aren’t simply strolling in there and killing Franklin,” he said, keeping his voice quiet and low-pitched.
He pulled the rifle down and set it behind the cover of the remains of the garden wall, settling out of sight. He took a moment to check the positions of his team, making sure they were sufficiently covered and concealed. They were all professionals, but they’d been away from Russia, fighting mercenaries and guerillas for too long, and he was afraid they’d gotten sloppy. A few weeks of combat was good for keeping troops on the ball, but after too long with too much adrenalin and stress hormones, even the best wore down, a knife sharpened too much, too often.
“They have mechs in there, and heavy security,” he added, having come to subscribe to the American notion of disseminating as much information as possible to his subordinates so they could accomplish the mission if things went wrong. It was very much against the Russian tradition, but if you didn’t learn from your enemies, well…there weren’t any friends out here on the eastern seaboard, so you just weren’t going to learn at all. “Whatever is being done with the duplication gear, it’s important enough for him to bring in the big guns. Which means it’s important enough we should make it our business to find out some more about it.”
“You just said we can’t make it through their security,” Giorgi said, forehead scrunching up in confusion. “I don’t understand.”
Anton sighed. Of course, the weakness of the American concept of dissemination of information was that some people were just too stupid to make any sense of it.
“There’s a weapons depot not too far from here,” he explained patiently. “Near Annapolis. It was planted a few years ago by an FSB infiltration team coming off a cargo ship.” He cocked an eyebrow at Giorgi. “You’re checked out on the Tagan mech, are you not?”