The Clone Assassin (22 page)

Freeman scared him; I could see it in his expression and I could hear it in his voice. Pugh was a big man, but Freeman was bigger. Neither man would likely give an inch, but if there had been trouble, Freeman would have emerged on top. A man like Pugh would remember that. He might have cut a deal with Freeman, but the scar would always remain.

I shook my head.

“We’re in the same boat,” said Pugh. “I expect he’d call you before coming to me. You’re the one with the tanks and the missile launchers.”

“Last he heard, I was in a coma,” I said.

“Now look at you,” said Kasara. “It’s like nothing ever happened.”

She was wrong though I tried to hide it. I was weak and stiff, and I didn’t stand like a Marine with my back straight and my head high. I had started playing with sit-ups and calisthenics, but I wasn’t ready for weights or running.

“Maybe we should go inside,” Pugh said. “No need to pose for prying eyes.”

“So is this yours?” I asked, as we walked toward the lighthouse.

“Men in my line of work don’t move into the lone house on the hill,” said Pugh. “I need to live someplace comfortable and inconspicuous. This isn’t it.”

“But you can’t beat the view,” said Kasara.

The inside of the lighthouse was empty except for shadows. As this was not his living space, Pugh hadn’t bothered furnishing it.

Whenever he thought no one would catch him, Ritz stole glances at Kasara. Whether he found her pretty or hideous, she clearly fascinated him.

“There’s not much I can tell you about Freeman,” said Pugh. “I’ll show you where we sent him and who he was up against, but I don’t think that’s what got him in trouble.”

Ritz said, “I heard he went into the mountains to kill a guy named Petrie. Is that right? He’s like you, right, a Martian thug?”

Kasara, who moved away from us as we started talking business, giggled when Ritz called her scary gangster uncle a “Martian thug.”

Pugh glared at her, then he turned his glare on Ritz.

Pugh stood more than half a foot taller than Ritz and outweighed him by a hundred pounds. He had a small army of goons at his command. Depending on which rackets he controlled on Olympus Kri, Pugh had undoubtedly been involved in killings. Hell, he’d sent Freeman out to kill someone and let three clones into my hotel room to kill me. That much I knew.

He didn’t scare Ritz, though, not in the slightest. If anything, he seemed to irritate Ritz, and Ritz generously made sure he shared in the pleasure.

Pugh thought for a moment, swallowed down his anger, and said, “Ryan Petrie ran the largest criminal organization on the third most populated planet in the Unified Authority. He had operations on other planets as well. Think of him as a
Martian thug
if you like, General Ritz. By all means, think of him as a
Martian thug
. I’m anxious to see where it gets you.

“Maybe Freeman thought of him as a
Martian thug
as well.”

I said, “Doesn’t matter if he’s a gangster or the patron saint of warlords. He wouldn’t—he couldn’t—have survived a visit from Freeman without organized help.”

“Ah, well, on that we agree.” That was when Pugh told me everything . . . including things that Freeman didn’t know. Petrie had run the docks on Mars. His men ate and worked while everyone else sat and festered.

The Unifieds had allied themselves with the biggest thug,
I thought. They would have supplied him with weapons and bodies when he needed them.

Ritz said, “He’s still just a local thug.”

“He doesn’t scare me, either, but the Unifieds do,” I said. “If they think they’ve got a shot at Freeman, this is going to be an all-out war.”

Location: Guanajuato, New Olympian Territories
Date: July 30, 2519

When he shined a light instead of using the night-for-day vision in his goggles, the walls of the mine were mostly tan and yellow, approximately the same the color of sawdust. Little clusters of crystals sparkled from the rock. Rough-hewn, with rounded ceilings, a thin skin of dirt and dust on the ground, stairs carved out of the same rock that formed the walls, shafts that dropped straight down to unseen depths, and darkness—seeing his surroundings, Freeman knew that fear would paralyze him if he let his thoughts wander, so he tightened his grip on his thoughts.

Some parts of the mine looked a thousand years old, crumbling knee-high offshoots that Freeman couldn’t possibly have entered even if he stripped off his clothes and slathered himself with grease. Some of the newer tributaries looked wide enough and strong enough to accommodate a tank.

The main hub of the mine was as wide and as tall as a gymnasium, with walls that shot twenty feet straight up. In one corner, shrouded in dust and cobwebs, sat an abandoned office, its door hanging open, its picture-window walls so covered in dust that they were the same color as the ground below them. A skein of cables and wires ran from the top of the office and disappeared into a pipe that had been driven into the ceiling.

Freeman harbored no doubts that men had died here, maybe even hundreds of them. He suspected that a thousand workers had watched their minds erode as they spent day after day trapped in the darkness and claustrophobia. He would not allow himself to become the mine’s latest victim.

Not far from the office, Freeman found racks of ancient equipment, and farther still, an enormous generator. The machinery was a snarl of pipes and motors, seven feet tall and twenty feet long, and covered in dust. Exhaust pipes as straight and thick as Grecian columns rose from the heart of the contraption and vanished into the ceiling.

He placed a sensor under the large cylinder, which must have held fuel sometime in the past. The sensor noted motion and lumen fluctuation; it also included a chip that recorded and analyzed audio and intercepted radio signals.

Freeman reached an arm through a gap in the machinery. He placed a remote charge against the side of a heavy motor. Walking around the generator, he placed two more charges deep inside the tangle of pipes and wires. The generator might have weighed six tons, it might have weighed eight; Freeman hoped the force of his charges would ricochet against the solid rock wall, launching the generator across the chamber. Depending on the condition of the structure, it might even blow the generator apart, sending pipes and bolts and fragments of ancient metal through the air like shrapnel.

The charges might bring down the house, but Freeman doubted it. The walls and ceiling were solid.

Freeman moved on. His goggles let him see through the darkness, but they did nothing more. The Unifieds, if they sent their Marines, would have combat visors—smart equipment that, in Freeman’s experience, was often smarter than the men using it. If they utilized all the tools in their helmets, they would be able to run sonar scans to find weak spots in the floors and hollow pockets in the walls. They’d find his charges and detect his sensors.

In this empty old mine, every floor, ceiling, and doorway was a risk. If the Unifieds brought all the right equipment, they would be able to analyze the tunnels to see where they led. They wouldn’t even need to enter the mine. They could send hunter drones that would locate Freeman by the noise of his breathing and his heartbeat.

Weak walls and crumbling floors wouldn’t bother the drones; some flew through the air, and others weighed less than a pound. Freeman hoped the Unifieds would start out by sending drones. Seeing their drones destroyed sometimes scared the humans out of following.

He walked down a staircase that had been carved into a solid rock floor. Reasoning that the floors would be weakest in their center, Freeman pressed against the walls.

A message appeared in his goggles, warning him that the motion sensors he had placed up near the entrance had detected motion and sound. Before he checked the findings, the message flashed and went dead.

The Unifieds might have destroyed the sensors, or they might have blocked all communications frequencies as a precaution.

The ceiling became lower as Freeman pressed ahead. By this time, his sprained ankle had seized so badly that instead of stepping, he now dragged the foot. He felt dizzy and slightly nauseated, and his breathing grew heavier.

In the opening days of the war between the clones and the Unified Authority, the Unifieds had tried to crush the rebellion by sending Marines to a planet called Terraneau. The U.A. Marines had hoped to fight Harris and his Marines in a traditional battle, but Harris outsmarted them. He lured their force into an underground parking lot attached to a subway station. Once he and his men had exited the structure through the station, he detonated the charges he had hidden in the parking lot, burying the U.A. troops under three stories of rubble.

That maneuver had stayed with Freeman, had influenced him to place the charges in the generator. If the Unifieds were sludging the airwaves, however, the charges would no longer work.

Using the gear in his goggles, Freeman sent the signal to detonate the charges. Nothing happened. The ground did not shake, the air remained still and silent, no flash disturbed the absolute darkness.

If a hunting party had entered the mines, they could no longer use drones. The same equipment that blocked the signals from his sensors would render the drones useless.

Here in the mine, Freeman had lost his sense of time. He didn’t know if he had been underground for an hour or a day. There was no sun, no sky, no shadows, just the variations of tan and yellow that formed into images in his goggles. The tunnel ahead was black. The walls were a bluish white. He passed posts and braces along the walls, some made of wood and others of metal. He looked for snake tracks on the ground but saw nothing. This deep in the mines, there would be little for snakes to eat. Sometimes he smelled ammonia and must in the air. Bats.

The smell of guano had made it hard to breathe in the first caverns he’d crossed. Now, though, he just caught a brief whiff of the bat shit. Bats wouldn’t venture this far into the mine unless they found a nearby exit.

He had no idea how long he had been in the mine or how far he had traveled when he heard the ground crack. As he limped forward looking for a safe spot, the floor disintegrated beneath him. Dust rose, and he plummeted, falling so quickly he wouldn’t have had time to reach for a railing if there had been one to grab. He fell backward, and his backpack struck a post or a wooden beam, something that splintered under his weight.

The fall lasted two or three seconds. He had no idea how far he had fallen. All he knew was that he landed on dust and rock, feetfirst, his legs buckled, and his knees struck the ground. Pain he could not ignore radiated up his thighs and into his spine. He grimaced but made no noise.

He was blind. The goggles had toppled from his head.

Taking a deep breath, he rolled into a crawling position and ran his fingers across the ground in search of his goggles. Freeman, who had never acknowledged his fears, now had to deal with rage and insanity. Neither would help him, but they might overwhelm him if he allowed it.

When he moved his leg, searing pain shot up from the ankle. The boot had become too tight, so tight that it now cut off any circulation into the foot. Soon he would need to cut the boot off his foot. If he didn’t, infection would set in, possibly gangrenous infection. Freeman had brought guns, goggles, charges, and a knife, but he hadn’t brought medicine or painkillers. Those, he had always believed, were the necessities of smaller men.

Freeman didn’t second-guess his decisions and mistakes as he searched the ground for his goggles. Patting the ground around him in an ever-expanding circle, he finally located the goggles laying with their eyepieces pointing up.

He brought the goggles to his mouth and blew the dust off them, then he slipped them over his eyes and realized that the worst had happened. They had broken when they hit the ground. Concentrating on what needed to be done instead of what had been lost, he tossed the goggles aside and forced himself to focus.

He started to pull the hand torch from the shoulder strap of his backpack, but he heard distant voices and let his hand drop. These would be the scouts, the stool pigeons. They would see the hole and most likely come to investigate. Would they drop down the hole? He wasn’t ready to make his stand, but if two men came, or three, or even five, Freeman would attack them.

For him, though, the darkness remained complete at that moment. He held a hand against the wall, limped forward as fast as he could, and hoped he had chosen a direction that would offer him cover. He couldn’t tell if he was walking deeper into the mines or toward stairs.

He grunted softly with each step. The ankle presented a problem. It was no longer just a sprain—bones had broken when he hit the ground. That much he could tell. He limped on another twenty feet before he found a ledge behind which he could hide. He discovered a deep alcove carved into the wall and stuffed himself in, stumbling over a pile of helmet-sized rocks, and there he sat. He pulled the flashlight from the shoulder strap, then shrugged off his backpack and felt inside it for his pistol.

He planned to save his rifle, his most favored weapon, for later. These were the scouts, he could handle them with a pistol, but he needed the scope from his rifle. He was blind without his goggles, and his options were few. He could start a fire or use the flashlight, but the glow would alert the enemy. His only other option was to remove the scope from his rifle.

As he tinkered with the bindings that held the scope in place, Freeman listened for the hunting party. He heard nothing but his own breathing. The acoustics in the mine stifled sound, drowning it the way a gallon of water would douse the flame on a match.

Time crawled on, and then he heard men speaking. The same sludging technology that blocked the signal from Freeman’s sensors and stopped him from detonating the charges now worked against the Unifieds. It blocked all interLink and radio signals. The only way they could communicate was by speaking. Apparently, a few of the men felt they had to shout to be heard.

One of the men said, “He went down that hole.”

His friend shouted the answer, “That’s a cave-in. If he went down there, he fell down.”

“Maybe he died.”

The scouts’ rappel tools purred softly as they paid out line.

Freeman gave up on removing the scope. It was a smart scope, a device that communicated with the rifle’s inner workings. To remove the scope, he would need to disconnect circuits as well as stanchion screws. Now that the hunters had arrived, he couldn’t risk giving his position away with a click or a scratch. Instead of removing the scope, he aimed the rifle in the direction from which he had come.

Looking through the scope, he could see the spot where he had landed, then tilted the rifle toward the roof of the cavern and spotted the hole through which he fell. He had fallen twenty feet, striking an old wooden crossbeam on his way down.

As he watched, three rappel lines rolled from the ceiling, looking like giant fishing lines. Keeping his scope trained on the lines, Freeman took a deep breath and tried to clear the pain from his thoughts. He had a harder time focusing now. It wasn’t just the pain; his mind kept drifting.

Removing his eye from the scope, he stared up at the ceiling, hoping the hunters would use flashlights. Nothing. Darkness. Total darkness.

It these men were Marines, they wouldn’t need flashlights. They’d have night-for-day lenses built into the visors.

He pressed his eye to the scope once more and waited until he saw three pairs of armored boots lower from the ceiling, then he leaned his back against the wall of the alcove. He drew in a deep breath and waited.

He would kill the scouts. With the airwaves sludged, they couldn’t call for assistance. The most they could do was leave a beacon to mark their path.

If they were Marines with Marine combat armor, Freeman would take one of their helmets. He would cut a groove in the back of the helmet so that he could fit it over his head. He’d done it before. With a working combat helmet, he would be able to see.

“Hey, check this out; there’s blood on the ground here!”

“Yeah, and a pair of goggles.”

“Hey, Sarge, there’s no doubt the speck came this way,” one of the Marines called in a loud voice. “He left some gear behind, there’s a whole lot of blood.”

Freeman considered the risks and the options. Three men had come down into the tunnel with him. He had no idea how many more watched from overhead. The clip in his rifle held twenty-five rounds, but the weapon was too slow and cumbersome for a close-range shoot-out.

“Man, that speck is bleeding like a stuck pig.”

“I don’t see blood.”

“Yeah. It’s hard to see it with night-for-day vision,” said one of the Marines. “Shine your light.”

By the time the light appeared, Freeman had already switched from his rifle to his pistol. Shining through the dusty dry air, the cone of illumination looked like an object, like a silver arrow, the broad end poised at the floor and the narrow end pointing at the target. Freeman fired his pistol.

The Marine dropped his flashlight as he died. It hit the ground, rolled a lazy half revolution, and inside its beam stood two Marines in combat armor. Freeman shot them, then waited in absolute silence to see what would follow. No more lines dropped from the ceiling; no one returned fire. Ten seconds passed. Twenty.

Willing himself to ignore the pain, Freeman gimp-stepped to the dead Marine and the fallen flashlight as quickly as he could. As he approached, he looked up at the ceiling and spotted a Marine staring down at him. Freeman shot him. He might have grazed the man or merely scared him away, but he didn’t think he had killed the bastard.