The Clone Assassin (38 page)

Location: Norfolk Naval Base, Virginia
Date: August 13, 2519

We had to strike the other underwater cities before the Unifieds figured out what happened to Quetzalcoatl. Hauser’s engineers spent the night getting a Manta ready for the mission, and I spent the night doing preparations of my own.

I dyed my hair blond, placed blue dye in my eyes, and glued a beard to my chin. Would people still recognize that I was a clone?

Ironically, my disguise made me look like what most clones were programmed to see when they looked in a mirror, except I was taller. I came armed with a sniper rifle and a pistol and a knife. Hauser’s engineers had also built a dirty bomb into the rear compartment of the Manta I was taking, just in case. If that little package went off, it would turn Gendenwitha into a highly radioactive bubble on the bottom of the sea.

The Manta sat on the water beside the dock, looking like a fighter jet designed by an engineer with a strange sense of humor. She had the same dart-shaped fuselage as a Tomcat, only it looked like her wings had been put on backward. They were broad at the front and tapered at the back. She was also a lot less sleek.

Most fighters only carried a lone pilot though a few carried a navigator as well. The Manta had tandem seats for a pilot and navigator along with tight accommodations for thirty-six passengers.

“You say you’ve tested this thing,” I said to the flight instructor.

“Ten hours’ worth,” he replied.

The three of us stood around the bird . . . fish; the third being Ritz. Quiet and stolid, he seemed to be in mourning for the Marines who’d died when we captured this boat.

“Did you recharge the batteries?” I asked. Did this thing even have batteries? More likely she ran on nuclear power, meaning I would be sitting in a miniature nuclear reactor with a second nuclear device, the dirty bomb, just a few feet away. Nukes spooked me—nukes had always spooked me. In another minute, I would pilot this nuclear-powered accident down into the depths.

Nukes spooked me, but that was a fear I could work around. My fear of the deep was not. Seeing the ocean had temporarily paralyzed me when I boarded the Turtle, and that didn’t involve diving under the surface. Now I was going down, down, down, and, frankly, my ability to perform might turn to mush. I suspected I could make it to Gendenwitha with most of my marbles, but I wouldn’t be in the right frame of mind for a delicate and dangerous op. Fortunately, I didn’t come empty-handed. When I explained my situation to a doctor in the base infirmary, he gave me something powerful to calm my nerves. Remembering the way I had frozen while I entered the Turtle, I hoped the pills rendered me unconscious.

We had to step on the wings to reach the hatch. I noticed that the bottoms of the wings were deep beneath the water. “Why are the wings so thick?” I asked.

“They’re not wings. They’re ballast tanks,” said the instructor. “This isn’t like flying, you won’t need wings to stay afloat.”

“What do they do?” I asked. I was nervous. Even stepping off the dock bothered me.

The water was a chalky, bluish green. The Manta was a steel-colored tube. The sky was gray. Everything looked dismal.

“Ballast tanks? You fill them with water to make the boat heavier; that’s how you make her go down.”

“How do I make the boat lighter again?” I asked.

“By flushing out the water.”

“Won’t I need that air?” I asked.

“You’ll have plenty of air, General.”

I was not entirely ignorant. Hoping to combat my nervousness, I had done some reading. One of the differences between the ships that went into space and the ones that went to the bottom of the sea was the kind of pressure they endured. In space, the pressure came from inside the ship, and the hull was designed to contain it. Undersea vessels had more to deal with; by the time I reached Gendenwitha, this Manta would have thousands of pounds of water pressing down on her every square inch.

I stepped on the wing, then on the spine, and into the hatch.

The interior of the Manta was reinforced with steel ribs.

“Admiral Hauser says you have misgivings about going underwater,” said the instructor.

Yeah, he gossips like an old witch,
I thought.

“Did he?” I asked. I hadn’t told him about my phobias, but Don Cutter may have. Cutter knew about them because he was the officer in charge when I disappeared on Mars. He’d also temporarily relieved me of command and ordered me to undergo psychiatric evaluation.

Once he knew he’d be taking Cutter’s seat, Hauser would have gone through his files. He would have read all about me and my psychological inventory; the son of a bitch probably knew things I didn’t know.

“You’re going to enter the city through a moon pool. Are you familiar with the term, General?” asked the flight instructor.

I nodded. I knew what a moon pool was, and the very thought of it played havoc with my phobias.

Moon pools were holes in the understructure of oceanic architecture. Instead of having enclosed docking bays like spaceports, the underwater cities had holes in their floors. The holes didn’t allow water in because the cities had highly pressurized atmospheres that canceled out the pressure of the water.

The flight instructor said, “General, it takes a great deal of pressure to force the water out at depths like the ones you will be entering. It will take your body nearly a full day to adjust to that pressure and another day to readjust before you can return to the surface.”

I remembered an old term I’d heard in school. I asked, “Are you sticking me in a hyperbaric chamber?”

He shook his head, and said, “The submarine will take care of that. Her atmosphere is computerized and self-adjusting. You’ve got a long, slow ride ahead of you, sir. There’s really no way around it.”

I reminded myself that this man was a flight instructor, not a deep-sea diver. Anything he knew about decompression and submarines was nearly as new to him as it was to me.

He spent a few minutes going over the controls, and that was really all the time we needed. The instructor didn’t teach me how to “fly” the Manta; the boat piloted herself—type in the destination, and her computers handled the rest. She knew when to fill her ballast tanks and when to purge them. Her communications gear was no different than the gear in our spaceships except that signals couldn’t travel millions of miles underwater. Any messages I sent or received would be short-range.

That was good. The shorter the range, the better as far as I was concerned. I didn’t want the Unifieds asking me to identify myself as I drifted toward their base.

It’s funny how phobias play with your mind. Death did not bother me; oceans did.

The flight instructor left, but Ritz remained behind. He said, “Harris, maybe I should come with you.”

I said, “I appreciate the offer, General, but I’d rather go alone.”

He said, “You’re scared, aren’t you? Are you scared of Nailor or the ocean?”

“Tough choice,” I said. “I generally spend vacations on a beach, and Nailor, he’s just a tiny speck. I could . . .”

“Nailor shot you and left you for dead. I don’t know about your vacations, but I heard about the way you acted when you boarded the Turtle. I heard you were scared of the water.”

“Is that what you heard?” I asked, noting how precisely he had hit both nails on the head.

“Yes, sir. That’s what I heard.”

I decided to change the subject. “How about you?” I asked. “You’ve been acting like you’re at a funeral. You’re dressing like an officer bucking for promotion. I don’t know if you noticed, Ritz, but you just called me ‘sir.’”

“General, we lost most of the First of the First rescuing Freeman. Fifteen thousand clones died yesterday. Fifteen thousand. I told you we wouldn’t bring them back alive, and we didn’t. The only thing those boys did wrong was breathe. They didn’t even know about the possibility of reprogramming when the Unified Authority caught them.”

“It’s not my . . .”

“No, General, it’s not your fault. But they still died, and the killing isn’t over. Maybe you’ll survive this mission, maybe you won’t. I get the feeling you don’t care.

“So maybe we’ll survive this war, and maybe we won’t. We’ve become a disposable empire. We’re throwing away good men to hold on to a planet that doesn’t want us because we don’t have anyplace else to go.

“That’s what I saw when we were in the mountains. I saw good men dying in a fight they’d already lost.”

Thank you for the cheerful good-bye,
I thought.
He’s all done,
I thought. When an officer goes into a funk like that, you can’t leave him in command. I thought about bringing him with me, but moods like his were absolutely contagious, so I thanked him for his offer and told him to go ashore.

Then I took my medicine and hit the autopilot. The sooner I conked out, the happier I would be.

As I waited for the drugs to make the phobias go away, I told myself that the launch would be the worst part of the trip, floating helpless, staring out across the docks, worrying about what to expect. My fears played havoc with my brain, leading me to see dark shapes under the water that weren’t really there. I imagined fins slicing across the surface and reminded myself that a shark would kill itself before it could harm this boat with her thick hull. Any shark that bit the Manta would end up with shattered teeth.

Logic and phobia exist on different planes. They are as alien as dinosaurs and angels and just as unlikely to interact.

The trip to the city would be long. I had over a thousand miles to travel before I reached Gendenwitha, and the Manta topped out somewhere around fifty miles per hour. Twenty hours, I hoped to sleep through it. Even if Nailor was down there, no one was guaranteeing that he would wait around until I arrived.

This is a mistake,
I thought, and I wanted to call it off.

In the distance, dockworkers loaded crates onto transports. Two APCs sat on a large landing pad. They were a welcome sight. I wouldn’t need to sail this fish all the way back to Norfolk when I returned from Gendenwitha. Hauser was sending those amphibious personnel carriers to retrieve me and the spy equipment he had loaned me.

I didn’t know if Hauser planned to sail the Manta back to port or sink her, and I truly didn’t care.

As if piloted by a ghost, the Manta’s autopilot engaged, and she pulled away from the dock and headed out of the harbor. My heart pounding loud and fast, my lungs swelling as they tried to hoard every breath, my head aching, I forced myself to check the gauges. My heart sank when I saw a gauge indicating that the ballast tanks had started to fill with water.

At some point before the Manta started her long dive, I began talking to myself. The submarine had a plastiscreen up front, and that was the only viewing port on the boat. Once we left the harbor, she started her descent. Water and sky were the only things I could see, and soon the sky disappeared. This was a dark operation, so I didn’t have radio communications.

“I specking hate this,” I said. A moment later, I added, “The speck am I doing here?”

Since there was no one else to respond to the question, I answered myself. I said, “This was your idea, asshole. Please tell me you’re not losing your nerve.”

Then I thought,
Shit, I’m talking to myself.

This would have been a good time to spot Gendenwitha. It didn’t happen that way. The submarine spent the next forty minutes hovering ten feet below the surface while she finished filling her ballast tanks. During that time, I pulled my rifle out of its case and field stripped it.

Obeying some logical impulse that now escaped me, I had elected to take a sniper rifle with me on this op. With a base accuracy of fifteen hundred yards, this was a great weapon for snipers and hunters, and a shitty choice for indoor combat. From stock to muzzle, the rifle was forty-four inches long, too big for concealment.

“You know why you brought this,” I chided myself out loud. I did know why, though I didn’t want to admit it to myself. “You didn’t come for recon. You came here to assassinate the bastard.”

The bastard, of course, was Franklin Nailor, but I’d have happily killed Tobias Andropov or any other Unified Authority war criminals I happened to see while I was down there.

I was getting sleepy. I told myself it was the medicine that had me talking to myself. Maybe it was.

A plastic button on the pilot’s yoke lit a pale red and a Klaxon purred a single, lengthy note. I stood in the doorway, holding that rifle, staring at the glowing button, knowing what it meant, and no longer caring. We were about to dive whether I was ready or not.

This boat didn’t need me to reach her destination. I was a passenger; I had no more control over this rig than a flea has over a dog. Something beeped, something else buzzed. I didn’t care. The Manta shuddered, and my brain drifted, drifted, drifted because of the medicine.

The stuff the doctor gave me never quite knocked me out. I fell in and out of sleep. When I felt the urge to use the bathroom, I walked to the head. When I was done, I curled up in the nearest seat. At some point, I went back into the cockpit and stared into the dark depths ahead. I recognized their endlessness, and thought,
Oh shit, I hate going down there.
That was the extent of it. No sweat. No fear. No combat reflex.

Twenty hours, thirty hours, I no longer cared how long the trip would take. I hadn’t brought books, but I was in no shape to read them anyway. I should have been bored. Time passed slowly, but now that I had luded, time no longer mattered. Medicinal magic.

I sat at the plastiscreen, staring out into the darkness as I had so many times on spacecraft. Space is not dark in the way so many people imagine it. Space is clear. There are billions of stars in our galaxy; after some fashion, each one is or was a sun. You may find yourself in a five-hundred-million-mile stretch in which there is no sunlight, but there are suns and stars in every direction that you look. In the ocean, there are no stars at all.

The Manta didn’t have headlights. She didn’t need them. Her computers saw through darkness using sounds and magnetic detection. At some point, the Manta would make contact with Gendenwitha. What happened after that was anybody’s guess.

Anybody monitoring their traffic control would probably have questions as my Manta sailed toward their moon pool. I would need to be alert. That didn’t scare me, though. The drugs didn’t slur my speech or leave me disoriented. Even after I started waking from the haze, the medicine left me feeling calm. My not being worried probably should have worried me, but I wasn’t feeling any pain at that moment.

I remained in the pilot’s chair, searching for sea monsters. No recognizable life-forms swam past, though I did see a galaxy of tiny phosphorous lights in the distance. They might have been plants or chemical bubbles or fish with lanterns on their heads.

At some point, my fears started to return, like blood reentering a limb that has fallen asleep. The phobias started as a tingle, a distant ache that remained in the background, making too much noise to ignore. With time, the panic came clawing back.

I fidgeted in my seat. I pulled out my pistol, an S9, and checked the clip. It held a depleted uranium wafer, good for hundreds of fragmentlike fléchettes. I would have stripped it for the distraction, but then I saw something in the distance and stopped.

Lights shone along Gendenwitha’s outer dome, revealing an enormous convex surface that was too regular to have occurred in nature. Those lights didn’t illuminate the entire structure, just scattered patches. From what I saw, Gendenwitha was larger than a school, larger than a shopping mall, larger than a military base. As the Manta approached, I willed myself to calm down, taking deep drags of the cold, recirculated air and holding them in my lungs.

I expected some traffic-control goon to appear on a monitor, but, apparently, undersea runways didn’t operate like the ones in space. Seemingly of her own volition, the Manta dropped below the lights and passed under the dome.

As the Manta passed under the city, I twisted my neck so that I could stare up through the plastiscreen. The city stretched on for acres and acres, with shimmering circles that shone bright white like stars; I realized they must be the moon pools. The pools were round, perfectly round, and I discovered they were enormously wide as the Manta passed below one. Nothing was visible through most of the moon pools, but we coasted past one in which I saw the silhouettes of five Mantas parked side by side.

Because of its immense size, I couldn’t see all the way across Gendenwitha, and any maps of the city had been destroyed when the Unifieds blasted the Archive building.

I realized that I was trying to judge the shape of a forest by its trees. I had reviewed an internal map of Gendenwitha before boarding the Manta, but that hardly prepared me for what I saw. I could not, for instance, tell what held the city in place. It might have stood on one enormous column like a giant mushroom. It might have had eight legs like a spider. For all I knew, the Manta might have entered a single enormous tunnel, and the rest of the city might have been built into the ground.

Portions of the ground beneath the city reflected the white and yellow light that shone from the moon pools in a gleam of silver. It was as if chrome-skinned hills lined the ocean floor. It took me a moment to figure the riddle out: The Unifieds had parked their Turtles down there.

The Manta traveled past several empty moon pools, then changed direction and rose toward one in which three other Mantas waited.

As we approached, rising toward the light, I stashed my rifle on the floor beside the pilot’s chair. I strapped my knife to the inside of my right calf and flipped my pant leg over it. I was dressed like a U.A. sailor, wearing the dark slacks and button-up blouse of their service uniform.

My hands were damp. They left moisture prints on the arms of my chair. I breathed a sigh of relief as the Manta inched into place beside the other subs, and the cockpit emerged into the air. Water dribbled down the plastiscreen, but the area the submarine had entered was dry and brightly lit.