The Clone Assassin (40 page)

“We brought you here from Mars,” he said.

“Here?” I asked.

“Not this city, one like it. We have a lot of cities.”

“From Mars . . . the brainwashing,” I said. “You were in on that?”

“Harris, I’ve seen you cry like a baby. I’ve seen you so scared you filled your pants. I know when you’re scared. You’re scared right now.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Good thing I’ve got the gun.”

The little bastard had gotten under my skin. He stood there with that confident smirk on his face, as he said, “If you’re so tough, why don’t you put it down?”

“Put down the gun?”

“That’s right, tough guy, put down the gun, and we can fight man-to-man, a fair fight.”

I didn’t respond. I just stood there, silent and watchful, the muzzle of my S9 pointed at his face.
Are you scared?
I wondered, not really sure if I was mentally checking on his state or mine. He showed no signs of fear, but there was a curious twitch in his eye. Out of the corner of my vision, I noticed the subtlest of movements. It wasn’t a person, just a shadow. I noticed the way the contours of the shadows shifted, but it meant nothing until I heard the swish of the pneumatic door.

I wasn’t caught off guard and the big fellow charging through the door did not have the element of surprise, but he forced me to show my back to Nailor for a crucial split second. I turned, fired three fléchettes into the bull-necked bastard’s face, and felt Nailor’s foot crash into my lower thigh before I could turn back to address him.

That was a smart move on his part. He didn’t have a clean shot at my groin or my neck or even my head, but by kicking in the back of knee, he caused my leg to buckle, and he followed up with a swift elbow across my head that sent me to the floor.

The sense of déjà vu overwhelmed me, only now it felt more like prophecy than memory . . . me lying flat on my ass, feeling dazed and confused, him standing over me, once again bigger than life. I had the gun, but his elbow had smashed me behind the ear, and my reflexes had slowed. He kicked the gun out of my hand before I had the sense to aim it, then he kicked me across the jaw, and lights popped in my head.

I felt a moment of paralysis. It probably was fear, but after everything I’d been through, it might have been fatigue as well. Even with a slow-starting combat reflex, I was tired, weak, indecisive . . . beat.

Nailor laughed and kicked me, the point of his shoe digging into my ribs. The little bastard drew back his right leg to kick me again. I spun on my ass and kicked his left foot out from under him. As he fell, I shot my foot between his legs and stamped with my heel. I don’t know if I hit his unit. If I did, I crushed it. I hit the joint where the thighs connect with the pelvis, and something broke.

Nailor let out a noise between a roar and a squeal. He sat up on his elbows and tried to pull himself away. Our eyes locked. I saw fear in his. He would have seen nothing in mine. There was nothing behind my eyes at that moment, not hate, not fear, and nothing remotely related to compassion. I would just as happily have beaten him to death or snapped his neck, but the S9 was closer, so I picked it up and shot him twice, once in the neck and once in the face. The fléchettes passed through him and lodged themselves in the floor.

A long, thin stream of blood squirted from the wound in his throat. His mouth hung open as if he wanted to hurl one final insult. He might have been gasping for air when my second shot hit him in the left eye and bored through his brain.

When a kill is close and intimate, I often read the final truths in the dying man’s expression. What I saw in Franklin Nailor’s face was surprise. Right up to the moment that I squeezed the trigger, he hadn’t expected me to shoot. Even after he attacked me, he must have thought I would be too scared to defend myself.

Blood dripped out of his head and throat. Using his blouse and trousers for handles, I dragged him and his bull-necked friend to a waste compartment. The big guy was a clumsy lift, and I felt weak as I hoisted his bulky corpse to the top of the compartment and tipped him in. He nearly filled the compartment.

I lifted Nailor and crammed him in headfirst. His neck snapped as I folded his back and legs down over his head to fit him in, then I tore off Nailor’s trousers and blouse, and used them to sop up the blood from the floor. The cloth was silky and stiff, made to resist moisture, not to absorb it. The blood smeared. I turned the trousers inside out and they sponged up most of the mess. Taking a quick glance through the window, no one would notice the stains on the floor. I left so little blood, anyone sent to investigate might think that some tech had cut his hand.

I opened the trash bin and loaded the bloody rags on top of their dead owner. Nailor was naked and lying ass-end up, humiliated in death in ways that he could never have been in life. So many things passed through my head as I saw him there, a crushed insect, the menace now evaporated out of him. No witticism left my lips. Seeing him there, the enemy who had left me buried in a mountain, now folded and exposed, I felt no relief, just a sense of emptiness.

And, of course, now that my ribs were bruised and my homicidal deed was done, the strip on the encryption bandit was green. Had it been green a few minutes earlier, I might have been ready when Nailor walked into the room. Silent and morose, I removed the encryption bandit and pushed the terminal back into its slot.

It struck me as odd. Nothing was broken. The computers stood straight and tall as ever, forming a perfect wall. You had to look for the bloodstains on the floor to find them, and the bodies were stashed in a closed compartment, buried under a layer of paper and coffee cups; yet, there was still this unmistakable air suggesting that something had happened.

 • • • 

I slipped out of the building and retraced my path. These were the desperate moments, the time when things go wrong. So much could happen. The grunts at the moon pool might look inside my Manta and spot my rifle, some tech might wander into the information-systems area and pull out the trash, the
encryption bandit
could have triggered a silent alarm, or someone could see me and realize I was a clone.

I had entered Gendenwitha as a spy and an assassin, roles that do not come naturally to Marines. We shoot, we storm, we protect. We don’t steal, and we don’t carry out vendettas . . . at least we’re not supposed to.

I turned down one empty street, then down the next, always listening for the sound of alarms. This was a city under the sea, locking it down wouldn’t take much. Only a skeleton crew now manned this post, but there were enough men to kill me if they trapped me. Strangely, I cared about getting away. I, who had given up on life, now wanted to survive.

I reached the domed wall that separated the city from the moon pool. Before entering, I turned back and looked at the city. In another hour or two, Hauser’s bombers would release torpedoes into these waters. The dome around this city would shatter, burying the world behind me in depths so black that only glowing fish could survive them.

It shall be a habitation of dragons and a court of owls,
I thought. A Biblical passage remembered by a synthetic man who had a life but no soul. Maybe death goes better for those without souls. When I died, I would sleep untroubled by my sins. At the moment of his death, Franklin Nailor might have tried to wish his soul away.

I had hoped that killing Nailor would come with some sense of closure. It didn’t. As I entered the gloomy underworld environ that surrounded the moon pool, my knees went weak. My heart pounded, and my breathing sped so fast that I barely absorbed any oxygen from my lungs.

Panic. Marines cannot afford to give in to panic.

The corridor wound around the wall of the moon pool and wended on, a wraith of a path and barely lit. In my mind’s eye, it led to a torture chamber in which men lay on racks, and bodies lay stacked like cordwood on the floor.
He said you were brainwashed here or someplace like it,
I reminded myself. Maybe that image was a relic from an erased memory.

I walked past the door to the moon pool, slipping by quickly, not even sparing a backward glance.
Marines exorcise their demons,
I told myself.
Carry them with you into battle, and you endanger the men who depend on you.

I walked to the end of the hall and discovered a maze of smaller hallways that led . . . I was pushing my luck. Sooner or later they would discover Nailor.
What will I accomplish by finding the place where I was tortured?
I asked myself.
Will that make the demons go away?

By this time I had entered the maze, and I found that I knew the way through it. I didn’t find labs or torture chambers on the other side. I found a brig. I found a row of holding cells for criminals.

Memories as jagged as shattered glass danced in my head. The images cut at my brain, a pain that felt every bit as real as a knife in the gut. Mostly I saw myself locked in a cell, lying on a cot, paralyzed and terrified, watching some sort of drama that would determine . . . was it my ego or my id that refused to release more information? All I could remember was a choice, one fate meant pain and the other meant death. Both came with humiliation.

Nailor had been there. I heard him shouting my name. I heard him taunting me.
You killed him too quickly,
I told myself.

Coming this far hadn’t exorcised my demons, it had empowered them. The door at the other end of the hall led to the labs, the torture chambers, the place where the brainwashing had occurred.

I stared at the door, took a long deep breath, and turned around. Maybe I could have freed myself by continuing on. Or maybe the demons would have whittled my psyche down to sawdust and sticks.

Hauser and his navy waited for my signal. They wouldn’t wait forever. Unless I gave them a compelling reason to stay their hand, they would destroy Gendenwitha. Bombers now circled all eleven Cousteau cities, ready to wipe out these centuries-old marvels of engineering with a single swipe.

It looked to me as if Hauser’s attack would destroy nearly empty anthills from which the armies’ ants were gone. The Unifieds had cleared nearly all of their men out of Gendenwitha though they hadn’t abandoned the old city. I suspected the other cities sat empty as well. What other territories had those bastards infiltrated?

I entered the moon-pool area. It was cold; my breath immediately turned to steam. The workers were still there.

One of them looked at me. He asked, “Still can’t find your jacket?”

He was a nice guy, a friendly guy. I wanted to let him live.

I shook my head, and asked, “Can you believe it?”

“Hey? What happened to your face? Did you fall down?”

Maybe Nailor had hit me, or, possibly, I hit my face when I fell. I said, “I tripped on some stairs.”

The son of a bitch was a natural-born who had joined the Unified Authority, and that made him the enemy, but I really did not feel like killing him. I had nothing against him, and he would die soon enough without my pulling the trigger.
Let the son of a bitch go as long as he can,
I told myself.

He said, “You’re the only guy I ever seen come here without a jacket and gloves.”

I smiled, and said, “It’s warm enough in the Manta.”

He stood up straight and his eyes narrowed. The friendliness left his voice. “Where exactly are you taking her?” he asked.

I made one final attempt to grant him a reprieve. I said, “I’m taking her to Washington.”

“Washington?” he asked. “You got orders for that, pal?”

He sounded more sarcastic than suspicious. It didn’t matter. I shot him. I shot the two men working beside him as well. I shot them and left them where they lay, on the cold, metal floor. By this time it no longer mattered if anybody found them. I had made it to my boat. I had escaped.

I pulled myself up onto the catwalk and let myself into my Manta. Once I had sealed her and pressed the right buttons, she slid under the surface. Still struggling to control my fear of water, I took in the sights as my submarine glided beneath the city. I studied the great disc of her floor, a giant circle spotted with moon pools with rows of white and yellow lights.

I realized that the vista was a thing of beauty and symmetry. For each light on one side of the great disc, there would be a similar light on the opposite side. Perfect symmetry. I thought about the crystal formations in snowflakes.
Are they as perfect as this?
I asked myself. My thoughts turned to civilizations long gone.

Once the Manta passed from under Gendenwitha, no person would see those lights again. It was an undersea galaxy, and soon it would be extinguished. I wished my fears would go with it. As the Manta emerged from under the city, I felt the ocean close in around me. The pounds per square inch that the Manta was fighting were nothing compared to the PSI in my head.

Killing Nailor had gotten me nowhere.

So what did you get out of it?
I asked myself. I wanted to say I would sleep more easily. That bastard had tortured me and played with my brain. He’d nearly killed Freeman. The world had been made a safer place by Franklin Nailor’s death. At least mine had.

I searched through my things and pulled out the little vial of pills that would see me to the surface. I took the pills and hoped they’d do their work quickly.

As the Manta slid into the empty abyss, my thoughts turned to Hell. I thought about canyons of sulfur filled with buttes and volcanic geysers. I thought about demons with horns and cloven feet that tortured victims beyond the boundaries of insanity.
A terrible fate,
I thought, but it didn’t frighten me as much as the hell at the bottom of the ocean.

So this was where I learned my fear of deep water. They had brought me here and taught me to fear Franklin Nailor and giant squid and sharks. I searched for whales and squid and other unearthly creatures, spotted tiny flowing lights in the distance, but nothing that looked alive.

I was already starting to get drowsy when I loaded the encryption bandit into a little beacon buoy, a bullet-shaped container about the size of my forearm.
You’ll see the sun before I do,
I thought. The brass cylinder didn’t know sun from darkness, but I did. I’d seen too much darkness. How long ago had I been trapped in that mine? Now I was three miles under the Atlantic.

“Darkness.”
The word ran through me, and I thought about Nailor, folded upside down, dead and naked. I was glad I had killed him. In my heart of hearts, I wished I could murder him a second time the way some people believed that the demons of Hell killed and reassembled their victims.
Maybe he has a twin,
I told myself. My thoughts had become dreamlike.

I placed the beacon buoy into a tube and launched it.

The buoy didn’t need to decompress. It would rise like a rocket to the surface, where Hunter Ritz waited on an APC to collect it. Ritz would personally deliver the encryption bandit to Hauser.

What secrets would it reveal?

The Manta rose quickly. I would be trapped in her for fifteen hours, but that didn’t mean I had to spend those hours on the ocean floor. I needed to be clear of Gendenwitha when the bombers dropped their nuclear-tipped torpedoes. I was far away . . . far, far away. I sat in the pilot’s chair and nearly slept.