The Clone Sedition (44 page)

It was the end. The transports would land twenty thousand infantrymen. They would have tanks and mortars and gunships and fighters. Ritz toyed with the idea of not warning his men…letting them die celebrating victory. The moment he warned them, they would dig in for a fight they could not possibly win.

They’re good men,
he thought.
They won’t go down without a fight.
But how much of a fight could his remaining two thousand Marines put up against an entire division?

“Are you getting this, General?”

No answer.

“Tell you what, Harris,” said Ritz. He laughed. It was the end, he might as well go down smiling. He repeated himself. “I’ll tell you what, Harris. Me and my men are going to go down fighting. We’ll hold those bastards off as long as we can.”

The transports dropped through the atmosphere quickly. The commanding officers on those birds would give their men one last speech in which they would instruct them to take no quarter.

“Good luck, Harris,” said Ritz. He didn’t worry about Harris, nothing short of a nuclear explosion would kill that clone.
No person alive could kill Harris, not even Ray Freeman,
he thought.

Colonel Ritz used the interLink to contact his Marines. He said, “I hope you boys saved some spare rounds.” That was all he said.

Something caught his attention.

Two swarms of ships launched from the direction of the Air Force base. They were small ships. From where Ritz stood, they looked like the tiny silver fish you could catch in a stream. He knew they were the explorers, of course. Those were the ships that had brought him and his Marines to Mars.

They emerged from behind the horizon. A few of them flew up into space, but most of them flew in an arc that led toward the transports from the
de Gaulle
. That was when the explosions began.

Had Ritz been a few miles closer, he might have gone blind.

Location: The
Churchill
Date: May 2, 2519

Cutter saw that the explorers had launched. He shouted, “What the hell is wrong with them!” He was an officer who prided himself on remaining calm in battle; now he was watching a suicide. The
de Gaulle
had not only entered the battle, she had launched her transports.

“Scramble every specking fighter!” Hauser shouted. “Attack
de Gaulle
!”

As the fighters launched, Hauser fired torpedoes even though the target was too far away.

If the explorer pilots want to commit suicide, there is nothing we can do,
Cutter told himself.
Maybe they have it right. The
de Gaulle
is launching transports. With two hundred ships in the air, some might escape. No one will escape on the ground.

He watched the display. Five of the tiny ships rose straight up, 202 explorers followed a path that took them high above the spaceport, where they would run into the transports.

The display showed the explorers as tiny specks, little helpless motes of silver that looked no more capable of defending themselves in holographic space than they were able to defend themselves in reality. The transports had powerful shields and hulls designed to withstand missiles. They did not have guns or torpedoes, but they would not need them to destroy a fleet of explorers. The transports could ram through them as if they were made of smoke.

On the display, the shining silver dots approached the red boxes that represented transports. When they were within a
mile of each other, the explorers dissolved in miniscule flashes of light.

“Holy hell, they’re broadcasting,” said Hauser.

The explorers had risen in a swarm, and they disappeared in a swarm. Two hundred tiny broadcasts erupted. Transports were made for war and able to withstand missiles and particle weapons, but not the sheer volume of energy unleashed by broadcast engines.

Cutter looked up from the display, and said, “Satellite view.”

Beside the tactical display, a large screen showed a video feed. A ghostly green ribbon wavered and shimmered in the Martian atmosphere. The sudden release of unbridled energy had triggered an aurora effect. On the dark surface of the planet, tiny sparks glowed like embers, the carcasses of fallen transports.

Cutter looked back at the holographic display. The ship he called the
Toothless
had broadcasted out. He had no idea where she had gone and no way of tracking her. She might have broadcasted to Terraneau, in the Scutum-Crux Arm. He did not air his suspicion.

About one hundred thousand miles away, the
de Gaulle
stood her ground, but not for long.

Cutter asked, “Who is the captain of the
de Gaulle
?”

“Meade, sir. Alan Meade,” said Lieutenant Nolan. He had looked it up on his computation pad.

“Send Captain Meade a message. Tell him that I don’t give a damn if he and his men want to commit suicide, but I want my ship back. Tell him if he surrenders the
de Gaulle
now, he might be out in time to enjoy his grandchildren.”

The sailors on the bridge who heard Cutter laughed. Meade was a clone, incapable of reproduction without the use of test tubes and lab equipment.

Everybody laughed; but the sailors who suspected they might be clones themselves laughed more nervously than those around them.

“They’re not responding, sir,” said Nolan.

The
de Gaulle
sat silent and still until the
Lancet
and the
Christy
flew into tracking range.

“Give Meade one last chance to surrender,” said Cutter.

Before Nolan could relay the message, the
de Gaulle
launched into space at maximum acceleration.

Hauser started to instruct his helmsmen to follow her, but Cutter silenced him. He said, “The
de Gaulle
does not have a broadcast engine. She isn’t going anywhere.”

Earth was surrounded by the fleets of the Enlisted Man’s Navy. Jupiter was five hundred million miles away and uninhabitable. At the speeds the
de Gaulle
could travel, the closest planet of strategic value was over a century away.

Cutter said, “We need to stay here in case more guests arrive.” He settled back in his seat, then added, “Let me know when we have contact with the spaceport. If I know Harris, that could be anytime now.”

Location: Mars SpaceportDate: May 2, 2519

Someone had turned off the lights. That didn’t change things, I had night-for-day lenses in my visor. I had heat vision that allowed me to peek through corners when I could not see around them. The walls down in this area were made of steel and cement, thick enough that they might mask a heat signature, but they would not hide it entirely.

The night-for-day lenses in my visor showed the world devoid of depth and color, with everything in striations from black to white with a bluish hue. Emergency lights glowed so brightly over signs that they rendered them unreadable through my visor. Halls that stretched unlit for more than two hundred feet looked like black holes. The pipes and fixtures that lined the ceiling looked all to have been painted the exact same color. Seen with the naked eye, they might have been yellow and white and pink for all I knew; but through night-for-day vision, they all looked bluish white.

I searched the first hall at a slow speed, coasting ahead carefully, searching open doorways and finding no one. I’d been in the underground for maybe five minutes before noticing Ritz’s prolonged silence. His name appeared on my commandLink; but when I tried to reach him, I did not connect.

Somebody was sludging again.

Whoever was doing the sludging, I thought he would also be the one who sent Riley and all of the security force after Watson and Freeman.

Walking alone through dark, empty halls, I had an odd sense of déjà vu, and not a kind one. I felt the same crippling sense of dread I had felt when I stared into the ocean back in Hawaii.

The spaceport’s water and a third of its oxygen came from the same source. Beneath the spaceport sat huge veins of underground ice. The Unified Authority had created a robotic underground mining operation that harvested that ice and shuttled it into the building using subterranean tunnels. The ice was melted and filtered. Some was sent to a plant in which the hydrogen and oxygen molecules were separated. The Os were fed into the spaceport ventilation system while the Hs were released into the atmosphere.

The machinery in those plants was old, powerful, and as reliable as a chemical latrine. I had heard somewhere that the Oxygen Separation Plant was fifty years old and still used the same machinery. A low thrumming rose from the blast chambers in which the Hs were separated from the Os. I was a thousand feet from the plant, but I could feel the vibrations in the floor.

A man hid behind a doorway up ahead. I spotted him with my heat vision. All I saw was his specter, a figure in glowing orange and yellow, crouching, holding something long and straight. It could have been a rifle, it could have been a pipe.

He was a smart man. He would be in the door of the oxygen plant when we met. I would not fire my weapon into those old relics, not unless I wanted to risk killing millions.

I thought about the toxic atmosphere leaking into the spaceport through the air locks. I thought about…

That was when I saw his friends. In all, four men attacked from four different directions, a classic ambush. I would have seen it was coming had I read the lay of the land.

Three of them came at me from behind as the fourth man swung around the corner. I heard the footsteps, spun, fired my M27, and dropped two of them. The third man fired his pistol, grazing my left shoulder, causing a moment of numbness followed by fire. I fired at the bastard, hit him in the face with three bullets, hollowing the back of his head with the first.

The guy coming from the Oxygen Separation Plant slammed the butt of his rifle into the back of my head. Bullets and shrapnel could penetrate my helmet, but knives and rifle butts never got through. He hit me a good one, though. Had I not been wearing combat armor, he would have broken my neck and shattered my skull.

Despite my armor, the force of the blow sent me face-first into a wall, and I dropped my M27.

I hit the wall, slumped to the floor, and recovered my senses all in the same second. My head hurt, and my shoulder burned, and my combat reflex kicked into full gear. I no longer gave a shit about pain or shoulder wounds or blast chambers. The haze went from my thoughts, and the need for violence returned.

The man spun his rifle around and aimed it at my head. At the same time, he clipped a foot across my M27, kicking it backward so that it slid across the floor toward the door of the oxygen plant.

Bastard,
I thought.

“Get up,” he said.

I did. And as I did, I did something he did not expect. I pulled a grenade from my belt and let it roll off my fingers. He looked down to see what I’d dropped, identified it and instantly knew I had not pulled the pin, but the grenade had distracted him long enough. I sprang to my feet, knocked the barrel of his rifle aside, and flew into him as the back of my armor shattered into fragments.

There had been a fifth man. He’d lurked like a spider, hiding somewhere in the shadows, someplace I had not thought to look. I did not see him, but the force of the blast from his shotgun lifted me off my feet and tossed me like a toy, while the pellets shredded my armor and punctured my skin. The hormones from my combat reflex raged hotter than ever; but from the small of my back to the base of my neck, my body would not respond.

I leaned helplessly against the man I had just disarmed until he shoved me backward. I dropped to the floor. There was liquid in my mouth. I felt like I would drown any second. I wanted to roll over so I could see the man who had shot me. My legs swung, but my torso did not follow.

Taking lazy steps, the unseen assassin sauntered beside me. He pointed his shotgun into my face, tapping the muzzle against my visor. He asked, “Are you still alive in there?”

I did not answer. I couldn’t speak. I felt like I was drowning, but my combat reflex kept me cognizant. I did not know the man, but his face was familiar. He had a scar, a circular dent in
the center of his forehead. I focused on that scar and struggled to clear my thoughts.

He cocked his shotgun, and said, “You’re pathetic, Harris; and it’s your own fault if you die. You walked right in. Mister Liberator Clone…Mister Super Marine…Pathetic.

“I should finish you off. You’ll probably die anyway, but it would mean more if I had done it on purpose.”

He laughed, and added, “You have fans in Navy high command, people who think you’ll be useful. Me, I think we should have killed you the first time. I bet you don’t remember the first time, do you?”

He kicked his boot across my visor. The blow did not break the glass, but the jolt spun my body a quarter turn.

The man laughed. He turned to his partner, the man I had disarmed, and fired his shotgun into his face. The man’s head vanished in a red spray that decorated the wall behind him.

The bastard lowered his shotgun and smiled down at me. He said, “If anybody asks, Harris, do me a favor and tell them he shot you.” Then, still smiling, he knelt beside me.

“Harris, if you survive this one, you should know that I’ll come back for you. I’ll keep coming and shooting you until you don’t survive.” He smiled, tapped the muzzle of his shotgun to my visor, and said, “They don’t even need to pay me. You just go ahead and survive, Harris; I’d love to go another round with you.”

He rose to his feet, stared down at me for a moment, and I realized that this was it—this was the face of evil. “In case you were wondering, the name is Franklin Nailor,” he said. “Now you can tell your friends you met me…if you live.”

This was the man the Unifieds had sent. He said I had fans in the U.A. Navy, people he must have known. The Night of the Martyrs, the bastards who chased me in Hawaii, whatever reprogramming had happened in my head, this son of a bitch was behind all of it. Here he was, standing over me, and all I could do was lie there helplessly and wonder if I would even live to fight another day.