The Clone Apocalypse (20 page)

THE RESCUERS

THIRTY-ONE

Date: August 19, 2519

The call came after midnight, making it August 19. Ray Freeman knew that Harris had captured territory on the east side of the Anacostia, that much had been on the news. He also knew that the attack had been a feint, and that Harris’s real objective had been to save Travis Watson. He hadn’t yet spoken with Harris and had no idea how that part of the mission had resolved.

Answering the phone before the second ring, Freeman said, “Hello. Who is this?”

The security circuit in his communications console altered his voice so that he sounded like a little girl. When calls came with audio/video connection, his console displayed him as a ten-year-old girl, syncing the voice to the image.

Freeman knew his audio disguise wouldn’t stand up to computer analysis, but it rendered his voice unrecognizable to the human ear, and that sufficed.

The man on the other end of the connection said, “Raymond, this is Howard Tasman.”

Freeman knew Tasman; he’d protected the neural scientist from U.A. soldiers on Mars. Recognizing the voice, Freeman routed the call through his security equipment and saw that the voice was genuine.

Tasman waited for Freeman to say something. After a few seconds, he said, “Look, Freeman, the Enlisted Man’s Empire is about to collapse.”

“How do you know?” Freeman asked as he climbed from his bed. He had an emergency kit packed and ready and sitting under his bed. The pack included a few small weapons, a change of clothes, rudimentary surveillance equipment, and money. Working as a mercenary, Freeman had made himself rich.

“We have their computer files.”

Along with his emergency kit, Freeman took a pistol and a knife.

“Wayson Harris asked me to decode the files.”

Freeman put on pants and a shirt.

“Harris’s girlfriend works for the Unified Authority.”

“Kasara Pugh?” asked Freeman. His voice betrayed no emotion, neither interest nor surprise.

“Who?” asked Tasman. When Freeman didn’t answer, he said, “His girlfriend, Sunny Ferris.”

Though he had never met her, Freeman knew the name.

Tasman said, “The U.A. is making its move, and she’s involved. Whatever it is, it’s already begun.”

Freeman considered this. An attack of some sort, why hadn’t he heard about it? Harris would have told him.

“Have you told Harris about it?” asked Freeman.

“I wanted to warn you first.”

“I’m not part of this war,” said Freeman. He was dressed, and he had his kit and his weapon.

Tasman paused and lowered his voice to a whisper. He said, “I found a file that lists Unified Authority targets. I’m on it, so is Watson.”

“And I’m on it?” asked Freeman.

“The only person they want more than you is Harris.”

Freeman said, “The Unified Authority has wanted me dead for a long time. They’d have killed me by now if they could have found me.”

Tasman said, “Ray, I got your number from their files.”

THIRTY-TWO

Before he moved into any of his apartments, Freeman wired them with security systems. He had cameras and listening devices in the walls and motion detectors in the floors and ceilings. Microscopic fibers conducted electrical currents between the windows and the sills around them. The same fibers created circuits between the doors and their jambs. Opening doors or windows would break the currents, setting off silent alarms.

Freeman took other precautions as well. He’d placed miniature motion-sensing robots called “trackers” under his furniture. Little more than a swiveling shaft with an arm and a motion sensor, trackers spotted targets and fired weapons at them. Freeman’s miniature trackers fired Taser jacks—highly electrified staples that packed enough voltage to paralyze a grizzly bear.

Freeman kept a safe in the closet in his office. But instead of valuables, it held a canister of toxic gas.

Having spoken with Tasman, Freeman searched his apartment from top to bottom, arming traps, checking cameras, and destroying computers. He wouldn’t stay in the apartment, not if the Unifieds knew the location. They might come after him, but they were just as likely to demolish the building with a rocket.

Taking only his weapons and his emergency kit, Freeman left his home, locking the door behind him. He took the elevator to the three-story parking garage. His car waited on the third floor of the garage, but he stepped off the elevator on the second floor, found a sports car with darkened windows and a low roof, and stole it so smoothly anybody watching would have thought he owned it.

He didn’t fit in the car, but that was why he’d chosen it. No one would look for a seven-foot giant in a sleek roadster like this Cerulean 750Z. His knees brushed against the dashboard, and the steering wheel pushed against his lap, but if Unified Authority commandos were searching for him, they wouldn’t give the car a second glance.

The 750Z’s racy engine didn’t matter to Freeman. He drove out of the parking structure, headed two blocks west, and ditched the Z in an alley. He used the car as a disguise; now that he was out of the building, he abandoned it.

Large as he was, and hobbled by a slight limp, Freeman glided through alleyways as silent as a ghost, moving slowly, allowing his eyes to adjust between moonlight and shadow.

It took Freeman nearly an hour to travel the two miles to his destination, which was a building beside the one he had just left. By the time he arrived, he had confirmed that no one was following him. He entered through the service entrance.

The building Freeman now entered was nicer than the one in which he lived. It had a more elegant lobby and nicer apartments. Freeman checked the halls, then slipped into the elevator and rode to the thirty-fifth floor.

Freeman unlocked the door and let himself in. This wasn’t his apartment; he kept it as a safe house. He had more and better security here than in the apartment across the street.

Freeman entered his nest at 03:37. He didn’t need to arm traps or power sensors, the equipment booted the moment he opened the door.

He was tired; but needing information more than sleep, he went to his computer and began looking up police and hospital reports. A battle had just been waged on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. There had been gunfights, casualties, and fires. The hospitals were packed. The police were busy.

Freeman knew about the clone attack, Harris had asked him to join in. That was the clones attacking the Unified Authority; Tasman had said something about the aggression coming from the other direction.

Freeman began checking hospital reports outside the capital area. It didn’t take long before he found his answer. Clones were sick. California, Connecticut, Florida . . . hospitals in areas with major military installations reported admitting large numbers of clones.

By 06:00, having found what he needed, he went to sleep. Freeman stretched out on his cot still dressed and holding his pistol. It took him less than five minutes to fall into a meditative state.

At 06:25, the soft buzz of the first alarm woke him. Somebody was attempting to enter the apartment in the building next door. He heard the alarm and rolled off the cot. A second alarm sounded two minutes later, warning him that someone was at the door of this nest as well. Freeman remained calm.

Carrying an S9 fléchette-firing pistol and computerized goggles, he went to the door. The S9 was silent and carried enough depleted uranium to fire one hundred shots. The goggles had been configured to interface with his security cameras.

He looked through the pinhead-sized camera over his door. Three men stood in the hall, all of them dressed like civilians. Using the goggles, he peered through cameras he had placed around the building, one in the lobby, another overlooking the street.

He spotted two cars idling near the front of the building, each filled with young and athletic-looking men in civilian clothes. Another car waited behind the building.

One of the men outside Freeman’s door used a magnetic key to override the main lock. The two old-fashioned bolts Freeman used to latch the door from the inside remained unmoved. Every bit as anxious to interrogate the invaders as they were to collar him, Freeman unlocked the bolts and stepped back from the door.

Several seconds passed before the invaders realized they could open the door, and it swung open. This was the moment. Freeman crouched in a corner, hidden but not protected by his overturned cot. He had his lights off and his S9 was ready. He had his goggles and could see in the dark.

The first man darted into the apartment. Freeman allowed him to pass through the doorway and into the darkened hallway before shooting him through the neck and the head. The other two entered.

Their guns had suppressors; they fired bullets. They shot at the cot, the place Freeman had been.

Using the night-for-day lenses in his goggles, Freeman watched the two men as they split up.
Imbeciles,
he thought. One problem with Unified Authority’s special operations was that it had relied on clones for too long. Now that the recruits were natural-borns, and the clones were enemies, the U.A. didn’t have any experienced agents or trainers.

The apartment was shaped like a U, with one hallway leading past and into the kitchen to the living room and a second hallway leading to the bedrooms and bathrooms. Hiding behind the computer desk in the living room, Freeman surveyed the situation.

One of the commandos searched the kitchen. He ran a hand along the wall in search of a light switch. The second stood just inside the doorway, his pistol raised and ready.

Freeman shot the one by the door three times, hitting him in the throat, the chest, and the forehead. When his partner came running out of the kitchen, Freeman grabbed him by the throat, lifted him off the ground, and slammed his head and back onto the floor.

Freeman could have killed the man, but he needed him alive. He had questions he needed answered.

THIRTY-THREE

Freeman stole a truck, drove north to Bethesda, and parked in the visitor’s parking lot at Walter Reed Military Medical Center. He knew the hospital would be infested with Unifieds, but that variable was out of his control.

The men guarding Watson would undoubtedly recognize him as well, but that couldn’t be helped. He would need to watch for people who were watching him. He’d done that many times throughout his career.

Walter Reed had several buildings, but only one had the kind of security needed to protect an important man like Travis Watson. Looking down from the third floor of the parking garage, Freeman scoured the grounds. He spotted men who might have been commandos near the entrance and all along the street.

Freeman could have picked them off; he’d brought an excellent rifle. But killing those men would only bring reinforcements, and the new commandos would be more alert. He needed them there, assuring their bosses that everything was under control until the absolute final moment, the moment when everything would go cataclysmically wrong.

One thing about hospitals, they had tunnels and service alleys. They had underground loading areas only emergency crews could access. Properly guarding the entire hospital would have required an army. Freeman didn’t think the Unified Authority would have that kind of manpower for another day or two.

Lacking men, the U.A. commandos would concentrate their efforts on the entrances to the building and the door to Watson’s room. Getting into the building would be easy enough, but Freeman expected to run into trouble when he reached Watson’s floor.

Having spent nearly an hour studying the layout of the hospital on his computer, Freeman knew what he needed to do. He took the stairs to the lowest level of the parking structure, a third-level basement compete with generators, heavy equipment, and a labyrinth of service halls. A tall man in a janitor’s uniform circled the area aimlessly. He might have been a civilian, but Freeman identified him as a spook.

Killing him would have been easy, but he might have been part of an early-warning system. If he disappeared, his teammates would go on alert.

Freeman waited in the stairwell nearly a minute, giving the man time to walk away. When he opened the door, the man had moved on.

The hall ran endlessly ahead, a dim but thoroughly lit tunnel, too bright to hide in but too dark for reading. The place was a maze, with doorways leading to laboratories and facility closets. The grumble of industrial air-conditioning units and laundry facilities carried through the corridor.

Long and straight, the hall was an assassin’s nightmare. There was no place to hide. As he moved through the hall, Freeman saw people walking in his direction, and they could see him. The first people he passed were doctors, but if they’d been Unifieds, there would have been trouble.

Three-quarters of the way down the hall, Freeman passed a gurney with a body bag spread across it. The bag was occupied.

Why place it here?
Freeman wondered.
Why not in the morgue?
Like every other hospital, Walter Reed had a morgue; it was right nearby.

The cadaver could only have been a clone. With the Enlisted Man’s Empire in control, Walter Reed seldom admitted natural-borns.

Thinking that perhaps this might be an early victim of the Unified Authority’s new weapon, Freeman decided to take a quick look at the body. He waited a minute to make sure the hall was empty, then he pushed the gurney down a small branching corridor with few doors and no visible traffic.

Body bags included a chemical stick like the one in Harris’s thermal pack. Whoever had placed the corpse in the bag had snapped the stick, freezing the dead man. He lay in his wrapping as stiff as a signpost.

Placing a hand over the man’s head, Freeman unzipped the bag. Freezing air rose out of the bag in cotton-fiber swirls that evaporated quickly. Freeman peeled the bag open and searched the body for wounds.

The man had been stripped before he’d been frozen. Freeman noticed that he had the skinny shoulders and softened physique of an older man, possibly a man in his fifties. His muscles hadn’t gone to seed so much as lost the sculpted look of youth.

Still looking for a killing injury, Freeman turned the dead man on his side. The frozen body remained rigid. There were no wounds to be found, no bruising, no cuts, no discolorations. The hall was dark, and Freeman would have needed a flashlight to be sure, but he thought he found beads of frozen blood on the dead clone’s ear.

Freeman knew all about the death reflex. He rolled the clone onto his back and resealed the bag.

Once he saw that the hall was empty, Freeman rolled the gurney back to the spot where he had found it. Walking on, he passed more gurneys. He turned a corner and found occupied gurneys parked end to end all along the hall that led to the morgue. After checking the hall to make sure he was alone, he pushed through the swinging doors and entered.

The man who met Freeman as he entered the morgue was a clone who looked deathly ill. He was pale. Exhaustion showed on his face. He had swollen, red eyes. Looking surprised that a natural-born giant had entered his domain, the mortician pulled down his procedure mask, and asked, “Who are you?”

“I’m Ray Freeman,” said Freeman.

Looking around the morgue, he saw bodies everywhere, some under sheets and some in bags. They were stacked four deep on a couple of examination tables. Little red lights flashed on the handles of the body lockers along the back wall, marking them all as “occupied.”

“As you can see, Mr. Freeman, I’m a bit busy,” said the clone. He coughed, and muttered, “Damn. I think I might have it.”

“Have what?” asked Freeman.

“There’s a flu going around,” snapped the clone mortician.

Freeman didn’t travel in wide circles, but he hadn’t seen any signs of a flu epidemic in the civilian world. Cogs meshed in his mind.
The Unifieds have something big,
Tasman had said. Now a flu epidemic had spread among the clones without spreading into the natural-born world. “Is that what killed these men?”

The clone rolled his eyes, and said, “I don’t see how this is any business of yours. You shouldn’t be here, Mr. Freeman. This is a restricted area.”

Freeman responded with his size and his menacing body language. He stepped toward the mortician, then walked around him and examined a corpse that had not yet been flash-frozen. He placed a hand on the dead man’s chin and turned it.

“This man appears to have bloodstains on his ears.”

“I cleaned him a couple of times; apparently he’s still leaking. Sometimes it lasts for hours,” said the mortician.

“He had a death reflex?” asked Freeman.

“Who the speck are you?” the clone repeated. “Are you a reporter?”

Freeman didn’t answer.

“Are you a doctor?”

Freeman shook his head. He asked, “Am I correct in assuming this man had a death reflex?”

The mortician coughed. He muttered, “Damn cold. My head hurts. My back’s stiff. I’m not sure why I reported for work this morning.”

Reported for work,
thought Freeman.
Not quite military speak, and not quite civilian.
He asked, “What triggered the reflex?”

The mortician shook his head. He said, “I wish I knew. We’ve lost forty-two clones in the last twenty-four hours, all killed by a death reflex. If you ask me, this qualifies as an epidemic.”

Freeman nodded. He asked, “Did they die here?” He looked back at the cadaver, noting the streaks of white in his hair. The dead clone’s face had wrinkles around the eyes and the corners of the mouth.

“Yes they did. It’s the damnedest thing, they all checked in complaining about flu symptoms. I have the same flu they had. If I didn’t know I was natural-born, I’d be really scared about now.”

*   *   *

Freeman reached the end of the hall and took the stairs up to the lobby. He entered a cavernous floor space swarming with men who stood five-foot-ten and wore their brown hair cropped short. Their coughing swept in waves around the lobby.

Freeman spotted three civilian men scattered among the clones and they spotted him as well.

The clones were all military men. They stood in razor-straight lines and waited their turns. The civilians were not so constrained. Seeing Freeman, one of them spoke into the discreet microphone in his collar. They all turned and started toward him.

Freeman waded through the sea of clones like an icebreaker pushing through thin summer ice. He didn’t pull his gun, and he didn’t worry about the U.A. agents pulling theirs; this was a room filled with soldiers. Sick or healthy, the first man to pull a weapon would be mobbed.

Freeman reached an open elevator before the men who were following him could push through the clones. He stepped in and pressed the button for the twenty-ninth floor.

As the elevator doors closed, he watched the natural-borns and practiced his breathing, slowing his heart rate as he pulled his pistol.

The elevator doors opened on the twenty-ninth.

The hall was crowded with patients, nurses, doctors, medics, and orderlies. Hiding his pistol in his pocket, Freeman pushed past medics and patients on his way to a stairwell at the other end of the hall. From his studies earlier that morning, he knew the location of the stairwell, and the short distance between the door and Watson’s hospital room.

He took the stairs to the thirtieth floor.

A man with a gun stood peering through the door at the top of the stairs. Freeman shot him in the face with his S9. The fléchette-firing stealth gun used electronics instead of combustion, providing nearly silent operation. Freeman shot the man in the face, he fell to the floor, and Freeman pulled him into the stairwell.

The men in the elevator had done exactly what Freeman had hoped they would do; they had attracted attention. Focused on catching Freeman, they had burst out of the elevator, guns raised and ready. Instead of Freeman, they had stumbled into the clones guarding Watson’s floor.

As a former interim president of the Enlisted Man’s Empire, Travis Watson was an important man. Harris had posted bodyguards in Watson’s hospital suite, outside his door, and watching the elevator. As the guards standing outside the room and the ones by the elevator converged on the Unified Authority commandos, Freeman crossed the short space between the stairwell and Watson’s door.

He opened the door and three men pointed M27s at him. Freeman looked beyond the bodyguards into the living room, where Watson sat alone on a couch, his legs stretched straight across the cushions.

Freeman said, “You need to get out of here.”

Watson smiled at Freeman, and shouted, “Hey, M, come on out; Ray’s here.”