The Clone Assassin (26 page)

I heard the chatter in my helmet and immediately knew what had happened. I heard: “Speck! What was that?” “Major, how’d you get through? I thought the Link was down. Oh, speck.”

Hoping the men outside hadn’t removed their helmets, I used a command frequency to reach Ritz. When he responded, I said, “Ritz, there are some escapees headed your way.”

As I ran the events through my head, there was only one possible answer. The Unifieds must have found a parallel tunnel and doubled back. They would have made their way to the front of the mine, then cleared the airwaves and set off Freeman’s charges to seal us in.

Ritz said, “General, we’ve got all the guests we can handle out here.”

“What are you up against?” I asked. I was in a cave surrounded by darkness, stillness, and silence. Had it not been for my helmet, I would have been blind. Maybe all of my enemies had fled this subterranean world. Maybe some had stayed behind.

But a mile away, Ritz’s world was filled with sunlight and chaos. We might have stood on opposite ends of the universe.

I continued walking as we spoke, moving ahead slowly, watchful for traps, enemies, and holes in the floor.

“We have three U.A. gunships out here, sir.”

Gunships,
I thought. My grenadiers had downed one before entering the mines. It had taken everything they had to swat one gunship, and we’d had all our grenadiers alive and present at that time. We’d lost many advancing up the ridge, and some of the survivors had entered the mines with my company . . . and even then, shooting down that gunship had seemed like luck.

Without telling Ritz, I flipped some virtual switches in my visor so that I could view the world through his eyes. The tiny camera built into the framework of his visor now showed me what he saw in a tiny window.

I wouldn’t describe what I saw as a battle. Ritz and his men stood on a ridge with little in the way of cover. They might have had enough grenades and grenadiers to knock down one of the gunships, assuming the other two stayed out of the way.

Some of Ritz’s men had run to the mine for shelter. Once enough of my boys entered the mines, those gunships would pipe a missile into the entrance and kill every last one of them.

The gunships were herding my men. Even as I watched, one of the gunships floated in like a cloud, her gunners firing chain guns at men trying to escape down the ridge, grinding them into pulp. A few Marines found shelter and hid. More died. This was First Battalion; when they saw they couldn’t escape the gunship, many of the men stood their ground and fired M27s as the chain guns bore down. The last great act of defiance is to die like a Marine. As the dust cleared, I saw armor and blood.

Swearing under his breath, absolutely unaware that I was watching through his eyes, Ritz ripped an RPG from his belt and sprinted toward the cliff and the hovering gunship.

“Ritz, you’re not going to accomplish anything,” I said, trying to sound calm even though I wasn’t.

“Get specked, Harris,” he growled, not even giving the words a second thought.

Looking through his eyes, I saw the edge of the cliff coming closer and closer, but he didn’t slow down. As he neared the endless drop, he looked down at the grenade in his right hand and pulled a second grenade to hold in his left. Two gunships hovered just past the ledge, their chain guns flashing. One fired a rocket. Ritz didn’t stop to see where the rocket hit; he focused on the closest gunship as he tossed one grenade, then the other.

One of the gunships turned so that she faced Ritz. She rose maybe a yard so that it hovered slightly higher than the ridge, and she moved forward. Ritz didn’t flinch. He did not turn away. From my vantage point, inside Ritz’s visor, it looked like he intended to play chicken with the big bird.

Less than ten feet from the ledge, he kept running. He looked down and snagged an RPG from his belt, then, still charging toward the drop, he raised his hand and prepared to fire . . .

I was drifting ahead, paying enough attention to stop myself from walking into a wall or stepping into a hole, but not thinking about what I was doing, and my carelessness damn near cost me my life.

When the first bullet struck the ceiling above my head, I barely noticed the
zing
it made as it careened off the rocks. I wouldn’t have thought about it had the second bullet not grazed my right shoulder. It cut through the edge of my armor, nicking me, but the force of the bullet twisted me around and sent me to the floor.

My mind reeled.

Unbelievable! I was miles deep in an abandoned mineshaft, which was dangerous enough, but I had forgotten that the Unified Authority Marines had sent armed men into this shaft. That is one of the dangers of combat—given a long enough break in the action, men are often lulled into lethargy. Let your mind wander during the slow moments, and the last thing that goes through your brain is generally a bullet.

I was watching Ritz when I should have been worrying about my own ass. At first I only felt the impact, then the pain started. It wasn’t severe, just a stitch along my deltoid, but it burned.

Switching off all distractions in my visor, I searched the darkness. A fire team paused behind me, all four Marines with their weapons ready. With the sludging gone, I now could speak to them. I said, “Sniper. Stay put.”

Searching the corridor ahead with heat vision and sonar, I found nothing, then I realized that the shot had hit me just below my shoulder and traveled upward.

I looked down and saw where the floor had caved in along a wall.
Specking
idiot,
I told myself
.
Only an idiot could have missed it, or an officer stupid enough to voyeur his men when he should be watching for enemies. I was lucky the shooter missed my head.

Staying low, I approached the hole. Fifteen rappel cords hung from its edges.

Specking idiot,
I thought, angry at myself now for overlooking a hole . . . literally, a gaping hole. Once I placed myself on point, I no longer had any excuses. I was the eyes; the lives of every man on this mission depended on me. If I walked past the hole, they would dismiss it as well.

Okay, yes, the hole looked like a shadow through night-for-day lenses. I tried to give myself a pardon, but I wasn’t having any of it.
Asshole,
I thought.
You’re going to get your men killed.

My wounded shoulder still stung by this time. That’s how combat wounds work; they give you a few moments to realize you’ve been injured, then they send signals about their severity. Sometimes the pain incapacitates you. Sometimes the fear and embarrassment hurt more than the injury itself. The gouge along my deltoid was shallow, like a slit from a knife. Blood ran down my arm, bunching around my wrist.

The notion that the Unifieds might have left a sniper behind finally occurred to me. As I remembered the noise I’d heard moments before the bullet struck me, I realized that two shots had been fired, the second shot fired one or two seconds after the first.
A lone gunman,
I reassured myself.

I thought about dropping a grenade down the chute. One of the men beside me had the same impulse. He reached for a pill. Like me, he thought again and changed his mind. The floor beneath us had already worn away. Drop a grenade, even on a low-yield setting, and those of us who survived would end up one deck down, buried in dust and rock.

I thought,
If the Unifieds sent fifteen men down that hole, Freeman must have passed that way as well.
“Freeman, you down there?” I called out, using one of the interLink frequencies he haunted. No response.

“Ray?” Nothing.

The shooter on the deck beneath us had gone silent as well. I kept low, out of his line of sight. He might pick up my heat signature if he used the right lens in his visor; he could hit me through the floor with the right armor-piercing ammunition.

Using the sonar equipment in my visor, I took a reading of the area around the hole. I risked moving closer, dropping on my ass and sliding within a foot of it. I edged closer, stopped, then slithered closer again.

I wanted to take a sonar reading to see how far I would need to drop to hit the next floor down, but to do that, I would need to look straight down the hole. Rather than make myself a target, I fished one of the rappel cords out of the hole and ran it through my fingers. I estimated the length at twenty-five feet.

I didn’t want to climb down, and it was too far to jump. A man on a rope is an easy and defenseless target.

“Ray, you down there?” I called out on several frequencies.

No answer. He almost certainly had gone down that hole, and the Unifieds had followed him. Dead or alive, he was somewhere in the shaft below.

I gathered my men closer and positioned men around the hole. On my signal, they opened fire, shooting blindly into the deck below, and I took the cord. Instead of attaching it to my armor for a controlled and safe drop, I held it tight in my right hand and dived in like a swimmer in a race.

I fell down, down into the blackness, my momentum still carrying me forward as I fell. I had hoped to land on my feet, but I hit a post, then another, knocking me off balance. Instead of surfing to the ground, I slammed on my back, the air bursting from my lungs when I struck bottom. My head hurt. My neck went numb. Forcing myself to go through the motions, I rolled along the ground, sweeping the area with my S9.

I had landed on a junk pile of sorts, a heap of abandoned U.A. Marine combat armor. Only, I instinctively knew that it hadn’t been abandoned. An entire squad had made a stand and lost on this very spot, and I had landed on their remains.

“General, are you . . .”

“I’m fine,” I said, not even bothering to ID the officer. “Wait for my orders.”

Then I shouted across all frequencies, “Freeman! Ray, are you here?” When that didn’t work, I switched to my external speaker. I said, “Freeman, you miserable bastard, you shot me.”

Silence. I was alone, just me and fifteen dead Marines. Pushing on helmets and chest plates, I worked my way to my feet.

I took no joy in wading through a pile of massacred natural-borns. They were stacked two and three high like dead trees on a forest floor.

“Freeman,” I shouted, using the external speaker.

Once I had forced my way out of the pile, I found stragglers, lying still on the ground like scattered stones. About forty feet away, Freeman sat with his back propped against a wall and his rifle across his lap. I spotted the glow of his scope. And then I saw him.

He looked bad. He’d gone mostly limp. If not for the wall, he would not have been able to support himself. He’d removed his right shoe. His right leg was so swollen that I couldn’t tell where his calf ended and his ankle began. I watched him through my night-for-day lenses. So much blood covered his face that he looked like he’d been carved out of wet stone. He sat there, eyes shut, face tilted toward the stars, and he drew in a deep breath, which he held in his lungs for several seconds. He couldn’t see me, not in this darkness, not without a visor or his rifle scope.

Approaching Freeman, I stepped over the body of a dead Marine. I took two more paces, then someone spoke to me over the interLink. “There you are, Harris. I knew you’d come.” The man spoke softly, a taunt instead of a threat.

Who the specking hell are you?
I thought, though on some level, I must have recognized the speaker. A cold chill ran through me. I froze in place, just a few feet from Freeman. Standing in the darkness, feeling as vulnerable and alone as a newborn in a crib, I tried to sound brave. I asked, “Who the speck am I speaking to?”

“The name is Nailor; we met on Mars.”

We sure as speck had met on Mars. The bastard shot me in the back and left me there for dead. He’d shot me, then knelt over me, so I could see his face.

“Are you down here, Franklin?” I asked. “I’d love to see you again, maybe give you my regards.”

“No need to shit yourself, Harris. I can’t touch you. I can see you, but you’re out of reach.”

I stopped and turned to look at the dead Marines. One lay on his stomach at the edge of the pile, his face turned toward Freeman, toward me. Freeman had shot him in the chest, leaving his visor intact.

Nailor watched me as I approached the corpse. He said, “Yes, that’s right.”

Like me, he had a commandLink. He could look through his men’s visors the same way I had peered through Ritz’s.

I pulled my S9 and fired into the dead Marine’s visor. It took five fléchettes to shatter the visor, Nailor laughing at me the entire time. I should have kicked it.

I felt this sense of dreaded déjà vu, as if I’d heard him laugh at me before. Maybe he’d laughed at me as I lay bleeding on Mars. I wasn’t sure.

He said, “I can’t kill you, not in that hole. I wouldn’t hit you if I detonated a nuke on that mountain. You’re buried alive for now, but you’ll dig your way out.

“In the meantime, Harris, I wanted you to know just how badly you have failed. The clones you left to guard the cave are dead. Unlike you, they couldn’t hide under the rocks until it was safe.”

Bastard,
I thought.

He continued speaking, his voice in my ear, in my head. He said, “You’ll dig your way out, but before you do, I’ll hit Washington, D.C. I’ll kill Watson. I’ll kill the soldiers you sent. Take too long digging yourself out, Harris, and by the time you wiggle out from the dirt, your Clone Empire will be gone for good.”

Once he’d delivered his message, he disappeared. Maybe he was just outside the mine, surveying my dead Marines and laughing at my failures. Maybe he’d called from one of the gunships. Either way, he couldn’t wait around. Hauser, who was supposedly monitoring the battle from the
Churchill
, would have sent fighters.

I didn’t know how many ships the New Unifieds had in their fleet or how many of my clones they had chemically converted to their cause, but Nailor couldn’t trade jabs with the Enlisted Man’s Navy. Hauser’s Navy had to have a ten-to-one advantage over the Unified Authority’s fleet.

As I knelt beside Freeman, I called to Ritz. “Ritz, you there?”