The Clone Assassin (41 page)

Location: Norfolk Naval Base, Virginia
Date: August 14, 2519

Hunter Ritz was not alone on the amphibious personnel carrier, but he sat apart from the other men. He’d brought an entire battalion.

According to the last report he had heard, the Navy had demolished the underwater cities, which meant that Harris had killed Nailor and broken into the Unified Authority’s computers. The news was good out of Washington, D.C., as well; MacAvoy’s troops had the Unifieds on the run.

All good news, but Ritz’s instincts told him that the war was far from over.

While his men assembled on the deck, Ritz waited in a ready room just off the bridge, looking out at Norfolk as the APC hovered into the harbor. It was the middle of August, but a gray day nonetheless. A slab of gray clouds filled the sky, minimizing the noonday sun to morning light levels. Green and gray water filled the harbor. Dreary.

Ritz had already pulled the encryption bandit out of the buoy and placed it in an armored case for safekeeping. The case was a foot long and two inches wide, too small to weigh as much as it did. He wondered if it was radioactivity-proof as well as bulletproof and suspected it was.

The docks were made of concrete, with thick wooden posts and rubberized ledges that acted like bumpers. The APC didn’t fly high enough to jump the docks. It flew beyond them and up a ramp meant for launching harbor boats and other small crafts into the water.

Ritz looked down at his men, standing alert, their guns ready. He took pride in these men. He had been a private and a corporal, and a sergeant. Now he was a general, a ridiculous rank that he considered a joke. He had the temperament of a corporal, and that was the only advancement that he had ever wanted.

The APC breezed up the ramp and hovered to the launchpad, where it settled to its skids.

Nothing had changed at Norfolk. It was as if the war had occurred in another universe. Sailors busied themselves on nearby ships. Dockworkers hauled cargo. The place was a colony of clone-sized ants, everyone working, everyone assigned his specific duty.

Ritz’s duty was to deliver the case. Standing at the window, he saw the transport that would fly him to the
Churchill
sitting on the other side of the launchpad just one hundred yards away.

He saluted the captain of the APC and trotted down the stairs.
Maybe it really will end,
he thought to himself. What if the data Harris stole held something big? What if it gave away the Unifieds’ plans? What if it named their spies and bases?

The end is in sight,
he thought, and he smiled. He didn’t believe it, but he wanted to.

Ritz crossed the deck. He had hundreds of armed men around him, loyal Marines, armed and ready to fight.

Kevin Rhodes, the director of data encryption at the EME Intelligence Agency, stood at the bottom of the gangway. Rhodes was a natural-born, a tall, slender man who dressed like a politician—gray suit, red necktie.

He flashed his government ID at the Marines guarding the gangway, and they let him past. Rhodes was supposed to be there. The Navy clones would need his help deciphering the data on Harris’s encryption bandit.

Ritz strode down the gangway and joined him. They shook hands.
That’s how civilians salute,
Ritz told himself.

He didn’t like spies, and that included Rhodes, though he could see that the man tried to be pleasant. Marines lived in a straightforward world of black-and-white, allies and enemies. Spies lived in the shadows, where the black was never complete and the white was gray along the edges. You might never know who to kill in their world, or who to trust.

Rhodes pointed at the case, and asked, “Is that the encryption bandit?”

Ritz nodded.

“I can’t wait to see what you found. I mean, this could win the war for us. It’s going to take some time to decipher everything, but it’s bound to be a gold mine—battle plans, inventories listing men and materials . . . a gold mine.”

They walked across the launchpad, heading toward the transport. It sat at the edge, its rear hatch open, the ramp waiting for Ritz and Rhodes.

“Have you heard anything from Travis Watson?” asked Ritz.

“They still haven’t found him?” asked Rhodes.

“It’s like he left the planet.”

Rhodes shook his head. “That’s funny; I thought the Army might have found him and hid him away.”

Ritz shook his head.

“How about Tasman? Were they able to find him?”

“Same story,” said Ritz. “We haven’t found hide nor hair of Watson, or Tasman, or Emily Hughes—Watson’s fiancée. Some of MacAvoy’s soldiers found the car Watson used to escape.”

“Well, if the Unifieds know anything, we’ll find it in here,” Rhodes said, pointing at the case.

Ritz carried the case with a newfound respect. He liked Watson; locating the man and bringing him home safe had become something of an obsession with him.

They walked up the ramp and entered the kettle of the transport. Rhodes said, “We haven’t found Watson or Tasman, but we have located one person of interest. We found Harris’s girlfriend.”

“Is she alive?” asked Ritz.

“Alive and well,” said Rhodes.

This was good news. He was supposed to meet Harris when his submarine emerged. Harris would be happy that his girl was safe.

“I brought her with me,” said Rhodes.

“She’s here?” asked Ritz, surprised that she’d been allowed on base.

“She’s right behind you.”

Ritz turned around in time to see her step out of the head. She was as tall as a clone—maybe a fraction of an inch taller. She smiled at him, a gentle, happy smile. Her entire face seemed to light up with that smile.

“Rhodes, this is a classified . . .”

“General, I feel like I know you. Wayson’s always talking about you,” she said, and she reached out her hand to shake his. She had brown hair and blue, blue eyes.
Darker than sky blue,
he thought to himself.
How the speck could Harris ever cheat on her?
he wondered. His final thought.

Though he knew she should not be on the transport, Ritz shook her hand, felt the pinprick through the soft pad of the palm just below his thumb and the quick electric shock that came with it. He tried to pull his hand back, but that was an involuntary reaction. The shock disabled him. She had aimed the tiny pin perfectly. The poison entered a vein that led into his wrist and from there into his circulatory system. Before he recovered from the shock, the poison had entered his heart and started the trek to his brain.

Ritz fell to his knees as if preparing to tie a shoelace. Sunny held on to his hand, keeping the needle in place far longer than needed. The poison would enter his brain in less than a minute, but she held on to his hand, looking into his eyes, smiling.

“So you are Hunter Ritz,” she said. Her smile remained warm, but her eyes hardened. The blue that Ritz had assessed as “darker than the sky” became harder than cobalt.

She released his hand as he tumbled backward, onto the metal floor. “It would have been better if we could have reprogrammed you,” she said. “With all this security, I couldn’t smuggle a canister in.”

She knelt beside him and stroked his cheek with her finger. “You really know your security procedures, Ritz,” she said. “You run a tight operation.”

Sunny wondered if Ritz could hear her or if the poison had paralyzed his awareness along with his body. He wasn’t dead yet, but he would be in another moment.

His eyes remained open, but she had killed men with this poison before; she knew that their eyes stayed open after they died. Ritz’s mouth fell open as he struggled for air.

A line of drool trailed out of the corner of his mouth. Sunny brushed it away with a finger as gently as a mother cleaning an infant child. She wiped her finger dry on his collar. Then, to see what it would feel like to force the air out of a dying man’s lungs, she pressed down on his chest until she heard the air rattling in his throat.

“I better go, dear. They’re expecting this transport to go wheels up, and I’m the only person on board who knows how to fly it.” She paused. “Do you know how to fly one?” Then, seeing that his eyes had turned to glass, she corrected herself. “Did you know how to fly one?”

She stepped over Ritz’s body, taking the case from his limp arms.

Sunny left for the cockpit without saying another word. General Hunter Ritz died without speaking. They both left the naval base in silence.

I am going to keep my author’s note shorter than usual because this book is considerably longer than any of my previous Wayson Harris novels. The good folks at Ace have indulged my oversized manuscript, but they might balk if I wade in with two thousand words in notes and explanations. That said, I still have one piece of business to which I must attend.

So, here we go.

I want to begin with a true confession. I happened to reread Robert Heinlein’s
Starship Troopers
while writing this book. The truth is that everyone writing military science fiction has benefited from the work of Robert Heinlein, though some less directly than I. This book includes a phrase that I filched from
Troopers
: “Wet Navy.” Heinlein used this term to distinguish between today’s navies, which travel the seas, and the navies of the future, which will probably fly in space.

I saw the term and was awed by its elegance and simplicity, and so I borrowed it—but I want to give credit where credit is due. Thank you, Mr. Heinlein. Thank you for so many things.