The Clone Sedition (17 page)

Advancing as slowly as a scared dog, I entered the city. Hearing nothing to suggest that Franklin had followed me out of the cell area, I realized that I now had an entire city in which to hide.

I walked into a tall building, stumbled to a stairwell around which no walls had been built, and climbed until I was so tired that I would have had to crawl to continue. My strength was spent. All of the hormones from my combat reflex had worn off. My muscles ached, and my brain burned.

Somewhere behind me, a door slammed. In the surreal stillness of the abandoned city, it sounded like a gunshot.

Distant shouts. “Harris. Harris! HARRRRISSSSS!”

Sitting four floors up and far away, I leaned against a wall and fell asleep.

Nothing woke me. No sounds. No movements. No lights. My sleep had been deep, and when it ended, it ended on its own terms. When I finally woke up, I felt stronger. How long had I been down here? How long had it been since that half-remembered conversation when I sent Cutter away?

First things first:
Where the hell could I find shoes?
The floors in this place were so specking cold that the skin on the bottoms of my feet seemed to fuse to the ground.

I sat up and reoriented myself. The building was a latticework of beams and frames with concrete floors and open stairs. The atmosphere was dark, with a faint haze of phosphorous lumens coming from the dome above.

The dome could have been made of glass, or it might have been made of steel or even cement. It didn’t matter. The French built their cities in the deepest oceanic troughs and trenches. Down this far, the ocean was as devoid of light as any underground cavern.

I went down the stairs and toured the unfinished city. Now that I had rested, I saw my surroundings more clearly.

The silence was absolute. The air was cold and dry. There was not so much as a breeze to disturb the peace. I was hungry, trapped in a world that was vast and sterile, relatively safe
but absolutely empty. I could stay here and starve or return to the cells for food, warmth, and destruction. Franklin waited there. Given rest and nourishment, I could kill the bastard; but waiting out here, I would only grow weaker.

I was not starving, but I was hungry. I had no idea how many days had passed since my last meal. Though I could not remember eating, I had never been hungry as a prisoner. Maybe Sunny fed me, or maybe the chemicals deadened my internal sensors.

I needed shoes, food, and water.

The French would not have started a project like this without first installing a desalinization plant, maybe several; but I had no idea how I would find it.

My thoughts ran wild.
What if Franklin left me here?
He might do just that. Instead of chasing me into the unfinished city, he could abandon me deep beneath the sea. The bastard could report my death—assuming he reported to anyone.
To Silas,
I reminded myself. Sunny had threatened him with a man named Silas. She said Silas might flush Franklin out a moon pool. Now I knew what she meant.

I knew something else. I knew that I was more valuable to Silas than Franklin. I was the lynchpin in Silas’s plan. Franklin was just a cog on a gear, useful but expendable.

Unless he wanted to answer to Silas, Franklin would not abandon me, and he would not kill me. We were stuck with each other; but there was one difference between us: I didn’t worry about angering the mysterious Silas. Let Silas come after me. Once I finished with Franklin, maybe I’d go for a swim in the moon pool. That sounded better than starving to death.

The thought of killing Franklin made me happy, but I was cold and though my strength was returning, it had not returned. As I thought about this, my head started to hurt, and I went back to sleep.

Once again, I woke with no way of knowing how long I had been out.

The terms “day” and “night” had no application in a man-made bubble two miles beneath the sea. To people living in this trap, the sun and moon would sound as mythological as this city had to me.

I woke quickly but rose slowly, wondering why I should even bother rising from my bed. I probably would not find food or water; and even if I did, how would I protect myself from Franklin? Even if I found food and killed Franklin, I’d still be stuck on the bottom of the ocean.

I remembered fantasizing about going for a fatal swim in the moon pool; but I could not do that. I could not kill myself, not with my neural programming. Liberators had more autonomy than other clones, but it did not include suicide.

I played a game to cheer myself up. I imagined the ways I could kill Franklin.
Strangle him,
I thought, just like he had strangled Sunny.
Beat him to death. Drown him in the moon pool.
As he sank, I would tell him, “Give my regards to Sunny.”

Then I came up with the winner.
Throw him from a building.
Throw him from a third-or fourth-floor landing, just high enough so he’d break an arm or a leg or maybe both. Then I could haul his whining carcass back up the stairs and throw him again. If I dropped him carefully, he might last three or four tossings before his neck finally broke.

When I stood, I found that my legs were strong, but the blood rushed to my head. I waited through a moment of dizziness in which I nearly stumbled, then my head cleared, and I walked to the ledge and tried to make sense of the city below. The streets formed a dark maze of lines and boxes. I had hoped that the designers had laid their project out as logically as a checkerboard with rounded edges. They hadn’t. Instead of spokes and rings, the streets formed cul-de-sacs and spirals. The men who designed this dome had created a community, not a military base, the bastards.

Under normal circumstances, I might have admired that decision—at a time when I was not trapped and hungry.

I looked for lights in the city. If Franklin was looking for me, he’d use a flashlight, or he might illuminate a section of the city…or he might use the night-for-day lenses in the combat armor of a dead Marine. Just because he had the armor did not mean he could use the complicated optical interface, but I suspected he knew how to use it. Franklin was part of something bigger and more organized than a gathering of fanatics. Behind the rage was a regimented logic. He could have killed me anytime he wanted, but he’d waited. He was undoubtedly a
criminal, but a war criminal. He might have been a spy, an assassin, an interrogator, or a mercenary, someone with intelligence training.

If Franklin did come after me in combat armor, I’d have another reason to kill him…for the temperature-controlled bodysuit and the armored boots. I was so specking cold, and that left me weak.

And then I saw it. The key to understanding this city was not in the streets, it was in the sky. What I had mistaken for random lights were actually markers. The city was an octagon with eight triangular sectors, each marked by a phosphorous pillar in the sky.

As I figured out how to read the sky, the streets made sense. I shuffled down the stairs to the street level and exited through the rear of the building. In recon training, I had learned to stay in the shadows when possible. Now, it was impossible to leave them. This entire world was shadow.

I cut through unfinished buildings and moved along the narrowest streets. After an hour, I found what I was looking for, a doorway leading into the circular, dark hallway that led around the moon pool.

I was returning to the wing that I had escaped. I had no choice. Franklin and Sunny and fifteen hundred reprogrammed clones ate food there. They drank water.

The air was cold, colder than I remembered.

I followed the hall to its end and entered the port with its glowing moon pool. I approached the bridge that ran across the top of the pool. I could not help myself. The moon pool fascinated me because it opened into the ocean with its bottomless depths. Held back by an invisible cushion of air were Earth’s final secrets, creatures that glowed and fish and squid more strange than anything man had encountered in space.

I stepped on that metal catwalk, trying to ignore the way its cold metal bit my feet. I was halfway across when I stopped and stared down into the illuminated depths.

Had those lights burned for the last four hundred years?

Indistinct shapes moved in the water below me. I understood the cycle. The light attracted swarms of small creatures. The availability of small creatures attracted minor predators that hovered just outside the light. Larger predators lurked lower still.

As a teenager, I studied biology in the orphanage, but that class had more to do with venereal disease than fish. The instructor mentioned something about sharks and giant squid. I imagined a squid staring up at me through the darkness, a big one, something sixty feet long with tentacles the size of fire hoses. I imagined it blending into the shadows, staring up at me from the darkness, ready to pull me into the inky depths. Ready to hold my body with two tentacles while tearing off each of my limbs with others.

Was I scaring myself? Hell yes.

Whatever Franklin and his friends had planned, I could ruin it for them with a short leap from this bridge. I would land in the water. Maybe a shark or a squid would kill me, maybe I would freeze or drown or both. The creatures that lived in those blackened depths represented the unknown to me; they gave shape to my fears.

I had vague memories of the tortures Sunny had inflicted upon me. What she had done to me was worse than drowning. If Franklin caught me, it would start all over again. Given a choice, I would take a few moments of water filling my lungs over hours of torture, then betraying my friends.

But I could not kill myself, my programming would not allow it. Liberators had been designed to fight an unknown enemy in the unexplored center of the galaxy. We had been designed for dark duty. The people who made my kind needed an army of soldiers that would continue fighting no matter what happened, no matter what they ran into.

My knees buckled, then they gave. As I fell down on that cold, metal catwalk, I tried to catch myself on the rail; but my arms did not respond. I fell flat on my face.

Franklin stood at the edge of my vision. “I’m not done with you,” he said.

I could not turn my head to follow him, so he vanished from my view as he stepped onto the catwalk. I heard his footsteps, the soft soles of his shoes padding on the cold metal until he stood over me. He said, “You should have jumped, Harris; but then you couldn’t. I’ll fix that.”

He did not kick me as I expected he would. He did not urinate on me. He just stared down at me as I lay on that bridge, then everything went dark.

Location: The
Churchill
Date: April 6, 2519

Travis Watson entered Admiral Don Cutter’s office with a casual air that the admiral interpreted as a swagger. As a civilian, Watson seemed to see himself as exempt from military protocol. Cutter did not share that view. He asked, “When was the last time you heard anything from Harris?”

Harris must have taught the boy something. He knew enough military culture to remain standing until invited to sit.

“Have a seat,” Cutter grunted.

Watson sat.

Cutter didn’t have anything he specifically needed to discuss with Watson; but he wanted to vent his anger on somebody close to Wayson Harris. Watson was the closest target. Had Harris been around, Cutter would have gone after him instead; but Harris’s communications went dark two days ago.

Sometimes Harris did not bother checking in. He was like a cat. He prowled and fought his battles, then returned to base when he felt like it.

Cutter wanted to box somebody’s ear. Watson might have been an innocent bystander/civilian, but he was Harris’s adjutant. In the admiral’s mind, Watson’s connection to Harris made him fair game.

“What do you hear from Harris?” he asked, knowing full well Watson had not heard anything.

“I haven’t heard from him,” said Watson. “Have you heard anything?”

Have you heard anything…sir,
Cutter thought. He said, “The reason we left Mars was because the general ordered us out of the space lanes.”

“He ordered us out?” asked Watson. He looked confused.

Cutter took some satisfaction in the perplexed expression on Watson’s face.
At least the boy knows who is in charge,
he thought. “Ordered us out,” he repeated.

“Admiral, maybe I don’t understand the chain of command. Harris told me you gave the orders.”

Cutter heard this, and his tension eased again. He said, “I thought maybe things were getting hot for him. When things heat up, Harris acts like a rabid dog. It’s a Liberator thing.”

“Did he say why he wanted us to leave orbit?”

“When Harris goes rabid, he doesn’t make a lot of sense. He called my crew incompetent and told me to pack up and leave.”

“He hasn’t contacted me,” said Watson, “not since he left for Mars.”

Cutter leaned back in his chair. He stared at Watson but said nothing. He bounced the chair back gently, let it rock forward, then settle back. Finally, he said, “Maybe you can help me interpret something. Harris gave me a message he wanted me to relay to you. He said, ‘Anything that can be programmed can be reprogrammed.’”

Watson shook his head, and said, “I’m not familiar with the phrase. Did he say what it’s supposed to mean?”

“If he had told me what it meant, I wouldn’t ask you to help me interpret it,” said Cutter, smiling with a new sense of smug satisfaction. “He said that anything that can be programmed can be reprogrammed, and he said to tell you that Ray Freeman wanted you to know that.”

“Ray Freeman again,” said Watson. “Is Freeman on Mars?”

Cutter shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. I don’t know how he could have gotten there, but no one ever knows how Freeman does anything. The man is more mysterious than God himself.”

“Admiral, I still don’t know anything about Freeman—just that I wouldn’t want to be trapped on a transport with him.”

“I’ve met him,” said Cutter. “He’s a merc.”