Fear had entered into my psyche. I felt afraid of swimming in the ocean even though I knew I was in good shape and would not drown. Fear.
I remembered everything that happened on Mars as if it was written on a list, not as if I had experienced it. There was that breakdown in which I had ranted like a madman at Don Cutter, an ally and a friend. And now I could commit suicide. I had simply pulled the pin of the grenade and watched as its timer wound down, something that had been made impossible by my neural programming. I added it all up and came to an obvious conclusion. Somebody had tinkered with my neural programming. Somebody had reprogrammed me.
Before Mars, I had not had the ability to commit suicide. It was not in my programming. I could not have pulled that pin without a target other than myself in mind. Now I could pull the pin as easily as I could unzip my pants.
I considered pulling the pin a second time and letting the timer finish its countdown, not because I wanted to test my theory but because I hated myself. I had allowed myself to be reprogrammed. I had allowed someone else to control the gears inside my head.
But there was something I wanted more than an easy way out. I wanted to know who had specked with my head, and I wanted to give that person a very different piece of my mind.
After that, maybe I would pull the pin on my life, too.
I stashed the grenade back in the box and took a shower. I shaved, I ran the blue light over my teeth, then I dressed like a civilian. My clothes included slacks and a loose shirt that hid the form of the S9 pistol I had tucked inside my waistband.
Then I went to my jeep and drove away. It was now early afternoon, with a bright, high sun and a few crawling clouds.
As I coasted to the front gate, the sergeant saluted. I returned his salute, and he let me through.
Instead of heading over the mountains and into Honolulu, I headed east, back toward the beach I had just visited. A minute later, when I checked my rearview mirror, I saw the white sedan.
They kept far away, which was fine, though I would have preferred for them to close the gap. I slowed, they slowed, cars came between us. Apparently the bastards did not worry about keeping me in their sights. I turned left into a small neighborhood of beachfront homes. They followed.
I parked beside a public access way that led between two houses. Off ahead of me, the ocean sparkled in the sunlight. Walking casually, I traveled from the road to the beach, glanced back to make sure no one was watching, and sprinted along the sand. I ran past three houses, then hopped a fence and cut across somebody’s yard.
I ran along the side of the house and out along the driveway, staying low, keeping an eye on the street. And there it was, the white sedan, parked along the side of the road with three men standing beside it. They must have wondered where I had gone, and they’d climbed out of their car for a better look.
All three stood with their backs to me, facing the access way I had used to enter the beach. They might or might not have been civilians, but they were not clones. They came in different heights and builds. One had brown hair, two had blond. They chatted quietly among themselves. Their voices sounded like a low rumble. Staying low and quiet, darting between parked cars and hedges, I stole within twenty feet of the bastards.
As I said before, I only needed one of them to get the information I wanted, so I shot the blonds in the back with my S9. The third guy watched his buddies fall and still needed a moment to process what happened. He spun to face me. I showed him my gun, and he raised his hands. He had some kind of metal box in his left hand.
My combat reflex took over. I fired the first fléchette through his thigh, causing the bastard to topple to his knees. He fell to the ground as silent as a leaf. My second fléchette
passed through the bastard’s left bicep. It was like cutting the strings from a puppet’s limbs. His hand flopped to the ground, but he managed to hold on to that box.
It must be some kind of weapon,
I thought.
His hands twitching as he struggled to maintain his grip on the metal cylinder, he fell on his ass and tried to sit up. My third shot drilled through his wrist. His fingers fell open, and the box rolled out of his hand. That was when he started screaming.
I picked up the cylinder. It was about three inches tall and an inch wide. It weighed next to nothing. It was not a grenade, not a bomb. The more I looked at it, the less it looked like a weapon.
The bastard’s screaming had attracted an audience. People came running along the street. They saw me and my pistol and the cylinder. They saw him, squirming on the ground, little fountains of blood shooting out of his leg, arm, and wrist. He cried and screamed, sort of an “Owweee Gawd! Owe. Owe,” sort of noise.
I said, “We’d better get you to the hospital.”
He tried to stand, maybe he thought he could run, so I shot him in the other leg and he fell flat on his face, screaming until his mouth filled with dirt. Then he started sobbing, his whole body twitching and blood spurting out of his arm and legs. I grabbed him by the shoulders and tossed him into his own car. Then I threw his buddies in on top of him.
By this time, a crowd of people stood a long way off, some dressed in bathing suits and some dressed in house clothes. No one came closer than fifty feet. Someone yelled something about calling the police. I didn’t care.
Slipping into the driver’s seat of the sedan, I remembered my jeep. Once I had my new friend checked into the base hospital, I would send someone to retrieve it.
I had something else on my mind. I thought about Seattle and how I had inadvertently killed the man I wanted to question. This time, I would make sure the victim survived.
The sergeant at the gate generally waved me through, but this time he stopped me. He came to my door, saluted, and said, “Sir, I have orders…”
“Sergeant, you better let me through or the sorry son of a bitch in the backseat is going to bleed to death,” I said.
The sergeant looked behind me, and said, “Sir, my orders…”
“That man back there is dying,” I said.
“There are three of them, sir, and they look pretty dead,” said the sergeant.
“Not the one on the bottom,” I said. In truth, I only hoped he hadn’t. I wasn’t sure.
The sergeant tapped his earpiece and spoke. He leaned into the window, and said, “They’re sending MPs to meet you at the infirmary.”
The gate opened, and I sped through. The sound of sirens filled the air. A trio of jeeps with flashing lights caught up to me and stayed snug on my ass. I didn’t mind.
I sped around barracks, past a baseball field, and into the infirmary parking lot. I skidded to a stop near the door, then hopped out of the car. Three sets of MPs parked a few feet away and watched as I dumped the stiffs.
The man I had shot babbled incoherently as I hefted him off the car floor. The blood had drained out of his face, leaving his skin chalk white. The holes the fléchette had left behind were not much bigger than a pinprick. They went all the way through the bastard. In the heat of the fight, I had shot him several times, including the one through the wrist; now I wondered if perhaps that had been a bit excessive.
The guy was in shock. I slung him over my shoulder and
dashed into the infirmary. He hung as limp as a wet towel, still mumbling shit I could not understand.
Two medics, both clones, waited with a gurney outside the door. I flipped the bleeding, babbling victim onto his back and laid him down for them.
The medics hauled my victim away and a half dozen MPs came to join me. They did not draw their guns or make any move to arrest me. The urgency had gone out of the situation now that they had me.
Along with the base cops came a man from Intelligence, a lieutenant who looked scared to death as he approached me. He said, “General, um…sir, I noticed that there were two dead men on the ground beside the car.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you kill them, sir?”
Somebody had to,
I thought. I said, “Affirmative.”
The poor bastard had no idea what was going on. He was just the highest-ranking Intelligence officer on a far-flung base. Someone from Washington probably told him he had a three-star problem without going into details.
I walked to a row of chairs and sat down. He followed me; so did the MPs.
“What are you doing?” asked the lieutenant.
“I want to have a word with that fellow when he comes out of E.R.,” I said, trying to sound civil.
He stood a few feet from me nodding and trying to figure out what to do next. Finally, he ordered the MPs to bring in the bodies.
He sat down in the chair next to mine, and asked, “Why did you shoot them?”
“They were following me,” I said.
“How do you know they were following you?” he asked.
I smiled, and said, “Just a hunch.”
Along with my S9, I had that strange cylinder in my pocket. I pulled it out and showed it to the lieutenant.
“What is that?”
“I took it off the guy with the holes,” I said, nodding toward the emergency room. Normally, I spoke more respectfully to junior officers, but I was still coming down off a combat reflex.
I twisted the metal cylinder around and looked at it from
every angle. “I think it is a weapon of some kind,” I said. “Whatever it is, the bastard did everything he could to hold on to it. I had to shoot him through the wrist to get it out of his hand.”
I gave the cylinder to the lieutenant and told him to get it analyzed.
“I hear you’re piling up bodies again,” Cutter said, when I picked up the infirmary phone.
“Maybe today is the third Day of the Martyrs,” I said. “Were there other attacks?”
“Just you,” said Cutter. “I’ve seen the video feed. It doesn’t look like they actually attacked you.”
“Bad camera angle,” I said.
“There are twelve witnesses who claim they saw you shoot three unarmed men.”
“Ridiculous,” I said. “One of the men was armed with a flask.”
“So I hear. We’ll open it in Langley. In the meantime, what do you intend to do with your victim?”
“I’ve got some questions I want to ask him.”
“Do you plan on arresting him?”
“That depends on what is in that flask,” I said. While waiting for my victim to come out of the emergency room, I reviewed the fight in my head over and over again, looking for ways of justifying my attacking those men. I decided the term “flask” conveyed a note of scientific menace. It would need a lot of scientific menace to justify shooting two men in the back and drilling the third guy multiple times.
Cutter said, “You can’t detain him, Harris. You either need to arrest the guy or let him go.”
“Or I can keep him here in the hospital until I’m sure that he’s healthy enough to leave,” I said.
“You are creating a diplomatic nightmare.”
“Look, Admiral, he’s not going anywhere. He took fléchettes in both knees,” I said. “If I need to arrest someone to make this official, I can arrest his two pals.”
“The ones you killed?”
“The ones who were down when I loaded them into the car. The witnesses don’t know that I killed them.”
“All twelve witnesses reported them as dead,” Cutter pointed out.
“What do they know?” I asked. “This is a state-of-the-art medical facility.” It wasn’t, but I didn’t care. “We might have resuscitated them.”
“One of the witnesses saw you shoot a man in the throat. He said there was blood spurting out of both sides of the man’s neck,” said Cutter.
I decided to change the subject. I said, “I need Intel to ID the bastards.”
“Intel has already IDed them,” said Cutter.
“New Olympians?” I asked, thinking they might be members of the Martian Legion looking for a little revenge.
“No,” said Cutter.
“No?” I asked, beginning to think that maybe I had just killed a couple of innocents.
“Unifieds,” said Cutter. “They worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. I don’t suppose you can tell me what two former spies and a retired assassin were doing in Hawaii?”
I gave the first answer that came into my head, I said, “Bleeding.” Then I said, “Unifieds. Admiral, if the Unifieds are involved, this is going to get ugly.”
When Mr. Arthur Hooper woke up, he found me and three armed MPs waiting in his room. He looked at us, sighed, and said, “Specking hell.”
I said, “Hello, Art. Glad you could join us. Did you have a good rest?”
He glared at me, and said, “Get specked.”
By this time I had seen Arthur’s personnel files. His buddies had been the brains of the operation. One specialized in surveillance and interrogation. The other was an interrogator with a medical degree—a particularly nasty sort of parasite.
Unfortunately for Arthur and company, they’d learned their trades back in the day when the Unified Authority owned and operated all of the satellites and the security cameras. Running surveillance was easy for them back then. Now we owned the cameras. Surveillance was easy for us.
Arthur, never the subtle surveillance type, had specialized in captures and assassinations, the bastard. He’d occupied a world of murky ethics, the world of black operations.
I said, “The big wheel of Karma seems to have spun a full circle, Art. I was just reading your personnel file. You were a scary guy.”
He was big and strong. Before he ran into me and my S9, he’d been tough, and he was not backing down now. Even with two holes in his right arm and a hole through each of his legs, he stood his ground…metaphorically speaking.
Our war-tested MedTechs were more than qualified to suture veins and staunch bleeding; but the only way they knew to deal with pain involved copious amounts of drugs. At the moment, Arthur Hooper’s bravado was chemically enhanced. I wondered just how resolute he would remain if I shut off his pharmaceutical courage.
At least he was lucid.
I asked, “What were three former Unified Authority spooks doing outside a Marine base?”