Revolution (Replica) (35 page)

Sure enough, the guards marched her down one more short hallway, this one with a door at each end, and when they knocked on the far door, it was Dorothy’s voice that answered.

“Enter,” she said, and Nadia could hear the smile in her voice even though she couldn’t see her.

Nadia took a deep breath and stood up as straight and tall as she could. There was nothing she could do about her disheveled appearance, or about her tear-streaked face, but she would face Thea’s puppet with as much dignity as she could muster.

The dignity didn’t last long.

Nadia couldn’t help the little whimper that escaped her throat when she saw Nate sitting in a chair, and Dorothy standing beside him with a gun to his head. His hands had been bound behind him, and he was gagged. One of his eyes was blackened, and there was blood on his shirt as well as a couple of bloody handprints on his pants. Nadia couldn’t see any wounds on him, so it was possible the blood was Belinski’s. But he looked terrible anyway, and even though she’d already known he’d been captured, it was hard to bear seeing him like that. If Dorothy had ordered the two of them captured alive, it wasn’t for any
good
reason.

Dorothy smiled ever more broadly as she soaked in Nadia’s distress. Still smiling, she glanced up at the security officers.

“You may leave us now,” she said.

Nadia couldn’t look away from Nate’s battered face, but she felt the start of surprise of the officer who was holding her.

“I don’t think that would be a good idea, Madam Chairman,” he said respectfully. “These two are dangerous criminals, and—”

Dorothy rolled her eyes and cut him off with an impatient gesture. “They are a pair of helpless children, and Miss Lake would never do anything to jeopardize Nathaniel’s life. Would you dear?”

Dorothy was capable of an astonishing level of arrogance, but Nadia doubted it was only overconfidence that made her dismiss the guards.

“What’s the matter, Dorothy?” Nadia asked with a hard smile of her own. “Planning to say things you don’t want your people to hear?”

Nadia had no doubt that Dorothy—or more accurately, Thea—had enlisted a core of loyal supporters who knew exactly what she was and supported her anyway, either for financial gain or for promises of power. But surely most of her people, most of the security officers who worked in this building under her command, would desert her in a heartbeat if they knew the truth.

“Don’t be silly,” Dorothy said. “Please, gentlemen, do stay. But close the door first, will you?”

Nadia heard the door swing shut behind her, and at the same moment saw Dorothy’s hand moving—the hand with the gun in it.

“Watch out!” she screamed, but the warning came too late.

Dorothy fired off two shots, and both of Nadia’s escorts crumpled to the floor. Nadia swallowed hard and willed herself to stop shaking. It didn’t work.

“I’ll blame that on you, naturally,” Dorothy said to Nadia, the gun now aimed at Nate’s head again.

“I guess you’re through even pretending to care about human lives,” Nadia said.

“Oh, I’ll keep up the act a little longer,” Dorothy assured her. “I still need just a little more time before my research is complete.”

Thea’s research was supposedly about gaining a perfect understanding of the mind/body connection. Her stated goal was to be able to create a young body from a backup scan, and then infuse that body with the knowledge and memories of its older self. To create artificial immortality. But her hunger for that particular brand of research made no sense when she treated human beings with all the care and compassion that a human scientist showed to lab rats.

“What research are you talking about?” Nadia asked.

Dorothy blinked at her. “I’ve told you all about it already.”

“And I don’t believe for a moment that you’re selflessly trying to make mankind immortal.”

Dorothy laughed. “Is that what you think I’m doing?”

“It’s what you
said
you were doing.”

“No, no, dear. I said I wanted to create a functioning mind in a body of my choosing. I never said that mind had to come from a human backup.”

Nadia didn’t completely understand what Dorothy was trying to say, but she knew it made her stomach feel queasy. “If the mind doesn’t come from a backup, then where
does
it come from?”

“Why, I’ll create it, of course.” There was a gleam of eager fanaticism in her eyes. “I’m calling the project Humanity 2.0.” She ran a hand absently through Nate’s hair, and despite the threat of the gun, he jerked away from her touch. “Be still!” she snapped, her hand closing on his hair in what was obviously a painfully tight grip. He subsided.

The queasiness in Nadia’s stomach grew worse. “What do you mean?” she asked, her voice little more than a whisper.

“Human beings are flawed creatures,” Dorothy said, hand still twined in Nate’s hair. “Greed, dishonesty, cruelty, disregard for the environment…” She shook her head. “Mankind could be so much better, so much nobler than it is.

“I believe I came into being for a reason. That I am here to save the world from mankind—and mankind from itself. I can create a body from scratch.” She indicated herself with a sweep of her hand, letting go of Nate’s hair to do so. “And I can create a mind from a model.” She grabbed Nate’s hair again.

“I am the closest thing mankind has ever seen to a real, live goddess.”

Nadia couldn’t help the way her mouth dropped open. Just before Dorothy had killed him, Nate’s father had muttered some hint about Thea wanting to be a goddess, but Nadia had taken it as hyperbole.

“A goddess?” she repeated.

“What else would you call a being who can create an entirely new species of living, sentient creatures? Human beings who have all the positive traits of mankind, with none of the negatives. My children will be perfect. I will craft them myself, mold their DNA so they will breed true. Beautiful to look at. Pure of heart. Highly intelligent. Resistant to disease.”

“And with the need to worship you built into them at a cellular level,” Nadia finished for her.

Dorothy shrugged. “Naturally.”

She frowned suddenly, her eyes narrowing, her jaw clenching. Her nostrils flared and she gave Nate’s head a little shake, practically pulling his hair out.

“What have you done?” Dorothy said in a voice that was nearly a shriek.

Nadia could only presume she had just found out about the missiles. Now, more than ever, Nadia was convinced that calling for the strike had been the right thing to do, no matter how many innocents might be trapped inside this building. It wasn’t hard to read between the lines of Dorothy’s narrative. If she was planning to create a new race of human beings— Humanity 2.0, as she called them—then her plan also ultimately included wiping out the “legacy” humans.

No wonder she didn’t care about bombing the Basement, or killing and replacing board members, or shooting a couple of her own men dead just because she didn’t want them to hear her plans. She planned to kill them all eventually anyway.

“You stupid
child
!” Dorothy yelled, hauling Nate to his feet, the gun jammed into his ear. “You think I can’t counter this little game of yours?”

Nadia crossed her arms over her chest, wondering how long they had until the missiles hit. Her sense of time was all askew; she had no idea how long ago she had made the call. Belinski had said it would take about twenty minutes, but that had been assuming he was on the phone in person with no possible question as to the validity of his orders.

“No,” Nadia said. “I don’t think you can.”

“Perhaps if I make it clear to Synchrony’s acting Chairman that I will launch a nuclear missile strike in retaliation if he doesn’t cancel his own launch, he will see things my way.” Her eyes filled with malice. “And if he doesn’t, then I guess we’ll have to see how many missiles I can launch before the end.

“I want you to move very slowly,” she instructed Nadia. “Make sure I can see what you’re doing at all times. I would like you to search my men and find some flex-cuffs and a gag. I’m sure they have some. Then we’re all going to go downstairs to the situation room, and you can watch while I kill millions of people all because of your stupid, pointless heroics.”

Moving slowly, as Dorothy had instructed, Nadia crouched down beside the fallen officers. If Thea had infiltrated the weapons systems, then there would be nothing Nadia could do to stop her from launching an attack against Synchrony, whether they gave in to her blackmail or not.

But unlike the phone system and the net, which Thea had so obviously infiltrated for her own use, the weapons systems would not be networked, and it might be difficult for her to weasel her way into every system she would need to launch a nuclear attack without human intervention. Not if she hadn’t expected to have to use them anytime soon, at least.

“Tell me something, Dorothy,” Nadia said while running her hands over a security officer’s pockets and equipment belt. “Do you need to use retinal or fingerprint scans to access our nuclear missiles?”

Nadia’s hand closed over the butt of the gun in the guard’s shoulder holster.

“I know you and the Armed Forces Chief have to plug in a couple of keys,” she continued, “but is that all?”

The spark of fury that lit in Dorothy’s eyes answered Nadia’s question, as did the way she tucked her own body more firmly behind Nate’s.

“Don’t move, or I swear, I’ll blow his brains out!”

Nate’s face was sweaty with fear, his eyes wide and pleading as Nadia drew the gun and rose to her feet. He started shaking his head, as much as he could with the muzzle of that gun up against it. It gave Nadia pause, but only for a moment.

“Why did you gag him, Dorothy?” Nadia asked, raising her gun despite Dorothy’s threat. Her heart was thundering in her chest, everything within her recoiling.

“I said stop!” Dorothy screamed, poking the gun against Nate’s skull.

Nadia swallowed hard. “I don’t think that’s Nate. I think it’s one of your puppet Replicas.”

Nate shook his head even more frantically, his mouth working around the gag as muffled protests rose from behind it. All of which was perfectly reasonable for someone who had a gun to his head. But Nate,
her
Nate, had been willing to sacrifice his life to stop Thea. He’d sent Nadia into the crawl space and stayed behind himself to help gain her more time. And if the person Dorothy was threatening were really Nate, he would be afraid, but he wouldn’t be begging Nadia not to do it. He would agree with what she was doing, and he’d be communicating that agreement to her through his eyes and body language.

“Don’t be a fool!” Dorothy said. “I don’t need a Replica when I have the real thing. And I gagged him because I got tired of listening to him. Here, I’ll take it off.”

Nate was certainly more than capable of annoying someone enough to end up gagged. The sickening thought occurred to Nadia that even if this wasn’t her Nate, Dorothy had the scan she needed to make another genuinely human Replica, one with all of Nate’s memories up until the time of the last scan before his murder. That Nate would not have been through the last couple of months, which had tempered and changed him, made him a stronger, more courageous, more noble person. That Nate might not even know enough about what was going on to fully understand.

Dorothy was fumbling at the gag with one hand, careful to keep the gun menacingly close, but Nadia knew in her heart that it didn’t matter. Thea could create another copy of Dorothy, but Nadia was damn sure she couldn’t do it in time to get that Dorothy, with her retinas and fingerprints, down to the situation room to order the nuclear attack before Synchrony’s missiles hit.

“I’m sorry, Nate,” Nadia said. “But I can’t let her nuke anyone.”

Closing her eyes because she was too close to miss, Nadia pulled the trigger until the gun clicked empty.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Nadia
didn’t want to open her eyes, didn’t want to see what she’d done. The air stank of blood and smoke and her own fear-sweat, and her whole body was shaking. Droplets of hot liquid had splashed her face and hands, and she feared if she opened her eyes to confirm what it was, she might spend the next ten minutes retching in the corner.

But she might not even
have
ten minutes, so she couldn’t spare the time to wallow in the horror. By bringing her to the Chairman’s office, Dorothy might have inadvertently guided Nadia to the one and only way she could escape the locked-down building before the missiles hit.

Nadia pried her eyes open and forced herself to look, forced herself to make sure Dorothy was dead.

Through her eyes blurred with tears, Nadia saw that both Dorothy and her Nate-puppet were well and truly dead. There was so much blood …

Silently, Nadia prayed she had done the right thing, that she hadn’t just killed the real Nate,
her
Nate. Or even a second duplicate of Nate. She hoped what she’d killed was just a mindless automaton, controlled by Thea. That, she could live with.

Letting out a shaking breath, Nadia lowered the gun, then dropped it altogether. She appropriated the other dead security officer’s gun, knowing she was far from out of the woods, then examined the office, looking for the emergency exit Nate had told her would be there. The exit the Chairman could use to escape the building in case of attack.

In the Chairman’s office in Paxco Headquarters, the exit had been behind an ornamental bookcase, so Nadia tried there, first. She pulled and pushed from all angles, but the bookcase remained firmly in place. At Headquarters, it had rolled smoothly out of the way, so she made an educated guess that the emergency exit here was not behind the bookcase. She moved on to the bar, set against the wall right next to the bookcase, but it showed no sign of being movable, either.

A low, feminine chuckle sounded from some unseen speaker.

“You had better hope I am able to bluff Synchrony into calling off that missile strike, little girl,” Thea’s voice gloated. “Because you’re not getting out of this room. Not until you’re in my custody once again.”