The Clone Sedition (19 page)

The archive collection included a list of video feeds labeled with names and dates and marked
EXPEDITED
. The first one was marked,
JOHN TURNBOW—EXPEDITED, 03/06/03
. Watson ran the feed and immediately recognized it as a view seen through the computerized scope of a sniper rifle. Readouts along the edge of the scope tracked wind velocity—fifteen miles per hour—and distance—2.3 miles. As the time stamp along the bottom of the screen ticked off seconds, lines closed in around the target, a man walking toward a car.

A voice so low that it reminded him of a kettledrum asked, “Do you confirm identity as John Turnbow?”

“Identity confirmed. Expedite.”

Without responding, Freeman fired.

The rifle made a sound no louder than a muffled cough. Having never witnessed a murder or an execution, Watson felt his breath catch in his throat. For a moment, Watson thought the bullet had missed. One second passed and nearly another, then a bright red halo appeared around the target’s head, and he fell.

That was it. From this distance, it looked like Freeman might have shot him with red paint.

Watson found one file marked,
EXPEDITED—MORGAN ATKINS, 11/8/09
. “Morgan Atkins?” he whispered.

Until that moment, Watson had believed that Atkins, whose fanatical followers had nearly overthrown the Unified Authority, had merely disappeared. His prurient interest overpowering him, Watson booted the feed.

The video was captured using night-for-day lenses to compensate for the lack of ambient light. Up ahead, a shuttle sat on a runway surrounded by a small army of guards.

Watson wondered if he was looking through the lenses of a combat visor.

“Are we on?” the now-familiar voice asked.

“Yes.”

“Yes,” just “yes.” That simple word had signed the death warrant of one of the most famous figures in human history. Watson sat transfixed.

There he was, the legendary Morgan Atkins, looking old
but very much alive. Atkins, with a stooped back and a flowing white beard that reached below his chest, walked at the head of an entourage looking for all the world like a modern-day messiah out for a walk with his apostles.

Still looking distinguished, despite the beard and degradations of age, Atkins stopped to speak to the soldiers guarding the runway. As he stood there, Freeman held out a handheld scope and captured his image. He asked, “Identity confirmed?”

A voice said, “Confirmed. Expedite.”

Atkins spoke for several seconds with one of the guards. They shook hands. The guard said something, and Atkins laughed and responded.

A device in Freeman’s helmet measured the distance. Atkins was 323 feet away.

Freeman climbed out from behind the boxes he’d been using for cover. Nobody noticed him until he started running toward the shuttle; by that time, it was too late.

A series of small explosions went off around the landing
strip. These were not large detonations, just small geysers of flame that shot ten feet up. Hoping to protect their leader, some of the members of Atkins’s entourage pushed him into the shuttle as bombs exploded and guards fell dead. The explosions continued for over a minute, a chaos of fire and smoke that sent bodies flying into the air.

The shuttle could not drive across the runway, not in all of the chaos caused by the bombs. Freeman darted into the smoke and flame without hesitation, paused long enough to fire shots at the last of the guards, and leaped into the shuttle as the hatch began to close.

Three men with guns stood just inside the door of the shuttle. Freeman shot them before they could even aim their weapons. He gave no pause to mercy. He simply stepped through the doorway and shot them.

A man ran at Freeman with a knife. Freeman shot him in the head. Atkins sat unarmed. He looked terrified. Freeman
shot him without saying a word. Then he went to the cockpit. He grabbed the pilot by his head and snapped his neck, then threw his dead body out of the chair.

The feed ended.

When it came to murder, Freeman seemed utterly indifferent. He did not speak to his victims; nor did he offer them the chance to surrender. From what Watson could tell, Freeman’s sense of morality belonged only to the people who had contracted his services.

Watson scrolled through the
EXPEDITED
files. The last one was marked,
WAYSON HARRIS, 12/18/16
. He stared at the monitor in disbelief, realizing that until that moment, he had considered Harris indestructible. Now Watson decided that if it came to a war between Freeman and Harris, he would bet on Freeman.

Seeing a file with Harris’s name on it, Watson wondered how Harris had survived. Maybe Freeman had killed him and the Harris leading the Enlisted Man’s Empire was a clone of a clone. Not knowing much about cloning technology, he had no idea if clones could be created with experiences and knowledge imprinted in their brains.

That thought brought him back to where he began.
If clones are programmed, maybe their intelligence can be replicated,
he thought as he booted the video feed.

The feed showed a Johnston R-27, a civilian craft capable of both space and atmospheric travel, landing on a small runway at night. The R-27 rolled past a row of military transports and stopped near a fence. The door of the R-27 opened and a man carrying a rucksack climbed out.

The scene was recorded through the computerized scope of a sniper rifle, possibly the same one Freeman had used when he shot John Turnbow. The lines closed in around the target.

“Do you confirm identity as Wayson Harris?”

“Identity confirmed. Expedite.”

Freeman fired the shot, hitting the man square in the chest. A woman screamed. The file ended.

As Wayson Harris’s aide, Watson had the authority to launch an “all-points alert” search, commandeering every camera on every satellite orbiting Earth. The cameras and satellites performed
their normal functions, but Freeman’s image had been added into their instructions set. Security cameras in police departments, military bases, government buildings, and transportation hubs now searched for Ray Freeman. Communications networks analyzed all transmissions, searching for his voice.

If Freeman walked down a street, spoke on a telephone, or entered a grocery store, the networks would spot him.

Location: Mars Spaceport
Date: April 10, 2519

The fight took place in the train station.

I had no idea how the speck the bastards got from the spaceport to the Air Force base, but there they were.

Whoever they were, they entered the base through the train station, caught the Marines guarding the platforms napping, and blew their fool heads off. Then they crossed the tunnel and sent a team up the escalator that led into the base. That was when the shooting began.

The bastards were not well trained or well armed, but they had one thing going for them—they considered martyrdom a privilege.

I was on the far side of the lobby talking with Curtis Jackson and a lieutenant when the first grenade rolled across the floor. Someone yelled, “Grenade!” and everybody jumped.

The grenade skittered across the granite, bouncing along an erratic path. In the spaceport, with its glass walls and civilian-friendly construction, a full-yield grenade would have caused a cave-in. This was not a full-yield grenade, and we were on a military base. The grenade exploded, but the walls remained in place.

The percussion of the grenade sent a few men tumbling through the air. It knocked me over. Feeling like my head might explode, I reached down and found my M27.

I tried to stand, but my head was in a funk. I was dizzy. I was tired. I was confused. Maybe I had a concussion. Six men ran from the tunnel. I shot them at the same time as thirty other Marines did. The miserable bastards stood and shredded as
hundreds of bullets perforated their front sides and sprayed their backsides all over the walls in reds and purples.

Six more men charged up the stairs. So many Marines blasted those poor bastards that I didn’t waste my bullets on the slaughter. Instead, I fished in my belt and found a grenade, which I primed and tossed into the train tunnel.

A grenade,
I thought. It almost felt like I shouldn’t have had one.

My grenade arced over the bursting bodies at the front of the tunnel and vanished behind them. A moment passed, and the blast from my grenade spit body parts all over the platforms below.

The invaders caught us unaware; but we were combat-hardened Marine killing machines. Our instincts took over. As the smoke and dust cleared from the tunnel, I crouched low and rushed into the chaos. Not knowing if any of my men had already entered the quagmire ahead of me, I held my fire, which turned out to be the correct decision. As the smoke cleared, I saw men in combat armor lined up along the rail overlooking the train platforms.

The tunnel was long and dark with a squared ceiling and three sets of tracks. A train sat dormant below me.

The bastards took the train?
I wondered.
I told Cutter to destroy the tracks.

Using night-for-day vision, I saw thousands of men crammed on the platform below me. They were not dressed in uniforms. They looked more like a mob than an army.

Three of my men sprinted down the escalator toward the platforms below, the muzzles of their M27s flashing so steadily they looked like welding torches. Buckshot nicked the metal rails along the escalator, sending dandelion sparks in the air. My Marines ran fast, presenting difficult targets; but with thousands of shotguns, even the Martian Legionnaires were dangerous. The first men down the stairs were atomized. The third guy down died as well, but he left a corpse.

I fished a second grenade out of my belt and tossed it into the sea of men blow.

“Fire in the hole!” I yelled over the interLink. Those were the first words I actually remembered speaking since I had
left Mars Spaceport. I’d been thrown around by explosions in other battles, but never dazed like this.

The Legion had placed itself in an unwinnable situation. There were only two ways out of the train station, back into the desert or up the escalator. They couldn’t go back out into the desert without breathing gear, and they’d be sitting ducks trying to file up the escalator. They had one train, and many of them started to board it.

“I need men and guns now, now, now!” I yelled into the interLink even though I already had more than enough men to finish this skirmish.

My men responded like Marines. A wave of men ran into the tunnel, guns raised. They stormed the rails overlooking the platform and shot the enemy like fish in a barrel.

The Legionnaires carried shotguns. They hit several of my men, killing some and merely injuring others. A Marine in combat armor slid down the side of the escalator, fired, and was hit in the face. The spray from the shotgun didn’t just penetrate his armor, it tore it to pieces. Buckshot and shredded plastic slit his skin. He slumped down, a gush of blood washing through his shattered exoskeleton.

A Legionnaire pulled a grenade. Only the ones in the very front could reach us with a grenade, and it would have required a good arm to hurl that pill up to the mezzanine and laser precision to arc it over the rail. Several people shot the bastard as he stepped forward to throw. He dropped the grenade and fell on his ass.

“Live one!” I yelled into the Link.

The force from the explosion shook the tunnel. I stood, peered over the rail, and saw the swamp below. The blood looked black through my visor. It covered the floor, the walls, and the tracks. Limbs and shredded bodies stuck out of the gore like rocks in a low tide.

My men and I wore combat armor that protected our ears. Most of the surviving Legionnaires either knelt or rolled on the ground. I could hear them moaning. Amazingly, a few continued the fight. A handful of Legionnaires ran along the platform, firing their shotguns and trying to reach the bottom of the escalator. They made easy targets that my Marines picked off with their M27s.

Throughout the five-minute battle, more and more of the attackers slipped onto the train. As the fighting slowed, the lights in the cars flicked on and the train started to move. A few last Legionnaires dived into the doors as it rolled toward the air locks. My Marines fired at the train, splintering its windows and punching holes into its sides until it looked like a sieve.

With the windows gone and walls shot to shit, the men on the train would suffocate once their ride entered the Martian badlands.

“Hold your fire. Hold your fire,” I told my men.

“You’re just going to let them ride out of here?” Jackson yelled.

“Let them go?” I asked. “They’re already dead.”

I watched the ghost train as it slowly rolled into the locks. The windows had shattered and fallen from their casings, the walls were riddled with holes. No one could have survived that fusillade, it would be like running through a hurricane and dodging the raindrops.

I was curious to see if the train would run all the way back to the spaceport. If it did, it would deliver a message. We’d lost round one in the grand arcade. They’d killed two of my men and gotten away with it. I wanted them to know that further attacks would not be tolerated.

I placed a new clip in my M27 as I walked down to the platform. A couple of dead Legionnaires lay partway up the escalator. I stepped around one and nudged the other out of my way with my boot. Then I came to the knot of bodies at the base of the escalator. Instead of pushing them out of my way, I vaulted over the rail and walked around them.

Body parts. Men killed by the grenade had been thrown against the walls and onto the railroad tracks. Not even their own mothers would have recognized these blood-soaked cadavers. Some had lost arms. One guy had both his arms still attached to his shoulders. He lay in a pool of blood with what looked like a third arm sprouting out of his gut. There was no determining which limbs were which without significant DNA tests.