I returned fire, aiming at the flares of the muzzle. Neither shot hit anything except the wall, but I must have come close. The man panicked. He ran past a communications panel and I saw his silhouette against the lights on that panel. I squeezed off two shots and hit the bastard, pausing to listen to the sound he made when he crashed into the wall and collapsed. I didn’t think I’d killed him, but he wasn’t happy. I heard him rolling around on the hard, cold floor.
“Sound off,” I called to my MPs.
Only three men answered.
We closed in around each other in a protective circle, our backs pointing in, our guns pointing out. We remained in a crouch as we slithered toward the spot where I had hit the infiltrator, feeling our way through the darkness.
Another shot. Hidden by the darkness, the bastard fired a single shot, then we were three. I returned fire, wasting three bullets. The guy next to me returned fire, too. Neither of us hit anything.
The clone I’d shot continued to spasm as we neared him. He kicked at me, but he was weak. I’d aimed low, hoping to hit him in the gut. If I’d shot right, he should have lost a lot of blood. I heard him wheezing, fighting for air. I might have hit him in the lungs or the stomach.
He kicked at me again as I knelt beside him. I grabbed his ankle with one hand and fired two shots along his leg. He went limp. Trying to emulate a coroner’s disregard for the dead, I worked my way along the body and found the dead man’s head. I wasn’t checking to make sure of my kill. I wanted his goggles.
No more than twenty feet away from us, but hidden by darkness, the second infiltrator clone made too much noise as he entered the hall, and I fired at him. My two surviving MPs fired as well. We didn’t hit the bastard, but we chased him away long enough for me to grab the goggles from the dead clone’s head.
Warm liquid smeared along my forehead as I pulled the goggles over my eyes. As a Marine in combat mode, I was trained to ignore the feel of the other man’s blood; but as a Liberator, I took a certain pleasure in it. It added to the combat reflex already spreading through me.
Now wearing night-vision goggles, I could see in the dark. I had not hit the man in the chest as I had thought. My shot had hit him where his shoulders met his neck, leaving a messy wound. Anyone else would have quietly bled to death, but this infiltrator tried to kick me as his life bled out of him.
The goggles had bulky, thick lenses, but they cut through the darkness. I could see the hall around me as clearly as if the noon sun shone through it. I glanced at the body beside me and knew that it was Sua, the sides of his head shaved clean. Filaments as fine as an old man’s whiskers stuck out of the bald patch—the wires that had conducted the electricity into his brain to disable him while he was on the cage.
Keeping my gun out and ready, I grabbed my last MPs by their shoulders and stood them up. As they fell in behind me, the infiltrator peered out from behind a corner, and I caught a glimpse of him. He wore Marine combat armor. Even if he went to the morgue, the armor would have gotten him through the updated security posts. With that armor, he would have been able to pass through posts without them reading his DNA.
I fired a shot and missed. He answered with a grenade. “Shit!” I yelled as I turned and shoved my men around a corner. Three seconds passed before the grenade exploded. By the time it finally went off, we had dashed around one corner, then the next, working our way back toward the elevator.
I pushed one of my MPs into the elevator, then forced the second one down to the floor. He must have felt the blood and known what I was doing because he smeared the gore on his chest and face.
I left him there, lying still as a corpse with his gun hidden under his ass.
For me, with my combat reflex in full swing, I might have taken a perverse pleasure lying there, blinded by darkness, knowing an assassin lingered nearby. The MP did not have the benefit of a gland flooding his blood with synthetic courage. Instead, he had nerve.
Marine combat armor had many uses, but it was not designed for stealth. The infiltrator’s armored boots clattered on the floor. His body plates clacked softly when they brushed against the walls. Me, I was dressed in a Charlie service uniform. My shoes had hard soles, but they weren’t extruded from a compound of plastic and steel.
Time was on my side. The infiltrator could hide if he wanted, but sooner or later an army of MPs would show up. It might take one minute, it might take ten; but once they finished securing the upper corridors, the MPs would arrive. The lights would come on and he would be trapped. He had to know that.
I reached a corner, knelt low to the floor, flashed around the wall for a fleeting look. The two men guarding the psychology lab lay dead on the floor. One was inside the open entrance to the lab. The door slid partway closed, struck his body, then slid back into its recess. A moment later, it repeated the process.
I moved toward that door slowly, my gun ready, my eyes searching for the slightest hint of motion. The way the door chewed on the dead man distracted me. Staying low and searching the hall around me, I darted into the lab and kicked the dead guard out to the corridor.
A moment after I entered the lab, I heard a shot followed seconds later by more shots in rapid succession. Not waiting for the shooting to stop, I hurried back to the elevator. I did not run. I moved ahead slowly, methodically, always expecting a trap.
When I reached the elevator, I saw my MPs sitting on the floor, talking. One held a gun in his hand, the other held the flashlight. They heard me coming, spotted me with their light, then shined it on the heap of combat armor lying dead on the floor.
I went to the dead clone and kicked him hard enough to send his helmet spinning across the floor. I kicked him again. These were dangerous clones, the kind of enemy who plays possum, then shoots you in the back as you walk away. Not this one, though. He was dead.
* * *
The cavalry finally arrived, and only ten minutes too late. At least they figured out how to restore the lights.
With the lights in the hall shining brightly above me, I returned to the psychology lab. Two MPs lay dead in the anterior office, their guns lying lame beside them. They’d tried to cover the door, but they were blind in the dark. At least they’d stayed at their post to the end.
I hesitated a moment and entered the lab. There was the cage, now little more than an empty table. Beside it, toppled to the floor, was the stool Dr. Morman had used as she interviewed her captive patient.
She wasn’t by the stool. Her body lay in a bloodstained heap in a corner of the lab. Sua—it must have been Sua—had beaten her to death. Uncontrolled outrage had been built into his psyche. From the angle of her neck and the twists in her body, I got the feeling that simply killing Jennifer Morman had not been enough to quench Sua’s fury.
PART IV
BETTER THAN WAR
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
The dynamics of the summit changed on the final day.
Gobi Station Security sent gunships on hourly sweeps of the desert. When they found fifteen Piper Bandits hidden in caves and under tarps, they issued an order to fire on any unidentified vehicles or people seen within a ten-mile radius of the base.
The first speaker of the day was Lieutenant Pearce, the naval engineer who modified Gobi Station security posts so that they would read chromosomes instead of DNA.
“It was easy,” he began. “We’ve had no problems reconfiguring the posts to catch double wise.”
Warshaw put up a hand, and asked, “What is a ‘double wise’?”
“Double wise, you know, clones with two Y chromosomes. The infiltrators. Now that we know what they are, the guys down in Security call them ‘Double Ys.’ Fixing the posts to read chromosomes instead of DNA was a
