The Clone Assassin Read Online Free PDF

second guard, the clone, hustled to the rail and prepared to shoot. He saw enemy Marines dressed in combat armor marching up the street. They marched in a column. They did not carry guns. Seeing this, he knew that the battle was forfeit.
    Unified Authority Marines,
he thought, knowing that U.A. Marines wore shielded combat armor. Bullets and batons were useless against men in shielded armor . . . “glowboys” as the EME Marines called them.
    The gunship fired her chain gun into the fences that surrounded the prison perimeter. Sparks danced on the electrified wire as bullets tore the posts to pieces. The gunship opened fire on the inside fence.
    Across the wall, guards fired at the gunship and the troops on the ground.
Useless,
thought the clone guard, as he chambered and fired another bullet.
    The gunship raised a few feet higher and fired a rocket. A thin arc of white smoke hung in the air, like a thread made of cloud, connecting the gunship to the outer wall of the cell block. Flames and smoke and clouds of concrete dust flushed into the air as the façade crumbled in an avalanche. The crack of the rocket still echoed in the air, drowning the dull thud of the demolition.
    The gunship pivoted nearly imperceptibly, then fired chain guns at the guards manning the towers. Bulletproof, but not chain-gun-proof, the guards’ nests shattered, splattering nuggets of glass around the guards’ dead bodies.
     • • • 
    The guards clustered around the entrance to the cell blocks on the second floor of the building. With the electricity out, the halls had become dark as a moonlit night, lit mostly by squares of light slanting in from small windows above the cells. A line of emergency beacons shone red along the wall.
    A few yards deeper into the darkness, prisoners stood in their prison cells, screaming at the guards. They couldn’t hear the battle outside. Concrete walls and shatterproof glass drowned out the sound of rifles.
    Then the rocket struck the front of the building, and a thunderous blast shook the facility down to its foundation, followed by a soft rumble as the wall collapsed in a concrete avalanche. Smoke and dust filled the hallway, sunlight slowly creeping in through the miasma.
    That first rocket didn’t harm the guards, but it sent them scurrying into the building’s depths. Outside, beyond the tattered ruins of the electrified fence, men in combat armor marched across the grounds unopposed. The gunship hovered protectively above them, no more than fifty feet from the ground.
    Some of the guards approached the ledge where the wall had been. They saw troops crossing the scraps of the outer gate and the gunship hovering above their heads. Death had come.
    One of the prisoners taunted the guards. He yelled, “You better run, rabbits.”
    “Shut up, Andropov,” said the warden. “Shut the speck up.”
    “Warden, you must really love your job,” said Andropov. Once a powerful politician, he knew how to slash at enemies with his words.
    The warden raised his riot gun and pointed it at Andropov. “I told you to shut the speck up.”
    Andropov lifted up his hands, palms out, and backed away, as silent as an altar boy.
    “He’s right,” said one of the guards.
    The warden looked down the line. He saw only forty men. The others had run away or died defending the building. Most of the men who remained were clones, retired military men who didn’t have it in them to run.
    Forty men,
he thought. He’d started the day with over one hundred.
    Sheridan held few prisoners, all of them labeled war criminals. Tobias Andropov had been a member of the Linear Committee, the executive branch of the Unified Authority. Most of the others had been senators or generals. Had this been a military facility, the guards might have had orders to kill the prisoners, but Sheridan FCI was civilian. No such orders had been given, and the clones who made up the bulk of the remaining guards were created without initiative. They