The Clone Assassin Read Online Free PDF Page B

would need orders before they could kill the prisoners; that was in their programming. The warden could have given the order, but he was a civilian; he cared more about his own survival than the survival of the prisoners.
    The first of the invaders entered the hall. He looked like a ghost, a glowing silhouette of a man that materialized out of the sunlight. Two more followed. Many more came after them, their armor glowing a dull orange-gold as they entered the shadowy building.
    Though he knew it was too late to surrender, the new warden handed his shotgun to the nearest guard and walked out to meet the invaders. He held his hands out so they could see that he came without weapons. Squinting into the sunlight, he took slow steps. He inhaled and held his final breath.
    The first of the invading Marines stood about fifty feet off. He did not carry a gun.
    Don’t shoot me,
the warden willed.
There’s no need to shoot.
    He came within thirty feet of the invaders before the man on point raised his arm and fired three fléchettes—hair-width fragments of depleted uranium that penetrated both the front and back of the warden’s skull.
    One of the remaining guards, a clone, raised his riot gun and fired. The buckshot spread, forming a two-foot-wide pattern. Shot that went wide of the invader cut ellipses in the wall on either side of him. The shot that should have hit his shielded armor flashed like sparks and evaporated.
    The gunfight lasted five minutes. In the depths of the hall, their shotguns echoing like thunder and flashing like lightning, the guards, shot, pumped, shot, pumped, retreated farther and farther into the hall, gave up ground, unintentionally freeing prisoners as they backed away from the attack.
    A clone guard hid behind a corner, gripping the butt of his shotgun as tightly as he could. Fear surged through his brain. As an invader passed his hiding place, the guard rose to his feet, and fired a shot at point-blank range.
    The U.A. Marine turned, grabbed at the guard, and the power running through his shields both burned and electrocuted the man. His face and shoulders charred as the clone died of heart failure.
    One of the guards threw his riot gun to the side, turned, and ran. The invaders shot him in the back. Blood drained from his body through dozens of pinprick holes. Another guard raised his hands high above his head and tried to surrender. He was a natural-born, something he hoped might save him. The invaders shot him.
    Once the guards were dead, the invaders turned on the prisoners. They freed Andropov and most of the politicians, then killed the incarcerated former Unified Authority military officers in their cells like penned animals.
    When investigators came to search the scene, they found no survivors.

CHAPTER
FIVE
    Location: The EMN
Churchill
, orbiting Earth
    At the time of his death, Admiral Don Cutter had not heard about the attacks on Sheridan Correctional or the Pentagon. It was 16:00 by the Space Travel Clock, which was synchronized to Greenwich Mean Time, five hours ahead of Washington, D.C., and eight hours ahead of Sheridan, Oregon.
    As the provocateur armed his bomb, and the gunship approached the penitentiary, Don Cutter, the highest-ranking officer in the Enlisted Man’s Navy and de facto leader of the Enlisted Man’s Empire, sat alone in his office.
    Cutter maintained a deck for himself and his staff on the
Churchill
, the flagship of the Enlisted Man’s Fleet. He was not the captain of the ship or the commander of the fleet. As the head of the Enlisted Man’s Navy, he no longer participated in the tasks that he loved. He had risen from commander to “commander in chief,” which, in his mind, meant the same thing as being put out to pasture. He had become the kind of officer he had most despised throughout his career. Instead of leading space leviathans into battles, he now settled political squabbles.
    He had trouble concentrating on his work. The report on his desk was about