Chapter 64: The Final Guardianship

Chapter 64: The Final Guardianship

The military camp was dead silent at 2 a.m.

The searchlights from Tromsø harbor swept back and forth across the snow, their beams sliding over clusters of tents and crates stacked along the road.

Wind came in from the north, pushing through the narrow gaps between tents, making the ropes that held down the canvas hum.

Two sentries leaned against the sandbag fortification at the northwest corner of the camp, rifles in their arms, shoulders hunched against the cold.

One of them fished a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his pocket and pulled one out, handing it to the other.

The lighter took three tries to catch. The flame bent sideways in the wind, and both men huddled together, cupping their hands around it. The orange glow of the cigarette tip flared once in the dark.

They didn't hear a thing.

The first sentry died with that freshly lit cigarette still between his lips.

A hand came from behind, fingers locking around his jaw and the top of his skull, then twisted left. The snap of his spine was swallowed whole by the wind.

The cigarette dropped into the snow and hissed out.

The second sentry turned his head. His mouth had just started to open when a short blade drove in between his third and fourth ribs on the left side, angled upward through his heart.

Blood seeped down the sandbag canvas and melted thin wisps of steam from the surface of the snow.

Twelve black shapes slipped silently through a gap in the wire fence.

They wore black combat gear, faces hidden behind masks, eyes exposed — cold, blank, carrying nothing.

Their breathing was kept perfectly even by implanted chips. Their footfalls complemented each other. There were no hand signals between them, no radio communication.

Because they shared one tactical model.

They were early prototype-batch clones, produced individually on Odin's Berlin assembly line, built from Kyle's earliest genetic sequence. No neural chips had been implanted during their creation. All combat instructions were written directly into biological memory.

Signal jammers did nothing to them.

Though there weren't many of them either.

The lead clone crouched down, drew a line in the snow with one finger, then pointed deeper into the camp.

The twelve split into three groups and spread out.

Cole's command tent still had its light on.

In front of him was a structural diagram of the Crow's Nest fortress.

He'd drawn a circle in pencil around the old drainage pipes on the fortress's east wing, and put a question mark beside the northwest ventilation system.

Heinrich's jammer identification module had already been pushed through. Gunnar's three assault teams should already be on their way to the supply depot. Three icebreakers and a submarine were docked and ready to move at any time.

The tent flap was thrown open.

Cole looked up. A sentry stood in the doorway, covered in blood, a short blade buried in his chest all the way to the hilt, blood running down the handle and dripping off.

His mouth was open, lips moving, but blood had clogged his throat and only a wet, shapeless sound came out.

Cole was on his feet immediately, knife drawn from his hip, but the sentry was already pitching forward, hitting the ground hard.

The first gunshot came from outside the tent.

Then the shots ran together into a roar.

Cole burst out of the tent.

The camp had turned to chaos.

A prototype clone had a soldier pinned to the ground, both hands locked around his throat.

Cole drove his blade into the side of the clone's neck, the edge catching between vertebrae. He wrenched it sideways. The clone's head tilted at a wrong angle, body shuddering once before the hands let go.

The soldier on the ground grabbed his throat, rolled over, got up, snatched his rifle, and put four rounds into the clone's chest.

"Wake everyone up!" Cole shoved him toward the barracks. "Tell them jammers are useless! Aim for the heart and the head!"

Three prototype clones came out of the dark between the tents at the same moment.

Their movements were synchronized — blades swinging at the same instant, each from a different angle. One slashed diagonally from the upper left, one cut horizontally from the right, one drove straight up from below.

Cole twisted aside from the first blade, used the back of his knife to knock the second one off course, and brought his knee up to block the third clone's wrist.

The impact of his knee against bone was solid. He dropped his foot back, used the momentum to spin at the waist, and drove his blade into the left clone's chest, dragging it sideways to tear open half the ribcage.

The clone looked down at the hole in its chest, expression unchanged, and kept swinging.

The second blade caught Cole on the left arm. The cold-weather jacket split open and blood welled up through the cut.

Cole stepped back twice. Blood ran down his left arm and dripped into the snow.

The three clones advanced side by side, steps even, the blood on their blades catching the searchlight in dull flashes.

One of them raised its blade and pointed it at him, mouth opening: "Alpha. Command. Confirm."

Cole shook the blood off his knife and tightened his grip.

The tent flap was knocked open again.

Cole caught the movement in his peripheral vision. His pupils contracted sharply.

Old Eric came rolling in on his wheelchair.

His arms couldn't manage much force. He held a hunting rifle, barely, the weight of it almost too much for him.

Old Eric forced the barrel toward the back of the clone closest to Cole.

He pulled the trigger.

Fire burst from both barrels. The round punched through the clone's back and came out through its chest, pulling a spray of dark blue blood with it.

The clone stumbled, turned around, and those empty eyes locked onto Old Eric.

Cole drove his blade through the clone's heart from behind. The tip pushed through the front of its chest wall. The clone's legs gave out and it dropped to its knees.

The other two clones turned at the same moment and went for Old Eric from both sides.

Cole cut in front of the one on the left, short blade catching the downward swing, sparks jumping from the impact onto his face.

The one on the right had already reached Old Eric.

The shotgun's second shell had been knocked off-line by the recoil from the first shot. Old Eric had no time to re-aim, and his arms had no strength left to adjust the angle.

Cole drove his blade through the throat of the clone he was holding off, then spun toward Old Eric — but he could already see that Old Eric had stopped looking at the blade coming down at him.

Old Eric was looking at Cole. His mouth was open, like he was trying to say something.

Then he threw his upper body forward and covered the clone's blade with himself.

The short blade drove through the center of his chest, the tip punching through the blanket and the wolf-clan coat, coming out through his back and into the snow.

"No!"

Cole shouted.

He took off the last clone's half its neck with one cut, then dropped to his knees beside Old Eric.

Blood poured from around the knife handle in Old Eric's chest, soaking through the blanket, the color shifting from gray-brown to deep black.

Cole pressed his hand over the wound.

"Cole." Old Eric's voice was barely there. "Don't trust... don't trust what you see..."

Cole cradled the back of his head, his palm going warm with blood.

Old Eric's lips kept moving. He wanted to say more.

Cole knew it was about Kyle. But he didn't have enough breath left for full sentences.

Old Eric lay there with his eyes open, fixed on Cole's face, and the last movements of his lips were no longer words — they were something only he could hear, some kind of prayer.

Then he turned his head and looked at Marcus, who had somehow made it into the tent without Cole noticing.

Marcus rushed forward and saw Old Eric's clouded eyes.

Old Eric moved the one finger he could still move and pointed at Marcus. "A blade can break... you can get a new one..."

But his voice cut off in the middle. His finger went slack, and his head fell against Cole's chest.

Cole knelt in the snow, holding Old Eric's body, not moving.

The wind came through and mixed the blood dripping from Cole's left shoulder with the blood from Old Eric's chest, freezing together in the snow into a dark red patch of ice.

Cole set Old Eric's body gently down in the snow and stood up.

The last two prototype clones had already been surrounded by Marcus and Elena and their people.

The clones stood back to back. Their masks had been torn off, and underneath were faces identical to Kyle's.

One of them suddenly lunged at the nearest soldier, but Marcus's shield caught it across the face. The short blade flew from its hand. Marcus followed through with a diagonal cut from above the collarbone, slicing through the carotid artery and the windpipe.

The last clone turned and ran.

It didn't get far before a sniper round caught up with it.

Elena stepped out through a gap in the tent, sniper rifle in hand, barrel still smoking.

The shooting stopped.

Cole held Old Eric's body, kneeling in the snow in front of the tent.

His face was pressed against Old Eric's cold forehead.

Marcus stood behind him, still holding the blood-soaked combat knife, lips moving a few times, and then saying nothing.

Elena set down the sniper rifle and knelt on one knee beside Old Eric.

Old Eric's last words still hung in the air.

A blade can break. You can get a new one. But not an Alpha.