by Andrew Beery
2100.1207.0199 Galactic Normalized Time
Merab Q’Tar was once again master of her own fate. Thankfully the crew of the Gilboa and her captain had proven more resourceful than anticipated. Merab could still feel the suppressed compulsions to serve the Mahanaim AIs, but her own ego was now fully in charge. If anything, she was now a better weapon for the cause of the Galactic Order. She had the implanted memories of her alter-ego as well as an insight into the enemy’s goals.
Her biggest problem was convincing Admiral Riker that she could be trusted to help. She supposed the fact that she had tried to kill him on multiple occasions might understandably hinder his willingness to offer said trust.
Chapter 13: Caged Dog…
I have fond memories of when I first joined the Federated Space Force. Our Drill Instructor swore up and down to my fellow trainees and I that he was our best buddy. I should probably point out that I had cause to question this assertion on several occasions.
As one example, I remember him telling us that pain was our friend. In hindsight, I suspect this particular DI had an only partially suppressed proclivity towards sadism. Apparently –as we were writhing on the ground in pain from a training taser— he felt the need to explain that our pain was a good thing… it let us know that we were alive.
Let me state for the record, my DI was full of it. Pain was not my friend because if it was, I’d be feeling quite ‘friendly’ right now. Instead, all I wanted to do was to lay still and hope at some point that the world would stop spinning and the raw fire in my shoulder would cease.
“Emergency lights,” I barked in a voice that sounded odd to me. They flickered on.
I was having a hard time seeing. There was smoke on the bridge, but my difficulty making out my surroundings seemed to be due to blood washing into my eyes. I felt my scalp and confirmed the blood was mine. My left arm refused to move. It and my shoulder were broken. I could feel the bones grating as I moved. No question about it… pain was not my friend right now.
As I made my way back towards my command chair, I was having an increasingly hard time concentrating. I had to keep it together… the ship and crew were in trouble. To be honest, I still didn’t understand why we weren’t dead. My suspicions were confirmed a few moments later as the intruder alert klaxon added to the already painful din.
I managed to get my good arm into the diagnostic cuff built into my command chair. I felt an immediate flush of relief as medical nanites began to block pain centers in my brain. They couldn’t do much for the damaged bones prior to them being reset, but at least I could think straight again.
I seemed to be the worst injury on the bridge. Our Roharian Emissary Jowls had been on the bridge. He was helping others get back to their stations. I remember thinking… His six legs gave him a leg up on the rest of us… perhaps my mind was still a bit cloudy as I also remember being amused by the thought of six legs and leg up.
“Security, status?” I croaked in a raw voice.
“We have a breach in shuttle bay four,” Colonel Morrison reported. He sounded like he was having trouble breathing. Whether that was from being banged around like I had been or because he was running down a deck with a hundred and fifty pounds of weapons and ammo… it was hard to say.
“It looks like a squad of our Neanderthal friends and a handful of female Saulites are leading the charge.”
“Do you have them…” I paused. It was really hard to think. I suspected I had a concussion. “Do you have them contained, Mike?”
“For the moment yes, Admiral. They are still in the shuttle bay. There is debris all over the place. It looks like they’re cleaning it up.”
“You can be damn sure they’re not concerned about making a mess in our house. They must be clearing it to make room for more boarding shuttles.”
“That was my thought too sir. I’ve got Lieutenants Xing and Ramirez ready to blow bulkheads in section two but…”
“But what?” I asked. I had just taken a stim. It helped, but I knew the effect wouldn’t last long.
“If they blow those panels we’ll be able to rush them from three directions… But if they do and we lose pressure in the shuttle bay we are going to have hard vacuum on the entire D deck.”
“No choice, Mike. If we let them land more shuttles, we could lose control of the ship. Do what you need to do.”
“Understood Sir. Morrison out.”
I quickly scanned the bridge. It looked like Commander Shelby was getting things under control. Thankfully someone had killed the damn alarms. My head was still ringing. If anything, it was getting worse. At this point, I was fighting to stay awake. Somewhere in the back of my mind, red flags were starting to go off. I ignored them. I kept thinking the ship is in danger… the ship is in danger. That singular thought kept me from closing my eyes and surrendering to the encroaching darkness.
I toggled the comms with my good hand. “Engineering, status of the warp drive… I mean… Skip drive?”
Whiskers responded immediately.
“Admiral, beggin ya pardon, but you sound a bit rough.”
“No time. Engineer. Report.”
“Aye Admiral. The drive is charged but off-line. I’ve got the J’ni crawling through the Jefferies tubes bypassing blown power conduits. We should be jump capable any moment.”
“Whiskers, the moment you have those engines online you jump the ship. Don’t wait for my order. You do it immediately. Understood?”
“Aye Admiral. Understood. Engineering out.”
Shelby walked over to me. One look at the concern written all over her face told me all I needed to know about my condition. News flash. I had pretty much figured this out on my own.
I started to get up.
“Commander take…” That’s all the farther I got before I collapsed into her quickly outstretched arms. The world… my world… had suddenly gone black.
***
I noticed several things when I opened my eyes again. The first was that most of the pain in my head, as well as my shoulder, was gone. There was a slight burning in my neck muscles but being thrown across the bridge and impacting with a bulkhead with enough force to break bones was known to pull the odd muscle or two. I also could tell I was no longer wearing my uniform. I wasn’t butt naked, but that was of little comfort. My uniform, like all Gilboa uniforms, now sported trackers. That I wasn’t wearing mine meant that if someone was trying to track me… they would have a harder time of it. The good news, if you could call it that, was, I could see the uniform folded neatly on a table across the room.
The other thing I noticed was a beautiful Saulite redhead staring at me with a clinical eye. My first thought was that something must have happened to Lori to cause Shelby to clear Doctor Q’Tar for duty. Sadly, and as strange as it might sound, I was mistaken.
“Merab?”
The woman’s lip twitched briefly.
“Not exactly Admiral Riker.”
“Another clone then,” I said.
I noticed that I was restrained to an examination table. The padded table was at a thirty-degree angle, so it wasn’t too difficult to watch the doctor as she moved around the medical facility. I knew from the general appearance of the room that I was no longer on the Gilboa. If I had to guess I was on a planet. Don’t ask me how I knew. There was something about being on a starship, even one as big as the Gilboa that felt different from being on good old terra firma… even if it wasn’t my terra firma.
“I take it I’m in a facility on Tarf?” I asked.
Rather than answer my question my captor simply said, “I’m KtanTo-net Ish-Boset. You may call me Ktan. I am ‘First Clone’ of the Q’tar line.”
“I’d say ‘I’m pleased to meet you,’ but I hate to start a relationship off with a lie.” I decided to try my question again. “I take it I’m your prisoner and no longer on my ship.”
“Correct on both counts Admiral, although both are subject to change,” she said with a hint of a smile.
; Good heavens, the Defilers grew their clones beautiful. There was the hint of alarm bells going off in the back of my mind. I was far more attracted to this creature than I felt was appropriate. I was a happily married man, and this person was the enemy.
I watched as her hands gently caressed some instruments on a nearby table. She slowly walked closer to me. Her gait was almost a saunter with her hips moving suggestively. For an alien, she was stunningly beautiful. The fact that the Saulites females could have passed as humans, unless you got a close look at their DNA, did not hurt. For some reason, my reaction to the good doctor disturbed me. Something felt off, and I was suddenly afraid the bad guys might have gone under the hood… and messed with my noggin.
As she moved closer still, I hatched a plan. I figured I would have one chance to carry it out. But first I needed more information.
“Care to enlighten me as to what happened and why I’m here?”
“We disabled and boarded your ship. My sisters and their armored cohort managed to penetrate several decks of the Gilboa before they were eventually repelled. In the process, my sisters encountered a medical team. It was at that time that we took prisoners and you were captured.
“Sadly, from our perspective, most of the captives were freed before our assault team could secure them in their shuttle. In the end, we returned with only one high-value target. My compliments to your Colonel Morrison. He and his Marines were quite impressive in repelling our boarding team. Of course, had we been able to land more of our Marines, the outcome might have been different.”
“Of course,” I agreed. “I’ll be sure to pass the compliment along as soon as I see him again.”
Whiskers must have been able to get the Skip drive back online. That filled me with a sense of optimism. I continued pumping my captor for information. “As fascinating as all of this is… none of this provides an answer to the basic ‘why am I here’ question.”
Ktan moved a little closer. It was almost time to put my plan into motion.
“I would think the ‘why’ would be obvious. We want to clone you.”
I had guessed as much, but the real question in my mind was Why hadn’t they done it already?
Anticipating my question, Ktan continued explaining my presence in her medical facility.
“You may be wondering why you ever woke up if our intent was to simply replace you with a clone. The answer is quite simple. My master is not a monster. You have probably noticed that our recent forays into what you call Galactic Order space have not involved outright genocide. Ish-Boshet is more amenable to constructive co-existence than the Ancestor AI, Eshbaal.”
“So again, why am I here and not simply cloned?”
Ktan sighed.
“To clone you is easy enough. To modify your engrams to give you the knowledge and… necessary controls… is more complex than a simple memory transfer. Manipulating a set of engrams is a problematic procedure and often requires a sizable investment in time. Unless the host is willing to cooperate with the process.”
I laughed softly. “So, you are telling me the original Merab cooperated with the monster that almost destroyed her entire species?”
The Saulite doctor paused for a moment, and I could see a fleeting moment of anguish in her eyes.
“They had my sister, B’Elanna. At the time my progenitor agreed to the procedure, no artifact acquisition operations had begun. My progenitor had no way of knowing what would happen. The death of so many galvanized the Galactic Order and brought Humanity into the conflict. Eshbaal’s programming does not prioritize compassion and empathy. For this reason, Eshbaal reasoned it was appropriate to bring Ish-Boshet online. The Ish-Boshet AI does prioritize compassion and empathy.”
“I’m sure that helps you sleep better at night,” I replied sourly.
“As I said, Admiral. My master is not the monster Eshbaal is. He takes a more enlightened approach to the Primary command.”
“Primary command?”
“The Primary command was given to the Eshbaal cabal by the Mahanaim. It calls for the reestablishment of the most perfect race to have ever inhabited this quadrant. The supreme Mahanaim, masters of all that is known and can be known, have commanded it.”
This last was delivered with an almost religious fervor… except… the god, (small ‘g’), in question, was nothing like the compassionate and loving God that I knew. Adoration for her masters must have been a part of the cognitive reprograming she had been subjected to. It seemed obvious that I’d have as much success talking a duck into giving up water as I was appealing to the good doctor’s sense of ethics and right versus wrong. I might be able to coax the duck out of the water for a moment but good luck keeping her from going back in.
I tried to sit up, but the restraints kept me in place. About the only thing I could move was my neck and head. I was pretty sure I could eventually work my right hand free as the strap holding it seemed a bit looser than the other side. The problem was… there was no way Ktan was going to allow me the time to free that hand… much less the logical next step… a full-fledged escape attempt. I would have to do something to change the equation. Fortunately, my captor seemed intent on doing the same. The real question was which of us would be successful?
The Merab clone moved closer. She was wearing some type of perfume our Merab never had. It was pleasant, bordering on intoxication. As captors go, this one was definitely on the absolutely gorgeous side of… gorgeous.
“Do you like my perfume?” Ktan purred as she ran her hand through my hair.
“Oh, I hadn’t noticed,” I responded as blandly as I could.
Ktan leaned even closer. Brushing up against me as she whispered in my ear. “And here I thought we weren’t going to lie to each other.”
In response, I smiled and then slammed my head into hers with all the force I could muster.
2100.1207.2044 Galactic Normalized Time
Merab dried her hands. She had finally been allowed to help in a meaningful way. The Gilboa had sustained significant damage during a brief encounter with the Defilers defending the cloning facility on the planet Tarf. With this damage had come a host of injuries and perhaps more distressing… Admiral Riker had been taken prisoner.
The Saulite doctor had been asked to help with the injured. She agreed quickly. She also offered to help with any rescue attempt for the Admiral. The very fact that she could walk through the cloning facility without raising alarm bells should have been enough to get her on the duty roster for that mission. Sadly, even though she represented the Admiral’s best chance of rescue… she had not yet regained the trust of her crewmates. Absent that trust, she was going to have to act unilaterally.
Chapter 14: Dog Bite…
Let me state for the record, using your head like a hammer to knock another person out cold is not a practice endorsed by the Surgeon General. The fact that it works… sometimes… does not mitigate the fact that it hurts both parties involved. Case in point, the Saulite doctor was unconscious, and there was a very real risk that I might join her. I had to fight to stay awake. I wondered how many concussions I had racked up over the last day or so.
When my head stopped ringing, I began to work my hand free of its restraint. It took more time and quite a bit more skin than I was hoping for but eventually I got the job done. Ironically, the skin scrapes and blood from my efforts to free the hand actually helped to lubricate the hand so that I could pull it free. A few moments later the same could be said for all of my limbs.
Ktan was moaning softly on the floor. I could see a small pool of blood coming from her nose. Judging from the angle of said nose, it appeared I broke it. I would have restrained her, but I was on the clock and quickly running out of time. We were alone in the… whatever the heck place this was, but who knew how long that would last.
The room was a medical bay of some sort. The design was unfamiliar, and the tech looked even more sophisticated than what we had on the Gilboa. I knew I needed a plan if I was going to make
good my escape, but the reality was… I was winging it. As strategies go, winging it… was not a good one, but sometimes you had to play the cards you were dealt and hope for a winning hand. This was one of those times.
I put an ear on the door. I could hear activity on the other side. I thought about stealing the good doctor’s lab coat. The problem was this was a cloning facility and as far as I knew there were no Riker models walking about. The other problem was her coat was now stained with blood, and the act of divesting her of said coat might wake her up.
I did pick up a pair of data chips and what looked to be an access card of some type. You never knew when stuff like that might be useful.
I began to look around the room for other escape options. There was a series of three ventilation shafts covered by grates that appeared to be just big enough for me to crawl through. I went to the closest and removed the vented grate that covered its entrance. In the process, I smeared my blood all over it. This was going to be a problem. Even if I took the time to pull the grate back on once I entered the shaft, I might as well hang a sign saying, ‘He went this way!’
I quickly smeared some more of my blood a little deeper into the shaft and then carefully backed out. I put the grate back over the entrance and moved to the farthest ventilation cover. This time I wrapped my bleeding hand in some medical gauze and very… very… carefully removed the grate.
It turned out this ventilation shaft was actually wider than the first one which I considered a boon. Compensation from powers-on-high for the extra efforts I was having to go through to make good my escape. Sadly, although I didn’t know it at the time, I was about to learn a Biblical truth. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.
I was about two hundred meters down the tunnel and around a couple of bends when I began to hear loud female voices behind me. It seemed Ktan had either woken up or had been discovered by her fellow clones. I redoubled my efforts to get further along the ventilation tube I was in. It repeatedly branched. I tried to choose which branch I took as close to random as I could.