Twelve unknown planets. Sixty-two unknown moons.
Thousands of landmasses, millions of settlements, billions of people.
And Logan was free to explore it all.
He checked the digital clock on the wall. 16:45.
Logan flipped to an empty page, beginning to scrawl down his ideas. He had fifteen minutes until everyone met up in the main hangar.
Captain Logan Rexington. His military didn’t have captains. He wondered if that was a promotion from sergeant, or was it a demotion?
He was now responsible for not only a crew of around sixty, but also an entire ship.
And an entire unknown system to explore.
After scrawling down all that he could, he noticed people around him beginning to leave. Other clones coming in to wake up their friends, bring them down to the main hangar area.
Five minutes past seventeen hundred hours, Logan made his way down. He double-checked the map James had drawn out, heading to the large staircase in one corner of the hangar.
He stood a floor above everyone else, getting a good look at the crew below him. Just over sixty people, from all across time, different cultures. All eyes were on him. Well, except for Crickett, who occasionally glanced over at Yrsa longingly.
“Well done, everyone,” Logan started, a strange hush falling over everyone as they looked up. Even James was there (although his clothes looked ruffled, definitely put back on in a hurry), along with Victor and the other three raptors. Grimsaw’s arm was back to working order, the barbarian flexing his regrown fingers before looking up at Logan.
He glanced down at his notes for a moment before dropping the pad of paper. He knew what needed to be said.
“We are all survivors. But we need to be more than that. We need a mission. Shennong is a dangerous place. The Arena of Doom was just one madman’s vision on a lawless world. We need to get out of this system. Which means we need light speed. First, we need to figure out what engine this ship has, if it’s nuclear or antimatter. Then, we need to make enough money to get some, enough fuel for a slingshot to the Chaucer system. It has laws that recognize clones as human citizens. It’s a lot safe than here. We’ll be exploring Shennong only as long as we need to, only long enough to find a way out. But tonight I will not sleep with worry, I’ll sleep with confidence. Every single person before me survived the Arena of Doom. Whether that was in the physical battlefield or the psychological minefield of serving a tyrant fruity cocktails at all hours of the day. We were once gladiators; now we’re free to be who we were always meant to be.”
Logan looked out across the sea of faces below him.
“A doctor. A cowboy. A pirate. A Viking. We all have more in common than we know. We’re all survivors, we’re all lost in time. We’re all clones.”
A platoon of clones. No, that didn’t sound right.
“Clone squad,” Logan said, a small smile curling at the corner of his mouth. “The Shennong system has no idea what’s about to hit them.”
An uneasy silence spread across the crowd of clones, everyone looking around each other nervously.
Damn. Logan had really thought that would help people, give them a bit of hope.
“Clone squad… clone squad…”
The murmur was quiet. If Logan hadn’t been standing above them, he probably wouldn’t have noticed Crickett beginning to quietly chant the words.
James nodded along, beginning to chant with her.
“Clone squad… clone squad…”
Victor joined in next, followed by Yrsa. Grimsaw joined next, occasionally glancing at his regrown fist as he clenched it tight.
“Clone squad, clone squad…” The geisha standing next to James (her clothes equally frazzled) joined in, her fellow geishas joining in a few moments later.
The Roman husbands chanted along, followed by the WWII soldiers.
Oog looked around confused, but began pounding her fists into the metal floor in time with everyone else.
“CLONE SQUAD! CLONE SQUAD!”
All sixty clones were now chanting along, a few of them stomping their feet in unison with Oog’s pounding fists.
Logan grinned.
He was right.
The Shennong system had no idea what was about to hit it.
Chapter 40
Lord Zemka sat in the desolated courtyard, the flies flittering about the decaying corpse of the T-Rex. He couldn’t believe he’d been betrayed like that. After everything he’d done for his clones. He’d been so good to them, fed them, given them screens for entertainment. They’d mainly fought dinosaurs, Nazis, zombies, robots.
He could have made them kill each other every day of the week. But Lord Zemka had been kind to them.
Well, that and the marketing data said too much of a special event would kill the interest, diminish the spikes in profits that came with true showdowns. Regardless, Lord Zemka had shown them mercy.
That would be the last time.
It had been a week since the escape. Anyone who’d pre-bought season tickets had been issued a full refund. Lord Zemka could probably live comfortably for the rest of his days on Crimson’s Lament with the money he had left over. His investments, the money he’d saved by cutting corners in the arena.
But he didn’t want to live comfortably.
He wanted satisfaction.
The base of the atmospire rumbled as the giant elevator came back down. Reprogramming the few remaining guard droids had been an absolute nightmare, but he’d finally got it done. The doors slid open, the three droids stomping out onto the sand, dragging the frozen bodies behind them.
Seven Nazis. The knight Yateley.
When Lord Zemka had checked the satellite logs for the night of the escape, he was beyond surprised when he saw a life sign appear on the log and then disappear a few moments later. Why had there been a life sign in outer space for a few moments?
Guiding the satellite into position, he’d discovered the cluster of bodies.
Whatever had happened, the Nazis and Yateley had been launched into space. From the looks of it, the Nazis had been killed before jettison, Yateley freezing to death in the cold empty abyss.
Lord Zemka walked into the main complex, holding his wrist up to one of the dozens of hidden doors. The chip in his arm connected, the hidden panel sliding open. The guard droids dragged the frozen bodies inside, the wet ice catching clumps of blood as they went. The bodies were barely beginning to thaw, no smell yet to make Lord Zemka’s stomach turn.
The elevator rose up to the very top level, opening up into the laboratory.
Not even Agent Glass had known where the lab was kept. It was a security protocol, to keep the clones from making copies for an uprising. They’d never considered a hack in the software at the other end. That the clones would deliberately upload human minds into raptor bodies.
Memory reconstruction was of course impossible without a fresh DNA sample. Not even the bodies of the raptors with Logan’s minds would be enough to get a recreation. By destroying the DNA samples, they truly were free.
All that money invested. The amount of deals Lord Zemka had struck. How many of those would come back to bite him? The Museum of People still charged him ten thousand gold a month for the right to use Hitler’s DNA.
He still had some clones left over, a collection left in the stables. Since he wasn’t making any more, would they still try to charge him for the ones he had?
The worries about the remaining Hitlers went away as Lord Zemka caught sight of the only scientist on Crimson’s Lament.
Dr. Blyste adjusted the dial on the control pad, a bead of sweat dripping down her nose, falling into a crack on the keypad. Lord Zemka wasn’t too sure how old she was, but her hair was gray, tacky like straw. Her white pale skin was relatively smooth, her mouth small, her eyes brown and large.
As usual, she was wrapped up in a wooly sweater, a crude picture of a Christmas tree sewn on the front. The inside of the lab was decorated similarly, colored lights st
rung up across the ceiling, a Christmas tree in the corner, old and worn since it was left out all year round.
According to Dr. Blyste, every day was Christmas Day when she got to work with clones.
Today she was less chipper. She looked over the frozen bodies, then back up at Lord Zemka.
“Again,” she said, “I must protest. We only have enough base organic material for ten clones. You want to waste it on echoes?”
“I want people who will hate Logan fucking Rexington as much as I do.” Lord Zemka held his hand out, for a moment expecting a cold fruity cocktail to slide into his grasp.
But his servants had all left as well. There was no one left to serve him. He had to go downstairs and ask the chef droid to make his meals for him, like he was some kind of working class schlub.
His outstretched hand turned into a fist. “I want people who will feel a burning passion to hurt Logan Rexington, not just someone programmed to follow orders.”
“You know what cloning from a clone will make?” Dr. Blyste raised her gray eyebrow. “The mental deterioration. The violent tendencies, the instabilities. You saw how horrendous Yateley was before, and you want to make an echo copy? Can’t we at least make an echo of Agent Glass?”
“His only value was his smarts, his cunning,” Lord Zemka said. “I need a force of nature. I need malice and death formed into flesh. I need Yateley back.”
Dr. Blyste blew a raspberry, walking over to Yateley’s body. She snapped blue gloves onto her hands, grabbed his middle finger, and cracked it off his body. “Make yourself useful and put that in recycling.”
Lord Zemka glowered at her, but there was no one else to help. He turned to one of the guard droids. “Put his body in recycling.” He pointed at Yateley’s body.
When the Seacole had gone into space, it had taken most of the recycled matter with it. There was a spare unit in the main laboratory, but since the clones always ended up in the Seacole, it made sense to make Victor recycle them there, and then transfer the raw organic material over to the lab.
Victor Cunningham the Second. His longest serving clone. He was almost as old as Lord Zemka.
How could people (even a dinosaur) be so ungrateful?!
The guard droid dumped the body into the vat, sealing the lid shut with a hiss.
It took longer than expected, Dr. Blyste extracting the necessary DNA, the body beginning to grow in an adjacent vat. This wasn’t the practiced ease of before. Dr. Blyste could work for half an hour cloning a Hitler, but this was new territory.
“For the Nazis…” Lord Zemka rubbed his chin, thinking it through. “We can do your splicing?”
A grin spread across Dr. Blyste’s face. She was so happy the lights on the sweater’s Christmas tree lit up, sensing the increase in serotonin in her body. “Really?!”
She didn’t wait for an answer, scrambling up from her work console, grabbing her sketchpad from her cot. She had her own room above the laboratory, but spent most nights sleeping in her lab.
Lord Zemka had always shot down her idea of splicing. It wasn’t what the crowd wanted to see. She’d even shown proof of concept, developing an octopus with the intelligence of a person, a mouth that could talk.
The octopus had ended up in the kitchen, Dr. Blyste’s splicing ideas put on the back burner. People wanted to see pure concepts. Pirate and ninja vs. zombie was an easy sell to the crowd. A half-spider person fighting an octopus-tarantula wasn’t as exciting.
Of course, he’d let Dr. Blyste have a bit of fun. The giant tarantula was her idea. Something primal for people to fight.
These deranged echoes needed an edge, needed more than what a human body could provide. Yateley would lead the way, but the Nazis could be improved upon. Made better. Mixed with an animal to make something far more dangerous than before.
Each new creation took at least seven hours of work. Dr. Blyste worked at the control panel, tinkering with the vats, using learning algorithms to try and extract the right DNA sequences. The first couple of days she took stimulants, keeping her awake to get more work done. But it began to take its toll, one of the splices needing surgery after his creation, accidentally forming without any lungs in his body.
After growing a pair and stitching them inside, Lord Zemka insisted she got at least four hours sleep every night. Soon enough, every Nazi body had been recycled into the vat, every scrap of flesh melted down. All except a thigh bone, Dr. Blyste removing it from under the chin of a dead Nazi. She put it to one side ‘for later’, getting back to work on the spliced clones.
One week later, Lord Zemka was back in the courtyard. He’d put the few remaining Hitler clones to work, the former chancellors of Germany working hard to keep themselves alive. There were a few errant beasts in the stables, Lord Zemka making sure the Hitlers kept them fed and looked after. They’d gotten to cleaning up, but were lazy by nature. Much more interested in discussing who should be the supervisor instead of getting to work.
Despite insisting they watch at least one movie a day, the Hitlers had eventually cleaned out the corpse of the T-Rex. It had been left too long to recycle, decay taking hold, making it worthless for the vat.
Lord Zemka didn’t need an army of echo clones. He just needed a few good men.
Or monsters.
Finishing off the splices, they had two bodies worth of organic material left over. If only the traitorous clones hadn’t destroyed every single DNA sample. They could have used a trick from their enemies, uploading their minds into the bodies of some raptors.
But the dinosaur DNA had also been destroyed. Every single clone was gone. All except Lord Zemka’s personal backup.
Maybe sometime soon he’d make a copy. He was living in uncertain times.
But for now, he looked over the spliced Nazis. The first one had been mixed with a wolf. It was an odd sight to see – the Nazis’ blond hair had turned the fur golden yellow, his head looking like a wolf. It looked like a werewolf from one of the ancient Earth stories, the nose on the end of his snout permanently wet. Clawed furry hands. One eye had grown much bigger than the other, permanently bloodshot, drool always seeping out a gap in his jagged teeth.
Each Nazi’s echo had been spliced with a different animal. The wolf would be good for tracking. And good practice to a first splice, easier to mix two mammals together. It gave Blyste a knack for the technique before she moved on to more challenging mixes.
The hawk splice would need practice, but flight would always give an advantage in a fight. Lord Zemka couldn’t help but grimace as he looked down at the feet. One of them looked perfectly human. The other one looked human enough, except talons were sprouting from the top. Like a grass field, dozens of brown leather claws sprouting out, all twitching in different directions, like maggots in a corpse.
The spider splice was even most disturbing, a cluster of inky black eyes in one corner of the forehead. Smooth skin would cluster into exoskeleton, the edges red with a rash. The tongue had tiny mandibles poking out at odd angles, like a centipede inside the mouth.
Apparently the splicing would have gone smoother if Dr. Blyste had fresh DNA samples to work with. The animals were easy enough to acquire, Hitler ordering them on the last supply run.
But the echo DNA had proven tricky. Even with Dr. Blyste working on every step of the process, anomalies had sprouted. Often literally.
At the end of the line, the echo of Yateley. He looked more muscular than before, maybe even taller. He was breathing fast, like he’d just finished sprinting a marathon. His fingers twitched, unable to hold still as he rocked back and forth.
“You all remember when Logan Rexington killed you?”
There were nods, yaps, Yateley grunting in response.
“Don’t you think it was time we returned the favor?”
Lord Zemka grinned as the deranged echoes in front of him began to howl, to scream, in glee.
Yateley grinned, his chin covered in stubble. But no scar.
Lord Zemka didn’t wa
nt a recreation this time.
He wanted revenge.
The Clone Squad’s adventures continue in The Siege of Cyborg Ranch, available May 1st, 2021. Preorder it from Amazon today, or turn the page to find out what’s next for Logan and crew!
Also by Connor Brixton
ESCAPE WAS ONLY THE BEGINNING!
Destroying the Arena of Doom didn’t earn Captain Logan Rexington his safety… only his freedom. His ragtag group of clones from across human history are wandering the stars on a salvaged ship with no intel, no plan, and barely enough fuel to crash land on the nearest habitable world.
The corrupt sheriff of Cyborg Ranch is terrorizing innocent people. Logan can’t resist answering their distress call. But the sheriff doesn’t take kindly to outsiders, and this planet ain’t big enough for the both of them. Winning a high noon showdown is the only way to get the fuel the clones need, but they’re far from a cohesive crew.
If the clones want to save the ranch, Logan will have to use every trick in his book. But the sheriff doesn’t play by the rules.
THE SIEGE OF CYBORG RANCH is book 2 of Clone Squad, a high-octane space opera pitting the deadly cosmos against a handful of clones out of time, out of ammo, and out of options.
About the Author
When Connor Brixton was 14, he got thrown out of a science class for asking too many questions about time travel, cloning, and alternate realities. He hasn't got any less interested in any of those things.
In his first series, Clone Squad, Connor's curiosity has expanded to include more questions, such as "Who gave that Viking a chaingun?" and "Can you really ride a raptor like a horse though?"
Arena of Doom (Clone Squad #1) Page 22