by Eric Brown
So uncanny, seeing them like this: people he knew well and yet who were not these people, but their imprinted copies.
“Why aren’t they all sleeping?” asked Travis. It was well into the early hours now.
“They’re newborns,” Ward said. “Their body-clocks haven’t settled down yet, let alone got into step with each other. And like the rest of us, they know it’s a big day tomorrow and like anyone they feel the tension.”
Travis peered through the feeds, and eventually spotted Kat—one of the sleeping figures, lying on her side with her legs drawn up into a foetal position. He hadn’t recognised her at first because her hair, instead of being long and straight, was a downy blonde fuzz like a baby’s.
Ward was staring at the display, too, although Travis couldn’t tell if it was the clones or the readouts that held his attention.
“There’s nothing,” the Unit director said. “If there was anything out of place, I’d have seen it.”
“But why kidnap Kat if it’s not something to do with what she’s been doing?” Travis said. “And the only thing she can think of is that it’s because of her involvement with the clones—she made waves to get access, maybe set some kind of alarm bells off. Can you think of anything?”
Ward was shaking his head. Travis could see he’d unsettled the man, normally so arrogantly sure of himself, but now clearly reassessing everything.
“I can’t believe they took her,” Ward said. “Thank god she’s safe, at least. I think her abduction shook us all up far more than we’d acknowledge.”
That was probably the most perceptive thing Travis had heard Ward Richards say.
Just then, Kat’s clone stirred, twisting her slender body, stretching her arms out and then sitting. For an instant Ward thought she was naked, then saw she wore the same kind of bodysuit as the others, the fabric hugging her form.
Ward did something, and Kat’s videofeed expanded to fill a larger area. “Hey there,” he said, addressing her.
She peered out of the screen, and Travis felt something leap in his chest. He remembered how disturbed Kat had been the other day, after she’d been here, and only now really understood how unsettling it must have been to see her own clone like this.
“Hey there,” Kat said. Kat’s clone. It was uncanny: apart from the hair and apparent youthfulness, this version of Kat was no different—the voice, the mannerisms, the way she moved as she climbed to her feet and stretched.
She reached for the bed to steady herself, clearly dizzy.
“The meds,” Ward said. “Some of them are still affected by the cocktail of drugs they had in their system when they were being held in induced coma and grown. We’re monitoring it.”
“Could that be it?” Travis said, wondering if somehow the medications had been sabotaged.
Ward shook his head. “All the med levels are fine,” he said. “I can’t see anything amiss, Travis.”
Bizarrely, this unstable, disoriented version of Kat in many ways reflected the Kat he had left at the coastal dome with Daniel: unsteady on her feet, slow in her responses, as the result of the drugs her kidnappers had administered.
She looked slightly to one side and smiled, and he realised she was looking at her own videofeed, studying Ward and Travis as they looked at her.
“Travis?” she said. “Is that you?”
She knew him. Of course she did. She had Kat’s memories, as well as her body.
“Kat. This is strange,” he said.
She smiled again. “Not as strange as seeing you dance,” she said.
Travis turned away, unable to do this any more, and Ward put a hand on his shoulder.
“Come on, man,” Ward said. “Give her some encouragement—they all need it—and then we’re done here, I think.”
Travis glanced back over his shoulder, smiled, and said, “Kat. Be strong out there. You’ll always take a part of me with you.”
Then he left the room, battling to choke back the complex rush of emotions.
Out in the entrance lobby again, the two men paused.
“I really thought we’d find something,” Travis said, calmer now. “I don’t know what, just…” He shook his head, only stopping when Ward squeezed his shoulder again.
“I can’t believe I’m trying to reassure you when you came here in the middle of the night…You even had me doubting Lauren for a time.” Ward stepped back, then added, “So, what now?”
“I don’t know,” Travis said, his voice heavy with exhausted defeat. “Vigilance—we know there’s something going on, something unanswered. I just needed to be certain everything was okay here, and bring you up to date. You’ll watch out, won’t you, Ward? You’re the best-placed person to safeguard things here.”
Ward nodded. “Believe me,” he said, “I’m watching everything, constantly.”
Travis shook Ward’s hand before heading out into the frozen night.
KAT
THE FOG HAD LIFTED BY MORNING, IN MORE WAYS THAN one. Looking out from the dome, Kat saw a crisp winter’s day, everything crystal clear for miles, and in her head, too—that drugged-up muzziness had evaporated, the tiredness gone, and she felt more herself than she had in days.
She hugged the blanket around herself, recalling the night. Daniel. Had she really finally succumbed to that sexual tension between them, the wary skirting around each other and never quite committing, never quite rejecting, until…this.
She slipped from the bed, left him sleeping, and moved to the bathroom.
She showered, still unsure about last night and what had happened. Had Daniel taken advantage of her, in her drugged state…? But she had acquiesced, after all, a part of her giving in after all those months of resistance. She still wasn’t at all sure about her feelings towards Daniel DeVries.
She was drying herself when her carpal twinged.
It was Travis, looking dishevelled and troubled as he stared out from the bathroom mirror’s smartsurface.
“Travis! Are you okay—?”
“I…I’m fine. Listen, Kat. You need to get down here. I’m at the base.”
“But…”
“Get down here now, Kat!” He said again, and cut the connection.
She hurried into the bedroom and grabbed some fresh clothes. Daniel stirred. “Hey, girl…What’s the rush?”
“That was Travis. He’s at the base. He looked…flustered. He wants us down there, pronto.”
“How pronto?” He grinned. “Sure we have a little more time…?” He patted the space beside him.
She felt a rush of impatience. “Get dressed, Daniel. We’re going to the base. Now.”
She turned and left the room.
¤¤¤
They headed south in her Jeep, Kat over-riding the controls to drive the vehicle herself. The landscape around them looked as if every crisp detail had been artificially sharpened.
“So what’s the deal?” Daniel asked. “What did Travis say?”
“Very little. Just that he was fine…though he didn’t look that good to me. And he said we had to get down there.”
“After everything we went through to keep you away from Danvers and Miekle?”
She flashed him a look. “What are you saying?”
He shrugged and turned his attention to the passing marshes.
A short time later they joined the approach road, the carbon-fibre fence along its full length holding back the crowds. There seemed to be thousands of protesters this morning, and their chanting came in waves. Something sailed over the fence and exploded in the road ahead of the car. Kat winced and veered around the broken glass.
“Bastards,” Daniel muttered under his breath.
They had to pass through an extra security barrier to get onto the last stretch of road, and then they were passing through the outer security gates onto the base proper.
“Dr Manning, Dr DeVries,” a guard said. “Special arrangements today—you have a parking bay reserved in Lot B.”
“Big day,”
Daniel said. “Make us walk farther so the VIPs get the good spaces.”
Kat swung through the inner gates and round to Car Park B, behind the main administration dome.
As they pulled up into the space indicated on the Jeep’s windscreen, she took a moment to pause and take in the sight of the shuttle, standing a mile away on its launch pad.
Outside, the cold air cut like a knife.
Kat had taken only a few paces when the dome’s doors slid open and two guards emerged. She couldn’t help but be aware of their hands poised over their weapons.
“What…?”
Then, behind the guards, two more figures emerged: Lauren Miekle and Major Danvers.
Kat glanced at Daniel, but he seems as surprised as she was.
The message from Travis this morning—she hadn’t even considered that he might have been coerced into calling her, that it had been some kind of trap. Had his self-appointed mission here in the night gone wrong?
If it were a trap, was she their target or…Daniel?
She half-turned back towards the Jeep, her mind racing. So many levels of security to get through: if they chose to flee, they could never get away.
“Kat, Daniel,” Lauren Miekle said, stepping aside and indicating the doors. “This way. Quickly. We don’t have long.”
“Come on!” Danvers snapped.
She turned, and the guard gestured with his stunner. “You heard the man.”
Looking grim, Daniel took her arm and they hurried along after Miekle and Danvers, with Kat aware that the two armed guards were following.
She caught up with Miekle and Danvers. “Where’s Travis?”
Miekle hesitated, hurrying them through an underground corridor. Surely this wasn’t some kind of trap—why would the mission administrator go to such lengths to lure Kat and Daniel into the dome when she could simply have security arrest them?
“He’s fine,” Miekle said. “He explained everything…”
They came to the door of the clone unit, where two guards stood sentry. Danvers waved his carpal at the sensor and the door slid open. They passed down another long corridor and turned a corner.
Kat stopped in her tracks. Up ahead, lined up outside the big door that accessed the sealed unit where the clones were dormed, stood a half a dozen figures in white immersion suits. Three of them were armed, and one hefted a stubby metal column that looked suspiciously like an automated battering ram.
“Why the hell…?” Daniel began.
“This way,” Miekle said, waving her sensor at another sliding door.
They followed her into the control room of the Isolation Unit.
The first thing Kat saw was Travis, standing with his back to them as he stared through the big plate-glass window into the sealed clone unit.
The she took in the scene beyond the glass.
“What the hell?” she said.
Travis turned, sketched a tense smile at Kat, and nodded to Daniel.
Kat moved to his side and stared through the window.
The eighteen clones were in there, backed into a corner like panicked sheep. She made out her own clone amongst them, looking unaccountably frightened.
There was one other figure in there, standing before the clones as if protecting them.
Ward Richards—and the man looked petrified behind the mask of his immersion suit.
Lauren Miekle stepped up to the glass and spoke, the Unit’s smart systems picking up her voice and relaying it into the controlled area. “I’ll tell you again, Ward. Give yourself up, come out with your hands raised.”
Kat touched Travis’s arm. “Ward?”
Miekle said, “We know what you did, Ward. We know everything, thanks to Travis.”
Ward said, his voice tinny as it came through the speakers, “You’ve got it wrong, Lauren. I didn’t…”
Danvers stepped up to the glass. “We know exactly how you did it, Richards. We got into your systems. We found where you’d replaced the stored copies of the core team’s original imprints with your own files.”
Kat leaned towards Travis. “What the hell is he talking about, Travis? What did Ward do?”
Travis stared through the viewscreen. “I was almost taken in, Kat,” he murmured, something like sadness on his face. “I thought I knew your every mannerism, your every tic.”
“Travis?”
“Last night, when I came here to talk with Ward and saw your clone…” Travis shook his head. “I observed the physical traits that came with your body, I saw what I wanted to see. But Richards had stage-managed the encounter, given me just enough to clutch at, to believe.”
“Travis, you’re not making sense…”
“Last night, Kat, I spoke briefly with your clone—or what I thought was your clone, at the time. But the clone that Ward Richards tried to pass off as you, Kat, mentioned me dancing that night at the party.” He turned and stared at her. “Don’t you see? How could your clone have recalled that? The party took place after your mind had been downloaded. There’s no way your clone would have those memories, unless Ward had imprinted the clone with a more recent copy.”
“But there was no more recent copy of me,” Kat said. “So—”
“So he must have imprinted a copy of someone else…”
Kat stared into the unit at Ward Richards, saw the terror in the man’s face, and saw also the realisation that for him there was no way out.
Travis went on, “Ward had engineered everything, Kat. That morning after the party, when you insisted on coming here, examining the clones. He managed to fool you by delaying your clone’s revival, but he knew you wouldn’t give up. He couldn’t have you discovering his secret. So he had you kidnapped.”
Daniel said, “Richards works for the Allianz?”
Travis nodded. “And has done ever since he studied under Mannheim in Bonn. He must have thought that all his Christmases had come at once when he was transferred to Lakenheath.”
Kat was staring at her clone, her perfect physical replica. “But if she…if she isn’t me, Travis, then who…?”
“Who else?” Travis smiled at her. “Your clone, and all the others, are copies of Ward. Instead of imprinting copies of the core team on their clones, he imprinted copies of his own persona, his own memories—his own Allianz agenda.”
Kat pressed her hands to the glass, and addressed Ward. “But… why? Why destroy something we’ve all worked so hard to achieve?”
Ward glared at her, and for a moment she thought he wasn’t going to respond. Then he said, simply, “You don’t get it, do you? No matter how much we protest. No matter how hard we try to reason, or simply to beg that the authorities show as much care for getting our species out of this mess as they do for grandiose gestures like Kon-Tiki…You just don’t get it.”
Kat turned to Travis, chilled by the hatred in the man’s voice. She thought of the times she had spoken with him—how hard he must have fought to suppress that hatred. “But what was he planning to do?” she asked Travis.
“It was the perfect Trojan horse, Kat: he planned to seize the starship, steer it to destruction or hold it to ransom—anything to destroy this colonisation project and force attention to focus back on Earth itself.”
Kat turned to Lauren Miekle. The mission administrator was staring through the glass at her lover, her expression a mix of guilt and shame that she had been fooled and played so easily by Richards to the extent that the entire project had been put in jeopardy.
Major Danvers spoke through the glass. “Ward Richards,” he said. “I’m placing you under arrest.”
He raised his carpal and gave the order to his men. “Go ahead.”
Kat leaned forward and watched what happened next. The door from the airlocked decontamination area into the clone’s sealed unit burst open and the security guards fanned into the room; the first three kneeled, the following trio standing behind them. Almost casually they raised their weapons and sprayed the cowering clones with tranquilliser darts.
Just as Kat realised this, Ward must have too, and he grinned, spreading his hands as if to taunt them all. “Come on!” he roared. “What are you waiting for?”
One of the guards fired, and Ward stumbled back before straightening again. Triumphantly, he reached for his throat and plucked a tranquillizer dart free from where it had lodged in the protective fabric of his suit.
“Is that the best you can do?” he said.
And then he understood. Rather than risk breaching his suit, the guard had fired directly at his breather unit, injecting the dart’s anaesthetic into the air he breathed.
Ward’s hands leapt to his mask, and for a moment Kat thought his final move would be to rip the mask clear and exhale his germ-laden air into the air breathed by the clones, but then…he slumped, his hands fell away, and his body crumpled to the floor.
Kat stared into the room beyond the glass, at Ward and his eighteen clones. A few remained standing, and she saw her own clone just as it fell back into the arms of Anna Eriksen and they both slipped to the floor.
¤¤¤
Maybe it was a week late, but the launch was as grand an affair as anyone might have anticipated. A crowd of two hundred dignitaries and project workers occupied a stand a mile away from the gantry and the rearing shuttle. A band played, and as the transfer bus trundled across the concrete apron the world looked on. It felt like the culmination of a long battle. In truth, the core team was only launching into orbit today; the Kon-Tiki wouldn’t depart from its orbit for another week. This was still a big thing, though, a huge leap forwards, and the statement was bold: as a species, this is what we do—we push forwards, Kat thought, we explore, we are proactive.