The Clone Conundrum (Forgotten Fodder Book 2)

by MJ Blehart

  But by then, they were too few to create a majority of any kind. One or two elected officials couldn’t do much to alter the workings of the government.

  Still, they’d made it their mission to overthrow the legitimate government in the name of their religious beliefs—first by legal means, then, after losing elections and numerous court battles, by open rebellion.

  Onima had been there to oversee the questioning of one of the main rebel leaders who’d been captured, and the main body of the zealots had thrown themselves into an attack to free him—or martyr him.

  The local enforcement authority had nearly been overrun by the zealots by the time reinforcements from another city arrived. Because the zealots didn’t care how many they killed, they had turned their attack into a suicidal last-ditch effort.

  It had been one of the uglier confrontations Onima had encountered. There had been no way to predict the attack, and they’d even persuaded other disgruntled people to join it. Though Onima had been shot, she’d gotten out otherwise unscathed.

  This situation, however, was worse.

  Onima looked around at the six armor-shelled goons in the back of the van surrounding her, Jace, and Kara. They had taken both of her pistols and cuffed her. She sat now on the floor of the hovervan, helpless, as it glided into a tunnel to take them beneath the city.

  Onima tended to be optimistic, but she had no idea how to change this situation in their favor. Maybe she could launch herself at one of the guards—but the others would be on her before she could do anything about them.

  What was more, any communication with Jace would be a giveaway. Onima really had no idea what to make of Kara now.

  Still, Onima believed there had to be a way. She just couldn’t see what it was.

  She looked to Jace. He appeared to be disoriented. She didn’t understand, and was about to say something when he cried out, slumped, and began to babble nonsensically.

  “What’s going on?” the leader of the armor-shelled goons asked from the passenger seat.

  “The clone, sir,” one of the guards said, their gender unidentifiable through the voice modulation. “He just collapsed and started babbling.”

  “If he’s sick, we gotta stop and dump him,” another guard said.

  “It’s probably the virus,” the leader called back. “It only affects clones. It will make our lives a lot easier if it kills him for us.”

  Onima was shocked. Jace had never before shown signs of the virus and had tested negative for it more than once. Maybe he had been exposed during their travels, despite it not being airborne.

  But it could occur via sudden onset. Onima was horrified: her friend might be dying, and she could do nothing for him.

  Perhaps, on the Aquila, Dr. Patel would have been able to put him in stasis or something. But here? All she could do was watch him thrash on the floor and babble incoherently.

  The armor-shelled guards around them, however, were clearly afraid. They were shouting to their leader, demanding that the driver stop the hovervan. Those closest to Jace were trying to get away from him.

  That was when Onima realized that they didn't believe that the virus only impacted clones. Granted, seeing its awful effects threatened her own rational thought process too.

  In the chaos, despite Jace’s suffering, Onima realized she might have an opportunity. She looked toward the nearest confused guard, formulated an angle of attack, and hunkered down to launch herself at him.

  Kara beat her to it.

  With a speed Onima would not have expected, Kara launched herself at the armor-shelled guard, slamming his head into the wall of the hovervan. Kara had gotten free of her cuffs.

  Less than a second later, Jace kicked the kneecaps of the two armor-shelled guards nearest him. While they had knee padding, Jace’s kicks connected at an angle that the pads would not protect. They screamed in agony.

  Time seemed to slow down impossibly as Kara took the rifle from the guard she had slammed to the wall and began firing at the guard farthest from them. It was a military-grade weapon, capable of rapid-fire, throwing almost two-hundred fifty plasma bolts in a minute.

  Armor-shelled suits were designed primarily to stand up to small-arms fire. As such, they could take a decent amount of punishment from pistols and the like before failing. While the shell offered some protection against a military laser rifle, it was not enough to hold out against continuous fire at close range.

  Kara managed to turn the rifle on the other farthest guard as the first dropped. Jace threw himself bodily into the last and knocked the rifle from his grip as the two he’d kneecapped rolled around the van floor in pain.

  Then Kara dropped the second guard in the back of the van, turned, and began firing at the two on the floor.

  But the first guard Kara had dropped was not dead. With one shaking hand, he raised his rifle to fire at Kara.

  Onima threw herself at him. Because of the angle he had was lying at—and the full-body power she had thrown at him—there was a crunch as his bones snapped.

  He got off a shot, but it missed Kara.

  Unfortunately, it brained the helmetless driver of the hovervan.

  The vehicle careened into the tunnel’s wall, bouncing off it and slamming into the other. As everyone was thrown around, one of Kara’s shots hit the leader in the back of the head.

  The van impacted again, tossing everyone around. The shouts seemed to be coming from far fewer than the eleven in the van, but Onima’s ears were still ringing from the gunfire.

  Without warning, blinding light pierced the windscreen—the van had emerged from the tunnel.

  There was no way to control the vehicle, and no way out of it. But Kara leaned over the front seats and blasted at the controls.

  The van dropped to the ground. Kara’s laser fire must have taken out the van’s antigravity hover capabilities. A moment later, the van rolled onto its side, and the wild ride came to a screeching halt.

  It took Onima a moment to get her bearings. The hovervan lay on its side in what appeared to be an open asphalt lot of some sort. Jace was struggling to get up from beneath two armor-shelled bodies, and Kara was moving toward him.

  Despite having watched her in action, Onima was still uncertain about Kara and her motivations. As Kara reached for Jace, Onima’s breath caught in fear of what she was doing.

  But then Jace’s arms moved as his hands were freed of the cuffs.

  Kara moved toward Onima. “Are you hurt?”

  “Just a little stunned,” Onima said.

  Kara reached behind her, and an instant later, the cuffs released.

  “How did you do that?” Onima asked, rubbing her wrists.

  Kara had a rueful grin on her face. “One of my implants. Fortunately, they used standard adjustable electrocuffs. There are a really limited number of codes for those, and one of my implants runs through and cracks them.”

  “That’s military tech,” Onima remarked.

  “One of the advantages of my past service,” Kara said, offering Onima a hand up.

  Jace was going through the various armor-shelled goons. Onima wondered what he was doing—until he produced their pistols and datacards. “I have our stuff,” Jace said.

  “What in the hell was that, Jace?” Onima asked.

  “Kara,” Jace said. “She gave me an old signal from my military days. Non-clones created several nonverbal cues for clones to help them out of certain situations. One was a wink of the eye to let us know to cause a distraction.”

  Onima shook her head as Jace passed over her pistols. Kara tapped a panel to open the side door of the van above them.

  “We should probably get out of here,” Kara said. “There’s no telling how much attention we just drew to ourselves. Also, given past experience, it’s only a matter of time before the shells vaporize.”

  Onima was feeling more like herself, though her shoulders were sore from the position they’d been forced into while she was cuffed. Further, she felt tenderized
after having been bounced around the interior of the hovervan.

  Kara had slung a rifle over her shoulder and found purchase to help herself climb out. Jace offered Onima a hand.

  Onima pulled herself out of the hovervan and dropped to the pavement. They were in an abandoned lot some three hundred meters from the tunnel entrance. Fortunately, they had not reached a populated area when the van had crashed.

  Jace joined them.

  “Onima?” Kara questioned.

  Looking around, Onima considered where to go, but not without giving thought to what they had learned, as well as the implications of their situation for the overall investigation.

  There was nobody visible and nobody coming to look at the overturned van. In an already bad situation, this was a lucky break.

  Though they’d escaped an initial attempt on their lives, so long as Onima, Kara, and Jace were in Jacobastad, they remained in danger.

  18

  Jace stood beside Kara, looking around the abandoned lot.

  “We’re lucky nobody’s here.” He gestured to the overturned hovervan. “But this will draw attention eventually. We need to get clear of here.”

  Onima was looking around. She had to be somewhat stunned—between their capture, his faking being ill, Kara’s unexpected escape, the close-range rifle fire, and then the crash. Jace was feeling it too. He knew he was probably quite bruised up, but he didn’t think he was more injured than that.

  Kara, on the other hand, had a nasty cut just above her left eye that was bleeding significantly, obvious bruising on her wrists, and—while he’d not seen her walk far just yet—she appeared to be favoring her right leg.

  “Let’s head toward that street,” Onima said, pointing at the cross street away from the tunnel. “But let’s cross the street first. Kara, leave the rifle.”

  Kara sighed, but tossed the rifle back into the open van.

  “Let’s go,” Onima ordered, her voice strengthening. “Switch off your comms. Let’s make ourselves that much harder to trace.”

  Jace turned his comm off. The trio crossed the road.

  On the other side was an old abandoned factory of some sort. Jace could not recall if Aarde had been able to sustain life when it had been discovered or if terraforming had taken place. The abandoned plant reminded Jace of images of terraforming in process.

  But then again, it may also have just been an old sewage treatment plant or something.

  Glancing back, Jace didn’t see anyone moving from the van or approaching.

  “We really got lucky here,” Kara said, cleaning the blood off her face with a wad of cloth. She was indeed limping.

  “What did you do to yourself?” Jace asked, gesturing at her leg.

  She chuckled. “Dislocated and relocated my knee. Happens from time to time. Probably need to get into the medical bay and let them run a cartilage repair tool over it.”

  “Kara,” Onima said, “I am grateful you freed us, but what the hell was all that about?”

  Kara sighed. “What I said earlier was mostly true. Director Rand added me to your team because you had no deputy marshals on it. He did tell me to learn what I could from you. I was aware that your priority case had to do with the murder of a Gray and Chuang executive. Director Rand said it had gone off the rails and told me to pay attention to how—then to report to him everything I discovered along the way.”

  “And have you?” Onima asked.

  “No,” Kara said. “Earlier, in the lot, I really was answering a secure comm message sent to me by Rand. But I have not at any time reached out to him to report, and that was part of what he wanted to discuss with me. He was a bit put out that I’d not provided him any info.”

  They reached the cross street without incident. They paused, and Onima pulled up a local map, the image floating above her datacard.

  “The spaceport where Yael is is on the other side of town,” Onima said. “Let’s go toward the western port. It’s still a hike, but considerably nearer.”

  “We walking?” Kara asked.

  “Can you keep going?” asked Onima.

  Kara nodded. “The knee’s tender, but I can walk on it.”

  “I would rather not rent a vehicle or hail a ride,” Onima said. “Staying on foot keeps us off the radar.”

  “Agreed,” Kara said.

  “Besides,” Jace added, “we look rough, disheveled, and I suspect we smell like plasma fire.”

  “That would be another matter,” said Onima.

  They began to walk west.

  “Why did you tell Bettani that message from Rand?” Jace asked.

  Kara chuckled. “I was trying to get him to admit his involvement in all of this. Which he did.”

  “And that almost got us all killed,” Onima pointed out.

  “I didn’t exactly expect that kind of a reaction, no,” Kara admitted. “I’d hoped he’d reveal something more. Being met by the armor-shelled goons was not how I thought it might go.”

  “Kara, I’ve got to be honest with you,” Onima started. “My governor warned me that we have a mole. He also has suspicions about your governor. I’ve had my concerns, since you were unexpectedly assigned to my team, that you were that mole.”

  “I can’t say I blame you,” Kara said. “Then I disappear to take a call from Rand, who you are already suspicious of, and play complicit toward the person of interest we’re interviewing. If I were in your shoes, I’d be thinking the same.”

  “Are you trying to tell me you are the mole?” Onima asked.

  Jace looked at Onima in alarm, but she had not put a hand near her sidearm or anything of that nature.

  “No,” Kara said. “But it is time I tell you more. Look, Marshal Gwok, I got these unusual orders from my governor to basically spy on a respected marshal, and I had to wonder why. My last assignment was to acquire a datadrive for Rand, which he claimed was from another law enforcement agency. But there was something not right about it, so I did some checking on my own.”

  They went over a cross-street, continuing in the same direction. Jace glanced around to see if anyone was following them or had noticed them, but that was not the case. Kara and Onima were doing the same.

  Kara continued. “My contact was not in any way affiliated with the Bureau, any local law enforcement agency, nor the AECC military. I considered that they might be deep cover, black ops, or something of that nature—except I did trace them to a small company on Bumi Prime. It made no sense at all. I didn’t recall Rand ever lying to me like that before.”

  A local law enforcement vehicle, running with lights and sirens, turned a corner toward them. Jace braced to start running, but the vehicle sped away and ignored the trio.

  Onima and Kara had tensed too, ready to flee.

  But they continued on. Without saying a word, they crossed to the other side of the street and kept heading west.

  “When Rand assigned me to you, there was something in what he did not say,” Kara said. “I got the feeling his primary reason for assigning me was to spy on you and your team and report that back to him. And when he contacted me earlier today, he demanded I file a report. Like I’d said before, I misdirected him—told him we were still aboard the Aquila.”

  She sighed. “Now, though, I expect that, since Mr. Bettani admitted to his contact with Rand, it’s only a matter of time before he knows I am not working for him. Fortunately, someone more important than my governor is already aware of this.”

  “What do you mean?” Jace asked.

  Kara smirked. “Jordan Tang.”

  Onima stopped unexpectedly, and Jace nearly tripped himself also pausing. Both stared at Kara.

  “The executive director?” Onima asked incredulously.

  “I didn’t know who else to trust,” Kara said. “Rand has other friends among the directors, and I certainly wasn’t going below him. So, I reached out to Executive Director Tang and told them what was transpiring.”

  Jace looked at Onima. She would be suspicious, but
he was feeling Kara was on the level and hoped Onima was feeling that way too.

  “What did the ED say?” asked Onima.

  “They wanted me to go with what Rand assigned, to continue to play along. They’d hoped I might be able to expose him and his motivations.”

  “Which you have,” Jace concluded. “I mean, Onima and I know Bettani is working with him.”

  “But that’s inadmissible,” Onima said.

  “Look, Onima,” Kara started, “I know it’s going to be hard for you to trust me. But please understand I have nothing but the utmost respect for you, and have considered it a real honor to be part of this team. Hell, Jace, I completely understand why Onima is keeping you as a part of this operation. Thank you for trusting me in the van.”