Six Wakes

by Mur Lafferty

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Mary Lafferty

  Excerpt from Behind the Throne copyright © 2016 by Katy B. Wagers

  Excerpt from The Corporation Wars: Dissidence copyright © 2016 by Ken MacLeod

  Cover design by Kirk Benshoff

  Cover photo © Getty Images

  Cover copyright © 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  Orbit

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  First Edition: January 2017

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  ISBNs: 978-0-316-38968-6 (paperback), 978-0-316-38966-2 (ebook)

  E3-20161108-DA-PC

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  International Law Regarding the Codicils to Govern the Existence of Clones

  Wake One: The Dormire Crew This Is Not a Pipe

  Diamonds

  Depths

  Failures

  Spymaster Teapot

  Joanna’s Story

  Wake Two: IAN 36,249 Seconds Out

  No Naps in Hell

  Life Is Cheap

  Katrina’s Story

  Bebe

  It’s Always Five O’Clock in Space

  A Missing Piece

  Bebe Makes a Pig

  Yadokari

  Hiro’s Story

  Wake Three: Hiro _

  Maria’s Story

  So Much Blood in Him

  Paul’s Story

  IAN’s Discovery

  So Many More than Five

  Wolfgang’s Story

  Breakdowns

  Wake Four: Katrina Before Cicada

  Maria’s Story

  Criminals

  IAN’s Story

  Trust

  Be Careful What You Wish For

  Hiro’s Story

  Wake Five: Celebrating Life Connections

  The Value of a Life

  Wake Six: Minoru Takahashi Deus Ex Bebe

  Acknowledgments

  Extras Meet the Author

  Also By Mur Lafferty

  Interview with Mur Lafferty

  A Teaser of Behind the Throne

  A Teaser of The Corporation Wars

  Newsletters

  For Connie Willis and James Patrick Kelly

  International Law Regarding the Codicils to Govern the Existence of Clones

  Established October 9, 2282

  It is unlawful to create more than one clone of a person at a time. Each clone is one person. Cloning will be used for longevity of life, not for multiplication. If a clone is multiplied by their own hand or others, the most recent clone has claim to the identity, while the other(s) are extraneous.

  It is unlawful for a clone to bear or father children. A clone is considered their own child for the rest of their life, including where it affects inheritance law. Clones must be sterilized upon rebirth.

  It is unlawful to put a mindmap onto a body that does not bear the original DNA.

  Clones must always have the most recent mindmap of their consciousness on a drive on their person. They and their mindmaps are subject to search by authorities at all times.

  It is unlawful to modify any DNA or mindmap of any clone. (Codicil 2 being an exception.) Clones must continue with the DNA of their original bodies and their original mindmap.

  The shells a clone leaves behind must be disposed of quickly, hygienically, and without ceremony or ritual.

  It is unlawful for a clone to end their own current life in order to be reborn. (Exception one: A clone can sign a euthanasia agreement, if a qualified doctor agrees that death is imminent and they are suffering. Exception two: See Codicil 1.)

  Wake One:

  The Dormire Crew

  This Is Not a Pipe

  Day 1

  July 25, 2493

  Sound struggled to make its way through the thick synth-amneo fluid. Once it reached Maria Arena’s ears, it sounded like a chain saw: loud, insistent, and unending. She couldn’t make out the words, but it didn’t sound like a situation she wanted to be involved in.

  Her reluctance at her own rebirth reminded her where she was, and who she was. She grasped for her last backup. The crew had just moved into their quarters on the Dormire, and the cloning bay had been the last room they’d visited on their tour. There they had done their first backup on the ship.

  Maria must have been in an accident or something soon after, killing her and requiring her next clone to wake. Sloppy use of a life wouldn’t make a good impression on the captain, who likely was the source of the angry chain-saw noise.

  Maria finally opened her eyes. She tried to make sense of the dark round globules floating in front of her vat, but it was difficult with the freshly cloned brain being put to work for the first time. There were too many things wrong with such a mess.

  With the smears on the outside of the vat and the purple color through the bluish fluid Maria floated in, she figured the orbs were blood drops. Blood shouldn’t float. That was the first problem. If blood was floating, that meant the grav drive that spun the ship had failed. That was probably another reason someone was yelling. The blood and the grav drive.

  Blood in a cloning bay, that was different too. Cloning bays were pristine, clean places, where humans were downloaded into newly cloned bodies when the previous ones had died. It was much cleaner and less painful than human birth, with all its screaming and blood.

  Again with the blood.

  The cloning bay had six vats in two neat rows, filled with blue-tinted synth-amneo fluid and the waiting clones of the rest of the crew. Blood belonged in the medbay, down the hall. The unlikely occurrence of a drop of blood originating in the medbay, floating down the hall, and entering the cloning bay to float in front of Maria’s vat would be extraordinary. But that’s not what happened; a body floated above the blood drops. A number of bodies, actually.

  Finally, if the grav drive had failed, and if someone had been injured in the cloning bay, another member of the crew would have cleaned up the blood. Someone was always on call to ensure a new clone made the transition from death into their new body smoothly.

  No. A perfect purple sphere of blood shouldn’t be floating in front of her face.

  Maria had now been awake for a good minute or so. No one worked the computer to drain the synth-amneo fluid to free her.

  A small part of her brain began to scream at her that she should be more concerned about the bodies, but only a small part.

  She’d never had occasion to use the emergency release valve inside the cloning vats. Scientists had implemented them
after some techs had decided to play a prank on a clone, and woke her up only to leave her in the vat alone for hours. When she had gotten free, stories said, the result was messy and violent, resulting in the fresh cloning of some of the techs. After that, engineers added an interior release switch for clones to let themselves out of the tank if they were trapped for whatever reason.

  Maria pushed the button and heard a clunk as the release triggered, but the synth-amneo fluid stayed where it was.

  A drain relied on gravity to help the fluid along its way. Plumbing 101 there. The valve was opened but the fluid remained a stubborn womb around Maria.

  She tried to find the source of the yelling. One of the crew floated near the computer bank, naked, with wet hair stuck out in a frightening, spiky corona. Another clone woke. Two of them had died?

  Behind her, crewmates floated in four vats. All of their eyes were open, and each was searching for the emergency release. Three clunks sounded, but they remained in the same position Maria was in.

  Maria used the other emergency switch to open the vat door. Ideally it would have been used after the fluid had drained away, but there was little ideal about this situation. She and a good quantity of the synth-amneo fluid floated out of her vat, only to collide gently with the orb of blood floating in front of her. The surface tension of both fluids held, and the drop bounced away.

  Maria hadn’t encountered the problem of how to get out of a liquid prison in zero-grav. She experimented by flailing about, but only made some fluid break off the main bubble and go floating away. In her many lives, she’d been in more than one undignified situation, but this was new.

  Action and reaction, she thought, and inhaled as much of the oxygen-rich fluid as she could, then forced everything out of her lungs as if she were sneezing. She didn’t go as fast as she would have if it had been air, because she was still inside viscous fluid, but it helped push her backward and out of the bubble. She inhaled air and then coughed and vomited the rest of the fluid in a spray in front of her, banging her head on the computer console as her body’s involuntary movements propelled her farther.

  Finally out of the fluid, and gasping for air, she looked up.

  “Oh shit.”

  Three dead crewmates floated around the room amid the blood and other fluids. Two corpses sprouted a number of gory tentacles, bloody bubbles that refused to break away from the deadly wounds. A fourth was strapped to a chair at the terminal.

  Gallons of synth-amneo fluid joined the gory detritus as the newly cloned crew fought to exit their vats. They looked with as much shock as she felt at their surroundings.

  Captain Katrina de la Cruz moved to float beside her, still focused on the computer. “Maria, stop staring and make yourself useful. Check on the others.”

  Maria scrambled for a handhold on the wall to pull herself away from the captain’s attempt to access the terminal.

  Katrina pounded on a keyboard and poked at the console screen. “IAN, what the hell happened?”

  “My speech functions are inaccessible,” the computer’s male, slightly robotic voice said.

  “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” muttered a voice above Maria. It broke her shock and reminded her of the captain’s order to check on the crew.

  The speaker was Akihiro Sato, pilot and navigator. She had met him a few hours ago at the cocktail party before the launch of the Dormire.

  “Hiro, why are you speaking French?” Maria said, confused. “Are you all right?”

  “Someone saying aloud that they can’t talk is like that old picture of a pipe that says, ‘This is not a pipe.’ It’s supposed to give art students deep thoughts. Never mind.” He waved his hand around the cloning bay. “What happened, anyway?”

  “I have no idea,” she said. “But—God, what a mess. I have to go check on the others.”

  “Goddammit, you just spoke,” the captain said to the computer, dragging some icons around the screen. “Something’s working inside there. Talk to me, IAN.”

  “My speech functions are inaccessible,” the AI said again, and de la Cruz slammed her hand down on the keyboard, grabbing it to keep herself from floating away from it.

  Hiro followed Maria as she maneuvered around the room using the handholds on the wall. Maria found herself face-to-face with the gruesome body of Wolfgang, their second in command. She gently pushed him aside, trying not to dislodge the gory bloody tentacles sprouting from punctures on his body.

  She and Hiro floated toward the living Wolfgang, who was doubled over coughing the synth-amneo out of his lungs. “What the hell is going on?” he asked in a ragged voice.

  “You know as much as we do,” Maria said. “Are you all right?”

  He nodded and waved her off. He straightened his back, gaining at least another foot on his tall frame. Wolfgang was born on the moon colony, Luna, several generations of his family developing the long bones of living their whole lives in low gravity. He took a handhold and propelled himself toward the captain.

  “What do you remember?” Maria asked Hiro as they approached another crewmember.

  “My last backup was right after we boarded the ship. We haven’t even left yet,” Hiro said.

  Maria nodded. “Same for me. We should still be docked, or only a few weeks from Earth.”

  “I think we have more immediate problems, like our current status,” Hiro said.

  “True. Our current status is four of us are dead,” Maria said, pointing at the bodies. “And I’m guessing the other two are as well.”

  “What could kill us all?” Hiro asked, looking a bit green as he dodged a bit of bloody skin. “And what happened to me and the captain?”

  He referred to the “other two” bodies that were not floating in the cloning bay. Wolfgang, their engineer, Paul Seurat, and Dr. Joanna Glass all were dead, floating around the room, gently bumping off vats or one another.

  Another cough sounded from the last row of vats, then a soft voice. “Something rather violent, I’d say.”

  “Welcome back, Doctor, you all right?” Maria asked, pulling herself toward the woman.

  The new clone of Joanna nodded, her tight curls glistening with the synth-amneo. Her upper body was thin and strong, like all new clones, but her legs were small and twisted. She glanced up at the bodies and pursed her lips. “What happened?” She didn’t wait for them to answer, but grasped a handhold and pulled herself toward the ceiling where a body floated.

  “Check on Paul,” Maria said to Hiro, and followed Joanna.

  The doctor turned her own corpse to where she could see it, and her eyes grew wide. She swore quietly. Maria came up behind her and swore much louder.

  Her throat had a stab wound, with great waving gouts of blood reaching from her neck. If the doctor’s advanced age was any indication, they were well past the beginning of the mission. Maria remembered her as a woman who looked to be in her thirties, with smooth dark skin and black hair. Now wrinkles lined the skin around her eyes and the corners of her mouth, and gray shot through her tightly braided hair. Maria looked at the other bodies; from her vantage point she could now see each also showed their age.

  “I didn’t even notice,” she said, breathless. “I-I only noticed the blood and gore. We’ve been on this ship for decades. Do you remember anything?”

  “No.” Joanna’s voice was flat and grim. “We need to tell the captain.”

  “No one touch anything! This whole room is a crime scene!” Wolfgang shouted up to them. “Get away from that body!”

  “Wolfgang, the crime scene, if this is a crime scene, is already contaminated by about twenty-five hundred gallons of synth-amneo,” Hiro said from outside Paul’s vat. “With blood spattering everywhere.”

  “What do you mean if it’s a crime scene?” Maria asked. “Do you think that the grav drive died and stopped the ship from spinning and then knives just floated into us?”

  Speaking of the knife, it drifted near the ceiling. Maria propelled herself toward it and snatched i
t before it got pulled against the air intake filter, which was already getting clogged with bodily fluids she didn’t even want to think about.

  The doctor did as Wolfgang had commanded, moving away from her old body to join him and the captain. “This is murder,” she said. “But Hiro’s right, Wolfgang, there is a reason zero-g forensics never took off as a science. The air filters are sucking up the evidence as we speak. By now everyone is covered in everyone else’s blood. And now we have six new people and vats of synth-amneo floating around the bay messing up whatever’s left.”

  Wolfgang set his jaw and glared at her. His tall, thin frame shone with the bluish amneo fluid. He opened his mouth to counter the doctor, but Hiro interrupted them.

  “Five,” interrupted Hiro. He coughed and expelled more synth-amneo, which Maria narrowly dodged. He grimaced in apology. “Five new people. Paul’s still inside.” He pointed to their engineer, who remained in his vat, eyes closed.

  Maria remembered seeing his eyes open when she was in her own vat. But now Paul floated, eyes closed, hands covering his genitals, looking like a child who was playing hide-and-seek and whoever was “It” was going to devour him. He too was pale, naturally stocky, lightly muscled instead of the heavier man Maria remembered.

  “Get him out of there,” Katrina said. Wolfgang obliged, going to another terminal and pressing the button to open the vat.

  Hiro reached in and grabbed Paul by the wrist and pulled him and his fluid cage free.

  “Okay, only five of us were out,” Maria said, floating down. “That cuts the synth-amneo down by around four hundred gallons. Not a huge improvement. There’s still a lot of crap flying around. You’re not likely to get evidence from anything except the bodies themselves.” She held the knife out to Wolfgang, gripping the edge of the handle with her thumb and forefinger. “And possibly the murder weapon.”