“Lights?” he tried, and the room was suddenly lit. It was lined on both sides with dozens of stasis tubes, while a catwalk arced out to their right, crossing into a vast hollow sphere of blinking blue lights. To the far left lay what looked like a small med center.
“What is this place?” he wondered aloud.
Behind him, Destra was oddly quiet.
“Mom?” he turned to look for her and found her standing just behind him, her lips slightly parted, her eyes wide and distant, as if her thoughts were suddenly someplace else, or as if she had been here before.
“Are you all right?”
She nodded slowly.
“Come on,” he said. “Those stasis tubes are lit up. I want to see who’s in them.”
Destra turned to him with a vacant expression and shook her head. “You go,” she said. “I can’t look.”
Atton crept toward the nearest stasis tube and peered inside. The face staring back at him looked familiar, but he couldn’t tell from where. He shook his head. “Who is this . . . ?”
Destra appeared beside him a moment later, looking pale and hugging herself against the cold. “That’s Master Commander Lenon Donali.”
Atton’s eyes lit with recognition. He’d met the admiral’s XO on various occasions while acting as the supreme overlord. “Hoff put his executive officer in stasis?”
“No,” Destra said.
“Then I don’t understand.” Atton shook his head.
“Keep looking.”
Atton moved on down the line of stasis tubes and stopped suddenly at the next one. “It’s Hoff!” He shot Destra a horrified look. “What is this? The admiral and the XO are hiding in stasis?”
“Look in the other ones, Atton.”
Wordlessly, Atton continued down the line of stasis tubes. As soon as he looked into the next one, he understood, but he had to see the rest to be sure. He walked past all twelve stasis tubes on that side, with ever-mounting confusion.
“They’re all the same,” he said, stopping at the last stasis tube in line, this one dark and empty. “They’re clones of the admiral and his XO, but they’re more than that. They’re exact replicas, aged to the day, with all their distinguishing marks and features intact,” he said. “Why?”
“To cheat death,” a deep, male voice answered, and then Hoff stepped out of the lift tube, and right behind him was Master Commander Donali. The XO’s red artificial eye glowed ominously in the dark, making him look like a Gor.
“What is this?” Atton demanded. “This is what you’ve been hiding? A cloning lab? This is a joke, Hoff.”
“If it is, I’m afraid I don’t share your sense of humor.” Turning to Destra he said, “What are you doing here, Des? I told you it wasn’t safe for you to know more. Why did you have to disobey me?”
“You told me the man I met on Ritan was a clone,” she said, her voice trembling.
Hoff inclined his head. “That was true, but you never asked if I were also a clone.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“Longer than anyone can remember.”
Atton’s jaw dropped, and Hoff gave a slow, unsettling smile.
Chapter 23
“You’ve been cloning yourself as long as anyone can remember? What are you?” Destra asked, backing away.
Hoff gave a small, sad smile and shook his head. “Now you understand why I didn’t want to tell you.”
“Tell me what? That you’re some kind of biological bot? What are these clones for, Hoff?”
“Spares, in case I should die. What do you think happened when I got stranded on Roka IV during the Exodus? My lifelink implant detected I was mortally wounded and unlikely to live, so it downloaded my consciousness to the next clone in line, waiting aboard my flagship in orbit. The fact that you later found and rescued me as you say you did is something I’ll never be able to remember, just like I can’t remember our time together on Ritan.”
Atton turned to his mother. “You knew about this?”
She shook her head. “He died on Ritan, Atton, and later came back to rescue me himself. I knew from that he had cloned himself, but I didn’t know that he was still doing it, or that he’s been doing it forever. How old are you, Hoff?”
Hoff shrugged. “The human brain is self-limiting in what it can remember and store. Eventually even important things are forgotten. That’s why I have my data center here—” Hoff gestured to the catwalk leading out into the vast chamber of blinking blue lights which Atton had seen upon leaving the lift tube. “In there I have stored every memory, thought, and experience from more than ten thousand iterations, and now Commander Donali’s own memories are in there as well.
Atton blinked rapidly as he did a quick mental calculation. “Ten thousand iterations . . . That would make your earliest memories more than a million years old, Hoff.”
“More or less.”
“The Imperium is—was—only twenty-seven thousand years old. A million years of life and knowledge! You’re practically immortal! Omniscient.”
“I’m not a god. Not the way people think.” Hoff started through the stasis room, closing the gap between them. “And I’m not just practically immortal, Atton—I am an Immortal, and traces of cloning in my DNA go back more than ten million years.”
Atton shook his head and traded a quick glance with his mother as both of them backed up against the row of stasis tubes to get away from Hoff. “Stay back,” Atton said, hefting the cutting beam.
The admiral laughed. “Relax. What do you think I’m going to do to you—kill you? Why, because you discovered my secret? Destra, at least you should know better than that. Commander Donali was the one who discovered you were pregnant with my daughter after we rescued you from Ritan. If I didn’t kill him then, why would I kill either of you now? I’m not a monster.”
Destra’s lips trembled and her blue eyes glistened brightly in the dim light. “You could trust him with the truth, but you couldn’t trust me.”
Hoff frowned. “Back then I didn’t even know who you were, Destra, but I knew Donali. I knew him well enough to know that if I told him the truth he would embrace it, just as I know you well enough to know that you will fight it. But I’m going to give you and Atton both the same choice I gave Donali back then: join us, or forget what you’ve seen here.”
Atton shook his head. “How are we supposed to forget?”
“This is not the first time we’ve been discovered, Atton. Why did you think holoskins and slave chips were invented? To hide from nosy mortals like you. We invented those, just as we invented almost everything else you take for granted today.”
“We? There are more like you?”
“Trillions more, an entire civilization hidden beyond the known galaxy, untouched and undiscovered by the Sythians.”
“The lost worlds . . .” Destra whispered.
Atton began to laugh. “You don’t seriously expect me to believe that trillions of humans have deceived themselves into thinking that they can live forever by transferring their memories to clones. That doesn’t make you live forever, Hoff. You said it yourself—two different versions of you were alive at the same time—one on Roka and one on this ship. Either one of them could have been you, but more likely, neither of them was, and the real Hoff was lost millions of years ago when your mind was downloaded to the very first clone.”
“You’re assuming that what we are is more than mere matter, bits and bytes stored in a biological computer.”
“How else can you explain the dual existence?”
“It’s a paradox, to be sure, but who’s to say that a parallel version of you isn’t already living in another dimension higher or lower than ours? There are plenty of theories which suggest parallel realities. Creating a clone of yourself with a copy of the same conscious experience is just an extension of that principle. But regardless of whether you believe it works, and regardless of whether or not you choose to believe in some immaterial soul which we can neither see, measur
e, nor transfer from one body to another, the fact remains that there is a lot for humanity to gain from such technology. It’s what got us this far. Imagine a galaxy where every time you die, you continue on living right where you left off, but you get to go back to living as a younger, stronger version of yourself. You accumulate more and more knowledge, becoming better and better at what you do, generation after generation. That is infinite progress, Atton. The greatest minds ever born never need to die.”
“But no one is actually born anymore in a system like that, are they? If you all live forever, then you can’t afford to keep having children. You would eventually run out of room, no matter how many habitable worlds there are in the galaxy.”
“There are population controls for that. Breeding is strictly regulated, and we’re cloned to be sterile at birth.”
“If you’re sterile from birth, then explain Atta,” Destra said. Her eyes were wide and terrified, darting around the room, looking for an escape.
Hoff smiled at his wife. “I haven’t lived among my people for a long time, Destra. Why do you think no one has seen the lost worlds or knows where they are? I haven’t seen them either, Des. I’m an outcast. They’ve been sending aid to us, and helping us to establish the enclave, but that’s as close as they’ll ever come to working with mortals. The betrayal runs too deep.”
Atton’s brow furrowed. “Betrayal?”
“Not everyone wanted to live forever. Some grew bored of it, while others simply rejected the system on moral and spiritual grounds, using arguments such as you’ve already mentioned. Still more of our ancestors rejected immortality because they couldn’t stand the tyranny of the breeding licenses which were handed out once every other century and came at an extremely high price. In a society where only the rich can fulfill their desire to procreate, you can begin to see how the war began—and war for an immortal is the most terrifying thing imaginable, because it is the only thing which can kill us. Kill an immortal’s body and he’ll rise again. Kill his body and destroy his data center and you’ve killed him forever. It was all too easy for terrorists to sabotage those data centers, which is why so much of our history has been lost—including Origin.”
“Origin is a myth,” Atton said.
“It’s real, and so was the great war which, as legend has it, drove us from the smoldering ruins of our world. For most of us, that war, and that exodus are the earliest things we can remember.
“Faced with an enemy which was almost too happy to lay down their lives to destroy us, we ran. Fully a third of us decided to remain immortal, and we ran as far as we could from those who sought to bring an end to our way of life. The third of humanity which stayed behind had their coveted children and died natural deaths.”
“And what about the other third?” Atton asked.
Hoff shrugged. “Casualties of the War of Origin.”
“Admiral . . .” A new voice joined the discussion, and Atton saw Commander Donali walk up beside Hoff. “We must hurry.”
“Yes,” Hoff agreed. “We can discuss this more later. Destra, I’m sorry for the deception, but hopefully now you understand why I felt the need to keep this a secret. I was telling the truth when I said that I’ve been betrayed by women in the past. You’re not the first to discover my secret, and not everyone took it as well as you. I have more than a few deaths to show for being overly trusting in the past.” Hoff eyed Atton’s cutting beam pointedly. “Speaking of which, I’d rather not add another death to the list. You can stop pointing that at me now, son. If you fire it in here, my security system will flood this chamber with toxic gas. A few hours later, after you’re both dead and the gas has been pumped out, I’ll walk out of one of these stasis tubes, alive and well, as if nothing happened.”
Atton grimaced, but he allowed the barrel of his cutting beam to drift away from Hoff’s chest.
The admiral continued on to the med center adjoining the stasis room. He crossed the threshold between the stasis room and med center, passing into the brighter light of the med center. Atton hurried to catch up, and he heard Destra’s soft footsteps echoing almost reluctantly after his.
The admiral stopped at a hover gurney and picked up a specimen jar with something small and shiny inside. Turning to Donali he handed over the jar. “Take it and go. Use a long-range scout ship. Lead them away. Stop a few times so they can pick up the trail. Learn what you can about the device along the way, and then jettison it into space. If all goes well, I’ll meet you back here at the entrance of Dark Space in a week’s time.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Hopefully the interference in this nebula is enough to prevent the signal from reaching them right now.”
“I doubt the nebula will inhibit superluminal comms if it doesn’t stop us from jumping to SLS,” Donali replied.
“Time will tell.”
Atton stopped beside them, his eyes flicking from Hoff to Donali and back again. “You hope the nebula prevents what signal from reaching who?” he asked.
Hoff clapped his XO on the back and squeezed his shoulder. “You’d better go. Good luck.”
“Yes, sir. . . .” Donali’s real eye found Atton and stayed there for an uncomfortably long moment. “You’re sure you don’t want me to stay here with you a while longer, sir?”
“No, don’t worry. They’re not a danger to me.”
“If you say so, sir.” Donali said. “All the same, however—” The commander reached out with lightning quick hands and snatched the heavy cutting beam from Atton’s arms. “—I’m keeping this.”
Hoff chuckled. “Well, there’s no point leaving anything to chance, is there?”
Commander Donali grunted as he hefted the beam weapon and strode off.
Atton shook his head and looked around the med center. He found his mother standing to one side of the room, staring at another table, this one a medical examiner’s table. It was covered with a white sheet that glowed a faint blue to indicate it was also covered by a containment field. A suspiciously human outline could be seen beneath the sheet. Atton walked over to her. “Who’s under here?” Atton asked. “Don’t tell me you slipped in the vaccucleanser and had to use one of your clones already.”
“No,” Hoff replied.
Atton reached out to lift the sheet, but a strong hand seized his and pushed him away.
“You don’t want to look under there—Destra, what are you doing!”
“No more secrets,” she said as she whipped the sheet off the body. Then she gasped and stumbled back. “I think I’m going to be sick,” she said.
Atton turned back to look, and he saw a very familiar humanoid body, recently sewn back together with thick black stitches running all the way from its sternum to its navel. It looked like a man, but the absence of visible genitalia, the pale translucent skin, and the presence of gills in the sides of the cadaver’s neck gave him away for what he really was. Atton turned on Hoff, suddenly furious. “What is this?”
“Did you think Kaon was the only one?”
Atton’s eyes narrowed and he turned back to the body. He walked around the table to examine the body more carefully. The cranial fins were missing, sliced off during an old torture session. “This is not just any Sythian, Hoff. This is Kaon. How did you . . .” Atton trailed off as realization dawned.
“Did you think I was going to wait forever to get my hands on him?”
“What have you done?” Atton asked, shaking his head. “Obsidian station . . . they found nothing but debris! It was supposed to have been a Sythian attack, but it wasn’t, was it? That’s why the Interloper was there. It was a Sythian ship. The damage would be consistent with Sythian weapons.”
“What’s he talking about?” Destra demanded.
“He killed them!” Atton said. “He killed more than a two hundred loyal officers just to get at Kaon!”
Destra’s eyes flew wide and she shook her head. She began backing away from her husband again.
Atton turned back to Hoff, his gaze s
harp and full of accusation. “You killed them all.”
* * *
Captain Loba Caldin frowned out at the flashing gray clouds of the nebula. “What’s the delay?” she asked.
Beside her stood Junior Captain Crossid Adram, the former captain of the Interloper. Caldin turned to look at him. The man’s profile was vulturine and sinister, with a long, hooked nose and wispy white hair that barely covered his pale scalp. In the dim light of the alien cruiser, his hair seemed to glow neon purple.
Adram noticed her scrutiny and he flashed her a quick smile. “I don’t know,” he said, “but I’m sure the admiral has his reasons for waiting. He always has a good reason for everything. He’s the admiral, is he not? That’s all the justification he needs.”
Caldin frowned. Adram had been recently demoted for questioning orders too much. At the time she’d thought it harsh, but now she had a better understanding of the reason for the demotion. Adram’s attitude toward the admiral was borderline insubordinate.
“What do you suppose he’ll do with Dark Space once he has the Valiant back?” Adram mused.
“I suppose the admiral will take command,” Caldin replied.
“Yes, I suppose he will. His first act will probably be to execute all of the criminals—or have them chipped and turned into slave laborers.”
“I doubt his policies will be so extreme. Half of Dark Space has a criminal record.”
Adram shrugged. “Then supporting them won’t be such a burden anymore.”
Caldin’s eyes narrowed sharply. “Look, it’s not our place to ask those questions. We’re officers of the fleet. We follow orders.”
“Which orders and whose?”
“Any orders from a superior officer.”
A faint smile parted Adram’s lips. “Is that what you were doing when you were following the imposter overlord—not asking questions?”
“I wasn’t aware that he was an imposter.”
“Exactly, but as soon as you discovered that he was, you took the appropriate actions to replace him, because you realized that he was unfit for command.”
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