“LOGAN! LOGAN! LOGAN!”
The crowd was chanting his name. Like he was a god. He couldn’t help but smile, taking a couple of steps back. It was nice to be appreciated.
It was less fulfilling when the ground beneath his feet suddenly opened up, and he dropped down into the dungeon below.
Chapter 8
Logan Rexington was covered in sweat, blood, and yellow goo from a giant tarantula. All three liquids flicked from his body as he landed on the stone floor, the hole above him sliding shut.
Moments ago he’d been in a gladiator arena fighting for his life. The body of the giant tarantula had still been twitching as the hole had opened up underneath, Logan plummeting down ten feet. Lucky for him, it only felt like a mild combat drop. His muscles now fully grown back to normal, he landed on his feet, bending his knees and taking a step forward to balance himself.
He was of course immediately knocked off balance when five droids charged him at once from all sides.
“GET OFF ME!” Logan roared as two metal claws wrapped around his wrist, a third prying the plasma cutter from his grasp.
Grabbing his other arm, it didn’t matter how much muscle Logan had. He couldn’t pry himself free from five robots clutching him.
The logical, sergeant part of his brain knew fighting was pointless. The robots had tensile strength unmatched by any human. He might as well try to fight against a tractor.
The lizard part of his brain flailed all his limbs, struggling to break free against impossible odds.
The droids were eight foot tall, shaped mostly human. Two arms, two legs. A blank silver face. There were sensors all across the body, but no eyes, no mouth, nothing resembling a personality.
The plasma cutter wrenched from his grasp, two droids grabbed his legs, wrapping their arms around his ankles. Logan kicked with all his freshly grown strength, slamming his heels into metal sternums, his elbows into rock-hard necks.
He absolutely caused more damage to his own body than the robots, but he couldn’t go down without a struggle. Soon enough his wrists were shoved into restraints, followed by his legs. Within moments he was tied down into a chair, even a leather strap tied across his forehead, holding him down in place.
“That was probably the worst final match we’ve had in a while.”
Logan couldn’t place the voice, so instead he looked at the droids backing away. They looked mostly like standard security droids, used mainly to intimidate on their patrols. Excepts the arms were different. Logan recognized the tubes on the side, made to slide down at a moment’s notice.
Chain guns. Each droid had a chain gun mounted on their arms. He could even see the ammo synthesizer on the side, an emergency solar panel on the side for power. Since when could they make ammo synthesizers small enough to put on an arm?
The droids all took clunky steps back, disappearing into the shadows of the room. It was made of thick gray uneven stones, lots of white mortar in between. There weren’t even any electrical lights in the room, metal flame sconces lining the walls round him.
“Who are you?!” Logan bellowed into the darkness. “Where am I? Why did I just fight a giant tarantula? How did I survive exploding the mainframe?! Why is Hitler in your sickbay?!”
Logan wasn’t sure who he expected to emerge from the shadows, but he at least thought they’d be wearing a shirt.
Instead the blond man wore only a jacket. Denim. The white skin underneath looked slightly pale, but had a good foundation. Logan looked at the hands. Again, they looked smooth, but he could see the wrinkles, the occasional callous.
Whoever this guy was, he’d worked his way up. But he definitely wasn’t ex-military. He didn’t walk with the precision of a soldier, the practiced marching drilled into everyone who signed up. And from the knuckles, Logan could tell he’d never been in a real fight before.
The blond man smiled, showing too many teeth as he looked Logan up and down.
“I’m Lord Zemka. And welcome to the Arena of Doom.”
“Lord?” Logan asked.
“My title,” Lord Zemka said. “I do own this moon, after all. Crimson’s Lament.”
“Crimson’s Lament?” Logan knew the name of every planet and moon in the Chaucer system. Eleven planets, forty-three moons. Crimson’s Lament was definitely not one of them. “What system are we in?”
“Shennong.” Lord Zemka held out his hand expectantly. Within seconds someone approached with a tray. The ginger man emerged from the shadows, the same one who’d shoved Logan into the arena, except now he was holding out a serving tray with an orange cocktail, complete with a small umbrella and fruit on the side. Lord Zemka didn’t even look as he picked it up, the servant placing it just in front of his outstretched hand.
“Shennong?!” Hardly anyone lived in the Shennong system. Maybe a few farming planets, but there was no governing body, not enough support. Sometimes people would go out there to try and make a new life for themselves, but if something went wrong (which it often did in the cold vacuum of space) they were on their own. “How did I get from Chaucer to Shennong?” Logan pulled on the restraints on his arms and legs, but he was tied down tight.
“Lord Zemka.” Victor took a few steps forward, emerging from the shadows with a first aid kit in his clawed hands. “If I could examine him whilst you talk, it would be—”
Lord Zemka waved his hands, Victor going silent as he took a big slurp from his orange cocktail. “You died, Sergeant. Over a hundred years ago. One of the most noble sacrifices in recent history. Blew up the Necrotron mainframe, left those robot bastards scattered. Of course, that was years before I was even born.”
Logan looked down at his hands, his aching muscles, the wound in his shoulder. Well, he glanced down as best he could, his forehead strapped into the chair. “I feel pretty alive.”
“You’ve not Logan Rexington,” Lord Zemka said, slurping another mouthful of cocktail. “Well, not the original.”
Logan blinked hard.
The strange genetic stuff.
Adolf Hitler.
The fact he remembered dying.
There was only one kind of technology that would explain all of that. A technology that had been outlawed even before Logan’s parents had been born.
“I’m… I’m a clone.” Logan slumped as best he could in the chair.
He supposed he should be happy he wasn’t dead. But was he even technically alive? What did it mean to be a clone?
Logan felt his head go dizzy, trying to comprehend who he was. What he was.
“But maybe something went wrong during the cloning process.”
His words swirled around Logan’s confused head. A clone. He wasn’t real. Or was he?
Lord Zemka took another slurp from his drink, sucking up air through the straw as he finished his cocktail. He held out the glass, the ginger servant expertly placing a tray underneath as Lord Zemka looked Logan up and down. “What the hell was that at the beginning?! You’re supposed to be a soldier. Why were you hiding like a child?”
“Yeah, I’m a soldier.” Logan might be a clone, but he was still absolutely one hundred percent a soldier. “It was the strongest tactical move. Besides, it’s not like anyone gave me any real intel.”
Lord Zemka sneered, glancing over at Victor for a second. “And where’s the scar?”
“The muscle growth was still in effect,” Victor said, tapping his clawed fingers on the first aid kit. “The wound would have filled in, like the wound in his leg.”
“People paid to see Logan Rexington, one of the finest warriors of our time, fight in the arena!” Lord Zemka waved his hand again. A fresh cocktail was put into his grasp, which he then hurled onto the floor. Glass, juice, alcohol, and the little umbrella went flying, smashing in all directions. “They did not pay to see you run and hide like a coward, without even looking the part!”
Logan shrugged, his shoulders barely moving half an inch. “Not my fault you cloned a soldier, not a gladiator.”
He then thought bac
k to the Viking, her face covered in blood.
“I’m not the only clone here, am I?”
“Don’t flatter yourself. We’ve got the best from all across the time periods. You’re just our youngest.”
“How is this even legal? Cloning is banned.”
“In Chaucer, sure.” Lord Zemka waved his hand, another cocktail brought to his grasp as one of the servants began to clean up the glass and cocktail on the floor. “Here in Shennong, each moon and planet can have whatever laws they want. It’s the Wild West out here. Just a little less dysentery.”
He slurped down a big gulp, ignoring the straw as he glanced over to Victor. “Now. About that scar.”
“I can put him under for surgery tonight,” Victor said, “and we—”
“Just cut him now,” Lord Zemka said. “Authentic, and all that.”
Victor froze, the tapping of his claws stopping. “The Hippocratic oath is one I swore to, both in my original body and this one. Do no harm to my patients. I will perform your surgery, but you are seriously not suggesting—”
Lord Zemka walked towards the servants cleaning up the cocktail, picking up a jagged and sharp piece of glass. “Fine. It’s not like I own you or anything. Why would you do what I say?”
He approached Logan, flicking off some of the fruity alcohol from the piece of glass.
Victor took a few steps forward, his clawed feet clanking on the stone floor. Three guard droids stomped forward from the shadows, standing in front of Victor, blocking his path.
The doctor snarled, a frightening growl bursting from his scaly lips. The guard droids stood unfazed, one of them spinning the chain gun around its arm, preparing to fire.
Lord Zemka reached into his jacket pocket, pulling out his coms device. A thin rectangle of glass, he pressed a few buttons, a picture of Logan Rexington appearing on his screen. He zoomed in on the scar, looking between Logan and the picture.
Logan pulled at the restraints clamping him down, but he might as well have been bolted into the chair.
“Now hold still.”
The glass cut into his forehead, biting into the skin. Blood ran down his head, pouring into his eye as Logan roared.
Chapter 9
In space there was no sound. No air for the vibrations to travel through. That was still the strangest part for Crickett. No sound of the breeze, no heat from the sun or the stars. Just a vast empty nothingness.
Or it would be, if Crickett wasn’t playing music so loud it felt like her ribs were about to crumble to dust.
Lying on the sofa of the atmospire elevator, Crickett took a sip from her bottle of beer. It had been ice-cold at the start of her journey. Now, over an hour later, it was beginning to turn warm. She grunted, aiming for the recycling tube. She threw with precision, the bottle disappearing into the hole, the machines inside already breaking it down and recycling it into the base components.
Back in her day, any trash was just thrown off the deck of the ship. But it wasn’t like that in the future. There was only one supply run every two weeks; they had to make use of everything they had in case a shipment was missed or something went wrong.
Crickett had been on the supply run for the last two years. Nothing had gone wrong so far. That was thanks to her iron stomach.
Growing up on the ocean, the deck of the ship was always unsteady beneath her feet. For some reason, this meant she was better at handling zero gravity than any other clone under Lord Zemka’s command.
Which was why she was always stuck with the supply run. She supposed there were worse jobs in the Arena of Doom. She could be stuck recycling the clone bodies. Or in the kitchens. Or made to fight a lot more often than she was.
Back in her first life, she’d been stuck up in the crow’s nest, on lookout for any approaching ships. She couldn’t blame her captain; anywhere else on the ship and she’d just cause trouble.
Luckily Lord Zemka hadn’t quite realized how much trouble she could be on a supply run.
The elevator was larger than most rooms in the Arena of Doom. It had a small bathroom, a comfy sofa, even a display screen that could play old Earth media. One wall of the elevator was filled with unseen gears, riding up the giant metal rod into space. The pole it was attached to was thicker than even the largest British naval ship. There had once been two pods on each side, eight working elevators made for traveling up and down.
Only three remained, two used as general storage for the arena. Crickett was still learning the basics of space travel, but it made sense an elevator would be more useful for breaking the planet’s atmosphere than using fuel and a ship each time. And it also gave her time to catch up on all the Earth media she’d missed.
Crickett left the music of David Bowie playing as she began to strap herself into the spacesuit.
Clamping her helmet on, Crickett pressed the button on her arm, turning off the gravity plates in the elevator. She began to float, her stomach holding steady as she pushed herself off the floor. Scratching her nose on the scratchy fabric inside the helmet, she strapped her back and arms into the thruster pack, Crickett moving with ease towards the airlock.
The air cycling through to the void, Crickett double-checked her oxygen levels on the holodisplay. She had enough for five hours, when the trip would at max take thirty. Thankfully the filters recharged any time she was on a planet’s atmosphere, but she always checked just to be safe.
The doors in front of her opened up, everything fading to silence as she pushed herself out into the void of space. It was always eerily silent. No crashing of waves, no planks of wood creaking, no snoring of crewmates from below deck. No air, nothing for vibrations to carry through.
Crickett pressed a few buttons on her holodisplay, starting the music track. There were trillions of songs to choose from, and music had come a long way since the days of sea chanties.
But there was something about David Bowie, singing about reaching out into space before the technology had ever been perfected, that spoke to Crickett. An ideal vision of what space could be.
As the piano and guitar of ‘Starman’ blasted through her sound system, Crickett glanced down below. She’d always known Earth was curved. It was why a lookout in the crow’s nest could see further than anyone on deck, the higher position letting her see further than the curve would normally allow.
But seeing the moon as a curved ball was still a sight to behold. Crimson’s Lament. The moon looked mostly yellow and green, hardly any oceans at all. Definitely not red.
Crickett was still trying to wrap her head around the idea of terraforming. Turning a barren moon into a habitable environment. Unlike Earth, there was no way Crimson’s Lament could sustain itself. Which was why she adjusted the joystick on her pack, a rumble as she headed towards the cargo crate left suspended in space.
This time it had gotten close. Only five hundred meters away. Considering it was sometimes a mile or two off, Crickett was thankful as she hit the back thrusters, slowing almost to a halt.
Transferring her code to the cargo shipment, the hatch at the front began to slowly swing open. The inside already vacuumed of air, Crickett flew in with ease.
The cargo pallet was packed tightly, covered in wrap. Five foot cubed, it weighed a fair ton. But in the void of space, that meant next to nothing.
Crickett pulled out her cable, slapping it onto the hook at the bottom of the pallet. She swung the hook from side to side, double-checking it could still slide around the bottom, able to move to the back of the pallet when she needed to slow down, then back to the front for speeding up.
It slid with ease, clearly oiled between each cargo drop off.
But she didn’t activate her thrusters just yet.
Instead, she reached into one of the sealed pockets on her spacesuit, carefully pulling out the bag of coin. Mostly coppers, a few silvers; Crickett tied the string around one of the clamps, securing it inside the cargo crate.
After months of bringing cargo back and forth, she’d left a no
te in the cargo crate out of sheer boredom and curiosity. Supply runs on the seven seas meant you got to talk to whoever she was trading with. Crickett had always been a damned good talker (for the most part) and missed getting news from the people on decks.
It was only after exchanging a few letters with the supply runners that Crickett got the idea for her small business. That Crickett realized she could get her own supplies into the Arena of Doom.
Supplies Lord Zemka wouldn’t be too happy about if he knew.
She kept it secret, only let a few people in. But word spread fast, and soon Crickett became known as the clone who could get you what you wanted.
For a few coppers, maybe a silver or two.
A beer. Fancy sweet foods. Magazines with pictures. Delights and luxuries Crickett could barely imagine back in her time.
She left the extra money for her own supplies, along with the list of items inside the bag. Taking off from the empty cargo container, Crickett left the thrusters on as the cable on the back of her suit went taut. She just needed a little force to get the pack of supplies going, sending her hurtling through space.
It felt very slow, but according to the holodisplay she was going at least ten meters a second. It got a bit confusing, space using metric while she grew up using imperial. But she knew she was going nineteen, maybe even twenty knots. Even the fastest ships of her time could only get up to ten knots in the highest of winds. She was flying through space twice as fast as any human had ever traveled in her time.
But moving through nothing, with no gravity, no air resistance. All she could see was the cargo container behind her, slowly closing back up. And the spire of the elevator, slowly growing bigger. Her only company the music playing through her sound system.
Soon enough, Crickett swung around the back of the cargo, hitting reverse on her thrusters, slowing the acceleration so the cargo didn’t go hurtling into the elevator.
She floated gently into the airlock, pulling the cargo down to the floor. Before closing the hatch behind her, Crickett peeled off some of the wrapping, digging down to find a little something to reward herself with.
Arena of Doom (Clone Squad #1) Page 5
