Although Icarus Hospital was technically part of the city, it had been built ten kilometers outside of it. If I couldn’t get to the city by nightfall, I would die. The night temperatures on Helron 5 dropped to nearly 150° Kelvin, more than one hundred degrees below the freezing point of water.
Within a standard galactic hour, your blood would begin to freeze and turn into a thick slush in your veins. Your heart would have to work harder and harder to pump and it would eventually cause a heart-attack. If you didn’t die of blood freezing, within two standard galactic hours your body would induce a fever hot enough to make your brain boil in your skull. That was for clones. For humans, the entire process took minutes. Many corpses had been found on the surface naked because people had stripped bare due to the intense heat their bodies had produced.
I stood and stripped off the titanium-mesh jumpsuit and donned the guard’s white thermalsuit that he was wearing underneath the armor. The suit was too long but there was a waistband so at least the pants portion would be held in place.
While I was debating whether or not to take the armor, I heard the unmistakable sound of boots hitting the floor in the corridor. They had responded far quicker than I had expected.
I dove underneath the doctor’s desk and pulled the glove tighter against my hand. I heard the office door open and the sound of men yelling. I guessed about five or six.
“Check the doctor,” someone said.
“No pulse.”
“Cut off access to the elevators and search this floor from top to bottom. Get a team outside searching the surrounding area in a one kilometer radius.”
“Yessir.”
I waited until they had all left. I didn’t hear any breathing or movement. I decided to have a look. Leaning to the side of the desk, I could see one guard stationed at the door. He would be easy enough but how many more were there?
Easing out from the space beneath the desk, I walked on my toes so as to make less noise. Coming from behind, I placed the glove around the guard’s throat to prevent him from screaming. He jolted and went limp and I pulled his body into the office.
He was smaller than the guard who had brought me here. His armor might fit. I took it off and placed it on myself. The breastplate was heavy and cumbersome but the leg and arm attachments were loose and easy to maneuver in. I was covered in black metal from the neck down. It was a shame the guards didn’t wear helmets. From up close anyone could spot me as a patient, but from a distance the armor might fool someone who wasn’t paying attention.
I placed the guard’s metal boots on my feet and walked into the corridor. Six or seven guards were searching the rooms and two guards were stationed at the elevators, another two at the end of the corridor.
I casually walked toward the elevators pretending to be adjusting my glove which I held in front of my face.
I was within five meters of the guards when one turned and looked at me and I could see in his eyes he knew who I was. He twisted toward me with his gloved hand and I sprinted at him. He swung with his ferromagnetic glove, but it was sloppy and telegraphed. I ducked low and then grabbed his arm at the elbow and smashed my glove in his face. He flew backward as if hit by a speeding hovercar. The other guard lunged at me and I barely moved out of the range of his glove as it whizzed by my face. He squared off with me and threw a kick low before coming high with the glove. He was better trained and younger than his counterpart.
Two more kicks and then he was airborne, kicking out at me and landing a blow on my chest. I flew into the elevator doors and he pursued, slamming his gloved hand against my shoulder as I twisted away, my arm burning.
He cocked his arm back for a killing blow and I cracked his nose with my forehead. His eyes watered and I began a quick succession of blows. Off balance and with blood gushing from his nostrils, he began backing up as he blocked me with his forearms and elbows. He glanced back quickly to ensure the path was clear, and that was all I needed.
I swept his legs out from under him and as he was in the air my glove caught his stomach, spinning him away from me and into a wall before crashing to the floor. I jumped and landed on him with a wet thud, the glove splitting his skull.
He had been a good opponent, and I said a quiet prayer for him.
I pressed the RETRIEVE button on the elevator. I could hear guards running down the corridor. The elevator nearest me was being recalled from the twenty-seventh floor. I quickly pushed the buttons for all six elevators. Then I simply closed my eyes and waited.
The footsteps grew louder. I could hear shouting and guards talking into their comm-links. I stood frozen, waiting for the buzz of the recalled elevator that would save my life. The footsteps were close. Maybe ten meters.
I opened my eyes and could see down the corridor. At least thirty guards were at a full sprint towards me. I had killed the Administrator. There wasn’t going to be an arrest or a trial, they would kill me right here. Perhaps rape me first. To them I wasn’t human.
I heard a soft buzz behind me and jumped without even looking if the doors were open or not. I fell onto the cold surface of an elevator when the doors were still not fully open.
I climbed to my feet. “Floor one, now!”
The doors were shutting as I saw a guard’s red and sweating face jump at me from less than a meter away. I thrust my fist into his face and knocked him back enough for the doors to close as the other guards lifted short-range plasma pistols and fired, catching only the metal exterior.
The elevator moved swiftly and without sound. This may be the last moment I’m alive. I took in a deep breath and thought of some of my better memories: the moment on Paylon when I had decided that I wasn’t going to be a slave any longer. When I had taken my owner’s platinum whip and wrapped it around his throat. The look in his eyes when life had left his flesh like a soft breeze over a sea. The look in the eyes of all the other young girls he’d held captive and the smiles and tears that came to them at the death of their nightmare. My father, a clone himself, and his loving face as he sent me off on an impossible mission to save our race.
The bombings on Xatera, wiping out an entire management wing of a clone slaver group. The mass poisoning on Baenlor 2 the night of an orgy, when the men had decided they would rape and murder the pleasure clones they had bought the day before.
But the finest of all moments had just barely occurred. Doctor Keynes had executed more “misbehaving” clones than anyone else in history. His was an evil I couldn’t understand. He wasn’t one of those drunken fools who genuinely believed that clones were inferior. He’d even said that humanity abandoned morality when they’d forgotten that clones had souls. He knew exactly what we were, and yet he massacred us by the tens of thousands anyway.
Today, I knew that I had led a good life.
“First floor,” the computer’s soft feminine voice announced.
I stepped off and saw that hospital security wasn’t monitoring this floor as heavily—only one guard and he was flirting with a front desk employee. I walked briskly to the front exit. With my hand scratching the side of my face, and their mutual attention to each other, they didn’t even notice who I was.
I was near the doors when a secretary bumped into me, a young girl. She was about to apologize, but then looked me up and down and her eyes went wide. She recognized me.
“Please don’t kill me,” she whispered. “I’m just an assistant. I’m nobody.”
I lightly touched her neck which I could’ve snapped in an instant. She could easily alert the guard as soon as I let her go. But I still removed my hand. “Your employment here ends today, right?”
“Right.”
I slipped past her and walked right outside onto the bright surface of Helron 5.
The doctor’s office was on the other side of the building and that’s where the largest conglomeration of guards would be. I sprinted in the opposite direction.
The surface of Helron 5 was more ice than snow. If I hadn’t taken the guard’s boots
, my feet would have been cut and bloodied. The reflection of light from Helron’s two suns off the blue and white surface was nearly blinding. I kept my eyes low and my legs moving. I could hear the loud crunch of ice cracking underneath my feet with each step. I listened to my breathing. I kept it as rhythmic as possible.
I had only one advantage: Helron 5’s relatively low gravity. It made running far less difficult than on Camon or Earth, and it was the only possible way I could run through snow and ice wearing a guard’s armor. It was the one variable the architects of Icarus hadn’t taken into account, a mistake hospital administrators attempted to remedy with tight titanium-mesh jumpsuits. I slipped off the armor, and the running grew slightly easier.
Soon all I could hear was my breathing. I stopped and turned around to see the hospital. The glare was so strong it was barely visible. Unless they were looking through a pair of ocular enhancers right at me, I was lost to them.
I held my breath and just enjoyed the silence. It was a type I’d never heard before, the type where your ears would start ringing from lack of any stimulus. Though I knew sound didn’t travel in space, I thought I could hear the movement of the planets above.
2
I exhaled and started running again. I couldn’t be quite sure where I was going. When the hospital disappeared from view, every direction looked the same. My only guidance was Helron 5’s suns. Though distant from the planet, they were burning pinpoints of light in the bright blue sky. They set in the north. The city was to the east. As long as I held a steady course, I had a chance of hitting upon it.
Within a short time, I felt the tap of icicles hitting my face. Chunks of my hair had frozen. My body temperature was dropping fast. I would be dead soon.
I hit a particularly deep patch of snow. It came up to my chest and I fought through it, aching step by aching step. In my training, they’d shipped us to an alien planet and placed hundred kilogram packs on our backs with oxygen breathers strapped to our faces, then they made run on the bottom of an alien ocean, telling us the breathers held enough oxygen to get us ten kilometers: five out and five back. In fact, they’d held only enough oxygen for five: two and half out and two and a half back—artificial natural selection at the hands of the trainers. More than a fourth of my squad drowned on the first attempt. But those of us who survived found that day-after-day the runs grew easier, until we actually began to look forward to them.
I thought of those runs now and tried to imagine that I would enjoy trudging through this snow should I have to do it enough times. But the ocean had been nearly body temperature and only grew uncomfortable after long exertion. The cold here was a torture I had never experienced.
My teeth began to chatter and I tightened my jaw muscles to try to get them to stop. The last thing I needed was to accidentally bite off my tongue. I could feel the heaviness of my eyelids and it took enormous effort to open and close them. My tear ducts were certainly frozen by now. I could no longer smell. The mucus in my nose was ice and my nasal hairs were covered in frost.
A crackling near me was on the outskirts of my hearing, but it grew louder and I thought that perhaps the cold had ruptured my eardrums. Before I could slow to decipher the sound, the ice underneath my feet shattered and I plummeted.
I slid down blue ice and the world became a blur. My elbows and knees dug into the slick surface to self-arrest my fall and I felt the flesh burn off of them, but I slowed enough that I could dig my fingers into the ice and stop.
I closed my eyes and centered myself by counting my breaths. I counted to twenty before opening my eyes again. The crevasse was deep but not wide and I found I could put one leg on the ice wall behind me. Silence, and a deep blue glow around me, I began moving up the ice. Glancing downward, there was only the blackness of the unknown.
I pushed and crawled and climbed until I had reached the edge of the crevasse and climbed out. The snow around me had collapsed into the crevasse and I noticed for the first time that I was standing on a hill. I brushed snow and ice off my body and face. My fingers were bleeding and two of my nails had been ripped away. I tore a piece of cloth from my clothing and wrapped my fingers. I put my hand over my eyes and squinted to look in all directions. In the distance, to the southeast, I could see the unmistakable flight towers of Gamni.
I ran at a full sprint down the side of the hill. Before long I was at the city’s edge.
Gamni had no walls; there was nothing to protect themselves from. The biggest danger came from the city’s criminals.
As with any big city, Gamni had an intense crime problem. Ice mining wasn’t exactly an easy or rewarding profession so many people turned to crime instead. The city’s law enforcement was as brutal as the criminals. Anyone accused of a crime was put on trial the same day and a single magistrate would decide the verdict. Anyone caught in the act of committing a crime was immediately executed.
I walked into the city. The buildings were a dark brown and gray and the streets were made from a slick black stone commonly found on Helron’s surface. Thin metal nets hovering above the city kept the snow off of its buildings and streets, but projected a shadow that made me uncomfortable.
The sound of ships coming and going from the spaceport filled the air and I could hear the occasional buzz from the hoverbuses of the public transportation. The sunlight was fading fast and I could see people scurrying to get home. Nobody wanted to be stuck on Gamni’s streets after dark. Even law enforcement wouldn’t go into many sections of the city.
I walked to the nearest goods trader and traded in my ferromagnetic glove for some Earth units, enough to buy food for the next couple weeks if necessary. I had enough left over for a pair of red thermalrobes. I hadn’t worn anything comfortable since I’d been crammed into Icarus and I had to stand around a while in the robes and simply feel the silky material against my skin.
I found a nearby grocers outlet and bought hot tea and baked bread. I sat in the little outlet warming myself by a heater near the back and ate. When I had finished, I asked directions to the spaceport and waited outside at the public transport pick-up. A silver hoverbus came by in a matter of minutes.
The bus landed in front of me and I got on with a few other passengers heading home after work in the city. It lifted off the ground with a loud hiss and whipped forward. I sat quietly in the back.
No one had asked me any questions. The goods trader didn’t care where I’d gotten my glove, a weapon reserved for government use only. Actually, he seemed like he didn’t want to know. So much sadness and pain filled the city that no one appeared to care what went on around them. As far as they were concerned, it had nothing to do with them.
The hoverbus came to a sudden stop, hard enough to jolt the passengers. I stepped off and heard the roar of engines blasting off toward the sky.
The spaceport was the only part of Gamni that was privately owned, and consequently was the nicest part that I had seen so far. It was carpeted with soft white carpet and the walls were smooth chrome. The hustle of a busy spaceport was something I had missed and it made me grin to be back in one.
I’d wasted enough time and had to move fast: right about now the guards were realizing I wasn’t near the facility and that I had made a break for Gamni. They would expect I had died in the effort, but they wouldn’t take the chance. They would notify the city’s law enforcement and call administrative authorities to post agents at the port.
Looking at a map by the entrance, I pinpointed the location of the spaceport lounge. I walked quickly, ignoring some rowdy drunkards that began following me and making lewd comments. A transient was begging for food on the floor and I took out half the units I had left and gave them to him.
The lounge’s entrance was a single padded black door. I entered and shut the door behind me. The lounge was filled with smoke and smelled of opium, resignate and colmb root. Though the stench was repugnant, somewhere between burnt hair and melting plastic, it was nice to be able to smell again.
The déc
or was different from the rest of the spaceport. The walls were tan and the floor was a simple black carpet. I stood in front of a glass bar and ordered a hot tea from the server-bot. His little circular frame went to work quickly and used a metallic arm to place the drink before me. The human bartender didn’t even notice me.
In my periphery, I studied the crowd. Finding passage off Helron wouldn’t be difficult. Most of the pilots and crews here were drunks. A few drinks and a handful of Earth units would be enough to buy me a stowaway passage.
A fat man wearing a gray canvas pilot’s suit came and sat next to me at the bar. He reeked of liquor and his face was weathered and red.
“Hi there,” he said, exposing small yellowed teeth.
“Hello.”
“What’s a pretty little thing like you doin’ here?”
“I’m looking for passage actually.”
“Oh really? Well I just happen to have a ship of my own.”
“Your own?”
“Well, a cargo ship owned by the People’s Republic. But I’m the pilot.”
“And what would be the payment for a one-way trip off of Helron?”
“For you,” he said while running his fingers over a strand of my hair, “all the Earth units you got. And at least one night with me.”
“Seems a fair price.”
He laughed quietly. “Oh, it is.”
“Fine, where should I meet you?” I said.
“Dock X-12. It’s a gray freighter called the Ulysses. How about you be there tonight, little darlin’?”
“How about now?”
“Oh ho. In a hurry, huh? Well maybe I should ask for a little more?”
“I don’t have anything else.”
“Sure ya do. A good lookin’ girl like you can fetch a high price with the lonely pilots at the ports. Maybe we rent you out a little bit.”
“Tell you what, get me off the planet and we’ll talk.”
Clone Hunter (A Science-Fiction Thriller) Page 2
