“You ever fired one of these things, rook?”
“Yes.”
“And where’d a mechanic fire a rifle worth more than a ship?”
I didn’t reply and she looked back to the target. She began directing me to the target which was more than five kilometers away. Wearing the ocular enhancers and firing the 41-A were mutually exclusive. The rifle was meant to shoot small ships out of the sky and it took total effort to not rip your arms out of your sockets.
“Forty-two, twelve, fourteen, thirteen, fourteen again, left two millimeters … that’s it, lock and fire.”
I held down the auto-lock and the rifle charged up in a few seconds. I fired and the recoil nearly knocked me backward, the padded shoulder rest of the rifle digging into my flesh. A burst of purple phased matter shot out of the barrel. It connected and obliterated the metal target, melting it into liquid that cooled in the Silorean air. It continued through the trees behind the target for farther than we could see.
“Nice shot, rook.”
“What are we doing here?”
“Target practice.”
“No, I mean on this planet. I don’t get why we’re all here. Why do they have a fighter pilot doing target practice?”
She took the enhancer from her face. “No one told you?”
“Told me what?” I said, ejecting the boiling chamber from the rifle.
She stared at me a few moments and then said, “I think you better have a talk with the colonel.”
Target practice lasted the full four hours and we fired hundreds of times. Toward the end my shoulder was raw but my handling of the rifle became smoother. I felt like I knew where Karma was telling me to go from only a few coordinates and we began outpacing the other teams.
When we finished, we were given four hours of rec time to spend doing whatever we felt like, which was mostly just reading, sleeping, or playing sports. I decided to stop by the colonel’s tent.
The colonel was sitting at a desk reading something I had not seen since I was a child: a book. Most information was shared through holopads, and if you were wealthy you could afford a synaptic uploader and have the information uploaded into your hippocampus directly through a port that’s installed behind the ear. Very few actual books were in existence anymore and if they were they were antiques.
“What can I do for you, Lieutenant?” he said without looking up.
“Permission to speak freely, sir.”
“Granted.”
“Why are we training here?”
“You weren’t told?”
“No.”
He turned to look at me. “This facility and mission is volunteers only. You volunteered for a mission without knowing all the details?”
“I was asked, so I said yes.”
“Interesting take on it. Have a seat, Lieutenant.”
I sat down across from him and he finished reading the paragraph he was on and closed the book. He pushed it into a thick case and then pressed a button that released the air from the case.
“The humidity destroys books,” he said. “I lost dozens before I learned that lesson.”
“I haven’t seen one in a long time. I wasn’t sure we even had any more. There’s more efficient ways to get information.”
“That seems to be the MO of your generation: efficiency. Everything’s gotta be just right. I bet you never even considered that you could read solely for pleasure.”
“I haven’t—”
“Colonel.”
An old man in a ragged uniform walked through. He appeared hardened, and though his skin was wrinkled with age there was toughness to him. He looked at me and then back to the colonel.
“What is it, Major?”
“Priority message coming in through the comm. We got a visitor on the way.”
“Who?”
“Eh, for your ears only, Cole.”
He looked to me. “This is Major Nathaniel Herr. He’s second in command down here, Lieutenant.”
“Lieutenant?” Herr said. “What’s a lieutenant doing with this lot?”
“She volunteered, though she didn’t know for what.” He looked to me. “We’ll talk later Lieutenant. I have to take this call.”
“Yes, sir.”
I rose and went to walk out. Major Herr didn’t budge and I was forced to go around him. I stood outside a while and enjoyed the sunlight before going back to the tent. Karma was snoring above me and I lay down and closed my eyes, dreading another night of no sleep.
7
The most difficult part of training was the lack of rest. There were entire weeks where we would do nothing but run. Run for every shift and at every opportunity we had. The scenery was incomparable: one day we would jog through forests and the next over sandy beaches and the day after that rigorous runs up and down the two small mountains on our island.
We drilled hand-to-hand combat endlessly and had teams of experts flown in from all over the galaxy. We trained with every weapon, from sticks to repulsor fists to EP blockers—a type of neural enhancement that helped the user move more quickly. At night, I was asked to wear a special synaptic uploader that I noticed no one else was required to wear. Someone would check on me every night to ensure I had it on. As far as I could tell, it was just soft, not unpleasant, noise.
After one particularly brutal run, we collapsed in front of the tent. Karma and Sy were lying next to each other and their hands brushed lightly and they looked to each other and then away.
“You know, rook, you never did tell me what you did before coming here.”
“Yes I did: mechanic.”
She looked at me and smiled and I couldn’t help but smile back.
“One day you just might trust me, rook.”
Rumbling tore through the air and we saw a flash in the sky above. A ship had passed through the atmosphere and was on its way down near us. It came around to nearly where I had been dropped off weeks ago and I heard a transport ship leaving the training facility to pick them up.
I rose and we decided we needed to eat. The mess hall wasn’t far and we walked there together. Sy picked up a strand of the harsh grass that was found all over Silore and began to chew on it.
“You going out on patrol tonight?” Karma asked him.
“No, I got a waiver so I could get some sleep. I’ve been out on patrols for the past four months.”
“There’s nothing on this island,” I said. “Why do they need to send us out on those things?”
“Training, I guess,” Sy said. “Discipline, whatever. They don’t really need a reason.”
We entered the mess hall and sat down with a man named Thaddeus. He was, by all accounts, the most amazing engineer in the People’s Republic Army and for some reason had been thrown in with us. I was amazed at how much talent was really here and I tried to find out everything I could. Karma and Sy refused to tell me why we were out here, insisting that if I didn’t know there was a reason for it and that the Colonel would tell me in due time.
Thaddeus said, “Getting a new shipment of supplies day after tomorrow. There’s supposed to be new rations; no more gruel I hope.”
“It’s all going to be gruel,” Karma said. “Doesn’t matter.”
Thaddeus shrugged and took a bite of the thick, black slop that passed for food around here. “I saw that sword,” he said to me. “It’s a plasma sword, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“Man, I would love to take a look at that sometime. Those things are rarer than beautiful women on this rock.”
Karma threw some water on him.
“Hey, easy, just kidding.”
“Where did you get that sword, rook?”
“It was given to me on a special day.”
“Could you be any more vague?”
“Lieutenant Story.”
I turned and saw the major standing there, hat tucked under his arm. My companions turned away from his gaze but I stared at him unblinkingly.
“Come with me, Lieut
enant.”
I rose and followed him out. He led me to the very rear of the encampment to a small building. He bent down and placed his eye on a scanner and it opened the door. We stepped through and the door shut behind us.
Inside, the colonel was leaning over some star-charts as what appeared to be a navigator was calculating distances and predicting trajectories. The colonel was listening and had an expression on his face as if he were being asked to do something unpleasant.
The major cleared his throat.
“Oh,” the colonel said, “we’ll continue this later.”
The navigator nodded as he glanced to me and then gathered the star-charts, which were three-dimensional projections from a holopad, and left the building. The major followed and only the colonel and I remained.
“Lieutenant, we were told you were the best at what you did. I’ve been keeping an eye on you out here and your performance seems to back that up.”
“What is it we do here exactly, Colonel?”
“You were an assassin, one of the best. But what we do is train a special type of assassin: hunters. Out of an entire class, only one prospect is chosen. That prospect doesn’t know it’s them we are training. You are that prospect, Calista. We have other purposes, training of elite pilots for example or army engineers, but our main task is to train clone hunters. There are only three in existence at any given time. When one dies or is otherwise disposed of, they are replaced and … we had one recently turn on us. You are taking their place.” He flipped a switch and a vid came on in front of him. “Watch this.”
I saw the cockpit of a ship. Two men, and a beautiful woman behind them. In a flash, the woman jumped up, broke the pilot’s neck and strangled the co-pilot with his own safety belt. She leapt from that ship onto another and was gone.
“What do you think?” the colonel said.
“Incredible. Extremely efficient.”
He nodded. “She’s a clone. And not just any clone, a terrorist. Perhaps the worst one we’ve seen. She is the hunter whose place you are taking.” He leaned against the console. “When your training here is complete, you will be going after her. No one will know who you are or who you work for. You will go in, eliminate the target, and come out. You are going to be part of a very elite agency, Lieutenant Story, one that only a handful in the military and the parliament know exists. We are the forefront of defense for the People’s Republic. We do all the things no one else wants to do. And you are authorized to terminate anyone that stands in your way. And by anyone, I mean literally anyone. Even your superiors.”
I stared at the screen. A clone. One that moved flawlessly and was as deadly as anyone I had seen. A real test.
“When you signed on,” he said, “I know you thought there was no turning back. But I don’t want people here that don’t want to be here. I’m giving you a choice: we can send you back now, or you can stay. If you stay, your life will be nothing but killing. Few people have the stomach for that type of work. This particular clone, who went by the name Ava, didn’t have the stomach for it. At least we thought so, until she started hitting military targets. But it’s a special type of killing. You will be terminating your own kind. Do you have the stomach for it?”
I glanced from the screen to him. “I do.”
He grinned and nodded. “Major, speed up her completion of the training and get her a dossier on Ava.”
LARSO
We shot into space like a fire-bat out of a Nelorian heat pit and the sky turned black as we broke through the Van Allen belt and fired into space. I wanted to get some distance before engaging the FTL drive, but I also was curious about the woman sitting next to me.
She was something I’d never seen: beautiful and deadly. Almost too beautiful: her features were so perfect that it almost disoriented me to look at her. I had to keep myself from looking at her too long.
“So you never told me where you planned to go once you were off Helron,” I said.
“King’s Grace.”
I looked to her. “Is there anywhere you go that isn’t full of people looking to cut our throats?”
“You don’t need to take me there, Larso. You’ve done enough for me. If you just want to drop me off as close as you are willing to go I would appreciate it.”
I exhaled. “I’ve got to make one stop first.”
“Dropping off your cargo?”
“How’d you know?”
“I don’t know many freighters outfitted with a cannon like that. I figured you for a smuggler.”
“Smuggler’s such a dirty word. I prefer entrepreneur.”
She grinned. “What’s the cargo?”
“Medicine, for an outpost in Beta.”
“The People’s Republic isn’t sending them any?”
“The People’s Republic couldn’t give a cap about anything near the rim. They think they’re savages and want to wait until they ‘evolve,’ whatever the hell that means. They don’t help them at all. In fact, there’s a lot of pirate raids out there where they rob them of the few supplies they have. I have a hunch that they do that with the sanction of the Republic.”
“So you’re a humanitarian?”
“No, I do what I do for profit. If there weren’t any pay in it I’d be doing something else. I just happen to be hauling something worthwhile this time.” I checked our nav routes. “I’m going to be engaging the FTL drives and jumping into hyperspace. May want to get comfy.”
“I don’t go into a coma.”
“What d’ya mean?”
“I’ll be up during the jump. But don’t worry, I’ll find something to do.”
“How do you stay up during an FTL jump?”
“It’s nothing special. It just takes intense concentration.”
I nodded. “Okay, well, don’t break anything.”
I held my hand over the controls for a moment. Just a slight hesitation. Did I really trust her enough to pass out for two SGH’s in front of her? What choice did I have? We had to get to where I was going and unless I wanted to be ninety when we got there, FTL was the only way to do it.
I hit the FTL drive ignition and lost consciousness almost immediately.
A lotta sound was what woke me up. Grinding metal. I stirred awake, my eyelids fluttering as I came to. The ship had come out of FTL and was drifting in orbit of May 3, a planet of the star Beta. I stayed in my seat a moment to reorient myself. The headache, known to pilots as a hangover, was pounding in my ears so bad I thought I might pass out again from the pain. I reached into a compartment next to me and took out a bottle of pills. I popped one and it slid down my throat and I felt it dissolving instantly.
I sat up, the hangover dissipating, and unbuckled myself.
Well, I was alive, so that was good. At least she hadn’t killed me in my sleep. I walked to the main hold of the ship and saw her there melding various bits of hemlight steel together.
“What’re you doing?” I asked.
She turned to me. Her face had smears of grease and her hands and nails were black. But somehow she still looked stunning.
“How was your nap?”
“Like being punched to sleep by an Elite. What’re you up to?”
“Just a little modification to the cannon.”
“What modification?”
“The plasma array was off kilter almost three degrees. I’m just making a stabilizer to adjust for the discrepancy.”
I looked around at the bits of steel and plastic strewn around the deck. “You’re making a stabilizer out of a bunch of spare parts?”
She nodded, placing goggles over her eyes to protect them from the bright glare of a laser melder joining two pieces of hemlight steel.
“Good morning, Mr. Moore,” a soft female voice echoed through the deck. The ship’s AI core.
Ava stopped and looked at me. “I was impressed when I met her. Not many ships this small have an AI core.”
“Kali’s saved my butt more times than I can remember. Isn’t that right, Kali?�
��
“That is correct, Mr. Moore. The intruder has been using resources for an unwarranted modification. I attempted to dissuade her but she would not listen. Shall I execute her?”
“I don’t think that’ll be necessary, but thanks.”
“As you wish.”
I looked to Ava. “Making friends wherever you go I see.”
“She started it.”
Kali said, “That statement is incorrect, Mr. Moore.”
“It’s all right, Kali. She’s a friend. Take it easy.”
“We will arrive at our destination in point three standard galactic hours.”
“Thanks.”
Ava turned the melder off and lifted her goggles up to her forehead. “So where are we going exactly?”
“May 3. It’s just a little outpost with only two cities on the entire planet.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“No reason you would have. There’s nothin’ there. But I think you should probably stay on the ship. My business won’t take long.”
She shrugged and went back to work. I watched her a little longer and then went back to the main cargo hold and checked the freights. There were about two hundred of them, all packed with medi-gels and keen-biotics and healing wraps and even a few things I didn’t recognize. It would be put to good use on May 3. And the ten thousand units I’d be getting wouldn’t hurt either.
I finished my check and headed back to the cockpit just as we entered orbit. I strapped myself in and gave a message over the comm for Ava to find the nearest seat and do the same. The ship lit up crimson and rattled as we entered the gravitational field and then the atmosphere. It took less than a minute to break through and we were in the red skies of May 3.
A message came through and I saw it on the viewscreen. It was from the Bureau of Clone Affairs, addressed to me. I deleted it and focused on landing the ship.
Clone Hunter (A Science-Fiction Thriller) Page 9
