The mining drones were primarily autonomous, but there were also manned EVAs. Both would be useless for long-range space flight, and there were no shuttles off this rock. The black site was their home, and, when the time came, it would be their grave as well. Alpha and the rest were all illicit human experiments, and if they ever made it off the rock, Papa would be complicit in any number of crimes against humanity. Papa had left them no way off the asteroid, and they never had any intention of leaving.
As he made his way into the elevator that would carry him into the mech bay, he thought about these implications and the realization that he would die here solidified. What had been merely theoretical and shapeless with the distance of time was suddenly and achingly concrete in its newfound immediacy. If that was what it would take to stop Victor, then so be it. He would see this operation razed and sucked into the vacuum of space rather than risk that abomination being discovered.
FOUR
ECHO LAY WITH her head resting against his chest, her arm splayed across his narrow hips.
"How do we know what's real?" she asked.
The question was a common refrain from her, the discussion one they'd had many times. She'd begun asking this question soon after her decanting as she began to explore the memories – Papa's memories – that were interlaced across her mind. She had spent several days initially disoriented by it all, unable to reconcile the memories of a man with her female features, struggling against the imprint and demanding that her life be her own until she had to be sedated. Eventually, the struggle eased, yet the question remained.
He had no answer for her, then or now.
"Alpha, you have to listen to me," she said. Her voice rang in his ears, inside his skull, across the open communications channel.
He shook his head. No, no, no. Impossible! He had watched her die. She was dead. It was impossible for her to be speaking with him. He was imagining it, hearing voices.
Victor, he realized. That son of a bitch was playing with him now, distracting him.
He moved down the row of deactivated mining drones, verifying their hull integrity before inserting their power cells. This was going to stop Victor. It had to. And Victor knew it, and was now trying to stop him with cheap fucking parlor tricks.
It wasn't going to work, though.
"I know who you are!" he screamed, whirling around in the semi-darkness as he screamed to the heavens. Victor was above him, somewhere, and inside him, too, deep inside his head, twisting his consciousness and his memory against him and projecting old thoughts, old desires, old questions.
"I know who you are and I will kill you, do you understand me?"
"Alpha, stop it. Stop and listen to me," Echo said. "It's Victor. Victor is inside your head. Do you understand?"
"No fucking shit!" he screamed. Victor, manipulating him, trying to trick him. He recognized the buzzing sensation, the spidery crawl across the surface of his brain, which was the clone's hallmark. He'd been feeling it since the synthesis began, standing beside the cloning tank while Victor took form. That should have been enough of an inkling to prompt an abortion, to purge the hybrid relic from the tank and reconfigure the systems for projects Whiskey and X-Ray.
But no. He saw now that he possessed every inch of Papa's hubris and his dangerous, wanton need to always be right, damn the cost.
"Victor is still in the tank, Alpha," Echo shouted. Her voice quivered in its awful pleadings, stained with tears and a jagged sobbing. "You're not well. We – I – can help you."
He curled one fist tightly, the pain and the bandages preventing him from curling both. All his effort brought his injured hand was fresh blood.
He was on the right track, then. If Victor was this worried, would go to these lengths to prevent him from activating the drones, then he was most certainly on the right track.
He was going to start up these fucking drones and sic each and every one of them on Victor, and he was going to destroy the whole goddamn asteroid while he was at it.
Gritting his teeth, he pulled open the battery compartment of the nearest drone and lodged the power cell into place. Managing this was difficult with only one hand, and his shoulder throbbed. The battery was large and hadn't been easy to maneuver. Pulling the hatch back down, he was forced to use both hands to bear the lid's weight.
His hand lit up in a brilliant, fresh spike of pain and he saw Echo even as he tried to blot her words out of his mind. She was lying on his chest, a pink bubble forming on her lips. His hand burned from the lacerations the glass had opened in his flesh, and he could feel her blood pooling between them.
Not like this, he'd thought. Please, not like this.
"Alpha. You need to remember. You need to get a grip."
The lid slammed down into place, and he buckled at the searing pain in his belly, forcing him to collapse to his knees, his useless hand pressed tightly to his stomach. His shoulder burning.
"Charlie," he said. "That's one done. Start her up."
He knelt beside the mech, panting heavily. A thick, coppery taste lingered in his mouth and throat.
"Charlie. Start her up," he said again.
The machine was lifeless, though. He began to second guess himself – did he forget something? Was there a start-up sequence or something to go through? Some method of priming the drone he'd failed to realize?
"Charlie's dead," Echo said. "You killed him."
"Fuck. You."
He forced himself to his feet, dragging the cart stuffed with batteries behind him. He felt terribly weak from the blood loss and knew it was only a matter of time before he died. He couldn't let Victor live, though, couldn't risk somebody trying to salvage the station's remnants and coming across the creature. Find him and dying at his hands. Or worse. God, what if, somehow, Victor made it off the mining platform? With his degrees of perception and ability to deceive, to play such twisted mind games with his prey, what would he do to the sky colonies on Venus, or on Mars or Earth?
At the next drone, he repeated the process of battery installation as best as he could. Two down and already he was significantly weaker. Sweat poured down his face, yet he felt frighteningly cold.
The lid slammed down like a gunshot and he felt an explosion in his torso. A second in his shoulder, and he staggered back and fell, the hallucination so vivid. He tripped over the cart, upending it beneath him and sending a cascade of large, heavy batteries across the floor. His bony hips crashed into the corner of a battery, sending fresh agony through him, his head cracking against another.
He lay there a moment, moaning. And remembering.
Charlie with his prohibited firearm. Guns were banned from the station, had been even as a fully operational mining colony. In the depths of space, a gunshot inside an enclosed facility was too large a threat. Somehow Charlie had come to possess one, likely pilfered from the remnants of station security from ages ago.
Charlie had shot him, twice. In return, he had opened Charlie's throat with the glass shard. Alpha had passed out briefly, and when he woke Charlie was staring at him, a gory hand wrapped around his ruined throat, lips moving but making no sounds. And then his lips had stilled.
"No," he said. "No, that isn't what happened."
He fought against the memory, his own mind rebelling against it, dueling factions within him screaming for and against.
"We tried to purge Victor," Echo said. "You attacked me with a chair, busted up my terminal. Do you remember?"
"No," he said, but with no trace of conviction.
"There was glass everywhere from the monitors you destroyed. You stopped us from purging Victor, and then you came at me with a glass shard. Do you remember?"
"No," he lied. Tears ran freely down his face.
"Charlie tried to stop you, and you killed him."
"I—"
"I'm dying, Alpha."
"I'm so sorry," he said.
Breathing through his nose produced a gravelly noi
se as liquid roiled deep in his nostrils. His nose and sinuses were so clogged, he had to breathe through his mouth. He wiped again at his face, drawing away moist gray clumps lined with red stains against the back of his wrist.
So this is what happened to Delta. The thought made him chuckle.
He forced himself to roll into a sitting position, his guts squelching and he could swear he felt the rubbery bulge of intestine threatening to spool free from the hole in his belly.
"I don't know what's real," he said. Echo whimpered over the comm channel. He thought she may have been trying to laugh.
Hallucination or not, he understood Victor's plan. Such a simple plan. They had tried to kill him, and so Victor had, in turn, tried to kill them. Alpha had been his weapon.
He saw it all now with awful clarity. Victor, in his tube, small and piebald and deformed, barely human. He wasn't growing, hadn't broken free of the tube. The purge had begun, and he'd lashed out in self-defense. Delta and Bravo had been killed after Uniform had failed to achieve satisfactory synthesis and had been purged. Had that been a warning, or revenge? He didn't know, but he knew Victor had been responsible for manipulating the men toward their deaths.
But information, intended or not, was a two-way street. Alpha had learned things no human mind should be privy to.
He saw, too, what Victor had ultimately realized was the only possible outcome, and what Victor's manipulations of him had been aimed toward.
He dabbed at the wound to his belly, digging his fingers into the ragged hole torn into him. Fresh paint for his brush, he thought, and he drew new marks across the floor beside him. Ancient sigils that put the god to sleep, even if too late.
Alpha slowly, painfully, got his feet beneath him, shoving himself upward from the prone cart for balance. He and Victor had a similar end-goal now, and he was quite content to deliver the creature's final wishes.
His steps were aching shuffles and it took him far longer than it should have to make his way toward the computer terminal. He keyed in the necessary sequences to start up two of the mining drones, their battery cells weak but carrying enough of a charge to carry through one last assignment.
Their thrusters powered on, their large insectile bodies unfolding from their resting racks to deploy. They arced through the warehouse and turned toward the freight elevator to carry them higher up and into the station, to the laboratory where Victor waited.
The mining droids would kill Victor, and then they would destroy the station.
Murder-suicide. That was Victor's endgame, and now Alpha's as well. He accepted that as his legacy. Echo was on her way to dying, Charlie already there. Delta and Bravo, both finished. All because of him, because of Papa and his – their – experimentation, their curiosity. All of it their fault in equal measure.
And so he would die.
"I've spent my life being a tool," Alpha said. "An instrument, constantly manipulated. I thought that Papa's goals were mine simply by virtue of memory, of the inheritance of thought. My life has been a meme, though, nothing more."
"It doesn't have to end this way," Echo said. "We could rebuild. We could—"
Her words were lost in a wet-sounding coughing fit that eventually trailed off into a moan and then an unsettling quiet. He could still hear her breath, though, shallow and rapid, and he knew her moment of expiration was close at hand.
"No," he said, eventually. "There's no coming back from what I've done. Or from what has to be done. This entire project has been a failure. A mistake. I see that now."
"Victor played you," she said, her voice nearly a whisper.
"Victor, Papa. What difference does it make?"
"I forgive you."
Her last words. He could no longer hold back the tears, and sobs racked his body. His wounds ached and leaked, and he cried and cried.
Communications with the lab had cut out, the mining drones doing their job diligently and destroying everything. The alarm sirens found a new vigorous energy as they blared. In his mind's eye, he saw the drones deploying their pick axes and torches as they went to work on Victor, plucking away his limbs, immune to his control and suggestions. Victor was small and baby-like, and it would not take long for him to be disassembled.
The pressure doors slammed into place. The drones had succeeded in breaching the facility to open space. The last gap safety measure would only hold for so long, but Alpha wasn't sure that he would live long enough to see it fail. Odds were, the blood loss would finish him well before.
Or so he hoped. If some part of him recognized that to be a coward's way out, then it forced him to cling to life by a tether of unadulterated agony. Eventually the lights failed and, as he lay bleeding in the dark, he heard the metallic pounding of mining tools working against the doors.
A short time later, an explosive breach of depressurization lifted his body off the ground and sucked the air from his lungs. His death came seconds later, only moments before his corpse would be left to drift in the orbit of a disused asteroid he'd once called home.
In his final seconds, he wondered if perhaps he would discover Elohim after all.
A Note to Readers
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Acknowledgements
Many thanks, first off, to Daniel Arthur Smith who invited me to take part in CLONES: The Anthology, where this story first appeared. It was a deep honor to be included in such a fine production, and alongside so many other wonderful indie storytellers. Thanks also to that anthology's editor, Jessica West. Her suggestions throughout the development and editing process were absolutely essential and proved invaluable as key scenes of this story were rewritten and polished. Her editorial acumen made this work all the stronger.
I also owe a debt of gratitude to Christian Bentulan, who did a fantastic job with the cover art fronting this story. I was blown away by his artwork for this title the second it landed in my inbox, and his small adjustments along the way only made it better. This marks my third collaboration with him, and every time he proves himself to be an exceptional talent.
My Patreon supporters help make my work possible with their monthly contributions. Special thanks are owed to KC Santo and Kate Martyniouk for their generosity.
Finally, many thanks, too, to my beautiful wife. I am eternally indebted to her for her love, compassion, and support.
About the Author
Michael Patrick Hicks is the author of the science fiction novels Convergence, an Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award 2013 Quarter-Finalist, and its sequel, Emergence, as well as several horror titles, including the forthcoming Mass Hysteria.
His work has appeared in several anthologies, and he has written for the websites Graphic Novel Reporter and Audiobook Reviewer, in addition to work as a freelance journalist.
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