by J. N. Chaney
X-37, the limited artificial intelligence that had gotten me out of more tough spots than gun fire and violence of action, still didn’t answer.
Because he was gone.
Everyone was gone.
“A bunch of bullshit is what this is.”
The floor was getting cold, so I climbed to my feet, treating each movement like a mission. Reapers needed missions. But they also needed LAIs, specialized weapons, and cigars whenever possible.
Give yourself a mission, Cain.
Why did my inner voice sound like X? Damn I was going to miss that annoying jerk in my head. He better not be gone for good.
Objective one, stand the hell up. Two, find a light switch and whoever was running this torture fest. With luck, someone would issue me a sincere apology and some pajamas. Better yet, a plush robe and the aforementioned cigars.
Someone just tell me this nightmare is over.
I stepped around broken glass, then bit back a curse and froze. Sure there were things I wanted to express, but now that I had my head straight, relatively speaking, it was time to get tactical. No more outbursts until I scouted the terrain, assessed my situation, and formed a plan.
That was what Reapers did. Like it or not, that was what I needed to be right now. Of course the sooner I got back to growing tobacco, managing my cigar factory, and sipping craft beers with my evening steak, the better.
My eyes adjusted quickly, which was good for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it suggested I wasn’t totally without augmentations. In fact, my gut told me I was prepped for upgrades. I had… tingly feelings now that my blood was circulating.
The arm and eye situation was disorienting but not the end of the world. I didn’t remember going in for reconstructive surgery. Maglan scientists were good and getting better all the time. Maybe they had some regenerative and transplant technologies I wasn’t aware of.
Reading medical journals or generally giving two flying fraks about anything outside my estate or a few quiet dinners hadn’t been my thing since—well, forever if we’re being honest. All kinds of radical therapies might be possible these days.
That was the simplest explanation, and those were generally the best. I was put into a medical coma for a dangerous medical procedure, and something went wrong.
Doctors fixed my left arm and my eye, and they muted X-37. He was probably still in there but turned off to prevent interference with surgical procedures. The life pod, even if it felt like a death pod, was full of nutrient gel that healed me.
Yeah. Sure. All of that makes perfect sense despite the fact I didn’t sign any medical waivers. I was just fine with my Reaper arm, eye, and nerve-ware. Maybe the anesthetic was still wearing off and I would remember the details soon.
Let’s go with that theory, Cain. I felt around the pod, found the power source, and followed cables all the way to a backup battery. This place had been wrecked for a while. My pod was the last thing to lose power.
“So maybe finding a light switch will be harder than I thought,” I said, just to hear a voice.
Walking around naked didn’t bolster my confidence, but neither did it turn me into a blushing maid. If I ran into a lab tech, I’d deal with it. Especially a cute one ready to laugh at my twisted jokes, but that was a topic for another time.
I slid my right hand along the wall until I found a light switch and tested it. No dice. My eyes were decently adjusted by now anyway.
I eventually found the locker room. Prying open the doors was a lot harder without my Reaper blade, but I got it done with brute force and a fire extinguisher. The contents were standard stuff—jumpsuits, boots, helmets, and tools.
The third jumpsuit I dug out fit me, and I found a good pair of boots shined for inspection. “I may be a wreck, but my outfit is squared away. Gotta look good in a place like this.”
No one jumped out of a closet or locker to contradict me. Where there were uniforms and footwear, there must be guns. Leaving no stack of underwear unturned, I soon proved no one had been hiding an unauthorized weapon.
This room sucked, so I left in search of better survival gear.
Room after room proved devoid of life, like no one had been here for a long time. Dust covered the floor, rare on any modern facility and unheard of on any respectable ship or space station. About the time I was growing hungry enough to eat my own face if I could figure out how to do it, I found myself dead in the middle of a guard room.
A lifelessversion of Halek Cain, complete with augmentations, stared at the ceiling. I recognized the blade I had used to fight through Roxo III, Gronic, and Greendale—and that first mission to find Elise and her father. The cybernetic eye was there as well, the same optical upgrade that had interfaces with Archangel armor and helped me save the people of Maglan.
That was me, but I was also me. This body was my past, a record of who I was. Where I’d been.
I realized something else. He had come here to rescue or destroy me. I wasn’t sure how I should feel about that. “Anytime you want to jump back in, X, I could use some help. This is going to take some adjusting.“
No response. My old LAI could be like that.
Much of the room had been burned. Most of his body was scorched, but what killed him was a bullet through the forehead.
The guards were missing, either dead or AWOL.
I stared down at the familiar face, then rolled the body on its side. The stench was almost too much, but I persevered. Ex-Reapers like me understood how to deal with the suck that was life in a violent and confusing world.
All things would end, which meant I could tough it out. What was so bad about examining your dead self on a failing space station? While weaponless and alone? And all of this without an LAI to offer explanations or hack computers to steal information.
I could handle it. I was built to handle it.
Comparing the original me with the current me was probably a huge mistake. I had all the parts I was born with but also metal shunts in my left arm—right where a Reaper blade might be attached to a stump. The procedure would require partial amputation. Which would seem crazy if I hadn’t volunteered for that exact procedure a lifetime ago.
Was I destined to become the corpse at my feet?
Did it matter?
I continued my search of the facility while examining my shunts. My theory about a benevolent medical staff regrowing and attaching a biological arm started leaking like a pasta strainer.
With that metaphor on my mind, I found the galley and looted it for food. The canned meat was nearly as disgusting as the cooked and canned spinach. It was difficult to tell which was which when I mixed them in a giant stainless steel bowl.
Bottled water was hard to find, but I secured several gallon bottles and drank one immediately. Lastly, I took a kitchen knife and concealed it in my jumpsuit.
Next was another locker room. This time I found a detailed journal and a handgun, which I tucked through the jumpsuit belt. Five minutes of reading confirmed there was nothing about the fate of this facility in the pages. This guy just couldn’t get over some woman named Samantha.
Whatever.
On the next level I found two hundred and thirty pods, all but one of them containing a dead version of me.
So if they’re clones, what am I?
The king of the clones. Why else would I be in a special part of the facility?
And who the fuck got my permission to copy me?
The revelation should lay me low, but I had never been more sure about who I was. Maybe I was a clone, maybe I wasn’t. But there was one Halek Cain, me. I knew this without a doubt.
I was the real thing, the last Reaper, the maker of Maglan Goldband cigars and connoisseur of all things related to beer.
Clones don’t keep memories like this. X-37 might argue with me, but he wasn’t here so I’d think whatever the hell I wanted.
“Hey, you know what would be nice? If this place wasn’t so big and full of fake Halek Cain bodies. Anyone
think to put a map somewhere?”
My words echoed slightly. No one answered, not even X-37.
I wanted to sit with my back to the wall, put my hands, plural, on my head, and just quit. What the hell happened to me?
I kept searching instead and found the quartermaster’s supply room. This was where I should have been looking for food in the first place. Five minutes after I entered, I found MREs, meals ready to eat. None of them contained beer, whiskey, or cigars so I picked out my favorite candy from ten of them and put another ten in a backpack. Who knew where I’d find myself by the end of the day.
Next I located the station superintendent’s quarters. Still no whiskey, cigars, or beer.
“Who the hell was running this place, nuns?”
I explored as much of the station as I could without EVA gear. The upper and lower portions of the place were sealed. There weren’t cameras to show me what was on the other side of the sealed blast doors, but I knew they often dropped to prevent violent decompression.
I backtracked to the clone pods and searched for clues. A small room with stainless steel tables and drains in the floor contained computers that were useless without power. I rifled through the desk, broke open cabinets, and leafed through notebooks of scientific jargon.
After half an hour, I knew more about limb amputation and cybernetic attachment than I ever wanted to. I also discovered a small refrigerator with plastic tubs containing gray mystery slime.
“Not this time,“ I muttered to myself. “Eat one tub of medical grade goo and you learn your lesson.” My voice sounded far too loud.
“Who’s there?”
I ducked behind a medical locker and listened.
“Nobody’s there.” The deep second voice was hard to understand.
“I heard a voice,” the first man said. “One of these pod people might’ve escaped.”
“No one escaped. We’ve checked these pods a dozen times since Cain tried to murder us,” voice two said.
“We dealt with him.”
“Don’t get cocky,” said the first voice. “And we didn’t get into the science vault. Could be another freaky experiment in there.”
Creeping up on these two wasn’t difficult. There were a lot of shadows, and they were noisy. Once I found the right angle to peek through the doorway, I was able to watch them easily.
This first man had red hair and a face that looked like it should be smiling. The second had thinning gray hair and a healing burn on his right cheek.
Three of their friends joined them from the main hallway. These were hard men, clearly soldiers. “What are you two doing?”
“Michael thinks he heard something.” The second man scratched at the burn scar and looked nervous.
I pressed close enough to read their name tags. The three newcomers were soldiers, station security: Sergeant Roth, JFT Palmer, and JFT Green. The first two were Michael Techson and Paulson—probably mechanics or ship engineers. I only knew Michael’s first name because I heard Roth use it.
“He might have,” Roth said. “The research vault is open, and guess what, we found an empty pod in there.”
“Fortunately we know how to deal with the freaking pod babies,” Palmer said.
Green fist bumped him with one hand while holding his short rifle on a sling with the other.
“Yeah, you two are a couple of bad asses. Why don’t you clear the morgue while I take these two to work on the escape pods,” Roth said.
“Why don’t we all go to the escape pods? Palmer and I can guard you while you work,” Green says. “Makes a lot more sense since this place is going down by morning.”
“Just clear the room,” Roth ordered. “It’s small.”
2
Roth, Palmer, and Green were large men. The sergeant had chevrons on his shoulder, a big pistol hanging in a thigh rig, and a hitch in his step that probably made him hate the universe. Palmer carried a short rifle, and Green had a shotgun with two barrels, one over the other.
“This is going to get hot, X,” I thought more than said. I shifted to the side of the entrance, ready to jump them as they came through the fatal funnel. To my surprise, they stopped just short of the threshold.
“Jump Force Troopers, sound out if you’re in there!” A pause followed. “Jump Force Troopers, sound off and show us your hands or you’ll get shot.”
I shifted deeper into the shadows. “I’m Halek Cain. Who are you?”
Negotiating was definitely the wrong tactic. These men were cleaners, a kill squad left behind to mop up after everyone left. That was why every pod had been powered down and the original me lay murdered on the deck.
They were also my only source of information, so I was willing to risk what came next. Maybe I could exact a little payback as well.
“Another Halek Cain, huh?” Roth asked. “Did we miss one? I really thought we got them all. After all those grenades we threw in there. Maybe you’re from the research pod with the rest of the slime.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Jump Force Troopers is a grandiose title for a bunch of space pirates,” I say, acting on a hunch.
The man just laughed. “You think so?”
I squatted low, then duck-walked to another position. From this new angle, I saw him giving hand signals to his team. He was talking to me to pinpoint my location while he gave them the go-ahead to attack.
“Well I wouldn’t expect a pod baby to know much, but everyone in this sector is going to know about the JFT soon,” Roth said. “Who the hell did you people think you were to claim the Maglan system?”
“We freed Maglan, in case you didn’t notice,” I said, not appreciating their snorts of laughter in response.
“Maglan was always ours,” Roth said too loudly, like he was covering the sound of his team’s movements. “We just hadn’t gotten around to claiming it. The place is barely worth our trouble, but it’s still ours, pod baby.”
Palmer and Green burst into the room, striding clear of the door without stopping. They activated their weapon lights once inside but turned them off briefly. It was a solid tactic.They were trying to blind me while avoiding making themselves easy targets.
Green came around the corner of the table. I stood up, driving my knife blade under his chin, lifting him off his feet. He didn’t have time to pull the trigger. The kill was sloppy, nothing like I would have done with my old arm blade—but dead was dead.
On the bright side, my new Reaper body was in top form even if the tools were generic. In a flash, I was even more determined to thank the scientists who cloned me, right after I beat some answers out of them.
Palmer faced me. I punched him so hard in his solar plexus that he fell to his knees, again without shooting. I did the only sensible thing when he crumpled forward—I drove my knee into his chin, either killing him or knocking him unconscious. I really didn’t care. They were here to kill a pod baby, and I wasn’t about that, especially since the pod baby in question was me.
“Why don’t you come in here, Roth?” I asked.
He hesitated but sounded worried when he spoke. “How would you know my name?”
“Us Reaper pod babies are new and improved. I know everything,” I said. “You can run, but you can’t hide. And you can talk smack, but you’re only going to get smacked down.”
He muttered excitedly to the rest of his team, the civilian techs. Nothing happened for half a minute. Apparently none of them wanted to die.
“I said go in there and get him!” Roth shouted.
“Go to hell,” a civilian shouted. “That’s your job!”
Gunfire silenced the protests.
My last chance to interrogate anyone but Roth went out the airlock. I really hoped he wasn’t just a grunt.
“I’m coming in there, pod baby!” Roth shouted. A second later, a new bank of lights flickered overhead, then kept flickering due to damaged bulbs or an inconsistent power supply—who knew or cared which.
“Yeah, sure. I believe that.” I crept closer
to the door, careful to stay in the shadows. The JFT sergeant wasn’t stupid. His team had entered a dark room with flashlights. He was mixing it up, trying something new, which meant he was thinking, and that was always dangerous in an opponent.
“You can do this, Roth. You can do this. Top of your class. Expert marksman. Toughest boot ever to make it through the destroyers.”
I listened to his personal pep talk and almost felt bad for the guy. When he didn’t rush in guns blazing, I went out to get him. On instinct, I left the small pistol I’d found concealed in my jumpsuit. I hadn’t test fired it and didn’t want to gamble on its effectiveness against an armored opponent.
A dark helmet concealed his eyes, but the way his head came up, I guessed he was bug-eyed with surprise under the JFT visor. He aimed, but I was moving too fast, sidestepping like my life depended on it. His first shot boomed about the time I chopped my left hand down on his forearm, snapping the radius bone.
He crumpled to his knees as his pistol clattered across the floor, an inarticulate noise hissing from between clenched teeth.
I shoved him prone, yanked both arms behind his back, and bound him with his own restraints. A quick glance confirmed he’d shot the civilian techs. Was that because he’d been determined to deny me a chance for human intel, or because he’d lost control of his anger.
Didn’t matter. He was all I had left, and he was going to sing.
“What’s your first name, Roth?”
“51732…”
I pulled off his helmet, then rapped my knuckles on his broken arm, not hard.
He screamed until his voice gave out, then sobbed.
“Listen, Roth. I was trying to turn over a new leaf. Don’t want to be a Reaper. My least favorite part of the job was always torture. Unfortunately, I was pretty good at it. Too bad for you, am I right? Tell me you’re looking forward to this and I’ll call you a liar.”
He panted for breath. Sweat beaded on his forehead. Spit exploded from his snarling lips. “My identification number is 517…”
