Clone Hunter

by Helix Parker

3

  Finishing my tea in one gulp, I got up to go outside and felt someone grip my arm. I instinctively grabbed the fingers and bent them back.

  “Ah! Ah! I give I give,” the man said. He was wearing a red and black pilot’s suit and was darkly tanned. I instantly thought he was too young and decent-looking to be a pilot.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “My name’s Larso. I overheard your conversation with Gabriel over there.”

  “It’s none of your business,” I said, letting go.

  He began massaging his fingers. “I know, but he’s going to rob you. Once you’re onboard his ship you’ll be lucky if you don’t get sold into slavery on Unlar.”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  He sat down next to me. “Against me, sure. But against Gabriel and ten of his crew who have sonic disruptors under their suits? Come on.”

  “Why are you even talking to me?”

  “You … reminded me of someone. Someone that I cared about a long time ago and there was no one there to warn them.”

  He seemed genuine and I felt bad that I had been so rude. “I’m open to ideas. You have a better way to get off this planet?”

  “The only people that come looking for passage in here are fugitives. Now you don’t have to tell me what’s going on, but I’d rather take my chances in a Helronian court than with Gabriel.”

  “Turn myself in? I don’t think that’s a possibility.” I looked over his uniform. “Are you a pilot?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why don’t you take me?”

  “No thanks. I like not being in prison.”

  “Well, if you can’t help we have nothing to talk about.”

  He took a deep breath. “How ‘bout a drink? On me.”

  “All right, one drink,” I said.

  “A Camonian beer for me and another of whatever the lady was drinking,” he said to the server-bot. He turned to me. “Hell of a grip you got. I could almost swear you’ve had some training.”

  “Some.”

  “Oh yeah? Where?”

  “Silore.”

  “You’re kidding me? In the military?”

  “Something like the military, yeah.”

  “I almost joined the forces myself.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I, ah, had some trouble as a youth.”

  “You mean you had a criminal record and you didn’t want to be turned into cannon fodder.”

  “Exactly,” he said as he watched the server-bot place the drinks in front of us. “Anyone with a criminal record in the forces gets suicide missions. We’re seen as expendable.”

  “All soldiers are seen as expendable by their governments.”

  “Yeah,” he said quietly. “Anyway, what’s your story?”

  “You first. What was your record for?”

  He smiled. “Joyriding in a stolen hovercar. Now you.”

  “Assaulting a law enforcement agent.”

  “An administrative authority? Really? What is that, about ten years hard labor?”

  “Fifteen.” I looked to my drink. “And I’ve done some other things. Enough that I need to get off this planet.”

  “I can’t say I blame ya. The prisons here are rough. But you’d still be pretty young when you got out. How old are you anyway?”

  “Twenty-five. Today’s my birthday actually.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  He lost his smile and looked saddened. “I wish I could help you. But all I got is my license; it’s just too much of a risk.”

  “No need to explain.”

  He finished his drink and stood up. “I didn’t catch your name,” he said.

  “Ava.”

  “Well, Ava, it was very nice meeting you.”

  “You too.”

  He looked down to the carpet as he walked out of the lounge. I felt an odd feeling in my stomach. I wondered what he would have thought if I had pulled my collar down and shown him my scar. If he’d known I was a clone, would he still have talked to me?

  I laid a few units on the bar and got up to walk out of the pub. I saw Gabriel and his crew staring at me. I didn’t need someone to tell me what they had planned. I walked to the main docks and found X-12 hidden away in a corner. The Ulysses was larger than I thought it would be. It must have been used as an ice freighter.

  I sat down on the cold dock and waited. I thought about my chances of escape. At this point they were uncertain. No doubt the administrative authorities were combing the city for me and had sent out vids of me to all the ship’s pilots. But most of the pilots were criminals themselves. They would only care if a reward was offered for my capture.

  Eventually, Gabriel and his crew showed up, stumbling and laughing wildly. I stood and walked toward them.

  “I’m here,” I said.

  Gabriel stepped away from his crew and towards me. “Yes you are.” He looked me up and down. “The price has changed.”

  “To what?” I said.

  “You’re going to work on the ship a while. Then we’ll talk.”

  “Fine. Can we go now?”

  “Sure, darlin’. We can go right now.”

  They piled on the ship ahead of me and dispersed to various locations. I heard the slow rumble of the engines coming online.

  The ship was dark and the only lighting was from the red emergency lights. I went towards the head of the ship and found the cockpit. I sat down on a metal bench behind Gabriel and the co-pilot and waited. I just needed to hear those six magic numbers….

  “Tower one,” Gabriel said, “this is Ulysses.” He was slurring his words.

  “Ulysses, this is tower one. Go ahead.”

  “Requesting permission for takeoff.”

  “Roger, Ulysses. Verify liftoff code now please.”

  “322721.”

  “Roger. Permission granted.”

  I jumped out of my seat. I grabbed Gabriel by the jaw and twisted his neck until I could hear the crunch of his spine snapping. The co-pilot attempted to reach for a weapon in his suit and I wrapped his loosened seatbelt strap around his neck and used my bodyweight to pull the strap tight around his throat.

  When he had stopped struggling, I jumped into the pilot’s seat. I turned the thrusters on and almost as quickly they shut down. An alarm was going off.

  “Ulysses, this is tower one,” I heard in the headset. “Magnetic grounder is in place, please turn off engines.”

  “Tower one, this is Ulysses. Requesting permission for takeoff,” I said. I heard a hint of desperation in my voice.

  “Negative, Ulysses. Please shut engines off and prepare to be boarded.”

  I didn’t need to ask who would be boarding.

  I got up and sprinted to the rear of the ship. Looking out the viewport, I saw Gabriel’s crew standing outside with Helronian law enforcement.

  The docking door opened and I closed my eyes. I wouldn’t let them arrest me alive. I was going to die in a fight. I grabbed the disrupter in the co-pilot’s suit.

  As I prepared to jump out of the ship, I heard blaster fire outside. I looked to see a small Class III transport freighter swinging over and firing from its main cannon onto the dock. Everyone on the dock scattered. I jumped out and looked at the ship. It came down close and a hatch door opened. I sprinted and leapt in immediately.

  “Hurry up and strap in!” I heard someone yell.

  I strapped into the nearest chair and held on as the ship maneuvered out of the docks and shot straight into the sky. The bright blue of the sky slowly turned to black and I started to see small points of starlight. After we had reached escape velocity and broken through Helron’s atmosphere, I felt the heaviness of an artificial gravity generator turn on.

  I unstrapped myself and walked the five or so meters to the cockpit. Sitting in the pilot’s chair with his eyes forward was Larso. I sat down next to him.

  Most of the cockpit was transparent hemlight steel and I could watch the stars
beneath my feet and above my head. Behind us was the large blue and white planet of Helron 5, slowly shrinking in size.

  Larso looked over at me and turned away. He noticed my staring and glanced back. “Happy birthday,” he said.

  I smiled, and turned to look at the stars.

  NEPHI

  I sat in front of Deir el-Bahri, holding my brimmed hat to my head as the desert winds howled. Many temples were older and better preserved, but I thought this to be the most beautiful of all the temples in Egypt.

  Built by the architects of Queen Hatshepsut nearly five thousand years ago, the massive stone temples were constructed on the cliffs of the west bank of the Nile. The stone had faded to a light crimson from the constant battering of the powerful Egyptian sun and harsh desert winds, but its grand splendor could still inspire awe. Even in those as city-bound as me.

  Suddenly I heard a rumbling out of rhythm with the desert winds. It came from the sky above the clouds and grew louder until the distant gleam of a ship sparkled in the sky like a gem. I swore under my breath, hoping the ship was just passing through and not there for anything to do with me. I came out here to be alone with the temples and the sands. The Egyptians—if you could call them that any longer, given that they had been enslaved in the twenty-second century by the Chinese and bred with them—left me alone and I could spend weeks out here centering myself. I had specifically asked not to be disturbed and that meant that whoever was on that ship wanted something from me.

  The ship twisted ninety degrees to the north and then back to the south before locking on to my camp. It began a slow descent, sand flying in small whirlwinds around the vessel as it landed twenty meters away and the engines shut off.

  A door appeared and a gaunt man wearing a thick mustache and a black and yellow uniform stepped off. Unaccustomed to the ruthless Egyptian wind, a loose piece of his uniform—a medal, I guessed—flew away. He attempted to chase after it briefly but quickly saw that it was hopeless. The wind was more powerful than he; the hungry sands swallowed the small piece of metal and it was gone.

  The man swore under his breath and walked over to me.

  “Marshal Nephi Sestus?”

  “Yes.”

  He thrust out his hand. I hated shaking hands. It was a filthy stay-over from some bygone era after all, but to insult him without knowing who he was didn’t seem wise either. I shook, and his hand was smooth as a child’s, a hand unaccustomed to work: a bureaucrat’s hands.

  “Raymond Kooney. I’m from the Bureau of Clone Affairs.” A gust of wind blew ferociously from the west and nearly knocked him over. I had to grab him by his collar to keep him on his feet. “Sorry,” he said. “I’ve never been out here.”

  “Your legs are too close together. If you want to walk hold them apart in a wide stance; you gotta lower your center of gravity.”

  “Yes, well, how about we go back to the ship and talk?”

  “No need,” I said, “I have a tent right over there.”

  I motioned for him to go first, seemingly out of courtesy but really I just wanted to see him battle the wind. Kooney nearly toppled over twice and kept his legs shoulder-width. At one point he stopped and glanced back at me with a grin and then continued on to the tent.

  We got inside and the wind was loud, but the force was dissipated on the hemlight mesh exterior of the tent. A holovid was playing of my son frolicking in the ocean with his mother standing on the beach as our server-bot filmed the scene. Kooney watched it a while and then raised and lowered his eyebrows as if impressed before turning to me.

  “Again, Marshal, I am sorry to bother you out here. I understand you’re in the process of retiring?”

  “If you understood that you wouldn’t be out here.”

  “Yes, well, regardless, I have come to you with a most urgent assignment. We were referred to your agency as the top agency for the handling of delicate matters.”

  “That’s me,” I said, unbuckling my pants before going to the opening in the tent and urinating on the sand outside, “delicate.”

  Kooney waited until I was through and had come back into the tent. I went to the end farthest away from the entrance and lay down, staring at the holovid. I reached up and clicked it off.

  “I’m sorry,” Kooney said.

  “For what?”

  “It’s my understanding your wife and child were killed in a terrorist attack. A clone, if I’m not mistaken, targeting a bioengineering professor.”

  My heart dropped into my stomach. It was something I thought about nearly every second of every day but had not mentioned out loud in over three years. I grew angry with him at first and I wasn’t sure why. Maybe I thought he was trying to exploit their memory to get what he wanted out of me. Or maybe I just needed someone to be angry with.

  “What do you want, Mr. Kooney? I came out here to be alone.”

  He pulled out a holovid and held it up to me as it began to play. It was a ship docked at a port. You could make out the cockpit and I saw the slender shape of a female stand up and snap the neck of the pilot. She wrapped some loose belts around the co-pilot and appeared to crush him in his seat.

  There was movement and yelling, and then another ship, what appeared to be a cargo ship or freighter, began firing on a crowd that had gathered. The woman climbed out of her ship and leapt onto the cargo ship. The video followed them up to the sky until they disappeared into the blackness.

  “What do you think?” he said.

  “She seems efficient. Who is she?”

  “She is a clone, Marshal. The same one that killed your family.”

  I didn’t say anything for a long time. I just looked at him, frozen. I couldn’t tell if he wanted me to speak or not but I held his gaze.

  “Um,” he said, uncertain what my reaction meant, “we would like you to apprehend her.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t do that anymore.”

  “I could promise you all the units you would ever need, but I know that wouldn’t persuade you. My understanding is you are a rich man.”

  “Your understanding seems to extend to a lot of subjects.”

  “My business is information. The more I know, the better my work. I stay informed of all pertinent matters. Such as when the top field marshal for the Earth Criminal Investigations Unit decides to suddenly retire at the ripe old age of forty.”

  “Fair enough. But I’m not interested in bringing home your pet. I think you’re going to need to find somebody else.”

  “You haven’t heard what I’m offering.”

  “I couldn’t imagine anything you have that I would want.”

  “Oh really?”

  He flipped a switch on the holovid and the video changed to a small laboratory. Two men in shining plastic lab coats worked at a table. Before them, spread on the table like a feast, were numerous women. They were nude and perfect. Clones. The men pressed buttons on the table and the women sprung to life, sucking in air as if bursting out of the sea and narrowly escaping drowning.

  “You’ve never actually seen how it works, have you?” he said. “The process is quite simple. A coating of proteins within a cell wall prevent it from, shall we say, reaching its full potential. It impedes the unessential DNA of the cell from performing any function not vital to that cell’s survival. But every cell contains the necessary DNA to produce a new organism. If not for differentiation, or this coating, any cell could be perfectly capable of producing such an organism. Egg cells, of course, are different because they can and do produce new organisms. To make a long process short, I will just say that we take out the nucleus of an egg cell and replace it with a donor cell. Simple. Um, in case you were wondering, clones, as shown in the video, are of course all female. Early experiments with male cloning had disastrous consequences. The males were far too dangerous.”

  “She appeared plenty dangerous to me.”

  “Yes, well, that is an unfortunate … side effect … of her breeding and training. She was bred to be a soldier.”r />
  “You mean cannon fodder, don’t you?”

  “However you wish to term it, that’s what it is. But you didn’t let me finish. We used to require a large amount of DNA to place in the egg cell to clone, but technology has advanced so quickly that is no longer required. What I’m telling you is that we would potentially only need a single functional cell to clone the original organism.” He grinned, and quickly suppressed it. “Something like, say, preserved skin cells from cosmetics would be enough.”

  “Are you telling me—”

  “Yes, I am, Marshal.” He looked me in the eyes quietly for a long time and then said, “I can bring your family back.”

  It took me a while to process what Kooney had told me and I stared out of the tent at the sand whipping up in small storms and whirling around before settling back to the ground, only to be whipped up again by another gust of wind. To his credit, Kooney kept silent and allowed me to think.

  “What if you can’t?” I finally said. “What if you promise me something and you can’t deliver?”

  “Well that’s possible. Nothing in life is guaranteed. What would you like in that circumstance?”

  “You found me out here and came out yourself. Didn’t send a minion. It must be extremely important for you to find her. My guess is I can ask for just about anything right now and get it.”

  “You … would be correct.”

  “Then this is what I want: a personal debt owed to me from the Bureau. To be called in at a later time.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s it. One debt.”

  “No problem here. But what if you ask later and I can’t do it?”

  “Then,” I said with a grin, “I’ll kill you and bury you out here in the sand.”

  Kooney laughed heartily and I laughed with him. No awkwardness or tension in his laughter. He thought I was joking.

  “Agreed,” he said.

  We exited the tent and, standing outside examining his ship, was a group of men with white sashes tied neatly around their heads to keep the sun off. Their camels sat lazily in the sand, seemingly oblivious to the winds that would have torn the bare skin off the rest of us over a short time.